skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, the potential issue of having different people having different configuration sounds a bit dangerous. OTOH, most issues you mention are true whether you use a db or a plain configuration file - they are just more explicit with sqlite3 (which acts as the model in a MVC organization of your app settings).

Incidentally, I am thinking quite hard about those issues (configuration representation, live change/querying, versioing) for internal apps, it is not an easy issue once your app has more than a few parameters.
Parents: Your Children Need Professors With Tenure
I don't think umask setting affects the executable bits of files, just directories. You can try by entering something like

umask 0; touch foo; ls -l foo
Fixed by a ID-system and a blowtest for alcohol.
IME users (office drones) seem completely ignorant of the back button.
Making Sense of Complex Controls
I remember a presentation he did some years ago for YAPC too:
slides: http://www.slideshare.net/cog/obfuscation-golfing-and-secret...
vídeo: http://yapc.tv/2005/ye/cog-black-magick/

Interesting stuff.
Yeah, everything is someone else's fault!
In this case yes. The torrent file from burnbit appears to list only the burnbit tracker.

A torrent file can list multiple trackers. It would make more sense for burnbit to take the official torrent and add their tracker to the list, allowing a client to make use of the peers listed by their tracker and the official tracker.

The offical torrent provides both IPv6 and IPv4 trackers, which is nice.
If water is the new oil, Canada is the new saudi arabia.
Very cool story, but how can you hire someone from Argentina so quickly? Does the US have a special visa setup with them or something?
More info: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade , https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/installing-upgra...
sort .bash_history | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -3
8 la
48 ..
106 d

So they're already pretty compressed. ".." is "cd ..", d is "ls --color=auto", and la is the same with -a.

Very diminishing returns after these.
The real villain there is the balkanized (and, quite frankly, medieval) nature of US cellular infrastructure.
Cheap Gadgets: Technology For Little Ones | InfoMov.Com
As best I can tell, you are reading that article in such a way so as to believe it was heavily slanted in favor of Oracle and you cherry picked one sentence you believe makes your point.

Shrug. I don't really care if the article was pro Oracle or pro HP or pro you. Wasn't my point, and still isn't.

The point I raised was that hiring a CEO that was involved in that mess shows really poor judgement on the part of the HP board, they had internal candidates that were far better choices IMO, and they do this. Another bad decision.

My point was all about the HP board.

And in rereading the article, I suspect that the author shares my point of view. It's not that it is a pro-Oracle point of view, it's a con-HP board point of view. I don't care about Oracle, I grudgingly respect that they wring every dime of profit they can out of whatever they do but I've had friends work there and from what I can tell it's a pretty crummy place to work. I do care about HP. I still have friends who work there and it used to be a fantastic place to work. I was hoping that getting rid of Hurd would be a step towards returning to the HP way and couldn't be more disappointed in what the HP board did.
I would start here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_example.html
Hoover Dam still stands as testament to American ingenuity
R package recommendaiton engine contest now live at Kaggle
Getting [k]ubuntu upgrades is about the only thing I've used torrents for seriously - it always takes far far longer than a direct download from one of my nearest mirrors. Like 24hrs instead of 1.

I'm not leeching I get lots of connections it just goes slow as molasses. Guess I'm doing it wrong but just in case others are getting slow downloads via torrent I'd really consider a direct download.
"Tenure doesn't guarantee that college teachers will be courageous. But it protects those who are."

This is the only argument given in the whole article. That teachers should be allowed to be outrageous and disrespectful because that somehow makes them better teachers.

There's a fine line to teaching kids to think critically and just being outrageous. Teachers without fear of crossing that line can do harm, too.

The whole argument is that teachers -can- be fired for things. Not that they -will- be. Good schools don't fire teachers for teaching children to think. If a school is inclined to fire teachers for that, tenure is not going to solve the problem. Is a teacher going to lay low for 7 years and then suddenly start teaching children to think? No. They'll have been doing it all along.
No opinion one way or another about how Mongrel2 handles configuration, but are INI files really "the fad today"? Just strikes me as an odd insult for something so old. (I don't work with Python, so maybe that's the faddish part of all this?)
wow - $0.085 for free!

they better give Ubuntu 10.10 public AMI ID.

http://alestic.com/ still doesn't list one.
Does this post bring anything to the table? I think I saw that exact same chart many months ago. It still doesn't -mean- anything. Most smartphone owners would choose another one of the same kind? Really? Wow! Some are thinking about switching? Wow!
I'd love to see data that proves that administrative bloat is the money drain on education institutions.

Not that I doubt it - most of the workplaces I've seen are one or two fat cats sitting on top collecting big paychecks while a bunch of people doing actual work get a small fraction of what the top earner makes.

I also tend to think that most of the repetitive administrative tasks can be replaced with small, well written scripts...
I'm not sure your FICO matters too much to DirecTV.

If you don't want to participate in the credit system and you ignore your FICO, you'll notice when you (a) buy/rent your home and (b) get a cell phone. I think that may be about it.
They flew the Vulcan again near to me (RAF Waddington Airshow) was an awesome sight (a little eclipsed by the Eurofighter/spitfire display) but since then I think they have had huge funding trouble.
And this idea that "the 'deadwood' either retired or died years ago" is very false. I've met so many professors who were basically useless but couldn't be fired because they were tenured.

Ignoring the vitriol that Fox News loves to vomit to its loyal sheep, the teaching profession for some reason has been allowed to act completely cut off from the market as a whole. There are so many very good teachers who simply can't get a job because of the tenure lock-in. If a teacher isn't doing his / her job, they should be fired and replaced! It works for the rest of the economy why shouldn't it work for the teaching of our children?
Co-founders are the better umpire. Your customers are the best umpire.

Indeed. Getting feedback from co-founders can be a problem if they live in the same echo chamber as you -- in contrast, as a single founder I have to listen to my customers, because they're the only people who talk to me!

(I'm not saying that you shouldn't listen to your co-founders, of course. Just make sure that you don't spend so much time listening to co-founders that you end up not having time to listen to customers.)
>and given global knowledge of where people are and where they want to go, it could plan the absolutely most efficient route.

Random digression, but I think you will find this is an NP-hard problem - I'm quite sure you can encode the Travelling salesman problem[1] within it. So the absolutely most efficient route is probably not feasible, although the system could certainly do a good job optimizing over what we have now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
I installed it from CD in a friend's PC. Couple of little complaints: he was confused by the installation screen showing that he didn't have the requirement of "2.6 GB of available drive space": http://lh6.ggpht.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TH7Lkl4Jd-I/AAAAAAAAByc/tt...

He thought this was because there was another OS in the drive and didn't know how to proceed (the "Forward" button was grayed out). I took a look at it, suspected no hard drive detected and that was it, the newly install HD had no power attached to it.

I just wished (for the newbies' sake) that instead/besides the disk space requirement with an X there was a note saying that no HD was detected.

The second issue is that even if I chose "yes, install proprietary stuff" the WiFi card wasn't working because of missing firmware (at least the message was right there when clicking on the network icon -strange up/down arrows btw-).

It took me only a few minutes to figure out and find the firmware update submenu and solve the issue but they could have linked that in the wifi connection message; my friend (someone with no experience outside Windows) would have not solved this issue by himself.
That's not marketing, dude, that's some thin shreds of organic traffic.

I'd say it's a thick shred. :-)

One of the benefits of Dropbox's popularity is that there are a very large number of people who google for "dropbox security".
Dubai, Thailand, Nigeria and the total domination by blackberry
tl;dr: Most music licensed under Creative Commons disallows commercial use. So, almost all authors are prohibiting the CBC from using their work.
Fund your startup - Man Makes $45,000 off Betting Slips from the Trash
It's all love, Colin. But you should get a cofounder.
Or just live somewhere where there's plenty of water.

Water falls from the sky, and in many parts of the world it's not a scarce resource at all.
Bad call. The canonical version of the server configuration doesn't play nice with version control, and so staff has to work with a facsimile and hope that nobody makes out-of-process changes.

(INI files though? What year is it?)
The future he predicts is pretty much the way life already is in large portions of (at least) central & northern Europe.
I would blame/credit audrey tang, pugs and the lambdacamels for popularizing the takahashi method[0]
(notable difference from lessig's style is the lack of non-text content).

My feeling about this is mostly anecdotical, but during the days of crazy pugs development a massive number of hackers from different communities was exposed to what was happening, tools designed for building such presentations bloomed, and, well, after that time I've seen a lot more of those :)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method
I know why they do this, but I will not host on a network that forbids a protocol just because some people use it for unsavory purposes.

I understand your perspective, but coming from the other side, I can tell you for a small ISP operation it can be a major PITA worrying about lawsuits and other potential issues related to users doing things on your network that draw the wrath of content owners. I don't limit bandwidth or protocols, and I've gotten a few notices of boxes that were hosting copyright content, but it's more overhead and hassle that you don't need to deal with.
Yep, when I ride my bike in the early morning, I purposefully do not wear light-colored or reflective clothing. I don't want to ever believe for a nanosecond that my safety is anyone's job but mine so I prefer to view the cars as actively trying to hit me and work to make it impossible for them to do so. The relationship (cars and bikes) is fundamentally adversarial in nature, best to act like it.
Go Green With Ten Startup Triple Bottom Line Ideas
Bettercodes.org - innovative collaboration platform for developers
I hate config files, having written a software tool GUI to configure lots of daemons that traditionally use config files.

The steps, in general, were parse-modify-overwrite, a real hassle considering the diversity of grammars each daemon employs - following the make your own parser mantra.

I welcome Zed's initiative of using sqlite, making a configuration GUI tool for it would be a breeze.
Here (where you have to search through Fibonacci numbers) I suspect memoization is rather the way to go:

# memoized fibonacci function
fibtable = {1:1, 0:1}

def fib (n):
global fibtable
if n in fibtable.keys():
return fibtable [n]
val = fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)
fibtable [n] = val
return val
Founders who have exited, impact of cash in quality of life
I knew I could count on you to jump in with your usual advice. :-)
From the site:

> Response codes between 500 and 599 appear flashing black on yellow to indicate a server error

Note that flashing stuff is one of the major sins of UI design, on websites as well as console applications. Even on really serious errors, flashing text is just distracting and makes the oh so important information hard to read.

I strongly recommend to remove the blinking.

Instead, you could rethink the color scheme. However, the current colors are working quite well for me, so I guess that simply removing the flashing will already do the trick.
Help HN: Want to build small web app for learning and side income.
Hi Guys,
I am long time HN follower. I always been benefited from HN community.

I am a full time developer and can code in ASP.NET (both web form and MVC), PHP (also i am beginner in ruby).

I want to build web app from which i can earn $200 - $400 per month.

Its not a big amount but it gives me following benefit which is more valuable for me.

1. Motivation for bigger move.
2. Getting experience in running SaaS based apps.
3. Side income.
4. Good learning about business, marketing and other non programming things.

I know i can make these kind of money though some freelancing but that option i am not looking for now.

I can invest my time 2-3 hours on weekdays and 5-6 hours on weekends (around 20 hours in week).
Also i can invest up too $300 if i have to do buy some sort of services/hardware etc.

Problem is I am not been able to think about any web app idea which solves some problem.
Please give me some idea about any web app which I should build.

I am not from US or Europa.

I am having high hopes from HN community.

Thanks in advance.
ITT: people who do not understand the tragedy of the commons.
what/where is the firmware submenu? I have WIFI issues after fresh install too.
on its way!
I wonder if you could harness this for serious information research. The grey area is interesting on 5. We cannot research your school paper, or do your job for you

examples: Find out if [your] anonymously uploaded website X violates anything in patent Y? What is the contact information for CEO in some big company Z? I could easily think of lots of others!

Might be worth a try at least and see how far they can really go :)
There's been quite a bit written on this; try these two Google searches for a start:

http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+education+bubble+admin...

http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+education+bubble+admin...
Cool! I remember building one of these in school, except we used Matlab and an infrared emitting led and an infrared detector.
Oooh I know what it was. One of the tech blogs had some annoying shit happening when you right clicked URLs that made the right click menu not show for me (slo0w connection here) so I blocked the subdomain.
Something no one seems to have mentioned: the post is by Sebastian Thrun, a professor at Stanford. His team won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and placed 2nd in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, so he's one of the most experienced people in the world in the field of autonomous driving. He's also done important work in robotics and mapping, two of the key skills needed for autonomous driving.

I didn't realize he was also at Google now, but this is probably good news for everyone, since Google will likely support him better than DARPA could.

Links:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/maverick/server/released.... has the AMI IDs for all the maverick server images, including the released ones.
The error message states:
"LinkedIn
Your LinkedIn Network Will Be Back Soon

We’ve notified our operations staff that you are having a problem reaching LinkedIn. We’ll get you reconnected soon."
Without the feedback of my co-founders over the years I would have been stuck many times.

I agree that when there is a conflict of votes (1:1 for instance) that it can get hard to manage things, but between smart adults there should be a way out of that without hurt feelings or someone being sidelined.

If the dispute is over something that can be tested, test both, if the dispute is over a direction to go in pick the safe one if the risk is large, the risky one if the risk is small (and have a plan 'B') etc.

Democracy is not the way to go within a company, one person gets to make the final call, who that person is should be agreed upon beforehand.

If the co-founders really are on equal footing I would suggest giving 1% of the stock to an independent third party with lots of business experience.

Customers are great for product feedback, they are not that helpful when it comes to choosing direction and strategy.
I don't follow: surely, a sql dump is possible with sqlite, and you could use just that in your VCS ?

As for ini file, the format is supported in the python stdlib, which makes it a natural default if you don't need too much. If .ini is not enough, I think in general you need something with a bit some logic, at which step using the database itself makes sense in mongrel2 case.
When I first saw this, I felt gutted. Having quickly record the coating whilst waiting for this pathetic ryanair flight get boarded, I feel better knowing I have just got a fantastic deal on my VPS. Won't mention the company here unless asked to, cost is just £10/ month.
Your use of xargs can lead to nasty surprises because of the separator
problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs#The_separator_problem

GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ does not have that
problem.

Watch the intro video for GNU Parallel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ
Being subject to non-torrenting, non-IRCing AUPs and other such nonsense would seem to negate the chief advantages of something like the SheevaPlug. If you're familiar with linux server configuration it's not any big deal to keep your plug at home.

If you're running a commercial web site with many users then obviously the SheevaPlug would be a poor choice, but for things like hosting your personal web site or blog it's perfectly adequate, and unless you make a complete hash of it maintenance is extremely minimal.
> You know, honestly these requests weren't all that outrageous...

True. Another valuable one - if your bank doesn't suck, you can probably meet with the branch VP and talk personal finance with him and get some advice on credit scores, what accounts he recommends, tax accounts, credit cards, etc. I used to meet with the head of the Citizen's Bank branch in Boston where I was near every two months or so for a quick chat, and he was always friendly and cool. Sometimes he'd ask me about technology and I'd answer some questions. I didn't have crazy money in the bank, I think any customer service-focused bank would do this for you if you're friendly and cool.
Too bad that even simple commands like "sum [1..10]" don't show output. :-(

Just "[1..10]" or a simple calculation like "1 + 1" work fine.
Great collection of jQuery plugins, including a 3d carousel effect
The website seems to work for me.
"In terms of objective reality this assumption is unwarranted. There are significant documented differences between the distributions of intellectual capabilities of genders including the higher variance in IQ for men and men's aptitude skew towards maths and away from language."

Are there? Cite some for me. And then explain why they mean there are fewer women in tech but not in other fields. Higher IQ variance means that there are more super geniuses and more mentally retarded men. You don't actually need to be a super genius to go into tech. Maybe to found a startup, though that's also a reach, but certainly not to go be a dev somewhere. And moreover, why do you assume that those differences are innate? Maybe they are, but there is also plenty of [uncited] evidence that suggests that many of those differences are learned.

I'm not assuming a priori that women are being screwed, but it mystifies me as to why this community tends to assume A) that the tech community is totally immune to societally constructed gender forces that have at some point affected pretty much everything else in the world and B) discrimination is the only bad thing in society that could be keeping women out of tech.

"It isn't as if it is a area that has ever been reputed as having a history of institution chauvinism."

…say what now? Maybe not like law/medicine did, but there's been plenty of chauvinism in tech.

"To me, the weight of evidence points more and more towards the differences in distributions of capabilities and preferences between genders playing a significant part in participation rates in tech. However much of an 'Inconvenient Likelihood' this may be for both the tech industry and many women, it shouldn't blind us to evaluating the evidence as objectively as possible."

What evidence? I'm very happy to evaluate the evidence objectively. But it seems so far that there's been very little evidence presented either way, and a common response then becomes "well, I don't see a problem, there must not be one!", despite the fact that A) this hasn't worked out as an explanation in the past B) there exist several societal factors we could point to that might explain the problem, if we bothered to think about it for two minutes instead of constructing some complicated and totally unfounded explanation based on evolution.

Instead of assuming that I'm a crazy and irrational feminist who cannot be convinced by facts, which is not the case, why not respond to the original argument I made, which was that our society conditions women to be afraid, which may explain why they're more risk averse?
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Flagging.
To get a canonical server configuration in raw text:

$ echo '.dump' | sqlite3 mongrel2conf.sqlite > mongrel2conf.human_readable
$ git add mongrel2conf.human_readable
$ git commit -m "Added mongrel2 configuration"

Then type the following before invoking mongrel2:

$ rm mongrel2conf.sqlite
$ cat mongrel2conf.human_readable > sqlite mongrel2conf.sqlite

I agree with you - I prefer a human readable/git friendly config file. That's why I invested 10 minutes coming up with this solution and putting it into run_mongrel2.sh.

[edit: earlier version of this post was unnecessarily snarky.]
There is no right turn on red in NYC.
I'm not so sure about that: lots of water around means that your drinking water has a high risk of becoming polluted with industrial sewage (as now did happen in Hungary) or salty water in areas close to the sea. Abundance of water != drinking water.
It works now, but did not work just 5 minutes ago.
The issue is exactly that people like it - everyone prefers a simple number to an hash, even if your name is Linus Torvald. But in DVCS, it is impossible to keep this naming consistent, and the cases where they work and don't may become quite subtle.
I flagged it too.

Aside: I don't know why LinkedIn being down would make the front page. (Amazon web services I could understand as people build on it, but I don't understand this.)
Electric cars neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim
released on 10/10/10. cool.
That works if you have a boss who is competent and if you don't work in big companies. That's exactly the kind of things which make small companies inherently more efficient, IMO.
Is the iPhone/iOS still an afterthought? Android users have had Google Navigation and Google Voice for a while now, and there are plenty of other app examples.

iOS and Android may seem superficially very similar, but the distribution model of apps and ability to access phone services are very different on the two platforms. I agree with wccrawford... this post doesn't really provide any new information or insight.