skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the most part, we were serving a generic page, except for prior actions done by the user. The only major differences between your page and my page, for example, is that article 5 might not show vote links at all, if I had previously voted on them.

For the most part, we accomplished this through cookies. If the cookie exists, read in a hashmap of activities you've recently performed, and update the page DOM based on those. If the cookie didn't exist, then go ahead and do a full query from the db, repop the cache and build the cookie.

That said, we noticed that in a lot of cases, that wasn't ideal, and we started rendering partial templates -- so instead of loading a whole page from cache, we would load page parts, basically one part for each article. This worked well, as each template was basically a pre-rendered static file, and we only had two basic states to work with -- whether the user had voted on this before or not.

Our new strategy then was to query just the indexed table for a user's recent votes, separately query an index for which articles to display, and load the templates for the to-be-displayed articles based upon the user's vote state.

That allowed the page to render a lot faster, but kept the box under more load. Though we suspect it would have scaled well enough (had the project not eventually fizzled out), it wasn't ideal server-side, though delivered a vastly superior end-user experience.

YMMV.
Awesome link. Thanks.

Also, their bookmarklet thing can be set as a shortcut for Site Launcher (hotkey-based launcher for bookmarks), so all you have to do is push Ctrl+Space and then your hotkey (mine is R) and you've got actually readable content. I love it.
Does anyone know how hard it'd be to send up a proper digital SLR and/or a proper digital hd camcorder on a similar contraption?

Assume you already have the fancy camera or camcorder.
Why was this even posted to HN ? It's got nothing informative about it, but the personal preference for a theme of somebody ... You don't discuss taste :)
No. Greatness is not achieved by waiting for the right moment for inspiration to strike - it's achieved by years of dedication, commitment and hard work.
This has been used for some time in sales training. The idea is that people want something because of emotion, but make their buying decision based on logic. They call it ERBN (Emotional Reasons to Buy Now) and LRBN (Logical Reasons to Buy Now).

Without ERBN, there is not enough reason to proceed. But you must also provide the buyer with enough data to flip his LRBN.

This site has a better explanation and a graphic:

http://www.deankennedy.com/blog/copy-tip-26-persuasive-sales...
The decreasing marginal utility of money meant that it was a good exit for the founders, regardless of whether it would have been optimal for the company in the long run.
better: use some ec2 instances (stock, or custom) and run squid front-proxy. It's just as easy to configure and you get cache sweeping and so on for free.
Recession, layoffs fuel many to start small businesses
Microsoft interns still feel the love
2012: The Year of the Alan Turing
Ask HN: review my tiny app - code to html converter
The Esperanto fans tried building a new one, but it has yet to gain wide acceptance.

There are good reasons why Esperanto never gained wide acceptance.

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

Esperanto doesn't deliver what it promises, which is an easy-to-learn language with broad international reach. In fact, Esperanto is about as hard to learn as any language, and its reach is confined mostly to certain parts of Europe where people speak other more widely spoken languages as interlanguages anyway.
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10 Amazing Tools for Sharing Visual Inspiration through Screenshots
Evolving the Python standard library
Telnic, .tel domains & the small business namespace
島根 September — RubyWorld
His description makes it seem like a tool for ill, but I've found it to be very useful for positive effects as well.

I work in emergency services (Fire/EMS), and eye contact is an amazingly effective way to calm someone down. Make eye contact, slow your own breathing down, speak calmly and firmly. I've seen very few panicky people who were "immune" to this.

Like the article describes, making solid eye contact seems to break someone out of the moment and get them to focus on you. What you do after that is what determines how "hostile" you're being.
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Meetings can be at 2 A.M ...you never know....What you think is not always right..sometimes.....
Wells has good credentials as a linguist on this subject. But perhaps if he wrote from America, the land of English as a koine language, he would be more optimistic about a mediating spelling that reflects plurality (and perhaps majority) practice in pronouncing English as a worldwide language. I don't see any world example that shows that a spelling must be "ideal" in the way he defines it to be practical for a broad speech community. Spanish, since its most recent spelling reform, continues to have dialectal variation (as one would expect given the wide territorial extent of Spanish-speaking countries, and their history of both conquest of and immigration by non-Spanish-speaking peoples). But people who speak Spanish seem to cope reasonably well with current standard spelling, and so also for speakers of German.
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Imagine that: free TV, over the airwaves... ;)
Amazingly, only just more than half of inhabitants of China are conversant in the standard national language, according to a recent official survey.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
"So I went to twenty blackjack tables and offered twenty dealers twenty bucks for their best advice."

That would have made a fine N-List.

Also just noticed that Esquire has an interesting Javascript running if you copy text. If the text is long enough, it will add a link to the article to the copied text.
That's one reason why I disagree with the author of the article when he writes "Everyone pronounces sight, site and cite identically, so it is absurd (except for advocates of etymological spelling) that we have to learn to spell them all differently."

What he overlooks is that having three different spellings helps a reader to distinguish between the three different meanings. The sentence "Cite the sighting of the site." is much easier to understand than "Site the siting of the site."

If you only use pinyin to learn Chinese, you end up (or at least I did) getting confused by words like 在 zài (located) and 再 zài (again).
Seth's Blog: The hierarchy of success
Or... Just get Keycue. It pops up the keyboard shortcuts that are available in any application, or in OS X.

http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/
For me, I need both creativity and grunt work to make progress. And they depend on each other.

Sometimes that creative leap is only possible because I've done all the little stuff to put me at the point where I can finally "see the light".

OTOH, a creative breakthrough usually generates a whole bunch of tasks to be done in order to implement that creative idea.

I have never been able to "force creativity". It comes much more easily at certain times and in certain situations. So what do I do when the creative juices aren't flowing as much as I'd like? The grunt work, of course. There's always plenty of that.

Procrastination as a strategy? Never. As an excuse? Sure.
One Thing: Extract till you Drop.
Lessons Learned from a Failed Startup
Submitting this anonymously to avoid hard feelings from my former colleagues who are likely reading this site.
No, procrastination and slow pacing can be a sign that your creative batteries are recharging; it is a cycle. You abruptly plunge into intensive focus on a problem, rest, and repeat. On a long project you just take many, many cycles to finish, and the key to success is simply to be able to fight through the melancholy that occurs at the bottom of each wave, getting enough done to get back on the upward trajectory again.

If your motivations are intact this won't be a problem, though you may have feelings of self-loathing since this sloth is in conflict with the Puritan-style work ethic.
The passionate developer: I do like my profession, I don't like my job
Alpha-geeks usually don't (want to) make a difference between their job and their hobby.
In reality I have almost never met a passionate developer, that is really happy with his job.
Why is that?
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Motorola C975 is an all-rounder and comes with a host of great features. You will definitely fall in love with this phone at first sight/ Let's start with physical characteristick of the phone,its dimension 53x 114 X 24m and weight is 139g, which is slightly higher in weight but you can comfortably hold in hand for long poeriod of time.
Nice domain name.

How about feature of automatically detect programming language?
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Isn't this a bit of a false dichotomy? There's a middle ground between being hostile and sociable. People playing a game generally aren't hostile but they do want to win. One might want to use eye contact to achieve some end result without wishing the other person ill - which a claim of hostility would connote.
Notational Velocity goes Open Source
No one ever succeeded because of execution tactics
learned from a Dummies book.

You mean, Tribes?
What are the Odds?  Debunking the 9lb 9oz 9/9/09 9:09 Baby
Author calculates the odds of this apparent phenomenon and concludes that someone must be cheating in the game of life.
Ask YC: Review my idea - Online book discussion
I'm reading Taleb's "The Black Swan" right now and, while it makes some amazing points, there are important sentences in the book that leapt out at me as being grossly oversimplified or non-rigorous (don't know if that's a word but it makes my point). I'd like to discuss/ask someone about them but nobody I know is reading the book currently.

Here's my idea, (which actually would NOT work for copyrighted works such as "Swan" but could be implemented as an addon to the Gutenberg project for public domain books) - create a discussion site in a 2 column layout, where the book text is on the left and user-added notes are on the right. Notes are editable by anyone, Wikipedia-style. I particularly think this would be useful for older works as by Shakespeare to decode some of the old terminology.

The notes would be the equivalent of author-added asterisks or footnotes, and could encompass explanatory text, interesting historical references, links to other sections of the book, or could link to a "discussion" thread for the book section.

In a physics textbook, alternate examples could be given. In a poem, hidden or dual meanings of a word could be explained. You get my drift.

I feel the Gutenberg project is filled with enough important works to stimulate interest in discussion, and this would perhaps make reading the classics a little easier. (Have you ever tried to read Ulysses?) I know there are dead-tree explanatory texts of each of these works but there's no chance for a dialogue - you can't ask the reviewer for clarification or raise points of your own.

Thoughts?
I often drink water from a refillable bottle, when I've had enough I don't throw the rest away but instead replace the cap and then drink the water later.

You must be from the USA?

Water costs plenty in production and produces waste due to energy requirements and chemical processing. Whilst water is cycled through their is a substantial lag involved meaning that water reserves can be damagingly depleted.

Throwing consumables away that are still directly usable is unnecessary waste - put the rest of the water on your pot plants or pour it in the kettle to use later.

One other thing, do you saran-wrap (aka cling-film) a glass of water sitting on the counter in the kitchen? Why then do that when it sits in the fridge? If you find you need a cover then use a reusable container with a cover.

Local caching of water still makes plenty of sense.
Ask HN: How to generate random terrain
When I was a kid in the 1980s, I read a library book on the topic of writing military strategy sim games, and it had an entire chapter on producing random terrain. It started with the usual fractal techniques for producing contours, but then it went on to use weighted random walks to produce roads and rivers, lakes, bridges, and cities.

I've tried recreating the algorithms from what little I remember of them, but they never produce anything that looks very good. Online I've found plenty of references to ways of generating the contours, but never realistic-looking roads, rails, and waterways...

Does anybody know an online reference to that sort of thing?

Thanks!
I am a data point in the other direction myself, but while I have no statistics I strongly suspect we are in the minority, and people's behaviors tend to support that.

Instead of doing things that would help reduce cars hitting pedestrians and traffic accidents in general(more sidewalks, longer yellow lights, more crosswalks, more traffic enforcement, more required training which includes focusing on sharing the road with non-cars....) many communities spend more time on things to prevent kidnappings which are already incredibly rare (the article goes into many examples.)

And mattmcknight has an excellent point.
Pygments can do this, it will be easy to integrate. Thanks for the suggestion!
Try at home: Opening some envelopes (or similar) fast produces a blue light.
I would have they or MS would buy Mint, maybe even Yahoo.
Man do I love 'The War of Art'. Written by the author of 'The Legend of Bagger Vance' and I find myself going back to it again and again and recommending it every chance I get.
From the TechCrunch50 DemoPit: Meaningo, Tucoola and more
5 Things Small Business Owners Should Do Today Online
Firefox addons: WOT warns you about risky websites
Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich
What's the plan for making money?
Nothing is wrong!

As you said there is probably more overlap with django than with twisted, tornado is a full fledged framework that happens to a have (thanks god) a new async web server, and I really like the self contained nature of tornado (and the no twisted dependency), if you do want twisted there are orbited/cometd already!

All this situation is getting pretty silly IMHO, opensource is about freedom to choice, they evaluated twisted and decided it was not the right path, everyone should accept this and get along. Before twisted there was async, before django there was zope, before python there was another language, before git there was svn, before svn there was cvs and so on... that's how opensource works, competition is the path to better things and I LOVE THIS!
Cattle produce a lot more than meat - e.g. cows are used for meat, leather, horn, bonemeal, whilst living they produce fertiliser and milk. Cattle can survive in areas where crop production would be too intensive to be a viable source of food (rocky hills, marsh, semi-dessert).

There's a list of chemical by-products here, http://www.telusplanet.net/public/jross/beefprod.htm . You can get beef-derived insulin and gelatin used to all come from beef-cattle (boiling up the bones I think though it's also in intestine).
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I didn't read the documentation yet. However, if a project is to be judged by the attractiveness of it's MindMap-style graphics, CloudCrowd should get an A++.
The letter thorn (þ), when hand-written, looks a lot like the letter Y [1]. So it remains, somewhat, in stuff like "Ye Olde Shoppe." Wikipedia claims that eth and thorn died out in common use (in English, anyway) between 1300 and 1500.

Notes:

1 - It gets drawn in one motion, down to the center from the upper left, then looping up to the upper right, back down to the center and down from there. So it looks like a sloppy Y.
> [...] discrete electrons [...]

May I add that quantum mechanics blurs the distinction further?
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Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones, described how for a while, whenever she sat down to write she would just have this immense feeling of inner peace flow through her, as if she were close to enlightenment, and she thought "Well, I will just sit here and meditate, because after all, this is the state of mind that writing is supposed to bring me to." She finally described her feelings to her Zen master, who said, "Oh, that's just laziness. Get to work."
Ahh, you make a great point, that if an instance goes down you lose those keys. Cassandra doesn't necessarily solve this, however, unless you have enough failover that it is unthinkable that you could have cassandra lose data. If you can rebuild the cache in cassandra you can rebuild it in the identical way using my scheme, but my scheme only requires N days of data to be run through.

Step 2 is fine, memcached allows setting of timeouts on keys. If you always set a timeout of (dig_time + five_days) - now() you are set. Be careful, times > 30 days imply a unix timestamp not a timeout.

Mysql kindof sucks. The clustering is easy to set up at least.

Cassandra and other big on disk hash tables are pretty cool. I think once they have datastore-like indexing capabilities they will be totally usable. My qualm with using them is that there are 80 of them right now, and they are all pretty immature. The ones that are mature, like bsddb, and complicated to use.

My point was that cassandra is just a big memcached.
Comments say "J is just APL done in ASCII".

Which is odd really, since many other new languages e.g. java, and c#. have source in Unicode. Yes, your class or method names can contain/be funky Unicode characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_embolism it's an accute problem and highly treatable. He had a collapsed lung and went to the doctor 4 days before he died. It's a common killer because it masks as other things, but you can do a fairly cheep pretest. Mortality from untreated PE is said to be 26%.

[edit] Anticoagulation is the more common treatment because it has better long term odds. But, that assumes fairly early detection.
It's very convenient to think that we could realize the perfect solution, if only we could do things our way...

Exactly!

Why do you think so many of us want to do start-ups? For the money? The long hours? The isolation? The family and social conflicts? Hardly.

Many of us are so sick and tired of participating in squandered corporate opportunities that we are frustrated into doing it our own way. We are right. And eventually, we have to do it our way.

Nothing selfish about it. Precisely the opposite. Who wants to go through life wondering what they could have given?
Dewey (the guy we get the numbering system used in many libraries) was looking to simplify English spelling. From the movement he was part of, we get spellings like tho for though and thru for through.

George Bernard Shaw used to mock English spelling with the word GHOTI. This, he pronounced fish as it took the gh from enough (or tough), the o from women, and the ti from nation.

As for changing spelling and grammar, that is a very difficult task, as we tend to get pedantic jerks like Samuel Johnson who were so enamored of Latin, that they cobbled up rules like "splitting infinitives is forbidden" because the infinitive form of latin (you may be more familiar with Spanish) verbs is a single word that cannot be split. And some people still get bent by the opening sequence of Star Trek ...to boldly go... omg! a split infinitive!
I use gist.github.com for this. Advantages:

* Always editable in a clean text-area.
* Version controlled.
* Language detection and syntax highlighting.
I think have become so burnt out that I am now lazy and am not "passionate" anymore. I think it's because I hear my employers telling me that they want me to be "passionate" and, like any jerk, I do exactly the opposite. They say to me: "We want someone who is passionate enough to spend the weekend working on something cool [that they can then give to us]."

They assume that my passion for code or building things (or whatever it may be) should translate directly into work for them. This is especially true of startups. I'm starting to think that I have had more freedom to do what I want in a boring corporate cube farm. I don't want to work for people that want to own my 20 self-improvement hours anymore.

So a startup should be about doing it your way. Working for a startup just means being another cog, doing it someone else's way, except that you are stuck working insane hours for less money.
To be fair, Facebook did allow Techcrunch to fax photos. Their article was accurate, if not complete.
Bullsh*t.
It's worth the read, if only for the reminder that languages are programming tools. It's not enough just to have the right functions, a clear syntax. I love me some snap-on wrenches --- they are the best in the world --- but I need other tools, too! I'd never touch lisp if I didn't have SLIME, or python without the standard library.
Wow, that's really interesting, I never realised that's where "Ye" came from.

I suppose a similar thing happened with yogh (ȝ) - instead of being replaced with something less ambiguous it became z in some cases, but is still pronounced the original way. I think it only survives in some Scottish names in that form though.
The quote is from Conan the Barbarian: it is a funny quote, a funny post, and probably not meant to be taken as a metaphor for business.