skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I lived in Russia for two years. When I first moved there (I was 19) I went through the painful experience of being immersed in a foreign language. For a couple of months I couldn't express myself clearly, if at all. I couldn't put more than a couple of words together. I only understood about half of what people were saying to me. I couldn't even ask the bus driver to stop so I could get off at my stop.

After that short period, though, I became very comfortable communicating in Russian. I realized that there's probably no way to learn a language without going through that painful period. I think the same is true of programming languages. You're going to have to stumble through a couple thousand lines of horribly written code before you become fluent. You might as well start writing those now and get it over with.

I just started in a new roller hockey league this week. I still can't skate backwards well. I know that if I want to learn I'm going to have to fall on my butt a bunch of times. As long as I stay cautious and don't allow myself to fall, I'll probably never learn.
A single bus would have hundreds of fares over the course of a day.
The Checklist Manifesto
The majority of the MBTA budget is paid for by sales taxes.

It has $1,037M for operating expenses.

Revenue Sources:
State Sales Tax	$756M
Fares	$430M
Municipal Assessments	$143M
Parking, Real Estate Tenants, etc.	$37.4M
Real Estate Sales and Misc.	$20.8M
Advertising	$11.0M
Federal government	$8.0M
Interest	$3.8M
Utility reimbursement from tenants	$2.8M
Total	$1,413M

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportatio...
The fewer unknowns the better the data and the more accurate the experiment.

In terms of predicting how likely someone is to finish their freshman year of collage having a test where you can increase your score significantly with moderate levels of preparation is not a bad thing. However, the fact you can easily game the test means it is a less accurate indicator of a student’s innate capability. The fact you can retake the test creates yet another sort of bias. etc.

More generally, it's easy to focus on defects in the test, which are irrelevant in a larger contest and subject to change.
My point was, you know nothing about how they store their passwords if they send you a reset link.
Given the recent article about how San Francisco is the worst run city in the US:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998554

Isn't this a good reason NOT to use open source? ;)
It's an interesting article, but I'm not sure how I feel about the word 'publicy'.
We are using Lustre on a projec. The differences that jump out to me on http://ceph.newdream.net/about/

1) auto-balancing when new storage nodes are added

2) copies of objects stored in multiple storage nodes

Running HA Lustre requires a LOT of work.

1) Lustre requires tricks like copying files to rebalance

2) Lustre only has one copy of any section, so each OST is a SPOF. Sun recommends deploying OST in pairs with DRDB and Heartbeat functionality (cutting your space in half and complicating the deploying), but a box failing won't break your FS. This doesn't fix the problem that if a network partition occurs since you still have locality of chunks in a single rack.

For more information about how complicated Lustre in a production environment is check out the talks at the last UG by Sun employees (Lessons Learned & Best Practices, Managing High Availability on a Shine-Equipped Lustre Cluster):

http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php/Lustre_User_Group_2009

I've not tested Ceph in production but many people I talk to about our Lustre woes recommend Ethan Miller's work - http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~elm/ - which leads to Ceph ;)

Even if you aren't worrying about availability, Lustre has issues with usage:

Lustre requires older kernels - which means compatibility with modern non-RHEL distros leads to headaches when you need the lastest version of KVM (or python).

Lustre also tries to be a POSIX filesystem but it breaks horrible when you try to use features like O_APPEND from multiple nodes (file corruption!) We are still tracking down Lustre breaking when we read files in a certain order (rsync is ok, but start skipping around in a file read leads to the kernel stopping responding)

After months of dealing with Lustre issues with trying to support POSIX I have come to love the non-POSIX (S3-like API) to distributed filesystems.
Wow, on my monitor one is red and the other is clearly brown. They're not really close.

Edit: After a quick look in an image editor, I can see that only the red channel is significantly different. This changed the value somewhat, but had hardly any effect on hue or saturation. I guess my monitor is over-emphasizing this difference.
The interview hasn't happened yet. If you prefer, I can submit the recorded interview once it is recorded, edited and posted on Mixergy.com.

I am by no means a Seth Godin worshipper... I just thought that some people on here might be interested to see the interview live and be able to ask questions they may have for Seth. He is one of the higher profile guests Andrew has interviewed and sethgodin.com submissions tend to create some interesting conversations here on HN.
I'm married to a biology PhD, and at one point spent a couple of years watching people, including biologists, deal with a constant stream of Creationists in places like talk.origins.

My experience is that if you're a personal friend, you get more serious conversation. If you're someone they know but not so closely, they'll have the argument if pushed but don't feel the need to actively educate. And if you're a random person spouting on the Internet, it isn't worth their time to get involved. If pushed to be involved, they don't feel the need to be pleasant about it.

After spending time myself explaining the same thing over and over again, I've come to feel the same way. I've also come to realize that there are plenty of smart people who do not wish to be educated. Including in my direct personal experience, at least one PhD in mathematics and another in molecular biology.

Based on this experience I have some sympathy for the position of climate scientists. You spend your life climbing around glaciers in Greenland, and you don't really feel like spending the rest of it convincing people who don't want to bother learning the basics about climate.
Note that if you're an employee instead of a contractor like in this case, your state very possibly has a unit that hounds companies that don't pay your final paycheck(s).

I and a number of coworkers had to do this in Virginia when a couple of investors (worth $600 million between them) revealed they were devils rather than angels. The process was pain free compared to the "sue them" route tallyho00 had to follow (the state employee(s) we dealt with were experienced and had heard it all before), and in theory it was backed up by their (in)action being an misdemeanor.

Kudos to tallh00 for cutting them off promptly and pursuing them, we need a more feedback like that in the system.
My new startup — hypemix.in
Completion audio alerts for long running, remote jobs
>Busting data lock-in would significantly improve competition and available choices.

For various reasons, proprietary software is a lot more likely to employ proprietary data formats than open source software.

Of course, there are exceptions - e.g. the native GIMP format, which I understand to be a real hairball; but apparently the developers are working on a new open standard to replace it in future versions.
I like the new site better than the current one, but it still needs work. Some general comments about both:

Width: To accommodate (almost) everything, most designers keep things to a maximum width of 960px. Your site is 1100px wide. On most sites I'd say this is an issue, because unless you specifically want horizontal scrolling it's a bad idea. Since your site is targeted towards gamers, they might all have monitors that wide--I don't know. I'd take a look at your analytics and make sure that's a safe width. I'll note that even if it is ok it feels really wide. Your designer's done a decent job of keeping it under control from what I can see, but recognize that text that stretches across the whole width is not at all readable.

Navigation mouseovers: right now when you mouse over your navigation links, they turn blue and get underlined. The dark blue is hard to see on both sites, and the effect just seems unrelated to anything else on the page. Do one or the other. For the color, I'd go with either the same color as the 'current page' link, or something halfway in between the two. I normally prefer the latter, but you do have to make sure that the difference is enough to be very easily noticeable.

Some comments on the new design, specifically:
First, I'd like to say that this is much better in general. It still needs work, but it's much improved.

A few relatively minor about the top section:

The baseline of the text in the logo should probably align with the baseline of the navigation link text. (I'd cut out some of the shadow or make it fade more quickly so it fits there.)

The switch to a serif face for your 'sales pitch' is good--it draws attention to it, and that's what you want. I would recommend getting a little more creative with font choices than Times New Roman though!

The snowflakes don't make much sense to me--I just don't know why they're there. It might look better than with a plain or gradient background anyway, but finding something a little more topical might be a good idea.

I see what you're trying to do with the computer, but right now it's drawing attention away from your software and putting it on the computer. I think just a screenshot of your software could be much better.

The bottom part I think needs some new ideas. It's too same-y (and a bit messy) and my eyes get lost. More visual differentiation would be a good thing.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069808
If you find yourself behind enemy lines, you need ammo, especially if they are hunting you down. Otherwise keep it for emergencies.
A Fantasy Explanation of Standard vs. Blind SQL Injection
This has already been tried in many cities outside the US. It doesn't work, and instead leads to absolutely horrendous traffic jams because road space is a limited resource. Some examples: Cairo, Lagos, Mexico City.
"'ll bet that in one of those Apple board meetings that Google (GOOG) CEO Steve Schmidt used to attend, he realized that Jobs was on the verge of building AppleWorld and he's been scared ever since."

I don't think it's possible to build a "closed digital world" that will have the traction of the entirety of the open Internet.

Closed systems are great for creating an ideal model of how thing "ought" to work. But the "wide world" tends to take those innovations and expand them beyond the limits of a closed ideal system.

Apple has made great profits on the Macintosh but it's also become happy with the Mac having a highly profitable niche position. That seems like the fate of the entire "Apple World" situation. Remember Disney never extended Disney World beyond Florida.

I'm sure Google is running. "Scared" seems like a bit of a reach. I suspect that Google is more afraid of entities which try monopolize and monetize their Internet pipes.
you'll get both if you take the cod liver oil that this article mentions.
It seems like Lisp is great the way Shakespeare or Hemingway are great. People go on and on about how great they are... but if you look at their bookshelves "The Compleat Shakespeare" tome is gathering dust on the bottom shelf and right at eye level are the harry potter and starwars books... the stuff people actually read.
Not to mention the negative effects on health caused by sigils. (Disclaimer: I like Perl/Lisp/Python.)
I read the paper and frankly speaking, I am very skeptical that this is an application for the masses.

I found this piece interesting:

>The Sikuli Search prototype has a database of 102 popular
computer books covering various operating systems (e.g.,
Windows XP, MacOS) and applications (e.g., Photoshop,
Office), all represented in PDF4. This database contains
more than 50k screenshots. The three-feature indexing
scheme is written in C++ to index these screenshots, using
SIFT [11] to extract visual features, Tesseract5 for OCR,
and Ferret6 for indexing the text surrounding the screenshots.
All other server-side functionality, such as accepting
queries and formatting search results, is implemented in
Ruby on Rails7 with a SQL database. On the client side, the
interfaces for searching and annotating screenshots are implemented
in Java.

... and the scripting engine is in Python.

Sometimes I wonder if Computer Science wouldn't have been better off with a constantly evolving C rather than all this mess. Every time I build a web application I feel as if I am building Frankenstein's body with different animal parts.

There were two major attempts to bring computers to the masses COBOL and SQL and they both managed to produce the opposite result rather than the masses using them a demand was created for very highly paid Programmer jobs! Electronic Engineers never attempted to teach the masses how to build TV's. In the late 80's I was teaching laymen things like 'How to Use MSDOS' and 'Introduction to Wordperfect' which paid for the rent but overall was a depressing experience. I also taught at the same time 'Pascal' and 'C' to Mechanical Engineers, my conclusion was that some people take to programming - like some people take to maths, they enjoy it and after an initial push they will teach themselves the rest and the rest will never touch programming even if their life depended on it.

In my mind the only successful 'programming for the masses' products are Excel and partly HTML.
Sesame Street: Using Twitter & Facebook to help parents talk to kids about Haiti
The line I presented to p5p went something like this:

print join "\t", map {$format[$_]->($row[$_])} 0..$#format;

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=34786 has a longer code example which I used to introduce some idea of what closures could be useful for to a lot of Perl programmers.
Déjà lu: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062730
what was the domain ? :)
Citation? My recollection is the opposite. Most state and federal highways here in Texas require local matching funds on top of any gas tax money.

"No road that we built in Texas paid for itself." - http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2009/11/aga...
But that's only true if the facts aren't true. If the Dow did really fall because people are worried by the new regulations than the title isn't sensationalist it's just factual reporting. So the question is this: Was it impossible to find out the motivation of investors? I don't think it is (especially when you have big time investors like Warren Buffett coming out against it)
Also, you want to try and make a signal to any rescuers or passers by.

Try chopping down trees in a pattern so planes can see the pattern. Have a bonfire ready that can be lit in less than a minute if you hear a plane or helicopter, or see a boat. A mirror too can be reflected out to people.
I agree with your comment however I don't think there is a difference, practically, with something being 'legal' and something being 'illegal' but tolerated nonetheless. In this case, the FBI acted improperly however with no consequences - nobody will be sued, or go to jail for this. Then what's the difference?
Common Lisp is a compromise between several different Lisp communities. It is in the nature of compromises that some will dislike the result.
Yes, it's suposed to look like the Firefox logo.
Interview with an Adware Hacker
If you don't feel like going that far, even a thank you note is really appreciated.
I know you are joking, at least I hope so :)

Perl has many nice ideas, that were copied into other languages ... think regexp literals for example, and I know people got crazy about DSLs once Ruby got popular, but DSLs have been the norm in Perl since forever ... due to its flexible syntax and to its interpreter (see Devel::Declare ... which allows you to locally take over control from the Perl's parser ... such that you can add new syntax).

The only problem with Perl is that it wasn't supposed to be such high-level and general purpose. It was just supposed to be a replacement for grep / awk / sed. Then it got popular :)

Larry Wall is a really smart guy (I met him at the last YAPC::Europe) ... a little crazy though :) ... but he does have good ideas. See for instance this article on why Perl is the way it is ... http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

I don't know why, but I like crazy people :)
If people keep all other aspects of their commute constant while switching from private cars to taxis, traffic will remain almost exactly the same. The same number of cars will be on the road at the same time. Parking lots will free up, but roads will stay packed.
Even open-source software has a potential problem in some countries. For example, while OSS is often received free of charge, the government can argue that the user still got an item of value. So they have to pay taxes on this "gift".
It's listed at the bottom of the article - newsvine.com.
ThanksHN : Here is almost the only place where I get information
Since a couple of weeks, I began unsubscribing to a lot of my feeds because I feel that HN gives me 80% of the information I want (and that's more than I really need).

In the last weeks, I pushed a lot of Scott Berkun (http://www.scottberkun.com/) because he's an interesting blogger and I thought that if he gains more attention, someone will subscribe to his RSS and then I could unsubscribe myself and let HN do the rest.

Blogs like 37signals or CodingHorror are filtered through this community to give me only the most interesting posts.

Am I the only one in this situation?
I take light rail from Mountain View to San Jose almost every day. My trip of about 18 miles takes 50 minutes. Fix that please.
Anyone can sue you at any time for any reason. Don't worry about this. If a take down request doesn't come from a lawyer ignore it, and get back to work.
Mobile 2010: Predictions for Apple, Google, and RIM
One difference is that "illegal but not prosecuted" is still not admissible as evidence in court. I'll bet there are some defendants' lawyers celebrating this ruling right now, because now the FBI is going to have to prove that it got those records legally, and that just got harder.
Vinod Khosla Boosted Funds to Over $1B
Pixel Qi: The LCD Screen That Could Finally Kill Paper For Good
Tell HN: I released my open source iPhone AppStore Sales Graphing Tool
No, but if you can find the space to put a pod like this outside, then you can find room for a small garden shed that costs < $1000 and outfit it with really nice furniture for a hell of a lot less than $25k.

Where I live, you can build a 30'x60'x15' pole shed for about $15k. That's bigger than some people's apartments!
But that was in an editorial op ed piece. Their op ed pieces have always been political, but they always used to do a good job to make sure the politics doesn't leak out from there.
This is going to be great
Let's see, Apple had a closed operating system before they went to unix with OSX, and we know where OS9 was headed. It's only when they co-opted unix that they achieved such great success with Mac market share.
Totally agree. Privatizing public transportation would be the fastest way to both make it profitable and deliver more value to consumers.

There is a good research to back this up, but intuitively it makes sense also for the simple reason that you always spend your own money more carefully than you spend someone else's.

A government employee is just trying not to be noticed or fired. A private company is fiercely competing to save their own money and make more of it (the only way to do the latter is to deliver a product customers want). The selfish profit incentive is the greatest method we've ever found to motivate people and drive progress for everyone.
That whole thing was bogus, they mixed expenses from the County of San Francisco with the City of San Francisco (because the boundaries are the same). Factor for that, and it's actually well run for a city with a major port, an airport, a great public transit system, and an open source policy.

I'd say it's a good reason FOR using open source.
No offense, but with no prior submissions, no comments, no bio and an empty twitter account, you are going to have to provide a bit more information to earn an email address.
This story was submitted a month ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014011

And a few days ealier than that:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005406

The BBC item got flagged and deleted, but here's the link in case you're interested:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8429634.stm

It's a hard problem, a really hard problem, and it's been oversold.
Are The Reals Really Uncountable?
That is incorrect. You are not allowed to cry fire in a theater nor are you allowed to say you will assassinate a public figure.
I know in DC Metro (where I am) the ads are insanely small

Have we been riding the same metro? The DC metro has some pretty big ads in the stations.
At the bottom of the site I've listed a bunch of things I'm planning for the future. If anyone can come up with ideas on what would make for a really good sales grapher, please do comment.
The client has a few but very important shortcomings like being unable to set what to alert for via text-to-speech, also one cannot set the volume neither of said text nor for anything else.
The user-interface seems a bit off to me, with that annoying background and other elements, but I'm a minimalist kind of guy but I do find it usable. Also the feature to "mask" your voice is not at all highly regarded by me, especially if it cannot be disabled globally on my side as it is usually more annoying than funny.
The website serves it's purpose but yes, what the others said about instant clarity what the site is about would help.
Make it really easy to get to the airport.

Pro: Airport parking is an expensive hassle, thus people are always taking cabs or asking for rides. Airports are far from city centers, and often inconvenient to get to.

However, it's probably not enough traffic to sustain an entire system, but I think it makes for a good first step in a new system.

The other thing is that we either need to:

1) Stop subsidizing air & road travel so much

2) Subsidize public transit in order to make it more competitive with road / air travel

#1 is politically infeasible ... but perhaps #2 is as well. Maybe public transit support could be billed as a way to get everyone else off the road?
I think this would be so much better and useful if it was a solar powered shower that sat in your garden. It could catch rain water when available and use tap water (from the hose) otherwise. It's pretty simple to stick a water tank in a solar oven to heat the water too. And you don't need a water pump if the water tank is on the roof, you get plenty of water pressure from gravity.

The water could also then drain into the garden if you used the right soaps in the shower.

A nice design like this could really bring grey water to people who don't want to build their own outdoor showers.
BTW, I know this idea is kind of out of left field but its the first thing I thought when I saw the box. It really looks like it would be a pleasure to take a shower in it while being in the garden.
Are you saying that OSX is more open than OS9? :)
I imagine they think we'll get what we deserve for doing so.
I won't use the word 'scared' but I actually think Apple is worried about Google.

In my opinion, It is Google that is getting into Apple's territory (Android, Chrome OS) and Apple is trying to stave them off.

A lot of Apple's IPhone users depend on Google services and not the other way around. This is why Apple would probably have its own Search and Map services in the near future.
"Apple quickly realized that apps would one day overtake .coms."

I'm sorry, what? In what conceivable metric do apps outnumber .coms?!