skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A file database like sqlite or leveldb might be a good compromise between the features of a database and the ease of a flat filesystem
Afaik the main reason for base58 is making it impossible to mistake an 'I' for an 'l', etc.
Beeing able to always double-click is a nice added bonus, though.
Yes, it's totally possible to write a blog, forum, or pretty much any "Web 2.0" application without using a database. You just need to be very, very careful with how you design your filesystem layout and file format.

As for the file format, it would be best to stick with standard formats like JSON, XML, or YML. Or the standard serialization method for your favorite language, such as pickle() for Python and serialize() for PHP. Try not to invent a brand-new format, it's going to be error-prone and generally slower than using a standard format.

A more difficult task is to maintain an index of some sort, separate from all the individual files, so that you won't have to read and parse every single file in order to generate the forum listing. Whenever a reply is posted, you'll need to bump a thread to the top of the listing. Think about how you can implement this without modifying or renaming several files at a time.

And then you'll need to ask yourself how you're going to prevent inconsistencies in your data over the next few years. What if you decide to add a new field to the JSON schema and all the old files don't have that field? What if you delete a thread but an error occurs halfway through and some of the individual posts still remain? You'll need to write logic to handle such edge cases as well.

SQLite solves a lot of these problems while offering the same sort of performance, if not better, on resource-constrained environments. As far as SQLite is concerned, a Raspberry Pi is a very powerful machine. There's no reason why you sholdn't be able to enjoy all the benefits of flat files together with all the benefits of a relational database.
Agreed. I've spent a ridiculous portion of the last 4 years in taxis and liveries in the NYC metro area and a few other major cities in the US and several in western Europe. Speeding has been an absolute constant; no exceptions whatsoever. Is there actually a place where taxis do not default to pushing speeds to the highest extent possible?
I learnt to read before attending school by literally reading through my parents' bookshelves, the simpler books at first of course … today, I still have many books on shelves but all never books are digital and invisible, especially to children. In addition, digital content is not made for use in a family, it is usually linked to a single account …
I believe Linux is written in C. Linux is going to be around for a while.
Gowex Chief Orchestrated Sham by Hiding Lies in Plain Sight
Reactive 3D game engine written in Scala
Expected horror story, got one with a good ending. Don't hear that often! Nice article.
I am amazed that so few of the comments even mention that the source of the submitted article is a newspaper in Ireland, where all the same arguments about

1) governments always being able to bail themselves out

and

2) excessive investment in buildings that no one can afford to occupy being a good idea

are a recent and painful memory. Ireland is still a long way from recovering from its real estate bubble, as are Spain and many parts of the United States. Commentary that suggests that China is somehow different and special and exempt from general economic principles should refer to more real-world historical examples.
Communication Protocols
Am still waiting for a robot to do my job for me.
You definitely haven't taken a cab in big cities in US. Cab drivers always speed. It is what they do - I don't know why - but driving below 75mph is not within their realm of possibilities.

You also haven't taken a UberX ride from looks of it. If you did, you would realize that they never ever speed and are very courteous in their manners!

I know it sounds strange - that professional drivers speed like mad dogs and are at many time disrespectful while random people like you and me are better/sane drivers - but it is what it is. Uber does a great job weeding out bad drivers through their rating system - unfortunately cabs can't do that..
Here in Amsterdam taxis speed all the time, to the extent that they are the most dangerous cars to keep an eye on while biking.

This might be due to the economical aspect of a taxi ride. The base fee starts at 7.00 euros sometimes, just for walking into the taxi. I don't have the exact fares data, but although they are earning additional money during the whole ride, for short rides it's clearly more remunerative for them to get to destination as soon as possible to be able to take another one.
This is an interesting and valuable analysis. But while applying selection and mutation to generate software might be a fun problem to tackle, it seems like a terrible way to produce useful software.

As a model, the evolution of human intelligence is not something we know remotely enough about to reproduce artificially. Our ancestors evolved in environments that were constantly changing. They had social relationships with other creatures of their kind. They competed with other organisms. They were predators and prey. The path from the first multicellular organisms to the humans of today was not a straight one.

How would you go about judging the evolutionary suitability for reproduction of a particular individual instance of the software? Not to mention that sex surely plays a role in our development. How do you model sexual reproduction and the recombinatorial process of mixing genes from the parents? How are the parents to judge the suitability of each other for mating? The feedback loop of mating behavior, sexual selection, and human intelligence is not a minor thing.

What about development? Humans are created through a process. Our genes alone do not specify our composition. There is feedback from the environment, from our nutrition, from the symbiotic organisms that live in our guts and on our skin, from our social relationships, from our parenting, from what skills we learn, and what sports we play, and which books we read, all of which manifest physical changes on our bodies that are not specified in our genes.

I cannot envision a situation where coming up the algorithm that could successfully produce an intelligent piece of software would not be far more complicated and impossible to create than the resulting intelligent software.

But if it were possible to create this software by this method, how inefficient it would be. Ask any evolutionary biologist how efficient natural selection is at coming up with ideal solutions to problems. There are plenty of ingenious inventions generated by natural selection, but very few if any are remotely "efficient". And the process of generating those systems via thousands and millions of generations of self-replicating organisms is about the least efficient imaginable system possible, as demonstrated by this paper.
I use UberX when I wasn't able to book far enough in advance for Ubicab, AddisonLee thinks it'll be > 15 minutes until they can send someone, or if I need one in a hurry and there's one near by. Reliably cheaper than Hailo.
It might be because I have a 5 year old subscription and that other rules apply, but I pay the $60,00 and backup everything from .txt, .php, .cpp, many gigs of .avi etc. (I would never get to 500gb otherwise)

No trouble from my ISP. Being from the Netherlands, I obviously have a 100/100 fiber connection. So it really isn't that much.
Argentina Discovery – National Park Los Arrayanes
>Let's take a look at a single bank in China which had a 22.49% bad loan rate in 2002. The government just bought the loans with some electronically printed money and everything just kept chugging along.

THAT part of the economy will keep chugging along, but shadow lending (which is growing at a fantastic rate and now comprises about ~60% of GDP) will not. The government isn't about to buy THEIR loan books. China's shadow banking system could well go nuclear.

>Now in the U.S for that bailout to take place the government would have to borrow that money from the Fed and the taxpayer would have to pay it back eventually. In China, nobody borrows it and nobody pays it back.

In principle the US kind of did the same thing actually:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axKqz...

Bad assets -> liabilities on the public balance sheet -> turned into cash (via QE)

It wasn't quite to the same extreme as China, obviously. That QE cash created also didn't get spent on goods and services, it was just piled into higher yielding investments. The cost of clothes didn't go up, but the NASDAQ and luxury apartments in Manhattan bloody well did.

In China the state banks just kickstart lending again (usually to SOEs) no matter what the losses. This cycle of never ending debt-driven keynesian investment stimulus with no market discipline leads to some of their more spectactular white elephants - like entire mini-cities full of housing where nobody lives, malls where nobody shops and weird theme parks that nobody visits.

Since the people employed to build all these things are still getting paid and spending their paychecks, inflation on goods and services in China is pretty high.
There are lots of samples for PHP, but you don't need to study that. As d33n suggests, there are examples that already use flat files as a database and you can browse Github for code examples.

Our forum was setup so that one thread = one HTML file. Any new replies to the thread were appended to the bottom of the file right before the footer. The added benefit of this is that it was very quick to read new posts as there was no processing taking place after the post is created.

Ex: If a new thread is being created, it will generate an ID, say 140585637400000000. Now this gets translated into a path : /140/585/637/400/000000.html and a file is created there.

The body of the new thread is added to the HTML file. Any subsequent replies are added to that same file right below the previous one.

So when a visitor requests example.com/topic/140585637400000000, the script takes the last part, turns into a file path, adds a template - which has the reply form with that ID - and sends it to the user. No additional processing needed. When a new reply is made, the script builds the path again and adds it to the bottom of the same HTML file. And so on...

I think your biggest hurdle is the initial planning. Try to carefully plan this out as much as you can, but obviously you won't know what future circumstances will bring. If you build it in such a way so that the storage mechanism doesn't need to change much or at all, you should be most of the way there.

Edit: Maybe I can convince the admin to publish some of the source. You're not the only one to be interested in something similar and I think there's a real demand for lo-fi community software.
Wouldn't Russian Doll caching tick that box?
Every rooftop has a low wall around it and has been capped off with a little cone of rubble.

In case anybody was wondering, this is most likely because Yemen has the same daft law as much of the Middle East: you only start paying property tax when your house is complete, so if you leave the "last floor" (roof) notionally incomplete (a row of bricks plus some construction detritus, as if you were still working on it), you never pay tax.
It's my understanding that forums like HN and Reddit don't regenerate the front page for every post or view; rather, it is regenerated every second or two and cached in RAM.

Of course, it's unlikely you'd run a forum as big as HN or Reddit on a Raspberry Pi.
I have not hear	the company requesting c programmers
Very interesting read--the immediate topic and the intertwined mental health discussion.

We generally approach science research as separate from the people making it (except for questions of reputation). There is a Scientific Method and if one follows it, Science results.

Of course, hundreds of small decisions are made by scientists all the time, each potentially introducing a bias (I find the catalog of cognitive biases alone impressive). Even the decision to pursue a particular hypothesis betrays a bias (albeit unavoidable if we want to rationally make use of past learning and accomplish anything).

But I hadn't considered mental health as a key factor--such things are quite rarely discussed (nor do they have a standard reporting mechanism in scientific papers). Apart from general stigma around mental health, I suspect it's also because it undermines the image if scientist as dispassionate seeker of truth. How much more interesting, nuanced and complex would our results be if that changed?
Anyway what will be easy to remember for a human will be sequences exhibiting high ngrams correlation, which is efficiently modeled by markov chains. Wondering if studies have been done from this perspective on password strength, and how chains generated from leaked password / passphrase collections would deviate from ones generated from common language.
I've been freelancing for a while and I've taken offers ranging from 10 USD/hour to 45 USD/hour. Minus insurance, minus VAT and other taxes, minus expenses such as electricity/heating, Internet, ~20USD/month on AWS bills, and gear (which right now is just my laptop, tablet and extra monitor).

I make between minimum wage and the average programmer's salary on my home country (which is a little above the average for senior developers but almost nothing for junior ones), without using my native language at all, and my average week is usually more than 40 hours.

I have to be available on sundays and pretty much every holiday, but at least I don't have any reason to hate mondays and I don't have to commute either :-)

Also, I get to travel a lot because I can work from almost anywhere in the world (I've lived in 2 different countries last year and visited many others), although it brings me down a little having most of my human interaction reduced to emails and online posts (Plus, when my girlfriend is not around, I have to talk to my cat to keep my vocal cords in shape. Seriously, it's quite difficult to just start talking when you remain silent for most of the day :-))
In kubuntu 14.04, Intel HD4400, Firefox:

Error: WebGL: drawArrays: incomplete framebuffer

Chrome:

GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION : glDrawArrays: framebuffer incomplete (clear)
GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION : glDrawArrays: framebuffer incomplete (check) (repeated many times)
why do I think this is a trollbait thread?
I hate it when people change the question so they can give the answer they want to give, but I'm going to do it anyway, as I think its a relevant data point; I think you're dismissing the ability to run a database too quickly.

I have done almost exactly what you're talking about with a raspberry pi, using Ruby on Rails (3.0.x era) and sqlite. the Rasppi (model B) had enough horsepower to run in development mode on webrick and handle ~5 rps with page rendering and database calls, and that was in develop! when running in production, rails does less reloading of resources, so should be even more efficient.
> There's also Learn C the Hard Way

Mixed reviews applies to this book as well. For how often I see it recommended on the net these days, I am disappointed at how many annoying little lies it has in it; it's littered with them. It's also very opinionated (and in my opinion some of these opinions are bullshit) and again it likes to impose the author's choice of tools on you, to the point where he doesn't really even bother explaining how to live without them.

It could do a better job of introducing standard C terminology instead of only presenting the ideas the author came up with, and which often conflict with the concepts as defined by C. It could also do a better job of explaining C's pitfalls and UB instead of just making the reader break certain things and see how his Linux/OS X/Valgrind responds.

EDIT n+1: I just skimmed again through half of the book. Zed actually uses bstring in one of his examples. I don't know whether that should be taken as an implicit endorsement or not, but shame on him. Also, his ideas about secure string handling make me cringe. Also, his "safer" string copying function is not correct. In fact the entire book is littered with lies about strings which no doubt contribute to the confusion people have about them. I'm sure he's well intentioned and he makes good points but for someone wanting to learn how to do C cleanly and securely, I just cannot recommend this book.
I still have a lot to learn about information theory and I'd like to have expert input regarding entropy. Is it believed / agreed upon that entropy is an objective measure ? It seems obvious to me that it is absolutely relative and meaningless without the associated computation method / prior information.
I don't think so. The repository owner, maymounkov, seems to be a solid guy. He co-authored "Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information system Based on the XOR Metric in 2002.":http://www.maymounkov.org/papers/maymounkov-kademlia-lncs.pd...

Still don't understand what his Escher metaphors are, though.
I can't speak to their current setup, but when I was there, pretty much everyone used Knox. Great app.
You could in theory set up a Bluetooth surveillance network though couldn't you? I really doubt that's remotely the goal for Apple but Bluetooth always on would make it possible I think.
I find North and South Korea to be a fascinating demonstration of the effectiveness of governmental policy to shape people's quality of life, for better or worse.
I guess most larger companies pay their employees taxi trips to/from the airport.
w3m has always opened images in an external program for me. I'll have to check out how to do this! :)
>You do realize that it doesn't matter for an importer of US goods if the high prices for US products are a result of high labor price or high dollar price.

No. I never said it did matter to them. It DOESN'T matter to them.

It matters to us!!!

The US already has way too much downward pressure on wages - causing MASSIVE income inequality, huge private debt overhang and anemic demand. More downward pressure will simply cause half the country to drop into poverty.

What it DOESN'T have is enough downward pressure on the dollar - causing exports to become more competitive and industry to start coming back, bringing jobs with them.
Reality check, this dude had taken a plane and needed transport around his destination - this is very much how people live when on a trip. This is perfectly normal behavior in most of the world, especially when it's a trip for business purposes. The only change is that the price of travel varies extremely between countries.
Εισαγωγή στο WordPress Blogging – SEO | WEB DESIGN
My current one is from atmel in 2008, before atmel quit making them, so I figure at least in this case I'm safe. I would probably not use a newer one if I was worried about TLAs though. As I am currently in the market for an MBP, where do I find this information about Apple TPMs?
Ireland was prevented from enacting any kind of stimulus by the ECB. In fact, it was told in no uncertain terms to do the complete opposite - bail out the banks and enact austerity at the exact time when she had plunging demand. This caused spiraling GDP contraction.

Ireland dutifully obeyed, because the ECB controls her money supply and so holds a metaphorical loaded gun to her head.

The ECB cannot order China to implement self destructive austerity, however. China is still sovereign in her own currency.

In principle Ireland could bail herself out too, but it would involve leaving the Euro, defaulting and a spectacular political showdown that she really doesn't have the heart for.
In Abu Dhabi there is fleet of taxis which are "GPS controlled". The driver stayed exactly at the speed limit on an empty 4 lane highway at night for half an hour. Somebody in their operating center probably has a job to watch the drivers.
Thanks for your hard work on the Mill CPU. It is truly fascinating to learn about it! I've been waiting for the Pipeline talk for the past week, checking the website few times a day. :)

And for those who are interested in this type of thing, here's a talk about the Mill CPU memory system which also touches caches: http://millcomputing.com/docs/memory/
Project manager would probably work for you just fine - have a look at the PMBOK for greater details on what that might entail.

Also it is worth considering that marketing is valuable to tech. Your post reminded me of this link, which is probably worth having a read:
http://steveblank.com/2009/10/08/get-out-of-my-building/

If you want to persist in building tech, then the key is going to be for you to find a project of your own that you're really excited about so that you will be willing to stick with it through development of all the hard and annoying bits.
Show HN: Bunchcut – Make quicker better image decisions
The Unbreakable Business Model
The article didn't mention whether the author made complaints about the police behaviour or about the Yellow Cab driver.

Always always make complaints when you've had a bad experience.
That disclaimer really detracts from your post.

But on topic, BitLocker is only suitable for enterprise because it's simply unavailable for home versions.
Why does it seem like so many people in authority just hate Uber? Is it the "dirty hippie" effect? Everything new is threatening and scary? What is it?
Or they might log the speed every n seconds and store it in a file for a program to analyse later.
Nagger: a Reflection
C++ Standards Committee Meeting in Rapperswil, June 2014
Cool India at #3 with Flipkart. Quite a long way away from US n all though...