skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been addressed many times (and btw, people wouldn't live "forever" -- you can still be hit by a truck, at least until we can backup brains).

http://fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.php

But in general, you have to ask if the problem that would be solved is bigger than this new potential problem, and do we have the right to make the decision not to develop these therapies and condemn future generation to die from aging? Every day that they are delayed, thousands die.

Maybe hard choices will have to be made: very low birth rates, or some rate of voluntary deaths (religious people who refuse to take the therapies, maybe?), etc. Maybe it'll be no problem because of technological advances (molecular manufacturing, advanced biotech, etc) and we'll have more than enough resources for everybody, and can colonize other planets.

But these problems caused by people not dying so much seem to be smaller than 100k-150k people dying each day after a long-period of suffering and frailty, causing pain to their families and friends. We've cured many diseases and fixed many of humanity's problems so far, and the benefits seem to outweigh the costs. Goal #1 is to cure diseases, living longer is just a side-effect, as it always was.

Objections to curing the diseases of aging must be at least as big as the problem. Otherwise it's the same old thing about overpopulation that has been going around ever since we invented sanitation and vaccines.
Aggressive Maneuvers for Autonomous Quadrotor Flight
Please reconsider, the bag is technology after all of a kind, and it might buy enough time for a new solution to arise. We live in an unfair world, you should not be having to make this decision, every child knows that appearances are not the important thing, unfortunately as adults we unlearn that...

Go find some women who are not so shallow as to judge a man by his limits, get online dating, it's worked for some my friends.
Yeah, doesn't make you think it's a tablet for pedophiles.

Did for me, though.
I really doubt that usgs.gov (#978) gets anywhere near the number of visits that nfl.com gets (#993).
This guy is my fucking hero.

I moved away from my hometown a few years back, but last time I went up and visited it, I just went walking. I've driven through it/around it/in it thousands of times, but this time, I slowed things down and just explored, looking at random houses and feeling trees and grass. It was the most pleasant thing I've done in a long time.

Sometimes I hate the internet, it has trained me to have multiple tabs open in life at all times. Disconnecting and just looking and touching the real world is something I, and most of us actually, rarely do anymore.

I want to ride a bike around the country, maybe I'll blog about it one day
An Android powered iPad clone for ~$100 is already selling:

Relevant submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1386333
Async JS in Nginx
Great Leaders Series: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com
Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency

Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Run the numbers: if the average user calls in 5 minutes a year (very low estimate), how many hours a day of customer support would it take?

And transparency - are you suggesting they open source their infrastructure so you can hack on BigTable to fix their speed issues?

1. In 2009: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=http:...
A computer is fast when the computer is waiting on you. A computer is slow when you are waiting on the computer.
Take the colostomy bag. Invent the artificial colon.

And stop worrying about what people think of you.
dropbox is great, though I've been bitten in the past by some funny issues when setting it up on my newer computer that has a case sensitive file system (basically there'd be both a Projects and projects folder, the former would be empty overall, but deleting it would delete the latter).

The selective sync is great, though I don't quite see why this would a nontrivial feature to engineer.
In House Q & A With Brent D. Payne, In-House SEO Director, Tribune Company
if you want to learn something, it's better to learn it by yourself. School is aimed at the lowest common denominator and is aimed at finishing a small portion of curriculum during the semester. And since most classes are 3-4 credits, at most you'll be paying to learn something 3-4 hours a week.

While on your own time, you can dedicate 30-40 hours a week on your studies.
Me, but you, but me
You get what you pay for. End of story.
...and each bank, ideally, guards against insolvency by distributing your deposits among a Redundant Array of Independent Debtors.
Yeah, I was thinking about the car forums approach actually, but the widget idea is a good too. Thanks for the feedback.
I think you'll be fine with self-study. The way you get feedback is to iterate and share your work with other people. Build a small robotics project, find your favorite robotics-related community / fourm, post "look at my robot, my robot's amazing", and wait for the feedback. Then do that again.

Eventually, you'll develop a sense of what's right and wrong (from your own experience and looking at other people's work), and then you'll have the tool you need to do the project you actually want to do -- experience and intuition.

It reminds me of that essay, "Teach yourself programming in ten years". You can't read a book and become an instant expert. You have to read books AND fail for yourself AND learn from your failures and success. You aren't going to get this skill in college, you can only get it with your own practice.
I don't think usability works that way.

90% usability may be a good deal, but only for the 20% of people who put the effort in to find benefit from the technology. Everyone else would have spent less, but gained less as well -- as they ignore large swaths of features, spending only enough cognitive time to use one or two core applications.

E.g. Note the incredible flexibility and power of desktop PCs and how that's been almost completely ignored by 90% of users, who barely know enough to do email and the web.

And that's a particular issue in the case of a mobile, secondary-computing device such as tablets, where having the functionality isn't anywhere near as important as actually improving the experience of using those functions.

i.e. They have passable email on their desktop and/or phone, so you need more than passable email to sell a tablet. If 'almost' having good usability was good enough, we'd have been hip-deep in windows tablets for the last decade and Palm PDAs before that.
Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks
Not in the way it is organized and encouraged in China. There are factories there that specialize in rip offs, companies that specialize in finding something invented/created elsewhere and reverse engineering.

Not to say that the US didn't do it, or that Japan was also well known in the 70's for much the same thing, but to say that it is only because China has "more people" and more "probability" is misleading. The practice is widespread and encouraged, not just by their culture, but also indirectly by their government.
Sort of.

There are times when a structured class gives you more benefit than unstructured. Specific examples off the top of my head are like sciences where you need lab equipment. Or if you're the kind of learner who needs lectures rather than readings.

School is not as worthless as HN makes it out to be.
Can't you go for a Master's in CS or Robotics or something? I know people with math/science backgrounds but no CS-backgrounds doing their CS Master's here at UCSD. It sounds like a lot of scrambling to catch up, but probably the best bang for your buck.
Totally unfair comparison. If you chop up the potatoes and put a lid on the pot, they'll cook a lot faster.
Palestine Betrayed
Everytime there's an earthquake in California, half the state goes there.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have rushed a bit through the css part in order to get it out there, otherwise bugs and ideas keep piling up and you never release (even small apps like this).

I have planned to switch to Blueprint css framework to simplify the design part (design is not my strong point).
Foxconn suicides: Company promises 20% wages hike
If you have time and disposable income, why not self-study with a tutor to guide you? Not entirely sure of the best way to go about finding one, but it would at least cut out some of the disadvantages of the self-study route.
I forgot to add a clickable link http://www.organizemysearch.com

feel free to use user/pass:hn/hn to test it out if you want!
I agree. Also, sometimes you need that outside perspective to challenge what you think and provide feedback. You can get this without school through meeting with people in the field and seeking out advisers. It'll take more self motivation, but then again you need that to start a company anyway so it'll be a good test.
I'm a big fan of self-study, but since you already have a PhD, it seems like you'd be quite comfortable learning in a classroom environment. Perhaps you can audit some classes in basic electronics and computer science? That should be a bit cheaper and could dovetail nicely into your self-study.
I'd say go with #2 (technical college), to learn how to program micro-controllers with sensors and actuators, and have hands-on experience with equipment.

That will give you a view-from-the-bottom perspective on CS; perhaps then you'll figure out if you need to climb to the top.
How To Critique An Interface
Well put. FWIW, the IE Developer Toolbar is free, and takes some of the pain out of IE6. Its a terrible clone of Firebug, but its better than nothing.

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E59...
I suggest a combination of 1 and 3. Get into a BME or BCE program and drop out after two years; at this point, you should have the foundations for which you could start to build your startup and proceed with your self study on the side to further your education.

My thoughts are that you are financially stable to afford the formal education, but you are limited by time - once you finish up a 4-5 years degree, that puts you are almost 40. I mean, your life is far from over but I assume that your priorities will change. Instead of thinking about your startup, you would probably be thinking about your children's educational future.
I wonder if they hired psychologists for this?
Oh, how I wish your quip was accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittersweet_symphony

And yet, he/The Rolling Stones felt no qualms about taking every penny of revenue from that song, despite it only using a small sample of an orchestral cover of one of their songs. Somehow, I can't respect much of anything he says about music revenue after knowing that.
Think Launches FaceCash Mobile Payment System
Google docs has been doing that for me for a few months, I found that if I close the main docs screen after opening a document (in a new window), it usually fixes the problem.
Does Chrome really render Web pages from bottom to top, as appears to happen on allrecipes.com? Or was that just done for dramatic effect?
One of the subtler and nastier parts of this is that, while currently the state doesn't impose any sanctions for infringement, sanctions (including disconnection) are planned if the piracy numbers don't go down a lot in the next year or so; but both Ofcom and the Government refuse to say whether being on this list of (alleged?) infringers will be used as evidence once those sanctions are enabled.

In other words, this is retroactive punishment.

The list is a bit like a criminal record (but with a much lower standard of evidence - mere accusation may be enough), but right now being on it carries no disadvantages, so people may decide not to bother appealing being placed on the list (especially since they shouldn't have to - presumption of innocence and all that). Then a year down the line the Secretary of State for Business has lunch with the IFPI chairman who says, "Remember how we said two years ago how piracy was going to ruin us imminently? Well ignore the fact that it's two years later and not only are we still here but our profits have actually gone up; piracy is still going to ruin us imminently, so you need to start disconnecting people pour encourager les autres." Now suddenly people who were already on the list before said lunch can lose their internet access.
Tony Stark's character was supposedly modeled after Musk.
I don't use Facebook or Farmville, but it sounds like the strategy is to just give you little scraps of gameplay at well-spaced intervals so that you are never fully satisfied. That makes you keep coming back for more.

(HN and SO are similar in this way. You randomly get karma points, which mean people like you, and so you keep checking your threads page to see how much karma you've gotten since you've last looked. Same goes for replies. If there was no karma or no threads page, I bet HN wouldn't have any users.)
Anybody reading this site knows that college is not a necessary step on the way to entrepreneurship, including you.

But less talked about it is the "journey" part.

As long one is in touch with personal motivations and goals, then college seems fine.

You're in no rush, financially comfortable, and as eager for experiences as you are your innovative product. I'd say college sounds like a cool idea. I'd just be careful to pick a good program, otherwise it could be painful/frustrating.

I'm about to go to college part-time with no professional necessity at all. I'm in a different spot than the OP. I don't have a first degree. But I do have a fine geeky career that I'm about to step out of to start a business (way less capital intensive than his idea :D ), and am going to college with the hope of learning a subject matter, but no real expectations. Just mostly for the experience.
Thanks, I might have discovered that too, but I lost track of which fix worked lol.
I had enough and switched back to the "Older Version". It's not bad that way.
The letter doesn't state anything about gameplay -- it's possible the graphics were similar to the original.
Hey! Having just finished a CS degree and after thoughtful consideration, if I had the opportunity to go back in time and do it over again, I wouldn't. I think that I could have covered all of the material in far less time on my own and used the extra time to develop my skills as a programmer. With all of the exams and assignments that occupy so much time in University, I think that your time would be better spent writing programs that interest you and reading other people's code as well. University will teach you the basics, but without much practice, it's of very little value. Furthermore, I gather from your post that you'd be studying for the benefit of starting your own company. As a result, you obviously don't need that piece of paper certifying that you know what you know. Conversely, if you thought that you might eventually seek employment with another company, the CS degree is (unfortunately) important just to get a look at your c.v.

This is just one man's opinion. Let me know what you decide.
Yet another reason to jump on the GTD bandwagon and have a 0 emails in your inbox policy.
15 things you didn't know about Steve Jobs
No. If you read the description of the chrome video, you'll see that they turned the LCD upside down to remove a shadow, and used software rotation in Windows to turn the display back around. The exact quote:

Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.
In one of his early entries, he explains that he made a conscious decision not to wear a backpack to save his knees and feet, it adds weight to every step. He's an engineer; if you read some of the posts he mentions researching different ways to take care of his needs while on this trip.

Although he seems to have spent enough time thinking everything through, I do think you have a point, I wonder if he will post later that he is getting rid of some stuff. He hasn't hit the Rockies yet (will he go through South Pass? I don't know).
I watched it earlier this year. Awesome.
This one is also good:

http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/09/six-secrets-of-farmvilles-...
I'm studying for an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at the moment. My course consists primarily of electrical and mechanical engineering with medical science, biomechanics, some chemistry, et cetera. I can code pretty well. This sounds like a really interesting project. Definitely keep me posted as you progress.
I wanted to laugh at it.
Time for DuckDuckEmail, I say! :-)
As someone not too far out of coursework in the US -- neither I nor most of my classmates didn't use source control. For most homework assignments and projects it just wasn't a necessity. You were working with so few people and just sorta ground it out. Setting up/using version control wasn't worth the frustration and time. Had it been required and assignments were turned in by checking in our final version, then it would be second nature.

I wonder if the framework/language thing is more just a lack of experience in using new things without jumping in head first. I still have some of that. However, it was made very clear that first principles should always be used.
Roark had job options working for other architects; the quarry was not the only work he could find. This was explicit in the book. I don't recall anything about Roark finding the quarry upsetting (i.e. it causing him suffering). If he was suffering -- which I think he wasn't, he was too strong -- it was because of the world in general, and the badness of the architects and clients he'd left behind, not due to the quarry which was nothing compared to them.

Do you think the people in Galt's Gulch suffered in their education? As I recall, they did things like voluntarily attend Galt's lectures (and pay for it, I think). No suffering in sight...
No, Larrabee is Not Dead
They should have used the potatoes as a battery to power the laptop.
Jokes aside, writing this fanfic is certainly a curious use of time for someone charged with the task of saving the world from an apocalypse.
Since you certainly have the discipline to pull self-study off, I would suggest emailing a professor teaching undergraduate classes in Mechatronics or Embedded Systems at Stanford, Cornell or Carnegie Mellon. They have very solid programs in robotics as they are always big contenders in the DARPA grand challenges. Get a syllabus and buy the books. When I took those classes, it was a lot of self-study anyways with our primary reference being The Art of Electronics and a bunch of AVR processor manuals. If you live in San Jose / Santa Clara area there are some GREAT electronics depots where you can stroll up and walk away with a bunch of servo motors for under $20 and start hardware-hacking.

Don't go back to school though. I think its a bit overkill. Having a PhD you already possess the skills to find the right resources and just begin doing what you want...no need to relearn the theory (unless that is half the fun for you). To address the isolation concern, I would suggest to find a hardware company (perhaps medical) that you could intern at. Try and find a mentor who can show you the ropes quicker than if you were to be by yourself.
Heh, Ezra (Engineyard) tweeted these out last night, I thought he was drunk.
Annotating Clojure programs with todo items
Where'd you get the Evo 4G from? I thought the release date was next Friday.
This might sound harsh, but since you are okay with dying at 26 of a disease that rarely kills, my advice would be: have you sought out mental health counseling? Along with your comments about confidence, no friends, girls, and with the pain I'm sure you've been through with Crohn's, and if you've been "working" since 13, I would guess you could very well be depressed. Maybe you would reconsider the bag if you felt better.
I don't think any woman in the world would date a guy with a colostomy bag. So by taking one I am committing myself to a life of loneliness and pain (crones hurts like hell).
I would skip college since a degree is just an excuse to get the foot in the door for job interviews.

If you are good at motivating yourself to learn you don't need it. Also most colleges you can just attend the lectures for free anyhow, you only pay if you need the degree. Just get some books on the subject, and find an online community to bounce your ideas off and your set. That way you can learn at a faster pace and not be dragged down by the speed at college.
1.- We're always wrong.

SometimesWereWrong + SometimesWereRight != "We're always wrong"

2.- If something can break, it will break.

Good thing this isn't true. I'm am continually amazed that some of the crap I have to maintain ever ran in the first place, much less that it continues to run. But it does. Sometimes for years without ever breaking. I call it "dodging the raindrops".

3.- All code is crap.

OP must have never seen really magnificent code for him to say this. What a shame. It's out there.

4.- There is always a bug.

False. The first step in writing bug-free code is believing that it's possible.

5.- The most important thing is the client.

Lots of things are important, but it's hard to argue with this one.

6.- Design on paper doesn't work.

Sure it can. Just because it usually doesn't work doesn't mean that it can't. I prefer prototyping, but blueprinting can be effective too.

7.- Less is more.

Generally, yes. That's what great design and refactoring are for. But there are counterexamples to this.

8.- Coding is only 20% of what we do.

If you actually believe this, then you're not spending enough time coding. I'd say more like 50 to 80%.

9.- The customer doesn't know what he/she wants NEVER!.

False. The customer often knows exactly what he/she wants, but may have trouble communicating. That's when you expert analysis and prototyping skills come in handy.

10.- Someone has done it before.

Similar to #4, the first step in inventing something new is believing it's possible. Lots of stuff that needs to be done hasn't been done for all kinds of reasons. Maybe no one thought it was possible or no one has understood its potential. But we know better.

Bonus: Hey! Our job is cool!

Yes! I agree!
#4 reminded me of these two laws:

a) there is always a bug
b) every program can be reduced at least by one instruction.

Hence, you can reduce every program to a single instruction which is a bug.
Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?

Don't mistake non-paying for no-profit. Those users don't pay cash but they do give google lots of personal data and ad-clicks that makes google money. I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads.

If google loses "non-paying" customers because of performance issues or outages that they don't know about because there's no effective way to contact them, they also lose money just like a company with paying customers.
I agree that it's an informational site, but the nicest to read information adheres to editorial principle. To me, information for information's sake is a poor substitute to well crafted, and concise "simply what you need to know".

I would stress that not all of Wikipedia falls into that trap. Obscure information (histories of places, etc) read quite well, and tend to get the information balance right. However, pop culture and movies in particular, seem to attract a kitchen sink style, as though someone just sat through the film with a laptop, and typed up everything as it was happening on the screen in front of them.
Unless you get a tablet, expect your Thinkpad to have a terrible screen with a cheap TN LCD panel. Newer Lenovo screens may have high resolutions, but contrast and color reproduction is awful. They are generally good quality machines otherwise, but the display could be a dealbreaker.