skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say Cory Doctorow should be ignored because he is a blogger; I said he is defending the production of material that benefits his own interests. Pointing out interest is not the same as attacking someone's identity. Your example is false; it is not like saying someone's argument should be ignored because "he's a senator." It's like pointing out that a senator is arguing for a bill that benefits a company he holds stock in. There's nothing convoluted or ad hominem about it.
You're running out of runway and have two choices:

1. Safely abort take-off: Stay back on the ground, join the rest of the employed world, and find a salaried job.

2. Crash: Let your emotions get the best of you, and stubbornly try to take flight in spite of the laws of physics working against you.

There's no shame in choosing option #1. People that do so have the option of taxi-ing around for a while and attempting another take-off. People that choose #2... not so much.

Now, I'll stop with the bad airplane analogies :)
The idea that "4chan isn't as lawless as it seems" is silly. Moot has always said that he'd give the authorities logs and such if they came asking for it with the appropriate warrants in hand. He's always told /b/ that 4chan isn't a shelter from the FBI.
Giant ice block baffles scientists
You were one of the Windows ME developers?
This title needs to be qualified: Linux on the desktop is a time killer. I sympathize (which is why I use a Mac), but it's a radically different story for servers.

I run quite a variety of headless servers. In almost every case, it is easier to setup and maintain an Linux box than a Windows box. Almost every software package I need is a command away. And if I were doing this on Windows, I would still have to mess around configuring the software I installed, so there is no gain there.

One command, and all security patches are installed and running - live, and without re-configuring a thing. The only exception is a kernel upgrade, which requires a reboot, but otherwise is trouble-free.

Plus, when things break, it is so much easier to get configs transferred and running on a new Linux box, than on Windows. Re-install the software. Restore DBs. Restore configs. You're good. To a degree this is possible on Windows, but it is a lot harder because there are so many black boxes, binary configs, registry keys, etc.
This advice should be taken with a grain of salt. It all comes down to the level of the instructor vs the level of the students.

If i taught like i were the student, most students would be left far behind probably trying to figure out how i got from point a to b.

With that said, on occasion (during advanced courses) i can really go all the way with the students and challenge them and sometimes even myself, it's a rare synergy between the student and teacher.

In any situation teaching is an act - it all about enthusiasm - even when its the most boring subject , you need to make the students feel excited about learning it.
Very useful article. One thing I struggle with as a consultant is gauging a client's price sensitivity. Unfortunately, the article doesn't cover this point in great detail.

I also have trouble mentioning my team's hourly rate without scaring my clients. Our rate is higher than a good number of my clients expect. This is especially problematic with smaller clients. I have some leeway to offer discounts, but it's hard to do without first gauging client expectations.

Does anyone have any advice on how to talk about a project's potential price, and how to get a better idea of the client's budget?
Thanks for this. It's too bad it has to be so incredibly ugly to make up for various incompatibilities, but I really like the references commented in the code at least.
GRPS
Check out the newest technology on structuring homes and recreational vehicles!
In a "normal" room (i.e., a room of normal ceiling height), using the ceiling is a solid bet. If your camera has TTL flash metering (and which self-respecting DSLR doesn't?) that'll help you take "perfect" pictures, every time.

(Note: "perfect" means people will ask you how you did it, and be suitably impressed at your photography skizzles)

Firing flash along the axis of the lens is a poor idea almost always. Also, your pop-up flash has an effective range of ~10 feet (depending on camera), so popping it beyond that range (which I see many people do) is basically pointless. In fact, if there are objects near, what the camera will do is expose for those objects, leaving your main subjects, who are too far away, in shadow.

This is why you'll see those crazy pictures where everyone is real dark and has glowing eyes.

But all in all, the solution is to get a faster lens - there are many point and shoots that have premium, fast lenses. Going for those will allow you to skip the flash for a lot more occasions, making better pictures overall.
NUVM
Miss dairy products? Try something so creamy like milk, you won't know the difference!!!
I wish I had a link to the report, but the Canadian government did a study where they showed exactly what your intuition told you. Even successful entrepreneurs had notoriously big debt loads in the early years. We're not talking double the average, but sometimes 4-5x that of salaried folks. Of the unsuccessful ones, a significant chunk went bankrupt due to their high levels of debt.
I was being sarcastic. The cliché uber nerd is a guy who lives in his mothers' basement, drowns himself in mountain dew, and worships some kind of super hot girl with an axe or sword.

You've misunderstood me. I wasn't implying that woman could not be programmers, I was joking that clearly the guys who made this demo ARE programmers because they're fitting that stereotype.
Are you saying it's "dismissive" to express a negative opinion without supplying a raft of supporting arguments? A person can express an opinion without giving a dissertation; it does not imply arrogance or vacuousness. To say they are "dismissive" implies they expect their opinion to hold sway without discussion.
99% of bottled water drinkers agree that other people should drink less bottled water
I like this both as a publisher and a consumer. (Privacy issues are real, of course, but I can browse in ptivate mode, via proxy, etc if I choose.)
Here's another fact about bottled water: it tastes the way water should taste without having to drain a few gallons of tap water. There could be a million reasons why the water in my kitchen tap smells unless drained for a while, but I'll rather go and buy a bucket of Poland Springs to get my tea and coffee right.
Camera+ iPhone app does $500,000 in 60 days
I disagree. His point is not merely that Haskell advocates cannot clearly explain simple interfaces like Monad (let's be honest here; this is more about Haskell folks being too researchy, and not being better skilled in the dog-and-pony-show environment of "practical" marketing), but that the lack of skill in clear explanation is due to a reluctance to admit that "Haskell needs the ability to do imperative things in order to be useful".

The thing to "get" about Monads are that they are a means to describe imperative things going on, in a way that blends in with not necessarily imperative things. Which is part of why it's so tough to explain them - we're all talking past each other regarding what "the point" of using Monads are. The point to them in Haskell is mainly twofold:

1) Haskell users can use a Monad to describe net access, DB access, file access, and other "once done, the results are out of your control" effects in the same way as describing using (Writer) computations that keep a log of what's being done, (Error) exceptions, (Reader) environment variables, (List) functions with multiple - or no - results, and more.

It's really easy...and kind of mind-blowingly complex, all at the same time.
I have noticed this in my own browsing. Unfortunately, after I purchase the "researched" item, I continue to see ads related to my purchase for several days.

What type of Adsense ads do you use (text, image)?
At the state level, but not the federal. There are federal unemployment benefits being granted. We didn't pay into that through past payroll deductions, so where is the money coming from if not current workers servicing the federal debt?
تحميل برنامج اسمع كلامك | كامل متجدد
Google CEO should scare the pants off of you
In the united states, the fee that you suggest is off by at least two orders of magnitude relative to what they already do get paid for that type of question.
Making your Landing Pages rock Google AdWords
Edison took 6000 tries to find the right filament. There is no harm in trying again - now or later.
Demand Media suffers a huge apparent traffic drop just as its IPO is announced
ah, I stand corrected. this is a hazy memory from a Reader's Digest condensed book I read 20 years ago titled "I captured Adolf Eichmann" ... can't seem to find a ref to it anywhere online now.
For me the turning point was when I realized that programming gave me a nearly infinite budget in terms of logic components that I could re-use without desoldering the circuit boards again. Before then it was all 74 series logic ICs and lots of scratching to break traces on pre-etched boards or routing my own boards with tape. Software is so much less messy, and you get to improve the end result without having to turn that neat board in to an ugly one, when it's done you can't tell how much it was 'refactored'.

It also saved a lot of money in parts, and when you're on pocket money and in to electronics a computer is actually cheaper in the long run (even if the up-front was substantial for me at the time, from my news paper route).
Check the 'saved' link in your profile!
Why Nokia won't shift to Android?
From the very beginning I always liked the Nokia phones. The had/have a careful approach with the software and hardware. Take the almost new Nokia N8; with Android it would IMHO be the most beautiful Android phone. But... for some reason I can't figure out, they insist on burying the company with Symbian.
Seems like you have more domain expertise than you know what to do with. Time to fashion yourself into an Adwords expert, or maybe shoot these guys an email, they're a YC company:

http://adgrok.com/

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm

If I was you I would give them a call and don't take "no" for an answer; push for a restraining order.
> It's quite hard to operate a robot safely and reliably in an environment that was designed for humans.

right... the roboticized McDonalds, well, I'd envision it looking more like a vending machine than a current McDonalds with androids walking around.

This is where Asimov got it wrong... It's easier to build robots into the things they automate than to build general-purpose 'human like' robots that can operate things the way humans do. It''s better to make robots that are decidedly non-human, and even that look decidedly non-robotic, In fact. Having a human-like shape and a human-like brain would be a liability, in most cases. Why do you need a full human-emulation to slap my logo on a hundred T shirts? You don't.

I think that most of the work at McDonalds, actually, is done by robots already. I mean, the people on the location mostly just reheat mostly pre-molded and pre-cooked stuff. I bet that the over sized vending machine I describe could do this job cheaper now (especially where land is expensive.) - I bet it's cultural issues that prevent the vending machine approach; people have negative associations with vending machine food, and people like being served by other humans.

>I think you forget that the assembly line worker has not really been obsoleted. They have merely been reduced during industrialism and are now being outsourced to india. But many people are still employed at an assembly line. Quite likely the pants or shirt you are wearing were sewed in Bangladesh, on a slave labor assembly line.

Hati and Mexico, actually, I just looked, so yeah, you have a strong point. I believe the turning point here, though, will be when wealth is equalized a bit more, meaning workers in india demand a little more money rather than when robots get cheaper.

On the other hand, I think that if wages were more equal, we have the technology to automate away most of the human involvement in manufacturing. I also have some shirts made in the USA... do you want to bet that American Apparel uses fewer man hours to complete a T shirt than the Haitian company that made the shirt I'm wearing now? Considering that bulk American Apparel shirts usually aren't even twice as expensive as the shirts manufactured in Haiti, I would imagine that they are using a whole lot more automation.

Incidentally, the Haitian made shirt I'm wearing now? my company logo was printed on it by a company running out of the USA. As I chose the cheapest printing I could find without regard to the country the work was being done in, I imagine the American factory doing that screen printing was extremely well-automated.

But my point is that the robotic revolution is here. It has been accelerating for some time now, but it's not a new thing.

The thing is, this 'robotic revolution' won't be heralded by walking into McDonalds and seeing commander data manning the deep fryer. The human shape and the human brain is a very general purpose tool, so optimized shapes for particular jobs will always be the most efficient way to build robots, outside of social constraints.
Human Cells Can Not Only Copy DNA, But Also RNA
Camera+ does $500k net sales in 2 months
Memcached, go-derper, Black Hat and an AWS Security Bulletin
I have Nexus One and I never had the need to reboot unless I'm upgrading the OS.
One quick tip if you're using the flash on a P&S is to use something to diffuse the flash. Simply hold a piece of white paper or thin plastic or something similar in front of the flash and you'll almost always get better results.
I'd definitely go back to paid work, first and foremost.
well, considering that a server should last three to five years, /if/ power cost is low, they could still be turning a profit... it's just that even with free power, they are making less profit than I (or any other American dedicated server provider) would expect.
I'd personally hate all my reading (including shit I open but do not like/read) to be shared on my account. Having control over what is shared is good IMHO.
HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass's base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.

For me, future-proof means it's easy for me to maintain. There is just far too much here I find unnecessary to make it easy for me to maintain.

But then again, I find designing websites in Photoshop silly.
Stop this. The sky is not falling.

Skype itself, today, runs over the general Internet, and got to its current position competing against an entrenched dedicated network that literally had been optimized for decades. (Aka the telephone network.) Oh, and one that is prioritized over general internet traffic.

In the nightmare world that you describe, any new Skype competitor starts with access to a better Internet than Skype did. Their main worry should be that Skype itself already exists, but for some strange reason Skype is choosing to spend hundreds of millions to billions making Verizon happy. And at the same time our new upstart can deliver to the exact same customers at very little cost! (Certainly a lot less per customer than Skype is paying.) Were I that entrepreneur I'd be crying, "Woe is me, don't throw me into that brier patch!"

And by this agreement, Verizon et al can't shut off this upstart service because guaranteed customer access comes straight from the consumer protections they've all agreed to.

In effect it is, "We have net neutrality, but the ISPs and anyone they can convince are allowed to waste as much money as they want in producing services with premium access." Given the history of the Internet I have no doubt that much money will be so spent, most of it will be wasted, and innovation on the Internet will prove to have been well protected.
What does "our hackday" mean?
yeah this is opt-in, as opposed to opt-out. you only click the bookmarklet for links that you think are interesting and worth sharing
Hey Ernesto,
Thought I'd chime in here with some extra info. Unbounce has a selection of templates that you can use - but you can also build your own page from scratch if you already have any designs lying around.

It's all hosted for you and you can set it up to appear on your own domain (via a CNAME).

We have a free package which you can use if you are driving a small amount of traffic and free trials for bigger account plans.

There is super simple A/B testing built in if you need that.

If you want to do MVT - I'd suggest Visual Website Optmizer www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com - which adds a nice layer of abstraction on top of Google Website optimizer.

Happy to answer any other questions you might have.
Cheers
Oli (from Unbounce)
Tao has little expertise in the area, and he isn't pretending to -- he's deferring to those who are more knowledgeable. He happens to frequent these particular blogs, but he isn't making any statements as to the correctness of the proof.

However, the linked comment is the first major statement from a well-cited researcher (aside from S Aaronson, who hasn't even read the paper yet)
It sounds like you have yet to release a usable version. You mention that you worked on it a lot, and wanted the thing to be perfect, but a newly released product is never perfect. Get to a point where you can release what you have, and then incrementally improve it.

Since you'll likely be getting a job to support your own efforts, you probably want to reach an agreement with your current partners to phase them out, unless they have useful effort to contribute. Since they supported your effort for a number of months, though, they do have some sort of legitimate claim on some of the work you've done, so I'm not sure what the agreement would look like.
I have read somewhere else that iOS4 has improved the MobileSafari speed/performance. Maybe you should try it.

Whereby I couldn't really tell the difference. I have an 3GS and it was fast with iOS3 and it is as fast in iOS4.
Dude, what the heck are you doing?

1) It sounds like you're doing all the work. Your "co-founder" - what is he doing?

2) Oh that's right - he's doing his other business - presumably the one that pays your income. How did that arrangement work out? Are you an employee of that business?

3) This sounds like a way to get royally screwed. Let's say you make the product, it turns out to be a success. Your friend can say that its IP of his company - that you were just an employee - or worse, you were a contractor. When you worked on that project, what agreement did you sign? Is there something there that says "any work derived by contractor as part of this project becomes IP of Company"?

4) This sounds like the classic, "I have a great idea, here, you develop it, and i'll give you no income and 5% when it's all done" scheme.

5) A demo is good, but it should not be an end all be-all for funding. The best ideas are the ones that leap off the paper. If you need more motivation/funding - there a dozen groups like Ycombinator now. Don't quit at just them. A true entrepreneur never quits!

6) Don't be an architecture astronaut. There's no point re-designing everything when you don't have a paying customers. Put stuff together, slap it with duct tape, whatever. You don't get users if it's just sitting in a github repository. If your site experiences growing pains, that's a GOOD thing.

7) I would cut bait and run, but make sure you pay your landlord back. It seems like he's extending a lot of faith in you by letting you be 2 months behind in your rent. Don't screw him.

8) Get a real job, and gain a savings cushion. This market that your targetting is full of consultants/hipsters/experts that are probably making a decent stream of cash. This will also help you generate buzz for your project when it's all said and done.
There's nothing to stop. This my opinion and others here too. We'll c how it plays out. Hopefully none of the scenarios i scribed here.
How to fire your boss
yeah, with Readness though you do have 15 minutes to remove something you've read from your "reading list". Also i believe they're making it so that it only counts as read after a certain time on the article.

Heck, I don't work for the guys. Just like the idead and prefer the lazier Last.fm like scrobbling in the background.
1.) 99% of the time, the people looking up are tourists.

2.) It is really funny to look straight up at the sky in a busy street and then watch twenty other people start looking up, wondering what could possibly be going on up there.
Schedule conflicts arose, and I will not be there this evening. Have a great time.
A portfolio / CV (even anonymized) would be nice to see if you would fit other companies profiles.
Actually sorry for my complaints. I thought about this more and realized being a professor is actually pretty good socially. I think being a grad student is just hard, unless you are very outgoing, and can get out of the lab.

I guess I just wanted to caution people that a career in computers and/or academia can very isolating unless one picks the right path. Moderation in all things.
Scale Testing Outlook Web Access with Mu Studio
I get great results from using that lens for portraits.
The 20mm lens is really a 40mm due to the x2 cropped sensor in m4/3 cameras.
The biggest mistake in teaching is not providing enough context.

So often teaching (or documentation) devolves into mere description. As if detailing every part of an automobile is a good way of teaching how one works. The human brain is a wondrous thing, so even with such a horrible method of teaching eventually smart people will pick things up. But it's a very inefficient and error prone method.

The right way to teach is to start with an abstract, low-fidelity model and then build upon that. Once students have a good mastery of the model then you can delve down into fine-grained specifics (how each component works, for example) and only then can you evolve the model into a more accurate representation.

That's why good teachers are so rare. Because it's easy to "teach" a complex system by describing each component in detail, but it's harder to come up with a series of models from low-fidelity to high-fidelity that bootstrap up from zero knowledge to expertise.
Maybe you should consider a plumber. Or at least a Brita filter.
Oh that's it, well that shouldn't be much then...
Quad Xeon 7500, the Best Virtualized Datacenter Building Block? - AnandTech
Internet Download Manager v6.01 Build 5 Beta Cracked
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to use Google's services, but I don't see how it's particularly good. Do you also avoid entrusting your food supply to grocery stores and your fuel needs to gas stations? I mean, it's possible, and some people might like living that way, but avoiding these things just doesn't stand up to a cost-benefit analysis for most people.
You can open multiple windows on an iPhone too. I found the Magic and the iPhone 2G/3G to be pretty much the same WRT to speed.
I also wouldn't be surprised if tethering were disabled in 2.2 for the Droid X like it is on the original Droid.
You can just use a basic HTML landing page and use http://www.reedge.com to create variations in the product offer to test what gets the best conversion.
Scribd periodically has "hackdays" where we all work on whatever interests us (think of it like google's 20% time). James Yu and I built this during one of those hackdays.
There are many WebKit based browsers in the App Store. I use Atomic Web because it has ad blocking and full screen. Won't fix your performance issues but it's worth mentioning there are some choices on the feature/UI side.
A lot of startups, especially in Mountain View/SF do this, I work at one of them.