skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand the desire to do define the formats, but this (Orderly) is bordering on ridiculous. You create a new microlanguage that compiles to a different microlanguage which is a DSL in the same language that your objects are stored in, so that it can be validated to be read properly in yet another language (unless your main code in already in Javascript). This just strikes me as a step down the path of WS-* or similar XML nonsense.

What ever happened to just having a README or documentation that just says what the fields in the object are? Why does it need to be validated by a different tool/language?
It would have taken 30 hours to generate the files without using EC2. I wonder how long it took to set up everything to do them in an hour, and whether it was worth it. It seems quite a complex set of tools for a simple task.

Perhaps just splitting the 3600 files into four sets and starting them off manually on manually created instances might have been quicker overall?
This reminds me of a fun math problem.

On a piece of paper draw the following shape:

-------------
| | |
| | |
-------------
| | | |
| | | |
-------------

We'll count a wall as any straight line segment dividing 2 areas. If you count them, it has 16 walls. The challenge is to draw a single continuous line on the plane that passes through each wall once and only once.

Part A: Prove it can't be done.

Part B: Part A notwithstanding, show how to do it. :-)

Edit: Since I am sure that someone will challenge me on the contradiction, I put a solution at http://www.elem.com/~btilly/boxes-solution.txt.
From the comments:

> I’d love to see some metrics on the average life expectancy of a line of code for different programmers. I know that some of my best code was written and has sat there with minimal changes ever since.

Now that's an interesting idea.
This problem really piqued my interest in graph theory, as well as did my first homework assignment.

At a certain dance there are two rules that hold:

1. No boy dances with every girl.

2. Every girl dances with some boy.

Prove that there are at least two couples that dance, B1-G1 and B2-G2, such that there is no crossing, neither B1-G2 nor B2-G1

Happy holidays HN!
Always remember the classic story about "where to put the X"...

Have you ever heard of Charlie Steinmetz? Legend has it that he was a prominent electrical engineer in the early twentieth century. Not long after his retirement, all of the engineers at General Electric had a problem. Although each was wise, they were unable to understand the complexity of the machinery. A call was made and Charlie Steinmetz came to the plant to offer his assistance.

Ol’ Charlie walked around the machine for a few minutes, just looking it over, not touching anything. After a few minutes, Charlie took out a piece of chalk, walked over and placed a large X on one particular part of the machine. When the other engineers disassembled the machine, they were amazed to find that it was exactly where the problem was. A few days later, the engineers received an invoice from Charlie for $10,000! This was a lot of money in those days, so they returned it to Charlie and ask that he itemize it. A few days later, they received an itemized bill which read:

Making one X mark – $1.00

Knowing where to place the X – $9999.00

Even if one tosses the idea that there are "rockstar programmers" who are 10x more productive than merely good ones, someone with the right experience and domain knowledge can be priceless. I have certainly found cases in which I could merely hear the symptoms of a very subtle bug and find it in 2 minutes, whereas a great programmer unfamiliar with the codebase, field, and my past experience might have taken a week to find it.
At least today (I believe in most, but not all countries) we don't have the specter of debtors' prison. I'd say that was a pretty hard barrier to a second chance.
I read (most of) his book on the fall of Rome. It has a lot of hard data about what happened. But the most noticeable thing about the book is how partisan it seems. He writes as if he were writing about a present day political controversy.
You don't usually see that in books on ancient history.

What he's a partisan of is the idea that the western empire really fell hard. There is a continuum of opinion on that. From what I know so far I tend to be on his side, but he's so heavy handed about it that I find it makes me skeptical about everything he says.
Or you could just mention the title. Thanks a lot :)
True, but I feel version control is a much needed component when you have syncing. When you multiple versions flying around, you inevitably have a merging accident / older file overriding the newer one somehow. Being able to rewind is then your friend.
It's another "unreleased product beats world" article. Has no-one learnt from the splendid coverage of the Apple Tablet?
Piracetam -- A nootropic for cognitive and memory enhancement
Anyone have any experience with this?
Title's a little misleading. From the article:

"...the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery."
It's not V^2 due to reaction time. Assuming 1.5 seconds it's around 1.5s * V + k * V^2. And using his numbers:

10MPH = 27feet
20MPH = 64feet
80MPH = 496feet

The point is even at low speeds you still have a fairly long stopping distance. Which is why you can see so many fender benders in stop and go traffic.

PS: At high speeds wind resistance can dramatically affect stopping distance, but your breaks have limits on how much heat they can take so it's a fairly convoluted equation.
There's a lot of game theory in the Senate.

It's not a secret ballot with a gag order.

So if you're a senator, it makes no sense to make a risky vote on a bill that you know has no chance to pass.

About Cap And Trade...

Frankly, the bill is an atrocious gift to investment bankers that will make billions in this new market.

But lets ignore that. Let's talk about why a 60-democrat senate cannot pass this or other Progressive legislation.

Here it is: The country has gotten more liberal in the last 10 years. But it's not 60% liberal. Not even close.

Democratic gains have been easy gains, politically speaking. The party ran conservative Dems in conservative districts. All in all I'd rather have a conservative dem than a liberal republican -- at least a conservative dem will contribute to the Democrats having control over committees and procedure.

But what I really want -- and what I think this country needs -- is a progressive. Democratic, Green, Indy, whatever. But, a progressive.

Everybody acts like Democrats should be able to pass progressive legislation just because there's 60 Dems in the Senate. Count the number of Progressives.

The work that needs to be done -- the activism and organization -- is to promote the progressive agenda at the grassroots level. We need to attack on all fronts to move the country left, the same way the Conservative trio of the Reagan Admin, Think Tanks, and new Media (including direct mail and, say, Rush Limbaugh) moved the country right in the 80's and 90's.
That sounds a bit too much like the 'noble savage', and runs pretty counter-intuitive to the parallels we see back here on Earth.

Sentience isn't an 'event'; it's not like some apes woke up one morning a few million years ago, and just somehow knew to make spears and hunt. It happens slowly, starting with the use of naturally occurring tools, like chimpanzees do with sticks, or certain octopi do with coconut shells. Some birds use rocks as tools.

Tool use evolves up from there, but if we look at our own species as an example, it probably doesn't ever really stop.

The Na'vi are probably more like echoes of human beings at an earlier point in our evolution, with the added property of having an intrinsic physical link to the environment around them. If the ecosystem ties directly into your CNS, you're going to think real hard before engaging in widespread destructive behavior, because you know first-hand how painful the damage is. So things like mining, which gave humans metal, would take the Na'vi longer, because they'd want to find a way to do it that won't cause them a ton of pain.

But they'd get there, and since Cameron is talking about sequels, the next installment may very likely show how contact with humans has pushed the Na'vi on to a more rapid path of technological development.

And your post really doesn't deserve to be downvoted, so it got a +1 from me. Come on, we're discussing the science fiction in a movie. :)
Another interesting question would be which of the OS design aspects of the iPhone are going to be ported back to desktop OS X.
Actually you got even less of a second chance in the dark ages. Bad times drove smallholders (voluntarily or involuntarily) into serfdom, after which there was not only no second chance for them, but none for their descendants either.
The connections were stable, high-bandwidth, and worked reliably.

So, we at least know it wasn't AT&T.
Never meaningfully demonstrated? Have you tried to verify the claim?

Go read Peopleware. You will find described very carefully set up coding comparisons that routinely found a factor of 10 productivity difference between different experienced programmers on the same task, and also a discussion of what organizational factors lead to those productivity differences.

There is other research on the topic as well. For instance http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm... cites "individual differences" research that found a 30 fold difference between mediocre programmers and the top programmers. That article is supposed to be a distillation of http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R... so I'd look there if you want citations into how that research was done and what exactly they found.
I think that part of the problem is unqualified programmers are part of the equation. The amount of "developers" out there who have no idea what they're doing is shocking. The dot-com implosion helped cut some of the excess weight, but there are still a lot of people working in software who have no excuse being there.
I doubt the cashier would have done much better with 33 and 45.
And you need to pay them anywhere from 750 to 7500$ bucks to develop an application for it...
So the gas giant in Avatar rotates about 50 times faster than Jupiter. Winds on Jupiter can exceed 100 meters per second, so the winds on Polyphemus would have to exceed 5000 m/s – this is supersonic and clearly implausible.

That's odd. I don't think there is substantial proof that winds on Jupiter are caused by planetary rotation. In fact, the atmosphere is part of the same inertial system as the rest of the planet. Here's an article suggesting that the winds are actually generated from within Jupiter's interior: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Jupiters_Massive_Winds_Lik...

Additionally, I see no inherent problem in supersonic winds. How does it preclude a foreign planet from being 'plausible'? If there is a problem, I'd like for somebody to help me identify it.
Spencer might not agree, but why not go at it alone until you find the right person? If you're driven enough to start your own company in a space you know a lot about, you should be driven enough to do so alone, at least temporarily.
I think it is harder to have more complex tunes stuck in your head. I will sometimes recall fondly shotakovich (symphony 11, movement 3 usually) in my head for about a half hour or so, but that is nothing compared to the unrelenting mind-invasion that old-time (traditional appalachian folk) tunes have.

Regardless of the individual variance in the complexity of the "earworm", one of the very interesting things is this interplay between short-term auditory memory and the loop being replayed. It will be even more interesting to see if their are ways to exploit this to effectively keep more things in working memory.
The article is locked behind a paywall.

[meta]
Perhaps if you posted a "Tell HN:" style comment with your summary of the article and included a link with a warning that it's subscription-only, we would get more utility from the posting.
[/meta]
There are so many variations of that story floating around that someone may have heard it, but not recognize any detail of the version you gave. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 cites several other variations for comparison.
Cloud / VPS Apache Performance Comparison
It's a legend that's often told about Tesla as well:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

There's a really similar story about Picasso asked by a lady in a restaurant to draw a simple sketch on a napkin. He does and hands it to her saying, "That will be [X] thousand dollars". Shocked, she says: "But that only took you 30 seconds!" "Madam", says Picasso, "It took me thirty years."
Credit ratings are just as prevalent in England as in North America. They are less heavily used in other countries but most countries have some sort of inter-bank debtor black list.
Few people are truly lone wolves. If you have a spouse you can lean on for a while, this may be doable.
Ask HN: Please Review: Regional News on Facebook [alpha]
I've been nursing this baby for quite a few months now, I can't hold her hand any more, so...

(this app will advertise itself on the news feed ~every two weeks. To disable, please opt out of the publish to stream permission)
I'd also add that the people who control salaries at a software company (particularly small ones) are usually not people who understand the development process very much at all.
Honest questionn--did the productivity study where the oft-quoted 10x number comes from count lines of code as the productivity measure? If so, lines of code avoided would move a developer into the "less productive" bucket. Anyone have a link to a source for this number?
Ask HN: Thoughts on non technical co-founders?
I've often pondered the idea of what a non-technical co-founder could/would be like (for a web/software startup), someone to do everything else. Does anyone have any experience with this? If so how did/does it work out?

Edit: fixed grammar, took out a verb by accident
"But most big projects start as successful small projects (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.)"

Do you have a source for this?

With small projects you can a) severely limit scope b) enter a smaller market and c) define success in an accessible way.

Edit: Also, with your experiences (from spending 6 months getting to know someone or with your previous business with nterface guys,) it sounds like you were doing some sort of "small projects" with your future cofounders, even if it wasn't framed as such.
Ask HN: What magazines do you subscribe to?
Be sure to explain why you subscribe to each magazine, and if you recommend it or not!
Winning the (Afghanistan) war through power point
CSS techniques
First off, I just saw Avatar yesterday and thought it was great. I highly recommend it. Even if you haven't seen it, I don't think this comment will spoil anything for you.

I have a few problems with this review, because the author assumes that the Na'vi must follow the same cultural development path as humans.

I argue that our path to our current culture didn't start with writing, but with agriculture. Agriculture, and later city-building, is all about destroying nature to build a new environment better suited to our needs. What if, because of the deeply interconnected nature of Pandora, the Na'vi evolved to include the surrounding nature in their in-group? That would imply that, for a Na'vi, morality would apply to a tree as much as another Na'vi. Clearing forests for crops would be tantamount to mass murder.

The Na'vi culture is definitely a "Noble savage" stereotype, but note that they have a warrior culture. This implies that they must regularly go to war with other tribes, even if they don't show it in the movie. I also object to citing Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate here. His arguments only apply to human cultures.
Stripping Reddit From HackerNews With BOSS Mashup
The author mentioned in an update that scene was actually supposed to be a time-lapse.
I think your post is actually more useful than the article.
Wow, terrible sales person
We've been using Olark for almost a year now (since they were Habla) and they do a fantastic job, highly recommended
So basically, this is the GSM version of the Droid when it gets 2.1. Yawn.
The number is from The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, based on his experiences when developing IBM's OS/360.

Beyond that, I can't really answer the rest of your questions; I haven't managed to sit down and read it yet.
Agreed, although they're adjusting, slowly. I came across this earlier this year but they didn't even have a proper developer program at that time. One can get pick up used EEG equipment pretty cheap on eBay, however, and there are some open development tools from the scientific community that run on Linux, as I recall.
We really could invent a million stories as to how the Na'vi got their 'usb ports'. I mean, without knowing their history they could have been so technologically advanced that they gave themselves and the creatures these things and then their society collapsed. I'm also sure I already read someone's theory about them having been created by a more advanced aliens. Ah, science fiction.
everything except for the Na'vi had six legs.

Legs, yes, but if you look at limbs many of the flying creatures had four.
Best Individual Path to Wealth: review Wealth Dynamics
Plura, a SETI-like Distributed Grid
It also seemed like most of the other animals had their nostrils on in the shoulder area. (I need to watch it again to confirm.) Why not the Na'vi? Probably because if they looked too alien (four eyes, four arms, no noses), the audience would have a hard time empathizing and seeing them as people.
Productivity based compensation for thought-workers isn't a panacea. Expenses based on time, income habituation, success or blame attribution, and differences of opinion on what is productive can actually make it a pretty horrible experience -- even for people who are well above the average.

Time-based compensation and productivity-based firing can be a pretty good system for a lot of people in a lot of situations.

I was hiring for some other jobs recently, and I was surprised at how the group I was hiring from thought about their compensation. It wasn't "I deserve $X", "Chris makes $Y", or even "I think I can get them to pay $Z." They'd come to me and say "I need a job that pays $A/month because [$A ~= monthly expenses + a little extra niceties + a safety cushion in case something bad happens]". It was refreshing.
> Smiling is perhaps a bad example, since it contracts a
> muscle near the sensors.

This is no doubt intentional.
It's unmoderated in the sense that the bare minimum amount of moderation happens. (to remove illegal content to avoid getting shut down/raided)
My list is pretty small:

* The Economist - great bathroom reading, good analysis of issues.

* Scientific American's Mind - I love reading about neuroscience and psychology experiments

* Rolling Stone - I bought tickets to a concert once and they started sending it to me for free. Eh sometimes interesting.

* Rock and Ice

* Climbing - I climb, so they are relevant.
But doesn't it sound like the underlying hardware is faster?
However, the XO 1.75 proposed later in the article sounds well within reach -- an incremental improvement to something that already exists.
Excellent! I think I know Unix pretty well, but it would be great if someone had a directory of common use scenarios that one could look through, rather than using Google and wading through horrible forum posts...
I can't remember where I first heard this, but I've always been able to get songs out of my head by singing them like Bob Dylan. I don't have to actually sing them out loud, but if I change the voice and cadence of the singer to Bob Dylan, the song goes away.

If it's an instrumental song, however, I'm screwed.
I'm pretty sure it's a fake name. 4+ years ago I mailed something to him and the name he gave with the mailing address was completely different (no I don't still have the mailing address, I'm not that organized) and I've heard that same name bandied about elsewhere (at least the same first name). But who knows it could also be fake.
It's worse than that. There is a standard way of assesing programmers productivity and is the worst it could be: kLOC's.
Developer headset is 500 bucks, Research edition (developer headset with EEG access) is 750, or 650 if you bought a developer headset a while ago.
The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get paid in proportion to their productivity. There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad.

I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools. I made 80 thousand dollars. He made 80 million dollars.
If you feel that lsof is the swiss army knife of unix debugging, then you haven't done much serious unix debugging. Don't get me wrong, lsof is useful and even indispensable in some situations, but not exactly be-all-end-all.

DTrace fits that description much closer, even though its only available for OpenSolaris, OS X, I believe FreBSD has a port and Linux is getting one.

edit: also see: strace, ltrace, gdb, truss
I think with the internet it doesn't apply as much.

You can do the lone wolf thing, and then just come post on HN or some other community site to get your feel of human interaction
I'm an EEG technician, with a background in electronics and programming. I use BioExplorer for neurofeedback routinely.

I suspect that the emotiv system relies on conditioning (eg. if i do action "A" - the computer moves the pointer up on the screen), not real EEG pattern recognition.

For the record, BioEra (www.bioera.net) does have support OCZ NIA system - cheaper, and no developer road-blocks.

BTW Your 100% on the mark about reducing artifacts. There is no substitute for a good connection to the scalp.

Edit: www.bioera.net for details
In the trade they're 7 inch and 12 inch, because many dance records are on 12 inch platter sizes but you play them at 45 (revolutions per minute on the turntable).

Protip: those dots you see around the edges of the turntable on DJ gear are not decorative; they're spaced so that one row seems to sit still (due to persistence of vision) depending on whether the platter is rotating at 33 or 45 rpm, and the degree to which the rows appear to slide past each other is a visual indicator of how much the record is sped up or slowed down by the pitch control, which usually allows a 10% variance (for mixing together tunes of different tempos).
Well, I just googled the peopleware citation and it seems the study backing this often repeated claim is from the 1960s and people have plenty of questions about its methodology.

I'll easily buy 2X or 3X productivity difference. I'm not buying these casually tossed off claims about 10X or 30X productivity differences without the supporting research discussed in detail front and center. Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years. And that's just not realistic.
The reason behind the BlackBerry outage
Putting a Bolder Face on Google
MyBlogLog Left Its Mark
> Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

--Bill Gates.

My favourite consequence of measuring productivity by the line is to ask how much I owe my employer when I spend a day eliminating redundancy and thus contribute negative lines of code.