skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
get your configuration variables correct, or it wont work out-of-the-box (kernel.shmmax, autovacuum, shared_buffers)

The only thing you really need to worry about is making sure the kernel SysV limits are appropriate (kernel.shmmax); autovacuum and shared_buffers are configured reasonably out of the box.

GSQL depends on authentication of the OS ("sameuser" on pg_hba.conf)

That depends on how PostgreSQL is packaged by your OS.

Learn about template databases. Your first database is a template database.

No; the default database is called "postgres", and it is not a template database.
Isn't Greenplum based upon Postgresql? They claim a fairly impressive customer list.

In my experience, it's a major type pain once you realize MySQL doesn't do stuff that you need. The other differences are pretty marginal (save for replication maturity) but when you need some more complicated queries and don't have them, you're in a bind and you're double screwed if you've actually embraced some of the MySQL niceties. (It's not the end of the world but it can be a deceptively large task to migrate and your customers don't see anything for it)

On the down side, what I'm surprised nobody as mentioned is Postgresql's ever changing on disk format and the process of actually backing it up and restoring it. Just backing up the on disk files without a dump can often result in trouble. Dumping can be a heavy task too. It should be a rare thing to upgrade your database in production but Postgresql does add performance and some nice features on a regular basis.
I wouldn't say it is "obviously" a problem: READ COMMITTED are perfectly reasonable semantics, and are preferable to many applications (e.g. many apps aren't written to retry transactions that abort due to serialization conflicts). Which isolation level ought to be the default is a matter of debate, but I don't think using RC by default is "obviously" wrong -- if an application depends on a particular isolation level for correctness, it should set it explicitly in any case.
Yahoo has dedicated internal people who, if you ask them nicely, will pick your app apart to find these kinds of design and implementation errors. Reviewing your code with them is very educational but not pleasant to the ego. Either they completely fell down on the job, or the Flickr devs decided they were smart enough to do security by themselves.
> No, you are just wrong. As dons told you, "There are reasons why Haskell is not popular. These aren't those."

I really like this Haskell group-think here. I am not the only one to have raised these points before, and those people were equally ostracized. The level of replies has been nothing more than just "you are wrong", and you wonder why Haskell still isn't more widely accepted.

And drawing an arbitrary line where purity can begin and end does not change the definition of side effects.
I have spent my life trying unsuccessfully to classify things, so I sympathize. But I stop short of saying things can be classified so simply and on the basis of so few observables as to describe an entire methodology as having or lacking duct tape :-)

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who bifurcate everything into two kinds, and those who don't.
Newegg files $175m IPO, made $15.9m profit in H1 09
Have you and brodie tried Ostheopathy? Anyways I think there are all kinds of things that can cause tinnitus, but present day medicine seems to have a problem with diagnosing the cause, so you are stuck with experimenting yourself. Ostheopathy and Yoga could alleviate the varieties caused from stress and "jammed bones" (don't know how to express it in english).
Title is obvious linkbait.
Biology is boring for most people... unless viewed as algorithm design?
Most people probably don't care about the inner workings of biological processes unless there are ideas there that can be applied in non-biological contexts.

So why not focus on biology as inspiration for algorithm design in high school?
There will be orderable Real Soon Now (tm). There is a fair bit of interest for smaller projects.
Highly valuable.

See http://renesd.blogspot.com/2009/09/screen-for-ghetto-servers... for more pointers.
How is postgresql hard to install and manage?

Postgresql is used in some absolutely huge places. I know of some that are terabytes in size.

There's tons of support options for postgresql, not sure what you are talking about.

I'm guessing you don't really know much about postgresql.
This table should be connected to live bus data.
Find a regional credit union. They tend to give better customer service and lots of free extras for the account.
You forgot: can you do something productive during your wait / ride?
Where does it tell you how to get customers? I always saw that as the biggest obstacle.
A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair.
Hey jacques, great article! I am thinking about making this jump soon, but am wondering how to be proactive in finding customers? It's one thing to drop a line to all of your contacts saying that you are a freelancer, but how does one actively go out and find jobs?
A Nigerian scammer auto-replier.

Yes I am very interested in the ONE MILLION DOLLARS ($1,000,000) you have stored in your NIGERIAN BANK ACCOUNT. To where should I wire the money?

I've got a toy version built on an early version of Lamson, but it doesn't keep scammers interested beyond 2-3 emails.
Without Free Software, Open Source Would Lose its Meaning
Do you want to write a library? A service? Web? Client-server? What tools do you want to use?
Online Retailers (Dell and Mesh) - The High Street Rip Off
There's no way a city bus travels an average speed of 30mph. I would be lucky to travel at an average of 30mph driving a car in most cities, and I don't stop every 3 blocks for 30 seconds to pick people up.
NASA wants your ambitious high-tech contest ideas
It seems like the problem isn't that people work hard, it's that people equate hard work with long hours.

It's not working hard to work 12-14 (or more) hours a day, that's just foolishness. Working 12+ hours a day does have the side effect of making it very unlikely that you're working on the right problem; in software, you're not adding functionality at that point, you're just dealing with the bad code and design you implemented when you were half asleep from burnout at 2am the night before. That's not getting the job done, it's putting in hours for the sake of putting in hours.
Just because algorithm design is interesting and biology is boring to you, doesn't mean it is the same for everyone else.
This is a highly customizable jQuery plugin to create realtime Twitter search-driven bar of tweets related to your post
That's anecdotal evidence, and you're assuming it also applies to this person.
Starting Findory: Acqusition talks
You might be able to do it with oprofile or the (poorly-named) "perf" tool in the very latest kernels. Or VTune if you want a GUI.
Unix Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
That's a rather sweeping generalization. I know way more people interested in the inner workings of biological processes than in algorithm design (myself included). It depends on whom you hang out with :)
And between scientists and politicians sit administrators, whose job bridge the gap between the two, so that scientists get the funds they need and politicians can credibly tell the public that they're getting good value for their tax dollars. Some funding devoted to projects that resonate strongly with the public may be a more effective guarantor of reliable future funding than an entire collection of good-looking balance sheets for projects that don't capture the public imagination.

As for Columbus, at that the time royal interest and the public interest were effectively the same. My point is that Columbus got the funding he wanted by being a bit of a salesman, and even though he never achieved his stated goal he's generally thought of as the guy who found a whole new continent.
Researcher: 350GB Approximate Needed to Store Entire Life Experience
Man, you hit the spot with the article chain! Your advice is way better and concise than many books I've read. I second tptacek's comment about Liability Insurance. I needed it 6 months into the process. Thankfully, General Liability is all I needed, and the process wasn't so painful.
Ok, Take any link and display the corresponding link in the web site's mobile enabled equivalent. Sort of like Bit.ly but with a mobile browser ability. Obviously this won't work for every site but a lot of major news sites have mobile versions. Take www.crackberry.com for example. They have a pc version and a mobile version but the links in the RSS feeds the links are always for the PC version. No auto switching if your viewing it from your Blackberry. So translate the PC links to link to their mobile site. That's it. Then users of the service can link to articles on crackberry.com but if they view it with a blackberry, it chooses the mobile site automatically.
My cluster headaches started in college. Was mis-diagnosed as migraine with different doctors until I started working and saw a neurologist. Various early migraine treatments in the late 80s and early 90s did not work. Duh!

When I could and when it started, I calmly wrapped up what I was doing, find a room, close the blinds... banged my head against the wall, literally, to feel better and trained myself to know it will end in a few hours.

No comment on treatment as I know of none. I sincerely urge those have this condition seek the best doctor for help. Anyone know if these are still true or apply to you:

* Cluster headache affects mostly males

* Cause of cluster headache has not been determined

* Cluster headache occurs less as one gets older
Feedback please on tox.
I love the term "Groan Pile". There's definitely software that I try as hard as possible to avoid opening and software that I get excited about and look forward to opening. Start-up time usually has a lot to do with it.
Use Bit.ly to Expose Click Traffic of Tweets
I was searching for some sort of tool to write flow charts online, that is something I did not find easily, flowchart.com has it, but requires inviation. I would like to see something like etherpad for flow charts.
Why Stylesheet Abstractions Matter
Eindhoven here. Anyone interested in meeting around southern Netherlands, drop me a note! (email is in profile).
Screen uses C-a as its "command" character. Unfortunately, C-a means "go to start of line" in emacs and terminals. The solution?

In your .screenrc file:

escape ^Ww

This will default C-w as the command character.
I recently found BSD implementation -- tmux better than GNU screen.
This is great advice, but what I would want to know is this:

As a small startup, how do you get yourself noticed by the big fish?

If you're bootstrapped and have a decent amount of traction an early payout might be a great idea, but you can't exactly cold call Google and ask them to buy you out... Does this just happen automatically as a side-effect of traction (and press coverage?) or are there strategic things a startup can do to get to that point where BigCo flies them out and gives them fuckyou money?
I am surprised to read the comments on the website. I didn't find any that even remotely disagreed with the idea that Americans have bad taste!
Foursquare's Angels: Ron Conway, Twitter Inventor Jack Dorsey, More
I don't think they do, because huddle is a dictionary word that means "to crowd or draw together". I don't think they might have a trademark case against me, especially since my huddle is not a company.

If they do, however, I think they might chill with the fact that I would be giving them some customers. Even if not, it's a good thing that I'm not living in the US at the moment (and not moving back until late 2010).
An Outsourcing Nightmare: Unwinding A Wasp’s Nest
How To Value A Young Company
Nuances of Twitter Financing
How about spatial support? Only PostgreSQL has support for spatial types (as opposed to those GIS API skeletons that MySQL has).
Help me to understand. Why is this interesting, useful, funny, informative, or of any positive value whatsoever?

No doubt the original was posted so we could all sympathise with a demo gone bad, and this is to balance that, but the whole thing just seems so cimpletely pointless. In fact, it's wasted time for a bunch of people - and to what end?
Let me know if we can make things better.
Chris's Stylesheet abstraction (Compass) has gotten me out of alot of tight places in the past. I really like the idea.
Isn't C-w kill-region in emacs? I recently came up against this problem too, but what else to change it to .. ?
I don't think a 4.13% CTR is all that amazing in the context of "Hey, person who finds me interesting enough to subscribe to my stream, here's something that I thought was interesting enough to share with you."

Then again, this kind of hints at the crazy number of Twitter 'users' who are either bots or abandoned accounts.
Screen is an amazingly useful tool. If you aren't using it or something like it, you are really making life more difficult for yourself.

If you want something that isn't GNU or GPL'd, take a look at `tmux`.
Tweetimag.es: Gravatar for Twitter (permanent URL for avatars)
Because the fringe benefits of X and Y might not be apparent. Here's a long list of things that were developed for the space program and which have turned out to be valuable in other contexts; but which might not otherwise have passed the 'necessity test' for investment: http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
But keep in mind that all 1+ million followers aren't always watching the stream all the time. So the true view/click rate is much much higher.

Though several people probably click on more than one article it's still an amazingly high number from a free marketing tool.
I currently use TelspanRayo but considered DimDim because of the substantially lower pricing. One major flaw I found was the inability to share a custom portion of your screen (as opposed to the whole desktop), so this was a no-go for my dual monitor setup. Additionally, the performance didn't seem up to par in terms of fluidity, mouse tracking, and overall speed.

That being said, Telspan still has issues from time to time so I'm still looking for a viable alternative...
I use it in most of my projects that is why I've developed the plugin for Grails to use CSS Compass framework - Grass
Yeah it is very far off from the mass-market yet. And the problem is that before the price goes down it will have to reach a sort of saturation point after which its own popularity will take over.

You're lucky to live near on of the fifteen in the world. ;)
have you ever tried http://www.gliffy.com/?
Sumo Paint: Online Image Editor: Home
I agree that this is an interesting talk, with more common ground than I expected. Here's a bit that struck me as a Lisp guy (this is Armstrong talking):

In a module you can say there's a parse transform, and the parse transform is given the parse tree of the program and it can turn it into another parse tree before it's given to the compiler.

Sounds like a Lisp macro, doesn't it? Except he then has to go into detail about how the parse trees are represented.
afaik, the API was built before Yahoo! bought Flickr
Newegg’s IPO reveals the numbers behind A $2B Electronics Retailer
This is crap. Councilman did more than store emails. He gave away free email accounts, then he spied on those who got emails from Amazon.com. The dude argued that because the emails went into storage on his server for even a second that he wasn't wiretapping. The judge agreed. On appeal, both the Justice Department and the EFF wrote in to say that counts as wiretapping. Let me repeat: in this case the EFF and the Justice Department agreed the dude was wiretapping. The whole rest of the piece falls apart if you know anything about the case. This is typical of the WSJ's opinion page -- which holds to NONE of the standards of its news pages.
I'm using C-z, but it's sort of an awkward key to use.
Kent Beck and Robert C. Martin are both programmers. They don't just "write books rather than software" so their input is valuable. On the other hand, this blog post was written by by someone employed by a software consultancy company that prides itself from their Agile practices. So I can hardly blame him for defending his employer's practices.
All my rxvts run screen automatically. This means if I then leave my workstation and need to access one of the terminals remotely I can just duplicate it with screen -x.

[Edited for clarity]
I for one would have liked the algorithmic nature of biology to at least have been mentioned during my high school's two-year IB bio series. I've been reading up on computational biology lately and am mulling over the idea of pursuing research in it. I feel that if my high school biology teacher had spent some time focusing on the computational nature of the field, I would have sooner discovered my interest in CS and potentially made more headway by now.

However, I agree with bbgm. Many (if not most) people would prefer the way biology is currently taught. I'd argue that only a minority of hacker-minded kids would benefit from a computational approach.
You could try C-o (open-line by default) or C-z (suspend/minimize by default). I use C-z as a personal command prefix. Emacs really puts those ctrl shortcuts to work, it's damn near impossible to find one that I don't use at least semi-regularly.

edit: You could maybe try C-9 or use a symbol. I was only thinking in letters.
Which is word delete in bash &c..

Ctrl+T is the menu access character in aptitude, is there any convention around that?
I've been using Screen for a number of years now, but I've recently come across Ubuntu's repackaging of it - https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/serverguide/C/screen-profiles.h.... This seems like a fantastic way to introduce screen to new users, who are probably intimidated by screen's default bare-bones config.
I have found a high CTR on my links, but have read somewhere that a good number of those clicks are bots.

One thing that I would love is a tool that surfaces all of the links that have been sent into my Twitter stream (meaning that they are links from people I follow only)...does that exist.
It's an interesting point you make.

You think we'd learn from the Google example where they came in and blew away the guys trying to create a massive ontology of the web (Yahoo).

ref: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
FreeBSD 8.0 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks
I think it's a good thing to have these abstractions available, and as the article notes it's better to keep these at a high level. It's not a call to extend the CSS specification or to add support for abstractions in browsers.

I have always found it easier to avoid bugs when parsers are dealing with canonical forms. In other words, make the browser support the absolute minimum syntax required to achieve every effect in CSS. Anything that's merely "syntactic sugar" should be handled at higher levels, and then "compiled down" into raw CSS.

This restriction not only makes it easier for browsers to agree, but it means that you're only likely to find quirks in your higher-level tools: which, importantly, are outside the end user's domain. Bad tools can be replaced, or you can adjust your flow to insert post-processing steps that fix the output. You don't need as many "debugging tools" because you can simply examine the generated files to tell if something was interpreted correctly (whereas, if a browser isn't seeing things the way you think, good luck figuring that out without extra tools).
Changing caps lock to control helps. Switching to dvorak helps even more. I kid.
You can start screen with -e to pass the control character in. I use

% screen -e^]]

Then Ctrl-] is my escape.
I use

escape ^^^

Ctrl+Shift 6
Ask HN: Review My WebApp, Threadify.com
Hi Friends,

I've just launched a weekend project of mine called Threadify. It's a straightforward Twitter app that organizes all the at-replies sent by or to you and threads them chronologically as conversations.

The motivation for building this was mostly for my own use, but I'm glad to see if the idea has legs and can be of use to others. With that said, all comments, feature requests and bug alerts are appreciated.

Thanks,

Danny

http://www.threadify.com
Ask HN: What do you use for contact|lead management / mini-CRM these days?
The options I am aware of are: Salesforce, Highrise, BatchBook, vTiger, SugarCRM. Do you use any of these? Or are you using something else?

Thanks, I will appreciate all the comments, as I am trying to pick one.
Tweetimag.es: An End To Broken Twitter Avatars
They've got a ton of really great tests. Seeing the actual change in revenue is a crazy - my favorite test was 4.2, where they added some ads to the homepage and decreased revenue.

Overall an excellent paper that both discusses specific, relevant examples as well as critical aspects of experiment design.
only being "naked"

Only being naked while being judged by someone with power over you, armed, typically humourless and in control of whether you make your flight or get 'extra processing'.
The content looks awesome. Really nice work, I appreciate having all the videos together in one place.

I agree with the poster above that the design could use a bit of work. It would be a shame for all the content to be dismissed because the site layout feels like one big advertising trap.
I use screen for bazillion of years already. When doing stuff with django I like to C-a c to make a new screen, then C-a :resize 10 so that I have two screens on one (you can switch between them with C-a TAB). So in the smaller one I run server and in larger whatever I need to. Excellent when having two or more monitors with one being dedicated to full screen terminal setup like that.
I also believe in an amendment to this hypothesis. Some actions that require will-power unlocks more will-power so you might gain will-power after the action.

For instance, going for a run boosts energy and will-power that allows you to work harder in the office.
If I'm understanding this right, I think you can do a search to find that out. Here's a link that shows the links I got to my twitter account: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=http&to=MichaelApprov...

It searches for any tweet with "http" sent to me.