skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't read too much into how other people behave on here.

I'm argumentative, rambling and usually off-topic, and most likely to satisfy my requirement for cognitive dissonance, I've carefully ignored my karma so that my personality on HN isn't beholden to my karma score. Obvious results, I might add!
Add A Youtube Video To Your PowerPoint Presentation
If you work presentation in Powerpoint, then is very useful add videos to make presentation much interesting and to keep the attention of the audience. Let´s say you need to add video from youtube.com, for beginning , you should download video and convert in a format you can use in Powerpoint.
Even in Oracle, we've had to schedule downtime for a single column schema change and population for 45 minutes. I would call Oracle "mature."

Note: I wasn't involved in doing the update, so it's possible there was a better way to do it. The table is used by about 50 different applications.
that is in fact what the president suggested in his "non state of the union" speech this week.

i didn't mean the post to encourage dropping out but upon reading it this morning, i realize it sort of does that
Succes is 99 % of fail and 1% of your efforts.
personally, i'm with tdavis. the level of cruft in windows is strangling it to death. the idea that they'd go so far as to make a fake window so display drivers can maul it is going WAY too far.

if you've got old programs that you really can't do without, then stick with older versions of windows.
My first question whenever I read about a new database system: Does it scale horizontally, by throwing more machines at it?

That's the one basic requirement for use in a website backend these days.
Ubigraph: Free dynamic graph visualization software
4 CS grads from MIT would be impressive, but more impressive are the two kids from RISD who raised $32k for their seed capital selling cereal.

it takes chutzpah to make it as an entrepreneur and the cereal guys can hire the CS grads from MIT easier than the CS grads can get up the courage to sell 800 boxes of cereal at $40/box.
I don't see how this scheme can scale simply for the reason that there's no built in balancer. What's to stop shardN from becoming overwhelmed when all the power users end up there, while shardN-1 has no activity?
Did you investigate any other network DBMSes? If so why did you find them inadequate?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_model
It's also probably has something to do with google's overall architecture for parallelism
Government May Force Ex-Bank Chief to Surrender a Chunk of His $23 Million Pension Pot 
Ex-RBS Chief Executive Sir Fred Goodwin may be forced to surrender at least some of his £650,000 a year-lifelong pension entitlement after RBS made the biggest loss in UK corporate history.
I recently read his book, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue", and while it was a little bit unbalanced (he spends far too long dwelling on certain points), I really enjoyed it.
The nature was forming for millions of years, and I don't think humans are smart enough to hack it, sometimes we are not able to hack computers that we have invented. This climate change is because of attempts to hack the planet. I am not against the progress, but when we interfere in the nature, we should think more than twice.
Ignoring everything else, I wanted to answer this one:

> 1. Is there a way of saying that some grammar is more complex that others - objectively?

I think so. English verbs, for instance, are significantly easier to conjugate than most other European languages. There's just less stuff to remember.

Another example with verbs is the subjunctive, which has all but disappeared from English (I wish I were, rather than I wish I was), but is still very much required in a language like Italian, even in the present tense: (Credo che sia importante instead of credo che e` importante, which is translated as "I believe it's important").
While your approach to do this in JSON is cool, I think you have overlooked the 'direct' solution to do this in a RDBMS - with a linked list. Here is a quick suggestion (works in Postgres):

create table l (
id char primary key references l(prev) deferrable initially deferred,
prev char unique not null references l(id) deferrable initially deferred,
mydata text not null
);

then I populate the table with your example items:

insert into l (id, prev, mydata) values ('A', 'F', 'dA'),
('B', 'A', 'dB'),
('C', 'B', 'dC'),
('D', 'C', 'dD'),
('E', 'D', 'dE'),
('F', 'E', 'dF');

let's see how that looks like:

test=# select * from l;
select * from l;
id | prev | mydata
----+------+--------
A | F | dA
B | A | dB
C | B | dC
D | C | dD
E | D | dE
F | E | dF
(6 rows)

to insert a new item into the list, you would do:

begin;
update l set prev='G' where prev='C';
insert into l (id, prev, mydata) values ('G', 'C', 'data for G');
commit;

so that's one update, one insert for an insertion into the list. Note that the two commands have to be in one transaction, because inside the transaction the foreign key constraint is violated (as allowed by the deferrable initially deferred modifier).

Let's inspect our list again:

test=# select * from l;
select * from l;
id | prev | mydata
----+------+------------
A | F | dA
B | A | dB
C | B | dC
E | D | dE
F | E | dF
D | G | dD
G | C | data for G

so the predecessor of G is C, and the predecessor of D is G, like specified.

Of course, you loose the ability to sort with 'order by', but that's no big deal: you know the predecessor and successor of each item, so it's easy to traverse the list in either order. This could be done on the client side [probably the best solution in your case], in the application code, or inside the database with a stored procedure or with a recursive query (coming in PostgreSQL 8.4), in Oracle it could probably be done with 'connect by'.

In reality, you would of course choose other datatypes for id and prev (probably integer), but I wanted to translate your example as literally as possible. Another problem that's easily solved: how do I get all elements of one list? Solution: Either give me one 'starting element' and the list is traversed and returned. Or introduce a listId attribute and select by that, which is probably faster but without sort order.
> Meanwhile, the majority who either don't want that or don't care have other choices.

Be careful with 'majority' - it's probably not really even something most people are aware of being a possibility. You'd have to go to someplace that's older, and with less space, like Europe, to really see a large variety of walkable city centers - the US only has a few, and they tend to be places like SF (and even there is not really all that walkable compared to a European town) that are simply untenable in their cost for most people.

In other words, people aren't really choosing - they're born into it, just as Europeans are born into what they've got and can't easily go live somewhere with low-rise, car friendly, suburban style sprawl even if they wanted to.

Also, what's with the "diverse" scare quotes? If that's his preference, that's his preference. Nothing wrong with that. I don't really care one way or another about living in a diverse area myself, but would find an unwalkable place a very sad place to live indeed.
Still seems to be too many of them at 2009-02-27 12:40:10 +0000. Also, playback gradually slows done here on Firefox 3. I gave up after about 1160 on Michelle's replay.
15 iPhone Golf Games
Here are 15 interesting golf games available for your beloved fruity device to keep you occupied even when it is raining cats and dogs outside, preventing you from hitting the green with your golfing buddies.
cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496467
If these sites were viable, but not a "fit," then we would be hearing about AOL and Yahoo selling the properties, not closing them down.
I was thinking of it. I recently rewrote thruqueue to support a api similar to SQS (where messages are locked on read and if not deleted put back into the queue). Not sure of a clean way todo this with memcached
Gmail Chat invaded by Phishing Scam
Google’s e-mail service has been invaded by a phishing scam that is using instant messaging to dupe unsuspecting users into giving up their passwords. Once users’ Gmail chats are hacked, the phishers take over users’ chat accounts and send out messages to other users purportedly linking to a “funny video.”
When we talk about software development, it's easy to spread the value created by the community to all people. What about other spheres of economy (agriculture, for example), it's much more difficult.
"Bleak-looking"? For a site that wants to sell people things? I'm curious what the strategy behind that visual concept was - doesn't it fly in the face of what most sales sites are supposed to achieve?
Common Lisp's library problem
API? As far as I know the plugin is basically a port of Quake III into the browser window. I don't know what kind of API he could publish; this isn't Flash or Java.
The Anti-web Manifesto
You shouldn't have to sell your soul just to download some music
Perl4caml allows you to use Perl code within OCaml
highly un-scalable
Demand for iPhone App Development Passes Facebook
Facebook's “In-House Sociologist” gives Stats on Users' Behavior
Some people.

Id is having a go at these people, plus all the others who can't be bothered to jump through any loop beyond clicking a link and ok-ing the browser plug-in installation.
What to do if your startup is about to fail
Computer Shopper Is Going All Digital; April Is Last Print Issue
Thanks for taking the effort. Are tags implemented as just references from a tag "foo" node to the tagged item?
The point of the advice is that if you cut too much your body starts catabolism (destroying muscle tissue). Ever kg of muscle you lose reduces your basal metabolic rate, and so if you go on a really restrictive diet you will find that you can't go back up to what was previously your maintenance level without gaining weight again.

Yes, you need to keep to A diet for the rest of your life to avoid adding weight back, but if you cut reasonably low amounts of calories of your maintenance level you will be able to go back to a much higher level when you've reached your target weight than if you cut a high amount of calories to get your weight loss.
Why is enterprise software so bad?
Think he does mention CD Baby (few paragraphs into the article)
Middle Men, Aggregators, And Apologies
I find it frightening that in the U.S. at least, basic research seems to have seriously declined at the government and large company level. Bell Labs is gone, and most companies now are focusing on applied rather than fundamental advances.

And before people start piling on large companies and the government with the usual rant, try to figure out how you could invent the laser, fiber optics, tcp/ip, lunar landing, orthgonal frequency division multiplexing , etc, with 2 college dropouts well-versed in rails and javascript.
Instead of 'branding,' how about startup-friendly policies for Mass.?
Gazelle is the browser that thinks like an OS
is there a regular build of the PDF to save those of us that do not want to fuss with lyx and latex?
I followed this diet 3 years ago and it did have great results. I think that the exercise had the biggest effect on me, as I was completely flabby. I'm planning on starting again as I have reverted to my old chubby self the past couple of years.
This is an interesting idea. You'd have to watch out for usage spikes that would end up dropping a large number of messages (kinda like paging... I suspect this gets worse quickly as the same message is sent multiple times). If you put some guards on the sending side, you might be okay (but with multiple senders this could get messy quickly).

I suspect in the end you will grow this to the complexity of one of the already mentioned messaging solutions. If you don't like them perhaps something like spread (odd licensing), jabber, or irc (my personal favorite) would work for you.
1. Development process is led by managers, not developers.
2. Developers frequently work under time / budget pressure.
3. Money is the only stimulus, so the developers try to make software good enough to get paid.
4. Big companies try to make something big.
For the lazy:

pdf: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomps...

html: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Indeed.

Plus, any "Japanese hate American products because they're cultural elitists" meme needs to minimally pretend that the freaking iPod doesn't exist. iPod had something like a 60% share within months of being launched while competing against like likes of Sony on their home turf.
The Microsoft patent attack
Good practice. Do you end up cleaning them up ?
Why your tiered password scheme is flawed, and what to do about it.
FWIW, you can hang out with the clubs and associations and not attend college.
Why does this topic keep coming up?

The same comments, the same threads, the same post-hoc justification (from all sides), the same faulty logical extrapolation, the refutation of aforementioned, etc., etc., etc.

"Anti"-college people: Hi! You do not need an article on a blog - even a great blog from an expert - to justify your life decisions.

"Pro"-college people: Hi! You do not need to act uncomfortable because you did go to college. What an idea. Where's the defensiveness coming from?

"Try inventing anti-cancer shark-mounted LASERS without college degrees!" / "You sure wouldn't hire a BRAIN SURGEON without a degree!" people: One of these things is not like the other. The kids who bypass university thinking they will strike it rich with a social network for iguanas would not go on to invent anti-gravity boots -- or torts -- if only they'd tough it out thru 4 years in a state school.

Who'd I miss?

Remember, folks, historically speaking, many of the world's greatest minds had no university education in their fields. And a lot of them did, too.

Who the fuck cares?

EDIT: PS: I dropped out of high school at 14. Take that!
Yellow Is the New Green
Blogger tips
Ask YC: Coding War Games Definition Required
I am planning to have Coding War Games for developers in my company. It will run for 24 hours and teams of 4 developers each will take part into it.

The idea is taken from Peopleware as most of you must be knowing.

I have explained the terms and condition for the event here:

http://dev.digi-corp.com/2009/02/coding-war-games/

Now as per the book the definition should require efforts from 1 man month to 2 man month. And it would be good if it is taken from some project which company has already done.

We people work on PHP, ASP.NET and VB.NET mainly and thus would like to have definition which is platform independent and can be written in any of the 3 languages.

Have you people taken part in such type of Coding War Games? Can anyone suggests good definition for the event which is exciting for developers to code in 24 hours?
ITunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?
@masukomi, have you tried 1passwd? I was about to buy it so if you have tried it and found a serious flaw I'd be interested to know.
cool, i didnt know about http://rufus.rubyforge.org/rufus-scheduler/ , that you're using in this project.
Travian ae27
Thanks for the recommendation. I had never heard of Forth, except as a buzzword, until I heard a local hacker give a short explanation of Factor, which is largely inspired by Forth:

http://factorcode.org/

I played with the demo a bit. It's very interesting. Even in the first few minutes you can sense the potential power of its super-spartan stack-based syntax, though if you're the kind of person who hates Lisp because it doesn't have the C syntax your head will probably explode at the sight of Factor or Forth.
The Size of Social Networks: Primates on Facebook
Two writeups about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/02/25/25re...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16624-itunes-universit...

It was one psychology lecture of 64 students, half went to class, half skipped class but listened to the podcast. The podcast group did better on a test one week later.
Netflix not ready to dive into streaming?
Hi, is there any chance you could have a look at this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497070

and let me know how you resolve this problem in practice? (Or correct my understanding if there is no problem really).
I think of Rt 128 as a Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
How do hash joins help with sharding? Surely once you go above a certain number of writes per second you're going to need to have more than one writable database server, at which point you need to start partitioning and better join algorithms aren't going to do anything to help.
I can't buy any of these explanations.

1. In my experience, most managers in the software development world started out as developers themselves. In our organizations, most of us managers still do a fair amount of development as well.

2. This is true. But how can it be otherwise? Anywhere in this world we must make decisions based on how to allocate limited resources. This is true even for open source development. A project must finish at some point, else it's a failure to begin with. Thus, we cannot invest infinite resource, and must decide how much we can invest in each part of a system.

3. I have not found this to be true. Virtually everyone I have ever worked with takes pride in doing a good job. Can you cite evidence to the contrary?

4. I'm not sure what this means.

I think that much of the problem has to do with #2 and maybe #4 (depending what you meant). That is, many important enterprise projects are just as big as large "shrinkwrap" software. But the number of customers is smaller, so the cost of development must be amortized over a smaller set of buyers. This means that there must be some balance of higher prices and cost-cutting. I suspect that the economics works out so that cost-cutting pressures are stronger in the enterprise arena than for shrinkwrap products.
This kind of storage should work very well with SSDs instead of disks. Is this the case?
Print You Favorite Wikis As Books, Courtesy Of Wikipedia
Facebook Pages Redesign Coming
This is a very important point.

Most people phrase the issue as either attending college or getting some boring job and missing out on the "college experience"...

The better model is to not attend college, but to hang around the college town and attend the clubs and associations...and network with the folks that are doing more than just attending classes...these will be your co-founders :)

The real stuff goes on at night when folks are working on their side projects.

The other benefit of this model is that you don't have mountains of debt from tuition...so you're able to take more risks later on.
I haven't, but one nice thing about 1Passwd is that I'm pretty sure that even if you don't use .mac it put your passwords on your iPhone (if you have one) with 1Passwd Touch for use when you're away from your computer.

Overall it looks like a pretty nice app, and I like that it works across browsers and makes it so easy to retrieve your passwords.

I really don't like the reliance on .mac for syncing between computers though. I feel that .mac is totally overpriced.
There is one in the Downloads section: http://github.com/tjweir/liftbook/downloads

I'll build a more recent one asap.

There's no nightly, sorry :(
Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 released
Beyond hot desk communism
Augmented Reality...(cool trick by GE)
No, they don't. My question asked whether yours was a convenient wrapper for cron jobs or if you implemented the same functionality in a cross-platform manner. Thanks for your answer.
$400 Unlocked Developer G1 Banned From Accessing Paid Apps [Android]
Stop Catching Exceptions
FTA:

> Many perfectly smart people I know have one strong password they use for one or two online banking type sites.

Unfortunately, banks are among the worst offenders when it comes to disallowing special characters and limiting password lengths.
How not to get a Wuzzy
Even something as simple as not charging $500 per year to create/maintain an LLC would be nice.

As a resident of the Commonwealth, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, the government is awesome and progressive. On the other hand, they want to be controlling and arbitrary. For example, there's huge biotech subsidies in the state - and it's a growth industry, but at the same time, it's somewhat arbitrary and means that those companies can pay up for things like office space since they're getting the subsidy and so they tend to become more of the economy. Likewise (since the article brings up transit), the Commonwealth decided that since a court ordered them to enhance public transit due to environmental concerns over that the big dig (a highway project) was causing, that it should be the MBTA (public transit authority) that should shoulder the cost rather than the big dig who created the need for the cost. That's simply bad economics to shift costs away from those that incur the costs. Likewise, the Commonwealth likes the double standard of free interstates (paid for by gas taxes) for everyone except those that live west of Boston (who must pay both a gas tax and tolls).

I'd prefer that the legislature tried to be a little less controlling of things on a high level and rather target the roots that they'd like to affect rather than simply deciding something like Industry A is good. Maybe something like, "companies with strong growth can get a discount tax incentive." Why companies with strong growth? Employing a lot of people isn't useful. Progressively employing more is useful. Being large isn't useful, growing larger is. So a company that exhibits strong growth is likely to employ more people in the future - especially if it has more capital to invest in itself. Likewise, if they've shown that they can do good things with capital, those companies will create more profits and more taxes in the future. Heck, even make it something like this: companies that show strong growth can defer (some of) their taxes for 5 years. That's like an interest free loan that gets them to locate in MA and have their growth in MA since that growth comes at a steep discount in cost with little long-term cost to the state.

I'm not complaining. Taxes are reasonable and services are high compared to other states (http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/460.html). It's a good place to live, despite the weather (although that's even nice today).
I thought impossible was nothing.
Developers at Mixi create a tweeting, IRC chatting coffee maker
I'm also in Japan and I found myself wondering how deep the author's experience went in Japan. I've never heard the iPhone described as unfashionable, for starters.

I agree about the sheer variety of phones. I think battery life is also a concern. Aside from that though, I think it will just take time. I haven't heard anyone say they hate it and quite a few people either have one or want one.
Would add Guy Steele's "Growing a Language":

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
The good news is that you don't have to use .mac to sync: it works just fine with Dropbox (and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't with other sync system).

To be honest, I don't use the iPhone app so much mostly because I would still have to type my primary password there and it's not convenient on the screen keyboard. Also it uses a custom browser (or a browser element inside the app) and not the regular Safari. That can be an issue for some sites. But I still have it in case I need access to one of my randomly-generated password.

Overall I highly recommend 1Password.