skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We'll just have to agree to disagree on the value of exposing kids to Christian cartoons that have little other merit (I think most kids programming has little other merit, so I'm not just picking on Veggie Tales...there are many things I'd rather kids not watch, most of which don't have Christian beliefs as one of the things they're teaching). And that's OK.
It varies, though it tends to be noisy repetitive semi-drone electronic-ish stuff.

Lately I'm liking Holy Fuck.

(Though I dug up some Hawkwind, too, for some odd reason.)
In a lot of cases you can partner with great people instead of hiring them.

To enhance ourdoings.com with online photo editing I just had to read Snipshot's API docs. To enable a super fancy comment system I just integrated with Disqus. I stopped hating slideshows when I tried piclens, and they're integrated too.

So follow his advice that the first employees must be perfect. If you can't hire perfect, find an alternative to hiring.
Sometimes, music with lyrics in the language I'm learning. I don't understand most of it, but my ear gets better at picking out words, and properly-conjugated phrases start to sound natural to me, even if I don't know what they mean yet.

But that's only when I feel I need to be pulled along. Once I get into flow, I don't see or hear anything except what I'm doing. My music will end and I won't notice until 2 hours later when I come up for air.

In "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister are even more explicit: if programmers need to put on headphones to drown out ambient noise, they're using up the very creativity they're being paid so much for.
I strongly agree with 99% of this post. But I don't agree with the:

"Three weeks vacation? Not going to happen."

It doesn't cost you anything to offer a decent amount of vacation. That's probably the best way to avoid burning out your highly motivated hackers. Give them some time off when they need it and they'll come back with even more energy and drive.
I believe if he ran the company himself instead of leaving it to other people then he would have been fine. His common sense was right on, he just didn't have the faith he should have had.

I am unsure how much he prayed about his decisions, but I believe he didn't pray enough and listened to other people too much.
Nice! Also loved the car pics you have put up there!
Anyway, What do you do for messengers? I use yahoo messenger extensively for work(I work remotely) and I need the voice chat feature and it just doesn't work on ubuntu, I hate that :(.
EC2 definitely proves itself to be the bestest way of doing what this guy is doing. I wish I had something cool to do with EC2, but alas, I only study math as a graduate student. Maybe i'll get some sweet computational stuff I'll need doing, and farm it out to EC2.
Poor man's web application with StrokeDB and Merb
Philip Glass is my favorite to listen to while coding. It's prefect for both background music while focusing on a difficult problem and for putting into the foreground when you just need to take a second away from the problem.
Mostly hip-hop, especially freestyles.
Yes.

What this means, of course, is that anyone who exhibits even a shred of self-confidence will probably be accused, by someone somewhere, of being arrogant. The symptoms are largely the same. The difference is one of degree, and of results.

Arrogance is hard to diagnose without the benefit of hindsight. It is now evident that Marc Andreesen was being arrogant when he proclaimed that Netscape would kill the Microsoft desktop. But Linus Torvalds was apparently not being arrogant when he claimed that he could build a better VC system than CVS in less than a month, because... he did.
That's one of the newtonian problems yes as time is essentially irrelevant you have one amount of energy 1 second after the big bang as you do 1 second before the end of the universe.

However, you can fix this problem. Causality won't be violated if the area you take the energy from is sufficiently far away from where you're acting. If I take mass from the Alpha Centauri system to solve the energy problem 5 years ago, if I just live out 5 years causality gets violated as our light cones merge.

If I take the energy from a star 6 billion light years away, I can go back in time 5,999,999,999.999 years and causality won't be violated as said star couldn't have had an effect on Earth for me to remove.

Essentially this is like time travel in a bubble.

As for "Back to the Future" style, that's actually between theories. Doc talks about multiple timelines, essentially describing the Multiverse model; I think Biff picks up a gambling book from the future and instead of being Marty's families' stooge, he becomes a rich bastard and like owns the planet or something odd. However, people disappearing from the timeline and Marty getting weak when he was unlikely to be born is more Newtonian as in a multiverse you can't effect your own past.

It's possible it's Quantum Time Travel, as it's predicted some particles act in time loops; essentially they ditch our time and go back a year and then carry on like normal and no one even notices, because they're actually there 1 second after they go back in time but we can't tell they're actually 1 year and 1 second older not just 1 second older. It's very odd.

In Quantum, violating the law of thermodynamics (AFAIK) doesn't seem to have an effect. As far as I understood what I read your latter assumption seems to be on par. However, I think if you sufficiently altered the entropy of a system, that's when causality would kick in. Merely having more mass in a system doesn't make much different, as long as that small amount of mass doesn't start causing asteroids to crash into the planet and black holes to form... or the death of your grandfather. Like the predicted particles, going back in time doesn't cause buildings to collapse or people to die, so the universe lets it slide. I think if we went sending neutron bombs back in time to wipe out Hitler, then there would be major causality problems for multiple reasons namely there'd never have been a Hitler to nuke!

So overall I'd say the BttF style of time travel was obviously the writers' confusion between two distinct theories of time travel. Multiverse fits the universal effects, but quantum fits the characters' effects.
I don't agree with trying to hide your identity online.

My username is my first initial + my last name. This is also my email address. I link to my blog which has my full name and a link to my resume which includes my address, phone number, education and employment history.

People like me with less common names wouldn't have much luck trying to hide our identity anyway. Google my name and you're likely to find where I went to high school, pictures, posts I've made to various mailing lists and the books I buy on Amazon.

The government already has my finger prints on file (and the finger prints of all legal immigrants to the United States).

I am against invasive procedures at airports (and other places). But given all the other things you must do to board a plane it's not that much work to put your finger on a small reader.
Check out the DL section of that site... lots of radio mixes by Above & Beyond, Ferry Corsten, Paul van Dyk, Tiesto, et al.
Which is why nobody was arguing to fire employees that are not workaholics in your stable and profitable company. Everyone was talking about startups where hopefully all of your employees have a decent amount of equity.

There are stable jobs at IBM, Microsoft, 37 Signals and Fog Creek Software for those that need work life balance.
I use pidgin as my main messenger, also have skype but don't use it much... The yahoo support for it is decent, not really sure about voice though

edit: Try gyachi for better yahoo chat support. Haven't used it myself, but it seems to be pretty popular on the forum.
I thought about this for a minute. The problem is that, first of all, arrogance doesn't imply ignorance. Data is data: If you believe that an SDK is unnecessary, but the customer feedback data says otherwise, the smart thing to do is to change your mind.

Secondly, I see no evidence whatsoever that Apple "did a 180 degree turn" on the SDK. The plan of waiting over a year to release the SDK is working out great. There are good reasons to have done so -- it strings the hype cycle along (if Apple had released everything at once, what do they do for an encore?), it lets the UI designers get some real-world experience, it shakes out the hardware, etc. Embracing MS is also something Apple has done for years -- MS software is a cornerstone of the Mac's success (Excel was a Mac app first!)

Finally, it's a mistake to equate the actions of 37s, or the Rails community, or Apple with the actions of individuals. No one person runs these things. Even a tiny company like 37s has more than one person, and Apple is a huge company with lots and lots of smart people.
I find "Kubuntu" to help me be more productive but then it is a matter of personal preference also.

"Yakuake" is a Quake style terminal that Smoothly rolls down from the top of your screen after you press the shortcut key. This thing saves a lot of time to get quick access to the terminal without having to look for the shortcut icon in the Desktop or the Taskbar.

If you need a good python editor than I would reccomend "DrPython". Also "ipython" is a good replacement for the standard python shell.

For text editing in general I like "Cream" which is basically a nicely configured "gvim" : http://cream.sourceforge.net/

Konversation is my favorite irc client.
Yes, and it's the kind of thing searching was invented for. But for some reason HN refuses to provide a way to search posts and comments (no, having to go to Google and search news.ycombinator.com is not decent search. Google doesn't take into consideration how long ago a post was, how many comments it had and how many votes it received, all information I think is useful for determining relevance of the results).
Komodo Edit now Open Source
Apache vs Nginx : Web Server Performance Deathmatch
Can you post a link to the theme you use ? If you customized it, do you mind sharing it ?
I found the beginning of the article especially interesting. The emphasis on continuous transformations seems out of place though. Why not discrete? For example, at time A I receive a coin from the future, flip it, then send it back to time A. Question: is it heads or tails?
Digitally Imported radio (di.fm) is a great trance channel. I used to subscribe for $5/month to get their higher quality feed, which was worth it when I had good headphones. I spent a lot of hours in the library coding and doing math listening to di.fm. They have other great channels like "chillout" and "house" which are also good for coding. Chillout is, well, chiller and good for relaxed coding sessions and house is a bit more funky and less "poo tsh poo tsh poo tsh poo tsh" like trance can get (and can get annoying).

ASOT++ btw. I listen to it every week. You can d/l it on most torrent sites, which isn't even as illegal as d/ling other music. Its like taping the radio and giving it to your friend. And this radio doesn't have commercials. Plus trance style music lives on a different plane of business than the rest of the industry they way I see it - which is a whole different tangent I'll not go down.
The vitamin D miracle: Is it for real?
I heard whale song, and ocean sounds now thinking of it, is supposedly good, however I've never bothered to try it. I'll have to find somewhere to get it that doesn't charge $20, it'd be cheaper to go to the ocean myself.
Adapt to what customers? People like Norman? The advanced customers 37signals isn't trying to serve?

You assume that trying to please a completely different type of customer doesn't alienate your current customers.

What if Apple added half the features of Final Cut Pro to the next iMovie, or if Microsoft made Windows Movie Maker nearly as complicated as Adobe Premiere? The advanced video editors would rejoice, but the people with simpler needs would be left out in the cold or have to wade through all the new modes and settings they didn't have to worry about before. The old users would be less satisfied. And the pledged new users would likely still be unsatisfied because they're expects and eventually push the limits of whatever software they choose to use.

And don't you think 37signals would have to raise their price if they started making their software more "advanced"?

It's like complaining that an apartment complex should radically improve their apartments with tiled kitchen areas, more bedrooms, and individual laundry rooms – because that's what you want. But that apartment complex may just be trying to serve people looking for moderately priced places to live.
I can see it now:
"Dude! New kernel is out!", "I'll get the beer... Psssh, crack, glug glug glug"

Never before were nerds that excited about recompiling the kernel.
"It's basically VPS but where you pay by the hour and it doesn't have a static IP and persistent hdd. You can also use a AMI with what do you need (I saw there was one for Rails)."

Yeah I'm looking to setup something where I can point a domain to a load balancer instance (but if it needs to be restarted and changes instance URL, the domain no longer points to the right one?) so I can essentially run an entire site/app off of EC2. But then again it's probably better off to make a regular server be the load balancer I'm guessing.

Since EC2 doesn't have persistent hdd - where do ppl keep databases? Not on S3 the latency would be up there.. in RAM on EC2?

I pre-ordered the O'Reilly EC2/S3 book months ago.. it should be shipping in March I think.
techno/trance. ETN.fm / DI.fm type stuff in iTunes Radio
Open up synaptic and browse through all the Documentation sections. There are lots of goodies there. :)
We aren't disagreeing about the merit of that show. We are disagreeing about the merit of the parent making all the decisions about what the kid is allowed to watch.
Ask YC: Real World Applications of Machine Learning?
I've been in grad school in physics for 4 years. Ever since I read MacKay's book on ML I've been obsessed with the field. I have a strong desire to do something with ML technology that real customers would pay for, but I'm a bit clueless about where to look. Questions:

(1) What are some specific commercial applications of ML technology (other than banking/finance which I'm not interested in for personal reasons) I've been looking at medical devices / biometrics, but any other suggestions would be helpful.

(2) Would someone with a physics background be taken seriously? I have a decent amount of experience doing numerical work and data analysis with python / c++, but I suspect that these types of jobs are hyper-competitive even for people with hard-core CS backgrounds.
I started out using Kubuntu, but the only thing is that they're switching to KDE4 for the next release. If your system is just for general use, then that's not a big deal, but I'm waiting till KDE gets a little more stable before using it for dev.
And really I think you're just having a semantical disagreement when your core beliefs are pretty similar.
Yes, but did you go to MIT? Or any "name" university? If not, why not?

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I have seen lots of insanely smart children whose parents were not rich. But, unfortunately, to get into these top colleges takes more than brains.

Nowadays the average MIT freshman has had a lifetime of parents indulging their curiosity and ambitions, prep tests and tutors, and this takes money. Not to mention (in the USA) the expense of living in an area where the schools are good enough. These days, sometimes it's the difference between a microscope or just a textbook. Sometimes it's the difference between a textbook and NO textbook. Many parents risk bankruptcy just to move to a district where their kids get a little better education.

Finally, there is the problem of not having connections. A family making less than $75,000 in household income probably doesn't have elite connections -- unless they are a family of academics or artists. Which is why I mentioned that.

When I was a kid, just buying a home computer was the equivalent expense of 10% of a laborer's salary. My Dad was able to do that because he was a bit richer, and it changed my life.

Today, maybe the couple consisting of a cleaner and a day laborer could buy a decent computer for the whole family -- but their kid is competing against a richer kid that had two or three of their very own, to play with and take apart.

If you want to believe in Horatio Alger and that anybody can do anything given enough willpower, fine. But in my opinion, when the children of the rich are often essentially coasting into such schools on a small measure of precocity, it should not require superhuman effort for the poor geniuses to get in.

In my ideal world, we'd have something like Swiss policy; ensure that all primary and secondary education is up to snuff, no matter where you live, and kindergarten to Ph.D is free as long as you can make the grade.
Yes, that's the problem of using EC2 for webhosting, after restarting the address of the instance changes. It's best to have a fixed reguler server and then instances varied on demand. RightScale is a company that sells this kind of services.

Those who use DB on EC2 (from what I read on the web) just don't restart their instance and make backups to S3.
Or just:

words = "zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten".split()
word_to_number = dict((j,i) for i,j in enumerate(words))
It tastes like a prison industrial complex. Just like this place.

Call in the Predator. The floor needs mopping.
Icons:
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/black-white?conte...

Window Theme:
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanoid+-+OSX+-+...

I think I got the background from DeviantArt, not positive though. And I just messed with the window color settings until the menus were a grey / titanium color.

edit: make sure you install the compizconfig-settings-manager package. That gives you the ability to set your own compiz settings for animations, transparencies, etc.
I think many of you are missing the number 1, in my book, best part about mac laptops: Sleep! It works brilliantly. I close the lid and it sleeps, keeping the RAM alive for up to a week. When I wanna use my computer again I just open it up and within a couple of seconds I'm back at it. I know windows laptops can do something similar, but its not implemented anywhere nearly as well and is a deal breaker for me. I don't have experience with linux laptops, but I imagine its at best as good as windows laptops.

I cannot emphasize enough how useful sleep is. I go to the library, open it up, start working, close it. Move to another desk. Open it up, start working, close it. Go to the coffee shop with friend. Have a tea, then open it up to show him a plot from the hw, bring up the plot (without waiting for it to restore...), show buddy, and close the lid again. All this happens with minimal battery loss.

That is the biggest reason i love my powerbook. If I was going to get a "windows" laptop, I'd get a thinkpad and put ubuntu on it.
Thanks for the information and link. Can't believe I didn't know about that. You saved me a lot of headaches and $$$.
Bands: Infected Mushroom, Shpongle, Sigur Ros

iTunes Radio: Electronic->AH.FM, Ambient->Drone Zone on SomaFM
China's latest crackdown: The liquid lunch
Core beliefs about religion might be similar, but not about attitudes to parenting. I've only expressed a small part of my disagreement.
Interview with Luis von Ahn explaining his idea of using CAPTCHA to digitize books
Fred Wilson: Saving Money On Startups
I think both 37signal and Don Norman are being arrogant (where arrogant in this case should be defined as state of mind that doesn't allow your mind to churn out sensible ideas). Please note that I've enormous respect for both of them, as I've read most of the Norman's and 37signals's work.
Believe it or not, I still am at a loss to figure out the philosophy of their design. Even pg once said that he tried using Highrise and even took the trouble to email Jason but then again he was being arrogant. But what worries me is that people are still paying money for it. That said, best thing they have done is Rails, all other products are well hmmmmm (technically I somewhat like Campfire :-) )....
Boards of Canada, Thievery Corporation, Morcheeba, Zero 7, Massive Attack, Daft Punk, Kid 606, Royksopp

zenlinux's idea of a last.fm group for this is an excellent idea.
The Latest Data: Yes, It's a Recession
There's room for one more startup.
When starting a startup, we shouldn't worry about if there's room in a particular market or not. If we're solving a problem, there's always room. Who would have thought google would become the biggest software company in the world. Software moves to the web, and google is the leader in that world. Almost everyone uses goog applications in one way or another. When our startup is in the idea stage, many companies can emerge into our market, and we wouldn't have time to track all of them down.
If we have a competitive advantage, there's always room. We don't start a startup to be 20% better than the competitors; we start a startup to be 20 times better than the competitors. When goog started, there were excite, lycos, aliweb, altavista, webcrawler..., but goog came in and kick ass. If we have to know something about our market, make sure we know if the market is new, or declining.
Trust me, if we're solving a problem, and we have competitive advantage, there's plenty of room.
> I am unsure how much he prayed about his decisions, but I believe he didn't pray enough and listened to other people too much.

Prayer as a surrogate for decision-making?
(1) All sorts of information and collaborative filtering. Examples: Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, etc. Lots on ML in defense these days too -- i.e. here's everyone's call data, who's the terrorist?

(2) If you just want to implement or tweak existing algorithms, it doesn't really matter what your background is -- the qualifications are the same as any software engineering job (so CS degree helps a lot but not mandatory). If you want to be in a research type position, you'll need a PhD in CS with a dissertation on ML.
If you have more than one computer you need synergy.
The Daily Chump Bot
Trying to inspire
Lately I'm listening: Read My Mind - The Killers
I don't get it . . . were you playing around with the voting mechanism and you figured out how to give someone multiple upvotes for one item? Otherwise, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.
Goldman Sachs raises possibility of $200 a barrel oil
Animoto Video
Welcome to the future of slideshows.
voting up someone's comment history.
It's not obvious to me that solving online dating is profitable enough. I just met a lead architect on a major personals site, and he noted that none of their success stories are repeat customers. Perhaps the ideal (evil) business model is to find people with a steady income and lots of hope but prevent their success.
Won't range behave like xrange soon anyway?
Reminds me of the $100 rebate. If that is true, makes me wonder what Apple has already planned for the iPhone. Full IPTV support on 3G iPhone? iPhone only geo-aware social network?
On 2, we are a company founded by a combination of CS/Physics people. We have found that pairing a physics person with a CS person leads to the best outcomes.

I think you should emphasize the things you are good at (probably modeling and data analysis) and not worry too much about the CS gaps There are a ton of opportunities out there for your skill-set.
Progressive trance streamed from ETN.FM.
As long as we're thinking about the physics of things straight out of science fiction (that have been entertained by reputable physicists as at least not violating the known laws of physics), there was a paper submitted to the arXiv about how, unfortunately, warp/faster-than-light travel requires unphysical amounts of energy, meaning it's effectively impossible. Bummer. http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9702026
Apple unveils plans for iPhone 2.0
I did the same. Using Debian at my Macbook.
I beatbox.