skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Clients Never Care As Much As You Do

A valuable lesson indeed. Things to remember: 1) your client isn't spending their own money 2) if it goes well, they get the credit 3) if it fails, you take the blame.

Point (4) that I learned in the consulting business is, it's nothing personal. Part of your fee covers "scapegoat for hire". You're just an actor playing a role. You'll never run into those guys again, and it has no bearing on you getting work from that organization in the future.
Problem Solving using Graph Traversals
Actually, I'm probably wrong above in saying that they cost the ballpark anything at all. I suspect the manufacturer pays Major League Baseball a lot of money every year for the privilege of supplying those balls.
Why you can’t rely on a replica for disaster recovery
When software design causes users to behave in a good way, we praise the software. So too must we blame software when it causes users to behave badly.
While movies for sure attempt to 'get it all right' they rarely if ever do so (German soldiers speaking English and so on), I highly doubt that the use of the wrong lettering in a movie is going to raise many eyebrows in light of the liberties that the movie industry normally takes when they portray some scene from the past.

Obviously a plane flying through a middle ages scene is going to stand out, maybe some car buff will realise that that model car wasn't out yet when the movie supposedly played and so on. But there are limits to how much research can be done to get a movie 'right' and I think that this is firmly across the 'don't care' line if only because not enough people would ever notice.

Most movies are made to be profitable, not to be 100% correct.
Been with them for a year now, their service is top notch.
The whole world sorta sucks; I have seen very little that could not have been done better. Also, this is the reason professional writers have someone else edit their writing or, where that isn't possible, set it aside for at least a week, longer is better, before coming back and editing themselves. Coders are just arrogant if they think they should be able to write good code the first sitting. Of course, unrealistic schedules forced on them by management has a lot to do with that in many businesses.
..maybe some car buff will realise that that model car wasn't out yet when the movie supposedly played..

This is pretty much the same scenario. The author even says as much in the article: Noticing little slips like this in movies can happen to anyone with knowledge in any specialized field.
He is a full-time contract developer, Gorrila-Mart was a new client.

This is about a contractor being unable to manage a client, not an internal developer being unable to manage management.
>My experience with the RBL has been exclusively negative to date.

>a well meant but incompetent attempt at improving the situation

I do not mean to dismiss your frustration, but I wonder if you are comparing the present situation to an unobtainable ideal.

Yes, email worked great in the early 1990s. (E.g., most people who ran the net-news infrastructure demanded that there be a working email address in the From field of every message, and I cannot recall anyone back then disagreeing with that demand.)

But the internet is drastically different now. We cannot just go back to the way it was.
Don’t do it because you feel intimidated or threatened or belittled.

I suppose ideally, no. However, it runs against basic psychology to fail to consider the enormity of the motivating force that is this kind of coercion throughout human history. It has untold power. So many things - good and bad, but all having enormous displacement - have been spurred by motives like proving something to someone, showing someone up, avenging an insult, publicly righting a false claim, establishing identity, going through a socially acknowledged rite of passage, validating strength, etc. Sex, money, power...

It seems to me patently self-evident that such forces underlie, in whole or in part, the actual activities of open-source developers, and technologists in general, though the level of indirection that must be navigated in order to see it is often greater than in more naked and crude testosterone plays like much hedge fund management and so on.

Don't pretend that we're somehow above the general liabilities of humanity (if that's how you see them).
My code is only good until someone rewrites it and makes it better. I can make my code easy to read and follow and do what it is supposed to do, and thus easy to rewrite. That is good code.

Good code is definitely not something intricately made by some Golden Design Pattern Rule argumented by a wise ass for hours just because he or she thinks his way/code is the best. That will on the contrary, and with high certainty, result in really crappy code.

Programming is not science, it's more like art - with one big difference. Code can be written to be easy to modify by other artists afterwards to their liking. If these artists can't modify or read other peoples code, but have to rewrite it completely there is a really big probability their new code is that of a newbie. It might be fancy and intricate, but still made by someone that lacks the ability to read, follow and understand old code.

Someone that can't understand "crappy" code, probably have a hard time even understanding design patterns - and have probably spent alot of time studying design patterns and memorized all their fancy names..
except when you DSL line goes down.
You can run jet engines on ethanol, too. It's slightly less efficient by volume than kerosene, but surely it beats hydrogen.
Interesting suggestion. There are little "moreofit" links on each result (as well as for the domain of the link)... I guess they are not prominent enough?

I'd like to keep the results rather straightforward. What I will do is link them all to a redirect script so I can log which results are most popular and possible create a smarter results algorithm.

How does including external links affect pagerank?
"ed was a command-line editor that worked identically to the colon-commands in vi and vim—in fact, you can press Q to get into ed mode (then type vi to get back into vim)."

This is wrong. Pressing Q in vi quits visual mode and returns you to ex(1). ex(1) precedes vi(1) and was an extended editor, based on ed(1). That's why the commands are similar, but not identical. And ed(1) isn't dead, it still is a command-line editor. :-)
And they don't have any contract.
Some real root servers companies still have setup fees or contracts, linode, slicehost etc don't.
Solving Different Problems (Flash video, HTML5 video...)
By the time we've burned all coal, global warming will be way out of control unless CCS systems are ubiquitous. All studies I've seen point to coal reserves being far, far larger than the atmosphere can handle.
I use the tags attached to a URL, as well as their relative magnitudes. In essence, each page has a 10-vector in R^60,000, and moreofit's job is to find kNN.

If you click "auto-suggest" moreofit will check your browser history for the top 2500 or so URLs, to give you a jumping off point. I'm not currently logging this data, because I don't think it's nice to, but I think it'd provide a gold mine of information to mull over.
Wait, do you really care about THIS?
First off -- thanks for delicious. Not sure if it's apparent, but moreofit uses its rich data.

If I might ask, how did the original URL-URL recommended work? Was it simply a query to find other URLs with the most matched tags, or was tag order also taken into account?
I rarely find myself thinking "this code sucks." Usually it's "this code is typical." Sometimes, it's "this code was designed to solve a problem we no longer have and gets in our way solving the new problem."

Either way, sometimes I do in fact see code ('not-invented-here') that clearly does not suck. It's concise, modular, comprehensive, and easy to trace and modify. There's a consistent and seemingly effortless balance abstract and domain-specific functions and logic. There might be jokes and humor in the code, but nothing that ever gets in the way of understanding. Nothing like "hmm I don't really know what to call this temporary variable so I'll make up a funny name for it"
I used to make a living building software for fixed prices. To make a profit, I had to prevent scope creep.

My most effective scheduling tool was a list of proposed features, each with an attached estimate. The client suggested features, I estimated them, and the client chose the order of implementation.

If the client wanted to add, remove, or reorder features, great! We'd get out the list and make new estimates. The schedule and cost would change based on those estimates. By making the schedule highly "visible", and working to update it with the client, I gave them what they wanted (fine-grained control over "what" and "when" and "how much") without trying to stuff 6 weeks of features into 2 weeks. And if I estimated something incorrectly, I didn't charge for the extra work.

I can remember only one client who liked to bully his contractors. (He was also bad about paying his bills.) I wrapped up that project quickly, and politely refused any further work, even when he offered me a small fortune.
I do think "further automation of the teller" is the most important step to pursue to make ATMs more useful, at least in the US.

It's 2010, why can't I transfer money to one of my other accounts instantly using an ATM? Why can't I wire or ACH money to anyone else's account anywhere--why do I have to physically come into the branch, or pay for an expanded array of online business access services to do this? Security concern? Fine, use biometrics or something else clever to deal with it. Why can't I deposit checks and cash 24/7 and have them credited to the account instantly? Handwriting recognition? Why are we still using written checks?

Admittedly, many of my problems in terms of limitations of online interfaces stem from using a small regional bank, which outsources different parts of its offering (business vs. personal online access) to different third-party vendors with disparate systems that don't communicate, and where most things (including transfers) can't be done outside normal 9-to-5 business hours. I could probably solve some of these by banking with some of the bigger players, there is still room for improvement in ATMs. The amount of overdraft & late fees I pay because I can't move money to the right account at the right time, as the owner of a very small business with a very high cash velocity and low transaction volume, is staggering. It would be nice to be able to do most of the things I need to physically hoof my way to a branch for on an ATM, and I'm sure the banks would be delighted in reduced personnel costs too.
As far as making installations easier, you can also check out Linode StackScripts: http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/

The LAMP and LEMP (nginx instead of apache) stacks are two of the most popular.
That's what I was thinking of doing, and I'd love to collaborate. But, the URL sniffing hack is being batched up in the next generation of browsers, though. When it gets patched, that would essentially make the service useless... unless you can think of some other value offering. It's a pity, because I came up with a beautiful way of checking thousands per second with no locking up or freezing or any sort of negative feedback on the UI.
I've been telling this to anybody who'd listen ever since I started doing it myself:

Continue living like a college student for 5 years after you leave college and you'll never need to worry about saving for retirement.

It really is that easy. You're going from a state where you have $500/month in expenses and zero income to a state where you have $5,000/month in income. It's trivial to save $10k/year at that point unless you go out of your way not to.

Even at 10% returns (which you can pretty much always get), your money will double every five years. Don't touch it 30 years, and that's a lot of doubling. And speaking of 30, that's when you can stop.

I essentially retired when I was 30 years old, and now just work the occasional short contract to pay the rent. Meanwhile the stack keeps growing in the background, waiting for grey-haired Jason to retire on it 20 years from now.
Ask HN: Recommend me a Podcast
Hi HN.. I've been doing a bit more commuting than normal lately and have found I have more commute time than podcast time. What Podcasts do you listen to that you can recommend to others? (Basically I'm after the HN guidelines -- anything that satisfies my intellectual curiosity)
I agree, although I will mention that there are times when I've evaluated open source software and libraries by reading the code and if it looks like crap I'm going to be wary of introducing it into any of my production systems. In situations where you're really hoping that the library or utility is going to solve your problems as advertised the bias actually goes the other way. The code has to have some measurable level of suck to get rejected.
Three Cards: One Black, One Red, One Half & Half
To expand more on this great answer; the point of the deauth attack ans so forth are designed to generate a large number of IV's with which to work on.

The idea is that you can use weak IV's (as described above) to attack the subsequent bytes in the encryption key. The important thing to know is that the next byte cannot be definitively calculated - you can only calculate a possible value. The reason a lot of weak IV's is needed is so you can perform the same attack multiple times - at which point the correct byte value will appear much more often than any other value.

(incidentally; the theory behind it is actually pretty simple but you do have to be up on your encryption terminology for it to make sense on first reading :) when I learned all this from scratch it took me ages to get my head round it)
In two years of self-hosting, we had a few minor downtime instances, but nothing to do with the DSL:

http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/08/redundant-is-never...

You run the same risks hosting at home as you do in a datacenter. Things can go down and it's your job to put them back up. There's no greater chance of the ISP cutting off a Business DSL line that happens to point to a residence than to a business downtown.
Spam is here to stay. Mostly by virtue of the idiots that continue to buy products that are spamvertised.

Blocking the way the RBL does it is counterproductive, you can't combat spam effectively that way.

Spamhaus has the right idea (block the spam from zombies), the RBL and it's cousins are out of control.

If the battle with spam will ever really be won however it will be by a combination of end user education and legislation that will make it more expensive to send spam than the money you will make on it.

The education part of it will be the larger component, the legislation to mop up the remaining die hards.
Well, it means, that the viewer can read the sign, which is quite practical. For example, in Czech dubbed TV series (like The Simpsons), a narrator has to read every sign that has any meaning to the plot, which would be quite weird, if you weren't used to it, and then even surprised that this is not the case in the original version. (As a bonus, it makes the video even more redundant, so you can take the whole episode, rip the audio track, and just listen to it :-))
The Journey So far : thecopypasteblog&rsquo;s 100th Article
Amazingly, matching can be done with a single MySQL query that will take anywhere between .05 - 2.0 seconds (on average .25 if I do a whole batch of URLs) -- it depends on how popular the tags of the URL are. Those numbers were too large for my liking, so I cooked up a Java program that loads the relevant db tables into memory and does the matching itself. The program uses about 80MB (though it only 'really' uses 35MB -- damn Java heap) of memory and takes .008s to compute 500 matches for a given URL -- which I think is suitably fast. However, its 8ms because I've optimized it quite well -- a brute force match would take URL_INDEX_SIZE^2 * 2 * log2(NUMBER_OF_TAGS_PER_URL) multiplications.

The main bottleneck is inserting those 500 rows into a separate table, which is currently taking .1 seconds. I'm sure there's a better way to do this... I'll have to look into it if it becomes a scaling pain.
Saving is good, but the "miracle of compound interest" is hard to believe in after a decade where you literally would have been better off stuffing your money under a mattress. Past returns are no guarantee of future gains, so the argument that "we're at a low point and can only go up" doesn't really hold. I mean, I hope the market will go up, I've been investing in a disciplined asset allocation rebalance once a year style for the past 8 years, but, I'm just sayin'

So if you don't invest the money in the stock market, where else? Yourself. Live off savings and do a startup. Pay for education. Other ideas?
Linode!

Fastest there is, cheap, and they have an API.

Plus no contract.
I wonder if anyone could recommend a VPS service that runs Windows (too)?
This reminds me of the time I sat through six hours of the HBO miniseries "Angels in America" (set in the 1980's) and spent the whole time vaguely unsettled that almost nothing in the movie looked like the 1980's at all, including blatantly 2003-era Coca-Cola cans.
Finally, somebody noticed! Hardly anybody is using "auto suggest" ... which is good -- I'm glad people have URLs in mind to search. Yes, I'm using the browser history hack that's been around for ages. It's going to be patched up by all major browsers in probably under a year, so don't worry. I think the latest safari already has it covered.
A Curious Course on (Python) Coroutines and Concurrency [pdf]
Pairing - Why does it work..
Hooting Yard http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/archives/category/shows/hoot...

Little Atoms http://www.littleatoms.com/

Skeptoid http://skeptoid.com/

Hacker Public Radio http://hackerpublicradio.org/

FLOSS Weekly http://www.twit.tv/floss

Linux Outlaws http://www.linuxoutlaws.com/
Reminder: Machine Learning Summer School '10 Registrations now open
Just a quick reminder that the registrations are now open. Will be great to bump into some of you there..
The competition in this market is quite strong in germany, there are 5 major companys offering basically the identical dedicated server service. The servers are not virtualized, therefor you usually have to commit to longer running contracts or higher setup fees.
So:

* 'my ISP at the time ended up on the MAPS RBL due to the actions of a customer-of-a-customer. (My ISP) decided to fight them'

* Then the place you worked at had: 'a root'd box (sic) or a customer doing something dumb, usually a mailing list'

That sounds similar to my own experience dpoing Unix work in the late 90s:

* Education provider has MS Exchange 5.0 box and is being used to send out gigs of porno spam (there is no relay control at all built into Exchange 5.0, MS made everyone pay to buy Exchange 5.5)

* Various boxes running Sendmail and incorrectly configured (fairly easy on sendmail).

In both my and your cases, the impression I got of RBL was positive. They Blacklist found real abuse, and the RBL's users/customers got what they wanted: less spam.
Symptoms of Low Blood Sugar Are Signs of Hypoglycemia
Jason Santa Maria on print vs web
Python 3.2 Alpha 1 Released
Victus Media: Web 2.0 Expo Proposal for Startup Showcase
The situation Patrick sketches to me is reminiscent of a boss/worker relationship, not of a contractor one, but the same rules (with some slight modifications) still apply.
I think I had the same boss as you in my first "real" job...Thankfully the experience taught me to choose my employers more wisely in all subsequent jobs.
Facemoods Search
Because most of the people who buy (anything) are not professional (anything) buyers.

I've shot a few weddings and to make a viable business out of it and do quality work, you need to charge about a grand per wedding. Probably more, depending on various factors. Really, that's just how the numbers work out. One reason the wedding photography business is so tough is that the people who buy your services have no idea what's involved (all told, it's 30-40 hours work, once you have your workflow down, using fairly expensive equipment) and balk at even half that. Esp. since their friend with his first "prosumer" camera has told them he can do it for a tenth of that[1], and they're being ripped off.

So the question really is, how much do you need the work?

[1] He can't; he is in fact committing himself to giving the happy couple those 30-40 hours of his time as a wedding present. But he won't know that 'til it's too late...
Dare I say it, but if you need to run Microsoft in the cloud then Azure is probably a good bet these days. Also, if you don't already have MSDN and want to run a Microsoft stack you can get a BizSpark license and that comes with some good freebies.
I like to imagine myself angel or even venture investing after successfully building a company or three. There's a lifetime of work in shifting markets, and much of it can be helping other people build fantastic stuff.

We only get a short time on the treadmill, better to throw it out the window so the next walker get's a beautiful view.
That's a fantastic way to do it. The clarity you built in to your approach is exactly the way to resolve this sort of issue, as soon as stuff is left 'up in the air' or is not made explicit the stage is set for some kind of conflict or disappointment.

By doing it your way instead of presenting the client/your boss/whoever pays your bills with a binary choice (this or that) you present them with a menu of items with an associated cost. They know their budget and you give them the freedom to expend it the way they think is best.

> And if I estimated something incorrectly, I didn't charge for the extra work.

Very honourable, and a really good way to show your customers you are confident and willing to eat your mistakes. Things like that will create a bond of trust between a supplier and a customer in a very short time, and you probably have sold to the same customers several times if that was your attitude.
This reminds of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson's quip with the Titanic, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE#t=26m12s

The best part, Cameron: "Last I checked, Titanic grossed world-wide $1.2B. Imagine how much more it could have grossed if we got the sky right"
Diagrams could be done using artist-mode (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode). Images themselves can apparently be embedded/displayed:

- http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp/html_node/Images.htm...

- http://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Showing-Im...

- http://obsidianrook.com/codelife/emacs_image_mode.html
Mark wrote a similarly interesting article about the typography in Mad Men a couple of years ago too.

http://www.marksimonson.com/article/236/mad-men-mad-props
I'm on Dreamhost and it's been fine for my limited sites. They're cheap, give me ssh access, and I can install whatever I need. I let them handle my registration as well, nice and easy.

I've used my primary domain to variously host standard HTML/php, a perl-based wiki/blog, a ruby on rails blog, and most recently a django blog.

I've also use it to host a private git repository, do ssh tunneling, etc.

Not bad for $8 a month.
If it really needs to scale: AWS EC2

For DNS: Dnsmadeeasy.

For low latency content delivery: Akamai

For dirt cheap makeshift content delivery: several servers from 478east

For servers that need lots of RAM(>24GB) on the cheap: webnx
Dead simple red-eye reduction
The most intellectually stimulating podcast I have ever listened to.
12 Byzantine Rulers - http://12byzantinerulers.com/

My podcast (I have no shame)
GeekNights - http://frontrowcrew.com/
Android applications list for local search [GPS & AR]
Use your Android to find restaurants, shops, new friends, never miss the latest event in your hometown or on your vacations and for sure Socialize
With good state bonds mix you can make between 3 and 5%. That's more than the average inflation, at least where I live.