skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Identify Bad Queries in MySQL
Magic Work Cycle for iPhone
The Number One Problem With Game Center
Not so much the database as the algorithm; if it's sufficiently understood (as seems to be the case with Google's algorithm, or at least a lot of people claim it to be the case), then spammers can target it directly. Merely having the original data used to train it doesn't give much insight into the algorithm itself.

On second thought, though, being able to identify common characteristics of the least spam-like websites would allow spammers to mimic those characteristics. It would take a lot of effort (figuring out the core bits), but they are clearly willing to put that in. So yes, I suppose that you're right.
Neat if you don't know the unix shell and you do know the ruby shell and I guess you work in a strictly ruby environment... but doesn't really make things easier, and many tasks may suffer performance wise when it comes to text processing compared to the standard unix shells & commands.
"The asian kid with a 1560 SAT and state violin awards (probably) isn't getting into Harvard"

18% of Harvard students are Asian, so yeah, he (probably) would. And, that's with a long-standing policy of "ethnic cleansing" in Asian matriculation[1].

[1]http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/2/19/affirmatives-of-...
Overview - Google URL Shortener API - Google Code
Is there a way I could save the "silks" that I create?

If not, would you please consider implementing it?
Yup, coming from a developer of a spam filter (http://www.openprotect.com), this is a common enough occurrence which sometimes means lost opportunities. At least in our software, which acts as an SMTP gateway, the server returns a SMTP error code after message data when the filter thinks its spam and quarantines the message, which causes most sending mail servers to generate a non delivery reciept to the sender (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_delivery_report). I know a couple of other spam filters that do this, but the majority of the spam filters out there dont alert the senders that their mail has not reached the recipients inbox and is sitting in some spam folder or quarantine.
Also, lagrom.nl has a bunch of LCD test images, one of them being a clock/phase image that serves much the same purpose.

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/clock_phase.php
I assume they want $45mil of $9 shares rather than $45mil of $36 shares.
Ask HN: Is there discrimination towards new users here on HN?
I don't mean to offend anyone with this question, but I've definitely seen cases where a user's creation date is brought up in the conversation - an event that is prone to lead to some form of discrimination. Many users have claimed that the newcomers, in general, are bringing down the site's quality. I'm almost positive that this is true to some extent, but obviously it doesn't apply to every new user.

What do you think we should do about it?

For those that respond, please keep your answers civil as to avoid this thread removed by the moderators.
I honestly thought the WSJ essay was as good or better than A Modest Proposal.
Anecdote is not the singular form of data.
Imagine explaining it from first principles:

Q: "Please explain what your application does, without comparing it to anything"

A: "It's the Heroku of PHP".. No!

A: "It's like EC2, but preconfigured for PHP with less control".. No!

A: "It's like shared web hosting, but with better performance characteristics and somewhat more control".. No!

.....

A: "You get a server on the internet, where you can install PHP stuff. Except you don't actually have a server, and it is preconfigured to automatically scale your app across virtual machines. It comes with a set of tools and scripts to make installing stuff easy, and you don't need to administer it. By letting us concentrate on system admin and scaling it gives you more time to concentrate on building your application."

Q: "Oh, you mean like Heroku, except for PHP?"

A: "FUUUUUUUUUUUU"
Hustlin' doesn't mean "trying to make a quick buck", it means moving quickly towards your goal.

In this timeless piece, Ross discusses his fortunes in the trans-Atlantic pharmaceutical trade, at one point managing over 100 employees and reaping the fruits of his labor - all the while trying to maintain proprietary knowledge and head-off new entrants.

[Is there really much of a difference other than him being unlicensed to do this?]
I guess I'm just a slow typist. I will implement a hard mode soon.

Thanks for the feedback!
I can only venture a guess and say that Jewish people have always isolated themselves and their practices under the purposefully exclusive and secretive shroud of Judaism and all its tenets and customs.

As such, Jewish parenting practices don't fall under the harsh lens of scrutiny as does the more blatant and hand-wavy aspects of Asian parenting (the mother's "mean face" and public displays of superiority in the form of music recitals and such referred to in the article).
> This is quite possibly the dumbest article about technology I've seen in a mainstream publication.

Come on, it's in the NYTimes & by Paul Krugman (an economist) - not bad for that combination. After reading lots of articles by technologists, you need to remember to temper your expectations when you visit the website of a mainstream publication.

That said, his theory isn't entirely false - Google may actually need some "outside" ideas to mix in with their own. Then again, perhaps (my instinct says probably) they've been doing that for years, and the spammers are just evolving faster.
Sage install for Ubuntu is very straightforward--they even provide the command to unpack. If you've programmed in Python, or even better Fortran or C, the installation is mostly trivial.

Nontrivial is compiling from source, however :-).

Sage does more than Mathematica, as I understand it. It can be used as a replacement for Matlab, R, etc. I got informed of it by friend who is an applied mathematician by day and a .Net guru by night. Wikipedia has a decent writeup at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagemath
Keep clicking. There's lots of fascinating stuff if you keep exploring around.
You've never met any neurotic, therapy-prone Jews?
Sorry I should have qualified that with some kind of research. When I say my experience, I mean myself and a few dozen fellow students I had spoken to. I understand that that does not constitute any way close to a majority.

Our experiences were that with the assignments we had undertaken we felt enriched doing the research and learning about the things that needed to be done. Exam time was inevitably cram time. Pure short term memory work (coupled with going over past exams - which coincidentally were templates for the current exams).

Now both your arguments about using something under pressure and doing so creatively would be fair, if it was not the case that most of our exams were based on previous years' ones.

I do agree with you about exams being less corrupt. But I am talking about students who actually enjoy doing their assignments and the whole research process (and students who learns for the sake of learning rather than doing well for exams).
Not Jewish, but I went to school with a lot of kids from successful Jewish families of varying levels of religiosity.

I think at this point that the whole "overbearing Jewish parents" thing is more of a self-conscious joke than anything else, excepting perhaps some of the more religious Jewish families. I don't know if it's gotten to that point for Chinese-Americans yet.

Also, by "a Chinese," what do you mean? Is there any hyphenation after that, e.g. -American, -Canadian, -Hong Kong, -Malaysian? Or are you a mainlander? There's significant cultural differences.
A friend of mine, a mother of a gifted 5th grader wrestling with similar issues of parental control as Amy Chua, shared the WSJ article with me today. It reminded me of something Steven Pinker writes about in one of his books. In his book, he breaks down the work of Judith Rich Harris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris) to this formula:

Genes have 50% influence over a child's development, peers 40%-50%, parents the rest.

Harris's work is strongly disputed, yes. But Chua's article seems to strangely confirm it.

By micromanaging her children's social interactions in a number of different ways, she wrests back a significant measure of influence back from their potential peers. I told my friend to note Chua's list of things she never lets her kids do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

Notice these are all activities that would potentially expand the influence of her kids' peers and undermine her totalitarian regime.

Chua probably believes that its her strictness and strong principles that are leading her children to excel. And these have their role, no doubt. But I would propose, following Harris, it is her oppressive control of their social lives which is the much stronger factor.

An interesting extension of her social experiment will be when it's time for her kids to go to college (the photo accompanying the article indicated they haven't quite got there yet.) Sure, they'll probably go to an Ivy League school, maybe even Yale where their mother is a professor, so it won't be complete culture shock.

Nevertheless: do her kids find peers who sustain their carefully disciplined social lives? Does mom continue to try to control their lives at a distance? Do they thrive with additional freedom? Or do they crack under it?

*Edited for formatting and spelling.
Recently I'm down to a couple of times a week, and it's been great. I've recently finally restarted an old part time project I had kicking around gathering dust, and since I actually starting having something better to do in my spare time I don't feel the urge as much.

When I read HN a lot I get a pretty strong paranoid feeling that I'm going to be missing out on lots of amazing stuff that I won't be able to live without, but it turns out I can live without it just fine.
I know that this is a pedantic criticism, but isn't that convoluted "kill stray mongrels" command just a simple pkill? The first example is made excessively complicated as well (why not just grep -c)?

Certain things are definitely annoying to do with just the standard set of UNIX tools, but not knowing them well certainly won't help.
10 Useful Tips for Design Students
If you are a Designer or you wanted to become a Professional Designer, or you are a student learning Designing, then here are 10 most important points for you, after reading this Tips you can become a Professional Designer. Very helpful tips for you.
Figure out how long the poll stays on the home page. For each group, scale that group's number up by the reciprocal of the probability of a person seeing the poll conditional on their membership in that group. (This conditional probability will be equal to min(the amount of time the poll stays on the home page divided by the average length between visits for a member of that group, 1).)

This assumes a person's visits are evenly distributed with time, and that members of all groups are equally likely to respond to the poll if they see it.

Probably less frequent visitors are less likely to have registered accounts and therefore less likely to respond to the poll if they see it.
Weekdays: I check it at most 3 times when I am at work,
and when I finally get home I load a tab and I check it at least 80-100 times till I sleep!
Weekend: A constantly loaded tab that I check 5-10 per home hour.

Since day could be the whole 24h thing I naturally voted for 100+..sorry 10+
"You'll have to take that argument up with Knuth, and not with me, though."

And.... so what? We don't all run to Alan Kay for our definitions of object orientation, we don't all run to John McCarthy for a definition of a lambda calculus-based programming language, and we don't all go running to Dijkstra as the final word in structured programming techniques. No disrespect intended to Knuth any more than I intend disrespect to the three other shining luminaries I name, but if we're still arguing about Literate Programming's original Knuth definition 26 years later that is nothing more and nothing less than a testament to the utter failure of the term.

Note carefully how I said the term has failed. In point of fact I think what has happened is that the core ideas that led to the formation of literate programming has indeed essentially succeeded (if not exactly "won") and does indeed live on in languages with abstractions powerful enough that they don't need an additional mangling step layered on top of them and already have powerful comment conventions, some even machine readable. We've found that we don't need to narrate the entire program, but just some bits, and that a "literate" approach isn't always the best. If we have not adopted every last trapping of Knuth's proscription, it is not because it hasn't been tried, it is because it wasn't perfect, any more than any of the three luminaries I mentioned above managed to give us the Last Word on any of those topics. I'm not particularly all that interested in Knuth's precise definition in my day-to-day life any more than I sit here agonizing over the fact that my primary language's object model is in gross violation of a couple of Alan Kay's ideas about OO. We've refined our ideas about documentation a lot since 1984, in all kinds of ways.

And I think Knuth-style LP has some serious cost/benefit problems in modern times that didn't exist at the time of the original proposal; maybe in 1984 I'd use it, but the costs have at best stayed steady and maybe even crept up a bit (as you are now no longer augmenting code with good reordering capabilities but now supplementing and interacting with their capabilities and adding additional complexity thereby), while the relative benefits have plummeted unless you're still stuck in 1980s era languages with 1980s era design techniques.
Is this a form of self-satire? I don't understand what is going on here.
How Chinese Mothers Raise Kids Is Not Necessarily the Best Method
We have a mixture of both in our office and I prefer the melamine ones because they seem to have less problems with marker hanging around after being erased. We also have some cheap melamine boards and some nicer ones; I'd recommend spending the money to get nicer ones because the cheap ones also have problems with ink lingering.

However, like the parent said, if you have a use case that requires magnets, porcelain is the way to go.
This is not intended to exactly disagree: Many times when people cite the Maslow hierarchy, they often to take it as an axiom that the hierarchy is completely exactly how people work, and to lead better lives, people must go about fulfilling exactly these needs in this order.

As someone who presumably subscribes to the hierarchy, would you agree that you seem fairly certain that this is how it works? And, if so, can you say why?

At minimum, I'd say that it's not obvious to me that the order specified by the hierarchy is really in evidence. For example, I believe I've witnessed a fair number of people I'd say were self-actualized and esteemed who are fairly short on the friendship/family/sexual-intimacy front.
So, Yahoo acquires Viaweb and rewrites it. The end result
is inferior to the original Lisp-based product. Sony
acquires Naughty Dog and decides to eliminate the
Lisp-based development infrastructure. The end result is
an inferior game development environment. Sure, there
were probably a lot of reasons for these decisions by
Yahoo and Sony (probably none of which had anything to do
with productivity or technical excellence - large
companies have other drivers which have more importance
than these two); however, the end result for both
companies has been something inferior to what they
originally acquired.

Quoted from http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html

Edit: The post has more about in what respect the author considers the replacements inferior.
So like most analogies, it leaks.

Actually the WoW approach has more to do with a different form of learning -- variable interval reinforcement ratios -- which has been canvassed at HN before.
Tech journalist to the rescue.
Hilarious! I should of thought of that! Here's a quick link for you in any case:
http://www.dist-systems.bbn.com/people/krohloff/shard.shtml
Chrometa: Time Management in the Cloud | Cloud Business Review
> the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time.

Not to sidetrack the discussion, but EC2 has had persistent disk storage since the fall of 2008 ( http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html ).
I'm a Malaysian, for your info.

But most Chinese parents here rise their kids in pretty much the same ways as Amy Chua.
Why single out Jews? Do you have any evidence that Jewish mothers do this in any sort of systematic way? Why not ask why when _any_ mother dies this, no one complains? And what makes you think they don't?
I can't help but think that Hacker News has made several design decisions that are geared specifically to keep people coming back over and over and over again.

Some that come to mind are not notifying you when someone replies to you, not having feeds for comments on a story, and not having a feeds for the beststories or bestcomments pages.
I used to like the Joel on Software fora about 2-3 years ago. They weren't overly technical, but they had more than a few people who always seemed to have something interesting to say (Bored Bystander comes to mind). Unfortunately, Joel killed them off for varying reasons and I haven't found a good substitute since. There's still one focused on ISV development called Business of Software, and I think the Bingo Card guy (Patrick McKenzie?) posts there quite a bit.

Some of the other Joel posters went to a place called CrazyOnTap, but I wouldn't recommend that. It makes YouTube comments look sane.
I think this is pretty cool. I've wondered what a ruby shell would look like. I don't "get" bash at all, but I find ruby very natural. I've gotten better at writing bash one-liners for basic sysadmin tasks, however anything more complicated is hopeless. I've found it easier to write chef scripts to automate any server task than using bash.

The ability to easily execute commands on several remote servers is really appealing. At work, I only need to be able to ssh to 5 different servers and I frequently don't have a free screen terminal.
thanks! agreed--what is necessary for success is completely different here, yet many Chinese parents still think there is a magic formula, and that they know it!
The model of SV has proven to be one to emulate. It's only a matter of time before other locals with that crucial mix of money and good schools get some version of it.
Exam Questions should not be secret
I manage a house with 4 tenants, seven total including girlfrinds and myself. All the chores are split up evenly. They include, garbage (bag to can, can to street and back) recycling (collected, brought to street on time) Kitchen (Cleanliness, sink, dishwasher, refrigerator) Bills (diving bills, collecting rent and utilities, paying bills). So far things are cleaner and more organized, moral is higher also. I am in charge of bills. I use excel and a calculator to total up all house expenses and write them on a sheet of paper with a pen, collect money and pay bills. Very simple.
Very nice game!
As some others have said the progression speed was too slow, I got to level 25 before I got to see any ships basically...

There was one thing that bothered me multiple times though, I couldn't distinguish between t and f fast enough on some occasions, I would suggest switching to a different font.

Also, a High-score list would make things complete.
Chinese is the new Jewish.

Used to be there were quotas on how many Jews to let into Ivy league schools. Now that's applied to the Asian kids, with "diversity" as the excuse.

I'm also sure for every joke and stereotype of the Chinese mother, you can find an equivalent one about the Jewish mother.
Look at it this way; your account is 10 days old and my account is over 1000 days old, so by this metric I'm 100 times "better" than you. In contrast, your account has a karma over 600 and my account has a karma of a bit over 100, so by this metric you are 5 times "better" than me.

The real answer is, the metrics are flawed.

One of the more interesting ironies is the people claiming the quality is declining due to new users are actually new users. Ask PG what he thinks, and you might be surprised.

The dynamics of open groups necessitates a group will change over time as its membership changes. It is unavoidable. But change can be for the better.
Just my couple of cents worth of first hand input...

Most Chinese families aren't crazy-obsessed with achievement - I'd say about 1/4 of them exhibit this kind of insane behavior, but that's still a very, very high rate, which is where this stereotype comes from. The rest are similar to their high-achieving white counterpart families.

Just as a data point, my two parents (two MDs and one PhD, yeah, it could have been real, real bad) weren't like this. I had a very normal childhood. I did all the things that white kids do.

I would like to bring up a possibility, which is possibly controversial: a lot of these kids let themselves be trampled on by their parents. In addition to (probably) being bullied at school, they are bullied at home by their parents. I really wish they would do more to stand up for themselves. They can't be blamed, though, as their will has been systematically removed by the parents in most cases.

Overall, this whole thing is a great example of very smart people doing very stupid things.

A not unrelated issue is the high rate of Asian American girls/women who refuse to date and marry Asian guys. It's so blindingly obvious as to why, I'm surprised anyone ever has to ask the question.
I second this comment. I'd really be interested in learning how you made something like this.
http://blog.shopify.com/2010/6/18/official-php-adapter-for-s...
My dad dropped out of Caltech in the 60's... he ended up getting a PhD and becoming a professor of asian history. :)
> A source familiar with the matter said the board viewed Meyer as somebody who stabilized AMD and helped turn it around, but wanted to look elsewhere for an executive to accelerate the company's growth.

These really are two different skills. A CEO that can turn a company around may not have the right skillset to put it into a sustained growth.

AMD's myopic view of only competing against Intel is also another problem. There's no real reason they also shouldn't be fabbing PowerPCs and ARM chips in bulk. At least in order to extend the life of older fab facilities.
Upvoted.

> We don't all run to

Maybe you don't. ;) I try to keep terms as sacred as possible, usually...

What I was trying to say is this: I don't feel that I have the right to redefine Knuth's term. Yes, it may not be the best anymore, and as MenTaLguY suggested a few minutes ago[1], maybe a rename or rebranding is in order, but I don't feel comfortable saying "Literate Programming is x", for all x that isn't what Knuth said.

I think we're in agreement about the questionableness of the value if going 'fully literate,' which I tried to hint at in my last few paragraphs. I haven't ever written such a program, and so I can't really say if I think it's worth it or not. However, lately I find myself on a quest to compare and contrast and blend together English and code, and so it's something of a great interest to me, and so I do happen to care about those that have come before, for both their successes and their failures.

1: http://twitter.com/#!/mentalguy/status/24667821577338880
I feel a missive from RMS on the way.
The quote from that comment is very telling.

I did not choose the title of the WSJ excerpt, and I don't believe that there is only one good way of raising children. The actual book is more nuanced, and much of it is about my decision to retreat from the "strict Chinese immigrant" model. -Amy Chua
so you liked or didn't like fish? or hotwire?