skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I was using just my own machine, or spent a few grand to put together my own CUDA farm, CUDA would have been great.

I think using cloud resources was the way to go though, because it's easy to search for keys concurrently, and you can summon an effectively unlimited amount of computing power pretty cheaply. You can add as many cloud servers as you want to your cluster without worrying about locking or divvying up work, and the number of keys your cluster is able to check per second increases linearly with the number of machines.

The winning team, awesome guys with a cluster of 8 very powerful computers and a CUDA program, were able to check just over 400 million keys per second. If I would have used 400 Rackspace cloud servers, it would have cost me about $100 to run them for the duration of the contest and I would have been achieving similar speeds.
Bad URL - Here is the correct one

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/07/do-you-believe-in-m...
Do you notice all the other crazy bad things that the applications you use do? This is not a particularly virulent attack.
Harvard professors are the highest paid in the nation. The students want professors to give something up. People responsible for cost cutting rarely apply the same logic to themselves and their own organization as they do to others.
I have to disagree on a couple points:

A single media player for audio and video is not desirable. They're separate and almost unrelated functions; the only time they might belong together is syncing to another device. That's not to say Rhythmbox couldn't use some polish.

How, exactly is Gnome's panel crude? I find panel applets far more natural than the system tray for little utilities that aren't part of a larger app, and I really don't care for Apple's dock. Is there some justification for this claim?
I haven't a clue, but it seems like the site has been a pretty constant performer, I have never seen it 'down', it looks like he has about 50K uniques every day.
That is probably the worst process I've ever seen in my life.
Paul Graham can be hit or miss, IMO, but this one is a direct hit. I don't mind meetings per se - in a good company, they have merit - but their effect on the work day can be disastrous. If you don't work somewhere that understand that programmers need large uninterrupted chunks of time, well, you're not at a developer friendly place. There's few worse problems. And non-makers often don't have any idea that it's not just the standard 'coders are cranky' going on. (We, as a group, _are_ cranky, mind you.)
The issue that a lot of organizations and businesses seem to be facing now is that they're doing like he says and spending in the fat years what they have which makes the lean years painful.

It doesn't work like that tho'. Here in the UK we have lots of underfunded pension funds. So why didn't the companies overpay into their pension funds during the good years? Because if you do that, you'll get raped by the taxman who thinks you're trying to conceal your profits. I don't know what the regulations are around Harvard's endowment, but I bet the people managing it aren't that stupid.
Hey, let's do impressions.

I'm c0nsilience. I fail to understand obvious satire, and am frequently confused by very simple things in every day life. If only some incredibly handsome man could leave a very sarcastic comment explaining how I failed to Get It, that would surely solve everything.
Yes, I regret the choice of words.

Harvard is a federation of many nearly autonomous entities. The Business School cannot tell the Medical School what to do, etc. By 'fat cats' I meant power centers who can't be commanded to downsize -- at least, not quickly -- by anyone.

The people protesting layoffs were, essentially, protesting this structure, whether they realized it or not. Some of them did realize it, and so were a little more aware than the G-G-P's hypothetical Californian voting for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses.
Quantum tic tac toe: A teaching metaphor for superposition in quantum mechanics
Or, click on the "print" link. All on one page, then.
Entertainment competition goes up. More tv, more books, more movies, more games, more music. I don't think i can objectively quantify fun had in a game 10 years ago or a game now. However, I think we can agree that how people spend their leisure time is a pretty good indicator of how much fun activity X is. In the early 80's movies were more fun than video games for just about everybody. Now, you see moms playing games on the wii. I think video games are objectively more fun than the alternatives than they were with their alternatives 20 years ago.
Stroustrup on The C++0x "Remove Concepts" Decision
I don't know if it's been stated officially, but nerd consensus seems to be that Google will be using something other than X.
Yes, I was. Online play is a significant improvement, and the gameplay is substantially different. Plus, the PlayStation doesn't have a catalog of new games. In order to continue playing new video games, you have to upgrade.
Its actually impossible to make a good point on the internet without giving someone, somewhere the ability to call it an over generalization. It turns out though, that pointing out exceptions to generalizations is the lamest comment one can make on the internet, because of course, any statement to a wide audience will have exceptions that someone, somewhere on the internet can point out. Pointing out over generalizations is like pointing out spelling errors, albeit less constructive.

You can't get any traffic to your blog if you don't make generalizations, because you won't appeal to a broad, general audience.

Of course, thats all just a generalization ;)
Thank you for making this point. This happens to be the position on the economic ladder where these people are. A few people are higher, most people are at a level equal or lower to this.

In some ways I feel like the tone pieces like this take when discussing Chinese life is condescending. For some people this is just 'work.' Consider using this kind of pity to talk about American blue collar workers - does it seem appropriate?
I've encouraged a number of people to give Linux a try on the desktop, and I've heard a complaint or two about it being too different, hard to use or missing some feature the complainer liked from another OS. I have never heard slow/unresponsive among the complaints. I've only heard this complaint from people who understood how X works and fundamentally disagreed with the design.
> For example, rtm's one of my professors at school, and he's certainly not the only one to be involved in other ventures. Professors are involved in cutting edge research - they need to make risky decisions, based on little information, of what to invest their time in, knowing full well that most of their research won't be overly influential. Sounds a lot like starting a company to me.

It's very easy to get involved in "risky" ventures on the side. Because your professors have steady jobs at the university, they are afforded the opportunity to get involved in projects that may flop, because their real job is there to mitigate the risk.
Students, take this advice to heart as well. Are all your classes grouped together? They should be. I'd go so far to claim that you should take a less interesting set of classes in order to group them all together. I'm taking Distributed Systems this semester instead of Data Mining for this very reason. Am I more interested in Data Mining? Yes. But I'll wait until next semester. Distributed Systems are pretty cool too, and even the most amazing class is not worth adding several hours of dead time to your week.

(Interesting note for anyone familiar with Randy Pausch: he mentions this very phemonena in his lecture about time management.)
pg, thank you so much for writing this!

"All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost."

YES! I was just saying this the other day: how a meeting for a programmer has a different cost than a meeting for a manager. I will be sending this link out to many people.
It's probably almost as effective to hit random people and make them think that they're are being singled out as a ringleader. Bad things happen to political detainees in Iranian jails (http://thesop.org/journalism/2008/02/05/cries-within-iranian...) It would certainly scare the crap out of me to be tagged.
If I am not mistaken, paintball guns are essentially pneumatic smooth-bore muskets. Definitely not "sniper" quality.
Try irc. :)
Yes, but in a different era kings still died from things that can be easily cured with antibiotics, or made endurable with insulin.
Office hours for non-founders? Maybe in a coffee-shop nearby to YC -- maybe once every 2 weeks?
Brilliant article and spot-on.

The hardest jobs in software (IMHO) will be the engineering leads that have to be an interface between management and their engineering team. They are also asked to "make" at high quality but can't escape the management schedule overlap. So the only other option is to work themselves to death at night when no one can interrupt.

I think some managers have also begun to require (or encourage) semi-constant instant messaging which can hurt a "maker's schedule", too. I've been guilty of this even recently. Perhaps the continual overhang of the interruptive IM can make them feel that anxiety of not being able to work on any hard/long problems for fear of being interrupted?

The best "makers" have adapted to this in their own ways, of course.
Wow, Gaius, somebody's downvoting every one of your posts.

There's a big movement towards emulators among the gamer scene I'm able to observe, because a lot of gamers are realizing that games haven't become fundamentally better in the last decade. Yesterday evening at a friend's, the Wii was forsaken for a Genesis; it's surprising how entertaining those games still are, because we've been conditioned to think you can't have fun without being cutting-edge.
Another problem this poses for companies is that conference rooms are a scarce resource. Not everyone can schedule all their meetings so they're not in the middle of an uninterrupted work period.
The other problem is that a 2 hour team meeting takes 2 hours for the manager 2*n hours for the team, even before considering the disruption.
My solution is to simply follow my old student cycle - "lecture time" from 9am to 1pm, lunch break from 1-2 (if you want a hot lunch as I do, it always triggers an interrupt regardless). Since lectures are almost never contiguous, you can slot meetings and speculative meetings between them. I often meet people for lunch (the equivalent of "for coffee") and put important meetings at 2pm - 3pm (so that they stand out in my schedule, but still don't break my contiguous day.)

Everything important happens at 2/3pm onwards. I often go for a run at 6/7pm (hint: exercise is important) but I usually do a lot of thinking while on the treadmill, so it counts more as "retreat and reassess time" than an interrupt. Peak time is 8/9pm onwards, since the run provides time for reflection and restrategizing. I view the next few hours as a "runway" in that it provides a time for loading things onto my mental stack. If by midnight things aren't flowing, I wind down and get to bed by 1am to prep for the next day - but if things are in flow, I unleash and never stop until I'm exhausted (anywhere between 3am - 8am) and crash. (This is why important meetings are kept for 2pm, so that recovery is still possible without constraining the runway)
I think this article makes some good points, and I found myself nodding a lot.

On the other hand, it (along with some of the HN comments) conflates a couple of unrelated issues: (1) how well software is written, and (2) whether software forces me to do things I don't want to do.

One of the parts I nodded along with, was his story of lunging for the computer when the camera software CD was inserted. But this doesn't have anything to do with whether the source of this software was readable, variable names, etc., nor is it related to the competence of the programmers or whether they are aware of their own failings. The issue is that such software is often written with a view toward taking over the way I do things.

I want to do things my way. That's the reason for my move from Windows to Linux, and it's why I use Firefox instead of IE when I do use Windows. It's why I avoid Flash when feasible, why I hate most children's educational software, and why I would not even glance at the software that came with a camera. Does this have anything to do with the quality of the code involved in these programs? I don't think so.
As usual Atwood manages to destroy a valid perspective (be mindful of your code quality) with unnecessary hyperbole.

I wouldn't hire anyone who said their own code was the worst they'd seen recently. Whatever points they may win for perception and awareness are totally overshadowed by their lazy acceptance of the situation.

"Which areas of your coding could you most improve on?" - now that is a question worth asking,
> agile standups seem to work well even for makers because they're bound tightly to the start of working sessions and last for a short time.

I think there's another thing going on too. Most meetings that developers go to have some specific purpose of importance. They are tactical, so as a developer you need to prepare (mentally and/or more concretely) for them. Standups - being recurring events - don't have this aspect to them. This makes them much less stressful.
Dealing with Client Logo Design Quotes - Ask for a Budget
Amazon Buys Zappos
Counterpoint: While I agree, I have found that when I have a little spacing between classes per week (say one hour between lectures on Mondays) I face less administrative hassles in the long run.

This is because there's nothing productive that can be done in that hour except administrative work. Submitting forms, replying to emails, returning library books are all things that otherwise fall by the wayside to your productivity, but this way I don't get into trouble or waste "good" time doing them either.
Have any of you ever served in the military?

I'm just wondering.
Porsche and Volkswagen's Nazi Roots
The point is there are people out there highly trained and experienced at focusing on the mundane, and if their jobs go away, what will they do?

They should learn something new... Just because they're highly trained doesn't mean they get a free ride for the rest of their lives.
It's fine if you trust your users.

What kind of site did you build where django took too long compared to drupal? Have you come across the Pinax Project?
That's because video game consoles are more popular, and they've become more accepted by the media.

30 years ago, my father and his brothers played Atari. I grew up with parents that both understood video games, at least somewhat. There's nothing objective about the way we view video games, or any other form of media.

For instance: I primarily look for media with some sort of emotional power, which is all-but-impossible to find in video games. I can think of perhaps five or six video games that had any emotional impact on me. I can name far more movies that have had a similar impact. My secondary search is for polish, and there movies also have an edge over modern games. The things I look for aren't what you look for, though - they're subjective. I remember having much more fun on an SNES than I did with, say, the Xbox. Your milage varies.
I'm convinced that young people should be learning descriptive statistics and move on to inferential statistics online like in: http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html it's easy now to learn from online data sets and you can collect more information through social media (vs. using physical paper questionnaires.) I learned these kinds of statistics when I was 12 years old - I wish someone told me what I could do multivariate analyses ...
Already posted here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717627
Parallelizing the Web Browser [pdf]
I think it was disadvantageous that they tried to make such a big fuss out of their technology early on. They could have been a bit more stealthy, see what works, and then scale up; that's probably why luck tends to favor the quiet guys over the loud ones.
> Already iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and Scooba floor cleaner are a part of more than 3 million American households. The next generation robots will be more sophisticated and are expected to provide services such as nursing, security, housework and education.

Riiiiight. Next-generation automobiles are also expected to fly.
Small problem with this logic: twenty-two years ago was 1987. It's not as if we weren't importing cheap crap from China by the truckload in the 1980s.

If you want to make a valid comparison, the "good old days", for the purposes of this question, are probably before the 1960s. I'm not saying that there isn't some confirmation bias going on in the OP, but it's wrong to say that products were bad in 1987, and that therefore products aren't getting worse over a longer window of time.
This is nice validation to have. For a while now, I've been wondering if I'm just a bit precious for asserting that I absolutely need full focus and no interruptions otherwise my productivity dies.

Still, makes me wonder how on earth I'm ever going to successfully grow the business, while I've still got development work to focus on.
This also speaks to why Makers tend to be somewhat noctural: the default for night-time that it be uninterrupted. Not just interruptions by other people, but by our own notions of what we "should be doing", i.e. going to the post office when it's open, doing laundry, following the news, etc.

Similarly, those people who have figured out that showing up to the office at 7am (or earlier) increses productivity are actually carving out Un-interrupted Time. I've found that early mornings are often a good strategy for being more productive if other things in your life conspire to deprive you of Un-interrupted Time.
"If you build artificial intelligence but don’t think about its moral sense or create a conscious sense that feels regret for doing something wrong, then technically it is a psychopath," says Josh Hall, a scientist who wrote the book Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of a Machine.

What!? How does this possibly work? Will the AI gun say "you still didn't fix that null pointer dereference that caused me to go haywire and kill people, but at least this time when I do it I'll feel bad?" This is one of the most ridiculous quotes I've ever seen.
Tony Hsieh's Email to Employees RE: Zappos' Sale to Amazon
Good for them, they are two of my favorite online retailers.
Sounds like a very good partnership for both parties
Given this statement and others on his blog/podcast, I'd be curious to know what experience Jeff has of interviewing people.
I never had a big problem in Windows that I could solve at all. Each time I ran into a snag I had to reach for the manual or call support, it ended in either buying new, compatible hardware or reinstalling the machine.

The "troubleshooting" section in Windows help is every bit as useful as horns on a goldfish.
the negative quantity mistake is pretty funny
My adaptation to this is just to say Bill does not do IM, and leave it at that.
Touched a nerve I guess. Heck, I got 4000+ points, I'll call it like I see it.

You're right, we are conditioned to value the wrong things. The same game with more polygons is the same game.
I think Jeff is exaggerating a bit with his phrasing, but I think there's an important point there: humility is always important, and it's the only way you ever improve. As soon as you start being really satisfied with your own work, you stop trying to improve it, and that's a dangerous point to be at. Most of the best programmers I know personally are all highly self-critical about their work.

I also think it's important for one's job satisfaction and enjoyment of life that you take pride in your work and can be proud of your accomplishments, and I think it's important to be able to juxtapose that level of satisfaction with a constant drive to improve (I actually blogged about that topic a couple of months ago http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/it-can-...)

It's also far too easy to assume that everything written by everyone else is crap simply because it doesn't map to how you would solve the problem, and while some of it certainly is crap, it's important to be charitable in your analysis there. Becoming better means being open to learning from other people's ways of doing things, and being a good teammate means giving your coworkers the benefit of the doubt and assuming that if something doesn't make sense to you or seems ugly, perhaps it's because the problem is more complicated than you thought, or perhaps they had to inherit some ugly legacy code, or perhaps the problem domain just wasn't well understood at the time the code was first written.
Good point. Another option (as Randy mentions in his talk) is to schedule a "fake" class during the dead hour. Just go to the same spot in the library every day and work on the same class. Office hours are useful for this purpose as well.
My Atari ST still works. Never needed a repair. Its Syquest harddrive still works.

The WD harddrive I bought last year crashed... My 3 year old mac needed a repair.

Yes, things run hotter, and faster, and are smaller, and whatever. But they are less reliable.
The windowing system is slow, yet takes more CPU than Windows.

Nothing that takes a lot of CPU is going to be faster than something that takes less CPU for the same amount of work, so the "yet" doesn't make much sense.

Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market).

I have a 10 year old PCI Matrox MGA 2064W Millennium that runs X just fine, all consumer level modern chipsets are more powerful than this ancient piece that I'm still getting use out of. How does the progress bar in full-screen gnome bog down the system? The progress bar only animates during video playback or during dragging, and during that time, the machine is busy seeking, decoding and drawing video, so that's the most likely candidate for system bogginess, not the progress bar in full-screen mode.
Here's the CEO's letter to employees, which has a little more info: http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter
In my experience, many people don't like Gnome because it doesn't look like the desktop they are used to.

If I went back some 40 years and presented Gnome to IBM mainframe users, they would complain the lettering is not green on black.

But I would love to have the 3278 font available on my boxes.

And no, it's not exactly the one on x3270. They got the 6's and 9's wrong
Asimov's 3 Laws were there to provide a constraints for a story to exist i --, they are the equivalent of a dead body found in a locked room.
I work an odd job. It is approximately equal parts system administration, programming, and tech support. Can you guess which part I dread most?

I relish the days I can lock myself in a basement laboratory and hide out with my code. Some days I just give up on getting non-support work done because I'm getting interrupted every hour with a 5-minute fix or to reboot a fax machine. I've toyed with the idea of shifting my schedule to only overlap with the rest of the office half the day. There is no way I can really schedule much active work (as opposed to reactive tech support) in a chunk less than about three hours.

I'll move on when I can, but right now I've got one perk I don't want to trade for anything.
It seems Microsoft is boosting up their astroturfing groups. Watch out for your karma ;-)
This is pure Bullshit!
Robots, or AIs don't have a conciousness (and probably they never will). And as long as we've not created a robot/AI with a real concious mind we need not to worry about 'punishing' robots or giving them ethical rules. It wont work!
I think people who write something like this, or theorize around that topic have time to kill or other issues, since they're solving a non-existant problem.