skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice rant.
Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FatHLHG2uGY
They license their technology to PayPal, and perhaps others. What the rev deal is, I have no idea.
> For one Agassi, there are a thousand Chinese children pushed as hard that don't make it anywhere.

The question isn't whether you achieve the highest levels of success - it's how results stack up on average... I tend to think the achievement/duty style of parenting does well at producing good results on balance. A lot of the numbers bare this out, depending on what you're looking for.

> That's the kids you should be considering when choosing a parenting still. My children may be mediocre, but their happy memories will last them forever.

But they're not mutually exclusive... it seems to me that purpose, meaning, duty, striving outperforms gunning for happiness. But this is the opposite of what most people in the West believe right now.

I disagree respectfully. Everyone chooses their own parenting style, but I think a focus on achievement and duty in younger years leads to more well-being and a better foundation than just-do-whatever-everyone's-a-winner. There's lots of ground in between them, but a slight shift towards achievement/duty seems like it'd cure a lot of the angst and confusion and unhappiness among young people in the West right now.
Pay per use? :)
Thanks PonyGumbo, kongqiu && schwabacher! Your views helped. :)
Thanks for pointing that out ;)
Testing without Testing
The first bubble came at the end of a recession too. Beyond that VCs are in the business because they have money where others don't and they want to get in on the ground floor of investment opportunities.
Exactly, we just spent about $10K on a bunch of 6 core i7 machines to serve as VM hosts. Once we had the machines we quickly found enough VMs to fill them up -- VMs we didn't plan on having before getting all this hardware. And that was a clearly a couple of thousand dollars in Intel's pocket.
> What are they supposed to do when they are beaten and locked out of the house for 24 hours with no food to eat?

Is this a serious question?

If that happens, you call the cops like the victim of any other kind of assault. I have a friend who did this and had dad arrested and taken to court. It worked phenomenally well - she was never beat ever again - wonder why?!

> Both of which presumably do not have a background of strict parenting

Nah bro, your reading is incorrect, not my hypothesis.

That's my point. Having an Asian significant other would be too much of a reminder of their shitty upbringing, or they irrationally believe they would be somehow subjecting their own kids to the same experience. I personally think it's a post traumatic stress reaction.
DracMail – Webmail Interface Built With PHP, ExtJS, MySQL & IMAP
dracMail is a webmail interface built using PHP, ExtJS (JavaScript framework), MySQL and IMAP. Features include: Rich UI, WYSIWYG editor, HTML mail composing and message caching. The project’s backend API has been developed using a FreeBSD server, but it should be compatible with any system capable of running these.
I always wonder why those update dialogs pop up when you start a program. That’s the one point in time when it is very clear that you definitely do want to use the program, the one point in time when you don’t want to be disturbed. Those dialogs would be a lot less annoying if they popped up when you quit the app, still allowing you to opt-out of updates but in a lot less annoying way.

One possible negative effect is that updates get installed later (an average session length later), I wonder whether that’s offset by people not installing updates when the browser starts because they have something better to do?
I moved from Austin to the Valley three years ago.

When I came here, I missed Austin a lot. Now, although I know I'll move back there some day, I'm going to miss the Tech Culture of the valley.

Austin's missing populated hackerspaces like the Hacker Dojo and Noisebridge, and generally lacks technology meetups and hacker parties. The tech-based people are there, but there's not much of a cohesive culture yet. (This is a solvable problem!)

Of course, Silicon Valley is missing out on the Alamo Drafthouse... which is one of the best reasons to live in Austin.
Maybe a counter at the top of the page (karma, counter) to show how much time someone has spent on HN in the past (day, week, #{interval}) guilt-trip (some) people into spending less time on the site? Or with the number of times they've opened up a page to HN?

// edit: This is a social/mental problem, not a technical one. I'd be surprised if a complicated change did anything to fix it. Noprocrast works because its simple. Changing algorithms around isn't as obvious, any behavior changes as a result would probably be much more subtle to observe.
How can I sign up? You sound like a great boss!
Weave Silk, scripting, and vanity website headers
> in the US a huge amount of her preparation time is spent on making lessons interesting to students, otherwise they disconnect. In China she is more focused on the lesson's subject matter, rather than tweaking the lesson for entertainment / attention value.

I came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and went to a U.S. college. The introductory science textbooks were all guilty of this. The biology textbooks especially were simply unbearable to me. What makes learning material interesting to an American kid is not necessarily going to make it interesting to someone outside of the American culture. Also, some smarter kids are simply bored by the lame attempts of textbook publishers to add "pizzas" to make the material appear "interesting." Smarter kids just want content, in the most concise form possible, so that it would not take a lot of time to read and understand it.

The thing that struck me most about American education: kids carrying around huge heavy backpacks with huge heavy glossy textbooks in them (those books would have cost a month's salary from where I was originally from) that were full of either cartoon-like drawings in poorly chosen colors or "stories" in colored boxes that all had very little to do with actual content and talked down to me as if I were mentally challenged. Oh, and those textbooks were published like every year or so in a new edition, so that you could not resell once you bought one and used it for the course. I was extremely happy when I got to graduate-level courses because it meant no more of those retarded textbooks.
No. Please.
Regarding the WSJ essay - my perspective is that what Chua's kids are going through is barbaric and will not generate well-educated, Renaissance-esque people.

There is tremendous value in learning and discipline, and my observation of American schools makes me think that American schools are pretty weaksauce in the discipline and focus department. I don't think anyone out there denies that.

To pick at a particular example of Chua - music. I am better-suited than some others to look at this, since I myself - and my sister - spent time learning music as children and into our college years.

Mrs Chua! Your kids do well in violin and piano. And only violin and piano. Why violin and piano? Is the trumpet - a fine instrument! - beneath them? Or the viola, an underappreciated sibling to the violin? Perhaps it was simply too blue-collar to consider such an instrument as the guitar and its fine heritage in baroque European works. Or perhaps your children's true ability would have been in the drums. But, no, alas. It was the high-brow, well-respected violin and piano you chose for them. How simple it is to say, "ah, these are the respected instruments, the instruments bringing good face to us". Mrs. Chua, you have deeply restricted your children's musical activities. You really should not have done that. There is no call to regulate and legislate play like that. You should have let them explore their own mind, their own heart. They are Human beings too, and their perspective should be taken into account for their play. If they sought after being a professional musician, then there would have been time for focus, and much of it. Focus is the hallmark of a professional! But play is something else.
I've been feeling that the Internet hurts my mental health.

Filling my brain with HN, Reddit, DrudgeReport, Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, etc., is exhausting.

And this is on top of the massive amounts of code I digest when I am being productive. New libraries to learn, more of my teammates code to decipher, new specs to write, new architectures to understand.

It's really exhausting, and my short term memory for things like names and social events is shot to shit. If I can't get a brunch appointment in my email inbox, I will forget it.

I'm not complaining too loudly -- I'm never bored, and I'm happy and successful in my career. But I'm just feeling more and more like my brain is full and every new piece of information pushes out something else, but there's still endless more information to absorb.

It's giving me more and more pause these days.
Make it so that comments don't need to be made right away (to get upvote exposure) to be in the top 10 or 20. Maybe you could normalize each upvote by the number of views per unit time (view rate). You could measure success by trying to increase the average age of the top 10 comments (age = time since article was posted).
Property taxes in Oregon are a little funny. It depends a lot on where your house is located and when it was built. I pay about 0.6% of current market value annually. I have friends that pay 2%.
Attention Overload Disorder
Multiple Concurrent Linux Distributions without a VM
> I think people of a different genetic background as ourselves are naturally appealing to some extent

Being open to dating people other than your race is completely different than outright refusal to date any people of your own or a similar race. One is a normal modern mindset and the other is some kind of post traumatic mental reaction.
That sentence sounds precisely like "bubble-talk" to me.

When expectations matter a lot more than actual revenue is when we start to be in trouble.

I don't know if twitter is making money or not yet.
Youtube is barely providing profits for Google.
Digg didn't make money for yahoo.
Facebook we don't have real numbers yet. (rumor says they are profitable).
"Why doesn’t nature just engage in cloning?

... If each generation of an organism looks exactly like the last, parasites can steadily evolve to bypass the organism’s defenses."

Why doesn't nature, indeed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual_reproduction
Google TV Jailbreak Opens the Doors to Developers, Hulu
The challenge is that though its a timesink, HN doesn't feel like a timesink, because its educational and for the most part work-related...

All I know is if I billed for the time I've spent on HN they would owe me close to $50k ;)
No, I would definitely remember something so unique looking. It was a DSLR, I think ... it may have been something like "press the button and take thousands of pictures really quickly, then select the best one," which is a bit different from what I first remembered.
I need breaks from what I'm working on - and this site fills that need. There's only so much I will get done in a day and this unquenched optimism & productivity that is common here is simply not something I do. I end up thinking back to something I read here months & years later, thus cementing it's leisure value above reddit, fukung and twitter.
Hackers + Google TV units = cool ass shit, IMHO.
Im Chinese American, and although I'm no psychologist, it's quite clear to me you're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
As a few people have already pointed out, a lot of our time is spent consuming the content and not necessarily creating it. Reading the comments is probably the biggest productivity hit for me. The reason for that is that you can quickly get stuck reading long threads of discussions - especially on the more popular articles. While this is great, maybe try making only the top 5 or 10 comments visible by default, and then giving the user a 'See More' button that would show the rest of the comments. You could also only show the first and second level comments in the default mode, which would add to the simplicity and make it less of a productivity hit. It would be interesting to see people's reaction to this feature if you ever decided to implement it.
noprocrast is a life saver.

About anything that doesn't happen immediately causes me fairly too often to take a look at HN. I much prefer coding without internet.
It's interesting how in those days being "simple to learn and memorize" was an important part of a cipher, but not these days.
This, a thousand times.
This title is very misleading. A proton beam is high flux, and protons aren't atoms.
The fact that the P isn't capitalized in this title is absolutely hilarious, for anyone familiar with the very meta controversy over capitalization in the WordPress world.
yeah, especially considering that a huge chunk of species on this planet reproduces, clonally, just fine.
Yeah, I know the term "ORM" is misleading, but I think it most succinctly expresses what it is. I certainly know that the "R" part of ORM isn't right, so should I call it an Oject Mapper? An Object Data Mapper?
Yeah, I've seen libs like this, and because I'm using the MongoDB native JavaScript shell for a bunch of other random tasks, I wanted to keep my Python query syntax as close to pymongo and thus to the native JavaScript as possible. Thanks for the link, though.
Here's one I made that I think you'll like:
encalc.com

It does computer algebra, like integrate(x^2), as well as physical constants, like coulombs or hbar. I made a draggable graphing calculator for it, but it was too slow so I never released it.
I found plain pymongo a bit too bare. I was starting to write connection pooling better DBRef support, etc. and that's what morphed into this library...
Not really. I've lived in both and the salaries are maybe 20-25% lower in Austin, but everything else is much cheaper for more value. Especially when you're paying for grown up stuff like 3-4 bedroom homes in safe neighborhoods, day care/nannies, etc. That stuff is off the charts expensive in the Valley. And your tax bracket is higher along with your salary.

I can't imagine being an entrepreneur in the Valley with kids without at LEAST a few million in cash. In Austin you only need 1. :)
You're might be aware of this, but Maxmind has a free database for geolocating IPs down to the city level. It's also open source. http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity
(Ruby's) "garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off."

I found this interesting. Ruby doesn't have a particularly cutting edge GC afaik, just a standard mark and sweep collector [1]. Why does ACL, which is a commercial lisp and supposedly one of the better CL implementations at least technically[2], have a (relatively) terrible gc?

[1]maybe this changed recently - I don't track Ruby or use it - but Andy is talking of 2007

[2] their licensing terms were terrible last I checked. If you use ACL to build a product you have to give them a chunk of your revenue forever (see the "Value Added Reseller" license at http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml#var ) I am surprised anyone signs up for this.
Top Dumbest Tech Predictions of All Time
1) Can you make a customized "Highest voted recent links" list based only on votes of users, who vote on the same links as i?

Or alternatively publish votes history (anonymized), so we can try with algorithms ourself.

2) Can you add TL;DR section editable by users for every link?
UCDetector: Find Unused Code In Your Java or Android Projects
Paul Graham's Amazon Profile - Reviews and Wishlist
First I thought this was a replacement for irb, which would have been welcome.

Firstly, this will never have the adoption of bash, sit down on any Linux and you will be familiar. If you get used to shell and a normal human being which will have some delay context switching it will be a performance hit (same argument I'm sticking with qwerty for now)

Secondly, bash uses a domain specific language to tangle your fillesystem, simple things are simple, and unfortunately harder things Gerald blinked in the process. This comes with the overhead of learning some unintuitive things about ruby (blocks anyone?).
Played it until my browser crashed at 61. Is it finite and does it ever get harder?
I thought it was a satire at first when i read the original article in WSJ. I was astounded that Ms. Amy Chua was serious. How arrogant it is! It also makes me wonder why WSJ published such an apparently ridiculous article. What are the essential differences between claiming Chinese mother supremacy from white supremacy?

Both my wife and I are Chinese. We have two lovely children. They are like free range chickens in our house and in the school. We showed them how to use Google, Wikipedia, Webster, etc. so that they can look for knowledge they are interested by themselves. They had their own gmail accounts when they were four years old. My older child had Twitter account when he was six, before my wife ever heard of Twitter. :)

Because we believe love, trust, and confidence are most important for them to live a good life. The utmost goal of our education is for them to be independently thinkers, to work hard, to be creative, to have sympathy, to do right things for this society.

And I have confidence to say there are many Chinese parents holding the same belief as we do.
You would have to create your own personal system. Since people may have multiple skills, and skills only relevant to yourself.

Although, if you read "Never Eat Alone" to provides a good framework to build from.
Clicked on the example image but it didn't replay exactly. =[ Nevertheless, the non-exact replay was just as amazing.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/1645/screenshot20110111at...
This reminds me of Peter Norvig's move to Python:

I came to Python not because I thought it was a
better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better
pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard
time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the
Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for
the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found
that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself
enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook.
I found that Python was very nice for certain types of
small problems, and had the libraries I needed to
integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and
elsewhere on the net.

I think Lisp still has an edge for larger projects and for
applications where the speed of the compiled code is
important. But Python has the edge (with a large number of
students) when the main goal is communication, not
programming per se.

In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and
elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as
important as all the other choices: if you have the right
overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the
right development process that allows for rapid
development with continuous improvement, then many
languages will work for you; if you don't have those
things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.

(from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815)
I agree we need to improve the interactive query capability of CouchDB.

As far as performance, the key with Couch is to keep the view generation speed faster than the insert rate. So if your users are generating less than about 1000 changes a second, you should be fine on a single server.

More than that and you may need to shard / partition, which can be done in a few different way. The leading option is BigCouch: https://github.com/cloudant/bigcouch
You're right - I guess I tend to assume bad faith when someone writes "like you seem to believe" about something I don't... that's not usually used in a friendly-getting-to-truth type discussion.

There's a couple points:

-What kind of parental focus produces better well-being in children? It's not binary, but I lean towards the achievement/duty side of the spectrum. I know this goes against the current dominant Western thought, but it's not a radical perspective historically speaking.

-When people do feel unhappy about their upbringing, it's worth considering that the grass always looks greener on the other side. A looser, more relaxed, less disciplined parenting style doesn't guarantee happiness - in fact, I think it might produce less happiness on balance. Again, I'm in the minority of current Western thought, but there's been a lot of very successful societies built on a childhood focus on duty, achievement, and service...
Neat, I didn't know about schroot. I've mostly been using vserver which is basically FreeBSD jail for Linux:

http://linux-vserver.org/
I’m not quite sure what search-engine sex would involve.
But Google apparently needs some.

Wow, Krugman spouts gibberish when he isn't talking specifically about economics. This post is meaningless.
Why GIMP is Inadequate
We are hiring.

I've worked at Bump for about a year and a half - the classic 'work from the founder's kitchen' story...

I really enjoy coming to work here. Why?

Because the work is engrossing - there are more interesting things to work on here than I have time for.

Because our team works well together - it is a low-ego environment, and we are all focused on building cool stuff.

Because our hardware procurement process consists of mentioning what we need to Andy (our procurement officer/CTO) and shiny things magically appear on our desk within days.

Because our offices are custom-made: http://imgur.com/qZAc6 (ha!)

Please check out our jobs page: http://bu.mp/jobs

Or email me; see my profile.
> Hate to say it, Sebastian, but this whole comment seems built on the back of a false dichotomy. You don't either berate your kids and force them to toil for years at something they hate OR they turn into listless, lifeless middle managers who just fart along.

C'mon Ryan, the whole discussion is littered with anecdotes, and I made another one. Obviously I don't think those are the only possible outcomes... but I do think a focus on duty/achievement/service/etc is underrated in the West right now.

> On this topic, I intend to teach my kids the three things my father told me over and over and over as a kid:

That's cool and your dad sounds like a pretty solid and cool dude, and that jives with generally what I believe.

Going beyond just parenting, I do think everyone should try to excel at something - unless the middle manager is fully engaged and driven by his work, then I think it'd be good for him to strive to excel in music or art or charity or philanthropy or teaching or athletics or trying to build an amazing family or something...

I think not striving for excellence in anything is kind of sad. Why not try to push civilization forwards? Sometimes the main reasons said out loud - "well, I just want to be happy" - seem to mask other darker reasons, like fear of failure or inertia or feeling ill-equipped to make a difference. That's a damn shame. Why not strive to make some excellent contributions, in addition to striving to be happy?
Internet Timeline: 1945-2005 (includes deep links)
I think the game is a bit too easy for good typists. Spaceships will start shooting words at you pretty early on (level five was when I encountered one) but only if you are slow enough to let them. (I’m not a very good typist and didn’t even make it beyond the fifteenth level.)
For those interested in ruby shells, there's also a framework for building ruby shells: http://github.com/cldwalker/ripl
But wouldn't a slightly smart thief be able to beat it by using a small sticker on the webcam?

I know a smart lady who (after reading about webcams on compromised machines being used to take snaps without the knowledge of unsuspecting users) used a simple fix; stick a bindi(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bindi.jpg) on the webcam.
As an alternative to irb, you may be interested in ripl, http://github.com/cldwalker/ripl