skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved from Dublin to San Jose almost two years ago.

Apart from the many many cultural differences, I think overall "the valley" is a better place to live & work for people at this time - don't have time to go into detail, but the great weather, shear number of startups & startup events / support and community here is hard to beat, feels like everynight there is something going on relating to startups.

Also the ability to attend various meetups and hear directly from big name CTO's and lesser know but often equally smart developers offers a great learning experience.

The cost of living here is ridiculously low compared to Ireland.

When you get stressed Tahoe is only a 3 hour drive away :-)
I had to do a 'apt-get install libevent-dev' to get this to build.
The first examples are unfair:

* Latex with indentation and justified-paragraph >looks better than> Word without indentation and left-align-paragraph.

* Latex with hyphenation >looks better than> Word without hyphenation.

I use both regularly, and I know that there are things that are impossible to do in Word and that I have programmed in a Latex package. But Latex has also some horror histories:

* Add the [spanish]{babel} package to a perfect working document. [spanish] does a lot of tweaks and like changing the roman numbers and making active <, >, ", ', ~ (perhaps not all of them in all versions)

* In particular the xy-pic package has problems with the redefinition of > in the [spanish]{babel}.

* In the {color} package you should remember to put the curly braces in the right place (i.e. Why \color{Red}{Hello} doesn't work?)

* If you change the .dvi file from a computer to another, weird things may happen.

* If you want to see your graphics in the .dvi, .ps ans .pdf files, you should put many copies of the graphics in the all the necessary formats.
Anyone else notice that the symptoms of overwork are rather similar to the symptoms of overindulgence/addiction?
But what's in that string? That still counts. What I should have done was put an additional restriction on what IO is available. Otherwise, something like "eval `cat f`" or something could be all powerful.

My first attempt shows Ruby simulating a cyclic tag system with only 15 unique characters including newlines and spaces: https://github.com/elitheeli/oddities/raw/master/only_a_few_...

EDIT: down to 14 characters.
Mostly due to two reasons:

0) People don't know how to use PHP with it: module or fastcgi; and which MPM to use here.

1) People don't know how to configure the MPM setting to allow Apache full use of server resources (without under-utilizing or over-utilizing).

2) Apache is a full / well-rounded web server application... It's not a specialty server (ex: static content mostly) that can exclude this and that and only provide 1 feature to excel at. Other servers are stripped down compared to Apache.

* Not the AMA guy (nor an Apache hacker guy), buy have a little known WAMP distribution (called WampDeveloper, used to be Web.Developer Server Suite) since 2003 with over 250,000 unique ip downloads between 2003-2006 (have stopped counting), and have worked on 1000s of issues for users and clients since the start.
If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it.

> crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen

The iPad has a 9.7in screen, with a 1024 x 768 resolution. By comparison, many netbooks have 10.1in screens with 1024 x 600 resolutions. I wouldn't call that enough of a difference to say that netbook screens are tiny while iPad screens aren't.

> its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there

Your bias is showing, as is your ignorance of the current specs of iPads and netbooks. The first generation of iPads had specs which were inferior to many netbooks at the time, especially when considering RAM; the current generation (which isn't shipping yet) has comparably fast processors, but much less storage and probably less RAM.

But yes, Apple is trying to position themselves as not a part of the herd, removing the need to compete on specs. They are definitely succeeding[2], which allows them both to focus on the interface and appearance and to make their products into appliances, where it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare them to anything else. How do you compare UI, after all? If Apple is able to avoid objective measurements, that's a huge success for them, since they'll be able to sell hardware that's slower or older without anyone noticing.

[1] In this case, it is factually incorrect, and perhaps an outright lie, to claim that iPads are cheaper than netbooks. $379.99 for a netbook is less than $499 for an iPad.

[2] As your comment makes abundantly clear, Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.
C++ has pretty lousy string handling, too. std::string is a step up from char*, but why can't I do std::string(10)? Or str = nErrors + std::string(" errors"); ? Why do I have to go through the hassle of a std::stringstream just because I want to have a number in my string? Parsing stinks, where's the std::string::split() function?

Boost has a bunch of string algorithms, but that's design overkill; I don't really need to have the algorithms work on C strings because I won't be using C strings if there were an simple, useful string class like Java's, or Qt's.
$1.25 million grants to digitize the archives of Nelson Mandela & Desmond Tutu
"Webkit only"

Most likely targeting certain mobile platforms that don't support Flash, so that they can still claim their tool is "write once, build everywhere," even if one build target isn't.

Kudos, I'm happy to see Adobe move back towards building tools rather than platforms.
I guess D really is becoming more popular. I'm hoping it'll eventually overtake C, much the same way C has overtaken COBOL. Guess I should dust off my "D Programming Language" book.

Regardless of the language used however, this is a great resource for learning about OS development.
That was not what I meant in my original reply. Teenagers' brains are different from that of an adult - different in a way that a 30-year-old and a 50-year-olds brains are not different.

So, to be clear, the original claim was that teenagers are adults minus the experience. That claim is demonstrably not true. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1241194... or any other story that pops up when you Google "teenage brains."
My Dad dragged me along when visiting his friends (still does) when I was 10 and older (maybe 9). I was expected to behave, but I he kinda made sure I would be part of the conversation. I'm 40 now, and it was good training. It still scares me to get in front of a crowd, but that early interaction lets me do it and feel ok with small groups. I also don't freak when strangers come up to me and tell me their life story.
The last time I looked at darcs -- which, admittedly, was years ago -- there was a problem where, under certain poorly understood circumstances that tended to apply to most people with large repositories, performance would fall off a cliff, meaning IIRC that from then on, every merge could take hours. Or years -- I think it went exponential.

The Wikipedia page about darcs says "Although the issue was not completely corrected in Darcs 2, exponential merges have been minimized."

I wonder what "minimized" means here. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty compelling reason not to use darcs for anything important.
if your parents or grandparents are Irish diaspora, like mine, you can claim Irish citizenship fairly easily. They already consider you a citizen, technically, so there's no immigration proceedings; you just need to "register a foreign birth" and provide documentation.

Yep. More info: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/moving_country/irish_ci...
Larry Lessig wrote a great article about Eldred v. Ashcroft, which he called "The Big One," since it was challenging the power of congress to keep extending copyright terms as they have been continually since the beginning of the 20th century. Lessig lost the case, which was a crushing defeat to him because he believes that with the right strategy it could have been won.

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_le...

Lessig says that his mistake was framing the case around a somewhat abstract argument: earlier cases like United States v. Lopez (1995) had found that when the Constitution grants congress an enumerated power, that power must be interpreted in a way that makes it limited. The theory was that if congress could keep extending the term of copyright whenever more works were about to fall into the public domain, their power over copyright terms was effectively unlimited. It seemed like such a simple, watertight argument and the Supreme Court had bought it recently for other cases.

Lessig made this argument the center of his case, and redirected every line of questioning with the Supreme Court justices back to this theory. When Justice Kennedy asked if there was any actual harm in practice, Lessig answered:

"Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our copyright clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws."

The justices wanted to see the actual harm, but Lessig only gave them an abstract argument. This is unfortunate because Lessig has made an entire career out of describing the benefits of "Free Culture."

The EFF is surely aware of Eldred and its unfortunate outcome, and it appears that their strategy is much more focused on showing the actual harm:

"In their briefs, both Mr. Golan and the Internet Archive pointed out that allowing Congress to remove works from the public domain inserts potentially paralyzing uncertainty to the system and harms people’s First Amendment rights to receive and share information. These concerns are even more pronounced now in light of technologies that make sharing and storage more accessible, and allow important institutions like the Internet Archive to thrive."
Jolicloud Becomes Joli OS, Announces Cross-Platform Apps
Falling Demand for Brains?
Keynotes and Program for Annual Linux Collaboration Summit Announced
Different design goals. Apache is meant to be robust, extensible and portable.

* Robust: that's reflected in its internal API that makes it near impossible to leak resources.

* Extensible: witness the gazillion modules out there.

* Portable: compiles and runs on very exotic or outdated systems. SCO, IRIX, Digital UNIX, VMS, the list goes on.

nginx and such were designed from the ground up with performance in mind - and with success - but the trade-off is a lack of portability and an API that is much harder to program to.
Just to clarify on the texts: The very cheapest monthly (as in a single month long contract) deal I could find came with, by default, infinite texts (and these are cross-network texts, which a quick Google suggests seems to be a restriction on Verizon in the U.S. even when you pay an additional surcharge for texts each month, the price of which alone is higher than my entire monthly bill).

I'm sure you've been able to pay extra for a ridiculous numbers of texts for a good while, but now they seem to have dropped to be very roughly in line with their actual cost, which I believe is indistinguishable from zero to the networks.
Wiggio Passes 700k Users, Launches v2 to Compete w/ Basecamp, Yammer & Chatter
Apple iPad 2 Media Event, Recap in 60 Seconds [video]
So... why would I want to use your site instead of using delicious?

Also, "It's free... for now! Users signing up from February 2011 onwards will be required to pay a small fee." - in contrast with "Bookmark for Free" in the features.
Painting a single rectangle against a timer resolution of 1 millisecond (which the browser won't even do) pretty much tells you nothing.
Their problem isn't their deployment process, its their monitoring.

Blindly ignoring errors is a recipe for failure. You should always look at situation like that asking "how can we monitor this weak point?" Logging plus a service like Splunk work great.

Should always have a solid on call rotation. We have two rotations, and ops one which is first line, and dev in case deeper code changes or more eyes on it are needed.
Worst idea ever: Sprint in talks to buy T-Mobile
A site for unbiased news reporting
I haven't experienced that issue in years. I do remember the issues it had before, and thankfully they seem to have been addressed. I don't know how up to date the Wikipedia entry is, but to the best of my knowledge this issue has been resolved, especially if you use darcs2 formatted repos.
Why? Because Yahoo has indicated that they will shut down delicious sometime in the near future...
Actually, I think that was people not using code review tools professionally.
In the past, I went out on a mission to start a department at an existing company. That failed and went on to try at several other companies. One thing I learned very quickly is the most important thing to have is perseverance. Many people will say no, many people will be uncertain. Even if you get to the stage where your foot is in the door, don't forget to keep pushing and pushing. Decision makers and gatekeepers are very busy people, it's not they they won't like your idea, it's that it won't be top-of-mind, so keep pushing.

Another thing to note is it's risky, in terms of brand dilution (Excluding FB or Google) - companies don't want to risk being associated with a shitty product (not that I'm saying yours is, but they don't know that), so bear it in mind and push numbers and revenue from the get go. Show them in no uncertain terms how this will make them money.

Finally, sell yourself. If you want to be given an opportunity, you have to show how you, and only you, will add such immense value to this project that it can go on to be the success you're pitching it to be.
Launch company Slinkables + Kickstarter to build their USB hookups
Hiten Shah Launching Email Newsletter
VP8 Codec SDK "Bali" Released
Ask HN: How to handle clients asking for a design document before hiring.
So, I just talked to a client of mine. I bid on his job on freelancing website. The discussion went somewhat like this:

1)Client: Hey, so, you are going building this thing.
2)Me: Hi, yeah.
3)Client: how are you going to solve this* problem?
4)Me: Well, you could do blah blah or you could do this other blah blah...
5)Back to step 3 (he did this almost 10 times)

He was asking things in excruciating detail. About how I was going to solve each and every problem. It was as if I was writing the algorithm for the problem. I finally had to stop and ask him to send me a requirements doc. And, he now wants an estimate with solutions to each of those requirement.

I haven't worked with this client before. So:
1) Should I really send him solutions to the problems in his requirements doc?
2) Should I even hope that this guy will hire me?
3) Did any of you have a similar experience? If so, how did you handle it? And how did it end?

I would really appreciate any help.
Amen.

I've tried convincing many companies I've worked for that weekend deployments are a bad idea over the years.

Even with continuous integration tests, rolling deployments, and all the precautions in the world things can still happen.

You need live people available to handle a deployment.

Personally, I don't like working on weekends. I've worked for companies that refused to believe that this was a bad idea. I learned pretty fast that life is too short to work on a weekend.

If something does go wrong, it's better to have people on hand to correct the error and get back on track. It's much easier to schedule those people during the work week. It's not rocket science.
Deutsche Telekom Reportedly Has Talks with Sprint on T-Mobile USA Tie-Up
20 seconds into the video and I'm becoming impatient, 40 seconds into it and I no longer care.

People - listen - video is not always the best medium to get your message across. Sometimes you want to back-track, review, re-interpret, and otherwise look at again.

Video imposes linearity and and imposes pace. Between them these can be a complete turn-off and prevent people from engaging with your material.

Think harder.

Use video for what it's good at, and use the printed word much more often.
How does the fact that the average age of first child in western societies hitting the 30 year old mark support the argument that there is a dramatic mental difference between those in their mid-20s and those in their mid-30s?
Case-Study: Web Designer Wall Redesigned
There's a balance to be sure, and there's some learning about yourself that is necessary. For instance, there's a critical difference between the feelings "I'm burning out and do not want to do this task" and "This task is boring".

It's possible you're feeling lazy; it's also possible that you're closer to burnout than you realize and that is your brain/body telling you that you need a break. Only you can decide which is which. There are consequences to being wrong either way, but, well, c'est la vie, non?

I've had some success maintaining some longish work hours, even under the American-style "vacations are for people who live in other countries and don't have babies" regime, for a very long time with this basic approach because only rarely will I force it, and when I have to for some reason I always budget some days that I will simply take off from computing entirely.
My pal, Robert Shedd, took his company overseas to Ireland after participating in Philadelphia's DreamIt Ventures. He's written a tiny bit about the experience thus far: http://blog.shedd.us/greetings-from-ireland%e2%80%a6/

He's definitely someone who could tell you about the culture and ecosystem from a US background if you're considering applying to the program.
I've dealt with burnout twice in my life so far, and I'm going to make sure it never happens again. Both were post-crunch meltdowns. The first, when I was just getting in to the industry, and didn't know better. The second, not so long ago, when I should have known better.

The first thing I've learned is that I can't accurately judge my limits. Even if I feel okay and on top of the world... things start to slide. Suddenly I'm writing code so bad, I'm committing code that doesn't even work, but thinking it does, because my brain is in outright rebellion.

Both times, I couldn't code for six months. The first time, I just tried to hide it. I quit my job, and took another. I wrote almost no code in those six months and was paranoid I'd be found out and fired. I wasn't, thankfully.

The second time, I took a few months off work, and requested a change of job for a period of time, so that I didn't have to do any coding. The second time was really bad, I started having panic attacks just looking at code on a screen. I'd start sweating, heart racing. It was horrible.

What I ended up doing for most of those six months at home, was building little plastic robot models. No computer use. Just quiet, methodical, brainless work.

Eventually I recovered, and started coding again. I'm better than ever now, which is good. But I learned an important lesson, which is that working too much is always bad. I know, it seems like a lame ending to this story, but it's true and ultimately important.
Busybox?
When I last used Perforce about five years ago, it did allow for read-only proxies to help reduce the load on the main server, particularly in environments where the developers were geographically dispersed. It worked quite well.
That is a mistake on our part! We were thinking of charging and when we made the changes we planned on charging. Since then we have had a change of heart but have obviously forgotten to change that text - we will do that tonight!

With regard to the Delicious question - we get that a lot. Yahoo could be shutting Delicious down, which would be a bonus! But the best explanation I can give is if you are a visual person, like things laid out in a nice way and you also want to know what your friends are bookmarking then we are a good fit. We offer Twitter like functionality whereby you can follow people - and then therefore see what they are bookmarking. If PG signed up to Favilous, you could follow him and see what sites and articles he bookmarks - we think this is a cool feature which Delicious do not offer.
Facebook as a nation state
"You should check out a third world country."

I should have said: poverty in the US. Poverty in third world countries is a result of the poor choices of the government.
The timeline seems to be something like:

2001: filed in district court
2002: put on hold pending Eldred v. Ashcroft
2003: reactivated with amended complaint
2004: district court denies gov't motion to dismiss
2005: district court grants gov't summary judgment
2006: appeal briefed/argued in circuit court
2007: suit partly reinstated by circuit court
2008: circuit court denies gov't petition for rehearing
2009: district court now rules in favor of plaintiffs
2010: circuit court now reverses, dismissing suit after all
2011: supreme court agrees to hear the case

The main weirdness is that each side has won once in each of the two courts, so it's made a bunch of trips back and forth. That and getting tied up with Eldred v. Ashcroft for 2 years at the start.
This is great. I grew up in Baltimore, but headed to the Bay Area after college because that's where all of the action is in the high-tech space. My mom always tries to convince me that Baltimore is becoming a high-tech hub, and maybe it actually is.
One Nuclear Bomb Will Ruin Your Whole Startup Bubble
I think alienation from the larger community is not that abnormal of an experience these days.

That's quite possibly true. Maybe the plight of suburbia. While I agree that adult/child hanging out is not common, I don't think it ever was all that common. I can't imagine I'd have any reason to talk to most children. It's not that I'm afraid of a phone call, but I just don't think it would be very interesting to me.

At best I think you find that one adult who you can relate to in some offbeat way. Maybe painting fences, as you suggest. But still that just raises your number of adults to 4. It's just not common that a child will associate freely, and w/o supervision, with 150 random adults in their childhood.
Preforked and threaded blocking IO consumes far more resources than event-driven non-blocking network IO. Process/thread stacks consume a significant amount of memory. This is why nginx ruins Apache at almost anything at scale (especially reverse proxying). Apache falls over while consuming grandiose amounts of memory in the low millions of connections per day while nginx can easily handle 10mm connections per day on a single core machine with 256mb ram. It's ridiculous.

On the other hand, for long-lived connections, you're better off using blocking IO since it's more efficient. Most web traffic is not long-lived, though. See Paul's interesting article on NIO vs IO performance:

http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/02/kill-myth-please-nio-...

http://www.mailinator.com/tymaPaulMultithreaded.pdf

And don't forget about Slowloris. If you see your competition using Apache, you really don't need to worry. :)

Disclaimer: I have nothing personal against Apache and used it for six years or so. I've just moved on to better software. If it works for you, that's great.
CoffeeStein: Wolfenstein3D in CoffeeScript
D is a very interesting language with a lot of good ideas in it... but that is also part of its problem.
Sounds exactly like what you're afraid of. He's milking you for free consulting. Tell him no designs will be forthcoming until he signs a legally binding contract and/or the first payment is made, depending on how you operate. I would assume that if you give him everything for free, he won't turn around and pay you after the fact.