skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PostgreSQL 8.4 Released
After many years of development, PostgreSQL has become feature-complete in many areas. This release shows a targeted approach to adding features (e.g., authentication, monitoring, space reuse), and adds capabilities defined in the later SQL standards. The major areas of enhancement are:

* Windowing Functions
* Common Table Expressions and Recursive Queries
* Default and variadic parameters for functions
* Parallel Restore
* Column Permissions
* Per-database locale settings
* Improved hash indexes
* Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
* Easier-to-use Warm Standby
* Automatic sizing of the Free Space Map
* Visibility Map (greatly reduces vacuum overhead for slowly-changing tables)
* Version-aware psql (backslash commands work against older servers)
* Support SSL certificates for user authentication
* Per-function runtime statistics
* Easy editing of functions in psql
* New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, citext, btree_gin
I'd pick this solution.
I don't think I get this. They could have put together a blog or similar website which they pushed articles of this type out to once a month, with all the convenience of linking and being able to view the content (there's very little imagery in this edition) in whatever platform you already use. Instead they've chosen a digital imitation of a physical magazine, which you need some kind of specialised reader to read, wont be indexed by google and will make it hard to reference. Am I missing something?
I'd argue 3.upto(6) is much more readable and obvious than range(3, 7). Even just on a conceptual level, Python requires a degree of translation and its stop argument is not intuitive whereas even someone who has never programmed before can understand the Ruby.
You're not really calling out HN, you're calling out the coders here who claim they can recreate StackOverflow. But it is an example of a provocative title that lured me into reading.
Implementing PubSubHubBub with RabbitMQ
AppsFire - AppStore recommendation app launched
Same thought process for me, but I decided not to read. I doubt more than 5% of the community thinks they can reimplement StackOverflow in a weekend.
"a community rife with arrogant children."

During FISL, a couple days ago, I witnessed something that really bothered me. It was a presentation comparing Rails with Seaside (which is, by itself, like comparing racing cars with subarines) and the arrogance of the Rails guy dismissing Seaside, Squeak and Smalltalk was very uncomfortable.

It seemed the room was too small to fit all the egos inside it.

I considered staying until the end and asking a couple questions to demolish the presenter, but I decided it would not be worth it. His belief on the inherent superiority of Ruby and Rails over any other language and framework, past, present and future, bordered on the religious.
If you're not exceptionally talented, it is a mistake to measure your life and set your expectations to have a successful career.

You can certainly take pleasure in purposeful work (from a non-profit to chopping wood). But don't expect the same praises you might have received in an easy college class.

They should suck it up and focus on something more interesting than work, like making or consuming some creative content, travel, sports, etc.

The 4 hour work week was made for people who can't excel in a career.
It will make it easier to cite, Issue X, pages 1 - 3, and since they chose pdf there is less of a chance that they'll update/change it. I agree it breaks the web a little, you can't comment on articles or link directly to them, but that's a trade off I'm sure they thought through.

Google indexes pdf's so I don't know where you go the idea that they didn't.
I know its an oft-visited subject, But I liked his analysis of how many programmers ignore the spit-and-polish of a UI and focus solely on implementing the model.
I was shocked the other day to read that basically really good athletes at a top-tier sports schools are basically professional athletes. Boosters lease SUVs like Cadillac Escalades, give the athletes the keys to the car - and it's all quasi-legal because the Boosters aren't technically directly affiliated with the athletic program.

When in the States there is so much societal pressure to be athletic/look athletic/enjoy the spectacle of sports, I think we are in trouble where Asian tigers like China have societal pressure and strong peer approval to study hard and aspire to become engineers.
Programmers who use the REPL heavily (especially in languages with good REPL support like Lisp, Python, Haskell) seem to get a lot of the benefits of "illustrative" programming, too.
I don't know about tel, but I use both pretty frequently (and usually together with rpy). R is great for some things, but I typically find that I need to use a general purpose language to acquire the data I'm processing. There are some processing steps that I easier in R though, so I offload things to that when it is more efficient. But for simpler things, I find that numpy is more than adequate for processing data that I've already got in a Python session.

I use them for bioinformatics analysis (large scale genomic comparisons and microarray data analysis). So the larger problem isn't the calculations, it's the data management. And for that Python wins over a pure R solution.
Thank you to all who responded.
This is sad news. I really hope a company emerges with some resolve to support those who continue to shoot on film as an artistic choice. I'm all for jumping headlong into the digital world, but fact is film still has that little bit of something extra that you just can't get anyplace else.
Apparently you did read it.
He might have better luck with a bar of chocolate, also it's even cheaper:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3639679.stm
Origin of Hack : Online Etymology Dictionary
Consider me educated.
I'd wager even less. If you search the thread he refers to (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678398) you see the original guy who said it would take a weekend only got 6 upvotes and the guy who claimed he could clone it over a weekend only got 4.

So I think someone's just trying to get to the top of HN with a provacative title (which in all fairness was a plan that seems to have worked perfectly)
Joel Spolsky talks about this over and over on the Stack Overflow podcast. People who are willing to do something for free !== People who are willing to do something for small bits of money or quantified reward.

It's possible that there is incentive to be had in the 'common goal'; "The Foo Project's Charity is the FSF; If we squash all the bugs by Labor Day, 80% of donations will go to the FSF. Otherwise, 50%"
This is the way things work now. Electrons move very slowly, but the electric field (photons) travels at the speed of light... and that's what carries the information through a conductor.
If by it you mean the original thread and/or the parent comment to mine, then yes. Fairly simple to infer the subject on the post from these two pieces of information.
Agreed. Despite its "provocative title", the "eternal optimism of programmers" rings true in my book!
I happen to disagree with Joel on that one - in particular circumstances :) also the aim might be to encourage those who tend not to do "something for nothing" to contribute :)

(The common goal thing is quite good....)
"There are programmers and there are hackers."

Then there are software developers.

Software developers are sometimes called upon to program, sometimes hack. A lot of what a software developer spends time doing is neither, working closely with all the other roles in a development shop to deliver software. Working with business owners, architects, junior devs, documentation, QA, operations, support, and the users requires a lot of time spent not programming and not hacking.
Nayar is actually right, in a way. Hackers should be considered unemployable by companies like HCL. From what I know of shops like that -- and I've interacted with various over the years -- a hacker would be profoundly unhappy working there.
Society's definition of value - there is no such thing. If something is valuable to you, then you can pay for it. There's no secret magic underlying economics. When the supply of people willing to teach is lower than the number of available teaching positions, the value of a teacher rises.

Editted - forgot I wasn't on /irc/ =]
I never understand why people say communicating faster than light violates causality. Can anyone give a simple example?

If I were to communicate with someone 2 light years away at 2x light speed, they just get my message in one year instead of two. No one is sending information into the past.

Any ideas?
Yes. Except I really have implemented caching in a half-day, using memcached. :) (Utterly fixed the speed issues with the site I was working on then, incredibly easy to use.)

That was a good day.

It almost never happens like that - in fact, the irony for me is the example he uses in the quote is just about the only time where it was _substantially_ easier to do something than I expected. :)
Text Processing with Emacs Lisp
Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?
> ... what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success ...

What actually makes SO a success is network effects, dude:-)

Is it nicely done? Sure. It's way better than "expert sex change" for sure! But something that took 3 people 6 months (as per the other thread) to do is well within the reach of a lot of people here. "Spit and Polish" included.

Now, how many people could get significant linkage/coverage from two people who already have huge audiences of just the sort of people who use SO?

That's your 'moat', your competitive advantage. Not to belittle the good work behind the app itself of course, but that's just the base you need to stand on. Joel could link some piece of junk and, yeah, it might not become a hit, but the community is really what makes sites like SO, or reddit, or even HN go. HN, for instance, doesn't seem to have a lot of 'spit and polish' and yet I prefer it to SO.
I don't know much about Python so forgive me if this is stupid - but could 2^32 have been optimized as a constant, so that the result is just a multiplication and an addition?
Social networking touted for software development
Zed seems to have a freaky ability not only to implement high quality code himself, but to find high quality code written by others, absorb it, and then explain it. Strikes me as the qualities that make a successful angel investor.
Awesome Combination - Bikes with Babes Wallpapers
I like bit twiddling, but I'm not sure I'd take the job if a primary concern of the interviewer is whether I know the quick way to find the lowest-order bit in a 64-bit int...
There are situations where you cannot have specialized hardware on set, because you don't have a set - for example image stabilization is a key component in film restoration.

For example: http://www.davsys.com/revival.html

and http://www.hs-art.com/

those two are what I've seen and used in practice and both have A LOT to be desired for.

I always said whoever solves automation of object recognition and pixel perfect outlines of them is a VERY RICH man. Current problem solving revolves around specialized software for rotoscoping masks around objects with a help of 2D and 3D tracking here and there. It is a very tedious job that requires a lot of man power. See, for example, http://www.mokey.com/
Really great idea. I can see there being some demand for these. I wonder if they could carry the idea over to other parts on the bike. I know the loads on the front fork make it tough to build out of anything but metal, but using hemp for the seat cover, and possibly using tires made from recycled rubber could carry the idea a bit further.
Microsoft got rich and successful by dominating the OS market. It's natural that they would want to repeat it by inventing the "browser-based OS". I don't think they'll manage to fool anyone, though.

Yet browsers have never been constructed to be operating systems. Principals are allowed to coexist within the same process or protection domain, and resource management is largely non-existent.

Chrome offers the protection Wang claims is not implemented. As for the resource management, the issues Wang raises are security issues with access to devices and interfacing directly with the OS. This can be solved in the browser plugin architecture without reimplementing it as an OS or, as they call it, "browser kernel". I'm betting that Chrome doesn't have plugins yet because people behind it want to do it correctly from the start.
I thought I was rather clear on the fact that I wasn't speaking in absolute truths. My answers reflect my personal opinion of why I (and others like me, in some cases) choose Python over Ruby.
He had a really good point with the last thread regarding Open Source and it's tendancy to be a little lacking on the "Polish"

But he's going a bit far now to suggest, as I read it, all FOSS suffers this fate... plenty of well polished Open Source software exists. And plenty of paid software lacks polish.

And at the end of the day; maybe not a weekend but SO wasnt put together in TOO long a time. With a couple of good enough hackers and someone to do the UI a few weekends might be doable..... the polish doesnt make SO.... it helps, but it sure doesnt make it (IMO of course)
Yes, it's a shame. Best thing to do is ask Yahoo to support it.
I think you're knocking down a strawman; many people don't think he's a retard so much as a mediocre author who writes a sometimes exasperatingly mediocre blog.

None of that means he can't be a brilliant programmer. I'll admit to being a little surprised that SO took off as it did, and I certainly don't think that being relentlessly hyped again and again by both blogs explains all of that success. But I'm not sure why that proves me wrong; am I supposed to start liking Atwood's blog now? I opened it to have another look; the top post starts with a pronouncement that "abstractions are powerful things" (oh God), and then goes on to tediously argue that they invariably leak, but are still powerful things. No thanks.
The Ultimate Spy Plane
Targeted at IRC, I think you mean.

But it's certainly quite a bit better than ESR's, simply because it doesn't come off as talking down to you. Thanks, I'll start pointing newbs to this one instead :)
I just wrote some code that the community recognizes as useful and that thousands of businesses incorporate into their product or process. Thanks for the twollar.
I have to say it's a pleasure to read something in this format rather than just another blog site. I think it gives a different feel, a clean-ness, something I can't really explain, that's missing from most websites. Maybe it's simply the typesetting?

In the "Up Front" section they make it clear that they're trying to re-create the magazine feel, and that they're experimenting with this, so I expect it will change. I look forward to seeing where it ends up.
You made several points, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't, but I am just going to address a couple that I consider key.

"More valid predictors are work experience, internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't."

I agree with this statement, but it comes with a caveat you left out. When most people are just starting out, they don't have any work experience with mentioning. The way to get this is to get that first professional job, but having a degree is (for most people) the best way to get that first professional job. Now once you have that work experience the degree matters a lot less, but it is easiest to get that work experience in the first place with a degree.

"This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer. Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier. The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after."

I largely disagree with this. After going through numerous interviews and hiring cycles as both a job seeker and a hiring manager, I have never asked a candidate for their GPA nor have I been asked for mine. GPA does matter for some things (Grad schools always ask for it, and so do some government agencies) but most employers don't care about it.

"A depression is definitely on the way."

Can you justify this? Most of the economicists I listen to predict that our current recession is going to end by 2010. That of course does not mean we are going to return to where things where. It takes a long time after a recession ends for the economy as a whole (and particularly) jobs return to their previous levels, but it does mean things seem to be getting better, not worse.
Coming soon: Calling out posts with provocative titles
A Corporate Guide For Social Media
More discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175681
Ah, you're right. A lapse of judgment and test cases led me to write that. Please disregard.
Yes, precisely, and not necessarily because we think they didn't deserve their short-lived wealth, but rather for the same reasons that people prefer relative wealth to absolute wealth (citation needed): Because you can't stand it when others fare better than you. And what's wrong with that? It is the foundation of a healthy competitive spirit which drives people to succeed.
Sir Clive is one of my heroes, despite the Speccy being obviously inferior to the C64...
Go and listen to 'Hey Hey 16k' if you haven't already: http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/
This is certainly true. But it all depends on where you live as well. If you take out $80,000 in loans it makes no sense to live in an area where the average salary is $35,000. Then of course, even in higher paying locations you have to juggle the high cost of living.
The guy makes a good point, but he is underestimating the redundancy and code duplication of web apps. I could have "something like" StackOverflow in a day, not because I will write it from scratch, but because I will be running global string search and replace on a bunch of stuff that I have in ~/hacks.

Having said that, I would probably estimate a 3 - 6month time frame just to cover my ass.

Be optimitistic all you want to yourself, but you must estimate projects very conservatively and assume the worst, Big "Murphy's" Omega of everything.

Arm-chair programmer != professional :-)
To claim that Ruby is a tangled soup of options and syntactic sugar is to miss the point really.

What is the point? I sincerely wish to learn, for my own intellectual curiosity. Because I have read Ruby code and I have done Ruby tutorials and talked to people who use Ruby and for the life of me, no matter how hard I meditate on the issue, I cannot understand why anyone would use Ruby over Python.

I don't feel Python is absolutely better than Ruby, anymore than an apple can be absolutely better than an orange, but I have yet to gain a comprehension of how Ruby is even relatively better. From a Python -> Ruby perspective I find it particularly perplexing.

Ruby presented far more cognitive hurdles for me because it allows you to do things in ways that seem simultaneously mildly more convenient and completely counter-intuitive to everything I've experienced with similar styles of languages over the past 10 years.
When in the States there is so much societal pressure to be athletic/look athletic/enjoy the spectacle of sports, I think we are in trouble where Asian tigers like China have societal pressure and strong peer approval to study hard and aspire to become engineers.

The strongest push in the US (and it's not even close) is to make money. The intense materialism here will insulate the country from most of its truly dangerous fools simply because capitalism works so well. Tocqueville, back in the early 19th century, made a note of the anti-intellectual streak in the US and said that a scholar would generally be happier in Europe unless they could occupy themselves with the challenge of earning dough.

Times have not changed. Except for a burst of scientific enthusiasm at the peak of the Cold War (1946-1964), commerce has driven most innovation.
That's been possible in python for a long time using pyprocessing (part of the stdlib since 2.5 i think). No idea about ruby but don't they have something similar?
All of this sounds super fancy, but it’s really based on solid research done on state machines over the years. Adrian simply took all the best research and built a sweet little domain language for state machines.

This is why research and open source are important. And kudos to Adrian.
You could have "something like" StackOverflow in a day the way a 10-speed bike is "something like" a Honda, in the sense that they've both got wheels and they get you around.
HTML/CSS is the easy part. Screen scraping and normalizing/organizing all the data and writing a custom mapping service were the tough ones.
NumPy.
The NDA for Friends
Sports programs in US schools are quite remarkable.
They clearly bring in a lot of revenue for the schools and it seems to me that's a good thing.

The bad thing is everything having to do with the student athletes.

So why not just make college sports professional. Just like the NFL and the NBA, this would simply be another league, made up of college branded teams.

Ah, but we can't do that, we can't call a spade a spade. Society has to maintain a charade. It's like collectively we're in the closet. And we're very passionate about college sports but we just can not get out of the closet and say fuck it, just make the sports program professional.
Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization
Rails folks are like that. Even though the rest of the Ruby community is much more reasonable, the weekly Rails debacle has driven a lot of people away from Ruby, including me.

If Rails weren't around, it would be much easier to enjoy Ruby without having to use it in isolation. Then again, a whole lot of people wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place.

Ruby lived fast and died young. If you don't want to use Python, learn Haskell.
Are you sure?

Pretty much all of the functionality (minus the stuff directly related to the questions) alreayd exists for my framework of choice.

The only "custom" from scratch bit I can really see is a GUI (arguably a lot of that might pre-exist in ones personal toolkit) the Q/A segments and the search.

Not that Im agreeing it can be done in a weekend: but I definitely think he is assuming a lot would be made from scratch, when the beauty of open source is you dont have to do that! :)
yes, you are right python >2.6 only
If you're at all familiar with how shares are traditionally divided in a business, then you'll realize this is no trivial matter. If you want to think of an individual operating agreement or charter as an "implementation," then the complex negotiations, armies of lawyers, rounds of iterations, and continuing amendments to these documents are a lot like a huge enterprise app.

What happens when we decide, like businesses, that we need new classes of shares? Who gets paid first? Who has "voting rights"? What's the process to to pursue remedies if you feel you've been cheated, or that the "board" (project owner and his lackeys) has operated in bad faith to defraud share holders?

This is a complex issue even before you hit the psychological problems that others have already raised.

What I'm saying is that shares can't really divided in a trivial, algorithmic way. I like the idea in theory, but I think it's impossible to correctly implement.
"Build a skyscraper? Dude, I could build one taller than the Chrysler building in like a week."