skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Important observation, from the post he's referring to:

"But second, be careful of what you read and believe on Twitter. I think some of the leeway granted to InTheStimulus is based on the soundbite nature of the site; people can get away with no citations, which is less likely than with a conventional blog." (emphasis mine)

Something that reinforces ones' worldview tends to be less likely to get questioned than something that contradicts it, and a complete lack of evidence can get overlooked: After all, it's obviously true.
Each individual success is mutually exclusive. The only thing that you can count on is that each individual experience changes you in certain ways...

That said, what's your urgency in having to make a life altering decision that impacts five people (including yourself)?
there is no need for you to make statements like that, sir. At least substantiate them and explain why you chose not to submit a patch, etc.
Actually, the answer above is the only answer you really need...
> for [anyone] without the skills to unshorten it themselves

I think I'm one, because I don't know of any way to unshorten these tiny URLs without visiting them or using some such service.

If you know of one, could you enlighten me? Thanks...
How Dumping TV Allowed Me to Quit My Job
Tom, thanks for all your contributions to the open source community. I hope that one guy writing an immature article doesn't make you feel too negative.

I'm surprised that an article written with that tone made it to the top of HN.
Devices That Read People’s Minds
MRI has had a variety of memory leaks. I did an extensive search for the memory leaks on god, which you can read about here: http://groups.google.com/group/god-rb/browse_thread/thread/0.... I've verified that it's not an object referencing issue (which you can also read about in that link). Something in the threading code of MRI appears to be at fault, but I haven't had time to track that down yet.
TapInko.com (DreamIt '08) Partners With Greater Media Group
I actually think this is an excellent idea. Before you interview them have them interview you for a couple minutes. We ask questions based on what we value so by listening to their questions it allows you to determine what they value.

Even if they try to say what you want to hear they'll be telling you about themselves because it will tell you what kind of person they think you are which in turn tells you what kind of person they'd want to work for/with.
Spreading false information to prove that you can spread false information is morally corrupt.
Tom , I just saw your comment on the post. I stand corrected. It seems the Ruby interpreter does leak memory!
I find HN is pretty good about finding sources and backing up facts. Commenters here will call you out if you say something they can show is false and I like that.
Totally misleading headline. DPI-based behavioral advertising and customer tracking might (might!) become unlawful. But even the people advocating for DPI regulation concede that it will be used for "security" and "network management", which means that ISPs will still be able to use it for:

* Blocking or throttling BitTorrent and P2P

* Satisfying requests from the RIAA and MPAA, and

* So-called "lawful intercept".

Note also that when the government "wiretapped" the Internet, they didn't do it by deploying Narus directly ISP networks. Instead, they offramped traffic to their own lab network. There's no reason you couldn't build a shrink-wrap commercial offering based on the same idea; ISPs already offramp internally to "scrubbing networks" when handling DDoS and botnet traffic.
Thanks, grandalf! It means a lot to me for you to say that.
I feel sorry for 356, the smallest number about which there is nothing "special". But perhaps that is itself special! Repeat.
the wikipedia environmental psychology page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_psychology#Densit...
Is there any way to contact you guys in regards to licensing your product? (I tried the contact form on the site, but no dice from it)
Social Bookmarking Websites for Visual Inspiration
ARM is hugely popular on portable hardware. ARM processors are everywhere: consider that each Nintendo DS has 2 ARM processors, and that's sold 100m units alone.
Something that reinforces ones' worldview tends to be less likely to get questioned than something that contradicts it

Yes, confirmation bias

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

afflicts most discussion, and especially most online discussion. Agreeing with another reply above, I greatly appreciate it when anyone on HN asks follow-up questions to another reply, to check facts and sources.
(1) No part of the DNS is currently any hacker's wet dream. Why bother spoofing at all? You don't need to bust out the batmobile to get into most people's accounts.

(2) The technique that "extended" DNS' security is the same technique that protects plenty of other core Internet protocols, so if it doesn't work at least in the medium term, we're all doomed.

(3) The issue isn't whether DNS is breakable --- it always has been --- it' s how easy it is. The problem is about cost, not about raw capability. If you can't pull the attack off drive-by, it doesn't make a difference in 2009.

(4) Anybody who tries to sell you on a DPI solution to DNS security is scamming you. You'd need a globally deployed network of DPI boxes, all synchronized, to make a dent in the problem.
What's interesting to me is the comments. I worked in a corporate environment that seemed to me at the time to be overly-paranoid about open source (any use of open source software had to be run past a legal team). After seeing people argue that Microsoft's millions of lines of code is in violation of the GPL due to a single Makefile, I have more sympathy for their concerns.
I generally agree with the advice in this article, excluding the bit about "each request that Apache handles loads PHP". nginx is glorious software, and the combination of nginx / fastcgi / and APC work very well. At Wikispaces we serve over ten million PHP requests a day using a similar setup.

However, this article implies nginx is better than Apache for the wrong reasons. nginx has two critical advantages over Apache in this context:

- handling dynamic requests without tying up backends (buffering proxy server)
- serving of static files from disk without incremental memory use (event-driven vs. multi-thread or multi-process)

It may also be the case that nginx is marginally faster than Apache in pushing bits absent of these two issues, but in my opinion gains here are greatly outweighed by operational considerations (see below). I'd modify this article's advice to be:

1. serve all static requests using an event-driven webserver (nginx)
2. proxy all dynamic requests through a server that buffers backend results and spoonfeeds clients (nginx)
3. wrap your backend scripting or application server in the system that is easiest to understand, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot (Apache and mod_php)

There are other choices here that may be as good or better in your environment, but with 1. and 2. in place, CPU/memory/IO savings by rejiggering 3. are minimal.

Operational Considerations: including but not limited to process management, logging, availability of value-add modules like mod_security, over-the-wire troubleshooting, HTTP load-balancing, and finally non-rarity of your solution. If plain fastcgi is a few percent faster than mod_php but orders of magnitude more rare, I'd happily forego the performance gain for the benefits of a larger install base.
God - Same issues stated in this article. I've had to move two different clients off of it to Monit.

Jekyll - I managed to access Github's database.yml in cleartext, I'm sure you remember that.

Fuzed - Never ran

Now, albeit, none of these had a 1.0 release and were practically abandoned before they reached it. I'm okay with that, because I really, really like Github.
Why do so many people think it's a really great accomplishment not to enjoy TV?

Imagine if someone in a conversation said to you "the best way to hack the web is to ignore it altogether".
DPI does not specifically slow down bittorrent traffic or speed up http traffic. DPI filters traffic based on the data in the packet, which affects all traffic. What happens to that traffic is up to the person implementing the DPI.

The problem with DPI is that its akin to the post office reading all of your mail.
I spotted Elf Island staffers at an investing get-together in Atlanta earlier. I wasn impressed by how they stood out from the group in their Elf Island shirts in a sea of dress shirts and ties. They got a lot of attention and it was a strategy that I'll keep in mind when I attend other events in the future.
It's all just a degree of abstraction.

I disagree in that when learning to program in BASIC on the Apple II, you are a mere PEEK and POKE away from the hardware; go any lower than that and you are no longer talking about abstraction (as we refer to it) but hard realities of electrical engineering. One floor down and you are the common denominator that defines everything we refer to as a "computer" (in the modern vernacular) and mastering this will provide you with insight which spans across all contemporary systems and many in the perceivable future.

Setting the "ground floor" of programming at anything above this level narrows your scope and greatly increases the potential of your knowledge becoming obsolete.

Someday this will change, and the basis of future systems will not be rooted in the hardware models of today, and it will be great because then we'll all have something new to learn.
Chronic is bad ass; as-is github.

I've only been disappointed with God mainly because its marketed as being "like monit, only awesome" when its really not.
I thought this was going to be an article about tree houses. I am disapointed. Anyways the most interesting part of this article to me is how you white list chatting. That has some interesting implications and I have never heard of that being used.
Pricing makes me think of YAPC. I went to one of those; it was a great time. Lots of talent, both local and big name. Larry Wall ended up being sick (IIRC), but Damian Conway gave a great introduction to programming in Klingon (with working prototype).

http://www.archlug.org/kwiki/KlingonPerlProgramming

http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/560
This has the feel of the Sokal Affair about it. The guy should have announced that it was a hoax over the wire, but the goal is basically the same. Put something together that has the same appearance as what you're trying to satirize, but include some critical flaw, and see if anyone notices.

I wonder if we'll end up seeing any of these in mainstream reporting; that would be quite the thing.
Microsoft is dead in the sense you don't have to worry about them.

Privacy is dead in the sense that you definitely have to worry about it. Wearing a small IR LED on a cap should be enough to block most CCTV photos of yourself. Most people won't, but if you care, you can take action.
So it seems they have, interesting.
Dynamical Simulation with Finite Elements
Yes, something less emotionally and politically charged could have been chosen. However, this doesn't necessarily invalidate the results, and I'd be interested in hearing of an experiment that would provide better proof that false information can be spread that would be equally or more conclusive and doesn't read like an arm-chair sociologist's blog post. At least there is an experiment and a methodology here.
Some IT skills see pay hikes during downturn (Linux, Visualization etc)
Thrill The Messenger - How Startups Can Break Through Media Gatekeepers
And what of the morality of testing the capabilities and limitations of systems? While the conclusions you draw from an exercise like this may be "morally corrupt" or logically unfounded, why is the act itself morally corrupt? For misleading people?
Judge them by their actions.

In an interview, ask them if they have any side projects. If they code when they don't have to, you know where their heart is. In a dating situation... if they don't call, or stand you up, that is more telling than what they say. People don't know themselves that well, and have trouble being direct in both scenarios.
Deep Crack
You're correct in the sense that it is not a Constitutional issue when a company chooses to do this; but that doesn't mean it's not limiting the act of free speech.
The Pinvoke collection is invaluable to me. So many icons for every eventuality possible. Highly recommended.
Inequality and Risk
I used one of these at The Sprint store in the Power & Light district in Kansas City. It was infuriating. It seemed like everything happened about 2.5 seconds after you had touched it. I walked off after about 30 seconds.
Vi or Emacs?
"Exciting new challenges that allow me to maximize my potential!"

As an introvert, I'm wary of requests to articulate such things on demand. I'm probably not going to tell an interviewer that my greatest pleasures include cooking with my girlfriend or getting baked and playing with synthesizers.
Digg and Reddit and Slashdot oh my
I'm glad you didn't post this before I figured out how to write my own. A fun educational puzzle!

Of course I use Safari much of the time, so I won't be using this much.
Among other species exist all kinds of adaptations, for example birds can fly, and that's natural for THEM.

Just because elephant herds consist of females and juveniles, while bull elephants roam alone, that doesn't make it natural for us hominids.

The only time the sex ration goes well beyond 70/30 in great apes or monkeys it's because of some natural disaster.

A century or two ago, women were property, and kept out of a lot of social life. Like they are today in Saudi Arabia. That also does not make it natural.

While gender imbalance is often about economic discrimination, and especially has been in the past, I think today women have ample economic opportunities. So I don't perceive the lack of women in tech. as punitive to women.

I think it's punitive to the (overwhelmingly) men and women who are in it today. It's just a weird environment, and that weirdness in itself has no benefit.
Can you fix the title? "A collection of the best small icons on the web"

FamFam is a long time favorite, I'm pretty sure everyone has used them by now though. Great find!
Hey guys, I deliberately left HN out of this because HN seems like the best Online community out there right now...

Hope you find this funny :)
Men "won't concede that I could beat them at Halo or CS any day" either. (EDIT: I meant that men won't concede that MEN could beat them either. I think this was clear, but I also think that the post is incorrect as written.)

I remember hearing of, but can't cite, a study or article that noted that women felt they were being discriminated against in the workplace, when in fact the men were just being as competitive with them as they were with other men.
He's not. In terms of episodes, I think he's even more prolific!
Parrot VM 1.1.0 "Half-moon Conure" Released
If you use the operator, it's (hopefully) safe to assume you know what it does. Then you should also know what interleaving the operator between the list elements does. Which is exactly what the reduction does. I don't understand your problem with it.
<ducking while the Git fans prepare to flame>
Some exceptions certainly apply, like monasteries.

That's to say, yes I agree with man have and will almost certainly continue to make up the vast majority of soldiers.

But as you said, the gender imbalance in IT, or for that matter nursing, seems to have a lot to do with inertia. Which is just kind of sad.
The original post was about Perl 6, though.
/Most shipping products have had line-by-line source code reviews done by at least two different firms (we did some of this work for Vista)/

But Vista was more of a fail I guess.

* I'm a GNU/Linux person
It might not be that real of an option for an average individual, but fixing it yourself in a large business could save you millions, depending on how big your IT Infrastructure is.

Think of this example. Company ABC has Windows XP deployed throughout their company. They need to upgrade some hardware, but the new hardware only has drivers for Windows 7 and Vista. Their only option (assuming a lot) is to upgrade to Windows 7 or Vista.
Let's say that they have 1,500 desktops that need to be upgraded. I'm not aware of the details of VLK license prices, but let's say this will cost $150/workstation, including labor to install it. Roughly approximating, this comes out to at least $225,000. This doesn't even count the amount of money they will spend battling incompatible software and hardware issues, after the upgrade.
--------------------------------
Company XYZ is using Linux Kernel 2.6.17, they have a problem with a piece of hardware that only has drivers that work with the 2.6.28 kernel. Company XYZ is a software development company, so they can just use their internal software developers to backport the driver from the 2.6.28 kernel to 2.6.17. They are already paying the developers a salary, so it won't cost them any more cash, maybe just a bit of productivity on other projects. This amounts to a huge savings over what Company ABC had to spend to fix a similar issue.
Is this a thought-exercise in confounding factors?!
In the market, yes. In security, no.
Thank you, I'll try out those two.
I was going to start rawring but this made me laugh. Still odd they chose to support Mercurial first. Maybe it's used internally more that git is?
I'd like to know where a link leads to before clicking on it; may be a small tooltip, like someone else in this thread suggested. This would avoid things like "Oh I didn't really expect a video here" to "Oops, my coworker would have thought I opened that NSFW website intentionally".

Sure, this is not a complete solution (there are videos in sites other than Youtube, Metacafe, etc., and NSFW content in just too many websites), but would help in very many cases.

Actually I'm surprised not so many people are concerned about the security implications of having opaque URLs (there's been a lot of talk about this recently, but very little action AFAIK).

I've been thinking about this lately and thought a Firefox extension might be of help. I was just planning to shake off my laziness and learn about how to make an extension so I could make this one.

A positive response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577896 might make this unnecessary, but then it might not...
Both are dead in the sense of inevitability. How much longer do you expect the IR LED trick to work?

Why should I worry about losing my privacy? Certainly there are secrets I need to keep, like my bank account details, but those are of a different nature. I won't be surprised if in a couple of decades, anyone on the planet will be able to find out everything I've done all day, complete with high-definition movies of it happening if they want. And, to be honest, I'm quite ok with that.
Unix To PowerShell - Seq
While I am a huge Git fan, I completely understand their decision to go with Mercurial. It has better documentation, better cross-platform support, and a similar feature set. Git is improving in all these areas, and I use Git for my personal projects, but Mercurial does have its advantages.
1) Pissing off users with no choice is one thing. Promoting open source is another.

2) None of the examples I gave go against user happiness, quite the opposite really. If you think something should be painful, you're less likely to notice when you're doing it wrong.
Apple Store gets a little less shiny with loss of 1,600 jobs
As far as I know the only thing that actually improves matters is taking men out of the equation. Females at all-female schools do great in fields like tech.

Also, protip: do not attempt to address a female project manager's sexist assumptions about your female co-worker's programming ability with sarcasm. It backfires very badly.
Mm, that's true enough, and it's also partially a cultural thing (I think it's less extreme here in the UK, for example).

But I do think there's a minor difference in the way you're treated in either case. People might not assume you're any good at the games, they just don't assume I play them at all. I wish I could capture some of the facial expressions I get.
Ask HN: sites for getting alpha testers
Hi, my site is in private alpha and we are looking to recruit alpha testers to provide feedback/report bugs and more importantly add content. Are there sites that make it easy to recruit paid and unpaid alpha testers for web 2.0 sites?
Ah that makes a lot more sense, I overlooked that.
Dont go there if you have the slightest interest in numbers. Your day will evaporate before your eyes. :-)
They document their tradeoff analysis here:
http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
Congratulations! Its great to see a fellow DreamIT company have success
PostgreSQL gets a lot of flack for not having replication. It's been my experience that it just doesn't matter in practice. Let me explain.

MySQL's performance sucks. It's great lightly loaded and with little concurrency. Add load and it noses over. (I've read that this is mostly because of the malloc they use. Regardless of the cause, it's a problem.)

I tested MySQL 5 vs PG 8.3 to handle session storage. This is about as simple of a test as possible. PostgreSQL outperformed MySQL by a significant margin across every load scenario, sometimes up to 2x the capabilities. PG's performance flatlined with load. MySQL flatlined and then hit a wall and dropped significantly as load and concurrency rose.

So the first thing someone does when MySQL noses over is to buy faster hardware. But that doesn't really help as much as it should. So they add replication to be able to distribute load across multiple servers. That's all fine and dandy until you realize that for every rep node you add, you are adding overhead for writes. And the headaches of keeping MySQL's brain dead replication in sync. Eventually you spend all of your time waiting for replication to finish or rebuilding a failed sync or chasing down ghosts in the system.

Back to postgres. Its performance scales nearly linearly with load and number of cores. Adding more hardware resources actually improves performance accordingly. So you end up being able to stay on one machine longer.

If you're truly going to have more load than one server can handle, break the data set up into smaller pieces (sharding).

Postgres is an awesome database. It behaves consistently and correctly. It has a lot of polish when you get into it. psql is a pleasure to use. It supports more of the SQL standard than MySQL. It's query analyzing tools are great. The only real pain point is that you have to do a dump/load to upgrade point releases (8.1 -> 8.2).

With all of that said, MySQL is great for smaller sites. It's available everywhere and every framework and language supports it. There are a million people who can administer it. Postgres is a lot harder to find competent DBAs.

PostgreSQL has been improving significantly throughout the 8.x series. Autovacuum has made life easier for everyone. Full text search is now built in. It now supports recursive queries and a bunch more.
Git vs Mercurial: Google Code Analysis
I don't know about anybody else, but there are only one or two shows that I can handle watching - I don't think I could watch more than 2 or 3 hours a week total, let alone in one day.
Would it be that hard to write a side-by-side comparison of God vs. Monit? You know, a bookmark/share-worthy post with some meat in it.

Was this just an attempt to stir the pot or were you just shooting from the hip?

FTR, I use God and its works fine for me.