skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> why do I want everybody to know where I am and what I'm doing?

Why do you want people to know how much you weigh?(http://twitter.com/jamesfelixblack/status/28034592562)

Why do you want people to know that you prefer an immutable style of programming? (http://twitter.com/jamesfelixblack/status/27850952929)

Why do you want people what indie rock bands you are into right now (http://twitter.com/jamesfelixblack/status/27713440042)

The answer (at least as I see it) is that in isolation each of these particular items don't carry much meaning. But in aggregate, if I'm a friend of yours I can get a lot of value out of your twitter stream. It's a quick and easy way to keep up with the random comings & goings of your life. It's an easy way for you to share these things with your circle of friends.

It's the same thing with where you are and what you're doing. Maybe you check in at a fancy restaurant and then someone sends you a quick text telling you that a particular dish is a must order. Maybe you check in at the movies saying you're seeing the new James Bond and then someone asks you about it the next day. Maybe you check in at a bar after work and a friend you haven't seen in a while stops by to say hello. Each checkin (like a tweet) is a small look into your life that you've chosen to share with your friends. Individually, they aren't so useful, but in aggregate it adds up.

And it gets even bigger if you are part of a medium to large sized community of people all using foursquare. I like to tell people it's a little bit like telepathy. Foursquare lets me know that when my buddies get tired and go home, I can pop over the the place a couple blocks over and meet up with another crew over there. Foursquare gives me a snapshot of nearly everything going on in my "social universe" right now. It makes it easier to connect, more often, with all of my friends.

-harryh, foursquare
Still some roughness with their data, it is showing me listing from Sacramento and Vallejo as in SF.
This is the program/code alexweber is referring too:

http://www.cacti.net/
We're running nginx proxying to Apache/mod_wsgi on RHEL. I've heard from the Parsely guys that they got their memory usage waaaay down by skipping Apache and just using the nginx equivalent of mod_python - I seem to remember that they weren't sure how well it would scale, though.
silicon valley is way cheaper than SF, but it's much less friendly to people who don't have cars. If you live near a caltrain and you work for a major corporation, you can probably get away with not having a car (most major companies have company shuttles that go to the caltrain) but it will put a crimp in your social activities.

Silicon Valley is essentially suburb. You can pay as much as you want on the high end... on the low end, a room in a house or shared appartment in the "poor" parts of Santa Clara or Sunnyvale might be $650/month.

the upside, here, is that things near the train stops are generally cheaper. I rented a 2bed 1bath apartment right over the Lawrence express way caltrain in santa clara for $1250/month total ($625 per person.)

If you want to live alone, the low end is $800-$1000.

The interesting thing about the valley is that I don't know of any neighbourhoods south of east palo alto and north of San Jose that I'd feel uncomfortable walking around in at night. And most of San Jose is pretty okay, too, so don't be afraid of the low end.

Food? in the grocery store, as far as I can tell, it costs about the same as anywhere. If you go out to eat, well, fast food is about as cheap as it is elsewhere. If you want to eat at local non-chains, you are looking at $8-$15 per meal, which is a bit more, I think, than most places.

If I were moving here for the social scene, personally, I'd get a cheap shared room close to the hacker dojo in mountain view.
one idea I had - You're in an airport bar - watching tv (usually sports). Why can't they customize the crawl at the bottom of the screen to show flight status?
That would hurt us all as consumers.
> The parent says it's $20/mo off for no-contract

Looks like this changed recently; when I signed up it was $80/month for the subsidized-phone full voice+data plan and $40/month for no-contract data-only.
He's certainly "passionate".

http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/23386/
...because real software startups involve a bit less drinking-while-coding than you might think from watching The Social Network?
Silicon Valley gains jobs year over year for the first time in almost two years
When I took my assembly language course back in college, the teacher graded us by comparing the size of our solution to his solution and assessing a penalty for every extra byte we wasted, so we couldn't do things like that. You also got no partial credit for non-working solutions.

That said, I did read the manual and figured out how to make my solution call his solution, but I couldn't use that because the TAs were smarter than that and the teacher was very interested in anyone who could beat his solutions by even one byte.
This is very unique, however empirically it may not perform well. In the end, it has the same attribute as two fields, except that instead of tabbing to the next you hit space.

Is it worth the change in paradigm for this small benefit? I guess only A/B testing will tell.
In my experience usually those are in complexes and they give a price range, but the $1200 is actually for the one bedrooms.
Anyone who thinks there is a ghetto part of mountain view is, uh, way more wealthy and has much higher standards than I do. I mean, there are "less good" parts of mountain view, but there isn't anything even close to ghetto.
Collectd + Visage (http://github.com/auxesis/visage)
Monit + Monit Aggregator (http://github.com/mattfawcett/monit-aggregator)

I've hacked on both a bit, but they're great starts for small clusters.
At least for Google, Facebook (and MySpace) and Groupon, their products became popular because of how they implemented it, not because of what they built.

Making a better product, successfully, is what sets apart clones from revolutionaries.
I live in Mt View and go to the city about once a week.

I take Caltrain ($6 each way) to the city but you can't stay too late. The last train from SF leaves at around midnight. It would suck if you miss it because a taxi would probably cost you $100.

There is an excellent coworking space in Mt View - Hacker Dojo which is $100 a month. I used to live in SF but I prefer being in Mt View since it's cheaper and for me, safer. Also, you don't have to deal with parking.

Not having a car might be a pain though. Get a bike at least.

By the way, hit me up (danny -at- launchset.com). My cofounder and I are in Buenos Aires for the next 3 weeks.
Where is the Global Interpreter Lock in Ruby?
Not to rub it in, but this is one of those cases where a bit of intuition will get you a lot further than a calculation. Is it plausible that a 2 ton vehicle travelling at 40 mph is equivalent to 70 kg of TNT?

Think about the damage done by a crashing minivan. Enough to bend some metal, maybe even knock down a small brick wall. But a 70 kg TNT bomb would easily blow the car into many pieces.

Alternatively, how much fuel does it take to accelerate your van from a standstill to 40 mph? A tiny fraction of a litre, which is why you could do it hundreds of times on a tank of gas. Is that tiny fraction of a litre of gasoline going to be energetically equivalent to 70 kg of TNT?
This is kind of a vague question. Do you mean "is the keyboard good enough to type on"? Do you mean "is it good for me to stare down at a weird angle for 8 hours a day"? Do you mean "is it easy to upgrade the hardware when I want to"?

If that's what you mean, no laptop is going to be acceptable. Laptop keyboards are crap. Laptop ergonomics are crap. Laptop expandability is crap.

If the question is, "does Ruby run on 2.13GHz dual core machines", the answer is yes.

I like to work from not-my-desk once in a while, so I have a small netbook for that. But honestly, it's so much nicer to work at a properly ergonomic workspace that I rarely do this -- only for hackathons and the like. If I am by myself, I am in front of a proper workstation.

(I also don't like the "well, just ssh from your laptop to a server" approach that others are mentioning. I can feel the latency. If I run Emacs over ssh or X to another machine, I notice the key lag. If I edit files on a remote file system, I feel the latency for operations like "git status" and even saving. Perhaps I am just very picky.)
I'd like to have a mechanical-switch keyboard someday; unfortunately most of the ones I've seen (including the ones in this article) tend to be full-size 104-key keyboards, while my tastes tend toward smaller keyboards like the Happy Hacker keyboard (which is excellent but uses rubber-dome switches).

Right at the moment I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad USB keyboard because it's a smallish keyboard with a built-in trackpoint device (one less reason to ever leave the home row). If it wasn't for the trackpoint, however, I'd be back on the HHKB - I like the layout more and I seem to have less trouble finding the arrow keys by feel.

Since they don't make HHKB keyboards any more, I suspect my next keyboard might very well be an Apple USB mini-keyboard - it's got the layout I like, it's small and light, and I suspect I could get used to the key-switches soon enough...
Ask HN: Do you use an antivirus on your mac dev machine?
I've not been using one for ages and have had no visible problems. Of course, I don't know about the problems I can't see. So I thought it right to ask you all, since many of you use macbookpros as your dev machine, going by what I read.
Average inuit lifespan is about 45 years - however, that means they had a higher life expectancy than we did before we surpassed them. So the extremely cold environment does seem to help (although you just won't get me there :)

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-...
I found this tutorial that did a great job explaining it:

http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-el...

The icons are from FAMFAM: http://famfamfam.com/
From a personal point of view, I've been using keyboard buttons to navigate through forms for so many years (tab to go to next field, space to tick/untick a checkbox, etc.) that it wouldn't save me any time.

From the point of view of more generic computer users (such as my mother), I wouldn't think learning to type a space would be any easier than learning to hit tab, and would probably just cause confusion, due to the fact that different websites use different formats.
Just wanted to say that this was just one of many great presentations at the Clojure/conj!

* Christophe Grand's gave a fantastic presentation called
(not= DSL macros) http://vrac.cgrand.net/DSL.pdf (PDF).
* Zachary Tellman's lightning talk on Aleph was eye-opening
(evented programming using sequence abstractions!).
* Alex Miller's preso on extending zipper functionality to records,
http://tech.puredanger.com/2010/10/22/zippers-with-records-in-clojure/
* Chris Houser's finger trees adds a useful new persistent data structure
to Clojure's arsenal http://github.com/Chouser/talk-finger-tree/tree/

Rich Hickey gave a particularly provoking talk that directly attacks our programming culture that focuses too much on rapid iteration, immediate tactics, and testing. He argues strongly for considered design, deep contemplation, thorough research, and most importantly working without a computer (preferably lying in a hammock :)
ADSafe — a “safe” subset of JavaScript for guest code (e.g. 3rd party ads)
Because I hadn't heard of it 'til now :-).

Will _definitely try this out. Thanks!
Google Headquarters.

Diverse list of excellent restaurants (Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, etc.)

No heavy traffic

Low crime rate

Lots of startups especially on Castro st.

Warmer by a few degrees than SF

Hacker Dojo

Sunday Farmers Market

Yeah, it's depressing.
Does anyone have experience and/or info regarding how the Air would compare to the 15 and 17 inch MBPs for more design-oriented (I'm leaving that vague on purpose) work? It's hard to find definitive display specs, so it's hard to anticipate what color accuracy and response times would be like.
The HHKB is very much still in production (mine just arrived last week), though it can be hard to get one in the US. I ordered mine from http://elitekeyboards.com.

My HHKB is replacing a 16 year-old Apple Extended Keyboard. It's definitely not as click-clacky as a buckling spring keyboard, but it's much easier on my wrists (and doesn't wake people up when I'm hacking at night).
You can definitely get a decent room in a 2-3 person apartment in Astoria (Queens) for $700/month. It's not Chelsea but it's not quite the middle of nowhere either.
I've seen one bedrooms occasionally for $850 and with some regularity for $900 on craigslist. I don't know what else to tell you. Good luck.
This is an interesting followup as well: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1808082/
Ethernet is not as fast? I wonder why?
I don't understand. What is a "proper workstation" ?

In my home office I have a MBP w/ a Microsoft Ergonomic Elite Keyboard w/ one 24 inch Cinema display (Apple) and one 19 inch flatscreen. I also use an Intellimouse.

As far as I can tell, that's the best of both worlds. Take the MBP on the road when you need to; stay cozy at home all the rest of the time.
Sony Vaio VGN-FZ38M battery 
Sony Vaio VGN-FZ38M battery
Type:	Li-ion
Capacity:	5200 mAh, 8800 mAh, 10400 mAh,
Volt:	11.1 V
Size:	209.90 x 47.50 x 20.40 mm
Color:	Silver
$ 89.33
http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgn-fz38m-battery.htm
I have some problems with this.

1) It's unfamiliar, and this will slow people down. While this is not a major issue, compared to the rest, it may certainly increase support costs, which may not be allowable if you're working on Enterprise software with a huge userbase.

2) It would require a nonstandard UI widget in order to display the username in cleartext while hiding the password in the same field. If you're designing for the web, this means you're messing with people on mobile devices, which are a fast-growing segment of the population.

3) If space is the delimiter for username/password, it means that you can't use space in your username. I HATE when you can't use space in your username and possibly in your password, depending upon on how well-designed and well-followed your spec is and becomes. For one, I prefer having my username as "Dan Hulton", not "DanHulton", though that's a minor quibble. More importantly, more entropy is more better, and allowing people to use spaces in their usernames/passwords encourages the use of passphrases, which are LEAGUES better than passwords.

Also, having separate warnings for your username and password matches is a bad security practice. Best to just say "username/password combination not found" instead of letting a potential hacker know he's stumbled upon a valid username.
If you are new to mechanical keyboards, I recommend a Cherry Brown-based keyboard. They have a great tactile feel that quickly trains you to recognize that a key is typed without having to bottom out.

I prefer the Topre switches, but the tactile bump is very subtle and if you do not consciously make the effort to not bottom out (initially), you will. And then it's just a very very expensive rubber-dome keyboard.

(The reason you use mechanical keyboards is so that you don't have to bottom out -- slam your fingers against an unyielding piece of plastic thousands of times a day. If you don't realize that and treat your mechanical keyboard like a $3 rubber-dome keyboard, then you are not going to get the comfort that they are supposed to provide. Rubber dome keyboards are bad because the keys only register when you bottom out, forcing you to hurt your hands in order to produce any text.)

Also, if you've used a Model M and hated it, it's because it's bad. You have to apply quite a bit of force to the keys (80g, compared to 35g on a Realforce), and that can be painful. Model Ms make a really fucking cool sound and are built like tanks, but they are otherwise not particularly special. I used to use one, but after switching to a HHKB, I could not go back.

Finally, clicky keyboards are really cool, but the Cherry Browns ("tactile") are a lot easier to type on than the Cherry Blues ("clicky"). I am not really sure why, but the Browns feel "sandpapery" (try it and see) when they register, but the Blues just make a loud noise. The rough feeling is much easier to recognize while typing than the sound, IMHO.

If you can, try each type before buying, but if you can't, forget about clicky and go for Brown. If you like the Cherry Brown-based keyboard but want something higher quality and slightly more ergonomic, then make the step up to the Realforce.
Never going down in a database doesn't just mean that it doesn't have downtime, it also means that as a whole system it's immune to bad queries.

Bad queries can destroy you in MySQL, if you are doing dynamically created queries that hit un-optimized areas, it can bring down all the other queries too.

I'd typically use Memcache with MySQL too, so there isn't any real difference in that case.

One use case I like SimpleDb for is for small scripts that need a very simple data store.
Segments of The Communist Manifesto were required reading for one first-year philosophy course I took.
I have this awesome ninja mask thing (which I wear while bike commuting in Boston in winter); it's perfect for keeping your face warm and doesn't impede your hearing:

http://www.rei.com/product/731408
Newer generations of SSD's have a command called "TRIM". It is meant as a way to speed up SSD drives by alerting the drive to blocks that are no longer in use by the file system and can be pre erased so to speak which makes future writes to that location faster. Windows 7 and newer versions of the Linux kernel support it.
Right, but there's no way to upgrade your hardware with that setup. Want a RAID-1 array? Too bad. Want a new CPU? Too bad.

And it costs more than a desktop + netbook combo.
What did a teenager get out of attending Startup School?
Find a place near Castro street in MV, and you will be in walking distance of pretty much anything you'd need. As an added bonus you can walk to the train station and can easily travel up or down the peninsula on Caltrain or VTA light rail.
A lot of BS. This article is more about things that will start dying in 10-20 years, but are still very much used right now: Blu-Ray, credit card, combustible engines, etc. Not worth reading.
HTML and CSS character encodings [Tutorial]
I have an old IBM Model M with the buckling spring switches and it's the greatest thing in the world to type on. It's loud, but it feels so good. My typing accuracy and speed have both improved greatly since I switched to it.

I dug it out of the back of a storage building a couple of summers ago. The sticker on the bottom says it was made in 1986. It works flawlessly, and with the help of an old tooth brush and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, it looks as good as the day it was made.
We tried using SimpleDB initially for a startup. We store a lot of numerical data. When it came time to actually query this data and do anything meaningful with it we ran into a lot of issues because all values are stored as untyped strings (comparison and ordering is always lexicographic). There are ways around this using zero-padding, but they are ugly and difficult. The SimpleDB query language is also limiting if you are accustomed to SQL and relational data structures. In the end it just wasn't the right fit and we reverted to an RDBMS.
Adobe Releases a HTML5 Video Player (with Flash fallback)
HHKB Professional keyboards are not rubber-dome keyboards. They do use rubber domes to provide tactile feedback, but the actual switch mechanism is capacitive.

The reason rubber-dome keyboards are bad is because you have to bottom-out to get the key to register. Topre switches (which is what the HHKB and Realforce keyboards use) do not have this problem.

Also, HHKBs are very much still in production.
Related: Google Caja, Google's own project that compiles JS source into safe, capability-restricted JS source: http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/
I get the opposite feelings every time I see a presentation 'given' in 'scribd'.
I think they also still use hall-effect keyboards on airplanes. (Unfortunately, they use an "ABCDE..." layout!)
Improper technique can make any mechanical keyboard feel like a rubber-dome keyboard.
Get a human on the phone really fast:

http://gethuman.com/
Ask HN: Multiprocessing & concurrency: C, Python, Clojure (& Go :))?
I've never looked into Clojure so far (sorry :) but how does this compare to OpenMP(I)? Or even with Python's parallel processing capacities? How much would performance difference vs. implementation ease be between a C MPI and Clojure parallel processing implementation? Or how would Clojure's MP libraries compare to Python's multiprocessing.JoinableQueue and Manager? Would it be worth considering learning Clojure? And, yes, I know I should learn a new language per year, but then I would at least like to know how it compares to Go - as I am considering that because of the channels, but I now often hear Clojure named alongside Go for exactly those reasons.

So, just from the MPI perspective: Clojure, maybe Go, and Python or C(++), what are you using and why?
Hmm... elitekeyboards.com only seems to have the HHKB Professional 2... the one I have is a "HHKB Lite 2", which (in a strange inversion of the usual hierarchy) includes an extra Fn key on the left and an inverted-T arrow-key cluster.

I realise using arrow keys is heresy to a certain subset of the programming community, but I've been using them for decades and it's hard to give them up.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

"In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, 'A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected'. This was true in 1996, and is still true now."
Secure delete is not reliable with modern filesystems. Just use full-disk encryption -- it's free.
I suspect 3rd party password managers and such similar features native to browsers would not cope well with this single input login form.

I also wonder about the accessibility issues that would be inherent. JS would seem to be a large part of getting this solution to function and that can be an issue for screen reader users for example.

My instinctual reaction is to think that this is a solution that causes more problems than it solves. But none the less, I like it when people challenge the status quo and propose something new. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't but if no one ever did this, where would we be?
Don't you mean a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
This can be circumvented by taking a used popcorn out of the trash, and taking it to be refilled. They're not dirty at all.
For some reason I was reminded of this blog post:

http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out
It says right below the video that it's a comedy sketch.

"his video is a teaser for our new comedy screenplay about what it means to be a little guy in the land of giants. This is our Christmas gift to the working class."