skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea that one must completely understand the implementation details of something they use before they use it seems silly to me. To be more specific, it seems to destroy the primary benefit of abstractions.

I wonder if this person knows the implementation details of the language he uses? Or the RDBMS he uses? What about the OS he uses? Text editor?
That chance to just walk out for a few minutes (or simply just to walk...) was probably the main reason I didn't want to stop smoking when I still worked for companies. I just find it hard solving some problems while sitting at a desk - can't help it. Once I started working from home it was suddenly no longer such a problem to stop smoking. Now when I feel like it I just stand up and walk around the room. No more need for excuses.

I wonder if one of the desks where you can stand would also have helped - I never had the chance to work at one of those.
Yep - the first is the most significant because of the others.

Which is to say, most people with a clue or with much experience see all the problems with PHP and move onto something else and have no problem doing so. The remainder are those who either can't or won't and a large percentage of them are the "idiots".
You do know the Jef Raskin is dead, right?
You smoke coke?
A vaporizer is not a pipe or bong, and it is certainly not smokeless.

You put your combustible material in a machine that heats it up until it smolders, and collects the resulting vapors in an airtight plastic balloon. Then you remove the balloon from the machine, put it to your mouth, and inhale the contents.

With a pipe or bong, you burn the material with a fire, and suck the smoke directly into your lungs. The difference with a bong is that the smoke passes through water first, which cools it and removes some of the heavier debris.
Actually, if you smoked for 3 months steady, depending on the asthma type you have, your symptoms will get better. Coating your lungs in ash makes them less sensitive to the usual allergens.
Am I so different because I don't smoke? I believe in pleasure, and I judge every drug on an individual basis. I drink alcohol and coffee and occasionally smoke pot when it's offered to me, and I suppose I'll try mushrooms if the right circumstances present themselves. I can't think of any other drugs that make a good case. (I'm rather conservative when it comes to risks, especially because most of the available information comes from people with knee-jerk pro or con attitudes towards recreational drugs.)

According to my priorities and what I know about it, tobacco is not tempting. It's apparently highly addictive, it's intrusive on other people (though I sometimes enjoy fresh tobacco smoke when I'm drunk,) it leaves a terrible stale smell in rooms, carpets, clothing, hair, and upholstery, and it makes a person's mouth taste disgusting to anyone who kisses them. I'm sure some of that is just individual taste that other people might disagree with. Does that make me seem like I'm from whole different world?
Bike, drive, and sit up in bed and grab my laptop, in roughly that order of frequency.
Reducing our carbon footprint
It might be irrelevant to Jeff, but it wouldn't be irrelevant to me if I was the one employing this person to work on my web site.
I was thinking of artist in the traditional sense- some renaissance painter mixing pigments and material to come up with the perfect shade of red, for example.

This is just a romantic myth. All the Renaissance painters anyone has heard of or seen in a museum employed tons of assistants.

Nearly any contemporary artist who makes any sort of money whatsoever has assistants doing most of their work. Damien Hirst has 160 employees! Murakami has dozens of employees. It even trickles down to smaller time guys like Ryan McGinnis.
I've done it three times over the last ten years actually. In two cases I just left, got on the ground and started looking for work. I had a few contacts but no prospects or offers. You just need some cash to tide you over for a month or two, rent some cheap accomodation and work the phones and email all day until you get something. If you're in another country and burning through your cash, you'll find work, and once you've got the job, you can upgrade your accomodation, make some friends, and you're set.

In the other case I organised the job before I left, but that was dotcom days so jobs were plentiful.

I somehow doubt it will stay at three times for me. Once you've experience the total life reboot that doing such a thing gives you, every time you start feeling like you're in a rut, then you start looking at flight details. I met a guy in his 50's who was working overseas, with his three kids and wife in tow. They were all having a ball. Family does not have to equal ball and chain if you have the right attitude.

The thing is : nothings permanent. Buy a return ticket. If it doesn't work, come back home and go 'oh well, was worth a try'.

As I've said to a few people over the years : what's the thing you want to talk to your grandkids about? The quality of furniture you had in your house? The shiny depreciating car you bought? Or that time you flew out to country X and found a job with company Y, and traveled around seeing Z.
I smoke cigarrettes & drink coke :)
Heya delano! you plum-cheeked, rosy-bummed, fun-pack of a man!

Oh, you're shocked I just said that? well, that was a response to your question:

>What do you say to a person without any context?

With the proper identity, the site can be tuned to encourage odd-ball, fun and goofy monologue-type conversations. It should foster an standup-comedy type atmosphere.

The site owner can encourage a conversation by offering them a "prop"; a graphic image of an object or a person that appears on the screen as a conversation starter. Perhaps a theme/stage/setting where people are encouraged to act out a persona, etc.

Now that thing I said about your bum and your cheeks? err, "nohomo"[1].

--

[1]http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nohomo
Habitat might have been the word I was looking for.

I agree that one should be careful when using emotionally charged words, but I also think that playful usage might be a way out of the self-censorship that surrounds a great many dreadful historical events. Not just in Germany.
It probably took about 40 hours to feel comfortable with objective C and the cocoa touch APIs. I still have to refer to the SDK docs. I didn't have any prior experience with Obj-C.
I interpret the quote as applying to things I do, not to things I see; and as difficulties in general, not necessarily adversarial.
Well, this is nice. However, I'm a bit surprised that you did a straight Quicksort.

What I mean is that Quicksort has O(n^2) worst-case time complexity. But the Introsort variant (Musser 1997) has O(n log n) worst case, is no slower than Quicksort in the average case, and requires no significant additional space.

Introsort is a modification of Quicksort: it keeps track of the recursion depth (counting tail calls as recursive calls). And if the depth exceeds 2 log_2 n, then it switches to Heap Sort for the current sublist.
I don't think it's simply a case of "some lazy and irresponsible journalists" - standards generally seem to have slipped. Shane Fitzgerald was intereviewed on the radio here in Ireland earlier today by the former editor of a national Sunday newspaper, a thoughtful and well-read fellow. With his first question, the interviewer invited Mr Fitzgerald to explain how the stunt had highlighted a flaw with Wikipedia.
Not to mention, it's a great ice breaker.

I'm not a regular smoker, but most of the cigars/cigarettes/pipes/hookahs I've puffed on in my life have been in a social context.

Pity about that whole lung cancer thing.
Every time I come across the whole pirate bay situation, I can't help but feel like it started as a joke that everyone took seriously and it spiraled out of control.

Does anyone else feel like this or is it just me?
I have difficulty relating to anyone who does not

There are a few reasons why I don't smoke. Besides the whole early death thing, the reality is that the "high" doesn't last long enough. You spend 5 minutes smoking and you feel good for maybe 15 minutes more. I just isn't worth the time involved. (Compare this to coffee, which I definitely have a lot of. 5 minutes with the espresso machine gives you something you can drink over the course of a half-hour or longer and with good effects that last for 2-4 hours. A much better investment of time, and it doesn't kill you.)

I also like cardiovascular activities, so a drug would have to be pretty good to risk damaging my lungs. Breathing is nice.
When you don't smoke for a year or so, that first one when you un-quit is unparalleled pleasure.

It's worth starting and enduring the pain of quitting just to be able to come back and feel that glorious mind blowing forbidden pleasure of the first one back. The power trip in not starting again is also delightful. I like having a cigarette about every year or so. A few times I quit, I was lured back, but I've only had one full cigarette since June of 2008.

Smoking is definitely not a good lifestyle for the long term. But as very occasional guilty pleasures go, it's truly top-notch.
A thought: disposable realtime notifications for webapps
My 4th year anniversary of using Rails is coming up. I have to say I remember those days of hitting the wall with Rails, where the learning curve goes vertical as you dig deep into the source to debug some extremely esoteric name collision or some other bug that should have had a warning.

In retrospect, it was a wall worth scaling. I have no fear of Rails meta-programming bugs, and I've developed strategies for dealing with the thorny issues that pop up every few months. All in all the FUD from the Java advocates has proven to be unfounded (the FUD from Haskell camp, not so much). The effort saved by eliminating reams of boilerplate and heavy IDEs is well worth a few less-obvious exceptions.

As Rails has matured I think the core team has exercised restraint, and the magic situation, while an integral part of the "Rails Way" is at least not getting too much worse. Plus work on Rails 3.0 is bringing real improvement to plugin-compatibility and modularity issues. That said, I'm glad I got in on Rails early and I'm looking forward to the next big thing already. When Rails came out it refreshingly plucked the best of 10 years of web development. Over time, as with all technologies it is getting bloated and ultimately will gain complexity as the developer base gains experience and needs to solve a greater and greater set of problems. Eventually someone will come along and distill all that experience into a much-simpler new framework (maybe ajax-based? maybe continuations-based ala Seaside?) that dumps the cruft of the current "best practices."
I found the whole article very very painful to read, with no leading thought. I prefer to read his code, nothing really interresting in his talk for me, except maybe the part about ruby rockstar attitude wich was fun

I guess it's the one liner style, it makes the whole thing sound so pointless ...
I don't like not being able to specify the exact value of the ticket. I always buy tickets in multiples of the cost of a round trip commute, so that a) I'm on my home, not on my way to work, when I need to buy a new ticket, and thus not in a rush; b) my balance ends at zero, so that the exit turnstile eats the ticket, making me aware that it's out of money so that I'm not taken by surprise by an "insufficient value" message.
Python has PyPI. Ruby has the Gems repository. PHP has PEAR. There's no CPAN equivalent for Javascript, but that's largely because one doesn't generally install Javascript libraries in the same sort of way that one installs Perl modules.
i drive, but i wish i could do any of the other options. i drive because it is my only option.
A real vaporizer is certainly smokeless. It vaporizes the oils in the marijuana bud; the marijuana is not supposed to burn. If you've used a vaporizer and it was producing smoke, that means that you had the heat turned up way too high.

vapor != smoke
From Jarkko Hietaniemi, the CPAN Master Librarian:

http://www.cpan.org/misc/ZCAN.html
Cigars, ocassionally.
I smoked for about two weeks during high school, after a friend of mine sold me that bumming a smoke was a great way to talk to girls.

The smoking itself didn't do that much for me, so I pretty quickly gave it up.
People that are righteously proud of not smoking and indignant at others who do seem like they're from a different world to me, unless they are allergic to the smoke or something. It's an individual decision based on individual taste. As long as people can keep that live-and-let-live mindset, I'm fine with them whatever they do.
I have. There are a great many things others enjoy that I do not, but do understand. Among them are strawberries, onions, large luxury cars and programming in Perl. There are many things I enjoy that I fully understand why others do not. Among them are India pale ale, hot peppers, minimalist sports cars and programming in Lisp.

There are certain things some people enjoy that I do not understand the appeal of. Among those are smoking cigarettes, drinking urine and self-flagellation.
I don't smoke, but several people I know who are smarter than me do. Does that mean I should start?
When I worked tech support in high school at a company where almost everyone was a smoker, I used to take hacky-sack breaks. Ah, high school.
If that credit card had access to all of the funds in the banks, then you would be right. Atwood has an administrator's account on StackOverflow, and presumably administrator powers.
I find it delicious, although massively overpriced.
I agree that primary sources should be used to validate facts, but I do reference Wikipedia when the editors have expressed a thought very well and I quote or paraphrase it in a paper- just to give credit where it is due! I find myself quoting Wikipedia a lot in such cases- but I always validate any facts by looking at the sources.
Sounds like a good use for web hooks: http://webhooks.org/
How the hell did this get modded up? Notice this quote: "If that's even close to accurate, it's hard to overstate the importance of it." But we have no objective way of gauging its accuracy, and this quote definitely doesn't pass the smell test.
Don't ask me what led me to know this or use this comment to make inferences about my musical tastes, but Carter Albrecht --- the guitarist from (don't laugh) Edie Brickell & New Bohemians --- took Champix and then drank a lot, went completely nuts, tried to break into his neighbor's house, and got shot in the head.

DON'T DATE ROBOTS.
"The chips aren't well-suited to general-purpose servers, but they can work well for server appliances -- machines that perform a specific task, like Super Micro's storage appliance -- and for home media servers, Brookwood said."

I feel like the headline is misleading, given this quote. (However, it's not the fault of the poster; it's the real headline on the article.)
I was looking forward to reading the comments on this after finishing reading the presentation, but there aren't any yet!
They probably had to do all that stuff themselves before they were famous though.
This is why there's the Pirate Bay.
Ever seen a Canadian cigarette label? "THESE THINGS WILL KILL YOU AND GIVE YOUR CHILDREN FEET FOR EARS". I don't think the cancer education is working. If anything, advances in treatment (which probably don't do much for lung cancer) are probably dulling the effect you're talking about.
Thanks for the introsort suggestion... I'll be sure to investigate. There is a general purpose quicksort implementation included in the package... but the numerical sorting routines are primarily radix sort based and will not fall victim to the recursion problem.
What's sheesha?
How did this completely content-free post get so many votes so quickly? Really, the world could do with a few thousand fewer blog posts and comments about how someone decided to learn web development and chose a python framework (usually django) over "Rails" (apparently unaware of the other awesome ruby web frameworks, or even frameworks in other languages) for reasons they can't articulate.
I feared the same thing when I stopped smoking, but I found, to my great surprise, it's actually possible to get up from your desk and go for a little walk WITHOUT smoking.
No. Not you, because you're coming at it from the same angle. You smoke pot, and do other drugs, when they make sense to you. You just don't particularly like tobacco. That is cool. I don't particularly like pot.

You hit the nail on the head when you said "knee-jerk pro or con attitudes towards recreational drugs". That is what alienates me. Unfortunately, for every enlighted fellow-self-medicating person like you, there's 1000 idiots who just want an excuse to be holier-than-thou. Extra points if the person telling you off is clinically obese!

I don't know .. the thing with tobacco is it's just so fucking useful. It's the thing to do next, anytime, anywhere. Smoking is what you can do while you pace around, dreaming of world domination. It's what you can do together with a cute girl you just met. It's what you do after sex. It's what you do while drinking. While driving. After you arrive. After closing a deal. It's just .. the universal activity. How do you replace it?
But this really is part of a trend seperate from the recession. People are leaving the exurbs and moving back to cities.
The Obie Fernandez book, "The Rails Way", helps make the magic make more sense. Unlike most Rails books, which are intro-level and full of the sort of marketing crap that makes Rails infamous, this one actually explains their design decisions in a sensible manner.

Unfortunately it seems the author has a crazy annoying blog like other Rails people. Oh well, at least he wrote a good book.
If that's what it was, the campaign would make sense. It's not. The whole point of "Option 4" is that Options 1-3 involved whether he was running or not.
Timeshare Re-sale Agents, a Business or Not a Business?
Trade Weeks Europe’s leading wholesale supplier of timeshare weeks to the trade questions the role of the so called “re-sale agents”

The Re-sale agents who charge timeshare owners to register their timeshare for sale usually at the price they paid for it or in some cases even more then claim to take a percentage of the sale arranged by them between a current timeshare owner and a perspective client are rife in Europe, Trade Weeks questions their validity and cannot understand the logic of a business we don’t believe exists!

Trade Weeks.co.uk concede that there are many timeshare marketers selling weeks directly to the public and doing a very good job, Mr Simon Mullish of Trade Weeks said “We know they exist we supply most of them with stock, they do a great job of marketing through, usually print advertising and are a great benefit to the consumer as they are able to sell at much lower prices because of their low marketing costs”

However Trade Weeks questions the validity of the re-sale agent with the two following points

1.	Timeshare is not usually purchased it is SOLD to a client in an extensive face to face presentation usually on a resort or in an office, there are exceptions to this statement, there are educated timeshare owners who look to purchase a specific week, they are the consumers who will reply to timeshare marketers who advertise LOW COST weeks (Usually less than 40% of the retails price) in the press, we estimate this market to be less than 3% of the total market.

2.	Why would any company with the ability to sell Timeshare at the retail price wish to do that on behalf of a consumer and take a percentage of the sale for example 20%, when they could buy the same stock from Trade Weeks at less than 10% of the retail price and keep 90% versus 20% from the consumer, even taking into account the amount they are paid to register the clients this does not make logical sense

Trade Weeks suggests that these business’s only exist to take registration fees, that is the focus of their business and we can only deduce from the facts that it is impossible to sell a timeshare week on behalf of a consumer at retail price!

Trade Weeks warns timeshare owners to exercise extreme caution when dealing with companies who charge upfront fees and that claim to have a buyer for their week at anything above wholesale prices, as to us it sounds too good to be true and when it sounds too good to be true it usually is!

The Timeshare Industry – Watch this video for more info:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMHuYUznUI&feature=related
I smoke a lot of weed, but I find that smoking while coding disrupts my working memory, which makes coding difficult. Working memory = the memory you use to keep a lot of stuff in mind at once = "the stack". Having to keep referring to the code to figure out my variable names/whatever, instead of just knowing them off the top of my head, slows me down.
Tradeweeks.co.uk is currently Europe’s largest wholesaler of timeshare re-sales to the trade and the company warns Timeshare consumers that the following legislation, as proclaimed by the European Parliament, that all reputable companies have now ceased the practice of “Cold Line” sales which are involved in the use of OPC (Off Premises Canvassers, more commonly referred to as “Street Touts”) that has caused a large number of the former OPC’s to open the so called “Re-sale Companies”.

Identifying Bogus Companies

The specific objective of Tradeweeks.co.uk is to protect the general public to be victims of these bogus companies that are often NOT properly constituted and these companies often use merchant facilities (facilities to take your credit card over the phone) from other establishments which vary from pet shops to bars.

“Modus Operandi” that they use to trap Timeshare Consumers
We have no doubt that in future you will be called by these companies who will attempt by all means in convincing you that they have a “real” buyer at who offers a very inflated price. They will then ask you to send them around £1,000.00, as giving some convincing argument, as payment for the “taxation fee” before the sale goes through. Once you paid this fee, you will not hear anything from them for quite some time and they will not contact you for a certain period. Eventually, you will then try to contact them and you will be told, “We are sorry but the sale fell through because of the credit crunch and that the purchasing consumer has failed to pass finance”. At this point, you will have no other options to choose from. Finally, you will be in a situation, wherein, they will be presenting you a list, until you are willing to sell for a very, very little or at worst and more likely it will be, the last time you will be hearing from them.

Our Advice

At this point, Tradeweeks.co.uk has been receiving numerous calls, emails and visitors who are seeking advice and help from our company if they can still survive from this awful experience from those companies. Our Consultants wanted to help these Timeshare owners in the best effort as we can. To avoid the increase of Timeshare owners to be victims of these bogus companies, we have the responsibility to inform all Timeshare owners to be more cautious enough and to remember these three IMPORTANT TIPS:

1.	Never pay an upfront fee, especially not over the phone
2.	Never believe anyone who gives you an unsolicited telephone call to say they have already sold your timeshare
3.	Never believe an offer that is anywhere near the price you purchased your timeshare for, this just does not happen
In case you are currently in that awful situation or have been transacting with those companies and needs further consultation you can refer to the author’s information so we can guide you out from it.

The Timeshare Industry – Check out this video for more info:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMHuYUznUI&feature=relat...
Hrm. My asthma isn't bad enough to probably justify smoking but ehh.
A great Reddit submission.