skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible in Python generators but in my tests the performance sucks particularly if the client can't receive fast enough.

Using eventlet or gevent was much kinder to the system.
Not terribly coherent w/ just part 1.
I posted a comment on the blog, but I might just as well begin the discussion here.

I'm working on a fun project with friends that we would love to see fly (We're applying for YC by Tuesday probably !). As a developers, I relate best to the technical kind of dept.
It's interesting to read about other kinds of depts that you will have to pay back when you deal with a startup, pre-launch, and post-launch.
Funnily, they all seem as important to keep track on.

Financial dept => game over.
Personal dept => burn out => game over.
Mental dept => burn out => game over.
Technical dept => quality/productivity freefall => game over.

Let's map them the to the assets of a startup.
Out of these four kinds of depts, 2 depend on the people and not the skills.
Financial depends probably equally on skills and people.
Technical dept being mostly skills related.

I think it illustrates well why having a great team synergy is so crucial to success.

What other depts can you think of?
Think you will find VLC, PS3/Xbox streaming servers and a whole load of others do the same thing
It is very difficult to collect animal samples from such great depths - the pressure difference.

It is one of the reasons as to why giant squids are so mysterious.
In dump.ly's use case, they would probably want client-side detection in JavaScript, not the UA string. You definitely have to be conservative implementing such an unexpected feature.

An older article (2008) that also talks about misreporting content-length for fun and profit: http://tech.hickorywind.org/articles/2008/05/23/content-leng...
Awesome! According to @PaulGAllen, they hit at 0752 local time, and "all systems ok"!
The Admonishment of Zynga
Thanks for the Ur link. But seriously, 2 clicks to get to a page (docs > tutorial intro) just to see a code sample?
It happens to all projects. Road blocks are within not without.
How to use social media and look like a rockstar on a recruiter’s radar
Great Interview !!!!
I suspect it's the VC pressure. VC's are mid-term owners, needing to return cash to limited partners 5-7 years after funding.

Going public should be a way to swap VCs out with pension funds and other long-term holders. Unfortunately, our public markets, while doing some of that, also swap in a bunch of short-term holders (who, fairly, are needed in some quantity to give the long-term holders the option to "exit" their position freely as well as know, to some degree of confidence, how much their stake is worth).
>But for a properly informed programmer for a given piece of code, not so much.

There are a couple reasons that even for "informed" programmers this is still important

1) For most dynamic languages, even simple operations can take a highly variable amount of time to execute. How many instructions does an array access take in Javascript? The answer depends on everything from the state of the JIT to the types involved, both of which are usually impossible to know before hand. In C we can answer this pretty easily.

2) The modern trend is towards writing more and more generic code. Even for statically compiled languages like C++ and Haskell, the actual underlying operations are purposely* abstracted away from you. Unless you know every possible instance that your code could be used it is impossible to know how long any operation will take.

And all this is assuming that the programmer knows everything about their compiler, assembler, standard library, imported libraries, ect, which isn't true for all but the most expert programmers.

*Admittedly, the actual length of time it takes is dependent on the state of the processor which can be very difficult to predict, but we will have a lot more information than we would have had otherwise.
When to pivot vs persevere?
Doesn't work in Opera? It just asks me for me name and then sticks at LOADING?

BTW you could probably come up with something prettier than a JS prompt to ask for a name.
I don't think the problem is that kids can't read at a basic level. The problem is that they can't read at a level that is considered by educators, policymakers and others to be an age-appropriate level.

I agree that the vitriolic "blame the parents" rhetoric is just as harmful as the "blame the teachers", "blame the unions", "blame the evolutionists" and all the other misguided rhetoric out there.

That being said, when you take two schools that do the same things, one where the kids come from affluent and well-educated families and the other where the kids aren't sure if they'll get dinner each night, the differences are obvious. The rich(er) kids almost always do better.

I don't think we need to "blame" anyone. In fact, I don't even know if there is anyone to blame. What I meant by my comment was that we've fiddled with the curriculum and the schools constantly for decades and it doesn't really seem to matter much, so perhaps we ought to start looking at other options. Let the teachers teach and see if we can solve some of the performance issues at the other end.

For example, maybe college-educated parents are able to help their kids with homework more effectively. Then we should provide more tutoring outside of school.

Or, maybe wealthier families are more likely to be able to provide kids with a quiet place to do their homework and study. Then we ought to be building libraries in poor neighborhoods.

Heck, I've even read that where you build the school buildings can make a difference. Building them in town, rather than out in a corn field somewhere outside of town being better for community cohesion. This could certainly be a salient issue in rural areas.

I really don't know what the problem is, or how to fix it, but it seems pretty clear to me that we should be looking beyond just the schools themselves when we talk about "fixing" the education system.

P.S. The school lunch program and Head Start were actually intended to target these sorts of issues. Not sure how successful they were. I seem to recall reading that Head Start ended up being a failure overall.
Learn the Basics of RBD and SQL
Hi. Since I have just finished my degree in CS I was looking for my first job. Now my biggest concern is my poor knowledge about the SQL and Relational Databases. I am looking for good and concrete courses fast to read but difficult to understand. The level of the courses I am looking for are the same as the papers: "A relational model of data for large shared data banks" and "The entity relationship model". The roots of RDB.

Could you help me?
James Cameron reaches the deepest point on Earth
Cameron hit the bottom at 14:52 PST, according to @PaulGAllen, and "all systems ok".

Here's Cameron's tweet announcing his arrival: "Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you @DeepChallenge"

https://twitter.com/#!/JimCameron/status/184036733959143425
Isn't the aim here to improve readability?
Not really sure what you mean, but don't want to fight about it.
Longtime Dvorak user here. Some comments:

- I almost always use my ring finger for 'L', including when typing 'ls', which is fairly comfortable. I only use pinky when coming from a letter that needs the ring finger.

- 'F' is indeed in a terrible spot, I don't know what the Doctor was thinking with that one.

- I use the setting on the Mac that leaves Cmd- shortcuts in QWERTY, so that's a non-issue.

- I've never had a problem using Dvorak with Vim. In particular, I like how 'jk' and 'hl' are on different hands.

- As for speed, I type much faster in Dvorak (~100 wpm) than I did in QWERTY (~60 wpm), but that may be because I learned it around the same time I started typing a lot more frequently, so take that for what it's worth.

Overall I agree that Dvorak isn't optimal but I wouldn't say the jump from Dvorak to Colemak is comparable to the one from QWERTY to Dvorak. Plus, I don't have nearly as much time/interest as I used to for learning a new layout. :P
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_number_system
Thanks for your input here, your comment is actually very helpful. I realise that if I don't learn from it now, the post could come back to haunt me. But that's just it, it holds me accountable, which is the motivation I need to sort it out.
No, what you produce doesn't have to mean anything. I remember one week I decided I wanted to write real-time tic tac toe in using socket.io and node.js. I did it. It was those small projects that let me start tackling bigger and bigger projects.

After a while, when you can see that you're making clear progress towards a goal its easier to slip in to the producer mindset.

What's hard to get past in the beginning of learning to program is that you're going to spend 80% of your time googling, 15% debugging code, and 5% writing code. It can feel really unsatisfying to spend 2 hours googling a problem you're having and the solution taking 3 minutes to implement.
It did also give us the PC running Windows - so there is a dark side ;-)

Unless your home PC is an IBM PC-AT it's the result of reverse engineering.
Meant to upvote, fat-finger downvoted instead, my bad. Hopefully somebody compensates.
While I don't rail against this kind of thing instinctively, I really do have to ask, is:

pri fn render_row(row)

really that much better than

private function render_row($row) {

?
Am digging through black lifeless seabed mud and ooze - hope to find script for next movie.
I found Colemak very easy to learn and regained most of my speed within a week. The only real problem is you have to deal with bad key-bindings, although it's worth it.
Alternately you could hand it off to the web server which is probably a better more elegant solution.

http://wiki.nginx.org/X-accel and mod_zip for instance.

Why do people keep reinventing the wheel, thinking node is the be all and end all when this is nothing new at all?
Perhaps guelo would like something less likely to offend his/her sensibilities.
Here you go: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
I didn't look too closely at this, but didn't you state that this was actually reported for schools, not districts? So then it could actually be that a single teacher could cause the "bump", especially in rural areas. I might be misinterpreting you though...
Don't try this at home, there are nasty edge cases around Infs/NaNs.

Use your math library instead; in Python, that'd be numpy.logaddexp or scipy.misc.logsumexp.
By which measure is

<- 2

easier to read than

return 2

There are many more examples in the code, but I generally found the PHP code MUCH easier to read, and I don't know PHP very well. It could be that I'm biased towards C-like languages, but I doubt it; words are a lot easier to read than arbitrary symbols.
If it is, it isn't working.
Snow: 33 Lines

PHP: 66 Lines

- w/o PHPDoc: 45 Lines

-- w/ Single-line foreaches, exceptions, and ternary operators: 34 Lines

So if we use the same formatting, the PHP is only one line longer, and 5 of the lines are just end-braces.

Now, taking my condensed PHP, and the Snow code, and converting 4 spaces to a tab, the filesizes are:

Snow: 746b

PHP: 847b

Using a lazy comparison: 12% less code, roughly the same number of lines.

I'm with you - I don't see how using a completely different syntax & complicating your toolchain is worth it to save a handful of characters when typing. Maybe more example code (2k-3k lines) would help.
Thanks Pete, that's a great analogy. And your sentence "I suggest that you stop seeing your inclinations as a problem and start thanking your lucky stars that you have a regular flow of potentially great ideas" really hits home, you're absolutely right. Thank you.
If it's classic HackerNews, what are you complaining for? I thought the problem was that HackerNews getting less and less like it was in the old days...
MDK2 (released in March of 2000) had you play a third of the levels as a four-armed anthropomorphic dog and respectively let you hold four weapons at the same time. The gameplay balance they were going for was similar to Serious Sam, I think... i.e. everybody dies in large numbers (except you, occasionally). Actually, that game was made up almost exclusively of cool new features, go play it. The fact that one of the best third-person shooters/adventures was produced by BioWare of all companies still blows my mind a bit.
I would add health/physical debt. Many people discount the impact of those extra pounds gained during an unhealthy streak of eating. They not only put you on an unhealthy trajectory that requires a ton of effort to reverse, but they also have many hidden and side effects that unfortunately we can't measure/identify until later on. And that, I guess, is why we discount the health debt.
You're on a good path when you acknowledge the problem. Overconfidence bias makes us take impossible challenges. Put the big project on hold and do a few small projects with good ROI. And try to partition the big project into smaller ones.
Not to take away from Haskell, but this is exactly why many people in academia use Python. It's easy to express an idea in it, and test at a low performing level. Then when you know where your bottle necks are, you can re-write that tiny bit in Cython and gain 90% of the speed improvement of writing the whole thing in C.
Pension funds have longer time horizons than the VCs they are being swapped out with. The issue is that these long-term holders require a fraction of short-term holders to give them liquidity, i.e. the safety of knowing that one can exit the investment without a substantial haircut if one needs to.

The present problem is that the proportion of short-term to long-term holders in the market is too high. The former are there to support the latter.

Another point is that the latter, at some point, demand dividends. The antipathy to Apple that I saw on HN recently when it announced its dividend programme is also anathema to a healthy public capital market.
The problem comes down to programming, I decided to leave it from the post as the post is more about the situation. I know I'm not alone with this problem, and any non-specific advise offered to me from writing this post may also help others.
I guess that's why I gravitate towards JavaScript, still kinda the Wild West where we can still write things from scratch.
Personally, I completely agree. Code is written once and read often, so when working with any codebase where contributors > 1, readability should win over writability every time.

This should not be an argument against language constructs which make languages more expressive, but there seems to be a trend where as languages move toward the functional end of the spectrum, they take on more and more terse and cryptic syntactical structures.

I've always felt that good code should read like a book. This can be reconciled with prefix notation, but not with overloading odd characters as operators.
Does anyone know how they communicate with the sub?

My understanding is that radio waves can't penetrate water very far (if at all) and that it's impractical to drag a long cable down.
Speaking of readability: Just `pri` as the constructor?
When having just a quick glance at code I want to know which part does what. Function names help, even if it is __construct.

And the @str title=null line above the class seems very odd.
So much criticism... As usual the php community is resisting any change. I think what you are doing has a lot of merit. Your DSL just needs some polish.

What I like:

- The new return "<-"

What I think should change:

- The concatenating assignment operator "%=" shouldn't change. It should stay the same ".="

- Accessing instance variables/methods should be by using '@' rather than '.' as that is becoming an implied standard and php folk are already used to using '.' for string concatenation.

- The setting of parameter types and defaults on methods is too heavy and not what people expect. I would put them back into method declaration.

eg.
@str title=null
class

# To become
class
fn constructor(str @title = null)

As @ would be the way to access instance variables what this means is the instance variable of title would be assigned the value that gets passed through the constructor.

# This is too much magic imo
@arr row
# List of integers.
[!_->empty: "$row cannot be empty."]
fn add_row(row)

# it should be something like this:
fn add_row(arr row)
!"$row cannot be empty." if row->empty

- This doesn't make a lot of sense:

for row in .rows
html %= "<table>" | .render_row(row) | "</table>"

# I would prefer something like:
html .= @render_row(row) for row in @rows
html = "<table>{html}</table>"

Good work on what you have already achieved, with a bit of extra polish I think Snow can become very desirable.
That would be pointless in most cases, whereas the history of computing has pretty well established that preprocessors are useful.
Isn't the behavior "site that just wants an encrypted channel to transfer, say, your login details, without making any claims about its authenticity"?
Two things. First, plan out your milestones ahead of time. It's a lot easier to keep your enthusiasm up if you break the project down into smaller projects and just concentrate on the next milestone.

Second, if you're going to do something that requires expertise you don't have, then you need to have a plan to deal with that from day one. Either you're going to get someone to help (with equity, perhaps, if this is a startup), or you develop the expertise yourself. Don't put six months into something thinking the solution for this part will fall from the sky.

Planning. That's it, in a nutshell. Planning is the key step to finishing any project, personal or professional.
sigh yet another failure of web standards and browsers to address the most basic requirements of designers. HTML was originally intended for academics creating standardized documents, and more than 20 year later we're still resorting to hacks to make things half decent for any other use.
Rails Is More Than An API
I don't believe that the term "open source" was in common use at all prior to the phrase being deliberately coined in a strategy discussion in 1998 http://www.opensource.org/history
I can't wait to see what he manages to film down there!
From Paul Allen:

"#deepseachallenge for the curious, using underwater audio coms UT2000/3000 at 8K freq to hear/talk to Jim five miles of water...30K ft now"
> I didn't say that.

Sure ya did. Here's how I read it:

Poster: "Take a look at the universities rankings[1] -- how many schools in the top ten aren't British or American?"

You: "the US is a much larger country, and therefore has many more universities"

For such a position to hold water, the US would have to be larger in population than the entire rest of the world.
Chrome 17 added a "feature" that blocks http resources from loading on an https connection unless the user manually approves it every time. Sounds like a good idea, but it broke all sorts of Google sites and widgets because Google violates that rule everywhere.

This is probably just another "feature".
An errant use of git force taught me that git is always logical, its just not always rational.
I'm fairly sure this must be the blog post you are trying to remember: [ http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf... ].
You need to consider that once you add something, you need to support it for the indefinite future. So we need to give serious consideration to things that are added. Does LZMA provide a sufficiently large compression ratio over gzip? Does the compression and decompression time introduce a lot of latency, especially on mobile devices? Does that increased latency mean plain text is faster?
One of the responses includes:

"There is always another part of the project you could be working on - even if it's mindnumbingly boring (like adding i18n)."

That, to me, sounds like a poor suggestion for this kind of problem. Anything that doesn't get you traction with your project, so that any users start yabbering for tweaks and progress to keep you motivated, are likely to be a mistake.

If the problem is that you're a front end developer running up against back end problems, then you need to be spotting this well in advance or else you're wasting time.
Great article. It is really important to learn to delegate.

The other side is making great team where people share common interest to make great/best product or service.

I read it and remembered the situation when I got division and delegated work to other people. It was a great experience and lesson.

P.S. Good lecture pointing about similar problem can be found here named "Managing people, managing teams": http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/building-a-business/id38...
I am genuinely perplexed by the fact that you don't seem to realize syntax is not just what you write, it's also what you read. Anything that makes code easier to read and understand is a win.

Python is just as "worthless" as Snow by the metric you're espousing here, because the benefits of Python over well-optimized C are in simplicity of reading and writing, not runtime performance.
This might be a nice replacement for PHP spaghetti code you might see everywhere - see the recent HN thread where PHP is voted the most-hated language - it's because even solid coders produce spaghetti code with it. You need to be really disciplined to create something that's easily maintainable.

I would not touch PHP codebase without a framework. Some nice PHP frameworks have emerged in past few years ranging from simplest CodeIgniter to pretty complete Yii I use for most projects now. I would never choose to use PHP for a project without Yii or a similar framework, so until we see a quality framework written in PHPSnow, I don't see any reason to use it.
Here's a side by side comparison without comments:

http://cl.ly/3Z3l1w0v2I2n2y231Y09/o

That's 10 lines more. 100 times more readable.
Actually the phrase "teeming with life" has been used to describe where he is: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/Deep-...
Workout Music: Linkin Park, Faint
Right, besides the fact that they no longer have much to lose.
something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_telephone

very hard to find info on how it works or at what ranges. but this suggests that it shifts sounds down to lower pitches to travel further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulated_ultrasound
I live the burbs and commute to the city by train - but out here I love my car... I never need to drive in traffic.
yay let's copy ruby and python!
Agreed about the "boring" aspect of commuting. If I have to commute, I prefer to walk or take the subway because I can listen to podcasts or read a book.
> So much criticism... As usual the php community is resisting any change.

This grinds my gears on a few levels - I really don't feel as though the reaction here is a resistance to change, as much as it is a resistance to completely redefining pretty much all of the core language constructs.

The Snow code is, in my eyes, almost completely unreadable, due to a seemingly random collection of characters.

I'm a PHP developer, and while I appreciate that (at times) PHP can be quite verbose, introducing such sweeping changes really doesn't make any sense to me.
The add_row() function in particular is mind-bending for me. Auto-declaration (and initialisation, within a loop, no less) can only hurt in larger systems - which is why developing with notices enabled is such a plus.
Consider looking into the symptoms and characteristics of adult ADHD, especially if you ever had episodes of hyperactivity as a child. It's probably not what's going on, but frequently switching jobs (projects) can be a flag. 9 out of 10 adults with it are undiagnosed, and treatment is very effective.