skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It’s knowing how indexes work and having the intuition to create the best indexes for your queries and your data set. Lacking this intuition, your production database will eventually slow to a crawl, you’ll upgrade your hardware in vain, and when all else fails, you’ll blame both gods and men.

it isn't an intuition. It is knowledge about access paths your system uses in query plans and how to manage them. "Intuition" and "use [always] indexes" - these 2 perpetrated legends is what frequently the root cause of the pitiful performance of reasonably large DB systems (ie. ones that many times larger than the RAM of the DB [cluster]). People get charmed by the "magic" of B-tree and miss the iron-platter reality of random vs stream IO. You see a DBA or DB developer expressing unconditional disgust pointing toward the red line of "Full-Table Scan" in query plan he managed to display in the GUI tool and you immediately understand what the situation at this client site is :)

Again, don't get me wrong, i'n not saying that indexes shouldn't be used - that would be the same mistake as to say they should always be used. What i'm saying is that you need to know (not intuit) when and how and why to use or not to use specific access paths.
The Language of the Web
To answer this question: do up a budget.

Write it on paper, soap it on a window, do it in a spreadsheet, use RoR. Whatever.

Write down your income, your deductions (federal income tax, SSI, healthcare, state, 401k).

Then list your expenses.

Compute them as a percentage of your income.

Rent and food are about 50% of my net expenses (including savings). Even my $100+ mobile bill is barely 1% of my budget. As with the Federal budget -- if you've got 15% of everything else (after entitlements, defense, and interest), then if you have a 30% budget shortfall (about the size of the current US federal deficit), there's simply no way you can cut yourself out of the problem through "discretionary" spending alone.

I can look to spend $200 less in rent. Or try to cut that same $200 from each of my cell, food, and incidentals budgets. Odds are I'll have an easier time finding a cheaper place to live (and the discount pays forward as it's a fixed payment each month).

Look to the big-ticket items first. It's a more efficient use of your time.

I cou
Reset the machine system state by deleting "C:\Windows\System32\". It's the only way to be sure.
You got to extremes with budgeting for food but you spend up on hiring a design firm for your frontend?

Your priorities are out of order. Some of the most successful sites on the web had completely shit designs.

The Google guys didn't even know html.
Laptop as wifi hotspot
Dropbox-Twitter-Facebook mashup
There Are No Bleeding Heart Republicans
Analytics Rock - Direct Insights on your GA Account
Agreed - in order to get a nice logo from 99Designs, I had to wade through ten tons of utter crap, but after doing that I both ended up with a nice logo and a relationship with a solid graphic designer that I've been working with directly to make additional assets.
Oh, sorry, the florid prose covered up the fact that you had scientifically proven your point.
Blog Posting Tips & Pointers for Beginners
Answer: Javascript allows variables to begin with unicode letters, but these characters are classified as symbols, not letters.

Internet Explorer 9 doesn't seem to follow the above rule, and permits unicode symbols at the beginning of variable names.
Fix your own site first if you are serious. It doesn't look that awesome btw.
Did you read the article? It's as much, if not more, about the style of teaching than it is about the fact that it's a foreign language to them.
Why Facebook becoming new Yahoo?
On-Line Thai Dating Sites
Love the design/UI for kennelboard... any ideas why it never really took off?
With all the good-paying ruby jobs out there, all over the world, why would you REALLY prefer to work for free? Why NOT applying for a proper position (or better yet, a telecommute one that would allow u to travel and work from anywhere)?

Just curious...
First time Google sign-in actually makes sense.
I'd like to know if you can return to Sony your PS3 AND all the game titles you've purchased for a full refund as they want to change the terms "after" you've purchased
خطب.الشيخ كشك. بالصوت والصورة
Deploying a Site With Git Hooks
Pirater un compte Facebook sur streaming annuaire
I'm based in Atlanta and would love to hear more about that.
I'm married, I have diverse non-software interests and outside hobbies. I still manage to pick up an awful lot of knowledge outside of my day job, and it's that knowledge that has tended to pay off in terms opportunities down the road.

If you want to be paid a lot of money to put in 40 hours and go home and never even think about a computer or feel compelled to pick up a new skill on your down time, hey man, I don't blame you. That sounds like nice work if you can find it.

But I don't think you're going to find much of it in a knowledge economy.

So if our hypothetical COBOL programmer had that job and is looking for something like that again, I wish him the best of luck, but I've got nothing for him. We aren't experiencing a shortage in domain knowledge.
Ask HN: Rent a SysAdmin?
My startup's team is 2 developers and a designer and we usually can get anything figured out that we haven't done before.

But we don't have anybody that is a real systems administrator and that is starting to cause some issues.

Is there any service that lets you rent a system administrator for a couple hours?

We could use some advice on a few issues as well as some actual system setup work but don't know where to look.

Any advice?
A single server running Now can easily handle 10-15k connections. The scalable solution you mentioned is called NowCluster. It is already in production-use by several companies, but has not been made publicly available.
Rock Star Fairies, 1st Edition
United States Navy Military domain is vulnerable to hackers
I wondered the same. The only conclusion I could come to is that they want to showcase this feature.

Based on the other comments on this one, the general consensus agrees that this is a bad idea though.
Well, for one, we're Parishes in Louisiana, not Counties, but that's mostly a pedantic thing.

There's another site that I've seen that does something similar: http://www.prodigyhealthinsurance.com/
BTW, while this may be a overly paranoid, check your local laws before getting a set of picks, especially if you plan on taking them anywhere.

When I got my set I lived in New York City and there you could plausibly be charged with possession of burglary tools for carrying them around.

As a practical matter I never worried about it, but things being what they are you should at least be informed about possible risks.
I don't know if this is really the case, but I thought lock picks were something you couldn't easily buy. But my friend from MIT told me that the Cambridge street sweepers used metal brushes and the bristles were long flat pieces of spring steel, and showed me a lock pick set that he made from that with a bench grinder. He had a few spare pieces and that's what I made mine out. Both the tension wrench and the rakes can be made out of this kind of spring steel.
Ask HN: What is your impression about new friend list feature in Facebook?
When I first read the blog I was confused. I thought that I have to make lists by myself hand picking my 200+ friends. But when it is rolled out in my profile I saw some lists are automatically created like family, my college friends, my office colleagues etc. They have smart listed my friends almost smartly. Saved hours of labor of creating friend list. Also having news feed on friend list is a great feature as it is missing in Google+ (I can not view each circles feed individually). Overall I am impressed. Competition is a good thing :) .
I know of no distros that set a default LD_LIBRARY_PATH, period.
There's a great scene in the Wachowski brother's early movie "Bound" where Gina Gershon is wearing a lock picking set as if it was a set of earrings.... Don't disagree with the legal risk you're describing, but female hackers might try the gershon approach.
I really wish I owned a rubik's cube right now.
Just for the authors' edification, Scriptlance is very "meh." I found the providers to usually be at least a tier below Elance, oDesk etc in terms of quality. $5 dollar-esque bids are the norm, which usually translates into that level of quality when it comes to code, imagery etc. But as with any freelance site, it's about the providers first & foremost. Pay close attention to the portfolios & ask detailed, focused questions before beginning any job.

Also watch out for North American middlemen that go out and farm your projects out to programmers in India, Bangladesh etc whose quality (or lack of quality) you may have no awareness of. Not that I haven't been burned in the past or anything...
I attended a talk that Matt Blaze gave on picking locks and he discussed various 'tools' that folks use. The fact is that many locksmiths make their own out of bits of steel or steel wire that has been bent into shape. Of course there are kits with a mix of tools in them that are often available.

But another thing he had done was to take a bunch of door locks and mount them into a board in a 3 x 3 arrangement (9 total locks) and removed pins so the first lock was 1 pin the next lock had 2 pins, etc up to 7 or 8 pins. Then you could practice picking them from easy (1 pin) to hard (8 pins). I found that to be a really clever thing and if you know someone who is re-keying their house or for some reason decides to replace all the locks, you can often get those from the locksmith doing the work.
Happiness up, Greed down
For me it just closed all but the original window and it says "This is the final hint". Not sure what I'm supposed to do now.
"that challenging kids and allowing them to excel is considered child abuse."

Actually that's nothing like my sentiment. There is an age and time appropriateness that shouldn't be overlooked. Immersive study is excellent - my own daughter had my support to immerse into Argentina for 6 months when she was only 17 and I certainly wouldn't have considered it unless she had life skills, coping skills and emotional maturity.

But, plunking a kindergartener into an immersive foreign language and culture environment is dubious wisdom.

While parenting is most certainly not deterministic, it does seem to me that the child (especially the youngest) experienced quite a bit of unnecessary suffering so that the author could proceed with an experiment. That the suffering ended with fairly positive results is as serendipitous as any non-deterministic process.

(edited for some grammar)
Wearing the sysadmin hat has been the hardest part of my startup. I just don't have the smarts or bandwidth to do some of the stuff I know I need. But on the other side I'm super paranoid about security and insider threats. So rent-a-sysadmin would be intriguing but there'd have to be some chicken and egg rating system in place to vet them.
Langford Pairing
Real Writing Jobs - Review
A complete and in-depth review on real writing jobs, total unbiased and honest with everything you need to know.
Actually, with that knowledge, I find your initial comment dishonest. You have a personal interest in seeing the project succeed. That's different than someone with no personal interest in the project thinking it's cool.
It depends on whether you want to make them yourself or buy them. If you want to make them yourself, street sweeper bristles work well (just follow a street sweeper on a bicycle and you'll get a few), as do the strips of spring steel inside of windshield wipers. Then, just look up some tutorials on how to make them (I'm sure youtube has a few decent ones). If you want to buy them, Southord has some really nice sets, and I personally recommend the PXS-14 for a beginner (I use it daily).
Minus the sites instability (seems to be extremely slow and causes chrome to freak out) this idea and implementation is very cool. I've learned stuff I didn't know before about our sites.
We like it here. We try to preserve what it is we like about it. Sometimes that means explaining our culture to new users.
Fair enough. I did continue - while the pedagogy is one thing, I still find the whole idea dubious. See my (slightly) earlier reply in the thread.
Is it just me or was it a god-awful write-up. There is very little extra information in this article other than the headline. What happened to researching, talking to people and writing a good article?
Stanford is offering free online access to their courses. You may want to check that.
Lock picks are generally quite easy to acquire: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EAME4W/

I don't know if they will refuse to ship to jurisdictions where laws are tighter.
Antirez is considering adding a special SUBSCRIBE command for internal Redis events. Right now it's planned to mostly handle warnings and replication stuff, but keys expiring would be a good usecase for it too.
This isn't a recommendation as such but may be of interest to you: http://learnlockpicking.com/

They sell a re-keyable pin tumbler lock that comes with a variety of different pins so you can practise increasingly difficult configurations as you learn.
Anyone interested in this might like to read the lengthy discussion from when it was submitted two days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999401

Edit:
On the other hand, it's now had a down vote, so I guess people don't want to read the previous discussion. I'll leave this here for a few minutes so people can see it, and then I'll delete it.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Second edit: Hmm. Now upvoted again. I'll leave it - let people up or down vote as you choose. It's late here - I'm off.
However, you are probably less enthusiastic than baseline because you don't agree with the reasons that cause others to be more enthusiastic or because those reasons simply don't cause as much enthusiasm in you. Any explanation of your lower amount of enthusiasm will be construed as criticism.
Hanging around certain bitcoin corners of the internet, i get the distinct impression that a good section of users (or, speculators) are keen to spin reality to distort the image of bitcoin prospects.. either through hopeful delusion, or (more likely IMO) as attempts to hype up the market.

This metric may deal with one issue, but it is still totally useless as an objective metric of 'the bitcoin economy'. A much more reality-based metric would be the number of retailers (etc) accepting payments in BTC (and their volumes if they were available). But this would be a much more sobering picture.
Thanks for the insights, Ted. It makes me so glad to see that someone else has struggled through some of these problems and done as well you as you guys clearly have.

Do you really provide support for most of the clients featured in your portfolio? There are so many! How much less do you charge than a typical IT company? Do you include the cost of support in the initial fee?

I totally agree with you that surviving on donations and grants alone would be too hard. For the first projects that Radical Designs did, were you able to charge? How did you convince organisations to go with you? And how long was it before you established your current business model?

Sorry for asking so many questions!
Check out this page:

http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583399/CoworkingAtlanta

Or for more general info look here: http://coworkingregistry.org
or the wiki linked above on the frontpage has a list of directories: http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583831/FrontPage

There's also a very helpful Coworking Google Group if you want to explore deeper and find the community.
Super Afiliados X – Segundo Video Revelado
Good to be aware of this if you plan to falsify your tax returns, according to a '98 NYT article (from which this post takes its neat title)

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/04/science/following-benford-...
Twhii (An experimental Twitter client for java phones)
If you want to extrapolate a more abstract lesson, I'd say it's less about thinking like a successful programmer and more about learning how to tackle problems while not following the "rules" of the problems. For example, a lock might have very sophisticated mushroom pins to avoid normal lock-picking techniques, and if you "play by the rules" with a normal tension wrench and simple pick, it may take you a long time - or it might never work. But on the other side, a sharp knock on the pins with a bump key refuses to play this game, and requires a different countermeasure for the lock.

It's about looking at the whole boundary area of the problem, rather than the generally accepted one.
Tom Kyte fan, by chance?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
The point of the UPDATE .. SELECT if updated pattern is that it's a mark-and-sweep completely outside of a transaction. Avoid locking > lock as little as possible > lock as quickly as possible.

Your blog is your business, the Lorax speaks only for HN.. (hey is Internet Lorax a job?) It would of course be great to update your readers, it'd be cooler to update your application and tell everyone how it worked out! Then you've got a story you can actually submit again
Embed iTunes now playing on any website (Mac Only)
I suggest you stay away from any of the elance/rentAcoder type sites, even if some of their customers seem to offer the skills you want at a price you find acceptable.

I gave them a try a couple of years ago to earn some beer money (I'm a sysadmin), and the rates that people went for were /so/ damn low that I literally couldn't see the point and just negotiated a raise instead :-)

I somehow doubt the genuine expertise and experience you'll derive most value from during a couple of hours session /won't/ be found at those low, low rates. Sysadmin are expensive ;-)
Interesting how the focus has shifted from performance / frequency to power consumption. I guess Intel is starting to get a bit of a scare of ARM's impending Cortex-A15 attack on the laptop space..
A (quite large) subset of Unicode characters, to be specific. Of course some "letters" are hardly recognizable as letters for many people (for example, Vai syllabary) but they are used as letters in at least one script.
Previous discussion of Benford's Law on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701342
A great designer would not be seen near such a place. Heck, any self respecting designer would do their best to avoid it. You're buying the time of kiddies equipped with photoshop, nothing more.
Sadly my situation is worse. 3am is probably average. I think I need to be more strict with time management on projects and also just go to sleep and maybe get up earlier, before school.
I've seen that discussion of new subscribe things; I believe it will be a good feature to introduce. I love this approach because its really simple and there is no new instruction in system (like backward compatible x86 machines) :)
5 Penthouse Suites Wallpapers
> Of course, if this .Clear method is a memory leak you wouldn't use it.

Yes. Exactly.
Twitter only seems to give you three options to choose from: Read, Read and Write, Read and Write and access direct messages. I used Read and Write for this app. Is there a way to be more granular and just request permission to tweet and is that going to have a notable effect on the speed of the app?
Is there a way for me to contact you? Im in the us. Thanks!
"The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them..."

"[P]eople who don’t like to be told what’s best for them" sure ended up in some strange company there.

Further, I would have thought that "Think Different" would not have welcomed, and not (I guess) repelled, "people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them".
I'm about to graduate college and have been considering doing something like this, but have zero business experience. There are plenty of non-profits that are doing great work, but relatively unknown and without much of a web presence, if any.

I'd love to be involved with this. I'm in Chicago/Iowa, and have some decent web app experience. Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, UI/UX and that newfangled HTML5 stuff.

rdgoetz@iastate.edu
if they didn't perform well in sub-freezing weather, they wouldn't be much use anywhere. as you gain altitude, things generally get pretty cold.
Yeah, you're definitely right. The only solutions I can think of are:

1) Training someone at the organisation to maintain the software (which could conceivably take a LONG time, and is fragile because that staff member could leave at any time)

and

2) Charging for long term support. The problem here is that maintaining legacy code is boring and frustrating, and it's going to be hard to get volunteers to do this willingly. So, we'd have to charge closer to the going corporate rate for it. Plus, it'd bloat the company with support staff, leading to increased bureaucracy, etc. (which is exactly what we'd be trying to avoid with the whole 'startup feel'.)
i find it interesting that whenever something that involves fatalities happens, the first reaction of people is to propose to ban it, while they continue to drive their suvs to mcdonalds while talking on the cellphone...
I changed it

http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/oldworld.html
Not every military vehicle is designed to be shot at. Even today most equipment is shipped to the battle zone on easy-to-sink freighters.
Creating Rich Interactive Web Apps With KnockoutJS
Im dealing with a few social enterprises myself and the funding is definitely one of the biggest challenges. Grants are certainly one way however relying on them can be problematic because they are hard ot get initially but at the same time its easier to get them once you get them the first time. Also usually they dont cover the total costs involved. Donations can be tricky because you have to get people to know about the product and to want to give money. Some are trying other ways such as developing mobile apps and selling them. My thoughts also is to talk to foundations and very wealthy people who might be open to investing in high technology products that will help people.
Why node.js? And Why not?
Can i contact you to discuss some projects im involved with?
"Work from a founder’s home"

Works great unless you're married or have a significant other at home. Trust me on this, after a week of seeing your face constantly even the most beloved becomes the most revolting.

See also: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home
This is a good point. My thoughts have been that if the product uses cutting edge technologies people might be more open to doing the work or helping out for a lesser charge. Hence why i use django as well as redis and mongodb and android.
Ten Startup Tips From Amazon Founder, Jeff Bezos
StartupU - Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Hiten Shah
http://www.startup-u.com
Airships are actually more efficient in cold climates. The craft gets its lift from the difference in density between air and helium. As the temperature drops air gains more density (in absolute terms) than helium.

In the early days of airships this caused quite a problem, since it meant you had to vent hydrogen at night when your ship was too light, and then drop ballast in the morning when it was too heavy. As the day progressed the sun would warm up the helium, making the ship too light again.

That's the big benefit of hybrids - since the ship is heavier than air it's tolerant of temperature-induced changes in buoyancy.
CSS3 Media Queries Tutorial: Part 1
With the introduction of a whole new market of mobile devices and tablets, there has never been more of a need for your website content to display across a variety of platforms properly. There is the old tried and true method of using multiple HTML landing pages that utilize JavaScript to redirect you to the appropriate page, then styling the content accordingly or you could make the entire process easier on yourself in the long run by exploring the possibility with CSS3 and media queries.
Did you track your performance beyond 8.5 hours?