skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Do you know how hard it is to get into the communist party? "

It doesn't matter. You still get killed or tortured and imprisoned if you think the "elite leadership" is wrong and express your opinion. An "elite" gang of thugs is still a gang of thugs, only more dangerous than your usual garden variety hoodlum.

I suspect the Mafia is also "Invite Only" as is Al Quaeda. That doesn't make them desirable arbiters of your life and happiness.
Parrot AR.Drone
In firefox, you can just type "slang sgtm" and you get to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sgtm

It's the definitive quickreference on slang.
Farm Frenzy 3: American Pie Game Download Free
Join Scarlett, the feisty star of Farm Frenzy 3, as she puts robots to work on her land in this Time Management game. Can you keep up with the latest advancements in technology as you grow crops, feed animals, collect produce and manufacture goods? Of course you can! Just don't let the zany new animations distract you from the task at hand. Featuring all-new levels packed with never-before-seen characters, buildings and challenges, Farm Frenzy 3: American Pie promises a bumper crop of fun!
To answer your question I think things will settle down -- in the long run it's too hard for developers to deal with all the alternatives and their differences.
To get a high-level overview of the NOSQL space you could read this blog entry: http://blogs.neotechnology.com/emil/2009/11/nosql-scaling-to... As Ben Scofield puts it (cited in that post): "NoSQL DBs often provide better substrates for modeling business domains". I think this aspect is often forgotten in the debate. So I'd say: start from your business domain, what are the characteristics of it? Then look for a DBMS that is a good fit. And to get down to the details of some of the NOSQL systems, here's a walk through: http://www.vineetgupta.com/2010/01/nosql-databases-part-1-la...
IT job satisfaction plummets to all-time low
Given the choice between Chinese or Indian or Phillipino citizenshup, I would take chinese. I would not give up my current citizenship simply because of travel opportunity: western countries don't want people from poorer countries entering their countries. If the world were truly open and I could live and work where I please, I would not care. I'd take the citizenship of whatever country I was in for convenience sake.

China is not as developed as the west. East Berlin was not as developed as West Berlin. People make the move not for freedom, but for economic opportunity.

When china is richer than the U.S and people can earn more money there and live better, you will see huge migration into china.
You're sure about sqlite? it's just that Apple use that extensively as the backend of CoreData, so it surprises me. Or to put it another way, sqlite by definition doesn't depend on this behaviour, because it runs successfully on Mac OS X...
There are no one-man dictatorships. Dictators always have the support of a lot of people.

When the military took power in Brazil in 1964, there was celebration in the streets. In the rich part of town, of course.

Your vision of an 'enlightened elite' is bit scary.
And is in the current development branch as well: http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/clojure
You make the Communist party sound as if it's some super-elite club. It's not. My girlfriend's a member and, while she's intelligent and well-educated, she didn't have to do a whole lot to get in. I suspect a decent education is enough.

Nor does being a member of the party suddenly make you a member of the "leadership class". For her, it's like a club membership, she pays some small dues every year and in return she can put it on her resume when she wants to. It also helped her avoid some prereqs in college. I guess if she wanted to dig further and start attending meetings regularly she could use it for networking.

In short, being in the party != being a member of the ruling oligarchy which calls the shots here. If you want to do that, marry into the family of someone who has a good government post.
How many frames can humans see
I think people have been doing these things for years, in the past they were just more apt to be embedded in desktop applications and so forth. Issues with scaling for the web have changed the dynamics, so the new non-relational approaches are quite distinct from the earlier ones such as Statice, ObjectStore, and Ontos.

CouchDB is well worth a hard look mainly because it takes advantage of several new ideas all in a very simple stack.

In a year or two I predict two or three will emerge as clear choices for a few distinct scenarios.
>Once one of my adgroups got suspended since it contained a copyrighted word.

I suspect you mean a trademark. You can not [normally #] copyright a word.

# I'd love to hear from anyone who's got evidence of a word being copyrighted. I can imagine that a really long poem length word could be considered to be a work for the purposes of copyright?
I'm surprised a ticket tracking / code repo app isn't mentioned on here. For that, use either Codebase (costs money) or Redmine (open source).
A first step towards freeing London’s data
Since framerate choice is not usually a technical but an editorial decision in order to create a particular effect, then saying interpolated frames create a "better picture" is hugely debatable.
A problem we face is that we have new abstractions every 10 years (fueled - or at least facilitated via disruptions - by Moore's Law). So it's hard to master them.

If that should change it would become possible for the industry to mature in the way you suggest.
Great share, very much in line with my post today, but with some additional spin. Massive parallel testing!
How To Modify Your Gnu/Linux Box To Serve As A USB Over IP Server
This looks like it could be pretty useful. As with all meta-programming though, if you're going to use this it's probably a good idea to make it clear in your comments and log files. It can be very difficult to debug.
The description for #1 is technically wrong, since Apache will send 304 Not Modified headers whenever it serves a static file with the appropriate request headers. What the Expires header actually does is prevents the browser from sending the request at all (unless the page is manually refreshed).

#4, the Auth* lines aren't necessary, only the order, deny, and allow lines.

#6, why are we using browser matching and not the Accept-Encoding header?
I really hope you're wrong.

The premise that after many years of the industry developing it is still unable to create effective enough abstractions that don't "leak". That's a tragic state of affairs especially when there is a still a huge amount of content to learn to achieve mastery.

I personally expect a maturity of the industry to arise when we make abstractions effective enough that those with less mastery are able to construct and run their own programs with less problems....
Wait, did I just state that something like VB6 helps mature the industry? Shoot me, please ;)
>China does not. India has war, border clashes and terrorism, china does not.

Thats funny (and inaccurate). Because a lot of Indian border clashes are against the Chinese. India and China have a long standing border dispute.

Also - I've never been to China so can't comment. But news sources say that India has a better human rights record than China. So the probability of throwing tire around the neck and petrol dousing is higher in China than in India. That stuff doesn't happen in India without consequences.

(Disclosure: I'm an Indian.)
Obviously being in the party does not mean you are in the ruling class. But to be in the ruling class, you have to be part of the party, and the criteria to get in the party will already filter out a lot of the idiots that have destroyed so many countries.
"Transparent" and "opaque" seem better terms than "good" and "bad".

ORMs usually let you fall back to SQL if you need to (ActiveRecord does), so I would classify them as transparent. Relational databases themselves are opaque though, they basically present you with a subset of relational algebra and how its operations will be carried out depends on a myriad of parameters in a non-trivial way. And you cannot possibly push some little modification in the inner loop.

Another good example is Larry Page asking how to set a custom user-agent for what became the googlebot in the then-current-JDK (and having no way to do it):

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/browse_thread/...
The "transparent" vs. "opaque" abstraction distinction is excellent, but I submit it is an example, an instance, of a more important philosophy. The philosophy can be summarized in one word...

Discoverable.

Opaque abstractions are not discoverable: you cannot look inside to discover what makes the abstraction work. If the abstraction works, life is good. <strike>If</strike> When it breaks, you are forced to limp along with a broken mental model of the abstraction. With opaque abstractions, every time it breaks, you get "buyer's remorse."

Transparent abstractions are discoverable: if you need to (or want to), you can open the box and look inside. As long as your mental model matches the actual functioning of the abstraction, you don't need to open the box. More importantly, when your mental model vs. the abstraction breaks down, you can open the box and either fix your mental model (likely) or fix or enhance the box.

Now to expand "discoverable", think of Apple's products (I think they are the best company at implementing discoverable products). Why do they not provide a 2 inch thick printed manual with their products? Because they have a comprehensive Help file[1]? No, it is because their products are discoverable.

You don't have to know how to use every feature of the iPhone in order to get started, you just turn it on and make a phone call. All the useful features a new user needs are obvious and intuitive. Need to browse the web? OK, there is an icon that looks like it will browse the web. Hey, look, it worked. Need to do ______? Poke around, ask a friend, ask Google and you discover new and better ways of doing _____.

As importantly, the advanced features lie quietly in wait. They do not distract the new user, but they are discoverable when the new user becomes more sophisticated.

Not needing a manual is just a side benefit of being discoverable. The bonus for the user and Apple is that the user's delight in the product does not end after the turn it on for the first time. There is no "buyers remorse." Instead, they are discovering new features for months, sometimes years, which results in a long term stream of surprise and delight in the product.

[1] Windows and most Windows software attempts to make their products discoverable by (a) showing all possible options at once, making their product incomprehensible, and (b) providing an incomprehensible help file that, if printed, would be 2" thick.
Because monoculture is bad and the more options we have, the more they all learn from one another (which drums up competition). In the end, like the other fellows on here have stated, you'll have a few emerge as the "standards" based on the type of problem you are trying to solve.
China India Education
Us sent 50,000 labor projects to china. India and China both had quarter of world's share in gdp but and this was India's gdp in 1750. Uk colonization and exploitation went down by 20% percentage points. so there is no India works less or is less educated.India on her own exports software to 90 countries, that alone took ingenuity & inventiveness.
It can also be trivially defeated by using an <iframe> with a <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=hxxp://hotlinked/image.gif" />

Removing the allow for the null-referrer ^$ fixes it for this, but breaks access for user agents that don't send Referer.
Replace "VB6" by "Haskell", and I won't. :-)
excellent well written piece with a nice comparison to Erlang.

I'm wondering how readily I can incorporate clojure in my Java work in terms of reducing the serious code bloat that often occurs due to enterprise scale object proliferation.
And you don't think that the United States has a similar elite? Successful societies have a leadership class that is based of some type of non-hereditary merit : for example wealth, education or intelligence. A lot of unsuccessful societies happen when power is seized by someone who does not come from this leadership class.

America has its leadership colleges and power families, same as france and a lot of western countries. You don't call it a political party, but it is.

Look at singapore, malaysia, botswana - what do they have in common in terms of leadership? What has been the result?

It's easy to accept what they tell you about democracy without really thinking about it. But actually consider the REAL systems of successful societies. They are not democratic.
Go look at how many people US government accidentally kills (e.g. stun gun mishaps, shooting unarmed even innocent people, innocent people receiving the death penalty, etc.) every year and multiply that by 5 (they have 5 times more people). I would be shocked if the number is less than 1700.

I don't think China is a fantastic country, but if what we do produces even worse results and even more misery (I don't know that we are, but it could obviously be argued) then how can we say we know better?
#10 is wrong. It should have a <Files> tag selecting the .htaccess file wrapping it.
Troy University
The official football team of Troy University Trojans left the field on Wednesday night, after '44-41 double-overtime...
A big part of admission into Google Summer of Code is having a good list of suggested projects.
But his example is two letters, rt in Helvetica. Perhaps he's referring to create text as an image for headings (bleurgh!) like in his very ugly background graphic.
It works like this: you start developing now. By the time you cut through all the red tape, you got the HTML templates, the servers were installed, the solution validated and you can finally deploy it into production, the package will be the same version you started development with ;-)
If you don't need to push technology to its limits, you don't need to understand the stack. Everything basically works, every program will work on both SSD and rotational disks, it will just have different performance characteristics.

Some of the purely software opaque abstractions are bad in the sense that all abstractions are inherently limited, and sometimes your job is easier if you can just access the layer beneath and get your job done. So a transparent framework is one that "doesn't get in your way" (like AWT for Windows GUI development versus MFC differ a lot in giving you options to customize what you do using raw win32 API).
God Mode Easter Egg (Windows)
The Chinese planned economy is a giant bubble waiting to burst and I assure you, when it does, it won't be pretty :-(
"America has its leadership colleges and power families, same as france and a lot of western countries. You don't call it a political party, but it is."

You have strange definitions of "political party" ;-).

"Look at singapore, malaysia, botswana - what do they have in common in terms of leadership? "

Are you trolling? All of these leaders are elected in democratic elections. Singapore is a somewhat borderline case and comes closest to a dictatorship in terms of restrictions on citizens, but it is still a long way away from the Communist dictatorship of China. I doubt Singaporeans are regularly killed for political dissent.

No one argues against having good leaders (educated, visionary etc) as long as the governed people can decide what exactly is "good leadership", hold their leaders accountable and remove them from power peacefully if they think the leadership is corrupt/inefffective etc. For this you need the ability for a citizen to express an opinion without fear of being killed or imprisoned.
Disagree does not equal downvote people.
Yeah sorry... snow has frozen my brain. Trademark :) thanks.
That's definitely worth keeping in mind! Does that apply to sibling processes as well (like two apache child processes)?
> Do people genuinely believe that the world needs this many NoSQL systems, or are we just in the infancy/resurgence of schema-free, ...

The non-SQL world is still pretty young. Well, the ideas themselves are old - but recent implementations try to solve unique problemsets.

> ... and things are yet to settle down?

Yes. IMO there would be 5-7 major projects supported by larger communities. Every of this projects will solve particular problem.

So, instead of having 2-3 general SQL providers, we can expect many solutions for very specific problems. The issue right now is that we don't really know what these problems are. Current NoSQL implementations are probing the market - answering the question if this specific features are useful for broader audience.

I think we can guess some of these 5-7 major specializations, for example:

- Memcachedb: Distributed K-V optimized for speed - no replication

- Distributed K-V optimized for reliability

- Distributed K-V optimized for size - like Dynamo.

- neo4j: Graph database

- redis: K-V with reach features, but limited to data size that fits in memory

- K-V framework created to allow Map-Reduce jobs - including scheduler, debugger and so on.
What about blockquotes/pull quotes and the like?
I just double-checked, and sqlite doesn't in fact use this. Perhaps I was remembering sqlite2. I've edited my post.

Btw, Apple uses dovecot and postfix on their Xserve platform, which means Apple does depend on this behavior.

Since this is a race condition on Mac OS X (Where it is atomic on UNIX and POSIXish systems like Linux), people may think these programs work fine on Mac OS X, when in fact they can lose or destroy mail in some circumstances.
If you have not been to a place, and only hear propoganda against it, it is very hard to judge.

In many ways I think the Chinese are more free than other societies. There are also many different types of people there, and even different cultures.

Like in all countries, elements are corrupt. They do a lot of bad, but also a lot of good.

If you don't mind living in a certain way, and you are mentally sane, then it is an ok place to be I think. They just don't tollerate people going against their way.

Living in china as a foreigner is much more difficult than other countries. You have issues like getting visas where you can not leave the country for years at a time. Also it can be hard to get your money out of the country. Basically they want people who will fit in, and really love china enough to stay there for a long time. You also have to register, or stay at foriegn licenced hotels. However, I guess every country has tough immigration rules.

cya.
Re: ORM/SQL, compare Django's ORM/MySQL to how PG implemented storage in news.YC - I've devoted several orders of magnitude more time working with the former, but I wouldn't be able to describe what happens in-hardware nearly as well as I could on the latter, which I read once (in a language I never seriously used) nearly a year ago.
Simulating the universe on an intercontinental grid of supercomputers
PragPub, January 2010
In Administrative Law, "powers" are often granted to government ministers. A power is the ability to do something (e.g. reject an application). They are often cast in this form:

The minister may reject the application if:
(i). <specific situation 1>
(ii). <specific situation 2>
(iii). for some other reason

It's quite bizarre format, carefully constraining the choice, then opening it up utterly, like Douglas Adams' editorial expenses joke.

I mention it here, because the first two reasons are like an abstraction; the last reason is like a transparent abstraction. It enables you to get things done, even if the drafter of the legislation hadn't considered the particular situation you find yourself in. It's an admission of pragmatic humility.

However, I must add a counterpoint. I really love the abstractions that do work supremely well - like arithmetic, field access and so on. We probably think of them as fundamentals rather than abstractions; the greatest testament an abstraction can receive.
Famous Perl One-Liners Explained, Part IV: String and Array Creation
<EDIT: I toned down the harshness.>

Abstractions are key to every good design. Let me try to explain more in detail:

Abstractions can be built in two ways,
I top-down
II bottoms-up

A top-down approach is per SICP described as 'wishful thinking'. We simply assume we have the function. And then we drill down, and we let George (the programmer) worry about the implementation. Taking the UML approach is not necessary - traditional black box abstractions will suffice.

A bottoms-up approach or Domain Specific Language (DSL) is not very well supported among the typical boiler-plate languages today, small languages like scheme is perfect for DSL, because of its smallness.

You design top-down - and you implement bottoms up.

Naming functions is a art of its own and is key to good software engineering.

Personally I'm sick of programmers who don't understand the art of abstractions - as much as I'm sick designers who don't know what the limit of a computer, or the capabilities of their language.

A note on UML: Uml got one thing right, and that was the 'Use Case'. A proper use case forms the foundation of a good top-down design.
China has the great leap forward, suppressing of the Uighurs, destruction of Tibet's culture and a ban on religion. India does not. China has war with Vietnam and Taiwan. Its main border clash is with Indian. I've heard it said that free speech is important, even when people use it for hateful things. How can you possibly know that no-one has been summarily killed in any Chinese village? I'd say the fact that people know such things happen in India is a strength, not a weakness. It is an embarrassment for India so they have a incentive to solve it. In China, no-one will hear of it and no-one will be embarrassed, so it will never be solved.

Ultimately, when your child dies because a bridge falls down, or the water is dirty, or you are forced to move out of your home for a dam to be built, and then the state imprisons you for having the cheek to complain, you will wish you are not in China.

Wikipedia: "The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturalization and industrialization. Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces. It ended in catastrophe as it triggered a widespread famine that resulted in tens of millions of deaths."

Count any lynchings against that.
Rats. Filled my cart with goodies and now the site's hosed. Still 2 hours to go.

Hang in there sparkfun guys. Its going to be a wild, wild day!
You'd probably have parallax trouble if you tried to use both displays concurrently. And unfortunately I suspect "transparent enough" would be quite difficult.
I expect a maturity of the industry to arise when we make [effective abstractions].

Right, that's a great way of saying what I meant. To expound: effective abstractions must be "powerful" in the sense that they let you express ideas in broad strokes, and also "clear" in the sense that they wouldn't have unexpected properties (leak). Some of the macros I've seen in PG's Arc are good examples: they're intuitive and quick to look up. The problem with macros is that they aren't very polymorphic - you can't set default variables or pass in custom key/values as you can in Python's functions, for example.
The next decade in web development: IE is out (& so is Firefox)