skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an aside, I'm reading Greg Smith's PG 9.0 High Performance, and it's an excellent in depth study of database optimization. The first 90 pages are bottom up: storage technologies and how to tune and benchmark them, memory, cpu, file system choices, and operating system tuning parameters. Once the fundamentals are in order, it covers the internals of PG in even more interesting detail.

Trivia: A fsync call on any file on ext3 will force a sync of not just that file but the whole volume; ext4 fixes that. If you buy large SATA drives, then partition them to "short stroke" using only the outside of the disk (discarding the slower spinning inner region) you get competitive performance to SAS disks for many workloads.

One of the best low level books I've found in a long time.
Except there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of dumping going on. I suspect the majority of Bitcoin investors are more interested in seeing how far Bitcoin can go rather than dumping all their coins the moment they've made a reasonable profit.
Qwerly is surprisingly difficult to type.
> Because pretty much all the browsers, on a better-than-quarterly basis, fall victim to attacks that allow arbitrary web pages to upload code into their processes and run it.

> Just not sure this needed the "attack class" name.

You are being too generous.

By default, all web browsers ALLOW execution of ALL code encountered
since all browsers ship with javascript enabled. Similarly, allowing
hidden and/or transparent elements ENABLES clickjacking by default.

In other words, the fundamental design is flawed, and it remains flawed
because of vested interests. Most argue the risks are worth the rewards,
and anyone who disagrees is promptly told that their tin foil hat is on
so tight that it's cutting off their circulation.

Seriously, do you really want to be the person who advocates removing all javascript and hidden/transparent elements?

We both know what would happen to said person.

EDIT: Getting down-voted for just stating the underlying problem on HN doesn't bode well for HN as a community.
OWASP (such as testing guide) would be a good place to start or simple books such as Innocent Code / Web hacking Exposed. Having prior experience in server-side coding will help massively.

Just like many other professions hacking/breaking is all about practising - you can safely hone your skills on these : http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20090406/hacking-without-all-the-ja...
I believe your assumption is correct as well. All of these 'new high tech safety toys' are the tip of the iceberg. With all of these components being used and people becoming comfortable with them, we will soon see more adoption towards driverless cars.

I think another major milestone towards this will be the next generation of GPS, with the increased accuracy it will help guide the cars where they need to go.
has anyone done a recent comparison of mongoid and mongo_mapper?
The images are created by interpolation from an image consisting of discs.
The raw data would look like this:
http://www.eps.hw.ac.uk/~pf21/projects/page1/assets/good-fnu...
If possible include 7 , still 30- 40 % user are on 2.1 update, or you can develop on 8 but specify min-version as 1.6 to maintain backward compatibility
PHP was my very first language, which in hindsight was probably a good choice for a couple reasons:

1. It's used in a ton of web applications. It's slightly less popular than in the past due to the influx of frameworks like Rails and Django, but a lot of major web software (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, phpBB) still uses it.

2. People tend to write very insecure PHP code, especially when they fail to use a framework. Again, this is slightly less true now than it was in the past. However, it's very common to see bad practices like:

- SQL queries generated via string concatenation

- Output escaping done manually, on a per-element basis, rather than in an automatic, context-sensitive manner.

- File upload scripts that let you upload PHP files, or file download scripts that accept a filename but don't sanitize against directory traversal attacks.
App Idea: Read It Later Binder Using Instapaper
If you could send the original link to (my first name) at (photobucket.com) I'll make sure it gets removed.
This would make riding my motorcycle much safer, I like it.
Ask HN: Need help conveying concept of technical debt to CTO
My company maintains a legacy application in the primary healthcare domain written in classic asp. The app has all of the problems that you would expect with anything written in classic asp - no separation of concerns, innumerable redundancies, no tests of any kind, brittle business logic etc. Working with the system is unnecessarily difficult and can make what should be easy tasks very laborious. We are frequently turning away new contracts simply because we don't have the resource to serve new customers on the platform.

I was hired over a year ago with the explicit purpose of helping the company transition to a new platform (I've been advocating something on the JVM, probably Scala and the use of *MQ to help decouple the system). Upon starting however I was immediately seconded to a new development project on the legacy system instead.

The business is now embarking on the development of a new service, which the CTO is intent on building upon the existing platform. He's aware that the existing platform has a number of problems, but due to time constraints he doesn't foresee us having the resource to develop against a contemporary platform. I've tried to convey that doing this will further incur technical debt and even further decrease the agility of the company. I personally feel like this decision is going to hurt the long term viability of the company, but I don't think I have adequately conveyed this. The existing system continues to function, but only through the titanic efforts of our development team, and I can't help feel that because it is functioning there must be some perception that it is not broken.
>But it’s clear that in the early part of the 20th century, the original advent of the motor car was not impeded by anything like the current mélange of regulations, laws and lawsuits.

They did try in the 19th century though, at least in the UK, with the Locomotive Acts[1]. The way those laws went out of their way to protect the status quo (i.e. horse-powered transport) is an interesting parallell to today's possible transition from human-controlled to computer-controlled transport.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts
> There would be a huge economic benefit to allowing trucks to run 24x7 without drivers.

What would happen to the current drivers? Which new jobs should they pick?
David Chelimsky on rake 0.9 and gem version constraints
"Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing."

Does not surprise me. Most Europeans have not even adapted to automatic transmission in cars, and still believe that a human can switch gears better with manual transmission (which has not been true for decades now). Makes me wonder if they ever adapt to fully automated driving.

(And yes, I'm saying this as a European).
You should look at redesigning the home page. I have zero understanding of what your site does from the home page. You have a little content with "features" but it doesn't explain anything. I'm assuming it's some sort of dashboard?

What does your application do that I can't do with my safari or chrome top sites, and a good set of bookmarks/plugins?

Is the site actually functional? or is this more of a coming soon landing page? I can't find anywhere to actually use the application.

Here's a suggestion for trying to land a job from this site. Have a good designer redesign the site and the whole user experience. At the very least buy a theme somewhere and hire someone to implement it. Even if you don't want a job as a front-end developer, you still need to know how to make things work across the major browsers.

Is the site open source?
> that also means that it's unlikely that significant evolutionary pressures went into designing the complex systems responsible for intelligent thought, so they were probably accidentally "designed" via random drift

I find this unlikely. Perhaps the initial "push" towards intelligence was based in random drift, but humans' evolutionary path has actually paid quite a dear price to have the high intelligence that we have:

* Larger brains led to larger heads

* Larger heads led to the need to give birth earlier, and with more risk

* Earlier birth lead to helpless babies

* Helpless babies require much more care, and mothers become dependent on fathers

* Large brains are only very useful if trained for long periods of time leading to long, expensive and dangerous childhoods

I don't think this whole process can be explained by random drift.

I think the question of what caused pressure towards higher intelligence in our evolutionary process can be answered by competition.

Analogously, consider tree heights. A tree doesn't need to be very high at all to collect sunlight. But a tree competing with other trees can grow to tremendous heights due to competition.

When competing for resources with other similarly intelligent beings, more intelligence could definitely yield an evolutionary edge.
This has been a fear since the earliest days of online communities. I don't think actual behavior has confirmed that it occurs more often online than elsewhere; if it did, Pariser would have more hard data (rather than just-so anecdotes and hand-wringing about potential-risks) by this time.

People who want to be insulated could always achieve it; however people also like novelty and (to a certain extent) challenges to their own views. (People even enjoy being outraged; I suspect right-wing-radio has as many listeners thinking 'ohmygod what an idiot' as 'finally someone who tells it like it is'.)

Online forums make it cheaper, easier, and even socially safer to incrementally explore alternative viewpoints without precommitting, via a public show of group-loyalty, to a standard school of thought.

I suspect the net effect is strongly in the direction of more awareness and respect for a wide variety of viewpoints, despite the sturm and drang of certain flamefests and partisan outlets. (And even despite the success of Pariser's own organization MoveOn, and its siblings across the political spectrum, with simpleminded outrage-driven us-vs-them fundraising campaigns.)

However, I'd like to see data or a well-designed experiment; none of the coverage of Pariser's book has yet suggested a qualitatively-rigorous case is made within.
I'd talk to the CEO instead. While there might be some part of the larger picture you're not seeing, a CTO that doesn't understand or care about the level of garbage in the system isn't doing their job.
A tool to help small companies to find potential contracts with the government. The main issue here in my country is corruption, and how to gain enough traction.

Like http://www.onvia.com/products but for each country.

It's something I've been working some time, because I think the NLP involved in analyzing and extracting some structured metadata of the mandated docs is really interesting.
Very likely a coincidence. D-Wave is a bit of a joke.

Do you think the method is scaleable up to the 128 qubits that D-Wave is claiming?

Well, there’s no reason of principle why you couldn’t scale to a larger
number of qubits! But given the history here, I’d be skeptical of
claims by D-Wave to have done so already, and would want to see the
evidence. (As usual, the burden is on D-Wave to prove that they’ve done
something, not on everyone else to prove that they haven’t!)

http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-prof-scott-aaronson-on-d-waves-quantum-computer/
I forked the code in this article and made it parse a Pastebin site hosted on the I2P Darknet (http://i2p2.de).
Expected to find alot of more stuff like this in a completly anonymous enviroment like I2P. But no, the anonymous people on I2P seems like a nice bunch.

Here is the code: http://blog.kejsarmakten.se/all/software/2011/05/29/i2p-past...
there are conditions in which seatbelts cause fatalities (even when used properly)

Do you have an example?
> Having an extra driver per car costs 1 person per person.

If the car has some sort of payload (like a Semi or UPS truck), then this makes total sense. If the human is the payload, then there is no benefit at all. (Well, other than being able to multi-task -- but if you're working from your car, why not just work from home and skip the commute?)
As a non-smoker I like smoking bans, since smoking affects me as a by-stander, too. I would also be OK with people injecting heroin instead of smoking---anything that doesn't stink.
I find the title of this article to be completely irrelevant to its contents. Dropping out of school and starting a business does not relate to Timothy Leary's famous tagline which was about opening your mind via drugs and dropping out of society at large.
Leibniz was an idealist. He lived in peculiar ideological waters: he was Christian. He had to believe that there's the mind, there's reality, and both never touch. If he ever went out the party line, the inquisition would take care of him.

According to Leibniz, neurons can't exist. Exercise does not improve your mood. Brain surgery is useless. Caffeine does not work. Hormones do nothing. Coma is unexplainable by definition. And so on.

Reality killed Leibniz.
> The conductor didn't do his job on the Chicago train and so a woman lost her legs. But a system with no human conductor would be an unsafe system by design.

Perhaps, yes. But in this example, with no human conductor, the woman would have just sacrificed her violin instead of relying on the unreliable human conductor.
This is the least flamey / most civil disagreement I've seen on this forum in my 1000+ days on.
"There is a crucial difference between believing that a computer can simulate a brain and believing that a windmill can do so."

That depends entirely on what you think a brain is, and it just so happens that a prevalent view these days is that a brain is a computer, and so of course it follows very easily that a computer can simulate a brain.

But once that assumption is gotten rid of, it doesn't follow so easily at all. People are ignoring a good lot of scientific method when they propose that were a computer to every simulate a brain the veracity of that simulation could ever be verified. The only data that could ever be provided would be a very limited set, namely, to the external behaviors. What would essentially be needed in the simulation, that is the production of consciousness, could never empirically tested. Consciousness as an object isn't even a scientific entity, it's something that can only be corroborated internal to the agent that has it. It isn't analyzable into parts and it isn't able to be abstracted out of its environment, and so cannot be turned into a scientific object. The brain, on the other hand, we might suppose is an object fitted to empirical methods, but what people really want to get at is consciousness, and the brain without that is probably not the problem most people have in mind. So one could simulate the brain but only on a very restricted very of what a brain is.

On the other hand, on second thought I do agree with you that evolution produces technologies and even maybe that that's all evolution has ever done. I'm afraid I'll have to think about that point more if I am to respond to it specifically, though I think it's tangential to the rest of the argument I am trying to make above (which is admittedly sketchy).
Who cares?

There was a time when 80% of the population used to work on farms. Now much less than 10% work on farms in the western world. Do we have 70% unemployment?
Your depression is stopping you from having a positive effect on the world.
Be very, very careful following the advice about disabling table scans ("enable_seqscan = false") — especially globally. In performance tuning terms, that's often the equivalent of swatting flies with a howitzer. (You can also set that on a query-by-query basis, which, depending on the query, may be more sensible.)

The fact is, though, that often-times, a table-scan is the most efficient query plan. Yes, indexes can speed things up, but they do so by increasing random IO (leaving completely aside the write-time penalty you pay for indexing). When your storage medium is spinning rust, increasing random IO will eventually — and much sooner than you think, at that — cost more than buffering an entire table into RAM and sorting/filtering there. Moreover, all that additional random IO will degrade the performance of the rest of your queries.
Intel 8080 CPU emulator (written in HTML5 and JS)
Speed limits, in some areas, also serve to limit noise.
The system has an automated track safety system. It can get a little annoying at times as a rider — I've heard blowing leaves on the tracks can trigger the system, which is significant given the large majority of stations are elevated and can be exposed to the elements. This article from a few years back has described some of the more unfortunate cases: http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/11/18/SkyTrain/
Yes, Dialyzer is quite cool. However it is run as a separate tool on your Erlang source right? What I'm aiming for is something that can be used interactively while at the REPL - Qi/Shen is the inspiration here.
Yes, that is the interesting bit. A lot of people are not in Bitcoin for the money primary. They are hoarders or altruists.

Once some person tries to cash a $50,000 BTC account it will go down. The market depth is simply not there it seems. The money supply is not regulated vs. the trade volume, right?
Great article.. really helps you understand the magic that happens when you type 'bundle install'
They can become candlemakers: http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
You're thinking of being able to comment or vote, but not both. That's not what I'm suggesting.
I'm not sure but if a person prefers to be more severely injured in the event of an accident rather than uncomfortable all the times they are not in an accident then it's an appropriate choice for them. I don't feel it's my place or any other third party to make these choices for adults.
It's not too bad in that regard, with a couple of bizarre exceptions (Inception is the ninth best film ever made? Really?) But overall it's a better and more historically diverse list than I would have expected.
I would think that more people would want to play Super Mario on their phones than Angry Birds just based on familiarity. How many billions of people know Mario and how to play it already? Final Fantasy 1/2/3 are selling well on iOS. What is your source for your assertion over what mainstream audiences want?
The problem with healthcare is not that progress is being ruled out but that healthcare is highly labor-driven. So far there's no machinery that can replace a doctor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
My ASUS Transformer is probably my all time favorite gadget ever.

I wouldn't really be interested in this tab/phone thing unless they worked a Transformer-style keyboard dock into the mix. After using the Transformer I've realized I want a netbook 80% of the time and tablet 20% of the time and I won't go back to using a pad/tablet device that isn't both (I know other tablets can be used with bluetooth and/or USB keyboards, but it just isn't the same as having it in an all-in-one device).

If they really want me to buy an ASUS phone too what they should do is have a variant of the Transformer which takes a docked phone into the keyboard dock while leaving the phone's display visible and usable. When the phone is docked into the keyboard dock, have it dedicate its display to being the laptop's multitouch touchpad.

Add in an API where apps could detect being in this docking mode and modify the phone's display based on context (somewhat like Windows SideShow, but as a multitouch input panel).

That would be a worthy followup for my Transformer and also convince me to buy an ASUS phone.
What made them outsiders in high school makes them stars in the world.
This kind of analysis should (also?) include checking what words were in common usage prior to the writer vs. what words originated with said writer...
Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" - Mobile IE 9 Browser Explored
While I agree with the second tip ("Replace a live table with DROP TABLE/ALTER TABLE") for ad-hoc stuff, its big disadvantage is that it requires knowledge of the indexes on the table. If you have one or more scripts to maintain that use this method on a particular table, and the indexes are changed in an unrelated update to your table structure, you have to make sure those changes are also reflected in your scripts.

Oracle allowed you to disable the indexes on a table (something like 'ALTER INDEX foo DISABLE'), which allowed them to become stale when data in the table was modified. You could do this right before a big import operation for example, and you could then rebuild (a different 'ALTER INDEX' syntax) them when the operation completed.

PostgreSQL doesn't appear to have an equivalent at the moment.

edit: wording
Change the tonic of a piece of music by tilting your computer back and forth.
Whenever I see Searle's Chinese Room argument, or a version of it, invoked to show that brains cannot possibly be computers I am reminded of a passage of Terry Bison's "They're Made out of Meat" [1]:

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

[1] http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...
5 unusual ways to give your credit score a boost
There's a bet over on longbets that in hundred years time (or so) somebody will have found a way to run AI on computers from around now.

I'd bet that's probably actually doable, but I believe that the first version of AI will need more hardware than that. Just because we don't know what we are doing.
Doesn't PostgreSQL support something like:

RENAME TABLE current TO current_old,
current_new TO current;

Which is the common pattern of atomically swapping out tables in MySQL with zero downtime.
Can someone describe the white hat credo with respect to 0 day exploits?

Did he give Microsoft a head's up about these and a chance to respond before going public? Or does he just give a conference talk and post it to his blog, potentially providing the information allowing thousands of browsers to get compromised (assuming they weren't already) before privately letting Microsoft get a chance to patch it?
Well, down the line I think I might want to eventually become a CS professor, so having a degree in CS is pretty important to me. I do do some web development occasionally, and could see myself making money off of it for some time, but I think/hope I'll ultimately be going into areas where a CS degree is more important/relevant.

I also really value community; I tend to learn a lot from my peers and also am often inspired by being around other intelligent people. Honestly, education from coursework is only a part of what I'm looking for from college, and maybe even a small part. I'm looking forward more to research opportunities and being around people with similar interests and passions than I am just attending classes.

And I'm interested in math, too, and was considering double-majoring in it, but UIUCs system for double majors is kind of weird, and I might just end up with a minor.