skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Don't spend a single moment in life doing something you don't want to do.

This advice or its cousins are found in many places around here and, well, I have a bad feeling about it. Is it not the epitome of egoism?

Is it possible to share a house with friends, or a spouse, or your kids, without ever "doing something you don't want to do"?

And in professional life, if you are a janitor, do you "want" to clean this toilets again? If you are a coder, you will do your share of boring work because you are in a team, right? And if you are a Big Boss, do you really want to fire this poor guy who is no fit here, will be no fit in no company you can think of, and has had already his content of shit on the head?

Even a painter, or a writer, or a comics guy like Mr Oatmeal have to do sometimes some things they do not "want" to do, professionally

The only people who really can avoid doing anything they do not want to do for a long period of time are the movie superstars and kids of some people of power. I do not think they represent a suitable ideal of life, and I do not think they are more happy than more normal poeple, quite the opposite in fact.

Then there are a few short-lived exceptions, a little slice of a life that is mostly free from hassles of any sort. I experienced this state during a few months myself: I got fired from a boring job, so I had the nice French wellfare and got 70% income for nothing. I also broke with my gf. At that time nobody counted in my life, I could and I did take risks, like getting involved in knife fight. I remember the only thing I did that I did not want to do was to take the train and join my parents to meet my grand-parents. for some important occasion. I actually had to wake up early and shave... But that's not real life, that's a short and egoistic period of my life. It has been somewhat useful in build my experience, but I'd not say I was happy. And most important is I would not make a general advice out of it. Only very few people in the world are lucky enough to find themselves with no professional or familial bounds and enough money to live free-wheeling for some month.

Or maybe the split is on another line: If young Americans can claim to never do what they do not want to do, maybe it is because they use autosuggestion, also known as The Coué method* , to make themselves "want" to do what they really just "have" to do. Using autosuggestion, I could proactively "want" to clean my toddler's diapers, or smile candidly and listen to this friend's spouse, while at the same time, deep in my heart, knowing she is really the boringest person in the world and I'd rather lick the streets than listen to her blabla (but I really like this friend, would not like to lose him...)

So yes, with autosuggestion, it is possible to force oneself to love to do what we hate to do, and it is most likely what many people do. But then, you'd have to balance carefully, because it is cheating, it is lying to oneself, and pushed too far it can become a poison, I guess.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cou%C3%A9#The_Cou.C3...
Exactly, I'm a student at waterloo, and there were over 900 job postings for Software/Computer engineers. It's pretty much impossible for a student to read through every one, so you have to make sure yours stands out.
Go doesn't have macros, as they're a whole other can of worms, so the simplification one might use in C doesn't apply to Go. :-)

Go has great support for closures, so you tend to use function types more often (or perhaps just more naturally) than in C.

It is just a matter of getting used to it. I switch back and forth between Go and other languages, and it doesn't bother me. (The thing that does get me is forgetting to use semicolons in other languages.)
HN has voting. Twitter is more like the New page on HN on reddit, which are horrible.
Be sure to use the recently released TopoJSON world map, though it doesn't have comprehensive islands.

http://bl.ocks.org/4180634

TopoJSON is a variant of GeoJSON that supports shape simplification, map coloring, cartograms and other topology-related features.

https://github.com/mbostock/topojson

For small geographic features like tiny islands, try the new d3.geo.tile plugin with a high-resolution tileset.

http://bl.ocks.org/4162068
https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins/tree/master/geo/tile

TileMill can create tilesets from shapefiles and other formats. It can export GeoJSON for D3 too.

http://mapbox.com/tilemill/

More examples:

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock
http://bl.ocks.org/jasondavies
http://bl.ocks.org/tmcw
Yup. People are ignorant of history and therefore of the need for privacy rights. Thankfully encryption doesn't yet depend on the public not being ignorant and politicans not being corrupt.
That's not how it really works out at Heroku. Our managers and vibe team really push us all to take at least a few weeks (3-4) off per year at a minimum. That's important because we all love our work so much that we work hard the rest of the time.
Google 'Room 641A', that's all you need to know...
I was in the batch with dillonforrest. Like him, I was a beginner. The only code I had written was in MATLAB. I am not sure if I am a rare exception or not, but your level of programming knowledge should not deter you from applying. If you can code FizzBuzz and want to improve, you should apply!
You mean it cannot be expressed using Go's (non-existent) preprocessor. I am relatively confident that you'd be able to express it in Go (perhaps sacrificing speed, in the process).
Ah, thank you very much. A google for "Naris" (as it is spelled in the RT article) isn't very helpful.

Your logic is definitely sound. It's just mind boggling to me that anyone could possibly be logging everything thrown through every port. Every single day. Just, wow.
Opportunity rover find clay hinting at ancient life bearing water
There's two senses of "scale:" large software, or software running with large data sets. The article uses the first notion: "at scale, for large programs with large numbers of dependencies, with large teams of programmers working on them."

So Go was designed for large software systems, and maybe it's really good at those things. Or maybe not, because nobody's written one yet. The article says so: "We don't have enough experience yet, especially with big programs." So Go is unproven in this way.

Speculatively, my guess is that it won't be able to "at scale" its current state. For example, Go errors out with unused variables, imports, or indeed for all warnings. Imagine trying to make a piece of software like WebKit or LLVM compile on all of the platforms it supports, with all of the compilers they support, without introducing a single warning (or extraneous header or unused variable) on any of them. It would be a maintenance nightmare. You need some flexibility - demanding perfect hygiene for every cell on an NxM matrix of supported platforms is infeasible.

In the other sense of scale - large data sets - Go apparently works well enough to be involved in YouTube. That's cool and is a credit to it.
Sorry, forgot to explain. 3+2 means "3 weeks accrued over the year and usable anytime, 2 weeks of company-wide break (specifically the weeks of thanksgiving and christmas)". The decision to do a company-wide break probably deserves a thread of its own. The short version is that it works great.
Show HN: Book Cheaply - Don't buy textbooks you don't need (side project)
In short, Rate My Professor for books.

http://www.bookcheaply.com/

As a college student I bought many textbooks that I never used. I could have saved significant amounts of money if I had some sort of website where I could find out if the book was necessary for my courses. Out of that frustration, Book Cheaply was born.

I currently only have two schools, Grand Valley State University(GVSU) and Grand Rapids Community College(GRCC). I'm already starting to rank pretty high on Google for queries like: <instructor name> gvsu, or <instructor name> <some course> gvsu, which makes me feel pretty good. I also just got my first unsolicited reviews (4!) on Book Cheaply today.

That being said, my design is pretty bad. I'm a developer with zero design chops, so I just tried to make how to use the site as obvious as possible. It's also hosted on an underpowered shared vps on DreamHost.

Any feedback would be appreciated and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thanks!
You can't install a certificate to enable your Chrome to one-click install a user.js from apple.com or Mozilla.org, but you can install extensions from Google.com. That is not an open web.
love it. would love to see caricatures made of people we know in this.
When you're dealing with a web cache, don't you want to explicitly know whether your cache contents are in memory or on disk, and be able to fine-tune that?

The point of this article is that you think you want to control that, but you actually don't. The kernel can probably do a fine job. (Of course, PHK develops the kernel, so when it doesn't do what he wants he can just change it. Many others are not so lucky.) PHK is telling normal programmers to follow the rules; extraordinary ninja rockstar programmers are smart enough to know when to break the rules. If you want extremely high performance you should manage everything yourself, but this is so difficult to do right that documenting how to do it would just encourage people to shoot themselves in the foot.

On a practical note, which is faster, HAProxy or Varnish?
Microsoft opens Socl to public - new social network
Or you could just click this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

(In a nutshell: "Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, beginning in 2003, and exposed in 2006. [...] It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic [...] contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.")
This advice comes up very often when people write about re-evaluating their lives. (Also, this retort comes up very often when people read what those people wrote. I don't disagree with your logic, per se...)

I think you're right, but the author probably did not mean the advice as literally as you're reading it. You're interpreting the advice as a call for egoism [0]; selfishness to the point of being unwise. I think that when people write this, they're actually writing a call for hedonism[1].

Hedonism is different from egoism. Hedonism, the way I see it, is realizing that our existence is ultimately meaningless, and that we should optimize for our own happiness (and well-being) rather than any other metric; all metrics are meaningless, so we might as well stick to what makes us happy. In actionable terms, embracing hedonism means realizing that you should aim towards doing things that make you happy, and that this aim should be your guiding force (at every "single moment in life"). This doesn't mean that you should be happy every single moment; it means you should be optimizing for happiness every single moment. (To use your examples: a spouse knows that compromising will make them happier overall; a janitor knows that although his/her life aren't perfect, doing this is what will lead to his/her life improving (hopefully) or at least keeping them happier.)

Anyway, that's the way I understand this type of advice, and I appreciate the occasional reminders. (Also, I don't actually know much about philosophy, so I might be misusing terminology here; if so, please correct me!)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_egoism (maybe?)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism
Aaargh! Physicists! Again!
Yes, this is old news, but we need a reminder every now and then about how intrusive our government has become.
i didn't get the idea behind this.
can someone explain?
I am reminded of the famous quote "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with backup tapes."
One of my first thoughts was: what will the effects of the reduced gravity be on the plants? Will they still be able to grow successfully?
ST is just a prettified C that's safe and well-typed. If you want to write C in Haskell that's fine, but you're not doing functional programming.

This is always the user/theorist divide. I'm not saying that sometimes ST isn't necessary, but it should always be the smallest necessary imperative subset.

By the way, the authors of the ST monad make this same point (read the paper). ST is (by necessity) always single threaded. It ruins modularity by not being able to interact with any non-ST code. In short, it's not functional.

Anyway, theorists will continue to do interesting things with Coq and whether or you think it's sufficient as a "programming language," it's useful to us.
I dont think this is based on interactions. My top person is my boyfriend, and he rarely comments/likes on my profile, but he does check it everyday.

www.katantonio.com
This. If you want to make money fast on the app store, don't make apps for the app store. Make apps for other people. That being said, you have to be selective with your clients otherwise it's miserable.

If you are patient, and ok with making money slowly over time, then there is still a long tail on the store you can make money with. It's a much more pleasant way to make money, but unless you get lucky you'll make less of it this way (most likely).
A news app for JavaScript developers build with Telescope and Meteor
I know Telescope form Hacker News last time:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840032

Then I create Dot-js.com with Telescope in a weekend.
Am I correct in saying that this is using the technology Google acquired from Sparrow? The swipe-left bar in particular looks very much like the swipe-left bar in Sparrow.
Check out my instructions: katantonio.com
If you have overcommit disabled and a process that is using most of your RAM (ahem, Firefox) wants to fork+exec, you will need a large amount of swap. This is not a problem for most Linux users since they run with overcommit on, but it could be a problem on more rigorous OSes. Just one of those dark corners that people don't think about.
Could someone explain to a market novice what the rationale would be for this? I thought buybacks were a way of delivering value back to existing shareholders, but why take on debt to do that?
Another thing that is annoying about it is the fuzzy text when you zoom in. They must be using web views in a non standard way because the built in HTML viewer usually re-renders text as you zoom.
I'd bet this was to give them time to get the entire Project Glass demo ready. Sergey's baby.
401(k)/Career Tips that could put $ Millions to your Retirement
Star wars fans build full size Millenium Falcon
The point is: you still have to make a conscious move to prevent memory overload.
Given the number of tickets available (~4K I think) and the something like 1k+ hits/sec they had, the tickets would have been gone in a few seconds if the site had held up, not in minutes or hours.
Ask HNs: Colemak for mobile?
So if I have my own server, with my own self-signed certificate, the government can still decrypt my traffic easily?
The Verge had some criticisms about the app as well: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/4/3728548/gmail-2-0-ios-hand...
So what would happen if you took 20 weeks off? 8 weeks? Where's the cutoff?
It's been a while since I've used Java too, but I don't remember it requiring try..catch around ALL code. If you don't catch immediately, it defers the error to somewhere up the stack. This is what I meant by "ignoring" exceptions being the default behavior.
From a previous thread under a submission from RT:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247829

"> The source of the submitted article, rt.com, is not known for careful journalism.

"Understatement of the year."
Great job, Jeff!
Infographic: Project Management Challenges and Complaints
Any specific reason why you need this? Can you explain the use case?
It's because the foldable model is printed out on a single side and it's probably going to be a pain in the ass to have users print 2-sided with lines on the other.
Your anecdote doesn't escape the fact that we are consuming more and more physical things (re-read the OP).

Also, real books don't have a 12 month upgrade cycle.
I know the point you're making because we struggle with something similar in a different industry. I think we've already seen the "phase out" of small developers in the App Store; rarely if ever does an indie company make it into the top 25 charts or, more importantly, the Spotlight app section. I don't really anticipate it becoming much worse than this because the submission process is mostly effective at weeding out the fart apps and broken software that often makes it into something like the Android store, and apps at the bottom are naturally hidden from the end user anyway.

I think the reason Apple can continue to allow mediocrity into the store is because those apps don't actually reach many end users and they pad those 700k apps and 25 mil songs vanity metrics. This is opposite someone like Groupon or a high end designer brand, where exclusivity is a major factor and driver. The only parts of the App store where exclusivity is a factor are the top lists and the spotlight section, which as I mentioned above have largely excluded small developers for a long time.
Sigh. I keep seeing comments like these whenever such article is posted. But there are 2 problems with that mentality:

1) Just because we the HN readers and Reddit readers, and other people who take an active interest in either being up to date with this sort of stuff, know about this, doesn't mean that population at large either a) knows about it, b) believes it (this sort of stuff sounds too much like conspiracy theories, even if it's real in this case).

2) Just because there were some news about it a few years ago, and there was like a mini-outrage for like a week, and then nothing really happened, doesn't mean we should stop talking about it now, and just let them continue doing it. The point is to keep raising awareness, and incite people to fight for their rights, and demand answers from NSA and the administration. More than that - demand change.
You seem to be setting up a false dichotomy between using the ST monad and writing pointfree code ("functions as a composition of other functions, never mentioning the actual arguments they will be applied to"). But you can write non-pointfree code that doesn't use the ST monad, and you can write pointfree that does use it. They're unrelated.
Just testing on my phone, I get the feeling the newsletter this OP has screenshotted has set it's own padding/margins as well, exacerbating the problem. Still, it should have been quite clear when they were designing it that two margins for a 240px width screen is overkill.

However, the inbox screen isn't so spaced out, and relatively condensed. Thankfully
How does this compare to the current practices in other countries? Are there whistleblowers elsewhere whose revelations are reported on in reliable press sources?

(I used to live in a country that was then ruled by a dictatorship, and I am aware of how people behave under such rule. That country now has a free press and free, contested elections for the national leadership.)
For memcached, it doesn't look you'd get much in terms of features -- you'd have to benchmark for speed of the library. Worse, it would appear you would lose Multi-get Escalation, which could be substantial for a lot of workloads.
i love this confluence guy
There are ways to be more clever than just mmap() + madvise() to improve performance in cases that might block (e.g. mincore() and some other system interfaces) but the further down that road you go the less portable and more complicated the implementation becomes.

In short, mmap() and friends were designed for a world where context-switching (e.g. multithread or multiprocess) is a great idea. Unfortunately, context-switching has become extraordinarily expensive for a lot of server software which makes multithreading a less palatable option.

These days, you want (1) native async I/O, (2) strict control of cache replacement behavior, (3) strict control of I/O scheduling, (4) minimal context-switching, and (5) memory locality control. On Linux, this means DIRECT_IO, io_submit, managing your own physical cache RAM, and locking one thread to every core (ignoring hyperthreads for the moment). This is more complicated to implement because there is not a simple, portable interface like mmap() widely available but it is also much more efficient and performant when done correctly. To make matters worse, some useful interfaces (like io_submit) are poorly documented.

But yes, if you build your own memory and swapping subsystem directly on top of the native interfaces, and use threads as an abstraction of a core rather than a swappable context, you can build very efficient server engines that stall minimally on I/O. (Note: even using io_submit and IO_DIRECT for async disk access, there are conditions that can cause blocking. They are just much rarer and easier to manage than mmap().)
Since each thread is an actual kernel thread, this will limit the concurrent connections to the maximum number of threads a kernel can handle which isn't that high.
Swapping debt for equity allows Intel to benefit from the interest tax shields from debt, which raises the enterprise value of the firm, assuming that default risk does not disproportionately rise.
So does the Westboro Baptist Church. Just because someone talks about something doesn't make it the truth.
Hate to say it, but I have a chembio degree and find the viewpoint that cancer cells use reactivated genes to do what they do brilliant. When cancer starts spreading it is called metastasizing. Often this spreading uses complex functionality of other types of cells like fibroblasts, which tear down and recreate the extra-cellular matrix, or like white blood cells which can squeeze through and move around like an amoeba.

Evolution, and cancer causing mutations that result in a successful cancer, often just randomly breaks and fixes functionality like this and it happens to work. The linked critique has one point where it says "polished exteriors of urbane and civilized modern cells" which is complete nonsense. Modern cells are full of broken crap. Heck, enormous portions are just dropped into the genome from viruses and aren't even human. He really showed his ignorance at that point.
Entertainment, lifestyle, and games.
Seems like a misleading title to me. "Disney, ​Electronic Arts, Gameloft, Glu, Kabam, Rovio, Storm8, and Zynga," employ many developers; certainly more than 25.
Take it from the point of view of Earnings Per Share (EPS).

The company thinks that reducing the number of shares can be accomplished at a price that is low, and that the interest on the loan to reduce the shares won't lower EPS. The shareholders should be (nominally) happy, because they are getting an earning income stream that is going to be higher in the future.

Now as an aside: Corporations famously mistime buying back shares, and management is usually trying to feather their nest rather than deliver long term value, so they typically make poor decisions on buybacks.
Go's pretty damn fast now. It's fast enough that we've got physicists writing simulations in it. It's fast enough that a lot of the people I know (systems and HPC guys) just write in Go unless they have to write in anything else. I've personally used it to write cluster management tools, a cpu-intensive simulation, a modem emulator, and a decent handful of servers.

If nothing else, it's so easy to do concurrency that I end up hiding a lot of slowness.