skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There certainly are cases with well-understood causes (e.g. birds flew into both engines to make them stop), but I guess there are cases that originally caused from combination of previously-unknown failure pattern; since the failure pattern understood enough to write a software to detect, it may likely be backed up by some fail-safe mechanism.

I don't know much about aircraft controlling software, so this is only a guess from my experience of general system software crash recovery; usually the hardest case is caused by something I've never imagined to happen.
Apple doesn't spend its money making sure people want iPods, they spend their money making sure people want to listen to "the right song wherever they are," and making sure that the iPod is the device that lets them listen to "the right song wherever they are."
Seeing as how most TV shows are now off for the summer this is not surprising. Also as noted they are quickly hitting the saturation point.
Let it send a signal.
Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply
The onus is on you to be responsive. If that's not going to work, then, respectfully, think about getting someone else to answer that email address? We ship Rails code; if it helps, we'll answer the mails.

The problem isn't just that the mails didn't go through; it's also that you apparently didn't tell the reporter where you were in the process. Before you express incredible disappointment, can you tell us that you asked him not to post?

Another piece of advice, from crisis management: don't feed the story. I'm actually interested in what your response was now (so I can learn more about how Rails handles stuff like this), but I don't see how your team benefits from hashing this disagreement out in public. It seems so lose-lose for you. Just apologize for the confusion and say you're fixing it and let the story go away.
> How would you implement a swap on such a filesystem? You couldn't, could you?

Why not? It's just a filesystem with layout that's a bit different to most, users of the filesystem should be completely oblivious to it.

Swap just needs a file it can randomly read and write to; if a fs can't provide such random access, it's not just swap it'll be useless for.
Funny how it partially confuses Pascal with the real thing, but still records its influences.
This was invented long ago. Its called a wife ;)
Apparently the story is fairly popular, the site is down for me.
Google Squared is Live: Who Knew Structured Data Could Be So Unhelpful?
Using wikis to manage software projects
Only 10 years since Napster became popular?

Feels more like 30 years...
Tell PG: Congrats on the Inc. cover story
Just got my latest copy of Inc. magazine with the cover story on Y Combinator and wanted to say congrats. It looks like their website hasn't been updated to show this newest issue yet though.
A Stakeholder Perspective On Pair Programming
I'm avoiding it because it doesn't have a "Send Link..." command.
The Woods Hole page on Nereus is at http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=10076
The real problem is that once you get past very common sorts of things (e-mail, IM, word processing) the needs of different customers start to become different enough that building a single product with no extensibility/customizability becomes incredibly difficult. For example, say you created a point of sale app: would that really be suitable for video rental places and for fast food franchises out of the box? No chance. If you don't make it extensible, you're guaranteeing the software won't be fit for the very, very specific purpose it needs to be put to. If you do make it extensible . . . well, writing extensible software is about 10x harder than writing non-extensible software, and as you say it leads to architecture lock-in that makes it hard to innovate in the future. Plus, the group doing the extensing is probably either in-house IT or outside consultants, neither of which are really going to have the vision/skills/motivation to make something with a truly great user experience. So by making the software extensible, you're guaranteeing it's not going to be highly polished and that progress on it will be much slower. But if you don't do that, you're restricted to incredibly small niche markets where people do things similarly enough that you don't need any extensibility (i.e. your market might be about 10 potential customers). And even then, you have to worry about integration with a gazillion other purpose-built systems, which can still make the user experience suck if they have to switch between 10 different apps, even if one of them is really, really good.

'tis a hard problem.
JQuery Tools - The UI library for the Web
I'm not trying to be first. All the kudos goes to you.
I like that they show you the source pages, confidence, and alternative sources for the data.

However, it suffers the classic Google app problem; it does interesting stuff, but just looks ugly, and is generally unappealing. Hard for me to explain why, but despite my interest in the technology I just didn't enjoy using it at all.

But it is interesting stuff, I'd been wondering when something like this would emerge since watching this Norving talk from 2007 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4].
Where should the security contact information be?

If you found a flaw on site example.com, where would you look first for a security contact?
"I've only received one response last Thursday that someone would look into it, but the issue seemed to die there."

I am not clear here where the 24 hours starts.
My wife:

- Rarely buys clothes for me without my presence

- Rarely gets something that fits, of the things she gets for me

- Won't return it if I think it sucks.

- Has a meh sense of style for men.
Not being a ruby programmer, is there a defensive coding idiom that would have prevented this confusion?
Ask HN: Does comment syndication bother you?
Guys, I wanted to ask your thoughts on comment syndication

Two YC startups, Backtype and Disqus both provide publishers/bloggers with ways to collect comments about their content from across the web in the comments section of the page/post (and includes the username and link back to the original comment)

Can you please vote:
1. Yes I mind
2. No, I don't mind

Many thanks.
fail: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=programming+languages
I'm not quibbling over credit; I just think this kind of simultaneity is a fascinating phenomenon. No doubt both of our thought processes got tweaked by the cluster of other security posts that were showing up on HN at the time.
It puts it in front of people that don't already know about your product.

I can ask usability questions of my users, but their existing knowledge will effect what is "easy" and "intuitive" (intuitive generally means, "what I'm used to"). I can ask marketing questions of them, but I've already pulled them into my site, so my current message will be the one that gets reinforced. I can ask "compare these two products" questions, but I already know a preponderance of people on my site prefer my product to our competitors (one of which is Fantastico, by the way). I can ask any number of things, and we do frequently ask our customers opinions on things, but by virtue of them being on our site the results are known to be skewed in exactly the way we don't want them to be for a large number of questions.

Also, I don't want to clutter up my site with constant polls. When someone is on our site, we have very clear goals we want to achieve: Teach them about the benefits, help them choose the right products, show them how to use it, answer their questions. Asking them random questions isn't my idea of good design, when it comes to those goals.
i'm sorry but i just don't buy the 'chutes aren't worth it / wouldn't work' argument. i'm confident that in the next few decades we'll have better safety systems in planes, it will just take a few really smart engineers. people will still die in planes, sure, but in the cases where chutes or whatever will help, there will be huge benefits.
We use the Backtype plugin on TheNextWeb (example here: http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google/) and up until now, we have had no complaints and only requests for how people could do it themselves. Today, one person, a Hacker News reader Gojomo (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gojomo) called us out then called us "sleazy" which frankly, whether comment syndication is a problem or not, is just out of order.
Remind me not to hire you for anything mission-critical.
Indeed, back in January I came across a directory traversal vulnerability in Rack (http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...). They had lots of unit tests, but none testing that particular case. Unit testing is certainly no magic bullet.

On the other hand, the Rack team was incredibly responsive and put out an update within hours.
So, this is different from jQuery UI?
How is the data stored in the black box? Solid state?
Yeah, if they're still showing any growth at all right now, they're doing better than I would expect. I stopped watching entirely a few weeks ago. Nothing new on.
Why do you think that it doesn't?
The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about. --

I have to respectfully disagree. Its often when a tool becomes so ubiquitious and sufficiently intuitive that its true power comes to the fore.

It is like the electric grid, when it was first being forged everyone who used it thought about it extensively, now hardly anyone does. But that does not mean the grid's prime time is over, it means that now it is truly becoming powerful.
I'm guessing 24 hours from now.
Good point. AppStoreHQ's 'Hottest' list is built on streaming blog post discovery, and the stream is what's on the home page (kind of like Hype Machine does for music) - so any app that gets a mention from any of 70+ "canonical" blogs, or any blog that drops an AppStoreHQ review widget into its review - will show up in the stream.

So yeah, you have to at least have gotten some traction somewhere to get into the stream, but the bar is pretty low. (That said, about half the apps in the App Store have never even received a user rating - they're still in AppStoreHQ's search results, but they'll need a little love to get out of the basement).
Strangely chutes on planes might be worth it, but maybe not like you think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems
Yeah. That is interesting. Pity I can't reconstruct my thought processes. I know that I'd been poking around inside the news.arc because I was looking for vulnerabilities because of my recent posts about 37 Signals and password hashing.

I wonder what set you off.

I do like the fact that here on HN there were at least two of us who thought of this way of hacking the site, one actually made it happen. It's a high quality community.
MongoDB vs Redis, a different interpretation of what's wrong with Relational DBs
TV is also delaying adult development.
Better yet, why don't they make them orange?
Consider the fact that aircraft/control tower conversations are done over AM radio, a very ancient technology as these things go. Why so old, you might ask, in the vein of your question. First, there is an infrastructure cost--towers everywhere, airplanes everywhere have AM transmitters and receivers already.

Probably the only viable alternative that is still reliable would be single sideband (SSB), but that would be a infrastructure change as well.

If you consider what is required to do a digital encoding including handshaking, synchronization and the like, you are less likely to have a less reliable system. If in the midst of an AM transmission you get a static crash, it likely deletes one word. In a digital system, you might well have to resync, like a modem.

So some of these systems need to be very reliable under all sorts of harsh conditions. The questions I would ask, is 1) do the satellites already exist 2) how many of them and 3) are they visible everywhere there are airflights? and finally 4) how expensive is this network to maintain?

My guess is that the cost of such a network is a lot greater than a few black-box searches. Additionally, for really difficult crashes, they retrieve every possible piece of the airplane, at an expense that makes finding the black box seem small: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
Relational databases are designed for dealing with huge collections of data. Huge like terabytes. (This is, of course, their very reason for existence.)

Every time a framework pulls a big set of data across the wire to do a local calculation on it (a for loop summing a list of values, for example), it's doing a completely unnecessary round trip to do (probably in PHP or Ruby, no less) a task for which the database has already been specifically optimized. It could have done all the calculation during the same pass it took to select the records and just sent the answer instead.

Frameworks obscure this.

Just a thought.
Nice site. I've been hunting for good executions of this idea. Thus far these have impressed me most:

http://www.freshapps.com
http://www.apptism.com
http://iphone.iusethis.com

But yours is right in there in the mix. Add a recommendation engine, and you're really on to something. Good luck!
For this to be true everyone would have to wear one, and the plane would have to break open in mid-air. Obviously, structural integrity is an asset more often than a disadvantage. You won't be able to engineer this unless everyone sits in mini capsules and the plane like a ballistic missile with MIRV. The costs (in planes accidentally exploding over false positives and spewing out their encapsulated passengers) vastly outweigh the benefits.
It does, and I think it is easier to pick up signal of a floating object than of an object 2 miles below sea level...
As far as I can tell, fibers can be implemented from continuations as long as you have first class closures. I think the better question is what are the best continuation based abstractions to be included in a language's standard library :)
CrunchPad Prototype
I am unclear if you are talking about bona-fide stock, or options.

If you have a stock grant with a vesting schedule, the vested shares become YOURS and are irrevocable, like pay. (and yes, I am speaking in the TYPICAL sense here, there are 1000 sub-possibilities).

If you have stock options, then as they vest you earn the right to purchase those shares at the strike price. If you buy them, they are yours. If you do not, those shares go back into the employee pool for potential re-allocation.

And I don't know if you have a specific case in mind, but if you have some "company" and one "cofounder" drops out, it's rather unlikely someone is going to come along and purchase anything for any price.

If your company is a real entity and was put together with even so little as templated "Let's Start a Company" kit from Staples, the specifics of this are likely covered in some manner in the incorporation docs.
They ARE orange :) no idea why they are called 'black'...
No damn VIM in "text editors", infuriating.
For example, no one wants an iPod. They never have. What people want is to hear the right song at any given moment in time anywhere they are at without any device whatsoever.

That's an adorable bit of engineer-brain reductionism, but I don't think it's right. Having some kind of device in the loop is useful as a symbol. It tells other people that you're listening to music, that you spent a certain amount of money to do so, or that you do or don't pay attention to what's popular. If you bought a certain color, you probably did so to convey (or to avoid conveying) something about yourself, etc. People like to carry around and display tokens of their interests.
This is an intriguing idea, has anybody heard of any research done for this regarding passenger airplanes?
We'll do a full announcement, and in a week or so report on what changes we've made (moving the mail server being an obvious one).

Nate was told that we were traveling and that we'd get back to him. I then went about fixing the issue, verifying there weren't similar issues in other areas of the framework etc.

Ideally we would have told nate the release timetable, but that wasn't clear yet. Clearly we messed up here. However I'd hope in future people would send an email saying "any update" before posting to their blog and crying 'unresponsive'.
A more interesting question to me is "how did SQL get so unpopular all of a sudden?" It seems to me it went like this:

1. modern programming frameworks all abstracted away SQL because people found it hard to understand

2. SQL written by ORM layers in these frameworks is slow. So people decided this was because RDBMS are slow.

3. So people decided to stop using RDBMS and use object-oriented data stores instead (which is faster, unless you have relational queries, which a large number of simple web applications do not)

4. Then when they started needing relational queries again, they started building complicated custom layers on top of their object stores to handle this

I figure sometime in the future somebody will publish a "brilliant" article called "Save yourself thousands of lines of object-manipulation code... by using RDBMS!" and suddenly SQL will be "popular" again.

I'm the first to admit that the default approach to web development for the past 10 years has been "slap all your data into mySQL, then start writing code". It works in a very, very large number of cases, but it's not super-efficient. It never claimed to be. It was just really easy and quick to write.

Now tools are growing up that let you solve these sorts of problems without using RDBMS, and that's great: the huge number of apps that don't need RDBMS can stop using SQL, and let us SQL junkies get on with our lives :-)
This reminded me of Google Sets, which has been in Labs forever: http://labs.google.com/sets

Sure enough, if you ask it to build a Square and it can't figure it out, it uses a Sets-like interface to ask you for five examples.
We'll push this fix to 2-3-stable and master now as the 'damage is done' in terms of disclosure.

The timeframe for the 2.3.3 point release is hopefully 'this week'. We're just waiting on a few other things to fall into place.
Taking Advantage of Newsletters Printing
Still, I'm not sure this solves the underlying problem. People will still only see the top X apps on your site. Unless there's a higher churn rate with top apps falling off after a shorter period of time, how will buyers get to see more apps than the app store?
Awesome, thanks for the tips everyone. So much to learn, so little time.
You can always test for nil explicitly. Compare:

unless foo
# ... foo can be false or nil to reach this branch
end

unless foo == false
# ... this branch is reached unless foo == false
end

Since terseness is considered such a cardinal virtue amongst Ruby programmers (including myself), however, this kind of issue is often ignored, and difficult to detect unless your tests explicitly check for "truthy" and "non-truthy" values in addition to the true/false literals.
No, but that's not how they run their business. You shouldn't expect Microsoft or Apple to be innovative, you should expect them to make a better product than everyone else and/or market it better than everyone else.

Amazon.com did invent Cloud Computing, Philips did invent the CD, Sun did invent Java, Toyota did invent the hybrid, AT&T did invent the cell phone, Xerox did invent the GUI. Those are the companies that run on innovation.
There seems to be some confusion between SQL, ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), and a RDBMS. And it would have been nice, as StrawberryFrog notes to see these concepts compared to OODB and other query languages.

Missing is the concept that SQL is really quite powerful.
Do they list any advantage for using Flashembed over SWFObject?

http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
Yes; it looks like it's more focused on a lightweight set of core features (obviously opinions as to what constitutes "core" features may vary).

It actually seems more reminiscent of early mootools.
For those unfamiliar with Johnny Lee, I highly recommend is YouTube videos on Wii Hacks ... he is a well recognized genius int the field and was recently employed by Microsoft after graduating Carnegie Mellon university. His involvement in this project ensures that it will have a better chance at survival.
Summary: Television network claims TV is not especially harmful to children if used in moderation.
They specifically refer to the basic JQuery UI elements when they state, under "Essential tools for modern websites"

<blockquote>
Let's face it: do you really need drag-and-drop, resizables, selectables or sortable tables in your web applications? Websites are not desktop applications. They are different.

What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, smooth navigation, great visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today's website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.
</blockquote>

This looks like repackaging the more popular stand-alone jQuery plugins/widgets into a single bundle/distribution, with nice docs and demos, very different from jQuery UI which is more like half a framework and some widgets.
doesn't the whole banning thing give more exposure to it?
18mm thick — about 3/4 of an inch. Hopefully it'll be light too.

I'm impressed. Maybe this TechCrunch tablet has potential after all.
An extremely useful tool. Thank you so much.
Verifying that length is less than K and verifying that length is the shortest possible route are two different questions. Can someone clarify how the travelling salesman problem is NP-Complete (i.e. how does it have a P verification?)
Masturbation May Pose Health Risk | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Radio doesn't work underwater. At 20 meters depth, a submarine can receive a 35 byte-per-second message using a long antenna, but it cannot transmit. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLF ]
it's actually not that uncommon. I spoke with my patent attorney some time ago and he could attest that very often the exact same inventions are sent to the patent office only days apart. Sometimes even on the same day. Famously Elisha Gray sent in his patent application for the telephone at the same time as Alexander Graham Bell. A letter was sent out to the two parties asking them to defend their application in order to find out who should be awarded the patent. Gray's company didn't find it worth the trouble to respond, so the patent went to Bell.

The point is that people and the ideas they have are influenced by external factors, many of them unconscious. But we will pick up on the same clues, think about the same problems, and maybe come up with the same solutions based on external factors. Nothing can stop an idea whise time has come.
Maybe (ha!) I'm weird, but I really enjoy shopping for clothes. No-one'd call me handsome or dapper, but there's something really satisfying about putting a look together.

I never have enough time, though!
then they won't be able to fly. :P that's why we have airplane bodies made out of lighter metals instead of heavy ones used in black box.
Flight recorders, along with being incredibly durable, are also incredibly heavy. It would be difficult to provide a remotely reliable method of having the device float.
Pretty much doesn't as a COW fs does not need to.
Yes, but you could put a radio beacon on a floating box. This seems like a good idea, possibly for a secondary box.
I'd certainly choose this over, say, a Kindle. If they can actually deliver, and at the price they've bandied about, I'd love to have one.
If MS's Silverlight catches on, Adobe and Flash will have some competition. But it seems most designers I know have some sort of serious pathological dislike of Microsoft so it seems rather unlikely.
Which version of Opera are you using and on what OS?