skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My body and mind have taken a beating I don't think I can do much longer from ten years of useless night work swinging shifts sometimes three times a week, that guy is too happy.

That's a great list of personal reasons, but business can come first for the same reasons. My last big deployment was to half a million set top boxes. In the end, I had to do it at night, but I had oh so many reasons for doing it during the day:

* What if a percentage of the boxes bricked halfway through the deployment? A statistical insignificance in the lab doesn't help me help 15k people with bricks on their TV's. When they start playing with the boxes, I'm going to have to roll trucks and that's expensive. Instead man up the call center during a time where we don't have to pay shift diff.

* From an end-user standpoint, there's a different set of eyes on the products at different times of day. Think about it this way, if you sell porn, how much are you selling at 2AM vs. 9AM do you think? They're not going to call and complain about their porno not working, but it doesn't mean there's not a huge level of dissatisfaction. There's a lot of general economics and trade offs involved.

* Top notch help has the luxury of sleeping at this hour because they've probably earned the tenure. I'm not going to get the vendor of a vendor to help me with this stuff at 3am, and they're definitely not going to be fresh and chipper, and getting anyone beyond support on the phone takes hours -- by that time, they're awake anyway.

Change the above as you see fit to adapt to your type of work, it's all the same.
As he puts it Apple is foremost a design company. I see interesting rivalry brewing up between Apple and Google. One where design is paramount and other where engineering is paramount. In fact in the tech world, Apple stands out as a design company where as pretty much everybody is more or less engineering and marketing company.
Where the brains are
As long as the horrible Java updater that the Windows version is saddled with doesn't come along as well. I've switched to using a MBP as my primary development machine but every time I start my windows boxes back up (which isn't that infrequently, probably once a week or so) it seems like there is a new Java update. It wouldn't be so bad, except that it seems that over half the time the update will fail without explanation in the middle.

I think if Oracle quickly steps up to the plate and promises to fill Apple's shoes, this could be a good thing. Otherwise, this could very well be another downside to Oracle gobbling up Sun.
Sweat suits
A sweatsuit is a suit that has a thick material usually made of cotton and polyester. A sweatsuit can be worn on many different occasions, but is commonly associated with sports. Sweatsuits are also worn during physical exercise, hence the "sweat" part of the name.
TRWTF is that it took Jobs and Apple's thousands of employees how many years to notice this? Either that, or his answer is pure BS and has nothing to do with why Apple made this decision now.
I assume that I can still download the java src and compile/install it on OS X, correct?

I am a Mac user and had never even realized that Apple uses a special distro and Java.com does not offer a JRE/JDK/etc. download for OS X.

After Java is removed, how will Mac users run java apps? What will be the easiest way to get Java back on OS X?
Why is it overrated?

Edited: grammer.
New Twitter Design Expanding URLs with Jquery, Ajax
Google is mostly about backend data processing. Google's front-end effort is nice, but dwarfs in comparison with the backend accomplishments.
The same is true for most other businesses.
So the demand for backend engineers would definitely be higher.
And it's easier to outsource UI than outsource backend, because backend is typically more complex and harder to test and communicate about, so keeping developers closer to business users is even more important in for backend functionality, than for front-end functionality.
Python v. Ruby. The eternal question. The languages might not be different, but the communities definitely are.

This just convinced me I need to switch my efforts from Ruby to Python.
I will now work snafu into all my conversations for the next week. Great article.
Beyond their features, these guys are great - they're determined and helpful. And for a service like theirs these things are paramount. Congratulations PagerDuty!
Amazon Web Services Unveils Free Service
Funnily enough, I was talking about this exact topic with a clinical psychologist recently. In a nutshell, intelligent people think more. They don't just think better, or more efficiently, they think more.

The side-effect is that certain illnesses like depression affect intelligent people quite hard. They self-medicate, often with alcohol.

As well, otherwise healthy intelligent people might self-medicate to calm down their perceived over-active thoughts.

Combined, the result is that intelligent people are over-represented in alcoholism, albeit perhaps as high-functioning alcoholics.
High School? That can limit the options, I suppose. Cross country party tours can raise thousands:
http://causeitsmybirthday.com/
Agreed. (Still not quite as bad as the Adobe Reader updates, though. My god.) Hopefully you'll have the option to use Java on OS X packaged like it is on Linux.
That's actually a fairly decent reply; far better than 'nope' or 'you're holding it wrong'
I like the knowledge sharing example - what about an "exclusive" knowledge sharing forum between certain professionals - say in house lawyers? I know in the time I was a general counsel there were a lot of questions I didn't have the answer to at my fingertips and would have loved a group of similarly qualified professionals to bounce questions and answers off of. Instead I always ended up researching it myself from scratch.
Do you really have to have a Django developer specifically?

If it is specified as a Django project, then a good programmer who doesn't know Django fits into the Hire someone who has done zero Django sites, or a few sites of less complexity than what you want implemented. This person will clearly be tech savvy, understanding what you want and promising the world. category.

I agree with the parent posts conclusions on that.
Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review
Or, could it be that it was a delicate inter-company relationship and it took time (and Sun being acquired by Oracle) for this shift to take place?
You could argue Twitter (and FourSquare) were both launched at SXSW.

Totally agree with you point though.
Is this essentially a JavaScript browser in a browser? When I worked at Netscape (1997), some developer developed one. No real use since you had to use a Nescape browser to run it but it was funny anyway...
My impression is that it is a strategic advantage of course, but not a "big advantage". Knowing that the enemy is weaker then expected is good, but it's not directly useful like decrypting Enigma communications or acquiring research material. If it really affected the war, I would have liked to see why.
Sometimes I think that HN is too self-centered. The fact is that HN, Reddit, TC, et al. are places where geeks/nerds/hackers go to. I personally enjoy all of them, but unless my product focus on this market, I would never waste my time worrying about being covered in them. If you make bingo stuff (à la patio11), you should be trying to reach out to those customers and just forget about TC. Part of the "make-something-people-want" involves putting aside your own personal filters and prejudices.
I don't know. The idea that that person would be of slightly lower quality or just in a honeymoon phase, or even naive I think is a bit much of you have a very experienced programmer that just hasn't done Django. I just quibble with the implication of lower quality, naivete, and "promissing the world."
Couldn't they make Java updates for OS X use the new App Store mechanism?
Any idea at all why Apple calls them "Flash drives" rather than SSD?
You can't capture all the energy. Basic thermodynamics. You have to black-body radiate away the heat of the star driving the system, or the only alternative is that it is all collecting within the system, cooking everybody within in a fairly short period of time.

I argue on the basis of real science that we know, not because we know it all but because we can't argue on the basis of science we don't know about. Given that, we damn well can make some guesses about what a space ship will look like, which inevitably includes some form of propulsion involving either the expulsion of very, very hot matter (to get optimum mass efficiency, propellant will be at a premium and no point dumping it out the back cold) or light directly (unlikely but at least plausible) in a directional manner.

The topic came up a few months ago during the discussions on whether it is rational for an alien civilization to summarily execute any other civilizations it discovers with relativistic planet-killers, but unfortunately trying to Google up a specific discussion about spaceships and relativistic projectiles is an exercise in futility. Still, work the math on what it takes to get a decent payload (at least several thousand tons would be nice) up to ~.1c, and then recognize that thanks to Newton's laws, the resulting mass-energy number you find must actually be coming out the back of your spacecraft in as close to a single direction as possible. Possibly literally as a laser, though as I said I'm pretty skeptical about the utility of a pure light-drive. It's pretty damned bright.

Look, I hate to be offensive, but if you don't fail basic thermodynamics and you actually take seriously the real science we already know, we don't have to retreat into romantic cliches about how we can't possibly understand advanced cultures. We can in fact put bounds on things if our understandings are basically correct, and if our understandings are basically incorrect then frankly we have bigger problems than the question of alien life.

The upshot of this, going back to your first post, is that if either of us is retreating into "religious dogma", romantic conceptions of reality held onto despite rational examinations of the evidence and science, taking shelter in the possibility of who-knows-what magic science may produce in the future and refusing to use what we already know, it's you, not me.
Uh, if you have a good reason to be asking for David Lee's time, there are easier ways of getting an hour of it than spending $500.
Bookmarking is alive, well and growing
Actually, having assets appropriate to the business type is one of the key factors in determining whether the corporate entity will be respected and you are correct that it differs for a RE company and an internet startup.

There are plenty of citations to case law to support this but I am too lazy to go find them to post in this reply.
Everyone else would find every available loophole they could given the chance. People just get mad because they are not the ones benefiting. It's human psyche to keep other people down if you're not going up.
Arington "covered" my project with a one-liner post that basically asked if anyone's heard of it. This generated some traffic, but it also generated calls from about a dozen VCs that led to a handful of in-person meetings. The odd part is that being in Canada I didn't know what TC was, and didn't realize the importance of mention for another few months... though the net effect of the mention was close to zero.
Right on! Today is the first day of the rest of your life!
I agree. But practically, a government must have a way to mollify powerful interest groups or you end up with revolution and chaos. I think American democracy does a fantastic job of producing a stable and fair environment. But I'm not convinced it does the best possible job. As you say, it leads to complex system of laws that are not fair.

As a westerner newly living in Asia, I can see Singapore delivers good, efficient government and they respond to citizens complaints like a good company responds to its clients. Taxes are low, simple, and are done on a post card. I think thats the advantage of not being a democracy.

However, its not clear to me how they manage their powerful interest groups. I suppose brute force plays a role. But honestly, I doubt there is any more brute force used in Singapore than in the US. And I would trust Singapore to be more fair and even handed.

My guess is that China models itself after Singapore. I think thats where China is trying go. If they can get there -- and its not clear to me that they can -- in my opinion, it will be a more successful form of government than the democracies of the West. But they have a long way to. Singapore is a small island in a unique political and economic situation and I think that makes a huge difference.
Or using the command line version of PHP and GNU Screen (I haven't fully studied the code, but it looks similar to a queue system that I hacked together a couple of days ago where the worker is wrapped in a while(TRUE) loop).

In the interest of some outside figures, how have you found this to scale? I implemented a similar solution as more of a stopgap until I had the time to get RabbitMQ installed with a "proper" worker dispatcher (more moving parts but less stress on the DB). I mostly ask because we implemented it for our notification system where we had to generate a send large batches of custom emails which was bogging down the page (and hard to debug where in the chain we were getting failed messages).
How have I not heard/seen your service before?
Stealth social networking startup CafeBots scores $5M from sFund
The thought of Larry "monetizing" Java by putting it in the AppStore is just too hilarious for words.
Ah, images. The best way to communicate the text of an e-mail. (Yes, we do have transcripts thanks to mahmud and sfraser, but still...)
You would still be able to run the Open JDK. There is a port for the Mac, but if I am not mistaken it uses the X Server and is not as well integrated with the graphics layer of OS X desktop. Example: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/
They certainly have Party Politics at the municipal level in Vancouver:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Municipal_political_pa...
This is awesome. I love JavaScript and all the goodness it offers and this is one more reason to love it even more because now I can pile all my greasemonkey scripts into the UI.
I can help. Which bit wasn't clear?

I was trying to explain the human interaction consequences of batch processing and NoSQL in presenting mined data in web applications.

If you're not into any of those things, I could explain but... its a niche. There's probably not too much point.
Positive: Jobs appears to be implying that one of the purposes of this change is that in the future Java will not lag behind on OSX

Negative: He gives absolutely no assurance or even hint that there is a plan that this will really happen, or that Apple will be helpful in facilitating it.
Good politicians are only going to emerge when this left/right doctrine is discarded and people can run without being classified as belonging to a particular dogma. It's possible to run a tight budget and deliver services, it's also possible to introduce social activities without trying to create a commune. It's also possible to avoid the 'centrist' tag, as you can be radical in one or two areas and mainstream in many others.

The left/right dogma comes from 150 years ago based on which side of the seine you lived on. It's an outdated and increasingly useless model for solving current problems.
The other thing to note here is that virtually all of Apple's web properties are Java applications. Apple has a tremendous internal investment in Java and Java technologies -- the App Store, Apple Web Store, iTunes Store, hell -- even Ping -- are written in Java (via WebObjects).
Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are good friends. Jobs was the photographer at Ellison's wedding. Since Oracle bought Sun, it's almost certain the two have discussed Java on the Mac and since Larry has shown his enthusiasm for Java (see JavaOne rundowns), I'm pretty confident things are looking up.
Seems like the reaction is overwhelmingly positive on the developer side. There are some concerns, but overall, developers understand how much more exposure a Mac App Store would give their software.
Neural Network FAQ
I assume that this was just a feel-good article written in response to their name appearing in WSJ recently. The project itself has been around a few months, at least publicly. The engineering described isn't particularly novel, but it is a high-level overview of a large-scale project.
AFAIK the code which makes the Swing UI use native OSX (Cocoa) instead of X is Apple proprietary. I wonder whether Apple will now give that to Oracle or release it as Open Source. Otherwise we're going to be stuck with X Server and ugly UIs for a long time :-(
The problem is, the barriers in this particular market involve people suing you. That's not the kind of barrier startups are good at.
Sorry about the Google cache; HN won't let you submit FTP links.

This was written by Warren S. Sarle from 1997-2002. I ran into it while trying to look for papers on benchmarking neural networks. I highly recommend it for its frank and accessible style.
FWIW, what you say is basically true, and in fact if you dig into actual relational theory (as opposed to the bastardized subset that SQL gives you) you'll find something that itself looks an awful lot like a graph.

But the problem that you will find eventually, and you should always be mindful of, is that nobody has solved the problem of representing arbitrary graphs and getting the sort of good performance you expect from a web service. This has been one of the big stoppers for "RDF", for instance, which by the way is still something you should check out even so if you don't immediately know what RDF is.

Intuitively, while I will admit I'm not an expert on the topic (just a dilettante that has gone down some similar thought paths), the problem is that a full graph has no structure to get a hold of and take advantage of in your query. A traditional SQL table has a regular, recurring structure and obvious indexes to use to optimize the performance (and in fact this is the source of most if not all of the deviations from relational theory, IMHO). A NoSQL database strictly limits itself to what is usually the equivalent of an SQL record with one key (more or less) and a blob in it. (And some of them do various moderately fancy things with that blob, but even so, a blob.) A graph can just do anything it damn well pleases, and they do not only in theory but in practice, and that becomes difficult to deal with in practice even when the theory is beautiful.
I'm being a little snarky here, but: more and more, Mozilla reminds me of that "friend" that let me play with all their toys, and then watched me enjoy it. Kind of an Eyes Wide Shut thing, if you know what I mean. Weird...
It is nothing like Nagios. PagerDuty handles alerting, not monitoring. Once your monitoring system discovers something is wrong, it tells PagerDuty. PagerDuty then gets ahold of the right person. It lets you set up on-call rotations. It does automatic escalation if the primary contact doesn't acknowledge the incident. If your monitoring system supports it, it will even automatically resolve the incident once you fix your servers.
+1 this. I've switched from magit to egg and couldn't be happier. Makes working with git a breeze
ESSAY MAP IDEAS I FREE ESSAY MAPPING IDEAS
Get yourself the best essay mapping idea and mind map diagram for essay writing using essay map examples; hero journey map Zorro essay.
Well...Java maybe not so much.

But we all know the only reason to buy a Mac is that we look great when using it to write our Rails apps! :P
If you're interested in machine learning, it's hard to imagine how you will get beyond tinkering without an advanced degree. A PhD brings a depth and maturity when thinking about how to frame machine learning (statistics) problems, which I rarely have seen in people who haven't studied to literature at the PhD level.

If you do decide, look for the right advisor (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/) and try to go to a top program.
No I didn't. When I originally said what I said, I wasn't really comparing PHP against Rails or Django, I was merely stating that there are better ways to get up to speed faster. I then proceeded to give my opinion on the frameworks I've tried in PHP, mostly to be a good sport to you. In any case, PHP with or without framework, feels (to me) like a messy solution with less structure than the usual suspects.
One thought I've had is encrypting sequential IDs with DES. The block size is 64 bits which conveniently maps to int types and the token you get is half the size of a UUID.
This definitely throws a wrench in the argument that high bandwidth user = illegal file sharing, baby punching terrorist.

I'd be surprised if Netflix didn't have some arrangement with the major ISPs. On the other hand, if Netflix is doing just fine without having to worry about negotiating with ISPs to avoid throttling, then maybe it is still feasible to fund and launch a new high-bandwidth product.
I knew about your FreeBSD background. Didn't know you were involved with Yahoo dealings though.
Well, it depends what the other 80% is ;) Personally, I think this presents a compelling argument that transferring video content takes a shit ton of bandwidth.
Apple has given no indication that they won't allow users to install Java runtime straight from the source itself. They're merely saying that they won't ship it with the OS anymore.
The key point is that you've done all your processing in batch, and you're only displaying the most prominent or interesting properties and links for each record. Hadoop/Pig/Python together are much more powerful than SQL if you don't have a real-time requirement, and by the time we get to the key/value store all the data processing is done. If you think you have a real-time analytic requirement... well you may, but quite possibly you really don't.

Getting to that point through batch processing can be hard, but the infrastructure is ideally suited to it. NoSQL doesn't impede you whatsoever. It enables you to think correctly about packaging your data for recursive consumption in trivial interfaces.

Real-time large scale graph processing isn't possible, or is very hard but... its not really needed to do amazing things.
Would you care to explain how is that a flaw?
I thought this was hilarious. "I remember going into Steve's house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed."
APIs introduce a more long-term maintenance burden than GUIs. If you take away a checkbox that hardly anyone used, no big deal, a few people are momentarily confused. But if you take away an API call parameter that hardly anyone used, a few people still depended on it, and maybe the change broke their systems and caused them to lose business until they patched it. Then they complain online, cancel their agreements with you, scare away your potential customers... it can be a disaster.

Everything you put in your API documentation is a promise. Facebook gets away with frequent, breaking API changes because they have a monopoly. Until you can say the same, it might be a good idea to keep your API stable.
Ideas vs. Execution
Do what you love. Everything else will follow.

edit: realize this reads as "not very helpful". But you seem to know what you want to do. Job opportunities will be what they are in 5 years. Who knows. But if you try to change your natural trajectory, I think you'll be less happy, and ultimately less successful as a result.
I can confirm this - IE's JS has nothing to do with .NET in terms of people or technology