skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to a "big box" type gym in January 2012 and hired a staff trainer. I told her that I wanted to lose about 20 lb, get stronger, and start running in mud runs. She started me off with basic body circuit training, working with her once a week and doing 3-5 more workouts the rest of the days. During this period I also watched my calorie intake. By May, I reached my goal on all three accounts, so she switched me to a routine more focused on free weights. Around October, she signed me up with a "specialist": a USAW certified coach that worked outside the "big box" gym, to do some Olympic weightlifting. This was a great experience. Not only did I get a lot stronger, leaner and got a lot more endurance, but I also learned a lot. The best part for me was that I did not have to focus on any one type of exercise: I did not gain 50 lb of muscle and lose all my flexibility, and I did not lose all my muscle mass by focusing solely on cardio. I learned the proper form for doing back squats, clean & jerks, and snatches, and as of a month ago, I can run a 6 minute mile.

My point with all that is that a traditional gym and a staff trainer can work, provided the trainer knows what she is doing. Everybody is different. I have no particular athletic talent; my only advantage is that I am relatively young. However, what I have is time. There are 168 hours in a week. Devoting 5 of them to fitness is not a big deal. For me, finally getting a professional to train me was what I needed. This may work for others as well.

Edit: by the way, getting a trainer to work with you once a week is fairly expensive. I got a raise at the beginning of 2012 and thought that getting a trainer would be a wise way to spend that money. I do not regret a penny I spent. Looking back, the alternatives I considered (getting a loan on a new car, a new computer, etc.) would not have made me as happy as getting more fit than I ever was in my life up to this point.
I wish you emphasized make extremely fair initial offers as much as "Never Make Counter offers".
There's also a simple way to modify the URL once the paywall kicks in after you've viewed the total number of free articles for the month. Despite the workarounds, I'm still one of the people that pays for the content.
I don't know how good Heartbeat is these days. I'm just going based on our experience back then and GitHub's stated experience now.

We (in a new place) use our own fail over code now, but we're running databases instead of file servers -- and you usually don't want to STONITH a database.

For file servers we use Gluster, and it works great for us (I'm sure there are reasons GitHub are doing active-passive DRBD) and you don't need STONITH since it's shared-nothing.
Goes to show that content is king and people will pay for content they want or think they need.
I think a better solution for controlling privacy on the Internet is - not using the Internet.

And by that I mean that it seems very hard to make anything private on the Internet, and it's becoming increasingly harder, instead of easier.

I think there's opportunity here for start-ups to solve this problem to allow you to better control privacy on the Internet. And when I say controlling privacy on the Internet, I mean keeping it private from the company itself, the users you don't want to share with, and government, too.
Yes, I'm aware of that, which is why I mentioned "huge amounts of fat and sugar" combined with 0 exercise. I know that the combination of those things does not lead to being fit (but the headline tells me that's a lie! so maybe that will lead to me being fit.)
The salesperson chews up hours of their time and other employees times because they don't have the backbone to say "No"

The salesperson does this because he'll get a nice commission if the sale goes through, and doesn't really care about the people whose time he's wasting.
Infrastructure only exists to enable applications, though it's easy to lose sight of this as a software engineer.
Want to Come Work at the Atlantic? Well, If You Know Python Etc. ...
I love the fantastic book Domain Driven Design written by Eric Evans too. Glad to see it is on DHH's top 5 as well. The concepts of that book (Entity, Value Object, Repository, Aggregate, Aggregate Root) have helped me a lot developing well written software.

I still don't get it why I've seen so few Node.js applications using Application Service layers, Domain Models and Repositories, and instead clog their MVC containers with calls to whatever datastore directly, with no Domain Model at all.
GitHub's failover problems have never been load-related. GitHub has pairs of fileservers where one is the master and the other's sole job is to follow along with the master and take over if it thinks the master is down, so when they do failover, it is to a node with just as much capacity as the previous master.

All the failover problems I can think of since they moved to this architecture 4 years ago have been coordination problems where something undesired happened when transitioning from one member of a pair to another. In this case, network problems lead them to a state where both members of a pair thought they were the master.
Thanks it looks like this one might work for my needs.
"[Marvell] argued in the case that it didn't infringe the patents, which Marvell alleged were obtained improperly by withholding information about prior inventions from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office." http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aonlin...

The way I read this, Marvell is claiming that CMU filed for the patent without having done a proper search for prior art? Can anyone dig up the relevant court docs? My legal-fu is not that strong.
three chief virtues!
love it!!!!
thanks
Data Validation With WordPress
Where do you store the configuration for where and how to access the configuration database?
Google Now: Is it just hype? How is it better than Siri?
agreed.
thanks!
While I agree with you, I think the anecdote is still useful because it shows that the problems of the present are really problems of the past too.

Software quality improves, sure, but you can still learn from the past.
New apparel website delivers personalized recommendations
The way the industry views raises is bizarre. In my mind, there should be an automatic say 3% raise to everyone's salary every year, performance review aside. If someone's not worth 3% more to you after a year, they should be fired. After that, give performance based raises to everyone. I know so many people who have quit because management never bothered to give out raises (hey, they make $150k a year, they don't need a raise), yet their employers could have kept them for a couple thousand extra a year. After the person quits, the company happily spends $40k on a recruiter to find their replacement.

I started working at a company out of college, and a year in, after a good performance review, got a 2% raise. I found out that this put my salary at slightly less than the company was offering new college hires for the current year.

So I confronted my boss about this, and asked for a 4% raise (including the 2% I was offered). While my boss agreed (or at least said that he did), HR blocked it, and so I was left with my 2% raise.

I did what most people would do - I found a new job and gave a generous 3 weeks notice. The counter offer was $20,000 on my next paycheck, if I promised to stay for at least another year. The raise that I had asked for was $3500 over a year. Naturally, I turned this down.
I think it's the opposite. Many good short .com and .net names are taken by squatters and/or users who don't do anything with them.

This will give a good opportunity to the rest of us.
Yes, it's ironic. It's a high-profile example for the legitimate discussion of what level of privacy can be expected from a company that's supposed to both respect our privacy and make a profit off our personal data.

But you don't choose your family.
If we're just ignoring the details of the article, we can just as easily characterize it as ripping off someone else's work and making lots of money on the resulting products.
My wife and I have encountered these at many hotels over the past few years.

The reason is environmental: the sink is supposed to splash if you turn the water too high. It's intended to keep you from wasting water.
So, in the EU and US the average amount spent is above the average amount earned. I'd be more interested in more data on that than what OS was on their phones.
Mountain Lion. Parallels 8. Windows 8. 1Password. I can never decide whether I don't really need that many applications, most applications I buy have long lives, or there are so many great free applications that I rarely need to buy something. Probably some combinations of the above.
When you combine Siri, Find My Friends, and other built-in Apple apps, as well as 3rd party, I'm not convinced Google Now does anything new. If you really want to know how your favourite sports team is doing, you can just ask Siri "How are ___ doing?" Despite all the bashing Siri's voice recognition gets, I actually use it every day, with 99/100 time success rate.
The Giant Wasteland and the Tiny Vault
Same here. I consider my "stack overflow question composition" skills to be my most valued programming skill. "Send me teh codez" questions don't get answers anyways.
Big, Open, and more Networked Than Ever... 10 Trends From 2012
No Exchange support.
Please please please use a mono-space font for code!
Not to take the focus off of your point, but the phrase "beg the question" caught my eye due to reading about it recently. I recommend the section below. Cheers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question#Modern_usa...
Great idea! Hopefully will see you in Sydney.
I find it interesting that here, when a university is doing the patent-suing, HN errs on the defensive side:

"Accusing Carnegie Mellon of patent trolling is probably not the most effective way to advocate for patent reform."

"Universities have been among the biggest producers of patents for 50+ years now."

"The internet needs more details so we can make an uninformed opinion and collectively decide to be impotently pissed off at the university or not."

However, when a large commercial entity is suing (e.x. Apple v. Samsung [1]), HN bashes the patent system:

"these cases set a chilling precedent for the platform that looks likely to dominate the computing industry for at least the next decade."

"It will hurt innovation because every damn thing is going to have to go through a committee of lawyers before being approved, and it will hurt innovation because the idea that innovation always involves making something brand-new and from whole cloth is fucking retarded."

"Apple's successful use of the broken patent system sends exactly the wrong signal."

Are these entities (Apple and CMU) really all that different? Both spend a lot on R&D, and both want to protect their property. In a sense, there are better reasons to support Apple filing patent lawsuits (forgetting about the specifics of either suit) than CMU. CMU receives a large fraction of funding from taxpayer-funded sources, and produces no real products, just IP. By contrast, Apple receives very little taxpayer money, and uses the patent system to defend its real products.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4430101
Toyota Moves To Settle 'Sudden Acceleration' Lawsuits For More Than $1 Billion
For cases where you're calling the US (admittedly probably not too often if you live in the UK) you can use the free app Talkatone (available on both iOS and Android). It's super useful if you're an American traveling abroad: just find WiFi (or a local data SIM card) and you can call all your peepz back home.
Yes, good point, training is something that you can measure quantitatively. Count the number of pages you've read, code golf [1] puzzles you've solved, etc. Good idea.

[1] http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
I opened an OpenSRS reseller account the other day ($99 one-time fee but I had a 50% coupon). Not the prettiest management panel but they give you lots of control over your domains with their API. Plus, free WHOIS privacy for every domain every year.

Compared with Namecheap renewals, .com on OpenSRS ($11.03) is actually a couple cents cheaper than a renewal + WhoisGuard on Namecheap ($10.69 + $2.88).

The primary reason I went with them was because they're a domain provider for resellers; they leave all the shenanigans of domain registrations up to you. They don't interfere with your operations unless they're legally obligated to do so. Also, you don't have to be a "reseller" to sign up.

I don't want to sound like I'm being paid to endorse them, but it's been a month so far and I like it.

---

Also there's internet.bs. I'm not sure how they are but a friend suggested them to me. They have an API too and are 2 dollars cheaper than OpenSRS.
"...medics are frequently armed so you can't distinguish them from ordinary troops, because fairly frequently the medics are singled out to be shot at first."

Medics are armed for their own defense, and generally wear clear insignia so they won't be targeted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medics#Geneva_convention_prote...
Google Reader's top-level hierarchy is: 1) black menu bar 2) Google bar 3) options bar 4) left panel 5) list of items. The first problem is, that the logical structure is unnecessarily complicated, but that's not the point.

The second problem is, that there's almost no visual distinction / contrast between the main segments of the page, which makes it harder to process mentally. It's like a file manager that shows the filesystem as a flat list of files instead of as a hierarchy of folders. My first impression of the new Reader or Gmail design was - messy bunch of black texts on white or almost-white background plus some almost invisible gray lines and a weird red button. It just seems messy and structureless.

Svbtle or HN are different, they have much simpler top level structure - just a menu and a list of items. BTW, svbtle's design is superior to Reader's on multiple level's.
Yep, it is a long time which is why I mean to speak specifically on the infrastructure side of things. Modifying the agg layer providing connectivity for all prod systems during a holiday weekend would suck.

When I say prod, I mean prod infrastructure. Not code.

Sorry for the confusion.
What exactly do you want? Do you want a resource that "clicks" with you that you can use to learn about machine learning, or do you want a witty piece of art like "_why's poignant guide to ruby"?

If its the former you are looking for, I have several recommendations. There are a plethora of online resources to learn about machine learning from. In video form, my favorite resource is Yaser Abu-Mostafa's (Caltech prof) video lectures, available here: http://work.caltech.edu/teaching.html

You can also actually enroll in the next version of CS 156 (Abu-Mostafa's class) and do the class online with problem sets very similar to that of Caltech students actually enrolled in the class. (It starts January 8th).

Coursera/Udacity contain several classes that involve machine learning; Andrew Ng's class is a good place to start.

If you (like me) prefer text to video, you can buy Abu-Mostafa's book (I hear it follows the course very closely, and the book costs way less than $500 :D ), read Andrew Ng's online lecture notes, or read one of several freely available ML books (such as "Elements of Statistical Learning" or "Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning", but I've found these to take more mathematical maturity that the other resources recommended).

Note: One reason that I've highly recommended Abu-Mostafa's resources (besides having taken the class at Caltech and loving it) is that his class is more focused on the theory of machine learning (ie hammering in over-arching principles like avoiding overfitting by regularizing) rather than just covering as many algorithms as possible. Also, I believe Mitchell of CMU has good online resources for his machine learning course.
I love the way this article dispels misconceptions and ends with practical solutions.

Does anyone know of an article that does the same for becoming a great developer rather than continuing to wade in the novice waters of programming?
For kernel-based methods in particular, Shawe-Taylor and Cristianini's "Kernel Methods for Pattern Analysis" (http://www.kernel-methods.net) is the textbook to use.
It's just a good book written by one of the founders, and offers unique insight into the design and implementation of *nix systems.
Re: your last paragraph(the edit), I agree completely. I can think of few things that make me feel as good about myself as when I have a few-month-long streak going of consistently spending time doing physical activities. Gives me such a natural rush of happiness and confidence all day everyday.
i agree with most of what i've seen here and am VERY thankful for the responses but there is something to the language of coding that is extremely specific that i'm looking for.

to the person who uses: LAMP servers, python script,ubuntu machines, etc. these items are matter of fact tools for what they do and are as sexy or dramatic as a hammer, saw or vice grip to a construction worker BUT to people being invited into a world they're not familiar with they become a welcome mat on the floor to a journey.
Not at all a fan of this. I guess it sets them up to do a web service later on, but it's seems a little aggressive and unnecessary.
They should consider that charity considering how much of a joke it is to get around. I know that sounds a little snide but as a programmer I cringe at it.
A roommate of mine (former D1 track athlete) loved to do CrossFit solely because the group atmosphere forced him way beyond his boundaries. The first 4 times in a row that he went, he pushed himself so hard that he threw up. He could not stop raving about how it got him back into such relatively good shape so fast.
Seriously, has anybody claimed that a service is completely free?

Who in their right mind would give something completely free, no strings attached?

Start acknowledging? I'm pretty sick of people mumbling "If you're not paying for a product, you're a product" every time Google, et al releases a free service.
Where does one go after finding success?
I've created a product for preparation of exams online and it's been a hit for the market that it caters to. As a solopreneur and sole employee with little business background, where does one turn to expand the business? Is it a President? COO? And how does one know who to trust or who is just full of air? It's a good problem, but a serious one that I've struggled with for over 6 months. I have no idea who to bring on board to help expand. Help?
My orginal parent post claims that a month of NYTimes content isn't as valuable as/worth 15 USD.

Are you saying the NYTimes is not a good value or that, it's simply not a product you seek because you're already amply satisfied by WSJ, FT, the Economist, etc.?

It just seems weird to me to call something too expensive when the real reason is that you've already purchased it, just from someone else.

Unless you think the cost to journalistic quality ratio of the aforementioned papers and magazines is superior to the NYT?
Google doesn't have a wholesome "voice" product like Apple has Siri.

They have Voice Search, which is used for searching stuff with your voice, or asking questions - much like Siri. As others have proven in tests, it's much faster than Siri, and also much more accurate, too.

Then they have Google Now, which is about giving you data "pre-emptively" before you even ask about it, like telling you how much you have till work in the morning, what is the latest score for your favorite sports, letting you know when your package is arriving, etc. It's based on Google search data, your location, your habits, your Gmail e-mails, and so on. They keep improving it and adding more stuff they can show you like this.
Not sure if there is. I found the below page with some ideas -- a few people have written some scripts to basically scrape the content.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5374045/how-to-access-kin...
Exactly. Even if you're honoring the rule in the breach, you're still honoring it. An that, by itself, represents a major win for the NYT.

As time goes by and the unsustainability and injustice of the "all content should be free" mantra becomes widely recognized, a much clearer line between contet that is and is not worth paying for will crystallize—and with it, the social attitudes that work with or against payment for publishers, depending on the surrounding expectations.

The Times has done a solid job of positioning itself. Pity those that lack the resources an foresight to do the same.
Shipping code changes is a different beast.

I am talking about the infrastructure side of things.

I have built large scale percentage-deployment, slice deployment (whatever you want to call them) scenarios like you speak of but modifying an AGG switch that provides connectivity to your entire prod space... Uh.. Go ahead and use your philosophy for managing large infrastructure and I will enjoy my days off thanks.

This change is not a SHIP IT! change. This is a switching infrastructure upgrade. This is not a push from your CI into your rolling rel. system that updates prod applications.

This is an underlying infrastructure change with high impact and high visibility with many stakeholders at risk.

Sorry for any confusion that my, very vague, post caused.

Maybe someday I will become a fisherman. But for now, I will keep these switches and servers up and running with 99.999% uptime. It is what I love to do!

Got any fishing tips?
Do you have any basis for that? See the second and third paragraphs in the comment you're responding to. By my reading, they can't use those unless you "donate" the voicemails explicitly, which I doubt anyone does (at least I've never bothered to, even for the more ridiculously transcribed ones).
agreed. first tip that comes to mind is to organize your css for easy maintenance. There's plenty of times I've gotten css and html that is a mess but somehow looks ok in ie6.

Tip #2, give up on pixel perfect designs
Sounds great. The only unsolicited advice I would offer is that if it ever gets boring, I would look into doing some sport half of the time. It will give you social, technical and mental elements that weight training just can't.
Turn an unwanted Christmas Kinect into something even cooler :)
It's also hard to think of anything less new school than freaking Autotools. There's a good kind of old school (C, UNIX, Audrey Hepburn) but Autotools isn't it.
It's almost as though these are different commentators (only about 20 of HN's thousands of users have commented on this story so far), different entities (yes, Apple Inc. is very different from Carnegie-Mellon University) and completely different patents (one covers a user-facing software feature and the other appears to deal with circuit design).
This article and this DVD really set my fitness regime over the last two years.

The DVD is a great guide to the six or so major movements in weightlifting and I found it was much easier to visualise what I was meant to be doing.

I got serious in May '11 and by Jan '12 my personal bests were a massive improvement over where I had started, and I found that I was really enjoying tracking my progress and getting strong and fit.

I'd gone from benching 80 kgs to a 1 rep max of 120kg, and squatting 90kg a 1 rep max of 160kg.

I found the major contributor to my improvement was
- consistency (3 times a week, every week), and
- focussing on getting the biggest impact for your time in the gym.

Even if you just squat and deadlift, I believe you're doing much more for yourself than by focussing on what most people do - tricep pulldowns and bicep curls.
Postbox: http://www.postbox-inc.com/
Postbox is a fantastic desktop email client, based on Thunderbird. It's primarily geared toward Gmail / Google Apps users. Paid $10.

Nirvana: https://www.nirvanahq.com/
Nirvana is a Getting-Things-Done Saas. $5/month
Of course, but maintaining the perception that it's harmless to continue to contribute it is the hard part.