skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I hate elitist and pretentious people as much as the next person, and I do believe in trying our best to help others. But in this particular case it's not difficult to google for "install debian with pxe". The second result on google [1] says "If your client machine's BIOS supports it, you can then boot the Debian installation system from the network (using PXE and TFTP), and proceed with installing the rest of Debian from the network."

Are you still not sure what those things mean or what to do? How about going to #debian at freenode and asking questions? Maybe the guy in the story was an elitist, so what? This is 2010, there are other ways to ask for help (I know, I know, IRC is sooo 1990's ;-) Hell, these days we can even search for movies and watch people solving the problem! Or, alternatively, how about forgetting about messing with BIOS and borrowing a flash media from someone?

We are not talking about Aunt Tillie [2] here, we're talking about a MIT student. He or she doesn't need to know everything, but I think it's important to know how to find information and to solve problems without too much hand-holding. (although sometimes a session in person can be very helpful and one can learn things that are difficult to learn just by reading).

[1] http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

[2] http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/Aunt-Tillie.html
"What you're not going to be able to demonstrate is that, in laboratory controlled conditions where literally every calorie is counted by a scientist, and all variables are taken into account (e.g. hyrdation levels) that one kind of calorie leads to a "metabolic advantage" over another..."

There doesn't have to be a metabolic advantage for there to be a difference between calorie sources.

The number of calories eaten does not equal the number absorbed. Some things will be absorbed more readily than others. Foods are not all equal. People differ in significant ways both longer and short term. We don't all have the same mix of intestinal floura to help with digestion. Some foods may help/hinder getting calories/nutrients from others. Efficiency no doubt is higher when the food is taken in throughout the day instead of mostly at once. Even chewing better makes some difference. And other aspects of body chemistry, such as stomach acidity level no doubt have an influence.

I read of a U.N. worker working to help people with serious health problems in very poor nations. To get a fast inexpensive benefit a comparison was made of healthy/unhealthy people with similar (limited) food access and exposure to environmental hazards. The conclusion was that those who spread a given amount of food out through the day got more nutrition that those who ate it all at once. Of course some things are absorbed very easily (like our corn syrup), but it's easier to disrupt absorption of fats and heavier things.

I'd been taught that it was better to delay most liquids to the end of a meal, so that stomach acids would be more effective for breaking things down. Eat most of the heavier items first, shifting towards veggies and fruit then liquids.

Doing the opposite may cause weight loss (seems better to say less gain), but I think most consuming a significant amount of liquid first are apt to feel uncomfortable, especially with higher fat meals, as they're not handled as well. Eating a patty melt or other greasy food after a lot of water or coffee always had me feeling much worse on the road afterward than the same amount of everything in the reverse order. It's better to eat less than to make digestion less efficient.

My summary: It's the water reducing the acidity that made the difference with constant calorie input, but it's better to eat less than to make digestion less efficient like that.
The Web isn't really dead, but it has competition now
No no, let's keep it general, please.
Hacker builds working 1/10th scale Cray 1
I found I got a lot "better" at communicating just by toning down my geekiness. Not by changing in the content of what I say, just by changing my bedside manner. Instead of saying, "and this part is neat," I joke about how much the computer sucks and how annoying it is. When I do that, people trust that what I'm telling them is actually helpful and relevant to their usage of the machine. Before, they would ignore most of what I said. They tried to filter out what they assumed was gratuitous geekery so they could get to the "payoff" where I told them how to do what they need to do. Since I wasn't actually wasting their time with extraneous information, they missed most of what they needed to know to understand what I was telling them. It's really hard to talk to people when they assume the proper way to understand you is to hear about 10% of what you're saying.

When I pretend to hate computers as much as they do, they actually listen to everything I say, and voila, they understand a whole hell of a lot better.
Though he predates Stoicism by a bit, I think Diogenes of Sinope [1] did a fine job of practicing what he preached. Also, while Stoicism might be difficult to accept through the conduit of someone like Marcus Aurelius, he was strongly influenced by and frequently quoted Epictetus [2], who also fits your criteria to a tee.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus
A lot of people here seem to focus on reasons why startups won't hire Dave Winer, but the this isn't a Winer-specific situation. Startups aren't filled with personable JSON-loving 50 year olds, or even 40 year olds.

One reason may be that most current web startups just don't do work that is difficult or innovative enough to warrant that level of experience/cost. You don't need 20 years' experience to create Reddit, for example, and even though a veteran team might have avoided pick the wrong language initially or storing users' passwords in plaintext, these didn't really hurt Reddit that much.

There's also the employee's side. In my late thirties I already find it hard to get excited about self indulgent social-location-based-nano-blogging apps aspiring to get mentioned at Wired. When you look for something that's either really challenging or tries to solve a real problem, your range of choice is greatly limited.
Can't wait for cable to be dead and gone. 5-8 minute advertising blocks drive me bonkers. I have pretty much stopped watching.

Google TV looks amazing - http://newteevee.com/2010/08/20/an-in-depth-look-at-the-goog...

I think this will be a great leap forward for crowdsourced news, home-brewed entertainment and video blogging.
I know you! you're the guy that wants to take the good advice and use it elsewhere!

^5s
That's a deep thought. Write a blog post about it, please.
Thank you everyone! I've enjoyed reading every post immensely and appreciate everyone's responses.

You guys are awesome!
Most times, it doesn't.
Delusional Code
Three Reasons Brett Favre is a Bum
Everyone's own square appears blue.
Yes! I'm in the final stages of finishing my M.S. in Math. I've been doing it part time and it's been difficult and time-consuming, but very enjoyable.

Interestingly, studying math may have a non-obvious benefit of helping you understand functional languages like Scheme, Lisp, Clojure, etc. And I believe that functional languages are going to be quite useful in the years ahead. So even though you may not get a job in applied math, it may be helpful in all other kinds of software development.
I actually think I'd be ok in this situation (and I have real difficulty recognizing faces) largely because my "friends" list is pretty damn short. I take the "friend" part pretty seriously - if they renamed it acquaintances, or had built in separate lists for friends/acquaintances, I'd probably have a longer list. Regardless, having Facebook lock me out on my holiday would be a good thing.

It does sound like this whole thing was poorly thought through. You can't encourage people to befriend everybody they every meet - and then ask them to know what they all look like.
so wheres the part of the presentation where you actually build the product?
Wow that's almost the same as scheme. Here's the scheme version of the above code:

Your example would be translated as:

(lambda (a b) (+ a b)) ;; making an anonymous function

(define add (lambda (a b) (+ a b))); ;; calling the anonymous function "add"

(define (add a b) (+ a b)) ;; syntactic sugar for above.
Wrong and wrong.

I don't log any data other than the date besides what you put in the fields. I also don't connect the email address to the listing, it just goes onto a mailing list.

For now it is confidential, though I'm not sure how to reconcile the idea of an API with confidentiality - even when anonymity is involved. Perhaps I should just change it to 100% anonymous?
My parents followed my selfish wishes, and came the next day from Sapporo to my house. I can never forget the first words out of my mother's mouth when she saw me lying there.

"I'm so sorry, for not bringing you into this world with a stronger body!"

I was completely speechless.

This part was just so incredibly moving. :*(
Why do you think that is?

A handful of reasons, I think.

Fatigue with the particular dish (I don't want to eat the same thing within a day or two anyway), a mostly irrational "ick" hygiene factor, not wanting to carry food around (it's less common to be parked close to where you're eating in the UK), a lingering (though lessened) elitist attitude to the practice, and a fear of it being considered an unusual request.

Different cultures engage in slightly odd behaviors (such as the prevalence of stick shift cars in the UK) often because people are, en masse, afraid of being unusual and making a change. If restaurants made taking stuff home an obvious and acceptable policy, I'd probably deliberately eat only half the meal and do it from time to time.
OK, I'll bite. 'Code' for me, at the moment, is a web app in beta that needs functional and cross-browser UI testing.

So until I script all flows into Selenium, twill, windmill or something else, and until I can figure out how to automate screenshots of all screens in the OSs and browsers I care about (http://stackvm.com ?), I have checklists, and I go through them manually.

It helps that my web app's UI is short and sweet, but that's probably because I'm trying to avoid thinking about the combinatorial explosion it's hiding.
Some things I would like to do, in no particular order:

* Backpack Europe and ride Eurorail

* Build an amateur radio transceiver

* Read the Iliad and Odyssey

* Learn ballroom dancing

* Learn how to make paper

* Learn to cook (!)

* Camp in every national park

* Buy a used motorcycle and learn how to fix it up

* Learn to play the banjo

* Build a 12" Dobsonian telescope and attend star-parties

* ...
In order of decreasing importance, I recommend you: Constantly check that you're building the right thing. Get some kind of testing framework. Look into Test Driven Development as a methodology.

With a testing framework, you won't waste time rolling your own. For Java, you could start with JUnit.

TDD is a formalized approach to writing test functions as you work, which you already do, while simultaneously designing your code. There are many sources on it around the internet, but Kent Beck's book took the magic out of it (a good thing) for me:
http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-Development-Kent-Beck/dp/0...

Of course, there are many other specific techniques you can use to test that your algorithms do the right thing, all dependent on what you've made. Regardless, I try to make sure that the a real user gets their hands on an up to date build as often as possible, and they're sure to show me all of the ways that my software is technically excellent, yet in no way solves their actual problem.
The system works for him, he's got his. Why would someone who's won the old-boy-network lottery want to tear down that edifice?
Think of the suit as an #DEFINE for the programs you are attempting to run on the relatively opaque interpreters that come builtin to the monkey brains we all use to think with.

The parameters you are setting when you wear a suit are the authority and credibility that the person hearing you should grant you. The seriousness with which they should consider your proposal, and the priority of your claim on their time and attention.
Likely community moderation.
Unless I specifically wanted your startup to be putting stuff into my facebook feed, I personally wouldn't log in to your (or any) site using a facebook account.

I'm a bit paranoid about the potential for 3rd party apps to publish stuff to my facebook account that I don't want them too - the whole facebook privacy thing is just too murky (I don't really understand what you could or couldn't do if I logged into your site with fb connect), so in general I just play safe and keep facebook separate from everything else.
This is why he says "…if you tell Facebook about your startup before you reach critical mass"

If you're at critical mass, you might be able to hold your own. Foursquare and Twitter have enough users and industry clout that they can hold their own. If you're just starting on an idea, maybe you're getting a little bit of momentum, it might be tempting to talk to someone at Facebook and see if they will help you.

But… It's easier and less risky for Facebook to just implement your idea themselves. If they want a feature for their users, why depend on some little startup that may or may not fail? I don't think they're going out of their way to steal ideas. I think they are trying to maximize their own success. We could call it a lack of morals, but I think it's subjective which is why we have these debates.

Still, you probably should try to think about it from Facebook's perspective and be realistic about your position of leverage before you approach them with an idea.
I've got to come in on Dave's side on this one. He does not say that "technology hasn't changed." Here is what he says:

"And if you think there's much difference between JavaScript and C, you're dreaming. Or between JSON and XML or plain text files. These are gratuitous reinventions."

Bear in mind that he is taking a very high level view here, and think about what he's saying again. Are not JSON and XML, fundamentally, simply better ways to put structured data into text files with formats everyone can agree on? Sure, they are better approaches than what preceded them (CSV? random ad-hoc formats?), but fundamentally, if I said the previous sentence to a programmer who gone into a coma in 1985 and just now woke up, wouldn't they understand it pretty quickly?

As for JavaScript and C, well, the syntax is C-like, and you add closures, a class system, and some standard scripting language features like built-in containers and a slack typing model, as far as I can tell from coming up to speed on it recently. Wouldn't this stuff be familiar to someone who'd learned and coded in a number of different languages in their career? Surely with a few examples to follow they could be up to speed quickly.

Now, of course he's exaggerating, and venting a bit as well. But for a programmer with a lot of experience, these innovations don't seem that special. Good ideas, sure, but not enough to make everything you've learned obsolete.
Yes [1].

[1] Rosser JC Jr, Lynch PJ, Cuddihy L, Gentile DA, Klonsky J, Merrell R., The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century., Arch Surg. 2007 Feb;142(2):181-6; http://archsurg.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/142/2/181
Could not deliver my simple multiplayer game..
Will try to finish in the week...
You should have your colour change when you reach certain point thresholds - when you "level up" I guess.

Also, maybe then you can push lower-level pixels around?

--
Ayjay on Fedang
Analytics is actually very cave-man level math and statistics. You could just work through Strang for linear algebra and a stats book and you'll know more than 80% of the people employed doing this work...and that's probably not even necessary. I will warn you that if you're already an infrastructure programmer, most of what analytics teams really need is someone to babysit the data. If you don't want to deal with that, I would disclaim all knowledge of computer programming beyond Microsoft Excel.

There's loads of blogs where people discuss statistics/ML and echo Hal Varian's quote that it's the next "sexy career" but if you look at the authors of those blogs they are all still in grad school, so take that advice with a grain of salt. Actuaries have been employed doing stats for centuries and they have never been "sexy," but they get paid ok.

Personally, I find statistics heinously boring so the excitement is lost on me. Instead of thinking "wow, we're awash in data, finally a reason to use my Stats 101" I tend to think: "oh fuck now that there's all this data I better not let anyone know I was an applied math major...I'll get stuck doing Stats 101 all over again." Now if someone wanted to pay me $200K a year to do knot theory, I'd be stoked...

Graphics is math heavy but you learn that math in a computer science grad degree, not a math grad degree.

Aside from Wall Street (where the useful math is often from the EE department, anyway) most math heavy programming jobs (i.e. "scientific computation") probably pay worse than what you're making now.

Signed, your friendly neighborhood math teacher turned programmer.
How do you play this game? Nothing works for me. I press left/right/up/down but nothing happens.
I thought he made it pretty clear that he made some effort to get his software approved by exception through talking to execs, etc. So obviously that explains the "limbo". Presumably, he recognized it would just get rejected through the ordinary channels.

And with respect to the other thing, your bringing that up kinda proves what I said, doesn't it? :P
Also, please check out 'Behavior Driven Development's or BDD, which is basically "TDD done correctly." It alters the description of the process a bit, and in the end, you write better tests.

Since I'm a Rubyist, I use Cucumber and RSpec to do testing. http://cukes.info http://rspec.info (note that you can use cucumber to test any language, and I bet you could use JRuby to test java.
It's like wikipedia smashed into github … but prettier. Nice work.
Founder laments how US govt caused his growing startup to die
I understand what you're getting at, but I also think that pg was justified in taking offense to your claims. What you're offering the startup community is speculation. What you're suggesting is plausible, but you haven't really backed it up with logic suggesting it's probable. Startups need more than the opinions of a few disgruntled competitors to base their decisions off of.

Think about it. There are two possibilities:

1) Facebook is trying to ensnare startups into its web of twisted lies so it can destroy them.

2) Facebook is just trying to work out a mutually beneficial deal with startups that want to leverage their technologies.

While #1 is possible, you have to admit that #2 is the more likely situation. It's like Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I'm sure you know what you're talking about, so this should be pretty easy. Give the startup community sound logic rather than speculation.
A more cynical view is here:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

The "psychopath" executives need "clueless" middle managers who believe in the team in order to manage the "losers" (regular employees).

(I'm not advocating this... just pointing out that the "right kind of (team-oriented) ambition" could also be viewed in this way...)
Look I've got a yard and gardens. I enjoy a well cut lawn and tidy hard surfaces (though prefer a straw broom to a leaf blower). There's a lot of reward for creating a tidy home and surrounds, particularly if you spend much of the day in front of a computer.

I think some people just like tidiness. You don't have to be of any particular persuasion to enjoy a well cared for garden.
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Please study computer sciences before stucking yourself into a endless quest for the best technology. I can tell you that every new tech is fully based on existent CS concepts.
It's human nature to try to understand things. And the best way to do that is to simplify the issue. But some things just cant be simplified.
Couldn't this be an expectation issue? Washing their hands signaled to the subjects that they were in a more "proper" social environment. To fit in, they may have judged the social issues more harshly.
I must admit that the OED is the #1 item on my geek to-buy list. I hope OED3, with what I assume will be 20+ volumes, is ultimately printed - even as an expensive collectors' item - I may be able to justify the expense in another decade.
nicely done! what are you using for persistence on the backend?
The new currency: Imagination – Why artists will rule the future
I'm interested in what you mean by the 'really' in the title. Do you think there's some kind of secret to how people test that they're not revealing?

If you want to see some 'IRL' test code, have a look at your favorite open source project. The test code will all be there, usually in a folder just off the root called 'tests/'.
Exercise For General Health and Wellness
Why work in corporation? Well, because
1) it is easier to find a job this way;
2) it is a good place to get experience.

I work for a corporation - for me it is easier, for now. I do not share any goals with the corporation at all. My goal is simple - to collect money (to drain the corporate cash), it is kind of opposite to the corporation's. Yet, my other goal is to maintain my integrity, so I am going to contribute as much as I think is justified.

You can work for yourself, even if you in somebody else's building.
If this really is true, might there be an in-built evolutionary aspect? That people who have an inbuilt tendency towards cleanliness have less chance of contracting disease?

All those religious texts and 'cleanliness is next to Godliness' - surely it can't just be a modern phenomonen? Even baptism - the act of dunking onesself in a river - must be considered cleaning for the purposes of being superior?

Note I don't expect this to be taken seriously and I'm no theological expert, but there is a talking point why cleaning pops up so frequently in religious texts of all persuasions. There surely is an element of life instruction in religious texts that drop below the moral level (do not lie) and into the physical level (clean yourself)
It's not really furnished to best, but worth checking out, a Hacker News Reader http://nko-naughtify.heroku.com/reader. Appreciate the attention. Really sorry for self promotion :)
What a great post, I especially loved this quote:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
I think little imagination can help you.
Check out http://browsershots.org/
So it was an HR acquisition? Point me towards a big tech company that hasn't done an acquisition like this.
IMHO whole title is kind of psychopatic - Right Kind of Ambition. Why in the hell anybody would tell me which ambition is right or wrong?
Some of the more creative people I've known seem to be the same ones that blur the lines between work and play. They'll have an interest in something and dive into it having a great time. They're constantly thinking, analyzing, enjoying what they're doing, looking at every angle of doing something. (sounds like Apple?) They're not afraid of much of anything either, including some failures (which they also learn from). They're not going through some memorized motions, they're heavily involved.

I guess that's where they play side of it ties in... heavy involvement, and the happy-chemicals that go with fun/play help to more easily form mental pathways.
Disliking what you're doing, being completely bored/mechanical or having excessive levels of anxiety tends to shut one down mentally.

Work hard and play hard