skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Use "cytokine storm" for your googlebait.
This is essentially a very brief summary of the 37 Signals (e)book, "Getting Real" http://gettingreal.37signals.com/

I suggest you all read it. They have some really, really good points and analogies.
Bingo, during college I re-sold office furniture by purchasing bulk quantities from foreclosed businesses. Aeron and Steelcase definitely retain their value, it's hard to find a used Aeron under $300. As an alternative to the Aeron, you may like the Steelcase Leap chair but they are much harder to find.

There are a few things worth checking on an aeron to make sure you're getting a good deal:

1. the quality of the mesh (check for cuts, etc. I would avoid if the mesh is in bad shape).

2. check the base, make sure you rock side to side. avoid creaks, and clanks. Aerons are generally REALLY durable unless they've been abused.

The issue with ordering Aeron's blindly is that they come in a ton of different configurations. Some have tilt forward, not just tilt back for example. Some have leather arms rests, different lumbar system, etc..

Like car shopping, there's no such thing as a "last good deal" so don't force yourself into purchasing something you're having second questions about. The economy is in the shitter, plenty of Aerons will be available if they aren't already.
Last line of the article:

> Common seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people every year worldwide, far more than the current outbreak of swine flu. But there is a vaccine for seasonal flu.

So unless I'm missing something _big_ here, like how much more contagious it is, or how much greater the fatality rate is... none of which is said clearly in the article... it really sounds like just media scare.
IMHO this is something Java got totally right.

With many other languages Unicode is some afterthought. Ever tried Unicode things in php? It's horrible.

Having all strings as Unicode is fantastic. If you're dealing with something else and can't afford the memory, then sure - roll your own with byte[] arrays. Not a big deal.
So I Am Legend would be Level 7, maybe Level 8.
I agree with that, but the WHO isn't the media. The media is reporting their change to 5, I quote "Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short."
I've had an Aeron (at work) before too and I prefer the IKEA one, mostly because I don't like chairs with arms. I've honestly never gotten the whole cult-of-the-aeron.
There are really two ways in which runners "hit the wall". One is when lactic acid builds up in muscles causing not only pain but decreased performance. This is due to muscles using anaerobic metabolism when there is not enough oxygen being brought to them. This is typically what you'll feel at the end of an 800m race.

The second type of "wall" that can be hit is when the body runs out of glycogen and has to start burning other things for fuel. This is what you will most likely be feeling at the end of a marathon.

In no case do I believe that "Runners are often at their fastest at the end of a race, when they should be the most tired." In fact I'll call bullshit on that one.
There's no difference between C and C++, except that in C++, you can define prefix and postfix operators on user-defined types. The two are defined separately because C++ was created for people who are really finicky about performance. (For some reason some people are really bothered by the possibility that you could provide really insane definitions, as if it wasn't already possible to create insanely named functions and methods....)

Anyway, even in C, ++i and i++ change the value of i and evaluate to a value. So there are two values: the new value of i, and the value of the expression. In the case of prefix ++, the two values are the same. In the case of postfix ++, the two values are different. If you ignore the value of the expression, then ++i and i++ can be used interchangeably. The compiler will probably figure this out and produce the same code.
Local high-end furniture stores and commercial furniture dealers often have Aerons, Leap chairs, Freedom chairs, etc in their showrooms.
Perhaps spokeless bicycles are safer, meaning that there is nothing that could get caught in there and get it stuck. I'm sure it's also light with fewer parts and no messy chain (but you get messy gears instead).
Level 5 means that there is sustained person to person transmission. So a real pandemic is possible and somewhat likely. Level 6 would mean that it had reached "critical mass" and you would probably see just about as many cases as you would with normal flu.

For this to happen, the virus needs a foothold in the southern hemisphere. In the north, with the approaching summer, the conditions for flu spread are becoming more and more reduced. In the south, however, they are getting increasingly better.

I'm currently working in real time modeling of H1N1 spread. We're constantly refining the model as new data becomes available. I've posted the link where you can get the latest updates: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583358 but it went pretty much unnoticed. We're planning on having updates every 24-48h, so just keep checking http://www.gleamviz.org .
It may be old, but he raises some good points. Java's syntax is probably a step forward from C++, but both are still far from intuitive.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a pared down version of Java's syntax matched with a better-optimized version of GCJ - the readability of Java combined with the speed of native bytecode would be a godsend.
Relax. Right now the flurry of new reports could be more an indicator of diligent search among travelers and current flu sufferers as much as actual spread.

It may have already been everywhere for weeks -- but disappeared unnoticed into the normal flu background until the latest alarm spread. That could, curiously enough, be a good sign -- it means it's not so incredibly worse than other flus.

The deaths reported from Mexico could be due to coinfection with something else -- bacterial pneumonia or TB -- and are not yet completely understood in context. Witness, for example, that WHO considers only 7 swine-flu-related deaths in Mexico as definitively confirmed (compared to the 100-plus reported from less rigorous sources).

A normal flu season results in ~36,000 deaths in the US each year... a hundred a day, though usually among those especially vulnerable for other reasons. So there's lots of potential to misattribute things in this period of hyper-attention.
I don't know if it's a scare, I think the media is reporting on what most people consider something of interest. This particular article, along with the line you quoted, I think access the situation realistically. Now all the twitter gossip I would consider scare mongering.
It's called networking for a reason.
I want to make it clear that I wasn't trying to karma whore, just hoping to offer some encouragement to anyone else who is as frightened by this kind of stuff as I am.
What I meant to say (but did so poorly) was that requiring a certain software platform is like requiring certain brands of paper and pencils to be used for note taking. I draw a distinction between course materials and the tools used to study them.

Using Excel spreadsheets as teaching/submission materials is fine by me, but it's not their business how the student deals with that, eg by using alternative software. I don't see why students should be required to only use Windows, any more than why they would be required to only use Dell laptops. FWIW I'm happily using windows right now...by choice.
Sudont: like sudo, except doesnt do what you tell it to
I second the Steelcase Think recommendation. I was having severe nerve problems using a basic chair (after a recent move) and tried a few iterations before I was able to get the Think. My problems instantly went away. Moreover, I can easily sit for 12 hours a day, with normal breaks, and I have no problems anymore.

It's a simple and clean design and it doesn't tear up your clothes like the net fabric Aeron. I find that the handful of adjustments that it provides are enough.
An idea for an iphone app to combat the swine flu.
The idea is that you would inform the app any time you see someone who sneezes or coughs or looks sick. The app would combine this tip along with your current location.

In this way, you can still leave your house but avoid areas where sick people were seen recently.

You can make it more sophisticated by indicating what this person looks like, where this person is going, the density of people around him/her, whether he/she is indoors, etc.
I use unicode in php routinely. It works fine. If you need sub-string manipulations add mb_ to stuff (and if you are manipulating an entire string you need do nothing special).

And if adding mb_ is too much trouble use mbstring.func_overload.

UTF-8 only of course. All the other encodings should never be used anywhere. With UTF-8 the majority of the time you can use regular functions - for example trim() works just fine on a UTF-8 string.
text article is at:

http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/04/29/revolt-t...
Ghost of Christmas future agrees. After being quite happy in a $200 Office Depot chair for more than a year, I developed chronic back pain that limited my work and mobility. I purchased an Aeron and haven't had trouble since.

Unless your budget is limited, the price difference is not worth the risk of injury.
Stick with the short answer: "investigators don't know".

The rest of the answer is about other viruses better understood in hindsight, and might apply if current patterns in Mexico are better understood. Which they aren't yet.
Yes I use to raise the argument saying TPB is doing nothing wrong and blah blah blah. But, TPB would not be what it is today had it not offered a way to connect computers to download COPYRIGHTED material; new movies, CDs, software and other intangible goods the public CLAMORS for yet feels entitled to enjoy it for free because they can.

I no longer use TPB or BitTorrent now there are legal streaming sites, as well as after starting up my venture.

This Google argument to me would not be silly if I was able from the Google search page to click on a torrent link and up pops UTorrent or whatever to begin the download. THat's not the case here!
The house Steve Jobs doesn't want to call home
I don't think you're right that the people behind Java didn't understand languages. There are actually a lot of things which Java gets right. For instance, Java's namespacing is very good.

Unfortunately, being smart and knowledgeable isn't enough to build a good language. A language has to "fit together" in a way that just can't be forced. This is why Java, whose design is pretty intelligent, is absolutely miserable to work in; while Perl, whose design is random and crufty by comparison, can be easy to work in and highly productive.
I might agree with the association idea, but making this a gender issue is incredibly unfair. If a t-shirt with a pair of breasts creates bias, it is absolutely nothing compared to how a sexy dressed woman affects a man. If we go this path, it is absolutely normal to ban short skirts. For both the sake of men's hormones and women's image.

Overall, the old principle "you have no right not to be offended" stands.
Note that 'pandemic' is only referring to how widespread a new disease is -- not how dangerous.

Our regular seasonal flu viruses are 'pandemic' across the world every year. They just don't trigger alerts because they're familiar.
This game is awesome, I've purchased a bunch of more 'in-depth' iPhone games but I've had the most fun with this one. I would definitely suggest trying it out.
How Wolfram Alpha May Trump Google
If you already enjoy membership in a specific in-group (whether that's the celebrity circuit, tenured faculty, holders of elected office or any other fairly elite social network), then the chances are that other people need to contact you than you needing to contact others. Nor do you necessarily need to leverage technology for a competitive edge to the same degree if you're already 'made it'.

Some people are just conservative; apparently Donald Knuth gave up using email and spends his time writing 'the art of programming' and building pipe organs. Other people are unaware or just not interested. Anyway, I'm sure lots of famous people who are interested in the net make use of it, but choose not to advertise the fact. There are social networks exclusively for the wealthy and famous, such as asmallworld.net.
Social strategy for being a host:
Introduce EVERYONE to EVERYONE.

If you met someone five minutes ago, introduce them to the person you met three minutes ago. If someone ask: "How do you know Bob?" you answer "I just met him."

You're not lying. You're not pumping anyone's ego. You are merely exchanging people's names and, if you know them quite well, a sentence or two about why they're awesome.

Everyone likes an introduction.

It's a very simple way to come across as a good host.
Surely that is why you have a VPN through your VPS set up.
Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Silicon
Here's my simple two-step process for not worrying about Swine Flu:

1. Realize you don't control it, so there is no reason to worry about it in the first place.

2. Realize that it is a "wimpier" flu strain than usual and unless you are a small child or lack any remotely decent medical care it is practically impossible to die from the flu in the first place.

Fixed!
Using rough numbers. In Mexico there have been about 2000 cases of people that MIGHT have the swine flu (based on symptoms) and had to be hospitalized. There have been about 150 deaths that MIGHT have had the swine flu. (Only 7 have been confirmed.) So all this numbers are very speculative because they do not know if they really have influenza I think there are only two laboratories in the world that can do the test.

So, there may be a lot more people in Mexico that have been infected but they have not been detected because they did not end in a hospital.
There are lots of opportunities at www.cogito.org. If you're looking for more detail about how to manage your school experience better - I've found the list of 4Cs of School Success helpful at this link - (pp18-19) - http://books.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/E00632/cha...

Is there a way for you to stretch yourself within the confines of school? Are you allowed to test out of anything, study with a mentor, or maybe take some dual-enrollment classes?

Here is an interesting article by Tracy Cross - http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10479.aspx

I hope you can find a good fit soon. Hang in there. It's not fair to be marking time.
This makes me wonder something. In my experience, women in programming has been treated extremely well, if only because they are so rare. My first (and best) programming teacher was a woman, and since then I've had woman as collegues and subordinates. Also I've met a very good (and respected) woman manger.

So I can't help but ask (I'm from Eastern Europe): other then being few, is there really so much discrimination against women in your culture? Or obstacles against choosing this career or advancing in it? Again, in my environment things are exactly the opposite: any young women programmer is always encouraged to continue working, and they tend to be quite enthusiastic too.
I think you are getting downvoted because you should have said "zombiepower to scale a ..."
Not the cloud sofa!

I repeat: There is more to designing than dreaming.

1) There is no stable arrangement of magnets to support a static object. Physicists prove these sorts of things to show off their stuff.

2) When that top part flips over and the magnets attract, and then get much closer together the occupant is going to end up as a red stripe around the perimeter of the room.

Unrelated blabbering: Wheels without spokes I can live with, but wheels with three or so spokes look quite dangerous. The nice things about spokes is one comes along to whack your body part out of the opening before you get so far in that physics takes the easy way out and chops off the body part instead.
It looks like the IE version is a bit more clever, since it seems to grab the name of the function at the point it's first bound to a variable. Huge benefit being you don't have to go back an instrument your code with .displayName's everywhere.
Those of us who work with Joe can vouch for that :)
Which One You Choose, N97 or N86
"It may have already been everywhere for weeks -- but disappeared unnoticed into the normal flu background until the latest alarm spread. That could, curiously enough, be a good sign -- it means it's not so incredibly worse than other flus"

This is exactly what I thinking. e.g. A coworker came to Mexico from Sacramento CA a month a go. When he went back home he spent a week in bed with a really bad flu. I am thinking he could have acquired the swine flu then but no one noticed.
Counterpoint: code is to be written by humans and only incidentally executed by machines (paraphrase from SICP). But can we please not rehash this debate here?
Interesting point (agreed on the pain of programming in Java vs Perl). What do you mean exactly by "fit together"?
Microsoft Bob Rides Again
I'm curious why Java doesn't use UTF-8 encoding by default; that would offer much of the memory savings the parent poster is talking about, if the data is mostly ASCII anyway.
And by their definition it is a pandemic (I was just about to quote your earlier post to you :) ). It's just that a pandemic is not necessary something with a high fatality rate. After all is said, we would just have a different strain of flu floating around.

I'm guessing the lack of a vaccine makes some people nervous in case it mutates and becomes more virulent, but from a practical purpose that's at least two maybe's away from a real problem, with a vaccine which is probably not so far away.

So pandemic, maybe. A problem for the average joe? Not even close.
That question I cannot answer. I'd talk to a lawyer and an accountant concerning a question like that.
Stop complaining, you earned your upvotes in laughter and relief.

... and don't worry until you really know this will be more dangerous for you than your traffic accident risk will be over a few years. (Most alarms like this are duds, afaik.)
Analog Computer Bouncing Ball
Ruby on Wails. If only they put half this energy into improving the framework.
Look closer.

YQL can output results in either JSON or XML. It just uses XML for table definitions, and as one of several ways to extract data from web services.
It's at least half a year since I first heard about it, and it's still the the stage of "motor installed, not running yet". I want to see it running, dammit. I just love the idea.
Number 2 is incorrect. Most deaths have been to healthy adults.
I would be surprised if they actually enforce this -- I bet you are smart enough to figure out a way to get a Mac on the network. Ask existing students.
It is work if you're like me and instantly hate most of those people, have no interest in listening to their boring conversations, and would rather be doing anything else ;)

"good time" and "nice people" are not phrases I'd use to describe networking events. More important phrases to me are, "free food" and "open bar".
While he makes the point that Java was 4 separate things that should've been developed and released separately, that probably would have seriously hindered adoption and even caused the language to die. [In hindsight, maybe that would have been best. >:)]

When I first started with Java years ago, one of the things that made it appealing to learn a new language was the fact that it came with a box of toys (such as easily-constructed graphics contexts, UI elements, and threads). In the days of Java 1.0, it was probably the quickest way to get fairly sophisticated things up and running, so that power made it all worth learning. Had it just been some research language with no libraries or JVM, I probably would've said "great, but...what can I do with it, nothing!".

In my case, this still came full circle; I eventually decided I really hated Java for any serious programming. I never choose to use Java for anything these days, I only put up with it if I'm maintaining something that is already Java-based.
On a related note, has anyone had problems with cats and mesh chairs? It just seems like something they'd have fun poking their claws into and that worries me a bit about the investment.
Under the system in place since the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, traders and bankers were supposed to be entirely different beasts.

The Gramm Leach Bliley Act of 1999 repealed a big chunk of the Glass Steagall Act, commercial and investment banks were allowed to consolidate.

Since 1999, bankers and traders have been the same thing. That why the entire financial system just came down on our heads. There was no separation these different entities. No firewall between the speculators and the life savings of retirees.
I find it fascinating that the lethality of the disease seems to be linked to those of a "Mexican-American" background (i.e. native American). The one thing that they are stumped about is that the foreigners (mostly "white" - of European descent) that have contracted the disease seem to have an easier time dealing with it.

It makes you wonder if there has been an outbreak in Europe's past that has protected the decedents of the survivors.

Pure speculation, I know, but intriguing.
You have a potty mouth :-)

I also think you ought to think long and hard about the hostility your online persona is projecting. I'm pointing this out because it is rapidly converging on the behaviour being vilified. You're swearing at people and belittling their concerns.

Do you intend it to be taken that way?
Version for Mac ("It’s UI salad") at:
http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/101550689/office-2010-preview
Python: Intro to Decorators
This is a good article. It reminds me of a talk I saw at SHDH by a guy named Shannon Clark.

My main take-away from his talk was that "networking is about giving", meaning that when you are networking you shouldn't be thinking "how can this person help me?" but "how can I help this person?" - this advice is simple but has had a profound impact on how I approach networking.

I think that this blog post covers a large subset of what I remember of Shannon's talk: http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/networking-advi...
Good answer :) Not for me maybe but I think I understand your point of view a little better
I think from now on, i will have the subconscious association that if i dare to make a presentation that can in some strange way offend a woman or other minority group i will for sure be punished buy this long verbose articles trying to explore how my brain makes associations, so trying to avoid this pain i will not ever do the same mistake as Matt. Mission Accomplished.
Feel free to dislike the language, but calling someone like Guy Steele a marketing droid is just unfair.
because it'd have an extreme effect on performance?

UTF-8 is great in terms of size, but terrible in terms of speed.