skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same here - after trying hard to read each long, pointless paragraph I was wondering: what is she saying? I gave up after the first third of the article.
Lately a lot of PDFs --- even if not from scribd --- get the [scribd] postfix? Is it because the original authors posted a scribd link and it got changed?

I'd just ban scribd links. I think HN readers can be expected to google the title of whatever they found on scribd and post the original PDF or (hopefully!) webpage.
Caltech's going through a bad period: 3 suicides in 3 months
Earned income goes up. Capital gains as far as I know is max 15%. Other tax laws for the really, really rich might change this though.
I'm just saying in your case it seems as if people are busy enough as is. Switching VCS will disrupt workflow as they learn. My experience is that branches, while a pain in non-git systems are still used in the places you really want them to be used (release management), and most of the other features are mostly in the "nice to have" category. At that point it seems a better idea to simply use git-svn so you have the power of git without having to force a change in infrastructure.

(Incidentally, you can turn off subversion's auto-updating. I try to keep all my computers running the exact same version of subversion for largely the same reasons you mention.)
There is a field for "Composer". You can add the column to any view though "View -> View Options (Cmd-J on a Mac)". The Grid view can also be sorted by composer.

Movements are often indicated by the "Grouping" column, or kept together my joining the tracks from a CD on import by selecting the tracks then "Advanced -> Join CD Tracks".

Sub-optimal, I know, but there isn't much more an application can do given the way CD metadata works.
iTunes on windows, perfect? When I click on a link to something on iTunes, it opens up another browser window and then opens up iTunes and leaves that orphaned browser window sitting around. Seriously, is that the best they can do?
Genius and Pandora are quite different. They have some overlap in functionality, but at it's core Genius is about the music you already know and have. It's more about solving the paradox of choice that occurs when you have a large music library than it is a recommendation and discovery engine.
Agreed. I would also argue that the audience will significantly effect the 'width' of the distribution.

For example, lets imagine we're building a model that will be used to predict the hosting costs for a website for tweens. I think it would be fair to assume that most tweens will be in bed by 9PM, and can only start accessing your site after school from 4PM. Note im in the UK, school finishes around 4ish...

Given that limited visiting window, we might assume that the normal distribution would have a mean around 6:30PM and a standard deviation of around 2, to 2.5 hours.

In this way 68% of our traffic would occur in the 4PM while 9PM - or within one standard deviation from the mean.
As thwarted points out, the entourage of XThings that follow XML around only exist to prop up the inherently awkward XML itself, whereas JSON, being more or less a straightforward serialization format for the data structures we all know and love, has no need for these things. To refine your analogy, I would say XML is to JSON as an M1 Abrams is to a sensible foreign policy of non-interference.
I'm not so sure this logic makes sense -- in fact I think it might be entirely backwards.

I've always been under the impression that though you pay a penalty for freezing things the first time you put them in, thereafter a full refrigerator (and freezer) is actually much more efficient because it's more difficult to keep air cold than it is to keep any variety of items that are more dense. If we're talking about leakage, too, air obviously exits the freezer much more often than its contents do.
I've been on the early access for a month, and it is indeed a very interesting technology, although one I think will initially at least see more use in the enterprise than with consumers. However, it's very much a walled garden at the moment, so I'm interested in seeing how it'll integrate with other tools we use on a daily basis.
Right, so iphone and android devs develop directly on the phones, otherwise there wouldn't be any apps...
1. Code a demo.

2. Show prospective consumers of the app. The more the better.

3. Use their feedback along with your judgment to scrap or enhance the project for the next cycle of feedback. Your judgment is just as important as their feedback, maybe even more so. Sometimes you just gotta go with your gut or else nothing would ever change. OTOH, if they brutalize your dream, maybe they're right and you just gotta kill it and move on.

#1 is the most important. By taking immediate action by building something, you'll probably learn a lot and even modify the idea. So get started!
You have that. There is a tag field for composer. You can add a column for composers by right clicking (option click, I assume) the column headers, then drag and drop into the correct order.

I expect classical music is probably always tagged badly, which is why the composer ends up in the artist field. Also, am I supposed to enter for Radiohead: Johnny Greenwood, Thom York, et al. or, just Radiohead? I tunes tagging ability is weak in some places. Also it doesn't help when you have a non-ipod and want to remove some songs and replace with others.
HN adds a Scribd link to all PDFs automatically.

Scribd is a YC company after all.
I work in Java on the weekdays and Rails on the weekends.

I do not find that Ruby is a weakness to me. Indeed, after several years as a professional Big Freaking Enterprise App Java developer, I would break out in a cold sweat if told to code up an A/B testing framework in it by my boss. I'd quote him two months.

It took me a week in Rails, working after I got home (generally past midnight).

Don't get me wrong, I like Java. I cut my teeth on programming Java. It put a roof over my head and food on the table. I support almost two thousand customers of a Java Swing app. But yikes, for the typical greenfield web application with flexibility to choose platforms, there are so many better choices.
I like this, but I have this bad habit of taking what's worked for successful people and having it not work for me. I've tried every imaginable scheduling technique until I realized that they just don't make much difference for me.

What does? The project itself. If I fall in love with the task at hand, I want to work on it so badly, I don't need a schedule. If I'm not in love with the task at hand, schedules don't work.

As a child, when I got a new baseball glove, I slept with it the first few nights. Now I do the same thing with hard copies of clean compiles. That's love.
I just cite papers I can find online. If you publish in some fancy magazine which is too expensive for my school (or my friends' organizations) to have a library access to - too bad for you I wont cite you.
Let me get this straight, you're asking how an air conditioner uses less power than a regular fan?

While I can't cite any wattage/amps/etc. figures, an air conditioner runs several things besides a fan motor, most notably its compressor. The more advanced ones also have other electrically driven parts, like a thermostat.

As for real world stats, when I lived in the Philippines, I can say for a fact that running a fan vs an airconditioner makes at least a 60-70% difference in my electric bills.
No, the user@pass thing is a browser stuff. It's not sent as part of the request line.
500,000 lines may be extremely concise for what it does :/
Any YC founders who spent the summer in Boston know that this information is very valuable. Bookmark this one in case YC moves back out there and you have to borrow an air conditioner from Jessica.
What I'm actually thinking of doing is using git for my own projects internally and as other devs help me out on those projects I'll induct them properly into how things work on that project, one small aspect of which will be git, and it won't be the only one, so they'll already be in a learning frame of reference from there. That said, keeping it as close as possible to the way it was is a good goal from a "I get this, it's easy to work with" perspective so I'd still really like to know if tortoisegit is as practical for real work as it appears to be from messing with it briefly in a VM.

Someone care to save me from a couple of days in windows again? :)

Wrt git svn, last time I tried that it started version controlling the .svn directorise o_O. Which was fine for git svn but the tortoise svn users were completely screwed on a checkout.

Wrt subversion versioning woes, yeah, it's kinda a solution, but at the same time I'm not the system administrator and really don't want to be, and trying to enforce "don't update" would suck even if I were.
Where, specifically, RFC 2616 does the spec say you must specify a http URI?

5.1.2 just specifies that it's a RequestURI and does not further define it.

3.2 refers you to RFC 2396, the URI spec, which includes mailto.

It's a valid URI and you are allowed to ask for it.
1. The biggest problem I say is its entirely closed nature. I don't mean simply closed source -- I've used tools such as Mediamonkey for Windows and have been relatively satisfied -- but entirely closed to plugins or user developed support. Specifically I refer to the inability to use/add anything to use FLAC, lyrics search, grabbing high quality album art ( a la allcdcovers.com ), social integration (mixtape, last.fm), 3rd party hardware syncing, and library visualization. Each of these could be solvable if only Apple allowed some sort of plugin integration

2. See suggestions above

3. Not using mac.
Ah, the [scribd] part is a different link and it's added on purpose.

Serenity now!
Feynman explains the feeling of confusion
"... How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night ..."

hotest it got here in Melb last year was 46C and multiple days above 43C with extreme fire weather ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157614397725714... Couple of measures you take:

- open windows

- multiple 4Ltr freezer blocks work well

- stay at the pool till late

- sleep on concrete or tiles

- use fans

- wet towels & buckets of water for feet are pretty good

That and eat lots of icy poles (don't laugh) and drink water.
1. HN is one of the few places where I constantly bump into people who are simultaneously more knowledgeable, more intelligent, and more accomplished than I am. Humbling, challenging, and rewarding.

2. I love that this is a community where smart people help other smart people navigate life, from deciding what to major in, to picking a database server, to dealing with an unruly roommate.
There are few things worse than reading an article consisting almost entirely of obscure references, proper names, and (presumably) complex ideas, linked together by an extremely subjective thought process, and expressed in such an idiosyncratic style that only the author herself is likely able to make sense of it, while to anyone else it resembles the output of a victim of Wernicke's aphasia.
Air has a very low heat capacity. It doesn't take much energy to cool a cubic metre of air quickly (see air con, for example). On the other hand, cooling a cubic metre of water and other watery solids takes a load more energy.

In terms of keeping it cool, that probably depends on how good your freezer's insulation is. If it's really good, it probably doesn't take too much energy to keep things cool (air or otherwise). If it's not so good, you'll incur a constant "your freezer sucks" tax.

In the case being discussed, we're talking about freezing stuff every day, and letting it thaw in/near your bed during the night. So the cost would definitely be there.
I sent you a mail back regarding this, you'll need a google account if you want access (that's how analytics works), if you don't want to set one up I can send you screenshots, but the google account would be the easier way.
My grandad runs a local auto shop, and I would have been hard-pressed to not learn how to repair my car. I did all kinds of work on my '83 Ford Ranger, and a good amount of work on my '90 Daytona, but I've gotta say that I'm a bit afraid to mess with my '07 Impreza. With all the computer control systems and other sophisticated components, I just don't feel like I should be messing with it. On top of my fear, I also lack the necessary (and expensive) equipment that's needed to e.g. clear the check engine light.

I do nostalgically miss tearing my old Ranger apart, and tuning the carburetor, and generally understanding exactly how it worked. But then again, my Impreza just doesn't need to be tuned -- it just works.
May I attempt to interpret/summarize your prose?

The first two paragraphs state that a person's mind is able to feverishly focus on a matter. Paragraphs 3 and 4 say that curiosity and 'obsession' elicits originality. The next paragraph says that people can create unique order from chaos (figure stuff out). Paragraph 6 says that obsession will lead to self discovery ('alignment with the universe') and happiness ('bliss'). Paragraph 7 asks if this obsession is malignant (a 'curse').

The next two paragraphs seem to be the heart of the essay. It says to not 'yield' (settle) to sub-prime responses to your 'obsession' or curiosity. Also, the 'novel' response to your obsession will be a guiding light for people with similar 'obsessions' as yourself.

Was I close to your intended meaning?
Car Lease
Leasing is a far cheap option than outright purchase, see thousands of offers in one location
Two things:

1. Perhaps I missed his explanation, but for two of those, it sounded like cause of death had not been determined yet.

2. Can someone run through the math here for me to indicate that this is statistically significant? According to Suicide.org, suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death for college students, and thousands kill themselves every year, so doesn't it seem like sooner or later, several of them would happen within a few months of each other on the same campus?

I don't mean to sound insensitive at all. I'm sure the families and friends of the deceased are devastated, but I just wonder if this is really a pattern or just an unfortunate coincidence.
When America First Met the Microchip
When I lived in Melbourne and the house was over 30C, I would take a soaking wet towel and use it as a blanket on my bare skin.

It sounds bad and the first minute is a bit creepy (until it warms up to your body temperature) but I would fall into a deep sleep in 10 minutes. It worked for me.
People will respond negatively to "if you can't afford it, you can't eat". But the government doesn't run farms and groceries, not even by "supplementing the private market". They give you food stamps. Why can't the government give you healthcare vouchers? Why do they have to set up their own insurance plan?
That's what he said. There's a difference between shortening a time interval of a light with a camera and moving the camera to a light which already has an interval that's too short. Both are wrong and breaking a promise, but the latter can happen by just being dumb, instead of bad intentions.
Not to detract from what you're saying, but just a note: The author has a PhD in physics as well.
On the other hand I think it's really cool hearing from those who haven't yet succeeded as well! Just because it didn't work out doesn't mean that the steps they took were bad. Plus, learning from success is good, but learning from failure (especially when it's not your own) is great as well.

We all know how crazy an entrepreneur with a world changing idea can get (I've been there). Succeed or fail, it's always an interesting story.
Single biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned, is the inability to script the folder hierarchy. If I want All albums folders to be prepended by the release year I should be able to do that.

Edit: Also, sometimes I have correctly named mp3's, but I haven't tagged them. Itunes gracefully renames my files to 'unknown' removing any trace to the correct name. And, if the files were in a folder prepended with the album year iTunes will kindly create a new folder to hold the files to leave the album art in the original folder. (okay, that last one is Windows only)
Reminds me of the 5.25" disk sleeve gallery: http://www.cyberden.com/dsa/

Edit: I pasted the link in without realizing that the maintainer of the site had recently defaced all of his images with a visible watermark. It's a bit of a disappointment now.
This is no longer no longer true.

I just went through that whole sign up process, and ended up at att.com, staring at a screen demanding my starbucks card # and pin.

It says you can get your 2 hours a day if you have a starbucks card that you've topped up in the last 30 days. Just like the grandparent whinged about.

So maybe it got good for a month or two and reverted, but regardless, it's still painful today.
Yup, it is discouraging, but it's one of those things you have to do, otherwise you're just fooling yourself.

You have to ask yourself, why am I being discouraged by this competitor? Usually it's because you're afraid that whatever you had in mind has already been done. And that they're already doing it better than you'll ever can. In that case, you should take your discouragement as a real signal.

Take care of the tougher aspects asap, you'll have to go through them anyway.
I can get a ton of stuff done at a Starbucks. I'm usually more productive there than at home, actually.

The key is that even though there's lots of noise and people talking, you're virtually guaranteed that nobody will be talking to you. That means you're completely free of distractions, and, as an added bonus, enveloped in a cloud of vaguely enthusiastic white noise.

There's this energy around you that somehow inspires you to actually do some interesting work rather than slack off and read the internet. You want people walking past to see an IDE and some cryptic-looking code on the screen, rather than pictures of cats with funny captions. The whole experience is a bit of a feedback loop.

When I lived in the States, I would routinely head off to a Starbucks to work away the morning, leaving my comfy home office & wifi behind to do so.
> I'm not purposely trolling here, it is my opinion that C is a poor language to teach students.

If you don't teach students C, you're denying them a deep understanding of how all of the higher levels are implemented.

If all you know is Python but I know Python, C, UNIX system calls, and even assembly, I'm going to run circles around you, even if we're both working 100% in Python.

For example, suppose your Python program says "import foo", but it's not finding module "foo". How can you debug what is happening? I'm going to take two seconds and run strace on the program to see what files the process is trying to open. You're going to... read some docs? Post a question on a message board?

Or suppose that your Python program tries to do an open("foobar", "w") but the open fails with:

IOError: [Errno 26] Text file busy: 'test'

I'm going to look at the manpage for open(2) to figure out what this error means. You're going to... go ask somebody who understands system software?

People who don't understand system software are totally helpless compared to people who do. You may see C fading into history. What I see is every single relevant technological innovation -- 2nd-gen JavaScript interpreters, Flash, the JVM, .NET, browsers, OS's -- ALL using C or C++.

I would challenge you to look around and find ANY stack of software that doesn't have C or C++ in it. It's just a matter of how deep you have to go to find it. Are you saying that we shouldn't equip students to deal with layers of software that deep? Are you saying we shouldn't equip them to understand things like trace compiling, which are the state of the art in language design and implementation?

Sure, if all you want to do is web development, you can probably go a long ways without understanding system software. But you'll always be dependent on the people who understand the stack up and down.
Think of the winter that will be here very soon, and the time when you'll have to turn on the heater constantly. A few days of sun (especially in a city like Seattle where sighting the sun is a rare occurrence), is not that hard to deal with. Open out the windows, switch on the fan if you have one, take a cold shower and you'll fall asleep.
Sorry, but don't you have a concept of `kindergarden' in your USA?
In Russia, this problem was solved maybe in 1960s: A thick network of kindergardens will take care of children during workdays, while both parents work full-time.

You can also hang your children on their babushka, if she lives somewhere near.
I always found it strange that Starbucks charged for Wifi. Glad to see they at least give you a little for free these days (even if it requires some serious hoop jumping).

It amazes me that there are actually still coffee shops in the world that don't offer free wifi. It's so cheap to set up, and so obviously good for business that it just doesn't make any sense not to do it.
"Alan Turing took his life by a poisoned apple"

- isn't there some story about the fact that because Apple has a bite out of it's logo, that it's in fact a tribute to Turing - or is that just a myth?
I notice the author didn't cite Dubin's paper in his post. >:(
How To Fly Without ID
I can't help with the statistics, but one thing to note is that Caltech is a small school. There are likely to be only around two thousand students total, including both undergraduate and graduate students.
reduce it to an absurdity:

If you imagine a giant freezer filled with ice it will eventually melt. This takes energy, a larger freezer will take more, an empty one will take less than a full one.

Counteracting the heat transferred through the freezer walls from the outside in will require an amount of energy proportional to the mass in the freezer and the leakage from the outside.

It takes energy to maintain that imbalance, the bigger the imbalance the faster the heat will transfer.

If the stuff in the freezer is light (air) then it will take less energy to keep it cold than if the stuff in the freezer is heavy (ice), because there simply is less leakage from air (a thermal insulator) to the walls than there is from ice (a pretty good thermal conductor).

Thermal conductivity is not very tightly coupled to mass but it usually is a good indicator, in the case of ice vs air it works pretty good.

So, it takes more energy to keep a freezer full of ice at a low temperature than a freezer full of air...

For an encore, which is heavier: A cubic meter of dry air vs a cubic meter of humid air ?
Totally agree, some people on the internet spent way too much time arguing about topics they know nothing about!
I'm currently working on a startup, and while our market isn't crowded by any means, I think having a few strong competitors puts us in a better position - they've made the mistakes so we don't have to.

Each competitor I see certainly nudges the bar higher, but it's only a nudge. Ultimately, we're all building web applications. They're just code, markup and javascript. The great thing about the web is that the entry requirements are very low and your competitors, no matter how strong, can never raise those requirements.

FWIW, my startup is testled.com. Our competitors are people like userfly.com, clicktale.com etc.
We don't really have a process, but after years pitching and developing movie scripts, here's kinda how we think:

1. Can you explain the idea in one, declarative sentence?

2. Write out the whole project, and the revenue model, on a single sheet of A4

3. Don't create solutions for problems that don't exist

4. Get independent, verifiable market research. Anything else is just your opinion

5. Keep computer stuff out of the conversation when trying to raise funds

6. Never, ever, ever give up