skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The big problem I see is that it makes it harder to know what the law says at any given time;

It's already the case that no one knows "what the law says at any given time".

> Change isn't necessarily bad, but in this case, change for change's sake undoubtedly is.

It's not change for change's sake. It's change to get rid of laws that aren't worth renewing. Since laws are, by definition, threat or imposition of force, they should be somewhat valuable.

I'd argue that simple renewal isn't enough, that renewal should require more effort/votes than the original passage. After all, renewal comes after experience. If a law actually works, it will have more support with experience.

Note that expiration also makes it reasonable to try more experiments because you can reasonably say "hey, if it doesn't work, we're not stuck with it". With "stay until explicit repeal", it's a lot more work to undo mistakes. (Note that almost all laws have benefiaries, and those folks fight tooth and nail against repeal to keep their benefits.)
The only way that you can be called in to fix an issue is if you let them. If you want a vacation desperately, then take one. And don't make yourself available to work, because when you do, it stops being a vacation...
* I was hit by a bus while walking on the sidewalk in Brazil

* I'm a scratch golfer

* I speak portuguese and spanish fluently

After reading some of these I feel that I haven't done much with my life :(
If quality equated market share, herpes would be a good thing.
Looks cool, I'm printing a copy now!
Exactly. I found that they couldn't even give me a job description. They just told me some hand waving statement like "we have a number of open positions in several engineering departments and we look at your qualifications and match you to one."

In addition you interview with a bunch of sometimes friendly, yet sometimes extremely condescending engineers. Some of the engineers I interviewed with were very respectful and corteous, while others acted as if I were wasting their time.

In general, I got the impression that Google is full of huge egos and that I should feel lucky if I had the opportunity to work there. No other company would act like this toward potential employees.

In any case, another disadvantage to working at Google is that they are getting involved in so many businesses, almost any side project is likely to become their property. The company I work at now is great because as long as I don't compete with their vertical, I can start any business I want on the side.
10 Lessons Learned from Usability Testing
I don’t see how this could work. In a society with a developing technology and economy, new situations come up (e.g., how to allocate spectrum for these cool new cellular telephone thingies) where one could reasonably argue that new government regulations are called for, and old laws are unlikely to become obsolete at the same rate.

So either the total number of words of The Law goes up or some body of executive-branch regulation grows to have the same effect or (as you pointed out) courts read complicated legal doctrines into terse legislative text or the law is so ambiguous that citizens have no way to predict how a court will rule.

Of all these alternatives I think the first is the least bad.
"Evil spirits caused the tsunami" is no less superstition than "global warming caused the tsunami".

Well.

When you think about it, global warming couldn't cause a tsunami, whereas evil spirits could potentially cause a tsunami (if they existed). They aren't equivalent statements.

So the first one is potentially true, but incredible, and the second is simply incorrect.

If your proposal is that evil spirits and global warming are equivalent beliefs, I don't think so. Global warming is actually testable (either the globe is warming or it isn't); you can't test for evil spirits. Global warming might be incorrect, and it might be supported by unfounded evidence, but it isn't superstitious.
Sequel, Oracle and Snow Leopard (german article)
Wow. Were none of the same cops ever on the repeat visits? "Hey Joe, isn't this the same elderly couple who had nothing to do with the murder and the coke deal and the prostitution ring? Why the heck are we here again?"
Only the ones too clueless to use Emacs or another editor that does it for you.
eval() strikes me as a dangerous thing, security-wise.
Benign as in it wasn't some overly mystical, witchcrafty black magic voodoo - any Hindu worth his prayer beads would recognise his 'chants' off the bat.

Not benign in the "what could possibly go wrong" sense :)
waybackwhen, I added additional code to validate s Swiss ZIP code to an application, thinking that the 8000 area must be the highest number area

Of course it is 9000 and ever since the ZIP code field is a non-validated text field in all applications I have done since :-)
I got burned out at 18. Took me three years to recover. I think it's a good experience to have early..it makes you realize what is _really_ important to you.
What happens is this: There is something called a "query plan." For trivial queries, it is the same as the query. But for more complex queries it works out how to use indices, joins, and so forth. It's kind of a lower-level query language. Figuring out the query plan can be costly for complex queries.

The database maintains a cache of query plans, so when you give it the same query, you get the query plan back right away and the database runs it.

There are data caches for other reasons, but the problem Jeff is describing is that the C# VM must interpret all the steps of building a SQL query in text every time it's run. The database may have the query plan cached, but even though the code never changes, building the SQL query string happens every time.
High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS On CentOS 5.4
It's interesting to me that he's got a top 1000 site with standard tools. No "NoSql" or the other such echo chamber flavor of the day fads.

Can get away with this because c#, .net, asp.net and sql server are pretty darn fast?

<fud>
It's been my experience that the standard 2 tier app with a compiled language is usually pretty fast out of the box. Databases are an _almost_ solved problem. The db folks have been at it a long time and you can wring some pretty amazing performance out of sql server|oracle|etc.

Problems:
php is usually slow as sh!t and requires something like eAccelerator to provide decent performance.

Java could be good, but the App Server/Broker/N-tier architecture usually kills performance rather than enhancing it.

Just me experience. No hard science here.
</fud>
Language designers take note: there is tremendous utility in making entities in your language isomorphic to entities expressed in previous languages.

I am actually using such isomorphisms in my current porting project. I'm literally getting a couple of orders of magnitude more productivity out of this over porting by hand.

Also note: less syntax makes this easier.
This thread has been yet another fruitful contribution to the language wars.

There seems to be something inherent in us that feels the need to turn our tools into our religion. It's not terribly productive.
This has just been posted on HN

http://msgpack.sourceforge.net/

Make sure you benchmark simple JSON. It might be enough.
The argument that XML can have various different structures for storing a person's name, while JSON provides one simple solution, doesn't fly. You could run into something like
{
"Person": {
"property": {
"type": "first-name",
"value": "John"
},
"property": {
"type": "last-name",
"value": "Smith"
}
}
}

This begs the question, "Why would you do something that convoluted?" Well, you can ask the same of the XML examples, and the answer probably boils down to requirements (or incompetence?).
I would assume that the people you would be working for are kind of corny, FWIW.
I think he just assumed that the number of people who are actually capable of cold blooded murder in public are very few, and that the number of people who know how to get and use poisons properly is even smaller.

Everybody can come up with a movie plot scenario where something is possible, but the actual risk of him dying was actually very small.
In the US yes, but here in the UK that doesn't work because of Meastro/Switch/Solo cards. It may also be different in other countries. So don't always assume stupidity when you see a drop down box :)
Less than 100 Ways to Make Flexible Web Tools
Thanks. Makes sense. I was curious because I've spent much time developing quality case parsing and semantic analysis technologies, and one of the very difficult problems I've been interested in - but not yet approached - is automatically parsing and analyzing legislation. I think there is much headway that will be made there in the coming years/decade, but it's a tricky problem.
Would greatly appreciate any shared tips in the comments of the post. I'm not above wise words shared here cut & pasted in with credit though.
very cool app, I just don't know if I'd keep my window open (in my slew of open tabs) and be able to find it again, to the point where its useful.
I used to work as a freelance journalist, and did find a couple of downsides to working from home.

1) It's easy to procrastinate, so it's bad if you're not disciplined.
2) Your 'office' is always a few feet away, so it's bad if you're a workaholic.

There is something nice about clocking out, going home, and forgetting about work for a while, instead of sitting at dinner thinking "I've really got to do X."

But if you're disciplined and balanced, yes, it can be great.
Isn't the Naive Bayes classifier biased to users with a large volume of text? Ie if there are two users and one writes 99% of the content it's very likely that that user will be picked as the author for almost anything? At the same time, this may be desired since someone who does contribute a lot on HN may have also desired to have some fun.
Apple's Demands for Getting an Early Access To An iPad
i thought he was saying more than that.

i thought that he was saying that a new plan is always constructed. what i was saying is that a new plan only needs to be constructed for "sufficiently different" queries, where "sufficiently different" can be something much more stringent than the hash of the literal text.

if we're only worrying about the parsing time (as opposed to the time to build and optimize a plan) then it's even more pointless to worry about this (i'm assuming parsing is significantly faster than actually building a plan).

[edit: i'm confused who is who here; have swapped person twice, hope this is correct]
Looks nice. I went into the tarball, looking for the Sage code snippets (they seem to be only inline in the Tex files). Then, besides the possibly redundant .hg dir, I noticed there were no image files for the figures. Those are also inline, with "{tikzpicture}"

Seems to be a fairly recent thing. Found this 2006 paper:
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb28-1/tb88mertz.pdf

P.S.
This seems good enough to fetch all the Sage listings:

sed -e '/begin.lstlisting/,/end.lstlisting/p' -e d *.tex

(Just in case it's handy for someone else. I always forget how 'sed' ranges work.)

P.P.S. The PGF/TikZ graphics for TeX seem to have been first released in 2005: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgf/ .
These things sneak up on you when you are not looking ... Google even tells me there's an "Inkscape extension for exporting SVG paths as TikZ code"
Affirmations: The Power of Thought
This is also a good link about the Maya doomsday prophecy, it's more thorough I think, but less authoritative (it not coming from NASA):
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/2012-th...
I would rephrase that as the problem with the Cravath system is that companies that claim to follow it, don't. The system, as developed at Cravath, involved extensive training and mentoring. The advantage of the system for other companies was that they got very experienced and well trained employees by hiring "alumni" of Cravath.

The Up or Out promotion system used by most companies (and for officers in the US military), the advantages of the cravath system were removed and only the up or out was retained. The most prominent example of how this perverted version of the cravath system came to permeate US industry was Jack Welch's GE. Welch is seen as a hero by business majors and every stupid thing he said or did is worshipped as gospel.

The quintessential example of Welch's stupidity came during a discussion with employees, where an employee asked about loyalty and Welch responded: "it's Friday, you got paid, we're even."
Dispatch from the Google Fringe
cops have flagged the Martin's address so no officer will be dispatched to the home without double-checking the address.

Call me cynical, but the first thing I thought when reading this is "so that's how they keep the police from bothering any of the 'connected' people".
For some reason, every time I let an editor automatically insert a closing parenthesis, quotation, or brace, I almost always end up with extras at the end, which is just as frustrating, if not harder to debug, as not enough. Maybe it's the way I tend to backstep as I think my way through the code flow, but it never ceases to happen whenever I step foot into Eclipse or Visual Studio...
Design Evolution of Plants vs. Zombies
Absolutely. HN has an "entrepreneur bias" (part of its reason for existing, of course) that discourages becoming entrenched; but for some people becoming entrenched in a cushy job is probably their dream, and who are we to judjge them?
"Hello world" must go away from all language examples.

It's irrelevant how complex doing hello world in Java is since no user actually cares about stuff visible in text mode starting a decade or more back.

Of course, Java won't win a brevity contest, but System.out.println isn't the best pick to demonstrate this.
Check out Avro, too. With both Protocol Buffers and Thrift, it's really hard to evolve schemas because you won't be able to read data written with an earlier version of the schema. Avro has the speed of binary while being flexible enough to read older data with later versions of the schema.
"Google knew that YouTube’s popularity depended on infringing materials", yeah, because all interesting content is created by large corporations with a need to control, amen.

"Google and YouTube had the technology to stop infringement at any time but deliberately chose not to use it." and how much of Google's horsepower does Viacom think Google is obliged to use for identifying their content?

"The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case." LOL.
Multicore requires OS rework, Windows architect advises
How? I'm evaluating strings that are built with my javascript code or from my server code, not arbitrary user input from other users. Yes the user is able to enter parenthesis into a textbox, and those become part of the evaluated string, but I regex replace out everything but the actual parenthesis.
For any "human" data: trim and escape, and you're done. If you want to validate it, just ask the party that knows for sure (send an email, run a transaction, visit the URL).

This includes names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, URLs, CC/account numbers, user names, passwords (maybe tell them that caps-lock is on or any other weird keyboard state if you can).
I don't think it has anything to do with giving their previous employer a kickback.

Rather, it's simply that they're already aware of their old employers strengths and weaknesses, so vendor evaluation is made a lot simpler.
I love Notational Velocity.
For those who like stickies but don't want to use a web app, your OS X comes with an app call Stickies that does exactly the same.
its not really "extreme", it might be a euro bias but I have had this happen to me a lot, hell getting @ working on some keyboard can be annoying enough.
Exactly, just the One....
Opera doubles download numbers in Europe after Choice Screen
Datacenter Barometer: Unifying with ControlTier
I guess they deserve a +1 for getting the word "rampant" into a press release.

-100 for the rest though - very little of interest; just the usual mud sling return (a lot shakier than the mud thrown at them, though).
This is the same book as the one mentioned in

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203937
> Huh? Where do legislators read laws before voting? (US Congress critters typically don't.)

Everywhere, including the US. But everybody doesn't read everything.

> You say that like it's a bad thing.

It's bad to the GPs assertion that laws will just be reinstated. I'm arguing in favour of automatic sunsets.
Link to the underlying researcher's summary of his own research:

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

Link to his most famous paper (on another college professor's, not the author's, site):

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
The key calculation is given a word w what's the frequency with which this user uses word w. So that's number of times w occurs / numbers of words that user has used. So it doesn't matter as long as a user has 'enough' text so that they've covered a good portion of the overall dictionary of words in use.

The prior probability is based on the number of comments a user makes. In this case that prior is insignificant because the sample text is large.
That's a misconception. If you design your schema properly, evolving it isn't a problem. We use protocol buffers (forced to because we're integrating with Google) and in the schema, everything is marked as optional so they can add or remove fields in future versions of the schema. This puts the onus on your code to properly handle missing fields, but that's the same problem you'll face with any schema that can be changed. Google has changed the schema multiple times and we've had periods where our code hasn't been updated yet. It works just fine.
Ah, my bad - hadn't seen that one and it (obviously) didn't get picked up as the same link.
Man, I wish you had never posted that link. I came so close to doing this: http://xkcd.com/386/ over there.
How to Split the Startup Founder Equity Pie
I think the database is smarter than a simple literal text for query plans. I think it reverse-engineers literals so that if you query WHERE t.initials = 'ac' and then later query WHERE t.initials = 'rb', it re-uses the cached query plan.

But the point of the article is that the problem is not in the database, it's over in the CLR which is spending a lot of time composing the SQL text that gets sent to the database.
They frequently don't allow apostrophes either.
Not only that, but they're only called ZIP codes in the US (this is a peeve of mine). In Switzerland they're "post codes" ("code postal" in French, don't know the Swiss German name). They also write addresses in a different order. As an example, here's the address of a Kebap shop I used to frequent:

Avenue de la Sallaz 29
1010 Lausanne
Suisse

1010 is the post code, identifying La Sallaz (or a part of it?), in Lausanne. My point? All this stuff is very local and if you want to do it right you should just ask for addresses free-form and if you need to extract information from it then you should use a geocoding library (e.g. http://geocoder.rubyforge.org/) to normalize it for you.
Some domains suit the relational database model better than others. If he was doing a huge amount of machine learning-type stuff he might have a different architecture.

Then again, given that he (like most people, myself included) has a lot of RDB experience, he designed his application around what RDBs do well. Perhaps if he had 10+ years of experience with distributed hash tables he might have designed a site with a different feature set.
Do you guys mean this article?

http://bit.ly/ayk1t3
Well, that's why I went straight on to something else.

But anyway I can't agree that "no user actually cares about stuff visible in text mode". There is a very substantial community of programmers that don't like to use IDEs.
This will become even more relevant as core counts above 32 become common place. Sadly most programmers have a hard time dealing with more than 1 thread. I agree a new paradigm is needed to solve this problem.
I can't really understand all the XML-bashing. Of course it isn't the right tool for any job, but I like it for its schema and validation features.
Congratulations antirez!
Your post sounds a lot like "I just graduated and I expect to be doing cool stuff and getting paid the big bucks, but I'm in an entry level position doing crap work." The good news is that you've finally reached the summit of the education mountain after a long climb. The bad news is that you've just reached the base of a new mountain, the "employment" one.

You might be in The Valley where every CS grad has a slightly better chance of becoming a millionaire, but in general the response to your inquiry would be this:
Welcome to the real world.

That said, however, entry level jobs will start to shape your career, so you should make sure you are on the path you want to be on. There are certainly entry-level jobs where you would be doing more than what you are now, and you should probably seek them out.

One thing that is telling here is that you are working for your university, which tells me that you went for the easy-to-get job instead of putting yourself out there. You're going to need to take some more risks if you want to get the good opportunities and the good payoffs. You're also still living at home, which gives you the mental cushion that if you fail you won't be hurt /too/ bad, but it also removes some of the incentive to push yourself towards self-sufficiency.

As far as the situation you're in right now, update your resume and look for something while you still have this job. Do NOT quit until you have a new one. The economy is the worst it's been in a long time, and while you may think "there's no reason I can't find a job in a relatively short amount of time", you are wrong. That's the hubris of a recent grad who hasn't faced the real world yet talking. If you really could get a job so easily, why haven't you? (And if you could, just do it already) You work in a university which is probably the most relaxed work environment you could have, so performing a job search while in this job should be extremely easy.

The only action that would be helpful and also counter to this advice is if you were able to land an internship (paid or unpaid) at a startup in the space you definitely want to be in. In that case the support of living at home will help you, as long as you have a plan to work your ass off and get really good at whatever you want to be doing.
I just used whitespace separated words after stripping punctuation.
Isn't it dangerous to eval()? Suppose someone put some malicious code in the JSON data?
Every time I see a reprog post, I get hungry from all those pictures of sushi.
Tell HN : Wordpress.com exploit
There seems to be a very serious wordpress.com exploit which allows 3rd party sites/domains to gather a hash code which can be used to login to an user's account. Here is how to reproduce,

1. Login to wordpress.com

2. Take a look at this page : http://www.sandaru1.com/wordpress_test.html (This page is just showing the hashcode/url, I'm not saving any hashcodes)

3. Open another browser (in an attacker's case, his/her browser) and paste the URL shown in the page

4. Goto wordpress.com on the new browser and you are logged in

The exploit itself seems to be too simple. Am I missing something here or is this a serious bug?

P.S - I emailed both Automattic support and Matt Mullenweg. I didn't get any response back.
Spanner: Google’s next Massive Storage and Computation infrastructure
Screenshot? If posterous is intruding on the reading experience of my users I'm going to change it.
jQuery includes a proper parser
More fundamentally, JSON embodies some fundamental metaphors we use in data types - numbers, strings, lists, and maps. Those are a lot more intuitive/familiar than whatever metaphors XML comes up with.