skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe that I can relate. I have a deep interest in various permanent and ephemeral topics that I simply have no idea who I would discuss them with. I am far more interested in these than most front pages of the newspaper, but the wonderful people who are my friends wouldn't sit still for the hour or so it would take them to get up to speed on the issue.

That's not to say I am particularly smart or anything, I'm just a specialist in terms of my interests more than a generalist. People also fit different amounts of thinking into each day, and I probably do more than most. That thinking may well be of low quality, but the quantity ensures that I would probably get blank stares from almost anyone.

So, I work on being a generalist where possible to help fit in, and I develop the skill of tailoring my conversation content and style (and speech) to different scenarios. That's fine for casual social situations, and great for work, but I still yearn for someone who has read all the articles I just read and wants to talk about them. I know from the web they are out there, but our paths never cross.

The funny thing is, I blame RSS. I think that RSS really did enable the computer to be a "bicycle for the mind" and that you can tell quite quickly now in a social circle who uses RSS and who doesn't. I guess that your friends don't. A well-stocked news reader expands your world and your interests and your knowledge of current events so quickly, that it almost creates two classes of people.

I have had people comment favorably on my breadth of knowledge on current events and I almost laugh - I just skimmed a relevant article in my reader that morning, so I happened to know what they are talking about. I guess they are also used to "dumbing it down" for others.

I finally convinced my wife to use RSS and now we have so many more good conversations. Her eyes glaze over quickly when I mention Tokyo Cabinet or Wolfram|Alpha, but that just means I have to work harder to make it interesting and relative.
I love #1:

"Some people are going to come to you with tough jobs. How you respond to their inquiries says a lot about you and your work. Are you going to be like Michael, who relished the challenge and motivated his crew to step up to it?"

We are fortunate to be in an industry still in its infancy. Many of our contemporaries don't know how to do things, so they mistakenly believe "they can't be done".

When I hear, "that can't be done," that's when the juices start flowing.

(Be careful, there's a flip side. Don't turn your nose up at work that "anybody can do".)
Interestingly (with reference to another thread), "solitary confinement" is a necessary requirement of some forms of meditation. Of course, that confinement is by choice, and of a duration chosen by the participant. There's no doubt that the lack of communication has an effect on the brain; whether this effect is always deleterious seems disputable.
I have been for vipassana. My conclusion is that there approach is to cauterization human emotions. I have also tried other meditation practices and find the zen method more to my liking.
I also have written C programs which (with some basic optimisations) are 1000 (yes) times faster than the Lisp equivalent.

Initially prototyped in Lisp, and the code ported over line-for-line to C.
Dont start working on a competing product while still at your current employer. You probably have an employment contract that gives them the right to your work. (This is different from working on something totally unrelated.)

How you approach your employer depends greatly on the corporate culture and your immediate supervisor and his/her boss. If no one else has side projects or if every minute has to be accounted for in reports or timesheets, your chances are not good. If the culture is a little more open and you have a good relationship with your boss, you could try for 20% time to explore your ideas.

I am guessing you are young. It takes a while to build up corporate political savvy. I tried just such a thing early in my career and was promptly fired. If you have a colleague with more experience in the company's political arena, have a beer and talk about your thoughts on changes, but not about going out on your own.

I am a strong believer in the future of enterprise SaaS, but such a startup needs much more that the YC level of support. Make a prototype for sure, but be prepared to raise 6 and 7 figures to transition to profitability.
Walking around making constant negative judgments about the intelligence of your peers is hardly a good way to get along.

I posit that this is mostly due to the very incomplete first-hand/direct understanding most of us have of intelligence. Most of us only know one or several slim slices of intelligence. This may make it very hard for us to recognize intelligence in another.

I am reminded of an encounter with the clerk at the comic book store the day before yesterday. He was trying to make me out like I was some sort of illiterate because I didn't know who everyone in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was. (I know the major characters only.) As it so happens, much of my interest is in music and not literature, but I am sometimes moved by literature. He seemed positively smug that only he was curious enough to Google all the minor characters.

One thing that I might say -- it seems that a degree of "emotional intelligence" might have tremendous leverage -- it may well help you find others who are intelligent in novel and interesting ways.

Another situation from the past week -- there's a woman in one of the jam sessions I go to, who's just a terrible drummer! She has no sense of rhythm, except to approximate the beat with random and inappropriate errors. (Which totally wipes out the wonderful push-pull on the rhythm that the really good musicians are trying to share with each other.) It's like she's an incontinent with no sense of smell, inured to everyone's teeth-gritting tolerance of her. Well, there's a definite "flow" to socializing, and many different styles. It's advisable to either learn the particular "flow" of your group, or find another one more to your liking.
Nambu Twitter client. I like it much more than Tweetdeck.
> I suppose the first lesson here is not to let people know you think lowly of them.

You are absolutely correct, at least from my perspective (although I don't think lowly of other people in the way you might mean). If possible, I'll edit my original post with my thoughts on this matter.

> You would have had much different replies if you rephrased your question

I know. The problem is that HN represents a small part of my interests, so it's unlikely that we share the same interests or values (especially considering I'm from a 3rd world country - I don't expect that many of you guys can relate to violence and poverty in the way that I can). The reason I chose HN is because I was hoping for responses with more signal than noise. I guess another lesson here is to choose your audience your wisely. And of course be mindful of how you address them.
If possible, can you explain which parts of my post resonated with you most and how you would have put it in your own words? I'm trying to understand how I should communicate these sort of issues to other people.
'Tis a fine bit o' trollin', indeed. One of the better attention-scamming blog entries I've seen.

Next time, could you put in a few more references to "damn kids," and a photo of the American flag, drifting over a car dealership, perhaps?

"Equity? These lazy Palo Alto kids want equity? Next time they'll want free chocolate sundaes and health care!"
Some of the things I use:

- DragThing; you will never miss Apple's Dock, this is an absolutely essential desktop enhancement, e.g. to create multiple tabbed docks anywhere you want, with themes.

- OmniWeb (now free); I've tried many web browsers, and I like this best. Safari engine.

- MacTelnet (tabbed terminal). It now works for local programs and not just servers, so I use it instead of Terminal.

- SnapzPro X (or alternatives), useful for doing more intelligent screenshots or video captures.

- DesktopCalendar (by Takashi Hamada), a really nice use of space and very configurable. Also has a menu option.

- Growl, for pretty and unobtrusive notification windows. This is actually really well supported by 3rd party applications.

- SCPlugin, if you're a Subversion user; nice Finder integration.
Editors: MacVim, Emacs.app (build from source `./configure --with-ns` -- f Aquamacs and last resort TextMate

Torrent: uTorrent

RSS: NetNewsWire

PDF, Document Reader: Skim
I think you misunderstood what I've said, or I wasn't clear enough.

In my opinion, I added nothing much of value aside from simply re-assembling the ideas everybody else already had. Arrogance was never my intention. I'm simply saying I don't see much new that I added. It's a reply to a complement -- thanks, but it wasn't that big of a deal. This type of sentence construction happens all the time in normal conversation.

If you're insulted, I apologize. I'm also confused. Where are you in any of the parents of this comment for me to insult you? You've got one comment on the page, and as far as I can tell, it's not even related to any of mine.

And saying I sound slimy is out-of-bounds. I'll end this here. I replied simply because I have no idea what in heck you're talking about and thought maybe I had done a poor job of explaining myself.
It's a bit disingenuous to claim that Buddhism has "such a fundamentally negative philosophical basis"-- one shouldn't forget that the third noble truth is that there is a way to end to suffering, and the fourth noble truth is the description of that way.

Furthermore, a lot of translators think that "suffering" is not the most felicitous translation of "dukkha"-- the root words mean "a wheel with a bad axle", and it might be better to translate it as "unsatisfactory".
He's getting it wrong (unsurprisingly).

If you just use Memcache to cache the same results you get out of a DB, of course you might as well just throw that RAM at the DB. With any sane DBMS this will result in the same performance improvement.

The problem with that is that it limits you to the amount of RAM you can throw into the DB. The biggest Memcache clusters reach well into the multi-terabyte range.

Secondly, you can use Memcache to store constructed objects which could take many DB calls (or CPU time) to generate. Now you're getting one Memcache hit instead of several DB hits, which is a distinct bonus.

Since it's shared-nothing, Memcache also gives you the ability to massively parallelize queries to many cache servers at once, and get a much quicker overall response than just hammering one DB into the ground.
When something is not core to what you're doing. Do the core stuff yourself, buy non-core stuff. The advantage of no cash: don't buy non-core stuff, but also don't do it.
> Most people have a socially adept friend

I don't think this came out very well in my post, but I think I am very socially adept. I'm the "socially adept friend" that you're talking about.
VIM does the same for free. $99 saved is $99 earned.
As to the disadvantages of not needing money: there's no immediate incentive to focus on making money. Which means you often spend months/years just building cool stuff that's useless.
I recently did some testing of Kon-Boot to see if there were any other hidden surprises (i.e., undocumented, permanent malware infections, etc). MD5 checksums of MBR, BIOS, and Video BIOS images did not change before and after running Kon-Boot on a Dell laptop, nor did Windows-based antimalware apps turn anything up. I strongly encourage others to run their own tests. Even better of course would be for Piotr to kindly release the ASM source code.
I definitely agree on the girlfriend, but from my experience that's even more difficult than learning social graces. It takes a perceptive woman to realize that underneath is a really good guy that just needs some help. Young women are often as dense in their own way as hackers. It took me years and the experience of a bad marriage to become acceptable to a good woman.
The increase in development for memcached is a good thing since it's a relatively easy and less expensive way to scale. As mentioned in the article, relational databases will be around for a while and were never designed for the kind of scale that many companies require today. It's a proven technology that just needs a boost in certain situations.

The combination of MySQL + Memcached is a great solution to for many small companies to scale.
Violating your non-compete will at least damage your professional reputation and at most get you sued.

If you are passionate about the product and industry you should recognize the awesome opportunity your employer is giving you even if you are unhappy with the progress.

Hone your skills on refactoring code and dealing with office politics while collecting a paycheck.

If you do valuable work you do have capital to spend
on fixing company problems you see. Learn how to use it, you will need this skill until the day you are paying payroll for your own employees.
This is happening with me also. I'm a hacker (ok a developers) and my friends don't understand really what the web is, so I turn to spend 98% of my time in front of computer and avoid to go with them anywhere because their talk makes me headaches.

However (few months ago) I did found a friend that really understand me (although being tech-savvy) and we are projecting for the summer.

Keep searching, if in your area internet is widely used, you may find, I already find another one (she's a girl and work as a designer) using twitter, but not in the same city.

Be patient getting good friends need time
All social groups do the "engineering dance" it's just the engineers do it nonviolently and are better able to decipher intellectual capabilities without damaging their ego.

It's a natural law. It's supply and demand. Chickens for example will fight over food if it is not dispersed on the ground so they can all get to it. They will fight and establish a hierarchy so they can all get to the food in an orderly manner. Lions do it. The males eat first because they are strongest, and on and on.

The difference with Engineers is that they see the world is full of opportunity for them so there is no lack of demand for their talents.

I've seen the "violent" approach with some of the less intelligent bosses I've had. They'll try to fire you or damage your reputation within the organization. The more intelligent bosses give positive incentives to remain and treat their people well.

The propensity to rule by force is inversely proportional to IQ. This is true at all levels of biology from amphibians to nation states.
Perfect example of sarcasm not translating well in this format. I got it. And used my one vote to go back up.
That's a very good point. Perhaps that also adds to the nonviolence of the Engineering Dance. Less intelligent people want to maintain power by being the top dog and more intelligent people want to learn from those above them and therefore be the bottom dog where there is more room to grow and "move up" so to speak.
Sometimes technology has a way of overwhelming societies capability to adapt to it.

Cocaine problems in the US. Ultrasound in a country with a one child policy and a strong cultural preference for boys. Here, rigid societal hierarchies are subverted by the anonymity of the internet.

Technology has the amazing power to shape society as well as mirror it.
+1 Perian

+1 Fluid

+1 Unarchiver
I totally agree in that I don't expect anyone to get up in the morning and make their mission-of-the-day the optimization of jar. I am just surprised that no one has noticed jar behaving strangely. As a developer, I am frequently on the lookout for programs that hit 100% CPU utilization. This is a very useful indicator. I have top running all the time. I don't run jar frequently... but if I did and it did hit 100% CPU, I would be curious indeed.

I have been at a new job for 2 weeks, using Java EE. My IDE and my application use tons of memory, and I am often waiting for it to respond. Why is it paused? My coworkers just say "garbage collection". But they don't know if that is, in fact, what's happening. If you see jar running at 100%, do you think "oh it's just garbage collection", or "a bug, perhaps?"

Considering the fact that, there are millions of Java developers out there, that open source development has proven true the mantra "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow", and that this jar bug has potentially been around for years... I am just surprised.

Also, as much as I would love to extrapolate meaning from your single anecdote, I suspect that some people out there are running jar a lot. In fact, the blog post's writer mentions that he was trying to address actual complaints of the user base. It is a "well-known" fact that jar is slow.
More food for thought.. "Enroll" feels like there is going to be some requirement of me, and I wasn't willing to make that commitment yet. This isn't the right language, but something like "keep tabs on this course", or simply "follow", or maybe there's two options: "enroll" and "audit"
That's pretty fun!
That's the trick! Find something interesting about people. People want to be appreciated and /almost/ everyone has something to appreciate. As an intelligent person, your job isn't to be more interesting than other people, it is to find the interesting things in others.

It's like playing games. Over time, if you always win, people stop wanting to playing with you. Find games they can win and lose frequently until you win all the time then find a new game to play with them together.
+1 Things: This app has changed my day-to-day to-dos
+1 NetNewsWire
Sorry to be naive about java, but isn't .jar just .zip with a manifest and a different extension?

Even if the goal is to make jar "100% pure java", which I don't recall it being, why wouldn't they transcribe a relatively complete implementation of .zip from the get-go?

A relatively complete, solid, performant implementation of what is probably the world's most common compression algorithm seems like exactly the kind of thing that belongs in Java's enormous library system. Maybe typical jar duties wouldn't tax it but it seems like someone somewhere would use it for something big and these kinds of issues would have shaken out long ago.
Try this one in Awk

http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/awk/smtpd.awk
Privileged ports are a mistake.
Your predicament is more common than you may think. There's a book called "Pretending to be Normal" it's about an aspie. You may not be an aspie, but a lot of what the author goes through and her behaviors could be lessons for you.

http://www.amazon.com/Pretending-Be-Normal-Aspergers-Syndrom...
Exim is the default on Debian
I would start my own! You have said "but I’m sure, if done properly, it would become a hit" if so, clients will go hundred by hundred.

But do you have sufficient funds? do you have time? Make a good study of your project (the case you build a company) and what are the problems you might encounter.

Making your own is the best (as of my point of view) but it's you who (and the possibilities) that decide which way to take.

Good luck
We're forced to regularly ban Mibbit users on Freenode technical channels due to abuse masked by Mibbit's proxying, and for that reason I must say I'm not a fan.
I'd say that is a big honking "yes" to jganetsk's question. The acceptance of the build system limitations is so uncritical that you don't even try to build more than a few times a year.

Which means that you don't do regression localization by doing an automated binary search of the total revision history of the complete product. ("Oh, but touching the complete product is rate limited by paperwork." [sob]) Having the build system hand you the exact delta that introduced a subtle bug once in your product's lifetime would pay for rather a lot of build optimization.
the engineering dance is hugely annoying. my preferred mode is socratic--ask a lot of questions, stake out a minimal position--but with engineer types this is usually misinterpreted as accepting the other person's superior expertise. whereupon said expert proceeds to shut his ears down and hold court.

over a period of several weeks i can steer the mode of conversation around, but for casual encounters i have more or less accepted the subordinate position.
i'm reminded of something joel spolsky said about the changing state of volunteering, that people are willing to do small defined tasks, but less willing to volunteer a certain block of their time each week. So if somehow you had a course todo list, and people could each contribute, i think that might work well.
1. Quicksilver - There are already explanations on this and I don't like Spotlight that much.

2. MacPorts - If you are a developer or you're just an open-source lover, this is a must have app for you. It has 5811 open-source programs ready to install, easy and... open-source! ( which is good... )

3. TexMate - My every day editor, I don't use another one besides this one.

4. Adium - For chatting.

5. pgAdmin - For PostgreSQL administration. I don't use MySQL that much.

6. Growl - Another must have for system notifications, I don't realy know why Apple hasn't put one in OS X yet.

7. OmniGraffle - For Visio projects and such.

8. Things - For task managing.

9. Tweetie - The best Twitter client I've ever found.

10. Transmission - For P2P file transfers. I don't like uTorrent very much.

11. AppZapper - To uninstall programs. When you delete an app some configuration files are left behind, with this program all the files related are also deleted.

12. Evernote - Well... to take notes! Even better if you have an iPhone.

13. VMWare Fusion - For virtualization

14. Scribbles - For those moments when you get inspired and just want to make some draws :)

15. Adobe - Photoshop and Dreamweaver between others are a must.

16. Teeworlds - Best game ever and... Open-Source!!!!

17. Toast Titanium - For recording CD's and DVD's.

18. ScreenFlow - To record your screen and make nice video editing

These are not by "like" order, they're by the order I remembered them.
I wouldn't recomend installing iTerm because Terminal.app does the job nicely and it has tabs as well.
I'll had more if I remember some.
Are you comparing the speed of optimized code to unoptimized code?
Well then, you just need to introduce yourself to yourself. :-)

My old neighborhood was very close knit with lots of neighborhood functions. Our responsibility was the Halloween party. Me ex knew the wives of everyone, VC's, congressmen, academics, and just plain neighbors. The party was so popular that strangers from 15-20 miles away asked to be invited. We divorced and both moved away. I told one of my daughters that I missed the closeness of the old neighborhood. She told me that my ex was the social glue. It's just an ordinary neighborhood now.

My suggestion is to throw occasional, family friendly celebrations (not the standard cocktail party) with a couple of other co-hosts. Family friendly, because the SO's greatly expand the contacts. If there isn't a readily available occasion, celebrate Guy Fawkes day or something suitably oddball. If you make it potluck, it isnt even expensive. It's easy to get a reputation for gatherings of interesting people (except for maybe DC and Manhattan :-).
Summary: People are idiots.
You've hit on the logical fallacy that everyone seems to gloss over, namely, Men and Women are not different species. Any trait selected for would manifest in both genders.
What this would lend credence to, is the cultural meme concept.
The algorithms were the same.

But... The C code probably ran 100 times faster than Lisp before I optimised it.