jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
>The greatest shortcoming of them human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Nice demonstration of rates of growth.
yeah. I have exactly the same reason. I had to connect iPhone to charger through the night and leave the app on, so it was emitting light. Another big reason is that using iPhone alarm I can just set it very easily. With SleepCycle I had to connect iPhone to power plug, open SleepCycle app, make sure the light does not interfere with my sleep etc..

So with Wakemate, if it could run in the background with no need to be plugged in and screen shut down , relying on notification, that would be a great improvement.
> I have a clone repo on the production server with a production branch

Do you protect the dot-files from being accessed via the web? I was at a security conference recently and a speaker mentioned a number of companies had source code accessible over the web because they served directly from a repo and didn't block accessing the VCS files.
This is a difficult choice to make because we're at an interesting crossroads in application programming. My gut feeling is that web programming will win in the long-term - there's so much competition between browsers now that the pace of innovation is faster than ever. There's still a long way to go though.

Web programming is great once you surrender to the fact that frameworks are the way to go. At first, yes, it's essentially magic. But once you get experienced and you delve deeper into the framework you can assimilate the (hopefully) insightful design choices made by the developers. If you choose web programming, I would highly recommend the Sencha frameworks: Ext JS 4.0 is out soon and Sencha Touch is looking very promising.

On the other hand: the iOS stack is mature, well thought-out and will teach you good programming practices. It's also where the money is right now - an iPhone/iPad shop I know here in the UK is literally struggling to recruit. I see it as a bubble akin to early web development; a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon just to have their own 'app'. You've also got to choose whether to learn Android or iOS, which is a whole other discussion!

I'm honestly not sure what to suggest. Personally I'm an experienced web developer learning iOS development and it's been fun so far.
> A language like Racket is great for teaching because it lends itself to exploring so many core concepts: complexity of algorithms, functional programming techniques, recursion, data structures, etc. ...

>I don't really think Python is very good for illustrating either the theoretical or the systems-level CS concepts. It's a nice language for motivating programming and showing off how much you can do with little serious investment, but it doesn't really motivate learning Computer Science, i.e. learning Programming on a 'deeper' level.

Could you explain what you mean by Racket lending itself to algorithm complexity, recursion, etc better than Python? I really don't see why one or the other is more conducive in this respect.
This has absolutely made my weekend. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet where you never get full.

Like like like.
Elon Musk is not Kennedy. His default style of speech is less political and usually not aimed at inspiration.

You can draw no inferences about his confidence from this comparison.

What you could take from this comparison, if you were so inclined, is that when it comes to inspiring Americans about space travel, Musk&Co. are less motivational than what worked in the past. Time will tell if you need the same motivational leader to accomplish something like this in the private sector.
This was heartening to read. It presents exactly the attitude and frame of mind that I've developed over the last year with my service business.

A year ago, I was getting impatient. I wanted to find some funding so that we could more quickly develop the products that we were ready to develop. What I found instead is that businesses like mine are the bastard children among entrepreneurs: it doesn't scale, it probably won't make millions next year, it's not sexy, nobody cares.

So, then I decided that the next best thing would be to talk to a bunch of business advisers, and see if there was a way to ramp the business up more quickly. All of them save one failed to "get" what the business was about, and gave us advice that amounted to, "don't do what you're doing, do it the way everybody else does instead."

I went through a short period of disenchantment and self-doubt, until I started looking at where the business had started and how far it had already come in just a couple of years. I took a second look at things like advertising and realized that, despite throwing a lot of money into marketing and the like, word-of-mouth had continued to be the number one source of new customers by far. So, the advertising and marketing budget got slashed to close to zero, and we doubled-down on what we were good at: taking care of our customers. I picked up another person who brought some more really great talent with him, and things are pretty great all 'round now.

I'm OK with slow growth now, and not getting a piece of the sexy SV action. I think we're growing like a freight train: r-e-a-l-l-y slow to start, but almost unstoppable once we get going.

In a few years, maybe I'll be able to do some seed stage funding of my own. That would be fun, and I'd love to focus on the people that so many others are ignoring: those that are passionate about their business, and want to reach as many customers as possible, without giving up all of the qualities that makes them unique.
This post is wonderful! Surprisingly straightforward, well-written, and with just the right amount of charm.

Perhaps because it was written by a mathematician? ;)
Even in heaven I am having trouble:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/76008/print_screen_121.png

It must be a buggy heaven.
Actually, food is the only problem when it comes to whether or not a population is sustainable. Enery and resource usage determine if a particular lifestyle is sustainable for a given population.

Food needs aren't static: They vary considerably from person to person and can be changed for a particular individual who sets out to change their lifestyle. Also, a lot of the energy that is currently being expended for transportation could be readily replaced by human energy if walking and biking became more popular -- which is both an energy issue and a lifestyle issue.

I currently live without a car and I have a medical condition that typically causes one to have a very high calorie need. I've worked hard on getting myself healthier and my calorie need has shrunk dramatically. In some ways it is counterintuitive, but living without a car has turned out to be an asset in that regard. Doing a lot of walking is one of the things that has helped me get healthier and shrink my calorie needs. Obesity is epidemic in the US and we do not have a very pedestrian-friendly environment. Most Americans seem unable to imagine living without a car.

So this assumption that energy and some kind of non-food fuel are separate from food and people just doesn't quite compute for me. They aren't totally separate issues. If people walked more and drove less, it would leave more gasoline and other fuel sources for other things and, at least in America, likely substantially lower food needs as well.
I started developing with Visual Studio but their C++0x implementation is far from complete.

Indeed, the following easy code ( http://pastebin.com/bjFWBrJq ) does not compile under Visual Studio:
"function returning function is not allowed"

It works fine in g++ though.
More images here: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/23/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-shows-...
> Its all about hard cash.

Quite. Studios have minimaxed their money making capabilities, and (generally) no longer take 70s style gambles on films like "The Godfather".

This is only exacerbated by the fact that it seems people are prepared to pay for the likes of "Transformers" but the people who claim to want more interesting/niche films aren't prepared to shell out for them, whether because they keep their money in their pockets, torrent them, or whatever.
I certainly know why Dominican Republic has such high death rates on the road. The people that drive there are freakin' insane. They have no regard for road rules, traffic signs, pedestrians... Driving in Santo Domingo is like driving in the demolition derby. It was absolutely terrifying.
Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings.

Not quite, but, its an easy mistake to make. There's a saying over here, "Politics stops at the water's edge." It means that with domestic politics, politicians can be as bipartisan as they like. But when it comes to international politics, politicians are united and present a similar set of ideals[1].

This idea goes back to America's founding, not just the end of WW2 and the rise of America as a superpower in the 20th century. Daniel Webster said it way back in 1814 and Arthur Vandenberg in the 1950's, when he was a Senator.

Anyway. My point is that if you (viewing from the outside in) look at American politics and use it to judge an entire nation, you're getting the wrong viewpoint. If you think that Americans are ignorant of other cultures because they are more occupied with what goes on in the states surrounding them than in countries an ocean away, you've got the wrong idea of America.

1. This is why it was such a big deal for Nancy Pelosi to meet with Bashar Assad from Syria a few years back. She said something different than what George Bush (the President at the time) was saying.
The Collateral Murder video was from before Wikileaks transitioned away from its own journalistic interpretations. So I think my point is still valid. The impact of the footage was powerful, but was diminished by criticisms that the title was biased, etc.
This. Patience.
From reading the post it seems like her dad made this decision for her, which feels a bit off to me. While the school may not have been serving her needs intellectually, I can see a strong argument for sticking it out socially. Then again, if she was already isolated or had strong friendships outside of school, maybe it's not such a big deal. Would enjoy hearing Katya's side of the story.
This makes me uneasy from my own perspective, someone who changed majors in college, well older than 16.

What keeps me grounded and open minded to the approach is that my wife knew what she wanted to do from 6th grade on and while she grows and changes in that career, she is where she wanted to be.

Maybe people know what they want at 16, but I think the purpose of taking just another history class and opening themselves up to many things they didn't know about is important and keeps your skills versitile rather than atrophying all but one muscle.
Some advantages of type hinting:

- Editors and IDEs can use them to provide better autocompletion for you. That way you can discover how to use APIs while you write code without having to look at the docs all the time.

- Static analysers can tell you when you're making trivial errors just after you type them.

- They provide a form self documentation. In practice, most medium to large Python projects already add type signature information in the form of docstrings, using thing like '@param'. This is better because it's more uniform.

This is not against duck typing, you can use Abstract Base Classes to define an interface for some behaviour and match objects that provide that behaviour even if they don't belong to any specified type hierarchy.

Finally, this is completely optional. You can keep coding without types for your small scripts or private functions, while using type information for the APIs of big libraries.
I'm using Pelican static generator to create the site. Once I figure out how to add the "Fork Me!" banner, I'll add that in.

The link to the GH repo is on the home page. I figured that makes it obvious, but perhaps not?
if only most of their documentation and code comments weren't written in chinese. It's great that they open sourced it - looks really good, but it will be hard for non chinese to grasp the more complex aspects of this library.
You are obviously right. As per mkramlich definition the startup is currently living off us (given only founders have invested in the corp) and we will live off non founder investors before being in the black.

I initially hesitated to reply but as the original post did not differentiate between type of investor I assumed it would be acceptable. I stand corrected.
Another vote for wasitup.com. I use wasitup.com, host-tracker.com, and basicstate.com, and wasitup.com is consistently the first one to report an outage, followed by basicstate, which has a surprisingly gloomy and odd interface, yet good service, and then followed by host-tracker.com, which sucks pretty much on all levels. All are free btw.
The solution to this then seems to be that Amazon should allow for you to prepay for AWS credit so one does not need to worry about their bank accounts suddenly being frozen, or some other mishap, just that they have X months of runaway in AWS credit for typical S3 charges.
Really annoying when it happens, although I've always found it possible to click ok in the alert box, and hammer ctrl+w(to close the tab) and it usually works. Sometimes it takes a bunch of ok->ctrl+w combinations before it takes, but it works. Good with a real fix for it though.

I just hope it will make the basic auth username/password-boxes tab-modal as well.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(the+population+of+cana...
Interesting idea. I commented on the blog already, but this thread feels so empty. ;)

I'm the founder of Goals.com, and while Goals is still way early in its development, I'd be happy to have you compare it to a competitor in the task/goal management space. But regardless of what you write about, my interest is piqued. Good to see what someone else thinks just from a product development standpoint: how is someone going to be tearing down my app?

Best of luck with this. If you'd like more info on Goals, feel free to email me at josh@goals.com.

P.S. Nice choice of Posterous. It's what I chose for the Goals blog for the time being.
What if rather than giving a hard percentage of one's earnings, one could try something like giving your product/service away for free or at a large discount to non-profit/educational orgs or the like? This is the kind of thing that I would consider as being far more realistic, at least at the earlier stages of a startup.

I've seen numerous startups do something like this. You're doing good, and you hopefully get some good publicity/reputation out of it as well without being out of pocket.
While I do agree, it's important to note that the state of collaboration between American universities and industry is far greater than any other country and has helped both grow. It's one of the problems in places like India, where there isn't much collaboration between private institutions and industry.

Of course things could always be better, but it could also be worse.
Not true. About a quarter of men and a third of women do not enlist: http://www.haaretz.com/news/idf-nearly-28-of-israeli-males-a...
He lost me at sentence 3: "Even before he started using a delay pedal, like on Boy".

Um, practically every U2 song ever makes heavy use of guitar delay.
The most recent example that comes to mind is Duck Duck Go:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-...

In this case the founder is obviously not critically in need of money, it still helps though.
It beggars belief that the EU is allowing the transfer of it's citizens sensitive personal data there. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1112/12242831...
Yes, and the parent was arguing that the internet should have communication systems whereby people can speak in public without the government being able to look at them for it.
Yes. My screen reader, at least Voiceover on my phone, had a stroke reading that. I had to navigate letter by letter and guess what it meant. But it's also quite common so I'm used to doing that regardless.
I think the issue is that we face truly existential environmental crises in the near-to-mid term, which has not been the predominant cause of strife for our history thus far (world wars, the thread of nuclear exchanges, etc.). So it is hard to say it is impossible, but it is even harder to say that it will be achievable.
Instagram was created by 10 people, and it was already good enough at that stage to get hypergrowth.

The truth is that all the huge advertising revenue is just a plus for the investors, the apps would have been created anyways, and then network effects take care of the content.
Those preferences are also available in the Firefox UI so they are accessible to non-power users:

1. Click the "Customize your New Tab page" gear icon on the New Tab page.

2. Uncheck the "Sponsored Top Sites" and "Sponsored Stories" checkboxes.
Imagine how awful it would be if services that wanted to change your DNS resolution had to place stanzas in, say, /etc/resolv.conf.d/ -- and even registered parts of the tree that they wanted to be responsible for, with most specific winning?

Oh, wait, that would be pretty useful, and avoid having a daemon running all the time. And be easier to debug.
Just checked. It's there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
I have two, as yet unsolved, work from home use cases:

- I often would like to watch one team member update Trello or Mural, at the same time as another updates Github, while I update a contract. I'd move those streams to my 4k monitor, to keep them readable, while I work on my primary.

- If I'm running a demo to a client, I'd like to have one stream sharing the demo platform, while another shares video of my haggard face, and a third shows my presentation. I don't want to share my whole desktop, to avoid sharing slack or SMS notifications.

OBS can probably do #2. Nothing does #1.
Internet comments have room for your current thought. Is there any reason to think that your current thought is in some way less informed by your experiences than a book is?

Blog posts give you 4 hours to write, backed by years of life experience, probably based on things you've had on your mind for a while.

Magazine articles pay you to write what the audience/advertisers want to see. They've got to be a net negative, convincing someone to write when they didn't necessarily want to, to say something they didn't necessarily want to say.

Books are an item for a CV or resume, and a status symbol. Sure there are respected textbooks, but there are a lot of worse books out there than respected textbooks. Look at "Why we sleep" recently - years to write, torn apart by one blog post. Look at bestseller lists rigged by false purchases. Look at tech books where writing a book on a language or tech stack is almost more of a status grab, or at worst a "teach myself $thing by writing a book about it" than a long standing tome.

(Also, 8 hours to read a book??)
I agree it's shocking - but the fact it's a shocking and potent symbol is why people at protests have done it over and over again:

Guillotine at protests in france https://twitter.com/MissPile/status/952867661901389825?s=20

A different guillotine in france https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6477953/Yellow-Vest...

Guillotine at protest against Trump https://twitter.com/jadelson/status/1084881540256010241

BLM protesters guillotine a teddy bear https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/portland-p...

Guillotine at Jeff Bezos's house https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/jeff-bezos-guilloti...

Guillotine at protest in South Korea https://twitter.com/allyjung/status/797313740211253248

Guillotine at protest in Madrid https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-dignity-march-protes...

Guillotine at protest in Guatemala https://twitter.com/hezbolsonaro/status/1330250357801365508

There's plenty of things of substance to criticise these protesters for - the fact they hate democracy, the fact they believe things that are completely divorced from reality, the fact so many of them adorn themselves with symbols of racism. Merely having extremely bad taste is pretty trivial in comparison if you ask me.
“Just create your own twitter” they say when you complain about censorship
It seems American society is determined to make every possible mistake.
Such an advantage could be well-integrated self-driving capability, assuming they can make it work. Everyone seems to be assuming that this will be a commodity, but it might be very hard to achieve.

If e.g. only two companies in the world achieve it in a reasonable timeframe, those companies will be able to price it such as to capture a large portion of the value. This is a huge market, and Tesla would already have millions of vehicles deployed.
Oops. You're right. I stand corrected.
Pretending to be part of the working masses is simply good PR and positioning for one's career as a ruler, and these folks have figured it out a while ago. They're hustling like everybody else, good for them.

If they can have the cake and eat it too, why wouldn't they? The voters seem to eat it up every time and give them no reason to stop the act.
I wish more Node.js people shake off their Stockholm syndrome and check out Elixir and Phoenix.
No, at least that was the case when I tried a couple of years ago.
The union helped them on their way up, and they are grateful, even though strictly speaking they no longer need the union.
last hype train i joined, was scala... this language reminds me of scala... a HORRIBLE developer experience, yet we zerglings are happy to be lemmings to someone's "best idea evah"

This brings up the pain of scala... only this time im not going to join the fan club.
I love with, completely forgot to mention it.
Yahoo as a brand is probably still worth something. Its a grand father from dotcom bubble that people still recognized. Yahoo still provided a lot of services that people use like Yahoo email for example.
So in programmer speak

if (!isFairUse(workUnderInvestigation) && copyrightable(originalWork)) {
bigCopyrightPayout();
}

Short circuit on the and operator. It's fair use, so copyrightable will not be evaluated. Evaluating copyrightable has an obervable side effect of creating a precedent.
You're right, that's a really fascinating observation. I can see myself noticing that on future shows.
Yeah, it's pretty weird and apparently it's being updated as well. Like, a year ago or so I wrote a browser extension to trick that detection mechanism when I'm on stock Firefox. Just when writing that comment I discovered something has changed and that's not needed anymore.
Those are systemic solutions.

The question is if the tradeoff in the reduction/change of collaboration is worth the increased productivity from the better layout. That's not an obvious question to answer, in fact—that's what I'm saying. You need to prove which system is actually superior, with data.
There's also a company based on the book, https://emyth.com
It would be easier to just wash my fucking dishes.
The copy on the "Why static?" page has some typos ("an developer") and off-putting remarks ("Only God gets to mess with time").
It's in blatant violation of kickstarters rules, and was probably set up as the result of a partnership with kickstarter. Kickstarter knew that the return of pebble would be lucrative for them, and pebble knew that by using kickstarter they'd continue to wear the facade of a small fledgeling grassroots company (and while they're the underdog relative to their competition from LG, Samsung, Motorola and Apple, they're a lot bigger than they were for their first kickstarter campaign.
"... seven faculty positions in the Department of Computer Science over the next few years, including two searches this year and three more next year ..."
What should I take away from that?