skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, large high tech organizations have many environments such as dev, build, QA, staging, demo, live, etc. The really good organization, with the smart engineers, have built this environments over the span of years and they've carefully thought through how each environment works.

Also, some organizations, especially ones that use cloud computing (EC2, Slicehost, etc) have the option of creating a staging environment for QA. testing, etc and, if everything checks out, the staging environment can be restarted as a live environment (there are ways to do this safely and securely) while leaving the previous live environment live. If, for some reason, you find problems with the new live environment, then you can simply shut it down and keep the old live environment humming along. Of course, this is easier said than done, but it'll keep the anxiety level down.

Another good idea is to have apps that know which environment they're in when they start up. So, if an app starts up in dev, it should only access the dev database. If it starts up in the live deployment environment, it should only access the live database. To enforce this security, the live database must only allow connections from clients in the live environment (IP address).

But, these "self aware" apps don't necessarily need (probably should not) have configuration files with the sensitive data used to access databases, credit card processors, etc. Rather, at app start up, these apps should know which environment they're in and then go over the network to fetch the sensitive data used for logging into databases, services, etc. (The apps should only store this sensitive data in memory.) The services, on the other end of that connection, should be checking the IP address of the app which is asking for the data to ensure that there isn't a mixup.
This would just decrease life time even further (compared to letting it run all the time).
Bug bounties: The Uber-Fuzzer
Merik Voswinkel (founder of xs4all and Knoware) newest toy:

SiliconSqueak is a CPU running on cheap us$80 FPGAs to run Squeak VM bytecode native as machine code.

The site is currently best viewed by google cache ;-(
Lets hope they bring it up again soon.
Uh, have you read about Cloud print?

I hate printers, printers in Linux have actually been easier than printers in Windows for me lately if you're willing to walk to the printer and determine the IP Address or hostname.

But Cloud Print makes it stupid simple. Install it on your desktop connected to the printer via basic USB, then login to your Google Account. You can now print to that printer anywhere in world from Chrome. Seems pretty easy to me.
I don't disagree with your sentiment - any future theory must hold to current theories at its limit. But I disagree that we know what anything really. To know what gravity is really we must answer. What is mass, space, time, spacetime, inertia? Is the graviton real? Is space continuous or discrete? Also note curving of space is due to more than mass lest how would light beams be gravitationally responsive? Curvature is described by the stress energy tensor.

What we do have are human graspable descriptions of plausible moves based on our observations of chess pieces. We have no coherent theory on the game or why it is played. But that does not matter. A more important issue intertwined with this bias is: are notions of information and entropy more fundamental to how we formulate laws than anything intrinsic to energy and space?
Logitech's implementation of Google TV sucks a lot too. When first booting up I instantly get an update message and had to wait 45 minutes with the forced update right out of the box. Afterwards customizing, configuring, and using Google TV is a jumbled mess of unintuitive design.

And they charged $399 for the experience. I ordered an Apple TV from Amazon with 2 day shipping off my iPhone right then and there. Been a happy camper since.

Google's first few attempts at hardware is a mess. Hoping they keep tweaking and get the product mix right but then you can't just slap beta on hardware, charge, and expect the brand to not tarnish.
Thanks for that catch. Yes, I meant binary trees.

For some reason, binary trees look real cool when you learn about them from a textbook that people sometimes forget about hash tables. But, that might just be my personal experience from candidate interviews.
Ask HN: How come my submissions drop so fast?
Just wondering, I submitted a couple of articles and one question. The submissions were barely on the first page for a couple of seconds. Is there some automation built in that's doing it? really hoping this question will an answer before it drops too
Sorry about my typo. I really meant binary trees, not b-trees.
Plug an electric analog clock on the same circuit as the freezer. If it is wrong by more than a minute or two (normal inaccuracy) then you know the power was off and for roughly how long. If the power was off for an exact multiple 12 hours you'd have a problem, but a) that's unlikely and b) you could get a slightly fancier clock with a date as well as a time component.
Is Bitcoin Money?
Turns out, Saudi Arabia actually is considering going nuclear, so we'll see my thoughts about feasibility tested for real.
Yeah and there's only one printer (I think) from HP that supports cloud print...
How Tweed came to be, thoughts on the future of RSS and Twitter.
Hey Matt - thanks for your thoughts. I think mild is definitely in the eye of the beholder. Doing 50 pushups everyday would be a walk in the park for me - it might be absolute hell for someone else. A developer/designer might take 15 seconds to debug something that I could only manage after hours if not days of researching/Googling/struggling.

As I mentioned in the post - I really like warm showers and hate being cold. For me, it really was quite difficult to force myself to take a cold shower. It's now much easier.

You're right, I have gone through intense suffering - dislocating your knee, tearing all 4 ligaments and undergoing 5 surgeries will do that to you. So please have faith in me when I say that this activity was a challenge for me, was highly uncomfortable at first and required substantial willpower.

I offer my experience as something others can draw from and suggest that this might be worth doing.
Yup, I have to agree with you that I was very happy to work on a team with professional standards. While commonplace at high tech organizations, there are many non-tech organizations with their own tech teams which aren't aware of good practices since it's something that you have to experience, rather than be taught from a text book. That non-tech group is the one I'm really hoping to reach.
Didn't they buy hotmail after it became wildly popular?

I recall hearing inside stories of the difficulties they had moving it off the Sun hardware/OS onto their own OS...
The assumption is that you've set up a desktop Windows machine. Printers are fickle things at best, made cheaply, and have mechanical in addition to software problems.

He's either got to buy a compatible printer (extra cost) or set up a windows machine too. It probably has to be on. Not the end of the world (and might be just right considering the family computer situation), but I stand by the notion that there are more potential points of failure.
I have zero musical ability and was playing with this anyway. I think it is one of the coolest google doodles ever. (Possibly THE coolest.)
TMO Interviews Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc Fame, Part I
Don't know why it's not mentioned, but it will also reduce your penis to subatomic lengths
Are you looking at the newest page (http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)? From what you say, it seems you are.
But isn't it really as much of an oversimplification as saying they're O(1)?

No, because big-oh notation implies worst case. It's an asymptotic upper-bound. If you want to talk about average case, then you need to qualify what your assumptions are. So insertion into a hash-table is O(n), but if we assume an even distribution of keys with a sufficiently large table, then insertion is O(1).
Yup, we turn off the online Apple store during the Steve Jobs keynote. Next time he speaks, check out store.apple.com and you'll see the yellow "We'll be back soon" sticky. If my memory serves, it's been like that for at least ten years.
Anyone else wonder how well a random RescueTime user approximates the average google user?

My mom uses google, would never use RescueTime, and almost surely didn't try out the guitar.

Those projected numbers deserve a big fat asterisk.
Happiness, by Riccard Mathieu[0]. He gave an introductory talk at google too[1].

[0]http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Guide-Developing-Lifes-Impor...

[1]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1424079446171087119...
Why did you fail?
Android can now work as usb host
You are thinking about yourself as a skilled technical person, not the general consumer of Apple products. The whole "it just works" marketing statement from Apple is key.

You and I will continue to use DropBox, Flickr, rsync, tar, scp, Aperture, svn, Eclipse, and jailbroken iPhones.

The other 95% of Apple's customers will relish the fact that all the sudden, for free, they can take a picture on their iPhone, show it to their friend on their iPad, and then show it to the entire family on their AppleTV without having to do anything but take the picture.

And you can bet that Apple learned their lessons with MobileMe.

Basically, Apple is betting the farm on providing a private back-end infrastructure that front ends all of their products. It is certainly a gamble and fraught with land-mines, but if they pull it off it will serve to take away additional market share from Google and the other big OS/Mobile companies.
You know there's something wrong with your perspective when you think that iCloud, iOS and the iPad put together are more beneficial to the computing world than eliminating patent trolling.
For those of you who, like me, thought a black hole spaceship is a spaceship travelling through black holes, I made an awesome diagram of how it's supposed to work.

http://www.juretriglav.si/images/blackholespaceship.png
It must be nice to have a hobby
How I survived my first E3 with technology failing left and right
>If we can't travel faster than the speed of light

using existing understanding of Nature - we can. At least the Universe provides the example of galaxies traveling with faster than the speed of light relative to each other. The same machinery is suggested in the

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The opponents state that the energy requirement of the drive is higher than the whole Universe's energy. Obviously it is wrong statement as we already have whole galaxies mentioned above and whose faster than light speed obviously takes less than the whole Universe's energy.
http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/

http://greenteapress.com/thinkapjava/

http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/

PDF: http://download.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/javaeetutor...

If you start remembering parts in detail, skim those sections.
I've done cold showers at times (for medical reasons). I loathe them and only take them in desperation.

Trivia that the HN crowd is unlikely to know: Ending showers with a brief bit of cold water is supposedly something French women do to keep themselves perky.
The world's first charter city?
edw, you raise a good point. Keep in mind that Apple has hundreds of development teams. Each one is different. I don't think I disclosed any secrets and I was very careful to not say anything that might embarrass Apple.

I think Guy Kawasaki's first book, The Macintosh Way, goes much further than my comments here – and he was even rehired back at Apple several years after his book was published.

My hope is two fold. 1. That someone reading this would pick up some good practices; and 2. That someone reading this would say, "I want to be a part of that!"

Apple's a great company to work at on so many different levels.
Which country doesn't have a downgraded credit rating? Also who is doing this "credit rating"? Standard & Poor's? The same crooks who fluffed up the ratings of fraudulent MBS & CDOs a few years ago helping to setup the housing crisis in the first place?

But no, let's further deregulate & offshore jobs to countries that have poor humane rights records so our corporate overlords can get ever richer.
The requirements to use "Cloud Print" are basically[1] a desktop machine, always on, fully powered and connected to an always on printer, for which one has gone through the hassle of setting up the printer. And after that you can print only from Chrome, and only where you've paired the printer to your account.

"Stupid simple" is only half right.

To me that's a lot of hassle to get basic functionality from a $500 dumb terminal. Better to spend $350 on a laptop, then use printer sharing on that desktop machine. Printer sharing is something that is in all major os's since Windows XP at least. This solutions allows you to print from any app on your laptop.

Better still to perhaps print from the desktop machine which is wasting space, money, and electricity acting as your print spool.

[1] of course cloud ready printers will become more available, but they are rare in the market atm
I'm reading 'the upside of irrationality' currently, the follow-up of sorts of predictably irrational, and I highly recommend that book as well.
No it's not. From Wikipedia: science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.

The key word is testable. Thought experiments are not science. Measuring stuff to disprove a hypothesis is.
I wasn't suggesting that taking a cold shower makes you like a Navy SEAL. I was suggesting that if you were training to become one, taking cold showers would help you prepare for the shock of BUD/S training.

But I guess you couldn't be bothered to read my post properly. For someone who has such strong opinions, you sure do lack reading comprehension skills. Removing context in order to make your argument more valid....real classy.
I love sticking my head into a shower stream of cold water. Gets me really pumped at any time of the day.
How exactly do I get this beta? I have tried, updated iTunes and my iPhone, but see nothing. Do I need iOS5 to be able to use it, which I would need a developer account to get access to?
Hey this is like 10 minutes from me! Not sure that it belongs on HN though...
Startups StrawberryJ.am and Buffer Team Up on Tools to Curate the Web
The true "character building" exercise here is publishing this article and letting the internet tear you a new one.
Exploring the Bitcoin Bubble: from February to Now
In fact, since the fibonacci sequence grows as O(phi^n), we need O(n) digits to hold the n'th fibonacci number, so the fastest possible algorithm to compute the n'th fibonacci number must run in time Omega(n).
Link-time optimization is almost never useful.
The third link was not from a vendor. Here are some non vendor links:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface - "Touchscreens are displays that accept input by touch of fingers or a stylus. Used in a growing amount of mobile devices and many types of point of sale, industrial processes and machines, self-service machines etc."

[2] http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=touch+screen... - "A display screen that is sensitive to the touch of a finger or stylus."
Not even close. Smallpox is "designed" (over an optimization gradient) to attack our bodies. Although it would have been much more effective to not kill its host.

Showering is a practice that has likely had minimal selective pressure on our genes due to the relatively short history of the practice.
HP is also aiming for that same private-cloud target, building that with operating systems including Windows, WebOS, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and others, with "cloud-mapped" applications from HP and partners, with the rack-n-stack hardware and networking gear (of course), the management tools that they've built and bought, a veritable blizzard of marketing buzz-phrases, and with the usual aggregation of other pieces and parts, as well as offering the softwarte and hardware (and cloud) services to keep it going.
I was suggesting that if you were training to become one, taking cold showers would help you prepare for the shock of BUD/S training.

I sincerely doubt it. The point of BUD/S is that it pushes recruits way, way, way past anyone would push themselves. Constantly getting wet-and-sandy is only one aspect of it, and one 10 minute shower a day is not preparation for being wet and cold for, literally, a week.
FYI, Les Paul, Martha Graham, Earth Day, World's Fair, and Yuri Gagarin are all up now:

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/graham.html

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/worldsfair.html

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/earthday.html

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/space.html
drchrono seeks Healthcare Hackers. Help us revolutionize healthcare.
Personal def'n = a relatively new company (=< 3yrs).
Recruiting engineers at Asana in SF
Many of you have heard this from me before, but it is a particularly sweet opportunity, so I thought I would call it out again for any who might have missed.

At Asana, we're recruiting engineers who are interested in working on complex problems and an awesome new programming paradigm & framework as well as enabling groups of people to collaborate together more effectively.

As a company, we are built to last and have an awesome culture that encourages personal growth, wellness and working as a team of peers rather than a command/control hierarchy. Past accomplishments of our team members include co-founding facebook, building android's end-to-end sync system and rebuilding facebook newsfeed.

We're looking for exceptional engineers to join us in our SF office AND if you refer someone to us who we hire, we will love you forever as well as pay you $20k ;-)

http://asana.com/jobs
Character building aside, I have always been baffled why people take hot showers during the summer. It's hot out. I'm hot. So I take a cold shower and it feels great.
I also use RescueTime (because I want to be productive) and did not try out the guitar (because I want to be productive).

Granted, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Is RescueTime a biased sample? Probably. The question to me is which way.
It's not clear that you should have the ability to delete your old posts. They have often become part of a conversation that is no longer yours alone.
You've described the very definition of the "greater fool theory" [1]. This is investing based on momentum rather than value (such as the price to earnings ratio). The intent is to sell to another "fool" after mading a profit. Of course it all comes tumbling down when the market runs out of fools [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
I received mine on the 8th and I love it. While it is true that the file manager is missing a lot of functionality I think the real problem that Chrome OS brings to the fore is the severe lack of good Chrome apps.

Also, I had no problem getting past the fourth step in the trackpad training tab, unlike the OP who was probably experiencing a PEBKAC exception.
USB carries both power and data, while MagSafe carries only power. This doesn't sound like a problem until you realize that the USB pins have to be unplugged in a strict order: data before power. This is enforced in the connector with varying pin lengths. With MagSafe, there is no guarantee of connection order.
>"Since then, with the exception of a brief period in 1903, a week or so in 1937 and some power outages between then and 1976, the light has been on."

Honestly, if they had said this bulb had managed to be on all of that time, I might see making a big deal out of it. But 110 years minus an entire week and several outages is like giving someone an award for perfect attendance who only called in sick 12 times.
One of those will me mine. I've never purchased a computer or laptop from Apple before but I can't resist the temptation any more.
Triangle Startup Factory is returning
Strange Magnetic Bubbles at the Edge of the Solar System
For what it's worth, Chris H. posted this to his blog, so we can pretty much say that it's not a "rumor" now:

http://trianglestartupfactory.com/2011/06/accelerator/

He's also saying that he intends to resurrect Triangle Startup Factory, which is good news.
be the Fashion Police coming to take me to a gulag for frumpy people

Would that be Slashdot?
The Snow Building is extra cool, just because of the presence of SplatSpace![1]

[1]: http://www.splatspace.org
I was going to put effort in to responding, but on second thought, it's just not worth the five minutes that would require. Best of luck to you Staunch.
Cafepress IPO Filing Gives A Glimpse At A Crowdsourced Business Model
The part that goes to the wall is detachable. What about making the other side detachable violates the aesthetic? Or am I thinking of something else?
Date and time handling with date() and strtotime(), magic methods, simple and practical array handling, proximity to the HTTP so you can solve problems the way you want instead of the way someone tells you you should.
It's downright embarrassing how long it has taken the computer industry to make that the default behavior.
Best of both worlds: www.livescribe.com
see also - http://classroomm.com/objective-c/index.php?topic=4939.0
The big problem I have with the "to the cloud" ads is that there's no real call to action, just a vague message that this "cloud" thing seems neat.

It shows you a bunch of features under the vague branding of "Windows Live" and "The Cloud", but it's not really clear what you're supposed to buy or download to get them. Are you supposed to run out and buy one of those touch-screen desktops they're showing off to get the features? Is Windows Live a thing you buy in store? Are these features actually already in Windows 7, and if so, in which apps?

As a techie I'm aware of the distinctions between Windows, Windows Live, the Cloud, and the touch screen computers that feature prominently in these ads, but most people aren't.

Apple is great at clearly getting across the idea that say, iCloud is baked into Lion and iOS 5, so be prepared to get those things to get all the benefits of the iCloud. They give you a simple name to hang all of the benefits they talk about on, a concrete way of obtaining said named item, and a date to expect to go and buy it.

Microsoft, in contrast, can't seem to clearly articulate to people how to get the benefits they are being shown.
4pm eastern time to 7pm pacific is peak time for submissions b/c everyone gets to the end of their day and starts browsing the web.
When i grew up in india taking cold showers was very common, infact my dad till to this day shower mostly in cold water.
Oh the other hand, at least 18,500 people learnt or were reminded of who Les Paul is and what his contributions we're.
Exactly, I've broken two of the cables so far and they are just bad. Period. Then, someone gave me a different, much more robust, cable, and I thought: "oh ok they realized their flaw, finally they improved their power coords". - Now I look at the image on the reddit post (http://i.imgur.com/yAywo.jpg) and realize the cables I've broke are the new ones, and the good robust ones are from 2007. Funny. Well Apple is usually top notch with these kind of things, and I don't believe the industrial design department didn't know about strain relief rings (that's their job FYI). So I'd go with the theory of planned obsolesce on these ones. Apple certainly is capable of pulling shit like this.
This is THE most salient story about the 21st century economy
How Apple’s iCloud Could Impact… Everything
Planned Obsolence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence). Yes Apple is doing it, does it surprise anybody?

edit: well thanks for the downvotes, I know RDF is strong here but consider how they removed the strain rings, how they charge $30 for a cable and why they use a proprietary port. Making cable is no rocket-science, this is definitely planned.