skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends what the distribution of consumption is. My guess is that 90% of marijuana users consume less than a quarter ounce a year. There's no question that there are people who consume close to an ounce a week that will grow their own, but I'm sure 95% of people would much rather prefer to buy it in stores. This will be especially true once the store-bought product is properly regulated and required to be tested for dangerous chemicals, excessive mold levels, mycotoxins, etc.
it read like a get-rich-quick-scheme aimed at tech-savvy middle managers who are stuck in a cube farm

what's wrong with that?

I'm the same as you in that I love what I do for a living, but to be honest with you, we're rare. Most people are stuck living boring lives, doing jobs that make them miserable.

I gave the book to two friends of mine in 9-to-5 jobs. One of them read the book and told me that she was legitimately blown away by what she read. Fast forward a few years and now she's got a side project going that makes her happy. It's not a "muse" per se because it takes quite a bit of work, but the point is, this book inspired her to start a startup so that she can one day quit her job.

The other friend I gave it to was cynical and echoed a lot of the sentiments I hear around here. It's not original, it'll never work, Tim Ferriss is dishonest. Well, it's been a few years and he's still stuck, stagnating in the same shitty job.

-shrug-
I've tried it on a treadmill. The need for callouses becomes exponential with respect to the speed you are running.
Perhaps that's what he intends... Maybe the reason he isn't giving the reason he is predicting the collapse is because the reason is to see what effect his prediction has on the market.
He's not all wrong. In algebraic notation division is written as a fraction, and has a lower precedence. So it's a bit ambiguous.
Great point. There are also other negative aspects of shoes besides promoting heel striking that have little to do with form. Every shoe besides the Vibram Five Fingers I have ever seen has too small of a toe box. Arch support and cushioning don't let you use your arch and the rest of the leg properly. [1] The Vibram Five Fingers get this right also.

1. Mark Bishop,* Paul Fiolkowski,† Bryan Conrad,* Denis Brunt,‡ and MaryBeth Horodyski. Athletic Footwear, Leg Stiffness, and Running Kinematics. J Athl Train. 2006 Oct–Dec; 41(4): 387–392.
Paint your 2D arrays with ArrayPainter
Nevermind the fact that most employers don't check to see if the GPA you put on your resume is actually truthful.
Code Red: How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform.
So far, on large areas I can see a difference between #404040 and both #3f3f3f and #414141 on the new 15" MacBook Pro.

That rules out a naive 6 bit display. I think. The application of color profiles can could cause some regions of to have one-to-one mapping even if there aren't enough output codes available to cover the inputs, but I think with the 4:1 difference I can rule that out.
that seems a little optimistic. There's a lot more money and traffic in cocaine from down south than in marijuana, which is bulky and grows perfectly well in more northerly climes. I don't see much chance of legal cocaine any time soon.
The calorie delusion: Why food labels are wrong
It sure looks to me like the animation shows sea level changes.
OT, but given that Twitter is a potential acquisition target for Google, doesn't Twitter feel even the least bit leery of using Google Apps?
true... better than a dysfunctional black market that doesn't prevent consumption while enriching drug lords and criminal organizations around the world.
I'm getting x = 11/3 as well.

My workings:

(x-3)/(x-1) = (x-4)/(x-5)

(x-3)(x-5) = (x-4)(x-1)

x^2 -8x + 15 = x^2 -5x +4

-8x + 11 = -5x

11 = 3x

x = 11/3

FWIW, wolfram alpha agrees with me.
Coming Soon Cars: Robotic - Talking Cars Avoid Crashes
Tell HN: Watch Out When Linking Wikipedia in Your iPhone App
Dear TrailBehind,

Thank you for submitting TrailBehind to the App Store. We've reviewed TrailBehind and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it is not appropriately rated. Our review indicates that the application content is not consistent with the current rating. TrailBehind allows unfiltered access to Wikipedia, which include frequent mature or suggestive themes. Applications must be rated accordingly for the highest level of content that the user is able to access.

Please visit iTunes Connect to resubmit your binary and rate your application appropriately.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program
Anecdote: I went to a $40,000 / yr college and got a GPA-based "Presidential Scholarship" every semester. A friend of mine, who didn't really know what to do with college, got a 2-year degree in general ed from a state college. I can tell you that he's at least as smart and about 3x wiser than I am. He gets more out of his job, has a better social life, is in better shape, etc etc etc.

So from my perspective, GPA is about 95% useless in real life.
It's not just the headline. Who makes a purchase decision base on a product being called "pro"? It must be very confusing for him when he visits a supermarket and encounters words all over the place like "new", "improved", "better", "more", "bigger"...
Agreed. I almost hit the report spam.
What is QmvcFramework ?
Funny story... this site was originally supposed to be a demo for the framework but then the demo was finished before the framework. =X
Very nice slide effect, but the size of the text does kind of slap you in the face a bit.

Is it your script or does Joel Madden tweet A LOT? And primarily about Subway?
I'm getting more than 1M SHA1 + Hamming Distance calcs/core/sec on a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz, and I haven't really optimized beyond the obvious.

It's a brutally simple algorithm, really. XOR + bitcount, which only iterates for each 1 bit, so the lower the total hamming #, the faster it finds it.

It's in C, so everything works in unsigned long blocks. Compiled with -O3 it's:

real 0m0.968s

for 1M each on two forked processes, and 80 lines of code.
Raising capital: Who gives a damn about the numbers?
FWIW: http://www.numberempire.com/equationsolver.php says -1/4. It will only give 11/3 if you explicitly put parentheses: (x-3)/(x-1)=(x-4)/(x-5) . So I believe Bing's result is correct. Based on elementary school order of operations, the implied parentheses on the original equation are: x - (3/x) - 1 = x - (4/x) - 5.
Because it's preferable to always use real HTTP between independent processes at every layer boundary
I think the dude just loves subway, what can I say?

I'll let you in on a secret I learned while building this app: most celebs are hella weird.
Add a link to their Wikipedia (or something). I know who Obama and Slash are, but not too sure about some of the other "celebrities".
The difference leaps out at you if you've done any sort of colour work at all. I can even see in the gradients on the Finder window toolbars.
I agree. Most people don't know how LCDs work, don't know what dithering is, and wouldn't know what 6bit or 8bit meant if their life depended on it. To these - the majority - of people, "millions of colors" is "millions of colors", and any losses by dithering be damned.

They would ask "if I looked at my monitor, could it show me 'millions of colors'?" to which the one-word answer is "yes". If you had some time, you could expand it to be "yes, but the majority of those are done by this process called dithering, which is when..." and the person you're talking to has lost interest and/or gotten confused. To them, color is color, and they don't care about dithering since it's not visible to them.

This is who marketing is designed for. When most people here see an ad for a system, they immediately skip all the marketing bits and go to the stats, and from that get a good mental idea about the performance of the system, where the bottlenecks will be, etc. When "average" people see an ad for a system they look at the ad copy that says "will launch Word in half the time", decide that that's what they need, and buy the thing.

Ad copy caters to, and explains in context for, the lowest common denominator. If you're not that, then you should be looking elsewhere (at the fine print, the stats, the asterisk at the bottom of the page, etc.) to draw your own conclusions.
There is a great This American Life episode about Running After Antelope which references the Tarahumara:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=685
The Truth at Last(.fm)
It's a big leap to try to be the very first to succeed with a dual AGPL/commercial licensed product. Hell, if you did that you'd also be the first AGPL project of any sort to succeed!

It's quite a gamble you're taking with the license, and one fairly orthogonal to your actual project.
I asked a body-builder friend if Tim Ferriss' workout could actually achieve the results Tim claims. He replied that a person can only gain weight that quickly with steroids. Research has shown that under optimal conditions, less than ten pounds of muscle can be added in a year.

Ferriss claims to have gained 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to...

Here is a discussion by steroids users that confirms what my friend told me:

http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/anabolic-steroids/10-pound...

I couldn't find the relevant research that says ten pounds a year is the max, but here is a Google Books search result that confirms it:

http://books.google.com/books?id=VnpCA-Z1qcsC&pg=PT166&#...

"Unfortunately, the average bodybuilder finds it nearly impossible to gain even
ten pounds of solid muscle tissue in a year's time..."
Oooog. Boy is my face red. I was recalculating the main SHA1 each time through the loop. A minor refactoring mistake with a major impact...

With the base string hash pulled out of the loop, it's looking more like 1.7M SHA1 + HD calcs/core/sec.
Canadian ISPs: “Consumers will make good choices if we don’t inform them”
Steam's DRM is actually useful to me for multiplayer games -- losing your license is a pretty compelling cheating deterrent! They also devilishly only make bans randomly several days after you are caught, to dramatically slow the iteration cycle of someone trying to evade the detection system.
The refactorings will be to avoid excessive joins in a lot of key queries. This is the key lesson from giant multi-terabyte table schemas (like Google’s BigTable) which are completely join-free.

Congratulations, you just implemented your key/value store in MSSQL.
Apple Kills Palm Pre's Ability To Sync With iTunes
Yeah. I have learned what is and isn't popular here. On the popular list is being really cynical about everything; on the "not popular" list are free software, the GPL, and being liberal.

Fortunately, I have like 7000 karma points and only lose 8 for every unpopular post, so it doesn't really matter. Although, I am still trying to figure out why karma matters at all...
Is this any different than creating a Twitter account for the sole purpose of following celebrities?
Sure, just cross-posted it.

Types in Haskell are boxed as well, though it's possible to get around this with some GHC-specific hackery, I haven't done it.

But the biggest problem is the parsing code -- it actually spends around 70% of the runtime parsing the input! Changing to regular expressions may help that, but I gave up trying to find good documentation for Text.Regex.Posix.
Free Desktop Wallpapers, 3D Images
Very few recreational potheads grow their own. But they buy from networks of friends, all of which go back to some illicit grow op. That grow op will continue to exist if taxes are too high. It doesn't need any startup costs or anything, because the black market is already running.

With cigarettes there is also a black market, but growing tobacco is harder, the black market is recently established, and it's easy enough to steal cigarettes (e.g. by robbing a cigarette truck).
Wouldn't it be better if the boxes were painted white or made reflective?
The government thinks they'll receive $990M at $50/oz in tax revenue. That means they've projected to sell 19.8 million ounces, which is equivalent to about 561 metric tonnes. That's a lot of weed...

EDIT: from http://www.canorml.org/background/CA_legalization.html:

"Over 1.6 million Californians have smoked marijuana within the past 30 days, according to the most recent National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, which found 5.6% of all Americans over age 12 are current marijuana users. Insofar as these figures are based on self-reporting of illicit activity, they are undoubtedly on the low side.

According to the survey, one-third of this population, or 530,000 Californians, are daily users.

The bulk of consumption is accounted for by "regular" users, who consume marijuana at least several times per week. Included is a small minority of very heavy smokers (10 or more joints per day), who push the average consumption figures upwards. According to a British survey by the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit [1], "regular" users average 2 oz of cannabis per month or about 2 grams per day (a gram yields one or two joints). The population of regular users is somewhat larger than that of daily users. Assuming 600,000 - 700,000 "regular users" in California averaging 2 grams per day, consumption by this group accounts for 1.2 to 1.4 million grams per day. Assuming the remaining 1 million monthly users average one joint every 10 days, this adds another 100,000 grams per day. Total marijuana consumption by Californians may therefore be reasonably estimated at 1.3 to 1.5 million grams per day, or about 1 to 1.2 million pounds per year."
That may be so, but the legalization of marijuana would still be a huge blow to organized crime around the world and in the US.
Not a Feriss fan but it's not at all impossible to gain way more than ten pounds of muscle in a relatively short time if you aren't already very strong. His exact numbers sound excessive but I suspect he's gone up and down with that muscle mass several times in the past, which makes it a lot easier to rebuild it.
It would only require a couple of weeks, if not days. These journalists need to cover their arses.
how can you be so sure you're fixing the brain, if nobody yet knows exactly how the brain works

Because it helps me function better, I will keep taking it. Nobody said it's going to 'fix' my brain. I'm OK with just treating the symptoms if all-said I'm doing better than without the drugs.
Washington, DC is the only US capital.
Heh...well, I didn't do the experiment. I'm just the messenger.
Exactly my first thought.
Damn, I don't have a GPA! I could send away for a copy of my transcript: ~35 pages of course descriptions and narrative evaluations of me by my faculty, along with self-evaluations (missing would be my evaluations of my faculty, which go in their transcript)
Google got it:
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:http://ww2.samhart.com/n...

Anecdotally, all the guys I know that drone on about BDD/Rspec/Cucumber/TDD Dejour... never actually use it.
Do you really think that it will be enough to put their political lives on the line? Right now everyone can point fingers, but votes are pretty black and white.
You changed the equation.

You started with

(x-3)/(x-1) = (x-4)/(x-5)

which is not the same as

x - 3/x - 1 = x - 4/x - 5

, the equation in the submission.
I had a comp.lang.lisp flashback, so I'll say you did a good job :D
You use credit in the HN "go change the world!" sense. In this case, it's about cash- the capitalist, the individual who provides capital to an enterprise and pays workers, is the one who receives cash. It's not about who gets credit and getting more gold stars than the next guy, it's about cash. That's capitalism.

Social entrepreneurialism, making a dent in the universe, helping those less fortunate, those are all awesome things. But capitalism, which is the issue at hand when talking about 4HWW, is about the accumulation of capital. Ferriss just talks about some cool ways to make money efficiently and spend money in ways that get you good bang for the buck.

And, with that, I'm going to stop procrastinating and go pack for my trip to Tunisia, paid for by creating an iPhone application, the development of which was made feasible by the savings achieved by moving to a country with low cost of living (Hungary). Cheers :D
Isn't it being maintained by Evan Weaver (twitter) these days? He made some ridiculous stand against 1.9 ages ago, maybe he refuses to update the gem based on that. No other good explanation I can think of, the changes are trivial.
Stack Overflow certainly deserves some credit. I was unaware of how much growth they have seen and that is mostly due to the fact that the service has rarely diminished for me. Taking on that kind of increased load, while preemptively scaling to meet is no easy task.
Apple disables iTunes on Palm Pre
This.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9pWKB2D23k#t=3m38s

I've been more dazzled by amateur hot dog eating contests.
Duke Nukem OS
UAE phone company pushes BlackBerry update with embedded spyware
Thanks for the feedback - if you hit that refresh button you should see your suggestion is live.

I made it open the tweet in a new window but if you guys think that's obnoxious just let me know.
Perhaps optimally.

But, I've worked with many a developer who couldn't tell you why divs differ from spans.
Denormalizing in some areas for performance is hardly the same as implementing a key/value store in MSSQL.
I've given up on trying to convince others of the usefulness of automated unit testing. It works wonders for me in my own projects, but the hassle of trying to police my co-workers just isn't worth it at work.

Love it? Hate it? I don't care anymore. I know what works for me and that's enough.
Actually, yeah, it is. :)
Book Review: Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
I actually _enjoy_ the things I choose to work on.

That's why Ferriss defines work as the stuff you do primarily for money and would prefer to do less of. Even if you love your job, there is going to be some of that in there.
Can I get rich working there in a reasonable time frame? Otherwise, why should I give a shit how?
You probably saw this already, but someone on the rb-amqp list wrote a library enabling use of amqp inside passenger: http://github.com/danielsdeleo/qusion/
Alpha doesn't do any better with this one:

http://www35.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=southernmost+state+ca...

which Google seems to handle just fine:

http://www.google.com/search?q=southernmost+state+capital+in...
Here is a little web page I tossed up to help people screen LCDs. http://jim.studt.net/lcd-sleuth/

It will make a table with cells whose text is just slightly off of the background. You can stare are them and explore the limits of your visual system and your computer's display. (No one will be able to see all of the text on any statically adjusted display.)

Additionally, on this MacBook Pro I looked at a greyscale gradient which I have used over the past and decided it was poorly distributed, so I ran through the color calibration (expert mode) in the Displays preferences pane. I ended up with a much better distributed gradient, but I introduced hue distortion so I didn't keep it. But there seems to be room for an improved profile.
If Microsoft specifically set out to make their software incompatible with third parties what would happen? Oh wait it did...
Right, because I'm sure they stopped using joins (as well as all the other RDBMS benefits) completely after they made those changes ;-)
Hey, I resent that...I didn't have that many pimples...
Damn I thought he was going to dive into a vault full of gold coins without getting hurt. :/
Translation: "I don't understand TDD."

I like how he links to the Wikipedia article on Horse Tack, but doesn't bother to back up any of his claims.
Apple: “Quit running those Laptop Hunters ads.” Microsoft: (Maniacal laughter)
Chromium developers invent impressive compression algorithm for smaller updates
I'm deeply suspicious of good grades. I think, "Didn't you have projects that were more interesting than your studies?"
There're lots and lots of former startup founders currently working at Google. Andy Hertzfeld of Radius & General Magic. Joshua Schacter of del.icio.us. Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal. Bunch of others whose employment and/or startups might not be known publicly. That doesn't even count the ones who end up at Google because it buys their companies.

It's not just famous people too: at least 2 or 3 folks I work with regularly are former startup founders, not including myself. Seems to be the new career path for bright aspiring programmers whose startups fail: graduate from college, start a company, fold up company, work for Google.
Well, first of all, most people don't smoke marijuana by the ounce lol.
An eighth of pot is currently around $60 on the black market, and legal sellers would probably keep the price around the same to compete. Which means, even with a $50 an ounce tax, assuming prices stay the same, there are huge profits for sellers.

At the same time, pot is much cheaper than cigarettes for the user, since an ounce would probably last a casual smoker weeks or months.
FYI, an ounce is a lot of pot. I don't smoke all the time, but when I do I'd class myself as a bit of a heavy user, eg I prefer to get stoned every evening.

An ounce would last me about 2 months, that'd be about $350-400 (based on buying a smaller bag once a week). In the Netherlands, a similar/quantity/buying pattern would have been about $250. This unscientific analysis (but with a very large sample size...cough...) suggests the black market premium is about 30-40%.
Eh, I could do it in a weekend. (I'm so sorry)
You must be furious pretty often, then - because the vast majority of LCDs sold today, with the exception of a few expensive high-end displays, use 6-bit color.

(This is 6 bits per channel, not 6 bits per pixel, by the way.)
Their handling of multi-tenancy is bound to be hilarious: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=67839
And a hint for you, in kind. When you post about Amarok, you don't get a bunch of people posting about how iTunes is "vastly better than" your chosen tech without anything other than dumb subjective anecdotes to back it up. Nor do people whine about how your viral licenses make them "sad".

For you to do so is not just rude, it insults our intelligence (do you honestly think anyone here doesn't know what free software is? If we're not using it, it's because we've been there and found it lacking. Deal.)
That's treating the 4th dimension as time, which is fine, but this article is referring specifically to the 4th spatial dimension. Sometimes pop physics type articles confusingly refer to the 4th spatial dimension as the 5th dimension.
Pretty random rant, if you ask me.
(which of course you didn't)
You are confused. "6 bit displays" have 6 bits of color data per channel, and hence can display 2^18 (262,144) colors without dithering. I'm not sure where you're getting 191 and 767 from.
I'm curious: how would people compare the prestige of working at Fog Creek vs. the prestige of working at Google? Or one of the other big Internet companies - Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, EBay, etc...?

I remember Joel doing similar how-to-get-hired essays when I was in college. I was always like, "Pffft. Why would I want to work for a company that does bugtracking software?" Ended up taking a job at a financial software startup instead. I'm wondering if other people feel the same way or if I'm just a gigantic snob. (The two may not be mutually exclusive...)
Notes from Charlie Munger's Meeting
Isn't that a "no real scotsman" argument? Anyway, what's there to understand? TDD plainly means writing tests before writing the implementation, and he's railing against the whole concept.

One also wonders how, or by whom, you might wish his argument to be "backed up". A compelling argument should stand or fall on its own merits.