skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working on a perl script that will serve as a migration assistant from WhatsUp Gold v8 to Nagios v3. My company has 1,300+ hosts and 2,500+ services, all in various groups and states of health. It is my job to port over everything.

The version of WhatsUp we are using does not have a good way to export the configuration, and no API to query, so I am basically screen-scraping the web GUI for all the relevant info. I then do some basic sanitization (there are some illegal chars in Nagios configs), error-checking (how to handle a URL with a loopback IP address), and some cross-reference (putting hosts in groups and attaching services to them).

Overall it has been a great learning experience for me. I got to know Nagios quite well, practiced my perl a bit, and got to use git beyond just the tutorials I had read.

I plan on open-sourcing this as soon as I get permission from my employer. Company time and all that.
Well, I'm using the AST to power most of the analysis. So the first-order diff is lexical--it works on syntax ignoring whitespace and the like. The second-order stuff, like matching substructures, is based on the first-order diff, but is semantic.

I'm also planning to add more semantic features. In the short-term, I'd like to detect other simple refactorings (particularly renamed variables). In the long run, I might even add very language-specific features (like trying to use type information to help with merging).
A better body.*

* Biohacking my medical condition is my number one preoccupation
The trial of Rajat Gupta: The insider
C++ GUI
That is a good idea. Might even be able to just get away with not displaying a language name or anything so if it's off a little bit, it won't matter much. For example, there'll be much less worry if some C# gets mistaken for Java in rare instances - I'm guessing in those instances the differences won't matter.

Thanks for your input :)
Probably meant to post the link, so here it is:

http://silkjs.org/
BTW, I don't like the word 'Follow'. Follow might've meant something else in the long-forgotten past, but right now, it means 'subscribing to someone's rants on a social network', which is _not_ what you mean at all. I think 'Discuss on HN' or 'Discussion' or something like that would be a much better title.
If you're complaining about namecalling, why would you resort to much coarser namecalling?
Just finished a Perl app called Daystack. It's a web-based calendar and notebook that helps users manage their day and their ideas.

Right now I'm working on a seamless way to encrypt and decrypt notes in the browser. This way only the encrypted version of a user's note is on the server.

https://daystack.com
Thanks for checking it out and the suggestion. Definitely will have to be upgraded soon (hiding it in the footer menu isn't the answer I guess).
Building a 2D virtual city: alphatown.com (today we push a new signin system).
A better life for my family.
Exciting stuff. Sebastian might be staying up late working on the 'Milk and Cookies' humanoid android release.
Quip - Awesome new Twitter app for the iPad
If your concern is that a single entity is going to have your information, then Diaspora wouldn't help you anyways, as long as at least one of your friends is using a federated service that is a majority service (like blogger).
How to outsource some brain power
It's the second time tonight that I've failed to read something that's just under my nose. Maybe I should go to sleep (it's 4:27 AM here)...

BTW, OS X's dictionary (/usr/share/dict/web2 - Webster's Second International, 234,936 words) is more complete than Linux's (and doesn't contain plurals!) :)

aftercataract

devertebrated

gazetteerage

reasseverate

terracewards

tessaradecad

tesseradecade
Are you asking if you should learn Qt?
Would an Apple TV with apps potentially become a games console? I don't know much about the connectivity available in terms of controllers, etc.

It would mean apple could infiltrate the lounge room gaming market without having to actually produce a competitor directly to the xbox/ps consoles
Easy money: Russian Zuckerberg provokes crowd fight over $160 notes
Yes. They did that at the beginning, but since they scaled up they have brought a lot of it in house.

I was addressing the fact that even though they did logistics/warehousing, I still believe them to be a database frontend (inventory/customer/credit cards), and I disagree with the above statement:

> However, I'll disagree with Amazon.com. Purchasing real world products is much more than just a database frontend.
Which of the Basic Assumptions of Modern Physics are Wrong?

As a Sci-Fi fan, "Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light" would be a nice one to be wrong
Care Unaffordability for America’s Warriors Cannot Be an Option
How are you liking ImpactJS? I have done some looking at it but the hundred dollar price tag just to try it turns me off.
Apple not interested in 'traditional gaming'
Given where Lasik is at, aglasses are going to be a purely optional fashion statement in 10 years. It will be perfectly acceptable and fashionable ( at times ) to wear them.
This. I'm surprised nobody else mentioned security. Instead of chilling DRAM sticks immediately after shutdown and trying to read its contents with specialized tools, people could just take the NVRAM out and analyze it at leisure.

I don't think it will be too difficult for security software to wipe their keys from memory before shutting down, and many programs already do this. But so much more would remain vulnerable unless the decrypted data structures were also wiped from memory. Implementing effective security with NVRAM-equipped computers might therefore negate much of the benefit of using NVRAM in the first place.
As my numerics professor said, "The more dimensions, the more you curse" :)

This has to do with trying to get a finer estimate of a problem. Suppose you have a one dimensional problem you're trying to solve. You take the line segment, break it into 100 pieces. These techniques usually a matrix with about 100 rows in it, and you have to invert it / find and eigenvalue, etc. These are O(n^2) or O(n^3) depending on the problem.

Now, let's get a better estimate, and use 200 points. We've doubled the number of points, so our solution now takes 4 to 8 times longer, depending on the type of problem.

Switch gears to a 2d problem. You now have a 100 X 100 mesh, that creates a matrix with 10,000 elements. If you want to improve the accuracy, you need a 200 X 200 mesh, which creates a 40,000 element matrix. Our algorithms cost O(n^4) and O(n^6) to get a better measurement now.

Now consider 3 dimensions and beyond. Your 100 x 100 x 100 system becomes a 200 x 200 x 200 system. This makes what is technically known a FREAKING HUGE matrix. Your algorithm is effectively O(n^6) or O(n^9), depending on the problem type.

You can see how this gets nasty quickly. HTH
Nice! I'll apply tonight, after I get home from work :)
Failing Fall Line-ups Offer Depressing Vision For Network Television’s Future
Oops, true! I mixed GR and SR
Very cool idea - that's taking user feedback to the next level. Will have to give it a spin.
Ask HN: I'm not graduating on time, and I have no idea what to do
Hey, I've been a lurker for about a year, but I'm posting from a throwaway to avoid repercussions later on in life...

I thought I would be graduated by now... in fact, as it stands most people think I did. It feels terrible seeing my parents and relatives celebrate my graduation when I know that that diploma won't be arriving in a month. I told them awhile back that it wasn't looking good for one of my classes, but they seem to have forgotten. I went through with commencement mainly because the party had already been planned with friends of my parents who also had kids graduating from the same university.

I took a painful number of classes this semester - 7 classes (21 credits) just so that I could graduate this Spring--it backfired, hard. I failed two of them, though it should be three (the professor and I worked out a deal). The day after commencement, I also got a call from my department head explaining to me that my grade for senior design would be lowered to failing because of ineffective communication with our "customer", despite having the project he requested completed. Admittedly, I could've answered more of his emails, but I had more pressing matters with tests and papers. I figured that as long as the project got done, all would be forgiven. I'm meeting the dept. head tomorrow, which will ultimately determine my fate in that class.

I've learned the core of the CS curriculum, and I was really looking forward to working at a startup at this point, but now my plans have been completely derailed. I don't know if I can return to college--my funding has been entirely from my aunt as my parents can't afford it.

Things aren't looking so hot HN, and I would appreciate any advice you guys have. I'm planning on breaking the news to my parents tonight--I just can't continue to have normal interactions with them otherwise, my conscience can't stand it.
This is very true, by some odd fate of chance... google searches... I ended up finding a great source of information for three.js on Reddit and that made me look to it for other stuff that I am also interested in. That little treasure made me look more in depth, wish I had found what is "beneath" sooner actually. So, congrats on your great content linker site, hope you keep improving it and long live.
Your comment looks kind of greyed out. I may have accidentally downvoted you while trying to click on your name. Sorry 'bout that.
I'm working on a simple app "Smileship". I am new and trying to learn php/mysql while building this. My app is fairly simple. The main aim of my app is to inspire people to smile.

You can see it at: http://smileship.com

Soon, I and my friends are going to work on plagiarism project as our college major project.
Love it. I'm not an engine guy, so having some of it done for me is wonderful. ImpactJS is well documented, reasonably fast, and has classes for the basics that work well. Plus it has a level editor that now includes collision detection. I'm satisfied with the $100 price.
Fitness is a cornerstone of success. I wish more people took it seriously.
The 9-5 bug [graphic]
What happens if you train a neural network too much?
Over the weekend I built a little app to simplify selling on craigslist. It essentially turns your listing into an auction, tracks views and handles all of the inbound e-mails. All you have to do is accept the best offer(s) if you decide to accept any at all.
This might help --> https://www.shiftdata.com/
This is the kind of tripe we were hearing just before the bubble burst the last time. Turns out, you really did need to be concerned with how you were going to make money. There are no money fairies that are going to put the dough under your pillow.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/22/kleiner-perkins-sexual-hara...

This is in response to a gender discrimination lawsuit.
The problem with tangible/intuitive models is that our sense of what is tangible/intuitive is based primarily on our millions of years living in the Newtonian realm of the universe.
Side note: I used to have relatively decent hooks into the music industry. A friend of mine is a well-known producer and while he was coming up in the 90's was working with a lot of then-popular artists. I heard multiple stories about name brand artists calling him up and leaving a message on his voicemail that went like 'Hey Mike! This is [Foo] I had this idea for a melody... It goes do doot doooooot dododooooot toooodoooooo. Or something like that. Can you put that down on an instrumental track? Maybe add a little bit of, you know, like cool drums and a keyboard? k thanks bye'

And then he would, and 6 months later you'd be hearing it on the radio or on an album.

Of course, in between the phone call, his prototype track and the release would be HOURS (I've been in 15 hour studio sessions) of mixing, remixing, tweaking, etc.

So, yeah, I'd guess Danny Elfman might write his 'pseudo-code' into a tape recorder that somebody then makes a first pass at. But that is not what you finally hear as the released song.
I'm working on a tool that helps you find the webpages you've previously come across.
This is primarily done by showing large screenshots with each bookmark.

I plan to add a variety of page-browsing tools to help you find that page quickly (from color palettes to cover-flow-esq flow).

http://folindux.com
Toronto, Canada needs a hug over here. Any teams or members willing to partner-up so that we can rock this baby across the finish line ?
You might have a look at http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/ Attempto Controlled English http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/docs/ace_nutshell.html
Jesus. Remind me to never work at a place where they count sick days...
Note: this comment is just about my experiences. I'm not trying to make a broad statement about all companies.

I think it depends. A lot of organizations would rather terminate the employee and find a replacement than wait for their leave to end.

Alternatively, many will replace the employee without terminating them; after their leave, they'll re-hire them if the position is open (aka they're hiring), otherwise let them go.
I wonder if votes are an expression of interest in the (payments) product.

That aside, I not only assumed Facebook had thought of the idea of payments, they might even be working on it. It seems like an extension of the "Like" button they already have on so many sites.

Certainly Facebook is certainly thinking about new ways to make money, but they did disclose that ads are a risk factor in their S-1, with special concern for increased mobile device use, where they don't currently display ads.
Parallel gzip, in case anyone wanted it: http://zlib.net/pigz/

I've used it to great effect during incident response when I needed to search through hundreds of gigs of logs at a time.
Its tough to keep quiet when you think that you've been wronged, especially so publicly. However, you're right. This isn't something that can be won in the court of public opinion.

Simply say: We adamantly disagree with the allegations and will defend ourselves in court.

Then keep silent until the case is won or lost. There isn't much to be gained from making public statements. You don't want to seem like the allegations are correct, so you want to attack the accuser. But that will only make you look worse. So all you can do publicly is make vague statements to show how diverse you are. And that doesn't help much either because all it does is remind people that you're involved in a discrimination suit.

I expect that this is the last we'll hear from them on the subject until after the suit.
Wonderful looking site, the UI and UX look really great. Wish I had a use for the tool myself.
Well, that's how physics works. Physics is stupefyingly strict about its methods. Most sciences don't put quite as much value into models. The problem is that in a desire to strictly follow the method, physicists have become complacent with regards to extraordinary claims. Sure, the universe is full of dark matter, connected by tiny strings, in between folded up dimensions, but gravity is leaking away into parallel universes, since that's what the model predicts (rather than it just being a mathematical anomaly arising from botched assumptions). It's comparable to an economic model that describes inflation as the work of invisible leprechauns who increase prices during the night. Sure, it might make accurate predictions, hell, it might even be true, but you should not put any value into it unless there is evidence that the universe actually works in the extraordinary way the model claims it does.

Biology has followed a much better path over the past century, and biologists are rapidly building up an extremely thorough understanding of how biological systems work without relying heavily on algebraic models. Physics fails to provide explanations for even the most basic physical phenomena like motion. It's effectively just assumed to exist as a law because some authoritative physicist said so and all other models rely on it.
Lousy web site (IMHO) a 3 inch wide column of text in the middle of my browser and not even a picture of the car
I have to ask: Does your naming company have a name?
I disagree with your assessment. I'm aware of xz and use it when file size is paramount -- which, by the way, is almost never. Most of the time, I'm willing to give up a few megabytes in order to save time, and in my tests pbzip2 crushed xz by a factor of ten when it comes to speed.

Why not use parallelized versions of xz such as pxz or pixz? Because pre-built pxz/pixz packages are nearly non-existent. When that changes, I'll consider switching formats.
Did you miss the whole FTL neutrino thing that happened not very long ago? Physics seems to be pretty open to new ideas to me. Even though that was ultimately shown to be an error, no crackpottery was ever suggested.
I’d have agreed with you just a year ago, but not anymore. Firefox made TONS of performance improvements and Opera actually got significantly worse at memory consumption.

At the end of the day, Aurora (with several addons) is usually below or around 300MB with my normal daily use, whereas Opera Next can easily go beyond 1GB of virtual memory.
JSX - a faster, safer, easier alternative to JavaScript
Smartphones used to be dorky (less than a decade ago!). So did computers and even wrist watches. I'm pretty sure "electronic eyewear" (which ARE dorky now - see oakley's nerd product, the Thump) will follow suit. Dorky, then widespread, then sexy and desirable.
Has anyone written a "Screw the Novice Users" article yet? The market is wide open!
I realize OP already altered the title, but I just want to reiterate that this is a universal problem and has zero to do with East vs West
seven: two dual-core Mac minis, an Atom-based netbook, and a Galaxy Nexus...

...plus the ones in my synthesizer, drum machine, and camera, I suppose. There's probably one in the router, too.
That looks very promising. As others have pointed out here, pixz would be much more accessible if one could simply install it via "brew install pixz" or "aptitude install pixz".
Given that really the only thing a computer can do is store, manipulate and present data, what else would make sense to store that data? Aren't RAM and hard drives pretty much databases?
Uh... the whole subthread was about NVRAM and the likelihood of it replacing the filesystem with different storage models. You'll have to forgive me for inferring an opinion about the subject we were discussing; I just don't see how that can be a straw man. It's just what happens when you inject a non sequitur into an existing discussion.
I've been using Folindux for awhile now, and it's super useful for collecting inspiration websites. I did, at one time, have a Tumblr that did this, but this works so much better with the bookmarklet. It still has plenty of room to grow, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here.
> The idea behind reCAPTCHA is that it occasionally throws in a word (or street sign, or occasional fragment of total garbage) that it doesn't know.

Yes, but you don't have to input those. Try it for yourself and see. (I never input them.)

When you do input them, it helps Google digitize books, street numbers, etc.--sort of like a "Mechanical Turk"--but it's completely optional. So you could devise a text-to-speech algorithm, but only for the word Google's CAPTCHA actually knows. (It's probably in the works as we speak.)
It becomes less able to generalize and its accuracy drops.
The article makes it pretty clear.
From the beginning of the article:

"My team and I at Parse have worked hard to create a platform that lets..."
Uh.

I might be getting old, but I remember a time where electronics ANYWHERE in your person were incredibly uncool.

They were called "wereables" from a reason.
Nicely done. Really.

Nice way to differentiate and monetize yourself from the competition.

Would it not be good to be able to assign a one-off task to a concierge (a la Exec)? Alternatively, have a "roll over" for unused tasks.
Your comment about controllers made me wonder about the possibility of using iPhones, iPods, and iPads as the controllers for games on ATV. People already play plenty of games using those devices anyway, so why couldn't they be used to control games on something bigger?
Ask HN: Splitting equity between a company and myself
I want to know how you propose splitting this company I'm starting, but here's some background first.

I got an intern-like drafting job at a company, even though I was getting a BS in Electrical Engineering (EE). As graduation arrived they told me they were not looking to hire an EE. They did ask me questions about my future, such as what industries (that hire EEs) interested me. One thing I happened to mention was that I was looking to start a company and told then about my interests. They told me to look into a particular (hardware) product. They also told me, likely at a different time and place, that they had thought about making this product, because: 1) There were no alternative suppliers 2) The lead time was at least a factor of ten longer than it should have been. 3) The price was too high. 4) The support was poor. 5) The design was lacking in several ways. 6) They, the company I had a job at, were a manufacture for several companies that purchase this product, but were also well connected within the industries that uses this product. 7) This has been an on going problem for nearly a decade.

Anyway, one day they sat me down and offered me this: They would pay me to develop the product and then spin it off as it's own company. The pay would not be as good as a full-time EE. They would buy me my own desk and computer, supply the software I needed. They would put me out back in the 'North 40', in a small office building they owned but were not using. So far they have paid for all of the development costs and material costs. The company I work for has 6 or 7 owners and 60 employees, none of them are leaving for this new hardware startup. They did offer to hire a leader/president, if I didn't want to run the company and do that type of day-to-day work, but be a lead engineer. They told me that if this startup didn't work out (failed), there would be no hard feeling, they would give me recommendations when I applied for EE jobs elsewhere.

The product is for industrial applications, meaning only companies puchase this product. It's a physical machine that requires power to run and does work (physics). It's for a niche market, basically a sub-set of a larger market. The larger market can not supply alternative products, because they don't pass state and federal regulations.

So far I've design the product, found suppliers, and am building several prototypes. It will then move on to (internal) testing and later to the regulatory approval process. Currently they see me in the research stage. At some point, I will report the feasibility of this product. The new company has not been created.

To me, they seam like an angle investor. They are supplying the money and the connections. I'm designing the product and later running the company.

My question is: How would you expect the equity to be split up? Questions are welcome.
Two birds, one stone. I think that's what they call in the industry "Experienced". Keep that up.
I do give them the benefit of the doubt, everyone deserves that. The reason I'm inclined to believe the allegations is that they're relatively mild, which makes them far more believable to mind mind.

I seriously doubt there was real premeditated or conspiratorial sexism on be half of the top KPCB guys, but I wouldn't be surprised at all that they unconsciously favored men for promotions/compensation. Even women have trouble not favoring men in that way, in my experience.

So even if KPCB loses the court case I wouldn't think much less of them. They're just humans at the mercy of their biases, doing their best to fight them, and sometimes failing.
Html5 based tethering for iPhone