skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People should really learn to use computers. At least a little. They should at least be able to painlessly install popular programs. Before they do, no amount of free software will save them.

We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort to install (you need at least a few clicks). So we have to teach.
That's the second thing he mentions, but the first is something he said on his personal blog that might have affected his work and that he got in trouble at work for, at least that's how I'm reading it.
thanks article seems to be fine, but the 2 marketplaces are boon for me. I didn't even knew these existed. Cheers....
We're judged by others all the time. If you're comfortable with what you've achieved and how you live your life then it shouldn't matter[1], you can't please everyone all of the time.

Nonetheless, there's a reasonable cohort of people[2] out there who although superficially successful do not feel like they're achieving what they'd like to achieve. The article is targeted at this group of people.

[1] If the judgment of others makes you unhappy with your life then there's a reasonable chance that you're not actually happy with it.

[2] I count myself amongst these
I agree for the most part. Even Tim Berners-Lee has his regrets formulating the semantics of the URL, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator#Histor...

protocol:TLD/domain/www/path/file.html just makes more sense.
Good luck Patrick, I really appreciate your blog and your explanations you share on it.. Hope everything goes smooth & well for you new life :)
Chinese Internet Memes & Dirty Words On Google Translate
Uncommented video bites (by euronews)
Google: did you mean "recursion"?
They not only exist but have a lot of visitors - so these are great places for selling your website :)
I love z! It saves a lot of typing!
The history of a model for fonts on the Web
What front-end developer candidates should know going into an interview.
The Dorkbot community is pretty cool:

http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsocal/

There also used to be events called "Geek Dinners" but they were mostly attended by "social media gurus" and the like. Not really my cup of tea.

I'm on the westside and am always looking for hacker events. My company is a big sponsor of Drupal events in Boston and Los Angeles and that's where much of my focus has been.
Continuous integration?
How Costco Primes Us To Spend More Money... | The Greenest Dollar
In my experience, the startup scenes as you know them in the Bay Area and Boston are massive compared to the one in Los Angeles.
SFL saved my ass in the mid-1990s. I was in dire need of some easy-to-use, well-documented functionalities in C and SFL was easily the best there was. A million thanks for providing such high-quality code to the community!
Funny, the I was on flippa.com for 2 hours today. I use the site to study how "repeat sellers" create hughly successful sites in a matter of months. I followed a tip from Glen Allsopp on seomoz.
In fact, if they are happy with their life they could easily be considered more successful than someone that gets ahead in the marketplace. There are many people who have achieved what society thinks of as success, but are never satisfied.
I'm not sure eliminating IT or 'killing the patient' as you so eloquently phrase it, is a viable solution for many companies. What can be done to increase the metabolic activity of creativity in said patient instead of killing him?
My New Project - Surprise Book Shop
There are 3 golden triangles of success one can examine, whereby an increase in 1 factor puts pressure for an increase in another. These triangles are:

project: scope, time, budget

ego: fame, fortune, power

wellbeing: health, family relations, work life

For work, this means a happy work life, that is, doing the work one does best, doing it well, not overdoing it, and being paid appropriately: maximizing flow. So work in the wellbeing triangle is a reward, not a burden.

Here are some rules:

- within a triangle, if you increase 1 factor, it leads to an increase in another, but if you increase it too much it leads to cessation in another, or a decrease. EG: pump too much money into a project, and too many people may be hired and deadlines are missed.

- too much pressure in a triangle will force a period of chaos until a new triangle can be formed with higher capacity. EG: your family relations may be so great that you can have more children but you are not making enough money to allow it, so family relations can have limits until work life improves.

- there are connections between the triangles, but the links are uncertain. EG: one person may trash their family relations and work life in order to experience a benefit of fame. This may in turn lead to new relations more relevant to that fame, and then a better family life.

My point: success is multi-factored. Success in one area doesn't necessarily mean success in other areas. Also, the road to success itself is a meta-success not to be overlooked.
[redacted till I finish reading what I should have read in first place]
Wow this is certainly different. Tempting...
This is a little side project I created last week - the idea is to take people outside of their reading comfort zones while also helping local charity shops shift their huge stocks of unread books.

I'm aware that the website is very simple - I decided that getting the project moving was more important than fussing about design in the early days. I like the idea but I have no idea if it's of any interest to other people.
Nice question. 0MQ has a wire protocol but it's minimalist, just doing framing. As we push 0MQ out into wider use we'll grow the protocol stack upwards. It'll take years. We do have a protocol specification project - http://rfc.zeromq.org/

We do intend to deliver IETF-quality specs that turn messaging patterns like pubsub into 1st class citizens of the Internet, so that arbitrary vendors can produce pieces that plug into this. But these specs will still be really simple.

I've always advocated a standard API for AMQP and proposed one (WireAPI) years ago, because this reduces vendor capture. Imagine if vendors designed arbitrary socket APIs... well some do, and it locks their users in.

So 0MQ is partly an API standardization project, partly an architecture project (to build a layer that seems to be missing from the stack), and partly a protocol specification project.
I really like your posts, Rajesh! When I first found your blog here on HN I just kept reading.

With that said, I think a lot of people don't really understand what you mean, perhaps because they have their own pre-conceived notions of what success is, or they might think that you look kind of slick with that shirt and sunglasses on... ;)

I think what Rajesh is after is that our world is a mess right now (at least this is what I feel) because lots of smart people/people with leadership qualities/creative people born in the 30s/40s/50s have spent their energy on things that are good for themselves, while not advancing the world.

If many smart people do what they can to make the world a little bit better, we will get a huge payoff.

And we need that.
Thanks. Looks like a good alternative to Aeron.
And so it begins... Seton Hill University to give all students an iPad
It was amusing to see a book with a picture of Ben Franklin being advertised on that page. It's hard to think of a stronger anecdotal rebuttal of the blog entry's argument.
How ebooks that are distributed in pdf are so hard to read on small screens, and the lack of properly working pdf->reflowable format (epub) tools. This is a hard problem and I'd pay for a 80% solution. It would have to recognize and properly fix/insert chapter titles, initial caps, tables of content, other leader/footer material, ... It would have to properly insert images in a sensible spot yet remove background images. Also it needs to properly recognize and format paragraphs. Columns would be nice but those are in the 20% I can live without.
This reminds me more of Get Satisfaction than Yelp - in the sense that people perhaps aren't even after publicity, but they can get listed anyway. Only now it's individuals that can have their reputation held to ransom!
Yahoo targeted in China cyber attacks
Sorry s/anyone/everyone/
very funny. very very funny.
Dropbox quota now 8/10GB if you max out referrals
new easter eggs?
damn those geeks :)
Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in.

This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts.

Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
Obligatory:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231262
I use the similar approach, with the main principle being that the family must not be neglected no matter what.

As my daughter slowly grows, I see clearly that a neglect of not spending enough time with her for a longer time can't actually be compensated later on, and that could only create regrets when I'll get older.

My experience have been so far that family/career can be balanced, since it is always possible to squeeze out more time for work by getting up sooner, stay awake longer or give up some personal leisures.
A Japanese chassis, Japanese lens, Japanese gasket, Japanese CPU, Japanese receiver, Japanese software, and Japanese keyboard in a Chinese paper box is a Chinese cell phone when it is convenient for it to be one. My neighbors got quite literally burned in effigy in the 1980s for making American manufacturers look bad (I live in the region that generates the lion's share of Japan's electronic components and automobile parts). They learned the lesson: don't be seen as making Americans look bad.

There is a Japanese proverb you may have heard of called "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." There are a few ways to spin it, but they all suggest not being that nail. Making China be that nail instead? That's like triple bonus points. (China and Japan have a... storied relationship with each other.)
Not that new: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719408
If the model is very good then random errors will not be "unbiased" in your sense: they will all be "away from the model". In fact, if the model is any good at all then random errors will more often be away from it than towards it.

There is an incentive for scientists to check for errors that make their models look better. You're more likely to get famous for finding an error in a widely used model than for yet another confirmation that it works OK. (Even more likely if you can come up with a better model. More likely still if that better model is different in illuminating ways.)

I expect there still is a tendency for measurements to get distorted towards better fit with models. But it's not as one-sided as you make it sound.
I really liked the Steve Blank post.
As for my personal experience, Skype and Google Apps turn this old paradigm around.
I am launching my first business right now, and last week my first son was born. As I work 90% from home, the 60 hours weeks don't interfere with my family time at all.
1) Since when was PDF an open, friendly format. Didn't Adobe go after MS when they tried to add PDF export to Word 2007?

2) His freedom to use any format he likes does not impact on your freedom not to use those formats. You are free to ignore the documents he creates.

If I decide to invent my own language and speak only in that, that does not impact your freedom not to learn my language.

(I'm not sure the analogies are making these arguments any clearer)
Python Patterns - An Optimization Anecdote
Yes I'm sorry but large organisations often seem to slowly and inadvertently replace creativity and enthusiasm with processes and procedures.
There is another problem with wine and that is that, contrary to popular belief, you cannot just hold wine in your cellar for as long as you want and have it appreciate in value.

Wines usually have a good or perfect age beyond which their quality goes down. It is different for each wine, and it is complicated wine connoisseur stuff. So your old wines may reach a point where you have to either drink them or sell them ASAP or they will start deteriorating. So you may be forced to sell in a bad market. As such wine is even worse than art (which is another fun but dodgy investment).
Methods in Losing Weight
There is an increasing number of people and even children who are getting over weight and obese. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in the whole world there are more than 1 billion of overweight adults and at least 300 million of them are obese. And, an estimated number of 22 million children under 5 years old are overweight. That is why more and more companies are investing on diet pills, weight loss products and programs.

There are a lot of methods nowadays available in the market and can also be sold through the internet. Some popular ways of losing weight are discussed below:

Weight loss drugs or anti-obesity medication. Many people use drugs in order to lose weight because it is convenient and is not exhausting. These are pharmacological products that can suppress the appetite of an individual so as not to feel hunger immediately; it can also increase the metabolism of the body so there will be faster digestion of foods that have taken in; and, it can interfere the absorption of specific nutrients in the body such as blocking the breakdown of fats so that it will not be absorbed by the body.

Diet Plans. These are very famous because these diets promote good health and reduce excess weight. An example is the South Beach Diet, it was developed by a cardiologist Arthur Agatston and dietician Marie Almon indicated to prevent heart disease. The diet plan provided alternative approaches to low-fat, and eventually it became popular as an effective method in losing weight. An effective diet plan is eating the right foods, such as fruits and vegetables because they contain high bulk but they have less calories and good vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fibers. It will make you healthy, fit and glowing. These are all natural and they are the safest foods that can be included in your diet to lose weight.
"Climate meteorologists"?

I think it's more accurate to say: A small number of people, most of whom are not climate scientists, have really done a brilliant job of telling the world that climate scientists have no idea what they're talking about. (The difference between your description and mine is that yours has the climate scientists doing something self-undermining and mine doesn't; so if my description is better, then one actually has to look at the science to describe which side is nearer to the truth. How inconvenient.)
I was under the impression that those were all WLAN, GSM and UMTS patents relating to the radio equipment. Hardly 'distinctive features' on the same level as accurate multitouch on a glass screen.
This is no different from the rest of the world which pegs the usage of IE at 50-55%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...

I would have guessed the number would be lower in India, as I figure a large proportion of the people using browsers and having access to the web work in IT, who in turn are more likely to use FF and Chrome.

Assumptions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_hoaxes#Easter_eggs
> We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort to install (you need at least a few clicks).

Why not? People don't want to learn how to install software. They want to do their jobs. Apple (with the App Store) and Google (with Chrome) understand that.
You bought screws for 1000$ and exported wood for 2000$ - so your "trade delta" is 1000$. I don't see what is complicated about it.

Unless you are interested in seeing the delta per country you trade with. But what use is that number?
I always wondered whether part of it (at least in this day and age) was that it's disadvantageous for the spouse to have a hard charging partner. If the partner gets ahead, then they could get a better spouse.
I wish you strength and that the community support you! It looks like a decent direction to move in.
Your efforts at messaging pattern commodification on the Internet looks especially interesting, given your experience with restms. I hope this cracks it and makes life easy for all of us!

Crikey, it really doesn't get much more simple than that! http://rfc.zeromq.org/
1) Are you sure you understand the spirit as intended by FSF?
They could have that formulated the other way, say "rejecting all files in proprietary format", but what they wrote is different. Why?

2) Where do you get that stupid idea that I want freedom for myself only? If I happen to like Pages I just use it. You are free to use whatever you want, be it Word or OpenOffice. FSF on the other hand wants me to ditch everything in favour of that ugly piece of software. Why should I?

More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe

Very wrong analogy.

And here, your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose
my freedom to not use them.

No, it does not. I will use what I want, you use what you want. How me using iWork forces you not to use OpenOffice?

And please, don't mix proprietary formats and software — they are not the same. As I said, I can produce pdf or rtf or plain text in Pages.

All this is just a lame attempt to replace quality with politics.
Using ActiveRecord with EventMachine
Your Treatment Staff and Second Opinions in Breast Cancer
First of all congrats Patrick. It's amazing to know you since your days at BoS. Unbelievable that within these few years, you have achieve tremendously not only with your BCC, but also your stardom in our web entrepreneur community. You're now a moderator @ Seobook and BoS, and a big celebrity here at Hackernews. All due to your unrelenting giving to the community by contributing useful posts!
MIT's Grand Unified Theory of AI
Did George Bush go "somewhere"? Most people by going "somewhere", want to significantly grow from where their parents put them, which includes doing a lot better than their parents. George Bush's Dad was already president before him. Though I guess George Bush Jr. did manage 8 years rather than the 4 years is father did - this is only a modest improvement.
Hrm. I've been talking through a decentralized social web architecture on my blog, with an eye to building an open source project later on, and had intended to use AMQP as the backbone for reliable message passing. This somewhat puts paid to that.

ZeroMQ looks good, but if anyone else has found themselves wanting to shop around, these detailed message queue evaluation notes from the folks at Second Life may be worth a look: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Not...
I don't understand why GDP is part of this calculation. It can be done more directly with (taxes/persons). Also, although greater taxes may depress GDP somewhat, there are other factors at play that makes the U.S. the home of the most productive workers. I still think the more interesting metric is tax burden as a proportion of total income, not absolute taxes paid per person.
Please someone tells me where I am wrong

1) You assume that using proprietary formats is only short term value. Why do you think it is?

2) You assume, that everyone going with open formats would improve software. Why should it happen, exactly?
I honestly tried various versions of OpenOffice at least a dozen of times and gave up. I have no hope it can get rid of that Frankensteiny feel.

And I have no idea, why and how average office worker (who spends most of the time working with those documents) should know the difference between proprietary and open formats and which is which. In most cases format question will boil down to "this is garbled" and "this looks fine".
> Suggesting that Women have different tastes in general to men is bigoted now is it?

No. Stating that they read thrash is.

> How many men read Mills&Boon? How many women read Terry Pratchet?

There's plenty of trash to read. Some of it caters to women, some of it to men. And since when is liking Terry Pratchet the shibboleth of literary taste? While I never got the whole "geeks should like Science Fiction"-thing, I can see the charm of Pratchet. So we'd probably appeal to different kinds of partners on a literary dating site, but I guess that's pretty much the point.
Nature by Numbers (3:44)
Funnily enough, I was going to talk about ePub as well. A lot is now resting on it, but the format is in desperate need of an overhaul. I'm running a BarCamp in London next month and hoping to get both geeks and publishers along to discuss the issues.
"This can only end well for them" sound far more plausible to me than "This can only end well for us" does...
Im not convinced by those figures; it doesn't reflect my experience of paying tax here in the uk (for example: I am above averagely paid and still not hitting the 13,000 quoted here)
Are location geeks at Where 2.0 off the path to real money?
Japanese version, just for your curiosity:

http://www.komaba.utmc.or.jp/~flatline/onlispjhtml/
This looks like something Google is trying to do, but in two different products: Google Wave and Google Chrome OS. Pip.io essentially combines these two to make one (imho) revolutionary product.
I co-founded Elgg (http://elgg.org/), which was started as a social environment for education. It's got a wider remit now, but is nonetheless used in a very large number of schools and universities (NB: I left the project last year to move onto other things).

One thing I said publicly, and other members of the team were aware of: if I thought anyone was using Elgg to replace face-to-face education, I would stop developing it immediately. I still think this kind of thinking is dangerous.

As another commenter has said, humans are social animals. Learning how to behave socially is a hugely important part of education. There's certainly an important place for elearning too, but they're complementary - all part of a nutritious breakfast - rather than an either/or.

More generally speaking, online social communications should augment, not replace, face-to-face communications.
Free Internet dating
In some particular cases - yes, you are afraid of going too high because the fall would be most painful. But still there may be, for example, some (latent or not) religious fears of too much wealth.
By the definition Mankiw is offering:

1. a vastly rich country with GDP $1M/person and taxes at 2% of GDP would be a "high tax country";

2. an impoverished country with GDP $1k/person and takes at 99% of GDP would be a "low tax country".

Mankiw's only justification for this is that "high tax rates tend to depress GDP". Perhaps they do, but it seems to me that his proposal waaay overcompensates for any such effect.

The question of whether moderately higher tax rates depress GDP at all seems to be controversial among economists, which seems like good evidence that they don't depress GDP much.
In my experience, most people working in IT in India, still end up using IE, either out of ignorance (they are like most other users - don't care about the browser as long as the site works) or due to Enterprise Intranet sites.
What is more surprising/worrying to me is the twitter spam showing up in results:

eg "@newsycombinator the recursion thingy in google is old :)"

Why would I want twitterspam in my result pages by default?
Family + Career = 0? Of course it isn't. If it were, success would be an automatic by-product of your family's misery.

What a silly, silly, statement.