skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All right, for starters: Most algorithms can be decomposed into graph problems. (Trees are a subset of graphs.) Set operations, as you noted, can usually be visualized with venn diagrams. Multiple inheritance may make more sense as a tree growing together. A garbage collector's arena could show its data fading away when it hasn't been accessed for a while. I like the idea of a hash of a variable affecting its color, making structurally equal items easier to spot.

Have you ever seen lavaps (http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/LAVAPS/index.html), by the way?

To turn the question on its head, I wonder what concepts remain undiscovered because people tend to brainstorm visually (on whiteboards, etc.), but some ideas are intrinsically hard to depict visually. (Speaking as somebody who is more textually-minded, but has become good at spatial thinking because of 3D programming.)

Brainstorming in terms of sound (harmonic scales or rhythms) could bring out different solutions, for example. I find anthropomorphizing components of a problem (like the actor model) helpful, too.
Hyperbolizing in blog titles is an ancient and time honored tradition. I probably should've stuck with "considered harmful" to make my tongue's placement a bit clearer.
I read an article from Microsoft advocating passphrases in 2004, and was taken with his rationale. I've been using them since then on everything except low-security accounts.

I now have much more diversity in the hundred or so passwords I actually use than I used to, and worry much less about forgetting them.

(P.S. Without loss of generality, pretend that for whatever reason I was reminded of Gummy Bears when signing up for my Gmail account. (An American TV show from back in the day.) I take a snippet of one line from their themesong, "dashinganddaring", which works fine as a password, optionally substituting a & for the "and" and with arbitrary capitalization. I'm highly unlikely to forget the password because, well, I've had perfect recall of that themesong for twenty years now.

I don't actually use cartoon theme songs, but everybody should have some source of highly entropic data that is evocative and meaningful to them.
This looks nice, but $1300 seems a little overkill for a home file server! (unless it's a home office?)
"this code is one of the reasons I was hired"

Or was it your ability to write that code?
XXX is the YYY killer is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, esp. if YYY is good and thriving. (Hardware notwithstanding.)
That all sounds like good stuff. A lot of people -- and in this case, I do mean highly technical users -- think that the Fork Queue is a fantastic place to see what's going on and merge it as if it was a "real" merge. I always thought this seemed nuts, and now I'm glad to see that it's not the intended use.

Personally, I never visit the fork queue, and instead use the network diagram -- which really is the bee's knees. Can you imagine clicking on a head and saying, "merge this?" I can. That would be awesome.
I don't see WA as a Wikipedia killer. It's more like a working version of Wikipedia articles: read about a concept on Wikipedia, then try it out in practice using WA. I think they complement each other very nicely!
Hopefully acquiring Sun will accelerate Oracle's work on btrfs, and we Linux users can get our own copy-on-write system.
It's the output of Processing that's visual. In graphical PLs, it's the input that's graphically manipulated; take a look at Scratch, you drag a "for loop" from a toolbox and drop it into a visual "control flow", then watch the FOR snap into place and presto.

http://scratch.mit.edu/
That's what I would do, too, but also verify with the employer over the summer that he is fine with open source code to be integrated into the project.

Also it might happen that while integrating it, improvements to the open source code come to mind. Then it should be clear from the start if it would be OK to feed improvements created during employed time back into the open source project.
I agree with all the technical things you said. The issue isn't that I don't know what the Fork Queue does -- I do. It's that many users do not, and it is unclear. Before I did know what it did, I thought it was a good way to let some of the less-technical members of my team deal with simple cases of collaboration without having to think about merging too much. Because it's cherry-picking whole trees (in a manner of speaking), it led to confusion all around, and would continue to do that.

The two solutions that defunkt and I both seem to like are (a) make it clear that the Fork Queue is not a general-purpose merge tool and (b) add a merge tool, someday.
I prefer this review:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
Good setup, but way too expensive for what adds up to a highly-advanced NAS.

I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard (knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either.

The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes bad.

OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an 80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.
Very well done article. One of the best sum up points: "A usable and secure password is then not a complex one. It is one that you can remember - a simple password using 3+ words." I've used that sometimes, and it works well; though I also happen to be someone who can memorize random strings of punctuation and gibberish, which I prefer. :)
In fact, there were two computers used for writing the first software for the WWW. The other one is exhibited in CERN's main data-center.

Here are more pictures, including one of the WWW proposal:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavorite/3185731514/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavorite/3185731512/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavorite/3185731516/
I have run into this before and I have never put someone else's code, including my own, onto a customer's or employer's computer.

What I have often done, however, is write another version of basically the same thing, but only what I need for the job at hand. I never use the same program or variable names. I want it to look like I wrote it just for them, which technically, I did. Sometimes I bring a hard copy and sometimes I cut and paste a little from my gmail account, but usually I just rewrite most of it from memory (which is good practice, too.)

They're paying for me to write them software, they're getting it, and I keep what is already mine. Winners all the way around.
Agreed, it's a last mile problem.

When I get a letter addressed to 914 instead of 918, I know which house it's supposed to go to. No effort required after step one: address envelope.

It'd be easy enough to hand out your address as a url, "just whois me." But to ask the postal systems of every single country on earth to do the translation for you is over the top (steps two through n). Put the onus on the user (sender) to do the google.com == 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway translation.

(I smell a weekend webapp)
cutting TV is more important than meditation. If meditation forces you to watch less TV then that's probably where some of the "benefits" are coming from.
I haven't lived abroad, but simply from travel and reading, it becomes clear that many social practices are arbitrary, and the range of workable possibilities is much larger than simple intuition-from-limited-experience might suggest.

After a while, surprise that things could be done so differently becomes surprise that each region thinks their ways are so natural.

That sort of insight certainly helps in negotiation scenarios like the one tested, and possibly other problem-solving as well.
I am reminded of the "Encyclopedia Butlerica":

http://www.weirdart.com/pages/ency.html
striving for excellence is not mutually exclusive with zen.
The World's Largest Comic Strip Unveiled
How many share holders total does Facebook have now? My gut reaction to hearing this was that perhaps they were nearing the limit where they would be forced to go public and that this might be a stop-gap so that they can time their IPO more conveniently.
> Where does that leave us?

It leaves us here:

http://memepunks.blogspot.com/2006/06/americas-war-on-scienc...

and ultimately, here:

http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html

Linus Pauling developed an interest in chemistry by experimenting incessantly throughout his childhood. Today, he would have been imprisoned. The new generation will have no Linus Pauling, unless the Third World - where one might still purchase a beaker without a license - supplies us with one.
We do that, and June 1st is our release date :-) you really should leave an email address in your profile.
Try getting any but the most widely used protein sequences out of it.
As much as I don't think WA is a Wikipedia killer, I think that simply writing off emerging technologies that are attempting to replace the status quo is naive at best.

If you're commenting on the actual phrasing of the article title, rather than the sentiment behind it, you're probably right. But I would push that assertion even farther: Link-bait article titles are 'pretty much guaranteed' to contain information that's either incorrect or obvious.
Is this an elaborate joke, or part of some "alternate reality game"?
Based on the statement in the article that Facebook's common stock sale program allows employees to "sell up to 20% of their common share holdings", I don't think this is about reducing the number of shareholders. They'd need to allow employees to sell all of their shares if they wanted to reduce the number of shareholders.
Hot Box – Cufflink Boxes
Hot Box Ltd., like its sister company, Victoria Enterprises Ltd., has been supplying top quality packaging in wood, metal and plastic from its factories in China for many famous brands and importers in the jewellery, watch, and pen industries.
Ask HN: Product images for e-commerce startup
I have a unique idea for an e-commerce startup. I'm still in the very early stages of planning, but I've already hit a major stumbling block: finding product photos for display on my site.

My site will need to display thousands of product images and I don't want to infringe on anyone's copyright. I know I could have a photographer take photos of all of the different products, but that may be prohibitively expensive at this point. Is there a site (or better yet, an API) where I can pay a reasonable flat fee for the non-exclusive rights to product images?

I know there are a lot of stock photo repositories, but they don't seem to have great photos of specific products. For example, I couldn't find much when searching for an image of an iPod nano. It seems to me that there should be a service out there that provides an API that allows clients to query for a specific product and image style and retrieve a nice stock photo. Does this exist? If not, maybe this is a good startup idea?
Well, I think it's partially a bug, and even in some perfectly egalitarian future we'll still have to deal with it. But at the present time, it's also firmly rooted in fact. People from different groups have different opportunities, no matter how talented they might be. If you're from the wrong kind of neighborhood, it's hard to escape the conclusion that either (a) your people are not meant for better things, or (b) the whole society is in some kind of conspiracy against you.

I mean, look at these kids -- they beat MIT in a robotics competition, but one of them now hangs drywall for a living.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.html

Yeah, I get that there's a huge legal problem here, (they're undocumented), but just compare their story, to say, the drug-addled C student that got to be president. The USA has a long way to go before it's a perfect meritocracy.

That said, I do have a lots of problems with the whole inspiring-role-model concept. It can be unrealistic to say that because some ultra-nerd got a scholarship, that this somehow should inspire someone of merely average talents who won't get special treatment. And to go back to the original post, it was really patronizing to stretch the concept of "entrepreneur" to cover notorious bloggers. That kind of bogosity is common in the self-esteem industry.
I'll submit that it could be measurable and provable, but we haven't figured out how to do it yet. It's quite obvious that after meditation, something has changed within me. I don't know how to quantify it, but it's a marked change. The fact that modern scientists aren't able to measure or reproduce that change doesn't necessarily mean it's not real; it could mean that we simply haven't yet established the tools to do so (or, maybe some have, but are ignored).

The comparison to organized religion is invalid. Outside of the religious context, meditation can be considered breathing techniques that calm the mind.
I love ZFS. I was on the mailing list for a year just to watch it develop. It is amazing. I love Solaris. When I deploy applications on it I get warm and fuzzies.

I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for 'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home.

But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods I pick via a simple web interface.

Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances' are software packages.

At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and I KNOW the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance. (And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually locked the system).

Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.
That seems to be a loosing battle.
in an age of abundant content it's a valid choice.

Whatever. I remember hearing the "grey album" and have still not recovered from the aesthetic disgust. It's just absolutely pathetic that people steal, steal, steal, and then add, as their contribution, a load of their own shit--only to be praised for it! And called "artists"! And base careers off of it! Legal matters aside, it should just be utterly banished from decent society.

just a thinly-disguised rearrangement of the same 3 chords?

Yeah, well, you might as well say, "Geez, music just keeps using the same 12 notes over and over, therefore it's okay to take exact recordings of other people's work, decimate it, and sell it as your own." Dishonor should not be rewarded. Neither should dishonesty.
a key has multi-value, multi-key point to the same value.

You can regard it as a efficient implementation of undirected graph.

Relational DB can do it very well with something like:

create table image2tag (
varchar image,
varchar tag,
primary key (image, tag),
index (image),
index (tag)
);
I would've used very different queries to Google those:

Q: [space shuttle speed]
A: 17,500 mph
Q: [17,500 * 24]
A: 420,000

That took about 2 queries and 2 minutes - the first result for the space shuttle's speed compared a bunch of sources, 3 of which were in agreement.

Q: [dynamite explosive energy]
A: 2.1 million joules
Q: [2.1 * 5]
A: 10.5 million joules

Wikipedia was the first result for that, with the answer right on the page (and the text leading up to the answer in the snippet).

Curiously, a lot of people do use full-sentence queries - perhaps it's the lingering aftereffects of their 3rd grade teachers. If Wolfram Alpha can handle those correctly, it'll be a big win. But other search engines have tried - Ask.com is based around being able to ask questions in natural language. And it never seems to work that way - computers don't seem to know which of the many things you say are irrelevant.
On the other hand, the Libertarian definition of "consent" is repulsive to me. From their point of view, I "consent" to spend my prime waking hours working on things other than my own (non-monetizable) inventions. Bullshit. It isn't consent unless I have entirely unconstrained choice, and the need to pay for food and shelter is every bit as much of a constraint as the laws of a brutal dictatorship. And I simply don't care if basic goods are expensive because an evil central planner priced them nearly out of my reach, or whether the market had bid them up. The net effect on my life is entirely the same.

Screw Libertarian "consent." Screw their "non-coercion." They are Orwellian concepts: their in-practice meanings in that ideology allow for the exact opposites of what those words mean in everyday language to slide through and flourish.
The Nigeria ones are actually a good candidate to find on Wikipedia articles. I recently thought about moving to Norway and wondered how's the temperature there, if they speak english, and googled for "wikipedia norway". Country pages are a good source of that kind of information.

Anyway, the others aren't really good, since they're time-based, and except for major stuff (like the political history), Wikipedia isn't the right place to look.

But I disgress and agree, Wolfram isn't killing anything.
On the other hand, it's hard to argue that David Hahn's reactor should have been legal.
> Funny how the notion of simply paying back your debt becomes "enslavement"

Yeah, let's bring back Victorian work-houses. I sincerely hope that you and your family end up in one.
"make the leaders page more useful" suggests that the leaders page has some utility.

What is that utility and why would increasing it have value?

> I'd expect the effect of this change to be even more interesting discussions

I'd be surprised if any change to the leaders page had any effect on discussions.

One easy experiment is to simply remove the leaders page and see whether there was any effect on the discussions.
the reason why not using sql is that the thing I am doing is more about using a "library" (like what tokyo cabinet c api provides). SQLite may be good for this purpose but still, I guess there will be a simpler implementation specially for attacking this kind of problem. MySQL/PgSQL is not suitable because of the authorization mechanism.
Right. I was going after link bait titles as a guarantee of little content. The true killers are usually not apparent in the early stages. Was it obvious that Google was the AltaVista killer? AltaVista had the brand name, a big parent company, and lots of smart people. WA is interesting on its own without all the "killer" blogs.
We started from me claimimg that the subject is not fascinating, by which I understood "interesting scientifically" and not aesthetically or philosophically pleasant. This is a point independent from gauging NKS content itself.

You still haven't said what is the scientifical idea.

Because I for one don't know. John McCarthy doesn't too, he once hoped to gain such knowledge by careful study, and later remarked regarding Wolfram "In the 1950s I thought that the smallest possible (symbol-state product) universal Turing machine would tell something about the nature of computation. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Instead as simpler universal machines were discovered, the proofs that they were universal became more elaborate, and [so] did the encodings of information."

how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics

Oh, and he got that wrong too... (by the so called No Hidden Variables theorem).
What I was getting at was that consumers in general lack the wherewithal to make computer purchases. In a situation like that, you can make a lot of customers satisfied by treating them well and paying attention to details in your products. Apple, CarMax, Saturn, Trader Joe's -- all of these companies know that if you look out for your customers, they will pay for that.

But your point is well taken. Most people react first with their stomachs, genitals, and fists before their brains. I'm starting to hate them. I suspect they are subject to the same foibles as the ones who treat Asians like cartoons and doormats.
How Casinos Can Find and Target Their Favorite Customers: The Biggest Losers
"May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."

The legal thing to do was to sit and vegetate in front of a TV set. Or beat smaller kids senseless. Or any of the other socially approved, mindless activities open to children today. He chose to be a free spirit, and paid the price.
> Outsiders? I'm from northern California and lived and worked for years in Oakland. Maybe it wasn't as bad as we thought, but there were definitely areas that you "knew" not be in after dark.

Yes, outsiders. Let me guess, you lived in a nice area of Oakland. What makes you think that you know anything useful about the poor areas of Oakland? (I lived in them when I was a kid.)
modern music is about the clarity of the production

It is also, in a big way, a function of the tribal effect of being part of a mass-media phenomenon, something which the labels are all-but-essential for. Disney could make any of a hundred thousand girls into the next Britney Spears.

(Typically folks recoil in horror at the notion that their enjoyment of music would be affected by this. What can I say... branding works and is not evil?)
Thank you to everyone who has given comments and criticism. We do appreciate everything you have to say, and we will be making changes based on your thoughts.
Unfortunately, due to a problem with the engine, the demo will not work. We are working on getting it back online as soon as possible. This is unfortunate, as we feel the demo is impressive.
Please keep the comments coming - we're taking everything into account.
So bookmark the query. Filling out a form is a lot easier to do while drunk than driving safely. Your fingers may have trouble hitting the keys correctly, but surely your brain remains usable?
I think ECC memory is a good idea if you can get it; turning memory errors from "random data corruption and crashes" into "harmless fmd/syslog messages" is pretty nice, and last time I looked, would add about £5 to a 4GB DDR2 system.

Of course the problem then is that Intel don't support ECC on anything but Xeons; AMD are rather better, all you need is a supporting motherboard (which includes some cheap and cheerful integrated ones), any AMD CPU in the past few years will do.

Now, if only Intel would get off their arses and release the W3xxx Xeons so I can build an ECC protected i7 system. 12GB without ECC is getting a bit ridiculous.

I'd also go for a pair of dynamically striped mirrors instead of RAID-Z2; modern disks can already pretty much saturate GigE individually, so I'd rather go for increased overall IOPS rather than increased sequential throughput at the cost of making every drive take part in each IO.
> They're paying for me to write them software, they're getting it, and I keep what is already mine. Winners all the way around.

Except that you just took money out of their pockets to write something that you already had.
Mirror:

http://74.125.93.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2...
Alligator can be seen here: http://the-crime-in-your-coffee.anagkh.net/?p=664

P.S. If you haven't read any Jorge Luis Borges, I'd advise considering that a bug to be fixed a.s.a.p. ;-)
Edit: bad link.
"America's War on Science" - Do you have a license for that beaker?
This is no joke, we are just unfortunate that the engine went down. Perhaps I asked for a feedback to early?

I am trying to get hold of my colleague to bring the engine up again. I am hoping this will be done shortly.

I agree that the text needs to be looked at - this is the reason why I asked for a feedback.