skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People will love rail transportation once they build high-speed rail. Now it's faster to drive.
Ask HN: Keep Going?
I'm about six months out of graduating college. No debt and currently living out of my relatives house who have allowed me to work here for free. I worked for a somewhat well-known startup right out school but decided to quit my job because it wasn't the right fit for me at all.

I applied to some other startups, got offers, but eventually decided to start my own company. I've been going at it for about 5-6 weeks. Things are going well: the product is really progressing quickly and investors are getting in touch with me (not the other way around). But damn, is life ever lonely.

I'm a single founder with 2 advisors. But I'm the one down in the trenches doing anything. The site is not completely public yet (we'll be launching full-on soon). I consider myself to be a pretty social person but not being from the SV originally I don't really have any friends or people I know. That being said, all I do is program and work on the company...which gets extremely draining with no social interaction.

Any advice? I feel like I need to give this a shot. I've got some money saved up and I've been thinking about moving into my own cheap place (just to have my own place for a morale boost). But, with no solid income its hard to really justify moving out from a free-rent place. At the same time, I've thought about quitting the entire thing. Should I just stop complaining? Advice welcome.
It seems like you are one for conspiracy theories to try to make that work.

The British airport guy complained about shoe checks and laptop scans. This threat was about cargo shipped bombs. They are two entirely different things with an minuscule Venn overlap ("having something to do with some sort of transportation device...").

The "cargo shipped terrorism" was all the focus during the anthrax worries. It isn't new.
I think it's actually 'use fewer words'... But on the other hand, you've mastered #5! ;)
Since we moved to Boston, we've driven to New York 5 times. Each time we've spent at least some amount of time in stop-and-go traffic. I haven't taken the train, but if we weren't hauling a load of stuff on the trip I'd prefer the train in a heartbeat just to avoid the aggravation.
Children of a Lesser Good - esr
They'll probably give you a good reference. They want to be the good guys on paper. However, if you are asked to give a reference for them, I understand that it's illegal to give negative criticism for an ex-employee review. I usually say something like, "It's not legal for me to comment negatively about XXXXX. Understand? Bye?".
i tried this and the thumbdrive ruined my nuclear reactor =(
For SSL, aren't the individual packets encrypted with a symmetric cypher e.g. AES, RC4, 3DES, etc?
I would also add that an off the shelf cart system will come with a fully fledge back end. This is nice because you can make use of reusable product options, discounting, automated email receipts, etc. But it's even nicer because you can get admin reporting like month to month sales figures, daily totals, most popular product rankings, and running discount totals. Sure you can track this in Excel but the point is that you don't have to. The ability to update, adjust and refund orders from an interface integrated with the store is nice, too.

Absolutely you can roll your own, but unless you have a really defined and limited product range it's just likely your needs will scale more quickly than your code, is all.
But if everyone - or even most everyone - is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

Reminds me of the mentality of some tech companies who choose to not listen to their customers in order to realize their own vision for their product/service.
If only King had applied his own advice to 'On Writing'. The first half of that book is nothing but tales of Uncle Billy Bob and what real men do in Maine. The second half I couldn't tell you.
The World's Most Underpaid Profession (creating an economy for great teachers)
His definition of talent is pretty useful in the context of learning to improve one's writing:

>People who are published steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what they have. Ergo, they are communicating. Ergo, they are talented.

In this light, however, his sage 1986 advice about agents is not really sound any longer -- there are no longer very many or very lucrative doors open in the publishing world to unrepresented authors, and there are plenty of agents willing to risk the time and effort on someone that is talented. These days, the way to be paid for writing in the traditional sense (a.k.a. demonstrate talent) essentially has to be by getting an agent (though of course there are loopholes, and segments of the industry in which this doesn't so much apply).
Slow down and start talking to people. You don't have monthly costs, investor expectations, or debt forcing you to work at a fast pace. Take it slower, start having more social interaction, and start talking to people again.
I'm going to spend some hard-earned karma by saying this, but here goes:

Welcome to Digg/Reddit
The Sexy Details of How the iPad and MacBook Will Hook Up
Amusingly appropriate to post the link right before Halloween.
Or revealed preference sans expletives:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
Ask HN: Is Apple repeating the same mistakes it made 25 years ago?
This is a possibly interesting question; I will try to explain how I just arrived at this conclusion in a discussion with some friends. Back in the rainbow-colored Apple area we were big fans of the architecture, alongside with Amiga and Atari. However, all three of them faded away because of one simple mistake: they had either vendor-lock-in (Atari, Amiga) or made it hard to develop for the platform because of exclusively proprietary tools and compilers that were impossible to come by legally (Apple). They vanished against DOS on the long run and we (had to) moved on (to DOS :S). Then came Linux and we happily switched our development platform, yet mostly still using Windows for multimedia and/or games (except for the "core" Linux guys, but then to them this whole question should be irrelevant, anyways). Then Jobs "came back" with the glorious ideas of a FreeBSD-based OSX and moving on to Intel processors that combined the two worlds, so we switched (again). In our discussion, we at least to some degree even agreed the true reason for the recent rise of Apple is not so much in iPad or iTunes alone, but the ability to develop open software on an Intel platform that works almost as if it were Linux while having the comforts of the "closed source" world: no longer we have to dual-boot Linux for work and Windows for multimedia (the games guys probably still are Windows, but whatever), and a platform that is dead-simple to use for non-IT guys. All was fine and up until recently there was nothing seriously wrong. But now Apple has dropped support for Java (the probably most followed language) and at the same time has created the "Mac App Store" (MAS). We have already seen the reception to the "iPhone App Store" (PAS) from the open source community - e.g. from the VLC guys, so I won't comment on that any more. And, for the MAS, you even need to pay $99 to get "into" it. I have no exact idea how open source-unfriendly the MAS is vs. the PAS, but I doubt even if it seems rosy now it will not be long before there is a real difference between the PAS and MAS. So, are the Apple guys apparently about to cut one of their "life support veins" after the other, and Android, etc. will take over the mobile sector and Linux/Windows will be again the norm in the home computing sector? I at least am seriously considering moving back to Linux again, and I am seeing patterns in Apple's current policies that make me think the question I put out to you guys has at least some substance. So, please, comment!
Maybe, but what a serious screenwriter (or HN reader) would consider a good script is not necessarily what will be most likely to get Joe Q. Public, IQ 100, to pay for a ticket.
You can self-certify for up to one week's sickness, and it's paid at just under £80 a week, which may be more or less than minimum wage depending on how many hours you'd normally work.

It's pretty much useless if you're actually living on anything approaching a normal salary. (It's doubtful that £320/month would pay most people's rent.)
They already do it - just look at all the Apple blogs. The only question is whether they'll pay for predictions vs. pull it out of their ass for pure profit.
You should look at the Rudix package of Clisp.

http://rudix.org/packages-abc.html#clisp
The problems begin with this concept of a "provably friendly architecture", which probably doesn't exist. Heck, humans aren't exactly provably friendly either.

But the main argument against this design goal of being somehow provable and intelligent at the same time is that we have fundamentally conflicting paradigms:

The first is the idea that in order to build an artificial intelligence, we'd need to build an actual artificial person. Complete with their own internal representation of the world (or as you might say: its own hopes and dreams). It's an approach to AI that is fundamentally uncertain in the way individual AI entities will turn out personality-wise, but it is guaranteed to work. We know this approach will work, because we are ourselves machines built on this principle.
==> good chance of success, somewhat limited danger

Then, conflicting with that comes this notion of a provably friendly/unfriendly design which sounds like it was made up by CS theorists who think intelligence is a function of raw processing power and thought patterns are in any way related to rigid formulas. They're very likely wrong, but luckily that also means this group of researchers will never produce anything dangerous except maybe a lot of whitepapers.
==> virtually no chance of happening, no danger

I do agree though that there might be a third kind of AI, a sort of wildly self-improving problem-solving algorithm that has no real consciousness and simply goes on an optimization rampage through the world. This would be a disaster of possibly grey goo-like proportions. BUT, this approach to AI is also very likely to be used in tools with only limited autonomy. And because the capability of an unconscious non-entity AI to understand the world is limited, the probability of it taking over the world also seems limited.
==> small probability of autonomous takeoff, but if it happens it will be the end of everything
> It became suddenly obvious that all and every application should continuously save its state

I'm not so sure. Continuous saving is one of those ideas that sounds great until you actually do it, but then you realise that saving isn't just about persistence, it's also somewhat about marking a meaningful checkpoint in your work.

Take a look at Google Docs, for example. Open a spreadsheet, edit a few things, hey, great, I can go back to every previous edit in the history of the document. Two months and thousands of edits later, all those early edits are completely and utterly useless, but it puts a horrible drain on the UI because you don't have (for example) separate copies that you saved from when you distributed draft 1 of the sheet and when you distributed draft 2, which are the only milestones you really care about by now.

The idea isn't even that great in the short term, because any usefulness in being able to jump back to work from a couple of days ago is swamped by the awkwardness of having to navigate through every single edit you've made since then to get there. Give me a real document control system and my Ctrl+S reflex any day.
After reading your footnote here is my intuition about the 2d pixels.

Whatever things we experience are stored in our memory. The way to "draw" pixels on our brain is through experiencing( as in observing through our senses). So each of the experience is a pixel according to me.

Trying to find lines and shapes in your vector graphics is basically finding patterns in the 2d pixels. Or what I would call learning in our case. What I think about learning that it is a top down approach. Each experience is very very specific. If you take any visual image from your memory, a huge amount of context is attached to it. The way we learn is we try to find patterns in these experiences and this commonality we save as a concept. Eg, we learn the concept of addition by seeing that when i get "2" "apples"
from someone and if I had "3" "apples" already than I have "5" "apples". I have quoted these because in your childhood you will observer that whatever is in the quotes can very. You can have oranges instead of apples in the quote, or any other number other than 2 and 3. So by observing this you learn that if I get two numbers i can 'add' them. You need to already have an understanding of 'numbers' though. This understanding of 'numbers' or 'addition' is the pattern that you have found, we call it a concept.

So, according to me, 2d pixels are your experiences. and concepts or notions are the shapes in the vector graphics.

IMO Why you cannot convey your intuitions can be attributed to the fact that we have words associated with well known concepts. You learn words by associating them with the concepts you have learned. But many concepts do not have words associated with them. Also The concept might made up of complicated combination of small concepts that you find difficult to break down in simpler language.
(I am also not a neuroscientist, but I have worked on the development of a neurology research s/w for few months.)
Here's the article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/15/1007615107

Paywalled, but even just the abstract gives a little additional detail, and the appendix with data tables/figures is open access: http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2010/10/18/1007615107.DCSu...
Baby Halloween Celebrities
Halloween is the real holiday for kids.
I'm working on a message passing style RPC using Couch replication and state machine documents, it encourages idempotent responses in the server's async processes, which is similar to functional operation.
The plausibility part.
Just ordered 20x Modafinil from them, also shipping to the UK. Quite anxious about ordering drugs from a foreign company, but from some quick research, it would seem UnitedPharmacies are quite reputable. I'll probably break the tablet in halve anyway and start with 50mg, just to be on the safe(r) side.
From the Komodo help:

Creating Macros

Macros can be created by recording keystroke and command sequences, or written from scratch in JavaScript or Python using the Macro API.
My Halloween costume will FaceTime you
Jetbrains idea
I agree about learning of language. Initially we learn words by examples. We associate foreign words and sentences with the one we know. Afterwards we need to know the grammar and all but first we build a vocabulary. And we have a pretty good intuition of the grammar before actually reading it.
http://aux.zendesk.com/wall/
"My friend, after six thousand pinks, it's time you tried painting or computer programming."

Interesting to note, he feels a bad writer should become a Hacker or Painter. Paul Graham, surely, would think otherwise? (i.e a good hacker or painter probably makes for a good writer?, so maybe they should try something else - like basketball).
The $80 license says:
"For use on a website that does not have customer specific data or charges for its use."

Showing a username is customer specific data I suppose, so I think most applications show customer specific data. Am I misunderstanding this limitation?
How does it show that? Amtrack doesn't operate like any normal business. If it did it'd have been gone long ago.
"During the nine months ended September 30, 2010, we also completed 37 other acquisitions for a total cash consideration of approximately $626 million. These acquisitions were not material individually or in aggregate."

Mind-boggling. Well over half a billion dollars in non-material acquisitions! Only Google.

Most here could easily identify the company from that single 10-Q line alone.
This blog speaks from my heart: maybe I managed to wrap my head around OOD and even tried some AOP, but in the end, as I am - in the most general sense - a data miner, I always crave for high-throughput and low resource consumption. Every language I looked into was the same: do it OO, and it is nice, but do it functional and it processes loads of data at much better speeds. I settled for Python and C because the combine a huge library with sufficient functional paradigms (and, with "goto"-like-statements, you can even do coroutines in C!). Now we have multi-cores and everybody is starting to look into how to program for them, with functional patterns being the most efficient to adapt for that hardware. I at least have the strong feeling that what this guy is saying is quite true. (Although I am disappointed that Erlang wasn't on his list, as I just picked that as my next target language to learn... :)).
We're experimenting with virtual presence using iphones and face time. If you add your facetime id, you'll get called by 1 or 3 "avatars" all roaming a large Halloween party in Seattle. They have masks with iphone inset on the face and integrated powered speakers so you can fully interact with party goers. Tell your avatar where to go and what to do. Would love feedback on the experience or how this concept could be improved.
Prop. 19 Polls Biased: Respondents Unwilling to Admit Support
The term hyperfocus doesn't appear in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold standard by which all mental disorders, including ADHD, are officially defined) at all.

The term shows 0 results on PubMed, a repository for studies, journals, and other biomedical literature. (Note: If you search for 'hyperfocus' it will give you results for 'hypertonus' because the original term returned no results)

And finally, the Wikipedia article is heavily flagged with 'Original Research' and 'Unverifiable/Biased Information' tags, and is also flagged for not having any real sources or citations.

I know the term 'hyperfocus' has worked its way into pop-psychology lately, but I've never been able to find reliable research supporting the claim. I am a bit wary of how easily it stretches the definition of ADHD to encompass just about every person I've ever worked with. After all, who wouldn't identify with the idea that they can 'hyperfocus' on video games or fun projects, but have difficulty concentrating on difficult or uninteresting work? Very slippery slope here.
It should be irrelevant that "twitter" and "tweet" were already words. I couldn't name my company "Apple Music", I'd be chased down and butchered by both Yoko Ono and Steve Jobs.
I'm in LA and in the industry and I agree with you. Take that menial job (although it is hard to work up from lowly PA, but not impossible). But here is the secret: DON'T BE A DICK. PLAY THE GAME BUT DO NOT COMPROMISE YOUR ETHICS TOO BADLY. DO NOT ACT LIKE A TYPICAL AMERICAN ENTITLED BRAT. BE RESPECTFUL.

I know someone who went from an assistant writing position to start in H'wood who is now co-producer of a network smash hit (Glee)... he did it by patiently building relationships and staying positive. I know "screenwriters" who sit at home all day and are supported by their wives... because they have poor social skills and feel they are entitled to money because they are smart. Don't fall into this trap, it's a dead end.
Then again, so would the highways, postal service, electric companies, gas companies, ...
> It's amazing how many people are quick to self-diagnose ADHD, but have no problem spending hours on their hobbies or interesting projects.

Having ADHD doesn't mean you can't focus, it means you can't control what you're able to focus on. Non ADHD people can make themselves focus on boring things when they have to, ADHD people find this anywhere from extremely difficult to impossible.
Not quite... when digg/reddit get it it'll be cut & pasted onto someone else's blog with ads all around it.
The "Phil" he's talking about in the first paragraph is Phil Sturgeon, and the original blog post is here:

http://philsturgeon.co.uk/news/2010/10/what-happens-next
I didn't downvote you, but I guess I just don't get it. Here's the guidelines, seems like this one pretty clearly stands in the on-topic realm of things.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I suggested David Burns' book (Feeling Good)for just the reasons you're stating. CBT treats the symptoms more than the root causes, but from what I can figure, he's in crisis and needs to work on the symptoms first. This is good advice you've given, and should be voted up much higher.
Steve Jobs probably has a different view on what caused Apple downfall.
If investors are contacting you, you surely have something worth pursuing. No matter what, tough it out as long as you can.

To cope with the loneliness, get yourself out there. Are you alone in the "I need like-minded folks to talk to" way? Or in a more "I want to hang out and have fun with people" way?
Either way, you can do something about it.

For the former: go hang out with people. It is easy enough to cold-email people and invite them to lunch or coffee (where in the bay are you, btw? let's go have lunch!) Go to tech meetups. Join users groups and go to their activities. Coincidentally, this is probably the best way to find co-founders.

The latter is a bit more tricky, but you can approach it the same way. Make use of meetup. Volunteer. Join a book club. Make it a point to talk to 1 stranger every day or every day you go outside the house. Go to bars by yourself and talk to people.

There is probably a large set of people who fit into both categories.

One way or another, keep at it through the hard times. I'm sure it'll be worth it.
Am I the only person who felt the urge to reinstall Railroad Tycoon?
Well, now we know what they've all been smoking over there in Redmond.
I like this idea. Any suggestions particularly?
Has Belfast film-maker found time travel evidence?
EITC isn't really the same thing as the basic income/negative income tax. The basic income has no means test whatsoever, whereas the EITC does. Check out the wiki on it. Also, most economists support the basic income as the ideal system of welfare (as confirmed in the article this thread is about), and it is intended to replace all other forms of welfare, including Social Security and Medicare.

Tax withholding was done during WW2 and before Friedman had changed his views considerably. But monetarism is his crowning achievement, it is what he is best known for, and where he was most influential. Friedman beat inflation and solved the mystery of the Great Depression.
Yeah, I see the point of III as "Oh wait, it's not always so simple as the needs of the few vs. many - we are all connected and some needs are more important than other needs. And now that we have that settled, time for more adventure." Not really as catchy though.
Another bump for the emacs/vi couple; I use emacs.
http://ghostly.com/discovery
Are you reading this Jacques? Lol ;0)
Instead of moving into your own place, have you thought about moving into a place with some other people? It would be a good way to be around people daily and also get connected into more social groups.