skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to be able to do that when I was young, it was great. Now, it is much harder to block everything else out, I would be so much more productive if I could do that.

Of course, you need a break every now and again, and not eating/exercising is going to catch up with you, but I am guessing this guy is quite young.
Because it saves space and because it makes maintenance easier, and it allows you to label a block of code with a meaningful name.

Caching also means that if you execute less code you will have better performance.

The actual instructions can be interpreted serially, in fact when you're 'desk checking' that is exactly what you do, to unwind the way the code is written to the serial stream that the processor is executing.
I don't understand why SO doesn't generate enough money for the founders to find an office space without having to worry about cost.

"Before I would have walked around New York for weeks looking at all the office space to save $2k/month."

They receive 25M page views a month. So even at $5CPM that's $100k/month in revenue. I'd think that would be enough income to get the ball rolling in an office downtown.

Maybe they have a hard time selling ads?
No it's you who misunderstand.

That some of the 6000 purchasers today would not pay $20 is irrelevant, others would and others from the remaining millions of game players would too.

You also disregard that I already factored in a 50% - 75% discount - the prices I put assumed a $5 - $10 price on sale.
Why Is Business Writing so Awful?
One small thing I like about Safari is that it understands addresses like nytimes/politics as nytimes.com/politics.
We have that here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1318012
Really? Let's do the math:

Let's be very generous, you own 2% of the company, so you are entitled to 2% of the company's profits. Let's be generous and assume you contribute 20% of the company's productivity. Your influence on your 2% is equity is 20% x 2% = 0.4%. For this extra 0.4% compensation, you work 50% more hours.

50% divided by 0.4% is about 125x. So you are on the losing end of this deal by a ratio of 125 to 1. Your "screwed factor" is 125.

Tweak the variables to find out your screwed factor.
Who owns email? Nobody.
More than once I had a wish managers would have read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...
Glad you like it, minalecs!

Out of curiosity, what might help you in the future? I'm planning on posting more of these as my journey continues, and I'd love to know what I'm not thinking of (or should think more seriously about) posting...
I understand exactly how the OP feels. I still get like that, even when I have explicitly released something as open-source.

The way I see it if someone contributes to your codebase you still have the right, and the obligation, to veto that code if you don't feel it matches your philosophies and quality standards. Asserting your preferences is the only way the code is still going to be 'yours'. If your idea of good code matches up with other people's, great! If not, the code will still be 'your baby'.
Sampling from biased populations does not remove bias.
It's not by any means required to be unsupervised, they just tend to be better suited for it, from what I remember. You can train a deep neural network just like a shallow one, but do you know you're training it in the best way? The unsupervised one might key in on something you're not aware of.

They are also more capable of dealing with tons of variables (in this case, ~100 million). If you had 100 million yes/no values that needed to be checked, could you really answer all of them accurately? In some cases, sure, but not many, and what's the correct number of variables for simulating a language, and what do they relate to? An unsupervised network will try to fit them automagically, rather than taking your word for it.

Unsupervised learning also poses a lot of intelligence-modeling uses, because we're essentially unsupervised for some of the "hardest" tasks to learn. Especially prior to learning to speak. All there really is for feedback is pain, and that doesn't necessarily lead directly to language.

But bravura should be able to answer better / more accurately; hopefully they'll chime in too. I'd like to know if there's more to it than what I know, which is pretty minimal.
Out of curiosity, do you have a citation for that? I'd be interested in reading about it.
if someone calls because they knew we worked at the same place and they're thinking about hiring them, the first thing I'm going to share is the fact that the person left everyone hanging.

Check with your lawyer before you do that. Really.
James Cameron at Caltech: The Science of Pandora
Yeah, this has been suggested a few other times. We'll get to it!
I don't agree. It's my experience that no mater how smart I work (or how long) there is always more work to be done. Lots more. Granted, I'm an in-house developer so YMMV if you work for a software company.
You got us.
This article upvote has been sponsored by MySpace.com
I guess that's true. Personally I guess I never noticed because I have Quicksilver indexing my Safari history. I can also use it to do all my Web searches.
iPad 3G and the vacancy of the connected textbook
Has the technology that gets us from here to there improved significantly since then?
I think it's pretty cool that they had cameras capable of recording at 500 frames per second back then. Then again they had enough technology and smart people to actually put men on the moon, so a 500 fps camera would have been a walk in the park.

In before any 'the moon-landings were faked' statements, although I would be surprised by any HN reader saying that unless tongue-in-cheek.
Digg and reddit aggregate links across a wide variety of topics and have a very diverse user base. Stack Overflow's focus is more narrow (much like that of Hacker News). The crowd is a lot more focused as a result. People are a lot less easily influenced by writing style than by correctness. (Try posting code that won't compile and see what happens.)

Yes, people are influenced by reputation and good writing on subjective questions, but those are discouraged on SO, and they don't really have one right answer anyway.
And apparently this "genius" thinks implication is the same as equivalence.

I don't think anyone claims everyone who has mediocre grades is a genius - it is not a sufficient condition, or even necessary. So now he hoists up a straw man, and then attempts to reverse it once again to not only claim that because mediocre grades do not mean someone is a genius, mediocre grades must mean they are NOT a genius, but also that good grades are a sufficient condition for genius.

In conclusion, don't bother reading this author's rubbish. I can't say if he grades are good, but I know for a fact he isn't a genius.
This explains why there are so many more startups in Canada than the US......
"... according to a report issued Monday by attorneys hired by the district."
This is true, but you wouldn't know it from the common rhetoric. We praise the comeback kid; the author points out that we need to remember that it's a far better bet never to fall behind in the first place.
Um... computers?
Which may sound shocking, even offensive at first. However, the correlation between vocabulary and socio-economic class is a very concrete result of many other studies, such that it is a reasonable thing to leave implicit in this case.
It also seems to mean that Calcanis would have waited until 2013 years before paying him what his skills could earn him in 2010. Presumably by then, the employee could have earned even more with new skills and experiences.
Simple Phone Verification with Twilio, PHP, MySQL and jQuery
If he writes software for manned spacecraft I think that would be terribly stressful: knowing that lives depend on whether or not there are any bugs in your code... I think if I wrote software like that I would be very likely to obsess over it.

And please nobody suggest TDD. TDD has its place but it's not a holy grail and it only tests the tests you think to write. Even if your code coverage is 100% you have certainly not tested every possible input and path if the software is at all complex.
Okay, we're talking about two totally different things.

Cheers.
> But I still think there is truth that efficient, sustainable hours can be more productive than long, stressful hours.

I agree here (when I find myself working 60+ hours a week outside of rare crunch time, I am usually doing something wrong e.g., giving bad estimates or losing focus), but forcing people to work "efficient hours" (you must be in the office at 9, vs. being allowed to come in at 11 and stay until 8) is micro management (loss of autonomy).

Not being allowed to do (even non-user facing e.g., infrastructure) projects without permission from project management, planning meetings and daily status reports is another example of micro management. Perhaps this isn't a part of agile manifesto (just like concentration camps aren't a part of the communist manifesto), but that aspect is certainly a feature of almost all implementations of uppercase-A agile (scrum, XP, etc...). I'm all for frequent releases, continuous integration (and possibly continuous deployment), iterative development (at least for product features) et al, but you don't need a full blown "Agile" process (planning meetings, daily stand-ups, index cards, bringing in training consultants, hiring "scrum masters", etc...) for that.

Work life balance is important. It's also very important to work smartly and use labour saving techniques (adequate hardware, tools/automation). Performance requires maintenance and I make sure to allocate down time (time with friends and relatives, concerts, non-technical reading, trips/vacations, exercise, etc...) to myself on a regular basis.

However, the most important aspects of a job (to me) are autonomy, great colleagues and challenging work (exposure to new concepts and technologies, which frequently have a learning curve). Given a choice between working a 1-2 hours more and giving up any one of these aspects, I'd gladly accept a few hours more of work.
Exactly what Schneier is trying to educate against.
If you have any data, I'd be curious how Slashdot fits in. Anecdotally, I notice a lot of borrowing in both directions between HN and Slashdot.
What do you mean 'lost networking'? Was Lish not helpful?
This reminds me somewhat of how Seneca and other Stoics would deliberately take cold baths.

EDIT: To elaborate a little, they would do it in part because they felt that facing uncomfortable situations on purpose prepared them for facing uncomfortable situations not of their choosing.
You want LispIDE

http://www.daansystems.com/lispide/

Hardly a substitute for Emacs/Slime, but for beginners, you can get a lot done. I use it when I am not plugged into in A/C outlet; it saves battery ;-)
Conveniently ignored Smalltalk, which at the time, would have been seeing a lot more use than it does now.

I missed the date of the article at first, it wasn't until I looked at the C code and had to double take it, because it wasn't ANSI C, and my initial reaction was "hang on wait a minute" then checked the date on the article.... yeah.
The author has inadvertantly stumbled upon a part of hacker culture with wide-ranging implications, that is almost never discussed—and that is that people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed, and not simply read. This stems from a deeply-rooted tradition in programming of not reading a codebase until you have a problem with it that you must fix. People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read to learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading more than 1KSLOC? The only reason, as a programmer, I will ever "cd src/", is that I am on a mission to fix a problem. Therefore, publishing code but reserving the right to derivative works, looks a bit like gloating, or showing off—"look what I did! Look how smart I am! It's no benefit to you... but look!"

This makes perfect sense in the art world (and writing is a form of art), as you never really "derive" from a piece of art; instead, you first look at the mechanisms by which it communicated its message to add those techniques to your repitoire of skills, and then re-use those skills on your own works. That makes perfect sense in an artistic medium, where any single stroke or word or note may be chosen from an infinitude of options—but programming requires formal grammar—a finite set of ways of expressing each concept—and thus there is relatively little merit in studying the technique by which a single problem was solved.

On a separate note, for the first few paragraphs he seems to be completely unaware of the medium of fan-fiction—which is about as core to "the culture of online fiction" as you can find.
The biggest problem I can see with this solution is simply that it's not an off-site backup. I haven't had any serious issues with Linode so far, but I don't want to risk losing source repositories (for example) to an event that took down their entire site.

As such, I configured duplicity to sync against S3 (http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) and I only back up my "important" bits. I pay roughly 75¢ month over month; definitely worth it.

As a sidenote, though, access to on-demand snapshotting might push me to front the $5 anyway.
It's sort of silly to suggest that people assess someone based on grades when first meeting them (or ever). No one has ever asked me about my grades in any level of education-they're average to below average compared to my peers (2.5-3.0). Most people assume that I did very well in school because I spend a great deal of time reading about a wide variety of subjects so I tend to know a lot about whatever topic comes up at lunch or whatever.

I've met some people who got good grades but can't do anything useful so they go nowhere. I've met some people who make my grades look excellent and they're much more capable than I am in terms of programming skills (in my estimation at least). In my experience the ability to influence people in an organization and read people's feelings is far more important to success than grades. Even the smartest people I know whose social skills are bad tend to have problems getting where they want to go in life.

I assume that people who write these kinds of articles did well in school (Joel Spolsky's made this point before so I'm mostly thinking of him). I think that people who did poorly in school are less likely to write this sort of article and thus if they did I'd pay closer attention to what they're saying. These sort of statements strike me as self serving and defensive.

If you did well in school you played by the rules and you got your reward already. Your parents were happy with you, your teachers didn't ever give you the lecture that went like this "If you only tried a little bit you'd be getting an A in this class", your friends admired your achievement, etc. I'm not sure I feel any need to give you anything more than you already have received. I don't resent your success at all but it's hard for me to feel sorry for you if people notice the underachievers who made it before they notice you.
I was excited until I realized it wasn't about the music service.
First speculative bubble - 17th century Holland
Probably the first speculative bubble.
Yes I know LispIDE, however it is really nothing more than notepad.exe with syntax highlighting and some basic REPL integration. I think of the VS F# editor with REPL ("interactive mode" as it is called there) as an example of what I'm trying to achieve.
Original Blog Title: High Academic Results Make Better Programmers

Personal anecdote about laziness and grades:
My freshman year of college, I had a semester where I decided that video games were more important than school. I got a terrible gpa, lost all my scholarships, etc. I spent the next several years making it up. Now I didn't quite just rebound to high 3's and 4.0's, it took a few semesters to overcome my bad habits first (3.2,3.5,etc). Eventually I ended up with a cumulative 3.5.

While I do regret getting that poor of grades, it does provide some talking material for an interview (provided your lower grades don't pre-filter you). It shows that you realized your mistakes, worked to improve yourself, and with your high junior/senior level grades, that you actually are smart enough to do the work (well, as much as college can prepare you for that).

So, I guess my point is that even if you have had bad grades, you still have time to prove yourself, and may even end up with interview talking points.
Yeah I've learned the hard way that to say something works in a browser you have to test it in that browser. That version too. And with http and https (the latter sometimes behaves differently due to caching differences).
But getting to the Moon is still a three day ride (always will be with the technology we have) and while the Orion capsule might be a bit more spacious than the Apollo capsule it’s not all that different.

(The Orion capsule won’t fly to the Moon now but it’s the only hardware on the horizon that would have that capability.)
"The truth is, most US academic prose is appalling: pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead."

[David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage]

This applies to modern business prose in spades.
I agree,
Ppl with good grades have hard time accepting someone without them to be as good or even better than they are.
For them grades become like a company whose share they hold. And any one making an arument against their fallibility even in special situation makes them extremely self conscious!
Er, no. The followup (you mean http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/phil_schiller_app_store, right?) has Gruber saying that he still thinks it's wrong to put a 17+ rating on a dictionary for having Naughty Words in it, and that he doesn't think the person who rejected the Ninjawords dictionary acted (1) wisely or (2) consistently with Apple's policy as described to him by Phil Schiller.

(He did say that Apple weren't as wrong as he'd thought they were, because he'd thought they insisted that the Ninjawords dictionary be both (1) censored and (2) marked 17+, whereas supposedly that turned out not to have happened.)

Anyway, I'm not sure what your point about the followup really is. Gruber said something very uncomplimentary about Apple's handling of App Store applications in this particular case (most outrageous yet, hard to do worse) and in general (clear implication of lots of earlier strikingly outrageous rejections). Therefore, he is not uniformly uncritical of Apple. -- Unless you're suggesting that he said that with the intention of issuing a retraction to make Apple look even better, and that his later comment wasn't (as he claimed) precipitated by getting an email from Phil Schiller responding to what he'd said?

Don't get me wrong: it's clear that John Gruber is on the whole very, very enthusiastic about Apple and their products. I would not look to him for unbiased commentary on anything Apple-related. But that is not at all the same thing as being prepared to defend anything "regardless of morality", which is the accusation heresy made above and which still seems to me quite un-called-for.
> I know that legally the service provider owns it, but I'm not thinking that is the way most people see it.

That's not the way most member states of the EU see it either, they have ruled very clearly that the user owns the data and has the right to access it, amend it and ask for it to be removed at any time.
Ask HN: Please (constructively) criticise + advise on my PL concept 
I, like countless before, have taken up the rather insane task of writing 'yet another programming language'.

I sum up my current ideas here - http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/terse/

Please criticise/suggest ideas/tell me how awfully wrong and silly I am for suggesting such a thing/etc.

I am at an extremely early embryonic stage of this project which is likely to last some years, and I would really appreciate some input from the HN community.

I know I am potentially breaking a cardinal rule here in not having code to show as of yet; though I certainly do have a plan as to where to begin and how to move forward, it would prove intensely useful to have your high quality input right from the start.

Also, if you have any questions I would be more than happy to answer them.

Thanks in advance!
Ask HN: Speaker independent voice recognition for auto-generated transcriptions?
Does anyone know of any code for doing speaker-independent voice recognition? I would love to be able to automatically transcribe various pieces of media.

I already know nothing is going to be even close to perfect. Is Sphinx still it? Is there anything out there that's great?

The code for YouTube's automatic transcription would be ideal. Someone tell me Google already open sourced it? </prayer>
Ceph: A Linux petabyte-scale distributed file system
If there is a significant trend here, it would be better to explore it than to try to suppress exploration with dismissive witticisms.
does it bother you that people don't capitalize properly in their personal blogs? i never understood that. i read through it just fine.

i know it's proper, but i guess i'm kind of lazy in that way. in the words of christopher walken: "i never liked capitalization. it felt like more of an imposition."
My doctors all have. "I can't afford that medication, is there something that's available as a generic that I might be able to use instead?" has worked really well for me.

I've also had their front offices recode stuff at lower rates when I explained my high deductible health plan.
People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read To learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading more than 1KSLOC? The only reason, as a programmer, I will ever "cd src/", is that I am on a mission to fix a problem.

Seriously? As a programmer, the problem I'm often on a mission to fix in /src is that I haven't learned enough.
I am in the process of moving my rails app to Rackspace Cloud Servers. It offers three backup images for free, but it only exists as long as the associated server is around.

A 256 meg slice only costs $10. So it is actually a pretty good deal.
Apple Policy Said to Prompt U.S. Allegation by Adobe
Cloudkick: New monitors, deployment tool integration, alert until resolved
The pricing on: http://www.linode.com/backups/

Linode 360: $5.00/mo
Linode 540: $7.50/mo
Linode 720: $10.00/mo
Linode 1080: $15.00/mo
Linode 1440: $20.00/mo
Linode 2880: $40.00/mo

Doesn't match the pricing on: https://www.linode.com/signup/

Linode 360	$19.95	16GB	200GB
Linode 540	$29.95	24GB	300GB
Linode 720	$39.95	32GB	400GB
Linode 1080	$59.95	48GB	600GB
Linode 1440	$79.95	64GB	800GB
There are people in my team that are currently just working 9-5.

Were they hired with the expectation that they would work longer than that? I ask because it's not unheard of to be told you'll be working one set of hours, and then expected to work something completely different.

If no expectations were set at all during the hiring process, that's more the company's fault than the employees' fault.
> In these times of almost endless opportunities

I think that you forgot to suffix that with "for developers in Silicon Valley." With the high unemployment rates, I presume there are a lot of people that don't have the luxury of tossing a job due to moral/ethical dilemmas.
Just some domain ideas: firstp0st.com, subunderground.com, subspring.com.
Straw-man.
th prblm s nt tht ts mprpr, bt tht yr gvng th rdr lss nfrmtn