skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not against a captcha level puzzle ("which box is blue") or arrange these numbers in order of least to greatest. But to do so to limit "less intelligent" members amounts to censorship and I cannot support it. The goal it stop spammers mechanically, and allow normal people to post, whether their post is of substance or not.
If it makes you feel better I don't really think of this as a right/left issue anymore.

If you look at the past decade you see George W. Bush spent money like crazy (on defense AND social programs) and President Obama is looking to keep up with him. So really there's very little difference between right and left when it comes to taking your money. The only difference is former President Bush borrowed money (which will some day increase your taxes in the future) while President Obama wants to take it outright (increasing your taxes now)

I really think we're coming into a time where people of all parties have to start looking for candidates who have fiscal responsibility as part of their platform. Because, to my eyes, Libertarianism isn't incompatible with either parties platform (it incorporates the lower taxes/private sector component of the right with the social equality goals of the left).
sigh

Yeah. Handling 1000+ http requests a second on a single 1.4GB VPS is lame isn't it.

Java rocks. But it's not for beginners.
IPhone still just 1.5% of mobile market
MySQL

Pros:

* Easier to replicate (and hence to scale for some people)

* Easier to find DBA's for

* More popular (twitter, sixapart, etc. use them)

Cons:

* MyISAM is slow as hell

* InnoDB is better but may have licensing issues

* Oracle owns them now, unclear whether it is for better or for worse

PgSQL:

* Better performance of DB engine

* Excellent query planner and analyzer

* Rock-solid in most aspects, with the core team dedicated to putting out a good product

Cons:

* Lack of a canonical, good, production-ready replication method (current choices: Slony, pgPool, Continuent, Londiste)

* Hard to find good DBA's

* Less popular to some extent

There you go. Maybe it boils down to performance (pgsql) vs replication (mysql), but that's just from what I know...
Sometimes I wish people would just shut up about the whole women in technology thing.
ARM's Feeling Lucky; Netbook 'Battle' Just Beginning?
> if you are a startup you are not even considering db2 or oracle.

Why not? The free versions exceed postgresql. If you succeed and face heavy load, then you just throw some money at the problem rather than blow hundreds of man-hours fidling with the hacks people use to scale the free DBMSes.
I mean low cost in terms of operation costs, not in terms of cheap loans.

Current bank structures are too cost heavy to provide light weight services to these under served markets.

Some of the embedded links show more concrete examples of such models.
When done tactically, government spending can lead to smaller government. The long term goal for much of the right's spending agenda is to create an environment where the government is forced to become smaller via debt fueled program slashing. Defense spending is particularly good for this, because there is abundant rhetoric for attacking someone who reduces (i.e. "cuts") defense funding.
Hope HN won't introduce anything similar to the burying system on digg which the powerful users on the site use for their advantage.
Well I think it should rather be required reading for those responsible for all those young people not knowing how to study after 12 years of schooling.
If a site is big enough that it has trouble running on Dreamhost then it already had trouble running on Geocities.

Good marketing on Dreamhosts side..
Fair enough, though it might have the effect of not letting humans in either ;-)
My databases in Postgresql have not exceeded approximately 10GB, so for larger databases you may want additional information.

With AutoVacuum enabled, and adding "VACUUM FULL" to the end of my nightly backup routine, I have found Postgresql to be really fast. MySQL has had some performance updates since I switched, but at the time Postgresql was performing better for me. I believe MySQL was at the first release of version 5. If there is a performance difference between Microsoft SQL and Postgresql, I'm not noticing it. I have a lot of experience with Microsoft SQL, and I can tell you that prefer Postgresql.
Wait, you're saying Lisp is simpler than Perl and then you use "use" and "require" as examples? How are "use" and "require" different from "(eval-when :compile-toplevel ..." and "(eval-when :load-toplevel ..." and "(eval-when :execute"?

Lisp and Python aren't as simple as you think they are, and Perl isn't as complicated, either.
This is just my opinion but I think the polygonal outline (which mimics your logo?) you use to show the face id makes the technology you've developed appear less professional than it should. Perhaps, a more processing-intensive desaturation/alpha blend (like they do in 20/20 with surveillance videos) where you highlight the head area?
This is old news, obviously. It's worth pointing out that as good as the code appeared to these reviewers in 2004, between then and now, Microsoft underwent a sea change in code-level quality control. Windows is now likely to be the best reviewed, most rigidly compliant code shipping on the market:

* Virtually every Microsoft senior developer has been trained on software security

* All shipping code is checked in-house, including some homegrown static analysis tools

* 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).

During the Summer of Worms in '03, when Microsoft security lapses were front-page material on CNN, Bill Gates told the press that Microsoft was going to totally overhaul security and code quality. They weren't kidding. Microsoft now outspends everybody on that.

Note: I'm a Mac person.
Save time for one. And, hit other mags too.
See, I was going to agree with the headline until I read the article. I was thinking along the lines of a data warehouse version of Mathematica with distributed processing and web front end and RPC/REST and all of that.

No, the author wants to "integrate a (not yet developed) visual programming language." On the JVM. What will this accomplish? Well, it would allow users to "create fairly sophisticated apps by dragging, dropping and plugging things together." But fear not, programmers: "Programmers wishing to make more sophisticated apps would have at least one real programming language with a DSL or DSL-like library for interacting with the system."

Wonderful, another do-everything GUI app development environment where users can do more and programmers can do even more than that. Ugh.

"Does anyone who understands the needs of the corporate market have some input?"

Sure, make sure you check out the billions that have been spent on this very problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4GL
There are many layers involved which lead up to this point. The teachers, parents, peers and selves all play a large part in how a person learns. A good combination of the involvement of each is needed to produce an upstanding member of society.
Your job as a developer is to pick a technology and build your application. Building/implementing an entire extra layer onto your project just so you don't have to make a choice is a bad move. The technical term, I believe, is Yak Shaving.
I'm amazed at how mainstream twitter is. I watched some talk shows on TV last night, and each one mentioned it. The newspaper was full of it.

Ugh.
I think an important point is that the programmer recognized that what he/she was doing was an ugly hack, (presumably under some serious constraint, like time) and felt compelled to point this out.

A mediocre programmer might come up with the same fix, but not recognize that the fix was an ugly hack, and not comment as such.
MooTools 1.2.2- Gets Fancier OO Features
You can modify classes dynamically via the implement method and all instances will get updated. Nice if you're used to this feature from the better OO languages.

Also refractor, opens up the possibility of customizing (aka monkey-patching) core functionality without breaking everyone else's code.
In grad school, I was a member of the local student chapter of SWE (the society of women engineers) [1][2]. One of the studies they came up with had the implications that boys were steered towards engineering, while girls were steered away from engineering [3].

Part of the problem is that engineering and IT aren't cool for most values of "cool." I personally don't think that it is a problem, let alone something that needs to be cured. However, I also recognize that I'm not everyone.

As an older developer, I'm also reminded of this comment:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1033515&cid=258...

Notes:

1 - I'm tired of hearing about "well, what about the society of men engineers" as engineering is so overwhelmingly populated by men, almost every engineering organization is "SME".

2 - Why did I (a man) join? Mostly, my lab partner asked me to join because they didn't have enough students and were in danger of being decertified as a student club/group/organization.

3 - The numbers I remember were along the lines of: 95% of women who enter engineering have a family member or close/influential personal friend who is/was an engineer. With men entering engineering, the number is 60%. Also women engineers drop out of engineering at twice the rate of men dropping out of engineering.
I'm wondering how likely this is to work over interstellar distances. Especially, given most (if not all) extrasolar planets have been detected through indirect means (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet#Detection_met...) rather than direct imaging.
Ask HN: Slicehost vs Mosso Cloud Server?
Now that Slicehost is owned by Rackspace the pricing situation seems a little weird.

The cheapest slicehost slice is ~20 per month(1) while the cheapest mosso cloud server is ~10(2) -- this seems cannibalistic to slicehost. Why would anyone continue to use slicehost?

1) http://www.slicehost.com/
2) http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers_pricing.jsp
DPCI and MEI to Showcase Dynamic Content Delivery Using K4 and Drupal
I don't agree. I think all code of any size, bad or good, has these words in it. The problem with his statement is that "UGLY TERRIBLE HACK" is relative. One man's terrible hack is another man's normal day-to-day style. In bad code, there are just more ugly hacks that aren't commented as such.
It's only a matter of time before someone creates an algorithm and app that takes publicly available and tagged photos of people (think FB profiles), and then uses the info to identify all of the people in a photo at a political rally, crime scene, or amateur porn site.
Oops! Sorry. I wonder how many other people get confused by this.
So then APC + PHP == (compiled python) == (compiled ruby) == C ? Sorry am not a python or ruby person so don't know how compiled code works out there.
Fake Facts on Twitter
When it comes to DVDs I want exactly one thing: a player that goes from closing the tray to playing the feature in less than one second.

No FBI or Interpol warnings in multiple languages, no previews, no disclaimers, no bonus features, no menus. Just. The. Damn. Movie.

If I want any of thatother garbage, I can press the "menu" key at any time and go there.

Copying DVDs? Who cares. Anyone who wants to do this already can, and the legality of such activity probably doesn't bother them. As a consumer I wouldn't spend a penny on this. But I would buy a new player that works like one I described above in a second.
You don't need VACUUM FULL. If you have problems with too much disk space used by your tables, increase the autovacuum frequency.
I guess s/he will realize this not in Statistics class, but in Psychology class. Human brain is amazingly equipped to find patterns, even if there exists none.
White Oak hiring blitz (Washington DC area)
White Oak Technologies is doing a hiring blitz between now and the end of May. White Oak has been the main sponser of PyCon for the last few years.

The White Oak mission is "To solve our commercial and government customers' mission critical, largest scale, and most challenging information systems problems by providing the very best staff and "bleeding-edge" technologies."

You don't need a USA security clearance to be hired by White Oak. But you should be qualified to obtain a USA security clearance.
I've never used PostgreSQL, but have spent my fair share of time programming against MySQL. It never fails to amaze me how far behind the curve MySQL is, that it still has table corrupting bugs happening frequently in the wild, and how unconcerned its developer pool is about this state.

So from that background, if I were forced to choose between the two for a new project, I'd go with Postgre. I know nothing about it at all, except that it seems to have a good reputation, and it's not MySQL.

Disclaimer: I spend the bulk of my time in SQL Server, and I have trouble understanding why anybody would use anything else out of choice.
For me the most important thing has been stability of time. If I can plan that on any given day, my "usual thing" will be to code a bit in the evening, that's exactly what I'll do - even if I miss a few times. But if I'm getting jerked around by external forces, be they errands, phone calls, travel, etc. then it won't happen.
Like people continually whispering "shhh," creating more noise than there was in the first place?
I took a look at the page. I have to say, not interested. I think it could benefit those who want "mentorship" without giving up their day job. But these people pay to participate.

Also, I'm not a fan of the whole anyone can be anywhere part of it. Some people are fine with this. To me, something about interacting with a program in person makes it more real. I'd compare this to going to college online vs. doing it in residence. Much different experience.

I think the application requirements (like joining their Facebook group) are an attempt at viral marketing.

And finally, the application process makes me think of a job interview more than a founder interview. I think the background check is a stretch but will let them have it. The written tests is a little too far though. If I was applying to something like this, I'd expect they could check my open source or treat me like an independent business man and take me at my word.

To sum this up (and I would say this to their face): I feel like the application process is trying to use me (marketing pawn + payment) and talk down to me at the same time (we need to "test" you).
My experience with several 10-20GB databases shows that if you have autovacuum enabled you don't need to run vacuum full very often. We only do it once every couple of months and we're not seeing any significant table bloat, even though we're dealing with lots of updates.
White Oak Technologies is doing a hiring blitz between now and the end of May. White Oak has been the main sponsor of PyCon for the last few years.

The White Oak mission is "To solve our commercial and government customers' mission critical, largest scale, and most challenging information systems problems by providing the very best staff and "bleeding-edge" technologies."

You don't need a USA security clearance to be hired by White Oak. But you should be qualified to obtain a USA security clearance.
True, but I didn't know how to say that without sounding like an elitist jerk.

Still, they have the opportunity.
I was going to reply earlier with a google search coming up with a rough count for William Blackburn, but I couldn't figure out if he was your guy.

http://tinyurl.com/cbqrfo (TinyURL'd to preserve formatting)
Cool site. You should add some tiles where the edges seamlessly repeat so there is no blank space between the end of one tile edge and the beginning of another.
You're probably more of a planner personality then. I think some may have missed my point. When I write down what I did--I don't say I sat at a terminal and count that as productive. I make an honest assessment as to whether I made progress or not.

This keeping honest puts myself into the right frame of mind to stay productive. It builds momentum. I feel a small sense of accomplishment every time I log a successful hour and it encourages me to want to keep doing it.

I would count anything useful towards whatever my goals are as productive. Working in a notebook planning higher level things, developing an algorithm, or sitting down and writing code are all part of this process.

I don't think my productivity/working hour is being questioned here so I won't address that.
From the post:

I try to keep the big things in my life ultra-stable — car, where I live, relationships — so I can afford to be ultra-aggressive about other things.

Simple, but brilliant.
How would you backup s3 stored data?
If I am using s3 as a saas for my app, storing image data for example, how do I create a backup of my s3 bucket? If for any reason I delete my s3 bucket will all my data be lost?
It's already under development by several startups, including ours (except ours isn't for gov't uses, but to map your personal photos with names using facebook pictures).

The cool thing about facebook's photos is that with their API, you can pull the name->XY locations of the picture which has a person tagged to it (making the facial detection portion super easy). Then with the set of name -> faces[], training the facial recognition database becomes even easier.

Facebook it self has a even more sinister potential. Imagine they train a facial recognition database for everyone already tagged in photos on facebook. Then have a iPhone app, which you can take a picture of anyone... which would spit out the name/info/school/interests/everything. There is nothing technologically stopping this, and it will be just a matter of time.

(puts on my tin foil hat)
It is strange; usually you see someone put their name in the footer, have an about page, or at least sign their work in a meta tag somewhere. I couldn't figure out who was behind it until I hit the "donate" link which reveals the donation will go to "yavorskiy.s@gmail.com", AKA Sergij Javors'kij of Khmel'nic'kij Ukraine, whose unfinished home page is at inetcat.com according to WHOIS. Why not see if Mr. Javors'kij is looking for work and offer him a job?
> I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control.

I didn't have a Geocities site but my dad had several. He created and maintained them for some of the organizations he was actively involved in. Photos, articles, a virtual storybook. He was very proud of it - he did it all by himself (which was a relief for his direct technical support line - me)

Perhaps we can say Geocities began the democratization of Internet self expression that has led to Facebook, Twitter and maybe even Googlezon and EPIC (or something similar). So long, Geocities, and thanks for the fish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlezon
The arrowed side of the polygon indicates the direction of motion of the head.

http://www.pittpatt.com/technology/
Thanks - no need to apologize. I do think you overlooked 2 things (or I didn't bring them out strongly enough):

1- entertaining doesn't have to be expensive to be impressive
2- throwing a dinner party or a garden party is a cheap and effective way to network

But your point is well taken.
Definitely. Privacy in general is dead (in the same sense that Microsoft is dead).
Too bad that the article completely skips these important new features:

- Windowing Functions
- Common Table Expressions & Recursive Joins
- Default & Variadic parameters for functions
- Column Permissions
- Per-database locale settings

But do I like the Daft Punk title. :)
This is very similar to the rants I've given and heard from plenty fellow students back when I was still studying a few years ago. I can see exactly where it's coming from, and yet I can't agree. Partly it's the blatant snobbery of it, which I know from my own experience. It's frustrating to see folk with no interest in the discipline do better because they're more focussed on getting a first than actually learning anything.

The thing is, the industry is a lot bigger than it seems when you're at university. Developers/programmers are actually a pretty small part of it. For example, software testing/validation is a job in itself which can involve very little coding. Professional documenters are paid to write about software and do very little coding, but an understanding of the field is still useful to them. And lets not forget the good old ranks of management, forever considered to be a complete waste of time that gets in the way of "just hacking shit out". Except it turns out people don't want shit.

So basically, just because somebody is on your course and doesn't want to spend all night fiddling with their ubuntu installation, reading HN and learning the stuff you know that you'll need for the job you want, doesn't mean they wont be able to hack it in industry. If anything the industry could do with more normal people. Preferably ones with boobs.
To me that makes no sense. The way I see it there are two reasons for small government.

First Reason: To save money. But in this sense the plan obviously fails because to even get to the point of spending cuts we have to use all our Government's available financial resources.

Second Reason: To empower the Private Sector. But if the Government has gotten to the point where they've exhausted the majority of their financial resources they are going to be forced to levy high taxes to compensate. That places a burden on businesses and makes them look to incorporating in other countries (just as most look to incorporate out side of California now). So it doesn't empower the private sector it all but destroys it.

Given the two points above I don't see how your thesis makes sense. It seems that you're so focused on small government that you've forgotten the reasons you'd want it in the first place.
Happy Birthday Hubble
Yes. I fully agree. I didn't mean to imply that you could pinpoint some one responsible. But it is sad, that you are lured into college on false premises. If one is not generally prepared to study can we expect one to "Take a day or two and research what is involved in learning to program." ?
There is no revenue to speak of at present. Also, that's what I inherited.
Deep packet inspection could be outlawed in US
I used to, as another poster has mentioned, pick up a copy whenever I flew anywhere.

Now I subscribe to the audio edition, which is of a fantastically high quality. Amazingly, there's more content (length-wise) that I can reasonably get through in a week of commuting, so I find myself skipping stories I'm not interested in.

Unfortunately, they don't expose their audio feed as podcast. It's available as a zipped download full of individual MP3s for each section. I've written a script which scrapes and processes it weekly and turns it into an RSS feed so I can easily consume it.

The audio really is high-quality, and their turn-around time for putting out a new edition each week is really impressive.

Every now and then their editing process slips up, and you can hear what should have been out-takes in the audio. Stuff like the speaker repeating sentences, or having a number of tries at a particularly difficult word - pretty funny, really :)
Certainly, HN must have a bayesian classifier looking at the content of its submissions and deciding whether they are "Hacker Newsworthy". By now, the site must have sizeable corpi (corpuses?) of good articles and spam links to use in such an assessment.

Since this site was built by Mr Bayesian himself, it never occurred to me that it might have weak spam filtering.
The Dark Side of Crowdsourcing
Use Monit with Rails, not God
Twitter Sucks
Ask HN: Social placemarking to share places with your friends. Ideas to Tagcrumbs.com?