skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I haven't expressed my self properly - I apologise, I wouldn't by any stretch of the imagination describe myself as scatty or unfocused. The question for me is, will I be focused enough, bearing in mind how big an undertaking this is.

I am hearing from a lot of people (not just on here), that having the right supervisor is essential. I will make sure to ask him just as many questions as he will me when I see him tomorrow. Thanks Tom.
Separation of layout and content allows you to do things like this: http://www.csszengarden.com

A few benefits that may be worth the headaches of floating divs:

* Redesign your pages without ever touching HTML (mobile/tv version)

* Improved SEO by arranging important content up top

* (Generally) lighter page sizes because CSS is in external file being cached

But I actually use floating divs because I find them easier. Tables are easy too, but after years of hacking on broken CSS--most of the thorns have faded away for me. YMMV. Use what works best.
If your objective is only to get focused and motivated, and not necessarily do research, a PhD might be too much of a time sink (I am a PhD student in CS). More so if you are thinking of taking it up part time, since most of your free time will be spent on it. Further, expect that the first couple years will not give you many positive returns to motivate you to go on: those are mainly spent building the foundation.

Having said that, if you truly enjoy the process of research, that might be just the thing to get you more focused and motivated. I definitely enjoy it at the moment.

In summary, don't go for it only to get motivated - if it doesn't interest you, it might end up taking too much energy for nothing.
Deepak Chopra's God 2.0
Looks like they're replacing the proprietary Sun libc with one from Nexenta / FreeBSD.

http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/rev/c8da1d642945
+1 This more or less mirrors what I just said. The Nexus One is a tragedy not because the phone itself is bad; in fact it is quite the opposite - The Nexus One is a tragedy because it is the best smartphone on the market and Google/HTC/T-Mob didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
i agree. i love my nexus one too. it got me off blackberry which iPhone never could
Trying to do way too much (Why did we build blogs/videos/images/forums for a blogging site whose unique feature was game mechanics/points for blogs?) and waiting too long to release (Why did we wait until EVERYTHING was done to release it only to find that people only used 10% of the aforementioned features).

All of my mistakes boil down to one of these two things.
huh. I was not aware that research professor salaries went that high.

still, I'd argue that becoming a 'star' professor could be compared with becoming a programmer or sysadmin, then joining a startup and making it... it's not going to happen to the average guy in the field.
this kind of sounds like a problem that could be solved by a good startup, no?
Can I ask why it is an outright 'no'? Is it not ok to ponder on something of this magnitude before diving in?
I don't think it will change anytime soon.

1, The marketplace sucks compared to the app store in many ways. There are few ways to feature your apps on the marketplace vs apple which has the "what hot", "new and noteworthy", "top paid", "top grossing" categories. In comparison, the android marketplace doesn't.

2, On the apple app store, you are given more promotion room on your app page itself for more descriptive text and screenshots.

3, The android marketplace is FILLED with crap and spam apps, just go to the "whats new" section of your android marketplace and its filled with 95% crap-ware and those ringtone apps. There is no clear way for consumers to find good apps vs these garbage apps. This destroys the user's experience in the marketplace.

4, Related to above, the lack of regulation has fostered a system where comment spamming other apps's page and creating apps that does shady things with user's data is actually more profitable than creating quality apps. see here: http://tinyurl.com/2f3r4g9

5, There is a culture of "free" and "opensource" in the entire Android ecosystem and most apps are released for free or are ad-supported. Google seem to love this since if you use their ad system, they get a cut and therefore they don't seem to have an incentive to push paid apps to have wider availability.

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to what Meego and Win7MO will bring for us developers. I hope they will follow Apple's model of having tighter control over their app stores rather than the mess that the Android marketplace is.
cool stuff!! i am paying tribute to your idea the cron job for webcams in the best way possible - by imitating it.
Also predictionbook seems nice as do your predictions.
I don't understand why people compare sales volume of iPhone to Android. Isn't that kind of like comparing MacBook Pro sales to Windows sales? People should either compare iPhones to Droids, or iOS devices to Android devices.
Having lived in Houston for 7 years, I'd say we have a much bigger problem with the car drivers not being "a good street-citizen." I wouldn't say it's Houston only, but there is a lot of it here. There's a lot of just plain pinhead disregard for physics and common sense here.
Picking up Android is only a matter of how open and capable it is.

Developing your in-house mobile OS is not easy or cheap. Companies like HTC/Motorola can't compete with Apple/RIM/Nokia only on hardware quality.

Most phones are Java ME enabled for that reason, but it's a shitty platform and everybody knows it.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/commerzbank/comm...

A moderately technical article on some of the issues that arise, and (for your question) see the end of the following:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v1/disastertol.pdf
Are you talking about learning OO to apply in C? Learning modern C++ OO won't help much. A little, but not much. A quick google on "object oriented c" produced a boatload of good-looking sources.

Remember, object orientation is an attribute of a program, not a programming language. A given language may encourage or even force a certain paradigm, but it's still a property of the resulting program. An "object oriented" language is simply a language in which it is difficult or impossible to produce a program that does not have that property. Object-oriented programming in C is perfectly possible, and often quite desirable. It isn't quite as slick but it's not terribly hard.

(That said, NewSoftzzz's suggestion of the C++ FAQ Lite is still a good one. I think it's just plain required reading, personally. Even if you don't program in C++, it will step you through a lot of scenarios in one very popular OO paradigm and simply by understanding one paradigm perfectly, it is easier to understand and use the next. If this seems contradictory to my first paragraph, blame English. This is theoretically helpful, learning C++ won't practically help you much in C.)
The C++ FQA is quite the same stuff as the .pdf linked in this topic. So the same stuff about mostly not being practically relevant applies here.

rgds, René
Not my experience either considering I have a Math degree and had no issue finding a job as a software developer. In fact, I've noticed that the Math degree makes managers think of you as smarter. There is a perception of Math degrees as being harder than most other degrees. (I personally think EE is the hardest one out there.)
Your calculations assume I am talking about bog $20/mo VPS. Nope, I'm talking about a $160 a month system with 2GB ram, 72 MB HD space, etc. As far as I know 4-8 of those fit on one of their systems. If I had a 256/384 slice, yeah, I doubt if the rest of the system could handle enough traffic that the I/O would matter.

My 2 year old, nothing special home desktop gives me 72 mb/s. I expect that a pricey VPS will perform at least as well. If not, I could get a dedicated server for $40 more.

Running hdparm, slicehost gave me 3-48 mb/s. When it was down under 20, my server was choking doing the simplest tasks - like say, logging into ssh while actually serving HTTP requests. Performance was sucking. Customers complained. I tried tuning my DB. Nope, it wasn't my fault. System load ranged from 3-50 for no apparent reason.

The same test on Linode yields 98-165 mb/s. I moved the server to Linode (saving $80 a month!!), have added new features and increased usage, and performance remains excellent. No mysterious slowdowns, no high system load. Everything hums along without a hitch, proving to me it is Slicehost's problem, not mine. Thank god it is theirs to deal with now. This caused me a lot of stress and I'm so glad to be on a host that is giving me what I am paying for.

I'm sure you know more about this from that side, but this is my experience as user.

3mb/sec is unusable for a moderately busy server. The fact that other hosts give better performance says all I need to know.

If they gave a steady 30-40 mb/s, from your calculations, that's what I'm paying for and yeah, that's probably all I need. The unsteadiness, though, and the dips to near nothing - that is unacceptable. I'm not a hobbyist. This is a business, other businesses depend on us.
I don't think the economics quite work out that way. Most enterprise scaling products are extremely expensive, have long sales cycles, and require lots of expertise to install and maintain them. They affect your application architecture design because of the per-server or per-socket licensing. You're also pretty much going to have to use that once it's purchased and put in place. If it no longer fits your business need, you've just wasted a ton of money. In fast-moving businesses this is absurd. For slow-moving industrial-age Fortune 100s, it makes more sense.

It also really sucks when you run into a problem and can't open the damn thing up. Case in point: I was working with some code that was instrumented with HP OpenView OVPA to collect performance analytics. When the new version of OVPA came out, we were planning a huge rollout to bring all 4k+ servers up to date. Problem is, the new major release had moved to a pthreads library and changed a bunch of the threading code, causing a 2 second lockup on start due to some sloppy code. For the vast majority of server software, this is almost undetectable, but these were CGIs that were invoked millions of times per hour. It took me about a day to locate the problem with truss (Solaris' strace). I had to spend a week in 5am meetings with HP's offshore development team to convince them that it was their bug. Of course, it took another week to get a patch.
Good post.. But I do think this general line of argument is a bit one sided. IMO there's just no one size that fits all. Some things have more R&D up front and that costs cash, others less so. Each business needs to try to figure out a reasonable tradeoff of how much needs to be done before entering the market.
I think there are two demographics. iPhone users already are used to buying music and have an iTunes account. It's a natural progession to buy apps. Android many probably hate iTunes and used p2p;

Other issues are...

- Google Checkout
- Apps not being sold internationally
- As noted above a messy marketplace; yet Google's focus is the web not apps.
Given the nature of traffic in China the one angle they don't show in the video is the one that matters most... what happens when vehicles in front of the bus straddle the lane, blocking it?

They line up neatly coming from the back because they physically have to but anyone who has seen the traffic in China knows that cars will not get out of the way or obey the lane markers and are quite likely to abruptly (even at risk to themselves or their vehicle) cut the thing off from the front in order to squeeze in front.
Although it usually only matters when compared code scores similarly, it is important to be able to know when benchmark comparisons are statistically significant[1]. I wrote a library[2] a while back to do this. This becomes even more of a concern when the benchmarked code is running on a machine which is not well-isolated and dedicated to running the benchmark.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance

[2]: http://github.com/Pistos/better-benchmark
Here's a common example of a monad being used in a non-stateful way:

map (* 2) [1,2,3,4]

Yep, that's a function on a monad — lists are monads. The same function can be written:

[1,2,3,4] >>= return . (* 2)
Your last point first: of course I'm not in the same camp as that guy. I haven't even read through most of that thread (I read through it years ago, but I don't remember most of it, just the original post). I certainly don't think anyone should be condescended to; besides, it's just a movie! I just thought I'd share the inspiration for my comment.

As for the theory itself, like I said, I haven't read the book and it doesn't matter to me; I'm interpreting the movie as a stand-alone work. Judging just by the movie, I haven't seen anything that outright contradicts the theory (for example, the whole "can't really see the bodies" thing). Then again, I haven't spent that much time digging into it. There is nothing that proves this theory either. I just think it's nice that it can be interpreted in another way.
packet loss is pretty huge, and data centers, generally speaking, really are better in that regard.
I'm sorry, I just LOLed the moment I read this headline.

I'm a PhD student hopefully 6 months away from finishing.

PhDs are like running a full marathon. You don't do it because you want to stay fit; or because you enjoy running -- marathons wear you out, cause injuries, and eventually are far worse for you than regular running. You only do it because

1) you want to learn how to run marathon-sized lengths (i.e. you want to be capable of wrapping your head around a multi year unbounded problem)

2) you want to have a sense of accomplishment

It seems you do want to use this as a way of learning structured thinking. But remember that:

1) Your life is going to be fucking depressing as hell.

2) It's many years of not knowing what the hell you're doing.

3) You're giving up your youth for a shot at something completely unquantifiable.

Bottomline: If your job doesn't require it, stay the hell away from it.
Easy Twitter Streaming API Testing with Mockingbird
I enjoying learning and discovering new things. My main motivation is to produce an original piece of work - something that will define me, if you will. A magnus opus.

Is it a waste of time that after two years of part-time research you find that the phD is not the approach for you and you abandon it?

The finding it interesting bit, is another questions in the back of my mind. Will this be something I will find interesting enough to keep me going for the next few years.
Neat idea but it violates the 'kiss' principle on several points.

I'll believe it when I see it, in spite of the fact that 'building will commence soon'.
Thank you very much for reviewing our site and giving such helpful feedback.

The passphrase idea is explained in some detail here: http://2easyoffice.com/tour7.php
The short of it is that we wanted to offer something with more security than usernames and passwords. We can include a captcha, as well or alternatively. But we thought that, if we are going to put a bit of extra work on the login, why not make it count toward more security than just the annoyance of a captcha alone? Our perspective was that users trust us with their information. We want to treat that trust with the utmost respect by doing everything in our power to secure the login process.
Ask HN: Way to make blog service at www.mydomain.com/blog vs blog.mydomain.com?
I've been looking for a Rails-powered drop in blog for domains so that I can have www.mydomain.com/blog instead of blog.mydomain.com. As I understand it, Google's PageRank algorithm assigns PageRank scores to each subdomain separately. Thus great blog posts on blog.mydomain.com will improve the PageRank score of blog.mydomain.com separate from the PageRank score of www.mydomain.com. For example, according to http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php, blog.twilio.com has a PR of 5 while www.twilio.com has a PR of 6. blog.shopify.com has a PR of 6 while www.shopify.com has a PR of 7. My naive guess is that if all the links to blog.shopify.com instead pointed to www.shopify.com/blog/... then the PR for www.shopify.com would be even higher.

Can anyone recommend a rails plugin that will add standard blog functionality (posts, comments, tags, feeds, etc.) into existing rails apps? Or is there some way to 'symlink' (not the right word but a proxy for the idea) the www.mydomain.com/blog/... to use posterous, wordpress, tumblr, etc. underneath?

Lastly, I'd like to avoid rolling my own. I created a simple posts controller in a pinch for a site I started on Thursday (www.formds.com) which was great in allowing links to my main site, but I'd really like to avoid recreating the wheel. It looks bad and is time I'd rather spend elsewhere. I'd _love_ a symlink'd tumblr/posterous/wordpress running under my domain.

Thanks for thoughts,

Robert
Working on big iron, I get to work with assembler, CICS, MQ Series, and DB2 in addition to COBOL. No, it's not flashy like web apps, but there's a certain appeal to bit-diddlers like myself. Perhaps it's the same as the difference between driving a PT boat and working in the engine room of an aircraft carrier. I would choose the carrier.

Also, Greenspun's Tenth Rule is in effect in the COBOL world as much as in any other language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_Tenth_Rule

The difference in the COBOL world is that you are more likely to work with people who would not know what you are talking about if you mentioned Lisp or Greenspun's Rule, or even the word "predicate" just to pick an unrelated example. So if you are into programming more than you are into business, you can function in the mainframe world as a sort of playground for exercising your programming muscle in ways that suit you, even if your colleagues aren't aware that something different is going on.

For instance, I generate a lot of code using a Common Lisp system I wrote for my own use. No one knows or cares--all they know is they seem to get reliable code from me very quickly. If I suggested that more people use the Lisp code generator, it would not fly because it would require training and might cost maintenance dollars. So it remains a personal tool.

More: My job involves a weekly task to analyze a release while it is under development. My predecessor did this manually and took all week. I wrote a Java/MySQL system to do it, and it takes me all of 10 minutes a week. Another win for the intrepid programmer.

More out in the open, I recently led development of a rules-based system. The team did not speak rules, evaluation, predicates, or the general use of collections. The challenge for me was to design the system using these concepts, then present it to developers who will never want to learn the general concepts. Done in record time, by some mysterious process (I broke the design into small pieces w/o reference to the comp sci terms, gave each developer a focused task, and tied it all together myself).

Definitely more Sears foundation garment than Frederick's of Hollywood, but I like it.
This can only end one way: http://i.imgur.com/62kbb.jpg
Don't forget that the iOS platform is more than just the iPhone. Of the 100 million iOS devices sold, 40 million were iPod touches and 3 million were iPads. So an app made for iOS can really travel.
Dup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726023
Women have a right to a home birth
I think jerf means that for the vast majority of PhD students, the most motivation you're going to have is at the beginning. It only gets worse from there. So if you have serious doubts before diving in, you're almost certainly going to have real trouble during the PhD.
Android and the N1 are a good combo. My problem with your statement is that other than activation the iPhone doesn't ever have to be plugged into a computer. Your example only shows that iPhone support on Linux is a not perfect, not that a computer is required. I download music and apps all the time directly to the phone, no computer required. My contacts, calendars and emails are all synced to the Google cloud that then syncs back to my mac.
Airtel Free GPRS Trick : August 2010
Maybe they could make the schools partly responsible for false advertising and high costs. Also, there is a serious lack of oversight of universities. Accreditation is a joke now days. There is such a divergence of curriculum amongst reputable schools and it gets worse for the new profit schools.

I'm glad I only had to pay 5K a year compared to others dealing with 10-20K tuition cost for school no even close to the top tier universities in the US. Harvard charging 20K is ok considering the rep you get just having a degree from there. But random private school X? not so much.
That would need to be *(x+98), which is longer than x[98].
This is the fascinating thing about Chinese business investment in Africa: It's business, not charity.

What the bug-eyed rock stars with the big heart for Africa don't tell you is that Africans don't even _want_ their pity, or their charity. They want to do business. Not the "colonial" business of old where resources were essentially taken with almost nothing given in return (except for "teaching western civilization to the natives" or some such nonsense). The Chinese couldn't really care less about that.

All the Chinese want is a stable enough environment for doing business and allowing their million+ workers living there live and work safely. One way they achieve that is by actually living among the Africans, in high-rises that seem to be erected by the day all over Africa, or in African neighborhoods. Where before, Western emigres walled themselves off from the natives, the Chinese actually build shops and restaurants and live in-town, which engenders the notion of "guanxi" between the Africans and Chinese immigrants. It was difficult early on, as the report suggests: First-wave immigrants living in trailers on the worksite, never venturing out to eat or take in entertainment. Now there are shops and karaoke bars all over, peopled with Chinese and African clientele.

Fact is, they aren't there to turn Africa into something the Dutch Boers or German Afrikaners envisioned, but more like whats been happening since the spice routes opened 1000 years ago: You give me raw material, I give you finished products. And, hey, it maybe a bit of a perversion of the Comparative Advantage theory, but one thing it's not is abject exploitation the way it was when the West colonized it.
I include 1 UPS'd outlet. I don't get overly concerned about power draw, it averages out. There is only so much power you can draw in 1U. People coming in with a beefy-ass server are going to tend to want dedicated bandwidth and a small subnet of their own (if not immediately, then when their operation grows), which moves them out of the $60/mo package and in to something more custom.

But yes, power IS one of the more costly bits of running a datacenter and I could see where some sites would expect you to run no more than a nite-lite on the power that is included.
I wonder how much of a dent the iPod Touch would put into the numbers if it were counted.

On a related note, it seems an iPod Touch sized clone for Android would be a worthwhile device for a company to make (especially if it fit in all those iPod Touch running armbands). I hear news snippets here and there, but you'd think there would be a worthy competitor at this point... (there could well be one I'm not aware of, but a quick google didn't turn much up).

edit: Samsung YP-MB2 seems to be iPod Touch sized and "coming soon": http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-yp-mb2-poses-for-photo-2...
It's funny you say that, because I just used this technique to make a few lines of my Clojure (a Lisp) code a little neater. I find it more readable, and prettier.