instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
|---|---|
Is it necessary to be a child prodigy? | FreeRadical: It's more important to be able to identify and act upon opportunities if you want to make money (or just be lucky). |
Solution for eye strain? | zacharydanger: I read a bout a neat "hack" so to speak here on HN some years ago that I've used to some degree of success.Tense up all the muscles in your body for about 20 or 30 seconds and then relax them. It should trick the muscles in your eye (the ones giving you the eye strain) to relax, too. YMMV, but it's worke... |
Is it necessary to be a child prodigy? | mahmud: Everything that you saw in the "seminar" was staged. Run for your life Rick. |
Solution for eye strain? | Myrth: I've made some notes from DVD I've watched recently. It was made by Dr. Svetlana Troitskaia and is in russian. Just wanted to share with my English speaking friends.http://dpaste.com/hold/120724/ |
Solution for eye strain? | karlzt: get your eyes near water, humidity is important |
Solution for eye strain? | pmichaud: I have this problem because I have one eye. I do a few things.1) Make sure my monitor has a high refresh or response rate. Either greater than 75hz or less than 4ms (2 is better) respectively2) You may be making things worse by setting the contrast down. Your have to do extra work to discern what it's seeing ... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | hendler: Good luck so far using EBS for MySQL, logs etc. I/O costs not significant yet.You can Raid EBS devices btw. |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | bretthoerner: You wouldn't want to use the virtual hard drive they provide you, but rather EBS (Elastic Block Storage). With that you can setup a mirrored RAID (redundancy is a given already) of as many devices as you please. |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | mark_l_watson: I can't answer your question from personal experience because I always just use plain old EBS volumes with my EC2s.That said, here is a good writeup on RAID use with EBS by someone at Heroku: http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | garyrichardson: I am using MySQL on EC2 c1.medium instances. I haven't noticed an IO limit yet, but that could be how I'm using it plus the data set is still under 2GB.I use the database as a raw data source and have a cron that generates read only data sets for the web servers to use. This works for my application, bu... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | dryicerx: Seconding the EBS Raid0 option. Some comparison here http://blog.mudy.info/2009/04/disk-io-ec2-vs-mosso-vs-linode...Also, if you have a part of a DB that just requires unholy amounts IO, there is of course the new 68gig instances, move that part and run it purely on memory with a combination of frequent dumps... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | scumola: Just write to /mnt (150GB ramdrive on the small instance) then occasionally sync to an EBS volume. That'll probably give you the best I/O. |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | charlesju: With any high IO web application, it all comes down to horizontal sharding to make it work. But, we recently switched from a high powered DB to Amazon and we're doing fine. |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | qhoxie: We have a highly trafficked and large dataset that we aimed to move from our datacenter to EC2. This is all in MySQL. Upon doing so, we had to spend significant effort trying to get our system stable and we ended up narrowing it down to EBS simply not being able to handle the IOPS we needed.We explored all th... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | jedberg: We run all of reddit on ec2, which includes a bunch of postgres servers. Each one is running with a single EBS. However, I've heard horror stories of people trying to run much less busy databases and having lots of problems, usually with MySQL.Those databases are all on XLarge instances, so there is minimal ... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | JoeH: Here at RescueTime we use EC2 for all of our servers, with the exception of one server outside EC2 for monitoring.All of our MySQL instances are currently each running on 4x EBS volumes using LVM stripped across all 4 volumes.Our primary transactional table is nearing a billion rows, and just this weekend we perf... |
Keyboard Recommendations? | nrr: Kinesis Freestyle. I bought mine for $90 from an online retailer, and I turned around and bought the VIP kit for another $40.In retrospect, I wish that I would've spent the extra bucks on the longer cable connecting the two pieces together. There're nuts on the underside of the thing that look like they'll accep... |
Is it necessary to be a child prodigy? | keefe: It's worth noting that the average person starting a successful company is not in his early 20s. http://www.startups.co.uk/6678842907756695817/the-average-en... That's one article discussing this, there are others.
The reason you hear about all the rich millionaires is that they make good stories and they're ra... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | jbellis: I work on the Cassandra distributed database for Rackspace. A _lot_ of people start out trying Cassandra on EC2 but the universal conclusion has been that I/O performance is miserable.Anecdotally, Rackspace Cloud Servers I/O works much better, although the only serious head-to-head comparison I have seen is t... |
Solution for eye strain? | shubhamharnal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540078 |
Please post information related to Non-Traditional Payment Models | CSunday: OMG, I've been battling this issue too, especially in regards to the music industry.For now, it is still unclear how customers can safely and conveniently pay for digital goods, without credit/debit cards; especially now we are not in a digital currency world.But these are all interesting models you've posted... |
Is it necessary to be a child prodigy? | bayareaguy: Remember that one method scammers use to exploit the ignorant and unfortunate is to tempt people with a glamorous lifestyle. If you think there is a scam going on and you aren't already "in" on it then you could be a target. Don't be fooled.Make something people want. If you're young then you have plenty o... |
I've got a tricky SEO problem. | coffee: dont worry about it - i've had plenty of sites rank just fine in Google with redirects and subdomains, if you do a little digging into Google's webmaster guidelines, they even mention it to some extent (not that everything mentioned in their own doc's are 100% accurate as to what will and will not hurt your ran... |
Scriptable command line browser? | cschneid: Something I've looked at: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/Also, I'm not sure how they do it, but Jaxer (http://www.jaxer.org/) has a headless firefox instance they use. Maybe do it in a similar manner? |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | spudlyo: It's worth noting that you can speed up write operations on EBS volumes by first initializing them by writing data to every block on the volume. Subsequent writes will be faster due to the way Amazon virtualizes disks.http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2007-08-29/Develope... |
Anyone used Amazon EC2 with a database or other high IO operation? | nearestneighbor: I'm curious about the economics of this. If you reserve an extra large high-CPU instance for 3 years, you end up paying $3,000 per year ($2,800 initial fee + hourly rate). Isn't it cheaper to have your own servers? |
Scriptable command line browser? | coffee: If into Ruby, I saw a presentation on how to do what your looking for, check out: http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2009/10/ruby-introduction-to-beha... - Should be a good starting point... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | shaddi: I mostly use my email. Gmail provides several features to make this easy. I know a lot of people say "your inbox is not a todo list", but I say to hell with that. Email is a good aggregator of information for me, since I can add things to it easily from a wide variety of devices, and with the techniques below I... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | wclax04: I use gmail. I have a label for storing tasks, and I can access it anywhere... |
Scriptable command line browser? | macemoneta: Lynx can record a session and play it back, which makes it easy to create tests. The sessions are easily edited too. It's available in the repositories of most Linux distributions, or here:http://www.lynxbrowser.com/ |
Scriptable command line browser? | Shamiq: Wait, so Selenium RC not hitting the spot for you? |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | genieyclo: Google Calendar plus Google Tasks in the sidebar that have tasks to do with dates so I can check them off when I'm done.Do the smaller, easy things first and fast, so you'll be motivated to get others done.Check out the GTD philosophy: http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | eswat: Things.app + Things for iPhone for most of the tasks I need to get done. If I get actionable email I just organize them into the appropriate labels without transferring the associated task to Things.This is what I've settled with after trying to get into GTD, Zen to Done, ActionMethod, etc. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | jedwhite: If you code (or even if you don't) check out the eclipse plug-in Myln (http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/) and using Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) as a task repository (there are plenty of good cheap hosts like projectlocker.com). There is a great extension to it called Tasktop Pro that lets you use a gmail lab... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | jlees: Paper notebook and Remember The Milk (mostly accessed via Gmail gadget). |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | kirse: I couldn't find an organizer solution that provided exactly what I wanted in the format I needed, so I just hacked one up in a week with PHP/MySQL. For awhile I had been using a simple pad/pencil and an EXPO board at home, but I noticed I tended to "forget" my long-term goals when using a daily pad and ignore t... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | imp: GTD suggests using anything that can manage lots of lists quickly. I'm currently using a Nokia N800 for managing my lists, and it works well. There's a basic To Do app that's easy to use. I'm upgrading to an N900 once it ships. I had tried using a physical paper notepad, but it kept getting stale. Lots of pag... |
Scriptable command line browser? | vorador: Have you considered using script(1) ? |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | raju: I haven't moved completely to this new system that I am implementing, but I have a few moving pieces together, so take it with a grain of salt.I started with David Allen's Getting Things Done (Another commentator also made a reference to this).GTD involves the use of multiple lists - these could be "projects" you... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | jamroom: I've been using "Tasks" for many years now, and it works really well:http://crowdfavorite.com/tasks/ |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | markbao: The Hit List for Mac, a Moleskine, 37signals Backpack (and its Journal function) and my Work Progress Journal http://markbao.com/wpj.pdf |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | diN0bot: pivotal tracker for project managementhttp://pivotaltrackercombined with mac's ical program for my daily scheduling
(i not only add future events, but i also log how i spend every hour of the day. i log using different calendars. i wrote a python script to aggregate the data into graphs and compute useful anal... |
Anyone have experience with Parellel Python? | bayareaguy: I stopped doing much with python about the time I first heard of it. It has been mentioned here before:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654842http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223972http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=147614http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107221http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8... |
Scriptable command line browser? | leif: uzbl is interesting, but I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | gurraman: I've been using everything from Things and The Hitlist to Remember the Milk and Ta-da list; used GMail to keep track of tasks; written two task list applications for the console; created three web-based (three different approaches) systems.I went out and bought a Moleskine to use while doing some research on... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | timtrueman: Personally I find a single text file + Dropbox both simple and all I need. I always know where to look and I can reorganize however I want. If I'm looking for a registration code or a favorite quote or a handy command line snippet, I can just use Spotlight or open the file and search. This has worked well f... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | jazzychad: I use my grandfather's method: Legal pad to-do lists.Each day he would write the list of the day's tasks on the top page, then use the rest of the page for notes throughout the day. The next morning, he would copy unfinished items to the next page, then tear off the top page and discard it.Rinse and repeat.H... |
Scriptable command line browser? | agazso: If all you want is server side automation, then you can try Xvfb, which is a virtual X server capable of running X applications.On a related subject I used Watin (.net) for browser automation and learned, that it was modeled after Watir, which is the same in ruby. See http://watir.com. |
Scriptable command line browser? | flashingpumpkin: I think Twill might suit you. Have a look at the example.
http://twill.idyll.org/examples.html |
Creating web page load "waterfall" images automatically | jaddison: Clickable link: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/images/activity2.png |
Creating web page load "waterfall" images automatically | jacquesm: That's two problems in one, I think you want a script that logs the exact load times of a bunch of files, then a secondary stage to convert that data in to a graph.For the first bit you'll need a script that loads a url and all it's dependencies, starts a fairly precise timer at the moment the connection to t... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | sidsavara: I like to Use ToodleDo and Evernote on my iPhone.Both apps sync with the web, and offer offline modes. This makes it easy to use no matter where I am. I used to use my blackberry and outlook, but really wanted web integration. |
Scriptable command line browser? | vithlani: Please take a look at Chickenfoothttp://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/chickenfoot/index.phpmaybe it does what you want? I was very impressed with a video I had seen about it a couple of years ago. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | RK: For my long-term learning goals, I wrote a quick python script to randomly select a daily study topic from my list. I'm also considering using spaced repetition for reviewing what I've already covered. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | billclerico: i just send myself emails. since so many tasks are email based anyway, it keeps everything in one place. i.e. "follow up with John Smith about X". when i complete the task i delete the email from my inbox |
Chatbots ... | jacquesm: I've written a couple and I had great fun with them.One of the best attempts was a really nasty little trick, basically a human-backed chatbot. The way it worked was like this:You get an icq (at the time) client and proxy it through the bot, the bot goes and makes random friends.When someone reponds to the bo... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | shimon: I wrote (and use) http://voo2do.com/ . I'm currently working on turning it from a popular side project into a business, so I'd love any feedback on it. My email is on every page. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | albertsun: I use lots and lots of loose leaf 8.5x11 printer paper and different colored pens. I keep a stack of this with me all the time. The top page is a to-do list and notes to myself. The other pages are other notes on things I've been working on recently. I continually add new items and cross them out as they get... |
hiring vs. buying to produce a prototype | ksowocki: I would strongly consider partnering with a developer who has the right skillset. Starting a start-up is a long-term gig. When you are hiring or buying, you are partnering with someone who may only be with you for 1 or 2 iterations. Their motive is short term profit, and your motive is long term biz-dev. W... |
Chatbots ... | sli: MegaHAL is open source and a lot of fun to play with. Be ready to feed it a lot of text, though. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | silentbicycle: Stop fetishizing moleskines.Meditate.Get off the Internet.Do what you're doing now. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | drinian: I have messed around with Emacs org-mode in the past, but never quite climbed the learning curve to the point of effortlessness.Many people justifiably are promoting Moleskines, but these days I prefer http://riteintherain.com/ waterproof notebooks. http://www.tadgear.com/ has a good selection (if a horrible w... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | jordanbrown: Things on the mac and iphone works for me! Small notepad also. |
Scriptable command line browser? | jamesbritt: A tool such as Tourbus might work. It's a Ruby app meant to stress test Web sites. It uses Webrat and (I think) Mechanize underneath, and does not open any browsers.If the site in question has scripting you're out of luck, but otherwise it should be quite useful.In fact, I found yourself using both Tourb... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | tgittos: I've tried a bunch of computer based solutions, software designed to help with doing GTD, to-do lists, Remember The Milk, a fancy, small leather bound notebook, all sorts of things.These days I carry around a small, cheap 50c notebook that fits easily in my pocket and a small pen, and use it to jot down though... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | hop: I have tried so many things - notebooks, moleskins, PDAs when they came out, web and desktop to do lists and organizers... nothing has ever worked more than a week.I am seriously retarded in the organization debt. I own two businesses and have equity in two others and its all going well, I'm just handicapped with ... |
Chatbots ... | intellectronica: A.L.I.C.E [ http://alicebot.blogspot.com/ ] is a 'brute-force' chatbot model that has been developed for many years. It has several free software implementations and is very easy to work with. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | andrewhyde: I have been loving http://www.actionmethod.com by the Behance crew... It is what I wished basecamp was. Lightweight but can manage a ton of projects, has an iPhone app and even gasp paper. |
Chatbots ... | viraptor: I had a bit of fun with chatbots. If you want OS and easy way, you have 3 choices really:- AIML engine- MegaHAL engine- proper parsers (most of them are written in lisp-like languages for some reason)Now it really depends on what you want to do - only waste someone else's time? MegaHAL will do just fine. You ... |
hiring vs. buying to produce a prototype | albertsun: What's your idea? Someone on this site may have the necessary skills and be interested in working with you to develop it. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | gcv: Why does everyone fetishize Moleskine notebooks? I went through a couple, and they all have terrible paper. I hate seeing ink bleed through to the next page. Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks have significantly higher quality paper. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | steveplace: Organizational issues often are a proxy war with procrastination. So as a cousin to other tools that have been offered up:1. Uninstall IE and chrome and use only firefox.2. D/L leechblock plugin, start your bad-site list (HN is in my list).3. Set a random password, write it down, hand it to your wife and sa... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | cgherb911: using my iphone right now. I would love an app that is able to sync with microsoft project. Anyone have something for this? |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | wenbert: A notebook. I have a 8.5 x 11 notebook that suits my big handwriting. I use 1 page a day.EDIT: Moleskines are too expensive for me. |
Tools/Libraries to build a RESTful web service in Python? | yummyfajitas: Take a look at piston.http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | lefstathiou: microsoft onenote. if you havent played around with it i strongly encourage you to. imagine word with tabbed documents contained in dozens of precategorized folders of your making with a seamless interface to engage in free form note taking (clipping, drawing etc). |
Creating web page load "waterfall" images automatically | thwarted: I was going to implement something like this a few years ago, then Firebug got its network stats page, and safari/chrome/webkit have it too. I was using bootchart ( http://www.bootchart.org/ ) for inspiration, but found out I didn't actually need an image of the loading once I could get what I needed from th... |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | Chirag: I use three tools postits(quick idea), notebook(Meetings, todo, discussions,work,thoughts) and Evernote(everything on-line,ideas,bookmarks...). |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | drewcrawford: I use omnifocus for task tracking. I used rememberthemilk for awhile, but the lack of projects/taskgroups pushed me over the edge. Omnifocus has enough features to make me want to poke my eye out, but they've done a decent job at keeping the interface clean. I've even been using it for issue tracking l... |
When to listen to users & when not to? | access_denied: These camps only seem to be opposed. How is the iPod nano not an iteration? |
When to listen to users & when not to? | etherael: I'll take a heaping of door number one with a dash of the second.Alone, the raw data approach is enough to tell you that you're on the right track, while the go with your instincts position is not enough to tell you anything in and of itself.Sticking to the raw data model but attempting to intuitively discern... |
When to listen to users & when not to? | trjordan: There are two ways to ask your customers what they want: you can ask them, or you can produce a product, and see if they buy it. I'd unquestionably go with the second approach.Even Google does it the second way, but, like everything else, they do it at scale. Instead of having a single designer, they let all ... |
Chatbots ... | paraschopra: I had made one very silly bot called SPEAK. It used simple matching algorithms to learn. I wondered who would use it, but people actually used it for real.http://paraschopra.com/software/ |
When to listen to users & when not to? | andrewvc: Well, the famous, if possibly apocryphal Henry Ford quote definitely lends itself to viewpoint #2:“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”At the end of the day you're in a gray area, and good judgement is the result of smarts, experience, and luck. |
Which is the best way to keep yourself organized | rene: Ive found task lists without a firm start and end date does not work which is why I add tasks into Google Calendar.For the 'gadget' I dont think there should be a specific gadget as Google (docs/email/calendar/tasks/talk) has solved the problem of being tied down to a single device.In saying that I have several n... |
When to listen to users & when not to? | DenisM: Talk to 18 of your future customers, ask them about their problems, ignore what they tell you and then ask what they were trying to achieve. Focus on the desired outcome, and the goal it leads to. If you stop hearing new things after 12 you have found solid targeting. Now you have technology on one hand and a w... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | omouse: Don't. Learn the concepts and ideas behind the "technologies" and work with them instead. Then it just comes down to messing around with the details of implementation. This way, whatever happens to be "the way of the future" next will be easy enough to pick up (unless it's something absolutely horrid which no s... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | vineet7kumar: I believe that if you are real good with your concepts - Algorithms, Data structures, OOP concepts, etc. there is no reason to worry about the technology. The job remains the same- giving right set of instructions to process the data.
Moreover, I personally believe that it's hard for anyone to be even fam... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | jdale27: I was late to the game [...]What game?Newer technology isn't always better. It's just... newer. What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something?[H]ow do you force yourself to step ou... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | patio11: There are two facets to this question: what you can do as WesleyJohnson and what you can do within your organization. Your motivation is making sure WesleyJohnson has a job four years from now. Your organization's motivation is selling more $FOO at lower costs. You need to start identifying or creating happ... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | Tangurena: A long time ago, I used to jump on every bandwagon that seemed interesting. That lead to lots of wasted time and effort with technological dead-ends. So I over-reacted and only bothered with technology that had been around a minimum of 2 years (or if a "for dummies" book on the subject came out).Some of our ... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | kaitnieks: The technology does not change as fast as it claims to. There are new languages, frameworks and even concepts all the time, but most of them are the old things with a twist and most of them do not even catch on. So if you don't want to be living on the bleeding edge, there is a good strategy:
stick to the st... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | dpcan: I have been dealing with similar feelings lately.It's not so much the "new", rather what's "hot" that makes me nuts. When a non-techie Client asks me if my stuff is in Rails, but he has no idea what he's asking, I get very frustrated.Lately I've been lost trying to grasp what new technologies are going to matte... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | ramanujan: At the risk of being downvoted, I'd say to look at other stacks besides MS (esp. Linux, OS X, Iphone, Android).With the noted exception of Stackoverflow, most innovation in tech today does not involve MS. |
Scriptable command line browser? | rudin: Maybe give vimperator a try. It is a plugin for firefox that gives it a vim feeling. I think you can write scripts for it too. |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | wisty: You just learnt interfaces? Those are in Java, C++, Python (2.6+) and any other OO language you care to mention.I don't use C#, so I'm not sure what Linq is exactly, but it seems to be similar to an ORM with baked in transactions. Lots of languages have ORM layers, and they will have some similarities with Linq.... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | donaq: If your fundamentals are sound, you should not have to fear. That said, you might want to pick up some non-Algol descended languages such as Lisp or Prolog, just to expose yourself to different programming paradigms. :) |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | jacobolus: Not sure how realistic it is, but today’s Dilbert is relevant and somewhat amusing: http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-11-16/ |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | Tichy: Don't follow every new trend. However, if you are stuck in .NET world, it might really pay off to look at other worlds for inspiration now and then.Reading Hacker News now and then should give you enough ideas? Every now and then you could read a book or do some exercises, or best create a small project in anoth... |
How do you keep up with changing technologies? | rykov: Side projects! I always try to incorporate promising new platforms/technologies into new side projects both as a way to learn and as a way to test the technology.You won't use everything you play with, but over time, your toolset and skill will grow and you'll be able to deliver better and more unique solutions... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.