skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, whether admitting it is dumb or not depends a lot on whether you're dealing with an objective or subjective situation, and the odds * costs of being caught at wrong answers.

For an example of a subjective situation, in a poker game it can be useful to pretend to know you will win in cases where it is unknown, or even in cases where you know you have a weak hand. The other player's subjective impression of what you know is more important than its actual accuracy.

On the other hand, computer programmers and engineers usually are dealing with objective circumstances where not admitting you don't know results in things breaking and delays finding out the objectively true answer.

A common failing is to not recognize which of the two types of situations you are in, and just assume you should treat it like the one you are most used to. Hence engineering types may be ignored because they don't sound confident in their answers, and political types forget that that rules or legislation cannot override the laws of physics.
FWIW, if anyone is curious to see the process of building my entry ("Conway's game of death") I just made the repo public: https://github.com/dlowe/death

This contest is great. I'm so glad it's happening regularly again :)
>Sure, you can sue for breach of fiduciary duty, but that duty does not include no-holds-barred maximization.

That depends on what you mean by "no-holds-barred". If the company is giving up potential income they had better be able to explain the reason, otherwise it is a breach of fiduciary duty. Of course they're not allowed to do anything illegal, and you can probably get away with saying "this would give us bad PR". But "we don't enforce our patents because we think patents are stupid" is definitely a breach of fiduciary duty.

See here:

http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/sp...
Hacked Pacemaker Used For Anonymous Assassination
You mean like happens in Russian, Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish...?

I would love that. At least until I was faced with the shock of something like http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html.
I'm not aware of any database that solves this problem. Is there one? As far as I know, mysql reads must be distributed to the slaves at the application level, which has no knowledge of master/slave inconsistency. I suppose the time delta between master and slave can be queried, but that still doesn't protect from race conditions/inconsistent reads. This is actually why we chose to only utilize slaves for data redundancy rather than read throughput at my last company. Inconsistent reads weren't tolerable.
i am embarrassed to say this but rather than configure SELinux to do those little things - like local mail delivery or open a new socket for httpd - i tend to just disable it. i'll chalk it up to a usability problem on their part and not laziness to learn it on mine.

i'm familiar with it, i've written some policies in it, i remember when it was introduced. that said ... i don't use it.
Few office buildings require heat, even in cold-weather climates. The residual heat from lighting, office equipment, bodies, etc., generally has to be removed, not augmented.

Not always the case, but I can assure you that in California, office heating demands are very, very low.
Looks like shipping barcodes to my untrained eye.
MongoDB kicks ass in the following situations (real projects I did as a freelancer):

- dealing with semi-structured input (forms with some variability) and storing as a document, all while being able to query across the data

- used as a store to provide very flexible ETL jobs (with ability to upsert, filter/query, geonear etc)

For those situations, I would definitely use MongoDB again. As a RDBMS replacement, I wouldn't use it today.
This may help in the majority of the cases, but many applications also can't tolerate inconsistent reads across users/sessions.
> Smart people are more aware of the things they don't know.

Possibly, but I think it's more about insecurity.

If you're less certain of your position, it's harder to "concede points".

So yes - the good people say "I don't know", but maybe that's just because they can get away with it more easily (lower cost for them).
Why Branch is failing to fix online communication
A cardboard bike that could change the world
Multivitamins may prevent cancer in men
Riak does. You say, when writing, "please don't return until this data is replicated on 2 servers." And when reading, "please only return a successful read if this data is read from 2 servers."

So you have R = 2, W = 2, R+W = 4, and if your replication (N) val is 3, you're fine (you're always going to get consistency if R+W > N).

Riak is cool.
Django security releases issued
I believe hackers can get into any device. What are your thoughts?
I love AutoPatchWork (for chrome) for this purpose: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeol...
Believing You Can Be Smarter Actually Makes You Smarter by APA
I love AC/DC :-)
Sounds like Vimium, but with interactions for popular sites built in.
I believe Cassandra does as well, not 100% sure though.
Did Quora actually have hyper growth in the early days?
Pi Bow - the most funny case for Raspberry Pi
Review: Web2py 2.0
All good, except I hate the pink. You should make the CSS customizable in Options.
If you start a business and have majority ownership you can always be CEO, but CEO's not for everyone. You can most definitely read books on leadership, charisma, networking, etc, and go act out the role for a while if you're motivated enough. However if you're really a private-type technical person at heart, amazingly once you can afford to hire someone else to do that job (without losing your majority status) you may suddenly find that you don't want it anymore. If that's the case it will probably be better for your company too. Some engineers make great CEO's of course.
>Range queries are indexed differently

If I'm reading your description right, this is hardly mongo-specific. Try it in mysql, for example:

(index is [:last, :first])

select first from names
where last in ('gordon','holmes','watson')
order by first;

An index is an ordering by which a search may be performed -
to illustrate, the index for my small table looks pretty much like this:

gordon, jeff
holmes, mycroft
holmes, sherlock
watson, john

Unless the first key is restricted to a single value, it can't order by the second key without performing at least a merge-sort. They aren't in that order in the index.
WebSploit Framework 2.0.3 with Wifi Jammer
"No, large."
I work with robertjmoore. I, along with a few other colleagues at our small office, voted for his past three blog posts. Many of those votes probably came from our single office IP address. Many were probably also placed after clicking a direct link to the HN posting. There couldn't have been more than about 10 votes like this, because we don't have many employees. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't vote for many HN posts besides those written by authors I know.

Is this the behavior that HN's vote ring detector is trying to discourage? I understand that these things are a slippery slope - but if so, it's too bad, because quality content like robertjmoore's last three posts is getting lost, and I would imagine that other authors at small companies like ours are unwittingly falling into the same trap.

If there have been other posts explaining the DOs and DONTs of the HN vote ring detector, I apologize in advance for not having read them.
I'm really glad auth finally got in this. With the biggest obvious stumbling block knocked off the list, I have some questions;

Is this production ready? Should I be using this for a greenfield project?

What is database access like? Postres, Mysql? SSL connections to mysql?

what's a typical setup/deployment look like?
It's faster and easier to use than Vimium for common use cases as there is no need to enter a two digit link code to open a link.
Made out of wood pulp. Even so, the 20-pound bike will, according to a story by Fast Company [1], support riders weighing up to nearly 500 pounds. It will also be waterproof and fireproof.

If that's true, I think there might be punch of other use cases for the material.

[1] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670753/this-9-cardboard-bike-ca...
It is. Though it only works well if you use it like this: ./hou ansi.txt hou.c
Sometimes people will make investments that truly, really, make no sense. In order to appear smart, and to fit in with people they want to befriend (and with whom they want to work or do deals), others will give you very long-winded explanations of why you simply don't get it, this time is different, etc. In the end, common sense prevails.

Most of the "contrarian" bets out there weren't really contrarian at all; you simply didn't have enough information to understand what was going on. AH's deal for Skype, for example -- you didn't have an understanding of the psychology of dealmakers at eBay or Microsoft to know what would happen (and, to be honest, I find it strange and distasteful that they are so proud of an investment in which they screwed over all of the portfolio company's employees so severely). Investment managers, all of them, have no imagination whatsoever; a good deal is one in which you simply have a lot more information than anyone else, and are thus able to engage in high-stakes information arbitrage.

Sometimes investment managers forget they are just that, investment managers. They want to be cool, they want to be the man in the ring, they want to be the creative artist. That's where they screw up. Phil Falcone's disastrous bet on LightSquared is an excellent example of a really smart guy shooting himself in the balls in this manner.

RapGenius is one of these investments. And anyone who has been around the block longer than a couple years is fully aware of it. Whether they are willing to piss off AH and state this publicly, however, remains to be seen. Very few people have ever truly called out KP on Segway, or Sequoia on Color, for example. It pays to remain quiet.

As for me, I'm just hoping smart young kids will stop trying to analyze this deal, and others like it, in the hopes of finding or "discovering" any sort of logic in what they see. Don't waste your time. Don't base any of your own ideas on what you see happening. Just focus on what you're doing, and ignore all of this nonsense. Yeah, these guys raised $15 million. No, they aren't role models; no, their business doesn't actually make sense within the context of the deal; and no, you shouldn't try to emulate any of this crap.

Oh, and this article has it all wrong. It isn't at all difficult to get close to people in the entertainment industry. They are all watching their businesses getting disrupted by young technologists, so they have an obsession with getting to know all of the young technologists they can. You used to collect cars or jewelry -- now you collect smart kids with startups. I can't wait for the next big rap song that has someone bragging about how "I got way more startups than you."

Call me a hater, I don't care. I'm just being honest.
Show HN: HTML5DevConf - Overview with links to some of the big talks
They've emailed kickstarter backers 2 or 3 times letting us know this was going on. Kind of a customer loyalty bonus as well.
The i before e rule isn't much use. There are so many words that don't fit, and so the rule gets expanded.

I before E.
I before E, except after C.
I before E, except after C or when the sound is "a" as in neighbor and weigh.

It's a weird rule.

Off the top of my head: seize, eider, science, frequencies, vacancies, fallacies, either, feisty, society. Etc etc.
this is interesting, I'd like to see a comparison with foreach vs. for too - just out of curiousity :) Also the $var == "" kind of suprised me, didn't know it was that bad, although I guess this does rarely happen since most probably use empty anyway.
Just think how much wasted effort and embarrassment you could have saved Pixar, Disney / Disneyworld, HollyWood, Shakespeare and JK Rowling if you'd been there to point this out to them.
Help me understand this ⌘ + return. This "⌘".....don't know it? explain more...cant be able to open a new in a new tab using that short cut
You can't always choose the protocol you want. So no, the first step is not necessarily to use ZeroMQ, or HTTP, or Thrift, or whatever protocol you like best. Sometimes raw sockets are necessary.
MongoDB has such feature (maybe its depends on driver, but at least JVM drivers have - http://api.mongodb.org/java/2.9.1/com/mongodb/WriteConcern.h...).

As for me, it's mostly the quesion of perfomance, and application architecture, most time you don't want to wait until it's replicated to slaves.
Interview with James Fong, co-founder of Listia (YCS09)
Apple Wins Patents for Camera & NFC Alternative Technologies
To elaborate on the semi-structured input point: Monogo and it's kin are great for EAV systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...), where your entities can have an arbitrary number of fields (often user defined). Trying to build this kind of system in a traditional RDBMs can be quite tricky.
Or, if you'd rather stay out of Callback Hell, you could go with the alternate approach of not using Twisted. Personally, I'm a fan of Eventlet:

http://eventlet.net/doc/

I also hear good things about Gevent, which is similar, though not nearly as well-documented. Or just use vanilla Python; sometimes it's all you need.
Gatekeepers. Administrators control what is taught. He's proposing a site like HN, where users submit links.[1] The flip side, of openess, is that a Wiki site would need Editors. Or some similar ranking algorithm (and a defense against spam/seo etc.)

_____

[1] The destination/backend of where those links are stored/maintained etc is presumably also part of the platform. As would be some consideration about intellectual property, ect. To the user, though, the more relevant bits are in the above sentence.
Making a decision based on your gut reaction to a pithy quip is a very bad idea. Pithiness is a rhetorical technique, and hides misinformation as often as it emphasizes insight.

Pithy quips emphasize cleverness of expression. The cleverness dazzles, and seduces the listener into agreement—but if you actually stand back and look at what they mean, they often fall down badly. Many very clever quips are shallow, meaningless, or just wrong, but they sound profound.

People very often don't bother with the "thinking about it" step though, and the result is that pithiness helps spread a lot of silly notions.
Somebody else already cited this, and I don't think it proves what you think it proves. In this case, Craig and Jim were sued because they were actively attempting to diminish eBay's share value. In my inexpert opinion, it is not analogous to failing to enforce dubious patents. At any rate, the odds that Amazon would actually have been sued for failing to enforce one-click strike me as incredibly low.
>Tromp's entry is amazing.

It really is, which leads me to wonder how difficult it would be, to deobfuscate this into code that can be understood by the average programmer?

At least in terms of being able to say what it does, without being told.

While most would probably regard security through obscurity as bad practice, perhaps there are practical uses in certain contexts.
It likely also includes cost of transport (it is a fairly large stainless steel structure) and installation (digging a hole, moving existing cabling out of the way, etc)

If not, prices have risen very steeply since 2007. http://www.visit-gloucestershire.co.uk/boards/topic/2674-str... states:

"The Urilift and associated installation costs amount to £45,000 (broken down as £27,000 for the product and £18,000 for installation). As the structure is made of stainless steel and is very robust its lifetime should be 15-20 years - equating to a cost of only £2,000-3,000 per annum in addressing this serious problem. Maintenance costs are estimated at only £2,000 per annum."

If £27,000 still seems expensive, you must consider that these things stand outside the whole year round, and, given the target audience, probably do not get the best of treatment by their users.
It's the command key on the Mac and the control key on Windows. What OS are you using?
Well, I subscribe to this quaint notion that people mean what they say unless there's a solid reason to believe otherwise. The advantage being I don't have to pretend I can figure out what really motivates them. I just listen. The 20th century would have been a lot nicer if the people in charge had done the same.
The technology behind Felix Baumgartner's jump from stratosphere
You should check out http://redditenhancementsuite.com/. I wish there was something similar Hacker News, or there is?
Just my opinions here:

>Is this the behavior that HN's vote ring detector is trying to discourage?

I hope so. It's great and all that you have 10 people to vote up an article as soon as its posted... but I don't. Shouldn't the content be voted up based on its own merits vs. how many people you know? An instant 10 votes is a huge unfair advantage.

> if so, it's too bad, because quality content like robertjmoore's last three posts is getting lost

If the problem is the content getting "lost" because you guys are voting up the articles... then stop doing that. If the content is vote-worthy it will get votes.

Additional comment: sure, I get that this wasn't clear to you guys... but come on. On some level you can see how this would be unfair- right?
I agree auth is a huge success, but no alternate DB support is a not starter for most I imagine. Any other non relational DB support would be a huge win, most people that I have talked to are blocked by Mongo's license.
Perhaps this is why they prefer to build datacenters in cold climates.
Can a computer game teach the basics of gerrymandering?
Rap Genius's stated plans are to be more like Stack Exchange than Quora. Each vertical will have it's own separate community and site so things will be more focused. As long as they're smart about picking verticals where they can get past critical mass, they'll be fine.

Quora on the other hand has been pursuing the one-size-fits-all approach which conflicts with the diversity that comes with increasing popularity.
I'd guess that at least for the new years eve 31st, there's be more staff rostered on than usual, but probably fewer then normal doing regular traffic patrol. I suspect Halloween is similar. I've got no data or evidence to back that up (and even less for Halloween, since I'm not in the US), but I'd probably choose to remove those two days as "exceptions". Filtering out other known public holidays might improve the signal to noise ratio of the data too...
The article starts out with these words (copied and pasted, emphasis mine): "It’s now common practice for colleges to require instructors to discuss with their students, on the first day of class each semester, the fundamental PRINCIPAL of academic integrity". As a non-native speaker and naturalized American, I'll have to ask: do we really care that little about the integrity of our language?
I would like to continue seeing high-quality content on the front page too. However, upvoting submissions based solely on the author is poor form. Submissions should live or die on their quality alone.

Giving a "boost" to your friend or colleague, even though your intentions are good, is unfair to other submitters.
> the merchant's customers are probably classified as the users.

I believe his subdivision of "customers" into "sellers" and "buyers" was to solve that issue - "sellers" are the merchants, and "buyers" and the sellers' customers. It all makes sense to me, but you're right - only in a context where you actually have customers
Cassandra does, you can write with a write consistency of W and read with a read consistency of R, and as long as their sum is greater than the replication factor (number of copies to store across the cluster) you have consistent reads. W + R > N.

http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ArchitectureOverview#line-1...
It's metaphor. If your life span is indefinite, a journey lasting a few hundred years is nothing.
well, a problem that I had when I was a barista (at a different coffee chain, back in 2001), was that we didn't have three sizes, we had four. So if somebody asked for a medium, I would get confused and say "well, we have two mediums", and if someone asked for a large I would have to ask "did you want the one that would reasonably be called large or did you want the one that is actually the largest that we have?". Whenever I tried to standardize "small, medium, large, extra-large" or "tiny, small, medium, large", then always half of the people would end up the wrong thing and get upset. It was lose-lose.

So now when I go to a cafe I say "I'd like a twelve ounce coffee", so I don't have to try to translate that through their local notion of whether that's "small" or "medium" or "tall"
The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
Are you going to let Microsoft finish falling?
Nerds were excluded by the System, then severely bullied, then Microsoft came, then made a revolution, then nerds became geeks, then geeks stopped being severely bullied, then stopped being excluded.

Microsoft is falling. Are hackers going to let Microsoft finish falling?
As far as I can tell, WriteConcerns don't protect from inconsistent reads in all cases. It looks like the most conservative setting is Majority, but even then there is no assurance that reads won't occur during the replication, nor that they won't occur to one of the minority of non-replicated servers.
I have to shake my head in admiration. What a powerful story - to start with not one failure, but three failures, and then to use the same tool you were trying to hock in those failures to figure out why you failed...and then, remarkably (at least for me) succeed wildly.

At least in this case, your tool provided some very valuable insight.
Ah, I didn't consider whether or not transportation / installation were included.

2007 was 5 years ago. Fuel and food costs have both risen sharply since then, as have the costs for just about everything other than labor. So, I wouldn't be surprised.
AFAIK, these things are operated by remote control by people standing nearby (http://urilift.com/: "Every night at about 22.00 the UriLift is activated by personnel from a bar nearby")

That way, they are about as dangerous as remotely controlled garage doors.
Except corporate philanthropy has limits. If the CEO of Exxon decided to donate 50% of all profits to philanthropy you can bet there would be a host of successful lawsuits.

If on the other hand a company's charter stats that 50% of all profits are donated to charity before it goes public then you your unlikely to successively sue them for continuing to do so.
Err, is there any way to get to the comments in HN?
Ask HN: What was the article about the effects of law on Protected Classes?
I remember there was a link here about a study related to the effects of law which tries to protect a class of people (e.g. the handicapped) and showed that they end up in a worse situation. However, I cannot find the article now and I was wondering if anyone remembered where it is. Thanks!
It's an early preview for a reason. That's why auth wasn't in til now. Not because it wasn't planned, but because the product isn't done yet. Wait for 1.0 before you start greenfielding.
Now I need to ask, what's blocking about Mongo's license?
How in particular are they blocked by Mongo license? It's AGPL but it only applies to changes made to the database source code itself. It doesn't impose any requirements on your application if you are just talking to Mongo over the wire.
We actually raised our target on advice from Naval from AngelList, because our original target didn't incentivize VCs to get in if they wanted to. For our business, raising the target was actually more helpful with raising more money, because we got oversubscribed faster, but with a number of VCs in the round.