skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious why you would recommend qmail these days. The last official version was released in 1998, and it seemed like it was stuck in some weird licence limbo until 2007, making forks unable to be distributed with linux distributions.
Fire. Aim. Load. Repeat. Lean Startups in 4 words.
Two sent to my zipcode, neither of them mine. I feel like a kid who just found out there is no santa.
I'm looking up that book on Amazon in another tab now. I took a look at sleepyti.me and actually found it very useful as I also have a tough time with being tired in the morning. Maybe that'll help me get up at 6:00 AM if I follow its advice! Totally sharing your site on FB.
I didn't realize at first that this interview took place so recently [2 days ago]. Arrington's interview style here is very similar to the way Zach Galifianakis interviews his guests on Between Two Ferns. It's pretty funny.
Other cool stuff that i haven't seen in many places is an environment that is automatically testing that the backups are working.

That's something worth of having as well.
Project Euler is great as a programming problem when trying to improve your solutions for speed.

Also, as someone who has not touched fundamental maths in 5 years it was also a good refresher; having to think about prime numbers etc again.

A good tip I have found is to use a language that can nicely manipulate longs saving you much overhead, I chose Python because it also has some nice maths libraries.
Isomers do tend to act differently in certain situations. You can't shake someone's left hand easily with your right. Although I'm not certain on the exact mechanisms I believe it is possible to screen molecules of different chiralitites by using chemicals that only attach to a right hand or a left hand partner. They might also pass through mazes and filters in different directions.

It's a good question, and I'd love to hear a detailed answer.
Really not sure how I missed these.. I wish I could search YC. Thanks for those links, taking a look through them now.
Unfortunately, you can't get SMS when you do it yourself using SIP/FreeSwitch. These companies have made the deals with the individual telecom providers to do that for each of their DID numbers.
Are there any other algorithms that can have these kinds of animations applied? Sorting works well and is easy to animate. What about graph traversal or network flow? I guess my real question is 'can all algorithms be animated in some way'? If not what decides it? If there were more than 4 dimensions I could see that being a problem right there.
Anyone else think the top of that page looks beautiful?
What's the best way to instrument an algorithm for visualization? Snapshot its state at periodic, well-named points, and render illustrations?

I can imagine doing this with an A* search: snapshot the graph, including which nodes are open or already visited, along with the heap ranking of the next nodes to visit. You might also want to show all the newly neighboring nodes and annotate them with their updated cost estimate.
It's not like viruses and antibiotics are the only thing keeping OTHER cells from taking over the planet - which seems to be the crux of the conjecture.

I call shenanigans.
I think that technophobes derive a great deal of their mistrust of technology from real-world blunders such as these (and fictional ones like Wargames) not realizing that "human error is normally the root cause for embarrassing failures", as the author points out.
Great suggestion, just don't get too married to the idea or spend too much time without feedback. Great products come from iterating and improving your understanding of the customers. And remember success comes from distribution, not just product.
The iPad is still selling strong in new markets
This may not be real/actual work enough for you (it's still an example), and it's not exactly the same as this BDD workflow, but this brief screencast still may be of some interest to some folks: http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/01/string-calculator-kata-i...

(I recommend embiggening the video player.)
From my limited understanding garnered by listening to SE Radio, monads are basically a way for Haskell programs to execute actions (rather than simply computing values), so that your program can ultimately DO something like write to a file. As you probably know, the functions aren't supposed to contain any side effects: you don't want something unexpected to happen when you just want to calculate a value. It would be like a spreadsheet that printed out a page every time you entered a certain cell - might make sense in a one-off situation but in the long run it's just inviting trouble.

So monads allow sequences of actual actions to be packaged together and given preconditions and then executed in a safe manner (perhaps with an eye to concurrency). You get to maintain the exquisite purity of functional programming while still writing software that, you know, gets stuff done occassionally.

If you were looking for an explanation of the mathematical concept though, sorry, ain't got a scooby.
I feel like thats the problem. Well 2 problems actually

a) People really need to watch out for the contracts they sign.

b) if you try and negotiate it seems alot of these people know they can just find some other poor sucker who will do it on their terms.
Oil will gradually rise in price

Really? No one -- not you, nostredemons, nor anyone else -- can make such a claim with authority. The simple fact is, we don't know. No one knows. The peak oil opinion is that reserves have been vastly overstated and technology has made extraction termendously efficient at the detriment of a gradual decline in supply. So they're arguing the opposite.

We also don't know how much of the 84 million barrels a day that we're currently consuming is price elastic. So the question isn't a simplistic, "Will we switch if the price gets high?," but the much more interesting, "if it starts to rapidly decline, will we have enough elasticity in demand to withstand the decades it would take to replace that energy with alternatives?"
It's not "all about the living room". He's got this exactly back-to-front. The living room existed as a shared space because the facilities it provided were either too expensive to provide in more than one place, too inconvenient to do so, or just plain impossible.

Now that we can have watchable screens for a fraction of the price of even a decade ago in every room (often multiple use - I can't remember the last time I watched the actual television but I use a PC monitor to watch something almost every day), why have a single designated room for television watching? Now that we can watch our choice on demand, why be tied to a broadcast schedule or even be tied to the preferences of others? I can put things I want to watch onto mobile devices and watch them when I'm constrained in place, such as travelling to or from work or social engagements. I can choose what to listen to, what to watch, what to read, when and where I want. The idea of going to a single designated room and reaching a consensus with other people on what to do there is by no means objectionable - it's just no longer necessary to always make that compromise. The living room has expanded to every room in the house and beyond.
I completely agree. I'm questioning whether TSA knows that or not.
Perhaps the founder does not want to pander.
Canadian Trademarks for Startups
Canadian trademarks for start-ups promotion ends on December 17, 2010.

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/news.htm
Trick question... if you're on hacker news, you wouldn't dare do such a thing.
Yes, but they really geeked-out with the Tengwar in the upper left.
I trust qmail more than I trust Postfix. I may be biased; I found a vulnerability in Postfix early on. qmail has one of the best security track records of any piece of Internet software ever written; so far as I know, the only bona fide major vulnerability ever found in qmail required a nonstandard 64 bit deployment, and an attacker writing gigabytes of data to the server.

I think you kind of have to admire a piece of software that is still useful without changes more than a decade after it was released. You're entitled to think differently.

The license stuff is totally irrelevant to me. Bernstein didn't want his code forked ("incompatibility is a bug"). Hordes of Linux people, most of whom had never published a line of C in their lives, swarmed him and the Internet with complaints about how qmail wasn't open source or (worse, and more misleadingly) was "proprietary".

It's public domain now.

Postfix is a perfectly acceptable alternative to qmail.
I was proposing two hypotheses. First, TSA knows exactly what is going on and they are lying about it. Second, TSA's testing procedure is flawed so they don't know what is going on, but they may think that they do. So if they are using a flawed test without being aware of the flaws, 'stupid'. If they are using a flawed test and they know it, 'lying'.
What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.

All of it is going to cost you more than Dreamhost's incredibly cheap prices - which are only possible because of it's police, as the guy stated.

It seems unfair at first - especially to a technical person, it's misleading - but the reality of hosting is that you do need to actually pay for the resources you are going to use - and the internet isn't free. The more your business is worth, the more you should be spending on solid contracts, multiple sourcing and fault tolerance.
Having used the iPad quite a bit, I don't think code editors are the problem when it comes to coding. After all, you can do that in pretty much anything.

The biggest disadvantage would be the keyboard. Especially how it handles "weird" characters that the average coder needs to be first-level rather than hidden somewhere deep.

Here's a good idea on how the keyboard could be greatly improved -> http://rosscarter.com/2010/320.html
I was with them for 1 year, September 2009 - September 2010 and I've now moved to Linode. I would highly recommend you stay away from them. The longest I went without downtime was 90 days, in total I've had well over 40 hours of downtime within 1 year, I've never had that much elsewhere even on dedicated hardware that isn't as "redundant" as they claim to be.

Their product is amazing if you don't care for stability and then it beats the competition hands down, but if stability and uptime matter to you at all stay away. If vps.net had the stability and reliability of Linode they'd rule the world.

Sign up for a daily node ($1) and then login to the customer forum, you'll see so many reports of problems and this is after they recently "revamped" the forum and removed over a years worth of posts. I can't provide links because they removed my access.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

The more important metric is to measure is how good the top 10% (of each) is.
Agreed- if it's not that great an idea but it's super fun to build, you're more likely to stick it out until a better idea comes to you.

And double agreed with your second Point- don't do something just because everyone else is. Just because everyone else is doing mobile local group buying checkins doesn't mean you shouldn't build that text to speech WordPress plugin you've been dreaming about (shameless castmyblog plug).
> The problem becomes, what if we're taken by surprise by some piece of infrastructure that nobody expected was critical, but that clearly is? How likely is that to happen? It's virtually guaranteed.

Well, such an event will either be an emergency or it will not be an emergency.

If it's an emergency, it's going to be far too late to bolt on some kind of half-ass emergency security and there's really nothing we can do anyhow. The notion that we could have some kind of oversight is, after all, not at all dependent on whether or not there's a list of industries in the bill. The same thing can (and will) happen if the agency makes up its own list with no public discussion at all. On that note, I'd like to quote something aristus wrote just over a week ago that's apropos: "Policies implemented under the gun have two unfortunate properties: they are wasteful and hard to change after the fact."

And there's nothing stopping them from consulting with that industry on proper security measures. If they're under attack by terrorists and they need help, well, who is going to refuse expert help? (This assumes the government hires real experts and not some congressman's golfing buddy... being able to refuse that "help" is a design feature.)

That leaves us considering the non-emergency case. If that happens, they can go back and amend the law after giving the problem consideration. The advantage this has over the new agency updating its internal list is that it has to go through public discussion. They can't just pass the buck off to an unelected agency with no accountability.
Do real math. Not this fake logic puzzle BS.
Not one person from WISCONSIN? What's with that? I'm a CISSP and CISM and I applied to evaluate the CR-48 from a security and usability perspective. So far, I'm not on the list :-(
Agreed. Most sysadmins I've encountered do not even realise that binaries like `ping` are actually setuid root. I wouldn't trust them (or myself!) to develop security policies.
That's odd - every datacenter (read: colocation facility) I've worked with had clear pricing for rack space, power, bandwidth, etc -I could use as much as I wanted, and I knew what I'd pay for it, and would re-negotiate if the regular usage was going to go higher.

By DC's - do you mean some kind of web-hosting provider instead?

Even the VM providers I use all have soft & hard limits on traffic stated clearly - in practice, anyone offering "unlimited" anything is automatically excluded from any kind of critical business hosting decision - because that's not realistic or maintainable.
Woodland Home Fashion Trio
FTP is a relevant feature while SSH and source control support aren't?
Completely agree, often I find the best articles on /new and not on the front page.

I think a great experiment for pg would be to set /new as the front page for HN and see what happens.
Deens: 2x faster than BIND, 25x less code [pdf]
Well, you could it's just not easy. A GSM modem attached to the server would do the trick.

Apache's free and hardware's cheap. Yet Rackspace still manages to run a huge web hosting business.

For some people and some uses, building a web server and hosting it on your home or office network is acceptable. But those that don't count "web hosting" as their core business and want the reliability, security, and stability that comes from having a professional do it tend to hire a company to do it for them.

Like most other things in technology, it's a simple build-vs-buy question. Is it more cost effective and better suited to my needs to build it myself or to buy from someone who's an expert?

Freeswitch and Asterisk are great. I was the emcee at the Freeswitch developer conference last year and we financially support Adhearsion, an Asterisk development framwork. They fill a great niche for DIY telephony. For everyone else, there's hosted services.
It's boring because it's so very common. It's the boring risks that hurt the most people (e.g. heart disease). It's the boring risks that we ignore, making them the worst risks most of us will ever take.

You're a security guy. You of all people should appreciate this stuff.
I thought it might be. I'd be curious to hear a more balanced perspective on the crisis, and I suspect part of that will come as I just inform myself about the industry as a whole.

Thanks for the recommendation - I will be buying Hedgehogging this week if I can't find it at the library.
You can search yc using google. Just scroll aaaaall the way down to the bottom of yc and click on the tiny search link in the footer. I wish it was more prominent.
Practically every commercial SQL database prohibits publishing profiling data. It's customer hostile and it sucks but there you go. Use a free software licensed SQL database if you want to publish perf numbers.
How come is a link to an old wikipedia article so valuable and new? I call shenanigans on this!
Opis: Reliable Distributed Systems in OCaml [pdf]
Ugh. E-Branding.

On topic, music without lyrics is the way to go.
what are your use cases for wolfram alpha?
Apparently writing poker bots is miserable.

Poker AI that can beat the average human you will find online is pretty trivial to write. Running profitable poker bots involves spending 90% of your time touching up your scraping algorithms to cope with the ever changing DOM of the casino sites, which shifts dynamically to prevent exactly this kind of thing.

With the level of programming skills required you can earn way more money with a legitimate job.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008kj9m

That programme in the link can be had for download if you look. Don't worry I've already paid for it, its on me.
There is a pregnancy condition called PUPPP -- itchy hives. I don't have a reference to the study on hand, but it is known that most women who suffer from PUPPP give birth to boys, and that male DNA is present in the hives. One theory about it goes that male DNA is a skin irritant.
The build date still doesn't indicate what libraries it links with.
hey guys

I got a pretty good response over at stackoverflow. If you're interested I put out the link below.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4421338/is-it-possible-to...
Combining static model checking with dynamic enforcement [pdf]
It is not possible to argue on data structures without the use case at hand. Linked lists have time complexity for head/tail addition and removal of elements that is O(1), and you can't have this with resizable arrays. So there are good use cases for both.

Instead the trick you mention allocating multiple elements per node is actually a linked list of fixed size arrays: there you are trading a constant factor per storage efficiency. This is a good approach for many use cases as you are still O(1) and the cache locality will likely help to compensate for the additional operations you need to perform.

Still it's worth to note that there is to handle such a data structure to make sure, in the case of deletions in the middle, a few adiacent nodes that will end with just a few elements are "compacted" from time to time while traversing the data structure.
FTA:

"Facebook had a really boring deactivation page when you close your account... [One of the designers created a page] which has all your friends waving good-bye to you as you deactivate. Give you that final tug of the heart before you leave. This reduced the deactivation rate by 7%."

While that's a nice reduction in deactivations, it also strikes me as somewhat manipulative. It feels like many of the "social" companies see users solely as metrics to optimize, not as human beings.
Amazon UK down?
Even this post is a duplicate sentiment.
Gawker Media hacked
The short answer is to read chapter 14, probably more than once, before it makes sense. It took me 2 times:
http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/
Bad Investment Decisions: Death from Opinions
This is HN on Sundays....
qmail may be old, but the author (DJB) wrote some _solid_ code. I believe there hasn't been a vulnerability in qmail in the last 10 years (someone can correct me if I'm wrong).
So moral of the story: Making unreasonable demands and threatening to completely cut off funding for related projects works as a way to force a contractor to deliver despite "setbacks" on your end?

Looks like the suits won this one.
One issue you run into is that, in any field, the tried and true gets repeated a lot (for newcomers and for other reasons). Anything 'really new' tends to not be embraced because it's untested and no one knows for sure it will work...etc. Those are valid concerns. Even for areas where people are doing cutting edge stuff, you pretty quickly develop a few respected "experts" and anything which doesn't readily agree with their view will be dismissed, actively attacked, etc -- even in cases where it is a non-competing alternative which addresses, in effect, a different issue/niche. Also, those folks who already know all the tried and true stuff will tend to be fairly small in number. Trying to get a good conversation going among that small group will tend to be tough and not well-suited to a very public discussion.

If you can think of a way around some of those issues, more power to you. But it is an issue that tends to crop up to some degree on every forum I have ever belonged to, regardless of the topic in question.
Well, it's not that complicated. In a tribe, you help your friends and you hinder your enemies.

Imagine some techie eating lunch with his techie buddies. Is he likely to talk about how he's against net-neutrality, or is it likely that he's for it? If he were against it, he'd seem weird.

Basically, you're not going to screw the people you hang out with all the time, and might want to work with later.
Source:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/investing-losses-death-...

"If you are relying on someone else’s opinion, then you are not relying on your own research, you are not basing your analysis on data, on history, or on logic.

You have no idea whether or not you are making decisions based on high probability outcomes, but the odds are against it."
DSL implementation in MetaOCaml, Template Haskell, and C++ [pdf]
I manage a Linode for someone else, and so far it's been great. For personal use I'd rather use something cheaper though, budget's a bit tight. Thanks anyhow for the great links!
Ya, I was thinking about doing exactly that. I figured that might be the best option, but thought I'd ask in case there was some Git feature that I just didn't know about. I'll probably go this way. Thanks!
Oracle VP: “We have a strategy to run Java inside a Javascript environment”
There was a 32/64 integer overflow.
If we had systems that sniffed for chemical residue of explosive compounds we wouldn't be having an argument about ineffective and silly porno-scanners, because they wouldn't be used.
One of the clearest explanations I've read. Thanks!
Everything that can be automated will be automated.

The price of something that has been automated is zero.
Bring the spice back into tech interviews?

I guess I never knew it was there in the past, and had gone away. However, not to be too rude, but I will take my spice from spicier sources and stick to TED for my nerd fixes.

I guess I am saying that it's time to retool, ladies. I AM the closest thing to your demographic, and I don't really get it. Your comment about not caring about the comments rings a bit hollow if you are simultaneously slinking over here to purr about your show.

Anyway, best of luck, but I would advise getting really serious about your tech interviews and leave the casual stuff for after dark.
So why is someone who sounds as awesome as the guy who wrote this article having to deal this sort of nonsense?
Patrick, how do you compress such hard-won wisdom in such a young person's head, and express it so well at the same time? ;-)
Water Car
Did you ever wish to be able to float on water with your car? This car is built exactly for that.
Try upserting (update if exist, insert if not exist) a row, that doesn't work race-condition-free even in SERIALIZABLE isolation.
Monads have nothing to do with OO. Ignore this guy's comment and read samstokes' instead.
Yes, there are many ways to make isomers--it is done commonly in the pharmaceutical industry. Can be done directly via synthesis, or a racemic mix can be separated by physical processes such as crystalization or enzymatically. Most enzymes have a chirality (like the glove analogy), so they tend to create produces with a single isomer.

This said, making an organism with mixed chirality would likely not be effective because, likely, many reactions would not proceed or would proceed with poor efficiency. All D- or all L- would work fine, but any evolved organism would suffer/die with a mix of D- and L-.