skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Optimization is a black art. It generally only applies to very specific cases. This is why most RDBM systems expose a lot of knobs to tune. The DB must be tuned both to hardware and work load, what is a good idea for one workload may be a disaster for another.

Here is an example, you can usually increase DB performance by about 15% by not allocating the first 8 MB of your hard drive. (Hint: the partition table causes misaligned reads/writes on raid systems if your partition starts at sector 1)

If you want to see the tricks of the trade, go read the TPC results, find the auditor's report and look through the source, the hardware configuration, and the software configuration.
3M claims ownership over purple
>It is extraordinarily odd to me that digg would create fake accounts to promote sites

Agreed.

The fact that it was primarily promoted publishing partners doesn't implicate Digg at all: Many of these spam accounts first seek to establish an algorithmic legacy by submitting and/or digging and promoting sites that they think will do well (see virtually every "Today I learned that Costco sells caskets/survival food kits" post), and that would be my suspicion here.

Eventually once that legacy is established they move over to the actual promotion pimping.
Social networking is almost irrelevant for me, but I've heard good things about an app called Gravity.
This is great. One comment: I'm not sure why the landing page has a blank central column taking over 1/3 of the space with nothing. Apparently it never fills, what am I missing?
AutoBudder
I think you need a more neutral website, with a very professional logo to attract clients. The current style is very niche,
You too. HN is at its best in discussions like these. :)
Blogging as Professional Fun
On the other hand, I keep hoping the Higgs Boson (or a discovery soon after it) will hold the key to either anti-gravity or wormholes. There is no scientific basis for this, I just want to be able to fly or jump across space. :)

No offence, but this is why people like you shouldn't be making funding decisions for these sorts of things.

And by "people like you" I mean folks with unrealistic expectations of what expensive atom crashers are actually likely to be able to achieve.
Yes and since that 8.5 percent number Microsoft in a surprise move decided to move all their 30 million Live blogs to Wordpress.com.
Much better, because its doesn't keep spamming you even when nothing has changed so far.
That is how he seems to work on it, but he talked as if it were so much more. Well, lots of us do that, and I'm not expressing any moral objection. Graham doesn't owe us anything. I'm making the practical observation that I don't think it can ever be a major language if developed this way.

Graham has spent nearly a decade now tinkering with syntax. I think he'd say that he's trying to get the foundation correct, and all the rest can come after that. But I'm saying that, as much as I like his syntax ideas, there is more to the foundation than syntax, that the other issues will inevitably have implications for the basic design, even for the syntax, that his half-dozen friends don't know enough to fully inform him of the state of the art in these issues, and that his lack of interest in enlisting the help of the rest of the world in the foundational issues is likely to render the Arc Project a mere exploration of syntactic tweaks to Lisp, not a major new language.
And another reason for doing it in the first place might have been to artificially inflate digg counts across the board to mask the lack of site activity after the exodus of so many users.
Why would the criminals put the command & control servers all in one place? Shouldn't they have backups elsewhere which will enable them to repudiate the seized servers and retain control of the bots?
News breaks, you write an article and you go to this site and find a photo for your article and post article with photo.

Or you post the article with a message (like BBC does too) saying "Are you there, send photos etc", go back update the article with someones photo etc.

Yes I know readers will automatically send some photos in, but a live stock library is a really good idea to complement readers photos (and whilst I might send a photo to the BBC, my local paper is pretty low down my list - I appreciate that differs on quality of local though).
> That doesn't mean that what Wikileaks did is right: in fact if they get somebody killed?

Has there been a single report that this happened the first time they leaked the information?

The article itself said "Robert Gates has acknowledged that earlier Wikileaks releases did not in fact compromises sensitive information or methods".
This is very cool in theory, but my girlfriend just quit her job at Nordstrom after working there for 3+ years and her experience was very different. She is a very hard and dedicated worker and some of the Nordstrom policies are very unfavorable to employees.

Two quick examples: 1, During one of their biggest sales of the year my girlfriend was working close to 80 hours per week, working long hours and in many occasions working overnight to make sure inventory was on the shelves for the next day. She was told by HR that she would be paid time and a half for her overtime hours, which is pretty standard I would assume. After getting her pay check, it looked extremely low and after verifying with HR they told her that she mis-herd what they said and for overtime hours she is only paid half of her normal hourly rate.

2: Nordstroms health insurance for employees working on the sales floor is off/on each month depending on how much you are selling. One moth my girlfriend had insurance and another month she did not. She was not notified when she was/wasn't eligible and had to pay more than expected several times on various medical bills because of this.

Even after this poor employee treatment, my girlfriend was not mad, the most frustrating thing was that Nordstrom preaches how well it treats their employees and how they are known for it. Clearly this is not the case.
> What kind of "technical" is this?

It's not technical. It's an industry gossip blog article about a lifestyle consumer electronics company's latest product.
The New Startup Founder’s Checklist
My point was that the graph wasn't originally intended for others to see. It's a behind the scenes look at HN.

Is this really that big of a problem? Really?
AFAIK, no. I looked into writing one of these, but it was right after google changed it's search API so that it was only javascript. (at least, I couldn't get a key to the standard backend webservice API). My impression is that google didn't really want you to be able to do this, because better metrics on rankings would make it easier for people to game google.

I decided against using the JS version because I'm not that good in JS, but mostly because I saw warning everywhere that "results returned by the JS search API are not necessarily in the same order as if you searched through their web interface". Blew me away -- they're really returning things in a different order?

But now I'm questioning whether or not that's just because their rankings will change depending on who is searching -- locale, preferences, etc., will all affect rankings. I suppose the thing to do would be to build this with their JS Search API, and see if I can get consistent rank results (and cmp to hand searches).

But I'm with you -- feels like this should be a tool that exists everywhere.
Writing HTML5 Apps w/ Clojure, Functional-Style JavaScript and NoSQL
"If digg wants to use their own batch of sockpuppets to influence the front page to their partners benefits they are free to do so, the responsibility, the upsides and the downsides are all theirs to take home."

The downside is that someone identifies and calls them on it, which is purportedly what is happening here (though the analysis and conclusions are flawed, in my opinion). I'm not sure what you're getting at.

"This is like saying google is 'gaming' the search results by having their people influence the rankings / search result pages by changing things in a way that benefits google."

But....people do that sort of analysis of the search engines all the time, trying to find patterns where it betrays user trust for selfish reasons. Search engines tread a dangerous realm where they can lose user trust (and usage) if they abuse their position.

"Bottom line is it is their site, and they can run it any way they want to"

I don't know why, but this sort of comment always bothers me.

Yes, we all know it's their site and they can do what they want. It's also the attention and trust of the community, and they can do what they want, including choosing to move on, distrust, question, etc.
You don't consider the interplanetary trips to be a huge leap? Or the discoveries of the Hubble space telescope? I (barely) remember when everyone was surprised to find out that Jupiter had rings. Let alone everything that we've found out about the moons.

Even if you don't care about science, the proposed space shield has great practical value for humanity. I absolutely think we should fund it.
Hey, thanks for that. I'm not as totally up on all of that as I should be, because frankly, this is one place where I'm a bit of an idealist. I disagreed with the very concept of a bailout on the grounds that failure is necessary in a capitalist economic system; without the threat of failure, we have no incentive to improve.

Frankly, the war is a bigger issue anyway.
Obsolete occupations
Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience
the good:

1) your opening text gets right to the point.

the bad:

1) the front page text is a little hard to read. i think the text color blends into the background too much.

2) your layout looks like a wordpress blog template. really really boiler plate. this is hardly the kind of site i want to pay $250 for a logo. you've got a todo list in the top right ("clean my deks", "feed the cat", "save the planet"), what does any of this have to do with logo design? it also takes up 20%! of the page.

3) your faq page is coming soon. either do it or get rid of it. this makes your website seem new and that's not the kind of website i want to be paying $250.

4) you have no logo yourself?

5) your order page is way too big/long. collect some small info first and then have a conversation with me that helps you answer all those questions.
I am (as I type this on a different system) in the midst of upgrading my MBP with one of these babies. :)
New to ASP.NET MVC? Test-Drive Your Way
The Rise of the Small Botnet
Google launches Boost
That's ok, you can just add some more RAM when you nee... oh.
Not to knock your website at all, I think it is really well designed, neat and I think that affordable quality logo design is a very important service that many people need and do not know where to turn for help.

Unless you are outsourcing the designs, similar to 99designs and company, I wouldn't consider the business a startup by traditional definition.

When I read the description that PG gives to what it means to be a startup it really opened my eyes and was definitely a turning point in the way that I thought about designing products.

"A company has to be more than small and newly founded to be a startup. There are millions of small businesses in America, but only a few thousand are startups. To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn't scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs."

So if you are looking to be a startup, you will need think about how you can mass produce the designs. That being said not all companies are startups, and that is fine - sometimes it's just good to know the difference between the two...I know it helped me a lot. Again, think the website is great and I don't mean this as a negative.

from: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

EDIT: I didn't mean this to be a negative at all, I think anyone who takes the initiative to create something and has the drive to actually get it started has done something great. I wish there were more people who actually did shit like this rather than just talked about it.
This is actually something I've been doing as a side project but it's not something I can give you access to right now. There are other "rank tracker" services, but none of them are instant. SEOmoz has one, which will allow you to enter up to 5 search terms, but you'll need to dish out some $$ to lift that limit - http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker

Basically, because the search engines don't provide this data through a public API, you end up having to use the different search APIs and crawl each one's results for your target domain.
granted Google is the big fish in the search engine pond ... does this imply that a court order to Google also means that Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, et al, are also getting a similar court order for the same user ?
That's probably been true for a long time. That and low-level libraries.

Even the really old Unix books recommend piping together small C utilities and stuff written in awk, sh, etc.
Indeed. This is why I aced at Imperial but sucked at Cambridge. If your goal is to learn proficiency in a skill or a set of knowledge that is presented to you, then test, test, test. But my test-acing skills didn't help when the goal was to go out and find all the information I needed and then draw conclusions.
You are certainly right about that. I should have added more context to what I was thinking when I wrote that.

I was thinking more along the lines of having some non standard font on your computer that would differ greatly from a common web-font, specifying that as the top choice in a font stack, and then designing your site using that font. Which I was thinking was essentially the goal of the OP.

I think your font stack example isn't quite as extreme as I was thinking in my head. Even still, your example has two sans-serif fonts that may/may not be on a users computer, with your fall back choices then being serifed fonts. Already, that font stack is setting your site up to present some very different designs to various visitors. That font stack would fare better if it was something like font-family: "Adobe Myriad Pro", Myriad, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;

If you are going to pick a non-standard font to use without font embedding, then your fallbacks should be web-safe fonts that are similar in design and in rendering size. Exotic Font Y at 16px can look much different from web-safe Font Z at 16px.

So, if a very small percentage of your users will have an exotic font installed that you want to use, and you aren't embedding that font for others to use, then you are setting yourself up for design/rendering problems for all of the people who have to use the fallback. It just ends up looking goofy and unprofessional, as well as being a bear to get to render nicely for both varying font styles in a "pixel perfect" design. Font stacks should be about trying to get the same experience across multiple platforms and browsers, not 30% get the best experience and 70% get a crummy degraded experience.
Yeah, and like people will understand that. Given the current lack of uptake of encryption in email, and the abysmal undertanding of encryption in general, you'll never get the average computer user to understand what the hell you're on about.

And then the spammers will spoof it and get people to click on apparently legitimate messages.
Maybe to you. Where I live Netflix doesn't have movies that you can't play online.
American law has never taken an absolutist view of privacy rights.

Does any form of law take an absolutist view of privacy rights?
I have used it for ram memory (free) and processes (ps) monitoring.
I agree with the poster that my laptop has uptimes that reach into the months generally. I can't say the same about my Windows machines.

10:11 up 36 days, 1:16, 2 users, load averages: 1.07 1.19 1.22
How to become a Professional Blogger
Does this mean that (in your opinion) the rankings aren't particularly accurate?
Can't Qt run on Android and W7?
I like the idea (as much as I like any advertising) - so it's like putting someone elses page ads on your page, the referer's in your case. So imagine they had Adsense on you'd want to display the same category of ads on your page too (or possibly ads for the same companies?).

Not come across this at all. Which referer's are you expecting to clone the ad categories from specifically? I say this because most referers on my blog, say, are Google (!) and so the keywords of the post generate ads (Adsense, Amazon) that are relevant as if they were on the Google search page (the referer).
Around 5 years ago, I read an interview given by Bill Gates. In that, the inteviewer remarked about Gates' reputation for having in-depth knowledge on diverse subjects. And the interviewer asked, if Gates could just understand anything and everything.

I don't recall the exact wording of it, but this is the gist of it as I recall:

"I read a lot, on very diverse subjects. There are a lot of things that I do not understand at first read. But irrespective of whether I understand it or not, I complete reading them. Then I re-read them. I re-read to the extent that I want to understand them in depth."

Also, he claimed in the interview that he completely avoids watching TV, that he instead spends time reading.

May be that is the secret to his smartness.
Ask HN: Anybody using rails and backbone together? How's it going?
There is a difference. A comment is voted up at the discretion of the users, while text associated with the url would be displayed at the top no matter what. Which would mean the first person who submitted a link could essentially make their comment upon it always be the top one, and define the discussion.
It would be more useful to say what country you're in and what kind of clients you work with.
Is it processing power or too much code bloat? The device in this video is an 8 bit AVR:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/11/8-bit_touch-sensiti...
Considering Google gets 140+ million unique visitors, that's less than 0.0064% of all users? Color me unimpressed. Now if you told me personal information was being offered WITHOUT a court order, then I'd be more concerned.
German electric car sets new distance record
respectfully, your post is misleading. it's not there there isn't an "absolutist view of privacy rights", it's that there is a very narrow "right to privacy." i put "right to privacy" in quotes because whether it exists at all is debatable (i take no view on the issue). i'm talking about privacy from a constitutional standpoint.

"private" documents/information are tangentially protected by various rules of procedure and statutes. for instance, a request for documents should have probative value outweighing the request's burden. however, i don't believe that there are privacy rights per se in very much or any of this.

the disclosure of a litigant's private information within the context and scope of litigation is the rule, not the exception. some people's favorite pastime is embarrassing their enemies through litigation. i have some sense of what that's like, having read thousands of litigants' personal emails.
Hi Travis,

As much as I'd hate to give away my secret, Google does have a RESTful API available to its search results. Best of all, it's in JSON!

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0...
I wonder how this jives with security expert Bruce Scheiner's stance: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirele...
Asking for 250 million is the equivalent of asking 3000 people to work for nothing for a year.

That's not an honest analogy, because there are no 3000 people who will have to work for nothing. The only purpose of such a statement would be to frighten people into thinking "OMG I could be one of those people!"

The correct question to ask tax payers is: This will cost 300 million over 10 years. That means each of us will have to pony up 10 cents per year over these 10 years to save us from fiery asteroid death. Do you think that's worth 10c?
Monster Energy Clothing
It will long term though.
If apps run everywhere then iPhone is just an expensive shiny phone then with a level playing field the company that produces the cheapest simplest phone (that runs the same apps) will make money.
Can you describe your experience with backbone? Now that you have built an app with it, do you recommend it? Or perhaps wait till it matures a little?
That's awesome. That's perfect tradeoff between the wishes of the parent website and convenience for your users.

I'm assuming you fetch feeds using a queue.

* How do you add jobs to the queue ? Do you run a cron every n minutes to check which feeds need fetching and add them to queue ?

* When you add jobs do you check to see if a previous job for fetching the queue is still in the queue or do you use flags to mark feeds for which the jobs are in queue and eliminate duplicate jobs that way ?
Another problem with democracy: lets say there are 9 people and there are some dishes that need washing, one could propose a vote to make Bob always do the dishes every time for ever. If everyone votes in their best interest then Bob is screwed. Obviously this is not fair and people would hopefully have the sense not to do this, but you can't count on people to be "fair" or even know what fair is.

This dilemma already exists, one examples is welfare. Now you may agree or disagree that welfare is good or bad, but surely there is some degree of welfare that is too much, and it will reach this limit eventually if it already hasn't.

I liked the quote: "...democracy is a terrible form of government, but eight times better than any other." -Winston Churchill

I do not agree that anarchy is the solution, although democracy has it's flaws, it does indeed seem eight times better than anything else... Or at least anything that could practically be done. I think the ideal solution would be to create a very basic set of laws that guarantees individual rights. And make any form of new laws impossible.

But how practical is this idea? The only way I can see it happening is if some rich dude buys an island and puts investment in it to get its economic foundation going. Yes I know crazy idea.
> It gets sluggish if I don't.
> ... Netbeans IDE, Safari (and a bunch of tabs), Firefox (ditto on the tabs), an FTP client, a Subversion client, iChat, Mail, a notes app, alarm clock, Dropbox, Evernote, terminal, one other text editor (MacVim or Textwrangler), Photoshop, MS Word, a clipboard app and sometimes VirtualBox

Did you check top? free? You should be able to see what's eating your machine after a few days of uptime.
Community port on Android, no change on W7, it's C#-only.
The Burrows-Wheeler transform used in bzip2 is truly mind-blowing.

Many algorithms are ordinary genius (eventually you would have come up with it because the problem space dictates the solution), but this one is extraordinary genius (mind-blowingly original and non-obvious). Every time I see it, I'm amazed that it works.
I would imagine it's just as cumbersome a process as playing a dvd, laserdisc, betamax, vhs is today.

I agree that the state of marketplaces is not there yet but I also think that it won't stay this way for too much longer.

I'm over physical media. Discs are messy, damage prone, and usually they just sit collecting dust.

Don't get me wrong -- I had a great time collecting a massive amount of movies and I still spend at least 3 hours in a quality bookstore when I have the chance.

BluRay adoption is very much why the format is doomed a laserdisc/betamax death. You're somewhat lucky though -- because the encryption is compromised fully so you'll be able to extract your data to a better format down the road.