skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When I buy the dead-tree version of my local newspaper, I have no expectation that it should be free.

I don't buy newspapers and I'd be insulted if cafeteria that has those papers lying around would charge me for reading it.
"it's the easier and to a certain extent the safest"

I think that's half his point. That's what average is, right? Easy and safe such that everyone can do it. Perhaps it's not being brainwashed, but the net effect of all human interactions will ultimately be average, so it's important that anyone wishing to achieve better must work a little harder to get nudged above it.

This reminds me of the language blub (ironically in an essay titled, "Beating the Averages"), except PG was very careful to prepare the reader for what he was about to say, "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub." Perhaps Godin could've done the same, but that's not his style.
Personally, I think you can do a lot worse than Doctors Without Borders
Krugman: "He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations. While another country’s success might injure our pride, it would not likely injure our wallets. Quite the opposite: it would be more likely to provide us with a bigger market for our products and send our consumers cheaper, better-made goods to buy. A trade surplus might be a sign of weakness, a trade deficit a sign of strength. And, anyway, a nation’s standard of living was determined almost entirely by its productivity—trade was just not that important."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/01/100301fa_fact_...
O'Sensei's thought and style evolved throughout his life. In his younger days, pre-WWII, yes, he was rough and tumble. Movements were sharper and more direct. Break bones, crush your enemy. He did this frequently while in the Japanese military while serving in China as a bodyguard.

As he grew older, post-WWII, his philosophy and style became much softer and more spiritual than the styles he studied in his younger days. This was due, in part, to his age (changing perspective and physical decline) and the influence of the Omoto-kyo. In these later days, the purpose of training with weapons were twofold: help students learn body dynamics and learn to defend oneself against an armed attacker. The purpose wasn't to be armed and gut your enemies, the purpose was to understand the mindset of an armed aggressor, know their movements, and meet their movements without being gutted yourself.
Softer in the sense of not attacking directly as much, but still dangerous.

I've heard (second-hand) a story about a high-level practitioner who got to spar with O-Sensei and at times he felt like he might not survive.
I've been practicing Wing Chun for 5 years now, and I must say it's probably the martial art that would suit a programmer mind the best.

Very logic, geometric.

It's a lot like C. Not so many basic "constructs" (no "batteries included"), but you can combine the basics to do powerful stuff.
I found American Jiu Jitsu to have a similarly practical orientation.
SF Room for rent: house comes with 2 startup vets for housemates
Agreed, this is my "cynical customer" perspective, the "breaking point" I alluded to above.
I would love #2 if it is available. allyn.bauer at gmail dot com
Don't miss out on his .94 year long comment history

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sambeau

It sums up to -1 by the way.
>Do you remember learning to factor quadrilateral equations? x2 -32x +12? Why were you taught this? Why did they spend hours drilling you on such clearly useless content? Simple: you were being trained to be a compliant cog, someone who could mindlessly follow instructions as opposed to seeking out innovation and surprise.

Oh god...
I think the state-of-the-art is headed towards man-lethal, man-portable stealth UAVs, either using lasers or some sort of projectile weapon to assassinate targets. If you could have a much smaller team launch a small vehicle which would then pick off a target by flying silently hundreds of yards away at night? You could pick people off with a high degree of deniability.

Big teams deployed in an urban environment are just not practicable anymore.
This is a good point.

There are a few examples like this where people buy credits and they expire at some point in the future. The same can be done with a subscription credits service by tracking aging Accounts Payable.
Right, I think it is sloppy of a hospital to allow people to walk in and cause that kind of damage. I think not allowing outsiders into the ICU could be a good move for many.
To be fair, kids grew up just fine without cars for almost all of recorded history.
Besides cheap labor, the secondary reason for overseas manufacturing is lack of (enforced) environmental laws. That advantage could last quite a while.
have any major papers even tried freemium yet?
Winners like Goldman and Enron?

The government can help by protecting productive concerns from the thieves and pirates. Those "winners" can go to hell.
IMHO it is always good to make people conscious of whate they do to what possible effect. It's the opposite that is appaling to me (example: advertising of the tobacco industry).
First Windows Phone 7 Series partner device unveiled (with video)
They had wagons. And no downtown.

People didn't travel much. When they did, single men used a horse, and families used a wagon.
Are there any research that indicates that presence or absence of copy protection has any effect on sales?
... How do you know it works better?
Economics and Sociology: What Scott Sumners defense of EMH really proves
The internecine battle among economists over the EMH hypothesis only goes to prove that economics isn't really "superior" to the other social sciences, despite what economists think and despite their extensive use of mathematics. What is clear is that the social world can't be explained solely through mathematics (though modeling is a powerful tool); other sorts of explanations are also needed.
Emotionally intelligent dashboard signage?
Same problem here, I have made a rule that I won't buy a book unless I finish one of my to read list. Though I still checkout books frequently from the library.
Hacking of Facebook Account
Yahoo got its Buzz before Google
I found that Yahoo had a Buzz service, and it's been around a least for two years:

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

HN first report: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124473

Didn't they say anything about when Google launched the same name service?

ps: off course there are other buzzes out there:

http://www.buzzthegame.com/

http://buzz.com/
Apparently this is only the intro to a larger manifesto that you have to click "View this Manifesto" through to read. (didn't realize at first) Here's the link:

http://changethis.com/manifesto/issue/66.01.Brainwashed#view
Sage advice. If you haven't done it yet you need to own something authoritative about yourself, e.g. yourname.com, or better yet yourname.tel, which is like a business card at the DNS layer (with a window from the web of course).

I also periodically delete my Facebook status updates and tweets, although I'm not yet sure whether Google/others will be archiving those indefinitely.
I echo that sentiment. To share another testimonial, I work in a vaccine manufacturing facility with control systems and robotics. The only reason biologics manufacturing facilities haven't been built overseas with the same zeal as other factories is the stringent requirements by the FDA, MHRA, etc. on manufacturing facilities that use live cultures. Many of the technician jobs are similarly dedicated to pushing carts and transferring components to the robots for processing. Because of the reduced efficiency of old drug discovery methods, many of these jobs are taken by college educated science majors who are finding that jobs in drug discovery research are quickly dwindling.

However, I disagree with the idea that robots are going to be able to take over in a five year timeframe.

I agree with you that the capabilities for robotics to do these tasks exist. "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed." I doubt however whether large manufacturing companies would be willing to shoulder the huge investments needed to develop robotics for these applications even in a healthy financial climate. Maybe this type of development could come from a company that proposes to do consulting work for manufacturing facilities, for example, Honeywell.

Additionally, I've seen that while companies see automation as an asset in pharmaceutical manufacturing, they also view it as a huge liability, as a single automation error can lead to enormous problems that take time to detect and can have huge costs, while human error generally leads to small mistakes that can be corrected and detected easily. Not sure how it is in other manufacturing subindustries.
Upvoting, because it's a great article.

My own personal preferences (on systems where I don't have smf, upstart or launchd available-- e.g., production RHEL/CentOS machines) is daemontools. My only quibble with it is that the logging system it comes with has a fairly insane feature of fsyncing() on every write (which, if you run a service which spews a lot of logs to STDOUT, can seriously degrade performance). I'd really like to investigate runit as an alternative: http://smarden.org/runit (the site is down at the moment, but here's Google's archive: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ZPOjz5Z7k9IJ:smarden.or...), but haven't yet.
Super iceberg + earthquake + tsunami + media: when geology gets personal
More subtly, don't ignore preconditions of methods. The custom sort method needs to implement several invariants, which the Math.random() approach ignores. This confuses the hell out of the sort algorithm (in turn, leading to non-random order)
Its strange that MS got this wrong as the shuffling questions is quite common in the Microsoft interview (as in many other).

Though I do wonder if it makes any difference, may be they are taking this as an opportunity to do some research testing, my personal opinion would be that the browser in the middle position might have a slight upper hand than others.
More New APIs and Discussion of the Trend
Looks like it's targeted squarely at programmers, given the name ("Py*") and the screenshot (green monospaced font on black).

Why? It's not a programming editor. And, judging by the other comments, programmers don't want this, as they can get pretty much the same layout in Emacs.

Change the name and start using a better font for prose and you've got yourself a much larger and more suitable audience.
Ask HN: Why do we still follow the 'Folder' metaphor?
I've noticed that I often have files that feel like they would be equally fitting in one of several folders, and it's easy to forget where I've put them; so I resort to searching. I understand that it would be difficult to completely get rid of the folder metaphor, but why aren't there any tag based file browsers?
I think if anyone on hacker news wants discussion on GW there are plenty of sources for it. don't need it on HN. I was fine with it when it was occasional but this is like the 4th story in the last two days to make it to the front page.
I used it quite successfully for Nanowrimo. The "Py" is probably because it's written in Python.
Did anyone else notice that employment % actually went up quite a bit after the parking lot boom? And the loss in population is consistent with less living space.

Before: 114,400 / 162,180 = ~71%
After: 106,900 / 121,580 = ~88%

Based on that alone, I'd say Hartford is almost a better example of the opposite. Almost 30% unemployment is hugely damaging to a city, though it does open it up for factories to come in. I didn't read through to any of the linked articles for alternate explanations, though.
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You couldn't walk into the (most) cafeterias, start reading the paper and then walk out without buying anything. After a couple of days you'll be told to go away.

They bought it to add to the attraction of going to the cafeteria. And it costs you to read it, even if it is a cup of tea, which is probably even more expensive than the paper.
Jscheme's Java Dot notation
AwesomeWM + emacs + turn off the other monitor.

Awesome helps because sometimes you really do need to switch to another application (a terminal or browser) while writing. With Awesome you can switch between applications without seeing anything else. Be sure to turn off the Awesome status bar and the emacs menu bar for maximum immersion.

Also, it's nice to use a web browser like Conky that makes random browsing less convenient.
I know nothing of this field. What is the story with Eclipse Phase?
Taking risk aversion to its logical conclusion one will end up selling himself into slavery - a good slave owner will take care of housing and nutritional needs of his slaves in good or bad times because he has vested interest in the slaves being alive and healthy. It's easy to see drawbacks of slavery, and so it stands to reason that risk-aversion, like many other natural urges, must be controlled.

Employment in that regard is the same story - you are trading in part of your autonomy in exchange of lesser risk exposure. It's rarely a good trade.
Add-ons for Firefox
MacVim's full screen mode has the neatest implementation I've seen of this. Play with the 'fuoptions' setting, which gives you control over the margin color and the maximization behavior. If you disable maximization, it will just use the height/width values in 'lines' and 'columns' and the (borderless) window will be in the center of the screen.
http://wiki.github.com/marook/tagfs/demo

It needs to have its corners rounded and rough edges smoothed out if you were looking for an easy solution, but it's there.
"However, I disagree with the idea that robots are going to be able to take over in a five year timeframe."

That's not quite what I said. I specifically meant that robots will be able to take over the task of moving things around in the five-year timeframe. That is, the guys moving bins of things from here to there. We've already seen warehouses adopting this technology with a fairly high degree of sophistication today, so it's not really a far-out prediction. I'm not predicting that something that doesn't exist will be created, I'm predicting that something that does exist will be commercialized to the point it will become irresistible.

Remember, even if the robots are initially expensive, to replace an employee for a year opens up about $50,000 in capital to play with, assuming a low-paid employee + insurance (yours, not the employee's) + overhead, give or take $20,000. $50,000 is becoming a lot of robot.

Completely taking over in five years, no, definitely not. Certainly not in the facility I saw. But the long-term job trend will be clear in five years.
How would you do the experiment?
Have you looked at Listia? http://www.listia.com/
That's not true, you wouldn't expect them to deliver a past newspaper to your house for free. You might expect to be able to access them from libraries, but your argument gets hazy then as libraries also have today's paper for free too. And they're NOT free, they're paid for by your taxes and your time in having to go to the library.

I also think that the only reason papers are charging for archive access and feature content online is because it's a desperate bid to monetize as they're forced to give away news for free, so I'm not sure you can really say he's created a straw man to attack at all.
> When I buy the dead-tree version of my local newspaper, I have no expectation that it should be free.

When I take a photo with my film camera, I don't expect to get it developed for free ... then cameras went digital.

When I ask a musician to fill my house with music, I don't expect him to do it for free ... then came radio (and then recordings, etc, etc)

Technology can remove limitations.
Notes from a production MongoDB deployment
A sales manager told me once that you can see the day a game got cracked in the sales charts because sales drop afterward that much. But well, purely anecdotal, I've not seen the charts myself and that was also 10 years ago.
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I am from India too and I agree with you.Except I have another viewpoint. There is something known as supply and demand of educated labor. Jobs involving little or no use of education(like working in a cheap restaurant, serving tea in offices, construction workers etc etc), can be easily done by kids. If you have educated 100 kids, made them do nothing until they turn 18, and there are only 50 jobs requiring education, and 50 jobs requiring no education then you have just wasted many years of working and earning of those kids who will work in the latter category.

Someone has to do jobs requiring no skill or education, By enforcing an anti-child labor law you are just removing the natural head start those people would have in life (by working and acquiring experience) against those who go to schools and colleges.

People who grow up on farms are almost always out of the application of anti-child labor laws, and its important for them to do so, and because of this agriculture remains a profession passed on from generation to generation.

The point is with gradual prosperity less and less kids work in dangerous menial jobs, its not the child labor laws which have prevented kids from working, but the parents have stopped sending their kids to work because its not needed anymore.

About break the laws of those nations, well honestly speaking my own observation is that American companies follow the most amount of laws in these countries than any other individual or domestic corporation, this really does increase their costs more than how a domestic corporation would produce the same thing(by breaking the stupid laws and bribing govt officials), but American corporations don't care because they aren't really producing for domestic markets, they are producing for American markets where people can pay the slightly higher cost.
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For what it's worth, I found that the aesthetic of Aikido was typically appealing to people in the math/computer science fields. While I hold no strong opinions about its ability to make one a good fighter, I did think it was enjoyable, grounding, and beautiful. That combination seems to line up with the original poster's appreciation of Kendo.
As the author of god, I'll agree that if your only need is to ensure that a process is running, and that process isn't doing a lot of fancy daemonization or forking, then init is the best solution. In fact, on all our boxes at GitHub we use init to run god, because init is incredibly reliable; who better to ensure that god is actually running?

But if your needs extend to ensuring that your processes are well behaved with respect to memory usage, cpu usage, response to HTTP requests, etc, or any custom metric of your choice, then you have to go a bit farther than the suggestions in this article. God is all about making it easy to keep everything running, no matter how complicated the setup or metrics may be.
We get richer as labour gets more automated and cheaper. So it’s not a bad thing. It shouldn’t be.

The big problem is that we don’t have work for bigger and bigger parts of the population. They are poor not because society as a whole got poorer, they are poor because they don’t have anything the labour market wants because it can be had cheaper now.

I think it’s about time we recognize that. We have to make it possible for everyone to live ok lives, even without having a job. We are rich enough. We didn’t get any poorer as a whole. We should be able to afford that.

How to do that is anyone’s guess (I’m betting on some sort of ‘basic income’), but it’s about time to start. We can’t think about work and earning money with our 19th and 20th century goggles on.
java:lisp
What you say is true, but reality has also become more complicated than free market good, socialism bad.
You don't resolve Brand's maxim by going wholly from one side to wholly the other side. Copies should be practically free, it is the effort to produce that is not.

Articles like this half realise that something has changed, that something is failing in the copyright-oriented way of funding production. But what is their conclusion? "Let's pretend it is not real, let's just go back to how things used to be." -- ultimately they completely fail to understand or adjust.

There is a simple fact: The benefit of the internet and the mechanism of copyright are severely, fundamentally, inescapably conflicted. What copyright restrains is exactly the good the internet offers. The intelligent thing to do is devise other ways of supporting production, better suited to the realities.
This is a good contrast to those who speculated that Patzer sold because he was forced by VCs. That isn't a surprise, though: general wisdom is that if you take VC funding, you should at least be open to the idea of building-up a company and (ultimately) taking it public; VCs have the right to block an exit.
In that case, you want something that actually blocks the sound, like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-Portable-Earphones-B...

35db of isolation. You basically can't hear anything, which is nice when you need to work somewhere noisy, or want to listen to music on an airplane. It's infinitely better than noise cancellation.
Corporate insiders are sending fairly positive signals about the market
Node.js, redis, and resque
Mac users would pay for air if it had rounded corners.
No, I meant the difference in skill. Your skills in any of those activities are at least somewhat interchangeable with real life.

Monopoly is only amoral because in the subset of the universe we've isolated, we've taken out some of the details that would normally result in morality. You also don't have to worry about eating in monopoly, or in Call of Duty. That's why it's a subset.

Rules in monopoly and rules governing corporate actions are analogous, not ==. That's what I meant by asking what's the difference.

When you play monopoly it's like isolating variables so you can hone specific skills. Obviously playing monopoly does not equal an MBA, but that's because monopoly is a scaled down version of life only dealing with buying and owning property (and without concern for individual human lives), and it certainly can hone some business skills. But this is, to some degree at least, how all games are. Some games will be more of a waste of time, others less, some none.
Being ineffective for speech is actually a "feature" of Bose headphones. I second the recommendation for Etymotic earphones.
Why the American Empire Will Rise Again
I'm not vulnerable to phishing anymore, because I use a password manager. If it doesn't submit a password, I know I'm on the wrong website.

A big chunk of these problems (and phishing in general) would go away if users weren't responsible for authenticating websites by looking at the URL. Good, portable password management needs to become more common.
I'm curious, and I bet others are as well, as to what your skill set is and what skills you are looking for in a co-founder?
It's like the print media somehow failed to notice the appearance of television and radio. Advertiser supported media started long before the internet.