skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's actually what most of the arcade game achievements are like, in my experience: stuff you would never do during the game, but is weird enough to warrant the game noticing, like in Geometry Wars, doing a certain (difficult) thing in the game without firing a single shot.

One game, Chime, has an achievement just for buying the game. Since all the proceeds go to charity, I guess they felt you deserved a few points for buying it.
To add my twitter stream, the site wants read/write access: #Fail.

I don't want flavors.me (or any other aggregating service) pitching itself on twitter under my name without my control. The default should be read, not read/write.
I don't think you're quite doing justice to his lack of perception. There's plenty more demonstration of superficial understanding of the world and the industry, including

- the obnoxious plug for "his company." It's a little hard to miss amongst the idiocy suggesting that until recently, the only place you could find data centers was in Silicon Valley. Never mind that "his company", Rackspace, is located in Texas and has nine data centers, none of which happen to be in California.

- this bit about foursquare:

"Go to a local coffee shop in your neighborhood, for instance, and ask people what Foursquare is. I guarantee you that in most Silicon Valley coffee shops you’ll find someone. Not so in most other places in the world."

I can think of many neighborhoods where this is demonstrably false, starting with the neighborhood in NYC where Foursquare is located.

- the paragraph talking about how low corporate tax rates are in Vancouver (noticeably discounting the rest of Canada), a city probably best known for insane cost of living, immediately followed by a paragraph talking about how the rest of the world has much lower cost of living than the bay area.

Not only doesn't he have a good understanding of the industry he works in, but he seems to lack a basic understanding of geography, politics and economics.

My personal theory is that one of the key reasons for the "globalization" of the startup culture is the preponderance of cluelessness in the pundit community in northern California.
Chavs. Not really gangs, not serious crime, but generally "anti-social behaviour" - disrespect to adults, picking on the weak, sitting on other people's cars. Basically, types of behaviour you do not see in any other developed country. Even in us 'ghettos' you won't see the youth harassing their neighbours.

The reasons are many -
-high density, more use of public transport
-mixed development (rich living near the poor),
-lower levels of welfare than the rest of europe,
-more exposure to american television because of shared language (wannabe gangsters).
-football hooliganism

There's are also a rise in american style gang activity, expecially among minority youth in cities, but it's nowhere american levels yet.
I strongly agree with the proposed existence of the Achievment treadmills. However, I think the difference between "fake" and "real" achievement treadmills are completely arbitrary, created by a societal average and either accepted or rejected by the individual. If society as a whole started valuing number of facebook friends over net income, then facebook would no longer be a a "fake" treadmill.

I think it's still a good article because it could be interpreted as advocating narrowing in on what achievment treadmills you feel are "real", and avoiding distracting achievement treadmills you consider are "fake".

Really it all comes down to avoiding cognitive dissonance, when you observe yourself acting in a manner that is contrary to your beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Evolution of the Mind: A Case for Design Literacy
Tree style tabs would be better if the tab panel would expand and put thumbnails under the links. I don't like that they automatically collapse either.
Which boat was that? (I was based in Groton about 10 years ago...)
Is this yours? There seem to be two blue buttons at the bottom, but they are hidden by the footer bar. (Firefox/3.5.8)
This looks pretty cool. I like the simplicity of the design choices.

I haven't signed up yet -- wondering if you can add just plain ol' links to stuff. (edit: nope.)
Hi. Thanks for posting this. I'm the author of the book. I would like to note that this is not a book for founders. It's a book for employees.
This article focuses entirely on cycling as a rational for leaving the laptop plugged in, but heat and charge state are staggeringly more important to absolute capacity.

A fully charged lithium battery loses absolutely capacity much more quickly than a partially charged battery. Even worse, a warm, fully charged battery will lose absolute capacity at an astounding rate. A battery at 140F will be down to 60% of its initial capacity after 3 months if it is fully charged during that time.[1] If the battery could be maintained at 40% charge during that time it would still have 85% of its capacity after a full year of use, even at the same temperature.

This means that leaving a laptop plugged in will kill the battery in a very short time. The alternative is to let the battery continually cycle down and then charge it again. This isn't a good solution either because the extra heat very well may offset any benefit of keeping the battery at a lower charged state.

All in all, I think it means that a laptop is not meant to be on all the time; unless you are willing to replace the battery at fairly regular intervals.

[1] http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
They have two armed guards on duty, 24/7, in the missile command centre on the submarine!?

Jesus. That's .. serious.

I come from a Navy family so I love this kind of thing. The pictures of the sub looming out of the fog were particularly cool. But I was surprised by how low-tech a lot of the onboard controls seemed. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think ...
Isn't that just Zen Buddhism? Was Hicks a Buddhist?
How to Prepare for a Social Media Disaster
I agree. It's like people expect smart people to do all the work because it's easy for them or something. Easier than being lazy. A lot of being "smart" isn't about being smart, but about being willing to do the work.

It takes a while to get good at saying no. People don't like when you say no, but it'll be much better for everyone.
If that's the case, daily mail readers overreacting and having power, how come it hasn't happened in other countries, why aren't there daily mail type people in those countries.
There's got to be some truth to a 'youth problem' otherwise asbo's wouldn't have been created.
I wasn't implying that I think parents, school, and aspirations makes an entrepreneur... those are just the points that were covered in the article.

I recognize that they do not make an entrepreneur, what I was asking was factors other people think do make an entrepreneur.
> But modern life doesn't need much in the way of actual physical labour.

Ha! Come work my job. Did you ever wonder how houses were built, or how shelves are stocked in supermarkets, or how trucks are loaded . . . just because you work in a cubicle doesn't mean everyone in the western world does. Despite a recession, the construction sector in the majority of the world is still rapidly growing, in parts it stayed well within the double figures.

BTW BMI in its present form and fitness have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. It was designed to study muscle development amongst soldiers, and more over it was designed to show muscle development on an individual basis over military training. IE where they started vs where they ended. In its original iteration it had nothing in it whatsoever to do with measuring obesity, because it was literally the heavier the better.
No, you can't. You can link how 'of' can be used to construct a nonsensical phrase all day long. It's still nonsensical. That being said, learn the language. 'Conscientious of' is an acceptable usage in a stubborn imaginary world in which usage is subordinate to your preference.
IMO that talk is beenz-level bullshit. Ask yourself this - would you use this? I sure wouldn't. And designing for other people is one of the key pitfalls of tech.

You know why I brush my teeth? It's because I want my teeth to be clean and I want to keep all of them and not have bad breath. I don't need points. Or, if you must, I already got the "clean, healthy, attractive" points already.

I don't need some arbitrary xbox achievements for brushing my teeth, thanks, I already got the points from the lowest level computer there is - reality.
Perhaps a better word would have been "intrinsic". A trait can be a result of compounding, non-shared environment. For instance, at any early age you might have recieved a reward for taking a risk. Perhaps that led you to take more risks, and achieve more rewards. Then you join a social group in which you develop a niche as being the guy who always takes crazy risks. As a result of this, by age 20 being a risk taker is built into your personality.
And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap? People said the same thing about fission, but it's turned out to be quite expensive, and the technology is likely to be very complex. If you calculate how large area of photovoltaics you can build for the price of developing and building a fusion reactor (not that anyone has any idea what this cost will be), I suspect you'd get a lot of it.
Better even is that PostgreSQL 9.0 will have solid master/slave async replication. PostgreSQL already supports better write concurrency and multi-core scaling than InnoDB or MyISAM, and the replication will bring web-style read scaling into the picture. PostgreSQL has a "free-er" license, a more unified community, and isn't burdened by possibly hostile ownership.
I've never been a Solaris fan (used it in school, and it's running one one of my old Ultra2s), but I really do love zfs. Every week it scans all my drives to ensure my data's really still there, and my file server sends me email when things go wrong (both from smartd and cron). If Solaris dies it will be a sad loss, but if zfs dies with it, it would really be horrible.

To be honest, I'm hopeing for some lgpl/bsd release of the OpenSolaris code so that all the fun bits can be fully integrated into BSD/Linux/Darwin. Solaris's driver support is too sparse for it to really be a good general purpose OS, but it has a few great functions that would do a lot to improve more generally useful operating systems.
This attitude is really self-defeating. Even pg has software patents. It'd probably be in your self-interest to start thinking about why patents aren't terrible.
What's the difference between "leveling up" and rising in a meritocracy? Ideally in any organization those talented enough to run it will rise to the top and "level up". If education and training help you achieve that, what's the problem?
Agreed. They also already exist in sufficient quantity to do whatever you'd imagine doing with an asteroid and still inhabit the Earth. Unless, of course, you don't have nukes. Maybe Iran should consider this? ;-)
At that point you might say 'the movie/book and the article were both about people'. That makes them easily comparable to Beowulf or Chaucer. Suggesting they are substantially similar is armwavy wankery, unless you can actually describe a way in which they are substantially similar.
I agree. My take on this essay is that it is but an early milestone on the path to enlightenment. It asks an interesting question, but ends in a total cop-out, where the author literally claims that divining the meaning of life is "easy":

The easy part to culling the bullshit is to ask yourself: Is this activity making a positive, tangible difference in my life or anyone else’s life?

Easy for him, maybe.

It's fine to make the limited argument that certain games devolve a bit too quickly into flavorless tickling of the brain's pleasure centers. So long as you are clearly arguing about taste in game design, not about the ultimate meaning of life.

But when you decide to delve further, to the point that you've argued not just that crack cocaine and MMORPGs are ultimately meaningless, but also that education, money, casual acquaintances, success, and writing comments on HN are ultimately meaningless, shouldn't you keep going until you get to the end? Which would be something like:

All achievement is porn; that is, it is ultimately empty.

Although I would never phrase it that way; I prefer a more classical phrasing, like this [1]:

Life means suffering.

The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof.

Now that is a general principle.

---

[1] I cribbed these lines from http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/fourtruths.html , because that's what came up in Google. There are probably a few other sources... ;)
If only the collective mind could communicate with more than 140 characters at a time...
If you're only going to the asteroid belt, you can probably get away with photovoltaics instead of nuclear power, too. And yeah, it seems it would be better to do it in place. But if it's really quite pure metal, there's not much refining that would need to be done.
Maybe now the Sun sales people will learn how to sell from their Oracle compatriots.
There are so many 'buzzy' words in such a short space that my brain hurts. This is an excellent example of why I think most blog posts are useless. They have as much information as a 2 minute inebriated conversation at the bar. There is no digging into topic, just a quick scooting over the surface.
DjangoStack
Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy HN, I think "Achievement Porn" is a danger on this site - I've recently recovered from an unproductive karma obsession. Although necessary for HN, karma is of little value (over a minimum threshold), except maybe for credibility reference for certain comments. The occasional binge can be instructive - everything in moderation I suppose(including moderation).
I was thinking about legal monopolies or companies barely profitable by virtue of tax credits/breaks or companies that don't have to follow certain costly regulations for some (legal) reason.

Would those factors actually make them "not really profitable" or "not actually private businesses"? Or is this where the "In a sense" part of your reply breaks down? (These are legitimate questions, but I'm afraid it might sound snarky.)
I agree with this type of interpretation, although I would struggle to call it inborn or even intrinsic. I still see this as a type of learning, albeit from an extremely early age.
Google Go captures developers' imaginations
Uhm, they might want to reconsider the background and tone it down a little bit. Like this it is just too loud, imho.
I gave you creativity, and you made cranky blog posts?
There was a good popularization of this (or similar) technology on NOVA Science Now:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0302/02.html

Definitely cool stuff.

That different artists have "signature" styles seems trivially obvious; it's interesting that nobody was able to analyze paintings rigorously enough to reliably apply this in the past.

Though I do worry about its accuracy. Picasso, for instance, painted in a number of vastly different styles over his career. It'd be interesting, and somewhat surprising, if his brushstroke signature was the same throughout his long career.
While we have power here, it seems much of the city does not (we've just been out trying to buy food). Many road junctions near us (Providencia, La Reina, Las Condes) are without lights; some bigger buildings have backup generators running.

If anyone is reading this from Chile and is looking for bread, I've got details here - http://www.acooke.org/cute/Earthquake0.html#Sat27Feb20101346...
crosses fingers

please find something awesome enough for space elevators
I stand by my statement: in the days of farming, easily 90% or more of the population was doing hard physical labour. (And I don't work in a cubicle. Actually, I work from home.)

And BMI was just a useful shorthand to indicate that I wasn't e.g. overweight or obese (or a musclebound athlete).
thinking a system sucks doesn't preclude taking opportunities that system presents you.
If it happens as the fetus develops. DNA doesn't specify the exact composition of a human down to the molecule.
Right, and I wouldn't play FarmVille either but, according to the talk, more people do that than have Twitter accounts.

Given that, and the other similar points the presenter makes, I don't find it at all unbelievable that a large percentage of the population would indeed brush their teeth for points.
Or if a trait is a composite effect of 'sub-traits' from both parents. It is inherited in its parts, but neither parents have the whole trait. What I mean: your dad has A, your mom has B, and AB leads to the successful trait.
See here's the thing, ragging on the education system is so overdone, such an easy target, such a bullshit "I wasn't the best so it didn't matter anyway" thing, that as soon as somebody does it in these inevitable articles, I tune out.

Seriously, every time somebody in one of these articles tries to get their pseudo-philosophical think on about education or achievement or whatever, they dive straight for AND OF COURSE WE ALL KNOW SCHOOL IS SO MEANINGLESS FNAR FNAR.
Agreed. They certainly aren't terrible if you own the patent. Great companies like Intellectual Ventures simply could not exist without them. Software patents open up a lot of innovative business models without the need to spend all the boring time and effort building stuff.
Why social network analysis hasn't led us to Osama Bin Laden.
I don't believe you. What if the points could be redeemed for coupons or something? It's helping you do something that you would have done anyway.
Home - HACKER VIKASH KUMAR
Herbert R. J. Grosch, 1918-2010
Read the second comment, which is by the author; it ends with "This post is laying the foundation for what is to become my argument for why the iPad could be the largest mistake that Apple ever made."
Solar power is you sitting 200 feet away from a bonfire. Fusion reactor power is placing a space heater directly in front of you. If you were cold, which would you prefer?
"..moving is incredibly stressful and people don’t realize it"

My family almost moved recently. We finally found a buyer for our house, and since we were moving across the country, we quickly took a short trip to pick out a new house. We had to decide on a place within days while not being at all familiar with the area. I think it was the most stressful time of my entire life - and I'm married and have a child!

Then the deal fell through on our house which canceled the deal on the house there, and for a moment it was a great weight removed! Except then we'd have to do it all over again because we were back to square one - despair and a whole new level of stress set it.

Finally, my employer decided that we didn't have to move after all and that working remotely was going just fine and it wasn't worth the effort. Suddenly the world was a brighter place, the sale sign removed from the yard, and the extended family was happy again.

How anyone could not realize all that stress is beyond me - and we didn't even actually move!
FBI Tools to Inspect, Hack and Analyze Other Computers
Thanks for that link! I might need it.
I'd agree with all that, but add a disclaimer. The rise of cheap and easy solutions for handling Big Data makes a lot of new applications feasible. All those cool correlations that Amazon does to suggest new books? You can do that at home now. Got a problem that would benefit from running an analysis of hundreds of millions of pages? You don't have to be Google to implement that.

It is a bit maddening to see people applying the NoSQL hammer to problems that don't need scalability, but it's partly driven by the realization that they open up opportunities to build entirely new applications.
A letter full of hot air, even when written by a lawyer, is just a letter full of hot air. There was no legal action taken.

C&D letters have no teeth. Court actions have teeth, and that hasn't happened.

Nothing to see here, really. Except laughable claims and example of poor business strategy.

What was funny to me is that Ryan set a trap and the guy (Shankman) bit the bait. It was Jason Calacanis style PR strategy at its best and clever if intentional. Why Ryan called getting a C&D a 'shitty move' is the non-congruent part. Ryan asked for it and Shankman delivered a delightfully poor response in spades. Total PR coup for Ryan.

Side note: If you run a half decent business you'll have your fair share of C&D letters and meritless lawsuits. Not worth wasting any emotion over. Just factor the legal cost into your cash projections and out-execute the heck out of everyone.
The talk is a really good one: thought provoking, and worth the watch. I really don't think he's right about his grand vision of where the technology is headed, though. The point system attracts a certain percentage of the population, its true. But most people just don't get obsessed by points. Only gamers really get really obsessed by the them, and not even all gamers do. E.g. The credit card industry has been using the point rewards system forever, and it does drive sales, but if it were really the be all end all, all credit cards would have point rewards systems.

I think that Jesse Schell, while a really smart, insightful guy, has trouble seeing the universe from outside the perspective of a hardcore gamer. E.g., he sounded pretty shocked that the wii did so well. I remember when the video of the Nintendo execs playing tennis was going around, and a lot of hardcore gamers failed to see the appeal. Everyone else was just like, man, that looks insanely fun. If you can't intuitively see the appeal of products that have a lot of mass appeal, it's kind of hard to predict where the technology is going to go.

Not saying I would be any better at predicting things. I just don't see his predictions quite adding up.
Hippies can remain behind and hug redwoods in northern california. If you need me, I'll be digging asteroids out somewhere past Mars.
Why has the actor model not succeeded? (1997)
I am curious about the validity of the measurements, but the difference is nearly half a standard deviation. The rest of the argument is a little odd:

1) He doesn't buy the idea that IQ is a measurement with predictive value, which is why he doesn't think that IQ... has predictive value when guessing religious affiliation.

2) He doesn't like the author of the study.

So, just to be clear, the blog post you linked is about reasons it is not worth your time to investigate whether or not this is true, not reasons to think it's not true.
Merit is continuous and not discrete. When you take a continuous function and try to make it look discrete, what you'll notice is that there is 'some extra' between the actual merit curve and the stepwise function that touches it. These so-called meritocracies are just a way to skim that extra off the top.

Look at it this way, if you went in to take music lessons and your music teacher told you that in order to get to 'level 3' trumpet player you'd need to spend X years and Y thousands of dollars, you'd instantly see it was ridiculous. School is the same way, you just don't realize it because that's the way it's always been presented to you.
... I’m just suggesting do not just grab advice from the Internet or friends tip and do not complicate beyond the need. ...(Peter)
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/03/01/kiss-kiss-kis...
Call for testing: OpenSSH 5.4
To be fair, Loopt does seem to be one of the pioneers in location sharing. And they have built a product. IV, on the other hand..
Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

I think the shock of entering an average large corporate bureaucracy makes a lot of people suddenly very interested in entrepreneurship - I know it's worked that way for a bunch of my friends.