skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using Apache for nearly a decade and it still takes me potentially hours of trial and error to figure out how to do something in an Apache config file. I'm pretty sure I'm not a stupid person, but there's something about Apache configuration that just doesn't fit in my brain. The Lua examples in that thread were instantly obvious to me, and I've never written a line of Lua in my life.
Rails apps wind up with SQL injection like every other application, patio11. All it takes is someone (a) doing a join that AR doesn't support directly and (b) using it to drive a table with sortable columns, pagination, or selectable column names.

This isn't "security theater". When you lose your users table, you don't want all your users to lose their GMail passwords. So you hash them. Why are we even debating this?
Is the tech industry bouncing back?
Is the 'Stellar Entry-level' position for someone in this scenario? "Hey dood, can you write our unit tests for us and fix these shitty bugs while we go on a 5 hr beer lunch? Thx man you rock."
Wait, what?

key=value is really so hard that we need to replace m4 with lua? Honestly? Before you feel the need to flame, imagine if this proposal had been for implementing the config file in COBOL (a language designed to be code readable by non-technical people). Would you still believe it to be a good idea?

What ever happened to wanting to keep things simple?
Rails has had SQL injection vulnerabilities before:

http://www.rorsecurity.info/2008/09/08/sql-injection-issue-i...

No need to make a bad situation worse in my opinion, especially if the cost is just about '0'.

I see password hashing as just another layer of defense, sure if you have the hashes and infinite time you can do more damage but it would certainly help as a deterrent.

Hashed passwords are a secondary strategy, assuming that you have already been compromised how do you contain the damage.

If the reddit guys had hashed their passwords instead of storing them in plaintext the fall-out would have been a lot less severe than it was.
It's just not very interesting. It would be the same to say "I give you 1 billion dollars if you write me a program that does hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz", without saying what "hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz" is. Saying "no machine can be conscious" is equivalent to saying "no machine is hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz".

I am not even sure it would be dishonest to take the money. It is kind of insulting to give such a task, so maybe it would serve the sponsor right. After all, the sponsor would be unable to prove that the program is not conscious.

Suppose I submit a program that does nothing than print "the weather is nice" on the screen. Who is to say the machine is not conscious? It could be all sorts of self-aware, but for personal reasons decide to communicate nothing but "the weather is nice" to the outside world.
Even the fully qualified name is a bit meaningless and needs some unpacking.

ERP is best described as a massive unified software product that runs a huge portion of a business's operations, usually including two or more of the following areas:

- HR
- Accounting (Receivables/Payables)
- CRM
- Business Intelligence / Reporting
- Business Process Management (e.g. form processing/approvals
across front- and back-office functions)

(not that edw519 needs it explained-- more for the original parent)
SPARK: Starter Programs for the Advancement of Robotic Knowledge
Writing a compiler is pretty much trivial. Writing a good optimizing compiler is close to rocket science.
well... the XML approach was in fact proposed in the linked thread.

mod_perl already allows for a totally dynamic configuration which should be sufficient in terms of automation.

The documentation is quite perfect already and would IMHO lose quality if the syntax changes this drastically.

The only point I'm willing to hand you is the validation argument, although the current parser seems to be doing a decent enough job already.

No. Discussions like these feel to be motivated by artistic considerations instead of practical ones. Think of all the external documentation such a step would invalidate. Books, Tutorials, Blogs. And think of the external addon modules that would probably break because of this.

Remember the 1.3 => 2.0 switch and how long that took and consider that 2.0 actually had some real advantages compared to 1.3.
Or as the article says, if you adapt an ERP to an organization via customization (which is unavoidable since you're dealing with very powerful pyramid heads with veto power over process changes), you'll pay up the nose to do it, in initial dollars, maintenance/upgrades, and pain/bugs, and the organizational structure/processes you've paid to have enshrined in code shift more rapidly than your IT organization can keep up with.
TED talk: How brains make moral judgements [video]
Sp., "effects" -> "affects"
Wouldn't work for this company. They clearly don't test their code.
Thing being ... mod_perl let you do most of your configuration in code years ago. Yet I've never done that, and nor have the vast majority of mod_perl users I know (and bear in mind these are people self-selected to already like writing perl, so language wars probably don't make a lot of difference to my argument :).

Configuration isn't code, and I don't really think trying to make it such is necessarily a good idea - I suspect it seems superficially attractive to developers but with my sysad hat on it really doesn't seem wise.
A functional game loop for GLUT in Scheme using continuations
I've found that if you don't have a onunload handler, the browser will cache it.
Auto Seller Network
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It honestly took me 10 minutes to figure out how to create a "Genius Mix" yesterday. Somehow I don't feel that going "Store > Update Genius" is the most usable way to activate a new feature... I really doubt my Mom would have ever figured that one out.
I liked this. I never thought about it this way. Short. To the point. Seems interesting and useful.
Of course, it's not "just about the cost". However, you could say it is "mostly" about cost of living and standard of living.
It's cool if you think suburban living is evil, but don't just say it is evil. Instead work to create a better city with better schools and lower crime. Basically what I'm saying is:
Stop whining and do something.
"Dramatically improve Sun's hardware performance...."

I think they're going to use the CPU simulator Sun used to design a processor (the T1) optimized for MySQL (I think it was) to make a new processor optimized for Oracle.

Just my 2 cents.
and techcrunch gets the most points
m4? key=value? Have you ever either read or written an Apache httpd config file?
Thanks! I won't start using Smarty because of that, but those sound like valid reasons for bigger projects.
Different strokes - I always find the NY Times lacking, while Amazon usually works ok for me :)

But the point is, these sites have a lot of data, divisible in several different ways to a lot categories.
Zoning.

By itself, the suburbs are fine. But it's the zoning that goes out of its way to pave all that greenery you theoretically move out to see, that causes the problems.

No mixed-use zoning clusters the lower-income together into apartment complexes and neighborhoods that have a net negative social effect. Parking lot requirements spread everything out to nigh-unwalkable distances. Varying or non-existent sidewalk requirements finish off any chance of walkability, or even bike-ability. All that space makes efficient mass transit implausible, forcing poorer/younger residents to lock up a significant chunk of their expenses in their cars, and making car trouble a near-catastrophic point of failure. All that space and all those cars also create traffic-related waste that's largely impossible to avoid and very expensive to scale with growth. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods kill any chance at efficient traffic flow. The spacing leads to higher infrastructure costs per resident (higher taxes) which retards or suffocates competition and advancement in the infrastructure space.
Etc.

In short: suburbs are great place if you're relatively wealthy and they aren't too big yet. But they're not self-sufficient or healthy socio-economic communities.
Would it be irony for a random HN user to post about an antipattern that happened to be reflected in the underlying HN implementation?
Clearly there are differences, but many of the same conditions apply, such as low pressure on the bones, so that it can still be useful in /most/ studies related to microgravity. It's a little like using an animal to test medicine -- there are differences, but the initial work can often be completed because of the overwhelming similarities.
I think part of the cause of the big drop off may be the "release early philosophy". Sure, release early, but I think your early release needs to have a critical mass of utility to inspire the first circle to tell the second circle.
In geek: maximizing your viral coefficient matters more than increasing the size of your initial seed set.
It's checked when malloc initializes, so the startup cost for a more complex method would have to be paid by nearly every process system-wide.
"These animals that have never seen humans before don't stand a chance."

Apparently, the local inhabitants have visited these areas on and off but not that often... so may be there is still a chance.
Here's just a small example of the daily pain I face when I use itunes:

I recently ripped both the mono and stereo box sets of 2009 Beatles remasters. These are all in a proper hierarchical file structure, properly tagged with musicbrainz picard yet iTunes insists on merging both versions of each album and I get something like this:

1. Taxman
1. Taxman
2. Eleanor Rigby
2. Eleanor Rigby
3. I'm Only Sleeping
3. I'm Only Sleeping
4. Love You To
4. Love You To
5. Here, There and Everywhere
5. Here, There and Everywhere
6. Yellow Submarine
6. Yellow Submarine
7. She Said She Said
7. She Said She Said
8. Good Day Sunshine
8. Good Day Sunshine
9. And Your Bird Can Sing
9. And Your Bird Can Sing
10. For No One
10. For No One
11. Doctor Robert
11. Doctor Robert
12. I Want to Tell You
13. Got to Get You into My Life
13. Got to Get You into My Life
14. Tomorrow Never Knows
14. Tomorrow Never Knows
Ask HN: Any experience with, or advice for, selling a site on Flippa?
Greetings. I'm curious if anyone here has had success with auction sites like Flippa (formerly Sitepoint Marketplace). I've just posted my first auction (it's a 3.5 year old retail site), and I'm wondering if there are any tips and tricks that I might be missing.

I'm currently contacting competitors and vendors to alert them to the auction. There was an "Ask HN" posted a couple months ago similar to this one, but I'm hoping for more specific advice or ideas. Thanks very much.
Na, they aren't evolved to survive. Humans would off those things with prejudice if they started invading our living areas.
> Adding software cannot improve the hardware

What do you mean "eh"?

Software can definitely, without a doubt improve the performance of the hardware. That's what device drivers and firmware exist for.
See also: "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler.

"The American highway is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don't want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular."
There aren't any tooltips on this site. And there is a Next Page link on the bottom of every page. The underlined links take you mainly to other articles on the site, which is pretty standard practice for news websites. Take another look.

Yes the site has a lot of issues. It's a terribly design - long and skinny, so you have to scroll to read it.

But the article is good and by ripping off the content and posting here, you impact the traffic to the site and the quality of the site too. The less traffic, the more the publisher has to rely on advertising, the less chance of their being enough budget for a redesign. And, the more likely fall guy will be the writer that could face losing their job as a result of cutbacks.

I am generally a fan of YCombinator and the community so I was surprised and disappointed to see this flagrant disregard for IP.
I could not say that it is "mostly" about cost of living (edit: or standard of living, which is subjective).

Who's whining here except you about how the suburbs get a bad rap for being evil? Why don't YOU work to make YOUR urban center better, fix the schools, stop crime, and stop hiding from the big, bad city in the sprawl and disposable lifestyle of the cushy suburbs?
Scribd must love this
Top Health Benefits of Grape Listing
There's a lot of waste involved, and a lot of suburbs get free rides on the infrastructure of the urban areas they're attached to.

I don't know if they're evil, but it looks to me like they combine the worst aspects of urban living with the worst aspects of rural living (surrounded by people but isolated from them; at the same time you can have isolation, but not solitude).
The city I'm in doesn't seem to have those problems. Maybe it's a problem with your city (or your perception of cities) rather than cities in general?
John Resig's Deep Leap: http://deepleap.org/
Er.. no, I'm saying if there's something magically special about our organic composition required to make a conscious being, then we can build machines out of the same organic compounds. If you want to get those compounds by disassembling people, well.. I guess waste not want not, but it isn't really what I had in mind ;)

"Consciousness is not computable" just means we need to build a new class of machine. Whether it's a blob of organic jelly in a box, or an IC with currently unknown structures on it to exploit certain handwavy quantum processes, or whatever; it just makes the task more complex, it doesn't make it impossible.
Mind posting a link to the auction? I'd like to check it out.
The problem isn't how expensive tests are, it is that someone is waiting for the test answer. Throwing away several days of data causes them to wait longer, which makes for unhappy product managers.
This visualization was coded using only 256 bytes
I have been doing something similar to the advice in this article and it's been working for me. I took a small hobby blog and got more serious about it, implementing these ideas as I go. So far it's going well, and while I think you can do a lot of things things at once I don't think you need to feel pressured to get it done all in one go.
yeah but it's so hard to get good metadata these days.

It'd be nice if iTunes did some sort of MusicBrainz thing.
Too dense, man. Only people who already get it will get it. People who don't get it, will still not get it after reading.

Try to explain it to your 5 year old daughter, or your 80 year old grandmother.
why don't the boolean methods have ?s in the names?

why did they put an english description too? either the ruby one is good or it isn't. make up your minds.
Swords and Flaming Handbags at VMworld...Say What??
In case you missed it, jsmath implements the full TeX layout algorithm in javascript. Quite impressive.

On the other hand, jsmath uses a non-unicode encoding of the math symbols which means you have to download their fonts that use the 8bit TeX encoding. I hope they switch to the STIX font.
Seems pretty clear to me, it doesn't claim to be an article for the non mathematically inclined. Not that "pop" articles on this subject wouldn't be pretty cool too.
When I was interviewing with the DB2 team for IBM, they mentioned that the high-end IBM database servers implement special instructions (CPU-level) for accelerating certain DB operations. I don't know any more details than that, but I'd guess that's where Oracle is going to go with SPARC.
For those in the UK:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m82h7

First episode of the 3 part series already broadcast and now available to view online.
Oracle isn't really developing Oracle Linux since that's just RHEL. All they do is provide support.
Goodwill
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the bugs caused by unforeseen interaction of a) turning &lt; and &gt; into HTML entities and then b) stuffing them in a pre tag.
Relaying Mail from Subdomains
Diminishing the Role of Folklore in Software Development
Pixen - An advanced Pixel Editor
"Gravity" isn't being created, but a uniform force is being applied at the molecular level, which is effectively the same. It is currently being applied "up" at roughly the same force as gravity, causing levitation. Vectoring this force down instead of up will produce force indistinguishable from gravity.
New free Seaside book, "Dynamic Web Development with Seaside", announced
It's not really that your living in suburbia is evil, it's the fact that suburban development is a hugely wasteful, inefficient, costly, and completely unsustainable mode of development.
$1 per watt refers to an industry standard of a theoretical peak energy production with ideal sunlight and does not include installation, mounting brackets and inverters. My calculation a few years ago figured a total cost of $2.5 a peak watt would be a break even (after subsidies), for residential use in areas with good sunlight.
Excellent article, 100% accurate. Nails many different topics right on the head. My personal favourite:

"This self-ordering behavior occurs naturally in the IT world because it is populated by people skilled in creative analysis and ordered reasoning. Doctors are a close parallel. The stakes may be higher in medicine, but the work in both fields requires a technical expertise that can't be faked and a proficiency that can only be measured by qualified peers. I think every good IT pro on the planet idolizes Dr. House (minus the addictions).

While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."
My point was the highways were an indirect effect of cars. Highways were a secondary effect of cars and suburbs were a tertiary effect of cars.

What you say makes sense but I think suburbs would have sprung up over time without highways just because the population was growing and people would be willing to move further away from urban areas as cars became safer and more common.
The way to encourage adoption is just provide new functionality only possible using the new config syntax. Need dynamic process pool control? Here's a Lua example...
Good read, though not really about the OLPC.

Cites a bunch of studies that show that introducing computers into schools in a cack-handed manner doesn't help. Tends to suggest this is the computers fault rather than the people rolling it out though.

"The World Bank studied a program in Colombia that increased the number of computers in schools ... and found no impact on student outcomes ... it was clear that the teachers simply weren't using the computers"

Found the info about the rise of private schools in slums and the impact of deworming (in both Africa and the US) surprising and interesting but I'm not a big fan of "you can't provide computers/open source software/better government until you've done X". Why not do both? In fact why not do anything that's shown to help, and prioritise by ROI?

Also interesting to see one of the easy and effective education reforms (grouping by ability, not age) is referred to as 'tracking'. I recognize the buzzword because the 4th series of the Wire mentions in passing that this is politically frowned upon in US schools.
Blind Man Sees Subconciously Inspite of Damaged Visual Cortex
Open source projects usually fair better with one author until they are somewhat stable, in my experience.
Every day car accidents kill a jet liner worth of Americans, and maim many more. Driving is arguably more dangerous than moderate smoking. Yet unlike smoking driving is subsidized and encouraged.
and writes her name in lowercase: "danah boyd".
How start-ups are like stubble.
Redemption Rights: VCs Recovering Investment
Every day I like GlimmerBlocker more. It can do anything.
Planetmath.org switched to this some time ago and I can't stand it. After initially displaying as a bunch of LaTeX, the entire page goes blank for 5-10 seconds as JsMath does its thing. So incredibly annoying, especially since I am usually just trying to glance quickly at a theorem or definition. I don't know why they didn't switch to MathML, which is supported by any browser someone reading math is likely to use, and is awesome.

On that note, does anyone know how to get Wikipedia's MathML display mode to work correctly? I have it set in my profile but it doesn't do anything.
You're entitled to your own choice. Your decision points about what constitutes a "lower standard of living" are completely your own. I'm not sure the "most people's standards" part is supportable. I'd like to see some research about 20 and 30 somethings, since they are the ones making decisions now about where to settle and form families, and their distribution.

What constituted a "higher standard of living" for us was a short commute, walkable area, cultural activities near our house, diversity in every sense of the word, and an area with a sense of community.

For raising our daughter, we balanced the quality of public schools with the education received by being around different people from different walks of life. Our goal as parents is to raise not only a reasonably intelligent child, but one who can understand and empathize with people different from her.

Btw, despite being < 1 mile from what would be considered the inner city, we have very little crime. I think this is due in part to neighbors all being close. We know when someone is out of town and what work schedules are. We also have a decent contingent of people who work from home. Add to that my own impression, from being raised in a poor working class area, that inner city crime certainly exists but has taken on a boogie-man hype factor.
...but not every Apache server has mod_perl. Adding mod_perl to a Rails or PHP server would eat more memory than its worth.
What do you do? Does your boss know?
This might be taking an extreme viewpoint, but the flat organization concept is something that I believe is already becoming visible in our society. Generation Y (WOAH WOAH!!!) is beginning to have an influence in companies of all sizes because of our inability to "play by the rules" and our desire to "hack" the system. We believe that if there is a will, then there is a way, and we do not want anyone to "tell us" what to do. As a Gen Y-er I am always open to intense brainstorming sessions, but EVERYONE's ideas need to be considered regardless of AGE or EXPERIENCE. This is the workforce of the future...what do you think?
They have the same username on flippa:

http://flippa.com/auctions/74131/Profitable-3-5-yo-Site-Sell...
Y Combinator Blog
Thank you, I was looking for a link to that presentation this morning and couldn't remember who had given it.
Does the vulnerability stretch back into any of the BSDs it was forked from? :)
Note how XP does not have this particular vulnerability.
While this is an interesting read one thing will never happen:

"3D virtual reality meetings will all but eliminate business travel."

As some people only trust you when they actually meet you in person.