skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He also played in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarion of Doctor Parnassus (which I just first saw last week) and was also there a very sympathetic character. I recommend it, it's odd in typical Gilliam fashion. It also has the distinction of being Heath Ledger's last film.
See here: http://jseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-... for a list of influential books on me. I actually have a half-written post on books I wish I'd read when I was younger; here it is:

1. <em>Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience</em> by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

2. <em>The Guide to Getting It On</em> by Paul Johannides [sp?]

3. <em>The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature</em> by Geoffrey Miller

4. <em>Hackers & Painters</em> by Paul Graham

5. <em>Man's Search for Meaning</em> by Viktor Frankl

6. <em>Stumbling on Happiness</em> by Daniel Gilbert

In all cases, I think these books profoundly shaped how not only I think, but I think others can learn to think too. All suddenly revealed new connections and ideas about the world I'd never experienced or expected to experience before.

Granted, no book can be removed from its context, and its possible that if I'd read some of the books above as a younger person I wouldn't have been ready to appreciate them. But <em>Flow</em> seems by far the most valuable of the choices listed above because it engulfs more of the content of the others than any other choice.

Steven Berlin Johnson's new book Where Ideas Come From looks promising: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-Innovation/dp/15... .
Knowledge is more and more dispersed in modern society while power is more and more concentrated. This is precisely why constitutionalists/libertarians think that the federal government should only enforce free trade among the states, pass a few necessary legal frameworks like the universal commercial code, enforce interstate contracts, and secure the border (this list is not exhaustive but you get the idea, LIMITED government). A local government is MUCH more likely to "get it right" because they are on the ground dealing with the local problems and people. The other nice thing about local governments is people vote with their feet: if your municipal or county government is in charge of most governmental functions and they are doing a bad job you can vote (where by the way your vote counts for much more because you are one among hundreds of thousands instead of one among hundreds of millions) and failing that move.
Wheretheladies.at Shows You Where The Ladies Are At
Wheretheladies.at
They paid into it, so they're entitled to it, and the benefits are capped far lower than their salary, so they don't cost the system any more than more typical workers.

If it's the first time they've been eligible for benefits, then they've paid in a lot more than they're likely to collect.

To be honest, though, I can't see many millionaires bothering to file.
People ask me how I go through the pain of watching Test cricket. My answer to them has always been "You don't get the point, do you?". People just don't understand how beautiful some things are. Some tastes are acquired. I understand that T20 gives instant gratification and I don't escape the lure of it. For me, T20 is like a one night stand and Tests are like long-term relations. I did not want to hurt all the T20 fans by comparing them with masturbation and making-love.

I feel that there is no relativity in good taste. I listen to Vivaldi, my friend listens to Bryan Adams and my younger brother listens to Justin Bieber.
Fiction:

Phillip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, Scanner Darkly.

If you really love reading - Orhan Pamuk - Black Book and My Name Is Red. ^_^
It's a bit early to tell, isn't it?

In 1910 you could have written: Is the Austro-Hungarian Empire a model for surviving the 20th century?
There is a possibility that the like button on external sites could morph into an adsense competitor over time, if that is the case (and it is successful) then fb revenue has the potential to really take off.
Referring to real life and the human beings that are a part of it as "meatspace" indicate that you have, for the most part, disappeared from it.
I think it's interesting that at NeXT he went from building hardware with NextStep to selling an OS and API's for NT/Solaris. Then after his return to Apple he killed off the clone vendors and focused on hardware again. I wonder if the first iMac's success convinced him to keep Apple focused on hardware and hide away OSX for X86 for the time being and kill off Yellow Box for Windows (Cocoa APIs for Windows NT/2k)
Laptop stand for sitting/standing (Nottable)
So beyond just having the founder take up the majority of the board seats? I suppose one needs to first find investors comfortable to let this all happen.
You're arguing the exact opposite of everyone else. According to your argument all the money is in science and yet women still prefer the liberal arts.
I'll have to second #3, the Mating Mind. It put a lot of stuff about dating into context.
I ordered mine from here: http://www.dhgate.com/nottable-laptop-stand-laptop-table-des... (doesn't include the mousepad addition)

Shipped from China, totalled ~$110

I hadn't found any reviews online, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but I've been using it for a week now and I'm impressed. The joints can be rotated to any angle and lock in place solidly, it looks great, and I trust it to hold my 17" MBP.
A while back I read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, and enjoyed it immensly. de Botton has a real philosophical bent, and profiled a number of different occupations, and makes a lot of really insightful observations about the modern workforce. Can't recommend it highly enough.
And we've had over two centuries of feature creep, while only rarely going back and formally updating the design docs.
We're looking for interns in Shanghai. Paid but not much (but more than enough to cover the cost of living in Shanghai)...

You would be working on Rails app and play with cool and fun things like cappuccino, redis and mongodb. Possibility of getting hired full time later on.

So, if you want to discover China and join a small growing startup (we do both consulting and our own products), send me a mail at guillaume -squiggly sign- agiletomato.com.

We're also interested in designers...
Some states are better run, and people (and companies) will move to those states, that's the point. With the federal government there are no alternatives, there is no choice.
This is apropos for me because just yesterday I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and switch to Vim from TextMate. The resulting [temporary] decrease in productivity put me in a bad mood for most of the day, but then the rational part of my brain kicked in and I was wondering why should I feel guilty about making a long-term investment in productivity?

Now I don't want to project my own issues onto anybody else--the point is to think about why you feel guilty--but in my case I think I have guilt issues relating to geeking out going back to early childhood when my parents were really not very supportive of long computer hours doing who-knows-what. I realized that the need to be outwardly productive at all times is a form of extrinsic validation that I sometimes lean on too heavily.

Okay, so this is quite a bit different from your story, but I think some general advice is applicable here: just follow your passion and don't let guilt feed some sort of psychological negative feedback loop. If you feel guilty about something, make a conscious decision to either do something about it or decide not to, but don't let it eat away at you.

As for the low-tech thing, well just remember that a lot of developers waste a lot of time farting around with whatever new toys they can get their hands on. It doesn't necessarily make them better. You could live in a cabin, grow a garden and chop wood every day, and if you sat down and focused on the craft of programming for 8 hours a day you could still be a great programmer. In silicon valley in particular I feel that the value of downtime and cross-disciplanary idea pollination is underrated.
US$5/US Gallon == US$1.32/l

We (Australia) are currently paying only slightly less than that at the moment, but have in the past paid much more. I'm pretty sure in the UK they pay way more, and in Europe slightly less than the UK, but still over US%/gallon

I guess my point is why is everyone in the US so worried about fuel prices when you've had it so cheap for so long. The rest of us manage ok, why do you think you won't as well?
http://goodreads.com is suppose to help you solve the problem of "What should I read next?"
Collective power of 4chan and Anonymous: the future of cyber protests
"Maybe, the article mentioned he started out as a waiter "

I think it was the roommate, Rogers, who had been a waiter.
Shows HN: One Million Tweeps Project
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
How To Use an Abacus
Yep - without wanting to sound all peace & love it doesn't hurt you to completely unplug every so often. Whenever I've taken a decent holiday where there's no net access (yes these places still do exist) it's done me the world of good.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is the best book I've read this year. It profoundly changed the way I look at things. I also found Sperm Wars to be very enlightening, ditto Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.
I was trying to figure out if he was suggesting that adding machines ought to deliver a superlinear performance boost, which would be quite a trick.

(Yes, there are sources of slight superlinear speedup in parallel scenarios, but nothing capable of beating n^2, never mind exponential growth.)
Hermann Hesse's novel "The Glass Bead Game".

Ostensibly it's about this sophisticated game played in a monastery that abstracts over the sum of human knowledge. To me it presented a very potent argument for the value of academia in a commercially-driven world.

If nothing else, it nicely counterbalances the monomaniacal ambition and stress of tech startup land in a way that us geeks can appreciate.
I didn't realize you could do hex calculations on a Chinese abacus. You just have to ignore two beads in each column when in "decimal mode"
Yeah, you obviously don't have the slightest clue what Gonzo is. Doing a quick scan on Wikipedia will not help you understand something. Read a few of Thompsons' works and then decide if you really would compare it to the current style of journalism that's prevalent in the west.
"God's Debris" by Scott Adams. Yes the Dilbert guy. It's available for free download http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_Debris.
On the philosophical side, I sugget "Existentialism Is a Humanism" by Sartre: it explains in a clear and simple way the idea of Existentialism, which is a great philosophy based on strong principles, and a key idea in the modern philosophical debate. It somehow changed my life, and made me think a lot more about life principles that can actually guide one's life.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a history of human reasoning, tracking the emergence of science into what we know today. Fills in a lot of meaningful gaps you may have forgotten from your various science courses, while providing the human side of major advances (rivalries, disappointments, hoaxes, all of it).

Science from a new perspective is excellent, but it's also such an interesting window on the many people who have struggled against really difficult problems to move humanity forward.

Also, make sure you go play Bioshock (the first one) for a sobering counterpoint on Randian thought. Atlas Shrugged is awesome, until you remember that you can't trust any group of people to maintain their rational behavior in the face of personal gains. Great story, and it'll drag you back from Randroid town (it did me, anyway). Either way, the kid in me would still love to have dinner in Galt's Gulch.

If you'd like to read eye-opening fiction, I heartily recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. It's an incredible exploration of what it is to be free and how modern societies evolve at the expense of their citizens' personal liberties. One of the most thought-provoking pieces of fiction I've ever read, and lots of fun character-wise as well. (Incidentally, Heinlein was a fan of Ayn Rand, so if you liked Atlas Shrugged, you may find this even more interesting.)
Although it has to be said, sometimes Hacker News does not seem to be that different from Men's Health and the likes. Here it is "How to get rich in four hours", in Men's Health it is "How to get great abs in 4 hours". And with Tim Ferris' next book, the two worlds will move even closer to each other.

Edit: this reminds, WHY is there no "Hacker News" for women's stuff? Where things like "the sensational new makeup" or whatever can be upvoted and so on? (No offense to women, I am talking about women's magazine readers). In theory women like to talk more than men, yet I am not aware of such a site.
Having lived in Michigan for almost all my life, I find Mr. Byrne's conclusion and observations about Detroit to be pretty accurate. I want to point out that not all parts of Detroit are ruinous; mid-town with Wayne State University, the DIA (Detroit Institute of Art), and other universities in the area make for an interesting and healthy part of town. As far as the tech scene, I'd say it's mainly concentrated in the Ann Arbor area.
I don't get it - concentration span not sufficient to read a book anymore, so you watch a movie instead. Except you don't have the patience to watch a movie, so you end up reading the transcripts?
This is a really great video to watch. It's worth watching once or twice a year to remind onself to be humble. And it's particularly apt this week!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61KMw5zVhg
I found myself that playing Combat Arms is a model of doing business in the real word.

- It is a competition between people that are not equal in resources (some have XP guns, some have unfair guns like m32) and skills.

- There are always people that will cheat and the authority (CA) can't stop them (after each fix they appear 2-3h again). So, just be calm and avoid combat with people that probably cheat.

- Whatever you do, there are always better players then you, but if you are persistent you can achieve some success.
Economics:

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Ebb and Flow of History. David Hackett Fisher.

This book is incredibly, incredibly prescient. Written in 1997, almost predicts the current financial situation. If you want to have an idea where, based on 1000 years of history, our economy and the state of the world is going, then you should read it. It didn't change my perspective (I called the crash of 2008-2009 a few months before it happened) but it really gave me a firmer understanding behind why I was correct to have felt like that was going to happen. It's also a page-turner. Fisher is an incredibly good writer and wrote a fascinating picture of revolutionary america in "Paul Revere's Ride".

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Wave-Revolutions-Rhythm-History/...

Malcolm Gladwell's books are good, too, but my position on them is that the insight is all stuff you should have figured out - sometimes you just need gentle reminding. I noticed outliers and tipping point on your shelf, those will go very very far in helping you come up with entrepreneurial strategies. Outliers got me off my butt and got me programming android (I hadn't touched computer programming in 4+ years)... I would suggest popping the gladwells to the front of your queue.
Meh. You don't need too many fancy tools.

The ones that got me through my PhD were:

- LyX (http://www.lyx.org) for my thesis/conference papers etc. It's the greatest tool available for preparing any document longer than six pages and that needs to look good.

- Gnuplot for preparing figures and charts (gnuplot on its own isn't that pleasant to use, but gnuplotme is a script that makes life must easier (http://www.jamjoom.net/tools/gnuplotme/gnuplotme.html)).

- BibTeX for references (although Zotero is more current and excellent for collecting references online - it's a Firefox plugin and exports BibTeX if you want it to). I can also vouch for Mendeley as mentioned by another commenter, although I've only used it briefly.

- JabRef for managing my BibTeX database.

- Source code control! I wasn't as organised as I should have been with this and regret the amount of time it wasted me. Set up an svn/git repository as soon as you start developing any code, and use it!

- A good text editor: I know I'd be loath to suggest one on here so that's all I'll say on the topic :-)

- Dropbox wasn't around when I did my PhD, but it would be a must-have tool for a grad student. Backup your work!

- Powerpoint/Impress/Keynote. Don't get seduced by the LaTeX Beamer templates. They will get you geek cred but that's the only benefit.

- A calendar/organiser: Not that I ever got organised enough to use one, but if you want to finish within four years then it'd pay to get yourself organised.
You make it a negotiating point; you might have to accept lower valuation or other terms to protect investors if you push on board control. Being obviously brilliant, responsible, and experienced (Parker) goes a long way in those negotiations too.
In fact, both have been out while I have been a user. When Google went down, I literally refreshed once, it failed again, and I went to Yahoo (today I would go to Bing). When Facebook was down, I did something else, since there was no substitute for Facebook.
A sophisticated cyber-missile
Java compiler bug with generics
Today I spent half a day debugging my code. I just completed a major redesign of a chunk of it thought I must have screwed something up badly. Well although I did screw it up, it was in a place where the compiler should have caught it.

Although the generics in java are better than not having anything, and they make my life a lot easier not needing to cast, they are still a bit buggy. Has anybody experienced something like this before, know what is causing this, and how to avoid this headache later? (see post for code)
This kind of surprises me. I love Khan's lecturing style, and he makes good use of a paint program to stand in for not having an overhead transparency to scribble on.

But as to his teaching style, the videos I've seen have caused me to react less like Patrick Mylund and more like this MetaFilter poster:

http://www.metafilter.com/78770/Welcome-to-the-Khan-Academy#...

Perhaps there's an ordered curriculum you're meant to go through, but every time I've sampled Khan's videos at random they've been structured as "if these are the exercises you need to do right now, now you can see me solve one."

Sure he does a good job of narrating his steps, explaining details and side-effects, and making illustrative mistakes. I just feel like he's all about the how and never about the why.
(of course, the downvotes are for your grammar. It should be "more pleasant")
A few ideas:
- Meditate
- Exercise (running, weights, etc)
- Yoga

Do something that's totally unproductive that's pure fun. This might sound silly, but finger painting or something similar.

Relaxing is all about feeling like there's nothing you NEED to to be doing right now. You're just in your own space, enjoying your own company.

Maybe there's something you've always wanted to do but haven't for whatever reason. Conquer your fears! Go take that mambo class. Attend that french pastry chef course.

You know? Mix it up, have some fun. : )
It turns out it worked when I did it this time. I must have had an elusive typo in my previous attempt. Thanks again.
What's wrong with having a few cities like this? If you had clean, organized cities through the country, life would be boring and the visuals would be monotonous.

Broken down buildings are history. A country should not be made up of suburban sameness, just like a mole on a models face enhances her beauty, enclaves of disorganisation can make the country as a whole more interesting and prettier.
I feel really bad knowing that from the level of polish WLE has, some poor souls working on it care and really want to feel good about their product, and are putting a lot of effort in.

I feel bad, you see, because as best I can tell WLE is a stillborn idea, and doomed to fail :(
The Great Books of the Western World:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Worl...
Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke)

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Hobsbawm)

Bhagavad Gita

Upanishads

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders (Whyte)

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)

edit: added 2 more & author names
I work at a company with 300,000 employees, and I had no trouble getting CPAN.

Perhaps it's just your company that's dysfunctional, not all big companies.
I like this site on safe cycling:

http://bicyclesafe.com/
Athens was the alpha testing.
The problem with learning and college
Whether it's creepy or not, if they are just crunching data and producing statistics and odds, I don't feel I can begrudge them.
http://sivers.org/book

Always find something useful for me there.
i agree that people want to help others for reasons other than "selfish" ones, but my point was that it's possible that creating a soda business and incidentally "'Storing' billions of dollars" is possibly more helpful than giving the dollars away.
at least two social bookmarking sites targeted to women have been attempted and failed

sk*rt: http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/skirt/
SugarLoving: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/sugarloving-com-digg-nev...
I actually worked a dead-end job a few years ago, and I didn't think it was so horrible. Even the people who are in our society's lower socioeconomic classes live like 15th-century kings.
To get over a bunch of limits.
If you want to read some eye opening fiction then I would recommend cory doctorows three books, Little Brother, Makers and For The Win. I know it is stacked in the young adult fiction section but it still is good read for anybody.

<something irrelevant> I am shocked that in 26 comments till now nobody has mentioned Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstater. Apart from everything else it has accomplished it is always the best seller in the "Nobody reads but everybody recommends" category, or at least the close second or draw to Art Of Programming by Knuth. </something irrelevant>
I think you are overdramatizing Facebook's importance quite a little bit here. It's not like your friends will hate you when you quit and I have seen plenty of people quit online social networks while retaining their life just fine.

I could make up a similar argument the other way around: to me, services like Facebook provide little to no value; I can quit them just fine. I have communication details of a lifetime in Google, I store my documents with them, organize my calendar. (Note: I have heard Google's export features are quite okayish so that argument does not really hold.)
Adidas Second to Drop Out of Apple's iAd Platform
I troll on Youtube, generally because I'm curious how people will react.

I see trolling as being akin to taking absurd actions in an RPG just to see what the game designers prepared for you.
No captcha to be seen, the IP ban is still in place, it's now 8 hours later.
Because real actual people are suffering in the city. Think of the poor who can't get out. Detroit schools are in serious trouble right now. Recently in the news they were taking donations for toilet paper. Apparently their EMS has trouble meeting demand because it's underfunded, and just about everything else about detroit is either underfunded or undermanned. Let's not forget about the crime and murders.