skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't upvote enough because this is the single most troubling aspect of our (US) justice system today: as soon as you are charged, your quality of life is ruined unless you are both wealthy and lucky enough to avoid pretrial incarceration. Even if you are both wealthy and lucky, the stress, effort and money required only to be found "not guilty" or get charges dismissed is a huge burden.

Even if there were redress for cases when "the system" makes a mistake, you can never get your quality of life back.
The halting problem is also decidable for finite memory machine, like our real ones, so ...
> Nobody is willing to accept responsibility for the problems and everybody believes they will somehow be resolved without their personal intervention.

But not without reason. Making a difference requires coordination. Coordination at such a large level requires government action (companies/NGO's/charities/etc. can't do it). And for climate/environment-related things, often action on the part of several/many/all governments.

But the fact is, the way democracies are built, they tend to be bad at this, and there's lots of research to back that up. People don't vote on candidates based on unproven consequencies that are decades from now, period. And non-democracies aren't going to worry about this stuff too much either.

Things change for reasons, which involve clear incentives. "Accepting responsibility" on a personal level doesn't really have a lot to do with it, I'm afraid, unless you're a world leader, and even as a world leader, you're awfully constrained in what you do.
are queries uniform over the data. For instance most of queries conerns only a little fragment of one table for instance most recent rows. Can you shard them ?
He didn't want all the complication of rsync, he just wanted something simple with a progress bar. Rsync isn't really that simple. Sure, he could of wrote a shell script on top of rsync, but he probably learned a lot more from this.
"It seems fairly clear at this point that as a race we're facing some fairly substantial problems that need to be addressed if we want to avoid major catastrophe"

I understand why this line of thinking is attractive but isn't it based on a fiction? That being; if it weren't for interference from intelligent life, humans, the earth would go on being in perfect environmental equilibrium for all time. In reality the earth's environment has always been changing. Those changes have been taking place since the beginning and many of them were the result of the effects of various living organisms humans included.

So isn't the desire of humans to preserve 'our' environment, in it's present state, in some sense a selfish desire to curtail the inevitable march of environmental change which might threaten the species but would almost certainly happen with or without us?
There is a difference between juice and a smoothie though. Smoothie still has the fiber in it, while orange juice is mostly just juice even if you get it with 'lots of pulp.'
[1] Been doing already and [2] Will re-visit soon

Thanks :)
> try pleading ignorance of the law when you're arrested for breaching a traffic regulation

That won't work for a mundane. However, if you're a cop, and you arrest someone under the pretext that it's for driving without a seat belt (max penalty $50 fine), judges might decide that your disregard of the law was mere ignorance and take that as an excuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_v._Lago_Vista
There are many studies. Here's one:

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=185157

This study found that SSRIs provided little to no benefit over placebo for patients suffering from mild to moderate depression. SSRIs did provide a benefit to patients suffering from severe depression.

This raises the question, how many of the 30+ million Americans currently prescribed anti-depressants actually suffer from severe depression and benefit from the drugs? How many are taking it unnecessarily, subjecting themselves to unintended side effects and eventual withdrawal symptoms.
Single Responsibility Principle and Encapsulating Responsibilities
Informative and entertaining, thanks.
Being able to sort by URL length would be nice.
Hi!

There are some good suggestions in this thread already. Step #1 is to determine why it is slow.

If it is slow under load, then I am going to suspect that you are hitting table locks - which means you need to migrate to InnoDB (row locking + MVCC). Important to point out: a bigger server may not actually help enough here, because while you are waiting on locks nothing can be done while there is free capacity waiting to be used.

If it is just generally slow related to growth, it can probably be improved by indexing - which will help you reduce what data needs to be in RAM.

In either case, two third party tools to suggest:
- pt-query-digest: aggregate your slow query log. You want to use 0 seconds as the threshold, record 20 minutes of slow queries during regular activity. Methodology described here: http://gtowey.blogspot.ca/2012/07/slow-query-log-is-not.html

- pt-online-schema-change: you can migrate from MyISAM to InnoDB online via triggers (not online by default).

Both tools part of http://www.percona.com/software/percona-toolkit
I actually just committed my first Open Source contribution patch to the next Wordpress release yesterday afternoon - http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/25086

After asking lots of questions, I was pointed to http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/, which does a pretty decent job outlining the workflow. It helps to read a lot of tickets first to get a feel for what they're fixing - http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/14 and then find a neglected (but fairly recent) but and chip away at it.

It's overwhelming, but I've found a great amount of confidence in just picking a (tiny) bug, fixing it, and watching the process work. Good luck to you!
Inline with questions 2 & 3 - what's the bottleneck? reading or writing or both? if you haven't already, it's worth looking into a master (writes) / slave (reads) setup - provides a bit of redundancy and lets you scale reads very easily by adding more slaves. It also helps with writes because it can take a lot of pressure off the master.

...assuming you're webvet.com it looks like you're scaling drupal, so these would be my first questions: are you using the views module? if so, kill that, as well as anything else by merlin (panels, etc). and look at your indexes. setup pressflow + percona. master & slave db. reverse proxy caching (varnish or nginx) are all good places to start. hostwise if you're not already on amazon, you can get a lot of mileage out of a service like voxel that lets you mix VPSs (cheap webheads) with physical hardware. it's not great and it may well be worth biting the more expensive bullet and going to AWS for long term needs, but it's a lot better than linode for an underwater db.

my email is in my profile if you'd like more detail - drupal is a bear at first but it can be scaled for a while.
Probably hardest game you ever play
Will get the book and check out the blog soon. Thanks. :)
Show HN: Texit - Easily show LaTeX anywhere
So far I haven't seen anyone question the SHA algorithms. Both SHA-1 and SHA-2 were designed by the NSA. Is everyone okay with that?

SHA-3 wasn't designed by the NSA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Hash_Algorithm
Crowd-funded longevity research at Indiegogo
Why do you want so much to limit to 6, especially since you also do a DNS validation?

You should better lean on the permissive side; that would be one less thing to think about.

That kind of "validation" does not check for existing email addresses anyway, so there is not much value in trying to be strict in this area.
So any ideas about how to realize the technical side of such a game? Doesn't running arbitrary code bring all sorts of security risks?
Price at Amazon starts at $100 and goes up to $1900.

Insane.

But shows how much a classic it is.
This is probably the right answer. Look at it from a cost-benefit POV - how much money will getting the right answers now save you in the long run?
Wincom Successfully Jailbreaks iPhone 5 on iOS 6.1.4
I may be wrong, but AFAICT, the kernel in question is basically an API layer between the real browser and the OS.

The point of the exercise is to prove that something like
a file read cannot be invoked with bad files and cannot cause buffer overflows etc..

That doesn't require turing completeness.
This post is a thinly veiled argument for GMOs and large scale agribusiness. Did it save billions? Obviously. Is it free from criticism because of that? Not a chance.
I would put Percona higher in that list if you have the money.
For imperative languages, the most popular approach to formal proof is to add partial correctness annotations in an axiomatic semantics such as Hoare logic. I've heard that Microsoft does this to verify many properties of the Windows kernel. (I think the most popular tools are 3rd-party and proprietary at the moment.) Of course, finding the right theorems to write down is not easy either.

There's currently an attempt to formalize a subset of C, with an axiomatic semantics, all the way from specification down to machine language: http://vst.cs.princeton.edu/
Data Analysis: Just one component of the Data Science workflow
I don't really like that a "secure" browser run: 'xhost +' on my computer.
Development froze almost 2 years ago :) Since then, just the data volume keeps growing.
You should look into caching. If you are talking about webvet.com it looks like a perfect site for using something like Varnish. Most of the content probably doesn't change often so you should be able to have a long TTL.
Rogaway published though: was lack of attention the result of the NSA influencing industry to ignore academic work?
Essential Twitter Marketing Tips For Internet Marketers
In Cloudflare's case "haven't bothered to send their own keys" implies "haven't seen the need to pay Cloudflare $200/month or $3000/month for the ability to upload a certificate+key". AFAICT only the Business and Enterprise plans allow custom certificates.
Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country yet.
Virtually all scroll effects don't work well on iOS devices.
It's not feasible for large programs in any generally used language, especially imperative ones. This is because most languages have undefined constructs and constructs that are so flexible that proving useful things about them is hard.

Even if languages designed to abet formal proofs, like SPARK, were commonly used, proving anything but the most trivial properties requires a completely different mindset, significant additional training and experience. This puts formal proofs outside the abilities of the average engineer (including myself).

Finally, useful properties, like termination (lack of infinite loops/recursion), let alone termination within a time bound, or correctness with respect to non-trivial requirements is extremely difficult even for those with extensive experience in the area.

In addition to the difficulty of creating proofs, it is amazingly difficult to state non-trivial requirements formally and verify that the stated requirements are the right ones: often the source of the requirements (customers/users, supervisors, marketing) have neither motivation nor interest to state them formally or review formally stated requirements.
This is what I don't get about the soylent thing. You can walk into any drug store or corner store and buy a few canned foods that together offer complete nutrition. How the heck is mixing a special powdered drink any easier than opening a can of oysters and a can of sauerkraut and downing the contents? There isn't even a glass to wash with the latter.

There is some sort of odd cultural glitch going on in favor of drinks as "healthful." Drink foods make people think of the medicinal brews of yore? I don't know.
Hmm.

Bringing in a consultant is probably your best bet. Database optimization needs to generally take into account YOUR data and usage patterns.

If you want to learn a bit yourself, pick up a copy of "High Performance MySQL." I've found that to be the most useful MySQL scaling book I own.

Figure out your slow queries. Run "SHOW PROCESSLIST" on the server and see what's typically running.

Look at the actual queries - if you're frequently running a query that looks through most rows of your biggest table, that's going to be a tough query to optimize. Instead, look to either caching or regular pre-computation of the results.

I've found that an unfortunate number of people aren't aware of "EXPLAIN" and its use to help figure out query issues. Learn and use it.

You're on a VPS. That may be fine, but it may have horrible I/O throughput. If you're writing a lot of data, or having queries that hitting some sort of mysql or OS cache, IO will be your bottleneck. Make sure it's fast enough. Look at average IO wait times. Test max. throughput.

MyISAM tables may be an issue. MyISAM tables use table level locking - only one session at a time will be able to update the table. This is quite possibly a problem if you're doing any updates or inserts to a table that is also frequently read from. Look to move to InnoDB soon. See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/internal-locking.html
We did use a tool (perl script) called mysqltuner.pl on this sometime last year and it did give us some useful/actionable insight. Will check out what you've suggested too.

Thanks. :)
A good alternative to cp.
> for that on first false rejection.

This assumes that you manually verify every rejection, or that they contact you. In other words: Either you're not using this anywhere with volume that matters, or you don't know that it hasn't caught false negatives.

> A negative is an indication of a bot activity or some other oddity that needs attention

High volume of negatives is an indication of bot activity or some other oddity. A single or handful of negatives is just humans going about their business as horrible typists.

If your volume is small enough that you can treat every negative as something to investigate, you really have no basis for saying anything about how well your regex works.
How Not to handle customer service - OneHourTranslation.com
Ask HN: Anyone willing to come to Romania as a guest speaker?
We want to organise a big web development conference in Romania and I am curious if any hacker is interested in coming. We will pay your quote no problem. Topics can range from front side web development to any programming language like Node, PHP, Python, Scala, Ruby, Clojure.
> "Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs."

Well yes, the farmer takes on some energy costs from the plant, by e.g. providing nutrients and protection from pests. In exchange to these external inputs, the plant provides us more food.

The alternative would be more diverse, less efficient crops, and 1–2 billion less people.

You may sound nice when you talk against fertilizers and pesticides, but if you rephrase and say that those 1–2 billion people should have never existed, you'll sound much darker.
Have to second this. You should monitor load for sure... but depending on how many cores you are running a load of 1 or 2 could be absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Personally, the most important metric for us is average query response time.

Additionally as others have stated where you can use memcache or some other key/value store you should be working on implementing that.
Rogaway didn't publish academically. He commented on the mailing list, and a bunch of standards group denizens pooped all over him. The same thing happened to Dan Bernstein on namedroppers. Is Perry Metzger an NSA agent? I have reason to doubt it.
There are various tools in the research world, but little real world use.

Isabelle/HOL - Coq competitor like GCC and LLVM (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/Isabelle/)

ATS - C with proof assistant (http://www.ats-lang.org/)

KeY - Java with verification annotations (http://www.key-project.org/)
I think never. Between the "ship early" ethos and SaaS becoming increasingly popular, software quality has been going downhill for quite a while. Most parties seem to be OK with it, so I expect it to get even worse.
See also Frama-C (http://frama-c.com/), which can use multiple automated and interactive theorem provers. It's really a proof obligation management IDE that you can use with multiple provers / proof assistants.
How do you formally prove that a GUI is "usable"? How do you formally prove that a game is "fun"? How do you even know what you should be formally proving?

Formal proofs (and type systems too) can only prove that your programs and formal specifications are internally consistent. The overwhelming largest set of failures in commercial software development are in requirements solicitation!

"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." - Bertrand Russell

There is a very high initial and maintenance cost to proofs and it would be a mistake to insist that people pay that cost when better cost/benefit trade offs exist for most needs.
I saw the headline 'Installing Ruby' and went no further.
For single files or monitoring other pipe based operations (like network transfers) pv [1] is also a useful tool.

1 - http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml
Bullshit > Linux.
No mention of platform support, no screenshots, no details at all. Just "hand over ~10 usd and we will give you something in the future.
It would be interesting to see if this is really so. The post just cites circumstantial evidence and does not reason why this would happen.

I personally hope the days of amateur, low frequency, niche blogging are not over. It seems to me as one of the fundamental goods that internet has brought and, as the post indicates, a solid reason to have RSS readers.
One of the less documented tuning parameters I found is the threa dcache size. Normally it is a very small value for the number of simultaneous connections you likely support. Increasing it can result in elimination of random pauses/slowdowns.

In general, it is impossible to "tune MySQL" though. You can allow it to use more system resources and in some cases you can get it to be less durable to gain write performance, but to get orders of magnitude increases you need to restructure your data. Try sharing or partitioning data. Increase or reduce the number of indecies. Denormalize data. Archive logs to flat files. Put the OS, /var/lib, and /var/log on separate physical drives. Run MySQL on bare metal since disk IO is often a bottleneck and virtualization can add overhead. Restructure the data. At one point a write heavy app I was optimizing was logging things to the database (that needed to be queries). Each log entry contained extra data we did not query. One speed up that worked was throwing the majority of the extra data into a single gzipped JSON blob. This made it easier for MySQL to fetch fewer pages. Less IO, faster operation.
Removing ciphers is aggressive, but what's wrong with deprecating ciphers?
Brian Smith seems to be ignoring everything Schneier has said in the past week regarding avoiding ECC, And preferring 128b AES over 256 or even 512 is so counter intuitive it is beyond reason. And this whole paper reeks to me of an exercise in finesse'.
...looks like you've (again, assuming webvet.com) also got an openx server. that'll benefit a lot from the master/slave replica. i'd also look at making spc.js non-blocking as that may be why the pages are blank for a few seconds even after content has been delivered...
How many offspring did Feynman have?
Recently saw this movie a couple of weeks ago. I really loved it--the recording Hackman captured is itself a character in the film.
It's not the Gmail-level volume, but it's an email per day either. And yet there is still very few negatives, so it is possible to go through them by hand. Vast majority falls into "fafafa" and "test@test" category. The remainder is typos, e.g. commas instead of periods.
I don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing.

For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices have very little to do with happy employees, and everything to do with productivity.

I detect a subtext when he says 'hierarchical is better, managers should think about strategy, Blackberry CEOs are a professional manager and a technician (which is a loaded word, as it means a low skilled technical worker).

I mean, is this a backlash against the increasingly irrelevance of management in flat organizations? If we read an article by an IT worker, explaining that Amazon Cloud might be making him irrelevant, but companies migrating to it are making a huge mistake, then we would see his true motivations in writing that. I wonder if computer enabled flat management is making people like Schumpeter feel under threat.

The idea of risks and experimentation, is that companies like Google are not creating products through a predictable process - they are farming black swans.

You can manufacture software to spec predictably. If you can find developers who will work to spec, remain motivated without personal control of their work, and generally put up with being treated like a production line worker, you can make software on a production line. Infosys do just this.

But you can't manufacture technological progress, the next big thing. Because the creation, validation, and creative implementation of ideas is not something that comes out of a factory. Sony try this. Look where that gets them.
That quote may have been in context of a psychiatry study, but applies equaly well to huge swathes of medical research.
Also, they can use fruit that doesn't look as pretty or is lower quality. Fruit used for juices are those not pretty enough to sell, fruit used for concentrate is those not tasty enough for "pure" juice.
Amongst other problems, that limits TLDs to 6 characters, which is about 16 characters shy of the longest TLD right now in the DNS root zone: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

Add to that the fact it would fail on a legitimate top-level domain like .рф or .中国.
Yeah, I agree in principle, but it's at 6 simply because it works fine as is. Given new developments it might make sense to bump it up and/or add support for punycode, and we'll do it once it's actually needed.
Each file is stored at 3 different servers at the same time. Hot files are moved to RAM automatically and will be served very fast without even touching the disks. Our tests shows that each servers group has about 500Mb/s free bandwidth capacity at this time. And it can be increased to several Tb/s in a matter of days if needed.
Additional servers will be added in 2-3 days do the server group if necessary.
Given the number of these sorts of code contests, which ones do Hacker News readers like/dislike?

I tried one mentioned on the reddit post linked in the top comment and enjoyed it (codewars). What do you all like?