skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Contrast: Up here in Canada we have a health care safety net. That's helpful when you're calculating "how bad could it get if I failed completely".

On the other hand, I often hear the meme "you gotta be in the valley" to get anywhere with funding and meeting people and being in a stimulating environment. Do those stimulating factors outweigh the benefits of the safety net?

I feel like there's a funny mix of risk vs. reward at work here.
http://merchantsofgreencoffee.com

I swear by them :-)
I used to not care much about beans, but recently, I've changed my tune. Now, I don't spend a lot of money on beans (I buy five pound bags of Equal Exchange from my co-op, since I get a 20% discount on bulk orders), but we had to use Eight O'Clock beans for a few days waiting for an order, and oh my, that coffee was not good.

I do appreciate a good cup of coffee, with fresh beans, a good brewing method, etc, etc. But...I don't have the time or motivation to do that regularly.
Well, I'm sorry, I somehow figured the problems with his "thesis" were obvious.

The votes (his thesis is at +5 currently) scare me a bit because at least those 4 people either agree with or voted without understanding his nonsensical assertions.

So, let's go through his points one by one.

Because sex is a private activity, and violence is public. So one is OK to show (public), and the other is not (it's private).

Our every day life is equally driven by sexual and violent influences on many levels. Declaring one to be public and the other to be private just makes no sense. And if you insisted on making this nonsensical distinction then you'd much rather come to the opposite conclusion: sex is more public than violence, at least here in the western world.

Just compare how often you are exposed to visible violence versus how often you are exposed to sexual stimulation (consider how many half-naked girls are presented to you on billboards when you walk down a street).

Because all kids experience violence, perhaps not at the same level as a tv show, but they experience it. Sex on the other hand is not that way.

All kids expirience both, sex and violence. Those two are closely related and easily the two biggest psychological drivers that keep us human beings going. This paragraph is exemplary for why I originally refrained from replying indepth. How do you even counter such a statement? It's not just wrong on the factual level, it's also a very strange way to look at these things. How does real-life violence justify showing it on TV (apart from the news)? How does the claimed lack of real-life sexual influences justify "banning" it from TV?

It's just meaningless to argue at this level - either way.

And related to above kids may not experience, but they do see "stronger" levels of violence in the world - because it's public. Again, not so with sex.

Same thing here. I still hope that he was playing devil's advocate and not seriously trying to imply that the display of graphic violence is somehow better or more acceptable than the graphic display of sex.
Learning a New Language
The article didn't need to be more than the title and the picture, but that's modern "journalism" for you...
How cellphones will enhance reality
Question: (newbie here) if we assume that with 350 million keys for the 64GB ram server we have reached the peak of it's capacity, if we double the number of keys, do we have to get new hardware, like a second server or double the ram?

Or is it something simpler? Like storing the current keys on disk (somehow) and keep going with the server as it is.

To rephrase my question: keeping all in ram... is "all" like ALL ??? Would this solution work for the "real" twitter, with the billion twits, if 350 million keys were created every hour?
I'm a espresso fan. A double or triple shot americano to start the day is awesome, particularly when the kids (toddlers) have kept Mom and Dad up half the night.

I use a Gaggia Classic espresso maker (bought used on ebay for a decent price) and a hacked Krups burr grinder (added #4 washers to allow the burrs to get a good espresso grind). It's hard to make a bad shot with this setup - easily beats what you can get at most coffee shops, except for one shop in my town that has both high quality baristas and a really good commercial espresso machine. I also have access to fresh, locally roasted organic espresso beans. If you're a latte or mocha fan, buy a stovetop steamer and do a little research on how to properly steam milk. Guests are usually impressed.

It's a fun setup and I enjoy the preparation ritual. If only my kids were old enough to begin their barista training . . .
Skype has been going for almost 10 years... seems a bit silly to suggest that it's still at the height of its hype... in fact, I'd say it's been descending down into the "trough of disillusionment" for some time. I don't know anyone who thinks that Skype is super-cool at the moment.

If anything, I'd place it deep into the trough - assuming there is something to bring it back up, which is far from guaranteed.
no CJK support.
> I've tried all the stuff mentioned in the article, and to me personally ... it hasn't made one bit of difference.

You mean you actually roasted good greens, let them degass, ground them correctly and pulled espresso shots (at the right temp./pressure) and found them to have not one bit of diff from regular, supermarket/sb coffee?
Another Tip: Try an Aeropress

Designed by the same guy who came up with the aerobie, it makes very good espresso shots (add water for americano) and it costs about 25 dollars. The great thing about espresso vs. french press or drip is that it's much less acidic so you're stomach will thank you.

http://www.aerobie.com/Products/aeropress_story.htm
No. All of them get the vast majority of their success from the same crap you find in Best Buy or WalMart. Their success only supports the theory that people prize convenience.
Cool Experiment!
I chose Apache. Thanks folks: http://github.com/ikirigin/tatatweet/blob/f310b2db75cfe0d507...
"What is really puzzling is that the backlash against Anderson’s ideas has taken this long to happen."

Umm, it didn't. Almost as quickly as his book was published, everyone pointed out that the data sets he based his theory on were deeply flawed, and in fact proved the opposite. He admitted so on his own blog.
No I was specifically referring to the first part of the article, about obtaining fresh-roasted beans, grinding them, and then brewing them in a french press using water off the boil.

The article writer alleges that that process improves your daily coffee significantly - I related my own experience, which was to the contrary.
This is not an appropriate use of linear regression.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620363
It's important to know that clang is not a complete compiler. It is the C/C++ parsing front-end that can be a complete compiler with LLVM on the back end -- but clang can also be used by itself for static analysis, or integrated into an IDE for on-the-fly syntax checking.

The front end of GCC, on the other hand, does not have goals of being useful in fast, interactive situations. It assumes while parsing that the end goal is program compilation. It therefore builds a larger data structure that assumes it's going all the way.

So, in this case, it's not just your basic time/space tradeoff. Clang is actually doing less work.

So I believe these measurements are just about parsing, and clang wins because parsing-without-compiling is a high-priority use case for clang.
MPL is my personal favorite. Basically says you can use and modify the code in a whole bunch of ways, but if you release a version with changes you have to post the diff somewhere.
I have this installed and everyone in my office has asked me about it at this point.
1000 ms - infinity: Occupant stops being aware of collision.
Combine with the second place team, hopefully edging over the 10% mark, and split $1 million between the two teams instead of 50k. Duh?
There is a bit of that here when he mentions the teenager, I agree. He may have a point that professional environments may have to come up with solutions to deal with this kind of thing, however.
There seem to be echoes of what I've seen in kdb+ (http://kx.com/Products/kdb+.php) in this offering from IBM. I know that kdb+ is an entrenched part of the software developed internally at financial companies to deal with huge streaming datasets

Any ideas how they compare? System S and kdb+ sound very similar, both offering a solution to development centered around streaming datasets with extremely low latencies, both with their own programming language.
Shared-hosting providers generally offer MySQL as part of their low-end packages, but not PostgreSQL (I assume this is because MySQL is easier to administer in a shared environment). So if you want your web app to use PostgreSQL, you have to find a PostgreSQL-specific provider or take responsibility for administering your own box.
You can do packaged coffee right. This is pretty much the only coffee I drink now. It is semi-regional to the South, but anyone who tries it becomes an instant fan.

http://www.communitycoffee.com/ccc/Catalog_CS/coffee-detail/...
That might be your modern C++ (and perhaps the ideal), but the variety that I've seen to be the de facto standard in corporate projects is basically just as he described: like Java.
Keep on brewing and wait it out.
Anybody had any experience with ComboFix? It really saved me once, and I was surprised not to see it here.
I believe the LGPL allows for commercial reuse.
It seems like you're trying to make some clever point. It's either too subtle, or there's been a mistake made on the "clever" part. Books can be used to ignore someone. But they don't bring you realtime updates of your tweets and emails. They don't have long stretches between save points, and you don't need headphones for the soundtrack.

In other words: He has functional reasons, and wasn't just being a Luddite.
Don't be a hater: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=610549

There's also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200

I only mention these two links because I've started trying to apply them to myself, and they seem to be helping. When people react badly, I first think "it's not me", "this is a one-off" and "it's only in this specific circumstance". That helps me to be "liberal in how I listen" by defusing my anger/judgmentalism. Then I try to be "strict in how I speak" by being factual (this is hard, but I can do it) and warmly/kindly (I'm not so good at this part - but that's how I'd like them and me to be.)

BTW: I think you make your point about consumers very clear in the above - it wasn't as clear before. hmmmm... maybe explicitly mentioning "in general" (as you do here) is a shortcut to avoiding people taking things personally, if one senses they might. I recall in Ben Franklin's autobiography, he reinvented his whole style of expression to be less confrontation, to "it may be so", "it appears to be" and such like, as he was getting in too many duels (a.k.a. flame wars?)
Graphite RabbitMQ Integration
A problem with shared-everything clusters like RAC is that they tend to scale poorly under write-heavy loads. Other problems would be the significant complexity, low predictability (esp. in terms of latency) and ofcourse the oracle tax.

It boils down to the old question of right-tool-for-the-job and a RAC cluster is not the right tool for most webapp scenarios.
What is there to a "virtual beer" beyond a quickly brokered time for a Skype session with a real beer in hand?

I agree with the solution but not for all of the situations the author mentions...

Status meetings in particular seem like inefficient token ring events

Collaborative problem solving and design reviews on the other hand could be more engaging to require an "unplugged" atmosphere.
Ha, the first entry was this post.
Interesting if a bit old (April 2004?) article... One bit I strongly disagree with:

It’s not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no.

You can learn to write, and you can learn to draw. Plenty of people do. And I'm pretty sure that you can learn to design good UIs too.

Sure, having an innate ability for it helps, but it's not a sine-qua-non.
I think Skype is super-cool. I can call my friends on the other side of the world for free. Or, I can make really cheap calls to their mobile phones, and the sound quality of those calls is almost always really good. Discount international calling cards usually have horrible (often unusable) quality when you get down to the Skype-out price range. AT&T will give me great sound quality too but they charge over $1.00 a minute for the places I call (the last time I checked).

I'm not quite sure what value Skype has for people who aren't doing international calling though.
"Yes. And the reason why you enjoy the quality coffee more than the cheap filter stuff is because it is more pleasurable. That is also the reason why you don't enjoy the cheap stuff anymore - because you know that it's actually pretty bad. You can still drink it anyway, but you know it's not that good.
Suggesting that this is a bad thing is kind of suggesting that you don't think your tastes should evolve for the better throughout your life. "

You're assuming that enjoyment and happiness always improve when drinking better coffee/wine/beer/etc. Untrue. If you're perfectly happy with what you have now, cultivating a more sophisticated taste will usually just frustrate you because now to get the same level of enjoyment you had previously you have to spend more money or time. Going back to what you had before doesn't return you to a baseline level of happiness, it makes you unhappy. To get back to the baseline you now have to regularly consume expensive or time-consuming coffee instead of the cheap stuff.

If your goal in life is to enjoy the "finest things", go right ahead. If your goal in life is to be happy, then be very careful about raising the bar for things that you enjoy. Being able to enjoy cheap crap makes you just as happy as being able to enjoy expensive crap, but at lower cost.

(As it turns out, this argument doesn't apply to books and movies and music because good books, movies, and music cost just as much as the crap ones, and because good art is intellectually stimulating, which is worthwhile for its own reasons.)
Studies on this issue have screened out people of Asian and Hispanic descent in order to maintain a more consistent data set:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?cu...
Yes, I'd want to compare sets, but using == for that feels to me a dubious programming practice, akin to using + for set union. A special method like hasIdenticalContents() would make me more comfortable, the longer name removing equals-ambiguity for readers and reflecting the nontrivial computation behind the scenes. And that would mesh nicely with other set operations like difference and containment that would be getting non-canonical names anyway...

Also, if you make Set.equals() depend on contents, you'll have to change the implementation of hashCode as well, wreaking havoc on sets containing mutable sets. So you really should only override equals() if your class is immutable or you're feeling especially exotic.
I believe this is technically incorrect, but it errs on safe side. I.e. if the string sweeps through the arc, the box will fit, if it doesn't swing through the arc, there is still a chance that the box will fit. I'm assuming this is what you are referring to by "edge cases".

Mathematically this "string theory" (sorry, couldn't help myself) is saying the following:

sqrt[ (l/2)^2 + b^2 ] < min(x,y)

where l = length of box, b = base of box, and x and y are the respective widths of the two hallways.

However, this ignores the fact that the pivot point on the box around the corner can slide as you push the box around the corner. So the pivot point could essentially slide from one end of the box to the other (at some point sliding through the midpoint you are measuring for), which allows a lot more leeway for the box's acceptable dimensions.

I worked on this problem a bit this morning, but I don't have my trusty TI-89 calculator to help out. This is actually a calculus problem that I have a difficult time explaining without posting some sketches. Maybe I'll do that in the near future.
"you gotta be in the valley to get anywhere" is not a universal truth. there are plenty of startups that are successful elsewhere. valley helps, but it its not a crucial ingredient.

i agree with the premise that if there's a social safety net, it would encourage entrepreneurism a lot more. in theory. in practice, it seems like people lose perspective on the "how bad can it get?" scale.

they just avoid the bottom level like the plague, more out of social stigma, i guess, than anything else. they avoid "the bottom" more than they're avoiding specifically being "homeless" or "on welfare".
I don't think it's actually that general, because some of those things are better handled through groups of people rather than on an individual level. That's not to say that government is a good solution, but there are non-State group solutions to things (grocery stores, coops, etc).
The issue with key-value store isn't that you can't create an application, its that the tools to control data integrity and access your data in unexpected ways are missing or will be alot of work to create. A simple example is that two way key-value pairs for the UID and username in this article. Now any update to one value (or is it key?) must update the other.

If your main concern is scalability, then Redis and the like can look very attractive, but we should be clear on what is being given up: data coherence and query flexibility. That may be fine on your app, or even many apps, but its important to point out what is missing.
I was just pointing out that he had an arbitrary cutoff line for the technology allowed. In the future, I suppose I will say things to my daughters such as: No immersive-reality goggles for this trip. Just laptops/e-books.
old + blog spam http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574459
Why do you prefer tightVNC to UltraVNC?
Oh ok. The "all" and "one bit" threw me off. And the creamy, 4 days old hand-roasted, Yellow Bourbon SHB double shot made me answer. :)
The two indeed totally different, but in lot of real world applications, the two are used together, and they are very complementary.

For examples, lot of straight C wrapped in Classes, and accessed in a very C++ way. It's appropriate to say C/C++ for these.
Link to full original content that was used for this blog-rip:

http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?Article...
I began working on this problem this morning, and my calc equations kept getting bigger and bigger, then after I had about 2 pages filled with equations, I saw your post.

I feel much better now knowing I wasn't missing something obvious, and I can finally move onto my actual work for the morning after seeing the solutions. Thanks!
I feel like a curmudgeon saying this, but this doesn't strike me as adding any value beyond eye candy.

At least most infoporn (eg, http://beta.twittervision.com/) has some redeeming qualities of presenting the information in a way that provides some insight.

I don't see any here.
I think he's getting at a key point, but never quite gets there. All of our interface technology is oriented towards a single user interacting with a single machine. There's a reason why a desktop PC has been called a "workstation." The design of the interface is specifically for a human who is not interacting with his surroundings. Even our "mobile" computing is really just relocatable computing. It's a "workstation" that you can easily move to a new location in which you can ignore your surroundings. Heck, even the iPhone is designed in this way. (You are not meant to be driving, biking, or even walking when you are using one!)

Interfaces designed for Collaborative interfaces with computers are being researched. It could be as simple as a big rear projection screen with Johnny Lee's Wiimote hack for an inexpensive multi-touch interface.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remo...

EDIT: I think this is one of the things that bugs me about Pair Programming. I don't think we have the right setup for it.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/images/FT_xmen_1.jp...
Look in to Boost
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs
Plugging In $40 Computers
Your comment made no sense, then when I started to write a reply requesting clarification, it refreshed, and you'd added more. I feel much better now that it makes sense; and I'll watch out for the live-edit-comment in future (I do live-edit myself too).

But I'll say that naming is tricky, since programming languages are really human languages, and as such are affected by the familiarity of their specific users as much (or, at times, more) than pure logic. Highly illogical, I know.

EDIT: The present implementation of Set.equals() depends on contents; it's independent of hashCode, and there's no problem with sets of sets.
just hadnt listed uvnc thats all
I make cold-brew coffee sometimes, which also lessens the acidity of coffee (supposedly by 67% or so.) It is especially good if you ever make iced/frozen coffee drinks, because you can adjust the concentrate ratio and get a much richer taste as cold coffees go. I also like the Aeropress, but my wife prefers the cold-brew method so we probably do that more often. We're trying to cut down on both, though.
I recently read a couple of studies that say that unfiltered coffee increased your risk of heart disease, because the diterpenes raise your serum concentrations of cholesterol, triacylglycerols, and alanine aminotransferase.
Interesting. Thanks for the detailed explanation!

I'll be checking it out in detail (hopefully) soon.
We are based in Montreal and there are a few perks that make a start-up more feasible:

1. Health Care

2. Lower Cost for employees via subsidies

3. Cheaper rent due to various rent control mechanisms and general mixed economy

There is plenty of funding up here, maybe not the mega bucks from the valley, but certainly enough to build something interesting. We work out of Station-C, www.station-c.com - a great co-working space, so that also saves us money.

All in all, I think you can start a company anywhere, but having a health care system (for you and your employees) and cheap rent makes a big difference.
C: Procedural language

Python: (Batteries included) Scripting language

Scheme: Functional/LISP language

Looks like you should learn either an OO language (Smalltalk, OCaml, Scala) or a Logic language (Prolog).
Yep, I did the same. The French Press was great and all, but I couldn't produce a good cup consistently and it was quite messy. Didn't particularly like the grit either. Have been using the Aeropress for about 4 months straight and really love it. The flavors are great, clean up is quick and painless. Now I'm thinking about roasting my own beans. A local roaster recommended the Behmor:
http://www.sweetmarias.com/prod.behmor.php
I didn't say it's not a killer product - but it's nowhere near being at the height of its hype curve. That was probably around the time it got bought by eBay.

Skype is also useful for video calls within a country, and for easy conference calls. Free international calls to other skype users are, of course, the killer app, though.
Employee Performance Reviews Do More Harm Than Good
Sites like Etsy are probably a better example.
Yeah, this is one of those edge cases where it doesn't satisfy the string test from above, but there is still a chance it could fit.

sqrt[ (57/2)^2 + 22^2 ] = 36", which is greater than 31"
Computer geeks are the best at sex
The Psychology of Incompetence