skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have any interest in defending PHP or Java specifically, but giant projects really are interesting. They're just not Computer Science.

The interesting thing about giant projects (say, hundreds of thousands of lines of code on up) is that they're by far the most complicated systems that humans have ever created. And coping with a million lines of unstructured logic is simply impossible.

Lots of interesting ideas in software engineering -- higher-level programming languages, modularity, abstraction, tiny-programs-connected-through-stdin-and-stdout, service-oriented architectures, et multa cetera -- are direct attacks on the problem of how to design systems that predictably exhibit incredibly complex behaviors.

These systems would be literally incomprehensible, and unbuildable, without the library of intellectual tools we've accumulated over the last couple of decades. That library is still growing. Maybe you or I will get to write a chapter. This is Interesting. But it certainly has little to do with the analysis of algorithms.
However, in many instances, transparency does extend well beyond an organizations boundaries to the public domain.

Many scientific and business code-bases are open source. Since the advent of portable languages and VM-based back-ends, the practice of open sourced software has increased - not decreased. Many algorithms themselves are published and peer-reviewed. You can purchase Corman's Introduction to Algoritms, Knuth's books Sedgewick's books, the Stony Brook Algorithm Repository. Scientific software has been especially drawn to participate in open-source. From the beginning, efforts of scientific software were focused on to increased accuracy and minimizing error. Start from Anthony Ralston's books and Richard Hamming's book for instance.

Peer review is available and performed at numerous levels. The original criticism "no one" does peer review is over-drawn, misleading, and I would say, unfounded.
Ah, from 1999 when there were no converters for transforming more human ascii formats to latex with its funny error messages. Today I'm amazed why people still struggle with latex weird syntax when they could also use wiki-like markup languages.
Large Hadron Collider Shatters Proton Energy Record
The Average American Watches About 5 Hours of TV Per Day [Nielsen Media Report]
That would be for typesetting letters and invitation cards in latex? That's what WYSIWYG word processors/editors are good at.
Flash and a SAN? (So not my area of expertise either.)
I have to agree. If the backbone of Dubai is built on slave labor than all of the people higher up (whether they came from poverty in Southeast Asia or an affluent background in the West) are building their wealth on the backs of those slaves. Good for some stewardess from China taking her family from rags to riches. But all of that money that she made was only possible because people were suffering horribly at the bottom of society.

From the description of the conditions that those workers are in, I would rather be homeless and dumpster diving for food in a Western country.
And pile on more lawsuits? This is a childish attitude.

(Also, I think open source hardware contains a fundamental contradiction: "anyone can build one themselves" goes against the economy of scale you need to get reasonable production costs.)
Took me a second to realize why 289. 17 * 17. One dollar per square. If you could get him to offer a prize for a 1000 * 1000 grid, you have quite a nice reward.
I like the subjective nature - you don't have to beat around the bush to find what the editorial staff's (!) position is it's plain as your nose right there.
If you are that addicted already then you'll probably need to use something like this:

http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/ - For Mac OS X

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/ - For Windows, designed to block porn but it can block any site you want.

Have fun!
Makes the award "10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009: Techcrunch Crunchpad Tablet" just that little bit more ridiculous.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4332415.h...
In years long past, I did some programmatic document creation with Word 97 & VBA. Even then, you could specify formats like "Title" and "Body". They were called Styles, and they worked fairly well.
I didn't mean to imply that China factory towns were _worse_ than Dubia. I've lived and worked around them a good bit and I agree its not slavery in the Dubia sense and Chinese certainly have rights and government protections better that most Americans understand they do. Though I do know Chinese that have been put in jail for debts. I also know some Chinese construction workers in Shanghai have been treated very unfairly simply because they are undocumented workers and have no recourse. You can't go to the Shanghai government for help because your not supposed to be working there.

My original post was simply finding examples of how people use their spending power to participate in various forms of oppression. Widespread marginal participation is possibly the worst as its hardest to solve. One billion people marginally participating racks up more power than a few hundred thousand oil-rich do.
I rarely comment
The Next Generation of 3D Printer: RepRapII
Man that was a long time ago, thanks for reminding me. We had another HN meetup earlier in 2007 that got 4-5 people.
The code I wrote for my simulations is not that big, but it's certainly big enough to be complicated and buggy. And it's GPL and available on my website.

And while I certainly don't expect any of my referees to go over the code line-by-line, one of the rationales I had for GPLing the code was to make it possible for someone to replicate my study. One of the basic tenets about publishing research is that articles should contain all the information needed to reproduce the results. This is not possible for simulation papers unless the source code is public (or maybe a binary is provided, but that has many pitfalls by itself).

Results generated with proprietary codes could just as well be hokus-pokus in my mind. It's not clear how it adds to the field unless others can reproduce and build on the results. And with reasonably complicated codes, it's not realistic to think that someone will implement their own version (though that is of course the absolute best thing).

So while I don't necessarily think scientific software should be peer reviewed, I'm very hesitant about results obtained with proprietary software.
Convert markup formats with pandoc
is there a tool (preferably a rails plugin or gem, or rack middleware, but hosted web service would be fine too) that will take images linked to in a site's css and auto-sprite them, fixing up the css at the same time?
10 Resources for web designers and developers
Scott is missing a key point in that people in America just don't buy used items very often anymore.

All those stereos, TVs, bicycles, etc that people used to steal and sell at pawn shops now have very little value. Most people just don't go shopping at pawn shops anymore.

That is a major factor that makes theft of personal property less lucrative going forward.
Arrington was going to have a Brian Kindle as the head of the crunchpad development team. Now that's what i call good PR
"business" in this context seems to mean 'activity' rather than 'for the purposes of commerce'.
It's untapped, I like the subject matter, and it will be genuinely useful to the people involved. I'd rather be poor doing what I love rather than rich working on something I hate (or am indifferent to).
What's your view on the mountains of scientific code that depend on proprietary math kernels and in some cases proprietary compiler platforms?
I'm sure that will be a nice, convenient source of income for your some day, assuming that the Crunchpad doesn't completely fold, which I doubt it will.
Hmm...well, I think it's actually getting easier to be a criminal, albeit completely unintentionally.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847620

But in terms of what he's saying, I think I disagree. I find it telling that he mentions watching CSI for examples of how law enforcement uses technology faster than the bad guys can keep up. We all know how accurate CSI is.

From what I've seen, the opposite of what he's predicting is the truth: criminals adapt and use technology faster than law enforcement. Additionally, many of the theoretical technologies he points out have enormous adoption hurdles, including technical, legal, and social. Hopefully some of them will never be used. And each new technology creates new vectors for criminal malice.

I'm just not convinced.
Some Biologists Find an Urge in Human Nature to Help
Concur.next — Tab Sweep
Drug dealers shouldn't get hooked on their own drugs.
As I read in a previous expose the workers are often tricked into acquiring the position they are shipped from poorer areas, they effectively buy the job which turns out to be effectively slavery - they don't even have the decency to give them good water to drink, it's poorly desalinated. Basically the people directly in charge have no respect for the lives of these workers.
Folding paper to make it smaller: is this really a magic trick? I mean I know it gets harder with every fold, but it's not really that cool.
That's because NoSQL was never meant to be a "movement". We were taking a trip to the Bay Area from London and we wanted to meet up with some of the guys who were working on scalable non-relational data stores. We planned a one-day conference and someone suggested naming it NoSQL.

It was just a tongue-in-cheek name, until someone came along and decided it was a "movement".
I know the professor who writes this blog, Bill Gasarch. I was thinking of interning with him (at our high school, we do an internship + report about it in our senior year), but then decided against it because the math is a bit too abstract and unapplicable to (as Gasarch would put it) make me "properly enthused". He seems like a great guy. Anyway, while I haven't read the entire thing, I would suggest reading the book he has online - it's quite interesting, and it goes into more detail about colorings and such, so anyone who likes this post will find the book interesting as well.
Added a second video, showing a more advanced example with drag and drop.

oops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NntBOWEaAlU
They might just be patterns for predetermined messages. So they are probably very distinct patterns.
The most correct answer in the U.S. is that the question of whether a defendant can be forced to give up his password is still undecided.

In the UK the government settled the question with a law making it a crime to withhold your password:

http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/encryption/faqs/

The issue hasn't really come up in Canada. Some authorities have recommended a law similar to the UK's.
RE the incompetent programmers: Think of programmers as servers - you can either scale up reliable, powerful components, or scale out weak, unreliable components and make up the difference with process.
Decent article...but bad title. Should've been something like "DSLs in Ruby and Lisp...why Macros matter". Regardless, I'd like to see this thread continued.
Actually, iPhone will kill -9 unresponsive apps also. Try writing an app that sticks itself into a tight loop, then start giving the phone inputs (home button, touches, etc)... the OS will soon realize your app is out to lunch and kill it.

This is the correct way to do it.
StepWise is no more
StepWise was a place for technical content on the NeXT platform and what followed it. It was not very active recently anyway.
I'll put up some references here to Hilbert's Hotel

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4080467

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A593552

http://faculty.cua.edu/glenn/187f09/hilbert_hotel.pdf

to help people follow your argument. I see you are getting into the power set when you write, "There are many, many sub-committees that have to convene. In fact, every possible sub-committee."
You should work on your copy on the main page. It isn't clear exactly what the app does. You discuss what it is (a way to get comments from another group), but I had trouble trying to picture exactly how it works. As near I can tell, I work on a doc (image, whatever), then can share it with other people who can comment on it, within a protected area of a site. That isn't too clear from the front page.
You're not being serious, I know, but I'll answer seriously anyway. 1000x1000 is not an edge case - it can't be done - so offering a reward for a solution is pretty pointless.
A possible (somewhat sci-fi) future extension to this idea would be directly monitoring the brain of the subject, in conjunction with eye movements, in an attempt to quickly detect a subconscious signal of 'recognition' while scanning the computer-generated faces. Might be that certain signals in the brainwave (e.g. the P300 or something similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29 ) could be used for this purpose.
UNIX has "wizards" too - and perl's origins as a super-awk place it firmly in the UNIX cultural tradition in a lot of ways.

I write more perl than anything else but I work in shell, make, perl and C regularly depending on what level I'm trying to work at (and often think in lisp for prototyping).

UNIX is my IDE. perl5 is my VM. CPAN is my language.
This was proven in 1976 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem
*sigh, the general public will be heartbroken when they find out that scientists are in fact regular human beings. Science has become a surrogate for their faith.
If you model the two alternatives as Bernoulli processes with unknown success rates, and assume that the only difference between the two is what is specified on the page, and that they don't interact, and you assume a uniform prior on both parameters, B's conversion rate is higher than A's with probability 0.999572.
It's hardware. Low margin hardware at that.

And it's about to be eclipsed by a silly (or not silly...) rumour of a tablet that has hardware and software with a serious reputation behind it and a marketing program that involves billions of people.

There was excitement around $300. This can't be made in low volumes and have margin for everyone involved for $300. And who is going to pick up the phone to help me network it to my router? Who is going to pick up the tab for replacing my exploding battery?

Someone got nervous when they all looked around in their three way agreement when it came time for one of them to write the check to make the first couple thousand.
Indeed, and why would Europe want to relocate people from such countries into its midst?

People with a Medieval world view, with Medieval morals and conceptions of Right & Wrong that they insist are not only applicable in 2009, but the only true way.

We've got lots of them all over Europe, and it's starting to show.
I think maybe the OP is just feeling a bit down today about his college life due to our poor showing against UGA two days ago. ;)
Everyone participates in this, some more than others, some knowingly and most people, unknowingly. I remember when I was a kid, there was a movement to boycott crackers (during diwali time) in India, as kids were employed by the industry. Lots of people, including me, stopped buying crackers. It did have some effect, but I doubt how much.

Ultimately, it is left to the each individual I guess. If only each one of us decide not to buy products of slave labor, not to support war etc, world would be a better place in an instant.
Help us understand why this is important - who or what is StepWise?
explanation http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-de...
Did you read the article? These are actually quite different.
http://www.opendns.com is another way to block sites.
I'm pretty sure you haven't understood the problem. It's really nothing to do with the 4CT.
The 4 colour theorem is about colouring an arbitrary planar graph such that adjacent vertices have different colours.

The problem posed here is about colouring a 17x17 grid such that there is no monochromatic rectangle.

These problems have nothing in common aside from the word "colouring" and the number "4".
Sync Google, Outlook, and iPhone
My goal has always been to have my iphone, google, and outlook all properly sync emails, contacts, and calendars across different computers without spending a nickel.

I’m not going to turn this into a full tutorial, this is (hacker news right?) but:

1 – Get your domain synced with Google
Buy your domain name, set up Google Apps free version @ http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new

2 - Flip on Mobile Syncing
When logged into Google apps, go to “Service Settings” menu then “Enable Google Sync”

3 – Make it work on your phone:
Follow the steps to get things working properly on your Phone @
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138652

4 – Download the new Google Outlook Calendar Sync: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89955

And now you’re in business.
The problem isn't what you think it is, otherwise the solution would be trivial: alternate one pair of colors on even rows, and then alternate another pair on odd rows. That satisfies the four color theorem.

This problem differs in two ways.

First, we're not looking for all of the vertices to be different colors. We're looking for them to not all be the same color. This is easier to do.

Second, he's not trying to color a simple planar graph. He means every rectangle on the grid -- for example, a 7 x 8 rectangle in the middle somewhere. This is much, much harder to do.

(To be fair, I made the same mistake on a first reading of the problem.)
That's not the same problem. This refers to a grid (not a map) of colored points (not regions), colored with 4 colors (at least in this case) in which a rectangle with four same-colored points cannot be found.
StepWise was THE site for NeXTSTEP / OpenStep. It had programming articles (many of which was useful into the OS X days) that taught a lot. I get the feeling a lot of OS X developers started there.
> Sorry. But after reading that article, I just don't believe your personal experience is indicative of what's going on in Dubai. You're the one who sounds out of touch.

I want to put this down in a way to further the conversation. "But after reading that article, I just don't believe..." - that statement. You read a news article - I've read many too - and you feel educated enough to make a judgment on my personal experiences including very upper class people, Western skilled workers, and some poor people who were maids, sanitation people, etc. After reading a news article, you feel confident to make a judgment that someone else's firsthand experiences are not indicative of how things actually are, and that the person is out of touch.

> There's so much in this article you seem to dismiss with a wave of the hand by saying other countries have their problems too.

No. That's not it at all.

I don't think people realize how bad poverty is. So when you read that someone worked 12 hours in terrible conditions for $800/month, that sounds incredibly horrible. But people don't realize that when a meal at a cafe costs 22 cents, a bus ride costs 11 cents, a giant bag of rice costs less than a dollar - well, then $800 goes a long way. I've spent time in third world countries. Most people who get righteous when a story likes this comes out, haven't. $800 goes a long way in the third world.

Some people pulled themselves out of poverty by working in Dubai. I'm not talking about the up and up people. Some poor people pulled themselves out of poverty in Dubai. Bad things also happened there, but good things happened too. That doesn't dismiss some terrible things, but the article ignores some people who literally turned their lives around there.
The number of disks you have should be determined by your workload, not the number of servers. Think of it more like 12 disks in a big server vs. one disk in a small server -- the total number of disks (and disk failures) is the same.
Maybe what people say they want is different from what they want. They might say they want to eat healthy and still stop by McDonalds on a regular basis.
That makes sense, sounds like it got away from you (kind of like "agile", which has lost a lot of its original meaning).

But there's a reason it got away from you, and that "NoSql" struck a broader chord. There are a lot of reasons people would say "no sql". Some of them are good, some of them are ill-considered, and some are probably just a matter of personal preference. I personally like sql and relational algebra, but that doesn't mean I enjoy writing a lot of dull sql for crud apps, so even a SQL fanboy like me does see some merit to a more general "no sql" movement. I'm just interested in trying to figure out/catalog the various objections, why people have them, whether they are based on a misunderstanding of SQL/RDBMS or are very valid, and so forth. I think it's a good discussion.
Understanding scam victims: Seven principles for systems security
Note that the second distinction you made is actually trivial. Coloring the vertices of a planar graph is the same problem as coloring the regions of a different planar graph. The graphs are duals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_graph

In this case, the dual of a grid is a grid. So at least that part of it would be the same problem. The other distinctions are true, though.
See the conservative assumption that "liberal == vegan" or "liberal == animal activist."
All true, I think the very fact that we can have an interesting discussion about where the three major disciplines draw their respective lines is evidence of the immaturity of the respective fields.

I have a feeling that, with the way the three disciplines overlap, when everything finally shakes out we'll probably see the formation of a few more disciplines. We've been doing math, science, engineering and building things for thousands of years, but software for not even a century.
How Do I: Backup Hyper-V with Windows Server Backup?
I'm sorry, I'm not a statistician (or any kind of mathematician) so I don't know the proper terminology. I'm just noting that the only way your previous example seems work from my perspective is if you take one over infinity to be zero.

I'll explain: The set of all of the points between two points is an infinite set, and the probability of selecting any single member of a set is approximately one over the size of the set, so it would seem that the probability of selecting any individual member of an infinite set would be one over 'infinity' that is, an undefined value.

Granted, the limit of one over x as x approaches infinity is zero, but the probability of selecting any single member of an infinite set isn't zero in the same sense that the probability of selecting a member outside the set is zero. That is, if I pick a point between 0 and 1, and I select point x, there was obviously not impossible to select point x. So while it may be 'mathematically convenient'* to say that the probability of selecting any given point is zero I think that it might be better to say that it might be better to say that the chance is infinitesimally small, rather than zero per se.

So while I may certainly be wrong, I think that you are univocating when you say that a range is an example of an infinite number of zeros being non-zero. When I was talking about the chance of a individual monkey typing out Shakespeare was zero, I meant that, if it was impossible for any monkey to type (imagine that we are using exclusively dead monkeys) no monkey could ever type out anything, much less Shakespeare.
I have seen a video like that as part of a TV show. The clip is probably online somewhere.