skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's no longer a case of "keeping up with the Joneses" - you now have to keep
up with everyone you've ever met, no matter what the cost!

I don't understand why so many people don't seem to get that you don't have to be "friends" on Facebook with everyone you've ever met. And you don't have to stay "friends" with them forever.

Also, I see lots of stuff on Facebook that isn't upbeat bragging. Prominent examples just from the past week include death of a family member and a friend starting chemo. Possibly this is an age thing, or a consequence of the fact that I prune superficial relationships from my Facebook, but I have a hard time relating to the experience this writer describes. (Also, while I don't want to diagnose over the internet, it's possible that FB makes the author depressed because he's already prone to depression.)
Murderfuck - Solutions for A New Digital Age
> It's not currently a problem, and it's too early to speculate about worst-case future scenarios.

Is that what they said about SMPT and spam?
Who wouldn't love 3 months of hardcore programming and collaboration with other smart, fired up people?
Meh, this is the same guy that wrote a nasty gram to some Microsoft recruiter when an simple email saying "no thanks" would have sufficed:

esr.ibiblio.org/?p=208
Congratulations on a great year and getting married!
Assuming using the web version: click on "sort: top stories" at the top right just under the post button. Change it to most recent, problem solved.

This doesn't seem to work correctly on iPhone though. Changing to top stories seems to get them in chronological order for some strange reason.
Don't attach the sexist label to things so easily. That devalues it in the mind of people that care not mindlessly.
Oh for crying out loud. In a lot of use cases, msgpack can be treated as a smaller, faster JSON. Let's do a quick experiment. Here's a small, very ordinary JSON document:

http://graph.facebook.com/btaylor

Using Python's json and simplejson modules, which are quite zippy, the encoding time was about 11.4 us, and the decoding time was about 8 us. With msgpack, the encoding and decoding times were 2.7 us and 1.7 us, respectively. The encoded size was 187 bytes with JSON, and 140 bytes with msgpack. Zlib compression brought those down to 127 and 125 bytes, while bringing the total encode-and-compress time up to 25 us for JSON and 16 us for msgpack.
Zuckerberg still owns over 50% of Facebook, right?
We have strong protections (constitution) and recourse (elections) against the government. While not perfect by any stretch they are far better than what we have against Corporations.

Government is much more transparent compared to corporations.

For me, it is more insidious to be exploited for profit than to be spied on.

Scale and applicability, as mentioned in the article. Facebook and other Corporations "watch" much more of us than government does.
My experience with self help books is quite similar to my experience with people who read "Learn how to program" books. Some people go into the book with a head full of steam, but they give up as soon as things get hard. Other people start with the same enthusiasm, but they push through the difficult parts and (eventually) become great programmers.

The best educational materials I've ever read always start from the perspective that what you're about to learn is freakishly hard and it will take hard work to gain even a modicum of skill. Tragically, writing that on the cover of a book would likely kill sales.

As a reader though, I like to remind myself that I'm embarking on a voyage of learning, not one of already knowing. I remind myself that this is going to take a whole lot of work and that I will be frustrated many times. As long as I'm willing to do the homework, I can learn how to do almost anything.

As for your third question, you'll find tremendous variance as people have a number of different learning styles. I'd argue that any kind of personal change would work similarly to expert performance, so I suspect that the best medium is whatever medium does the best job of encouraging deliberate practice.
Which only raises the question, if all other considerations are equal, why do some obtain degrees and others do not? Could it be those factor(s) that results in better employment opportunities rather than the degree itself?

A few points come to mind: (1) Access to money makes going to school and finding work easier. (2) A "go-getting" attitude makes successful completion of college and finding work easier. (3) Living in the right location (namely cities) makes going to college and finding work easier. (4) Simply being lucky makes the successful competition of college and finding work easier.

If you could find two people who are exactly equal in every single way, except the piece of paper in hand, would you find any employability differences between them? I'm highly skeptical that you would.
"I want to explore flying to an industry conference as a sales channel for AR"

Have you ever considered direct mail or advertising in industry trade journals? Or issuing press releases for those trade journals which are always looking for material to fill their pages? Another thought (cheaper than flying) would be to simply write a few articles for those journals speaking about the general problem of appointment reminding and then having the byline be you. It is something that others are doing. The same article could easily be repurposed for different journals. Once you are "published" you can then do reprints of your articles to DM or hand out at shows if that ends up being an attractive route.

In looking for an example of "card packs" which I have successfully used (in a different business) I came up with this which illustrates the direct mail route:

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Post-Card-Mailer/828394

Cost to spray something like this to 10,000 offices is no big deal. You'd have to repeat a few times to the same people I would imagine to get a desirable response.
Wow, that sounds great! Thank you for sharing such specific numbers on financials.

What I'd also like to see is a breakdown on the time spent doing things you'd rather not be doing (i.e. doing work), and how that compares to your previous salaried position.
Everything should be everyone's business
Actually I didn't claim that lock-free is more efficient - I explicitly said that it isn't necessarily more efficient, though I didn't discuss the reasons that you do discuss; I only said that "lock-based" is defined by the need to deal with blocking upon suspension - not that it's necessarily a bad property in any way, in particular in its efficiency impacts.
> Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it.

History is written by the victors.

This is a plain-and-simple fact, and the only fact you'll find in History.

Everything gets re-written to fit the winner's point-of-view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#History_a...
Another use is storing a lot of small items in Redis. It's compact in memory, and can be manipulated using Redis 2.6's Lua scripting engine, which is a very handy combination.
When a comment leads to a syntax error in Bash
Daniel was real hinting at the evo bio genetic imperative, and how facing end of life not having kids makes you admit the death of your genetic line. I suspect that elders with nieces and nephews would feel something in between the other two cases.
Everyone goes in enthusiastic and comes out more skilled. The definition has not been altered. Sure, in three months you can't learn it all, but you learn to keep learning. You go to become a hacker, not because you are one. I think that was the point trying to be made.

DISCLAIMER: I am on the Hacker School bandwagon as a participant myself ;)
I do need a job please help!
Hi folks, my name is Avaz, I'm Front-End Web Designer/Developer. Recently I've arrived to NYC with Green Card program. Can't find a job, I live with my family in NYC. Please do help me. Job websites not helping anymore. Thanks!!!
I've had a similar need in my app, which has been in use since 0.6. I ended up basically abusing child_process.fork() -- every call to a certain rather long-running, possibly exploding async function is made not from the main node.js process, but is actually spawned as a separate process from node. So if it explodes, the core app instance isn't affected. Of course I do some intelligent things such as kill these "worker forks" if they take longer than 30 seconds, and I check for various UNIX signals to watch if they die and react appropriately.

I also tie the worker PID to each user's session, so they can't spawn an infinite number of workers and cause serious strain on the server -- the server just kills the previous worker and spawns a new one if it's asked to run the function again.

I was actually thinking about opensourcing this, but I guess it's pointless now that domains basically do what I hacked together.
Why not have the outsourced phone calls go over skype/twillio where you can record them ?
What's the Deal with End-User Licensing Agreements?
End-user licensing agreements are becoming an ever important legal aspect for app developers. While the app store EULA covers some terms, it is limited.
My first thought was "maybe it would be a useful JSON replacement for Unity" (which still lacks native or even aolid third party JSON support). I'm not sure how big a deal the lack of seamless UTF8 supportwill be in practice (in most cases no big deal i think) but it does look promising owing to its C# implementation.

I do agree the tagline is bound to annoy.
Problem solved - temporarily. On Android and the web, my preference for most recent stories changes itself back to top stories on a not infrequent basis.
I agree with you entirely that the generally recognized name doesn't fit; however, I still think it seems counterproductive to attempt to rebrand it.

"Digital Restrictions Management" worked better, because it still abbreviates as DRM so nobody goes "huh?" when you say it. "Restricted Boot" needs an accompanying explanation to tie it to the official name of 'UEFI "Secure" Boot', which makes the attempted rebranding counterproductive.
You are confusing how hard it is to push a rock back up a hill with how hard it is to push the rock down a hill.
This still makes it superfluous. Very few people are ever going to achieve the success that Patrick has. If earning such a huge income off of various lifestyle businesses was within reach of most people, they would be doing it. Stories like Patrick's usually involve a rare amount of luck and certain intangibles that most people don't possess (things like a large network, notoriety, etc.) So reading these things is innately a waste of time.

Moreover, the fact that he needs to enumerate his income so thoroughly just makes it makes it insufferable while not contributing to the ostensible point. He does not need to discuss the financials so particularly when educating others on how to run businesses in a general sense. That's why I simply can't believe that he (or anyone for that matter) writes these things for a purpose other than to express their occupational superiority and financial success to everyone else.
When I see young men and women consulting, I'm always curious how it's working for them. Do your consultation customers care that you are so young?

I'm genuinely curious about this. Most successful consultants (that I know) have decades of experience in a specific industry or specialty, thus they have a large amount of knowledge based on actual, real-world experience and that is why clients seek them out. They are very successful, but that success seems solely based on their years of experience and insight.
Amazing, congratulations. And congrats on writing a post like this and coming off as a down-to-earth, regular guy. These posts (along with the people who write them) can often come across as "Look how great I am because I don't follow the status quo!" kind of stuff, but you sound completely humble about it all.

Best of luck for the coming year!
Patrick - When you were starting your video course, how did you figure out how to go about doing it? Did you seek any advise from Ramit, since you're friends and he has multiple video info products?
ASk HN: Feedback on a tool I used to get numerous followers
Because the group that says sugar and wheat is bad is different to the group that says that bacon is bad.

In fact, the group that says that sugar and wheat is bad says that bacon is very good for you.
I agree about the 2nd amendment guys. If they say they care about the 2nd amendment because they want to be able to stop the government if it becomes too oppressive, then the 4th amendment should be the first thing they should defend, because the 1st and 4th amendment are the first things an oppressive US government would try to bypass. So these amendments are the first lines of defense, and they need to fight for them as hard as possible to protect them, if they really want to stop the government from becoming oppressive. But considering gun owners are usually Republicans, and Republicans are also usually the first to suppress the 4th amendment, there is some inconsistency there.
I've generally heard this referred to as "continuous collision detection" predictive implies we care about collisions in the future, where in fact, we just care about all collisions in the frame.
I think our definition fits pretty well with ESR's and the definition of "hacker" from the Jargon file[1]:

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.

2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. (Though as we point out, we don't think being obsessive is necessary.)

Also, in ESR's "How to be a hacker"[2] he includes both learning to write and communicate well and sharing what you learn and build with others as requirements for being a hacker.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

[2] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4

EDIT: To anyone reading the parent comment without clicking through to the blog post it's excerpting, please note the parent comment ignores the first two criteria we list:

Someone who is intellectually curious. Hackers enjoy tinkering and understanding how things work. They revel in going deeper into things, and love asking questions: How can I make my code easier to debug? What is making my program slow? How does this work?

Someone who enjoys programming. We spend most of our time at Hacker School programming, there aren't grades or tests to make you study, and you don't get a degree or certificate for doing Hacker School, so it's important that you like coding.
> theoretically the government is accountable to its citizens

That's a big "theoretically".

Personally, Facebook bothers me much less, because I can and do opt out of Facebook
I was in part inspired to actually get off my duff and write Bingo Card Creator because somebody wrote about their experience with making and selling skeet shooting software as a sideline business. Prior to reading that, it was outside of my comprehension that you could successfully run a sideline software business.

If you run or work at a closely held software business, you may have very good estimates of e.g. what reasonably achievable conversion rates are, how expenses break down for a small software business, or what global demand is in terms of unique users for a very niche application. Most people do not run or work at closely held software businesses, which makes a lot of those numbers very non-obvious. They're of interest to people who might aspire to one day running such a business or to people who run a business but would like to compare their experiences to those of somebody else. They're also very rarely disclosed publicly.

I would hope that the six-thousand odd words of narrative in the post and copious linked material contains non-obvious useful tidbits such as "You can increase the sales of a mature, six-year old software company by over 60% solely by A/B testing while keeping all other factors constant. Here's a case study." That is, I'd think, an interesting result which suggests something that many people on HN could propose at their first meeting of 2013 at their workplaces (or start implementing themselves). It is a substantially more compelling result than having me say "You should A/B test. It works well. (People hire me to do that but I usually can't talk about it, but trust me.)"

Those are mostly reasons why some folks might want to read this. As for writing it: I find writing helps me crystallize my thinking, because I'm very capable of bamboozling myself mentally but often less capable when I see the half-formed rationalization in print. Also, even if nobody else ever read them, having seven years of annual reports is useful for me, since it captures at-a-comparative-glance what I've learned over time and how employing that has actually worked.

If you don't like hearing about my businesses, I recommend avoiding posts from kalzumeus.com domains. They're approximately 1/30th of the frontpage, once or twice a month.
Explain to me how a better png is going to interfere with facial recognition? Are you suggesting some kind of algorithm that finds faces based on Huffman trees or related compression metadata? It sounds unimaginably fragile.
Or better yet, support the development of truly open hardware with that money. There are a few small groups and companies doing this, like the proposal for a SoC that just had general purpose processor cores, instead of dedicated video encoders/decoders and 3D acceleration.

I am certainly willing to pay a bit extra (higher cost, reduced performance) for an open platform.
@Rule 2: Code Well

I recall our boss having a slide with a bullet that said "biologists can't code."

We deal with all kinds of scientific software and I thought this was mean. Then I got the programs, and features included crashing GCC (by doing something illegal with OpenMP), not using a BLAS, BubbleSort in tools.c, and an object oriented nightmare that should have been io limited but ran 100x slower then io.

I had a slide on my PowerPoint where I wrote "biologists can't program."
I was wondering about this a couple of days back.. looks like I'm not the only one who feels this way.
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It varies a lot based on how picky you are with your choice of child. That said, a quick and easy adoption of the most available child is more likely to be followed by a life time of having a less healthy child, for various kinds of health issue.

That said, I think it is good communitarian practice to be involved in at least one adoption, as a parent or sibling. There are so many abandoned or abused kids who deserve better than what they have.
Shouldn't they also sue Samsung for not letting me install android on my 43-inch LCD television?
While I generally agree that "just use havok" is a bad approach, havoc, along with most physics engines, are able to be used for just collision detection, and not response. In many cases, it may prove useful to use an existing engine even for very unrealistic things.
If you ask for an explanation in 10 words, you shouldn't complain when it doesn't address all your concerns.
For all I thought Svtble ridiculous at first (and I do still consider it a tiny bit wanky) - and for all I cheered on those who created knock-off themes based on it, and watched the ensuing drama with licked lips - I have to say that I get a real jarring discomfort when I see a Svbtle-style blog that isn't part of the network. It just doesn't look right... the fonts are off, or the spacing, or it's just not quite right.
What businesses can learn from OpenSource?
It's also almost API-compatible with JSON encoders, so if you wrote a program that uses JSON for serialization, switching to msgpack is often as easy as doing a global find-and-replace.
Sure.

But I want them to succeed-I'm willing to give them a little free publicity. (Emphasis on a little)
My recommendation would be:
Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" for people wanting to understand social and psychological mechanisms and use them more efficiently in real-life scenarios.
As long as there is robust availability of hardware on which you can install your preferred software, why should EVERY bit of hardware offer that feature?
Take a look at this: http://nytm.org/made-in-nyc
Older fathers have increased risk for autistic children!
* Rank of “attire” among the leading reasons “millennials” are unsuccessful in job interviews : 1

* Rank of their posting inappropriate pictures on social media : 2
I wonder if people "in security" are just particularly abrasive assholes, or if there is just observer bias on my part.

In ~20 years of following this stuff, I've never seen a professional discipline as petty and mean as security. On the other hand, I've never gotten as deep into other fields like politics, finance, other parts of computers, etc. From what I have seen, security is an outlier. Network operators are slightly abrasive but nothing approaching security. Firearms and tactical stuff absolutely has the "for guys" thing, but there are women in the industry, and they tend to be treated fairly well. SANs and storage are positively polite by comparison to security. etc.
Very few people are ever going to achieve the success that Patrick has.

Is that critique equally applicable to the 2006 version of this post, which you can find linked? (It is the first one?) Spoiler: that shows ~$1,000 in profits on ~$2,000 in sales.

That does not sound like a towering and insurmountable barrier to me. (Neither do my 2012 results, since I know how I got them and none of it involves being the Dark Lord Of Software Optimization. Plus, they're fairly modest if your reference set includes larger firms in the software industry, from publicly traded titans like Google down to the businesses of many other HNers, which would lose my entire business in the petty cash drawer.)
I sympathize but also find it kind of ironic. In the end, whats the worst a company will do? Show you increasingly relevant ads? Leak your private photo's? Perhaps your address to someone you didn't want to know it?

I realize there's a lot (more) to fear, but by comparison, what can the government do? What are governments doing around the world? And I'd argue that for many people, the fear isn't what Facebook does with the data, but what they could hand over to the gov't.

I"m not worried about what the government is doing today. But when you look at recent history, or even at what other governments are doing today, its hard for me to understand why people aren't more concerned with the government than with Facebook.

> Government is much more transparent compared to corporations.

I think many would disagree with that.
Those images don't sound big enough to trigger the bot. So we're back to it being usually useful.
If you've convinced yourself that you're never going to achieve the success of a modestly successful consultant with a sideline business in bingo card software, then you're right.
You don't care about your security scaling.
You care about your security being secure.

Maybe after you have that, then you start caring about it scaling. (If you really need storage to scale, buy a TeraData RDBMS. It will scale beyond your wildest dreams.)

If your security is in your storage engine, it is easier to secure because you only have to get it right in that one place.

If your security is in the apps that uses the data stored in your engine, you have to get every single such app bulletproof. The attack surface is much larger and much worse in the second case.

As for security, that belongs in your application layer/domain model

-Unforgivable.
Unless you are a sugar daddy/mommy, dating transitions from drunken hot hookups to desperate mating search over time.