skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've recently been through testing out 4 different noSQL stores for my new app: Tokyo, Redis, CouchDB, and MongoDB.

For my needs, here's how I ended up with Mongo.

Tokyo - I really wanted this to be the answer as its more mature and fairly feature packed. What killed it was needing to run a different Tyrant for each table/collection. Maybe we'll see a multi-table-tyrant some day.

Redis - Limited by RAM; not full featured. Redis is probably a very good choice if looking for a better memcached. I would need two systems, my RDB and Redis. I want a one-size fits all for my new app. One killer feature of redis is "db-side" editing of collections and sets. Turns out mongo does some of this as well.

CouchDB - I've read mixed results on performance and scalability. The dev model is a bit awkward for me. There are simplifications on that, but I'm not interested in using some ActiveRecord look-alike as I want the unique features of the DB to be more transparent. Time may fix these issues.

MongoDB - more full featured than the above, sort of a healthy blend of each. I can use mongo as both a cache and a full-on DB, although I do not expect the cache to perform as redis would, I just expect it to be "good enough". The dev model is simple, the monogo-ruby-driver is a good mid-level API.

I'm still in the dev process for the new app. Hopefully, I won't run into a serious hitch with Mongo...time will tell. So far, I'm very pleased.
I believe these are fake. Chrome OS is not in beta -- Chrome for Linux is in alpha, and Google releases betas. Also, the maximized window with all that white space is bad design. My expectation is that Chrome OS will look like a maximized version of Chrome the browser with task management inside of the browser window instead of outside of the browser window like in these screenshots. Though I won't be too upset if these screenshots are real.
I don't think I would really put it as a matter of "desire"—humans are control systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system

The problem is not that we "want" to eat, in some sort of non-scientifically-deducible free-willed manner, but that the reference value for our "hunger" control is set too high, and so we feel hungry when we shouldn't, and don't feel full when we should. Interestingly, this (and other control systems) are all linked to serotonin: depression moves the reference value down, making you eat more to feel full; anti-depressants move it up, causing a symptom of "lack of appetite."

The true diet pill would just be a very selective SSRI, to move your hunger referent to the correct position without affecting your other controls. People don't the idea that they should be taking pills to solve their weight-gain because they have a "brain imbalance", though, so they will just keep trying, and failing, to use conscious willpower to overcome their controls, no matter what gets invented in the meantime.
Or perhaps people who were building up to a suicide attempt for a while, then made one, discovered "that wasn't so hard" and became more willing to tackle things they previously dismissed as hard.

Or maybe they internalised the idea "may as well try this difficult thing, I've tried suicide before so I can do it again" as a kind of backup/escape option that feels more real and available.
I think that would fall under "examination of the day"
Would any other out of town HNers want to split a hotel room in SF? I figure I might make a trip of it and stay a few days.
The best programmer joke? One of my co-workers.
$ finger linux@kernel.org
[kernel.org]
Trying 149.20.20.133...
finger: connect: Connection refused
Trying 204.152.191.37...
The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.6.30.4
The latest prepatch for the stable Linux kernel tree is: 2.6.31-rc6
The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.37.5
The latest 2.2 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.2.26
The latest prepatch for the 2.2 Linux kernel tree is: 2.2.27-rc2
The latest -mm patch to the stable Linux kernels is: 2.6.28-rc2-mm1
did you upvote me because you thought I was being ironic?
Are there really that many people spending 8 hours a day in a coffee shop that they feel that it's wise to restrict access to everyone?
Open Student Finance for the Guitar Hero Generation
No, based on my experience with WordPress.
Yes. Effect size is the difference in means in proportion to the pooled standard deviation to the two treatments, and is a great measure of how large the difference is. All groups are different given large enough n. Whether that difference means anything is dependent on the effect size.

When the effect size is large you know that whatever effect you are seeing is much less likely to be chance. It's also less susceptible to large differences in variation, which the tests you are using to test significance use as an assumption (variation is equal).
The Ritalin Experiment, Day 4
I wish I had the karma to give more than 1 upvote to wizardofoz and infinite downvotes to the topic.
2009 Startup School, October 24th at Berkeley
I have been learning Clojure casually for a few weeks now. I have been wanting to learn Lisp for years, based on pg's essays. Clojure finally gave me an approachable, useful way to do that.

Pluses so far:
+ Concise code; no ceremony.
+ Best concurrency paradigm I've seen. This is huge to me.
+ Effortless integration w/ Java libraries.

Cons so far:
- Not the most readable language. Reminds me more of Perl than Python. Newbies like me take a while to figure out all the sigils.
- Making Clojure code run fast is non-trivial. Often a speedup-focused rewrite produces code that is much more obscure than the original.

My opinion may change over time, but those are my thoughts currently. I am really enjoying Clojure.
However, most pretty printers only perform lexical analysis.
Sounds practical. I'm down if accepted.
Rush definitely trolls on purpose--he was even offensive analyzing football. He has just mastered the art of trolling in a way that makes people want to listen.
If your new web app isn't too complex to get bootstrapped, you will learn better if you choose a light framework: ruby - Merb or Sinatra, python - webpy, etc...

One of the reasons you see so much disappointment with ruby is people start with rails and that doesn't really help you become a good ruby programmer. It may actually teach you bad habits and keep you from knowing how the language and http requests, and db requests really work (none of which is that complicated).

I use ruby over python. Mainly because I picked it up first and don't have a good reason to switch. I use merb as my framework, which is a fine choice, but if I had to start again, I might go with Sinatra.

If you do go with Ruby, buy this book: The Ruby Programming Language http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David-Flanag...

I have seen no text that comes close to this new book in teaching Ruby.
I took it once b/c I have mild ADD... it doesn't work if you are sleep deprived...

See how it works if you get lots of exercise, reduce processed carbs and alcohol, and get plenty of sleep...

It helped me focus when I tried it, but then I realized I like being a bit more scattered.
What is "Powerful Goodness"?
Stroke of genius
Short Shelf Life: Do we need link-shortening services like Tr.im and Bit.ly?
I look at it this way--I can usually get new OEM parts at less than what a shop would charge me for reman or knock-off parts, and any tools that I need end up costing less than the labor at shop rates. I end up spending less than I would at a shop, have the tools for next time, and I know the work was done right, on my schedule.

Oh, many auto parts stores will rent or loan (for free!) tools that you may only need once. Around here, you can even borrow the OBDII code scanners for free.
To Live, Twitter Must Die
I really wanted to use javascript (client and server) for my new webapp. But alas, the various server-side frameworks aren't quite ready for me yet. I think a pure client js + app server js + js db would be fantastic. Even though the various javascript server libs/frameworks are maturing very fast, I cannot afford to toss perfectly good high level solutions that exist with something like merb: production server process management, integrated release scripts, session management and authentication, etc... If you go with js server side at the moment, you get to roll your own for all this.

I want this to be the answer, but for right now, I can't afford to cut my teeth on it.
I like how it uses Google to test an opinion: I do this for things like spell checking and phrase verification.
As someone just rolling out an internal XML service, it's mainly because JSON hasn't caught on with the corporate developers. Try to bring it up in a conference call without having half of the parties misunderstand it as "A guy named Jason will do the data feed part of the project for us".
The question is too open ended if you take that approach and does not allow for concrete answers. The OP does allude to the fact that he wants to build a webapp and does mention ruby and python, both decent choices. A lot of the answers here suggest that either is a fine choice, which perhaps is all the OP needs to hear.
Bohrbugs: OpenOffice.org won’t print on Tuesdays
The left side I think purposely doesn't have defined borders to refer to a general area. So I would actually assume that the contemplation would intermix with examination of day and sleep. It's also between 9, and 10 o' clock.

Plus, he can't possibly fall asleep at 10 o' clock sharp.
Read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. I have never come across a more thoroughly researched book. Taubes, a journalist for Science magazine, was really slumming it to be writing about nutrition.
Almost immediately after this schedule in his Autobiography is a lament that he could not keep to it.
I have a question for anyone who knows: What does Netflix pay to the studios for renting out the DVDs? It can't be the same as we pay in the shop, or they'd make pennies per 100 rentals. Is it a kind of royalty system or - as in video shops - the 'tape' itself is very expensive?

Also, I have an old original (paid) Carolco bond (!) used to pay for Terminator 2, as a kind of 'good luck' charm.
Not disagreeing with the rest of what you said, but I just wanted to point out that the article does state that the city moved the cameras to intersections with yellows shorter than 4.0 seconds.
yeah, ambiguous phrasing..
I think this illustrates it best:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby%2C+.net&ctab=0&g...
Hey, uh, thanks for the answer... I didn't see the little curly bracket the first time I looked.
The top ten rules of venture capital and dating
The brutal truth about America’s healthcare
To anyone still following my amazing misadventures,

I woke up this morning to find house-mate #4 laying down the law. Turns out no one opens the door in the morning, it's all the one guy and now I know at least two of us have had it. For now the problem has gone, but at the cost of fuelling his paranoia that we are all out to get him as a group. One more thing and I'm getting him kicked out.

Thanks for all the advice guys, it's cool to see how the crowd thinks.
Compared to BeOS, Web apps that are cached are in no way lightweight and responsive. Maybe we're defining lightweight and responsive differently. I am thinking about the real-time media capabilities of BeOS which let you drag around videos on Pentium IIs. I'm thinking about native C++ applications and a completely multithreaded system. I'm thinking about Gobe Productive and native e-mail clients. For me, lightweight runs on a Pentium Pro with 64MB RAM.

Gmail is not lightweight. Compared to Yahoo Mail or Live Mail, its design is airy, and it's well-optimized. Let's be honest: Chrome OS is only here to tap the netbooks. It's not going to revive the massive amount of old hardware that BeOS could use. YouTube isn't lightweight. Chrome's process-per-tab system isn't lightweight.
Market is not perfect, it works well under certain assumptions which are not always accurate after government interventions.
Then this [1] suggests that Ruby is used by hobbyists while Python is used in real projects ;)

[1] http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+.net&ct...
I certainly agree J2EE is a travesty. Framework design by committee is wrong wrong wrong.

I do not agree that Java is all that great. I classify it as "ok". I don't disparage "ok" but there were languages before Java that were better than "ok". Java isn't and never was a revolution, it picks from various things that came before and in some places make incremental improvement.

During the early days of J2EE I built an app framework that ended up being about 300,000 lines of Java, we had to replace most of the core JDK classes as well due to their poor design. What we ended up with was enterprise quality but far more accessible than the J2EE equivalents. Prior to this app framework, I built essentially the same thing in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk version was much fewer lines of code, easier to maintain, easier for the end-user. And so far as Java performs great, yes it does. One key reason is the hotspot and jit stuff which were directly taken from the Smalltalk world.

btw, when I'm playing up Smalltalk here, I know its hard for newcomers to see the value as Squeak is "hard to take" compared to what we had in the early 90s.

[EDIT] one thing I do like about Java is it forces the programmer to think more formally about an object's interface. This is a good skill to learn and can be applied to other languages. The loose way some play with duck typing is a little much for my tastes.
"attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn't too successful"

What seems rational by economic standards may not be rational by other standards.
Absolutely. Before I started listening to him on TWiT, I used to just think he was incredibly dumb. He's not - and he knows EXACTRLY what he's doing. He's a MASTER at creating controversy and posting "maybe true, but definitely inflammatory" stuff that will generate more clicks - and he's openly admitted doing this before on TWiT (and apparently this YouTube video too).
As someone with a Ph.D. in physics, I found the whole article wrongheaded and partly wrong. Sure, Einstein's original paper (I did read it in its original German) did not have E=mc^2 in the short form, but don't worry, since it is still true. If you compress a spring, it weighs more. If you add a photon to a box, it weighs more. The net momentum of both does not matter here.
If the screen which you want to A/B test is not the first screen, you can make background calls to your server and based on result decide which screen to show. Write to user settings when you want to permanently disable it.

Note:

i) Reasoning behind not having it as first screen as it really slows the application launch.

ii) You should make sure that if webservice call takes too long, just pick one default which is shown to user instead of waiting for result

iii) if you really want to do it for first screen, load and save the result in user settings for next launch while the application is running
There is a problem with the research and their conclusions: "7.5% fat to a diet that was 55% fat (and 29% protein and 16% carbohydrate)"; that is too much PROTEIN for rats. I raised rats for a while in the 1990s, and giving rats too much protein causes visible skin problems; I would not at all be surprised to learn that it could cause the sort of minor mental deficits noted in the research.
If you posit some nonmaterial spiritual influence, then you have the awkward problem of the magic-stuff <-> physical brain interface (and no, it's not in the pineal gland).
What's really interesting is that no one here seems to be interested in asking whether Vivek Kundra is indeed unqualified for the position. That's what's really important. I mean the CIO of the United States should be a total tech badass, right? After reading Dvorak's post on Kundra, listening to the No Agenda podcast where they played clip after clip of Kundra speaking like a moron and after reading Om Malik's response and Kundra's Wikipedia entry, it seems like Dvorak may actually have a point.
I don't understand what they mean by "the next best one" after having discarded X number of candidates. "Best" relative to what?
I was going to do http://www.airbnb.com/
A venue has been listed, it's Wheeler Auditorium with 705 capacity. :( I think a 2000 person theater would have just felt too big, but I guess it would have been worth it anyways from our perspectives.

http://facilities.calperfs.berkeley.edu/wheeler/techspecs.ph...
They don't care if you stay as long as you want because you have to PAY for the freaking wifi. Duh.

Most coffee shops give you free wifi so yes it is kind of abusive to buy a $1.50 coffee and stay for hours. However, if you have to pay for the wifi, I don't see the problem with staying indefinitely.
Arborsculpture relates to Richard Reames's method of shaping trees At wikipedia a group of people from the field of shaping trees came to the consensus that a neutral name was needed for the artform, and Tree shaping was decided upon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping.
I used to have Volkswagon rabbits and even replace the disk brakes and ball joints. for the ball joints, I had to buy a "pickle fork" and drill through the rivets. It was intimidating at first, but I figured it out and even did an "eyeball" alignment using sticks as guides. My mechanic skill reached a peak when I had an accident and had to rebuild the front end and the rack-in-pinion steering from an almost matching parts car. But I was a student and had more time than money. Now, like plumbing, I'll pay someone else to do it. I'd rather be doing something else.

But I also got lucky. My mechanic is a second generation mechanic who went back to the family trade after getting a masters in mathematics.
Why do we make things so hard?

GET mailto:username@example.com HTTP/1.1

301 Moved
Location: http://example.com/users/username

(forgive the HTTP mistakes)
Undop: use display dimming to penalise time wasting
I am no physicist and would appreciate if somebody can explain why the speed of light is used everywhere in physics, specially in that E=mc2 formula.

What is the meaning of using light when calculating energy or mass?

And what if light is not the fastest thing in the universe, would we need to rewrite all formulas?

Excuse my ignorance, but this topic really picks my interest.
An "entertainment" company with a friend. Currently shooting a short film and produced/performed one theater play.
My friends must just be very laid back people then, I guess :)
Hotel [Edward] Munch
I think this is a neat idea. It would be irritating thats for sure. However, if I don't have enough self control to not read HN for example, I probably don't have enough self control to not turn off the script.
The "horror stories" I mention mostly involve surprise fees and/or odd contract interpretations.
In the partially ordered set of partners (ordered by <=), given some ordering {p_k}, choose p_N from {p_(X+1), ..., p_100} s.t. p_i <= p_N for all i in {1, ..., X}.
Techzing Theme Tune (Generation Zero) in Full
Also, I worry about the health-related question part - aggregating data sets of medical data is a serious business; it's not just a case of pooling it all together. If there is really a specific question of interest, either gather data from a valid meta-analysis (like a Cochrane review) or stick to a single sufficiently-large dataset so that you can understand the biases in the data collection.
The exact # I don't know, but the rental copy of a movie is usually about 4x the retail cost of a consumer DVD - so around $80 - split between distributor and studio in a ratio that varies considerably, but returns about 50% for a major studio and maybe 20% for an indie flick.

Interesting though this is (I work in this field), I'm not sure what the relevance of this (slightly inaccurate) 8 year old article is to HN. Although it'd be great if there was a HN/YC for film...
In this case I will honestly say I certainly wouldn't trust myself beyond changing the oil or tire or something. I would imagine I could learn to do enough car repair to get by and it is interesting but up to this point I have spent most of my time trying to get better at other things and haven't put any time or effort into learning to repair my car.
Another Reason Scientists Don’t Always Make Great Storytellers
Dvorak is a troll, but by discussing him we are just validating him and he will continue doing what he is doing. Trolls generally do their trolling to bring attention to themselves.
It's too monolithic for my taste.

It should be taking a leaf from Django's own design book and providing some high-level CMS building-blocks. Otherwise you just end up reinventing Wordpress or Joomla. Look at Pinax* or FeinCMS for a much smarter sense of how to get Django goodness without reinventing the CMS wheel everytime.

* I know Pinax isn't a CMS - but it's tackling the hard problem of how to allow several apps by different authors to work together and integrate into the same site.
Did you read the post?

There's a lot more to it - particularly when you look at the roadmap for where Wordpress and Buddypress are headed.
Actually, you've nailed it.
As someone who has come extremely close to ending my own life on several occasions (and have since begun treatment), I am inclined to believe that the mentioned "extra resources and care" are of significant impact.

Mental illness was and (albeit to a lesser degree) is a severe drain on my energy and productivity; I believe that for many this may account for the reduced income levels relative to "comparable peers".

Psychiatric care coming after an attempt may close this gap in productivity, allowing for increased income.

Of course, I speak only of my own experience and cannot of others'.

It may be enlightening to compare changes in income based on the presumed basis for the attempt or ideation (i.e. mental illness, economic circumstances, or familial / social factors).

I believe it to be especially important to study those suffering from mental illness separately, as illness can beget thought processes severely lacking in logic and rationality; an economic model assumes a level of rationality in the decision-making process that may not necessarily be present.
I believe the assumptions are that there is a reliable fitness function giving an overall score, but only one candidate can be evaluated at a time, and once you reject a candidate, you can never go back.

So "the next best one" means the first to reach a new high value after the initial run of X. (And note that the first X candidates have no chance -- no matter how high they score -- because you don't even start with any hint of the overall distribution.)
Posted here a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752852
Well, Jeff Fox has been documenting it for a while.

Can you think of any other people who have done the same thing? Chuck surely isn't the only person ever to have designed his own CPU, but I don't know of any others who have done both the hardware and the software.

I admire what he's done but I'm still not sure whether the work is actually important in some objective sense. It certainly appeals to the Robinson Crusoe in me, but I'm not sure if it's actually useful, just because the level of compatibility is so low.
Perhaps you're not the sort of customer some businesses want? Not everyone necessarily wants to feel like they're on a university campus at exam time or in the middle of a business park. A bunch of people with laptops is unwelcoming if you enter a coffee shop primed for chatter and flirting (for example).
Sometimes contemplation allows you to see if you are going into the right direction. Way too often people work like crazy 16hr days for a week just to find out they did something not needed. Planning is good. Relaxation is good too. Both these things will pay off greatly in much improved efficiency.
I assume their purpose is it makes them lots and lots of money. Whether or not they believe some of what they say is probably not what gets them out of bed each day.