skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have always thought that achievement is when one accomplishes his/her goal, be it $1B worth startup or a level-up in a game.

Though, I think the author is talking about useful achievements. This gets a bit tricky: it's all about how you see the world. In my opinion, I would make a useful achievement when I influence people to take some action. This could be: subscribing to my webapp or even making people follow me on twitter, if that was my goal. The key word here for me is - influence. Nevertheless, achievement is all about reaching your goal. At least that's how I see it.
This gem is from the posters resume page:

So this guy dies and goes to Heaven, and when he gets to Heaven, he’s trying to explain to God how he spent his life.

Wait, wait, God says. Let me get this straight I gave you a body able to swim oceans and climb mountains

Yeah, the guys says.

and you sat in a cubicle?

Right.

I gave you creativity, and you made widgets?

Yes, the guy says.

The one thing I withheld from you, the only thing you could never get more of, time, you traded away for?

Money, the guy says.

link: http://www.petermichaud.com/resume/
Tendencies don't have to be heritable to be inborn. Nor do they have to be expressed to be heritable.
That's true for people that don't need alternate browsers. It's like, "why build wheelchair ramps outside of businesses when 99.99% of people are able to walk up steps?"

http://www.section508.gov/
If having entrepreneurial parents, going to an ivy-league university (vs a mediocre college), and having entrepreneurial aspirations early in life doesn't make you an entrepreneur, what does?

I liked the article, but it focused on proving the current misconceptions wrong rather than explaining what goes in to the making of a successful entrepreneur. Any opinions on this?
Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?
IsItTheWeekendYet?
Charles Nutter has a writup on using nailgin with JRuby: http://blog.headius.com/2009/05/jruby-nailgun-support-in-130...

I've tried this and it works fine.
How can something be inborn without being heritable? (Unless something is considered inborn if it is taught extremely early in life...)
Yeah this guy seems so full of it. Why is climbing a mountain not a fake achievement?
Tell HN: One Year (365 Days) on Hacker News!
Today is my 365th year on Hacker News! I can't believe it's been a year; I can perfectly remember the day I have signed up and I have visited HN every day for a year.

At around 20-40+ times a day, I estimate I've clicked the little orange Y favicon in my bookmarks bar more than 14,000 times.

Thank you for an amazing year! I can honestly and proudly say that HN has changed my life.

Cheers!
Adblock Plus. No other browser comes even close to its ease of use.
A lot of that can be addressed by making the connection a bit more "robust." A lot of people who play on trains and buses can could be accommodated by having 24 hours to authenticate.
Software patents are terrible.
> Most smart people would probably help you. For free.

This is the part that I always disagree with. I think smart people's generosity is taken advantage of. If somebody helps you for free, there are free ways you can repay that help. A recommendation, merchandise, discounts, whatever.

If that's the case, then why not do this for smart people you know before they can help you with anything? I think if you prepay good-will, it pays off in spades.
I'd love to hear the reasoning behind down-voting this. In a thread with 225 comments, only my post and one making a pun about gays is down-voted to 0. If you have something to say, say it. sheesh
Wanted: Greasemonkey script to share Hacker News up-votes
Who decides what's useful and not? Perhaps the future will adapt to exploit the skills of gamers and those who never pursued these "fake" achievements will be useless. I'm not a gamer, but I could think of a number of ways how to make humans solve relevant tasks through games.
I can't find the source right now, but I remember reading a paper where it was assessed that a new technology needs to be roughly twice as good as what it's replacing if it is to be successful due to the inertia the post describes.

The post also makes you realise that marketing and evangelizing is a very important aspect of doing a startup, especially if your product is groundbreaking and threatening to the status qou.
I recently started taking vitamin D and I feel great. I'm more energetic, sleep better, and, yes, feel happier. So that's one data point in favor of your thesis.
What do you mean by "a serious problem with its youth"? High crime rate? Gang activity? Why do you suppose the problem exists?
"Any achievement in a video game is a fake achievement"

This is a great soundbite to build an essay around but ignores two decades of learning, cognitive, and psychological research. There are too many examples to try to pack into a comments, but among the most obvious:

- 3D games are have been demonstrated to have positive effects on spatial perception and to allow rehearsal-based training for real-world activities (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~daniela/SeriousGames4thePolice_Ah...)

- Medical education in virtual worlds has also demonstrated the efficacy of training in synthetic worlds (http://www.jmir.org/2010/1/e1/)

- Massively multiplayer games' positive impact on literacy (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.114...)

Easy to go on and on, but the short answer is that it is preposterous to dismiss technologically mediated achievement as somehow fake.

The author's other points about variable-reward based training and the lure of positive feedback are also well researched fields. Since Skinner we've seen evidence that small amounts of positive reinforcement with some randomness -- called variable reinforcement -- generates the largest behavioral changes and longest engagement, so it should come as no surprise that achievement games -- like gambling -- engage a large number of people.

Of course, the 30,000' view of the article -- that variable reward games can consume a large amount of time and may not be making the player's life better -- is true. However, the simple assertions that games are fake and hurt their players are simply not supported by the data. For a very deep analysis of MMO players, you may want to peruse Dmitri William's work on the EQ2 data: http://dmitriwilliams.com/research.html
Did anyone actually doubt he was a real person?

Still, it's nice to have his full name.
Yeah, that makes as much sense as machines using humans for energy in the Matrix. For a good time, see this Reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/b5gz7/an_american_p...
The tone of this was all wrong, but I still laughed right through it.

I look back to situations where I was put into detention when I was a kid - devastated, of course. And now I see parts of it as funny - either in the trump "you're fired" sense, or in the manner of the humiliation.

Imagine the wry smile in ten years' time when one of those kids hears a tune, recognises it, realises why they recognise it and comes to like it.

Shining bright lights at tipsy kids from helicopters so they'll stagger home? Only the British could think of this stuff. It's funny - laugh!
Warren Buffett's 2009 Letter
Requires Java? No thanks.
Just curious. What is so bad about Oracle, exactly?
I disagree. I think it takes intelligence to accept and realize the ambiguity, complexity and downright contradictions that are endemic to our existence.
I'd love to see some hard evidence of that claim.

It's a tragedy of the commons. Daily Mail readers like parent poster are convinced the country is going to the dogs. Since many of them have the power, money and/or influence to do some small thing such as set up private CCTV surveillance of public land, or deny public space to a disenfranchised group (only by ageism of course - watch for a proper fight if they try this on a race-related basis), between them they can damage our public spaces and society. The same people will write the council demanding double yellow lines outside their house, and write to the council bemoaning lack of on street parking near their favourite shop.

Eventually you end where we are now - with local councils using anti-terroism laws to create mini intelligence agencies for the school admissions system. That is not a joke. Google it.
holy cow, I served with CDR Lahti on another ship 10 years ago!
Probably a coincidence. Never trust anecdotes when it comes to computer problem stories.

(Also: never read in support forums before deciding what to buy. What you are seeing is most likely not the average case.)
Pragha Semplice Player Audio 0.7.2 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
I make a distinction between exercise and work. The things you do repeatedly, all else being equal, are the things you get better at. Do actual physical labour, and you'll get stronger; do fake physical labour in a gym, and you'll also get stronger. But modern life doesn't need much in the way of actual physical labour. FWIW, I've never been in a gym in my life, and view the religion of the church of the gym with some bemusement, but I'm not particularly unfit - right in the middle of normal BMI, and I enjoy cycling as a means of commuting, rather than exercise.

Mental work, on the other hand, there is an abundance of. There's no end of things a motivated person can put their mind to and affect real people positively. Cognitive exercise is at best a cultural experience - such as games - or mental chewing gum for those waiting periods, but as we grow more connected with gadgets etc., there are fewer excuses to waste effort with no substance.
Its not "indiscriminate" as the author claims - its whole point is to descriminate between people and sort them out. And its not just the UK - half the shops in the local mall play loud music which I can't stand, because they don't want me (50yrold) in their shop, they want teens.
And the corollary: you may be a master of the universe, and bring in lots of profit, yet not actually add substantial value.

As the article says, moneymaking is its own treadmill, its own fake achievement.
The Psychology of Moving
Some handwritten code by Mel on this page: http://www.bemorehealthy.com/LGP-30Computer/The30.htm
I've always thought it was an exaggeration based on some truth. Either way, he's definitely a legend. He even has a wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Kaye
Of course, in A Clockwork Orange, the an/protagonist actually liked classical music. England will now be ravaged by classical loving hellions.
Still they are one tenth the dimension of the b&w illusion.
The movie (and the novel) portrayed an active-aggressive policing of citizens. What is described in this article (even if perhaps exaggerated) is not unlike what the movie portrays, but in passive form.

The concluding paragraph--on adults trying to educate/entertain/police youngsters from afar, without engaging with them--is scary for the recognition it evokes. Not only the UK is pretending that giant masses of uneducated citizens are to be dealt with sticks and stones, instead of books.
If a trait is determined by a mutation it is inborn but not inherited.

This is one possible explanation, but I am not a biologist, and I am not sure when the op intended.
Agreed, climbing a mountain serves no purpose other than to say you've climbed a mountain. I climbed aboard a plane and got much higher than any mountain climber did on land, and I did it at a far more economical price.

If you believe sitting in a cubicle is meaningless, then don't sit in a fucking cubicle, it's common sense. I can't stand office work, it's just something I cannot do because it feels like a laborious chore, rather I choose to work outside in construction because despite working the same hours as anyone else, it doesn't feel like I'm forcing myself to do it. However, I'm certain lots of people don't enjoy moving equipment that weighs hundreds of pounds, so to each their own.

In my life I work my job so that I can afford a nice home to live with my wife, to spend time with family, to travel to foreign cultures and to take care of animals. This is what I like, and this is what I do. My life fulfils me, that's why I live it this way, if someone ignorantly wants to believe that my actions are not real achievements then so be it. Obviously their grand achievement in life will be of wasting time caring about what other people are thinking and doing.
I think there is a huge, huge gap between TwiDiBook's needs and the needs of the overwhelming majority of sites on the Internet. There are plenty of applications which do real things for real people which will never have scaling issues associated with them. The vast majority of the remainder of applications will have issues which are tractable by fairly simple solutions. And then we get to the pathbreakers who have to invent new methods of engineering to keep up with their growth curves.

The party is just getting started for "Hey, check it: we can put a cache in front of our database" for that broad middle of the curve. (This includes applications where relational databases are a great fit but for certain performance requirements in small bits of the program. For example, you really don't want to have to implement a university backend system in a key/value store. Just trust me on this one. It is virtually made for SQL, but while 99% of the use of the system is less than performance intensive, having resources in place to support that last 1% costs the university hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think we could slash that with creative caching.)
Theft, fraud, criminal damage: whatever applies really.

It's much the same principle as how they took down Al Capone for income tax evasion [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Conviction_and_Impris...
I'm surprised to see no mention of the iPhone and iPad as departures from the Alto UI paradigms.
Are REST's Days of Dominance Numbered?
Solar power is fusion power. And if you're dealing with an asteroid you can capture it and use it with no transmission loss.
Why do different kids of the same parents have different personalities? Presumably they're "wired" that way from birth, yet it's not necessarily inherited directly from one parent.

Genetics probably plays some role (as it does in almost anything), but it doesn't have to be the sole determining factor.
Working on our backup path. I run some Limbo[1] code using Windows Scheduled Tasks. This copies the contents of My Documents and Desktop (or wherever) to a Venti[2] server running on Linux on the LAN. The storage arenas of that server are extracted in 500Mb chunks and encrypted, along with the scores for accessing them, using GPG[3]. These are then copied offsite, via the internet and bundled into DVD sized groups and burned to optical when appropriate. As Venti arenas are append only this is minimum transfer, secure backup.
That's obviously just the Windows machiens that use Limbo. Unix likes have native clients. Our Venti store also contains data from other soruces such as the website and imap servers. Though it might make sense to separate them out, that's the decisions I'm working on as I go along.

I would also like to find an encryption method that uses fixed size chunks so I can upload only the appended data. That's something I need to look more into. I know they are around somewhere.

[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/
[2] http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html
[3] http://www.gnupg.org/
You do. The author is calling on you to asses what you choose to achieve.
Refining almost-pure metals is fortunately NOT as polluting as refining ore. It may come to the point where it becomes illegal to refine anything BUT roid-metal.
This is the sort of reddit-bait that does not belong here. Thanks.
If having entrepreneurial parents, going to an ivy-league university (vs a mediocre college), and having entrepreneurial aspirations early in life doesn't make you an entrepreneur, what does?

The first two don't make an entrepreneur by any means. The last might have some bearing, but I'd imagine a fair number of people have aspirations and end up not becoming entrepreneurs, and vice versa, so it seems more of an indicator than anything else.
Seneca wrote about this in _De Brevitate Vitae_ about 2,000 years ago, and unlike TFA, actually said it well.

Those who do not study philosophy are condemned to blog mangled versions of it.
Actually, you very well can be meticulous, scrupulous, or careful of something. Again, see definition (5a) of the word, "of."

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of

5a: relating to: about <stories of her travels>

That being said, I will probably say "conscientious about" from now on as a result of this conversation, just in case people really do have a problem with "conscientious of." However, "conscientious of" is an acceptable usage.
Flavors.me - automatic personal web sites
Writing an mp3 crawler in Clojure
Different kids of the same parents have different genetics. When people have kids that aren't twins, each kid has a uniquely different combinations of genes, which could result in differing personalities as a result of inheriting a different combination of genes from the same two parents.

Of course, people's personalities are influenced by their home life, their experience at schools, and their experience growing up with siblings (which is different amongst kids of the same parents) among a huge range of other variables. I suppose the making of an entrepreneur is similar.
Trying to define what should be meaningful for other people is pretty arrogant and an insular perspective on life.

My personal take on reality is that the whole shebang is a "meaningless treadmill", but I'm willing to accept that it might not be true for the next guy.
Politicians - so they can brag about their H-bomb being bigger than yours.
I counted 5 offers in 1 year to work for free for an unspecified share in the venture. What they were asking was, I donate billable hours (cash) and they risk nothing. Smart people are often smart enough to see that con a mile away.
Normally spelling corrections are somewhere around Argument Level -1, but I just wanted to point out that when you wrote: "The author is calling on you to asses what you choose to achieve." I read it at a glance as The author is calling on you asses to choose what you want to achieve. A moment later I understood you meant assess, and while the two statements mean much the same thing, the one I misread is far more memorable :-)
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
Points For Toothbrushing: The Gaming Speech Everyone Is Talking About
Here's something you might find interesting
Gamma error in picture scaling
http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html
By this rational everything is a fake achievement, so just off yourself and save us this boring shit from being on the HN front page.

The majority of our life is doing useless, thankless tasks. Simply by spending 15 minutes in the shower every day I will have wasted an entire year of my life in the shower. By sleeping in 1 hour on Sunday I wasted 1/2 a year of my life, equally anyone spending an hour in church also wasted a year of their life (unless on the off chance god exists, then they only probably wasted a year of their life worshipping the wrong god). Those two teeth cleaning's my insurance company covers per year, assuming I'm only in the average of an hour, I just wasted almost 7 days of my life despite no medical evidence the procedure does anything, but if I get the maximum done yearly, well that's 12 days.

Why should I brush my teeth the 2 minutes morning and evening recommended by my dentist? that wastes 81 days of my life. Just doing 1 minute morning and night only wastes 40 days. Why should I sleep the recommended 8 hours a night when just getting 6 hours has no appreciable difference on longevity or health? That's a whole 6 1/2 years saved if I just sleep 6 hours.
I did wonder if his name was really Mel - the rest of it sounded entirely plausible.

However, that story always reminds me of the chap I used to know who had done some programming with a hand drill...
Sure there are. Take General Dynamics, for example. A private company that sells billions of dollars of military hardware to the government.
He may just be upset because he's no good at video games.
The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo
The author of the piece seems to mix up three extremely different things, which resemble each other only in that they involve teenagers and classical music. [EDIT: spurious word left over from an earlier version of the paragraph removed.]

Playing classical music in places where you don't want teenagers hanging about: obviously harmless, no? It harms no one; any teenagers who actually like classical music will just go there if they want to and not be traumatized; it's no different from choosing the music and decor in a shop to attract a particular demographic.

Using classical music as a form of punishment in school detentions: unlikely to do any very grave harm, but certainly bad for the cause of classical music since it encourages the pupils to think of classical music as bad.

Using classical music to accompany Pavlovian conditioning to break the will of a teenage criminal ("A Clockwork Orange"): obviously vile, though the main badness is in the conditioning itself; also, curiously enough, not something anyone is actually doing.

There's plenty to dislike about "ASBO Britain", but this is just bullshit.
BuddyPress:  Turn your WordPress site into a social network
Yes, some parts of the market don't need the kind of scale talked about here (you'd think the domain name would tip you off). And plenty of people get by with MS Access, still. I don't really think either point adds to the discussion.
Rule of thumb: Any organization that allows you to level up is out to fuck you, take your money, or both.

Examples: School, corporations, scientology, military, world of warcraft, etc.
Wikileaks is, as far as I am concerned, the textbook example of a site that should not exist.

Firstly, if you need Wikileaks in the first place, you have bigger problems.

Secondly, Wikileaks actively tries to place itself above the law. No-one should be above the law.

Thirdly, there is little that has been revealed via Wikileaks that could not have been revealed in the traditional way via a free press. Wikileaks may make things marginally easier, but if you're in the business of leaking private stuff only if it's easy, maybe you should reconsider your world view.

Finally, before anyone comes along and tells me how much good Wikileaks does, consider this: they also released the private membership list of an unpopular political party, causing very serious consequences for many members of that party. Whether or not you agree with their politics, that sort of action is way over the line. What about the anonymity of those party members?
I posted a comment at the OP's site: If you talk to a lawyer, ask him/her whether you might be able to assert "nominative fair use" in response (see generally the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use).
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever. Because this is just a ride."

-- Bill Hicks
Secure URL Redirects using Apache, ModRewrite and ModSecurity
Most of the time, a claim must be really egregious for a judge to actually penalize the lawyer for bringing it. Legal ethics rules vary from state to state, but they generally say, in effect, that a lawyer owes every client a duty of zealous advocacy.
Intelligence, honesty, curiosity, humanity, and getting things done. :-)