skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed 100% here.

After a long time of using a Netbook for computing, I'm realizing soo much how the 'battery life and portability' is really not an issue.

Every year, more and more laptops come out that are lighter, faster, and just as cheap. And in all honesty, weight shouldn't be a deciding factor anyway - you can't operate the damn keyboard in mid-air, so you're going to be setting down your laptop a lot. If you're running a dedicated environment, you're also probably walking around with a backpack or messenger bag - my preference here, both for easier access and just plain looking cooler : )

But the issues of screen size and better keyboards are huge. Between the common need of many for running VNC and remote servers, and just the fact that an increase in pixels up to somewhere around 3000x1000 leads directly to increased productivity, the drawbacks of a 4-5 hour battery and an extra pound or two quickly fade away. Most people that are serious about the portability either bring a charger or an extended battery - I prefer the latter, since I often find myself in places without outlets or power strips (like the subway, or a conference auditorium ).

Think about it this way : What's the difference between a bag that contains the following:

3-lb "Workhorse" laptop;
power cable;
spare laptop battery;
notebook;
pens;

And one that has a 1-lb netbook?

Nothing.

Except for the fact that the netbook is slower and smaller, and only marginally cheaper.

As I write this, I begin to regret my own purchase :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
And do what? Shut down the company, all its services and fire the employees?

I'd rather see Yahoo continue to try and improve its services. To, you know, become competitive again.
Expecting a good answer to this question in 30 minutes without any warning is totally unreasonable. Expecting anyone to implement a deployable, generalizable, tested solution to this in two weeks is totally ridiculous. I wouldn't work at a place that asked questions like this or made development calendars with schedules like that.
Totally agree with you: even if I never end up using the language, learning new idioms and patterns has been immensely useful.

I still make time to learn new technologies, I just find the physical act of coding to have rapid mental diminishing returns after around 40 hours. That probably isn't a big deal if you were running a startup. Code for a while and then attend to the many other aspects of the venture. Having a day job can really throw that balance off, especially when working for a company that doesn't waste much time with meetings and busywork (which is a nice thing).
Definitely true - I do want to say, however, that newer netbooks will be able to handle all but the largest projects in Eclipse/Netbeans with ease, so this part is less of a consideration. Your main bottleneck will really be memory, which should still be adequate.
I have a specific schedule that I follow when starting different parts of dinner to make sure that everything is done at the same time, including adjustments for different pots that I know cook differently. I suppose you could think of this as some sort of scheduling algorithm.
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Thanks but I am sorry but I don't understand this solution.

In my problem, I get a string s that user enters in a form.

I append that to an empty list L = []

then I test if the last saved string is the same as the new string. If same, I write it on the same column; if not the cursor moves to next column (I was trying to do this with tables) and as long as the user types the same string the cursor stays on the same column. If a new string is typed; a new column is started; and so on.

I don't think your solution is to this problem. You assume that there is a list with duplicates.

Does this make sense?
Learning Chinese online, the simplest way to master the language
Yeah, same here (also in Canada). Been trying to get an iPhone 4 at Rogers since they came out and still didn't manage to get one!

To be fair though, couple of my friends got one by either waiting in line at the Apple store or calling Rogers retention etc... but I really don't care enough to jump through hoops to get one so I'm still waiting!
As someone who has struggled with some of the same things, I can sympathize. However, I really think you need to toughen up a bit. Not everything that you do will be laden with meaning or will feel terribly fulfilling. It seems like you want to feel something deep and meaningful as a sign that you're on the right track in life. I've only had that feeling after putting in years of work and dealing with uncertainty, periods of depression and frustration, and generally just hanging in there.

Speaking for myself, those times that I have dropped out of things, I've felt regret and it hasn't helped my confidence. It probably would have been better to hunker down for five more weeks and deal with the discomfort.

Chances are you do know what you're passionate about and you're simply not listening or you've tamped that part of yourself down. You're obviously bright and introspective, when's the last time that you really felt excited about learning something in class or starting a project? Do you daydream about music, art, or architecture?

Anyway, good luck.
Looks to me like you're trying to shoehorn everything into the one list, which is going to make your code hard to write. Something to note is that you're adding blank strings ('') to your list to pad it out, which is a bit of a warning sign that your data structure is wrong.

Rather than do that, I'd use a dictionary keyed off either an id or the original text, store the user input as a list after that, then sort out how to display this in the display part of your code. Something like:

typing = {
'Hello World': ['Hello World', 'Hello World', 'Hello World']
'Hello Universe': ['Hello Universe', 'Hello Universe', 'Hello Universe', ...]
}

Bear in mind that dictionaries are unordered though, so you might need to either use a list to order them, or use sorteddict from the collections library.
Thanks truman. I have that your business takes off

I really appreciate the turnout and how receptive the whole community has been to me. I know that I'm like the odd man out in the group haha. But, its awesome cause I've had a lot of people have reached out to me by email, phone and skype.

Like I said, I'll keep this offer standing and post an offer once a month to field all the questions people have. But, you dont have to wait. You can reach me at contact@thekenggroup.com. They'll all get forwarded to me directly so they're not going into some black hole =)
I find that while my 'dayjob' programming saps my willpower, the same activity for my sideprojects refills it right up.

I firmly believe that you need downtime though. Between my dayjob and my sideprojects I always take an hour or so to play, watch television, read or anything else that doesnt take much brainpower.
Is it about your side-project? You really should only be doing a side-project for your enjoyment and the challenge. However, if you stress about your productivity you might lose sight of the reason you started a side-project. I am the person who can concentrate 16 hours a day, or even days on end without sleep or breaks (in fact, i'm well known for it). It doesn't mean my projects get done faster, the real result has been making those around, like my family, feel neglected. I say enjoy your time with your girlfriend, focus your productivity at work where it matters, and just enjoy your projects. --- There is probably a good argument about the mental health of those, like myself, who can concentrate for days on end, months at a time. Actually, I think its great that you can relax after 10 hours a week on your project. I can never shut my mind down long enough stop working on my projects, or even sleep.
I feel like Zuckerberg is understandably defensive about the way he was portrayed in the movie. It would freak anyone out to see their character faults displayed and magnified and exploited to drive much of the dramatic content in a full length feature film. The Newark donation, the response in the interviews, it all comes off as defensive to me.

Zuckerberg is a lot of great things but in my opinion he's not entirely aware of how his actions are perceived by others. By that I mean he doesn't seem honest. He says he came out to Stanford in the summer "just to hang out." Why can't he say, "I wanted to build facebook and they have great programmers out here. The weather also kicks ass."? It's hard to believe him sometimes.
I have been slammed with work for the last 6 mo, picked up two other guys and am still slammed. I literally code 12-16 hours a day and have a side project that has just been languishing on the back burner for months. It is definitely not a case of want to but I have too, I pulled a 116hr week one week of literally non-stop code. I freelance and not pulling those hours means that I loose the contracts that I have. It is a treadmill but one thing I have learned and the piece of advice I can give you is that once it becomes habit, it is actually easy to put in these kind of hours regularly if it is what you want to do. I now find that while I work long hours when I do work, I also tend to schedule longer amounts of time off to travel and recharge, it works for me, but I would like to have enough head room to get back to doing my own stuff as well.
My question is: I don't know any Python and would like to start learning it. Should I bypass Python2 altogether and start with Python3 or stick with Python2?
Personally I can't code for more than 5 hours a day productively. Luckily I work from home so I'm not forced to sit in someones office and be judged not by what I accomplish but by how long I sit in my chair.

I actually get more done at home anyway since I have my perfect setup, good music and no interruptions. Anyway, count yourself lucky that you're actually very productive already.
In the 24 or 48hr competitions (rails rumble, node ko, tc disrupt,) the most frequent winners are those that still get sleep.

I think it is unreasonable to expect > 40hrs of pure programming productivity a week -- the body/mind needs time to recover.

You should still keep up the gym, diet and smoking improvements as they will continue to benefit you as you age (we all age, dont ignore it!)
I've got this on a site I'm building that offers a sort by distance option. There's definitely a performance hit. I'm going to look into 'dumber' ways of filtering out the data prior to running this function. Maybe start by including state in the where clause, for example.

Any other ideas?

One solution I saw used more simple arithmetic to calculate a range of coordinates within levels of distance. That could be pre-cached, but it's a lot less accurate.
Tell HN: A simple facebook game I developed
http://apps.facebook.com/n-puzzle/ - A facebook app of the popular n-puzzle that I wrote. Read more about n-puzzle - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_puzzle. The source is available here - https://bitbucket.org/abhirama/n-puzzle
I have been coding 14-16 hours a day for the past year for my startup. The only down time I have is to hang out with my girl friend to keep her happy. Originally it was my day job and the start-up and about 18 hours a day, but ended up quitting the day job because it was draining my energy because I did not enjoy it. I have to say it is not normal and very unhealthy and I personally can't wait to force myself to reduce my time (for which I have plans soon). That being said I don't find my productivity taking a dive and I do love doing it, it's just awkward not dedicating time to anything else.
Use tiles.
Conrad has been at it since ~2002, IIRC.
I didn't mind paying the $24/month to use it for running my side contracting jobs, but they seriously aren't good enough that I'd consider it worth paying double the amount for the same feature set.

EDIT: Looks like they just dropped the Basic plan from signup options, I'm still on it, Plus is now the entry level plan.
I think the speed increase comes from += creating a new string object every time, whereas << literally concatenates it.

Programming the hunches and guesses way on the HN frontpage makes me sad.

http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M000807

str + other_str => new_str

Concatenation Returns a new String containing other_str concatenated to str.

str << fixnum => str
str.concat(fixnum) => str
str << obj => str
str.concat(obj) => str

Append Concatenates the given object to str. If the object is a Fixnum between 0 and 255, it is converted to a character before concatenation.
Who's asserting it's illegal? You seem to be setting up a straw man. Google should remove it because its use is unethical, and its continued presence is an indictment of the market's legitimacy.
Geohash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

(Edit: to be more specific, you can get a pretty good distance measurement using Geohash and comparing strings. Obviously, indexing strings is something databases do well. The exact distance a single character corresponds to depends on longitude & latitude, but there are lookup tables for that. There are also edge conditions to be aware of which may affect your application)

Or, use Postgres which has geospatial indexes.
Who is Joel?
Interesting, but who wrote this? Is it a design doc for redis cluster?
the kobayashi maru isn't the impossible question itself.
The kobayashi maru here is the situation of the jerk asking you the stupid question.
Depends on who you are. If you look at my comment history, you'll find several very long comments with many, many upvotes. On the other hand, when I tried to do the "quick one line correction" thing in this thread, it didn't turn out too well! (though at least it was a nice setup for hugh3)
Our Attempt to become the Pull-to-Refresh of iPad News Apps
Definitely.

One candidate when faced with some questions on how he'll handle load said he'll switch to Oracle :) Promptly asked to leave.

Good ones clearly show that they have the ability to deal with multiple tracks of ideas, know that trade-offs need to be taken care of, in general, have an approach that with some ingenuity, almost all problems are solvable. Thats the attitude I (and I guess you too) look for.
yah its at fido. I go check every week. They have signs at every store saying "no iphone 4s" and if you call their answering service says "we do not have any iphone 4's.... <menu>"
Thanks! I have graduated already (almost a year ago) and so far so good working for my own company. We'll see when tax time comes.
The point of the Kobayashi-Maru test isn't to test whether they're capable of passing impossible tests, it's to test their character facing death. If you're choosing fellows to go to war with, you want to choose ones that won't shit their pants or otherwise make your last moments alive together awkward.
If you would like to use App Engine (great & free!), then stick with Python 2.5 for now.
> Having flash crash and bringing down my whole browser sucks.

haven't OOPPs (out of process plugins) been released since ff3.6?
You just outlined the exact reason that getting into freelancing worries me. You start out as one guy and will have to face some long hours no matter how well you plan. I know when push comes to shove, I can do it, but anyone capable of doing 80+ hours/wk for 3 or more weeks and stay productive is superhuman to me.
You can't do better than mhartls book followed by The Rspec Book (Prag prog) to fully grok this concept. You'll have an "a-ha" moment at some point.

I'm by no means an expert but feel free to hit me up and I'll see if I can help: dev@evan.co.nz
I've been teaching myself python for a while, and I just built my first Django site. It works fine in runserver, but I'm having trouble deploying it. Is anyone (OP or otherwise) willing to help me understand how to go about doing that? I could really use some help.
Great questions to ask early employees for startups.
HP may be a shell of its former self these days, but they were the prototype for Silicon Valley. Hewlett and Packard were a couple of bright engineers who parlayed a clever oscillator circuit built in a garage in Palo Alto into a billion-dollar company. They made the tools almost every engineer used. Thanks to their reputation for technical excellence and respect for their employees, HP was a dream job for many engineers. (Most famously, Steve Wozniak) The best analogy I can think of is that they were the Google of their day.

Unfortunately, being a mature company with unsexy product lines like scientific instruments wasn't popular with investors in the late '90s and the bean counters and MBA types were given free reign to strip and gut HP so that now it's little more than a marketing division for cheap, Chinese-made crap with funky bezels.
Hopefully employers have gotten wise by now that certification does not necessarily guarantee skill.
Thanks, my lifestyle changes have definitely made me feel a ton better, especially in the mornings. Hopefully that will translate into more mental acuity over the coming months as well.
Where is this 40hr number from? Is it written in the manual book for our brains? I am certain that it is cultural and does not apply identically person to person.
I hate to be that guy, but vi was written by Bill Joy at Berkeley.
Feel free to email me
"Are the 16 hour/day guys the exception?"

I sincerely hope so, and I question the hygiene/health of anyone who spends 16 hours a day > 1 day a week in front of a computer. I certainly have done 16 hour stretches of coding, but I don't think anyone can sustain that for more than a day or two and still be sane. (I think you turn into rms, which can be seen as good or bad).

The message that I would like to give you is that of quality over quantity.

First off, you don't have to be at a computer to be solving your coding problems, keep a notebook, keep them in your head, write down answers as they come. Relaxing you think about a problem probably doesn't count against your concentration hours.

Secondly, if you are banging your head against a problem, it is probably time to take a break or get help with it... There are diminishing returns from struggling with a problem.

I don't doubt that you can spend more than 40 hours a week coding, but that seems like a shitty quality of life.
Wouldn't you rather see the sun occasionally?

Wouldn't it be better for you to just work within the 40 hours, optimizing your use of them? Maybe find a way to get stuff done at work more efficiently, so you can spend more of your quota coding your side project?

It might also help to not try so hard when you are 'concentrating'. Let me explain:

I feel like if you are trying really hard, it takes more out of you mentally than if you are approaching it from a mentality of playing. Having more fun will definitely stretch your endurance for these things.

My mantra is to 'work' as little as possible to achieve my goals. So I like to turn 'work' things into puzzles/games. 'Work' is psychologically un-fun.
I'll second the positive review of "Glasshouse." The lack of knowledge portrayed in the book is also an interesting commentary on one of the often unsung evils of DRM. That license server certainly won't be running 300 years from now.
I don't know about you guys but when I go grab dinner with my philosophical-type friends, we all share a fork and knife.
Well I disagree man, this was the last release of chrome on October 19, 2010:
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/10/stable-chan... ... now Firefox, January 21st, 2010(it's been a while huh?) http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/ but is not only about the release time, look at the features, I can see more innovation in Chrome than Firefox and more faster.
There are times when jailbreaking an up-to-date iPhone is not possible, but right now the latest firmware can be rooted in a few minutes with a very simple program. It does not affect your Apple ID, iTunes association or anything other apps. It just gives you root access and installs the jailbroken app store from which you can install OpenSSH, etc.

I'm not sure if there are any trojans available, but if there were, you could easily install them and then either delete the jailbroken app store or just hide it from SpringBoard.

This process could easily be done in 10-15 minutes as long as you have physical access to the phone.
Andrey Ternovskiy on the future of Chatroulette
19/20. I've done this before because Dr Eckman's work interests me. I always misinterpret Asian smiles, for some reason.
Thanks for the pointer! This looks interesting. The edge conditions seem like they might pose a problem. I'll have to check out how often it would occur. Maybe the geospatial indexes are a better bet. It looks like MongoDB supports them also. Good excuse to try that out.
I've been through something similar, add me on skype "abinoda" if you'd like to talk.
Getting a good grasp of RVM is the most important tool in this respect. It serves a similar purpose to virtualenv and in some respects pip because it also integrates rubygems.

It also helps to have a decent grasp of git, you'll be using it a lot for installing things and getting resources from the community. Other than that, it's all personal opinion and you'll work out something that works for you soon enough.

I recommend railstutorial.org as the first and most important stop for Rails learning anyway, so you should try following his instructions for setting up an environment:

http://railstutorial.org/book#sec:rubygems

In terms of getting your app in front of the public quickly and easily, you can't look past Heroku. It has an awesome free account and you won't need to start paying until you want to either a) increase your traffic, or b) run background tasks (such as scheduled bulk emails or something like that)
Thanks. I am sorry that my question is not clear. In this case, the user enters a string s in a form and
I append that to an empty list L = [] then I test if the last saved string is the same as the new string. If same, I write it on the same column; if not the cursor moves to next column (I was trying to do this with tables) and as long as the user types the same string the cursor stays on the same column. If a new string is typed; a new column is started; and so on.

In your example, if I understand correctly; it is assumed that there is a list of 3 "Hello World"s. In reality, each should be entered and then displayed (I use Mako templates).

This looks like a simple problem but I was unable to make it work. Thanks again.
Offer HN: I'll unclog your backed-up toilet for you
Self-explanatory.
Yes, this is antirez's presentation about Redis cluster at a recent Redis meetup:
http://twitter.com/antirez/status/28939763430
Portability is important to me, and when on the move you can't find too many electrical outlets. And bringing an extra battery adds weight to my already overcrowded bag, not to mention changing it is disrupting my work.

Also, when a device consumes less, it also generates less heat. This summer got really painful to hold my Dell in my lap.

I also like to travel with public transport, but it is not fun to carry 6 lb with you especially on a crowded day.
Upvote for you. I have a Dual Core one with an AMD Neo. It works pretty well for a small machine. Probably going to install a smallish SSD in it soon. It also runs Ubuntu quite well.
If comments on my site are handled by Disqus, is it they who have to mail this form and $105, or me?
Ask HN: Who's using Yodlee?
Hello!

I'm building a personal finance app and would like to know what other companies use Yodlee.com's SDK to provide customers access to their online banking data, except Mint and InDinero?

Are there any realistic alternatives for accessing this data? I believe that building screen scrapers from scratch is not a good one.

Thank you!