skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not totally true. Using a varchar of 255 or less saves one byte vs one over 255. So if you don't know any particular size to use, 255 is reasonable.

And varchar(20) vs varchar(255) for a 10 character string use _exactly_ the same space. So there is no reason to artificially use a smaller value.
How many people with Obama's skin color support McCain? Something to think about, when Obama gets undisputed support from the people of his skin color it is very likely that he will return the favor. Do you want to live in the administration that is supportive to certain race or ethnicity?
It seems like this guy has completely lost it in his desire to get revenge on Arrington.

It's backfiring, at least for me.
If this is the best he can come up with in something that he seems lately to have made his life's quest, Arrington must actually be pretty clean.
personally I prefer to work out a little bit more and eat whatever I want instead of watching my diet. For me pretty much the entire day is nothing but junk food, the only time I have a proper meal is for supper.
I'm talking comparatively.

Thanks for the kind words, though.
BeautyTips, a jQuery Tooltip Plugin
That's because you're passive/aggressive and I'm aggressive/aggressive. Not a big deal.

You say dickish things in a passive aggressive way like "Every part of it has been lovingly slavered over to perfection" or "I'm fairly certain there are more convert stories among people who have used the Mac than there are stories of people disliking them." or "I can't possibly imagine people liking Windows more once they get into OS X."

or

"Microsoft added features that look "Mac-like" but without the inherent usability."

or

"OS X feels like a complete solution in a way"

And then you hide behind comments like "No offense meant..." or "I don't want to start a flame war" ...BUT.
Every time I read one of Steve's blog posts, I realize how little I know about software development.
Headaches Continue at Gmail, New Outages Reported
Motorola’s social networking phone coming sometime next year
Dreaded capital calls at venture funds may not be met
Shifting The Line in Social Media Advertising
Spec-identical on Amazon for 299: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-8-9-inch-Laptop-Processor/...
I actually made this point once while working for Apple, saying it was like thinking about whether the other side had won World War II.

But I think the point still stands that Microsoft has managed to cause far more harm during their reign than Apple, precisely because they have been more successful. I also think that Apple is somewhat constrained in the damage they can do, because Steve Jobs wants to be a Tyrant of Taste, more so than Ruler of All He Surveys. He has little interest, for example, in the mass business market or the clunky boxes at the bottom of the market. To have Apple branded boxes at that price range, with all the compromises that entails, seems to horrify Jobs.

As for other product areas, probably the most tyrannical is iTunes. But even there, the damage is constrained by the fact that the majority of people still just pirate their music, anyway.
I think the advice that 'tech people should learn to talk business' and 'business people should learn to talk tech' is spot on, and ultimately the most important point here. After all, there really is no such thing as a 'business person' or a 'tech person' there are just people, some of whom have spent time building experience in one domain, some in another domain.

My word of caution is this: due to the all too common 'them and us' situation (as described in the article), it is sometimes the case that the situation escalates to the point that one (or both) parties put up barriers to prevent 'the other side' from learning to speak their language, aka 'domain freakism'. This is sometime done as a defensive measure to prevent 'the other side' from 'getting in', for example to cover the tracks on things they dont want 'the other side' to know.

This doesnt always happen, but it is sad when it does.
My advice in this scenario is to find an independent person (either inside the company or outside) who can help you learn the basic language of 'the other side' to help bring that wall down. And then go solve the root problem around why one side does want to let the other side in (it's often skeletons / legacy).
VLC media player: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
AppLoop Transforms Blogs Into Native iPhone Applications
That shows as $325.99 for me...
Free Network Tools from PacketTrap | TechJaws
"I'm going off of every designer whose opinion I like and respect."

For the record, I'm not JUST going off of my peers at work, I happen to belong to a number of user groups and I also happen to visit many, many real working people in corporate workplaces around the world and I'm quite confident that it wouldn't be that hard to come up with a list of awesome web 2.0 developers that absolutely adore ASP.Net...

Anyway, sure, I can drop it as soon as you can drop it :)
The Facebook Platform is dead
I'm aggressive/aggressive, too. I just have tact, which you seem to lack.

You say dickish things in a passive aggressive way like "Every part of it has been lovingly slavered over to perfection"

It's not dickish if it's true.

or "I'm fairly certain there are more convert stories among people who have used the Mac than there are stories of people disliking them." or "I can't possibly imagine people liking Windows more once they get into OS X."

This isn't passive aggressive. This is genuinely what I believe.

"Microsoft added features that look "Mac-like" but without the inherent usability."

It's not dickish if it's true.

"OS X feels like a complete solution in a way"

It's not dickish if it's true.

And then you hide behind comments like "No offense meant..." or "I don't want to start a flame war" ...BUT.

I've had arguments with Windows users that actually were productive and led to interesting arguments being made. That's why when I write, I deliberately avoid, y'know, calling people dickish. It's why I've avoided insulting you directly during this debate. I mean, you've got an opinion, and my opinion's that your opinion's wrong, but I genuinely think it's possible for people who disagree with one another to learn from each other, and I think it's only possible if you leave the discussion open enough to let the other person talk.

This isn't a matter of conflicting personalities. You're attempting to get some sort of emotional response, and I'm treating this like a debate. I'd rather not have things get ugly on HN: I made that mistake before and it led to a really stupid pissing war. I'd like to believe that you've genuinely got something interesting to say, and you come close to making interesting points, but then you piss that away and start the personal attacks.

Stop it.
Number of IT venture deals falls to 10-year low
Sure. Let's.
Apple needs to upgrade their support to compete with the Dells in corporate America.
Don't know if this will do what you want, but these two reader macros add syntactic sugar for Common Lisp's aref and gethash forms. You should put these definitions in an eval-when. Disclaimer: I haven't used these in a while (not programming in Lisp at the moment, alas), so they may have some limitations which I have forgotten.

(set-macro-character
#\] (get-macro-character #\)))

;; Array syntax: [array-name array-references] is equivalent to
;; (aref array-name array-references)
(set-macro-character
#\[
#'(lambda (stream char)
(declare (ignore char))
(destructuring-bind (array-name &rest array-references)
(read-delimited-list #\] stream t)
`(aref ,array-name ,@array-references))))

;; Hash table syntax: #[hash-table hash-key &optional default] is
;; equivalent to (gethash hash-key hash-table &optional default)
(set-dispatch-macro-character
#\# #\[ #'(lambda (stream subchar arg)
(declare (ignore subchar arg))
(destructuring-bind (hash-name hash-key &optional (default nil))
(read-delimited-list #\] stream t)
`(gethash ,hash-key ,hash-name ,default))))
And poor Lee Felsenstein, who created community computing projects in the early 80s. He was briefly a millionaire from Osborne, the stock plummeted and he was not a millionaire anymore (I won't speculate on how much he cashed out).
There is no bubble. There is no bubble. There is no — oops.
I never had any issue with the .Net framework installation, but I'll take your word for it.

I guess I just feel spoiled by Visual Studio, while every time I start something in Python I feel like I have to spend so much time trying to find quality tools to make it do what I want. It just doesn't feel like a very complete solution to me.
Top 10 Ways Not to Spend $12 Million on Marketing
Please point out one personal attack that I made BEFORE you called me a dick.

That's what I thought. kthxbye.
It depends on what you mean by artificial. It's a good idea to use a smaller value if you have an idea of what the actual limit should be for you want the column to contain.
x .-~~~~-. |\\_
.-. _______| @_/ / Oo\_
|=|/ / \ | \ \ _(")
| |_____|_""_| \ W-| ||'--'
|_|_[ ]_|____| \_\ \_\\

^ ^
|	|
open barn door	horses
Second Life Offers Business Teleconferencing, Now Penis-Free
On Windows, I prefer VLC. It's an easier install though YMMV.
Comcast To Double Speeds, Offer Faster Connections
Your entire attitude is wholly immature. The original comment of yours that I pointed out was the most obvious example.

When you enter a debate with a condescending attitude, that's an insult right from the get-go.
er.. conversion error
Hmm, interesting. It's definitely $299 for me.
if you are on either 'side,' then you either own stock in one of the companies, or their is something wrong with you.

But that's just my opinion.
I just went back and read every one of my comments and not a single one of them got personal with you. Maybe you're mistaking rhetoric for ad hominem attacks.

Sorry, not my problem.
Take a look at your own comments my friend, especially the ones I quoted. You think that's not condescending?

Maybe don't throw stones if you live in a glass house.
Great Design is a Bottom Line Business
How does Facebook compare to Search?
Periodic feedback in one on one meetings is a necessary precursor to any effective formal review. One of the bigger problems with most review forms is that they rest on a premise of a well rounded individual and focus on improving weaknesses instead of building on strengths. Marcus Buckingham wrote a great book, "First Break All The Rules," critiquing this approach.

Problem with Performance Reviews
http://gmj.gallup.com/content/529/The-Four-Keys-to-Great-Management.aspx

First Break all the Rules summary
http://gmj.gallup.com/content/1144/First-Break-All-Rules-Book-Center.aspx
you have to see the movie. It is so bad and so good at the same time. It is one of those full of cliches bad movies, which is actually really good/entertaining to watch.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/37498/starship-troopers
It's a personal insult when you enter a conversation with the attitude that the person you're talking to is an ignorant know-nothing. It's offensive.
> So there is no reason to artificially use a smaller value.

That's not true either. As the document explains, MySQL's internal buffering uses fixed sized columns matching the length limit of the VARCHAR column. So a VARCHAR(255) will cause 255 bytes of memory to be allocated versus only 20 for VARCHAR(20). Of course, it depends on what range of sizes your data fit as to what you do :)
Actually, would there be any real problem with keeping the map in a closure, and passing around a function that gets (or, with a second optional argument, sets) the value for a given key?

(h 'key) and (h 'key 'new-val)

That's not too bad syntax-wise. Or, taking a cue from actor languages:

(h 'get 'key) and (h 'set 'key 'new-val)
To be fair, some of them have changed names, rebranded, or been bought out. For example, the one listed as "RSS Digest" was owned by me but was a donation-ware service at the time. It became Feed Digest, got angel funding, and in 2007 I sold it. The new owners rebranded it and it continues to operate.
Capitalism at bay
Don't forget also that when your CPU shares time, it divides up the time equally among the processes. So if your application creates 20 processes, it takes a disproportionate amount of CPU time (I believe, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

It depends on the OS. In most cases, threads are the only schedulable entity (think of a classic process as containing one thread), so there is no difference between 20 single-threaded processes and one process with 20 threads.
guessing a search for site:www.wsj.com would reveal all indexed pages (probably pretty recently crawled too) for us to view now, thanks goog!
Every one of the statements you quoted were made preceding an attempt to explain them.

You've explained yourself part of the time, but at other times you end up sneering and saying nothing useful.
5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Accepting New Work
Ask HN: Uncov articles being moderated on Hacker News?
I submitted an Uncov article about an hour ago and it has 3 points, 1 comment so far as of this post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338138

However, I do not see it anywhere in the top 300. I can only see it under the "Newest" link. What's going on? Is this submission being moderated? I believe it has enough points and age to be considered in the top 300.

I'd hate to think that Hacker News is unfairly moderating Uncov articles because things may have hit a little too close to home...
74signals is a low blow, I respect the people who at least setup a decent blog and make 'real points'
In my experience, especially with a project with a lot of code written for it already, its good to work through the code and learn it. You'll kinda kill two birds in one stone, learning the language/framework/technology, while catching up on the actual codebase.

Bite off a small piece of whats on the TODO list and try to implement it.
could it also be that the cloud gang saw this coming?
or just as you (pg) say - tech, stocks are not strongly interdependent
JavaScript also supports obj.id == obj["id"]. Python on the other hand does not support this (which is a shame, because obj.id is more readeable than obj['id']). But it's possible to hack this on dicts ( http://pastie.org/296506 ).

Syntactic sugar in languages is quite convenient, especially for things that are used a lot. Thought a lot of syntactic sugar (like in Perl) can ruin a language and it's readability.
I guess it's more of a coffee maker, even though it has crema, but where I work everyone loves our Senseo: http://www.macys.com/catalog/product/index.ognc?ID=136943...
most of the advice is common knowledge, and the rest of the advice is of dubious value

So in turn, your advice would be to read random fitness forums...
iTunes/iPod are the most tyrannical because they're the only place Apple is in charge. It's not right to excuse their DRM practices just because most music isn't purchased from it. It's still the number 1 music retailer. They've sold over 5 billion songs, most with DRM. They use a proprietary system to create vendor lock in.

Their NDA for the iPhone, and the tyranny over the application store, are worse than anything Microsoft has done to the consumer. They're just limited in scope by the fact that they own such a small % of the overall phone market, but if they ever get the kind of market share there that Windows has, everyone will hate them far more.
Yes it is being moderated. I suspect if there is any substance it will be pushed through before too long.

/joke - Sorry for the confusion
It doesn't matter. There were enough people on the internet 3 years ago for a product to be wildly successful. Even if 0 of the older people use Twitter, their potential audience is more than large enough.

A product doesn't have to appeal to 100% of the population to be successful. It does to be Coke or McDonald's or Google successful, but you can still make a shit ton of money by only appealing to 50%.
A 4k espresso machine is not for one person. If you have 20 people they might spend around that much a month at Starbucks. (10$/day) But I still think it's a perk and has little to do with saving the company money in the short term.
Exactly. I'd rather be one of the engineers who helped with Apollo than someone making money off day trading. The latter is richer, the former helped with history.
Kramnik just blew a superior position in the World Chess Championship
MySQL Disk Benchmarks with Sysbench. When will mySQL / INNODB stop scaling?
I agree 100%. Another thing is people feel the need to eat until they feel full. Your stomach can stretch and contract, so obtaining that full feeling isn't really a great measure for determining how much you should eat. I'd say controlling your portions based on something other than feeling full or clearing your plate is more important than trying to split your food up into more than 3 meals a day.
As I remember, webchat was (is?) anonymous by default.

Friendfeed is not anonymous by default. My point was that subtle changes in context seem to matter a lot - eg. tumblr vs blogspot. I use tumblr and still cannot tell you what it does that blogspot does not - blogspot just feels heavy.

So, even though friendfeed circles back to webchat, it might encourage entirely different kinds of things since people know each other by default and even know a bit of the social graph now.
It is $322 for me. Amazon must just roll the price dice.
Boxee adds Hulu support
New CNN Political News Game - Campaign Rush
Isn't that what John McCain said about medicare in the 2nd debate?

"What we have to do with Medicare is have a commission, of the smartest people in America come together, come up with recommendations, and then like the base closing commission idea we had, then we should have congress vote up or down"

Not to make this political, but why is it laughable when this guy says it, but not laughable when one of our 2 candidates for president says it?
The number of points an article needs to get onto the frontpage is not constant. It varies depending on the age of the account that submitted it, and the age, ip addresses, and previous upvotes of the upvotes on it. Comments have no effect.
But with iTunes, Jobs moved quickly to make iTunes Plus a possibility. And it's got more DRM-free music than its next-largest competitor, Amazon, does.
I hope people realize you're joking.
> why not just have (snip) one LED that's turned on/off?

I used to have a camera with a battery charger that only had one LED that was turned on/off. The problem with that particular solution to the red/green charge indicator is that you don't necessarily know if it's off because it's fully charged, or off because it's not plugged in correctly or there's no power, and I got burned a few times this way. So to have two separate labelled LEDs would be a nicer solution, one for power and one for whether or not it was charging.
Thanks qhoxie. Is this what HN does to all articles? Or just because it's from Uncov.com?

Edited: inb4 /joke
Since when has beating Texas A&M been an easy win? Other than Michigan and Notre Dame, what team has been as strong over the years?

http://lifetussle.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/all-time-best-col...
Was recently discussing with a friend who is color blind. He pointed me to this site which gives good examples (normal vs color blind):

http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness
I'd call myself on Apple's side, mainly because where they go there's an emphasis on polishing things till they shine and really caring about users. I've had a marvelous experience not only with Apple products but with Apple designers. Not so much on the other side.
Thanks for the clarification PG. And yes, I thought he was serious!
But a higher borrowing cost is not a problem unless it is so prohibitively high that it prevents lending, which, judging by the relatively steady loan amounts, it has not.

The necessary supply of funds is there, it's just that no one trusts anyone, so they are charging lots more for the risk.

For an analogous situation, consider this: The Fed decides to institute a lottery, where they pick a random bank every day. Whichever bank is picked gets shut down, and all their creditors and depositors get nothing. This is obviously very bad for whichever bank is picked, and bad for anyone who lent money to that bank. No one knows who is going to be next, so they charge everyone higher rates to account for the risk. There is still plenty of money to lend, and there is still a market for the loans, it's just that there is extra risk of a random insolvency event.

In the real world, the illiquid and non-transparent Asset Backed Securities are like the Fed lottery, in that, by marking them to market, all it takes is one lowball transaction by third parties to crater a bank's balance sheet, forcing it into insolvency. Since no one knows who still is at risk, they are charging higher rates. It's not because they don't have the money to lend, it's because it is better to have the money sit idle than to lose it. (And in the case of some banks, it is better to have cash on hand in case their own asset-backed securities become worthless. Even lending it to a perfect borrower is riskier in that case, because even if the borrower can repay, it's no good to the bank if they need the cash in a pinch.)
Google Learns Lessons in the Ways of Washington
How about a more descriptive headline? You would probably get a lot more clicks if you gave people at least a hint about what is behind this link. If submitters can't take an extra few seconds to write a few descriptive words why should anyone take the time to look at what they've posted? I was tempted to flag this before I saw how many comments are here.
Both as a developer and as a university student, I can testify that this is certainly true.

Good and spammy apps alike have suffered greatly, and the FB Platform is deader than ever.
Apologies for the confusion. HN is as democratic a news site as you will find, so no worries!
> Eat 5x a day, spread out every 3-4 hours

Bzzzt. Frequent eating keeps your insulin levels up, which encourages weight gain as well as stresses your body in various ways. Eat two hearty meals and a light one. Digestion dulls the mind and saps energy, so why do it more than three times a day? Preparing good food should also take some time.

When you eat frequently your body never burns fat. It becomes accustomed to constantly running on glycogen and you get hunger pangs very easily. You want to run mostly on fat metabolism; it's really how your body is designed to work. You're not a grazer like a cow. You're closer to a lion or a bear. These animals eat their fill and then go long periods running on the fat.

> Drink lots of water

Drink when you're thirsty. There is absolutely no reason to drink more than thirst demands. If anything, drinking extra water stresses your kidneys and depletes you of water soluble minerals and vitamins.
Please fix the iPhone
Government 2.0: Ask What You Can Hack for Your Country
Moved quickly? It took over 6 years.
Great article and, IMO, much better than that recent one by Calcanis on saving money with your startup.

Interesting, I was seriously considering a PR firm for one of my startups. I had met a PR guy from the Bay Area at a wedding and considered using his company. Good to know.
Black and white TV generation may have monochrome dreams
hmmph, his dress code remained the same even then - I thought it was a marketing gimmick - guess not.
Analyzing Ulysses
VCs: Current crisis worse than tech meltdown
Psychological aspects of natural language use: our words, our selves.
I don't mind running Linux in a virtual machine or PuTTYing into another host. If you have gigabit access to it, does it really matter if you must use two OSes to get the job done?
Scientific Product Development
Yeah, but you have to remember that those names will affect the perception of similar names. The Wii, for example, being a monster hit is going to affect the way people perceive names.
yeah, i like my mac, but the mb air doesnt seem worth the money (for the portability, atleast). this, however, seems very reasonable.