skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we have to have this discussion again...

we could just copy one of those systems wholesale

Maybe. But when you do out the demographics, there are plenty of reasons to think that things here are not quite the same. With different sorts of problems, the same solution isn't guaranteed to work.

If you saw a better technique for doing something at your business, and didn't do it because "i don't like to see problems solved in that fashion, regardless of what the metrics tell me", you'd be an idiot, right?

Maybe. But maybe you're constrained because of what the Board of Directors will allow you to do. By analogy, the Constitution simply doesn't allow the federal government to do many of the things that your solution would require. Even if they're great ideas, it's simply not allowed. So you should be concentrating on changing the Constitutional restrictions that prevent those solutions, rather than getting the Courts to throw out ever larger chunks of the only thing that protects us from tyranny.
Personally, I would prefer to hash my fields like this:

1. Hash each field in the key in some fashion

2. Concatenate the hashes, for example implode(".", $hashes)

3. Now you've got a point in the space of all possible concatenated hashes. On each client, have a partition like this for each key:

["", "abf34.9f8c7.92833", ...]

4. go through the partition and find the last point that is smaller than your point. That point maps to your shard.

5. Monitor your machines. If one of your shards becomes too full, or too much action is going, SPLIT IT. You do this simply by replicating the data to one or more new shards (like it says in the article) introducing one or more points in the partition right after the point mapping to the shard. Point them to the new shards. And update all the clients!

That's all
Greg
If you don't value the testing Colcrys did (I probably wouldn't, colchicine's been around long enough), consider getting it from a "Canadian" pharmacy online. Generics of otherwise patented/exclusive drugs in the US are frequently legal in other countries. I know of a number of people who order from an online "Canadian" pharmacy for a generic version of Singulair, which is produced in India.

The legality of importing these for personal use is pretty murky. The FDA probably wouldn't like it, but it's not a blatant violation of any laws I'm aware of either.

More generally, I really struggle with patent protections for pharmaceuticals. It's difficult to imagine how they'd justify paying ginormous amounts of money to develop and/or test products to the FDA's standards without patent protection, but I find the idea of patents pricing people out of medication distasteful.
No, I'm talking about a wage index. It attempts to measure wages, while ignoring factors like hours worked, jobs worked, etc. I.e., if I quit my job as a trader and get a job as a bike messenger, wages haven't gone down in either profession.
My use case is "When is it the cheapest to get me out of here?". I can take vacation days at pretty much every date so I do not really care when I go on vacation. The destination does no really matter to me either.

Unfortunately, I found Kayak Explorer does not work for this as it does not allow me to see flights at a day for day granularity. http://www.adioso.com does a much better job. I can just search for stuff like "SEA to anywhere" and it will show me what I want.
social privacy is qualitative so no, facebook does understand privacy then a user would because they are looking at the quantitative technical side of internet security
Not true, it's part of Python's syntax. Here it is in Pypy:

Python 2.5.2 (79560, Nov 26 2010, 14:57:55)
[PyPy 1.4.0] on win32
>>> a = [1, 2 ,3]
>>> for a[:] in [[6, 7, 8]]:
... pass
>>> print(a)
[6, 7, 8]
Stringent FDA requirements that require extremely expensive testing are basically a health care problem. The fact that we have to give people monopolies so they can afford to do what the FDA wants is an unfortunate symptom of the problem.
a lot of these sound like they should be libraries.
Great post. The most of your personality in your product, the more that working continuous 15h days feels like a privilege, not a chore

The two commercials are hilarious, by the way. I want to star in the next one, but only if I don't have to drink rotten milk
This is the FDA's fault.

Without the FDA, you would keep buying the generic you had been buying, and the company would keep making it for you. But with the FDA, a company can come in and essentially buy a monopoly on a market that would otherwise be free.
How to Prepare Your Family for Entrepreneurship
MacRuby 0.9 is released
I wouldn't assume that there's no difference for someone who is older, uneducated, or unemployed, because the cross-border friction is WAY higher for them.

You might be right, but I don't think you can simply assume it.

For example, a well-educated, professionally employed person old enough to have an established family is highly immobile for those very reasons. Their jobs and their family ties are holding them in place. Who knows how these factors all net out.
As I said in the other thread, displaying the fact that an SSD supports TRIM does not prove that HFS+ uses TRIM, but it's a good sign.
LinkedIn team collaboration with tight email integration
Agreed. and Anderson consulting using an experimental, non-obvious language? I don't see it.
More than anything else, Computer Science is young. Unlike other disciplines, there has not yet been a schism between the theoretical and practical yet. In school, we learned a bit of everything. I took classes focused on algorithms and computation, but also took classes on software design, learning how to use databases and practicing loose coupling and such.

If you look a physics, which has been around a little longer, you see a definite split. A physics major is a license to explore the theoretical limits of the physical world. Engineers design bridges and learn skills that let them do that really well. Both sides have overlapping knowledge and their knowledge is complimentary, but schools split them into distinct groups.

My guess is that, in time, we will see the same split in computer science.
Thank you for showing me that I wasn't the only one that had the same HORRIBLE experience! I gave a valiant effort for a good 3 solid days, at which point, I was much MUCH further along with the same tasks on iOS. For shame, RIM.
"A lecture within a lecture", haha.
Ever since 10.1 the Flash updater is ridiculously fast and never asks me to restart my system. Easily the best automatic update experience among the various programs that constantly need to update themselves.
They still have that sort of sales process in other industries.

I know a girl who works for a company that sells Expensive Things to a Big Lumber Company. Her full time job is to be fun to be around. Every weekend you'll find her and a few random BigCo executives (or formen depending on the weekend) riding jetskis, snowboarding or just buying rounds of tequila at the Mexican restaurant. Her office is at the BigCo plant.

It still happens in tech too. Drive past the Microsoft campus next time you're in Redmond. Notice how Intel has an office building next door?
depends on the person, i guess
Ah, you definately have never developed for any sort of linuxy or embedded hardware that requires a full moon and the right software version every step of the way.
Oh, and the Android installer isn't flawless either: it does require some setting up of cumbersome paths, but the installer of individual SDKs (which to be fair are seperate files/downloads) works like a charm...
Gosh, US patent law is more messed up than I thought. Not only do The Lawyers get a huge cut of the money on any "infringement" cases, but you have to pay them along the way to make sure that you get your rightful infringement vengence.
Seems like a cool idea, but doesn't have enough fare data. If I leave from Chicago Midway and check non-stop flights only, I can go nowhere in the continental U.S.
The Unforgettable Pros of CAD Services
When it comes to CAD drafting, it is considered to be one of the most dependable professions in current times. It typically involves the role of civil engineers, architects and builders.
It's been brought up a few times on HN recently, but I think it's worth bringing up again - Imposter Syndrome is rampant in our field. It's the reason a lot of people drop out or don't even get into it. You're far from the only person who feels this way.

Interviews and conversations online may lead you to feel like you need to beat yourself into reading books on operating systems or some other specific sub-field, but a sincere interest in things like garbage collection isn't the only path to success. Algorithms comes up a lot because it's easier to filter for people who know the topic well, but those people have gaps in their abilities, too. Those topics aren't more important than things like domain knowledge or writing maintainable code, they just aren't always as easy to recognize, test for, or brag about.

Sure it's good to learn them, but learn them when you have some motivation to - start writing a game and then read about path-finding. Learn RegEx out of an interest in shortening some code at work. Turning learning into hard work by forcing yourself to learn about things that don't interest you is just going to make learning more difficult. What's important is just that you learn something - so relax and do something fun.
Yeah, I like this route a fair bit. I'd like to think that I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by people who would do this type of thing.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. :)

My hesitation on something like this (and also the reason I didn't put our company in this post) is because I don't want to give him any unnecessary attention until necessary. Plan of attack being worked out now...
I actually have an approved app for the PlayBook and actually found the entire process quite straight forward, especially considering that both the sdk and simulator are both in beta.
Maybe he should get 1/sqrt(log(N))% of the reward.
Yes, most definitely. I set up gmail to automatically add everyone I reply to to my contact list and in my job today I often get 5-10 e-mails per day from potential customers, investors, partners, etc (sometimes many more). I have to be able to follow up with any one of them at any point, and while I don't need to have them in my contact list (I can search for their e-mail and copy-paste their address), it would make my job much more frustrating and time consuming. I haven't hit the 10k limit yet, but I suspect I will relatively soon. This is actually a very common use case for a huge number of business customers, it's certainly not an isolated edge case.
Like "Quick and Dirty", "Moral Majority", "Jumbo Shrimp", and "Military Intelligence", there is no such thing as "Fuck You Money".

By definition, everyone I know who claims to have "Fuck You Money" doesn't have enough money to buy themselves class, humility, kindness, or inner peace. They're never happy because everyone else either:

- has more "Fuck You Money" than they do, or

- doesn't know how much "Fuck You Money" they really have

If you really want more money so that you can say, "Fuck you" to others, you may want to consider an attitude adjustment before going after any more money.
The complaints are:

$200 price to develop with 10 app limit.

Multiple registration forms.

Requiring multiple downloads.

Requiring to purchase vmware fusion.

Installer that just copies an iso.

Having to password protect the simulator.

Bad documentation on how to load an app on the simulator.

The comparative ease with which you can do these things with android and ios.
Guilty as charged on the first point :) The separate files/downloads was a minor annoyance, but fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. On the whole, I just found it to be an very frustrating experience.
Agreed about Lawyers. I am happy to spend money on them as necessary for the right things, but this seems like something that could be very lengthly if not approached the right way... and one thing I know about hiring lawyers is that long problems have big bills. :p
Absolutely. I studied the Itanium design philosophy back in 2000 and this is exactly what they were aiming to do: drop all the complex logic devoted to keeping the pipelines full and all the units busy.

True about data, though I vaguely recall EPIC had advantages there too because without needing to do branch prediction, you didn't need to speculatively fetch multiple memory addresses; meaning the same D-cache went further.
I don't object so much to the word "science" in CS as I do about the word "computer". Edsger Dijkstra said: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
I think reducing doctors' salaries is a good idea.
Nice list of show HNs
I'm curious what the opinion of people here is as far as how much F-U-Money is "enough". Obviously it probably depends on your goals, but is there a reliable way of calculating the amount needed?
DIY: Free tools for removing malicious software
On POSIX systems, clock_nanosleep() can accept an absolute time argument.

// In a real program one would probably not use time()
// Also, some older pre-release versions of the realtime
// kernel patches had the clock_nanosleep() and time()
// clocks out of sync by 0.5s (IIRC)
for(;;) {
struct timespec after_epoch = { .tv_sec = time(NULL) + 1, .tv_nsec = 0 };
// Check for EINTR in a real program
clock_nanosleep(CLOCK_REALTIME, TIMER_ABSTIME, &after_epoch, NULL);
printf("Tick\n");
}

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/clo...

Unfortunately, this probably doesn't help with Flash or JavaScript clock demos.
Has reddit been appearing on Hacker News far more frequently recently or is it just a coincidence? I'm sure this is the 2nd or 3rd time I've seen it.
A) Call it even for health outcomes if you'd like, we could argue the numbers regarding demographics, lifestyle and all that until the cows come home, but health in Canada/UK/France/Japan definitely isn't materially worse. So for the sake of argument let's just call it even, except we're spending several times as much. (we actually spend more gov't money on healthcare per capita than many companies with socialized medicine, in addition to private sector spending -- that's how broken our system is).

B) Regarding doctors wages, I'm not really talking about "poorer" countries unless you'd call western europe, canada, japan "poorer". If they make significantly less in those countries than here.. sure, fine. Given that we don't offer cheap schooling like those countries there might be a limit to how low we can go, though.

C) Top 5% of income != doctors, necessarily. And the money we're wasting, a tiny percentage of that is going into doctors' pockets. Most of it is just plain pissed away, and a lot goes to insurance company profits. Doctor salaries are pretty far down on that list, so I don't think I was proposing drastically lowering their salaries, no.
Here's some advice I learned the hard way.

Every time you register a dotcom you intend to use for business, register it as a trademark. Its cheap and easy. Just consider it part of the cost of domain registry.

This is helpful in two ways. First, it will prevent you from accidentally registering a domain that is too close to someone else's trademark (and losing your domain later in a nasty surprise kind of way). Second, it will give you a nearly bullet-proof automatic way to file a complaint with ICANN that will almost always result in you being given the offending domain.

In any case, head on over to http://www.icann.org/en/udrp to see what your options are. Just filing the complaint may be enough to cause your shadow to move on to less proactive victims.
Alternatively:

By date: http://searchyc.com/submissions/Show+HN%253A?sort=by_date

By points: http://searchyc.com/submissions/Show+HN%253A
Now I feel like an idiot for spending an hour and half writing it, lol.
Crowdbooster is lots of fun. I've been using it on my own piddly twitter account and a mega twitter account, @dropbox. Knowing which tweets resonate the most with the audience is great. Hint: people liked Dropquest.

http://twitter.com/ikirigin

http://twitter.com/dropbox

http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=659
Keep us updated. No doubt there are people here who can help spread the word.
If you're interested in getting Leopard's old-style exposé back in Snow Leopard, I wrote a blog post explaining how to do it: http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2011/01/9/old-style-mac-os-x-leopa...

Proportional-style windows make so much more sense than the grid-based layout. I'm thrilled that they've reverted back to that for Lion's exposé, using the grid for the new Mission Control view.
Sorry guys, but that's probably what's happened. I did do a quick site: Google search for the page title but it didn't bring back any results. Apologies for the double post.
I've completely switched to Preview on the Mac and Foxit Reader on my PC and haven't looked back.
Ask HN: What Web server load testing tools are you using?
A Web developer should be able to tell how does their server perform under heavy loads before having those loads in production. Which tools are other hackers using? Which would you recommend as the best? And what makes those stand out? Thanks!
Is this a reference to the quality of HN discussion going on lately? I'd lurked long before I ever signed up, and I just always assumed that getting noticed was largely chance. For whatever reason, it feels like you're saying this wasn't always the case.
Yeah, just wish there was an easy way to download once in the viewer.
I think Chrome is still the winner here. I don't even notice when it upgrades itself.
Don’t forget Kik (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935093) and the arbitrary way RIM may decide to not only take your app down, but sue you (http://www.kik.com/blog/2010/12/a-sad-day-in-waterloo/), to boot.
The post is factually inaccurate.

- $200 per registration fee is waived for now. In fact its been waived for over a year now.

- 10 app limit is not enforced either.
Yeah, the $200 was a major blocker for me. As a student, I just want to make silly free game apps. $200 for $0 income? Well that's certainly not appealing. On the other side, don't they not take any cut of your income from their app store?
Or http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&safe=active&...
Greplin (YC W10): A Search Engine For Your Social Life Online
Presumably the difference between earned income and expenses is made up for with credit and welfare.

umm, why would credit and welfare not be counted as income?

Credit is (presumably) just a future income. And welfare is very real current income.
I was participating in a developers survey by Rim around a year ago (one of those where they grab 10 engineers and put them in a room for some cash) and the complaints were exactly the same!
Imported From India Best And Brightest Want To Work In U.S.
I think the concept is pretty good, and I could see something like this going viral, but before marketing it I would work on the user flow a bit more..

1. Engage people right away. I think those login / signup forms are going to scare people away. If it were my site, I'd just have a box where users input 5 facts about themself, an input box where they pic a username, and a big button that says "Create my page at 5factsabout.me/xxxx". Once they do that, ask for the their email / pass (or fb / twitter login) to finish the process.

2. Make it as easy as possible for people to choose their facts. Suggest some ideas for real facts (a place where you lived, your middle name, etc..), and then possibly pull up facts entered by other people to give people ideas for fake facts. Maybe they can just click a suggested fake fact to add it.

Also, I'd suggest using the standard fb and twitter connect buttons. The buttons you're using now don't seem like login buttons. People are used to the standard fbml facebook connect button.

In my opinion, those changes could easily be the difference between it going viral and not going anywhere.
That's interesting. I hadn't run into this before in college or grad school, and it seems like a good way of bridging the analytical gap between theory and practice that Sedgewick talked about.

It's unlikely that Sedgewick hadn't heard of this before. I suspect that he didn't mention it simply because it isn't often taught. According to your citation, it was introduced in 2001 which is quite recent in academic terms. How did you come across it?
Hunch engineering is answering questions on formspring
I've had luck converting people tweeting about the problem my product solves to beta users. I'm sure it depends on who your customers are and how likely they are to express themselves on Twitter and other social media.
Isn't the requirement to get VMware Fusion Mac-specific? Might as well complain about not being able to write iOS applications on Windows.
This is actually old (2007), but interesting nevertheless. Here's a link to the video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6694143975371488739...
I still disbelieve. Ruby is as much a general programming language as Python, yet supports a syntax that I find much more readable. I even find the deprecated os.popen interface in Python to be more readable than the official Python 2.6 interface. And, of course, the Python 2.7 syntax is better.

Therefore I can't agree that the Python that I presented is as good as is possible for a general purpose programming language.
I thought his reasons for advocating Java for teaching are interesting, in particular:

Q. Why not Python?
A. Poor data abstraction; everyone needs layers of abstraction

I've recently been telling my dad that he should teach himself Python (he has no programming background aside from BASIC), perhaps I should rethink this. I like Python's REPL for teaching, but back in my Java days I used to use http://www.beanshell.org/ to provide something similar.
MVC Architecture for JavaScript Applications
I've used JPerf before, and found it adequate for what I needed. As I understand it, it basically wraps JUnit test cases in independent threads and lets them all run. Depending on your server, this approach might give you the load you need.
Have you tried Ctrl+S or selecting 'Save page as...' from the wrench menu? I'm running the dev build so I don't know whats in beta or stable, but I get a nice little dialog box to save the pdf.
I hope MacRuby finds its way into Lion. I used it a few revisions ago and it was quite solid.
Judging by the fact that the dev kit shipped with an ISO for running the simulator, I suspect you would need some kind of VM package in Windows as well. However Windows has the free VMWare Player.
What? Like Ctrl-S?
I think "fuck you" means something more along the lines of "no I won't sell cocaine to orphans so I can drive a nice car, fuck you" and less "fuck you mom".
complete release notes:

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2011-Feb...
The post mentions that the fee is currently waived. And it’s not like the author made up the 10-app limit, just because he wasn’t aware it’s currently not enforced.
One thing I am surprised to not see in this list is that, as an individual, you are required to have your form faxed back after been signed by a notary. AFAIK, this is not practice of Google or Apple either.
We've been frustrated to the point of abandonment on trying to install a Blackberry simulator to test out jquery-mobile apps. Similar story to tell--just kept hitting wall after wall of poorly thought-out and poorly documented steps.

It's a shame because most of our customers use Blackberries but it's just not practical for us to support Blackberry on our mobile apps.
Seth Godin: 30%, the long tail and a future of serialized content
Why those numbers... 8,192 and 16,384 perhaps?
I have exactly one reason to launch Reader by itself: when setting up a computer for another user in my organization, I launch Reader once to accept the license agreement on his/her behalf. Then I delete the icon.