skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I go to SXSWi?
I was just about ready to book myself a place when I did a bit more searching on HN about it. As opinions here are closer to my interests it matters what the HN community think.

I was a bit surprised to find that it's not as well thought of as it used to be with comments like "it's now full of Social Media Experts" and "there isn't much tech for an interactive event" or "remember it was originally a music and film festival with tech bolted on later".

Here's why I wanted to go: I'm a designer who loves the whole tech industry. However, I live in Leamington Spa, UK and feel pretty distant from the main hubs, I don't get to meet many people with similar interests to my own (let alone people with similar problems, solutions and discoveries). I also wanted to hear some great talks/panels for some inspiration and lastly, I've always got my eyes peeled for cool places/projects to work on (whether directly, via an API on my own project or some other fun/useful hack).

Do you think SXSWi would be a good event for me to visit?
VIM is muscle memory to me. I don't usually think about what I'm typing. I just think: 'I want this text over here' or 'I need all these phrases replaced with this new one' and then my fingers do it...like scratching an itch.

That being said, one still needs to learn it to begin with. I'm lucky that I decided to sit down during college and at least learn the basics. I'm not convinced that it makes sense for every one to learn VIM or Emacs if they are perfectly proficient as they are now. For me, it's the right answer as long as I'm not pairing with some one who doesn't know VIM.
My first browser was Netscape Navigator and today but obvious I'm on firefox. The only reason I am still stuck and not moved to chrome/ium is due to Vimperator. Your comment was a validation to me :) . I have nightmares that with chrome/ium becoming so popular, I might lose Vimperator.....
I tried it on Ubuntu a while ago, and it was the most inhumanly difficult program I've ever used. It always seemed none of the tools looked anything like what I wanted to do. It probably exceeds Paint.NET in its capabilities but would take far longer to learn.
I don't hear varnish and haproxy being used together often, especially when nginx is also in the mix. Are they really complementary and worth the extra complexity?
> There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory

Can you refer to any scientific research to back up that statement? My impression is that the more you use your memory, the easier it is to remember new stuff. Memory seems to be more like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets, rather than a bucket that can get filled up.
Is it a good or bad sign that I'm starting to see a lot of stories repeat on here? I installed Ubuntu on my work machine last friday and I was just looking at this earlier this morning (I had saved this the last time it was posted).
That might explain this, ironic, section:

"If you're sending e-mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft's problematic â€œSmart Quotesâ€ feature ... This is so you'll avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail."
Mmmm, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. To take just the point about safe and unsafe strings - well, you could do that with naming conventions, sure. But then you've got a peer review issue. It helps, but it's not great. So the next thing (in a language which lets you use types in this way) is to create a type of UnsafeString, or SafeString etc. And your language doesn't even have to be that great to let you do this - just having a simple type system. And now you change your write method so it doesn't take a String anymore, it takes a SafeString, and only a SafeString. And you make it so that constructing a SafeString can only be done by Encoding at some point.

Now you have something which can still look clean (how clean may depend on your language, type inference, etc.) without bringing in messy pseudo-Hungarian-ness, which stops me doing the most important thing with my code - reading it easily.

Obviously it's only a silly and trivial example, but I'm not sure this article has dated that well in some regards (or perhaps only really applies to certain types of languages - Visual Basic, for example, pretty much forces you to do something like Hungarian to maintain any semblance of sanity long term).
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Lisa Wu-Hartwell, Real Housewives of Atlanta's Splits from Husband | NEWS 365
its not good to loose ones ego.
The downside of that approach though is that you end up wrapping the bulk of the API functions you're using to make them conformant. You've got a huge amount of extra work creating and maintaining these components, and a major training workload for any new hires so they know why they can't use the standard options they're used to and what the internal replacements are.

Personally, I'd rather go Hungarian.

Edit - well, yes, you may well be able to do this sort of thing nice and easily in Haskell, but I'm not sure that going with Haskell to avoid the training and maintenance overhead of complicating your Java (or whatever) is a net reduction in workload and hiring difficulty...
That's definately plausible and i think that's what the author meant by "video stream". We only see clearly enough to read in the fovea, which is only 2 degrees of our field of view.
Bill gates made billions and he's donating lots of it to the third-world.
Short sightedness is a convergence problem. There's nothing wrong with your fovea, so you still have the sharp vision when using glasses or looking close.
It certainly is a nice way of thinking about hiring. The "problem" is that each one of those slices (whatever they are) is deeply and intrinsically subjective both in width and length. For instance, how can you determine how important "vision" really is in any particular position, how can you hope to evaluate "vision" on a scale of 1 to 10? How do you know that someone with stellar skills on one area isn't capable of transferring those skills to a new area that they have no experience in?

Moreover, I am convinced that employers often really don't know what they want out of a potential hire. In other words, there may be pieces of pie that they're not bringing into consideration or pieces of pie that should not even be on the table.

I think that employers would do best to look for what is known as "T-shaped" people: folks who have broad experience and a few areas of very deep expertise. These are people who have demonstrated that they CAN develop expertise and if they've done it before they can do it again in new areas. This makes sense because, except for the most humdrum operations jobs, you never really know what your employees will have to work on in the future.
> hungarian is not related to finnish

"" The Uralic languages ( /jʊˈrælɨk/) (sometimes referred to as Uralian languages) constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. ""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
never have I bookmarked a url for future reference more quickly.
Yes. If you're in the business of selling and haven't read it, you're either lazy, stubborn or a fool. It remains the definitive text on direct marketing. I know of no-one in the direct mail industry who hasn't read Bird's Commonsense and I know no-one who considers it anything short of a masterpiece. Ogilvy said "Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the world.". Commonsense is the essential distillation of everything Bird knows about DM. If you haven't read it, either you have no interest in understanding the business of DM or you're terrible at choosing books. Either way, I don't want you anywhere near my business.
Do You Have the Right Video Marketing Priorities?
Be Realistic with Your Keyword Research
Why a ‘Date Night’ Could Actually Make things Worse
I think part of that would be asking the candidate how they feel about their skills.

Sure, they could lie, but if they're lying, the whole interview is suspect. Hiring a person who lied -at all- in the interview would be a bad idea. How could you possibly trust them?
Developing Multiple Touch Points
An interesting section from the article (read the whole thing though):

"I heard a fascinating story just this week from a physics professor here in Austin who has written a paper about how the British lost the commercial airliner industry after World War II. They set out with a national priority to dominate civilian aviation. But they had the wrong model. And their model was that they would inspect the hell out of their planes so that there was no metal fatigue. And their planes kept falling out of the sky. They kept saying ‘we inspected them,’ but there was still metal fatigue.

Boeing hired a grad student who didn’t know the accepted wisdom that there could be no failure. He read all the papers on the subject, found some obscure guy who said that what we have to do is make the planes more resilient so they can tolerate cracks in the metal, and based on that Boeing figured out how to use tougher material that could handle cracks. They figured out what the maximum crack length was before you had a catastrophic failure and they figured out how to have periodic reinforcements so that cracks would never get longer than that—rather than that there would be no cracks at all.

And in a similar way, we need to understand what’s a catastrophic crack and what’s tolerable. And if we can have more tolerance for failure, we’ll have a more resilient system and a more resilient system is more adaptable, and it’s going to do better."
LeapFrog My Own Leaptop - Violet
I read through and got a lot out of O'Reilly's "Programming Amazon EC2". It is short and sweet with some good real world examples.

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Amazon-EC2-Jurg-Vliet/dp/1...
> What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks...

If people really thought of those questions as time sinks, they wouldn't bother responding. The aggravated forum response smacks more of a perverted delight in bullying the novice.

And I understand the impulse. You've just answered the same question three times, and get it again? What gives!? Someone should smack these people!

But if people are asking the same questions over and over, it's time to take another look at your search/FAQ/layout. If people are hostile to other people on your forum, it shouldn't be dismissed as "they just love challenging questions." It's time to fix your buggy culture.

Someone should write a companion piece working on the other end. How to Answer (Stupid) Questions the Smart Way:

1. If hate customer service, let someone else handle it.

2. Provide the most efficient answer.

3. Don't question the question.

4. Assume good faith (to crib from Wikipedia).

5. ...
It sounds like you would use operator overloading for exactly what it was meant for (and good at)!

I think the usual complaint is that people use operator overloading for non-mathematical operations. For example, a guy doing a webapp might overload the "+" operator for Group and User as a clever way to add a User to a Group. This turns out to be a terrible idea.

In fact, my eyes glaze over as I read Scala code for this very reason, because everyone and their mother defines a method with some random array of symbols because it makes sense to them and they prefer shorthand. It makes the code totally unreadable.
bitches? that's kind of expensive
On a related note, I also keep an old pc around as a learning box. It's great to be able to easily wipe the hard drive, install a fresh *nix and have a development environment set up that keeps me fearless.

Where I might be concerned with muddying my main pc, I don't feel any problems with doing something potentially hacky or dangerous on the old box. Freeing up this mental space makes the first few steps of learning some new language or environment much easier for me.
Saving the Mobile Ecosystem
Well, it doesn't help me. I mean, why I'm even reading this? I should be working right now...

Jokes aside, I find that reading stuff on the Internet often makes me unable to work at all - the harder problem I have to solve, the more I want to look for something interesting on the 3rd page of HN. But it's the usual procrastination stuff, covered many times on HN.

My God, I actually installed a Twitter client for Emacs today while procrastinating...
How Vulnerable Are You to Cell Phone Hacks?
For best results, play on the emotions of technical folk. It is like the old saying: Instead of asking "how can I do X in Linux?", state "Linux sucks, it cannot do X!"

Not only will people go out of their way to prove you wrong – thereby answering your question – but the resultant discussion will also provide insight into the problem beyond what would not normally be given in a direct response. The latter is often just as valuable as the answer itself.

I don't really want to advocate the behaviour, but it is interesting to see how people react to each.
Based on the rest of this thread it looks like you're main objection is the wording I used (proposal versus some sort of preliminary design). So it boils down to marketing essentially.

I'm just one person and I'm fairly busy so I can't afford to spend the time screwing around with potential customers who are looking for free spec work. There's actually a significant number of people who heard about this web 2.0 social startup awesomeness and want to spec out their amazing idea with no intention of ever paying me.

It usually goes something like; "I think it'll cost around $xxxxx but I can't guarantee that until I've spent a good amount of time breaking it down into it's features with you to reduce risk for both of us and make sure you're getting something you really want."

It's at this point that I require an investment from them. It might not be a huge investment but it's generally a combination of compensation and their time (answering questions etc.).

I guess I just see most projects as more of a partnership to build something great. They bring the domain knowledge and I bring the programming / architecture know how. I won't partner with anyone who hasn't also committed their money, time, and resources. It sets a bad precedent to the relationship and they'll never value my work.

Everyone does things differently though, and I appreciate you're feedback. I don't think we're so far apart based on you're other comments. I stick by my recommendation, but feel free to reject it ;)
Autocompaction for CouchDB
it depends on what you're doing. c# is great for rapid development and will work for anything you're doing unless you absolutely, positively need performance.

c++ is pretty much a terrible language to use for anything unless you absolutely, positively need performance. some haters will argue that you should use c, but honestly,

for (std::vector<Hater>::iterator it = haters.begin; it != haters.end(); ++it) { cout << it << "'s gonna hate."; }
Why Twitter Images Is Important ()
That's very narrow-minded. I would just recommend the book and tell them to come back after reading it. Someone who's genuinely incompetent wouldn't get much out of it alone. Someone who is competent will be even better than they already were.

That's if the book really is any good. I'm going to go check it out after your roundabout recommendation.
You may be missing the point. Sure, buy a Mac so you can test your site on it, but buy an old, slow Mac, not a top-of-the-range shiny thing.

Tablets --- that's more interesting, because they're all new. I don't know to what extent it makes sense to optimise for the ipad 2 -v- the original ipad.
> a text editor whose interface was already far behind the state of the art when I started school?

And what exactly is this state of the art you talk about? If it's the IDEs you are talking about, saying that they suck at text editing will be an understatement. Code completion, refactoring support etc isn't text editing.

When I am using a language which requires a lot of boilerplate and demands an IDE, I go for some plugin which gives me vim keybindings(eclim for java, don't do much C#).

Code is text at the end of the day, and something which isn't good at munging text isn't going to be my code editor. Eclipse, Visual Studio are both good tools, but they aren't good at munging text, not at all. And the boilerplate code they generate doesn't do anything to mitigate this.

> So why, exactly, should I voluntarily use a text editor

Because it isn't a pain in the ass like the IDEs when it comes to text editing.
Really? I love the native app, especially the new update they just released. I'm looking at the mobile web version and it's just a list of links to new posts.
"It did make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur."

As someone who relates to the post [i.e., been spinning my wheel's studying for a while], I totally understand the author.

I would say that what makes someone an entrepreneur is a diferent mind set: the people who want to, feel a need to do so. A need to, when you enter a cab and see something not right, start thinking "How would I solve this business issue?".

But, like everything in life, there's the funcional entrepreneur and the dysfuncional one [hope the Author doesn't take it as an insult]. Dysfuncional one's have a passion and a great want to be entrepreneurs, but have a nasty and unhealthy dose of "I want to get this absolutly perfect" syndrome. At the first try. So, we study. And research. And keep researching. And try to forsee every problem we could maybe/possibly encounter, and solve it, mentally. And, times goes by, and little is actually done (though we have a clear "vision" in our minds. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.)

The post doesn't make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur. If he didn't he wouldn't even have started. It makes me wonder how to get out of this dysfuncional "wheel-spinning" pattern of entrepreneurship.
These days all variables created by me, in any language, are in descriptive_snake_case. I just can't see any reason to use anything else.
Things You Need to Do If You Were Fired Yesterday
This is what I am using currently:

* haproxy - frontline proxy
* nginx - static files and back proxy
* supervisord - service uptime
* gevent/meinheld - wsgi
* django
* gevent/eventlet - websockets/comet
* postgresql - Database obviously
* memcached - caching for django
* rabbitmq - message queuing
* celery - message processing
* fabric - deploying
* hudson - building
Yes, I get it: some hackers of lore kept adding magic commands to the unix line editor until it grew into a stand-alone editor. Still doesn't appeal to me. Too many arcane keystrokes to do simple edits.
> And what exactly is this state of the art you talk about?

Oh, that's easy: Emacs :-)
I quite agree: I don't think megapixels will get us very far, if we could even formulate a consensus definition. I much prefer a perception/discrimination measure, as you said, and as it seems neuroscientists in the visual field have settled on.

Clouding the issue even further is the fact that different areas of central vision processing handle different features. Some areas are tuned to react to points, some to bars, some to grids, some to movement, some to rotation, etc. Perhaps it would be simpler to make the comparison in the other direction: "How intricate do I have to make this visual scene to fully exercise the perceptual abilities of grating-sensitive neurons in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus of the thalamus." That way, we could put some sort of upper bound on the useful specifications of a pixelated display. We would then have to iterate over all the known feature sensitivities (bars, grids, rotations, etc.).

Display engineers surely must know that below such-and-such pixels per inch, a screen can present any reasonable perceptible pattern. So outside of casual interest, ristretto and I think that eye "megapixels" is relatively meaningless.
Apps ported from other platforms to Windows Phone get free advertising
Can be configured globally or per database.

It seems it is based on rules : minimum file size, time-of-day, fragmentation level ( ratio of old data ).
Happy 91st Birthday, Ray Bradbury
"I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories." -Ray Bradbury

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." -Ray Bradbury
I agree with you that the notation can be helpful. My problem, at least in the java world, is that prefixing is inconsistent across the board. Even within the same file you will find mixed notation.

I have to say that I have enjoyed ruby's variable conventions which are enforced by the language and seem to be much less abused.
I've been saying something similar for the last year or so. I can immediately tell whether your software is well-written by running it on my netbook. I can play Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft pretty well, Adobe Fireworks runs like a dream, the entire Office suite is snappy.

And then you try something like Windows Live Messenger or Skype, who both somehow find ways to use more RAM and CPU than half of the games on my system let alone other applications. It is amazing to me how long it takes some websites to load, too - fast browser, fast internet connection, slow CPU, all adds up to a pretty miserable experience if you like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, GMail (is there ANY other website which has a loading bar?).
A social sharing service that shares your entire browsing history on facebook (or any social network), would probably help. Or even just sharing you search history.
This is my usual experience.

Are you able to provide links to previous questions you have asked? Perhaps that can help someone reply with suggestions that might answer the original questions, or explain why the questions were not answered back when you asked them.
Tracking Twitter Traffic Just Got Way Easier
Tail Recursion in Perl
> querty

Ooh, I think we found part of your problem.
Why should I have to grok a text editor? Up, down, left and right should get me around and if they don't, I'm not the one who's wrong.

"You guys just don't understand why I eat dirt. I'm on a higher plane of existence and you just don't get it."
That might be procrastination but remember that the brain keeps working on different levels. While you're doing something else you might come up with the solution you were looking for.
Before anyone goes on to say that of all the patents these are the only useful ones, it's not really like that. First of all, the Courts won't accept many more patent infringement claims than around that number. You can't go to Court and claim patent infringement for 5000 patents. Oracle tried with a few hundred and the judge forced them to drop most of them. This means they're going to find as many that are some of the most useful ones.

Also, Apple claimed patent infringement on 20 patents against HTC, and they only won with 2 very old ones, and I think they won a few hundred millions with them. So it's good to keep that into perspective.

Even if Motorola loses in Court with about 20 of them in the first round, they can try with another 20 in another lawsuit later. This is why Microsoft and Apple will probably settle their patent disputes with Google. Google has too many patents now, more than Microsoft even.
"Math is hard, let's go shopping"...

I find that when I have something difficult, or new, to do I want to read HN and other sites more frequently. However, once I start on those hard / new tasks they are invariably engaging enough to keep me focused. It's just that initial hump.