skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK. So, I just put together that this event is competing head-to-head with Startup Weekend. http://vancouver.startupweekend.org

That seems a little rude. I'm with you that $75 tickets are steep, and hacker unfriendly, but it seems like 2 competing hackathons are going to spread our city's finite dev talent really thin. I can't see how this leads to a better experience for SW or your event.

Wouldn't it be better to have spread these events out? If people think SW is too expensive, they'll wait. If they want to contribute to both, shouldn't they have the option?
My younger son made that icon, and at first the ad was for my older son's website that sells tshirts, http://hackertees.com/ I'll pass along the complement to my younger son.
Power Posing: Fake It Until You Make It
You've got the nail on the head. Capatcha publishing sites are already weeding out the idiots who will jump through hoops to join and blog comment argument or whatever it is - now they can sell the idiots to the highest bidder. Even if they get more spam, the idiot just earnt them cold hard cash in exchange for the spam, and you can still go back to solving spam the non-capatcha way.

It's evil, but evil in a kind of clinically beautiful way. I'd say it stands a good chance of working in the short term too - like punch they monkey ads made a lot of money for some people back in the day
"I would really hope that a group of people as rational as HN would see through the need for that kind of thing—the sentence decodes to an opinion either way."

Interesting writing should contain both statements of fact and opinions. Having the writer provide cues to indicate which is which makes reading easier.

Otherwise, how does one quickly distinguish between an unsupported statement of fact vs. an opinion?
It's a great reason to sing their praise and encourage them to do more of the same. I don't see why it wouldn't be.

edit: but no reason not to give them shit for anything bad they do, of course.
I definitely echo the community center sentiment.

More specifically, I envision the future library as a place that teaches people how to learn:
- How to use online searches intelligently
- How to use online crowd-sourced resources
- How best to use online communities to gain knowledge
- How to find relevant online classes

Though I agree with some of the above comments that people will continue to benefit from the physical books, I do believe that libraries will transition to a Netflix model, where they have access to a limited number of e-books that can be loaned to e-readers for a limited time.
I want to give Scribd the benefit of the doubt. I don't really see this as malicious as much as a business decisions that was misinterpreted.

It was probably something like this: People upload a lot of stuff to their service. Once content goes "stale" no one is viewing it anymore, but they are still storing it. They decided they could either remove the material to make room for new stuff or monetize the old material in a way that justified keeping it around.

The cost of storage is pretty low so maybe I'm reaching a bit here on their behalf. I have no idea what sort of scale they are at. Perhaps I just like to believe that people aren't trying to be evil.
If you've been running your own business for five years, surely you have marketable skills that would keep you out of the running for a frontline McDonalds position.

If I were you, I'd start by making a realistic assessment of your skills in as many different areas that you can, and then thinking about who those skills could be most valuable to.

From the sound of things, you're aiming too low.
A whole pile of data on scribd was never uploaded by the original owners though, but by people posting links to pdfs to sites like HN.
I believe, in this case, it was "a skill that disrupts others' previously-established judgement of your worth to them."
In the long term, ugly, hard to use websites will loose. It can be a very long term in some cases. Just be patient.
very cool, haven't read it through yet but i'm curious, what's your motivation for this research?
Just another case study, I did that too and it worked like a charm. (adding features, and charging for those).
Ask HN: Do you print business cards, postcards, etc?
How often do you print business cards, postcards, announcements, invitations etc?
Xerox PARC turns 40: Marking four decades of tech innovations
It's a tradeoff, sure. In my case, I'm perfectly happy to trade a few comments from people who don't want to deal with a captcha for never having to manually deal with spam. YMMV.
I feel your pain... I have a fulltime job besides my startup. I can't afford to quit right now, but my backup plan is working as a taxi driver in the evenings. The pay isn't actually that bad, you meet some people, and they usually look for "older" (>25), responsible people.
I found that the higher skilled job you're looking for, the more difficult it gets working part-time.
So what would I like to see happen? Get rid of the dead trees, but don't stop there.

It sounds like you want to get rid of books ("dead trees"), but maybe you got a little overexcited. I just went to the library today, to return and check out some books. It's a nice break from the time I spend behind a computer, and e-books don't interest me that much.

But while I was there, a group of toddlers were engaged in a singalong, and several people were browsing the web on library computers. Now, some libraries are better than others (for some strange reason, our local library only has one terminal dedicated to searching the catalog, so you have to wait if someone else is using it and you can't simply use one of the web PCs without signing up for a session, plus there's no wifi), but the trend is definitely toward improving the library as a community resource. The bigger problem is the lack of funding and other resources. If you want to help your library develop along these lines, volunteer, donate, vote and/or simply ask accordingly.
Too bad we can't remotely access video files on the computer.
That's what I thought. But when you have an odd view of 'best', then you take odd steps.

That episode sticks with me years later because it was the only time it's ever turned out that way.
Not really. A library can easily buy more books than everybody in the surrounding communities could possibly want at any given time, which is why if you go to the library you'll see books on the shelves. Books are cheap and I can't use any more than a few at a time.

But any legitimate cluster user can easily use an entire mini-cluster, all the time, on their own. (I know I can!) So the demand for the resources can easily outstrip the supply, for any reasonable value of supply.

A decent M-node cluster with a good backbone costs N thousand dollars per node, where N is some surprisingly high number. If you have more than M users it's pretty much useless for everybody since I can't do anything I can't do on my home computer, and if you have fewer than M users it's a damn poor use of library money to buy an expensive cluster that hardly anyone's going to use.

PS. This thread reminds me that my library books are a week overdue, I should return them right now. Thanks!
He is a regular HN poster. From what I gather of him is that he has been doing this for a while now. He is also a consultant which means that you are allowed to have multiple customers at the same time in various stages of development. If he is focusing his efforts in jobs that are similar he is able to reuse some of the utility routines and design patterns that he has accumulated over the years. I see 88 as a perfectly fair number.
"Know what they are. Not feelings of something real, but something your mind is creating.
...You have to train your brain not to worry."

May I also add meditation.
This is an interesting idea. Something needs to happen to get politicians listening better.
It baffles me that someone can accurately assess that "you are strong in searchlight intelligence." It seems so difficult to measure. I can't imagine claiming that at an interview and supporting it with a few anecdotes.
It seems to me like those who are voting this comment down are doing so not because the viewpoint it provides is wasting our time, or poorly expressed, or anything like that.

This looks to me like nothing but shouting him down because you disagree with what he's got to say. In a case like this, I think you ought to win the battle through superior logic and rhetoric, not just by voting him down so nobody sees his thoughts.
Studs Terkel's _Working_ is a collection of short essays about people in a whole variety of professions. Most of the writing is people talking about their own jobs in their own words. It -- like all of Studs' work -- is incredible.
Someone has been reading way too much Ayn Rand. Selfish != assertive and lots of people out there live perfectly assertive lives without opposing other people all the time. I think there's a difference in following your goals/dreams and being a martyr.
> I don't see why it wouldn't be.

Because it technically rewards bad behaviour, you wouldn't be singing their praise now if they had not messed up first.

1) mess up

2) do an about face

3) reap praise.
Hmm... definitely agree with nick. The hacker community in Vancouver is already so small that there's no need to do both on the same weekend.

I also agree $75 is quite steep, so I've talked to the SW folks about working together somehow & getting a better discount for scrappy entrepreneurs & hackers (while preserving the high $75 for business & "marketing" folk who tend to hijack hacker events here in Vancouver). They're all for it!

So far, we got a 20% discount off for Startup Digest readers (code: startupdigest), but I'm sure we can get even more.
If anybody has any good tips for getting in the zone, I'm all ears.

Meanwhile, my advice would be: learn how to be as effective as possible when you're not in the zone.

"Flow" feels magical, and it's easy to get addicted to that feeling. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that people lose sight of the fact that what we do is work, and it's not always going to be fun. If you're relying on the buzz of being in the zone to motivate you, you're setting yourself up for failure (if the "flow" fails to materialize.)

My advice: start where you are. It's a truism that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but what people often forget is: it's all single steps. So, even if you're not in the zone, take the next step. And the next.
Following conventions/best-practices. Not duplicating code unnecessarily. Using features of the language to my advantage instead of forcing the language to fit my program structure.

And also just an overall improvement in the quality of the code - less room for bugs, less 'hacky fixes', easier to maintain/extend/modify
The disagreement isn't about leaving the world the same or better, almost everyone wants that.

The argument is which is the superior method for making the world better. On one side you have Krugman who believes you should tax the rich and let the government spend the wealth the rich accumulated to improve conditions for everyone.

On the other side you people who think that if you allow people to spend, save and invest their money as they choose, society will come out better in the end.

Side A likes to portray side B as selfish, greedy bastards and side B likes to portray side A as communists thieves. Really though, if you take the actual objectives of both sides I would argue they're generally noble.

There is still the matter of who is actually right. That is where the real argument is.
This is a worker system that uses queues, not a queue unto itself.
Native Apps Account for Half of Mobile Internet Traffic
I wonder if Apple's policy changes are from worries about Windows Phone 7. They largely eliminated Microsoft's biggest selling point to app developers and redirected a lot of development talent that may otherwise have spent the next two months building apps for the WP7 launch.
I've never been able to get HN's OpenID login to work -- it used to work at some point, but when I log in, I just get the error message:

"Bad OpenID login."

If I log in to ClickPass first, it sends me to a screen where I can enter my HN username/password -- but when I fill out that form, I'm taken to < http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge >, which just says "Unknown."

From this experience, I assume the OpenID support in HN is more of an afterthought than a real implementation.
7 hours? The battery life is about 8 hours for normal usage. Since decoding Theora takes about as much CPU as decoding DivX all the statements about Theora halving battery life are probably bull.
Hey there, great initiative, make sure that you get approval to run a 'wallet system' or you could find yourself in a ton of trouble. Maintaining a balance on behalf of customers comes with a ton of responsibilities, in the EU you would be considered a bank.
The Grand Taxonomy of Hip-Hop Handles
That's another fine example of why 'disrupt' should die. :P
I found that the higher skilled job you're looking for, the more difficult it gets working part-time.

This reverses itself when it comes to consulting. If you're skilled enough, and high-priced enough, you can do quite well coming into a company for a very short term engagement. Hell, speakers often get paid for a single hour.
Investors seeing farmland as safer bet than stocks
He says "The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy," yet his own career has greatly benefited from his talent for writing and self-promotion.
What does the Medal of Honor tell us about the nature of bravery?
With an admitted android bias, I'm having a hard time seeing why someone would pay $5-10/mo for this, working only on IOS4, instead of using Google Latitude for free, on any number of supported devices.

Latitude doesn't support the manual geofence alerts, but it does have its own automated alerts, the pros and cons of which are up for debate. For many people, though, not having to set up and curate alert settings may actually be a welcome convenience.
I second the vote for Resque: I have been amazed by how easy and stable it is.
Cool! I like that you have the source on github. It feels a little poky on my Droid (OC'd to 800'hz) but works great! I also realize I could just fork on github & make it faster, but I haven't much spare time at the moment.
I've known several dozen wealthy people and none of them are like that. Not one. All of them were older, and paid little attention to the 'consumer culture' that advertising promotes. Most of that advertising was through channels that target the young (under 45) crowd because they are the ones best influenced by it.
I'm happy to pay (reasonable) taxes for needs that cannot be easily serviced by private industry. That isn't what my post was about.

The post I was replying to was trying to insinuate that having "excess wealth" leads to being unhappy and therefore (in the context of the OP) it is ok to tax the rich more because it will make them happier in the end. And that is a bullshit reason for taxing someone.
> I think it is time that companies reach a point in their understanding of users' reaction to the bait & switch.

For real. This always reminds me of the dude who tries to be friends with the girl so he can eventually date her, instead of simply asking her out, and risking the 'No' like a man.

Slimy.
I actually played Hunt the Wumpus on my dads Kaypro2 when I was a kid. Grand Theft Wumpus might be the funniest thing I read this week. With Lisp + Graphs? Solid. I wonder if more of No Starch's offerings are this cool.
Delivering pizzas might make some quick cash.
Aye. But as a writer, not a chef. He complains quite often about following the money instead of the experience during his tenure as a chef for many a failed restaurant.
Ask HN: How to properly dispose of hard disks?
I have some really old dead hard disks to dispose of. What's the best way to remove/wipe/destroy the data on them prior to disposal?
The FORTRAN "IV" provided by the IBM 1130, which used 360 components, but the FORTRAN was e.g. lacking logical IF statements.
Apple, Facebook, and Google go to war
It seems to be capped at 60FPS. But it's the simplest demo, my results for the others are nowhere near 60FPS, most aren't even usable unfortunately.
I just want to point out that most of the taxes you pay in the US do not go to the upkeep of society you may benefit from (which we can define as schools, police, education, etc).

Most of your tax money either goes to propping up a bloated military-industrial complex, maintaining bases overseas, counterterrorism ops, foreign aid to oppressive regimes, etc etc.

If you're a pro-tax liberal you're probably against high defense spending, but you're perfectly happy to keep funding it with your tax dollars.

Just food for thought.

EDIT: If you want to quibble, the majority of discretionary spending is military(not counting Social Security/Medicare). Since that's where your income tax dollars go, it's a reasonable argument to make.
Intuit’s Scott Cook And GE’s Beth Comstock At Disrupt SF
Is that really lock in? It's the benefit of selling Coke over other drinks. Free fridge. Cold drinks drive sales and you might go for it. "Lock in" has a built in negative connotation. Cancel your service, return the fridge, what's the lock in? You want the fridge, sell the product, or don't. If Coke is the only company that offers a free fridge, and you really need it, I suppose you're locked in.
This was my initial reaction as well. The key fallacy (and I hesitate to use such a "strong" word) is here: "Do I want to read a novel? I can have it delivered to my kindle in a matter of a few seconds and still not get out of bed." Not everyone can afford a Kindle, and most of the older texts kept by a library are not in eBook format.

Interestingly, the "Internet age" has actually returned me to my library because of accessibility and cost effectiveness. My town is a member of the Fort Wort Public Library System, or MetrOPAC. It links together all of the Fort Worth libraries, along with several of the suburbs'.[1] The card issued by my city works at a couple dozen other libraries, and allows me to get a card at roughly ten more. MetrOPAC's card catalog is online[2] and even lets me have books or other material brought from another library to my own.

It sounds like the "broken" library is the one the author went to. Because it is a publicly-supported institution, things like a HPC cluster or other specialized tools are impractical (though I'd be there every waking moment). Providing the knowledge to seek these out IS what a library can do. My library is always packed, and even though my city will get about $400,000 less in tax revenue this year (declining property values), the library is fully-funded and is getting a small budget increase because the citizens use and value it. That's what a library should be, in my eyes.

Edited to add: Oh, and our wireless Internet access works well. ;)

1 - http://www.fortworthgov.org/library/branches/
2 - http://fwl.ipac.dynixasp.com/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=
You really think this is not a waste of time to read? "It is no more right to take a dollar from a man who has a hundred of them than it is to take a dollar from a man who has one."

And given how extraordinary the claim is, there's not a single argument to support it. It seems like the definition of trolling. A well-reasoned argument for why we should either have no taxes or an extremely regressive tax system would be welcome, but I see nothing of the sort in that post.
Scribd would rather increase the amount of content on it's servers by making uploading easy and free. While the guy that publishes the article is really the Scribd user, he can publish elsewhere if the price makes it too much of a hassle. The viewer has less of a choice, if it's only published on Scribd it's either pay up or go without.

I don't agree with their choice (or methods) but it makes sense for them to do this.
This reminds me of chi.mp. I recently suspected that my Gmail was hacked, so I clicked maniacally to get to the page where I could reset my password.

I discover that my chi.mp account is the back-up e-mail, which is great; the service lets me decide which e-mail address to forward to.

I go to chi.mp, think for a minute to remember my password, and get to the e-mail-forwarding screen. The account is set to forward to an e-mail address that is inconvenient (I can't remember the reason), so I remove the forwarding I've set up and---

"Something, something, you need a Pro account to create a forwarding address."

What the hell is a Pro account, I think to myself, a thought that is quickly eclipsed by the fact that a) The guys screwed me over without telling me, and b) I have no way of saving my e-mail account from a potential invader, unless I pay these <expletive>s.

I have yet to e-mail them and give them shit for it, but I didn't want to let it ruin my week, but I'll be sure to contact them when I can muster the time and energy.
The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s)
Android Market Ranking Across Phones
How to Create a Simple SaaS Price Chart (HTML/CSS)
The VLC authors seem not to think so. It's their call.
I can't think of any reason why I would spend more time on it. Why are you asking?
This is what I originally wrote:

> If I have ten brilliant ideas, the best thing to do is to execute full-steam on one, instead of dividing my attention.

And this is the altered version:

> If I have (what I consider to be) ten brilliant ideas, the best thing for me, personally, to do, is to execute full-steam on one, instead of dividing my attention.

Now, there are things—aesthetic descriptors, like "brilliant" and "best"—that are completely subjective (except in certain jargon contexts, like "best-case efficiency.") Using an aesthetic descriptor is inherently implying that whatever you are saying is an opinion, because aesthetic descriptors have no other use—there is no way to "support" the "fact" that something is best, or most moral, or is the most dance-able, or tastes most nostalgic. These evaluations come from your utility function, not your model of the world.

All I did, here, was to add qualifiers to my aesthetic descriptors marking them as such. Frequently, I do the same to, say, a summary of a post by Zed Shaw, as a comment to that post, and people reply with "well why didn't he just say that?" It's bizarre to me, because these things are completely clear and never the subject of argument in spoken conversation—yet they seem to be points of ire almost always when online. I wonder if there's some sort of body-language cue that people normally rely on so subconsciously that they never realize they've avoided actually parsing any aesthetic qualifiers they've encountered, instead just inferring their meanings from analysis of tone and intent.
I didn't inherit any money. As for my aptitudes and interests, they didn't make me a 'high earner'; they didn't make me a dime. My work to apply them did.

I see a lot of that attitude, that because I was born smart is why I have the job I do now. I wasn't born smart. That information didn't start out in my brain. I spent a lot of Saturdays as a kid at the library, reading non-fiction. I spend a lot of time now, reading non-fiction. In other words, I study.

I have a career coach, that helps me make plans to accomplish my goals. A lot of work went into this 'born success'. I think it's only perceived that way because others don't want to see that they can do it, too.
Ask HN: Why is HN so slow on the iPad compared to other sites?
I have tried to open all links in a new window so that I don't have to reload the HN page but this doesn't save any time because the HN page refreshes for no reason when you go back to it.