skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LeftRight Studios (AlphaLab startup) looking for computer science summer intern
Now I would like to see the statistics of sizes of Star Wars T-Shirts sold. In fact statistics broken down for all geek themes, please (are Linux users fatter than OS X users? and so on...).
Kudos on cracking SELinux!
I agree. I implemented a pre-calculated nested tree, as in the article, based on an existing PHP implementation but in Perl. In benchmarking it, I found that it was faster than I thought to update the entire, large tree - but that the L-Tree was going to be a much better solution overall. L-Tree has that low-level C, Russian hacker edge going for it :) But your mileage may vary.

The nice thing about the pre-calc stuff is that it is very approachable, and you can build it yourself. I found doing so very educational and encourage anyone who is curious to play around.

As someone else mentioned - we also looked at rolling our own materialized path trees - and did an implementation of this as well, but in the end L-Tree 'just works' out of the box, and is wicked fast compared to a higher level implementation... so we went with it. Its great. I'm not a Postgres fanatic or anything - I like MySQL and Postgres, and lots of NoSQL databases too, but Postgres is great at this in particular.
It sure doesn't sound like they gave anyone the "green light" to publish anything.
How does the saying go? "Anger is punishing yourself for other people's mistakes".
BEA has its own JVM as well, and guess who bought BEA?

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html

By the way, I think JRockIt is the best JVM out there for server-side deployments. I've used both JRockIt and Sun's JVM on EC2, and JRockIt has much better memory management.
"Vedder says that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only five of the 25 fastest-growing occupations over the next decade require any kind of college degree. The rest include jobs like office clerks, home care and health aides, janitors and maids--not exactly the nursing or green technology jobs Obama highlighted in his speech. Vedder says the president is cherry-picking his data."
I suppose. But abstraction layers give you so much more than that. A good counter-example for why you should use one is simply prepared queries. Doing stuff like:

mysql_query("SELECT something FROM table WHERE that='" . mysql_real_escape($var) . "'"); is just terribly ugly and annoying, especially if the query gets complex.

I've never put any faith in the whole database portability claim for exactly the reason he points out. Any even moderately complex app is going to leverage database-specific performance enhancements that can't be abstracted away.
Agreed, getting into shape is the best thing a person can do for their life. The self confidence it gains you, will open you a lot of doors.

And it's not like its a huge time commitment, an hour a day is all it takes to be in the best shape of your life
It might not affect you directly, but what about your partners? Apis you might take for granted. Do you sit back and hope they have the expertise to move to a new solution. I think Oracle should embrace the community and benefit from it's contributions.
> Prison and school are in fact natural, it's civilized society that's takes effort

Civilized society is spontaneous, and pops into existence whenever two people meet in the wilderness.

Both prisons and schools only come into existence when governments create them.
How is it an imposition?

What does creepy actually mean?

Why are they faux friends and not simply weak social connections that may have potential to grow stronger?
Netscape was a classic example. Even before they decided to rewrite everything in Java. Charles Ferguson's book is one place to read about this.
"Marketing is basically what separates humans from animals."

Sorry ? I really don't quite follow that, would you care to elaborate ?
I remember very little of school (my experience was meh, not bad). Sometimes (again on Facebook) I’ll see a name that seems familiar, but I can’t remember the person. Some (few) other people I remember clearly.

An addendum:

I can’t even remember college that clearly. More clearly than HS, but I can’t remember the names of most of my instructors. Where by “most” I mean all but one, and I only remember his name because he also became a friend.
I would be more pissed with Palm than Apple on this one. This is nothing more than a hack that Palm used to make the Pre look like an iPod, and a hack that they advertised, knowing fully well that it could be broken at any time, and they have no control over it. I'd even go so far as to say that it's better that Apple does this now while there's only one device that's affected by this, before other companies follow suit. It would have happened sooner or later--perhaps when Apple changes the way that iPods/iPhones sync and it would have broken unsupported devices anyway.
Isn't the definition for geek basically a nerd without the high intelligence.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=geek
I don't really agree with you that it's a marketing problem, but I don't think technology is the answer, either.

Looking at the Digital Bridge Academy's website, it just looks like another way to hold a student's hand.

Community colleges are awesome and serve many much-needed education niches in the U.S. but pushing people through an education that they don't value isn't going to create strong workers, or an educated populace, but simply drive up the minimum education requirements for any job.
I believe html5 should help bridge the gap when things are offline as it supports a concept similar to Google Gears. So yeah, the next generation of browsers is a able to change traditional app design.
Well, here's some studies.

Twitter's demographics: http://www.istrategylabs.com/twitter-2009-demographics-and-s...

Facebook's demographics: http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009-facebook-demographics-and-...

Twitter does slant older. 52% of Twitter users are over 34, whereas only 8.5% of Facebook's users are over 34.
Been to a live gig recently? I met more systems programmers backing up a vocalist on some instrument than anywhere else. The most recent one was a local fellow yank here in Sydney, he plays jazz for a living; this guy introduced C++ to MCI/LDDS/Worldcom back when it was a macro-processor, and he was their in-house compiler geek (btw, geeky bar talk with strangers has a peculiar taste to it; register allocation strategies over beer ftw! :-)

I also met a former Atari dude who now runs his own bar in Thailand.
Idiotic consumers persist in inappropriate enthusiasm for netbooks.
He puts way too much faith in karate to help his kids learn how to fight back. Karate does not teach you that.

I was in karate for years as a kid and got a black belt. I took karate for the same reasons he's putting his kids through it. I was tired of being picked on and I wanted to make myself more intimidating. It did not work. You do not learn how to fight in karate. You learn how to perform choreographed moves and routines (like katas and lots of shorter ones that we called 'techniques') and you kick and punch a lot of pads. Sparring is more like a game than a real fight, where you get points by making contact at the right places. Karate gives you good exercise (which is why it can be great for some people), but I did not get out of it what I wanted. I never learned how to fight simply because we never did any real fighting. I had a black belt, yet when it came down to it and someone was physically threatening me, the silly routines that worked against invisible attackers in karate did not work in real life. If you want your kids to learn how to fight and defend themselves, take them to a place where they actually have the kids fight each other. There are no shortcuts.

The self-esteem boost that I desperately wanted from karate I was finally able to get in high school by becoming really good at percussion. People finally started respecting me for what I could do. Drumline was where I belonged.
This would allow for defining the context of the search, so that would be a benefit, wouldn't it?
Although I am focusing on personal computing, distributed fits too?
From the post:

"Because it’s working for them. They’re making a killing taking their 30% commission on the 1.5 billion copies of $0.99 top-25 games that they’ve sold. Who cares if the App Store discourages good developers from putting serious effort into it? Apple doesn’t need to care. And, clearly, they don’t."

Yes, it's working for them. They are making money hand over fist. They don't care about developers because it's not in their interest to care. I know an app store dev with a top 100 app and he makes $5/day. The top 10 apps are making their authors rich and the rest of the apps are just trying to win that lotto.
Goldman Sachs is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, it's bad for America.
Managing beyond Web 2.0
As a kid in France I found that starting high-school the bullying mostly stopped with most bullies going over to the technical high school... (and it never was as bad as what I've heard from american friends)

Now I'm not so sure if the particular district the school was in (the middle school was a small countryside middle school whereas the high school was in a bigger town.) had any influence... How out of curiosity where did you study?

Thanks for the link on Summerhill very interesting idea... I 'm always interested in education experiments, I thinks there is a lot of research to be done on how to best educate kids and make sure they don't suffer from moral damage from bullying (although as someone said in another thread I'm also grateful for some of the bullying I've received it made me much more resistant to what people think about me)
No, I shouldn't care. If mysql dissappears there is postgresql and many other open source options.

All you should do is have an easy way to port all your data/code to the new database, which you should already have such backup plan, right?

Hosting providers should be aware and prepared to switch databases too.
These debates come up every now and then when one company makes a factually incorrect assertion about another company's product in an effective advertisement. Last time, it happened when an effective series of ads strongly suggested that cable internet access wasn't scalable, and would (it was suggested) inevitably slow to a crawl as neighbors came on line, leading to humorously presented civic unrest (the ads were amusing and effective in promoting this inaccuracy). Well, sure, this could happen, but won't necessarily happen. Anyway, when the Cable folks complained, the DSL companies behind the ad trotted out the same old line "they're just made because the ad is effective and they look bad." Of course, this is just how marketing and often legal folks talk. It probably rankles an engineer more, because we get angry when rhetoric obscures the truth and leads to misinformation, especially about technical issues. This can be a weakness when engineers try to address the public - Andy Grove sure looked bad when he lectured everyone (entirely accurately) about how unimportant the floating point error was. Truth is, amusingly and engagingly presented lies can absolutely form the public's belief system. Marketers are great at this.

Anyway, I don't know what Mac's cost, so I can't evaluate the accuracy of the claim. But if Apple does have some decent choices in the sub $1K range, then sure, the Microsoft is making inaccurate claims, and Apple isn't peeved "just because the ads are effective."
They've moved on, he's still holding onto anger from the 1980s.

From my purely biased perspective to be sure: Of course they've moved on. They had very little to more on from. The inflicted pain was purely asymmetrical. Tormenting him was just part of their day, like riding the bus, at worst or just the background noise of highschool at best.

It would be nice for them if he participated in their reunion to aid the perception that they were all just kids being kids, each playing their part, and now that we're all grown, no hard feelings, right?

King's to you, Fernand.
It's fitting that there's so much intersection between people who think censorship is a good idea and people who think evolution is a bad idea.

If you think about it, the whole idea of freedom of expression is evolutionary -- that we should allow ideas to compete on a level playing field and be "killed" naturally as they lead to or are replaced by better ones. That's natural selection.

Enter these well-meaning trogs, who believe they can "design" the perfect landscape of ideas, like a mental garden of eden, complete with the black list Tree of Knowledge.

Eat from it, and suffer in torment. Amen.
I understand how this guy feels, and I've been there.
Clearly, his emotions are still very raw from this. But I can't say I agree with his reaction.

I was in his shoes in high school, and now, I've been to the top school in the country, work at a cool web 2.0 startup and, most importantly, am engaged to the most wonderful woman I could possibly imagine. I am, quite literally, living my childhood dream, and I'm incredibly lucky.

So today, these f-ckers mean nothing to me. I don't feel the rawness that the author evidently still feels.

A year ago I ran into one of the a-holes from my high school days. Not the worst, but a bad one. And you know what? He apologized. It turns out he's a decent guy now, and I had a lot of fun hanging out with him. Is he going to be the best man at my wedding? Hell no. But am I glad I ran into him that day? Yes.

So I would go. Partly to have some closure. Partly out of curiosity. But mostly because I'm a relentless optimist. We've all done incredibly stupid things as teenagers, and people can change. I'm sure there'd be at least one person I'd be happy I'd met.

And if not, it'd still be fun to rub their faces in my success. ;)
Civilized society is spontaneous, and pops into existence whenever two people meet in the wilderness.

Are you sure? I am pretty sure there have been extensive studies on tribal groups all over the world that would disagree with you.

Also I think part of the success of Lord of the Flies was because it struck people as a realistic account of what would happen in that situation.
I don't know who downvoted you - you're absolutely right regarding the human ability to influence others. You didn't word it well, but the core of what you're saying is completely correct.

I've never been able to watch any Bill Hicks routine because that's the first one I saw, and it shocked me with how needlessly ugly it was. I can't find that stuff funny. Suggesting people kill themselves for their profession... That's fucked up.
Newly Digital in 1983
Social skills are skills -- and they can be taught. I firmly believe this because I went from being a barely social-able geek to having "decent" people skills.

The first step was working at a college radio station -- being a D.J., interacting with other D.J.'s in and out of the station taught me a lot about interaction/communication.

Afterwards, I joined a frat. Right or wrong (I later left because I realize it wasn't for me) they taught me how to interact with "non-geeks". Just how to be outgoing, friendly, etc. How to start a conversation. What NOT to talk about. How to pick up cues.

I couldn't have done it in high school. Nobody was teaching me, nor did I understand the value of the skill. Looking back on high school, my entire senior year girls were throwing themselves at me. I honestly thought they just wanted homework help and rides home. Completely oblivious.
Probably because what he is saying in this post doesn't align well with Tufte.

The premise of Tufte, or at least his aesthetic taste, is that graphs should be as information-dense as possible. The premise of Seth's post is that the only point of a graph is to get someone to understand the emotional impact of an idea. So instead of sending someone an email telling them that sales are down 12% this quarter, you show everyone a graph with a thick red line sloping down and to the right.
Karate teaches a lot more than self defense, it also teaches self control and a whole bunch of social skills.

Chances are that his son is less likely to get into a fight because of going to karate classes than he would have otherwise been.
Luckily they are also receiving things like the discovery channel, and presumably don't have a method of detecting which signals are tuned into more frequently by earthlings.
Learning Perl the Hard Way
Flagged because while Krugman has a Nobel prize, his NY editorials are mostly politics.
Good points.

but that form of structuring has been imposed by the nature of directories/files. I am not sure what the right solution would be for that case, perhaps internal tags for a set, but that would make things complicated.

In the nature of sets, maybe this could be done:
"Source Code", "Shared With XYZ", "Application1"

Sharing could be defined on the set, "Shared With XYZ" is a tag that when defined could have the permissions etc. When a file is "placed in it", it is automatically shared.

We need to get detached from hierarchical thinking to see the possibilities, which is difficult as it is all present.
Sort of, although you still have access to nearby islands and there are communal places such as those I mentioned. It's more isolated than the city, but it's also not always like being totally alone and devoid of any community at all.
So why do folks [make templating systems like Smarty]? Because PHP is also a programming language and they feel the need to "dumb it down" or insulate themselves (or others) from the "complexity" of PHP.

I don't think that's it, or if it is, it's not a very good reason. Using a templating system that's less than a full programming language keeps you from putting too much logic in your templates. Most of us prefer that logic and presentation be separated. PHP's HTML embedding tempts people to do the Wrong Thing in that regard.
It's an imposition, because it puts me in a position of either having to respond, or having to refuse to respond.

Creepy, according to Webster's, mean "annoyingly unpleasant". That works for me.

In terms of the last question, I think Mark Chu-Carroll, in the original post, explains nicely. He doesn't feel any particular connection to the folks from his school-- even the ones who didn't torture him. If he had, he surely would have been in touch with them in the past 25 years in some other way. If the weak social connection really had potential, why did it take Facebook as a catalyst?
I've heard of this concept of 'set-based' filesystems (although with different terminology), and I think it's brilliant. And not just for documents either. Generally speaking, websites have moved away from storing data in a hierarchical matter (e.g. old-school Internet directories), and on to flat, tag-oriented categorization (e.g. delicious) because of the abundance of information to categorize. Hierarchies do not scale and are difficult to change, whereas free-form categorization do not suffer from this.

Personal systems have more files on them than ever before, and fitting them to hierarchies that were invented decades ago can be tricky. These issues have been abated for now with things like OS X's Spotlight and Win7's Libraries, but my suspicion is that set-based filesystems would be far simpler than the current paradigm.

A good example off the top of my head is resolving what command-line executables are available. In most operating systems, this is done by setting a PATH variable with a list of directories that contain the executables. While this is trivial for the type of people on HN, it is far from for your average user. Instead, command-line executables could be given a specific tag, and the command-line would be able to execute any application that has that tag.

Now, whether set-based filesystems could replace hierarchical ones is a different question. Such a filesystem would diverge so greatly from current assumptions that people might be too aversive to change. It wouldn't be the first time; I think Plan 9 was light years ahead in so many respects, but it never took off because it was such a radical departure.
Yeah, what I really mean is that it's a value system/society/psychology problem. I don't think slick ads for calculus or PSA's will help at all.

We homeschool our children, and rather than ask them to do workbooks, we study grammar and math, and they get educated by being around us, because we put subtle psychological pressure on them to know what we know.

I went to CC, and David is spot on about the eclectic collection of students. I lived in a mountain/resort community, so the CC attracted great instructors, but they still could have done more by having higher expectations.
[Apache Sanselan] Retrieving Image Metadata using Sanselan
Aliens are almost certainly not tuning into our broadcasts, they dissipate rather quickly over universal distances, to the point where they are not distinguishable form background noise.
Helpful, yes. Thank you.
What I think most geeks don't understand is most bullies don't hate you. It's done to show dominance and amuse themselves, but it's got little to do with the target. Granted, there are a few sociopaths out there, but mostly it's unfocused aggression that ends up focusing on people who don't or can't defend themselves.

If you watch young friends you see a lot of put downs and aggression, but with the right feedback it get's defused and everyone laughs. When you lack social skills and strength you are constantly on the wrong side of that aggression and it never let's up. But, change the interaction slightly and you are now part of the gang.
The articles poses a question at the beginning about science sort of replacing religion in the popular psyche. It implies that as science explains more and more about our world, people will naturally accept it as obviously true.

It just doesn't work that way.

Overcomingbias.com and lesswrong.com spend a bunch of time talking about how religion isn't a position chosen after careful consideration of evidence. It's a social cohesion, tribal thing that operates in a totally different process of the brain, and serves an entirely different purpose than logic serves.

If science were going to replace dogma because of the overwhelming weight of the evidence, it would have done so already.
Materialized path is a good tool for trees that won't be deeply nested, and for tables that won't grow particularly large. However, because the path is stored in a string, read operations are not particularly efficient. It's a good tool to know, but it doesn't scale as well as Nested Set to very large datasets. That being set, it's much less complicated to implement than Nested Sets and is more efficient than adjacency list for many types of data.
Judge Dismisses SEC Insider Trading Case Against Mark Cuban
Thank you for a heartfelt story from real life that does not segue into the opening rap of The Fresh Price of Bel-Air. I have been reading too much Reddit and am ashamed to say I got suspicious halfway through.
I've had this idea several times, because there are a lot of discussions (not just flamewars) that end up being repetitive from iteration to iteration, forum to forum, including the classic online beer discussion (a combination of making-fun-of-American-beer, the counterargument that America has several good microbrews, and a friendly discussion about which microbrews and imports people like.)
"But it's absurd to say that pursuing open-source models would improve this. Whether the software is open or proprietary, the real barrier to what the author writes about is that hospital IT departments aren't up to the job."

That's also where I differ with the author; I have yet to see any evidence that open-source software could ever be up to the task.

In this case, relying on the kindness of strangers simply won't get the job done, since unless developers are doing this work for a living, odds are they won't be interested.

So as a hospital modernizing its IT system, you'd need to get a good development team to do it, and whether or not the end product is open source is irrelevant.