skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article. He did his homework, targeted his audience and finally sees a payoff. But it took him 10 years of working in a nursery school and babysitting and party hosting at DZ for him to manage to get there. But good on him for recognizing that he had a gift and that he could make a living doing it.
"A function is "idempotent" if the result of doing it twice (feeding the output of the first call into the second call) is exactly the same as the result of doing it once. (Or, in other words, every output of the function is idempotent under it.)"

Uh?? According to this definition this wouldn't be idempotent:

(defun add-one (x)
(+ x 1))

CL-USER> (values (add-one 5)
(add-one (add-one 5))
(= (add-one 5) (add-one (add-one 5))))
6
7
nil

edit: What the... Wikipedia seems to be agreeing with him. It seems I mixed up idempotence and referential transparency, I thought they were equivalent concepts. I'm confused...
Building One's Own Solar Panel
I really wish the submitter would have just linked to the blog post here: http://shohagsust.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/unity-iphone-game....

I'm building an iPhone app with Unity3d right now and it's actually been a real pleasure. It makes building real 3D games dead simple.
On the one hand, the idea is an intriguing one (especially if the demo was already up and running), and the founder of Twitter had a stellar background considering Blogger. On the other hand: revenue plan?

But the guys who made Twitter weren't planning to make it into a business. It was just a cool idea that they had and expanded on.
DO IT! I did exactly this after some soul-searching with my wife over xmas '08. We figured that with my energy, ambition, ideas and so forth I could make something good happen within a few months. Handed my notice in on 5th January. Left on the 12th. Happy as I have ever been on the 13th and stayed that way ever since :)
I am one of those, I stay in MacOSX because: MacOSX itself, Textmate, Transmit, Things and a other number of Apps that makes my work much easier.
In English, even the most stupid thoughts sound right, just because of the language-culture itself.

Well - that certainly doesn't sound right to me.
No problemo. I remember reading it at work when it came out, thinking...what the heck IS this thing?

It came to me originally from the mailing list of Warren Ellis, a cranky, foul-mouthed British comic book writer who hates and despises everything he sees, hears, and reads. That morning he sent an e-mail out to the 12,000 people on his mailing list saying: "Here's something that isn't terrible. In fact, it might be the best thing you read all year."

That's the sort of endorsement that encourages you to keep at it.

http://www.warrenellis.com
How many words a non-native-english speaker programmer (like me) has to learn? I bet no more than 30-50.

It's not a a problem for 99% of programmers, so that's the reason most of languages stayed in English without the need of being translated
I have no idea if your startup will succeed, but quitting the lunch bell is definitely the right decision. The worst that could happen is you fail and find work for some other company.
I don't think that area (of solar panels) would be sufficient to generate any serious charge.

Good sun in an ideal case is around 1kw/m2. Whereas, a scooter output will be around 10kw (?).

So naturally depends on how much area you really want to invest in. But I'd say 1m2 would be the maximum for a fold-out on a scooter.

With the losses, less ideal sun, the weight of the batteries and the solar panels - not sure this would add up as a viable solution... You'd need to be charging for a day or two just to get an hour's output.

A plug-in option probably more viable.
There's no way to learn any of this from that page without external knowledge...
There will never be a good time to do anything. You will always be able to find at least one reason in favor or against making any decision.

No one person can tell you whats best for you. The only real advice I would give it to stop teetering and make a hard decision one way or another. Once you've done that, take a second to breathe; congratulate yourself on your decision...and then embrace it.

If you decide to keep your job, make the decision to make the absolute best of the situation, commit 100% to being the best you possibly can while you are there. Likewise, if you quit, go after your next opportunity with all the energy you have.

The bottom line is that you will never be happy if you are constantly second guessing the decisions you make in life. So instead, make the decision that you feel is best for you and don't look back.

Thoughts point us in the right direction, but only actions will get us to our destination.
Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google
A good example of an idempotent function is the absolute value function.

abs(-1) = abs(abs(-1) since both equal 1
I see him as a sort of Reader's Digest of programming. Not sure if that's good, mind you.
Ohm my god.
I think that quitting your job for going freelance (doing something you're passionate about) is actually a safer choice. Dont let your fear lead you to making poor decisions (like say, working for a client you dont like, because its never worth the money).
Who knows, maybe your current job would lay people off and you would not be as well prepared as you seem to be right now. Take the chance, you will not regret it. And during the time you'll work for your friend, im sure you'll find plenty of other opportunities because people will know that you're free for some contracts.

Best luck.
I'd recommend jEdit.

It's my editing weapon of choice for OSX, Linux and Windows.

By default it's a bit plain, but the plugins available are fantastic:
http://taat.pl/en/jedit/

Download it here:
http://www.jedit.org/
His definition of idempotence is correct. As an example, a hash table with idempotent delete would work fine if I did this:

(setf h (hash-new))
(hash-insert h 'foo '(1 2 3 4))
(hash-delete h 'foo)
;;; some time later
(hash-delete h 'foo)

A non-idempotent implementation might complain that 'foo doesn't exist in the table.
Might be just noise but the alt texts for the 3 YC blank squares are: Mellanox, VanceInfo, Paypal. Paypal in there hints to me it's probably just noise...
> As it turns out, they have enough extra work to
> keep me busy for at least a few months (probably
> much more), and I'd be making more than I make here.

It seems you're pretty safe financially. Just saying.
I believe you are saying that because certain places overcharge for the same experience, they should be more worthy of charity.

If this were the case, then the more they charge, the more worthy they would be, no?
Lexico seems cool, might have to try it out.
Reader's Digest of programming is the perfect description!
Yeah I agree - Their use in a programming language is generally so abstract. Knowing the words "for" or "do" doesn't really help a whole lot in understanding a loop construct.

This isn't true for the API though - the API contains a much greater lexicon.
I didn't find Zed's review much of a review at all. He doesn't go into a lot of what's going on under the hood which would really take more than one battery but is typically more Zed's style.

What Zed does talk about are the conceptual things that make Django appear good on paper like reusable applications and he also likes Django's tip of the hat to Jazz. It's too bad he doesn't talk about stuff like the crazy ORM that Django has which seems to be the least Pythonic ORM out there, or whether or not Django handles string encodings well, caching, etc. That's the kind of detail I've enjoyed from Zed's previous reviews... err... rants. Hopefully we'll see some more substantial review in the future.
No plot of Mario's position vs. time? They need to verify that their equation (x = x0 + v0t + 0.5at^2) accurately describes the fall.
Blogger who insulted Ayotollah dies in Iranian prison
1) You've got a business that already has some money flow;
2) You've got a safety net to bring in extra cash (the friend that can contract out to you);

What are you waiting for?
I really do like HN, I think for the most part it has been beneficial to the community. But for the love of god, I wish half of the comments on Coding Horror submissions here would stop being the same old ad hominem attacks on Jeff's writing style. At least the HN community could add something substantive to Jeff's arguments.
I think Jeff conveys the wrong sense of idempotence. He has somehow extracted the purely mathematical sense, while the source he quotes goes on to explain the programming angle.
I don't get why people are building these fancy new editors - You can get both Emacs and Vim to behave Textmate like in many ways. They are both usable everywhere, including in a terminal.

No matter which editor you want to use, you have to learn it and it takes time. A few years back I decided between Emacs and Textmate and learned Emacs - the main reason was because I can still use it when I am forced into a terminal or Windows.
very good overview. i have been learning and utilizing django in most recent project and generally liking it as well. the things i like the most are the orm, and the modular application architecture is truly potent. missing however - and some would have the opposite feeling - the greater opinionation of rails ... i for one welcome a crystallized project structure. my rails projects still read so elegant, clean, and paired down comparatively.
There is ALWAYS work for bright, hard-working people. You sound like you've thought things through and even prepared a bit - do it!

Rivers always reach the sea...

Cheers
This domain was registered about a year and a half ago as a gift offering to news.yc.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84039
Another alternative is to ask for a unpaid leave of absence. That will give them time to reconsider and you time to think and do.
The concepts of referential transparency and idempotence are close, but not quite equivalent.

'Idempotence' is the property that you can run something 1 or 100 times, and there is no difference in post-conditions. "x=1" is an idempotent operation. Idempotent operations can have side-effects.

'Referential transparency' means you can replace an expression with the value it returns, and it makes no difference in post-conditions. The expression "x=1", while idempotent, is not referentially transparent; the expression (in most languages) will return a value of 1, but you cannot replace "x=1" with "1" in your code and expect the same post-conditions. Referentially-transparent expressions cannot have side-effects.
If you are miserable, it's really that simple. Just do it. Everybody is unique, and it's your fault your friends cannot find a job. It will be your fault if you keep being miserable. You hold all the cards.
York fitness - Best exercise bike supplier
York fitness - Best exercise bike supplier in united kingdom
To find an example that I considered better than a university, I just referred to the most effective charity that the Copenhagen Consensus came up with, according to Wikipedia: "The highest priority was assigned to implementing certain new measures to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. The economists estimated that an investment of $27 billion could avert nearly 30 million new infections by 2010."

That sounds like a pretty good deal, but it turns out the Copenhagen Consensus website says micronutrients are the best investment, so maybe Wikipedia's information is old.

In the hypothetical that I had serious money to donate, I would of course try to evaluate effectiveness of the charities. Hopefully I could find the exception to "most".
Not everyone is a huge fan of re-learning how to type. Cause that's really how your doing it, with all the chording and such. Some of us are just used to typing in a box and hitting file->save to save.

People create new editors cause there is a need to fill.
Reading this makes me think of all the adwords-driven "brochure" sites with centered text and a 50 foot ribbon of testimonials, all designed that way because the data show that the work. I'm sure they do.
There are so many variables in a decision like this that you've not covered. Just to name a few:

- Do you have a family that relies on your paycheck?
- Do you have enough in savings and little enough in debt that you can survive given that the "extra work" could dry up?
- Are you focused enough to be your own boss?
- If you aren't successful and can't find a job, do you have a fall back when the money runs out, like living with your parent, a working spouse/partner, etc?

The thing is, no one but you can answer those questions, and no one else can assess the amount of risk you're personally willing to stomach.

I guess what I'm trying to say is coming here for advice seems like a poor stratagem. You should really be asking yourself and people who know you well, they'll give you much better feedback than an anonymous group.
I wonder: are Apple's designs just as data-driven?
The scholarship that allowed me to attend my Alma Mater was entirely funded by the donations of other Alumni, some of whom I've met. I know most students in the US get federal support as well, but being an foreign national, this wasn't true for me.

I've been awarded time and again in my professional life due to the quality of my education. I feel I have good reason to feel indebted to my Alma Mater, and will donate to it when I have sufficient means to do so.

Honestly, supporting motivated students get a great education seems as worth a cause as any.
"If this were the case, then the more they charge, the more worthy they would be, no?"

This seems to be the psychology behind it, yes.
> "Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

That's pretty damning. Google has always had a very developer-centric environment - and backing up design decisions with data definitely seems like a logical extension of that.

> "I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong."

It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. It seems like it's far too safe for them to go with what they know and what's been tested rather than something new and challenging.

A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.
Your two statements seem at odds - You want less pollution, but you're happy for hordes of people to buy a new, polluting car - especially one which doesn't have the same emission standards. e.g. It's catalytic converter isn't nearly as efficient as western cars.

Maybe we should be getting out of cars altogether and invest in the public transport system.
Thanks for all the answers. It's starting to make sense now. Maybe I'll do better actually starting to build circuits than from reading books.
Hire an seo consultant and get straight to the top
if you want to hire an seo consultant look no further
He actually makes it quite clear that this is a superficial overview.
I spent two years working a job that got me so depressed by the end I couldn't even get out of bed to go to work. I mean clinically depressed, not just metaphorically. So as someone who has been there; quit. You may have to buy a lower grade of peanut butter for a couple months at Trader Joe's but your freedom and your happiness are priceless.

Sure, the economy isn't great but our society (I'm assuming you're American) has come up with this notion that if you don't have a job at some big company as your parachute you're somehow going end up living in a van down by the river. WRONG. I quit that terrible job and traveled the world, and let me tell you I'm still here in one piece and haven't had to look for used vans yet. Since traveling I've ended up in jobs I didn't like but found it much easier to quit those and move on when I've been unhappy; that was the freedom I learned from having that first bad job experience. Now I know I can leave an employment position and my life won't fall apart.

All that said, don't do anything stupid like quit with no money in the bank. You're still going to have to realistically pay bills and you may end up needing to take a job that's not so glorious after leaving this one to help you get from point A to point B. If you do, make the most of those experiences. Know they too are temporary and only there to help you get to your end goal. Set a timeframe so you know those temporary jobs will eventually come to an end. Stay focused on where you want to be and you will get there.

[edit] I'll also add, don't quit and leave your current company hanging. Give them the proper two weeks (minimum) notice. Try to leave without burning any bridges, regardless of how little you like your current job.
Maybe we should be getting out of cars altogether and invest in the public transport system.

Agreed. We need to start treating cars like other harmful habits, like smoking and gambling, and tax the hell out of them. We also need to eliminate fares on our public transportation systems. (Nobody's going to take the bus a few blocks to the store when it costs $2.25. But I bet they'll take it when they can just get on for free.)

Anyway, I bet that this will not happen in my lifetime.
Conversely, he is basically stating that third parties like himself are working as exploit-oriented QA Engineers for the software they are exploiting. If full-time QA people get paid for it, why shouldn't he?

Please enlighten me... I don't see any mention of selling the exploit to criminals, just mention that they could get a lot more money than is offered. Is there just a subtext I'm missing with those statements?
My understanding (as an outsider who has heard some UI-related people from Apple talk) is that they iterate on their designs, but it's all in-house. There's no A/B testing going on, they make a decision based on experience and give that decision to the end-user.
See my response to nazgulnarsil below.
Actually I was surprised when I found out that Ford has actually made incredible increases in fuel efficiency, but they did it all before people started caring about fuel efficiency and they've never shook off the reputation of being a gas guzzler.

Let me put it this way, if Ford used the same amount of fuel (compared to other vehicle makers' vehicles) as 20 years ago then I don't think they would have lasted through the insane gas prices last summer.
As one more guy who seems to generate a lot of ideas I'm slowly reaching that conclusion myself.

At least in my case this phenomenon occurs whenever I have to actually implement/create/do something. It's almost magical, if I run out of ideas all I have to do is start working. Especially if I find the thing I'm working on boring or difficult.
Ask YC: Open source HTML to PDF
Any suggestions for a solution to producing PDF's automatically from dynamic output?

Something preferably able to produce output similar to manually "Printing to PDF" from a browser window...
A better Way to Apportion Startup Equity?
The fact that you listed two be-all end-all text editors suggests that neither of them is the perfect solution for everyone...
Flying Saucer (https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/) is a pretty badass solution for what you want. It's a Java library, but you can use it in Ruby or any other language that runs on the JVM pretty easily.
An engineer in Michigan did exactly what was just proposed:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/04/don_dunkees_diy.php

I imagine that in southern California or Arizona, the thing would get substantially more than a 1/2 charge during the day.

Depending on the battery chemistry, this could save a heck of a lot of battery life, even if it didn't provide enough to eliminate plugging in at night.
I'll simply say that what you post here is not current information (it may very well have been current information at the turn of the century) and leave it at that. The income range you mention is taken into account in admission decision-making today, and I know current examples of that happening in this year's admission cycle. The Laura D'Andrea Tyson article I posted as a separate submission recently

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

seems to have been part of changing the culture of university admission offices. A student from a family with an income at the fifteenth percentile of national household incomes is a rare student at the most selective colleges and IF the student has competitive grades and test scores and some economically reasonable extracurricular involvement, the student has a great chance of admission today and a very good chance of lavish financial aid. Colleges today do brag about admitting students at that income level.

See also

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/12.06/99-admissions....

for more on the recruiting efforts.
Thoughts on SXSWi 2009 from a First Timer
I suggested this to my company chairman in 2001.
I got a nice appreciation letter from the chairman.
Actually nothing really happened after that.
This ends up needing to be posted in every Stackless discussion:

Stackless DOES NOTHING ABOUT THE GIL! Stackless is not about concurrency. It's about implementing coroutines.

It's a really easy mistake to make. Lots of people think Stackless threadlets look like Erlang processes, but instead, they look more like regular Python generators (although they're admittedly much cooler). To complicate matters, people sometimes actually do use the fact that you can pickle threadlets, send them across the wire, and resume them on another thread/process/machine to implement some form of concurrency, but this does not mean that Stackless gets around the GIL in any way vanilla CPython can't.

To explain more about Stackless, I'll refer you to Jesse Noller's recent post on the subject: http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/23/stackless-you-got-your-cor...
there are a good handful of options. what language would you prefer? or do you want some separate system?
Quite right. Remember, when a politician proposes $N for science, remember that he actually means 50% of $N as subsidies for universities, and 50% of $N for science.

(Assuming of course that the science is done by university professors. )
> I'm not much into auto, but I guess there's a govt team that reviews cars manufactured in India.

Why would you think that India's safety standards would be the same as the US? Why would you think that they should be? (Americans and Indians have different amounts of "not car" risks. Spending money to make India's "car risks" the same as the US would not make much difference to the total risk in India and would use resources that could be used to reduce said total risks.)
That's what happens when a company has more assets to protect than to conquer...
This is great advice.

Knowing it's going to be a rollercoaster really helps -- you don't get too caught up in the highs, and you know the lows are only temporary.

Sure you're still going to have them - but being conscious and aware makes it a lot easier.
Given Detroit's record, the lesson they might take is:

We need to hire more lobbyists to work on those pesky safety regs
Quit!

I'm quitting my job Monday next week. I don't know what I'm doing next or how I'll support my family. Those answers will come - but if I keep coming to this job everyday it will kill me.