skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He said it was 2.5 weeks of calendar time to get 40 hours in.
From casually looking at both CPython and JVM code I conclude that implementation of exception handling in Java and Python is almost same. So this is more a cultural difference than effectiveness issue.
That seems a little outdated, aren't most theaters using digital HD projectors now? They should be IMO... I've got one in my bedroom and it's why I don't go to the movie theaters anymore. :)
I used to think Belkin was good. I like the clean look and design of most of their products. Then, they pulled the stunt you mentioned above. Now, just when I think the moral decay has been flushed out over time, we get this new story.

They have become the Arthur Anderson of computer companies in my mind.
Heroku is free. It's also easier and available right now. I uploaded the code for http://fuel.dustincurtis.com and it was working within 10 minutes.

For most of my little fun projects, I don't need an entire instance, and Solo is extremely expensive for that.

Also, I have a question for Engine Yard: why did you make the EC2 stuff transparent? One of the downsides of EC2 is that it has a very complicated pricing structure. The people Solo is targeting probably don't want to deal with a 20 row table of different prices.
i sort of miss ultima.. and king's quest
Look, my point is not one way of the other (although I do have strong opinions on the matter.) My point is that when you mix politics and controversy in an anonymous public forum, you get a lot more heat than light.

I'm amazed that this story hasn't been killed yet (it really seems to go against a lot of previous editorial decisions here, which I thought were a really good idea.) Can you imagine a story about Hamas using human shields on the front page? it would be nuts, whether you think it's an important issue or not. These kinds of stories are a magnet for trolls.
That's better.

So how about them, custom components? :-)

Yesterday I played with balsamiq to create a wizard flow-chart and found myself in a need to have a straight left to right arrow which does not seem to be possible. I ended up using the curved arrow and I think it turned out looking even better than a straight arrow would, but the lingering desire to have more control over the document has remained.

Overall I think you're onto something really big here. It amazing how much easier it is to perceive the pseudo-hand-drawn boxes compared to absolutely accurate shapes.
Here's two he didn't mention.

LIRS: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.2.43...

CLOCK-Pro: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/hpcs/WWW/HTML/publications/abs...

Disclosure: Zhang was the head of my old department, and I took a caching class from him.
They example they gave was this:

Imagine you're operating on a person and you accidentally leave a sponge deep inside their abdomen. The nurse, following the checklist, tells you and you go back in and remove it. In the process, you cut an artery and kill the patient. The patient's family claims the hospital was performing an "experiment" on the patient because without the checklist they would not have gone back in to remove the sponge and the patient would have lived.

Obviously, this is stupid. But cases have been won on this principle, which shows legal precedence. When the FDA came knocking, the hospitals, afraid of lawsuits, complied.
Structuring Clients' Payments to Minimise Risk and Maximise Engagement
http://www.infamous-adventures.com/
Signal & noise about Jaiku this week
New algorithm for learning languages
I haven't used zumodrive but I'm soooooo impressed with Dropbox.

One fundamental difference is that Dropbox syncs things between drives and cloud. Zumodrive only uses your local machine as cache. The difference is when you have 20 gigs in the service, a Zumodrive doesn't actually use up any of your HD space. On the other hand, you don't have to be connected to the internet to see/edit your Dropbox files, only to sync.
Hi there DenisM, Peldi here from Balsamiq.

Re: arrows: there's a little slider in the floating pop-up which lets you choose the curvature of the arrow. If you stick it in the middle the arrow will be straight: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/help#pi

Re: custom components. In order to keep the app as simple as possible, I have been telling people to use the image import feature for it: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/help#images - just draw what you need however you want to, and bring it in as an image.

Thanks for the feedback!
I own AMD and Intel stock.
Single-stepping, inspection of variables, view source code of current instruction. That's about it. I'm only calling it "modern" to distinguish it from what I'm using, which seems neanderthal.

I know that Slime is supposed to do these things if you use SCBL and various planets align, but (a) I've never gotten it to work, (b) it's obviously no one's priority, and (c) I don't use SBCL much anymore.
Before we started doing more complicated games, the early games on Rock Solid Arcade (Stunt Pilot, Dogfight, Planet Cruncher) were all developed in his definition of a week. It's really fun seeing something come alive so quickly.
Make something you yourself want to use. To get started, pick a subset small enough that you can implement it in a couple hours max.
The other way to look at that is the avoidance of IP conflicts. If your day job is not software related, then you won't have to worry about future IP lawsuits.
I got excited. Even though I don't have a need for this at the moment, I know I will in the future.
Finding a job that pays the bills while allowing you to hack is an interesting way to become 'ramen profitable'. That might be the ultimate way to hack the funding process...
How about fireworks?

A firework gun that can set at what altitude the fireworks go off and then launch them.
U.S. VC Investment Down 8% in 2008. Last Quarter Slowest Since 2005
Adjusting to it doesn't mean you like the weather though.

I go to college near Rochester, NY (and home is near NYC) - and its around 0F right now. I love it during the late spring/summer/early fall, but I can't stand the winters and still want to get out of the state and go to SF Bay or LA area.

The temperature can be fairly important. I love to sit outside somewhere while coding, but can't exactly do that if its snowing.
Nice. I'm not the only one from there. BU '04.
Tweetfind a new yahooBoss + tweet search Freshness search engine
It isn't exactly fair to compare opportunities in the NBA and the NFL.

The average NFL career lasts less than 3 years. I would expect that the median lifetime earnings of a Rhodes Scholar to be higher than that of an NFL player. As a bonus a Rhodes scholar doesn't have to deal with the lingering injuries.
great, just great. So much for funding this year :(
ey-solo will be generally available on the 28th of Jan.
It's actually kind of encouraging that the last quarter wasn't worse, considering how serious the economic situation is supposed to be. 2005 wasn't a terrible year. The Nasdaq is back where it was in 1998.
In Java you can do stuff like, the JVM is going to bounds check you anyway, so why bother checking yourself if you're about to go off the end of an array? Just i++ and catch IndexException (or whatever it's called).
There are thousands of people who studied what he studied and have made no impact.

This is a terrible criterion by which to choose a career. Believe me, I know.

Once you've chosen a field there's nothing wrong with gravitating toward the most interesting, important, or high-impact problems in that field. Indeed, that's often what you want to do -- though it's hardly a requirement for a happy life. Thank goodness there are superbly competent people in the world who are pleased to do good work as dentists or plumbers or surgeons or accountants, without feeling the constant compulsion to become legendary rock-star accountants. (Indeed, as we've all had occasion to observe, "innovative" accountants who are driven to "make an impact" can be a menace to society.)

But I assure you from personal experience that, while curing cancer seems like a more important problem than writing good CRUD apps (though that depends on the CRUD app!), that doesn't mean that you will be happier working on a cure for cancer than working as a programmer. Your happiness will depend more on whether you prefer pipetting to typing, or molecular biology to computer science, or NIH grant proposals to software specs, or academic politics to office politics.

Meanwhile, I can hardly blame anybody for not rushing off to play pro football, a game which I kind of like to watch (somewhat in spite of myself) but which I'm given to understand is an exhausting game in which you are slammed to the ground, hard, a few dozen times a week by fast-moving giants who weigh well over 300 pounds. If you're lucky, none of those guys will land on you the way Lawrence Taylor landed on Joe Theismann, your knee cartilage will survive more than a couple of seasons, and the repeated concussions won't cause perceptible brain damage. But, in the meantime, you've got all the personal autonomy of a private in the Marines and you can't even high-five someone on the field without a penalty. I accept the fact that there are people who absolutely love that life, but I don't understand why we assume that everyone should.
Very impressive how slow he got the plane to go. Without using the engines for reverse thrust, I don't know how one would slow down.
very nice. ping me some time -- omarish@ the school we go to .edu.
Is there a way I can use this instead of a multi-slice conventional EngineYard setup? Or do you have a RightScale-type thing in the works?
Yes, specifically Darwinian evolution (natural selection).
They're slow to switch. Mostly because consumer HD pales in comparison to 35mm film, quality wise, when you blow it up to a diagonal of 6-8 metres or so. As far as I know, digital cinema projectors have a "4K" resolution (4000 x ~2000) and are fed the film from a stack of terabyte hard disks. The projectors are SERIOUS money.
(wonder why this was upvoted, are there /other/ APU users out there?! seems rather unlikely :/)
Koko the gorilla's sexual harassment
As a student, I worked as technical support at our libraries to help other students with computer stuff.

For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.

During "work" was when I discovered/experimented with Ruby on Rails, got interested in start ups, read a lot of PG essays, starting hacking on side projects, etc...

Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo.
given the up votes, I thought I'd elaborate.

I spend 3 days a week as a sys admin, and 2 days a week freelance/working on startup. (was freelance mostly, now mostly startup)

sys admin is good work - i'm particularly lucky - my company is very flexible, and Mac OS X.
Well, you generally are obliged to apply for any job for which they put you forward. Deliberately under-sell yourself and get caught and you can wave the money goodbye. I suspect it's quite a hassle if you're qualified and people are trying to hire you left right and centre.
"... one man army ... will be better than ... multi million dollar corporations?"

This one is easy. No bullshit bureaucracy that sucks the soul out of you.
Perfect landing. And he was lucky the river was so empty. There are often large oil barges moving slowly or moored in the center of the river.
That actually kind of surprises me. I saw Trevor at CES and he looked like a proud parent over his robot.

Building robots seriously seems like it's incredibly fun and interesting.
Sounds like you are "moving the goal posts" to me.
The ec2 stuff is transparent because we aren't trying to hide the underlying platform. You can still utilize the full power of AWS form our system, you just don't have to unless you really want to. Sane defaults but major flexibility is one of the goals of this platform. That being said you may be right and we may need a tiered pricing system tha includes certain amounts of bandwidth and storage for a known monthly price. Time will tell as people start top use the platform.

Also you can run multiple applications on one solo instance. Since you have 1.7 gigs of ram you can run 3-6 little apps pretty easily if you use the apache + passenger stack.
There's a counter-argument to multi-cores being the next IT revolution: although they seem to be the way to faster performance, faster performance isn't needed.

Data point one: the rise of the netbook. They have slower, single-core processors, and are fast enough for most of the mainstream stuff people want to do: web, email, word-processing. Netbooks are getting faster (and this is needed for some webapps e.g. that musical score webapp is a little sluggish on my eee PC). But what is more important in a netbook is weight and battery life - that is what is needed. Performance isn't needed.

Data point two: even in video games, the wii console is the most successful of the present batch. It is unusually low powered even for single-core (and in coincidence, one of its competitors, the PS3, is multi-core). Performance isn't needed.

Data point three (an exception): some applications do need performance (weather simulation; google server farms), but these are already multi-core, and have been for a long time (the core used to be in separate computers, but the app was multi-core).

I'm arguing that most of the mainstream market can't absorb faster performance (and the high-performance market has already solved the problem).

Ripe for Disruption?: It's common for whole industries to overshoot what is needed, in terms of the particular metric they have worked at improving for years. Their corporate organization, product development and marketing are based on improving that aspect, and selling that aspect. When the basis of competition shifts, you get a new set of leaders, because the old ones can't adapt.
The iPhone Could Be The Ultimate Study Machine
We have ey-flex coming in a few months. Flex is the multi slice clustered version of engineyard on AWS, replicated db's autoscaling app servers and load balancing, message queueing plus logging and monitoring aggregation services.

So the answer is yes you will be able to replicate a traditional EY cluster setup on AWS in a few months.
Totally depends on the company. Some admin jobs are basically NOC and some are more non-stop engineering. Make sure you know which one you're signing up for.
You can do that, but nobody writes Java code like this since it's more awkward and aesthetically offensive than explicit bounds checking.
Consider the following before you start worrying whether or not some VC will or will not start pouring money into your application. Are your users pouring time into your application? Is your application even in production? What is holding you back from putting your application into production?

Quit whining about the economy and put your application into production; IMHO, VC is over-rated, and even if your new application does find funding, it is a poor indicator of the success of your product. Over here at HN, I think we sometimes get all caught up in whether or not we can find funding and pre-optimize our product for profitability. Don't do it, remember what you're making, who will use it, why they are using it, and how often they are returning to use it.
> The end result of this thinking is sloppy products that don't work, are hard to use, or are unreliable

But won't competition take care of that... if the market really does care about those metrics?
How would you replace trim?

Why would I need to replace trim? Trim existed before the filing date of the application for patent. The patent does not cover trim. Why would one think that the patent does cover trim?

According to the text of the patent any method that removes leading or trailing space would fall under protection of this patent.

No, it wouldn't. The 2. Description of Related Art section states:

Currently, TRIM functions, available in SQL, are used to remove leading and/or trailing space characters from data being presented to a user.

Therefore, merely any method that removes leading or trailing space cannot be what is being claimed in the patent.
Not to mention when a lot of those injuries are to the head, I worked for a guy who played on the Jets for 4 seasons, and still had recurring problems due to concussions.
voted up for building something i'll use and for having an awesome job
I think they don't use engines to slow down. I have seen some parts of the wings (like the rear half of the wings..) along its length standing up right ( something like right angle to the direction of motion of plane) putting a lot of resistance to the air while planes need to slow down.

Using the engine to slow down is like using the reverse gear of your car to slow down, which no one does, which never works (because of possible breakdown of the engine) and should not be done to save the engine from damage.

[ I am not a mechanical or automobile engineer. But this is my knowledge ]
If anyone wants to know what we look for in YC applications, this is it.
Human intuition is often wrong, and the only way to know something for sure is to test it.

Hear. Hear.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Seems like theft that isn't illegal. No thanks.
Yeah, that's very true. Usually, it's "where's that?"

What year?
hey, that's really cool. I like your point that it's lateral visibility that matters. But I think in practice, the side of the bike is visible only for a very short time (as a car passes it), and the driver is looking forwards (not to the side). The bike needs to be visible from behind.

Another projection idea is a downward-facing rear light - perhaps angled so that the light reflected from the road hits the eyes of the drivers behind?
While I sort of miss Final Fantasy Adventure on Gameboy. I miss mindless 2-Dimensional quests. Ah what I would do to be a kid again...
I would love to see ZumoDrive support Linux. I've recently adopted Linux pretty much full time, and the Dropbox client for it is great; it really offers seamless integration.

Does anyone know if ZumoDrive plans to offer Linux support in the future? I have a huge flac library I'd love to be able to stream to my lower storage laptop. Heck, I'd store a ton of stuff in the cloud.
Water is much harder. The drag as soon as you touch is incredible so the deceleration is nearly instant. He had to know to keep the gear up, the flaps not extended and touch at the perfect angle. Even then, there is a large element of chance. Most water ditchings end with the plane catching a surface in the water, cartwheeling and then breaking apart.

Its hard enough to land planes that are designed with floats on the water. This was the perfect combination of luck and much skill, like an NBA player getting that buzzer shot from 3/4 court to win the game.
Behind the desk at an Internet Cafe?
Don't neglect sales.
I just finished an FC implementation on a site I'm working on. The site still has local accounts, but users can now connect their local accounts to their facebook account Facebook or just login through Facebook (which actually creates a local account).

Beware: integrating with FC turned out to be a surprisingly large undertaking, although lots of that effort was spent a) trying to assemble an understanding from the FC docs about how the thing actually works and b) figuring out how to handle all of the weird cases (and the common cases, for that matter).

The FC developer docs are not all that coherent. The wiki seems to cover most of what you'd need to know, but lots of the information is on pages only linked to from obscure other pages, and there's not a good big-picture technical explanation. Even worse, much of the wiki is locked down so you can't fix it.

And there are a bunch of special cases to handle.. what if a user is logged into a facebook-linked local account on your site but is logged in as the wrong facebook user? Or what if they're logged into a facebook-connected local account and not logged into facebook? If you make a mistake, Facebook doesn't usually provide a helpful error message, and their javascript is all compressed, so it's a pain to try to use firebug.

If anybody's interested, my site's at http://mushpot.net. If anybody's got questions about the implementation, feel free to post them on mushpot and I'll try to respond.
I don't doubt any of that. But the question is, did you then go and write any actual, production applications using Haskell or did the book just go back on the shelf with all the other academic texts?
M&A usually fails.

Yet a lot of YC companies will end up getting acquired.
Is it just me or are downvoted posts completely unreadable? It would be nice if there were an "unhide" button or something; it's extremely annoying to have to squint to read it.
They reverse the engines when they land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust_reversal

The wiki article on ditching is a little rough,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditching#Commercial_aircraft

...but it seems like this procedure isn't done often enough with jets that we could honestly assess how difficult it might be. I suppose it's just like a normal landing, but doing it so gently that it doesn't break apart.
Path Feasibility Analysis for String-Manipulating Programs
How about, "Over the first 30 pages, ...". (It covers about as much material as SICP does in same, for example, and the typesetting is comparable.) After that it moves into examples with GL programming, alternating theory and application chapter by chapter.
Memories of the great sporting performances will last for centuries.

no they won't. Do you remember any great sporting moments from the 1700's?
A big company can accept that some of its acquisitions won't work out well. Small companies aren't as strong.
That's my dream - robot building. I look forward to the day that "robot startups" are as trendy and commonplace as "web startups". :-/
"The rule isn't against the use of WP where there are heavy concentrations of civilians, it's against using WP as an incendiary where there are heavy concentrations of civilians."

Classic military-industrial double-talk. WP doesn't come equipped with a non-incendiary mode.
Sorry, when I first went to the link, it was returning a blank page. I see it's doing more than that now.
I love doing projects like this, but I tend to get ugly code, since I'm aiming at getting something working quickly (and experimenting with different approaches).

One barrier for me is that the cleanness of the code arguably doesn't matter in a project like this, so the time feels wasted. But, in reality, I'm creating sample code, that I do come back to later, to see how I did things. Like a personal text book. When the code is ugly and hard to follow, it is less useful as sample code. Thinking of it as sample code removes that barrier (that cleanness doesn't matter).

I've started to spend time cleaning up code, and uncluttering it, as I go - but I find it takes an extraordinary amount of time...
Unype, over here - a connected poetic ear
Another happy tarsnap customer here. I've had it backing up all the stuff which matters to me every day for the past month. It's way simpler than my previous solution (backing up to S3) and it's much faster. It's also incredibly cheap (less than a dollar so far, my prepaid $5 should last a while :p)
He meant it more in the sense of a dream short term job to make money on the side in college. Building robots is definitely what he's always wanted to do, given the opportunity.
I'm looking forward to the generic Rack deployment option.
It’s not Information Overload, it’s filter failure - TDSD [pdf]
The engine itself does not change direction. Surfaces are deployed to redirect its thrust forward instead of backward. And that is only done after the plane is on the ground.