skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Following traditional gender roles, the male's job is as a provider. When you start talking about settling down, the reduced ambiguity about future provisions seems to start looking real attractive. YMMV
> It is actually. Read the array.c and zend_hash.c code. It's only a constant time operation if you're not interested in the difference between whether a hash key actually exists, or whether it exists and its value is set to NULL.

That's weird, and does seem like a wart. But is this really a problem in practice that leads to performance difficulties in real code? (This is not a snippy rhetorical question, I'd be interested in a real world example.) It seems to me that if I'm using a PHP dictionary as an array, I'd know the length, and thus I'd be guaranteed that any access exists.

I also like that arrays being dictionaries gives me the ability to do foreach($array as $index=>$value) if I want, which is nicer than some other languages, though admittedly some dynamic languages do such things better.

> Code that I'd write in Common Lisp or Perl that takes advantage of multiple inheritance and the composition it offers is a lot uglier in PHP when I have to hack around not having multiple inheritance. It leads to bigger and monolithic classes that you can't easily compose.

This is a holy war, obviously, and you do get interfaces at least. It suffices to me to know that I do have some intelligent supporters on the side of disliking multiple inheritance and mixins very much. If you're one of the people who can be extremely productive building large programs in a Lisp style, much respect and power goes to you, and anyone has to concede that PHP will be too limiting in that case.

> This is actually a major problem with PHP. Unlike Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp etc. you can't easily run most PHP code persistently, so the execution model for most applications is to parse, compile and execute the application for each request.

Agreed, and it is a huge pain when you want to do something after a request but yet you don't want to tie up the user in the mean time.

I'm not sure I'd want PHP to be a language that makes it easy to have a persistent execution model though; that simplicity (and restriction) is one of the things that has made the language so popular and scalable. PHP's model usually works fine for the kind of web-based problems it's intended for.
Andrea Belz: Is venture capital becoming an academic pursuit?
Then every writer with a large audience is arrogant - pushing their opinions off on people without any dialog.

I think arrogant has to mean more in this context.
It must be the three boxes you're referring to - I tried to make them keyword-rich for SEO but maybe I went overboard. I'll work on it. The domain we're definitely sticking with but maybe if we change some other things - more white space, get rid of "make more money", it'll help with the spammy sense.

Thanks for the feedback.
They are probably trying to improve their search keywords
Gas explosions require quite precise conditions. A high gas concentration will also prevent an explosion by displacing oxygen. There were several cases of terrorist gas explosions a few years ago in Russia and most leaks were not discovered because they were in large apartment buildings and gas pipes were tempered with in rarely used stairwells.
This is highly overrated. Some photos were not annotated properly. Certainly not news worthy.
bump for this awesome list, especially highscalability

I don't know where OP's experience level is at, but I think there's no substitute for direct experience. Running, debugging, performance testing a remote server is an art all its own.

If you don't have much industrial experience with this, I'd suggest getting hold of the source code of some site that you know scales ( http://code.reddit.com/ ) and then going on EC2 and use some performance testing tool ( http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/ ) to check it out.
Suck it up and upgrade to Windows XP SP3 already
Last night I was just playing around with the scrolling on Safari on iPhone. In fact, I was on Hacker News. Placed my finger on an item, wiped up and down as fast as I could without lifting my finger, and after 30 seconds my finger was still pointing to the same item.

I think the touchscreen tracking has to be the one core thing that makes the iPhone/iPad experience so enjoyable. The moment you get lag in that area, everything else falls apart.
I won't say I am in the big league but I have enough to last me a couple of years if I stay comfortably. It is invested well so I am hoping that it will last longer. I also don't have any major outgoings like mortgages or rent.

> * Has your life changed in unexpected ways?

One change has been that I haven't worked for the last 2 years and don't plan to in the near future. I love programming so just spent my day working on some hobby projects and watching stocks. The risk is that as there isn't any hard deadline for delivery I end up taking things easy which is not good and probably something I should be changing.

One problem I face is that much of the money is just lying in either accounts or investments so its not really visible - no flashy cars or toys for me. And I tend to be frugal in my living so most people think I am good for nothing and feel bad for my wife. Some of her concerned friends have been asking here when I plan to start working. My wife doesn't have any problem with my lifestyle as she knows about my financial situation.

> * Has there been any change in the way you interact with strangers?

Social interaction is one thing I miss about having a job. It provides a clear structure in which you interact with other people. So my interaction is now primarily with existing friends and family.
If anything, my previously average social skill have probably become below average.

> * Has the number of things you have to endure increased or decreased?

I would say life has started appearing much simple to me. With money not a factor in my choices, I sit around doing exactly what I want to do. As of now I have nothing to show for my last 2 years (except my investments going up but thats a passive activity) but I am hoping that will change in a year or two.

> * And is "FU money" all its cracked up to be? e.g., is your life an order of magnitude more enjoyable now, or is it pretty much the same etc?

I would say that I put up with less crap but its less enjoyable. To explain the contradiction, when my wife comes home from work and talks about "management is making X mistake", "my product was not highlighted in our newsletter" etc, the usual office activities. I understand that but its been a long time (2 years to be precise) since I experienced these things. These basic experiences (good or bad) did keep me occupied and made life interesting. Now with all that gone, its HN, hobby projects, stocks and after that I am pretty much on my own do something that would make me feel worthwhile.

Overall I would say that I am much more comfortable and happier than I was but my social interactions have become pretty minimal which I don't think is good.
Linux supercomputer, worth £2m, sought by University of Warwick
That's the thing. My rational self says this is a nice design. But the first impression is "domain parking page".

It might just be too high pressure, buy now, etc. Might also be the numbers in the name. And then there's the "Breaking news" bar. Reminds me of the shopping channel :)

But it is still a nicely made page, and it is clear that quite a lot of work went into it.
I'm moving to SF in 10 days and I'd like to know the best way to go about securing an apartment. I've been trolling Craigslist for a couple weeks but have not received one response despite in-depth emails. Should I just have my credit report, a couple grand and the ability to drop everything and go look at a place? My friend (who, unfortunately for me, is moving from the Mission to Berkeley) suggested that a lot of people just leave things 'til the last minute. Any insight would be appreciated.
Paper or Plastic? Enviromentalism as Public Religion
Sorting algorithm visualisation (nice)
Unobfuscating and Attack - a look into an evil PHP script
Eventually, it didn't change me much, but I do spend a bit more on cheap frivolous stuff (like http://store.xkcd.com/xkcd/#Sudo). But then I have been through the cycle twice.

Initially I was broke.
When I got my first real job (after undergrad in India), I felt like I had all the money in the world. In the first few months, I bought myself a nice camera, motorbike, smartphone, gifts for family and my girlfriend, started eating at nice restaurants etc. But then I figured I already had whatever I needed and things I enjoyed most didn't really require any money (except the camera and motorbike, I guess).

Then I quit my job and went to grad school for which I had to pay for (Masters, not a PhD) and went into debt (US schools are sooo expensive), and drastically cut down my expenses (ate cheap Thai food almost every day).
After that I got a well-paying job again, paid off all my loans, and am now back to my earlier lifestyle i.e. I spend on things I enjoy, give a modest amount of money in charity regularly, enjoy the occasional expensive dinner, buy nice gifts for my family and close friends, but I still save a good amount.

I am definitely happier than I would be without any money, but I don't think I would be any happier if I suddenly started earning 2x.
You need to consider the amount of fuel used to produce the calories you consume cycling, which may be more or less than UPS, depending on how much additional driving UPS has to do to deliver (it may be fairly small e.g., if they're already in your neighborhood for another delivery).

[Of course, cycling has health benefits too, but if we're just considering fuel...]
Not that this isn't a cool analysis, but seems as if there's selection bias to these data. Lots of psychographic segments will never start a search with "how can I...".
There seems to be a consensus around that. It's now one of my main priorities, thanks for the feedback.
Rising correlation and computer-driven trading
There are a couple of excellent mailing list posts discussing the relative speed of JGit and Git, which are excellent reading:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/1180...

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/1180...

That said, there are probably very few applications that have been this heavily hand-optimised, and probably equally few where you actually need it. Where C really stomps Java is around very low level memory management, I think. With modern processors, code can benefit greatly from colocation of related data that can be very difficult to achieve in an idiomatic way with Java.

Edit: link layout
Probably meaning 'how can I better search in Google'. Can the users be trained into making better, more specific queries? At school, maybe?
Really futuristic would be if the Washington Post would let my iPad show the photo gallery.
http://cruztablet.com/specs2.php

Looks pretty nice. I might have bought it, except I already decided I needed a good portable and bought a netbook.

It's everything the Cruz is and more. I can even easily hold it in one hand. And it cost about the same as the 'tablet' model.
Do you know about a good Host in the region then.

There are quite a few reasons why hosting in Chine would make sense, the number one being latency.
I think the problem is that Google does great when it comes to behind the scene filtering.

For instance their spam filter in gmail is almost flawless at least from my experience.

Anything that's about algorithms being part of the design they are great.

But they fail completely when it comes to allowing people to interact with each other. They simply don't have the design principles for that. It's not part of their DNA.
I'm going to think about answering this because it's going to take more than a short comment, those are 4 really complicated questions.

The short answers are yes, yes, decreased, no and different.

The longer ones will take me a bit of time to put together.
It could make for an excellent live interface prototyping tool as well.
Java leads the programmer into using bloated libraries, which absolutely litter the Java landscape. Its very hard to measure or even predict what effect a Java interface will have on your solution.

I agree with the author, the language has no intrinsic slowness, its the tendency to use a triply-nested abstraction for every trivial purpose (a hash table of objects containing references to a database API...) instead of Hey! a pointer, that lead the app programmer down the primrose path.
But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments.

I wrote a piece of OSS A/B testing software, which is rather similar to funnel analysis in application, what type of businesses it appeals to, and who will likely be implementing it. My software is used in some small places and some big places. It has not been my experience that big places tend to take up more of my time than small places.

Integration is hard. Educating users is hard. ("You seem to be under the impression that A/B testing software includes genetic algorithms to write copy for you. This is not in scope for this project, but you're welcome to patch it in...") These don't get less hard just because you're firing the API less than Employee #4602 at BigCorp. (If the user can do 100 API accesses without incident they can probably do a hundred million. Scaling is just a matter of getting the architecture right, and you don't have to redo that on a per-user basis.) Also, BigCorp has internal engineering resources that they will likely fall back on prior to emailing you, where one-man shops might be more inclined to mail you first.
I have heard another option for the origin of consciousness. True or false, the theory goes that every neuron has a micro-consciousness when it is not busy and the more neurons a thing has that are not busy with things like heartbeat and breathing the more conscious that thing is.
Yea, I get that and this was a call I had to make. The service allows you to uploads files, share links, etc. so I wanted to have some accountability for that. You can however check out the public scribbles in the Scribbles section at the top; maybe I should make that more clear? Maybe I should add a tour/features/walkthrough page to highlight what it does?

There are certain things I definitely want accountability for but I could add the ability to do some things anonymously (comment maybe?). I should mention that you can invite people to participate in your scribbles which will alleviate their need to validate the e-mail address since the invite has to go to a valid e-mail.

I like the simplification of "a way to create tiny discussions"; I may use that in the future if that's okay with you :)
I think I mentioned this in the bullet points.
BizSpark: SubPrime of the Software Industry
The majority of the questions on that first page of proposals have nothing to do with Quantitative finance. Moderating such a forum would be a nightmare.

Perhaps this indicates a market for a separate "Hokey-pokey finance" StackExchange ...
Nice utility. Few things that I think can improve user experience :
1. User gets no clue about what it is, what to do, how to do until and unless he creates an account. (there should be some kind of demo/trial stuff before logging in).
2. Even after logging in the documentation is very limited.

The thing is that User should know what to do. I understand it's a weekend project but i guess u can use HNers comments to improve it .
"With this arguing, isn't it reasonable to assume that a project Foo written in C or C++ is faster than an equivalent written in Java simply because the author writing project Foo in C/C++ likely understands performance by choosing C/C++ in the first place?"

No, not at all. First of all, don't assume that someone knows what they're doing just by choosing C or C++ over Java. There are plenty of dumb C/C++ programmers out there, and a well-written Java program is always going to outperform a poorly written C/C++ one.

Secondly, remember that Java programs may actually be faster than C/C++ programs. Programs written in C/C++ require more time and knowledge to performance tune. Writing something in Java (or other high-level language) allows the author to spend more time focusing on the big picture issues rather than having to deal with a lot of lower-level issues.
Free Premium Blogger Template of The week: iTech
How estate, income, and employment taxes will go up starting next year
Haha, that made me laugh out loud. I'm sort of in the same situation, but when things get hard in my startup I sometimes begin to panic.
I'm not sure why someone would downvote you. Having a journey _is_ key, and this is why "FU money" would be useful. Given a lucky $5,000,000 lottery win, many people on HN would probably have a chance to leave the day job and finally take a shot at accomplishing their dream (perhaps building the next amazing geo-tagging-social-network, or opening a store, or whatever it might be.) Without a dream, people will just spend money on toys that seem far too obvious, such as fancy cars.

Simple money management skills help as well.
Moving a small-scale startup to Bay Area
Hello All,

We are a small 2-person startup based in Eastern Europe. For many reason we'd like to move the startup to Bay Area - almost all of our clients are based there, living is better, the atmosphere, etc.

We have started 1 year ago and are currently on target to make approx $100K for the year, and our revenue is rising relatively fast at 10% per month. We operate in the "developer tools" market, selling building blocks for development shops (and corporations) in the ASP.NET Webforms, PHP, ASP.NET MVC areas. We also have plans for Java/GWT version and a new idea for a SaaS service.

How do we proceed? Do we need Y Combinator money (or any other venture/investor there). I'm not sure we need that much money anymore, just the logistics and legal issues related to that.

Any advice is welcome.

Cheers,
Rumen
Was the term "FU money" coined by Neal Stephenson, or was it in use before he wrote Cryptonomicon?
There are at least three ways of handling errors - return codes, trigger_error(), and exceptions, all of which are handled differently and used inconsistently by functions and libraries, and require messing with various combinations of global settings to cause errors display or not display to the user. There are furthermore no agreed-upon conventions for handling errors, so libraries freely mix all of these methods along with directly printing errors to the output which is impossible to trap.

For me this was a show stopper for using PHP for anything other than maintaining existing stuff that we inherit (and only for clients we really like).

error handling is at its core a foundation to quality, without proper error handling you have to put in significant effort to build a quality product because the structure has to be reinforced at every level. Having multiple ways to handle errors is almost worse than having none at all. This is one area that really needs to be standardized and have "the one way" to do it. Good or bad, it allows everyone to know what to expect.

It is just my opinion but, this one flaw makes PHP one of the worst languages I have ever use, which is sad because Wordpress and Drupal are great products but I can't stand to have to work in PHP, if I have a project that I know will not require custom development, I use Wordpress or Drupal I really wish they supported alternative languages for writing custom modules,It would be nice to be able to write them in Python or hell even JavaScript has proper error handling.
Two kinds of schooling
Sounds like they are already. Were going to use the money to hire a new guy, right? Instead, putting up a couple more servers. Or is that just the start?
Have you considered taking you hobby projects further? Hiring a team, renting an office and putting a product out there? I am not suggesting you do, I am just curious.
You shouldn't have to pay to talk to your own customers
What teenage people want.
I lived in SF for a few years and I'm about to go back after dealing with some family nonsense, so I've given this some thought.

There is huge variability in the SF housing market and great deals tend to go quick. I'd put my stuff in storage and stay at a long term hotel for a few weeks and be really careful about this, after all you're talking about spending 12-20K a year.

You can get a decent hotel around the airport for like $60 on hotwire, which is really pretty cheap for SF.

http://www.housingmaps.com/
This is useful.

>despite in-depth emails
Too long and you'll get no response just like any other CL ad?

One random note : some places require a social security card.
I love the idea and with wordpress integration and less work for user, that is great. I'm not a fan of those links though whenever I'm browsing the internet, but they work.

As said before, the domain name is not the greatest. Find something catchy, more unique, that makes sense and people will automatically associate to this type of linking and ads. The front page is really confusing and took me a long time to figure out what you were doing. Everything below the navigation bar is all cluttered. There should definitely be controls for your slideshow presentation.
Q. Did You Ever Smoke Pot? A. It’s Complicated.
> I'm not clear on why this layer has to be repetitive and full of duplication.

Let's say you have a database with 100 tables in it. How many insert statements might there be, just a rough estimate, in your layer of functions? My ORM has 1. At the most basic level, a simple ActiveRecord ORM has 1 insert, 1 update, 1 detele, and 1 select statement. How many are in your typical app? If it's more than 1 of each, then it's duplication.

I haven't written an insert/update/delete statement in years because I don't need to. When I need a fancy select that's an aggregate of several tables, I write a view and then map it into a list of objects with the ORM. This is virtually no work, I spend all of my time working on the actual problem at hand and virtually none marshaling data in or out of the database.
"who will ever go to Facebook to search how to buy some power tool?"

Well, considering many people already have Facebook open pretty much all day... if Facebook decided to add a non-sucky form of search, somewhere in a sidebar of wherever, then nobody would have to "go" to Facebook... the ability to search would be already there. (Traces of that are already showing. Doing a search for X in Facebook shows people and pages as usual, but also a few web results. Nowhere near a threat for "real" search... yet.)

Maybe in a few years people will say, "Why did we ever go to Google to search, when we can do it right here on Facebook?" <0.1 wink>

(Of course, things may be different in work environments... If I worked at an office and had to look something up at Google, that should be OK; having Facebook open all the time, on the other hand, well...)
LaughingStockExchange?
Yes I completely misunderstood! Thanks both for setting me straight.
completely agree, if you have a family mountain view might be great but paying a premium to live there with the like 10 shops on castro, mmmmeeeehhh
Absolutely, thanks for the feedback. Maybe this was a mistake on my part, but I wanted to use HN as a sounding board for improvements since it was built for me and it therefore obvious to me what it's job is. I figured it could be more useful, but needed some direction after living in my own little bubble this weekend.

Thanks again for the feedback! I'll put together a walkthrough and some help info and maybe some guiding information messages after you've signed up.