skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And this requirement to test the shit out of your code [2-to-1 ratios aren't uncommon] kills the spirit of exploratory programming for me."

Which is why most of us don't write unit tests when we're in the exploratory phase of something.

"Moreover, 200x speed penalty means that simple O(n) algorithms won't cut it for an average data set, forcing you to build more complex solutions just because your language can't scan a big-ass array under 10ms."

I think that you and I have different ideas of what an "average" data set is, then, or the performance constraints expected of it. Although given the number of mathematicians and professional scientists who crunch their data in Python these days (see: NumPy, SciPy), I'd also suspect that maybe you should investigate this a bit more deeply.
Should Creative Workers Use Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs?
Dude, awesome!

Now I have to watch myself, because I'll be looking for a stupid excuse to use Python for something in the next few weeks.
Keys to Unlocking Startup Growth
Ask HN: Why is there a disproportionate amount of interesting text vs. spoken content?
I find it very easy, perhaps too easy to fill hours every day reading very interesting articles online. Then when I want to go outside for a walk, I would prefer to continue listening to similarly interesting content. I've found I take a lot longer walks if I'm engaged with an interesting podcast.

But there is a great divide here, it took a lot of digging just to find a few good podcasts (Stack Overflow, Venture Voice and Radio Lab), but they provide me less than 2 hours worth of content each week. With text, I wouldn't even be able to keep up with all the interesting content out there.

At this point I am fairly confident I have found most of the stuff I might be interested in listening to, so my interest now is to understand why more is not being produced, and if there is anything we could do to encourage production? Is there no demand for this? Are programmer types too shy? Why doesn't for example Steve Yegge just read aloud his blog posts and make them iTunes-subscribable?
OK, I am beginning to see how to get a technical blog going, if discovering a standard SQL form allows for a lengthy blog article.
"but it may be overkill for you"

I am curious about this line. MySQL is not very complicated to set up, so how could it be overkill?

Edit: seriously, "overkill" to me would be to use a sledge hammer to drive in a nail, that is, something that is too fat/heavy/complicated for the problem at hand.
still has my old siemens M55.
that thing is really hard to break though :)
Click around. All the stuff from this guy is gold.
In my orginal post I used a LEFT JOIN from content_to_tags to content. ... Using NOT EXISTS was just over two times faster, and I would assume that as the tables get populated with more records the difference exponential.

If using sub-selects is faster than JOINS on what I would assume is indexed data, your query-optimizer is doing something horribly, horribly wrong.

And given how everyone complains about MySQL's support for sub-selects and the performance of those, I can't even start to comprehend how bad and inefficiently it implements JOINs if sub-selects are indeed faster.

Yeah, I think I'll just stick to SQL Server for now.
The conondrum is: do we consider this trolling for karma or shouldn't we care how often this link comes up, because the papers are supposed to be invaluable. But honestly, how many people actually bother to read them, instead of just giving them lipservice?

Which raises the question: submitter smanek, have you actually read these papers?
Is an application supposed to be able to run on arbitrarily low memory? If not, I don't see the problem - you run out of memory, end the application with an Out Of Memory error.

Also, I wonder about the memory measurements on the iPhone? I only know from Java that the amount of free memory that the respective method call would return might be much lower than the actual memory available. That is because the garbage collection would sometimes only kick in once the memory would be urgently needed. So before you allocate an object, you might have only 1KB memory left (on paper), after you allocated it, suddenly you have 10MB.

I suspect a similar thing might be going on with the frequent complaints about the memory consumption of Firefox. Just because some system monitor claims that application X is using 100MB of memory doesn't mean application X is REALLY using 100MB of memory. Might be 99% "garbage" that could be collected at any moment.
"""Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term "object oriented." When asked what that means he replies, "Smalltalk programs are just objects." When asked what objects are made of he replies, "objects." When asked again he says "look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles"""
There is more than one reason.

* Many Internet users surf the web from their workplace or from public computers. Listening to audio in these settings, even with headphones on, is very difficult. This drives down the demand for audio. Heck, most people never even bother listening to audio when it is available, preferring to read through the transcripts instead.

* As a rule, anyone smart enough to be listening to programming podcasts can read faster than the podcaster can speak.

* Producing an engaging podcast takes more effort than writing an article. After all, you wouldn't want someone to just read out an article to you, would you? We expect more than just words from audio. A podcast would have to be scripted carefully to make sure it's engaging.

* Most geeks are excellent writers, but boring speakers.

* Text is searchable, audio (as of now) is not. How much metadata can you tack on to an audio clip, anyway?

* You can skim through text to see whether the content is worth reading or not. Skimming through audio is not that easy.

* Text allows more anonymity than audio.

It's not that people don't like podcasts. Audio is just too inconvenient a medium for most people.
If the curses bindings didn't force me to make a console app, this sure as hell did. Thanks a lot, HN!
Edit the title so it says HN instead of NH sort of glaring typo.
Customer Development Gut Checks
The only thing I can really stand to listen too much is the audio version of The Economist.

Mostly, though, I think long walks (or better, bike rides!) are better for listening to what's going through my own head. I'm bombarded by enough information as it is. Other than that, "GeneralMaximus" sums things up nicely.
It's easier to organize thoughts clearly when writing. Once you have said something it's already been broadcast. You don't have a chance to go back and revise, restructure or edit the message in any way.
For goodness sake, why anybody would post such subjective things? I saw more attractive CEO's, but so what?
Seems like one step away from being Evil. Imagine a similar extension that would redirect your buy.com order to amazon.com with your affiliate ID attached.
Watch manana es para siempre capitulo 142 online
C++ at the day job, Java for hobby projects, and sometimes PHP for freelance projects.
Uhaul
I have beleive, honestly, that real hacker being often
an anarchist, or just a bit to the left, he/she
would never be excited about somebody being a great CEO;
It is very well possible for CEO to be "good" for shareholders
and investors, but horrible for the employees of the company.

I must have been reading too much of Chomsky.
Gordon Moore: The Accidental Entrepreneur
The biggest pair of shoes was created on the Philippines
The problem with low-QS is not just that it will perform poorly in absolute terms. In addition to various monkeying with your positioning they will do, which will distort the heck out of your assumptions you're confirming, each click will cost a punitive amount of money. My highest QS ads go for 3 to 4 cents a click. Your low QS ads, for the same keyword, will cost $1, $5, or $10. (And the sky is the limit on that if you are in a niche more money-rich than educational bingo cards. Basically, it is priced to punish based on whatever the prevailing CPC is in your niche -- if it normally cost $8.20~9.80, it now costs $100 even, etc.)
So cooks, carpenters , people really serious about clothes are "hobbyists who have reached the utmost peak level in their art" but when I buy green and toast then grind for myself, I'm just a "coffee snob"... hmm... no Monsooned Malabar [1] for you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsooned_Malabar
Yes. Definetely. But the problem is that the big pharma will spoil everything again, by bribing doctors, excessive ads, etc.
But then you might end up not being able to see the forest of data for all the Huffman trees.
7 best practices for taking decisions in the development team
Most probably write down what they're going to say in a script, but then they've already written it down and can be done by copy-pasting that text into a blog..

Seems to me like audio content is added work that doesn't provide many benefits, at least for this sort of prepared content. Audio is more useful when recording spontaneous conversations.
Everyone in the Rails community is trying to be the leader in their field. The result is a lot of blog posts about how everyone else is worse than them.
I suggest adding some price-comparison functionality to your website. You can let people try out your site and build trust to help convince them to download and install a plugin.
The 'Slow Code' Movement
Google's Eric Schmidt hasn't considered quitting Apple board
Regarding space filling curves some implementations would be:

1) http://code.google.com/p/uzaygezen/ (Hilbert)

2) http://www.h2database.com/html/features.html#multi_dimension... (Z-order)

Other space transformations could be employed like the Pyramid technique or the iDistance (http://obsearch.net).
Nevertheless, if the "intrinsic dimensionality" of your objects is too high then the curse of dimensionality comes into play and sequential scan might be cheaper. In such a case the Va-file, IQ-Tree or even "sketches" might be the only way to go.
I wonder if by leadership he means someone of high caliber or skill in their chosen field.
Tax Relief Help
Tax relief from tax professionals. Advice for filing your taxes.
Too much free
Is this "thought Leader" stuff a specific American thing? Not being derogatory, I am wondering if this style of "being a leader" obsession is common amongst _some_ Americans and few other nationalities.

And if there is a noted concern amongst other nationalities, how much of that is trying to mimic the Americans versus actual concern with being a leader.

I just got back from EuroDjangoCon, and the American speakers were much more evangelistic than the British/Euro/Australian.

---

> deluge of poorly written trite?

It's depressing, isn't it. Especially when written by someone who is trying to take on the Mantle of "Being a Leader"
We do use affiliate IDs but we don't ever redirect without user's explicit permission (user has to click a button). Is it really evil? why?
In a mostly irrelevant personal note Grant and I graduated in Numerical Mathematics from BYU the same year; there were only a handful of us so we spent a lot of time together in the top floor of the Math/CS Building. He was working on this during a big chunk of our undergrad and I think some after as well. I'm embarrassed to say I haven't taken the R plunge yet (SAS and STATA right now) but when I do I'm sure this will be my starting point.
The trouble is, until it has passed a double-blind test, it's basically hearsay. We have those tests because even good researchers working with seemingly promising drugs can be fooled by optimism or other biases.
I've often wondered about the sanity of using VC funding as a metric for measuring the success of a start up. If your business is simply developing tech to raise funding, then you're existing in a vacuum. Abraham Lincoln would have made a create start up founder:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights."

"The penniless beginner in the world," he once explained, "labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him." This steady, gradual advance, Lincoln insisted, is "the prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all."

Sage words.
Sorry, I hadn't seen that.
Marti Hearst of Berkeley has written on this topic for Edge.
Out of Work in Finance, They Turn to Teaching
I agree completely. The post is nothing more than a "hey, if you're not using ssh for these two things, maybe take a look." I went this route because there are so many other full fledged introductions to ssh, that I thought it'd almost be a waste of my time. I'm sorry that reading it wasted yours.
NotePub lets you Tweet multiple uploaded images and files
Andrei Alexandrescu:  (C++ STL) Iterators must go [pdf]
Good article. I am surprised very few people talk about engagement and quality of traffic on a website.

We've always tracked PV/UV ratio as a measure of quality of our product and audience vis-a-vis competitors.
Merriam KS 66203
The law is government interference.
"So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, red is the color."

Clearly his proofreaders were in a blue room.
Why is this evil? As an user trying to shop around, its a great way to get notified on a cheaper retailer. As long as, the cheapest retailer is shown and not always the same retailer or the one who pays more to show up in the plugin, this seems ok to me.
It contains some egregious errors and a geyser of wishful thinking and baseless guesses.

Which parts? The important parts of the article (Powerset using open source, jquery inclusion in VS, MS's earlier negative stance on open source) are all well documented.

Only MS's "keenness on consuming open-source software and embedding it into its proprietary products" is probably exaggerated.
Web Windows | Online Retailing Sailing Weathering The Economic Storm
The report also suggests that men are more likely to shop online than women and that online shoppers are expected to spend an average £773, on presents this year.
I think some people perceive affiliate marketing as an evil practice because it's generally tied to spammy sites.

However, in this case, the evilness comes from the fact that you have immense power. How do I know you're not linking me to a deal where you get a higher commission, instead of the deal that saves me a little extra money?

Ultimately, a deal is a deal, and the maker of a product has the right to make some money. Put up a disclaimer, and if people find it valuable, which it sounds like they might, most ultimately won't even care.
Because Mathematica costs at least $2000+ and R is free software. That makes R more suitable for teaching purpose.
One word - Yoga
Identity in the Browser
PitchTV: Ask Tony Hsieh of Zappos anything
Yet another good web app
This is really cool! An app which I would like to use.
A Customized Self Storage Salesforce For You
Our self storage salesforce is always growing, and with each added member I learn a little bit more about storage sales.
IT conversations (http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/) has quite a lot of good content.

If you just want something other than reading there are quite a few video presentations available on Google Video (http://research.google.com/video.html). And naturally TED talks (http://www.ted.com/index.php).
Yes, you're right, there is no way of knowing that we suggest the best bargain and not the most profitable affiliate link. However, we promise we are not doing this because we believe that the way to success is by providing the best service for the user, so irrespective of the commission, you'll always get the biggest price difference we have.
That works fine in MySQL, but assuming you have an index on (key1, PRIMARY_KEY) this is faster:

select distinct a.*
from table1 a join table1 b
on (a.key1 = b.key1 and a.PRIMARY_KEY != b.PRIMARY_KEY)

Yours took 0.59 sec, and mine was 0.10 sec (on some random test data).

In general MySql doesn't do so well with subqueries - it likes them as joins. But in this case I think any database would be faster with my query (anyone care to test)?

And when I say joins instead of subqueries I mean:

select *
from table1 as a join
(select key1 from table1 as b
group by key1
having count(*) > 1
) c
on (a.key1 = c.key1)

Which took 0.00 sec (must say I was not expecting that).
I've had mainly 3 reasons to switch to R:

(1) It's free

(2) It has a huge repositoriy of libraries. There's hardly anything that you can't do with R. In my special case it was about hazard-rate models, which are barely implemented in other tools that I tried (namely EViews, SPSS)

(3) It has a BIG community behind it, which you can ask for help once you're stuck. I haven't found this kind of "service" in other software (namely, again, EViews).
You can read RSS along with Facebook's new stream (+Twitter, Flickr etc.) in my app, FriendBinder (http://friendbinder.com), I expect other apps will follow soon.

Though I wonder if I should be worried also, even though we don't re-share the data, they seem to be quite picky.
If you're restricting yourself to audio only, you're missing out on a bunch of interesting videotaped lectures that you can listen too without missing out on much. Check out the entire @Google series on Youtube or a bunch of interesting documentaries or TED talks.

I've written about how to run video in the background on an iPhone: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/running-videos-in-the-backgrou...
Ask HN: Please review my iPhone app AppCreator Database Manager
AppCreator Database Manager for iPhone or iPod touch lets you easily create database applications that fit your specific needs.

You can see AppCreator in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYJseL7QLik

iTunes Store URL: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=314153944&mt=8

What do you think of the app? Would you use it?

Thanks in advance,

zin
Alfamega is a Snitch?
BBC Vs National Geographic - a subtle comparison
> But as implemented, in a lot of places there's extensive wi-fi connectivity and unused internet bandwidth but it's all private. How great would it be if every router gave 90% of the bandwidth to the owner and leaked 10%, with some sort of packet-tagger to say 'mobile origin'.

This already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FON
Thanks for posting this!

If any of you want to know more about Intel's early days, I strongly suggest reading Tedlow's biography of Andy Grove. He goes into great detail about the early culture of Silicon Valley, more than any of the articles I've seen posted online.
Hbase is not reliable in production (it wasn't when I tested it 3 months ago)
Ask HN: Gmail down? [Temporary Error (500)]
Is Gmail down again?
I'd prefer this model to a tiered internet. Not that either are desirable for the average consumer.
Not as accurate or complete as http://www.levenez.com/lang/lang.pdf , but a nice read.

And if anyone is wondering (as I was) how many programming languages there are, http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm has information on about 2500 languages.
Nokia 1600:

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_1600-pictures-1188.php

It has more features than I'd like.
I'd recommend the "Off the Hook" podcast by Emmanuel Goldstein and the HOPE recordings available for download via the 2600 website

don't really do podcasts much myself, though. But these did keep me mildly entertained/informed a while back (esp. the HOPE conference about coupon hacking)
Fine for me.. but a friend tweeted it was down.
Same here - Temporary Error (500)
The Harlem Miracle
Just to be clear, the problem I had was limited to a specific type of network protocol, and that may be why nobody bothered to take interest in fixing it.

Sorry if my comment came across as saying that DD-WRT is just unreliable..
Dark Messiah had an interesting combat system. Too bad they outsourced the multiplayer component, which absolutely sucked.
Most large databases nowadays are divided by sharding

Err, this isn't even close to true. MySQL isn't the only database in the world, you know.
"the evilness comes from the fact that you have immense power"

This is exactly right, IMO. If your product becomes successful, it will be incredibly tempting to tamper with the results to maximise your profits. You might think you are an honest person, and I'm sure you are, but what if one day you realise that just by making one little change, sending people to shop X instead of shop Y, you can make, say, $1000/day commission .. how many people wouldn't at least be tempted?

Being put in this kind of situation corrupts almost everyone. Because of this, I think people are very suspicious of affiliate arrangements.

I'd advise you to make it very clear that you're sending people to affiliate links - maybe even go over the top into radical transparency and explicitly give another link, the non-affiliate one. Put (Support this plugin!) and (Do not support this plugin.) after the links, give people the very clear option to choose one of the two. Make it clear that the non-affiliate link is exactly the same price as the affiliate one. If they feel like they are making the choice, many will no doubt opt to support you. But if they get the idea there is anything sneaky about it, they may get very hostile. I would really err on the side of transparency.

Anyway, just some ideas ..
It is back online now.. I wonder how much productivity gets affected even with 5 secs of downtime
What was stupid about it was the scale with which both things were launched. Pet food, for instance, is the sort of thing that could easily have started quite small and grown as needs be, rather than having millions of dollars dumped into it. Webvan wasn't just grocery delivery, it was grocery storage too. In big, huge, expensive (california real estate) warehouses (refrigerated, to boot, IIRC).
This is when real-time search is really useful:
http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=gmail and
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail

It's down and it's down all over the world.
Down for me briefly, a few minutes ago.
not scheduled?
it is down - http://www.google.com/appsstatus
Strike enters 14th week over proposed education reform in France
Help wanted: Seasoned wikipedia editors to write a proper article about Fravia
A mourning friend of Fravia, new to Wikipedia, is trying to write an article about him, but his lack of experience triggered the heavy hand of admins, and the article is currently a semi-protected minimal stub.
I didn't know Fravia until yesterday, so I'm in a bad position to help him personaly, besides trying to explain him the local, arid rules, but it's a bit hard to explain that to a man in sorrow. The stub is here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia, and the WIP article here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fravia/WIP
On a related note, there seems to be little reliable information (in the Wikipedia meaning of reliable) about Fravia. He was more of an underground hero.
Having an eulogy or a tribute published in a respected publication may help sourcing the article. I know it's silly to have an eulogy written only for that purpose, but Wikipedia has become the default knowledge repository, and it would be a shame not to have an article about him. If (the friend of) a high profile hacker who knew or was influenced by Fravia read this, it would be nice if he could do something about it.