skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been wrestling with "what to learn next" recently and had kind of narrowed it down to learning Javascript (probably using Rhino) more fully and trying Erlang as my first functional language. I think this nudged me towards Javascript. Even if I stick with Ruby for most of my server-side work down the road--I don't deal with data center integration--it can't make me worse at client side stuff.
The quote in his signature is very prescient:

"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." -- Alan Kay
4 hour work week

:)
I find that I frequently have to get up and pace when doing any work that requires thinking work. I don't know that I'd like to work while standing however.I have a tendency to lock my knees and this leads to unfortunate consequences.
I wouldn't have the confidence to apply, thanks to "You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible."
If there's anything I learned from statistics, it's the sneakiness of the word "significant". What, exactly, is a significant boost? Two points? Ten?
The hell with it. I'm posting the clip of talking dogs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCYaw5tGYAs
Computer languages and facial hair
I have been following Paul Graham for some time and attended Startup School a couple years ago. At that time pg was somewhat adamant that they were not be interested in funding companies innovating in the 'online dating' space. Of course they ended up funding iminlikewithyou. But the initial negativity led me to decide against applying to YC. But it hasnt stopped our team from following our dream.
We have been working very hard on modernizing (in fact revolutionizing) 'online dating'. When I tell people this they are generally unbelieving and point out all the terrible shortcomings of current sites. To me, that signals opportunity. We are really going to change things for the better.
Although our site is still under wraps, if you are interested in finding out more then visit http://www.jumbledate.com and put your name on the list.
Prototype Invest: It is time for more than money and connections
He's not that far off the mark. The amount of partying going on in Silicon Valley right now is extreme. There are startup mixer events at least every three days. Last week during "Web 2.0 Expo" there were 2-3 per NIGHT. These aren't wine and cheese and show us your powerpoint type events, either. It is straight up barfing on the sidewalk and the sales team doing coke in the bathroom. The frequency and intensity of these events has been steadily increasing over the past year, in the same manner as they did right before the dot-com bust.
He might need to port code from VB to VB.NET. It's his problem by using VB6 at the first place.

Heck some people probably have books like "Rails for PHP developers" or "Rails for Java developers" or "Moving to Rails" (if exist).
If the VB app is more useful than C++, RoR or Java app out there, who failed?
If only widgets were edible.
Could be because life was better in the (relatively) short term, but ended up worse overall. Maybe it also seemed better than it actually was. Evolution had prepared us to see and fear the hazards of hunter-gatherer lifestyle (such as hunger), but not of agricultural lifestyle (such as eventual disease).
I believe Bezos relocated from New York to Seattle because it was cheap and because there was a major wholesale bookstore there.
This is a great observation. In regards to point 2, a former coworker put it slightly differently: "I don't think trying to solve a problem is the best way to win big. You want to build something that CREATES problems nobody ever had before."
no, i don't _really_ know the platform or langauge (unix/c)..
google image search, yo
My suggestion is to use what you have - play your home for its comparative advantage.

What have you got? You might not have a strong local VC community, but you do have something the Valley doesn't - a very low relative cost of living. With an international market, you can sell a service at 'Western' prices, and spend it at Nigerian prices.

Unless you can move to a startup hub, you're unlikely to get investment, at least initially. So it's going to have to be a bootstrap job. Get a merchant/PayPal business account, get paying customers as soon as you can, and work towards self-sufficiency. Once you're there, you can look towards expanding, getting investment, or moving overseas if that's what you want.

You're in no worse a position than many bootstrappers here - but, thanks to your location, the bar you're shooting for is lower. Exploit it!
There are also implementations of CL and Scheme for the JVM and maybe the CLR. I know that brlewis is using Kawa Scheme in a large financial company of some sort.
Congrats! Hopefully the first of many rejections.

(and eventual success)
Modular robot reassembles itself when kicked apart (YT video)
Funny that Techcrunch can't do basic equity math...

If their combined stakes we're 5% and they got 2.5M$ each then the valuation was 100M$ not 50M$...
Probably on the "if we ignore it, maybe it'll go away" list.

On that topic, I'm interested in creating a something-not-evil to PHP compiler in the style of Fog Creek's Wasabi (not that the language would be an extended version of VB like Wasabi is). Is anyone else interested in working on something like that?
I read the article, but came away with a sense of "go fix big problems" and very little sense of what sort of thing he thinks people ought to be doing besides

> rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.

which, frankly, sounds like a little bit more than I can handle at the moment. It also sounds "hand wavy" - it would help if he specified some details. In terms of actual poor people... it seems to me that the Chinese, for instance, are actually getting a lot wealthier these days. But that's happening due to their own opening up, and global trade, not because of some entrepreneur in SV.
Standing desks are great, especially if you have lower back problems. It does take at least a week to get used to it, because initially the pressure gets transfered from your back to your legs. If you can swing it, the ideal work setup for back health is a standing desk and a sofa or easy chair you can stretch out on with a laptop. I also have a medicine ball on the floor (you can use any sort of ball, soccer, basketball, etc) to put one of your feet on from time to time in order to change positions up a bit.

Another thing to think about is monitor position. Even with a standing desk, you don't want to be looking down into your monitor... you'll eventually mess up your neck. I'm relatively tall, so I have one of those monitor swingarm things that raises my monitor up to eye level.

A suggestion for those who are space-constrained... now that we have LCD panels, you can simply mount your screen on the wall, and then use a shelf or shelving "system" to create a "desk" mounted to the wall. This is what I did at home, and it cost < $100 for the LCD mount and semi-custom shelf/desk.
"Any moron can get around Windows with no prior instructions."

Totally untrue. Give a Windows machine to someone who doesn't know anything about computers, and watch them fail. My parents bought a nice (~$3500) computer in 1998 and I set it up for them. From then on, Handholding Central. My dad couldn't figure out much on his own, and his wife was only a bit better (and only because she'd used a Windows machine at work sometimes).

When they decided that they needed to upgrade in 2006, I strongly recommended a Mac Mini to them. They bought that, and it took about 2 hours of instruction for them to know their way around, and I get a LOT fewer calls now.

Just an anecdote, but the point is that the fact that you've learned so much about Windows does not mean that Windows is naturally easier to figure out. My own switch, in 2003, was much more difficult, but that's partly because I was coming from Gentoo, and there were things I used all the time that couldn't be exactly duplicated ("select to copy" is something I still miss).
VisiCalc during the early days [w/pics]
You jest, but I would seriously consider spending (my own) money on such a thing. Poor ergonomics can result in skeletal, muscular, and tendon stress injuries. I have yet to find a chair or desk that really suit my shape and posture, and the aching back I have at the end of the week is becoming more and more of a concern as time goes on.
I always love reading stuff like this. It's really inspiring to learn about other inventors who have had great success and started out in the same fashion as you. (I'm currently working out of an attic in Arlington Ma, not too far from that house).
Have you seen Knuth's "Computer Musings" lecture on Notation? (http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/students/Dam_ui/pages/Archived...)

Not one of his best sessions, in my opinion, but still pretty damned interesting.
The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.
Improving Interface Design
America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree
I am still laughing out loud about an Amish computer desk.

I am not sure I wish to stand all day, I really would prefer to go back and forth between the two options perhaps with a laptop or two workstations.
Here I stopped reading: Scripting languages have a purpose, and that purpose is generally different from what general-purpose languages do. C# really doesn't need a REPL--don't fall into the trap of trying to make it into Lisp.
he _nails_ javascript (referred to as ES in quote):

Can we please finally just accept that ES is much more than just a browser extensibility tool? For most developers, this is their first exposure to a classless prototype-based object-oriented language, and unfortunately, most developers don't ever bother exploring it beyond "How do I make my web page do that floating image thing...?" Gah.
Plus, if your startup fails, you can wheel your Aeron chair out of the door as a severance package while Michael Arrington flings mendacious personal attacks at you on TechCrunch with gleeful schadenfreude.
The Rubyists are Wrong
Supposedly Aeron chairs don't depreciate much over time. You could sell the chairs and even get most of your money back! I recall reading somewhere that the Aeron chairs companies bought during the big bubble were their most valuable assets when they went under.

Schadenfreude indeed.
You disagree? How so?
Tech sector laughs in the face of recession
Couldnt it do a one or two click install like Windows and then let you just delete the program from Apps directory?
They became dumber, could no longer understand the technology that was keeping them alive, and died out.

Really, the only reason we are as intelligent as we are is because intelligence turned out to be helpful for survival. But that same intelligence lets us defeat our own survival instincts (which is why we have obesity, drug addiction, and porn). This suggests that for continued survival, either our instincts must become stronger than our intellects or our intellects must become weaker than our instincts -- both of which lead to the same place: exhaustion of resources before we actually accomplish anything.

(Disclaimer: I recently rented "Idiocracy".)
Ubiquitous computing done right
Aerons are about $400 used, last forever, and you can get $400 for it again if you want to sell it. Their utility as a symbol of excess and financial mismanagement died out in the previous dot-com bust. In fact, now that servers are cheap, you might as well spend your money on nice chairs and desks - at least they last forever.

The new metric for startup waste is the amount of time founders and their employees spend on social networking sites. If your CEO is averaging 50 TWEETS per day, you're fucked.
Not relevant to programming, but a nice diversion.
Which is your favorite 70-80s computer book?
or should I say 8 bit book?.
While reading the "Programmers don't read books" thread just come to my mind those really nice days where computer books where an extremely useful source of information. One of my favourites mentioned in the thread was:
BASIC Computer games by David Ahl

Which book was your favourite?
I'm not sure how excercise after the breakfast would help. I think one should take excercise before the breakfast. But has anyone tried it?
Its important to remember that market for Internet skills was completely different back in 1994. Working sweatshop hours, and jumping to unknown VC-backed companies for a shot at an IPO was just part of the game.

I will also note that the ad is promoting explicit high-level programming skills and states that "[F]amiliarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary." This would have cut-off a lot of people who were riding the "web development" bandwagon (rudimentary HTML, perhaps some CGI scripting) and gotten the attention of lot of skilled people looking to catch a quick IPO.
Why the Semantic Web is More Pipe Bomb than Pipe Dream
That article says nothing of the sort - it says that the designers and IAs (who are presumably the people who build the site "templates") hand code their markup, but it makes no claims about the content producers who are actually posting up stories on a day-to-day basis. They certainly use a CMS, but there's no indication of whether they author in HTML, use some kind of WYSIWYG interface or use some other form of markup.
There are practical reasons ads don't work, but they are bad for other reasons.

Display ads also suck because it's really hard for life to have meaning when what you do with your precious time on this planet is manipulate other humans into harmful economic behaviors. It must be hard to make a living selling a certain kind of advertising and not want to kill yourself, or at least realize deep down in your soul that you truly suck on a cosmic scale and when you are breathing your last breath, instead of reliving your life, experiencing the iconography of whatever religious superstition you happen to believe, or dissolving into blissful non-being, your consciousness will expand into a loop of all the disconnected distracted moments when people clicked on your shitty psychologically manipulative ads running over and over again. Just your soul, or whatever component of your waking experience that is responsible for your experience feeling like it's yours, and the endless distraction for an entire cycle of existence. The people who create shitty advertising must be aware of this, but incomprehensibly go on advertising, making money manipulating morons, and ignoring that increasingly desperate little voice that tells them everything is wrong, by increasing the level of distracting surface activity.

I hate advertising so much. As children of whatever beautiful, chaotic, creative force is responsible for our existence, we have to be able to do better then this. There is a practical case against advertising as a business model, but there are also other more meaningful considerations. Is a life of bad advertising and lying to yourself about the morality and implications of what you are doing really why you exist?

(Sorry for my (slight) rhetorical extravagance. I was reading Thomas Ligotti earlier with my coffee.)
I'm sure Jakob Nielsen can make his statistics say anything he wants, just like everyone else's statistics. All I'm saying is that I hardly, if ever, click on a text ad but I do see banner ads. Different kinds of web surfers are impacted by different advertising schemes, we can't always fit everyone into one little box.
I've been working standing for the last few months, with similar results. It's definitely easier on my back, and seems to be good for my wrists as well. If you try it, make sure you mount the monitor up at eye level. When you're standing up straight, there's a lot more distance between your wrists and your eyes.
I've always wanted to get one of those big exercise balls to replace my general issue office chair, but a desk that I could stand at would be nice, too.
From Defeat, Rejection to Success
If your standard is "principles of fair dealing and good faith, a sound basis for evaluating facts, no exaggerated or unwarranted claims, and opinions for which there is a reasonable basis", then Jim Cramer should be put in jail every weekday at 5:30. Of course, I think these regulations only apply to members of the NASD.
I've also heard the theory that alcohol production was one inducement to settlement.
Out of curiosity, where do you find them used?
Recall, if you please, that the rhetorical phrase "However X Y may be,..." translates to "I, myself, don't necessarily believe that X is Y, but perhaps you do. So I'm going to pretend to accept your argument that X is Y in order to lure you underneath a ten-ton weight, which I will drop on you immediately after this comma."
I'll have to go home and put cinder blocks under my desk legs to prop it up to standing level and try it. I have recently noticed that I have leg fatigue at the end of each day from sitting so much, and I do all my thinking while pacing about anyway, so standing seems like an interesting option.
Anyone who disagrees with you must be trolling.
I spent an unbelievable number of hours with William Barden's books on the Z-80. One of them completely fell apart. I loved that CPU. It was the first CPU I ever met.
Making a Rubik's Cube studio seem effortless
I think you should take food first. The idea being that no food + demand for nutrients (exercise) tells your metabolism that resources are scarce. This makes your metabolism burn protein from your body (muscles) instead of fat from your body or proteins from your food, so if you are trying to gain energy or lose weight, eating first will be better at kick starting your metabolism.
And she DEFINITELY won't be installing it there.
Thought this had some neat ideas for making a studio not feel like a closet. I'm tempted to put my bed under a platform like this and put my desk/chair on top of it.

Anyway, maybe handy for starving bootstrappers out there living on ramen.
craig's list, and if you are in SF or Oakland there are a number of furniture places that buy and sell them.
Windows has come a long way since 1998.
I'd be worried that their landing page is written in .NET
very neat, how about programming languages that not only find bugs but use a discovery tree to try solutions and test them, then report back to you the options (which include the option to do it manually) This already exist?
I was 14. Child labor...no no!
Larry Brilliant talks about a web crawler constructed with modest resources that could find evidence of emerging pandemics faster than WHO.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/58

So there are things that us hackers could do. Another is a Java project for a low cost medical records database usable by hospitals in the 3rd world.
That there's a fundamental difference between "scripting" languages and "application" languages? That if there is, Lisp is on the scripting side? That a REPL would be useless to an application developer, or even a systems developer?

I'm writing Ruby code right now that generates X86 basic blocks to runtime patch Win32 PE images in memory as part of a scriptable debugger for a DMA-driven peripheral I'm reversing. You cannot get more systems-y than I am now. I'm using a REPL to test X86 code written as Ruby. It is the best thing ever.

People who talk about "scripting" languages are the 2008 equivalent of the people who stuck up for assembly language application development in the early '90s: an in-joke for the rest of us.
I'm not seeing that. I click just about any application to load and the little icon bounces at the bottom for just as long as it takes to open Word on my Vista machine (2gb RAM).
I like to imagine bankruptcy auctions; what would the listings look like if any of these companies went under?

The bulk of most would be hardware and shwag. And that's not comforting.
"There's no way anyone could guess this procedure"

How is that not an obvious troll statement.

Either you're just incredibly bad at operating computers, or you wanted to get a reaction from people and start a fight.
General translation of the post by me

"...I had the idea of making a more complete drawing using the Verdana font and 'absolute positions' in CSS, generating a vector drawing that is directly embedded in the HTML.

I chose Homer Simpson because he is sufficiently popular and recognizable.
It is working in the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 5.5, 6 y 7

• Opera 9

• Firefox 2

• Safari 3

How does it look in other operating systems and browsers?

Note: for it to look right, you must have the Verdana font."
Not bad, but if I have to think about it or Google it, it's counterintuitive. Windows just saves your passwords in the app if you tell it to. On OSX, they save them in a keychain and require me to put in my keychain password every time. This doesn't save me any typing.
I simply love the idea - can help a lot of people. Stop whining :-)
My favorite fiction books are collections of short stories by Thomas Ligotti.

My favorite non-fiction books are books about consciousness studies and related issues. Favorites include Hofsteder's I Am A Strage Loop and David Chalmers The Conscious Mind. Oliver Sacks Musicaphilia is another recent favorite.
It's a simple statement of the counterintuitiveness. That was my point. Macs are not intuitive.
Compare:

"Energetic detail-oriented software engineer who wants to create systems with mind-numbing performance. Should enjoy working with people, solving non-trivial problems, and communicating these solutions. Should also wish to learn more about how others have engineered high-performance systems. We desire someone who is an expert in at least some of the following areas and eager to learn the others: distributed computing, compilers & interpreters, fault tolerance, network & storage devices, high-performance computation, algorithms & data structures, os/kernel experience."

That's from my last employer, which has been around for 8 years and has I believe about 4 recurring customers. In the 2 years I was there, they got no new major customers and only a few consulting jobs. 3 key employees have left in the last 8 months.

My point is that all job applications basically look alike. It's very difficult to pick out winners just from the job-app. In hindsight, the big successful companies all require top-notch engineers, exciting markets, and confident coworkers with high expectations. But many employers have that (or ask for it; it's often hard to tell the difference until you've been working there for a while) and still fail.
Pipe bomb in that when you hear about it you have the urge to call a bunch of men in padded jackets to safely defuse it? Yeah, I quite agree.

A small hint: If you were to draw a venn diagram of the internet, the intersection of the most syntactically and semantically correct pages and the most interesting pages would be very, very small indeed. Why on earth would search engines possibly give higher placement to pages with semantic markup? Their whole purpose is to locate the most useful content regardless of its format, hence Google indexes not only HTML documents but also word, PDF and plain text without hindrance or let. The second they start serving inferior results to serve a political agenda, that's the very second they start losing market share to their rivals.
The Ahl was a classic-- I had the DEC edition-- but I also have fond memories of Adam Osborne's "Introduction to Microcomputers".
but the parent of the sarcastic post wasn't actually anti-science at all.
You're seriously crazy if you think 99% of people don't download and install programs. I mean, you have to download and install flash, and >99% of people have that.

Everyone under 50 uses bittorrent or emule or something to pirate music. Do those programs come installed?

Everyone under 50 uses instant messenger. Is AIM installed by default? How about Skype?

People do plenty of program installation.
Blog post frequency and SEO