skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know how many more of these kinds of posts I have to read before I get my act together. One more at least.
Aw, gee, a snotty insult with no actual substantive response. Stay classy, hacker news!

Sure, the snotty insult gets upvoted and the response pointing out that it is not useful or adding to the conversation gets downvoted. Votes are driven by ideology, not objectivity, eh?
These answers are all pretty long. The answer is yes, definitely, without a doubt. Practical means "for use in practice" and PHP powers a lot of your daily web applications, especially the simpler ones. Judging from your question text, at your skill level, PHP is sufficient if not ideal for development, deployment, and performance.

MySQL is also fast and easy.
Drink more water. Dehydration is your enemy.
That's interesting. I'm guessing these are Microsoft employees who quit before the perf review system here at Microsoft was basically changed from scratch 3 years ago?
Midwest beer nerds trapped in San Francisco should give me a shout.
This is awesome, looks like a great book. Some really good ideas for games, which I could use to illustrate my own language. It would be fun to add graphics or sound functions to some of these games, while keeping the code simple.

The first version of this book was published in 1973, and Microsoft has published a new version this year (2010)! I prefer the simpler style of BASIC used in the originals.
I actually think this is one of the places Microsoft has done very well in over the years. I don't think used to be the case a decade ago though but the IC career path is as lucrative/supported now as the management path. One can choose to be a Anders Hejlsberg/Dave Cutler as much as one chooses to be a Steven Sinofsky.
spam against spam
sounds interesting, what is the difference between a clone and an emulator? do you mean it looks like a Vic20, but does not actually emulate 6502 (or whatever) machine code?
> ... world government ...

Bingo! I think we have the whole climate denier phrasebook now...
It looks like cperciva is taking the bot through its paces.

http://twitter.com/cperciva
Just started with "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" by Andy Hunt.

Also reading "1453: The Holy War For Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West" by Roger Crowley. More of an action book than a historical one.
I do have some similar books targetting BBC Basic, with graphics and sound, etc., from the 80s. It's a pity that computing books these days are much more dull! because the languages are so much harder to use. I'm very interested to correct this problem by making good language/s and writing some books! a fun thing to do.
Your price is not an issue. You need to deliver more value. Try anchoring. E.g. cost of attending uni for an extra year because you failed chemistry, vs cost of notes.

Explain the virtue of having so few pages. 29 pages vs 400 pages on textbook.

You need to claim expertise. Why your notes are better than professors'. Perhaps it is because you tutor, and that keeps you in touch with what topics students have the most difficulty with. Maybe it is the way it is arranged for easy revision. You need to show it.

Email them a sample page. It'll be less risky.
Automation system
Amtecinc uses its industry-leading knowledge and global capabilities to serve the needs of multinational customers with its sophisticated automation systems. It provides innovative, custom designed, built and installed manufacturing solutions to many of the world's most successful companies.
You're saying that the only way to debate you is to go to some blog, do a bunch of research, construct arguments against that blog post, and then post them here?

Must be nice to not have to do any thinking at all- you just link to some propagandist and have your opponents (anyone foolish enough anyway) debate them.

I fell for that once, and the person's response? "Well, I never said that!"

Meanwhile, you completely ignore the arguments that I have put forth, ignore the science and facts I have referenced, and continue to demand that I answer questions that presuppose facts you have not presented.

Maybe you're just incapable of debate. Or you don't care- because this is a religion and the science really means nothing to you.

The ball is in your court. You can respond, or you can continue to equivocate. I really don't care.
Many interviewers don't realize it.
It's always the fastest, but whether or not it's the fairest depends on how you define "fair." The simplest example I can use to illustrate this is the case where there is 1 server, and 2 people. One person will take 60 minutes to process, and the other, 1 minute. The 60 minute person gets in line a millisecond before the 1 minute person. Is it fair for the person who will take 1 minute to wait for the slow 60 minute guy?

If you define fairness as the average user-wait, I think fastest first is actually optimal. This is still the case with one-queue systems: If you let the 10-minute person go first, you'll have blocked 1/10th of throughput for everyone behind him, and thus increase their wait time. Fastest job first is generally not a bad way to handle queues; it works great for things where "jobs completed per unit of time" is of importance, like chores or fixing bugs (of equal or similar priority).

Besides average user-wait, you could start inventing your own units for fairness depending on the problem. Maybe its average user-wait per processing minute, or something like that, in which case the solution might be more complicated (or might not be, I'm not too concerned with it).
Statements like this make me rage a bit; students have to put up with non-technical teachers in part because precious few people in the high-tech sector can be moved to do teaching work in their community.

That's because a) there's no reward for excellence or penalty for failure in teaching (see the list of articles I compiled here: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/ for more on that subject) and b) standardized contracts mean that high-tech people who want to teach aren't going to be subtly underpaid -- they're going to be vastly underpaid. Notice the data from Payscale.com here: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp .

I actually thought about being a high school teacher. In Seattle, where I lived, teachers with an M.A. made ~$36K / year and got lockstep pay raises to the point where they'd make around $65K / year after 30 years. You get summer and winter break off, so you can effectively multiply that by 1.2.

Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies start superstars in the neighborhood of $75 – $100K and go up from there. The possibility of starting your own company is there.

That's why competent technical people seldom work in schools. It isn't "our fault" so much as it is the fault of some combination of voters, teachers' unions, and school districts.
Stop and Shop in New England has a scanner gun you pickup when you enter the store for self-checkout. You scan items before you put them in your basket and when you get to the self-checkout, you've already scanned your items. Helps situation 2 not take forever.
> Now, if you visit the actual Silicon Valley, you will see a lot of office buildings.

Not just any office buildings, tilt-up office buildings.

And, we drive on the right.

And you've got to make sure that it doesn't rain for half of the year and doesn't snow in the other half.
I sure wish you would actually respond to the arguments, maybe make salient points. Instead of simply snidely characterizing everyone who doesn't agree with your ideology.

Also: It reflects on the nature of hacker news that the snotty response has upvotes.
I'll throw in my comments about Washington D.C./Northern Virginia.

I've lived here about ten years (first five in Northern Virginia, the past five in downtown DC)

Pros:

1.) The tech community here is actually quite good. It definitely feels like it's gotten better since I've lived here. There's no shortage of smart folks working on cool things, even if they are a little more spread out geographically.

2.) While I wouldn't say it's "recession-proof", the area is certainly way less effected by the economy. You can attribute that to the preponderance of government and government-related industries here.

3.) Public transportation is mediocre. Some people think it's great, some people think it's awful. I would say it's somewhere in between. If you live downtown you can get around most places on the Metro. Northern Virginia is accessible out a little ways to Arlington, then it gets sparse.

4.) There's a lot to see downtown if friends or family come to visit. The museums are nice (and free), but I think after a couple months here you'll have had your fill.

5.) You're fairly close to a lot of other places. NYC is a four hour train ride (or a $20 bus ride), Philly is even closer. You have three airports in the immediate area, so you can get to most other places directly.

Cons:

1.) It's really expensive. I moved here from Northern California and was dumbfounded that rent was as expensive here (without the benefit of living near the beach). Like most places, you can find things for cheap if you're willing to commute (or if you live in DC, you can find things for cheap if your willing to live in one of the not-good parts of the city, of which there are many).

2.) Food isn't particularly good. Which isn't to say that there aren't good restaurants, but there's a huge drop-off after you get down from uber-expensive. Oh, and there isn't a single good pizza place in a 30-mile radius of the city.

3.) There is a giant preponderance of government-related folks. This isn't a con for everyone, but anywhere downtown is filled with lobbyists. On a related note, it's also a little weird to live somewhere that is so caught up with politics where your vote doesn't matter (we have no representation in Congress). Local politics is a cesspool, made worse by the fact that DC is cuckolded by Congress.

4.) Some may disagree, but I think the weather here is terrible. It's oppressively hot and humid in the summer (actually four or five months) and then cold and gross in the winter.

5.) If you live in DC, you are relegated to a few neighborhoods that aren't awful. It's changing over time (even just in the time I've lived here), but as to whether that's an improvement is open to debate. If you're talking Northern Virginia, you're pretty much limited to Arlington if you want a semblance of other people. As soon as you start to go west, it's all strip-malls and suburbs.

I've been trying to leave for about nine of the ten years I've lived here, but I know plenty of people who like it here. If you wind up in one of the up-and-coming neighborhoods and meet some good folks, you can enjoy yourself here. Just don't try and look for good pizza.
Loved the book "Buyology". I enjoy shopping more now after knowing how my brain works in buying stuff :)
Isn't that how a lot of internet advertising works anyway?

e.g. You're talking about medical condition X, therefore I shall try to sell you drug Y even if you don't mention Y or drugs at all in your search terms/blog post/etc. And I don't care if you even knew that drugs for X existed.
Cuddle Voyeurs
Walking around for a couple hours is not really exercise, it's normal human behavior. For instance, my 86 year old grandfather does this every day. If you aren't exaggerating you might want to see a doctor. That level of exercise intolerance is a key indicator in a number of severe health disorders, such as morbid obesity, congestive heart failure and multiple sclerosis.
You can also post on your WordPress blogs by email but I guess it is not known to many.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email
If rabid frothing twitterers want to get into arguments with someone over topics they know little about...

... and they are happy to continue arguing even if the interlocutor isn't even human...

... then who are we to stop them?
We moved one of our girls recently, from a fairly traditional private school, to a Montessori school (which is working out brilliantly, btw). The reaction from other parents at the original school was extremely negative; you'd think we'd taken their kid and condemned them to a life of, well, something horrible. Amazing.
I wouldn't optimize for the mom. Instead I'd look for anybody who didn't look like a fresh-faced teenager. Since I enjoy living near a grocery store that has reasonable prices, I also tend to recognize the workers. The ones who seem the most senior usually can work the till faster.

You're right about it not really being worth it for optimizing your waiting time. If there is only one checkout and it's some lady with 50 items and she's struggling with a checkbook, other cashiers will usually open up if you make eye contact with a free employee.

You'd save the most time by planning your shopping in advance. Make a list, and categorize it by food type. If you know your store layout, some time spent thinking about the order of you visit can pay off quite well. Plus, it helps reign in impulse purchases.
This presentation is somewhat long, but extremely informative. If you're designing any sort of application or content that includes sharing or privacy, I'd consider it almost required reading. It's that informative - the best I've seen on the topic.
The good news of this presentation is that vast improvements in the social network space are possible, improvements that might just be able to tumble the incumbent. The hard part is finding them.
I was going to buy the microsoft version, but BASIC is not Basic without PRINT! (They use TextWindow.WriteLine() or some nonsense. Who would type that 500 times to write a game?) And their substitute for DATA is hideous. Compare:

http://computerscienceforkids.com/DavidAhlsSmallBasicCompute...

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=49
http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=46
why is this interesting?
The punchier version is, "Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission."
Buy a house, clean your floor, move your butt: Ars reviews Kinect
Are you a counter-bot?
I too have spent a lot of time arguing with people who didn't understand the difference between beeing politically correct and being right.

A lot of people will argue about any matter; climate change, religion, Middle East, economics or anything else, even if they now nothing about it and spend more time watching sitcoms than reading up on science or religion or anything.
Content Delivery Networks - Are they for you, how they work and providers
I live in Portland but my wife's family is in Minneapolis, so I thought I'd contrast the 2 a bit:

In Portland you can go out for a wonderful $50+ per plate meal in t-shirt, jeans, and a multi-inch-long beard. In Minneapolis the only other bearded guy in the bar I was at was the drunk that wandered in off the street and promptly got thrown out, and I think his beard was better groomed than mine. Definitely the cleanest city I've ever been in.

However, when I asked for local beer, I was given a bottle some fairly unexciting porter from New York for $8. A 22oz bottle of Deschutes Abyss costs $11 in Portland...I didn't want to become a beer snob; it's just hard not to.

Minneapolis is (or at least seems) far more diverse than Portland. Except for certain areas in North and far SE, Portland is excruciatingly white.

There may not be any 14k foot mountains in the Midwest, but pretty much the entire northeast corner of Minnesota is covered in forests, lakes, and parks. Not the Pacific Northwest but still impressive. Minneapolis also recently stole Bicycling Magazine's #1 Bike City award from Portland. I think that was enough to scare our mayor into raiding the sewer fund to improve the bike infrastructure.

I saw a hipster in Minneapolis riding his fixie in just a hoodie (no gloves) in sub-20 degree weather with snow on the ground... It may be cold there, but the natives don't seem to mind.
I'll put the argument (against the paper) in simple terms:

The SPPI paper says that land weather station data is broken, temperatures are being reported as much higher than they should be, it's all the urban heat island, etc.

Yet the satellite data strongly corresponds with the land based temperatures and also shows an increase. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/surface_satellite_compa... (or read the damn blog post properly)

In addition to this, both urban and rural stations show the same levels of temperature rise: http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/jones_london.gif

Which brings us back to my original question: If we take what you are saying about the land based temperatures at face value, how do you explain a) the extremely strong correlation between the satellite data and the land based data, and b) the extremely strong correlation in the trends between different stations if the data is flawed?
“I figured we may as well be one of the cool kids with something: version control seemed like a good choice”

It seems like this is the main reason why you switched from SVN to Git -- hype.
In my experience, you can get as far as needing to hit "I agree to pay" and scribbling on the touch screen.

Entering in/scanning your customer loyalty number and pulling out your credit card and scanning it (and pressing credit/debit) is what I've been able to "preload".

One other neat thing I've noticed is that at my Costco gas station, I can pull the pump out and select my gas type while simultaneously scanning my costco + credit card. I usually try to time myself with the person in front of/behind me to see if I can start my pump faster than them. I usually win :)
See my previous replies. You still haven't answered any of my original arguments, btw.
The idea that Galileo's life was in danger is itself dogma.

He put himself into trouble by using the Pope's views in the form of his bot Simplicio, embarrassing the Pope. He was in trouble, but not in physical danger.

The irony is that the Church was open to heliocentrism, but demanded more scientific proof before teaching it.
It may be cliché now, but was it cliché in 1995 (when it appears it was written)?
IPhone App Store Acceptance Time / Download Results
This is another form of insult. You lie about what I have said in order to characterize me in a negative way. Ad hominem. Reality is, I have responded to your "Arguments" such that they are, and you have simply ignored my responses.

If science is really on your side, why so evasive? Why are you arguing to the person rather than to the point?
I live in SF currently, and used to live in Portland. It's a lot easier to find work in the bay area, but I think if you can find a good job in Portland or make your own, it's the nicer place. If I had to put down roots somewhere it'd be there.
> It's hard to find good/great developers period and when you find them language is rarely a concern

Totally correct, however, with Ruby I think it's easier to find them primarily as there are less Ruby devs about, and using your example above, more or them are intermediate/senior (40% for Ruby, 10% for PHP). Then again intermediate/senior != good/great.

(Disclaimer: we're a PHP shop, but know a lot of really talented Rubyists)
My parents live in Northern Virginia and I've gone to some tech events there. Compared to SF/Boston/NYC I felt like there was more of a focus on milking government contracts than on creating startups. The average age of people in the technical community seems older than in other areas.

Also, because of all the government jobs, the housing market didn't decline as much as the rest of the country, i.e. there's still a housing bubble there. Traffic there is pretty insane too and is related to the high housing costs.

It's not all bad though, there are some good things about the area that stand out. The public schools in Maryland and Northern Virginia, especially Thomas Jefferson, are really good.
Flash/Game Developer Co-Founder Needed
No, Apple approves an app that pre-processes and converts Flash content on the server and delivers nothing but html-friendly content to the client, displaying it in an embedded browser.

It's not even the interesting case of a Flash runtime standalone app being approved, let alone the browser plugin that would be needed to 'support Flash content' in any reasonable sense.

(Also, as the article notes, it obviously doesn't work at all for interactive Flash content, either. It sounds like a glorified flv->mp4 service.)
The projections are based completely on the temperature record, and changing the temperature record would produce different projections. The projections are essentially fudged to get the result that is desired for political reasons.

I'm guessing you haven't been exposed to many arguments against AGW, or maybe not many good ones. But since you have an open mind, I'd suggest you look into the absorbtion of IR By CO2, the actual proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere, the lack of tropophere warming (where it should show up) and the historical correlation of CO2 and temperasture-- CO2 has been a lagging indicator and has, in the past, been much higher than it is now from natural events without causing a runaway greenhouse effect. These are basic facts that don't take much analysis and greatly undermine the AGW theory. Also, the planet is getting colder in recent years (past decade) while CO2 has been rising.
Actually, for 9x9 Sudoku doing any more advanced propagation is pointless, since it will slow down the time to find the solution (assuming a reasonably fast search process). If one wants to solve 9x9 Sudokus without search, full propagation combined with shaving (hypothetical reasoning: if I assigned this square this value, woould it lead to an inconsistency) suffices as far as is known currently (no proof, just experiments, http://www.4c.ucc.ie/~hsimonis/sudoku.pdf).

For 16x16, it is more of a toss-up if one should use more advanced propagation. The solve-times are still so low though, that it doesn't really matter (tens of milliseconds). For 25x25 it starts to get interesting. In my experience, full propagation on lines, rows, and regions is needed, but more than that slows it down. Without a good heuristic (some learning process, prefferably coupled with randomized restarts), the solve-time easily goes up into hours. Wih a good heuristic, minutes seems to be a reasonable time-span to hope for.
This is one of the many reasons I love Go, gofmt takes care of almost all the silly style issues, and there is no need to learn any style guide, just run your code (or anyone's code) through gofmt, and you are done.
My point being that it's not easier to find them because there isn't as many of them available. The ratio may be better but the gross numbers aren't.
> This is principally targeting the homeless problem.

Did you miss the word "hiding"? It doesn't seem to be much of a way to "solve it".
You don't understand it correctly. Models are supposed to fit the evidence, otherwise they're incorrect. That's how science works. Say you've gathered evidence of the big bang. You create a model for it. Then, suddenly, for some reason observations and measurements of background radiation doesn't fit your model. If that is so, you'll have to either adjust your model as to fit the data, or throw it away and build a new model that fits the data.
Anyone got an idea how hard it might be to port this to work on top of Hadoop?