skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work from home in a highrise condo (that I'm leasing) conveniently located in the middle of the city. That being said a lot of my neighbors are much older (35+) than me (22) and don't listen to loud music. It is dead quiet 90% of the time with a remaining 5% being on the weekends when some neighbors have guests over and another 5% for when occasional cleaning crews are on the floor or when the lady above me that wears high heels is home and walking around.

As for when I need a "change of scenery", I sometimes move down to the lobby floor where there is a secluded library that has the added benefit of smelling like books.

Granted it is rather expensive and I live by myself, but it helps me to be very productive and the fiber Internet line is always a plus.
CS, Dec. 2008. :)
What's the half sentence?
BA History/Computer Science, 2006
10 Financial Commandments for Your 20s
whats the link to your site?
Library, still the best.
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Hmm, no one here from IITs i guess.
Ask YC: YC (Dropbox) vs YC (ZumoDrive)?
Sorry for the attempt to be cute with the title :) but seriously, isn't there a substantial overlap between these two? Does it matter if two YC companies end up directly competing? As a very occasional angel, I wonder how this works ...
I don't know much about it (i.e. I haven't tried it yet) but from the documentation, it is EC2 but with a lot of 'sysadmin goodies' added on the top of it. Think of it as value-add to EC2.

To me this looks like Heroku but with more flexibility.
The article corrects some of the myths about how the inferior product beat out the better one, betamax vs vhs, for instance. People tend to forget the contexts in which some of these decisions were made. After using languages like Pascal, the switch to C was truly liberating. Sure you could do dangerous things, but you could also write good code without fighting the language. Or take Windows vs Unix. I installed Unix on my first PC. I had to pay $500 more for Unix (on 10 floppies) and another $500 for the extra memory and disk space to run it. Most people in the world made the opposite choice.
I'll be there. Been wanting to try Republic for a while.
check out meetupdiary.com on alexa - the spike is due to connect.
RU CS '04-'08
Nice tip for coders
Ask HN: Are you still planning to make big money?
Or did you give up on this ideas and then just concentrated on working for some company? If so, what made you do this and how many failures you've been through? If you didn't give up, then why? What still makes you think you're gonna make it?
I believe that PG has said in the past that YC has no problem investing in companies within the same market. If they are promising enough and the market is sufficiently large, it won't be an issue.

The storage market with these two companies seems like a pretty good example.
Cheap vinegar/ water winshield de-icer hack
Apple’s Cook Pushes Staff in Lieu of Jobs’s Magic
Right now, data is cleaning bandwidth's clock. My internet connection is just barely faster than five years ago, but now I want to ship around pictures, music, and movies wholesale, whereas back then I really didn't care. I'd estimate two orders of magnitude of increase in my data desires... and I was a power user five years ago (as well as today, though epic torrenters have me beat). My wife has gone from email and web browsing to shipping around video, too, for her it could be even more.

Is it feasible to expect data growth to level off long term? Tough to say. Audio probably won't grow much, but pictures and movies can get a lot bigger, but eventually you have enough resolution. But in the fuzzy long term, there are other possibilities for large-scale data movement that are harder to predict.

That's because processing power is no contest. Local processing power is growing radically faster than anything else, and this will continue. Local processing power is growing so radically faster that it has long since penetrated the architecture itself, and we now have deep, deep memory cache architectures desperately trying to catch up to the increase in local processing power... even reaching out five inches as opposed to five nanometers has a huge performance impact.

If you want to take advantage of that, you're going to move data closer to the processor. Processors are quite likely to live in the home, for a variety of legal and technical reasons. (The updated version of rms' Right to Read story is the Right to Compute Locally... long term, you are a fool of epic proportions to give up all computational power to the owners of the cloud!) Due to some fundamental latency issues, and the fact the cloud will always be partially underprovisioned due to simple economic reality, there may still be a desire to move large amounts of data around in the future. Bandwidth is hard, and easily consumed.

(And while I'm here, since I've built the foundation: I don't think the cloud is the total future for these reasons. The cloud will never be able to be as reliable as local resources, because the cloud will always be distant, latent (as in latency), and busy. Local resources backing to the cloud is a far, far better proposition than a pure-cloud-with-dumb-terminals-everywhere play.)
There are thousands of people who studied what he studied and have made no impact. Most likely, he will also make no impact in the field he studies.

In my opinion, he's making a poor decision - you have many many years to study anything you want, but just a few years where you can be a great athlete.

And this story is not relevant to any other players - they found the thing they love and they became great at it - just because they do not go study public health or some other irrelevant thing to them does not make them any lesser.

The journalist probably studied somewhere where intellectualism is supposed to be good just for itself. So for her, 'good' is defined by intellectualism. One could just as well turn this argument the other way round, and the pro football players could mock her for being so weak at sports.

This person has some passions and he's following them. This does not mean that every other person who has a passion in some field has to also have a passion in some unrelated subject that just happens to be offered at oxford.
Arrington has a bunch of staff writing entries. Not so on BT as far as I can tell. The new owners are apparently searching for volunteers to write articles.
That is exactly what it seems like to me. A lot more turnkey than the rest. That being said, all that came to my mind was "when we get another round of funding...". A min of $129/month is a bit much right now.
Clouds must markup. They can't charge the same prices or they are merely covering hardware expenses, which doesn't cover personnel expenses, let alone profit.

Fortunately you can get some premium value out of that markup that is way more expensive to set up yourself. (In particular multiple backup sites.) But the cheapest storage solution absent all other concerns will always be simple local storage.
BA CS, Class of 2012
Also, if there are any Hoyas here, please email me. I'd love to connect.
I always look at the 1-star reviews first - they're often the most insightful:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0262011530/ref=dp_top_c...

The only pro for this book is the wealth of information. The main con is that all of this wealth is presented in a haphazard way. I couldn't understand most of it. This text would be OK as an occasional reference, but nothing more. It is definitely overrated.

Just as an example, data directed programming, the way it is presented in the book, is counterintuitive. Operator overloading in C++ makes much more sense, even if its syntax is a little tougher than Scheme's.

And finally, what's with the jokes? When they mentioned Microshaft, I realized that the authors are just two immature jerks. Don't get this book.
At first I read it as "Google SilentEar" and wondered why Google started to produce earplugs :).

I used just ordinary worker-protection earplugs when there was some very noisy construction work going on in my building. These were just simple shapes made from memory foam. Very cheap and very effective.

http://koyotegb.tmb.uk.com/K310%20Ear%20Plugs.htm
Any backup service that won't accept encrypted blobs is worthless. Any cloud backup software that doesn't make that easy in both directions is also worthless.
I used to spend my winter holidays in northern germany near bremen as a kid and I loved skating on the river... It's a completely different feeling from skating in a ice skating rink...
I understand your problem with noise. I've had many people suggest that I use headphones or play music but I find that equally distracting. I learned something recently that might add some understanding to your problem. It's called Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), you can read about it at wikipedia:

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

If moving to a place without shared walls is not an option, you might want to shift your schedule a bit. Continue to work while they are not home and also work after they've gone to bed. Then it's very quiet.
Some Thoughts on User Interfaces for Activity Streams
Yes, but you didn't say "be an optimist" - you argued that I don't care, because I don't want to discuss it on this site, which is a bad argument. There are plenty of issues that I care deeply about for which this site is not an appropriate forum.

> 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing' - Edmund Burke

Discussing the issue on internet forums is so close to "doing nothing" as to be virtually indistinguishable.
BS Math + CS, 2007.
The A-Z of Programming Languages: F#
for anyone who lives in the general Boston city limits (including cambridge, somerville, brookline, jp, etc etc) I highly recommend checking out the Boston Public Library (right under the Hancock Tower). It's quiet, there's wifi, the Sebastian's cafe there has great tables and comfy chairs, and in the summer the courtyard in the middle is absolutely fantastic.

I usually work out of my condo's 2nd bedroom (what we call our office) but when I have the itch to get out and really get work done I head to the BPL.
I'm very happy with a pair of Philips noise canceling headphones that I purchased for $60 a couple of years ago. They work best for drowning out air conditioning and fan noise, but since they're full size, they make everything quieter even without the noise cancellation activated.
I work in an open plan office and people often have to yell or throw things at me to get my attention.
Alex/all, thanks for posting this. I can't make it, unfortunately as visitors are coming in from out of town (learned about it this morning). Would have like to seen/met all of you.

Have fun tonight and stay warm! My office is right up the block on 19th and Park so I've been to Republic and the food there is mmm-mmm-good. :)
I went into a Bose booth in an airport (I was bored) and they were showing people the noise canceling headphones.

The employee would flick a button after you put them on that also turned on some subwoofer that made a huge amount of grey noise.

Now sure that is somewhat airplane-ish, but that's sneaky.
Wow... so did I (another Oak Parker!)... but OPPL blocks all outbound ports except 80 and 443. So I couldn't do alot (like SSH admin of remote servers). However, I did create an EC2 instance once where SSH was running on port 80 -- and that worked splendidly. :-) But I can't do all my work that way. Did the blocked ports bother you? Or did you get around it?
Ask HN: Working with Apache/PHP on OSX
I just got a new MacBook (first time using OSX on a day-to-day basis) and I'm trying to set up my development environment on it. I'm trying to evaluate my web server options. I am used to using Linux, so I am figuring out how to migrate over.

I've read a lot of articles about different ways, but haven't found the "preferred" way. So, should I use the server that comes with OSX, or should I use something like XAMPP or MAMP? Or something else entirely?

Also, what's the best way for installing/managing PHP modules. Ubuntu made it really easy (well, Debian did, really) by having packages for all of the major PHP modules. Is there something similar for the Mac? Is this what MacPorts is for?

Basically I'm looking for the "standard" way of setting up a LAMP stack (minus the L) for OSX and a nice way of dealing with PHP modules.

Thanks, HN!
That desktop makes me shudder. How do you keep track of so many open programs without multiple desktops?

And it's a laptop too, ugh.
Can you elaborate on what you view as the downsides of the Lisp approach?
Scope the place out, try to sit away from doors, leave my jacket, throw my laptop in a sleeve and take it with me. I would never leave a laptop on its own.
Sometimes it's particularly fun to read clueless 1-star reviews of classic books. ISTR there was a 1-star review of Newton's Principia complaining that he bought to help him with his high school physics course and it was way too confusing.
Originally they weren't competing. ZumoDrive evolved out of Versionate. Even now there are significant differences in the way the two work. They should be able to both succeed.
Graduated from Temple University, and am currently auditing classes at the University of Pennsylvania.
San Diego State
Current EE student
That seems far more effective, since the vast majority of router buyers don't read any publication in which this story would run.
Intro to Caching: Caching algorithms and caching frameworks part 1
I will be there! This could be fun.

Any django hackers planning to go? I'm into Django, JQuery and Python at the moment and would be stoked to chat about peoples projects with it.
He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium...

I don't think that argument is preposterous at all. I'm halfway there, already, even with my anemic cable internet connection. It just requires a shift in thinking. You may look at my setup and say "you're storing data in a personal hard drive and backing it up online over a fairly slow internet connection". But someone else could look at the very same setup and say "you're storing your data online, but because your data connection is kind of slow, you're keeping a big local cache in a personal hard drive."

It's not as if the distinction between storage and backup and cache is necessarily cut and dried. They're amorphous and fluid categories. If called upon to distinguish between them, I'd probably claim that "primary storage" is a label for "whichever medium is most durable" -- in which case it's not at all clear that the cloud isn't more "primary" than my hard drive. There are risks and downsides to storing cloud data (bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies), but there are also risks to storing local data (crashes, security, fly-by-night system administration :), and it's unclear which is better. The best thing is to diversify and keep copies in several places.

I would never refer to my iPhone as "storage": I conceptualize it as a cache, a subset of my data that I carry around with me only because the network is slow, not ubiquitous, and not always trustworthy. I now treat my laptop the same way. If I weren't too cheap to buy a whole terabyte of S3 storage, I might well come to think of all my local machines as nothing but local caches of my S3 data, as well as local backups in case S3 gets taken over by Skynet or IP lawyers or some other threat to humanity.
blocks all outbound ports except 80 and 443. So I couldn't do alot

You should tunnel everything through ssh or vpn when on a public network, anyway, so having a server or router you can ssh into on 443 and use for tunneling is a must for mobile work since it solves the port blocking problem, too.
I don't plan to make big money. (How much is big? A billion dollar?.)

However, I do plan to have a tribe of smart, fun, and motivated friends.

Have a billion, you can do a lot.

Have a tribe, you can do anything (including making a billion.)
Life's rough when you hate both the city and cars. America isn't well set up for that.
I think all the Lightweight (agile) methods in sw development put emphasize in being able to prototype ideas easily.
DB simply don't do that.

In HN there are often questions on How to manage schema changes in the DB. I know there are tools for this but the mere fact, that is still a common question is an indication of the inflexibility of database schemas.
"PHP: <?=h($firstName)?>"

Bzzzt wrong. And this is why having a template engine might be a good thing. <?= isn't 'safe' because it can be disabled in the php.ini file (and is disabled by default). If only you had a template language that keeps you having to know that! Also, the default is that your html escapes -- you can't forget to wrap your variable in the h() function. So it's already less error prone. And this is still just a simple example.

"PHP's loop: <?while(loop()){?>"

It's at least <?php while(list($key, $item) = loop($iterator)){?> to be correct and useful. And the template engine can inline the code (rather than call a loop() function) for better performance.

All those correctly expanded PHP tags intermixed in the HTML makes the template harder to follow. You might want to type twice as much identical code for each output variable, but I don't want to do that. It is an advantage that it's cleaner and clearer.
Videos show US Air crash-landing
how's microsoft going?
$129 minimum isn't that inexpensive. Otherwise, it looks quite clever.
CS, '11
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?
I'm about to get laid off from a very nice job, but I have a couple of projects I'd like to focus on. Does anybody know of ANY job where I can sit at my desk and more or less hack away at what I really want to work on?

Jobs I've been looking at:

house sitting

night shift security

library desk

etc.
I used the QC2s for a couple years when I was traveling the poker circuit. I liked them a lot at the time. They do greatly reduce certain types of noise. (You can Google for why anything sucks or doesn't work and find results, it doesn't mean much.)

Then another player introduced me to Shures. I've now owned a few sets (most currently http://tinyurl.com/8eyhck) and I would never go back.

The best way I can quantify how much better they are is to say that on a plane, with the QC2s, I would have my volume at 17 (out of 20) but with the Shures it's at 10. And the difference when considering non-ambient noise is even greater. With these in and no music, you can't hear people talking to you from the same room.

They're also significantly less bulky, and more durable. The QCs crack easily, and really require a hard case if you're traveling with them at all. I did have a pair of Shures where the earbuds separated, but they honored the warranty even though it was a year out of date and even sent me a newer, significantly more expensive model as a replacement.

On the other hand, I also had a pair fall out of my pocket, which is $400 lost in an airport.
It's great to do a study, but in the meantime can anyone explain how a checklist could be dangerous? If you can't give any ways, then it's silly to ban it for now. This isn't a new medicine with potential unknown effects.
Sounds good. I'll be there.
Due the fact that companies often evolve substantially from their original business models, it is impossible to make a lot of investments without at some point having clashes among your portfolios. A group that makes 40 per year couldn't possibly avoid such a thing.
Bush's war and no-bid contracts to his buddies look [...] like "make work"

Were Bush or his action or policies mentioned in the article?
You weaken an otherwise useful post by using words like "bullshit". The problem with "bullshit" isn't that you are cursing. It is a way to dismiss an article with out actually engaging in any of the arguments made by the article. At the end you do hint that you believe the article gives a biased report of history, but you give no specifics, and it comes many paragraphs after "what bullshit".
Fix this, please. It's making this thread just about unreadable.
The German economy, Europe's biggest, could shrink by 2.5 percent this year
Alex, I like the 607 #. I'll try to swing by the meetup tonight.
I have asked someone to ask my laptop after sitting with the same people for a while and/or they have asked me to watch theirs - in a kind of tenuous, reciprocal agreement. However, most times I feel it's not worth the effort.
I thought the complaint about slowness was about the try clauses, which of course are paid for whether an exception occurs or not. Did I miss something?
Interruptions = Bugs

I wonder if you might be more productive by changing your habits. Get up and hack for two hours before going to a job that does not require creativity, then perhaps hack a bit more in the evening as life permits. The advantage here is that you will have plenty of thinking time between execution periods and it will support the quality of your work.

I know an author that does just this, his problem though is that he is too conscientious and competent and keeps getting promoted to positions that require too much creativity. At that point he has to change jobs.
$129 per month with engine yard appears to whoop Joyents equivalent Accelerator.

1 GiB RAM, 15 GiB Storage
1/4 CPU core guaranteed, Burstable to 8

vs

~1.2Ghz
1 ECU, 1.7GB RAM
160 GB Non-persistent storage
Discussing the issue on internet forums is so close to "doing nothing" as to be virtually indistinguishable.

I don't think that's true. People are very much influenced by things other people say, and there is nothing magic about the web that makes this stop working online. I've often been influenced by things I read in forums.

And in this specific case, you're particularly mistaken, because the situation is so much influenced by public opinion. If everyone in the world was talking now about what's happening in Gaza, the Israelis would have to stop.
Maybe you know more about this than me, but last I had heard, it was the use of agricultural DDT that was most condemned, whereas DDT for epidemic control was supported by, for example, WHO. The idea was that, after some years, agricultural DDT caused DDT resistance in mosquito populations. This rendered DDT for epidemic control ineffective.

Of course, the whole argument is complicated by the fact that pesticides are needed, in current practice for high-yield rice at the green-revolution scale, without which millions would starve.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
E OKUL Not ÖĞRENME
PSU alum ('07)
Sounds like OpenVPN - http://openvpn.net is what you need.
Trevor has always said that his dream job was to be a projectionist in a movie theater.
Web design resources
I used to work in a video store. Not many people used to turn up, so had a lot of time to myself. You might want to just jump into the store next door. Would be a good bet.
In Germany blogs aren't that popular like in the US. It is not a main source of news. It is more opinion publishing. There are only a few who can live from blogging.
Probably not anymore. They've been squeezed by technology, but more importantly they've been forced to go mobile as a cost-cutting measure by chains, which want fewer staff serving more locations. It might be a really crappy job now.
If this internet forum existed in when I was an undergrad and I knew about it, the information and conversations shared back then would certainly have shaped my life direction.