skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not quite there yet, in the process of getting there. When all I'm talking about is contract art jobs and there's no dayjob - I'm there! =)

- Mindfulness, oddly enough. I always need to stop, notice that I'm getting tired or distracted (or burning up way too much energy on something), stop, re-evaluate, and go

I notice sometimes I might just be "screwing around" on something (shuffling CSS around, painting bits of a picture that aren't critical), so I'll focus again and do something thats adding value

Especially when you're tired - its easy to futz about doing not much at all while thinking "I'm so busy and productive". It takes effort to mentally stay on task after a day at work

- Cold showers and coffee

- Being more assertive / aggressive at work. I used to burn myself out trying to do everything and anything, and spent a lot of time bashing my head against walls because someone else thought it was of value (and I didn't).

The more confident I get with my freelance jobs, the more risk I'm taking at work. Quiet happy to tell someone that an idea isn't worth pursuing and push back when I've got too much on my plate.

Also, learn to argue (in a professional manner) without feeling like shit about it. Saves a lot of hassle.

- Just doing it. It's cliche, but nothing beats this: take off your work gear, shower, change, prep, shut the fucking browser, turn off the tv, and go.

Sometimes its almost comical what I have to do to break out of habits like idling online or gaming or etc. I will sit and literally yell at myself if I have to, to get myself back on task.

Small post-its work as well, like "get back to work" or "is this really worthwhile and enjoyable?" (that one's stuck to the PS3)

- Remembering that projects are fun. I feel way better about myself after a half hour working out or four hours building time on something than watching TV all night. It turned my mood around quiet a bit too - went from being quiet sullen to very content and positive about stuff.
Someone needs to create a filesystem optimized for something like two heterogeneous drives, like a 64GB SSD and a 500GB HDD. It would try to put larger files on the HDD (where storage space and sequential read/write speed are useful and random-access less critical) and smaller files on the SSD (which has better random access). This would rock! You'd have a really zippy laptop with scads of space.
In addition to your points above, Microsoft needs to:

1. Make it easier for developers to port apps from iOS and Android to WP7.

2. Allow OEMs to customize WP7 and the hardware to some extent so they can effectively compete with differentiated and innovative products; else WP7 smartphones will become commoditized, just like Wintel PCs.

3. Consider a different revenue model. Charging $15 a copy to OEMs is a tall order, particularly when the competition is free (Android). Some have argued that the total costs of deploying and maintaining Android are higher than deploying WP7, but how can this be, given that almost all the costs with deploying Android are fixed in nature, while WP7 costs are primarily variable (on a per copy basis).

4. Improve its brand image in the smartphone market and across the board. Microsoft has a weak brand in the hacker community, given the preference for open source. Hackers are driving much of the innovation in the application markets.
This shows an eventual long term direction of the iOS and OSX desktop/tablet/phone interface and business model merge.
Beautiful review, though I think Anand should consider using videos to describe some things.

This is telling of how strict Microsoft is being with the hardware:

"At the top left of any Windows Phone there must be a volume rocker. The top right has to have a power/lock button. The lower right has to have a physical camera button capable of waking the phone up from sleep and putting it directly into the camera app. Microsoft views the smartphone as the replacement for the point and shoot camera and thus Windows Phone needs to be able to function just as quickly as a P&S. Finally, all Windows Phones must have a 3.5” stereo audio out jack and support for headsets with three button integration."
On that notice page, Google suggests using "Google Sites" for pages and attach files to pages on the site. If it is straightforward for someone to do it, I find it strange that they don't do it automatically and tell the people "we'll be migrating your data to Google Sites" instead of taking it down.
Games are usually good candidates for portability because the GUI capabilities & conventions of the host OS need not affect what you do in your custom full screen rectangle.
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Or they're doing programming in a domain that involves a math a fair amount of the time.

(Like robots.)
Yeah, #players and playingtime are both on my list of things to optionally filter. Just need to find a nice way to do it without complicating the initial user experience.
> even the numbers you’ve cited wildly contradict each other

The idea of those two separate was that while they both contradict each other, they both prove the premiumness of reddit demographic.

> First, reddit’s own admins have called out these statistics as inaccurate

Link please.

You gave an unsubstantiated claim that Reddit demographic is

unattractive to advertisers, which are proven to be wrong by two most widely used site demographic markers. Showing two links which are hate speech, racism or worse etc don't prove that the demographic is not advertising friendly.

> I know reddit likes to think of itself as a community of intellectuals and sophisticates ...

Reddit doesn't need to be intellectual to command premium rates. If > 30% of its audience makes > 75K/yr, it has premium ad inventory. Have you seen Icanhascheeseburger's ad rates? :)
You may check FlightStat https://www.flightstats.com/developers/bin/view/Main/
I'm all in favor of the physical camera button. I was actually brainstorming today about ways to be able to select which app you want to run without actually turning on the screen (be it iphone/droid/wp7/whatever). I want to be able to take out my phone and just start doing what I want to use it for immediately, without fiddling with lock screens and menus. I want it to be a voice recorder on demand, camera on demand, camcorder on demand, mp3 player on demand, etc.
If you have a quality 802.11n AP then WiFi is actually faster than 100 Mbps Ethernet, making a USB 10/100 Ethernet adapter pointless. That speed isn't theoretical; I'm in a high-rise apartment building and I can see 25 other SSIDs from my couch, but I still have no problems getting >100 Mbps from an AirPort to a MacBook.
I'm fairly certain that the "Disney Vault" is well preserved, guarded, insulated and insured. Unfortunately our children and our children's children will be paying for Cinderella's dry cleaning for a long time to come.
Apple has removed people from the app store and basically put them out of business, and no complaints or legal issues were an issue too.
First off, no Android device sold blocks installing custom home screens from the market. In the US at least, all major carriers but AT&T allow side-loading applications. What you do see across the board is restricting root access, which, while unfortunate, still allows for a lot of customization.

Secondly, different users will always have different preferences and use cases; the variety enabled by customization allows for more users to be happier. Furthermore, such openness has produced custom apps that blow away everything else away. Swype, a custom keyboard that cannot be distributed to the end-user of rival mobile OS's, is the most obvious example. At least at the OS level, this modularity is a sign that Android is well-designed.
Ok, now that the fanfare has died down, and there inst hundreds of people trying to talk all at once, my chat room is the place to go to chat with other YC applicants. :)
Then give them a choice. The inverse of which is one of Apple's tenants for a holistic ecosystem.
A USB DVD writer/burner costs very little, sothat will always be an option.

Also: this might make MacBoks not be such a good choice for running Ubuntu in the future.
I really couldn't be happier about this.
Interesting premise! Trying the description itself:

"Enter a paragraph of text. We'll run it through our highly sophisticated algorithms* and output a lovely, totally original piece of text."

rather amusingly yields:

"come in a piece of writing of text. We'll run it done our extremely advanced algorithms* and end product a lovely, wholly unoriginal part of text."

As a next step you could encode rules from Strunk & White [Strunk: http://www.bartleby.com/141/].
Thanks for posting this! Arc is really a great language - I use it every day to power my Chinese e-commerce site (there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support). Libraries are no longer really a big problem: with aw's additions in Anarki, it's really easy to call Perl and Python libraries, in addition to all of those from Racket. And Anarki has a healthily growing set of indigenous libraries as well.

The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).
Ubuntu is most easily installed from USB stick already, so not sure why you would say that?
I wouldn't be surprised if someone looking at Launchpad for the first time would be surprised that their macbook "has apps now", even though they are looking at the same applications that have already been on their mac for months.

Exactly. They needed Launchpad because (1) the App Store means that people will have more apps than can comfortably fit on the Dock and (2) average users aren't comfortable finding the Applications folder.
I didn't keep a journal, but after a couple of weeks when I decided to write this post I jotted down what I'd done when. The filesystem helped with a lot of dates (creation, last modification and so on). Going to England in the middle was a good, specific memory aid too - it's easier to remember what I was doing and thinking in an unusual place.

I love your appjournal idea!
And if you run the result you get "semen in a part of authorship of text. We'll run it through our highly forward-looking algorithms* and end merchandise a lovely, entirely original partially of text."
Lettering.JS - a jQuery plugin for radical Web Typography
Show HN: New iPad cooking app - Gourmaide
We're a couple of hungry developers (no pun intended) who wanted to simplify cooking so we built an app to do just that - it's called Gourmaide and we'd love for you to try it!

App store link: http://bit.ly/bJdhfM
No. I thought about Directed Edge, but playing with recommendation algorithms was the raison d'etre of the project. I didn't want to make a web site and throw some amazon referral links at it, I wanted to play data miner!
The issue being that by the time such a filesystem became stable enough for people to trust it with their data, SSDs may have already caught up to HDDs in terms of storage capacity.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion presented
http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
Something like this: http://aidacase.com/keycase-folio-deluxe-with-built-in-keybo... might work for you eventually, though it may seem silly. I think the difference in this is that you can just open the front flap for quick, instant-on tablet access, and unfold it further for keyboard usage vs. having to set up / maintain two different systems or use a tilt/swivel joint to access the touchscreen.
What? You're saying they're making 40k (hosting costs) + all salaries from advertising? I find that incredibly hard to believe. Like impossible to believe.
An interesting point. Although CDs are not archival media.
Doing accurate triangulation (localization) of a bluetooth receiver from a bunch of active bluetooth nodes is maybe a little more difficult than it seems.

Certainly a great idea in theory, but the accuracy of your localization will depend on the signal propagation model you apply to the received signal strength (RSS) that the phone provides. I would bet that it's difficult to find a phone that will give you signal strength in dBm at a high update rate.

I worked on a localization project using passive RFID tags and an RFID reader (a more power efficient setup than having active bluetooth nodes). Especially in a store/mall type environment with many people moving around, I think it becomes hard to get a decent model of expected signal propagation (mainly due to constantly changing multi-path signal amplitude).

All of that said, for your application you might be able to get by with the reduced accuracy (within 10 feet might work?).

With bluetooth, you also have to consider the number of connections a bluetooth receiver can handle. That will probably greatly restrict your density of nodes. RFID again holds an advantage here, in that RFID is a very low-level interaction, while bluetooth is much higher level. This problem just screams RFID. Too bad everybody's phone doesn't have a built-in RFID reader... or a software radio!
Apple Mac App Store - Buy, download, and install apps made for Mac.
And that was, I feel kind of redundant in pointing out, exactly what I meant too.
I'm voting that keyboards will be around for as long as there is a physical input mechanism of any sort. The throughput and flexibility with keyboards is just too great to get rid of completely.
Wow, great idea. I am envious.
Lists like this aren't generally shared, because then the nefarious bots would know they had been caught.

Well behaved bots tend to use useragents that make themselves fairly obvious.

The best bet is to watch your logs for an IP or agent that seems to hit more URLs than anyone else, and then investigate by hand.
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore_types.py", line 1324, in ValidateProperty
prop_validator(name, v)
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore_types.py", line 1215, in ValidatePropertyString
ValidateStringLength(name, value, max_len=_MAX_STRING_LENGTH)
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore_types.py", line 1205, in ValidateStringLength
(name, len(value), max_len))
BadValueError: Property content is 1393 bytes long; it must be 500 or less. Consider Text instead, which can store strings of any length.

oops
It's something to wave in the face of the pro-Copyrighters that ride a campaign of "more restrictive copyright for a brighter future."
OSX Java ported by Apple deprecated
Here is a really good talk by Adrian Cockcroft[1] from Netflix on this whole project to move to AWS over the last two years. It was given last week at hacker dojo in Mountain View. Video could be better but there is some good stuff in there.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10209077

I think he is giving a talk at http://qconsf.com that goes more into the nitty gritty of the software side of things Nov 2nd.

[1] http://qconsf.com/sf2010/speaker/Adrian+Cockcroft
I just wanted to point out that it's not 90k concurrent users, but 90k total users (for some unknown definition of "user"). But it does process a couple dozen tweets per second according to him, with low load. That's quite a far ways off from 90k concurrent users. That's not to say that Go wouldn't help in that case, it really depends on what the application is doing.
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De Bono has also some interesting ways of 'generating ideas'. For example in one he proposes to start with something obviously paradoxical - like a car with square wheels - then you think how you could make it work - so for example you invent some new suspension design that would compensate for the problem - and then you think that maybe you could use it also for circle wheels.
Wtf is this shit? I thought the video was gonna get better, it only got more boring :(
Link, as requested: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

I would just add that reddit’s difficulties selling its ad space—they’ve had to resort to serving Flash games and pretty pictures just to fill the advertising frame, though they spin this e.g. “Instead of an ad, here’s a flower/Just our way of saying thanks”—speak volumes about reddit’s ability to appeal to sponsors of the sort sought by Condé Nast.
I predict a $50 million buyout offer by the end of the week. :)
I am working on a CMS that is "data first, design next". There is a large number of people saying people hate filling up forms. They hate wizards. But existing apps compounded the problem instead of solving it. Applications like Squarespace and Weebly are design first. This is where my app differs. I make it mandatory to have a required minimum data like images and company profile ready before they dive in to create a simple website.

I will be releasing this app in a few weeks. Thank you for asking. Bookmark http://getsetweb.in

I am located in Mumbai, India.
For context, sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage started this initiative to spread hope to LGBT teens struggling through what can be a hard time in their lives. From the youtube channel:

"Billy Lucas was just 15 when he hanged himself in a barn on his grandmother's property. He reportedly endured intense bullying at the hands of his classmates—classmates who called him a fag and told him to kill himself. His mother found his body.... I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.
1. Ok

2. I doubt it is that simple. Once you let apps to run in parallel you will need to manage them, to look after power consumption, have an UI to support multitasking, etc.

3. Ok, I guess that's easier than improve Flash for mobile.

4. I don't think the browser on WP7 is based on IE7 just for numbers to match. And this give me little hope there will be quick improvement in that area.

Also there was this tidbit about detecting WP7 browser from user agent string. That's not the way to do it. The way to adapt your layout for a mobile device is using CSS media queries (IE9 should support those).

BTW, about the interface. Some seem to really like it, but I find that clipped text a bit weird.
Emergence of Platforms 2.0 - The Next Music Industry?
Console developers pay something similarly ridiculous, be careful what you wish for!
Swype is also available on Symbian. The company that makes it has stated that it wants it to become a standard on all mobile platforms.
If this ends up becoming an industry trend it has some interesting repercussions for the music distribution industry. The combination of a compact disc's unencrypted contents plus an optical CD drive in almost every computer really helped push the ubiquity of digital music unencumbered by DRM. To consumers any DRM system seemed like a bigger hassle than dropping a CD in the drive, ripping the bits and then converting them to MP3s.

We're years away from this, but if a majority of computers don't have an optical drive to rip CDs then the average consumer loses this non-download path to digital music. That probably emboldens DRM advocates, helps Apple's music download business, and will effect countless other things that are hard/impossible to predict.
ehh, until we can stream blu-ray quality videos over the internet i doubt it's going anywhere soon.
Computing at scale, or, how Google has warped my brain
They definitely have problems getting enough quality advertisers, but that may have something to do with them not having anyone (until recently?) whose job it is to sell ad space. Vogue does.
Yeah, and they don't suck just because they do let you change something you don't like.

Every Apple product is so well designed, until the next Apple product comes out.
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Absolutely fascinating, agree. So just by talking on other ports they use the NoSQL or SQL approach, depending on whether they are doing primary-key-reads or more complicated joins.

And the best part - they released the plugin to the public.
Gotta try it!
I'm not sure whether to respond to that with "How stupid can you be?" or "I find that very difficult to believe."
Another option would be to use robots.txt to stop bots from accessing a particular URL (for example, an 1x1 image or somesuch). Hide that somewhere in every page, and only count visits where the image was shown.

This does require that the url expansion works as a display + redirect, so an intermediate page is shown. If it doesn't work like that...

Well, you can simply exclude the bots and crawlers with robots.txt. The downside of that is that then they won't index your shortened links either, which may or may not be a problem.
You are right. I was confusing Symbian^1 with S40. I've heard the 2.3M figure. That sounds about right given our experience and place in the download rank. I'm generally feeling negative about the whole platform now. To me that figure is 2.3M moments of pain and WTF? per day. :)
> and run political advertisements that claim they "passed legislation to help america's small businesses", etc.

... because they did.
How to get motivated for and plan my pet project?
I am a student now and I have been coding from the last 3yrs. I think I am am good at it. Made some awesome apps where I worked and interned. (on java), 80% of 24hrs is spent doing something for my school project or trying to learn some random thing. I also made a website which has 1000 odd hits/day which was build using php 3yrs ago. (pretty simple).

Now, I have been playing with Rails from the last 1 month and trying to upgrade my website and in that process learn Rails too.

I am also pretty much motivated and I know if I get things rolling, I will work on it day and night.

But my problem now is, when I start with rails and try to make something, I get stuck at some very basic things which are like good UI, JS etc. I am not able to get a start. I think it has primarily 2 reasons: 1. Lack of Rails know how, 2. procrastination

So, any suggestions? What is a good way to go about it? How should I divide my project?
First decide what you want out of the deal. Do you want to get into business with a couple guys that seem legit, but on the other hand, you've just met them? If you wound up with a minority piece of the equity, they might see you only as a "service provider" who can be bossed around. What if their idea is good, but their execution sucks? It doesn't sound like they have any track record in web sites.

Whenever anyone suggests you work for "free," that's a giant red flag. Try asking for 50% of the equity. If they balk, quote some numbers. Or use the hybrid approach as others suggested.

Remember this old saying about "spec work." Don't "spec" to get paid.
Don't forget also that a large portion of Reddit users are college kids, and people with very low amount of disposable income.

As I say though, volunteering to view ads doesn't make them a better more marketable demographic - Anti-consumerism Liberal College kids mainly.
> that Obama claims will "Stimulate" it.

... that almost all economists agreed would stimulate it. Important clarification.
> Money is a tool for me — I want more money to hire people full-time, to pay for some boutique development work I want done, to do a few personal things I want to do. I want to be able to work with my dream team (and they don’t come cheap). That sorta thing.

Love that. More money can equal hiring more money, commissioning more art, hiring better trainers so you can learn faster, buying better tools, funding science and research, traveling more and easier, doing more and greater charity, and otherwise good things. I always thought it's silly when people go out of their way to say, "I'd never need more than $xx,xxx." Okay, you wouldn't need it, but with the least little bit of creativity, there's a lot of good and cool things you could do with it. Money's a terrible master, but a pretty good servant.