skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main things I learned:

- don't smoke. total waste of health and money.

- don't drink/hang out in bars. total waste of time and money

- make an earnest attempt at becoming a professional BMX racer or late night talk show host or whatever your REAL childhood dream was before spending too much time programming the internet.

- make a lot of friends

- if a girl doesn't sleep with you after the 3rd date, don't call her back

- always have about $30 grand in a bank account somewhere. this will give you the peace of mind to not feel pressured to stay in a job that you hate
Ask HN: favicon o.O
Did anyone else notice at (http://news.ycombinator.com/news) that HN's favicon was temporarily reddit's favicon around 7:30am PST? Maybe I need to get some sleep.
yeah, this sounds fine for the bachelor developer with no one dependent upon them. When you have a family things change. I am good at what I do and I have plenty saved up in an emergency fund, but the risk of potentially losing my job, benefits, etc. just to take a month off isn't worth it. That being said, I do get 4 weeks PTO (no sick/vac all is PTO), so I suppose I could take a month off if I wanted to. But I'd rather split it up during the year.
That is very good Perl code. I especially like the commenting you did.
> So before consumers know it, they will pause their Linux based television to receive a call on a Linux based phone, while they use their Linux based tablet to browse the net through their Linux based router.

This is already happening today.

Linux doesn't have much traction on the desktop because the most important things to users are the most broken:

- graphics drivers

- wireless drivers

- flash performance/silverlight support

Whole article is uh; not good.
Joost failure had nothing to do with technology. Instead they fundamentally misunderstood movie business and had a wrong business model. They did solve half of the problem, cost of bandwidth, but they failed to solve the much harder half -- upfront cost of content.

The story goes is that Joost came to studios with $40 mil to get rights to movies. They were told that that a prime movie rights were $10 mil prepay upfront, so they could choose 4 good movies, or a large library of junk. They chose junk, but neither option was viable.

To do business the way they wanted to, Joost was undercapitalized by a factor of 100.

YouTube and Hulu solved content problem differently. One through copyright infringement, the other though being owned by content owners.
Feedback on my startup job aggregator
> The poor girl in HR thought she had a stalker

Sounds like she's got a bit of an ego...
I'm not saying we shouldn't live a relaxed, sustainable work-life, but seriously?

Sounds to me like you abused your leverage. Almost any employee, especially at a small company, is extraordinarily valuable and, sure, can use that to take (see: extort) 6 weeks vacation, but it's disrespectful to the organization. The cost to replace you outweighs the cost of letting you leave for 6 weeks if you are good. You're right economically.

Ethically it's a dick move (even if you do it "once every few years" 6 weeks of unannounced leave is really not cool). And if you don't feel like you have a relationship with your work where you have to respect it you shouldn't come back from that vacation.
Gandhi, "racist"?

Would you mind very much googling "Harijan"?

You seem to have latched on to a very strange definition of "racist". Gandhi might have believed during that early period in his life in keeping races separate, which is not surprising given his orthodox upbringing, but he did a very great deal, later, to unite people of all religions and races and motivate them to think of each other as equals, persuading them to literally call each other 'brothers and sisters'.

I cannot accept that that is the same as what is commonly understood as "racist".
Fred Wilson's thoughts on Foursquare's $20M Series B
Firefox? Most likely a browser bug, I've had sites show favicons of other sites I've recently visited before (not for a while, though)
The problem is that most parenting literature is based on one person's subjective opinion. There is a dearth of real evidence to prove that one technique actually produces better outcomes than another. So how are we to know what skills to learn?

There is a tremendous variation in individual children so mostly it has to be a trial and error process until you figure out what works for each.
I get where you are coming from, however if your application is already using SQL then the transition to a more limited but faster database is a lot simpler than going to NoSQL.

Also one of the simple hacks to increase speed is to have a smaller working set database on a separate system to handle more recent items. Because it's under a much higher load the "live" database tends to have really simple usage pattern also due to its smaller size it tends to fit into RAM. And, the “Live” DB tends to have different optimizations (EX: Fewer indexes because you have more writes). Based on this a "striped down" but still SQL database seems like a perfect fit.

PS: It's a lot like Memcached, something that can speed up your application with minimal development time is worth a lot.
Still we should wait before declaring foursqure a success. It would be interesting to see how they use the money they recently got.
That's a beautiful piece of code, and really interesting too. It's a great example of how to document what the code is intended to be doing rather than documenting what it's actually doing (eg: "add one to i"). I would maintain your code any day.
i strongly endorse employees exploiting their employers as much as employers exploit their employees.
Taleb's point is that unexpected outlier events are the ones that have the greatest impact. Prediction works because the next moment is usually not much different from the current moment.
Aftermarket modding of femtocells will be very interesting. Load these up with asterisk, connect to a voip gateway, mesh network them together across a neighborhood or city.
I have no time now to download it, so I won't waste one of your promo codes. Just a quick comment as an iPhone developer on what I see in the screenshots:

- the second one seems too messy to me. Usually on the iPhone you keep the visual clutter to minimum, while here you put too many stuff on screen. What's the point of having "today, tomorrow, due, etc." differing in both color and dimensions?
- speaking again of the second screenshot, icons on the left are not aligned properly. The shadows on the labels in the upper part look awkward. What is that purple - up right? A button? It does not look like one and you are violating the Apple HIG. The segmented control looks awkward too. Did you customize it? Because usually segmented controls don't look like that one on the iPhone.
- On the fourth screenshot you are violating the HIG again. Where did you take those checkboxes? These are not part of the SDK so they must be custom. But there is a reason you don't find them in the SDK. It's stated somewhere in the iPhone development guide that you should not use checkboxes. There are switches instead, or other interfaces.
And again, the text here is totally screwed, with different dimensions for labels and weird spacing.

These are just comments on interface and not on functionality. But on the iPhone people usually expect polished interfaces. Look at competition: Omnifocus gets it right in my opinion. Yes, Omnifocus costs a lot more than your app, but it looks more like a quality product.

I'm totally not a good example of iPhone users demographic, but I bought Omnifocus because all the competition did not convince me. When I see screenshots like these, I skip to the next app, regardless of all the rest.
Just make sure it would take longer to hire and train someone for your job than your vacation is.
Absolutely, but my point was if you have a relationship with your employer where you feel they are extorting you you should leave and find some place where they aren't.
> I found that spending a lot of time reading other people's code dramatically improved the readability of my own code.

This I wholeheartedly agree with. I spent the first five years of my career porting large hairy codebases from PCs to embedded devices, without the original programmers available, and that has given me a drastically different code style to a lot of people.

> I venture to guess that his code is a little opaque in places without meaning to be, as a result of his not spending much time reading other people's code.

Here you lose me. I went out of my way to avoid memorizing the operator precedence rules too well, so that when I saw a complex one-line expression I'd have to stop and pay attention. A lot of the time the subtle bugs creep in because the naked expressions flow in a way that looks seductively correct, and so with an easy knowledge of precedence it's easy to make the same mistake as the original author.

As Bjarne S once said about casting in C++, I want it to look ugly in the code because it's an ugly idea. I want my code-reading to stumble when I hit those long unparenthesized expressions, to make sure I pay attention.
Links is to an interstitial ad- a crummy thing to do.
I wouldn't say Firefox "started" all the improvements ... Opera has been at the forefront for a long time, natural progression has taken place over the years, and now Firefox is playing catch-up with things like tab-isolation and HTML5
I believed that I would always have hair.
Summarising:

In the USA it means to postpone, give up on (possibly temporarily) or to make someone else's problem or responsibility.

In other parts of the world it can mean to press on with, perhaps against the odds, or to take an aggressive/assertive course of action.

Might I suggest that people should be aware when using the term that it might be taken to mean the opposite of what you think?
I'd say it's all about practise.

Through-out my life I've found that I get better/quicker or worse/slower at writing depending on how much I've been doing of it lately.

Working for home for the past two years purely on a computer, my writing looks terrible and I'm very slow.

Rather than traditional "practise makes perfect" methods used in classrooms (copying out lines etc.) I'd suggest that it's very important that what he is writing doesn't bore/anooy him. Obviously that's unavoidable in life, whether at school/work/other, but if he were to practise at home... if he enjoys what he's writing about, he's more likely to pay attention, care more, and therefore improve faster.
He's pointing out that you can't make money providing something that isn't scarce. So, because lack of scarcity is a good thing, we want to see more kinds of businesses that work by bundling a little bit of scarce stuff with a lot of non-scarce stuff. Such as for example this "open core" stuff and what Red hat does, but we also need some new ways just for variety.
Unless you have an equity stake, like at a startup. Then you're probably just hurting yourself.
Today I launched Startups Hiring. The idea is simple; eliminate recruiter posts, noise and the need for startups to maintain and manage job postings on third party job boards. I ended up building a curated list of companies that are crawled for open positions directly from their career pages. Links are fresh and updated daily. Clicking a link takes you directly to the job description on the company website. The service is free and we are adding new companies every day.

I would love to hear feedback from the HN community and suggestions on possible ways to generate revenue outside of featured links (which I have).
Elon Musk Says 'Goal Is to Remain Independent' After IPO
I honestly can't imagine why folks continue to use MySQL over PostreSQL. All technical benefits of PostgreSQL aside, I can't help but wonder if it really comes down to something silly, like MySQL being much easier to pronounce properly.

For my part, I'm stoked about 9.0. It can't get here soon enough.
Even if it were true, last I checked a lot of industries receive "unfair" advantages in the form of government subsidies.
Joost was only launched in 2007, so what he is talking about Youtube surpassing them?
This is a relatively recent development in human life. Roman women didn't usually live past 30. And it wasn't until the XX century that average life expectancy exceeded 40 years.

EDIT: And 50% of Roman women died giving birth. So there weren't many grandmothers around.
Looks great! The favicon is a fav.
Regarding the police, I know that there is a least a subset of libertarian capitalists that would disagree with you. They seem to dislike the police and strongly prefer gun rights for protection of self and property.
It depends, lots of people know mysql and don't want to deal with switching costs if what there doing isn't going to be limited by database performance. So even if PostreSQL would be the better choice it may not be in terms of migration costs.
Redeemed #3. I'll be back with thoughts.
You spelled GitHub wrong.
Great link, Mr. Graham always puts things into perspective. My takeaway just step up to the plate pick one and see where it leads and if change in necessary, change.
In 2007, before the financial crisis and before becoming Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel investigating the Troubled Assets Relief Program, Dr. Elizabeth Warren gave a very interesting talk at UC Berkeley titled "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

At the time I thought it was a little alarmist, but in view of recent developments I recommend watching it (58 minutes, sorry). It speaks directly to the point about wages and how middle class households employ revolving credit to make up the the difference. The graphs and data are interesting.
Thanks. If I expect a piece of code to survive any length of time I try to document it well because I tend to forget how/why I decided to do things. In that piece of code, I knew that I'd forget the trig. part quite quickly so I figured an ASCII diagram was needed.

If you enjoyed that piece of code you might also enjoy the C code linked here: http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself...

Perhaps there should be a 'beautiful code' blog as a sort of counterpart to the Daily WTF. I could reuse the domain usethesource.com.

Update: An there it is UseTheSource (http://news.usethesource.com/news). Submit examples of beautiful or interesting code.
It was on hackernews from cdixon blog a few days ago : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1431531
Another advantage to breadth is that you can recognize when another field's tools might be a better fit for your current problem.

Being a pure generalist probably sticks you to the initial triage role (which is no fun), but having a very large number of baseline competencies is handy.
Ray Kurzweil: How to Predict the Future
"... I only beseech your wisdom about what mistakes/naivetes I'll incur in my twenties, oh the elders of the Hacker News ..."

- value life: that as bad as things may get never loose sight that the objective is to get old. [0]

- time: doing a little, a lot adds up. So practice that "foo" or do that "bar" over a long period of time the repeated task adds up. Be generous in your time with others. Time is the ultimate gift.

- be good: if you see something wrong fix it, something bad speak up as evil triumphs when seemingly good people do nothing.

- work on something of value: don't waste your time on trivial crap of marginal value. Work on something that is/or will be valuable now or in the future.

- learn perspective: laugh at your misfortune, cry at injustice and don't fret at things lost.

- work hard: don't do things half-arsed.

- have fun when doing: because it makes things a whole lot more interesting.

- learn from mistakes: don't make the same ones twice.

- evaluate: don't take things at face value, evaluate and adjust to your environment such as work, friends, values.

- rest: learn that there is a time to work, a time to play and time to rest.

"... I'd like to cheat in life and instead of learning my life lessons the hard way, I'd like to skip ahead and read the ending of the current chapter that I'm currently on ..."

If you don't get burnt, how will you learn from these lessons? You really only learn from experience.

[0] After catching up with some mates last week I was amazed at the number of (male) mates who killed themselves in there 20's for what at the time seemed important but in hindsight trivial.
Oh greed! The inhumanity! More regulations. Less free markets! Markets are inefficient!

Oh please, every inefficient market is an entrepreneur dream. That what HN entrepreneur types want to exploit. Get the damn monopolies out of the way and let entrepreneurs eliminate the inefficiency. Or rather, don't expect efficient market everywhere. There will alway be some inefficiency. For example, the browser market was stagnant for a while. However, it didn't take a government to remedy it. It took a non-profit enterprise, who against all odd, brought firefox to the masses.

Anybody who believes in the efficient market hypothesis did not realize the functions of entrepreneurship and the uncertainty inherent in market. In other words, it's a strawman designed to make free marketeers look like naive believer in the magic of capitalism.

Regulations? Heard of regulatory capture, much? There are good regulations and then there are bad regulations. It's not about regulators being asleep at the wheel, it's about regulators sleeping with bankers. When that happens, the regulations will be modified to fit what the bankers like, not whether it is healthy for the economy.

Don't give me the bollocks about how the world should be more humane, responsible, and just. Everybody wants the world to be more humane, responsible, and just.

Discuss or debate with the strongest supporters of capitalism and come back, then wow me with your socialist insight instead of attacking the weakest version of capitalism.

As it stand, the youtube video is pathetically weak. Free marketeers will pick apart the video like no tomorrow.
He's right about two weeks not being the rule; in most western countries four or five weeks is the rule.

To me the amount of holiday/vacation is a Big Deal.
I was lucky when I lived in the US that my company offered four weeks (and I could earn extra comp days doing weekend tech support). Although I once had the general manager ask me point blank how I was taking more time off for a trip to Peru, so I went through and proved I had enough vacation days left. He still didn't seem too happy about it though. Perhaps most people didn't use all their vacation days?

Lack of vacation days is one of the reasons I'd be uncomfortable about living in the US again, so I could definitely see myself taking unpaid leave every few years like TFA suggests or just quitting my job. Then I could do important things like visiting family in NZ or getting in some serious skiing.
"The police force is a very 'capitalist' institution."

Seriously? Are you are claiming that socialism has very little or no need for police?

This whole statement seems a little... shoddy.
I've had a casual relationship with functional languages for a while now. I've decided to really get into one and chose F# as there is a possibility of using it on the job. For the functional gurus, should I ignore that benefit and go to what seems to be the holy grail of functional languages, Haskell?
There are plenty of non-exploitative work places. At most places I've worked the organization genuinely cared for employees.

There is such a thing as being a dick to an organization that has treated you well.
I like it. In fact, I confess that lately I've been thinking of HN as Daring Fireball's comment feed.
I was expecting YouTube's thoughts in a video!
Filter plans still on after Labor shake-up (Australia)
$3 billion openly flown out of Kabul airport in Afghanistan
I completely agree. Many Indians here often travel to India for a month or two and even save up vacation time over a couple years and use it all at once.
Tell HN: we've made dddone.com - a TODO app done right
Hi HN, we've made http://dddone.com. It's a TODO app. The main idea is that you can have 2 views of the same todo list: one is for the structure, so that you can have the global vision of the project, and one is for the priority with the most important tasks at the top. We made it for ourselves, because we felt no existing app satisfied our purposes and this approach seems to be extremely productive for us.

Hope you'll like it. Of course, any suggestions and reviews are welcome.
Google's advantage is that people use it to find things they want, including things they want to buy. A user who is searching for "hiking boots", for example, is valuable to an advertiser because they are actively seeking information to make a purchase, and a sponsored link might be exactly what they're looking for.

Conversely, people use facebook to chat to their friends. They don't use it much to make purchasing decisions. So advertising there is less valuable, because people aren't necessarily in a buying mood.

This is why facebook needs far, far more data on you as an individual - what you like, what your friends like - to advertise to you effectively. Because you're not telling it what you want - as you do with google - it has to guess based on what kind of person it thinks you are.

I'm sure facebook will have a lot of success with advertising - TV does okay, even though people aren't trying to buy things while watching their favourite shows - but I don't think they'll be beating google.
clickable: http://dddone.com
I've implemented a "get it done" based vacation policy at my company. I.e., as long as my devs are getting the work done, I couldn't care less about their seat time, physical location, state of dress, etc. Hell, if you're on a beach in Cancun and only working a couple hours a day, that's cool, just make sure you get your code checked in and answer emails within a reasonable timeframe so we don't miss a deadline. And wear sunscreen. Developers and sunlight don't usually mix well.

With that said, if one of my guys did what this guy is advocating, I'd have little choice but to replace them. I have to be able to rely on my guys; I trust the hell out of them. Bailing for a month plus with little to no warning...that fractures our relationship of trust, and no relationship can succeed in that condition.
From my personal experience:
- No one knows shit about they are talking about
(As a corollary of life's too complex for the human mind. Or the fact that there are plenty of black swans)

You may be THE expert on whatever subject.... and you'll never know all your variables. It's imposible to always be right. It's useless to pretend so (unless you are selling something).
Examples??? you'll find them in the news all the time. Subprime crisis, BP spills, etc

Do not believe what you are told. Take it as OPINIONS. And decide from that.
I agree. I'm currently using RedMine now. Why would I want to switch at this point. I didn't see a compelling reason.

I do like the look and feel of the site, but that alone is not enough to switch.
Everything was really easy for me, all through undergrad. I think it hurt my diligence in studying.

Because I remembered everything in lectures, I aced tests without reading a lot of the content. I feel like that hurt my depth of knowledge in areas.

I wish I had been told that skill is entirely learned and nothing innate. I thought I was naturally talented, but now I attribute it mainly to the curiosity parents instilled in me.
There are a decent number of things for which I don't care if the data gets corrupted a bit over the long run. Performance is a much bigger consideration.
> a lot of rounded boxes, shadows, and browser-based gradients, since those things are getting easier to do;

Interesting question: since they're easier to do, more people will do them, and they won't stand out. So the 'cool kids' will move on to something else?