skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Many people ... are anxious about what it means to succeed."

Sometimes kids get loaded down with expectations, even expectations to 'redeem' a family of people who see themselves as failures. Or carry on for 'winners'. Who wants to be in that position? That's a heavy load to carry. Some people only 'succeed' after a decade or two of struggling to really understand a problem - then go on to discovery after discovery.

Success can create an expectation of further success. Early 'success' can result from good fortune. That may create a weight that can't be carried. Child actors, for example. Many people do all the right things, but don't promote them ... and get ignored. The world can be very blind.

And there are people who just aren't motivated by what most people call 'success'. Success might mean solving a problem that few understand. Or it might mean overcoming all those expectations and doing what satisfies oneself. Ironically, that might be described as 'self-defeating' by more conventionally-valued people. Schubert and van Gogh had very little 'success' during their lifetimes. Yet they kept doing what they loved ... and damn the torpedoes.
Do you get lucid dreams? I am quite prone to lucid dreaming, especially when napping or getting back into bed after waking up in the morning.
Database systems are optimized to store data, and do real-time transactional processing of data.

You can mirror the DB and configure it to do off-line analysis, or use something more suitable, but if it doesn't need to be transactional (and really, the top 10 comments your friends just made don't need to be transactional) then use a more suitable tool with less strict behavior.
Perhaps -- but your list of benefits matches a list of typical benefits of meditation as well. And falling asleep while meditating isn't terribly uncommon, especially when you're tired. When I first started meditating, it was a lot more than 1 out of 5 times for me.

I'm willing to overlook that every dictionary I've checked includes sleep as an essential part of what defines napping, since they all suck at defining meditation. To my mind, if we take successfully falling asleep out of the definition, a nap would still mean lying down, closing your eyes, and not engaging in a specific mental practice, but rather letting the sense of sleepiness overcome you. You might fall asleep, or you might just lie there, consumed in sleepiness for 20 minutes.

As soon as you start an exercise to control what your mind/attention does or does not do, however, you're getting into meditation territory: directing your attention to specific parts of your body and willing them to relax, directing your mind to relaxing thoughts, directing your mind away from distressing thoughts, and trying to culture a state where your mind drifts freely all qualify as meditation techniques to me.

I think intentions also matter. If you goal is to fall asleep for a while, then you probably napped, even if you didn't manage to fall asleep. If your goal is to let your mind and body relax and refresh, without preference to whether sleep happens or not, then that's meditation to me.
Work on an open source project. A real one. Mozilla is super-friendly to new guys, and working on Chromium means working with Google Engineers and other smart people.

Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.

You should probably consider working for a medium-sized company. Large companies have a tendency towards being soul crushing places for interns. A strong, almost-all-of-the-time tendency. The only exceptions might be Google or Facebook, but your odds of getting in there with only introductory programming. Most big companies want interns that they can recruit.
Old news... We all know what a real PHP coder must write their on DBMS... mostly because sorting is just aweful in Mysql.
I agree that a diagnosis should be covered, but the way I read that email it looks like it wasn't.
After a lot of hemming and hawing, her answer appears to be "yes".

I think she's giving short shrift to small businesses for two reasons:

* Those single-person contracting firms she's talking about are a vector for new multi-person firms. Contractors can make more money for the same amount of effort as FT employees, and, more importantly, usually have much more flexibility. No contractor needs to beg legal for permission to start working on a new product.

* New firms apparently average 5.6 jobs created, which sounds low. But new firms are also the engines of new product development, and some of those new products will create entire industries. That may or may not be reflected in the 5.6 person average she cites, but it ignores the intangible benefits of keeping US leadership in new markets.
No offense at all, I think I probably did take the "hotttnesss" theme a little too far with the colors...
Ah. I assume that the person wanted the repairs done by Apple so that it stayed under Apple Care or at the very least for the same reasons that people tend to go to the dealership mechanics for repairs on their cars.
It's all done algorithmically, here's a good blog post about the data: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/12/09/a-rising-star-or/
People should be free to do whatever they want, but not to make other people finance their wants. I see no contradiction.
run an ultramarathon? maybe don't: http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/2010/3/21/still-not-born-...
I disagree. The reason I cliked on the link (and I suppose several other people will too) was to read Steve Jobs's responses (as suggested by the title of the post), not some guy's rant about Steve Jobs's responses
Haml is an external DSL. Sinatra is an internal DSL. Rubyists insist on using the term so much because Ruby's linguistic flexibility makes it easy to define them, so they're constantly doing it.

Martin Fowler is often credited with coming up with the distinction between the two. The concept is similar to a "fluent interface" from a different point of view.

http://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html#Inte...

http://martinfowler.com/dslwip/InternalOverview.html
Manned space missions that go more than "just passed the exosphere", making sure people with the pre-existing condition called "old" and "dirt poor" and the extra-duper fun combination "old and dirt poor" are actually not left to die on the streets with a simple infection, networks of massive national laboratories whose prime mission is to secure technologies and advance science for one of the most technologically advanced and by far most innovative countries on earth (perhaps not in the adoption of personal electronics, but we surely laid the foundation for all innovation, not the least of which was von Neumann and his work with Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC, the first programmed computer). Those labs take several billion a year each to operate, and have arguably single-handedly placed and kept the US at the forefront of technology for decades.

I'm not going to pussy-foot around it, we spend 50% of our tax dollar on defense, and most of that into personnel and pure weapons r&d and manufacturing. It's a shame, but it's the truth. Just imagine if we could refocus those dollars elsewhere (in an ideal world, anyway), where would we be now?

More importantly, why hasn't private industry come and done it for us?
Upvoted for happiness inducing factor! yay =)
> let's assume most people aren't idiots

That's where you're thinking breaks down though. There are a large enough portion of idiots to ruin things for 'the rest of us.'
Contradicts how? She's still free to whatever she wants, including get published in csmonitor.
Definitely put practical project/job experience above education. That'll help differentiate you.

When I took Csci 1901 (at the U of MN, see Matthew's resume), I—and the other 200 people in the class—had an end of term project that applied what we'd learned. I'm guessing you probably had to do the same, right? Mention your end of term class projects. It'll help make your in-class experience seem more concrete.

On a vaguely related note: if you have the chance, take anything Loren Terveen or Joe Konstan offer. The experience you'll gain from their classes will pay off in spades down the road.
When elected members of a political party find themselves in opposition, they are not paid to just sit on their hands and say 'fuck it'. They still have an obligation to their constituents to participate in the legislative process even if they don't expect to succeed. That's why we have a legislative branch instead of just an executive.
Here's a little snippet of elisp to automatically download and apply a random dark theme: http://gist.github.com/341879
I tried doing this when learning Haskell, to minimize any connection to monads. For whatever reason, 'twasn't easy.

Then I tried it with Clojure, even though I don't have to, and it seemed a lot simpler. Just pass a map around with all the data in it, or whatever.
I'm pretty sure he didn't rail against generalization in general, only for people in particular ;)
Ya, so dude flipped out, and hoped for pity. It's a gambit I myself have employed in the past.. to little success.
Object-orientation has got to be the most confused and abused concept in all of technology. Even the experts can't agree on exactly what it means, but that doesn't stop every other dingbat from telling you.
At my first SA job someone was using the database for some cargo-cult manipulation and sorting - it took eight hours. I rewrote it in a few lines of perl, and it took 17 seconds - 12 after removing the debugging print statements :-)
High fixed costs can often be a factor. Google now has about a hundred thousand engineers, right? If you make a great ad network (and found way to make it scale without needing google-scale servers) google wouldn't be able to compete on price.

That's also why MS won't shift push a basic subset of HTML as a document format (using Word as something you use to lay out printing), leaving things like MediaWiki as the bees knees of collaborative editing.
Nice demo to learn openFrameworks from.
Cool app too.
Obviously the customer is complaining about a convoluted, possibly unfair, repair process more than trying to evade responsibility. I believe Apple has since changed their practices. The last incident I had with Apple included a free evaluation (they paid postage too) and a flat repair cost that was pretty hefty. About $200 less than a brand new computer. My guess is the estimate included the possibility of replacing the entire machine since we never discussed the possibility the machine couldn't be repaired. (but I didn't bother since it was just a banged up Ethernet port)

Anyway my personal feeling is I give a company as much respect as they give me. I admit I've tried to screw companies on warranty repair if I was either unhappy with the product or didn't like how their technical support people treated me. If a company plays it straight and fair I'll show them respect. Over a period of probably 3 years I had some awful experiences with Toshiba and I certainly will try to screw them again in the future if possible. Treat your customers with respect.
I've been through the same process, and all those hurdles are extremely easy to avoid and/or overcome if a company has a decent set of lawyers who deal with this thing. That kind of resource is easily within Google's reach, especially judging by the number of other companies who have legal departments dedicated to the process.
Actually computer guys may write brilliant software--but most of them have historically been weak in coming up with good abstractions.

In the last years mathematical abstractions have become more popular. Think of functional programming and other declarative languages.

One early example of the same thing have been regular expressions and grammars.
I frequently evoke envy in people with my ability to nap virtually anywhere - airports, trains, arms folded across knees with head resting on arms, noisy living rooms, whatever. (I don't get sleepy at work usually, I have too much to do).

My method: first, only works if sleepy, or if conscious that sleep is really necessary. Second, obviously, avoid stimulants pre-nap. Third, get in a position where your head won't flop around if when you fall asleep. Then, with eyes closed, imagine your consciousness as a sphere - sort of like the world of wakeful attention. And then mentally, push that sphere away, distancing oneself from conscious thought. Finally: wake up 20 minutes later.

I have no idea if that will actually help anyone, but it works for me every time, with no gadgets, masks, whatever. I think the key is the ability to mentally distance oneself from conscious attention. If you can let the world slip away, you will fall asleep.
That's the second choice, and far more appealing (don't have to uproot). Reading HN does keep that option front and center!

I'm still searching for what to sell - I have access to a relatively cheap and talented labor pool, and to some nice technology not used in the US (the Genexus codegen tool), but I don't know what niche I should target.
There are certified (by Apple) service providers – at least here in Germany.
On Feed Digest (a RSS feed processor I sold a few years back but was doing ~300m "digests" per month) I had a similar experience, so I think I know why and what they were doing here..

The problem was that even though I denormalized my "posts" (from RSS feeds) table into a "post contents" and a "post metadata" table, MySQL wants to create a "temporary table" to do sorting and pulls every relevant row into it (I found this was even true with indexed columns at the time - I hope they improved it). This can lead to heavy disk access if the number of rows needing to be sorted is too high (consider 100,000 rows of 150 bytes each.. 15 megabytes, not good for a server under heavy load that needs to return a query in < 0.2 seconds).

My solution was to pull out ONLY the post IDs and date (or whatever column I wanted to sort by) from MySQL, do the sort in memory, then pull out the posts from the database by already ordered IDs (e.g. SELECT * FROM x WHERE id IN(9,4,22,38,4,..)). MySQL is crazy fast at giving you back rows X, Y, Z, and so on, if you specify them directly.

I ended up with many more fast queries rather than fewer deathly slow queries, and that was a great tradeoff in the end. I believe the system still runs that way under its new owner.
I think most of them are doing just fine. The problem is that too many of us paid for their swimming lessons :)
I wish I was running a site big enough for these scaling issues with MySql to be a problem. I'm sure an SSD drive or a battery backed RAM drive would sustain some pretty serious growth for all but the really mega sites like digg. This makes me wonder if these super scalable systems will ever be made into products suitable for small and medium sites without a team of uber geeks to support it.
Yeah, we did a little connect 4 AI project, except that you can drop pieces in from the left side and they float to the right, in addition to normal dropping from the top. I actually tied for first place in the tournament. Didn't figure that sort of thing would be interesting on a resume, but that's a good tip.

I'll be sure to look out for their names, that's a helpful tip.
since it makes no sense for php to be any faster in sorting than mysql.

Perhaps MySQL has improved lately but working on my working knowledge of about 3 years ago, it can make sense to do sorting externally... if you can work with fewer data to do the sorting externally ;-)

MySQL does/used to pull entire rows into the temporary table created for sorting. So if you have a 10,000 row, 100MB table and you're doing a SELECT that grabs, say, 10% (1000) of the rows and sorts them.. MySQL's temporary sort table will be 10MB (I found this to be true regardless of indexes - which only sped up the creation of the temporary table, but did not reduce its size - but as I was doing complex multi column sorts, it didn't matter anyway).

If you do it in PHP/wherever, you can pull out ONLY the "id" and the column you want to sort by (say, a date), and use only about 1000 * 10 bytesish == 10KB of data to do the id sort. Then you pull the full rows out by id (which MySQL is quick at).

Disclaimer: I last did all this about 3 years ago on an early version MySQL 5 deployment doing about 200 queries a second. So I ain't no RDBMS expert and what I say should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
From my experience YC is sort of like the state of Missouri. Show me don't tell me.

The ideas on this list might not be pie in the sky, but they are most likely something people can get their head around, and are fairly polished.

This makes sense as the next step for many of these teams is going to be to try to raise capital. The more pie in the sky, the harder it is to get buy in from an investor, unless you have the goods. In three months I'd bet these groups have something pretty nice to show for their time spent in YC and inching toward an even larger goal that might not be evident from their 3 line description.
I'm assuming he's already a senior because she's a National Merit Finalist.

Where are you going to college?
Weatherization: Energy efficiency hits home
Thanks for the tips. I've been preparing cover letters so I'm glad to hear confirmation that it's a good idea.
Too bad we do not have a government that is willing to protect our US based businesses from this kind of nuisance lawsuit money grabbing.
Your resume is all about you. Successful sales is all about them. I'd focus less on what classes you're taking (of rather less intense interest to other people than it is to you) and more on what you can do for them. Give higher billing to the fact that you have Actual Shipping Products With Code You Wrote In Them. ("Code I wrote actually executes in a production environment! And it doesn't explode!") This is a signal of ability to complete tasks, maturity, and a bit of professionalism sadly lacking in most academically inclined programmers.

(And I say that as somebody who was 25 before he started using, e.g., source control and routinely writing things that successfully executed the first time I pronounced them "done".)
Great story. I build a lot of Oracle clusters and have to deal with "certified DBAs" that have "opinions" based on experience back when 9GB hard drives were a large size.

Luckily, there are great tools out there like ORION (Oracle I/O Numbers Tool) that let me simulate an Oracle workload which give me real quantitative data that I can use to prove a particular configuration is non-optimal.

I've had to prove and disprove configurations before, and personally I think that if you're building any storage for database, you better benchmark it. Too many sysadmins just take the default settings on their storage and might only get 10% of the potential out of it.

I've seen a lot of systems that were setup in wtf ways. For example, having 4 HBAs in a system and all data is flowing down a single path, since the sysadmin never bothered to install multipath drivers or set path preference. This happens _all_ the time.

Check out my blog for some of my latest database storage benchmarking: http://sanarchitect.blogspot.com
Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.

Seconded. Going to Northwestern has been a big leg up so far. Attending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS) may be the difference in getting an interview or not (where you can really show off ;)).
Ok, so the answer is, "because Rubyists have redefined that phrase"? ;-)

The sweetening of the syntax in Sinatra seems to be rather straightforward. I assume it's something like:

# internal route stuff

@routes = {}

def get(method, &block)
@routes[method] = block
end

# user provided code

get 'foo' do
puts 'foo'
end

# something hooked up to execute at the end of the file

while input = gets.chomp
@routes[input].call if @routes.include? input
end

I find it really hard to call that a language – it's just a clever use of normal Ruby syntax.
You have zero idea of what he thinks. If he is depressed about living with his mom, he hides it well. He is depressed about teh state of politics in math, not about his lifestyle. He didn't say, "I have no choice," he said, "I have everything I need." Those are not the words of a depressed man.

Furthermore, a founder couch surfing does not hate their existence and only endures it because they hope to strike it big. A founder is having fun working on their dream and will later have a different kind of fun when they later strike it rich.

lA friend of mine hit it out of the park. When I was living in Parkdale (a poor neighborhood in Toronto that is fighting gentrification tooth and nail), he visited my apartment. His words? "This reminds me of my college days in Montréal. Those were good times!"

I later asked him whether money changed anything. He said, and I kid you not, that he and his wife used to drive to Grateful Dead concerts, now they flew and could take friends with them.

I am not so sure Perelman needs anything else. His mathematical achievement is on par with anything else done in the last century. If this were business, he would be Gates or Ellison or Buffet. If one of those guys declined an award that had no cash value, we wouldn't blink. Why should Perelman desire an award that has no mathematical insight attached? It literally has nothing to offer him, nothing.

Money is your currency. Knowledge is his. Don't accuse him of a harsh and depressing life until you can make a case that his life lacks the things that matter to him.
Oh man, I can't remember ever attending a meeting where I didn't phase out..
Citrix has an office in Tampa. Maybe it's that?
For programmers wishing to learn to do applied math:

I'm very sorry to tell you, the solution is obvious and you've thought of it already: hard graft. Pick a project, work at it, read text books and watch video lectures as you come across unfamiliar territory. Solve lots of problems. Rinse, lather repeat.

(Yes, I've been through that journey, and I can slowly see myself coming out the other side. Took me about 2 years so far, it's still the beginning but it's not scary anymore.)

Tips:

- You ARE smart enough. It's this hard for almost everybody else, too. Our brains were designed to gather fruit.

- Find other people to physically sit and work through problems with. (This is really where college shines).

- Read some meta-math books. Like How to Prove It and How to Solve It.

- Use Gershenfeld's "The Nature of Mathematical Modelling" as a guide. Do all problems. Find other sources on each topic, use those to help you.

- Get on MIT OCW and do 18.085 and 18.086. Do all the problems. If you haven't had linear algebra, calculus, or diff EQs, do those courses too (this will take a while if you have to do all of it from scratch).

- If you want to use (rather than invent) basic stats/ML, all you need is probability, simple linear algebra, simple calculus, and convex optimization (free book from Boyd). For many applications, you need substantially less.

- Spend time in a technical library. Just browse. Find a book that's interesting and in which the first two chapters seem comprehensible (though probably not obvious). Take it home and do all problems.

- Read Peter Szekeres "Modern Mathematical Physics". This book more than any other made me realize math is fascinating rather than scary.

- It sounds stupid, but I learn better (and enjoy it more) when I let myself get genuinely excited about the material. Even the Intermediate Value Theorem is seriously cool when you really think about it.

Remember: there's a lot to learn. You're trying to teach yourself what people spend years paying $50k/year to (barely) learn from lifelong teachers. It's always hard. But it can also be fun, once you're not totally lost.
And then use your ill-gotten fame to seek out grants and funding from governments and philanthropists to further your goals.