skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My current Drupal install for Virtualmin.com has 184 tables. I don't think of it as a particularly big Drupal installation, but I don't have a lot to go on. It has forums, shopping cart (Ubercart), issue tracker and project modules, and a bunch of the usual suspects for analytics, search, etc. Two of the tables are for our custom modules for our license manager and shop integration, and a few more are legacy Joomla->Drupal migration data tables (which I planned to use to make old URLs work, but the URL stuff in Joomla was so insane that I gave up on it, and just leave them around for manual lookups just in case). We migrated from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 before launching the site, and I'm pretty sure we had about 160 tables when it was Drupal 5, with roughly the same functionality as the Drupal 6 version, but none of the migration tables.

I guess maybe the Ubercart stuff is responsible for a lot of the disparity...I see a lot of "uc_" tables in my Drupal database.
All I get is: "502 Bad Gateway"
I almost always write my own stream parser with regular expressions to deal with large XML files (especially very regular ones), though it should be noted that there are stream XML parsers.
That seems to be the case. Just a stand-in for whatever makes sense given the context, not unlike the var keyword in C#.

No wonder they instituted a ban on it.
I'd love to see an new idea aggregation site, but was bummed to see that it just returns: "502 Bad Gateway"
That's not very sound basis for your bet. Though you'll be able to study this with the more letters you send. I just wanted to point out that you need to test this rather than assume.
I love #2... that's an awesome idea. (Especially since my wife has some pretty badass penmanship!)
It's in the Bag The Apple Tablet Computing Device
Probably so. However on Wall Street in general (especially in areas investment banking portfolio management, high frequency trading, etc) programmer salaries in the 100-150k range is the norm. Part of that is simply NYC cost of living, of course, but 60k is really seriously low, even for an entry level gig.
I guess that's kind of the dilemma. On the one hand, you could totally re-do these sites to be appealing and useful to their users, but if you're focus is on getting ad revenue more than actually being useful to people, that's doing the opposite of what you want. There's no reason for the owner to be dishonest here either, even if he provides "decent content", it's easy to see that's not why he made these websites.

But on the other hand, optimizing your design for clickthroughs is also a pretty good way to get blacklisted, so the design that works best for making money off of visitors, is also a long ways from being the best layout for getting more visitors to your site.
The query syntax is pretty cool, but as far as raw geocoding I don't really get it -- Google has a much bigger dataset than this, offers reverse geocoding just fine (With good neighborhood data in the US and Europe). And I gather you are just proxying requests to twitter and flickr (and not actually storing all this for all places yourself) -- why wouldn't I just query their APIs directly?

Not trying to be snarky, I just don't understand....
Also the "ads" on Wikipedia have a hide button.
Joe Hewitt: On Middle Men
Not really, not unless you're very small. People buy market research for a reason: data trumps guesses.
I think it's quite inappropriate for this person, who should know better, to be posting other people's email addresses in his blog.

It's uncalled for, even if they are on the school's site. This person who should be acting like an adult is being quite childish.
History note for you. Newton understood calculus through the idea of fluxions. It is often claimed that an insistence on teaching calculus with Newton's fluxions instead of Leibniz' infinitesmals held back research in England for a long time. (Another random note. Bishop Berkeley's famous comment about "ghosts of departed quantities" was a criticism of fluxions, not infinitesmals. In fact he had positive things to say about infinitesmals.) So yes, I do think it would be bad for students to understand calculus like Newton did. :-)

That said, to my eyes the primary problem with how we teach calculus is that we introduce too many big concepts at the same time. The key picture that people should come away with is the tangent line. But when you say that the derivative is a function defined at each point as the slope of the tangent line at that point, most people experience brain freeze.

Instead I would like to see students get to the point where they can calculate tangent lines. Then stop. Work out lots of tangent lines for lots of functions. Introduce them to how the tangent line can be used to estimate error bars. (Typical word problem, if a rock take 5 +- 0.5s to fall off a cliff, how tall is the cliff?) And then only after the picture and mechanics of the tangent line is well established should we move on to defining the derivative.

This approach, if done right, would be rigorous but informal. It should avoid the problem of causing brain freeze by presenting too many layers of generality at once. And it would really cement the key image behind half of calculus.
I expect Hunch could easily grow this way: a mixture of introductory questions to assess your purchase interests and priorities, leading to an increasing proportion of sponsored 'questions' that are offers/pitches tuned to your revealed preferences.
I don't feel papers like this are really adding much to the community. Of course all explanations of consciousness go against our conventional understanding of the universe, that's why we don't understand consciousness yet. More likely than not, we just don't understand the universe as well as we thought we did. Bonus points to those who think different.
"As perverse as this is, this "review process endurance" stamina I have is a real competitive advantage, when you consider the fact that most iPhone apps that do well have a huge first-to-market advantage for whatever thing it is that they do."

That is if you get your app first to market. Maybe the person developing the same app gets lucky and gets a more lenient or faster reviewer - bam there goes your first to market advantage. Or maybe there is already an app ahead of you that will get approved just a bit sooner.
I used to be amused at how the deeds of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie got forgotten and they were lauded when they turned to philanthropy later in life. I'm substantially less amused to see the process happening with Bill Gates.

Warren Buffett, however, I've always liked.
This is a good website. It appears that this service does what redbeacon does, in matching requests to businesses, except your website is also a social network in addition to free advertisements for companies. I think the value propisition is good and if you can get enough people to upload a commercial it could be a very resourceful website. This is certainly attainable in that there are thousands of videos uploaded to youtube per day, some of which are for people who are uploading business "commercials". I can see that prospectvista.com allows much more control for branding than youtube. Youtube obviously provides more immediate coverage since everyone knows about youtube, but if a company is trying to brand itself on youtube the next link could be a kid lighting his fart on fire. I could see why companies would opt for prospectvista.com where they can have more control over their profile and what is shown on it. I logged in via the password you supplied and the "request center" looks to be a very solid deal. So, in essence I see this as a website for companies to advertise on, brand their emails with a link to their own commercial, as well as get business leads from the request center. All in all, I like it. I can see some of the points from the reviewers, but again, as a whole I think your website is good and if you can get traction on people using it, it could be big.
Yes, but do you BUY 10 newspapers a day? Hardly. Circulation is a source of revenue (currently a larger source of revenue for papers than online ads). Moreover, buying a physical paper encourages someone to spend more time with it, to read it thoroughly and to have greater exposure to the ads. Even today print ads are more valuable, per eyeball, than online ads. When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? How many ads do you even read?

This is not to say that a paper couldn't survive with only online ad revenue, far from it. The key point is that the operations of those 10 newspapers whose sites you visit are no cheaper today than they were a decade ago. Most importantly, they are not cheap enough to be supported entirely by online ad revenue. And when you take away the print revenue and the circulation revenue, online ads are all that's left. You probably don't read the classified ads, the weather forecasts, the republications of identical national wire reports, or the beetle bailey cartoons at each and every one of those 10 newspapers. Yet each of those papers still puts out all of that material. And that costs money. It costs yet more money to arrange everything for a physical page and print tens or hundreds of thousands of physical copies of the paper every day.

Papers could survive if they changed, but they don't want to change. Because if they concentrated on just the tiny fraction of work that they do that isn't redundant or unnecessary in the online world they would be much smaller operations than they are today. Not only that, but, odd as it sounds, not reprinting beetle bailey and all that other crap would cause them to lose a lot of subscribers in the short-term, even though it might be healthier in the long-term. So papers haven't changed much even while their industry has been radically transformed by technology.

And most papers won't change much. It's questionable whether there exists a path between the way a given paper exists today and the sort of entity that could exist in the online world, it may be that it's easier to build something else from scratch.

This deal with Microsoft is yet one more example of newspapers trying to avoid inevitable changes to their ways of doing business.
What part of posting a publicly available work email address strikes you as inappropriate?
D'oh! Sorry.
Ask HN: Favorite Project Management Solutions?
We're a small web startup with a CEO in New York, a CMO in Vancouver, a CTO with 4 developers in San Francisco, and a small outsourcing team offshore.
We use Git for SCM, but we haven't found an ideal solution for communicating everything else.

Taking into perspective our fractured company structure, what project management solutions can you guys recommend?

I know this question has been asked in the past, but like all other software, the options keep changing.
Wait, so what are you doing differently than Dustin on your end?
"Murray and Strout don't understand human nature. People -- especially teenagers -- don't like following pointless rules."

Au Contraire -- Murray and Strout understand fully, but as employees of the public school system, Murray and Strout are paid to teach their students to follow pointless rules with docility and even joy (or at least the feeling that they are doing the right thing).

(Edit -- I consider it a compliment that I get upvoted and downvoted so often. Teenage rebel gives me a point... humorless school principal takes it away...)
Ask HN: Busy hacker would like to pay less busy hacker to build website
Hey fellow hackers,

I have a website idea I would like to execute, but alas I have too much code I am already in the middle of writing. I am willing to pay cash and/or equity in the website - whatever your preference is. If it's straight cash, I expect to pay a couple thousand dollars for the first version, as defined by a set of wire frames we jointly agree on. There will be no design work required - it can be as ugly as you can imagine.

The idea is this: the website allows users to post that they want to buy things, and then vendors can email the user via a method that keeps the users contact information hidden. I also have a feature for this website that I believe is essential, which I will share with you once we start talking, but I am going to keep it a secret for now.

That's it - it's basically just the "I want" portion of Craigslist, and the website doesn't have to be pretty or complex - it just has to be fast and usable.

I want it built on EC2 or App Engine in Django, so I can participate in development later, and it should employ Django mem-caching.

Drop me an email at andrew@gaiagps.com if you are interested. I want you to show me at least one Django website you have built, or if you are a great hacker, show me something great and I'll assume you can pick up Django quickly.
He said that all those email addresses are plainly available on the school website. Therefore reposting them on his own website is of little consequence.
Interesting link from the comments: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/11/rogue-amoeba.h...
Just say that the information for other countries –outside Sweden– is pretty inaccurate (they should only show averages for more than 5 tests, and using 3G, not GPRS/EDGE, etc.)

But still interesting!
Dr. Quantum explains the Double-slit Experiment
I would have thought Theodora was a female name...
On #2: you have missed the point of why a hand written letter to a loved one is special.
I was about to suggest MediaWiki before I even opened the link ;-)

Going in depth in their database schema and code might be a good idea, it's got a lot of really cool optimizations (which makes sense, considering it powers a top 10 site on the internet).
That is true. School is in part supposed to teach you to live with requirements. After all it should be preparing students for the workforce, and in the real world if you are working for an employer they might have similar strange and seemingly unreasonable requirements.

Yet I guess that the hackers and independent entrepreneurs among us can not help but sympathize with a rebellion against the status quo, even if it is over something as trivial as the word "meep". What else would cause a grown adult to send a "meep" email to a school principal?

I just find it funny that the thing has turned into a holy war of sorts.
> The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.

If I was at a job interview and was asked these sort of puzzles, I wouldn't feel under pressure. Instead I'd think "Cool, I like solving puzzles! And I'm good at it too so this is a chance to make a good impression." Maybe Google are looking for potential employees with that attitude?
It wasn't any assessment of the commenter, but rather the cumulation of my experiences doing interviews and talking to folks from these companies. Still prejudiced, but you make me sound like a total dick. :)
I certainly understand the value of a hand written letters. I am only suggesting a market opportunity.
If you can validate the addresses and generate Zip+4s, you may want to look into this if your volume reaches the minimum: http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/senditwithintheus/pr...
Bird from the future sabotages Large Hadron Collider
i new to this field, but i was thinking the same as well, since ejabberd support BOSH, then what's the point of having Punjab in there. (does anybody have an extensive documentation on how to implement it? from speeqe's setup instruction, it doesn't seems explain how to connect to a xmpp server)
It's not just them, anyone might need it. I'm sick of the "only <insert socially unacceptable / bad figure> needs privacy" argument.
On The Horizon For Google Music?
Normally you'd come up with use cases before you actually implement the idea :) You could encourage people to use it with any sort of online trade (craigslist / ebay etc) but I don't think it'd take long for them to duplicate the behavior should this ever become very popular.
Wish Upon a Hero - I wish need electric bill paid of 84.31
Enterprise 2.0: What we know so far
Wait, how is this "benefit"? Based on the above, App Store rejections are still bad for indie developers, but not as bad as for other people, so that for an indie developer the risk of getting rejected is supposedly more like a "pain in the ass" as opposed to a "prohibitive liability". But that's just saying you "benefit" because you're not being screwed as hard as that other guy.
Owner Finance Classifieds
Yeah, I worked it out just as the interviewer explained it. $0.1 per click, 20 out of 100 visitors click, that's 20*0.1=$2.0 per 100 visitors. We need $20 dollars so we need 1000 visitors. This really is child's play. Honestly I think the pressure must have crippled her.
RichardDawkins.net Evolution/Creationism Debate Points
> programmer salaries in the 100-150k range is the norm

This is the norm outside of Wall St as well, for anyone who has actual talent and/or experience and isn't a spineless pushover. For example, a truly talented sales engineer can easily make $250k/year + benefits and equity compensation.

> 60k is really seriously low

It was a 60k bonus.
Anyone might need it, but criminals are the ones likely to need it, and therefore criminals will account for most of the site's usage. Just math.
I realize that. I also don't want to work for McKinsey. I don't think management consulting would be a good fit. Really, I think I have too much of humorous subversive streak for that.

I realize I can do a lot of things with time and effort. I feel pressure on the time part, Overloaded. I'm doing a bit too much on top of that. I'm a little less that one week to my bachelor's critique in new media/internet art. We're a crazy bunch of folk, them artists. Long term I want to switch to learning coding, and haven't had the time to sit down and even think yet...

Or really apply for jobs yet. That's uhhh after next week, after I finish classes. When I know where I'm living/doing. That's normal for a college student though where I am...jumpy folk, mostly halfway through a very short midterm cycle...BA nearly got deleted, those sorts of things. still coming off of that sort of thing.
The public API they are referring to is a Mac OS X API. They assert that it is alright to transfer the image provided by that API to another device and display it there. This may or may not be the case but in my opinion, the argument could be a non sequitur. Just because one system provides you the means of getting a certain bitmap does not automatically entitle you to use that bitmap somewhere else.

It's silly that Apple accepted it before and refuses the bug-fix release. And RA is right to be mad at them for that. However, for me the "it's a public API on the Mac so we are allowed to use the bitmap returned by that function on the iphone" -argument does not hold.
My guess: it was easier.
Submitted apps go up almost instantly, no approval required.
I put in "Goldman Sachs is crooked" as a query...and it returned:

"Text in not likely to be stupid"

Clearly this is a very perceptive algorithm!
I recently attended a talk by a WebKit developer employed by Apple. The topic of the talk was advanced CSS techniques. The speaker demonstrated some incredible capabilities that WebKit has added to CSS, including transition animations, 2D and 3D positioning and transformation, and gradient generation (to name a few). When he combined these techniques into a demo web site along with the HTML5 video element, I was blown away.

Unfortunately, Joe is correct that "Web technology is still relatively weak, and improving slowly." On the iPhone (and, to a lesser extent, on the desktop) there is no comparison between the quality of native apps and the quality of web apps. Native apps still afford much more to the developer. Yet the web stack has proven to be very developer and user friendly. Unfortunately, it is crippled by the browsers (especially one browser in particular...).

Somehow we need to accelerate the empowerment of the web stack. One way to do this is to diminish the power of various "native" stacks. Ironically, Apple is one of the companies leading the way in this regard. The latest version of iTunes is almost entirely WebKit based. Mobile Safari on the iPhone can use all those amazing CSS capabilities that other browsers can't yet, even on the desktop.

In the end, I have to agree with Google's strategy: bet big on HTML5. Eventually, all apps will be web apps (though hopefully they won't require a native app -- the browser -- to run). I just don't know what to do in the interim while the web stack is still crippled by the browsers.
No job is a vacation: I've done work under pressure as well for both school and other land.

Google is not going to be bankrupt in a week. If your interviewer is really smart, do the Seth Godin thing: freelance the person for a few weeks, or offer them a real life case they are currently working on to see what that person is actually going to do.

One of the ways I figured out I would make a horrible teacher was I worked as a teacher. I really believed and worked very hard as a teacher. Ultimately, I needed a more collaborative environment, and I was stressed out because I met some really smart kids who were flunking half of exams on purpose when I confronted them about it. They would not work with me to fix these skills in third grade, particularly when there were background issues going on, and I was not the primary teacher. I found it not appropriate for me. I found that really high pressure, and not appropriate for me. Meanwhile, I know I will stay up all night on my own unpaid looking for affordance of different websites and how they can be applied for different business reasons. There you go? That seems to be appropriate for me. I just wish I knew more people in that field, and I wish I had the time to learn to code (after first round BA critiques....)

Interviewers need to sit down and know what is the pressures of the job, Half that interview would not have helped her at all. Furthermore, It is can I work with that person on the job, and help me and her reach a goal under pressure. That's a reasonable expectation. Very reasonable.
Computer Software
There is very much a review process for software sold on store.apple.com, as evidenced by the fact that there's a lot of software not sold there.

The problem is there is no outlet for rejected software, but I don't think you are any more entitled to sell via the App Store than you are to demand that your product be sold in Apple Stores.
A stupidity filter that doesn't block stupid memes is not a stupidity filter.
Why is it horrible? Do they have anything similar to the App Store, btw?
While this is not a legal document, NSImage class docs have the following text for some constants:

Images representing standard artwork and icons that you can use in your applications

Drag images you can use in your applications.

Images representing sharing permission icons that you can use in your applications.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/R...

However, NSImageNameComputer, which Rogue Amoeba uses, doesn't have "you can use in your applications":

Images representing Finder items.

Though, it has the following text:

You should use these images to reflect specific elements of the Mac OS X environment. For example, you might use the burnable folder icon if your software allows the user to organize content for burning onto an optical disk. The appearance of images can change between releases. If you use an image for its intended purpose (and not because of how it looks), your code should look correct from release to release.

Does Rogue Amoeba use these images to reflect specific elements of the Mac OS X environment? I guess so.
Ah, thank you for the clarification -- yes, Newton loved his fluxions, didn't he? In future examples I'll s/Newton/Leibniz/ :).

I think the general point is true about the brain freeze and too many big topics -- it's way too easy to just throw a definition out there, say "this represents slope which is the rate of change" and move on to the next idea.