skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Squeak and Scratch are honestly the best possible choices (along with the story generator style tools are also), please ignore any opinions to the contrary. I would especially recommend checking out Scratch, as the folks behind PLT Racket/(Scheme) who are very very into early CS education has spoken well of it, though PLT itself might be a great environment for more supervised learning of programming etc and had some very nicely developed materials you to work from

For those who ask "why?" I say: Because visual construction/play is the first view that is presented to the user in those environments! All things being equal, it is always always easier to learn any topic if you are being presented information across several media (visual, auditory, textual) than only one.
It depends on the length somewhat. The shorter you intend it to be, the closer to where you currently are it should probably be. For example, moving abroad wouldn't be worth it for 3 months, because the cost of the plane ticket would likely overwhelm any cost-of-living savings. But it might be worth it for a year.

Within the US, basically anywhere that isn't one of the stereotypically expensive cities is cheap. In California, it's dirt-cheap to live anywhere that isn't in the SD, LA or SF areas; San Luis Obispo and Eureka are decent coastal options. Anywhere in Oregon outside Portland is also cheap. Among cities, the midwest rust-belt cities are cheapest, e.g. Pittsburgh, and pretty interesting.
Having been immersed in professional martial arts, I see all the time really gifted people who don't amount to much because they fail to practice and are just not as "hungry" as some of their non-gifted counterparts who will push through their limitations. Innate ability will only get your foot in the door, but without self discipline, practice and wanting it bad enough, you just won't get to that level.
Be the Startup with the Skull Decal
I'm not aware of any analogous examples. Apple controls the OS, the hardware, and the application distribution channel (I do know about enterprise distribution, but they still control that IIRC.) They've developed a reputation for not being the most friendly to developers, too. Why would you risk a business on that when there is an open source alternative with lots of hardware vendors and a huge corporate backer (Google)?
There's no grand plan. It's just that programming is not a subject that lends itself to extensive illustration, and long blocks of unbroken text are visually boring. I wanted my blog to look nice, and also to have a recognisable visual idiom; since I love sushi and it looks so nice and colourful, it seemed like a good pick.
While I agree with your concerns, I don't see how your P.S. adds any value to the message.
New math features in Wolfram Alpha
http://www.dymaxionduo.com/3-days-left/

>If I recall correctly, I think I remember him once falling asleep at the Flying Saucer while we were out drinking.

Kids these days...
He is 17, so depending of is financial situation, using the million to get a top notch education could be his better idea.
Kojo might be worth taking a look at: http://www.kogics.net/sf:kojo

It's Scala, but reminds me of playing with Logo a long time ago. My 12 year old son really enjoys Squeak, but is fascinated by Kojo right now. (edited to add part about Squeak)
When the iPad was first announced it seemed like it could be a great digital sketchbook... until I found out it lacked pressure sensitivity. I know a lot of people have shown off the drawing abilities of the iPhone/iPod Touch but as long as it lacks this Apple is pretty much snubbing artists.
That hadn't occured to me. On a large scale operation like producing Coke wouldn't these costs be quickly diluted by the large volume of containers that they are producing? Or do Coca-Cola contract many smaller companies that would have to change equipment individualy?
Are any of these non-mainstream opinions? Of course the first three are now, but that doesn't matter (I don't care to think what "mainstream" opinions of computing limits are). I'd wager you can't find a successful person from one hundred or two hundred years ago who had an opinion that would today be considered non-mainstream. It's like when people try to argue against Darwin, saying he was racist -- it was the mainstream opinion of the time.

Besides, all four quotes are bad examples. Nietzsche's quote has to be looked at in the context of the 1880s. Certainly that opinion was quite mainstream then -- the first woman to be awarded a PhD in Mathematics was only in 1886 (source: http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/firstPhDs.htm).

Carnegie's quote -- ignoring the part about race -- is a simple history question. Was there ever a "danger of war" between Germany and others? I won't try to answer it, as I don't know. Either way, what matters is what other people thought at the time.

Einstein's quote is simply about facts. Was there the "slightest indication" that nuclear energy was possible? Science marches on -- before the industrial revolution, was there the slightest indication that horseless carriages were possible?

Von Neumann's quote makes more sense when you think about the theory of computation. Computers today still run on the Von Neumann architecture from the 30s and 40s -- any progress has been optimization, and does not push the limit any farther. You still can't sort a list in less than O(n log n) time, or sum n values in less than O(n) operations. As far as I know it, the only thing to push the limits of computing is quantum computing, which is currently in its infancy.

Of course, none of this means that you should think only "mainstream" thoughts -- if you never ask what else is possible, you won't do anything new. But progress marches on -- everyone has mainstream opinions today that will be non-mainstream decades hence.
oh come on, have some humor, its sunday
Funny, I've heard a lot of stories of people starting this sleep schedule, but not a single one of someone that managed to maintain it. Let's see how this one goes.
Everyone would like to charge from the get go, but the trick is convincing customers to pay. Paying something is a huge psychological barrier, and it is so much easier to get people on board for free.
Trust Me: Why Ponzi Schemes Work
I'm flagging - seems like spam. I saw no content b/c I have to enable javascript to view the page. Really? No thanks.
Online funerals showing more appeal
I wish I had cites for this, but my observations and my understanding of human nature tell me otherwise. Most people never even start, they think idly about starting a business, complain about their lives, say how happy they would be if...

In another thread a few weeks ago I posted that my friend who had started an after hours handyman business found that the biggest complaint his customers had (and what made it easy for him to get business) was that the contractors they talked to on the phone simply never showed up!
The Thought Factory
To clarify what I meant was: "dismiss the perception that it's just a larger iPod Touch"

As in I've heard multiple times the iPad is just a big iPad touch, when in fact, it's quite a bit more.
It sounds like you maybe played games too much (forgive me if I'm wrong there, obviously your one comment is not enough to know that). I don't think there's anything wrong with recreation for its own sake and games are a form of recreation. They're fun, and it's good to have fun things in your life. Just so long as they're not the only (or, I'd say personally, the major) thing in your life.

By creating games you are helping other people have fun and relax, that doesn't seem like a worthless thing to me.
Early to mid twenties. They both have supportive work environments and a whole host of people helping them through the days. Theoretically it will take them a few weeks to get used to it.
I'm just saying, there is a big niche for shared hosting providers.

Setting up many modern webapp frameworks requires more than 'basic linux shell skills' and it requires sitting on several security mailing lists to watch for holes in the framework, etc...
Having dealt with small construction contractors several times, it's not just that they don't show up, it's that half the time they stop showing up in the middle of the job. Just vanish.

It's the weirdest thing.
Again? This comes up every few months. A good discussion that explains why it's not a good idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650

On that thread, I found crocowhile's comments particularly good.
This is Caitlin: http://www.caitlinwoodward.me
"There's nothing unusual in that agreement. It sounds like every other social network."

I don't use any other social network, and this is one of the reasons why.

I have now deleted my profile on LinkedIn, which is a shame as I had a nice recommendation from a customer at a past job on there. Then again, the site has only ever generated me irrelevant junk mail from agencies rather than useful leads anyway.
Indeed - regardless of whether this is stated - one should assume that with the internet as a whole. You can't takes something back once it's out there.
This mirrors my personal experience very closely, and as such I think it's great advice. :)
One of the things that is important in my own value-system is to cherish eccentricity. As the author points out, the entire race is becoming more and more homogenized.

I'm not going to spell out a list of eccentricities. Oddly enough, if I did a good job of it you guys would just vote me down.

I will, however, point out several of the ways that society is creating more and more conformity: sites like this, the use of medical diagnosis to cover simple human differentiation, the use of various mental illness labels to cover formerly fine behavior, widespread rampant consumerism teaching people they are all basically the same consumer, use of new laws to control what is or isn't acceptable, use of social intervention as an excuse to make everybody's private behavior now a public concern.

The species desperately needs outliers. We need our (peaceful) Ted Kacinskys And we're getting better and better at finding them early and fuzzing them out.
This is usually called the "second system effect", especially when the second is overambitious and never gets finished.
Is there a possible segfault at line 108 in udpclient.c? pport is a junk pointer at this line: sprintf(pport, "2222");
http://mozilla.seanmartell.com/raindrop/ - I was looking and only saw images in the article.

Doesn't work for me in FF3.5.8.
Because the author of the blog post works for Mozilla?

Oh, and OP, it isn't "rain drop", it's Raindrop.
Free tickets to Airbnb Party - April 10th (almost gone, 614 RSVPs)
The elephant in the room is that shipping bottles of carbonated corn syrup around the world will never be "eco-friendly" no matter how much effort invested in the packaging.
Shake, Rattle, Seattle
Who is the enemy of FOSS today?
In attendance will be YC alumni, Airbnb users, and various people from the tech scene. We already have 589 RSVPs, so free tickets will be gone soon. Click register if you would like to come.
The resident type theorist at a college I was considering attended recommended Luca Cardelli to me when I asked about good introductory texts: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Cardelli_...
US State Dept questions Australia's planned Internet Filtering.
I'm very pleased that this topic has been raised on the international agenda.

So far I have only heard meaningful criticism of the plan from within the Internet industry.... this is so much more important than the man on the street realises.
I have, actually. It's more comfortable if you wear it on your chest instead of your back.
That's true and probably the reason why interfaces improved so much. Whitespaces are a design element and what you call junk is somebody business need.

The fact that the blank canvas got bigger on the web allowed to much better interface patterns, or maybe it was just a question of maturity.

But I guess the most interesting discussion is not the visual part but the utilization scenarios of the Ipad. I'm not sold on it as a mobile device, but how many people use a laptop as a mobile device? Mobile phones are the first truly mobile devices.
I'm just starting to notice Iphone owners on the middle of a crowd trying to text somebody, you have to hold it closer to the horizontal plane to have better accuracy making it less natural.

I'm not sold on the Ipad as a mobile device, in the mobile phones sense, but I also don't think its success depends on it.
I might be showing my ignorance here, I'm not a network guy, but a vast majority of internal networks use 192.168.1.0/24 192.168.1.1/24 and so on. What happens when the source and destination networks both use the same class C addresses?
The article makes it seem as though people failed to hack Chrome. The truth is, AFAIK, that nobody even tried.
Screenshots of Ubuntu-based Media Center Element 1.1
Amazing Hosting and Training
I'm very happy with webfaction.
You must be so much fun at parties!

I don't play video games either, but that hardly gives me the authority to deprecate them for creating merely a "manufactured sense of accomplishment." There are many people for whom games are the only practical release from daily drudgery and that alone makes their existence, and by extension their creation, worthwhile.

Not everyone aspires to solve "interesting, difficult and worthwhile problems." Sometimes we just want to have fun!
Graceful Upgrade of Internet Services
Reducing the content is a good way to raise prices without "raising prices". And the green spin as the reason to reduce content, well that's just brilliant.
This is why we started this website and are telling a lot of people, to help us maintain this cycle.

It'd be very easy for me to say "Eh, screw this", but the fact that we have ~50 Twitter followers, local friends, and other people following us through the website, all helps to give us motivation.

Okay! It's actually nap time, so I'll be back to answer some more comments in 30 minutes.
Google as a backer is a red herring. They aren't going to be necessairily any use in fixing your problems at 5am on a Monday morning...

On the other hand apple will at least answer the phone when your developer rings them.
This is clearly only designed for home NATs. The simple fact of the matter is that most home users don't want to know how to forward ports so that they can use p2p software.

This allows one to write software so that such users can use p2p software without having a central server to discover IP addresses.
I don't think the system needs changing - sometimes submissions just get unlucky and/or have a bad title. Just try again a while later, or hope someone else does. Nothing wrong with that as long as you aren't spamming the post (imo).

My highest voted submission of recent times was an article I thought was great, that someone else had submitted a few days earlier, which hadn't got any upvotes. So I made the title more appealing and tweaked the url, hey presto 100+ upvotes. The system works! (well enough)
If we never talk about anything that ails us we'll never fix it.
I know people, and indeed, get like this myself sometimes (though not as often as I used to), who will have natural cycles in which they are awake for hours on end and sleep only 1 or 2 out of every 24. But even for those who seem to be naturally wired to do so, it only lasts for a few days before either their body or their mind needs sleep so badly that they a) fall asleep in the case of physical exhaustion, or b) must take sleeping aids to force themselves back into a normal pattern so they can think clearly again. Polyphasic sleep sounds good in theory. In practice, well, there's a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.
I took the guidelines on titles to imply that if they were adequate then leave them alone. Perhaps I'm misreading them.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please resubmit in a month or so. It sounds as if they haven't started the experiment yet?
Once a particular version of a module is on the CDN at a particular location, it will never ever change, and URLs pointing to it will always point at that exact version.

Well, I still don't see the revolution. Javascript hosting is not exactly rocket science. So, okay, they have a shiny plugin store now. Great. Pig + lipstick?

you may be surprised: http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html

Thanks for that link, interesting comparison.

I'm sorry to say that I was not surprised, though. There is not a single snippet where YUI is less verbose. In every non-trivial snippet YUI is more verbose, often significantly so.

The difference may seem small in these trivial snippets but it hints at what happens in real-world codebases: YUI complexity does pile up exponentially, not so with jQuery.
Given the same volume what is that now 20tb?
I agree with the gist of your argument, but I think 1M is low, even in Russia. So low, that's worth not selling it and seeing what happens.
I agree completely. My company's site was set up with yui2 before I came on board. Maintaining that old code and being forced to write new features with yui has not been a pleasant experience. I am transitioning the site to jquery as soon as possible. I've looked at yui3 over the last few months and while it's better than 2, it's still a mess to work with. There's also performance issues. Jquery is simply more capable and more efficient than yui3 according to recent benchmarks
Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design
It was news when Geocities did it in 1999, but I thought it was pretty much a given by now.
Why does it matter if a social network has a non-exclusive license to content you post to their website?*

*This is a serious question.
Imagine a person who wants to work on large volumes of search data. How many opportunities in life does such person have? Not many: work for Google, work for Bing, work for Ask.com, and that's it.

By narrowing down your scope of interest you're making it a lot harder or even impossible to make money beyond wages.

Another point to consider is that you will do much better if you focus on a demographic instead of technology (like most geeks do). Ask yourself - do I want to make teenage gamers happy? Well, how about elderly gamers? What kind of games could they want to play? Something from their childhood? Something to play with grand-children? What kind of problems do they face - font size? Pace?

Demographics > technology.
They did, but are on their second day. I agree, there should be periodical updates here. I'm very curious about this.
I guess I'd rate making interesting videogames at considerably more worthwhile than many of the startup ideas we see around here. I mean, ultimately most web 2.0 sites are kind of a waste of time, except for the potential to get rich off them. If anything, social media is a bigger unproductive time-sink than videogames or TV are these days.

I do agree that building just another clone of an existing game (say, a new FPS with no real innovation) is a bit of a waste of time though, just like building a Twitter clone or reddit clone or something would be. But that's true in all media: most Hollywood films are derivative crap good for nothing but mindless entertainment, but that doesn't mean the entire idea of making a film is pointless.

Of course, others have talked about this at greater length: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/91012...
Any recommendations on how to start?
If you want to design games, as opposed to working as an engineer on some small part of them, you probably are actually better off doing it indie, or finding an indie company to work for. If you work a normal game-industry job at a place like EA, you aren't really going to be designing games, but more likely will be debugging a texture mapper somewhere deep inside an engine, or something equivalent.

Plus, all the interesting stuff is happening in indie games anyway! --> http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html
Cool blog design. One column per person style is something I hadn't seen before.
Please don't attempt to drive a motor vehicle or operate heavy machinery while doing this.
This article makes some good points about the balance of design & graphics, but with the first image being of the windows 'ribbon' interface, I wish the author would have used that as an example, and am curious if the author would use that as an example of bad design.
Personally, i still can't adjust to the ribbon, too much going on, and lacks direction.

At the same time it is great to hear Donald Norman perspective 'prettier things are actually easier to use, or are at least are perceived to be.'
This is my opinion of Mac's (which I am typing this on now). Pretty, but I think most people confuse that with easier to use.
That contrapositive isn't quite accurate, because it indicates a different time-order than the original. "If you don't have a non-mainstream opinion, then you can't be successful" implies that you must have non-mainstream opinion before you become successful. "If you're successful, then you have a non-mainstream opinion" indicates that you have a non-mainstream opinion after you become successful. It's fairly likely that your non-mainstream opinion before becomes the mainstream opinion afterwards. After all, isn't that almost the definition of "successful"?
I don't get it. Why are they calling themselves kids?
Leeenux Linux 3.0 now available for netbooks
Start thinking of every piece of content as a little startup
In the Scott McCloud-ian view of "ultimate goal of the art," I'm either trying to push the bounds of the medium, or developing a message within it. Right now I lean towards the medium, as I still feel there's a lot for me to learn.

I don't think I'm succeeding at it yet, but what if I do? What if others do?

"Ultimately just entertainment" comes from a linear mode of thinking about the nature of the industry and its potential for immediate utility. The utility of an entertainment medium stems from a balance between the inspirational and the functional - something that can say more about our world. Most of the products, just like most businesses, are going to completely fall flat at this. That does not subtract from the good ones.
Cresce procura por sites de relacionamentos.
Timidez, carência e falta de tempo são principais motivos de crescimento na procura de sites para encontrar parceiro(a).
It doesn't show anything to compare it to in size. Useless.
And the API is Java, not some strange language decision makers have never heard of. Big selling point for large corporations and government agencies.
Before the SAT changes in 1994 that made them worthless

I've heard this a couple times, but there is not much reasoning to back this up. Having taken the SAT after 1994 and receiving a high score, I think it is a bit disingenuous to claim that the SAT after 1994 are useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#1994_changes

The mean SAT score remained virtually unchanged, while the removal of antonym questions and non-multiple choice questions seems to be an improvement. There were many times where the analogy questions were quite ambiguous, I could think of a dozen reasons to support each answer.
For a rough-order-of-magnitude, picture your stretched out hand as roughly the size of the inner ring.
Firefox 3.6 on Windows, freezes up
Firefox 3.6 on Windows, does not freeze up
Firefox 3.6 on OS X, freezes up
Firefox 3.6 on OS X, does not freeze up
Firefox 3.6 on Linux, freezes up
Firefox 3.6 on Linux, does not freeze up
Firefox 3.6 on other OS, freezes up
Firefox 3.6 on other OS, does not freeze up
I am using another browser
UPDATE: 614 RSVPs
Interesting blog. She switched to Dvorak too, which somehow doesn't strike me as a surprise.

But that still doesn't explain why they call themselves "kids".
You say that jokingly, but I am sure things equally ridiculous could be to blame for this.
Two new scholarship programs for lean startups
I had actually assumed they were doing it with their children. And wondered how long until they were investigated for child abuse.