skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your business has customers coming in every single day and agreeing to be restrained in a chair by an employee holding sharp implements next to their head. If that isn't a wonderful scenario for pumping them for information I don't know what is.

Ask your customers what they don't know about hair. What concerns them about their hair? What concerns them about their children's hair?

Write down exactly the words they use. Answer their questions. You'll probably notice patterns: How do I X for a person with Y hair? With a few exemplars of X and Y you can start doing multiplicative idea generation. (10 values for X and 10 values for Y = 100 articles. Get cranking. Better yet, write up outlines and get the freelancers cranking. Note that if Y is irrelevant for some value of X, and the process is actually the same regardless, your customers do not necessarily know that and they'll include Y in the query anyway.)

You'd also want to get some links to have trust to rank for non-branded pages. There is a newspaper in New York City which you might have heard of. They have an ongoing interest in racial/gender equity and many other things of concern to upper East Side liberals. "Hair is a race issue" is the sort of just-counterintuitive-enough-to-be-novel-but-nonthreatening that their editors eat with a freaking spoon. You can plumb that for many, many ideas. cough What White Moms Don't Know About Their Black Kids' Hair cough (If only there were a prominent US politician who was black, raised by a white woman, and beloved inside the newsroom -- the editors would fight over themselves about what got to cover the article.)

Does that get you started?
"You shouldn't have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. It's not that you got it wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed."

Paul Erdos, re: a 1987 Atlantic Monthly article profiling his work
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If you are getting disinterested, do some project that C would be good at, like graphics, or a hardware driver, or an OS kernel.
People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it

I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting their attention (or even noticing you) may be hard, but pushing against the current?
The essay was about programming aesthetics.
(Related: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)

My read of it was that systems 'like' Unix are in a cooperative relationship with their end-users, and are not the 'servant'. This burden on the user is rewarded with the 3 cited characteristics.

He further framed this relationship in terms of "dated" main frame style programming and concerns -- scarce computational resources and subsequent minimalist (some would say cryptic) approach to defining the API for the OS.

Certainly you can put a pretty GUI on top of Unix: http://artbinaire.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/iphone... (Hello?:) That's not the point.

The point is that that pretty shiny GUI is not as stable as the underlying OS. But the reward here is that the "system" is in a master-servant relationship. ("man pages" ...)
Oh, I don't mean to say that undergrads finish understanding Maxwell's equations. I took about six semesters' worth of material that basically boiled down to the equations, and I came nowhere near reaching the limit.

But it is true that we routinely use the equations to solve problems that were very difficult intellectual struggles for Maxwell. A big problem is that Maxwell was encumbered by his mathematics and notation - everything he did was later refactored to be more straightforward. The dev, grad, curl stuff we use today came later. We have Oliver Heaviside - a man whose name is now more famous from Cats lyrics - to thank for them.
As they would say on Wikipedia, not a reliable source for medicine-related articles.
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Maybe you're on Substance D?
Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Ughh, easier to say than find! :) There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems". I like to ask entrepreneurs what are their thoughts on this intense cutthroat competition. The best answer/advice I've got so far was "Watch those who almost succeeded and learn from them".

Now I need to learn to distinguish between "failed" and "almost succeeded". :)

Also, can this be related to "idea vs execution" question? Finding an overlooked problem is an idea (very hard) and coming up with a _simple_ solution is "execution". Both are overwhelmingly hard to crack.
I have been banned by Google for 'SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITIES'
Got up this morning and tried logging into gmail and Google groups, the message I got was that I had been banned from using Google services because of my recent 'suspicious activities'. I am like WTF? what does that mean? Am I the only person experiencing this? because I have not been involved in any suspicious activities' or is this a glitch from Google?
I completely agree. I've stopped reading Siegler's pieces for that reason.
I took 250mg of Provigil daily for almost a year and it's nothing like what this Johann fellow describes it as. You cannot get an accurate "feel" for Provigil over one week.

I've taken a lot of drugs. Dozens. If you're looking for "brain viagra", it's not Provigil. Amphetamines are much more effective for that kind of thing. Provigil is good at keeping you awake and preventing you from "winding down". It does not improve concentration beyond that point, in my experience, and it seriously impairs creativity.

Honestly, you're better off just drinking a coffee.
Can you possibly link modafinil? I tried looking around the site and couldn't find it through the product list. Perhaps I am navigating wrong, as is common.

Also, what didn't you like about adrafinil?
Agreed. You can make it a great site just by removing the front page and a bunch of other subreddits from your account, and just including /r/code and /r/programming and a handful of other good ones.
Ask HN: Can you be sued for stealing an idea?
(This is a throwaway account)

I'm a software freelancer and I quote lots of small projects for random clients (maybe 4-5 a week). The vast majority of these (more than half) fall through, typically because I'm more expensive than outsourcing.

There have been a couple of projects (maybe 2) in the course of a hundred over the last 6 months or so that might actually provide a decent ROI if I were to personally pursue them.

To be clear, I'm not talking about stealing anybody's detailed design. For instance, a client might come to me with "Build a teleprompter" and I go from that sentence (and maybe a use case or two) to a UI design and a quote, and they decide to pass on hiring me.

In the absence of any written agreement about their "idea", what would be the legal risk of pursuing these?

Alternatively, what can I do going forward to minimize my legal risk?
I wonder what the benefits would be if you learned to play poker (learned the odds well, that is) on it, then played cold turkey.
Summarizing: pollute the Internet with cheap content as hard as you possibly can and then "milk" it.

Assume my company has finally nailed the text recognition, I must tell you I'd be disappointed by having the need to employ $10/article English majors to keep my site "up to date".

The issue I'm having with SEO is this: if millions of fake articles/blogs didn't generate so much noise, my hypothetical speech recognition startup would have gotten a few rave reviews organically via handful of legit tech news outlets and that would be enough. But thanks to the current situation this won't be enough (I know from experience) - you need to spam the hell out of everybody to "be in".
Over the last ten years, Apple produced above average products. Their growth reflects it; as does their marketing hubris.

Why lie? Why cover empty boxes? They have enough goodwill and fanboyism without having to manufacture an aura. They curate it, no doubt. Which leads me to the hand-picked reporters. Calculated, definitely.

The reporters a risk? Nah. If Gruber yanked a cloth, he'd gain notoriety, be escorted out and others would glimpse something in a relatively similar form-factor or not at all (say, the iPad a year ago).

It would suck for Apple. But can you imagine the expectation over an iPad being revealed from a PR event went wrong? The expectation would be even higher.

There is little risk. They can manage. It seems like more work for Apple to lie at this juncture.
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I just finished reading The Art of Unix Programming. Eric Raymond gives insight into exactly why this is a bad analysis.

Regarding the anti-CLI argument:

GUIs are helpful for one-time tasks... things that don't require much repetition. They are discoverable (i.e., the learning curve can be easier) and easier for non-technical users.

However, as one understands the CLI and the power of DRY code, one gravitates towards it for its power, simplicity, reusability, and transparency.

Commandline options only make the programs more versatile and scriptable, further boosting productivity.

Of course we could do a bug-by-bug comparison of standard Unix tools to standard MSFT tools, but I'd rather not go there.
Is Arc a success on the same scale as Viaweb or Y Combinator?

In the academic sense ("was it a design that influenced others?") I think the answer is yes. pg's essays about Arc and the language itself got a lot of people thinking about how to improve Lisp. Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, was influenced to some extent by Arc.

In the practical sense ("is the community active and thriving?") I think the answer is no, so far. #arc on freenode is dead quiet and nearly empty, and there are only 20 new posts on arclanguage.org in the last 40 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not "on fire", that's all. Not yet, anyway.

But it's only fair to give it time. pg said:

"Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code. It was mainly to aid the evolution of the language that we even released it."

So it's not surprising that an active, thriving community of library creators hasn't sprung up yet.
It seems I spoke too soon, just found out that my email address was compromised and used to send spam to all the addresses in my address book. Got it all sorted out now.
What, specifically, about the Linux kernel and Unix structure makes them bad for distributed applications, again?
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When I'm in the midst of a project, the current is easy to spot. All the people who wouldn't take a stake in the project are now telling me what I should do, that they wouldn't. That's the current.

As for pushing back, every day I wake up and face the battle. Not easy, not fun at times, but the key isn't some great scheme, or brilliant pattern, or ruleset; it's just getting up and fighting, over and over, each and every day.
But no one, not a single person in history, has published more papers in mathematics than Erdos. Only a single person can have claimed to have published more pages than he, and that's Euler. I think its worth recognizing that his regiment of drugs likely increased, at the very least, the volume of his output.
I am sad watching Google losing the battle... It is beyond me how Digg pages (that only have a link!) show up higher in search results than the actual content they're pointed to?

Just yesterday I wanted to learn more about SAN storage and no matter what I searched for I could only get "buy! buy! buy!" links on Google's front page, until I retreated to wikipedia. Look at this crap (below), how could it possibly be included in the index, the text-to-link ratio (as well as text-to-dd) is horrendous, why not just ignore these?

Here, I think it was search result #3 for "how fast SAN storage is?", the usefulness of google is fast approaching Altavista circa 1996:
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,si...
That was my first thought, too. Am I missing something? What does the live video (and "FaceTime", specifically) give me?

Can I call gimmick?
Well, maybe I was wrong about you - I'm cynical. When I watch a late night informercial with some guy claiming he'll sell me his super simple plan to make lots of money, I tend to think I already see his plan.
Not sure about this. To analyze the future of so many industries without IP law in a few sentences is asking for a bunch of angry comments. Take Movies, for example: I'm pretty sure I won't be going to movie theaters nearly as often if I could just stream HD to my gorgeous TV.

Software is also controversial. Google works by hiding their code in the datacenters, you can't just copy it. Microsoft works by compiling their code into binaries, and the only workable model for OSS has been support, which isn't very sexy/scalable business model.
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Lots of Haskell libraries now. What are we going to do about it?
I wonder how much this TC post cost Apple.

To downvoters: it's a genuine question. Apple is in trouble, their stock is down almost 10% and that's after the launch of their best product to date. They are in a full damage control mode. If they show their most secret testing facility to the selected few, I am going to guess they will not settle for just any coverage. They are the control freaks, and it's only logical to assume that there must've been an arrangement between them and those let into the sacred lab. And the most obvious question is what the arrangement was.
Don't install Exchange. OMG.
Aside from the claim that there have thousands of equally impactful mathematicians (have there been 100?) that doesn't invalidate the claim that illegal drug use has had a positive effect on mathematical knowledge, even if Erdos has been the only human in history to benefit.
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Anyone know of anything similar for Rails apps? Or even Django, PHP, Sinatra, etc apps?
They work fine in Chrome 5 for me, are you on a Mac or Windows?
To be fair, Mises.org put their content empire under the creative common attribution, have PDFs for people to download for free, and at some point seek people with bit torrent expertise. They also managed to sell books at the same time.

They don't fight technological changes, they embrace it.

Realize that the LvMI didn't just go anti-IP in one day. It takes years of debate for them to change their mind about stuff. That's important, because you don't see major libertarian think tanks change their mind everyday. When they do change their mind, it probably mean that a lot of people change their mind.

Once you got people who have their mind changed, then they will do stuff like start business models not based on IP. That in turn could mean something improtant for the broader economy as a whole. It might mean intensified competition as the anti-IP people starts eating IP supporters' lunch.
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Not quite that but I love http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
/r/code are you sure? There only seems to be around 5 submissions there.
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If you're truly interested in this question, you should read Against Intellectual Monopoly, available for purchase here[0] and reading for free online here[1]. It's written by two professors from Cambridge? It's the most thorough discussion of intellectual property law I've ever read.

0: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-...

1: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html
Should I be considering this differently from solar? They're both harvesting ambient EM radiation; and the energy density of solar is much higher. I guess that radio goes through walls and never sleeps, so that's a plus. Anyway, I thought that the mentioning of a solar calculator was quite appropriate and warranted further discussion.
I recently got into a very lengthy argument with a friend of mine about this very issue. I argued that because sharing content is becoming so easy, the ability to protect copyrights and patents will disappear, and at some point we (or the next generation) will decide that it's in the better interest of society to embrace free sharing of ideas and reject the concept of owning information.

There's no doubt that a lot of people will lose jobs over it, and current industries and businesses as we know them will cease to exist, but that doesn't mean the music will stop. If anything, it will remove the people who are creating content just for the money and increase the overall quality of all content, media, and information.

It's going to happen, there's no question about this. It's just amusing to watch people desperately hold onto the old ways. I imagine this is quite like the transition into the industrial age was; fascinating to watch and be a part of.
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c, capabilties (or lack there of), self healing, runtime based optimizations, concurrency, locking, threading and just generally the way it's structured it's not meant to be a distributed operating system the applications developed for it show this. Have you seen how glusterfs, lustre or any other distributed FS works? They bend over backwards trying to implement a POSIX API usually with hideous hacks.
Not sure I agree. Property rights are maintained through the use of force. I don't think that will ever change.
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The one thing I feel people often forget is that the idea of a patent (i.e. a government mechanism for providing an incentive for inventors to share innovations with the rest of the world) is a good one.

I think that the existing implementation of the idea and where it has lead has numerous problems, but the fact of the matter is that it is beneficial for a society to have mechanisms like patents in place.

The article argues that things would still be done, which is true, but in the case of inventions, the problem is that they wouldn't be shared and companies would probably work hard to obscure any innovations that they did make to make it harder for competitors to copy them.

The argument for getting rid of trademarks is also kinda weak. The end user should be able to easily understand what it is they are buying. You shouldn't have to worry that some sneaky guy is selling cow manure in a box and calling it cheerios.

Beyond that, the point that removing IP restrictions everywhere else would only have a positive effect is something that I tend to agree with.
Looks like somebody's gone off his meds.
People say my idea about combing RPG with the focus on self-improvement is a great idea.

I don't know what to think but I am building it.

EDIT: RPG is role playing game, not Rocket Propelled Grenade.
There's this good blog that shows example apps and occasionally has articles about best practice for Ruby on Rails. It is, however, 2 years old but should be close enough for learning Rails 2.3. http://originblog.wordpress.com

EDIT: check out this StackOverflow post too - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/193632/where-can-i-find-g...
With c++ programs, there is a well-understood model for how memory works and decent tools/method for finding memory leaks.

A garbage collected program should never leak memory but if it does, then your problem is nastier - for example, how do you find memory leaks in C# in Mono? The tools are not sufficient. And standard Ruby, btw, doesn't official leak memory but simply never return allocated memory to the main pool - it keeps it in a private pool for future allocation. But allocate 1Gig and your Ruby instance will keep that 1Gig forever.
I assume this is a joke? Being that with computers we can only generate pseudo random data, amirite?
As far as I know, building small is the best way to do concurrency. (And the functional programming paradigm is in some ways an extension of the principle of building small.) Also, traditional Unix philosophy (the kind this author is arguing against) rejects threads in favor of lightweight, inexpensive processes and IPC and sockets.
>we realise people might need to see the entire list

Please add a 'Browse' button
For me, the main corollary of this essay is that individuals in small groups have much more power and leverage than people might think.

You really do just need a good idea.
I'm not sure if I have to, but I have the impression that these spammers look at other spammers' lists for potential new targets, so keeping myself off those lists is (in my mind) a good move. What's more, it sends a signal to the people at Twitter that this person is no good.

I do think, though, that not reciprocating is probably sufficient. I should've mentioned that I'm also a minimalist and like to keep my lists clean.
No written agreement, but did you have a verbal agreement or imply you would not use what they disclosed against them? If so, I would advise letting go of the idea.

Of course, if they fail to move on it in a reasonable amount of time, all bets are off.
We came out with something just like this a little while ago http://wheatt.com/ , but nobody here seemed to care.

Although instead if emphasizing text search, which I didn't find that useful in the beta testing, we focues on combinations of tags, dates, domains, including terms like "today" and "month", but there is still full page text search, which can be used in combination with those other search terms.

Maybe its too complicated for most, but I find it useful and use it many, many times a day.

http://wheatt.com/
You could call it a window into your personality. A photo only gives the impression of what you look like.

If an artists sees more of you, such as in a video, he/she gets a sense of your personality (are you funny? dark? or perhaps in your case, cynical?) and can put a little more of that into the artwork.