skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For my job, I have to shave every weekday. I used to really hate shaving. Now I find it tolerable and occasionally even enjoy it as a quiet and meditative time. My purely subjective list of the things that helped me enjoy it, ranked by my perception of usefulness:

1. Good shaving cream, in a tub or tube. Try Kennedy's or Nancy Boy or Proraso. This made a HUGE difference.

2. Badger-bristle shaving brush. You can get a decent one for around $25-30. Don't skimp, it should last a really long time. I tried a boar one, and it smelled really bad and made my face itch.

3. Decent after-shave. So far I like the Nancy Boy aloe-based one the best, but I haven't tried many. I have never had good results with the alcohol-based ones. They irritate my skin.

I tried a Merkur Futur, and a straight razor. Perhaps I was not patient enough, but even after a few weeks of each I found that I did not see enough of an advantage to justify the additional time. I have heard that the Futur is a bit fussier than the HD, so I have been considering giving that one a try and perhaps using better blades. I went back to the Mach 3, and with the changes above it has been OK, but just OK. I still get a lot of chafing around my collar.

Just my input having given this stuff a try. If you do one thing, get some decent shaving cream and a brush. That made 75% of the difference right there.
The thing that makes my iPad great is its user experience, not its features.

The fact that the app ecosystem is huge, has plenty of quality titles. I don't have to spend any time building apps to satisfy my needs, nor spend hours figuring out how it works.

Yes, I could buy four of these devices for the price I spent on an iPad, but if they don't provide user experience parity to an iPad, how can it be considered a "real competitor"?
It should properly be pointed out that while it is really easy to cut yourselfs, it doesn't hurt (I am normally really skittish around needles) - the worst thing is the sting that can happen when the cream touches the wound.

It is a weird feeling when you don't realize that you bleed until your hand touches your blood.

The cut is so clean that it also heals nicely.
Has anyone else been shaving without shaving cream?

It probably only works for the baby-faced ones like me, but so far I haven't noticed anything bad happening to my face from using just water.
The whole thing, from lathering to cleanup, takes me around 15 minutes. Many people can do it faster, but this gives me time to wake up.
That looks disgusting. Just the green-gray(?!) gradient made me squirm. And after that list of cons... really, what's left? The price? You get what you pay for.

In any case, my bullshit detector comes on full force whenever it encounters so many exclamation marks.
I use a currently 4 months old Mach 3 "Turbo" (big laugh) for my legs/etc. No matter what the commercials wants you to believe, unless you are one of those men inflicted with steel wool growing out of your chin, the blades really do their job not entirely as swift, but definitely well enough, far longer than Gillette wants them to.
Can't I use university email addresses as proof? Of course that means university staff (professors) could also get it for free.
Perl6 Loop Constructs
> Yep, Android's has lots of cool features that iPhone has not, but a lot of its core functionality isn't fucking done.

Right, like if only Android would get multi-tasking, like the iPh...oh, wait....
Yes, I agree. It is like trying to write the Great American Novel, without knowing how to read or write English.

Now, you could get someone else to write it, and simply tell him the details and plot points you want, but without knowing how to read English, how would you know whether the story flowed right and was succinct?
Oooh, so that's who made it. I was wondering how an open-source project got to have such a gorgeous icon.
I just hate when this happens. People look at you and they say "ah, he's just a kid" and don't take into account the amount of knowledge you have.
This is excellent. I'm not really all that psyched about android but this is a great way to bust out proof of concepts, prototype, and useful one off apps. As a programmer nothing sucks more than getting deep into development than stopping halfway through, wasting days and hours, because you realized that what you envisioned wasn't going to work anyway.

It's also a good way to teach the basics of programming and OOP, which frankly a lot of programmers still can't grasp. In 2010 no less!
That's per api server, we have 4 api servers.
HP Pavilion dv6000 running Windows Vista (gaming) and Ubuntu 10.04

Would love to get more boxes to play around with, but as a broke student, VMs help.
2) It’s not a very bright screen, like the iPad.
But if you intend to do a lot of reading, this is a plus.

No, it's not. On the iPad you can adjust the brightness of the screen directly in the iBooks app if you want. But when you want a brighter screen for anything else, you can have it.
I've found a compact camera to be a decent "portable photocopier". I'll have to sign something, or I'll see something I'd like to follow up on. "Snap" -- no problem.

Mine's a bit older but has (for the time) especially good light sensitivity, so that in most settings I can take a decent picture without flash (which would wash out a document): Fuji F31fd. I also had a Canon A640, until it was stolen. Much better lens, but a generation prior to vibration dampening and so the same shots were chancy at best. I guess anything with dampening would suit the purpose, though the Fuji gets 500 odd shots on a single charge.

P.S. If the document has sensitive data, make sure you don't lose the camera! (You might want to pop the storage card and carry it separately.)
I have a lot of thick facial hair and the disposable razors just weren't cutting it. I've switched to a straight razor with a DE for travel and when I'm in a hurry, and the difference has been amazing. The area on my neck where I used to constantly have ingrown hairs is finally smooth and happy.

I think there are four issues at play:
- attention to shaving technique tends to be much less with a disposable, possibly due to ignorance
- shaving cream from a can does a bad job of lubricating the face
- disposable razors are poorly designed, with a gap between the razor and the skin, and are easily clogged with cut hair
- the sharpness of disposable razor blades is essentially unknown
Are there people who don't find programming strenuous? I certainly don't enjoy all aspects of programming.

Just wondering if this founder is giving up to easily. Of course just being the boss and telling other people what to do is more fun than doing actual work.

On the other hand, is "being a programmer" a bit like being a studio musician? I never understood why anybody would want to be a studio musician rather than writing their own songs, but I was told that some people prefer it that way. In the same vein, maybe "real programmers" just enjoy programming whatever they are being told to program? I don't want to diss "real programmers" - I just struggle to find my niche in the work force, and it appears being a real programmer is probably not it.
How Facts Backfire
Yes - Cinema display or other nice external monitor. Should boost productivity (although I'm not sure how much).
Visual Basic got me into programming in middle-school.
The way you suck the children in, is to give them a tool like this, with almost instant efficacy, it allows them to grasp that their ideas can be made real, and that it is not as impossible as they might have thought, then you should promptly give them a problem that VisualBasic/Scratch/Inventor cannot solve.
We run one mongod master, one slave (soon to be two slaves). These are used across all the api servers.
Tutorials @ Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2010
We have three PhDs / MBAs. Can certainly be an advantage. People who come from the best school's will probably have a much easier time raising money than a company of college grads from run of the mill universities.
Amazon has double the bit rate though. That may not matter to some people, but I'm not going to spend money on 128kps songs. I'm no audiophile, but there is a difference at that low of a bitrate.
Spain win World Cup with lowest goal tally
make a faux chart based on efficiency of using your service vs excel and how it saves tons of money.
Have Online Communities become Havens for the Terminally Angry?
Reboot into safe mode with networking (press F8 during system startup) and run your web test. If everything runs fine there, you're almost certainly loading some piece of malware that's stealthy or malevolent enough to be hidden from the scans and inspection you're running during a normal boot.

If you're still seeing broken performance in safe mode, then dig deeper with tools. But safe mode eliminates most driver issues and all but the most ridiculously sneaky malware.
That example bothered me as well mostly because when the move function is placed outside of the class it is now performing a different action. The new function no longer really moves a point so much as it adds two points (regardless of the point/vector issue).

I think many of the naming conventions commonly used in OOP for mutable objects are not as appropriate for their immutable counterparts.
I love it when people think competing with the iPad means having more bullet point features.
Before I list my setup, I'd like to ask: What's with all the laptops?

I worked off a 15-inch laptop for several years, but after using a desktop, I've completely converted. Laptops give you less screen space and less computational power, and in general I've never liked their keyboards. They're also more expensive (I think?) and trickier to self-build. The only advantage I see is portability, which is understandable, but I think it's more that they're becoming the new default computer type for everyone, rather than having people choose between them and desktops.

Anyway, mine:

I put together the desktop a couple months back: AMD Phenom II X4 @ 3.6GHz, 4GB RAM, and an SSD for the OS and programs. I decided to future-proof myself, after living off that laptop for too long. It's connected to two Acer monitors - one 24-inch, one 23.6-inch, leaving a difference that's enough to irritate me every time I try to align things perfectly. It runs Windows 7 for general use and a virtualised Arch Linux machine for development work. I've tried setting up Windows the way I like it, but when Linux is available I don't think it's worth the effort. The VM does nothing but run Emacs in seamless mode, so everything still works together, and I don't have to worry about window managers.

I type in dvorak on a Kinesis Advantage (the black one). I've never had recurring hand problems, but the keyboard setup feels so much nicer to use, I stick with it. That, and a Logitech mouse that I'm ambivalent about.

My phone is an HTC Dream (aka the G1), running Cyanogen 2.1. It's been outclassed several times by today's standard of phones, but I'm waiting until it fully breaks down before replacing it. Not sure what with yet, which is a shame, because I like the design, even if the hardware space bar is already starting to go.

All in all, I'm happy with what I have.
Very well stated Jason. I think your opinion on "Pretending your faults don't exist" is especially spot on. Programmers, myself included, can sometimes become so attached to a feature or coding approach that any criticism, warranted or not, becomes a personal attack. I also think it has become way to acceptable to say "no" to customers. Rather than the constructive reasoning behind saying no, often times arrogance or even self consciousness leads to pretending faults do not exist. For this reason it is always helpful to have a trusted source for non-programmer feedback.
Everything about writing a marketing research paper
When writing a Marketing research paper, conducting surveys and interviews are important. Importance of evaluating research ideas and topics, studying sample papers and previous papers and making a detailed plan at the start of your research project is shown here.
Spotify Linux app goes live
Does this even have the necessary buttons to be an up-to-spec android device?
Yes, that's it! Thank you! That's where I learned it.
Hi Christopher, glad you like Wordnik. Do you mean you couldn't find this?

http://www.wordnik.com/words/monad
More Macro, More Money (aka Another start-up, Am I nuts?)
Their competitive advantage was that they had a pretty huge and passionate following (between SvN and DHH being the face of RoR) before they ever launched their first product. Not dissimilar to Joel Spolsky and the Coding Horror guy launching StackOverflow to instant success (but largely fail to see great success with non-geek-oriented StackOverflow sites).

If you can be charismatic enough to collect a bunch of evangelists (among the people who talk and link most on the web) and then build a pretty good product that is designed for that audience, you'll succeed. I think 37s stuff and StackOverflow are pretty good, by the way.

Doing less is NOT a competitive advantage (as evidenced by the army of 37s copycats who realize that not many companies can get away with zero sales/marketing).
"Usually, those who are most enthusiastic about dividing things into "good" and "evil" are themselves extremely evil by common standards."

True, but it isn't always about dividing things... Sometimes there's just no other word to describe certain actions or groups of people. Mentioned elsewhere in the thread were the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- what is one to say about those? "Oh, it's just a matter of perspective?" I think not.
He forgot the Japanese Balloon Bombs and the US Government coverup of them.

http://www.unexplainable.net/artman/publish/article_8992.sht...
My favorite remains the Gilette sensor excel. I used to skip shaving cream altogether with it, in fact. The biggest problem without using cream is that the cut hair winds up getting caught in water that runs down your neck.
Arrgh! I think I just accidentally downvoted this comment while zooming on the iPad.
Vitrue is hiring a few good Rails hackers in Atlanta
The company I work for, Vitrue, is looking to hire a few more full time rails hackers in Atlanta for an immediate need.

About us: We're a small, profitable, quickly growing company that helps our clients to manage their social media presence. We work with some of the largest brands in the world and are frequently told by them that we have the best offering in our space. The vast majority of our development is done on the Facebook platform with Rails and MySQL.

I've been here for a while now and need a few more co-workers! If interested, shoot an email and resume to me at andrew@vitrue.com and we'll take it from there.

Lastly, here's a link to our official job posting: http://vitrue.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=307
Can you speak to the additional time commitment?

Keep in mind I haven't done any stop-watch studies...

Shaving with a normal razor takes me about 5-7 minutes (I still use a plastic 2-blade razor when I travel). The DE razor probably doubles that, maybe in the range of 10-12 minutes.

At first it was much longer, like 15+ minutes until I got the feel of it. But after developing a technique, it goes pretty quick overall. Either way, the additional time is still on the order of 10-15 minutes at most, and should be an extra 5-8 or so when you get the hang of it.
You're No Steve Jobs, So Look Before You Leap
Nice work! Mind sharing your hourly rate?
Spotted: Mysterious tiny screen with Apple copyright | ZDNet
What a kickass idea!
Now support extensions written in Java, that you can sell in the Android Market, and kaboom - middleware explosion.
This is my exact setup! (minus the 2x1TB HDD)

http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/5986/imag0011w.jpg
> Innovative design and intellectual property are no longer long-term competitive advantages.

Really? Google and Apple don't get advantage from their great design and engineering talent?

> You live in the era where the most powerful programming frameworks and tools are free, local broadband and high-availability servers are cheap, and world-class people are willing to work 60 hours/week in exchange for Ramen noodles and the chance to be a part of a cool new startup.

Yes, but tools are tools. Most people still make shit with them.
That's the new way of doing it. The art of photography is about framing, subject, lighting, and a range of other factors. When film cost money it was about squeezing good shots out of a roll of 24 or 36. The cost of film, development, and blackrooms had a real $ value attached to it. You hired a photographer because he/she knew what they were doing and knew what you wanted.

Now, digital cameras are cheap and everyone has one. You can basically post a project online, and get 1000 photographers to respond. Instead of hiring 1 photographer to hopefully get "the" shoot. You can browse through flickr and other photo sites chances are they will have what you need.
I love it when the faithful think that features and price are not competitive.
DevHub Now Turns Building A Website Into A Game
Knowledge doesn't allow anyone to out-think anyone. Who has more domain knowledge in mobile 3 years ago-- Motorola or Apple? Most of the successful founders I can think of didn't know much about their space before they jumped into it.
No problem - there is a trivial (in the mathematical sense) solution to Japanese militarism.
Startups: Your Customers Are Not Ignorant, Selfish, Control Freaks
Direct link to the book, skipping the tweet
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449389550/

Or at Amazon.com for $12.23
http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...
Working on bringing Hippos and Water to Haiti?
The iPad's not too secret weapon: a virtuous cycle
U.K. Designer "Grows" an Entire Wardrobe From Bacteria
Fast enough quad-core proc, 8 gb ram, 24" monitor, xmonad on ubuntu.

Will probably end up with another monitor here soon, just haven't decided if I should get another 24 or something smaller that I can run vertically.
The "repeat while EXPR { ... }" seems kinda goofy that it still evaluates after the loop runs once.
Nuke’em Till They Glow – Quitting My First Job
Well it's similar in the fact that they both search data on the device.. But gestures is an application to access the index using quick, simple gestures instead of typing. If you want to search using a keyboard (the default method) then you wouldn't start the gesture application.
13" MacBook Pro + iPad + Bose speakers + iomega backup drive. I will eventually buy a new monitor or two and use a keyboard and mouse at the office.
way to be pedantic. maybe you should read some of those sections about communication.
>The experience is why I got an iPad

I use it to read HN - with the iPad user experience (TM) mere troll posts are transformed into repartee of Swiftian brilliance by simply having 24bit colour in the icons and rounded edges to the buttons.
The video seemed to start over when I watched it.

Otherwise, I think you need to show some examples that make my mouth water.
Back to the Future power laces made a reality
Not all consumers will pay, but like Flickr, you can serve consumers and charge the loyal "pro" user subset. Focus on the basic interface first. Add the advanced features later.
Please review my startup isWearing
Your Online ID: Are you being Honestly You?
It's a competitor even if it addresses a subset of the iPad functionality. This one has e-book reading, something many people buy the iPad for. Different people weight different features differently (sory - had to do it) and this thingie may end up with a better value than an iPad for a lot of people.

Me included, BTW. I could buy one of these and a Nook for less than what an iPad costs. For me, it's a winner.

It's a competitor, even if you prefer the iPad.
Hacker claims to have cracked Skype protocol
Plan C - beard

Plan C.2 - beard and once a week do the bits around the edges so you don't end up with the full ZZ-top look.
Have you considered growing a beard?

(A quest to find the perfect beard trimmer is, of course, a very real risk if you follow this suggestion.)
Not just large-scale events. Many people make the mistake of reading their own lives as literature, even though as far as I know, even the ones who believe in God do not believe he is an Author who imposes a literary aesthetic on his creation.
Related: I got tired of buying shaving cream and now use hair conditioner. It works just as well and is much cheaper.
Can Jelli's crowdsourcing model re-energize music radio?
I have been using laptops ever since the Pentium 1 days (it was a 133Mhz Thinkpad 310 ED). I have had a few desktops as secondary computers, but having my computer with me has been a way of life for over a decade. That is changing some now that I have an iPad.
i'm working on "that" ;P
You mean like: http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html#multipro...
Thanks for your feedback. I'm just fixing the video (thanks for watching it all the way through!).

Mouth watering graphs in the works.

EDIT: Video fixed now.
Sorry if this is a bit OT, but does anyone have any experience using panasonic toughbooks? I travel fairly extensively and my MBP is basically in tatters (I have enjoyed it immensely, but the hardware has been subpar - battery exploded, screen went dead, power plug nearly caught on fire, HD failure, etc. I've noticed the new ultralight toughbook is out, and thought this loaded with Linux might be an ideal solution. I have no problem paying premiums for tools that work (my assumption with the MBP) but also obviously don't want to buy something that doesn't return the appropriate value. Anyone with any experience with these tools?
Lest you become a crazy cat lady. I like this metaphor.
Something struck me about the visual programming language used here after looking at it for a few minutes: it's Lisp.

It doesn't have parens, of course, and sometimes the blanks on the blocks are positioned so that arithmetic appears to be infix, but it's most certainly Lisp. It would be trivial to create a 1:1 mapping between the visual representations and s-expressions. My guess is that behind the scenes, that's exactly what's going on.

After this realization, I noticed that Hal Abelson is involved in the project: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/app-inventor-for-...
I have a rough neck, and facial hair that grows fast. I eventually gave up nicking myself every morning trying to get a close shave and went electric. It would grow back by 3pm or so anyway. I got a Braun Activator, and haven't looked back. It still needs a cleaning fluid cartridge, but I love the convenience of running it dry over my face & throat, dropping it in the cradle, and letting it clean & sharpen the thing.

I went with a light beard for awhile which was also convenient - just set a beard trimmer to the lowest setting and run it over every few days.
great post. no need to have the same computer or OS for everyone on the team. designers could have Macs and programers Linux or Windows. plus everything is always sync and updated in the cloud.
I haven't read it yet: do they cover that in their book, Rework?
I wrote a small Facebook application that let friends send me text messages from my facebook page for free (using email=>sms that my provider offers). 0 => 3,000,000 users in a couple of weeks.
Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can't recommend the iPhone 4