skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know one. There was a math major at my school who graduated last year at the age of 18 after three years of college. Right now he is in med school. I can't say how far he will go, but I think he's doing fine right now. I talked to him every now and then while he was still in school, and he seemed pretty balanced.So while I'm sure it was hard work, he looked to be happy while he was in college.
Note that this article compares the costs of printing all copies of the New York Times to sending only subscribers free Kindles.

I started this post expecting to explain how this made the NYT's printing costs sound a bit more reasonable. Then I found that according to Wikipedia, which cites a 2007 release by the paper itself, the daily circulation of the New York Times is 1,000,665 Daily and 1,438,585 on Sundays. I am honestly quite surprised that the number of papers sold at newsstands and vending machines is therefore under 200K on weekdays. Using these figures and building off of SAI's estimates, the cost of printing copies just for subscribers is probably about $503 million, or still enough for just under 1.7 kindles per subscriber.

Note also that neither bandwidth costs nor the costs of delivering papers is counted. I presume factoring this in would make the print newspaper look even worse.
Dont worry, all good programmers I know have sucked at maths at one point or the other. Try sage http://www.sagemath.org/ , its a free software written in python. The software has a web interface which lets you program the equations and see visual output in form of graphs or other suitable figures.

Have a look at sage demo at http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact and try it after downloading. If you still have issues, write back, we would love to help you...
For languages that have a phonetic alphabet (like georgian, armenian, russian, japanese hiragana and katakana, korean), I found the easiest way is to spend one hour a day practicing for 1 or 2 months and then never ever use an alternative transcription when you could use the native phonetic alphabet (or it will take you that much longuer to really master it).

First start by some simple study of each letters pronunciation and use them in simple words and use flash cards to remember.

Once you master that I recommend doing some dictation exercise, just listen to a dialogue in the target language and start writing it, it's a great way to improve your speed and fluency in the new alphabet... And fluency in an alphabet is very important to help you with memorization of new word (once you get past the decoding phase, I find it's much quicker to learn new words written in the alphabet)

For ideograph (like japanese kanji, chinese hanzi and korean hanja), I find that finding a book that teach you the ethymology of the character helps a lot in learning by giving you context on why the character is used that way and it's also very helpful to help master the differences between same characters used in japanese and in chinese.

A good website to read on learning languages (despite the rather cheesy title) is http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html The forum discussion is rather interesting...

Good luck, and try to visit the country, it's still the quickest way to learn the language
IMHO something like Chandler Project. PIM+PKM+GTD+Workflow
OLPC XO-2 to be open source hardware
Here's the link to the X0-2 page:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2
The best situation for me has been one of my personal projects. It's a gaming site that I use everyday. The database dump is less that 100MB gzipped, so I load it in my development environment every week or so. That way as I develop I'm verifying (to some extent) the quality of the backup.

As a baseline, you should at least restore from your backups occasionally.

It helps that I'm familiar with the data -- so after restoring the backup I expect to see games, messages, forum posts, etc that I've just seen in production.

I do some more thorough automated tests on the backups less frequently. App specific things, like replay games and verify results, etc. This process is more about assuring backward compatibility with the code though.

I think verification should ultimately be somewhat app specific. That said, I'm sure you can find tools to help with verification.
Right. You'd better fix "Upcoming Events near Washington, MD" before having those tropical drinks. It's Washington DC here and you don't want to underestimate this market.
What super bowl 2009 start time?
I second the idea of a time log. I started keeping one this week, and it's shocking how much more I get done. I haven't even had time to really review them, but it just helps me to stay aware of how I'm using my time. There's something about forcing myself to right down how much time I'm wasting that keeps my breaks short. I'd really recommend people try it for a few days.
Link: http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/triple-your-personal-pr...
I think he meant behind in terms of number of users. Gmail is third, if I remember correctly (after Yahoo and Hotmail)
I did not get the same behavior as you when I tried this just now - rather, I had:

> x.a = 10
> print(#x)
0
>

Which makes more sense than 1. At the same time, 3 is also a valid value of #x, because it is the integer index of a value directly preceding an index with a nil value.

This behavior has been hashed over on the mailing list multiple times... the exact wording of the documentation allows for it but it's not exactly what people expect of the length operator.

The length of a table t is defined to be any integer index n such that t[n] is not nil and t[n+1] is nil; moreover, if t[1] is nil, n can be zero. For a regular array, with non-nil values from 1 to a given n, its length is exactly that n, the index of its last value. If the array has "holes" (that is, nil values between other non-nil values), then #t can be any of the indices that directly precedes a nil value (that is, it may consider _any_ such nil value as the end of the array). -- From the manual

My expectation is that there will be some changes to the handling of the # operator in 5.2 increasing its usefulness and allowing it to be overridden via metatables for user-defined types.

In any case, this is one of the few currently ugly corners of the language itself. Another would be the handling of destructuring varargs via the select(...) function, which can be really funky.
Adding "kick" also works. :))
For sites that get such a small amount of traffic I don't know if Compete is accurate enough to draw any conclusions. Rails Forum gets about 110,000 uniques per months, but Compete says 24,000.

I guess the point still stands if they're essentially even in traffic, though.
I'm in college so I really like Cal Newport's blog. He writes about time management, and to succeed at college without stressing yourself out. For instance, he mentions that you should ignore your g.p.a. . He talks about finding a bunch of citations from his professors his senior year, because he never looked at the letter with his g.p.a.
Link: http://calnewport.com/blog
Turning the Ads Off
Actually, this is incorrect. LuaJIT is explicitly compatible with the standard Lua ABI for modules.

http://luajit.org/luajit_features.html

Since it is able to use certain non-ANSI C features on the various platforms it supports it can do other neat things like enable coroutine calls across Lua/C stack boundaries.
Many people did not choose the suburbs freely. They were driven out of the cities by incredibly high levels of violence. The typical American city now has a homicide rate 10X to 100X that of a Victorian era European city. That's not a typo, 1990's DC had a homicide rate 100X that of London in 1900.
"Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma concluded six years ago that Linux and open source seemed to be executing a classic low-end disruption on Windows and closed-source technology."

Yeah, and he turned out to be right. Now, only 6 years later, nobody uses Windows and everyone uses Linux.

I love how he uses a prophecy that has totally failed to occur at all as the starting point for rehashing the same prophecy.
I've been using Amazon's MP3 store since they began. And its been good so far. High quality MP3's (non-DRM), easy to download, and seamless integration with iTunes.
I believe that statistic, but the truth is that people were driven out of cities in cars. The violence is probably effect as much as cause.
I assume you mean this discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231999

I'm really curious, has anyone here started competition? edu perhaps? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232092) Anyone else?
Khai mạc chương trình "Du lịch về cội nguồn" năm 2009
@drhowarddrfine, @neovive: Thanks, it's nice hearing when people find it helpful :).
The obvious discussion question: who will be buying, who will be shorting?
It's actually http://techstars.org/, and they operate out of Boulder, CO. Were you thinking of Founders Co-op?
Man, there are getting to be so many of these things. I hadn't even heard about this one myself yet.
"There are industries and products where it's possible to get away with telephone sales, but not support. But, it's not the business I'm in, and it's probably not the business most of the folks here are in."

I think it's a matter of how you set expectations around the number and whether you have a PBX. I ran a web dev / hosting company.

Contact page read: "To keep our prices low, we currently only offer support via email unless you have a dedicated server with a support contract." Or something to that effect.

Phone maze said: "For sales, press 1" (that went to a person, when we wanted to be available). For Support, press 2" (that went to a message that said "To keep our prices low, we don't offer telephone support. Head over to www..."

If someone circumvented it and got us on the line somehow, we'd say it verbally.

You're right, it probably pissed off the people who read the clear verbiage around the phone number on the site and chose to ignore it... But I was happy to live with that. And the phone number landed me plenty of high profit customers that I was glad to have.

Of course, this only makes sense if you have SOME premium offering and a generous margin. Most real businesses WANT to talk to a salesperson rather than buy online.

If we didn't have dedicated server hosting (thousands per year in revenue), that number never woulda seen the light of day. ;-)
Imitation is the sincerest form of something. Maybe you should have gotten a patent.
I get way more false positives with Yahoo.
> The typical American city now has a homicide rate 10X to 100X that of a Victorian era European city. That's not a typo, 1990's DC had a homicide rate 100X that of London in 1900.

No, it's not a typo, it's an error. DC is not a typical American city and it takes a considerable amount of ignorance (or ?) to claim that it is.

The comparison with the Victorian era is somewhat odd.
DC's crime rate in the 90s was considerably higher than it is now or than it was in the Victorian era. DC was proportionally less populated during the Victorian era than it was in the 90s. (It may have become somewhat smaller since the 90s.)

Yes, US cities became more violent as they grew relative to suburbs and small towns. The big increases in violence happened in the 60s, when the cities were still growing. The shrinkage, where it has occurred, is very recent, since the mid 90s (and violence started dropping soon after).

That said, violence in American cities that have significant violence is highly localized in areas populated by people who, for the most part, can't afford to move out. (That's not to say that folks don't move because of a fear of violence.)

Note that folks who leave cities don't have to move to suburbs. They can move to small towns. They don't. (Suburb isn't a "size", it's a kind of community design. Big cities used to be surrounded by little cities. Those cities were turned into suburbs by folks who prefered that.)

In fact, small towns lost population to suburbs and cities.

FWIW, DC's peak murder rate was less than 1/4th of the murder rate of East Palo Alto during the same time. EPA is a suburb which borders Palo Alto (CA) and Menlo Park. Those two suburbs have a murder between them every 5-7 years. (EPA's murder rate has dropped a lot since its peak and may be under DC's now.)
Wikihow is an SEO play. Only frequent vistors would notice/care to turn off ads. That's why it doesn't affect their revenue much.
How ClickToFlash works
I don't ignore the last 20,000 years, but (for the most part) our genes do. So my argument about cities is basically sound. (See, e.g., http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/04/...) You might be right about suburbia, though; it can be quite isolating.

N.B. I say this only because I myself misspelled it for years (right up until around 2000): "millennia" has double-ell, double-en. Since making this discovery, I've found that "millenni(um|a)" is misspelled ~20% of the time---and the present occurrence makes two just today!
If you use Gtalk, it'll pop up (silently) when you get a new email.
Negroponte must be on crack if he think they can build these for $75 each. They still haven't gotten their current hardware below $100... how they plan to build something significantly more complex for less escapes me.
Django: Impressions from a Non-Web Developer
> As with other things, I'd take the UNIX philosophy here - small, powerful, well-designed tools that can be combined. I'd take a small apartment in the downtown and a small cottage in the middle of nowhere rather than one of the houses above.

Feel free - suburb folks aren't going to criticise your preferences.

However, many folks can't afford both of those things.
No offence intended, but I think the utter irrelevance of this question has taken everyone a little by surprise.

I can kind of see why you are thinking about it, but ultimately this question is entirely unimportant in the great realm of Things That Will Help You Succeed.
http://zetamac.com/arithmetic/

ok, not really the math you want, but still fun!
A commenter on proggit mentioned the Brazilian city of Curitiba as a great example of urban planning, and it's certainly worth reading up on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curitiba#Urban_planning
Some Javascript Tips
Form validation, toggle messages and Clear click
> 1. Even if you completely disagree with the message, Kunstler's delivery alone is worth the 20 minutes.

If that's the standard, let's get Robin Williams, or Brando, reading the phone book, the Boston phone book if class is relevant.

> In my view the suburbs are simply a bad design choice - he explains how they came to be, what are their inherent problems, and why this touches many issues of our society & life quality, well beyond energy consumption.

He doesn't actually explain so much as try to justify his combination of disdain, digust, and pity for folks who live in them, folks who don't have the good sense to flee in horror.
haha. doh! i seem to mix those up a lot when writing. not on porpoise, of course.
Father Of The Bride Speech
Open-source politics breathe fresh air into the Big Smoke [Toronto]
An uncompressed DVD is only 9GB max - 2.5TB is still ~300 movies.
There are a number of things in their favour:

No markup - They don't need to make a profit or even subsidize employee wages
Their costs are local - Shipping and labour for example are going to be extremely low in the local economy

Indian has done similar projects before such as generic pharmaceuticals which they sell to other 2nd and 3rd world companies.
he has a great attitude and seems quite balanced. he scored well and decided to aim higher, and then higher and so on. seems like a good natural tendency.
Branson: Fortunes to be made in downturn
This doesn't account for the fact that most copies of the NYT would likely be read by more than one person. The ad rates take these extra readers into account. How many people do you know who would gladly let others read the news off of their $400 Kindle?
Link to the research article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Can I please please have that 180MB collection? I grew up with a //c and spent several years as a kid collecting //c software. My email is in my profile.
It's not clear what hysteria you're referring to.

Given that remotes trend toward having ten times as many buttons and the corresponding size, complexity and dismal ergonomics--while accomplishing little more--it's not unreasonable or hysterical to refer to it as a good design for the purpose. I suspect it more closely resembles the remote you used 7-9 years ago than most do.

I'm not sure if I believe that anyone has referred to it as "pure genius", though surely your quotes indicate that you are quoting someone and aren't just exaggerating to make a vapid point.
>If that's the standard, let's get Robin Williams, or Brando, reading the phone book

Ultimately it's vote-based site, so it has as much chance as anything. Standard-wise, in a week where the top stories were about Arrington getting spat in the face, I honestly don't think this submission is lowering the average. But, again, it's a matter of taste.
Matt from Metafilter did this years ago.
Raising $40M sounds more like a VC round than an IPO. Not any more, I guess.

The article makes it sound like they totally dominate this industry ... but they only show 59 restaurants in my state of Oregon. They may be the market leader, but it seems like either there's a lot of untapped market or its just not that big.
I've got 500 gigs of just photos I've taken (and I have 2 backup copies == 1.5 TB). Terabytes are going to be passe within 2-3 years. Waiting for the first petabyte drive.
Good riddance to Arrington: Mike, you will not be missed.
Often to build more complex systems is a matter of changing the game entirely.

Alan Kay talks about how the Arch allow craftsmen to write cathedrals with 3 times more volume than the great pyramid and only 1/10 of the mass. (ie they used less rocks). They were using a complete different approach to construction.

So if Negroponte and Mary Lou Jepsen want to get to a laptop of less than 100 usd. They need to reinvent the device. I don't know if it will be $75 or $150... it still will be impressive.
If your adviser thinks highly enough of your work and potential, then he will make suggestions as to how to make it work. On-going collaboration would have to be the go. You don't actually have to sit at his feet to succeed. If on the other hand he isn't encouraging you, then may be it's a case of hero worship and you need to get on with your own work.
And is ~3750 movies, assuming a 700mb dvdrip. ~550 movies, assuming 4.7gb rips (Which can be either standard DVDs with all the audio tracks that you can go and reburn again or 720p rips with one audio track). Which is a bit more impressive.

Just because a DL-DVD can hold ~8.5gb data doesn't mean its all always used.
I think this ignores the fact that the reason some people (like me) buys/subscribes to a paper is because it's... printed on paper. I can get all of the information with my computer or my iPhone, but I enjoy the interaction with actual paper. I wouldn't want to read it on a Kindle.

For the record, I'd be willing to pay substantially more than I currently am for that privilege, but the newspapers don't seem willing to significantly raise their prices.
Everyblock was funded by a Knight Foundation grant, and I believe still are.
I know plenty of audiophiles who swear by foobar now instead of winamp. They want winamp 2.x back, something about AOL ruining winamp with 5.x? I can't remember the exact reasons.
Everyone I know has a hotmail account. It's everyone's throwaway-give-to-spammers account. Those same people have all slowly migrated to using their Gmail address for their most important emails. So if you look only at number of users, Gmail might be behind. But if you were to know the number of active users, I would guess Gmail is way ahead.
This article is so vague. The money quote:

“It doesn’t actually hurt revenues that much anyway. And users love it. So why not do it?”

Sure, if you're only making money from per-click advertising like the Adsense used on Wikihow. If, however, you're selling CPM advertising, wave goodbye to X% of your revenue as X% of users turn it off..!
I learned DCT's without a good math background, so it can be done. I looked at sample code, and compared it to the equations. Eventually it started to make sense. I used Excel to work it all out graphically. Maybe I should post those spreadsheets...

BTW if you just want to write decoders, you're probably better off using a library and just think of it as magic. Why do you need to really understand it anyway? Is that some sort of fetish of yours?
Why guess? :)

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist...

If you're inclined to believe what the companies say about its own services.
Pitifully bitter. Don't bother reading.
If you're in Europe, http://www.7digital.com/ covers several countries and is pretty competitive against iTunes and Amazon. However, I've moved to Spotify mostly which is free :)
Coding To Music - Fun with man pages
Coding To Music - TFMSC: Spend money on the important stuff...and that's it
My friend Tom is a python hacker and works there, I pointed out the thread... maybe he'll chime in.
New users: Welcome.  Please read the site guidelines.
There's been a big spike in new users the last couple days.
Unfortunately it's been visible not only in the traffic stats
but in the character of the comment threads.

New users: we'd appreciate it if you'd please read the site
guidelines before commenting. Most importantly, the principle
that you shouldn't say anything in a comment that you
wouldn't say to someone's face.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News is an experiment. We're
trying to see whether by asking people to be civil we can
avoid the kind of nastiness that anonymity breeds by default.
The experiment has worked so far. And while the new users
may not realize it, this is why they're here. People like it here because one can have a civil conversation.

The principle that you shouldn't say things you wouldn't
say to someone's face means you can't express yourself the
way you might be used to doing on Reddit or Slashdot.
This, for example, would not stand out on either of those
sites,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459250

but it's not cool here.
This is where the community comes in. The TTC has committed to not just make a vehicle-tracking website, but to make the vehicle-tracking data freely available in real time, in a format that other programmers can use. (The TTC's spokesman, Brad Ross, says the service should be working by the end of 2009.) This means that outside programmers can pick up where the TTC leaves off.

Awesome to see this coming to Canada.
I had never heard of this site before. All of these articles look really interesting! There goes my weekend.
I was actually trying out Chandler earlier this week and I found it disappointingly hard to configure, and I'm not normally one to have that be the show stopper (cf occasionally spending 10 hrs figuring out how to build some unixy software and have it interact nicely with some sort of emacs package)
Mutt a la web 2.0 :)
I would agree with the article that django has lowered the entry barrier but thats it. Problem with django is, it is easy to do 70% of the work but rest 30% would make you cry... as long as you have clearly defined problem, like newspaper cms or todo list etc., django is a pain to work with and the django ORM is a toy...
Duplicate submission. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219081

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133453