skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2 is especially slow for me. I'll probably upgrade just to see if it gets any faster. Pretty sad.
Any 64-bit MySQL will do fine with big memory. It is with > 16 cores that modern MySQL suffers from concurrency problems with mutex contention. These AMZN big memory instances have 4/8 cores, well within the area where MySQL performs well.
Funny. (you probably know this but) The cartoon isn't about if batteries are more dangerous than water bottles or even a jab on the TSA policies about grading the danger of stuff, it's about how nerds will dig their own graves because it's on our nature to point flaws, to improve a system/process, and how detached from the way relationships work (specially these of power, like employer/employee) we can be. In other words, how reason and logic tramples everything else.

At least this is how the cartoon resonated with me.

But hey, we all look at our own bellies.
That social fear is what keeps plenty of people from just jumping in and failing at plenty of other things. Of course there's more to success at a thing than willingness to fail. But out of fear, people sabotage the endeavor before it's begun. Fear that people won't like what I've made. Fear that what I've written isn't good enough. Fear that I won't be good enough compared to my perception of their expectations. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of rejection.

That's the thing. Of course some people won't like what you've done. Of course you'll make a mistake. Of course you'll get rejected. Being able to accept that will at least put you past the self-defeating stage. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
My brother goes to a school where they use computers to work through lessons at their own pace. There are humans lecturing (kind of a youtube with powerpoint split video) and they solve the questioning problem by having teachers for each subject in the same room as the students.

Personally I think this is a rather stupid way to do school because you don't get that interaction that you would in a normal school, one such example would be when a teacher asks you about the current subject and you have to quickly use critical thinking to come up with an appropriate answer. This is completely lost when such a learning system is used.
What a disingenuous defense of a policy enacted in response to a completely infeasible terrorist plan.

The funny part is that people generally know security theater like this has jack-all to do with actual security or safety. We just obediently continue to take off our shoes, surrender our nail-clippers, and buy our drinks at the stores in the airport.
And it's handy for showing all the spam that's showed up:
http://jquery.markmail.org/search/?q=porn
Tell HN: The Free Version of My GPS iPhone App Came Out Today (Gaia GPS Lite)
WoW and D&D are very different. D&D is a real interactive experience with other people.. and you are not nearly as limited in what you can do.

Assuming you get the right people...
Many people still have trouble with computer skills.

Even more people (me included) prefer printed and taught material to staring at a PC screen all day.

Language is very expressive: you can teach things with the tone of your voice that might take 20 lines of text just to describe.

Passion for a subject.

Social skills teaching.
The next time you're in a security line, turn to the person behind you and say, "Here's a thought for you. Aren't you glad that the shoe bomber didn't hide the explosives in his underwear?"

Guaranteed laugh. Try it. You can say it to the screeners as well, and they'll laugh as well. And it perfectly highlights the absurdity of the security theater we suffer through. Some guy tries to blow up a plane with explosives in his shoes, FAILS, and we all have to take our shoes off now.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater if you haven't heard the phrase security theater before. Not only does the term describe the TSA perfectly, it was actually invented to describe the TSA.
You agreed to work without a contract? You LET yourself be taken advantage of. Don't make it sound like you were an innocent bystander.

I'm sorry you are upset but it really seems like you did everything wrong in this situation. You need to do some reading about employment law and employee rights, specifically as they pertain to software development.

It's a bad situation, and other employers might have been a lot more charitable towards you for taking initiative. But that's what it would have been... charity. From what you've told us, they don't owe you anything.

Consider this a painful lesson and move on.
One of the most difficult things to do is to create an effective mechanical way of measuring that student has learned the subject matter.

Naturally for some subjects it is more straightforward than others, but the problem is still challenging on balance.

Early childhood development requires a lot of psychological growth, in addition to knowledge growth. Abstract thought is not always acquired at different rates, and recognizing its emergence isn't very deterministic.

A solely software-based system also requires that the user provide honest input. It's hard to diagnose a lying patient.

Some parts intuition, some parts adaptability.

As the ability of software to handle these tasks improves, it will surely become a larger part of the equation. I don't think it will replace live humans in my lifetime though.
Is reddit profitable (or could be)? That would be benefit enough.

I don't think every enterprise a company is engaged in must synergestically complement its other enterprises.
I wanted to open some dialog with you about this, but I believe your email address might be incorrect or there was an issue with how I converted it that I can't find. Care to send me a message?
The author's point is that the true nature of practice is that you get good at whatever you repeat. This is because practice uses the brain's built-in automation mechanism. If you spend all of your time procrastinating, for example, it becomes automatic...because you have practiced it a lot, even if this was not your conscious intent. (That is my example, not the author's.)

Taking outside money, the author claims, encourages you to practice spending money. This is at odds with what the author suggests that you should practice instead: making it.
I'm sorry you only had bad teachers. If you had had a good teacher sometime in your life, you would not ask this question.
I posted the paid version a month or so ago, and a lot of HN folks downloaded it, so I thought I'd post the Lite version too.

A download would be much appreciated, and a rating or review would be doubly appreciated: https://userpub.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZUserPublishing...

Thanks for all your support everyone! For those of you with Gaia GPS, 2.0 is coming out soon, and includes GPX imports among other stuff.

Here's a link to our website too: http://www.gaiagps.com
fanman?
If I recall correctly, Ardi had an opposable big toe and although he was bipedial, he couldn't have walked or run like us. If "Born to Run" is correct then Ardi represents a point in our lineage after bipediality developed, but before we evolved to become runners.
Passion for a subject

This would be my best answer. I love technology and think it can do a lot but it can't make you love a subject in the same way a great teacher makes you love a subject. To this day I find one of my most profound interests is U.S. History and that's largely due to my High School Teacher whose love of the topic carried over into his teaching (and hence made me love the topic as much as he did)
This is good advice. I worry that you've already put up barriers with your ex-boss, but if there's any way you can salvage the relationship, perhaps they could at least reinstate the credit to you on the site. You aren't going to win this one, but at least you could put the site on your resume.
This was a great article - what a deadly combination. The thinker and do-er.
I believe it was Scott Adams who suggested that one woman should take one for the team and build a bomb into her bra. Once the TSA realizes that they would have to require each woman to remove her bra while passing through airport security, the whole thing would unravel pretty quickly.
I've played D&D with plenty of people who weren't particularly witty or capable of creating and exploring a fake world.

But if you have fun, you keep trying and get better.
Groups does have a 1-5 star rating system; I've noticed spam often gets one-star votes in groups I frequent. But that doesn't really address the problem; they ought to have a "report spam" featuer as well.
I praise you for these insightful words of wisdom. Thank you.
The dollar signs are not the problem with PHP's variables. Their global scope is.

But anyway, well-abstracted PHP ends up looking like Java -- very verbose. Quick example; if you want to pass around a callback that has state, you have to make it a class, since there are no closures (instances of classes and closures are about equivalent). This is, however, a lot of typing to do something simple. Instead of a quick one-liner, you now have a new file and a new class, or, at the very least, an interface and anonymous class. Messy.

You can't abstract away that pattern, either, as there is no MOP (to auto-generate the classes as needed), or macros (to at least type in the code for you automatically).

Anyway, something that's just a few characters in other languages is now multiple files. Sure, it's well-abstracted and pretty easy to understand. But it's also massively over-engineered, and distracts from the task that you were actually trying to accomplish.

If you are going to write PHP code that looks exactly like Java, why not just use Java and get your 70x speed boost?
Is there are a way to get all the articles to show in the RSS feed? It'd be more useful than just having the date of the digest.
I don't think you're locked into InnoDB tables, just that seems to be the default. I've just set up an instance and imported my MyISAM tables across and they all seem to be working ok.
Bump is hiring: now with salaries! (YCS09/Sequoia)
Yeah, or we'll all have to arrive two hours early and get strip-searched if we want to get on a plane. Think it couldn't happen? I wouldn't bet against it.
I think this is a big part of why so many VC funded "we'll figure out how to make money later" startups fail. The runway encourages a weakness in the DNA of their company. If primitive man had a refrigerator full of food back at the cave, he would never have learned to hunt.
Cleaned up to be less confrontational.

There is a difference in stride efficiency between jogging and running at high speed. 20 year old men don't run 50 miles in one go let alone 70 year old men. Now jogging that distance over several hours is a reasonable form of transportation, but running is out of the question. So, jogging is a way to trade energy for time and distance where running trades endurance / distance for time, energy, and speed.

I would assume if humans where built purely for distance running then our most efficient stride would be used for distance running. But, I don't know what the overall tradeoffs are.

PS: There seems to be two definitions of running one of which is a stride there all feet leave the ground at the same time and the other involves high speed. While skipping falls under this definition of running the implication of speed is missing.
This app is awesome! We are using it all the time. Thanks for the good work and keep it coming!
Asteroid Explosion Over Indonesia Raises Fears about Earth's Defences
Jesus. Can we move on, yet? George Carlin nailed this topic over 10 years ago. xkcdsucks (nb: usually funnier than the comic!) nailed this cartoon: jokes about airport security are so overdone that there's actually signs at the airport warning you not to make jokes about airport security.

Yes, the "3-1-1 restrictions" are completely retarded. Yes, people are mostly liquid. Yes, batteries are dangerous. Hollering about that here isn't going to help you, because the TSA people live in an entirely different universe than you do. To them, the 3-1-1 rule is perfectly rational. It's a reaction to an actual threat they had. To abandon the restriction, they have to accept responsibility for the next time liquid explosives are used to destroy a plane. They are never. going. to. do. that. It would be irrational --- from their perspective --- for them to do so.

This TSA response isn't disingenuous. It's exactly what any thinking person expects them to say. So what are we discussing here?
HN readers are a vastly different audience than Joe Student. I would bet that over half (or more) are autodidacts, extremely capable learners with few mental obstacles to motivation or learning.

All of the good research I've read on online learning is done with self-selected groups of adults who would probably learn well regardless of their modality. All of the research I've read on K-12 studies suggest that computer use in the classroom lowers students' scores (though computer use as a supplement outside of the classroom can improve scores).

Besides that, this ethereal "software that provides a personalized learning experience just right for their abilities" doesn't exist.

I'd really really love for there to be some magical software that can figure out what a child needs and start from there, and we could probably hit a decent percentage of the population, especially those children created in our own (autodidactical) image, but if you spend any time in K-12 schools (I'm a founder and currently on the board of our local charter school and have 4 kids of my own), you'll notice that children have vastly different learning abilities, interests, needs, etc.

I would guess that more than half of what a K-12 teacher does doesn't have anything to do with teaching facts, but teaching about life and how to motivate, how to behave, how to stop flicking boogers on your friends, how to deal with disappointment when you can't "get it", etc. Learning for children is much different than learning for adults. And we're not even addressing more subjective education such as creativity, synthesis, and higher-order thinking skills. These don't translate well to computers because they require direct human judgement and some subjective evaluation.
Let me say that I have used PHP extensively, and found it to be incredibly painful. It basically allows the expressiveness of C with classes. It is possible to write working applications like this, but that's about all I can say. Given the choice, I would pick absolutely any other language. Even a tiny bit more expressiveness makes me happier and more productive.

The only reason I can see for picking PHP for one's own internal applications is ignorance. Any language is better.
Upgrade price is $40 (from v1 or v2); regular price is $60.
But would you want to use an assault rifle in a mugging?
You're already getting strip searched before you board planes; they're just using millimeter wave scans to do it. People really need to start calling these things what they are: electronic strip search machines.
So true. PHP library implementers seem to love making everything a strange corner case instead of taking a step back and picking a better abstraction. It is amazing how easy it is to write code that works for all possible inputs when you pick the right abstraction, and it's amazing how downright difficult it is when you pick the wrong one. PHP libraries function accordingly.
The article proves my point. What if anything are you trying to get at?

Apparently, you've never heard of the Pure Food and Drug Act either, or why it was created, given the presence of adulterants common in goods at the time. People like you don't want to understand--rather, you'd like to adhere to your flawed worldview. There's no sense in arguing with people like you. I hate to say this, but it needs to be said: you're an idiot.
Thanks Russell :)
Good grief, could they miss the point any further?

"The batteries may be more dangerous than a bottle of water, but they are not more dangerous than a water bottle filled with liquid explosives."

The relevant question is whether the batteries are enough to cause an explosion that could bring down a plane; not whether batteries are more dangerous than water.
Ex-Chief Returns, Luring Talent From Bailed-Out AIG
"Completely infeasible terrorist plan" is exactly the wrong argument to make. (a) you don't actually know it was infeasible, which costs you credibility right out of the gate, and (b) you're tacitly accepting that every "feasible" terrorist plan deserves explicit countermeasures.

Another reason why this discussing annoys me; people always insist on having it on the TSA's terms. Why? They'll win this argument every time. They have more facts and their facts are scarier than yours.
I think the demographic that uses reddit is often regarded as the most difficult and skeptical demographic to market to. Owning reddit probably gives them some fairly useful data and allows them to monitor trends and perhaps better position their more-for-retail brands to attract this user-base.
Some different protocols do different things. But XMPP, particularly wrapped in the Wave implementation, can do many, many things.

Wave might catch on as little more than an open-source alternative to, say, Sharepoint and Biztalk. (collaboration and workflow automation being the most obvious non-communication uses).

But I don't see why people would stop short and not replace their SMTP/Jabber/IRC/RSS use with Wave once they and everyone they need to work with is using it.
Android 2.0 Official Video
How would you respond to the YCRFSes? 4 ideas in 24 hours.
Ok, I'll start off. I follow the following twerps:

JavaScript / Visualization:
@jeresig
@sanchothefat
@flight404
@paul_irish
@rem
@F1LT3R
@zacharyjohnson

Web Standards / Policy:
@danbri
@ppk
@EFF

GeoWankers:
@Billfgreer
@mikel
@anselm
@mikeliebhold
@ajturner
And load balancing matters: Google runs something like 5000 threads on systems with 16-32 cores.

Even in the most IO-bound of domains or in the case where 4.9k are sleeping, does it really make sense to ever have that many threads/core?
Fair enough. I suppose I do try and keep it KISS and that does often require abstractions and even the occasional meta-programming. But in most cases, KISS principles are best achieved by using the most minimal abstraction that does what you need.

> Also, you have 100 line SQL statements embedded in your PHP programs? That is the wrong level of abstraction.

If you need to calculate payroll against a schedule of appointments consisting of elements that need to be calculated as a flat fee, percentage, or sliding scale of appointments and you need to return results in real-time than it's the right level of abstraction. And when you actually need to mix in values, constants, and even function calls from the software into that SQL statement, you need something very different from your example.

"The point of my abstraction is that a quick one-liner is the same mental complexity as your supposed 100-line statement."

The same technology that allows you to make quick one-liners of moderate SQL statements would balloon my 100-line statement into a 200 monstrosity that would be impossible to follow. There are trade-offs with abstractions. Look at Rails, absolutely great for certain types of projects but when you need to do something outside of the box it gets very complicated to work with.

"Anyway, probably not worth arguing with you, since you are quick to make personal attacks"

You're the one making a lot of assumptions about "PHP programmers" that I could take offense with. I really don't think pounding my keys really fast makes me productive. Or that my HTML, PHP, and SQL is all in one file. Or the countless other things that you've said. Really, if I was black would you think I talked all gangsta too?

> and won't discuss anything specific.

I was just very specific, enjoy.
A Google Groups mailing list is not a Usenet newsgroup.
The Space Elevator Games (sponsored by NASA)
What Hole is Amazon RDS Filling?
I hesitated to post because it might be considered "political." However, I thought HN-ers would be interested in the economics of market self-correction.
Marine Mechanics Work 50% Faster Using Augmented Reality Goggles
FTA: When you show us a bottle of liquid, we can’t tell if it’s a sports drink or liquid explosives without doing a time consuming test on it.

Right. Which is why all self-respecting terrorists won't bother to show you the dumb bottle in the first place. Am I the only one who has, on multiple occasions, checked my bags through the scanner to realize that I'm technically in violation of the "no liquids" rule because I'd forgotten something?

The rule is ridiculous. Just live with it.
I agree completely. I started reading this book, but by chapter 4 I was tired. It didn't need to be so long.
As a bootstrapped company I understand what you mean, but that doesn't mean companies like that cannot succeed. ie. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Digg, etc.
Randall's reply:

--

Randall Munroe Said...

> The batteries may be more dangerous than a bottle of water, but they are not more dangerous than a water bottle filled with liquid explosives.

Hey! I'm the author of that cartoon, and was delighted to see your reply. Thanks!

Certainly, a bottle of water is harmless, but I was actually assuming the water bottle was also an explosive.

Laptop batteries have relatively high energy density. The two batteries I travel with (which I've never had anyone object to, contrary to your stated policy) combine to hold roughly the same energy in a 6-oz bottle of pure nitroglycerine. This energy cannot all be released quite as rapidly, but my friends have made laptop batteries explode with enough violence to, in one test, take the top off a small tree (when nestled in a fork of the trunk).

I understand that practicality plays into the decision of what to ban, and the joke of the comic was mainly how silly it would be to explain to a security guard how you could make a bomb with the expectation that it would have a good outcome. The laptop battery is a borderline case at best.

But I really do think there are some pretty serious problems with our approach to airport security, and that the rules we've come up with are more the result of a desire to do something than out of a practical assessment of what would make us safer. Articles like this one make the point better than I could: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security

I mean, when liquids are confiscated, what happens to them? Are they destroyed with explosives, tested, or just thrown away? If they're just thrown away (or set aside until days later), what's the point of confiscating them at all? The terrorist can just try to sneak some through again the next day, since there are no consequences to failing.

Yet if you don't put on the show, I suppose the airline industry might collapse. I really don't know what the solution is, but I get frustrated dealing with restrictive security procedures whose practical intentions are simply to reassure me.