skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not if you're a design student. Nobody uses things developed in design school, they're only for being looked at. (According to my friend in design school, they fail if they don't develop something that "looks different". Apparently none of them have ever read Norman.)
I think I disagree. I can't imagine writing code or a book with voice recognition, even assuming 100% accuracy. The initial dictation isn't the hard part, it's editing that's hard. What commands will we use? "Change that last foo to bar?" That still seems pretty tedious.

I could do without the mouse, though. I would rather press a link with my finger than move my hand all the way over to the mouse, then point, then click.
If you need me to elaborate, I can point you at statistics. Vancouver has one of the lowest rates of smoking and obesity and one of the highest life expectancies. Surely, that correlates with gorgeous and fit.
Interesting article. I share the author's sentiments to a large extent. I was born in India, but moved to Nigeria when I was 4 months old as my dad worked there. After having spent 15 years there, I moved back to India, for a total of 7 years, and have already spent more time in the US than in India.

I have no family in the US, and occasionally do think of my family back in India and wonder if I am doing the right thing. I don't think of it as a "price" per se, since I don't regret coming to the US, but having led a such a "nomadic" existence for so long takes its toll. You leave behind social ties, the comfort of your surroundings, friends...

And you start a whole new life everytime you move. Further, I think it changes you as a person. I have noticed that as I have gotten older (and consequently the more times I have moved :D) I have chosen to live a slightly more "hermit" existence. My group of friends has grown smaller and smaller, and I don't mind it so much. Maybe because in the back of my head I fear that its pointless.

I apologize if I went totally off track, but somehow, this article resonated with me (at some level)
I know back when I worked at sconex.com we hosted are application at rackspace with our images at serverbeach. I'm not sure about prices but I know our CEO would not have let them rip us off. And for the most part we seem to have fairly good customer service.

Though I'm just the user interface designer so take that as you will.
Hey Aditya, This may sound off topic, but I followed your profile to your website so that I could find a way to contact you offline. Unfortunately, I could not get to the About page (and could not go to any of the articles or the comments page). So i am resorting to dropping you a line here. I was hoping we could talk, so drop me a email if you are interested. Email's in my profile.

Oh! And thanks for posting this question. I too was thinking along similar lines, and this answered some.
Dan Weinreb’s recap of European Common Lisp Meeting 2008
I've heard that India is not really low cost anymore. Also, IT industry has been booming for years in India. I wonder if there is a "next cheap" country coming up that will catch the next outsourcing wave.

A few years ago I worked with developers from eastern Europe, and they were very capable for 1/3 or 1/4 of the price.
Microsoft might extend XP's life
Google Says Yahoo! Merging With Microsoft is Much Worse Than Simply Adding AdWords
Shneiderman's rules for design
I thought that the links are nofollow until an editor has validated them.
Formerly Ford-Owned, 95% Recyclable Mass-Market Plastic Electric Car to Sell in US in 2009
Snag a Job Brings in $11 Million a Year, Wins Small Business of the Year 2008
Pizza.com Domain Name Sold for $2.6 Million After Vodka.com Sold for $3M
"I've heard that India is not really low cost anymore."

This is not completely true. If you are trying to outsource to companies, sure it is getting more expensive all the time. They have to pay legions of useless managers / "process control" (think ISO 9000) people from the money the programmers earn.

If you have interesting work, you can get good programmers at 25-50 $/hr. You could get work done on a fixed fee basis as well (which is what I would reccomend). 10 - 20 k$ would get you a lot of code (assuming you found good people in the first place).

A lot of people would like to work from home on decent projects vs being at the mercy of the outsourcing companies where you have little control over what technology/projects you work on. The sheer size of the country's outsourcing industry obscures the fact that there are a lot of good programmers who would want to work on more flexible terms, especially for startups. In that sense, India is still very much unexplored territory.
RIM BlackBerry Desperately Working on a Plan to Fend Off the iPhone
Most of the startup stuff going on in Montreal is all in English.
Zed Shaw on Modern Literate Programming
Seventy five percent of top-bloggers either followed no blogs or followed less than 10 blogs daily
You can't outsource passion..
NYCC08: Interview With Douglas Rushkoff and Scott McCloud
The problem isn't porn sites masquerading as banks, it's fake banks masquerading as banks.

A reverse lookup through a search engine is more akin to a blacklist of bad sites, whereas DNS and SSL is essentially a whitelist of good sites. The problem with blacklists is it's inevitable that bad sites will slip through the cracks.

DNS solves the UI problem: the inability of humans to easily remember IP addresses.

As I mentioned in another comment, DNS isn't the problem, it's the allocation of domain names. If squatters and spammers couldn't register domains so easily and cheaply it wouldn't be a problem.
Americans Drive Too Much--What Incentives are Possible?
Computing vs. Computing + X
MCL as Swank Client: an IDE for other Common LISP environments
"Calculus for the Practical Man" first and "Advanced Calculus", by F.S. Woods (1926) then.
You can also get the MySQL dumps (and have been able to for awhile):

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
The little b language: yet another biological DSL
GPL'd Source Code
Recently I took GPL'd source code, simplify them, remove few functions that I don't need, add new functions, and use them in my closed source program as plug-in. Is that legally allowed?

Secondly, I want to release the new source code as MIT license, is that allowed?
Badass.

Not sure I want to spend $80 though. I wonder if I can bleach the markings from an old keyboard or something.
Interesting. Any word on when they'll add hydraulics?
Rather than having a hundred little tiny LCDs, they should have figured out a way to have one large display and some sort of ingenious key assembly/lens system. Seems it would be more economical.
I think there is a shift in thought upon us. Twelve years ago people thought my family was strange because we didn't watch TV; now when you say you stopped watching TV the reaction is more like what you'd get if you told someone you were exercising or on a diet.
The book (Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference) to which this is the epilogue is excellent, I cant recommend it strongly enough.
Aye, but free time combined with mass wealth is a rather new combination.
not a lawyer... not legal advice.

The first is (I think).

However if you want to share any GPL-ed Code it must be released as GPL. GPL is viral like that.
Very cool. Have you seen Pyphant?
http://www.fmf.uni-freiburg.de/service/Servicegruppen/sg_wis...

There's also Vision, which uses Python:
http://mgltools.scripps.edu/packages/vision/overview

I have used Simulink (with Matlab) before, and I think that for certain applications, visual dataflow programming is an extremely useful tool. Would be good to have some mature software for doing this with Python. For example, I could create a custom block with two sockets, name it "foo", double click on the box, and write the source code, i.e.

def foo(arg1, arg2):
....
Is Airbus a company of criminals?

I think that misses the point though. From a rational perspective, of course, companies don't want the US government grabbing their private data. But from an emotional impact perspective, which seems to be the idea of a pitch, it makes it sound sketchy.

Possibly more emotive, and catering to the (annoying) zeitgeist would be "[...] designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands of hackers and cyber-terrorists [...]"
dupe... I posted this earlier.
We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work. Maybe you're tired, hung over, sick, not feeling it, etc. However, even given this caveat, the author's point still stands. Because even if 4 hours of TV watching only translates to 1 hour of useful creative work and 3 hours of blah, that's still a huge amount of cognitive surplus.

But I think that it is like exercise - just because you watch TV for 4 hours, doesn't mean you could have jogged or rode a bike for 4 hours straight instead; your body isn't up to it. Why isn't it up to it? Because you're used to watching TV. So even if we only get a very poor 4:1 conversion rate at first, as we exercise our minds or bodies at doing other things besides TV, as a society we'll improve that exchange rate.
My guess is no. But on the flip side I've never heard of a legal case involving open source code outside the SCO lawsuit and that was more like extortion.

Personally, I've always stuck to using LGPL, MIT, or BSD licensed code in closed source products.
Thanks for the link! I'd always just called them "clicky keyboards" and wondered why you could never find them anymore...
I think you can easily get into trouble by looking at only the very richest people: by definition, they are the 1-in-a-million who took the right risks, and got fantastically lucky. Dropping out could very well be high risk, high reward -- but that doesn't mean the overall expected value is particularly high.

Dropping out can be a necessary condition due to timing reasons alone.

Sure, if you're sitting on an opportunity that is truly once-in-a-lifetime, then dropping out can be justified. But I think that is almost always not the case: if you have opportunities now, you'll have opportunities in a few years once you graduate. Good business ideas are not scarce.

There's also the non-trivial issue of losing your most
energetic years as a young adult (18-22) by spending them
on something other than your life ambition.

I think more people should view entrepreneurship as a career, not as something you do for a few years in your early 20s to make a few quick bucks. IMHO you have 20+ years to start businesses, and there's not much to be gained by rushing. The long-term value of a good education is considerable: credentials, quality of life, networking, and simply a much broader base of knowledge.
That's a heck of a sales pitch!
It wasn't on purpose, actually-- they randomly chose to cover the site.

But there may be a way to submit suggestions to their newsletters. The only feedback spot I see is here:
http://www.komando.com/feedback.aspx
shouldn't this be ask yc or something? this is not reddit.
actually I though once of posting articles on my blog disputing her.
my first job was found through snagajob.com. wow, it's been 8 years.
1. You are allowed to use GPL code in a closed source application. If you distribute that application, you must release the source code to the entire application under the GPL.

How is that different? If you're making something for internal use at your company, it means that you don't have to give back. If you are distributing it to users that are not yourself (or your company), you must make it GPL.

2. You cannot relicense code under different licenses unless the license explicitly says that you can. The GPL doesn't have such a provision.
>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think he messed the maths up

1 wikipedia = 100 Million hours (from earlier in the article)

Annual TV watching = 1,000,000 Million hours

1% of annual TV watching = 10,000 Million Hours = 100 wikipedia's

Correct me if I'm wrong.
If you started from GPL code, what you produce is a derivative work and must always stay GPL. It does not matter how much you simplify, change, fix, improve, or extend: if you start from GPL you have to stay GPL.
Recently I took GPL'd source code, simplify them, remove few functions that I don't need, add new functions, and use them in my closed source program as plug-in. Is that legally allowed?

Secondly, I want to release the new source code as MIT license, is that allowed?

Your work is a derivative work of the original copyrighted source code.

The GPL only gives permission for you to distribute such a derivative work if it is also GPL'd. Thus, if you're only using your code privately, you should be OK. If you actually distribute your closed-source derivative work to others, then you have reused the original copyrighted source code in a manner not approved by the rightsholder's license. You are then violating someone else's copyright.

This applies whether you distribute your derivative code in a closed-source product, or under a non-GPL open-source license (like the MIT license).

(I am not a lawyer but this is pretty basic GPL interpretation.)

Edit: to clarify private use vs. 'distribution' distinction.
Start-Up Junkies: Reality TV show about starting up.
Not an affiliate link; just saw this pop up in iTunes Store.
I disagree. Leisure time for the masses is a recent development. If one observes modern small farmers and seasonal agricultural laborers, reads history on peasants, pre and industrial laborers then one should take away the observation that these people work and worked all day long most if not all their lives. Even for hunter gatherers, they spend most of their time half-starved scratching for food.
Or use python as a meta-descriptor language for a faster implementation in C for a given target.
If it's a plugin that's distributed separately from the base application I suspect you would only have to release the source to the actual plugin.

Look at it this way: Photoshop is a proprietary application, but anyone can write a plugin. If someone wrote a Photoshop plugin using GPL'd software and distributed it independently, Adobe would not have to GPL all of Photoshop. They would have to release the source code to the plugin, of course.

That said, if the only reason the piece of software is written as a plugin is to circumvent the GPL, you'll piss off a lot of people. (e.x. the Acquisition LimeWire client for OS X)
http://www.facebook.com/business/?polls
Just don't spill water on them. I destroyed my last one with a wayward cup of water and have been using a crap logitech one since.
Debugging other engineered systems is clearly just as much a science as debugging software. But there are other aspects of engineering that don't seem like science to me, like design and optimization.
Contrary to the replies in this thread, I'm pretty sure you can put "All modifications are dual-licensed under the GPL and MIT license" on your own original code and people can take and reuse the MIT licensed parts under that license - you can't relicense the already-GPLed parts though.
That's interesting. I tested about 30 keyboards before I settled on it. The decision was almost entirely feel and I love it. I type/code ~6 hours a day on it.
The U.S. Small Business Administration guarantees as much as 80% of the principle on small business loans from banks in order to help entrepreneurs get started or expand a business. It's great that an internet startup won this award.
If Adobe distributes Photoshop and the plugin together they will likely be violating the GPL (see the GPL FAQ). I think it's only OK to use GPL plugins in non-GPL software if the GPL plugins are distributed separately by a third party (but then again I'm not a laywer).
see http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS3973290690.html

usually the FSF will send notices to people or companies violating the GPL, a lawsuit is the last option.
http://www.mojohd.com/mojoseries/startupjunkies/

These are eight episodes following Earth Class Mail - http://earthclassmail.com . In a clip on the first link I mentioned, the founder says they have 1,000 users and shows what their future facility will be. So, if this has some high profile startups, and shows them way back when, before they got 13 million in Venture Capital, that is even more exciting.
Validate Social Security Numbers... good or bad?
What programming language did you use?
Resonates with a blog posting by Scott Adams: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/earthclassmail/
> if you have opportunities now, you'll have opportunities in a few years once you graduate.

Sure, but not all opportunities are created equal. Think how different things would be if Gates waited a couple years, or Woz and Jobs, or even the Google guys. Google would have incorporated right around the dot-bust and likely would've tanked because it wouldn't have had those couple years to become established first. If ViaWeb had waited a couple years then instead of selling to Yahoo in 1998 they would have run into the bust as well, making it that much harder to get bought. WebTV would've missed out on two years' worth of being viable back when websites were designed for 640x480. Microsoft would have been a couple years behind and would've missed the IBM deal.

In this industry, a couple of years is a long time and things are constantly moving, so there's always an incredible opportunity cost for waiting.

On the flip side, college will always be there. Woz went back and got his degree after Apple went public.

> I think more people should view entrepreneurship as a career, not as something you do for a few years in your early 20s to make a few quick bucks.

You can do it as long as you want. However, as an oldie, I can tell you that my productivity level was MUCH higher when I was younger. In the 18-22 range, this stuff is EXCITING. You've never DONE it before. Everything motivates you!

I don't think it's an accident Reddit was done by guys that age. It's such a simple site with a boring design that people with massively more experience wouldn't even bother to do something like it. But they started out in Lisp, so it was an adventure! Then they learned Python and rewrote it. New and interesting!

Nothing substitutes for enthusiasm because enthusiasm leads to getting things done. New things are exciting. Youth = inexperience = more things are new and therefore exciting and so you have more enthusiasm. Youth also means higher hormone levels, which means more energy and caring about things more and being irrational by expending irrational amounts of energy on projects that interest you. Lower hormone levels mean indifference or just talking about something but not having the excitement level needed to break your energy-conservation threshold and DO it.
Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "energy" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too energy depleted to <x>.
> The comment didn't add anything to the discussion, so it was spam.

Can we please stop using the word "spam" for everything? Spam doesn't constitute anything online that you didn't appreciate. His comment wasn't enlightening nor insightful and as such many may consider it useless. But it's noise, not spam.
As the old saying goes, if they don't show the price, and you have to ask for it, then they are too expensive for you.
"all you do is play on that computer!"
goes back to watching TV

Yeah, because your time watching entertainment tonight is better spent than my time researching for economics.

I fucking hate old people.
Funnelling Cognitive Surplus With and Without Your Permission
Maybe they are just trying to cash out. With cloud computing entering mainstream, and Amazon, Microsoft, Google and probably Sun start investing a lot of money, the space will be very competitive and capital intensive.

I don't think it will be a great stock to have. The margins will only keep shrinking.
The Google Online Marketing Challenge
similar to programming is martial arts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi#First_duel
"If you try to wield the long sword quickly you will mistake the Way. To wield the long sword well you must wield it calmly.
stage1: only when happy are you calm. Feel the force, Luke SkyWalker.
stage2: calm at all times, whether angry or drowsy
stage3: minimizing emotion; just aa game
stage4: harnessing emotion; Music Composers write when
they are in love
stage5: emotional and concentration peaks bio-rhythym.

many car accidents from Americans driving drowsy, inattentive.
ADD? writing boring, routine, same old, same old code?
are you driving drowsy?

Why is tennis champion champion? Because only on the
'critical match point' shots he wins. Difference in percentage
between loser and BIG winnner is very small.
270 baseball batter and 320 batter difference is 50 points.
1/4 second - OLympic gold medal swimmer.

a possible good way (controversial) introduce the competitor's
star team of programmers and comedy writers to 'fashion models',
'drama queens', inject an overload of emotion.

Can you concentrate on writing critical code after have your
face slapped by a girl friend or even her friend?
bottom line :

- tex / latex rocks

- lp not so much
"This might be what helps us escape from the emacs ghetto."

Wow, I guess I have no idea what this means. Emacs/Slime has been truly enjoyable to work with.
I was advised to use "omnibus survey" on the theory that it's cheaper that normal full-blow survey. Never gotten to use it, so just passing it on.
YAPC:NA 2008 in Chicago
When Free Content Remains Captive
Frankly, I wouldn't want to argue with Knuth on very many things. While I don't get literate programming, I suspect he understands something that the rest of us don't (yet).

And, I share his suspicion of most XP techniques.