skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always sort of admired people in the entertainment industry for their ambition and determination. Someone who is taking time off studying CS at Stanford and trying to make a company work is not taking a risk of remotely the same magnitude as someone dropping out of highschool, getting a GED, and working in the music industry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth).

If you're a programmer, you have so much to bank on (the CS knowledge/degree) and even if you fail people will be pretty understanding. Try getting a good job in any industry with music skills and a GED.

At the end of the day, a technical stopout founder is taking a smaller risk (really, losing the college experience) for a bigger potential reward (billions) and attractive intermediate rewards (talent acquisition). And frankly, the odds of making it big as a programmer (industry celebrity-big) are not very different from the odds of making it big as a musician (standard celebrity-big).
The amount of time and effort put into something is inversely proportional to how likely it is to fail.

This isn't just because of the actual time and effort, but because as others observe this time and effort, they take the thing more seriously. For a startup, this is important because it not only means they're more likely to take it seriously, but that others are more likely to contribute their own time and effort.
I would suggest being careful with this kind of response. It's the kind of thing you can tell a close friend face-to-face and it might be just the kick-in-the-pants they need to get them going again.

But saying it to some completely anonymous person on the Internet may be more likely to backfire than to help in the manner you intend.

There are also potential cultural differences to keep in mind as well. Brits and Americans may be more likely to respond positively to 'tough love' than Indians or others.
It will probably be made.

I am not sure how true this article is; I know people in college that majored in English or Journalism and got a TV writing job straight out of school. You probably aren't working on your own show at that point, but you aren't spending 18 hour days getting coffee for people either.
I think that in general there are more interesting problems to work on in the programming language design than additional syntactic sugar.
Can't disagree enough. Rather than making arguments to defend the BBC, I'll leave that to Stephen Fry who does it significantly better than I would do.

Check out this speech he made on the subject: http://www.corincole.com/misc/Briefings_Stephen_fry.avi

(Also: s/$300/$233/)
Notable that both YouTube founders stayed with Google -- they left YouTube to, according to the article, work on other Google projects. That's pretty impressive on Google's part; it implies that they've built enough of an internal startup culture that these top-notch founders find it more attractive than going outside the company.
Age 30, sure. Age 21, when you are still figuring out who the real you is... not sure that helps or hurts.

At his age he'd be better off reading some good non-tech books... Catcher in the Rye, Siddhartha, Fountainhead, a Taoism book... maybe a Philip K. Dick book or Vonnegut for some fun.

Maybe it's just me but I haven't run across too many mental health professionals that really seemed to know what they were doing. It's like chiropractors - there are a lot of them that are doing more harm than good it seems.
I agree, when I was 19 and left my web dev degree with no real plan other than knowing that Uni wasn't for me I wallowed for a long time and ended up with some really crazy thought cycles from keeping myself isolated.

The best thing my family could have done which is what my Mother did which was to tell me it was time I was paying rent and I had to get a job. Of course, once I had a job she never asked for rent as that was never her intention. And once I had a job, I realised that the thing I was doing was not my future which drove me to get on with stuff I liked. 18 months later I was in charge of the web dev graduates at the agency I worked at.
Correct, correct, correct.

Television (and music and film, for that matter) are hardly a meritocracy. What ends up on screens and CDs isn't determined by quality, at least not primarily. There are fantastic scripts out there, masterpieces that will never get made. Crap gets turned into two-hundred million dollar blockbusters.

[EDIT: This gets voted down why exactly?]
That's precisely what I say elsewhere in this discussion. Lack of HTML5 means we wont support WP7. Period.

I'd love to support WP7. More competition. Keep Apple and Google on their toes. No problem with that.

But no HTML5? Game over. Decision made. It's madness. Madness I tell you.
This assumes you only get options and not restricted stock units. With the accounting changes in the way corporations have to value options many more now give out RSUs as well.
I guess we'll have to start screening people before they get in the line, then.
In fact, looks to me from the above quote that the whole article is just an excuse to use what is a neat example of Trek continuing to have an effect on the mythos of our age as a stick to beat on Texans, probably because most of them don't see eye-to-eye with the author.

I think his point was that here is a cool geeky thing, preceded by a paragraph about how he feels about Texas government, which I agree isn't really relevant.
Can you elaborate on the F15 thing? According to google, it's just the mute button!
I'm pretty sure I don't agree. Many of the fundamental assumptions in economics aren't just first-order approximations; they're about tractability. You can leave out friction and get reliable ballpark figures, but when you assume monotonicity, you're liable to end up wildly off base sooner or later.

That's what I consider the main problem of economics. To use the gp's expression, they have physics envy when they need to be demanding statistics and psychology. The problem area is difficult and overpopulated, and what's worse, worth money. That means that the most apt people do business for themselves instead of suggesting on the business of others.

Much of economics is useful, but little is reliable. As much as it pains me to say this, I believe we could do with more (quiet) focus on economic policies - just not from the math people, but from the social studies people.
Yeah yeah yeah... every l33t Mac hax0r knows how to use the option key. Great! But guess what? People program on Linux and Windows too, and the fact is that it's a hell of a lot easier to type "fn" than it is to type ∑Ò™£‹˙√«»ç◊... where the hell is the key for lambda?
you don't have to get rich for it to be worthwhile.

i joined a company a year before its IPO, got a modest number of shares, and it amounted to a nice little bonus every month. didn't make me rich but allowed me to build up a lot of savings while paying down my mortgage. it's totally worth trying to get into that situation if the option is available.
Does being shamed by Texas courts really have a political overtone? I interpreted that as a reference to the Eastern District of Texas Federal Court, the preferred venue of patent trolls due to the notoriously complainant-friendly judges there.

Shame over that mess should know no political boundaries.
Maybe you just have a lot of deadbeat friends? Some of the most intelligent and successful people I know are regular pot smokers, and many intelligent and successful people will tell you the same (just read the darn thread). You should try doing some research and expanding your horizons before making blanket generalizations about topics you don't understand.
I thought the reason why people left the SXSW interview was because the interviewer was a giant, self-absorbed douche who gave Ev little time to speak and/or didn't do a good job of facilitating.
The concept of "no save/infinite undo" is definitely in "The Essentials of User Interface Design".
It's interesting to see how people react to walls of text with significantly less critical thinking than they do to shorter posts. I will admit that I was briefly under his spell as well, mostly because reading it all is quite fatiguing. It's also interesting to see that the author seems to write walls of text exclusively.
That's actually really nice. There's no reason an editor couldn't just do it behind the scenes, like how Emacs' org-mode handles dates and links in a plain text file.
Ask HN: Password reset?
I know this gets asked a lot, yet my google-fu appears to have failed, because I see no real answer excecpt to email "them", with no reference as to what that address actually is .. So I lost my password, either that or I forget which of 20 openid accounts I used to create my account with, and clickpass appears to be abandonware at this point. Anyways, how do I go about getting this dealt with? What's the magic email address?
I've heard report that attack was actually revealed by whistleblower from Saudi Arabia. Good job unknown US and UK secret agencies for taking credit for saving the World, again!
http://news.ycombinator.com/changepw?
Totally agree, this has made me cry working on any app that has been sustained for years. This is why I think for any "graphical" language approach to be adopted by seasoned programmers should be fully keyboard accessible (think vim, but you can manipulate things across files and objects.
Did you see their comparison of WebP vs. JPEG at constant quality? http://code.google.com/speed/webp/docs/c_study.html

(Not only is this thread a dupe, but every single comment as well. Nice.)
"I'm just trying to find out if it coffee makes me more anxious, but right now I'm just sleepier."

I quit caffeine a year ago and I went through the same symptoms. I slept for 10 hours a night for 3 or 4 days and then my sleep cycle went back to normal.

After quitting, I realized that it amplified my anxiety levels in many social situations. It also put me in sort of a strange state-of-mind where my emotions seemed dull (I'm comparing now to then). In a way, it made me more of a compliant person.

I also can remember my dreams almost 3 or 4 times a week when I'm using not caffeine. I still drink it once in a long while, but it doesn't really start up the cycle anymore (I don't keep drinking coffee or pop on a regular basis).
And marketing is making coffee for Michael Arrington?
There are lots of different moments & quantiles of the income distribution that are interesting and useful to look at, but its not like the mean is terribly misleading here. In the plot you provide, median income in real dollars has increased from 25K in 1950 to 40K in 1990---a 70% increase in real income.
Which is kind of weird, considering that the Ohm symbol is by definition the greek Omega - why did we use two separate unicode slots for them?
Cornell and Dartmouth Shame Students for not donating money to universities
That's where obviousness analysis comes in. It's tough to do in hindsight. That's why courts look to "objective evidence." For example, praise from other researchers, or extensive citation of the published paper, could be indirect evidence of nonobviousness.

(One of my partners at my former law firm told a story about representing a major university in seeking a patent for a biotech invention. It took a number of years for the PTO to do the initial examination of the patent application. The patent examiner perfunctorily rejected the application, asserting that the claimed invention would have been obvious in view of the prior art. My partner responded that in the years that the inventors had been waiting on the PTO to examine the patent application, they had been awarded the Nobel Prize for that very invention. Result: Obviousness rejection withdrawn. Of course, I could well be misremembering, but it nicely illustrates the principle.)
>there's little a candidate can do which is more irritating than being the 20th person in a row to talk about a few hours of volunteering at the local hospital as if it qualifies them for sainthood.

What field are you interviewing in? I've never met anyone that told me they volunteered at a hospital (but I know plenty of volunteers as it happens).

If you don't want them to tell you about themselves - eg what volunteer work they do - then perhaps ask a different question?
Roof Studio
Try stablon.
All of the people I know, myself included, whoever smoked pot went on to become successful, well-adjusted people in society. Do I take that as evidence that people should smoke pot in order to become well adjusted, successful citizens? Of course not. Correlation != causation. There are many factors why someone would drop out and end up just wanting to get high/play video games/surf the net/etc. Underlying depression can often be masked by substance abuse for example. The substance can cause an effect but it can't control you. As for getting the facts out there and basing policy decisions on them I want all the facts to be known, positive and negative.
thanks. is this linked to .. anywhere on the net except from this comment?
So does most of your data live in S3 in JSON format?
Income is more concentrated today compared to the post-war period, but I don't think that makes the mean meaningless---it depends upon how much weight you put on a dollar held by different parts of the distribution. That being said, I think you'd be hard pressed to show that any part of the income distribution is worse-off in real terms than they were in 1950.

Incidentally, we only know about these changes in the income distribution because empirically oriented economists have been collecting and analyzing this data for many years.
"Gun Thumball" : UK toy promotes school discussion of guns
This is something that is used and talked about quite often with Haskell, because the languages roots in Category theory, predicate logic, etc. You can use the more accurate mathy Unicode symbols in place of the ASCII and ghc can interpret them correctly

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/UnicodeIn...
On #2, will the law change this? I was aware that the grants are controlled by federal law (where marijuana would still be illegal)
HackerbySea, I agree the Secondary Market is inefficient, and is artificially inflating prices. Individuals are bidding up prices without any financial information or real competitive market.

However, I think the public markets will be more efficient, and have more complete financial information. My guess is that the public markets will not value Facebook, or other high flying private companies, at a much higher valuation. In fact, I think the public markets could value these companies at substantially less.

In the end that is what makes a market, buyers and sellers, all with different opinions. It is impossible to say who is right at this time.

My point is that private valuations have been driven up far higher than ever before for three basic reasons;
1.) Lack of IPO market has driven the creation of new markets
2.) 409A has required companies to value their stock at much higher valuations than ever before.
3.) Second Market allows individuals to buy private stock, and bid up prices, without complete financial information.

Time will tell how efficient or accurate these alternative markets really are. My guess is the gap between private valuation and IPO public valuation has narrowed considerably, and we will not see the IPO price bounce we saw in the past. Just a guess. Time will tell.

Don Dodge
Why not just remap one Shift key to a "Greek" key, which inserts the corresponding lowercase greek letter? (And then Greek+Shift+letter inserts the uppercase, obviously). That would give you quite a lot of the useful functionality without too much trouble...
When you say the question trips you up do you mean because you don't know what they're asking? Or because you know what they want to know but don't know what to say in response? Or because you know what information you want to proffer in return but not how to couch it?
You need to take an exclusion approach. Most passengers on US air flights have clearly established records. If you can take the majority of people out of the current overkill security theatre, that means they can go through standard-level security queues quickly (note no one is proposing dropping security here).
I dread standing in the densely packed security lines at DIA. A single suicide bomber could kill several hundred people on a busy day there without ever passing a security checkpoint (as the author points out this is now the bigger risk). If you can reduce the number of people who need to remove shoes, liquids and have back-scatter and pat-downs to a small minority, then everyone will be safer.
I'm a libertarian (in the Jefferson sense). But I agree to reasonable security checks voluntarily by choosing to fly. But invasion of privacy has gone too far when someone makes me walk through a Dick Measuring Machine or is "meeting resistance" for the sake of public relations theatre.
It can also do ASCII art spreadsheets. Org mode is ridiculous, and I love it.
True, but the article implies that "economists all agree on these things, economists are experts - therefore these things are correct"

But the same responses would come from US politicians of both types - would Swedish or French economists have the same views?
And beyond that there's not even a hint that it's actually adjacent 7 character passwords.
I'm interested. You can email me at dustin.hoffman@breefield.com
You should add your contact info to the main post, or to your HN account.
He's lost his password.

see:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#pwlost
“Rally to Restore Sanity strictly prohibits filming” at National Mall
http://recurseapp.com/single-login
Maybe, maybe not. The point is you make your own luck. Work hard == more chances to get lucky.
Part of the fun of using Lisp is that there are emacs keystrokes for tree navigation and manipulation. It's very handy.
Apparently not: http://www.google.com/search?q=links:news.ycombinator.com+%2...
What field are you interviewing in?

We're discussions college admissions here, not job interviews. :-)
Living in the UK (I'm pretty sure we have one of the highest levels of CCTV monitoring in the world) and also having worked as a CCTV operator for a summer job (surprisingly fun), my opinion is that they are yet another tool their to keep honest people honest and do little for those intent on committing crimes.

In my summer job I was watching over a section of a shopping mall which was 1 mile from end to end, my area was about 1/4 of that and I was the only pair of eyes watching around 40 cameras. Recorded images are practically useless unless you are deliberately watching someone, the camera is almost always pointing in the wrong direction otherwise.
Ask HN: Best cross-platform code editor?
I am kicking around the idea of moving off my Visual Studio IDE and into something more vendor-neutral and cross-platform. Specifically, I'd like to eventually starting coding F# in mono, and I figure changing IDE/Text Editors might be a good start for that. I can learn the new editor while I'm in windows, then it'll be easier to pick up once I make the move to linux.

I need something that is able to handle multiple files, can highlight language syntax (to keep from typos). F# language syntax highlighting would be awesome, but that's probably too much to ask.

It'd be really cool if the editor would integrate with git and ftp and have a macro system -- great to use for blogging.

Any ideas? So far I can't find anything that meets all the criteria: the short list is Vim, Emacs, and JEdit.

I'm really not crazy about any of those -- looks like going back to 1980 for me -- but I'm interested in what the community thinks.

Any other editors I might be missing?
Surely they track each driver's "nobody home" stats and fire the drivers with noticeably higher rates.
Steele is taking a very pragmatic approach: his target audience with Fortress is mainly scientists and people with scientific programming backgrounds, and they would love to have their programs look more like what they write on a blackboard. So Fortress comes along with a fancy Unicode syntax that trivially maps to an ASCII syntax underneath.
In all fairness, I'd credit this specific case much more to the form factor and input system of the device over the software UI.
Wrong analogy. If you build a web app, you need paying customers. If you write a script, you need to get a producer to read it, like it and finance it. Different aims require different kinds of marketing - for writers it's networking on the producer-level.
I can help you with UX direction and Interface work. I don't need any dev work currently but if I can bank them for future.. then I'm interested.

fhashemi@gmail.com Send me a quick note, I'll forward you my portfolio to help you make a decision.
I resisted for many years, but I recently got a script for Adderall, and it's made me a better thinker and doer. I haven't experienced the lack of creativity that some report - on the contrary actually. I've also found that I sleep better - which is actually common my doctor says.

I've been taking 15mg morning and after-lunch, but not on weekends so as to reduce my dependency and tolerance to it. This has worked well so far.

I'm not sure if perhaps people who have the gene coding for reduced dopamine re-uptake (i.e. a big predictor of ADD diagnoses - like myself) are the ones who get the strongest benefits and the reports of bad reactions could possibly be from those without this genotype?
1st rule
That's baloney. The police power flows from the individual's right to defend his own rights and to cooperate with others to do so.

When the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the few can volunteer to help out or the many can offer something to compensate the few for helping out.

But the many don't have the right to sacrifice the few whenever they decide it will hurt the few less than it will hurt the many. If anything, the law is all about opposing mob rule.

Its interesting to note that in the following movie Kirk explains that he went back to find Spock because the needs of the few sometimes outweigh the needs of the many.

All this really means is that an individual or a group can decide to help others when the value of the saved is clearly worth more to themselves than even a personal loss or even risk to one's own life.
I wonder why is that? I've got a 3GS and most times it takes seconds to power down and other times it can take up yo 20 seconds or so.
> Still, it's not our place to be "prescribing" drugs to someone who really should be getting some professional opinions.

Of course it's not our place to prescribe drugs. I am not prescribing anything.

If you say you're tired and someone tells you, "Grab a cup of coffee" or "Take a nap", are they writing you a prescription? No!

This advice is given in the same spirit, and while you may think it's bad advice, that is your opinion, based, hopefully, on your personal experience. This is my opinion, it happens to differ with yours, and it is based on my personal experience, and it also happens to be grounded in sound science. [1]

No prescription necessary, just an honest suggestion that the poster is free to research for him or herself.

Yes, there are risks to be aware of, and hence my mentioning set and setting, and the importance of having a sitter. Take the advice or leave it, I'm just mentioning it, and yes, conditionally endorsing it.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Psilocybin#2006_Johns_Hopkins_experiment