skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, I will give it a shot.
The more successful charter schools seem to work by molding the cultural assumptions of their students. KIPP, Lighthouse Academies, etc... all seem to work by getting strict discipline into the classroom (eyes up front, everyone quiet, etc..) and convincing the students that they all should go to college. I'm not sure if the current approaches are optimal, but the 'quality' of students seems to malleable.
I've never heard of Guerilla Show Runner before - but really like the site. Thanks to whoever posted this. I've picked up the RSS feed.
Hello liuliu, there is no race:

when all the clients are pointed to write in the new instance, that is a slave, but as all Redis slaves can accept writes, you are already ok. Then you elect the instance as master just to disconnect the real master without issues.

Redis Cluster is something where we (Redis core team, that is, I and Pieter) can't get help for now, but will need help soon with testing.
Also, don't get discouraged by all the amazing projects you see on the internet. I used to feel that I would never be any good because I would spend all day looking at the latest thing on Hacker News and know that I couldn't build those things. But remember that those same people spent years developing their specific set of skills. It didn't just happen overnight.
How is this the top story on HN again? This is really old.
I worked as a programmer for many years. I hit 30, felt bored, and am now in graduate school studying NLP.

A lot of people in NLP are awful programmers. We have a group of ML researchers down the corridor and they build all their models in Matlab. You do not need to write great code to do research. It is more important to come up with a well thought out model and then throw together a horrible implementation to show it works.

Math is a very wide and varied subject. A lot of things you'll learn in a CS degree are useless for ML/NLP. Many people argue that ML is just applied statistics, with a sexy name to get more funding.

Finally I think the reason you're feeling stupid is that you're starting to challenge yourself. I spend most of time feeling really dumb in graduate school. Your brain is a muscle and needs constant training. You'll hit plateaus where everything seems like gibberish. Keep it at and you'll be surprised what you can learn.

Good luck.
This reminds me, my copy of Twilight Imperium is waiting at my local game store...

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12493/twilight-imperium-t...

Now _there_'s a board game.
Thanks for your words.

Sadly I have really bad social skills.
This can be turned off with one checkbox in the touchpad settings, which I did immediately.
What do you count as a "thing" completed?

Anything.

It could be anything from "Add one comment line to function x" to "Read Chapter 7" to "Get sorting in Module 17 working".

Obviously, I like breaking up tasks into smaller and smaller doable pieces, doable in hours, not days, weeks, or months. The entire point is the binaryness of it all. Finishing a one hour task completely is better than finishing a one month task 50% (which really means that 90% is still left).

I learned this approach years ago from my hero of project management, Tom DeMarco

http://www.amazon.com/Controlling-Software-Projects-Manageme...

Every task is either complete or not complete. In spite of what many bosses of mine have thought, there is no such thing as "partially complete".

Even when I break things down like this, I still have many "red days". Amazing how easy it is to go through a whole day and achieve nothing. That is the outcome that each of us should be trying to avoid.
My experience might be out of date at this point, but I remember getting similar experiences out of installing Slackware and FreeBSD years ago. Nowadays, the Ubuntu installer takes care of so many details for me, that I don't really have to think about the install process.

Probably something like "Linux From Scratch" http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ would also be a good way to learn the important details.
While I agree with virtually of what you said, the following statement I do disagree with: You don't need a book; you need a project. (in reference to laerning algo and data structures).

There are too many non-trivial algorithms that you are just likely to not rediscover. Many are the result of some of the best minds in various fields over decades. Dynamic programming isn't something that will likely just show up in your code w/o knowing about it (it may, but probably among the more skilled). Balanced trees almost certainly won't. Heck, even standard binary trees probably aren't obvious to someone who hasn't thought about the problem.

And definitely not things like the Fast Fourier Transform or stability of Gaussian elimination, etc...

I'd at least recommend spending a weekend reading a pragmatic algorithms book like Sedgewick, http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/Algs4Flyer.pdf.

Have a project that you're working on too, but don't do it without also learning algorithms and data structures more formally. Otherwise you'll end up finding a lot of poor solutions for problems that have known good solutions.
Illuminations 4 Firebug: ExtJS4, YUI3, and Closure Library, & awesome inspecting
Basically, you just need to pass a Chef bootstrap script in through the instance's user-data.

Knife, a Chef management and interaction tool, provides several bootstrap scripts you could use as a starting point: https://github.com/opscode/chef/tree/master/chef/lib/chef/kn...

Let's use the Ubuntu 10.04 gem bootstrap script as an example (https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/chef/lib/chef/kn...). The basic steps to use this with Chef would be:

(Note that this assumes you have a Chef server or are using the Opscode Platform. There's also a server-less option called "chef-solo" that you can use)

1. Create an appropriate first-boot.json to be used by the node(s). This will probably just be a "run_list" with entries like "role[app_server]" (function) and "role[production]" (environment).

2. Replace line 42 of the bootstrap script with your first-boot.json. Since this bootstrap script is actually a template, make sure to replace all other .erb stuff ("<%= %>") as appropriate.

3. JSON-encode the bootstrap script (handy tool: http://artur.ejsmont.org/blog/content/ultimate-web-encoder-d...)

4. Build your CF template, placing the JSON-encoded script in the "user data" section of your instance/auto-scaling group(s).

5. Instantiate your CF stack

If you'd like to use Chef for the entire lifecycle of your instances, just include a Chef recipe for running chef-client via cron every, say, 5 minutes. This allows changes to be propagated automatically in a pull style.

Done right, the end result is a complete, Chef-managed environment provisioned from bare metal using just one command.
Thanks. I was pretty sure more folks on HN would enjoy this, but it's hard to get noticed. I figured my timing was off so I thought I'd try again. I guess it just may be the content :)
>The young people entering the economy don't have the job availability they need. Old people aren't retiring as early as they once were and basically aren't getting out of the way for the young. People are living longer and need to work longer. As a result, young workers are forced to be underemployed and struggle to become part of the economy.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your argument or not, but it sounds like you're saying that the more old people work, the fewer young people can, i.e. there are a fixed number of jobs. If this were truly the way economics worked, then it would be easiest to find in places full of lazy and/or incapable people. This isn't the case though.

As long as there exist services or makable things that people want enough to spend money on, there are always jobs to be done. Maybe the issue is in education, willingness to retrain, liquidity of job markets, or hurdles to starting businesses, but I don't believe that old people working means that young people can't.

If 99% of Japanese companies truly did hire old people into upper management who weren't as capable as younger people at doing their work, the other 1% would eat them alive.
Perhaps try it inside a VM. Installing gentoo from scratch is a brilliant way to learn linux, but it's not so much "trial and error" as "trial by error" (message.)

If you do it in a VM or on a spare machine then you will have convenient access to web resources, which you will need :)
More or less yes. Actually with Redis Cluster you probably want one instance per core anyway, that will use all your CPU power. But Redis will handle all the sharding, adding new nodes, removing nodes, selecting the right node, and so forth.

The point of the article is that with what you have now as stable releases you can mount a schema that may work for you.
That might be true in Libya, but it is clearly not true in Egypt, which has no substantial oil reserves. Mubarak made "his" fortune by stealing from the Egyptian people.
We are in not-complete Beta but if you are signed up to http://www.Quantter.com (log in via twitter for now) you can record things you do just by including in your twitter message this microsyntax: #label:xMetric eg. #run:5miles or #thingsdone:2 ...

If you go to your Quantter settings (top left of profile page), select your "favorite activity" (=the hashtag you 'Quantt'/quantify) and you will seen a green check each time you do that activity at least once. The number of consecutive days you did this activity is your streak (given at the top of your Quantter profile page).

Finally you can follow 5 other people's streak, just by going on their Quantter page (while being logged in): http://www.quantter.com/user/TwitterUsername (eg. http://www.quantter.com/user/egadenne)
and you click on "Follow Username" link under the grid.

As mentioned here, another very good implementation of Seinfeld "don't break the chain" is Kyle Bragger Streak.ly.
That is not what that said at all. It said that of the 36 or so domains that were the MOST blocked, 84% of those sites were lowered in the search results. Which means 4 or so crappy domains escaped being penalized. With that high of a "win" they might affect 1 or 2 domains on the entire Internet that should not be affected but I am sure it will eventually be corrected for those domains. This also means that many more than 36 domains will get punished for poor tactics.
Thanks for your answer.

The last thing I want is to give up again, sadly the more I try the more these thoughts come in to my head and the harder it is to throw them away.
You may not like it, but it is far from a piece of shit. Very modular, easy to use, well supported, well documented and does the job well.
Leo is at the forefront of a movement of bloggers and writers releasing their content into the public domain. I think it's a really interesting strategy, and it seems to have worked well for him: http://zenhabits.net/open-source-blogging-feel-free-to-steal...
Fast on the heels of me gleefully noticing that the New York Times has apparently started linking to primary source material, we get a University that fails to live up to the same standard (in an article that has a vested interest in having people actually read the article).

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1011/1011.4105v1.pdf

Also, here is an post from the mathematician who solved it himself (from November of last year)

http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/janos-pach-guth-and...

For those who want a simple example of the sort of thing the problem is trying to solve, consider an equilateral triangle. There are 3 points, but only one distance between any pair of points. Consider a square, you have 4 points, but it looks like you are going to be forced to have at least two different distances (the nearest neighbor distance, and the diagonal distance). In general, given n points (placed however we wish), what's the minimal number of distances?
What Does It Take to Become an Entrepreneur?
Does Canada count as a nordic country? :)
While it seems like there could be some issues with this in a (particularly conservative) workplace, I think the concept is great: give users some incentive to practice safe passwording.
London Stock Exchange in crisis meeting with market data vendors
Netsukuku: a peer-to-peer routing system for ISP-free communication
Ask HN: Convincing my cofounder not to drop brand name from title tag
I've got a non-tech cofounder who thinks SEO is the best way to grow your brand. Currently about 50% of our traffic is from search engines. But he thinks we can do better so asked me to drop our brand from the end of the title on all of our pages. It's like a store with no sign or a letterhead with no company name.
His explanation when asked why was that Google's formula is keywords/length of text, which is just not true. He thinks no one knows our brand, so it's better to focus on keywords.
How do I convince him this is a bad idea, and to not only focus on keyword SEO? We have no blog entries, just listings and some descriptions. We have a few customers, some money is flowing, but there's not a lot of traction. SEO doesn't seem like a sustainable growth strategy now.
Thanks!

And yes I really think I need a mentor, just haven't found one yet, or haven't looked hard enough.
Is Big Pharma Strangling Biotech Startups in Their Cradles?
> The Rubygems project has been extremely poorly maintained over the years despite having one of the largest user bases of the Ruby ecosystem.

Have you ever tried to help out? It's understaffed because people like you would rather complain about it on the Internet than actually improve the situation.
In other jury nullification news:

A judge in Florida has moved beyond merely forbidding the act of jury nullification in his courtroom. He's also banning advocates from letting anyone know about it.

http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/08/judge-orders-prior-restrai...
You can't possibly be taking as long as I did; see "my evolution as a programmer": http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

I'm obviously not in a position to evaluate your IQ, but to me you sound pretty average. If you stick with your determination to get better, you'll be better than average in a few years, because most people don't.
Very excited! Hope some of you out there are too... :)
Her lips look like a mustache
Aa2,; appears to be the shortest that gets the full monty.
London Stock Exchange has called a crisis meeting with market data vendors

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262882
Yes! thanks for mentioning that book I forgot about it but I plan on getting to it eventually, there's just so many things to learn, so many books...sometimes I feel overwhelmed.

Thanks.
TwoShay has a great writeup of this technique: http://www.two-shay.com/articles/habits-calendar
> and on a production system, there is zero reason to have the docs take up space.

So you're saying the root problem is you haven't configured your production servers?
This is the single best requirements gathering tool I have in my arsenal. It's unfortunate that most programmers shy away from getting in the trenches and seeing how products are actually used. I see this problem almost daily and it results in faulty products that either languish or are used with gritted teeth.

Very few people can effectively make things other people want without experiencing it. On the flip side, I've also found that very few are able to accurately describe their problems when they are out taken out of their normal contexts (i.e. pulled into a "requirements gathering" meeting). Getting in the trenches solves both of these.
This is why I suggested doing it from something like knoppix.

He could even do it from his current Ubuntu install.
12 Virtues of Rationality
Ask HN: do you track your time?
Following the vitriol towards time sheets that I've seen in a few places recently (see e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2251705) I wanted to see if others think the same way as me.

Every job I've had has been working for clients, which shapes the fact that I used to have to do time sheets as part of billing and I so probably don't hate them as much as I "should". During the time running my own company, however, I have never had to do time sheets. When we were tiny, it wasn't how we billed clients and these days, I don't do a large proportion of billable work.

Nonetheless, I track my time. All of it. I use toggl (http://www.toggl.com) and I find that any time I slip away from tracking all my time, my productivity slips. I spend too much time in email and not enough getting things done.

I'm therefore intrigued that others hate them so much. Is it just the fact that bad management uses them to beat people down, or is it the actual tracking itself?
Consider giving yourself a break.

You talk about going back to school, finding a new job, overcoming a learning disability, learning computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, operating systems, software design, discrete mathematics, compilers, and command line essentials.

I think you will feel better if you step back and focus on one thing at a time.

...

Perhaps you should pick a new language, pick a well known introductory book for that language, and then commit to spending a few hours after work every day going through the book. You can do this on your Windows work computer- don't bother to learn the ins-and-outs of a new operating system.

Read each page, type out each exercise, consider how what you're going through relates to what you already know.

If, after a month, you're making progress and still looking forward to spending time with the book after work, I'd bet programming is for you.

...

As a next step, find a local user group for whatever language you pick and drop in. If they seem like nice people, if they are talking about interesting stuff, if it is something you enjoy, keep going back.

After three months, I'd guess that you will have finished the book, you will know a bit more about a new language, and you will have met some other people in your area that area up to something interesting.

...

While any language and book will do, try to find something basic that you can finish in a few months. If you're looking for a specific suggestion, you might try ruby and http://pragprog.com/titles/ltp2/learn-to-program.

Take care.
Ah, it was you that submitted it last time as well.

Hmm.

I know what you mean - I would've thought more people would get something out of it. However, I found the presentation pedestrian and repetitive.

I may be wrong, but my impression is that the number of poeple on HN who use the command line intensively is small. Most seem to be involved in web stuff, and seem less interested in the command line, and getting the most out of it.
On Annoying Others | Be Slightly Evil mailing list
It would be nice if the colour was meaningful, i.e. if one could, at least roughly, guess the time based on the colour. Say, that the brightness would reflect time of day (brightest at noon, darkest at midnight) and the hue the time within the hour.
Could they please not make everything gray scale like the new iTunes?!
As a css-hacker who doesn't really know anything about (or have talent for) web design, this was actually very enlightening.

Breaking it down into steps seems to be the first stage of gaining some understanding of (but not necessarily the ability to do) the web design process.
Cassandra tech talk by Ben Coverston of DataStax
Norway is a counterpoint. Western, plenty of oil money, yet has very low corruption and a very high standard of living for most of the population. The country has used their oil revenue wisely.
Does that even run? :)

Nested comprehensions are one of the things I hate about Python actually. The functions in itertools are so much clearer. I can't really think of a good reason to use nested comprehensions... they become unreadable really fast!
The 80's were Japan's time in the sun. I remember shock waves in the Valley when HP announced that it was no longer going to use US-made memory chips because Japanese ones were so much better. And a picture in Forbes Magazine open on a Tokyo sidewalk, saying that the real estate taken up by the magazine was worth $500,000K or some such astronomical number. General Motors announced that its goal was to make a car as good as a Toyota. And for us technical types the big shock was the Fifth Generation Computer Project was going to make Silicon Valley a backwater. Well it didnt happen that way. US semiconductor manufacturers learned to make chips, companies learned just in time inventory control and QC, and the Fifth Gen computer was overtaken by the PC, Moore's law, and the internet. (OK we did loose Detroit.) Then the 90's came and the Japanese economy tanked from the real estate bubble, insane infrastructure protects, and fiscal mismanagement, and never recovered dominance.
None of the exchanges have the required talent.

Ahem, based on what evidence exactly did you reach that conclusion ?

TBH, from all the exchanges/brokers I've seen and dealt with in the past, there are a few that are pretty solid - Deutsche Borse is one of them. There's EuroMTS as well.

Essentially, most exchanges that deal with many market makers have got an extremely challenging technical problem to solve - scaling and latency. One that most investment banks can't even begin to solve.

I'm not saying there aren't any good talent in banks - there are plenty. I'm just saying that there's some really smart, talented people in exchanges.
Digg.com #FAIL
Putting the Science back in Computer Science
Try TopCoder. Three problems in an hour. The easy problems are sufficiently easy that I guarantee you'll be able to do at least one or two of them, so you won't feel like an idiot, and spending time thinking about the harder problems will ignite your curiosity about how you could have done them, giving you a perfect push to learn new algorithms.
Handling of special characters could use some improvement. For instance, "Hello" (no quotes) has her in her underwear, but with "<H;>/", she still has pants on. That said, this site is more about the presentation than the algorithmic implementation; I'm sure someone will fork her on GitHub and teach her to keep her clothes on longer.
FTA: "The report was not a review of the climate data itself."

The senate committee report referenced in the article raises questions about non compliance with FOIA requests, scientific objectivity and how money was a determinator in process.

The committee report is here: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.P...
Hubabl: node.js + redis + socket.io is Open Source
My first public repo, so pretty nervous and would love some feedback : )
Hey Guys - Congrats on the good article! Looking forward to your launch...
The nesting of list comprehension is just an aperitif in this function.
It was fun to try out this software. It lacks some features in the interface though... With some more automatic processing and UI improvements, it could definitely be a low-end rival to splunk, but right now it can only do a standard search on custom attributes or whole text (not with a proper full-text index though) or show stuff "around that message". That means basics only.

But with the development happening all the time, it's definitely a project worth keeping in bookmarks. If it can get some of the features available in octopussy without looking just as fugly, I'm in :)
> Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do it?

Yes, provide more details so I don't have to spend twenty minutes figuring out what it does.

(Going by my three-second-look gut feeling: It's the Sieve of Eratosthenes)
Valuaible Content On Your Blogs For The Visitors Or Readers
You may start thinking about marketing, when once your blog features content. You should use a Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and many more, to both tell people your blog contains information they will value and to also grab readers for your individual posts.
Ben Bernake, the Fed and Goldman Sachs [translated from french]
It assumes all your users want to see naked ladies.