skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This bears repeating. Because MongoDB doesn't do joins, sharding is orders of magnitude easier than with an SQL system; if you run out of RAM, shard.
> this is like kryptonite for entrepreneurs.

The truth hurts. Everybody wants to be a rockstar, but for most people, it's little gigs all the way.

A proper understanding of what this means will lead to less heartbreak, although the dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur won't care anyway.
Why "Too Much" Mobile Hardware Choice is a Good Strategy
That argument would be plausible if Amazon was patenting a particular logistical implementation of 1-click purchase. ("This is a specific device which allows canceled orders to be tracked and routed back to inventory...") But they patented the entire concept, which would prevent even companies with trivial logistics from allowing 1-click purchasing without paying Amazon royalties.

And indeed, according to Tim O'Reilly, Bezos defended the broad patenting of all types of 1-click purchasing. Here is an excerpt of O'Reilly's description of their conversation:

> First off, Jeff wanted to explain why he thought 1-click was original enough to patent. It has nothing to do with the implementation, which he admits is fairly trivial to duplicate, but with the reframing of the problem. At the time he came up with 1-click shopping, everyone was locked in to the shopping cart metaphor, because that's what you do in the real world. You pick up an item and take it to the counter to buy it. On the Web, he realized, something very different was possible: all you had to do was point to an article, and it was yours...

>What's more, Jeff went on, small inventions can often seem extremely obvious in retrospect. The patent literature is full of this kind of thing. The significance of an invention isn't how hard it is to copy, but how it reframes the problem in a new way.

> This may be true, I replied. But it is hard to believe that if Amazon hadn't introduced 1-click ordering (if they were indeed first to do it), that someone else wouldn't have done this. It beggars the imagination that this is so significant and unexpected an innovation that others should be prevented from using it. Patents are meant to promote the common welfare, the idea being that certain ideas won't be developed without government providing a degree of protection. Is this an idea that required that kind of protection to be developed?

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.htm...
I'm curious what the bias of patents classes in law school are (at least in your case). Are lawyers really taught that when an engineer brings them an 'invention' to patent they are supposed to try and expand the scope of that patent to absurd levels just because they think that they can sneak it past the patent examiners by making the language so obtuse that the simple act of inhaling and exhaling clocks in at 2,000 pages?
Yeah, making "them come" is almost as hard as building a product that will keep them coming back...
I just wrote you quite a long story, so in case you don't have the patience to read it all, here's my recommendation for you (as echoed again at the very end):

If you have no backup of your data, I recommend taking your drive to a special data recovery center. I think the data is still there, but they will need to physically remove the platters from the enclosure and place them in a new drive with a new circuit board. It will probably be quite expensive, but it sounds like it will be worth it for you.

Ok, now my similar story:

I had a remarkably similar thing happen to me a few months back so I can't remember exactly what happened, but basically it went like this:

15 years of life on old 750GB HD, wanted to transfer to new WD Passport 1TB. Plugged it into USB, also got annoyed by the pop-up software, tried disabling it, nothing. Didn't use the full-on encryption, but did use a password to access the drive (it was immediate, so I'm assuming no encryption actually took place).

Anyway, then I realized it was annoying to always have to enter the password whenever plugging in the drive, and in any event, I just didn't like the "feeling" of some weird third party software -- the WD pop-up software -- managing a password for my critical data.

So I elected to remove it. I don't remember whether I was successful, but what happened next was terrifying: I couldn't access my drive. Same as you, only the WD VCD software loaded but the drive itself wouldn't mount.

This was on a modern MacBook Pro running the latest version of OS X btw. So I immediately tried booting up into Windows, and even tried an actual Windows box as well. Weirdly, the Mac and Windows device managers were able to see SOMETHING there, but they couldn't access it.

The drive would spin up, but nothing else. Nada, zip.

So I immediately took the drive back to the Apple store, and one of the employees walked in and before I could even tell him what happened, he said, "Let me guess, your brand new WD drive just failed?"

Turns out they have a circuit board problem: after testing, they concluded mine had failed, and that apparently circuit board failures on those drives, if they happen at all, happen within the first 24 hours of use.

So then I faced a dilemma: how do I get my money back and get rid of all my data? There was no way to format the drive before sending it back, and I wasn't going to entrust 15 years or more of my life to some employee at WD somewhere to just physically destroy the drive.

Long story (not so) short, I elected to just swallow the $150 and keep the drive, i.e., keeping my personal data, well, personal, was worth $150 to me.

So I went out and bought a Seagate and just recopied my data.

As I said above, if you have no backup of your data, I recommend taking your drive to a special data recovery center. I think the data is still there, but they will need to physically remove the platters from the enclosure and place them in a new drive with a new circuit board. It will probably be quite expensive, but it sounds like it will be worth it for you.

So sorry for what you've been through, I know how it feels...... :(
But there cases of those startups that primarily revolve around a tech idea, outsourcing the coding. If the crux of the idea revolves around sound programming, wouldn't it be better to have a tech team onboard than outsource it?

The irony : I am coding for a startup that found me somewhere on the internet.
the number of people who can effectively code for 10 hours a day for a period of months is... small. Nearly everyone I know who claims this ability spends a lot of time doing things like reading hacker news rather than coding.

This, I think, is one of the tests of a manager. A bad manager loves to see people looking busy. A bad manager will hire people who claim to work 10 hours (or more!) a day. This manager will quite often stay at work with everyone else (it doesn't matter how early you show up, as long as you show up before the boss. It doesn't matter how late you leave, as long as you leave after the boss.) but he usually slips into dealing with personal business. And so does nearly everyone else.

I think a much better approach is to let people figure out what their optimum productivity is. I know one guy who says "i have four good hours a day" - and he is very, very good during those four hours. But after those four hours, really, you might as well send him home to play video games or something. He's done.

Expecting 10 hours a day of work on average encourages a culture of deception; a culture of "look busy" which really, isn't any good for anyone. Yeah, I want you to work as much for me as you can. But really, if you are going to work for five hours a day and screw off on facebook the other five? I'd prefer you just go home and do something fulfilling. You aren't making me any money on facebook, and destroying your home lives doesn't make me any richer.

Now, there are some people who can code, consistently, for 10 hours a day. But they are dwarfed by the numbers of people who act busy for 10 hours a day to meet the expectations of management.
It really will change everything! Asbestos is now safe again! Thanks liquid glass! ;-)
backgrounder:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/Why-Async;jsessionid=512A2...
The trick is to find the right people in India to outsource it too.
It's not just because he is doing "something wrong", it's mostly because he isn't really helping the site he wants to help as gnossis pointed above.
No. The spray can will just be shaped like a volcano.
"If your application is a good fit" is the operative phrase here. SVG does some things very well, but lags in other ways. They really are different tools made for different purposes (though they do have a little bit of overlap). It is like Illustrator and Photoshop, which both can make pictures, but a good designer will use both depending on the circumstances.
I honestly don't know of any good open source examples of complex async applications in either language (ruby or javascript) that are well structured.

So, at first you claim there is clean way to do it, but then you admit nobody is doing it the clean way?

That sounds a bit strange, doesn't it?

I think the reality is that there simply is no pattern to escape callback-hell in complex evented applications. Or why else would everybody still be writing the same spaghetti-code with the logic scattered over at least two
callbacks (success/errBack) per unit of work?

I'd go as far and claim the spaghetti-pattern is inherent to evented programming, unless you wrap it all up in something sane like co-routines.
Watch IBM’s Watson AI defeat puny humans in Jeopardy (video)
But can it screw in a light bulb?
Actually it's the flowers that make you shoot fireballs.
Or just javascript:alert(Math.sqrt(Math.E)); in address bar.
Like scotty79 said, we'll just end up in another 'antibiotic-resistant bacteria'-type situation. Some bacteria will find a way to thrive on those surfaces, and we'll have little defense against it. By that time we'll be largely dependent on those types of surfaces and it won't be easy to change everything out.
In the spotlight: All-In-One Business solution for SMBs
What's the comparative advantage between a human and a hog? The same relation may very well obtain between a superintelligence and a human.
Some love for Ballmer
How Python affected my C/C++ brace style
Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
> As for a hoverboard - sure it's technically more interesting
> than a Segway, but would it truly revolutionize anything

It would for the cast of Back to the Future on Ice. ;-)

Seriously though, I think that the technology behind a hoverboard would probably have far more implications than the technology behind the Segway. The product itself might not revolutionize much, but the technology behind it would.
I think, before I ran my first business this kind of thing would have been discouraging. But now that I have experience building and growing a business, accurate data is good. I think a seasoned entrepreneur will tend to look at grim data and say "OK, now I've got a grasp on this, admittedly bad, situation. How do I make things better?"
I was gonna post the same link.

tl;dr you gain occasional productivity boosts by extending the work day, but that is inevitably followed by a decrease in productivity to make up for it.
The tagline even supports that interpretation.
The problem with medication long-term is that it may keep you in a drowsy state and not allow you to be alert and aware. If the medication is stimulating (like coffee), then it can result in too many thoughts so that the silence is not experienced.

Anyway, that's your call. Getting out of depression is the most important thing first. Keep practicing being in the present moment, and staying alert and thought-free as much as possible alongside.
Metaphors!
IBM computer 'beats' human winners in exhibition match of Jeopardy
Ah, so the rich automatically have 'character and fitness' and are immune to corruption. Makes sense.
I'd love to see this guy worked up over an issue that actually matters...
Typesetters have strange "rules," like quotes straddling "punctuation."
10 Immutable Laws of Security
I think what raggi said is that there are no good _open source_ _complex_ async _apps_, mostly because when people are writing open source they tend to write libs, not apps, or end up not working anymore at the problem before it gets really complex.

I've worked on a commercial, complex, async codebase with raggi and have to agree that there is a way other than callback-hell, even for complex evented applications.

In my personal opinion, even more so on ruby than javascript, but I don't want to get to that really.

edit: changed asterisks to underscores because I didn't know they'd be italicized
"Should I still learn Java?" Answered: Yes.
Thank HTML (and TeX) for auto-collapsing consecutive whitespace...
If you're using jQuery then, http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/
That doesn't follow. If we define "OOP" to encompasses everything that anyone calls OOP then it's very possible for there to be "good parts" and "bad parts" in that set.

P.S. Smalltalk is a beautiful language with a great deal to offer anyone, but multimethods are superior. The fact that multimethods don't require multiple dispatch patterns demonstrates this.
I've heard the same complaint from a client, adding products to Amazon, and having them taken over.. Definitely a risk to consider when giving a potential competitor all your sales statistics.
It's Official: Ubuntu Will Embrace the Cloud--Flexibly
Pretty shameless, but not a plug (as HN is clearly not the target market). Here's something I did the day after he public domained his articles:
http://alfredpang.com/steve-pavlina-blog-collection/
I was at a Polytechnic for my degree. It is pretty much a uni, just doesn't have the prestige. The lecturers are as good and have taught at universities in the past. I say this as I think they are often confused with community colleges in america. It was really good in that the classes were small (it ended up being 15 students in first year). We could even talk to our lecturers at lunchtime.

I felt free to listen in to my lecturer's discussions at lunchtime, or raise a topic of interest and discuss it with them. They also had real world experience which was great. For example: the head didn't have a degree in my field. It was in commerce, not Information Systems. The Information Systems part was from working in that field for years.

There is a place for completely studying solo, but meetups in physical space do allow people to innovate better (bouncing ideas off each other without impediment). Creating a study group with red_beard08, squizgirl77 and <some guy with a weird name> has a certain amount of artificialness to it. Perhaps due to not knowing them. Maybe social tools like twitter will help alleviate that.
Windows Team Releases Updated KDE Applications
I thought that's an American thing.
Still sounds dubious to me. Then why has this pattern not emerged as best practice long ago?

And, frankly, I'd be curious to see a snippet of code in that style.
A crash course in Python
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/11298/is-there-a-...
Twitter: The science of the hashtag
Dealing with the same, small issue over and over again would get on anyone's nerves.

I rarely have to deal with other's 'English' documents and yet it annoys me every time I have to double-space when editing someone else's document to keep it consistent with the rest of their document.
Arsenal vs West Ham United – Match Preview 2010
How I'm funding my startup with a non-tech muse
Single page

http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/pagenum/all/
Google now translates your conversations
Unless you were coerced or the contract came into being in some other illegitimate way, you certainly have a moral obligation to fulfill any promise you make, contract or otherwise.

<Quick moral theory>
To be moral, an action must preserve agency of those involved. When any action is performed, a reciprocal standard of action is established. (When I do something, I am willing that it is ok for you to do it to me.) If the action in question strips another person of their moral agency, the actor initiating the action is also accepting that it is permissible to be stripped of their own agency. This is where the contradiction exists. If we authorize the removal of anothers agency, then we are authorizing the removal of our own agency as well, and thus our ability to determine morality.

Cliffs Notes: If you screw someone over, you're authorizing others to screw you over. This perverts your sense of morality and you are no longer sufficiently able to decide morality.
I stopped reading when I saw "head first design patterns" in second place
What Do IT Professionals Think About Surveillance?
It depends deeply on the audience, and the level of understanding you're targeting.

What does the 'child' already know that can be leveraged?

Do you want them to have a fuzzy, perhaps-intuitive understanding... or bring them up (however many long steps it takes) to a complicated understanding?

Can the explanation be delivered interactively, confirming understanding of explained (or assumed) bases along the way?
Hacking Your Organization
Not only does TeX collapse consecutive whitespace, when typesetting justified text, it will put whitespace back in the least ugly way it can figure out. It's systems like this that make me think humans shouldn't be responsible for things like "number of spaces" at all, unless they really know what they're doing.
i use thefind.com for product search instead of google. they bought like.com which will hopefully help them out in this area. peter yared (author of the article above)
Keep it Simple and Stupid
50 Best Web Design Blogs You Aren’t Reading Yet
So when is facebook going to start with 'Facebook Local Deals' or something?
> you certainly have a moral obligation to fulfill any promise you make

Morals are not absolute. Trying to apply your own expectations to others has the ability to cause a lot of grief in life.

Having paid off about $35k in student loans 2.5 years after I graduated, I do feel sympathy. It's easy to take on loans when it's just numbers on a piece of paper and one may not have earned much money up until that point. I only realised the hindrance of debt after taking it on. It can be a very tough lesson for people to learn if they have taken on too much and do not have prior experience on which to base their decisions.
Two spaces is so long ago, that as an europaen I even didn't know, you can do this. Big cultural gap!
But It Was All Borrowers
It's nice to see a positive java posting on HN for a change!
Groupon Prepares for Spring 2011 IPO at a $15B Valuation
The New release of iDatabase 2.0 for Mac OS X is Here from Apimac
Apimac has released iDatabase 2.0 for Mac OS X. Designed to permit bi-directional syncing between computer and mobile device, iDatabase is a complete personal database management solution. Ideal for tracking membership lists, expenses, projects, Internet accounts, etc., the app includes 16 ready to use templates such as Accounts, Contacts, Exercise Log, Recipes, and To Do. Creation of custom templates is also supported. iDatabase is the most intuitive personal database management software for Mac.
Except this time it'll be with Apps... :)
Where I got my undergraduate degree, software testing is an elective course for CS and SE majors -- http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~spiros/teaching/SE320/index.html
Honestly I find his argument rather moronic. There's a long list of outdated practices that cost a ton more in productivity than double spaces and he has little hope of changing them as well.

Also, I like Courier AND Terminal.

NOTE: Single my spacing here is due to the iPad, not preference.
Bah. My reading comprehension not so good.
It’s an amusing article. I don’t think he is all that worked up.
Most colleges do have an entrepreneurship course in their business college, and many colleges allow you to take electives outside your degree program. I did, and entrepreneurship was one of them.
I think HN collapses two spaces. Let me just test that.

Edit: Indeed, HN won’t allow for two spaces.

Second edit: The two spaces are in the source text. Is this a HTML thing?

Third edit: Yes, this is a HTML thing. I somehow must have forgotten how HTML treats whitespace.
It's easier to get worked up over an issue with a clear, unambiguous right answer. Safer, too.
Oh, I recognize the joke, but I still worry about any engineers who believe that 1 is prime :)
I have a Lucid desktop that I have specifically avoided upgrading. It hasn't offered me an upgrade yet. I don't know if that's a bug, or if it just won't offer me an upgrade until the next LTS.
I can't say I disagree with the author. Even with all its troubles, there's simply too much legacy Java code to abandon. Much like Cobol and Perl, there will always be a need for Java programmers to--at the very least--maintain existing code.

If you're a complete newb, learning Java will also introduce you to the C-like family of languages. (Although I say everyone should learn C first in order to appreciate memory management)
If you're in need of a good startup idea:
Claim a patent for crossing fingers to build a luck generator.
I thought that two spaces are to discern between the period that ends a mid-sentence abbreviation and one that finishes a sentence.

By the way - I think that the layout should be dealt with by the software that converts the string of characters to an actual graphical context. Why should I care what font will my text be displayed with? I prefer software that understands "end of sentence", "end of paragraph", maybe "end of abbreviation" (if necessary to make this distinction) and puts whatever amount of whitespace is appropriate for this to look decent. This usually isn't even an integer number of spaces, but rather a fractional one.

And yeah, I'm a single-spacer but rather because of laziness than anything else.

TLDR: A space in ASCII (or Unicode) encoding of the text != amount of whitespace in layout.
I was tempted to post just a smiley in response to your post, but I wondered if that would've been a bit too subtle :)
The guy is deep in debt, but chose to keep a low-paying part-time job he [presumably] likes and to default on his loans instead of seeking options that would allow him to keep his obligations. And the complaint is that the guy should be free to do what makes him happy?!

Really? Is this a location issue? Because to me that sounds like the entitled moaning of a 10 year-old. The real world does not and should not care what YOU feel like doing. People are expected to behave like adults and to uphold their obligations. It's YOUR job to figure out a way to do what you love while successfully doing that - not everyone else's.

On the other hand, please correct me if I'm missing some important issue here.
I'm a two-spacer ^. Perhaps it is wrong by current standards but I still think it adds to the scan-ability of a paragraph. They call a paragraph full of holes ugly, I call it easier to scan.

And for the record, monospaced fonts aren't dead: all sensible text editors use them. Monospaced fonts are what I use to write ruby code (not many sentences appear there), java code (sigh... Lots of comments and sentences), and even LaTeX documents. I normally compose documents and long emails in a text editor exactly because the typography of a word processor is a distraction. Even this comment box uses a monospaced font!

^ except on the iPhone where it's impossible/awkward
> learning Java will also introduce you to the C-like family of languages
Aren't Java and C, different family of languages?
Is that an API key in the source code?
This Year in Game AI: Analysis and Trends from 2010 and Predictions for 2011
They just seem so....sleazy though. I've heard their CEO talk and he's just the epitome of sleazy.
Try writing him a letter...

in Comic Sans ;)
It's probably standard HTML rendering that is collapsing the spaces. That will happen unless you put an explicit space using &nbsp;.