joshstaiger

Protocol buffers are great, but the Python implementation provided by Google is written in native Python and very slow for serializing/deserializing protobufs (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767882).

I've heard you can get around this by SWIG-wrapping the C++ implementation, but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

The Hacker's Diet accounts for this by encouraging you to look at a moving average of your daily weight, rather than the number itself:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/signalnoise.html#Fa73

I switched from Python to R as my calculator of choice for this reason.

I only recently discovered that there's a lot more to R than intuitive division of integers ;)

I posted this chart in the other thread, based on the same data.

http://tinyurl.com/hnrank

Shows the fraction of #1 stories, by submission time.

I happened to be playing with R today, so I took a stab at making a chart:

http://tinyurl.com/hnrank

Friendfeed did something similar:

http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

You can donate lower-priced titles to your local library.

I've been more interested in checklists after hearing Charlie Munger repeatedly espouse them:

"...You’ve got all the tools. And you’ve got to have one more trick. You’ve got to use those tools checklist-style, because you’ll miss a lot if you just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it. But if you’ve got a full list of tools, and go through them in your mind, checklist-style, you will find a lot of answers that you won’t find any other way."

http://www.tilsonfunds.com/MungerUCSBspeech.pdf

Your loved ones could greet or see you off at the gate.

John Gruber had an interesting explanation for this with his Auteur Theory of Design (with Steve at the top):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3UcgbbmxQ

Note that this graphic only accounts for ~25% of total US debt - the foreign-held portion.

The majority is owned by US institutions (mostly the fed):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Estimated_ownership_of_tre...

Company financial statements are like porn to Warren Buffet (his words).

The average investor doesn't do nearly as much research or thinking about their investments.

Meanwhile, brokers and fund companies have a vested interest in making investing seem simple, predictable, and effortless.

Really?

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

From 2004, but comprised mostly of essays that are on his site.

Actually, this presentation has been around for a while. I remember reading this around 2005.

Not exactly 1998, but still :P

(http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.marshallbrain.com/mi...)

Go to http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&... and click on the first link to bypass the pay wall.

Though, I find the article a little light on content.

He also has a webapp that does the same thing:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet

If that's a problem, I'd assume you could shard your SUP feeds any number of ways.

Say... first 100k feeds reference sup1.json, second 100k reference sup2.json, etc.

And given that each RSS/Atom feed <links> to its SUP feed, you could reorganize arbitrarily by updating the link, and the poller should pick it up on the next go-around.

True, but I find my ability to code significantly diminished after even one glass. I'm all for finding some time to unwind with a glass when you can, however...

I have the same tossing and turning problem when I work close to bed time.

I find that reading a fiction book, even just a few pages, helps flush my brain's "cache" and relax.

Whenever I run into a frustrating "bug in the compiler" type problem I find it's useful to take a walk or revisit the problem again the following day.

Many times my mistake becomes obvious right away.

When you have a leader like Steve Jobs, who understands the business on such a fundamental level, you can afford to be a bit heavy handed to make that leader's vision a reality.

Problem is, there is only one Steve Jobs and vanishingly few who come close.

I think most companies would do well to avoid Apple's tactics.

Increasingly I wish my friends would move to a more open service like Friendfeed that is good about playing nice with others and exporting data feeds to the outside world.

Unfortunately, Facebook is the local maxima that most of my friends are stuck at. And I neither see that changing, nor Facebook becoming more open any time soon.

Same here. Plus I've written a crawler that periodically checks items I've upvoted for new comments/activity and creates an RSS feed accordingly.

I like CSS Mastery:

http://www.amazon.com/CSS-Mastery-Advanced-Standards-Solutio...

It does a great job of calling out CSS bugs in specific browser versions and describes how to work around them.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5g9VS0ENM for a video demo.

Yep, the comments links are back in Google Reader. Thanks!

While this is good enough for me, if you'd really like to know the diff between the current feed and the "ideal" feed that works in the maximum number of clients, http://feedvalidator.org is a great resource.

Agreed.

The comments link needs to go inside a <description> element, and a GUID could be as simple the HN item URL.

I've been loving reading Hacker News via Google Reader since the comments link started showing up. It was a downer to see it gone today.

I read Hacker News via the RSS feed in Google Reader.

Looks like the comments link disappeared yesterday.

Not sure if Hacker News changed or Google Reader changed, but I think this can be fixed by putting the comments link inside a <description> element in the HN RSS feed.

You might consider Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC area. I'm in the Bay Area now, but I enjoyed living in "The Triangle" as they call it.

Cost of living is great. There are three large universities in the area: UNC, Duke, and NC State, meaning lots of youngish, educated people.

There's a pretty good geek community. IBM, Cisco, Redhat, and SAS all have large presences in the area, and there is a startup scene (nothing like the Bay Area, but it exists).

When I lived there, we had twice-monthly geek meetups and got great attendance - met some really interesting, fairly diverse, people. The large amount of northern ex-pats mixed with the southern culture made for a pretty cool, laid-back, friendly atmosphere.

And there is biotech in the area as well. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_%28North_Carolina%... for a start...

Only downside is you'll definitely still need a car to get around. If you're smart and/or lucky you can probably minimize that a bit, though. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro area can be pretty walkable/bikeable.

The problem with Netflix's online streaming business isn't time caps, but lack of selection.

Currently their "watch it now" list is heavily weighted towards classics and foreign films. Very seldom does it contain new releases or movies I'd ordinarily think to add to my queue.

Additionally the online streaming feature only works in IE for Windows, which is a pain (for me).

I guess it remains to be seen what, if anything, Apple is going to bring to the table, but there are obvious opportunities to improve on the Netflix model.