skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel that my SQL skills are woefully inadequate. That however is probably one of the best traits of anyone allowed to play with a live database!

I'm not ashamed to say that --i-am-a-dummy.

All that fake bravado may get someone hired, but eventually he or she just ends up as an object lesson on a blog somewhere.
Those are mostly valid points/questions... I think some, such as knowing all of the date/time types and their precision really depends on what kind of work you're doing.

I've noticed a big difference in interviews between software companies vs. internal IT departments. IT departments tend to favor how much product knowledge you have. So they think a senior person should know what's new in sql-server 2005 vs 2000... or be able to rattle off the differences between all of the various ways to store date/time.

Software companies, on the other hand, care more about how you think and design things, and what you've built. Design an algorithm to do "X"... Make "X" scale... etc... I saw you built "X"... How did you do it?

I put down that I had used C# on a resume... My first experience with it was writing a server that monitored a directory for alerts, then did some processing on the alerts, and routed them to various other 3rd party boxes... I used the file notification, threadpool, and http client libs, wpf... I subsequently used it for some Project Euler problems.

Do I "know" C#? Well... After a couple of interviews full of questions such as "explain what a delegate is... what a mutable class is... explain IOC..." I would have to say no, I don't really know C#.

That hasn't kept me from using it to bring in hundreds of thousands in revenue.
I'm using it to do http traffic analysis on captured packets... about 2.5 million packets a second at peak. This is to provide realtime charts for our web service which didn't have realtime reporting hooks.

I am also using it for HTTP request reconstruction and retransmission in real-time to enable live-data and full load testing of pre-production code.
Sierra Club’s $26 Million Donation Fiasco
From 2007-2010, Sierra Club accepted donations from Chesapeake Energy, but now, under new leadership, it is turning down $30 million in new donations. Is it enough to turn down energy donations, or should it turn down all corporate money?
Shipping containers are a fetish among people who don't know what they are talking about - the pictures show two types of structures - structures few people can afford and structures few people would choose to live in.

None of them are as sensible as traditional modular housing:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Shipping+Container+Houses...
Foursquare Solves A Basic UI Problem That Eludes Google Maps And Yelp
Quiche eater - my new favorite word around the office!
SANS Security Training Course - Bangalore - February
I have worked with Ogone (http://ogone.com/) several times. No complaints so far.
My favorite adaptation of this was called Real Men Don't Play GURPS. An excerpt:

~~~

The easiest way to tell a Real Man from the rest of the roleplaying crowd is by the game he plays. Real Men play Dungeons and Dragons. Quiche Eaters play GURPS and Storyteller. Mark Rein·Hagen, the designer of Storyteller, was once asked, "How do you pronounce the dot in your name?" He replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolises how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." One can tell immediately from this comment that Mark Rein·Hagen is a Quiche Eater. Real Men don't need the abstract concepts introduced by Quiche-Eating games — like characterisation, immersiveness or realism — to get their jobs done. They are perfectly happy with a sword, a spellbook, and a beer.

Real Men use swords to kill monsters.
Real Men use swords to tame the wilderness.
Real Men use swords to negotiate peace treaties.
Real Men use swords to romance the opposite sex.

If you can't do it with a sword, do it with a fireball. If you can't do it with a fireball, it isn't worth doing.

~~~

This last line is perhaps one of the greatest ever uttered. sniff

full text: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm
Could you please elaborate on this? What are the "types" of your sites? Thank you!
This looks awesome! I love the term 'education club' too.

Keep me posted on progress please - alex@indyhall.org
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd much prefer to see "this was the line item last year, and this is the line item this year", rather than saying some circumstantial evidence supersedes a black and white figure.

If he cut state funding to zero, he cut state funding to zero. If some municipalities can still afford to run libraries on their own dime, that doesn't really change the fact. Especially considering that federal grants have dried up and municipal budgets have tightened over the last 10 years.
Actually, it has nothing to do with ruby. The problem here is that some people use minification tools that rely on semicolons. If that weren't the case, this would be a total non-issue.
Moisissure
Structured if implies block structure; Fortran had a single-statement if (with ambiguous lexing to boot). That single statement could be a goto.
So, is it cheaper per kilogram to LEO than SpaceX Falcon 1e?
RTFM usually means: I answered that question substantially, and at length, several times already. If you had bothered to do the tiniest bit of research, you would have found those or similar answers on your own.

Now, please, go away and only come back when you've at least done the homework.
Sounds like a really specific need rather than a broad issue, why not tweet them about it?
> And I used to do Java development in eclipse/netbeans with db, ide and appserv all running on one machine that had 2GB and I never had any issues... memory hogs hello.

This matches my own experience pretty well. I have a MBP with 8GB of RAM and a Linux box with 16GB of RAM at work for Java development, but that's because our Java web app at work requires 7GB+ (!) to get off the ground.

Most of my own personal development, be it Java (IntelliJ) or Python (ditto) or C++ (XCode or Eclipse) or C# (MonoDevelop), is done on a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM with no problems. I'm getting a MBP (yes, with 8GB of RAM, the horror!) largely because I want to be able to replace the optical with a second SSD so I can dual-boot Windows (and because 1680x1050 in a 15" laptop is kind of really friggin' nice, 1366x768 is kind of cramped).

Plus, even if the writer of this post was on point--8GB of RAM is dirt cheap in 2012.
It has an opportunity cost, as well as a fair-market value.
I like what he's done and I'd love to do it if I could somehow work around a few issues such as:

I have a job:

Go down to 50-60%, adjust living expenses accordingly

I can't build a house 8 hours a day for 30 weeks (1500 hours)

So go a bit more than 30 Weeks. Let's assume you work 3 days a week (60%). If you average 4 hours a day on the days you work and 8 hours on the days you don't, you'll be done in 60 weeks. Also there is nothing that says you have to work on the project alone. If you have just one person helping you 50% of the time, then you're down to 45 weeks.

I can't get the land deal he did

Have you tried? Sure you probably won't get land next door to where you're living right now, but if you're willing to relocate finding cheap or even free land is far from impossible.

No one said that it was easy, and I'll be first to admit that it's not for me and I'm not even going to try. But I'm also sure that for someone who really wanted to do it and was willing to make the necessary sacrifices it's certainly an option.
Joseph Puopolo Leaving StickerYou
> Granted, I've never ever encountered these, but still -- it's not as simple as you make it out to be.

There's one and only one of these cases which I've seen (and I'd see) happen: `return`, for users of Allman, while that is completely nutty (just as Allman) some people will write:

return
{
key: value
};

even though they're defining an object literal not a scope. The result is returning immediately (undefined) and dropping the object in space.

`throw` would be really weird, it may happen with a labelled break or continue but I've yet to see those ever used at all (so a user of these probably wouldn't fuck up the label, plus that label would become a bareword which most static analyzers would trivially see) and postfix operators outside of continuated expressions (e.g. function calls) are unlikely to be split.

I've been bitten more often by not having inserted semicolons than by any of those.
so... you'd have to write a series of ifs and single-statement gotos every time?
Buying up second hand books in bulk (think 5k+) and selling them individually on the Amazon marketplace. Incredible markups. Need lots of storage space though.
As long as we don't forget how to do everything, we can ramp manufacturing back up quickly. Currently there are manufacturing plants pumping out aircraft, tanks, ships, and munitions at a slow rate. They are limited by money and lack of demand, not by the ability of the manufacturing plants to pump out more. If suddenly we needed to double or triple capacity you bring in more people and machines to do the work, but the process is in place.

But if we stop building - even for a few years - we will lose all that and be back at square 1. This is why the Navy has a huge number of aircraft carriers. We don't need that many really, but if we stopped producing them we would lose all the institutional knowledge and experience. So they dribble one out every 5 or 6 years so that lots of people are constantly working on it.
Presenting Your Last-Minute App at a Hacker News Meetup with 500 Attendees
It's because you're using 10.5, last of the great OS-X's. Performance requirements went up in 10.6 and WAY up in 10.7. I have an old MBPro running 10.5 and it consistently feels faster (and is provably far more stable) than my new model work machine running 10.7
Um, the theory behind the government provisioning of police, firefighters and roads is that they are a public good. I.e., people will refuse to pay for police while enjoying not being murdered.
Its about time to distribute a radical new way of ads. We've had the same version of the fossil like "in your face" campaigns for the past 80 years. No matter how you try to tweak it, it will always end of being the same version of a very ineffective form of brand recognition. There are very early stage solutions to this problem with the start of social ads and and recommendations. We need to make greater strides to precisely expose users to the products that they need, at the same time removing the clutter. This benefiting both the distributer and the receiver (from shooting themselves in the face). :)
> my OSX and Debian files could be shared when booted into either

You can but you'll have to share data on a non-journaled HFS+ partition for it to be writable from Linux. Watch out for UIDs/GIDs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook#Home_Sharing

ArchLinux has their img booting from usb, so I don't see why not.
> Over the years our servers seem to die in the following order: hard drives, power supplies, motherboards. We tend to stay on a hardware platform until the [...] motherboards start dying

Hum, that's quite surprising. I currently tend about 250 servers, and server motherboards live way past any useful life.

In the 5 past years, I've replaced about one hundred disk drives, a few power supplies, two RAID controllers and zero failed motherboard.

This week I replaced a 2004-era motherboard by a newer 2008 one, because of its lack of SATA ports; the old board still works fine, but is becoming hard to work with (no SATA, no PCIe, DDR-1 RAM, 32 bits only...).
The inactive count is a misleading figure in many ways. It includes both 'dirty' and 'clean' (i.e. identical to what's on disk, and hasn't been altered) memory that's not been used for a long time. Purging 'clean' memory is instantaneous. The only cost you'll see is writing 'dirty' memory out to disk.

Your explicit purging is changing the cost of writing dirty data out from an ongoing cost to a single, longer, upfront cost. Instead of writing only when more RAM is required, you're forcing it all to happen at once.

Incidentally, the OS does try to keep an area of free RAM so that some memory can be allocated instantly, it's not only swapping things out when RAM is absolutely full. It's possible though to outrun this process if an app tries to allocate huge amounts of RAM at once though (i.e. more than is kept free for this purpose).

For your specific case, presuming apps are behaving well (see below) you would be better off quitting apps and relaunching them when you need them later. This will free up app the dirty RAM they've allocated (just like when you purge), but the 'clean' inactive RAM will not be purged (because that's not necessary - as I said, it's free to purge that kind of memory when it's needed for something else).

You also want to run Activity Monitor when your system is in it's bad state and see if it's one of the apps you're using in particular that's allocating lots of memory (check out the "Real Mem" column). The OS can't do anything if it's an app that's really allocating and writing to memory, it's obviously not able to just discard this written-to memory.

Really though, if you want to do all those things at once, more RAM might be required. Remember, with VMWare and the iOS Simulator running, you've got two whole other OSes running at the same time, it's reasonable they'd require lots of memory to work well!).

By the way, the purge command was written to simulate /worst case/ conditions when performance testing. It's designed to flush out caches so that the system has to e.g. load all an app's code from disk when launching.

[Source: I worked analysing this kind of thing at Apple until a couple of years ago].
When things break (and they do) having a stack trace start in the bowels of a minified library is hell. So you'd generally use the "normal" library and the project's minification/concatenation tools.

Even when they handle ASI itself correctly, these tools don't always handle things that nicely across files.
"very nice to the line engineers but hard on people VP-level and above"

That makes me wonder about a "sandwich" model of management - a leader at the top who has a lot in common with engineers at the bottom, together putting the squeeze on management (who still wield most day-to-day authority) in the middle. Looked at another way, authority does mostly flow downward as in the traditional model, but then you "close the loop" by joining those at the bottom back up to the person at the top so that nobody's left without recourse when they think things are going awry.

I'm not really sure where to go with that idea, but it seems to bear thinking about. I'll bet somebody smarter than me already wrote a book about it.
Ask HN: How can I get my HN password?
When I signed up for HN, I used clickpass and associated my HN account with a google account. I'd like to associate it with a different google account now, but when I try to do so, I'm prompted to login to HN to connect to my google account. However, I've never logged into HN with a username/password combo, and I don't see a way to obtain information about my password on my account page.
I would prefer a Seeks Project public server setup by the HN community. http://www.seeks-project.info/site/about/

I like everything about DuckDuckGo except for the search results. I so often wind up re-googling what I searched it isn't worth the effort. And this is with a unpersonalized Google version. I am not logged into any Google account, I run Ghostery and I clean cookies at every browser shutdown.

Many times a search time yields zero hits in DDG and I instantly find what I search for with Google. Sad but true. And yes, i use "" around all words and phrases in Google.
How is the power management of Ubuntu on the Macbook and does close-lid-to-sleep work flawlessly?

Those are the two non-starters for me with linux on a laptop. OSX just does an awesome job with both of these.
Matt Taibbi's is the only person I've encountered who consistently writes something on this subject that resembles reality, and I consider myself to be very conservative.

The mainstream media's lack of coverage (or poor coverage at best) of this subject has been shameful.

Prediction: all of this supposed austerity on Wall Street will be very short lived.
I just recently started learning Rails (purely out of interest).

Getting any form of Rails installed was a massive pain in the neck. Between GCC issues and architecture issues involving sqlite3 (for some reason), it must have taken over 12 hours of tinkering before I could even start the rails guide.

Nearly gave up on Ruby/Rails many times out of frustration. Glad I stuck it out though.
Steve Jobs's FBI file
I'm often surprised to see that few people get what's going on.

Jerry Brown wants to raise taxes (yet again). But the public at large is tired of waste, and refuses to go along.

So the Governor proposes cuts to those things that cause maximum pain to the public: state parks, libraries, etc. A fairer approach would, say, cut funding across the board. A $30M budget item in a $100Billion budget works out to, 0.03% ? If he did that, no one would notice and no one would yelp in pain. So, to drive the point home and make the public notice, you go for the public's soft spots.

The first thing Jerry Brown did when he took office was to sign contracts with the powerful unions in the state. Once they were happy, he turned around and started crying about the budget. Since their contracts are signed now, they can't be subject to these budget cuts; base secured!

More on California's budget woes:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-...
Employers like MIT grads because MIT makes you learn 1) how to learn 2) to get shit done. Soul-crushing courseloads may not be optimal for learning, but most employers care more that you're smart, get things done, and can learn fast on your own.

By allowing people to take things at their own pace, MITx will perhaps be more optimal for learning the material, but will not provide the same intense environment in which "hardk0re" MIT students are forged (for better or worse).

You could perhaps try to imitate this by taking a soul-crushing courseload from MITx and having a support network of others doing the same. It also makes a big difference whether your support network aspires to get certified so they can get a comfortable job, or aspires to (or actually does) build brain sensors or self-driving cars or musical Tesla-coil hats that play the Mortal Kombat theme (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEgaI6WouQ0).
Agreed. Aesthetics should be the first thing to go when they cause real-life issues for what you are making. The only value of the aesthetics of not having semi-colons is to the developer himself.
That's pretty cool, and, naturally, it looks like it was founded by some hippyish individuals not far from my home town of Eugene. Where else but Oregon or Northern California would people do something like that? :-) They do look like a pretty good option for a cabin for some land in the mountains. I wonder how well they do being left alone for most of the year.
I've been around the Internet for a long long time and that's the first time I've seen "SCNR". As I had to search to see what it was I'd suggest you expand it in future usage.

You are right in the point you make though, continental Europe is awash with ridiculous red tape and pompous bureaucrats. Although I have to say I am surprised that the he "got away with it" in the UK as it's not much better there.
Had an iMac for 2 years, loved it for the first few months, and then, over time I grew less and less enamoured with the OS.

1) Finder just plain sucks
2) Window manager is complete azz
I guess I prefer Compiz keystroke-snap-to-grid style window management vs dragging windows to desired positions and generally having a cluster-fuch of windows all over the place
3) Spinning beach balls, fun, OSX, the new Windows
4) Overall a McDonald's Linux for the masses

Yes, hardware support is excellent, out of the box works fine, blah, blah; in fact, for those suffering in Windows, I always suggest they buy a Mac; however, saying that, if you are comfortable outside of the GUI, why waste another moment on OSX?

Absolutely stoked here on Fedora 14/Gnome/Compiz ;-)
you were impressed with Sahil project -- in terms of idea or execution (so far). I for once still fail to see how he will fight with fraud and overall if enough people would want to use it. What do you think?
Hah thanks for submitting this! But the 50,000 was a joke. It was more like 500.
Well, this is a stylistic preference issue that does matter if it causes issues for people using certain tools or in certain situations (such as the tethering ISP issue).
The finance industry is up or out. So, no you are not employeed no matter what.
I think this is one of those stylistic preference issues that basically doesn't matter, which is why people will probably go on about it for weeks with no resolution in sight.

In theory, yes, it doesn't matter. In practice, it does (and YUI, etc. do not fix the problem):

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/401
Maybe U.S.-style wasn't the correct term, but since the NBA is regarded as the top basketball league in the country, it's what most people look up to.

The NBA tends to run a very isolation-oriented offense. This means that a point guard usually brings the ball to half-court, and if the PG is the main iso guy, he keeps the ball, or he dumps the ball to the main iso guy. The rest of the offense then spreads out so that iso guy is 1-on-1 with the defender. He'll usually play 1-on-1 (taking a shot or driving to the basket if he can) until there is 10 or so seconds left, and then the offense will start really moving.

Being from Cleveland, we saw this in the extreme when Lebron James played for the Cavs. We nicknamed this the "Lebronfense", because the entire offense (especially in the playoffs) consisted of Lebron holding the ball for 15 seconds and then making a move. This generally doesn't happen as much in other countries and leagues as it does in the NBA. Generally, guards and SF's who score a lot in the NBA are iso-specialists.

I'm not well versed enough in basketball strategy, so I'm not sure why this happens. It likely has to do with maximizing a superstar's athletic ability and overall impact on the game, but that's just a guess.
Access does not equal ownership
By the numbers: Apple vs. the world
Medical student + dev = new start-up, feedback? / Stay up-to-date on your health
now the computers program the people
I wouldn't argue for a "better" RDBMS with such a small silly feature. Obviously SQL Server is meant for developers (not DBAs) who are used to writing myCSVar = null. Besides you can turn it back on with SET ANSI_NULLS ON. Oracle also has a plenty of features which are not compatible with the standard (and which can't even be turned off)

'' (empty string) being the same thing as null is really neat though!
Ninja-fixed to avoid further confusion. ;)

Nevertheless it's great story about hustling your wares.
Can't disagree with that. The CEO defines strategy. Anything below that level is tactical. Many have difficulty in getting those two levels to bat for the same team - which Steven Sinofsky discusses in One Strategy.
"Lorum ipsum" and even "Lorem ipsum" worked fine for me.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35411291/ns/us_news-life/t/fla-f...

There's a reason it's free...
Why would you ever write that
The effort it would require to do something that absurd is astonishing.
I'm curious, what are some of the pains you've had with MacPorts? I've been using it for about 8 months with no real issues, but then again I'm not a C/C++/native developer.