skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am prone to have zillions of ideas. Some are good, some are terrible. They all seem amazing the first time, but after a while they lose the shine and I leave them incomplete.

So, the first test for me is to write down everything I come up with. Then leave it and revise it again after a week/month. If it still sounds amazing, then I pay some more attention to it.
This is interesting, since CyanogenMod devs recently removed default "root" access. You can still enable it if you want, but if you don't really need it, it's a gratuitous security hole. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3716104
I'm curious, but it kills the Android Browser on my Droid X. Words appear on the right frame, but before I can see them, or anything, the screen goes black and I'm back at the home page.
Great post - two questions:

1) What occupies your time these days Derek ?

2) Possibly related - what unfulfilled dreams do you still have ?
Is it possible to be a semi-donkey? I have, if I were to try to count, 4 major 'things' going on in my life right now. One is keeping fit, one is keeping up with free online learning resources like Udacity, one is my job, and one is learning to play guitar.

Are you suggesting that if I don't drop three of those, I won't succeed in any of them? That worries me a bit, because the job part takes up LOTS and LOTS of time, far more than the other three combined.
(Disclosure: I'm a Developer Advocate employed by Basho)

Postgres is a better fit for most Ruby web applications. When you first launch your app, you'll have a tiny handful of users and won't have any problems fitting it in a free Heroku instance on the free 5MB shared Postgres, and the compromises you'd have to make with your data model to fit a database like Riak aren't going to pay off until you get enormous. Postgres and ActiveRecord get the job done quickly and without fuss, and allow you to launch quickly and see how your app is received.

You can always scale later: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php
how much would that $20 purchase net you over an invested lifetime

$27

(Assumptions: You save it at age 20, it grows at 5%, and you spend it when you're 80.)
I have found that this is very true. Right now, I'm studying physics at the undergraduate level. It's hard, but at the same time it doesn't feel challenging. I don't feel like I get very much out of my lessons. However, I did manage to get myself a job in one of the space science labs here on campus. I have learned so much from that work, simply because it is expected that I be as capable as the graduate students I work with. I have learned much, much more advanced physics and internalized it than I could ever do in my basic physics class. It's the challenge that educates you.
I'm assuming others get to a "There are no tickets available at this time" alert and then you have to start over. At least, that is what is happening to me.
I'm not, I was simply saying that if all those things were legal, criminals (the cartels, not the users) would find something else illegal to peddle. These people look for an easy buck, and right now, that happens to be in illicit drugs. Take that profit away, and they'll just find something else.
I have a lot of practice buying first come first serve tickets as a sometimes occasional scalper, and I'm good at it. In the industry, scalpers would have labeled this onsale as "suspicious", as in a lot of tickets were likely held back and there probably were far fewer than 5000 tickets onsale.

I've hit no available tickets 4 times now. My advice to everyone reading this is to keep trying until 8AM in case they are releasing the tickets in batches.

EDIT: Definitely batches, got 1 at exactly 7:15.
MySQL doesn't work in Python 3 yet? Hasn't Python 3 been out for years?
People are scared of "Nuclear" - mention uranium and many people will panic.

There's the problem of allowing some countries to have a Uranium energy programme which gives them access to the beginnings of nuclear weapons technology.
This is ridiculous, the sell out time has gone from days to 10mins (last year) to 30 seconds this year, even at $900! At this rate, next year they'll be gone in microseconds.
The repo's still up: https://github.com/basho/luwak
The main reason why I don't find this principle as useful as it appears at first sight is the phenomenon of obfuscation by abstraction.

You can cut down on LOC and even make the code appear more elegant by making it very abstract. Is this better than writing more lines of code that express the intention more directly? I don't have a general answer to that and I don't think there is one. Nothing will ever free us from the burden to find the right balance.
We all have multiple goals. (Be healthy. Be a great programmer. Be a great dad. Etc.)

You'll know if you have so many that it's holding you back, and paralyzing you.

If it's not a problem, if you're able to progress on all of them, then congrats! No need to change anything because of a silly blog post. ☺
Just let's not forget we also need ethical ones too.

In fact, I'd trade a crazy unethical one for a sane and ethical one without thinking twice.
I've done that a few times and it got good results. Taking it to the next stage of finding a regular audience is hard though!

I really like Unbounce for building landing pages. Unfortunately Google refuse to run Adwords campaigns for them though, which is a shame.
Some great advice. I'd like to add:

- Change: change is a sequence of stages you move through according to well-defined processes: (1) pre-contemplation (where you haven't started considering change, or are even aware it's an option), (2) contemplation (where you're considering change but haven't decided), (3) preparation (where you've decided to change and start preparing for the consequences of change), (4) action (where you actually practice change) and (5) maintenance (where you maintain change - going to gym once is change, but doesn't really count :)

That 'instant' you refer to is familiar to me and IMO it is when your brain collects enough awareness of your push/pull factors to move you from preparation (3) to action (4). Many people underestimate how critical preparation is, and for most people steps 1, 2 and 3 are not conscious at all and you will go back and forth over them for years. If you're quitting smoking but smoking gives you a break from your annoying boss, or it's how you socialise, or gives you access to the cute guy/girl you're into, and you go unprepared (unaware) into action and quit smoking you are highly likely to relapse (i.e. go back to stage 1 or 2).

I highly recommend reading Prochaska et al.'s "Changing for Good" (http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Good-Revolutionary-Overcoming...) to understand about the stages of change, how to evaluate where you are w.r.t. a certain change and if you're ready to move forward to the next stage, and the processes that help you move from one stage to the next (taster: 'commitment' is only suitable from the 3rd stage onwards, and can actually hurt your chances of successfully changing if you commit when you're in an earlier stage!).

- Changing the way you think: David Burns' books, particularly the "Feeling Good Handbook" (http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/0...), and Helmstetter's "What to say when you talk to yourself" (http://www.amazon.com/What-Say-When-Talk-Yourself/dp/0671708...)

- Awaken the Giant is a great book, and I get the timing thing you talk about. I read it first over ten years ago and it meant nothing to me. Having gained a bit of experience since then I listened to it recently about a month ago and suddenly I could relate to 90% of what was being said, and Robbins helped solidify a bunch of ideas that had previously just been floating around in my head.
Restructure Indian textile sector loans, says Committee
Restructure Indian textile sector loans, says Committee
He said "I didn't work on Draw Something."
iPad still beats Android tablets by default, PC Magazine illustrates
Redhat sells support services, among other things. They hire key people in key projects so that if something goes wrong for their clients, they can get it fixed expediently. When your production is on the line, you'll gladly pay for the piece of mind and the very real reduction in business risk.
I finally got through and registered as of 7:16

Edit: I got "no tickets available at this time" several times before getting through so don't give up.
1. Thorium is a natural by-product, in fact it is in the waste slurry, from rare earth mineral mining.

2. Tiny amounts are required relative to uranium for electricity production. We have already mined in the West more than we will need for a hundred years, if we had production Molten Salt Reactors today.

3. It is far more electrically efficient than uranium.

So, there is no comparison purely based on which is the better fuel for fission. Thorium wins by multiple factors if not magnitude across many aspects, including fission waste prodcuts.

However, that said, the trust cost of fission is, as you mentioned, the upfront cost of the nuclear reactors. Since this quasi-government industry has seen little innovation in practice for 70+ years, conventional nuclear power plants have remained enormous capital sinks and risky endeavours.

There is now some serious research going into MSRs (including thorium) and other nuclear tech. But it is mainly being led by China, excluding sidetracking efforts like the Travelling Wave Reactors of Bill Gates et. al, who need as much energy as they can get.
Can't even get past the enter your name screen.
Futurico UI HTML based on Scaffy framework
Derek, this thread really resonates with me. I've been at a crossroads between 2 distinct paths for several years. Path A is a road I've been on for almost 14 yrs, and I've grown weary of it. W/o going into explanation, things have slowed on that road, and won't move forward w/o considerable effort. But I know exactly what needs to be done, there's little risk, it's very practical, and I will have company in the process, which I've come to realize is very important to me. On the other hand, I've always wondered about this Path B, w/o ever having taken any significant steps towards it. So I'd be starting from scratch, and yet it seems much less complex than Path A. I wouldn't have any company for probably a few years on Path B, so it's sure to be a lonely road at first. In the end it would be quite rewarding I'm sure, but I'd be letting down a lot of people by abondoning Path A. And I'm fairly certain that there's not enough time to pursue both Paths and do either one of them justice. Your thoughts on this??? Many thanks...
OK, so then what you're proposing isn't a pure fusion reactor but a hybrid fusion-fission reactor. That's probably going to combine many of the disadvantages of fusion and fission. You get both the highly radioactive and long-life decay products of fission, still need relatively rare fissile fuel and you get the containment problems of fusion.

Moreover if you need a fission explosion trigger you need a critical mass of fissile material for each detonation so there's a limit to how far you can scale down the process.

I think it's highly unlikely this could be practical.
Well I'm pretty sure his lawyer would tell him that he cannot use that term, as per the article:

- I didn't work on Draw Something.
Google I/O Sells Out in 30 Seconds
Its unplayable on my iphone 4 (up to date) I really dont see why its so popular? its SO slow. Personally I prefer depict!
Silver bullets usually aren't. (Sadly.)

Yeah, these drugs appear to improve survival times somewhat, but at extortionate expense.

Avastin for instance has been something of a disappointment: yes, it appears to delay mortality but that's about it & the FDA has pulled its approval for use in breast cancer because there was no evidence that it actually helped. The side effects can also be difficult, as you might expect for a drug that targets a process like blood vessel growth.

If dietary changes could have profound effects on cancer progression then a controlled trial would be simple (and ethically straightforward). In reality, eating a decent diet is known to reduce the rates of cancer & improve survival rates of those who are diagnosed with cancer, but it isn't a cure & it probably never will be.
DotCloud Adds Support For WebSockets, Vertical Scaling And More
Well, as someone married to a lawyer I one thing that is completely different is that they have to worry about their professional license - if they screw up badly enough then it can be taken away and then they can't work as a lawyer anymore.

There is no sanction that can be applied to a developer that will mean that they can never get employed as a developer again.
I learned Sierpinski's name in high school (he had a pretty carpet, don't you know); I'm pretty sure I learned Hilbert's name from a Nova episode at around the same time.

I first heard Noether's name last year, I think, from some article like this one. Of course, the notion that "where there is a symmetry, there is a conservation principle" came up half a dozen times during my physics/EE Ph.D. studies, but nobody ever suggested that this might be a theorem with a name, let alone the name of Noether.

Your point is well taken, though. A major reason why the female scientists and mathematicians of history are largely invisible, unless you make an effort to see them, is that all scientists and mathematicians are invisible to first order. To get your name out there, even to fans of such things, you have to do a bunch of self-promotion. And self-promotion is a nonlinear endeavor: A little additional friction – from, say, having to lurk quietly at the back of lecture halls and slink in and out the back door of the office, lest you be forced to defend your very presence from a handful of people who are made uncomfortable by it – and you're behind in the fame game.
It is on github, you could propose a patch... Mozilla is a not-for-profit, this is a technological demo...
Relationship or friends with benefits?
Hard choice isn't it?But you have to think twice before doing something you may regret one day.
There's a significant difference between the two statements "I don't get this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it." and "I understand this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it".

There are cases when the code is a convoluted, buggy, unintelligible, undocumented, untested and untestable mess. In those cases re-analyzing what it should do and re-implementing it from scratch is often both faster and more reliable way of dealing with required changes. Especially if you consider resources spent on maintenance over a significant period of time.

At this point, I get the nasty feeling that many people who preach "don't ever rewrite" mantra are the people who have produced large volumes of code in the past, but consider themselves too "senior" to maintain it now. The common rhetoric regarding "young/junior programmers" only confirms that notion.
"I am beginning to think that even small teams should be split in two groups: feature and maintenance"

Noooooooooooooooooo! :-)

Seriously though - I'd go as far as saying that it's an organisational anti-pattern. Every time I've seen folk do this it's gone terribly wrong. Some of the behaviours it seems to encourage:

* The feature team no longer get to deal with the messes they produce - the maintenance team does. So the feature team suffers a pressure to not worry about those issues so much, which leads to worse code getting released.

* The maintenance team gets seen as being less important than the feature team, so product maintenance gets neglected.

* You waste a lot of time in pointless arguments over whether something is a feature of maintenance. The distinction often ends up actually being fun vs not-fun.

* Feature development is perceived as being "harder" than maintenance - so all of the best coders end up in the feature team

* Once the previous point gets into play and you have the "good" devs on the feature team and the "bad" devs on the maintenance team you suddenly get being assigned to the latter as a being seen as an insult/punishment (in one particularly egregious case I saw being assigned to the maintenance team being actually used as a punishment! Gack!)

Seriously - total suckage. Don't go there.

(Also curious to know why you don't think a kanban approach is a good one for feature development - since I use it that way myself, and know a bunch of other folk who have that approach too.)
Just for the sake of argument, I think there's an entirely different way of looking at this: People who are good at innovation, have an advantage in innovation. Those with the entrepreneurial bug and talent for creating great things, get on with it as soon as they can i.e shortly after high school - they don't wait till they're in their 40s and that's why you see the data that's out there. On a different note: outside the USA I don't think you find quite the same number of successful young people, so it's not really universal.
How do I find my Kimo Williams?
Has to be batches. Nothing else explains why it would say "no tickets available AT THIS TIME" several times in a row, then suddenly open up and let a few people get a ticket.

That said, I don't have one. Waiting for an academic ticket too.
(1) : I'm spending most of my time learning Rails, Sinatra, Sequel, Nginx, JavaScript, jQuery, and Backbone, all back-to-back from books and test projects, quite intensely.

... because ...

(2) : If I die before turning these projects into reality, I'm going to be pissed-off! http://50pop.com/code

It's really my main drive these days, to finally launch these ideas I've had spec'd out for a long time.

I know I could just hire someone else to make them, but the joy (to me) is in the process, not the goal. I want to learn these programming techniques so well that I can quickly create all my future ideas, too.
Thanks, Derek!
A C# Book Video Trailer
Open Source Security Vulnerabilities Plague Large Organizations
Hardly an official news release.
Didn't I write this: "I do not think that they deserve what they get but I would say that it is in part there fault."

A sovereign nation can only be forced with arms ever thing else is just strong insentives. There is a diffrence.

The book however is on my readinglist, I have heard alot about it.
Academic tix are gone as of now.
Academic tickets are always tougher to get, if it's really important to you to go to the conference you might consider putting the full price one on your credit card and selling your swag.
IIRC, GeoIP accuracy drops off sharply outside of the US. I did a risk analysis a few years back (I'd post the report, but I don't own the copyright) and we determined that if you get 90% accuracy at the regional level for a country outside of the US, you're doing amazingly well. Contrast that with 99% accuracy at the regional level and 90% accuracy at the city level within the US.

Yahoo used to have a GeoIP developer API, but I believe they deprecated it. You could check their developer API index.
Aren't employees protected from this kind of crap in the US? In the UK, when a business is acquired, the employees must be offered work on the same terms as before.

So in this case, if his prior contract did not have the objectionable clause, the new employer may not add it.
National Hack the Government Day 2012
I don't know. Any ideas, anyone?
Is it actually sold out, or did you just time out when requesting a ticket?

It's not really clear from the "checking for available tickets" polling.

also, academic tickets are clearly marked as sold out, but the main tickets aren't.
Good to find this article again. I'm very autodidactic, and found universities so far disappointing for the lack of speed.

After you where taught everything, fast, why did you still go to Berklee? How was your time there?
This is probably my biggest fault.

"So I whipped together a quick API integration yesterday evening..."

"Oh, so you're almost done then!"
I didn't downvote you, but you're wrong for a huge variety of reasons.

Firstly and most importantly, the stock market is not zero-sum.I don't know why you think it is.Equities in companies ideally (and historically) grow in real value.This is basic common sense.If your friend sells you a stake in his company, you have an ad-hoc stock market (a buyer and a seller for company equity). Is one of you destined to lose in this deal? Or can the company do well and you both succeed?

What's going on with HFT is not a novel way to exploit the system. Financial pros will always get the information sooner and be able to act on it more quickly/efficiently than retail investors. People who suggest otherwise are deluding people for political purposes. Before computers existed, people on Wall Street still got the information first and acted on it first.

What computers have done is made the whole thing quicker and more convenient. If you want to fill an order you are much more likely to be able to. Those advanced algorithms help make sure things are correctly priced which is good for buyers and sellers. The companies looking for investment benefit from this. The smaller investors aren't hurt by this at all from this, assuming they are trying to invest in value and not take advantage of arbitrage opportunity.

Contributing liquidity and pricing information to the market is valuable. Some people do it faster and better than others and so they profit from it. It's unclear to me why they need to do a worse job of it so that other people can share in this value. Should Google be limited to only providing so many search results a day so that other small(er) search engines can get some of the wealth too? What exactly is the problem, besides the general popularity of banking fear-mongering recently?
Given how often it is that the first vote on a good comment is a downvote, I can't help but wonder if there are people who deliberately downvote good comments so their comments rise higher.
Is location, role, and current/desired comp sufficient to match employers with talent?
You can't store electricity so it's mostly pointless to build extra power plants beyond what we are actually using.

So, if we don't need more power now what should we be spending that trillion on? IMO, R&D would have a much better ROI both in terms of economic development and climate change. However, for various reasons, the Bush / Obama stimulus plans focused on protecting bankers in the short term vs. long term economic growth.
How odd, it runs really well on my old 3Gs. And yes, I'm completely addicted to it :)
Thanks for the quick response. I'm a bit more at ease now. And the post was anything but silly. It makes a really powerful point!
Not having a back button is a big deal. You sit there and think "well, I better just whip out a drawing so I can get back to my list of games" -- the only alternative is to exit back to the homescreen and wait some undetermined time (perhaps for the app to be moved out of memory?)

But the point is that forcing you to play the next turn in the round instead of picking another game acts to perpetuate engagement very effectively.
$373.58? $27 assumes a 0.5% return.
I think this comes down to timeboxing everything.

1. Goal: Keeping fit. Invest 30 minutes each morning to that goal, which leaves 3.

2. Goal: Your job. Again, this is timeboxed until 5 pm, so do whatever it takes. Which leaves 2.

3. Goal: Play guitar. Not it gets tricky, because you could do both. But I think, again, timebox them. Monday through Friday you concentrate on your guitar, which leaves only 1.

4. Goal: Udacity. Now that you can do on the weekend. You will probably still play some guitar (I know I do), but thats not "learning", but playing (which is also important).

I think if everything is timeboxed and planned, I at least don't have problems keeping up, because I don't feel overwhelmed.
But some easy bucks are easier and less damaging than others. No doubt if drugs are legalized they will move on to something else but the total market they can address will be smaller.
On the other hand, in the armed forces, rank commands respect (or at least all outward forms). In the civilian world, those with rank may be more insecure.