skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shouldn't there be max along with min and avg? Std dev is higher in many cases. Could there be an issue where max (worst case) has worse performance in Unladen Swallow?
The Economist calls California the ungovernable state. They have a much more realistic appraisal of what's going on here:

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13649050
The Patent Troll
I've always found there to be two primary camps as well, with the following division.

The first group is the Stallman-esque group. They believe that people should use software because it is free (free as in libre, of course, not gratis). Being good is secondary; the fact that something is free should be sufficient for people to prefer it over other solutions. This has potential negative consequences for developers; a developer who believes in this may be less motivated to make his program better than proprietary equivalents because he does not believe that it needs to be so for him to promote his program as an alternative. The Stallman-esque group also tends to believe that marketing is more important than engineering; open source is about advocacy more than it is about coding.

The second group is the Linus-esque group. These people believe that the primary goal of open source is to produce, via a community process, really good software; freedom is secondary. That software will become popular not because of marketing and advocacy, but merely because it is so good that its engineering merit will stand on its own. Users should use what software is best for them--it's the developers' job to ensure that "best" means "free". These people are often seen as "impure" by the Stallman-esque group because when asked for the best way to set up a system, they will often include non-free software in the mix--they would design the system for maximum effectiveness, not maximum freeness, since their goal is to produce the best system possible, not the most free.

From what I've been able to tell, the divide between these two groups seems practically unbridgeable; the philosophy differs so much that the two sides often completely fail to understand each other, much like the divide between GPL and BSD advocates.
kiru's point + keyboard macros & elisp & registers = hypercool

Any data formatting and parsing is extremely simple and easy, since this essentially becomes programming by doing. Much quicker than any other method I know and awesome for the many, many quick hacks one needs throughout the day.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the hashes are being cracked, but I was under the impression that this is cycling through all possible inputs, hashing them, and comparing to the given user input. However, I believe the original value is restricted to being 8 characters long (assuming that's what this means: "capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set)"). By salting your hash, you make the input to the hash function much larger. Then it's quite a bit over 8 characters and no longer feasible to crack.
Both OpenSSL and BIND have the unenviable position of being the defaults, and thus get banged on constantly and frequently get integrated poorly.

OTOH I think the comparison to BIND is a bit inapt, as OpenSSL was never historically the pile of poorly-architected shit that BIND was.
Awh, was hoping for censorship debates about all the dirty pictures the images contain. Then at least it would have been funny.
I see your point - I certainly can make good use of the world clock gadget but there's nothing exciting here.

I have to say that the Google Calendar is the one google product I have no reservations over recommending. I think it is very feature-complete for what it purports to be.

If you are looking to organise your time more closely than a traditional calender, try something like toodledo.com which maintains your to do list and then will try and schedule you if you want (eg "I have 10 minutes before my next meeting, I am sitting by my phone and computer, what could I usefully do?" type of organising). It does sync to Google Calendar too.

My calendaring needs are modest: I just need to know where to be when and to avoid scheduling conflicts, while being able to check/enter entries from wherever I am. GC works great for that.
Another point is that with a b-tree you have your rows in sorted order, which means you can do "select * from blah where id > 100 and id < 200" and you're still using the index. If you were using a hash table, you'd be doing 100 random disk seeks instead of a few sequential ones.
The only editor anyone should ever need is that which the blessed pg provides in these little text boxes.
I believe that Ustream actually offers an export-to-YouTube feature.
Clay Shirky: Not an Upgrade — an Upheaval
Research study raises questions about scientific validity of matchmaking sites.
Why make it so absurdly cheap? It's (from what I hear) a great product, that makes using outlook substantially less painful. So why charge only $30?
I'm surprised their licensing model is a one time fee rather than a subscription. Missing out on a huge opportunity of recurring revenues.
That is what he describes, his point being that rationalisation aside, let's face it we do this because it is fun.

"the divide between these two groups seems practically unbridgeable"

I don't know enough to comment about whether that is accurate; but I would say that this is one divide that doesn't necessarily need bridging. We're not talking about VHS versus Betamax here; as long as both sides keep doing what they are doing for whatever reasons, everybody wins.
I like his articles, but this one is silly. 4 Messages on 4 blogposts and he's drawing conclusions? That little data doesn't warrant any conclusions: too many uncontrolled variables. Results might as well be random. Audience, and expected clickthrough rate, per post topic may differ, the effect of repeating the implorement several times kicks in and if I bothered to give it some more thought, I could probably come up with ten other reasons that could explain the results. That was even possible after the first set of measurements in my physics graduation experiment; let alone in sociology/psychology.
Maybe... "You should join my 4,615 followers on Twitter _here_."
> I have grave doubts as to whether users of a mail client will pay $30 for an add-on to improve the indigenous search, no matter how much better it is. People sometimes pay for additional functionality that they deem necessary, especially in specialised industries, but rarely for just an improvement of a built-in function. Witness the sudden death of any software competing with something newly built into an OS, even if it was superior.

I haven't used outlook in a few years, but when I was forced to use it, their search functionality was horrible and never got better. It's even worse if you have lots of mail in archives. I found it faster to just export the whole archive into the general purpose mbox format and use other mail clients to search for stuff. I'm guessing it's not as useful for individuals since they already use GMail or Yahoo Mail, but I'm sure companies who are reliant on Outlook will eat it up. $30 per seat at most companies is chump change when you consider the per seat license of Outlook is $300 and the damn Aeron chair they sit in is $1500.
Barriers To An Effective Web Measurement Strategy [+ Solutions]
If OpenSSL has the kinds of blatant implementation errors that Graham is alluding to (e.g. memcpy memory corruption problems in ASN.1 parses and padding checks), we all have bigger problems than whether he's right about it being a crappy library. A huge number of critically important systems depend on it.

I don't love OpenSSL's code --- it's a mess with a zillion different authors and styles --- but the bar for finding horrible problems in it is quite high. The position of being the oft-banged-upon default isn't necessarily unenviable; in OpenSSL's case, it means a lot of crap has been shaken out.

The comparison to BIND is superficial; BIND's problems are architectural, OpenSSL's problems stem from it dating back to Eric Young's code, which predates integer overflows and hails from a time when we thought you could mitigate a buffer overflow by malloc'ing instead of allocating on the stack.

Don't use OpenSSL --- it's the wrong level abstraction for lay coders --- but yes, don't bash it for the wrong reasons.
BTW, HASH is default index type for MEMORY tables in MySQL.
Poorly played.
Or the Cialdini route: "Can you follow me on twitter because I have X followers?"
Subscriptions aren't always better. There is absolutely no reason for this to be a subscription, and I think it would be way too hard a sell.
Content is a Service Business - Tools of Change for Publishing
Ironic that An Anonymous Exec Demands Transparency From Google
I had to make changes to ruby's em-http-request for this

http://github.com/coderrr/em-http-request/commit/8e6444fe472...
Could OCR conquer the calligraphylion?
Gates on physics, Chrome OS, and Project Natal
Some may revel in the return of the 'letter'. Lost art of correspondence and all that...
Link Tracking - (lies, damn lies &) Statistics?
Any Idea how bit.ly and other link shorteners/tracker distinguishes between a link lookup and a link click?
The Guinness World Record Sends Bogus Takedowns to Failblog
This was (probably) fixed in Anarki a while ago:

http://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/6cb43b3a5977950a61bfd6ce5a...
Programmers should learn to be language agnostic
A while back I thought of doing the same thing for Unicode characters... am I a genius too?
Compared with CrazyEgg and ClickTale, I think the prices are actually very affordable.

CrazyEgg, while great for click analytics, does not offer scroll or form analytics.

On the other hand, ClickTale does, but they price by Page Views (individual pages), not Sessions (all pages browsed by a single visitor). If you do the math (assume 2 pages/visitor @ 20,000 page views for $99/month is equal to only 10,000 sessions), ClickTale is actually more expensive.

Of course, I'll have to let my potential customers decide the pricing, but I tried to choose prices that fit within the current market.
Something I find effective is offering loyalty perks. For example gamefly gives you a voucher for every N months you stay with them and some perks that kick in after a certain amount of time (eg. free shipping for merchandise after 3 years). Then when you go to cancel, they remind you that these benefits will be lost if you change your mind and want to rejoin, and offer you a discount if you prepay for the next 3 months up front. I find that quite effective.

As for the original question, I think an exit survey is fine but make sure there is a free-format field as well - not all complaints can fit in a multiple choice format, and I at least have taken the time to leave detailed feedback when presented with the opportunity to do so.
From 1995: Esther Dyson on Monetizing Creative Content
Download Free Trials of Cyber Cafe Software HotSpot Billing Bandwidth Manager  
The Most Cyber Cafes Worldwide are POWERED by Antamedia Internet Cafe Software. Running in Over 170 Countries in 30 Languages. Internet Caffe controls time and bandwidth usage of your computers and game consoles. You can easily manage customer accounts, setup security, charge POS items and get latest statistics, logs and detailed reports.
I'd be very surprised if they didn't properly survey their users to calculate the optimal price point. So the answer is because they'll sell more than twice as many copies at $30 as they would at $60.
GPL is being used as a vehicle for corruption in the Philippines.
The Philippines have taken the 7.2 Billion Pesos bid on Smartmatic voting machine that will be used in the 2010 synchronized presidential elections. http://pmana.multiply.com/journal/item/51

According the the specification, the machine is using uCLinux, which is a GPL-licensed application, which states that anything you linked against it, you'll have to release the code. But it seems that COMELEC doesn't want to release the source-code to the public for audit and review. http://www.cp-union.com/cpunion/blog/2009/07/14/it-doubtful-comelec-will-release-source-code-automated-election-system

Now we are on petition to prevent their interests of corruption. But it seems that the government doesn't listen.

http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090713.025447.d298f560.en.html

http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090713.031109.b9fbe3ab.en.html

God help the Philippines..
Any Idea how bit.ly and other link shorteners/tracker distinguishes between a link lookup and a link click?
Rebooting the RSS cloud
yes. how much of an investment can I put you down for? ;)
Any database engine worth its salt will use some kind of balanced tree structure (canonically, a B-tree or variant thereof, but since I'm on a project that isn't using a B-tree, I'll be a little less restrictive). This is primarily, as said above, because trees speed up range queries, not just point queries (hash tables only improve point query speed), but also because you don't need to rehash everything whenever your data set grows beyond some size. Balanced trees get the nice property that, though their point queries are O(log n), everything else is O(log n) as well (updates, inserts, range queries, deletes), while hash tables suffer the penalty of being amortized (fast for almost everyone means slow for some). Besides, log is a very powerful function. Even if your database is extremely large (a million elements, say), the log factor is only going to give you about twenty seeks.

Another problem with hash tables is that if your keys are large (varchars), you have to hash the entire string, or deal with more collisions. A reasonable balanced tree index on varchars just needs to call strncmp(3), which can terminate much sooner than a hash function. Of course, it's unlikely that your index, if it's large enough for you to care, is going to be CPU-bound, but it's important to remember that the constant inside the O(1) (amortized) hash table is probably going to be pretty large in this case.
Any good startup should demand a lot. Far more than established companies. In return, they give equity that can, potentially, be worth nice chunk of money. Which is something established companies won't do.

If you want money and cushy job, go to big company. If you want to work your butt off, create something interesting, with the potential of a big payoff, go to a startup.
We tell them we are sorry to see them leave, and delete their accounts.

We ask them if they have any last minute feedback, you'd be surprised how many people respond to this and are thankful that you asked.

Exit survey seems a bit over the top and impersonal.
10 is a stretch. After a couple hours of computing several hundreds of millions of attempts, the best I achieved was a distance of 43 bits (assuming duplicate words are acceptable).

jruby rubinius MRI Cloud postgresSQL record MRI exception record mongrel tokyo Cloud

This task is so unbalanced as a contest. The thought of spending a couple hundred dollars of cloud computing time to just buy more 'lottery tickets' for $3000 worth of prizes (assuming you could use the cloud time) is too much of a stretch for me.
Does anyone know if there's a hacker house in San Francisco?
Assuming there are around 2 million active users (TC mentions a figure of 2 million downloads just last year) of Xobni, assuming a conversion rate of 1%, is 20k users that pay, which is over $500,000 in revenue. Nice change!

IMHO, outlook users would pay, considering Xobni makes their lives easier and the fact that the number of emails are increasing rapidly.
A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair
Maybe this would help?

Section 19.3

The line terminator for message-header fields is the sequence CRLF. However, we recommend that applications, when parsing such headers, recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore the leading CR.
Hrumph - I prefer what this other guy said:

"The disadvantage of believing that all programming languages are equivalent is that it's not true. But the advantage is that it makes your life a lot simpler. And I think that's the main reason the idea is so widespread. It is a comfortable idea."

http://paulgraham.com/icad.html
Winner of the GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE award: http://www.genetic-programming.org/hc2009/cfe2009.html
I think that's slightly naive. The schoolbook graphs of price elasticity show that there's a single maximum, that can be reached simply by walking the curve. It tends not to work that way.

You also have to consider how people react on prices (if you sell the product for $30 in the first 6 months, then start selling it for $60, the first users won't get upset. If you do it the other way around, the loyal beta users who upgraded will feel ripped off).

People also don't tell the truth in surveys. They believe they will buy it at a specific price point, but in reality they don't. In survey mode people may think about what other software products cost, and think what they consider reasonable. When people have to actually make a purchase people have to pick between going to the movies or buying a software license. Wildly different results are to be expected.

I wonder what other people's experiences with surveys are, and how people go about picking a price. It's certainly a fascinating subject.
Pakistan, A Popular Outsourcing Destination?
With the one about towels (number 2), I wonder if people behaved better because they thought they were being monitored; and, if so, whether some of them decided not to stay in that hotel again.
Three Years of Real-World Ruby
Facebook Design: Re-designing our registration page
2 million active users? I think the video said 2 million downloads total, which would put the number of active users probably at 20% of that. Given that they have accepted 15 million or so in venture funding, it really is just change to them.
But often the sides come into conflict. For example, most recently, the Stallman-esque group started a massive marketing campaign for Theora--it's free, so we should use it. This caused the Linus-esque group incredible aggravation, because they cannot understand why someone would want to promote something that is technically inferior in many ways. Equally, the Stallman-esque group cannot understand why the Linus-esque group would even consider using multimedia formats covered by patents--why would anyone do that?--it's against the open source philosophy--and away the argument goes again.
Twitcaps: Watching the World in Real Time
If I can phrase things to drive people more efficiently through interfaces, it will help them have a better experience.
Half the groups who apply only do it in the last day or two before the deadline.
Nothing has changed in that respect. We rarely accept single founders and when we do we usually encourage them to get a cofounder before YC starts. So the $14k for a single founder is more of theoretical possibility.
I apologize and thank them for trying it out.

I tell them how to delete their account (or delete it for them if it's not easy).

I tell them we just got started and ask: "Question: How can we improve the site such that you'd recommend it to your friends?"

I thank them again for "giving us a shot".

I sign the email as a cofounder of the site.

So far the majority of deleters answer the questions and are very, very nice about it. The change in tone from "delete me" to their pleasant tone in the final response is great.

I keep meaning to toy more with ~"We know you might not like the service, but here's a few free months (coupon code) you can give to your friends as our thanks for giving us a shot and providing great feedback."
How do statisticians decide on what a good sample size is?

Certainly they can't use the science of statistics to determine the sample size, since a good statistical study would require using a good sample size.
Q4M (Queue for MySQ) Presentation Slides at MySQL Conference
I'm going to write something about how to apply. I've been meaning to for years.
The rather good Fiddler debugging proxy (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) always flags HN for this. In a popup, no less. So it drives me nuts too, and if it could be fixed, I could click on fewer popups.
We've been getting lots of people asking about it. Maybe it was the Inc article.
He makes a good point about sport fans and coupon clippers having subsidized "real" news. HN is a prime example of why that can't work online.

Is there any reason that can't capitalise on that reversal by creating niche news sites that excel at reporting on those kinds of topics ("city council or the coup in Madagascar" were the examples he gave)? The self-selecting that is killing them now could theoretically keep then help them simplify their content and advertising targeting.

Maybe someone is doing that already and it isn't working?
You should include those in the data set.
Engineyard Challenge Python Code
Eh? Apache is a fine web server which has done a great job over the last 10+ years for all kinds of people and businesses.
Here's a first pass at a python implementation for the Engineyard Challenge (http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/programming-contest-win-...).

Note that it doesn't do any random chars at the end of the string and doesn't change the case of the words.
I wonder if this is the reason I get a proxy error when I try and browse HN from my mobile phone.
That's not an article, it's a pandering, resume-padding piece of bait for his potential employers. And "language" in his case means PHP vs Java:

In fact, when looking at projects, I always consider the project’s needs first and then would look at languages.

I said the exact same thing, in interviews. But as soon as I am hired I tell them I am actually Common Lisp implementation agnostic.

P.S. He also used "irregardless".
A recommendation to applications is hardly as noteworthy as a written spec. Most clients (rightly) go by the spec, as you can see in this thread (PHP and Ruby have been mentioned; Python's urllib.urlopen also fails to properly parse the CR out of headers). So, no, that doesn't help the fact that the current production server violates the spec and breaks most mainstream http clients in the process, and does so with any oversight that is trivial to fix (which should never have made it into production and indeed already has been fixed in the repo).
This is secondhand information, but apparently at the PyCon VM Summit this year the Unladen Swallow guys mentioned that they were already faster than Psyco for Youtube's workload.
Dustin's research has applications in areas where every word makes a difference in your marketing efforts, or in guiding users more effortlessly through a process. That's why it's important.
10% selectivity is the minimum selectivity necessary for a b-tree index to be helpful.

That's probably on the high side. Suppose that records are stored in 8KB pages (which is probably too small for a modern system, but nevermind), the selectivity of the scan is 10%, the records that satisfy the scan are randomly distributed over the pages, each page holds, say, 40 records (which is conservative, even for small 8KB pages), and we're considering scanning a secondary index[1].

That means that a typical page in the heap has 4 matching records, which means we are very likely to have to read every page in the heap anyway. Worst still, the order in which the index scan returns results is unlikely to correlate with the physical storage order of the heap pages, which means that the 4 IOs per page are going to be random, not sequential. Add to that, in a scan of a secondary index, you need to read both the index page and the pointed-to heap page, which is an additional I/O (compared to a sequential scan of the heap). So it's easy to construct a realistic scenario when you wouldn't want to use a secondary index when the scan selectivity is "only" 10%.

[1] And that an index-only plan can't be used: i.e. we need to fetch the pointed-to heap page.
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