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I am sorry you are having a rough time.

I think writing a journal, especially a private or anonymous one, is an exercise in introspection (where it is not a short-term venting exercise). While that can be fruitful for certain kinds of problem, the danger is that you fall into a self-reinforcing thought pattern. Looking at it another way, it is rare to be able to psychoanalyse yourself - even therapists have therapists.

I think finding some kind of support network, be it family, friends, counseling or even the anonymous support that the Internet is so good at providing, may be better for you, if not your writing skills.
packaging makes that stuff viable as a collectable

I think the story that "I paid $50 for garbage: ask me about it" makes the stuff viable as a collectible.

Are you familiar with fugu? Its a species of pufferfish, and considered something of a delicacy in Japan. Fugu is a fishy fish, distinguished by other fishy fish by one property: its incredibly lethal nerve toxin.

Fugu sells because of the nerve toxin, not in spite of it. You get to say "Hey, I ate fugu, and it didn't kill me!" (Ironically, fugu is probably the safest meal available in Japan, because everyone pulls out all the stops like "clean your utensils before preparing the food" when failing to do it means your hands get bathed in nerve toxin.)
SICP makes me feel incompetent How do I overcome this?
I have so far attempted to work through the book three times and then quit. Each time I start from the beginning, go through every line and do every problem in the exercises and then eventually stop somewhere down the lane (within less than the first 50 pages).

After a lot of mental effort I decided to make another attempt. However this time I decided to analyze why I stopped the first three times and found that I stopped every time at the exact same page. At this page was a problem which made me realize: "Here is a solution to a problem which I could probably have never ever thought of by myself". I think this somehow depressed me and made me wonder if things were going to get very tough for me to understand or its probably the fear of encountering such problems more and more as I go through the book.

Note that I thoroughly enjoyed working on the exercises until this part of the book. It was like an orgasm of the mind. But somehow when I get to this problem, I feel incompetent. It doesn't help much that I am bit mathematically handicapped.

The problem I am talking about here is the counting change problem in the first chapter.
that's hardcore. do you have a ridiculous excel macro to look up rates by county?
unless things have changed recently, SC's 1.0 beta is anything but stable. It's great for hobby projects, but I would worry if attempting to use it for production. I guess if you're starting a new project now, SC isn't a bad route. Will probably be stable soon.
To clarify, I understood the solution to the problem. But what bothers me more is that I couldn't have thought of it by myself.
Erm, it does depend on which part of the scientific community you are talking about - we're not all a monolithic Borgian block you know. There are a bunch of non-programmers using the Perl Data Language for example (pdl.perl.org).

The real problem in my opinion is that perl has no buzz so is not picking as many new users - we can speculate about the reasons, I personally blame how perl6 has gone for a lot of it though.
and? I don't know about you, but I think I am reading the wrong book if the author is not better than I am at the subject at hand.
All of that being just, fair and useful is predicated on a reasonable definition of patents.

If there was a reasonable definition of patents then suing for infringement would be rare in comparison to companies legally acquiring licenses to patented technology.

Instead its easy to patent something and then wait for someone to independently come up with a similar enough technology and sue them. This would be very difficult with an appropriate definition of patents, because independent invention would be unlikely. Now in the case that another company independently comes up with infringing technology, you can happily wait for them to assume all the business and manufacturing risk and then hold the patent over their heads for unbelievable sums of money.

In this extortion model of pricing for patents the more obvious and less specific a patent is the higher its value. In contrast specific and innovative patents are much less likely to trip other companies up, so they have to be priced according to their value to actually make things before all the manufacturing and other business risks have been factored in.

Actual patents as means of transferring and trading in invention seems to be completely dwarfed by the ability of patents to be used to extort money from successful businesses.
Anyone have an idea how R and Matlab compare?

I've only worked with Matlab and it's great for putting together library functions but horrible for writing any functions yourself. Is R any better?
Is this on HN for the sole reason to make the rest of us feel bad about not taking the time to make animal-shaped foodstuff for our kids?

(PS: I have a couple of the "Laptop lunches" boxes - they are okay but a tad overpriced IMHO).
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Played a fair bit at highschool. That was before this Interweb business came to town so have never played online. Still have a box of cards in a storage container back home.
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Have you tried mind mapping? It's not plain text files, but I think you are asking quite a lot of a flat linear format.
Show me an open source encoder with GPU support. From my research, when you are doing high quality encodings the speed difference is negligible at best.

Also, at web scale encoding time isn't nearly as important as the ability to go parallel which is significantly cheaper and easier to scale using a bunch of EC2 instances.

We process 2-300 videos a month, though during competitions we process 10x that in a month. All of the bandwidth, storage, processing is less than $10K a year with an average encoding FPS of 33fps.

I would love pointers to sources if this isn't the case and I can do this for massify cheaper. Would be appreciated.

EDIT: We also encode 2-3 different versions of the video at varying sizes and bitrates.
"niche applications?" Have you seen Pocket Universe? http://www.craicdesign.com/

The first time you look up at the night sky, see a star, hold your iPhone (3gs for best experience) up in front of that star and see the display show exactly the same view, with labels, you _know_ the compass and accelerometer have a purpose -- nay, a holy calling.
My stock solution to libraries with, let's call it, "substandard polymorphism" -- facades and/or wrappers. This often lets you put all of your conditional logic for dealing with the errant library in just one place. It's better than nothing. Sometimes, it's a lot better.
I expect that Apple isn't forbidden to do it; just forbidden to use the name "Apple" for that purpose. Solutions:

1. Apple finds (or creates) another company/business/brand to do it.

2. Apple negotiates permission from Apple Records (perhaps involving royalties and the latter's experience at the "artist" end of the business).
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Much more bioinformatics work is done in Perl than Python.
I can't speak for other fields, though
I have to disagree. It would make for less buggy software, but I suspect not for software that people want. The best way we know how to make products people want is to get a basic version released and iterate rapidly.
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To be fair, he was just asking if there were any concerns? Doesn't deserve such rabid downvoting imho.
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I think it was originally designed to reduce the server load caused by polling but now it has been dragged out of the attic to join the real-time hype wave. I agree about real people, though.
What are the use cases for setting up reverse proxies for production web apps (of medium to small scale) versus using a CDN like Panther Express/CDNetworks?

(Genuinely curious)
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Who said Ruby was the "English with some bits of punctuation" language? That isn't even the idea behind a DSL.
See the last point in the write-up.
No, Scheme is Scheme, and Arc is Arc. You don't call Ruby a Python, despite that those languages are much closer than Lisp and Scheme.
Roof falls in - oh well, tenant didn't move in yet. Hit undo, problem solved. The design part may well be more difficult, but the build cycle's pretty damn easy by comparison. You can get away with a lot more as a programmer than you can as an architect, I think :-)
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Thanks
Difficult question. I know that Matlab has some very strong Machine Learning libraries which make it extremely convenient to experiment. As much as I like GNU R and FOSS in this case I would say Matlab has the upper hand.

For one it has a huge userbase which posts code examples and solutions to various problems. Another being that Matlab has nice Machine Learning libraies in my opinion.

There are e.g. some interesting video lectures from stanford about this topic by Andrew Ng http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/ && http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599 )

In the first lecture the question comes up and he has the same opinion.

I think eventually GNU R will be better but that will still take some time.
Why is Taleb getting all this mainstream attention?

He's telling people that "common knowledge" in a particularly despised sector of our economy is not only wrong, but downright idiotic.

And he's presenting it in a way such that Joe the Plumber can feel like he groks it, even if he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of really understanding what's been happening here.

Not that Taleb's altogether wrong - Eugene Fama may be very aware of the limitations and caveats implicit in risk measurements, but it wasn't Fama that got caught pants down screwing around for billions with an asset class that he didn't understand, was it?

What academics understand about the market often has very little to do with what real traders and banks will do in it. Taleb has valid criticisms against the real players, who were freaking idiots in a lot of ways, but he's presenting them as if they're criticisms against the establishment as a whole, which is a bit unfair, but makes for a good publicity play.

Smart move, if you ask me. Nobody would know or care who the hell he is if he hadn't made such a fuss over this stuff.
I agree that the pricing is not visible on the website and the reason for that is that we are still in the price discovery mode. You gave a perspective on pricing which is very useful in this regard.

Another reason of not having pricing on the site right now is that we have two possible paths to go forward: pure product selling OR a providing complete solution (product + testing strategy + implementation). The latter one leads to variable pricing which is very client dependent.

Anyway, let me know if you want to try out the solution. I'd be happy to provide you with an account.
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define:medium. You might want a reverse proxy for production web apps if you have an application on a few servers (where it also fills the role of load balancer), if you want to be able to serve stale content if your app servers go down, you want to use awesomeness that is ESI, and you don't want latency between your edge and your app servers for quick flow-through, if you want sticky sessions (ewwwww!), et cetera.
I rarely read anything longer than 5 sentences these days, but I couldn't stop reading until I had finished. Thank you.
You seem to like that word "idiot", arent't you? In two days you used it for Dave Winer and Matt Mullenweg (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810288).
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I think a more fundamental reason is that PubSubHubDub solves the problem "I used to use RSS to read articles, but the 15 minute delay between the article being posted and me being able to skim it in my RSS reader was unacceptable" and that this is a problem real people do not have.
As far as I can tell, the principle of least power[1] applies to descriptive languages (HTML, RDF, etc.) that are meant to store information. A program by comparison is meant to store instructions. I'm unsure about the argument you're making. Can you elaborate a bit?

[1] For those that had to look it up like I had to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_Least_Power
First, I haven't met Nathan personally but from everything I see about him internal to Microsoft (from his time at the company) and his time outside, he is a very, very smart man. And quite rich. I think assigning simple labels like 'good' and 'evil' doesn't quite cut it.

My opinion/guess (with zero inside knowledge) is that Nathan doesn't really care about the patent side of the equation much. He just wants to do interesting ideas and get people in the room to dream up of (and sometimes build) cool stuff. Some of their work around nuclear power is super interesting for example. The patents are just a revenue stream for them to continue doing this.
Big crashes will always occur, but I would not blame the recent crash on the gaussian models. I'd rather say that (almost) everyone underappreciated the risks connected to the real estate prices.

Part of the reason they underestimated those risks is that they paid attention only to the middle of the distribution, where things are approximately normal. I wouldn't say the explicit Gaussian-ness of the models was the reason for the trouble, but it's hard to imagine a Gaussian model providing any sort of reasonable risk estimate for the type of thing that we saw happen. It was so far outside the "business as usual" range that no risk estimate based on what was happening on most days would have been legitimate.

Taleb pushes for a strategy that consists of buying a lot of very safe assets and blending them with bets on "extreme events" (like buying far out-of-the-money put options). Is that a viable long-term strategy? I have my doubts, since there are no evidence suggesting that 'uncertain' strategies have greater returns that more quantified ones.

I don't know about this; it's all a question of price. If far out of the money puts are really underpriced compared to how often they "hit", then he could be right. My immediate impression is that the crappy prices you tend to get due to low liquidity in the extreme tails might make a profitable strategy tough to come by.

One could certainly look at the historical data over the past several decades and see whether such a strategy might have been profitable (which wouldn't necessarily tell you whether it will be profitable in the future, but might shed at least some light on the matter), but I don't have options data going back very far, so I'm not the man for the job...
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Well that's reasonably promising.

I think there's still a race between IPv6 adoption and carrier-grade NAT. If the big ISPs deploy CGN rather than IPv6, that will eliminate the big motivation behind v6 (the IPv4 address runout), while at the same time neutering the Internet into something resembling little more than interactive broadcast media. Given that the major US ISPs--which tend to either be broadcast media conglomerates (threatened by P2P media displacing traditional broadcast) or telecommunications conglomerates (threatened by VOIP displacing more profitable wireline services)--would seem to have a motivation to go the CGN route, I'm holding my breath a bit.

IPv6 seems to be winning, in the sense that I don't think we'll all get stuck behind CGN and IPv4 forever, but I'm not quite ready to call the race just yet.
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Lookup CUDA

For example
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#state=detailsOpe...
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The site stores "permanent searches" per user and displays the results to the user after logging in on a Google Reader-like interface. Can you explain what's wrong with this? Perhaps you're saying we should let you define searches and export them as RSS so you can add them to your existing feeder?
I wonder if its any different from http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer . Hopefully someone posts once theres something there.
yeah, that train has sailed a while ago.
> There are many of us who prefer the command line, though.

I prefer it too. But I never realised how much work setting up the LAMP stack could be. I must admit I was trying to set it up with php4 for a legacy system so that probable made it harder than it needed to be. I recon a default LAMP install would be a good option. But I can understand the motivations for wanting to scare off the cpanel crowd who will most likely demand 'managed server' type support and then badmouth you for not providing it.

Apart from automating provisioning you should have an automatic payment option as well. I'm sure most hosts would have a large number of 'sleeper' customers who can't be bothered to get around to cancelling their account even though they don't really need it. So apart from the time saved with chasing payments, you'd have more customers who use little or no resources. Kind of like I might end up being. Now I've got to go and pay your most recent invoice.
At my work, not a day goes by when someone doesn't curse Bill Gates.
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There are lots of good reasons that go beyond content caching (which is the topic of the article).

Somewhat terse write-up here:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html

The basic idea is that there's fair bit of useful logic that can be handled by a simpler, lighter-weight, more easily securable front-end system than the lumbering tank that is your app server. This includes basic load balancing/failover, partitioning (requests of type foo go to these servers, all the low-latency ajax stuff over there, static content somewhere else), babysitting slow clients, blackholing malformed requests, etc.
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It sounds like you are whining about Wordpress

I fail to see how the original question qualifies as 'whining about Wordpress'.
"... How many of you have kept a private journal or an anonymous blog in the interest of getting through difficult situations? ..."

Sure do, start here ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/7215762118...
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Indeed. EC2 rocks for spikiness.

S3stat needs about 6-8 hours of compute time each day to do its thing. And those 6-8 hours all have to happen between 1am & 2am GMT. We simply wouldn't be able to pull it off without EC2.

But you're right, I still haven't convinced myself to try keeping one of those machines up for a whole month to run as a webserver. We keep a couple boxes in a colo for that sort of thing.
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I don't have an issue with the authors being smarter than I am. I think they are awesome. Like I said, I liked the challenge of the exercises for which the authors didn't give any solution. And when I cracked these exercises it felt really good.

And I have read many other intellectually stimulating books, but those books don't make me feel like what I am feeling right now.
"It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty"

seems empirically not to be true; see all the medical research about the health hazards of relative poverty, eg: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/health-care-for-all/1509

not to mention Veblen.

It would be better and simpler if people only cared about absolute wealth, but to quote some essay I read recently, "of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that."
I'm not going to weigh in on the likelihood of this happening at all.

But if it did, I don't see why it couldn't function like the App Store (but for artists instead of software developers): let anyone publish music, the good stuff floats to the top the same way it works for iPhone apps.
No "what" stock but that you should invest instead of a warning that the economy will break down soon. Most economists (something like 99,9%) failed to do so.
Much better resources:

WhichTestWon - http://whichtestwon.com/
Testing Thursdays - http://testingthursdays.com/
This was a really great talk - hopefully the video of it goes online quickly because I think the delivery was a huge part of what made it great.
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"Here is a solution to a problem which I could probably have never ever thought of by myself". Now you have a clever solution you can use as a tool in your belt of tricks. You might end up applying to a problem of your own on your own volition. That would be a feat on its own.

How much time did you allocate to working at the problem before looking at the solution? What do you want to get out of SICP? A book won't help you become a master on any subject by itself. Many people slave for tens, hundreds, thousands of hours on subjects that interest them occasionally without what you might consider "progress".

It appears that you did give up and peeked at the solution. So logically, you do not know whether you would figure it out on your own or not - you've lost that opportunity. The thing is, everyone experiences setbacks, pitfalls, speedbumps - FAILURES. This is nothing to be ashamed of and if you let it, by learning from it, you can help prevent anxiety and move on.
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There aren't any open source CUDA apps that do transcoding, so far they are all Windows apps. And non-scriptable ones at that, which rules out web scale.
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