skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Darn I'm 18 not 21 =/
If only there were only some way to add more routers to the internet!

Oh the humanity!
Do you guys mind sharing if a PR firm helped you get the spot? Notice a significant upgrade in the number of sign-ups?
There is certainly something not 100% with this Pascal Bourguignon guy. Also see this recent thread where that Lisp attitude spills over to the objective-c newsgroup.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.objective-c/browse_...
Don't think it really captures it.

"Compiled web" I guess is just client server, but running in a browser. Now the "compiled stuff" can be some embedded runtime (flash, java, silverlight) or compact obfuscated javascript, but really, its client/server separation all over a again (with a lot of the upsides, and some of the downsides, but not the installation hassle).

I think the happy medium that a lot of web sites like is the classic web app, with just enough ajax to help with the user experience (but not ajax dominated) - works well for content heavy web apps.

For JS, more and more people are compressing/obfuscating/compiling it - how does that affect the web in general - people can't see how it works and reuse it...
How Facebook stores its billions of photos
caused by a bunch of beauracrat ninnies with nothing better to do looking to justify their existence as well as news people scavenging for the next story
Guidelines For Using Grant Money | Fundraising Ideas
That still leaves the problem of reputation-building; a paper where an individual is only one of 20 authors probably isn't so impressive on a CV.

Is the effort expended for the paper able to be divided cleanly into chunks 1/20th the size, to be credited to each author in turn?

Doing research, or any creative work, is not a manufacturing process; the output does not inevitably scale linearly based on the number of inputs. It is possible that a paper could describe something that was very impressive for 20 people to accomplish.
http://obsd.cec.mtu.edu/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/i386/
Unless there's some kind of accident.
1Password doesn't forget my passwords, even if they are a 50 character hash.
It is silly to have a discussion about whether each submission falls within the guidelines. This submission has received more votes than any other today (80 at present) and has not been rejected by the moderators. What else do you want?

In the end, this story is congruent with the community guidelines but your comment is not.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And their ISO images are one of the least fussy of any distros (linux/freeBSD) I've used. I much prefer having a minimal iso image that installs everything from a network connection download, rather than downloading an entire ISO complete with a million useless packages, when all I want is a simple server that does a few basic things.

The OpenBSD ISOs are a few meg, and take a few seconds to download, even from a slow mirror. Compare that with downloading 700 meg ISOs for other distros.

An experienced OpenBSD user almost can go from nothing to installed in less time than it takes to download the Ubuntu ISOs on release day.
It's close, but it is. If some facts in this article are true they're technically interesting. Also the change in policy is real and has implications which do interest hackers.

The discussion is a bit reddit-like, but it can't be helped. The article itself was interesting enough.
This seems to be BSD week -- NetBSD 5.0 is released on Wednesday, OpenBSD 4.5 is released on Friday, and FreeBSD 7.2 is released next Monday.
This is NY, you'll be OK.
Chernobyl was a criminally unsafe design coupled with a criminally unprepared crew in charge of the reactor. TMI was only an obsolete design (in use because it's hideously expensive to certify a new one) with a sadistic user interface for the operators that prevented them from finding out what was happening.

Many anti-nuclear activists perceive nuclear as unsafe, but a lot of others want it to be unsafe because it makes them important. If nuclear was perceived as safe, they would have less money and volunteers to play with.
I, for one, very much appreciate the fact this site doesn't require an e-mail address.

Many websites should offer e-mail-less logons since it's simply not necessary to have password retrieval or anything but basic authentication.

It makes signing up much easier. Since convenience is generally the price of security, I appreciate it when a website affords me the convenience of using the correct level of security.
They're facing ongoing, unbounded growth.

...on an app that consists of a solved problem (pub/sub). Cry me a river.

Or better yet, give me a million dollars and I'll build you a twitter that doesn't fail. In 60 days. You'll just have to bring the users.
While I haven't ever been on a several-day retreat, I meditate periodically, and the most fitting way I've heard it described is this:

"You spend so much time trying to think that it's like clenching your fist all the time, and you've been doing it so long that your wrist is shaking and your knuckles are white and your arm is cramped and you don't even notice. You need to just stop, shake it out, and let it relax."

I don't know whether doing a big blowout extreme retreat thing is worth it or not (I'm a bit wary of them being cult-ish), but meditating now and then really helps. It's a small and mundane-sounding thing, like flossing or getting enough sleep, but it adds up.
I worked at HP in IT. We had literally hundreds of stupid little internal projects. Some were giant, some were 3 aspx pages. All of them used SQL Server or Oracle. But none of them came anywhere close to leveraging the databases.

I can think of only one app that was large enough and complex enough to really require a "commercial" db, and it was talking with SAP.... ohh, and it ran into constant problems.

What I don't understand is that other than features, the other argument is "Support". I have never seen microsoft get on the phone with a guy for free (yes you can pay...) and help out. But you know what, you can pay for a guy to help you out with postgres.

And you know, by going with proprietary databases, that cost so much money, there were severe restrictions on getting a database. They were in the hands of another team, who took weeks or months to get us setup. I know a part of that is server management, but another part was cost cutting on licenses. Remember that a small cause can have a very large effect in a corporate culture.
An experienced programmer can learn a lot about a new language in a relatively short period of time. A lot of times, the language isn't the issue, understanding the system is the issue.

So I don't think it's the first thing I would think of when deciding to hire someone. If an engineer has worked on cool things, and done cool things, I wouldn't care if they didn't know X.
Google style perks at your startup?
I really like that they're supporting the posix realtime scheduling extensions, and async IO.

Very nice. Even if to know such things are available on more platforms now.
Check out http://www.credentify.com/
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From what I understand, Three Mile Island wasn't a disaster, but a huge success. The safety systems worked as they should and prevented an actual disaster.
Thanks for responding.

My pleasure!

What would you say is the lasting profound effect on your day to day life?

The lasting impact has been a sense of connectedness and perfection behind our apparent reality. Yes, I know this sounds trite and the same sentiment can be found in countless books on near death experience, spiritual life, etc, etc, but that is the best way to put it.
You can stretch and acclimate your knees to the sitting position, unless you have a major existing medical condition or something. It comes with time.

The next thing that will come up is that zazen can be incredibly boring.

(It is.)

But it helps.

Also, sometimes people considered authority figures act like dicks. Sometimes people cut their authority figures slack because they're "enlightened", or whatever.
That is not a certainty. According to the NRC report on 3-mile Island (which I think is the worst in US history) the release was about 1 millirem. For comparison a x-ray is 6 millirem and normal background radiation is 100-125.

Western reactor designs are not like Chernobyl. They are designed to fail 'safe' and have over-designed containment vessels to prevent accidents from leaking into the community.
The article misrepresents what I see happening. In larger companies engineers are treated as a commodity so salaries stay low when compared to a similar level of experience in management, sales or marketing. People leave engineering to pursue higher paying opportunities. In tech companies management sales and marketing are mostly comprised of people who were once engineers. I have worked with many people and usually those in their 40's and 50's that stay in engineering stay because they like it and are willing to sacrifice higher compensation. As a group i believe they are more competent. I have interviewed many recent college grads that could barley articulate what a virtual function was in C++ or Java and how or why you would use it. These concepts are more than 30's years old and have been in common use in software development for the past 20 years.
But not OpenBSD! I don't like how they don't provide ISO images as an excuse to make people buy their CDs.

buying cds helps the project by providing funds to buy hardware, hold hackathons, and pay for other project expenses (including the openssh project). you get printed installation instructions, all of the pre-compiled packages, and stickers. cds can be pre-ordered and received days or weeks before the ftp release.

however, we do make iso images of the installation sets available on the ftp servers (installXX.iso) and have for quite some time.

alternatively, you can download cdXX.iso which is just the installer, then boot to it and let it fetch and install just the sets you want over ftp or http. or download bsd.rd and pxe network boot it. or download floppyXX.fs and make a floppy disk.
Since they're backward looking statistics they actually track what happened before the dot com boom. They still might not be relevant given the current marketplace, of course.
I don't see the parallel. The violent overthrow of a monarchy vs. a bunch of argumentative sea-steading libertarians?
I've used MySQL extensively for personal projects (all of mine have been at a pretty small scale). I've also used both Oracle and SQL Server for projects at large companies.

There's probably not much of an advantage in the database engine itself, but the SQL Server suite shined in 2 areas: analytics and reporting. The 2 add-on components made large-scale data mining & model-building much simple, and also automated the generation & delivery of complex reports tracking many metrics. I could probably do both with MySQL, but only with much more effort.
I'm saving up for an 8-core mac for a project I'm working on, and I'd prefer at least 16 (which is not economically feasible at the moment).
Where a lot of people make their mistake is in spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on commercial databases and then doing nothing more than simple SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT type operations with them, bury them under an ORM and try to pretend they aren't there.

Can you get your money's worth out of a database like Oracle? I think you absolutely can if you USE the features it comes with. If you don't want to do that, or don't need those features, then you are throwing your money away.
Twittering with Mathematica
According to Bob Cringely (http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/three-mile-island-memories/), who was part of the presidential commission that studied the situation, TMI was actually a disaster for the failure systems, but was saved by a super-high-quality containment system.
The "support" argument is almost always a bad one. Support for infrastructure products is never free; it's sometimes bundled with the license fee, but it's never free. Support is available in the form of paid consultants for any popular piece of open-source infrastructure. What commercial products DO have is official support, which provides some degree of consistency. Even that isn't a strong argument though; it's easy to tell good consultants from bad by asking for references.
You're correct that I haven't come across such a tool. But I have also programmed in Lisp, and whilst I like it a lot, I don't consider it the pariah of programming languages as you seem to do.

What makes you believe Lisp is so superior to other classes of programming language? For instance, what makes a Lisp superior to a stack-based language like Forth or Factor?
It's interesting to see all the opinions here. I recently found a zen (soto zen) dojo in Bucharest, to my great surprise. The last weekend I attended a short "retreat" there.

Mostly my experience fits with what I read here. Overall it was fine, and I will continue going there. Probably my biggest problem is that I finally understand and feel the difference between atheism and agnosticism. I am atheist, zen is agnosting. That is, it really doesn't care what religion (if any) you have. In practice this means people will be occasionally talking about "positive energy" and "negative energy". It's mostly small talk though, and the teacher was reasonably... well actually emphatically neutral.

As for the regular meetings, they are much cleaner. It's just "hello" and small talk, then you sit, then "good bye" without small talk.

I did learn a lot of tips about correct posture and I got a proper pillow, stuff I could not learn on my own. So even if you don't plan to join a dojo, a few visits are probably very useful.

Edit: Oh yes, another thing that somewhat irked me. It took me a long time to put my finger on it, but there was too little self deprecating humor in the teacher's talks. Sue me, but this is how I felt.
Cross-tabulation is not about denormalization. If anything, it is about producing the reports you want while keeping your data normalized.
I keep a copy of the dwm source (with a few relatively inconsequential patches) in the same git repository as my home directory. It's much less trouble to set up, once you get it configured. (I don't really care for Haskell, though.)
I'll agree with this. Gil has an incredible manner of speaking. Some of the other zencast podcasts have people that tend to lecture at you on their topic, whereas Gil just seems to draw you in to the way he leads his life, warts and all. I actually miss my one-hour commute (now a 5-minute bike ride) that gave me time to listen to him.
Have to wonder if they turned this on today because FriendFeed made their new real-time interface live yesterday.
I would rather have the waste of competition than 20 mediocre scientists coming together and putting out dubious research simply to protect reputations.

I would rather have neither waste nor dubious research. In the case reported in the submitted article, there is (considering the journal that has agreed to publish the research) an important research finding that had not been achieved under the former system of dueling research labs. In this case, it appears that getting the various labs to collaborate both reduced wastage of research resources and improved the quality of the research result. I have no idea how generalizable this happy result might be in other fields of science.
You are advocating a "clear out the cobwebs and start from scratch" utopian vision, and arguing that gradual improvement does not work (which implies that existing institutions ought to be destroyed since they are somewhat coercive and reform is impossible. This implies violence). That's what the French Revolution was about, too.
Spammers Cashing in on Swine Flu | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
"Well sure, you spend a ridiculous amount of money on IT. Ever wonder why?"

So you have someone to blame, who is tough to identify with open source software.

Never forget, in many large enterprises, these decisions are not technical, they are political.
Very cool idea. It does seem faster than most captchas I've used. Would be cool to have the option of only one image, and be able to choose the answer in one click instead of via a drop-down menu. That would make it really fast (though probably less secure)
At the time though the things that were happening with the internet were all largely new concepts. New graduates who had been studying heavily web based technologies would have had the advantage over an older person who may have come from a DOS background.

These day's although still evolving I would say web based technologies are a lot more stable.
How 10 Iconic Tech Products Got Their Names
I really liked this article!

~felipe
Looks awesome!

I think class implementations of Directories & Files would probably go a long way to helping cut down cruft in the view code:

http://code.google.com/p/django-filebrowser/source/browse/tr...
That's true, but I find it much less of a problem than the colored halos.
"I could probably do both with MySQL, but only with much more effort."

I know you could. You know you could. Most of the people here know you could.

But your boss doesn't want to bet on you. That would require him to manage you. Easier to spend a bunch of money through a capital expenditure request to get a piece of commercial software that already does it. When your boss(es) don't get the job done, it's easier to blame a vendor than an employee.
By what measure is peoplesign more secure? You have 6 choices in 2 menus -- even a robot that is completely stupid will pass 3% of the time.

I know that in the past some captchas were broken at rates of 30-40% (Hotmail, I think). Is this really still the case?
Different != Harder

Yes, you will have to read the fine manual. But their man pages are to die for! A real treat; up to date and complete. Actually useful.
That was much more exhaustive than i was anticipating. I'm curious how this stacks up to sites like flickr.
I don't see anything wrong with that either, but I think the quote is phrasing it slightly wrong. Here's how I would write that sentence:

"Employers justify shunting aside mid-career programmers on the ground that they lack the motivation to develop skills in, among other thing, the latest software languages."

The problem is that this lack of motivation won't show up until the programmer is midcareer.

When they graduated from college/trade school/etc, they were likely trained in some the latest technologies and languages. Based solely on skill set, they looked motivated enough; maybe not as much as some, but certainly more so than the mid-career programmer was just kicked to the curb for not knowing anything from more recent than five years ago.

But they stagnated, because they really weren't motivated or interested in what they learned beyond the predictable payout it guaranteed.. They went to school because they needed that structure to force themselves to learn material they were told would be highly lucrative. Learning more about their field was hard and not at all satisfying, so they made the gamble that they could coast on what they learned in school until retirement.

Unfortunately, technology moves fast enough that their gamble blew up in their face. They wouldn't be able to see it coming either, because the structure they embed themselves in to increase the odds of their gamble would be equally phobic of new advances. The realization would happen suddenly, likely due to an internal shake-up either by new management or the same old technology no longer being good enough.

The problem is that a course in the hot new language du jour isn't enough. The problem is that their lack of motivation is now painfully obvious to everyone. They aren't the least bit curious about new advancements, otherwise they would know something about them. The knowledge they get from the training course will inevitably become obsolete again in another few years, because they'll never supplement or expand upon it.

This is the real reason for the shunting, as I see it. And I, like paulbaumgart, see nothing wrong with it.
No.

I've always called this plausible deniability in corporate culture. "It's not my fault the DB is down. I'm on the phone with Oracle right now, they'll have a fix soon". The OSS solution is much riskier. "I chose this free DB, and now it's broken." In large corporations, the first is much safer for the employee, but much more expensive for the corporation.

As a half-serious idea for a company, I thought of IT insurance. Rather than paying support to Oracle, we will audit your solution and charge premiums based on the riskiness of your setup. In case your OSS DB goes down, the insurance company would pay the downtime.

The company would provide two services. 1) I expect our "plausible deniability" would be cheaper than paying Oracle, and 2) we put a pricetag on the reliability of your setup.