skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Donald Knuth has a dedicated work computer, too - but apparently completely without network capabilities:

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has
no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory
drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for
network surfing and graphics;

taken from an interview with Knuth:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
(it was posted here a few weeks ago)
U. Michigan CSE@50 Talks
Back in a previous life, I used to work at a silkscreen T-shirt factory. There was a decent one-time set-up charge, to cut the screens-- but once this was done, the per-shirt charge was pretty reasonable (pricing depended on the quality of the shirt and the number of colors), and the screens were kept on file in case there were repeat orders.

Any vendor should be able to send you samples, so you can check out the quality of the printing.

I'd suggest you try to find someone reasonably local, so you can pick up the shirts yourself and avoid the shipping costs, and can check out the quality in person. Plus, many shops have designers in-house, who can help you if you don't already have a finished shirt design.
I'm going to go with blog, but for a different reason that what I've seen so far. Blogs will put less stress on you (or whoever ends up with the duty of writing it) than a vlog will.

Blogs can be written from anywhere, on any computer, and in bits and pieces. You could write an update in an airport terminal, at your home, at your work, or in the park.

A vlog will require a quite location, a solid chunk of time, and in most cases a pre-written script, which could have probably just gone to your blog in the first place.

I suppose vlogs could put a more personal face on the startup, which may or may not help you connect with your customers. If you think it would help, you could create vlogs much more infrequently than the blogs, maybe just for large milestones in the company.

Interesting side note: Even though they broadcasted live 24/7 for a while, Justin.tv also had a blog. I'm not sure exactly why, but I'll bet that elad's point about blogs being indexed had something to do with it.
SOAP was engineered by enterprise companies for enterprise applications. It came form the same thought train as COM/DCOM, CORBA, etc.,. It is still a major player in the enterprise world. You wont see many B2B apps that don't use SOAP or some other XML payload. I have used SOAP extensively in PHP and C#, together even. The support is there for it if you look. Java actually has good support for SOAP, if not the best (http://java.sun.com/webservices/ http://ws.apache.org/axis/).

Most of the haters on SOAP and other thick WS technologies are people trying to do simple AJAX type message transfers. SOAP is a little heavy for that. But when you try passing messages between multiple systems in multiple languages, it becomes the obvious solution. As far as the following response goes...
"allow me to put it this way: 1k of text to get a 2 or 3 digit temperature from a weather service."
SOAP stacks will automatically parse that 2-3 digit number into the correct data type for the platform/language you are using. Now say instead of a 2-3 digit number you passed an entire object or data structure. Would it be easier to role your own parser or have the SOAP stack automatically marshal it for you?

Added to this, when you use the full set of SOAP technologies including WSDL and XSD, you also have data validation and to some extent, documentation. This is what JSON and the likes lack. If you provide a WSDL I can look at it and usually use a tool to automatically generate all the data types and interfaces needed (ie. wsdl in .Net). You point me at a JSON interface and I have no such luxury. I wont know what data to expect until you write documentation for it. Further neither of us would know if each others messages were valid without some kind of custom validator.

Also SOAP is transport layer agnostic. If you use HTTP you can take advantage of any compression the underlying platform supports. Apache's Axis and Perl's SOAP::Lite both support HTTP compression in their SOAP stacks. I am aware of ways to enable it in .Net as well.

Advances in computing power and network resources are making SOAP a more viable option, not less. It comes down to using the right tool for the job and REST is viable in some applications, but SOAP is as well. SOAP's life span will be at least as long as COM or CORBA. They haven't completely died yet either...
That's fine if you're PG and you write all the software yourself, but what if you're using a web framework or other open-source tools and need the web to access documentation or ask questions?
Thanks! Very good point. I hadn't been accounting for how bad the shipping might be.

We're boston-based, so QRST might be a decent option. Do you have any other direct experience?
> then I quit [whatever] because I got addicted to computer websites.

I suspect that's where most people reading this site are.
I assume: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL7
As a matter of fact I'm running into this exact problem right now. RSS, SOAP, XML, why can't I just:

wget http://weather.com/api?field=temperature&zip=02142

and get back a file consisting of "52" or something similarly simple.

Currently I have to get a 1k+ file and create a parser for it. I can't even find a really simple format that would allow me to use prebuilt XML parsers. If anyone knows of a dead simple API for temperature, precipitation, etc., I will upmod you at least once.
My Uncle has a promotional products business (anything that could be printed on, really). The website is a little antiquated but the quality is great.

http://allamericanmarketing.com/

They also have a special inkjet printer to do images and other things that couldn't be done with traditional silk screens.

The great thing is that they'll also do pens, mouse pads (does anyone even use those anymore?), hats, etc, so you can do more than just shirts all from only one supplier.

They're located in Valencia, CA so I don't know if it's too far for what you want.
Have you looked at wsdl2java? http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/user-guide.html#WSDL2JavaBuil...
Coincidentally, Nathan Myhrvold independently conceived of BulletBall three years ago in a roundtable with 7 PhD's. Boy, were they surprised when they tried to file for the patent. I guess it was an invention whose time had come.
Thanks for this short article, I suffer the same problem and your analysis seems pretty good. I'm going to try out the two computer solution now too, because I've had enough of these Email and Web mornings myself.
The world's 10 best-selling cars ever
Way too much - it's an industry driven by greed.
The technique that has helped me the most is simply acknowledging that I am not able to be computer-work productive every waking hour.

So when I notice my focus starting to drift, I consciously make a decision: Am I going to refocus and continue working? or Am I going to do something else?

I dont feel guilty about doing something else, as long as that something else is also productive, ie work in another domain.

As I have practiced this approach, I am able to identify the loss of focus more quickly and because I do not feel guilty about shifting my productivity to another domain, my overall productivity has gone up.
ejrogujdeM
UK Children Fear being labelled a Geek
Okay I'm pretty lazy:

http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/
Yes you should bother. Two recommendations: http://codeigniter.com and http://cakephp.org
Paul Prescod has written some very thoughtful articles on REST versus SOAP. See:

http://www.prescod.net/rest/

in particular:

http://www.prescod.net/rest/rest_vs_soap_overview/

SOAP is indeed on the way out but not quite for the reasons most people say. It's not just due to the overhead, or even the incompatibilities. These are symptoms of the fact that it's solving the wrong problem. SOAP is a way to tear your program apart and put half of it on one machine and half of it on another. REST is a design strategy that requires the absolute minimum of coordination, thus it scales somewhat better, like the web itself.

That said, magical RPC-injection protocols like SOAP often work really well for quick and dirty apps within a single organization.
I use the net to spin up the brain before working, and I use it during the day to keep the brain spinning. My work can be boring at times, and checking the net - news feeds, email, forums - keeps me up.

If I'm disconnected, then I'm still filling that spin up time reading something that is not related to my work. I'm rated well at work, and am known as being very productive and reliable. I don't tell them how I work, I just do it. They seem happy, based on what they tell me and what they put in my bank account.
Thank you, you've touched a point which didn't cross my mind, but is very valid, and that is time. I like the idea of using a blog for the frequent posts and video for those big milestones.

I feel there is an importance to put a face to my company because I believe I can better share my enthusiasm and passion.
I've not tried it yet, but we have to do a particular distributed crawler app for something and it's been recommended to look at it. For me if a language is amazing at something then it would be prudent to focus on that. I often use more than one language in my projects - the best language for the particular job.
Distraction or Down Time a Part of What We Are?  "Is It a Cheetah?"
I'm going to try this - I've got a television upstairs that's basically just a computer with a giant 42" monitor (It isn't connected to any kind of television broadcast, because I download the shows I watch).

I'm going to try and use this as my Internet machine since it's primary purpose has always been entertainment.
The game doesn't look that bad... a sort of mix between air hockey, ping-pong, and handball. Though, just looking at him crouched over to play makes my back hurt. And enthusiastic players slapping away with their hands and forearms might cut or bruise themselves quite often on the table edges.

And, it's got some problems as a bar or arcade game -- every point results in the ball rolling away on the floor somewhere to be retrieved, and there's no clear path to making it coin-operated.
idiotism
I found this interesting because I own the domain name bulletball.com
A blog is definitely the way to go. I had the same dilemma when I wanted to start blogging about the start-up I'm working on. The vlogging approach is really time consuming and over the last 4 months I've only done a couple to go alongside the blog. Videos are a good way to mix it up and maybe attract people that don't like reading blog. They're also great for sharing with friends on Fb etc, but given the time it takes they're better as an occasional feature to a regular blog. This gives them some novelty value too.
This is exciting. The #1 thing holding back Ruby right now is its aging and leaky implementation. I'd say half my debugging time spent on ruby ends with, "Oh, the implementation of ruby has a bug."

This is not to say the Ruby guys aren't smart and don't work hard, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone.
Guide to Web Hosting: Part 2 - The Uptime Game
"You have a problem, you know the solution, and you keep maintaining the problem because you perceive this problem as not being your fault, but somehow the fault of external factors."

In all seriousness, I don't see how you get this from the my comment, esp. in light of the second paragraph. My basic argument is just that surfing the web is rational for an intellectually curious person in the context of compulsory schooling, but that it's a difficult habit to shake once the context changes and it's no longer rational. I think you're reading too much into this.
Yep. I stopped paying careful attention when I realized she hasn't mastered the very thing she's claimed to master.

Her disinterest in programming has nothing to do with her sex, and much more to do with her (ahem) obvious deficiencies.
You got downmodded, but it's entirely true that there are very good developers with less than great math skills. That said, CS degrees typically require some mastery of the subject.
I work in a similar field. Among their staff levels, ibankers probably have an average rate about $400-$450/hour. To do a deal on the small side (like the ars deal), I would estimate roughly 250 hours. So, somewhere in the neighborhood of $100k.
Erlang may be getting the "recognition" it deserves, but... the "break" it deserves? Really?

Come on guys, give Erlang a break.
Considering this some more, I think this guy is brilliant. He understood that for TV, what was needed was a melodramatic story. By playing up the 'insane dedication' angle, whether they loved or hated his invention, he ensured maximum memorable/emotional impact.

And thus he's getting secondary news coverage, like here.

I suspect he wanted that far more than their money, because if we assume (like he does) that Bulletball is fun to play, the real key to its success will be increased awareness.
Huge, epic fail. I work with some extremely smart developers. When ever a task involving SOAP comes up, faces drop around the room. RESTful APIs (be they XML or JSON, the latter often preferable) are far, far easier to consume.

I don't have a link, but I remember hearing Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Services claim that the services they provided in both REST and SOAP saw an order of magnitude traffic to the REST interface.
Well, you can pay to get balls to play with.
How to stop spam from free email accounts
"SOAP stacks will automatically parse that 2-3 digit number into the correct data type for the platform/language you are using."

JSON stacks not only do that, but they do it better because the set of available data structures in JSON is constrained to a sensible subset - you don't end up having to replicate complex classes in multiple different languages just to get a chunk of data from one place to another.

Has anyone in the history of computing ever really taken advantage of the "transport layer agnostic" aspect of SOAP?
Math for IT? No. For real computer science? Absolutely.

If you don't understand math you can't understand all the cool parts of computer science. 3D - it's all math. AI - from minimax to clustering algorithms: math. Writing CRC and hash algorithms: math. Security in general: math. And it goes on and on.

If you know math you can build a raytracer in a weekend, like this guy: http://www.superjer.com/pixelmachine/

Really, who wants to build CRUD (DB create/retrieve/update/destroy) applications his whole life?
I'd be a bit scared of using Erlang for crawling since the actual text processing capabilities of the language are pretty weak. Crawling seems like the kind of thing where you'd want a message queue style system (potentially written in Erlang) that co-ordinates plenty of individual crawling processes written in a language better suited for text handling.
I was also wondering whether web surfing is really a "waste of time". Would I be better off if I had never come to this site, never read hacker news comments and pg essays and using all this "wasted" time to become better in a programming language, instead? I know, you will probably be more succesful if you stay focused but there is so much interesting information in the internet and what the hell, you only leave once.
http://www.getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.2/ here is where u can find a firefox 3 RC 1 compatible release.
Could someone explain what this is to a Rails guy?
Tamarin Tracing Internals, Part I
Ok, while she may have point about incomprehensible math instructors, the rest of this was filled with blatant ignorance.

But that may not be her fault. If she doesn't see programming as a career, then it's possible that the field is incorrectly portrayed in higher ed. If I were to describe what a programming career looks like, it would go something like this:

You solve interesting, hard problems every day, and not just "math" problems. You solve communication issues, design issues, and you learn a hell of a lot about the way other businesses operate.

You get a flexible work schedule, not a 9-5 hell (unless you choose corporate life). For women, this can be especially helpful. As a woman who kept working through the whole family starting phase, I can tell you that almost no other career will allow you such freedom in working hours. Get in at 8, go home at 3 to pick up the kid, code from home 8pm-12am after the child goes to bed. Hours in the office matter less than the quality and size of your contribution. I can't imagine being a single mom with rigid work hours; I'm being judged on what I produce, rather than how warm my office chair is.

You have so many avenues in programming to start your own business, be it a consulting shop, or a start-up business. Build a webbapp, a desktop app, or help others do that.

Here's my favorite: your programming skills apply to EVERY industry, interest, or hobby. No matter what you love the most, there is a way to use programming to further that thing, streamline that thing, advance that thing. Try to find an exception.

So how interesting is a programming job? How convenient? How suited to women? I say: A Whole Fucking Lot.
Yea, like darts.
What the blogger said,
1. Whenever a message is sent to a recipient that has never received a message from that account before, modify the message to include a link at the top that the recipient can click on if the message is spam.

--This is probably something workable, but then it needs a certain proactive work from users which I think people who don't clear their inboxes don't do normally.

2. Limit the number of new recipients that can receive email from that account to a few dozen a day.

--nope, won't work. What about jobseekers who spam employers. As much as this is spam, there are diamonds in the rough.

3. If the number of spam reports from that account exceeds a certain threshold, shut the account down.

--workable. but what if the user's computer is spambotted? not everyone is an expert. probably a few days warning before a shutdown is a workable solution here. again, it'd be better if the server informs the user of spam flagging and intercept outgoing messages until they agree to a TOS. If there're still TOS violations, shut it down.

4. Require a valid credit card number to set up a new account.

-- nope. privacy issues. just not worth it.
Oh come on people... This one was rougher than the rest. Americans watch 4 hours of TV per day? Source? (Ok, there's Google, but that's not the good-old footnoted style.) Next, a bunch of fairly obvious things (TV is a time sink, so are other forms of distractions, and distractions prevent you from doing work!), then a submarine (plug for a personal investment).

The "solution" of separating out a work machine isn't particularly insightful either. I've done this before and I bet many others have also, and its efficacy depends highly on the person. (interestingly, I would guess that those who are very good at focusing wouldn't have to employ as many tactics to prevent their distraction).

Indeed, this wasn't the peer-reviewed kind of essay that normally gets linked here, but probably an inspirational thought-stream writing. Pardon my lack of tact, but given the ever-warm feedback to all pg essays alike, this one was, frankly, comparatively bland.
Grape: a New Desktop
I finally got to the bulletball website. It looks like a fun game.
I'm particularly interested on your take on various forms of distractions, given your response to my question about frustration.

Distraction can be used to kill frustration, but there's likely a secret, a skill, or a science in utilizing it, in the sense that it takes your mind off of something enough to change your approach, reinvigorate your interest, or whatever.

You talked about working on completely irrelevant projects for "long" periods of time. That somewhat qualifies as a thorough distraction. But then you say something like you find yourself return with greater competence [1]. From experience, have you found a good strategy? As in, magnitude of problem vs. type/duration of distraction?

I'm further interested in anybody else's "skillful use of distraction"; do share :-)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191503
2-4%.
>After spending 20+ years (these were BulletBall years) as a manager making millions for major corporations across America, I decided in 2004 to "step out of the box" and work towards realizing my own dreams.
"School did so much to suck the joy out of reading that reading was simply out of the question for a good five year chunk of my life."

This is quite a curious thing to say, and I'm taking it quite literally: assuming this is true, how is it that you know so much?

Have you "made up" for your lost time after high school? Or were you actually learning, but latently? If the former, that's pretty amazing efficiency. If the latter, what part of school do you think it was that caused this?
my co-founder also founded a t-shirt design/print company. He can do the sourcing, design, and printing for your apparel, and you'd be helping a fellow YCHN member:-). He is based out of Portland, ME, so pretty local to Boston. He recently did a couple of projects for Dana-Farber for the Boston Marathon. Send me an email if you'd like to talk to him about your project. Thanks!
99,843% of the time I hit content online that is video only, I immedietely hit the back button. Unless it's funny.
When comparing "access to the world's information in one click" to "lefora.com is forums made easy—it's like blogger for forums" you're confusing the mission statement with the value prop. Value prop answers "what's the practical use right now? What problem does it solve for me?". Mission statement is "where do you take it next? what's the pattern to your actions?".

Your users wouldn't care for your mission statement nearly as much you yourself or your investors should. The press, well those might be either way - depending on who is their target readership.

One important exception to the rule is if your mission is touchy-feely, like "our new GM seeds are solving world hunger, one seed at a time" (for a GM research lab). That would make good press for any newspaper.
I tell you what we did (which seems to be working):

1) Launch your free product (the free part of the freemium).
2) By the time you get it tuned up, you'll have a strong sense of where the pain is (and hopefully a reasonable guess of where to put the pay wall).
3) Put up a little permission marketing form that essentially says, "Hey-- we're going to launch a premium product soon that does this, this, and this. If you want to hear about the launch, give us your email address". Measure how many of your free customers sign up for that.
4) Look at the resultant list for interesting email addresses and send a personal email to some of them asking them if they'd want to dive in as pilot customers and help shape the product.

#3 helps you confirm your understanding of the value of your premium offering. #4 gets you your first customer.

If you don't have the sales-fu to reach out to pilot customer candidates, just launch it quietly, email a subset of the list who signed up to hear about it, and measure signup percentage (which will be WAY lower than you think it will be).
How To Structure a Yahoo-Google Search Deal: It’s All About The Tail and the Torso
Here's the one I have coined recently, trying to explain to my friends why I bought Dyson vacuum:

Dyson is the iPod of vacuum cleaners.

How's that? :)
What if your work _is_ the internet? What if I need to be connected in order to test web applications, update my sites, and commit to subversion and git file repositories?

I'm going to try out 8aweek..
Around 2% and fees in the tens of thousands.