skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jefferson didn't say that. It's one of those bromides that get misattributed to a famous dude and then spread faster. According to Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson), the actual source is Stephen Leacock's Literary Lapses. (Side note: Leacock is the Canadian Mark Twain, though not nearly as sharp, which is about what you'd expect from a Canadian Mark Twain.) But Literary Lapses is in the public domain (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6340/6340.txt) and it's easy to verify that the quote isn't there either. So we have a misattribution squared.

I find this little domain of fake quotes fascinating. It's one area where web search is totally broken. Search any of these quotes (like the famous fake Gandhi one about "First they ignore you") and Google will happily serve you ream after ream of crappy web pages all repeating the same mistake. Or perhaps you'll get some pages saying a quote was Benjamin Franklin and others saying it was Einstein (they're both wrong). This is a weakness of web search: stuff that gets repeated often enough (as catchy misquotes certainly do - that's what they're optimized for) becomes the answer, drowning out the truth.

Presumably the antidote to social-proof-driven search is some kind of trust-based system. As far as quotes go, Wikiquote seems to be emerging as an authoritative place you can use to check up on things. But it's a bad sign that the above citation turned out wrong.
Frankfurt/Main? Why?

Besides the banking sector the city is dead. No user group activities, no "cool shops" or startups. Highly expensive like Munich and Hamburg without having real benefits besides the great airport.
For Finland there was ONE company capable of doing that, IIRC. They had a hard time finding other companies willing to invest in that area.

Airbus sells many airplanes. Boeing, too. It took a long time to go to fully digital control systems on airplanes.

I don't think any one wants a reactor to passively fail. That's a worst case scenario. If your reactor control system has to fall back to that, then it has no chance. The control system has a) to keep a reactor at all times in safe operation conditions and b) it has to work under failure conditions. If the core melts, then this is an economic loss of billions. The reactor in Finland will cost upwards of 6 billion Euros (last estimates I read were at 5.7 billion Euro). No one would want to have a core melting at such an expensive machine.

Read more here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8138869.stm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/27/nuclear-po...

This sounds even worse:

http://www.electricenergyonline.com/?page=show_news&id=1...
Seriously? 65 comments and the top voted is about (off-topic) hygiene? With a community such as this, I expected a lot more advice and personal stories. To be fair, I guess this did get posted early on a Sunday.

Many thanks to Zed for bringing it up the topic. I think it is always good for the programming community to hear different views on it. As we rely more and more on computers, mobile devices, etc., we're going to see these sorts of injuries more and more and I'm not sure the medical community knows how to deal with them yet.

I read HN sometimes and there are so many people doing full time jobs, then coding at home, then playing guitar on top of that! It is depressing to read because I'm lucky if I can make it through lunch without my arms hurting some days. I don't think people in my camp speak up enough (partly because we are trying to type as little as possible). I haven't played my guitar in years while I try to cope. I've been to some physical therapy, but found that it didn't improve things much short or long term. If you do visit a doctor (which you probably should), just be aware that they may suggest surgery. Personally, I don't think that is the answer to RSI in most cases.

I weight lift occasionally but I can't tell whether it is helping or hurting. I've always been curious about yoga, I just need a kick in the pants to get started. So, there's my personal story.

As far as advice, I don't have much since I haven't actually found something that works well for me. I read "It's NOT Carpal Tunnel Syndrome" which was an short, interesting read, but ultimately didn't help me with my particular problem. It does have good general advice, a section with stretching exercises and nerve glides, etc.
> But was that because they were programmers or because their mind was already wired that way?

I think the dialogue with the computer gave them what they never could get from having a dialogue with people, someone that could keep up with them and that understood them in a way that few people ever would be able to.

> If they had become physicists, would they not have ended up living more or less like hermits?

Physicists don't as a rule work from their houses with curtains in front of the window to block out the daylight and nothing but food ordered by phone. As a software guy you can easily get away with that, and with the virtual office trend we're even formalizing that whole concept.

> Lets suppose that they are self-taught programmers: would a section on mental health in the introductory works they read, warning them against the dangers of loneliness and seclusion, have helped?

That's a really good question, and I haven't a clue about an answer for you. Would it have hurt?

> Would they have heeded the warnings and would they have been able to socialize, or were they already the kind of people that didn't socialize anyway?

Maybe the computer is the escape for people that fall in to that category, but maybe there is more to it than just isolation. Personally I think isolation makes a bad thing worse. I've seen programmers work for companies that were absolutely gifted but they were kept as far behind the scenes as possible due to their lack of social skills and I'm not just talking about taking a bath or changing clothes. And according to their family they were doing ok as people until they discovered the computer, and then they somehow shut out the world. So the tendency must have been there already, but the machine amplified that to some extent. Again, probably nothing you could have read about that would have warned you.

But I know of at least one person whose story I would love to read, if only he were around to write it, there might be a warning in there for some of us that really would make a difference.

> Perhaps the problem is the other way around: programming attracts such people, because it's a profession where you can be working alone.

Yes, I believe that is true.

> If that is part of the attraction, no amount of offtopic warnings are going to help.

Not sure about that. As I wrote above, I have no evidence or idea of whether it would help, but since programming seems to attract such people the place to warn them would be in a place where those interested in their health would read about it, say a book about programmers and their health.

BTW, I'm upset at the way you're being downvoted in this thread, I'd prefer those that downvote to articulate their point of view instead of this silly piling on mob voting. The point you made was articulate, maybe unpopular but it definitely added to the discussion because it brought some interesting stuff to light.
There a some people recommending Bratislava: next to Vienna, great place to live and still cheap.

Would be interested in hearing more about it. Anyone?
Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes
In this case there is already an early beta firmware of Android 2.2 floating around to prove that they are working on it, plus they've open sourced the drivers:
http://www.androidguys.com/2010/07/30/samsung-open-sources-c...
Yes.

Also I'd claim that your 286 has higher build quality and it's less sensitive than modern computers.
Ran pretty well for me in Chrome Dev Channel (Ver 6.0.472), with about 60%-70% processor on my Core2 Duo 3 GHz and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M.
It's Android, you don't have to attach it to anything, windows or otherwise :)
I position my hands comfortably so the wrist is in a comfortable natural position. This means always working on a keyboard which top is aligned with my wrist (by using a gel pad).

Flat out refuse to use a keyboard without it. Kept me out of wrist braces for years now.
My copy of Safari must be broken then, because it plays the embedded .ogg audio just fine.
Google does this with name:value pairs, like site:yahoo.com or format:PDF. You are concentrating on syntax here rather than semantics: the same thing could be accomplished with the (poorly named) "slash" tag, letting users do slash:map, slash:time, etc.; obviously, you would then want to restructure the space of tags to make more sense.
The choice of Java is one of the most mind-boggling things to me. There must be so many developers turned off of the platform because of it.

Luckily, you can now distribute Python scripts as APKs (http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/SharingScrip...).
HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph
I took gelatin supplements for a long time to help my tendon problems. Later, I worked on my general health. For me, it appears that wrist pain was really caused by some form of infection. Getting healthier has largely made this problem go away, in spite of the fact that I have had a couple of significant injuries (from sports and a fall) to the tendons and ligaments in my dominant arm. I do sometimes get sore. But I no longer wind up in so much pain that I am impaired in functioning.
We looked at worker but decided that for us, prefork met our needs better. Nice article though, good job, I enjoyed reading it.
The tutorials as live demos are great. You should say "live demo" somewhere, because "tutorial" makes it sound like text.

The front page is a bit split-personality: you have the idea of data mining; and the idea of sharing data sets. I think you should pick one to be the dominant focus, with other one present as an aside. It might make sense to focus on producers at the beginning ("scrape data and share it"), and once you've built up datasets, switch the emphasis to consumers ("wikipedia of datasets"). Maybe it's worthwhile to check how similar producer-consumer websites did it at the beginning: wikipedia, youtube, flickr.

BTW: What do you think of an interface like excel has for web-scraping: it displays the webpage, and you select the bit you want visually (no coding, not even html)?
The only thing that sucks about linux media centers, is that you can't get Netflix streaming.
So i worked at Odeo and was involved in the initial product exploration and creation of Twitter.

It was not created accidentally. We were experimenting with and thinking about the way people communicate. What if it were casual and open. In the same time as we did the first prototype of twitter, we also built hellodeo, very similar to stickem/dailyboot, a kind of social voicemail, a mocked out groupware 2.0, etc...

We looked a lot at SMS, interviewed teens who used lots of sms, played with txtmob.org and UPOC as examples of something similar with explicit groups. At one point i remember, Ev i think, saying "what if we just made a clone of UPOC, but without explicit groups." Or something to that effect.

We started using it, and with a couple hundred users who liked it, we were sending hundreds of thousands of tweets a month. Few people used the first versions, but those who did, became hugely addictive. The half a dozen other prototypes we built, didn't have passion. Twitter, people loved or hated, or both.

Evan Williams then took his resources from selling Blogger.com to google pre-ipo, and was able to buy the VC's out. His original idea was to do Obvious Corp, continue the prototyping and process which had created twitter. Unfortunately Twitter overwhelmed Obvious, and they spent the next couple of years just playing catchup.

It's not hard to do good new product work. Spend time really getting to know a space, look at practices people are engaging in. Then start thinking about variations. Are people doing something in their social practices, by using technology NOT how it was intended. What if you shaped tech for those intentions.

Twitter's lesson is you can do prototypes until you find something which is compelling, then keep doing what people want, based on their actions (not what they say they want.) If you do that, then you'll eventually figure out a business model.
Apart from UK cities I would also check out Dublin. Barcelona does have a startup scene as well but spanish laws and regulations are generally insane.
I didn't include this in my post but here is the deal: the first time I ran the raw read / write test the results were pretty close to the manufacturer's claim. On the 2nd try (and the next 20 after) i got EXACTLY what is presented in the post.

Weird.
How will this work for Windows 7? Most user accounts will not have write access to the Firefox folder. Will the updater use the system account?
The better your heart pumps, the slower your brain ages.
Would it help to seal the CDs/DVDs/CDROMs in a vacuum bag? And/or in cryogenic storage?
Tiny raytracer port from C++ to JavaScript
Also, all devices that were tested were plugged into the exact same external e-SATA enclosure on the same e-SATA port.
Iphone UI is a little bit better. Android is open and google products works very well on these phones.
Regarding development it's easier to develop apps for andorid. Only problem is fragmentation. Different screen sizes and os versions can make lot of troubles.
Per default, extensions are turned off in Chrome's private mode. I guess other browsers behave similarly.
What would you have chosen? Java is popular, featureful (have fun allocating memory with objective-c while working on iOS apps!) and fast. I'd bet that it got more people interested than turned off.
I use a Kinesis Freestyle split keyboard.
It's not that hard to predict the future of technology if you follow the relevant fields of science/engineering. There are usually a set of core problems that everyone in the field is aware of and has been working on for decades. What is difficult, is predicting the timing of mass market viability of those technologies. (So in this respect it's like how many people had identified a housing bubble in 2004, but anyone who'd bet heavily on its imminent collapse then would've lost out.)

Microsoft in particular actually have a track record of entering a market prematurely with an unpolished entry (often because the hardware resources/architecture/maturity of the underlying academic field aren't yet there to support a polished entry), failing, shelving the idea, and then being caught flatfooted N years later when someone else enters with something more polished.
A Nearly Naked Gaga Redeems Herself at Lollapalooza
Add also Actionscript 3 ,you can run Adobe Air on android Althought it's rather limited in what you can do.
What do you use to put music and movies on?
Without iTunes you will have no way to backup or apply system updates. It's not worth it.
Wow, this is old news. I am using Flipboard for two weeks now.
Getting an MBA is not getting a degree in entrepreneurship, although there are schools who have tracks for entrepreneurship. Often times, you are learning other things that are not terribly related to a pre-revenue software startup.

In my opinion, it is much like law school. You should have a pretty good idea of what you want to get out of it before you go, otherwise, when you finish you still won't know what you want to do with the degree.

If you want to jump from your current engineering job to a different field, getting an MBA can be a good transitioning point. If you want to go into quantitative finance, getting an MBA can also be very useful.

Just don't confuse getting and MBA with figuring out how to get your startup off the ground.

* I recently finished a "mini-MBA" at Kellogg. While I very much enjoyed the experience, and I do say that certain things we learned added some foundational theory to things such as pricing and strategy (ever wonder where tiered pricing comes from?), the experience has not given me some "magic key" to turning any idea into startup gold. Everyone here should already know that there is no silver bullet for that. If you don't know that, I don't think an MBA will help you.
There is essentially a continuous normal distribution of "apneic" sleep features. There is no bright line between apnea and not apnea, though we create lines for simplicity's sake. Of course if you need CPAP, use CPAP. But there are plenty of people who have soft tissue that closes off the upper airway to a significant degree only when supine. These are the people who don't need to deal with the modest but non-zero risks associated with respiratory assistance — all by just sleeping in a different position.
Perfect. Just what node.js need now, another web framework. I just can't decide which one to use.
Ghandi did more to defeat the caste system than the British Empire ever did. The British Empire was quite content to be the Brahmins to the Brahmins.
Web Developer Job Search: Interviewing Tips
Enh, I miss the blinking red light too, but:

1) You can set the device to vibrate every once in a while to remind you if you haven't answered your messages,
2) You can put your "messaging" tab on the home bar at the bottom (replacing the - for me - useless iPod app), and
3) The iPhone pushes in much the same way the BBerry does. I get messages and Email without having to do really anything.
Is the Nuclear Renaissance already over?
And China is building some right now. The HTR-PM pebble bed reactor is actually two reactors connected to a single steam turbine, for a total of 210 MWe. They're building one of these two-reactor modules now, and they're planning another 18 reactors on that same site once they've got the kinks worked out and the factories set up to start really cranking them out. More on the current status and technical and economic details here:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/02/current-status-and-technica...
"I’ve yet to take a mathematical class that discusses algorithms and as far as I know I will not even be required to take one."

This quote sums up the situation for the author.

Why don't you take the interesting classes? You don't have to take just the required classes. Take the classes that interest you.

Computer science is about how to solve problems effectively, not necessarily the hot programming language of the day.
You must live in a rather humid climate because that isn't too hot, it is more of a comfortable temperature.
I always recommend Brightcove (http://www.brightcove.com). It's relatively cheap and has an amazing feature set. Everything is customizable and accessible via an API and even works in sans-Flash environments like the iPhone.
gfr, are you writing a book or something? you've done 8 Ask HN's and only ever posted 2 comments...
Taxes are very hight to afford for a startup, I don't have numbers right there but look at what cost an employee in France ... and taking advantages of government support for young companies requires a skill in french bureaucracy that not all entrepreneurs have + it's often harder to get it when you're not a french entrepreneur.
Banking was just an example about bureaucracy in general. You'll spend way more time in France to setup simple things, need way more papers, seriously it's a pain ! I can't compare with lot of countries but by experience it's far more easier in Berlin or in SF.

And about the issue about being a semi-slave : I worked for many startups in Paris and I never felt that. Of course if you take the consulting way you can't really compare with startups.
And yes an internationally competitive salary is required and it costs an arm for the employer.
Ask HN: Hiring challenges and strategies for startups
One of the biggest challenges of a startup is hiring and we're facing this exact challenge right now. Many have said that hiring is not an unique challenge and it doesn't matter where your startup is located.

My startup is one year old, mostly bootstrapped and raised a small seed round < $50k to get us started, and we've been profitable for the past 3 months. Now we are getting ready to bring on board our employee #1. Yay!

That's great but we're also not getting great results with our recruiting effort. We did the usual things, like posting on craigslist, posting on FREE job boards such as startuply etc. Our startup is located in Pittsburgh, so it's a mid size US city with a great university, CMU, producing awesome engineers. So why can't we find the ideal candidate?

1) Google and a few other big boys have offices here and we're competing against them.

2) Most graduates just wants to go to the valley/SF to work for Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

We spent some effort going to local technology meetups that we're using and talked to developers and people at these meetups but again the effort wasn't fruitful.

The last resort now is working with HR recruitment agencies. This is almost the last option on our list and typically HR agencies charges 20%. Is this an industry standard rate? of course there's always room for negotiation but that's what we were told to base off.

So I hoping we can use this post and gather a list of suggestions and ideas for finding that first hire that is so important at this stage of every startups. Or even share how much are you paying the HR agencies if you did work with one and hired a referral.
The Apple /// came without any fans because Jobs wanted it so, and therefore overheated.

In this case, it may be equally difficult to know who's really responsible of what.
> it wouldn't accept MMS or SMS with non-English characters in 2010

That's odd. I used receive and send text messages in Latvian and Russian all the time and so do all of my friends. You should try to reinstall the iOS.

Back to the flamewar: I recently got myself an Android phone and I'm not really happy with the Market application quality and the operating system itself. At this point it just isn't quite as polished as iOS is.
It's definitely controversial--so I feel obliged to mention that Sarno's methods also worked/work for me.

I also ran the gauntlet of standard medical treatments and therapies before trying Sarno's approach.

If you have seemingly untreatable RSI, it's worth giving Sarno's ideas a look.
Another huge thing is Google Voice

I don't use Google Voice for outbound calls, but I absolutely love the voicemail features from Google Voice. I thought that visual voicemail on the iPhone was nice, but after switching to Android I realized the combination of the web interface and the onboard voicemail app on the phone is a huge winner.

Also, to address the OP's concern about staying on AT&T, my AT&T band N1 seems to work like a champ. If you're not afraid of eBay, then I wouldn't think twice about getting one that would work on AT&T's 3G bands.
The Great Vim / Textmate Debate: Opinion #56 - How to make Vim more accessible
I have an N1 and T-Mobile also and totally agree. My T-Mobile no-contract unlimited everything (minutes + text + internet, including tethering) is $79, not $59. It's listed on my bill as "FPEvenMorePlusUnlTTW." T-Mobile coverage does have weak spots but in the good areas tethering speed is > 4Mbps.
Another useful thing is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myofascial_release.

Go pick up the hardest foam roller you can handle and start rolling:

http://www.amazon.com/Foam-Roller-6-x-36/dp/B000Y4W9VA/

It has done wonders for my body.
They really glossed over the sound, which is one of the more painful aspects of a Linux HTPC in my opinion. If you're planning on usual digital audio instead of stereo sound, be prepared for a rather nasty battle.
Put on some deodorant after you wash and keep a stick/roll-on in your bag or at work.

If it really is unbearably hot you could even pack a spare t-shirt. An American Apparel Summer T-Shirt will fold up to the size of a wallet if you're short on space.
Herbs Pictures and Information