skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've one asus eeepc and I use it exactly like a phone with Skype 2.0 (with video support). I planned to buy a new phone (currently I've a nokia N70), but now that I've the eee I don't feel the need anymore.

What's cool is that I use most of the time it as an appliance and not a computer, like when I use skype or when I see some movie or listen to music, but I manged to install Apache+mod_ruby on it and the C compiler so from time to time when I'm not at home I use it to write code.

At first the keyboard was not exactly the right tool to write
code but after two/three weeks I started to write without problems at 70% of my usual speed.
Shoulda used Erlang! :P
ZeroSum: Sentinel on a server triggered by a crontab
Sure, yeah, there's a Ferma's last theorem as an "extra hard exercise" in Knuth, a story of Huffman and his codes, device
for thin shaving IC for the purpose of cloning them, etc, etc

It's all part of a standard CompSci folklore package. If
you dig into Math or Physics folklore, there's even more stories. In fact, there are thick books filled with them. But do you seriously want to see them on a front page ? I can assure you many of them inspiring and a lot of them are far more "in the spirit of the site" than this one.
"writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself."

I disagree. I write a lot of stuff that nobody else sees, just to clarify my thinking. My head's full of vague ideas, and it's only when I write them down that I can pick apart the contradictions. It's no different from coding: once you actually start writing code (rather than just planning it) you suddenly notice a host of edge cases and potential bugs.
A quote from the sales print on the sitepoint book: "The book uses Rails 1.2 — the very latest version of Rails"
"Real artists ship." --Steve Jobs

But seriously, from what I've seen, iteration is the best way to give birth to something real and useful into the world. There are just so many scenarios and edge cases that you will never think of until:

1) You're actually coding it
2) A real user is actually using it and fails

If two people of equal skills have the same idea and one starts coding and the other sits back to ponder the idea some more, my take is that the do-er will 9 out of 10 times beat the thinker.
I think the key issue isn't whether apps are worth using, but whether many people actually use them. The answer is a pretty clear "yes."
It's true, writing is a great way to capture thought. The brain just can't hold enough things at one time to fully understand many problem spaces, but a Word doc can be infinitely long.
I don't even like Rails, but comparing it to Paris is just mean.
That works as long as a panic attack doesn't cause any kind of irreperable systemic shock. But I guess such a thing is unlikely. Such an event would have to be worldwide, otherwise the equilibrium you mention results.
Great comment, though people should take Jakob Nielsen's site with a grain of salt. He's a bit of a Web 2.0 luddite.

I gotta recommend reading "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. It is the best beginning user experience design book out there.
App Engine and Pylons
Unlikely. Debt we owe china is leverage we have over them. If they tried to use it for political purposes, all we need to do is say "we're not paying." For bonus points, we can also say "100% tariffs on chinese goods."

All of a sudden, $900 billion of China's assets are toast. This will hurt their credit rating as much as ours (do they have any collateral anymore?).

Debt between nations is not the same as debt you owe to the bank.
what worries me is that if you're not american, you're a "non-citizen". I'm still a citizen, just a british one. What's wrong with saying foreign citizens?

this always freaks me out when I arrive at SFO.
Lets say he attaches 10% odds to this happening.

He makes a fantastic prediction. 10% chance he is remembered forever (he predicted a black swan, what foresight!), 90% chance of nothing.

He makes no fantastic predictions, just "the future will probably be much like the present". 0% chance he is remembered forever (he predicted no major change, big whoop).

10% > 0%.

It may be a very good move to make big, ridiculous claims.
Wow, at least the other one had some sense of grouping/visual hierarcdhy.

This one uses the same colors everywhere, so the user can barely recognize the logical groups on the page! Yikes.

Here's a tip -- the squint test. If when looking at your UI, you can't squint to see logical groupings (regions of activity that are related), then you don't have a good visual hierarchy.
Ask YC: Do you write essays in VIM?
I primarily use VIM as my editor of choice, and am quite comfortable editing code in it. What I almost never use it for is writing long essays. Sometimes I will put some quick notes down, but almost always switch to something like neo office to finish it up. So my question is, if you use it, what kind of setup makes things easier for long essay writing?
You're right, the shadow does give a sense of substance to their simple design, and the same idea is used in google maps. I can imagine how amateur the site would look without the shadow.

Are there more fundamental design principles, or is it more a matter of experimentation and experience?
Guess they're due for an update. In general, though, I am a big fan of Sitepoint's easy to read style.

A quick look at a what's new in Rails 2.0 will get any rails noob up to speed. I stand by recommending the book, though caution people to make sure they do follow it with Rails 1.2.6 otherwise mass confusion will ensue.
I was expecting a link to Git.
Strange; I find it easier. To right-click, I just put down my right finger, the one I use for right-clicking with a mouse, and which is otherwise unused. With separate physical buttons, I have to move my thumb to an uncomfortable angle.
Good prediction.
If I had to expand my list, I would include:

"Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte
"Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

Tufte will give you the vocabulary around visual concepts. Norman will give you the vocabulary around evaluating basic usability. Krug will apply both to the domain of the web.

Additional recommendations:
About Face 3.0 -- written by the head of Cooper Design, it outlines in somewhat dry fashion the frontiers of user experience process. Buy this only if you're desperately interested in becoming an interaction designer, or you want to institute user-centered design in your organization. It's really the UCD bible.
GrandCentral has been down for almost 8 hours now.
Google AppEngine - A Second Look
Five Lessons For Startup Entrepreneurs
Steve Yegge generally makes unfiltered work for him.

PG treats his essays like oil paintings, and keeps working on them over time until he's satisfied with the results. Yegge's "drunken blog rants" are more like sketches -- when they work, the spontaneity is part of the appeal, but they tend to be much more uneven. Neither style is necessarily better than the other, just very different.
Check out our tool, http://tagger.flaptor.com

It's based on a Bayesian algorithm plus a bunch of other heuristics for fine-tuning. In our case, the classification algorithm is not nearly as important as how we select documents for the training set.

Also, take a look at this post that was mentioned here a few days ago:

More data usually beats better algorithms:
http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h...
I start to have problems implementing ideas at night as well, but that only starts happening around 5am. On the other hand I'm pretty useless for at least 2 hours after I wake up.
Distraction Free Writing Tools
I bet the data structures for this app look pretty much identical to this interface. It looks like the author read Joel Spolsky's "Painless Project Schedules", wrote a GUI to do that, then exposed all of the plumbing to allow endless tinkering.

Sure, the interface is pretty sadistic for Yet Another Scheduling Tool, but maybe the original goal wasn't to make another FogBugz -- maybe it started as a prototype to explore different ways of munging data from project schedules. Comparing the original Joel article to the current Evidence-Based Scheduling approach of FogBugz, it's possible that even the HCI wizards at Fog Creek hacked together a few obtuse prototypes before finally settling on the right combination of plumbing and porcelain.
TextArc: Book Text Visualization
Follow Startup School 2008 on Twitter
Writing about your problem domain may also help you to make better pitches and sell your product better.

I'm passionate about what I'm building, yet find myself fumbling for words when explaining it to sceptical acquaintances. It takes practice to master any skill.
Regulators will probably respond by extending patents to non-commercial use. After all, if the desktop replicator becomes reality and really manufactures everything, the only asset corporations retain is IP.
Step by Step Guide to Getting Started with Merb and ActiveRecord
The simplest answer may also be the best: there's a lot to learn. And it seems that as society becomes more complicated, there's more you must learn to survive.

There is a strong evolutionary advantage to taking care of our sick and elderly -- experts are very hard to train. As medical care improves we can afford to invest more time (childhood) and energy into training increasingly specialized experts.
I think the most delegated of these lessons is controlling the burn rate. It's so easy to run with every new idea no matter what it costs. The problem is that if you spend everything on long bets, you lose money that could be spent on the core product.
I'll be more emphatic than yummyfajitas: You're doing it wrong.

By the time an act is playing in the venues that meet your description, they are over, also-rans, irrelevant, and tired.

Go see local acts and smaller touring bands. They care that you came to the show, and will work hard to entertain you. There are no programs, only passionate people doing what they love. If you like to recognize the songs being played by the folks on stage, check eMusic and Amie St. and MySpace for the bands that you're going to see...you'll find them there.

The huge mega-rock show is a pointless exercise in soullessness and has been for as long as I can remember (I swore off of them soon after high school after seeing a couple of arena shows of bands I liked and being disappointed by the tiny, tiny people bouncing around on stage while I looked on from the distance thinking "I could see something more entertaining from my couch").

But, every weekend, in every reasonably sized city in the world, there is a concert happening in a small to mid-sized club that you would enjoy. It's a unique experience that you can share with 100-1000 like-minded music fans...a few of whom will be a little drunk, but no one will be heavily drugged up because the small clubs don't tolerate troublemakers. Beer is usually a couple of bucks, and the wait is often less than a minute.

Oh, yeah, club shows cost anywhere from FREE to about 15 bucks. The best shows I've ever seen, in a lifetime of loving rock concerts, cost $12 (Flaming Lips on the Satellite Heart tour), $8 (Fishbone on the Reality of my Surroundings tour), $15 (Mission of Burma reunion), $10 (Spoon, many times at Rudz in Houston), $12 (Spoon, at Emos in Austin), and lots more. $300 will get you an awful lot of great live music if you give it to folks who are really passionate about music.
pg makes a point of devaluing the classics in his essays. I don't know why.

Let's assume there are consistent patterns to how people work, and these patterns are consistent because people forget about them. So, the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history.

Now let's come back to the present day. People give this idea lip service, but no one really takes the classics seriously anymore. Because of metanarratives like evolution, we think progress happens automatically and that there is no intrinsic human nature. We don't realize this worldview is very recent and people thought it was a bad idea in the past.

Consequently, our worldview becomes a local optimum that limits us from looking for anything else. This is called hubris in classical literature. Think Oedipus.
Another side issue (not challenging your comment) is that it's very difficult to get an H-1B to work at a company that the applicant owns a big chunk of. So a founder wouldn't be able to get an H-1B at their own startup. However, they can be on the payroll at a company they own during their OPT, and it's conceivable to be acquired within the new 29 month period.
Pairs programming improves efficiency, because I don't want to look like the slacker who has to check his email (or reddit or Hacker News) 4+ times per hour.
Except he's entirely wrong if he's talking about the US.

The only thing you don't need a license for is for purely speculative work, generally interpreted as nothing more than idle curiosity. Even research (such as trying to build a new invention out of an old one) is technically patent infringement unless you have a license.

Here's the actual law:

Except as otherwise provided in this title [35 USCS Sects. 1 et seq.], whoever without
authority makes, uses or sells any patented invention, within the United States
during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/patent/35uscs271.html

It says nothing about noncommercial use.

If you want confirmation, ask Duke University. It tried to argue that non-commercial research use should be protected in the case Madey v. Duke University. It lost. The Federal Circuit (the court that deals with patent appeals) held that research use is still use of the invention and still violates the law.
http://www.bakerbotts.com/infocenter/publications/detail.asp...

Here's another good summary of the Duke case:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied an "experimental use defense"
in a patent infringement lawsuit against Duke University, signaling that academic
researchers may be liable for use of patented equipment and processes even without
use for commercial purposes. The court declared that the noncommercial character
of the research in Madey v. Duke University was irrelevant. What matters is whether
the research "is in keeping with the alleged infringer's legitimate business,
regardless of commercial implications." In the case of a university, noncommercial
research is "legitimate business," subject to the patent laws.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5609/1018?...
No price? I'm looking for an extra Linux system to develop on.
I think it is a good thing if being a musician is no longer the cash cow it once was. This means the musicians will be more authentic (no more Monkees) and producers will not make a point of dumbing the musicians and us down so as to have a large common denominator.

Some people talk about this fracturing as a bad thing, but this is the good side. Mass production had to lower everyone's tastes out of necessity, and now the trend can reverse.
That's not it. The brain can hold far more than any hard drive. And you don't really understand something that's not in your brain: all the neural links just don't exist on paper.

It's the writing that helps. I'm not entirely sure how, but something about putting thoughts into sentences makes the thoughts themselves more coherent. Maybe because it forces you to think them in new ways => more connections => better understanding.
LaTeX is the way to go.
My take on the new rules is that anyone with a pending H-1B gets the 17 month extension automatically, but that anyone else in the OPT period on an F-1 with a science / technology / engineering / math degree working for a company that required skills related to the degree could file for the 17 month extension even if they don't have a pending H-1B.

Can anyone verify / refute this?
Best comment roundup
Comments are the best feature of this site, yet they get much less air time than the articles. The best comments list also doesn't cut it because many were posted on a highly rated article, which almost guarantees less discerning votes (happens even to the best of us voters).

So, here's a place to recognize these gems of insight.

My favorite is this one by nostrademons:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149130

"It's possible, you just have to remember that there are many more lurkers than posters in any given discussion and write for the benefit of the lurkers that have not yet chosen a DH level.

Actually, I've used this as a fairly effective technique for arresting flamewars. It doesn't always work, but when it does, subsequent posts are usually at the DH level of your own response rather than that of the parent comment.

The key seems to be drawing 3rd-party onlookers in before the original flamer responds. If someone else responds to your comment at a high DH level, the original flamer has a choice. He can respond to your comment with another flame, which makes him look stupid and petty because there's a sibling comment that's much more well-reasoned. He can respond with a real argument, in which case you've raised the level of discourse. Or he can go away, which seems to be what happens most of the time. Regardless of what he does, you're free to ignore his reply and continue responding to the person who engages you with actual arguments.

A corollary is that educated, rational lurkers hold a lot of power on discussion boards. If you don't get directly involved in arguments but instead cherry-pick the comments you respond to, you can set the whole tone for a community.

BTW, the same trick works in face-to-face conversations, as long as there are more than 2 people involved. The person who asks the questions controls the conversation, by virtue of which questions they choose to ask. And the person who sits back and shuts up controls whose ideas get developed, by virtue of who they choose to respond to. That's why the quietest person at a meeting usually controls it, as long as they're not just a passive onlooker."
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/browse_linu...

~$5,500 per core. The blade is cheaper but you'd have to buy a chassis.
Higher antitrust bar for Yahoo-Google than Microsoft
Sometimes when I get stuck on a code problem, I start writing an essay describing how the system works. Even if I don't have a clear idea what that should be, by the time I finish the essay, I've worked out what I should write in the code.
As Brad, is unlikely to pimp it, I will instead. Check out his creation MonkeyTex (http://monkeytex.com).

Makes LaTeX document creation (and collaboration) easy.
the hardware just works. My computer never crashes. Ever. Sleep and hibernate work without any tweaking, which I don't think is possible on linux (IME with, literally, dozens of distros on laptops).

That's why I like my mac.
I agree with your first premise - Paul Graham's writing is enjoyable because it is terse.

I can't support your second premise. Just because Steve Yeggi's writing is long, doesn't mean it's full of fluff. It may not be as compact as a PG essay, but Steve Yeggi is also expressing very complex ideas and I think he uses just as many words as he needs to, to get the whole point across.
Total replacement of manufacturing in the near and medium term is _very_ unlikely, because of the efficiency gains of high volume manufacturing. Things like casting require much less energy per unit of output when you can use a high thermal efficiency furnace for example.

In the long term this won't change, however there might be something that changes to make a surplus of energy a reality so the efficiency drop won't matter.
sigh... I guess US law likes to kill innovation
Not quite. Long term memory does hold much more than a hard drive. But what the GP is talking about is the limited capacity of short-term memory. When you are thinking about something and fill up your short-term memory, things start dropping out and by definition you can't notice that fact, because all your short-term memory is full! The benefit of an essay is that you can fix the ideas down on paper and move on in your thinking, without having to worry about forgetting where you started from.
i also enjoyed reading the deleted parts.

obviously pg is aiming for "terse" in most of his essays. but if he left in a few of the diversions, personal feelings, reactions to others, etc, he would seem more human. fewer people would have the occasional violent negative reactions to him that we've been seeing lately.
I'm not a designer, so I'm probably not the right one to ask - but for what it's worth I think that it is like everything else in life: a little talent and a lot of work will get you the experience needed to do good design.

When I work with designers I notice that the finished result is often very far away from the initial idea, and that the intermediate steps are obviously experiments in some direction. It is apparent that a lot of time goes into trying things out that are never seen in the finished product. It's probably a lot like writing essays: write a lot and throw away the 90% you don't really need.

So in short: I think there are no shortcuts, it's about experience and hard work.
me too. Especially when on the mounted TVs you can see only CNN, and most of their reports are about the "war in terror", and all the scaremongering going on, then you see the ocasional guard with the machine gun, then the voice saying that we are in "Orange level of threat", (has it ever been blue or green?). Added the knowledge that you can whisked away to Guantanamo Bay, and have no recourse in courts whatsoever, it makes a very crappy experience.

No wonder tourists don't come as much in the US as it was before 9/11, even after falling dollar they'd rather go somewhere else where they feel welcomed.
You're absolutely right, SwellJoe. Your post brought back many great memories of smaller venues I had forgotten. When did I lose my way? Now where is that copy of Creative Loafing?
I completed a computer engineering degree in embedded systems. Everything I have worked on has benefited from the courses I took during my PhD program in user centered and participatory design. How are people going to use their CS skills? I think it's very rare for someone's hacking not to have an effect on someone else even if it's just fellow engineers...
They do have a very basic fulltext search library they didn't put in the documentation:
http://ri.ms/2r
Ask YC: MySQL vs. SimpleDB for startups?
Basically, currently we contemplating between MySQL db and cloud databases. We are looking for a scalable and reliable database. Consider large user data in multiples over 100k to 1M users. We understand that we need to make this decision sooner than later as it may get difficult to turn back. The things that worrying us are,
1. Is simpledb (by Amazon) is reliable?
2. Can professionals or enterprises or startups opt for simpledb.
3. what roadblocks we may get considering long term plans, if we opt for simpledb.

Please feel free to point databases other than these.

Even citation of other articles is appreciated.

Thank you.