skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been a dfranke fan. Ever since reading his "Code free or die()" essay. He used "beg the question" correctly. I got misty eyed. That's good peeps.

And, oh look, he's also a fantastic hacker.

Thanks for taking the time to write this out. This is the kind of hack I enjoy most. Watching the combination of obscure facts and astute observations come together into a coherent and powerful whole is a pleasure.
I'd like to go. I haven't heard of this group before. There is no history other than this thread ont he group
Searching for "java xml binding frameworks" says that XMLBeans is required. I guess the other frameworks just aren't worth using. :-D
Because it would be too heavy to take off.
I wonder what is the median number of sales for all products sold by Amazon?
thanks for the comment apu. It's a fair point and that's what we've been doing so far (plus working in Cafes). But we just realized that having any kind of work space would make us way more productive and concentrated. Does that make sense?
My first thought was "Popular compared to what? What was the alternative?"

I was expecting to see hierarchical databases, OODBs and alternate query languages mentioned. The claim for "Distaste" for SQL is odd and vague. I agree with the first point - "Relational databases are ACID and that's powerful" but I ask "so what, where's the distaste?"

People who know a bit about RDBMSs know that they do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Is the point that a younger generation don't know that? What are they teaching kids in college these days?

Massively parallel data storage systems are in vogue now, bacause of the very the few very popular web apps that need to scale a lot horizontally, and SQL databases don't really deal with that. But that's not "How SQL got popular". Maybe it's why some have forgotten.
Rapper Ortega Henderson shot dead
Aside from the usual reasons given (a plane consisting mostly of steel armor could not get off the ground, etc.) it would make no difference to the passengers. Falling to the ground from altitude will kill you even if you are sitting inside an indestructible box, simply through rapid decceleration.
or is it shielding them against the statistically unrealistic presentations of the world that are tormenting older generations?
Shouldn't Facebook Friend Its Users?
Isn't it cool that with free software your users can have the rush of the hack and demonstrate the fix without having to screw your production server?
Good question. Likewise, I've always wondered why don't they have parachutes in aeroplanes :(
The best reply I've ever seen on HN.

Redundancy is good, always. Especially when the cost is negligible compared to the lifetime operating expense of the machine and the costs from any misinformation regarding the last moments of a doomed flight (a Crash that is the Airline's fault mega-screws them in the wallet).
I really miss Napster. I was in college when it was first released, and remember completely saturating the network with downloads.
Too much leg room if they do that
Why don't they make black boxes floatable?
Not quite: The site is inaccessible for the vast majority of mobile devices.
To take the other side...there is currently a beautiful simplicity about this idea and execution.

I pretty much just fall asleep when I start trying to deal with A/B testing, market research, ad effectiveness, etc. This is so simple that all I have to ask myself is, "Do I have a question I'd like to ask a bunch of people?" and "Do I have five dollars?" That's a really good place to be, because everybody in business has questions, and everybody has five dollars.

I will absolutely use this site. I do question where the people are coming from, which I guess is a demographic question...but I think any time you ask of the user to choose it should be later in the sales process. For statistics wonks, mention it in the FAQ, or something. But I wouldn't clutter up the initial offer with too much stuff like that. I wish I had a product that was this simple of a sell.

And, of course, the more involved things get, the more expensive it will have to be. I really like five dollar market research. I might not be so enthusiastic about $25 market research.
I disagree with democratic color selection. I have older eyes and have trouble with low contrast between text and the background. Gray text is hard to read and gray on black is impossible, like what you find on Japanese electronics. The gray on gray in this article's introduction is about at the limit of easy readability for me.

I have no problem with viewer choice, so long as the default is high contrast.
Copy-on-write tree. See WAFL, ZFS, and Btrfs.
"Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc."

That doesn't mean they aren't innovative. It's easy to invent the MP3 player. It's hard to invent the MP3 player that people actually want to use. That doesn't suck.
I didn't either. Maybe I still don't.

I think it takes a search and is smart enough to give you comparisons between results. Look at their examples to get a feel for how it works.

I could be wrong, someone let me know if I'm completely off base.
One would hope that the Mac version uses the keychain.
Whenever I read articles like this, I get the impression that an apparently sizable (or just vocal?) subset of the people who "know SQL" learned it from some sort of "Teach Yourself PHP & MySQL in 24 Hours" book, and completely missed learning about how the relational model actually works, how to normalize a table, etc.

They have a terrible experience using MySQL on a database with one huge, un-indexed table, and they're convinced for life that all RDBMSs are crap. I mean, if you don't like relational databases for a real reason, that's one thing, but this is like complaining because gcc won't run a Visual Basic program you copy-and-pasted, and having half the people you whine to not know any better, so they tell their friends too.

I can understand when people complain that SQL is a lousy implementation of the relational model (or about its syntax being a bit verbose, etc.), but that's clearly not the case here.
I agree with you here. Is there any one here on HN who is not comfortable with SQL?
However, the increasing usage of frameworks such as rails/grails/hibernate/JPA makes it easier to access data without having to worry about SQL until something breaks.

The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about.
Probably because the majority of passengers are not trained to operate a parachute, attempting to jump out of a plane at 40,000 ft is likely to be lethal even with a parachute, and that having 200+ people orderly jump out of a plane with parachutes while the plane is crashing out of control is unlikely to work.
"For example, no one wants an iPod. They never have."

Obviously this guy has never watched a television. Apple spends hundreds of millions each year making sure people do want an iPod.
Because unless most passengers are actually trained in how to use them, it wouldn't do much good; plus, for most reasonably sized planes, there simply wouldn't be enough time for anyone to jump with a chute.
The sentence was grammatically unambiguous as written.
After the Corporate World, Considering Start-Ups
INPUT: http://google.com/

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 47710208) (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /home/aarongou/public_html/easy_web_qa/simple_html_dom.php on line 760

SUGGESTION: Sane-itize input.
It's not really a question of known weaknesses because it's not designed to be secure in the first place; it only performs a single round. Its purpose is to be fast and to be "random enough" for scientific applications.
Interesting. Try starting with an empty square. Add a few items, and then add a few custom columns.
I played with hulu a month ago and really liked it. For about 2 weeks the streaming was good. The last two weeks, its useless stutter. Maybe too much growth too fast?
Nate,

I'm sorry that you weren't told that we were working on this as part of a point release that was due out in the next 24 hours. Clearly there's been a failure in communications somewhere along the line. For what its worth your emails to the security list never arrived in my inbox. There's something wrong with one of our mail servers, but other messages to that list arrive frequently.

However I remain incredibly disappointed that you posted this so publically without so much as following up one more time with pratik, or emailing the rails core list or anything.

The wheels were in motion with this one, and drama like this will merely distract people from the issues at hand.

Michael Koziarski
Rails Core Team Member and 'Dude who gets the security emails'
Ruby: Fibers vs Continuations
Extreme Venture Partners launches Extreme University summer program
There's one comparison to ZFS:

One of the most noticeable features of NILFS is that it can “continuously and automatically save instantaneous states of the file system without interrupting service”. NILFS refers to these as checkpoints. In contrast, other file systems such as ZFS, can provide snapshots but they have to suspend operation to perform the snapshot operation. NILFS doesn’t have to do this. The snapshots (checkpoints) are part of the file system design itself.
Doesn't #1 contribute to making it even more hit driven?
"Religion" is entertaining. Christianity is written by CS Lewis and published by the Oxford University Press, which in fact publishes most religions. The canonical image of Islam is the guy holding the sign "behead those who insult islam". Slavic mythology (the 27th result) is located in the country of Afghanistan. The distinctive image of Humanism is a bus advertisement (I think) saying "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake."

Adding the column "adherents" reveals that there are 4,400 Jews in the world to Islam's 300, to Christianity's 1.9 billion. Adding the column "Leader" reveals that the leader of Christianity is Chris Argabright, complete with a phone number I won't reproduce here.

Actually I have to admit this isn't too bad for a computer algorithm, it's just the better the algorithm gets, the more entertaining the wrongness gets.

Ah, and poking "science" in gives you a phone number for each science. Nice.

Further edit: Poke in "X-Men Origins" as a column for almost any query. It's like magic. A coworker tried something like the following and discovered the column showing up, then we couldn't resist poking it into many other queries: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=square&items=tria...

Further, further edit: Add "Rating" (not "ratings") to religion! It's so great that we have Google to sort through the difficult problem of rating religions for us.
I did check out the example searches. First one I clicked on - Hawaiian islands. http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=Hawaiian%20islands...

What does "color" refer to here? The island's flower? What colour is melemele?

I should point out, I get what it does technically, but I'm just struggling to think of a repeatable user scenario where this would be useful...

I also noticed a couple of weird things:

1) They're not URL encoding their example searches. Tsk.

2) Searching for "google squared" on regular Google brings up Techcrunch, and the Google Squared site is halfway down the list.
care to expand on that? I don't think TV is helping on the rationality front.
Another similar site:

http://www.ask500people.com/
A more interesting question is why one is not permitted to bring a parachute on board at one's own expense, and why there are not even token provisions for enabling their use in a situation where they might be helpful.

Air travel phobia seems to be rooted in the lack of control experienced by the passenger - specifically, in the anticipation of utter helplessness in the event of a crash. A parachute would help with that, even if its role is largely ceremonial.
Two thoughts:

1. It shows that tests are only as good as the thinking that goes into them, i.e., it's up the programmer to think through all the use cases, possibility for breakage, and use the appropriate tools to try a wide range of inputs.

2. This lack of responsiveness to the vulnerability reminds me of the complaints Zed (Shaw) made about the Rails Core back when he announced he was leaving the Ruby community.

Preemptive disclaimer: These are not supposed to be snide remarks in any way, they're just two quick associations of a tired brain. So please no flames.
Once you wrapped your mind around how to use this, I can see this being really useful - perhaps even more useful than Wolfram Alpha.

It still gives you lots of garbage results at the moment (try a search for religion - it's hard to get relevant data when you add columns or religions), but the ability to do a structured search on a whole array of similar items at once? That's cool! With countries, although you get some obscure nations to begin with, you can add rows and columns (like GDP, population, area, etc...) very easily, and get very useful comparisons.
You only have to transmit data when something is wrong. You can use software to determine when to start sending updates.
Yep. Commercial airliners already have a number of redundant power sources, located in different parts of the plane, wired in different pathways for maximum operational redundancy. There were even studies to done to find the parts of a jet that are least affected by eddy currents due to electrical storms....yet the black box can operate even when those different redundant systems fail.
I imagine that if they floated they would be carried far out of the way of the crash scene and thus much more difficult to find.
Fair enough... but if this is just a completely random, not-even-remotely-scientific man on the street approach, then what problem does this solve that a poll i can add to my website/blog/favorite forum via Fantastico in 180 seconds doesn't?
They probably are, but they are stored inside of the aircraft, so if it goes down, it drags the box down with it.
Official description: http://www.google.com/support/faqs/bin/answer.py?answer=1392...
Justin, I've been mucking around for awhile in MTurk trying to use Qualifications to create an survey that would target a specific demographic. Have you cracked this nut? Is this something you're considering adding to extend the product? Or is it simply not within the scope of MTurk's capabilities?
Google is returning structured data.

Google's specialty has been navigating through the seas of unstructured Web data that comprises the Web and making sense of it. Squared shows that they understand enough about this data to (semi-) automatically return it in a structured form.

Structured data on this scale is considered a bit of a holy grail, especially from the POV of Semantic Web advocates. The cornerstone of the original Semantic Web vision was to have web developers manually annotate semantics into their HTML sites. Now they don't have to.

The real value of Squared is the ability to query this data via an API. Arguably, Freebase already provides this capability, so the value of Squared is questionable, but presumably, Google is more automated and up-to-date or at a larger scale. I'm not sure -- maybe somebody more well-informed than I can comment.
I'd pay twice as much to be able to target a specific demographic. Nice job John.
The guy did notice why SQL "got popular", but he only noticed the tip of the iceberg. SQL "got popular" because it gives you tools to make your data store solve annoying problems for you, sort of like how programming languages give you the tools to make your compiler solve annoying problems for you. SQL "got popular" because, while there are of course differences between implementations, it was the closest thing to date to a common protocol to interface with the database. SQL "got popular" because it gives people the tools they need to directly poke around in the data without needing to write an application, a task that's often underestimated.

The "distaste" for SQL comes (as far as I can tell) from attempts to work around it. If you just want to write a Python program, SQL becomes just a bunch of boilerplate that you want to avoid. If you want software that does X, and you know how to use your database, it will help you enormously.
AFAIK ZFS never "suspends operation", whatever that means.
Try example searches for "roller coaster" and "US presidents" . I think those are better examples to try and get a feel for what's going on.
I suspect that a floating object increase the range over which you have to search. If you object sinks to the bottom, at least you know about where it ended up.
What problem is this specifically solving that dozens of other scheduling/task/GTD/Calendar systems haven't solved?. Even the most basic phone now has some kind of alerting feature on it.
> hash=<sha256-of-key-with-data>

Oops, you invented your own keyed MAC and now I can append any data I want.
You have to re-construct the flight before things go wrong to know when things went wrong. Maybe something you thought was right turned out to be an error given a different parameter. Kinda like debugging I guess.
More than once per second (in fact, more than many times per second) means the difference between FOD ingress failure mode and, say, a spontaneous single blade failure in a turbine, between a synchro follower field inversion (think of a compass needle flipping around in an electromagnetic coil forcing the table it sits on to try to re-orient itself to the new reality) and a hard manual input, between externally-induced overtemp and a fire starting in the monitored system, not to mention vibration-induced momentary shorts playing all kinds of hell on both digital and analog control systems.

People really ought to try to grasp how quickly things can go wrong in the real world, and how difficult it can be to tell what made the nice shiny silver bird look like the crumpled foil discard of a cigarette pack smeared with a poorly-preserved meat jelly. You only have to see one used-to-be jet (complete with used-to-be pilot) before you start wondering how anyone could make sense of it -- and that's with the physical evidence in hand.
Haha, Ouch.

I hadn't thought of testing it with something quite as insane as Google. Nice catch!
I suspect it's a practical concern if nothing else, having to do with mundane constraints like carry-on sizes. Also, as another practical matter, I highly doubt that the folks with severe air travel phobia would be even remotely trained to use a chute (which requires doing it, more than once!)
Using heuristics, it attempts to form structure from unstructured data. It's a pretty good first attempt.
I think you're absolutely right. This idea sticks like the emperor's new clothes. Nobody wants to point out it's not true for fear of looking bad. Because supposedly the people who believe it's true will be producing exciting, awesome products.

I'm still trying to work out what amount of organic growth one should see before doing advertising. It certainly isn't every user getting ten other users.
Open it to other countries :-)
Unfortunately, no. It's to prevent people from talking about the event on its anniversary, and to prevent Chinese people from hearing other people talk about it.
Seems pretty useless right now as far as the actual data is concerned, but I like the interface and the idea.
I'm running 2.0.172.28, is there a newer version?
There is so much ambiguity in evaluating startups, investors rely too heavily on evaluation crutches such as being a previously successful entrepreneur. Sure there is some signal present in that metric but also a lot of noise, and I think more noise than most people admit (taking a kind of "fooled by randomness" thesis here).

It seems to me that second time entrepreneurs end up being bad for first time entrepreneurs because of it, funneling money to established successes. At least, thats the way it seems to me. A bit nepotistic. What we need is more opportunities for first time entrepreneurs, like YC.
Snowleopard release date at least. I would be sad I've been waiting to be a new mac if this weren't true.
A vendor who had only a passing knowledge of microsoft.com coding policies delivered the first Windows CE site. The first test on the site with Weblint, a tool used to check validity of HTML, returned 100 pages of errors. There was a harried pre-Comdex weekend in November 1996 where every link and quite a bit of other code on the several hundred page site was manually recoded by a handful of people so it could be published in time for Bill Gates' Sunday night keynote.

Amusingly, the w3c validator now finds 188 errors at microsoft.com.
The percentage of actual crashes in which a parachute would do anyone any good is likely vanishingly small.

You can't use them when too high up (not enough O2) or too low (not enough time to deploy). Most crashes take place on takeoff or landing.

Of the problems that do happen that would take you through a "jumpable" altitude, you can only make the jump if you 1) have time, 2) have enough airplane left to jump out of. If a big whole ripped in the plane while in flight at 30k feet, you are very likely already unconscious or dead.

There are other issues related to the fact that commercial airliners are not made to be jumped out of at speed. Its difficult or impossible to open their doors during flight (with good reason). Even if you could get them open, there may not be a jump trajectory from some doors that doesn't provide a personal introduction to wing or engine part.
Also, you cannot jump and live from a plane going 300 knots. The plane would have to decelerate to near stall to make it safe and if its already crashing, maneuvering at the edge of performance is not likely.

Also, consider that professional and military jumpers are highly trained, in top physical shape, and the landing sites are carefully chosen to avoid injury. As a fun thought experiment, take Rosanne Bar, put her in a small canopy "emergency chute", and drop her, at random, over the Arizona desert. (She was on her way to Vegas, baby). Calculate survivability.

Chutes for everyone would be expensive, heavy and probably only be beneficial in single digit percentages (or even sub single) of all crashes. They would very likely cause more problems than they would solve.
Ask HN: A question about vesting
Say me and a cofounder start a company. I decide to drop out. At that point, does my unvested stock goto the other cofounder or does it goto the company, TYPICALLY?

Also, if we have a board and I'm on it, do I still get to keep my board seat?

I always think about this hypothetically. Say a cofounder drops out. Other cofounder gets the company. But a month after getting the company, he sells the company for dirt cheap and gets to keep the dropout cofounder's unvested share AND his own share. Is that how it would work typically? Or is each vesting agreement very different?
And it's really quite good: I got meaningful results on a wide range of topics of varying obscurity. A few outright failures, mostly on complex terms; eg 'california TV stations' gives me CA city information.

I sent my list of 12 suggestions to the labs team: highest priority were share/export to docs|base, and entering search terms or [sublist search] in individual fields. If they can make it social and create 'trusted tables' there's the possibility of having users curate a lot of data for them a la Wikipedia.
The Indian freedom fighters are unusual, in that most freedom fighters offer violent, armed revolt. Even Wikipedia singles them out in the second paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fighter
The problem is that North Korea has thousands of conventional artillery placements along their southern border. I'm not sure there are any viable attack strategies that don't include Seoul being mostly destroyed.
Sound Trademark battle in San Franciso
They would still probably be trapped under parts of the plane, and if it's floatable, it can be punctured/crushed.
What Detroit Can Learn From the Apple Store