skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...but I was working there.

Here's the answer to your problem. Do things. Be active. You can find extracurriculars — dancing and yoga are wonderful activities, as are any sorts of gatherings that involve intellectual conversation of any sort — but the fastest, simplest, stupidest answer is that if you're active in things that require other people, you're getting out and meeting them and bonding with them.

On paper, I have perhaps the most antisocial set of interests you'll ever find. I spend hours and hours on the computer, I delight in writing essays and similar longform, I'm fascinated with both postmodern and classical literature, I listen to bizarre avante garde music. Essentially if you wrote up a list of things you weren't supposed to do if you wanted friends, I'd be everything there. And last year it was true: I didn't talk to many people, I spent hours in chat rooms, I tried not to leave my room.

This year I've changed that, and now I find myself going out several times a week purely socially, with several bunches of people with whom I'm also making things. The work simply gives us a reason to get together.

Curiously, I also find myself using Twitter and Facebook more and more as I become more social, because as I've stopped looking at them as tools of communication and started to use them more playfully, there's less inhibition involved.

Let me throw a twist in, however, because thus far I might as well be describing entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, while fun, may not be the sorts of people you want to get involved in. My twist is this: Find people who aren't anything like you. If you're a technologist, don't bud around with technologists. Find people with other talents. Take advantage of the fact that everybody's good at something, and let them take advantage of you. That way you're playing to your strengths but you're meeting different people who do things you're not familiar with. Then, if you want to shed the image of yourself as a geek who spends his time, say, writing five-paragraph responses late at night on Hacker News, learn about whatever all those other people know. Let them teach you things. It makes you well-rounded, it gives them the pleasure of talking about what they love, and it lets you exist without falling back on that geek crutch.
Unlimited Free Calling with Google Voice
SPQ   Gold
The SPQ Gold is the only assessment in the world that measures Sales Call Reluctance – the fear of prospecting and self-promotion.
Yea, I wish I could <script language='ruby'></script>
Apple is defined as a culture of crappy rip-offs. Why would they care?
Did you enter that same email as your domain contact info? Because in that case, it is in the WHOIS databases in plain text, and yes, it is trivial for any spambot to harvest.

The same holds for any registrar though. The only way to avoid having your email out there in the open is to sign up for a private WHOIS service (which GoDaddy offers, as do many other registrars).
Looks like the carpalx software (mentioned above) can be tuned to find you a layout that doesn't work the pinkies so much.
Give the guys a little slack, you might be jumping to conclusions. And we of all people knew the risks with buying a hardware product from a startup.

As far as fitbit being and alternative, it doesn't do wake mates main function: wake you up at the right time.

That said if you want your money back I hope they give it to you hassle free. They missed their dead line and there is no reason they shouldn't try their best to satisfy customers who want their deposit back. Let us know if goes well.
To add to this, threatening to chargeback can be an excellent way to get decent customer service out of some places. Most customer service associates are trained to go way out of their way to avoid it.
Their web site still says "Limited quantity, reserve today! Pay $5 now and the rest when it ships. (Expected ship date 1/25/10)"
> The QWERTY vs Dvorak argument is silly; both were designed at a time before any research had been performed into typing ergonomics, and the only reason to pick one or the other is largely based on hearsay and rumor.

I grew up using my own odd way of typing with several of my fingers, but didn't type by touch. When I started studying comp sci I decided to finally learn to type properly. After a year or so of typing qwerty I had pain in my wrists and fingers.

Obviously I couldn't afford any injuries before my career even started, so I read up on dvorak and the decided the reasoning behind it was sound. I switched and it was one or two weeks before I could type very well at all, and a month before I was what I call proficient. Since then no more pain.

So whether my fingers actually travel less or not, I don't really care. Something about it is better ergonomically, for me. It's been 5-6 years since then without any pain or discomfort (apart from 20+ hour sessions, and I deserved exactly what I got, that's just dumb).

AFAIK Dvorak wrote studies on this for some US gov't body, around WW1 or WW2 iirc. I haven't looked for them but to call his research hearsay and rumour is not very fair. You need to back that up.
New charger can tap electricity from WiFi
"i've long hoped for a decent language for writing low-level stuff."

brace was on HN a few months ago: http://sam.nipl.net/brace
Paypal has locked Wikileaks' account
Seriously asking here: what would you like more about Ruby as opposed to Javascript if they were in the same boat (i.e. if Ruby had client ubiquity, no systems frameworks, no major non-browser platform, etc)?
Richard Stallman on The Setup
From your draft paper,

"A few months ago, a graduate student in another country called me (Vaughan) to ask for the source code of one
of my multi-robot simulation experiments. The student had an idea for a modification that she thought would improve the system’s performance ... we were able to offer the requesting student some code that may or may not be that used in the paper. This was better than nothing, but not good enough, and we suspect this is quite typical in our community."

Fwiw I've had a similair experience.

A few years ago I was reading Daphne Koller's "Using learning for approximation in stochastic processes" and it was a very elegant and powerful idea, but it didn't seem to me at the time that there was enough detail in the paper to implement the algorithm and I wrote to Dr Koller and asked if she had source code available. She replied that her student had departed a decade ago and the code was effectively lost.

Dr Koller was very helpful and clarified some doubts I had and in the end I managed to re implement the algorithm and so a happ ending after all but if code was archived and made public for every paper, it would have really helped.

Awesome that you guys are adopting this methodology.
Yeah but the false negatives are a bitch!
Yup, that's why they call it a water table. There are exceptions if one happens to live in very dry areas with interesting geology, but generally any piece of land is good enough for a well if you dig deep enough.
They've answered this concern on Twitter:

"all the planned features are still free! we've developed some new awesome premium features that we're planning on charging for."

http://twitter.com/wakemate/status/8102380070
> Wake me up when they get serious about supporting Python.

Looks like Allison will be giving a talk on Pynie at PyCon: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/88/

And, regarding difficulty in implementing a given language, hasn't the PCT ( http://docs.parrot.org/parrot/latest/html/docs/book/pct/ch03... ) made that a lot easier of late?
CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones
Wow. I don't have much to add to the article, but I must say that was an interesting read!

I am curious about the security considerations they have taken with the employees that work with the ATM on location. I mean there is a connection to some banking institution there and I am not so sure if I would want non-Wells Fargo people working too closely with the machine.

On the other hand, my knowledge about ATM's is quite limited. They hand me money.

(and my girlfriend was rolling her eyes as I was throwing useless tidbits about ATM's at her this early in the morning)
this.

Seriously, there are DOZENS of apps that are utterly identical in function and layout with minor differences here and there. As far as apps go, these weren't even that similar.
In the email they mention delays due to new innovations -- so basically, I won't be getting my product on time because they were developing a premium service I didn't know about and will now have to pay for to benefit. Doesn't seem right...
Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
3-D Gaming Is Waiting for Its Avatar
accidentally touching the mouse-pad and moving the pointer, which would be a nuisance

Sheesh. One would hope he has better reasons than that for using console. It's not that hard to configure X to not switch window on mouse-over.

No offense RMS. :)

I didn't know about the yeeloong, though. Interesting device.
Please, let us know how it goes!
For the record, YCS09 began 8 months ago and ended 5 months ago.
Or maybe the pain went away for some reason unrelated to Dvorak, and would have gone away on its own even if you hadn't switched.
Yes. It's 200 or 250, if I remember right.
I'm really sorry you feel that way. Of course if you want your money back we have no problem refunding your 5 dollars.

We've developed some great premium features in addition to the existing product. The main features are still free.

We're working really hard to get the product out. It's difficult to launch quickly and iterate with hardware and we want the product to be amazing. I can promise that it will definitely be worth the wait!
What does raytheon do in antartica? Also the wikipedia page still says it's operated by the US.
I'm sorry if it seemed that way. The new features are in software and the delays are mostly hardware related. I would be pissed too if it was delayed because we were trying to squeeze more money out of you. That's not the case.
This has happened countless of times to others.

We have had it with our paypal account, and this after having assisted paypal for four months during their beta roll-out. No reason, no possibility to petition, simply bang all your funds are now belong to us, come back in 6 months and maybe we'll give it back to you.
I second this notion. You should be willing to pay a few extra bucks to get a legit, trustworthy service.
LuaJit is awesome, but he talks purely about using Lisp to describe "C" semantics.

Take it as use "Lisp" Alphabet, but still write a "C" language. Not good analogy, but gets you there.

What he would achieve - well the same semantics, anything generated by his amplifier would be linkable, runnable the same way as C.

What he would achieve by using Lisp - we'll he can just skip the whole C++ templa-bastardization, and just use common lisp macros. He can use it for anything that he would like... Hell I would like to use it tommorow.

It won't be easy on the guy that's trying to debug that thing, after such transformations you would need some heavy "#line" preprocessor magic put in the "C" code, but it's doable.
It seems unlikely given how many people report that same benefit. On this thread alone, there are 4 people that report it's much easier on the wrists (to which I'll add myself - I'm a Dvorak user and found it physically much easier to type on than Qwerty) and 1 person that reports it's worse.
Part of the reason why there is some backlash against this announcement isn't so much against that it's going to be late, but that the monthly fee was a complete surprise.

It's totally normal (and encouraged!) to have premium features, but the shipping delayed announcement went like this:

* Hey peoples are really excited about wakemate!
* We've made some breakthroughs in the development of wakemate that makes it more awesome than before (yay!)
* Because we've been making it better it's going to be delayed, and we're going to compensate the delay by giving you free access to the premium analytics features. (Wait, what? What premium analytics features?)

I think this announcement would have been received better if the premium features had been mentioned in the same paragraph announcing all the breakthroughs. The premium feature could have been presented as benefit of these breakthroughs (with the increased feature set, we can now charge for value), but because it was first mentioned as part of compensation of the delayed release, it comes across as negative.
I did the exact same thing with my startup's name in 2007 and it was amazing, but in 2008 they went to an auction system (their "domain name aftermarket"). It was a super-hot deal at the time.
One note: Copyright law is a bit broader than the blog thinks. It's entirely possible to create a derivative work even though the assets and code are 100% newly created.

That said, this is clearly not an infringing case. While the functionality is largely similar (although never really the same), the actual execution seems to be hugely different to me. Apple clearly just wants to avoid litigation.
RMS is my favorite computing austerity artist.

The RMS Waltz: That's one, two, three internet connections. Now here's one Emacs (Gnus is not responding), two Emacs (dired and the tramp), three Emacs (at this time, Count von Count can be heard laughing in the background).
It sounds as if he operates in batch mode with regard to communication.
More reason why you should use a real bank that offers online banking services rather than a website, especially one that is not regulated in some parts of the world.
Appreciate the clarification.

I think the non-conciliatory tone and some of the content from your email is a little off-putting to a lot of folks.

Whereas most people were expecting to receive an actual product within a week or two, we're now told we'll have to wait indefinitely; words like "tentatively" "first batch" and "as early as" convey this.

If we're waiting because the hardware got better, give us some specifics instead of keeping it vague. I was under the impression the WakeMate was already awesome -- if it's delayed, tell me what you've been working on and improving to show me why I should still be excited about this, why you guys did me a favor by delaying.

The delay email is also functioning as an introduction to PREMIUM features (at a cost) that nobody was aware of, which feels out of place in the context of the message's initial intent.

I'm sure you guys are working hard and round the clock, but unfortunately we don't get to see and experience that, live and breath the company with you guys. All we're aware of is the image you convey in the few paragraphs you send to us. As a company that people have invested in, that has taken money from soon-to-be customers, you need to be ultra-cognizant of how you present to us.
The most accurate answer would probably be 'depends'. If this huge client of yours is in anyway even remotely related to the government, then there is an extremely high possibility of having to deal with corruption.

OTOH, there are a lot of companies that meticulously try to keep their hands clean in all dealings. So, the best thing to do would be to inquire around about your particular client.

Disclosure: I'm Indian and have lived in India for a majority of my life.
Calculators are Needlessly Bad
Grants Pass Homes for Sale
For me a copy of The Hindu in my left hand and a hot cup of filter coffee in the right is the only way to start a day. I don't really watch TV, nor do I read news online, so the newspaper is really my only source of news.
Squeak by Example
Non-iPhone user here to provide a more objective baseline:

At a glance of the comparisons, I saw a total of 3 screens that actually looked like direct copies of each other. The ruler, balancer, and battery stats. The rest share similar functions but are obviously different in design and even details. I also count a total of six apps that AppBox simply doesn't have. That's out of twenty-six apps in total, at least on AppVault's side.

It seems like bad business to keep others from doing competitive business. Not if you're running a market place like the app store. It'd be like a farmer getting his cart kicked out because his fiji apples - amongst a selection of oranges and melons - are in competition with his more senior neighbor's granny smiths.
Fast conversion of bitmaps to SVG
Engineer’s Guide to Drinks
Expunge criminal records
Everybody knows the exact meaning of expunge, it means the seal or erases. Nothing is permanent except change.
Previously submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070048
Every time I read about scientific settlement on Antarctica I long for a mad scientist billionaire to head down there with an appliance style Mitsubishi nuclear reactor, ocean containers of MREs and cold weather construction equipment and materials, a pile of weapons for self defense of their claim, a large team of highly motivated scientist settlers and their families and a new flag to plant to claim Antarctican Independence and restore the great frontier right here on earth.

Looks like an ATM is covered, which is just one less thing to bring.
How does bribery switch the crime from multiple manslaughter to mass murder in your mind?
On an unrelated note, Wikileaks needs a freenium model, or some other means of revenue besides donations.
This is pissing me off more and more. How do I know that these "premium" features are not the actual features that I want? They may just give me the bare minimum, and since I already invested $50, they now try to squeeze more money out of me by withholding the good stuff.

Tell me this stuff before you make me pre-order. Let me be aware what I am getting into. I thought that the hardware is what you pay for, and the website and all awesome upgrades would be free. But it seems the hardware is just the entry ticket, then they will do the usual - premium, solo, business bullshit to try to make me pay them $99 a month or whatever.

This is bullcrap, and I feel it is dishonest marketing. I would not be pissed off if they just asked me to put my email on a list. But they asked me to give then $5! Then turn around and stab me in the back. No, I don't want your product anymore.

When I give you money, we have entered into a very different kind of relationship, and you have given me the right to get pissed off about you and complain on the internet.
Typical Stallman... taking everything to the extreme and suffering the consequences. It's the burden of the idealist.
Rapid Photo Downloader 0.1.3 su Ubuntu
Fundraising Through Poker Tournaments
This article I will cover setting up online tournaments
and live tournaments and advise you of the pros and cons
of fundraising through poker tournaments. I will also cover
another poker fundraising method associated directly with
tournaments which is donations of winnings and the most obvious
–direct advertising of the charity or appeal.
I admire his willingness to stand to what he believes.

Also, extremisms aside, he's contributed a lot to the community.
"This interview is available under the Attribution No Derivatives license."

Am I the only one who finds that ironic?
Not especially, Stalman campaigns for free software and he has reasons why he thinks it's a very good idea. Those reasons don't really extend to interviews as far as I can see.
You can also avoid the call center by looking up your favorite source of executive information, finding the name and address of someone like a VP of Customer Relations or what have you, and writing them a polite, businesslike letter on dead tree explaining what happened and what they need to do to make it right for you. This will get read by their secretary, who will call the switchboard, ask to be transferred to the person in charge, and say "The Boss wants this handled now." And that is about all it takes. (Well, apparently the VP in this case was not great, either, but you could have shaved two months off the resolution time by contacting her earlier.)

I've had to do this to a bank or two which was under the mistaken impression that I owed them money. Incidentally: a tact I particularly like, since I own shares of essentially any publicly traded stock by dint of owning broad index funds, is to send the letter to Investor Relations. Just say you're a shareholder (you are certainly not the most convoluted situation that results in getting invited to their shareholder meeting) and that you've had a problem, blah blah blah, please fix at your earliest convenience.
Beliefs are the bastion of the uninformed, and those so set in their ways they can't take a moment to think things through.
This is largely off-topic, but thank you for the work you've done. Hacking the Kindle is by no means glamorous or easy, and it's good to see someone doing it. Keep up the good work.
The theory may very well be true, but it isn't very helpful. Firstly, you probably won't have an infant around when you get to that deserted island and secondly, if you do, it's probably your own and you'd rather die yourself than watch your child die. Of course the latter is stupid, because the child will die if you die, but humans aren't rational beings.
"For the love of god, stop the retardedness with the J"

I wouldn't go that far, but yes you have a point. Clojure library names (not the libraries themselves) try for a "cutesy" vibe (Enclojure, Compojure . blah) so yes it grates a teeny bit, but in the end what is important is not the names but the code.

(Spoken as someone who has no intention of using Clojure on any sustained basis)
I got the feeling that there's more to this issue than that has been posted in blogpost. I'd prefer to hear AppBox's side of the story before making a judgement.

For example, having the "same graphics, layouts" with " with different color" may be not just copying an idea, it migth mean copying the expression of the idea as well. Being loud != being right.
This reminded me of the Don Dodge GOOG/MSFT transition post. Maybe it was the displays of platform loyalties, or their perceived backwardness of the technology habits?

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/11/thank...
Depends how hairy the code is really. Any format can be reverse engineered, but that doesn't make it open. Is it really open if the code is so hard to read it's not much easier than reverse engineering from a compiled program?

I don't actually know anything about The GIMP's format, just talking in general.
That's a straw man, as that isn't what tptacek is saying. He is obviously talking about parallels in the causes of security incidents. That the consequences are different, and arguably incomparable, is irrelevant to the correctness of his observation.
Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International
Good post! I can confirm that: I switched to Dvorak from Querty a few years ago too - big improvement.
My reply on their site, i think Jason Schwarz got a lot wrong, mixed up things.. sujective bad written article, imo:

"On the other hand, i heard that Apple looks to replace google by bing, don't know if this is true, but if it is, it shows who is scared and who is not.
What you don't see with your view of "iphone + itunes + appstore" is that by the end of the year it will be "dozens of android phones, tablets, ebookreaders, mp3 players + android market + youtube + gmail + gdocs". In my oppinion, Apple is in the position to lose market share on the mobile market (which analysts also predict) and has a reason to be afraid of. They have been the major (like 99%) player in this area for years and now fear to lose some ground, which is just natural.
You make a lot of assumptions and mix things up (google search vs. facebook, d'oh?) to tell your theory, but all in all, i wouldn't agree.
Also, afaik Schmidt left the board because of conflicting interests, which just seems natural for me. If you would be Apple, you wouldn't want to have such a competitor in your board, would you?
Beforehand it was: Ok, Google brings good apps, ads, search, maps to our platform, thats great. With Android and Chrome OS this obviously changed.
Then again, if GOOG shares go down, i'll be happy to buy them ;)"