skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
*ix = emacs.
win = syn text editor :: http://syn.sourceforge.net/
I know you can use emacs in windows but somehow using emacs/cygwin etc. in that environment just feels wrong. Like spinning punk records at your upper class cousins wedding or something.
Classifying poverty as vice is worthwhile to a point, but works well only in very general ways (I know it wasn't your opinion, it's just worth discussing). The main problem that I see with that view, however, is this:

Take a 12-year-old kid in middle school. Let's assume he is bright enough to do well, if he did the homework, etc. He goes home every day to a dirty house, where he spends hours by himself playing video games. His mother is at work earning an hourly wage, and when she gets home, she is bitter and sarcastic. His father is gone. There isn't enough money to pay the bills, so the phone, tv, etc. are constantly being turned on and off (i.e., general chaos).

At his suburban middle school, he has to endure the humiliation of being pushed toward lower-status "vocational" programs despite his (at least average) ability, because of his poor attitude, laziness and the fact that his family is known in his hometown as being somewhat "troubled."

It is only natural that a young person in such a situation might become disinclined to work hard, because he doesn't know what the point of "working hard" is. In his world, and the world of his family, "working hard" just means putting in more hours that enrich someone else. He hasn't been exposed to any other ways of life, and the well-to-do telling him that he's "lazy" probably won't serve to motivate.

Having said all that, there is nothing stopping this person from realizing the error of his ways as an adult and acting accordingly. Luckily, we have many examples of successful "late bloomers" available to us these days, but I think for many kids the damage will have been permanent.
NodeBox: Create visual output with Python programming code
People say Google will buy Skype and Expedia and, and, and, and
You could try it: go to a friend's home that has his sink full of dishes all the time.

Wash them all but two.

Go there a couple hours later and see what happened.

That would only be a sample of one though. The experiment may be worth just to make you realize how powerful the mixture of gratitude, self-hate, the willingness to help oneself, greediness and generosity is.
"SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold."

Hahaa, brilliant!

So that's why I've been paying insane amounts for texting...

@ breck: I have semi-unlimited texting with Verizon, it's free to send or receive from Verizon customers (which is why I got it, I was tired of yelling at my friends for sending me texts like, "im bored. whatre you doing later" and "idk my bff jill?"--almost all of them have Verizon). It is exactly ten dollars a month right now, and I only get a hundred or so texts to and from other companies. A truly unlimited texting plan is somewhere in the area of $50.00 a month, I believe. Don't quote that, my internet is being ridiculously slow and I'm not about to wait for it to load the Verizon Wireless page to check.

@ tptacek: I may complain about Verizon, but it's only because I love them. Why, you ask? Two reasons. One, my close friends all use Verizon, so texting them costs me nothing, and costs THEM nothing as well. Two, I have brand name loyalty and know it. It is MY network and so, logically, it is better than everyone else's.

Haha.

Seriously though, if there WAS a better network I could switch to, as well as have all my friends and family switch to, I would do it in an instant. The problem that I have right now, is that even if I were to pay less money, switching over to something like Cricket, my friends would all end up paying MORE money because I'm no longer on their network. Which probably means that while I have unlimited texting to whoever I want, no one will want me to send them messages, because it's costing them money. And if no one is sending me messages, and I am not sending anyone else messages, what is the point of having unlimited texting?
HN's procrastination block.
I agree, it would be nice with some empirical data instead of just opinion (not that most other opinions are better supported).
Inheritance is included in the statement: "poverty causes poverty".
I agree that the book is way too overused. I was immediately turned off when I would interview people who started talking in design patterns (not to mention people who would say the wrong ones).

However, I think there are completely valid uses of the "Singleton" concept. It can be an elegant solution to a lot of problems.
Microsoft Withdraws Offer to Buy Yahoo; Buys Three Smaller Companies Instead
I'd consider it a nasty bug if I spent significant money on bandwidth.
You say you don't want to go into the details but you really should in order to strengthen your argument. At the moment you're just using DH2 (Responding to Tone), DH1 (Ad Hominem) and perhaps a little DH0 (Name calling). If you really think the GoF are aiding conmen in tricking the weak-minded, then please substanciate that.
what the hell is time management?
The article is mainly about the psychological reasons why people in poverty act the way they do. I'll add my 2 cents: The fact is people's brains are wired to not keep doing something when it seems hopeless. Although from an outside perspective it seems illogical to work less when you have less money, from the perspective of the person living in poverty they know that no matter how hard they work, at minimum wage they're never going to have an easy life, and that's a very powerful psychological force. For instance, as a student, I borrow money at the beginning of the semester, and I have some big expenses. I work part time, but my fixed expenses exceed the income I make from working. So I go to work knowing that no matter how hard I work, or how much I try to save, it's physically, mathematically impossible for me to ever come out ahead. By working hard, all I can do is sink into debt more slowly. At least I have solace in the fact that I will soon be graduating. What if I didn't have that hope? What if that were all there were to life? I see people every day, in rural Oklahoma, who live like that, without hope. They go through cycles where they work for a while, realize they aren't getting ahead for all their work, and give up. Wouldn't you?
You are right in that the article (or the mentioned book) does not provide any evidence at all for the radical suggestions being made. In fact, counter-evidence is discarded with a very strange "it was ambigous" hand-wave.

Although, I am unwilling to believe that people who have never been destitute cannot come up with a solution - it's harder, but saying that it is impossible is like saying we just don't have imagination.

[Edit: no-idea why you are being heavily down-modded. I had that knee-jerk reaction when I first read your response (probably because I tend to go leftist), but when I actually read the article in detail, yours is a very valid response.]
of autotools, etc
Tell you what. If you'll agree to write up useful notes from the event that I can post to OnStartups.com as one or more blog articles, I'll pick up the $300 that you have left to raise.

Message me and we'll take care of the details.
A Ouija board and Mac Mail's todo list. Some spirits keep spelling out "GTD" (the book remains on my shelf), but I just haven't found the time to read it.
Thanks for the great comment. My personal believe is that there has been too much dogma written about entrepreneurship.

So the idea of focusing on "being your own surrogate customer" is a way of breaking out from the rigid mindset of "either being a solution looking for a problem" which is what engineers do or "a problem looking for a solution".

By being a surrogate customer, I am talking about the latter but with the additional emphasis that it is a problem we ourselves experience.

This is particularly important for the YC class since their advantage is not just that they are "hackers" but that they are also representatives of their own generation.
20 reasons why Seesmic acquired Twhirl
Haha, I already know the result. I live in a house with four other girls, and the sink is usually filled with any number of dishes. Once it becomes completely piled up (as we don't eat together, and most of us cook real meals, this usually happens about every other day), one of us will become disgusted with the others and empty the dishwasher, fill it with dirty dishes, and clean most of the dishes left in the sink.

Do the remaining two pans and glass get cleaned by anyone else?

Of course not; they are the base dishes that we pile everything else on top of that day.

Why clean the remaining two dishes, there was originally an entire sink full of them! Comparatively, it's almost spotless!
I stop trying to manage my time and just DO the things that I need to do.
Todo lists for direction, RescueTime for tracking, 8aweek for blocking wasteful sites.
As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between. There will be people who freeload, and there will be people who seize the opportunity to get themselves out of poverty. There are surely hard working people who can't improve their situation because they are working two jobs just to support their family and can't get a better education, just as surely as there are people who would take the handout and buy booze.

In my native Sweden, which has a much more generous social network than the US, it's clear that there are people who don't bother getting a job because they can live off unemployment. But social mobility is also higher than in the US; the correlation between income and parental income is weaker.

It boils down to the question of how many freeloaders you are willing to accept for each person that these policies help become self-sufficient. One way is to try to calculate the minimum cost to society in the long run (based on policy cost, positive contribution of those who succeed, as well as external factors such as cost of crime). Another way is to make a judgement based on moral grounds (either that people should not be given handouts by society or that it is morally wrong to have people living in poverty.)
Well, if they're doing it right, they're learning how to make arguments based upon evidence, and evaluate the arguments of others (which will also hopefully based upon evidence). Not all schools/depts./profs. do this, however; I understand your concern.
Windows Vista source code
Strawman. Sufficiently so that I won't comment further than to say that I was translating what I perceive them to believe--"them" being the class of people who thrive on dysfunctional populations.
Another view would be that it is everyones responsibility in a democratic society to vigourously (but respectfully) debate how that society should be structured.
Fair enough. Not suggesting that advisors wouldn't have the funds to invest -- just that there might be other things keeping them from making one -- like the logistics/paperwork.

But, point conceded.
Frank Zappa on the Guitar Clone
Frankly, at least as an American, I'll take a few more well-schooled philosophy grads who ask tough questions over technically brilliant bio-weapons researchers who do what they're told by Uncle Sam.

(I know that's a false dichotomy, but it has a nice ring, doesn't it? :-))
How-to have an excuse for anything
The article does have a little empirical data (towards the end):

>In the early 1970s, a large-scale study gave poor people in four cities a so-called "negative income tax," a no-strings-attached payment based on how little money they made. The conclusion: the aid tended to discourage work.
they need something like EU, which puts good regulations on hold. Carriers used to charge lots of fees for calls made out of your country, and I think EU is putting an end to that extortion.

Sure, you have the "free markets" types that say eventuall something will rise and sidestep SMS, but that's now going to happen. In this case free markets, with no proper regulation, just create an enviroment where the carriers can collude, and milk every cent from you.
Cute. I'm kind of irritated, I want to get a new laptop but I'm going to have to go through and get rid of Vista, as it's the standard Windows operating system now...

And I can't stand it.

Anyone else also boycotting Microsoft Office 2007?
I modded you up even though I disagree with you.

Using design patterns really helped me in a large project I did in C# two years ago - although I must admit I used the friendlier Head First Design Patterns as my reference rather than the original Design Patterns book.

I honestly think I would not have been able to do the project without the aid of design patterns. The project's architect was living too high in the clouds to grasp why his architectures were unimplementable, yet tried to micromanage the implementation as well. He continually specified implementation details which violated basic constraints of the language syntax and the static type system (like asking for multiple inheritance in C#). So I would use design patterns to get around a language limitation to do something close to what he wanted. Since he didn't understand design patterns, he found my explanation of how the design pattern accomplished the trick impenetrable enough to just leave it alone.

It backfired on me when he learned the Singleton pattern (which he kept mistakenly referring to as the "Simpleton" pattern), and started insisting that every object should be a "Simpleton".

Anyhow so the reason I didn't downmod you, is that I do think design patterns are useful, but they fix a problem which is partly that the language is broken, and partly a people problem.
Here in the UK, it's better, but not by much. I remember reading a study a while back that historically, the UK mobile costs tended to be lower than elsewhere in the world.

My defense is this: as the cost of technology is constant going down, we the customers are not seeing any corresponding drop in costs. And that with the introduction of new operator (called 3 Mobile). In my mind, such a competitive market would transfer these savings to customers.

Examples: A 200-minute (ish) any time any network plus some included texts price plan has stayed at around £25 for the past 6 years. More recently, they started experimenting with 18-month plans. These tend to give much better call and texting costs but when you factor in the "free" phone, they sometimes end up costing more than a comparable 12-month plan.
I don't know if the curriculum has changed, but when I got my Philosophy degree form Princeton in '92, there was an enormous grounding in formal logic, and not nearly so much grounding in bullshitting as in some other liberal arts degrees.

At the risk of offending people, at the time, the best departments to learn bullshitting were the deparments that weren't actually philosophy, but were grounded in 20th century continental philosophy (a.k.a. "critical theory") such as English and anthropology.
IMO, it is fair that the book was ignored.

The guy completely ignores the time and risk factors, namely being short-term-payoff-oriented and long-term-payoff-oriented. This is a subject of microeconomics (not 101, of course - it's a lot of maths, integrals and derivative functions).

Poor people do not save extra money exactly because of being short-term oriented. Drugs, entertainment and having early sex also deal with short-term payoff. Short-term payoff orientation also makes a person more risk-tolerant, which is a common attribute of criminals.

All the given examples are easily explainable with a utility function that takes into account risk perception and time discounting (long- or short-term orientation) and current posessions.

Committing a crime or not is a choice between risky and not risky opportunities. This deals with risk perception. Few posessions make the low-risk choice even less valuable. Fixing or not fixing dents on a car fit into choice between long-term and short-term payoff.

Writing this I suspected that the author hasn't worked with advanced microeconomics' maths. Indeed, Karelis is a philosopher. I haven't seen the book, but by his words ("Econ 101 is to blame") suspect that he doesn't know any more complicated economics. That's the reason he finds it wrong.
Dean Allen (founder of TextDrive, the first significant Rails host) is back!
I'm not sure more regulation is the way forward though. Maybe in the short term, but certainly not long term...
Im pretty sure hes missing a bracket at the end. Although thats probably intentional :)

ebukys: There's always a Mac
I am tired of people bashing Windows! Enough already. Your customers are using Windows, and that is all that matters.

Anyone in the business of creating software (including online apps) must support Windows. It can not be ignored, and should be taken quite seriously.
Create new words
Here is my list. It is probably not a good hacker list, but a CS/ML/bioinformatics list.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), Abelson & Sussman

The Little Schemer, Friedman

The C Programming Language (K&R), Kernighan & Ritchie

The Analysis of Algorithms, Purdom & Brown

The Elements of Statistical Learning, Hastie, Tibshirani, Friedman

Biological Sequence Analysis, Durbin et al.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Russell & Norvig

Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Sipser

Introduction to Linear Algebra, Strang

GEB is my 1/2
After 4 years in college for a CS major, I count only two classes as having been worth my time:

Intro to Philosophy

General Psychology

And I mean that both from a knowledge-for-knowledge sake point of view, and a pragmatic view.

In contrast, it was the courses I took related to my major which were utter bullshit.
I know a little bit. The relationship isn't very close.

Gamblers tend to derive utility from gambling, i.e. the act of gambling gives them a rush. The extreme case of this is video games. I'll never win any money by purchasing a Wii (like the lottery, I lose with probability close/equal to 1). But I will derive more happiness from playing Wii sports than I will from the money I spent on it. Similarly, gamblers enjoy playing the game, and this gives gambling positive utility (for them).

However, the argument Karelis seems to be making is that the marginal utility of increased income is zero (for some income range which constitutes poverty). People don't tend to do actions with zero marginal utility, so they don't try to increase their income. Basically, earning $15k/year doesn't make you any happier than $10k/year, so why bother to increase your income?

(Note: he actually claims that "economics doesn't apply to the poor", which is either stupidity or hyperbole. )

One interesting policy implication of his model (if it is true, which I doubt): taxing the poor is good policy. If a poor person is no happier at 15k/year than at 10k/year, then we should tax all poor people making $15k/year at 33%. It won't make them any more unhappy, whereas taxing a richer person will. It also suggests that any wealth transfers to the poor that dont solve all their problems are wasted (welfare is "all or nothing").
I am not a PS guru. All of that is gibberish to me. I think this is what is going on:

1) There is a single source file foo.ps
2) Since PS is interpreted, there is a statement like:
if(filename=="recommendation.ps") { show_recommendation(); }
else { show_give_security_clearance(); }

This attack will work on no matter what hash you use because it uses social engineering (i.e., laziness - no one looks inside their PS files)

I think so anyway...
There is a plenty of good web applications for this.
I use OrchestrateHQ for to-do lists, 30 Boxes as a calendar and 37signals' Backpack for notes.
Just RTFA'd. Their attack is much more involved than I describe. However, it should be trivial to do the same thing for an OpenOffice document or Word document. Maybe I will try it...
I had a similar experience in undergrad EE, an excercise in pragmatic uselessness.
The example in the article is flawed. I find it easy to care of big problems rather than perfecting a single small one. I wear clean clothes every day, but find it hard to care of a single small spot or a few grease or dust on my trouses or shoes. BUT if they become noteable dirty or very dirty and I'm in the office and still have to work half a day, I'd rather clean then, or go home and change, not give up. Easier to solve many problems than to be a perfectionist. Completely the opposite of what Karelis observes.
An Outsider’s Flawed View Of Silicon Valley
Your customers are using Windows, and that is all that matters.

My customers aren't using Windows.

... ok, I don't have any customers yet. But when I launch, FreeBSD and Linux will be the only supported operating systems (with other BSDs to follow as soon as someone cares enough to ask for them; and OS X on the near-term to-do list). Windows is too expensive to support; and in any case, people who care about security probably aren't using Windows anyway.
cmon guys, lets not start mutating into digg. i started frequenting HN because the content and community is much better. lets try and keep some standards.

i think its safe to assume that most people here also at least scan digg, so if its on there, and you're thinking "ooh boy HN would love this!", odds are, we're all loving it already as we see it on digg, just like you. so leave it on digg, unless its topically relevant. please.

(for reference, i'm saying this because this image was frontpaged on digg yesterday-ish.).
I beta tested MS Office 2007. I actually liked it. The new UIs for Word and Excel are much better than the old UIs. My XP machine is dead though, so I now use my Mac for everything.
Executive Pay: The Bottom Line for Those at the Top
One way to explain lottery tickets is to hypothesize that people don't typically process small probabilities well. So Radon looks like terrorist attacks looks like lightening. What people seem to do in practice is to lump all small probabilities into either one quantity that means "small but worth paying paying attention to" and zero.

This decision making process works pretty well for day-to-day life, but it can get frustrated when the outcomes are very large, usually dying and big money. So some lottery players approximate the chances of winning to be zero and don't buy; others approximate small probability and get a large expected value of a ticket and buy many.
Non-linkjacked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH5eYCdheLw
I don't have the book to quote it. But roughly, here is how it works:

What is an "Iterator"? It's an object that contains functionality to retrieve objects from a container. Period. The end.

Now, what is an "Iterator Pattern"? (Again, I don't have the book, so...) I think it is about 10-15 pages of how to define, describe, document, specify, graph, implement, re-use, contextualize and otherwise belabour the Iterator object.

But, at the end of the day, an "Iterator" is simply the next-next-next functionality moved from the linked list to another place. That's all it ever is, in practice. The book makes things worse by using PhD-dissertation levels of vocabulary and grammatical structures to describe simple, simple concepts. This gives confusion to people who don't see through the bull, and when they say "Aha! I understand Iterators!", they believe they've unriddled a mystery, and so become "educators" and "advocates" on behalf of others.

I speak from experience, and have no statistics on this.
...oh... Sorry. That looked sort of serious though.
I just dropped Verizon, and they have a plan for 10 dollars a month, unlimited texting to and from any network. Where'd you get the $50 number?

(Aside: It's probably better to just do multiple replies to the people you're responding to directly than to create a new comment with @ replies.)
Ugh. Please don't. I don't like Windows either, but this is a bad joke and I've seen too many variations on it. I don't want this sort of stuff cluttering up HN; I thought we were above that.