skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Dealing with stuff" (From about 32 min into Bruce's[1] talk)

- Pay most attention to your "common everyday objects". Ie. anything that takes up your immediate space (eg. on your body, in the room with you) or your time

- Buy the best possible common everyday objects you can. Most importantly:

-- your bed: you spend a third of your life in it. Consider per-hour cost

-- your chair: stop whining about your wrists and back hurting and buy a really good chair

- Ditch anything you haven't used in the last 12 months. eg: wedding china, tuxedo, everything in your storage locker

- Only buy real things you will really use

---------

Getting rid of stuff is HARD but doable. Do not start on impulse. Think hard about it and make sure you're morally prepared.

For each item in your life:

1) Is it beautiful?

Test: You have it on display. You share its beauty with the people in your life.

If yes then keep it, otherwise...

2) Is it emotionally important?

Test: It has a narrative. You tell its story to other people.

If yes then keep it, otherwise...

3a) Is it a useful tool, piece of equipment, or appliance?

Test: It efficiently performs some useful function. It actually works. It is the best possible tool. (Do not put up with broken or shoddy stuff)

Note: There's nothing more materialistic than doing the same job 5 times because your tools are inferior.

3b) Are you experimenting on it?

Test: You methodically work on it and you publish your results.

Note: Beware brand-new time-sucking beta-rollout crap.

If yes to either then keep it, otherwise...

4) It's unworthy of taking your space or time. Virtualize it (take its picture; record the barcode; record any anecdotes about it) then get RID of it. If you ever need it again, get another one from eBay.

---------

[1] http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bruce-sterling-reboot-11
Greenspun has an even better explanation of this than I do:

The most reliable source of supranormal profits is superior knowledge of one kind of customer (Way #3). Ideally this will be the kind of customer that larger companies are overlooking. The founders of SAP, for example, were employees of IBM Germany for many years and got exposed to the accounting challenges of large manufacturers. When they quit IBM, they were among the best situated programmers in the world to build an accounting system for manufacturing companies. It is not because these guys were the world's best programmers that SAP is today bringing in $10 billion per year in revenue and has a market capitalization of $60 billion. It is because these guys were the best programmers who understood the problems of their customers.

http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/
Hmm. That's kind of neat. How about using edge detection to suggest boxes? E.g. I swipe the mouse along one linear feature, and if it's an edge, you create some kind of guide-line there. Do that again for another perpendicular guide-line and there's a corner, etc.
If I had to guess, it's because he doesn't want to sue a company he has a stake in. That's like suing yourself. Patent and intellectual property copyright is a funny thing; the owner can enforce (or try to get it enforced) when they feel like it. They usually let it go when it's to their benefit.
Having a successful career doesn't necessarily have to correlate with monotonically increasing income (although that's how most people perceive the phrase).
Do you typically use the same firm/people? If so, would you mind passing along their contact info or posting it here? (my contact info is in my profile)
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems like much ado about nothing. I mean, I get it, if I "like" something then that site now has the ability to leave me messages. I just don't see this as much different than following someone on Twitter - once I follow them, they have the ability to DM me all they want (until I unfollow anyway).

Liking anything lets the owner spam you.

This just sounds like a scare-tactic to me. That's like saying "following anyone lets the owner spam you", or "emailing anyone lets the owner spam you".

I guess the real point here is to only "like" things that you trust. Just as I won't start following shady looking accounts on Twitter or handing out my email address to every website I visit, I won't "like" shady looking websites.
Most of Google's own first party apps require at least 1.6 -- these devices can't even run Google Navigation for example.
What I find is that randomness produces the appearance of cycles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

The last couple days were particularly bad, with lots of articles about controversial but fundamentally boring topics. But I think it was a coincidence, as usual.
The title should say "please (re)read and follow the HN guidelines".
How did he know what guns and swords are? There are plenty of outside influences that could pass on societal gender norms even if the parents avoid doing so.

Five or six is when kids typically enter kindergarten in America, where cultural influences from others abound. I don't know what the right explanation is, but I wouldn't discount culture.
Most professors at those institutions care very little about the teaching part of their job. The incentives they face make it that way.
"He said he tried selling Firefox for a while, but sales were very low due to the free competition."

:)
IPlaid? 11 Apps For the Aspiring Hipster
The hipster lifestyle is loosely based around the search for irony (whatever that really means). But hipsters can’t be expected to mock traditional culture and stay on top of pop ‘indy’ culture, all on their lonesome. That’s why the iPhone is a hipster’s golden ticket to hipster glory.
For a corporation with money to invest, housing isn't such a bad thing. There's a reason Metlife build stuytown.
What's the fuzz? It worked great on XP with Pentium 4 onboard video card while a load of other apps running in the background.

Perhaps the author could add localized billboard ads in street view and makes some money that way.
Remember, it will be September soon. That's probably the point of this post.
If they were shipping 1.6 or 2.0 I might agree but 1.5 has a ton of compatibility problems these days. You can't even run Google Navigation on it. That's something the average user might notice.
For me it's mostly a matter of making myself read (books). It's too easy to pick up the phone or stay tethered to the computer and read what's online. Once I get hooked in a book it's pretty straightforward to finish it. Thanks to the internet, though, the vast majority of what I read anymore is in short blog posts and articles.
Neat demo, but the markup this produces isn't all that clean, and certainly not intuitive.
I'd imagine the problem is more when two developers with different formatting preferences are working on the same project at the same time.
While the term "barefoot shoes" seems highly oxymoronic, it does accurately represent shoes like the Vibram 5 Fingers. These shoes also give you that initial impulse to run on the balls of your feet. Their main benefit is smoothing over gravel and my old nemesis, crushed up acorns (damn you mighty oaks!!!) I've run 6 5Ks in the shoes and will never go back to the thick healed shoes. I'm still a bit overweight but was much more overweight when I started running. Running on the balls of your feet makes you use your body's natural shock absorbers and not the cushioned heel. I highly recommend for anyone to try out some minimalist shoes. Also, one of the better terms to find out more on Google is "minimalist running".
"Facebook and farmville are the ghettos of the social media world"

I thought that title is exclusive to MySpace?

I'd say Facebook is the suburbia of online media. It gives the illusion of being connected to people the same way suburbia gives the illusion of American Dream to home owners.
My take is that hackers are sometimes gasp interested in discussing political issues. Thus, the best approach is not to have people constantly chastising topics/comments as off topic, but to keep the quality of each comment high enough that an intellectually curious person would enjoy reading it, even if it's about something not typically associated with hacking.
It's on HN because someone submitted it, and other users have subsequently upvoted it enough for it to make the main page.
I don't see HN going downhill in terms of submissions or in discourse. Things are mostly the same as they were 2-3 years ago.

I do worry -- perhaps unnecessarily -- about the killing of submissions for no obvious reason. Apparently using a URL shortener is verboten, although the HN guidelines don't mention this. But using one will get your story autokilled.

Yesterday, I tried to submit what I thought was an interesting story about Scoble's Building43 and older founders, but the submission page kept calling me a spammer. I am by no means a spammer.

I really want to understand what causes stories to be killed, mainly so that I can participate in good faith. But even asking about this seems to make one persona non grata. I sense a chilling effect here. I hope I'm mis-reading all this, and that I'll be proven absolutely wrong. :-)
Ask HN: Is it possible to raise money without a working prototype?
Hi HN! I'm between a bit of a rock and a hard place - in order to create a sufficiently working prototype I would need to dedicate about a thousand hours of time. Unfortunately that's very difficult with a pre-existing full time job.
Not only that, but if it does find a story to the same link, it will upvote it.
Overall, the idea is to automatically turn a mockup of a page into HTML. This is predicated on the user having a picture of the page they want, whether it be a photoshop drawn file or by hand.

In this version, we are outputting floating CSS (with padding, margins, etc) & intelligently named divs, which is intended to save web devs time on getting all that together by hand.
Winston Churchill, entrepreneurs and perseverance
I like the part where ruby developers get huge launch parties with pretty girls.
It's disappointing to hear that you had such a bad experience, and if you're searching at certain price points I can see how you'd hit a bunch of brick walls when trying to find an apartment - having inside knowledge, whether it's through a friend, working directly with a management companies, or having a broker who knows what you are looking for, is always the best way to find a place.

> As far as I can tell, almost every price listed by a management company for an apartment in a new development is "net effective," whether they list it as such or not.

You're right - new developments and management companies are the ones who thrive on advertising net effective prices. They are not officially "brokers," so they are not held to the same guidelines and restrictions that brokers are, and they operate in an uncomfortable gray area when it comes to advertising on CL.
You'd be surprised. Its been a while since I checked, but in 2003 it cost ~$140k to build a Habitat house in Winston-Salem, NC, not including the cost of the land.

"Low-income" shouldn't mean shitty. Good construction is expensive, even on relatively small buildings.
So are we talking about an Octopussy like Github and a Fail Whale like Twitter? Cutesy personality stuff like that?

May work for some... and certainly throwing down a comical quirkiness to your failings helps to ease the pain of being down (Fail Whale, Blippy's rainbow 404 page - not site failing but still cute) but one must be careful with how they go about giving a personality. Too cute and missing the target market and I'd wager you'd be dismissed as amateur.

If what you mean by personality is "theme" then, yes. Every site, every business, every aspect needs a consistent theme. It doesn't matter if you're a SAAS or a coffeeshop, a manufacturer or a lawyer. Every business needs a theme that demonstrates their "why".

That still doesn't answer the question posed, though.
The second system syndrome is to blame here, not the framework.
Do you know this from personal experience or is it just one of those things that "everyone knows"?

My experience of both real-life lectures and podcasted ones suggests otherwise.
To me the Like button seems used like it's more similar to a Digg this button (they are frequently next to eachother even). While I expect that my Digg friends can see my Digg, I don't expect the article I just Dugg to be able and spam me later on. It's a huge invasion of privacy and Patrick's comparison to email opt-ins is on point.
Yes, That is certainly a useful suggestion. Seems that taking away any barriers to entry to trial it out with pre-populated data would:

1) lower resistance to test the product/service.
2) Eliminate the need for a free trial period
3) Increase conversions.

Has anyone done this and what was your response rate?
Why should a lazy lookup behave differently than any other one, except that it happens later?
I'm no expert, but I say: Sure! Mock something up and give it a shot. Sell investors on the idea and the market, the pain and the cure. Convince them that you're the guy or team to make it happen.

Anyway, if you had the thing built you wouldn't need money, now would you?
I am all for both carefully designed and carried out research; and also from personal, anecdotal experiences of students and teachers. My mother taught me the first part of the Aeneid in Latin while as a 5 year old I followed her around on washday and making beds etc. I have taught doctors for 40 years,using lectures, pushing them to read encyclopedic books, short summary manuals, watching experienced doctors doing dangerous procedures on patients, using socratic discussion with other doctors, etc. and find that people vary in their ability to learn from each approach; therefor, I encouraged all, and if they found a way that worked best for them; to push that ahead of all others. But, when "research proves that class size doesn't matter", I can't help but think then that we should have large regional schools scattered across the U.S. I would suggest that we put 3,000 (three thousand) students in each classroom if size doesn't matter.
What do you need the URL shortener for? I find it very annoying to have to click in order to see who the author of the content is when I can just look at the domain name at the end of the HN submission.
Yes it is. Coding and debugging are concrete processes with measurable results. They require quantifiable skills and training.

Which one sounds more concrete:

"I cleared out the ticket queue and wrote tests for all outstanding issues"

or

"I thought about my vision."
We are doing the processing server side, so that might be slightly difficult, but we are intending to make the process automatic, including auto-finding the divs.

here's an example of our auto-detection algorithms:

http://gen1.recreclabs.com/mocks/43?guid=67e5e7082e6a6283296...
You aren't telling them where they can or cannot run the code. You are telling them where they can or cannot brand the product. The Android brand is not open source.
1000 hours is about 3-5 months, so you're probably looking at $15-30k of seed money to support you while you get your prototype built. If you keep your expenses low, that should be plenty of money. If your idea is good enough and your team is strong, you should have a good chance at getting the seed money to start. That's the idea behind programs like YC.
This has to be the most disruptive startups around. The videos are always applauded, but I think not as many people know of the web applications Khan has built for some of his videos.

I urge everyone to watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8

Khan lays out the future development goals for Khan Academy. There's software, peer-to-peer learning, and better allocation of teacher resources.

It makes me realize that the way education is taught right now has to be one of the most archaic traditions.
Play .xvid and .mkv video on your Android phone
Sure, selling devices with outdated versions of Android is bad, but to me it is worse that they don't release updates for existing phones in a timely manner. If I buy a phone I want it to feel fun at least until the contract runs out, which means 18-24 months. If my friends gets new phones running better software, my fun is reduced and my next phone is more likely to be an iPhone, where I know I'll get timely updates.
You're looking at it through your own prism. Selling is just a prerequisite (along with multiple other skills), it's not the most important part of being a good CEO.

Discovering the right strategy/vision of the company is not a sales job. Communicating it to people is though.

Choosing the right people to hire isn't sales either. Convincing them to join is though.

I think it's very harmful to boil down the role of a CEO to merely salesmanship. There's so much more that matters at least as much.

Thought experiment: Where would Steve Jobs be now if all he had was his master salesmanship, but none of his design and product skills?
I'm glad it's like that in Norway. You're a lot saner than most countries. Here in America 40x is closer to the mark. And i'm not knocking the value of thinking carefully about the next step. That's an obviously important thing. I just don't see why someone should be paid so much more to sit around thinking about the next step than the people who actually implement the "vision."
Hi I'd be interested in the firm that you use as well.
My contact info is in my profile. Thanks.
I think if we can get it to the point where it's like going out for beers with a bunch of smart people at a reasonably nice bar that will be perfect.
> The Facebook "Like" button is akin to "Follow" on Twitter

It doesn't "sound" like it to me ... I thought that when I pressed "Like" I simply got counted, nothing more.

And since when in English ... Like =~ Follow?
Sure, maybe for maniacs.
That's exactly my quandry - it's a bit of a catch22.
I'm confused. Hasn't this always been the case when you 'Like' (previously 'Become a Fan' of) something? Pages I became a Fan of well over a year ago (maybe longer!) have been publishing updates to my stream ever since. (The ones I don't want to get updates from have either been removed or blocked.)

The Page-to-User relationship is absolutely no different than the User-to-User one. By becoming Friends with someone, I'm letting them publish as frequently as they'd like to my stream. They can spam me if they want, and if I don't like it, I can block/remove them.

Saying that 'Like' buttons give Page owners permission to spam you is grossly misleading, and leaves out several important pieces of information that allow one to understand what is actually going on.
Verifying that a pixel is valid is much, much, much less intensive than searching for all possible valid pixels. You could do the scoring client-side, with the server verifying.
Ask HN: How do you blog?
I have often many articles in progress, sometimes I lost myself into all my post ideas.
Do you organize your posts ? Do you work on one article at a time ? Do you have some organisation tips ?
We're supposed to ignore the fold now aren't we? :)
Calling athletes "freaks of nature" does both a disservice to athletes in general and his argument in particular. He falls into the same trap of missing the fact that regardless of talent or genetics, if you don't work your tail off, you aren't ever going to amount to much. Just because you're born tall, doesn't mean you can play basketball any more than if you're born as Scott Adams, you can play pool. It still takes an inordinate amount of work to become a "professional" at anything regardless of your starting point.

I don't see how it's impractical to keep a log of how much time you spend practicing something. It can be as simple as placing an X on a calendar or as complex as keeping a detailed journal. Once a person does that, they can typically begin to track their personal progress in any particular skill.
Unfortunately I already have an apartment to pay for, and no guarantee that if I left my job for 3-6 months I'd be able to get it back. Definitely worth thinking about though!
How To Keep Your Browser Plugins Up To Date
FB has no ability to control where third-parties put the like button, but the functionality itself is very useful.

I can't agree that it's an invasion of privacy- If I follow Dell on Twitter, I see everything Dell posts. That's the point.

If I "like" Dell on Facebook, I see everything Dell posts.
Again, that's the entire idea.

You can argue the name isn't perfect, but neither is "Follow", for that matter. Subscribe, perhaps.

Take a look the HELP section- There is a big button for the Like feature, and what it means.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/help/?faq=17115

What does it mean to "Like" a Page?
When you click "Like" on a Page, you are making a connection to that Page. The Page will be displayed in your profile, and in turn, you will be displayed on the Page as a person who likes that Page. The Page will also be able to post content into your News Feed.
Side by side, yes, they will see they are different. They won't know why though. Most people will never realize they are running a particular version, and few will even realize it is Android (vs whatever phone they have in their hand).
Sounds like the women are still competing to do the best boyfriend to me.
Note that this essay focuses on his Discourses, which is a rather different work than his (in)famous/notorious The Prince.
I wish I had signed up when I started reading and not when I decided to stop lurking.

Then again, I'm pretty happy with the overall quality of the site and comments so I guess it doesn't really matter :)
I think it may be unfair to say that they don't care, but certainly the incentives weigh against spending their efforts on teaching (against, say, writing a paper or yet another grant application).
I love Arcade Fire but this was over the top gimmicky and it puked new windows everywhere.
Neither.

I have a tablet PC(Lenovo) which is near perfect for ebook reading. Why?

1) I can have Kindle for PC on it.
2) I can have Nook for PC on it.
3) I can read any PDF well
4) I can read all sorts of comics well.
5) I can continue reading on my iPhone (don't have an iPad but if I did then Kindle works great on that, too)

What it won't do well:
1) Battery life isn't as great but it's no trouble being plugged in when needed most times.
2) Can't get iBooks on PC and there are some titles that are iBooks exclusives.

And finally, what none of these do well and why paperbacks won't be squashed:
1) You can't take them to the beach or anywhere sand/grit/or water may get them.

So if you really, really, really want an ebook reader (which we're talking hardware alone) then go for the one that gives you the most freedom, a regular PC (ideally a tablet).

Asus makes a small 10.1" and a 8.9" one that is around $400 and is far better than an iPad and far more useful than a standalone ebook reader.
You're assuming that execution happens on a limit, and it doesn't.
" IE8 needs you to run Windows Update, which a significant number of users don't want the hassle."

I think we're each arguing from incompatible anecdotes.
Yeah, but that's going to attract "hangers-on", isn't it? I think that's why that sort of community can either be stable or open but not both.
Embarrassing? I'd call it growing pains. Google allows manufacturers free reign and once the UI has reached a certain point I'd say that's when Android will start to get locked down. Too early for that though.
You should check out some of the smaller subreddit communities. For example, r/coding is extremely nerdy and has virtually 0 drunk assholes.
Introducing Deliberate Discovery
As I understand, I don't think Google particularly cares if someone replaces their device with an iPhone -- the last I heard from Google on the subject was (paraphrasing) 'any phone with mobile web and applications is good for us', the premise being that any device capable of visiting Google's web services was all that they wanted out of consumers, so that we could keep consuming their services and being served their ads.
Lanyrd - the social conference directory