skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I first learned to program coming up with the algorithm was everything. I thought of how to move the data, compare it, and finally compute and represent the solution. As I grow more experienced the algorithms come naturally.

I now think in terms of rules, context and complexity. I mostly think about distributed algorithms and the key to me is always a small set of rules that all nodes must follow. Rules are generally reactions to events, involving communication and/or state changes. Much of the time the rules follow from some constraint, such as complexity requirements or limited information. There are often different possibilities so you consider the trade-offs based on your context. I approach computational problems in the same way. I figure out data elements need to interact and then come up with some reactive rules. The computation is the chain-reaction of those rules.

The algorithm follows from the rules. Essentially it is a formalization of the ideas into an iterative instruction framework. The algorithm can then be implemented on a computer by any competent engineer and may be analyzed mathematically (e.g. for formal proofs).
> It comes down to tact, an I don't think there are any "rules" to applying it.

Actually, there are rules, and they're called "etiquette".

It's a cached lookup table of what millions of other people have already decided is tactful, and what is not.

Etiquette, like lookup tables, serves two purposes:

1) it spares you a lot of computation to arrive at results that are already known

2) it implements the DRY principle

Etiquette serves a bonus third purpose:

3) helps you avoid the temptation to justify whatever sort of selfish bad behavior appeals to you at the moment via bogus reasoning. If people "just DO NOT EVER text at a funeral", then you can remember that fact and avoid concluding that "if they really really need to check on how the WoW guild raid is going, they can".
Honestly, this was one of emacs' defaults that caused me to give it up and go back to vim. Also being forced to type out 'yes' completely to quit.

Vim is the kind of editor that never makes you type three characters where one would do. Or delete some text and then paste it back as the only means to 'copy.' It's about efficiency down to its bones.

Now, I'm well aware these things are customizable in emacs, but they're shipped as defaults. This implies the community thinks they're best, and belies a mentality that I just can't get with ("more keystrokes? no problem").
Doesn't that just replace C-kC-y with C-cC-k? Given that C-cC-k is used by various major modes to do mode-specific killing this doesn't seem like a good trade.
Yes, he acknowledge the fact that he actually has no idea and then continues to talk authoritatively about how it is "unlikely" that there is a god. I find him to basically be an ass, I've seen vids and read articles. He talks quite often of atheism, just google him... here's a qoute :

"An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.[67]"
Pardon me, but why isn't there a black 23 in this case?

As I understand it, half of deciding 'fair use' is:
-is the use of commercial nature or is it for nonprofit educational purposes?
-how does the use affect the potential market?

It seems to me that Nesson might actually have it right: the sharing certainly wasn't for profit, and he seems to have evidence showing that there is no effect on the market.
If this wasn't a RoR hatchet job, why put it in the title and sprinkle sarcastic jabs all over the article?

Regarding his recommendation at the end, if someone suggested a server with 32GB of memory to run a site that has "About one user every 10 minutes", I would think "damn, this doesn't scale" :)
... but you also get a better book for your money (good binding, acid-free paper, larger print). Whereas the current e-book pricing model seems to be to charge the hardback price while the book is in hardback and above the paperback price (so 9.99 Kindle download while the paperback is 7.99) when the paperback comes out. It is no wonder that people find that unfair.

Moreover publishers gain from e-books in other ways (eg. by killing the second-hand market).

No matter what is or is not "fair", the reality is that I, a generally early adopter with a comically bad shelving problem, would like to get into e-books but hesitate to do so due to pricing and DRM concerns. If people like me are not jumping into the water, I think it shows that there is a large untapped market that would respond to better pricing. If volume goes up, price can go down.

Right now my wishful thinking involves a Netflix for books; basically pay a subscription be able to have 1-3 books "out" on a Kindle (for the sake of argument) at a time. If I like them, I would probably go and buy the hardback to keep/lend/re-read/get-signed but most times I probably wouldn't.

Edit: I think that O'Reilly's Safari is close to that model, but a captive device like Kindle and Amazon's huge catalogue would take that to a whole different level.
Yes, that "finally" was very questionable.
A counter part to the viral loop is the concept of viral channels. It is important to realize that the more often a viral channel is exploited (see e-mail, app notifications), the less effective it becomes until it actually starts harming your application.

Social / Viral plays these days have a tough time because of how quickly these channels become saturated. IMO you can disregard a lot of the rules in the article as long as your app has network effects and a unique viral channel.
Ahh. Reminded me to cancel my account. Thanks!

Mostly just because I don't use it...it's interesting, but not really very useful to me. I already know I spend too much on food!
RightScale can provide services that span service providers. Currently, AWS is the principal cloud service provider but likely later this year there will be others (i.e Slice Host, FlexiScale, GoGrid, Sun). Services spanning service providers may include migrations, load balancing and redundancy.

It appears to me that RightScale is positioning itself to be a market for cloud computing services. It will be interesting to see if they pull it off.

Also, from the description of the monitoring service (i.e. no agent required) it is likely the monitoring data is collected at the host not the guest OS. So there is probably no process monitoring it follows that application profiling and similar services will not be possible with the data.
Eminem Backs Off Nick Cannon Beef | Hip Hop MVP
(global-set-key "\M-w" 'copy-region-as-kill)

There's a core Emacs function that does this. It's confusingly called copy-region-as-kill, and it's bound to C-INSERT and f16 by default. I bind it to Meta-W.
Search engines aren't a public service. The article half-way acknowledges the robots.txt solution, and quickly dismisses it as unworkable. It's clear, however, that publishers have a recourse if they feel the search engines are doing them more harm than good. If they want finer granularity than is currently available, they need to talk to Google, not the government.
+10 great post. Would be interesting if he replies.
It looks like she had a page on li batteries, but it's been removed:

http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/~lfnazar/linda%20nazar%20li-...

This announcement / press release has a bit more information:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/nsae-crt05180...

The finding is reported today in the on-line issue of Nature Materials.

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat246...

Yet a bit more info, including some numbers, for those who don't have access past the paywall:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/05/researchers-develop-...
What is a math whiz kid? I know there are a few professional mathematicians here -- professors, post-docs, etc.

...not a math forum like AoPS

AoPS seems to be about math competitions. Math competitions have about as much in common with real math as the space marines from DOOM (demons, plasma guns) have in common with real marines (marching, painting stuff, acronyms). Real math is about building theories that are as general and powerful as possible, or making tools, or finding and solving interesting problems in the real world.

Math competitions are about how many reductive insights you can come up with in two hours' time while sitting at a desk you're not allowed to leave except perhaps to go to the bathroom.
"This division of labor has, rather than increased productivity and decreased cost, in fact increased cost due to monetary waste at each exchange."

I find this argument to internally contradict itself in light of the fact that Western nations have a much higher standard of living. I will not disagree exchanges result in monetary waste, but in fact would argue that the increases in productivity due to specialization far outstrip the losses due to waste. The higher number of exchanges is thus evidence of the higher productivity that makes them affordable. The issue of whether there is increased productivity due to specialization is completely separate from that of whether the division of labor will result in wage slavery. There is quite a bit of evidence to support the former, while the latter appears quite speculative.
To understand why algorithms are important, and how they are used, it might help for you to give up your mental model, described in your original question, of the link between physics and algorithms. They are not both attempts to represent some set of quantities. Rather, think in terms of physics as stating the equations (describing how the values relate to one another), and algorithms as methods for solving the equations (calculating the values).

So for example, physics describes the answer to "where will this spacecraft be five years from now?" while to compute a numerical answer you need to apply some particular algorithm (like a differential-equation solver).

Most of the algorithms in "Nutshell" are what you might call core-level methods of figuring things out. For example, the book describes different sorting algorithms. From your question, you sound more interested in what kinds of problems demand sorting (for example). For that, you might try a bigger-picture book, for example Steven Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual." It goes into less detail about actual implementation, and more detail about what the algorithms do for you, and when you might apply them.
From what I've seen, it only takes 1 upvote to hit the front page, and stories (if they aren't killed) tend to stick around for at least 24 hours. My hypothesis is that there isn't a best time.
I was just about to point out the same thing myself. This is just dumb -- you add keystrokes to save typing or to simplify a metaphor. This complicates the metaphor (decide between cut and copy), saves nothing (actually it's harder to type for those with ctrl bound properly -- K/Y can be done with two fingers of the same hand), and pollutes the space of key bindings to boot.

That said, it's a nice tutorial on how to set a global binding. They just should have worked harder on picking a useful example.
nano or pico, perhaps?
This has occured to me, but I would have as much trouble keeping something like this up to date as a real will (unless I knew I was dying! in which case I could just leave instructions).

I have a password scheme (i.e. a way for my husband to figure out what my password on any given site is, without using the same password everywhere). I think this is a good compromise between having all my accounts inaccessible in the event of my untimely death, and handing over my entire digital life to a third party.

Obviously, it involves trusting my husband, but then if I don't trust him when I am alive, why should I trust him when I am dead?

Really, all you need to tell someone is your email access details. Once your heir is reading your email, the rest is easy - within a month or few they will probably get an email for any significant business or person in your life, and end up with a current list that way.
The problem is not that you need better hardware for this scenario, you just need a better programmer.

"Not helping matters was the fact that the sysadmins found some public pages that went into MySQL 1500 times with 1500 separate queries (instead of one query returning 1500 rows)."

Looks like someone forgot to use :include on some finders. Let's say you have 1000 users with an address each. This will produce 1000 SQL queries:

User.all.each do |user|
p user.address.street_name
end

This, however, will only issue two queries:

User.all(:include =>:address).each do |user|
p user.address.street_name
end
I guess. But in this particular case, the early development of git looks almost exactly like what's described. You can go back and read Linus's early descriptions and the traffic in the early days on the mailing list and see the design as it actually unfolded.

Why use a parable when you can use history instead?
It's part of the distinction between a master and a journeyman in the development trade. If you dont have a basic understanding of algorithms and the analysis of algorithms, you will never be a master.
Create a custom Apple iPhone icon for your site
Whats wrong with highlighting a region, and doing M-w on it, then yanking it back in?
So many web frameworks slowly evolve features that Pylons has had for years. I think it's by far the most under appreciated framework out there.
The ones with longer potential sentences

1) have received a larger gift, and would thus lose something larger. They may also experience a stronger desire to reciprocate this gift back to society.

2) can imagine a larger perceived injustice (compared to everyone else) if they are put in jail again. People judge things (including the size of punishment) through comparison, not absolutely. The key concept here is the punishment you would receive when "compared with others". If a person would get a larger sentence for an identical crime it offends there sense of justice and highlights the negative aspects of the punishment making it more salient in there minds.

I think my opinions above are still valid.
Hacker news account lost?
I'm having trouble logging into my regular hacker news account (Tacomanator). I'm not sure, but I think it may have been caused by a failed attempt to merge the account with my OpenID. I don't remember changing the password yet it's not accepting it, and there appears to be no way to reset the password unless you are able to log into the account. Is it possible to fix this? Thanks!
just built a service in PHP that can process 15,000 rows of data, with a complexity of about O(1000*(10|100)n) and it runs in 4.5min. I was looking to beat 15m. I expect to get that down further.

right now i use a LIMIT of 100 to minimize sql queries, and memory. i might try going to 1000 rows or about 10k in data, but in my experience when the DB has to return that much data you are not really gaining that much.

what do you think? any other optimizations i should look to?
I get home at about 6. Eat Tea by about 6:45, then work for about 5 hours. I usually go to bed about 12:30 wake up at 8:30, rinse repeat. My girlfriend does the shopping and most of the cooking. On weekends I would probably do about 8 hours on my game, as well as housework, drinking etc.
It has nothing to do with humility, but rather the value of your time. Obviously, there's value to teaching, but when you're an investor doing random short meetings, you're doing it to further your own business. If you help someone out along the way (by investing in them or otherwise), that's a nice addition but by no means the goal.
SoupCycle - Organic Soups Delievered by Bike in Portland
You're onto something, and crash diets/extremes are no good, but there is a lot of value in giving it all up for periods of time. I wish I had opportunities to do this more frequently, once a year for a month would be very nice. I don't mean vacation - I mean disconnect.

There is so much going on, so much information coming in, so many interactions in our lives that many of our perspectives are on autopilot and if we get too buried, outside influences have too much influence on our perspectives.

I have taken time out a number of times in life, ranging from a month to two months. No friends, no family, no things to do, no internet, picked up a newspaper a few times (if you added up all of them I'd say 3 or 4) - spent most of my time outdoors, occasionally with music, and interaction with people I came across, and with no intention of keeping in touch. Works best out of country; first time was in the Himalayas, but one year I was poor and so I just went to a city a few hundred miles from anyone who knew me. The results are simple: various things that have been jumping around in your head settle, things that would have taken a year to figure out become crystal clear by week two, your life in so many ways becomes very clear, and you come out of all this with an incredible focus, energy, and just freshness.

You could do studies I suppose that figure out if this increases your overall efficiency, if it leads to better ideas, but such a study would only feed my curiosities because the value in this is more than just increasing efficiency, or improving products -- its about increasing the quality of life.

Reflection, pausing, meta-cognition, wandering into an alternate mindset are good to integrate into ones overall lifestyle, but sky diving for a weekend, or chilling out for 30 minutes a day - it seems with a busy life, as I'm guessing yours is as well - it's often like swimming against the current. It's nice to pause the current, enjoy your thoughts, paddle around some without worrying about it. It's very nice. I don't think it's going to happen this year for me, and that's unfortunate.
I agree with everything you wrote. However, it seems to me that AoPS is populated with math enthusiasts, while HN is populated with hackers. AoPS is indeed mostly about math competitions, and yes, math competitions have little to do with real math, but just count the number of great mathematicians who performed amazingly well in the IMO: Terry Tao, Misha Gromov, Grisha Perelman, etc. My point was not that AoPS is about real math, but rather that it's more likely to have math whiz kids than HN.
Looks interesting. Could the connection be used for other purposes, like sending print jobs or file serving off the phone? Or would the speed just be comparable to the current wireless connection?
We have several application components that use software load balancers (HAProxy) so we can manually scale each component quickly. The load balancing service will let us shut down each of those instances for a decent savings. Our QA environment is a copy of prod (scaled-back, but identical, including LBs) - more nodes to shut down, more money saved.

This is easy to implement and is basically found money, so we'll be doing it ASAP.

My expectation is that an Amazon (LB) access point is more reliable than a generic EC2 instance. For these components, we'll be paying less for something that's both more reliable (hopefully) and easier to manage.

Auto-scaling is powerful and easy to set up (even in the private beta, before tools were available), but as we're heavily integrated with RightScale (specifically, using templates throughout) migrating to pre-configured AMIs would take some effort. We'll have to do some internal review before making a decision on rolling out auto-scaling to existing apps.

Monitoring is, as expected, also provided by RightScale. Amazon requires you have CloudWatch turned on for instances in auto-scaled pools (for obvious reasons), so that's one way we may end up using it. RightScale's blog post mentioned they'll be integrating their alerting and reporting with CloudWatch, but I'm not sure it's worth the extra $0.015/intance-hour to have the data come from Amazon instead of RightScale. I expect that, for now, CloudWatch is more relevant to:
1) users not on RightScale, Cloudkick, etc.
2) users who want direct access to their monitoring data (for archival, custom graphs, whatever - not currently possible with RightScale, not sure about other cloud management vendors)

Amazon's move up the application stack (Elastic MapReduce, for starters) may create additional use cases for CloudWatch, but that's entirely up to Amazon.

What I'd really like to see in the near-term is an open source tool to read in and graph CloudWatch data that's been archived somewhere (SimpleDB would be cool, but S3 would work too). Of course, I can see why people would be hesitant to start down that path given that Amazon has a console that's begging to include this functionality.

-Mike B @ ShareThis
Less time on frameworks, more time on useful applications/services.
Yahoo Mobile Abandons Its Smartphone App To Focus On The iPhone
Tried all of them, still using LuxiMono.. love it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomas_aylott/294076124/

http://wiki.macromates.com/Main/AlternativeFonts
I've used Wesabe, and yes, I like the service. It is more of a community built around financial management than just a financial management tool.
You don't usually get a better book for the money, actually. That was true up till about 1970. Nowadays hardcover editions are no better made than paperbacks; merely bulkier. They're now almost pure price discrimination.
You're missing that a minimal headless environment is always going to be more painful than a full desktop.

Also, I suspect you're also missing that linux has package managers that will find, download, (possibly compile) and install packages for you. It depends on the distro, but if you're running a Debian derivative, 'apt-get install whatever-you-want' would find, download, and install it for you.
Data point: I use mint.com. This morning I awoke to three text messages, all telling me in one spammy way or another that I could get a "cash advance". All three messages were from different numbers, and one of them was from a number that has only ever sent me my Mint.com alerts.
Also in the category of improved Vera family fonts is Espresso, which ships with the web editor of the same name (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/).
(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)
For day-to-day programming, why does l/1, O/0 matter? I usually don't see them in contexts where they could be confused.
I consider myself an introvert, but people tell me I never shut up. So uhh... somewhere in between? :) Not sure why it took the form of movies, but most people do have trouble ceasing thought, as I'm sure you experienced.

Yeah, if I was isolated I would use it to my advantage and meditate. Perhaps I would exit enlightened :)
1. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.

Doesn't this simply exclude some domains. email, facebook, dating sites. Are you suggesting that these domains need to be approached by inserting some basic (slightly unrelated) utility that is useful without other people?
Readership peaks midweek, midday (US). But that doesn't mean it's the best time to submit a story, because there's also more competition. On a weekend, 2 points will keep you on the frontpage for a significant time. On a weekday it might not get you on at all.
Every Linux comes with the standard editor, Ed.
References and a sincere, open answer. You deserve a lot more karma than the sophomorish comment currently leading the thread.