skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Under Gentoo, at least, the default postgresql.conf is still garbage. limit of 100 connections, hardly any shared memory, really nothing about it is good. I don't think shipping a good config file is possible though; we need a good config file generator, that looks at kernel configuration and hardware configuration and makes a good config based off that. It doesn't look like such a thing exists though.
It's not a question of whether he approves or disapproves. It's a question of whether economics deserves a Nobel... do psychology, philosophy, and history have Nobels?
Absolutely agree. I would also add wrestling. Any kid who did wrestling easily had me on the ground screaming before I could get any fancy blocks, punches, or kicks out (it is always a bad idea to try to kick a good wrestler). Basically, any discipline which involves you having to physically overpower another human being will make a difference if you stick with it.
hah, and then i remembered hearing this talk at the iwp9 in madrid:

"ConcepOntoFs: A Semantic File System for Inferno",
http://lsub.org/iwp9/cready/abheyshahplan9.pdf

this paper also has references to other papers on the topic.
You may like some other opinions on that article as well: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/matt_ta...
There's also no Nobel Prize for Mathematics. If mathematics is also a bogus subject, then it'd be worth knowing that there is no Nobel Prize for Economics.
So here is my general thinking on this contest, with an eye on computational efficiency:

1. SHA-1 is done in 64 byte chunks, with the result of one chunk being the base of the next. Padding and length only factor in at the last chunk. This means you can half the number of computations (or even 1/3 it...) by computing the first block of a "prefix string" then going from there.

2. Cuda is good on integer ops. SHA-1 is integer ops.

3. All the combinations of <= 5 printable chars can be represented in <60 MB meaning they don't have to keep being generated.

Not saying anything the article says was wrong per-say Im saying that large amounts of computation can be factored out from the naive approach, large enough to be meaningful that is.
The premise of the author's argument seems to be "don't worry, the programmer won't do anything bad with the code". I don't think it's such a good idea to just implicitly trust that an employee who downloads your source code isn't going to do something unethical with it.

(especially in an environment in which the owner of that code, i.e. Goldman, has already taken great pains to prevent copying of the source code, such as removing physical access to the PCs, etc)

Goldman has to protect their shareholders in this kind of thing, and there really isn't any room for "let's just trust this guy won't do anything harmful to us" in that.
Various parts of Real World Haskell show how to do scripting-type tasks using Haskell, especially chapters 7 and 9 (linked below, but they'll make more sense if you also read the preceding chapters):

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/io.html

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/io-case-study-a-librar...
My dream, love it!
Thanks! Any libraries for web oriented tasks?
The Community Life Cycle
Not for 20 years they shouldn't.

Gotta love the down mods... Seriously... as a person you can't harbour this type of resentment for that long... it defeats you.
You sir, are incorrect, there are lots of discoveries in economics. They are just not empirical they are derived from logic and the study of human action. When studying a complex dynamical system its is impossible to make predictions, but there are fundamental laws that can guide human action and understanding. For instance, when printing money inflation occurs, by definition inflation is a term to describe increase in the amount of money. Now all things being equal when there is an increase in the amount of money prices will in general go up, more dollars chasing the same number of goods.

If you're interested in solid well grounded economics, I highly encourage you to look at Carl Menger, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. There are of course many more, but they are giants.

Knowledge and information transmission and dispersal is a key economic domain. The price system is perhaps the most powerful information system ever invented since it allows people all over the world who have never met and to coordinate their behavior in mutual beneficial ways. A quick easy read is Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (http://mises.org/econcalc.asp) is a clear example of how economic thought can be applied to predict outcomes of various systems, but notice it doesn't say in 10 years X will happen.
It might be realistic for kids, because kids aren't socialized as adults. In fact, we've deliberately delayed socializing them as adults more and more, and I think that's a grave error, which we've only been able to afford because we're so wealthy as a society. I think there are enormous costs, not only in the "educational" system that delays education more and more, but in the costs of that delay on the productive lifespan of people once they're finally accept as "adult", some 5-10 years after they were physiologically adult.
Actually, if anyone has a good cuda card and wants to team up on the code writing email me: sophacles@gmail.com. We an use different random seeds when it comes time to running the stuff or whatever... I just think it would be fun!
This is exactly what I thought when reading the OP's post.

A Y-Combinator clone that specialized in industrial hardware or medical devices. Man, my brain would be in warp speed. I work for a medical device manufacturer but for all my experience, would never think of doing a product in this field because of the huge financial and regulatory hurdles. If yc-type guidance were available, I'd be going over ever problem I know of in this field to figure out if I could do a startup to solve it!
Although, one could also make the case that he already had access to the code before his departure as part of his daily responsibilities. Therefore, the fact that he was leaving had no real implications in him knowing the innards of the application and its source code.

What I don't understand is why there's no word about an NDA between Goldman and Mr Aleynikov. Had he been under contractual obligations, or bounded by a noncompete clause, Mr Aleynikov wouldn't have been incentivized to extract code from the repository to being with. It seems logical to me that if you're dealing with coveted IP, a contract between the parties is a necessity rather than a luxury.
Seems they make stuff just much more complicated there. I'll give it a better shot, but for now, new commands for the filesystem, it's just crazy. I want my grandparents to know how to use this, and I remember I always had to explain the concepts of cabinets, folders and files.

This is why I over stress the need for use cases.

The reasoning behind this idea is how I use my files, the intuitive processes to organize and later find, the flow of thought and command.
Have to be anonymous for this as it is a little too personal for comfort.

My earliest memories are from probably extremely traumatic situations: Finding my mother's boyfriend dead from a heroin overdose in his bed (both were addicts) and watching an ambulance crew carry him out. Eating raw pasta when our mother had left us alone in the house for days. Being taken from our house by social workers (I remember parts of the drive from there in vivid detail). I was four or five at that time.

The funny thing is I don't remember how I felt at the time, but the scenes are etched in my memory.

Oh well, make of it what you want, it just came back to me when reading your post :)
If you give a majority share to a VC, or they have more board seats... you should expect to move down from CEO to another position, if you don't perform.

Why is that a bad thing? If you don't like it - don't take the money. If you take the money - expect to step down if you can't hack it.
like... Flash?
God told me that if you interpret the bible correctly, it proves that Man's fingers were designed to use vi, not emacs. But only on Windows. Discuss.
Dawkins is so thick-headed. He has a bias about how believers think, and applies this to all of his arguments.

Check out this passage from page 6:

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and
incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It
could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of
Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God,
Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the
least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think
that's the case.

Collins has just told him his definition of God and Dawkins rejects it.

I honestly don't want to jump into an argument on the merits of each side, but intolerance is unacceptable. There certainly exist religious nuts, but this God-delusion belief is itself dogma and is blind to the articulate believers.

PS--in that Ben Stein movie (Expelled) Dawkins himself states that life could have been brought to this universe from a higher being, but that that higher being itself had to come from somewhere. This IS "God" for many people. Not very many people believe God is some guy with a white beard who yells and throws lightning bolts.
Someone try it and post back here. I'm too scared.
> What other subjects don't you approve of? Psychology? Philosophy? History?

I suspect you'd find a surprising number of people on HN who think (most) psychology is bogus. Ditto for philosophy, nutrition, economics, etc. Any field where there is a long, unresolved disagreement about basic facts, comprehensible to lay people, will attract a certain level of skepticism (if the economists don't believe each other, how are we supposed to believe any of them.)
It won't be the VM or App developers slowing down progress in this area. It will be the "standards" issue so that developers don't have to write three different modules for three different accelerometers and properly load the right one depending on which iPhone or Palm Pre you have. That will definitely slow things down as vendors fight over which of their API is "the bestest" for all phones/netbooks.
It's true there's nothing funnier that the sound of a geek's finger breaking, but the down side is that 25 years later they won't be at the class reunion, and that hurts.
Yup, and eating right. What kept tripping me up in my 20s as I tried to get back into shape time and time again was learning that I couldn't eat like a teenager any more. I have to be really careful what I eat. I eat nutritious food now wherever possible. I throw in 3 1-hour visits to the gym during a busy week and 4 if I have the chance.

It does give me self-confidence. It also helps me think more clearly, handle more stress under pressure, and since most of my friends are at the same gym we get time to socialize during the week. It beats spending money on booze to socialize at a bar with friends during the week. Save that experience for the weekend :-)
It may be true that most students who drop out do not do so for financial reasons. However, those students who do are fairly easy to help- they simply need more money. Helping the emotionally disengaged is a far harder problem, not one solvable by the government.
It's pretty useful in unit tests, since it very clearly lays out the sample data you'll be comparing. I rarely if ever used it in the production code.
Yes, $12B of the AIG bailout went straight to Goldman as a counterparty.
The article was over-the-top in its conspiracy theory, but Tiabbi was certainly directionally correct.

His follow-up after Goldman's earnings is much more in line with the actual facts: http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/16/on-goldmans-gigan...
Any SUID binary which allows library loading would work for this purpose. Normally that's not a security problem, but a combination of other factors has allowed it to become one.
I don't really know what to say to that other than that I'm really happy to see you on the 'other side' of that and alive and apparently well. I thought I had had it pretty rough at some times in my past, you make me feel like I had a very easy childhood.

Wow.
OK. But he apparently had some expectation related to the Pro nomenclature: I complained that it was a Pro machine, and should be treated as such.
Yeah, put the SQL in the view - where it belongs. Long live Spaghetti PHP!
What would you suggest they do? Your follow-on indicates that you think ties should be adjudicated on the basis of the "best" algorithm, but how do you objectively define that?
Oh...awesome passage:

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the
face of constructive investigation, it is the word
miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed
like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by
the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle
just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps
saying things like "From the perspective of a believer."
Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you
find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and
your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry
to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of
what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my
scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The
difference is that my presumption of the possibility of
God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours
is.

Dawkins is again ridiculous. He's defining "miracle" as "impossible event" which is absurd. He's also supposing that people of faith lose scientific skepticism. The retort that he's the only one denouncing something is brilliant.
But along this line - PHP started as a template language... and it should have remained a template language.
Extremely useful if you are a photoshop guy and you need to slim down a website. People aren't paying as much attention to shaving kilobytes off of the size of a webpage anymore, but given the number of mobile devices with data access, it is still a very big deal.
"used to not talk to him"

That's not the behavior he was upset about. Speaking personally, I'd have been ecstatic if people not talking to me were the worst I had to put up with in high school, and I had it a lot easier than he did, from his description.
Here are some thoughts:

First one to hit Hamming distance of 5.

Lowest average Hamming distance over top n trials.

Most trials in x hours.

...
Alternatively, I wonder if Apple could put a hook into the iPhone's browser api such that any use of a browser in third-party apps can be restricted from parental controls.
A simple criterion would be "capable of calculating the most results", which can be objective and meets some definitions of "best algorithm".
I would agree with you but recently I have really started to like the TechStars program. Why? Because of the impression given to me from their recent videos about the start-ups and the program that have appeared this time. The videos show how the program works, the openness, the mentoring, the city (Boulder not Boston), the community/spirit there, what the founders are like. When TechStars first started, I was thinking 'they have no chance, YC is the only place to be'; but now, I really respect what they have going on there, and wouldn't mind going there.

YC seems a bit more closed. Outsiders can't gage what it is really like except from a few vids here and there and the comments on HackerNews. Plus, with the increased popularity of HackerNews, it is quite difficult to track the comments from YC company founders. Of course, when someone gets in then they probably don't care any more, but it's always nice to be open and show people what you're all about. The same goes for all the other programs.

The point: if you're starting a new program, especially in a traditionally non-tech area, it is best to be open and show what the program (including location) is all about. It's just good marketing.
He was computing the probability of a Hamming distance of exactly D instead of at most D. To get the "at most" version, you could just add up the exact ones, but it's better to just use the central limit theorem instead.

As for your math, I think you are over counting a little :). The problem is, 100...0 is counted by both ??0...0 and ?0?00...0, where ? marks a digit that you've allowed to be free, and 0 marks a "chosen" 0.
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I don' think I've seen medical termanology and the term "mofo" used in the same sentence before.

Your point about overriding apoptosis is a good one, however in cases when the patient will die of radiation poisoning, cancer becomes of secondary importance.
Oh yeah, I didn't go to my high school re-union either. I liked the people I went to class with at the time, but the memories from the time are painful so I really have no desire to stir them.

At the same time I go to my college re-union every year, which is associated with a time when life became stable.
There are many forms of karate and some of them have little to do with fighting. If you want to quickly learn to street fight take Kenpo. If you want to learn how to make your body as lethal as possible take a non sport from of Muay Thai.

Note: I took American Kenpo for a few years and liked it, but I don't think it's really the best art for the average 12 year old.
How much of a breach is it when a hacker 'steals' his own code?
I find this, and comments in the thread here extremely depressing, for a few reasons.

First, it's sad how evil kids can be. Clearly Lord of the Flies isn't a apocalyptic fantasy but a realistic description of the social order of our youth.

That said, what I find truly disturbing is seeing bright, intelligent, logical adults wallow in disgust and outright anger over things that were perpetrated on them by children.

Look at your average kid from highschool. They are unfinished. They think in ridiculous patterns and do nonsensical things. You were them once. You thought like they did. The point here is that you are likely nothing like that person by the time you hit 25. Neither are they.

I was never a geek outcast so perhaps I just can't relate to some of the extreme behaviour that others have experienced. That said, I was never a "cool kid" either, and felt all the social stigma of being the outcast. I so wanted to be one of the cool guys with the hot chicks smoking in the parking lot. Alas, I wasn't well off and had peculiar interests coupled with less than stellar social skills; a bit of a late bloomer you could say.

I look back now however, at 34, and realize that it was me that survived the teenage years without incident. I realize the pretty girls weren't all that hot then, and certainly aren't now. I realize that spending all day skipping class translated into not getting a job worth much. I've got a wife and 2 kids, wonderful experiences of a 1/3 of a life. What am I supposed to be mad about?

The author is mad because people from a school he admits he had no friends at are contacting him 25 years later! They not only remember him, but want to see him. They remember that they were children once, but they aren't the same kids from 25 years ago any more.

The only one that is affected at all is the author. It's time to let go, move on, and be proud of who you are and what you've achieved. Harbouring such resentment isn't healthy, regardless of whether it's understandable.
Oh, it is so common. Sublimation and suffering are required for a success in creative activities, like going-through-pain is required for success in a professional sports.
A more appropriate book would be:

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion = Robert B Cialdini

I agree with Mr Hicks, using your intelligence to find ways to psycologically manipulate people is pretty low.
This seems really great, however, the TINY resolution requirement for the box art makes me wonder how good the quality will be printed out.
>no one dares to reevaluate the underlying concepts that bound those layers. One of those underlying concepts is the hierarchical file system found on every personal computer of today as well mobile device.

I see someone hasn't read a single thing that Ted Nelson has written just yet.
I'm working on a project right now. The amount of money that YC would invest in my project would be helpful, but not game changing at all (since I have savings).

The only reason I would consider applying is to have access to the resources and experience that PG would be able to share via his contacts and other YC alums.
Deciding between TwiML and VoiceXML when building telephony apps
Interesting -- a GNU Free Documentation alternative book on starting perl for practisioners. However, the page looks stale. The PDF is (c) 2003, so unless this is a recent re-release under the GNU Free Documentation License, we may not see: the LaTeX source code (with figures and a Makefile) will be available soon.
Apple is rating all Internet capable apps 17+
Internet capable means access to the internet, period. There is no built in web browser, nor any content provided to users of this application other than the content that they themselves have placed. They will never see anyone else's content, nor will anyone see theirs.

Thats why this is such a big deal. It's ridiculous and to the point of being extreme, rather than making smart decisions about what should and should not be allowed.
There's a big list at http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_librarie...

I haven't used any of these, and none of them look super-compelling to me, though HAppS seems fairly mature and full-featured.
Putting Max on the Back Burner (notes on shuting down a startup)
I agree. It's worth noting that the vast majority of religious people don't actually care about how the universe ticks; it simply makes no difference to their daily lives.

It's too bad that only the loud extremist minorities get all this passive aggressive press.
I'll second this. I studied karate as a child and it is one of my most cherished memories. In addition to the concepts of self defense and self control, it teaches respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others. I believe respect to be one thing most people in our current society are lacking.
What's the real story here: is it "Apple locks out a competitor's product" or "Apple closes a security hole in their software"? Since iPhones also sync email account information and other sensitive data it's probably not a good idea to allow any USB device to pretend to be an iPhone and suck out all that data.

Likewise, the firmware updates that tend to break iPhone jailbreaking only close security holes. Apple is remarkably apathetic about whether you jailbreak your phone, since they already made their money from the phone.
For some reason, this domain is redirecting to Bloomberg.com.
Maybe some sort of namespacing on tags would fix that; ie. so that your 'conf' tag for a software project doesn't conflict with the system 'conf' tag, which may have a different set of permissions.
i guess this is why i don't get the whole ruckus surrounding the oracle purchase of sun. Can't some other entity just takeover the responsibilities (under different branding) if oracle decides to let mysql flounder?