skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have to agree. Stackoverflow is in the alexa top 100, with over 400 million page views per month, and it runs off a single MS SQL Server instance (with a hot replica), with a Redis cache in front of it.

All the high-scale users of nosql systems end up having to learn a lot of arcane technical wizardry to make it scale (as demonstrated by the slidedeck linked here), and I'm not convinced it's actually easier to scale something like mongo than a traditional RDBMS.
> If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs
> you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain
> about where to steer.

Really? Not even in the case you think the captain failed to notice the iceberg, and a simple heads up would save not only yours but all the other passengers' lives?

Nothing ot do with Gnome, I suppose, but this was a really bad analogy.
Quick-sort with Hungarian (Küküllőmenti legényes) folk dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWBy6J5gz8

Bubble-sort with Hungarian (“Csángó”) folk dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZQPjUT5B4
I just looked at the bug again and it’s been sanitized. I commented 2 or 3 times in the linked bug to add backstory. Those comments are gone now. The attachment I added is still there.

Funny story, they banned me now because they think I submitted this HN story. I didn’t, I came here way later.

http://i.imgur.com/wCTh0MZ.png

Makes you think, doesn’t it? (The warnings refer to another bug a few months ago, where I tried to make another developer explain his removals, and good discussion and a full blog post resulted. All in all a good result. But still they said I was out of line because I named names)
Not just arguably--that's exactly what they are. E.g., in Haskell:

data Suit = Spades
| Hearts
| Clubs
| Diamonds deriving (Show, Eq, Bounded, Enum)

this creates a type that acts exactly like an enum. With the added benefit of having a well-defined string representation and maxBound/minBound constants for free.
At the track, sure, but I try to never let my car get below half a tank in case of earthquake, personal emergency, power outage, etc.
I've read your comment three times today. I still cannot avoid thinking of Richard M Stallman and trying to link him to the Titanic. Even though I know it is wrong.

I've got the wrong closure over HN.
Reminds me The Dip by Seth Godin.
Current fish author here. Thanks for giving fish a try! I hope you tested a 2.0 branch build, and not the 1.x train from 2009 - a lot has changed since then, including major performance improvements. Check $FISH_VERSION if you are unsure.

'ls' is slower on fish because it passes the -G ("colorize”) flag to /bin/ls, which gives you nice colors, but requires a stat of each file to determine its type. If you want faster but uncolored output, you could redefine the ls function to invoke the ls command with no arguments:

alias ls 'command ls'

For other instances of slowness or bad completions, we’d sure appreciate it if you opened an issue on the github page at http://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/
I remember a startup that had presented a similar app couple of years back at TC 50 (can't recall the name) it had also signed up a US west coast city as one of their customers. I found it as one of promising ideas of tat year.

[EDIT] this was it http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/tc50-citysourced-lets-you-r...
I'm not sure about the rest of the world but honey prices in New Zealand are skyrocketing - this may be due in part to Manuka honey being a particularly valuable honey. It might be hard work, but the returns would appear to be at levels so high that give theft is in the papers regularly now.
I have been using vimwiki[1] with vim + Dropbox. It has been fantastic. That might convince you to move from emacs :)

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2226
A faster next-power-of-two algorithm
I think it would be cool if the gif gradually enhanced the colors, starting out with the 256 colors and filling in details in subsequent passes. The user would just notice the color fidelity increasing. The trouble is that I don't know if gif implements non-looping animation.
Every point raised by this post was discussed and rehashed multiple times, debated, argued over, complete with emotions. The end result was something that feels right to the vast majority of the discussion participants (give or take a few minor details.) Anyone has the right to criticize, and anyone also has the right to participate in the design and decisions - this is open source. Sadly way more people choose to take advantage of the former freedom than of the the latter. But that's old news, just the way things are.

Every language/framework/system has features some people won't like. Python has many too. But Python did a great job at striking a careful balance between expressibility and syntax, and most programmers who have to deal with it love it. Enum's design was guided by the same principles. Given that we didn't want to add new syntax to the language just for this feature (Python's minimal syntax is one of its greatest strengths), we had a few challenges to face. We tried to follow Python's overall guide of explicitness, while allowing numerous features.

The end goal? To replace the plethora of hand-cooked enums almost every large Python project has (including examples within Python itself).

Finally, remember that many issues here are issues of style and personal preference. It's not far from a brace style war really.
(a) All security does indeed have a time/value component.

(b) The word "current" in your sentence is inaccurate in its most generous interpretation. All mainstream secret-key cryptography is believed to resist quantum computers.

(c) If you're relying on potentially-susceptible number-theoretic encryption algorithms like RSA, you could at some point switch to lattice or code-based alternatives.

You should read "An Introduction To Post-Quantum Cryptography", by Daniel Bernstein.
Kind of a side issue to the article.

CSSLint is useful, at least for me. The only problem is I find myself disabling a lot of rules.

There are certain rules that would be useful if you could easily specify their parameters. For example, there is a rule that says that you can only have 10 font-size declarations in your CSS sheet, which is completely and utterly arbitrary. What if I need 11? Or what if I ONLY want 3? It would be useful if I could specify that. In fact I should be able to do that for any property.

Developers need to be able to enforce standards in their JS, CSS and even HTML. The fact, however, is that certain standards aren't ubiquitous across every webpage, and need to be set by the developer.
On the Win 8 subject - needing 3rd party downloads to fix the borked desktop is very much screwing the pooch, especially when the vast majority of your users are entry level and have no idea what a desktop extension even is. The 8.1 climbdown is further evidence of cockup. Not to mention the serious analysis in the mainstream press suggesting that win 8 has actually depressed the pc market. So yeah.

The point is there is no single linux desktop and the OP seemed only to be talking about gnome.
FWIW, it's trivial to get benchmarks into their comparisons, provided they aren't microbenchmarks, at least in my experience. Saying they pick benchmarks that are favourable is untrue: the majority were added because of PyPy performing badly on them, and they've improved as a result of being included thus making them mostly benchmarks PyPy does well at.
Yeah, I would gladly pay $10, not $25
It feels like an alternate universe version of the show.
I host my personal website on relichost.net, it's £6/year but for my one page 'about me' and some simple email it's more than enough.

Also I hadn't thought of S3 - that's a good shout.
From the title I was imaging a system that uses something akin to FreeNet for datastore, making it truly distributed. While not exactly practical, it would have been neat.

But this is cool too.
If you can't distinguish between enumerations and named tuples, I think you have a bigger problem than you think. I mean this in full seriousness. Conceptually, the two constructs have completely different uses. That you can twist and bend one to implement a faint shadow of the other doesn't mean they are the same.
Other CC's WON'T gain strong traction until a centralized exchange (i.e. MTGOX) has an easy UI like MtGox and allow withdrawal to currencies that pay the bills. Vircurex (the main LTC exchange...which exchanges LTC to BTC) recently has been hacked compromising wallets. One of LTC's strength was that it couldn't be mined with a GPU, FPGA, or ASIC...but thanks to reaper, now miners can get MHashes with their GPUS. And when MtGox announced that they were holding off on Litecoin integration, LTC dropped to almost $2 and miners on the forums had an exodus. First tech to people's impression remains the standard...in this case, it's Bitcoin. -quacker
How Sim City greenwashes parking
I don't know about metaprogramming, but you reminded me of a text regarding AI...

http://www.wra1th.plus.com/awk/awkfri.txt
Next time, at least in Chrome, you can hit the back button to return to the page you were at with your text in tact.

But, you probably wasted your time anyway because no one is disputing with you that you that there are quicker ways to navigate in Vim than exclusive use of hjkl. The argument is that there is a place for them in navigation, and that using them over the arrow keys keeps your hands on the home row allowing a smoother transition between navigation and input.

Now, you may disagree that there's any loss by using the arrow keys in your workflow. And you may be right. But that certainly does not make the claim "hjkl are useless" universally accurate--which is what started this thread down this argument.
> Frankly, if you have to subsidize it then it wasn't good for business.

Electronic car subsidies attempt to balance out the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels. These subsidies are meant to serve the public interest, which is often inclusive of business interests.
Finishing stuff is nice, it took me awhile but i finally got there. The new problem i have is: now that i finished a project, how do i get people to know about/use it?
This is a very good article that trying to define some really good practices.

I'd like to add another practice that has served me well over the years; Separate layout from style. Doing this will make your CSS much more modular and reusable.
Ideas that seem good on the surface are a dime a dozen. More refined and more specific ideas aren't. However, execution is needed to iron out and refine even great ideas, it's an interplay.
Thank you Gnome

Next time I get into a discussion about how Gnome doesn't give a rat's ass about user experience, I'll just point to the article link.

Here's (another) proof of that.

And that's why switching to XFCE is the first thing I do in my Linux installations
I was going to point you to this Github issue, but then I realized I'd be linking you to yourself :)

https://github.com/stubbornella/csslint/issues/380
I'm not completely clear about what you're saying, is It, "it is believed that a majority of the deaths from the 1918 flu were ultimately due to secondary bacterial infections (generally treatable today by antibiotics)"?

And "cytokine-storms can be very fast and lethal (I've read of cases of apparently well individuals dying in their sleep, presumably from that), but they did not account for most of the deaths"?

If so, was this true for the "healthy younger adult" cohort that were disproportionately killed in 1918? (I.e. not the typical young children, elderly and compromised patients who are the normal majority of flu victims.)

Hmmm, in that case we have to wonder why the previous pandemic wasn't so lethal. But from everything I've read, "If you learned one flu pandemic, you've learned one flu pandemic", to quote one expert. And it's frightening how little we really know, like we don't really know why it tends to break out in winter....

BTW, I've read you can generally get 3 doses of antigen per egg (note to others, what we think of the egg is one cell, it's the multicell egg membrane in which the viri grow). Although, with three different antigens per dose of vaccine, that gets you back to 3 eggs produce 3 doses. Except they're talking about doing two strains of type B: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#2013-2014_Nor....
Odd. It works fine in the stock Android browser.

It actually renders faster than on my desktop. Maybe Firefox has a higher per-frame delay?
Ha ha thanks ;)
And yet most large Python projects reinvent the concept of enums in one way or another. This includes Python itself, where enums could be used in many places in the stdlib. Actually, one of the main reasons IntEnum is part of the implementation is that it will be possible to replace stdlib constants with it (for example some socket.* and io.* constants).

This was discussed in the mailing list in the past, and I even had a prototype of CPython with constants replaced by IntEnum. Due to its being an actual int it retains backwards compatibility while providing very nice printable representation for the constants.
You can subsidize it or stop subsidizing big gasoline trucks. But you can't keep the implicit subsidies for gasoline and cry big government when people ask for subsidies for electric trucks.
Why is the use of tables considered poor practice?

[Edit]: And what then is the most optimal method to use instead of tables?
You're right, this can be done without changing the Python syntax and in fact there was a proposal (with implementation) on the table for a long time. But eventually it was deemed to be too error prone and the more explicit approach was chosen. Python often resolved a tradeoff in favor of explicitness, and IMHO this ended up being a good decision.
Well here starts the trouble with the whole "Freiwirtschaft" movement, surely our economy is heading for negative interest. But for an alternative currency growing within that economy, a negative interest rate may not be balanced at all. So maybe there is no fixed demurrage rate at 5% but instead this rate is just another price and should be adjusted accordingly to the state of the market (and may be positive or negative).
I know a lot of ranchers who keep their own storage tanks on site for gas, because they live so far from a gas station. An electric truck would be awesome, especially considering most ranchers have the capital to install solar panels. Then you will only need diesel for back hoes and the like
Adding more:

Siddhartha - Hermen Hesse

Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse

The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse

The Consolations of Philosophy - Alain de Botton

A Brief History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

Politics and The English Lanaguage (essay) - George Orwell

A Modest Proposal (essay) - Jonathan Swift
I figured that that was the issue. Thanks for the link!
Not effortless and not easy - but not unrewarded. Farms pay to have hives for pollination here - a weekly fee.
Well, I was assuming that you were participating in the conversation, rather than just seizing upon a sentence and nitpicking.

The conversation was about the role of the free market in health care.

User curt said that the only way to solve health care pricing was through the free market via individual choices. Mikeash said that would only work if we were happy to let people die of treatable diseases. Anonymoushn said that was a distraction, that the market would be fine if people could know prices up front. Grey-area said that predicting costs was basically impossible, so the market-based solution was unworkable.

You jumped in to say that prices were predictable through this new thing we hadn't heard of called "estimation", saying that this solved the problem. The problem, presumably, being how price opacity and unpredictability make a hash of individual-choice market mechanisms.

So I have no idea what you were trying to do, but as far as I can tell, it was either a) pushing people back toward an unworkable market-based solution for health care, thus preventing them from moving toward a solution that doesn't fit with the fundamentalist liberarian ethos so popular on HN, or b) you're doing this: http://xkcd.com/793/.

Given that you ignored the meat of my point twice in a row with nitpicky comments, as well as doing the same to the previous poster, I'm figuring b.
Well I think there are if statements, loop conditions, and wildcard expansion that works in zsh but not in bash. So you could get used to something working in zsh, then you write an sh script with that thing, and then it doesn't work, and you have no idea why.

Example, I _think_ / (recursive globbing) works by default in zsh but not in bash. If you have / in a bash script without setting the right options then your script won't work and you will have no idea why until you've wasted a lot of time debugging.
All the same ways were chosen for the Enum functional API, by the way (list, dict, string separated with either spaces or commas). In general, the functional API was inspired mostly by namedtuple. It's not that the namedtuple syntax is pretty. It's not, we all know that, but that's what Python can offer at this point. But it's good enough so people learn to live with it, get used to it and intuitively understand what it means, and that's good enough.

That said, the preferred and recommended approach to define enums is with the class syntax.
I’ve tried different things but ended up using snotes[1]. It is a simple bash script (depends on git and dmenu [2]). Small is beautiful, after all.

[1] https://github.com/v4hn/snotes
[2] http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/
It is pretty obvious to most people.

That doesn't make you stupid, but you may find that you encounter similar situations in life, and it's something you may want to be aware of before you start throwing around big words like "lies", "shameful" and "dishonest" where such reactions are completely misplaced.
I would classify one as more than none.
As I read more about software patents, and with what knowledge I've gained working with software, I remain opposed to the idea of software patents in general. My problem, though, is that I have no concept of what the arguments are that support software patents.

Can anyone list any of the more compelling arguments supporting software patents, or any blogs/articles that discuss why they're not bad?
Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto identified?
Replace 'truck' with 'white van'.
I think the interesting thing about electric cars is that they can contribute to the solution of several other issues. They are much cleaner technology, so they would help reduce air pollution as well as slow down global warming. The former also means fewer pollution-related problems like lung cancer and asthma.

I know this sounds like grasping at straws, but I'm speaking in the long run (~50 years). I think the effects will be noticeable then.
Good article. I'm not much of a front-ender, so I always ended up with completely unreusable and unmaintainable CSS. I've been trying to write more maintainable and reusable CSS the last year, but I'm still struggling with best practices.
No problem, the image at the beginning of chapter 10 is one of my favorite GEB gems: http://i.imgur.com/NahfzTp.jpg
Bernanke et al have signalled they're getting ready to pump the brakes. Or break the pump. Or whatever.

In other words, interest rates might start climbing again sooner than you think.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732474410457847...
Do you know what really destroys economic efficiency? Well-meaning people handing out monopolies to things they don't understand and then creating laws, agencies, courts, and breeding specialized lawyers to navigate the mess - all taken from actual inventors.

> Buying and selling is seen as conducive to economic well-being.

Oh gosh no. Buying and selling might not work to your benefit. Far better to be the guy who labels everything for sale and sells it. Absolutely zero risk.

Which is why patents are a dream.

Further, that reasoning (make things property to stimulate the economy) is as obviously broken as breaking windows for economic growth. It only works in the short term while there's stuff to stick a price tag on, and it's only wildly profitable when it's other people's stuff.
It does support non looping animations. The problem is that I am not sure how you would calculate the 'tween frames. I get the first frame, it's just the final image dithered to 255 colors, but what would one of the intermediate frames look like. A small box with a more restrained palate, or would you break the final image into frames based on spectrum?
Below is the excerpt from the module's docstring:

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 2:03 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> I'm beginning to see why enums as a class has not yet been added to Python.
> We don't want to complicate the language with too many choices, yet there is
> no One Obvious Enum to fit the wide variety of use-cases:
>
> - named int enums (http status codes)
> - named str enums (tkinter options)
> - named bitmask enums (file-type options)
> - named valueless enums (any random set of names)
> - named valueless-yet-orderable enums (any not-so-random set of names

That's probably the best succinct description of the core problem I've
seen, and I've been following the various enum-related dicussions for
years

Cheers,
Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
Can you not specify that the next frame's colours should be added to the current one's? Then you could do it in only 3 frames total - one for the red, green and blue channels.
If you want it to pass, you need to call your Congress Critters and, more importantly, get other people to call theirs. Most people don't understand the issues at hand, so it is up to those of us who do understand it to educate others.
Developing database-driven web applications with Chicken Scheme
Quite similar to what Harper Reed and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer did at 7-on-7 a few weeks back (which was quickly disabled by FB) http://www.friendfracker.com/
thanks for this, now I'm going to have to get a print and put in on my wall :-)
"32697 colors" is not True Color, it's High Color.
AGREE! Bitcoin is established compared to others (litecoin, feathercoin, namecoin, PPC, etc...). To be wary of Bitcoin now is to be one of the IGNORANT people that continue to call bitcoin a fad or a scam...they're just mad they didn't hop on it sooner.
In my own experience I find them to be very inflexible and unpredictable.

There are still scenarios when you need them though, so I wouldn't call them 'poor practice' so much as something that should only be used if it makes sense.
A big problem is that the last two "pandemics" were declared early on to be so, but did not end up being pandemics. That seems to indicate that the trigger criteria or observable data for declaring a pandemic virus were inadequate for at least those two cases.

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic towards public health agencies, because to effectively head off a pandemic you have to detect it and take action early. However, if you're going to err on the side of caution, there are going to be a lot of false alarms, which in turn is going to lead to public relations fatigue about the whole issue. Then you're going to have a problem mustering a response if a pandemic actually comes up. It's a difficult problem.

One suspicion I have that leads to this problem is that we've never before had the tools to so easily & rapidly track the progress of a particular strains of flu virus - I suspect that really we just don't know about what the range of characteristics about the transmission rates really are to this level of detail, so really we don't precisely know how to accurately forecast if a virus at early stages will lead to a pandemic.
It's like a North Korea of development. Any dissent, real or imaginary, and you're gone.