skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always preemptively raise my eyebrows when I come across an article about agile because, in my experience, agile is mostly used by hit-and-run managers as an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions. Apparently, "embrace change" makes it okay to randomly interrupt people in their work to solve the urgency du jour, only to blame them when they miss their deadline. "Daily scrums" give the manager the green light to avoid one-on-one interactions with his team members.

Interestingly, the best development teams rarely display overt enthusiasm for their "methodology" and just get work done.
The Future of Personal Robotics: Open Source
I had this issue for a while, and got around it by requiring Firefox to prompt me if I'm closing more than one tab at a time. It's ugly, but it works.
That would be elitist. If it was what I was saying.
Thanks, we will make the links more obvious :)
I think the idea is that you store your data in a relational model and access it using SQL. But for things that need to be looked up a lot, and very quickly, rather than tagging on a KV store in front of MySQL, use the method he describes instead.

This way you don't end up duplicating the cache, it is shared between the two different types of lookups. You also don't end up with data inconsistancies. And yet you get the speed that a dedicated KV store would have got you anyway.
Terrible idea. 1024 works very well with the iPad. Unless your app is specifically designed to display large amounts of data I think improving the tablet's browsing experience is too important.
"new breed of Southern demagogues, intolerant,Examiner.com
MOTOROLA V9 BLACK
Featuring Motorola V9 with superb features and terrific look having attractive gesture attracts you all the way. The Motorola RAZR 2 V9 is equipped with dual displays, a large 2" external screen with picture aller ID support and a 2.2" boasting twice the resolution of the original RAZR.
Thanks, I've added the upgrade to our backlog, stay tuned!
These are great to go through as a first time Objective-C/iOS developer and help tremendously. They can also leave you scratching your head a bit as they encourage you to explore and find out a lot on your own. If you watch these, make sure to do the assignments.
Just for the record: I am not going to use air travel in the US as long as that stuff is going on.
Although this is from 1994 I haven't heard of any more recent improvements, and it is well acknowledged that computers are better than the best humans (as in Chess, contrast to Go).

This article gives a nice overview of the situation in AI (2001):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
You don't even need to leave Python:

http://pycells.pdxcb.net/

It's worked for the various things I've done with it, but as far as I know it's not maintained.
That picture is now ten years old. I wonder how affluence and population density have changed since then.
Ask HN: Python, php or ruby for personal project?
Hi,

I've mostly been a perl and java guy to date, and am looking to expand my horizons with one of php, ruby or python. To that end I've settled on a simple personal week(end) web app project which should give me a little intro. My requirements are:

- Don't really need a web app framework. This is (more-or-less) a single page app. A script that can be called by apache/httpd is enough.

- Need decent url parsing & encoding/decoding

- Networking, specifically http

- DOM rendering, a la dom4j, so i can traverse and alter/add/delete nodes and node attributes.

Whether intrinsically or via libs, is there anything to recommend one language above the other?

Thanks for suggestions.
Yes, this. I was happily coding and kept failing the (very) simple "Shazoo" challenge because either 2.3 or your interpreter doesn't understand the "if __name__ == '__main__'" logic for Python portability. I'm ashamed to say that it took three tries before I just took that out and submitted a program that, while inferior, passed.
Right. Essentially you get password-free ssh logins without sacrificing (much of) your security.
interesting idea, how will you measure the "length"? just how many characters the source code is made of?
we could make a competition out of it...
They're concerned about driver's license lines, so why wouldn't this also concern them? Oh, wait...
Can Crowd-Sourcing Spur Aerospace Ideas?
You can use any origin, EC2 or otherwise. The diagram shows just one way to use it.
I agree with your premise but not your conclusion. I'm a touch-typist - but many touch typists in the computer age end up not always using classical touch typing methods - after all,the traditional typewriter keyboard didn't have an alt or cmd or ctrl key, right?

I use the thumb on left-cmd and a ring finger on either q or w (never thought about it... maybe I use the pinky sometimes) - and I don't recall ever making a mistake, although I suspect that may partially be because I primarily use safari, and it warns me if I try to close multiple tabs or a single tab/window with form data filled out.

And everyone should hopefully be mapping capslock to ctrl.... that just saves all kinds of hassle down the road.
And meals.
Surely the number of threads you can handle will depend on your hardware specs, in particular your cache sizes?

Also, were these threads proper OS threads, or more lightweight coroutines?

Thanks
CIJ's "Looting the Seas" using Treesaver (a new HTML5 platform)
There are sane keyboard layouts besides Dvorak.

Just to name two: I heard Colemak is nice, and I also tried learning Neo for a while. (Neo is especially suited for German.) I am using Dvorak at the moment.
I did a number of wow theorycrafting spreadsheets (Dorkiest pursuit on Earth!) and found I got more mileage out of the row/column level formulas, named cells, and imports than I did out of the Python integration, which was opposite of what I expected.
Broken Heart (composed of gears) by GregFrost
The problem with this is that the most difficult puzzles usually have few submissions, so the ratio between pass/tries is not meaningful.

We've been thinking about asking the users to rate the difficulty level of the puzzles once they solve it.
What is even more sad, is that their DNS console for hosted servers and Slicehost is so much better. They are literally sitting on something better and giving their cloud customers crap.
Game mechanics for thinking users
Use password-protected key pairs when you can, passwords where you can't.

And always check the key fingerprints.
Actually I think 'Unfortunate' would have been the appropriate word in that song. Most of the situations described don't involve any direct negation of the protagonists intentions. The only possible qualifier is

'Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly

He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye

He waited his whole damn life to take that flight

And as the plane crashed down he thought

"Well isn't this nice..."'

... but the last line is still sarcasm, not irony.
This is a pretty crappy article in my opinion, and certainly won't do anything to help the problem that the author describes - that developers' knowledge of concurrency comes piecemeal without any structure.

I challenge anyone to gain an understanding of volatile variables from his description. His example of volatile vs. synchronised contains an example of incorrect code but not an example of how it should be fixed, and doesn't even contain a particularly clear explanation of why it's bad.

The explanation of the bytecode generated for a synchronised method compared to a synchronised block is curious if you're into bytecode but totally useless for a working programmer, and offers no guidance on choosing between them. Worse, it actually makes it sound like the option you almost certainly don't want (the synchronised method) is somehow more efficient than the almost universally better method (synchronising on a lock object, which provides much better lock granularity, prevents deadlock in the case of some external object claiming your object lock and generally makes lock ownership much clearer and easier to track).

Finally, his example of the AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater ignores the javadoc (This class is designed for use in atomic data structures in which several reference fields of the same node are independently subject to atomic updates) and proceeds to show a contrived example of a compareAndSet that is really only a more confusing set, and doesn't actually achieve anything at all.

There are much better sources to learn this stuff if you really need to know it, starting with Java Concurrency In Practice - no Java programmer should be writing concurrent code without having read the first 7 chapters of this.
I am not sure what is the worst thing about this interview: Offhandedly blaming Walmart for infant mortality (!) or the unbearable smugness of describing your own personal preferences as "right-sizing."
Paul,

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the problem is definitely there. So you'll get at least one upvote from me in the hope that THIS post of yours stays in front...
Speak, money
This actually becomes really important when you set up a small server as a proxy sever. We had to bump up our HAProxy server to a 512mb instance in order to get adequate bandwidth to serve our sites.
Great! Soon we will integrate everything in one single page so you don't have to leave the editor to get the feedback on your submission.
We solved a lot of our "battering ram at the gate" problems by simply moving our SSH port. It seems that most hackers go after low hanging fruit. I'd venture they're looking for people who aren't paying attention to security. The number of ssh auth attempts against our VPSs dropped by at least one order of magnitude when we moved the sshd off the default port. Prior to the move, the fail2ban process ranked third or fourth for CPU time on most of our VPSs behind processes like MySQL or our app server. Now that we've moved ports, it's at 10th or 15th. We're going to implement a port knocking setup as well. That should limit our exposure to targeted attacks.
It's done automagically for me in Python and Haskell, too. Instead of hitting the paren keys in Emacs, I just hit tab to cycle through the possibilities.

Because the Lisps have such a canonical way to indent them, in practise it feels very similar to significant whitespace with a funny input method.
Speaking from experience, while keys are more useful, and more secure if universally used properly - I've seen keys bite firms where it hurts much more often than passwords - because people at some level leave an unprotected key laying around, and that key ends up with root level access to a huge array of servers.
The argument is made, in the article, that if people won't password protect their keys they are equally likely to email their password - but this doesn't ring true - it's more logical and straightforward for people to understand a password that needs to be kept secure than a keyfile, which is more abstract and they may not understand.

So - does that mean I wouldn't recommend using keys? No - but if you are going to use them, you have to couple that with strict policies regarding usage and rotation.

I use keys for systems where I'm the sole administrator - because I know MY key management practices - but in group situations, we generally stick to passwords as the primary entry point (and then perhaps keys when it comes to accessing clusters of servers - but we tend to treat those clusters as a single functional machine, so keys make sense here)
Sure, we can add any language that have an open source compiler/interpreter.
I've added Prolog to our backlog. Stay tuned!
There was a little discussion when this article was posted here three weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807527

(OT: under what circumstances are duplicate submissions allowed? There's nothing in the FAQ or the Guidelines.)
eww,text doesn't zoom.
Well, look at your own article. There's an h2 tag wrapped around each of the subheadings (e.g. "NO MORE H2-H5").

How do you propose content authors mark these up if they don't use an hn tag?
Unapologetic Reductionist
When we have money we'll do X
I'm indian american, and honestly don't have many indian or indian american friends (just never found many in the social circles I like). But I have a few fun stories:

1) Someone in another group hired some fresh-out-grad-school Indians, and a few months ago I was bored and googled their names. One of them was asking for code for some algorithm on a java forum. I didn't care much about it, I was more impressed that the guy used his full name on the forum. I realized though that indians have a bigger problem with not fully sharing the problem they're trying to solve, and just come off as asking for random things instead.

2) I had to work with a big name customer who hired two foreign university kids trying to leverage an API I wrote. On a call they demanded source code for everything the API supplied in order to write their app (they didn't need it all), and constantly emailed me about questions reading a industry-wide spec would've answered. Luckily they eventually stopped working there and my email got a lot easier.

3) I tried to hire a contractor recently, and after struggling with agencies, I decided to give craigslist a try. I'm going to write a blog post about this one day, but basically 75% of the names I received were of south asian descent. Nothing wrong with that, I read every one of those emails. The problem is that of that 75%, half of those were outsourcing "$9 / hour" agencies, and a good portion of the other half didn't have experience relevant to the position.

Big lesson learned with 3. As an indian american, I gotta really step up my networking skills in order to find other positions. If I want to apply for a position over the internet, I ABSOLUTELY must do things to stand out from the piles of emails. I already take time to write personalized cover letters, but have to have a non-standard title to stick out, and have some internet presence for them to feel comfortable with me.

Make no racial generalizations though. I've met indian folks out there that are truly amazing geeks, and can comfortably talk to you about lisp / clojure / rethinkdb / etc. I last met one in an IRS office of all places.
Interactive Infographic: Global Web Index
I really appreciate your insight on this. I'm going to take this back to my team and discuss. Thanks.
How so? I suppose if you paste Python code in a comment box that happens to eat whitespace, then there is a problem, yes... but for those cases there's pastebin and such. Other than that, if you're writing a blog post or article, then you can just slap the Python code in <pre> blocks, which preserves the whitespace; most "humane" text editing formats like Textile and Markdown have ways to preserve it as well.
Oil near $90. Thanks a lot, Fed.
That post was rather long. A post in title alone would have sufficed.
In Python:

http://pycells.pdxcb.net/

As I mentioned in the Python spreadsheet thread (where I'm assuming this was found), this package has worked for everything I've tried to do with it but I do not believe it's maintained.

Does anybody know of something similar for Javascript? A cells implementation would be preferred, but a spreadsheet engine will do.
Ideas aren't worth anything, and early startup valuation is just voodoo. The numbers balance the venture capitalist's need for a certain stake, the company's need for capital, and the founders' desire to avoid excessive dilution. They don't actually reflect what anyone would be willing to pay for the company at that stage.
The thing that always bugs me about fluid layouts is line-lengths for pieces of text. In that example, the line length of the main text varies between about 280px (when the window is around 800px wide) and about 720px when the window gets smaller. That's quite a range.

In terms of typographic design and readability - that can be a problem - not sure what the solution is, but I do find it to be an issue.
Google Introduces Visual Preview of Search Results
Maybe the startup version of this is "when we have users, we'll do X."
IT Departments Fight for Respect
Beyond basic TDD
google contacts supports oauth so you don't have to provide your password. I'm not sure whether facebook uses this support though
Clojure for Google App Engine
I don't think Venture Capitalists fund "complete newbie, probably straight out of school, yet buzzing with an idea and looking for an investor to fund his concept" these days. You have to either be a known entity in your field, have experience, and usually have at the very least a working proof of concept. Of course there may be exceptions, but your probably better off going to friends and family (going the 'Angel' route, do a search on the concept) then trying to find those exceptions...
The problem is that the subheading in my articles is really part of the main heading. Without it the heading itself loses meaning. When using the hgroup tag only the main title is considered for the document outline so I'm losing valuable information there. As for the fix, I'd rather split both titles in the h1 tag itself. That way both titles remain 1 whole, even for the document outline.
Meh, this has the same problem the acm online judge has, and the sphere judge and so on and so on. Which is also why I will stop usign this after a single attempt.

The issue is that it is impossible to debug these programs. I just submitted a solution. It failed. I get no input that failed, I get no message why it failed. While I can guess further inputs in this simple case (missles), for more complicated problems, this becomes simply impossible. Especially for more involved puzzles where subtle differences in problem definitions dictate the difference between a perfectly fine and a horribly wrong solution.

Sorry, but pretty much every coding kata site failes on this, and you did not manage to get this one (for me) crucial, make-or-break feature working.
i invest $1mm in your company for 20% -- the company is six months old and this is the first investment of outside capital -- a week later you sell the company for $2.5mm -- you get $2mm for six months work -- i get a $500k loss
does that sound fair? -- no it does not -- that is why there is a liquidation preference -- to protect investors from that happening to them

A founder selling a $5+ million company for $2mm probably has a reason for trying to get out (like catching the start of the spiral before there's nothing left). Would you prefer the company be scuttled and a $1mm loss instead?
> > comparisons between Java and Erlang with respect to the number of threads the system could handle

> Also, were these threads proper OS threads, or more lighweight coroutines?

Exactly, it's apples to oranges in terms of what's happening underneath. Erlang has its own scheduler, whereas Java threads are system threads.
Did you try resizing the site? It uses css media queries to resize the content all the way down to mobile phone resolution.

For more information read:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
Ideas are certainly worth something - they're just not worth anything unless they're actually implemented. If a VC truly believes that early startup valuation is voodoo, then he shouldn't invest. His willingness and want to invest early is shown in the amount of risk he carries, but VC's need to remember that risk carries both ways.
I believe that there is some truth to the claim that the length of a phone number affects our ability to remember numbers of that length; in Norway, we have 8 digits in our phone numbers.

A couple of years ago, I decided to try and remember as much of Pi as I could, and I found that precision to which I could remember it, was in fact 8 decimal digits. Even though I have only been asked to recite as much of Pi as I could remember once during the last year, and I seldom actively try to remember it, whenever I come to think of Pi, 3.14159265 usually pops into my mind.

However, whereas I remember telephone numbers either grouped on the form 12 34 56 78 (twelwe-thirtyfour-fiftysix-seventyeight) or 123 45 678 (hundredandtwentythree-fourtyfive-sixhundredandseventyeight), I remember Pi as a sequence of digits (three-comma-one-four-one-five-nine-two-six-five).

Edit: The two ways of grouping the digits in a phone number that I mention here, is the way that phone numbers are usually written here in Norway. Often, landline phone numbers are written on the form xx xx xx xx and cellphone numbers on the form xxx xx xxx. (Additionally, if I remember a phone number on one form, and someone else says the same number on the other form, I find it hard to tell whether we are speaking of the same number).
Ask HN: Why Lua?
Why would anyone use Lua? What advantages does it offer that languages like js and ruby don't? I'd really like to know because it seems as if there are a decent amount of developers writing in Lua, but I can't seem to understand why?
I'm sad that fluid designs are not more common. This is how HTML was intended. I like to play with the size of my windows to fit whatever I'm doing side by side. The only thing I think is acceptable is a maximum text width for those with the "maximize" disease, but please, no minimum...
How about just choose a grid that best fulfills the needs of the project?

I don't mean to be curt, but using an existing grid saves you half an hour at best and might not even be a good match for your needs. The solutions that let you dial in a width and column count are better, but there's so many kinds of grids that it seems like prematurely restricting your solution.
Game mechanics are one of those things that I can recognize, but am still a total sucker for. Any time something can be quantified, compared, and put up as a leaderboard, I'm pretty much instantly, hopelessly addicted.

This is one of the greatest realizations that Microsoft has come to with the XBox.
There is a big difference between a little fud and being willing to say anything. These machines have been called, by a reputable scientist, as potentially very dangerous. I see no problem making sure everybody knows that they are dangerous, nor do I particular care to present both sides of the argument.
I was expecting something about Freddie Mercury.
I hit the new once or twice a day, but sometimes it s just too much.

Plus I don't feel that welcomed when the only enhancements to the site I see are taking away permissions (I'm at 460 karma. I can't downvote anymore)
Email me, I'm sure you can come along as well when Vivek and I meet on saturday.

Suggestion: make your contact information available on your HN profile.
that is clearly a risk, but ..

i'll bet ten years from now these are still must haves and the current crop of "super angels" will be crusty old VCs just like me demanding them
Scott McNealy keynote at PgWest
When the machines become sentient, you may have a point.

In addition, the machines are bad on privacy terms, but since the debate has been frame such that those who advocate privacy are considered suspect, we have to work with what we have and make the best of it.
Maybe they shouldn't, but when you're going up against the kind of ruthlessness that will stop at nothing to invade your privacy by any means, limiting your angles of attack for ethical concerns might not be palatable for everyone. I'd like these machines to be banned for privacy concerns as well, but if they're banned for safety concerns that I made up, that's still better than them being put in every airport.
Building a Django App Server with Chef: Part 1
The only problem I have with caveats like this is that on all the hundreds of occasions when I've heard someone say, "Actually, that's not irony," the subsequent explanation of what does qualify as irony has been different every single time.

This is additionally confounded by the fact that British people really do mean "sarcasm" when they say "irony." (At least, most of the British people I've spoken with do.)
yup

above 1x is a huge red flag on the investor. entrepreneur beware.

and i also agree that the elegance of the liq pref is that it is an economic deal and does not impose governance on the entrepreneur