skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on the project. I've spent the odd weekend starting on Friday night and finishing on Sunday morning (although that doesn't happen now with a wife).

Years back I started writing multi-format shellcode, which required me to learn 4 different OS and 3 different chip architectures to the point where I could get assembly running across all of them. That was an insane project that started out as get shellcode that worked on Linux and Freebsd/x86 and just ran and ran as I found more things to add in and tweak. Then I'd sleep through the whole of sunday and turn up for work on monday.

On the other hand I've worked on projects in my work time that are so mind numbingly dull that I've spent 4-6 hours a day actual programming, come home and collapsed in a heap.

It sounds to me like you're going past your wall and it's not flexible. You need to qualify and stick to your limits. The gym, diet and smoking side of things is a good idea, but not enough.

How's your sleep? I find that's the biggest factor in my day.
The problem, in my opinion, is that unlike Linux, recreating the important parts of Java as open source wouldn't be fun.

The issue isn't the VM, or the compilers or anything like that (which exist and _are_ open source) or the standard libraries (which IIRC are also open source as much as is possible), it's the patent portfolio and the JCK and JCP. If someone wants to fork Java, they'll have to replace the JCK to get any sort of traction.

Hackers enjoy hacking on software, not fixing compatibility test suites and setting up standards bodies. Java's dead, and it's because it's gotten to the point where it really, really needs a large player behind it, paying for lawyers and politicians (more lawyers).
I know a lot of people who had no trouble picking up an iPhone 4.

My advice is to threaten to switch carriers. They'll take care of you nice and quick.
That was sarcasm, btw ;)

My point is that thanks to Microsoft and Apple (who are both getting money from licensing H.264) we have no consistent video format and we will never have. MS and Apple will never support ogg or webm and Firefox will never support H.264 (which is the only decision they could have made from their point of view).

The dream of one consistent standard for the web that was HTML5 has been destroyed by some greedy corporations once again.
Google utilized Apache Harmony, which is a clean room implementation of Java. I guess it'd be best to read the actual complaint, and look at the code in question, but this seems to be a real shot across the bow of Apache.
If I could make a suggestion, change the box at the bottom to default to yes please instead of no thanks.
>Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

Yes, I am. Education is a diversified investment. While you will get a few negative returns (e.g. your waiters with English BAs), you will also get a handful of exceptional returns (e.g. Sergey Brin). As long as the overall ROI is positive, public education is a good thing.
My Vaio has a 143dpi screen (1920x1080 on 15.4") and applications written to take heed of my DPI setting look great, other apps do not - in particular chrome and firefox which you need to use extensions to have it remember your custom zoom settings correctly. It can get quite frustrating.
Well, let me just comment that I don't know a single line of Python, and yet I know what Django is (loosely) and have heard of it a lot.

Never heard of Pylons.
I hack on my older Asus Eee PC 1000HE. Replace the default Windows with Ubuntu UNR (10.04 edition, not 10.10 imho) or some other Linux, upgrade the RAM to the highest amount possible, and it's as snappy as a desktop workstation.
Is the offer only for Americans?
I use the nearest neighbour algorithm to solve the travelling salesman problem, when travelling to sales meetings.

I'm going to shower now. I feel dirty.
Do you know if there exists a set of template files or code for an demo iPhone UI?

I'd like to do an 'animated prototype' of my app - and Flash is definitely the solution - but it would be nice if someone has already done the basic animations (moving screens, button states, etc).
seriously the Triumpf Adler 1976 rocks. diagonal arrows - innovative!
Animation & Multimedia
These courses contain make special effects, animation, or other visual images using film, video, computers, or other electronic tools and media for use in products or creations, such as computer games, movies, music videos, and commercials.
Ah yes, the inevitable "I write my own framework" post. This completely overlooks the fact that with a well-known framework you have thousands of other developers available to help you if you should run into a problem. It also overlooks the value of not re-inventing the wheel.

> I've looked into frameworks like Django. It's not good because it abstracts away the functionality of the database.

The Django ORM is no more or less easy to do your own queries as CakePHP, Propel, Doctrine, Hibernate, or SQLAlchemy:

blogs = Blog.objects.raw('SELECT * FROM myapp_blog')
Diseased
Special Products
Hi Jon,
I'd appreciate your advices on my video startup http://videolla.com! I dont think mentioning Zencoder is spam in that topic, its great! :) Sent you email
Here's F# on OSX: http://blog.mbharrington.org/2010/10/27/fsharp-on-osx/
Ask HN: Why "offers" link is not on the top bar of news.ycombinator.com?
Why "offers" is any different from "ask" and "comments"?
Over the last 30 years bond yields have fairly steadily declined. Admittedly with variation, but the trend has been clear. However there is no way for them to decline further at this point - they can't go much below 0%. (They can go below 0%, Treasuries did briefly during the crisis, but not by much.) Furthermore in the last 30 years we've seen the broad expansion of bond categories like junk bonds and securitized bonds. This has resulted in great growth in the bond market, and it simply doesn't have room to grow by that much again. (Indeed fallout from the subprime debacle is likely to make it shrink going forward.)

Prior to that the advent of increasing inflation rates winding up with stagflation did constitute, from the point of the bond market, a long and nasty bear market.
Yes, but not by "dreams" in the abstract sense of something you wish will happen, but by actual dreams, in the fantasy sense of something talking to you in your sleep.
> I want dialogue! I want mutual reinforcement! I want to comment and be commented upon! I want community, in other words.

Long rant, but pleasant read.

This thought sprung up: On-demand reinforcement, the kind that one would get just by asking for it, makes us dumb, like kids lavished with "positive feedback". But, as a tool that helps us align our goals with our motivations, when nurtured in a community, could deal with the causes of procrastination.
It wasn't Google who made the decision to use Java. What we today know as Android OS was developed by Android, Inc (purchased by Google in 2005). Android, Inc. was led by Andy Rubin and their technology was essentially the same as the technology used in his previous startup, Danger Inc, started in 2002.

Decision to use Linux for the kernel and Java as a language for user space programs was therefore made in 2002 and at the time it was a very sensible decision.

V8 was released 6 years later and even today JavaScript is extremely bare bones as a language and wrt. to base libraries (only recently there has been a push to standardize on basic things like file support, modules etc.).

As such JavaScript is not capable enough to write many kinds of programs one would like to write. Not today and definitely not in 2002.

Additionally, Dalvik Java VM in Android is much better tuned for constrained, low memory, low power mobile devices than V8, which was designed for desktop class computer. Technically it's a better solution for the target devices than V8.
I usually don't post comics, but this fits too well:

http://xkcd.com/287/

That's what I use my CS degree for :)
Well I've been using Firefox since back when it was called phoenix. :P Not that that's even remotely relevant.

Chrome is my default browser but FF 4 is a worthy contender. Using FF 3.5 seems like taking a step back in time, but FF 4 feels very fast, responsive, and is more usable than ever. When it's released it'll put Firefox back in the game.
I can't even do 40 anymore. When I was in my twenties I did about 4 years of 60 hours a week but those days are over.
Thanks for the great offer.

Our website is http://www.longlongago.in an online library for children's books. Two of our common questions are (esp. new users to computers) is how it works, what plans you have. Of course both the information are available in home page! So our design is not reaching out to all users. Would be happy to see a redesign. Thanks.
That's a great idea. I've thought of writing something like that myself, but with a focus on learning Django (for people who already know Python.)

Do you think there is any interest in such an ebook?
I agree completely. This site should be about hacking and startups, not about politics.
Vienna was a total 'woah' city for me. The history, the culture the beauty of that city is amazing. I remember feeling like my head was swimming the few days I was there. For me it was easily the most beautifully amazing city in Europe. I am so jealous that you live there!
> linear relationship between bad weather and increasing ADHD diagnoses

bad weather != sedentary inactivity

That linear relationship could just as easily be due to something like vitamin D deficiency, SAD, environmental factors of growing up in such an environment, etc.
That was true, but I think they have hired extensively since then.
Thanks for all the answers. He has already emailed me a very simple Python program. I think he's on his way.
and Barbara Boxer is, along with her fellow foolish democrats and republicans, destroying the American Way. I guess they're even steven.
I don't think that the analogy has to be considered in the context of a monogamous relationship. Marriage has not always been monogamous -- in fact, almost exclusively in the Western Christian tradition has marriage been considered exclusively monogamous, most other cultures have allowed polygamous marriages.

From that context, the headline makes better sense -- you are not necessarily considering Python as the only tool in your toolbox, but as something that is worth taking home and making a life with, i.e., using Python as a mainstay in your professional life.

Python, like all programming languages, has its shortcomings, you are right. But potential wi(fe|ves) have shortcomings too -- in this mortal sphere, nothing is perfect, but we can't let that paralyze us.
Don't worry, you're normal.

I've wondered the same thing a LOT. What I've discovered is that you can only push yourself so much (although it's more than many people believe), and that there are limits on how long you can spend focusing on one (type of) thing.

Also check this out: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/242985/rules_of_productivity.pdf

It's called "Laws of Producitivity: 8 Productivity Experiments You Don't Need to Repeat" and it's exactly what it says it is. Very interesting; I forget where I originally discovered it.

My advice is to keep pushing yourself, but don't sweat it if you don't improve over night.
The problem is that Ballmer, like Yang, doesn't actually know what he's trying to say.
I usually code around 5 hours at work. About an hour is spent getting coffee/lunch or just stretching, another hour at scrums or the occassional meeting, another couple in discussions around desks.

At home, when I'm actually working on a project (ie. not work related) it usually goes from 2 hours to 4 or 5, if it's a weekend I might spend a whole evening on it, otherwise I save my nights for relaxing, playing a game, going out etc.

All in all, it's probably more than 40 hours a week; around 55, I'd say. I'm kind of trying to reduce it though, maybe hit the gym 3-4 times a week again, or just find a hobby. :-)
What would Milton Friedman do now?
i work with asp classic and that wont be thrown away in the next 10+ years.
This is fantastic.

The early web is a treasure trove of an interesting time in history. It was the first time average people could just write public documents to express themselves.

Naturally the pages were terrible, covered in things that look good the first time you see it, pointless opinions and personal shrines to obscure relics of pop-culture.

The web is still the same, but more everyday. Companies work day and night to have a web presence, and "using the internet" is synonymous with replying to status and 'liking' things.

Geocities, AOL Homepages, and tripod are landmarks of the first time in history someone could just make a page about themselves, or something they liked and _anyone_ could see it. It was society making paintings on caves.

Unfortunately, these sites don't produce revenue, and never will, so from a corporate point of view, they are worthless.

The early era of the web is like trying to find rare music. Of course there is a modern site, a torrent, or some convenient way to find most of what you want. What you find is at best, the same thing everyone else finds. The old web is full of non-technical people earnestly trying to make something, not a startup, not to sell a book, just trying to put something together which is largely lost in the ease of "List your favorite bands"

Not that it was better, or more insightful, simply that it is a huge body of primitive work that is unlikely to be recreated. These things should be stored, if for no other reason than we can see the bloviated opinions of mensans, the C-style poetry of 90's sysadmins, or just the insane ramblings of people who think like Gene Ray, but don't have the perseverence to keep up timecube.

The sites are a labor of love, no matter the revenue, and it annoys me to no end that AOL or Yahoo has the power to simply delete these old sites because they don't make business sense, to businesses that don't even know what they are doing.

Anyway, as someone who mirrored a few old HomePages and Geocities sites, and backs up pieces of the old internet whenever I can find them, this is a breath of fresh air.
Hack An Email Account
Learn How To Hack,The Hacker's Underground Handbook,Learn Hacking,How To Hack
Quicksort is great when you have to sort people by birthday.
I said back in the day HP should have hired Catherine Keener just to play the CEO, and I was right.
Microsoft to H/W Manufacturers: You Choose Android? Now Pay Us
Except .. in mainstream media where a hacker is someone who do digital breaking and entering.
I have used Pylons extensively, but not Django. I really prefer Pylons's packaging and methodology. Django seems more like a "classical" web framework where everything is included and much has been reinvented. Since my exploration in programming is often a matter of personal taste (i.e., not forced by employer to learn something very often), I have not really spent much time with Django as that style of framework does not mesh with my preferences.

That said, I have recently been tinkering with a Satchmo cart. I am under the impression that Django apps that utilize the Django backends can be converted into plugins for other Django apps with trivial or near-trivial effort, and that gives Django-based applications a lot of power, because if both Satchmo and some Django-based forum use the Django admin and user database, I can plug in or replace forums really easily without creating a bunch of extra overhead for my users. That is very appealing to me, and the first reasonable use of a "big" framework (like Django, Rails, or Cake) as far as I am concerned. It has encouraged me to explore Django/Pinax more thoroughly.
I wouldn't chalk all of The West Wing's success with an unusual recipe up to Sorkin. Martin Sheen, IMHO, does an amazing job in his role, which (also IMHO) is pivotal to the recipe, and I can't imagine any other actor pulling it off so well.
Currently living in Europe and having visited many of the European cities, I find Vienna to the best among them too. This is a really generous offer and one could save a lot of money.
Read the NLTK book available online for free here: http://nltk.org

The nltk tools them-selves might not always be state of the art (e.g. compare with the java libs from the NLP dept in Stanford) but at least you will get to know all the major concepts.

Other interesting book, although not completely finished yet: http://www.manning.com/ingersoll/ Taming Text by Grant Ingersol, Thomas Morton and Drew Farris involved in the Apache Lucene / Mahout and OpenNLP communities.
Agreed. Infact you could say that that's what a CEO does.
The goverment should be there to protect its citizen and provide a framework for justice without fees. This fee does not provide any form of function except being an income source for the government and lawyers and a tax on the people wanting to produce and invent.
When I got to the meowing cats in the music video I knew I had to have a copy of the book. :-) Congrats!
You need to read a book called Bill & Dave ( http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/... ). Seriously.

Everything good about Silicon Valley is owed to that company, and to its founders. It's impossible to place Fiorina's actions in any sort of context until one understands that.
Using IDEs with netbook is not really good experience: screen area is just too small for having all components on screen same time and you cannot help noticing that modern IDEs do need way too much resources to be smooth on such tiny machine. Netbooks cannot really be used like normal laptops: usually there is no other option than programs fullscreen, which in practise means you need virtual desktops. This effectively throws windows to the bin, but if that is not problem for you.. go ahead and get one. Just make sure you test it beforehand, many netbooks still have horrible keyboards!

Lately I have been doing most of my developing on netbook using vim and must say I love it. There is no performance problems with any scripting languages, not even while having mysql + rails/cakephp on. Only problem is compiling bigger projects when doing c/c++, but that isn't problem if you have access to box with more power like you suggested.

My own machine is Samsung n140, although my config is not the most usual one: stripped down arch + xmonad. Battery life while using wlan is from 10 to 14 hours. The reason why I ended to this particular machine is combination of awesome battery life + really nice keyboard, one of the best I have found from any laptop. Minus side is kinda low quality HDD which blew up quite fast, but I use this machine only on battery power with agressive spindowning and load count jumps into sky fast which can explain.
Sidejacking 48 popular sites - Complete list
in part they seem to be claiming copyright on the java api. is that possible?

some other examples come to mind: wine's implementation of the windows api, various unices/linux implementing the unix api (but maybe there's some waiver here?), and so on.
* You can just as easily say that having your baby sleep in a crib runs the risk of you having purchased a 'defective' crib that will kill your baby and spawn a recall.

* You can easily say that putting your baby in another room runs the risk of something happening to your baby in the other room that you either can't hear, or can't get there fast enough to do anything about.

* Your baby can just as easily die from SIDS in a crib as they can in your bed, and SIDS is probably a larger risk than you rolling over on your baby (as long as your don't go to bed after drugs and/or alcohol).

> this risk/reward ratio is horrible

Please tell me what the risk/reward ratio is.

> In the case of cars we accept the risk in exchange for our lifestyle
> (going to work, go to buy food etc) so this is an acceptable
> trade-off for most people

Most people don't do risk/reward ratios. What is the risk/reward ratio of the majority of the populous zooming around in personal automobiles as opposed to pooling resources for effective (and well-maintained) public transit? In many of the places where public transit languished while automobile usage took off it had far more to do with the prestige of owning a car. Using public transit meant you were poor, but having a car (or multiple cars!) was a status symbol. Why do you think that you can find extremely 'pimped out' cars in the drive-ways of houses that are falling apart in places like Detroit? Why do I get teenagers/20-somethings (infrequently) yelling things like, "I got wheels baby! WHoooo!" (or similar) when I'm walking along a busy street? The car is a status symbol a hell of a lot more than it is a utility device (do you really need to drive 5 blocks to the store to pick up beer and drive back home?)
Seems to me that quite a few tough choices need to be made in DC and I don't recall Boxer making any that didn't involve wasting vast sums of money.
Did you get in on any rare earths stocks before China's embargo?

What's your take on them, do you think they've peaked or still skyward from here? A couple stocks I was looking at only a month ago have already doubled (RES.V, HUD.V)
It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Hewlett and Packard were the Romulus and Remus of their day. They didn't build a company, they built an idea.
The Future of Cloud Hosting | Cloud Business Review
Might hit the road in december.. Hope this is not only for americans :)
Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/) is really good at geo/spatial searches on MySQL data

Example: http://www.god-object.com/2009/10/20/geospatial-search-using...
I always keep the Dock hidden, even on my 2560x1440 iMac. I launch applications from Spotlight¹ and switch between them by +tab.

About the widescreen aspect ratio – I'm fine with it. Feels more natural. A 4:3 screen looks like a square. I don't have square vision.

Then again, it's true that less than 800 pixels of vertical space feels somewhat cramped, and purely for web browsing / reading, 4:3 makes sense, and 3:4 would make even more sense. Personally I do much more and the widescreen is better all-around compromise. Two fingers + inertia makes scrolling pretty enjoyable.

¹) Quick enough on SSD'd machines, otherwise a bit slow. Luckily I rarely launch apps. I just keep tons of stuff running in different Spaces.
I tend to spend ~40 hours coding and rest designing/discussions and run to clear my mind. It just wouldn't work if I code all the time.
Has anyone come across any opensource/community attempts to build a set of financial site scrapers? It seems like an area where such an approach might flourish.
The true mistake is the one you do not correct.

Testing and code review should give you the opportunity to do so, among others.
Also, there's always a trade off between bullet proof and time to market.
Beware, coordinates are not always expressed in the same referencial (geoid, ellipsoid, etc.).