skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And if you're looking for a good doorway into the .NET blogging community (well, maybe it's more of a firehose):

http://www.alvinashcraft.com/
Do you really think you can derive the character of a person based on the title of their blog?

Seems pretty damned shallow to me.
I'm 30 and I thought the ad was cool. Maybe I'm just ahead of the game... and already clueless.

Snide remarks aside, I disagree. The ad works, and I'm exactly who they are selling to, and I was interested. It was hip, rad AND awesome.

Still, Blackberry to me means email. I had one for 2 years and loved the heck out of it. In fact, I was frustrated with my iPhone for a while after the switch. Now I love each for what they are and ad or no ad, it's too bad RIM is walking away from its textual non-media-centric awesomeness.

Word to your mother.
A real big stretch. Overnight hours normally spent sleeping shouldn't be factored in. And how many people took a vacation day for this?
I sit on a cushion for fifteen minutes or so, sitting cross-legged so that my back is relatively straight and my knees keep the whole posture relatively stable.

Beyond that, it's just sitting and observing. If (ok, when) I notice my focus has drifted and I'm getting caught up in thoughts, I stop feeding into them and return focus to my breath, posture, and surroundings.

It can be dreadfully boring, but when I do it periodically, it really does help - like taking the lid off a pot on the verge of boiling over. (It's an especially direct way to train your mind to stay focused, too.)

There's a decent chapter about sitting meditation in Brad Warner's _Hardcore Zen_, which I also recommend because it isn't a bunch of new-age-y sunshine and lollipops. (Looking at a lot of other Western books on Buddhism, you'd think Zen had antioxidants or something.)
The analogy may not be exactly right, but your explanation also went off on a tangent. It is not the app purchasers who matter here -- it is the people who want to make apps (or finance the making of apps if you will). Just like the movie producers who will pay top-dollar for actors/directors/etc. if they are proven to make a product (the movie) that is successful (like he has been according to what he says).

By claiming that he is charging a ridiculous per-hour rate, he is actually adding to this "stardom" :-).
I tried to look up more info about it but it seems like to learn anything, one has to take some $1500 course. Can you summarize how it differs from the standard meditation (i.e. zen meditation)?
That article is shocking, in the sense that most of the meditation teachers are unaware of the bad side effects. Basic relaxation techniques are mostly harmless, but "serious" meditation very often leads to profound challenges to one's sense of self and perception of the world. In the religious traditions that cultivate it, that is in fact the point, and there are many stages that are highly challenging and unpleasant.
While I generally agree with your comment, it's kind of a non-sequitor. These jobs are all startups, either doing well or with funding. They don't have any connection to all that shenanigans.
I like how I have to allow his domain in NoScript just to see the page text. Not that the site actually does anything in javascript, as far as I can tell, besides pointlessly slow down page rendering.
In most real situations, people arrange more than one means of communication, or more than one step, so there is not a single point of comm that is critical. When I was in the Air Force, for one critical procedure there were 44 different methods of communication. Yeah, it was the Cold War, and we had limitless money, but it was amazingly reliable.
Even if they do, I (and many others) still wouldn't use it then, because Microsoft has already abused their position in the past. I know I won't contribute to their success.
I practice it as samatha meditation. If this was not HN I would have corrected you and say it was samatha (tranquility) meditation and not vipassana, but on HN I have learned that people usually know what they are talking about ;-) and thanks to Wikipedia I have just learned it is used for vipassana as well. Apparently the Buddha himself regarded it as a Swiss army knife that develops all "seven factors of awakening: sati (mindfulness), dhamma vicaya (analysis), viriya (persistence), which leads to piti (rapture), then to passaddhi (serenity), which in turn leads to samadhi (concentration) and then to upekkhā (equanimity)."

As I understand the distinction, samatha meditation develops the ability to achieve mental tranquility and sustained focus, and vipassana meditation develops insight through awareness, introspection, and rational analysis. It's easy to see why breath-awareness meditation can be used for samatha, but I did not understand how it could be used for vipassana. According to what I just read, it becomes vipassana when the meditator takes his consciousness itself as the object of awareness.
Buick’d (A personal plea to keep those too old to drive off the roads)
Why not drop the meditation and sleep a more-normal (and certainly more-refreshing) 7 hours a night?
Much more is lost due to Hacker News. :-)
PyPy 1.3 released
Slightly O/T, but can someone explain why with JavaScript disabled this blog post is completely invisible?

I can't see any technical reason or understand why one would penalize NoScript users (like me).
The Sobering Reality of Entrepreneurship in the U.S.
Mark, you are correct, it does install packages globally. It's designed to complement the project-oriented approach of Leiningen and Maven, not replace it.
I love Red Laser and bought the iPhone app, but (and I can't believe I'm saying this) Bing's new upc reading function in the Bing app is head and shoulders light years ahead. Honest.

And it's free!
I don't think he's claiming to be a great coder, but rather a great app designer. And he's right, life experience can come in handy in that area.
You have to explicitly agree to the TOS for the android market before installing any app from it. If you install apps yourself (outside the market), google can't touch them.
iPhone 4. There is no such thing as iPhone 4G.
Calling the UK part of Europe is a stretch...
Fortunately, much is gained as well.
Microsoft JDBC 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 will no longer be supported June 25th 2011
Only because they keep doing brand-awareness marketing.
Well, the problem with this theory is that a fairly significant portion of the line crowd had their ipads/iphones and were working away. I, personally, cleared out a significant portion of my Jira queue, and triaged (and responded) to pretty much the entire day's email while I was in Line in Palo Alto. It was actually a very productive 90 minutes for me.
Historically many of the APL glyphs were produced via digraphs - 'quad' is [] overstruck, making a narrow rectangle. The rotation verbs overstrike a circle with -, |, or \. While the original character set was different* ,
it seems like a reasonable alternative to a completely different keyboard layout (in hardware or software).

* According to the APL book I was looking through recently, some keyboards required the user to overstrike ' and . to get an ! (!).
Just another textual factoring of a data composition structure?
This PG essay is a good refutation of the notion that (progressive or, at least, non-regressive) taxes are a "win" for the poor in a zero sum game:

"The Pie Fallacy

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.

What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.

Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. [5]

Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don't have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones-- a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market."

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Taxes on wealth creation discourages it. (It may still, at least in the short term, be good for revenue)*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Again, who is the media? The media is us. They're not a race of aliens hell bent on making humanity care about Kim Kardashian. They're people just like you and me, who have a financial incentive to expose the stories you and I want to hear/read.

The media doesn't shape us, we shape the media with our attention. CNN doesn't derail their entire programming for a week every time a cute little white girl gets abducted because they have some sort of agenda. They do it because if they don't MSNBC will and we'll all watch that channel instead.

That's why I don't watch cable news. I'm more of an Economist kind of guy which is also media, though diametrically opposed to much of the media in philosphy.

Which is yet another reason the original argument is silly. All viewpoints do exist in the media. The media collectively IS doing it's job of putting out a wide variety of information and letting us choose, with our attention, which we want to see. Sadly more people choose Fox News than the Economist. This isn't the media's fault, it's ours.
Interesting stuff, some more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
Speed Testing the Bleeding Edge Browsers' HTML5 Performance
He isn't talking about charging $1,000/hr for coding. Rather, he is doing technical consulting. This means he should be able to deliver high value in a short time, and he'll only ever bill clients a couple hours at a time.
Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who hires him?
I agree.

Brad Pitt earns what he does because of the amount of money his movies bring in. If Mike Lee can bring in enough monies for his clients to recoup his exorbitant hourly rate, more power to him.

He should definitely tone down the ego and rhetoric a bit though.
After using the iphone for 2 years, I decided to try the nexus one Google gave us at googleio.
What I really like about the nexus one is the seamless integration with google apps, gmail, running gtalk in the background etc., but thats it. Most of the apps I have downloaded really sucks, their UI is terrible and they crash often.
The multitouch response on google maps is not that good,the pinch doesn't respond that well.
Google needs to polish a lot of things, and we are still waiting for Froyo to come out.
New Digg Redesign
A few years ago, my PR company insisted that I train with a coach for an interview they set up for me on GMA.
“Why?” I said. “I spent a year of my life building, launching and talking about this site. Isn’t that enough preparation?”

That reminds me when once ago I have worked for a PR guy, actually a corporate communication expert. He ran an expensive training program for CEOs, corporate reps and politicians, which was not only a basic presentation/interview course but included simulated crisis situations with journalists, etc. The funny thing is all of that big shots also thought that professional experience was sufficient to do well in any interview, but during some stages of the course, many of them ended up crying. No matter how much experience, power or money they had, once approached by a pro journalist, they were helpless.

Although a startup interview is not a crisis situation, I believe it's a good advice to get a training before the first one.
ActivePython updated in anticipation of finance regulation
And as far as getting into the framework you can disassemble down to the IL if you like which is also well documented. For most people Reflector is good enough.
They had the G8 (as was) meeting in a remote location (Gleneagles) in 2005. It just meant that all the protests, demonstrations, and marches were held in the nearest city (Edinburgh) instead.

We had half the Met. (London's police force) up here acting like thugs. Meanwhile, some lunatics blew themselves up on the London Underground.

These meetings are a farce. Anything that's going to be agreed at the meeting was in reality agreed beforehand. Why bother creating a target for protestors and a distraction that evil bastards can use?

Never mind a remote location - why do it at all?
The most fuel-efficient driver in the world. (2007)
-1, semantics crank. "Current does not flow."
Not much of a difference - what does it matter where in the circuit you start tracing current? Why use analogies to water - I dont find it helpful.

Good to distingush between Current and Charge. I likewise like to distinguish between money and value - which is money over time.
On the one hand, I really like this article in general. It's a pretty clear explanation of how transistors work physically, without requiring too much knowledge of semiconductor physics. Though I don't think he introduced the idea of holes very well.

On the other hand: the whole article is written in a style that suggests this is some kind of major revelation to someone with a background in electrical engineering. I really find that hard to believe: is this really never explained in EE courses? I'm a physics major turned materials scientist, and this is really well-understood in both of those communities. HN EE's, did you all never get a course in solid state physics or electronic materials?

Which isn't an insult: I can understand that this kind of understanding might not be essential to circuit design, though I might think it would help. But if this is seriously not something they teach EE's, you're missing out. Because solid state physics is some seriously cool shit.
I think that these affordances are more important for non-tech people than what techies in particular give them credit for. In order for people who prefer using the analogue equivalents, this is a great way to inspire confidence enough to rely on the computerized tools, and to see some of the advantages of having the stuff in a computer.

I think it's a phase in many ways, but an important phase nonetheless. Scaling UX to handle total newbies and hardcore experts is not a simple one, and so far examples of doing that in any way that could be considered successful are few and far between.
Actually, under Eisenhower and Kennedy the top marginal rate was always between 91% and 95%. Then it was 70% until the early 1980s when it went down to 50%.

That's just federal, not including state and city income taxes.
Individual programmer style does matter, but languages also guide our style. I'm often asked to convert Perl scripts to Python scripts, and the originals don't exhibit the "optional readability" you're advertising, and which Python encourages by default.

An entirely different angle on all of this is that NLTK is aimed at novice programmers (linguists) as well as expert programmers (CS students). Perhaps readability is a different concept for these two user groups...
Presuming the time would have been spent elsewhere productively?
A taxonomy of cargo bikes
Likely insomnia prevents him or her from getting more than 5 hours of sleep.
Eh, I dunno. He did get really pedantic in that part, but you do run into a lot of circuit analysis that seems to forget that there are actual charged particles moving around in there. And that is really helpful to remember when you want to understand what's going on in detail.
As defined in this article (% of people self-employed / owning small businesses), I think there are some other factors involved. I only know about Greece first-hand (about half my family lives there), but one reason there is that regulations and incentives generally discourage large corporations from entering a whole lot of markets, though they've been relaxed somewhat recently.

For example, Greece's high self-employment rate includes a lot of one-man grocery store or fruit/vegetable stand operations, because large supermarkets were more or less banned until recently. More generally, there were (again, recently relaxed) regulations on how many hours you could have a retail establishment open per week, and what hours they could be, intended to make it easier for small businesses to compete with the large ones: a one-man store can't reasonably be open more than maybe 60 hours/week, so the law generally banned businesses from being open more than a certain number of hours a week, and required them to close at least one or two days a week (depending on market segment). That made it much easier for small operations to compete with the large ones, because your mom-and-pop store open 6 days a week, 8 hours a day, wasn't up against a 24/7 chain store.

Some though is perhaps just cultural. When a rich Greek builds a vacation villa, for example, he'll typically get a independent architect to design it and oversee its construction, rather than going with a big design/architecture/construction corporation, which is seen as too cookie cutter / less prestigious. I bet just architects alone account for several thousand of the self-employed Greeks, whereas most American architects work for corporations (exceptions only on the very high end of world-famous architects). It even extends to commercial real-estate: the typical 6-story office or apartment building in Thessaloniki or Athens is designed and built by a small independent firm.
I don't see how that is an equally valid interpretation. In the abstract all they claim is that both meditation and listening to a recorded book improved mood, but only the meditation group improved along other dimensions. It did not note any negative effects from listening to Tolkien. The aim was to have both groups engaged actively on something (meditation vs listening to a recorded book) and to compare the outcomes. Why is that an invalid comparison?
I'm a huge FreeSWITCH fan, however I must agree with akalsey: WHY, exactly do you feel this way. I know why I do, but that's another story.

-MC
Using a SQLite database doesn't mean you can't use fabric, so it's not going to work better or worse. You see the difference? So far nothing you've said invalidates sqlite files or sql as a configuration interface.

The version challenge points directly at what's wrong with config files: they aren't accessible to automation. If you can't even do this very simple thing from one programming language, then it means you can't do other things easily.
I think the language has evolved well, but the framework certainly has some useless cruft. Luckily that can be ignored.
>This PG essay is a good refutation of the notion that (progressive or, at least, non-regressive) taxes are a "win" for the poor in a zero sum game:

This is a straw man. I cannot think of anyone (and I'd love to see you find a progressive or anyone) that would say that economics is a zero sum game.

A lot of this community did form around pg's essays. However, it's a little sickening to think that anyone would take them as gospel. Since the early days of reddit and hn these things have been vigorously debated. pg is at his best when talking about start ups and I think the way he conveys how founders should think is good stuff. However, please do not expect, or treat his writing, like he will win a nobel prize in economics.
Controls are always the toughest issue in experimental research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
> Spending money doesn't make us richer.

Sure it does. If I buy good A for $X, I must value having good A a least _slightly_ more than having $X in my pocket. Similarly, the seller values $X in his pocket more than having good A in his inventory.

Hence, we have completed a transaction where the wealth of both parties has increased. This is the essence of why capitalism works.
One large reason is the lack of universal health care in the United States. Should you or your family be hit with a major illness while you're busy being entrepreneurial, you are sunk. One of the best things the United States could do to promote entrepreneurship would be to implement proper universal healthcare. Sadly, it's unlikely to happen in the near future.
I highly recommend http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion as a forum for open and fairly nondogmatic discussion of practice. The existing threads have a huge variety of practice techniques and discussions/diagnosis for their results.
I hope you're joking. Sure it's bureaucratic, but it's also straightforward. Follow the rules and there are no issues. A lawyer for a tourist visa? Please.
Entrepreneurship ain't for everyone.

You will:
- work more hours.
- deal with so much more stress.
- flirt with financial ruin at least once.
- struggle to balance work and family.

But some folks are just cut out to do it. It's like a genetic predisposition that can't be denied. And if one can learn to cope with the issues I mentioned (and more) being an entrepreneur is one of the most rewarding life experiences out there.
For an electrical engineer transistor is a black box 99.9% of the time. It's enogh to know it's interface.
They'll make it up with multi-tasking.
The launcher side has been done (very well) in C for JVM languages: http://hashdot.sourceforge.net/

Just waiting for someone to go make .debs for it!
"He says that .Net coders don't answer each other's questions. What's stackoverflow then?"

The first response in the comments secition is plug for stack overflow. The author didn't know that it existed.
Really late, but thanks!
> I can say that flight times vary by at least 7%, so that would suggest that fuel use variation should also be over 7%.

Couple of things to remember.

1. This was a single test flight. Not statistically significant by any measure.

2. My calculation was back of the envelope with unreliable figures. :)
But they do have a connection to that shenanigans, at least to the extent that government spending does eventually "trickle down" through the economy. By propping up firms through direct fiscal injections and bailouts, they prevent the employees of those firms from losing their jobs. Those employees then continue spending, at least more than they would've if they'd been laid off. The businesses that receive that money do better than they otherwise would've, they make investments that they'd clamp down on if they perceived the economy was in the toilet, and that makes its way to technology startups.