skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came here to say pretty much just this. SQL and declarative relational programming are extremely powerful. The new breed of DBs are throwing away something with a solid mathematical and theoretical foundation.

In fact, I wonder if a lot of the reaction against relational databases stems from a lack of understanding of the declarative style and the underlying relational algebra.

Most of the programmers I have worked with can write Java or C# code just fine, but they do just like you described when writing SQL, which makes SQL seem clunky and perform horribly. On the other hand, when you start thinking in sets, and learn to embrace the query optimizer (it does work) you can stop writing silly SQL code and write beautiful and elegant code that does exactly what you need 99% of the time.

I like Ruby, Clojure, Haskell, JSON, shell scripts, and dang it I like SQL.
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Like libraries?

[edit] More seriously though I think 'universities' as we know them are important for particular things. What is likely to take off in the future however is good independent accreditation for private-study. The most important failing of universities at present is that you can hardly ever fail...
Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch, higher education is a positional good. It is about scarcity. The original author recognizes this at

"The real question is whether broadening access ends up reinforcing the educational caste system: if you're not smart or rich enough to go to a "real university," you become one of those poor, second-class students with a certificate Online U."
I made a picture tagging site - Please take a look
I'd really appreciate if I could get a few people posting to maybe let it improve a little bit. Please let me know what you think as well.
Speaking as a fellow who won a Jolt Award for JProbe, ( shoots cuffs), there are lots of ways memory leaks can happen. A "Lapsed Listener" occurs when an object is no longer active but is pinned by another object observing it for changes. The infrastructure should have removed the observer's reference of used a weak reference.

A "Lingerer" is an object that should be garbage collected when it is no longer needed, but is not garbage collected until another object replaces it. For example, if you have some sort of process pool like a pool of database connections or request handlers, you might have memory that is needed to handle a request. Many naïve programs free that memory when creating another request by overwriting references to it. However, it should be freed when the request has completed. Although the memory is not permanently pinned, performance suffers by having it "linger" unecessarily.

These types of memory leak anti-patterns apply to all garbage-collected languages.
The point is he might be making a loss to the business for some other goal (e.g. making a quarterly number that his boss will reward him for, costing the business even more), so making assumptions based on the value of the expected average market value of the car has a decent chance of setting the value higher than the value of the car to that salesman at that point in time.
Remote Pair Programming with tmux and Vim
Like always, if you can't trust your machine, you should stop using it and reformat it. The only security comes with a controlled behavior in which software is installed in your computer, which websites you visit, etc.

Any software switch can be overriden by a silent hack. Besides, overhearing conversations is the least of your problems if your computer is compromised. I would worry more about documents and web browser data.
It could be wise to fire Dodd just to allow the MPAA to continue making contributions without risking interpretation as a quid pro quo.

From the Hobbs Act: "It is important to note, however, that it is irrelevant whether the public official in fact intended to hold up his or her end of the bargain--it is enough that the official had knowledge of the payor's intent to buy official acts."

Supreme Count statement in McCormick v United States (1991): "The receipt of such contributions is also vulnerable under the Act as having been taken under color of official right, but only if the payments are made in return for an explicit promise or undertaking by the official to perform or not to perform an official act."

Related analysis: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/whitecollarcrime_blog/2005/...

See also Chapter 6 of http://books.google.com/books?id=gJY-i4QHHC8C&lpg=PR7...

For example, consider Case 4 (http://books.google.com/books?id=gJY-i4QHHC8C&lpg=PR7...) which is very similar to Dodd's, and which Lowenstein argues might be considered bribery under the Hobbs Act, in light of McCormick v United States.

An (opinionated) editorial on the topic: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0606.birnbaum...
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What about putting a wee piece of tape over the mic hole?
At large scale, there's something even better than money: votes.

Make a website where I can express my point of view about some legislation (SOPA, PIPA, etc) and then, given a list of candidates for the elections in my district, show who should I vote for based on their voting history.
True, I find the same thing myself. I find a good mark in a test provides only short term satisfaction whereas having a thorough knowledge of something can serve me for years to come.

There are however a lot of students who see academics as something of a game and measure their achievement by score, the fact that they may learn a few things along the way is secondary to their desire to be able to say "hey , look at me I'm a high achiever please pay me lots of money". These people would probably be lost without a grading system of some kind and a lot of them are actually very smart people who probably should be at university.
ذكرى ثورة 25 يناير - January 25th anniversary of revolution
It would be interesting to know the identity of the vendor for "DBMS-X". I work in the "enterprise" data warehouse space and I'm trying to advocate moving away from "database appliances" towards distributed computing, and having a quotable source from Google would be very compelling.
Lobbying in its most basic form is simply free speech. I should have the right to assemble with like minded people and say whatever I want. We should also be free to contact politicians with the message, or pay for ads on TV with our message. How do you stop this and claim to be a free country? I don't much care for Citizens United, but I am certain the founding fathers considered political speech to be covered in the 1st Amendment.

I agree with the idea, but the devil is in the details. Congress should start with a cooling off period for staffers to work for lobbying firms, but I don't even know what it means to "criminalize lobbying".
Did Giants Strategically Concuss 49ers player Kyle Williams?
Professional engineers have their very own strict certifications, entirely independent of the university, precisely because the university cannot in general be trusted to weed people out.

You in particular may be incorruptible, but if you were untenured and the student had a lawyer I'd bet on him "passing" your class.

The counterargument: If the student can pay cash and wants to take an engineering class why not indulge him? Shall we deny all those without math skill the opportunity to even see, say, robotics, just because we're sure they'll never be qualified to practice it at a pro level? Why is the purpose of calculus class to sort people into silos rather than simply... Teach calculus? And why can't a student of means be allowed to fail the classes of his choice?

One answer is that engineering education is so expensive to deliver, and demand so high, that we can't afford to lavish it on hobbyists. (If you've had the pain of trying to teach a class containing students who are over their heads, you can feel this argument in your bones, because the resource being wasted is your time, for which you are not well compensated.) But... Maybe we can fix that? Productivity-boosting technology has many uses.
The current education system was built during the industrial revolution and for the time I think it worked great. The problem is that the world has changed since then, information is more fluid and free-flowing. People are exposed to a wide variety of skill-sets and specializations. The old structure no longer works and needs to be evolved the same way the rest of the world has.
I don't think that public funding of elections or free advertising (see the bottom of the page) are the solutions to government corruption. That would just force bribers to be more covert. It's analogous to the fact that SOPA wouldn't stop piracy.

It seems to me that the real solution is to dramatically limit the size of government, so that there is nothing to be bought, rather then just changing the currency used to make the purchase.
Andreas Pihlström | This is scriptogr.am | scriptogr.am
There's a number of little things that would make lobbying less effective.

- Move legislators back to their home district

- Term limits

- Permit them to only accept contributions from registered voters in their district

- repeal the 17th amendment
Paranoia much? Surely a much better approach to security would be network monitoring, anti-virus and vigilance. This sounds like blacking out the windows because you can't be bothered to close the curtains.

If your tin-hat doesn't feel like enough protection, try downloading and installing Sound Flower (Generally cool app). Basically it lets you 'patch' one audio output on the computer to an audio input, so you could record the output of your computers speakers at near full resolution (Useful for screen-casts/video game play through and probably lots of other things). Activate Sound Flower Bed and select the option along the lines of 'no input'/'no device'. Go into system preferences and select the Sound Flower device as the default input device.

All of that is, however, completely irrelevant since applications can select audio inputs external to system preferences and record the input at whatever volume they like. (E.G. Skype can use a different input to the sys default, Logic Pro can record from all you system inputs at once etc.)
The adversarial tone of international vs. domestic manufacturing was probably due to compassion for the "Maddies" of the US. True, there seemed to be no care for the "Maddies" outside of the US giving it an "us vs. them" feel. Not necessarily racist, but overly patriotic perhaps?

If anything this phrase caused me a furrowing of the brow "the Gildemeisters and their ilk".
Any ticketing system that supports attachments is OK.
I'll tell you what else seems to always be listening - the camera on the MacBook Pro, even when the little green light is off.

Cover the camera with your finger or shine a flashlight/mobile phone screen into it, watch the keyboard lights react. It's obviously listening for light level changes.

I just wonder how much data you could collect from the sensor without the green light turning on?

edit: I'm wrong, see my reply to jcromartie
And you can actually redistribute it yourself as widely as you like, just not take cash for it except in their store.
The Death of Antivirus Software
Oh no.. Site's down!
Yeah .. umm .. and there is no guarantee that your CPU isn't broadcasting every single operation to a top-secret government satellite, either. The technology is there: have you audited your CPU today?
Even if the default input device is set to "Line-In" software would be able to get the audio data from any device on the system. The NSA precautions mentioned in the article are superstitious and would likely do nothing to deter anyone who had compromised your system that badly.
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State of The Union crowd-sourced live voice translation (up to 6,975 languages)
Wouldn't the reduced size only mean that there would be fewer politicians to pay off?
If you mean that a smaller government equals a government with no power, then why have a government at all?
Exactly. I was going to suggest using something like Soundflower to create a fake sound input device, but at the end of the day it's still a software thing that can be overridden.

If you're really paranoid, you could always remove the mic with a soldering iron... =)
Limit its size...and limit terms.
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HN-Effect:

--------------------

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Maybe I just read it differently, but for me this article described a way to cram things that I _want_ to do (other people might play the violin every night at 20 for fun?) into the early morning hours.

You're making a good point, _if_ we're talking about doing business in these hours (like trying to progress on your own little startup idea). If you just want to meddle with a small project, experiment with this $randomNewTech or improve your code for the fun of it, then this attitude of 'It should be fun' seems perfectly alright.
If you look closely, there's actually another dot next to the camera. That's the ambient light sensor.
As a brit this is one part of american culture I don't understand.

Why are academic education and sports playing so closely tied together?

Most of our football players for example would be a complete waste of a seat in any academic institution.
Too late, Bloomberg government[1] its already doing it.

[1] http://about.bgov.com/
There are actually quite a few of us here (surfing in nicaragua myself at the moment.) every month or so another article will come through with somebody you've never heard from before summing up a year's worth of traveling and building a business from the road.

Seems it will only get more popular over time, since every one of those articles has at least one comment along the lines of "ok, screw it, you've convinced me. I just booked my flight!"
And today, with the wide availability of books in electronic formats, not having an interesting book to read is no longer a valid excuse.
Edit: The main domain is back up.
what is now considered good practice?
Edit: Should be back up now. Sorry about that.
You're right. I thought that was the LED but it's not.

Well now, what am I going to do with this tin foil hat I just made?
Public Knowledge Advises Movie Lobby To Stop Threatening Politicians
Brief aside, what is the name for this type of writing? A longish piece in a magazine illustrated with personal stories interspersed with facts about how it relates to the bigger picture and general trends? Editorial?
Citation needed.

Please provide studies to the effect that the practices you consider "proven" are, indeed, effective and references to the fact that they were widely adopted before the agile movement.

Because, so far, you've drawn a line based on personal opinions -- actually, just your own personal opinion -- about what's effective and what's not, what was common practice and what was not, said everything effective was common and everything not common is unproven, and then, based on this edifice or your own single opinion, declared that the agile movement didn't improve anything.

I'm very impressed with how much you deduced from your own thoughts, which means you are probably omniscient. In that case, you'll have no trouble providing actual evidence backing your statements.
That was fast!
Amusing :)
Thanks!
Not sure about this one. Fiddling a little bit, I'd rather say that there is a light sensor left of the camera.
Blanking only the camera does nothing, blanking the spot just left of it triggers the backlight dimming.
"Reducing the size of government" means to reduce the power of government, not the proportion of representation.
I don't know anything about Chrome extensions but I know that typical bookmarklets function in all browsers. So my question is: why? Why not just using bookmarklet as is?
Edit: Never mind. The site is back up.
Problem is they have no motivation to change. Universities must like the relative simplicity of taking a big chunk of money for sitting a bunch of glazed over students in front of a blackboard for a few hours a week.

Once they go online not only will they have to justify their fees but students may get this crazy idea that the university should be there to help them fulfill their own learning goals.
Use the same laptop RMS is using and read the source.
http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/
Would you consider posting weekly updates? I would really like to read them and I'm sure they'd contribute some traffic to new site.
If bribery has to be covert, it can be investigated by the legal system. In its current form, bribery is essentially legal. Think about Lessig's suggestion. http://rootstrikers.org

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-13-2011/exclu... http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-13-2011/exclu...
http://lessig.org/content/av/
Hurrah, so the people who would be bribed wouldn't be publicly accountable officials - they would be whoever we handed the power to.
>No, no its not. Its to show that you've learned the material.

But it doesn't do that. It merely shows you were able to perform well in a contrived testing environment that has little to do with how you'd actually approach problems in the "real world" (that is, everywhere but a test).

>12-13 weeks is plenty long to learn the material for a course. A student is at a college to learn. It should be their top priority to learn the material during the course.

I think you're missing the author's point here. Yes, a student is at college/university to learn. However, the job of the institution should be to teach, not to weed out students, and that's where the true failure is taking place. And again, nobody is always in full control of their life. Shit happens, as they say, and just two weeks of illness (or really any unforeseen circumstances) can cost you a whole semester. Some students need to juggle studies, work and getting enough sleep while pretty much having no life because of the horrendous costs of attending higher education (which is a whole other problem entirely).

>As for "failure #3", lectures have been used for hundreds of years because they work.

That's an appeal to tradition. They haven't been used because they work, but because there was no viable alternative. But now, we have such an alternative - video lectures and online courses.

>He also seems to miss the fact that for science courses, you need labs. You cannot do chemistry labs online. You won't be able to do field work in biology by watching a video.

That's true indeed. I don't think it's productive to attack universities as a whole, either. They serve a lot more purpose than just holding lectures. You can meet people in the same or adjacent fields as you, you can form connections, work in research (and maybe even stay there after graduation) and many other things. But that doesn't change the point of the article, which is that lectures as a teaching format suck when compared to the alternative.

>You lose the overall atmosphere of a learning environment through online courses, and that is not something I'd want to give up.

You'll have to excuse me for being a bit snarky now, but if by "atmosphere of a learning environment" you mean cramped lecture rooms, long and drawn-out lectures without much (if any) interaction with the lecturer with the overall process often being more of a hassle than anything else for all involved parties, then no, I don't think that's something worth clinging to because we've done it this way for the last thousand years.
Flying the Spitfire From a Pilot’s View
To be precise: in old macbook pro versions, the sensor was in the speakers. The unibody macbook moved it next to the camera:

http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/22/where-is-the-ambient-light-se...
I like something similar:

(1) show a list of bills currently under consideration

(2) allow the user to 'vote' on each bill with some monetary amount, along with a preferred direction for the legislation ('aye' or 'nay')

(3) after voting occurs, the cash is distributed evenly to the legislators that voted in the direction the user desired.
Jus kulit manggis
Manggis nama buah yang fenomenal karena khasiatnya, tetapi jangan salah bahwa kulitnya pun tak kalah dengan buahyna. Kulit manggis memiliki banyak khasiat karena kandungan yang ada di dalamnya.
Please, lose the page-blocking pop-up. It's one of the worst web practices and I wouldn't even bothered reading the article if it weren't so praised in the comments. It's always easier to close a page than close the pop-up.
We are not touching the organic results. The code for the bookmarklet is freely available; anyone can verify that.
When you plug a microphone device (e.g. a headphones/mic combo that comes with the iPhone) into the single audio port on a recent Macbook, it will be detected and the control panel will switch to giving you settings for "External microphone".

The internal microphone no longer shows up, suggesting it is disabled as before.

Thus, the simple plug hack should still work.

(I'm running Lion on a MBP8,1.)
Plumbr uses heuristics but no feedback from the user, thus it can't learn: this will give bogus results beyond some project complexity threshold.
I'd be tempted to call it Gladwellian.
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Refusing administrative minutiae
Some useful scripts for Photoshop Layer Manipulation
1 Single Tweet Built A List by 1,000 in 48 Hours
Turned off. You're the 2nd person to suggest that. Thanks.
what is your lifestyle business?
Are you considering adding any other payments types? Not a fan of paypal.
It's just classic long-form essay writing.
Yeah definitely. If you want to, you can choose to subscribe on the right and it should auto-email you with each new post.
This quote from Christopher Dodd, heard on NPR the day after the blackout, really irked me:
"It sort of reminds me of kids who can't get their way hold their breath and start screaming, instead of engaging with the debate and providing information, encouraging a discussion on how this can be improved. It just seems petulant to me."

I wonder what he thinks of strikes, boycotts and public demonstrations, I guess they are all childish too.
Are you suggesting that my mac book pro is sending this data to some apple server somewhere?

Can you imagine A the traffic that would take and B the amount of useless information that would be recorded. They have millions of computers!

If its not being recorded locally or sent to an external source from a privacy point of view there is no problem. Both of these would be easy to detect by looking for sound files somewhere on the device or monitoring outbound internet traffic.

So is it battery life that you have the problem with?
Naive guess—Chrome extensions run automatically on specific domains. Bookmarklets run only when clicked.
Either am I. That's why the app uses Stripe to process our own payments. What others do you suggest to add?
Why do us small business owners care about optimizing TCP?

Why does Google? Because web search is behind billions of dollars of revenue. Micro-optimizations matter to them.
Yet you still get "democrats" who lower taxes, start wars, and restrict liberty. Yet you still get "republicans" who raise taxes, increase the size of government, and create social programs. If you have blue visible light and mix it with red visible light, is it still called "red" or "blue"? Or is there a different name for it? Because it sure as hell isn't still blue.