skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello Sidwyn,

Why are you afraid that politeness will slow you down?

When you walk in to a store and you wish to place an order '1" wrench' is probably as compact as it gets. But 'I would like to have a 1" wrench please' is the normal form and even though it takes slightly longer typically you'll get a better response. You give the recipient a feeling of being appreciated, even though in the strict information theory sense there is nothing added to the conversation.

Those few words are the idiomatic way of asking for something and since email is similarly unconstrained in space (as opposed to say SMS text), has its roots in traditional letter writing, and is very easy to write people have settled on a form that is somewhat more compact that a regular (dead tree) letter but still long enough that it carries a sense of old-fashioned politeness. Typically this includes a salutation at the top and a signature at the bottom of some sort (usually a standard file).

Of course you are free to leave all of that stuff out, but if you write me 'give banana' without any introduction or explanation the only place where your 'instant' email is going to go is the trash bin. So all that flowery stuff actually increases the chances of the message making it through by using a slightly less compact form.

Greetings and much good luck with your quest for efficiency.

Your truly,

Jacques Mattheij
spending time to Build some thing useful > (far greater than) spending time to prepare for some thing so complex that only few people can crack.
Likewise, iOS applications are far more constrained than OSX applications.
Equity is worth 80 Million. He was able to take control with $25 million when the share price was ~2.5x of what it is today. So for $10 million you could take control. Why couldn't you spend $10 million and then declare bankruptcy canceling all/most debts? Would you be better off letting them declare themselves and then going in and buying the the assets your self?
http://fluin.com/?search=%22%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27XSS%27...

A little security flaw ;)
Exploration vs Exploitation tradeoff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
"Apple is a mass consumer electronics company, with products at every price point, usually representing the value option"

For general purpose computing devices, I don't see it. Apple doesn't sell a monitor for less than $999. A MacBook costs a minimum of $999 (a better spec-ed Asus is $300 less). MacBook Pros are very expensive. The only tower they sell is the MacPro, starting at $2499. Even the Mini is high priced, although crammed into a nettop form factor. Plus, they hardly ever discount, so you end up paying retail for the whole product lifetime.

I actually agree with you when it comes to smartphones, as the iPhone 3G at $99 is a value option, but for computers, they do not typically offer value options.
For full durability, you configure/ask the DB to fsync the transaction log before reporting the transaction committed to the client.

Most people can tolerate a few seconds of data loss, so a sensible config will only fsync every few seconds and will report a transaction committed before it hits the disk. If the DB crashes, you lose those recent transactions in this mode.

All (?) relational databases let you choose which fsync style you want. Most (?) ship with this setting set to the conservative 'fsync on every commit' mode. Once you configure a SQL database with a more relaxed setting you get a database that performs much more similarly to NoSQL. But some people need full durability - or want it for particular transactions. In that mode, you're basically bound by the the number of IOPS your disk can do, but are guaranteed full durability.
Very interesting indeed. How is it hosted? I am impressed that it can withstand traffic from both Reddit and HN without feeling sluggish.
Write a video game. I tell this to everyone who wants to learn to program. Forget web development, initially (unless you want to learn HTML5/Canvas to build the game, which is not a bad idea at all). Game development is probably the best way to learn to program because it's fun, you have some sort of goal, you can be creative, and you have to learn a great mix of skills -- graphics/sprites, sound, timing, interaction, math, physics, etc.
Don't learn.. If you are gonna learn something, learn ruby or python.. PHP is a dead-end..
Steve Jobs’ New Year’s resolutions found on Starbucks napkin | Scoopertino
I don't mean to throw you off, but you might be confusing 'simple stuff' with 'common stuff'. Things that you see in all and every application might require a bit of knowledge/learning (authentication, user accounts, design/css, database, hosting).

However - these things aren't rocket science.

Depending on the desired product (site, app, ...) - the choice of means and tools could differ.

Some here has suggested a CMS - and perhaps it's a good starting point. Many CMSs would allow you to get things up and running, and incrementally experiment with code.
I'd suggest a wordpress as it's one of the less-bloated CMSs to understand.

One advice is to be courageous. Experiment and repeat.

Drop me a line, perhaps I could answer few of your questions.
Google interviewees are asked to sign an NDA regarding the interview questions, mostly so that no one can look smarter than they are by studying those specific questions. Some candidates do forget it and leak information, but since bullshitters sign nothing, the bs quotient is high.
எம்.எல்.ஏ., குத்திக்கொலை: ஆசிரியை கொன்றதின் பின்னணி எது?
Linux kernel swear counts
I doubt it's still an issue, but some scripting languages (Python?) had math errors. Why, I don't know.

edit : Here's what I was referring to.
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-January/085...

edit2: It seems like it was fixed 17 months ago.
http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/3308
Guide software RAID/LVM TRIM support on Linux
This uses UDP with a non-standard port. Personally, I would be wary of poking a hole in my firewall to make this work.
do you feel it's "production ready"?
Not sure if you'll find specifically iOS design, but http://sortfolio.com is another service for finding designers.
Email isn't meant to be instant, even if it is faster than snailmail. Unlike a phone call, it's meant to be disconnected.

I find the use of a greeting helps me focus on the intended audience. But I don't care if other people use one.
Try http://99designs.com/ ?
http://xkcd.com/843/
You can use jRuby - http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/
This is true, but I was referring primarily to the principle of whether someone has "stolen" by playing legally owned copyrighted media in public. Copyright laws have also forbidden public screenings for videos as well, and I think those laws are equally ridiculous. Come to think of it, I've also heard that Grooveshark has a live music program for DJs and venues.
Good point. I still use forums.

Nevertheless, you don't see the PUA community frequenting reddit.com/seduction. Don't know the % of them who actually know what Reddit is. I don't know of any one true "base," for lack of a better word, to find good PUA content (ex: TechMeme for tech news).
As a mass consumer electronics company, Apple sells the iPod shuffle ($49), and the Apple TV ($99) (vs blueray players), both representing the value option.
do you now of any good resources for getting started with sphinx + mongodb (preferably on rails).. thanks!
Defamatory speech is also protected to a degree because it isn't possible to weed out beforehand, but carries consequences and could be censored after the fact.
awesome, I look forward to trying it out.
Ask HN: Recommended research tools for Linux machines?
I am doing research on city and communities. Have been a Linux user for years. But it seems like there is not much tools for research to choose from. I want something that helps me catalogue stuff and make it easily searchable or even with handy annotation tools. Maybe it would look something like this Papers app for Mac: http://mekentosj.com/papers/ Can anyone recommend similar tools for Linux?
4 things you can do to immediately become a better programmer if you've not focused on these areas.
0) Master recursion.
1) Learn how to write a parser in whatever language you're happiest with.
2) Learn to treat error handling like a complete and utter frothing maniac. If it can go wrong, it needs to be checked. Without rigorous error handling large programs are impossible. Furthermore, parts of the program need to be easily and quickly tested.
3) Learn git and branching so that you can easily experiment without worrying about losing everything.

Beyond that, being proficient with an editor is key to reducing repetition. learning to use flexible tools will make everything easier.
I was a double major; CS and Accounting and my first IT job was building computerized accounting systems..
I swing more to lifestyles than jackpots, but a successful (for any definition of "successful") lifestyle business is a great place to try conquering the world from. A recurring theme for folks trying to shoot the moon is how much time fundraising takes up and how conflicts with investors can drive you under. If the rent is covered and salaries are already in the bank, you have a great fallback position. (BATNA is "We go back to where we were before we knew you. Oh, shucks, successful business." versus "We fail to make payroll and the bank repossesses my liver.")
I wonder what a mobile OS based on Haiku could be like?
[Upvoted because I don't feel your downvote is fair.]

I disagree with your analogy, because the First Amendment doesn't cover buying beer for a minor. And the First Amendment isn't just some law--it's a cornerstone for our relationship with our government.

Is it "ok" to publish the secret documents? Of course not.

But allowing the government to punish third parties for publishing the documents is even less "OK"! The US government is heavily restricted because history has shown that a government will abuse the hell out of its citizens.

And sometimes this means the US government's hands are tied, and people that do "bad" things are set free. But the Founding Fathers agreed that the greater good was served in this manner... and I concur.

It sucks that the secrets got out. We need to take steps so that it won't happen again--such as not allowing people to walk out of secure areas with freakin' CD-RWs!

And finally, I have a practical argument against publisher restriction. Once the secret has been stolen, it WILL get out, and it will get out BIG. How many mirrors of WikiLeaks are there? 1000? How many of those aren't under our jurisdiction? How many are in countries unfriendly to the US? Are we going to go to war over someone's web server? No. So even if you grant the government the power to punish the publishers, you still won't keep the secrets secret.

If you want all this abusable power given to the government, I'm going to want some appreciable effect in return... and there is none in this case, so... no thanks.

I'll agree with you that it's not "ok". But that's as far as I go. It's also not "ok" for a guy who committed an unwitnessed murder to not say so on the witness stand. But I'll back his right to remain silent every time because I know in the long run the greater good is served.
I apologize if the meaning of my prior comment was misconstrued, as you have not reached my intended conclusion.

I'm intending to say that building a user base should come before monetizing - not replace it.
We've noticed that even with fewer servers we can get better performance on the same load after migrating to IIS 7.5 from IIS 6.
We're talking about the same molecule that serves as an excitatory neurotransmitter in your brain. It turns out that if you eat a lot of it, it's possible to get a headache (other people claim other ailments). Not much is known about the specifics of the mechanism, but it's not that implausible.

The blood-brain barrier makes this completely implausible.
thanks! I'll have that fixed
In this case, absolutely jump in the deep end. Find a way to get RSS feeds, and a way to display them -- there's probably libraries for either, however you plan on doing them -- and try to process them in between. Start with something small that works, and add functionality piece by piece, careful to make sure each change you made results in something that works. If you understand each piece, you understand the whole. Every piece you understand, you've learned something.

About "being an expert" -- programming is a very, very broad topic, with far too many different technologies and libraries used in different situations, so when even "experts" work, usually only a tiny amount of their work falls under their actual "expertise" (as in what they could do blindfolded), and they are always Googling what to do next. So when you do that -- constantly Google what to do next -- don't feel like you're not an expert.

I guess what I'm saying is, (perhaps unlike other fields) the body of knowledge in programming, not only that exists, but that any typical work involves, is so vast, there are no "experts" that have intimate knowledge of all of it.
An excellent point that seems to be under-emphasized. Instead of swinging for the fences on the first at-bat, focus on getting a man on base first. /cheesy metaphor
I'm interested, maybe we should chat? taitbrown@gmail.com
Sleep dentist
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I'd prefer to think of it as "Nothing I had to do today was more important than reaffirming that I care about our relationship."
I'd say, having never really thought about it, you learn quality by coding the same thing repeatedly and optimizing it each time. So you can learn in that way.

And having a friendly reviewer is excellent!
Just signed up to check it out -- but yes, it looks a little shady
Elisha Cuthbert  Elisha Cuthbert – World Great Pc Wallpapers of the World
Why not put Helvetica before Arial in your stylesheet? Mac/iOS/Galaxy tab users will see better typography, and nothing will change for everyone else.

Other than that, super cool concept!
Stop korupsi dan suap di indonesia
And another:

http://bit.ly/eN40yI

Edit: Using a bit.ly link, since HN's URL parser is leaving out the closing ].
> than playing it on a loudspeaker in a public space

Read the licence on your cd's. You're NOT allowed to do this without explicit permission.
You've missed the point.
btw, VW owns Porsche now- after Porsche's failed take-over attempt.
I'd love to see a DHT network with some level of attention to durability.

Having played a lot with Kademlia, the biggest bummer was that in practice, stored resources had a lifetime of about 4 hours max, and that was when the requester was able to find the node holding your resource. This necessitated spamming your important resources pretty frequently to a redundant set of deterministic keys.
Did Monstanto Finally Buy Blackwater? There’s No Way to Know
Cloud IaaS: The Future of Web Hosting
Why, exactly? To your point, it uses UDP on a non-standard port; forwarding the traffic won't expose any of your existing behind-the-firewall services.

Anyhow, one of the draws of UDP for this stuff is that it's possible to do clever hole punching so that you don't have to open the port. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching
I think this is an important point to raise, and it brings us back to the matter of how important it is to "define your objective." Is your objective to be your own boss? To pursue a dream? To try to make it rich? Etc...

While the "jackpot" target is small and elusive, I think a more _reasonable_ but still far-fetched goal is to search for a place where you are 'impactful.' You may not be rewarded in some strictly remunerative way, but if you are passionate about changing something and can make it happen - better CRM tools, better ad exchange software, better reverse osmosis technology, whatever it may be - then that is something great, completely aside from whether $$$ follows.

Lifestyle stuff is great too, but for myself - as someone very young but idealistic and ambitious - what moves me most is the possibility of making a difference in the world. Businesses - and one where you define the rules and set the agenda - are one way to do that.
Rothberg Seeks to Make DNA Sequencing Common
Case Study- 300 New Customers & Thousands in Revenue
definitely holds potential
http://minimali.st/2010/03/helvetica-and-arial-font-stack/
Foo is Bar! Bar is Foo!
I switched from zoneedit to zerigo not long after they had a period of extended downtime. I was also put off by them talking about a new admin which was coming. Blab about it after it launches not before.
One thing both Google and Apple might be getting wrong is if they won't let developers make serious money. They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps", which might mean that a lot of interesting software will never be written for those systems.

Microsoft always allowed and encouraged application developers to make money from their Windows applications, even though a "cheap applications means we can sell more Windows" strategy would naively seem to make sense.

If I had to pick an OS winner, Android is still the one I would bet on, but with this move, Windows definitely seems to me like a more credible contender.

Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC...
If you try to work IRC up to be a real, true XMPP replacement, you'll be complaining about how hard it sucks in no time.

I doubt that.

The parts that actually somewhat work in XMPP would be fairly straightforward to add to IRC (mostly related to persistence and identity). From there the question is where you'd want to take it, not what idiocies XMPP fell for. I.e. the task would be to do it right, not to imitate a broken protocol.

Just compare http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt to http://xmpp.org/protocols - where the latter isn't even the full story.

And then tell me with a straight face the complexity is "inherent to the problem". No. It's not.

IRC handles very similar problems to XMPP already (and then some that XMPP doesn't have) and the specification, in its entirety, is only 3643 lines long. Extending that for distributed, message-persisting operation would not bring it anywhere near the insanity of XMPP.

Naturally that's an academic exercise, nobody would actually re-shape IRC into an IM system that way. However, when cherry-picking concepts for a new protocol then IRC should be high on the list, and XMPP rather low.
I'm sorry, this is a bit dumb. The senate was not founded because "we cannot trust the people" but because in the senate EACH STATE has equal power, regardless of size, while in the congress each state has power proportinal to the population. This ensures that small states with 0.2% of the population are not entirely ignored in all politial matters because they might literally have the ability to break ties, no more. It might wind up being that ruling NY + NJ + FL + TX + CA would give you enough power to outvote every single other state.

The senate is critical and not to be abolished.
Ask HN: How to create certified or trusted reviews?
My startup (currently in private beta) is brainstorming ways to implement some sort of credible review system into our site. While I cannot disclose the exact nature of the site, our review feature will be dealing with documenting customer experiences with salespeople.

The issue that we are struggling with is the prevalence of fake or deceitful reviews across the web. Does anyone have any suggestions/ideas/products that could help us in creating a trusted system?

Thanks
I read the headline with the context of business models, and businesses that grow to rely on Google, and then, one day, find out: uh-oh.
but that doesn't work?
Becoming a skilled developer might take 10 years (http://norvig.com/21-days.html).

You should pick a SW opening as an example and focus on developing your skills to land your first job. Your best chance is to leverage your backgrond in math and physics, for example for a programming job using python for research (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864591).

Once you are programming full time you can spend your spare time expanding your skills as a programmer in other areas.
I'd like to be rooting for Apache but practically speaking I'm now using lighter-weight webservers (with nginx or varnish as a front-proxy).

Using Apache taught me a lot, but I expect that by next year I probably will have only one Apache server (the one built-in to MacOS X).
That makes sense, thanks a lot.
To get really good, you'll need to put in lots of hours developing. There is no shortcut that I'm aware of. You might as well make those hours enjoyable though.

Find where your interests with development overlap. Seeing as you already have a background in Math and Physics, put it to use. Go look for some open source projects that you're genuinely interested in and try them out. Like other people have said, contribute and engage with the community.

If you're just fixing small bugs in these projects - it's still valuable enough in that you had to have some understanding of software some other people wrote (in a potentially large codebase).

If you do eventually decide to be more ambitious with creating a project of your own - aim to do something very useful / interesting (that doesn't necessarly mean a large application). Make it open source, have people review it and don't shy to promote it. That kind of thing is great to have on a resume.
I replied to a specific comment, not to the article in general.
This looks surprisingly fun!

It's funny how different a voxel-based game looks to my eyes than a 3d-pixel game. I suppose the voxels offer a lot less resolution right now, but they just seem to work in a different way. I wonder if they will feel more or less engaging in 3d than a triangle-mesh type game.
"Actual powers of two" would imply 512 GB.
i just have the feeling of watching slides in scribd.
ØMQ came to mind when I read the doc, too, but:

* UDP could be useful for hole-punching firewalls
* In most networks, multicast traffic will be filtered at the WAN boundary
* The nodes in most big DHTs aren't reliable anyway

The eventing would be nice, though... and the notion of an internet-wide ØMQ network is neat.
Amazon EC2 is always a good option. https://www.djangy.com/ looks promising as a Heroku for Django.
+1. If I am not asked to write code in the interview, it is likely that other employees of the firm were not asked to in their interviews either. In the absence of other indicators (like open source code published by the firm), I will take this to mean that the codebase I have to work with, should I accept the position, is likely not to be stellar.
Thanks for the feedback. I've never had much luck designing compelling UIs, so I just snagged a cute template for $15 from ThemeForest. After I had finished coding the site, I applied the theme. It went from having a raw (but functional) HTML interface to what's online now in a single day... And that's including several unlinked pages that support downloads, cancellations of service, etc.

I wish I could figure out how to get the site to show up in a Google search so I could gauge others' interest in it!
This "bug" shows how annoying it must be for any poor Google engineer involved with a project with public bug tracking.

The request is "Please add Javascript". Responses range from people pointing out that you can put Javascript in the HTML output by AppEngine (!), to those pointing out the various ports of Rhino to AppEngine.

People use the bug tracking as a general discussion forum, and add nothing useful to it at all.
I would argue "a large percentage of Windows users" do not have Helvetica installed as a system font (CS fonts are not used for web rendering unless you also install them as system fonts), and I would argue Arial looks bad no matter which platform it is rendered on :).