skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Say there is an indie developer working on something like that, what would your wish-list be?
My OpenBSD story
Why do you put audit logs in postgresql? Wouldnt riak be a better storage?
I remember reading a long article (which I can't find right now) about those searching for planets around this system for many years. Great to hear that progress has been made.
> Unlike most applications, we are much heavier on writes than reads.

I think what they meant to say is that unlike most web applications, they are heavier on writes than reads.

Write-heavy workloads -- aka OLTP -- are the bread and butter of relational databases. To the point that people complain they aren't as good at read-heavy workloads.
I tried to use LaTeX to take notes in Middle School once, no joke, and I found it quite difficult. LaTeX is meant for explicit typesetting and having fine-grained control over your documents. If you want to write an English or Math paper in it, then it's perfect, but I think it's overkill for notes. I now use reStructuredText to write my notes and rst2pdf when I have to print them out to study. It's very simple and I don't have to worry about typesetting. For math...pen and paper. Your math example was well typeset but I doubt you'd have time to do all that in class short of asking the teacher to stop for 15 minutes.
Ask HN: So I was on front-page of several national newspapers in Singapore...
I don't want to provide too much details, but I recently got a lot of publicity for these things (welcome to Asia):

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/10/17/nation/12182362&sec=nation

http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/singapore/story/asean-scholar-stirs-controversy-over-sex-blog-20121016

http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20121016-377851.html

The blog in question had something like 100k unique visits yesterday, big by Singapore standards, and probably even more today. I didn't know what else to do other than to put up a MailChimp form to collect emails, so that I have an audience for my next project.

What is the best way to make the most out of this publicity? My goal is to turn this temporary publicity into long-term, permanent fame/voice.
Just got me thinking, there might be some interesting results from making these kind of observations from say Voyager distance and scaling the resolution of the measurements accordingly to match our results of far more distant system.

Not knowledgable enough in the area to know if this would be worth doing.
PostgreSQL is a pretty mature, reliable piece of kit. Audit logs in a financial sense are generally a matter of extreme importance and are not performance-sensitive on the read side.

Conservatism is the watchword when $$$ are involved.
If a clone of our Solar System were out in space our chances of detecting it would be extremely low.

In order to detect Venus or Earth it would require around a 1 in 100 chance alignment of the orbital plane relative to the observer to be detectable via the transit method. Jupiter would be detectable through radial velocity techniques but it would take a minimum of 12 years to confirm a single orbit and more likely it would take at least 2 orbits for a proper confirmation. And even so it would be a coin flip on whether the orbital plane was aligned properly to be detectable at all.

With the increased sensitivity of the new instrumentation used to detect the Alpha Centauri B planet things are improved slightly but still the chances of detecting an Earth-clone via radial velocity aren't that great.
juju is a cloud service orchestration tool.

So basically you search in the box for the service you want (Hadoop, haproxy, memcached, postgresql, and so on) and click deploy and then an instance launches with that service on AWS/HP Cloud/OpenStack. You then connect them and basically model your deployment via the web interface.

Then when you want to horizontally scale you just add units to the service.

Sorry that wasn't clear in the blog post, I was mostly targetting existing users and totally forgot to explain what it does: http://juju.ubuntu.com
Is that a backdoor or an “administrative password” on your Verizon router?
You can do that with ease. Here's my blog post:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/run-amazon-elastic-mapred...
Feature Prioritization - Test Before You Invest
Whoa! Earth-size planet in Alpha Centauri system
As someone who was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, had several bouts of psychosis, and settled into BiPolar disorder without the psychosis, I can speak on this subject a bit. As a kid I exhibited the typical, thinking fast and trying to talk just as fast. My first major manic episode I recall was while studying for a midterm, where instead I had inspiration and handwrote a 8 page business plan. After my my first psychotic break, a year later I spent all night down the rabbit hole of importing raincoats from China. I showed no Schizophrenic symptoms until a major psychotic break that triggered my underlying proclivity towards Schizophrenia, partially by roadtripping to a new place and excessively smoking marijuana. I ended up in an out-of-state hospital for several days before transferring to a local one. My family thankfully had insurance, but the profit-driven company battled with us to deny paying for that expensive out-of-state care and treatment, thankfully they paid. I couldn't get non-group insurance until insurance companies could not as easily deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Before that event I had genuinely enjoying smoking for nearly 2 years in college with no paranoia. Uncharacteristically, I got into minor legal trouble thanks to a dumb, drunken night. The day my probation ended I lit it up again, leading to a mild psychotic episode with friends who were freaked out. That was the end of marijuana for me. Never tempted to touch it again as I know that is seriously playing with fire given my tendencies. I've had one other paranoia-fueled episode where I went off my medications because I didn't like the side effects. I somehow got tangled with a local urban gang, after they broke into my house and stole my roommate's golf clubs and spotted my expensive studio equipment only to stake the place out for another burglary. I avoided hospitalization with the help of close family this time.

The biggest thing for people with BiPolar or Schizophrenics is to stay on their medication. It's a very tragic feedback loop, you feel good or normal so you go off your meds. Then you are OK for a while, then you are nearing a nervous breakdown, manic episodes (which are really fun for most people), paranoia, or deep depressive episode (which is why so very many BiPolar people commit suicide). Every time I went off my medication, a break down was near, and you had to basically hit the "reset button" on your life again. Start a new job, new location, try again. This time, you pledge to stay on your medication, your family reminds you as well. Things can stabilize when you get on the right medication with the lowest effective dosage, get regular sleep and exercise. I am stable now, with the help of family, friends, low dosage medication, and exercise. (In that order)
How Microsoft transformed Studio B into a real hardware company
I've used Weka, and RapidMiner once. As I recall, RapidMiner seemed to be general purpose, but lots of posts were for using it for data mining stock data to build a model.

I think it would be interesting to see breakdowns of different software, and where they are used. Often times it seems to me that people just use the tools their peers and co-workers use, and people tend learn to like whatever they use most.
From a logical standpoint this makes no sense at all, but it was still a fun mental experiment.

I guess if this was true, innovation would go up when countries suck, thus leading to a better situation and less innovation, which means the country would eventually suck again… after a while, would things finally come to a stop at an innovation/suckiness equilibrium?
> I don't think individualism would be a major factor.

There are many countries which satisfy your former criteria yet lack this; none of them have the same innovation economy that the United States possesses.
What happens when everyone starts to assume everything is vaporware because there are so many landing pages and so many fewer startups connected to them?

People stop signing up.
I've read this, but I don't know if it's true other than my own anecdotal experiences. But the reason that so much innovation comes from America because the it's so damn easy to start a business and take risks while having protection from the law. I can (and have) started businesses in under an hour with full legal protection of the law. That is, my personal assets are separated from my business assets. This includes getting a bank account and federal tax ID number. In the state of Nebraska this costs around $125. In other words, it's dirt cheap to do so.

I've also been told that officials are not as corrupt in other countries. I can't verify this, as all of the foreign countries that I've visited has been for leisure.

It could also be stated that it's in our culture and our DNA... that if you work hard you too can live the American Dream and prosper. Obviously, that's not always the case, but that statement is repeated quite often from peers, schools, and businesses so maybe some citizens start to believe it i.e. self-fulfilling prophesy.
Perfect Tic Tac Toe AI
I just look at the pile of overdue bills for a moment and the harsh slap of reality gets me right back to work.
From a technical point of view I know that there are two teams searching for exoplanets around Alpha Centauri [1]. Hopefully this means that the other team will be able to provide evidence that correlates this find.

From a human point of view, I'm in the southern hemisphere and we will have clear skies. Alpha Centauri is still high above the horizon at this time of year. Tonight, I'm going to take my two kids outside and point out Alpha Centauri to them. I'll be able to tell them about it. Tell them, that now we know, part of what’s there. Tell them, that there is likely other worlds. Worlds more like ours orbiting that tiny, almost insignificant spark of light.

[1] http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=22603
This slapapp has few advantage:
a. wont need update
b.No advertises

But one disadvantage
a. might quit one day
The title makes it sound like a new web UI framework. This seems to be a web app GUI for the ubuntu juju devops package.
Relevant: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say...
With one star, they teased out nine different planet orbits from its wobble:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_10180
Maybe America sucks just enough for there to be problems to innovate, while still being able to support said innovators.
Why are your jobs 12-48hr? Allocate more worker hosts during job runs.
What do/did you program?

why is it worth the time to learn what is considered a complicated IDE (if it needs to be taught)? Would the time not be spent better, say, being genuinely productive

Why delegate work when that takes time you could spend doing the work yourself? Because you can't do everything. At some point delegating starts to pay a return on the effort.

The goal is for You + Computer to create a system which is greater than the sum of its parts. For you to use the computer as an external brain.

If it's just you and notepad-as-typewriter, you're doing all the work.
Deaf paraplegic blogger is exposed as a fraud
I have a friend who emigrated to US from China when he was in his 50s, and that was about 15 years ago. He's an entrepreneur who sells machine tools via paper catalog and his website. It's truly fascinating to meet with him every few months and just talk business, family, life, all that stuff.

He has this hypothesis that one of the primary reason for American innovative dominance is due to the ubiquity of basements in America. His theory goes that while much of the rest of the 1st world countries are very crowded in the cities, America has room such that even folks who live in the cities have basements.

Basements being where the majority of the "tinkering" is done, because you don't have to leave home to go work on your pet project. Because basements aren't as "livable" as the rest of the house, they are usually relegated to work benches, mini-offices, and the less-sightly kind of things you wouldn't want sitting out in your living room or cluttering up your closets. And they're as big as the house - so plenty of space to work with.

Because just about everyone has basements, everyone has convenient access to a private working sanctuary to attempt to live out their dreams.

So that's basically how his hypothesis goes. It's one of the more interesting thoughts I've heard, and it's fascinating to see it from the perspective of an outsider who moved here and made something of himself.

Coming from a machinist background (rather than a hacker who can work just about anywhere with a laptop), the availability of a basement for him to keep his machines is something that might seem obvious to him, and certainly lends to why he holds this as true.

Surely it's not the whole truth, but it certainly makes one think.
A letter to myself
The substance of the article is more similar to "America is awesome because it doesn't stifle the free-market", but I guess that isn't as intriguing to potential clickers.
Well this whole thing was pretty dumb.
Rescue time never worked for me. It always said I spent almost no time online. Something about my ad blocking config or something was confusing it...
The best way to save time on Hacker News is to add it to /etc/hosts and route it to 127.0.0.1

Then, just browse it on your phone.
(author here) First, thanks for trying Autobahn! I wanted to mention that Autobahn has always allowed you to enable/disable any of the three features in the Options panel. I'm also curious about what you didn't like about the Profile Overlay? It shows the user profile in an overlay so you don't have to click the back button, as well as the user's twitter handle, picture, and profile image. On top of that, it makes links and emails clickable. Thanks!
They say you should do what you love, so you are never "working" at your job.

Start a slapping startup!
I really like the minimalist design of the site. The other game I found is more challenging:

http://connect4.cwoebker.com/
Windows System Exploit
Paul Graham seems to have a similar theory. I believe he calls it "marginal space".

http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
Summary: They show you in twelve lectures how to construct a simple computer, starting with NAND gates and moving up to compilers and finally being able to run Tetris
Wow. Your thinking is downright scary.

"compromise [is] a logical fallacy"

That is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of my intended meaning. Some reading for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#co...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambit_claim

If it's hard wired then maybe that's for a reason. And the reason is likely because it keeps you or your progeny alive longer.

Modern civilization hasn't existed long enough for evolution to catch up. Our hundreds of thousands of years trekking across and out of Africa didn't prepare our feeble minds for the complexities of modern politics.

What would have happened without that ability to sue for copyright infringement?

Most likely? World peace, universal equality, and unlocking the universe's infinite money cheat. Or at least, one less patent troll dragging on innovation.
Where are you getting your chances from? Is there some theoretical limit on the sensitivity of the radial velocity technique, independent of current technology?

(edit): This spectrometer is supposed to be capable of detecting an earth-clone, starting around 2016:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPRESSO

This graph shows its predicted sensitivity (green line for a sun-like star), compared to exoplanets previously detected by the same method (gray circles), and solar system planets for reference:

http://espresso.astro.up.pt/images/content/science/image012....

http://espresso.astro.up.pt/science.php?show=chapter3
9/11 was great for American workers. For a few years.
A small point, but it would be great if your examples came with a render of what it looks like. The description helps, but without the visual to match it the context is slightly harder to grasp.
The estimated number of potentially habitable planets (planets within the goldilocks zones of their stars) is enormous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMUDXO4xkW8
> It annoyed me that clicking on someone's username wouldn't take me to their profile page

Thanks for using my Autobahn for Hacker News plugin for the past few months! I thought I should let you know that you can disable the Profile Overlay in the options panel. I love it because I can see the user's twitter name, image, and follow button, as well as clickable links and e-mail addresses, all without having to click the 'Back' button. What don't you like about that feature?
I think the "v2.0" part of the title addresses why it was posted again.
Can you do sprites with a svg, though? If not, there's the single file aspect.
Is there an open source framework related to this work/run?
Show HN: Plan meeting, let the group choose the best time for the meeting
You've got to be kidding right? Your entire argument is based on the rail system? Which is still one of the most extensive in the world?

The US has less of a need for a national passenger rail service. The low faire airlines filled that gap long ago (southwest?)...

I don't buy it.
She's a...

w-hacker
And this, kids, is why pair programming WORKS.
An interesting study highlighting some of the problems with diagnosis of schizophrenia was the Rosenhan experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment) essentially it showed that doctors working in mental hospitals were unable to reliably tell the difference between those with schizophrenia, and those without it who reported a single hallucination. Albeit, the study is now close to 40 years old, and the diagnosis techniques have been improved, with for example, further editions of the DSM, major problems still exist.

In my Master's thesis I created an algorithm to diagnose schizophrenia from EEG recordings. It's obviously very preliminary research, but it would be amazing to see computers revolutionizing the way that we do neurological diagnoses.

My thesis is here for those interested: http://www.adriangreen.ca/Green_Adrian_CA_201211_MASc_thesis..., and hopefully soon to be condensed and published as a paper.
As others have mentioned, the basic idea that angry people innovate more smacks of a first-world mentality: there are many places in the world where people are far angrier than in the US, yet most of are so far removed from being centers of innovation that people scarcely even dream of innovation coming out of them anymore.

But they do say that necessity is the mother of invention, and so perhaps it's more a matter of finding the balance point: supporting people to the point that innovation seems possible, but not doing everything for them to the point that innovation seems unnecessary.
Walt Mossberg's Windows 8 Review
Apple snaps up celebrity-backed Web app firm Particle
How To Keep Your Startup Healthy
Didn't work for me - Dragged file (jpg) using Chrome (Version 22.0.1229.94 m) opened link in IE 9 (9.0.8112.16421). Went to 100% on chrome once link was opened then just stuck on "waiting for response from justbeamit.com" in IE. Seems like a cool idea.
>This makes progress in software much more vulnerable to impedance by patents, because patents cause a greater increase in the relative cost of each element and because there are more elements involved.

I think you're possibly understating the problem. The idea that there are "more elements" implies that there are something like ten or a hundred times as many in software as in other industries, but it's worse than that.

The problem is that software uses categories where other industries use instances. Everything is designed as an abstraction on purpose. The result is that patent claim limitations that would be actual limitations in other industries are in software de facto claims of the entire class.

For example, if a claim limitation requires a network connection -- even a specific kind of network connection (e.g. stream sockets or unix domain sockets) -- and you're writing a piece of software intended for use with files on disk, you might think you're safe because you can't infringe that claim. But you're not, because the system calls that work on file descriptors also work on socket descriptors, and socket descriptors can be associated with any supported kind of connection. Your users can run your program and give it the name of a "file" which is really a socket and wham, your software is infringing. The abstractions we use to make things scalable and efficient also cause a combinatorial explosion in the scope of possible infringement.

In the extreme case, general purpose programming tools can in concept infringe any software patent. A user merely needs to type the claim limitations into the source file and the interpreter is happy to infringe. Naturally that case is probably too extreme to find much sympathy in the courts (or they'll come up with something like "substantial non-infringing use"), but the problem is that there is no line. Can we really draw a reasoned distinction between a bash interpreter that allows you to infringe a software patent by typing a twelve line shell script, and a web page that allows you to infringe a software patent with twelve mouse clicks?

It reminds me of this (http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html) re: DRM. "Make me a general purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out." That's not how computers work. It's not how software works, and it's not how software is designed. You make software to have all the features users want by abstracting everything and making it modular so that anyone can plug in alternatives as they come about. Software patents come in and say "make the software have all possible combinations of features in the world, except this one combination which is covered by these claims." It just doesn't work that way.
"Master Data Collection Service. A very simple REST service accepts GET and POST requests with key/value pairs. ... we then front end the service with Passenger Fusion and Apache httpd. This service requires great attention, as it’s the likeliest bottleneck in the whole architecture."
Seems this can be replaced by DynamoDB.
PHPSass for the command line use with Jenkins
I just started using it icon fonts. I was initially using SVGs using an IMG tag, but the issue there is that you can't change color, opacity, or style it with CSS.

You can sprite SVGs, but you have to maintain it just as you would have to maintain a sprite of PNGs. The only advantage being that a sprited SVG would scale to a HDPI monitor without needing a second set of higher resolution images.

I ended up going with icon fonts because it requires significantly less CSS than dealing with the position of an icon in a sprite. I actually find it is easier to maintain since I can style icons with shadows, opacity, color, etc.

One drawback, using icon fonts generally means having flat icons. You can't have fancy 3D-like iconography.