skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will never have a good sleep - wake cycle. I normally go to sleep at midnight. wake up at 0600. And the worst thing is that I work, read, study & sometimes even eat on my bed. I'm not at my home there's very little room to make big changes with. But I'll try to re arrange my little room to keep up with your advice. thanx.
On the use of frameworks and, more specifically, why I choose Django.
Just out of curiosity, what is this skill?

I ask because I have a couple knacks that are hyper-rare in programmers, (In my experience) but I'm having a terrible time capitalizing on them.
I've always found django pretty hackable. If you really want to break the flow of returning objects, you can always use threadlocal to store the request object, the template, or whatever else you want.
Have you read his posts? He's an authoritarian. He actually made up the word "archist" and called himself that.
also LOLcats and Homer Simpson. I usually go for 3 allusions per joke.
ISBN-10: 0887307280
ISBN-10: 0446677450

Read. Learn. Implement.

Contrary to popular belief, you are not the only soul born into the neo-feudalist slavery of corporate America. Less than 10% escape within one generation; you may need to develop a multi-generational plan. But if you don't, nobody will. Nobody cares as much as you do.

You may not have written the rules, but you must learn to play by them if you are to succeed in life. In truth, the laws are written against employees, which is why you have correctly identified you must become an entrepreneur to be truly free.

Don't give in. Don't give up. Maintain an open mind. Count your blessings. Break the yoke of bondage for yourself and others.
After reading most of his archives, I'm still trying to decide whether he's insane, or if he's sane and it's everyone else who is insane. More and more I'm thinking the latter. Perhaps I need to disconnect myself from the internet for a while :-)
This was the tutorial shed a lot of light on the issue:
http://student.northpark.edu/pemente/emacs_tabs.htm

You get to configure at least three things: how many things emacs enters when you press "tab", what those things are, and if you see a tab in a file how wide it should be.
> A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.

And Doug Bowman's not the only one - Jeff Veen left recently too, who headed up their UX group after Google acquired Measure Map and applied the lessons learned to gAnalytics.
"Also, some of the most widely-used written languages like Chinese have very complex character systems that are not really amenable to traditional computer text entry methods. "

In my experience dumbing down the interface has two advantages: (1) it somewhat reduces the complexity of the application on the development side, and (2) it helps users in their learning curve. It is dangerous to assume the user is not intelligent enough to pick the right tool for the job. Better to assume they are more intelligent than you but ten times more impatient. The competition for this application would seem to be the iPhone.

Anyway, a Chinese user will not look at your application and say, "it doesn't support my language, but those vector graphics are nifty, I think I'll draw everything instead of typing for once." They'll simply buy something with Chinese language support like the iPhone.
This article is a great example of what the web was made for.

So why PDF‽
One thing I learned while working at a newspaper is that the business section is a ghetto. It's the last cash cow they have left, basically thinly disguised display advertising. Business Week is like that from cover to cover.
>> "Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better."

That surely is an overkill. Why do they have to decide between 41 shade of just blue? Instead they could have had a hackday kind of event and asked the designers to come up with his/her own designs based on a basic layout and then combine the best features (and colors maybe) of each design.
Mathematically: For a map m from set A to itself (it is trivially obvious why this must be the case), we have m(m(x)) = m(x) for all x in A. Unfortunately, programming is nowhere this clean (unless you happen to work with haskell...)
What is the best voip call termination service provider?
I have setup an asterisk server and have a call origination service and an incoming phone number, however i was wondering if anyone knew what company sells the best call termination service.
Thanks in advance!
The actual talk was very well-presented also. Andrea is usually a very lively presenter.
Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?
There are no "linux web frameworks" either, aside from Rails I guess, because I don't know of any currently popular language other than Ruby that doesn't really work on Windows.
This lack of consistent colour presentation is actually an advantage for Google's approach over the designed based one.
Their approach is optimising across the population of 'end colour presentations'. Even if 50% of users happened to see it shades of aqua then the best 'aqua' presentation would also be incorporated into the result with a 50% weighting. A designer would find it very difficult to weight all the of presentations proportionately even if he knew about them whereas Google's method doesn't even need to know about the variations. Let's face it you never really know what peoples internal representations of colours are.

Of course this type of testing only works where you can measure the results and the number of options to be tested are low compared with the number of tests. If you look at the whole layout of a page then then there are just too many dimensions for this type of testing to be practical. A designer could perhaps argue that changing the background colour, the border colour and using a bigger red button would be the best option. A designer could also argue that they are optimising for 'overall experience' rather than some measurable metric like clicks.

I think this all goes to show why both designers and 'measurement geeks' need to work together on these things.
Ok, I'm not particularly attached to the idea of AIDS prevention being the greatest charity of all. As mentioned, I just checked Wikipedia to find out what the Copenhagen Consensus came up with because I'm sure they put more thought into it than the few minutes I'd allocated for it.

That said, I'm aware that givewell.org rates charities for their effectiveness. Their top-rated charity is Population Services International, which works on - among other things - preventing AIDS and malaria.
"We estimate that it costs PSI $650-$1000 to prevent a case of HIV/AIDS and $500-$2500 to prevent a death from malaria; across the organization, we estimate that it costs PSI about $650-$1000 to save a life."
http://www.givewell.net/PSI

If GiveWell's figures are accurate, it seems that $650-$1000 is what it should take to save a life. $27 billion to prevent 30 million infections sounds about right. If you have a cheaper way to save lives, I'd love to hear about it.
can we please try to add more rhetoric and emotionally charged words please?
As soon as I get a time-machine people like you are getting dropped off in actual slavery days.
Ask HN: why is computer graphics research important?
Many areas of CS have "practical value": algorithms help us understand asymptotic speed of algorithms; security helps us avoid getting hacked; networks teach us how to deal with distributed, unreliable machines; machine learning helps us deal with noisy, large data sets; ... however, computer graphics research these days seems to be focused mainly on entertainment ... anyone here see what uses will come from it besides computer games / holly wood?
MRI stuff, but maybe that's already been done.
> for some reason the business guys needed rails developers

Not anymore?
The Big Takeover
I was on the exact same situation last year (except, my job was great but it just me that always want to do my own startup). Therefore, i can understand what you meant by "depression" on working in something that you feel is not for you.

Anyway, my experience is, just do it (especially you have few months savings)!! Sure, day-by-day is very unexpected and you never know if you will ever have enough money to survive. But, oh man...life become much more exciting and all of a sudden the proverb "do what you'll love and you'll never work another day" become very true. It's become very fun and enjoyable experience even though times are tougher and you work much harder.

A bit of tips, just be prepared for the emotional roller-coaster.
Making IE8 Emulate IE7
If you are a programmer, you should be pissed off and outraged by anything that doesn't allow you to automate itself.

Ooh, burn burn, rage rage, agreement!
Can you explain in simple words what value they add to documents, please? Is it the format conversion? The embeddability? I don't understand the market.
I love the way my mom's younger brother wakes me up. This is a memory of my kid time. He softly talk to me saying "it's better to wake up" while providing some dim light with his little torch. It gives me a comfortable wake up.

I wish I can have that smooth wake up all the time but now he has his own kids to worry about and he's so far away from me. It'll be good if there's something emulates that feeling.

My story won't mean you anything. But I enjoyed reminiscing those nice wake ups & if I ever have to wake some one up I'll definitely do it my uncles way.
Others that he didn't even mention:

* CakePHP (it's better than CI, Symfony and Zend)

* Catalyst

* ErlyWeb

I think it's particularly surprising that he left Catalyst out with the language's huge mindshare and the productive nature of the framework.

Drupal simply isn't in the same class as these. It's a CMF, not an application framework.
Cool Adobe AIR customizable drum machine
This little app allows you to drag and drop mp3 files into a grid that then you can play using your keyboard. A lot of fun if you pick the right sounds.
Except many people in those parts are so malnourished that their minds don't develop properly.
Clever as a Fox
Agree with the sunlight recommendation. In my case, controlling light levels makes all the difference. I need it pitch black when I'm supposed to be sleeping (whenever that is), with gradually increasing light when I need to get up. Some motorized blinds and a sunrise simulating alarm (possibly linked into a home automation system) might help, since the sun comes up too early during the summer and late in the winter at high latitudes.
Because when they do that, they get burned badly. For instance, when I was working there Larry Page said that they had never used yellow as the background color for ads becsuse it reminded them of "piss". This decision lasted a a long time until they did a whole bunch of A/B testing. Yellow turned out to increase click throughs significantly (can't post percentage, but well into double digits).

So now they back tracked on their original decision which was based on opinion and instead use the one that actually has good data behind it and wound up making them millions upon millions more. Sometimes they'll restrain colors to stay within a theme knowng that the best they'll get is a local maxima, but when you've got the number of users that Google does, it makes sense to try 41 shades of blue, because you'll sometimes find that just a handful significantly outperform the others, and the probability of you having picked them as a designer with no testing or data is pretty small.

Designers hate how Google does things, but the results speak for themself... The methods used work really well.
The "stickiness" is not a result of stubbornness, its a result of how the deflation cascades through the economy. Let's make the scenario even more clean. Imagine overnight a virus runs through computers of the banking system, switches the furthest one to a zero in everyone's account, and thus cuts everyone's savings in half.

The next morning, everyone wakes up, realizes that that their savings is much lower, and that they therefore must cut back on expenses. But they won't cut evenly across the board. They will cut spending on cars, hdtv's, and travel. They'll spend roughly the same amount as always on rice, eggs, water, gasoline to get to work, trash pickup, etc. The manufacturing companies respond by laying off millions of workers. Some of the companies go out of business. As the unemployment rate rises, it puts downward pressure on the wages in the sectors that are still producing at full capacity. This results in wages gradually coming down. As wages come down, the price of products come down. As the price of products come down, people now have money for luxuries. Entrepreneurs buy up the factories and restart car production. Eventually the system rebalances. At the end up the reblancing, the structure of production is the exact same as the structure before the crisis. The only difference is that the price of everything from cars to wages will have dropped to 1/2 the original level.

The government can avoid the whole mess, the whole two or three year cycle of unemployment, by just flipping the bit back and restoring everyone's account to the original level. To not do so, and force the economy through wrenching liquidation and layoffs, would be insane.

Ordinarily, I do not believe the government should rewrite contracts. Nor am I a fan of fiat currencies. But we have a world of fiat currency. And in a fiat currency, the government has a responsibility to prevent a hyperinflation or a hyperinflation. And if the government has been complicit for decades while counterfeit bills circulate through the economy, and all the contracts, business plans, personal budgets, etc depend on those counterfeit bills being tradable, 1 for 1, with federal reserve notes, than the government should do the right thing and allow people to trade in their counterfeit notes for FRN's, rather than allowing a catastrophic deflation to tear through the economy.
I wouldn't recommend it -- from what I've heard, rooster meat is really tough.
We educated people to use stronger passwords (although many haven't learned yet), so we can educate people to use a greater variety of passwords. Simpler passwords makes that possible because they are easier to remember. I think that this neatly addresses your concern.
A definite Yes. I was laid off from a tech support job, so I began my consulting career. This was 1990. I not only survived the dot.com bust, I thrived. Following your heart while satisfying a customer base is a great recipe for success.

I also think it is better not having regrets about the changes I could have made...
GPU research seems to be increasingly important in the search for faster processing power (in conjunction with CPUs). As we grab better, larger, higher resolution displays, graphics will become more useful for displaying data. Without great graphics to match increasing CPU power, we'd be left with a rather boring computing experience.
simulations. medical simulators, flight simulators, etc..
I stopped reading when I got to "The vast majority of broadband internet users already subscribe to a video service". Maybe in America this is true, but there's an awful lot of people out there using DSL.
Definitely a Balsamiq style entrepreneur. I don't even think twice about ideas that don't have a pricing model. I don't even seem to come up with them in the first place.
"But how will Google ever make money? There's the rub."
Is his point that even though I say I'm unhappy paying for a lot of bundled crap to get the few shows I like, my revealed preference demonstrates that I am happy with my cable company monopoly?

Maybe, but I think he is grossly underestimating the disaffection most subscribers have with this arrangement. Or possibly he's referring to people who watch sports and they don't mind paying for WNBA in order to see NFL games.
It's not a matter of content people being stupid. His entire case against a la carte programming seems to be "it doesn't pay well enough". Be that as it may be, the alternative is currently dragging customers kicking and screaming to pay you exorbitant cable fees.

Is it any surprise that free, cheaper alternatives like iTunes, Hulu, et al, are taking off?

Maybe a la carte isn't the answer, but neither is cable bills and $70 a month subscriptions. The mere existence and massive popularity of other models (unprofitable as they may be) represent a very dissatisfied customer base.

My guess is that the costs of production will scale down to meet the new revenue reality of a la carte programming, instead of the other way around.
No, at least not for their hardware lines, for which the feedback loops are longer and the opportunities for multivariate testing are fewer.
I wonder how Paul Buchheit (the guy who started GMail) got around this problem. He mentioned that he's not an early riser in the book "Founders at Work".

When searching more on the subject, I found this interesting text:

"This sort of smugness is prevalent among morning people, who count among their ranks Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, nearly every American president, and even Jesus. (See Mark 1:35: "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.") Night people are stuck with psychopaths like Adolf Hitler and Juan Arreola, the guy in Pennsylvania who nearly killed his girlfriend's 2-year-old last year, explaining to a judge, "I'm not a morning person."" http://friendfeed.com/e/cc0e9eb4-39ff-11dd-9d6f-003048343a40...
Bugs will always be there; but you can maintain credibility in a few ways. One, by showing that you do have solid tests (sounds like you do). Two, by being frank with customers from the very beginning, about the imperfections of software. And three, by showing haste, within reason, to fix any problems that are discovered, to respect customers' time and investments.

Still, the owner of a software project cannot be naive. He or she must be reasonably aware of the sources of the various bugs, and deal with any patterns that are forming. For instance, maybe one developer is responsible for the vast majority of problems. Not all developers are good; in fact, many are quite bad, and don't belong anywhere near the code they're currently maintaining.
Yes, but if you had built the car, you would have given a warranty.

Now, I'm not saying he should fix bugs for free, as he promised no warranty. But that's how he's feeling. It's like he shipped a car with a bad transmission that died, so he feels like he should replace it for free.
The departure of Jeff Veen and Doug Bowman is fairly significant - they are big names in the UI/UX design field and played major roles in the design of Google Analytics and Gmail/Google Calendar, respectively.

If Doug Bowman says the culture at Google sucks for designers they are going to have a hard time recruiting great designers - his word has a lot of weight in the design world.
The article has been prepared for academic publication, and ironically, academic computer science has been somewhat on the trailing edge with respect to preparing documents for the web.
These help me with early wake-ups (3:00am):

* My pre-alarm goes off 15 minutes early. After this alarm, I start thinking and worrying about what I need to do. When the real alarm sounds I'm ready to jump out of bed.

* I don't use the bathroom in the morning when I'm sleepy. A full bladder helps me stay awake.

* I nap whenever I can't work.

* Also, drink some water before you go to bed and don't use the bathroom, this will help you wake up in the morning.
Safari Mobile is also on every ipod touch. giving it an even wider user base.
For various reasons, I became cable tv-less. And I love it. My IQ went up instantly.
Because they say things like: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Yes, I was going say the same thing. I think investors want entrepreneurs to do a scale first. Easier to make big and fast bucks on something emotional than something rational.
If I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and choose not to eat the crab meat, am I getting ripped off because I "paid for" the crab meat?

A good all-you-can-eat content subscription service is a wonderful thing. Yes, there are loads of problems with the current cable TV distribution model. The fact that it's an all-you-can-eat subscription isn't one of them.
Enterprise Web vs Consumer Web [2.0]
Do you have any links/advice regarding how to avoid being scooped?
Actually, I hate editing any code outside of Vi nowadays. I've gotten used to 'cb', 'dat', etc. I've been using Vi heavily for about ten months.
These fractals are absolutely stunning! Who created them and where can I find the equations?
The assumption you're making here is that the passwords are not stored in plain text :P
The company I'm with was founded literally right after September 11th, then funded in early 2002; basically at the nadir of the original tech bubble. But it had exactly the effect that you've described; there was no hurry to make a land grab, and far less pressure to try to get big quick to score a fast exit for the VCs. Starting in a down market gave us time to actually build something real and valuable and to build the company for the long haul instead of having to worry about the short term. It also let us hire an all-star team that would have been hard to assemble in boom years (and, incidentally, the most recent downturn has again made hiring easier for us).

The downside is that you'll get a comparatively lower valuation for the same amount of funding, meaning the founders will retain less of the company, but that company will probably have a higher probability of being worth something significant. So as a founder, it's still a net win.
Scott Draves and http://electricsheep.org/
Going to bed is easy; the trick is being able to get to sleep earlier. Melatonin can help, and so can simply not getting as much sleep as you'd like for a few days in a row. And only shift your schedule in short increments if you're looking to make a bigger change eventually.
Now, of course, when there's a web site that is good but un-monetized, the answer to that question is "Google ads."
The problem is that cats will wake you up when they feel like it. Sometimes that means 4:00 AM.
I think he is well aware of the consumer's desires. According to Cuban subscriptions are increasing and the networks are reluctant to try another medium because as far as they are concerned, they are currently in the money channel (no pun intended).
I think he would just come back and point to the increasing subscriptions. I guess this means that people are not only paying for monthly subscriptions but also using Hulu and iTunes.
I was messing around with the Twitter API the other day and was under the impression that their OAuth implementation was still private beta.

Is this still the case? Any ideas when it will be open for all to use?
What do they do just north of SF?
a crisis like this can't exist in a vacuum. dumping money on an economy doesn't magically making people's labor less valuable, neither does disappearing a bunch of money. the only reason it has an effect is because of aforementioned stickiness. labor values are relative to one another not absolute.

then you identify the root cause but shy away from it. how would this crisis happen without fiat money in the first place? large amounts of some commodity with inelastic demand would have to be dumped on the market at once (or taken away).
That begs the question, what about Google? A couple of first-time student founders taking on the hardest hitters in the industry with little more than a some ideas about how web search could work to show. (Presuming this was before they had a working prototype and even perhaps afterwards.)

Perhaps a better question: At what point in their development would Page and Brin have been interesting? Or would a couple of Stanford PhD students have gotten them an interview on that alone?