skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sorry to nitpick, but how can life not evolve around General Knowledge which, ostensibly, includes all knowledge.

The answer is obvious -- most of those who excel, who create breakthroughs, do it by specializing. This is not argue against general knowledge, only to say that specialization is an element of nearly every success story and scientific breakthrough.

There's even a new psychological theory about specializing, that celebrates focusing on a few things, or one -- it's called "Grit":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

"Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective."

An example would be Albert Einstein working alone for years on his relativity theory, to the exclusion of any other activities.

But, just to prove how consistent psychologists are, the exact same behavior can get you an Asperger's diagnosis:

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

"... an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests."

These two theories describe the exact same behavior -- intense focus and specialization, but come to opposite conclusions -- it's good. No, wait, it's bad.

Given that there are two opposing but equally plausible psychological theories about this kind of personal focus, guess which historical figure is now diagnosed with Asperger's? Albert Einstein. Along with Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Bill Gates.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/building_science
GoPro's success is based on one thing, It does it's job very well.
> No secure server is complete without a firewall.

Comments like those are why I normally point people to actual security expects (like, say, Schneier), and why I recommend that new admins should ignore as much as possible the practices chanted by the industry. A secure server does not need a firewall. A firewall can be used to secure a server against a specific threat, but that's it. The days of ping of death are behind us.

I would like to point out that following the article's guide and firewalling away ICMP, you can end up with a lot of trouble. (see http://serverfault.com/questions/84963/why-not-block-icmp). Some ICMP messages are not blocked by default by ufw, so I'm unsure how damaging ufw is when used like this.

At any rate, a Firewall is a block. A new fresh server install won't have ports that needs to be blocked. By putting up a firewall, there is nothing to be gained. Before the firewall, the ports are closed. After adding the firewall, the ports are closed. All that is gained is a hurdle the next time one wants to install something like a monitor tool (like Munin), or a new service.

It might be useful as a last line of defense against malware regarding outgoing traffic. I am normally against that kind of thing however (as focusing on the cause is better than the effect). At best, one can catch a spam malware, but any bot net, web server, ddos or other type of malware are untouched by the rules (port 80 and 443 is allowed). If the server has email sending configured so root message can be sent, then the spam malware can use that route and the firewall will just sit there.

So let's take a newly installed machine. What threats can be identified and what risks are we trying to mitigate with the help of this firewall (as specified by the article)? The only thing I can think of is either a Zero day TCP/IP stack vulnerability (not a realistic threat), or that the admin doesn't trust the other admins when they install new services. Yes, if an admin installs a new email server and enables relaying to the whole world against the explicit recommendation in bold font by the install wizard and the configuration file, a firewall can block that admins' actions. Then again, that same admin could just as well have disabled the firewall to "get the mail to work", so I'm not sure it's a viable defense against bad admins.
Thanks tgrass! That's kind of you :)
It drives me bonkers. Use UTF-8. Use other encodings only when talking to systems that require it, and use those other encodings only when actually reading or writing the data. Translate to UTF-8 at the earliest opportunity, and translate from UTF-8 at the last possible moment, and only if you must.

This isn't the 90s. This stuff is basically solved now, except people can't be bothered to use the solution.
Shawshank's message is "Enjoy the journey"? Andy's "journey" includes rape, beatings, and solitary confinement. I don't see how you can find that message in the movie.
Becoming an academic in CS for the sake of showing off would be an extremely dumb move. You get paid less than your students after just a few years, and nobody knows about you except some small clique of international researchers.

I do know of one or two in my area who seem this way, and I think they're very shallow people. And I know of some profs who are just kind of slackers. Maybe they though academia was something different than what it turned out to be.

But most profs are smart enough to know what kind of life it is going in. (A modicum of intelligence and societal savvy are required to get the job.)
The problem is that "shiny and fair" is linked to the "miracles". Vaccines mostly work to eliminate disease by means of herd immunity. If vaccines because an individualistic economic luxury-good, they will stop working and we will return to the dark days of mass plagues.
You are not looking for the best optimized performance since threads share memory within a process.

That is a non-sequitur to me. The first half I'm on board with: generally, you use threads to improve performance, but because of the GIL in Python, you may not get the parallelism you want. If you're calling into libraries that don't hold the GIL, then great, but that means you have to be very aware of what's going on below you.

The second half does not follow, though. Typically, that threads share the same address space is the entire reason we use threads over processes. And the reason comes from improved performance: if the thread share an address space, you don't need to copy the data. Copying data is expensive. (It also means you're susceptible to a whole host of synchronization bugs.)
Imagine you are a fairly normal windows user or even sysadmin. Imagine you are considering Linux to replace some task that a windows server performs.

Now imagine the conclusion after reading this thread. As some one who can just about get something useful done in Linux, this thread makes me want to never use it again, it just looks too scary. Loads of disagreements which seems to have lots of dire consequences. OK, great discussion for deep geekery, but scary as hell for normals.

Now, when ever I see those annoying posts from smug Linux users who jump in every time a Win or Mac user highlights a problem, I now have this discussion to point to as to why Mac and Win users wont generally go near Linux.

Sorry chaps (and chapesses), I am on your side, Linux is a great thing, but this has to be the worst advert for Linux ever.
So it seems that we prefer XML which is easy to read. I have seen those files way often. Like: <xml><item><key>1</key><value>Something</value></item><item....></xml>

Then you have to combine what ever keys and values are in item tags. I found out these to be very annoying files to handle. Especially when key is X3 and value is 83d, you have to look for every combination from some kind of mapping, because non of those tells you absolutely nothing directly. At least its easy to create files that full fill the schema, because the complexity is pushed out of XML level. Often these files are created by "upgrading" CSV to XML. Let's just call column key # and then put what ever is in that column to the value tag. Yes attributes could be used, but often aren't.

Then you have to know that if key X contains value Y then you also need to look for key Z and hopefully it does contain value N or what ever.
Nice. "Also by mentioning 'Star Wars' everyone will understand what I mean. And I'll receive several thousand more visits."
20% actual education time is damned good. Getting children to sit still for twenty minutes is hard, getting them to listen as well is appallingly difficult. And after twenty minutes you may be talking but they're not listening. Even with motivated adults 20 minutes is about the limit of how long a lecture csn hold one's attention.
Verizon catches deacon with child porn stored on cloud. Turns him in.
I think the only reason we see this in the programming subculture is because it's mostly programmers who are here reading these discussions and writing these blog posts.

I used to go to school with a guy who dropped out of school at 15, having failed year 11, get a job working outside, did a part-time course, ended up in an apprenticeship, worked a few years, started his own business, sold it, he's 28 now and owns his own house without a mortgage...

Put him in front of a computer and the most he can do is use facebook and play video games.

That's a single case, but there's millions of people just like him, and there's millions of people who are missing out on having a good life because we told them they aren't intelligent enough to go to university simply because they weren't good at one thing at school.
I've read a lot about telecommuting here on HN lately. While I do this myself, I'm hoping that one day infrastucture and cost of living near the workplace will be at a point where everyone can just walk to the office (in 5-10 minutes). This is the best of all possible worlds for me: healthier, allows working from home and still dropping in at work for meetings or lunch or whatever comes up and no getting stuck in rush hour traffic (not in the car and neither in the subway/tram), no dangerous biking (in the city).

Also, Mr. Branson does not look too comfortable in his outdoor chair next to the street. ;-)
"Yes, they were a fairly recent invention and will probably be gone soon."

What do you mean by "recent"? They have existed for perhaps more than 100 years and before that there wasn't the type of work where they were needed and so they didn't exist. (There was no paper to be pushed? Or phones to be answered?).

"build a room for consistent telepresence"

There is much nuance you can pick up when someone is right in front of you vs. by telepresence. I'm not saying you aren't right or that what you say won't happen but don't discount the value of face to face at least in business, negotiation and management.

It takes much more work from me to buy something face to face (because I have to act and hide visual cues) then it does by email. But on the same hand I can pick up visual cues in the seller and make split second decisions based on them. It all depends on the situation of course.
Kurzweil and homunculism
Lenses are very constrained by physics, and cost. Ground glass and more exotic materials are expensive to produce - injection molded plastic isn't. A high MP sensor is miles cheaper than an upgraded optical system.
This episode was optioned by Robert Downey Jr. to be turned into a film.
Gesture-driven nav in the browser
America has laws that restrict you from building dense European-style or Asian-style apartment buildings, effectively forcing everyone into quarter-acre land plots in the suburbs. This is actually considered a major driver of inefficiency and waste in the American economy.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO...
"DRM Chair" self-destructs after 8 sittings
Books accomplish pretty much the same thing as moocs, yet the academy survived the invention of the printing press. I'm sure moocs will have their place, but I think fears about the destruction of academia are a little exaggerated.
It's neither probably. Their competition is other "action" cameras within more convenient packages. Luckily for GoPro they still excel in video quality (in their category).
I'm confused, are you actually advocating only reading things you agree with? Or is this last line supposed to be indicative in some negative way of the overall quality of the article?
A Big Data experience revives the glory of SimCity
This is the supposed web developer's website: http://www.cherryonline.co
Who uses XML in 2013 anyways?
Yep, it was the most recent Ubuntu UK podcast http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/
That's true; but where would you find such a beast? AFAIK you can't switch namespace-awareness off in modern parsers, so you'd have to find a very (very) old version...
Thanks! I really appreciate it. All to often we are quick to criticize someone for missing information without any willingness to back it up with better, correct information. The jokes goes that the best way to get an answer is to publish the wrong one. =)
The sensitivity didn't increase by exposing it longer - its simply accumulating more signal over time.

Many sensors are ill-suited to long exposures though. While they can do it, you end up with heat related issues (commonly manifested as stuck pixels and general noise). CCDs also end up saturating and spilling over to adjacent cells, making high dynamic scenes a challenge.
Andreessen And Horowitz ‘Decode’ Andrew Mason’s Farewell Memo
Days since last known Java 0-day exploit
Well, that's pretty much Berlusconi's entire political career: 20 years of scandals and still going strong. At the same time, you can expect at least one scandal per French president, but we seem to change them with more regularity.
All I am saying is there's no "way around" Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The title is an example of sensationalism.
"I could go on about all the benefits of a standardized"

I could just as easily go on about the detrimental effect of standardized education. The executive summary is this: societies do not advance when everyone thinks the same way as everyone else.
Two key differences here:

1. The data is now available under the MIT license. This is important because (a) it is a predictable, well-known license that allow businesses to interact with the data without fear of the unknown (license) and (b) it does not have the "you must remove our data if we ask you to" clause that their data portal has [0].

2. They're actively seeking contributions from the community. None of the existing data portal tools have a built-in way of doing this, so they went with GitHub because it's a step in the direction of taking feedback. Is the data wrong or lacking something? Add it yourself and submit a pull request.

[0] http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/narr/foia/data_disclaim...
There's no such thing in this case though, there's a single layer of tags with escaped content inside (the example document uses CDATA, but as others have noted automated generation is not a good use case for CDATA)
The theme being used called "London Live" is for sale here: http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine...

Costs 40 dollars.
Not to down play the immense success, but having a prominent Silicon Valley VC father and a 100k initial investment on his part must have been crucial in getting the injection mouldings done and ready for volume production.

That was pre-kickstarter days.
Kickstarter has levelled the playing ground for other hardware entrepreneurs in getting early support to pay for the tooling and moulding process.
The wired version of this device was in human trials ~10 years ago through cyberkinetics, a startup spun out of brown to commercialize the technology. See NYT article from 2004 talking about the start of their clinical trials: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/health/13BRAI.html
The issue I see the most is that NoSQL has become synonymous with distributed databases which is really where making ACID promises becomes a challenge. If you had a single node document DB, it probably wouldn't be very challenging to make it ACID. SQL or not, as soon as you want to make it automatically shard and distributed, then you will suffer large performance impacts with transactions. Are there any single node document DBs which provide ACID guarantees out there? I know Redis can do it with multi/exec but Redis isn't really document oriented though it's an awesome piece of software.
AMD has made serious commitments to their open-source drivers. They've released documentation for their chips and have several people working full-time on the OS drivers.

As for supported chips, everything up to "Northern Islands", the last generation, works really well. The latest "Southern Islands" chips also work well but don't have all the features implemented yet.

I use a HD7970 in my workstation. 2D works great and is very fast. 3D is pretty slow, b/c many things aren't accelerated yet. So, for example, minecraft runs about 20fps.

The next generation of AMD gpus "Sea Islands" will use the same drivers as "Southern islands" so the former will be supported as soon as the latter.

Probably the biggest issue is power management. dynpm dynamically changes the clock but doesn't work with multiple heads. The "profile" power management flickers when changing the clock speed.

The reasons for the lack of support for "Southern islands" is that support required many changes that couldn't be release incrementally. Better support is expected when the "Sea islands" chips come out. Check out this post by an AMD developer for a little more detail: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?73824-Bridgman-Is-...

Check out http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for a table of chips and features and information about mapping engineering names to board marketing names.

If you have never experienced kernel mode setting(KMS) and in-kernel drivers I would _highly_ recommend it. It is such a better experience. It's so smooth, switching from xorg to a VT doesn't flicker. And having to upgrade proprietary drivers is a huge pain. I could never go back to UMS and proprietary drivers.

As for my recommendations, if the intel HD3000 or HD4000 meet your 3D needs, they work extremely well and have great in-kernel drivers.

If you need faster OS 3D or a discrete card, go for a "northern islands" Radeon. bridgman recommends a mid-range card for the biggest band-for-the-buck with OS drivers. The high-end cards won't be slower but the drivers aren't as optimized to get the highest performance.

If you are patient and like submitting bug reports you should get a HD7970 ;)

EDIT:

Oh and if you need OpenCL on gpu, intel doesn't support it yet. I believe its works on AMD "northern islands" and earlier.

For more info check out:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-sdk-frequent...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI3M...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1N...
> Native software is dead.

That's quite a leap considering that the big movement of late has been towards native apps (in the context of tablets/phones), and considering that everyone hates it when someone releases an iOS or Android app that's simply a web app in a wrapper. Also considering that much effort is being spent on things like PNacl to get native apps to run over the web.

Web apps still suck compared to their native counterparts. And as long as that's the case, native apps aren't going anywhere.
Apparently I'm an anomaly, but I like going to the office. Currently my company's offices are utter shit, but I'm still not opposed to the concept in general... and I still come in despite the less-than-inspiring setup we have at the moment.

I think what's crucial here, however, is that I don't extrapolate my "I prefer to work in an office" sentiment to everyone, like Bloomberg does. Furthermore, I'm lucky in that I have a choice in this and my bosses are constantly encouraging me to work from home more.

So I think if there's one thing it's better to predict, it's that employee choice will be much more of the norm, not that offices themselves will be history.
The post links to this:
https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...

And I have a rant about that:
I wanted to see the date when that commit was done.
But all it says as "date" is: "a year ago".

Why? Why can it not say the actual date? "A year ago", what does that mean? I want to know which month and day, even the time!
http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/827263
for those who haven't seen it.
"Yet we butcher these poems on speculation and assumptions. We don't learn anything from this in my opinion. The entire process of analyzing books/poems/movies in English class is silly."

I have conversations with people (adults) who clearly never had to do these things (or any other similar study of the written word). It's like having a conversation with a child; they miss puns, subtext, irony, sarcasm, struggle to consider more than one conflicting opinion at a time, struggle to interpret beyond the purely literal and struggle to communicate their own thoughts to others. An inability to communicate beyond such a low level is crippling.
I concur--it's a flawed analogy on a couple levels (but still a good conversation stimulator) but I believe one of the hardest things to manage in a start-up is that your success isn't binary.

Yes, there are a great many start-ups that fail to get out of the gate and a small, small number that take off so quickly that success is almost a guarantee. But if you're in the muddy middle the decision to grind it out or try a new approach has to be a difficult one, and is usually a low-data decision. And platitudes are little help here with "it takes three years to create an overnight success" on one side and "fail fast" on the other.
Nice work. The pro company that does this for broadcast is Sportvision, www.sportvision.com/
You're trying too hard, bro.
First, let me say that this is a very neat project for a high schooler before what I say next because I'm not trying to downplay what he did. He figured out how to overlay an image in realtime over video, which is neat.

However, this is only a small part of what is actually done to present the final image. The more complicated part is the computer vision which allows for things like composing the image so that the swimmers are always above the labels (i.e. the superimposed labels appear to be at the bottom of the pool). They also are using computer vision to recognize where the labels should go, rather than some kind of positional mount on the camera as he suggests. The image is processed through a computer which is capable of recognizing the lane lines, the boundaries of the pool, and the bottom of the pool. This way, when the camera moves the image is updated automatically.

Again, I'm not trying to downplay what was done here, it is a very nice hack.
Integrate PayPal in LiftWeb application using Scala
I'm not a huge fan of the lessons drawn here, it feels forced. I think the two key takeaways from Shawshank are 1) "Get busy living, or get busy dying." and 2) "Hope is a dangerous thing, hope can drive a man insane." I see these as complementary, one should simultaneously relentlessly persue one's dreams, startup or otherwise (get busy living) but be aware that those dreams can be dangerous, they can "drive a man insane."
Toe tapping design - Keeping parents in mind when creating a children's toy.
Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'.

Seems strangely appropriate for a startup.
Clever promotion for their own portfolio company.
But maybe there are better tools to do this?
Redis doesn't support transaction rollbacks, so they're not really "atomic."
I object to those last two! Those communities didn't collapse, they were deliberately murdered from outside.
The whole main reference for the article is worth reading

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm

and plenty of other fast lenses

http://www.taunusreiter.de/Cameras/Biotar_en.html

and here is a good summary of the developments that went into it (how hard would it be to find this page if not for a link on wiki?!)

http://web.archive.org/web/20090309005033/http://ogiroux.blo...
If you hover over them the full time shows up as a tooltip at least.