skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing is that you're buying into the false dichotomy of the Net Neutrality debate. It's not an all-or-nothing prospect. Rather than framing the question in terms of, "who should control our internet," we should be asking, "how can we fix the current situation." In your post, you make an excellent suggestion, anti-trust. The only issue with that, is that we've proven in recent years that the power of the corporation extends well into the government, and most anti-trust attempts end up as not much more than slaps on the wrist.
Awesome perks for a Web Backend & Data Systems Engineer in SF
How “Dirty” MP3 Files Are A Back Door Into Cloud DRM
(apologies in advance if someone else already mentioned this ... i haven't read any of the replies yet)

i would recommend thinking intensely about ways you can serve others (not just your girlfriend or immediate family, but strangers in your community and even beyond). volunteering at local non-profits, hospitals, or other organizations where you can directly impact people's lives might be able to mitigate this quarter-life crisis of yours. and by volunteering, i don't mean volunteering to make a website or install Linux for your local organization ... i mean doing something in person to directly interact with people in a helpful way. if you can selflessly give your time and energy to directly helping others without expecting anything in return, then you might be able to expand your mental horizons and get 'un-stuck' from this local minimum that your current mood is on.
jtauber: Have you thought of cool things to do with the data?
By function, all (except Emacs) running on Windows:

*SSH: Putty
*File transfer: WinSCP, TortoiseSVN
*Coding: Aptana (Rails), Matlab (Matlab), Eclipse (C++)
*Text/hex editing: PSPad
*Server-side file touch-up: Emacs
*Browser-based debug: Firebug
*Image editing: Photoshop, Fireworks
That's why I want multitasking, too. I don't particularly want it for switching apps since that seems fast enough to me.
Don't let her tie you down to a life you don't want to live. You can't live your life for another person.

I almost made this mistake.

Refusing to make this mistake ended the relationship, but it was well worth it.
I wanted to enter my data, but doing that seems like too much work. Way too much clicking and page jumping, and then it looks like I have to fill in dates too that I’m not sure I can pull out at the top of my head. I think the UI for that could be a lot better and can fit on one page.

I’m down with the idea, though.
Teletax Express Inc. launches it's corporate website.
Teletax Express Inc. is a privately owned CPA firm based out of Passaic county in northern New Jersey serving north and central Jersey, the Lower Hudson Valley, New York City and Long Island. Founded in 2001 by a single accountant, the staff at Teletax Express Inc. brings over 30 years of tax experience to the table.

Beside the traditional accounting, tax, and audit and advisory services, Teletax is your most trusted business advisor concerning all of your financial services needs. Teletax is an accounting firm that goes beyond simply processing and presenting numbers. We recognize that Teletax's success and growth is due, to a large extent, to the success and growth of our clients. We strive to ensure the growth and success of our clients is through our business consulting approach to client service. While our clients desire timely and cost-effective accounting, tax and consulting services, it is equally important that they retain committed professionals that take a personal interest in the success of their total organization.
Most of my school's funding is and was not dependent on their student's skills, schools get funding for attendance. When I went to school they checked attendance 6 times every day (once for every class), and gave you 3 bathroom breaks/year/class. Taking attendance took about 5 mins/ class, every time you went to the bathroom a teacher had to sign a form verifying you had permission. This comes out to about* 340,000 HOURS of wasted time in ONE YEAR FOR ONE HIGHSCHOOL. This isn't even considering many, many fundamentally wrong things with how grades and classes are structured and credit is awarded. For every competent teacher teaching a useful subject there are 3-4 incompetents wasting people's time with sophistry and selectively blind adherence to stated rules.

Public high school education in this country is a net negative. High school "education" has nothing to do with teaching students skills, its there first to benefit the people running the school, and second to make people obedient for factory jobs.

Math & science people tend to be humble & introverted because they're usually wrong about the solution to whatever problem they're trying to solve, and they spend all their time doing math/science and not talking to people.
This is a bad thing. Every hour spent on spiffy presentations is an hour not spent on telling people public school's are doing it wrong. The author wasted his/her time on this* * , it's not going to change anything. Math/Science people who want to improve the state of math/science education should spend their time politicking, not science'ing.

* (5mins/attendance * 6 classes * 10 mins bathroom break form filling/a day * 2000 students * 34 weeks/year / 60mins/hour = 340K)

* * It is pretty cool, though.
In Snow Leopard, you can use x64 SIMBL to extend compiled applications, and there is an SIMBL bundle that will get you terminal colors of your choice.

http://github.com/brodie/terminalcolours/downloads
What kind of things can a 3 year old do with a computer?

An actual computer? Check out the games on pbskids.org - esp. the Curious George ones. For under <3s, you will probably need to "drive" the mouse while the kids tell you what to do.

The iPhone has a myriad of kid-friendly apps suitable for the toddler set. Try AnimalSNAP, Scribble, PreSchool Playground, Matches, and Wild Animals jigsaw. While obviously the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad is not a substitute for real play, it has certain advantages, such as encouraging seriously fine motor control, a level of abstraction, and being a compact source of amusement for plane rides.

Also check out the kids books "with synchronised images" from audible.com. It allows the iPod to pretend to read books to your child. Again, not a substitute for you doing this, but a good tool for your emergency arsenal.

I have to say though, that the most educational thing on the internet for the preschooler is youtube. There is nothing like, say, talking to your kid about the instruments of the orchestra and then being able to pull up somebody playing the tuba right there and then. Indispensable.

That said, get your timing right. I kept my kid away from the TV till she was two, and away from gadgets till she was three. I think the level of engagement you get by introducing things at the right time is much higher than if you expose too early.
This is really the only way to crack down on copyright issues, watermark each file with some information pining it to the buyer. When you combined this with the cloud, only or someone with your username can access the media (I'd bet they'd rather some biometrics). Interesting stuff.
@asym - are you in San Francisco? I've gone (and am still going) through some similar issues. I see you rock climb too, we should hit the gym together sometime and chat face-to-face.
yeah, we're regularly trying to improve the UX. this is just the start (was only thought up last Thursday)
Curricula, not curriculums...
oh, note that dates are optional
yeah, we have all sorts of analytics planned
on a side note, the author looks a lot like the PC guy from the mac ads.
It raises their visibility too, because it puts them in the main list of apps, as a top-level thing.
It feels to refreshing to read an essay that gets away from the "blog" style of writing. There are few writers on the internet and a lot of people writing articles. The articles often make great points and have excellent content but rarely is reading them fun for the sake of reading.
I have a copy if anyone wants to take it off my hands. Just pay the shipping :)
I think this is great advice. I've been in some dark corners myself, and the parent comment resonated with me, especially:

* It seems like you're the only one dealing with this, but you're really not. My friend describes us as ducks -- all calm above the surface, padding madly underneath, but only you know about that. Everyone you know is dealing with something, and wondering why they're the only ones. They're not, and you're not.

* Exercise really does go a long way. After a long bike ride I get what really is best described as a "peaceful, easy feeling" (oh man I hate the effing Eagles) but it's true -- after a hard ride or workout you realize how much better you feel, and how stressed out you normally are in comparison.

* It sounds ridiculous, but's really easy to forget to have fun. Don't forget to do the stuff you love. When you do, you'll feel "more like yourself" again.

Anyway, the main thing to take away is that (as you've seen from these comments) lots of people are in the same boat, and there are things you can do to help yourself.

Good luck!
On the contrary, your comments have wasted far more of my time than his article. I thought it was well written and interesting. If it is not your cup of tea then don't read it. To say that essay needs a "warning" is a bit over dramatic.
Carter Bays spent some time looking for good 3D life rules - see his papers the Journal of Complex Systems.

See also: http://www.cse.sc.edu/~bays/d4d4d4/ for a Java implementation
Windows 7 is so much better than vista. I almost switched to a Mac, but gave Microsoft one more chance. I am glad I did.
First off, re: the "but everyone around me seems to be perfectly fine" line. Everybody may look fine, but what is going on under the surface might be entirely different. When I was in the darkest depression of my life only a few select people close to me even knew how I was feeling. To the rest of the world I put on a good display of acting happy and motivated, but on the inside I felt directionless and... empty.

Anyways, after reading your post and comparing it with my experience I would say you sound depressed. Life seems to have lost meaning, the things that once gave you pleasure no longer do, etc. If you see a psychiatrist they will most likely recommend an anti-depressant. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I take a small dose of Celexa that leaves me feeling no side effects whatsoever and removed the suicidal thoughts and feelings that used to wash over me like a tsunami.

However, in my opinion (and let me stress that it is an opinion, I am not a doctor or psychotherapist), drugs alone don't seem to work well. Things didn't change that much for me until I was forced to face my alcohol problem. As a consequence of doing a 12-step program and facing my fears, insecurities, and resentments, I began to find some measure of peace and fulfillment that I had always found lacking. My life began to change, I began to feel a sense of purpose and excitement to life, and my depression eventually lifted completely. I have also discovered a spiritual side of myself that I never expected to find.

I'm not sure if that helps at all, but at least know that you aren't alone and that things will get better if you are willing to make changes. Hope the road is easier for you than it was for me!
I think we're going to see more and more motion in this direction. The problems of block storage, of building structured data out of block storage (even key-value is a structure!), of partitioning/replication, and of read caching are fundamentally different, and there's no good reason why they should all be squashed into the same codebase. (Depending on how partitioning and replication are done, they are sometimes separate and sometimes need to be done together.)
Read this post by fiaz about trading sometime:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413
In addition to the advice above:

1. Take Omega-3 supplements.

2. Build an asset that you can use later no matter what you decide to do. For example, if you can get 5,000 RSS subscribers to your personal blog then this is something that's going to help you for the rest of your life.
It's not actually that nebulous (I was simplifying because it seemed more appropriate for the setting than to give a thorough discussion of the relevant analysis). The technique, though, is regression analysis, which is widely used in econometrics (amongst other fields) to gauge the marginal effect of various variables. Obviously the exact percentage should be taken with a grain of salt, but those numbers (which are significant at 5% confidence) clearly demonstrate the point.

Again, the Berkman Center's study is very well-done, and if your skepticism remains I encourage you to at least skim it. Otherwise, you're arguing from a position of ignorance and are contributing little to this discussion.
It's surprising how sensitive the capacitive sensor in Macbook trackpads can be. I found an app once that gave a visual indication of where touch events were occurring on the trackpad, and it can detect your finger before you're actually touching the pad.

Of course, the software and hardware is calibrated to have a specific threshold, but the fact that technology is commonplace that can detect when something is near it is just amazing. A former roommate's Dell laptop did the same thing - the controls on the side lit up when your finger got near it, so you didn't have to fumble for the buttons OR deal with annoying LEDs all the time.

This is part of the reason the iPhone always felt so fluid to me. I can flick a list, barely even grazing the screen, and the list will spin like a slot machine. It gives you such an immediate sense of powerful, accurate control that it's very gratifying to use.
It may be depression; it may be a brain tumor... seriously, consult with your physician ASAP.
Apparently Latin wasn't on the curriculum at that school. :(
I can (and do) use Vonage, or scads of other IP-based carrier

You're missing the point, services like voip could end up priced arbitrarily in the interest of the carrier. What if non-AT&T voip services were priced out of the market? This is not beneficial to the consumer.
It's easy to claim wireless or some new technology will always provide innovation and options, now, when the market is new and less consolidated.
10 years from now, there's no reason to think a single company won't own cell networks as well as cable networks, or any other medium for that matter.
The status quo sucks!
I don't know about your area, but around here ISPs rarely, if ever invest in infrastructure, and upgrades are unheard of. My parents in a rural area have been waiting for years for any land based broadband options, 3g doesn't even work there!
So because this piece wasn't written to your specifications, it should be avoided by everyone?

You didn't like the writing style or presentation. Well, bully for you, go right ahead and move on to something else. I, for one, did not find it a waste of time, nor did I mind the pagination.

Criticism is so easy.
"Or if I do know exactly where I want to live, I'm always terrified that I'll regret the move later."

I was almost literally born moving. Dad was in the Army with orders, and they let him/us stay where we were until I was born, then two weeks and go. I moved with my parents a lot in the Western US and Hawaii. The I joined the Navy, saw the world from Virginia to Hawaii to Kenya, and moved duty stations with my first wife a lot in the process.

I did all that by the time I was 24, lived in Seattle 15 years then moved to Denver, where I've been another 15 years. I'm in my early 50s now. Besides the moving, I've lived what I think of as four fairly different lives, different friends, jobs, interests, relationships.

I say all that partly to acknowledge that I look at moving and changing differently than a lot of people. It's not a big deal to me, and I usually look forward to it. It's difficult for me to understand what it's like to live in one place most of one's life, so my perspective is probably different than yours.

All that said, when I look back at how much I've moved and settled comfortably, I think at your age you have more than enough time to move somewhere, decide you don't like it, and move again. And maybe again. Moving at all is something of an existence proof: if it doesn't work out, you can do it again. Nothing needs to be permanent. If you want permanence, it's OK if you don't get it the first time out.

I have liked and profited from everywhere I've lived, everyone I've known and everyone I've been. Most types of change are a gift. No choices have to be 100% correct, which is good because they won't be.

"I have no idea where I want to live, no idea what I want to be doing, no idea where I want to be doing it and no idea what will actually make me happy."

Suggestions, tailor as needed. Try stuff. Treat your career as necessary but secondary for awhile, as something to support everything else. Focus on fun things outside of work. Outlandish things. Go skydiving. Go skydiving in a foreign country. Go skydiving naked. (I can enthusiastically recommend all of the last three.)

Get yourself into really, really good shape if you aren't already. Become a gym rat. (I recommend Crossfit, sometimes discussed here, but anything that isn't 24 Hour Fitness/Big Box will do.)

Learn to fly, models or full sized. Get really good at Bridge. Get good enough at Poker to make a living at it. Form a startup around Poker or Bridge or flying or naked skydiving.

Travel as much as possible, short and long trips, with and without your girlfriend.

Learn a foreign language, and go live and work where they speak it. Immerse yourself in your favorite instrument. Take up a martial art.

Try stuff, lots of stuff. Be like that guy in that Jim Carrey movie and say yes to (almost) everything.

Open up to the world, and let the world show you what interests you.

Or as my aunt says, rise up, go forth and fake it. You don't have to know that whatever you try next is going to be "it," you just have to try it.

When you get to the other end you'll have a lot of cool pictures and stories.
The most bizarre part - WSJ won't even let me subscribe to the iPad edition. Every time I do, they ask me what my account is for wsj.com, and when I give it to them, they tell me "Hey, we'll let you use the iPad version for no additional charge." So, for right now, it's really only $1.99/week for the WSJ (Web + IPad).

Meanwhile the NYT, which is completely and totally free on the Web at nyt.com, is trying to charge me $19.99/Month Now, for the times reader, which is only a _subset_ of the nyt.com (they don't include business graphs and figures last time I checked, just before I canceled my subscription)

I don't really understand their pricing/marketing strategy, and I'm one of their core audience.

Why, precisely, am I supposed to pay the NYT $19.99/month for a _subset_ of what they offer for free on NYT.com?

bizarre.
Respectfully disagree

>Best case scenario: ... all I have to do in your great big for loop is scroll up...

Once you have to scroll up, you are toast. I mean within a function, not within a loop.

There is a rule of thumb of how many things can the mind process at the same time: It is 7 plus-minus 2. You can treat the loop as one element in the function context and analyze the loop context at a different stack frame inside your head.

While working in a loop, you have to think about the list, the index and the element, so you are down to 4 more things you can do before "running out of memory". I think that's why the "for each" loop has been successful across many languages. I also think that that's why "i" is preferred over "index"; it is a known idiom that helps you think about the "i-th element" and saves one slot in your brain.

>Worst case scenario: the something is also badly named and I have to open up a debugger and set a trace to work out whether the iterable is people, channels, cows, or dinosaurs.

Eventually, anyone who has been around for a while inherits some abomination like that. It is not funny. However, no amount of coding standards prevent morons for doing their thing. I would not sacrifice an useful and well known artifact for the sake of idiot-proofing.
The best antidote I've found to the hamster wheel of achievement for achievement's sake is Eastern philosophy.

In particular, Alan Watts has been a revelation for me as he has a really jocular and irreverent view of life which is a great counter-point for super analytical types (like those which inhabit HN) who think everything can be resolved with logic.

Watch this short clip from one of his talks and see if it doesn't strike a chord.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoTmNU_5A0

PS: Figuring this out in your 20's puts you way ahead of the game.
Our uptime could use some improvement, surely. You will bear in mind that it has improved substantially over the last year. It's largely because of things like Gizzard...

I think one of the compelling things about Gizzard is that unending list of crazy and obscure failure conditions that cascade in unpredictable ways and take the site down--all of those that have occurred up till now are encoded into the design of Gizzard so that they do not occur again.

We have not fixed those "unknown unknowns", to be revealed in the future, that can cause a Gizzard system to crash. But my guess is that, over the last year, we have built in fail-safes for scenarios that exceed anything most people have ever experienced or ever will experience-- and by a long shot.

I love Cassandra, I think it's awesome. Twitter plans to move its Tweet storage to Cassandra. Suffice to say that Cassandra is young and the reliability of Cassandra with our throughput and our (very very large) corpus can use some improvement. Cassandra is not yet ready for production use at Twitter despite the fact that it has been deployed successfully at Digg and elsewhere. The Cassandra community is improving the database very rapidly. In a year or two I expect Cassandra to be a reasonable option for many popular web sites. But, even then, Cassandra's design has certain limitations that might prompt you to design a custom store (or consider alternatives). And indeed, there is a lot of stuff we have at Twitter that we have no plans to store in Cassandra unless there are substantial design changes.

An advantage of Gizzard here is that it is more flexible. You could, for example, build a document-partitioned inverted index with Gizzard such that you could do local intersections on each shard and merge these intersections in Gizzard itself. You might, in fact, use Gizzard in front of Lucene to do just this. There is no way to do that with Cassandra though perhaps they will build such features in the future. (To anticipate an objection, Lucandra is not document partitioned so it will suffer from fundamental efficiency problems for a certain class of search queries.)
The nut graf is 8 'pages' in:

That is to say, the AdSense program makes possible an entirely new and utterly despicable business model online: get an assload of written content together—quality be damned—distribute it across a bunch of different sub pages of a central site, add AdSense at every turn, and voilà—a healthy revenue stream fully formed from the head of Zeus.

The essayist is a former Demand Media pieceworker feeling guilty about the useless crap writing he did for them, including "How to Buy PEX Tubing Online". He reworks an old Michael Caine quote to good effect:

Ah, fuck all. Your essayist’s name will be attached to that rubbish in perpetuity, for anyone and everyone to stumble upon online. He wishes he could be like Michael Caine in regards to his role in Jaws IV: “I’ve never seen it. I hear that it’s awful. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” The closest your essayist can come: “I have seen it. I bloody well wrote it. And the Subway sandwich and 12-pack of Miller High Life it purchased were mediocre at best.”