skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if most geeks today really are just buying Macs instead of building
their own overclocked Windows PCs from Newegg parts?

I can agree with the point of the article, but I wish it weren't so one-sided.

I'm using Ubuntu because it saves me from dealing with that piece of trash that is MacPorts.

I'm also (still) building my own desktops from parts because it's cheaper and I like the control in choosing the capabilities that matter to me.

But then something strange happened. Lots of people switched
to Apple laptops.

Statistics disprove this point. Maybe true in certain niches; also Windows is popular precisely because normal people want to get their job done and just won't give a shit about cool and shiny things or about superiority of architecture.

In companies I am seeing 7-year old Windows XP setups. And in companies with a good IT department, people use backups and image restores in case a computer gets affected with viruses; it worked very well thus far.

I also worked on a MacBook Pro for 2 years, and I did have to reinstall everything at some point because of hard-drive failure ... and because I was in a minority of OS X users, the internal software used for OTA backups wasn't available for me, so I had to install everything from scratch with no support from the IT department.

Using an exotic OS ... yeah, there's a dark side to that.
Ask HN: Hacker couches for Startup School guests?
Behold, a wee spreadsheet for Startup School attendees who'd love to crash the couches of fellow hacker/entrepreneur types, and local dwellers interested in hosting unknown (but quite possibly likeable and interesting) valley guests:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/huebert.ca/ccc?key=thptja2MaaFZKqyYFoVBzXQ&hl=en&authkey=CLqZtbQF#gid=0

There are sheets for surfers & hosts to list themselves & find each other.

I have no real idea whether there's interest beyond me, but (1) all the obviously 'hacker' homes on AirBNB seem to be booked up, (2) since I have limited time in the SF/Valley area I'd really like to stay with hackers and entrepreneurs, as mixing with such rarities is my entire purpose of coming, and (3) for potential hosts, your guests are somewhat pre-screened because of the Startup School selection process.

I think posting a little personal info is only fair, since letting someone into your home is a very personal act.

*I like AirBNB and am trying that channel as well, but there seems to be a gap here remaining.

Feedback/comments welcome.
Clickable link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/huebert.ca/ccc?key=thptja2M...
Legal formalities for starting a company in India
Usually as soon as they've hit the market and haven't made the sales, revenue or numbers they expected to make.

At this point a decision to pivot may be made, along with minor tweaking. It all relates to the metric being measured, which is usually $$$ or userbase. No traction = no future.
Agreed. For a moment, I expected the piece to be some kind of satire.

Trying to avoid having your social network trolled by 4chan types doesn't really fit my idea of "stopping humor online." Goatse isn't exactly what I think of when you say "humor."
I have to agree. I would think the epicenter of Silicon Valley would be more likely Sunnyvale. It's surrounded by Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino and North San Jose.
Think Apple, Google, Intel, AMD, Lockheed, Nvidia, Cisco, Adobe, HP, ebay, Yahoo. These are all a small drive from Sunnyvale.

I think Fry's started in Sunnyvale... And Cyberdyne Systems is in Sunnyvale. ;)
The expiring link part reminds me a lot of 3LNK.com, but the effort to make it easy to remember is nice.
Pete Warden's / Parallel Curl
A friend of mine wrote an article on his blog about generating pronounceable hashes for just this purpose:
http://peterbraden.co.uk/article/pronounceablehashing

Not necessarily a better solution than this, but an interesting alternative I thought.
My bet is on 3D printing, personally. Can you imagine how the world will change when that hits the mainstream?
Amusingly enough I've just switched away from my last Mac and am now happily running Gnome on Fedora. And I find it better, and certainly more fun. Tools like Shotwell are better than iPhoto nowadays.
I found pg's On Lisp to be more enlightening on this subject. Available for free at http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html.
Changing to a standing position doesn't have to break you out of the flow.
"The pronounceable url shortener"?
Copying successfully: Flipkart: An Indian copy of Amazon
The alpha geeks are into transforming old-world technologies into geek-friendly forms. The field I'm personally familiar with is desktop manufacturing. Robotics used to be expensive and arcane. Machinists used to be either old graybeards or undereducated trade school graduates. Custom plastic parts were something you got made in China at great delay and expense. Now, there is a new wave of machinists who read Make and have 3d printers and buy lathes for their garage. There's people with a software background putting robots together out of hardware store parts and arduinos. The whole field is transforming from high-capital professional only to geek and hobby friendly. So I think that geekdom has moved out of computing and software to some degree, into the rest of the world because frankly, computing for the sake of computing is a solved problem, a boring field, now.
Starting Business in India – Simplified step-by-step process
Transhumanism.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that it contradicts the OP's hack.
I'm going to blatantly ignore most of your post and just ramble about solving AI.

I don't put much stock in the idea of a surprising, monolithic "solution" to AI being discovered. If the past 30-40 years are any indication, AI will continue to slowly encompass harder and harder tasks until one day we stop having easy ways of distinguishing it from whatever we consider intelligence.

They used to say chess was too hard for computers. Then they said computers couldn't do anything but pure logic. Then it was that they couldn't do reasoning unless it was directly programmed in. What will be left in another 10 years?
New Cars Prices and Specifications
Used Cars & New Cars Trade in Pakistan. Buy / Sell / Rental / Lease, Sale / Purchase of Autos, Bikes / Motor Cycles, Trucks, Vans, Buses, Tractors & other Vehicles
I had the same question. The Wikipedia article on the URV lead me to "Inertial inflation."

In the medium-to-long term, economic agents begin to forecast inflation and to use those forecasts as de facto price indexes that can trigger price adjustments before the actual price indices are made known to the public. This cycle of forecast-price adjustment-forecast closes itself in the form of a feedback loop and inflation indices get beyond control since current inflation becomes the basis for future inflation (more formally, economic agents start to adjust prices solely based on their expectations of future inflation). At worst, inflation tends to grow exponentially (leading to hyperinflation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_inflation
And they'll give you one for free if your planned project is 'cool', enough.
I'd like to take up this challenge but the nature of my work prohibits me from doing so. Maybe on the weekend.
Spot on! I posted the same thing without reading yours (now stands deleted 'cos it was more or less a duplicate).

I'll just add this - Even MIT's famous formerly-known-as-SICP course is now around programming real world asynchronous machines - robots. A big meld between electronics engineering and software as far as I can tell.
Autumn in Vietnam
I have just left my job, a bored job. My wife advised me to travel somewhere to relax before finding a new job. We come to Vietnam because it's hometown of my wife's friend whom she made friend in Australia University. I'm very curious about Vietnam which is a courageuous country.
I come to Vietnam in a special occasion which Vietnam was welcoming great anniversary of 1000 years Thanglong - Hanoi. What worderful! I mostly understand why call a courageous Vietnam. Vietnam has a great long history backgroud.
Before coming to Vietnam, I search this country on the site, I only knew that It's a peaceful country, the best is Hanoi capital, and travelling in Vietnam is not expensive. But, when coming here, It's outsite my imagination. Vietnam is both peaceful, beautiful and magical. Hanoi is 1000 years old with the first name called Thanglong by the first Ly king because the king saw dragons fly over Sword Lake (Thanglong means Dragons flying up). I heard this legend from a waiter in Kiti restaurant on Old Quarter Street which is famous streets in Hanoi and is near Sword Lake.
I'm still travelling in Hanoi, Vietnam. I have excursion and enjoy great anniversary of 1000 years Thanglong-Hanoi.
18 Essential things to ensure before launching a blog
The article highlights a few important things which are essential and should be done and tested before launching any new blog.
Meet Twitter for Google TV
Zimbabwe doesn't have a currency anymore.

They gave up and went to nationally accepting the dollar (USD), pula (Botswana), or rand (SA).

Helped things a lot. :-)
Wow, I guess that explains the uptick in the brazilian population in South Florida during that time. One year of school I only knew one brazilian kid on the bus. The next year over half the bus was brazilian. Big migrations like that usually happen because of economic reasons or war. I just never put 2 and 2 together until now.
Okay. But I would guess that the main reason that the offline one is “funnier” (insofar as that’s true at all) is that you’re more likely to know the guy making the joke. If you just walked up to a random guy on the subway and he started telling a joke, it wouldn’t be any funnier than if you found the same stranger’s e-joke.

People clearly tell different jokes to different audiences, but I don’t think the distinctions in audience here are inherent in the medium. For example, someone telling a joke in an IRC channel with a bunch of regulars who know each other will tell a different kind of joke than someone writing a Youtube comment. Likewise a guy might tell his poker buddies a different joke than he’d scrawl on the inside of a bathroom stall.
may be this can make tv alive again
Interview with Peteris Krumins
Play Madpac 2 Rabios online at y3 Games club
MadPac has been badly hurt. Help his friend Rabios to get revenge!
From electrons to Asteriods
Also, if you have a +1 are you not allowed to use the shuttle?
How would there be such a camera?? 
According to its introduction, is really worth the price? I want to buy!
Yeah that's more like a secret agent of sorts. "Yes, I confirm Mr Ellison has left the building, pursuit in progress, I repeat, pursuit in progress"
I have founded Nexmo.com, Low Cost SMS API (in private beta), early this year after spending 7 years in the Wholesale SMS industry. Delivering awesome SMS service on a global scale is tricky – but it should not be! We just finalised building our back-end SMS network.

Here are some challenges the industry faces:
———————————————————-

-Many intermediaries to reach end-users:

Between an App and an end-user you can get up to 4 or 5 intermediaries operating their own infrastructure. Adding intermediaries not only increases cost but also exponentially reduces quality – QOS is measured in terms of availability, delivery ratios, speed, features supported, etc…

Ask your provider about their sourcing strategy? Who do they buy from? Do they have a strict policy in terms of suppliers’ selection? Can they share delivery ratios?

-SLA does not really matter:

What if the providers of your provider do not guarantee any SLA?
A provider can potentially guarantee an SLA on its own infrastructure but can’t control what happens afterwards.

-Non transparent fees:

Customers get charged on SMS sent to networks that are not or poorly covered but listed as LIVE in the provider’s reach list – even when you sign a written agreement.

-Tricky to reach all Networks:

Some networks in the world are tricky to reach and sometimes the only reliable way to deliver SMS is to connect directly. Other are installing SMS filters to cut certain type of traffic (e.g. Spam). For instance, if your provider mentions networks such as Comcell Colombia or IAM in Morocco, you’d rather check again because these networks are impossible to reach with full feature support/reliable service without direct connections. Currently there are at least 26 networks that are tricky to reach and 22 that are filtering.

Another rule of thumb is to check whether in Europe their prices are above $0.055, since European Wireless Carriers (also applicable to other regions/countries) require a termination cost for reliable SMS routes. If below that price, it could mean that your provider (or the provider of your provider!) is using unsolicited routes that are not reliable/has limited life time.

———————————————————————————————————

Delivering hassle free (and Low Cost!) global SMS termination is not obvious but we are working on it :)

Tony Jamous
twitter: @nexmo
e-mail: tony.jamous [@] nexmo.com
Interesting Hacker News Discussion about standing instead of sitting (around 5 month ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311857
Pardon me, but was that a pun?
Ask HN: I'm moving to South Bay from Houston (at 18), any tips?
Like on finding housing/roommates, things to see, things to look out for, etc?

I'm moving cross country at 18 to work at a startup, so it's a large change for me and I don't really know what to expect.

I've visited SF a few times and I'm familiar with how the munis and caltrain work, so that's good, but I've never had to look for housing here!

I've looked at sublet housing on Craigslist but nothing really caught my eye. I've also checked airbnb but nothing besides like one week stays :\. I'm looking for short term lease (3 months) as that's the "trial period" where I'll be working, just so I know i'm not stuck with a lease if things don't work out. I'm targeting around Santa Clara since that's where the office will be.

Any help guys?
The community norms around here reward humor that is (1) relevant to the topic at hand, and (2) insightful, and additionally (3) not mean-spirited.

Trolls only have an outsized influence to the extent that the rest of the community has fuzzy or differing ideas about community norms. The larger the community the more likely this becomes. Trolls work by flirting with the boundaries of acceptability.
That's funny.

You complain about internet humour being nothing more than remixes of old jokes, pop culture references and done-to-death memes. Yet, you employed a similar technique by basing your title on that of an existing text... for humorous effect?

I saw irony there.

(You even predicted my tongue-in-cheek response. Bravo, sir!)
than you for this explanation. i also came across this example. https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Nanojit. my curiosity has been satisfied :)
Pretty cool. I've never really had a problem just implementing curl_multi, but if I need to do something with parallel requests in PHP I'll definitely check this out.
Downtown San Francisco - KODA (KODA.us) is the online community that is changing how employers connect with and recruit the emerging workforce – Gen Y. We are looking for interns, as well as software engineers, for a variety of cool engineering projects: web crawlers, recommendation engines, scalibility challenges, analytics, upgrade to Rails 3... Our application is in the cloud, developed with Rails, jQuery, memcached and more! We love TDD but are not religious about it!

This is a paid internship. We are very flexible in terms of workload / work hours, so you could definitely fit it into your schedule. You can find more information about the position at http://koda.us/employers/koda/jobs/1629875

If you are interested or just want to hear more about KODA, drop me a line at max@koda.us
Seeing an opportunity to play with metaphones, I generated a homophone-free dictionary.

You're welcome to plug it in if you decide to tinker with the project any more.

http://qwerjk.com/unique.txt
Hello, Goodbye: Offsite Redirect Upgrade
I find it fascinating that every time I see an emacs vs. vim debate nowadays, everyone refers to the fact that it's a 'holy war' then proceeds to discuss the relative merits of the two editors sanely and without rancour.
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

http://www.sagemath.org/
Most people that I know who work or have worked in the service industry say that standing around is much more uncomfortable than actively moving about. I can't find the source at the moment, but I do remember reading an article essentially stating that humans physically aren't meant to really just "stand still" for extended periods (hours) - we should be moving about.
Steve Jobs demonstrating NeXTSTEP (1992)
Around the start of the Afghanistan war, our high school (I lived in Finland at the time) invited someone working for the US Embassy to give a talk. The auditorium was full, as a lot of the students had opinions about the US involvement in Afghanistan, and mostly negative ones, so there was much curiosity about what an "official" would say about it to such an audience. The embassy representative arrived, had a long talk about how much work it was to get his job, and how cool it was to travel to Europe and live here, and then stated the purpose of his visit was to show us how beautiful the US is. He then proceeded to slow hundreds of slides of landscape/sunset/nature photos. After all this, he evaded the inevitable request for commentary on the war by stating he had run out of time. This is sort of the feeling I get from this article. It's a travel guide look at silicon valley, but doesn't have any depth or insight about the actual effect SV has on startups. This is a great guide for people who live in the region and want to play tourist for a day. But how many of those don't know these things?
Tim O'Reilly, "Thinking Hard About the Future"
I highly recommend Avinash Kaushik's blog - http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ and mixergy interview - http://mixergy.com/analytics-avinash-kaushik-interview/.

A key point he made in his interview was that tools should just be 10% of the cost of your analytics, the people should be 90%. He might help you make a more informed decision.
Not if I'm understanding correctly. Russell is just making fun of the fact that the setup looks incredible unstable.
You are right, but the author still has a point: even good programmers can't implement an impossible specification.
As Malcolm Gladwell states in (what the dog says):

'Self-conciousness' is the enemy of 'interestingness'

(Yeah, I'm aware that Gladwell uses a lot of anecdotal evidence, still in this case I believe it's correct and exactly what the op says)
MCS, I liked this for the back end in prep to resolve migration of two huge construction company databases. Curl is like a ghost but its stability to hold both patterns is pretty cool for dual extraction methods. It works better as a seam between two existing sources rather than a compliment to any new gear.
completetely missed the point of the original post, it looks like he just got insulted by its premise without reading it or at least figuring out what it was supposed to convey
As I've been slowly recovering from back injury/surgery over the past few years, I've been unable to sit for long periods of time. In order to be able to write software at all I've had to construct a laying down desk where I look up through a glass table at the monitor.

I wonder, does this improve my odds wrt to the article? Or rather, is it that 6+ hours of waking inactivity increases the likelihood of premature death? (either sitting or laying down)
Having worked in television, "atmos" is a semi-technical term with a specific flavor and specific baggage. This article uses it reasonably (but not entirely) accurately.
It's funnier because the people who are joking know each other and are able to affect each other's lives in much more significant ways.
Trading your browsing data - Privacy be damned
Cool hack gives Instant heart rate app for iPhone & Android
When Success Makes You Sad
Good points. There does seem to be a trend for articles to have a theme of: "X is bad, embrace it." (Although, a lot of the time this is simply intended as irony, it can still be misinterpreted by a reader.)

In my humble opinion, the positive take away of this article is rejecting that mantra and focusing on becoming better.
Definitely worth the $1/month and happy to support such a great product
I understand your perspective, but I don't think a list of books generated from best sellers/most popular is the way to go... after all that's why I don't want to get an MBA - because it's the same old populous thinking that actually ISN'T the way forward nor most relevant to startups.
Nice find, thanks for the link!
I wouldn't qualify as a geek any longer, but there are a lot of excellent things I've been hacking on in my evenings and weekends, or intending to hack on soon:

1) Wedging stupid languages onto the iPhone and whipping out an app or two a week (ad hoc distribution for itch-scratching for self, family, friends, and neighbors)
2) Arduino hacking (soon, now that the old version is throwaway cheap)
3) MakerBot stinky plastic fabrication
4) CUDA programming

I still screw around with my Mac Pro too much, constantly upgrading the internal drives (SSD) and external DAS.

If I'm doing this, and I'm a middle manager for a retailer, I have to imagine technical people are doing incredibly interesting things. The stuff I'm doing would have blown my mind when I was 7 years old. (That's 31 years ago.)

The rest of my wanking is pseudo-philosophical, thinking about agorism and the profit margin possible while eliminating scarcity, and wondering why I'm up at 1:20am updating my BibTeX database and posting on HN when I have to go be boring at work in eight hours.
The OP is asking what the alpha geeks are doing?

Hardware:

http://thecrucible.org/kinetics-electronics
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004214.php
http://www.arduino.cc/
http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=ACCT88394&sc=2&c...

Software:

Clojure, Haskell, Scala, Any of the NoSQL's, Startups of any variety

Go to the Maker's Faire. You'll see a swarm of R2D2 robots, people making scale miniature battleships that shoot 1/4" ball bearings at each other, robot battles, physical pong games that play like the original video game, etc...

I strongly disagree with the premise that alpha geeks are doing anything other than what alpha geeks have always done. We're trying to build stuff that makes our friends say, "That's awesome!".
>> Infosys make only 2% money from selling software. 98% money they made by selling consulting viz bribing clients, exploiting engineers and manipulating stock prices.

Please provide your sources. And if you don't provide them, I will assume you are just one of the many stupid fellow Indians who like to make shit up and bitch about it for no reason. And don't forget this isn't one of your regular comment and forget websites and forums you visit regularly. I did see your comments and I must say that are not enlightening.
So you downmodders think 300 employees is a reasonable number for a yet to be proved no business model startup? Wow.
What's also interesting, beyond the idea that we're internet citizens (and not just American, btw), is that we switch between cultures. A lot of people on HN are also active on reddit, and were on digg before that. And while it's true that you drift between your favourite communities, you also change your attitude dependent on which one you happen to be visiting.

I could change tabs over to reddit in a moment and post in a pun thread, or head over to twitter and #stickto140.

So not only are we netizens, but we're also often multi-nationality netizens.
Hard not to like usage of hardware in ways the vendors never anticipated. That said, I'm a little disappointed with 57bpm. I've decided I must have got a little excited.
Bank of Japan adopts a zero-interest rate policy
*.ycombinator.com
What kind of license will this nice app have? The license item on the menu is switched off...