skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dangerous code in that example:

Step1: Don't chmod a directory 777. How about 770 (or maybe 775) with an appropriate owner and group. There is just no reason to allow a stranger or zero privilege nobody/nogroup hack to write arbitrary data into your cache.

Step3: There is a race condition here that can corrupt your cache and cause sudden catastrophic performance problems. When the cache expires, until someone manages to rewrite the cache all readers will try to regenerate it and rewrite it. If you used this technique because you had database load issues you are in for a thumping. Worse, each will then write the cache, probably about the same time since they will be in lock step from the database IO, with an fopen/fwrite/fclose. You could end up with a muddle of a file.

To fix: you could use some sort of lock to ensure only one reader tries to rebuild the cache, but that scares some programmers. For writing the file you should ALWAYS write to a temporary, unique filename, close, then rename the file to the proper filename. It is a tiny nuisance, but rename is atomic in unix land and no one will get a partially written file or one muddled by multiple writers.

(For bonus performance, I'd add a random number to each "too old" check. That way the first process that decides it was too old would start the rebuild of the cache, but most of its temporal peers would probably not think it was too old and would happily use the cache. Otherwise you get a bunch of processes waiting for the rebuild.)

Step 4: If you are on Apache. It can make things more fragile by spreading your site across the filesystems, but I prefer to put files like this off in an area of filesystem not under docroot. The danger is that when someone goes to move the site, they have to know about these other files as well.

And finally: benchmark before and after. This can be a big performance win, but sometimes you can be surprised.
Is mobile Internet really such a good thing?
i think it's actually quite a sensible policy, to reduce echo.
Page not found?
Depends. Are you in the real estate business or the luxury hotel business?
I agree completely, a good physio is the way to go. Monitor your results, and if you are not satisfied with the way things are progressing, try another physio. Like anything else, some are better than other.

In terms of the guitar, though, I'd definitely recommend Jamie Andreas's Guitar Principles, to help you play without pain/injury. (It will also improve your playing.)
You made the topic slip from lying to influencing. Influencing their children is a big part of what parents do. It's called "education." It's unavoidable, and there's nothing wrong with it if you do it with honesty and respect.
I get the sense that a big part of the story didn't get told here. For instance, how did those guys get the financing to buyout the Enron stuff? Where are the investors coming from -- locally, inside-the-company, etc.

I'd also like to hear how a relatively small startup pulled down some big international players. Getting business from local investor-types is one thing: loading up with huge DoD sensitive stuff isn't something you just wake up one day and do.
I was making fun of the previous poster, who seems to be arguing that even if group A has an average IQ of 115 and group B has an average IQ of 70, there is overlap between their distributions and so it should be shocking to you that there are more A's with Nobel Prizes and more B's unemployed or in prison.
Does he ever claim to be humble? He only claims to be sensible -- owning a house is a waste of time and effort when you're rich enough to stay in a different hotel suite every week.
Younger people still report to older people, and usually if you're emailing someone who is your superior (your boss, a customer) you let them determine how formal things will be. This doesn't hold true in every case, but it's common enough to explain the trend.
Arrington has a good response to this on TechCrunch. I think O'Reilly's out to lunch on this one.
Text doesn't always load, so:

"

Not eating for 12-16 hours can help people quickly reset their sleep-wake cycle, according to a new study from the Harvard Medical School. This discovery can drastically improve a person's ability to cope with jet lag or adjust to working late shifts.

Scientists have long known that our circadian rhythm is regulated by our exposure to light. Now they have found a second "food clock" that takes over when we are hungry. This mechanism probably evolved to make sure starving mammals don't go to sleep when they should be foraging for food.

The lead researcher Clifford Saper explains:

>The neat thing about this second clock is that it can override the main clock ... and you should just flip into that new time zone in one day.

It usually takes people a week to fully adjust to a new time zone or sleeping schedule. To think that this new "food clock" hack can help you change your internal clock in one day is mind boggling.

How does it work?

For example, if you want to start waking up at 2:00 am in the morning, you should stop eating between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm the previous day. When you wake up at 2:00 am, eat a nice healthy meal to break your fast.

Another example: If you are travelling from Los Angeles to Tokyo, figure out when breakfast is served in Tokyo, and don't eat for the 12-16 hours before Tokyo's breakfast time.

Why does this work?

Like everything else in our evolutionary history, it has to do with survival:

>"For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death," the study

>"Hence, it is adaptive for animals to have a secondary "master clock" that can allow the animal to switch its behavioral patterns rapidly after a period of starvation to maximize the opportunity of finding food sources at the same time on following days."

>The shift is a survival mechanism in small mammals that forces them to change their sleeping patterns, Fuller suggests. One starvation cycle is enough to override the traditional light-based circadian clock, the study suggests.

>"This new timepiece enables animals to switch their sleep and wake schedules in order to maximize their opportunity of finding food."

>"A period of fasting with no food at all for about 16 hours is enough to engage this new clock," says Saper.

>"So, in this case, simply avoiding any food on the plane, and then eating as soon as you land, should help you to adjust — and avoid some of the uncomfortable feelings of jet lag." CBC (quoting study published in the May 22 issue of Science.

For more information, check out Science Friday's interview with lead researcher Clifford Saper. "
Rails vs Django Poll
So prompted by another recent long discussion on the merits of these two frameworks, I quickly threw together this little poll for giggles.

Clicking on either logo logs your vote. Done my best to prevent vote spamming, so hopefully the results won't be too inaccurate.

If you have any great resources or comparison articles I missed for either stack, please let me know and I'll throw them in.
your new source is basics, not new results. i just wanted an interesting paper on new results to read. those are normally published online.

your ignorance of public intellectuals and professional philosophers is not an argument against Rand. lol.
I did file an appeal but got exactly the same template email, after that, they never replied.

It does state in the T&C's somewhere that you have to tell them about it and advice on net suggested you should do the same, maybe I shouldn't have paid attention to that!
New MP3 Revolutionizes Way You Listen to Music
I think the community here just knows that science is not really the right tool to use to decide if God exists or not.

We probably also know that the argument degrades rather quickly once started.
NASA's Phoenix Mars Landing: Where To Watch On the Web
Hack a Nintendo DS to Make an Awesome Digital Sketchbook
Ask YC: How do I find a new programmer?
I'm the majority partner in a start-up that needs a change in direction. We need to find a new programmer that wants to take an equity stake in our company and receive significant creative freedom to design our user interface and process.

Occasionally, I see users on YC announce their interests, but it's not too regular. Can someone direct me toward a resource to find such a programmer (the default requisites apply: smart, talented, whiz with the keys, creative, wants to work collaboratively with us to create something interesting). If you're reading this on YC, you can reply with a note and I'll shoot you an email.
Can We Live In Public?
Microsoft: Users confused by Vista UAC prompts
Oh I was meaning in my real life community. In the UK I think religion is quite a bit rarer these days, so it doesn't really come up as a topic of conversation here.
MIT helps develop new image-recognition software  (coded with as little as 256 to 1024 bits of data)
mentioned 3 exercises: wrist curls, spinning ball thing and i don't know what the 3rd is called (finger abductors?: expanding your curled fingers outward) in this thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185743

http://www.fitter1.com/Catalog/Category/35/HandWrist.aspx

Make sure you don't cock wrists at funny angles when you're driving a car, using power tools, sleeping (don't sleep on your side). And elbow and heel of hand supported weight-wise at all times when working mouse and keyboard.
Mac OS X has this baked into Xcode, as well as general grid computing capabilities. This implemented with distcc and Bonjour (zeroconf), and Xgrid, respectively.

Linux, too, can implement this.

Operating systems as far back was Windows' arguable predecessor OpenVMS have distributed batch capabilities with clustering and with distributed batch queues, and you can toss build-related jobs into queues. Nowhere near distcc, but it works.

If nobody's already gotten traction with this distributed environment within the Visual tools over on Microsoft Windows, well, have at. Microsoft and its related business decisions would centrally affect your future here. Ignore, buy, trump, etc.
Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo Expands His Empire
John Ousterhout and I worked together for years... he talks to his computer. See his description here: http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/wrist.html
I used to suffer from RSI in both my wrists years ago. Switching to ergonomic keyboards solved the problem. I'm using the "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard".
Just to prove that this was indeed the cause, whenever I travel for a while with my laptop only, my wrists start hurting again.
Rails Widgets - quick and easy UI widgets for any Rails app
Organised bioinformatics experiments with Datamapper
Nothing folksy about left/right brain distinction. Check out this tour de force TED video with a Harvard neuroscientist talking about the differences in brain halves http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
Two things to read about:

1. Electric Cloud (which is a company I started) that does parallel compilation (amongst other things) for mostly very large teams.

2. Xoreax which does something like your idea. Typically for smaller teams.
Anyone ever played with "BKNR Lisp Application Environment"?
What does that say about CL?
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...

With the exception of some lisp work done a long time ago, no one has seriously worked on making dynamic languages fast.
repost with proper spelling please
It's interesting that they have gun-carrying guards. Are you really allowed to kill someone for unplugging Google's server?
For several years (starting with my senior thesis), I was having a lot of arm and wrist pain when typing. I tried all sorts of things, but what finally made the pain stop was rock climbing. I joined a local climbing gym, and all the pain just went away. If I go for more than a few weeks without climbing my wrists start getting stiff and then hurting again, but as long as I climb regularly the pain stays away. Climbing is also a lot of fun!
Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN22520427200...

LiveScience: http://www.livescience.com/health/080522-food-clock.html
I am hugely surprised no one suggested creating packages (rpm, deb etc.) and then deploying it on prod boxes
It does sound like this is all show. I'm in no way a military expert but having your guards going around opening doors for visitors just doesn't sound right. If you were treating a visitor as a potential threat would a guard really turn their back on them to open a door?
369 003 690 Big Macs?
Failure would rarely be "catastrophic" in the context of web search as described in the article. If the ML model makes an incorrect prediction on new data you have a bad search result. No big deal - just feed the new data back into the model and learn again.

If the data set is large enough then the ML model may find patterns that escape a human expert. When it comes to finding patterns in very large datasets machines scale much better than humans. Given a large enough dataset a ML approach should be less susceptible to the Black Swan phenomena than human experts.

On the other hand, if failure of the system really could be considered catastrophic then there could always be a human involved. In these cases output from ML models could be one of the inputs that the experts considers before coming to a final decision. E.g. you wouldn't want a ML model doing medical diagnosis by itself but it could be very useful for identifying patients that should be double-checked, scanning diagnosis for errors etc.
The plugin should be smart about avoiding the user noticing that other users are compiling software on their machine. Locking itself to a single processor is a good start, and refusing jobs if the user on the local machine is compiling code or doing some other processor intensive activity.

The plugin should do this? How about letting the OS do it, that's the whole point of an OS after all :) Just nice down the distcc thing and let the OS do the rest. (Hint: the OS' algorithm is probably better than the one you proposed, so why reimplement it?)
Aside from news.yc... If you're in a metro area, Craigslist is usually a good bet as well. As a programmer, I've had reasonably good luck finding interesting jobs through Craigslist -- much better IMO than dice.com or Monster or other major sites.

Other job boards with intelligent readers that you might consider are at 37signals and Joel on Software.
I didn't say that, I'm talking an hour or two long project here.
Interesting - but not portable. ;)
>"it is just a giant colocation centre"
I wouldn't be so quick to trivialize something like this.
This isn't really image manipulation in JavaScript at all, it's image manipulation in PHP with a javascript front end. It's also not particularly new -- see snipshot (http://snipshot.com/).
>I realize it is 'just a piece of paper', but that piece of paper signifies an accomplishment.

What's written on that piece of paper is more important than the accomplishment in my experience, at least as long as finding a job is concerned.

If a company deals with hundreds of applicants they need some way of trimming them down, and not having a computer science degree will put you at a disadvantage even if you do have some other degree. I've been rejected for jobs because I have a physics degree and not "Comp. Sci"; I'm sure there are mathematicians on here who can say the same thing.

This might not be so true for startups, but I suspect that when faced with a deluge of applicants even startups will go straight for the "Comp . Sci" degrees if just to make the numbers managable.
cheezburgers
I'd budget 3-6 months if you aren't networking w. smart people already. I've tried dice, monster, craigslist and I expect it takes me 150-200 resumes before I get to one interview.
to a degree I did. Maybe not to the degree you desired.

My point was is that even though it filters out many of the worst programmers it would also filter out all of the really great programmers. I'd rather have my search take longer and cost more to have those great programmers on my team than end up with just good programmers.
If you really wanted that many Big Macs then you'd get a discount. However, why would you want that much junk food?
parentingsquad.com is so ad-riddled that it actually has more adblock'ed items than the actual content.

In any case, the article in short - "Starving yourself before a long flight may help prevent jet lag"

And here's Reuter's version
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN22520427200...
PR Secrets for Startups
Defragmentation of Linux Filesystems
Can someone explain how this works.

Lets say I want to start waking up at 6AM everyday. How can I use my food clock to help me?
Are you one of these kind of guys?

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/692562510.html
One way of defragging your files: moving all your content over to a fresh partition and moving it back equates to a completely unfragmented file system.
Check your email.
Interesting. Can anyone explain why this works? My best guess is: by climbing, you exercise your muscles in that area, thus making them more resistent to damage from typing. But I don't really know anything about medicine.
You need to fast for the 12-16 hours before 6:00 am. So stop eating between 2:00 to 6:00 pm the day before. When you wake up at 6:00 am, eat a healthy breakfast.
one of my friends tried yoga and that helped him get rid off all the pain.

ymmv.
I've never used it, but I hear that IncrediBuild does exactly that:

http://www.xoreax.com/main.htm
That was an interesting meme. I have long valued waking up early, and I promote going to bed hungry. Looks like the two principals are related.
Their "man trap" and guards seem like any one of the dozens of data-centers/co-los I go to on a regular basis. Most of theses are NOT located in strip malls either. Many of these host servers for fortune 100's and governments as well as ordinary schmos like me. Some even have vaults like banks. I'm thinking the reporter just got dazzled by the altogether ordinary trappings of a datacenter that does co-lo simply because reporters don't usually visit many datacenters. I guess the man-traps and biometrics must have seemed pretty "Star Trek" to me the first time I went to a co-lo as well.

Completely unremarkable. I call "don't believe the hype" on this one.
Staying Enthusiastic as a Developer
A human expert may be better when you're in unknown territory (i.e., something happens that doesn't fall into the domain of expertise) because then external factors acquired over a lifetime may prove to be more useful than textbook or algorithmic knowledge.

But more importantly I _do_ know that statistical models are better at diagnosis and prediction than are human experts. Sad to say, doctors, lawyers, judges and other foolish people keep us from using them.

FuturePundit summary article
"Statistical Prediction Rules More Accurate Than Experts":
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001558.html

The FuturePundit article reviews the paper:
"50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science" by Michael A. Bishop and J. D. Trout
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2250+Years+of+Succ...
FriendFeed; 1995 Message Board, the Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation
I don't know. All that effort, and I'm not even sure the quoted improvement is outside the error of measurement. The author doesn't specify the hardware here either, and the sustained rate of 15MB/s (peak: <35MB/s) seems to me like it's fairly old. His graphs are anything but convincing: need better data.

Really, the best thing you can do to improve your HDD performance is to:

1. Throw out ext3 and replace it with a better file system - consensus seems to be XFS if you have lots of large files, Reiser if you have lots of small ones or JFS for a nice blend. I personally have been using JFS for pretty much everything for a few years.

2. Buy a better hard disk. Good SATA disks are blazing fast these days. Get a Serial Attached SCSI RAID if the lack of speed is costing you money.
Your question is hard to answer, since in real life, "all else IS NOT being equal". In my life as a programmer, about 90% of my work was compiled, so I certainly have a bias. My personal perception was, that when working with compiled languages (mostly C++), I felt like building something. With interpreted languages (mostly Perl), I felt more like hacking something.
I think people might be afraid to vote for controversial stuff if votes were public. Probably that's why there's such a long tradition of secret ballots.
"I've also heard of stories where decision trees supposedly outperformed human cardiologists in making diagnoses. (I'm skeptical of this claim but let's assume that it's true)"

If you substitute "Statistical Prediction Rules(SPRs)" for "decision trees" in your statement, then it's true in every tested field of medicine. Read the FuturePundit article (URL below) and it's links. The system _always_ outperforms the experts in it's field, without fail within the domain of expertise. Even the _best_ experts. Always.
> Why should each app re-implement routing?

The same was said of Internet Protocol. Why would you want to send packets over a public network with no guarantee of throughput? Well, it greatly increases the connectivity between hosts and it significantly reduces costs. However, it is less secure.

Likewise, why would you want to send data via application-level multicasting? Again, it greatly increases connectivity between hosts, some of which may be behind firewalls. Furthermore, it greatly improves the efficiency of data distribution because the reduces the significance of the bandwidth of the initial host.

At present, there is some duplication of effort. Some duplication is to avoid proprietary interests. Some duplication allows specific types of data to be handled. Finding and promoting a more general solution would be desirable.
Since wrist strain is probably a function of characters typed,
it would presumably help to program in more succinct
languages.

I mean this quite seriously. I've consciously tried
to make Arc easy to type.
HTML 2.0 Browser detection
So prompted by another recent long discussion on the merits of these two frameworks, I quickly threw together this little poll for giggles.

Clicking on either logo logs your vote. Done my best to prevent vote spamming, so hopefully the results won't be too inaccurate.

If you have any great resources or comparison articles I missed for either stack, please let me know and I'll throw them in.
So prompted by another recent long discussion on the merits of these two frameworks, I quickly threw together this little poll for giggles: http://www.railsordjango.com

Clicking on either logo logs your vote. Done my best to prevent vote spamming, so hopefully the results won't be too inaccurate.

If you have any great resources or comparison articles I missed for either stack, please let me know and I'll throw them in.
Free online tools that simplify my life
After my friend had his hard drive crash, and he lost a lot of important data, I realized I’ve been protecting myself from something like this without even noticing. If my computer crashed right now and I lost everything on my hard drive, I wouldn’t lose anything important. Not because I’m paranoid and have a tape-system backup in my basement, but because I take advantage of free & portable web technologies that simplify my life. If you don’t use them now, check them out. Who knows, you might find something useful.
I suspect it also develops flexibility of the tendons/ligaments.