skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may just be New York. I haven't seen any instances of laptop use being discouraged, except for non-customers.

And the rule of no outside food and drink makes perfect sense.
Learning an unfamiliar technology is like learning to drive
Developing _anything_ for _anything_ is a big gamble, akin to betting on horses. Talent, enthusiasm, and perserverance all play a role, but luck also stands behind success.
I have to laugh at the misplaced smugness of your reply.

With your own quoted figures:

$480 million / 60 million population = $8 per person in the UK

$1.9 billion / 300 million population = $6.33 per person in the US

Nice try!
It's not particularly bad advice. Perhaps for someone who hasn't worked with databases long enough, it's dangerous to tell them "don't worry about normality." But denormalizing certain groups of tables can certainly cause a significant performance gain.
So far, this appears to be largely a New York phenomenon, though San Francisco's Coffee Bar does now put out signs when the shop is crowded asking laptop users to share tables and make space for other customers.

Cool; I'm never moving to NY.

It's highly unlikely that many SF or SV places could actually "get away" with kicking out their paying customers and maintain any kind of loyal customer base. It's really a symbiotic relationship -- being nice to the laptop wielders makes it much more likely that they'll be nice to your business in online reviews and contexts.
This may be true. But France also has public schooling that is a mess. They have incredibly powerful teacher unions that rape the state budget. Since it is such a large amount of people, they have an incredible amount of political clout. France gets a lot less bang for buck education wise for the amount spent on education.

It will also be interesting to compare the average remuneration for doctors in France and Canada when compared to other countries. I am not saying that the American system is not broken – but France and Canada’s health system isn’t the model to follow.

For interest sake, Canada imports a hell of a lot of doctors. They simply do not train enough doctors to be self sufficient and must rely on the brain drain from 3rd world countries for their staff. (In the province of Saschatewan, more than 50% of doctors are from abroad – most prominently from South Africa).

The amount spend on medical research in Canada is also a lot lower (per capita) than the USA.
Don't be, use Redcar (www.redcareditor.com) on your linux box :-) At least editors across *nix are faaar better than ones on Windows.
Yeah, and now that we know where it's coming from, please don't screw with the hum and kill us all, k?
Yes, I'm pretty sure charset support in Postgres is at the database level, not the table level. See here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/multibyte.htm...
I think I've worked with you before.
5 Questions you need to be able to answer as a start-up
Things we don't understand about humans
How to Build a Spectrometer with Just Three Household Items
Microsoft responds to HTML5
You should check out my friend Nikolaj's project page. He has done a load of RC and electronics projects that are along the same lines. They are documented here. http://dzl.dk/projects/index.html

There are a few tesla coil projects too that are kind of fun :-)
Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=215527

Have HN's impressions of the tool change since this discussion?

I didn't know Microsoft was doing anything like this.
"Bing" "microsoft vs stacker wikipedia". The first result is a wikipedia page on disk partitioning.
Google the same, you get as the first three results wikipedia pages on Stac Electronics and MS-DOS, and as the third result this HN page.

As you can see, Google did what you wanted. However, the litigation was between Stac Electronics and Microsoft, so now try "microsoft vs stac wikipedia".
Bing: returns wikipedia category "microsoft criticisms" and the third result is "microsoft litigation".
Google: returns the wikipedia pages "stac electronics" and "microsoft litigation".

The conclusions I draw from this is that Bing and Google just have very different algorithms, relatively speaking. Wikipedia appears to have a much lower ranking in Bing than Google, at least in cases where there isn't a page with a very similar name. Here are two searches to compare:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft+vs+stac
http://www.google.com/#q=microsoft+vs+stac

While I understand why people bash MS, as well as Google (I agree with most of it), I think sometimes its best to take an unbiased look. I cannot see any attempt by MS to remove useful results; the first one is the original text of the lawsuit!
It doesn't really have the potential to be huge - yes there are a lot of iPhones out there, but they are not all potential Cydia users. You need people who are technical enough to jailbreak, interested enough to jailbreak, willing to do some care and maintenance and maybe re-jailbreak every time an upgrade is released and who are unhappy with the AppStore.

Given that the marketing for the iPhone is about how easy to use it is and how comprehensive the AppStore is, the iPhone target market is pretty much entirely excluding the Cydia market. The crossover is a chance happening that geeky people like the iPhone too, and the iPhone is actually a nice gadget dressed up as a phone.
John Hughes Knew Our Secret: No One Fit In in High School
Solution: Build a very high-level, declarative, domain-specific, semantic, platform-agnostic core for your app, and then generate most of your platform-specific port from that.

You'll still need to customize some UI and behavior to respect platform conventions because you DON'T want a generic "cross-platform look and feel", but you'll otherwise be very agile about porting to whatever platform is hot at the moment.
It's always nice to see someone do an honest self assessment, and then own up to it, even the negative parts. My current office-mate is like this, he sucks at coding, but is very broadly knowledgable in tech stuff, and very good at bringing ideas together, and getting broad strokes of what needs to be done fleshed out. I'm sure a lot of places will hire someone like this, but the job title is usually Architect or similar.

As a tangent, if I was him, I would fess up to this at interview time -- any employer who doesn't want good self assessment from employees doesn't deserve someone like this.
10ren,

I don't understand the exception you are proposing. If the "crucial problem" is several steps in, then your first several MVPs succeed easily (indeed, that is the case for Tattlebird). Any successful startup overcomes several PFAs (potentially fatal assumptions). You absolutely need faith to proceed on this path, but you need facts to stay on the path and not waste your time.

I would need to know a lot more about your product before I agreed it was an exception. Your product's success relies on a long list of assumptions. Validating those assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible increases your chances of success.
There is a fine line that has to be drawn though, can't let people not buying anything sit there all day in the hope that in the future they will start buying a decent amount.
Microsoft's feedback on HTML5: "More questions than answers"
I am proud to say it took me a few moments to figure out what MBP stands for.
Avoiding the Texas rat f**k in patent infringement cases
10mHz, thats once per 100 seconds. What kind of ocean waves are these?
i was being melodramatic, I feel the topic warrants it as I find having my interests conflict with the interests of an entity that can afford to lobby the legislature and keep a team of lawyers on retainer to be chilling.
How Does Google Maps Work?
Feedback on my new site Chipped.In
Hello Everyone,

I've soft launched a new site for groups to keep track of shared expenses. Initial target is 'casual' expense tracking for things like road trips, weddings and other largish events, but it's also useful for families and roommates to keep track of their normal month to month expenses as well.

I am in planning mode to figure out what to add next and that plan will be so much better with some feedback.

The url is: http://chipped.in/

Vince Hodges
Silicon Valley Approach to Third-World Challenges
Lovely analogy. Is there a way of coming up with these, i've been trying to improve my ability to do so for a long time :P

They're such useful tools in arguments.
See, drugs are bad for you:

http://translationparty.com/tp/#621996
The truth about lying: who does it, and why
Agreed.

Most of the serious commercial databases I've worked with/near/on have been de-normalised to some extent.

e.g. SalesForce run massive amounts of data. Their implementation really boils down to one de-normalised table; with a dozen or so supporting tables.

When I hear about some (not all) NoSQL implementations I occasionally wonder why they just didn't adopt a de-normalised SQL solution.
"It turned out that the same plane was being used for both the Montreal-Edmonton and the Edmonton-Vancouver flights; I made the connection, but my suitcase didn't -- it was taken off the plane along with all the others, went into the airport's baggage routing system, and didn't make it through in time to get back onto the plane."

I can understand why they wouldn't bother optimizing such a rare special case. There are probably a long chain of procedures that would have to be made more complex to accomodate this.

Yet another case of choosing general scalability over local performance ;)
What Do You Expect from Google Chrome OS?
It's not that bad if you pay with money you print yourself.
You may be right about the practicality of collectively 'forgetting' the data. But practical considerations do not change the ethics of using the data. And I'm disturbed by the idea that saving lives justifies using data obtained by murdering others. To do so means that we are judging the lives being saved as more valuable than those lost.

We might make that judgment today because the lives lost are 70 years in the past. But perhaps tomorrow someone else will make that judgment because the lives lost are of one tribe and the lives saved are from a 'better' one.
Got any links to documentation?
A seriously good Super Mario Follow AI
http://http://notarealurl.com is not a real URL, but http://notarealurl.com is a real URL and a real domain, registered by someone in the UK.

If you want something which is not a real URL/domain, you can use http://example.com (or .org or .net).

(OK, it is a 'real' URL/domain, but reserved for documentation and example use, so it's not a real real one. Either way, it's more appropriate than picking some random registered-by-someone domain).
Reading Lolita in Tokyo: http://translationparty.com/tp/#623528
Paul Graham, Michael Moritz in discussion with Guy Kawasaki [video]
Postgres lets you define your own aggregate functions and has an array type. http://mssql-to-postgresql.blogspot.com/2007/12/cool-groupco...
High-performance Computing Isn’t Always About Performance
Haldeman's Marsbound is trite, disappointing
The other day I was in post office and there was a guy who was 2 years short of the retirement and he was making 50,000$/year. Guess what he did? He sold stamps behind the counter. You can hire people to do his job for 7 to 8 dollars per hour but because of Union/labor laws, he makes 50,000$. How is that for efficiency?

Were you aware of how long this particular employee had been working for the USPS? Yeah, it's a little old-fashioned, but there is something to rewarding long-time and hard-working employees. (Japan companies get the retirement concept oodles better than the US). Maybe he'd long ago paid his dues as a carrier, and was simply happy to be working the last couple of years before his actual retirement.
Twitter vs. Facebook: How to manage a downtime
Also, install yslow for firefox: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
"laws" -> "politics" -> "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics"
Urbanspoon Takes Online Reservations
Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest
I don't really see anything about this that suggests he can't actually program. The worst bit might be this:

"... if you ask me to sit down and code up a new application from scratch I will spend ten times longer than programmers who are much more junior than me."

That doesn't sound so bad to me. It kind of implies that he can still get the job done, just more slowly than some others. I don't know if that should be a "I can't program" qualifier, though.

He must not think that his extra coding time adds any value to the process. In my case, I know I'm not always the fastest around, but I like to think that my code is better designed and easier to maintain than the average (* may or may not be true...) because I'm almost pathological about building my applications from small, self-contained components, never having the same logic exist in more than one place if at all possible, and perhaps most importantly, clean, clear and consistent naming conventions. That kind of stuff takes time but, IMO, improves overall quality in immeasurable ways. Speed isn't everything.
As far as I know, Starbucks locations allow you two hours of wifi access along with a purchase. Seems reasonable to me.
This isn't called 'unjust'.
It's caleld 'crazy', 'disgusting' and 'medieval'.
Apple Tablet PC Could Take In $1.2 Billion
The problem with my self-imposed iPhone boycott is...
Luckily, research isn't done per capita. Find a cure, it's applicable to (pretty much) everyone.

You might say that other, smaller governments spend at a comparable per-capita rate. But that doesn't change the fact that the USA is still spending much more and accomplishing more research.
That's exactly what I do. The first interview is over the phone and they type out their answers over a WebEx link.
Nice goatse illustration on the heading of the article.
How did the illustrator get such an abstract-but-faithful-to-the-original illustration of goatse past the editors of The Economist?

That must qualify as a skilled bit of social hacking…
WebPageTest is essentially a hosted/online version of YSlow and Firebug.
and also, people will visit once, see that the results are completely irrelevant, then next time avoid clicking on it and grow to hate it.
I think you're oversimplifying the divide between geeky and non-geeky people. Or, to be more specific, you'd be surprised at the lengths "non-geeky" people would go to to get what they want. "You mean I can get more free apps for my iPhone? Show me!!"
I don't think every illustration involving hands pulling apart something can be described as "faithful" to the original goatse.
I always thought that allowing customers to sit around was the coffee shop business model.

It's like Barnes & Noble versus previous bookstores. Barnes & Noble encourages you to sit down and read books you have no intention of buying. They're smart enough to know that if you're in the store for 2 hours at a time on a regular basis, you're going to buy SOMETHING. I buy a lot of stuff at Barnes & Noble even though Amazon is generally cheaper. I go there all the time because it's such a cool place to shop, and I buy stuff because I see it and I'm like, "I WANT!"

Anyway, my impression was always that Starbucks and others had the same idea. If you let customers chill for a few hours, they're going to buy stuff. I know I do. If I'm going to sit and read or sit and use a laptop, I'll buy a good drink and some kind of snack. If I want to stay after I finish that, I'll buy something else.

I guess the problem is now customers aren't buying stuff, which sadly coffee shops are fighting in less-than-optimal ways. The problem is, I think, that there is no optimal way that coffee shop owners can do anything. Customers need to be reasonable and support the businesses that are giving them such a nice place to hang out and get online.
Yes, you're right. I agree that there are times that denormalizing makes sense. My point was that the item said:

* Throw away the normal forms you learned in school

* Denormalize [...] whenever it makes a query faster.

I think that's bad advice as stated. As you imply, you have to know why the rules are there to know when to break them intelligently. I didn't get that message from the item as posted, rather that the author thought that NF had little value, which probably doesn't belong in a list of database tips and tricks.

[edit: format]
If anyone is interested in more details, I've just posted an interview here with the same guy. Worths the check.

http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/10041/...
I grew up very close in time and location to the settings of Hughes' 80's films. Perhaps that's why they seemed so immediate to me.

Unrelated, more recently my father got to know Hughes, a bit. I was never privy to those conversations, but I will say that my father is a very knowledgeable and intellectual person. To the point where, entirely in good will, he can almost overwhelm you with both knowledge and carefully thought out insight on your topic of choice. That Hughes chose to continue to have and even seek out, as chance allowed, conversations with him, impresses me of itself. And I thank him, as it was a relationship that my father greatly enjoyed, as well.

RIP, Mr. Hughes. We won't forget about you.
No, but because of how precise the experiment was. At first I didn't quite understand it, and now the full force of the article has hit me.
Microsoft joins HTML 5 standards fray in earnest
So we've gone from "The US not having socialised medicine makes it a reseach powerhouse that the rest of the world has to leech off because of their backwards programs" to "The US has more citizens than other 1st world countries".

Hardly a great argument, but at least the latter actually is "common knowledge".
Its a cool premise, but for me to want to join it'd need a better design and tour of features. ie. before I sign up and give you my e-mail address, I'd want to know exactly how the site works and what I'm getting into.
If you see a goatse illustration in the heading of the article (thank you for bringing that even up, HN is read worldwide, it's dinner time somewhere all the time) then you really need help. Apologies for bringing it up again.

It appears there is some comfort for you in knowing that you at least are not alone in this. I have to wonder how long you stared at the subject of your association though in order to develop such a strong likelyhood in seeing analogies in unrelated images ?
I'm pretty sure it happens because my exhausted body falls asleep way faster than my brain.
I've seen a few places that offer an hour or two of free access with the code printed on the receipt. This always seemed like a reasonable solution to me. What are your thoughts on that option?
"Fess up" is an interesting suggestion but I'm pretty sure that would not go over well in an interview situation even with many employers who otherwise would be good to work for. Admitting weakness in an interview is generally just giving the other side arguments to use againsnt your candidacy with very little upside. In some rare cases you may find someone empathetic but I doubt it's worth the risk.
Interesting !

Top relevant results for me on google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
http://vaxxine.com/lawyers/articles/stac.html

(query: http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+vs+stacker )

Bing:

http://www.vaxxine.com/lawyers/articles/stac.html

query:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft+vs+stacker&go=...

I did not enter 'wikipedia' as a criterium.
the problem is that the law has such a wide scope that it's pretty useless to figure out who is really guilty. The guy taking a piss outside, gets smacked down the same way as a pedophile who raped a 6 year old.

Let's say you have someone move in next door, who is in the sex offender database. With the current laws...sure the guy may have raped a 6 year old girl. However, he could have just:

a) took a piss outside

b) had sex with his girlfriend, when he was a few months older than her.

c) had a nude picture of his kids taking a bath

d) sent his own nude picture to his girlfriend

etc
Speaking of which ...

Does anyone else hear, on occasion, very low-pitched drones? As if there was a very large machine nearby humming away, yet at no discernible location?

I've experienced this for years, in multiple locations, and have decided it is some form of tinnitus, but sometimes wonder if it isn't some external event.
If it did node-based diffs.
I already have friends using some of the apps mentioned http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/15-cool-tools-for-easy-expense-.... Why should we switch to yours?
Depending on which state he's in:

e) Been found with a japanese comic he bought at Barnes & Nobles or Borders.
Water-cooling. Is it worth it?
That is indeed tinnitus.

I've had it for a long time, especially when listening to violing concertoes certain tones would sound very ugly in one ear and nice in the other. It's gone now tough (and I can't tell you how happy I am because of it, listening to music is one of my largest pleasures in life).

I had an ear infection and it took years before my hearing was back to normal in that ear.
Why Predictify, a faux prediction market site, failed
Thanks for the link. Looking forward to trying the array approach as well.
Ford adds RFID scanner, to track tools
FTFA: "The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of," said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE, in a July interview. "In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards."

This is important. For years noted Web designers have been touting "designing with Web standards", and for good reason. While there are many sweet things in HTML5, treating what's defined today as if it were some final spec risks creating, over time, a hodgepodge of not-quite HTML5 documents.
Preparing a video of my comment.
Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 - web developer changes
Good post, but most of those are SQL specific, and not really unique to Postgres, right? But yeah, very crucial points you covered that you see a lot of people not implementing!
Dupe. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749330
FCC wants real answers from ISPs on broadband investment
Bandwidth for video is expensive.
Bandwidth for text is not.
I was rather interested in Arduino for a long time (having grown up tinkering with Parallax's BASIC Stamp ][), and ended up ordering the projects kit from MAKE last month. I also got a "max m" rgb led array and am planning to make an ambient information system.. In a sense I just have this thing chilling in the corner of my room and depending on color and brightness it will convey to me different types of information. I still have to get the ethernet controller, but likely it will check for new users on my web app and if we get a lot turn red, etc... or check my gmail. one of those.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls/3710500813/
Twitter not so popular with the young people