skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a former obese fellow (BMI 34, now BMI 26) there are a few things:

- Self image issues. You tell yourself you don't care, but come the fuck on, of course you do.

- It's not comfortable, at all. When you are lounging on the couch you can literally hear yourself wheezing each breath in. Not in the "ohgodimgonnadie" wheezing, but it's far from comfortable.

- It holds you back from doing things you normally would want to do. I wanted to walk around the city and explore more, but it meant being severely out of breath constantly and sweating profusely. Neither are pleasant.

I'm still a tad heavier than I'd like to be, but I feel a million times better than I did at my heaviest.
Gaining a master's degree doesn't automatically make you a better teacher. I'd much rather be assured that a teacher has other basic abilities (e.g. good communication skills, patience, fairness, organization skills, and even some creativity).
I was cured of the desire to play these kind of games by playing the game Upgrade Complete, at http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/upgrade-complete.

I played Upgrade Complete until the abrupt ending. I found I felt annoyed that the game was over, and asked myself why. I realized all the playing of the game I had just done was pointless number-increasing – I think conveying that message is the point of Upgrade Complete. That inspired me avoid games with too much grinding and not enough more interesting parts like puzzles or story, and to use cheats whenever possible to skip the grinding.
It might be about that - but it's wrong. The obvious proof is that Penguins and Fish can drink sea water.

At least the comment was correct, although about a somewhat different subject.
PayPal wasn't a bank (I think they might be now). If you are just shuttling money, you don't have to become a bank. However, there are rules (like no holding onto people's money).
If osmosis was the entire story then fish and penguins would die of thirst.
GitHaven, an open source clone of GitHub
Modding someone down for stating a fact isn't legitimate discussion, either. Unless Apple somehow guaranteed that stuff in the Cache folder was permanent (which more or less violates the definition of "cache" as widely understood) you relied on undocumented behavior, and you got burned by it. It happens all the time (it's happened to me before, definitely). If the data is that important (and I agree that it could be in this cae) the user needs to take the hit and pay for permanent cloud storage. That 5 gigs of storage would cost them a whopping $10.00 per year at Apple's announced price. BFD.
Wow that was really interesting.

The thing I found most surprising was at the end when he was able to go off the screen by going backwards which very much seems like a bug in their algorithm, but maybe "it's a feature".

That game definitely has good camera management though. I never sat down and thought about how elaborate their scheme was.
I wouldn't worry about the cost just yet. If you can really deliver three hour turn-around, you will find a class of customer who needs to get money somewhere quickly. Those will be the customers you want to cultivate.

The only caveat might be in larger transfers: if I need to get my late mortgage payment to my bank, 5% can be in the hundreds. At that point, FedEx is cheaper (but still slower). Make that balance work, and you can be successful.
Would you mind clarifying what specifically you were referring to as "services like this"? I am curious what type of service you had in mind.
no, but its a good way to gate on intelligence
Slipping out of the Honeymoon Phase. Waking up Scared. Oh Shit, This is Real
"Consume" is an interesting word choice, @twainer. Unlike making a ham sandwich for lunch, you don't actually consume anything when you copy a file (except a bit of electricity, of course).

Any chance you could come up with more appropriate language? Or does your position weaken once you start thinking about it a bit more precisely?
Huh? If you setup the paid plan with an organization it's about $2/month per project. The advertised plans go up to 125 repositories for $200/month.
Exercise and allowing myself, which is SO difficult, to take that afternoon power nap has saved me. I find an extreme amount of gilt when I attempt to force myself into that afternoon power nap, but when I do, and wake up afterwards, I'm 100 times more productive than I ever was before, or if I had skipped it.
That's not how I would approach the problem of learning emacs. I'd choose something I want to get more efficient at (managing notes, dealing with broken compilationsm finding files, editing Java files, etc) and research packages for that. Once you find a package, pick a couple commands to learn, tape them to your monitor, use them until they are wired, pick a couple more, rinse and repeat.

In all circumstances, make sure you know how to use all the various help tools and make sure you know enough elisp to do some basic configuration.
no that doesn't at all. Why not have any two humans mate to have offspring? there are 23 pairs of chromosomes and only 1 pair is sex determining. doesn't really make sense to have male/female especially since the 'male' physical characteristics are small enough to be present in a female also.
One of those classic cases where it's hard to determine if the person is either brilliant or an idiot.
Why is EC2 a runaway train?
There is some bookkeeping involved when you want IO watchers and timers, but it amounts to a heap for the timers ("when does the next timer go off?"), calling select with the timeout set for when the next timer expires, and then updating the timer queue when you wake up (if it's because the timer time arrived, rather than because IO is possible). That's basically why we have event loop libraries, to tie those two data structures together.

The critical thing to learn about epoll is event-triggering and level-triggering. I've seen people write libev code where they make watchers for r and w on a socket, then keep those alive regardless of whether or not they have data to write. This means their process never goes to sleep, since the fd is always writable and the write callback is called every time the process tries to go to sleep. They are expecting edge-triggering when ev provides level-triggering.

On the other hand, I've seen people using libzmq with libev have the opposite problem. libev's watchers are level-triggered, but libzmq's ZMQ_FDs are edge-triggered. This means you really have to know what you're doing to get things to work (but if you treat the ZMQ_FD like you should treat a normal fd, that is, read until EWOULDBLOCK and write until EWOULDBLOCK, it works), and reading an article that discusses how both work could be helpful in getting you to write correct code. OTOH, the terms themselves are pretty clear.
Here we create a dummy struct which makes copying arrays easy for us

typedef struct { int array[SIZE]; }Array;
Array a = {{10,16,2011}};
Array b = a;
I hate that this rule exists in the form it does, but changing it is potentially difficult.

Accredited investors and the offerings they invest in are largely outside the regulatory system, and it's ripe for fraud. The whole idea is that accredited investors are (hopefully) sophisticated enough to avoid most of the fraud on their own, without the SEC's help, and have enough resources to absorb the losses when they get it wrong.

With a low-dollar exemption, even if an individual may not suffer significant hardship if they make a few investments and it goes badly, it can still make it easier for fraudsters (or just careless buffoons) to make off with/waste large amounts of money from a lot of individuals.

I agree that there needs to be a middle ground between accredited investors and the fully-regulated system, but getting the rules right without making enforcement mechanisms either toothless or too expensive is going to be hard.
This is part of the things that I list under "human-built things I technically understand (more or less) but are still completely baffling if I stop and think about it".

Amongst these:

- same example with Google Instant: the fact that what I type goes to Google and back that fast and that I never get somebody else's page is pretty amazing;

- CRT monitors: a flow of electrons is bent with electric current to hit a specific point on the screen, for millions of dots at least 30 times a second and it never misses its targets; (leaving aside that we were able to get a constant flow of electrons in the first place…)

- car engine: fuel is injected, compressed, lit up in cylinders at 3000rpm to make a 4,000 vehicle move at 65mph and the engine barely ever have hiccups.

- cell phones: I'm driving in California and can talk to my Dad who is in a high-speed train in France. It works and you can't even notice a significant delay.

And there are obviously so many more things like these…

It's like this Louis C.K. bit about people who complain about being stranded 40 minutes on the ground before taking part of "the miracle of flight". We should spend more time amazed at when it works than pissed at when it doesn't.
glucose is the key.
While I agree with you, I don't think HN is for debating general politics.
Nature is frankly amazing. Since it's "spider season" over here, I've been amazed at the fact that something as small as a spider can build something as complicated as a spider web. And that's putting aside all the biochemistry of creating the silk.

But I think in the OP, the amazing part is that it was build by human beings. It's something that humanity as a whole made and understands. But still, it's hard to comprehend all the layers involved…
Duplicate of an article on the front page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115872
It is worth noting that Bruce Eckel pretty much gave up on C++ as a hopeless mess long ago. After some time in Java-land and Python-land this days he is hanging out in Go-land.
This is a duplicate of this post from a few hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115872
First thing I thought: holy shit, if we did this kind of stuff for those living below the poverty line, they would have enough resources to pick themselves up and get new jobs (after showers, job interview supplies, counseling, etc etc). At the very least the 22% of American children living in poverty would have a meal and clean clothes.

Second thought: if this was Orlando most of the donators would be arrested.

Third thought: This is the perfect time to backpack up to New York and have a week-long vacation for super cheap. Swing a protest sign for long enough to get a free meal, then move on to sightseeing.
In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated
When you specialize, you will learn more indepth about your field. You don't stop learning.

Of course, a good life means humans must learn certain life maintenance skill and social interactions so that we can function and hopefully be happier overall.
It's more simulation than game, but one of the most intricate and detailed simulations ever. Personally I lost interest once I realized there was no real goal or point to it, but a lot of people like the sandbox feel.
Sort of puts arguments about "leaky abstractions" in the appropriate perspective. Even assembly has a lot of turtles holding it up...
I think you're confusing make up with too much make-up for the most part(with some exceptions) if it's obvious a woman is wearing makeup she's got too much of it on IMO.
Depending on the work environment this might be good advice. On the flip side, however, I think many people have or remember having coworkers who ask questions any time they get stuck without hardly trying to solve the problem for themselves.

Spinning your wheels for too long doesn't help anyone, but a lot can be said for people who are independent and don't needlessly distract those around them.
which I think is under-diagnosed because a sleep study is kind of an expensive hassle.

And I think it's also under-diagnosed because of that correlation.

I "have a friend" who is of normal weight, and who also doesn't snore and is young (2 other anti-correlates.) This friend struggled his entire life with sleep issues and blamed it on laziness. It wasn't until it was affecting his career that he had a sleep study - and it turns out he stops breathing 60 times an hour. (That doesn't make for especially restorative sleep.)

If you have sleep issues despite making an effort to have good sleep hygiene etc. - talk to your doctor!
What's about egg donors or surrogate mothers then? Doesn't the baby turn out like their parents?
These games are the embodiment of a generation raised on the idea that when the bell rings you change classes and at the end of thew week you get a gold star if you did all the things you were supposed to.

It puts them right back into a safe world where if the follow the rules they get rewarded.
Ask HN: Need help tracking down a thief
Hello HN,

I was in a huge mess where my apartment-mate did not pay rent on time, forcing me to pay over $700 in legal fees to the landlord to protect my credit from an eviction. I was out of town when all this was happening so I couldn't talk to him in person.

My apartment-mate promised to pay me back, but to this day has failed to meet and now that the lease was long over he has moved elsewhere.

I should have sued him while he was still living in the apartment, but I thought it would be less hassle for me to just have him pay me back. I lost over $1000 in total because of this whole ordeal; apparently he took several of my stuff including a router.

I now want to file a small claims lawsuit, but I have to find his address first apparently to have the lawsuit served to him. Does anyone know how I can track down his address with the following information?

- phone number
- email address
- university name/class
- facebook and linkedin profile

Thanks.
Lessig on PlainSite: Congress is corrupted by privately funded elections
Is there a particular reason why you decided to purchase 14 physical servers instead of spinning up virtual instances (or even co-located servers) for easy scaling? As you've discovered, it's hard to estimate what kind of load you'll need to handle, and the up-front cost is impossible to recover.

Also, I'd recommend spending some time looking at your architecture, as you should be able to handle 50,000 active users with a lot less metal. The extra infrastructure can often be more expensive than a well-designed architecture.
No it seemed to me that they named it 360 to keep up with Sony in the eyes of customers. Sony is on its third console, so ms had to give the impression that it was too.

I doubt MS feels that they'd need to do with the next gen, but I wouldn't be surpassed if we get a PlayStaion 4 and Xbox 4 U or something like that.
Finland's schools are great because they are full of Finns, in the same way that schools with many Finns in the US do very well.

Hong Kong and Singapore's schools are great because they are full of Chinese, in the same way that schools with many Chinese in the US do very well, even in poor neighborhoods:

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/16/local/me-lincoln16

To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few
generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from
poor and working-class families.

According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and
Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High
have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And
yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic
Decathlon team.

It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. But most articles don't even consider such explanations, preferring to keep looking under the streetlight for that quarter.
Please tell me you're joking. If you're a good programmer, you could move to San Francisco and have a six figure salary within a week.
I've got an engineering question posted on my site regarding a portable desalination device (potentially using reverse osmosis), if anyone has ideas: http://zombal.com/zomb/scientific-design/emergency-desalinat...
Copyright is a (supposedly temporary) government granted monopoly.

It is very often used for censorship, and its origins are in the censorship system (ie., requirement for publishers to be licensed by the king) of the middle ages.

Authors that publish their works have no god-given right to control how others use their work, if I'm an sculptor and I sell an sculpture, whoever buys it can do whatever the hell wants with it, they can smash it, put it in their toilet, or whatever else.

The point of copyright was supposedly to encourage the creation of art, but it clearly has been stifling both the creation and enjoyment of art for a long time now.
I would think that people in Singapore and South Korea considers education very important and thus students in these countries try very hard to get really good grade.
CAs are one of the biggest scams of the last twenty years.
...and java is slow if you use it?
Chinese Struggling Less Than Americans to Afford Basics
> What can I do today that will help justify the eighty-hour work weeks that Adam and Josh have been putting in for the last six months?

What is everybody else on your roster doing? Cut some fat. And if your devs are pulling 80h weeks, why are you watching TV at night?
This article does consider that though:

They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it
lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one
points out that Finland has the same demographics as
Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior
results. I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument,
because it implies that African-American and Hispanic
children cannot benefit by having highly experienced
teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts
and activities.
I was dumb enough to pick white straight after it loaded. After a few seconds I thought my brand new LCD monitor had started to go.

It would be interesting implement it as a dynamic background to something.
This is an argument Spolsky once made in favor of offices I've always liked, from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html.

"Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

"Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff."

Granted, interrupting a peer makes more sense if you actually can't make progress without another opinion on design, rather than just being lazy and using them as a living reference work.
New MPIs Version Announced – Open MPI and MVAPICH (OSU)
It's an interesting and eloquent statement, and worth thinking about. There's no need to resort to ad-hominem attacks against whoever said it, no matter how fictional they might be.
Wouldn't the zero-length array potentially run into other memory?
If you are interested in feedback, had a similar reaction. Many people are now more interested in reducing distraction, not increasing it. Maybe you could find a way to do that, blocking and batching feeds.
"I was asked about current trends in U.S. education, and Finnish educators were astonished by the idea that our governments intend to evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores; that made no sense to them. They were also surprised that we turn children over to “teachers” who have only a few weeks of training and no masters’ degree. They did not understand the idea of “merit pay.” They are paid more if they do more work for the community, but they can’t understand why teachers should get a bonus to compete with one another for test scores. Since they don’t have comparative test scores for their students, our practices don’t make sense to them. Nor do they understand the benefits of competition among teachers who ought to be collaborating."

This will not last. The anglo corporatist cancer with its insanely frequent "performance reviews" and bogus metrics will eat them alive. Long live exacerbated competitiveness and backstabbing your peers. Long live natural selection and the annual culling of the herd.
GitLab doesn't include support for wiki pages (or I couldn't find it). Comparing apples to apples, I'm focusing on the issue tracker databases. I don't know where GitHub stores this kind of data.

If your team uses GitHub, you're paying a company to reliably store your data, and that's all the company does, and so I'm sure they have RAID0, plus backup drives, plus tape backups. If your team uses GitLab, you're hosting it yourself, so you are responsible for having reliable storage and backups. Obviously, it's infeasible for a tiny startup to have the same level of reliability that GitHub has.

palish's argument is that losing data is unlikely in either scenario. It's true that it's incredibly unlikely for both, but it's far more likely to happen if you roll your own solution. (It's incredibly unlikely that two values hash to one MD5. It's far less likely that two values hash to one SHA1. Either case is very unlikely, but SHA1 is magnitudes better.)
Cross posting my reply from another site:

> We were now rendering our site index in 1.5 seconds or less, compared to 3 seconds before.

This is the real WTF. What kind of queries take three seconds to run, that is ridiculous. Even with indexes 1.5 seconds is insane.

Deciding against premature optimisation isn't permission to throw away good, efficient design. It's clear from the rest of the article that these guys really have no idea what they're doing. Quoting the results of all their optimisations:

> In the end, we did not go down. The last round of load tests with httperf showed us handling 200 GETs a second indefinitely, with an average response time of about 1.2 seconds. We served thousands of requests without even a hiccup, and we did it without spending any money.

This is really poor performance, and it shows in the site when you change page or select a different category/filter. I'm guessing that they also chose a nosql solution for the wrong reasons, as it seems everything there could be done much faster/better by using an ACID compliant database.
Siri Will Never Open To 3rd Party Devs
Events are evil, much better use something like Plan 9 (port) libthread ( http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/thread ) or Russ Cox's libtask ( http://swtch.com/libtask/ ).

Or better yet, program in Go ;)
just want to say hi to a fellow HN reader from Vancouver.
As you get seriously fit, your clothing options are somewhat constrained as well.

Ask any squatter about buying jeans ... at your own risk.
This "it's not a big deal" post makes it even worse, I think: so the upper management knows about the problem(s) outlined so well in Yegge's post and still does nothing (that we know of)? Why?
Communism is the answer!