skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the Old Breed is a truly great book.
The second idea runs into the chicken-and-egg problem.
This is a great follow-up to "What You Can't Say." Thanks.
Why am I getting voted down for this--are these not legitimate questions? I am just trying to understand the definition of suburbia in this context.
bitpal.com - bitpal is a cross platform personal information manager designed to live on a thumb drive. It manages your contacts todos and calendar that sycs between two or more copies (think home and work)of outlook and even betwen outlook and mac (iCal and address book).
Never could get the flash drive companies to figure out their biz models. Its a great little tool. www.bitpal.com
More On Lies
I'm surprised that nobody's ever mentioned http://epresence.tv/! It's actually fully open source (we use it for archiving our own videos) and it already has powerpoint integration and a slick website. My friend at the UofT was taking a course there with Prof. Baecker and says it's pretty awesome to have video archives with slides to review notes and what not.
This sort of problem is really hard, but a little bit of cleverness gets you a long way. Theres some really cool information theoretic bounds that you can cook up on how good various algorithms can do for video using whatever assumptions you have on the video. (eg does the motion respect physics? do we have sufficient sampling that we don't some ambiguous choice? etc)
Now that is insightful. I think you're saying that, when a program gets into an unstable state of stress and confusion, it throws exceptions... and vice versa.

I could buy that.
Apparently if you have another installer called "setup.exe" on your desktop when you try installing WWT it actually tries to install that instead.

[sigh]Windows[/sigh]
Not if it works.
regarding dying: One of the most vivid memories I have from childhood is the time my father told me he was going to die. It was quite simple, he said, "someday I will die, when I die, here is what I want you to do...." Its one of those things that shaped my whole view of the world, I think I has 10 or 11. Its more amazing to me now that I have a son, that he had the courage to be so honest.
Windows within Parallels Desktop (OS X virtualization package) won't even run it. It needs hardware 3D acceleration apparently. I doubt Wine will work.
Unfortunately they all have different issues. Google video is good because it supports long videos, but some of their servers seem unreliable and occasionally videos fail to load. Blip is good but they don't support seeking well (i.e. you sometimes wont be able to jump ahead to unbuffered parts of the video).

Youtube is actually the most reliable, but as you mention only supports small videos. One option is to break long videos up into 10min chunks and then stitch them together on Omnisio (we support compilations of multiple videos). It's a bit of a pain I know.

We are looking into support for other video sites - I wish there was a perfect answer :)
I think that for the rest of my life, every time I see the word "procrastination", I'll think of my first pg essay (and the one that got me hooked):

http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
After living in suburbia for 23 years (and finally getting out this month, thank "God") I can attest to most of this. One thing PG doesn't mention is that some people flat never grow out of the idyllic view of the world that this segregated space presents OR become so impossibly jaded that they're damaged beyond all repair.

One friend of mine managed to have both of these happen. Not only does he have an idyllic view of the world, at least in how it _should_ be, but he's also become extremely jaded, having found out that most of his views are wrong (despite still clinging to them). These are often entirely contradictory. For example, he believes in true love and that if you _truly_ love someone you could never, ever do anything to hurt them. On the other hand, he's seen enough relationships and enough cheating and other "nastiness" that he's jaded to the point that he believes (his words) "all women are whores."

I would argue that you have less of a chance of becoming extremely jaded if you grow up in a societal sub-section that neither attempts to hide the gruesome truths of the world from youth nor presents them on every street corner. In my humble opinion, suburbia is too close to the former extreme.
It's neat, but not that much better than Google Sky. Perhaps slightly better imagery, but I don't see why this would make Scoble cry if he had previously seen Google Sky.
I agree with the main point of this article. It always feels wrong to me when you see an app that offers an upgrade to get rid of ads. It seems to say we're gonna piss you off with minor irritations to make you upgrade, or at least that we know you don't want these but it pays the rent. Neither of those are offering users what they want.
Just launched, so not dead yet. Got 100 or so registrations, but no one seems to want to post anything. "Can't find anything that's cool" is the excuse. Anyway, the site is a unique way to list and vote on any item you think is cool.
http://thatscool.org I'll send you an invite, pronto. Add something, anything!!
Yeah, that was pretty underwhelming. Wake me up when they do something interesting, like finally decide to drop the legacy core and run with a bsd subsystem.
A modern analogy that illustrates this is a famous interview problem: you have a cake with an irregular piece cut out of it, and you have to figure out how to cut the cake into equal pieces. The smarter the person, the harder it is for them so solve this problem. People come up with all sorts of ingenious (and usually incorrect) solutions, when the obvious solution is staring them right in the face - just cut the cake horizontally.

This solution, of course, is just another implicit assumption that the irregular shape cut out of the cake is oriented vertically.
A more general version of this I once heard (mostly in jest) was that "suburban neighborhoods are named after the part of nature that was destroyed to make the neighborhood." Mostly this includes various flora, although geographical descriptors such as "silver creek", "meadowmont", etc., are also used.
Oh, I interpreted "almost no one reading this knows..." as referring to the users of this board.
Unlawful and Unfair
Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past
very good link! thanks.
Top 50 Android Applications
> This solution, of course, is just another implicit assumption that the irregular shape cut out of the cake is oriented vertically.

This is an excellent observation. I didn't realize this when I was writing about it.
1. pg writes essay.

2. Essay is posted on hn.

3. Essay quickly becomes #1 with 100 points.

4. 200 comments. Debate ensues.

5. The "pg aftermarket" blogs their rebuttals.

6. Many pg aftermarket blogs get posted to hn.

7. Many more comments. Much more debate.

8. 3 days later, someone says, "Enough already about ..." That post gets downmodded to -10.

9. 1 month later, go to Step 1 (I hope).
The Delusions Of Nathan Myhrvold
What the F***? - Why We Curse
Demo of Firefly
PG: "I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't."

Can you give us some examples of things you don't want to know and avoid learning about? Also, you must already have some idea of what horrible truths you might discover if you learned further, so can you give us a general idea of what those are?
http://toobs.tlrobinson.net - crime maps and reports for USC / Los Angeles/

To be fair, it was built in 24 hours for a programming contest two years ago, and hasn't been touched since.
Intelligence of crows for a greener planet
checked out RDA. Its only for S60 phones and not all phones are available.
Typically, if you describe a problem that is harder to solve the smarter the person is, there's some implicit assumption. The problem gets harder for smarter folks, because there is no general solution.
OK, I brought it to the front page of proggit: http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6j9dt/comments/ (might fall away soon)
On Using A Framework
An artificial culture is obviously phony and worse than no culture at all.

I once worked at a company that "claimed" a culture with emphasis in employee training (which was obviously false).

The employees referred to the corporate culture as:

Big Ultimate Large Lame Special High Intensity Training
...but I wouldn't say that is a bad thing. I tend to find such debates rather fun to watch and participate in.
Right. Being able to see these assumptions is arguably an incredibly useful skill. More traditional intelligence coupled with ability to see such assumptions should get you much further than traditional intelligence alone.
Video of it here: http://scan.jsharkey.org/

Great idea, but implementation could be smoother. Definitely something to look forward to :)
No, definitely not a bad thing. More like a phenomenon.

Sometimes I wonder if pg planned it this way all along.
Actually, I think it's important not to think of tests necessarily as "comments," but rather as "specs." This is pretty much the thesis of Behaviour Driven Development.

If your tests define what your program _should_ do, then your tests can become (a) more understandable and (b) more valuable to new folks familiarizing themselves with your code.

It's a subtle but important (IMHO) distinction.
Doesn't work on the Wii though (youtube/google video/iplayer all do).
Feature request for the Disqus guys...
I was wondering if you guys could offer the option to specify a 'postback' url for a site, to which disqus would post all the comments made on that site in the same xml format the export uses.

For example, in my dashboard I'd specify http://www.example.com/comment as my postback url. Whenever someone comments on http://www.example.com/blog/entry.html, Disqus would make a POST request to the postback url with the xml for that comment. Then I could store this information however I wanted, index it for search, whatever.

Of course, if there is some other way to get this information, just ignore all that. I know I can constantly export the xml file and work with that, but it'd be nice to be able to take advantage of the Disqus ajaxy goodness while still getting the comment contents for other uses.
I suspect that the "brilliant failure" model is a bit of a Barnum profile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect). I suspect most reasonably smart university students feel that way at some point in their careers.
In case others need some help persuading, here is the link to that recent Scientific American article to that effect ( http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm... )
YouTube'sSecret Ad Plan Revealed: 'Buzz Targeting'
This essay really makes me wish for down-arrows. It seems to me nothing more than a plug for Alan Watts's CD, and the not-exactly-earth-shattering observation that people sometimes make unwarranted assumptions. A few more examples of the kinds of these "far more dangerous lies" would have been helpful.
Google street view, caught in the act. Must see image!
We need a tag evolution
I think this is the cause of death for a lot of my projects that could have become successful businesses. Once I figure it out, I don't care any more.
for us non programmers jquery really is super easy to use.
I used to manage a group of engineers who were very keen on maintaining their standard of software craftsmanship. They had a high test/code ratio and were always up to date on the latest idioms. That was their idea of craftsmanship and something that written standards could easily support.

However, our customers were complaining bitterly about bugs and missing features. They had a totally different idea of craftsmanship. Certainly our written standards could have been expanded but I found that the core issue was that the engineers had latched on to code quality when our customers really wanted them to latch on to software usefulness. The fault probably lay with the managers, as we couldn't figure out what was the useful thing we wanted to build. Thankfully one of the engineers invented Twitter in his spare time and we were all saved (a simplified but mostly true story).
Heh, I clicked to add this to del.icio.us, then noticed I'd already added and tagged it three years ago. It's amazing how much goes around and comes around again without us noticing :)
Counterexample: A significant fraction of Indians are vegetarian. They seem to be doing ok in the brain development department.

Are there confounding factors? Sure... but calling it child abuse seems a bit much.
My least favorite pg essay.

I agree; it's even worse than the one on philosophy.
Cleaning Your Display and Keyboard
This whole issue is a sore spot for me. Seems like I've always had someone who missed their deadlines but "cleaned up" something that didn't need cleaning up. I've even done it myself. It's an easy trap to fall into, after all, we tend to be optimizers, maximizers, and perfectionists.

The best approach to this I've ever found is the solicit agreement to a few simple rules and standards. Things like:

- Don't fix it unless it's broken.

- Don't delete any code. Ever. (Did I say ever.)

- Don't bypass tools we've agreed to use.

- Don't violate standards we've agreed to follow.

- Quick and dirty isn't quick. It's only dirty.

Often the violator doesn't even realize what he's done until you point it out. OP was obviously a caricature, but you still gotta stay on top of it.
I think this particularly applies to anything the OpenSSL guys produce. Their security track record (and understanding of software security) is almost certainly better than yours, regardless of who you are.
Android Developer Contest Winners List with Descriptions
Just another real life warning to not get into bed with the wrong company. (thinking xobni dodged this with MSFT)
"placed deceptive ads on Google such as blue underlined headlines like Craigslist.org and Craigslist.com"

Sounds like a legitimate complaint. As for the rest, I don't know what there is to steal: besides audience and brand name, what does Craigslist have that eBay can't replicate by building a similar site with a similar price structure?
As someone who's considered this tactic (I'm some years away from having children, but planning seems like a good idea), I'm interested in how that's working out. Have you ruined cursing for your kid as some people imply this tactic would?
In that case, I wonder if religion counts as a lie. Lots of religious people either truly believe, or have done a great job of tricking themselves into thinking they believe.
I'd argue that the phenomenon is a bad thing only to the extent that it encourages people to write articles like this. It's a mostly-unrelated, fairly uninsightful way for some guy to whore for his own belief system (everybody buy some guy's CDs!) by disguising it as a response to pg's essay.
How much would it cost Apple to integrate a GPS bug, or whatever it's called, in all new macs? Somehow, only the owner would have access to the exact coordinates of the computer. Wouldn't this eradicate all theft of new macs instantly?
My inlaws once raised a couple of turkeys. They did name them. Thanksgiving and Christmas. They tasted good.
An alternative to Dual Licensing
The program Recolored packages this functionality up into a nice app.

http://www.recolored.com/

The gallery is impressive.
http://www.recolored.com/gallery.php
I agree. Especially about Office. I can't believe Alley Insider called GoogleDocs a direct competitor to Office. I see how Google Docs competes with Microsoft for the market of people that prefer to make spreadsheets and documents with 90's era tools, but for users who care about their work Office is much more powerful. The only cool thing about Google Docs is that it allows you to easily share lousy documents and spreadsheets with your friends.
Maybe I will go roll a spliff now...
>"But, this revenue model seems silly to me. Advertisers pay a premium in order to reach people in their specific demographic with disposable income. This idea of people paying to remove ads ensures that the audience for your ads are actually CHEAPER than the average internet audience."

If you want to analyze it like that, it's far more accurate to say allowing users to remove ads by paying for the option negates the necessity for advertisers to be on your site in the first place. Invariably, it's more money for the middleman (in this case: the site offering a service), but if advertisers pay for ads, and users pay to remove those ads it's a figurative stalemate for the entire purpose of having a revenue service.

Financially, it's win-win for the service provider, and that doesn't sit well with me.
Another YC Clone - Dream IT Ventures
yet another codinghorror post that reaffirms to me that it has jumped the shark.

Go back and look at posts from a year ago and they were significantly better than the posts in the last 6 months or so. Interestingly enough, they started to go downhill when Jeff decided to post ads on the site (not saying that ads are bad, just that the pressure to publish might be causing him to post more of the noise and less of the signal which drove people to him in the 1st place).
Text Messaging Is More Expensive Than Downloading Data from Space.
Holographic storage technology promises to let us store 100 movies on one disk
http://scobleizer.com/2008/02/14/microsoft-researchers-make-...

This at least explains the reference. I certainly don't understand why he felt so overwhelmed by this of all things.
It is not a disguise, I couldn't be more direct about it. My goal was to introduce people to an excellent (yet little known these days) author who did a very good job explaining these concepts and helping people free themselves from the bondage of their assumptions.

Do you ever read a book and find it so good you want to tell the whole world about it, yet when you try to tell people all you get are blank stares? This is it.

I guess it's a natural reaction in an age when too many people plug too much bad content. All I can say is, read the wikipedia article about him, read his essays, then make up your mind.
I honestly think procrastination paid my way through school. When you don't start studying for tests until a few hours before, you suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands.

The key was creating incentives that forced me to spend that free time on my business. IE: artificial deadlines. Turns out clients are a great for this. They become very disappointed when you don't do what you said you would, when you said you would do it.
There may be certain, errr, privacy implications of that...
interesting discussion. but regarding 99%, I know of no environmental manipulation which can explain that much of individual differences. it's not just about reliability, it's also about explaining all the variance - two different things.
MemeMixr: Aggregating HN, Reddit, and Slashdot
if the memes cause effects in the presence of certain trivial traits caused by genes then that issue is solved, isn't it? the genes work as predictors like the study thinks, but don't actually do much of anything.
How to Fix the News
Craigslist's counter suit against eBay
Will "freemium" destroy the Internet?
I like to read HN, Reddit/Programming and Slashdot/Developers. After DHH's and PG's take on releasing flimsy things quickly, I decided to just whip this out and see what happens. What do you think?

The basic idea is to have a single stream of things instead of multiple streams. A single stream could lead to serendipitous connections becoming apparent between news stories, or might lead to new ideas.
Maybe some humility would do you good, then? There's more to successful businesses than most can predict.
There is a book you might find illuminating:
http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin...
also, the essay "worse is better".
Wish they had a better logo, might seem more legit.
Don't people have any imagination?

I mean seriously, this is almost a complete ripoff. Can't they at the very least try to expand a bit on the Y-combinator idea instead of just blatantly ripping it off like that. Apparently it is harder to get a good idea of your own than I thought.
Why not delete code? Old/stale/unused code gets only in the way and doesn't serve any purpose. And if you really happen to need it later, it is readily available in your version control system.

I fully agree with your rule about quick and dirty. I'm currently rewriting a module that was "designed" with the "I just want to get it done" approach to software engineering.

What's the old saying? A few weeks of coding can easily save you 5 minutes of design?

We're also missing a deadline. But what is the point of meeting the deadline if we have to throw out the code afterwards and start over anyway? It is better to do it right the first time. A solid system a few days late beats a crappy system on time.

In my opinion, if the code is so complex and messy that you can't see whether individual pieces are correct, then it must be considered broken, even if it compiles and does something.
Thanks. I saw your comment on not liking the stories :)

Do you think you would use a tech subwatrcoolr? If so, what "most emailed" equiv. feeds do you think there are in tech. I can think of programming.reddit.com, equivalent digg section, news.yc, yahoo most emailed tech.
"And if you really happen to need it later, it is readily available in your version control system."

Of course. I was referring to code deleted from everything, including the version control system. By the time someone noticed, it wasn't findable even on backups. Believe it or not, in some shops it does happen.
Do you ever read a book and find it so good you want to tell the whole world about it, yet when you try to tell people all you get are blank stares?

Yep. And then a few years later, when I re-read that same book, I realized that it just wasn't as good as I'd thought it was at that stage of my life. It was actually kinda trite. The blank starers were right all along. I only thought it was great because I was young and I was being exposed to new ideas that I already kinda agreed with for the first time.

Any of that sound familiar?

And now I just wanna travel back in time and slap my thirteen-year-old self for listening to The Dark Side Of The Moon over and over. It's not that great an album, younger-me!
Sure, but you could make this argument about anything worth talking about.
This American Life, while excellent, has very little to do with news. Perhaps you could compare it to a typical human interest story. But its goal is clearly not to provide information on current events.
A good example of this is the "flat Earth model". It took thousands of years for a thought that the Earth may not be flat to enter people's minds. Why?

The "flat Earth model" is actually a myth. I guess you've been lied to. The Earth being flat was not a prevailing view in the Middle Ages. By that point, it was well known that the Earth is round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology
Then you remember that there are millions of other younger people out there now that are at the same stage in their lives that you were in then. Just because it's trite to you doesn't mean it'll be trite to everyone.

And I still think Dark Side of the Moon is a great album. I actually like it more now than I did as a teenager.
You don't create it, but I think it can be artfully guided. By being cognizant of the incentives and disincentives you create every day, you can exert a good deal of control over it.
Twitter All Your Bash Commands
I sympathize with mwmanning, and I don't think it's a matter of humility; I think it's that solving an interesting problem is often a much stronger motivator than the prospect of making money -- that is, running a business, as difficult and unpredictable as it is, sometimes isn't as much fun as fleshing out an interesting idea.

I toss a lot of stuff on the scrap heap after "figuring it out," not because I'm confident that I know exactly how to turn a profit from it, but because what I'd rather do is move on to the next idea.