skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it is petty leave Facebook because it's not the cool thing anymore. But I joined Facebook because it was the cool thing which is equally petty. My friends can contact me just fine without Facebook. So yes it's petty, but that comes with the Facebook territory.
> This doesn't necessarily make sense. Memorization is a first step to learning, nothing more. I don't believe you can learn the higher level concepts of any subject without memorizing the details of its primitives at some stage of your study.

I vehemently disagree, maybe because I understood the original statement differently.

In classes, I've watched students diligently write down everything on the blackboard and yet find themselves incapable of answering the simplest question on something just explained (but not written down). They spend all of their mental capacity putting ideas down on paper in front of them, rather than putting those ideas in their brain and playing with them, as they should. They can regurgitate what was just said, sure, but give them new data and ask them to apply a concept just explained with different data, and they're lost. That's the difference between memorization and learning. Memorization is something you can do at home with a textbook. In fact, textbooks have already "memorized" facts for you, why are you doing it at all? When you come to class, you shouldn't be worried about that.

Personally, I'd much rather be in a position to explain (for example) a formula I can't write down exactly, and say what it does and means, and why, than have a thousand formulas memorized which I don't understand.

> I think note-taking still has its place. For me its ultimately production. When I need to get my thinking clear on a given subject or problem, I fire up a terminal, write down what I know, what the problem is, and what I need to know to solve it.

Heh, I do the same thing. cat > /dev/null seems to be my brain's swap space.
Monday's Gregalouge: My New Gay Bar
Or just call a licensed exterminator. That's what I did both times and it worked.
The people in their study don't seem like a group that would actually understand the value of their assets

The same could be said of the people who were trying to get rich quick by flipping houses. Every one I heard seemed to think housing prices could never go down.
This Atomic Veterans History Project, now apparently disappeared from the web, seems to have a lot of interesting stuff in it: http://web.archive.org/web/20080211170204/www.aracnet.com/~p...

Wonder what caused it to go offline? There's just an empty directory there now (http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/), but it was being actively maintained up through mid-2008.
They could bury both with an Android/iOS plugin for Visual Studio. Make WinMo8 SDK a meta-API for mobile development. Wrap the fuck out of Android/iOS and bundle top-notch, win32-only emulators.

They have an opportunity to be a wise-elder to the industry, if only they woke up and realized they're no longer the prizefighter, but an elder.

With a move like that they can become a reference platform for mobile adoption; first in big business and government, then academia, and once the quality of their Qt-like API improves the game developers will start using it to push the envelope (remember when DirectX was laughed as full-screen GDI, and game developers still used their own hardware abstraction layers, by-passing Win16/32 for the tried and true power of DOS underneath?)

[Edit:

I must add that they might want to naturalize Symbian refugees. Grab the top 10 ten Symbian app vendors and offer them a migration route to WinMo, next comes J2ME which is effectively dead, thanks to Oracle's unapparent interest in mobile.

Backward compatibility is something MS knows best. Take the refugees before they commit mass seppuku and offer them a new home.

Take over StackOverflow or launch your own mobile Q&A site to centralize mobile development knowledge and keep it under your watch.]
Giant QWERTY keyboard for children
Have you worked on a team with him, or reviewed his code? Also, he doesn't write any math formulas on a window in the movie; his CFO does.
Yes following your passion is always a good advice I guess, but that doesn't mean you have to stop setting goals.

It might be a cliche, but goals (when written down, reviewed daily, visualized) have more effect than just giving you direction in what you do on a day to day basis. Goals change the way you react to opportunities that arise and seem to do magic.
At least that is my personal experience. Old almost forgotten goals suddenly became reality for me. My advice: do what you like most and set goals to use that passion to get results.
Yes, that's inevitable. You can't help take away from others. Even if you're a Jain, sweeping the floor before you to avoid killing insects. Perfection is unattainable, but I dream of a system that takes people's motivations (both selfish and altruistic) into account.

Nice turn of phrase. (Source?)
> Financial lobbying should be outlawed.

From the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Suppose we posited that corporations per se have no rights, only people do. Even so, the individuals who work for a corporation, or own shares in it, would still have that First Amendment right.
Whether we like it or not, Facebook is as much a part of the web ecosystem as Google. Instead of trying to fight it, just embrace it.
I don't really see how your approach to installing Windows applications can scale. Also, pinning will allow you to hold back any packages you'd like.

The only potential problem I see is statically-linked applications issue. However, I think in the case where libraries are open and shared amongst many applications/other libraries, it makes no sense to use static linking. Its advantages are that you don't need to worry about dependencies but that "is a solution to a problem that doesn't need to exist in the first place" since package management takes care of these issues.

IMHO it's better to spend 30 minutes once a year resolving an issue that arose when a Debian/Ubuntu repository got screwed up for a short period of time, than to constantly try to solve the problem of managing software installation/upgrades.
This is a pretty stupid article. It basically boils down to, "I'm old and it's my right to assume kids are stupid even if maybe they aren't - but I know they are! So there!"
If asset bubbles are part of the human condition, then why have they been so rare? There was tulip mania in Holland in 1637. The South Sea Bubble of 1719-1721. The canal overbuilding bubble in England in the 1820s. In the USA, there was the Florida land boom in the 1920s, ending in 1926, and then from 1926 to 1929 there was the stock market bubble. There was the Japanese real estate bubble of the 1980s, and a similar, smaller bit of overbuilding in the USA. Then there was the dotcom bubble in the USA stock market during the 1990s, and then the real estate boom of the 00s.

Those are the big ones.

Why were there no bubbles before 1637? In a word: government. Under a feudal regime, people are not free to do what they want with their money, therefore there were no bubbles. People were not free to bid up the prices of assets - most assets are illiquid under feudal regimes. The fact that a heavy-handed monarch can suppress markets and therefore make bubbles impossible is a fairly strong argument toward government effectiveness in stopping bubbles. Likewise, the lack of asset bubbles in the USA from 1932 to about 1982 also suggests the effectiveness of government in suppressing bubbles.

Of course, one might argue that we want bubbles, that such freedom of investment has positive consequences, or that heavy-handed government, while creating some benefits, also imposes large costs that outweigh whatever benefits are being offered. But that would be a separate issue.
You're probably right. In the second presentation[1], Mayer (Google's VP of Search prod. and UX) pointed out some problems users who search might experience: 1 of them being the serial presentation of information, and not a full set of information at once (eg. Google presenting you only 1 result at a time, or Wikipedia 1 fact at a time).

[1] thank jeromec: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9900486
It comes from spending time in some domain, like wikipedia, photo sharing, forums, shopping etc... You don't just come up with an idea out of the blue, you do something long enough and you'll have an idea in that domain and have a few hunches on how to execute it well.

There was a TED talk about how people come up with ideas, can't remember what it's called. Basically ideas take time to develop just like everything else, they only seem like eureka moments because they sometimes come about when you're not focused.
It's better than nothing. A heck of a lot better.
The ted.com audio files are available on iTunes (and probably many other places). I find many of those speakers quite inspiring. Even better, although much longer, are the Long Now talks, which are available both on the Long Now website, and on iTunes.
Did it happen a second time in the same spot? If so, that's not very convincing.
Currently I'm learning C taking notes using Numbers (iWork) alongside OminiGraffle. I like to create visual diagrams of complicated things, and then dump them into Numbers alongside text. Actually making the diagrams is the best part, because it helps imprint the info into my brain, and it's more fun than simply taking notes all the time. Here are a few diagrams I made recently:

http://www.dave-gallagher.net/coding/CDoublyLinkedList.jpg

http://www.dave-gallagher.net/coding/CSwitchStatement.jpg

http://www.dave-gallagher.net/coding/CTypeAbbreviation.jpg

My goal currently is to create a single Numbers document (like a cheat sheet you could take into exams during college), detailing everything that I need to know in C, and/or things that tend to confuse me. It's a living document, being iterated constantly.
Well, the article is specifically about ack-ack fire. I guess from a statistical perspective, adding enough armour to prevent fighter bullets from killing you would be a bad trade-off.
Most of my notes are in an big OmniOutliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/) document called Notes.oo3. I find the outline format best for me when taking notes, because if I come to the computer and I want to write multiple things down, I can just write the first bullet for each of them so I don't forget the main ideas and then write the sub-bullets afterwards. Sadly, OO only lets you search the whole document, not just the top-level bullets, so it's a bit hard to find old stuff, but the convenience of bullets outweighs that annoyance. The notes in that file are in two sections: Permanent, for notes I want to keep long-term or which will always exist, like a list of the programming projects I am currently working on, and Temporary, which is like a to-do list.

I also use Notational Velocity (http://notational.net/) for a few things that don't need to be outlines and can just be a list, because it is easy to search. My ideal note-taking program would be Notational Velocity, with all text in an outline format instead of free text. (I know you can simulate outlines with the tab key, but the indentation on multi-line bullets is wrong, and you can't drag bullets around like you can in OmniOutliner.)
Raytheon Unveils 2nd Generation Exoskeleton Robotic Suit
OpenCourseWare is great but I sort of feel like it's been so hyped over the years. Think about how long its been around, now look at how few courses have videos or any content worth mentioning at all. I could understand some of the other disciplines lagging behind in content but really it's the computer science stuff that is quite sparse. They have a big list but most of the courses just have some assignments without solutions or some lecture notes, which are available from most university web sites anyway.
Tell your actual friends you're leaving Facebook.

As for your "Facebook Friends", remove all of your content, lock down your privacy settings, and leave a note on your profile page that says the account is no longer being used. That way, when people find you on Facebook they will know what's going on.
How to get your Professors’ Attention, or: How to Get Coaching and Mentorship
Cool Gadgets for Energy Saver:Tenrehte PICOwatt | InfoMov.Com
I had the good fortune of taking this course from Prof. Leiserson a good many years ago -- and ended up having him as my Masters thesis advisor.

His ethics pep talk, which is a mainstay of all his courses, are about not cheating on the take-home exams. I still remember him saying to the class, in a fatherly, earnest way: "You've got to learn to make friends with that feeling in the pit of your stomach" and to face the fear rather than give in to the temptation to cheat. One of the MIT CS department's great teachers.
I'm waiting for the Boxee box. Seems the best bet unless Apple pulls off something really amazing with the next rev of the apple tv.
Litigation counsel will have a field day (and make a ton of money) demanding, then reviewing, life-log records of people associated with lawsuits and/or litigants.
Note that this is a companion piece to the essay I submitted last week, "How Universities Work;" see the fairly extensive discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 .
I don't see a very convincing discussion of how this differs from any other generation. Yes, people are using electronic devices for some things that they used to do mechanically. And people in the past generation or two also did--- and used mechanical devices for some things that they used to do manually. The helplessness angle in particular predates even that, and goes back to specialization, where people would have no idea how to do things that once were considered basic knowledge, because they now just buy them or pay someone else to do them.

Some of the complaints seem very similar to some of the stuff you can read from the late 19th century, where farmers complain that city-dwellers couldn't milk a cow if their life depended on it, and seem to think that food comes from grocery stores. I could even buy that maybe we should have a wider range of basic DIY knowledge, but I don't see it as a unique problem of this generation. Why is kids not knowing how ice is made a bigger loss to society than kids not knowing how butter is made, which the article author doesn't seem too worried about?
Question: would people be interested in summarized transcripts for these lectures?

The reason I ask is because I know I'm not going to watch 20 hours of the videos, and when I take a look at the transcripts they are good, but they are also long. It would take a while to even skim them.

I've been doing some work around machine text summarization, and it seems like these transcripts would be a great candidate to put it to work.

What do people think? Would you like summaries of the transcripts of these lectures?

EDIT: Thanks for the positive feedback, I'll submit them as a story here in 24 hours (right now I'm supposed to be getting ready for a big dinner tonight).
That's a good set of lectures.

My girlfriend recently did several as she was learning about CS as a postgrad, and found them very useful.

They, and many more, are also available on 'iTunes university' from within the iTunes interface. The Stanford CS courses that are up are also well worth a look; there's a good Machine Learning course up there.

The only issue is that the videos often aren't properly edited for the Internet. They don't strip out the class administrative parts, and the lectures would go a lot better with a navigable text index to allow you skip to different parts of the video.
The Khan Academy is also worth a look as a similar project.

With a little more care and attention to editing and presenting for the web, this could have a big impact on education.
I'm just a bit sad that "modern Perl" is OO Perl, and not more in the style of Higher-Order Perl.

There's an element of practicality. Perl doesn't force the use of any specific paradigm, but as it's not a pure functional language, the dominant paradigm for maintainable, large applications tends to be OO.
I think most of the comments are are missing the main point of the article: enjoy the journey instead of painfully achieving a goal. Goals are wonderful. However, I think our society is a bit too goal oriented (i.e. be a doctor, get a law degree, go for the promotion).

Have goals and enjoy the journey. Maybe I'm reading too much into the article, but that's what I got.
There was an article about this in the paper recently, specifically about dolphins protecting swimmers from sharks. The scientist said, dolphins are curious about you because you're warm-blooded like they are. They usually have their kids with them, so they will make sure the area is shark-free for that reason. If you don't get rescued before the dolphins get bored, they'll leave you to the sharks without a second's thought...
Better to have ignorant voters trying to make the decisions in the interests of the country, than a small group of rent-seeking special interests making decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of the country.

When you're deciding about wars, financial crisies, decimation of the middle class, increasingly extreme wealth distribution, etc., the former probably is the lesser of two evils.
Fujitsu Ships 10 Petaflop Supercomputer
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Strange insect encounter: Carrion Beetle with Mites
Epic picture. Ballmer doesn't seem his usual comical self. I would say, he's lost hopes of progress, let alone a burial.
Sorry for being patronizing, but I went through a phase like this too: figured out that human life is dominated by habits, decided this was "the" problem, and resolved to live anti-habitually. It didn't work. I think the reason is human nature: we're creatures of habit. Not to have them would be not to be human.

Habits can supplant other habits, but even that is not subject to direct conscious control. There's an entire self-help literature around it, some of which is good, but it's easy to take it the wrong way and go down a superficial path.
I bet understanding the acceptance process here would be fascinating.

YC is, by all accounts, is an organization tirelessly focused on making decisions based on the merit and potential of the founders. They have clear opinions of what is a good indicator of merit, but have shown a willingness to test their opinions and refine.

If anyone involved would be willing to shed light, I'd love to know how you've refined the process of identifying good Startup School participants over the years.
what was your result?
"Cuz I said so, that's why!"

It's hard to tell people what they should love and hate without coming off as petty. Yeah, you had some issue that bugged you and Facebook was involved. Your likes and dislikes are not everyone's. Some are happy to trade privacy for convenience, and some aren't. That's what freedom is about.
It doesn't matter if it drops your lifespan; that was not the author's point. The article is about living longer not in terms of actual years, but in terms of less monotony. Regardless of other costs, ending a marriage certainly accomplishes such a goal.
I'm not sure that I'd pay for this -- it's too easy to build something customised -- but a FOSS "standard" API would be cool.

I presume a paid service could offer cross-product achievements, which might have legs.
Outliner

Anki
I agree to some extent with everyone here stating that an idea doesn't need to be novel to develop your skills. However, I do think executing on an idea of your own versus reverse engineering something that exists does require much more from you. With a project that is entirely your own, you have nothing to fall back on. When you start at square one, you must design and implement everything.

So with that being said, I'd encourage you to check out a book called Thinkertoys[1]. Although it's a little elementary at times, it lays out specific techniques to get your creative juices flowing. Its great for analytical types because it provides a concrete framework for a very abstract activity (idea generation).

---
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Thinkertoys-Handbook-Creative-Thinking...
Formation of the elements/Nucleosynthesis in the early universe
Did you just relate native intelligence to parental income level?
I wonder how he blogs if he never has a goal in mind? I imagine he doesn't just write random words down. If you don't ever set goals then how do you ever create anything that requires more than a few simple steps? Surely you must have an end result in mind.

I think the message he really wants to get across is a combination of 'be more spontaneous' and 'don't be afraid to change your plans', which isn't the same thing IMO.
If even if reitzensteinm was talking about capacity-per-watt, he's still wrong. The specific drive he mentioned was the "Raptor" model but that's an old, slow, small (150G) and power hungry (9.5W) disk. The newer WD "VelociRaptor" 10K RPM disk is more likely what he meant, and is a more fair comparison. The new Velociraptor only has a 600 GB capacity. The highest capacity OCD IBIS drive is 960 GB.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=821
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid-state-drives/hsd...

OCD IBIS Power:
6.6 Watts Idle
9.5 Watts Active

WD VelociRaptor Power:
4.30 Watts Idle
6.20 Watts Active

Now we do the math. A total of 9600 GB would be 10 OCD disk or 16 VelociRaptor disk.

16 x 6.20 = 99.2 --WD VelociRaptor

10 x 9.5 = 95 --OCD IBIS

Similar is true for idle.

If we were not limited to VelociRaptor, when you get into some of the very slow but very huge disks (1-2 TB), sure, you could beat the rather specific OCD IBIS models on Capacity-Per-Watt. But it is very unfair to open only one side of the rotating vs. ssd comparison to every disk made, and there are higher capacity SSD's with even better power consumption numbers than the OCD IBIS.

As you noted, the metric of Cost-Per-Capacity is often 10 or more times more favorable for rotating disks. If you don't have a valid _need_ for the speed offered by SSDs, they are certainly not worth the added costs.
Yes, in the runner-up for worst zinger: "you're not an asshole, you're just trying hard to be one". Huh?
The Secret Sauce behind Zappos Word Of Mouth
at least the shoe still worked afterwards
I have been hearing lot about working on one's strengths. It is also mentioned in the 4 Hour Workweek and it does make sense. But let's say I am good at design, does it mean I shouldn't learn programming (something I am doing right now)?

Even if one is not planning to master something that he isn't good at, does it make sense to invest or waste time on it?
Our brains are effectively good at certain things and rather mediocre in other things but it does learn things and thus changes if persistent effort is made.

Over to someone who wants to chip in with some better explanation.

Thanks to OP for sharing the article though.
I'd like to say both of those things :-) Look at the great things I created, and look at the fun I had doing it.
"And a habit-free existence — as I wrote last week — isn’t really possible anyway. It would be an existence without expertise, and so a life without language or meaning."

I don't believe he's actually suggesting you get rid of all your habits (i.e. wife). He was just stating that habits make time pass quickly, and getting rid of them slows things down. But that doesn't mean we should get rid of them... just that we should realize and accept the tradeoff.
FYI Income entry chokes on commas (ie: 50,000)
Stop thinking about new ideas and start getting deeper in the first thing that comes to your mind. Iterate through it, don't develop yet. Be at least one/two weeks thinking only about it, Can it be extrapolated to something else?, How would you do it?, Improve it in your mind, iterate few times, find which niche could fit.
Start implementing it... and iterate again, and again.

After a few weeks you will get a deep understanding on it... ideas will flow.