eblume

That's actually what got me to close my FB account. I was tired of getting emailed birthday spam because FB knew my birthday, so I changed it to April 1st and forgot about it. This April, I got about 10 or 20 'Happy Birthday!'s before I posted saying "It's not actually my birthday, April Fool's!" ... and then people kept posting happy birthday without noticing.

Wasn't worth keeping it around after that.

We do the same doing some terabyte-scale data processing. We try and load all of the shared state in to a read-only structure ahead of time, then fork off the workers. This way, copy-on-write memory architectures get the advantage of only persisting the data once, yet we get multiple processes working from a very very large shared set of data, all without having to do any sort of IPC or locking. The only locks we used are around streams used for a very basic sort of IPC used to communicate to shared stream controllers like logfiles - these do perform very poorly compared to 'proper' parallelism but they make up for a very tiny fraction of the total workload.

We've found that this will beat a 'better' parallelism even if we need to do a lot of extra or redundant work due to the lack of IPC or reduction due to the no-overhead approach, although this will of course be highly dependent on the problem at hand.

When can I use my HTC One X as a replacement for my credit card? Call me when that happens, until then I see this as just another PayPal.

Unless we're already there, but some short internet searches found nothing but misleading blog post titles.

My understanding is that anyone can do it if they provide a validation study showing that the IQ test directly correlates to job performance and doesn't discriminate on other protected statuses. My understanding is also that the number of companies that have done this is as close to 0 as makes no odds.

It's important to note that those 'share by email' things are something the sharer specifically checked - it's not checked by default. If the shares are unwanted, I would complain to the person sharing them (although one imagines the email must include an opt-out link.)

There is (subjectively) a marked deterioration of comment quality on front-page discussions in the past few days, I feel. I have also noticed that HN articles are getting linked on reddit more frequently (I use both networks, but for highly disparate purposes - gotta get those funny .gif's somewhere). No data supporting this but I fell it's a trend and I'm not liking it.

I couldn't get past this part:

    Even geeks can’t handle folders in folders

Hierarchical file systems weren't invented because it was ancient times and they were the easiest thing to produce. Hierarchical file systems were invented because they are a really, really good paradigm for storing and retrieving hierarchical data - which I strongly believe is still the case for the majority of files.

I didn't read further in to the article so perhaps I missed where this same idea was discussed, but I think a useful idea going forward would be meta-tagging of data. Something very basic like the ability to flag a file and later search or sort by those flags. Do it for specific folders, like the Documents folders. Done.

Now the 'non-geek's can deal with flat file structures and us 'geek's can do smarter things.

I agree completely. The integration between G+ and all of the other Google apps - particularly on my android phone - is really, really slick. Great stuff. Even if I never posted on G+ I'd still like having it around just for the contact management it gives.

Interesting - I have the exact opposite experience. I was amazed at how easily I could integrate multiple accounts in to one interface and switch between them seamlessly. But it sounds like you had an unusual (I hope!) experience, so that could be causing it.

I'm still new to HN in general so this is probably a a rather mundane/ignorant comment - apologies - but why is this at the top of HN at the moment?

There is no content in this post, no useful points, no specific examples of what is wrong (although there is an example of how to do it right - thanks for that). No call to action other than "Do it better!".

I'm not saying it isn't worth talking about, I'm just honestly curious how the HN algorithm works that this has made it to the top. Is freshness so highly weighted?

This will definitely lead to more people using Postgres on their OS X setups, but what I wonder is whether it will lead to an overall better quality of development.

Let me try to articulate my point, but I could probably use some help:

I suspect that the sort of developers who were writing apps and using SQLite locally but deploying with Postgres were the sort of developers whom will still use shaky and poor development and deployment practices regardless of whether or not Postgres is available to them locally.

Orthogonally, I think that the kinds of developers who will actually take the time to follow best development and deployment practices probably wouldn't want to use an app like this - not because it isn't a nice and helpful app, but because they probably want to install the full always-on server bundle via 'brew'.

That's my guess anyway. Does this mean the app was a bad idea? No, definitely not. But I don't personally expect a huge uptick in Heroku deployment quality because of it. At least it definitely won't be for lack of trying!

When you tie a chrome browser to your google account, configuration gets shared across machines. I'm not sure how handy that is if you're often on machines you don't control, but for my use case (where I work with 3-4 different machines every day, but just those same machines) the shared state solves that problem.

This is a very good point, and one I think the author completely missed.

I use bloom filters in an application at work and was very interested to hear about this, wondering if some sort of hybrid might be useful. But when I saw that the hash map was storing the actual objects, I immediately dismissed the idea for my use case - we can't afford to store anything more than a handful of bits. (Our bloom filters set between 9 and 11 bits per signature.)

The key advantage to bloom filters is that the represent set identity lookups (albeit in an adjustable lossy false-positive way). They do not, however, store actual sets of data. They must be coupled with a storage mechanism (traditionally with a several-order-of-magnitude slower lookup speed than the bloom filter) to actually store the items contained within the set - the bloom filter is just a way of definitively answering the question "Could this set possibly contain this item?"

I think you meant CERN, not LHC there. LHC was built rather recently, the web has been around far longer.

I'm not sure this counts as a constructive comment, but an interesting anecdote anyway - an early coding partner of mine once wrote a procedure he expected to run once exactly every second by continuously polling the time in a while/do_nothing loop until exactly one second had passed. It took some convincing to get him to accept that try as he might, it was very unlikely that "==" was what he wanted there.

The best part was that this was in Javascript (and obviously he was not using a timeout). The entire page would lock up while it waited for the second to elapse. He never even figured out the obvious usability concern because he was so confounded by the fact that the procedure wasn't getting called after a second had passed.

Ok, to be fair, it was a freshman year programming class - not an unexpected or even unusual mistake. But it gave me a chuckle just now remembering it.

That was my thought as well. If I need to buy some fancy hardware and swing it around to play a game... I'll probably just go buy a practice foil and sign up for a class instead!

Personally I use Chrome Nanny[1] for this sort of thing, but it's a pretty interesting idea.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cljcgchbnolheggdga...

Issues of the domain name aside, I think the entire project is a bit 'fuzzy' in that the kinds of problems that will be posted here aren't easily lent to this sort of 'spare time' coding.

Working on someone else's project is something that eats a LOT of time. Even small projects inevitably end up taking weeks, months, or years.

If you're getting paid or if it's a personal passion then it tends to get done very quickly. Anything else tends to be regulated to release-date-pushing hell.

Probably more relevant material taught (well) than in my 4-going-on-6 year education right now, too.

Oh wow - this is really interesting. I just released a VERY similar program called `gmail-safe` yesterday. I was going to do a Show HN sometime today.

If anyone is interested, here is the URI: http://eblume.github.com/gmail_safe/

Note that this is my first Node app. It needs a lot of polish. It is published under the MIT license, though, which some people here might enjoy.

Yeah, that seems like a no-brainer to me. Even my company's small 2-person software 2-person QA team has a release test to make sure all debug parameters are shut off. The software won't even run if a debug parameter is on without some special shim that only us devs have.

This sounds neat, but I want to ask others here as I am not (yet) a Cocoa developer - is all Cocoa code this ugly? In these short examples I honestly can't fathom what is happening due to the syntactic 'oddities'. Maybe my C-variant-fu is not as strong as it should be.

Where I've worked, invoicing gets sent to another system that does retain data (I think forever).

A lot of companies (or at least several I've worked with) have policies that emails must not be kept for more than one or two months. I gather in-house exchange servers helps to enforce that.

I was told that this is because such a policy allows the company to respond to subpoena requests by simply saying "our policy is to discard all emails after two months, so we cannot comply with this request."

Fantastically thorough research, the kind of stuff I love to read. However I can't help but feel the much less impressive other answer "Use Levenshtein distance, here is the link." (paraphrased) is the better answer.

The long-winded answer goes in to a huge amount of details on really interesting pattern matching problems... but not really the specific problem mentioned by the question asker.

I'm glad for a world with Stack Overflow and other similar resources, because I find the long answer fascinating but if I were asking the question I'd much prefer also having access to the shorter, succinct, and also-correct answer beneath it.

Too true - we also had a marketing department for an entire year before we had said product. Now I certainly understand that you need a marketing department before the product launches - but consider that at a time when development was in full swing (about three quarters before launch) we had two software developers and three marketing people.

I work in biotech and this is rampant there - our company changed names three times before we ever had a product (or any revenue at all). These were not small name changes, either - they redecorated the entire office to the new company colors each time.

Definitions notwithstanding, I tend to prefer the term 'AAR' (After Action Report). I had a manager in an early campus IT job that had been in the Marines, and he enforced a strict mandatory-AAR policy for anything even remotely complex.

It's really a fantastic idea and something I fully intend to use in every capacity that makes sense going forward. It doesn't make much sense as part of the software design flow, but it absolutely could (and probably should) be a tool in any deployment protocol.

My AARs usually read pretty much like this blog post, more or less to the T, although we emphasized what we would do differently in the future more.

Good point. My training said no full names, but that was because we were directly associated with a specific product/analysis, so any full names would associate the patient with a particular health... thing.

A name by itself, you are quite right, is not PHI. Thanks for the reminder!

In this case, probably yes. Might want to remove the post, it's a fairly major violation.

Often, names alone wouldn't necessarily constitute a violation as names are generally not sufficient to count as personally identifiable information... but a name like 'Bobby Null' is, I think, quite unique.

When I was being trained on HIPAA compliance I was told that sole first names are generally perfectly fine, and sole last names can often be fine but should be avoided for very common names. But I should also say that I am not an expert on HIPAA compliance.