skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This kind of server monitoring is exactly why we wrote and released http://www.nerdkits.com/files/notifo/ two months ago (although our server monitoring component itself hasn't been released). We don't use it for payment notifications as the screenshot might suggest, as that would get annoying very quickly! Instead, my co-founder and I get notifo alerts when anything might be out-of-bounds: daemons not running, load averages, memory usage, DNS/web test queries, various queues, etc. This gets tied in with our internal business dashboard, so we can see warnings before they get to the "failed" state that triggers a notifo, or usually just see a bunch of nice green checkmarks underneath our sales stats!

Honestly, after running it for 2+ months, the problem is that it's been too sensitive, so recently the progress has been in adding logic to make it ignore and/or fix and/or retry without notifying us at all. For example, if one of our secondary nameservers is unreachable, my script knows that I don't care, but it will let me know if two or more are down -- and only after trying a few times. And if our Asterisk instance can't talk to our SIP provider, then it will instruct Asterisk to try to reconnect. Another example is in our Django FastCGI processes restarting after serving a bunch of queries (to reduce the effect of process memory growth / leaks): if our script does its checks at that time, it may notice one extra or one fewer process running, so it will wait a few seconds and then check again.

At the end of the day, while notifo is only a small piece of the code at this point, it's a core feature that motivated this "autotester" server monitoring script and makes it a must-have for us. We've had it running for long enough that we have fairly good test coverage for all of the moving parts of our server, and over the last few weeks have been able to write some smarts into it so that the frequency of Notifo alerts is small enough that they're usually worth looking into.

From a business perspective: This lets my co-founder and I sleep much better and have our mind off of server operations when traveling. That's a real benefit. Thanks, Notifo!
The New Digg Version 4.0 Alpha
I don't think you should be declaring mixed types with one statement. Declare a pointer, then declare the `int` separately -- and the mystery is gone.
I think zeph is saying it a little strongly, but doctests find a HUGE portion of typing errors with python. Additionally, many people who do have typing problems find many go away when they make their python code slightly more object oriented.

Here is a link to doctests. There are godly, and unlike any testing library, in that they aren't a library, they're a comment scanner: http://docs.python.org/library/doctest.html

Smallest amount of rigmarole required to make testing happen I've seen in any language.
But it dos give me a 80% understanding for 20% effort.

That's the sort of knowledge that's most valuable for the average person to have nowadays. Enough knowledge to know what questions to be asking and what queries to be making, not necessary enough to answer every question accurately!
Great to hear about a Notifo use case like this - thank you for sharing!

edit: on the subject of electronics, we (chad and I @ notifo) have had an idea for little project for a while. So we work in a garage and think it would be neat to hook in RFID + arduino + solenoid + wishield or wifi yellowjacket + notifo for garage access logging/notifications. IE, one of us gets a notifo when the other tags his RFID to get into the office. I guess we're just looking for an excuse to dust off our arduinos..
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/

http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k-jit/
Wasnt there a thing on here a few months ago about a "guy and a girl" who were going to attempt polyphasic and blog as they do it? Would like to find that and see how it went.
I once worked as the sysadmin for a blogging network. We used Logicworks.net for quite some time. They managed the servers and helped out when things were going bad, but would also stand back if we wanted to do anything ourselves.

I can't speak highly enough about the guys I dealt with there.
I haven't use that blog in awhile, but here you go: http://rowdybytes.blogspot.com/2010/06/learning-to-love-pyth...
We agree that rates are weird and relativistic. Myself I've seen $50/hour described as too high, and $100 as too low (head explodes), and I've been treated alternately as both overqualified and underqualified for doing some technical thing that I know I could certainly do. Also seen and heard that bidding low will increase the chance of getting a gig as well as decrease the chance (for some clients), and, and, and... It's just crazy inconsistent and relative.

There's also the "all developers are the same, therefore commodity pricing is in effect" phenomenon which is annoying to encounter. And the "just tell me rate, because I know exactly how many hours this will take, and no other factor matters" phenomenon. Crazy stuff.

One good takeaway from the Lee article I had was that if you set a really high rate, even if you scare away a lot of people, all it takes is 1 client to agree to that, billing anywhere from 1 to a few hours in a given month, and you're in the holy "Ramen profitable" zone. Well, able to cover food and shelter anyway. But then you'll have tons of free time and energy leftover for other activities.
Thanks for your insightful comment. Here are my comments on your points.

a) They have currently started doing it.

b) Companies don't need it. They aren't really bothered with Access 97 and Windows 2000 or XP. All they need is our application. Low OS/Application means low and cheap hardware.

c) Tried the simple linking in MS Access, no improvement in speed. We need to re-write all the queries from scratch. Many problems showed and since the code base is huge, rewriting from scratch seemed more feasible and easier.

d) The application is huge, it has dozen of DBs

e) I don't know what you are talking about, but will do a little research.
MRIs are cheap in Japan because the Japanese government will only pay so much for them. As a result, there is less of an incentive for people to develop new imaging technologies since the government will similarly limit the profit that can be made from them. That doesn't mean that innovation in that field will stop, especially since more profit can still be made in other countries. The pace of innovation is just likely to be slower.

I didn't say incomes were rising. I said disposable incomes are rising. I can't find data to back that up, especially since the economic definition is different from the colloquial meaning of "disposable income." However, it's clear that technology has made both the necessities and luxuries of life far cheaper over time, which leaves more money for us to spend on other things even with a stagnant income.
Correct. My sports picks at http://www.jgsbws.com are free because after I got the rails site up, modified the prognostication software to work with the site and a whole pile of other work, I took a vacation and never set up users, so anyone could see the work for free...

Opps. Fixing that now.
Yahoo Boomerang API
Yeah, there is a ranking algorithm, same as for the story ranking: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704

And?
Wait. Why do you have to choose?

What's wrong with the following pattern:
1. build an HTML5 app
2. build a native app that embeds a Web control
3. package the app and HTML5 app together using application cache
4. distribute on AppStore

You get the a) offline support b) monetization c) distribution via AppStore
That's actually not completely accurate anymore. PG had changed it to take users' average comment scores into account as well. This happened fairly recently, I think. I'll try to find a link later, but I'm just about to eat dinner now.
As an alternative to moving to a low-cost rural location, have you considered moving to a lower-cost, creative cultural city? I'm thinking specifically of Montreal, QC.

There is an incredible creative scene in the city covering, music, the arts and an amazingly supportive technology community. There are also a couple of very active seed-stage funds (though nothing compared with Silicon Valley and not much of an angel network, I'm afraid)

The best part is that cost of living in Montreal is among the lowest in North America, yet you still have access to amazing infrastructure, stunningly beautiful architecture, and beautiful friendly ladies - seriously.

I am actually looking to trade places with you and am planning to leave this wonderful city to go check out San Francisco for a bit (I have my reasons), but I cannot recommend Montreal enough. Oh, and I'll be back!
Due to adding together the various categories of debt, this is fairly tricky to interpret. Countries with large private-sector corporations and advanced financial sectors (like the U.S. and Western Europe) generally have more corporate debt, because leveraging up is almost ubiquitous--- even conservative companies often use leverage, they just don't do it to as high a multiple. Meanwhile, in countries with a lot of mom-and-pop businesses and small or heavily regulated finance sectors, business debt is quite low. The bottom three on the financial-sector debt, for example, are Russia, India, and China, three countries in which the financial sector is heavily state-controlled.

Not that that necessarily makes the debt good or ok, but to a large extent it seems it just correlates with "has a non-government-controlled financial sector".
http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih3/sleep/guid...
This type of fact misrepresentation annoys me. Painting the EFF CC and PK as organization promoting pirating is down right dishonest. I just hope the artist are smart enough to not fall for this crap.
I've always found putting the * next to the type instead of the variable, like this, more intuitive. Does anyone know why the other way is used more often? Is it just historic, or is there a more practical reason?
There's no great benefit for the pain. The really cool work in the language - new GIL-removal work, PyPy, pip and virtualenv, etc aren't yet included in Python 3.

When I make the jump, it will probably be to the inevitable 3.5 or 4.0 that includes all the juicy stuff.
One pitfall: why charge less? There's really no reason, and it tends to bite you back. Just charge the same.
Sleep is weird like that. I've read a lot of articles about people trying modafinil and similar substances in order to sleep less and be more alert and, again, most who blog about it (or even write articles for popular publications) tail off or give up for extremely vague "It was great but it's not going to work for me" type reasons.
Sure, this is being proposed by clueless incompetents. But the worrisome thing is that they are wealthy powerful clueless incompetents backed by people with guns, and this is the world they want to live in.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398764

Key pg quote: "I did recently (about 3 weeks ago) tweak the algorithm for ranking comments, and that has had a noticeable effect. Previously it was the same as the one for ranking frontpage stories. Now it also considers among other things the average comment score of the submitter."

The thread has some further back and forth as well on this point.
Turning Work into a Skinner Box
They were very tired. Then they stopped. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225122
If he just logs on to the US iTunes Megastore he gets the contract in English.

This may be true and all but where on that page does it indicate he should do that?
I've been using WiredTree for CurrentHipHop for the past 2 months. They're cheap, managed and great support so far.
The best part is the Comic Relief section. Read that, and you'll know what to expect every time you read a blogger experimenting with polyphasic sleep.
But code is read far more than refactored, so I think it's an okay tradeoff. (Plus what editors are ya'll using where changing the indentation of something is difficult?)
What a strange article.

Kids don't know what a "smartphone" is.
Kids don't know what a "router" is.

Neither of these should be surprising.

That some idiot out there doesn't realize that their MacBook is a laptop, now that's just weird. (Of course Apple calls them notebooks, possibly because of the folk that got burned by placing them on top of their laps, but still.)

And somehow this is turned into a big success story for Apple? "iPod" becoming the new "Walkman" is the real success they've had in this area, and he doesn't even mention it.
One of the things I like best about this area -- and stop me if I start to get annoying -- is that it's just about as small or big as you want.

There are plenty of places 10 or 15 minutes from town that are really isolated: little dirt roads in and out, and neighbors that you might meet but never actually see. You can pick your climate too; beautiful, chilly Tahoe forest a short drive up highway 20, or rolling grassy hills without snow in "south County". (Both of those have a lot of trouble getting broadband though.)

If you feel like you need a more social night out, Auburn is 30 minutes away, Roseville is an hour, and Sac'to is just a bit beyond that. If you get to missing the Bay Area, it's just 2.5 hours away.

Or, if you want to really get away from everyone for a bit, just drive up highway 20 to the Grouse Ridge area, or highway 49 to Downieville (another beautiful small town) or Sierra City, with some gorgeous 8,000 foot crags and lakes.

So yeah, come check it out!
The FSA (Financial Services Authority - UK financial industry watchdog) ruled that simply checking a box that says you've read and understood a contract doesn't protect the financial services company from your later complaint that the contract was unfair or not explained to you properly.

(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/fsa_contract_guidanc...)

I found the OFT guidance really interesting:

"The purpose of declarations of this kind is clearly to bind consumers to wording regardless of whether they have any real awareness of it. Such statements are thus open to the same objections as provisions binding consumers to terms they have not seen at all."

That implies that in the UK situations where you have 50 screens of unreadable guff with an 'I agree' checkbox at the bottom may not be enforceable.
Consider New Orleans. It's a bikeable, walkable city where one can get by for very little. Not the biggest tech city in the US but loads of culture and if you're considering moving to the wilderness that's probably not a big deal for you. As long as you don't mind heat or living near minorities you'll be fine.
To complement what other people are recommending here, I'd say that in cases like this I only sometimes read the documentation. Other times I put a line in my code:

import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

which makes it enter the debugger at that point, and I simply inspect the object that I'm really getting, looking at what it supports, the documentation on its methods, etc.

Doing it this way is not always feasible, since sometimes there's a prohibitive amount of setup code that needs running before you can get a real object. For short code paths though, like Django apps, it works really well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd
The scary thing is that something like this isn't entirely impossible to implement. Especially once 95% of the population is using appliances like iPads instead of general purpose computers.
Don't forget the drivers ;)
Honestly, I program in Python every day and my biggest complaint is that duck typing and dynamic types as a paradigm is not well suited for large projects (like the ones I work on). When the codebase is larger than you can keep in your head, the types become a huge issue. When a bug is at one level of an application you have to figure out what argument was passed in. In a language like Java or C#, it is trivial to follow the trail of objects. In Python, it is cumbersome to say the least. Likewise, if you do adopt duck typing you will eventually find that there is no way around dispatching via types at some point. Again, it is not that huge of a deal, but it ends up being boilerplate-ish code you don't want to write.

Tests are effectively the answer, but they are a pain to write and having to document your type information via tests seems a lot more cumbersome from just doing "int my_var".

The party line with Python and dynamic typing is true in many cases, especially when starting a new project. As time goes on though, things get confusing and tests are rarely good enough to offer the same contract static typing offers. To say "you're doing it wrong" is somewhat correct, but no one does it right all the time.
Huxley is sci-fi and not reality, and so are your reasons. If you want to avoid a pandemic, invest heavily in biotech. If you want clean energy, invest in nuclear plants and more efficient energy storage and such. If you want to avoid a nuclear war, invest in infrastructure that will allow the world's poor to create wealth and raise their standard of living and not want to kill anybody.

By instead dumping all those billions into space exploration, you are actively raising the chance of something terrible happening here on Earth, this "basket" whose destruction you consider so nonchalantly.
I like it, but don't make it "free". Make it "first 50 banners free" or something similar, as long as you set a clear expectation of price.
But its true. To organizations like ASCAP, the Creative Commons is undermining copyright as they've come to understand and use it.

To ASCAP there really is no difference between pirating songs and releasing them straight to the public without a detour through compulsory license middle-man world. They miss out on the payday either way.
Yes.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/06/0622_most_expensive_...

"Note: Prices are for Manhattan only."
A while back I had to do something similar to download a podcast. The iPhone doesn't let you download apps or iTunes media (including podcasts) that are over 10MB in size over the cellular network. So I tethered to my MacBook, downloaded in iTunes, and synced the podcast back to the device.
From this tweet: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/15617022129

Statement: Washington Post had Collateral murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT it to the public.
I'd also recommend Logicworks -- they helped us setup a distributed app across two different parts of the country, and it worked well. And it always helps to know a person there too. Give Steve Zeller a call, he'll take care of you and let him know Ivan sent you: szeller@logicworks.net, http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenlzeller
Let me give you four words of advice here: Stay away from winter. At least do that. Really.
“Unreasonable” terms and conditions are unenforceable in Germany. You can only put in stuff that the consumer can expect.
The UI looks slick. Removing duplicated concepts and thus getting stuff for free is cool (like completing editors). Specifying cross-references in the grammar, so they can be used (eg) by the editor to complete (eg) method names, is also very cool; and they claim this is unique in compiler construction (though I've written a grammar parser generator that specifies cross-references myself). The first link suggests generating an editor for free is the killer feature (http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=tree&goto=3701...)

I'm not sure I'd use it myself (my IDE is vim), and the specification of a grammar remains complex, despite the freebies - that's just the nature of the beast. (their ch. 2 and 3 are worth reading: http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/documentation/1_0_0/xtext.html) It may not be that easy to use, if they can be profitable from professional services on it (but maybe that's not their main revenue). Finally, Z-Bo's comment Each generation of programmers thinks they can take a grocery clerk and turn them into not only a programmer but a compiler writer. reminds me of:

Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. http://www.otostopcu.org/yazi/h2g2/b2c25.php (DNA, RatEotU)

I'm still on the young one's side (in attitude), but you've got to limit the scope and power of the tool, so it really is domain specific (and maybe simplifying the domain). It's not that users are dumb, but busy with other stuff.
Actually getting the basic PCI scan passed should be quite easy, especially if you do not store the card data.
boost::unordered_set is an in-memory hash table, not unlike std::hash_set (which may save you some download/link time). Note that the blog post discusses your options when your data is too large to fit in memory.

Most hash tables operate under the assumption (based on good hashing and probing algorithms) that hashed key collisions are somewhat common. If one were to apply hashing to this problem (data on disk), the data file would necessarily grow (hash tables rely on empty space to reduce the probability of collisions), and would still require at least 1 disk seek+read, but likely more depending on the characteristics of the particular hashing algorithm used.

Actually, since the original problem specified uses md5s as the key, arguably the best hash probe sequence and chaining would be something similar to interpolation search; which the index still beats.
Good points, and we're doing almost exactly that, with one difference.

I think it's worth having 2 branches you ship from: master and production (or, in reverse, master and development).

The reason is that this way, if you're in the middle of some relatively large and untested changes in the development branch, you still have a copy of exactly what's on production to work on in case there's an urgent patch that needs to go out.

This is not strictly necessary, of course, but we've found that it's saved us some hassles.
Not accurate for me. If the average salary in XXX is $10,000 and the cost of a lunch is $50; then it's not quite expensive for the average person. But when your salary is $300 and the lunch is $10, it's really expensive.
I don't have it anymore however the ones below function similar enough.
I guess it depends on what industry you are dealing with and on what level. When you are dealing with Hollywood, they tend to pull out ALL the tricks. Protection and savviness on business deals is a must. Its an aggressive world out there and if you are going to take your business out of doing family and friends business, you may need to be prepared for sharks. We have done contracts within many very competitive markets and it can get aggressive out there.
Startup Financing: The Coming Super-Seed Crash
If you look at my Scala examples above, they are both more succinct than their Clojure and Python counterparts.
Mathematically constrained wedding vows
I've run into that 10MB problem, too! I think I remember Apple's threshold was 100MB originally, and the 10MB one is just absurd. These solutions seem a little bulky, but the tethering is to the point it's pretty seamless. I just wish an iPhone 4 jailbreak would come out so I could go back to MyWi instead of paying AT&T an extra $15/mo.
Most of the slides are blank, single sentences, or changes in highlighting. I'm sure they were flipping through them pretty quickly and just using slides to give certain phrases extra punch.

See also: Lawrence Lessig's presentation on Free Culture (http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html) That's probably 1000 slides, but they are used expertly to deliver a clear, concise message.
Looks like a great niche idea and the execution/presentation is very well done. My suggestion would be to get as many of the ad networks to link to you as possible, directly from their ad upload/setup pages. You can even try revenue sharing with smaller ad networks.