skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it will make zuckerberg look like fuckerberg to most people. he already embodies the brand of FB, superficial and materialistic. Fakebook should have been the title of the movie.
Heh, I made the same prediction one year before Apple released the iPhone.
http://stuff4ben.blogspot.com/
Oddly enough, it was the last post I made on my blog. Wish I could have capitalized on my foresight.
I'm not sure there is a great deal of new insight in this article for anyone who isn't already a coffee geek but it's worth a read.

For me, what is more interesting is that this is an article from 2002! (yeah, check out the latest discussions over on alt.coffee!)

I wonder how these things resurface?
If you knew a technology was going to take off, learning their programming language/API and becoming a well-known expert on it could pay great dividends. Additionally, you could work there to make contacts and learn even more. Finally, you could try to join their developer programs while they are still in beta.

Note that unlike suggestions to purchase stock in the company, this advice applies to technology at private companies, as well.
GNOME 3 Preview (in a word: Killer)
FreeBSD's support for paravirtualization is a bit immature right now. I'd definitely wait a bit on that.
Startup marketing strategies to build a buzz around your product? (part 3)
The other common trap to fall into: thinking that all programming problems are solved. All you have to do is code the "business logic".

A corollary of this is that it's impossible to speed up "business logic" at all. You have to drop from Java (typically) directly into assembly language.
Does Apple read Hacker News?

If Apple gives me a free iPhone 4, Microsoft will be in big trouble...
Linux has an exception at the top of its license specifically for that.[1]

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".

[1] http://github.com/mirrors/linux-2.6/blob/master/COPYING
Techzing 52 – StartupDigest
I'm sorry, I totally forgot. Should be fixed now.
That's not at all simple. The corollary of that statement is "if you don't like the GPL, don't develop applications for GNU/Linux".
I like nice things, I really do, but what I've found is that sometimes being a connoisseur kills your ability to enjoy simple things.
Paul Allen to leave bulk of wealth to charity
Is computer science a dead end in the workforce?
How does this work? Did they port Erlang to Android?
An Introduction to Ontology: From Aristotle to the Universal Core
I'd bet it will accelerate it, if it's even possible to accelerate it further.
Yegge plays Villa-Lobos? That's so cool. For those of you who skipped over that part of the post... listen to this etude and tell me it's not badass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxCR0aMeo8g -- and don't bail before the middle tremolo section at 2:00.
> [Originally I posted this article on Thu Apr 25th, 2002 at 02:29:34 PM EST to Kuro5hin.org. I am reprinting it here with minor corrections.]

wow, kuro5hin.org, that brings back memories... and it is still kickin' (barely)
Very sorry, I meant to put those fields in, but forgot. Just added them though.

I can't do an import of the old, full-public spreadsheet today, but if you (or anyone else) wants to, just send me an email with your Google account email so I can add you as a direct editor.
The implicit assumption here (in order to get from your comment to "…so it's OK that Motorola does this") is that using modded phone software causes more problems for the average consumer than having his phone bricked. Without this assumption, the fact that hacks might cause trouble cannot possibly lead to the conclusion that bricking hardware is a good course of action.

It sounds kind of ridiculous when stated explicitly, doesn't it?
Ask HN: What is a good language to learn/use for writing compilers/interpreters?
I would really like to learn how to write compilers/interpreters in depth.

What are the best languages to concentrate on to write compilers or interpreters in?

Do the basic concepts transfer easily from one base language to another? That is, how much difference conceptually is there going to be between say writing a compiler/interpreter in C or Java vs Haskell, OCaml or Lisp (for example).
Old Spice: A Case Study of a Successful Social Media Campaign
I've read that book although I admit I did not take the final challenges. Still I found that to be a very interesting book, very well written where you can actually learn something useful.
Latin Alphabet and Arabic Numerals.
Totally disagree with you here. As of (at least) the 3G (and 3GS), Apple has delivered very scratch resistant products. I totally abuse my iPhones, carry them in the same pocket as my keys and coins, and I've yet to put a visible scratch on them. I've got a tiny little chip on the side of my 3GS, but that was from dropping it onto a concrete sidewalk from a height of about three feet.
I guess I missed all the brew-ha-ha and build up. Am I mistaken, or can you sell GPL software legally? Even if his themes fall under GPL licensing which is somehow enforced, what difference does it make? (other than ideologically?)
Independent Filmmaker’s Review And Demo Reel Of The Canon Rebel T2i (EOS 550D)
That's a great model. I own a Krups XP9000 (similar to the Jura) which went out of production about 9 months ago but you still see them being sold off at places like Bed Bath and Beyond and even Amazon.

It's a great machine that originally retailed $2000 but you can pick it up for ~$500

I flip back and forth on the idea of having an espresso machine at work. Jason Calac-anus raves about how great it is your employees don't have to leave the office and can be more productive but I actually find getting out of the office to stretch my legs, give my eyes a break, etc is all beneficial to my productivity.

I'm also lucky here in downtown SF to be close to a number of Blue Bottle outlets and other fine local coffee establishments. It does add up though, I probably spend $50+ a week on coffee from cafes.
I hear you about the confusion there. It's really just shoddy writing. One of my weaknesses as a writer, one that I just recently became explicitly aware of, is that when I write, I do it after stacking lots of "schemas": I understand A because of B, and understand B because of C, but many of my audience might only understand C, and I talk about A without first meeting them at C, graduating to B, and then stacking A. (In case you're interested, I'm planning on writing a cohesive post about this phenomenon soon).

Many of my claims are scientifically backed but I simply do not care enough to go through and cite them; I would like to but it's not a good use of my time at this point. If you are curious about a specific claim I am always happy to point you in the right direction of the research. Other claims are admittedly speculation and I almost always denote them as such. There is a storied history of philosophers engaging in thought experiments so dismissing my actions as part of some NEW pseudoscience born through the web is erroneous. Likely many of the things I discussed (such as the precise nature of memory encoding, storage, and recall) will not be unraveled in our time. But you may be pleased to know though that I have discussed several of these articles with academics and would've hesitated to publish if I'd got strong dissent.

P.S. The lesson is "Actions to achieve our goals are explicit, and prepackaged so we can directly execute on them." The text copy I was referring to was steps for the user to take. Thanks for the feedback.
In hindsight if you do enough searching you can always find people who predicted, or appeared to predict, future events.
Is Facebook funding this film at all?
Buy Out of the money call options. lots of leverage for small premiums.
Can you get FroYo on the Incredible without any jailbreaking or other messing around?

I've been thinking of getting a Nexus One specifically because of FroYo (and its wireless tethering -- which finally puts it on feature parity with my old Nokia E61i), but it's fairly expensive and I'm loath to drop $500+ on something if there's something better on the market or about to come on the market.
In general it seems to refer to the fact that drinking and irrigation water is becoming more scarce in parts of the world and we need both technological and social systems for managing this resource. Aside from pure diminishing of water stock a practical example could be one country building a dam upriver from some other country.
Good, Bad and Ugly of Product Management
Your blog post reads more like a wish than a prediction. "I want my Apple iPod to make phone calls for me, play video's for me, play J2ME games for me, be WiFi enabled so it can login to my corporate network and check my email on Exchange, take 5MP pictures for me, allow me to IM people and surf the net, and play MP3's all in an iPod-like fit and finish. Why is this so hard?"
New Tokyo Billboards Use Face Recognition to Identify Viewer's Age, Gender
That is a dangerous statement dolinsky my man. That means that we should buy the phone only to realize we got a gimped device for the purposes of verizon deciding which software features to lock so they can charge us 10 bucks a month for each.
Aren't you conflating lifestyle businesses with service based businesses? Not every lifestyle business is necessarily a service based business.

In a service based business like ad agencies, web design agencies, you don't get paid unless you're continuing to do the work. I wouldn't really consider them lifestyle businesses either.

But if you're selling a product or software-as-a-service that can scale beyond how much time you are putting into it (e.g. a traditional startup), then you could certainly build that into a lifestyle business by avoiding taking external funding and growing it to profitability.
Very impressive. In 1994 (I think, I can't be sure of the date anymore), I wrote an article in MacWorld France where I said the combination of Apple's GUI with the Unix kernel had a promising future.

I didn't know it would take another 10 years...
Yes, Erlang has been ported to Android and Nokia Maemo, others on roadmap.
"Steve's writing is quite good in that it evokes an emotion in the reader almost without exception."

The fact that it's somewhat formulaic is probably what annoys a lot of people. Personally I enjoy formulaic nonfiction, but almost every writer in the genre has a ton of haters, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Zed Shaw, etc.
Ha, this made me search the web for things PG said recently. I didn't find anything that specific although I wonder what he thinks of Google/Facebook or Android/iPhone standoffs

Come to think of it, I wonder what is going to happen to Microsoft? Something is obviously coming (they won't just fade into background), but what would it be?

People say that oh, don't worry Microsoft will become just like IBM, but I don't buy it. IBM does a lot of different things, and it did even more in the past but stopped. Microsoft, on the other hand, really does just one thing well: Windows/Office and, assuming those are going to fade away, what does it leave them with? That's why I believe there's going to be a major shift/transition in Microsoft business model.
I've had motorola phones randomly call people. And not let me hang up my phone calls until I pull the battery. At least they didn't take 10 minutes to boot like the blackberry.
Another problem I see in big companies is wrong balance between effort balance BEFORE and AFTER the first launch. Big companies do a lot of work on version 1.0 and not enough on 1.1. Therefore, most obvious problems discovered by users stay unaddressed.
Or maybe pg is really Steve Jobs.
The derivative work must be released under GPL code as well, and thesis isn't http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Beginners’ Programming Environments, and Haskell
Please get an ergonomic computer desk
Well, I know from experience that even small time producers of digital goods want some form of DRM, whether they know it or not. A common question I get from my BitBuffet.com customers is "How do I know they won't share the file on their website? Can't we lock it or something?".

I never really know what the best answer is for this; I try the diplomatic "There certainly are technologies for this, but they are especially annoying to your paying customers and the tech isn't foolproof" but I really doubt there is enough demand in most cases to warrant an effort on combating piracy. It is difficult to convince them otherwise when its their hard work.
The FreeBSD-EC2 issues have nothing to do with being able to load custom kernels -- if that's all it was, I would have been running FreeBSD on EC2 years ago.

FreeBSD's paravirtualized Xen code doesn't work on the Xen EC2 is using.
Unfortunately, it won't.

I remember listening to an interview with Michael Douglas one night(I have insomnia), where he remarked that people actually came up to him and said that they wanted to be Gordon Gekko. This will in fact add to Zuckerberg's appeal and people will use Facebook to tell other people on Facebook how cool the guy who made Facebook actually is.

Other than them the others simply won't care and will go right back to playing one of those Zynga games.

The only thing that will kill Facebook is another fad, which gets embraced by the "cool" brigade.
First, well done for wanting to improve your skills and contribute. You might find these links useful (especially the first, which is identical to your question):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/117561/what-are-good-open...

http://pythonsource.com/
I could be completely wrong here, but all the arguments I have seen from WP have to do with themes being derivative works, which is more of an idealogical argument of the GPL than anything else.

Does anyone know why Wordpress is so defensive over this though?
Anyone else find it ridiculous that Chuck Schumer feels the need to weigh in on this?
Hmmmph. Is PHP so different from C/C++/Fortran that it essentially transforms the GPL into the LGPL? If one compiles against the GNU scientific library, or writes a GUI frontend for GNU octave, the application is tainted. The FSF has also been explicit that one cannot get around this using shared libraries (hence the LGPL, where one can).
I miss the old layout of AVC's site, with the funny little painting that I always assumed was of him. It felt really homey. For some reason this one makes me feel like I just walked into a big warehouse with too much open space and high ceilings.

Just sayin'.
No accounting for taste I guess. Maybe it's just because I'm such a fan of the original but I find this cover awful.
I made this site, trying to build a useful buying guide.

I'll be in and out, but feel free to ask any questions here or through the contact form on the site. I'll try my best to get back in a reasonable time frame.

I'd also appreciate any feedback on the technical/marketing aspects of the site.

Thanks! Ben
I wouldn't have recommended the rationale if he had asked "Why do YOU care about Clojure." Not knowing anything about him other than his self-confessed lack of effort, I thought it best to point him to some source material, not tell him what suits ME (which he didn't ask anyway). Also, no fair someone else getting karma for posting the link to the rationale. I left it out in hopes that the lazy questioner would lift at least one finger in his quest for Clojure knowledge (no, not THAT finger).
There are always at least a half-dozen anti-Apple posts on HN at any given time. I see one post about this, which is already falling off the radar. If this had been about an Apple product, people would be working themselves into a frothy geek-rage.
Great advice. One addition: Learn the coding and doc conventions of the project before submitting code. And find out the preferred format. Usually it's a diff patch, but it could be a git pull request or something.

Some project leaders prefer that all code be accompanied by a unit test.

Bottom line is, try to make it easy for the people who might review your contribution.

Good luck!
What Every Internet Marketer Can Learn from Eminem
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." -- John Maynard Keynes.
IOS 4.01, iPad 3.2.1 Released
Perhaps I misunderstand the meaning of "connoisseur", but I don't see anything connoisseur about the article. It talks about really simple things: just get a good, fresh coffee and don't rely too much on expensive technology: a simple press will do.
I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on HN, but Daytimer is not a dictionary word, so you're threading on thin ice.

Does the dot-com actually have to do something with Daytimer? I mean, is this a "Daytimer-sucks.com" kind of situation, or a completely different context?
Everyone loses with this, though. Motorola loses because their devices are more expensive and take more effort to manufacture. Apathetic consumers lose because the devices are more expensive and geeks are less likely to be inclined to improve the ecosystem. And geeks lose because the devices are more expensive and harder to hack.

It makes no good sense for Motorola to burn cash on making their phones harder to hack when they don't need to - it's only managerial paranoia that leads to this, as best I can tell.
Now what about the user-generated content (e.g. blog post)? The content is mixed with the HTML from the GPL-covered work. Is it then also subject to the GPL?

I ask, because Bison is distributed under a modified GPL for this reason, and Gnu.org addresses the question with respect to Bison and to CMS templates.

"As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs. This is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison standard parser program in Bison output files without restriction. We made the decision because there were other tools comparable to Bison which already permitted use for non-free programs."

- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForN...

That document also addresses CMS templates specifically, stating that they basically shouldn't be GPL, for the same reason, as far as I can tell:
"It is normally harmless to use copyleft on minor works, but templates are a special case, because they are combined with data provided by users of the application and the combination is distributed. So, we recommend that you license your templates under simple permissive terms."

- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WMS

Relatedly, I've been bothered by Drupal.org and the SFLC's stance that all Drupal modules and themes are GPL-covered for exactly this reason. [edit: for exactly the reason that the SFLC is claiming that Thesis is GPL]
We work with the Common Craft folks quite a bit. Knowing the amount of time they spend doing each video, I would advise doing a screencast rather than the live action cut-out style that they do.

For screencasts, nothing beats Screenflow. All of the videos on our site (http://wistia.com) were produced using Screenflow. It costs $99, but given that your video will be an integral part of you marketing, it is well worth it.

In terms of production, start by coming up with a script. This will possibly take longer than the actual recording and editing, but will make a major difference in terms of the quality of your video. Keep it short and punchy...people won't watch things they aren't interested in.
The Linux kernel currently is around 450MB of source code. I've worked on individual projects with 1-2MLOC, I suspect that's about 100MB of code. A couple of those don't seem all that implausible.
What amazes me about the coverage of this film is that David Fincher is getting totally overshadowed by his subject. Case in point, Techcrunch doesn't even mention that Fincher is the director, even crediting the film to Aaron Sorkin who just worked on the script.

Why is this an oversight? Fincher is one of the smartest directors in contemporary American film. Seven was a brilliant critique of how visual media feeds social violence. Fight Club turned a stylish but shallow nihilist novella into a meta-recursive critique of nihilism itself. Zodiac was a narrative masterpiece created out of nothing. The Game was an ambitious attempt to turn The Magus into a film that succeeded so well no-one seemed to notice. And even his lesser works, Panic Room and Benjamin Button, were still films that tried for something and are worth watching.

Yet not a single mention. Amazing.
Read a little further:
"Once Apple figures this out, their record iPod sales from 2005 will pale in comparison." and "I'd rather carry one sleek iPod-ish device that does everything for me."

You see wishes do come true!
"Gamers love to earn points, badges, and status."

I am completely sick of them. They scream "you are being fooled" to me - namely, you are doing work in exchange for play money.
PG also made this statement in May 2009 (iPad released April 2010):

What would be your dream setup?

I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. I don't know why Apple won't make something in between the Air and an iPhone...

Source: http://paul.graham.usesthis.com
Facebook is not funding this film. Furthermore, it is against Facebook's Usage Terms for this film to be promoted through paid advertisements on Facebook.

There is a quote from the studio somewhere talking about it. He basically says that any advertisements that are about Facebook the company have to be approved by Facebook. He said once the studio found that out they didn't even bother submitting advertisements.
Higher accounting costs and legal risks every year of being a public company doesn't make being a public company less attractive? Companies don't care about expenses?
looks awesome, can't wait.
GPL and the Wordpress x Thesis theme issue (Why Chris is right)
Keep in mind this is Techcrunch not Roger Ebert.
Hmm.. so contact some popular sites and buy some clicks, put the expected number of clicks in a spreadsheet. Make up some conversion rate numbers for each traffic source. Then confirm with those popular sites that the numbers you bought/arranged are the numbers you'll get.

Is all this to say that you should simply know your target ad buys well before you launch? I guess I was expecting more...
I wouldn't even consider it.

If I were going to consider it, though, I'd talk to a lawyer, like immediately.
>>Is there any central 'help wanted' noticeboard,

The closest thing I can think of is Source Forge's help wanted section.
What happens when the entire market segment balloons? APPL might beat out MSFT, but if everyone is more profitable, your short failed.
its more of a planner type of site for a niche market...
AND Trent Reznor is working on the score.
Dude, you’re getting a (new) Meta [excellent damage control]
> it was easy to appear agnostic about search results

As Techdirt often says, this is a stupid argument. Search results, by definition are biased. You're asking Google's opinion on what is most relevant and useful. The whole purpose of search is to get biased results, otherwise you'd end up with "60 million pages containing your query 'liver'. Displaying 1 of 10, sorted number of times 'liver' is mentioned."
That's what he looks like? I don't know why I imagined PG to look a lot more like a bearded Unix-type ...?
From Good to Great: 5 part series on better CSS with Compass and Sass
The book "Dreaming in Code"[1] can also be summarized in a couple of sentences, but you won't walk away with anything from that summary ... that's literature for you.

Also, sacrificing an hour of productive coding by reading good literature increases the chances that you won't grow up to be a dumb fuck.

Steve's articles may not be of much artistic value, but he combines non-fiction with fiction in a wonderful way, explaining his reasoning through plots and drama :) He gets personal, not being afraid to expose his feelings, and I really wish more people would do that.

[1] http://www.dreamingincode.com/
Thanks. I didn't know this.