skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three reasons why I personally think the Kindle is superior to the iPad as a reading device:

1) It's lighter and smaller and thus easier on your hands to hold it. My hands begin to hurt after holding the iPad for more than two hours. Reading is something I can do for hours without interruption.

2) I thought that an advantage of the ipad would be that I can read with the lights already out. I was wrong - staring at the illuminated screen quickly hurts my eyes in an otherwise dark room. Interesting: Watching videos is no problem, but reading apparently is something I use my eyes differently than watching a movie.

3) The distraction factor is huge if reading your mail, hacker news or google reader is just a small home button press away. I can't. get. any. serious. reading. done.

For me, reading a book is an activity I'm doing for hours at a time if I finally find time. Then, being distracted, having to carry a heavy device or hurting my eyes all are not optimal solutions.

Hence, if I'm reading, Kindle is my device.
It seems like you're looking for an idea. This is something that annoys you - you can't come up with an idea of your own.

Other people probably have the same problem. Maybe you can help them (and yourself) solve that problem? How about an idea management tool?

Maybe people are even willing to pay for something like that? Maybe an "idea market" works better? I don't know. The point is that ideas are everywhere, you just have to start looking. Sometimes it's easy to miss the forest because of all the trees.

Here's another piece of advice on how to think about your idea: http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2009/08/03/your-business-id...
That's easy - you just impose expensive environmental regulations on top of building nuclear reactors and, suddenly, solar power becomes cheaper. With a couple iterations, even hamsters in cages will surpass nuclear.

How green is solar panel production, BTW?
Awesome! I'm going to try rW4gappl0x! on your Paypal and rW4gagml0x! on your Gmail.
The future is cloudy
Ideas are a dime a dozen, or cheaper still. Execution is what counts. I would tell you to get a soul sucking job, volunteer your time at a worth while, human helper, dogoodnik organization of your choosing or even whacking some bugs off some open source software you use or want to get to know better.

All those things will broaden your horizons, open your eyes to new problems and give you an appreciation for the suck that certain things can be and get you thinking about how to fix them.
Funny I just read an article about Russia's "subway dogs" which also talked about these foxes.

Link to the article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628a8500-ff1c-11de-a677-00144feab4...

From what the article said, as they started breeding the foxes with the most favorable characteristics, they noticed physical changes in the foxes. Their ears became floppier, they were more likely to become spotted, and that they were much more doglike (i.e., tail wagging and barking).
A comment by a dude called Simon on that page:

So: Red Hat employees 2 years ago: 2200. Canonical employees 2 years ago: 130. (Source: WP history for both).

That’s a ratio of about… ummm… Just over 16 to 1! What a coincidence.

If this is a real fact, there is no point in this post.
There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.

If your philosophy is consistent, then the above statement is only true for you, correct?
That's one of the best things one can do to oneself! Congratulations!

I lost almost 45kg too and it is just unbelievable how life can change. Just curious, what is your age? (I am almost 40)
Four years ago, I moved to Montreal, Quebec, without a job to land in.

I gravely underestimated how important true bilingualism was in finding employment as a software developer. After a number of interviews where I was told, in as many words (or sometimes in not so many), that they would always give the job to a bilingual candidate over an English-only speaker, I took some time off from the traditional job search. During this time I played poker to sustain myself and support my girlfriend as she started her own business.

I moved in with my Quebecois girlfriend and her six year old son. I worked in carpentry for 6 months, completely immersed in a French/Italian speaking environment. It was exhausting (I had a 90 minute commute each way and a 12 hour workday), I was working for a pittance (< $10/hour), I was broke and discouraged.

I eventually landed some independent development work and quit construction. 12 months later I landed in a very stable situation.

Without a savings safety net, I couldn't see myself doing that again. But I came out of it alright, learned a lot, and oddly enough, loved the perspective that working manual labour brought me.
as a programmer entrepreneur.. i have to agree. Theres a few factors why I would join a business guy.

1. You have raised funding before, and have some sort of proven record. You sold a company, or have enough capital.

Thats about it, otherwise.. I'm already working on several ideas myself, and trying to validate things. You could have a great idea, but I'm not signing any NDA, and have probably heard your idea before, and think the ones I can do are better. Even if I do hear your idea, and think its good, more than likely I don't have the knowledge domain, and if I do, I would then possibly consider it only if you can add real value other than the idea.
100% agree with this. I worked on Wall Street for almost three years, and ended up with a good idea for mortgage bond analytics software. Most jobs out there use some antiquated, terrible, but really expensive niche software. Most people would love to upgrade to something better, but there's often only one company in that particular space.

The following article provided some helpful inspiration for me. Hope you enjoy it:

http://nukemanbill.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-sell-your-sof...
SIGGRAPH 2010: Sony's 3D display doesn't require glasses
Why Doesn’t Job Retraining Work (in America)?
Since high school, I've made it a habit to put myself outside my comfort zone every chance I get. Adopting this frame of mind has had an interesting effect. Every time I get nervous or anxious about doing something, I subsequently calm down and feel reassured in knowing that I'm doing what I set out to do.

To answer your question directly: yesterday. I did a live on-air interview on ABC Radio Newcastle (Australia) on a topic for which I'm no expert. I just happened to write an article on the science behind having a bad day. Lifehacker picked it up. Then ABC Radio is called me for an interview. What was I going to do, turn down an opportunity to be interviewed on the radio? So, I played the role of expert.
If early learning experiences are that important, then surely the best investment you can make in your child's future is to have one parent stay home and teach them stuff for the first five years of their lives before they get shipped off to kindergarten, rather than shipping 'em off to daycare while both parents work?

I'm shocked by the number of children who show up to kindergarten unable to read.
Also http://thetalentcode.com/book
Speaking as an ex-teacher, more money is also direly needed.
:) We've been getting a lot of requests for PHP, it is next on our list.
You need a customer first.
I've had 2 or 3 occasions that I've had a post which was the most popular on both HN and delicious at the same time. The stats here sound reasonably correct. I'd need to dig in deeper though, but I can certainly say HN drives more traffic. The real question I guess is: Is this comparing apples to oranges (popular on hn vs popular on delicious).
I agree, I think many people would pay more for their children to be taught by a teacher who has demonstrated superior results. Which is different from paying for private schools, because as a parent you still aren't sure by whom your children will be taught.

Additionally, there is the political issue that proponents of more egalitarian and redistributive systems will claim that this would be disadvantageous for those who can't afford expensive educations. Those children would be left with the bad teachers, reinforcing their lower social position. I presume we won't find out anywhere in the lifetime of anyone reading this now.
> One of my pet perl hates, the inability to write "sub foo($a, $b, $c) {" is fixed.

I think you're in for a good surprize there, you can even do

subset Even of Int where { $_ % 2 == 0 };

sub foo(Even $a) {say $a;}

foo(2); # prints 2

foo(3); # Constraint type check failed for parameter '$a'
Ideas by proxy don't work, you have to have something that matters to you. If I gave you my list of ideas, you'd laugh at 'em and say how crap they are even though I reckon I could turn them into decent businesses.

If you are in the UK and want to work with me for a year, I'd consider it. I've got too much on my plate and plenty of ideas to explore.

Ryan
Go ahead.

I find it secure enough for everyday passwords. Also, the actual pattern and placement need not be as proposed. The principle still holds.
When I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1528715

Positive so far, need more time to be sure.
Emacs has VIPER mode, which uses the Vim keybindings in Emacs.

Haven't tried learning the keybindings yet myself, and I've heard VIPER isn't the complete Vim.
I started taking dance lessons three weeks ago for my upcoming wedding. I've never danced before and was quite nervous the first lesson. Last night was my last lesson before the wedding and me and my fiancées enjoyed it so much we are trying to find ways to make long term lessons work with our finances. To top it off, I can rumba, foxy, hustle and swing for my wedding. Our first dance is also choreographed. I can't wait to surprise our family and friends who have very low expectations of me when it comes to the reception :)

I think dancing is a great way to meet women too. The number of women at the studio was 2:1 females to males, and the number of women stopping in front of the dance studio to watch me and my fiancée dancing was huge.
Are Elite Colleges Biased Against Poor Whites?
Wow, thanks for that Liger reference, I'd never even heard of them, much less would have expected such a combination to be fertile. Amazing stuff.
Polyglot Persistence: Integrating Low-Latency NoSQL (Cassandra \ InfiniteGraph)
Sample code and description of integrating two low-latency NoSQL stores (Cassandra and InfiniteGraph). Graphs are extracted from Cassandra, analyzed, and the results are placed back into Cassandra.
>That's why there are a bazillion Honda Accords and Toyota Camerys on the road, and far fewer cars that cost over $35k even if they are "better".

Bad example since the more expensive cars usually aren't better. They tend to break down more often and be expensive to get fixed.
If you read the article that Dave links to, it's pretty obvious that the author doesn't read very much, because he clearly can't write.
Neil deGrasse Tyson at UB: What NASA Means to America's Future
Life Begins at? Google reckons 40.
Your sacrifice is consumed in a flash of light! --More--

Unluckily, you feel the power of Emacs decrease!
I imagine that would be an annoying limitation. Although like you said, that's carrier specific, not OS. On my TMobile N1 I've got no problems using my data connection while talking on the phone... I do it pretty frequently actually to send and receive emails while sitting on conference calls for work.
I don't disagree, but it seems like you're overstating your point by calling OOP "optional" in Scala (and possibly F#).

Scala is explicitly marketed as a hybrid OOP/functional language. At least from "Programming in Scala," it seems as though writing idiomatic Scala really requires both paradigms. I see Scala as adding functional programming rather than de-emphasizing OOP, the former being a common thread in new (multi-paradigm) languages.
I think I'm falling for perl all over again <3
Ask HN: Startup feedback
Hey HN, looking for some feedback -

http://wodder.com

Crossfit is a workout methodology that has gained immense popularity in the past few years. Crossfit gyms have popped up across the world. Most of these gyms post their daily workouts online, however most of these workouts are never seen since these websites are scattered all over the web.

I built Wodder to showcase daily workouts for this multitude of gyms in one place. I find this tool incredibly useful, and I think others would too. I'm trying to drive traffic to the site.

Any advice, feedback, etc? Donations allow users to save the workouts on the site - any suggestions on a better way to generate profits, at least to cover the cost of server space?
are you doing a tech project in mtl now?
One of my first hacks as a kid was to change the opening copy for Civilization by editing the game's text files to read that I created the universe.

One of my next best hacks was discovering King Solomon's Proverbs: http://bit.ly/aJpmva
True, but if you have command line ssh access you could also use Emacs' Tramp Mode to transparently edit the files using your local editor.
I am not, currently. I relocated back to Saskatoon. I miss the heck out of Montreal though and always keep my eyes open for opportunities there.
Ask HN: Forcing programmers to fix their own bugs result in better code quality?
I'm a programmer who works for a consulting company, and I've been assigned to a project where I'm fixing lots of issues created by other programmers, none of whom are still on the project. I have an issue with this, as I think it breeds bad quality (or at least doesn't facilitate better quality) by not assigning any real responsibility to the original authors. What do others think? Would adopting a model of requiring programmers to be responsible for x% of their own bugs lead to writing better code in the first place?
You poor sod, you haven't been shifting your entire hand to be over hjkl, have you? Just maintain standard homerow position and hit 'h' the way they taught you in school.
Burgernomics: Big Mac index suggests the euro is still overvalued
what do you want to do exactly? launch a startup and resign from your job?
Walked out of a job (start up) - Jun 2005. Was King Rat in a sinking ship. My blood pressure came down from 144/120 to 112/78. Has been stable ever since. They were going to put me on medication. Work with many intelligent people right now. Life is good, but the call of the startup is getting stronger
1984 in July, 2009.
YMMV, yadda, yadda, yadda. Nothing to see here, move along.
That pet Perl hate was solved a while ago. See http://search.cpan.org/dist/MooseX-Declare/lib/MooseX/Declar...
I suspect that the two are related. If the people setting your salary see you as a cog who is expected to do precisely what you’re told, they will see your labor as cheap.
Oh, I know that, but I didn't want to confine my sample to the tiny fraction of twitter users with a grasp of basic grammar.
The nook works perfectely well with the Project Gutenberg books. I recently found this fact out and downloaded over 50 books and they are all nicely sitting on my nook now. The only drawback is that they are seperated from your purchased books and are found only in the My Documents section of the nook. (I do not know if this is a rule, but I haven't found a way around it.) I would have liked to see them right along side my purchased books.
...as long as Dick Cheney is the only one sticking up for military contractors while the taxpayers want to protect their oil supply and rebuild Iraq, and then bitch and moan about the nerve of Halliburton to get a no-bid contract at above market rates, well... I'm sympathetic to the contractors, and if Dick Cheney is the only one standing up for them, then he is doing more good than harm.

[edit: not actually defending Cheney, just pointing out flawed logic.]
I think http://showmedo.com/ is what you have in mind. It's not really sexy. Then again, programmers don't need sexy design.

I have tons of ideas on hand. I'll email you one or a dozen.
My idea for you? Make RandomRunners.com happen. I'll even give you the domain name.

The concept is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554144
Great! You will surprised them, no doubt!

And...congratulations! Best wishes for you and your fiancée!
With BizSpark the upfront costs are negligible.
If you want a dog that looks (and sometimes acts) like a fox, check out the Shiba Inu.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
It's not what you don't know that will hurt you. It's what you know for sure that ain't so.

I think it's a quote from Mark Twain.
Git workflow for a staging environment with Heroku and GitHub
You might want to know about these things before disagreeing so vehemently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492920
Rooting your phone just to remove ads is like removing an engine from your car just to get rid of hubcaps -- they should just snap right off.

But seriously, a new iPhone costs $199 with 2 year contract. My Galaxy S (Captivate) cost $229 with 2 year contract. You would think that for a higher price than the iPhone -- which is heralded as the end-all-be-all of smartphones, and which doesn't have ANY bloatware whatsoever -- Samsung could afford to not preload an otherwise awesome phone with so much crap.
Sprint offering a hack; use iTouch/iPhones on their network.
there is a very active tech community in mtl now; as a matter of fact, i notice many english-speaking devs working on tech startups.

if you get back, let me know, I'll show you around
My mother was a kindergarten teacher for about 10 years. She loved teaching and went back to school and got a Ph.D. in early childhood education. She wanted to go back to teaching kindergarten after that and the school wouldn't hire her back. They said they were REQUIRED to pay her based on her qualifications, and they didn't want to pay that much for a kindergarten teacher. She never taught again.
If you find yourself worrying too often, ask yourself "Does what I'm worrying about truly matter? Is it really worth obsessing over? Do I even have any control over it?" If the answer to any of these is no, put it out of your mind. It seems like fairly obvious advice, but if you can remember it, it can make your life a lot less needlessly stressful.
Pop-up sunshields do exist for back windscreens, I remember seeing one on an S-Class Mercedes back in 1995ish. I find it hard to believe that nobody in the car industry has ever thought about putting one up front as well.
Hearst's LMK builds Drupal add-on to create Facebook, iPhone and Android apps
LMK.com's Christina Bender claims that they can launch an app in all three environments in under an hour.
Did you find some interesting work?
Well this happened out of my consent but I guess it may be called an experience out of my comfort zone:

I'm a computer engineer and every man has to serve in the army for a limited period in my country. Normally computer guys like me are selected to work in army's computer and communication centers, but I submitted my papers late and instead of working in such center I was selected to be a mountain commando squad leader (no joke). Even the officers who were giving us basic training told me people in my profession generally aren't selected (and suited) for that kind of training.

After 3 months of basic training (think of heavy marine training, but you climb up mountains as well) we were assigned to our squads and my squad was in the eastern warzone in Turkey, just near northern Iraq. During 8 months of my battalion service I was responsible for the lives of 18 men and went on to the missions which included searching for IEDs, securing roads for military convoys, patrolling base perimeter at night and ambushing terrorist routes during midnight. I repeat again, I'm just a decent computer engineer, and has no battle experience besides Call of Duty series.

My squad didn't have any casualities but other squads were attacked by both IEDs and automatic rifles, and some soldiers were injured. I guess I should consider myself lucky for that. It was a traumatic experience both for me and my family. My service ended in this February but still I have nightmares somedays.

So yeah that was out of my comfort zone, I really don't know if it did me any good or not.
I studied this in a course on canine psychology and you are exactly right that they were selecting only for tameness and that it helped answer the question of why we see certain traits in domesticated dogs.

The original work was done by Dmitri Belyaev

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_K._Belyaev
Mark Cuban: success and motivation – You only have to be right once
Great, now he knows there is a market for it.
Indeed - relying on someone else's infrastructure for production installs is always a risky business. Even once PyPI's infrastructure gets better (there'll soon be multiple mirrors, automatic fallover, etc.), it's probably still going to be a good idea to run a local mirror.

There's a pretty easy way to do that these days: pep381client: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep381client. This'll create a directory structure that you can serve from any web server and will act enough like PyPI to serve as a local mirror. Then you can point to your mirror and know it'll be there when you need it. You'll need about 15GB of disk space to mirror all the files from PyPI.
Yes. Illegal copying is as much murder as it is theft -- i.e. not at all.
Getting Your Open Source Project to 1.0
Alexa top 100 sites can give you plenty of ideas to steal and improve.

If you deliver you'll be an instant billionaire.
i only wish that i could annotate a kindle by pen or touch. this is super clumsy:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

i read a lot of papers and text books: typically i want to draw pictures for intuition or write math. you can't do that with a keyboard easily.
Worry a little bit less.
Ha.

A friend of mine worked for Raytheon right out of school. Really good paycheck.

At the end of his first couple months, his boss was flabbergasted because he insisted on actually getting something done every week. He was on the fast track immediately.

And, by all accounts, Raytheon is significantly less crooked than Halliburton.
Years back I saw a programme on TV with a British Presenter/Comedian, Griff rhys jones, talking about anger. He'd get wound up about so much trivial stuff it's unreal and he just seemed to be going through life being angry and upset.

So my gem is this: Stop getting mad or angry about what happens, especially if you can't change it. If someone screams at you, don't waste the energy screaming back, it's done, there's nothing you can do to change it. Just work out what you want to do next to get the best result and do it.
Direct link: http://www.backblaze.com/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-...
Traceroute in 40 lines of Python
I really like the idea of LinkedIn and other forms of social media (and, honestly self-promotion) making recruiters less relevant, if not entirely irrelevant.
Use more than one operating system on a regular basis.
Achievement comes from continually building something, not repeatedly starting new projects.
Being surrounded by like minded people definitely helps along with working on things you find interesting. One disparity I'd say I've found is large corporations don't put a value on developers the same as a software company does. Within a software company, software is the core value of the business, so it gets the highest attention. I've seen larger businesses not willing to spend for 2 monitors for developers, which would be an obvious worth in productivity in most cases. This can usually be seen in the general attitude of the company, is IT there to support the business or to be a key differentiator for your company. If the environment does have those things the next area of course is compensation, does your developers salary match that of google/oracle, while you may pay better than similar companies, check how it compares to the known software shops on somewhere like glassdoor and see how you rank.
Do people really have a problem with internet addiction? or is this just another meme?