skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the work is somewhat interesting and challenging, I'd hardly say it's something I'm passionate about.

The reason you are not passionate about your work is because something is missing. Identifying what is missing is your first step in determining where to go from here.

I have been in a similar situation to you. Always working. Important stuff. Sometimes cool, often not. But something was always missing.

Architecture not rigorous enough. Inadequate data base design. Insufficient requirements definition. Lousy code base. Unable to scale. Unable to expand or handle completely new features.

But I always managed to make it work anyway.

Then it occurred to me, if such mediocre systems were able to produce adequate results in commercial environments, what would be possible with great systems?

So now I'm building a framework/architecture/environment that beautifully handles everything I thought was missing before. The passion is built-in. Instead of, "Look at me, ma!" now it's "Look at this, everybody!"

Where do you go from here? Fill in the gaps that should have been providing passion all along. That oughta keep you busy for a while.
I disagree with the post. It failed for 2 reasons:

1) DJs are not mainstream (as opposed to rock bands). Mashups are not mainstream.

2) We have a bad economy. People can't afford to buy a new $100 video game accessory.
I used to run daily and I have chronic problems with my knees stemming from a childhood accident. Anecdotally, I have much less pain using an elliptical machine.
GSM encryption broken
AT&T halts (online) iPhone sales in New York
Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 Release Notes
A great book! I devoured it. I sometimes feel that future is here now, which I guess is what makes it such a good read.
Agreed. They're making double-digit profits, and have ~91% (retail) market share of the most margin-heavy part of the market: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Apple-Mac-PC-Marketshare-ma...

Really, outside of pathetically-low-margin customer demand, why would apple make a netbook? Cheap, fairly-crappy laptops won't help the brand or image (to sell other stuff that has margin), and doesn't actually make (much) money on its own.

Instead, they can focus their limited engineering team on stuff that makes lots more money.

Aren't there a stack of business books saying that it's important to know when to say _no_ to distractions from your core business? How are netbooks anything but a distraction?

PS: Apple's market cap is $191 bln @ $212/share.
Online strategy games
The ability of a human being to be able to strategize and conceptualize a variety of things has been the main primary reason as to why the human race has evolved.
http://twitter.com/byrneseyeview

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=byrneseyeview

Strange.
You're on there. I searched profiles for "twitter" then extracted names from both twitter.com/* and @
The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet. ~ William Gibson
I won't. You are still a sheep.
No, I'm not sure why it missed you (and many others).

I'll manually add anyone who asks (as long as you're not a spammer/bot/"social media guru")
Can you recommend a guide?

I would like to start a blog, which is technically no problem. It's just, running into all the abandoned blogs on the internet has been discouraging.
His leader would have gotten someone else. This guy on Flight 253 was not the planner of the attack, he was just one of many people that wanted his 69 virgins or whatever.
missed me ;), I used 'twitter.com/pauladam' which looks like it shouldve matched against the regex you supplied...
And people still ask me why I prefer taking high speed trains!

I know! I just love that hourly New York-to-London train service that runs under the Atlantic...
interesting. in ruby:

ra:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> defined? a
=> nil
irb(main):002:0> defined? b
=> nil
irb(main):003:0> a = b
NameError: undefined local variable or method `b' for main:Object
from (irb):3
irb(main):004:0> a
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> b
NameError: undefined local variable or method `b' for main:Object
from (irb):5
irb(main):006:0> defined? a
=> "local-variable"
irb(main):007:0>

'a' gets defined.
Start a company. Just pick some interesting idea you're actually capable of executing and just start building it.

Don't worry so much about whether you will actually make money, to keep it a hobby, but make it in such a way that you might, to keep alive hopes of actually making a living out of it.

Doing it that way will allow you to make it however you please and to make it as beautiful as you want. The fun part is that along the way you will encounter critical areas you never thought about, but which are quite interesting to do once (setting up a build infrastructure, migration etc.)

Just make sure your code stays a thing of beauty, something so solidly engineered that you're truly proud of it. Don't rush things but take the time to make them 'just right'.

That way you'll have had a great time writing it, and if your company ever gets off the ground you'll have an amazing code base to start off with.
Part of the magic of the Magic Shiny Rocks is that if it is not as expensive as real, genuine Magic Shiny Rocks it isn't as esteemed and makes you an evil, evil person. Except for using alloys or "flawed" Magic Shiny Rocks, those methods of generating Magic Shiny Rocks for cheapskates are traditional.
Knee-jerk much?
You don't need sarcasm to make fun of rail. Every time I try to get a hypothetical route on Amtrak.com for Dallas to New Orleans, or Florida, it insists on routing me through Chicago. Every. Single. Time.
Or at the very least you are likely to get terribly confused. The posters confusion has absolutely nothing to do with conditionals and modifiers and is entirely about Ruby variable definition and scoping semantics. In fact if you broke one of his examples by reversing the conditional, the variable, the assignment of which is never evaluated is still defined.

>> a = 1
=> 1
>> unless defined? a
>> b = 5
>> end
=> nil
>> defined? b
=> "local-variable"
>> b
=> nil
This is apropos of nothing. ajross already pointed out the problem with the snowfall claim, and the article only talks about land surface warming, not CO2.
No, it's because drugs are evil.
By the way - a departure time, and arrival time, and a wristwatch all work fine in a plane.
Software's Dirty Little Secret
Several takes on how to cull your library
Great submission ypavan. This is a big reason why I check HN all day.
More Than a Game: Testing Your Blood Alcohol
Ask HN: How long after launch did you get your first customer?
How long after launching did you get your first customer?

What was your plan on acquiring the customers?

I'm going to be launching my SaaS soon and would love to hear your experiences ;)
Just the ajax parts are missing. It's a demo for a UI kit, so that seems appropriate.
I'm talking about a smaller version of the macbook air.

I very much doubt Apple would try to compete with cheap netbooks, but a smaller form factor would do well when you're more pushed for space.

So I was using 'netbook' to describe the form factor, rather than price point.

I'd say there's far more potential market for a sleek mini Macbook air, than there is for a tablet.
We make extensive use of these at the day job. It is a lifesaver. If I ever get around to using bug tracking for myself, I'm certainly going to continue the practice.
I agree with everything you say, except for "Family Planning & Birth Control". The last thing we want is government enforcement of birth rates; prosperity takes care of that without taking away anyone's freedom. Most prosperous nations have lower-than-replacement birth rates among the wealthy citizens, and that's actually going to become a serious problem unless we can make more poor people wealthy.

By 'wealth', I don't mean just money, I mean everything that goes into a better quality of life: Freedom, food, water, housing, education, and energy. In my opinion the first and last are the keys: people must be free to pursue activities which will improve their lot in life, and energy must be abundant and inexpensive to enable people to act on their freedom. With plentiful energy, food can be produced with minimal labor, water can be cleaned, materials for housing can be produced cheaply, and all of the above can raise people up from struggling for subsistance so that they have the time to devote to education.

Finally, in a world full of industrious, well-educated, and free people who have plenty of energy at their disposal, the problems caused by global warming can be tackled and solved whatever they may be. Dikes can be built, farms can be moved, even whole populations can be relocated.
Amazon: Kindle Is Most Gifted Item Ever
Both security theatre and terrorism is about managing perceptions. One is just a response to the other in the public + media domain.

Also government will do whatever it takes to seem like it is doing something. Lots of rules, directives with cryptic long numbers separated by dashes, TSA employees with uniforms resembling those of real police officers, etc, etc. This is all very very different than actually doing something or making anything safe.
I'm jmattheij on twitter, I think you missed me too.

I'm not very active, usually only when I have some kind of goal or a project underway.

Thanks for doing this!
whoa. didn't see that coming.
Depends what you are astonished by, I suppose. As far as I can tell the Ruby behaviour has to do with the fact that Ruby variable definition appears to take place sometime before evaluation, maybe during parsing. So as long as the statement parses and looks like a variable definition/assignment, you get your variable. On evaluation, undefined variables cause barfage but in the case above, the a got defined before the statement was actually executed.
Right, variable definition happens as early as when the code is parsed, even if it is never used.
If it's a bug, it's by design. Note that this only happens with local variables (rather than instance, class or global variables) according to David Black's The Well-Grounded Rubyist, page 153 ("Assignment syntax in condition bodies and tests" - everything that follows, including emphasis is from the book):

Ruby doesn't draw as clear a line as compiled languages do between "compile time" and "run time," but the interpreter does parse your code before running it, and certain decisions are made during that process. An important one is the recognition and allocation of local variables.

When the Ruby parser sees the sequence identifier, equal-sign, value, as in this expression

x = 1

it allocates space for a local variable called x. The creation of the variable - not the assignment to it, but the internal creation of a variable - always takes place as a result of this kind of expression, even if the code isn't executed!

Consider this example:

if false
x = 1
end

p x # Output: nil
p y # Fatal error: y is unknown

The assignment to x isn't executed, because it's wrapped in a failing conditional test. But the Ruby parser sees the sequence x = 1, from which it deduces that the program involves a local variable x. The parser doesn't care whether x is ever assigned a value. It's job is just to scour the code for local variables for which space needs to be allocated.

The result is that x inhabits a strange kind of variable limbo. It has been brought into being and initialized to nil.
That was a good article, not only for investing strategies, but also had a few good tech business ideas - very appropriate for HN.
Perhaps a plastic coating to preserve the microstructures...
Still valuable, the colors apparently can be dialed up to order, unlike paint etc which depends upon mixing and batch etc.
Start a company. Just pick some interesting idea you're actually capable of executing and just start building it.

Ideally, I'd do just this. I'd leave my job, take a few months and do my own thing. The problem is that I'm not prepared to take that risk; I have a good job, it pays well, and it supports my family. If I walk away and succeed (where success >= the same amount I'm making now), awesome. If I fail, however, I've left a job I'm good at, and that I'm comfortable at.

Perhaps that's the crux of the issue right there. I don't want to take the risk of putting all my eggs in one basket, but I find it difficult to get inspired if I'm not fully invested. Thus, if given the option after a long day of work to either watch Top Chef with my wife or do something interesting in Python, Top Chef+Wife wins every time.
I think the article is wrong. His rewrite on line 06. should use if instead of unless.

$ irb
>> b
NameError: undefined local variable or method `b' for main:Object
from (irb):1
>> if defined? b
>> b = 5
>> end
=> nil
>> b
=> nil
>> defined? b
=> "local-variable"
"Just the ajax parts are missing"

I don't know what that really means, but I can tell you that it's disingenuous. First of all, on the face of it, it's not really true. Menus don't work. Toolbars which have overflowed don't work. Buttons (even ones that don't do "AJAX") do nothing. Resizing the window is broken in subtle but annoying ways.

I don't think any of those things say anything at all about the quality of this framework. But I don't like when people try to pass it off as something it isn't.
How Google became Microsoft: A decade of hits, misses and gaffes
Why is apple considered a company with 'limited' engineering capacity while they're are one of the most profitable, largest companies in the entire world? And they don't even do the 'hard expensive stuff' that's capital intensive like semiconductor fabrication? Microsoft and Apple have a market cap ratio of just 1.5, yet microsoft engineers a significant greater amount of products and projects, and owns a very large percentage of the PC market.
For the record, I was referring to transmitting information with another party (either text or voice) - should have been more specific.
I have done it a few times, no questions asked. (The key is to have an excuse, like "I guess I need to gate-check this.")
Funny you should mention this, as I meant to put this in my original post.

The one thing I did recently that made me happy and that I genuinely enjoyed, was writing a 20-or-so line script in Python that checked some file my wife was using at work. Basically it involved reading an excel spreadsheet and checking to make sure all the data was sane - a tediously manual process that was easily automated.
Point taken. I didn't look closely enough.
This seems like an absurd, silly idea..

1) Have any laptops (or MP3 players) actually been used to smuggle explosives onto a plane?

2) Aren't laptops and such searched for explosives anyway? (x-ray'd, sniffer-dog'd etc - my hand-luggage was randomly swabbed for explosives)

There is some logic to banning such electronics, but it's the same logic that lead to water bottles and metal butter-knifes being banned..

The linked news-item (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27plane.html ) seems to be a better argument for giving all airline passengers guns than it is for banning laptops..
I don't think any one is denying that.
Femtosecond lasers are actually common nowadays. We use a Ti-sapph at my lab.

Unless I'm crazy, Prat's answer is actually unrelated to your question. It's an article about pulse shaping, which is used to, well, change the shape of an ultra-short pulse. Not generate it.

What you want to look for is mode-locking. Essentially it's based on interference. You have a lot of standing waves in a laser cavity and lock them so that they all have the same phase. Then they'll interfere destructively except at a regular interval where they add up to make a powerful but very short pulse. Imagine water in a pool, if you generate waves just right you can get it to splash suddenly and powerfully in certain spots, even though your wave machine itself can't generate such strong splashes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-locking

Disclaimer: I use these lasers sometimes, but I'm in signal processing, not physics.
I think lawsuits are generally vindictive in nature, and it's rarer when they're not. But that aside, looking at it on the other side of the coin a judgement of $1-$5 million would most likely have bankrupted many an employee.

The man had so much money to the point where his family claimed "money was no object". It seems the punishment fits the situation he is in, where given his situation he's been reprimanded in the same manner a mere "commoner" would.

Otherwise it reminds me of those congestion fines creeping up across cities. Basically rich people aren't bothered by them and the poor are inconvenienced greatly. I know I'm not bothered by the fines at all, and pay them when I'm hit by them.

It would be amiss to let rich people destroy other people's lives through libel because they can afford to pay the "fine".
Missed me: @johnsheehan
Links to a registration prompt. If anyone is really interested in reading this, google the URL.
>> if false
>> a = 1
>> end

>> defined? a
=> "local-variable"

>> a
=> nil
My Twitter ID is thevarungupta

I appreciate your effort! It was much needed.
I talk to people who have problems

I'll second this, but add that you can reach more people online than in meatspace. Change your focus: instead of only reading blogs frequented by programmers, read car enthusiast forums, gardening blogs, dry cleaning business forums... you get the idea. Spend time listening to people whose problems are completely alien to you.

And get another hobby :-)
Keyword Targeting via AdWords
" ... make me feel somewhat nauseous"

I think you meant nauseated.

nauseous -> nauseated

poisonous -> poisoned
Well, I am astonished that entering invalid code can cause a persistent state change within my interpreter. I can't think of any other REPL language in which that happens. OCaml:

# let a=b;;
Error: Unbound value b
# a;;
Error: Unbound value a
#

Haskell:

Prelude> let a=b

<interactive>:1:6: Not in scope: `b'
Prelude> a

<interactive>:1:0: Not in scope: `a'
Prelude>

Scheme:

guile> (define a b)

Backtrace:
In standard input:
1: 0* (define a b)

standard input:1:1: In expression (define a b):
standard input:1:1: Unbound variable: b
ABORT: (unbound-variable)
guile> a
ERROR: Unbound variable: a
ABORT: (unbound-variable)

You can see where my astonishment comes from...
Why Sitemaps and Website Navigation Plans Matter - Creately
Lenovo's wireless Multimedia Remote with Keyboard sneaks out for retail
No, it's using unless like I intended. But your example also demonstrates the weird behavior. As a few people have pointed out here and over in the post comments, the issue at hand isn't so much about statement modifiers as it is about how Ruby 'defines' local variables.

Take this for example:

ra:~$ irb
a = irb(main):001:0> a = b
NameError: undefined local variable or method `b' for main:Object
from (irb):1
irb(main):002:0> defined? a
=> "local-variable"
irb(main):003:0>

It just so happens that using statement modifiers in the way I tried using them brings this behavior to light.
Somehow I forgot to mention "as a side project" in my original post.

Your job will most likely always be shitty, at least I know it is for me. No company I can find excites me and the ones that do generally don't stay exciting for more than a year, after which you'll be hunting for a great job for several years before you find another one.

If you don't want to work on it in your spare time, your only choice is to find a kick ass job that pays enough to keep your family happy. If you figure out how to do that; let me know... ;)
I was going to point that out also. This isn't a permanent change. It's still silly, but at least it's not permanent like the stuff with liquids and toenail clippers.
Can you please describe your own experience here? I think a lot of people would find that useful.

I'm one of those people who needs to be allowed to have complete independence to do any work so its been hard in a corp environment.
Lighthouse not only does this, but lets you modify tickets with your commits (through Github, at least). Pretty cool.
Clickable: http://www.google.com/search?q=Code+That+Protects+Most+Cellp...

Deleting cookies for nytimes.com will also do the trick.
Thanks Matthew Blair
Can a bug be by design? :)
MapReduce: A Flexible Data Processing Tool (AKA Dean and Ghemawat strike back)
Zed made some good points. I also like simplicity in designs (and make things more complicated by refactoring if the need ever arises). That is one thing I like about Ruby: it is so simple and concise to do things that are not simle and concise in other languages - this makes code look simple and thus easy to read.
Because Apple has about 10,000 non-retail employees, while Microsoft has about 90,000.
Saying, "I don't understand what's going on" does not mean that nobody understands what's going on.

PS: If you actually carried out the experiment using the picture as a guide you would measure a rise in body temperature. The human body trys to maintain constant temperature, but it can't ignore the laws of physics.
About a year ago they let me board the wrong plane.

I was flying LAN, and the first leg of the flight, in the US, was operated by American Airlines. When I got to Miami for my connection to Peru, I showed my ticked to an AA employee at the gate and asked which gate the flight would leave. She pointed me to a nearby gate, I went there, waited about an hour, and boarded when they called everyone. They manually checked my ticket and gave me the stub back.

When I reached my seat there was someone already there. He showed me his ticked stub and he had the same seat number as I did. As I was cursing the airline for overbooking, we noticed his ticket was printed by AA, mine was by LAN. Since I had just flown with AA with a LAN ticket, I thought it was OK. The flight attendant returned after a while telling me that LAN and AA both had flights to Peru at that same time and my flight was actually leaving from a completely different terminal.

I had to run all the way across the airport, get a new ticket printed, go through security again to get to the right flight. Since my bags had been checked to the final destination, if the AA flight wasn't full and they hadn't sold the seat I had I might have never noticed the mistake.
"its equivalent to top layer being transparent that lets light through one way but doesn't let it reflect back"

That would be a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. It's impossible to make a one way mirror. If you could, you could allow light through from one side, and collect free energy, since one side would be hotter than the other.
Transparent aluminum is called alumina, and it exists, and it's incredibly hard. But not perfectly transparent (it's difficult to manufacture).
Before I launched each app, I had my first customers lined up. I think it's a mistake to spend time developing something first and then hope there are customers somewhere.

To be more specific, while developing a big product I spent time each week contacting people in my network until I found customers that were ready to pay as soon as I went live. It worked well.

In one case, I found a company that allowed me to offer 4, 2-hour classes with 15 people per class for 1 day after launch just to introduce them to the app, answer questions, and get everyone signed up.

I got about 40 paying customers that day, and it was the best launch ever for my small business as all those people told more people and we were growing from day 1.
The CCC is an excellent security conference and one I hope to attend some day. It is always scheduled between Christmas and New Year's Day so it is a little inconvenient.

Past amazing projects that were announced there:

- Forging MD5 certs

- Automated reverse-engineering of gates from silicon, used to attack Crypto-1

- First Xbox360 hypervisor exploit

- First unsigned code loaded onto the Wii
That's a great story. Thanks for sharing it. Can I ask what market segment you're in?