skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is important, but seems a little technically sloppy. The issue isn't about autoincremented IDs, but the fact that they are used as external identifiers. The specific reason they shouldn't be used is that they are guessable.

It also confuses the concept of a GUID a little, I think. That refers to a global UID, which could reasonably be a URL+autoincremented number: global and unique.

But guessable. Which is the core issue.

I try to consider external IDs like passwords: create a cryptographically strong hash, using some salt, and externalize that.
The guy has the phrases "secret startup" and "java enterprise development" in the same sentence in the About Me section of his blog... can't imagine a real hacker saying either of those things, let alone in the same breath and without laughing.

Of course, I wouldn't claim to qualify either, but then again, I understood that sqrt function just fine.

I'm pretty sure his true definition of 'Production Language' is 'Java' and 'Toy Language' is 'Anything Not Java'
Top 8 Tech Trends in '08
Matchpoint - Let Them Compete For Your Business
Another problem with auto_increment occurs when the user id comes from an auto_increment field. By signing up as a new user once a week and observing your own user id you can measure the rate of growth of a competitor.
Scientists propose test of string theory based on neutral hydrogen absorption
yeah good point.
I share on YouTube for family. I share on YC cause the idea of digital karma is interesting. I only consume from Digg and Reddit, I dont feel significant on those sites.
Web Innovators' Group presenting startups in Cambridge tomorrow
Ah, OK. Thanks. That's a slightly more specific meaning of "database" than what I've gotten used to lately.
That should be "scholars of ancient Greek".
redditAll: Python valentine ("Paul is still giving us hell for not writing it in Lisp")
innodb, there is no other
You can't judge a big company's soul based on small granular events unless they form a pattern.

Blackballing CNet was a bad move, as was agreeing to work with the Chinese government to censor search results, but if you're in a judging mood you have to look for the bigger picture, in which they do more good than evil. You'd also want to find articles like this: http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/google-to-kill-domain-ta...
Bush asks for $6 billion to fight the terrorists online
Grats fellas. When/where's the party?
The Corporate Veil (or How to Lose Your Business, but Keep Your House)
Congrats guys!
Old. Also, not a real 'leak' - a paranoid/satirical fabrication. Of course sites will lie in their headlines as link-bait... but does YC.News have to repeat them?
I switched to Dvorak some years ago. Because the keys on the keyboard did not match what you got when you pressed them - Dvorak forced me to touch type - which I hadn't been able to do on querty (or rather quertz) for lack of pressure.

Now I am much better at querty and Dvorak. You do not unlearn the old layout. In fact I find that I can alternate between both layouts as fast as I can tell the computer to switch. (I assigned the windows-key for switching.)
anywhere was a winner from the day it launched. congratulations guys....
I lost about 24 karma on a thread yesterday. I'm still here :)
Great idea, great product.
Yeah, isn't this a "news" site.
Python : myFile = file(argFilename)

open is deprecated. Besides: You are right.
RailsConf 2007 Videos
Why East Coast VCs lack the Midas touch
I wonder if this will affect nokia's support of maemo (uses gtk+ toolkit)... I had the idea/wish they would eventually integrate maemo into their line of smart phones.
Imeem Gobbles Up A Young Startup, Anywhere.FM
Twitter Stats gives you a graphical look into your twitter activity
I like SICP Wadler does, too. Nevertheless I think he has a point in his critique. (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.p...)

For example - he argues that Scheme has not enough free Constructors. (Look into the pdf for an explanation..)
The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme
Gabe's comment mid-way down is interesting.
The funny thing is, the example given approaches 'sufficiently complicated' territory already, even though it's so short. Unless, of course, you use the 'Human Compiler' design pattern.
No, they should learn about transistors first. Or maybe particle physics. Only then can they really understand how addition works.
xkcd endorses Obama
'100% accurate' face recognition algorithm announced
quite frankly i think it is a trial and error process. there really is no proven technique. think it, build it. build it fast. assess response then react.
Why Google is for search and Digg is for laughs
safari, OS X
I had a quick look through the archives. This is another fun one: http://lkesteloot.blogspot.com/2006/08/hackers.html

I want nothing to do with hackers because I don't have hard problems. I don't have to write compilers or distributed databases. I have problems where co-workers write "WARNING:" in capital letters in messages to the user, effectively yelling at them. I have problems where co-workers write, "5 selected album(s)" because they can't be bothered to write an "if" statement to conditionally remove the pluralization. I have problems where co-workers write the entire text of a dialog box in bold and don't line up the title and the body of the message. Those are the problems I have, and hackers aren't going to help me. In fact, hackers are the ones most likely to commit these errors because user interfaces bore them.

Yes, user inferaces bore me. I wrote a recursive layout generator so I'd never have to worry about lining up anything ever again, so I literally do not have the problems he does at work. But I guess my 'toy' implementation isn't fit for a 'production' system, wherein you manually align everything.
Of course, the difference being that a 767 can land on most runways, an A380 can land on about what, 10 worldwide (exaggeration).
Yea, it happens in both Safari and Firefox.
Why I chose erlang; "The OO straight-jacket is a major hindrance to web-based computing"
anyone who changes the size of my browser window should be shot.
I personally think that C++ and Java are less readable then Lisp, Python, Ruby, ...

I think you get used to every Syntax. The point is, Lisp et al are much more compact, which makes the concepts easier to grasp.

I get a (mapcar #'f '(1 2 3)) much quicker than a

x = {1, 2, 3};
for (int i = 1; i < 4; i++) {
x[i] *= 2;
}
How Much Money Are Facebook Apps Making? Not Much Apparently
I am baffled by the hype surrounding Facebook applications. I wonder where the payoff is for the companies that develop these applications. The users are reluctant to pay for them. Advertising is clearly less than optimal at this point. Where exactly is the money coming from, or is it that money has yet to be made by anyone yet.
Lisp in Ruby (by Jim Weirich)
I am baffled by the hype surrounding Facebook applications. I wonder where the payoff is for the companies that develop these applications. The users are reluctant to pay for them. Advertising is clearly less than optimal at this point. Where exactly is the money coming from, or is it that money has yet to be made by anyone yet.
Well done, kudos!
Why in the world is anyone surprised? Do you people honestly believe facebook is worth the billions they claim?
Well in all fairness it would be:

(mapcar #'(lambda (x) (* x 2)) '(1 2 3))

vs

x = {1, 2, 3};
for (int i = 1; i < 4; i++) { x[i] *= 2; }

(I think... my only real experience is with Scheme, so I'm sure I messed up the pound-tick or some parens in Lisp)

But yeah, I generally agree the Lisp version is easier... especially once you get past trivial stuff like this.
I absolutely despise corporate-speak like " Team Centric X Collaborative X A+ Players with Low Ego. Get in on the ground floor and join a winning team."

I occasionally would throw together simple sites for my graphic designer friend... this is the one I'm most ashamed of:

http://backendrevenuesolutions.com/

Some "key" phrases:

Develop synergistic flow between website, CD-Rom, and other product components for campaign.

Assumes key position to drive growth

Hire and Manage writer for website to ensure that website works synergistically with the infomercial and back-end sales

And worst of all, I had to type all that out because the client insisted on using images for text, so she could have her damn font show up correctly.
Ask them again after they vest. :)
I think those gestures are pretty standard for panoramic images. Every QuickTime panorama I have seen used them.
Hiring with your gut
Aha, now we are getting somewhere: genes are a red herring. All the arguments regarding intelligence, DNA, memes, apes, irrelevant. You would have taken the same position about mountains. Or, I take it, hurricanes, earthquake zones, forks, dolls, different types of houses, TV shows, anything (though some things are more or less influential).

I guess to start with, you have said living in mountain regions is correlated with different kinds of culture. But you have not said by what mechanism it causes it. Which actually is the same question I kept asking about genes. So please do answer it.
I think the interface is quite intuitive. When I am using something as simple as this, I would rather learn by playing with it than read any instructions.
First lesson of pilot training:

Do not, under any circumstances, drool on the buttons.
It's strange you would think I had said our current culture is the random whim of nature. I actually think it is a mix of the good ideas and mistakes of people not nature. My comments the entire time have been human-centric in where they attribute causes.

Why does our culture have major gender roles that permeate people's personalities, today? It's not because it made logical sense in the past. Whether it did or not then, it does not now. And hasn't for some time. And this has been pointed out on a number of occasions. A particularly well-stated case was made by William Godwin in the 1790s.

What happened? People did not listen. They let their biases and closed-mindedness and unreasonableness get in the way of progress. That is the reason gender roles remain entrenched. If people were more thoughtful during the last few hundred years, then we wouldn't have recognizable gender roles today. That's the sort of cause I consider important and meaningful to explaining the present day situation.

Another fact of the situation is that parents teach gender roles to their children, whether the children like it or not, and without regard for whether it is helpful or hurtful, useful or not, makes sense or not, etc In a culture which does this, it isn't reasonable to say the gender roles exist because they are correct: the mechanism which perpetuates them does not depend on them being correct, and people are unwilling to change it so that it does.
I agree with a lot of what he said, although I don't expect that Clinton would get "swatted" by voters against any of the potential Republican candidates.

But mostly I just wanted to say that I thought the postscript was funny:

Windows Vista is flopping, and Mario Kart will be out for the Wii soon. I think the future will be okay.
Down with the arts students!
Do you believe you have any evidence which implies that this emotional view of humans is correct and that mine is not?
Anyone remember 'Knuth vs Email'? (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)
comment history only has 2 items
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=curi

it's from posting in heavily nested threads. it'd be nice if it could show the more recent comments, without the full tree, or something. it's not very useful, in this case, the way it is.
I feel like number 2 there is far and away the biggest.
Answering questions online. Oh, how I look forward to my degree in math. ;)
It's best to listen to what people say they want, then ask why over and over. You'll notice that as you dig through levels of answers to that question, that very different requests come down to the same basic unmet needs. Then you engineer a solution to that.
Obama simply looks presidential. He is very charismatic. I'd much rather watch him deliver the State of the Union than Bush.
OK, I guess I got confused because it's the opposite of Google Maps, which I use much more often.
For once could someone describe their startup for what it really is? I would love to see:

"We do not yet have a completed product but we are working on it..."
Digg's competitor is cnn.com and similar, not google.
Based on your experience, do you have any recommendations on things to do (or avoid doing) if you're coming to the US to work at a YC startup?

Do you think there is anything YC could have done to have made your friend's experience better?
Sweden set to sink the Pirate Bay
"San Francisco" trashes Yelp -- and its own ethics
Congrats! This project had a great user interface from the day it was launched, but also served a purpose, and likely was designed to scale from the start.
we chose innodb for likebetter. i just spent the weekend trying to figure out how I could get it to reliably handle a table with 85 million rows. though it can, the issue with innodb is that there really aren't that many tools to analyze it. but it is getting better (http://sourceforge.net/projects/innotop)
Bank's billions burnt in 10 days
At least The Register isn't buying it...

The Glaswegian psychologists may be hot stuff at face recognition, but plainly aren't engineering types - an engineer who said he'd produced a system with 100 per cent reliability would be laughed out of the room.
The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini
The law isn't very refined on this point. It's perhaps best to talk with a lawyer, taking the attitude "I'm going to do this, now keep me off the waterboard".

US law doesn't ban individuals from being international actors. It barely even acknowledges the possibility. But ultimately you're subject to the whims of whichever boarder guard your happen to meet.

Canadians are legally allowed to vacation in the USA for up to 6 months. I'm not sure, but I don't think the law is too specific on not being able to work (the semantics of the word are too tricky), but you need a visa to be in someone's employ. That may leave certain possibilities open.
No mention of the hundreds of restaurants in NYC proudly displaying Yelp stickers in their windows. Saw one last week with an award from Yelp for extraordinarily high ratings.

Very active community here. I just started telling everyone I know about it. Give them a couple of years and they'll be everywhere.
One thing is to make extra efforts to look professional. This is unusual for many hackers. That means: print color application letters on company letterhead. Dress nicely. Be gracious. Use bullet points and corpspeak with your job description. As a Canadian TN applicant, you need to apply for the position 'computer systems analyst', not 'software engineer'. You need to bring a sealed copy of your university transcript. You need to outline your compensation. You should briefly describe the company, and keep documents showing the company is real and incorporated, or they won't believe you. I imagine Alexa results will also help. :-)
I'm pretty sure Lego is what unleashed my inner hacker as a young child.
Hah! When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut...not really because they get to fly around in space, but because I saw a picture of some cockpit with tons of buttons and thought that was pretty cool.
His argument could just as easily be used against languages that have subroutines in favor of languages that don't. Sure, subroutine calls make your code more concise, but at the expense of readability: you have no idea what's going on in all those called functions! Better stick with a more verbose language - there's more code, but at least it's clear and explicit.
I think the recent economics articles have been about as much politics as I want to see here. These are discussions that are really better left to a beer with friends.
Easier, but more importantly safer in that any potential memory trashing code is implemented inside the language implementation itself (the bug that's in your C version couldn't really happen in the Lisp version).
How To Drastically Improve Yelp and Other Recommendation Sites
I'll lend you the gun
It's hard to steer clear of political discussion these days, isn't it? I spilled over into that area myself with a recent screencast for a new ourdoings.com feature:

http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/morephotos.htm
Yeah, or you can head to reddit or something. I do want to see more scientific articles relating to economics here. I mean articles on economics with actual analysis, data, graphs, etc.

And if the same can be done for any other subject, politics included, I'd support it. Present it in a way that teaches us something, rather than feeding us a conclusion without data.
Not a great reason to vote for someone.

I mentioned on reddit that I like him among the Democrats for his commitment to open government. However, while he has opposed the war he has not spoken out against wider American militarism. In addition, along with his democratic colleagues he seems not to appreciate the value of a free economy.

I'm pulling for Paul (Graham or Ron), but I guess he'll be alright. Nowhere to go but up, right?
SmugBlog: Your private photos are still private (response to "dangers of autoincrementing")
I'm part of the Lisp/Scheme crowd. I don't use continuations in my web development, but I think you're stating things too strongly to say they should never be used. I think it's easy to see the convenience of them, and rapid prototyping is important. When scalability becomes a big issue people will come up with a good way of serializing continuations.
Obama simply looks presidential.

Since you left out the evidence for that assertion, I'll supply it:

http://imagesource5d.allposters.com/watermarker/12-1253-W68T...

Yep, like a pea in the pod.
Karma. I'm hoping to come back as a walrus.
I thought it was a reasonable suggestion, considering that game OCaml is known for C-like performance. This seems to be borne out by its use in the financial industry, which also cares a lot about speed and performance.

(note - also written by a Lisp wannabe who knows about Naughty Dog)
Don MacAskill (SmugMug CEO) has posted a response on his blog: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/01/28/your-private-photos-...

Says Don: "To us, privacy and security are two separate, but related, issues. One analogy we use often is that security is like locking your front door and arming your alarm (no-one can get in without a key), and privacy is like closing your window blinds (no-one can look in from the outside, but you can tell people where you live and they can visit without a key)."
I think economics is fascinating, but I'd rather sacrifice it than be stuck with the short leap to policy discussions and attendant discord that often ensues with even more or less 'scientific' articles.
Startup sets full mobile browser free
For some reason I imagined the cockpit of the world's largest commercial airliner would be much bigger.
To everyone that hates stuff like this getting posted (I'm one of them), just remember that a presidential election is the biggest media circus of the year, and it lasts a really long time. It affects every American (and some would say the rest of the world as well) and coverage is so pervasive it's hard to avoid, so some of it is going to seep in.

For those that wish to post political articles, please consider that a significant portion of the readers of Hacker News greatly dislike the tone that political discussion often takes. If you decide to post something, please make sure it is 1) fair and even handed, 2) not polarizing, and 3) loosely related to Hacker News in general.

A big thank you in advance to everyone who helps keep things civil over the next (oy) 10 months.
I wonder if the throttle move. In almost all aircraft, excepting the A3[2|3|4|8]0 family, throttles move when in any automatic mode. If the autoflight system decides to go to full throttle, they'll slide all the way forward. This was definitely true on the B7[5|6]7 series, but I'm not certain about the B777.

There were a rash of concerns (though no incidents that I recall) because pilots often leave a hand on the throttle to have a sense of what the aircraft is doing. A sudden movement could mean a change in flight mode or a level off, or a stall.

By contrast Airbus's non-moving throttles are just shiny switches. They have detente settings for each mode. They could just as easily be a set of toggle switches.
Paul would have my vote, but some things he says just don't agree with me. Right now more things Obama has said matches my views. Although I think Paul would make a great president.
That is the most ridiculous article title I have ever seen on hacker news.

It's one thing for a Senator to endorse a candidate, but xkcd? Just... no.
You're right that most existing web application frameworks (targeted at lisp or otherwise), use some sort of server side state mechanism. But that is not to say, that a rapid prototyping framework couldn't be made, which used solely client side state.

Anyway, I am of course putting it a bit on the extreme end here, but in principle I stand by it. Continuations are but an elegant hack; I might prefer it over other similar hacks, but I'd rather not have to use it at all.
Can anyone offer a cogent argument for why I should give a shit who Randall Munroe thinks should be president?
A Very Speculative Theory of Free Will
"By signing up as a new user once a week and observing your own user id you can measure the rate of growth of a competitor."

I've done similar with cheques. In a previous job, I was paid by cheque. Each month, I logged the cheque number. From this and taking into account other payment methods, I determined that the company had significantly fewer transactions than the boss claimed.
How Tiger Woods makes everyone else on the course play worse
What a Car Can Tell You About Entrepreneurship
First, I'll second the folks who have already responded by saying that you shouldn't be typing for 15 hours per day. Coding, perhaps, but easily 1/2 or 2/3 of the time you spend programming should be spent thinking, reading code, etc. If you're consistently banging out line after line of new code for >12 hours per day, something is horribly wrong with your workflow, and I can't imagine you're getting much of an opportunity to refactor and test your code as you go.

That being said, I've found that even 8-10 hours of steady typing can be too much for me, unless I'm using an ergonomic keyboard and good office furniture. If you can find any model of keyboard at all that works for you, buy it. Ditto for wrist rests, chairs, monitors, whatever. If it's expensive, make your employer pay for it. No manager worth their salt should look askance at spending $1-2k if it'll keep you in front of the keyboard for even an hour longer per day.

If you're working for yourself and therefore self-imposing these ridiculous hours and spending limits, then stop. Seriously, just stop. Think about whether the payoff is going to be big enough to make crippling yourself for life. Hell, if you're really sitting at a computer for 15 hours a day, you're probably at risk of getting blood clots in your legs from lack of motion. No startup is worth dying over, or even seriously degrading your quality of living in the future.
Enerjy - Automatically review your java code by comparing to open source
Interesting concept. I wonder how well it works.
Well, what's the point of an endorsement? To save you the trouble of researching everything yourself because someone who you already know tells you what they think. If you trust the endorser, then they've saved you some time. Ditto if you distrust them (there are some people that if they endorsed my favorite candidate, I'd probably be so suspicious I'd change my vote). I know a lot about what the xkcd guy is like than my senator (well, not my senator (Obama) but probably everyone else), so his endorsement is more useful information.

It was also a well written explanation of his views, whether you agree with it or not.