skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Until I've gotten where I need to get to. I used to use this technique when I was an undergraduate to get through tough periods of the semester.

Recently, I used it on my startup after I finished grad school. I had a goal of getting a beta out and pushed myself into this working mode. I then kept going until I released the beta.

I tend to spend months in a zone where I'm able to concentrate and think about a project. During this time my social drive is down. Then I spend months in a zone where I just want to be around people and I can barely work. I think this technique is a way to throw myself into the working part of my brain at will. I won't claim to understand it. And I won't guarantee it will work for you. I just know all the plan things out stuff I was taught did me no good. This worked and so that is why I point it out here.

I work out and eat well but any one who knows me will tell you that I am life balance FAIL.
Slony-I is a terrible piece of software; it's incredibly difficult to administer, requires full table locking across the entire data set (EVERY SINGLE TABLE!) to do DDL changes, and occasionally breaks in mysterious ways which can lead to data corruption.

I haven't used PGCluster, but it's synchronous multi-master and thus inherently fails to scale out as well as async systems like Slony-I and Londiste. Probably great in circumstances with only 2-3 db boxes though.

Londiste, on the other hand, is awesome, and with the 3.0 release now has hot backups. Simple to administer, rock solid, and has really important features like live DDLs. Demand Londiste and the SkyTools package! Don't settle for less!
Curtain Wall Design | Curtain Wall Engineering
Tunes, lyrics, and music news,WhoDitty.com is a website dedicated to music artists and music fans. We provide a unique tune search and social network combination that was created by musicians and fans.
Ah, but there's the rub. Extrapolating from my comment above, your number one job is to make spammers feel successful when they fail. If you reject new accounts like this, you'll force them to write those little proxies to get around your system.

The better thing to do is to simply notice what they're doing and flip the IsSpammer bit on all those new accounts (including the first one.) That way you can correctly classify any content they may post from those accounts in the future.
With the 3.0 release of londiste, that's no longer true as far as I can tell. Postgresql now has a great replication solution.
Bandwidth is not included in Mosso's Cloud. I think if you were to max out on bandwidth slicehost is still a better offer.
One thing I've never liked about postgres is that for any major version upgrade (8.3 -> 8.4) you need to do a full dump and restore of all your data. How do people handle this?
There are already many services who claim to provide social placemarking? What are the key points for this kind of location-based service?

Mobile, easy mapping interface, visualizations, search, filtering, community?
Let's say you write a Python program that outputs Javascript. It could be considered a "compiler". Or let's say that you write your own language, which outputs to other 3 or 4... there's also compiling involved. A compiler doesn't need to output assembler. Even if every compiler did that, features of the language would result in different execution code.

For example, PHP's variables can be a string of any size, or a number, or an object, and you can change its type while the program is running. The compiler doesn't optimize the code execution as easy as, say, in Java. You can not allocated the minimum amount of memory that will store the variable values, for example.
I don't think what's going on in this article is a good idea. As soon as women start showing up in any profession in any numbers the men start leaving and all it's social institutions are suddenly looking and feeling like the next episode of "Oprah". Women first entered (in numbers) the engineering profession (mechanical, electrical, Chemical, civil, but not so much computer science) in the 70's and those professions have been pretty much destroyed for the guys. Right now men are better off learning how to drive a truck than wasting their time earning a degree in Chemical or Mechanical Engineering.
That's a very good point, one that I hadn't considered. Although I don't think that being able to study and doing a little research are mutually exclusive.

But, as you say, most likely a person who doesn't have the ability/desire to study and learn about a certain subject probably wouldn't take the time to consider the time and effort involved.
Prescient Larry Ellison interview (2005)
Postponing the choice until you have enough data to make an informed decision is a good idea, though, and trying to isolate direct interaction with the database to a relatively small number of code paths would be worth doing regardless. If your code is so entangled with the database code that you can't separate them easily, you have much more immediate problems than theoretically having to coping with scalability someday (if you're lucky).
Andy Budd: My First Impressions of Balsamiq
The $10.95 Mosso plan doesn't include transfer and the $20 Slicehost includes a total of 100GB. If you use the calculator on the Mosso site to estimate the cost of the $10.95 server and 100GB of transfer (50GB in, 50GB out) it comes out to $25.95. It's not so cannibalistic anymore.

This also doesn't appear to be an apples to apples comparison. Slicehost provides fixed virtual private servers and Mosso seems to be more similar to EC2.
I agree 100% on the website. The dead pages are due it being recently hacked/restored :-( But it's very much brochureware. I've had a lot of resistance to changing that, but your comment helps a lot.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.h...

6:47 minutes into the demo :)
Ha, the boob point is well taken.

I'm certainly not/not going to be the world's most stellar programmer, but I have to look at the other people in my class who are obviously holding up the rest of the students through their complete misunderstanding of the material.

Sure there is potential in everyone, and most likely a career path for any number of variables involved in producing a quality software product. But when a person is taking their second class in a programming language, and you ask them to show you their switch statement, and all you get is blank stares, is it your place to think that they need to find something else?

Obviously this is all from my personal experience, and I don't profess to know all the answers. But, as a general question, how do you handle a fellow student who is obviously not getting the coursework, and if they achieve the same degree will lessen the effectiveness of said degree from the same institution?
Combating Markov Chain generated spam sounds like fun.
Amazing how people can only say anything favorable about Microsoft if they hide behind the guise of a competing company. God forbid a PC guy had this opinion.

Up voted none the less.

Note: I'm a Mac and a PC person.
We do it over the weekend. Or at night. Or both. It's not fun, but we can handle it once every year and a half.

I considered using Slony replication the last time we were upgrading to copy data between the databases, but I figured it doesn't make much difference and did a dump/restore instead.
I agree. In this era of Hulu, Amazon Video, Netflix Instant, iTunes, and Bittorrent, there is absolutely no reason to pay $100/month for television.

(There is also no reason to keep Comcast around for your Internet connection, either. Just get DSL.)
This idea has a lot of potential, especially if you were to focus on a few situations that I've seen over and over in the corporate world.
The most common scenario I've seen is data coming in an extract format like CSV, containing information required for another business process. You've got data coming from an expense reporting web app that needs to processed before entries can be made into an accounting system. A spreadsheet or database is created by a computer-savvy manager, and a clerk uses it on a weekly basis to do their work of posting entries. If the data format changes, the manager tweaks macros and formulas to adjust, and life goes on. Any new clerks coming on board learn how to use "the spreadsheet" and the business process keeps chugging along. Change managers, and 9 times out of 10, a lack of documentation and knowledge transfer will cause things to blow up in a short period of time.
If you were to introduce a tool that exposes the funky macros and formulas in a more visual, understandable fashion, I think it becomes more easily maintainable. Providing some data validation, error handling and notifications would be valuable. Finally, provide some version control to prevent accidental deletion or modification of important functions. The key would be a much better user experience than the Excel function editor.
different keywords passed to a well understood form: "eval-when". what each opt does can be horrendously complicated if you so chose. however i understand the evaluation rules and can just focus on learning what each option does. require on the other hand can take a string, but it
can also take a VERSION expression that will then be compared to
$]. but wait, there's more. it can also be a literal v5.6.1 - that
works too. otherwise it will look for a library. if the expression is
a bare word require will conveniently add the .pm for
you, however notice that $lib = 'somelib' require $lib is not a
bare word therefore you need to add the '.pm' ...

i'm tired already.
To give you a background why vacuum is necessary: When you update a row in postgres, it is marked as deleted and a row with the updated contents is inserted. Likewise, when you delete a row, it is only marked as deleted but the space on disk will not automatically be reused. The vacuum process appends all these rows to the list of reusable rows.

If the autovacuum process is run too infrequently, the space used by the tables grows larger and there are many gaps between used rows. In addition to filling up more disk space than necessary this reduces sequencial scan performance. In this case you should run a vacuum full which packs the table and relases the unused space to the operating system (think of file system defragmentation). Unfortunately this is quite slow and uses table locks so you should not do it on a production system.

[EDIT:]
From the awesome postgres documentation:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/routine-vacuum...
In terms of a long-term solution to the DNS cache poisoning issue it seems deep packet inspection could be the only way to go. The work-around was to extend the encryption involved with DNS but that only makes it harder, but not impossible for DNS hacks to take place. Only if deep packet inspection happens would DNS hacks truly become a thing of the past, since if my ISP is inspecting all the packets, and it's stored IP for say cnn.com gets re-routed to a hacker's IP, an inspection of the packets coming across could flag a problem to the ISP. I am not an expert in this area but I just recall from reading a 'Wired' article on this issue that the only really good solution here is in fact deep packet inspection. So outlawing it would be a hacker's wet dream, and by hacker I mean "cracker" or "black hat" people obviously.
Does Earthlink impose a usage cap? (Comcast's is currently 250 GB/month, IIRC.)
Selling images - my report for March
Anyone guess which algorithms they're using?
A friend of mine has degrees in english and computer science, and works as a technical writer. While his job does sit at the intersection of those two fields, what he learned in college is laughably underutilized on a day-to-day basis.

If someone just wants to work adjunct to software development, why should they take the same courses as people who want to be software developers? A class that presents programming as a medium of communication rather than an exercise in minutiae seems like it would get a lot more traction with people who don't see the glamor in spending their nights and weekends in front of a computer screen.
Medical mission
Women for World Health continues fulfilling their mission statement through medical mission and free surgical operations. To help, to give, to nurture, and to serve is what they aim and believe.
Wow.. I thought the iPhone/iPod touch were pushing ARM and BSD out with their 37 million units. But ARM goes through 1.3 billion units every quarter? That's huge.
No kidding. Why are people so surprised that using an RDBMS well requires an understanding of databases? Database administration requires a very different skill set than programming, and DBAs have different priorities (e.g., Do NOT corrupt the data. Ever.); they're not just there to inconvenience programmers.

It seems like almost every time I've read a review of a database book, there's been somebody complaining that it's "full of a bunch of boring theory" (or else, "at least this book doesn't have much boring theory"). At the same time, some programmers nonchalantly do things that could land them on a DBA's equivalent of The Daily WTF (e.g. http://ask.metafilter.com/117908/Theres-got-to-be-a-faster-w...). It's a weird disconnect.
From Seduction to Twitter's Micro Modular Innovations
I have to disagree. Since the advent of blogging, I now prefer that style of writing. For example, the writing style in this article illustrates precisely why I no longer care for the standard journalistic style:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10226746-92.html

Can you imagine a standard technology coverage piece in your daily newspaper saying "kudos to Ubuntu 9.04: you got game"?
Ask HN: What question would tell you where someone's heart is?
I'm not speaking anatomically. In an interview situation, regardless of which side of the table you're sitting on, what can you ask to determine what type of person you're dealing with (on a personal level)?

The same could apply to a dating situation where you have the difficult task of summing someone up in a short period of time. But I'm primarily concerned with a professional context.

Is there a single question you can ask, the answer to which would reveal what type of person you are dealing with and whether you are likely to get along well with that person?
Larry Ellison, 2005 interview with SF Chronicle

"Q: Does that lead to a consolidation period?

A: The industry is maturing. It is going to consolidate. That's exactly what happened to every other industry. I didn't invent the idea of consolidation. What happens during a period of consolidation is (the company in) second place can suddenly move and become the winner.

One of the interesting things is (that) when you look at when the automobile industry, the clear winner in the early phase of the automobile industry was Henry Ford. Ford was the No. 1 car company in the world by far. Then a guy by the name of Alfred Sloan decided to get all of the good losers together -- Chevrolet and Buick and all those guys -- and built General Motors. Then General Motors passed Ford during the consolidation phase in the automobile industry.

So during the entrepreneurial growth phase, Ford won. During the consolidation phase, Ford lost and found itself in second place.

Q: So you don't want to be Henry Ford.

A: It's too late for anyone to be Henry Ford. That phase is over. We did pretty well in the database business. We have the No. 1 database in the world, and I'll argue that, at the dawn of the information age, that's not a bad position to have."

The entire interview is interesting for Larry Ellison predicting the future and then implementing it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/08/...
Reasonable people can differ only if their prior information is different. Or, "People with the same priors cannot agree to disagree.", as put by Robert J. Aumann here: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2958591
Man goes looking for stupidity in modern culture. Finds it. Film at eleven.

Seriously: If you think Deepak Chopra tweets like a vapid self-promoting version of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations [1], why are you following him? Oh, right! Your article is due in two days and you need something to hate!

Someone should put together an anthology which tracks the history of technology entirely through cranky-old-man articles. It could start with Plato (in the words of his character/mentor, Socrates) complaining about this new technology called "writing" and go forward from there:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent/webliteracies/platowri.htm

Not that all cranky-old-man articles are bad. Plato knew how to write. And The Unix-Haters Handbook was lots of fun, though now terribly dated, as most cranky-old-man articles are.

---

[1] Speaking of obsolete technologies. Does anyone even now remember what Bartlett's Familiar Quotations was? (Be careful when Googling it; the top result spews popup ads.)
Better Link: http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/apr2009...
The End of Innocence at Apple: How Steve Jobs Was Able To Save the Company
AFAIK, most captcha breakers aren't hired. They are simply bribed with porn and similar things:

"To see naked pictures of Marissa Mayer, please type the words below into the box."
Note that there's a limit. They're not willing to do what ubuntu does for security eg add a repository, remove wga, release analysis tools, etc.
You've mistaken me for my argument a bit there. The right's fiscal philosophy is based on the idea that people who earn money deserve to keep it. People who don't earn money shouldn't be re-appropriated money from those who do. In the long term that is achieved by having a smaller, less expensive government.

It is not the case that the government must raise taxes when they exhaust their resources, the other option--the desirable outcome from small government advocates--is that they slash services and oversight to an extent that is politically impossible under other circumstances.

Politics is not motivated purely by reason, but also by the different parties are motivated by philosophical ideals.
"What do you love?"

Seems to work in all kinds of situations. Occam's Razor, anyone?
ARM is in everything. Since their architecture is so flexible, they have solutions for the simplest needs as well as the more complex (netbooks). Anything you look at, from MP3 players and cell phones to flash controllers have a very good chance of having an ARM processor in them.
Back when I was interested in that whole "job" thing, I interviewed with White Oak Technologies.

I don't say this lightly: They have the most programmer friendly HR team I've seen in a tech company. When I applied they responded quickly and moved through the process quickly. Bruce and Dave (the HR guys) really seemed to get programmers.

When they wanted to do an on-site interview it was clear they had a process and the details were taken care of.

I interviewed at some other companies that didn't quite have their HR act together. Here were the things that got me:

1. Having to "ask" for a flight to the on-site interview

2. Waiting three weeks between stages of the process

3. HR people that look at programmers as common cattle (although to be fair, we probably do the same to them).

If you're bigger than a startup -- talent will walk away from you. To bring this back to WOTI, these guys realize this.
Elven Architecture
Agreed. I love developing locally with a version controlled SQLite database and then deploying to *sql and having everything just work. Sometimes there are differences that need to be worked around (same as cross platform development), but starting with the assumption that your db might change is a good thing, in my opinion.
DARPA's TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive
If you're a Rails Developer; MySQL does NOT support transactional migrations, which means if something screws up during a deployment your database might be left in an inconsistent state.

If a migration screws up and you're running Postgres, the schema (and data) will just roll-back.
Innocuous vs Hacker news
Perhaps make the title of the site configurable in the account preferences ? Just a thought.
Haven't all the cool kids moved on to Phusion Passenger? Is there still a compelling reason to play around with mongrel/thin etc clusters?
This is a very interesting example of a concern that Schneier has long had about "semantic attacks" on the Web. Since I started participating on Usenet in 1994, and even before that on commercial online services since 1992, I have noticed that some participants are quite willing to poison discussion of contentious policy issues with made-up "facts." That's why I think it is a good idea, here on HN and everyone online where people discuss important issues, to check facts and ask for sources or further details for any "fact" that seems striking.
I don't doubt that the percentage of women who choose technology as a career is less than the number who would make competent technologists. However, I would love to see some actual data on the effectiveness of the proposed methods of addressing this. You could measure the results by increasing the number of females at a college who choose CS as a major, or take a career in software, or a number of other ways.

The nascent computational pedagogy field (itself a fringe, underappreciated movement in CS academia) is doing some good work on this.

Without numbers, we're all just throwing opinions out there.
Suggested in the feature suggestions thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576066
TechCrunch Comes to China
If you could change one thing about humanity, what would it be?
People want multiple categories, so there can be more winners and we can encourage those who are showing progress to keep going and inspire others in their demographic.
"Ruby leaks. God is written in ruby. If you run God long enough, it will run out of memory and stop working properly. In all fairness, this is not Tom Presten-Warners fault. He spent a lot of time trying to minimize the leakage in God but its simply not possible in Ruby. Monit was written properly in C meaning it won't leak like a long-running Ruby application."

This is absolutely hilarious! A process monitor leaks memory and crashes the server. Words fail me!

EDIT: Rub my eyes and read again. Ruby leaks memory? The language (interpreter ? VM? ) leaks memory? That can't be right? He must have meant the application (God) leaks memory (perhaps by holding onto objects and not letting the GC collect them)
Greasemonkey script: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576544
This is completely nonsense.

The current workaround to the DNS spoofing hacks has nothing to do with encryption.

The solution to DNS spoofing has nothing to do with packet inspection (Google for DNSSEC and DNSCurve for details).
Yeah, that's the next trend. There are still quite a few people though stuck with mongrels/things and are still using God.

For our company we're stuck with thins because of a very specific way we're launching our application. Phusion doesn't have everything we need (yet).
A collect of best small icons on the web
"Is there a single question..."

No. And there shouldn't be.

Instead of spending time and energy trying to determine the perfect quesiton, why don't you just spend that same time and energy actually talking to people.

Talk about anything. Listen as much as you talk. "Engage" them. After 5 minutes of sincere (this is key!) interaction and a half dozen subjects, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of where their heart is.

A low tech solution that has been working very well forever. All it takes is a little practice.

OTOH, if you don't do this and probe with a single question, you'll look phony and won't learn anything.
I hope that they freeze the websites as internet history after shuttering the service. I'm going to miss websites like:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/6552/
or maybe
http://www.geocities.com/saufor/

These are gems that should not be taken from us.