skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, soda, cheese, chocolate... I noticed all these things too, but I figured it was just "different" around here, just a matter of taste. I have the same problems with some other foods and drinks as well... what they call "chocolate milk" here (in the US) is a joke, same for mayonnaise and even coffee. (I realize that neither the US nor European countries are native producers of coffee, but somehow something seems to go wrong during the importing and processing.)
What does he? Ask users to pay for seeing daringfireball without ads?
Not only light beer, but icy cold beer! Some bars here even take it as a point of pride that their brew is chilled down into the low 30's Fahrenheit range and furthermore served in a mug that's been kept in a freezer! You can't even taste a beverage under those conditions. Many claim that beer tastes better that way. The truth is that many cheap American brews start to get skunky once they warm up enough. Yet lots of my fellow countrymen want it that way and disdain anything different.
When I was a kid I would lay half awake in bed, looking at my alarm clock, interpreting the time as an algebraic expression (mentally filling in the variables) and factoring it. This is when I was in a crazy Japanese math program where I had to factor algebraic expressions every day. Seriously, to this day I can beat physics grad students at factoring. (It was a long time before I learned that factoring was not as useful a skill as I assumed.)
The F-86 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRt6UnNzR6I
Review BlueMD product &ndash; BlueMD Acne Blue Light Therapy Treatment
just because it's a headline doesn't make it a controversy.

I have seen what my government (not UK) needs in terms of IT infrastructure and there isn't anything microsoft specific that is being exploited to any degree. Most IT related jobs are outsourced to contract workers and the big money play would actually come from migration costs.

also, some government branches might be running custom software, which would either need to re-written or, quite frankly, trashed -_-.
I think this is fantastic, and I might have to have a minimized version running for the next month.
Ask HN: Has Andy Grove (Founder of Intel) lost it?
In his recent article in Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html

He talks about a trade war with China!
I mean how can we take him seriously, he knows that they/Indians have nukes right?

Here how it goes post a trade war (which he says US must fight to win):

US starts a trade war China / India

Huge inflation in USA

Huge inflation / un employment in rest of the world

Extreme inflation due to increase in Oil cost

US/India/China/Europe start securing whatever oil they can find.

And as last brink we have a hot world closer to a world war with nuclear weapons!

These are following points which he misses due to Patriotism:
1. Indian + China have 3-4 times population of USA

2. India + China have huge smart population with high IQ: deduced from earlier point

3. USA's Tech advantage isn't as significant as it was in Cold War,
Indians and Chinese can write code, make computer chips, Produce drugs (read about Indian Pharmaceutical companies producing cheaper drugs) , have decent war and space tech (exploding nuclear weapons and sending objects to moon). This isn't 1970's anymore.

4. Breaking the globalization would lead to nightmarish Inflation
with loss of trust in $, so you have everyone getting a higher wage but it actually gets you lower amount of Goods.

5. A Trade war is nothing but a recipe for disaster!

I cant take this guy seriously anymore
He sounds a complete xenophobe
> I say that a lot ("Good to know it's not just me."). I'll have to think a little bit more about why.

I say it a lot too, especially when talking about interfacing with external resources, and I don't think it's anything to do with enjoying others' misery. It's simply being happy to have it confirmed that the problem you're observing is (probably) someone else's fault, not your own; this carries the bad news that you (probably) can't fix it yourself, but the good news that you don't have to fix it yourself.
Using emacs :-)
Maxon motors are about as quiet a motor as I've ever used. But be prepared to open that wallet wide :-)

[edit]
OK, from reading your responses below I think I misunderstood what you meant. I'm not talking about the typical cheap R/C servos. Maxon makes precision balanced motors with just about every parameter you need to know specified. And then you can just put an encoder on the endcap to close the loop.

But the first point still holds: we're talking at least an order of magnitude cost-wise, from R/C servo motors.
I've had this happen to me with Tetris and not batted an eye. When it happened with Nethack, though... I freaked out and didn't play again for a year. That shit was scary.
Coffee. You're not supposed to use roast that's more than 2 weeks old. The beans in the bags on the grocery store shelves is way older than that. And ground coffee? You're not supposed to let ground coffee sit around for more than an hour. No wonder office coffee in the US all tastes bitter, sour, and stale. The grounds in those little foil packets have usually been sitting around for several months!

The entire time I've spent in Italy -- not one espresso with any trace of bitterness. Every cup of coffee was excellent to my taste.
An Entrepreneur Who Took a Chance on Herself
Paul, I wrote that answer to be concise. I am not trying to write another book on Google. When you build a Google, you can tell me I am wrong.

Everyone I have spoken to that has built a successful company has told me that their ability to manage the long term interests of their company was impaired by losing control of their board of directors.

If Mark Zuckerberg did not have control of his board, the company would have been sold to Yahoo for just under a billion dollars, where Facebook would have died. The Yahoo executives wanted to "Nascar up the site". It would not be a 30 billion dollar dollar company today if the board had been investor controlled.

The reason Friedster failed was that the company was managed from the board of directors by investors which did not use their product. The founders of Friendster were screaming at the board of directors that the website took 40 seconds to load, but the board was more concerned with expanding into new markets and adding features, rather than solving the scalability issues the company was facing. Myspace copied Friendster, solved the scalability issues and dominated until Facebook introduced the feed and notification mechanism and took the college demographic.

If you want to build a long term success like Google, you have to be in a position to ignore your investor's short term desire to improve the company's financials by sacrificing long term growth. The quickest way to increase your margins is to reduce investment in the future.

Most of Google's costs were from their consuming facing search product. Almost all of Google's revenues were from enterprise search. Dropping consumer facing search would have improved Google's financials for sale or IPO. Everyone at the time believed that search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the management team did not have board control, the decisions that would have been forced on the company would had led Google to a different, much grimmer corporate destiny.

The management team at Google believed strongly in the future of internet search and the growth of online advertising. They saw the potential of using search queries to target advertisements and that search engines were uniquely positioned to monetize lead generation; at a time when search engines were loss leaders for portal sites. If the company had cut its loss centers and focused on its profit centers, the company would not have been as successful as it is today. The operating autonomy of Google's management team was critical to Google's long term success.

I do not care what Paul Buchheit says. Eric Schmidt has on several occasions discussed the advantages of Google's ownership structure and how it enabled Google to ignore outside influences and focus on the long term success of the company. If Paul Buchheit disagrees with the CEO of Google about the importance of Google's ownership structure and the operational autonomy of the management team, then its unfortunate.
Not for the last, gosh, probably 15 years. Editors are just too good these days. Listings would show me less than Visual Studio, Emacs, whatever. Colorization, collapse/expand, dead-simple search for "i don't care if it is before or after where i am in the source file, find me function flap, like now".

And I think stuff printed out would look kind of funny, no?
I would rather pay $10 a month than have to shuffle through corporate-generated content.
Anyone use ssl acceleration cards these days?
The Willpower Paradox
Oh, he's right. More often than not, it's uncommon just because we're doing it wrong.

I spent a good couple of years thinking up layout optimizations like the one in Figure 6. I think that's fairly common design style, when people choose to think about this stuff. The challenge is coming up with consistently better layouts for a specific application. One benefit of java, for example, is that you can move things around without worrying about pointer arithmetic like in C.

And his rant about Figure 7 resonates. Again, it's brain-dead obvious that you should take the memory hierarchy of your system into account because you waste millions of cycles waiting on a disk read, but it's really hard to do. Our education system doesn't help, and neither do mainstream tools.

I think of it as concentric revolutions. The pentium's algorithm for processing instructions out-of-order first showed up in a mainframe 30 years before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasulo_algorithm). The internet gradually rediscovers what desktop devs gradually rediscovered what the minicomputer devs originally dreamt up. Most of the time it's not common yet simply because people haven't gotten around to it.

It's basically YAGNI on the scale of industry segments. A successful startup will gradually make its infrastructure more stable and higher-performance after it's ensured it'll be around. And a successful new technology will first validate its reason for being before gradually trying to use what previous technologies have learned.

Sorry this is poorly written. I'm not sure what parts of this are non-obvious, so feel free to ask more questions.
Forgetting motor type for the moment, you need to give us numbers.

How fast? How much mass must be moved? The inertia of the assembly? Required acceleration?

Once you know this, then you'll know how much power is needed to move the object. At that time you can start searching motor databooks to find one that's suitable.

And then don't forget you'll want to figure out how precise the motion must be (how much overshoot/undershoot is permissible?) so you can start with the electronic/control system design.

Fun stuff!!!
Most days look something like this:

7 Wake up

7-8:30 Breakfast and relax with daughter and girlfriend

8:30 Bike to work

9-12 Work

12 Bike home

12:30-1 Lunch and put daughter down for a nap

1-4 Work

4-8 Play with daughter, run errands, cook dinner, put her to bed

8-9 or 10 Work

10-11 Watch TV

11 Girlfriend gets home

12 Go to bed
I’ve heard very good things about Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321...
I mostly agree with you. Online dating is not a panacea and will not replace traditional dating. It's just one tool of many to find a good mate. What people don't realize is that success in online dating is just as difficult as regular dating. Many people think online dating will be easy, and so get very frustrated when they don't meet the partner of their dreams after a couple months. To that I say, how is that any different than real life? Maybe it's just that nobody cares about your uninteresting profile that took you 45 minutes to write. Maybe your pictures are suboptimal. Maybe you sound desperate or wounded. Maybe you target the wrong people. Maybe you're looking for flings when the site mostly caters to those looking for marriage. Or vice versa. Maybe that particular dating website just sucks. Maybe you can get those first dates but you come off as untrustworthy. Maybe a thousand other things. :)

The way I see it, online dating has two main advantages: 1) much of it can be done from the comfort of your own home, and 2) you can be very specific in your preferences up front. In this respect it can be vastly more efficient than traditional routes.
I'm skeptical of "keep the money local" and "create local jobs" arguments. They sound good, but rarely end up being good economics.

Beware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism

In my mind, the two most important things to consider are:

1) How will worker productivity be affected by the transition? Retraining and relearning can be extremely expensive, especially for information workers who are set in their ways. Not to mention the cost of migrating all a company's documents, scripts, programs, assets, etc. over to the new formats.

2) How is worker productivity affected in the long run? OpenOffice is still far behind Office in usability for the average information worker. The savings in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term productivity hit.

In the grand scheme of things, software is pretty cheap. Wasted man-hours are very expensive. I haven't seen evidence that these transitions to open source actually save money.
Thanks!

Yeah, I saw this in my fork queue, among other things. I will try to get to them soon! Sorry!

"It's hard not to take criticism personally but there will always be people who think you code is shit and approach all wrong."

Indeed, I completely suck at taking such in stride!
Getting Tetris right is extremely hard. There are so many tiny things to consider, e.g. timing stuff, fine grained controls, how blocks can be rotated when they are in a confined space... the list goes on.

I built a simple Tetris for the GameBoy Advance some 9 Years ago. It's bad, but I learned a lot: http://www.chaosquake.de/files/temp/yast.zip
I'm sorry that it didn't work out for you.

There's a lot of FUD in this comment. (I'm a Canadian immigrant myself).

"It's quite funny to have your application denied by a Chinese first generation immigrant." Why is it funny? an immigration official is a Canadian citizen, I don't know what you are implying/thinking/feeling here.

"The Canadian government will routinely break their promises to immigrants" this is utterly crap. The Canadian government cannot break any promises because they don't make any. Otherwise please indicate any official site or comment about any "promise".

It's true that there are lots of unscrupulous immigration lawyers or advisers, that's not the Government's fault; actually they recently hardened the requirements to be an immigration consultant to avoid scammers. Also unlike other governments Canada has everything related to immigration clearly explained in their web site, including forms and a tracking system and one of the first things they do is to advise against immigration "consultants" and note that anyone can apply by following the instructions (I did it without a hitch).

The Canadian immigration program is probably one of the most (or "the" most) generous and transparent in the world although of course they can make mistakes, especially when there are many fraudulent applications.

Finally if you don't like long winters (those months you don't "lose") probably you're better off someplace else; this is like wanting to live in Arizona and not liking hot weather.
I wrote the article, so will just respond to a couple items here. If you read it you'll note that most of what you said I agree with.

I'll start by saying that I wish I had the time to work on a solution for this. There is a lot of money to be made in Africa, as products like Mpesa show us. I'm currently up to my eyeballs at Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com), the iHub (www.ihub.co.ke) and AfriGadget (www.afrigadget.com).

You'll note that I was specifically saying that it does not appear to make business sense for some of these web organizations to pay attention to Africa. There is lower hanging fruit elsewhere, so why should they?

Most shouldn't. Probably. However, it's interesting to note who is paying attention and who is putting money into figuring out how to monetize the web and mobile space in Africa. A couple:

Google - Google Kenya was the first independent office (sales, engineering and product development) that they had in the world.

Facebook - I didn't see this coming at all, but they were the first to zero-rate their site.

Nokia - Nokia runs a couple research labs on the continent and spends a good amount of resources figuring out customer needs.

Though there are startling opportunities, and the chance to make real (big) money in Africa, it isn't where you want to put your money first to turn a quick buck. It's where things will be happening in the future, and that's why those with the deeper pockets are taking advantage of.

Outsiders need deep pockets and a long-term strategy when working here. This is why the space is ripe for local entrepreneurs to move and make headway in users and market share while there is still a gap.
No, you stop having the Tetris effect after a while. My theory is that you experience the effect only as long as your brain is busy figuring out / internalizing how Tetris works. After you have learned to recognize all the patterns instantly, the game becomes all about precise fingers motion control. The Tetris effect is gone at this point.

[Or at least it's how it worked for me; I never tried console Tetris, but I play different PC versions since '91 regularly. I can usually play level 9 tint (it's linux tetris clone) till I get bored.]

{also, "show next" is for sissies}
It makes sense that a zero comparison is faster, but 0ms does seem strange. It's 31ms for a basic for loop on the same platform, whereas in Safari the times are 2ms and 5ms respectively, which seems a lot more reasonable.

Is it possible that IE 7 is deleting the whole loop as a no-op?
Awesome. And it only goes to show that the goons they hire to man these lines are getting minimum wage for a reason.
> Coke has a horrible aftertaste IMHO.

True, but these tests were done when they still used sugar.
In my stats class in school, I volunteered for the coke vs. pepsi blind taste test. I had to guess which was which, and I was right 9/10 trials. Teacher was a bit shocked at that, calling me an outlier.
What exactly is Membase?
Role of a Company Advisors and How to Spot a Bad One
If they had a gyroscope they could measure it, of course.
The title of dreaming in code comes from a story told to the author by one of the programmers working on Chandler.

Happens to me all the time.
I submitted this yesterday, no discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1501842

dons: Do you folks plan to post videos of all the future tech talks?
90% of these open source initiatives are just schemes to put pressure on Microsoft to lower licensing fees.
Ask HN: Should I Learn Ruby?
I would like to get some opinions on the value of taking a basic Ruby programming class.

About me: Recent Eng/Biz grad, want to eventually start my own company. I am much more of a business person than an engineer, yet having graduated from a top ten engineering school, I realize the value of understanding tech no matter what part of a startup you work on.

Because I am interested in the web tech space, I think it would be a valuable experience for me to take 6 week online crash course in Ruby in order for me to 1) be conversant in a very popular language in this space and 2) have the ability to do very rough mockups of product ideas, or at least understand what goes into building them, and 3) become more generally aware of peripheral issues in web tech and what goes into the development process.

I have taken C++ classes in the past (no HTML or CSS experience though), so programming itself is not new to me and I have no illusions about becoming some mad awesome programmer in a couple of weeks. I’m simply looking for a new perspective in seeking out and solving entrepreneurial problems.

I’d love to get some perspective from actual programmers and startup people on wisdom or tomfoolery of this idea. I am leaning towards going for it at this point, but might be dissuaded if the reasons are strong, or if better uses of my free time are proposed.

For the record, the class is cheap (<$100) and is geared to beginners.

I’m all ears.
Get a MBA and some work exp.
I mean, I'm a Unix guy so... I know bash. I don't really want to touch PowerShell or C# or .Net or anything of the kind (at work, the first thing I do is start up a Linux VM), but it's interesting to know that there is a way to treat the Windows registry as a filesystem.
Maybe I value my time more than my net worth. Maybe my fear of boredom outweighs my fear of failure. Or, maybe I have an irrational belief that I will succeed against all odds. Whatever it is, I find the risk of entrepreneurship to be not only worthwhile but also necessary for fulfillment. Work is no longer work. It is life, and a good one.

Is it just me or do those last paragraphes sound like beautiful poetry?
Ah, shame. It's in the wrong direction for me. I did the Trans-Siberian a few years ago, but heading from east to west.

This really captures the feel of the thing. It's just like sitting on a train, except for an entire week.

Of course, for the full experience, you'll need some Russian businessmen who don't speak any English (but understand a little German+) filling you with inexhaustible quantities of really good vodka and crushing you at chess, and you'll need to step outside for ten minutes each day to buy potato cakes and liter bottles of beer (to dillute the vodka).

Highly recommended!

(+ Evidently when a group of people keeps repeatedly showing up in your country uninvited every few dozen years, you eventually get to know their language. Hence you can get by pretty much anywhere in Russia if you speak German.)
> Adwords was not critical to Googles share when it came to searches

Even that is arguable, but that is not the topic under discussion. The topic under discussion is this statement you made:

"There are really only TWO decisions that google made that made them successful"

> Adwords allowed Google make money

What in the world do you think "success" means? Despite the fact that this forum is called Hacker News, it isn't really about hacking per se. It's about starting companies. "Success" in such endeavors is not measured by how many people use your product, it is measured by whether or not you make money. To be sure, all else being equal it is easier to make money with a large market share than a small one. But you can make money without a large market share (e.g. the Apple Macintosh), and you can have a large market share without making any money (e.g. the Apache web server).

So maybe you meant to say, "There are really only two decisions that Google made that allowed them to achieve a large market share" or something like that (though even that is arguable). But "large market share" and "success" are not the same thing.

But in September of 2000 Google had neither success nor a large market share. All they had then was a kick-ass product and a really good team. Again, all else being equal, having a kick-ass product is helpful. But it is neither necessary (c.f. Microsoft) nor sufficient (c.f. Napster) for success.
Anyone, have any ideas what Bret's up to these days? Squirreled away deep inside the Apple Lair?
In k, a similar operation is called "peach", for "parallel each", though (as with J and APL) most of the operations already have an implicit map/loop built-in.
Yes, indeed we do. At least the ones where we get approval from the speaker.
Divorce Destroys Capital