skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Facts Behind the Code Indention Style War
As someone who dislikes spam, I really like the sound of this.
also: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/09070...
Maybe I don't understand all that "full instance metaclass" implies, but if you use properties, you can control how each member is handled. With properties for each instance member, seems like you have total control.

Or is that just not convenient or powerful enough?
And even worse given that the last 4 digits of your SSN have been regarded in the past as a "safe" way to identify people... I know people whose email address was based on it, for instance.
It would be unreasonable to say everyone falls neatly into that category. I like the idea. It might make some iPhone owners more likely to lend out their stuff. People that wouldn't normally.
I submit this for a few reasons.

The first is that when I use SatNav I arrive at my destination having no real idea where I am. I remember in a science fiction book reading a statement like "We claim to have explored space, but in truth, we have explored the small bubbles that surround individual planets. Of the great depths of true space we have no knowledge." I feel a little like that now when driving longer distances with the SatNav.

Secondly, it's interesting how often the SatNav produces "obviously" sub-optimal routes. The Travelling Salesman Problem is well-known to be NP-Complete, so it's not surprising, but some of the foibles are incomprehensible. It's no wonder some people distrust them, and quite surprising that others seem to have complete faith in them.

Finally, stop for a moment to consider the miracle that is the modern SatNav. Despite its short-comings it contains a device to tell you where you are to within a fathom, maps that know where you are and where you're going, enough power to compute a sensible (if not always optimal!) route between the two, a suer interface that non-technical people can usually drive, and all for the cost of a few hours work.

Addendum: GPS works by computing varied flight times of radio pulses. Light travels about a foot per nano-second, so a GPS receiver has to work with time differences less than a typical clock cycle (for the on-board computer). If you have a 1GHz computer, light cannot travel across the motherboard in a single clock-cycle.

Stunning.

PS: Yes, I do know the details, and I know the inaccuracies in the above.
Right, but if the recommendations are just ignored, how are they relevant?
A Django Model Manager and How to Customize the Django Admin
New HD codecs work well. It can finally handle my Blu-ray rip of Blade Runner without being choppy.
In Defense of Web Developers
Alex's News Picks: July 7th
You have to remember that Java sucks. Sun was very closed to suggestions and improvements, and until C# came along wasn't really doing much with the language. J++ with improvements eventually turned into C# which is far superior to Java.
No doubts that open source model creates vast value to software industry, but that model is distributed only in terms of the big picture. If you look at a specific open source project, it's probably still organized in a hierarchical way. It still needs a leader to do the high level design and decide direction. New commers still need to climb the ladder - by contributing to the project - to a point before they can significantly affect the project.
At least he thinks so: his resume page says "saved the company by optimizing performance up to an acceptable level." That's not a quote from somebody else!
I definitely agree, I especially like to lend tools to encourage building, creativity, etc.

I wrote the app so I could be even more casual about lending things out, because I wouldn't have to try and remember where they were when I needed them back.

Thanks for the feedback!
I'd love to see how a bunch of commodity PC's will scale to 100TB, and still be manageable

100T is 666 spindles when you go RAID10 with 300G drives (common size in the SAS/FC area).

If you go S-ATA then it'll fit on 200 spindles using 1T drives. I'll stick to the latter variant for now because I'm too lazy to lookup Sun's pricing for SAS spindles, for my comparison below.

So, 200 spindles amounts to roughly 15 hosts (throwing in a few spares for good measure). The whole setup will comfortably fit into one rack, including the FibreChannel machinery and other fluff that you'll likely want.

Thus from the hardware side this is trivially managable, 100T is just not a lot of data nowadays.

On the software side it's up to your creativity and mostly depends on what you actually need to store. I've seen people setup commodity postgres clusters, as well as more fancy things like HDFS, GFS or homegrown storage layers that way. And it worked.

And, regardless of the indeed relatively sane pricing of the Sun (formerly StorageTek) products, the bottomline is what makes the difference.

In figures, for a 100T SAN on the 7310 you're looking at something like $50k for one head, plus around $75k for three trays. We're in the $125k ballpark, hardware-only. And I'm being rather optimistic here: This setup actually holds only 96T and the head is maxed out (3 trays max per controller/head). That means your next upgrade will incur another $25k markup for the next head, good thing you didn't ask for 150T...

Squeezing the same amount of storage into 15 min-spec supermicro pizzaboxes I arrive at roughly $3000 per node, including spindles. A good buyer will get them cheaper. This commodity cluster sets us back only ~$45k in hardware.

That's 1/3 the price of the 7310 solution, being optimistic on the Sun and pessimistic on the commodity side.

That kind of difference makes up for a lot of development effort for the custom solution - most of which is a one time investment anyways and yields better flexibility in the long run. It's also the reason why most of the big boys don't use off-the-shelf SANs for their primary storage.
Future Internet Stress Test project launched
> And more importantly it convinced me.

Huh?
Interesting: The Shootout has since added language scatter plots thanks to this article:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/shapes.php

(Isaac Gouy, the Shootout's maintainer, appears in the article's comments.)
Professor griefs gamers, feigns surprise at reaction
What he tried to prove is something that each one of us already know but don´t have how to do. The "evolution" of humanity is restricted to some specific sectors, like technology, biological and so on. But when it comes to internal evolution, specific about how to treat different people, we still being the same shit ever. Two thousand years, forty ... don´t matter.

An simple example. I´m from Brazil (sorry by my poor english) ... and i play World of Warcraft as well. On the game, one of the social rules (no legal rules) is to talk in english. No problem. We do our best and it´s good to practice another language sometimes. BUT ... when we meet other brazilian folks and start talking in portuguese close to american guys ... all the hell start. They (not everybody off course) tend to offend us, our country and start saying a lot of bad things of us. We don´t take it personal, most part of the time, but it´s very weird because the tolerance to out of box things (like another idioms) and the treatment to those who make things in the "wrong" way is far too bad. I´m not saying that the scientist was correct, even us who talks in portuguese, but the reaction and the self control of the average human still being to naive. And, i think, he proves it very well.
Er spell the end
But the discussion isn't whether you can create quality writing while giving it away for free (obviously that's going on, long before the Internet - eg the Bible..) but whether "free" is a sustainable business model.

Anderson's own example is a guy who actually makes a living working as a civil engineer, ie selling his time for money. What he does in his spare time, for free, is known outside the Wired hype bubble as "a hobby".
Thanks for that :-)
Now to find out what this kind of theory is called and work out how to create equivalence :-)
You can probably use Gosper's algorithms for computing with continued fractions ( http://perl.plover.com/yak/cftalk/ ) to generate precision as needed. The CF for phi is [1; 1, 1, 1, 1, ...] and basically all you need to do is take the n^th power.

I'm trying to figure out if you're intentionally making a sophisticated math joke or not -- and failing. Are you?

The precision to which you need to compute phi in order to compute the Nth Fibonacci number by exponentiation is the precision you'd obtain by computing the ratio of the Nth and (N-1)th Fibonacci numbers -- which is exactly how you evaluate the continued fraction for phi.

So your suggestion amounts to "compute the Nth Fibonacci number... then do a lot of work to use that value to compute the Nth Fibonacci number". :-)
I agree, this is one of the biggest flaws with this line of reasoning. However, it does say something (although it's unclear what it means for us) that some of those cultures had less incidence of the diseases commonly associated with old age compared with nearby similar cultures that ate less or no meat.
To be clear, this is talking about google apps for domains.

Which is a shame because I know a lot of people who use it to host email for their personal domains. I would think that most companies using it for corporate mail can swing the $50/year.
Management and IT consulting - powered by deliverables
> We can chuckle at the "sorry" "mistakes" of the "domino-theorists"

Umm, what "mistakes"? There was a domino plan.

Yes, the "not-communists" were brutal thugs. However, the communists were, in fact, worse. (That's not to say that we opposed them in the best way, but it's also not obvious how we could have actually done significantly better.)

Perfection is rarely an option, either in choosing what to do or how to do it.

One can argue that this was not of our biz, but it's unclear why the same standard shouldn't apply to WWII, South Africa, the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur, or even inner cities.

There is no bright line here.
I understand your reaction, but it doesn't automatically mean that we want to bomb anyone, scientists or professors or others, just because we are discussing his ideas.

So in my case, I am saying that the ideas states by the Unabomber minus the bombing are still quite striking (especially about oversocialization, artificial drives, etc; as I mentioned above).
I understand the annoyance at someone saying they could replicate a product in a weekend. And I also understand the desire to say that this is a bad idea because it probably isn't possible.

However, I think all of us at some time or another worked up the courage to build something much larger, important, or interesting because we deluded ourselves into the belief that it would be simple or easy or only take a small amount of time.

I consider this nearly universal estimation problem a benefit to the entrepreneur (at least at the beginning). It allows people to start projects that would be too daunting if they saw each and every task in front of them and that it would actually take them many months or years of their lives to make it work.
Rules for Bootstrapped Web App Startups
Whoah wait a sec: you're not using FPS are you, you're using Simple Pay. So with Simple Pay you don't get the error granularity you get with FPS however you do still get a return value in the Return URL: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimplePay/latest/ASP.... You're probably getting a return value of PF which is Simple Pay's way of saying "no payment received. we'll spare you the details. reroute your customer back so they can attempt the transaction again." Your app has to check that return value and if it hears PF you need to have it redirect the customer back to the payment authorization screen (after notifying them "the transaction timed out etc.")

I'll bet that group of 5-10% is upset. They probably visited a "success" URI and naturally thought they were charged. If you find them (via the buyerEmail return parameter) don't tell them the problem is with Amazon, the truth is you didn't follow the developer doc: error-checking is your responsibility.

If you were using FPS you would get a more descriptive error. Your transaction status would be something like 'initiated', 'reinitiated' or 'temporary_decline' and for those you don't announce the error to the customer you just let FPS keep trying until you get a success or a (descriptive) fail. Net, FPS lets you better manage edge cases e.g. when the pipes fail.

Keep in mind the payments dashboard is for anyone with an amazon.com account so it's like hacking with mittens. It's not meant to be a full interface to FPS or even Simple Pay. You should not be doing your transaction error checking there. The reason Amazon Payments is "not able to provide transaction partners any information about a failed transaction" is because the failure is occurring within the context of an API and that API already informs you how to interpret all possible errors.

I guess there is another way to reach that error form after all. Looks like a user experience bug. Good catch.
I'm not reasoning that all foods are equally beneficial and harmful, and I accept that it may very well be that a plant-based diet is superior to a meat-based diet. I reject the idea, however, that we know enough to say that this is true, and I absolutely reject the idea of significantly changing behavior based solely on epidemiological studies -- the epidemiological studies should be the starting point for much further study. To date, most large-scale controlled studies on diet have unfortunately been shelved. It should entirely be possible to separate multiple groups on multiple different diets and see what happens over a period of, say, ten years -- one diet as vegetarian, one diet as meat/fruit/nut but no grains, a fish+vegetarian diet, while holding other variables constant (such as calories). This is what we need to do to know, and this is what has consistently been proposed, but not done.
I've been considering this for a while. I may end up keeping the online version though, just for the NHL channel since there really isn't a substitute station for that right now.
Article is less so about being too perfect, more so about wanting to be perfect when you aren't. Titles that are more marketing than description annoy me.
What is going to happen to those of us already using it for free?
I'm not quite sure why Mono is so important. Technically, it's an interesting accomplishment to be sure, but I don't see that it gives you anything you can't get elsewhere. Particularly on the web front, MS is certainly not leading edge anymore.

On the desktop application front, this is certainly better than coding GTK apps in C, but other alternatives to that already existed (namely the Ruby and Python bindings for GTK).

The bottom line is that while C# and the .NET framework are certainly better than MS's previous development offerings, it still offers very little of interest in my opinion. Ruby, Scala, Clojure, and Python have much more compelling features for most problems.
This is great advice that can be applied to more than web apps too!
Useful Tools Review of Viralheat: How hot are you?
Combining different software licenses
How to Learn Stuff While Procrastinating Online
What does the Traveling Salesman Problem have to do with typical GPS navigation? Typical use of a GPS device involves a start and an end point, and every once in a while a couple points in between, that ideally you may want in optimal order (though I doubt typical devices can do that for you). But there's nothing intractable about the scale of that.
It seems odd that startups should "pony up" for Oracle or SQL Server when the very company you mention - Google - does not use them to a significant degree. Nor do Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Digg etc. AFAIK.
I wrapped up a ~1,700 mile roadtrip just last night and used my first-gen iPhone to listen to Pandora/NPR along the way.
10 rules everyone who cares has heard before,
Startup Law 101 - Who owns the IP in your startup?
StumbleUpon is Stumbling Downward | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
11: If you want to be taken seriously, don't make obvious spelling errors.
My "knee jerk reaction" is simply that there isn't enough evidence to provide real nutritional guidance. The types of studies that need to be done have not been done.

And the fact is, there are not numerous studies consistently showing a correlation, there are many studies that do not show that those who eat more meat get more disease. For example, Cretan villagers have lower heart-disease rates than even the Japanese and eat diets consisting of 40% fat. The "French Paradox" is so termed because the French eat high quantities of animal fat but have low heart disease. Tokelauan's, who had a diet high in fat (50% fat) and saturated fat (90% of the fat they ate was saturated), were relatively healthy. After migrating they consumed much less fat and had higher heart disease.

In other words, there's a lot about diet we don't understand yet and you can't boost the relevance of epidemiological studies by saying that "virtually nothing is proven ever" and therefore we should just accept observational science, when it's known that epidemiology has significant flaws as anything other than a hypothesis generator.
Publicity! I believe the current VLC 1.0.0 release thread at reddit is the highest-voted VLC post ever. We're all suckers for nice round numbers.
Ask HN: What skunkworks project are you working on?
I guess I'd just like to know what type of thing everyone's working on - new projects, products, process improvements, tool integration, etc.
Help: Artificial Intelligence best language to learn TODAY
Hello,

I´m working in a personal project that takes data from the web and extract informations from this data. All this stage i made very well with ruby (lets say, an modern language). But now i need to start working on a module (we call "brain") that can take the information of the ruby software and take decisions about the best moment to buy and sell currencies. I had a very hard time to chose between ruby and python (yes, i had to learn the language before make the bot) and now i´m having another hard time to choose an language to make this "brain". So i came here and ask for your help. I think most part of you will say "take lisp or prolog" but i have afraid of spend my time learning an old language, like lisp ... but that´s not the big problem. If a go to lisp, WITCH dialect should i choose ? Common Lisp is old, but looks like more situated to this task. Scheme looks like naive close to common lisp, i´m running from that ... and clojure looks like new, but not so good like the others. So i ask you hackers for help. I still doing my personal researches but a vision from somebody with more experience would be appreciated. By the way, sorry by may bad english ...
How about googling for it first before posting:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
As Japan's lost decade taught us - the end of rapid decline does not necessarily lead to meaningful recovery.

And since their problems and attempted solutions look an awful lot like ours, I don't see much support for optimism.
Uh, did you click the link? The changelog from 0.9.9 is right there on the page.
Haskell has also been around 13 years longer than Scala.

It's no wonder it's more polished.
I gathered that people did try to use civilized means to get him to stop. He didn't. That people escalated doesn't really bother me.

Also, "medieval behavior" would be actual, physical harm. I think it's worth noting that no one escalated it beyond the online realm.
Justice Department to Investigate AT&T-iPhone Exclusivity?
Exactly. I wouldn't mind too much if new users cost $50 / year or they began charging after 10 users (I have plenty of friends who just have a single email under Google Apps for your domain)
Free Softwares, Games, E-books, Movies and Many More....
guys check it out.
I always used to use K&R style and I think it teaches bad habits: I used to obsess about compressing code. I remember when I started trying to help people with learning Python. A friend, and arguably better (python) programmer, commented:

Go Tom, great stuff. Now all we've got to do convince is teach you to space it all out so I can read it

I switched to Allman after that: much to the relief of many people ;)
Help convince Joel and Jeff to open source stackoverflow
God, I wish Houston METRO would open up something like this.
still, there have been lists which were a lot worse...
Build your first prototype in the language you are most comfortable using. When you know which bits are hard to write then you can look around and see if any other language has facilities that make that part of the task simpler to write.

Whichever way - enjoy the learning experience. I doubt you will make your fortune trading currencies - but I could be wrong so good luck.
Why? Why on earth would I want to do that? How would open-sourcing StackOverflow benefit Joel and Jeff, or anyone else?
Pffft... GPS. All you need for navigation is a South-Pointing Chariot: http://odts.de/southptr/
FYI it was posted earlier too http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691246
Step 1. Invite RMS to speak.

Step 2. Whine on the internets when he (<sarcasm>completely unpredictably</sarcasm>) says something offensive.

Step 3. ???

edit: added sarcasm tags. A reply suggests it isn't obvious that I'm mocking the idea of inviting a speaker well known for his lack of social graces, and then complaining about being offended by his speech.
China blocks Twitter and FB... again
It would be a real shame to to lose this, I use it on 3 of my domains - and was hoping to bring it to a charity I work with too. It's a great solution, and very cheap.
And which type of omnivorous animals? And which type of fat?

Saturated fat has little effect on rats, but polyunsaturated fat induces tumors in rats according to to many studies. Low-fat, high calorie diets lead to more tumors than high-fat, low calorie diets in rats (in fact the high-fat, low calorie diets essentially stopped tumor production entirely). This latter was a major study in the journal Cancer Research. Only in high calorie diets was high-fat worse than low-fat, and in low calorie diets, high-fat was better than low-fat.

Atherosclerosis is often observed in pigs, cats, dogs, sheep, cows, horses, reptiles, rats, and baboons when fed exclusively vegetarian diets.

Monkeys in captivity often become fat and diabetic on high-fiber, low-fat, no-cholesterol diets.

It's entirely possible that a no-meat diet is best for humans, but I don't think we're anywhere near the understanding needed to say this -- and his recommendation to avoid fish as well would be viewed as dangerous by much of the medical and scientific community. What we really need are controlled studies, which are entirely possible to do.
Marines train with a low-tech transportation technology
Whilst I can believe that Oracle probably does scale, when it costs $17.5k per CPU in licensing then it's not for everyone.

It would seem that problems of a bank with a large already established userbase and lucrative, stable business model is very different to a start-up with no tested business model, may never become popular enough to need to scale and may not survive.
Personally, my project team would benefit greatly if we set up something like SO for our clients. Additionally, we have no money to spend on the hosting fees.
Given an unknown object, how would your program distinguish between meta-info and property?
Hehe, they got me too some 6 months ago. But it's still there, and fortunately I haven't heard of any plans to close it.

They do mention somewhere that the free edition is for non-businesses, but I don't know how serious they are about this.
The file formats for other competing formats (like say, .txt or .csv) are also very simple.

They also don't fully interoperate with Word or Excel.
... and if not, you'd better read the expanded version:

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

:)
Design Dictionary from Visual Fate
New design dictionary from Visual Fate.
Design terms and subjects