skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent a semester doing this as a physics and astronomy undergrad and had an awesome time of it. I was already spending nights either taking observational data at the observatory or working a graveyard shift job, I had another job as a physics & astro T.A. and my own shared office in the physics building and ended up usually sleeping in the office, on a couch in the lab, or in the planetarium, and I barely ever even saw my apartment, so what was the point? I had all my belongings in my physics office or my car and I showered at the gym. Letting yourself into a planetarium alone, setting the stars to rotate slowly overhead, and lying in a center seat looking up at them is an awesome hack for getting a restful nap in the middle of the day.
They'd love you for it.
There ought to be a web hacker Oscars
So I've learnt since the first time things went kerflooie.

However I chose Fremont because it's the closest datacentre they have to Australia. Most of my readers are here.
I've been using easydns.com for my registration and DNS hosting needs. They have an excellent feature set, as well as reasonable prices.

I haven't done any particular stress testing of their DNS servers, but their documentation suggests it should perform well. I have noticed no problems empirically.
EIS – Importance to UK Angel Investments
It shows the fundamental differences in the work a manager and a software engineer does.

The open communication will make it easier for the manager to load-off work, to stay in the loop, to check on their employees "subtly" and writing all those project plans and reports does not take the same amount of "being in the zone" as software engineering does.

So if the manager works better with more people around them and everybody knows how important communication is since they keep drilling that into managers these days - well of course your manager is going to assume that putting 5 times as many coders into one room is going to give them 5 times the results plus even more since we all know in a team 1 + 1 = 3, right???

The sad thing is, it is obvious that to this day most managers have no clue how software engineering and any other kind of "knowledge work" (I hate that term) is fundamentally different from Ford's ideas of mass production.
Actually, I think most programmers know the 'even/odd' trick from memorizing it, having seen it used elsewhere. It's a mathematics trick, not a programming one.

When learning to program your first language, there's a lot of memorization involved as far as algorithms go. But if you can write an algorithm in 1 language, you can basically write it in any language.

Learning languages after the first is never about algorithms. It's about learning the features of the language and the easiest ways to do things. And sometimes the syntax, depending on the languages.
Right on. I particularly hate sites like myspace and some blogging platforms that translate the window dressing (button labels, sidebar, etc.) to your local language based on IP address, with no regard to the language that the page's actual content is written in.
There is a specific / very specific case missing here - Working on the Trading Floor.

I have found that the general noise + energy level of a Floor gives you a natural high and it also drowns out individual Phone calls + conversations (which tend to be the most distracting). Additionally, in my case i only get interrupted via email and very rarely via IM, so it works for me.

Failing that - a quiet co-working space is best.
Ugh. Meeting at 7 turned into meetings at 7 and at 8 with people in California =\ Looking forward to next time!
So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?

In my book what Microsoft does is waaaaay beyond "trying to save on toilet paper". The last place I worked having a monitor bigger than 19" was a status simbol.

Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right? Because I have noticed that juniors tend to have this petty fascination with hardware that goes away with time (myself included).
Reading between the lines: does this thing have the same issues with I/O that virtual machines tend to have? (That doesn't make it useless, of course...)
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It's free. You get what you pay for. Yelling at the developers because they hit your pet peeve is not a good idea.

Instead of that rant, asking what those things mean and then writing good documentation would have been a much better use of their time. Or just some research, even.

When I'm doing something new (and I do that a lot... I tend to start new hobbies all the time) I don't rant at people for not explaining things to me. Instead, I do a lot of research and experimentation. As a last resort, I politely ask questions, first of friends and family, then of strangers on the internet. It's just polite.
There are a few people talking down about open plan offices, but I'm moving from a company where we all have our own offices to one where the developers are in open plan.

I don't believe what gamble said, that companies do it because it's cheap. That certainly helps, especially for newer companies, but there are many people like myself who prefer this environment and consider it to be a bonus.

I think it's more about company culture than the layout. My old company had a toxic culture. Most office doors were closed, people thought it was OK to just walk up and talk at you while you're working etc. A company with a good culture of people who understand each other's needs and the work they're doing will be much more able to get along in an open plan office.
Access to a client-side SQL database from Javascript in Safari/Chrome is also asynchronous - which takes a bit of getting used to.
Paid in advance is still free on a month-to-month basis. That's what I meant.

Paying for a service forever in advance is a devious mis-alignment of incentives. The customer will feel that they are owed everything. The business of it won't work out.

As I said, the lesson is, don't give shit for free - even for an initial payment. Ongoing services need to be paid for in an ongoing manner.
the paid Google apps has an awesome feature that lets you configure it such that all outgoing mail is sent through a relay of your choice and that all incoming email should only be accepted by specific relays.

I'm using this to my advantage in that I'm keeping every mail ever sent to or from our Google apps accounts.

even better: the messages are kept in maildir format that's ready to be served over IMAP if Google really screws up.

Being able to do this configuration was the condition for me to even consider Google apps for serious purpose.
I think it would be nifty if every title linked to the relevant section of the POSIX spec (maybe with a [POSIX] link next to the title itself).

Also, OpenBSD's pdksh seems to stick quite closely to POSIX shell features, it's probably a good test environment.

> In general, beware of trusting the people who wrote your editor instead just trying it to see if it works :)

That runs the risk of encountering an additional feature of the current shell compared to POSIX, this is very much the source of all bashisms: just trying to see if it works.
I got a bad feeling for RIM when my new Android G2 even had a nicer sync with Outlook than my Blackberry Bold, let alone comparing the apps at large. I still use the Blackberry as a nice backup alarm clock though.
Someone could make an app or script that backups your gmails to e.g. an online backup service like Backblaze.
I agree with the general theme of the OP. Bayesian methods are technically better than frequentist methods.

However, like Betamax vs. VHS, there is more than just the technical correctness. Your point in 2.2 is the big one -- if there was a simple way to switch to Bayesian methods in existing statistics software like SPSS, that would be quite revolutionary. Right now, null hypothesis testing is too easy to do and widely accepted, even though the results may be completely wrong.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (March 2011 Edition)
As many have been posting about new beginnings and starting afresh, it's time for another Hiring thread.
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers? (March 2011 Edition)
Similar to the "Who is Hiring" thread but, please remote positions only.
That is a good reason.

It's also possible to turn off the autoupdates.

It's debatable what the best default setting would be, and wether or not average users:

a) know how to disable this
b) care to disable it

Like you say, it necessitates a level of comfort with a company. I suppose most people don't give this a lot of thought, and thus feel pretty comfortable with any company.

Wether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate discussion imo.
Submitted from the original 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262693

Many comments there.

Isn't this submission just blog spam? I fail to see what extra value this brings. From the guidelines:

In Submissions
...
Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site,
submit the latter.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Using Google Groups To Backup Gmail

http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gma...
He's not saying that palantir is going to be the next big social network or search engine. He is saying it is going to be the next tens of billions $ startup exit.
At the same time, sometimes you grab whatever you can get.
"what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?"

I work on a 3000 node super computing cluster doing heavy duty Machine Learning and signal processing and a lot of funky (and classified) hardware, and yes, no one would blink if I wanted two more machines (or a 100 more) - as a matter of fact we recently did a million$ + upgrade of the hardware on my say so, so yeah everyone on this project gets all the hardware they want ;-)

Looking around I see (my personal system, doing mostly rendering and reports) 7 quad core machines, three 27 in monitors, 2 laptops, both Thinkpads. I (literally) only have to ask to get more machines.

"Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right?"

Patronizing is always inexcusable and rude, and snark appropriate on reddit isnot so valued on HN, but I don't mind at all. When you say things like that you just make a fool of yourself in public, go right ahead. :-)

And as for my age, I am closer to 40 than 25, so perhaps you just need to try again? ;-)

EDIT: (btw "paper towels" != "toilet paper". You missed the reference This which wrt the benefits cuts in 2004which included stopping towel supply(later rescinded) - I confess I am only guessing the towels were paper. ;-)

from mini msft (I heard from a friend in MS, but mini is an online reference)

"Should have just done the towels and called it a day!" - Lisa Brummel, May 18th 2006.

You know, one moment of reflection: the circle is now complete. My second post to this blog was on July 6th, 2004. It was right after an impromptu employee meeting with Ballmer and Gates and as part of that, Mr. Ballmer justified the unfortunate recent benefit cuts, the main two points of ire being the towels and the ESPP revamp. Now, two years later, we're getting our towels back.

Has it always just been about the towels?

(Possible book title flashes through my mind.)

It's not like we're sweaty work-out animals always in need of a shower and fresh towel. No. What riled us was the bone-headed way the towel cut-back was handled, explained, and justified. It truly made us wonder just who are these people in charge and just who do they think they are leading? The towels became the symbol of poor leadership. That and the office-supply hide-and-seek.

Someone should send Ms. Brummel a golden towel award. I'd like my old ESPP back, too."
Thinking over this comment, would it be weird to set up an office where the managers all are in an open-plan setup, and the developers all have their own private offices? I think it would be interesting to see what the outcome was

(Disclaimer: i'm a developer who works in an open-plan office and hates it)
"fucking up their day"

This is interesting--I would never feel this strongly about being interrupted unless someone was being overtly rude or annoying. I want to be productive, but I don't feel obligated to plow forward relentlessly hour after hour. If someone breaks my flow to ask a reasonable question, I don't think of it as a big deal. I think true flow is a lot less fragile than many give it credit for. It doesn't vanish anytime a pin drops nearby.

I think there's something to be said for the benefits of a less serious and more relaxed mindset. Working steadily, but not getting all caught up in "how productive am I?" like you're an assembly line robot. Coding is as much an art as a job and often you can be more productive by playing ping pong and chatting for 6 hours then having an insight that saves you 100 hours in the long run because your mind makes a lateral leap about the architecture that almost definitely wouldn't have happened if you had just sat at your desk typing all day.

I still see the benefits of private offices because it can be very beneficial to have the option of silence and intense focus when that is what you need to get over a hump, but it also seems like a lot of programmers are missing the great potential rewards of real creative collaboration--probably because they are used to collaborating in an uptight business-guy kind of way. Instead, they should take a cue from other creative people like artists, poets, and musicians, and allow their minds be free a good portion time through relaxation, speaking freely, and gasp having plenty of thoroughly unproductive fun. The gains in inspiration will easily outweigh the lack of perspiration, and life will become more enjoyable to boot. Isn't that ultimately the point of all this toil anyway?
Dammit, I allowed myself to work through the list as it seemed to only take a minute.

It took me a little longer to notice the list just kept on growing as I progressed.
9 year softie here (Shell Test in my early days, now doing Dev work)

Indeed everything is dependent on need. PMs always get laptops because they spend lots of time outside of their office. On my team, most dev leads are also issued laptops. Friends of mine in teams closer to laptop features (think Windows 7 touch input, for example) never have had problems getting a laptop. On my current team, it's not common for an IC dev to have a laptop. It's also not common to find an IC dev with a machine more than 8 months old. I haven't quite figured out what everyone else's fascination is with laptops. I bought one for my own personal use, brought it to work, and then stopped bringing it because it just sat on my desk doing nothing 95% of the time. The other 5% I've replaced with post-it notes which, I'm happy to say, are available to both PM and Dev.
Neural Network Follies (2003)
I wish the pictures linked to google maps.
It seems so obvious. Why don't more countries do that ?
pdksh (at least the one in Debian) has numerous bugs; try the shelltest.od script in redo to see some of them.

I agree that "just see if it works" isn't a good portability strategy if you only test one shell. But the idea is to get as many shells as possible and try them all, or (as redo does) to write a script that accepts only shells with all the expected features. Blindly assuming POSIX compliance is a dangerous way to go, since there's no guarantee that it's in a shell just because it's in the spec.

I'll grant you that using a feature that's both in POSIX and in all the shells you test is the best option, though :) $() is in both categories.
> It's the really new, junior guys that don't get them right away.

I've been at MSFT for 9 years and have yet to be issued a laptop. I've been MSFT for 9 years and have yet to actually need a laptop. :)
I think this makes sense for you and the product. Someone needs to compete with UserCycle ;)

Good luck with the round.
My personal setup is 3 24" monitors, 2 quad-core desktops, and a ThinkPad laptop, backed up by a few tens of thousands of machines sitting off in a datacenter somewhere. With what they're paying me, they could afford my total hardware setup with less than a month of salary, and it's saved me far more time than that. I use basically all of it - all 3 monitors are usually covered with windows, and it's not unusual to have 4-6 webservers running on my desktops.

I'm older than 25, though probably not as old as plinkplonk.
If you're not going to do anything further with it, or, if it (the site) fails to do anything for you:

<$500 > $0 :-)
While I enjoyed the article, I resent the misleading title. It should be "46 Tips For..." or something. It was certainly not 46 Ways.
Assume without explanation more?
For those of us in AU, the Fremont DC is the best choice for us Linode customers.

However, I've learnt, and hopefully have others, that having everything in one basket isn't the best option, even with how excellent Linode are, they are at the mercy of HE etc.

So now we have a split between Fremont, Dallas & Newark.

It's worked pretty well, we are most happy.

Anyone running a large app or site would do well to run multiple systems with Linode across multiple sites where possible.
I agree with this in principle, but in our Web 2.0 world, "beta" has become almost meaningless half the time. Gmail has only come out of beta last year, hasn't it?
Wayne & Garth?

http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/604823569/1/tumblr_l2j7f1fGXv1q...

What's up with the glitches?

http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/602808976/1/tumblr_l2hy4noyIh1q...
http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/2514627600/1/tumblr_le7c01dQBv1...
http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/604710840/1/tumblr_l2j5aqOlYc1q...
http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/602895911/1/tumblr_l2hzv1Iy6O1q...
http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/604809388/1/tumblr_l2j75fjOiJ1q...
http://9-eyes.com/photo/1280/604756995/1/tumblr_l2j65tODrJ1q...
priors acknowledge subjectivity.
I think a lot of designers would love to work on open source projects, but I'm a designer and a developer myself and even I feel that the creative input wouldn't be taken seriously.

If an OS project assigned a Creative Director, that may help lead the way for other designer to join a project.

Also, Source Forge and GutHub and the like aren't going to cut the mustard for Designers. There needs to be somewhere like them, but tailored for design.
You say major flaw, I say interesting experiment - watch the vote totals as the European office workers wake up, and see how the proportions change once the US comes online :) I wonder if there is a significant difference in working environment preferences between the two?
I guess thats where I am now. Three years and it might be time to look towards something else. Cheers for making me feel better about it though.
I think this varies dramatically depending on your role. At my company, when we were evaluating office space, the consulting people came up with this "hotel" scheme where everything was an open floor plan and you didn't even have a regular desk, and they all loved the idea.

Meanwhile, I thought that sounded like the worst possible scenario imaginable.
If I really wanted to cater to such insanely reckless third parties who can't proxy through their own servers, I'd leave my real services unchanged (so they can still be consumed by non-broken clients) and add a js proxy service that can call any of my real services, and return a response with js that stuffs a description of the real response into an object supporting the XMLHttpRequest interface (especially including getResponseHeader(), status, and statusText). That way the caller can treat XHR as a uniform API for handling responses, even for those cases where they had to resort to an ugly hack rather than XHR to actually get the request on the wire.
I'll admit to sometimes getting annoyed when I'm interrupted and lose my train of thought. I like to code, damnit, it's hard when something keeps me from coding. :-/

But I've also found that my stress level just dropped so much when I acknowledged that I get nothing done during business hours, and so ought to just go in and accept the fact that my job is to help other people get things done. I can still fit in 2-3 hours after dinner, once everyone's gone home, and I found when I was doing my startup that 3 hours is about the maximum time per sitting that one can spend doing high-level intellectually creative work without getting totally burnt out. The unfortunate part is that it time-shifts my day (I go in to work around 1:00 PM and work till 9 or 10 at night), which means I only see the sun for half the day. But with enough practice (obviously failing now, since it's almost 3:00 AM), maybe I could swing my sleep schedule around and just have the mornings off to do whatever I want, then go to sleep as soon as I get home from work.
It's fully-loaded for me, and Chromium says there are 170 <img> tags.
What you really mean is not "these professions can do no wrong", but "the media finds it difficult to blindly tar these professions the way it does to others".

Doctors can do no wrong? Is that why malpractise has help skyrocket the cost of medicine in the US? Doctor shortage a machiavellian plan to keep salaries high? Pull the other one. Yes, I do think that there aren't enough people with the smarts and the motivation to be a doctor - in fact I think that there are less of them than actually are doctors.

Policemen can do no wrong? Yes, in law courts they're seen that way, but I can guarantee you that plenty of people see police as doing plenty wrong. Police cop plenty of abuse.

And Teachers can do no wrong? Tenure or not, teachers cop it from students, administration and parents.

Firefighters can do no wrong? Meh, firefighters have the soft option. Cool toys and generally don't have to deal with the general public if they're not paramedics. Stick it to 'em :)

But really, the 'can help friends in Katrina' argument you make is just desperately clutching at straws. Not sure how this is a prime motivator for emergency personnel (I know a few, and this is not why they work in their respective forces) or as a 'can do no wrong' argument.
It's just a pity Australian bandwidth is so ruinous, or I'd move my servers here.
I'm amazed that some hours later google chrome still reports that there is malware on the site. According to the article the ad with the offending malware was removed. So what gives, basically?
We can see what it measures. I'm just saying that it's a pretty nebulous metric when used out of context. Taking 2 numbers and condensing them into 1 (à la Megapixels) is an exercise in marketing.
app engine is surely in public beta if not production? although agreed that it's a stripped down version of core python.

i imagine it's difficult for companies like these to compete with the likes of a google.