skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm especially surprised at where the discussion of this speech is focused. It seems that people aren't focusing on the context or the core message.

He's speaking at a HBCU to a largely if not all black graduating class. This isn't Stanford or MIT. I know theres a blind spot to the inequality African American students face and that this is a sensitive issue, but I don't think telling African American students who are graduating college to be wary of a lot of the distractions these days such as xbox and twitter is a bad thing.

I could go on for a bit about why, but Obama lays out the statistics for you...

American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country.

I would say that Obama is inspiring a generation of African Americans to work harder and strive for more because inequality is still pervasive throughout American society and education is the key to overcoming this. Why is it so hard to miss this message?
Please, no false dichotomies.
Was down for me - the google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=fr&q=cac...
Inventory costs aren't the factor here. The cost of making films available isn't going to change a lot with streaming. The physical cost of a DVD is very low, it's the content that costs, and streaming vs physical isn't going to dent that.

Now, Netflix's delivery costs are something else. Obviously that's a much bigger factor in the dvd vs streaming debate.
On Apple store about 3k/mo (most of those from medical) with a bunch of little apps.
There's quite a few available on Froogle:

http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&q=capacitive+stylus

They would probably also work with other touch devices: droid, nexus one, laptop trackpads, etc.
Don't eat such large portions, and cut back on the caffeine. Both of these things help me stay mentally sharp.
Actually the keybindings can be changed to those of vim (by typing "set -o vi" on terminal). It is probably not set as default as it is confusing to new users.
Brain-Computer Interface Demonstration by Emotiv
It is is entirely possible to work in the software industry, on interesting projects, without living this way.

I average about 45 hours a week, with no more than 35 from the office. I ride my bike to and from the office, spend most weekends outside either climbing or riding my bike, and spend the warmer evenings with my family in the backyard. Oh, and I just got back from a one month road trip.

Certainly, I've put in some long days (this is not limited to sedentary labor--ever talked to a farmer?), but these are almost always offset by flexible schedules and comp time. I suggest, perhaps, if you like programming, that you look for another gig.
In http://www.hackaday.com/ there are several Rovio projects, including some using EEG headset to control Rovio.
in 2008 it was just a matter of putting anything in the store. I was making few hundreds per day.

I remember at the beginning you could even afford to check everyday which new applications were published, and some days the number 0...
I haven't interviewed as a programmer in a long time, so I'm curious, what defines "the most complicated thing was they ever programmed?"

Algorithmic complexity, like a graph database or a computer vision system or an AI? Does it matter if they just read a bunch of papers and implemented the formulas? Does it matter if they used libraries like OpenCV? Does it matter if they decided the best implementation path was to outsource it and use a SaaS like DirectedEdge?

Social complexity, like a Facebook or Meetup or Digg? Does it matter as to whether they came up with the technical architecture or social architecture to actually process all those votes and friend requests and event managements, versus just doing what the tech arch or design lead told them to do?

I've implemented device drivers in x86 assembly (a well-trod path and it wasn't very original work) and AI (for a video game, original work but with lots of abstractions provided) and an embedded systems JPEG block rewriter in C (abused the spec to create something very original, but was ultimately only a few dozen lines of code when all was said and done). Which of these is "most complicated" and why?
From Python to Monty Python?
Interesting to see Bend there. Perhaps it's the fact that it's only gotten larger very recently, or the fact that it doesn't have a university (the closest is the U of Oregon over the mountains in Eugene), but it just doesn't strike me as a good place for startups. Maybe I'm wrong though - anyone from HN in Bend?
Fortunately, some types of apps can get very nice revenue from ads. (I mean, compared to games.)

We're getting like $2000 a month out of ads with our free apps, but only $250 from our paid application, which is just a generalization of the free ones.

An interesting fact: we experienced no decline at all in the number of sold instances of our paid application when we increased the price from €0.50 to €1.00. That means, we doubled the revenue :-O. (Yeah, well, the new release included some improvements, but still surprising IMO.)
Over the last 6 months I've lost a little over 20 lbs by eating healthier and exercising.

I tracked what I ate with an iPhone app and joined the gym. Tracking food intake was tedious but helped me unlearn bad eating habits. I've gone from panting after 5 minutes on the treadmill to running 4 miles in about 35 minutes. I feel like I've found a sustainable, enjoyable pastime that will keep me in good health for years to come. Support from my wife was crucial too.
Virtual memory is not a synonym for swapping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory
"[...] are you telling me that they really thought the Obama Administration should NOT have bailed out the Auto industry and forced them through pre-packaged bankruptcies?"

Yes, that's exactly what the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal thought. Not to mention it being the first example of Obama's style of "gangster government" as Micheal Barone puts it (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Gangster-Governme...)

Do you seriously think Government Motors will survive without endless bailouts (or suppression of its competitors like Toyota (which has its problems, but the piling on is more than unseemly))?

The editorial board thinks ObamaCare will make the system worse and won't fix much if anything (heck, after all this fuss, it still isn't going to cover every American citizen and legal resident). That's rather different than the straw man of "should NOT fix the broken health care system".

The energy crisis has been "looming" since the early '70s. History pretty convincingly shows that the free market, e.g. Reagan removing oil and gas price controls, beats central planning hands down. I was there; if you weren't, you might want to read up on it.

I will agree that they go too far in the promotion of allowing "wall street to run wild doing anything they want", e.g. essays in support of insider trading (excepting those based on the nasty problem of it having no statutory definition) and the backdating of stock options.

But they also have all sorts of good points that are backed by evidence (we've accumulated a lot by now).

Let's put it this way: given that we're on HN and likely interested in startups: did the government's suppression of IPOs (expensing and SARBOX) help any of us? The game of venture capital that ran from the late '50s to the dot.com bust is over.

I've been reading the editorial page of the Journal since 1970 (sic) and I haven't noticed any significant change due to Murdoch. (Where does Alies fit into this???)
If you use Chrome, you can easily direct Google to use the old user interface for search results pages.

Go to preferences -> Default Search -> Manage -> Add a new search engine

The enter this as the search URL "http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=%s (enter whatever for name and keyword) and make it the default search engine.
And there's Father's Day not far down the road.. I think that's the same in both countries!
It's not, but historically things like this are pretty rare.

If anything I'd be more in favor of offshore drilling, not less. After a disaster like this people will learn from it. (Just as they have from every previous disaster.) So offshore drilling is likely to become even safer.
Boot race video: Windows 7 vs Ubuntu
My gmail address is shown on the top right. Thank you to remind me that I am tracked, I don't see the connection between the search interface and my gmail account I created just to pin down my name.
We've had a lot of experience with Admob, and also with Mobclix. I'd recommend the latter.

For some types of applications (such as news readers, definitely not action games), ads can work very nicely.

You can expect something a eCPM of $1.20. In our case, that translates to like 6 cents per click (which is a metric I like more).

We have a very shallow comparative in our blog: http://www.androidsx.com/admob-vs-mobclix-1st-round/
Anyway, that's why I'm supporting my job : that mental and physical reboot through sailing every week-end became essential to me. Finding your own weekly brainwasher is a fair compromise !
Why isn't there a 'Posterous for selling stuff'?
The context in which Cuban uses it, though, seems to presume that any hacker will use his findings for illicit personal gain rather than for the benefit of the community.

Admittedly this is a bit pedantic, and I know the popular use of the term has come to imply black hat, but this is Hacker News!
As a medicine doctor and a former president of USA I advice you not to seek health advice from anonymous guys on the internet. Btw, yerba mate kicks ass.
How (and when) to motivate yourself
http://my10-9.com/

The iPad design is not shown but it too includes a nice case to hold the stylus.
In my understanding Mouse is to become irrelevant someday, as Moose goes forward.
Right... I meant participating in open-source work on nanotech.
how many installs do you have to be able to pull $2000 a month in ad revenue?

which ad network are you using?
Yes, I'm sure it is, just as Moose will become irrelevant when perl 6 becomes widespread. However, right now it's pretty handy if you have something where startup time matters and you don't mind giving up some of the deeper features of Moose.
That is one well-spoken 14 year old.
> There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on.

If you're playing the short-term investment game, all of those things matter hugely. It's a zero-sum game. In order to make money at it, you have to have a better system than the rest of the people playing -- just like making money on sports betting.

They don't matter nearly so much in the long term. Long-term investing isn't zero-sum; economies can grow, and your goal is to own a growing piece of the economy. There are oodles of people playing the long-term game, but the market is big enough that even I, with my relatively limited information, can make good solid investments.

Consider this a corollary to "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". The market can offer irrational bargains to such a degree that even once those with better information have had their fill, there's some left over for people like me.
Fundraising? Intrigued about valuations? Understand how VCs do their math
Hackers like to differentiate blackhat from normal hacking. The article uses "hack" in the blackhat manner: seeking to cause damage for personal gain, and not openly discussing the exploits found.
A foam roller. Awesome for relaxation.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/24888-using-foam-roller-ba...
First, the obligatory PG link you're probably thinking of: http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html.

Now my comment - I recently spent 3 months with my gf backpacking Europe and when I say backpacking I mean I had a satchel (http://www.rushfaster.com.au/product.php?pProductID=BOQ-MSD-...) and my gf had a backpack and both were small & light enough to meet carry-on restrictions for even budget airlines (e.g. Ryanair). I'm not going to tell people to abandon their possessions, but there was a certain power to having to keep your "stuff" to this limit each day and it's something that has inspired me to "focus" my possessions back home. What I mean by focusing includes:

* Donating anything (old clothes, PC hardware, not books although I would donate children's books if I had close friends with children) that might be better used by others (donation bypasses my "don't want to waste this stuff" filter).

* Actually buying/planning to buy new stuff if it means I'm not spending all day worrying about "that monitor that has to have the cable positioned so-and-so" or "that car that is always breaking down" or "those clothes that don't fit so great but I don't have a replacement for".

* Finding out-of-the-way storage locations (parents/grandparents etc. might be a good place for this, otherwise your attic/shed) for sentimental stuff that I don't want to see everyday but don't want to part with yet.

The whole idea is to streamline the role of "stuff" in my life, and avoid that "attrition" cost from stuff whose cost now outweights its benefits. In some ways it is about treating stuff in a more "liquid" fasion - it is better to throw something overboard when it starts to weigh too much than try to move with a thousand different anchors.
Yeah, investing your money well is a serious time commitment. But saying one can't do it because other people do it too is like saying that you can't invest your money by buying and renting out houses, because there are professional realtors.
"It's not, but historically things like this are pretty rare."

That's false. Drilling-related spills are quite common:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/09/weekinreview/0...

"Oil regularly spills into Gulf waters....Oil companies reported that drilling platforms alone dumped nearly 50,000 barrels of oil, or more than two million gallons, into U.S. Gulf waters from 1996 through last year."
I have to agree with Hexstream here (2 downvotes really?). A pithy overgeneralized saying proves nothing. Nearly every occupation benefits from a worker who can learn fast: lawyer, doctor, architect, CEO, salesmen, stock trader etc...

This is not specific to programmers and it is imaginable that a slow learning programmer with domain specific knowledge has value.
Anti-virus Fail
http://zitstif.no-ip.org/?p=372
Picwing is Offering 2 Months Free in Honor of Mother's Day
"Americans already put in more hours than workers in any country in the world..."

ORLY?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Differences_among_...

"By far, workers in South Korea have the longest work hours among OECD countries. The average South Korean works 2,390 hours each year, according to the OECD. This is over 400 hours longer than the next longest-working country and 34% more hours than the average in the United States."
The President's speech is the educational industrial complex's standard paen to itself. It is uttered at appropriate "levelling-up" ceremonies by certified members of the cabal to customers seeking justification of their expenditures and validation of the status they have obtained. It's the appropriate boilerplate to deliver to customers at this point in their buying experience, but it doesn't say too much about the President's views.

If I read his speech on my iPad, does that make it a distraction, a diversion, or entertainment in the President's rubric? Am I being entertained or emancipated? It depends on who's doing the consumption and to what end.

Am I being overwhelmed with an unmanageable deluge of information? That's the argument the church made against the Luther Bible and the printing press. Information wise, we've always been capable of overwhelming ourselves by scanning a landscape, listening at the shore, or staring into the night's sky. Is reading a novel educational or entertaining? Does it depend on the nature of the novel? Is there a quantitative basis for that classification, like the number of neurons rewired by ingesting the novel? or the improved efficacy or performance of the system after ingestion?

Distractions, amusements and entertainments are the means by which our minds extend themselves to qualitative and quantitative changes in the information landscape: in information space, we evolve through play. Playing with information yields further information, knowledge, and maybe some wisdom. Sometimes play spills to the physical realm as artifacts or shared experience. Differentiating between "education" and "entertainment", "entertainment" and "art", or ranking things in terms of "usefulness" is post hoc analysis geared to reinforce the status quo, its information taxonomy, and its hierarchy of cultural value—an increasingly unmaintainable fiction, the acknowledgement of which would invalidate the blessing being conferred on this cohort of lemmings by the establishment through the President's words.
The Economics of E-books
Re: gray. Yes. I didn't say it was a medium gray, I said it was a neutral gray (neither warm nor cool). But you're absolutely right, this model is merely an approximation of perceptual color. You could instead build a complicated manifold representing perceptual color space, and define a criterion for a cloud of points in that manifold that resulted in pleasing colors, but it would be a lot more work than using the sphere, and you'd not gain that much, I don't think.

Re: how do we know? Well, mostly this system is based on the work of a number of thinkers, starting with Goethe and running through Munsell, Itten, Kandinsky, and a bunch of others, who spent a great deal of time putting colored squares next to each other. They discovered physiological effects of color, like simultaneous contrast. They attempted to learn about psychological effects of color. They admitted that, while some color combinations are attractive only to individuals, there were other sets that seem to have universal appeal. One of the things that those universal combinations had in common was that they centered themselves on the color wheel.

We know, more or less, by science. It is a largely empirical question (put some colors together, see if people like it). You can repeat the experiments yourself, if you like --- you asked 'how can we know'? Either take their word, or try it yourself.

And finally, in reply to the my use of the word 'emotional' --- if I were to say that colors whose center of balance is far from the center axis of the sphere are more surprising, and less comfortable, is that acceptable? I don't mean to say that red and green don't evoke different emotions than yellow and purple --- but they are both comfortable, obvious, familiar combinations; while, say, magenta and brown is less comfortable and takes more work to accept.
I tried to read this article but gave up because the pop-up ad took up my entire iPhone screen and scrolled when I tried to get to the 'close this window' link. Anyone have a quick work-around for this?
Explanation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zey8567bcg
I've been wondering, do you really need to jailbreak to get this functionality? Seems like you can hook just about anything up with the 'Camera Kit' (aka Apples steath USB adapter).

So is it possible rig a USB hub up to allow for multiple USB devices hooked up to an iPad?

Would be cool to have a third-party dock that you can plug a bunch of USB devices into the iPad.
* Stay far away from microwaves

* Don't drink soda

* No fast food

* Have fruits and veggies daily

* Lots of water

* Exercise daily

* Stretch daily

* Meditate/Yoga
Charlie Stross on Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Ebooks
The question is, couldn't the same be achieved by working on those goals part time (for a longer period ofcourse)?

Is it really מecessary to drop everything? If so why?
Occam's razor says the increase in productivity happened because when companies had to make cuts during the recession, they cut the least promising projects.
Apropos username. ;-)

OK, so, I've always been kinda cerebral, so communicating with people was something I had to "figure out". I'm not so much that way any more, but I do remember most of what I did to learn it.

It's definitely more about feelings than facts -- purely factual statements make a lot of people turn off to you -- but it's also about empathy. Not a new-age touchy-feely kind of empathy, but merely the ability to quickly understand the other person's habits, backgrounds, emotions, and personality. Think of it as learning to communicate in a different language, like speaking Russian to a Russian.

I studied some psychology, and although on the whole I think it was not terribly valuable, it did help me typecast people a little bit faster. For example, I tend to notice whether a person talks about what they think, or what they feel. If they say that they feel like x or y is right or wrong, then they're talking from an intuitive, emotional standpoint, and being all cerebral around them isn't going to get you very far.

There's also body language, the kinds of jokes a person tells, the sorts of phrases they use, and the dialect of language they use. I don't for example talk to boulderers the same way I'm talking now ... unless I want them to laugh at me. :-)

It started out as something I had to think about and study, but now it's intuitive and I don't think of it the same way anymore. It's just something I do.

I think this is a really valuable thing for other people to do; it would help communication between people a lot. There would be fewer misunderstandings.

Or, as my much-more-personable-and-outgoing girlfriend who again is reading over my shoulder says, "Well, yeah, it teaches you how to listen."

Guess I still have a lot more to learn.
So should health insurance by that logic.
Modulo the rare exception it takes time, bloody minded persistence, talent and a certain amount of luck. The more of the first two you invest the less the latter two matter, talent because the more time you put in the less your initial (lack of) talent matters and luck because if you spend long enough at it some will find you.

So really you need persistence because if you've got that you won't have a problem keeping it up for (time). Persistence is easiest when you're motivated; when you're doing something you enjoy or that pays well enough.

You're unlikely to get paid until you've made something impressive and people ask you to do it for them. So what you need to do is find something you think is cool and do something about it, publicly, over and over again.

Get a hobby and write about it (blog) or think of an interest and set up a forum around it (e.g. alternatehistory.com for what-if). Things that are harder to do are more impressive and get more attention and link love, e.g. a relatively professionally shot and edited 20min video put up reliably every week on... Chinese cookery, or a programming screencast.

Persistence is key. Calendar time, not wall clock time.