jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> D) lack of well written textbooks

1.
How do I program? I dont know how to build abstractions. I dont know how to write correct, modular and reliable codes. I'll start with "How to Design Programs"

2. I want to learn more about recursion. I want to master thinking recursively because I have found that they solve a lot of my problems. Let me see "Little Schemer".

3. I want to learn more powerful constructs like continuations, tail calls and what not. I want to learn to solve harder problems in Scheme. Let me pick up "Seasoned Schemer".

4. Wow macros are pretty nice. I want to learn more about them. Let me first see how to write unhygenic ones. Paul Graham's "On Lisp" is amazing!

5. Constructing higher levels of abstraction is something that I really want to master. What kinds of abstractions can I build? What are the ways to construct large programs? What is the way to organize programs? What is programming? Let me read SICP

6. What is a loop? Why doesn't scheme have it? How can I build it? How do I build these kinds of abstractions? Wand's EOPL is my bible at this stage.

7. Let me do something useful in Scheme. How do I write much more powerful macros? I love my types. I love my modules. I love my libraries. Racket, I think you are the most powerful thing out there.
Poor Americans are simply much, much, much needier than people realize.

You're not needier just because your neighbors are richer than you thought they were.
Great perspective. Describing something as a "failure" makes it easy to overlook the value it's created. I prefer "less successful than I had hoped" :-)
Exactly, and I can't see why the charts shouldn't look like this. Saving money is a luxury, it's a good thing to do if you can afford it and if you're saving your money for something worthwhile. What's important is that people are living the lives they want to be living, and I'm sure that's possible without lots of savings (although wealth could probably help).

Most people like to spend money now instead of later though, and the charts reflect that. It's as simple as time preference.
The announcement with details can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/kod-app/browse_thread/thread/...
We do and for now we'll be focusing on implementing rudimentary support for stuff everyone needs. To compete with Azure's Table/Blob storage I think a combination of S3 and SimpleDB (or an rdbms) would be the best option... Obviously we would like to make it as easy for people to get started with this as possible, so we'll probably end up wrapping it in some way convenient to our users - for now people should feel free to use these services directly from amazon.

The ability to instantly scale up/down is a feature at the core of our business and it will be available no later than our official launch.

Providing various caching options is also ranked highly on our feature list and will be available as an add-on (and paid) service.
The content producers should be ecstatic about this, but we should remember we've fought this once before with music. Everyone could have a copy of everything, but the biggest piece of news lately is that the Beatles are finally available on iTunes for purchase - I'd say the fight didn't go as well as hoped.

It's a different fight this time; the internet is much more mainstream than in the 90's, technological progress in the form of portability and speed, and just the different consumption habits for video being more favorable to renting. In your analogy, the people with megaphone are the ones paying for bibles; the producers are have to adapt just the same as those with megaphones.

Make no mistake, the utopian ideal for everyone to have a copy of everything will have a monthly service charge.
Not sure about 20 years ago, but 10-15 years ago finding hosting was pretty easy. You probably got some free from your dialup ISP (at least here in the UK). And everything else was substantially easier, because unstyled HTML was still considered perfectly OK. It's a shame the need for rounded corners and less legible colourschemes has pretty much killed the idea of the web as a read-write medium for the masses.
Either you replied to the wrong comment or you're not familiar with database queries?
That's great. My first attempt at using heroku was frustrated by their not-so-sweet logging. I'll have to try it out again for my next project
I do have a rails app that I just deployed to Heroku, but of course with the acquisition, I am open to alternatives :)

The landing page is incredibly vague though, so I'm curious as to what you offer (besides Node.js) that Heroku does not. Things that are important to me:

-amazon s3 integration
-database push/pull (specifically mysql)
-custom domain routing
-full-text search integration (akin to heroku's web solr server add-on)
-easy, safe collaboration (akin to sharing projects through the heroku console)

I requested access regardless, and I can certainly try it to see if it works and provide feedback on the migration process.
http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/landing...

Another great resource to build perfect landing page. Makes great reading to compare these two resources together
> " "Argument" to you is disagreement with Thomas Ptacek, who time and time again bizarrely gets upvoted without merit or regard for accuracy."

Found in the code of most HNers brains:

if (poster=="tptacek" && subject=="security") upvote();

There are other nicknames who get an auto-upvote on hacker news in their 'realm'. It's just one of those things.
What struck me most was this passage:

In order to thwart piracy, she refused to allow her latest novel to be released as an audiobook since the format is popular with file-sharers and also denied the publication of Russian and Chinese versions.

Isn't it like taping on the cover of the book: "Only for white"?
I'm interested to know how you are determining these ranks. I just tried a bunch of keywords that I focus on for certain sites, and have focused on for a couple of years. I know these are difficult keywords yet all but a handful turn up 0 days, 0 sites are indexed.

SEOMoz has a keyword difficulty tool (http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty/). I've never looked in to the methodology they use but it seems fairly accurate in its difficulty measure.
Its going to be different for every product, market and industry.
If most of these private sector bailouts took the form of purchasing commercial paper, doesn't that imply that the Fed got paid back? None of those companies have defaulted.
It's unfortunate that they still have no way to delete your account, because I wanted to delete mine a year ago and I'm sure they would have a lot fewer emails to send out.
the obstacle is that systems composed of many simple elements quickly become so complicated that we can't simulate them anymore, even if we would completely understand the individual elements.
In Turkey you can move around almost cashless now. Taxis started to accept cards in droves due to the pandemic and some municipalities are integrating VISA/Master infra to the mass transport, so you can just travel with your card.

Besides that, literally everywhere allows contactless payments. Even Visa/Master is changing their card designs to move vital information to the back of the card to prevent information theft via hidden cameras or a very keen eye.
I've worked at a place had a good excuse for using a real "big data" processing system - a large hadoop cluster on bare metal - because the dataset was way bigger than would fit on a single machine. The cluster had over 20 machines that had 10 or so 3TB disks each, and a large computation might use half the dataset. Even if you could put all the data in a storage appliance and read it from a single machine, you needed the separate memories and data busses to just sift through the data and keep the relevant bits in non-swapped memory in less than a day.

I think the important lesson from this paper, and which a few researchers also learned from our cluster, is that the amount of inefficiency that can be in software, and then removed by competent programming, is astronomical these days. You see many arguments like yours - programmer time is expensive, you need to be a super expensive expert, just pay for the systems, blah blah... it underestimates the cost of the ridiculous inefficiency, and overestimates the cost of competency.

Even scientists in-experienced with serious programming can often get appreciably better at writing their data processing jobs before their first job finishes when you're dealing with the really big data. What a lot of people call big data isn't even big data. They'd rather go through the motions of setting up and using a big-data processing system and using it poorly, than learn better software engineering skills, even if that would take less of (theirs + others) time, amortized over the next few months of their work.

This isn't toyota vs bugatti. This is... freight train with conductor, engineer, station staff, and one car of payload... vs getting a drivers license for a large van.
With that in mind I wonder what the uptime % of HN is, and if the master/standby setup involves automatic failover.
I don't think you have a real understanding of terror related topics as it applies to Israel. In an area of the world where getting ak47's is easy as heck - you can go a few countries away from Israel and buy them at open air markets - it makes a lot of sense to make sure no one is carrying guns and other weapons made with heavy metals into your airport.

The security is made of layers - just because they are checking for heavy metals doesn't mean that they don't know anything about (or are ignoring) plastic explosives or ceramic guns.
would be more interesting if they talked about their test framework method and the numbers from their benchmarks.
Thankfully for their job security though, research projects at Google regularly launch as parts of major products.
It is practical if it gets the job done.
3 times this year? It's 3 times a week for me.
You're just fine with bcrypt. scrypt is almost certainly better, but even iterating SHA1 repeatedly is still acceptable. What isn't acceptable is using a naked hash function (or a naked hash with a "salt").
> The rest falls into place.

You're just lucky to have some natural attraction then I guess. I'm extremely confident in myself and sure of myself and women don't give a fuck. I do opera singing and salsa dancing and go to the gym regularly, am in outstanding shape, and am not even that shy any more. I've been on internet dating for two years and have tried speed dating a couple of times and can make friends with almost any man but have achieved precisely jack shit with women.

Trust me, if I had any choice at this point - any choice - other than trying to learn skills in gaming women's minds I'd be doing that.
If it's a publicly-traded company and the value of the shares is higher than the strike price on your options, you can do a cashless exercise:

http://www.investorwords.com/5448/cashless_exercise.html
Don't be shy. If you want a Happy Ending with your nut massage, just ask the TSA agent for one. ;-)

Also, common courtesy dictates that you should at least offer a reach-around. http://www.moviesounds.com/fmj/cowboy.wav
If you're dealing with nation states, all the big cloud providers have NSA presence in their network. Even without that,secret warrants are a thing and VPS providers rent datacenters from someone else ,that someone else (azure,hetzner,ovh,etc...) also rents out infra to VPN providers. The only differrence is VPN providets sell VPN while VPS providers let you access the whole vm.

The only differnce is how a VPN provider can be incompetent or malicious. It is less likely for MS to be incompetent but so long as the nation state is a western nation,they are more likely to be malicious.

I guess it does depend on your threat model but I would say for most people who don't have specific threat in mind they should exclude highly sophisticated attackers much like how you don't secure your housr against sophisticated bank robbers that might pull a heist on you.
Had a similar idea, was too lazy to implement it. Good luck and I hope this takes off.

https://github.com/andreis/ideas#github-comments

PS: There's also gitter.im, but it's not super useful for small repos.
Cmd + tab (cycling b/w open apps) and Cmd + ` (cycling b/w open windows of app with focus) are definitely my 2 most-used shortcuts.
Previously reported: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941207
No need for an exokernel here. A microkernel could enable the same thing, since your network stack would be Yet Another Service (TM). This could easily be implemented on the likes of L4.
It says in the article, 10 weeks work of him and an assistant.
Nah, that's not even necessary, I believe: the congestion window is a TCP feature, but any normal user space program (with a few privileges) can create IP datagrams with custom content, so you would only need to implement a bit of tcp in a normal old style monolithic kernel

And since you control the only higher level protocol (your http implementation) you can probably cut some corners and get done quickly :)
According to their FAQ:

No. There's a constant average rate of new Bitcoins created, and that amount
is divided among the nodes by the CPU power they use. When Bitcoins start
having real exchange value, the competition for coin creation will drive the
price of electricity needed for generating a coin close to the value of the
coin, so the profit margin won't be that huge. The easier way to gain a lot
of wealth would be trading goods.

At the moment, though, you can generate new coins quite profitably, if you
expect them to have real value in the future. If you choose to, be aware that
Bitcoin is still experimental software.

http://www.bitcoin.org/faq#So_your_wealth_is_determined_by_t...
Google checkout is the thing keeping me from buying apps. I've been close to buying apps a few times, but then I have to go through the hassle of setting up a Google checkout account on my phone and decide that it's not worth it just for some app.

What Google really should to if they want to get people buying apps is to make a deal with the carriers so that apps I buy show up on my phone bill. If they did that then there would be no barrier at all for anyone to buying apps and I no doubt would have bought several by now.
Without a third party plugin, I can only think of Spotlight, which turns out to be good enough.
I grew up in Oman, and my Indian passport is issued from there. It's mentioned as a place of issue, but most TSA offices have never heard of "Oman." However, I have a few entry/exit stamps from Oman (where my parents live), which obviously involves some Arabic. When traveling in the US, if these pages get seen, I'm pulled for special screening and emptying out my baggage.

Back in college I sometimes rushed to the airport straight after finals week and packing my dorm room, so I may not have shaved a couple days, and I was almost guaranteed to have to deal with an extra hour of special checking (which I would probably have to have dealt with anyway, so it was more important to reach the airport early than to shave). They'd make me go get my checked luggage and empty every suitcase and identify every item there and I'd have to pack it all back again. At least the random stuff they'd confiscate like pickled lemons from my mom would create extra space in my bag making it a bit easier to pack in a hurry.

I've never actually been detained or questioned or made to miss a flight because of this, but I think that's just dumb luck and not because the process is just or reasonable. It's one thing I do not miss at all since leaving the states, airport security in America.
I'm quite willing to believe it; I just didn't mention it as I have zero exposure to the situation in Asia.

I doubt the investment situation will improve until those who succeed aren't (effectively) chased out of the country for one reason or another before they do succeed. I'm pretty sure you need a home-grown feedback loop.
Yeah I mean I understand the money flows, but it's so tedious to keep my credit card transactions, splitwise, and venmo open while I'm entering things in the spreadsheet.

A budgeting UI that managed this would be amazing, but I understand other people may not keep track of their money flows this way so it doesn't necessarily surprise me that it's not already built.
Boston Dynamics Robots vs Human Originals (The Contours):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VGsfgo8_Jo

Although the dance moves are different, the spirit is synchronised :)
The 'market' was influenced by two things. 1. Intel using ECC to segment consumer/server offerings. 2. Even when AMD supported ECC (officially or unofficially) on consumer products, consumers voted with their wallets with a mix of ignorance.

ECC ram should be more expensive as you're paying for more bits, and marginally slower as you're comparing stored with computed. If consumers don't value their data (they say they do but don't act accordingly), bit errors is what we get.

I do my job on a company laptop, if it were my own company I'd use an AMD desktop with ECC.
Nvidia Broadcast if you have a recent GPU
I think it's astute of you to point out that the Signal developers do not value chat history the same way many people do, but I am not sure I track with this:

> It's not a technical issue - they just think you're wrong when you want to keep your conversations.

as much.

When you are treating security as a number one priority I think there are a lot of things that become technical issues which aren't typically. Transferring or backing up history between disparate devices, which become trusted at different times, is one of those things that I think _is_ difficult to do without sacrificing security.

For example, in the classic case when a user adds a new device and wants history to be available on both you can't let the devices controlled by one person simply sync with one another. To do so would be making a security concession to the other members of the chat in that they no longer verify every destination of their message. If you are unwilling to make a security concession everything in this area becomes magnitudes more difficult. I wouldn't say it is impossible, but it's definitely not trivial.

My gut reaction is also that it is difficult to _guarantee_ history in this type of security first mindset. If you add a new device and someone doesn't approve/verify/trade encryption keys with the additional client then there isn't much you can do besides not make that data available no? So I don't think it unreasonable for developers to hold the mindset that history is not a priority for a security first application.
On the contrary, there are orders of magnitude less megafauna than plankton. And there’s a diminishing range in between. It’s easier to get berries for dinner, than boar. Of course, things could be the opposite during Ice Ages, but that’s just a glimpse in geological time, not convinced that metabolism would change entirely during that period.
> A donor on Known Donor Registry told me that he used to donate to a big sperm bank but that it was too clinical and cold.

I can empathize with that. We did IVF, so I had to go through the same process a sperm donor goes through. It's quite clinical and not really very enjoyable.
True, it does not mean another solution won't - but what is there to suggest another solution will do any differently?

None of these alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages have spread even as far as Esperanto. Whatever Esperanto did, it did something right.

(And the way you say "learn from its failure" - it's still around and widespread on the internet and available in Apps; you can learn it from http://www.kurso.com.br/ and http://www.lernu.net and talk about it at http://www.reddit.com/r/esperanto and write in it at http://www.reddit.com/r/esperante and chat in it on IRC on Freenode, or verbally with Mumble http://retbabilejo.net/ , there are decks on Memrise for it, it's in development on Duolingo http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/eo/en/status and there are Facebook and Skype groups, Anki flashcard decks https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/esperanto and heaps of Youtube videos in / about it https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=esperanto ) and yet it still isn't very popular (despite the Internet), and you still had not heard of it. That's a failure of it.

I think it's more likely that most people don't want to invest thousands of hours of effort into learning another language, and those who do, do so because they like a particular country/language/culture, than any big mistake it made.
What's the overall build quality like?

I've read (almost exclusively) bad things about the keyboard and overall plastic-ity of them.
OS X upgrades are free, more like Windows Service Packs in a way. Microsoft also drops support for pre-SP versions of Windows after a time. The clock is ticking for Windows 8.0; you have to upgrade to 8.1.
Please do not make content-free posts such as this. It adds no value to the conversation and is only noise.

If you actually wish to bitch about a post that we all got the point of, you're going to need more than two paragraphs.
If anyone is curious, the default accepts header in jQuery is

*/*

which means, "give me whatever you have." This will actually cause Rails to respond with whatever the first format is that you happen to have defined with your respond_to or respond_with method in your controller.

This isn't very intuitive, which is why we made the jquery-ujs set the default accepts header for remote requests to

*/*;q=0.5,text/script

which says, "give me whatever you have but I prefer JavaScript if you have it."
Pretty interesting article. Apologies for going off topic.

I choose not to have Adobe flash installed at all. Yes, this can be a hard road on the Internet, but I think recent flash 0days at least give some weight to the approach.

One bright spot in an otherwise plugin filled world is youtube. I use chrome, an html5 video compliant browser, and youtube lets me opt in to their html5 trial.

Most of the time, this works great. The videos look good, stream well, no problem. But sometimes, like in the case of this friday video youtube insists that I need the flash plugin. Why? It's not that it isn't encoded correctly - as far as I know it's that it has an ad. And google has decided it'd be too easy to skip the ad with html5 or it can't play it so it just doesn't let me watch it. Of course, if I can't watch the video I'm not seeing the ad anyway.

Here is the kicker though. To watch the video I picked up my phone and opened the youtube application. I don't have flash installed on my phone either, but the youtube app is happy to just play the basic h.264. The kicker? Well, youtube didn't show me an ad there either.

Sorry for the rant. Is youtube ever going to start treating their html5 video as a first class citizen?
Seems like a copy of Tweet Mag App http://tweetmagapp.com/
Amazon's EC2 SLA is extremely clear -
a given region has an availability of 99.95%.
If you're running a website and you haven't
deployed across across more than one region then,
by definition, your website will have 99.95%
availailbility. If you want a higher level of
availability use more than one region.

Good point.

let P(region fails) = 0.05% and let's assume (and hope) that the probability of failure of one region is independent of the state of the other regions.

P(two regions fail) = P(one region fails and another region fails) = P(region fails) * P(region fails) = 0.05% * 0.05% = 0.0025%

Making your availability = 100% - 0.0025% = 99.9975%

Ultimately it's more of a business decision if you want to pay for the extra 0.0475% of availability. I would think (or hope) that most engineers would want it anyway.

The numbers at this size appear insignificant. How would one (say an engineer) convince "the management" that the extra 0.0475% of availability is worth the investment/expense?
Interesting pricing. The Platinum seems priced to have no one use it, considering how much of a jump it is over Gold.