skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of these protections and benefits that "traditional" employees have, unemployment insurance, we don't actually need. Why do you need to insure against the possibility that you may fail to get work? Is this not what savings are for?

Health insurance in traditional employment is subsidized and this should end. along with the distortions it creates.

But seriously, protect me from discrimination? How the hell would you do that? Companies may discriminate against workers but no one protects companies from arbitrary crap like that. Either you have a good reputation and offer value or you don't. How does the writer propose to micromanage these relationships? Will we all have to explain why we change babysitters in the future?

Part of the reason you can make more when you crawl out of the quicksand of corporate America is because you're free of a lot of crap imposed on traditional employers.
We have a Ruby course listed on the site already:

http://codelesson.com/courses/view/the-ruby-programming-lang...
Meet my little (Clojure) friend mapmap
Isn't it likely that FB is making google more ad money without google having to lift a finger? On FB, a good chunk of links to "outside world" stuff pass around. Websites do fbconnect 'cos FB&twitter drive traffic to them. Google places contextual ads on these sites and in youtube videos without anybody needing to search for anything. Even youtube has "share on FB" button.

I don't think FB can keep their soc graph to themselves for much longer .. if as ES says people will just give the data to google ... just as they probably do for FB now. (You can tell FB to crawl your gmail contacts and link up.)

So by that argument I can buy ES's "FB is not our prime competitor" statement. Apple is somewhat obviously not a competitor since google can also push ads to iOS devices and pull data like location.

That leaves Bing .. which makes me scratch my head. The only reason I can think of for google considering Bing to be their main competitor is to avoid antitrust suits by not looking like a search monopoly.

Side note: FB's ads are pretty funny actually. I keep getting "Download Chrome, a fast browser" ads on my FB page despite the fact that I'm viewing the page in Chrome.
Funny.
I'm 18, college freshman, and have been facebookless since May.
I got my account when I was 15, so I had two and a half years of addiction to fight.
My experience without a facebook? I get the exact same experience as everybody else around me, but with 90% less drama.

I like this.
Here are some free books for machine learning/AI

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/186/good-freely-availab...
Perhaps not but you could say that about a lot of things. People will make up their own minds, and most will do so based on their preexisting biases. Those who try to keep an open mind should be aware that this story is a rumour based on hearsay, not a verifiable fact.
seconded. security is a priority here. plus they have pretty good rates.

unfortunately not available to canucks.
heh, I get:

> WordPress.com is temporarily unavailable.

so that monstrous website is based on wordpress? I could never tell.
The times when I feel the most balanced are times when I'm doing the following:

- Exercising a lot

- Eating right

- Being somewhat sociable

- Getting enough sleep

Things that lead to more stress:

- Worrying about stupid things like paying household bills, letting paperwork build up, etc.

- Not enough sleep

- Not enough exercise

- Too much time spent holed up writing code.
Useless without pics.
i have mixed feelings about mentioning this... but prescription drugs can help immensely, but they are hard to stop doing. i was on clonopin for a year and my business thrived. however, it was hard to stop taking them.
I've built this. Is it worth pursuing or just mad?
Don't bother trying to implement something complicated with multi-processing in PHP. The article defeats itself: "If you need multi-threading, use a different language."
There's a lot to be said for just sticking to your standard form of agreement.

Taking a project on spec is basically making a loan. Makes sense when there's collateral (or if you're a bank).

When your work product has no value to you, then there's no collateral.

There's no reason to formally "pass." Just propose on terms that meet your goals.

If they take it, you'll be happy.

If they don't, you have still been responsive and that will leave the door open.

Good luck.
Background: Spent the last couple of weeks working on this weird graphical RSS Reader. Not sure where to take it next, but put it up here for comments and feedback. Any advice, i.e. is it a viable startup idea?
Well good luck to you. Don't worry about the haters that say you won't make it because there is no trust built up like the trust users have for Paypal. Who trusted Paypal when they first got started? And many people certainly don't trust them now.
If you can talk about it, I would love to read more details about this...
To the author: I'm not on facebook , but I'm writing this article on wired, hoping you will "like" it and tweet it. 31 like so far from facebook, I'd like to see an article with the title: 6 reasons why wired is not on facebook or 6 reasons why I don't use the like button my articles. What a funny. As shortformblog put it, it's like wearing a giant sign around the office that says "I don't deserve my Job"
i agree. plain white is much cleaner and simpler to read. alternate colors just add noise.
Techcrunch is down at the moment. So is wordpress.com...

WordPress.com is temporarily unavailable. We’re working on the issue and things will be back up and running ASAP. Please check back in a few minutes.
I'm a big fan of them because they're the only ones the legal department at work will allow us to use in our products.

Using a BSD license means you're being nice to developers.

The GPL means you're being nice to users and telling companies/developers to move along.
Ask HN: Any advice for a high school graduate?
Hey HN,

Just finished high school a few months ago. I donot have the money for college nor am I motivated to go. I figured out that I cannot work for someone but at the same time I also cannot run a business.

I wanted to escape from the tech/freelance/start-up world and have tried many times but some how opportunities come my way and I end up right back in.

Now I know the technology sector is where the money and jobs are but I donot plan to sit down and program for 5 hours straight for the rest of my life.

Thanks for your help.
Creating government bureaucracy should definitely be avoided. We're stuck with inherently-complex problem domains of global climate and large-scale information manipulation, though.
I don't see anything wrong with these alleged agreements, per se, but it sets a terrible anti competitive precedent that is all manner of bad for employee marketability. It would be difficult to sus out the truth of what these types of agreements actually do behind the closed doors of these company's HR departments.
Today I posted a simple non-programming question on Quora after I skimmed an article by MG Siegler espousing its greatness. Ten hours later and I still don't have an answer.

The same thing happens to me with Stackoverflow. Sometimes I get argumentative answers but most of the time I get no answer. Maybe I am an idiot but I think sites like this will fail when they are overwhelmed by people who have questions but aren't necessarily in the position to contribute back themselves (hey we are busy!)

The utility in these types of sites is the range of questions that will be archived and served off search results for years to come.
Considering this is completely about graphics, the parent comment is totally valid.
So basically: a completely inaccurate statement.
This is synonymous with Zed's recent Python rant, and the "DLL hell" mentioned previously.

FreeBSD went through the pain of extracting itself away from its perl dependency years ago. And, it's way better for it. There's nothing like a minimal install. A nice, clean, empty slate.
And meanwhile, in other news, Paul Krugman is predicting a certain political party is bent on dismantling portions of said social support system(s):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=...

</snark>

I do hope that this does not come to pass, and would rather see options change with the times. Having transitioned from sole proprietor to LLC corporate member, I am just now finally trying to figure out how to take advantage of some of the benefits of larger corporations in regards to taxation and asset accumulation... It sure does seem like an up-hill battle, right now.
I don't know about you, but to me Google is already pretty scary. Google has the power to completely destroy your business. They have little to no human communication, thus not allowing for any real follow-up, they're like this god, or black box. You have to hope and pray your begging will correct things.

For example, lets assume you have a somewhat successful product, getting pretty good search results for your category, and one day your site throws some errors, or it goes down, or something of that nature, your site is now no longer showing for your category. They don't tell you anything, not even if you use their Webmaster tools, all you know is that according to their search query result performance that all of a sudden you stop showing up for any other term than your name. Previously you were showing up for many terms. After you correct these issues, which you can only really guess at, you submit a re-consideration request describing the issue, your solution, and why you think whatever thing you think is the problem should be corrected. Now you wait. Not for some response, but just an automated reply saying that your response has been dealt with, not whether they did anything, or if in fact you had an issue. This will come 2-3 weeks later, your business may already be dead. But if it's not, and magically you show up for Google results again, and webmaster tools shows you that your previous search terms have relevance, you will most definitely not be in your previous position. Time to get out there again, get fresh in-links, and re-build your business.

This is the current status quo. This is very very scary. Even Credit Cards have to tell you why you were rejected, not enough credit history or something like that, you can even get one free credit report in response that will explain things. Not Google. I would sleep much better at night knowing that there was some process that would tell you if there's a problem, and if possible what the reasons were, in general terms. Once you correct them you should be able to submit that you did, and hopefully that would address the situation in some reasonable amount of time.

It's crazy that most of us are ok with a search engine dominating 70% or so of search, without any ability to resolve conflicts, ask questions, or anything. We can only click buttons and hope that after enough times the great Google will listen.
Good to see you guys pro-active on this, that's better than to end up a few thousand (or worse) in the hole because of fraud and in trouble with the law.

The original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709481
NASA added the safety systems after Challenger because the crew survived the explosion.

Similarly, they added tile repair kits after Columbia.
I don't really get some of you points.

1) I'm not relevant.

You then go on to explain how relevant he is with Wired.

3) Despite my position at a publication that relies on technology and social media as both a promotion tool and main subject, I want to annoy my PR contacts and writers by forcing them to use other techniques to contact me.

Is FB the primary way to contact people professionally? Apparently it must be as potential contacts would be 'forced' to use another method. If it essentially was the only way of contact, wouldn't that prove his points about privacy and running everything through a questionably motivated company?

Got a problem with that (privacy)? Don't overshare. Make a fan page so people can worship at your altar, and turn on your privacy settings so nobody else can see your data. Use your head.

Then what's the point? If he's not using it as a way to communicate anything of significance (your point #3), then why bother? How would a fan page make him understand and be connected (wired, if you will) to the world?

6) I want to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. And as a side effect of that, I'm choosing to no longer be relevant in my field of technology.

Or, perhaps he believes that there is nothing technically amazing about FB other then it gained critical mass to build a huge user base. Are the uses of ajax and some clean UIs really bleeding edge? In my mind FB is similar to what YouTube was before it was bought by Google for 1.6B. A nicely implemented site (nothing technologically jaw-dropping) with a massive user base. Essentially: decent app, excellent domain name, and superior name recognition.
i disagree. i've been coding for quite a while now, and am now just picking up emacs. the only way for me to begin is to start with basic/simple tutorials (e.g. peepcode, emacs starter kit, etc.). for an experienced programmer trying to learn python, i'd imagine zed would be an amazing fit since he could possibly customize/direct his vast knowledge specific to the user.

though i agree with the idea that there are very few resources geared toward expert/advanced users. i'm not sure how flexible the course material would be in this case tho.
This is actually really neat! I've always been interested in the idea of a web app that can provide a better browsing experience than a boring list of topics and website links (no offense HN!) Keep on building this!
It's not just the attributions leaving the main feed. Just a few months ago Twitter was going out of their way to promoting 3rd party clients (in the form of free advertising in the web client, in the space now occupied by Who To Follow). The last few months have seen almost all promotion for 3rd party clients disappear.

Going from attributing every tweet in the main feed and promoting outside clients freely on the sidebar of everyone's account to shunting attributions into a secondary info pane, that's a very large shift.
Thanks, I'd never heard of Jruby before, that looks really interesting.
To put it another way, when I hear "google is a search company", I take it to mean "google's business depends on searching the internet" instead of "people use google to search the internet" - the former being much wider in scope than the latter.
Scrabble Is First Paid Game App for Kindle
just pointing out the fact that you can make a lot of things sound trivial if you try :)
5 hours straight? I think you mean 8 hours straight. Or 12.
Sony Ericsson goes Android, leaves Nokia as only big Symbian fan
Epic Biking App Marries Game Mechanics with Excercise
i think he was asking if zed would be teaching a course on ruby.

if so, what about mongrel too?
:)
It's just a technological failure (because it requires too much cpu power to dig through a non-indexed non-relational db) and they don't want to show their shame of poor design.

Can you imagine any other service surviving where you cannot lookup older data?

BTW Google has a social search that indexes twitter and facebook but it's not complete by any means.
the godfather has spoken.
yep. which doesn't contradict my phrase "newer or sexier languages"

also, i'd bet more people moved from Perl to Python, than the reverse, since the 90's
This comment is dead on, but there is one tiny footnote that I'd like to add.

There have been some less than scrupulous operators of payment systems in the past which have made it much harder for bona-fide operators to get started or to become even moderately successful. The fact that any such service instantly attracts a bunch of money launderers also does not help (that's not fraud from your perspective, but it is illegal and you are instrumental in making it work).
I wouldn't even be that generous, it's an outright lie.
Yes, but now that experience of being locked in a room and bored to death is pieced up and spread throughout every day of your life; album by album.
For those of you who have asked for more details (that I should have provided to begin with...)

We're a small company, about 40 employees and 15 developers. The app is written in Ruby on Rails 3 with MongoDB for the backend. It's designed to be run on a server and provides a JSON and XML based API for general-purpose reporting of user metrics in (web) apps.

One of the main goals with open sourcing the app, from the company's perspective, is that they would like other people to fork and contribute back to the project. Any thoughts on what license might be best for those purposes?

Obviously the GPL means that people have to publish their changes, but I wonder if that restriction might cause less adoption than using the MIT / BSD license to allow people to do whatever they want.
Chaitin’s website about the book, which seems to include the full contents (in HMTL format): http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lm.html

A PDF draft from 1994 at Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9407009

Some other links about the book (putting these here to save people scrolling through many pages of search results & running into journal paywalls):

The only review at Amazon (2 stars): http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZJVJX57T6YVA/

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/reviews/reviews...

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/siam.html

A couple reviews whose "official" URLs are journal-paywalled: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/bookrev/30-1.pdf http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~svozil/publ/greg.htm

Math Trek: http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_03_06_06.html

* * *

Everything2 page about Chaitin: http://everything2.com/title/Gregory+Chaitin

Several interesting looking papers in this book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20445762/Randomness-and-Complexity...

Slashdot review/discussion of another Chaitin book, Metamath! The Quest for Omega: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/10/1947247

The page about that book (full text also available, apparently): http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/omega.html and Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/0404335

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/two-philosoph...
Maybe not nearly as cool as this: http://gizmodo.com/5646063/how-to-use-your-iphone-as-a-bike-...

But Epic Biking brings game mechanics into cycling by adding OpenFeint integration. It is pretty cool to see how well... Ok, really how poorly I do in relationship with other cyclists around the world.

This app was written with Corona from AnscaMobile.com. If anyone cares to hear about the experience, I'd love to share. Let me know what you'd like to know about.

Here are a few promo codes for those that are interested:

JYT77EJEAFTP
HAJR9JNN9XFT
YL7RN6K3FHWJ
3XR3J64WRTJP
39WTMNE4RNNK

Please rate the app. Thanks!
Physically: Eating non-junk food, exercising, and sleep are the only requirement for sustaining a fast pace. Make your own simple healthy food, ride a bike or run, sleep until your body is ready to wake up.

Mentally: Take one or two day breaks from work entirely: play Starcraft, watch DVDs, take a road trip, or whatever. Constantly remind yourself that nothing is as scary or great as it seems.
i second that. not just mongrel2, even ruby, jazz guitar, etc.

i think being able to get feedback from someone like zed allows one to QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY get to the meat and heart of ideas and concepts. whereas in my experience with other instructors you're sometimes wondering in the back of your mind whether the person actually knows what they are talking about.

it's similar to being able to study directly with a zen master. except in this case it's not zen, it's zed.
"If I wanted people editing my words, looking down at me, and deciding to change stuff, I’d start a wiki. as is, my answers are my own, and they reflect my mood, and my typos. and if they want me ot fix them they should ask me."

Sounds like the author is suffering from exactly what he is accusing Joel and Jeff of.
It's Ruby on Rails. See my top-level reply for more details...
You said the magic words: points are redeemable for money. Congratulations on your entry into international money services! Please send a truck around at your convenience to pick up the relevant regulations. Please make sure your convenience is immediately or we will seize your accounts and possibly prosecute you for money laundering.
Thanks for that - really appreciated. I've been heads-down getting this working and to be honest lost a bit of perspective on if it's an ok idea or not.

Did the zooming in/out work ok?
Thank you for appreciating Friday night downvote bait.

Point is technical specifications do not alone support the headline!
Cargo isn't inconvenienced by traffic delays.

People are.
>When it does, you can just fork Notational Velocity, add books/tags/whatever, make it sync with a web app, and get back in business!

Awesome! That should be easy then, because Notational Velocity already has tags, and it already syncs with Simplenote — very well, in fact:

http://scrod.posterous.com/interesting-facts-about-simplenot...
It isn't a part of our core business.

As for the motivation, pardon the management-speak, but they're looking to "harness the power of the open source community" by giving away the initial code and benefiting from other devs working on it down the road.
Old article.
"Given the amount of hardware on this new chip, it's complete overkill for a smartphone. "

No it's not! I can't wait to have a killer smartphone with HD graphics on a high-resolution 5" screen. That would really rock. Smartphones this powerful could replace laptops as long as they had monitor-out and usb plugs.
I'm always bereft of good web designers for my ideas :(
i'm curious as to what sort of pedagogical approach zed will be taking with this course. i know zed's personal preference is to pick up a book and just go thru all the exercises in it (e.g. mickey baker's jazz guitar).

will he be doing anything different from traditional student/instructor methods? curious as to what zed's personal take on this is as well.
Software can be covered by both copyright and patent; isn't it unique in that regard?
Interestingly QWERTY came out the worst for me by far. To bad I'm a laptop and Vim user.
It depresses me to see the banality of the the people that I thought were cool in college. Nobody is cool. What a bummer
Your post contributes nothing to the discussion.
Oh god, I've been wanting something like this for ages. I've always dreamed of a regex driven list generator, but where I can supply constraints on repetition operators (*->{0,2}, +->{1,3}) to limit the scope, but then get a comprehensive list of all the matching strings.

Imagine using some rules to take something like a user driven entry, where they'll enter something like say...a phone number freetext, but then use some rules that turn that phone number into a regex that'll match many common ways to write that phone number, then generate all the possible matching versions of that phone number for submission against an indexed database of text documents to see if any match. It's a trivial example, but a similar concept could work for things like names that have been Romanized from a non-Latin alphabet....generate a regex to match some variants, then generate the variants and search an indexed database for those variants. It would be much much faster in many cases than scanning through all the documents with the regex.