skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is certainly a theme to their emails.

Critics of this style say that lengthy emails are bad, and that their length does not convey extra information.

I would like point out that there is a email writing style for office use and a different one for customers.
buy or sell?
Exactly what I was thinking. My best guess is that their data is triggering a latent bug in their gzip compressor which causes it to output something that decompresses to 2MB of zeroes.
That's what I thought you'd done, and it was a great idea. Except for dateutil and sh, I hadn't heard of any of these. In response to the 'Python for Humans' post, this was a perfect compendium.

Thanks a million.
Because part-time employees don't get health insurance.
I work for a media monitoring and analysis company. It's a special arrangement, and the research is potentially beneficial to them, so it's probably a one-off.
Hugo! I never really announced it but I accepted an offer with Twilio to join as a mobile engineer. I only interviewed with partner companies. I was going to mention it when I got back from my trip. I think other people got offers from partner companies as well.
So an exec wants to stop potentially embarrassing leaks? What's surprising about this? Also the fact that he worked for the CIA 20 years ago seems disingenuously noted by the author; I don't think anybody expects him to kidnap employees and detain them in torture camps, although I suspect the author is trying to invoke that "secret agent" connotation.
Yes, I guess you're right. I didn't even know about the old Euro zone currencies. I guess SIX Interbank Clearing could pick another unused 'X' code.
Wow, I can't believe I just read someone referencing a Usenet meme thinking it was originated in Digg.

September did never end uh?
My point was that none of the GCs completely avoid full on stop everything, sweep and compact all the things GC cycles. They will all do this if they are in a position where they think the heap will be exhausted (specifically when a concurrent mode failure occurs). There really isn't anything else a GC can do in this situation other than throw an OOM exception. Thus any time your pushing the heap to its limits, regardless of what GC you use, you will see complete GC sweeps of the old generation.

If you want stricter failure requirements use GCTimeLimit and GCHeapFreeLimit. By default the JVM with throw an OOM error if it spends 98% of execution time in the GC and frees only 2% of the memory, GCTimeLimit and GCHeapFreeLimit switches allow this these values to be changed. Also only the 'stop the world' portions of a collection apply to the execution time limit, concurrent phases do not. So if you managed to keep the collector in concurrent mode (by cranking up the duty cycle for example) then only the 2 mini-pauses will count even if the concurrent portion were now pegging a CPU core at 100%.
link to android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bliss.simo...
I just came back from a 9 month break.

After being in the Valley since the dot-com boom, and going through the bust, and other personal issues, I was pretty burnt out, suffering from stress-related health issues, and after a couple of health scares, decided enough was enough.

I quit my job amicably, and spent 2012 just "doing my own thing". This entailed spending time on small, frivolous projects that I normally wouldn't have had time to pursue, and learning things that might help me in my career later on. I also spent a lot of time cooking dinner for my wife.

I don't spend a lot of money in general, but even so, I didn't curtail my spending at all, so I ate through a big chunk of my savings. I didn't care, and my wife and I even went on several trips. Obviously, having a working spouse helps, but one thing you learn after suffering through a few health scares is that money will come and go, but you're only young once, and your health (physical and mental) is pretty much the most important thing you have.

I didn't have any vast goals like creating a startup, or even creating my own iPhone app. I ended up not doing a lot except learn, but I really did feel refreshed and more important, I felt a lot better about myself and about programming in general. I spent 6-7 days a week, 6-10 hrs a day programming and learning, so I didn't waste any time at all, but didn't feel stressed out once. I even started working out again, although I didn't hit any of my weight targets.

After about 9 months, I figured it was time to get back to the world of the gainfully employed. Thankfully, no one cared that I took the time off, and I was able to get a new job at a company that I really am excited about within a few weeks.
All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (2005)
I did a PhD and a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with my current company, but this is my first proper research job.
Trying to run a newly released OS on a 3 year old machine? Hey, let's try running Windows 8 on a Commodore 64, I'm sure some people still have those around. Sure Microsoft has made it affordable but they also have a minimum required hardware spec. Ignore it if you like but don't expect it to work on out of date equipment. That's just generally bad advice.
One I'd like to add is Docopt: http://docopt.org/ and https://github.com/docopt/docopt

It makes it very simple and intuitive to build command line apps.
Think of this as a list of companies that investors or acquirers are/were willing to pay $1b+ for.

If you want companies that have justified their valuation based on past profits, you will need to go to older dates.

eg 1998: OpenTable, Google, Rackspace, PayPal.
Bokeh: an implementation of Grammar of Graphics for Python
Lots of Australian ISPs route to Asia via the US. So it's a coinflip as to whether any particular customer will see much better pings, or much worse pings, if you host in Singapore/Tokyo.
When I scrolled through the list of the ~40 marked as attending, I thought about how useless that list was.

I wonder when Meetup is going to start suggesting events based on the people who are going. I can imagine they have a massive amount of data, with a huge graph of connections behind it. I can recall when joining it sucked about 98,000 parameters from my Facebook profile into it.

It's trivial to show me things I might enjoy based on a few tags, like, "oh you like ruby so you might like this hackathon on friday" I'd love it if they put that data they've got on me to use, however, and started to suggest things like "hey it looks like you and about 15 people attending this nuclear fusion discussion would really get along, want to learn more??"

I think the value of meetup's in general is the people that go and the social interaction, not necessarily the topic at hand. I'd even go to a web programming with QBASIC meetup (get it, goto, haha) if I knew that there were some cool people there that I might want to talk to.

On second thought, a QBASIC web programming meetup would be a good time no matter what.
What kind of performance benchmarks are you looking for? There used to be some memory leaks in xpyb (the X interface qtile uses), but 1.3.1 addresses most of those I believe.

Other than that, I'm not sure anyone has ever reported any performance problems.
The Sign: The unusual way I realized I should leave my job to launch a startup
Personal Knowledge database
I was making a point that you're using the cloud if you're doing remote backup, with point 1.
How BigTable DBs (Cassandra, HBase) work
I'll just leave this here.

http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
I'm currently taking a break from working. This year, I've been a contract developer, which has been very lucrative because I charge a very high hourly rate. I can now afford to take the next few years off, depending on what city I move to of course. Thing is, for my whole professional life, I've been a workaholic. I used to think that it was fine for me to work so much because I just love programming so much, but I think all those 60 hour weeks gradually wore me down. I think I'm at the point now where I have to force myself to chill out for a while and develop other interests in my life besides coding. So, that's just what I'm going to do.

Luckily, I don't have children or a mortgage, but I do have a health problem that requires me to maintain health insurance, which I pay for myself.
That is not necessarily nonsense, but it depends on the speakers.

Digital clipping is one of the worst things you can do to speakers with a separate high frequency driver - it radically changes the power distribution due to the additional frequencies generated by square wave clipping[1]. This can overload and burn out the driver (depending on its design). Even expensive speakers may not have sufficient protection, or the "conservative" ratings may be not adequate.

I don't know if any laptops come with 2-way (or better) speakers, but lots of computers are connected to such.

[1] http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scots_Guide/audio/clippi...
It feels like this list is somewhat invalid, given the fact the all companies values are being measured at different points during their lives.
"If you actually find work satisfying and care about the results, then I think it often makes sense to devote as much time as possible without causing yourself to stop enjoying it or become unproductive."
But would you still work (doing the same thing) if you had 100000000$?

"If I worked less, I'd want to spend the extra free time doing something important."
Why do you focus on doing important things and not what-you-like-things?
I agree with Toshio, well written TDD is the best low level spec you can get, and it is always up to date.
For python people, I found this 30 min talk by Ned Batchelder extremely helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHbC6udIqc
The 'Dropbox Effect' Is A Myth
Could you elaborate on why yours is much better? I'm willing to make the switch... However how is your method any better?
It's not really necessary to second you, but I'd like to add that "code as data" is more real in Racket than is CL since code is not just the AST, it's also (as you point out) location and more importantly, context. In this setting Racket' syntax objects are more "code as data" than "code as sexp" as it is in CL will ever be.
In iTunes in the music view (which shows you the full library), you can just order by any key, also by the added-date. Isn't that what you want? Do other complex players not have similar support?

In this project, there is no such view yet so there is no way. But it is easily possible to add such criteria to the intelligent queuing algorithm which will have the effect that new songs gets selected more likely.
Being multi-threaded is a relatively recent thing for Erlang. And IIRC, it only starts enough of them to cover all the system cores.

It has preemptive multitasking for its "processes", but seeing as how those are all in the same Unix process, and time is allocated to them via Erlang's own virtual machine, calling out to something in C that blocks would be a problem for Erlang.

Erlang, at a basic level, is event based, and this kind of protection is necessary.
Relevant: I think you’re all fucking mad. Deranged. From "A Short Lesson in Perspective. http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-p...

Your perspective is just that: a perspective. When his body changes (for the worse) so does his perspective.
Very few tram stops in Zurich have any kind of analog clock. And I'd bet that most of those clocks don't have the red second hand, which is the most distinctive feature of the railway clock.
Novel idea for something you would see on an infomercial or skymall, but no tech savvy person would ever purchase one because

(1) Tech people already know how to block ads.

(2) The idea of having a random linux box on your network that has access to all of your internet traffic, and can be compromised as well as a general bottleneck isn't the most comfortable of thoughts.
U.S. Oil Output to Overtake Saudi Arabia’s by 2020
I'd probably go back to perl, and in fact I've back-ported some scripts from ruby (part shell, part ruby).

Issue with shell scripts: commands have different options on BSD vs Linux. e.g. date. If I use coreutils packages, I don't know if other users (or my later installs) will have the "g" prefix.

Issue with ruby (I am a rubyist): 1.9 has broken most of my scripts due to the unicode string thing. Some scripts run as both a cronjob which runs a stock 1.8 ruby, and interactive (1.9) so that results in errors with string parsing.

Perl 5.x has remained the same over the years. Just comment your code enough. There's a perl power tools (ppt) project somewhere on sourceforge that might interest you. Python should be fine, too. I'll investigate these 2 shells you've mentioned.

Edit: homebrew supports scsh. you can try installing the brew. Had a look at both. Both are lispy. What is the benefit of something like scsh for scripting over zsh/bash ?
I'm still seeing, on January 11th this button will change the world on main page? is there any way I can navigate into the main site folks?

Thanks.
Unit testing in Windows Phone 8 – Asynchronous operations and mocking
Perhaps the gentleman has skills in more prosaic areas of security work, like cross referencing evidence, attention to detail and good old fashioned police work.

Seriously: if CISCO is going off the rails, just find somewhere else to work...
Secho — The ultimate echo, actually useful, but no one wants it.
Sounds like a good use of a VP's time. Hunt down unhappy employees and lower morale instead of working on their products.
Introducing Sprint.ly 1.0
3SheetsResearch - Web usability research on drunk users
I find it's a bit of a distraction. I think I know what's going on, but I'm not 100% sure.
Hello,

I'm in VA (Fairfax) and would be interested to participate probably not tomorrow as I'm busy. But I honestly don't feel like driving just for happy hour, I'm very social but I'd rather come and discuss/discover a topic. I'll be happy to present something around security (I work in security research in different DARPA project). I believe this would create connection based on technical interest rather than social affinity.
Most windows are poorly placed to collect sunlight. Anything that's not sloped, southern facing, and shade free is going to be a lost cause unless this ridiculously cheap.
GitCanary: a Node Knockout entry that analyzes technical debt on github
I assume you mean foobar2000?

http://www.foobar2000.org/
I have an app written in ASP.NET MVC with an API. Would like to either convert it into, say, RoR (or Python/Django/whatever if you prefer). Or, write a separate web app that uses the existing API.

To explain further, I had the app built in ASP.NET and find I don't give it enough love because I'm a mac-using product person (design and front-end dev). But it's a nice app that has some potential. There's an iOS app in existence that utilises the API.

Would be nice to have a web-app to complement it that we could work on in unison perhaps. It probably won't amount to anything more than a side project, but I've always found it enjoyable to work on.

My twitter is @tomcavill if you'd like more details.
GC is the only server side thing in this case.
Just to save anyone else bothering to check, 2M of nulls gzips to almost exactly 2k. Easy to imagine with compression how you could miss that, although it is still a bit embarrassing.
Reddit Considering Accepting Bitcoin
Sure, an application that inserts into HTML can handle what you speak of, but that doesn't address my questions about the statement of CSS being unsuitable for the task of styles.

Sorry, but inline styling is still CSS. I know that CSS standing for "cascading style sheets" may cause confusion but all styling for an HTML document is done with CSS. Even the default styles a browser uses on an otherwise "unstyled" document is based on CSS. You can insert styles directly into an HTML element with Javascript and you are still using CSS.

But if you start using such an application to insert your CSS directly into HTML then I'm willing to bet you are due for a headache in the future. There are several reasons why inserting CSS inline is a bad idea. First, you are seriously duplicating your code since you have no class structure to work with. Second, you've just given up pseudo classes. Third, good luck maintaining that code, especially if you eventually stop using the program that created this code in the first place. I fail to see how that's easier.

"all otherwise unstyled text boxes have a grey background" - those "unstyled" text boxes are now "styled", you seem to be repeating the statement that prompted my response in that somehow CSS is not the answer but then you provide an example that uses CSS.
Show HN: I made a Windows Phone game
Use your quick reflexes, amazing tapping skills, and ultimate judgement to survive each of 70+ levels, collecting stars and earning medals while you're at it!

+Navigate through all 3 zones with 70+ increasingly challenging levels
+Collect up to 3 stars per level to be awarded with coveted medals
+Use your skills to avoid 3+ types of obstacles, and conquer tricky level designs
+Challenge yourself with Warp Drive mode, moving at 1.5x your normal speed
+Master your ship, and become the only captain to survive this insane obstacle course

What I really tried to do this time was make a game that was of high enough quality to justify putting a price tag on it.
The game is $1.29, but there's a free trial to play the first 10 levels.
> Internet Explorer uses processes but may opt to pack more than one tab into a single process to reduce system load by too many processes.

What is it about having too many processes that causes extra system load?
A bit of noodling shows people having this (or something similar) in 2009.

(http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcust...)

195,000 blank lines? Oh you kidder, Microsoft!
(https://padavis.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/sharepoint-designer...)
That's well done.

You can split the product intro email and the personal intro from the CEO email, by the way. Stagger the CEO email by a bit and deliver it as text only, and many users will perceive it as if the CEO had just mailed them personally.

e.g.

Hiya,

I saw you signed up for the free trial the other day. My name is Patrick and I'm the founder of the company. Drop me an email any time if you have a question or need anything.

I know one guy who puts "Sent from my iPhone" on it but that strikes me as being more aggressive than I'd care to do. (If you don't like the "I saw you signed up for" verbiage then a) email this email to yourself, rather than to them, and b) copy/paste the text into a new email to the email address called out at the top. Then everything is literally true again.
This issue has been on my mind quite a bit recently. There's significant parts of my life that are not going great, but I have nobody to blame for that other than myself, and with some willpower those areas will improve.

Other than that, though, my life seems like a ridiculous streak of luck. I could go into detail, but suffice to say that serendipity is a running theme.

Now of course part of it is coming from a (relatively) stable family, being white and educated. I am aware of that.

But compared to others just like me, on paper anyways, I still have a ridiculously good life.

I truly believe a lot of that has to do with expectations, and the perspective you choose to have. I don't think it has much to do with personality. By nature I worry a lot, and I tend to be depressed and pessimistic.

For me, it's the difference between reacting and responding. When I 'react', it is a passive/automatic action following some event, some intrusion, something unexpected. I was not prepared for this event, so my reaction is often not optimal, in hindsight.

When I respond, the actual responds might be equally 'automatic', but it is based on a more generic kind of preparation, and leads to better results. In hindsight, it seems like I knew what was going to happen.

I have, through circumstance, spent most of my life with a lot of uncertainty, so I naturally developed skills that allow me to 'respond'. And as a result, many good things came about because I 'responded' correctly, based on some trained principle or perspective. And many bad things didn't impact me as much, because I feel like most of my life is improvisation anyways.
Yes, given a design rate of true positives or negatives, and a cost for false positives and false negatives, you can pick the optimal operating point. It will be optimal in the sense of minimizing average cost when the incoming rate equals the rate you designed for. You'll get the exact same answer as a "Bayesian" who uses conditional probability to calculate the same thing and whose prior equals the design rate. I gave a worked-out example in my original post ("If you want to decide whether to take action...").

Sure, it is generalizable -- we use ROC curves for radar, medical imaging, almost any diagnostic test...
You're right, it would have to be a new syntax.
I wrote a nice long response to this, but HN apparently ate my comment :-(. Here's a second try.

> can someone explain what the advantage of a tiling wm is? here people talk about not using the mouse, but i don't use the mouse with kde most of the time (maybe i am already "tiling" as as i have my xterm and browser side-by-side, or an ide window that's full screen, and simply alt-tab).

Sure. Need your web browser? Mod-W. Need your chat client? Mod-C. Need your terminal? Mod-Enter. Need to close this window? Mod-X. Need this window to be full screen instead of side by side (or any other layout you've defined)? Mod-L. Have you ever spent more than 10 seconds fiddling with gimp's multi window design? Problem solved with a tiling WM.

There's another advantage which isn't necessarily a tiling WM specific thing, although it is typically only implemented by tiling window managers. Your windows are grouped by screen, not by screen set. This means you can have your web browser on screen 1 and your terminal on screen 2. You read the tutorial from screen 1, get an error on screen 2, bring up IRC on screen 1, paste something in, talk to someone, get your error fixed, then switch back to the tutorial. Most traditional window managers (compiz/beryl is/were a notable examples) don't have screen independence, so you need a terminal for each viewport.

> also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible, with things like huge clocks, apparently because of horizontal/vertical stacking. are there any that are flexible enough to look attractive?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some people think simplicity is beauty. That said: there was a fantastic talk that Matt Harrison gave about qtile at pycon a few years ago. He ran the test suite, which uses xclock as a window to test things. Hopefully that's not what you're basing your conclusions on.

> finally, can i still use applications like amarok (the kde music player) in a tiling window manager? what about all the kde infrastructure for sound management (phonon etc) that amarok depends on? what starts that? does the tiling window manager run in kde?

Yep, they all work fine. I use clementine as my media player on a daily basis. I use a custom X session to start qtile and I do a few other things beforehand, but you can run it directly if you want, or start it within some other DE.

> another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate windows from a vm?

A tiling WM doesn't change how you interact with your software, just how you interact with your windows. Thus, you get one big window, same as you always did. I think qemu allows you to run apps in their own window, though I've never tried it.