skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You may not notice it, but you have some entrepreneurial and hacker spirit there already. Ever read about projects like TheGlobe.com or people like Robert Tappan Morris and pg? (Go Big Red!) Here is some advice, but I can't tell if you're trying to start a company, or encourage others to, so this is a bit of both.

1. Go ask Student Agencies if they need any tech problems solved. I think they run TakeNote, those coupon books, and a bunch of other student-related services. They may have an idea for a student-related service that you can implement and run yourself or eventually sell to them. Since they're sort of a student-run organization, they would be a good way to bring together some problem-solving students and more open to eventually paying you for starting a project for them.

2. show up to the cslug or acsu meetings and mailing lists. Ask others what they're working on, or ask them for help or advice on your ideas. Show them that you have a commercially viable project, and they'll start following your lead either by participating with you or by starting their own. Cross-pollinate these groups with the Ithaca Perl Mongers, Ithaca free software group, Ithaca linux users, and whatever other small, niche user groups are around there these days. One activist per year can completely change any of these organizations.

3. If you can't consistently steer the meetings for one of those clubs towards the topics you would like to hear more about, start your own. Meet monthly someplace nearby off campus where they serve beer, but you don't have to be 21 to enter. Select someone at each meeting to talk for a few minutes about their idea or project at the next meeting.

4. Find the professors who are actually doing things. Sure Tim Teitelbaum's company is pretty academic and different from the general YC startups, but at least he has a company. There are others. Ask him for advice on starting a company in Ithaca. Have a professor speak about starting and running a local company at the meetings discussed in steps 2 and 3.

5. I don't know what the "Center for Advanced Computing" is like these days, but it used to be that hanging out by the coffee cart in the Theory Center was the best way to meet folks who were actually using computers to solve problems. Go hang out with those guys.

6. Sit in on some classes at the Johnson School. Eventually, you'll figure out which of those MBA students actually want to start businesses. Invite them to your meetings, or join theirs. Offer your technical services to any of their pipedream projects. They need you.

I'm glad to hear you're interested in this. You can make a large difference just by consistently beating a drum. I'm serious, one dedicated person in a community like that can change a lot. Good luck!
You know, based on reading thedailywtf[1] for a while, I've concluded that it happens very infrequently even under the most absurd circumstances. Most of the time, the interviewee says something like "This was bizarre, but I figured I should just stick the interview out". I'm curious why that is.

[1] http://thedailywtf.com/Series/Tales_from_the_Interview.aspx
This is true. Research is similar in that knowing when to cut your losses and start a new project is an important skill.
The fact that they're running them for free is kinda interesting. Going from corporate censoring the ads, to reddit essentially giving the campaign a huge contribution. It'll be interesting to see what the fall-out from this is.
That's kinda my point - if reddit can not be allowed the freedom then CN (or AP or the Newhouse Family) have control over reddit and not reddit themselves. The donations requested are thus donations to the billionaire Newhouse cause and not to an independently run reddit.

That's just how it appears to me.
It's a very reasonable number. Consider that there are three factors feeding this:

1. Increased promises to the public sector workforce.

2. The need to make up shortfall in the funding due to market declines.

3. The need to make up shortfall because the funding was insufficient to begin with, owing to accounting ... creativity.
Did you try using a trackball?
Yeah, these lines look great:
"OpenJDK is has been distributed by Oracle under GPLv2.[1] GPLv2 includes two implicit patent licences, so users of OpenJDK should be safe, and modified versions of OpenJDK should also be safe (even if they're heavily modified).

The protections in the GPL are unconditional. The software doesn't have to comply with any specifications in order to benefit from these protections."
I find it interesting that he seems to disagree with his co-founder on what seems like a key issue moving forward.
Apple just released new versions of the iMacs. This used to be a major event and they made a lot of fuzz about each new update.

Now go to apple.com. What's taking up 90% of the front page?

Apple is a consumer device company. Sure, they still make great computers, but that's more and more just a side business.
Since we're not allowed to benefit financially, reddit is now running the ads for free.

Nice hack, reddit.
One solution may be to have taxpayers directly vote on benefits for public servants...make the unions take on the people who will be paying for it rather than temporary placeholders with no real skin in the game.
The Magic Trackpad.

After getting my MacBook Pro, I knew I couldn't go back to a regular mouse again unless I could use a multi-touch trackpad on it. I had no plans of buying a desktop Mac at all until the new trackpad was released this summer. I got one a couple of weeks ago and find it works perfectly.
This shortcut is genius. In TextMate for example, you can type the first few letters of a project and open it near instantly if it's still in your recently opened list. It's one of my biggest productivity differentiators in OS X. You should all try it.

I think it's enabled by default on Snow Leopard (not on Leopard). You'll find it under Setting > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts > Show Help menu.
Art & Copy does a great job at explaining why the Mad Men era was important - there was a shift in the 60's from large corporate sales-driven organizations to smaller ones where art directors and other "creatives" were in charge.

The parallels to today's startup scene are really strong, with people fleeing corporate cubicle farms and stale products to create fresh new stuff on small teams.
Patents are good for protecting inventions that require a large amount of capital investment to bring to production.

Fashion and food were traditionally not protected by patents because to make a cake or a dress, one only needed an oven or a sowing machine. On the other hand, complicated manufactured goods needed patent protection because the factories needed to produce them would cost millions to build, and a small inventor could never raise the money without patent protection.

In the age of computing, the cost of the equipment to create software is negligible, so it's far more optimal to not grant patent protection.
10 years ago, the dot com I was working for went out of business. Even better, I was a PHP developer with all of a couple of years of experience. The dot-com crash was not a good time to be interviewing.

The recruitment agent I was using must have been equally desperate. He sent me along to an interview for the position of in-house developer (yup, the only one) with a company based in central London.

The interview went well at first, but after the first 15 minutes, I sensed something was amiss. The damned recruitment agent had edited my CV to say that I was a Perl developer with 5 years experience. I explained this to the 5 people interviewing me, and to be honest, they were lovely about it.

In fact... a bit too nice about it. They wanted me to inherit their complex Perl-based system, despite me not having a clue about the language. I explained at length why I wouldn't be a good hire, but still they wouldn't end the interview. In desperation I wrote down the phone number of a friend who DID have some Perl knowledge, and practically ran out of the place.

It was nice, and I realise that non-techies might not make a distinction, but my they were insistent that I not leave!
I've dealt with RSI too, so I have a few years experience trying to minimize mouse use.

Other people have talked about the main keyboard shortcuts -- Command-Tab, Command-Tilde, and Control-F2. Make these second nature. Also, of course, learn the keyboard commands for your most-used applications. You can add and change many keyboard shortcuts in the Keyboard preferences pane in System Preferences. Make liberal use of this to make the commands you use most often the easiest to remember and invoke.

I used Quicksilver devotedly for years, but it became much less stable with Snow Leopard. It may be better now that it's under more active open-source development, but I'm happy with LaunchBar. Certainly one of those two (or Butler, or Alfred, or there's probably others) will allow you to perform basic filesystem tasks (launching, opening, moving, copying, duplicating, opening a document with a specific application, etc. etc.) with a few quick key commands.

A general suggestion: Don't try to learn every single keyboard shortcut all at once -- it'll never work. Instead, figure out the single most common reason you're reaching for the mouse, and replace that with a keyboard method. Once that's second nature, repeat the process. You'll be surprised at how quickly you can learn this way.

Use shell scripting, AppleScript, Automator, Keyboard Maestro, and/or Hazel to simplify anything you do repeatedly. Once you've reduced mouse use, you can use these tools to reduce keyboard use as well!

Good luck.
In short, rvm operates at the individual developer level, and bundler at the application level.

rvm gemsets are still a great way to have a general purpose Rails 2 setup and Rails 3 setup on the same machine. Granted, if you only work with applications that use Bundler, it's totally unnecessary. But often you will have legacy apps, or you just want to hack around quickly on some code without set up a Gemfile.
IIRC the thumb operated ones are optimized for ergonomics while the finger operated ones for accuracy.
I programmed this little Facebook app (Nearby Friends) last night to show your friends' recent Facebook Places check-ins on a Google Map. Let me know if you have any problems using it-- I've hopefully fixed all of the major bugs!
Thanks! I didn't want to add opinion. In fact the idea was to make people reflect on those facts, given the heavily biased op-ed in the WSJ.

If I mentioned his lack of credentials it would've been ad hominem. His credentials being bodybuilder champion, action hero actor, and marrying into a well connected family. Ouch, now I did it!
Firefox does not support OS provided codecs. Not that it's not possible, but they don't. Regardless of what Apple/Nokia do, Mozilla is very much pushing to not support h264.

If they were being open about it, we'd already be able to do it.
I've read that, and that's much, much better.

I went back and re-read the blog post, and I can sort of see how I might have been misinterpreting it a little. But I still dislike "toughness," and I think using that term invites the sort of misinterpretation that we're seeing here. Here's why.

I have met quite a few folks in business who seem to think... well... they would never use this term or say it like this, but they basically think that it takes a sociopath or someone with narcissistic personality disorder to start a successful business.

I've seen several examples of this in action... of people who put up with or even fund downright abusive off-the-charts-narcissistic personalities because they were convinced that those are the sorts of people who will be successful.

The thing is: this doesn't match what I've seen in terms of actual success. Granted, I don't have 300 examples. I have about five. But what I've seen is that success is determined by good market research, good analytics, iteration, perseverance, intelligence, and a bit of luck. There are lots of factors, but those seem to be the big ones.

In the narcissistic world of startups, the term "toughness" is going to bring to mind narcissism and sociopathic behavior. There are just too many bad examples. Use another word, like "perseverance" or "resourcefulness" and your point will be better taken.
Considering the early age that many public pensions allow you to retire at, you can have your cake and eat it too. Retire early on a guaranteed public pension, then take your chances in the private sector.

Or don't take chances. It's very common for bureaucrats to retire to become lobbyists, working for private industry at comfortable salaries in order to exploit the regulatory system for others.
The costs are going up for several reasons:

1) Many pensions are underfunded. The state has to play "catch up" because they weren't putting enough money in the fund in the past.

2) Pension funds play the stock market. In a recession, the fund needs more money because the market is down.

3) (I'm not sure this is the case for California, but it's definitely the case for the federal gov't) The gov't often guarantees pensions issued by bankrupt companies. The gov't just takes on the extra debt, and often bankrupt companies don't keep up with their pension contributions.
"SICP for Prolog" would probably be _The Art of Prolog_ by Sterling & Shapiro, mentioned above.

Clocksin's _Clause and Effect_ would definitely be the _Little Schemer_ of Prolog. (No elephants or PB&J, though.)
Yahoo Labs Competition Yields Better Ranking Model
Yahoo!’s Learning to Rank Challenge reinforced the company’s approach to relevance ranking, but didn’t stop it from handing off its Web search to Microsoft.
Amazon.com is missing. Also missing are any Seattle-based companies.
No one ever said that. Ever.
They are quite established and offer an exciting environment.
Sounds like an opportunity to me.
I started in basic Vim and migrated to using the Vimoutliner plugin, especially for non-code text. Orgmode is a hell of a lot more fully featured than Vimoutliner, has a much larger user base, and a much more active development team. I'm able to stomach Emacs by using the Viper and Vimpulse plugins that emulate a nice subset of Vim keybindings, but it still doesn't feel as good. If you need the extra features of Orgmode it's well worth it, though. Still, Vimoutliner probably has Orgmode beat when you consider just the outliner functionality (but of course Orgmode offers much more than that).

Lately I've been witing LaTeX documents using the Vim Latex-Suite plugin. What I really should do is configure Orgmode to work with my LaTeX preamble and/or revise the LatexSuite so its outlining works more like Vimoutliner.

Either way you can't lose.
Patents are referenced here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://online.wsj.com/pub...

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,263,507
U.S. PATENT NO. 6,757,682
U.S. PATENT NO. 6,788,314
U.S. PATENT NO. 6,034,652
Finally somebody using JFS... I could never figure out why you read so little about the filesystem. Seems to be fast, mature and not all that CPU intensive.
I also wonder why they're not using something like gluster fs to replicate data over several nodes. data seems to be pretty local at backblaze.
How general are they? Harmony has a VM as well.
They're called pubstros: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pubstro
Why SpiderOak doesn't de-duplicate data across users
I can't believe that comments like this are upmodded but yet HN has the audacity to tout some air of supremacy while laughing at the notion of a "digg vs reddit" flame war.

The community remains remarkably split on adblock use (especially on sites they like, etc). There are people that oppose plenty of drug use (calling pot a drug is disingenuous for shock factor of "calling out" reddit) and being antigay is yes, unpopular on a social voting news site, shocking.
Its pretty sad to see that yes men of Apple vote you down, when you speak the truth and offer an intelligent start to a conversation.
Little is known publicly about Allen's state of health these days, or who is really in control of his holdings, for that matter.
Yes, that's exactly what it is about. And about your own 'perceived value' versus what your customer thinks it's worth.
Assuming the buyer has the programming talent and vision to create it, and the managers to allow something "crazy" to be built. That's rare in large corporations.
Microsoft co-founder sues Apple, Facebook, Google over patents
Allen, unlike Myhrvold, has done a lot of good. This is a weird move by his previous standards.
Night of the Living Dead (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfShkumjeq8 ) is about as classic as they come.
Ssh tricks - the usual and beyond
That sounds like an interesting big Ruby gig that would be a good story to tell the anti-dynamic languages FUD brigade.

You should blog :)
They're every bit as awesome as the job descriptions they post when they're hiring!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've read parts of vol. 2, especially about random number generation. I found it in a library book sale for a quarter. THAT made my day. :)

I've found a suspiciously high percentage of the people who have totally! read the Art of Computer Programming are unable to answer even basic questions about MIX, by the way.
Debian at 17: As Important as Ever
Almost Genius: Refrigerator Saves Energy, by Clinging to Walls... Outside
What's the over/under on the complaints about corporate giveaways to political campaigns? I'll take the under.
I'm not familiar with Conde Nast's publications. Do they traditionally avoid political issue ads? If so I don't see any good reason why Reddit would be an exception. It sounds like they want to avoid the issue entirely and won't run anti Prob 19 ads either. I don't think that's unreasonable. I also have to question the value of any pro Prob 19 group spending money to advertise on Reddit. They'd be better off targeting the mainstream voter.
I'm not sure how long 'it would last' would need to be for you to be convinced, but for me it has been going for about 6 years now since that conversation and it still works.

The interesting bit is that I was just as skeptical as you are (and probably even more so) and in the end decided that trying it was the easiest way to see if it was true or not.

The second time I was even more skeptical but then I figured 'in for a penny, in for a pound', just to be able to tell Richard that he was wrong the second time. But he wasn't.

It doesn't hurt to try though, and if it does work for you then it's free money, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Keep in mind that if your product costs you $2 to put out there per paying member and you manage to increase your sales price to $19.95 you've just gone from a 50% gross profit margin to 90%.
Company A makes patent infringing product.
Company A makes puppet Company B that licenses product for <substantial amount of money>, successfully fulfilling any sort of patent infringement limitation you can think of for the low low cost of a few lawyers.

Any policy you think of is going to have ridiculous loopholes and require companies to have patent 'watchdogs' who will need to search out fledgling products to make sure they're not infringing on any patents. These company watchdogs will have to justify their wages... by making even more patent lawsuits than there are now.
As long as your product is not actually identical to the competition, you'll be amazed at what little things count as differentiators for customers.

An anecdote:

My company produces a PDF reader for iOS+. There are, give or take, 20-30 competing products. One of them is iBooks, which is heavily marketed by Apple, a high quality product, and free. Most of the others are cheeper than us, but we're out-grossing and out-unit-selling many of them. There are at least a dozen products with non-zero day to day unit sales. One day before we went live in the App store I discovered that there were not one but two products with basically the same name as ours++.

We can't credit marketing for this either. To be frank, our marketing has been terrible. We've tried to build a better widget, but mostly I think it's that we have a slightly different widget.

From the perspective of a customer: I pay for Lighthouse and Github every month. Github offers issue tracking, and both Github and Lighthouse try to keep things pretty minimal, but I prefer Lighthouse. It just feels more like the bug tracker I would build if I decided to go down that road, and that's worth a few bucks to me every month.

+ Plug: http://ballisticpigeon.com/folio

++ We did our due diligence when we started writing the app... about a month in... before we started writing our user manual, but at about two weeks from launch we were in crunch mode and stopped checking anything. They were both released in this window.
I agree. For example, many people view the "Mac and PC" ads as being about uncool vs. cool -- I think the actual marketing message is more about technology-that-does-what-I-want vs. technology-that-doesn't-do-what-I-want[1]. The Mac in the ads is portrayed as transcending the petty hassles and inconveniences the PC gets caught up in, and letting the user simply accomplish their task with ease. It makes the Mac appear aloof and cool, but really it's just that he's portrayed as being at the finish line while the PC is still tying its shoes.

[1]: I mean "does what I want" in the "my mom can make a photo slideshow without tech support" sense, not the "I can install Linux on my iPhone if I want to" sense
More of a "tax and regulate", which is a step towards legalization.
True, it's just intriguing that they're both high-ups from MSFT.
There are a lot of emacs keybindings available in OS X's text fields, you can even add your own. Check out http://www.applematters.com/article/emacs-commands-work-in-o... and the links in those comments.

In particular, the following links are very interesting:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/selectors.html

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/system-bindings.html
I'll believe that when I see it. But it's a possibility.

The breadth of this is certainly something to give food for thought, this is not an 'ordinary' patent troll lawsuit.

Part of me has Paul Allen as a very nice and visionary guy and part of me reminds me that he didn't exactly distance himself from microsofts illegal practices during the Gates' years.
How about pulling off what OXO did? They realized their products cut be copied and sold at a cheaper price. So they created their own competition. Just made a worse design, used cheaper materials, slapped on a new brand and put both lines on the same shelf.

That way you can market to two demographics and cover the market. Extra bonus is that you can use essentially the same underlying tech.
Business talent showdown
They bill by the hour. Rates are hundreds of dollars an hour depending on the lawyer - the paralegal is cheaper than a partner. In my opinion, for low six figures, the deal would have to be ridiculously simple for the fees to make sense for both you and them.
Anecdote: I have a friend who recently started a medical instruments company in Utah. He got angel money.
Understood, and I think I agree with you. I was thinking in terms of larger prices (i.e. $500 on up; I tend to work with custom and specialized software in my day job.).
What Would Rails For the Semantic Web Look Like?
Cute. :) But it seems like a lot of time and effort to put into a joke. Perhaps they could have spent those resources on decreasing their Google dependence...
We shall see how well it works out for them to be the brand for people who aren't fond of rules...computer geeks excepted.

I think we see it pretty well already, no? People who think they can change the world aren't the kind who care whether or not Apple gave them permission to jailbreak their iPhone.
Good point. I think Microsoft calls those SKUs. (They just didn't put the same brand name on it, I suppose.)