skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It makes my brain hurt how dumb Scoble is. I've never done any heroin in my life, but every time I read Scoble it makes me want to find the fattest, rustiest needle I can, load it with heroin mixed with whatever mystery powders I can find, and jam the whole works as far as it will go right through my eyeball into an artery deep in my brain. Because feeling my brain dying from an intraventricular brain injection of way too much heroin, comet bleach, and flea powder would be better than how I feel after reading Scoble.

In this case, I want to replace my cerebrospinal fluid with dangerous narcotics and harsh industrial chemicals because of two particular stupid as fuck comments.

"We will never get an open Web back if these two deals happen."

Um. No. We will. Because microo!softbook will be a monstrous nightmare that will be plagued by a Vista-like level of incompetence of creating applications that are pleasant to use. Meanwhile, cool young people, who all have macs anyway, having realized that while their parents had to use shitty computers, they don't, will have already eschewed microsoft before it became the sterile chimera microo!softbook, will stop using facebook, because, hey, it's 2009 or 2010 and facebook was so 2003. Besides, it turns out that Ning in better and closer to the maclike good experience they expect anyway.

"This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than a week."

Um...this hasn't created any value. It certainly doesn't bring them into first place in a week. How do I know? Because I'm not a moron like scoble. In order for this to work, steve ballmer would have to successfully execute this strategy. Steve Ballmer is too disconnected from the experience of the end user to do this. He is not able to be the visionary and he's also not able to correctly recognize either this flaw, or the person who he should delegate the job too, as evidenced by the massive failures in Vista and the X-Box production problems. I don't mean to be trashing Ballmer, he's done extremely well for himself, but he can't lead this battle, and hasn't been great at delegating to people who can. God is in the details. Ballmer can't make them work.

That a guy who basically got his start licking microsoft's asshole with his tongue in public thinks it might work doesn't mean much.
The countries weren't cherry-picked for this analysis -- the article says that they were data sets published in Science for different purposes.
It has a similar sprawling ticky-tack faux automobile-metropolis feel, and the food except in places like downtown generally sucks.
Google or Microsoft: Yahoo Should Pick Both
Microsoft Braces for Major Customer Shift
The real thing that you should focus on is avoiding being beholden to the network effect.

Build something that is useful with for a single user, but better for a thousand users.
> Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

Am I the only one not startled by this? My reasoning was as follows... I can think of a ton of jobs that are traditionally dominated by females (elementary school teacher, housekeepers, talk-show hosts) that I happen to not want to do. It has nothing to do with me being male or some perceived descrimination against me by the females in the field. I just don't have any interest in being those things.

I would assume the same thing holds true for a female and some professions that just happen to be historically dominated by males. I mean, some of the disparity probably is because of gender-based slight, but it seems rational to expect that some jobs just aren't interesting enough to attract people in droves of equal and politically correct gender ratios.

> The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

My guess is this is because they have the option to choose careers, rather than being forced to accept whatever pays well and is safe.

> Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off, and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields, a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback.

I have seen this in talking with my girlfriend about her career goals. She is a chemical engineer, and often fears that taking time off to raise kids will doom her career.
San Jose is not a nice looking place. However, the locals are pretty cool. There are nicer places on the peninsula and in the south bay, if you are looking for suburbs. Menlo Park, San Mateo, Mtn. View, Palo Alto etc.
Last paragraph of the article: "A very interesting variation of this is when you apply Metcalfe's Law not to the entire network of users, but rather think of a social network as a loosely grouped set of connections. In that case, some local networks might have achieved critical mass, and if they are big enough, they will be retained. However, if the smaller networks around any given group start collapsing, then sometimes even the large networks will get pulled down with them."

This also explains why some people just "don't get" facebook, while others do; and these two groups have a hard time understanding each other. It all has to do with critical mass.
Wow, I don't know what it was like when jwz wrote this (12 years ago?) but these days Palo Alto is the epicenter of mediocre expensive food. Mountain View, however, has some really great ethnic food for cheap, especially on Castro Street.

The other thing that people don't really know until they've lived here is that you typically don't have to live in suburban hell so long as you know where the "main drags" are. The peninsula / south bay used to be all orchards with "main streets". Today there's a "main street" in nearly every city that is worth living near -- walking distance, and only a slight premium (University Ave excluded, thanks to Facebook). Santa Cruz Ave in Menlo Park, Castro St in Mountain View, 4th St in San Mateo, and California St in Palo Alto come to mind.
Alfred Saforo’s Journal | Tech Jaws
Apple’s market share of PCs over $1,000 hits 66%
SFO International is pretty cool. Very open and light with decent A/C.
Internet best for consumer research, less for purchasing, survey finds
The author pretty much seems to say "What will happen if everyone starts coding?" It is amazing how some people don't try to extract what is valuable to them from Tim's book, PG's essays etc and simply try to reiterate why it won't work for them.

This guy is a blubist.

(I am using http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html to my advantage ;) Search for defeatist)
SFO is one of my favorite airports because they designed it for convenience. There is a parking garage at the core of the airport, so you can drive into this garage and drive in a circle and park adjacent to your terminal, and walk out on the axis directly to your flights. The new very large international terminal links directly to BART, which is quite a good idea as well. I've always had a very low opinion of SJC.
Hold up. Living in Boston, I can say that winter is just not that fun. I can't say, go for an enjoyable jog, for at least 4.5 months of the year. I basically hibernate for 5 months of the year. This is true for large swaths of the northern US. Is it really so bad in CA, or is the grass always greener?
I would tell you to stop using Windows.

But I won't.

...because you and I might be competing in the same space.
I'm confused as to how SJC could be considered a much better airport than SFO. Many cheap flights do go to OAK but Virgin and JetBlue also fly out of SFO. I've never had a problem finding a cheap flight that goes out of SFO, if I have time to plan ahead.
Convince me to use Subversion over Clearcase
I don't need convincing really, but what would the benefits and downfalls be of switching SCM solutions?

Software department of ~500 engineers. Multiple sites. Windows, Linux, Unix, and Solaris boxes. Currently using ClearCase for version control and ClearQuest for issue tracking.

Any good case studies out there for moving away from the Rational Suite to a cheaper, better solution?
Perhaps I was insufficiently specific. The problem isn't that the conception of the median programming job is wrong. The problem is that technical people of both genders are often completely unaware of the existence of better jobs. Sometimes, when people talk of career prospects of becoming a programmer, they say it with such disdain that they might as well be talking about becoming a drone.
This is great. These are incredibly exciting new developments.

There was a great one I read a few days ago about our conception of space as a continuum being an approximation. Space might be better understood as being quantized.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080514-black-holes.htm...

There is also the idea of doubly special relativity, in which there is a shortest unit of space, which all frames of reference measure the same that is analogous to the speed of light being the fastest light can go and all frames measure the same.

When I studied philosophy in college, my interest was philosophy of mind/consciousness studies. My papers were mostly papers that examined the philosophical implications of assuming space was quantized and doubly special relativity were true on theories of consciousness. I had to waste entirely too much effort arguing that philosophers should pay really close attention to the science when doing mind or ontology. I'm excited to see that these developments are unfolding. This means there is a huge space in academic philosophy to merge this new information in physics with philosophical theories about consciousness, spacetime, and ontology.

These developments might indicate that once in a generation revolutions in physics and philosophy are imminent over the next five to eight years (assuming the academic philosophers can hold the circle jerks long enough to hear and grok what the physics people are saying.).
i love san jose, and the whole bay area. i feel so deprived not being in cali right now. i would state reasons but i don't really know them. my best guess is the mesh of civilization and nature. the hills are so beautiful, the trees are lush, starbucks is on every corner yay!
That's a little (edit: lot) misleading. Apple's market share of PC's sold direct in stores over 1,000 is at 66%.

The 66% would not hold if internet or corporate sales are included. Therefore your title exaggerates apples market share in computers over 1,000 by at least 2x, possibly more (I don't know the exact numbers.)
Undoubtably some tech jobs are suitable only for hermits. But the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them.
should i have rambled on about how boto helped me get going on SQS and S3 super-quickly? would another anonymous "yeah, this helped out in ways i wont describe" testimonial really be more valuable than just "thumbs up because i like it" ?

i realize "thumbs up to boto" is pretty simple, but its darn honest.
Webmonkey.com returns
for some reason i always work the best in a chaotic environment (i.e. tv, people, music, etc)
Maybe because he doesn't want to make the Fundamental Attribution Error?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
In my last job I helped move the company from sourcesafe to subversion. Which was pretty decent. Since then I've been using darcs, mercury and not git.

I'd recommend using Git. It's by far the best version control system out there. Everything else sucks in one way or another.
On the other hand, San Diego's weather is probably the best in the whole US, the people (except maybe for the far-righters and far-lefters) are pretty cool, there's nice history, beach access, culture ... sigh. Wish I was there.
I, for one, plan to fire upon them with my trusty sonic cannon.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,385048,00...
Our founders were the hardest working people of their time.

I think that distinction probably goes to their slaves.
You're supposed to say "+1 boto." Alternatively, "boto FTW" for style points. "Thumbs up" is not tolerated on Hacker News because, as it happens, Roger Ebert is a sworn enemy of Paul Graham.
I don’t agree with Robert on this one. Google has billion of pages and data to crawl and index. Facebook data might still be worth; nevertheless it’s not that big of deal for Google to worry about. Microsoft already has an ad deal on facebook; I don’t see a rationale behind buying facebook for search
I have to agree, while some of it is interesting, much of it has fortune-cookie like application.
The grass is always greener. In CA (for the most part) the climate is mild and you could jog all year without much trouble.

Funny aside: CA is also one of the most varied states in climate. There are places that are under snow for 4-7 months of the year; you'd think you were in WI or MN except there are mountains.
Comcast invests in P2P video-delivery startup
I've lived in Boston (Allston and Cambridge). Weather in San Jose trumps Boston winters for sure. However, Boston proper in the summer is better than San Jose in the summer. If you grew up elsewhere, one thing you may miss is hot, steamy summers. The weather in the Bay area is almost always a little bit chilly. In San Francisco, the weather in the summer is actually colder than it is during the rest of the year.
Interesting and enjoyable comparison, but it sounds like the author was looking for reasons to justify his love of Erlang over the alternative. It's more "Why I will continue to use Erlang over Scala" than "Differences between Erlang and Scala."
~8 years ago webmonkey was my first introduction to web development, six months ago I started coding Python and I see their featured tutorial is "Get Started With Python."

On a different note this is the 2nd major development learning resource that has launched in the past two weeks, the first been Google's Doctype (http://code.google.com/doctype/)
If it were as popular as Perl5 still is, it would be more popular than Python or Ruby. One has to be careful about how much the hype surrounding a language effects your view of its actual popularity.

But, you're right that a lot of new companies and projects are being started on Python and Ruby that would have used Perl five years ago. The two languages are also having more luck at stealing Java developers than Perl ever was.
"We don’t mow our lawns, we don’t clean our homes, we don’t cook our meals, we don’t drill for oil, we won’t build oil refineries, we simply don’t do much anymore".

This is a sign of prosperity not a lack of hard work. We also don't cut our own trees, build our own furniture, use printing presses or churn our own butter. Instead, we've been able to reassign our time and talents to more productive or fulfilling tasks while leaving or paying for tasks such as these to machines or to a lesser amount of people.

One caveat, in TFHWW, Ferriss often comes off as sort of a douche, but that doesn't mean there aren't great concrete ideas and references throughout the book - the key is knowing which ones are applicable to your life. The book is by no means perfect, but it's certainly better than the self-improvement fluff and vapor proliferating itself all over the Amazon best seller lists.

The blog post author seems to confuse working hard and working smart.
Modern armies share structure that is essentially identical. Section/Squad (8-10) -> Platoon (30-40) -> Company (100-120)
I love working at night because it's quiet. I can hear myself think.

You can tell how productive I am by observing the volume of the music I'm listening to. The louder it is, the less I'm accomplishing.

Actually, the more I get involved with my work the quieter I set my music to be.
> the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them.

This is a slightly weaker statement than the one made above, but I still don't agree with it. Surely there is variance, but the median programmer is far far less social than the median (for example) doctor.

Yes, there are Tim Brays on our side who are quite socially oriented and radiologists and virologists who never see actual patients on their side, but every real programming job requires you to be alone and focused on a computer for long stretches of time. Is this incorrect somehow? What programming positions don't require this?

(My fiancee is a resident, and I assure you that she does not spend long stretches of time on singularly focused tasks like programmers do - you will have to have a spectacularly convincing argument to convince me otherwise)
While nice people, I would say the locals in SJ are "provincial" people, mostly boring.

Anybody that is interesting and that has traveled a bit, will avoid that hellhole at any cost.

And let's not mention the fakery of places like Santana Row. It is almost comical.

Addition: Call me crazy, but I think that living in a boring enviroment, might make one boring, over time. Just as boring jobs affect a person's brain, there is a chance that living in a place where there is little human interaction, (car driving everywhere), might affect a person in the long run.
No matter how strong a individual is, the enviroment around affects us a great deal.

Live in a interesting place, where there is a lot going on, might affect creativity in the good way.
Chinese Gov: All websites are to stop all entertainment activities for 3 days. May 19 to May 21
To all propaganda departments, online propaganda units and foreign affairs offices, and to the various bureaus and websites in all cities and counties:
The State Council has gazetted May 19-21 as national days for mourning. In line with the spirit of the Central Foreign Affairs Office's emergency notice, the requirements are as follows:
Agreed about the "downtown". To me it feels little larger than the downtown/college area in my home town, Eugene, which is only about 130K people, instead of a million.

In terms of a 'real' downtown, such as that found in a European town like Padova, Italy, the European one is "fractally better" - on every level and scale it's nicer, from the interesting bits of frescoes in Piazza San Nicolo to the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, to the overall layout of human-scale streets.

The depressing thing about all this is that you'd like to take bits and pieces from all over and utilize them to create the perfect place, which is very easy to envision, but impossible to realize.
Ask YC: How to choose hosting platform and programming language for product
What is the best hosting solution available for a media related startup. Does the programming language you choose to develop the product, depend on the hosting solution? The reason for this question comes from the fact that Google AppEngine supports only python. Appreciate any help from HN folks that have successfully deployed their product on one of these hosting platforms. Thanks
Take Fedora (Linux) with you on your USB
maybe i misunderstood this but did he say that you could take your Fedora-OS with you on a small USB-memory and install into any other computer?
and that it would conatin all your latest saves etc?
Report: Government's Cyber Security Plan Is Riddled With New Spying Programs
I've been told by many people that I should play basketball not based on my abilities (I have terrible eye-hand coordination) but based on my height.

Was that wrong in any moral or normative sense?

I'll grant that the underlying positive belief is incorrect, but what makes giving out well intentioned (if bad) advice wrong?
Also, I don't know how uncommon that perfect storm is. Isn't one of Starbucks' primary products convenience? They're all over the place so that it's always really easy to change your plans to include a "Stop in at Starbucks" step. So, not that they've targeted DD for overflow pick-up, but they've positioned themselves so that whenever someone is thinking they might want some coffee and wherever they're standing doesn't have it, they don't have to go far. DD just needs to keep from being a place like that.
Replace "Gen Xers" with "Humans" and "Work" with "Enterprises" and you've got something.

Start your own business.
http://www.morganquitno.com/cit07pop.htm#25

Safest city >500,000 population.
What's with all the hate for the South Bay?

Seriously, I see posts like this from people in San Francisco all the time. I understand that they like where they live, but why the seething hatred for San Jose? Nobody's making them go there. :)

Does this sort of whining happen in other metro areas too?
How is San Diego for tech jobs and startups? I generally like to work at startups and would look at rails type jobs (if my startup does not work out for some reason). If it does work out, I'd be interested in whether there is a decent population of high tech folks in San Diego as a talent-pool.

Edit: I'm in Boston, now, for comparison.
I once visited Morocco, and one bus company offers passage on either of two identical buses at different prices. The more expensive bus is just less crowded.
I actually didn't argue with that. Maybe the 'typical' programming job is a terrible fit for the 'typical' woman.

But there's a solution. Forget the 'typical' programming job. Even if the typical tech career would suck, it's still possible that of all possible careers, there a tech career that's the best for you. I think this is largely true in the startup world. And I think that if the press on startups focused less on founder youth, geekiness, and round-the-clock machismo, and more on the social benefit produced, the freedom gained, and the excitement experienced, we'd start to see very different people founding companies and working in computers. One might even suggest that's already starting to happen.

Many fields can have long periods spent alone, honing one's abilities. Lawyers can. Writers can. Musicians can. Housewifes can. It may be a defining hallmark of technical careers, but I think it's far overrepresented in both the media, and our own heads.
'Second Life' is frontier for AI research
How Did That Chain Letter Get To My Inbox?
Having lived in Albania during the bring of communism, and having been in similiar lines myself, I can tell you that it was not the price that was the problem.

There was no FOOD!! that was the problem. You either bought the bread, or went to bed starving. It was a period of transition (about few months) that no matter how much money you had, food was hard to find.

The rationing was a result of scarcity. If priced the food such that there were no lines, only the rich would afford it, and the rest would just starve.

Well, guess what? Those starving people eventually would have had it enough, and throw your goverment out sooner than later.
By rationing during hard times, everybody was guaranteed some kind of minimum level of nutrition, and avoided some people hoarding food, while others went to bed hungry.