skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Also, what size does a problem need to have to result in such a meeting? Every argument with your colleagues? Every customer related problem? Every technical problem?"

Disclaimer: I work at IMVU, but I am not the article's author
This is a problem you have to solve for your own context. I suggest starting with only the biggest problems, and seeing how the process works for you. You'll see the people who are in those meetings getting accolades for their follow-up work, and you'll find that as the root cause analysis gets up to why #3, the participants are solving problems they didn't cause. Both of these will help to build the right corporate culture, as you mention. Then, if it seems appropriate, it will be easier to apply 5Ys to less serious problems, because their value will be well-known to the team.

Being mentioned in a 5Y here never bothered anyone. Because you know you have to come up with a fix for all five levels, everyone too preoccupied thinking up solutions to begrudge anyone.
Base52 url shortener perfect hash function in C
Where did I say that having few taxes made it easier to avoid them? My comment was about the amount of distortion caused by people's efforts to avoid taxes, not the amount of tax people would succeed in avoiding.
You wrote that weird distortions were a possibility, and I agree, but do you also think they'd be more dramatic than the ones which exist today? We have some big taxes on productive activity and a lot of small taxes to go along with them. All of these already produce distortions in how we live.
A camping safari adventure in Tanzania
Although Tanzania safaris are not well known, they are regarded as one of the best ways to have an enjoyable culture and wildlife experience.
One version of Moore's Law predicts x1000 increase in 15 years (x2 every 1.5 years; 2^10 = 1024).

48GB isn't standard today. The ordinary amount in an average desktop PC is about 2GB. Therefore, in 15 years (2024), we can expect ordinary, standard desktop PC to have 2TB RAM.
yea these stories are amazing.
Everyone thinks it's cool to live in a neighborhood where your neighbors blast hip-hop all hours of day and night until they have to sleep. Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes.

Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me when I just want to chill out and exchange messages with my friends and comment on my fruit smoothie this morning.
Apple patching serious SMS vulnerability on iPhone
For people like myself who aren't familiar with the history of California's constitutional reforms, Wikipedia describes this "proposition 13" as follows:

"The proposition's passage resulted in a cap on property tax rates in the state, reducing them by an average of 57%. In addition to lowering property taxes, the initiative also contained language requiring a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. It also requires two-thirds vote majority in local elections for local governments wishing to raise special taxes."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%2819...
> there isn't downside protection for the state.

Actually, there is downside protection for govt, and we're seeing it now.

The downside protection is in the property whose taxable basis is lower than its market value. If the taxable basis tends to grow slower than the market value, some basis will be going up even when overall market value goes down.

And then there's the question why govt should have downside protection. I don't.
10 interesting Ajax framework
You're right, and that's what great about ORMs! But if you're asking a question of your data, like "how many widgets did I sell today?" then navigating a conceptional graph of data is the slowest, most convoluted, way of getting at that information.
I hear the argument about browsers blowing up on MySpace all over the interwebs, but it really depends on the company you keep, to some degree. In other words, they give people freedom and some pages are horrendous, but some people's profiles are interesting and really well designed.
I note that AWS instances themselves don't scale at all. They are what they are.

You "scale" by buying more and lashing them together as you see fit.

Amazon happens to provide a very high capacity datastore, but it could provide RDBMS instances just as it provides "compute" instances.
That's just silly. Just because you don't want to work on your car yourself, doesn't mean you ought to choose one with the hood welded shut. It should be obvious that "can fix" is short-hand for "can caused to be fixed, either doing it yourself, or by cajoling or paying someone else to do it". Without the source, there is no option to fix it.

I'm not an Open Source or Free Software extremist, by any means, but there are real benefits to having the source code to important software for any user, even those who have never opened a text editor or seen a line of source code. It may not matter for video games and the software that runs your TV. But, there are a lot of areas where it should be the single most important factor in the decision-making process, even if the decision makers don't realize it. Government, for example, probably ought to exclusively run on Open Source software, or at least only buy from vendors that provide the source and a license that allows in-house fixes in the event the company goes under or is unable or unwilling to fix security vulnerabilities or interop problems. Many large companies insist on "dead man switch" arrangements wherein they get the source if the software vendor goes under. A free software license is just the logical conclusion.
Google Code Blog: Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series: Using Timers Effectively
Funnily enough I actually like doing the dishes, and cleaning in general. Unlike almost everything else I ever seem to do, it's a simple task with an unambiguous "end condition", unambiguous and well-defined motivation, and instant payoff with a nice clean kitchen.

I like this passage from Iain M. Banks, which sums up my feelings well:

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while.

'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.'

He agreed that the table was clean.

'Usually,' the man said. 'I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my speciality... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled... but,' he slapped the table, 'when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement.'

'But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table.'

'And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.'

'But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me plea­sure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,' the man laughed, 'people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,' the man said with a smile, 'it's a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?'
Indeed. It would be nice if you could mark a post as "don't extrapolate on what I've written." Just a little social cue to potentail respondents that they should check their rebuttal to ensure that the point they're refuting is actually contained in the text of the original. Like this:

But if they did actually clone genetically engineered dinosaurs from mosquito DNA,
I'd prefer they did it on an island well off the mainland to ensure that
they couldn't escape and endanger the population at large.

/noextrapolate
The Bathroom Reinvented: Virginia Gardiner's Loo Watt (Video)
Universal Clicker Products, Garage Door Openers, Garage Door Opener Accessories
Find all the Chamberlain accessories you need to make your garage door opener even more convenient. Try out http://www.chamberlain-diy.com for some amazing products.
Is this survivor bias?

I mean, there are thousands of handicappers, or bettors, who employ "scientific methods" and "mathematical models" to try to win at betting. But only a few succeed. And the successful ones will get featured in wsj and news media. Why we should attribute Bob's success to skills, rather then luck?
Would be fantastic if they'd let me pay them to forward my calls internationally...
Why would it take you twice as long? If anything it will take less time, since you're paying attention. It's not a compromise, not from this point of view at least.

It won't _seem_ to take longer either, though this is a more subtle point. When you wash dishes wanting to just get it over with and move on to the next thing you'll be aware of the time almost constantly. Every extra cup you missed the first time is an annoyance. If you pay attention on the other hand you're most likely to achieve "flow" - which is incredibly easy to achieve with such menial activities btw. So not only you'll wash the dishes in most likely the least time possible, you won't even be aware of that time passing.
I should have clarified, I meant around 5GB per one type of data. Maybe a table or dataset that needs to be merged. For instance if you had a product database table that needed to be joined with another GB large or set of data at runtime.

At that point, even in RDBMS you have to stop with the joins and flatten. I have experienced these limits in Oracle and MSSQL around 20-30 million row tables.

Scalable fundamentals like database flattening, dimensional modeling etc are all what key value stores give you from the start. But really a good mix works best or project specific, just saying in the future with TB, PB of data the JOIN is a historic remnant.

It is possible one day that RDBMS will be seen as one of those evil optimizations that we made in our small relative worlds at the time.
It's a SMART goal? Studying maths is a lifelong commitment, "getting a degree in maths before I die" is achievable. :)
Andrew Reynolds
Andrew Reynolds - Read all the latest news and testimonials about Andrew Reynolds' events and charity work.
Well, I gave up my lifestyle and lived in poverty* to do a degree in maths and hated it - switched to computer science after the first year. Theoretical computer science turns me on way more than pure maths. But it firmly sounds as if you want to do it and you're willing to do it, and at 41, you've had enough life lessons to realise when something's a true goal. Go for it.

* admittedly, it wasn't a big hassle, since I was 18 and had a choice between continuing a half-decent job and going to uni. Uni, as the accepted path for people my age, wasn't exactly a hard choice. ;)
Bing: Not Really Gaining on Google
Cryptanalysis of Caesar Cipher
So what does likely() do?
"We may see a shake-up in the mobile market, with at least 18 new Android handsets being released this year. Until that happens, iPhone will remain a market leader and developers will have to put up with XCode and Objective-C."

Although the author says this, the fact that 18 new android handsets can be released in a year is one of the problems with both Android and, to some degree, Windows Mobile.

The iPhone OS isn't really revolutionary. Even their interface on their home screen is pretty simple, it's just a more rigid desktop metaphor, Apple dock and all. It's the hardware that truly stands out. The hardware features Apple's carefully thought out design and style, along with an incredibly well done multi-touch screen. The awesome hardware accompanying the incredibly polished and functional screen are really the biggest selling points of the iPhone that no one has matched yet.

It's the same win that Apple's laptops provide over the multitude of OEMs that produce other computers. But it's obvious that hardware design is more important to consumers than the development platform, thus developers are going to have to cope.
It's more creepy than offensive mostly because of her extreme reaction. It forces you to kind of use your imagination. It's obviously not some soft-core girl-on-girl porn she's seeing. It's obviously something far worse which is just really creepy. My first thought was child porn. I doubt that's what Microsoft intended but you gotta be careful suggesting something is REALLY bad or people will assume the absolute worst in many cases.
Hm. Well, I agree with your observations. But maybe they're more willing to suggest alternatives because they haven't invested so much into learning an alternate system? You would expect someone who has, say, spent the last 15 years becoming an expert on DB2 to refrain - even subconciously - from questioning the very fundamentals his career is built on. MySQL users may not be advanced but at least they are unbiased.

MySQL is not that bad, no. With proper knowledge it can do a lot, and beyond its limits, capably configured, I am not sure any RDBMS can help. Facebook is not developing Cassandra because they can't afford Oracle.
Isn't a flu virus like spanish flu an evolutionary mistake? Killing your host is a bad way to passed on. The penalty for the "mistake" is that the strain, or at least its notable features, no longer exist.
I think you should stop reading Taleb and Gladwell's pseudo-deep books.

The difference between luck and skill is consistency. If one is "lucky" for 20 years straight, then it's not luck, it's actual skill. Sure, if you have enough monkeys typing, one will type a Shakespeare's play, but that is just an academic example. Probability is just a way of modeling uncertainty...
Why a degree?

Because of all topics/areas of study, I've found math to be the most difficult to self-study. I've made some progress on my own, but having a professor/teacher and marked stepping stones in a program is best for me. I'm definitely an autodidact, but I know my limitations.

What is my motivation?

The times my mind is fully engaged and I've been able to make mental leaps are when I'm working on interesting problems.

I have taken a few distance learning math courses at an accredited university and I found myself very engaged and learned a lot. But I found the format lacking: for difficult subjects I am going to need a real connection to encourage me past difficult spots.
Thank you for your story and advice.

I agree about online. I tried it but I know it will be better if I have direct contact with a teacher in a classroom.
Can one actually "imagine the future" in the mindful way the article suggests? Or is that a contradiction in terms? One resolution:

One can imagine an abstract model of a concrete physical object (e.g. a lever; a geometry; a count of objects) and then ignore the concrete reality, and become so fully immersed in the abstraction that one loses track of time. I suggest that this is a form of mindfulness. Thinking about an abstraction is not necessarily mindful: it can be done in a non-mindful way by being constantly distracted by other concrete objects or other abstract models. Mindfulness is flow.

The "future" is a abstract model, and so the above also applies to it.

For human beings, these imagined interior worlds - be they abstractions of objects or of the future - as just as much a reality as the physical world. I suggest that we naturally and instinctively apprehend them in the same way, and both can be done in mindfulness - or not.
Fun. And because my life is at least half over and I haven't tried it.
I have tried this (I am in the US) and the programs I have found with accredited math programs are for teaching math.

I took a look at Open University and they still don't have a full program for US-based students.
Presumably it is defined to __builtin_expect(x, 1)[0], a hint to gcc that one branch (in this case the first) of the if is more likely.

[0] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html
"The GPL is only popular with businesses because it is irrelevant when you're not distributing source-code"

Well, the AGPL (Affero GPL) is becoming more popular these days, which counts public availability as distribution. First "serious" (ie, I am consdering using it) app I've seen which uses it is MongoDB.
the demographic for Lifehacker would probably find that a bit hardcore :)
It doesn't have anything to do with how long it takes - you wash the dishes for as long as it takes for them to be clean. When they're done, they're done. What he's talking about (and I first experienced this while washing dishes, strangely enough) is the startlingly different mental state that develops when you stop thinking.

Stop thinking about whether the dishes are clean enough or not, you can see that. Stop thinking about whether it's fun or what you could you would rather be doing, which is only going to distract you from what you're tying to do now. Washing the dishes requires paying attention but not much in the way of cogitation. Instead of splitting yourself in two, just give the mental chatter a rest and look at what you are doing.
and what happens when an engineering fluke hits your KV store and locks it up. And it takes you 10hours to fix :)

You see your not actually paying for the 3 9's or the 5 9's. That is just corporate bullshit. Your paying for the promise that whatever the problem someone will be able to fix it in a few hours at most.
macro for gcc __builtin_expect? http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html
I've been curious about alternative startup funding ideas for awhile. Selling rev share units thru Amazon in particular projects seems like it could be compelling for a variety of tech financing situations like building an iphone app, or a facebook game.
Opening minds: peering inside a brain
The experiment does exaggarate the impact indeed, but I think there are real-world examples that are pretty close to it. For one thing, some bloated virtual machines. Let the effect of optimization of your VM be 20%, not 15 times, then 20% would be a huge gain you might struggle for if this is the runtime environment for your language.
The "Billie Jean" story definitely has a lesson for software development.
"GM Common Stock Will Have No Value"
XCode and it’s associated tools (debugger) like to open lots of windows. Want to open a file? How about a new window for you!

Er...Preferences -> General -> Layout -> All-in-one?
No AEIOU because of fear of spelling naughty words?

Over what set of inputs is this claimed to be a 'perfect hash'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash

I guess I'm missing the point. Is an explanation of the motivation for this anywhere?
I don't know why you were downvoted. I'm guessing that's exactly why it was pulled.
Looking forward to teaching my kid this kind of stuff as well. But it will take about another 15 years until he turns 11.
"It was directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite, who rose - and fell from - fame after starring as Zed in the hit Police Academy movies. "
IBM Announced the World's First Open Source Machine Learning Compiler
Commercial Garage Door Openers from Chamberlain LiftMaster
LiftMaster Garage Door Openers, Gate Operators and access control systems for home and commercial use.
Asking HN for feedback: Conn'r - An easy, cross-network, communication framework
Dear HN Community,

I've been writing an open source framework which will allow a developer to write an application that allows realtime data exchange with all of your social network contacts.

Connr is an open source platform to allow developers to build applications that allow users to exchange realtime information freely between a user‘s client and all the other social contacts from existing social networks - thereby making the humble sign up form redundant.

Users of a connr based client can exchange data as long as they share a common link on atleast one of the many (extendable) supported social networks. This library is being written to prevent companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to have sole control over being able to write social applications that use their friend graph. With Connr - anyone can write an application that works out of the box with all social networks.

The concept is very simple - find all common links by matching lists of friends across networks and use XMPP to handle the communication. But we hope to abstract the functionality enough to make development easy.

We are two Indian undergrads working on this project and need feedback from the developers of various social applications,

You can see a rough diagram of what we have in mind here: http://anirudhsanjeev.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/connr2.png

Or read my initial write-up here, with some more details:
http://anirudhsanjeev.org/project-connr-easy-open-cross-network-communication-framework/

I have an immense respect for the insight and experience of the HN Community and would really appreciate your advice and feedback.

Thank you.
Interesting idea that should be encouraged. Quite likely against securities laws.
The number of applications on AppStore shows, that developers cope just fine.
Also it is very tough to compare technology and tool you are familiar with to the new ones without any bias.
On the iPhone: I make it ra1n
I think there are no REAL problems inside America. Developing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World to First World is a good problem America can solve.
There is worse in the enterprise market, where they basically charge exactly what you can afford (sometimes a bit more) ratcheting it up as you get more and more locked-in. Read about software pricing economics and how you just have to suck it up till you hit the "Fuck You Oracle" point here:

http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/date/20040828#the_economics_of_soft...

Amusingly, it looks like he'll be an Oracle employee since they are now buying Sun.

(Note, this is "just business" as far as I'm concerned, i.e. about .7 on the weasel scale. What saddens me is organisations too short-sighted or misinformed to see the trap they are lumbering into as they are too distracted by salesmen with slick powerpoints, particularly if they are governments wasting my tax dollars)
Apple makes nice things, but market segmentation is good. It means people can choose between the basic 25 Euro Nokia that doesn't do that much, or the 500 Euro model with all the bells and whistles, or a variety of phones in between.

My guess is that Apple doesn't really care: they'll eventually end up with some reasonable, but minority stake in the market... more or less like the computer market.