skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is also true. But it's a question of levels of abstraction. The skyscraper is built out of (in part) a plumbing system, the plumbing system is built (in part) out of pipes, and assembling pipes is like assembling Tinker Toys. Which is why we give a five-year-old aspiring plumber a set of Tinker Toys to learn with. [1]

But this is only a few years after the web was invented, and the average website is still sufficiently ad hoc that the Tinker Toy level is a lot more visible.

---

[1] Break any human-designed system down far enough and you'll often arrive at something as simple as a Tinker Toy. Although, of course, Tinker Toys are not that simple, so this fact may not help as much as you'd think. And this is not true of all systems: In metallurgy, the "simple" parts are atoms, quantum mechanics is not like Tinker Toys, and even if it was nobody has experience with a Tinker Toy set containing 10^28 pieces.
The original assertion, from the article, is that classes have no physical existence. The upstream comment claimed that a blueprint was an example of a physical object which was a class; I claim that the blueprint is not the class.
If anything, our focus on email and creation tools spurs far more original content than other traditional blogging methods.

We do honor DMCA takedown requests -- they're fairly easy to do and we are very mindful of taking down infringing content.
Isn't that what the Magic Eight-Ball says?

Outlook not so good
I think you have described me well.

I'm not bragging. You should be able to tell from what I've written that I'm not proud of what I've done in life so far.

Is it wrong for me to prioritize getting some real stuff done over having a car, house, or girlfriend? It's not like a gas-guzzling vehicle will make me any happier, and I find gardening distinctly unenjoyable. No comment yet on this relationship stuff.
Go back to School.

Get a Master's degree in Computer Science if you are doubting your programming skills. Take or Audit a bunch of weird classes (in and out of the CS branch) and see if anything there interests you. Drink up (now that you can afford quality beer) and get laid.
While there are limits, they're sometimes further than you think. I am a 5'10" white guy, and I really wanted to dunk basketballs, so I "just did it more". I dunked on shorter hoops, read books, experimented with every method of practicing and training, soaked up sports medicine journal articles, and pored over everything related on the internet. Eventually, I could dunk quite easily, and even developed my own system for helping others do the same.
That's not what I meant.

Email should be kept forever. I meant if you don't log in for a year they can delete the account.
I don't know specifically for the Nexus S, but as a manufacturer you can buy flash-chips that have a mmc interface, so that they look like an SD-card to the microprocessor but can be soldered like a "usual" chip.

E.g. look for SanDisk iNAND.
"abuse" was not the word I was looking for: I meant you're using Perl's syntactic freedom, and this trick does not work with PHP.
I agree that "if they ever release it" is a powerful point against screen. Is tmux actually better in that respect?

I feel like your critique of screen's customization is a little inaccurate; you said that "screen only lets you change a few of the bindings," but actually, copy/paste are the only ones it does not let you change.

I agree that they're rather unintuitive. As a vim user, I have less cognitive dissonance, but I do dislike the way that the bindings are almost vim. I think you did yourself a disservice, though, by never figuring out copy/paste at all--it's quite usable once you get the hang of it.

I think that hand-wringing over using suid for shared sessions is premature; while I agree that any experienced sysadmin should flinch at the overall concept, it's important to remember that the screen binary itself is still writable only by root, and that while you run it with setuid, the resulting shell child process is not run as root. So, to the extent that there are no "screen injection exploits," running it with setuid is a non-issue.
I was in the same situation (besides being a little younger thanks to the outrageous salaries of the late-90s) and what I did was to join a non-profit that helps people. The pay sucks and it won't get you completely away from politics but at least you'll be helping people while not spending your money (and politics aren't so bad when you know you're being paid below your worth because you have a lot more leverage)

Non-Profits notoriously have lousy technology and unfortunately the low pay can draw even worse IT people. So someone who has the skills to make it in the private sector can make a big difference.

At this point in my life I can point to literally thousands of children who are at least a tiny bit better off because I was here and that's worth a lot to me. If you think it would be for you too than it's an option I'd check out.
My complaint with IRC (and I freely admit that it could be that I am not using the "right" client) is that there is just this sea of text on the screen. There is very little formatting to speak of, and it reminds me of everyone talking at once on a conference call.

slighty off-topic:
I am proud to say that I was introduced to Wealthfront via HN, and I was so impressed by their engineering blog that I went to their website. And it sounded cool, so I joined.

And ever since then, I continue to see some awesome things from them, and so far their investment-matchmaking service has paid off, too.

Win-win if I've ever heard one.
That's an insightful analogy. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but you are absolutely right. I'll keep that in mind.
I own the domain Nerdeals.com (and have the Twitter name) because I had a very similar idea as this. Whoever does this should get in touch with me :)
The last days? By whose definition? Not to discount Thomas Young at all, but I have no doubt that in the age of wikipedia you could find tens of thousands of people who could deliver that same address he did - myself included. I would argue heavily against the title of this article. These aren't the last days of the polymath, rather these are the days where we're so saturated with them that few stand out.
Click on the link twice.

Google docs has some weird bug at the moment afaik which causes this.

(Worked for me the second click, probably some cookie set the first time).
I don't think he's judging your character or personality -- I think he's extrapolating from "I've never had a girlfriend" to "I haven't experienced much of life beyond work yet". If you've got enough money for ten years (or longer, as you say), why not take just a bit of it and travel for a while, or volunteer for a charity or something? You might just find something that does restore your sense of purpose.
Your link only shows a tiny excerpt for me.
> common in modern cognitive psychology

Only among a small besieged minority-- the majority have moved on to neurocognitive research.

>and is presumed by theorists of evolutionary psychology

That's just straight-up wrong. Perhaps there's some theorist who buys into it, but it's certainly not common.
If you include a window list in your caption, I believe there is a specific flag that shows up (I want to say it's an asterisk), which indicates "other user viewing this window."
When encountering problems where I have to derive the answer without a crutch, I solve most by thinking how to solve them either through native language or spatial movement of object, then translating into code.

How would you reverse the order of charms on a bracelet? Any time a step isn't clear, break it down further.
You haven't won jack so stop feeling sorry for yourself. You're now in a position through either drive or coincidence (doesn't matter) that you can make a real impact on other people's lives, and now you have to meet that obligation. Find problems and try and solve them - you can start a company, volunteer, whatever - but you have to interact with people to understand what they need. Plus it's better to to hang out with them in your 20's because by the time they hit 30 they'll mostly be self-serving douche-bags (myself included).
Chrome Web App Store: rough notes on a poor first experience
Many Europeans Find U.S. Attacks on WikiLeaks Puzzling
It's not the sort of thing we should have pride in--that web programming is hard. For me, it goes to show that web front-end programming has a long way to go to make it better for developers.

We're still looking for X to do to front end web programming that Rails did for back end web programming.
The Register on developers as 'The New Kingmakers'
Yes, certainly, but if you follow just the links I cited it's at least a good introduction to the topics. Following everything in that page is somewhat... less recommended.
Here's what you need to do:

1. Find someone who needs help.

2. Help them.

That's it. It's not about you and your skills and your intelligence and your blessings and your depression and your inner psychology etc. etc. etc. It's about others.

They may need help in an area you're already familiar with, but maybe not. Either way, you'll learn something new, they'll get where they need to be, and your situation will profoundly morph into something else.

The sooner you start helping someone else, the sooner you will wonder how you could have ever posted this. A hundred ideas will come your way when you least expect them, along with the energy to do something about them. You will find that there's lots to be done and you're the perfect person to do them. You'll have a different problem then. You'll need help getting all of it done. So you'll be making a very different post to hn. I'm looking forward to that one.
Thanks Andrew. It's nice to hear somebody else find it useful. I'm a big fan of your site too!
That is exactly it, I think.
What is "real stuff"?
This is exactly why I wrote https://github.com/thwarted/nodebot, as a I ran into problems scaling and securing things like supybot, and integrating it with shell scripts. nodebot is announce only, and doesn't join the channels (so your IRC server needs to be setup to allow that), and since it's not centralized, high traffic from one node/service that ends up getting rate throttled by the server doesn't delay messages from other nodes/services. Each machine has an identity, but it can be configured to have a different identity (because I'd rather that git messages come from "git" rather than from the machine that ran the hook).

We use it at yelp for monitoring all manner of system status. There's separate channels for scribe log processing, nagios alerts, code deployments, and load balancer status. Our git hooks announce when developers push and merges are happening, and who's branches are being deployed. We get announcements when config files change. And it's all on-demand, if you're not interested in seeing it, you don't need to join the channel, IRC is perfect for these kinds of updates.
I was searching for a page and came across this. I thought I'd respond since no one else has. Hopefully this helps.

A few sites come to mind that fit this idea in one way or another.

http://balsamiq.com/

Balsamiq - This app was not purpose built to take notes, sketch and brainstorm. That being said, almost everyone I know that has bought it uses it for that purpose sometimes. I know I do. It is still limiting important ways. Dense or complex textual content just doesn't work. Though it works well for diagramming such information. It doesn't have any dynamic behavior like checkboxes. It can't track the history of a document. And it doesn't support sharing. But I have used it in meetings in lieu of pencil and paper. And it kicks out diagrams that impress customers and would be a nightmare to create in gimp or photoshop.

http://writeboard.com/

writeboard - In a minimalist perspective this could work. A big plus is it works with most 37s products.

http://workflowy.com/

workflowy - Seems to be the new hotness right now. It's essentially an upgrade over writeboard but without integration into 37s products.

http://37signals.com/draft

Draft - But it's ipad specific... /sigh. I haven't seen it in person but by this time everyone knows what they are going to get from a 37s product. Minimalist, consistent design targeted at a specific common business process.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/

OneNote - I don't like plugging Microsoft products let alone Office ... but it does everything that you want. Combine OneNote with a tablet pc and it's impressive. I used to work in the .NET world and knew a few architects that used tablet pc 5+ years ago pre-OneNote and they could do all of this back then... but it took time to learn tricks and teach the applications how to read your handwriting. They completely failed at the pricepoint of the device, at marketing it and at making any incremental improvements towards non-powerusers.
I thought Goldman had a proprietary language called slang?
It's the Wall Street Journal. That's all they give to non-subscribers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-based_...

I'm always amazed at what can be found on wikipedia.
Very cool. I'm using Tornado for my projects and I gotta say, I'm really enjoying the minimalism and design. I can dive into the source and tweak it fairly easily.

Recently I tweaked the templating engine to accept keyword arguments in a namespace for the {% include %} command. Anyone interested in my patch?
The short answer is that they're all illegal. If you're in the United States, you might consider reading the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

But seriously--anything you might consider "subversive hacking" is illegal. I'm trying to think of an exception, and one really isn't coming to mind. It's legal to port scan people, but scanning the government or military is sort of asking for trouble.

It is easy to get caught if you don't know how to cover your tracks. I'm not going to give more details on not getting caught doing illegal things, because that's not how I roll.

I work in information security, and would love to point you in the direction of legal (but still cool) resources. One popular resource is the Offensive Security Metasploit Unleashed course http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/Metas... -- It's well written and teaches you pretty much all there is to know about Metasploit, from basic usage to advanced scripting.

Hope that helps a little bit, and remember--the knowledge isn't illegal, but breaking into systems without propor authorization is. Don't throw away a bright future because you want to see what's on some random box.
If you're moving to GitHub from Google Code, you might find this issue transfer script useful:

https://github.com/cfinke/googlecode2github
...whether the segments that are replacing it...

No sector has "replaced" manufacturing. Some sectors of the economy may have grown faster, but manufacturing has also grown.

It's much the same with skills. My martial arts skills have grown more quickly than my computer skills recently, but I've become more skilled at both programming and fighting. Our economy provides both manufactured goods and massages - historically it only produced the former. That's a good thing.
http://mbed.org/ has a full ide for embedded C programming.

It's as easy as writing your code (in your browser), launch the compilation process in their systems (cloud) and automatically downloading the resulting binary file, which can be easily transfered to the device by drag&drop, since it's recognized as a usb storage device.

I got mine for free a while back and it took me few minutes to develop a simple multi-threaded application to control a few LEDs and Servos.
Everything I've been interested in making already exists in a form better than I can ever do myself. (That ought to be a wonderful thing in itself, but my selfish ego demands that I personally make a difference somewhere.)

"Better" is subjective and based on multiple variables. IMHO Ferrari makes better cars than Ford but Ford sells plenty of cars. I think Reddit is better than Digg, but plenty of people disagree.

Be careful not to fall into a trap of seeing things as black and white. There's a lot of fun and money in the grays ;-)
Figure out what sort of looks and cultural qualities you like in a wife/girlfriend. Travel to that country and live there for a couple months staying in hostels or couch surfing. Meet girls. Extend the 2 months as long as needed, switching countries if there are issues. Marry foreign girl. Stay in her country where you now have a spouse visa. Start new life.

The reason for this advice is because you said "I'm sick of corporate America and all its bureaucratic shenaningans, where I'm only learning the wrong way to get things done. I want out." and you also said you didn't have any ideas for new products or interest in starting your own company. So move to a place where everything is different and that should be sufficient challenge to keep you interested in life. Bureaucracy might be the same, but it's going to be a different kind of bureaucracy.

I also strongly recommend you find a girl with the exact opposite personality as you. If you are introverted, she should be extroverted. If you are analytical and cautious, she should be free spirited. There are actually studies that have shown the exact opposite Myers-Briggs personality type is an ideal match since you'll complement each other very well as a unit, creating a balanced unit facing the world. So if you are a INTJ programmer she should be a ESFP party girl. You might say gosh but we have nothing in common, I can't relate to her way of thinking at all. And it turns out that's exactly what is best. Rather than stay at home surfing the net or playing video games or whatever she'll drag you out to parties or art openings where you'll meet some ambassador or Nobel Prize winner or what not.
> Traveling around the world is frequently suggested here. I like to travel, and have done a fair amount of it. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm running away from my problems and not confronting them.

+1, I like to travel too, and perhaps spending a month trotting around Europe would be an eye-opening experience, but I always think you'd get back home and think "well... now what?". Similar to the feeling I get when I finish watching a movie - enjoyable for the duration, but no real lasting benefit.

I can't speak for you, but I can share my ideas about what I would do in that position (I am a 27 year old developer with a good education and work experience):

Take some taught courses to get my weaknesses up to scratch - for me it's Mathematics and Motivation. I don't know how the second can be fixed but the first is easy.

Then I would specialise in my interest areas - for me it's machine learning in various forms. Probably I'd do a PhD.

I'd seek to network a lot better than I have in the past. I have friends working for very exciting companies, and I think if we all got together something amazing could happen, but they're mostly in London and I'm not. I'd fix that too.

So in summary, my plan would be to get my knowledge and skills up to speed, and then arrange my life to coincide with like-minded individuals as much as possible.
Excellent question.

Something that makes a difference in the lives of real people. In all honesty I don't know any more than that, but I have a hard time believing that it's any of those things you mentioned.
Of course it's doable. Like I said on my website, I need to get off my ass and start coding up linked lists, binary search trees and sorts "til I fucking throw up all over Manhattan". Yes, of course it's doable. I'm no dummy. I can stumble through it on the whiteboard as well -- I'm not deaf, dumb and clueless -- I don't just stand there at the whiteboard listlessly, with blank stares, if that's what you mean. If I practice enough, reciting from memory (and on the whiteboard), coding the stuff up perfectly will be trivial. But to me, that's gaming the interview.
This article contains more details than the previous submissions, some of which are here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991659

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991557

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990493

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988818

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948365

There are more ...

http://searchyc.com/submissions/antikythera?sort=by_date
I have a working (but far from perfect) App Engine based one here: http://qkhack.appspot.com/

Only Firefox for now, due to the editor UI. If you'd like to help integrate Skywriter/Bespin, I'd love to collaborate. The code is here: https://github.com/niryariv/weblets
but is quitting really necessary for that?

Short answer: Yes.

Why are you so attached to having a full-time job? Is the point of life to just spend all of it working and accumulating cash? You're in a great position to grant yourself a sabbattical/mini-retirement/etc. I also have no idea what abyss you're worried about falling into; it sounds like you're already in one. Jobs are a commodity, lifetimes aren't.

Or you could look at it as a new job: you're going to be employed by yourself with the objective of reinventing yourself and learning to live. Your task is to spend 40 hours/week on moving toward self-actualization: learning to be independent, having a girlfriend, and finding your passions. (Edit: And spend time volunteering and making a difference in others' lives as people have suggested in this thread.)

Where in California are you? I know a couple of "hacker houses" in Berkeley and SF that are filled with interesting and passionate people. You could spend a couple months in one and immerse yourself in a fun, interesting, engaging environment.

Relevant: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1112823,00....

You should also check out the book "4 Hour Work Week". I don't subscribe to the literal idea of a 4 hour work week, but the life-optimization philosophy explained in it is inspirational and makes a lot of sense.
I bet 90% of the time, any "expert" is working on things that any idiot can do. But that isn't why people pay experts!

I think experts are paid so much because of the other 10% of the time. When convoluted edge conditions have made a mockery of all things abstract and sensible, they are capable of diving into the black boxes and figuring out what's really going on to save the day.
I did C and C++ programming for more than 10 years, before suddenly delving into serious web development only 3 years ago. I soon realized that I had vastly underestimated how deeply technical web development is.

But the reason was simply that I had formed my opinion back in ~1998, when "web development" really did mean just HTML, and maybe some roll-over script, most of the time! Being a systems programmer, I simply never had occasion to update my perception, as "web development" dramatically evolved while I wasn't looking.
Cool idea and I like the design a lot. Just curious, do you have a plan to monetize this as a business?
For an instant change I suggest you'd break out of some of your usual habits. Since I don't know what those are, take my suggestions with a grain of salt:

Don't go home after work - join a gym, go bicycling, walk thru the city till it gets dark.

If you're used to go to bed early - stay up late and spend the next day at the office trying not to fall asleep.

If you don't hang out during the weekends - call some of your friends and get really wasted.

etc.

The point is getting new perspectives on life, new experiences will help you find out what you really want and need.
Good idea. Amazing name. Beautiful website. Good price (free).

I'd be interested in how effective the matches are from a non-musical perspective (are they successful long term).

I can't imagine this not succeeding if you add features and additional accessibility.

ALSO: Submit it to Last.Fm's API build library: http://build.last.fm/
That's great news. Definitely sounds like a good service. I can't wait!