skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you go about weighing assumptions? I imagine not all assumptions could be worth equally. What is that scale and how do you determine it? An interesting quandary also arises out of contemplating the weight placed on the assumption/belief whether Occam's razor is true in the first place.
I sympathize with you. All I can say is that.. don't give up. Somewhere, sometime, you'll ready enjoy what you're doing and you will look back at this sad time of your life and think: Damn, I'm so happy I didn't give up.

Also, it's easy to make friend and I agree with you that it's hard to be motivated to stick with them.. However, I'm sure you'll encounter real friend where you won't need to be motivated.. you'll just enjoy being with them as they will be part of your life. Same with girls.. once you'll find someone that you really like (and not only the first kick), you'll be actually happy to spend time with her and she'll help you to get more motivated.

Finally, next with the startup.. once you'll really enjoy your project, it will be so much easier to stick with it and get motivated. And sometime, the best way to motivate you, is to start small and publish something.. with real people around the world waiting for your next version, it really does give a little kick in the but :p
for the tl;dr crowd- The author writes about an incident in which he discovered a teenager was trading his sheet music, without his permission and approaches her about it, said teenager actually makes several very good points, which get ignored by the author on various occasions in their conversation in lieu of a "lecture" on copyright.

Further tl;dr - the comment section by and large are all pats on the back to the writer. Few worthy of reading, but not many.

While I certainly see the perspective of the author here, wanting to preserve the integrity of his work, invariably he faces the same crisis the mainstream music industry faces: refusal to accept the change in mentality about content distribution and consumption, and an ardent unwillingness to entertain the idea that maybe in order to attract new audiences you have to tickle their senses and find out what they want, and how to give it to them. "Build it and they will come", thing.
I totally despise this article. It contradicts open-source philosophy completely. It falsely and stupidly implicates Linux. It compares two very different kinds of things. And I know lots of people who thought their Android phone was great on day one -- including myself. So what's the deal here? This is frustrating, horrible low-brow fanboyism
here's one more to add to your list: if you do an automated text meta-analysis of "Ask HN" titles and see what words/phrases are correlated with more upvotes, then post your analysis on a blog post, i'm sure people would upvote you like crazy ;)
That's all fine as long as you don't make the leap from "my imaginary friend is useful" to "my imaginary friend is real".

I would however assert an unnecessary semantic overloading -- why use a word (God) that has so many assumptions built into it? Invent a new word, and confuse fewer people.
> They will get ported eventually.

This is what worries me about Python: Python3 has been stable for a long while now, yet major projects (SciPy, Django) remain on 2.x, with no clear deadline for being ported to Python 3.

Contrast this to Ruby, where Rails 3 is 1.8-compatible but recommends 1.9. Ruby 1.9 is being used in production even though it's not completely stable yet. In short, Ruby is clearly evolving, major libraries are constantly being updated for the latest version of the language, and everyone in the Ruby community has a strong sense of "getting better all the time."

Python 3 is a better language than Python 2. That it's taken so long to become the canonical version makes me wonder about Python's future.
ah, I see what you mean. Thanks.
Ask HN: hacker day jobs in NYC?
I am trying to write a fiction book about my past 12 years working for startups in silicon valley and NYC. I am looking for a job that is more like a day job than it is the ultimate startup experience. I.e. I don't want to work more than 40 hours a week, and could even do part time.

I've worked on all sorts of stuff: iPhone app with 200K users, websites with 2M users, scaling, data warehousing, systems automation, e-commerce, "media", scientific research, java, ruby, python, perl, etc.

I'm going to have a meeting with my current CTO next week to see if I can arrange something at my current company. However, we go way back and I'm almost certain he won't go for it. (he's one of those "hobbies and outside interests are for the weak" types... but I love him anyway)

Anyway... any suggestions would be appreciated.
tl;dr SSDs that run Windows need TRIM for a vast performance boost, but macs either already have TRIM and are not advertising it or do not need TRIM because of intrinsic qualities of the OS.
I had no idea what to do starting college, then I dropped out. I went back later (long story) - ended up taking a logic course in philosophy program - aced it, and routed myself in to a philosophy degree. What the hell do you do with a philosophy degree? Get a programming job of course! (which is what I managed).
Define "hacker". Becoming one means different things to different people, and you haven't given much context. Without more specific information about where you are and where you want to end up, you're not going to get any useful responses.

Also, you'll probably be taken more seriously if you write using full sentences and avoid lazy internet slang ('hav', 'u', 'wat'). It makes you look like a kid or a troll. Or if English is not your first language and you're learning from the Internet, know that you're picking up some terrible habits.
While 'going against the grain' might not be the correct way to phrase it, you have to reali[sz]e that the entire rest of the English speaking world spells things like that. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. . .

As far as the divergence in spelling is concerned that's almost entirely due to Noah Webster who purposefully spelled things in a more Germanic way because he found the English spellings with the French influences to be distasteful.(1)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue_Backed_Spelle...
This is not a substantive, HN-worthy article. It defines virtual, shared and dedicated servers, then makes an assertion based on a sales pitch from Linode.
Heh, I've always thought that South Australians are like the Liverpudlians of Oz, accent wise :)
You're correct in that it uses the term have instead of feel, but my understanding is that it's the other way around: "And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." In other words, if you act only because you expect a reward in the after-life, or because you want to show how pious you are, or simply because you are self-destructive, you aren't practicing true charity. I believe this is a deontological argument, but I'm not really equipped to discuss theology or ethics.
In most vending machines, inserting a coin and then hitting the change return button will return a different coin than the one that was inserted. Do this a large number of times and you will likely see all the coins. (Also useful for collecting the state quarters.)
An in-depth look at the engine behind Crysis 2
Both sides changed. I think 17th century English was much different from either side today, and neither side can comfortably lay claim to it.

It was the Americans, and Webster in particular, who decided to go around rationalizing the way things were spelled. It was the English who decided to go non-rhotic. We're both changing the language, and we continue changing the language every year!
Yeah, when I first moved to the US the bank offered me a "secured credit card" deal whereby I would lend them my money for no interest and they would lend some of it back to me at some nonzero rate. I told them that they could go fuck themselves, and if they wanted proof of my creditworthiness they can damn well phone up my bank in my home country and ask them about me.

Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea.
You're plenty welcome. And... as odd as it may have seemed, the phone number's there if/when you want to chat. It may amount to absolutely nothing, or it might be useful for the both of us. I'm not awake 24/7, but am available quite a lot :) By way of reference, I'm plenty older than you, and have dealt with a lot of how you feel (except for the startup in highschool stuff!) since my teens - it definitely can get better. To a large extent things are what we make of them, and the beauty of life is that we can make of it what we want (sorry to get too philosophical so late/early in the day!)
There are many more than 2 pythons. Several versions 2.6, 2.4, 2.2 happily in use in the wild. Not to mention jython, Stackless, IronPython and the like.

Use the one that fits your new project.
Insider Trading Inside the Beltway
Ask HN: How To Sell Software Without Setting Up Website Or Payment System
Question: Is there something similar to the App Store for other platforms? Meaning something that takes care of the selling and the billing infrastructure and lets me focus just on the development.

One of the neat things about Apple's App Store is that they totally take care of the business side of selling software. As a developer I just upload my bits, create some copy for the landing page and then Apple takes care of everything else.

On most other platforms if I want to sell software I have to create a website, set up a shopping cart, take care of billing, refunds, and many similar small details before I can start selling.

So is there a company that provides end-to-end selling infrastructure for small developers? I want to just upload my app and let them take care of setting up the website, the downloading, deployment, the billing and the payments.
Thanks for the reminder - obviously it's something that some people might be concerned about and if I wanted to play it especially safely, I would.

I don't discriminate against the guy. We are open about our positions and can discuss it at the right times, but all it is, is a difference in belief in one aspect of life (admittedly, a big aspect of his life). I pay him more than I pay myself and he is an invaluable employee who does great work for me. I think the only way he'd lose his job here is if I ran out of work for him to do!

I am just framing my perspective so that a religious person might comprehend it. e.g., Santa Claus is an identity that some people believe in at some point but not at another, and at that later point they (hopefully) have zero doubt about their belief.

To get it further back on track: If I suggested that you (marcamillion, not frederick) believed in Santa Claus to get better presents, how would you even do it? You know Santa doesn't actually deliver presents with his reindeer, right? You'd stake your house and life on it, surely?
I voted scientologist because I can't resist giving silly answers to polls. A couple others probably behaved similarly.
Mamma Mia Tickets
The perfect place to get your Mamma Mia Tickets is no other than Excite.com. Apart from the massive inventory of tickets available, we also get you absolute bargains on your Mamma Mia Tickets.
http://digitalriver.com springs to mind. Haven't used them myself - would rather keep in direct contact with my customers, but that's not everyone's cup of tea.
Ask HN: Why is the last 10% always so hard?
I am working on a small side project that I am hoping to finish soon. I did 90% of the work: set up the infrastructure, wrote all the code, made it all work end to end. What's left is to polish it all and release, but I find it harder and harder to get motivated to do it. Has this ever happened to you and how did you get through it?
Funny you should say that. I saw someone post a link from an Aussie comedy show on another site. Apparently most of the Americans couldn't understand half of what he was saying, which surprised me because while distinctive, it's certainly not the thickest I've heard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suVxmPpyR9s

Edit: My experience (and that of other Aussies traveling to America) seems to be that you have to slightly Americanise the way you speak to be understood easily.
Read a colon delimited file /etc/passwd and display certain columns
One possibility is that your 90% is an overestimate, and that there is still more work to do than you consciously admit.
I really like slides 60-61:
How would it work if it were human?
How would it work if it were magic?

It's very useful to think about design in terms of how you wish something would work if technology/frameworks/etc were not an issue.
Some fairly well-known consumer-facing things that use machine learning are spam filters, recommendation engines, speech recognition systems (speech-to-text or customer service stuff), internet advertising, news clustering (Google News), related stories, handwriting recognition, questionable content identification, automatic closed captioning, and machine translation. These are not all equally successful or sophisticated, but are ML-based and mostly good enough to use.

There are a number of examples that are not consumer-facing, like credit card fraud detection, snail mail routing, quantitative trading, market segmentation analysis, demand prediction for inventory control, and other things. It is also used for scientific data analysis in several areas, with bioinformatics being the really big one. There are other examples.

There are also applications that are not considered machine learning, but use the same ideas for different purposes. An example would be modern codes, which are used for things like compression and satellite communications, and are based on the same `graphical models' pervasive in machine learning.

There is hype, and some applications need only a little bit, but it is at least used in some real stuff.
Most people are religious and that number is only decreasing recently, thus one should expect a certain number of luminaries in any domain to be religious.

Looking through history and trying to discern intent is a difficult thing to do. I don't think any of the development of God(s) as a concept was done with much long term intent but was likely as most things are done the result of mutually beneficial agreements made on the spot to secure wealth and power between the parties to the agreement.

Basically, stuff happens and then people talk their book, each gains a number of supporters and the interested parties create a consensus or official truth that best meshes with the official truth from the previous event. The magna carta wasn't signed because the King or Parliament had some love of freedom. The opportunity existed for a power grab and they took it. Even the Declaration of Independence was heavily watered down after it reached committee. Sure, Jefferson and Washington might have been true believers but most of the signatories were want to exclude things that would negatively impact their bottom line. (eg. abolishing slavery). Look at the list of grievances it's mostly about money.
You're so generous. Thank you again! You may also be local to me(yay 919ers).
I second (or nth) the see a doctor and talk about your focus and mood difficulties. The root issue of your difficulties might simply be a chemical imbalance of some sort (some variant of bipolar disorder (manias and lows) or inattentive adhd).

Go talk to a doctor such as eg a psychiatrist (get a referral from your normal doctor perhaps?) and be very very clear about every relevant anecdote in your entire life about your troubles. Mood/attention disorders can be very frustrating when unmanaged, especially since in many cases when you talk about difficulties that are ultimately due to such to most other people, their response is like "no biggie, just do it" or the like.

That being said, this is just one avenue worth investigating and many of the other posts will probably speak of much more likely applicable approaches.

But seriously, its always a good idea to talk to a doctor when theres nontrivial physical or mental distress that is evading solution.
Why not just wait until the guy who changes the food comes in and ask him?
I think it added credibility. Obama is the President. With a stroke of the pen, he could have sent a couple of carrier strike groups to add their vast resources of nuclear electricity and machine shops and freight, suspended all environmental regulations regarding deep water oil skimmers unless supported by clear evidence of harm, and so forth. A strong practical leader like Teddy Roosevelt or Ike would have moved heaven and earth to solve the problem.

Instead we got Operation Boot on the Neck.
> I split my time between serving adults (pastoring type stuff), children (Sunday school stuff), and the poor (I run a temporary food pantry). I also run a business to support my family, help my community, and build wealth. I keep busy and wouldn't change anything.

Lets say, for the sake of argument. You don't believe in god. What would stop you from doing the above things you mentioned? Would it be fair for me to make an assumption (and I apologize if I am wrong), that you are not necessarily doing those noble things because you think those things will help people, but possibly you are doing those things to appease your god so that you get a better after life.

Assuming my above assumption is right (again I apologize if its not), do you see the inconsistency in your morality?
I'm sorry for being a bit rash with my statement. I learned to get around vim as fast as in my old editor in 1 hour. Since then I learned to be much more efficient than in my old editor. I don't claim to be a vim expert today either. My point is that as soon as you are as comfortable in vim as in your Notepad++/Coda/Eclipse, etc. you can pat yourself on the back and drop whatever you were using before. From there you'll only get faster/better/more efficient.
Gray text on a light gray background is very hard to read. See for yourself: http://www.fastnlight.com/contrast.html
Black text on a white background please, or make the gray text/gray background style something I can turn off.
Thanks.
"Coding, for a counterexample, is '90 percent finished' for half of the total coding time. Debugging is '99 percent complete' most of the time. 'Planning complete' is an event one can proclaim almost at will."
-Mythical Man Month, page 154
I don't think the circumstances compare.

Python 3.x is different in a bunch of little ways from 2.x. Just like you say Rails 3 runs on Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, most Python libraries will run on 2.5, 2.6, or 2.7 (often 2.4 as well) without modification. Python 3.x breaks these libraries. Python 2.7 is also several months newer than Python 3.1.

It reminds me of the 2.4 -> 2.6 transition for the Linux kernel. People were using 2.4 for a long time. Heck, you can still find Linux 2.4 in the wild.
I'm saying the question is meaningless

Why? Is it because we have not been able to answer it yet?
I will order that book now. :)
Dude, you don't have ADD. You aren't bipolar. You're a normal young man -- or at least within the range of normal for young men. Forget therapists. Forget drugs. Forget everything you've been told, and join the Army. Seriously. Trust me. Yes, yes, I know that you don't know me. But you're describing me in this post, and a lot of guys I knew back when I was in: Smart guys, but bored. Can't concentrate in class. Can't suffer fools. Takes a lot to motivate them. They need to be passionate about something before they will even try it, and then they try it, and things don't happen as quickly as they thought they would, and they get discouraged, and their minds wander. And then they try something else, half-way. Fuck that shit. Become a marine. Try to become a paratrooper. Do something physical that attracts a better class of recruit, and don't stop till you get there. It will teach you to finish things that you start. And along the way you'll probably be doing more good for the world than any ten Peace Corps volunteers. Yes yes, I saw that Collateral murder video. Wikleaks is a bunch of liars. When you finish, you'll have learned an important lesson. Which is that more than anything else, winning requires that you show up.

After that, if you still feel useless, you will have plenty of time to kill yourself.
Sweet, I'm vote #666 for Nonreligious/Atheist/Agnostic/etc ...
> Debian said (paraphrasing): No, you evil capitalist pigs.

Oh, please... Apple could have used dpkg if they wanted to.

dpkg is open source software released under the GPL license. Apple just chose not to, because they would have had to open source all their code that linked to dpkg libraries.

That is the price they would have to pay for piggy-backing on the efforts of many volunteers and gain immediate access to a state of the art packaging system.

But of course Apple being Apple has a lot more money to spend on PR and along with the help of their fan boys, the story turned into "Debian developers are mean, capitalism-hating hippies". I am not really surprised.
Sorry, but there is a decent dose of bullshit in those slides. "I'm a great lover", "I see you're a great lover". Bah.

But also some good stuff.
Let Jason Robert Brown feel mighty and righteous about his sheet musics being copied.....I mean...err..stolen.

For the rest of everybody else who actually have some common sense about business, this is a dream come true. It's market inefficiencies ripe for exploitation. Exploit it and don't let the illegal pirates take it away from you, especially when your competitors decide to stick his head into the sand and give you a free lunch. The more Jason Robert Brown type people, the better.
"I have considered addrell many many times only to hear from close friends that it will turn me into a bot."

People vary enormously in how they respond to brain drugs, and each drug is different too. You just have to try them and see if you can find a dose where the benefits outweigh the costs. If it doesn't work, all you have lost is a little time and money. (Well, some drugs can be dangerous, but Adderall and friends generally are not.)
The trackball doubles as a handy-dandy notification light, too.
I am pretty good about this. For most of my projects I keep a pretty atomic TODO list and move things into a DONE category whenever it's finished. The list grows as I come up with new things, and shrinks each time I get something done. I know I approach the finish line when I stop adding things to the list as quickly as I'm getting them off the list. This of course has nothing to do with the number of hours left, just the number of tasks.
I can help you sir
I think education system should ideally create employers and not employees.
Especially when someone claims to be a member of an ethnic group because their parents were of the corresponding religion.
Handwriting detectors implemented by the Postal Service. My ML professor worked on algorithms with USPS for over 20 years and gave our class a sub-problem for a term project. He once told us a story that the computer scientists were all up in arms because they wanted the post office to design letter boxes on envelopes to encourage people to write their characters in legible english. Obviously that didn't happen and thus it took quite a bit longer to design software that would reliably recognize v's from u's and b's from 6's and r's from t's and c's from a's under the ridiculous constraints that sorting millions of packages of mail requires.
Luckily God is omnipresent, so that shouldn't be an issue.
That's exactly why iPhone applications generate so much revenues. Not only if you want to sell your app you don't have to worry about accepting payments and everything else, but also your clients won't have to worry about looking for a credit card and fill up never ending forms.
Ugh. As pointed out in the Slashdot comments, this article is not even wrong.
or quantum
Why is the easiest 90% so easy?