skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hey curious to know what you mean about "Chinese service sucking" since we're not international yet... are you referring to outbound calls to Chinese numbers, or something else?
would be interested in too
Generally, if you care about performance, you're using a collection that doesn't malloc individual nodes, and allows random access without crawling pointer chains and tearing up your cache.

Instead of wasting more energy on improving the (overused) linked list, write a little resizable array library that doubles size on each fill-up. It's easy and much faster.
My friend and colleague lost his job over this type of behavior... He'd simply go of the rails for days trying to figure out a problem. When he got his next job, I advised him to always think about how the company makes money from his labor. Sometimes it makes sense to "go deep", but often it's cheaper to let it go. If you're dead set on figuring it out, do it on your own time, not the company's.
Without analysis of the counter-factual, the list seems impressive. But had Howland died there is a high probability that there still would have been a 32nd, 41st, and 43rd US president; prominent 19th century poets; Alaskan governors; pediatricians and Hollywood leading men. And listing both Bush's seems gratuitous - why not list all the Baldwin brothers?

Probably the only two individuals on the list whose impact on US history might be considered irreproducible are Smith and to perhaps a lesser extent, Young because creating enduring spiritual systems [Mormonism] and political states [Utah] seems more dependent on individual characteristics than the roles filled by other individuals.
I partially disagree. I think in a graduate program at least (esp. one that requires close relationships with faculty, like a PhD), it is reasonable to assume that most of the student are passionate about their subject. But professors have limited time, and the article is correct that the approach matters when trying to get attention from faculty. As the article argues, proving that you are not wasting their time is key for professors to decide how to allocate their time spent working with students.
Not a big deal? I actually was a bit scared when reading that. Sure, one person doesn't make the game, but a harbour is full of ships.
Good post! I especially appreciated "staging = production - users", simple and easy to remember.

It is so useful to have very similar setups in staging and production.

In particular, I really try to avoid having a different architecture (eg: 32bits vs 64bits, or different versions of ubuntu, or passenger just in production etc). It makes it easier to catch issues earlier.
I've done many advertising campaigns who's dates shift based on the client dragging their feet delivering assets. We absolutely put them on the hook for getting critical stuff to us and then saying it's 3 weeks from that delivery date.
Avant-Garde Music Offers A Gateway to Artificial Intelligence
It's just like insurance, you are required to have it but when you need it and have to use it the insurance company jacks up the price from that point on.
Hashable – The Invention Of People Check-Ins | RazorianFly
I keep reading stories of people who do things like this, on HN and I always wonder that how is it that people are able to afford something like this. Do you mind telling us (me?) how you're going to finance yourself for the next 5 years (I think you said you plan to work - freelance?), what you think you'd do once the 5 years are over (if you come back to the US/wherever, do you think you'd still have what it takes to be employed at a similar job again), how you plan to handle the potential loneliness (travelling alone for a long period of time can get lonesome, after a while) etc.?

BTW, having lived in Malaysia and visited some SE Asian countries, I highly recommend it (KL, Langkawi), Singapore and Thailand; but then again, these places were probably on your list already.
Why there's a white shadow on top of the black one? Doesn't look natural.
Signal, Curation, Discovery
This was excellent, and really deserves a blog post of its own. Thanks.
The way I see it is, if UK2 wants to fuck customers out of the service that UK2 advertised and the customers paid for, the customers are welcome to fuck right back.
Why most Hardware Specs are Total Bullshit
unfortunately it's not always easy to recognize when a programmer is doing the right thing, because then things are running smoothly. it can seem like the programmer isn't special because hey, it's easy to read the manual, etc, whereas going deep to figure something, whoa, good thing we had that guy on the team! same thing with simple and elegant versus complicated designs.
IMAP support. Really, that's it. I loved mh back in the day, but it's never going to be able to cope with a centralized mail store.
I'm living in Europe and just have been to the USA for the first time. LA, SF, Vegas - 4 days each plus 6 days NYC (start and end point). I'm not sure you can do even the typical tourist stuff in one day where you don't have to think about where you go.
A Snapshot of Apple's Latest iPhone Camera Patents
Maybe, but the fact that someone can be prosecuted for "hacking" by guessing someone's password means that the misconception has real negative consequences.
Documentary on WikiLeaks
I think there is, the problem is the severe imbalance of funding power between a publisher and a developer. Also some care has to go into writing the contract. It's possible the language in the contract didn't require the publisher to provide the code.

In this case, the developer should have been able to sue the publisher and renegotiate the contract. But I suspect that wasn't economically feasible.
Not really. My habits are far too ingrained at this point. I have taken on the INBOX/everything else structure at this point, though, and no longer maintain the vast array of twisty sorting rules of a decade ago.

Too, there's no google in my life, and every other webmail interface I've seen is utter, utter pants.
If you're a man and you have children, anything you did differently before you had them would have resulted in different children because your sperm would have shifted.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/06/parenthood_as_t....
This, needless to say, is what those people who talk about the virtues of "diversity" are trying to say. And the virtues of a diverse team of specialists is, in turn, the theme of most caper films (e.g.: Sneakers).

Especially in emergencies, it can be really great to have three or four people attack a problem from different angles. What you need is someone reading the docs while the system programmer is running strace() and the tuning guru is reallocating processes and memory and the customer liaison is on the phone trying to figure out if they really need to be running this particular enormous task on every page load.

The alternative, if you're by yourself, is to try to multiplex the roles, but it can be extremely difficult to pull yourself out of systems engineering mode while you are in there.
Gold Panda, Four Tet, Baths, Toro y Moi, Caribou, Pantha du Prince - http://www.rhapsody.com/myrhapsody/playlists?playlistid=mp.1...
It doesn't seem like a dichotomy to me. There are two types of food -- meat and vegetables, yet I can have steak and beans on the same plate. Moreover, I may eat one or the other alone depending on my disposition at any given time.
Well, I didn't mean an actual MapReduce cluster, that's just silly. I was just pointing out that Haskell compilers can convert trivially convert these sorts of things to multicore code. Parallel Haskell basically does this, converting normal code to easy multicore code.

My point wasn't about using Haskell for high performance computing, my point was that Haskell's compiler can convert normal Haskell code to multicore code without (much, if any) work from the programmer. There is a large gap in between sequential single threaded program and a full MapReduce cluster and I think there is a significant amount of software written in this gap where Haskell-like languages could help with the parallelism/concurrency. The only reason I referenced MapReduce is since its a well known example even for people who are not well versed in functional programming (its a very common concept in functional programming).
I've had this go both ways before, too. I think the point to take away from this sort of experience is that the best you can do is apply your best judgment and re-evaluate as you go along. Often opaque documentation makes sense after you gain some context by reading the source; it works the other way, too. With experience, you gain a sense for what path to go down; sometimes that (subconscious) heuristic is totally wrong, which is why it's important to consciously re-evaluate on top of that. The current approach isn't making you any practical headway, even though you're learning a lot about the system in question? Take a step back and try looking at the bigger picture; what are you really missing? If you can, sleep on it for a bit.

Most of all, if you're getting it right more than 50% of the time (and I'm finding it hard to imagine a way you'd do worse than that) there really is no point beating yourself up about it.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a fairly sophisticated dungeon crawler that is open source and hosted on sourceforge. Its got a small community of developers that work on it. I did a few minor patch submissions about 2 years back. They use C/C++ and LUA i believe, but I generally didn't touch the LUA. Take a look.
Hacking School: An Unconventional Guide to Better Grades with Less Effort
Admittedly early for me, but I read the headline very differently.
Sorry for nit-picking on an otherwise great post, but:

It is virtually impossible to understate how much using source control improves software development.

Shouldn't that be "overstate"?
Are gadgets ruining our kids' brains?
Eeeh, what? The killing time and saving time division of phone usage is common in the mobile industry. There's of course nothing wrong with using the phone to play games or check your Facebook, it's just a very simple way to show two user scenarious.
I have a client (stealth startup) who I've been working with for a little over a month. I'm consulting with them while they get an MVP out the door. After that, I'm shepherding them to stand on their own. I'll let them speak about their funding themselves; however, for reference, they've had zero problems paying my invoices promptly.
They are seeking an EMPLOYEE (remote is A-OK) for a PT/FT Ruby on Rails developer. Particularly interested in people with experience using: Heroku, Test::Unit, Capybara, Rails 3, and developing/maintaining RESTful APIs in Rails.
Contact me through the email provided on the last link in my profile.
SimpleCDN has provided fairly consistent service until now. Their customer service was always non-existant, but they were exceptionally cheap. We were forced to switch yesterday when SimpleCDN went down -- I actually wasn't aware what happened until I saw this.
First, there is no such thing as a "systems programmer". This is a useless, career-limiting, HR-invented categorization. When I made the mistake of signing on with a few recruiters on a job hunt a while back, they looked my recent job experience and labeled me a "systems programmer". This was differentiated from things like web design and GUI. It is wrong wrong wrong. We are software developers. It should not matter what layer of architecture we are coding in. Every layer has so-called "business rules"; everything has MVC. Label yourself, and you limit your thinking and your evolution.

This article does have a valuable lesson, in spite of the miscoloring. What we see in this article is an example of overthinking the problem. With experience, your debugging/problem-solving skills will get better, and this kind of mistake will not be often repeated. It took me many years to get out of the habit of speculating and to get closer to actually debugging. I had learned that it was faster to look at what was really happening than to guess at it. It helps even more to come to a detailed understanding of your system, but if you do not have time for that... Never start at the bottom first: start with the symptom.
Paralysis by analysis is one of the most common ways more intelligent opponents are beaten by less intelligent ones. From what I understand, this seems to hold true in chess, warfare, and a lot of other contexts. This might be good for us to remember in the coming years.
The Present and The Future (continued)
I was a client of both Softlayer and 100TB/UK2 whatever you want to call them. Both instances were separate occasions and my experience with Softlayer was nothing but spotless.

I had 2TB monthly bandwidth allotted, and the server was using up close to 80% of that. We were hosting 4 TF2 game servers, forums etc. Their customer service and services provided were top notch.

100TB on the other hand was not as pleasant. Even though we ended up not going with them in the long run, I have to say that the process of signing-up, managing the servers and canceling was ok. Nothing great. The factor that pushed us to another carrier was network speeds. There were moments when we were getting 10% of what we were paying for and that wasn't a fluctuation worth the risk.
Understand Haskell Monads through Macros
Rebase Is Safe
A third option for the staging database is to do a dump and then scrub the data for security compliance. You may be able to use that database through several development cycles.
You Too Can Be Julian Assange In ‘WikiLeaks: The Game’
Twilio have been more visible and active - Tropo seem slightly behind in evangelism and generally pimping their product.

1) I wouldn't say "slightly". 2) Twilio's great at it because Danielle was employee #1 at Twilio. Marketing and evangelism are in Twilio's DNA.
Called to check on the one listed in my zipcode. It's going to the house directly next door. Now I'm seeing the security issue with this...
Not the same thing really.
I was looking at creating an IVR monitoring tool. I would like to 1-make a call every hour, 2-record the response, and ideally 3-verify the response matches the expected. Thoughts? It looks like twilio and tropi might be able to do this (although I wasn't sure they weren't more focused on inbound), but the 1 cent price is prohibitive for what people might pay per-month especially at higher monitoring frequencies. Anyone have other solutions that are reasonably simple?

edit: If I did run adhearsion/asterisk, what do I just have to connect it to a phone line? Vague on the setup needed to do this...
Finally, Privacy is in the Spotlight Tech
The MH-E manual states "Most people use nmh, but you may be interested in trying out GNU mailutils MH, which supports IMAP."

The mailutils home page states "the utilities provided by Mailutils include imap4d and pop3d mail servers, mail reporting utility comsatd, general-purpose mail delivery agent maidag, mail filtering program sieve, and an implementation of MH message handling system."

I've always wanted to try this, but never found the time.
While they may very well win in court - their business will be destroyed.

Why on earth was their CDN built around a single provider? Had they had multiple providers,this would have ended in reduced capacity, with buffer time to re-deploy elsewhere.

Sounds like a good lesson learned - when I need bandwidth X for Y years, I make sure I have solid contracts to that effect - not just relying on a simple clause about severability. If your business depends on your providers, you make sure your providers know what business you are in and make sure the contracts are solid.
I find this interesting as well. It's a rare song that I like /because/ of the lyrics (or even despite the lyrics). For the most part they are just part of the music - another instrument adding complexity to the song.

Despite that, I can't really program while listening to songs with lyrics. Somewhere in my brain a thread is running parsing the lyrics and stealing cycles.
They are fine for joe average who wants to play around and start a blog.

They aren't fine if you want to deploy a web-scale infrastructure on top of them and make tons of money. That much should be obvious to anyone architecting such services.
I also recommend to have a demo server, to which you can push your latest changes without thinking twice. This way, demoing new features to the customer or testing your deployment script does not change the staging box.
This way you can have your staging deploy be a much more realistic test run of your production deploy. You only push to staging, when you are about to push to production. Otherwise you might get state differences between the two like outstanding migrations that need to be run on one server but not on the other one. Typically things like that beak you neck during deployment to prod, so you want to test that. But you still want to have a faster way of getting features vetted by your customer. So you should have demo and staging.
Group finds 5 main flaws with proposed Net Neutrality rules
For an alternate perspective, read "the next 200 years" by Herman Kahn.
What made you decide to pass on it ?
2011 Predictions: You'll Rethink the Living Room (Web + TV is Finally Here)
Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last
TechCrunch is slow
I noticed major slowness all over TechCrunch in last few days. Anyone else?
MSFT + Facebook: What Could Have Been
That would be cool, seeing as one is headed to my ZIP and I'm a 45 minute drive from the louisville ups hub...
The idea about supporting source coordinate mapping in Firefox/Firebug is great! This could make it much more pleasant to debug generated JavaScript.
When Free Software isn't better
Wow. There is a "Journal of Transportation Security"...
It has become increasingly slower over the last few months for me. They seem to load a lot of javascript with their ads and widgets. The biggest problem I have is that, at least for me, I can't view the whole page until everything is done loading. I have tried from Chrome, Firefox, and against my best wishes even IE with no luck.
It's a little bit worse than that. Most insurances will at least pay up and then jack up the price. 100tb.com is not paying up (as in: providing service), instead they canceled the contract, apparently on short notice.
I hopped on your website, sir (madam ?) and no doubt, you are a rockstar. I'm talking about typical jobs -- typical embedded vs. typical desktop vs. typical web. Yours does not seem like a typical job, nor do you appear to be a typical developer. Most typical desktop/embedded jobs out there do not require keeping up with constantly changing technologies the way typical web jobs do.
means that you could saturate the full 1gbps for the entire month.

Except for the minor inconvenience that they cancel your account when you actually do that.
Being successful on the internet is easy! Just create interesting content, and then generate viewers!
Well done! Your sensible soccer multiplayer clone is pretty neat. If you polish that enough to make it play properly, I can see quite a lot of people getting hooked! Congrats!
Are you sure about this? I tend to think of a Systems Programmer as one who is more skilled in a particular area of the stack (closer to the OS). For example I wouldn't generally hire a self described "Web Programmer" to work on the guts of VMWare if I worked there. Sure, a good programmer can pick up on that stuff but a good programmer can also pick up basket weaving, it doesn't mean basket weaving is a useless career limiting hr invented categorization.
I have an office with a door that closes, but I usually leave it open and play Soma FM's Drone Zone quietly in the background. No vocals, little to no rhythm, and helps to put my mind in a slightly far-away place where it's just me and the problem I'm working on.
I'm against security theater, but this sounds like an information visualization problem: if the image contains enough signal that a theoretically optimally trained eye can detect the contraband, they should be able to use machine learning algorithms to detect suspicious items and make them show up with higher contrast.

In other words, the software should magnify anything out of the ordinary, like contraband. It's not foolproof of course, but would help.
This is almost always true, but there is at least one interesting exception: http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/cgi-bin/commerce.exe?preadd...

I imagine for dedicated listeners, there might be others.
Yeah, bad software is the point Philip Greenspun makes about the incident: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/12/11/airbus-a380-en...
A Mothers's Blood Reveals Entire Genome of Child
Wal-Mart Shoppers: Homeland Security Wants You
We are..http://miami.craigslist.org/pbc/eng/2092075120.html
For one client, we're going to do exactly that, and put an automated process that will produce the data, anonymize sensitive data (with checks).

This will also be useful for developers willing to test changes with the real data volume.

EDIT: after reading patio11 comment, I can only emphasize the importance of using a "white list" approach here, ie carefully picking the fields you will keep, and adding ETL screens. You have been warned :)
Remote root access vulnerability in exim - rapid action advised
The real trick is finding a company and industry where it always makes sense to go deep.
Danielle said this during the API panel moderated by Thomas Howe at ITExpo West in October this year. When asked of the differences, she said that Twilio was focused on growing the market and making it easy for web devs instead of trying to keep up with Tropo on features. Many itexpo sessions are recorded. There may be audio or video of this somewhere.
Glad you like it, SWOS, is by far the best game ever, IMHO. That's the prototype there, the actual multiplayer is under development and it's looking good. It's quite tricky getting multiplayer right for such a fast paced game with physics and all but it'll be done. And of course will be open source when it's done so everyone can contribute perfecting it.
Back to Waterfall Isn’t Quite the Right Answer
Lots of companies have single points of failure like this, probably more of them than those that don't.

This only goes to show that if it is too good to be true it probably isn't.
Cathedrals are not built anymore but neither are Rams’ calculators. I don’t think anything humans made was ever truly timeless – there is always context.

I would absolutely consider some cathedrals examples of good design, or some chairs made 200 years ago.
I implemented "text me when someone orders" in about 25 minutes of time, from clicking "sign up" to "cap deploy." Super awesome.
A company I am familiar with did that. Down that path lies madness. See the 33 bits blog: if data gets out, you are almost certainly screwed. (Trivial example: imagine you're my university and you release the medical records and student registration tables of your students for research purposes. You anonymize names and randomize ID numbers. Want to find my records? Look for the only person in the university who ever took AI, Japanese, and Women's Studies in the same semester. My medical records are pretty boring. They don't include, for example, an abortion. Let your imagination run wild on what happens if your company leaks the identity of someone whose records do. Something similar-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off has happened before.)
I agree - an overall great post. But to add another nitpick, do you mean anachronism where you say asynchronism?
@al3x - Alex Payne

@hotdogsladies - Merlin Mann

@rands - Michael Lopp

@mattlanger - Matt Langer
A Simple Solution to a Classic Problem in Software Development
You don't have a preference? Nothing stands out as better than the other? Can't even give us a genre?
This is even more important for bigger sites because on staging sites with limited data some performance issues won't be visible until bigger data is thrown at the code