skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I can tell XML config files (at least those intended to be hand-edited) have largely fallen out of favor in non-Java open source projects.

I also don't mind the current config file, but I've been using Apache for more than 10 years so I've probably lost all perspective at this point. Having the config file in Lua would certainly make it eaiser to automate, validate and document though.
Sprint to Offer Free Minutes to Any Mobile Phone on Any Carrier
Is there a definition of consciousness? The gist is that people are dishonest when they claim they have a conscious program or robot. The notion that a program causes consciousness is not well defended. Suppose I have a program X which is conscious and let it be written down. Does it get conscious if a billion people execute it in parallel? It is not clear what is conscious in this case. (Searle's Argument)
Has the DOJ approved the merger? Last I heard they hadn't and the value of Sun was disappearing by the day (because the longer it takes the more people leave and take with them valuable knowledge).
True, though I think it's probably a very large undertaking for a single person. Bringing it up on the mailing list would be a good way to gain mindshare and contributors.
Why I wrote Shufflito
Thats what I am doing. Of course I did not use the right words, but I assume my intent was clear.
I wouldn't worry. When the debt hits 100 trillion, we'll probably be lopping zeros off the currency Zimbabwe-style.
Necessary Games: Video Games [and] The Future of Art
I wonder if the people who made those comments are in denial about the complexity of Apache configuration files. Having never seen one, I Googled "apache sample config file" and I came up on this page: http://www.pantz.org/software/apache/apache13config.html

This is representative of the more complex entries:

<IfModule mod_alias.c>

#
# Note that if you include a trailing / on fakename then the server will
# require it to be present in the URL. So "/icons" isn't aliased in this
# example, only "/icons/". If the fakename is slash-terminated, then the
# realname must also be slash terminated, and if the fakename omits the
# trailing slash, the realname must also omit it.
#
Alias /icons/ "/usr/local/apache/icons/"
Alias /icons/ "/var/www/icons/"

<Directory "/usr/local/apache/icons">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

#
# ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts.
# ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that
# documents in the realname directory are treated as applications and
# run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the client.
# The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias directives as to
# Alias.
#
# ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/"
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/"

#
# "/var/www/cgi-bin" should be changed to whatever your ScriptAliased
# CGI directory exists, if you have that configured.
#
<Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options ExecCGI
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

#
# "/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin" should be changed to whatever your ScriptAliased
# CGI directory exists, if you have that configured.
#
# <Directory "/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin">
# AllowOverride None
# Options None
# Order allow,deny
# Allow from all
# </Directory>

</IfModule>

That is a language, and it's one that exists solely for Apache config files. I think using an actual programming language would be easier for most people.
On the OLPC
I didn't realize the database didn't scale. If an automatic scaling MySQL database as a service doesn't already exist, then there is an idea for a startup! If you build it, I'm sure a lot of people would pay.

EDIT: I didn't see the other comment...I guess someone at YC beat you to it!
"Why ERP is still so hard"
- An ERP doesn't adapt to an organization, an organization has to adapt to an ERP - Old 'joke' or reality of why its hard
Code is not the avatar - it is the knowledge and memories (probably written in form of a big blob of neural net coefficients) that makes a concious being. Each time the game is restarted there would be new beings in it (unless their data is saved between games somewhere).

Erasing knowledge and memories of such AI would be analog to killing, and it will become problem, because throwing out data is easier, and writing you enemies to DVD after each game of Quake 10 becouse of moral issues will be problematic after some time.
They did not cause it they contributed to it as the original source says:

"This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline."

There were many factors involved in suburbanization. Emergence of a new middle class, white flight, proliferation of cars (thus highways have been built) to name just a few.
Seems likely that the gas part could be abstracted out... once the rest is working ok. Then people could have a choice of putting in a solar or a wind generator... or having all three.

Gas lets them simplify the problem. Since the power generation is more easily controlled with gas, it makes the task less risky.

It's also a multiple use thing... people already pay for heating, electricity, and for hot water, so this thing does all that for them too. So you can spread the cost over those things, plus you get paid rent, and money every year depending on how much power you generate. Finally you pay less on your electricity bills.

As a bonus they get to pump money into a car company... which governments are wanting to do now to stop them dying. I wouldn't be surprised if there are government subsides people could get to cover the $7k too. Extending a mortgage for these things would be very easy to get as well.

A very sensible approach all around... a good first step.
Aishwarya Rai's Latest Red Hot Sexy Photos
Programmatic configuration solutions seem easier to me in a Lua world than the current .conf approach, which means it would be easier to develop tools for the casual user.
I wonder if there is enough water in the air under a potential hoverboard or in soil, roads, etc?

I guess hovering over water, snow and ice would still be cool.
Did you just cut-and-paste from the article comments?

Posted by: quilner | 09/10/09 | 12:28 am
Some questions about Nanosolar’s $1-per-watt claim:
What happens at night?
What happens when its cloudy?
What happens during the winter-time?
Does Nanosolar’s $1 per watt investment guarantee a consistent 24/7/365 source of electricity?
Does Nanosolar’s $1 figure include the cost of installing transmission lines?
Does Nanosolar’s $1 figure include the cost laying cement for a power plant, assembling the cells into solar panels, installing the panels, and commissioning the power plant?
Does Nanosolar’s $1 figure include the cost of building base-load generating capacity to provide electricity for when the sun doesn’t shine?
Installing electrical transmission lines costs about $1 million per mile. Most PV power plants are located far away from demand centers.
This sounds like vaporware.
>A longer and better Metro system -- most of all with better parking -- would have meant even more people moving to the suburbs.

Transit oriented suburbs are structured much differently from highway oriented suburbs.

There is a strong economic premium attached to proximity to the transit station - the closer you are to the station, the higher the premium. As a result, transit oriented development tends to produce dense nodes along the transit corridor. This leads to walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods that enjoy economies of scale, density and association and can become economic engines in their own right.

On the other hand, proximity to a highway is an economic drain - the closer you are to the highway, the bigger the economic hit. As a result, highway oriented development results in sparse, low-density land use that generally separates uses and requires car ownership to perform any errand.
This is the kind of article that I like to see on Techcrunch.
Small thing, but it's "Lua", not "LUA". It means 'moon' in Portuguese, etymologically related to 'luna'/'lunar' in Romance languages. (Lua is from Brazil.)
Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time. I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library. Schemers are very DIY; for example, see http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware.... Rolling your own libraries on top of a tiny implementation is not particularly uncommon. (I just hope you can write more, uh, ethical software than that guy!)

PLT has the most batteries of any distro I've ever seen (disclaimer: one of its authors was my undergrad advisor). That is, PLT is (a) free, (b) mature, and (c) has a fair number of modules written by people other than the developers of the language.

There's no sense in waiting, just dive in. If you don't want to use PLT, Bigloo can call Java libraries---solving your battery problem in a different way.
http://people.apache.org/~rbowen/presentations/apacheconEU20...

Right, and it's a language with a brittle, inconsistently documented, largely ad hoc syntax. While Lua's syntax has its quirks (the syntax for lambdas is a little cumbersome, arrays are indexed from 1), that's because it is designed to be straightforward for simple use by non-programmers. The advanced features* don't get in the way if you're only using it as a log/config/etc. file format.

* Tail-call optimization, closures, coroutines, etc.
Sadly, you won't find many suits hanging around ycombinator. I have the sudden urge to forward this to a few people I know....
I think that config files should be simple to write DSLs, and not programming languages. For automation what is really needed is an API exported by Apache via some kind of networking (a TCP socket could do the work) that allows to configure and change the behavior at run-time via a scripting language. This way you have the best of both the words.
Formaldehyde: PHP debug info for the client side
And this is not bad in itself. It's only a negative thing if you have the responsibility to "make it happen", without the authority to make the proper decisions, or under arbitrary restrictions that hobble the making of happening.
Cars were widespread and affordable in the 20s and 30s. Car dependent suburbs without street cars didn't happen until the 40s and 50s. It's not as simple as just cars. It was the confluence of Eisenhower's interstate program and white flight from blacks as well as a crescendo of corruption and incompetence in the governance of the urban cores.

I think a major piece of the puzzle is that living in a car dependent area has been an effective way for the middle class to segregate from poor people. If you're not rich enough for the well policed part of the city, you can still get a car and live somewhere poor people have difficulty getting getting to.
Non-linearity of technology adoption
Thanks! It needs to not work on http://docs.google.com so that you can click the "Download" link if you need to...otherwise you are stuck in a loop. Also, I noticed that the search on the full-screen page isn't always available (ie http://bit.ly/4tf1xt)
Glad to see Loc8 on the list. They are the guys behind the official iPhone app for the Edinburgh Festival, the largest festival in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Festival
Coming soon: Finding your friends on YouTube
Is it just me, or does Vanish sound completely impractical?
I'm not sure if highways caused or simply enabled suburbanization.

One commenter expressed confusion about why suburbs seem to be hated. I'm not sure suburbs themselves are hated or the design of them for the last 40 years is hated.

From ages 30-38, I lived in a suburb. Prior to that I lived in a variety of places but mostly urban areas. What I came to dislike greatly about suburb design is the need for a car to do simple things like buy a pint of half and half on Saturday morning for coffee. It seemed absurd that I couldn't walk out to a convenience store and be back in 5 minutes to enjoy my freshly brewed coffee.

What often develops in a suburban area is the next irritant: strip malls. They seem like a godsend to a new suburb. But, as traffic increases, a simple Saturday afternoon errand - e.g. buying groceries for the night's dinner - can easily take an hour due to wading through mall traffic.

When my wife and I visited Sonoma County 5 years back we were drawn to the setup of the towns like Sonoma and Healdsburg. They were setup to have a town center that was totally walkable and acted as a community center. If suburbs were designed more like small towns, with mixed residential and commercial use, I think they would be more palatable.
I recently (less than a month ago) used git-svn to do a conversion of https://svn.dev.java.net/svn/hudson and discovered a few things.

The git-svn clone was not made from the canonical hudson repository, but rather from a svnsync clone hosted on localhost accessed through the svn:// protocol. Nevertheless, the conversion took about three weeks on a 2.6 GHz Core2.

There seems to be a memory leak in git-svn. The size of the git-svn process grew slowly and after about two weeks it was at 1.2 GB resident size, at which point the OS refused to let it fork. Thing is, this was a blessing in disguise. I was able to resume the interrupted clone with a simple "git svn fetch", and it ran much faster with the now radically smaller heap. This, worked so well, in fact, that I got into the habit of interrupting and restarting the process every evening and every morning. A few days later it was done.

The problem seems to be the structure of the Hudson repository. All modules are in a single huge maven-style multi-module build under /trunk, but the branches and tags are not complete copies of trunk, but rather of individual sub-trees of trunk. This does not mesh well with how git sees the world. For git tags and branches are always for the whole repository. This mean,s that git has to work extra hard to figure out what's going in in a repository like Hudson.

Because of the oddball structure of the Hudson repository, its history is not as browsable in git as I might have hoped. Still, it's proved to be an interesting experiment.

Size: the complete history works out to 203MiB (.git/objects) in git, though 754 MiB including all the cruft in .git/svn. In Subversion 1.6 FSFS format the repository is 795 MiB.
Uh, yeah, that's true exactly up to the point where they manage to code an injectable SQL statement --- you know, like every web application ever built.
DOJ approved it; they're waiting on European approval.
Shutter – a GTK Screenshot Tool
This site would make a great case-study of pagination gone wrong.

1. No "next page" link. You have to determine which page you're on and then click the next one, a process made difficult by

2. A barely-apparent current-page indicator. Two offenses you might be able to forgive if it weren't for the

3. Lack of a printer-friendly/all-on-one-page option.

Why is pagination still so hard?
Whenever I see a bug this serious I always wonder if it's been floating around in the wild all this time.
Why is suburban living so evil? For me, living in the suburb just makes sense. The cost of living is far less, the schools are better, I can enjoy the outdoors more, and crime is lower too.

Mint says I spend a total of about $270 per month to fuel and maintain two cars. Even if I were able to get rid of owning both cars altogether and move into the city, it would still cost me much more for a lower standard of living (by most people's standards).
Admins are not slow to change. Operations and Corporations are slow. Admins generally have more than one version of any software running. More than you can imagen.

Generally they do have development versions daily updated and built and tested under the hood. Generally they do provide support and feedback to these software by bug reports or even with changesets.

But they are not slow.. most of the time they do work out of your eye sight.

I can bet some admins are trying to see if mod_lua can be a good replacement for the current configuration.

For myself I do not like it to happen. Because most of the deployments of apache are huge and this will break too many things.

And yes, if it's working do not change it :)

(edit: gramer and typo corrections)
About the search not being available, I think it's something to do with google's implementation, not the script. The other, I'll fix ASAP.

Edit: Fixed version available now.
... dramatically improve hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware

Eh? The hardware and its performance stands alone. Adding software cannot improve the hardware. Only the software performance may be increased by better hardware utilization.
Right, but I expected them to slowly phase Sparc and Solaris out, and offer their existing Sparc customers discounts to upgrade.
Nope, it was just a thought. You're just going to be changing the innerhtml of DOM elements. Shouldn't be tough.
The orange line train he's talking about runs down the middle of I-66, a major highway. There are dense, high price walkable areas all along the orange line corridor. They sprang up out of car dealerships and strip malls in the 25 years since the line was built.
you can also do this in gimp. I also believe gnome has a standalone screenshot tool as well. Seems like overkill.
Tool of the Day: Organize Everything With ToodleDo
I don't know. Should FedEx shut down its web ordering system until they figure out how to hash passwords? Because they'll happily send you your password via email if you lose it. And they have your credit card on file.

Not hashing passwords is suboptimal, to be sure, but both you and patio11 are on the crazy-talk ends of the debate here. In a security assessment, weak password storage is a "Severity: Low" vulnerability, right alongside the "Weak Ciphers Enabled in SSL" finding.

Brian's stored XSS finding is considerably more severe, but it got fixed relatively quickly.
The Beauty of Fidelity
Congratulations, David! (The submitter's company, Boxed Ice, is one of the finalists; they make Server Density, a very cool server monitoring software company.)
Did you not read the talk? You can provide the car/cdr interface on top of tree-based implementations. Yes, you pay a cost to use that interface...but you pay a different (Guy Steele would argue more expensive) cost if you write your algorithms using car/cdr instead of, say, empty/singleton/conc.

Moreover, as is pointed out on the slides, a lot of processing can happen without ever having to talk about car/cdr, e.g., using higher-order functions like map and filter.
Isn't Growl there already?
All that and they don't bother to mention salary. Seriously, they want someone "super-smart, motivated", blah, blah. They want to suck you dry so millions of women can shop better and for what in return? To piss away your super-smart, highly motivated existence programming Rails? Vision care? yeah, they do apparently have a health policy that through no fault of their own, you can't keep after they suck you dry. So what can you keep? Well, I'm sure the stock option contract is 20 pages of pure "screw you". If it wasn't, why not publish the options contract? They drop the hint several times that this may be a good job for a perv that wants to collect data on millions of women!! What genius thought dropping the "women, hint, hint!" line several times was a good idea.

No, the only thing you walk away from most any job with is $$$cash$$$....they leave that part out!!!

The ad is well written. And cute. But here's my message to companies: Tell us HOW MUCH!!!

wow, I sure woke up on the crabby side of the bed, today ;).
SQL injections are a bright spot in Rails' security, actually: to cause them with ActiveRecord, you have to go out of your way to write insecure code.

Safe by default if you use the easiest way to write code:

User.find params[:id]

User.find_by_favorite_fruit(fruit)

Safe by default in the natural Rails idiom:

User.find(:all, :conditions => ["favorite_fruit = ?", fruit])

To get compromised you have to ask for it:

User.find(:all, :conditions => "favorite_fruit = '#{homerolled_buggy_sql_stripping_regexp_i_copied_from_some_dot_net_guys_blog(fruit)}'")
Basketball players: funny, cool images
RabbitMQ, Celery and Django
Because the smartphone market is a small part of the global market. The iphone is also one of the most expensive phones around. In a few years when the market gets more mature we will see a lot more competition from the "other manufacturers". Most of which also provides telecommunication systems.
These are the geek versions of "movie plot threats": increasingly unlikely contrivances of a combination of poor choices and brilliant evil genius which can only be addressed by the fact that the hero studied ballet back in high school which we know because he was razzed about it in scene two.

Bull.

Back in real life:...

Well, in my real life, I've never "rainbowed" a table, or even know what that is after 12 years in IT, but I sure can open a sql file in a text editor and figure out which field is the password.

It's a layer of defense and widely accepted as the minimum and so easy to implement it's ridiculous to argue against it, especially as a "movie plot threat".

Quick, somebody make a movie out of this:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=729362
I reallllllllly want to know if the TCP/IP Timestamp Options vulnerability --- the one where they keep a stale function pointer in memory that winds up controlled by an attacker --- refers to the IP Timestamps Option or the TCP Timestamp Option.

The IP Timestamp Option is more likely --- it's crazy complicated (among other things, you can play tricks with IP timestamps to determine whether two IP addresses are virtually hosted on the same machine). The good news about IP Timestamps is your router probably doesn't pass packets that have that option set.
And here is the code for it: http://github.com/richhickey/clojure/blob/270185aba54cef1d8c...
No mention of MySQL anywhere in that declaration, which is interesting given the EU's regulatory body concerns.
Regarding 37signals and communication
This site makes a great case-study of many things gone wrong.

I inadvertently started a second debate by posting the content of the article here. I felt I had little choice. I'd rather skip the whole thing than send someone to that site. But I wanted to discuss the content, which was excellent.

If it wasn't for that excellent content, I would have never struggled with this horrendous site. It was as if they are daring you to finish the article. Some of the other horrors:

- embedded video ads (incredibly distracting)
- way too many words of the article were underlined links
- many other underlined links that were *not* content and hard to differentiate
- tool tips everywhere, that were a huge problem because
- you need to mouse so much just to scroll the content
- less than 10% of screen real estate used for content, which
- brings up a new acronym, WTFA *Where's* the fucking article?
The original paper claims that highways are about 1/3 of the reason.
The unstressed win here is the cogeneration. The waste heat is captured and used for building heat and hot water. That gets them the 92% efficiency number. On a CO2/(kwhr at the house) basis you can't beat that with centralized power plants.
Skoda car radio mounting kits Autoradioblende
This mounting kit allows you to install a double-sized, aftermarket stereo in
your vehicle's dash opening. To ensure that this kit will work with your car model.
The environmental impact and culture of waste are enough to make suburban-living evil to me. It's not just about the cost to you in driving your ass around.
this simple rot-8 approach feels too simple for a puzzle like this.
Wow thanks, this is a great, well written intro that makes a great refresher !

Anybody starting machine learning and data mining ?