skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No need to backpedal quite so much. You didn't offend me.

I am angry, but not at you. I'm sure it's not The Done Thing to admit you're pissed at your audience on the internet, but here goes: I'm pissed at my audience!

I am so freakin tired of people who whine about how it's tiring to work after their work, or that it's rough to work on two or more things at once, or that all they really wanna do is just work on their little pet project and not have to worry about bills.

It just smacks of entitlement. And, worse, avoidable failure.

Look, here's the thing. My story? Not remarkable. Not special. Not new.

I'm happy if you read it and feel encouraged. That's why I keep writing about it. But the fact is, I'm just doing what successful people have done forever -- hustlin the shit out of everything I got, and then some. Not sitting on their butt, not complaining, not waiting for an invitation, not waiting for somebody to map out the territory before they start walking.

If you really want to be inspired, look to biographies. Try one about Ben Franklin to start with.

I guarantee you that if you* read about what he did and where he came from, you will be knocked on your ass with humility when you look at the amount of effort you are expending and what you expect to happen in return.

* you being anyone, not just jasonlotito
I'd like to echo ashu's comments; I have no skin in the SEO game and Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test for me. There might be a bias on HN against you or your site, but if you want to change that, it's your job to argue with solid facts that can't be refuted with a 5 minute Google search.

The fact that you're trying to completely change the subject with your post about the Open Angel Forum doesn't really help your cause, either.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are FISA warrants granted far too freely? I'm sure they are. And yet FISA safeguards were problematic enough for the Bush administration that Cheney and his legal team had to go through contortions to create an end-run around them. Read "Angler", the (excellent) book on Cheney's role in the previous administration, for more on that.

But be that as it may: whether the system is abused in the future or not, it seems to me hard to refute the idea that unfettered connectivity to a network that has been (perhaps negligently) connected to critical infrastructure around the country is something that the executive branch will have to address.
I'm not even a little bit interested in debating the merits of Joe Lieberman with you.
I hope HN doesn't embrace this sensational tone of headline.

When I see a headline like this I automatically reduce my expectation and increase my quality bar for pressing that little grey triangle.

Not that I think this is a bad article, I'm just unconvinced that it lives up to its patronising headline.
A much better book, written by an actual scientist, is Life Without Bread.
You're taking it too literally.
I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly:

5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.

6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.

So if I didn't have this disorder I can over-eat and become sedentary and not become obese?
This is exactly the unusual type of suggestion I was hoping for, beekeeping has never crossed my mind but I'll definitely look into it, thanks.
The difference is that they were actually building the rubygems for people. Here, you upload the already-built .apk, and the QR just makes it a little easier to have your phone download the .apk and install it.
He did actually make a bunch of negative comments when launching Hacker Newspaper, which is sort of interesting. He says he repackaged HN because HN's layout was crap, and its discussions were "ridiculous time-wasting garbage", so he wrote Hacker Newspaper, with a new layout and no comment threads, to "reach a higher level of information hygiene".

See: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news...

And especially: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news...
On building it quickly:

* Use a tiny framework like Flask that will let you get up and running quickly. It's a two-page site -- you don't need Django/Rails.

* Pare down the features to the bare minimum: no signups, accounts, etc. You put in your numbers, get sent to lineardiet.com/diet/abc123/ and have to bookmark that if you want to get back to it..

* Use an simple data model like: ID -> {start_date, end_date, start_weight, end_weight}.

* Render graphs in-browser with Raphael.
An iDEN Android phone

I never thought I would see an Android iDEN phone!

I've never worked for Motorola or Nextel, but I have been a loyal Sprint customer for over 10 years.
The pdf claims that for simplicity sake, the constant pi should have been a factor of two larger.

Reminds me of electrical engineering "mistakes" such as the convention establishing electrons as negatively charged; or the ohm being very small/amp being very large compared to everyday usage.
Practice. Practice, practice, practice. The most important thing to realize is that math isn't just a body of knowledge, but also the skill of applying that knowledge. Example: Memorizing a bunch of trig identities will not let you integrate crazy trigonometric functions. You need to be able to figure out which identities you ought to apply to push your crazy function into an integrable form. The identities you can look up from a book when you need them. The important skill is applying the identities you have.

This ability, to see the direction you need to go from the pieces that you have and the goal you want to achieve, is the most transferable skill that mathematics will give you. And you can only get it from practice. Get actual textbooks, with practice problems. Preferably, get the teacher's edition, or one with the answer to odd-numbered problems in the back so you can check your work. And when you make a mistake, don't just correct it, go back and figure out why you were wrong and why the answer is correct, because that's often one of the most instructive activities you can do.

You probably already know that any given level of math builds on knowledge and concepts from previous levels. Depending on the speed of progression, it's often necessary not just to know the preceding knowledge, but to master it. The lower-level stuff has to be downright trivial if you want to focus on higher-level stuff. It's simply not possible to do, e.g., line integrals in the complex plane if you have to stumble through basic algebraic manipulations like canceling variables while you're doing it[1]. The converse of this, is that you often master important math concepts by using them as the foundation for something more abstract, because only then do you see why they were so important.

Anyways, enough generalities, time for specific subjects. Geometry isn't very important, but trigonometry becomes important, especially because it's related to exponents which are super-critical. Learn trig. Then, learn linear algebra (matrix maths). Then, find a course or book on discrete mathematics, which usually means intro-level number theory, graph theory, and combinatorics. Calculus is worth picking up at some point. It's not as important to a programmer as to a physicist or engineer, but it is foundational to several other areas, and shows up in the damndest places. Simple single-variable calculus is probably sufficient, and focus on what an integral represents rather than how to compute one. After that, the two interesting paths are analysis (and topology), and algebra.

[1] It's a lot like learning a new language in a different alphabet, which is something I'm doing right now. It's really hard to deal with important concepts like characterization and tone when you can barely fit three letters in your head at the same time, much less a whole word (that you have to look up), much less an entire idea.
The Hacker News Experiment
Or that's what he claimed. For some reason, he forgot to mention that he went from a post-IPO behemoth to a pre-IPO company that was the hottest thing on earth at that point...
No, Apple has not sent that message. The hugely successful, continuing "there's an app for that" campaign actually sends the exact opposite message.
The Lua pattern-matching code he mentions is here (http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/lstrlib.c.html#match). You can browse the overall source (http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/) online, too.

The Lua standard string library includes a minimalistic regex implementation - it doesn't have full REs because the implementation would probably be larger than the rest of Lua (!).

For situations where you're better off with a real parser and not just REs, LPEG (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html) is available as a library. It's a bit different from both REs and LL(k) / LALR(k) parser generators (it's a PEG variant), but works quite well in my experience - while designed with parsing in mind, it scales down quite nicely to typical RE string stuff.
You say they're in no particular order. OK then, put them in order and address the one on top of the pile first.

Beyond that I can't help. I just turned 45: the last time I cared about my age was turning 30 and wondering why anyone made a big deal about it. Never had a quarter life crisis, don't have a a midlife crisis. Life is too short to spend it navel gazing (which is what those crises tend to be!). At every point in life there will be some "issue" to deal with.

If I were to project my values on you (in terms of what would bother me) I'd address sexual frustration first since it has a way of distracting you from everything else. The biggest thing to bear in mind here (assuming you're straight) is that most single, unattached women are as sexually frustrated as you are -- it's not like it's tattooed on their foreheads, though.

Want a project? Make a site for people who want to travel to the same place but don't want to do it alone. They can meet, get to know each other and decide if they want to travel together. If you can get that to work, it'll solve a bunch of your problems :-)
I like memory sports like memorizing decks of playing cards, Pi, mental calendar calculation, etc. It's done mostly offline but I use some online gadgets I made to enhance it. It's not physical but if you memorize while running (and collecting mnemonic 'journeys') or working out it's a nice combo. I count my exercise repetitions with the digits of Pi. Ron White trained while in scuba gear.
http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html
Ibis Reader on iPad and iPhone now has full font support & more
I was about to write something very similar.

There have always been a small number of people who claim that electromagnetic charges should be reversed: that is, that the positively charged particle should logically be what "moves" in the circuit.

Most people just look at it, shrug, decide it doesn't really matter, and get back to doing it the way they've always done.
I'm sure Dan is replacing his TV and cable hookup with a network-connected computer and HDTV monitor so he won't be forced to watch only the programming the cable network provides (and takes a cut of) but will be free to watch the vast array of entertainment programs available on the net. The fact that there are almost none of these shouldn't sway his decision, because if everyone did the same, surely there would be some, sometime.

I feel the same about this as I do about any economic or technical decision made for religious reasons. You're free to think what you want, but, as Scott Adams says, I'm free to hear what you say on the subject as incoherent babbling.
Get on the phone with Michael Milken and raise a few $100 million by selling junk bonds to eager investors if your idea is high-growth (note: he's banned from the industry but it's how a few billionaires got started).
In computer science, I'd say the first part is true but not really the second, at least in the areas I work in. People definitely use "did it get into a journal?" (actually in CS, more often a good conference, since top conferences have more prestige than journals) as a quality filter, but they don't really get their information by browsing the latest issue of journals. For that, it's much more common to just get PDFs off the internet--- from authors' homepages, Google Scholar, CiteSeer, citeulike, mailing lists, personal suggestions, etc., and then figure out where those PDFs came from later.

In some cases, if it's an author I already know of, I don't even bother looking to see where it was published until I actually need to write out a bibtex entry to cite it. Doing things that way, I've cited papers from publication venues I've never even heard of, so they aren't really doing any sort of information-filtering work for me. In those cases, the article may as well have been a tech report for all it mattered to me, since the publication venue was really serving as nothing (from my perspective) except a fancy place to deposit PDFs. Admittedly, that works mainly when I already know something about the author (or someone I know can tell me something about the author). If they're a total unknown, I'd probably be more wary of citing stuff that didn't already get into a venue I respect.
Ask HN: What real-world concurrency/distributed/parallel problems are out there?
I'm learning Erlang and OCaml simultaneously and want some problems to solve using them.

I've gone through the usual Project Euler and CodeKata problems, but want something where I can apply the benefits of these languages successfully.

Thank you in advance.
If you look at the listing, you'll see "Room type: Entire home/apt". So Derek's got the whole apartment to himself, not just a room in someone's apartment.

I would guess that people who stay for long stretches like that tend to look for full apartment listing, since the host might also be obnoxious, and it might get old to stay with someone for a month even if they're just neutral.
Most people are not grown-up enough to realize that it's not effective to runn away (or lash out at) anybody who/anything that makes you feel "bad emotions."

It takes guts and patience to experience the bad and look for the good in it, and I've met very, very few people (of any age) who do it on purpose and only a slightly larger handful who do it naturally without realizing.
I used to have one at my old employer and I did not like it at all. No matter what I did, I couldn't keep the plastic seat edge from cutting into my leg just above the knee. I'm 6'2" and one of my coworkers was 6'4" and he had similar complaints.

Definitely try it out first before you buy one.
The memory difference is a pretty good reason. I was still using a 2G when 3.0 came out and it was never nearly as snappy again throughout all the 3.x releases I had on it. The 3G, with double the RAM, is a bit slow with iOS4 in spots. My understanding is the way memory management is designed in iOS Apple can't risk significantly decreasing the amount of memory available to third party apps without causing some big issues. I would imagine iOS4 apps will also have a bigger memory footprint than 2.x and 3.x apps as well. I'm sure someone will hack it onto the 2G so we can see for ourselves within a few weeks. I'm betting lots of sluggish operation and low memory warnings.
No it's not. Look at it: it's one-selector-per-line, which is a very common style for handwritten CSS. If it were compressed, it would have no line breaks.
+1. although it's kind of sad that there is this rich trove of knowledge about computer science that has somehow become "discriminatory" instead of "lingua franca." It seems to parallel the disdain some elements of society have for science in general.

I will probably rename everything at some point and use it to try to lure people into finding out more about combinators. Perhaps "Ruby Shoes for jQuery" could be the gateway drug for combinatory logic... But somehow I'm still saddened to think that we could look at something, know it has a name, but fear that calling it by its name will make it less popular than if we try to find a catchy nickname for it.

Should professors rename the combinators "returning" and "into?"
Programming is far to broad to assume everyone knows every word. I'm a recent grad ~1yr working as a web developer on a ms stack so what I use every day may be completely different from what he uses every day. Therefore I am going to know a completely different set of terms then him.

I never heard of K and T while in college. Why? Probably because its not a major enough term. There is hardly enough time to learn all the lingo especially when it takes a whole 10 lines to write these combinators. I would have just wrote those ten lines and not cared what its called.
Lie Group Computations With Python
Changing to a car-free lifestyle is also a great way to lose weight. If you are considering relocating to a new city soon, that's a good time to investigate whether your new city would be conducive to car-free living. When I moved to Boston and ditched my car, I lost 50 lbs without even trying.
"I do not like Guido's language design instincts"

I am curious. What don't you like?
...have the entire hall smell like delicious chili...

How do your floormates feel about that? I hope you at least share the chili with them. :)
sounds very much like the misconceptions of much of those in Silicon Valley
Having spent enough time in both places I can tell you that it's much, much, much worse here. In SV, you have actual businesses to counter-weight. Here, you don't.
You can try to stream the video from here: http://streaming.ndc2010.no/tcs/
The server seems to be overloaded right now though.

There is a torrent of 33 talks from NDC2010:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/757631/NDC2010/NDC2010%20Part1.torre...
Rob's talk is in there.
I read it as "Donkey Kong effect" at first. Do the incompetent tackle problems by lobbing barrels at them like an angry gorilla?
science output is not directly proportional to effort. Instead of ranking scientists purely on their publication records, credit should be given for all sorts of activities that don’t necessarily come across in traditional metrics.

While I agree there is more to science output than publications, candidates for post-doc/faculty positions shouldn't be judged on "effort", but on making real contributions that bring progress to their field of research. Judging that on anything else than quality publications becomes difficult, but I look forward to what people may do about it.

So far I've heard mostly talk and little action.
Travel Deals-Free Local Travel Guides
i'm kind of enjoying being a saltwater reef aquarium enthusiast, right now. it employs knowledge about a lot of things, from design to chemistry.
A Million VMS. Test environments in Virtual and Cloud infrastructures
If you have an iOS 4 iPhone could you do us a favour and access http://vm.io/wm and click "connect".

A near-real-time twitter feed should appear if WebSockets are supported (tested w Safari5 Desktop, Chrome 6).

Please share your results. Thanks!
This is great information either way.
California budget idea: Ads on e-license plates
blarg - multi-tasking was the one update I wanted.
Yeah, I love how Safari Reader and the Autopager add-on unpage these sites. I do wonder if and when the site designers will try to fool them.
Link to the wifi scale: [http://www.amazon.com/Withings-WBS01-Wifi-Body-Scale/dp/B002...]
Why aren’t Apple's error messages written by marketers?
Well, next monday we can celebrate 6/28 as 2pi day or proper pi day... Just in time article.
This is rapidly turning into Humpty-Dumpty-ism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_Lo...
I'll take a look, thanks!
And hours more spent arguing over if software can even be an engineering discipline or not.
Old news. This ranks up there with the fact that it was a bad idea to use base 10 instead of base 12. Absolutely and utterly true, but completely not worth the switching costs.
That would require her clients to make a public and private key, send her the key, and then know how to use the private key to decrypt the resulting doc. Too much work for them.
What do you mean exactly by "international" company? If you register it in Delaware, it will be an American company, pay American taxes etc. (please correct me if I'm wrong here).

Is this a company that already exists? If so, registering it doesn't make any sense. (Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
i think you're confusing "lingua franca" with "jargon". you're using jargon now, and should translate it into lingua franca for the non-CS trained jquery users.

and that is just how it goes with the popularization with any field. the masses will have their own way of talking about concepts that differs from the educated academics. and there's a growing group of non-CS educated web developers/designers that make use of jquery in meaningful ways.
The worst of all is "persistent" as in "persistent data structure"[1]. This ignites tempers like none other.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
He has a point. I've always found the diameter:circumference ratio so much more natural for thinking about geometry that when I used to program regularly I had a macro called 'tupi' which would expand to (2 * pi) at compile time. Whatever mental blind spot I have about it was causing me to introduce a bug about a quarter of the time I needed to reference pi, probably because some part of my brain was continually asking what point there was to a constant that needed doubling in order to be useful.
Dr. InfoSec's Quotes of the Week (001)
For that matter, why aren't everybody's written by markters or at least given some UI thoughts?

People talk up good customer service all the time - sort of starts w/the error message IMO
Doesn't look like it does just yet (3GS, iOS 4 GM seed).
http://www.ehow.com/how_4696999_register-llc-based-company-d... seems fairly authoritative.
"The More Constraints One Imposes, The More One Frees Oneself Of..."
Is the site in german?
There's an Aeron-like chair from China that is more comfortable. I use one. http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/510830/Realspace-PRO-Q...
The big ones for me:

-- Logic Express: Not my job -- just a hobbyist. ardour is way too unstable and doesn't even compare to GarageBand in terms of features at this point.

-- OmniGraffle: Big part of my job. Better than Visio IMO. Dia is maybe on par with a 10 year old version of Visio at this point and I haven't seen any significant improvements in Dia in years.

-- iWork: My office needs are pretty simple so on features OpenOffice's feature set is good enough but it's always been buggy and clunky. Just stupid stuff like a dialog box drawing underneath and active window causing the program to appear to be frozen. Compatibility with MS Office formats is subpar even compared to iWork which isn't quite good enough for me not to keep MS Office installed.

-- Mail clients: I still prefer a desktop mail client and I haven't found anything I like on Linux. Evolution is clunky in the UI department. Thunderbird is clunky in the performance department. My IMAP store is kind of big (3GB-ish) so when I was using Linux I actually had to keep both Evolution and Thunderbird installed because one of the two handled big IMAP folders better than the other. (though at this point I can't remember which was which)

-- VPN clients: At this moment I have VPN profiles for Cisco IPSEC, L2TP, PPTP, and use both Cisco & Juniper SSL VPNs on a regular basis. It was too difficult to set them up. At some point Cisco offered a client that handled Cisco IPSEC but it would break every time I did a kernel update. L2TP/PPTP weren't a big problem though I had to fight to make split tunneling work properly. Juniper SSL VPN flat out did not work at the time though I've heard they released Linux support over the last 18 months or so?

There are a few other examples that would be pure personal preference. If I really had to I could use something else but basically I just don't want to. A more motivated person could probably overcome these issues.