skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even though the Nexus is discontinued, you can still get the same phones the carriers subsidise and rebadge outside their official channels under different labels without their hinderances, this is how it works at the moment where I could go on ebay right now and buy a Samsung Galaxy S unlocked and unsubsidised and have effectively the same thing as I have with the N1.
Although you're right about the N1 being discontinued it doesn't make a difference to the ability to acquire an unburdened device through alternate channels to the carriers.
Yeah... in my opinion there is clearly more money floating around startup investment than is strictly rational but it's a long way from a systemic bubble.
I'm actually okay with "pro-life" as shorthand for "pro-sentient life". I think that's obviously implied - the debate isn't about whether cows should be able to get abortions.
a buyout is probably unlikely (given how many offers/deals Zuck has either rejected or pulled out of in the last minute over the past 6 years). That said, he may be looking to Apple as a default liquidity provider which would save Facebook from needing to go public. If existing VC firms seeking liquidity and employees looking to cash out all sold to Apple that would probably decrease their outstanding # of shareholders and keep them clear of SEC regs for at least a little while longer. Also seems like a solid long term relationship given both companies' strong focus on design, usability, and the consumer.
This would be a great side project for learning how to setup and manage a social Q/A site.

I don't think it's a good business/startup idea though. It doesn't seem much different than Reddit, in particular.

How about playing with the Reddit, Twitter, etc APIs to create pages devoted each devoted to an open-ended question? For instance, a user could ask the question, "Is marriage worth it?". You could use Natural Language Processing and other techniques to pull answers from all the web's wacky sources. Still have a submission system for your own users to submit answers-- but prepopulating with existing content on the web might help solve some chicken-egg problems for you.
I still remember how the Bush administration carefully worded some bills.

Healthy Forest Initiative - opens up more parks to the timber industry

Patriot Act - Who would dare say they are against Patriotism?
Just the email address in caps? I think that's safe enough, could be a convention they fell into. AS long AS he isn't USING caps to emphasize THE wrong WORDS it should be fine.
I may have used the wrong word with commoditized.

Firstly, Apple has done a great job of riding the engineering curve, from the first iPods, down to several versions of the iPod shuffles. During that period, performance was crucial, partly because it enabled a smaller battery, and therefore a smaller and more convenient size overall. It does seem that iPods are now as light and can carry as many songs as anyone could want - that is, there is little room left for improvement that people will pay for (and I believe the last version of the Shuffle - v.3 - didn't sell that well, even though it was tiny).

At this point, the iPod market is ripe for commoditization. Since tech advances have made performance factors no longer an issue, there's an opening for the less efficient modular approach to offer other benefits, like cheaper price, more configurable and so on. But there's a problem.

iPod sales are down. They are being cannibalized by iPhones and iPads. That is, performance is now so good, that people would rather carry something heavier than an iPod Shuffle in return for more functionality (like movies, phone calls, internet and apps). I haven't checked, but I imagine the current iPhone probably has similar weight & size to the first iPod.

In these new categories, performance again becomes a premium: people would love a faster iPhone, that has more memory, that is lighter (where "love" means "would pay for").

To summarize: the iPod digital-music-player category wave didn't last long enough to become commoditized.

But note that my key point remains: Apple needs a pipeline of products, where its integrated approach gives a competitive advantage.
Go - find some friends in a similar situation, and start a business. It's what i bitterly regret not doing when i graduated, but the job market was too good to pass up.
Your situation may be a blessing in disguise, when in 10 years time you may be a rich co-director at a flourishing IT company, whereas i'll still be stuck as a wage slave.
It is much easier for you to start a business, as you presumably are young with no kids/mortgage/wife to support.
BTW, a lot of what he writes is covered in a recent presentation he did: http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030715
> What's wrong with it?

"Here, I've got this simple three-line improvement to make."

"Whoa; back up, have you got a CA in?"

"What's that?"

"Um... OK, do you have a fax machine? This might take a few days/weeks."

Even the FSF with their high level of paranoia and many lawyers doesn't require copyright assignment for patches under 20 lines.
If you release on Thursday and there are problems, you can always fix them on Friday. If you try and release on Friday, any problem will make for an unhappy releaser.
"When bought brand-new, it has consumed more energy than it has saved" does not imply "buying this is never the best choice for the environment". Instead, it implies that one should work out where the break-even point -- beyond which the net is savings over a gasoline-powered vehicle -- occurs, whether that point will realistically be reached and passed by the majority of owners, etc.
- polish your resume, learn how to introduce yourself. Find a friend, practice if you must.

To be honest, this is huge - looking at his resume, the only thing that makes it look like he did something significant is his sweet dreams/soundscapes project. Everything else under "experience" - which stands for "work experience," which is what he's applying for - discusses learnings.

What did he do during that time? He spent 6 months working in his university's computer vision lab, which sounds awesome - and he "learned how to take several ideas and combine them into a single result that highlights their strengths while nullifying their weaknesses."

That's incredibly vague - I'm glad he learned, but it's a cliche by now that you should be using "action verbs" in your resume ("built," "designed," "debugged," etc.)

Launch and iterate, right? That works for this process as well - send out your resume, and if you don't get the responses you want, tweak your resume and send out another wave.
Getting a job is about networking. My little brother graduated this past summer from University with an gasp Anthropology degree and he has 3 job offers to decide from.

The big difference is that he schmoozed the shit out of his TAs and professors for the past couple years. His advisors were basically falling over recommending him to their peers.

I doubt this reverse job application will work. Networking with friends and peers will.
Quant hedge funds, maybe?

I know a few that suck up physics and math PhD's dissuaded by dwindling academia/research. Perhaps it's a soul-draining job, but the pay is good. Most likely you will have to program, but since you're here I don't think that will be a problem.
That's one of the things that I don't like about twitter: Anything that otherwise might turn into a reasonable debate gets cut down to size, until it's basically a much less funny version of Monkey Island quip duels.

(I remember when "proper journalists" used to say that about blog posts. Now I wonder whether there'll be a time when we look back upon twitter as witty discourse…)
Seed Funding locally (New York, New York)
To be clear, you have no objections with the content of the agreement, just that it's friction.
That logic is unsustainable. New vehicles will (have to) be purchased.

Going out and buying a Prius for the sake of being environmentally friendly would be dumb. But choosing a Prius instead of a Charger for your new car purchase makes plenty of sense IMO.
That's assuming every single one of your investments gets 10x. Any kind of very naive exponential assumptions are going to look silly quite quickly. Besides other people would be willing to take on those investments even if they are too small for these incredibly lucky super angels.
>It certainly wouldn't be accurate to call most people on that side of the debate "pro-abortion." A lot of them don't like abortion for various reasons, but believe it's the woman's choice.

Well, it's a legal debate. The argument is about the legal issue shorthanded as "abortion", no? In which case I can understand why someone would call "pro-choice" the pro-abortion side.
Diagnosed With Prostate Cancer But There Is Prostate Cancer Treatment Options
The argument "there are other problems in the world so there is no point in fixing problem X" is weak to say the least.

If there are other problems you find after cutting the cost of government worker salaries by 70%, fix them next.
So, who is going to be the first to make a device like that? I have no doubt we'll be seeing them within 5 years.
I think it's a really interesting way to challenge established social structures. Schooling into the 20s is a pretty recent invention, and one which is more and more lucrative for the providers of eduction. Opening up new alternatives could play a part in challenging the future growth of tuition, because college then wouldn't be the only visible way to make a good living.
Cyber War or Cyber Terrorism “A Publicity Stunt by Hackers”
I've always wondered why there aren't more creative attempts at monetizing free Wi-Fi. This seems like a great start.

I've always thought that Wi-Fi providers should find a way to add an affiliate tag to links to major e-commerce sites like Amazon.com. It would be the online version of parking validation.
You can always try starting with Lispbox - http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/

Another option is to download Franz Allegro CL Express - http://www.franz.com/downloads/clp/survey and Franz' own emacs package - http://www.franz.com/emacs/ They also have nice tutorials up there.

Or Lispworks personal edition - http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html

I just set up slime into my emacs (which I use all the time anyways) and hooked up Clozure CL to it - http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html

On the other hand you could try Scheme, particularly Racket (ex PLT Scheme) - http://racket-lang.org/ (IDE is really nice, but sometimes confusing for newbies.. for example "Which Scheme? And why?")

Maybe your best bet would be to start either with Lispbox and some Lisp book (like the one linked on Lispbox page, it's free) - or Racket Scheme and its IDE (DrScheme) and try following SICP from here http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... and especially here: http://academicearth.org/courses/the-structure-and-interpret...
I'd recommend Racket+SICP at first, both because of less hassle with tools instead of language at first and for my personal bias toward Scheme. Just found some pointers for SICP and DrScheme here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/939582/which-language-in-...
I'm seeing it. This is different from a "dislike" button though.

When you have blog posts and other content with hundreds or thousands of comments, chronology is no longer an effective way of sorting. This idea seems to make sense. I think that I heard that YouTube finally did something similar with video comments.
We think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, “What’s best for the customer – fragmented versus integrated?”

Sounds awfully familiar. Didn't they learn anything from the desktop wars in the 90's?
He might be. I dug around and can't see any such buttons in my account.
I think the real point is how many third party libs and packages support Python 3 yet.
http://dev.pocoo.org/~gbrandl/py3.html
Anyone have recommendations on which ones to watch first?
I end up talking to recruiters from D.E. Shaw just about every six months. One time I showed up at a conference Sun put on in the city and asked a question about using the hardware for main memory databases and that got the attention of one of them.

Hedge funds are pretty cool and pretty lucrative, but the only thing I really want to do now is information extraction, semantic databases, stuff like that. Finish the job that Doug Lenat started. And if you think that's crazy, you're one less competitor that I have.
Well deserved success. It's an excellent game and I love seeing solo developers at the top of the charts!
Most of my emails are short. When I must write a long one, it's usually because it includes technical content. In that case, I do this:

Bob,

I discovered why the frobnostication terminal was slow and submitted a fix. It will be QA'd tomorrow. Please find the technical details below.

Regards,
tophat02

<A bunch of newlines so Bob can see it's a short email with some appendix-type stuff below>

Now here's where I get into the technical details of the blah blah blah. This can span several paragraphs if I want. I don't worry about because I know Bob got the point up there -^
Or get a Nexus One, which you don't need to root. Still the best phone in my opinion.
i would imagine that applies more to the entertainment content. A game released on Thursday, will get played and told to the friends about Friday thru Sunday
>> I've realized that entitlement hurts you much more than it helps.

I think this is the biggest problem with entitlement. Not that it's annoying and presumptuous, not that it's A Sympton Of Everything That's Wrong In Our Society (TM), but simply that it hurts the entitled.

A lot of what we interpret as entitlement is just a focal inaccuracy. In school, we're judged, more or less, on the quality of our own work. A teacher or other official who makes a decision based on his personal preference is viewed to be unfair. With the job market, however, as with dating, it's never about the applicant, only about the decision-maker.

We come out of school thinking we'll be judged on our merits, but we won't. Interestingly, that realization not only helps people ignore rejection, but also prompts them to take initiative to stand apart from the crowd, thereby making rejection less frequent.
AngelList (http://angel.co/) is innovating a lot in this arena.
Most Python programmers only use a handful of significant third party libs. I use fewer than a dozen. What is more significant is WSGI, which still has not been finalized for Python 3. There are two competing, unimplemented PEPS: 444 and 3333.

I have also heard some comments about the Python 3 standard library leaving some things to be desired. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can elaborate.
What is your rationale for including life coaches, but excluding sport coaches?
Ask HN: Great things to instapaper?
After weeks of bugging my friends I finally got instapaper for the iPad and wow, I'm really enjoying the experience of clicking read later and having a decent supply of articles to read on the train (I spend a lot of time on public transport).

My question for HN is... what next - I went through the Ask HN archive and instapapered most of the threads I wanted to read and a few external resources but I'm running out... (and I have a trip to london tomorrow and a trip to san francisco on monday)

What posts / sections would YOU 'read later'
One of them did -- Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb was great friends with Mandelbrot.
ITU's 2010 "plenipotentiary": 19th Century Pomp Meets 21st Century Technology
Yes, but unlike the would-be applicant, they have the upper hand. So they don't care (though they should).
Another performance trick during competitions is association, the act of concentrating intensely on the very act of running or cycling, or whatever your sport is

Oh cool! I've always told friends that if you can listen to music or talk, you're not running fast enough. It's for this reason that I can't ever go out for just a "jog" unless I really need to recover... when you get in that zone you're like an antsy racehorse wanting to shoot out of the gate. The desire is just to go as fast as possible.

I love that part of the run though, where it's your mind against your body. You keep repeating to yourself that you can make it... each step closer to the goal. Your body wants to quit, but each step boosts your confidence. It gives you that runner's high.

For me, running is always about that focused relaxation. As the pain increases, you must focus yourself to continue to exert as much energy as possible in a relaxed and fluid manner.
the idea of interfacing with the twitter apis is an interesting one...

can you show me an example link of an open ended statement on reddit?

here are some examples on twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/search/%233wordsaftersex

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23wordsthatleadtotrouble
My suggestion why people didn't pay attention? He had no real theory. I've read a couple of his books, here is the general formula: "Look, gaussian's don't fit the market well. Aha, I've made a graph that looks visually correct!"

Now, it's absolutely true that gaussian's don't fit the market well - they only work sometimes. The thing is, everyone knows this, and tacks on additional features to explain the other phenomena. For instance, one might assume movements are normally distributed, except for short term spikes followed by high volatility. A good risk manager will throw non-gaussian volatility at a model during backtesting.

Mandelbrot's fractal story just didn't add much. The black scholes story has some convincing theoretical background (it assumes an "evil" market out to get you [1]). It misses things, but many of the things it misses can be added in, in a more or less convincing way - e.g., I understand the black scholes part of my model handles small movements, and the stochastic jumps handle the big ones.

All Mandelbrot's model gives me is a graph that kind of looks right - it doesn't give me any understanding.

[1] This is not the textbook description, but Bob Kohn convinced me this is the best way to think of it.
But but but... Then companies would have to trust their employees! Black would become white! Up would be Down!

I think this hits the nail on the head of why good developers are developers: They want to build shit. Help them. Some of that shit will help you. Tangentially, you'll get a better developer. Some of them will even work on pet projects to help you directly, so you'll get free work.

The flipside is that contracts saying that you own their IP are disgusting, they foster distrust and show that as a company, you don't really care about them as anything except a resource, and not a human one.

(See also making developers front up cash for salary sacrifices and not offering time-in-lieu)
More interesting albeit difficult to quantify would be PG's writing style.

If you've read a PG essay and found yourself agreeing because you're gradually taken towards a conclusion yourself instead of having it preached to you, you'll know what I'm referring to.

Turns out there is a style for that.

I am no writing expert, but I feel PG's style is (intentional or otherwise) most akin to Classic Style as outlined in the book "Clear and Simple as the Truth" (overview from Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/deceptive-writing-styl.... ).

Most telling excerpt: "Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive is disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity."

CaSatT homepage: http://www.classicprose.com/
2.7 with -3 and from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals
No, you have, you don't ask me to not share my opinion but you tell me as if I am your employee or your kid, I am neither.
I know you try to mitigate damage to the bad name IE is posing to itself by not playing the standards out there, you know, those defined by W3C and WhatWG.
I do remember that IE invented the CSS standard, shame it never stuck by it and went the netscape way of making proprietary rules.
I started doing HTML in the beginning of the 90's and have seen everything in that category, the good things, the bad things and IE.
I think the standard model also tells you that you cannot do much, no ? The efficient market hypothesis from Fama somewhat boils down to the fact that you cannot beat the market unless you have information that other don't have.

Another reason for the "conventional" methods success seems to be related to their empirical testability, at a certain period of time. The best article on Mandelbrot and the link with finance I have seen so far is on econoclaste (http://econoclaste.org.free.fr/dotclear/index.php/?2010/10/1...), but in French unfortunately.
The author is attempting to find the opportunity costs of his purchases retroactively. It's very important to weight the opportunity cost of something before making the purchase.

The method that he uses to elicit the values is extremely interesting. He locks the items in storage to realize their true value to him.

In the process he discovers a major economic principle. I can't remember that exact term used to describe the situation, but I think it deals with Willingness To Accept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willingness_to_accept). In summary, the principle states that one tends to increase the value placed on a good if he owns it. For example, you bargain with a salesman for a hat. He brings the price down to $10. A well-dressed man sees you walking out of the store with your newly purchased hat. He likes it, so he makes you an offer for $10. You will likely not accept because the hat is now worth more to you than just $10.

Overall, the article itself is presented in a motivating fashion shedding some light on these economic issues.
If you click 'back' again before the Twitter home page loads, it behaves correctly. (That is, basically double-click 'back' from pg's tweet.)

I guess it's because Twitter is inserting things into your page history to make its AJAXy interface work with forward/back buttons. These things are a mixed bag of useful and fragile.
Here are more examples on twitter... yet there is no best of.

i laugh every time... http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ilaugheverytime

annoying question... http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23annoyingquestion

when i was little... http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23wheniwaslittle
There should be options for that too, then. Windows allows you to turn your computer off after the update is complete. I'm not sure how long the updates last, but I'd say, in general, not the entire night.
For Common Lisp, the web server of choice would probably be Hunchentoot[1]. If you're using it directly, that would be similar to some of the more lightweight frameworks from other languages (Sinatra, Flask etc.). If you're looking for a bigger framework, Weblocks[2] could be of interest. Haven't worked with it myself, though. It does use Parenscript[3], which is a pretty neat way of writing JavaScript without dropping down to C syntax.

Common Lisp has pretty good support regarding books, libraries and developer mindshare in the Lisp community (which generally is quite fractured, albeit not on a Forth level). They can be pretty harsh at times, though.

Personally, I'd recommend going with some simple examples. Getting to grips with the language, the environment (probably Emacs+Slime) and a somewhat novel web framework at once can be pretty daunting. So taking baby steps on the result level, i.e. making stuff that could've been done with CGIs, won't heap yet another helping of novelties on your plate.

[1]: http://weitz.de/hunchentoot/

[2]: http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/

[3]: http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/
Interesting discussions on it at: http://tinyurl.com/2cepr72 and http://tinyurl.com/25pgqql

More in-depth post at: http://allanmcrae.com/2010/10/big-python-transition-in-arch-...

Seems there's not a lot of uproar or cheering on it (though it depends on who's doing the posting.)