skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(At risk of hijacking this thread) I'm a first-year physics grad student (so ~5 years to go, for a PhD), and I'm pretty sure what I want to do is software engineering, SV-type stuff, and I've been seriously considering quitting the physics thing for most of the past year.

Compared to business school in the post:

* I've got about 5 more years of school,

* school isn't costing me anything (I get a ~$20k/yr stipend; no tuition),

* I'm not enjoying myself at all (lots of hard core classes, required to pass preliminary tests in a limited number of sittings, boring city, boring people, boring school, no friends),

* the payoff is slim-to-none. I can't find evidence that a physics PhD is worth much in, say, software engineering. An MIT PhD student just told me he's heard ~$120k typical-ish starting salary in software engineering with a physics PhD (and he was trying to talk me into staying). That doesn't sound worth it at all! "Starting" salary!--if you don't count the 5-7 years of school (basically work).

I could go on, but I'm interested if anyone's got an opinion or some advice. It's a bit similar to the MBA decision.
Ask HN: What's the best Domain Registrar?
I've been looking for a good new domain registrar. I know that a lot of people distrust Go Daddy these days. But who are the good domain registrars?
It's not just consultants. They connect you with industry experts. One of the biggest spammers on linkedin I find are these types of companies looking for domain experts.
How does ambition fall into the connections and capability mix?
How Appthority Won "Most Innovative Company" at RSA, 2012
Trying to create an account on exec:

- email cannot contain the '+' character (yes it can!)

- phone should be 10 characters long

I can go around the first problem but not the second one (I'm in France: country prefix (33) + number = 11 pos).

I understand the service is targeted at SF residents right now, but since it's available for "virtual" tasks, why be so restrictive?
Thermodynamics doesn't govern diet so much as it does everything in the known universe. ;) But I'll admit that my statement is merely a highly probable assumption. If fat doesn't leave based on burning it for energy, where does it go?
For what it's worth, it's already standardized at 350MB: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... (section 7.6.1)
Damn, that is fucking stupid. Your post is bad, and you should feel bad.
Database vendors typically charge by the number of cores. 64-core can get really expensive with database licenses. The hardware cost has decreased drastically over time but database licensing are still in the dark age. Postgres 9.2 has real competitive advantage here. Hopefully it would force the other vendors' licensing cost down.
It isn't key to his point, but of course his math is wrong. 300% of 8hrs is 24hrs. 300% more than 8hrs (as he says in the article) is 32hrs.
View source on the iPad and iPhone
A friend of mine runs http://www.namecheap.com - I have massive respect for them after they ran an anti-Go Daddy campaign when Bob Parsons posted the elephant killing video, and again when he supported SOPA...
A vulnerability/exploit like this was only a matter of time. With cloud computing getting ever more popular I think it's only a matter of time before something like this causes a complete and total outage for EC2 or Rackspace or $Cloud_Provider. Security in the virtualization space should be focused on stuff like this because everything else can be addressed with traditional methods.
Speaking only in broad generalities, it's because PostgreSQL was not suitable for large scale businesses until lately. The lack of replication, limited performance on multiple cores, etc. drove businesses to MySQL/Oracle in the past, and inertia keeps them there now.
How whites took over America
You can never make generalised comments on pricing. If higher prices are better then why newspapers are shutting down and bloggers are rising? Why are people using Linux? Pricing has nothing to do with Apple products. They sell because of their design and quality.

I don't think the books are comparable. OP's book seems a lot more comprehensive than Sascha's book (which I bought) and it would have taken him a lot more effort. Themes are different (general design vs app design) too.
I don't have anything against Balsamiq or their product (nor do I know what it is,) but why are we lauding a company for doing what any human with some basic modicum of morals would do?

We forget that companies are staffed by human beings, and those companies might forget the same sometimes, but lauding people for doing the appropriate thing or taking the appropriate moral route, saying what needed to be said to the people to whom it needed to be said, encourages people to do that for the wrong reason: peer acceptance.

You shouldn't be apologizing because people will like you more for being honest.

You should apologize because you did something wrong.
The upcoming Adobe Creative Suite will be offered also as subscription.
How Linux is Built And Developed [video]
The last time was about a month ago IIRC. Can anyone explain why this keeps happening (and why people keep giving karma to those who just repost month old HN links)?
Not bad! On a similar note Etablissemanget adopted "treating objects like women" as their slogan.
Web Inspector's New Dock to Right Feature
I would argue that the lack of a simple installation process to get Rails running makes it inaccessible for a lot of beginners (myself included). Without stackoverflow, I wouldn't have known where to start - or what commands I'd have to enter into the terminal. As far as I know, there is no script that automates this process.
Compare this to PHP, where most of today's shared hosts support it right out of the box.
For those confused about the confused, if you've not used Android, it's trivial to share to any capable app via the default Camera/Gallery. It's very fast for me to snap a photo and share it over FB/Twitter, so unless you're into "hipster filters", Instagram doesn't really add a lot of value to the experience.

That, and I don't know anyone that uses it. I'm surrounded by iPhone users in the Midwest but I don't know a one of them that have used Instagram, most don't know what it is.
Can an environment based on connections and not capabilities be sustainable. May be. It's possible. But you have to be careful that another environment (which is start-ups) sucks some of your market share and many of the competent people out there (going as founders or co-founders). At some point, you'll finally collapse and over paying those "well-rounded" people no longer pay-off if they don't have an equivalent experience.

So you need:

1- Good Skills for the business; at any time.

2- Good Connections for the business; this business and this time.

You are good to go. If you can't make 1+2 happen, then definitively pick up 1. It's the safest bet in the long run and you can get back (and stronger) to 2 at any time. I dropped 1 at one company and focused on building my technical skills. I have never regretted it, I'm actually doing it again.
What does the HN community think of ITIL?
Am I alone in regarding ITIL as mind-numbingly boring and platitudinous?
Ah, the new snake oil. Soon the market will be exploding with how-to-have-an-epiphany books and epiphany coaches will be swarming the halls of enterprise. CEOs will be having an epiphany every time they take a shower! I hope I'm not the first to point out that the outcome of a dullard getting an epiphany by putting a handful of random scraps of misinformation together in a flash is a stupid idea he really believes in.
Most - perhaps all - of the situations a Tarantino character would find himself in _are_ extreme situations.

Most of us don't find ourselves in places like that on a frequent basis.

This might be true of most action movies. If you're shooting it out with a band of Euro-trash criminals in a skyscraper, a 'yipi-ki-yay-mother-f%%ker' is appropriate.

Probably not so much picking up ice cream, milk and yogurt.
That's not Microsoft "screwing it up", that's you not feeding the algorithm enough characters for it to be really sure. While that short string is below the threshold, the threshold is actually quite surprisingly small; if I remember correctly it's just over 100 bytes and any non-pathological input will be correctly identified with effectively 100% success.
> RE patterns can be horribly ugly

It worth to be noted that the verbose flag (re.X or re.VERBOSE in Python) may help to get more readable/friendly regexes (by allowing whitespace and comments).
I enjoy that the title doesn't say "and from Coachella", as fulfilling that requires your driver to not be passed out in a tent somewhere
That much was fairly clear on the site. I'm talking about the math itself.
And here come the down votes. Neither sarcasm nor dissenting opinions nor thinly veiled attempts at humor (trolling) are welcome on HN.
Let's hope this doesn't get out of hand... remember this?

http://assets.fiercemarkets.com/files/wireless/fierceimages/...
To get a general idea, you can compare this formula with the simple version, that is * mu - 3 sigma* (be careful when the number of samples is small), where mu is the average and sigma is the standard variation, and 3 is a parameter that depends on the confidence (~93%). When the number of samples (n) is big, then the two formulas give similar results.
I don't have any data on this but I think "have lunch/coffee/dinner with a celebrity" is a common thing to raffle off in charity fundraisers.
You use ambition to build connections and capability.
Why is Great Customer Service so Important for Customer Acquisition?
I found the opposite to be true. I went to a top tier school but 99% of my connections to the VC world did not come through my MBA network. They came from building good products, YC, and blogging--in that order.

Incubators like YC are far better at connecting first-time entrepreneurs to top angels and VCs. And investors are far less likely to be abusive with an entrepreneur that is backed by a good incubator because it would affect future deal flow.
I think this is a pretty significant point. Thanks for bringing it up. I was part of Dev Bootcamp and this is where I thought the whole experience lacked as well. But here's the interesting bit: I left the experience feeling like there was a gap in my knowledge and wanting to go fill it. Even in the last week I was heckling the mentors for a deeper understanding.

By contrast, I left college last May with a large theoretical base in Finance and with no desire to pursue it practically.

In some sense, programs like Dev Bootcamp and traditional education start on the path of knowledge from opposite ends. In the middle lies experience (that mystical thing people say I will have one day).

Having started on each end of this path exactly once (on a large scale anyway), I don't know if they hold any gravity, but, in my experience, learning practically by "hacking out some web apps in Ruby on Rails" left me hungry to understand software engineering while learning theoretically about investment strategies and real estate markets left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
> Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable."

I think about this a lot. Much like a writer, developers do the best work objectively when they "write what they know". What this means in practice is that the market is flooded with products that are at the union of common developer knowledge. That is why there are so many products for consultants out there. Basecamp, Freckle and Projector are all examples of this. Obviously there's always room for a new product, especially when you have used many of these products and decided exactly why you don't like them so you can come up with a uniquely better product.

But when I get outside of the tech bubble, I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money. Now obviously you will never be a Facebook or a Twitter in an established market, but if you can combine some domain knowledge with cutting edge tech skills, there is a lot more low-hanging fruit than fighting over early adopters for the latest tech toy.
Will breathalyzers be provided? How will programming ability be measured? :)
Chapter 2. (I googled "freakonomics real estate" and got a helpful google book search except. I love living in the future; Book Search and Google News are the best-executed Google products of the post-gmail period.)
GameStop sees solid future despite video game shift to digital
http://xkcd.com/303/
Exactly. I do love Rails and it's great for what it does, but it isn't (and never was) designed to help beginners write web applications.
Being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure this is a lawyer question, not a "Ask HN" question. Everyone here with a brain is just going to tell you to call a lawyer. Unless you're just looking for moral support, then you should create a poll and we'll all vote for Angry not getting anything and possibly contracting lupus.
The Earth has just one moon, right?
Change the branding to Supermicro and cut the cost to $5,000 and suddenly, many dedicated host providers out there have these servers. We're probably only 2-3 years away from this core count being a $2,000-$3,000 box. Throw ARM and Tilera architecture and whatever AMD is doing with the acquisition of SeaMicro in there and it might even accelerate that pace.
Python decorators: A neat way to modify functions
I had an in depth discussion about patent trolling with a friend's father who is a very prominent lawyer, albeit not in patent law. Regardless, I mentioned how ridiculous it has become and gave a couple examples (Honeywell vs Nest, Yahoo vs Facebook, Arrival Star vs every poor city). He agreed but pointed out that there's no reason to be upset with the lawyers. It's congress who's allowing them to get away with it. Subconsciously I knew this, but it's hard not to be angry with the lawyers who are taking advantage of it.
Turkey: A Rising Power in the Backyard of Europe
I can't show a link to the work I do now, sorry, but here's a link to a toy operating system written in Go that proved to me it could be done and inspired me to try it myself:

http://code.google.com/p/gofy/
Tricks to extract square roots of large numbers easily and quickly
Android doesn`t respect your freedom.
Evidence:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-...

"The
number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table"

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-...

They give you a big discount for buying Sun servers (.25 factor). Either way, it's a huge amount of money, the standard edition costs a cool $17,500 per processor so with 64 cores and the best .25 multiplier you're still looking at 16 x $17,500 or $280,000 for the DB processor license (that doesn't cover support or anything else). The Enterprise edition runs an astounding $47,500 per CPU, so you can easily run north of a million dollars per server if you're running a lot of cores.
might have
They may be known for their home-grown databases, but they shouldn't be known for their use of them:

Amazon's primary database is Oracle. Dynamo is used for their shopping carts i.e. for storing sessions; Memcache would probably work just as well.

Facebook's database is MySQL, with sharding and Memcache. I was under the impression they stopped using Cassandra entirely?

Google's business (advertising) is built on MySQL, as are many of their sites e.g. YouTube. I think the newer Google-developed sites (e.g. GMail, Reader etc) are indeed built on BigTable.
Any manager who cannot be more specific than "work smarter" isn't smart enough to work for.
I am not quite sure if I follow you. Are you saying that "systems programming" is the greatest impediment?
I get the feeling that Ada could receive some hacker love, see the discussion in this thread (4 days ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3774156
To some extent true, but when core counts increase, they tend to double. Given the very new version of PG and Linux required to get these scalability benefits, it is nice to seem them pipelined ahead of the EC2 curve...it takes a long time and a lot of work to correctly alleviate lock contention and get new versions of Linux disseminated (the new LTS from Canonical will do a lot...I believe it features 3.2)
Sorry, right now I don't think we have a good way to validate international phone numbers, we should fix that soon. The email refusing "+" was because of a crappy lib that I was using, and it isn't terribly high on the list of things to fix.

So, I guess the real answer is that it is restrictive because that was what was easiest.. sorry :(
Imagine that you're not part of a company or a PhD program, and you're choosing between spending 5 years to get a Physics PhD and go into software, or going into software directly. Which sounds more appealing to you?
From the horse's mouth:

http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#goroutines

When they say "system resources" they mean stack space. It's limited in 32-bit because a stack large enough to be useful takes up too many virtual address space. For instance an 8 MiB stack takes up 1/512 of the 32-bit address space so you can only have max 512 threads, but in 64-bit you can have 33 million (current CPUs limited to 2^48 address space)

So they segment the stack in Google Go to get more than some small number of threads. Even though Linux (edit: the kernel) only uses 4k or 8k per thread some OSes have severe limits, so they compound the segmented stack problem (making C interop slow and cumbersome) with userspace threading (M:N). A collection of links why that's a bad idea:

http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html#1:1

Eventually they'll concede that this wasn't a good idea, but I wouldn't bet on when.
Interesting that right at the top of rubyonrails.com is this quote:

“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”
-Tim O'Reilly, Founder of O'Reilly Media
> you should worry about my shameless and transparent marketing efforts :)

Which totally just worked on me, by the way.
Haha we're still looking into that... though the test might be less than scientific for legal reasons.

Programming ability might have to be more subjective, but we've also built a Ballmer Calculator based off well established formulas.

Basically, you put in your weight and sex, we tell you how much you 'should' drink to get to the Ballmer Peak.
You didn't send him an email saying thanks.

Edit: (I did, to my embarrassment)
It was a hotly debated topic whether the www should use 7-bit/mime or not.
To be more precise, the IVT is a table of 4-byte 16:16 far pointers typically located at address zero that is used in real mode. When a x86 processor in real mode encounters an interrupt, it looks up this table and does a far call to the address. The IDT is used in protected mode which contains additional information, and thus is 8 bytes per entry (in long mode, 16 bytes).
Disclaimer: I've not held every Android tablet in my hands, so my opinion is based on general impressions of many non-Apple tablets. And I'm only talking about the bigger tablets; in the 7" space, Androids compete more with e-readers than the iPad.

I just checked, and I had no idea that the 10" Tabs beat the iPad on weight. If it wasn't for the fact that I prefer 4:3, I'd be strongly tempted. And credit where it's deserved: Android 3+ is much better at tailoring the environment to a tablet rather than being a modified smartphone OS.

Nonetheless, I can't really picture my mom using a Tab. That may be an unfair assumption, but that's part of my point: the Android ecosystem is not creating the right impression with its target market of people who are sick of their computing experience being computer-y. (And of course, the price issue is also huge for a luxury item like a tablet.)
They lost me at, "Finding and Hiring Startup 'Rockstars'".
How would you improve search?
Zap Finding the right app and extension just got easier
How are lawyers "taking advantage of it"? Their clients tell them to sue, they sue.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp
It is not a VM breakout. Just causes a escalation to ring 0 within the VM.
The parent clearly did not say "don't write fiction" but rather "label fiction as such".
You should do what you love and thereby love what you do. If you don't, take a step back as you may need to recalibrate a bit (or a lot). It's a healthy and productive exercise, if only to reaffirm your current direction.

EDIT: I don't mean to get all meta, but it's not about the ideal of others but rather what makes you happy as an individual. Anyway, that's the way I rationalize it all.
ACLU: Most police departments track cellphones without warrants
I watched my roommate study development independently and in Dev Bootcamp, and Dev Bootcamp was way more productive. His earning potential has gone up ~$40k/year during the program, so I'd counsel any interested parties to keep the cost contextualized. (And, of course, it's free if you get recruited, which he has.)
Interesting. One thing I noticed is that in your original "looking for a co-founder" post, you specifically cited "Python/Django" as a competency. This led me to believe that your prototype was either already in Python/Django, or you had a strong leaning toward that language for some other reason.

Does this mean you found a technical co-founder, and they preferred Ruby/Rails to Django/Python?

Not attempting to start a language debate, honestly. In my experience, I've found that in most cases, they're fairly interchangeable, but I am genuinely curious how you got from that post to this one.

My apologies in advance if that's listed in your blog -- I read this entry, but I do not generally follow it. If there's an answer somewhere, I wouldn't take offense to a link and a "RTFM".
I'll admit I don't stay current on the latest trends in human diet, but I know some coworkers who are proponents of raw foods specifically because they are harder to digest. They say there's more fiber, more bulk, and fewer useful sugars (simple carbs being bad for you). When they eat foods raw that normally would be cooked, they're taking in fewer calories and filling up faster. As the food is broken down slowly, they are given nutrition throughout the day without eating more. This is their claim.

As I admit though, I don't know if this is the same as the dietary movement we're talking about. I don't know any amount of science in either direction.
See, now this is how you promote something like this without coming off as a tool.

Well done!
>Subconsciously I knew this

I have to disagree with this. Just because the law allows something doesn't make it acceptable to do so on any other level. (Ethically, morally, being-a-decent-human-ly, what have you.)

The law should be the final, last resort "stop" on behavior. If you rely on the legal system to decide what's okay and what isn't, you'll end up being a pretty horrible person. We shouldn't allow companies to say "But it's legal" as a defense to any bad behavior.
http://nearlyfreespeech.net is good I hear.
Fair enough, I guess part of what I'm asking is can the lawyer even do anything outside of say "pay him 1/3"?

Meaning, do we actually have any kind of argument because he "abandoned" the business?
A new design pattern in Android 4.0 (and available via Google's compatibility library down to 1.6) is that you're supposed to be able to swipe between tabs, so in theory there is no advantage to having them at the bottom. (Tabs in Android have always been at the top.)