skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't know about Q objects before. What are their capabilities regarding, say, moving from an SQL database to a web-service or a third party application?

I mean, this is the kind of stuff I have to do surprisingly often when maintaining legacy applications and putting them up to date. Your data model ends up changing or just not supporting all the same idioms again. You might need to join some info coming from your database without half of it coming from a RPC.

I've found such changes in the foundations of where data you get is to cause a whole damn lot of problems on all the layers above. I haven't figured out a better way than wrapping lots of it in fat models, but if Q objects have something that can help with that I'd be very happy to learn about it.
I don't want a new car. It's 25 years old, and I wouldn't mind replacing the ratty, decaying upholstery. My house is great, but could use some repairs.

I've got a wife and four kids, and if I didn't have to work I wouldn't have this ten hour hole in my day where I can't spend time with them. And, you know, time for learning a new language. Or, maybe, a hobby. I could play catch with my kids instead of fixing the washing machine.

It's about the time.
Jobs loves symmetry. Look at his choices in design for mice: symmetrical even to the point of being harder to use.
> it's not especially culturally acceptable for a woman to conceive a child from a man who isn't her life partner.

Beyond cultural acceptability, there is objective optimality. Since men thrive to validate themselves by providing more than they consume (cf. article again), it's a comparative disadvantage for women to raise kids without the benefit of that surplus.

In a society where it's reasonably easy to secure a (male) provider, you're a major loser as a woman if you can't secure one. In a society where it's hard, e.g. due to skewed gender demographics, it's acceptable to be a single mom.

There's been a quite politically incorrect paper about black US communities, their lack of men due to huge imprisonment rates and higher mortality, and the resulting prevalence of the single mom model. I think it was referred to by Freakonomics.
Rather you than me.
Warning: mssql_connect(): Cannot open connection: Timeout expired. in /var/www/database/mssql/common.php on line 10
I wonder, how much damage could you actually do with that drone? I mean, if it isn't armed then there isn't much too this story - failures happen all the time.
We made a previous version of the software in collaboration with Richards Heuer that you can get for free from PARC:

http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/ach/ach.html

The setup is a lot easier with that version if you just want to try it out. It is just a little java program. Unfortunately, I don't think it is open source.
I would say the people who made this site are fucked. Google is only showing PSA ads.
A German here living in the US for about 10 years...

I found that I my line of work (software engineering), this is not generally true. I used to work more daily hours when I was still in Germany, and there was a culture of "You have to be in the office, otherwise we cannot verify that you are actually working".

Here I work from home when I like, work odd hours, work few hours (as long as I work focused during the hours I do work), and I am generally trusted to get my work done.
Google is pretty good at blocking out upcoming competitors.

But do you ever get the feeling that Google knows too much about you? Has a little too much control? I use Google as my primary search, I let them read me email thru Gmail, watch my browsing thru Chrome, etc. But those are all privacy related things, not financial concerns. If I was spending a lot of money on online advertising, I would prefer to use a platform other than AdWords.

AdGrok should be ok.
Look, the "piracy community" is made up of people with different motivations for why they do what they do. For some of them it's an ego satisfying game. For others, it's something else. So, I would rather look at them as decent human beings making a mistake. It just makes it so much easier to deal with anyone.

Sometimes, being nice to people and holding them to a higher standard works. Irrespective of who they are, because genuine respect and decency combined with good humor is something so rare that it's a prized commodity.
RVM 1.0.0, Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.

+ Rubinius will remove the GIL ("the work has already begun" -- Yehuda Katz http://yehudakatz.com/2010/08/14/threads-in-ruby-enough-alre...)

+ MacRuby will be even faster, more stable and more documented

It will be an awesome end of 2010/2011 for Ruby programmers.
I received my italian citizenship a few weeks ago, still need to go tet the passport :)
I have to agree with this. Landing in the US on an international flight is always the worst part of the trip.

1. Taking so long to get my bags, then getting them re-scanned, that I miss/almost miss the connector

and/or

2. answering 20 questions to the customs officer
What it does do is create incentives for people to remodel extensively--keeping just a fraction of the house intact so it's legally not new construction--rather than move.
Beat me to it :p

One thing that really sticks out to me here is the emphasis on NOT growing too large. I think this is a management view that is going to grow increasingly common in the future.

Despite years of pounding in our heads that growth is the only avenue to success, people are finally realizing that great culture, lifestyle, and profitability are enough. Sure, some people will never have enough and will continue to grow for the sake of growing. But the idea that you can lead a 20 person company for many years and enjoy the profits is very tantalizing to a lot of us Gen Y-ers that watched parents work themselves to death.
Hands On: Netflix for iPhone works well, needs higher-res icons
Evolutionary psychology without lots of backing data means very little. The hypotheses are very fun to think of, but there's no guarantee that you've thought of everything that could have happened a thousand millennia ago(and you probably haven't). Baumeister brought up some very interesting points (that I'm sure riled up a lot of feminist feathers), but there are also holes in his argument, such as the two below.

First, there is no mechanism of action that backs up his claim that society uses men as expendable. It's easy to see that it would be adaptive (for the society itself) to use men this way, but there's no guarantee this will happen without a mechanism of action. In fact, society seems to have developed mechanisms (such as monogamous marriage) that act against allowing men to be disposable sources of semen.

Second, even accepting everything else, his essential claim that a woman can't increase the number of her descendants by acquiring wealth and prestige is clearly false. All she has to do is find a way to transfer the wealth/prestige to her son(s), who in turn can use it in the ways Baumeister indicated.
Getting your superiority high for the day?
I did elaborate. All he said was "No" in so many words.
There is a difference between:

Working a "real job" first (e.g., 2+2), vs. grad school w/o experience

and

Getting an MBA, and getting a super-top elite MBA.

These distinctions aside, I do not think that an MBA is often worth the cost in both dollars and opportunities. I see too many of my peers just thinking they'll work for two years, get an MBA, do something cushy. Even if it's true, it seems... unfulfilling.
Judge Rules Against Monsanto GMO Sugar Beets
If you compare the US with Canada, which has a similar mixed ethnicity,...

False. Canada has more long lived Asians and far fewer short lived Blacks (and "some other race") than the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

In any case, I'm not asserting that ethnicity is the only factor affecting life expectancy. My claim is that many factors affect life expectancy and health care is way down the list in terms of magnitude (once you reach first world levels). Thus, using life expectancy as a proxy for health care is simply a terrible idea.
It probably should display informix as an option, but got a row lock error.
I would argue that the top flight schools typically do a better job preparing their MBA students for the real world (externships, more realistic case studies with active participation from visiting corporate leaders, etc) than the bottom 90% do.
Not really.

The test is whether a customer/client would think this new site was associated/owned/blessed by facebook.

Now, if it has facebook widgets and like buttons all over it, you have problems.

Also consider the cost of your lawyer having fun with Facebook's legal team.
Debt or Equity?
Analog Hacker Raises $20k to Make Handmade Lockpicking Tools
denmark, sweden, norway, and iceland are all members of the schengen...
Really? I thought it was called Cola because of Kola.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_nut
People who use DB2 don't need to go to howfuckedismydatabase.com
It was an example because I'm at work and don't have time to find another...But anyways the X is larger than the Y chromosome and also has more genetic information. So XX would have more genetics information, thus moderating the extremes---height, weight, intelligence etc. Whereas the Y these would be more pronounced because there would be fewer chances to have the genetics balance out. I can't explain it any better than that or I would. I am just trying to have a discussion, not an argument.
A 600 lb helicopter landing on your house would do significant amounts of damage.
I've backed this project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/schuyler/lockpicks-by-op...

I think they're going to be a great set of picks/sets of locks.

Also you can see a lot his project updates here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/schuyler/lockpicks-by-op...
I call this type of approach, Judo Marketing: where you use your opponent's strength to your benefit.
FYI: muslin isn't a race.

Oh, I know, it’s a fabric.

I'm glad we agree that it's not the paradise that so leftists claim it to be.

So you really didn’t have a point, did you? Just wanted to blurt out a few insults?
I use RVM for all Ruby installations now. I can't think of a distro or UNIX flavour whose Ruby packages are so good that I would use them instead of RVM. That includes Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, BSD, OSX.

For those developing Ruby libraries, RVM makes multi-version testing a breeze.
"Google is pretty good at blocking out upcoming competitors."

Your comment made me think about the last time I tried logging into AdWords using Firefox.

The css file seemed missing or broken, and the form wouldn't submit.

Then I switched to Chrome, and everything was ok.

Not sure if that's deliberate on Google's part.
But why isn't there much fight against Swift, the telecommunications data retention and other stuff?

I don't understand that...those issues are way more important than google street view.
This reminds me a story...

At my last job we used Postgres on a Windows server. Whoever initially set up the database pretty much stuck to the defaults.

Whenever we would read/write text to the db in code we were using functions that basically returned raw data. All of our text was encoding using UTF-8.

When using the Windows Postgres Admin tool to run a query that returned text, you'd occasionally see some weird characters (cafÃ©), sometimes you wouldn't (café). Sometimes the query would fail due to invalid characters.

When I looked into it I quickly realized what was wrong - on Windows Postgres defaults to Win1252 encoding (which is a form of extended ascii). Normally when you are writing text to the database Postgres will convert the encoding but since we were writing raw bytes we skipped this part.

Win1252 contains some undisplayable characters which occasionally show up in a multi-byte UTF-8 character, explaining the failed queries. However it didn't explain why sometimes we got cafÃ© and sometimes we got café.

It turned out that there were some scripts/apps that were reading file names on Windows and inserting them into the database without converting it to UTF-8. Windows uses UTF-16, although somewhere this was auto-magically being converted to Win1252.

This meant that our Win1252 encoded database contained both Win1252 text and UTF-8 text. I ended up doing a text dump of the database and writing a Perl script that would run through it all byte-by-byte and convert all characters above ascii 127 that were not part of valid UTF-8 sequences into UTF-8. This was then used to create a new database correctly encoded as UTF-8. It actually worked (although there were a few snags - we were getting some data from this service that would randomly include the sub character (ctrl-z) occasionally which would cause cat/split to stop running).
I haven't traveled that extensively, but every time I've entered a Schengen country with nothing to declare, I've been able to walk right in after getting my passport stamped.

Every time I've returned to the US, however, I've had to go through an exhaustive baggage screening and pat-down before I could even board the plane, and then stand in line for half an hour in Immigration once I got back, filling out an entire form to declare that I have nothing to declare, and answering random identity-verifying questions from an immigration officer. I feel tired and uncomfortable just thinking about it.
Bumper Stickers Provide Your Business a Competitive Market Edge
Bumper stickers can surely provide your business a competitive market edge on time. That is why they have today become the hottest selling products for both small businesses as well as large businesses throughout the world.
DevOps: A New Approach to An Old Problem
My take on DevOps
For large-scale projects, this makes a lot of sense. Without another layer of abstraction to keep database-content-specific code out of your controllers, you end up with:

db -> orm -> 100,000 flat-level queries tied directly to the format returned by the orm

With abstraction like they suggest, you can achieve:

db -> orm -> [your organization method here] -> your never-changing data you requested

Significantly better if you're working at that scale, and if you ever need to change your DB/ORM. In a situation like that, I wholly agree: there should be zero ORM-tied code in your controller.

BUT: tutorials are rarely-if-ever for people working at that scale. You should have some grasp of what you're doing if you're attacking a problem of that scale, or at least be beyond the tutorial stage. If tutorials addressed this, they'd remind me of most beginning stuff for Java programming:

subclass this, override main, subclass that, subclass that, subclass that, build a polymorphic inheritance structure, print "hello world". Easy!

Totally opaque until you understand the underlying organization of Java, and it tends to distract newcomers from things they want to achieve, by bogging them down in things should do when they have no comprehension of why. Once you understand why, it's merely annoying; before that, you really can't know if you're supposed to use an interface, inherit from Object or Array or GenericArrayListWithBellsAndWhistlesRadixSorted, or just code the damn thing by hand.

ORM tutorials are for coding the damn thing by hand, a necessary starting point for building that scalable abstracted structure, and the foundation of it. Not for helping you build a 3000-table, 5-billion-row, 10,000-request-per-second Google-killer.
Another thing in favor of a tiling WM (and a keyboard centric setup in general) on a netbook is that it is often more convenient to use a netbook without a mouse. I am happy to reduce my track pad use in general, especially hold-button-and-drag operations.
The real problem is their offsite "Like" button and other offsite widgets.

It is too easy to have these on a site, and users will think it is sanctioned/blessed by Facebook.

This effect is much more significant when the domain name ends in book.[tld].

This is a double-edged sword brought on by their success and operation.
As an Indian, I don't know whether to laugh or cry at India's place in that chart.
Just a minor point: Constantine didn't "establish" the Catholic Church in the sense of making it the official religion. Rather, he issued a decree which made it legal to practice Christianity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan
The same can be done with Openbox.

I am not so sure that makes it a good idea though. Why undermine something so deliberate?
NodeNockout: i have 3 spots on my team
I have 3 spots on my team, i'm going to build a Twitter interface.
Anyone interested in joining let me know at mailto : zemanel ON zemanel.eu
A society without children is called dead the next generation. Not that I'm pro-subsidies (never used any) but I can see why there would be some collective advantage about the previous generation having had children (that's why you're here...) and we extend that to the next. This also benefits those without children because they end up getting a pension from other people's working children. (your pension typically isn't money that you put in the bank, contrary to what most people seem to think).
Private/Local Custom Cell Phone Tower at Burning Man (or any disaster zone)
Ask HN: How can I grow my webapp?
I put together a web application evenings and weekends over the Summer- Lonava.com - It's a Social News site (like Reddit/HN), where people post under their real names.

The problem is, I'm not really getting any traction at all.

I tried posting to HN for advice (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628254), and I've tried advertising on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/comments/d4oyu/lonava_is_a_redditlike_site_i_put_together_where/) and Google, but registrations have been next to nothing.

I'm not shooting for FB-levels, but I figured I could at least get a few dozen people to give it a shot.
What else can I do to try growing the site?

Should I try pivoting the site, dropping the key differentiating feature (real names), and relaunching as a generic anonymous reddit/4chan clone?

What other strategies do you have for growing a userbase?
Actually it isn't. The Gimp is not exactly a fork of photoshop.
I'm not sure about that--none of the fascist leaders were actually the head of state of their countries, at least to begin with (Germany had a ceremonial President, Italy and Spain had kings). You can get the same aspirational voting for a PM or Chancellor as you can for a President. But it's possible that Europe as a whole is cynical on having the kind of aspirational leaders Americans always try and go for.
Warren Buffett's partnership letters from 1957 to 1970
Facebook mobile app guru Hewitt trashes Android OS
His response to his haircut: http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/06/my-mohawk-and-being-the...

"Simply, I decided that I was going to be a high-profile person and create a high-profile company with a very strong and meaningful brand.The mohawk, the blog, the plentiful f-bombs, etc. are all just a part of who I am as a person, but I also choose to accentuate that part of my personality for strategic reasons."
Nor text files.
IPad app or HTML 5?
Blogspam.

Source:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home
Just realized there is not an option for FileMaker Pro.
You probably had AdBlock installed and enabled.
i could swear that in the early/mid 90's, the story was that germans were more awesome because they worked longer hours than we did. now we're not awesome because we work longer hours. am i misremembering the articles, or have we indeed always been at war with eurasia?
Facebook sues a startup for having the word "book" in its name
Not sure if you read the article but he talks about not looking homeless enough.

Even after attempting to grow a unibrow, not shaving, and not showering for an extended period of time, he says:

"There is a liquor store RIGHT across the street from the homeless shelter. I'm talking maybe 25 steps away max. As I was buying the bourbon I asked the clerk if, "He gets many of us homeless people in here." He responded, "Nope, I don't get many of them in here." Puzzled why he classified them as "Them" instead of "You" I asked if he thought I was homeless. He immediately replied, "Nope, you don't have the tell-tale signs of a homeless person." I was a bit relieved and disappointed by this.

Relieved because I didn't REALLLLYY look homeless (despite entering his store with a beard, ripped/dirty shirt, carrying a garbage bag and asking for only bottles made out of plastic). Disappointed because perhaps I didn't do a good enough job of disguising myself...."

He aslo mentions that while sleeping under the bridge, he has to worry about where to go to the bathroom.

By this logical conclusion, you can assume he has a fairly good chance of finding urine tainted dirt.

The coffee grinds are good because they are clean.

Go back to your Clouds, sir.
Ask HN: Trying to understand a high latency scenario
This is a personal issue, but I'm hoping you guys can share some more general principles:

I recently moved to San Diego and it took a while to unpack the router, so we hooked a laptop directly to the cable modem, and, as promised, enjoyed a blazing fast 30 mbps connection. After a few days, I found the router, and plugged it in. The connection suddenly took forever. 20 seconds on average to load a page. Speedtest showed 20 mbps a latency of 1.1 seconds. When I ran mtr, the ping times were consistently between 0.9 and 1.6 seconds.

I was using an overclocked WRT54G v 5 (250 MHz) with DDWRT firmware, so I changed to a factory WRT54G v8 (240 MHz), which did no better. I went back to a direct connection, and the problem resolved (latency by mtr: 50-90 ms). I bought an AirPort Extreme last week (1.2 GHz), and ping times are still super slow (about 1 second). Changing DNS servers (internal, Time Warner, Google, Level 3) did nothing.

The modem is a Motorola surfboard 5101.

I'm not asking for troubleshooting (although Time Warner's folks have proven useless), but I am curious: why would my network latency as measured by mtr skyrocket with a router inserted, regardless of which router it is?
This whole thing makes me sad because I have a friend who is very good technically who just started his MBA this week. I'm strongly debated not sending this article to him just because I don't want to depress him.
http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/

Bob: So, how do I query the database?

Ed: It's not a database. It's a key-value store!

Bob: Ok, it's not a database. How do I query it?

Ed: You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang!

Bob: Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

Ed: I believe I did, Bob.
The problem is research costs money, and people with money are more likely to be interested in average users. Nobody's going to do research on obsessive HN-reader-type users who are willing to go out of their way to memorize lots of Emacs commands in order to ensure their exocortex is fully optimized.
RVM is so full of awesome. Specifying a project's gemset with an .rvmrc file is my preferred workflow now. Its a genius tool.

http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/gemsets/basics/
http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/workflow/rvmrc/
Wow. I just want to record how cool this feels. I got posted on Hacker News by someone other than me. Thanks.
I think it is. Goals are a destination. Strategy is the road that leads to your destination. Put another way, this quote is saying, "If you don't have goals, your strategy can be anything and you'll succeed at reaching your non-goals."

Thus you need goals, so you know the success condition of your strategy. The Lewis Carroll quote is quite appropriate here.
"it's really flexible, agnostic, and developer-friendly, but also really sloppily designed,"

Doesn't sound like 'trashing' to me. It sounds like criticism.