skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely I would. I would have my own station built that I could travel to when I'm feeling like a vacation. It would have a rotating deck to simulate gravity, and I could stay there in case of anything serious happening on earth.

I would also like a ship that could take me to the moon and other places as well. That way I could go on "road trips" when I'm on vacation in my orbiting space hotel.

The criticism of space travel is that there are other things that you could spend your money on, or other problems that need to be corrected here on earth, before moving on. This classifies the act of space travel as recreational, which I think is untrue. Think about the explorers thousands of years ago. Sure, there were other things the government and other wealthy people could have spent their money on - decent roads or aqueducts/sewage systems are good examples. But so much came out of their exploration and expansion, and I think that space exploration by our wealthy individuals will produce solutions that can be applied on earth as well as in space. Wasn't Velcro supposed to come out of the race to the moon?
Retsaot is Toaster, Reversed: Quick ‘n Dirty Firmware Reversing
Excellent article! I worked in a large consulting company for some time, and the up-or-out model was the norm there. And, you know what, the consulting arm definitely had a very good percentage of very good people!

Daniel
Ask YC: Open-source social networking platform
I'm looking to create my own social network, but with more customization than Ning offers (and I'm willing to hack). Any recommendations?

I've looked at Insoshi (RoR), and Elgg (LAMP). Any others?
"3) we are very definitely not fixing these problems: the level of cleantech investment is tiny, etc."

KP has $600mil earmarked for green/cleantech. Sequoia has stated numerous times that they are actively looking for green/cleantech (McAdoo used the term "browntech" in his talk at Startup School but no one else seems to know what that means). These two are, admittedly, the top of the VC food chain, and they've been so successful by being ahead of the curve just a wee bit more than the rest of the industry. But, where they go, the rest of the industry will follow.

I think you're underestimating how much people in the valley are thinking about the big problems that they are able to solve--the global economy is a two stage process, involving both government (the largest degree, and something that startups can't have a notable effect on) and business (the big ones that already have clout...startups don't have the power to affect global economic change, though Google and Microsoft do to a degree). But energy is definitely getting attention in the valley. Virtualization is a huge and growing market, partly because it saves tremendously on power requirements in the data center, and lots of money and time is being spent on it. Batteries, boring old batteries, are getting funded.

I think the problem is that you're expecting software and hardware people to move into a completely different field. Sure, some really smart people are working on stuff that might not meet your definition of solving big problems...but if they switch gears to a completely different field (which most of your specified problems are) it'll take years for them to get up to speed on those subjects. Big problems take a lot of research and a lot of knowledge to solve. Most startup guys are not independently wealthy--they need to make their startup pay quickly or they have to go back to their cubicle at MegaCorp and solve even smaller problems and waste away wishing for what could have been.

But, as I mentioned, the money is flowing into energy related startups, and the rate of flow is increasing. Startups will follow the money.
This stuff is fascinating though :-)
I don't know about anyone else, but my first thought after watching this was... Replicators!

Self assembling and repairing machines are pretty neat though. Anyone know what kind of software techniques they used (if any) to make the parts work together?
Deadly Sins of Web Design
Maybe, but only after I have traveled to every country on earth.
Space Tourism would definitely be on my 'bucket list'.
OQO Hacked to Run Leopard - Now World's Smallest Mac
This is why your printer never works.
Only when there is somewhere to actually go. I hate flying, and I can only imagine that flying to space would be even less comfortable. Once I've done what I want to do on earth, I'd love to head for the stars with no plans for return...but just going into space and coming right back down sounds like a horrible way to spend a weekend.
My favorite part was the end (when it commits suicide). Still, this was very cool to watch. I hope that this progresses very quickly. I want to see iRobot style servants in my lifetime.
No. Suppose you're that good. Then you don't think you're that good.
How would it tell the difference between desired and non-desired behavior?
Must have been this one: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2710812/c64users-guide00toc-introd...

When computers still came with a manual that taught you how to program...
He was the original "be good" writer, 2004-2008 B.P (Before Paul)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site+b...

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2008/03/edge-principles-frie...
OK, I phrased to the extreme, I will try and leave it at "be flexible."
In IT, I've found that the degree only has any influence on your first job. After that, future employers only care about your work history - no one cares anymore about your degree, your GPA, or the school. So if instead of going to college, you can find an employer who's willing to hire a high school grad, you may be 4 years (and many $$$) ahead of the game.

Does anyone know if this is the case in other industries? Does the degree make a difference to a prospective accounting clerk if she already has 5 years of work experience?
Riding Rails: RailsConf keynotes: Kent Beck, Joel Spolsky, Jeremy Kemper, yours truly
It was intended to be funny and ironic, I'm definitely not trying to impersonate the great rms. It originated as an abbreviation for "rupert murdoch sucks."
True. However, one might expect that as drug lords get richer, the stability of legitimate businesses becomes more attractive. So if they can earn $5 million/year selling coke (but worrying about their safety) or $500,000/year selling the data-mining software they developed to keep their capos in line, the latter may be attractive.

In addition, such techniques might be passed along by folks like this guy: http://www.scribd.com/doc/10429/Former-Marijuana-Smuggler-Se...
So it's the end of the speculation, but not the end of the speculation because the data -> useless?
I helped my dad start an office furniture store back in the 90's, so I learned a bit about ergonomics by osmosis.

The central problem with kneeling chairs is that one of the most important ergonomic principles is that you have a natural (and necessary) propensity to shift positions every few hours. Kneeling chairs don't allow you a range of positions the way that conventional chairs, exercise balls, standing, etc. do. The ergonomics people I knew always went out of their way to say kneeling chairs were actually a bad idea.

Having said that, whatever works for you, works for you. But for people considering a kneeling chair, you want to be careful not to just try it in the store for 10 minutes, then buy it.
I think the real problem is his choice of languages. He's pretty much doomed.
I fall into some grey area...

All I can remember is waiting for my dad to bring home the latest "3-2-1 Contact" so that I could look at the basic program that was in it. Then my dad broke the computer and it wasn't until 10+ years later that I was in a C programming class in college.

I kinda skipped all the good stuff, so even with an early start I'm playing catchup.
I'll wait for affordable orbital travel; I'd prefer not to settle for Spaceship2.
I was recently looking around or something similar, and came across a project called LovdByLess (RoR):

http://lovdbyless.com/

I can't say I've used it, but it looks like it's worth checking out.
To be perfectly honest... this is one of the two selfish reasons I want money. To touch the sky is even a goal that seems reasonable in this day and age and I know that if I work hard I will see it happen.
It's kind of an out-lier but Engines of Creation. Not strictly about computers, but it had the first description of hypertext that I had seen.

If we really have to go 8-bit then the TI-BASIC manual I had for my 99/4A. I had no secondary storage, so I'd type in 100 lines of code and run it. Then retype it all and make some changes and run it again. And then have to turn the damned thing off (losing everything) because my parents wanted to use the TV. Bastards.
This has to be false. Apple knows the current screen is already almost too small for the virtual keyboard.
Yes, if in the future it were possible to take your family with you. What better way could there be to teach your kids to dream big than to show them first hand what the Earth looks like from outer space?
Package management is modern UNIX-y. I'm talking about the process where you download a single file that contains an application (a disk image or a tarball, say) then perform a process to install the app (dragging or "./configure && make && install").

These OS X / UNIX techniques compared to Windows' "download an EXECUTABLE that does all the installation for you" is like night and day.
Damn straight. His "Thinking Forth" also. Abrash's "Zen of Assembly" was also another memorable book.
Well, they would choose the idea only if they like it, so imo its not that bad. I mean you pitch your idea to somebody, if they like it, they are in (pretty much like finding a co-founder), not sure if they have any say in features?
I am a libertarian capitalist, and I agree there has been a government-inspired (Fed-inspired, really) transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Let's say you are a smart hacker and I offer you this "deal": you put in $15K, I will lend you $150-300K at very low interest rates, which you can invest as you see fit. The gains (minus the low interest paid) are yours, and in the meantime you can also charge me reasonable expenses. If you fail, you get to walk away, with no personal liability. Will you take this deal?

That was the deal private equity, hedge funds got from the Fed & the banks (aided and abetted by the Fed). In good years, they took great money home. In bad times, many of them go bust, with no personal consequence to themselves.

End result: societal transfer of wealth, from the poor/middle-class to the wealthy. This is not a consequence of a free market. The original sin is the easy credit, supplied to the financially well-connected.
I'm aware of the GRE math test (I took it many years ago). And if everyone took it and appropriate breakdowns were provided (e.g. "Students with SAT between 1300 and 1400 did scored 6 on the national"), that would be a good thing (at least to evaluate math majors). You look for your interval, and find a college that will do well by people like you.

Also, teaching to the test is fine if the test is good. If the test accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do well on a test without knowing the material.

Regarding NCLB, the current mess is the same as the old mess. NCLB just gave teachers someone else to blame.

(1) Most calculus/physics/chemistry tests do a decent job of this for skill levels not too high. Most tests make good students indistinguishable from great ones, but that can be remedied by putting harder questions on. If someone gets a perfect score, the test is too easy.
What I look for in Startups
My experience has been that those who have a problem with me not having a BS are generally the type of...limited individuals I wouldn't want to work with, anyway.
Approaching useless.

And here's some quotes from the article:

"None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients"

"Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there are many more registered users"

Also, note the commenters saying that the count is higher/lower than expected. Plus some not sure what to expect. I'm not hating on Twitter or the OP, just find the data rather meaningless.
I'm aware of the GRE math test (I took it many years ago). And if everyone took it and appropriate breakdowns were provided (e.g. "Students with SAT between 1300 and 1400 did scored 6 on the national"), that would be a good thing (at least to evaluate math majors).

Except that the GRE math test covers nothing that should even remotely be considered appropriate for a undergraduate mathematics curriculum. It is only tangentially related.
Dang. Didn't make the list. Gotta keep workin'...
it will be awesome. Another weeding out of companies that provide not much value. A lot of them, should really be just few guys working form their apartments, getting some revenue back ala Craigslist, and not these big companies, with offices, with lot's of expenses, and "hyped" evaluations. The ecosystem might not support this large companies, and once they burn their vc funding a lot of them will be gone, or just be a lot lot smaller than today, to match what they actually are earning.

Just like earth's mass extinsions, where 60%-80% of the animals died, and new ones came up and flourished, bringing us humans to light.
It's amazing what doors having attended a good university can open. I'm on my second job after graduation, and I could obviously tell that the university I attended had a much larger impact on my hiring than the last years' worth of work experience.
But it might profit the drug lords to Open Source their methods. Lots of small-time players using very effective methods would keep the authorities quite busy and they could also benefit through the shared innovation. Though I'm not sure if I want to see the GPL enforced through hitmen and car bombings.
Ask YC: How self-made weather forecast can be monetized?
assuming it's good enough. Which forecast is better - local or global, short-term (couple of hours) or long-term (hundreds of years)?
We already have diverse legal regimes. Africa? China? Russia?
I have heard the opposite. In large companies, the chaff is sent to do "consulting". Better breaking somebody's else systems than yours. So I guess the top of the chaff was staying, and the really bottom was eventually let go.
Interview With Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, Strands VP
I stand corrected.

Site traffic is definitely a weak metric, and total users indeed probably isn't that interesting.

I find the 200K active users/week and 3M messages quite interesting. I admit, it would be more enlightening to know the distribution -- or at least something like the median number of messages per active user -- but that's a pretty good sense of the reach of Twitter.
The Smear Campaign Against Larry Lessig And Free Culture
The fibula and the safety pin
um assuming its good enough... if you could predict 1 yr in advance and sell the knowledge to brides to be for a couple hundred a pop... you could make quite a killing

you could even offer a money back guarantee... and if the probabilities and prices line up you dont even have to be that good at forecasting
Homesteading the High Seas (or: Will three generations of Friedmans be enough?)
Cory Doctorow on inbox management
Does anyone know where one can get an adjustable table for a little cheaper? $1200 is a little out of my budget.
Don't worry about the monetization here, worry about the forecasting! It's still an unsolved problem. 3 day forecasts on local/national news aren't that accurate. Do better and your technology is worth a lot of money.
I'm running a workshop on Websites, Blogging and Facebook for business this week, and this clip gets a definite play - good commentary for those of us familiar with the networks, and I believe enough information to be insightful (and funny) for those who've only heard of them on TV.
Well... Bill promised Windows 7 by mid 2009. If it fails as completely as Vista, there won't before much long-term value for Microsoft out of the corporate high-inertia market.

Either way, it will be fun to watch.
I actually would have responded just for the "you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible" part.

Note that it doesn't say work 3x longer. I measure time in hours not days, so finishing something 3x faster doesn't mean 120hour weeks, it means finishing something in 13 hours instead of 40.
Move to Israel or Japan.
Inkjets work very well at what they were designed to do: Extract fifty bucks for ink from customers every couple of months for the short life of the $80 printer. The problem is that people think they were designed to print things, which is, in fact, only an afterthought in their design.

Laser printers, shockingly, work every time and run out of toner about once every two years for the average home user. I went through four or five color inkjets before finally learning...my color laser has been working fine for three years now, and has only needed the black toner cartridge replaced once (color toner cartridges are still at about 30% full and have probably another year of service in them). Sure, it cost $800 (it's a networked model, and they've come down since then), but I had already spent more than that on inkjets and ink cartridges over the years. I expect I'll get another several years out of it, and I never have to wonder if my printer will crap out when I really need it to work (which happened numerous times with inkjets).

Not that I'm bitter.
> Also, teaching to the test is fine if the test is good. If the test accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do well on a test without knowing the material.

Sure, but do you really want the federal government to decide the appropriate curriculum across all colleges? "Sorry, we're dropping topology because it's not on the federal recommended list, and we're focusing on test readiness." Um, I'll pass on that.
you better make 10-15 billions, and fast, as the dollar is dropping.
I suggest you to scale your ambitions to more realistic goals.
I am an equal opportunity cringer. I cringe at .NET, Java and Windows. I don't like OSX's lack of package management but, apart from that, I'm OK with it.

Hackers are clever people. It pays to observe them.
> local or global?

Local. I don't care about the temperatures all across the Midwest. I care about the weather where I am right now (Boston).

> short-term or long-term?

short-term, but longer than a couple of hours -- upcoming weekend would be nice.
Have you been applying to large financial institutions because they seem to be the only ones who care anymore these days.

10 or 15 years into your career no one is going to care if you went to Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon or any other school.

You reach a point where the general studies that you took are just assumed and people will begin to want to know the particular niche skills that you have experience with (e.g., you've worked developing an automated trading system or you've worked developing some sort of image processing app).

If I'm interviewing an engineer of 10 years and he mentions more than once where he went to school I am going to hammer him with technical questions. "OK Mr. MIT, let's see if that education really paid off."
I'm not saying it's a great C book, just that it's a popular one; in fact, that's kind of my point.
I think that a well-written language specific book can be much better than the internet, because they can take you from the beginning through advanced concepts in a structured way. This means you can really see how everything fits together, why the language developed the way it did, and how to do things the "right" way.

One example of this is "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" (the Rhino book). In some respects this is exactly the kind of book that the article is criticizing: it's huge, it tries to be a reference book, it's specific to a single technology, it's about something that real programmers should be able to figure out on their own. But it was much quicker to read it than to try and make sense of the scores of tutorials out there that each explain one small part of the language. Yeah, I could have all figured it out anyway, but that doesn't mean it would have been the best way to do it.
Please include locale hints in headlines of specific geographic interest -- an "[NYC]" at the end of this headline would save many people a click.
Every language has its extreme difficulties. In America, you have spelling bees, in France, you have grammar conjugation contests, and in China, you pride yourself on the number of characters you've memorized.

I really despise this article every time I see it. No. I don't despise it, I hate it. I can't read worth a damn in Chinese, but I can speak a dialect of it quite fluently. Its focus on written Chinese is completely unreasonable.
So, the answer to our problems is neither C++, nor Java, nor C#, but rather an unnammed (let me guess: Haskell) statically typed language that no large system has ever been built in.
Here's your alternate article, then:

1) Protein & Fruit (say an omelette & cup of blueberries)

2) Not sugary stuff, ie most cereal, white bread toast, anything that begs to be slathered in Aunt Jemima.

I slept through a year of Trig because of Aunt Jemima.
Why do you choose "dork" instead of "geek?"
At the risk of drifting further afield from the topic, isn't the real solution to to scarce water supplies better filtering and water recycling -- in other words, wouldn't there be plenty of water if we just took what went down the drain, filtered it, and piped it back out again?

Feel free to correct me if I have misunderstood the problem.
Ready To Rumble: Here’s Who Microsoft Will Bring To a Hostile Fight Over Yahoo
I suggest you to scale your ambitions to more realistic goals.

Even if I don't get there, I'll be closer than if I set lower standards to begin with.

Besides, the question was "...if you make it big." so I see no harm in letting my brain run wild with what could be possible. It's actually a great motivator for me.
I read about a company doing this on TechCrunch last year

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/02/use-weatherbill-to-bet-...

Not sure how it's going for them, though they haven't been deadpooled.
And craigslist? Has he been living under a rock?
My psycho-analysis of Steve Jobs is that he blessed the iPhone to avenge the Newton. Avenging the Pippin is probably on his list too.
Wigix wants to kill eBay
Once a million people go to and from space without disintegrating or blowing up on takeoff or landing, I will most likely try it out.
I Am Woman, Hear My (Web) Roar
Heck yeah. I want to be a space dweller. I would love to go on a mission to mars. Especially if we can get some sort of real time communications thing going on.
The Revolution Will Be Twittered
a few of my friends were really wired. one ended up dropping out of high school to program at $150k a year, others at $80k a year. It was an insane time. And it could have been another auction site, but i remember "something" bay. McHenry, IL had a pretty interesting BBS network. If only I was roaming on their instead of roaming on prodigy net.
Wanted: 5 Startups To Change the World
Actually, I think Scala and F# are good incremental solutions that can use existing infrastructure and approaches to scaling. The risks of moving to a language that can perform better static checks but retain the rest of an existing deployment stack are actually quite low.

They also have the advantage of interoperating with dynamic languages such as JRuby, IronPython, and others to allow you to deploy a mixed static/dynamic solution and optimize for which language style is the best fit for particular parts of the solution.
i have a display driver loaded, but its just slow.

so, can i skip right to 'sudo nvidia-settings' ? or do i need to do one of the above steps?