skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've biked as primary transportation for five years (including through Michigan winters), and in my experience ensuring that other drivers see you at intersections is most important. They're often unclear about intent, who has right of way, etc., when they see you at all, and that's where paths cross.

Being visible from behind is also important, but doesn't take anything extravagant: A five-red-LED blinker on your bike and a blinker on your helmet or large reflective strips on your bag is almost certainly sufficient. As long as you're not weaving from lane to lane and not terribly unlucky (e.g. being followed by a drunk or a car full of reckless teenagers), it's unlikely you'll get hit from behind.

(Fog/glow under the bike would be awesome, though.)
<?= isn't 'safe'

This is a web app for God's sake. You have full control on what your php.ini have. Which one is more complex? Install a templating language? or ensure your short-tags=On (or whatever that is) in your php.ini. And if you are talking about hosted service, short tags are by default kept "On" on most hosted services, if not all.

<?php while(list($key, $item) = loop($iterator)){?>

No, I can write any of the following if I want the variables localy.

<?while($r=loop($rs)){?> <---- this is the version I use most frequently.

<?foreach($rs as $key=>$item){?>

or even

<?while(extract(loop($rs))){?>

Now compare all these with any other language beside PHP. Java, C# or Python.

response.write "<html><head><title>" + myTitle + "</title>";

response.write "<body bgcolor=\"white\">";

while(loop inside iterator){
response.write "<tr><td" + print_var;
}

Imagine typing your full page like this! You need to enclose each of your line inside a quote and also escape all quotation marks inside it. Here code and design are mixed in real sense. These are the languages that really need a templating engine.

And the template engine can inline the code (rather than call a loop() function) for better performance.

Here is an idea, better performace is gained by not loading the templating engine at all. Whatever number of chars typing saved is more complicated by loading and initializing the whole templating engine. Even that is not enough, which is why Smarty has {if}, {else}, {switch} statements. So long for seperating code and design.

You might want to type twice as much identical code for each output variable

I am not typing identical code even once.

If only you had a template language that keeps you having to know that!

We can continue discussion without making attacks? No?
It was an incredible feat, but I don't think that knowing to keep the gear up when landing on water is particularly remarkable.
I find 40 hours is much more productive if spread over several weeks. Maybe one's unconscious works on it the rest of the time.
I do consulting and I get a written agreement giving rates, total amount, and other terms. Usually the company issues a purchase order and I invoice against the purchase order, usually net 30 days, 15 if I can get away with it. They send me the checks. I dont give discounts. I havent worked with mom and pops. My clients are multi-million to multi-billion corporations and I havent had any collections problems. It's may be more problematical with sole proprietorships and such. My billings are typically 5 digits per month. If you are talking a few hundred per year, the purchasers usually expense it on a credit card because the PO process is so cumbersome.

Getting large companies to pay on time hasn't been an issue, but you need to agree to their idea of a schedule. Sometimes 15 days works, but one insisted on 45 days and the 45 days was when they put the check in the mail.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438740 for another perspective.
I'll be you use a lot of RMS-style free software, though! Just because you don't want to contribute, doesn't mean free software isn't a good thing.
sorry, you are "dead" already. Actually you were "dead" from the moment you went to Google.
Do you mean people who have something like this on their CV, or projects that are like this, or an attitude like this...?
There weren't any then, in our sense. In those days the word sport meant hunting. The closest thing would have been prize-fighting. I believe there are some fights from that far back that are still famous among aficionados today.
The week Garfield died. Analysis & comics
I'd get a handle on how to understand those users. The smaller shops need a fair amount of help dealing with almost every aspect of codecs on their devices. From patent clearing to implementation, deploying these systems are ridiculously complicated if you want to do so legally and in compliance with the gpl, iso and other licenses around these tools and when you combine this with some of the less , ahem, legit codecs that are floating around (people pulling code from qt and wma players then representing them as their own work, etc...) there is a fair amount of consulting opportunity out there.

This is assuming you are with any of the following: ffmpeg, mplayer, vlc, gstreamer, etc...
Like we really need a zillion little Jaikus/Twitters. The value of Twitter is your connections to people.

Now, if it were a distributed / decentralized type thing like XMPP or something, that would be interesting.
Also, NVU is easy to use, go get some cheapo designer or grab a free template online.
I've had Bose QC2s for about 4-5 years now and it might be the $300 I've ever spent. I worked for several years in an office with an open floorplan and without my headphones, any time someone in the office had a conversation it would distract me. With them, I could completely zone out and get stuff done. The active noise canceling was only part of it, just the fact that they completely wrap around your ears makes a difference. There are obviously cheaper ones that do that, but I don't think they are as comfortable as the QC2.
Hearing people talking with the QC2s is a feature -- they equalize the noise canceling to cancel out engine noise but allow you to still hear people.

What the QC2s have going is comfort. The high end earphones, namely the Shure and Etymotic and at the highest end, custom in-ear monitors offer superior noise isolation with sound quality comparable to the best in existence.

You can get Etymotic ER-4Ps for $174 on Amazon. They're comparable to the highest end Shure earphones. The Ety's will have less visceral bass.
So what you're saying is that when it works, the reward is enough to offset the failures.

Given this, there is no reason startups should avoid merging simply because it "usually fails" (as the post above was suggesting)... In fact, it's a risk in the same league as doing a startup in the first place.
The first and the third, which I would guess are identical. What we look for is an incurable tendency to build stuff. And if people have this quality, they'll presumably already have shown evidence of it by building stuff.
I think people who use lisp, use it because it's lisp and not smalltalk :-).
But so do many of the people who are essentially homeless and just riding a broken Huffy against traffic.

(Also, the article is from the UK. Cycling there is probably sufficiently different from in the US (due to city layouts, cultural acceptance of cycling, etc.) that there may be too many other variables to compare them.)
It was 71 in cupertino today.
I am not the best person to give advice on this, because I have had only a few customers that were big companies.

However, the standard for payment is still a check via US Mail. If you anticipate slow payment, bill early and include some standard text on the invoice about net terms of 30 or 90 days, whatever is appropriate, and if you wish specify that late payment is subject to a 2% per month late fee. This is fairly common, although there is a wide variety of practices.

If they wish to pay with a credit card, I send an invoice using the Google Checkout email option. This costs me 2% of the bill, but it is probably worth it to get paid early, and I eat that 2% (but treat it as a business expense).

Some companies and some industries are known for ill treatment of contractors and vendors, such as habitual late payment, suggesting that they will only pay the outstanding bill if you agree to some future work, etc. I suggest you simply cut off all business with anyone who starts treating you like that, one of the advantages of being a startup is that you don't have to put up with shit from "long term customers", so don't get fresh new shitty customers.
I worked the desk at a mid-sized hotel (50-ish rooms), and it was the worst job I've ever had. The checkin/checkout rushes were bad, but then we had to reconcile the accounts, set wake-up calls, answer the phones, etc. There definitely wasn't any time to relax.
ZumoDrive turned me off instantly with their horrible Mac offering. I like the idea, but Dropbox actually has a real nice client on Mac.
I've been encouraging Trevor to make this happen, by making his new QA into an Apple II of robots that people can bolt their own stuff onto. So far it's not happening though: the thing only has one hole in its exterior case, for the charger to plug into.
noonespecial is not talking about landing gear, he's probably talking about things like this: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/48376/plane_crashes_on_water/
While is it true that Zumodrive by default uses local storage as a cache, if you have enough space you can set it to keep everything local.
I've also seen the argument advanced that requiring helmets makes cycling less safe: Some people will refuse to wear them and won't bike at all, and others will get the impression that cycling is more dangerous than it is because a helmet is being required. (Are drivers or pedestrians nagged to wear helmets? Besides, the most common injury from cycling isn't a head injury - it's a broken wrist from trying to stop a fall.)

The decrease in cyclists on the road reduces the likelihood that drivers know how to share the road with them, that cyclists will learn from each other how to ride safely in traffic, etc.
How To Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent
What's the status of getting .wiki approved as a TLD
My daughter is at the age where she's learning to spell, so I thought it would be a good time to set her up with her own wiki. It would have been nice to have hername.wiki. Guess I'll have to wait. Is someone lined up to start .wiki and just waiting for ICANN's larger opening-up of TLDs?
These kinds of stories are a magnet for trolls.

And yet...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438654

So why can't the discussion continue? Why aren't Israel and Hamas's actions viable targets of inquiry?
you might find ruby and rails are included in leopard. Open terminal and type:
ruby -v
and then:
rails -v

PHP would be ideal too.
Very Stunning, Very Space, Very Cool: The Launch of Space Tourism
OK, your empiricism beats my theorism.

Thinking of my own experience (I've ridden daily for a couple of years), the only two close-calls I've had are from a car that's in front of me, when it suddenly sees a parking spot, and swerves across, almost side-swiping me.

I could probably avoid this by riding in a full car lane, instead of to the left of it (between the lane and parking spaces), but it seems wasteful to take up a whole car lane (and I can't pass cars then). Also, what I'm doing may be illegal, as it's not marked as a bike lane.

(Bonus: fog/glow is more visible when raining.)
A 1000 libs and apps produced by an open source community in 18 months. Sure, clusterfuck. Good work.

Here's a breakdown by category: http://galois.com/~dons/images/chart-hackage.png

Science works, bitches.
Do what this guy did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438646

I'm always most successful at getting something done when I: choose the smallest useful thing I can think of, choose something even smaller instead (which can be expanded later), develop a schedule for getting it done (e.g. 1 hour per day), keep a calendar showing whether or not I'm working as hard as I said I would (no slacking!) and timebox the whole thing (lack of time is the greatest motivator in the universe).

Update: for fun, I actually just tested this. I tried to write a language interpreter in Arc that could execute the following function:

(def fib (n)
(nth n (sequence s 0 1 (+ s.-1 s.-2))))

which is written in a hypothetical Arc-like language I just invented. I gave myself 30 minutes. I didn't get it done, but I did pretty well. The language had a namespace, functions, macros and all the basic operators I needed. Unfortunately, I didn't quite finish the eval function. Another 10 minutes and I would have had something I could run (although I don't know how long it would have taken to fix all the bugs).
Not sure, but if the .com is still available, consider using that instead.
Exeter University, UK.
A tour of Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology
That's intentional. Downvoted posts fade both to save people from reading them (presumably most are mistaken or nasty) and to damp the submitter's karma loss (the fainter they are, the harder you have to work to be offended by them).
Only if you callously assume that the NFL player who gets his spot in the NFL won't do the same.
A nation of ophthalmologists tents its fingers.
My guess is that Amazon will put a stop to this before too long.

The potential for legal trouble is just too big.
I'm more interested in the exclusion of thinking time.

He didn't log the time she spent in the shower, but that's when he says some of his best ideas hit him. Personally, I could spend 2 or more hours thinking for every hour of work I do.
imho, a better (generic) definition of caching would be that it is based on carrot-and-stick princple. locality-of-reference being the carrot, and amdhal's law being the stick...
Don't start till May. Traveling Kazakhstan -> Moldova -> Estonia until then.
That reminds me of a story I read about Michelangelo. He stared at the lump of marble that was to become David for a very long time before making the first cut, when asked what he was doing he said "I'm working"
Damn. This is impressive, yes, but when I read "RPG" I was expecting something with a Final Fantasy-sized plot; as a developer who is also a writer, I was intrigued about the idea of developing an interactive story within such a short timespan--something similar to NaNoWriMo, but producing a game design document rather than a book as output.
Why Hacker News Thinks PHP Won Something
Georgia Tech CS, graduate soon-ish.
Here's something else from (this part of) Europe: 'bollocks'. For a start, each country has its own rules on unemployment benefits and I've no idea where they pay 80% of your current pay.

Then, at least in Britain, they send you on pretty patronising courses about how to read job adverts, how to go to interviews and so on along with making you go in once a week and give proof that you've been "jobseeking". The job centre'll put you forward for any work going, regardless of whether it's a good match for your skills. If you refuse, no benefits. And for all this, you get the princely sum of £60 a week. Not enough to feed, heat and house yourself, let alone travel the globe.

It's not a free ride by any means, and if you've been through it through no fault of your own it's a pretty demoralising and humiliating system.
The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
Digital Storage Options for Workers on the Go
>"Many of these [education] apps [from smaller publishers] seem to work well, but they may be overtaken once the aforementioned “trusted names” start establishing a larger presence."

really? i bet if the non-brand name apps are done well and stick through the effort of making a name for themselves they could still compete.

what do ya'll think?
I am assuming the majority of YC startups are teams of 3-4 and merging would mean teams of 6-8 working together, fixing the same problem-set.
Qwerty couldn't be much less scientific. You can spell "TYPEWRITER" with the letters from its top row, for fuck's sake.

Dvorak (the man), on the other hand, dedicated a good part of his life studying Typewriter Behavior (he wrote a book with the same name but it's out of print) by looking at actual people while they type, then formulated theories about what eases typing speed and accuracy, then conducted experiments to validate his models. Wait... Haven't I just described the scientific method?
Where can you find a freelance gig that isn't a total rip though? I'm sure the parent doesn't want to get paid $14/hr hacking on a Windows clone for someone on ELance or Craigslist.
The article does point out that Amazon's Terms of Service disallow any piracy activity that may occur. So if anyone tries to use this for illegal purposes, they won't be up for long.
Why EC2, why not a Dreamhost account? They have tons of bandwith, after all.
Babe Ruth started his pro career in 1914. We're almost a century past that.

Other sports are newer and younger, but we will remember them, too. And what's even cooler, we will be able to watch them, for centuries.
EC2 is overkill for leeching (or even seeding) a few torrents. If you want more bandwidth just find some crappy $5 VPS server somewhere (lowendbox reviews a steady stream of cheap hosting) and install torrentflux.
It's enough to offset the failures for a big company if they're any good at acquisition. For a startup the payoff has to be a heck of a lot more. The odds of the merger going bad are higher (too many chefs) and going bad means a total failure of both companies.
Duke, BS Econ 2002
The Programmer’s Delimma: When and How to Refactor your Codebase
I'm curious what it is you don't like about the ZumoDrive Mac client.
Dreamhost blocks BitTorrent usage on their servers.

http://torrentfreak.com/dreamhost-back-to-blocking-bittorren...
Zuckerberg is taking the road less traveled. Most sane people would have cashed out $100MM and walked away as soon as they could have. I would have.

He's trying to turn Facebook into a billion+/year revenue company by utilizing an as of yet proven (or identified?) business model.

Worst case scenario is that he could do what MySpace did. Put horrible ads all over the site and milk it for everything it's worth. Should turn profit if they then cut back on spending (and fire 80% of their staff).
We are looking to support Linux soon :)
Radio stations have also become increasingly automated over the past few years and mostly have no-one in the building overnight. (In days gone by, they'd sometimes employ a DJ to play music without talking through the night!)

However, there are still positions where you spend a lot of time sitting in the studio with not a lot to do. Many stations run "network" programming which is delivered via satellite or ISDN from a central hub and employ a "tech op", usually a wannabe DJ who's still in school, to oversee it and make sure the network feed and local ads or other inserts go out on air. It's a job with a lot of downtime and you're sitting in a room full of computers. What could be better?!
I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.

I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video rental places, etc. I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not take (windows stuff) when desparate. My impression is that these types of side jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough about the job to try hard not to get fired.

As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs that were more suited to my needs. Rather than be able to work on my stuff at work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.

The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses considerably.

The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part-time business" ideas. The one which I partly did and made money on was finding old books at garage sales to sell online. (Very little money.) The one which people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral" fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements. I had this pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care). People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.

Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time, and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day a week. If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest the rest of your time in your startup idea.
Is windows in your future?
I feel like I have that incurable tendency to build stuff, but don't have time to use it. In fact, I'm extremely frustrated with my current job because I can't feed the need. How do others do it?
Seems like she left before the fallout but I guess it's possible to spin that as either cowardice or wisdom.

I wonder if you would love to call it wisdom if warrior does the same as CTO of a whole nation - hopping into a golden parachute just before it slides down.

Come on, you need a founder's spirit and loyalty in all the top executives at least the CEO, COO, CMO and CTO if you need a company to exist and survive.
1. I don't know why I didn't check Instructables sooner. :) http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Glow:-Ground-Effects-Lig...

2. Barring unusual state laws, taking the lane is usually legal. IIRC, in Michigan the law says something handwavey about riding as far to the right as is safe and practical. I will generally take the lane (right lane if there's two, or a wide shoulder), but try to be cognizant of traffic buildup behind me. Riding in a manner that seems predictable to drivers contributes more to safety than following the law to the letter, anyway. Route choice probably also makes a big difference.
Probably, but not very soon. Unless you consider Cygwin to be Windows, in which case you can start using tarsnap right now.
I don't think so.

Amazon is protected by DMCA Safe Harbor provisions and doesn't have to act until they've received notice of copyright infringement on their servers.

There are many legitimate uses for BitTorrent, I don't see Amazon putting an outright ban on torrent usage on their servers. It limits their usefulness as a generic hosting provider to only allow certain types of traffic.
I really do not understand people reacting violently on how "PHP sucks/horrifying". PHP is just a tool that people use. Blame the programmer not the tool. I have had encounters with horrifying code with a lot of times BUT most of my complaints were on bad design and how programmers badly handled their code.

"Being mindful of best practices in software development fundamentals can be more effective than adopting every latest technology." - Bill Karwin
> I also pay only for what I use - which by my estimates will hopefully be less than $30 per month (real data to follow)

Last I checked EC2 was around $70/month minimum just to have your instance running, so unless he plans on manually turning his instance off when he's not using it (which would equate to about half the time) he's going to be spending $70 + bandwidth.

I was actually hoping this would be an article about using EC2 instances as trackers and seeders for distributing your own material as opposed to some lame attempt at piracy.
Thanks for posting this! I was in the midst of writing something very similar.
I always figured that the main demographic of iPhone users would be those with a tidy amount of spare cash, which students aren't exactly famous for having.