skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps he did "ls -l".. which requires a stat() for each file. but even in the worst case scenario, that's 10ms for each roundtrip.. way more than it should be: something sounds broken with his setup.
How do you make sure to buy from a quality OEM?
Ben In The Bay
www.bentern.com

I'm a student flying out from Omaha, Nebraska to attend StartUpSchool. However, I'm also on a quest to walk into 25 or so companies (including Y Combinator) hoping to meet some cool people. I'll be filming everything and anything in the process. Wish me luck!
Oracle, postgres and mysql are not in the same space. That leaves informix/DB2.

Not being in the same space is maybe not enough for the anti-trust people though, to them 'databases' are 'databases'.
Obtuse question - what are the practical use cases for these ..umm.. enterprisey solution things? What problem do they solve?
You also need doctors to be willing to accept the software. They may not since they may feel that it makes their job look "easy" and will therefore cut into their incomes.
In the name of freedom, what the MySQL flavor of GPL has achieved is to give special powers of dual-licensing to the "original author" - all animals are equal, some animals are more equal than the others. The MySQL business model is entirely based on this special power they reserved for themselves. Stallman's defense of it (which is not new) is precisely why I have always been wary of using GPL code and am a passionate believer in BSD/MIT license approach to software freedom.

The time has come for a reevaluation of what constitutes real open source. I believe GPL should be excluded from it, and the MySQL business model is the classic example.

To those who answer "Linux", keep in mind that Torvalds unilaterally declared that applications that run on top of Linux (calling Linux via the standard libraries) are exempt from GPL. This is in effect LGPL, not GPL.

MySQL specifically takes the opposite tack: any application that uses the database using standard libraries comes under GPL, for distribution purposes.

LGPL and GPL are very different animals.
I store passwords as a hash in the database, but send it to the user in plaintext when they register. Why?

1. I didn't used to do this, but I got so many requests that I eventually caved.
2. No money changes hands on the site.
"In the long run we're all dead" is a cop out, and is used to back up theories that can't withstand logical scrutiny.

I see runaway inflation as a serious threat to the united states, and I think it is very possible.

Here's a good take on the FED and it's relation to the great depression: http://mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf

All money is simply a barter system; money is a commodity that is traded that, there is nothing stopping and in fact many stores do have prices in dollars and euros, etc. So there is no problem with competing currencies, the problem you mention with taxes is easily fixed by specifying in what currencies your taxes will be payable in. Eventually we settle on 1 or 2 currencies, but if there was ever a problem there would not be legal reasons for creating a new one.
but that's a culture problem and not a technology one.

(I don't know what this 'fleet' you speak of is, however)
Healthcare, plan and simple.
Immigration processing is one, atleast in US.

I've still not understood why it takes 4-5 years to USCIS office to grant or deny residency of an applicant. How can that process be so slow? All papers and evidences are submitted on day one. Then why it takes 4-5 years to process back-log applications and then process yours.

I know there is quota per country for per year. But not all quotas are full by all countries. Why can't they do shuffling and do dynamic quota management?

This inefficiency is frustrating to many individuals, so definitely need some technical innovation to process things efficiently.
I haven't tried anything like it, so I can't comment on the difficulty of creating the fingerprinting technology, and frankly, I'm not all that impressed with Shazam. But as I understand it, Pandora uses the same Music Genome data to make its suggestions, and that is REALLY magic.
Agreed. And to think I was downvoted for my screed against puffery: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=887482
First thing that came to my mind. Also, pressing on a surface with zero physical or simulated haptic feedback over and over.

(How are people in general holding up to their iPhones?)
Amazingly, the new iMacs have s-IPS screens, too! So not only are you getting a free Mac, but you're getting a tremendously higher quality display as well. (Actually, I don't think any other LED-backlit IPS screens exist for sale.)
If you've never needed asynchronous systems and messaging, perhaps you should consider yourself lucky.
I haven't used one yet, but if you watch the videos closely, you can see it seems to physically move when clicked.
New computing tool could lead to better crops and pesticides
That's a pretty compelling argument actually - especially since all monitors I can find with comparable resolutions (2560x1440) are over $1000.
That sounds more like a shakedown than anything. Shame so many people laud it.
Please don't sign your messages, this is discussed in the site guidelines:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"""Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile."""
Reliable, fast UDP-based data transfer protocol that outperforms TCP
Agreed, but that's pretty broad. Are we talking:

-Learning materials? ie- textbooks
-Learning software? ie- someone just kill blackboard already
Yes, This is known as a prepared statement. You compile a parametrized statement once, then execute it as many times as you like with different arguments.

Also, SQLite, unlike most other databases, is an embedded database which does everything in-process rather than invoking multiple processes.
I like the Evi Nemeth book for admin:

http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-System-Administration-Handbook-3r...
First, you need software that is actually helpful. This means that it has to assist me with creating and ranking differentials that I wouldn't otherwise have pieced together. I have yet to see any software like this.
I don't think a boycott is the best way to proceed with this problem. For starters, I don't think you will get enough publicity to bring a boycott to critical mass. Secondly, I think it would be more useful and effective to send an email to the perpetrating website, inquiring or complaining about their password storage techniques. When customers/users complain, a good business will respond and attempt to resolve the problem.
mkdir /tmp/foo
cd /tmp/foo
for ((i=0;$i<6000;i++)); do touch $i; done
time ls >/dev/null

real 0m0.012s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.000s

Perhaps try ext3?
You can't by any chance share a bit more about the project, can you?

I'd certainly be interested to hear about this, because I'd love to know what the breaking points were.
just install Windows XP on a VM with 768Mb of RAM.
(You can do the same with all other "box scenarios" you need)
Absolutely but in education, like other industries, any technological innovation cannot succeed on its own.

Immediately comes to mind is political change (political in the sense of the interaction between a governing body and the people/users). Usually this involves a nontransparent decision process by a centralized power. This thread was particularly enlightening: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803287

Also in education, one cannot forget the social element. Any game changing innovation today will likely embody some web2.0 ideals.

Not only does it contribute to the spread of innovation. I hate to use the word viral but in today's world it likely will have to spread virally through the internet. Reminds me the adoption of the printing press, arguably the greatest educational innovation, was really helped by pornographic material.

What really interests me in the web2.0 and education space is crowd sourcing. Not only Wikipedia but Wikibooks.

Edit: Expanded on web2.0
http://fleet.cs.berkeley.edu/docs/ivan.talk-the.fleet.archit...

You think software is not technology ?

Throwing away the structure that we have today and rethinking software from the ground up is definitely technology, not culture.
melodis.com (the maker of midomi) is a lot more impressive than Shazam.

Here's a brief description about its proprietary search technology.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/multimedia-online-internet/2007012...

Here's an article that compare the features of both iPhone apps.

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/11/05/app-app-shazam-midom...
Anyone find it irritating when a company advertises the environmental benefits of a product (e.g., LED displays)?

It's sort of like putting words into your mouth, making assumptions about your worldview.
Myspace does this too. Good thing I use a different password for every site, but even then we're vulnerable to exploits or other security holes.
I agree with you. I have written to such website before but it is just more one thing to do and follow up on. I was thinking if I start collecting all of them together I can do some kind of bulk action one day. This blog entry is just the starting point and is no means the last action on this.

Boycott might be too strong of a word. I just want to bring attention to this point that the user community care about security and this is not a good practice.
Apple was one of the first ones to market w/ Nehalem based systems. Looks like the same will be repeated w/ the Gulftowns.
Healthcare, construction, K12 education are three tidepools that a lot of IT innovation has left behind over the last 30 years. None of them need invention, they need to import and adapt working innovations from other fields.
That's because it is a deterrent.
Automobile - currently we are under the model slow and steady wins the race and kills the environment. Traffic sucks, gas sucks, texting kills people.
just as i was getting happy with the 1920x1200 on my 17-inch MBP (i'm huge fan of high pixel pitch)...
Our county got smartboards in every school, and, the thing is, about a third of the teachers can actually use them effectively.

And they cost 6000 dollars to lease. And our county is short on money anyways, so all in all people aren't really too happy about them...

But at least it's a step towards progress.
just because the contract says that doesn't necessarily make it legally enforceable. plenty of contracts disclaim all implied warranties, yet there are plenty of situations in which that disclaimer is not enforceable (and liability is).
Housing & Home Construction

Most house construction in the industrialised world is still done by semi-skilled hand labour. There are few radical advances in materials or methods that have gained traction with the industry. Partly this is because the building industry is held back by antiquated construction codes that specify acceptable means and materials rather than the minimum performance constraints that buildings must exceed to be considered safe. But there is a lot of cultural resistance as well, both from the building trades and from customers.

Home construction is an area where several orders of magnitude improvement in both cost and performance are possible, just by the application of basic engineering principles. Well, basic engineering principles and a willingness to circumvent the established order.
The benefit of an LED display goes beyond just the environmental benefit. LED backlights don't have a warmup time like CFL backlights, and they provide a more uniform brightness level across the panel. The panel will also be cheaper to run over the lifetime of the device because of its energy savings (lower TCO, to borrow a term from the server community).

The fact that they are mercury free is just one of many reasons why LED backlights are considered a marketing point.
Well, e-waste IS a massive worldwide problem, so you should be considering how you're purchases will be disposed and what effect that will have on the environment. Is that a worldview?
If you haven't seen Frontline's Digital Dumping Ground episode, it's worth watching: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/vid...
It's handy when certain actions that your system performs is really slow compared to everything else. You send a message to a queue that will result in the action eventually occurring, and then you go on with your business. One example would be building a full-text index of a large file (or group of files). You don't need to hold up your user while that slow process goes, so you send it to a queue and let worker processes do their thing. If the process is not only slow, but also compute-intensive, these worker processes can be on a different machine/farm of machines.
http://mcsquare.me/
Ask HN: What does a major in CS entail?
I'm a high school student thinking about majoring in Computer Science when I go to college, but I want to learn more about it first. What sort of courses do you have to take? Is majoring in CS at all useful, or should I choose something else and study it in my free time? Is the major's value highly dependent upon the teacher/college/student environment? Thanks for any information you're able to offer.
Um... yes and no. In general, I'm with you -- that's sort of a very open job description and it's hard to figure out what the responsibilities are.

OTOH: R is an open source project. Maintaining good relations with the many people who contribute to R is pretty key to a company in this space. Also important is talking people into using R instead of the many (SAS, SPSS, Stata, Eviews, Matlab, gauss) alternatives. Pushing themselves as open source plus extras seems to be their business model. There seems like there should be somebody around who talks to the communities of developers and users.
you dig deep into small areas of math. Take electrical engineering instead.
This is an interesting perspective, but a 30" display still has about 25% more screen area than a 27" display.

Not that absolute screen surface area is the most important metric.
Very useful in a distributed systems like environment. Imagine process A needs to send some data to B, but either could reside anywhere in the cluster. Each just has to register with the broker and it does the dirty work of figuring out how to route messages.
This is what I mean. These lectures are really irritating and would make me LESS likely to buy a product.
I absolutely hate that I have to pay $60 a month to get 5 gigs of 3G on other devices.
Human intel shops have a nice acronym for that:
M.I.C.E.
Money, Ideals, Coercion, Ego

Money: You pay them.

Ideals: Appeal to their ideals. Say in this case, protecting the Jewish state.

Coercion: Blackmail

Ego: Make a powerless bureaucrat feel important on a historical scale.

Top three countries that spy on the US:

1) Israel

2) China

3) France
Thanks for the advice, but could you be more specific? What sort of small areas, and why do you prefer electrical engineering?
I'm a non-practicing lawyer in the tech space. There actually is a lot of technology in law. For example, eDiscovery is a really hot field right now. The basic problem: given a multi-terabyte corpus, which documents are legally relevant?

In the past one would gather a room full of lawyers and actually read through all of the documents (a task I did once). Now you can use a combination of linguists, lawyers, and search techniques to do the job.

(the discovery phase of a trial on average accounts for 50% of litigation expenses)
Our Brains are Wired for Hypocrisy
Sleazy is the word I'd choose.
The Verizon Droid Might Be Landing Sooner Than We Thought
I have already had the cracking thing repaired under warranty once. It has since done it again. Now that my version of the MacBook is no more, I'm going to haul it in on Nov. 28, 2010 (the last day of my AppleCare warranty) and kindly request they fix it again :-) Who knows, maybe I'll get comped an upgrade.
Smart boards seem like many lazy school boards' way of saying, "Here, now we can say we're up to speed in terms of technology." My high school did the same thing, and they were never used, but always brought up in school presentations.

Investing that money into getting an excellent technology administrator or computer science teacher would have made much more of a difference.
String theorist takes over from Hawking
I agree with you that good UI should have affordances that are easy to use. But, you are missing a bit point in why this mouse is good for UI; The single button is still there in primary action without any need for tutelage. The things that people may need help on is the advanced features that most people will not use. I agree with PoET in things that you don't use everyday should be easy to grok without a minimum of effort but I think that with something so essential to the modern computing experience that we are OK with making some features harder to understand to for the novice in making the device that more valuable to the advanced user. (But really, other than moving the cursor, the mouse only has 5 things it can do if you count the swipe gesture as two operations.)
Did they specify the dot pitch on the 27" screen? I recall testing the 17" MBP @ 1920X1200, but the text felt a bit small. Considering the old 24" was only 1920 pixels wide, packing 2560 pixels across into 27" seems tight.
Regardless of whether there is a 'commercial' option for the source code itself, there is plenty going on with GPL-based development and an alternative for InnoDB led by Monty Widenius (Monty AB's development of the Maria Engine should lessen the concern due to Oracle's purchase of InnoBase and their patent ownership / 'original author' status). It's already been discussed at length, so I'll just say I'm not convinced it's in Oracle's best interest to try to kill off InnoDB in order to decrease consumer options for MySQL. I guess we'll see what they do if the EC approves.

But the market for 'commercial services' around MySQL is doing just fine -- Percona and MontyDB being the most obvious (more here: http://lwn.net/Articles/329626/). Not an endorsement, but our team decided to start using Percona and it's been OK; over the last couple years we didn't end up using MySQL AB's support that much anyway.
Displays with an LED backlight are also capable of displaying a wider color gamut than those with a CCFL.
Perl 5.11.1 now available
Since it can detect two fingers, you'd think users would be able to customize a two-finger-click as a right click >_>.
Take #1 and generalize it to the mistake of trying to fix a problem without really understanding what the problem is. This has to be the most common mistake I've seen in the sysadmin world.
I really hope that is not the case because I think this mouse could be excellent if it actually knew where the rmb was.

I have a suspicion that the video did this just to emphasize the right mouse click for video and not because it was a physical limitation of the device. Or at least that is my wishful thinking because I really like the MBP multitouch trackpad.
If the app can "reverse" the encryption, so can an attacker. The case against storing passwords this way is pretty strong.
Universal web site tagging
The HPC world writes a lot of code in FORTRAN because of the library support, and the fact that there's a ton of legacy FORTRAN code that's genuinely hard to rewrite. There isn't much C work going on; the few C libraries that exist are usually wrappers around FORTRAN code.
Now if only Apple would get around to putting in a non-glossy 1920x1200 panel in a 15 inch MBP, I would have even less reason to not move on from my aging Dell 8600.
The sales pitch should only mention the performance benefits of a technology, leaving any environmental benefit to perhaps a subtle sticker on the product that one can easily remove.
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MB986LL/A?mco=MTA4MTgyNj...

It's time to move to the other side....

They added the anti glare as an option in the refresh a while back.
I've heard a couple times that Pandora doesn't really rely on the Music Genome any more because it has so much other listener data it can use to determine relevant matches. Haven't actually asked Pandora about it, so take that with a grain of salt.
The Decline and Fall of the Idealistic Spark: how does an org turn to evil?
Smaller dot pitch is better. If the text is too small, increase the font size.
I'm pretty sure somewhere in my resume there's something relevant to this conversation, but I can't remember.

Meanwhile, the reason I brought up djbdns is that it has automatic best-practice behavior for a lot of basic DNS config issues, like matching PTR records, or setting up reasonable TTLs and SOA field values. It's right there in the data format.

That's apart from where the dots and semicolons go in the database files. Which yeah is a mistake I managed to make a lot, even after writing a dynamic DNS server for our ISP, and is a problem that djbdns makes go away completely.

Sorry. You're going to have to add this to the list of topics I'm insufferable about. ;)
thanks for the work - their depth / quality of work is much different than what I am used to (which is blogs AND sales sites for applications)
Where is this documented? What are the CIE color points of apple's new display?
I find it funny that you fixate on one part of the overall sales pitch as offensive. Can you imagine a consumer that is thinking to themselves, "I need a laptop that has a 15" screen and is environmentally friendly. I don't really care about the color gamut but I would like to be assured that I am not going to kill the environment."
We’re calling it: The Amazon Kindle had a good run, but it’s done.
Dell has a much cheaper U2410 which is also IPS, although not LED.
Third party handsets will probably have to conform closely to its screen size, processing power, and input methods to play nicely with third party apps.

Isn't the whole point of Android that this isn't required?

Is the average consumer going to understand there is a "Google Phone" but also Google phones?

Very easy to address with branding/marketing. Think Honda/Acura or Toyota/Lexus.

Google is going to have a huge competitive advantage.

But it's in their DNA to give up a tactical short-term gain for a big long-term strategic win, of the kind involving Open Source.

What is Google's motivation? The latest batch of Android phones look fantastic. There is no need for a Google first party device as a supplement to the other handsets on the market. This leads me to believe Google is getting into this space to win.

I think they're getting in this space precisely because there is no need for their phone to win. It's their platform that needs to win. Therefore they are free to innovate, unencumbered by the pressures that the carriers will face.

I think they're in this space to exert pressure to innovate. Instead of the "public option" think of them as the "innovative option."
Yeah I got that backwards, the hint should have been "element n = e^(nth fibonacci number)".
Apple started wearing their environmental impact on their sleeve after Greenpeace screwed them over: [ http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/E83D58B3-10E0-4A9C-884... ]
Electricity, the power grid... Right now I'm pretty sure power companies can't tell you if the power is on at your house or not...The system is pretty old.
The key is to just use a different password on every site by employing a special password structure.

For example, for HN, you can use:

orycPASSWORDy

[2 last letters][2 first letters][master password][1 first letter]

Good idea to mix and match numbers in the master password for added security. So for HN it can be: orycpassword1y

The good thing is that you only need to remember a single password for all your sites, yet they are all different. And if you ever forget a password, you can figure out what it was by simply looking at the url.