skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would agree with this. At my new job I was forced to use a Mac for my first couple of weeks and it was like being put in a straight-jacket. A lot of the gui can be manipulated from the keyboard in gnome, and this is what I missed the most. If Mac had alternatives I'd be happy to use them, but they weren't immediately obvious after a google or two.

Conversely if you're a 'mouse person' then this may not be an issue for you.
"The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand my bible.. you definitely love it if you like Atlas Shrugged.. same author and same philosophy.. more centered towards one protagonist.
Society of Mind. by Minsky. his book changed my perspective on how the mind operates.
I didn't know he wrote a book about it, thanks. I've watched the speech a few times and it is excellent.
The one I would want to build even if I can't earn anything with it and could only use it myself. Once that one was determined to be commercially viable.
Check out: http://fivebooks.com/

"Every day an eminent writer, thinker, commentator, politician, academic chooses five books on their specialist subject. From Einstein to Keynes, Iraq to the Andes, Communism to Empire. Share in the knowledge and buy the books."
is it within a domain you know a lot about?

is it fun?

can you build it?

can you sell it?

what makes it stand out? someone will copy it if you're successful, so what makes it sustainable e.g. brand, customer engagement, network effects etc.
Although I agree 100% with your critique I disagree completely with UX being about triggering an emotional response.

I know UX people like to claim they are responsible for the user experience but this is really not true unless they are able to actually visually design the site too as the visual part is the primary emotional trigger.

This is why all UX people should be able to design.

The problem with his twitter redesign isn't about the emotional response but simply about the information design. It's badly done and reduces the ability to scan the page.

But other than that I agree completely.
I have two comments about that, one idealistic and one pragmatic.

If I am not mistaken, the state-centric view taken by the founders was to afford the people a vote-by-shoe-leather system. It literally was: "if you don't like it here, leave" but without the bile.

Also, as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, in order for your interests to "win" in a federally-scoped election, you have to convince a ton more people, who [as members of other states, natch] quite possibly have a very different life situation than you do. In order for your interests to prevail in a state-scoped election, you only have to convince a smaller set of voters who are very likely in your same situation.
Snowcrash is fun but doesn't have anyhere near the depth of his later books. Cryptonomicon is fantastic, you shouldn't let the first one of the System of the World put you off, and I love Anathem. Unfortunately Neal Stephenson is terrible at ending books; but the journey is def. worth it.
I have only one suggestion which helped me pick out the good ideas from the bad - to get external opinion. It's almost like humans have a self defense mechanism by which they can't adequately find flaws in their own selves and ideas. Thus, your idea might be the biggest thing in your mind, while other people might feel otherwise.

That's why I told everyone about my idea - presented it in startup events, showed people demos, put it up on public mailing lists and wikis. The idea got battered and beaten down and each time there were little changes. There's this huge hype about being a "stealth startup" and a fear that people in some web shop will steal your idea and clone it.

tl;dr - the idea that you start with is the one that people can't completely tear apart and obliterate.

Also, the idea is pretty much useless. If I had an idea that I'll make a touch screen phone with an app store, nobody would've taken me seriously. If I'd pulled an apple and built one, people would've. Three months into full-time development of a product, I can only say that execution is pretty much everything.
Have a look for something that interests you. After you've looked at several sites, you should find somethings that you would like to do but can't or are difficult to do well. Having identified a problem you have the idea for an improvement.

Just look at all the add-ons that Facebook, Yahoo, etc have attracted. Each of them addresses a specific short-coming.
Bettercodes.org
bettercodes.org: Open Source Social Network for developers with free code hosting based on SVN or GIT, project management, code snippets, questions & answers, discussions, shared news, events, competitions, developer connections, and more
I hope dearly that Lawrence Lessig succeeds in actually calling a constitutional convention (http://www.callaconvention.org), if for no other reason than to strike out your "in theory" qualifier.
I'm currently reading Full Tilt - a thrilling personal account of an amazing Irish woman's bicycle journey from Europe to India in 1963. Highly recommended.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/163921.Full_Tilt
Exactly, here's the story Feynman told on the matter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05WS0WN7zMQ
I find this point the trivial one. The surprising point is that names really do matter. I had no idea how many sycamore trees there are in NYC before I had a name for them; having a name also meant having a set of characteristics that let me label a tree as a "sycamore" - being able to apply a name to a thing also means recognizing the thing, and being able to communicate about it.

(Actually, probably London Plane trees, but don't let my ignorance get in the way of my point.)
The one that is so good that you don't just find people who like it, but people who act on that hunch and become your co-founder.
Read novels, on paper, outdoors.
Ask HN: I'm done with the IDE. What's a good alternative?
To me, the modern IDE has become so bloated these days I dread to even think about firing one open and letting it consume a horrendous amount of resources.

So what's the alternative? People have spoken about Vim and Emacs and all the others, but I'm not very well versed in either. I've been using Vim for quite a while to write simple scripts so I'm used to the commonly used keyboard commands, but I'm still a bit confused about how people use their preferred editor as a full blown development environment. Vim to me seems like an ever expanding series of configuration files and keyboard tricks to get something remotely powerful.

What I'm asking is, what is the alternative to the modern IDE? How have people managed without one? Or do we just have to except the fact that the IDE is something we can never get away from?
These books, although some now I might not endorse some of their teaching but they have help me to see the world in a different light:

The Mystery Method - Erik Von Markovik[Social Engineering at its best]

Rich Dad Poor Dad: Guide to Investing - Robert Kiyoski

The Thoughtworks Anthology: Essays on Software Technology and Innovation (Pragmatic Programmers)

Bible - First class book in teaching how to behave towards others, especially proverbs.

Tao Te Ching - For this two verse you should read it:
"When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other"

Cyropaedia - "Along with the The prince this book was required reading by all former statesmen."
This is just opinion, not based on any facts or circumstances that the companies might have faced.
1) We do exclude robots now, yes.
2) historious doesn't spider websites, it only saves the pages the users give us. It's the same as a user deciding to make a backup of a webpage on their computer...
what if you don't have any co-founders?
Reminds me of this movie by Louis De Funes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074103/
It should be noted that the are a lot more things other than the genome and connectome. There's countless epigenetic factors, the extended phenotype, and there's some evidence that inheritance can occur through the proteome through prions (the helpful kind) - at least in yeast.

I'm fairly sure this is just scratching the surface of all the ways that "codes" and initial conditions define you.
I like to work on ideas that

1. really excite me

2.just won't get out of my head even after it's been days since I first thought of them

3. keep luring me to go back to work on them even after the initial honeymoon period is over and I've been through days when I felt utterly bored of them.
i don't know if he is one or not, he just sounds like one.

and the relevancy is that social media experts have a vested interest in making people believe that Facebook is not a complete waste of time
Unconventional Ideas for learning new Language?
I am looking for some unconventional and innovative ideas for learning German language. I know there can't be better place then HN to ask this question.

Why unconventional because I think my language part of brain is not normal or so. So in school they tried to teach me English grammar for 10 years but still I do not remember any grammatical rule. By accident I learned(sort of) English while watching Hollywood action movies and commentary of cricket matches.

Now the problem is that I am not addictive to TV any more specially action pack movies which makes it impossible to watch daily some German movie to learn German.

Another problem is that I cannot do rot-learning for memorizing the vocabulary. May be because of ADHD or my laziness.

As an example what I have done in past. Once preparing for GRE, I had to memorize huge vocabulary of English, so I wrote a program to which given a ebook as input, adds meanings of difficult words in footnotes of each page. Difficult words were the words from GRE word list. That helped me a lot. But this cannot be used for German as I am in the beginning.

I am using a Polyglot chrome extension for German and doing customizations according to my needs. But still I need some other ways to quickly start communicating.

Now I am looking for other ideas. I am in Germany and started working part time in a software house. Can I involve my German colleagues somehow? Or what other methods you used for learning a foreign language?
How Popular is the iPhone Anyway
A classic! Kinda sad to see that world has become reality & nobody seems to have noticed it.

Edited to add: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_separated_meat
Could you memory map your memory to disk and let the kernel take care of it?
A simple guideline for blogging
It's possible to do with JavaScript modules:
"JavaScript code modules are a concept introduced in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3) and can be used for sharing code between different privileged scopes." https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_JavaScript_code_modul...
Every vendor publishes their own buggy version of drivers for what is essentially the same hardware, all neatly packaged with some buggy "value added" crapware that introduces new and unpredictable behaviour mom has to deal with.

No. I really prefer the Linux way.
This is such a pile of BS propaganda.

> "It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from"

No, it's not.

> "Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve—bones, eyes, guts, and all."

No, it's not.

> "because it’s crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color."

Yeah WTF? Some evidence is handy to verify those ridiculous hyperbole scary claims.

Perhaps you meant "They add preservatives, coloring and flavoring" like 99% of other processed food.

At least read the wikipedia article on MSM (You're far more likely to eat it in hotdogs than chicken products).

I am flabberghasted this is the TOP story on HACKER news. Some FUD, content free, propaganda piece about chicken that is basically totally factually incorrect.

I'm guessing it's voted up and has been spread around the internet because it fits in with peoples idea/fear of what might be true, if they forget that little matter of 'facts'.
In retrospect I think I exaggerated it. But if we would somehow put our effort to it and invest a couple trillion in it, it may be achievable in this century.
The one that you can finish first
Coolest Dad ever!
With the British media's preoccupation with where food comes from, I've seen stuff like this before and always wondered why they can't artificially flavor other, healthy but still cheap material.

I'd eat a burger/nugget made of mushed up, chemically enhanced cabbage/potato/soya/whatever, as long as it tasted as "good" as the existing thing. Why isn't this more common than mushing up animals? I'd have expected it to be cheaper and people are easily fooled by artificial flavorings, but they'd be slightly more healthy and slightly less gross into the bargain.
I honestly didn't know this existed.... thanks!
1. Is there a market

2. Do I need to teach people that this is important...or do I get to exploit existing demand?

3. Is there some sort of barrier to entry?

4. How long will it take to build a minimum viable product?

5. What the competitors are like, their current reputation, their current SEO rankings, their current adwords campaigns etc.

6. Then I usually build a quick fake page to see if there is any demand. I'd rather piss off 200-300 people and see what the actual demand is like, instead of relying on them to tell me what they think they want.

7. If everything works out, I get to work. If not, I get to save 3 months chasing an idea that has no potential.
As someone who tried using Wesabe seriously for several months, I will tell you why they went out of business: their product was not very useful.

I spent quite a while entering receipts and tagging things and all I ever got was a few charts that showed me how much money I had spent. There was no tool for budget estimation, there was nothing to help do mortgage calculations, cripes, there was hardly a point to using the website at all with the sole exception that they had some pretty good discussion forums.

The only reason I preferred Wesabe to Mint was because Mint wanted to reach into the guts of all your accounts and that felt kinda creepy.
So that's how they make chicken nuggets! That looks suspiciously like pink ice cream.

So they use ammonia to kill all the nasties. The real issue is whether that ammonia ends up in you in large enough quantities to stress your liver and kidneys. Its not enough to say "dangerous stuff used to kill potentially dangerous microbes in our food" you need to show that enough of it is getting into our bodies to actually be a problem. Ammonia is a natural metabolic waste product so we're well adapted to dealing with it already(by pissing and sweating it out as urea).
We Got a Mention Now Let’s Panic
Mint.com's Customer Acquisition Strategy (via @putorti)
Right, and it sounds like what actually killed this guy was hitting his head on a lamp-post.

I also had a snowboarding accident a couple of years back - it was the first time I'd been in years and I was just starting to get the hang of it again on the first day. Then I woke up in hospital which was a good hour away from the slopes. I'd been concussed, so I was awake the whole time they took me there (snowmobile off the slope, then ambulance to the hospital) but I don't remember any of it. I have photos of me chatting to the red cross which is surreal since I have no memory of it at all.

I now wear a helmet snowboarding too :-)
I've had nothing but a completely smooth experience with Dropbox on Ubuntu. YMMV?
Why is this on Hacker News? Seriously, who would vote that crap up?
Exercise your critical thinking... http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/dkopf/say_hello_to_mec...
> I am flabberghasted this is the TOP story on HACKER news

It's been a very long September, hasn't it?
Help me with an idea (digital / mobile publishing)
The idea for my company is that I will find authors that have (or can produce) interesting content, but have no skills or money to prepare an iPhone application.

The company will then prepare the iPhone app & split the profit with the author. Much like a traditional publishing company, but instead on paper / cds we will do it on the iPhone / mobile medium.

What do you think?
Where can I find authors? (I already cooperated with two, but that is not enough)
- there is some problem to be solved

- I must understand how people solve the problem (apart from specially designated software)

- I must understand what's wrong with all existing solutions

- I must be personally interested in solving that problem even if it does not bring millions

- I must have at least remote knowledge of how to implement that idea (technically, I mean). I'm reluctant to rely solely on others.

- etc.

See the YC application form, it has very good questions.
Then you'd be trying to avoid yourself.
Maybe it's time to raise karma thresholds for story upvotes.
The Japan Syndrome
_"Pick one task around your house that needs doing that is small and can be done in short order and go take care of it."_

Doing the dishes is a good one. It doesn't take all that long, it gives you time to reflect as it rarely requires great attention, and, even in a dwelling that is habitually cluttered, a moderately clean kitchen will make it seem like you have accomplished something.

Doing the dishes/cleaning the kitchen is my number one low-tech way to feel better about myself and my surroundings. (With the added benefit that my wife greatly appreciates it, since she can relax and watch video clips on her iPhone.)
I keep meaning to learn how to properly use emacs or vim, but I've never actually found the time to do so[1]. So instead, I've just ended up using a plain multi-document editor with syntax highlighting and sessions - KDE's Kate in my case - and a bunch of terminal windows/tabs for REPLs, compilers, build scripts and version control. Where appropriate, I use a stand-alone debugger for whatever runtime I happen to be programming in (JSwat for the JVM, and KDbg as a gdb frontend).

That said, certain types of work for customers is most easily done in an IDE, for example .NET or Win32 stuff (Visual Studio), iOS programming (XCode) and Nintendo game consoles (CodeWarrior), so I use those where appropriate.

It's probably not an optimal approach and it certainly earns me zero respect from my peers using vim or emacs (or eclipse...). Considering how varied my work tends to be, relying on a cluster of totally independent tools actually works pretty well.

[1] I do use vim for shell scripts and configuration files. iravpPdwq!/?: are the only commands I know, however.
Or name and shame the upvoters.
I quote: "if your first language is Java, you learned it in school, because that's what they taught—you didn't yearn for anything more".

That's language prudishness, right there.

I also find your assertion that if someone learns PHP as a first language they're likely to end up a "better" programmer than someone who learns Java as a first language absurd. There are good schools teaching Java, and smart, inquisitive people studying it. Many of the best programmers I know still use Java for pretty much everything since it allows them to get their jobs done. Some know other languages, some don't. It's a purely pragmatic choice, but to say that those people would not be valuable to a startup is crazy.

Maybe the process you use when interviewing is good enough to separate these people from others who really don't know how to program, but it seems like they're going to be starting at a significant disadvantage if you're interviewing them.
If you liked "Atlas Shrugged", you will love "East of Eden" by George Steinbeck. It has some passages on self-determination that puts anything found in Rand to shame. It's a tome, and it starts slow - do yourself a favor and make it through the introduction of one of the villains, Kathy (chapter 8 or so). It doesn't slow down after that.

"The Watchmen" by Alan Moore. It may be a graphic novel, but the issues it raises on ethics and morality are chilling. I still think about the ending every now and then, and I haven't read it in over a year.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. In addition to the primary themes on class, race, and the killing of innocents, it has an interesting thread on living with your own moral code.

"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller. Ostensibly a satire of the military, this is a good self-reflection on the American soul (circa 1961).

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". The life of a Nobel winning physicist and renowned professor doesn't have to be boring.

"Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer. The premise is too complicated to describe here, but it really delves into the cruelty and self-protectionism of the human heart. Plus, its hysterical!

"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Describes the horror of war and the effect it has on the rest of your life.

"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marques. Tells the story of a murder that everyone in town knew would happen, but nobody tried to stop.
I also used wesabe for several months. When mint.com launched I was tempted but I was initially turned off by the online-ness of it. I liked that wesabe was a desktop based product and I had ownership of my data. Now that idea seems a bit quaint. I think people (including myself) have gotten a lot more comfortable with their financial data being online.

I am not using mint (for my US-based accounts) and I like it a lot. The reason I stopped using wesabe was because 1.) I was MAc OS X and the desktop client they had was buggy. and b) I kept hitting bugs with the banks I used. I don't think they were able to keep up the pace. It was frustrating. I'm sure it was not lack of effort on their part. Perhaps they should have been willing to compromise more. It's really hard to say.

I really appreciated Marc dumping his thoughts on the matter.
I recommend the nightly chromium dev build if you can do it.
I wonder if becoming a Q&A site for personal finance would have been a good pivot for Wesabe.
The reasons for not doing that are discussed here:

http://antirez.com/post/redis-virtual-memory-story.html
Yeah I believe that was lipstick.com.
I watch out for the ones that come back to keep me up at night after the inevitable phase of boredom.
The research proposal is one of the hardest things to write. You are expected to know what problems exist and how they could be solved. Assuming that you have a specific area of interest, use Google Scholar to look at the papers written on that topic in the last 2 years. You will probably need to invest 40-60 yours to do this well. Reading some recent PhD theses is also an eye-opener.

Having done this step you should have a better idea of the sorts of theoretical research questions that others have asked and thus provide you with ideas for yours.

The core point of a PhD is to make a significant contribution to the body of knowledge. It is very different to that of a Masters where you learn and apply advanced knowledge (developed by others). Looking at available technology is only likely to have merit if you find a deficiency and find a way of solving it. And a sound theoretical justification for your solution.

Your comments on US universities might apply to some you may have looked at. From my experiences Stanford, MIT, Berkley, Princeton have very high standards and demand for theoretical foundations. Edsger Dijkstra had noted the trend for stronger mathematical foundations in the European universities than the USA ones.

A PhD is an apprenticeship for becoming a researcher. So you will learn to think like a researcher as you progress. Most universities have introductory courses on how to do research, literature searches, etc. There are also excellent books are resources on the internet. Seek and you shall find.