skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of my new compression algorithm. Start with this dictionary:

WORKMAKEDO ITS USHARDBETTFASTRONGERMORE THANHOURNEVAFTOV

Then encode each line of the lyrics as ordered pairs of start index and length values:

(0,4) (10,3)

(4,4) (10,3)

(8,2) (10,3)

(4,4) (13,4)

(17,4) (33,2)

(21,4) (33,2)

(25,4) (33,2)

(27,6) (33,2)

(35,9)

(44,4)

(45,3)

(48,3) (33,2)

(49,2) (33,2)

(51,3) (33,2)

(0,4) (10,2) (13,1)

(54,2) (33,2)

Since the dictionary is 56 characters long, this compression scheme is amenable to base64 encoding of the start-length pairs for 7-bit ASCII transmission channels, or packed binary representation for an even more compact representation.
Although this is a stunning trick which I will probably use myself, I think finding un-indexed queries is the wrong way of going about things. Sometimes queries are slow even if they do use indexes, so the best route is to find slow queries.

In MySQL finding slow queries is a pain because you STILL have to restart to enable the slow query log. In Postgres you don't (just set log_min_duration_statement to 0 and reload). Then you can use pgFouine (http://pgfouine.projects.postgresql.org) to analyze them - it produces a nice report.
Because it is a portable format. MP3s you gotta waste time burning, cds are good to go right away
An Emacs cheatsheet as a mindmap
San Francisco Opens The City’s Data
My anecdotal experience leads me to argue to opposite case. As the article notes, "the better technology works, the less we'll learn about how it works."

My grandfather (almost 90) knows what operating system and browser he's using because he bought his first PC in the early 80s when you had to mess around with DOS. My dad is the same way, as am I. My sister, who is 6 years younger, has no clue. By the time she started learning to use a computer, most of the technology had already become invisible (for example, she never learned how to use a modem because by then we had DSL - always on).

Now, my sister is certainly web savvy, very comfortable with cell phones, texting, social networking, etc. But she's got no clue about any of the underlying technology. She doesn't need to know, because it just works. So I agree with you that upcoming generations will be more comfortable with the uses of technology, but I think that most of them will be clueless about how it works.
Thank you -- I see a lot of people thinking 'banking' is all about your personal small loan from the neighborhood bank. That's like a tiny slice of the tip of the iceberg.

Most banking takes place in volume, it is done through personal contacts, and it requires substantial knowledge and background in banking to do. Anyone who has ever managed a significant line of credit, term loan, or more sophisticated instruments used by larger businesses knows that you cannot just replace it with some peer to peer model.
I think "the rule" should be very simple: if your data has just one parameter, don’t use colors! The gray scale will give you the only faithful representation of the data.
For Web Workers: Reclaim Your Attention
Try using "Paul Graham". The visualization is quite interesting.
Making a big deal out of color in the design sense in tech is probably a great way to discourage men from buying your product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcBpXYI1r3Q
Site doesn't seem that polished, since hitting the logo gets you an error
Neat. I like it. It surprized me that the result for the same name was different on succesive attempts.

But why in god's name did I have to increase my window size?
i think we are witnessing a growing dichotomy in the purchase and use of digital media. one group has invested in high-quality sound system(s) and CDs are the highest quality form of music you can purchase (other than SA-CD and DVD-audio of course, and vinyl some would argue.) on the other hand, you have the group that wants to purchase tracks one at a time and listens to them on their ipod/laptop/docking station and the sound quality of downloads is 'good enough'.
Add-Art: Art replaces ads
Hopefully pg stores the passwords in plaintext so he can set up a quiz like this for HN passwords just to be sure.
Root cause analysis isn't really their strength, in their announcements anyway. Do they think people would get upset if they knew the core reason for the problem or something?
I'm confused as to the problem you're describing.

I log in to Google Checkout, there's a search box right above the list of recent orders. (Title: "Search Orders.") I type in "Smith" and get a list of 10 orders. 6 of them are buyers with the last name "Smith." The other four have "Smith" in the address somewhere.

I agree that search and reporting (among other things) leaves much to be desired--I ended up hiring someone to do data entry when I wanted a list of customer zip codes recently--but when I find myself in a similar situation to what you describe, I have no problems at all.
It will be me, but... I. Don't. Get. It.
I could see something like "Fast failure is good", in the sense that (ultimately) successful startups are a lot more responsive to user/customer feedback. The faster you fail, i.e. come to realize that a given idea isn't working, the faster you can adapt.
Arrow of time no longer double-ended
That's absolutely true. Obviously I was speaking from the view point of a semi decent developer :)
Or you could work while going to school, skip the partying, ride a bicycle, and keep your debt to a repayable level.

I am 22 and I have a real job. During school, I washed a lot of dishes, picked up a lot of construction site refuse, drove a lot of nails, cut a lot of boards, and cleaned up a lot of spyware. Now I write software, for more than the spyware and dishwashing, but less than the construction. I'll still be able to repay my loans when they come due.
This is helpful: http://personas.media.mit.edu/
Would be great to see a profile comparison feature.
Having a physical, tangible CD in my possession feels more real than downloading mp3s. And if I want to, I can always rip the mp3 off the CD myself.
This has been submitted already earlier with the original headline:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772471
I would love to see a list of the most popular searches as well.
Downvote me if you want to but I honestly can't believe that this article got 50 upvotes (at the time of this writing), while some really thought provoking articles get 2 or 3 upvotes. I know that whining about how HN content has dropped in quality is frowned upon here, but I can't just stand beside and say nothing while content like this slowly ruins HN, turning it into a caricature of it's former self.
So, at the risk of getting heavily downvoted I'm still going to express my opinion: This. Doesn't. Belong. Here.
I'll throw an anecdote in - I started lifting weights when I was 12 and I'm the shortest male on either side of my family.
I thought that repeating defamatory remarks was a defamation on its own!
Hmm .. so this is a sales / lead generation problem right?

* Just to look at today's solutions - have you tried digging LinkedIn real hard to find the person with the right title? Knowing the exact title or "path" on LinkedIn would quickly tell you if someone really knows person X or not?

* There's a few pure lead generation companies out there, have you tried those? (Just to understand what's not working with how people do things today)
SASS makes CSS fun again (sorta)
That's pretty f'd up. Do journalists have to publish their street address?
A whopping 40% of Mozilla’s work is done by volunteers
The Impossible Cool
We don't know that this is still the case. Text messaging is very popular, and what was once a little-used patch of bandwidth might not be so spare these days. This is not to say that the charges are warranted (except that people pay them) but that the 1985 unused-band consideration isn't as applicable.

This is the basic problem. Geeks like the idea of unlimited bandwidth, but it really isn't a possibility. Physics tells us that you can't have it, especially over wireless.
I believe that the window size thing reflects that its more of an experiment and possibly even an art piece, so they're managing the aesthetic experience.
The CDs I buy are a lot cheaper than digital downloads. I imagine this is due to the fact that CDs are subject to overproduction, and shops or publishers will reduce prices to get rid of excess stock. Digital downloads are not subject to this issue, and seem to remain expensive.

There's a few other reasons: CDs have no DRM, and offer very high quality. Fuzzy reasons include a certain enjoyment of the physical artifact, and the fact that it encourages me, every so often, to listen to an album straight through, something I rarely do with digital media.

Mainly, though, I resent paying the same or more for digital downloads - CDs are a physical artifact, so digital stuff ought to be cheaper. I buy singles via download, as they work out cheap, but albums do not.
I didn't even see the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, need to scroll down. So I kept refreshing the page because I thought it was broken.
And yet the Virgin Megastore in Times Square closed down.
I find this article weird. Why isn't 95% of all music sold in the U.S. via compact disc?

All my music purchases are CDs (and I do purchase quite a few), because if I only wanted a digital copy, I would probably obtain it online outside of a paid download service; P2P is free, usually more convenient, and usually higher quality.

I don't think I need to enumerate lengthily the virtues of CDs; physical artifact, nice art, cultural signifier, (more or less) perfect fidelity, can play in car, etc.

Anyway, I just don't see why this writer is confused that more people aren't buying something they can get better for free. I understand that there are some people who consider it unethical to download pirated music, but I don't think that they are a majority of music consumers.
Because there is not much advantage to digital music.

I can play a CD natively in my car, or any car. I can play it on my iPod, I can play it in Linux. I can back it up for later, but I still have the artwork.

With digital downloads, I have to burn them onto a CD, label the CD, and probably rip some DRM off it to work with non-iTunes players.

For CDs the only hard part is buying them. Sometimes I can't find the bands I like at my local store, but it is a decent independent record shop so it has a good selection and I like supporting them. If I go to a show, I make sure I buy the CD there. If I can't find it at either place Amazon is cheap enough and it gets delivered to my mailbox.

I guess the only advantage is being able to buy songs a la carte, but thats not how I personally listen to music. Sometimes I buy a CD and had a bunch of the tracks and first, and a month later those are the ones I love. How can you tell that from a sample? So I just buy the whole thing anyway.

Not everything new is better.
You should never have to ask to link something on the internet!

I'd prefer to host it, mainly because my technique is pretty crude at this point, and I do intend to improve the quality.
Huh? That's the definition of bonus!

Let's say you do a little side project for a friend's business. He agrees to pay you $1,000 regardless of whether his business succeeds or fails. To motivate you to put in more time and effort he agrees to pay you a bonus of %5 of the profits should his business double within the first year of your work completing.

Because of this percentage enticement you put in way more time and effort than you normally would for $1,000. However, his business fails completely and bankrupts him, despite your efforts. You don't get a bonus.

Now a reasonable person would understand that this is the risk you took with your time and effort. That you were only guaranteed $1,000. Any extra effort you put in was essentially an investment.

Let's say though that your friend convinced his neighboors that his business was essential to their well being and took up donations. Now instead of laying low and working hard to get his business back on track and pay off his neighboors, he start throwing bonus money around, most likely because he is also compensated via bonus money as president of his business.

This seriously works for you?
The Insufficiency of Scrum
How to Eat on a Dollar a Day
Or if you need to use any other libraries.
C# is great assuming everything you need is in .Net. As soon as you need a decent maths library or a screengraph or some image processing it involves a lot more work.
DeadSwap, a clandestine offline file sharing system
My aborted (due to lack of time) attempt to do the same: http://code.google.com/p/slash-social/w/list.
Bleh: "Express Install is not supported on this operating system."
I thought buying CDs secondhand funded terrorism?
I'm sure I saw that on a RIAA a somewhere
Prolog,Lisp,ML in one
I've only read partway into this article, but I really don't understand what he's saying in the section "Misleading Use of Color in Your Data". I literally didn't have a single one of the problems he listed with the colored representations. I don't see color banding, and I don't have trouble distinguishing various shades of green-to-cyan. Also, I think the third grayscale image in Figure 2 is really misleading, since it's showing a 2D cross-section as if it were 3D.

Used properly, the colorscale (is that a word?) should give 3x the amount of data as grayscale, which I think is clearly shown in the fourth image.
Back in the early days of HTML standards, there were comparatively few browsers, and comparatively few HTML documents for them to read, and the HTML working group seemed to feel it was reasonable to release updated standards that specified what browsers should do with conforming markup, and assumed that non-conforming markup would be rare or wildly broken enough that nobody would depend on any particular behaviour.

In the modern age, we know that broken and non-conforming markup is the vast majority of content on the Web, and not only does this content depend on certain parsing behaviours, but those parsing behaviours are fairly reliably implemented across browsers. Of course, that interoperability is far from perfect, and took vast effort to achieve (legend has it that in early versions of IE, Microsoft reverse-engineered and re-implemented parsing bugs Netscape didn't even know they had, and later Mozilla had to do a lot of the same work on IE's behaviour). This is a good part of the reason that there's only four reasonably useful HTML rendering engines on a planet of six billion people.

One of the goals of HTML5 is to reverse-engineer and document what it is that browsers actually do to turn tag-soup into an internally consistent DOM tree, in the hope that future browser vendors won't have to reverse-engineer the wheel yet again. For example, ".innerHTML" is a property on DOM elements that allows script to quickly change the content of that element. It's widely used on websites, and supported in all major HTML engines, so you'd think it'd be pretty easy to get right and interoperable, right? Wrong:

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1158969783&count=1

How about the property "document.title", which should just reflect the content of the title element?

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1161121410&count=1

In short, yes - I think formally specifying browser behaviour in the face of the existing web is a truly noble and useful goal, especially if it helps increase competition in the field of useful HTML renderers, and it falls under the auspices of the HTML specification because what other specification will tell a browser vendor how to understand and display the existing corpus of HTML documents?
Without the ability to drill down into the different categories, this is meaningless. For example, as a serial entrepreneur in the financial services industry, why is 15% of my online presence in "Art"?
I don't think I agree that "audiophiles" are sticking to CDs for this reason. Losslessly compressed audio isn't really constrained by space anymore, now that we have 2 TB consumer hard drives, and it retains perfect fidelity. (And there are multiple P2P communities specifically focused on providing high-quality lossless downloads.)
How FlightCaster (YC S09) was built (RoR + JVM + Clojure + Hadoop)
Mind if i put that piece of gold into my '.fortunes' ?
Did William Petty (1623-1687) pioneer the carbon tax? unsettling economics
Why CDs make up 65% of U.S. Music sales
Incredible: Apple responsible for 25% of US music sales
Seems to be made up. I have a unique name and really am not interested in the military or sports, but they still took up 1/3 of my characterization. And what the hell is "illegal" ??
Security Alert Do Not Download this Software | TechJaws
The only replication we're doing is master-slave which works extremely well. The slave comes back in sync after about 10 hours and then stays up to date.

The replication pairs are very interesting as it allows automated failover. WIthin your code you specify a list of the servers and it will automatically set one as the master. If that fails then the others will negotiate which one will become the master and take over without any need to change your code.

Sharding is experimental and isn't documented or recommended for use at the moment so I can't comment on that.

We're also using the commercial support option to guarantee us 24/7 response if something goes wrong and to get bug fixes quickly, which we have used once so far.
>the colorscale... should give 3x the amount of data as grayscale

The visualization can't contain more data than the data itself!
Safari in 64 bit on Snow Leopard is fast
The original article was terrible, so normally I wouldn't comment but I'll attempt to improve the discussion..

Do applications in C++ get modeled the same way as they would in Java or C#? Allocation speed doesn't quite seem like an apples to apples comparison.
One definite advantage to colors, however, is expressing certain thresholds (as in the coast-line example). The only way to express multiple thresholds in gray-scale is to distort the scale, and then you no longer have a faithful representation either.
The article is nearly impossible to read.
Stay Hydrated to Boost Your Metabolism
ReQall: Never Forget to Remember
SWFSEOLite: Easy to implement seo friendly flash content.
obligatory mention of brainf
Ahh -- seems they got around to fixing that. I swear, it used to be Order Number or email address only.
Call me back when it computes the results in less than a couple of seconds.
This is just an advertisement. If you want the real content, click on "Home" then the last link in the top post.
Silicon Valley Mobile Investment Report
What's the rental like in Times Square? Must be millions?

25% of music sales in the US (according to another headline on HN) are on iTunes. Perhaps most people that used to use the Virgin store there now use iTunes?
There is much debate about the arrow time. (Related disciplines are thermodynamics, statistical physics, quantum mechanics, gravity, inflation, so it gets technical.)

Here are some good papers, look them up at http://arxiv.org

Hollands and Wald. An Alternative to Inflation. arXiv (2002) vol. gr-qc

Wald. The Arrow of Time and the Initial Conditions of the Universe. arXiv (2005) vol. gr-qc

Kofman et al. Inflationary Theory and Alternative Cosmology. arXiv (2002) vol. hep-th

Carroll. Is Our Universe Natural?. arXiv (2005) vol. hep-th

Carroll and Chen. Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time. arXiv (2004) vol. hep-th

Lebowitz. Boltzmann's Entropy and Time's Arrow. Physics Today (1993) pp. 1-7

Wallace. Gravity, Entropy, and Cosmology: In Search of Clarity. arXiv (2009) vol. cond-mat.stat-mech

Maccone. A quantum solution to the arrow-of-time dilemma. arXiv (2008) vol. quant-ph
"Seriously? What kind of technology is behind this thing that a 3am PST HackerNewsing could bring it down?"

Django, according to the about page.
Well, of course :) I mean the potential max amount of data can be increased with color, since now you have three axes (RBG instead of L). Although now that you mention it, he was only using "hue", and holding luminance steady, so I guess in this case it's the same - just rotating around the very outside edge of the color wheel without going inside. I still think it has more visual contrast, though.
An advertisement? I thought the about page was a good introduction to the site, from there you can find the rest of the content without being thrown in randomly.

But for those who want to go straight to the diary, here's the link: http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/it-star...
"MMA has ruined america. There are more "tough guys" walking around now it seems with everyone so quick to want to fight."

[citation needed]

If there's been some sort of epidemic of fist fighting breaking out all across America, I sure haven't seen it in the news. I suspect this is more an ideology you have that leads you to the emotional conclusion that this is outcome, not a logical one.
Thanks! Didn't realize we could post links here (relative newcomer).
Because 90% of digital downloads are not "legal", and thus do not count as part of the 35% of music sales. That and I can trade CDs with friends and still get the MP3s from both CDs.

Yo! Ho! a pirate's life for me... ;)
As with most searches, using my real name pulls up nothing to do with me, even though I use my real name in many places (in addition to 'randallsquared', which I started using back in 1999 precisely because 'randall randall' was effectively unsearchable).
I feel a bit sorry for Riverbank, the company that makes the existing PyQt bindings, because their business model is being wiped out as Nokia replicates their efforts 1:1. Riverbank relied on dual licensing (GPL + commercial) to monetize their open source work, but this doesn't work anymore as Nokia has converted the entire Qt ecosystem to LGPL.

But such is life for a toolmaker: when the platform provider decides that your product is good enough to be integrated, you're out of business. The best defense is probably to make tools that are not merely API plumbing, but have a user-facing component that is not easily replicated.
AOL Thinks It Owns All Advertising Domains
Model Viewed Controller ?
Your bank is running a prize draw for loyal customers - Fill in your bank account number to see if you've already won a prize:

Please add your full name, phone number and main email address so that we can contact you about your winnings:
Sorry about yet another HN meta comment but, can we please save article like this for mma.reddit.com
There a book built around this concept: http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/

I'm not a salesman, so I've never tried this technique for sales, but I'm always surprised how much better people can understand things when I diagram them in real time using a piece of paper than with any fancy infographics I might have carefully constructed ahead of time.
My love for Opera - Why Opera is so much better than Firefox
"Nowadays it's frowned upon to criticize anything in society."

Vapid, semi-literate rant that starts out with the very lamest sort of defensive posturing. The only actual point on Clojure is that, gasp!, it's built on Java and not some mythical modern-tech Symbolics machine.
Nice. Unflagged :)
The most significant feature of modern banks is fractional-reserve lending. Your bank borrows $100 from you (e.g. by letting you deposit money in it), lends $90 to your neighbor, and predicts that by the time you want your $100 back, someone else will have paid off its loan so that the bank has $100 in liquid cash sitting around. (If that prediction turns out to be false, then your bank borrows money from another bank, and if no other bank is willing to lend to it, then the government steps in.)

There's no way you can play this game without a large amount of money and a willingness to jump through the government's regulatory hoops.
Implications of Virtualization and Cloud