skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a vote of confidence and a thumbs up from another self-taught programmer. Don't forget that we are very desirable in our industry, having demonstrated a fantastic ability to assimilate core skills as self-starters (instead of needing these skills spoon-fed). Good luck!
RethinkDB CEO here. Don't worry. During early stages of ReQL design I suggested string representation for commands (that start with the dollar sign) and the engineering team kicked me out of the room because that would have opened RethinkDB up to injection attacks. If I suggest something like write durability off by default (or something of the sort) I'll have a full mutiny on my hands.

We're systems people. You won't get another Mongo.
The American psychologist Roy Baumeister has a very good book on evil: http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Inside-Human-Violence-Cruelty/dp/...

My review of it can be found here: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1605

Short version: Baumesiter focuses on data, not imaginary scenarios, which he correctly identifies as profoundly misleading (which should be no surprise to anyone paying attention to the past 300 years of scientific history, which has basically been a monotonous repetition of "Your imagination is a terrible tool for knowing reality"). He defines and rejects the imaginary "myth of pure evil" and investigates empirically what causes evil and how it works in the real--not the imaginary--world.

The causes he identifies are fragile egotism, material gain, utopian idealism, and sadism (the last is the least, accounting for perhaps 5% of evil acts.) He backs his claims with data, not imagination, and anyone arguing against him must bring far more than "it just makes sense to me" as a counter.

I can't recommend this book enough. Is it the last word on the subject? Of course not: it is science, and therefore open-ended. But it is so much better than almost anything else you will read on evil that complaining about its shortcomings looks silly. It is certainly vastly better than the purely imaginary accounts of evil found in the Bible or the Quran or "A Treatise on Human Nature", to the extent that they are incidently but convincingly shown to be completely irrelevant as practical guides to human behaviour.
I suspect the trouble with the idea is that selling power to the grid and selling RV parkings becomes more difficult and costly as you get further from areas where real estate is desirable. There may be no point where the cost of land+panels and benefit from electricity+parking sales work out to be a reasonable investment.
Can students have too much tech? Probably not. TV didn't ruin kids, and neither will the Internet. But this article is completely correct that more technology is not a panacea. Putting more technology into classrooms does not, by itself, improve learning outcomes.

Science and engineering, at the university level, are still largely taught the same way they have been for 100 years. This has not hampered the ability of engineers to dream up and create amazing and innovative products, nor the ability of mathematicians and scientists to push the boundaries of their respective fields. If (when) an engineering student takes a course on differential equations and doesn't grasp the material well enough to apply it to their future work, that's much more likely to be because:

a) They didn't understand how these concepts would be applied to practical engineering work and thus failed to apply themselves; or
b) They found lectures difficult to follow and didn't have any resources to fall back on (e.g. professor office hours; teaching assistants)

not c) There wasn't enough technology in the classroom

Technology is needed for vocational training - whatever technology would be used to do the job needs to be present in the classroom. But in primary/secondary school and university, you need to teach fundamental, abstract skills and a chalkboard is perfectly adequate for that.
This sounds really awesome, but does anyone have an explanation as to why they are doing it? Building something like Google Earth Pro must take many millions of dollars, so why would a company release it for free?
like a great many projects on github. Popular/mainstream projects on github have thousands of forks.
On Ubuntu if I wanted to install Haskell, I would type:

sudo apt-get install ghc
The OP says they are engaged - depending on the situation this may mean the increased risk of a startup is not a great choice.
I notice the link "grab a free key" leads to a URL ending with free_trial.html, and that page is a form that asks for plenty of information. The lack of any justification for why something that used to be $399 is now free also feels a bit odd to me... like it's somehow implying that giving Google your name, company, phone number, and other information is, to them, worth more than $399?
I kind of the think the subject line thing is a little off.

If I say something to a client they may want to document it (as would I) and generic subject lines after a large correspondence kill it.

I've personally fond of piping.

New Site | Contact updates

I've been told by the receiver that it makes a difference.
Registration is failing for me at the moment.
Hmm, haven't you answered your own question? What are you doing with your one and only life? Of course, don't be reckless, but I definitely wouldn't want to look back and regret playing it safe.
Yes, he is demonstrating poor "trigger discipline".
Well there's putnam for ya, letting the obvious visual difference between southern and northern italians sail right over his head.
Whether its sadism or not is independent of the experience of the bug, even if that question is meaningful. It depends on whether the person committing the act believes the bug is suffering, and whether they enjoy it on that basis or some other.

And since the question is open as to what the bug's experience is, there may also be a tendency for individuals to interpret their behaviours as being evidence of suffering or not depending on how sadistic they are. Non-sadists may tend to interpret the bug's behaviour in ways that suggest there isn't any experience of suffering. Sadists will do the opposite.

It's difficult to see what if any interesting issues the question of the bug's internal experience could bear on. It's our perception or imagination of that experience that would seem to be far more important in how the act should be classified for a given individual.
Registration failed for me with a message suggesting such remedies as trying a different email address. Punched in a gmail address and it worked. Perhaps coincidentally.
People feel less bad when a large corporation drops all support for a 'free' product than they do for a $400 one?
Yep.

> Error! Your sign up can not be completed due to We're sorry. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later..
Perhaps they had few enough customers that the effort of maintaining the "Pro" version wasn't worth it?

Perhaps they're starting to see a handful of people relying on other data sources, so they want to give people an incentive to stick with Google?
I live in Cambodia. I pay $250 a month for a villa, electricity is around $20 a month and water is free. Food costs me around $5 a day -- which is a lot. You could live off $2 a day if you want.

For internet I use a sattelite connection, which gives me 4mbit full duplex for $25 a month.

Life is great, but after 10 months spending time here I feel like I'm still recovering from the rat race back home. I'm spending my full time on hacking away on Haskell projects, just learning for the sake of learning, and I feel that slowly I am starting to miss home again, so I'll probably return somewhere at the end of the year.
Find a friend to pair program with you.
You are 100% correct, but it begs an addition:

Industrial-scale rural solar power would beat this every time in the same metrics. Land isn't a scarce element of solar power - and transmission is cheap.
Google Earth cost on the order of 10s of millions of dollars to write, with a couple of the key companies, keyhole and Where2, being acquired for approx. $40mm. [1] . Google Earth Pro is a small, but very useful addition to the base Google Earth - I know a lot of network designers who get by just fine with Google Earth, and have never availed themselves of Google Earth Pro.

The real cost, of course, is maintaining and serving all that data. I expect that Google, in offering Google Earth Pro for free, ensures that no other competition can slide into this space, and, I also expect the incremental revenue associated with the Google Earth Pro licenses probably wasn't worth the cost of not owning that market 100%.

This is going to make life for a lot of the other GIS vendors even more miserable than it already is - I can see MapInfo being annoyed by this decision. Just spitballing, but perhaps Google is looking at acquiring them (or a competitor?)

[1] http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-acquire-Keyhole-(Go...
> There are so many great minds in this area so would love to hear techniques to connect to potential founders, VCs, engineers, PMs,business people.

> What can I do to attract people, to get myself invited to parties and have someone talk to me about their ideas, meet people from Goog,Twtr,Fb,Reddit,HN more and more.

A couple of suggestions:

1. Don't focus so much on meeting specific types of people or people who work at specific companies. When you have a clear agenda motivated by personal gain, it can be a huge turn-off. Instead, make a habit of talking to lots of people, and remember: to be interesting, be interested.

2. Parties are overrated. It can be hard to make quality connections, especially if you're introverted. Instead, try meetups/events that put you in the room with folks with whom you share an interest. It's a lot easier to break the ice in these environments.
Xiami Note Mi Beat Iphone 6
How to host a static site with GitHub Pages
I registered, but got the following when I tried to download:

http://dl.google.com/earth/client/advanced/current/GoogleEar...

Access to this site is currently restricted
MongoDB has been pretty decent (the defaults early on were probably not the best choices)...

The biggest difference in RethinkDB's approach has been data sanity first, niceties a close second (nice devops and dev interfaces)... It's a very well thought out database, and as long as people are moving a little farther away from SQL thinking and interfaces it makes more sense.

I'm not sure where automatic failover stands wrt RethinkDB, but barring that, I would probably reach for RethinkDB, MongoDB or ElasticSearch for most small-medium db tasks, depending on what the application's needs are. By medium I mean less than 10-15 server cluster. Anything bigger, Cassandra would probably be my first choice.
> Like, why do we still use plain text in flat files for source code

Information density. Images and graphs are exceptions to the general rule that text can contain a lot more information on one page than graphics can.
Or a great time since you can decrease risk with another income?
How did you arrange it? And is someone cooking/cleaning/shopping for you, or do you do that yourself?
A Day in the Life: Coyote's Wilderness
I think the version based on the Note 4 is 2560x1440 so that's already quite a big leap up. Give it two years and we might have usable text editing maybe?
Volunteer. Get involved in the community. What San Francisco needs is not just people who want to be part of a tech clique. Your network will expand and naturally there will be people from some of these companies.
You can get a very basic real-time push in PostgreSQL with per-row triggers and NOTIFY/LISTEN (pg_notify/pg_listen).

The hard part is building out a change feed that lets you synchronize on a subset of a table in a way that is performant, and to make this work with joins (i.e. when you're using the database as more than just a document store).
Be careful with Strategic Partners/Investors
Ask HN: I just got rejected from my dream college, what now
Hi HN, I'm a high school student in India ( US citizen ) and I just got rejected from the college that I had pinned a lot of my hopes and dreams on, Olin in Needham, MA. Any advice as to how to deal with this and further gloomy college prospects?
Years ago before I started at my current job some people had Google Earth (free) on their PCs. But then someone read an updated Terms of Use and determined that we actually needed to be using the paid version of Google Earth so many people had their copies removed from their PCs. Then around the time I started someone read an updated Terms of Use and it was determined that there was no problem using the regular version of Google Earth. So it became part of the standard build. Then about a year ago someone read another updated Terms of Use and determined that we were out of compliance and so we removed all copies of Google Earth from all computers. And then we purchased licenses for Google Earth Pro for only those users who really relied on it. For a yearly per-user fee. And now apparently we can install it for everyone once again. For free.

I wonder if Google realized that a lot of companies and government organizations were confused about licensing or ignorantly non-compliant or just gave up and tried some other program. I know in my department we already installed alternative software for most people. Although nothing is as nice or easy for exploring or creating KML files as Google Earth in my experience.
Very good article on some of the more plastic or marketed aspects of tech, over what really building good systems and products is about.
The U.S. economy is killing off the middle class
source: Brent Staples https://twitter.com/BrentNYT/status/559796286569062400
thx @blfr
Falling into weird pits is a pretty damn important part of hackerdom if you ask me.
"try!" is close to something one might call "cruft". It tests a function for an error value, and if it gets one, it returns from the containing function. "try!()" is written like a function call, but it doesn't work like one - it can execute a return statement. That's outside the normal semantics of the language. This is the only macro in the standard macros with such semantics. Fortunately. This is a capability which needs to be used with extreme restraint. Writing a macro "try_except_finally!(maincode, exceptioncode, cleanupcode)" would probably be a bad idea.

There was at one time a fad for extending C with macros like that. Fortunately for program readability, it didn't last.
In your scenario, you need "just" two machines - and really only one running most of the time. You have varnish+appservers running one one vm now. What you need is one more vm, running the same stack. Depending on how you handle sessions this could be as easy as:

0: reduce ttl of dns to ~60s
1: bring up vm2==vm1
2: upgrade vm2
2.1: test vm2
2.2: shutdown vm2, take DO snapshot
2.3: instanciate vm/droplet of vm2
3: point/change dns from vm1 to vm2
4: wait for traffic to die on vm1
5: shutdown vm1
6: possibly increase ttl in dns again

Next round, same procedure. This is not ready for HA -- easiest way there is running 2 vms like now, but with haproxy in front (so the vm has ha-varnish-3appservers), along with heart-beat and a shared ip. I don't thing DO supports that -- and it is probably not worth the hassle if you can live with dns changeover-time==downtime (say, minutes modulus wrongly configured dns caches).

With a couple of dedicated ips, you can usually get away with vm2 taking vm1s ip (and vice-versa) -- but again that depends on your session set-up and/or if dropping sessions are ok. With sessions in some kind of replicated cache/db (eg: redis, mysql) -- you could probably set vm2 to slave over/replicate sessions, then do the dns [ed: or ip] switch[over].
Exactly. The "oooooh" moment isn't when we find out about the early release. It's when we realize that the people the camera is showing you during the, ah, main event aren't the ones watching the most disgusting and degrading thing happening at that moment—that pleasure's been reserved for us.

Then there's the framing and lighting on that last shot, which made me sit up straight and go, "oh, crap, I need to start paying closer attention to the film-nerd details in this show!"
Agreed, except that we shouldn't ignore network effects. Drivers go for one smartphone-ride-sharing-app over another because it has more riders, and riders likewise: because it has more drivers. That can be very hard to shake.
Show HN: Reading wikipedia.org in a new way
they are not patenting the ui/ux - they are showing examples of what their tech (the patent) can do.
I think the hype around high-end keyboard is really justified.

Most typing implements these days are among those despicable types:

1) touchscreen virtual keyboards

2) race-to-the-bottom cheap mass-produced rubber dome cap

3) gaming keyboards, which are less race-to-the-bottom-ish but sin by abuse of bells, whistles and gongs

4) laptop keyboards optimized for looks

Some attention to the proper form of the best computer input peripheral ever invented is definitely welcome.
>On top of that, I'm the only one expected to work these ridiculous hours

If you're anything like me, that's just a self-imposed expectation. Otherwise, you should tell your partner that you're going to work fewer hours. Maybe 6 hour days.

Whatever you need to stay healthy. I think you hold a lot of leverage that you need to exercise.

I was recently in the exact same position with my partner (I'm also the only programmer) and it was all resolved by being open and honest. Talk it out.

Also, take a break for an entire week. Try your best to not think about the project. Your life doesn't depend on it :)
Embark. Mass confusion. Eaten by gators.

There's nothing anybody could have done... Poor dwarves.
Are you doing anything clever to figure out e.g. which subset of changefeeds subscribed to a table might be interested in a given update?

Let's say I have a table containing data for many users, while each subscription only needs data for a single user. Instead of scanning through all the changefeeds, you could put subscriptions in a hashmap and figure out which ones to update in O(1) time rather than O(N) time in number ob subscriptions, per update.

Obviously this is much harder in the general case, but do you do anything along these lines?
From the description of your situation, there's no single-step answer.

Phase 1 has to be to recover some balance & perspective: take a week off, and if/when you resume work, cap your working hours to a more traditional schedule to allow variety and recharge time in your days/weeks.

Phase 2 is to use the balance/perspective/distance to evaluate whether the partnership/team is right, the development goals are reasonable, and the schedule expectations realistic. Abandonment of a project that hasn't matched original hopes is always an option.

If you choose re-dedication to the same project, be sure you know what will be different. You likely need a technical collaborator, for both mutual-review and task-sharing, far more than any amount of 'encouragement' from someone whose skills aren't applicable or even yet needed.
Pick your second-most-dream college and go there. Or if you really hate all your options, go work for a year and reapply, possibly to different colleges (you might be surprised how much your preferences can change in a year...let them). In the grand scheme of things, the college you go to matters little.

FWIW, I was also rejected from Olin (I applied to be in the very first class of Olin Partners, back in 2000), it was also my first choice, but I learned that if your top choice is an engineering school don't say that you want liberal arts. ;-) I ended up going to Amherst, had a decent-but-not-great time there, and then had a very successful career as a software engineer, working at 2 startups, founding one, ending up at Google for 5+ years, and now founding my second. If I had to do it all over again, I might not have done liberal arts (actually, I regret not applying to big schools like Stanford, CMU, or MIT), but it turns out you can recover from most mistakes you make as a teenager. Good thing, too, because you make a lot of them.
Registration failing
"The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor."

http://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2010/09/fate-of-empires-p...
Linux support is pretty ambiguous. The download link says "Download Google Earth Pro for PC or Mac," the minimum specifications link gives specifications for Linux, the actual download gives you a binary called GoogleEarthLinux.bin, but when installed gives you an outdated (3 years) and non-pro copy of google earth.
Discussed earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8973020.
Partner, I know exactly how you feel (except in my case, my partner is my mom, lol. And I run masterrace ember-on-rails instead of plebian angular on node), and I completely agree, sometimes it really is too much. We see the other people in our industry, folks like jashkenas, wycats, our benevolent overlord Linus Torvalds, and the host of other celebrities and we marvel at their productivity; we hear stories of how ninja-hackers build their entire business working 24 hours straight over a hackathon and come out with an amazing business like Cloudflare; we look towards folks like Zuckerberg, Ohanian, Poole, etc. and seethe with envy at how they can build amazing products that not only scale to massive size but also actually do it all part-time while going to school or whatnot.

And then we look at ourselves, at our own handiwork, at the small handful of shoddy projects we have under our belt (most of which probably are ignored because of their incompleteness), and feel frustration.

"Why am I not as good as they are?"

"I should be better than this!"

"I need this done by X or else I'm going to lose this opportunity forever"

"Why am I not making money yet?"

If this describes you in anyway, then congrats, you're a workaholic passionate about your craft. Me too, actually. But unless you enjoy irreparably wrecking your health, and dying of colon cancer at 40, you need to temper that fire in your heart. Here is what I did to help me get out of my own emotional hellhole some time ago:

1. I admitted to myself I am not a "code-ninja", "programming rockstar", "chief-architect", or even "senior-level programmer". Despite the fact there are plenty of people (some younger than me) who can make software happen overnight, I am not one of those people; whatever I do will take time and often I will make mistakes.

2. I admitted this to my partner (aka my mom) and accepted her disappointment in me, but asked her to nevertheless bear with me as I slowly get better. I also admitted this to my investor, who didn't mind too much because he was well-diversified against my (no doubt) imminent failure.

3. I accepted the fact I am not Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or any other likely-to-be-invested-in-by-union-a16z-yc candidate going at a break-neck pace to change the world. I'm happy learning about and doing js, web, css, and programming at my own pace and if my works will one day be appreciated by society, then great, but if not, that's okay too.

Those 3 realizations helped me fix my attitude and improve my lifestyle, hopefully, they can help you too.

A disclaimer: Some may read the above as saying "don't have ambition, don't try to push yourself, don't achieve". I'm not saying that at all; instead, I'm saying to temper your ambitions with patience, and if you wish to overcome your weaknesses, then the first step is to accept them. Life is long and not as fast-paced as the media makes it seem, nor is it a competition to see who can succeed earlier / faster, so go at the fastest pace you can while still managing to enjoy your work.
In my school, bullies even at the time justified picking on nerds by saying we were elitist and snobby. It really annoys me when people make unfair attacks against nerds or intellectuals, because it doesn't just hurt adults, it hurts children.

And my experience was exactly the same as yours: people developed a kind of snobbery as an emotional self defense.