skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, thus my original skepticism, but I'm trying to be generous. I might be able to convince my mom to watch it.
Tim O'Reilly on the power of social media and life beyond Web 2.0
Wow! This is worth diving for!
To be fair to the grandparent, Python goes out of its way to discourage use of functional programming techniques.
Not exactly. If your doctor treated you while on crack, you probably have grounds for a malpractice lawsuit. Overall, I'd expect drug use to increase, once drugs are both legal and cheaper.
Some people I know who have tried both legal anti-depressants and illegal drugs, and I can't see the difference, other than the legal one is patented.

They both have pretty similar effects including fairly strong addiction.
An investor's take on the recession
I didn't RTFA, but the answer seems obvious:

cat > file_to_be_rewritten

HTH
Actually 340 was withdrawn in favor of the 'with' statement, so blocks haven't been ruled out, as far as I can see. However, it will have to be Pythonic (no braces of block terminators) and well thought out.
That makes sense, but surely trying to keep to an unenforceable law that clearly is being flouted (eg. pot) everywhere undermines the legal system even more.
This article made me wince. It describes a style of programming which has been common among corporate Oracle and Microsoft developers for years but seems very inefficient and outdated now. Writing a set of stored procedures in the database to call for each query you intend running has always seemed absurd to me but if you're using an ORM framework like Rails or Catalyst or whatever it's not even an option. I wonder if the author of this has even heard of things like replication, sharding, memcached or CouchDB or BigTable... Perhaps it would have been better titled "Ten Characteristics of a Very Conventional Corporate Approach to Database Design."
I've used pgpool2 in (lightly loaded) production.

It is quite amazing and works as advertised. True multi-master for updates, and load balancing for reads. I don't know why it doesn't receive more attention.

It is, however, very fiddly to set up and maintain, and you have to provide and roll your own "initial synchronization" which you can base on WAL archiving or pg_dump, or whatever.

It has also been a work in progress, with its design and features changing over time as it matures. This has made it a bit hard to wrap in easy to use scripts.
You seem to be saying, in essence, "except for the drug dealing he is a pretty good kid, so therefore he is a pretty good kid." Um, what if you include the drug dealing into the equation, and all of the possible damage to the lives of people he is selling drugs to, or perhaps even to their friends, families, and loved ones?

(You didn't say the kinds of drugs, and maybe you believe that whatever he is selling is not bad, since you argue that marijuana is harmless and maybe he is selling only marijuana. But you did not say that and it is a pretty important caveat.)

While not condoning or agreeing with newt0311's argument, I wonder if whether the difference is a fundamental idsagreement with the place of individual human rights? Because newt0311 cites China and Singapore approvingly, I wonder if he believes that the harmony of society (or some other group-level values) are so important that the wishes and desires of individuals merit little consideration? In other words, drug addiction is so bad in its costs to society in general that the very lives of the individuals taking drugs are insignificant compared to the interests of society as a whole?

I only suggest this because if the disagreement is really at this level, arguing specifics and details will not be very fruitful.
When I was using pgpool2, it dealt with schema changes seamlessly - you connect to the proxy and issue your table updates, and it all just works.
If your doctor treated you while drunk you'd also have grounds for a malpractice suit.

Making more drugs legal doesn't change the dynamics of irresponsibility.
And JFK.
Are you Human?
Sigh. Didn't they teach you in school that name-dropping makes no argument?

About China, includes even a history lesson for you: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=14...

And about Singapore: What are your sources?

Last time I checked there was no data from Singapore because their government is not particularly interested in allowing independent studies to be made. There is data about their execution rate (death penalty), though. Amnesty international considers it to be amongst the highest worldwide.

cf. http://www.hrw.org/legacy/englishwr2k8/docs/2008/01/31/singa...

cf. http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/regions/asia-pacific/singap...
That's not a good tack. I have strong opinions about murder, though I've never been involved in a murder.
Replication is how you reduce downtime!

It's one possible way.

It's the same reason why Raid5 is more then useless in a web server - if a disk dies it has to reboot and has to reconstruct data for hours.

Clearly you're using the wrong RAID; the whole point is to keep going after a disk failure.

you need 3+ 100% accurate and up to the second copies of your database which can take over at a moments notice. One single server, no matter how beefy it is, can never accomplish this.

An alternative would be a single reliable copy of the database (using RAID, redundant controllers, and multipathing) attached to multiple servers.

I suppose database replication is mighty attractive if you assume that disks have to be trapped inside servers.
What's objectionable about this comment? I don't know. Fill me in?
This article is very well-written, well-thought-out, and interesting to hackers. (Do any hackers really want to live somewhere where the government tells you what you can and can't eat?)

So while it might appeal to Reddit for the "legalize weed" angle, it appeals to us for the points it brings up, and its explanation thereof.
Pop off, son!
Do you feel that Wolfram can rightly claim the thesis offered and explored in the book? Regardless, how well do you think he supported the thesis?

The thesis of A New Kind of Science is something like "systems comprised of a small number of simple rules can perform arbitrarily complex computations."

The book proceeds to support the thesis. The content is comprised of descriptions of such systems, corresponding Mathematica execution trace diagrams, and analysis. These analyses are related to a ambitiously large scope of natural phenomenon and scientific knowledge.
I think people who mock those phrases mercilessly probably never heard them used in context. They're government contractor-speak that is probably popular around the DoD, but they're not meaningless. Here, let me try.

Known known: There is a bug open in the tracker which reports that there is a race condition under certain circumstances. You have someone assigned to look into it.

Unknown known: One of the programmers noticed a race condition under certain circumstances, but he did not put it in the tracker, and as a result the information is compartmentalized and the issue is not being dealt with.

Known unknown: In preparation for your release you've got a load balancer, four application servers, and memcached set up, but you're not sure whether it will be able to handle a Slashdot on release day. You resolve to test this, when the schedule permits.

Unknown unknown: Your password recovery form permits a SQL injection attack and nobody in your organization has a clue.

The manager take away point: it is far better to have known unknowns than unknown unknowns because you can take steps to mitigate the risk, and unknown knowns are almost useless to you as a manager because they prevent you from mitigating the risk even if you're aware of a solution at some level of the organization.
Another important thing to look at is where the ink jet nozzle is placed. Some printers have this as a more durable part that's separate from the cartridge, whereas others have it in a more disposable form on the cartridge itself.

One lasts much longer, and the other will crap out shortly if you try refilling it too many times. It's a great way for them to keep you going back for the "real" ink.
I'm a big fan of individualism. I don't remember the last time anything great was made by anything other than individual will, so perhaps I'm biased. People who think we should be cogs in a big machine can feel free to disagree with me.

You seem to be saying, in essence, "except for the drug dealing he is a pretty good kid, so therefore he is a pretty good kid."

Not quite. It's more that I'm saying drug dealers aren't just drug dealers. The people who sell drugs are rarely more or less scummy than other people. Saying you want to kill them for drug sales is ridiculous, and it's vilifying a lot of people who are more than just drug dealers.

"Um, what if you include the drug dealing into the equation, and all of the possible damage to the lives of people he is selling drugs to, or perhaps even to their friends, families, and loved ones?"

If it's their choice to buy drugs, then if he wants to peddle, he should peddle. (I honestly don't know what else he sells. I don't buy drugs at all, so I've never asked.) You can argue over whether or not drugs are good for people, if they help them relax or if they're burning people out, but in the end it's the choice of the people who want to buy the drugs. And there's some complexity to that argument - I think that the only meaningful things worth doing are the things that actively help people, but that means that I dislike people who write slush stories or directors who are sloppy with camera work or pretty much most people, if I'm going to stand absolutely by that metric. But that's not a reason to incriminate somebody. It's their choice to sell and I think they have that right.
Yeah, Python has named local functions:

def f(x):
def g(x): return 2 * x
def h(x): return 1 + x
return g(h(x))

More interesting was your point that Haskell has anonymous functions and is whitespace delimited. I don't think significant whitespace and anonymous functions have any connection at all.
High graphics card memory has its benefits - it allows the use of high-resolution textures (which has the maximum benefit at high display resolutions). It also allows developers to do more work without hitting your bus, which is the real benefit.

Nowadays all games use shaders, which are GPU programs that can transform images (and geometry, but that's another story). One of the chief pains in graphics programming is the necessity to feed data to the card, run a shader on it, and feed the data back into RAM for lack of graphics memory, so you can make room for something else.

Bus speed is the killer of 3D performance. Pushing and pulling data cross PCI-express 16x is really, really slow compared to how fast your shaders run. More memory really does give you significantly higher performance.
The D word is mainly used to fill the time in between commercials with talking heads debating irrelevant semantics. I also doubt a long recession or depression would significantly impact a decades long trend by much.
Really? Are you saying that the student who screws up and decides to experiment with drugs deserves to die?

And what about all of the addicts whose drug use correlates with other serious problems? There is a strong correlation between serious mental illness like schizophrenia and drug use. And what about all the veterans? Over a quarter of soldiers in combat teams are at risk for developing PTSD. And around have of people with PTSD abuse drugs. I can't ethically support the death penalty for someone who risked their life in the army and whose only crime is abusing drugs.

Sure, every drug addict made a choice to use drugs. But I can't say that I would have not abused drugs if I was born with some serious mental illness or had gone through some traumatic event.

PTSD/Drug use stats in veterans:http://www.veteransforamerica.org/2007/11/29/hidden-wounds-l...
It might be more productive if you argued why others should share your belief in fate or God, instead of just stating your belief without any justification. I do believe in God, but I do not find your statements very interesting without at least some attempt to persuade.
Unless he's forcing people to buy from him, I don't think it makes sense to demonize the delivery guy. Gun dealers have helped introduce unimaginable pain to millions of families, but I'm sure there are some really "good guy" gun dealers.

I think unalone was just suggesting that newt0311 hasn't gotten out of the textbooks and actually studied the drug issue from the human side. That not all of these people he wants to murder are faceless mob gangsters, some are just like him.

It's easy to sit in your apartment and write Asperger's induced rants about how X is bad and that if we simply kill Y% of the population X will cease to exist and 100-Y% of the population will then enjoy Z% more happier lives. As long as the numbers work, what's the downside?

Empathy can't be taught, but ironically there are drugs that can help.
How Twitter can be better architected for search
can you telnet to the port (both 80 & 443)? perhaps one lib is using ssl and the other not. amazon blocks icmp packets, so the traceroutes, they do nothing.
New Energy Drink For Startups?
Come on, pg. You know you wanna ;)
I would love to be able to trivially make buttons that ape other UIs, especially in platforms that have a existing look and feel.

Examples:

Buttons that look "native in Facebook" for fb apps

Buttons that looks "right" in a Google Gadget.

Elements for Apple Dashboard widgets.
A.I.G., Where Taxpayers’ Dollars Go to Die
Façade trailer (interactive drama game)
and all of the possible damage to the lives of people he is selling drugs to

Why oh why are we always making victims of the users?

In my humble expirience the big evil dealer forcing the innocent child into a drug addiction is a myth or a very rare exception at least. The demand makes
the market, not the other way round.

I for one am a smoker. It might kill me, I should quit, it's an absolutely stupid, useless habit. Using the above logic I could comfortably blame it on the tobacco industry. They seduced me, they deal it to me.

Unfortunately that's not how life works. I can blame it on them all I want, it's still my life and my health and my decision.
Wallpaper Juggler
I just finished doing an introductory project for my machine learning course. I had to write a program in matlab using Bayesian Regression and KNN to do character recognition. Our professor gave us 2400 feature vectors of horribly written characters and we had to write this damn program that would recognize the characters if we gave it 2400 more horribly written, but unclassified characters. It was a mess.

However I did learn a few things. 1) KNN is a pretty good beginning classifier. 2) Character recognition is a really tough problem because of the ridiculous dimensionality 3) Machine learning is chock full of "black magic" type techniques.

I'm planning on launching my own website pretty soon though. I hope to have some real world applications of machine learning for all to see and use freely. Some of the theory really needs to be distilled.
Drugs aren't in the same category as murder (or any violence). Most obviously, they are personal. Drugs don't bust into your house at night and kill you. We don't [typically] see suicide as a crime because of that even though the result is the same.
"Good to Great" Circuit City finally dead, could be managed with Quickbooks.
http://www.interactivestory.net
In the unlikely case that this cool, athletic drug dealer produced the drugs in his dorm room himself, I would agree with your position, but unfortunately the drug trade doesn't start in the dorm.

Do you realize how many truly good people's lives are destroyed in the process of keeping supply of drugs up with demand in America?

What about cool, athletic Juan in Mexico who was executed for refusing to join the Zetas? What about mayor Carillo who was gunned down in an intimidation assassination? What about Jake who died of an overdose in the frat house because he thought drugs were cool?

> Do I deserve to die because I voluntarily used chemicals?

I'm not going to go there, but ask yourself how innocent you really are.
Um... All those are legal. Also, the first and third have known beneficial medical effects which would still be allowed if my proposal is enacted.
From the article:

"I wish there was one kind of fatal blow that we could all pick out," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at market researching firm, The NPD Group Inc. "Every time there was a crossroad ... in hindsight they almost always did the wrong thing."

In one of the most famous business books of all times, Jim Collins singled out Circuit City as one of the best managed companies in the world, distilling lessons on how to run a succesful company from its story. Yeah, Best Buy depantsed them, but why would a "Good to Great" management team allow that to happen?
I know a guy who's using convex optimization as part of a project to sample an ultra-wide range of frequencies looking for a hidden narrowband signal (I leave it up to you to guess who would need that kind of device).

Apparently they use "compressive sampling" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing) in conjunction with the convex optimization so they can avoid building the superfast A-to-D that you'd normally need to cover such a frequency range.

You can apparently prove that it'll always find the narrowband signal, as long as it's narrow enough.
I remember when a physicist came to give a lecture at Cornell about the difficulties of cleaning up Hanford, Washington. It was a hair-raising presentation. I forget the details, but the gist is here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14119133.900-the-dirti...

It was one hair-raising talk. And so I was not at all surprised by this fascinating news article from earlier this year:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16447-earliest-weapons...
This would have the effect of encouraging legalization of some drugs. In some sense, the worst situation is where things are illegal but widely tolerated and practiced. This gives authorities a lot of scope for locking up people they don't like.

Currently, middle-class taxpayers who smoke pot don't worry much about getting busted, because it's fairly rare to end up in jail. But if they saw serious consequences, they'd lobby for legalization of all but a few hard drugs.
No but most suppliers are and if the users aren't removed from the situation, we will continue to get suppliers: supply-vs-demand all over again.
Brilliant post. Lots of great information from a rarely seen point of view.
That's why I had such a big problem with the "war on terror". It came across as political spin. And implied that America was the superhero saving the world from the evil terrorists, instead of just reacting to a perceived threat.
The Gentle Seduction - A Short Story About the Singularity
I'm not going to go there, but ask yourself how innocent you really are.

I'm not innocent. I'm a human being. I've offended people and made an ass of myself and done things that I regretted. Does that make me somebody worthy of death? (Frankly, if I were to make a list of "things that would be good excuses for somebody else to kill me," drug use wouldn't be in the top 10, because at least that hurt nobody.)

What about cool, athletic Juan in Mexico who was executed for refusing to join the Zetas? What about mayor Carillo who was gunned down in an intimidation assassination?

That's a good reason to encourage legalization followed by business supervision. Used to be people were killed over alcohol. Now people have turned winemaking into an art, and not many alcohol gang deaths occur.

What about Jake who died of an overdose in the frat house because he thought drugs were cool?

What about my grandmother, who died of lung cancer? Or the people who die of alcohol abuse?

The solution is education. My college has many hard drug users, and zero hard drug deaths.
I think medicine has helped a _lot_ of 5 and 6 year olds...

Don't take my God comments too much to heart - Id vigorously defend your right to believe in whatever you like.
My college supplier buys it from a guy, who buys it from another goy, who homegrows his stuff. It's a peaceful if illegal business.

Answer me this, before the conversation goes further: what is bad about using drugs, beyond their being illegal, and beyond problems started due to illegality?
Python already has a solution for callbacks:

@reg_callback(button.onclick)
def callback():
do_stuff()
> drug use wouldn't be in the top 10, because at least that hurt nobody

Unless you produce your own drugs and consume them secretly, that is not true.

> That's a good reason to encourage legalization...

The reality is, drugs are not legal. You can't go there.
Finite State Automata, Binary Decision Diagrams and Presburger Arithmetic
How do I page through the questions? Seems like this could be offered with a modified version of wordpress and you would get way more functionality. Just change blog to question and comments to answers.
That's exactly how I felt when I first gave Django a test drive.
Typo in emails sent out when questions are answered: .come instead of .com

Widen the text inputs on the sign up page, right now they're really narrow.
Unless you produce your own drugs and consume them secretly, that is not true.

The only people hurt were hurt due to illegality. Who is hurt when you drink wine? Used to be wine was illegal, and people got hurt until alcohol was legalized.

The reality is, drugs are not legal. You can't go there.

Drugs being illegal isn't hard reality. The solution is to legalize them rather than to stop persecuting the people who are using them.
I'm buying cheap shoes and clothes all the time and really can't be arsed to background-check where exactly my model of Nike or Adidas was manufactured.

I guess it's highly likely that I have owned (or even still own) at least one product that was manufactured in a sweatshop. I think it's equally likely that the same applies to you.

So welcome to the club, we are both supporters of child labor.
What now, suicide?
It is anecdotal.

To clarify, well over 50% of the US population has taken pot at least once. Like alcohol many people don't appear to be negatively impacted by it. But, we don't hear "Please smoke pot responsibly" instead pot and people with an alcohol problem are demonized. People see anecdotal evidence and such as the large number of entertainers that admit smoking pot and assume it's safe. They then extrapolate to the sample size of their friends when evaluating other drugs. Ecstasy does horrible things to the human brain over time, but people don't evaluate the long term medical effects they just assume they are invincible and "the man" is full of crap.

I am further suggesting that for drugs that need a large scale distribution chain, and are extremely addictive and dangerous a more effective deterrent than prison should be employed.
In Defense of Elections
You can always write a wrapper to start a transaction, extract the file from the database, exec $EDITOR on it, replace the database data with the file, and commit the transaction. That is very safe, and very easy to do. (And, you can make the txn apply to multiple files, which is quite useful.)

We use this technique in the command line utility for KiokuDB.
good point, but still drug use would likely go up