skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obama, Jobs to roll out Apple iVote
Just on the heels of the release of the MacBook Air, Apple has launch of the iVote, a widget that can be imbedded into a blog or Facebook profile and will also decide the next US President.
Yeah, if you could drive two monitors PLUS the internal monitor I would get the Macbook Pro religion, pronto. But I'm pretty sure you can't. You've got two displays, but one of them is the Macbook Pro's built-in display.

This is one reason why people bother with that big-ass 30" display. The other is that, admittedly, the 30" display is one nice piece of hardware. But pricey.

As it is I plan to buy an iMac, plant it in the center of the desk, and use my monitor arms to put my secondary display to the left and my Macbook to the right. Then I have two computers and three displays. Use Synergy to share mouse and keyboard between the two computers -- I've done that between Mac and Linux before, and I presume it will work from Mac to Mac.
Side question: I used to really look forward to each issue of Wired. It struck me as clever, attractive, provoking.

Then it turned into a glossy catalog of pricey cars and cognacs, with articles tossed in to fill some space.

I haven't really looked at an issue in a while. Is it worth the cover price?
StreamFocus.com (Integrated Project/Workflow/Action Management with workflow organized files, Critical Path management, Collaborative GTD, etc.) Private beta launching in March :) (First 30 days free, then Personal version starts at $20/month, Business version starts at $40/month)
And you would be right. But it would have expanded my horizons, nonetheless.
Web 1.0 sites that still rule
Not the way that I develop. Usually I leave the last 20% for stuff that may actually be rather easy, but just isn't within my expertise or I'm not qualified to do. For example, I may save polishing the design, graphics, copywriting, publicity, and legal for the end since I can just contract most of that out anyway.
Just from perusing these pictures - Warren Buffett looks like a regular, amiable, fun guy
Same with me.
Remember, doing all this I-am-startup-man-stuff is very much possible when you are healthy. If you start to feel even the slightest bit sick, most if not all of it goes out the window. Feeling you are getting sick is a red flag from you that one or more variables (nutrition, stress level, amount of sleep, exercise, workload, social life) is out of whack. Better, focus on balancing your life so you don't get sick (eat right, exercise, take a break and go out with friends).
Yes, it is a joke.
Page Views Are Dead, Engagement Named As Heir
I couldn't find the original article but the scene in a Star Trek movie where a photon torpedo is reconfigured is a utopia of what programming/integration could be in the future...

http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/articles/star-trek-and-adapta...
Social network downtime in 2008
I'm already working on a language that does this. It's called Maroon, and it's as high-level as they come. For instance you'd type in "make fantasy sports site" and have one working in seconds. Or "clone Google".

I'm going to put the project on elance, since I obviously have no experience writing programming languages. How much do you want to bet some Indian firm says they can program it for $1,200 in 2 weeks?
13 Types of Shell (Some You Never Probably Heard About)
Rands: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/04/04/more_messy_... and http://www.flickr.com/photos/rands/2198653768/in/pool-pixelr...

Another Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000740.html

The best I've ever seen is a 30" with a 20" vertical on both sides: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWrit...
Heres the problem I see: should it ever come to a point where ripping DVDs and downloading ripped movies is totally legal, will studios then have an incentive to produce quality movies?

Won't it hurt us if they stop making movies we like to watch, because they can't turn a profit?

I see the guy's point, but it could prove to be an unfortunate truth.
No list of shells would be complete without a brief mention of John Coker's adventure shell: http://nadvsh.sourceforge.net (which among other tresures included the fabled "wand of emacs").
"Oh, I get it! I get jokes." -Homer Simpson
Or Donald Trump - "My building isn't worth millions of dollars because I built it, its worth millions of dollars because its a great building."
Umh, we pretty much have that today.
48% of teenagers bought zero CDs in 2007
At the last place I was working (as an employee) I had 4 displays.

17" laptop display
2 - 24" Dell monitors (I think 24")
1 - 19" LCD

Frankly it was too much. I mostly used the two 24"ers in the middle and used the outriggers for email and other junk like that.

It actually did make it nice to have VS.NET, Flash, FlashDevelop and IE open full screen on a separate monitor, although I lost track of the mouse quite frequently.

In your case, I'd recommend buying the biggest monitor, with the highest resolution you can afford. I'm with Rands on this that the most pixels win.
Let's hope those numbers translate into votes and let's hope superdelegates don't steal the election away from him.
You should have at least 3 different light sources in the room. Try to have diffuse lighting, as diffuse as possible.
> Assuming that all you need to do is tell people about what you've got and the money will come freely and nothing will break,

That's a pretty big assumption... ;-)
I've really enjoyed this series of posts and the comments that follow. But there's something I don't understand:

How does all of this work when I don't see advertisements?

I haven't seen an overt ad (in the standard 'clickthrough' sense) on my browser in a LONG time. I didn't even know, until I went and tested, that YouTube had ads! And this service is ITSELF a -free- service. I don't have to pay for my AdBlockPlus subscription (they should monetize that!), and only rarely do I either have to add an add to block OR disable blocking because it breaks a feature.

So a world in which the user doesn't even see the ads being presented...how does that influence the system?

It seems like there are a few options:

1) Sue people who block ads.

This idea seems silly at first, but it's not entirely unfounded. The concept is explored in Sagan's _Cosmos_. And Kelo v. New London could conceivably provide justification, though probably not. How would an EULA that REQUIRED viewing the ads play out?

2) Require strong enforcement

There are any number of ways to require viewing an advertisement -- almost all of them at the risk of inconveniencing your 'honest' users. Is this the price to pay if you want it free? How does that compare to television advertising? With dozens of channels when I was younger, I rarely saw ads. Now it's harder, as most stations seem to take breaks at nearly the exact time, so you have to watch -someone-. And some shows are so good people daren't change the channel. How can this be ported to the internet? Should it?

3) Consider it the 'cost of doing business'.

Some people will block ads just like some people will change the channel. Do advertisers care?

4) Integrate ads with content.

TV shows started integrating product placement in order to make more money from advertisers. Can bloggers be bought? How much is a "content-full" endorsement worth? Radio personalities already do this: the most expensive ads are the ones integrated into "host banter". Would a blogger be torn to shreds if readers discovered he or she was being paid to place content as a POST rather than as a clearly demarcated ad?

5) Adusers

Using 'trusted users' to push a product has already been done. Sell your posting history for profit! Do these 'guerilla tactics' work? Probably. But it's hard to see how a service provider can utilize this power: it's the users that get the 'insider status' that makes their endorsement worthwhile.

It seems to me that failing to address how the Freeconomic process can be subverted is problematic to the overall argument.
I'm a high schooler, taking 7 AP courses and 2 other courses with no lunch period (I have to eat during some classes). After school, I run 10 miles cause I'm on the distance running team. I get home, shower, dinner, and between 8pm and 7am, I have 12 hours to do a combination of sleep/homework/programming.

So from my experience (as someone who averages 3-4 hours a night), NO CAFFEINE. Caffeine ends up destroying you and making you less capable of doing things. Apples wake you up more than a cup of coffee. EXERCISE. A few pushups in the middle of the night wake you up better than anything.

Prioritizing is probably the most important. I usually go Schoolwork -> Programming -> Sleep as my priorities. On days before track workouts or races or big tests, I swap Sleep and Programming as priorities.

It really is difficult to balance school and programming, but hey if you want to pursue something you gotta give it your all. Just don't destroy yourself while you're at it. I exercise, eat, and sleep binge on weekends. Its a good life.
Casual cryptography for web developers
... and have a 10% chance of not just having done something really dumb! ;-D
> Turns it into MVC programming like Rails or anything else.

Why not then just use Django or Turbo Gears or Ramaze or Nitro then?

In the end, you have to live with the underlying language.
Growth fears hit Google shares
> Agree with yourself that you'll do whatever it takes to make it succeed.

Or, conversely, "fail fast".
Rails Way is pretty good (though someone borrowed my copy before I could spend much more time perusing it).

I also suggest The Ruby Way (though perhaps I'm biased); however, the Web dev section is dated. :(
I am glad you guys are finding my article discussion worthy, but why aren't you commenting on Read/WriteWeb? This way it is much easier for me and other readers to respond. the whole point of blogs is to discuss things around content not in remote seclude chats like this one.

And regarding me being wrong about Free - not all as simple as a lot of you think here.
[referring to the past lecture that had no lies]
"Do you remember the first lecture - how I said that 'every lecture has a lie?'"
...
"Well - that was a lie."

What if THAT was the current lecture's lie? :)
I don't know about this lack of sleep bit. I tried it and people have better ideas and do better work when not stressed. I'd rather substitute better planning for lack of sleep.
At home, I have a 15" MacBook Pro with Dell's 30" panel, and I like that setup a lot. The 30" has enough room for all the apps I'm actively using, while things like iChat and iTunes sit on the laptop display off to the side.

I'm also pretty sure there's no way to drive two external monitors from a MacBook Pro. But my previous setup was a Power Mac with dual 20-inchers, and I like the single-large-display setup better, at least on OS X -- there's just more flexibility in sizing and arranging your apps onscreen.

If you're going to go the 30" route, the Dell's worth considering -- it works well and will probably save you 25%+ over the Apple, especially if you can find a coupon code for it.
Intresting. I thought Cortez initiated this stradegy
My 1st blog post: My mom is leaving Facebook
Github is MySpace for hackers
Stupid Ruby Quoting Tricks
This really is a very cool little community . . . they're going to make a killing when they start charging.
I have been thinking about starting a blog for quite a while now, and I finally took the time to do it today. In order to get up and running quickly, I just used a pre-made blogger template and focused on adding my first entry. Blogger seems decent, although that default formatting of having the first paragraph be spaced out nicely and the rest smashed together bothers me, and I'm not sure I like the blockquote formatting, either, but I don't feel like wading around in the CSS at the moment to figure out how to fix it.

Anyways, that's all I've got at the moment. I know that I am a bit short on links to other blogs and things like that, but I'm a bit new at this whole thing. Any comments on my writing style or formatting suggestions to improve the general readability would be greatly appreciated. Of course, comments on the post itself are also welcome :).
My back of the envelope calculation says an electon at normal electronic speeds (maybe 1/10 the speed of light) takes less than a millisecond back and forth across the Pacific. So blame the electronics, not the ocean
Protecting Journalistic Integrity Algorithmically
Yep get more sleep. Take a nap in the middle of the day
Exoskeleton Turns Humans Into Terminators
I've always wanted to charge Bill Gates for third party testing services. MS project is all right for simple gant charts I guess...
> a startup that is boostrapping a semantic web framework through top-down crowdsourced information from free plugins and widgets

Web2-speak is leveraging the new synergistic paradigm! ;-)
Hmm. Sounds like Twitter isn't Clinton's demographic. Would be hard to say her unpopularity there reflects similar unpopularity outside of the interwebs...
I'm using fogbugz, like it a lot!
Unfortunately webpy is poorly documented. Not good for a beginner. It is better for those people that know python well, and like to have absolute control of what's going on, and don't like the overhead of a large framework.

While webpy is small, I found myself often looking at the code, which has little commenting, to understand what's going on, or how to use a certain feature, mainly b/c the documentation is so lacking.

CherryPy might be a better choice.
Linux: from power up to bash prompt
Encyclopedia of Life launches, crashes (11.5 million hits in 4 hours)
It is a good analogy. During WWII the soviet red army got smashed at the beginning by the germans, and was in retread (lost a lot of men and equipment). Millions of soldiers were captured. Hitler gave the order to summary execute all commanders and communist members found in each unit.

Meanwhile, Stalin, pissed at the poor performance of its army, gave order to execute all the commanders who retreated, or their units gave up to the germans.

Giving up, ment certain death, retreating ment execution, so the red army commanders; from simple captains, to even generals, were left with literally one choice: Fight to their death.

At the end, we all know who won the war.
IIRC GMail isn't exactly making money for Google. I never thought about it before reading this, but I can see GMail being offered for free to drive people away from Yahoo and Hotmail. Chances are once you're on Google services you're more likely to use Google Search (which is where the money lies).

For example look at the nicely placed Search the Web box at the top of GMail.
Jerry Weinberg told a story about how IBM used to send him around to their most expensive projects. He would report back about which ones deserved further investment and which were hopeless and should be killed. Usually they took his advice, but there was one he couldn't get them to kill no matter how hard he tried. This was a project to create an "automatic debugging machine". The executives were too enthralled by the diagram the people on the project had drawn for them: a box with an arrow going into it saying program with bugs and an arrow coming out the other side saying program without bugs. (At this point he was met with incredulous laughter and insisted it was true.) Although they had sunk millions of dollars into this with nothing to show, the executives had been so burnt by programs with bugs that they refused to give up the idea.

At long last, Weinberg said, he finally came up with the argument that got the project killed. It went like this. "Say you have an automatic debugging machine. I could feed it a blank sheet of paper, and out would come the program I wanted. So you'd have to have a mind-reader in there!"
I didn't consider this a political post.
If you have exactly two mutually exclusive sets of users, I'd suggest just having two GUI set-ups, with a big ol' toggle switch between them. I'm guessing that's not the case, though--can you be more detailed as to what the differences in the requirements for the different userbases were?
Serious Drama, And Lots Of Stupidity, Behind Stage6 Shutdown
Am I the only one with a Facebook account that has a total of fifteen people on it, all of which I speak to every day?
Politics aren't explictly banned here.

http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
You might want to tell your visitors about your post having been picked up by HN and that they can find additional comments here. To comment on the article on readwriteweb I need to

a) scroll all they way to the bottom,

b) need to create an account or type other boring details like my name and email address

c) potentially wait for approval (it's not exactly clear if I need to wait for approval, which fields are required, etc)

d) have another site to check to see replies to my comments,

e) discuss an article in a boring, non-hierarchical comment structure (how do I see who is replying to me, how do I reply to someone else?)

f) miss out on the interesting/insightful replies and comments of my peers on HN (specifically in reply to one of my comments)

You certainly might not like having to come here to check for comments to your post, but understand there are no incentives for HN users to post their comments somewhere else. Hopefully you find the discussion thread here interesting and worthy of your time and attention.
Another vote for FogBugz. I'm using it at one of my clients where there was resistance to doing anything other than keeping a list of TODOs on a bit of paper on someone's desk. FogBugz is _very_ easy to use for almost everyone and it has replaced the bit of paper, and (surprise, surprise) the team has suddenly discovered that they have better visibility into what they are doing.
When Did You Become Someone Else’s Intellectual Property?
What PayPal does with your money
There is a problem with this. All developers are not created equally. It may take me 100 hours to complete a task a more capable programmer only needs 5 to do. In such a situation, I'd acrue more value than the next 3 closest developers.
That article, the article that inspired it, and numerous comments here are all wrong about one thing. Gmail didn't win. Yahoo Mail has almost 15x the customers, and over half of the web mail market.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/051007.png

My favorite quote, in reference to email services, "when Google made its move, Yahoo! could not compete." If being unable to compete means having a 15x userbase (some of whom are paying you, unlike your competitor, who has only free customers) then I sure hope every business I ever run cannot compete.
Reads more like a troll than spam, I think.
How does all of this work when I don't see advertisements?

Would be interesting to see what's the proportion of users using ad blockers. I'm guessing it's a small minority.

It seems to me that people are taking ads for granted on internet, just like they take them for granted on TV.
I don't think doing something so unhealthy could possibly be worth it. There will still be startups left to be founded after you graduate. Or there will still be grad programs left to be attended after you IPO.
I tend to agree, but there are some gestures on the MBP that are really handy:

1. Two finger tap: since there's no 'right click' (which is CTRL-click on a Mac) the two finger tap means I don't remove my fingers from the pad to get a context menu.

2. Two fingers to scroll. Very handy on web pages and it works up/down and left/right.
Ruby 1.9 with Symbol#to_proc and (soon) curried Procs
Thin The Fast Ruby Web Server
"... . On the other hand, 2 side by side monitors might accomplish the same thing and I could buy the 23" and set my 18" monitor next to it. I'm wondering if two monitors better than one and if a 30" is worth the expense. Thoughts? ..."

I've just upgraded my old sony trinitron 17" to "a" new 22" Asus & have thought about some of the q's you have asked. Some things I'd suggest are:

- if you use double monitors try to make the the same size, ratio

- check the hardware will realistically support 2xmonitors at max rez

- check if graphics card has 2 vga ports (eg: NVidia)

- check OS supports max rez

- look for tip/tilt egonomics

- check text rez for reading

- check if you are getting right monitor for use editing + (heavy dvd usage?, gaming?, colour correctness for graphics?)

- power consumption. some of the new LCD's are guzzlers

2 x monitors is good for individual apps on 1 screen (1 for code, 1 for browser etc) but I find virtual desktops (Virtual Pages) are just as handy. I'd advise against mixing monitors. I've tried it but the different sizes make it hard (but not impossible) to use.
As long as you eat and get your exercise, foregoing sleep isn't THAT bad.

Though, admittedly it hurts your liver and slows brain development. And bad sleep patterns will follow you later into life...

but hey, we're young and we think we're invincible! Dont ruin the illusion! ;)
More On Why Google Is Habit-Forming
It's an unintentional parody, which makes it all the more entertaining!
"...but don't ignore them" is the point of the article.
No, it isn't.

No, they're not.
Pakistan hijacks YouTube
good explanation on chain of events
I love the internet
Ha, yeah, what kind of moron would try to build a debugging machine? Any idiot can see that it should be a software program.

I'll list that on elance too.
Pretty neat. Thanks.
That may be true, but I'd prefer the option to dig through my code if/when I want to. I'm never in favor of enforcing things on people that they could opt to do themselves because you think it's good for them and they lack discipline.
Notes from Collective Intelligence Foo Camp
Iminta expands support of services
Give it a try...

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/test-yourself/Doors.swf

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=117
There might have been a heavy overlap with market speak, but each word was deliberately chosen.

boostrapping: opposite of Cyc. Starting with a unintelligent system, and making it more intelligent.

semantic web framework: machine understandable content

top-down: creating a taxonomy of areas of understanding like songs, books, movies, etc.

crowdsourced: built into existing pages, with user input

free: zero cost

plugins and widgets: blocks of code that go into sites like blogs

edit: I think I took your comment too seriously. Thank god for emoticons ;-D
Ask YC: What do bootstrappers eat for dinner?
I quit my job a week ago and moved into an apartment with a friend to work on an idea full-time. I'm 23-years-old. I want to know, what do you guys eat for dinner?! How do you buy food when you have no income? When I was an earning man, I managed to get by with meals at the office, lean cuisines, and hummus. Now that I'm on my own I have to figure out everything for myself. We plan on making Costco runs about every two weeks and going to Safeway to get anything else we need. How do you guys survive?