skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you about the non idomatic python code - It reminds me of my earliest attempts at python after switching from matlab. I saw a lot of criticism that PCI should have been done in pseudocode and I wonder if the book's coding style was a deliberate attempt to satisfy this complaint.

I think that any maturing field needs a hierarchy of explanations that go progressively deeper into the subject - the explanations of the second law of thermodynamics that you get in freshman chemistry course are superficial compared to what you would deal with in a graduate course, but this doesn't mean that chem101 should be taught at the grad level, or that it is pointless to teach freshmen about the second law. The real danger is if you lie or misrepresent the facts in an attempt to simplify. I'm sure there are some errors and falsehoods in PCI but I didn't see anything too bad in the one day that I've had the book.

Learning API's by reading the docs sounds like trying to learn english by reading the dictionary - It's just my personal preference, but I feel that I learn more effectively by reading real source code that works (even if it is horribly written)
High-fructose corn syrup contains large amounts of sugar.
but my idea is too valuable!
Pure Digital should apply the same logic to their website, which currently uses bloated/time consuming Flash to deliver their product pitch.

Click Products>Mino ... wait .... click a feature ... more waiting

Their main Product page is an Apple inspired layout/design, why not continue that throughout?
Aw cmon it's pretty funny. I guess Alex just isn't as cool as the rest of Twitter's staff... ;)
Apply gossip in graph form .. nice, not very useful to me though.
I used to work at a startup where everyone was always baked and we also had serious quality control problems.
@josefresco - is gossip every truly useful? :)
Call me naive but I'm a bit surprised to hear that a company with $15 million plus allows "weed-talk" around the office.

I'm not saying it's wrong or bad or the reason why Twitter has issues, just surprising.
I understand they're trying to resist feature creep to keep the device simple and easy to use, but some features don't necessary take away from the user experience. For example a longer battery life and more storage capacity don't (by themselves) make the device any harder to use.
you're naive - silicon valley is on drugs.
There are four screenshots in the post and throughout the comments... doesn't that count as some evidence?
Who will write tomorrow's code?
Cue Mastercard commercial...

Getting out of South Carolina: priceless. (I was born in SC, and grew up in Greenville. I can say stuff like that.)

1. Itinerary should be whatever you want to see. You'll never have a better time for traveling than now...young, single, plenty of cash. Just take your time, and travel light. The increased stress of moving and keeping up with lots of stuff isn't worth the benefits you get from having the lots of stuff. If after a few days you really wish you'd brought X, you can probably buy X for less than the hassle of having X, Y, and Z "just in case" is worth.

2. $1200 is low for anywhere in the bay area, not just SF. Otherwise, I guess it's probably right (though I haven't shopped for housing anywhere outside of the bay area). Though I have seen a few good short-term deals on Craigslist. You might try lining something up a week or two in advance of your trip to any of the high demand areas, since finding something on short notice may be hard.

4. Safety net:

- Health insurance (from a national provider, preferably)

- $200-$300 cash tucked someplace safe - if your wallet is lost, you still want to be able to get a hotel room or something for a night or two, and eating is not optional

- Bank account that has ATMs and branches across the range of where you're traveling (BoA, WaMu, Wells Fargo, I guess?)

- Good credit card for car rentals and airline tickets (because of the extra "travel protection" services they provide...it's trivial, but probably worth getting anyway, as even a small reduction of stress when traveling has a very high value)

- Emergency contact names and numbers on a card in visible location in your wallet

I agree with Einar. Trade in the pickup for a small hatchback (though, for reliability, I'd recommend a good Japanese car over a VW, even thought my girlfriend has an 07 Rabbit that's tolerable). It'll give you more freedom of movement when weather is bad, more security for your stuff, and it'll offer a moderately nicer place to sleep than the pickup if you get stuck somewhere overnight. It'll also get significantly higher mileage per gallon. The tradeoff is that it won't hold quite as much, but if it won't fit in a hatchback, you're probably taking too much stuff.

I suspect you won't have a hard time getting some HN folks together in the Bay Area. Nerds and entrepreneurs love to talk. Drop me a line when you get here.
Answer: Speculators.

Not a lot of meat in that article, cool motorcycle though!
Nvidia debuts chips for tiny PCs
PHP gets a lot of bad press (some deserved, some not) -- but you can't fault the language. When PHP was first released, it was a major advancement over PERL and SSI which prevailed at the time. With the growing adoption of PHP5 and the upcoming release of PHP6, PHP should be back on par (or at least close to) many of its 'high-class' peers.

The slow migration to PHP5 by web hosts has definitely been a major bottleneck for the language. It's too bad that the extreme popularity of many PHP4-based apps is what prevented hosts from upgrading, thus giving developers little incentive to upgrade.

The good news is that the popularity of Rails and MVC has inspired a broad selection of excellent MVC frameworks for PHP5 (ZendFramework, KohanaPHP) and with PHP6 on the way and new web hosting architectures on the rise, there may very well be a resurgence in PHP.
Unfortunately the "Memory" column in System Monitor is pretty much useless for actually visualizing what memory a process is or isn't using. There are a lot of different ways to measure memory for different situations. That column doesn't actually give any concrete data on what's going on in the system.

http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-mem...

Gives the 10,000 foot overview of measuring memory usage on a Linux system.
If your going to use craiglist for appartments, use craiglist appartments on google maps, alot nicer!

http://www.housingmaps.com/
Looking to raise capital? Send an executive summary.
Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 code named "Snow Leopard" - report
Any reason for staying in the country?

Drive up and down Highway 101 and you are pretty much done. (I've been all over the west coast)

We can meet up when you come to Seattle (gmail kirubakaran)
Ruby on Rails on Reefer
JavaScript Recomendations for AJAX Component Writers
Was there anything non trivial that I missed? It seems evident that as the possible release date approach the gossip buzz is larger.
Versions is very cool... but doesn't it seem like they've missed the boat a little?

Git has effectively taken the world by storm recently, with a slew of web-based interfaces to people's push points and a huge amount of developer mindshare.

This might have been big money a few years ago.
Yeah, I5 south of Redding is boring, and so is Sacramento for that matter. Take 101/1 south - leave I5 in Grants Pass and go the inland coast route. It's a beautiful, if slower drive.
So, you want to deploy a J2ME app in the US?
An unlocked car only leaves the owner vulnerable to break-ins. This is more like noticing that Honda Civics can't be properly locked, and leaving a note on the dashboard of each and every one, so that Honda will experience pressure to fix the problem.
If you're using Git on a Mac, try GitNub:
http://github.com/Caged/gitnub/tree
Lessons Learned “Selling” My Micro-ISV
I agree that Crichton's analogy to eugenics is really inflammatory and offensive, and even that that's likely part of his reason for choosing it. But in his defense, it might not be the main reason. Consider: How many examples of bogus expert consensus are still remembered today? It seems to me that in order to be remembered, such examples need to be pretty horrific in one way or another. For example, we still remember that doctors bled patients for centuries. If Crichton had tried to draw an analogy between global warming and the long history of bleeding medical patients, wouldn't that've been offensive too?

So what about choosing less-well-known examples, then? E.g., in principle he could have talked about the 1960-era political and academic bogus consensus that the long-run Philips curve allowed governments to reduce unemployment in a usefully stable and predictable way by printing more money. (short form of the last chapter of that story: 1970s stagflation) That analogy would probably've been less offensive than eugenics or bleeding, but it also would've required teaching most people the whole story from scratch. That's a pretty high practical price to pay for being able to use a less offensive example. He might increase his audience by not giving his audience the "he's just being offensive" excuse to ignore him, certainly. But people who disagree with him are unlikely to want to trust him, which makes it hard to tell the story convincingly. With the eugenics story he can keep appealing to things that people already know independently, and so can convey his points about the story even to people who're looking for excuses to ignore him.
I wouldn't want anyone to do that. It is a good thing that photo VR is becoming mainstream.
> We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

Can you please share what the maximum, median etc for this group was? I want to see where I stand.
Whatcha workin' on? I'm near Dallas too, always on the lookout for other geeks.

/me has wife and kids too
I rather dislike it, because I have to kill it in order to free up memory for Photoshop. My laptop only has 4 GB, and my image scans end up being around 1 GB each. I need that memory!
You have experimental data? Wonderful, link away.

You were complaining that "otherwise useful" students were doing poorly in school rather than working minimum wages jobs, specifically mopping floors or flipping burgers. The poster was complaining especially that they were "wasting your money."

At what point is joining the work force 'giving up'?
You are “giving up” at the point when you “give up” on doing better than a minimum wage job with no high school degree. It’s very hard for a person of average or below-average intelligence and ambition to move beyond this—and these average people are the people we have to consider.

And how recently did this become the case?
This is a flippant question, but here’s an answer anyway: Around 1870 public education became universal. Prior to that, we weren’t even trying, and hence, could not “give up.”

Also, do you not think there are any jobs that don't require at least a high school education, or do you think that a high school education is important even if we know in advance that the person who gets it won't be using it?

There are many jobs that do not require a high school degree. In fact, there are examples of people without a high school degree doing almost every kind of work there is, and getting paid all sorts of different salaries for it. But we’re not talking about exceptions here, we’re talking about average people. And a high school diploma is very valuable for most people. http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/site/c.kjJXJ5MPIwE/b...

I believe that a high school education is valuable in itself, beyond financials. If we’re going to have a democracy, it would be nice to have voters have some idea of what’s what. It’s also valuable in parenting. These concerns, however, are really not necessary to show the value of a high school diploma.
Over three weeks in the summer of 2006, I took a road trip from Madison, WI through the following places (in order):
Mitchell, SD
Rapid City, SD
Sheridan, WY
Yellowstone National Park
Missoula, MT
Coeur d'Alene ID
Spokane, WA
Grand Coulee Dam (awesome - tours are free!)
Lake Chelan, WA

-> take highway 2 into Everett/Seattle. It's the most beautiful thing you'll see!
Seattle, WA (spend more time here - see Pike Place, the public library, which is a beautiful, tall and extremely modern building downtown)

Olympic Peninsula (skip this - stay in Seattle longer)

Portland, OR (Seattle is way better - but if you're in there, go to Saburo's - http://www.saburos.com/ - you might have to wait an hour, but the sushi there is incredible.)

Driving down PCH is a great plan. I like the northern better.

I saw a bunch of other stuff, but Oregon's not nearly as impressive as Washington or Northern California (don't miss the Bay Area, of course, but don't bother driving any further south.)

We went from LA to Vegas, and it's skip-able. Utah was OK, and from there we went to Denver and then back home.

The whole trip was over 7,000 miles.

Anyway, focus on the pacific northwest. It's just beautiful. I was just in San Diego for a week last fall, and it's awful. You'll just wish you were in SF, so stay away from San Diego.

And if you're into Canada, try visiting Banff. I'm going there next (on a trip that will take me to Alaska and then to Hawaii by ferry.)

You're probably going to hate your truck. I would get something sleeker.
Looking for advice on Startup equity
Hi,
I am in the very very early stages of my web startup, we are 3 partners but we have not yet talked about equity and I was wondering if you guys had any tips on how to do it? -- Thanks!!<p>Idea - I came up with the idea
Funding - I am putting most of the money (90%)<p>Thanks again!
Versions was first publicized about two years ago. Their site has been saying "coming soon" forever; I figured it was vaporware.

I am stunned that it was actually released. Hopefully, they can quickly adapt the beautiful UI to work with git.
It's in San Francisco. They probably buy from the VCs.
I think you underestimate the number of users SVN has now and will continue to have. As SVN goes more and more mainstream companies will stick with it once they have it up and running. Switching to the latest and greatest VCS all the time is not a good use of time and resources.
Same here, except with VMware instead of Photoshop. It's rather disconcerting when Firefox takes up as much memory as an entire virtual machine running Windows XP....
Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever.

A = "eugenics is wrong"

B = "opponents of eugenics where persecuted"

There simply is no logically correct way to deduce A from B, and drawing an analogy to

C = "global warning is wrong"

D = "opponents of global warning are being persecuted"

doesn't make it any better (you can't infer C from D, that you can't deduce A from B doesn't make D => C any more legitimate).
YouTube releases Video Annotations beta
Oh, so that's what they mean by "seeding!"
Verizon Reportedly In Talks To Buy Alltel For $27 Billion
BBC1 to be shown live on internet
Firefox is a memory hog - you can't deny that.

Of course so are other browsers.

I've been using Firefox all day (6 hours now?) and loaded hundreds of pages and have 8 pages open now (including a flash-based music player) and it's using about 200MB of RAM. That IS hoggish. I just launched MSIE 7. Three tabs (YouTube homepage, news.yc, and macrumors.com - nothing too heavy). It's at 140MB. That's hoggish too (especially considering how light a load).

So yeah, Firefox hogs memory, but I at least don't see a compelling advantage in alternatives. I guess I just can't get riled up at this time of day.
Quick releases, and a huge marketing budget mean that this is a great move. Microsoft has to be getting a bit worried....
Alsace
Alsace France - Information relating to the France's beautiful Alsace region. View the towns, history, wines, cuisine, regions and much more
and it's also how the Twitter idea came to fruition
Yep. I work at a rather large avionics company, which still mostly uses ClearCase. It's often an uphill battle to get projects moved into Subversion. Git?... not for a long time here, methinks.
If you ask an F1 engineer to fix a bicycle with a crescent wrench, do you think he is going to be lost without his $250K set of tools? I don't think so.

The blogger is not talking about major pieces of code, he's talking about fundamentals. So, yes, the programmer should be able to do it on paper. And I bet if you ask a Lucas Arts 3D artist to draw on paper a basic shape, he/she will blow you away with what they produce.
Hey Sam,

Vancouver's pretty pricey too. You may want to check out Vancouver island/Victoria instead. Either way, there's plenty to see & do, and really, they're only an hour apart on a boat (it might save you some money though).

The west coast stays pretty temperate year-round (even up here in Canada), but heading south is never a bad idea. You might want to drop some Mexican destinations in there at the end (beaches never hurt)

Another idea might be to see if you can lease/borrow/buy an RV. Sure, the gas issue sucks, but there's a ton of nice camp grounds up and down the coast, and it will help with your budget.

If you do make it up north, I'm out in the Southern Gulf Islands (Mayne Island, Google Map it). If you're up for a day trip sometime, I'd be happy to show you around.
A short review of Collective Intelligence in Action
I'm agnostic when it comes to the moon landings.
Soccer Data
Soccerdata.net is a unique, massive database full of player, club and staff profiles. Has your club signed an obscure player? or if your team been drawn against an unknown team find out their strengths and weaknesses with the most accurate database on the internet.
I'm more interested in my definition of better than the algorithm's.
> Take a technical degree that interests you.

Get a degree in Electrical Engineering. You do many computer topics. I met a fellow who was studing Electrical Engineering who was using tensors in a machine vision project. Many others do chip design.

Also, it would let you follow your interest in solar power.
Just to venture a guess, I think the problem with HN isn't only signal/noise ratio, but the amount of signal--there might not be enough.
I watched it on google video and even then he admitted that large projects need to be split. Funny part is that Mercurial is int he same boat - they also do not allow partial checkouts.

Where I work we 80Gb trees (sans history, that is) and idea of everyone syncing the whole 80Gb on all of their machines quickly kills any discussions around alternative source controls.
I ran this through babelfish, translating from geek to reporter:

"Cellphones science science science science, science science DNA science science cancer. There is no known science science science cancer."
But what will happen to Chad...?
I think I used to work there, and all I can say is, "I'm sorry."

I managed to get Ruby used there on our contracts. Maybe you could get Git into the workflow? The easy sell is that Git is a better backup scheme than any other backup scheme ever devised, because of the distributed nature of projects.
Ask YC: Favorite Wordpress Themes? Need Input!
I am looking for some great wordpress themes to try out on my wordpress.org install.

I am open to being premium or free wordpress themes.

please share!
I did a 6 week summer road trip a couple years ago - from Ventura up to Tahoe, then Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Banff, Glacier Natl Park, Montana, Idaho, Salt Lake City, then finishing up in Vegas.

If you have a truck then maybe a camper shell will come in handy. In a pinch you can always sleep at a truck stop or walmart parking lots.

Geographically, the coast of Oregon is amazing - recommend some beach camping. Olympic National Forest is interesting - the only rainforest north of the equator. The Montana / Idaho area is nice but only if you are into the outdoors / nuclear powered aircraft (http://members.tripod.com/airfields_freeman/ID/Airfields_ID_...). Salt Lake City is great for skiing and mormon watching (I found it interesting). And everyone knows what Vegas is about.

Denver is probably too far out of your way to be worth it - plenty of good skiing all over CA and Utah.
I work with primarily MS shops and so many of them are still using Visual Source Safe and don't even know what SVN is, let alone Git.
There's no reason to assume he was at Twitter HQ when he sent this out. He could be pretty much anywhere in SF. :)
i love the cropping up of new communities like this to help entrepreneurs link-up with investors. as if proprietary deal-flow wasn't hard enough to get, this trend helps ease the playing field a bit and puts some coverage (which hopefully translates to leverage) on the budding entrepreneurs side.
You've made that assertion without any evidence. I was home-schooled for about half of my K-12 education, part of that included time on the computer during "school hours", and I was also given time on the computer after school - in moderation. As a result, I have a distinct love of the things that is not shared by my siblings who did not receive a similar education. So, since I am a (hopefully) competent systems administrator and programmer, I think that my experience on the computer as a child benefited me. I think that doing many different things in moderation is far more valuable than sending your children outside for every hour of the day.
Zion National Park Narrows is definitely worth a look - you walk / swim through rivers in super-narrow stone canyons.
As others have said, skip Sacramento, stick to the coasts (Hwy. 101). If you ditch the truck, you'll also have a much easier time driving and parking in the cities -- parallel parking in downtown anywhere can require some dexterity. Look for a used Civic hatchback or similar.

While you're in San Diego, you can go a certain distance into Mexico for a day trip occasionally without much commitment -- Ensenada, easy. Hotels are easy enough to come by that you can head further south for a weekend or so, to see more of Baja (maybe San Felipe). You'll notice that the further you get from the border, things get less sketchy and more interesting. I only mention it because you started by mentioning you'd like to see "something else", and you can definitely cover more than the U.S. west coast in 6 months.

Another day trip from Long Beach that probably wouldn't occur to you: Take a boat to Catalina Island with some friends, rent bicycles, get blitzed, eat sushi. It's a resort town done right -- golf carts instead of cars, lots of beach, and easy food, drink and sightseeing. One day is enough.
Techcrunch video project: Elevator Pitches
Move when you need to take advantage of something only SV (or other start-up hubs) have to offer. For now, use Amsterdam (cheap, existing network) to your advantage.