skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel similar to you. I wonder if being on HN is healthy for me. It exposes me to lots of new concepts and technologies, but only on a very superficial level since I am not diving into it... And it has a cost of feeding into an inferiority complex.

I have almost entirely started to avoid facebook for this reason. You always just see the bright side of everyone's lives, which can make you feel depressed if you are unsatisfied with your own. Likewise HN shows you the cutting edge tech, the cool startup scene, and a lot of writing from some very VERY smart people. If you don't feel like you measure up it can be an addictive way to reinforce that feeling.

Clearly I am competing with a deeper psychological issue and the ultimate solution is to accept myself, accept my limitations, and find peace. I am working toward this and making some progress. But I wonder if my progress is being hindered by such a flood of exposure of awesome like HN.

Many (most) thoughts I have had reading HN are clearly irrational. "I can't be happy unless I am founding a startup." "I can't be happy unless I am programming in language X." "I can't be happy unless I move to SV."

I recently severed a very close relationship because I finally accepted how toxic it was, even if that toxicity was largely due to my own loose boundaries. I wonder if my relationship with HN is the same thing.

tldr: HN exposes you to so much awesome that sometimes you feel like shit in comparison. You're not.
I completely disagree with Robert Scoble. If anyone has ever attended a TC50 or TC Disrupt event AND Launch, it's like a day and night comparison. While I don't have exact numbers, TC events were by far much MUCH more crowded both in the demo pit area as well as those pitching on stage. I swear it was like a ghost town at Launch in comparison.

The quality of startups sucks and I'm not sure I can agree there were a lot of press there BUT to be fair, this is not an area I can really comment on since I wasn't paying attention to this are much (regarding press).

Most of the people in the demo area didn't really have anyone else to talk to except other startups that were there. It was dead. And while I have nothing against Launch personally, I'd probably never attend again if this is how it'd always end up. BUT to be fair to Jason and Launch, it is their first "Launch" event so I'm hoping this will vastly improve.
Maybe the real problem is that Ruby documentation generally sucks! :-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2259761 suggests there is no "best" time by some measures. The point is that if you post at quiet times your post stays visible for longer, but there are fewer people to see it. If you post at busy times your post falls down the "newest" page faster, but there are more people looking.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022547 gives advice on how to stay on the "newest" page the longest.

They don't tell the whole story - I am continuing my analyses.
Sorry- travel day for me.

>It's well established that in the US companies can be forced to do business with minorities, protestants, females, Democrats...plenty of people they may otherwise wish they didn't have to (well, maybe not Democrats)...It was well established until the 1860's that humans could be slaves. That something is established is not justification for that thing.

So you really are arguing that...companies should be allowed to...wait... What exactly are you aguing? That a fundamental human right is being denied to a company? Which one? Why should companies have fundamental human rights? They are legal entities, not humans. And they are not allowed, by the way, to violate the human rights of those who work for them. The people who make up the company != company.

And to the point your were making on my comment: I agree with that fact that we can force terms of business on companies (even mine), and I agree with the now well-established fact that it is illegal to have human slaves.

Seriously? How does this sound: You can either give me your money, or I can torch your house. I'm not forcing you to do anything, but if you don't want to give me your money, I'll torch your house. You can always move down the road, but your house is gone if I don't get your money. Sound good to you? Or does it sound like I'm forcing you to do something?

It is at this point that I suspected you were trolling, but your profile says you are "well established" on this board so, contrary to your argument above, I should take it seriously.

Your analogy could be improved, as you are using extortion as your hypothesis. Try this:

You can either stop beating your wife, or we will put you in jail. If you wish to continue beating your wife, you should move your family to a place where you can get away with such behavior. But we won't let you do it here.
That is a big, rambling presentation with a lot of interesting topics in it. Despite the title, I think Sedgewick is really making a case for putting more mathematics into Computer Science. I think this is an important long-term trend.

Last year I read Bergeron et al's Combinatorial Species and then dipped into Flajolet and Sedgewick's Analytic Combinatorics. The first of these is concerned with mathematical structures that are tantalizingly close (or identical) to data structure that we often use. These can be represented as algebraic expressions and converted into related or equivalent ones using simple operations from algebra and calculus. F&S exhibit the tools necessary for analyzing the properties of these structures, using complex analysis, the same tools used to get a grip on "ordinary" algebraic expressions. It turns out these tools can help predict the performance of algorithms or help generate large random data structures for testing or statistical analysis.

We are used to the strong connections between type theory and mathematical logic, and here we see something that looks like types being manipulated with algebra!

To me the trend is this: CS will benefit in the future from borrowing more and more design patterns from math. E.g. Don't think databases, think relations, or better yet, graphs.
decided that 10000 would be safe

aka, an arbitrary limit, rather than a specific technical limit.
I imagine that if you have 50K employee's and you are paying google ~50$/account/yr(2.5M/yr) (im sure if you had 50k employees you would work a deal out with google), you could work a deal to get the contact list thing straightened out.

1 User who says they are willing to pay is significantly different then a company who is paying for 50k employees.
The Art of Management: Business Has Much to Learn from the Arts
"But then I realized that it's pretty common to invent the same things. You should try doing the same".

That said, I really don't care at all. I want to build stuff that work, I want to have fun, understand new things. This is why I build Redis.
PS If you don't live in an area with good schools that let you take classes on the side, the best thing you can do is move to such an area.
The Xoom browser is not ready for prime-time, even for HTML4
You could also just keep track of about everyone you ever talked to. Just keep the contact in some database with some notes/references about him. Always better to just loose/delete the contact.
Just another case of someone with a catchy headline and no substance trying to get picked up by major news outlets to drive some trafic/$$$ to the site.
Try it. You'll never know what you are okay with or aren't okay with unless you try it.
Speaking of authors on the subject of productivity, one of the most prolific popular writers in history, Isaac Asimov, said that the key to productivity and avoiding writers block was simply to write every day, no matter what. Asimov's autobiography, memoirs, and letters are absolute goldmines of wisdom. And pretty funny, too.

I recently downloaded King's On Writing in audio book form for my next long drive (I travel full-time, so I drive a lot), in hopes that it would offer similar inspiration. Sounds like I made a good choice.

Also, I think writers have a lot in common with programmers, and that's why there's so much overlap in the sorts of tactics that work for each group.
Py2exe is quite easy to use, i've used it for a few gui apps and did not run into any problems(actually had a small problem getting image resources recognized, but that was in wxpython's end).

btw, How are you deploying your lua apps?
Some people have jobs which have them make five to ten new business contacts in an average workday. No, they're not becoming best friends or anything, they're just exchanging business cards. Still, that's only five to ten years of that kind of work.

The thing is that people don't know ahead of time which contacts they need. They just put everyone they meet in their contacts. Then if someone says, "Hey, do you know so-and-so?" they can actually email or call that person right away.
Displaying the fact that an SSD supports TRIM does not prove that HFS+ uses TRIM, but it's a good sign.
Yeah, they might not come out and say it, but if you look at the majority of gems that have configuration options they usually assume defaults and you just configure them if you need something different.
I think math helps here.

If YC funds 400 startups, they've spent somewhere around 8 million dollars. In the late 90s one .com startup probably spent that much on their office chairs.

Granted, there are subsequent rounds of funding, and maybe some less than prudent investments, but while we may be in an 'expansion' cycle of funding, it isn't fair to say that it's 1999 all over again.
One test I've used to check relevancy is to follow our posts on twitter. A lot of our posts are aggregated on various HN twitter feeds. Some, more than others. I've been using this to determine the quality of the post and understand what various HN tweeters find valuable.

There's so many great posts on HN that get zero comments or up-votes. I'm convinced there are a small number of posts that get enough momentum from a very select group of voters, and once these posts are "blessed" so-to-speak, they then get some frontpage exposure - which gets them to some valid threshold allowing the community give it further boosting.
Have you and like minded people continually staged sit-ins in public, in legislatures, in court houses, etc... designed to peacefully hold public attention, educate others on the cause, and protest for the redress of these grievances?

A gun is a tool which can very easily remove completely and irrevocably another person's most fundamental rights. As someone who claims to care quite a bit about such rights, you present a clear hypocrisy when you choose rhetoric which encourages reaching for that tool as anything but a last resort for effecting change in the body politic.

What exactly are the grievances to which you are referring? Please do answer, but as you do answer, know this. When we read your answer, we will each be able to determine the answer to the question at the start of this comment. And though I cannot speak for others here, in my opinion, until the time I hear on the news about your being arrested numerous times for being chained to the benches in legislatures across the country, you have no true justification for violence in its cause. No, you have harder, more mature work than pulling triggers to do. You have the work of convincing us to join you, chained to the gears of an unjust power.

The floor is yours for that end, but please spare us any egotistical, violent hero fantasies which rely, in their essence, on the premise that you, and people who agree with you, deserve more than the rest of us the power to choose who lives and who dies.
Well, it looks different. I very much doubt that they changed much of the internals – the Finder just was completely rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard.

When is the Finder slow for you? I never had problems with a slow Finder.
Coming of Age as an Entrepreneur
Once you start dealing with a lot of data, you feel a very heavy weight from the physical limitations of your computer. The path that led me to computing was really a flight from my blue collar roots and the tyranny of the physical universe, but now I have my days when I wish I was good at using a milling machine.
IdeaMachine: a generative grammar for fun and profit
And here's a parallel version written in Clojure that scales across your cores, https://github.com/swannodette/flocking/blob/master/src/floc...
Senior Software Engineer at Mertado (YC W2010)
Google App Engine - Advanced Bulkloader tutorial
Data Wrangler, an alternative to Google Refine
Established Merchant Focus Application
About 3 years ago, Business Week published an article about the MFA being the new MBA -- interesting to see the different branches of this theme.

Have you recently encountered managers who seem to be integrating artistic perspective into their managerial style?
Ok, is there any direct evidence of this? Let's just say that I've seen this type of crusading before, and that formal, yet highly aggressive letter doesn't really assuage my suspicious feelings about the man and his motives... or, I suspect, the judges feelings. :-)
It is one of my dreams to be involved with cancer, perhaps a medical device startup. One of my college professors (biology of cancer) urged me to go to med school but cancer specifically has always been very attractive to me. If I wanted to get involved with a biotech/med device startup where would I go about looking?
Food prices have doubled the last couple years.

No, they are up 6.7% since Jan 1 2008.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIUFDSL
Just had a demo at the NICAR11 conference, it looks very impressive. Restricted to 1000 rows and 40 columns, but can export Python script to process larger files. It suggests and shows previews for changes to the data, which is helpful, especially to those who aren't so experienced at data manipulation.
The first comment is a little obscurely done. I think it's implication is just because you don't have people saying productivity is going up fabulously doesn't mean you don't have a bubble.

With second quote, I think I remember Alan Greenspan saying that the mortgage bubble wasn't one because it involve "a lot of local markets" so reasoning is "just because you have a very local phenomena doesn't mean you don't have a bubble". The other point is that when you investment banks falling over themselves to buy VC and when have Milner making a blanket investment in every Ycombinator, you again have blind investment.

I don't know if all of this is true, just raveling his cryptic comments.

As bubbles go, one thing that comforts me is both the dot-com and the mortgage bubble show that bubble need to reach a fair percentage of the whole economy in order to truly die. So if this is a bubble, we've got some time ;->
I know a lot of the people at Kink.com (they're a solid part of the local SF tech scene, regardless of what people think of the content) and they have some interesting technology across the board.

However I wouldn't actually use their websites as good examples of best-practice in this vertical. Having disrupted the traditional DVD-based content houses, Kink.com is now getting disrupted themselves a little by the 'tube sites' and they really are not on top of this new era for that industry.

The main issue for video sites - of all content genres - is discovery. The author's premis about 'drawing in the viewer' doesn't really allude to this greater issue. YouTube doesn't really do a great job of discovery - relying only similarity clustering and string search.

I'm not going to link to sites from here, but there are a number of adult content tube sites that have some really quite excellent taxonomy, categorization and deeper search functions - surfacing the content that each viewer wants is a unique experience for each person.

Many of their video player experiences and social features are excellent too - ones that YouTube should really take a look at (in fact I know of YouTubers who gone to work for these sites).

For me, the tube world is yet another example of where the adult website industry is once again leading the R&D in the space.
Food prices have risen twice as much as inflation. So, no, they haven't doubled, but their rate of increase has outpaced the rest of the economy. And with wages stagnating in relationship to inflation, this is a cause for concern.
We're in the same space in the sense that we're working on the same problem, but our approaches are very different.
I'm with you on Goedel, Escher, Bach. Also, thanks for "frothy and pretentious" - adding it to my verbal arsenal now...

I like CC but also agree it's of less use to the seasoned programmer than to beginners. Then again, seasoning doesn't necessarily produce good habits.
"This video contains content from Ubisoft, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

Here's the Ars article about it:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/02/share-your-wiimot...
ThinkUp has a similar feature, it indexes your twitter activity (and facebook) and allows you to export and analyze it as you see fit.

http://thinkupapp.com/
Is Posterous down?
Also submitted four days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246089

although it gains very few upvotes, and no comments. More evidence that getting noticed is largely chance, or gaming.
> ... and underemployed people.

Depends. If they can keep labour cheap enough, they won't be underemployed.

I don't worry about future under-education in the now-developing countries. Education is all the rage in most places.
Python still has (even in 3.2) os.system, which is the equivalent of the backticks from perl/shell.

Sorry, but you're wrong. The os.system call is the equivalent of Perl's system call. It runs an external command and gives you a return code, but does not give you the text generated by said system call. The officially recommended (as of Python 2.6) way to get said text is what I wrote.

The deprecated but possibly still working solution is to use os.popen. That is cleaner for this common use case, but I chose to stick to the the officially recommended solution instead.

Eventually the Python folks realized that the blessed One True Way to do it was actually pretty horrible, and so they added subprocess.check_output in 2.7.
As far as I know, for business using google apps, if you have 10k employees you don't need to have 10k contacts, I think there is some kind of ldap integration.

Edit: See http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... I don't think user profiles (that would be what is used for employees inside an organization) and shared contacts have a 10k limitation, only the user personal contacts have it.
Dear Brad,

You need a CRM tool. Have you looked into SalesForce? It's online, just like Google Apps.
I thought a bit bias was when a coin predictably landed on heads more than tails.
That particular book is listed as being released on March 21 2011. Is there something I'm missing or are you recommending his earlier books on Algorithms in C?
No -- I am arguing that alignment, consistency, appropriate typography, non-mediocre use of color are only NOTICED and cared about by 1%.

Overall usability is what the other 99% care about. And should be of primary importance.

Saying that overall usability == "alignment, consistency, appropriate typography, non-mediocre use of color" is just not true.

Usability is one type of design. Those are another. They are not synonymous.
Meh, this probably encourages people to distrust your website.
I think this works for simple words and phrases (just like the Rosetta stone). But if you really want to go deep into the language and become fluent, it will become difficult to create pictures for everything. This feels very gimmicky to me.
Please use InternMatch to find interns. They will guarantee that you find a good one.
Expanded URL:

http://www.getharvest.com/blog/2011/02/easy-rails-asset-hand...
Omgwtf? So yeah, wow they finally found someone who hit the 10000 limit solution. Maybe they'll make the 10k browser limit turn into a more dynamic/pageable solution and maybe they won't. Choosing to solve browser issue with 10k at the time was probably the right engineering answer to the problem at hand. The solution is complicated and time consuming and time for engineers costs money.

So yeah, just use another enterprise app instead. You don't really have much choice.
Open source is way bigger than that. But, if you didn't like Eclipse or vim. What did you like?
I love the mindset behind the advice of having a little saved up. I currently have about $15k saved up. I fully intend to one day have real FU money. In the meantime though, having a small emergency fund that I'm adding to each month makes me feel like I don't have to take shit from my day job. I truly am not worried that if some day I was asked to do something completely unreasonable, I could essentially say FU and quit and work on my side business.

This is only one small reason why people should have a small fund saved up.
I used to use boids as an interview question for candidates who whizzed through my first few code challenges -- was interesting to discuss various collision detection options with an eye on performance.

Such a simple algorithm w/ such a cool result.
Google apps already autocompletes on the employee list: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

The personal contacts is another thing. So having 10k or more employees isn't a problem for google apps, what is a problem is employees who have more than 10k personal contacts (not very common).
This is very interesting and very true. I think the main points of this article are:

1. Constants do matter, specially most programs end up with an asymptotic that looks like a N^b, and a and b are often not what you'd expect. This matches my experience a lot, and it's interesting that this is one level below O notation but one level above "counting how many operations should happen, roughly", which is what you have to do in practice to make algorithmic code go fast.

2. The examples around which an intro to CS course is structured are really uninteresting. I couldn't agree more, and never cared for computing factorial, fibonacci, etc, or for writing silly games or dumb data-processing programs; Simulations and numeric algorithms are far more interesting, and can get students interested more easily when they realize that other classes' work can be made far easier with computers.

3. Everyone should know CS. Even my philosophy-major wife often has the need to run short scripts to automate some tasks, and I think that if a philosophy major can benefit from CS concepts anyone else should as well.

All these things one should find out eventually, and I agree that exposing people to these concepts as soon as possible is a very good idea, far better than what is usually taught as CS-for-non-CS-majors.
Are Diamonds Really Forever?
Move to Boston and work on an advanced biology degree.
Before GNU Linux, only corporation had access to Unix systems like HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc.
for me it works on firefox but not on w3m
You can pass shell=True if you want it too:

subprocess.check_output("ls -al", shell=True)

Note the possible resulting security vulnerabilities.
I have 19K+ emails in my inbox, when I go to 'oldest' page, I see everything up to the gmail welcome email. So, no missing emails here as far as I can tell.
This system works best when the action is repeatable, e.g. going to the gym or getting to work before 11 or something like that.

I've tried it before after I first read that article, and it is quite effective.
Considering Google automatically adds anyone I have an email conversation with to my contacts, I would say one day we will all get to this point, some just sooner then others. And I can think of nothing more painful then trying to prune through 10,000 contacts to figure out which ones I'd want to keep.