skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I feel my way around it. I'll use my editor/debugger/REPL to jump me from place to place to build up a non-visual structure of the program in my head.

This is interesting because I am a "visual" developer and have never really used a gdb-style debugger at all in nearly 10 years of professional dev experience.

I prefer isolating problematic code programmatically and refactoring my mental picture of the architecture/data structures until I can mentally visualize what's going wrong in my math/logic. This has given me grief with hairy pointer code where running something like 'printf' actually changes stuff in memory that you're trying to look at, but I really just don't understand how anyone can use a debugger to step through things one line at a time when that's essentially what I'm doing in my head when I look at code.

Then again I've never worked on anything as complex as, say, an OS kernel, so what do I know.
Yes, IE6 (60%) and 7 (20%) make up 80%(!) of the browsers in business (Forrester research, April 30th 2009, http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Microso...)

But the JavaScript voodoo to "upgrade" IE6 is getting better and better.
I think the reason for the upper quartile underestimating their abilities relative to the others is related to the fact that bright people tend to overestimate the intelligence of people they have casual contact with. Which would result in lowering their own self-appraisal relative to the others.
This is worth noting:

> Much of what’s automated over at Slicehost (like provisioning a new instance) is handled manually at Prgmr.

(Which is also true for Linode). That might potentially be a big difference - I found it very quick to bring up new Linodes or Slices, and it's nice to know that that's a quick and easy possibility if you start generating more traffic.

Also... Calexico? Seems an odd place to be running a hosting business. It appears their actual servers are in San Jose... so where did he get Calexico from?

http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/About_prgmr.co...

(Which is what their 'about' link takes you to) Looks like a smaller operation than Linode or Slicehost, too.
Guys tend to argue over who picks up the check after dinner.

What guys? Normally, say 5 people, the bill comes and it's $50, everyone chucks in a $20 and says they don't want change...
I found the location by using a Geo IP lookup. It could therefore be inaccurate.
Yeah, they should have just called it "marketing", but I can understand why they didn't, because their audience hates words that non-technical people like to use.
Or if it's poisoned.
I am so thoroughly surprised nobody mentioned this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

A couple of people in my high school along with me were hooked to CW. I remember those days with fondness that cannot be replicated.
Old Japanese maps on Google Earth unveil prejudices
Larry Page Gives Commencement Speech, Story of his Google Dream
I think you can totally live on that budget, if you play things right. You might also look into living in some neighboring cities that would allow you to commute for events, but you could live on that budget in San Francisco proper if you were careful.

I think you should just plan on the 2.5 months though and go to school afterwards.

I'm in a very similar situation. I'm taking a break from school (college), I have a bunch of savings built up, and I have a business that makes about enough for me to live off of.

I'm sharing a place now with some other hackers (we were in Palo Alto for a few months) and it's come down to $500-$900/month for rent depending on who gets a roommate. Not too shabby.

Coming from Boston, I thought it was really lame that there wasn't a central, unified subway system. But the busses here are just as good. There's one route that comes by my place every 5 minutes.

Also, I never realized how much the weather affected my emotions. I love how sunny it is out here.
The Friendster exodus wasn't to anywhere tho'. People just stopped using it. Facebook came along later.
you can get pretty cheap rent if you don't mind living in sketchy areas. I lived on treasure island for a few months, and besides feeling like the set of a zombie film, it was alright living for ~600pm

I lived in the mission for a little more. Definitely try the east bay for cheap rent- if you don't mind getting the bus/bart into the city the rent is a lot cheaper.
That is fun to play with! It reminds me of Circuit Simulator? from the MacPlus days.

I think you should make the simulator stopped/active control more obvious.
The Padre (Perl (and not only Perl) IDE) Plugin Contest
Oakland is a fine place to live, and I live there, but you have to watch the transit situation when living there. If you are too far from a BART or an express cross-bay bus, you will burn a lot of time waiting for bus transfers. See 511.org or Google Transit when researching potential places to live.
How OpenTable Could Actually Matter
notdarkey,

Those people who are telling him to do it probably have done it themselves (that includes me). After moving in the Bay area, I asked myself why I didn't do it earlier.

I have lived in 4 US cities and no city comes close to the startup environment in SF. It's like watching the Superbowl in person versus watching it in your own house. The energy is just different.

He's 18. If he fails, so what. Sometimes, it's better to regret things you have done than regrets things you didn't do. (Ok that doesn't include committing crimes.)
Can anyone recommend resources / activities to improve spatial visualization abilities? I would think this would help everyone become a better critical thinker. Thanks.
Why You Should Let Your Developers Surf
Scott Adams write his blog from the perspective of a person in a position of power and influence. Notice that in his anecdote he is the person paying for dinner. Also, he is the person persuading the subjugated to accept their horrible fate ... for an admittedly "ridiculous" reason.

Accepting a free dinner is easy to do. Accepting a lifetime of domination from an oppressor is "not the same thing".

I wonder if Scott Adams would be so willing to accept a ridiculous justification if he was the one being tormented every day of his life.
I have a hard time swallowing this. It sounds like a classic case of confirmation bias. "We did these nine things and were successful, therefore these nine things made us successful."

There's no data which tells us which of the nine building blocks mattered, if any, and to what extent.

What's more likely is that they believed these nine things were important -- and some of them quite possibly were -- and their belief has been confirmed by their success. But that doesn't mean if you duplicate these 9 features you will be successful, or that you have to duplicate all 9 in order to be successful.

All-in-all not a very helpful article.
If you implement the FFT using this matrix representation, you could have just as easily just built your own complex number system and used that. It seems that this matrix representation is just an easy way to not make mistakes when doing the complex arithmetic.

Most languages make it pretty easy to implement basic complex number support.
Ask HN: What does the Google Ocean team do?
I was out for dinner with family last night, when I noticed a group come into the restaurant wearing Google Ocean fleeces. One member of the group was carrying a laptop and some documents, from which I surmised that I was witnessing a project team dinner. Does anyone know what the Google Ocean team might be doing in the field? Could they be piloting the Google Ocean View submersible? I'm in North Vancouver, British Columbia.
That's reasonable, just be sure to seek out the same sort of peer group, learning curriculum, and maniacal focus on execution-while-living-cheaply. (Startupness is not just acquired by osmosis once in the silicon valley air.) And remember too YC's biases against single-founder startups and doing other things (like contracting) simultaneously... I believe those are a key part of their formula, which helps offset what could otherwise derail young startupper migrants to the bay area.
"What this means is that consuming caffeine regularly does not appear to produce any net beneficial effects, based on the measures we examined."

Depends on your definition of "beneficial effects", I suppose.
Still, there's a chance home values will undershoot below "fundamental value" for an extended period of time.

But I agree phrases like "A home worth $300,000 may soon be worth $200,000 or less" are misleading.
Indeed. In the CS architecture class here they use Logic Works, which is only a little higher-level, but with a much worse interface.

It is no replacement for more powerful things (e.g. FPGAdvantage), but for didactic purposes, this is quite useful.
$3k isn't going to last you very long in San Francisco.
Sure you can do it. From 2002-2004, I lived on about that much per month, but it wasn't easy.

-Rent was under $500 - you can still get these prices. Sublet a room in a house with some other young people.
- Electricity/internet bill - $35.
- Cell phone - $50.
- Bring down your bicycle and bike for transport - Free
- If you cook every day, and eat mostly vegetarian and rice - not just MSG-infused ramen - you can live on $5 a day - that's $150 for the month.
- Give yourself $250 for very infrequent meals out, beers, or BART/Caltrain trips - and surprises.

I'm guessing most of the people who said you can't do it for $1000 never tried. If you have to, you make it work.

Summer's a great time to live in SF for cheap - lots of free outdoor activities. 2 months isn't that long to tough it out. Come back again and enjoy the great city when you hit it big :)
Once, years ago, I created a C++ library to do complex arithmetic. All that operator overloading made me realize that C++ is probably not the most efficient language to work with. Fortunately, Python has built-in complex numbers...
Nah, we do the same thing for things suggested on Twitter :)
Its always worth it to pay more for quality. Especially when the difference is only $12.
I don't think it's a fair comparison. Slicehost grew very quickly then got acquired. Prgmr seems to be the smaller guy growing slowly, getting rack space http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2009/03/colocation-in-s... and trying to grow to a full rack. The automation is a huge plus especially if you are in the hosting business. The pricing model and the added features are what sets the competition apart from EC2. I think many of these VPS providers have to catch up and come up with some of their own "Why choose me" features, services if competing with EC2 is their focus.
that was one of the points of the essay, though. the intersection between personal space and online, duology of self in a way, the artist as voyeur behind a closed door. breaking those boundaries loses something. and y'know, I'd have been way too scared to talk to him at the first coffee shop incident too.
Linode seems to occupy a good middle-ground. You get much more for your money than Slicehost and it's a fairly large, well-established host with multiple locations. A $20 Linode for instance gives you 360mb of of RAM, 16gb storage and 200gb transfer. They also use more powerful CPUs than the Athlon's listed for Slicehost/prgmr - my Linode is on a quad-core Xeon L5420 (2.5ghz, 6mb cache).

Just guessing, but I'd expect disk access is a bigger bottleneck on highly loaded VPS servers than the CPU, so the worst and average case disk performance are probably what would concern me the most. I think prgmr is a fantastic deal - I certainly haven't seen anybody else offering so much RAM at that price point. I'd be a customer if they were located on the east coast.

Finally, for those who don't know, prgmr is owned and run by lsc who's a member here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc
TwitPic already lets you do that, doesn't it? I'm surprised that the Facebook iPhone app doesn't let you (I haven't looked). IMO this seems logical and, for that reason, I would assume Facebook, Flickr, et al are working hard at putting that together.
Not sure if this is how it works in the US but our petrol prices are often technically 3 decimal places. 1.059 etc.
They had some kind of deal with EngineYard, where EngineYard customers got free devjavu service. I'm pretty sure they got a discount on hosting for that.

Since EY's customers are mostly Ruby developers, it must have been hard competing with GitHub + Lighthouse:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS145946+29-Ap...
Beta access to Symbian, distributed via twitter
Oracle Office, MySQL, and other dreams
On a related note - anyone familiar with the Berkeley area care to share some tips about housing (places/buildings to avoid, where all the free-wifi coffee houses are, etc)? Please drop me an email at me [at] euwyn.com
DIY Arduino Strobe Light
A disturbingly tabloid headline. The article's premise is that it could change certain aspects of search, though I'm sceptical - others have tried human-curated 'knowledge databases' and we all still use Google and Wikipedia.

Plus, I think today's searchers - for the most part - speak search engine lingo, and have certain expectations. I don't want my search results to play D# major if that's what I'm searching for, I probably want to see the notes. I won't type in "10 flips for four heads", I'll type in "coin tossing probability".

I can see kids doing homework projects having fun with this, but beyond? Dunno. I'm quite happy for it to be a wild success and prove me wrong, I'm just very sceptical this will happen.
Lap times in F1/NASCAR?
Two things to consider:

A) Slicehost isn't an overnite operation. Not saying I don't wish Prgmr all the luck in the world, but still ...

B) vCPUs don't matter as much as the guest/host contention ratio does. If I gave you 4 VCPU's and stuck you on a host with 128 other VMs .... you performance is going to suck no matter what. The fewer the number of guests, the better the performance of the guests.

Now only if Slicehost would stop sending me email I've got credit with them even if I have used 'em for over a year ...
The difference is $12 for a 256MB slice. What if you start to grow and need 5 1GB slices? That is a $250/month difference.
Oddly he doesn't actually give his 540 word palindrome, but here it is:

A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac, a liar, a hoop, a pint, a catalpa, a gas, an oil, a bird, a yell, a vat, a caw, a pax, a wag, a tax, a nay, a ram, a cap, a yam, a gay, a tsar, a wall, a car, a luger, a ward, a bin, a woman, a vassal, a wolf, a tuna, a nit, a pall, a fret, a watt, a bay, a daub, a tan, a cab, a datum, a gall, a hat, a fag, a zap, a say, a jaw, a lay, a wet, a gallop, a tug, a trot, a trap, a tram, a torr, a caper, a top, a tonk, a toll, a ball, a fair, a sax, a minim, a tenor, a bass, a passer, a capital, a rut, an amen, a ted, a cabal, a tang, a sun, an ass, a maw, a sag, a jam, a dam, a sub, a salt, an axon, a sail, an ad, a wadi, a radian, a room, a rood, a rip, a tad, a pariah, a revel, a reel, a reed, a pool, a plug, a pin, a peek, a parabola, a dog, a pat, a cud, a nu, a fan, a pal, a rum, a nod, an eta, a lag, an eel, a batik, a mug, a mot, a nap, a maxim, a mood, a leek, a grub, a gob, a gel, a drab, a citadel, a total, a cedar, a tap, a gag, a rat, a manor, a bar, a gal, a cola, a pap, a yaw, a tab, a raj, a gab, a nag, a pagan, a bag, a jar, a bat, a way, a papa, a local, a gar, a baron, a mat, a rag, a gap, a tar, a decal, a tot, a led, a tic, a bard, a leg, a bog, a burg, a keel, a doom, a mix, a map, an atom, a gum, a kit, a baleen, a gala, a ten, a don, a mural, a pan, a faun, a ducat, a pagoda, a lob, a rap, a keep, a nip, a gulp, a loop, a deer, a leer, a lever, a hair, a pad, a tapir, a door, a moor, an aid, a raid, a wad, an alias, an ox, an atlas, a bus, a madam, a jag, a saw, a mass, an anus, a gnat, a lab, a cadet, an em, a natural, a tip, a caress, a pass, a baronet, a minimax, a sari, a fall, a ballot, a knot, a pot, a rep, a carrot, a mart, a part, a tort, a gut, a poll, a gateway, a law, a jay, a sap, a zag, a fat, a hall, a gamut, a dab, a can, a tabu, a day, a batt, a waterfall, a patina, a nut, a flow, a lass, a van, a mow, a nib, a draw, a regular, a call, a war, a stay, a gam, a yap, a cam, a ray, an ax, a tag, a wax, a paw, a cat, a valley, a drib, a lion, a saga, a plat, a catnip, a pooh, a rail, a calamus, a dairyman, a bater, a canal--Panama.

There it is, Dan Hoey's panama palindrome.
Wow. Thanks to Wikipedia, I've finally understood the mysterious slugging percentage. Sorry, not a huge baseball fan.
See if you can hook up with a YC team and sublet a room with them or something, keeps costs low and keeps you surrounded by the right sort of people.
Thanks, I was keeping an eye out for a way to cut costs for some non-mission-critical stuff - this looks very interesting (that's a BIG price difference for the larger plans). Will give it a try.
Getting the order of magnitude right is actually a problem for some folks. I remember a pilot in Eve thinking that his 10,000 km/s speed in real-space could actually make a significant dent in distances measured in parsecs. (Not in under a minute!)
as your traffic grows, so should your revenue.
It's a codename having nothing literally to do with water or seas. The codename is for a released product.
Ask HN: "How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs?
I'm interested in working on a small side project to roll my own short URL, similar to how TechCrunch recently unveiled their version of http://tcrn.ch/.

If you know of any detailed How-Tos for creating your own version of a short URL, I'd appreciate it.

(P.S. To keep the question on topic, I'm not interested in debating the merits of whether short URLs promote spam, acts as a middleman, etc as was covered some weeks ago here by joshu.)
I do feel like slicehost "must" be overpriced these days, just based on the fact that their prices haven't decreased that I can remember. (At least ~2 years, maybe more?)

Not sure if prgmr is where I'd end up, but can't be all bad when "figlet prgmr.com" was all the time they spent on logo design. ;)
I'm compelled to quote, from the author's previous post (on Linux vs. Unix, http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1602 ), this parenthetical remark:

of course, the smart thing to do - working directly with AIX local devices - is a lot like hanging wallpaper in the dark

Wish it wouldn't also describe so many other computer-related activities ...
The limitations with the tower defense game are the result of programmer laziness rather than some limitation with JavaScript itself. If the game was reworked to use sprites instead of drawing using basic geometric shapes, it would appear much more polished. The major limitations with JavaScript versus Flash revolve around dealing with media (we had to use a Flash tool to implement conceptual sound support for PTD, http://github.com/rictic/processing-tower-defense/tree/maste...), but I think these are generally being resolved with HTML 5.

To respond to your questions:

1. With some minor effort we were able to get PTD running on Firefox, Safari and IE. (Chrome didn't exist at that point.) The performance on IE 6 and (I think) 7 were prohibitively bad though, so it wasn't actually playable. Thanks to projects like excanvas, even browsers without native canvas support don't pose a big problem.

2. I don't have Flash experience, but PTD is just a collection of static files. I never felt deployment was a problem.
The problem with using the metric system in the US is that it really isn't applicable to most real life situations and feels quite artificial. I recall having that feeling as a child while being taught the metric system.

It's funny that they show you the superb benefits of the metric system very early and when it is most apparant while doing basic arithmetic, yet you live in a country where regular use of the metric just can't happen.
The American Express Blues
That is true...I'm not too sure at all. I guess my plan is just to see what's out there and what sounds cool to me. If you know of a few internships or jobs, I'd love to hear about them, 0xdefec8 at gmail dot com Much appreciated, thank you!
In what I would call "economical security", you're right, it's absolutely relevant.

However, we seem to be entering an age of "ethical security". As computers and software become more powerful and complex, people expect every system that is "secure" to be "absolutely secure", at least up to some fuzzy isomorphism inside different "security classes".

What this leads to is thinking like: "if your website offers to protect my account with a password, it should be as secure as the most secure example of password-protected systems (passwords stored as hashes, strong password requirements, and so on)."

You can see this as well in the emerging (and somewhat stagnant) market of commodity biometric security devices, such as off-the-shelf fingerprint readers. There was a lot of talk about how they could be defeated by lifting your prints, taking impressions of your hand, and so forth. Essentially, the argument was "if you're going to offer biometric security, I expect it to be on par with NSA-class biometric security".

I'm not going to make a judgment as to whether this is the right approach, or not, but I suspect it is beneficial in the long run, even if unesseccarily expensive and overkill at any one point or example.
Contain seems slower than javascript based sites. Any idea why? If you leave the flash UI framework and do it all yourself is there a big performance hit?
isn't it part of Google Earth, ocean-floor mapping?
Thats what Ning does to your site, I think.
I agree with the first part, but how would several iPhone headlines sound if you break em down? Just read several numbers more thoroughly. Financial Q4/Q1 2009 approx. 30% down. Financial Q2 2008/Q2 2009 up 123% with 85 added countries...

"The demographic who is early adopters of the android phones are pretty likely to be heavier tech/web users than the iPhone folks."

I've seldom seen a 'normal' guy using an iPhone before the 3G iPhone came out...
In fact, there's an instructable for making a V-shaped book scanner:
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-...
Because it was THAT hard to Google it, right?
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+ocean
I'm not sure if it's a bug in this case, but I've used logic simulation software with the same issue and it was considered a "feature". Basically, unconnected nodes of an or-gate are considered HIGH. I suppose it makes more sense when the AND-gate has more inputs.

Confused the hell out of me at the time, especially since I had left the assignment to the last possible minute.

Edit: remembered the name of the software: http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~burch/logisim/
And which product is that?
Three Open Source Projects That Needs Your Help
It's neat, but it ain't killing Flash for a long, long, long time, even in theory.

1. Timing loops are absolutely useless in most browsers. Stable 30fps is all but impossible, and forget about 60fps.

2. GC pauses are abysmal and very frequent in FF.

3. Even with putImageData, you can't currently blit more than about 100x100 on a core2duo.

4. For most people, a large use of Flash is as an embedded video codec, which canvas isn't going to be able to touch.

Of course, these could eventually be fixed, but I think Adobe's smart enough to make sure that Flash doesn't stand still.
You can write the basics of that sort of thing from start to finish in half a day - easy stuff. You need:

1) Database table to store the "codes" - two "main" columns: Code, DestinationUrl

2) Random code generator to generate the "Code"

That's really the gist of it.
http://tinyurl.com/cdlspk
VentureBeat reported the team has something to do with book search and digitization.

Here is more information for the curious: http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/02/what-is-googles-other-ocea...
Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
In some circumstances, an arbitrary decision >> indecision.
Four Ways Ruby on Rails Can Help You
HI hostels have a maximum stay restriction. I think it's around two weeks. They certainly don't let you camp out for an entire summer.