skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"if Django's bundled jQuery and your bundled MooTools each want to bind '$', who wins?"

Yep. There needs to be a migration plan:

1. Announce that jQuery will temporarily use '$djq' (Django's jQuery) for jQuery starting in a few months. Don't let anything using '$' be committed during the migration period.

2. Immediately add JavaScript code to the bottom of every admin page that checks for the existence of '$djq'. If it is present, put a big flashing warning message on the page that says "Your Django admin page may break soon. Have your sysadmin look at this page [link goes here]."

3. The poor fools using '$djq' get a short chance to migrate their code. Probably nobody is using it anyway.

4. Start using '$djq'. You don't want to do this forever because it will confuse all the novices reading the jQuery tutorials and books.

5. Announce that the Django admin will switch to '$' for jQuery at the Django 1.1.0 release. (Or 1.2.0 if 1.1.0 is too soon.) '$djq' will be permanently left as an alias for '$', for compatibility with local admin code written during the migration period.

6. Put JavaScript code at the bottom of each admin page that checks if '$' is not jQuery and puts a giant blinking warning at the bottom of the admin page. Have a settings.py option to turn off the warning once the sysadmins learn what is going on. If somebody turns it off and doesn't develop a migration plan, that's their fault.

7. Shortly before 1.1.0, put in a new flashing warning that can't be turned off.

8. Substitute '$' for '$djq' for the pre-1.1.0 releases.
I was rambling on about this in 2001. You use Gnutella to search the 'transient web', which is just a bunch of home webservers serving up people's pages. Gnutella would link them all together and perform searches, as it does for MP3s now. Note: not searching filenames, but - like Google - a list of words in a HTML document.

I tried to get Gnucleus (John Marshall's Gnutella project) to incorporate full-text searches. He said he'd help but my code ended up - disabled - in Morpheus Preview Edition [itself based on Gnucleus] which was downloaded over 100,000,000 times (!). If anyone can be described as blowing a chance, that was me with MPE.

Then I tried Limewire, and wrote the code to interface with Lucene (a Java full text search engine), and they blew me off too.

Since then I've given up, but I did at least get a poster paper at HT03 about it!
I decided to do the comparison for him. Using a 386 build of today's tip of Go from the hg repo and stackless python 2.6.4 built from source. Running on Ubuntu 9.04, running the binary 2.6.28-16-generic kernel (32-bit) from Ubuntu. Hardware is a Core 2 Duo at 3Ghz and 4GB of RAM.

~/development/go/dev$ time ./8.out
100000

real	0m0.632s
user	0m0.288s
sys	0m0.344s

~/install/stackless-2.6.4$ time ./python 100k.py
100000

real	0m0.350s
user	0m0.292s
sys	0m0.060s
PyPy Sprint Report: inlining, guard chains, and exceptions
I know little about couchdb but the documentation score seems wrong: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell despite the negative second half of the review. I've read his book "The Tipping Point" and I felt that it contained great tips for startups and small businesses.

Currently I am working on "Blink".
Well, it's a good thing I didn't spend $100 on the 2nd edition last month at the book store.
An elementary non-commutative Freiman theorem
does anyone know what are the differences from the 2nd edition?
A few weeks ago, I searched a bit for "appliances" that would run on GoogleApps and found basically nothing. One would think that, given 5M free pageview/month, there would be much interest in semi-private forums, poor-man's http proxy (to circumvent The Man) and the like.

My wife participates on a semi-private forum of mommies, and it concerns me that none of them have strong control over the data they generate.
Paper notebook and Remember The Milk (mostly accessed via Gmail gadget).
I couldn't find an organizer solution that provided exactly what I wanted in the format I needed, so I just hacked one up in a week with PHP/MySQL. For awhile I had been using a simple pad/pencil and an EXPO board at home, but I noticed I tended to "forget" my long-term goals when using a daily pad and ignore the EXPO board after awhile.

Mine is lightweight and my homepage on every computer/mobile device I have... My current sections are:

- daily to-do / scratch pad box, which get moved from...

- the monthly goals box, which get moved from...

- the bucket list box

- calendar with simple tagging (for searching)

- a mini journal so I can reflect on the positives of the day

Ultimately your best solution is to do a little personal "customer analysis" and write out exactly how you'd want to manage your life and just design something to that. You know yourself best so just mix and match until you find what's optimal for how you want to operate, whether that's a simple pad or a complete netbook.
I _am_ red/green color-blind, and I can basically agree with this:

If you have to use colour as a signal, use another one as a failsafe -- use different patterns, borders or underlines in addition to different-coloured fills, outlines and texts.

But I really want to filter it down to this:

When designing your site, use BOTH colors AND symbols/icons to get meaning across to your users.

It will be much more intuitive for the average user and will be good enough for me and most people with some sort of color-blindness.

I can't expect designers to go out of their way to figure out what colors I can/can't see and which melt in to each other, but I can make the argument above that will help ALL of their users, and me as well.
You have a candle, a slice of cheese, and a pair of old boots. You need a fork-handle.

This one really made me laugh.
Basic Maths 
I'm a long time fan of Khoi Vinh's work but I'm not sure what to think of this. Basic Maths is released under the GPL but you must buy a site license and pay $45 to get the code.
cheaper but less flexible.
Kudos to icodemyownshit for creating something like this (unless he/she just submitted it, then kudos to whoever built it).

I can see how much easier it would be to just modify css hex colors than process whole images. The difference in the difficulty of implementation between the two are very significant. Thanks for a nice version 1.0. (We will be waiting for the next iteration which handles images, as well :) )
GTD suggests using anything that can manage lots of lists quickly. I'm currently using a Nokia N800 for managing my lists, and it works well. There's a basic To Do app that's easy to use. I'm upgrading to an N900 once it ships. I had tried using a physical paper notepad, but it kept getting stale. Lots of pages of half-crossed-out to-do items was annoying and not easy to sort through.
Your hope is unfortunately misplaced, the 'always' is the operative word.

Probably we will never see the end of this kind of attack until we switch to some radically different architecture.
The Trap is the killer one. Part 3 just hits all nails ever on all heads.
And at the $8 end of the scale a VPS costs less than the electricity to run a normal x86 machine.

I have a couple of low end VPS machines with different providers. The liabilities include:

1) If it goes down, and you need it up NOW… there is nothing you can do.

2) It may become inexplicably slow as they move pigs onto your box.

3) Given your low rent neighborhood you may find yourself banned because of your IP range. (I live in hope that someday Comcast will lift their wholly unjustified ban on my email server and my daughter will be able to send email to her great aunt.)

4) Expect more outages than a simple PC. Sure they use "server grade"[1] hardware, but they also have insanely complicated setups. I generally reboot my physical servers when uptime goes past one year, just in case. That is not going to be an issue with the VPS machines.

5) Many packages have a predatory bandwidth overage charge. I've never triggered one, but it is a cause for concern.

6) Storage can be very expensive.

On the happy plus side:

1) When the server goes down, there is nothing you can do. Go have lunch. This beats the heck out of frantically diagnosing and fixing while the phone rings off the hook with people who want to tell you the server is down.

2) You automatically have two sites. Your house becomes "offsite backup".

3) Your VPS probably has much higher bandwidth than your house. (Except you lucky Koreans, and Finns, and Japanese, and.. well a lot of you people with real bandwidth to homes.)

[1] "server grade" means a 100% chance of a high price, and an X% (where X < 100) that it will be reasonable quality. I've purchased and installed batches of "server grade" machines from top manufacturers that had MTBFs under 12 months. By the time you know a model well enough to trust it, the vendor no longer sells it.
Charging for software in the age of web apps
i don't, other than my linode virtual servers (i definitely have a non-work personal one for experiementing with).

i consider myself a developer along the lines of programmer and maker, even software engineer at times. i love extensible code. i love making things that work, are useful and have code that i can be proud.

code is TOTALLY different than configuration files and installing things. i only do system administration because i have to, and even then i consider it the worst "waste" of time (it's not actually a waste because yeah, it's nice to have a webserver and cron jobs, etc).

i'd much rather be writing documentation or even better, designing and diagramming how some neat pieces of code are going to work together.

i feel like people who figured out how to make allen wrenches keeping thinking it'd be cool if everyone else made allen wrenches. i just want to make bikes, including choppers and tall bikes and elegant fixies. other people just want to ride bikes, and that suits me fine because maybe i can sell my bikes to them, just as i don't mind buying allen wrenches.

maybe we each of us have a maker inside, but luckily we don't all want to make the same things. don't fight the business model.
Funny how the first example contains a subtle bug, the string termination is never done, if the stack wasn't zeroed prior to running that program, you may not only overflow 'buffer' on purpose, you may overflow it a lot further than you'd think by just reading the code.

large_string[255] = 0;

Would solve that.
Will Games Developed For The iPod Touch Be Considered Duplicating Functionality?
But you are already giving up flexibility with the 3 year term and reserved instances, or am I misunderstanding something?
Have you considered using script(1) ?
Rickrolled? Get Ready for the Hail Mary Cloud
Yes.

But as a percentage of innovation worldwide, not as much as historically.

The US has done a great job of teaching other nations how to execute, which is to say, how to set up an environment within which motivated people can be rewarded for being successful.

Perhaps not ironically, some of those other countries have learned the negative lessons within such a system (for example, a lack of financial regulation and oversight), and have done more work to mitigate the negative impact than the US has.

The key for the US will be to see if it too can learn from its own mistakes, and from the success of others.
AT ~$20/month why not have both?

One can setup dynamic DNS to map one's physical home server into the cloud. This gives you all the advantages of a legitimate POP whilst also providing the security, redundancy, and local audit-ability of your own hardware.
Thanks decode! I've updated my page with a pointer to here as well as your conclusion numbers. Let me know if that's a problem.
This article seems to defeat its own point. The visual with companies' logos on the visible spectrum (http://www.flickr.com/photos/philgyford/56867986/sizes/o/) shows that multiple companies can claim the same colors with no problems.

I don't confuse IBM and Intel, Barclay's and Prudential, or Ford and GM simply because they occupy similar locations in the color space.

This is an interesting article but I don't think we're going to deplete the color space the way we're going to deplete the IPv4 address space. People and companies have been using distinctive colors for a very long time, and we've managed to avoid this problem quite well.
Tech folk here in a room half filled with Tech grads at ASW3 :-)
at first i thought this would be good. data munging is definitely a time of programming that occurs.

but then the list just gets ridiculous, almost poking fun at the different jobs one might do. more importantly, real tasks are left off.

i flagged this submission for being boring.
This problem is inherently single-threaded. Stackless Python is single-threaded. Go distributes the goroutines over several processors using a thread pool so the performance is naturally lower for a no-op program like this one. Conclusion: inter-processor communication is expensive?
I can't find anything about a headless firefox on the jaxer site. I thought it was server-side javascript?
Domain Sharding Tests in IE7/8, Firefox, and Safari
Yes, but that wasn't the point, defense funds exist, they're being used, and it won't take much to institutionalize them where people will simply set them up pre-emptively.

Such indemnification schemes can be made illegal by the authorities though.

It's a reverse lottery, if you play and you end up losing then the pot covers your losses.
Comparing Go and Haskell : http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a4n7s/stackless...

This is all about how cheap threads are.

Go is about twice as slow on this benchmark, and doesn't scale past 400k threads. GHC 6.12 goes to >3 million threads (limited by available ram at that point).
Is there any particular reason why this is posted on Hacker News?
Bloomberg's offices are, depending on who you ask, either fantastic or terrible.

Yes, they've got a bunch of art and screens everywhere (including a curved escalator, which I had never seen before I went there). Yes, there are some great free snacks. Yes, there is some nice public art, and a decent corporate dining room.

On the other hand, it's still somewhat of a sweatshop. The whole office is open plan - the highest dividers between workstations rise about seven inches above desk-level and louder than they describe it. The whole building is covered in monitors that display, in real-time, information about how terminal sales are going. When you pull up an employee's internal profile page (which is accessible to anyone within the company), it lists what time you badged in and out for the past week.
This is a branding and marketing issue and not a tech issue. The word "server" is scary to the mainstream audience that would adopt it. The tech is there whether it's windows home server or ubuntu with Samba. Making it easy and how you market it to the digital home is the real key. More and more media is being created+consumed in the digital home. A digital home looks something like a multi-computer household with a wireless network + at least one HDTV. There's certainly a very big need for this, now more than ever.
> Go distributes the goroutines over several processors using a thread pool so the performance is naturally lower for a no-op program like this one

Performance is certainly worse with more cores. And you can end up with exponential slowdowns due to thread migration. The best strategy is to pin parts of the thread ring on each core.

Go doesn't have a good SMP scheduler, so you see that slowdown, and the GHC team have written about the solutions. See this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a4n7s/stackless...
I'm still kind of interested in what it was you were trying to say though, maybe I'll re-try later on :)

> (As an aside: I never suspected English wasn't your first language! That comes as a bit of a shock.)

Why would that shock you ? It's true and there isn't a day that I don't learn something new about English. I also am quite dependent on my spell checker to keep me on the straight and narrow. And I can't seem to decide on English or American spelling, that's quite messy.
I appreciate your point of view, but would find it more interesting and useful if you could give an example of the sort of programming you feel has been left off, rather than just dissing the item without being constructive.

I look forward to your contribution.
This is something that really irritates me. Clearly what they mean is that if you are going to run a commercial server (with the attendant increase in outgoing traffic), you should buy a business account. But that is not what is stated in the contract. As it stands, the Verizon FIOS contract disallows running sshd and logging in to your own computer from outside your home network. Now, they don't block this, and won't, yet the contract language disallows such a personal and reasonable use.

I have tried writing to Verizon, politicians, the FCC, and the BBB on this issue. The only one that bothered to reply is the FCC to say, basically, "not our problem." I would appreciate any ideas as to who else I can contact to try to improve Verizon's language.
The trick is that you don't hire a lawyer. You defend yourself and they are the ones getting all of the invoices from expensive lawyers. There are also things you can to do cause them to have higher legal fees.

Books from Nolo are very valuable when you are defending yourself.
Are you able to build something quickly to do some test runs against Windows Azure to see if it has the performance you need? You may also want to check out SQL Azure (part of the Windows Azure Platform), also in beta, to see if it can do what you need for DB performance.

As far as Windows Azure being early in its life, you are correct. However, it has been in beta for about a year and it is running Windows Server 2008, which has been in the market for almost two years. You may also want to look at the Windows Azure forums at http://bit.ly/MSDNWinAzureForum to get an idea of other people's experiences with it.

You can also get more info about Azure and its beta availability at http://bit.ly/WinAzurePlatformDevCenter

(Jason - working for M80, representing Microsoft)
I'm actually quite aware of my fingers. I have been playing piano, banjo, and several other instruments on a fairly regular basis for around 15 years now. If that doesn't make me "aware of my fingers," I'm not sure what would.

I don't see why having to press a key down slightly farther is necessarily a problem. If your forearms and wrists are in a comfortable position, it doesn't much matter how far your fingers have to move. In fact, I tend to think that a bit more movement is actually helpful with circulation.

You're entitled to your opinion of the keyboard, but I think it was just downright rude to say that the keyboard was designed for unaware sheeple like me.
Back up strategies
The flags for disabling executable stack are:
"-Wl,-z execstack" "-Wa,--execstack"

I also added -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE in the Makefile for the exploit project that the security course I'm TAing is currently working on. Not sure if that was entirely necessary.
Several of my gmail labels have a corresponding labelname-to-reply label.

I realized I was using my inbox for several functions:

1. notice urgent or topical subject lines

2. store items to read later

3. store items to reply-to later

4. store important already-read items for later reference

5. store to-do items, often implicitly as 2-4 above.

Once I set up the appropriate labels, I was able to move functions 2-5 out of the inbox, leaving it just for function 1.
A revised web site should be up shortly, detailing what's new. Here's what the preface says:

This edition captures the changes in AI that have taken place since
the last edition in 2003. There have been important applications of
AI technology, such as the widespread deployment of practical speech
recognition, machine translation, autonomous vehicles, and household
robotics. There have been algorithmic landmarks, such as the solution
of the game of checkers. And there has been a great deal of
theoretical progress, particularly in areas such as probabilistic
reasoning, machine learning, and computer vision. Most important
from our point of view is the continued evolution in how we think about the field, and thus how we
organize the book. The major changes are as follows:
\begin{itemize}
\item We place more emphasis on partially observable and nondeterministic
environments, especially in the nonprobabilistic settings of search
and planning. The concepts of {\em belief state} (a set of possible
worlds) and {\em state estimation} (maintaining the belief state)
are introduced in these settings; later in the book, we add probabilities.
\item In addition to discussing the types of environments and types of agents,
we now cover in more depth the types of {\em representations} that an agent can use.
We distinguish among {\em atomic} representations (in which each state of the
world is treated as a black box), {\em factored} representations (in which a state is
a set of attribute/value pairs), and {\em structured} representations (in which the world
consists of objects and relations between them).
\item Our coverage of planning goes into more depth on contingent planning in partially observable
environments and includes a new approach to hierarchical planning.
\item We have added new material on first-order probabilistic models,
including {\em open-universe} models for cases where there is
uncertainty as to what objects exist.
\item We have completely rewritten the introductory machine-learning chapter, stressing a wider varie\
ty
of more modern learning algorithms and placing them on a firmer theoretical footing.
\item We have expanded coverage of Web search and information
extraction, and of techniques for learning from very large data sets.
\item 20\% of the citations in this edition are to works published after
2003.
\item We estimate that about 20\%
of the material is brand new. The remaining 80\% reflects older work but has been largely
rewritten to present a more unified picture of the field.
\end{itemize}
Social Media Start-Up Job
I'm a long time reader/first time poster. Let me start by saying I have come to admire the intelligent discussion and thought provoking comments and stories that I find from Hacker News.

With that being said, I have a question for you all: Do you know anyone who may be interested in becoming part of a three man social media start up?

We are a stealth start up looking for a Developer in the Social Media space, and require someone with a strong background in data management structures, systems, and languages who is comfortable in creating both a database and algorithms capable of digesting data and spitting it back out while maintaining user security. My partner and I fall on the business side of things (with myself on the marketing end, and my partner on the finance end) and are starting interviews this week.

The project will need to be scalable and on the back end deals with pre-defined variables that will be submitted by users and will need to be indexed in a variety of ways. In addition, on the user side of things, privacy controls will be crucial to our product in their ability to allow users to limit access to specific data.

In terms of a monetization strategy we have an answer to the standing advertiser problem in terms of monetizing a free site in this space. The current founders have extensive experience and in finance and business and strong ties to VC and Investment Bank funding. We are looking to bring on someone for equity in the company. Location is not really an issue as long as the developer would be willing to participate in meetings on line and/or conference calls for status and strategy updates. However, we are currently based out of Charlotte, NC.

If you have any interest or know of someone who does, please leave a comment here, or contact me directly, my email is in my profile! Thanks again to those who read this, and keep up the discussion!