skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PostgreSQL is 100% pure MVCC, a little bit like the "SNAPSHOT" method described in the article: updates and deletes always create new copy of a row, and every row has a visibility associated with it: the oldest transaction and the newest transaction that can see that row (if the row hasn't been deleted by any currently active transactions, the 'newest transaction' ID is empty).

There are definitely some drawbacks to MVCC. For example, many people are surprised how long "select count(*) from X" takes to run, because it has to do a full table-scan to check which rows the current transaction can actually see. You need to periodically 'vaccuum' tables, which updates a cached list of which table rows are deleted, so they can be reused by future update (modern Postgres will auto-vacuum, but it's another set of knobs for the DBA to tweak). Plus, the storage overhead mentioned by the article (although that really depends on the amount of churn in your particular application, and regular vacuuming keeps it to a minimum).
Nice essay, but backed by these horrible examples:

* a group of mediocre architects could have built a better dome in Florence than Brunelleschi

* a group of mediocre stock pickers could have outperformed Buffett

* a group of mediocre designers could have built a better computer than Jobs

* a group of mediocre basketball players could have beat Jordan in the NBA finals

* a group of mediocre humanitarians could have had a bigger impact than Schindler

when the truth is:

* Brunelleschi did not lay the 4 million bricks of the dome, a large team did that

* Buffet outperforms the average stock picker by about 13% to 20%, it so happens that in the financial business 13% to 20% is a big deal, while 13% to 20% better is not disruptice startup-level improvements

* Jobs never built a computer, he needed to lord power over a large team to do that

* I believe that a team of 5 mediocre players could easily beat a team of 1 Jordan

* 1 Schindler saved 1200, while 2 million mediocre Nazis killed about 9 billion who they felt where ethnically inferior. In this case, I think the mediocre Nazis had a bigger impact.

So while my heart tells me to believe in the point you're trying to make, that one alpha engineer is worth a ton of mediocres, the examples do not support that point.
(This assumes either A and B are multisets, or they are disjoint.)
Quoting myself here to illustrate what you think you are disagreeing about that isn't really a disagreement between us, I wrote,

A young hacker shouldn't be told to set aside the computer and play Little League baseball.

And what I meant there, and thank you for joining issue with this so that the issue is clear to onlookers, is that no child should be forced to DROP something personally important and educational for them solely to fit in with what everyone else is doing. In actual fact (and I think a reader who used the search function on HN could find examples of me saying this) I encourage all of my children to participate in team competitive sports. Because of the healthy developmental nature of our local youth soccer club, all four of my children, from my hacker son who now lives in New York City to my daughter, have played "travel" competitive soccer through that club. All three of my boys have qualified for the Minnesota state championship tournament at various age and competitive levels, and my second son has won a state championship with his teammates. So I by no means disdain sports. I'm very proud of having four children who all have achieved more in sports than either of their parents ever did. (Sports were not emphasized in my upbringing in my family, nor in my wife's upbringing in her family.)

I do indeed promote activities for my children that provide "well-roundedness" and especially activities that provide commonalities with other young people growing up in the same time and place. It's just that I don't do that at the expense of my children having a LOT of time to pursue their own interests. (That's why we homeschool--to have the schedule flexibility to allow a both-and of deep involvement in something meaningful to each child and broad involvement in things that build connections with other people.)

Thanks for checking. I FULLY agree with you, based on my own experience, that men growing up in the United States are well advised to have sports involvement. That helps them have a lot to talk about with other men. It's not strictly necessary, but sports involvement is awfully helpful.
I really like pagekite! very convenient!
If you don't play D&D you might be excluded from some networks. Like the Dallas Gaming Mafia.
Yeah, one of the very amazing things about going to an art museum is that paintings are often incredibly different in "real life" than they are in reproductions (pictures on the net, postcards, posters, etc, even high-quality art books).

It's not just the colors, which are very often completely mutilated by reproductions—and sometimes that's inevitable as many paints react to light in a way that's simply not possible to reproduce using simple colors and standard inks, from differences in gloss, to metallic pigments, to paints with embedded "stuff", to paints that are oddly "intense" (due to fluorescence?)—but also the textures of paintings, which can range from dead flat to subtle but noticeable strokes, to painting where the paint is literally 10+cm thick, and sculpted, often with fabric and other materials incorporated.

Seeing a painting on wikipedia is not really seeing it. This isn't mere pedantry either—in many cases it's an utterly different experience.
How long have you been using Firefox OS? Also, which major software company doesn't upgrade often?
As a long time programmer, I've learnt the mantra "somebody has already solved this, let's go find their solution." That applies to pretty much any technical or non-technical issue that you need to solve. So much of what we need to know is written up somewhere on the internet, leaving us to focus on the 1% of the problem that we alone can solve, and differentiates our value proposition from all the other alternatives.

My short answer would be "know enough to be dangerous, and surround yourself with smarter people".

Recommended reading - http://www.sacred-texts.com/nth/tgr/tgr10.htm

Start from 'Henry Ford was called "an ignorant pacifist."'
Just a bit of context from a person who works in contemporary art: the question of "exploitation" is complicated by the fact that a career like this is probably based in some part on exploiting people who don't understand the state of art or the mainstream art market.

The notion, for example, that he is comparable to Monet is absurd, not only because this kid isn't a good painter but also because it would be impossible to make Monet-like paintings today and be anything like Monet was during his time. The questions Monet was answering are no longer the questions anyone is asking art to answer.

If people are being told that this boy is a genius, or that he is likely to be an important artist in the future, they are being defrauded. Whether his parents are participating in the fraud or are being misled themselves probably has some bearing on how much we should trust them as parents I think (neither being a great endorsement but the former being much worse than the latter).
Correct. I've actually seen Census figures that suggest that Minnesota has a very high percentage of "interracial" marriages, which have never, ever been illegal here. My wife likes living in Minnesota very well. We've both heard funny questions about our relationship to our children in various places we have been, inside and outside the United States, but never to an annoying degree here in Minnesota.

AFTER EDIT: I was Keith's classmate in law school. I like Keith too. I can't vote for him (I don't live in his district), and I don't share many policy preferences with him, but I like him on a personal level.
How the Tesla Model S is Made
There are barely 10,000 hours of awake time in two years. Nor does the 10,000 hour theory explain, e.g. a friend's son who can decode text lightly encrypted into abstract symbols at normal reading speed - a little over a year after after he started to read English.

The 10,000 hour theory occupies the same niche as every piece of self-help snake oil, whether it is intended as such: a comforting feeling that the formula will bring success to the reader.
Also sad that it's refereed to as a signature.
Any interracial couple is going to get stares. Even in LA.
That mileage doesn't seem that good to me. I've got a petrol honda accord, it's a 2.2 L and I can drive auckland to wellington (just over 650 km) on a 55L tank. My friends with diesel golf's can do Auckland to Wellington and nearly halfway back on one tank though.
I daresay this kid will grow up with that confidence as well. The normalcy they're speaking about is likely normal human interactions with other children his age.

A friend of the Culkin family recounted in an interview how people would stare at the young Macaulay Culkin on the street, and the actor himself has expressed a desire to have had a more 'normal' life.

The normal they want for their child is unlikely to involve suppression of his creativity, and is likely to involve supporting him as he deals with his fame and his peers' reaction to it.
If by "reality distortion field," you mean the legal community, then yes. Having been through something similar recently, the lawyers will likely be making sure everyone involved understands the concept of PII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personally_identifiable_inform...
You already have access to Shapeway's convenient 3D printers. There are thousands of objects already designed and you can design your own without that much difficulty. Why aren't you using them to make things? Why would it be different if the printer was at Kinko's instead of Shapeways?
I'm waiting for the sparrowOS guy to comment on this thread. Despite his hell-banned status, I've been impressed with what he as an individual has come up with. He seems likely to have implemented many of these features for his edification.
Conclusion Overall, omega-3 PUFA supplementation was not associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiac death, sudden death, myocardial infarction, or stroke based on relative and absolute measures of association.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1001%2F2012.jama.11374
Yeah, I won't dispute that Markdown's emphasis syntax is a bit more layman-friendly than Quaint's (though there might be a way to hack it in anyway). One important goal with Quaint is syntactic consistency, though, which means some tradeoffs have to be made. I think it could be a nice option for comments or other generic input, though. Some implementations of Markdown can get a bit frustrating when you're trying to do some unusual things like nesting emphasis (though, to be fair, it's often only an implementation problem... I just wish they'd fix it).
"Cookie forcing" is more commonly called "session fixation". You'll find far more about it if you search under that name.
So how do you square that with the financial success?
It is also mercenary: establishing a trust fund in the child's name shields the money from liability claims against the parents.
Is anyone aware of any documented reports of well-known "reputable" antivirus/antimalware companies being involved in the development or spread of viruses, etc.? I've heard in the past reports (that make sense) about these companies making business for themselves by ensuring a threat exists to fight, but it is tough to believe that this could happen without it eventually coming to light.

Could John McAfee have known about this or even have been involved, and this is one of the reasons for some of his strange behavior (related guilt, involvement with criminals and criminal organizations)? Or is there no basis to any of that?
I just prefer flat six to a V6. Smoother power delivery.
I've actually seen Census figures that suggest that Minnesota has a very high percentage of "interracial" marriages

Minnesota's percentage of interracial marriage is 4.4% (In contrast, California is 12.8%. The highest is Hawaii, which is 37.2%)
That's a mystery.

I've heard this 'Every body has a job to do' thing many times when I ask managers what they do.

But they never tell 'what exactly are they doing or they are supposed to do'.
This feels like an odd angle to take in concern around the next decade of programming.

It starts a level below what problems might be the next thing to tackle and focuses on what shiny objects have already got enough traction to be considered concern of the past 3-5 years.

Short-sighted. Boring. Couldn't dance to it.

1-3 years are feasibly predictable
3-7 are 50/50 hunches 20%CI
8-9 you might as well be talking jet packs
10+ You aren't talking about saving or controlling the world? Refactor!

10 years from now, we blow IP up. we napster algorithmic experiences because you can't patent wiping your ass
10 years from now, we make devices cheaper than water from scrap plastic
10 years from now, any human can talk to any other human anytime, anywhere
10 years from now, my meta-data is meaningless and we defund NSA because they are deaf dumb and useless
10 years from now, we eat the rich and feed the poor

Why bother looking 10 years ahead without setting some real goals or at least looking at things that might actually drive the innovation in the next 10 years vs what is already well-planned?

We're all going to be 10 years closer to death and you are believing we'll have "smart dust"? A Roomba in every house!

Do you know how long it's been since I first heard that there would be fucking smart dust? You mean we need to lay a powder of infrastructure down to detect what distributed, distant sensors could tell you? Looks like a whale just barfed in the ocean and we got a ton of our dust back online... water's still wet AND salty there! Dial back the Antarctica dust belcher for a minute to balance out the South Pacific by next year... stupid whales, when will you learn?

He should have stopped at sensors. We'll have 1984. Smart dust? We'll be crotch-deep in gray goo.

Whales are like, "IIIIIIII WIIIIIIILLLLLLL DEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSTRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!"
I had much fun playing with Rebol
Indeed, but in the context of minor changes in how things SQL should behave, we can assume that everything is a multiset.
A half white, half asian kid is not going to get stares in LA.
A friend showed me the HTC One recently. Apparently the camera shoots those mini-videos by default, and you can then pick a still from there.

You can also stitch multiple shots into a single one: http://blog.htc.com/2013/05/your-sequence-shots-with-htc-zoe...
An abstruse way of saying "I don't know what you should do" is likely not particularly credibility-enhancing either.
Thank You, GitHub
Yes, not as well. California's dysfunction is due to its own right-wing wingnuts.
I bet you could find a video about cell phones from 1975 or so that people in 1989 were laughing at (or would have been if youtube were around then). There's a cycle to these things.
J is kind of mind blowing because it has some programming paradigms that are pretty strange and interesting.
But where in the article does it say anything about forcing him to drop painting to fit in? I think you're reading too much into this.
> It happens that my children grew up in an environment in which most of their acquaintances are supportive of young people who pursue their own passions, and they haven't had to be ground into sameness to have peers who like them.

I'm truly astonished by the West that this sort of thing is worthy of remark. I studied all my life in India, both in government schools and in different private schools, and every kid who did something that was atypical was always cool for it.

You're the tennis star? Nice, everyone loves you. You're the guy who plays Golden Axe better than anyone else? Damn, nice. You top the math class or are good at building things? "Wow, I wish I were that smart".

I would never have suspected that in the land that ostensibly worships individuality, not being "ground into sameness" is worth mentioning.
What's the Buttonhole Trap?
I have to agree.

Shakespeare: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...?" Or as brilliantly stated by XKCD, you end up going back into the "Lego box" http://xkcd.com/659/

To define what sucks about death is the concept of complete non-existence and the the total erasure of everything you ever were and consequently destined to never exist again.

Your atoms may change into different forms but you will never experience it. That to me makes even the worst of life experiences better than death sentence known as "...we owe god one death."
> Earliest defense for making sure windows doesn't get infected - NAT, don't leave a windows machine on a public IP...

Yes, but a basic one. You'd prevent something running on port X from being exploited directly. Doesn't do anything against other methods, like getting you to open a shady PDF or SWF file.

> That said, I'm mostly a mac/'nix house hold these days.

If you're running a window manager, there's virtually no difference between them and recent versions of Windows. If anything, Windows has the upper hand on the non-headless side.

It's nice to be able to say "At least I'm not on Windows anymore", but it is no reason whatsoever to not be as vigilant.

The primary reason why you're not targeted as much on OS X or Linux is not that they have a much smaller attack surface than Windows (anymore.) It's that it doesn't make economic sense for an attacker to target Linux users if they are less than 2% of the desktop computer market share, and they generally consist of tech-savvy (e.g. more likely to use NoScript, or spot shady processes than normals).
One of the understood requirements of publishing an app on the App Store is that developers must provide some means for customers to contact them directly (support page, email address, etc). If you're selling apps on the app store, people can already peddle their wares to your email account.

So yeah, developer's names, addresses and emails are not secrets by any means. Why would anyone buy an app from someone they had no means of identifying?
FBI announces review of 2,000 cases featuring hair samples
Obviously not, but the article was written from the perspective of the western world, and so I answered the question in that context. There are security experts and security companies in most civilized nations.
Leap Motion is getting live tomorrow
I would never have suspected that in the land that ostensibly worships individuality, not being "ground into sameness" is worth mentioning.

The UK has always seemed to have some respect for eccentricity but I wouldn't say they've been known as a place that "worships individuality." They have had a historical reputation for merciless bullying at the grade school level, though.
Everyone seeks normalcy in certain aspects, and fame in others. You'd be hard pressed to find many amongst those who wish to live in the limelight who would want every moment of their lives photographed so that the tiniest of their mistakes can be displayed in full colour in public. And unless you're Perelman, most people want some recognition for the things they do that they're proud of.

Would it be nice for this child to be recognized for his talent? Yes. Would it be nice for his peers to see him as some painting freak? No.
ARM (quite common these days) will sometimes do this as well, as the immediate value of an instruction has to fit inside of the fixed-width instruction, and the instruction is only itself 32-bits (some required for overhead). While it is slightly more likely you will see a PC-relative load, that requires an extra data fetch; so, instead, a "movt" (move top) instruction is used to set the upper 16-bits of a register after first setting the lower 16-bits. This requires just as much space as the load and separate data literal, and runs entirely out of the instruction cache.
*its journalism
I've kept an eye on continental social science since leaving university, and I must say that—for most practical reasons— it's useless. It is not, however, worthless (quite the opposite).

You might be familiar with Feynman's story about how he was trying to decipher a social science paper, starting sentence by sentence, he encountered something like

The individual member of the social community
often receives his information via visual,
symbolic channels

Which he translated as "people read". He then continued "translating" the paper and figured out there was not much to it.

Having been exposed (unwillingly) to many of these kind of papers, I've come to understand that they are abstractions. It's not just reading, it's how you receive all kinds of information through your eyes. You "read" people when you make judgements of how they dress, talk and act, you "read" objects in a store and decide if you want to buy them, and so forth.

Critical theory authors are trained to understand that all interpretation comes from a culture. In understanding a foreign situation (say, the Syrian civil war) you must be conscious that you are looking at the problem through western eyes. These theorists tend to over-analyze things (they are the very embodiment of analysis paralysis) but they make an interesting read when you are familiar with the problem. It makes you feel like you've seen all the possible angles of a specific event. This is why I'm not surprised Washington would make use of them.

If you'd like a gentle introduction to this kind of writing, I'd recommend Tzvetan Todorov. He exposes really complex ideas without the mumbo jumbo. You can make a fair judgement if it's horseshit or not (as it's clear he's not hiding behind obfuscated writing).
Not necessary at all, as you say, but it's never hurt. I'm a smallish, nerdy, computer programmer. On a camping trip this weekend I tossed a football around with a guy I might never have chatted with otherwise. I'm so thankful I learned how to do that when I was a small child. My parents were right to push me in that direction when I might have preferred staying in with my Apple II.
I sometimes wonder if this is Henry Ford's "if I asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a 'a faster horse'" objection.

The question is perhaps not "what do we buy today that we could 3D print instead", but "what objects/things don't exist today that _could_ with widespread and affordable 3D printing" (and the associated new 3D modelling software/libraries/new-techniques which make the idea->object process more accessable).
Seeking privacy is as foolish is seeking fossil fuel. This is not a sustainable model, and it has to change. Transparency is better in every way.

It might be a necessary evil for now, but the focus should be put on the real problem (the government) rather than privacy itself.
I'm in Kansas City for the month, who wants to grab a beer/coffee?
You know, the Missouri side.
Whether you like it or not, your world runs on C, C++ and assembly. These languages form the ninety-percent-plus core of modern computing's foundation.

Isn’t that part of the problem? There is no technical reason we couldn’t have a language that offered the same fine control and hardware integration as C, compiled to native executable code in a similar way, but was both safer and more expressive. There is no advantage in having an awkward syntax for specifying types or in making all pointers nullable.

Mainstream industrial languages today are a triumph of good enough, and they continue to dominate primarily because of momentum and the size of the surrounding ecosystem rather than technical merit in the language itself. Unfortunately, this creates a vicious circle that reinforces the status quo, and the few organisations with sufficient resources to break that cycle have limited economic incentive to do so.
The person I'm replying to is American, and according to his profile is from Minnesota. Americans have a reputation for individualism.