skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try thinking about things in life that you want to do but can't. Usually there's no reason, it's just the way things have always been.

You can disrupt these things. Look at the global fallout of the film and music industries. We did that. Us geeks.

The really, really hard problems are: governments; banks (finance in general); telcos. I'd avoid those until you've made your first billion. But they are great targets. They will fall one day. And someone will be responsible.

Here's a few. I moved house recently. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to get rid of. I found that freecycle sucked -- at least in this part of the world. I wanted a freecycle replacement, but something much better.

For stuff I wanted to sell, there was no option but ebay. I have moral objections to ebay, lots of them, so I wanted something else. I didn't want an auction. Just a place to list and sell.

And on the list goes.

It's like the reverse of buying stocks, where you buy into the things that solve your problems.

Next time -- that'll be later today or tomorrow -- that you find yourself saying "ffs, it can't be that hard", go and fix it.

And don't worry if someone thinks that they are doing it already. Because you can do it better, if you just think about it.
I just watched the first lecture.

What is a recitation assignment? I am not familiar with the american school system.
Wow, I didn't think that saving non-renewable resources and ensuring people are paid fairly would be so disliked here.

I am disappoint, as the saying goes.
I haven't deleted my account, but I just post status & a message board message saying I don't log in often and where to contact me - which is my web page. You could just leave an email address there.

For me, Facebook is a giant phone book. It is a way to look people up and for people to find you. I like it for that, beyond that - email me.
To me, having no goal means having no particular goal, not being married to a particular outcome. It doesn't mean not working hard or ignoring opportunities. It means being flexible.

If you're on the way to pick an apple off a tree and you a diamond catches your eye on the way, you should allow yourself to be distracted for a moment. And you should not be so intent on a goal that you ignore everything else.
http://twitter.com/intellicode

code, startups, android, html5, games
Yes, it's called 'contracting'.

No employer is going to let you work part time. There's a lot of time and expense involved in finding and maintaining programmers, and they'd rather have a full-timer instead.

As for starting your own company, those always take more time than a full-time job if you want to make any money.
Try a thought experiment: Imagine that "Google Inc." had no legal meaning except as a convenient identifier for a collection of individuals -- viz., Google's stockholders -- acting in concert.

A) Should Congress be able to restrict the right of those people to hire professional advocates to petition Congress for the redress of their (real or imagined) grievances?

How would a "no" answer be reconciled with the First Amendment passage quoted above?

B) If yes, should the shareholders have the right to vote to designate some of their number -- viz., Google's board of directors -- to decide what specific policies will be advocated on behalf of the shareholders?
There are part-time gigs out there, but ime they're pretty rare, and afforded to people who've been with a company a while and 'earned' the right to the flexible working situation. Everyone else if f/t or contract.

I think you do need to move to freelance/contract work, and be firm in how you structure your work agreements. If it's MTW, with Th-Sun off, be up front about that. You'll be able to find gigs where they just need you 5-10 hours per week. Get 2-3 of those, work your time, then take time off - you should be good to go.

Most of those part-time gigs may not pay as well as f/t work, but you're looking for the time freedom, not maximized revenue anyway, right?

http://indieconf.com might be useful for you to attend, with respect to getting started in freelancing. We don't specifically have anything on 'going part time', but I'm sure some of the sessions can address that.
he was at sunfire offices last weekend giving a talk i believe. anyone here go to that?
Yes, I work part-time essentially all the time these days. (I run a small software business and consult on the side, average 20 hours or so a week, and take off pretty much any day I feel like.) If I wanted to, I could sustain this lifestyle indefinitely.

I'm told that many consultants do something like this. If full-utilization for a consultant is $200,000 (and that is by no means a ceiling), then 50% still puts your household in a pretty decent place to be. There exist some consulting opportunities where you can schedule arbitrary amounts of work over long time scales -- I have one client relationship where, if I wanted to bill four hours on Monday and four hours on Tuesday and then never touch the keyboard again, he'd be thrilled by that. There are other opportunities if you want to parachute in, work for two weeks, and then get back to living.
The dynamics of fare and frequency choice in urban transit
For some (myself included), visualizing something is part of memorization. I find constructing diagrams of a system really helps me just get how it works.

So, the OP is probably memorizing the content of the diagram through creating it.
Do it anyway, and find little things you can do differently or better.
If you're thinking along the lines of mash-ups, I'd Google search for a web 2.0 API list, and then pick a couple to put together that would be really slick.
Interesting listen, and closely mirrors my own experience.

* The UI is very responsive on pre-release hardware. I've been told that the released version will be faster.

* The keyboard is very nice. One feature that I noticed is that if you hold down the letter key, you get accented versions of that same key. Makes it much easier to type résumé instead of resume. I can't compare it in over-all usability to other smart phones as I haven't lived day in day out with a smart phone.

* The way applications are organized is interesting. Instead of merely having a mongo huge list of apps, apps can also register themselves in app hubs. So applications that manipulate photos will show up under your photos, applications that deal with music show up there, etc. I'm not totally sold on this, but it seems like a good idea.

* Development for WP7 in silverlight is shockingly easy. And silverlight on WP7 runs super fast. Actually runs faster on the device than on my beefy desktop in emulator.

* There isn't yet an easy way to handle deploying WP7 phones in an enterprise, but I was told that this will be addressed later. There was only so much they could do before this launch though.

I'm in the market for a smart phone, and after handling the WP7 phones I am sold. It is better than Android, and in my opinion at least as good as the iPhone.
Until they change the privacy settings, and it's defaulted to On again.
There are two types of classes, Lectures and Recitations. Lectures are large (hundreds). Recitations are small (~20).

The recitation assignment is simply which recitation you are in.
TL;DR? Sanchez said he doesn't get ahead because Jewish network executives are prejudiced against minorities. Dominick noted that Jews are minorities too. Sanchez didn't agree.

I bet Sanchez also thinks that Stewart received a phone call from the Mussad on 9/11, not to come near the World Trade Center that day. When someone starts explaining anti-semitic conspiracy theories on the air, it's time to let him go.
Vdara hotel 'death ray' claiming victims in the Las Vegas Strip -- Engadget
Exploring speculative execution and evaluation
For the incredibly paranoid and those that would otherwise use mini recorders to do the same thing with just audio. In those cases it would likely be better disguised by removing it from the ear piece. Mostly situations that would come up in small claims court where it's your word against theirs and whatever evidence you've managed to gather.
No employer is going to let you work part time.

Stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a lawyer: this, like everything else in your contract and HR handbook, is ultimately negotiable. I mean, heck, my day job put it on the table while trying to prevent me from leaving, and I was a Japanese salaryman. (They had a couple of offers -- another one involved more work and less pay.)

Any particular company may be more committed to full time employment than a Japanese megacorp, but I strongly doubt (and have personal knowledge that it is not the case) that all companies are totally committed to full-time only.
Is the Game of Cricket a Model for Surviving the 21st Century?
Would appreciate any corrections and input from HN compiler pros.

The material is new to me, and blogging forces me to try and understand a topic
Touchless door and light switches appears to be used extensively in Canadian hospitals. Without any holograms though.
Ah. I was wondering why it read like, "Stuff that's in China"
This would be really useful for programming, particularly refactoring. Imagine being able to quickly apply a relatively mechanical refactoring that still required human judgement (pretty common), and have other programmers do it for you.

I imagine it would work something like this:

- Select the files/directories/blocks of code that you want the refactoring applied to.

- Describe (in english) what the refactoring work should be, and do an example on one piece of the code.

- The work gets split (by file?) and distributed via a mechanical turk-like interface (extra points if it opens tasks in your favorite editor with syntax highlighting). As workers submit their work, the code is automatically built and tests are run (could be a callback to your local development environment, so you don't have to worry about shipping all your code up to the cloud and figuring out how to build it there).

Could be pretty awesome, particularly if you could enlist an army of freshman CS majors, bored programmers, and eager overseas engineers. I wonder if intellectual property concerns would be too high for people to actually use it though.

EDIT: If I still worked at Google, this would be a fun project to try internally as 20% project. There are lots of mechanical refactoring tasks that need to be done across large portions of the codebase, good build/test infrastructure to easily verify success/failure for a given task, and lots of bored/eager engineers that feed off of reward-based systems:)
This reminds me of phorid flies, the natural enemy of the fire ant. The larva of a phorid fly eats its way into the head of the ant, decapitates the ant by dissolving its neck with enzymes, then cocoons in the head. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ant#Natural_predators

Nature is beatiful ;-)
In my reading, he was talking about privileged white liberals. Dominick brought up Jews.

I always find it odd that talking heads are "allowed" to discuss conspiracy theories involving Christians or Muslims but are verboten from discussing Jewish ones. For the record, I'm Jewish.
Haskell is high-level, fast, and its optimized machine code would be nigh impossible to decompile in my opinion. Unfortunately it'd be a bit of a stretch to write a large GUI app in Haskell at this point...
Say Goodbye To Your BIOS: Hello, UEFI
I'd love to go, but it conflicts with the Boulder Ruby conference, Mountain.rb ( http://mountainrb.com/ ).

Maybe next time, but thanks for organizing this!
Why would it be a stretch? (I've never been exposed to Haskell before.)
I started out with tiddlywiki (single html file, very portable/easy to configure (read: no configuration)). but search and collaboration features are lacking so I migrated to mediawiki.
I spend a lot of time consuming information (HN, books, blogs, Mixergy interviews and Twitter) but have nothing to show for it.

How you take notes doesn't really matter much (you will develop and refine your own style over time) but, I hate to say it, most of that stuff you listed is superficial. It can be fun but it is mostly valueless.

Books, academic papers, and face-to-face time with experts are really the only way to gain deep interconnected knowledge. Read a book, take notes, read the book's wikipedia page (I actually do this before I read the book), follow the wikipedia references, look for other analyses online, start working through each of the book's "works cited", rinse, repeat.

Information fed to you (rss, twitter, social news, etc) is not super relevant or deep and comes with a ton of distractions. You have to have to have a focus and actively seek out the most relevant and most valuable information.
"Oops! Lithium-7 is not inert inside a thermonuclear device."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo#Cause_of_high_yiel...)
I think what all of these articles point to is that it's expensive or time consuming to raise kids, so people simply don't have them. It seems like the key to raising fertility rates is just to provide a good environment for parents to have them in, like giving leave to new parents and giving tax incentives or stipends to those who do. Then again, its probably more complex than this.
Very true, and you'd really need a team with a serious track record in banking. I imagine half of selling the product would be based on the perception of trust and experience.
On the contrary, you currently get far more leverage out of your money by participating in the (US) political system and flashing cash than you do by apathy. And the more money you spend, the less risk there is.

Why is there no net neutrality bill? The rich are overrepresented in our system for a reason. Sad but true.
It seems pretty simple. Just put your desired contact info in your FB profile, stop going there, and stay logged out.
Ask HN: $40k on physical hardware? or use the cloud?
Our company is at a technical cross roads. Upgrade current hardware to latest IBM Xseries running VMWare and a nice SAN disk array ($40k) OR start looking at Amazon EC2 ala cloud hosting? This will be a production system so no down time!

Can cloud hosting be reliable? Thanks!
I'll be there! Will email you.
Reflexions after the sale... – Philip Jacob / Whirlycott
I think ideas come with life experience, so get out and experience the world.

Really take notice of your surroundings and the people in them, and then most importantly notice how the people interact with the surroundings. Then ask yourself, is there a better way to do this?
I'll try to make it!
UI operations, and IO in general tend to feel a bit out of place in Haskell. It often feels like you're trying to trick the compiler in to accepting your program instead of just saying what you mean. That said, if you can cleanly separate logic and presentation in your code, it might not be too bad.
The paper you linked has the words "A meta-analytic
review of longitudinal research." in its title so I stopped reading. If you want to summarize, I'll take your word for it.

It's controversial because it could be used to justify a number of racial or eugenic policies, and because it's sort of silly, in the melting pot of America, and with our knowledge of intelligence, to make any claims on social classes having stratified into different classes of human within the space of a few generations.
You can disrupt these things. Look at the global fallout of the film and music industries. We did that. Us geeks.

I can't upvote you enough. That's the single most inspiring thing I've ever read on HN. It's easy to take for granted, but it's everywhere. Newspapers. Manufacturing. Communications. Hell, even ask an old engineer how they did things in their field before CAD. (Engineers used to make a living wage reducing logic expressions by hand.)

We wrought this creative destruction, tearing this world down and building it back up again so it runs better.
HashMask - A middle ground between clear and masked passwords
Try it on John Gruber's Daring Fireball. Everything collapses quite nicely and it's fun to start at the top and then shoot everything as you go down!
I know there's GTk+ bindings for Haskell. I don't know if there's any others.

Can anyone comment on the quality of the GTk+ bindings, or the existence of any other bindings?

I have enough experience with GTk+ from C and Python to say that it creates really nice, snappy UIs under Linux, but it's really hard to make it "feel right" under Windows, and pretty much impossible to make it "feel right" under OS X. On those platforms, it will almost always stand out the same way that Java apps do.

I'll also say that Haskell, while awesome, is a PITA to learn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-banging_incident
Why not Craigslist? I've had so many good experiences with Craigslist that it is my default solution to anything involving "stuff".
Start coding the flickr mashup and keep your mind open during the process. It'll morph - you'll see something you can do. Other advice in this thread is sound on the general idea creation process - I would also add talk to people! Talk to people with problems, talk to an underserved group, talk to your friends and family, etc.
Six-Dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe
FWIW, I worked at an online advertising company that ran a whole division on EC2 machines - at the peak, nearly 100 instances. This was never a problem for us because we were judicious in our use of the machines (minify your content!) and we were disciplined in our deployments and management. If you go that route, just be sure the learn and follow best practices - you'll save yourself quite a lot of time.
I'd like to help but you need to explain a bit more about what your system does. I've helped build and manage racks and cloud installs. Some general stuff:

Downtime happens. It often happens when you move hardware around (say, you need another SAN or replace you switches. Cloud servers are very ver flexible; you can set up a parallel system and test it for a week. You can't do that with your own hardware without spending serious cash. The first time I rearranged my entire server set up, while sitting in a cafe, was pretty damned cool.

It also happens when hardware fails. With owned systems you have to drive to the colo in the middle of the night.

I suggest you build a minimal parallel system in a cloud and try it out. Try several providers.
>Many of the 'friends' you have on Facebook are anything but. They're all superficial and mainly virtual relationships you have with others you will most likely never meet let alone contact offline.

Seriously? I have in the ballpark of 180 friends on Facebook, and maybe a dozen of those are people I haven't met in person. The vast majority are either friends from real life or people from my social circle I interact with occasionally anyway. Then again, I've always treated Facebook as a fairly personal medium, and I don't friend people I don't know or don't like.

I mean, yeah, if you treat Facebook friends like pokemon, it's not going to have a lot of value for you, but if you abuse any social tool, it's not going to have a lot of value for you.

Earlier today, I found out that an old friend of mine that I grew up with is going to be in town in a couple of weeks and made plans to grab lunch while he's here. I haven't seen him in 7 or 8 years. Things like that are incredibly cool to me, and the entire reason I use social networking sites. They facilitate me interacting with people I care about; they're not a substitution for actual interaction, but they make it possible in the first place.
I actually did install Ubuntu on my mother's system and haven't had any such gadget shortcomings.

What kind of life of bizarre peripheral addiction do your loved ones live? I can count for myself wired USB headphones, a mouse, a printer, speakers, wireless headphones, a camera (if putting the card into the built in card reader counts), an iPod and... and.. well, that's only seven. They all work with no problem on Linux. What on earth are the other 18 that the average person uses?

We did have a problem with a USB GPS device, but overall the computer is actually lot more functional compared to back when I had to go over and uninstall a new virus and spyware suite every 30-40 days. My mother seems to like Ubuntu a lot, and when I took the computer the other day, she was complaining about using my Father's windows laptop. It was pretty classic, she wrote and said she missed her computer with the 'mozilla fox operating system.
The best part for me was when Mark was hacking early in the movie and mentioned Emacs... I looked over at my wife who laughed, as she's used to me saying similar things.
I'm sorry, this is complete and total gibberish.

* The CAP theorem is a logical proof of the impossibility of providing both consistency and availability on a network which can lose messages (or using machines which can fail). You can't implement it any more than you can implement general relativity. It's a description of reality.

* The CAP theorem is not a data model which competes with or intersects at all with relational algebras. Rather, a relational algebra is the logical model (allegedly) underlying RDBMSes which are systems which historically provide consistency at the expense of availability in the presence of faults (thus obeying the CAP theorem because they're real systems and not opium dreams).

* Scaling horizontally does not imply anything about fault-tolerance. It instead describes systems in which resources can be incrementally added to incrementally gain capacity. It's possible to build a horizontally-scalable system which is less reliable than a single-machine system; it's also possible to build fantastically fault-tolerant systems which are also horizontally-scalable (c.f. Dynamo). Doing the latter is considered "a good idea;" doing the former is considering "fucking daft."

* Nothing about horizontally-scalable systems (or NoSQL or really anything the author mentions except for Redis) requires that the entire dataset be kept in memory. Systems like Riak (http://riak.basho.com) or Voldemort (http://project-voldemort.com/) use pluggable storage engines, some of which (e.g. InnoStore and BDB-JE) have excellent performance with 1:10 RAM-to-dataset ratios. By the author's own metric, the Holy Grail has not only been found but the damn things are multiplying.

* Neither epoll nor kqueue "scale indefinitely in terms of I/O concurrency." Nothing does. That's horseshit.

You're better off huffing glue than reading this thing. I don't even care what he has to say about Redis. He could have some incredible insights about it, but they'd be completely and totally negated by the incomprehension, misinformation, untruths, and general crazytalk which preceded it.

tl;dr: 15+ years of RDBMS experience gives you 0 clues about distributed computing; reading Time Cube (http://www.timecube.com/) is preferable to reading this drek.
Very true, but in all fairness it would appear that Portland Ten is not in the same vein as the others listed, as they do not invest in your company.

However, I do think it is dishonest for everyone to be using the y-comb name recognition as a selling point for their own programs.
My personal hypothesis is time is perceived to move more quickly the older you get because an hour, a day, a minute become smaller fractions of the time you've been alive.

EX: When you're 10, a year is 1/10th of your life, but when you're 60 it's only 1/60th. The magnitude of an additional year of life at 60 does not feel as great as it does when you're 10.
Please review my startup, Bebaroo
Well ... isn't the question more "Will $40K of IBM and VMWare kit in our hands be (significantly) more reliable than Amazon's services?"

For your purposes, including scheduled downtime.

Also factor into the cost of the time it will take your people to learn how to make your systems on EC2 reliable enough.
I know you said NYC, but I have to add Hoboken. I absolutely loved living there 2007-2008. The Path subway was nice and reliable and terminated at World Trade and as far as Maceys on 33rd. Here's some trivia. Hoboken has more bars per square mile than anywhere in the US.. result!
Creating a real-time chat app using Hookbox and Flask