skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of things that you depend on that aren't "user-visible" and require what you call "programming for the sake of programming." In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's good that some of us love that stuff, otherwise there would be no one to write and/or fix the fancy language features, libraries, and embedded systems young whippersnappers like you depend on.

By the way, I'm actually fairly young myself (23), but I've always loved the down and dirty, close-to-the-metal details of programming. And I also have the soul of a 50 year old (a la: "I need a lawn so I can yell at kids to stay off it." http://xkcd.com/479/).
At NY entrepreneur meetings I tend to encounter a few of the same types over and over 1) people who don't actually make or do anything but constantly show up at all the entrepreneur meetings and 2) people in suits

Lately this seems to be changing, which is a good sign.
Thanks! But may I challenge you to tell us how this could be done? (resources and money are irrelevant) You have set the goal, now we need to find out how to get there!
if you build it, they will come. . .
I find it interesting that after speaking about the right idea, and the right team (and the right time), Catrina makes the comment 'It would have been easy for me to build another social networking site, or another photo-sharing site'.

Doesn't this ignore the team and idea. Just because she had success with Flickr, or maybe because Flickr was so successful, doesn't that lead one to believe there is less opportunity in this field? Same with social networking? Hunch was a good move because in addition to keeping her challenged, it isn't an area that already has a dominant player.
Why not offer any type of media or product that you can grab from Amazon.com or another source to match on?

Books, movies, songs, travel locations, favorite restaurants, etc.
I feel like instead of opening up the bulkhead, pulling out crystals, and rearranging, future sci-fi spaceship repairs should happen via ipad juggling.
You need to put in some hooks to help spread the word about the site. How come you're not encouraging people tweet or post to Facebook right when they sign up?
In "Built to Last," Collins observes that the great companies have a certain uniformity in who they hire. "Fits like a glove or ejected like a virus" was something along the lines of how he described it. So lack of diversity of thought is not necessarily bad.
Windows Hack - خدمات العرب
Colorbrewer: Color Advice for Maps
Westinghouse was a good marketer, however, so Tesla did not need to be.
This implies that women won't start startups, but it doesn't say anything about why there are few women in IT generally.
It really is the broken window fallacy, but in reverse; that working harder could decrease aggregate employment implies that working less hard (or more counter-productively) could increase aggregate employment.

This is even more hare-brained than the suggestion that we should all work less to allow more people to be employed. Increases in productivity (e.g. working harder) can only be harmful in a closed economy with very fixed consumption practices. Pretty much any country or region, however, cannot be said to exist in isolation, nor does it have fixed consumption. When either world interest rates go to 0% or people become miraculously content with everything they have, let me know so I can slack off, but until then I'm gonna keep working.
Agreed. As Haskell is the only language among the three that I know well, I had to say it was pretty strange looking. The "length w where w = ..." was especially strange. Why not, you know, just apply "length" to that expression? That's what functions do :)

I won't comment on the single-expression do block or all the parens in the putStrLn expression or mention that "putStrLn . show" is just "print".

Anyway, 6 lines of Haskell is just excessive. How about two lines:

fibs = 1 : 1 : (zipWith (+) fibs $ tail fibs)
main = print . length . takeWhile (< 10^999) $ fibs

I think this is as readable as the example, and I didn't even have to line-break any expression.
if you give someone a pile of money and tell them to improve the world what's going to happen? there isn't a single, good, clear, correct plan of action, as far as i know. so even if this hypothetical person with a pile of money was an objective, honest, smart person, they'd be pretty unsure about what to do. and most people aren't objective, honest and smart.

so what's going to happen? they're going to push right ahead with whatever they think is right. and because they have a pile of money they have a pile of power. so you end up with this powerful person telling everyone what to do - even though it's probably not the best solution.

so it seems to me that it might be a good idea to look at alternatives. maybe your question is assuming the wrong thing somehow.

but what alternatives are there?

here's one, off the top of my head. instead of having a system where we go like crazy to make a pile of money so that we can then "do good" with it, why don't we ease off and not make so much in the first place? if we didn't try so hard to make the place unequal, perhaps we wouldn't need to spend so much on fixing the inequality.

[there's an obvious answer to that about life not being zero-sum, and i agree there's some kind of balance necessary, but i am not at all sure that we've found the best equilibrium where we are.]

here's another: give everyone a dollar. or a pig. or a chicken. or a saw. exactly what isn't so important. what's important with this idea is that you spread the money around to everyone. you spread it really thin and then let the people "on the ground" decide what to do.
Build a lot of Water Desalination Plants and lay a lot of pipe. Power them with tidal, solar, wind, or nuclear.
First we have to assess the problems. Before we tackle wants, we have to identify areas that still have needs as basic as water, food, and shelter. Provide these for areas in need, then we can start with the wants.
see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141205
We search both blog content and blog comments, so if a TechCrunch article or TechCrunch comment mentions you, there is a good chance it will show up in the dashboard. Given the volume of tweets versus blog comments versus blog content, the blog content is usually more buried and has to be filtered out with the radio buttons provided when browsing a Stream.

Admittedly, we are not running our own crawlers right now, so it's hard for us to direct searching at older content or specific sites/blogs. We currently use Backtype (http://www.backtype.com) and ContextVoice (http://www.contextvoice.com) for finding blog comments and blog content respectively.

Our end goal is to find and rank social media content in real time. If somebody as prominent as TechCrunch mentions you, we would like you to know immediately and have that piece of content displayed, noticeable and ready for your approval in our dashboard within minutes.

We are not there yet and it sucks when we completely miss important mentions, but I promise we are working our damnedest to get better.
I totally agree. So we have to fix the inequality somehow. But how? Let's not talk about resources at this point. The idea of my assumption is that while you build your plan of action, whenever you need money or anything else, you can just ignore that.

This allows us to think about questions that would otherwise never be asked:
- Would it help the world (from a holistic perspective), to pay off the debts for all countries?
- For Altruists, is it even possible to do more good than we're currently doing if we had more money?

The questions was meant to be more of an experiment. Just assume the person with all the money/resources was you. You seem pretty nice. How would you try to maximize the happiness of all the people in the world? (A valid answer is also to not make use of it or do individual, smaller projects)
Brilliant, especially love the hangman! Surprised that my browser didn't warn me when I click through your site. :)
What Should Twitter Ads Look Like? And Will You Really Love Them?
If you're interested in seeing just how volatile the energy markets can be, I recommend checking out http://www.wattclarity.com.au/

They have a program that allows wholesale purchasers of electricity in Australia track the real time prices (which can change by $000s in minutes); when there's an interesting spike, they blog about it with some screenshots.

Last week prices in one State (NSW) momentarily hit $10,000/MWh while nearby Queensland was steady at $9 (0.09% of the price).
Reddit has its moments, but it seems to have a low signal to noise ratio.

http://i.imgur.com/p8hNg.png
Here's some Ruby golf:

n,a,b = 1,0,1
n,a,b = n+1,b,a+b while b<10**999
p n

48 chars.
Government Grab of Retirement Accounts a Matter of ‘Social Justice’
Business training and entrepreneur support for developing and third world (if there's a distinction) countries.

Business builds a functioning economy in a way that aid cannot; a support net may still be required for decades, but a 'hand up' is better than a 'hand out'.
Naps can make you smarter
Love in the digital age
Treasury to TARP Inspector General: Drop Dead
Probably true. At least you will see some Haskell-syntax.

Writing an extension for XMonad may be worthwhile, though. Or learning about its inner workings. (There are some good introductions floating around the net. They put a lot of thought into the types in XMonad.)
Andy Simmons on: "The iPad: What It Means For You, What it Means For Apple"
You don't need closures for using Monads. It `just' makes them usable in practise.
I like coding. I hate shipping software
On the other hand, I imagine a fair number of Rails developers will take advantage of the Javascript framework agnosticism and switch out Prototype+Scriptaculous for jQuery. (One could do so already without too much hassle, of course, but Rails 3 makes it plug-and-play).
Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples
We changed the location this time around as well as modified the structure of presentation.

As always, we're looking for feedback as to the location (first time at Forum) as the meetups are getting larger and larger each month. It's tough finding good spots here in NYC!
Embracing the Freelance Life… Unexpectedly
You are right. Though actually foldM is not that opaque once you get used to it.
Stats on Spam
quality post!
Almost everywhere I drive, people usually speed. As a result, the speed limit is a constant distraction - I have to pay attention to what it is on the current stretch of the road (some of the roads I have to drive on to get to work change speed limits 3-4 times) and to the average speed of people in each lane, and figure out whether it's in my best interest to drive at the speed limit, or whether I'm going to have people constantly merging around me if I don't speed.

If the speed limit was gone, I'd just pay attention to the velocity of other drivers and make sure I have plenty of room in front of me to stop - which I try to do anyway. I wish some states or counties would try making changes to speed limit policies.
Remote/cloud backup is a common use case for the masses that would benefit greatly from a very high speed connection. It's already main stream (plenty of TV commercials), but it really sucks to do that initial backup of 250GB.
I have verizon FIOS and have no TV contract.... hmm
I look forward to the day that stop keeping IE6 alive by talking about it. First rule of fight club...
I don't think it is. The point of his rewrite is that at the end of each branch the function returns so that you don't have to remember so much to make sense of what it does.

Sure, a COND that's the only (or final) form in the function that contains it has the same property, but the key thing there is that it's at the end, not that it's a COND. COND really is the same thing as if ... else if ... else ...; using that rather than IF when you have more than two branches is a good thing, for sure, but I don't see how it's good for the reason you give.

Am I missing something?
Come on, for this audience the title should be amended to: "Treasury to SIGTARP: Drop Dead"

Or maybe "Treasury to SIGTARP: kill -9"
"verify that the waveforms match within a tolerance" The problem is, that is not easy. Determining how close two pieces of audio sound is the majority of the lossy audio compression problem. You can of course check if you're output is bitwise identical, but when it isn't, you need ABX testing. With people.
She is free to plug it in herself; his refusal to do so is purely symbolic. At least, I had not considered any other possibility and am confident that most American readers would read it the same way. Perhaps I'm the one making a bad assumption, though. MarkPilgrim, do you wish to clarify?
If he doesn't want more stuff, he's not being noble to say so, he's just telling people what not to get him. If someone gave you a pillow every year, why should it be rude to say, "please don't get me a pillow this year. I have enough pillows!"? I know some people are too timid to say things like this, but it is possible to say without offending.
I'm sure the readers of this post, are skewed towards the work-life balance believers. I don't. Most of the best entrepreneurs I know, don't. Apple. Facebook. Microsoft. Paul Graham as well.

A few posts I like about this subject:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/sacrifice-your-health-for-your-st...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/calacanis-fires-people-...
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/20/european-startups-need-t...
They would except for two powerful motivators to maintain artificially low limits:

1) On city and suburban roads, parents demand extremely low speed limits in the name of child safety. This results in 25MPH and 35MPH zones on roads where reasonable drivers would normally travel 40MPH or higher.

2) Traffic ticketing is a significant source of income for the local government and police agencies. Artificially low speed limits allow speeding tickets to be written on a regular basis.
It would be cool if a touchscreen device could fire a mouseover event when a finger was NEAR the screen, and only fire a mousedown event when the finger TOUCHES the screen.
I love ideas that solve social problems with brain dead simple solutions.

Unfortunately it's unlikely this solution will last or spread to other states for two reasons:
a) It takes the control from the authorities and gives it back to the people.
b) Because the states make a lot of money from speeding tickets and it will be a lot harder to give them if there isn't a speed limit.
Very nice. Looks like assembly language :)
Sure, but I think that for that to work, you have to tone down the dating parts of the site and emphasize the matchmaking parts of the site.

Basically, a site that is good for hookups or dating makes it very easy for users to quickly browse through the other users' images. The best ones I've seen basically lets you make a (detailed) search, then just shows the results one by one with a big NEXT button on each. No lists, no clicking back and forth, no popups, just a very simple flow through the results.

But matchmaking needs a workflow that is more refined and feels less like a flesh-market. In the market research we did where I worked many years ago we found out that matchmaking appeals to people with little time. They don't want to spend hours browsing profiles, they want to be fed a slow stream of new profiles that the system has decided is good for them. This could possibly work with book taste as a base. If you make a recommendation engine like Netflix or Amazon, you could then grab other users that actually liked the books and have that as a starter.

"User X shares your taste in books, but hasn't read book Y, why don't you tell him/her about it?"
Founders at Work seems like a great book. I'll check that out.

Overall these tips are great. Thanks.
I think what he means is if you just stay withing doing simple CRUD. I think the vast majority of programmers do CRUD or slap GUIs on other people's code as a way to start (I know there are exceptions, but they are exceptions).

What differentiates those that grow from those that don't is whether they go deeper or just keep doing more CRUD and more GUIs on other people's deeper code.
Cars would probably sort more efficiently between left-lanes and right-lanes based on their desired speed with the removal of an artificial anchoring value. And if lower same-lane variance in speed is achieved, there would be fewer dramatic changes in tailing distance between cars and fewer lane changes required, resulting in fewer opportunities for accidents to occur.
Your point is worthwhile, and spandrels certainly do exist, but you weaken your point by linking to a paper in which Gould was involved, even if Lewontin (who actually knows what he's talking about in evolutionary biology) was the co-athor. Also, spandrels would be expected to be ephemeral over evolutionary time, while the much greater skewness of male reproductive success over female is practically a biological universal. The optimal reproductive strategies will thus differ, and higher male risk tolerance seems one of the more plausible evo-bio "just so" stories.

Lewontin's Fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin%27s_Fallacy

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/
If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.
Sperm Whales Use Teamwork to Hunt Prey
Arbitrage opportunities exist in most markets, and while they may be seen as a drain on the system - ultimately they have the net effect of keeping markets sensible.

THere's no free ride.... if people are making a killing on some arbitrage gap (whether on the global economic markets, or betfair, or multiple offshore gambling sites) - the market will eventually correct for it as the arbitrage activity becomes part of the market.

There's no free ride.
If I do a search and then click back, the button still says 'searching...' and I can't do another search. If I then click refresh it goes back to 'find people' but doesn't work. I need to click in the title bar and press enter to do another search. Firefox 3.6 linux.
It's not that big an if — I'd be very surprised if odor played an insignificant role in attraction, especially given how important odors and pheromones are in other organisms.

See http://www.ejog.org/article/S0301-2115(04)00474-9/abstract if you are on a university campus (otherwise it won't let you access the full text).
Wonder no more: http://code.google.com/p/i-jetty/
I have less respect for anyone who demonizes, based on nothing more than some rhetoric, an entire informal and nebulous group of people.
Hm, I don't think it's that bad. It's just the usual fib algorithm:

a,b = 0,1
a,b = b,a+b while b<limit

With a counter interspersed ;)
Free Online SVN & Git Repositories for Closed-Source Projects
Should Startups Pitch Associates For Funding?
Developer of Hooters iPhone app responds to Apple's new policy
Technology and Tenure
If >90% of his society embraced the tradition of giving new pillows every year, then he would indeed be a little out of line in expecting others to accede uniformly to his pillow-less demands. It's not rude to ask, but it is pointless to get upset when some people decline to do what you want.

Edit: actually, by convention it is a little rude to ask most people to give you particular types of things for your birthday, unless they are very close to you socially (spouse or significant other, basically).
I know of at least one: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. But really, any one of the thousands of omnivorous and scavenging species fits the bill nicely.
Really? This was worth 4 downvotes? I'm not being offensive or stupid or uptight, I'm just expressing my opinion. I know it's a joke. My point is that, when I first saw it, I didn't immediately recognize the joke. If I hadn't clicked the Sign Up page, I probably would have left the site without fully getting the joke. If a potential customer didn't get the joke, it might leave them with a bad opinion of the company. (edit: by company, I mean Mac Mini Colocation, not this fake sub-business)

I know how we love our nerdy humor, but all I'm saying is that companies have to be a little bit careful not to inadvertently let inside jokes hurt business.
Just as an anecdote, I took a class on human sexual evolution about four years ago. Our professor said he was so convinced that this phenomenon was real that when his daughter got engaged, he convinced her to go off the pill for a month to ensure that she still loved her fiance (she did).
Quick. Shot it with a silver bullet. In the head. Ram a wooden stake through its heart. Just in case, fill its mouth with salt and sew its lips shut.

Make sure the coffin is made of lead. Pour no less than 6 feet of concrete around it. Mark it clearly so as nobody ever tries to open it.
"We Can Easily Prevent Ice Ages"
Heh-- I hope that didn't offend. I remember being pretty shellshocked during the interview process and, from what I've heard, I think we had it easier than most folks did. Coming in expecting to fill the time with an uninterrupted demo probably isn't the best bet. :-)
Well, yes, but can you do universal algebra on top of combinatorics? I see several mentions of Zorn's lemma, so the answer is probably NO ;)
Everything About the blogosphere
No salt in whole foods? That's hardly true. Perhaps if you consider plants to be the only whole foods, I suppose. Meat of all kinds has plenty of natural salt content.
In essence, you were studying by doing the assignments. I don't see this as that much different than actually "studying", i.e. sitting in front of the book and learning the material. You just did it an earlier stage in a piecemeal way. Most classes are designed so that if you do the work (or whatever prep) during the course of the semester, you will need little review by the time the exam comes around. Maybe you are better at not forgetting, but it doesn't seem like your learning was any better than anyone elses (except maybe about going to lecture, although I assume many people dont go to lecture if it was anything like my school).
I didn't realize mint used a third party (Yodlee) for that. Currently many banks only provide that type of access (OFX). I use mint and it requires bank logins though...

Looks like Yodlee uses OFX and screen scraping? Doesn't seem so safe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830236
Nokia S60 has been able to run Apache with mod_python for a few years[1] and I've used a jailbroken iPod Touch running apache and php to demo web apps previously.

[1] http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/mobile-web-server/
Damn it! I don't know how to juggle! There goes my dream of being a spaceship engineer!
> What about the extreme of No Speed Limits on 4 lane
> Interstate and rural federal–aid primary two lane highways?
> These same fact–based engineers point to the German > Autobahn,
> where, with no speed limits, authorities are consistently
> reporting lower fatality rates than comparable US highways.

This is an unfair comparison. Getting a driver's license in Germany is much harder than in the US.

http://www.german-way.com/driving.html

(I am not a German, and only have the slightest idea of the actual laws from German class in high school.)
Look at it this way: the author asks his wife if they can get rid of the TV. She says no. He then unplugs it and refuses to plug it back in for her when she wants to use it. The author elaborates on how difficult it is to plug/unplug the TV because it's behind a dresser drawer. Symbolism or not, he's being a bit of a jerk here. He made his point, but now his wife wants to use the TV and he refuses to help, despite the fact that he's the reason why she can't use the TV in the first place.