skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Without a doubt, one way to mimic the successes of these people is to do what they do.

Careful with that thought. If someone creates their own path, following in their footsteps after the fact will be an entirely different journey than the one they took.

That said, I'm curious as well. With the crowd that HN attracts, personal anecdotes can get pretty interesting.
This is also why all cheese in the US tastes to Europeans like plastic. It's extremely surprising that people actually buy cheese in the US, and they seem to have it with everything as well :/

To anyone who has tasted real cheese, it's just bizarre.

The other oddity is chocolate. In the US it seems to come universally without any milk or sugar added. Hersheys is bitter. Even the "Cadburys" (made under license) is quite hard to eat, and not anything like real chocolate.

And agreed. HFCS tastes pretty gross compared to the same drink with real sugar.
That's not a particularly strong argument. It's just a call to authority argument without actually adding any real information one way or the other.
Coke has a horrible aftertaste IMHO. I can't drink much of it at all. Pepsi is far sweeter. Pepsi Max is the best though.
>They might also see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.

I get an effect similar to this after playing airsoft, except it looks like BBs flying towards me.

What I find interesting is that it's not all-that common while playing to see BBs flying towards me. It happens several times a game, but only for seconds at a time. So if this is the same effect (not just a different one with similar symptoms), it's not caused simply by an overload or repetition of a particular stimulus.

(It's not just me: my friend said he gets the same effect. But I haven't asked around, so I couldn't say if it's widespread.)
>> "Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill."

I can't see why Reddit should be a particularly high CPU usage website. So perhaps time to optimize and swap out some things...
This happens with me for maths. I even sleep talk about solving maths problem. They say I sound like a professor when I'm solving problems in my sleep.
Are there any reason to use Silverlight front-ends over HTML/JS web apps?
I'm working at a company, where upper management is leaning towards using Silverlight instead of my recommendations to stick to native web applications.It may end up not being up to me, but I have staked my career and learning path on Web Applications being the way to go so it surprises me.

Has anyone had any success in building Silverlight apps?

It is for our products front-end. It will be tool for building websites, newsletters so I figure it will be even more awkward to use as we'll need to be laying out HTML with in the Silverlight environment which from what I can tell is going to be grossly inelegant. That's just one of the immediate/obvious issues I can see.<p>How is the OS X version? Does it lag behind in versions? Is it buggy?
The community, and their comments, has gone downhill, that's his point.
I was given this book for my 15th birthday - it rescued me from Sinclair Basic! It may be old but it's a very readable C tutorial and won't lead people far astray.
Writing a Redis client library for Node.js
Turning adblock off doesn't necessarily mean anything. The fact you install adblock at all, means you're not a good demographic in terms of advertising - even if you turn adblock off.
6:00 am: Rise from bed.
6:15 - 6:30: Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling.
7:15 - 8:15: Study electricity, etc.
8:30 - 4:30: Work.
4:30 - 5:00: Baseball and sports.
5:00 - 6:00: Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.
7:00 - 9:00: Study needed inventions.
Actually Jean-Francois Revel did not have a PhD (he explains why in his autobiography "Le voleur dans la maison vide").
Sure but that is dependent on how low-level your definition of "mimic" is. I did not mean that I would do the very same thing. This might not be the most instructive example, but for example if someone said "I work hard all day long", you can certainly get successful as well by doing that. I guess I should have said "get inspiration" instead of "mimic".
I'm creating RestBackup.com right now and my next project will probably be RestArchive.com. I'm interested in the problem of data archival for regular people. I've been thinking about the problem of business continuity. One possible solution to the problem is to endow a trust to maintain the archive in the event that the business fails. I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks about this.
How to learn to be a big company manager?
If money is not a problem, then I think you should not try to hit the perfect solution the first time. Trying to do that will make it harder to get started. I had to build a linear motion platform last spring. Since I had never done anything like that before I decided to just start buying stuff and testing it. I started with some small servos and brackets from Trossen Robotics - http://www.trossenrobotics.com/c/hobby-servos-for-robotics.a... and some Phidgets USB controllers from http://www.phidgets.com/

I started with the servos because it seemed cheaper and I could start without having to build a lot of stuff.

Then once I was happy with being able to control a two-axis setup with a little webcam on it using Python on a Linux box, I moved up to some 185oz-in steppers from Keling and some more Phidget stepper controllers. One of the big motors with a toothed belt can lift a full can of paint and hold it indefinitely.

I chose the Phidgets over Arduino because I didn't want to have to simultaneously learn a new toolchain while I was concentrating on the mechanical stuff. I figure I can always go to an Arduino or other controller if I need to shrink things down.

Having now worked with the steppers, I would second the idea of using DC motors with some kind of external feedback, maybe optical shaft encoders or something. Even with steppers, where you can count the number of steps and know where you are, you still really need to be able to run it into a limit switch in order to find some kind of a zero point.
More Fun With HP Printers- Rss feeds
(a) is quite the tough one. Large part of the problem is taste. You need it, as does the author of any guidelines, and you and the author need to be in sync.

Worth looking into are grid layouts, and CSS frameworks that making working with grids easier. I'm a fan of 960gs, but there are a few good ones.

http://www.thegridsystem.org/

http://delicious.com/jamesbritt/Grid
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I'd certainly love to try the oldest version of the formula that doesn't use 'spent' coca leaves.
> (out of about 750 pages)

Come on, it's 777 pages for a reason! :)

When I realized the page count (purposefully) included the index I was quite tickled. So many gems, little and large...
I was having this discussion with a my partner not too long ago. Basically, we launched an MVP (a downloadable ebook about a niche topic) about 5 months ago. It has done pretty well considering we have spent almost no time on it since then (we've been busy with jobs and such).

We are planning to start working on really improving the ebook, the site, and adding other features that we think people who buy the ebook would be interested in. We have three ideas that we want to try out, and my partner is in favor of the Dry Test Method for each of these three, while I am leaning towards trying to build an MVP of one or two of these features/products and seeing which gain the most traction.

Anyone have any thoughts on what they think is the best approach? Note: Our audience is mainly international university students and young professionals.
Emerging Internet Giants
Here's an interesting tidbit of canadian culture.

As mentioned above in Quebec Pepsi outsells Coke by quite a bit. This is how the "peppers" nickname for Quebecers came to be. Or at least that how the legend goes.
I think the HFCS is a big factor.

Mountain Dew recently ran a limited-time version of their drink made with normal sugar instead of HFCS. It was, at least to my taste buds, much better than the normal HFCS version. I hate the normal version of Mountain Dew, but that "real sugar" version was amazing.
This rings true: no girl I've dated would have given my profile on a dating site a second look. You can't communicate over a profile what you can collaborating on a project, tutoring someone, or even playing WoW. Conversely, I don't like girls for what they would put in an online profile, but for the way the act in person.

So the elephant in the room, I think, is that dating isn't really a problem that needs solving via a web app. You can meet significant others in bars, art and yoga classes, the gym, book clubs or Bible groups, summer or weekend classes at a local college, study groups or tutoring, AA seminars, group therapy or AA seminars, in galleries, concerts, parks, parades, political action groups, conferences about hypnosis, or video games, or comics, or programming languages, or role playing, and on, and on, and on. Dating your coworkers might be risqué (although it hardly stops people), but dating your coworker's friends is quite all right. And guess what: your coworker's friends have friends, too. As long as you do things which involve meeting new people, you'll probably run into people you like enough to date.

Hell, I know a lot more couples who met playing WoW than I do who met using dating websites. What's the point of isolating and controlling the meeting of mates, when it's such a natural byproduct of being social? Yes, for most people, I think WoW counts as being a social activity.
There is some seriously fallacious thinking going on here:

"It is estimated that tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is involved in more than 50 percent of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. In light of these statistics, the authors of this study question why alcohol and tobacco are legal to use within current drug policies for Britain and the United States, while less harmful drugs like ecstasy and LSD are deemed illegal to use."

Ok, so if you start with a statistic representing the frequency of an event in the general population caused by a drug that is legal and in widespread use, you cannot simply compare that directly to a lack of the same event attributed to another drug whose usage population is far lower. Far fewer people use ecstasy (just an example) than use alcohol or tobacco. That, in itself, doesn't make it less dangerous. You'd have to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the population that uses the drug, then apply a per capita calculation.

I'm not necessarily arguing that any of the drugs on the list shouldn't be there, but as soon as I saw bullet #3 (The drug's overall impact on society) I knew things were going to get fuzzy.
This is a problem of perspective. Printing presses are better and faster than a pen, but they are not cheaper in any way that isn't essentially a rephrasing of the other two qualities. It just so happens that they are sufficiently good and fast that it makes up for their relative costliness.

Also, this is really referring to the behavior of a project, not a product. A project might be able to create something that is indeed better, faster and cheaper than the competition — but it will not be able to do so faster and more cheaply than it could have made a product without all those qualities.
has anyone had this experience with math

Yes, and also computing. Among other things, I've had a dream where I was trying to open files and had to win a race against someone who was replacing them with evil symlinks; several dreams about copy-on-write B+Trees; and a dream where I was a mutex and was trying to keep threads straight except that I got confused when I was locked recursively.
This conversation is a bit like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Looking forward to some good competition! We just launched as well (but before you guys) - we're also free - wwww.people2remember.com Amazing similarities between your product and ours - though I must admit your UI is very clean and concise. Nicely done!
I'm on it now. Love it.
Is open data is the future of web discovery?
>What? /r/iama is one of the best things that happened to reddit. Sure, most of the submissions are shit, but some are golden.

Well, and there's the problem. The SNR on most of the larger subreddits has gotten absolutely terrible lately. I went through a couple of weeks ago and unsubbed from most of the larger reddits and nearly all the self-post only reddits because I simply don't have the time or inclination to dig through 100 garbage headlines for the one golden post.

>The community. Most of the value is in the comments.

The "community" on reddit is incredibly forced in nature. It's almost entirely based around memes that have been coopted from elsewhere and feel-good circle jerking.

Oh, and let's not forget when the community decides to rage about something, jumps to conclusions, and often as not ends up being completely wrong about it, but only after a significant portion of the users have taken to harassing or otherwise disrupting some innocent person's life.

There's still value to be had on reddit, I just increasingly feel like it's being pushed out more and more to the smaller subreddits.
Totally agree. Just figured I'd put that out there since some people waste too much effort trying to take on the superficial mannerisms and habits of successful people as a distraction from the more difficult task of actually getting things done.
I'd be interested to know whether this guy gets the Tetris effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo According to the video description, he's the best Tetris player in the world, and I can believe it: the end of the video is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
I bought GEB when I was 13, mostly because I liked the Escher paintings. I was hooked after reading the first Achilles/Turtle episode, though, and even though many concepts went over my head at the time. I still haven't read it cover to cover, though, but I still have a hard time not agreeing with this particular recommendation.
Pretty fascinating stuff. I like to create rituals for the same purpose (i'm sure the OCD crowd is familiar with the idea). For instance if I'm about to embark into a particularly challenging or critical piece of coding I'll meticulously clean my desk before I start. If I'm about to write music in my studio / home office there's a whole bunch of things I have to do first.
The only similar effect that I've ever experienced was that after few hours of continuous playing of Frozen Bubble, I saw everything insanely blocky. Even quite round shapes were looking like blocks. But that was over within few minutes.

I play tetris a lot, but when doing so, I don't think about it. Tetris is a game that you can play without actually thinking about it. I play ltris, and if I play another variant that has different colors for different shapes, or some other minor difference, I'm completely screwed. In fact, I play tetris in order to be able to think about something else, it employs my hands and I can clearly think about something I want. The game itself is just a complete routine.

(And by the way, I can play tetris completely in my head, without a computer. Just close eyes and imagine playing it. And it actually feels like playing tetris. Shapes randomly appearing at the top, that I try to place as I would in the real game, then they make rows, disappear, and after some time, it gets so fast that it overwhelms me and I lose :-))
Currently, yes. But I think that as time goes on you get N+1/N. Where the illegal immigrants are replaced by H1/L1 visa holders. As one of the recently fired employees said, she, a Mexican, was replaced by a Mexican with a nonimmigrant visa. The longterm solution would be to go back to her country and apply. In the meantime, she'll probably go to another employer. But I think many are hoping and waiting for asylum to be part of the immigration overhaul and so far that doesn't look likely.
oh god. i guess there's a bejeweled effect too and another for brain age two's game
I've never noticed any particular aftertaste from Coke or Pepsi, but I have noticed that with Pepsi I get that 'sickly-sweet' taste after about half a can, which I don't get with Coke.
Of course, once you invent a word... it's a word. In this, words are unlike Ms. Mountweazel, who does not spring into existence in the timestream just because an article is published about her.

Or... does she?

This calls for an obligatory Jorge Luis Borges reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius

Though I can never cite that story without confessing that I prefer the four-paragraph condensed version by John M. Ford [warning: literary prerequisites suggested; tolerance for awful puns absolutely required]:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004636.html
If money isn't an issue, just buy one and if it doesn't work, find another one and buy it, etc.
A Review of DarkJumper v5.7
Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials Suggest
Making SSL Fast, Overclocking mod_ssl
I took a course in philosophy during my Cognitive Science studies, and our course book (http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Anthology-John-Heil/dp...) was really useful, since they had an original text and a couple of criticisms of that text, sometimes followed by a retort on that criticism. That was really good to get a grasp of the subject, even though I agree with others here that having an excellent teacher did a lot more to get the subject than any book would have.
Pumas on Hoverbikes
George Carlin ~ The American Dream
My advice: Get really good at C in linux. Focus on learning about cool algorithms and datastructures (hash tables, rb-trees, alpha-beta search, shift-reduce, ...) rather than the particulars of any language. If you get great at C programming in linux, and have a solid algorithmic foundation, then you'll be able to pick up the language-du-jour in a matter of days (if not hours).
Similar discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634986. My schedule is still similar, but I would be less social if I was trying to bootstrap. ;)

6:30AM Wake up, shower, eat breakfast, make coffee

7:30AM Catch the bus to work

5:00PM Finish work

5:07PM Catch bus home

6:00PM Get home, make more coffee, change clothes, eat dinner

6:15PM-10:00 Program or socialize. So far this has been a 50/50 split.

10:30PM Sleep

On weeekends I try to get up early and hit a coffee shop from 9:00-3:00. I get somewhere between 15-20 hours of programming in per week (outside of my job).
When this happens on a map, it's called a "trap street" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
What they did was enter an existing market with a lot of competition and do something that the competition was absolutely incapable of matching without going back to the drawing board (there are a few other companies who do this too, the list is left as an exercise for the reader).

But that's teasing! Your observation is a shrewd one and now I want to know who you think the others are.
It depends on how lowly. For example, I would never think it would be worth it to be a secretary at Google over a programmer somewhere else. However, coming in as a regular developer when you've normally had senior or lead roles is fine. People do it and if asked about it later they will understand why you took that step, in order to get experience within that company.

Most of all, talk to the people giving you the offer. Make it clear that in a career sense this is a step down but you are considering it because that's how much you want to work for the company. Ask specifically what the growth path is or growth opportunities are for you there. I wouldn't expect them to make any guarantees but you can phrase it as: if I were to perform exceptional, then... You just want to make sure they know they aren't hiring a low level code monkey who will be happy doing the same thing 5 years later.
It goes all over the place, but here's what my best days are like:

8:30~9:00 wake up, stumble into shower

9:15 turn on computer, check email, do non-work

10:00 work begins

13:00 lunchtime!

15:30 shouldn't have brought a book! work resumes

17:30 ~ 18:30 creative impulse dies, work ceases for day

+ 1 hour go to gym

+ 2 hours eat dinner

+ 2.5 hours evening plans

22:00 ~ 2:00 AM read/game/movie/etc, check email, maybe write some goals down for later, go to sleep
Its the same, but C99 adds a couple of neat features like boolean types, variable length arrays, variadic macros, inline functions and a lot more.
Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366479
Open up self-serve ads for the rest of the world? I wanted to buy ads but I couldn't because reddit is not processing non-US credit cards.
What's the Fastest Way to Code a Loop in Javascript?
Even with a centripetal force of 137N (2g, 70kg), you'd think passengers would notice earth's gravitational pull circling them.
This is ridiculously awesome.

I had a laptop die on me while traveling in South America this winter, and spent a month developing through Remote Desktop from internet cafes to one of our servers back in the US. It involved configuring a VPN on a sketchy box to pull off, but at least it got me running the IDE.

If I'd had this set up, it would have cut out pretty much all the pain from that scenario. In fact, it would make a good case for simply leaving the laptop sitting in the cage at the datacenter, so as to have it available to work on, but unavailable for nightbus thieves.
Here is the direct link to the PDF version of the second edition published in 1994 (third one published in 2006 is in print though):

http://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/gfology2.pdf
I suggest you read the non-designers design book. A lot of it is pure math - colors, alignment, contrast, repetition, and proximity. Even if you won't learn how to design you will learn to tell good design from bad, and what makes it so.

Stay away from Kindle version though - in a twist of irony the book's layout has been severely corrupted, serving more as an anti-example to its own content.
Most American cheese is pretty nasty. Wisconsin has some good stuff, though you've gotta try a handful of bad ones to find them :) I've worked with a few travelers / Europeans, and while WI may not have a taste for the softer, riper cheeses, what's there is apparently pretty competitive.

My sister moved to Illinois, and has been (extremely successfully) converting her neighbors away from whatever those orange blocks are they sell there. She brings back 20+ lbs of cheese whenever she visits. She's also managed to educate a couple in cheese curds: squeaky, not fried.
My typical day:

9:30: wake up

10:30: get to work (now my home office), check email

10:30-noon: procrastinate

noon-1:15: lunch then 45 minute walk

1:15-5:00: procrastinate

5-7pm: 2 hours of amazing productivity

7-8:30: Cook & eat dinner

8:30-midnight: Take rest of night off or perhaps have another couple hours of productivity.

It's not as bad as it sounds cause usually the "procrastination" is me experimenting with new code or programming languages (or reading HN), just not what I'm "supposed" to be doing.
After a Mass Effect marathon, I started instinctively reaching for "quicksave" before making decisions or initiating dialogue. If only...