skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My first is 13 months now; we live in central France, and my closest family is a brother (busy with his own family) in the Netherlands. The rest of our families are in the US or Malaysia.

Luckily my wife & I both work from home (so we're both always around to help each other), AND we have some very supportive neighbors & friends here, but it's been quite difficult at times. Here's a huge tip: get a large freezer (the type you put in the basement) and fill it with food like curries (to eat w/ rice) or pasta sauces, soups, etc. -- things that can be easily thawed and made into lunch/dinner with minimal effort & shopping required.

Another tip: prepare yourself to be a parent. Do not assume that it will come naturally, because while some parts do, most really don't, and in the modern world there is a huge array of choices you have to make that require research and thoughtful consideration -- and once the baby arrives you'll find that difficult.

What will actually work with your baby varies on the baby, but you should know a lot about breast-feeding (startling difficult to get started, even with help & preparation), formula (if breast-feeding is impossible -- and it might be for medical reasons -- you should know how formula works), co-sleeping and/or ways to help teach your newborn to sleep alone (not letting them "cry it out", for one), swaddling (amazing but not suited to every baby), ways to carry them & help with gas pains, how to change/clean this tiny fragile thing, etc.. Never mind all of the things you should know about the delivery -- how to avoid getting a default c-section if the labor is slow, etc..

It's worth studying your ass off, really.

Human beings have evolved to have remarkably helpless babies that need educated care because we are capable of teaching each other how to handle that care -- normally, you'd have your entire extended family around you to teach you how to do everything. If you don't -- we didn't -- make damned sure you learn how from other sources (and have help available for when you need it!).

I love having our daughter here. The whole experience blows my mind sometimes, and she's unreasonably cute -- check this out http://robwhelan.com/photos/galleries/12-month_12/img_1153.j... -- but it IS difficult and there's a lot of know-how required particularly if you might not want to just go to the baby store and buy all of the stuff the salesperson says you'll need (hint: your baby will be happier without most of it).
I remember reading somewhere that talking about a project you're going to start makes you less likely to work on it, because talking about it is satisfying.

If you go public, you might be less motivated to actually make progress. I've found this to be true for myself, but I can't remember where this idea came from... I wish I had a citation for you.
And maybe one day when there are multiple sites consolidating the deals from the sites that consolidate deals, someone can create a new app that consolidates _those_ sites. ;-)

On a more serious note, this would be pretty useful if it was smart enough to filter out duplicates - a lot of those deals sites have overlapping content.
Though there is a fine line because you will often be trading your time for saving a few dollars. This is subject to diminishing returns after a certain point.
What is your rationale for sticking with whatever the majority of historians said?

If I may, when the majority of experts in a field all believe the same thing, it is referred to as consensus. The consensus of the experts in any well researched field tends to be, if not actually right, at the very least the best answer that can be arrived at with current information.

Of course, they are not always right, even in a field as well grounded as mathematics, the consensus has been wrong in the past (the consensus for a very long time was the Euclidean Geometry was the only possible geometry.....). But it is quite reasonable to demand that someone trying to say the consensus is wrong has a high bar to meet to establish that.

In general, the most reasonable thing for someone without the expertise or interest to carefully do an indpendent analysis of all available data is to believe the consensus. When someone does meet that high bar to show that the consensus is wrong, then in any reasonable academic field that consensus will change.
American Pictures
Oh hey everyone look! Another childish post about syntax! Let's all argue about nothing!
Introducing the New Youtube Mobile Website
I think we can all pretty much agree that both Hoover and Roosevelt (and the administration in general) made things worse.

The biggest problem we have is the obsession with GDP instead of trying to measure things like wealth creation - which is precisely what Henry Ford was in the business of.
It seems obvious to me from playing with one in a store that few people would look at both the Kin Two and the Android-powered LG Ally, which have identical prices for phone and service and pick the Kin. I think the only way it could have worked would have been for the Kin to have a much cheaper plan.
I agree with what you're saying -- I thoroughly enjoyed the pure theory classes as part of the CS curriculum. I also agree that it is more important to teach concepts than specific technologies. That said, I think there are schools that fail to teach concepts as well... things like working as part of a team, using source control and designing a product modularly and writing code which would be considered "production quality." There's a tendency to put those things off because it is "just for a school project."
Not sure I agree with the premise of this article.

You can always make the case that, on the contrary, you may want to go to a hotel to experience something that you haven't experienced before.

If the design is somehow more functional or otherwise makes the room look very beautiful, I'd be more than happy to stay at a place like this.

If necessary, they can always put little notes explaining how some of the main tasks get done.

I agree that the fact that people stay in a hotel for only at most a couple of days puts more constraints on how accustomed people can get to another interface. My own programming "quirks" have developed for a reason. So why does the author then use this example to justify his point about teamwork when the metaphor breaks? Or is he implying that you will only work with a team for such short time that no one will reap any benefits from getting used to ideas that make things faster in the long run?
I'm a big fan of MongoDB, and I think its replicated durability characteristics are good enough for many classes of applications. If you could lose a minute of data and have it just be "bad" instead of "customer enraging and business threatening", then it's a very nice database system.

However--I do think the decision to make writes "fire and forget" is just a mistake. If you use abstractions like a connection pool under heavy concurrency, you can get unpredictable behavior in terms of when the data is "actually there."

For example, all in one thread:

with connection pool: do_write operation A

do other things...

with connection pool: read something, assuming A has been applied

Specifically, the fact that you get an arbitrary connection out of the pool means you cannot be sure that the database has completely processed operation A before executing your new query.

MongoDB has a "safe=" flag in their Python bindings that implements the project's official (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Last+Error+Commands#Last...) recommendation for "it is written" consistency. It's a bit of a hack, but it calls "getLastError()" on the connection that does the write before returning from the update()/save()/insert()/delete() call. I think it's astonishing this behavior isn't the default.

In fact, I recently updated diesel's bindings to be safe=True, so getLastError() is always executed on write operations to make sure they succeeded before the call returns:

http://github.com/jamwt/diesel/commit/95cd71d82ffc5c308060b6...
Yahoo MObstor Unstructured Cloud Storage Service
Heh, it seems a lot of Starcraft enthusiasts are lurking around HN. Last time I've been on /r/starcraft's IRC channel half of the people where programmers (no not progamers). Coincidence, you tell me! :)
Although there are those who say "Clojure is a terrifying meld of a beloved character and an unreasoning alien onslaught." based on: http://vintage-digital.com/hefner/misc/lisp-programmers.jpg

Me, I'll probably need to use Clojure on top of the JVM someday but I'd like to get a "Turtle Clojure" developed after Clojure-in-Conjure gets somewhere ("it's turtles all the way down"). But that's because I'm not too concerned with doing anything particularly or at least immediately practical right now.
It means, literally, that all the websites you visit are visited more often by women than men. The implication breaks down past there—there are other reasons for visiting female-dominated sites than being female. It could be (if they're mostly content sites/blogs) that you enjoy female writing style/viewpoint more than male writing style/viewpoint. It could be (if they're forums/social sites) that you're single and seeking a female partner. Many other explanations exist. This is a correlation, not a causation.
It's always worse to look back and compare the actions of someone 100 years ago to what we would consider normal today. I'm not forgiving the guy, but you'd have to look around at some of his contemporaries and see if this type of behaviour was normal. Going further back, a lot of well-regarded American had slaves, for example.

A lot of people were friendly with the Nazis in the early-mid 1930's. They did turn Germany around and get it going in the early stages.
> I disagree.

You would, because you are taking things far to seriously.

Of course loving a child is just not enough. There are a monumental number of other things that need doing. There are mountains of books. A small post on HN isn't going to be the definitive "How to raise your child" post. It was merely a response to a person who is preparing to have his first child.

> Veruca Salt is spoiled by her parents who simply love her

No, they don't.

> When you say "it's rather easy" that sends up a few flags for me.

You are making this much more than it is.

Being a parent is easy. That doesn't mean it doesn't have it's challenges. That doesn't mean you can't mess up. That doesn't mean some days you can't help but pull your hair out.

Being easy doesn't mean can't be challenging.

It's easy, because it's worth it. It's easy, because even when it's difficult, it's rewarding. It's easy, because I love being a father to my son.

You ask me two questions of how I would handle things, as if their was a definitive right answer and everything else is 100% wrong. I know enough to know that their is no right or wrong answer. I can only say what I've done for my child when things arose, and I've learned from them as much as he has.
I mean like Evil. Or Gloom. Or Danger. Embarrassing is a much wider set. Anyway, just curious...
Are you kidding ? Civ is the king of micromanagement.
Single server durability is coming, v1.8 in the fall. We chose to prioritize some other things before that. http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-980

We've always clearly said don't build a bond trading system with it. Our philosophy is one-size-fits-all is over; use the right tool for the right problem.

Based on how I like to define the term, there is nothing in the NoSQL space that does full "ACID", including complex transactional semantics involving many objects, on many server clusters. That is ok : the perf + scale problem isn't really solvable if you don't give on something.
My wife's grandmother has a garden out back.

I swear, the kid eats better then I do. He get's fresh pasta sauce all the time. >_<
Ok, here I go:

We don't need additional protection from pleasure, because guilt is our built in protection:

> When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent.

He also thinks that we need protection from non-pleasure:

> The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.
Doesn't work in Safari. (Which is a good thing, I suppose.)
Upvoted since I live in Eugene and know some of their employees. :)
I don't mean quite at that level, I think "Commander" is more accurate than "General" in this context.

I just mean that there's a large amount of manual drudgery to playing games like StarCraft, and it would be nice if the game wasn't unfairly balanced in the favor of people who are really good at said drudgery.

For example, early in any StarCraft 1 game (I haven't played SC2) you have to do an exact amount of tasks in some exact order to get an early game Zealot or Zergling rush.

It'd be nice if you could just command that instead of manually mining a set amount of resources, construct a Gateway just as your nth Probe gets constructed etc.

Another example is unit production. If you have resources being mined you have to constantly switch between that and telling the computer again that you want X marines and Y Battle-cruisers or something. It'd be nice if you could just leave that on some production preset so that you could focus on warfare.
I don't have a kid yet (3 months to go), but so far my take would be definitely no force feeding. I can't imagine a kid would go so far as to not eat when hungry? Would they rather starve to death than touch a vegetable? If you start fretting over food, of course you give the kid leverage over you - now they can refuse to eat to punish you...

And with respect to chess, why would you encourage him to forget the game???

Letting him win - maybe there is a better way, like correcting his moves so that he really wins? I only played with a guy who did that once when I was a child, and I was really impressed. Or instead of playing games, work on chess problems together (nobody wins or loses)? Or play together against opponents on the internet?

I can imagine it is difficult to find the right way to handle it right, but then again, maybe to play or not to play chess is not the most important matter in the world either? If you screw that up, it seems likely your kid would still find other things to get interested in.
Several that I've worked on. There were aspects of the language that we avoided, like export, because they weren't implemented. But in general, we didn't have ground rules about features to use or not use. At least not in the past 15 years. Back in '93ish we would be more careful, because the features were still evolving, but by 2002-2003 I don't think we had a lot of issue using the language.
This is trivially true: "Love isn't about giving people what they ask for, it's about giving them what is best for them in the long run."

...but the more I learn, the more I find that my intuition has been often wrong on "what's best for them in the long run". Usually just in subtle ways, but sometimes in larger ones.

Being a relaxed parent is good advice, though that was more how I was a good uncle (but I'm learning to make adjustments to become a good parent).

It's super-important to understand that kids are not little adults, even once they start talking and can seem that way. So I don't agree with your game advice (I don't think the lesson you're teaching will be the one the child learns), but you're probably quite right that they'll grow out of it anyway. :)

And I'll stop there, because my opinions are based on tons of reading & talking with parents, but only about a year of being a parent myself so far....
Which Identities Are We Using to Sign in Around the Web?
Systemd: An upstart/sysvinit Replacement
34K still seems a lot, but how many are really involved in developing the core products? A lot of them would probably be sales people etc?

Maybe MS would do better with 34K than 100K people...
Perhaps more newsworthy is its inclusion in Fedora 14.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd
This is a nice emacs addition and helps the developer, but it doesn't help the people who then look at his code using other editors, or via public repos on the web.
If I could trade an iPhone for a house, I would. You're blatantly misrepresenting the scale of these things in order to equate them.
I thought it was a trick question because it was so obvious.
To whomever put this custom skin over the SO Engine (and sure you're reading HN, aren't you?), that's an awesome job. This site looks really unique compared to Stackoverflow, Superuser etc. and quiet appealing too.
To be fair, my first cell phone only displayed one line of text which was only numbers, didn't have a phone book, had terrible call quality, in addition to all the listed missing features. So the Kin is actually a great phone. Should have sold millions.
They thought they were ordering a kindle.
I also highly suggest supporting the developer of LINQPad by purchasing the auto completion (once you have evaluated the program). Its quite cheap for a licence, and makes the app twice as useful.
Apple's products weren't highly regarded through most of the 90s. The survived on a niche market at the time, but weren't highly regarded during this phase either for their design or technical architecture. Pricing wasn't their problem -- their products were the problem.

It wasn't until 2000 or so when they got their mojo back.
The iPhone also launched what.. four years ago? At the time, those limitations weren't such a big deal.
Unless they change the "rules", I think it will suffer the same problem as the other Stacks: They don't handle duplicate questions very well.

In succession, duplicates are annoying and detrimental, but on the other hand, the best answer in 2008 may not be the best answer in 2010 and there's no easy way to update old questions and bring attention to their need for new answers.

The set of answers for broad questions at SO is gradually becoming stale and the new questions are beginning to become uselessly specific to the person who asks the question.

Maybe a way to append or revise older questions as a lower-reputation user would help, and doing so would bring the question back into the community's foreground to be seen by fresh eyes.

Edit: "They" meaning the website, the community and the SO engine combined, not necessarily one or the other individually.
That's true. The difference is that the Iphone lacked features because of Steve Jobs' desire to only do something if you can do it perfectly. The Kin lacked features because of politics.

This is what will kill Microsoft.
Reviewing the Nokia N900, User & Developer opinions
Wait, what was that about some alchemist "making" gold? I tried looking up the alchemist's name (Marco Bragadini according to the article) and found nothing.
There seems to be a muddling of concepts in the article. My understanding of the concept of core grammar comes from Steven Pinker. The core grammar is not a syntax tree ready to parse anything, but a set of instincts that can be applied when learning you native language. So you can learn word order syntax or tonal syntax; one of a small set of patterns. However if you have not learned the the specific rules for a given language, you will not be able to recognize them. Recognition of the passive may be in there, but you will not recognize if you havent learned it.

Failure to recognize "every" as the universal quantifier is silly. In normal conversation "every" is not a universal quantifier. It signifies a general rule, something quite different. One can say, "every dog has 4 legs", but not be thrown into logical confusion by the sight of a dog with three legs.
I guess that is when you remember stuff like "never negotiate with terrorists"?

Presumably it is kind of the job of kids to test their parents' limits...
Yeah, interesting article, weird conclusion.

The comparison of hotels to website design is pretty apt. A hotel is often just a place to sleep, and not the point of the trip (resorts are an exception), so even if it makes the room prettier, in the end it doesn't justify straying from standard expectations. Same with most websites, people generally aren't interacting with one given site continuously for 8 hours a day, so they don't have time nor inclination to get used to some quirks.

But for web development frameworks? Lots of people do work on web dev for 8 hours a day, so if some nonstandard framework trades a couple days of learning curve that results in productivity gains measured in months, it's totally worth it. E.g., Rails and Django fell out of such things, and they had to start somewhere.
Disclosure: I'm an Android developer. However I've also developed Qt4 applications, something which had me excited about Maemo since I could've leveraged my skills to build on yet another mobile platform. After trying this phone for 3 weeks, sorry Nokia.
Or the other more sensible response that mobile devices are one of the major growth segment in the industry. Why would you give up on that?

But conspiracy theories work too.
It's not really about losing a minute of data though--the whole thing could become corrupted, and repairing it will be extremely difficult.
Why? Don't you like Star Trek?
Yeah I agree with those points.

I must admit I didn't read anything really to do with parenting before becoming a parent. It seems like there are so many different variables, every child is totally different, that reading books might even spoil things, and you might start looking to books for solutions rather than your intuition. (This might just be my personality - I don't like reading programming books either that teach specific programming style etc). But then I haven't read books on relationships either, but think I do ok there (My wife hasn't divorced me yet ;) ).

I can only say what I think worked with my Son when he did similar things playing games. But then I can't be sure if he 'learnt the lesson', or if he just grew out of it naturally. Seems like trying to play at around their level is best, although that's sometimes pretty hard :) If I had identical twins at least I'd be able to do proper A/B testing! ;)
I completely disagree. I think the burden of having to authorize two applications is much higher than having to authorize one that will have a little extra power that I may or may not use.
Yeah, Apple probably has a lot of retail employees for their Apple Stores.
A lot of people have that opinion. Such as the Mini-Microsoft blog: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/, which is supposedly ran by an MS employee.
Blizzard to require real names in Starcraft 2 forums
"Anthropomorphic paper clip software assistants linked with cancer..."
Evolutionary Algorithms: The Little Things You'd Never Guess
That is a _really_ open-ended question... can you give a bit more background to what you're wanting to get out of the event?

Are you a developer? Designer? "Business" guy/gal?

Are you looking to create a web app? A desktop app? A mobile app? Something else entirely?

I _think_ I'm headed to the event as well, so maybe I'll see you there!
If MongoDB doesn't have single server durability, what kind of durability does it have?
In some countries it is actually illegal to beat your child (or other children).
"... The first version of my code was pretty much brute force, every user was sending their X,Y position every time they moved their mouse. Yes, that's 'a lot' of data per second. There has been 50gb of data transfered in just 4 days :P ..."

also read the related blog post ~ http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/701
If you're gonna compete, you'll have to compete with the iPhone4 not 2007's iPhone. That said, I don't know if all these statements are true, but some would be quite dealbreaking for me.
I suspect what this 'tool' really tells us is that its author needs a new source of data as to what sites men and women visit.
I'm not sure Steve's desire of perfection was the reason for all lacking features. MMS comes to mind. Ditto for being able to send an SMS to multiple people. Common features of phones, no magical implementation by Apple, but not supported originally (hell, it took iOS 4 for you to know how many characters your SMS contains).
Ah nice, that's what I was looking for.