skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah let's put it this way. Say school has no vacations so they used to get 52 sales a year, in which of course the clubs with a precedent of needing more money took precedence. Now say they now get 104, or hell... 156 sales a year because of the change in rules. Let's say that clubs that needed money took 80% of the days (this not changing in the worst case scenario), leaving 10 or 11 days for the rest of the clubs before, the remaining sales for this other clubs increases to 21 or 32 respectively.

The only way that the chess club was going to take away sales from the other clubs is if their percentage of sales increases, and even then it would have to increase beyond a threshold where it started eating up the extra days beyond the original sales the other clubs where having.

Sure it could be the case that other clubs where missing out, but it is very much more probable that everyone was benefiting from the chess club 'hack'.

Besides, you could argue that if your club does nothing to take at least some advantage of the relaxed rules it's the other clubs' fault, not the chess club's. In the end the clubs profited, the members profited, and the businesses that provided the food profited. This is a good compromise if X club didn't get much benefits after all.
I've largely given up trying to optimize my shopping time, but I do find the subject interesting. I'd be interested in seeing the effect of the (to me intuitively superior) one line, many cashiers setup, like at Fry's. I realize supermarkets make a boatload of cash from the geegaws sold in line that you hounded your parents into buying you as a kid, but I can't help but think that the many lines/many cashiers setup is less an optimal setup and more an artifact of some Lionel Hutz type who sold the cabal of Evil Grocery Barons a bag of magic beans in the 1960's.

As usual, I am too lazy to go look it up for myself. Back to hacking.
Yep. It's much harder to mess things up when you use regular expression.

Between C, Python and Jython, I don't think there's a single reason left to use Java.
similar story here. and i wish they stayed with Postabon. think that name and logo/style had more personality.
I love Post-Its. I would recommend using different colors to denote the various priority levels of your to-do items.
Do you really need wire transfers, or would ACH transactions suffice? Wires generally have a fairly significant fee schedule associated with them.
Article about politics.
Instead of picking the fastest lane, it would in principle be faster to distribute all your items across all the lanes. That way, you minimize the time from you are first in line until you are checked out.

Consider the problem of optimizing the response time of a set of servers. Load balancing - keeping the hardware busy - will keep the request queues at roughly equal and therefore minimize the maximum queue length. That ensures that the hardware is as busy as possible, but you can improve on that.

When a new request arrives, you can either add all of that request to one queue, or you can split it into pieces and distribute those across all the queues. Distributing the request, assuming perfect load balancing, means the latency for that request will be k + 1/n instead of k + 1, where k is the length of the queue.

In other words: Parallelizing gets you a substantial improvement in response time without additional hardware, and without making the code run any faster. I didn't realize the implications of this until recently.
Yep. And they just keep getting better the further into the series you go.

It was a shame to hear about his Alzheimer's. His work will be sorely missed.
the old "it's possible to own an idea or pattern in nature" thing. i love that. patents -- oh how I hate thee, let me count the ways.
Got a link for the tech cluster going through murder mile statement? I only saw mentions of "East London" and "Olympic Park".

Also, having lived in murder mile, I don't really see how it's unsafe nowadays. Definitely sucked with regards transport though. Only so many night buses one wants to take in life =)
My latest reading list:

* Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

* Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl. This one was very good. Psychology can actually be logical and accessible.
thank you for sharing.
When you say wire transfers, do you mean international wire transfers or domestic ACH transactions? For the latter, there are a few companies that provide electronic ACH processing & an API.

The biggest problem that you'll face is not actually moving the money, but complying to anti-money laundering regulations and the like.

That said, we're building a banking service with an API. We've done the hard work. I'd love to know more about your use case to see if we can help.
Thanks Adamgedde I support the community of hackers everywhere. And especially to lose such a towering figure within our community it's definitely painful.

condolences to the family.
send me an email, i know a few pro chefs and can knock an idea around for you
Apu is giving Marge contradictory advice.

The old guy ("Grampa" Abraham Simpson) is in fact also a single guy.
I live and work out of two houses and offices. One in Seattle and one in SF. Less than 100 people. I used to be a consultant... if you've never done it I recommend all devs to spend some time doing it.

The listed salaries in ads are just for where to start negotiations at :-)

In any case, if your start up does well, but not so well that you can retire like Brin & Page (exit w/ say $3-5M) you'll find that higher paying offers tend to come a fair bit easier.

I couldn't tell from your page (or I just missed it), what does your start up do?
i think the pitch for tumblr and posterous versus wordpress blogger, etc. is that they were designed from the start to be social.
It's expected that you let the person who's been waiting the longest move there. That's why you'll hear the new cashier say "I can help the next person in line." I consider hopping over from the back of a line to be very rude.
And yet, the best beer in the country comes from Kalamazoo, Michigan.

http://www.bellsbeer.com/
But priority is already determined by location, highest priority to lowest, top to bottom, and left to right. I'm still unsure of what to use colors for.
Fastest doesn't always matter in a grocery check-out lane. Look for the cashier who appears to be a Mom. She's the one who won't crush the bread or put the big jar of spaghetti sauce on top of the egg carton at the last minute.

Besides, the better item to optimize when grocery shopping is the actual shopping experience. While you may spend five minutes in a check-out line, you may spend an hour or more shopping. Nicking a minute out of the check-out experience is irrelevant if you just wasted five minutes zig-zagging through the store for multiple items (traveling salesman problem) or if you made a couple calls back home to find out if you were out of ____ or needed ____, a time issue that is magnified if you forgot something and need to return to the store before your normal (optimized) shopping trip.
However, there are two particular design choices that increase complexity when attempting to horizontally scale each tier: Decoupling and sessions.

Session is by far the deal with the devil that comes back to haunt you later in life. Introducing a stageful concept into a stateless medium was destin to have ramifications. I remember the first implementation of the concept of session in a web framework. I remember a developer that I worked with going on and on about it and I remember thinking right there that is a very dangerous pattern.

At our shop we do three things. One we only store the most critical information in session (if at all), we have an audit script on our source control system that generates a warning to the leads any time new access to session is developed and finally we always ensure that session can be recreated from a stateless medium. Therefore session acts like an in memory cache for us.
In the stack rank meetings that I was involved with, we ranked employees in the order that we would hire them to a new team. This ranking considered several things: productivity, ability to drive tasks to completion, quality of code, willingness to help others, personality and more. Although it was like comparing apples to oranges, there was usually a consensus on the ranking.

A useful aspect of this ranking is that it's a different perspective from the written employee review. The review measured people against goals agreed to at the beginning of the review period. The stack ranking criteria considered more of a person's contribution. An employee could suck at meeting goals, but come out high in the stack ranking because of other things the employee did.
For fricks sake, work on the economy only. Do not stray into anything else.
Chickenfoot for Firefox
Mobile Design for iPhone and iPad eBook
Right. You aren't insane as I first thought.
Introducing Mashup Computers
what about vancouver (canada)?
I have, along with the relatively small teams I've worked with, saved/earned Google at least several hundred million dollars. Possibly over a billion. Certainly more than I can expect to earn over my lifetime.

What size bonus is appropriate for that?

I don't view it in those terms. I get paid reasonably well, but certainly not millions of dollars. And that's because the employment agreement I signed when I was hired is essentially an apportionment of risk. It basically says "I will give my best efforts for the company in exchange for $X/year, and in exchange, the company takes on the risk that those efforts will have zero or negative effect."

After all, I don't have to give back my salary when the I cost Google millions of dollars, which has happened on more than a few occasions. Hell, I've done virtually nothing useful since last May (I've done a whole lot, it's just that none of it has turned out to be useful).

I've played the startup game, and for the roughly 16 months that I was working on my own startup, I earned precisely $0. I worked harder then than I do now. But basically none of the risks I took paid off. That's the nature of risk: you win some, you lose some. It's not really fair when you collect huge paydays when you win and small paydays when you lose (though this seems to be the compensation scheme upon which the financial industry is founded).
It's definitely clever and fun, but at the same time it's a troll feeding the trolls, which can't be very productive.

Still. Neat idea.
That hasn't been my experience. In fact Manning, my publisher, has been pretty hands off in terms of the material that I've written.
I enjoyed LPTHW and my vote for the next book would be Learn C The Hard Way. As I'm sure you know, that scratches an itch in a way that the other options for the new book don't IMO.
I cant easily look it up myself right now (am on a mobile device) but I believe that the many cashiers many lines approach is faster from an average wait time perspective. However people tend to prefer the many cashiers one line approach because it instills a sense of fairness (first come first served).
It would be a political debate whether how to account for that. To me it is too hard to say so, as the border is actually cutting the mountain in half. However technically the peak of the mountain is within the border of China.
exercise reduces stress. stress encroaches on working memory.
That's not what I meant, though -- I was referring to the GP's notion that people would actually sue Apple if they didn't allow the 3G to upgrade to iOS 4 at all.
Especially when driving and late for work...
Totally to my surprise to see this comment... ratemystartup.com is actually my site.

I can speak first hand to this issue... A massive number of submissions to ratemystartup are spam. I evaluate each of these submissions by hand and it's not always easy to do.

On ratemystartup users have editorialized content. On HN I would suggest that link posts are only permitted to users with X amount of karma. I am personally more of a HN reader than a contributor but I would gladly sacrifice the ability to post links (unless the karma threshold is reached) in exchange for maintaining a great HN reading experience.
One-on-one coffees with Silicon Valley venture capitalists
Great point about SF being an echo-chamber. I live in Singapore and the burgeoning startup scene here has started to feel like an echo-chamber too.
Chatbot Takes on Global Warming Deniers
> but gecko was also around before KHTML.

Actually, KHTML pre-dates even Gecko, given that it descended from the "KDE HTML Widget" KHTMLW. Even in 1997 this library was being developed (example email: http://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=88665877914652&w=3)

By 2002 or whenever Gecko was more widely used than KHTML but that doesn't really matter because it was harder to integrate into Apple's code. Apple even had to go so far as to write a KDE/Qt wrapper layer (KWQ IIRC) and it was still less work than integrating/fixing Gecko.

As another example, the lead Safari dev, David Hyatt is famous for (among other things) co-starting the Firefox project (called Phoenix at the time) so it is a very large stretch to claim that Apple simply ignored the better choice. Hyatt would have to go way out of his comfort zone to adopt something other than Gecko, and the fact that he did so anyways should say something...
Are you "uncomfortable" about any other scientific discovery or just this one? Which just so happens to be the one scientific discovery that oil companies have spent millions of dollars on propaganda against?
yes but you could do it with a hosted search solution which, can index without crawling if it can be fed xml feeds of old and new posts...
Meanwhile, here in Minneapolis (really could apply to any upper Midwest city like Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, etc.):

Pros:

- If you like seasons, you get them.

- Excellent beer. Many bars. Great nitelife.

- Clean. No poop on the streets, even in the worse parts of the city.

- Great public transportation (except Milwaukee).

- Cheap rent (2BR for $1500 along the river with a view of the skyline)

- Many excellent CS departments in-state and in the states surrounding. (UW-Madison, UIUC, UMN)

Cons:

- Tech scene is slowly simmering. Madison's is growing like a weed, but elsewhere it's quite slow.

- Not as much outdoorsey stuff to do as in the Pacific Northwest, but there's still enough to do (skiing, fishing, hiking, biking, etc. -- just not on 14kfoot mountains)
I dig the layout & the first few posts are written in such form that I'm looking forward to tracking along and reading the rest!
Forked, fixed, pushed, sent pull request. It's hosted on github, why not? :-)
This is the funniest thing I've ever read on HN.
- Signed, the guy who wrote the original piece for TR
Just link to the permalink of the parent comment.
In this case optimization refers to trying to pick the best option. PG talks about it a lot: we could spend hours trying to pick the most efficient desk layout, the best apartment for getting work done during YC, or a hundred other things. As a startup, the right thing to do in most cases is to shut the hell up, pick something, and get back to work. That was SVN for us.
I'm also curious about this one...
Snark indeed. All of paragraph 5 could have been left out.

As for the communication part, there is a name which, because it is omitted with so much efforts, can only be noticed: Apple. They are working with Google to enhance Webkit, not Google and Apple, the originator of Webkit.

Apple was, apparently, so slighted by this ommission that we have to forget that Apple derived the WebKit code from KHTML. "Originated" is kind of a strong word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins
What are your guys' opinions about LA? Coming from Singapore it's a huge step up, but I'm sure SF is far crazier.
"there is an undercurrent on HN of treating all opinions as equally valid?"

I think people on HN are used to thinking critically, so responses that disagree with or point out something incorrect about an article tend to get upvoted.
send one to me too, my gf is pretty passionate ill pass it along
One of my cofounders has a PhD in neuroscience. Whenever I am stuck on a technical issue, he encourages me to get up and exercise for a while. His reasoning is that vigorous activity increases bloodflow to the brain, which in turn leads to creative problem solving.

Anecdotally, this has served me well so far. Our entire architecture came to me during the middle of a hellish session on the treadmill.
There's a very curious effect at Google that the most interesting work goes to interns. The least interesting goes to heroic senior engineers who've taken it upon themselves to clean up Google's codebase.

This is as it should be, I think. Actually, I've noticed an almost direct correlation between the quality of a Tech Lead/Manager and his willingness to do the boring stuff and pass off the interesting, challenging tasks to his subordinates.
Has anyone been able to get this working with a web server running cPanel?
I never had the patience to argue with climate skeptics because I figure once in a lifetime is enough and I wasted my youth arguing with creationists. It would be trivial, given a database of counterarguments to creationist talking points, to write a chatbot to argue with creationists. There are only so many times you can explain to people that the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply to the earth because the earth isn't a closed system before you realize your part in the argument could be just as productively filled by a chatbot.

Once again, I'm not claiming to know anything about global warming, other than knowing well enough to steer clear of arguing about it. So I can't speak to this specific case. However, from past experience with other controversies I understand the mindset behind this type of thing.
The next step: Snopesbot.
You can use colors to denote a category, if you can easily categorize your tasks into a few groups.
Probably should put snowy winters under cons too. I'm from Chicago and quite frankly don't think that I could live somewhere without a real winter but I'm fairly certain the rest of the country thinks we're nuts.
Color's could be used to show which project it's associated with. I've been doing this with my Moleskine lately. I have a differnt color of tab depending on what project that page or section of pages has to do with.
I'd love to see the R book to a) actually become familiar with it and b) because it'll also provide a refresher to some theory I've unfortunately forgotten. Plus, you're due for some more posts about the importance of that stuff for programmers. :)
Was recently in Minneapolis and can't say enough nice things about it. You could certainly live a nice life there if you had a small shop or are solo/remote (my situation, can't speak to a larger startup). It could even be a great place to live and work in temporarily.

However, I did make visit before the winter. Not sure how I'd feel about that aspect.
I like the idea of a consensus assessment. Sometimes a person's value to the team is less quantifiable on paper than someone else's, but that doesn't mean it's intangible. It's usually quite tangible, and if everyone notices it (or the reverse), that's usually a good sign of the person's value-add. Not everyone is going to be the tireless codebot on the team, but that doesn't mean everyone isn't playing a critical role (Joel Spolsky obviously goes on at great lengths about this). Consensus-style reviews would probably arrive at a fair assessment of such value a lot more readily than individual writeups would.

Also, a lot of people make critical contributions that just don't get noticed by the team lead because those contributions -- moral support, culture, taking time away from one's own work to assist others -- aren't boss-facing. But if you asked his or her peers, this person would get a stellar review. In situations like these, group feedback seems pretty important.
Yeah, http://www.ecargnfx.com
or http://www.ecargnfx.com/grace_portfolio.pdf
Apollo Chronicles: Strange Shadows on the Moon
This seems like the kind of hubris that will come back to bite him in the ass.

Maybe someone can take a screenshot of their iPhone showing the deal, then send it to their friends.
I think he's just rallying against this postmodern delusion that all opinions are equally valid, when the weight of scientific evidence is clearly on his side.

And he's not exactly chasing people down, he's just responding to people who are deliberately putting their opinions out there.
How Facebook is Pulling an Android… and Why
yup, I applied for TS as well.

http://www.ecargnfx.com
And what do you think the number should be?
"If they provided a link to something supporting their position I'd probably pass out from shock."

Ok I will take that as a challenge to produce a link, so how is this.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_de...

Did you pass out?

My stance is that all the name calling (ie. deniers) does not help. In the field of science a healthy level of scepticism is required, and it helps further study. It is only when an issue becomes political (Global Warning) or religious (Evolution/Creationism) and leave their scientific basis that people get pilloried for saying they are not convinced and such n' such an issue is not up to scratch and needs more research to confirm or disprove it.

As the the 95% of people. Yes that stat would be right. 95% of people are always out of their depth in any argument of any complexity. But it says nothing about their position. I have lots of friends that believe things, but if faced with a skilled debtor can't hold their own position. Nor should they have to. Life is too busy to be on top of every issue.
> There is a lot of money in global warming.

Those poor, unprofitable energy companies must have trouble fighting all those overly-funded climatologists!
From what I recall of queuing theory that's not actually correct. From wikipedia:

"One observational insight provided by comparing queuing models is that a single queue with multiple servers performs better than each server having their own queue and that a single large pool of servers performs better than two or more smaller pools, even though there are the same total number of servers in the system"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_model#Multiple-servers...
"Technology Review" should have mentioned at least what language he used. Do you know?
SF streets are pretty disgusting. It's true that there's fecal matter everywhere you find homeless people, which is nearly everywhere in SF. It is not at all uncommon to find a big brownie right in the middle of the sidewalk. The streets and sidewalks in my tiny, obscure East coast village, OTOH, are as clean as they are in Singapore. I don't quite understand why SF doesn't do something about this, as it's a health hazard. Why don't the yuppies, hipsters, scenesters and other trendy rich people care? Do they not walk or bike in SF?
I'm in. Can we call it Atlantis?
An old tweet of mine:

Whenever I see or hear "facebook.com/foo" I think "AOL keyword foo".

http://twitter.com/thwartedefforts/status/15794051975
I'm putting in my vote for Learn C the hard way. If I need to buy this book to support that, I will.
Do you know anywhere that has seriously tried, or do you have any justification for claiming this?
Asks me to login to facebook... Um no.
Not central to the authors point, but I think surfing, and exercise like it (mountain biking, for instance) are superior to simply hitting the treadmill. Getting out into nature and getting some vitamin D is a whole lot better than doing the rat-run in a gym cardio room. That said, anything is better than nothing.
They don't want their taxes raised to pay for the clean up :)
Mine is short intense workouts early in the morning. 3 birds with 1 stone.
I concur. I loved living in Minneapolis, and I go back at least yearly. But the winters are awfully long, which has to at least rate a mention as a con. Overall, though, I much preferred Minneapolis to San Francisco from a livability standard. It's also an excellent bike town, much safer and less idiotic than San Francisco.