skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One tip (of the many, many good ones in there) that I'd like to pull out for you is using scoped finds, as it establishes security by convention rather than requiring programmers to make the right choices every time.

Actual examples from my code base:

@word_list = @user.word_lists.find(params[:wl])

versus the alternative (of which there are multiple variations):

@word_list = WordList.find(params[:wl], :conditions => {:user_id => @user})

This will work fine... right until one of your programmers forgets to put that condition statement in there. Then, you'll allow folks arbitrary access to other people's data, silently. I have seen a lot of Rails code that guards against this by checking access before critical actions -- again, this will work fine until you forget to do it. Instead, establish the convention that you only instantiate the model objects through something which guarantees authorization, and then the existence of the model object is proof that access to it is authorized. (Adjust as required if you work in banking or state secrets. I write bingo cards for a living.)
I think the core point is that you need to care. The chance that you will be good if you don't care is vanishingly small (because you are competing against people who do care). If you care, you can find tools that will help you.

That said, I've seen people who care less but are still excellent developers. Talent can compensate to some degree.
Yes sadly with some of these experiments (really smart dolphins, talking parrots, extra intelligent apes) it is that particular animal which is above average. Other animals can't learn everything that the one "high IQ" animal can.

So when that animal dies the experiment cannot be repeated and the research is pretty much over until they find another smart animal to work with.

So many of these animal experiments are very non-repeatable both in theory and in practice.
nail on head. he should read Murray Rothbard's paper, "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" http://mises.org/money.asp
What makes you think you would get to know people better as a waiter than as an IT worker?
Do you think only one out of every 73 is capable...?

Less, actually. The evidence being that of those who make it, many barely make a single useful contribution over a lifetime of research. The question is really about whether more than 1 in 73 deserve to be able to try - and my opinion is that, really, no. But there shouldn't be 73 in the pool to start with.

PhD training should start earlier (maybe after Sophomore year of college), and should be much shorter and more intensive. I think that peer-reviewed articles (and not a dissertation) should be the standard by which a PhD is judged (this is the case in many European countries).

But I agree with you that the quality v. quantity balance seems a bit skewed.
We need fewer PhD students, and their studentships should be redirected toward paying more to the good ones and their supervisors, toward more funding for their projects (I believe this was your point in the linked comment). We need fewer journal articles (maybe), but deeper contributions.

Yet: so far, it's what we've got. It works pretty well. Yeah, it sucks to be a PhD going through the grind, watching the 4th-years in the lab slowly deflate as they realize they're going to have to get real jobs. But perhaps we were all crazy to believe we could really make a career out of trying out crazy ideas and telling other people about them.
"Here's a test: when Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, he would often go into town for dinners with his family."

As an aside, its amusing how many people come to Concord and are stunned to learn that Walden Pond is only a little over a mile from the center of town - not exactly the middle of nowhere.
16 Year Old CEOs, What Has The World Come To?
Think of it this way. If you only read fiction for the rest of your life, could you program a computer? Could you build a house? Could you understand quantum mechanics or any myriad other practical skills? Probably not.

My practical skills are only useful in their relation to my human condition, both of which warrant exploration.

This of course is my opinion, but if I had to choose between a future life of only fiction reading or a future life of only nonfiction reading, I would choose nonfiction.

Fortunately for all of us, that choice is entirely unnecessary, and I've no problem suggesting that anyone who actually dismisses either fiction or non-fiction is demonstrating a remarkable, frightening lack of insight.
This is an extension to Firebug, not another built in feature. When you have to do some event detective work, you'll probably be glad it's around.
I wrote "Experience delivering quality work on time" I didn't write "has a resume that only proves he showed for work for x number of years".
So who is in the wrong? Paulson for buying the insurance, or the banks for selling insurance they couldn't pay for?
Careful Chris Hansen doesn't mess around

Yikes :( I guess the post wasn't clear enough, I'll edit it. I meant that I eventually want "Kindle in my web browser", with regular (not just children's) books .. followed up with some kind of social reading that doesn't suck (which has not been invented yet). I like their book reader and attention to detail, I think they could make a really luxury "coffee house" feel to a book-reading website.

That said - maybe you're right, and there's room for social features on the kids' level. Organizing play dates between our kids if they both liked such & such a book?

(edit: apparently I can't edit my previous post. weird.)
Bad example:

Apple has an HFS+ implementation for Windows included in their BootCamp package. There are various utilities for Windows that can also access HFS+ volumes in userspace including MacDrive, TransMac and HFS Explorer. Additionally Linux supports HFS+ and Apple's own HFS+ implementation is open source. (you could actually boot Darwin on any PC and access the data that way) Anyway..

All closed source software is inherently vendor locked. If that's the point you're trying to make I agree. It seems we were talking about how a company chooses to sell their closed source software which is a different issue. For example, if I had all my data on an NTFS formatted drive I would need a Windows computer to read that data (ignoring for now there are other ways of doing this via third party tools -- but none of them are developed or supported by Microsoft) My choice is HP, Dell, Acer, etc but I'm still vendor locked to Microsoft. Same deal. Microsoft abstracts their vendor lock away from hardware in the PC world -- in other areas such as the Zune, Xbox 360 they also include hardware. Open source is the only way to be free from vendor lock for people who are concerned about it. For the most part there are simple work arounds in the closed source world so it's not usually a major problem. (which is why most people don't care I think)
A large portion of revenues for social games/worlds (Zynga, Playdom, Second Life, IMVU, etc) are gotten from users so passionate about the game they pay directly for credits - that is as clean as it gets and a solid revenue stream even if you cut out the bottom-feeder lead gen offers...
> I believe he was asking for the defense of literary criticism's value to society.

It's valuable because people are, and have always been, interested in discussing and analyzing literature in order to gain a better understanding of it. I'm not sure why you think that it has to "contribute" some definite thing to society in order to be valuable. Music and art don't obviously contribute anything either, but presumably you don't think these are without value.

>The question is, have they added anything of value to society?

Yes, they have added a greater knowledge of literature and how it works. I don't think it's necessary (or possible, really) to argue that knowledge is valuable to society. But I think the way you pose the question is a bit odd. Why does literary criticism have to "add" something distinct from itself to society in order to be valuable? Some things are valuable in and of themselves.
I find stuff like this interesting to read but also a bit sad. Rebelling by doing the "opposite" of something is a poor substitute for real choice because you are still defined by the thing you reject. Generally speaking, I prefer pursuing "the third option" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TakeAThirdOption).

I do currently live without a car and I'm happier this way. But, having spent many years as a homemaker, I don't think there is some inherent virtue in not having money of one's own or an income. I did get to live for many years in a way that taught me inherent value over "price". Lots of people these days seem to equate placing a dollar amount on something with real value, but it's not the same thing. Perhaps that is a mental model this individual was struggling with when the original essay was written. He does indicate he has since bought land. Presumably his thinking has evolved over time and he might not say the same things now that he said when this was written. Maybe he has found his own third option now, one where his idea of "freedom" involves more real choice rather than reactionary rejection of money.
I assume somebody mis-clicked on their 'submit to HN' bookmarklet.
Taxi to Toronto Airport
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Most of the people who whine about postmodern critical theory haven't even read any, so I'm not sure how to give a defense of work which people haven't read. I expect that most of it is rather low in quality, but most of the work done in every discipline is rather low in quality. And in any case, not all literary criticism in the academy is "postmodern" in the invidious sense.

>Instead, I think the phrase ["critical literary analysis"] is being used here as a term of the art,

There is no such term of art, as a quick google scholar search would tell you, so I see no reason not to interpret the OP literally.
Plus, they chop your day into small bits, so you have only 20 minutes of free time here or 45 minutes there. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can't do that in 20 minutes.

That bit reminded me of pg, because it's something he said too and because of the writing style.
Why do you think that? Besides fitting in with pg's general thesis.
The reason I chose 1850 to the present is that it was well past the chaos of the American Revolution and yet far enough away in time to show a trend.

Further this time period covers the change from nearly all women working inside the home (or working on the family farm), to many working outside the home.

Many posters seem to have missed my point; perhaps I could have stated it clearer.

To restate it, there is little causation between women working outside the home and whether or not children are educated; and if there is, the Economist article quotes no sources to establish that.
The video, for those that missed the link in the second paragraph: http://vimeo.com/7403673
sigh It's textbook vendor lock-in even. That's Apple's business model. Bring consumers into their ecosystem and don't let them out.

Nothing wrong with it, but it is what it is.
It doesn't necessarily cause your basal metabolism to drop. I just confirmed this with two physicians and a nutrition student.
What do you consider cheap for bandwidth?

Is $3.99 per mbps with a minimum commit of 10Mbps expensive? A 10Mbps would give you approximately 1250GB of traffic in a real-world scenario. See: http://uberbandwidth.com/pricing.asp
It's important to note that choice of language affects a lot of these issues. For example, the unicode issue in Python:

>>> s = unicode('Les Misérables','utf-8')
>>> print s[::-1]
selbarésiM seL
I can't bring myself to trust dedupe without verification after every hash match, so I plan to use it with a fast hash algorithm with full verify enabled.

CRC32 is faster than ZFS's default of Fletcher2 and has less frequent collisions.
> 16 Year Old CEOs, What Has The World Come To?

It's come to ageism.
Very nice! (Although I think the interface needs a little work.)

For those wanting some pointers: The two prominent blobs below the Milky Way in the right half of the image are the Large & Small Magellanic Clouds. Orion is near the right edge of the image, just below the Milky Way. The Big Dipper is in the upper-left portion of the image, more left than up. The Andromeda Galaxy is not too hard to find: straight below the Big Dipper, a bit below the Milky Way.
It's All Just Programming
I don't think you understand how dedupe works for cases where it is a benefit.

Imagine you have 10 VMware virtual machines, and all the VM files are stored on a ZFS server with dedupe support.

Let's say that the base install image is 2GB in size of OS, GUI, Java libraries, etc.

Non-dedupe scenario means 20GB of storage is used.

Dedupe scenario means maybe, 2.5GB of storage is used due to slight differences in the way the blocks are arranged, etc.

Now you add an 11th VM, same OS, same base setup. Storage goes up by maybe 100MB even though the VM has the same 2GB of files.

Do you see how zipping a file would not show you that effect?
I have always admired my government (NZ) for its anti whaling and dolphin hunting stance but I suspect it gets all the government support due to our tourism interests. I see this problem being solved, among others, with PETA's (artificial) meat in a vat idea.
Easier to summarize than to come up with an original thought then? Is that your point?

So in what way is not offering a netbook a method to maximize profit? Again you fail at offering absolutely anything of value.
I don't consider it changing my life, rather attacking the problem in a different matter.

I will always chase my interests and goals, but rather than doing it for someone else's company and someone else's ideas, I'd rather do it on my own, on my own terms.

Obviously, changing to a job that's equally stress free but more interesting wouldn't be bad at all, however there is a certain amount of stress involved in that process inherently, and I really need to be able to work remotely at the moment.
Like getting incorporated is such a big deal.

It's a simple form you fill out and pay a few bucks, and bam, you are now the CEO of an incorporated startup.

Personally I'd feel weird calling myself a CEO unless my company was making ~60K(basically a salary) or I had some funding to at least prove my legitimacy.
Yeah, I've been telling a series of stories to my daughter for 5+ years now....there are only so many funny situations you can make up with an elephant, 4 squirrls, 1 monkey, a klutsy rabbit, a spider, an ant, 2 cats, a dragon ...

Here you go: http://thepeopleoftheforest.blogspot.com

Man, sometimes I don't have it in me to do anything new on that.
The power of "no"
Many ZFS users already leave compression enabled which uses more CPU time than SHA256 and is still fast enough.
It was the exact reason I chose the G1, its generous 5 row qwerty keyboard makes daily use of SSH possible. You can type numbers and symbols in your password easily and quickly, and you get a full 80x25 display.
For all the fanfare of iPhone's pinch-to-zoom, just give me a button for zoom. Shoot. Honestly the iPhone could use a few buttons to make some of these actions easier, especially when holding the phone in one hand (pinch-to-zoom and pinch-to-zoom-out are definitely NOT trivial manuevers to pull off with just one hand). The Droid looks like it has four buttons on the face, let alone the plethora of buttons on the slide-out keyboard. So long as you can press a button for these actions, or at least program a button for these actions, I'm perfectly happy.
"The difference between fiction and reality?? Fiction has to make sense." --Tom Clancy
there shouldn't be 73 in the pool to start with

This is my point, actually. I'm not expert enough in the issue to believe strongly that I'm right -- but this is my intuition. I don't really care if the extra funding goes toward projects, etc. I just want to see people have to optimize less to get up the next level in the pyramid, so that they can push their work in better alignment with 'pure science' rather than maximizing chances of publication within 2-3 years (especially strong pressure on the postdocs). Something like a 5:1 ratio, rather than 73:1 (or whatever the real number is), seems better to me.

Yet: so far, it's what we've got. It works pretty well.

Agreed. I just don't like miscellaneous calls for 'increased science funding'. That just expands the pyramid, fat base and all. I would like the pyramid to be shaped more like an imperial battle cruiser [1].

[1] http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/File:Executor_prototype.jpg
Thats kind of the definition of good fiction [or good art, even highly abstract art]...

eg. Neal Stephensons Young ladies illustrated primer or Cryptonomicon strike me that way - they make you think even more about what is real.
If a 16-yr old CEO has the social acuity, business acumen, and maturity of a 45-yr old CEO, then major kudos to them.

I met a CEO and member of the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) several years ago. In the brief time I knew him, he inspired me. I know it's a cliche but his attitude was infectious and amazing. Every year, the YPO picks a different city to party and network in. That is the club that you might aspire to be part of.

Strict requirements. Responsible for full operation of a qualifying (by revenue) corporation or division by age 45. Yes, they require at least 50 employees (which may be more tailored to traditional business)

http://www.ypo.org/criteria.htm
Ask HN: Should I generate passwords for new users instead of asking for one?
By generating passwords for users at registration, I would only have to ask users for their email (I'd email them a password they could change); thus, making registration simpler. However, doing this either requires the user to change their password or remember/look up a randomly generated password, possibly discouraging repeat visits.
Truth is, in a few years we won’t be teens anymore. We will no longer have our foot in the door just because our age is impressive.

Yeah. I sometimes think about what the entrepreneurial funnel for these seemingly uber bright kids looks like. I've always felt that each additional year x% of kids that looked like the next (insert some top name) drop into the average John.

And of course, every year many average Johns that did not grow up as "CEOs" turn into CEOs.

I've learned my lessons over the years. No more any kind of story around me. If there is a story, it should be about my start-up. Of course, I am also 22 now but you'll find out the reporters' infatuation with age and hyping up an individual never really ends.

There are some folks that actually excel from this sort of publicity. They end up writing a book or two that actually sells. I realized I'm not one of them and self-publicity is mainly a distraction at least at this point in my life.
Two minor bits of critisism:

- The small version of the support_open image is hard to read

- There are some weird errors in your css (and some that are easily fixed in your html). See http://vldtr.com/?key=astorybeforebed
Ask YC: Viability of StackOverflow for other topics and community building.
YC:

I know that most of you have at least used StackOverflow. I had thought that it would be a great platform for Q&A of any topic. I whipped up gamersaurus.com and now (before I even have any real users/questions) I'm not so sure. For example: Do most video game questions have answers that are 1) cannonical AND 2) not widely available? To me, that's really the value propisition of stackoverflow.

So, my question is: Is stack exchange, as a platform dead in the water for this, or is it as valuable as the community you build around it (or something else). My friend who runs a video game forum with 220k members seems to think the former.
MIME types are ultimately a folly, as any specific type worth using will quickly grow into a general container that's no longer useful for the differentiation that matters to clients. application/xml? image/tiff? video/mp4? FUCK ME

In implementation, it's even worse: the Content-Type in nearly every HTTP Response on the web is either text/html (default, so it triggers sniffing), application/octet-stream (because your webserver doesn't know any better), or sniffed by the webserver from its extension in the filesystem (again, FUCK ME).

On the client-side, mouthbreathing open-source developers are always paying ultimate fealty to Content-Types that were naively sniffed on the server -- text/x-python? how could I possibly display that?
And we made Goldman whole on their collateral through AIG, so they didn't have to go after the folks who would have owed them money if AIG had gone down.
It's hard to define a concrete point where you aren't being pompous by calling yourself a CEO, but having more employees (or at least contractors) than yourself is probably a good start. I find it a little depressing when I'm reviewing the resume of someone applying for an engineering position and I see their first job experience listed as CEO or CTO of X, especially if the date range is before graduating from high school. "Founder" seems like a much more legitimate, scalable and reasonable option.
With anonymous downvoting comes an ethical responsibility : clarify your position with counter argument.

My position is that psychology is not [yet] a science.

Falling back on what we actually objectively know about dolphin anatomy [and subjective behaviour which does not contradict that] you would have to admit dolphins are possibly 75% as intelligent as humans, accounting for the huge difference in environment.

Does it not follow that they should have some form of protection under law as semi-intelligent beings?
That quote seems absolutely insane, the most egregious out of all of them. I searched and can't find a reference for it, though. I'm surprised that Thomas supports the power of the DEA created by the executive branch given its clear unconstitutionality.
I think that e-mailing a password for them to change adds another step, instead of taking one away.
the big bang.
Gentle exercise: the secret to a healthy heart
"due to rainfall thousands of miles away, my unit test had moved Greenland into Argentina. Fail."

Argentina's 11-day notice for changing their DST rules wreaked all sorts of unexpected havoc. It's sort of awesome (small worlds are more fun) and also totally exasperating.
Protecting aircraft from high-powered lasers
Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart - new scientist
Ask HN: Startup School Videos
I was wondering if there was a way to watch the presentations from Startup School 2009. I heard lots of good things about the talks and would love to watch them.
In my case it means the latter.
As a parent who travels frequently, I think this is a great idea!
Very good stuff, but he did forget to download latest sbcl source and compile it.
I think it's safe to call yourself a CEO when you're in charge of managing the engine of revenue; that is, a system whereby you can have your executive team hire someone, give them an instruction set to execute daily, and have money flowing back into the company.

If this isn't happening then it's probably better to call yourself a founder, director, chief instigator, etc. Although it really depends on the culture of the people you're selling to and/or trying to raise investment from.
Agreed. I incorporated at 15. It took less than 30mins.

My advice is use the CEO tag if you're following a strategy to get stories around it which you'll use to achieve another end(hopefully making money somehow). Don't use it just to feed your ego.
Well if he can't beat them, he joins them.

It doesn't look like he's doing all that well following the latest fad though.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a_XX...