skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh! Why do you think it's been haunting me ;)

I'm logged in as root now trying to make sense of what's choking it.

I just nuked about 100 http processes that were just sitting there. We'll have it up this afternoon I suspect (the guy that set this up is much more familiar with the framework than I).

Here's a look http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1127092/BuggyProcess.jpg. Go go dropbox public links to images.
Online YAML (and therefore JSON) Parser
10 Online Tools and Apps to Help Optimize and Format CSS
Dingwall lumps a number of separate issues under "soft delete": undo, audit trails, soft create, and performance in the presence of historical data. He presents several solutions, not all of which I would buy.

The is_deleted column is a pretty simple solution that we all use and there are a number of solutions to the problem of retrieving only the active columns, such as views.

Audit trails and performance are more interesting. A while back I worked for a web analytics company and we had the problem of the storage and performance costs of historical data. Only the 5% of the data was of any real interest, but the 95% historical data made writes slow because of the large number of indexes. They adopted the solution of historical tables with fewer indexes on cheaper drives.

I like the solution of serializing historical, deleted, and audit data and storing them in a NonSQL database of your choice. Then you can bring them back as individual undos, or into a data mining database for scenario playing.

I dont particularly like his suggestion of creating separate tables for each state of an element. I think that's needless complexity.
the 2 books on amazon's Bought This Item Also Bought" blurb are more rigorous, and quite useful books, also covering topics like Lucene/SOLR with full java code listsings:

Algorithms of the Intelligent Web by H. Marmanis

Collective Intelligence in Action by Satnam Alag
I do something similar and it's amazing. I cannot live without it. Costs will go down. Mac minis START at 599. This is a good price point for a full fledged HD capable computer.
I agree that it could be more user friendly, but here's the function of delay (from http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html):

>There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them.
Greg Young has some very interesting ideas surrounding explicit state transition models. The end result is a system that can be rewound and fast forwarded and that doesn't use a database in a traditional way.

In fact he recommends an in-memory current state, while past state snapshots and the complete history of state transitions written to disk.

It is interesting how he started with a domain problem and the end result lead him to a NoSQL type system with a denormalized reporting database.
Moving to a new app? Mind the data trap
There are canvas emulators that make Canvas more or less functional in IE, albeit with a speed hit. But even then, Canvas isn't designed to do the same things Flash excels at: vector-based animation.
Does this somehow disprove the information that has been presented though? Just because the presentation has been manipulated to maximize the statement for his cause–and those scientists were at the very least prejudiced towards their opponents–doesn't change the impact of their data.

To me though, the argument against cap-and-trade and against heavy investment in alt-energy is entirely lost and asinine to continue to chase. These resources are finite and the atmosphere's tolerance is similarly and provably so. Now is as good a time to re-ignite our initiatives in sustainable energy as any, and there are significant benefits to the many post-industrial western economies that are glutted with well-educated but under-employed people. IT and IS can't be the only thing that we have over developing nations willing to exploit themselves to gain true 1st world status.
Since other people are reminiscing about ARM:

- It was the first language I wrote real programs in, back in the late 80's on the Acorn Archimedes desktop machines it was originally built for. The A in ARM originally stood for Acorn, not Advanced.

- Writing ARM demos I was always jealous of the Amiga's blitter, but then I discovered STMIA could store multiple registers pretty darn fast.

- I chose to go to Manchester University purely because Steve Furber, one of the chip's designers, would be a lecturer on my course.

- He spent weeks taking us through diagrams of the x86's instruction decode hardware. I was convinced that any processor that had to expend so much of its silicon just decoding instructions was doomed, not my best insight.

- The instructions' simplicity did make it easy to build low-power versions however, hence its ubiquity in mobile devices. Steve seemed as surprised by this as anyone, it definitely didn't seem like a design goal at the start.

- His main research project was a clockless version of the ARM chip, with asynchronous logic, called Amulet, really interesting technology that never caught on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor

- ARM is the only British-born computer technology company I can think of that achieved lasting international success. I'd welcome any other examples.
Questions for Lord Mandelson (copyright enforcement in the UK)
Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]
There's a balance. Also one of the traits startups need IMHO is the ability to 'become an expert quickly' if you need to, and if it makes sense time wise.

VPSs are great, but I've never got the point of things like engineyard where you're paying masses to get people to do sysadmin.

There's so many reasons a site can be down, you can't just move all responsibility to another company - at least I don't think that's a good idea at all. By all means move hardware to them, net connection to them. You don't want to worry about power outages, etc
Well, I've got no dog in this fight - I only program for nowadays, and not on the iPhone. It's just that the app store reminds me of the early 80s when software for home computers came on plug-in cartridges (and required the thumbs-up of the manufacturer).
The magic of metaclasses in Python
I think that's a little unfair to people using ORMs. Obviously I'd hope people don't want to avoid knowledge, but I'll be damned if I want to write SQL, it's not fun for me. That being said I contribute to the ORM of my framework of choice, if I write the solution to my problem once I'll never have to do it again. I think it's a bit like complaining that C programs are trying to abstract away assembly. Yes they are, but as long as they have some level understanding of how machines work they'll be ok, and a hell of a lot more productive.
Why not do both? Oppose the laws, protest the laws, and when that doesn't work, then develop new technology to get around the laws.

This is a cycle that has been happening for millennia. It's not new. Authoritarians come into power, then they amass power, and then they attempt to rule by force. Usually, people first welcome their new authorities, because they want order and they naively expect that authorities are on their side; then they begin to become disenfranchised; and finally, they begin to subvert the authority and eventually counteract it altogether.

The only novel thing here is the level of technology that we're dealing with now -- but that benefits both sides.

Look at China: they've developed probably the most advanced national communications surveillance and filtering technology in the world (depending on how deep your paranoia runs); and while that works for many people, others are still finding ways around it.

Or, look at BitTorrent. Media "authorities" attack centralized distribution; hackers develop decentralized distribution. Authorities attack centralized tracking; hackers develop distributed hash tables. Authorities attack the protocol itself; hackers develop a new protocol. Authorities attack unencrypted communications; hackers develop decentralized, anonymous, encrypted communications.

Eventually this cycle of escalation will lead to distributed networks -- "guerilla" wifi mesh networks are already being used in some places -- and the only way the authorities will be able to counter that will be to shut down wired, wireless, and cellular communications for the great majority of the population.

How long do you think that will remain popular?
Stanford has a Machine Learning course available in iTunes U.

Direct link to course in iTunes: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.s...

Stanford iTunes U site: http://itunes.stanford.edu/
Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code
Ergonomic Upgrades for Your Workspace
Okay, then there's two issues here:

1. Adding something in square brackets after a title looks like a format hint (e.g. [pdf]) and not a seperate, clickable link

2. With Safari (Mac and iPhone) the second link just gives me the PDF file on the arm.com site. Is scridb unsupported on these platforms? Is its purpose purely adding a redirect? What value does this add?
I think his idea of every select is a report really simplifies the way an ORM is used. Instead of worrying about lazy vs eager loading of child objects, you create a de-normalized flat reporting object that represents all the data you need for that specific report ( ie. UI Element).
If you stopped developing for the iPhone and started developing web applications or desktop applications or, indeed, almost any other type of software, you wouldn't have to ask anyone's permission to sell your software or improve your software.

Not everyone wants to write desktop or web applications.

My choice to work with the iPhone is a technical decision -- the hacker in me will stick with the platform because I love writing code for it -- at least until it's clear that it makes no sense for my business.

I'll continue to voice my concerns because I see the technical value of what Apple has created and the potential for Apple to improve.

If I were writing desktop applications, I would be writing them for the Mac, as well. I don't want to see Apple turn to the darkside, on the iPhone or otherwise.

[Edit] The downvoting to -0 on this comment and others in this thread is, in my opinion, entirely inappropriate. My argument is cogent, and if it doesn't match your worldview I might suggest that you attempt a cogent reply in return, rather than downvoting opinions you disagree into the negatives.
I honestly don't know what to think about all of this. I am a new graduate student at Berkeley, and my perspective is undoubtedly a little apathetic because of this: my department pays my tuition, I haven't been here long enough to experience any substantial cuts in services I use, and the (private) institution I attended as an undergraduate had tuition rates that were around $15k per semester by the time I left. Things look pretty darn good to me at Berkeley right now, and frankly I was a bit annoyed when, upon arriving at campus yesterday, I realized that someone had intentionally pulled a bunch of fire alarms, forcing me and my colleagues to wait outside in the pouring rain.

I can certainly sympathize with the feeling that the university broke a promise to students and staff, and that this is worthy of anger. I think providing a free, or nearly free, top notch public education is a worthy goal. It does seem stupid that basic services and staff are being cut but new construction projects are going forward. But I am not yet convinced that these protests were the right way to bring attention to these issues, and I feel that the harm, inconvenience, and cost that they visited on others was somewhat self-defeating.

I wish I had a better solution to offer, but at the moment all I can think of is a meta-solution: there are a lot of smart people at Berkeley -- why not pose the problem to them, in great detail, and invite them to come up with creative ways to raise money or reduce spending? A lot of what the protesters object to, I think, is the feeling that decisions are being imposed on them. Why not instead let us (every individual department, say) make the decisions about what to cut ourselves, with the stipulation that if we don't reduce costs enough, fees will go up accordingly?
Then don't read them. I'm tired of the vagaries of Linux on my desktop, but I solve that by not using it.
I'm good enough at SQL to know about normal forms and how to write recursive queries.

I also know that there is very little value in me writing a new set of CRUD queries for a low-load site when someone else has written a well-debugged interface for me.
"I like that for once something as good as this has significant marketshare in mobile cpus. Just wondering if they could gradually creep into the market for desktop cpus as well."

It is going to be hard to displace x86 desktops, but I'm looking forward to ARM-based "netbooks" and pocket-sized computers like the Nokia N900. See Ubuntu job postings and Google's ChromeOS - I believe this presages ARM-based small and tiny mobile computers.

The big question is whether the Atom (and whatever AMD is working on) will be able to reduce their chipSET power to compete with the ARM SOC power numbers before ARM grows up into that market (growing up is always easier than growing down).
Cross-compiling Haskell to OMAP3 and iPhone
I recommend starting with weka and this great book:
http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...
Google also gives you a link to view it on their site. The only difference between Google's PDF viewer and Scribd's is that most people don't link to a Google PDF page.
>> "He spent weeks taking us through diagrams of the x86's instruction decode hardware. I was convinced that any processor that had to expend so much of its silicon just decoding instructions was doomed, not my best insight."

I haven't found figures, but I'd be willing to bet there's far more ARM devices in the world than x86. x86 didn't die, but it's not in the same league as ARM in terms of success.

Agreed though, the x86 is an absolute dog mainly because of the backward compatibility. Tacking on 32 bit instructions with prefixes, It's a mess.
Video Lectures has a ton of DM and machine learning lectures up for free.

http://videolectures.net/Top/Computer_Science/
Any feedback is welcome. Is the interface useful? I personally use it all the time, and like the interface, but I'm just one data point.
Best summary of the emails is here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cu...

I've been reading through them -- no smoking gun but lots of unscientific behaviour, and quiet admissions of weaknesses in the climate science.
Yes, but C maps pretty cleanly to the underlying assembly, whereas there is a very large gap between (proper, nontrivial) SQL and the typical ORM.

Perhaps "Haskell is trying to abstract away assembly" is a better comparison.
Going with the crowd ...
No doubt. I've heard the 1% rule, which mirrors my own experience, but I've never heard the "5% rule of thumb". Also, what defines a "really sweet offer"?
Wow. This could come in handy for the already insane javascript, canvas, html5 space shooting game I am working on, especially if it is high performance.

My employer have insane plans of making an open source MMO that's a hybird of EVE Online and Subspace that start with my game as a prototype.

Seriously, I must have the best programming job, ever!
I've started using Redis for the majority of my projects, with one caveat. I still need full-text search, so I use Redis in combination with MySQL. Small and frequently accessed user data is all stored in Redis, while the large chunks of text are kept in MySQL. That way I kept the speed of Redis, and still get to use Sphinx.
Potential pot of gold: iPhone users have high disposable income, low novelty threshold, and Apple is a trusted online retailer. It's the equivalent of having your product on sale in a chic department store - you get in front of potential customers who enjoy shopping as much as (or maybe more than) they care about value and utility.
It shows almost no success because the code that makes MacOS X and Windows what they are is still proprietary. Having a UNIX shell in MacOS X might be nice, but that's only one part of the system.
For instance, by filtering and transforming metacharacters in such a way that it accidentally picks up neutral metacharacters turns them into hostile metacharacters.

Some sites, especially complicated ones, have intricate rules for what, where, and how metacharacters are quoted, substituted for entities, or rejected. It probably isn't a great idea to interfere with them.
The Strang book is pretty much indispensable, I think.

http://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Applications-Gilbert-St...

The course lectures are online, too.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Video...

I've been taking courses related to Machine Learning, and never having taken a Linear Algebra course, I find myself going to this text and watching these lectures a lot to bring myself up to speed.
If I had a persistent gadfly like Stephen McIntyre who would use every opportunity to twist my data and words to his own political ends -- and the media accordingly -- I might also behave in such an untoward manner regarding the release of data and internal communications.

I find the theft of internal communications abhorrent, the politicalization of the issue uninteresting, and I seriously doubt there's any real science to be gleaned from this entire sophomoric debacle.
On first glance, it seems pretty bad, but on second thought I read more of a kind of paranoia in it. Almost every set of data can be interpreted in multiple ways, depending on the context in which the data is placed. People can twist and subvert data in ways that are very hard to contradict. It's often easier to sell lies than to sell truths and I sense an extreme fear that they have to spend all of their time defending complicated truths against simple falsehoods.

Edit: by which I do not mean they are right and the skeptics are the ones subverting the data and convincing others with simple falsehoods. You may fear your opponent doing that while doing it yourself. The above can be read with the sides interchanged. I'm merely pointing out that reality is underdetermined by data, that truths are sometimes hard to sell and that that leads all sides to fear the other side undermining them in ways they consider immoral.

Plain human psychology may be enough to explain this, without invoking all kinds of conspiracies. Conspiracies are extremely unlikely, because there will always be someone that blabs. A few people imploring others to do immoral things does not a conspiracy make.
"This XSS filter has to be one of the most braindead far-reaching decisions since the invention of magic_quotes in PHP."

So, I'm guessing you're also against the XSS filter Firefox is adding, and NoScript, and any other attempt to automatically mitigate XSS attacks? All those are also "marketing-driven technical incompetence" right?

This bug in IE8's XSS filter is a bad one, and its much worse that they've known about it and not fixed it. That doesn't mean its categorically a bad idea.
If your math background is weak enough that you don't feel totally at home using calculus and linear algebra, I'd recommend "Principles of Data Mining", which they use for the intro to ML class at Princeton. The ratio of English to equations is pretty high, which might help you to get into the swing of things.

If you think that you can learn enough math to follow the material, you should watch the Stanford lectures given by Andrew Ng. They're available freely online through iTunes U. Andrew is also one of the most respected experts in the field. As he points out, you will eventually need to understand the math behind the methods. Otherwise, a day will come when you start wasting time coding algorithms that plainly don't apply to the problem at hand.
That's the point. It's not science.
ForeUI: UI Prototyping Tool
The Berkeley webcast* Introduction to Statistics, uses "Statistics, Fourth Edition" by Freeman. I don't know what the differences are, but I think it's mostly for the exercises involved.

* http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=...
ARM core sales are measured in billions per year.
Someone who is barely scraping by is a) the least likely to get hit with more tax, b)most likely to derive benefit over the long term from an economy wide rising tide, and c) most in need to subsidized education that could improve their earning power.

I have extensive first-hand experience of barely scraping by, and reject your analogy of 'pointing a gun at someone'. For things like education and healthcare (which liberals like myself believe to be worth public funding), some compare it to sticking up the weakest and poorest and taxing them farther into poverty, whereas the reality is that those services, which are almost essential for economic security and advancement, are stuck behind a big paywall and those who object to the existence of this wall have guns pointed at them. Yesterday, literally so, in the form of riot guns.

High school graduates have the lowest earning power and the highest rate of unemployment. I don't see the social good in saddling them with tens of thousand in debt so that when they graduate they are forced towards the most lucrative offer. That's how we ended up with a shortage of scientists and engineers and a surplus of quantitative analysts on Wall Street.
> but the 95% historical data made writes slow because of the large number of indexes.

Why does updating an index take more time if there are many table rows?

i.e. if you have 5 indices on a table and 1 write/second, what's the difference in the work done by the db whether there are 1000 rows or 100k rows?
Why do some programmers feel the need to piss on other people's projects?
The understanding dilemma
Separating one table into multiple tables based on status has caused me a lot of pain over the years. Now I have multiple tables I need to join together more often than I would hope. Is this really the best way?
ARMv7 has a SIMD unit (NEON) that easily outshines SSE and Altivec. Floating point support is also good nowadays.
What? The comment you're replying to was asking about the individuals involved in the CRU hack, not anything involving Nate Silvers.
It's not just science. There is science being done but the shouting^Wpolitics more than drowns it out.
Sure but you only get one chance to impress. How many people will be bothered about trying Google wave again when they think it is ready? Still a mis-step IMHO.
These aren't "iPhone owners" in general; they're plaintiffs in an obscure civil claim against Apple involving a very broad antitrust argument about Apple's relationship with AT&T. They're not arguing iPhone users are entitled to source code, but rather attempting to do some kind of legal discovery.

They appear unlikely to succeed: judges have lots of latitude to protect trade secrets during discovery, and Apple certainly has these people outgunned 100-1 on the legal front. In the incredibly unlikely scenario in which the plaintiffs do get some redacted access to source code, it won't matter to us, because they'll never be able to talk about it ever again.