skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on some of the replies to my comment, I think people might have misunderstood what I was getting at. The main purpose of my comment was to say simply that Bloomberg could have made an equivalent rhetorical point in a way that didn't make him sound like a plutocrat arguing that he needed illegal immigrants in order to keep his golf club maintenance fees low.

Also, there's an important difference (to me, anyway) between 1) a descriptive statement about who does certain kinds of work in today's US, and 2) a prescriptive statement about who I think ought to be doing those kinds of work, and under what conditions they ought to be doing so.
i'd email them and see. i know i was going to use them last year but they had no space for a couple months so i went w/ something else.
I understand what you mean... he's earned himself a reputation as a bit of an egomaniac. To be fair though, his book is how I was first exposed to MVP ideas and his approach to life and business changed my life. Granted, it took a lot of work and a lot more digging once I got past 4HWW, but it was an eye opener nonetheless.

I think a lot of blatant self promotion comes across as spammy to "people like me" (for lack of any real description of what that might be), but the more I look around, the more I realize that most people eat it up.
I'd upvote this 10 times if I could. In some cases, I have to even drop music that has interesting beats, because I start trying to find patterns, listening intently to the beats, etc.

What I've found to deal with this is 2 of SomaFM's channels:
Drone Zone and Space Station Soma

Turn those up on some noise-cancelling headphones and lock out everything else. Good times.

EDIT: formatting
btw, whoever downvoted me for providing basic info; thanks- you're a gem.
I don't think someone needs to 'be humbled' to get it. They just need to be humble. It -is- possible to learn lessons without having your nose ground in it.

Also, there's a difference between thinking you're smartest and knowing it. Mostly in attitude.
Nice catch. Some of them appear to be affiliate links.

I also think his book has a few businesses like Yourmaninindia where he tells the reader to mention his name. He probably gets commission for that too.
I'm very sensitive regarding personal rights, and given the current information I hope that he's getting out of trouble easily.

On the other hand, please excuse if I have to add the following: For someone living outside the US several parts are just far harder to understand. In addition, the coverage seems to be in general favor of carrying arms/the NRA, which again is hard to understand from the international outside.

Bottom line: If he was just making use of his rights, I fully support the fuss being made. But - it's hard to see the point from this place on our planet.
How do I get to those examples? It prompts for a password.
The real value in Tim Ferriss' work for me is not usually in the actual content (This blog posts talks about where to register domain names rather than nitty-gritty business details, for example) but rather in observing how well he sells himself and understand what people want. He obviously does a lot of research and testing, and his posts are carefully tailored to sell dreams to large portions of the population.

He has two books: One sells you on the dream of world travel with minimal work, interspersed with stories about how awesome he is and how you, too, can be just as awesome if you follow his instructions. Nevermind the fact that he clearly states he wrote the book because he became successful by working long hours and working very hard to make his company successful.

His second (upcoming) book is all about how to 'beat the system' when it comes to eating and fitness. He talks about losing body fat while eating anything he wants using little-known secrets, among other things.

Finally, his blog (and this post in particular) tell a lot of feel-good stories that feel just within reach. He's a master at weaving a narrative that makes you feel like you want his lifestyle, and that it's within reach if you just follow his simple advice.

So what do these all have in common? He's a master at selling people on an idea, even when all of the facts don't quite line up. His works all make lofty promises, but they all seem just crazy enough to still be within reach. He even puts reverse-psychology disclaimers throughout his works to trip up your own sense of disbelief. Meanwhile, he has become wealthy and successful not by following his own advice, but by selling his advice to others.

The takeaway: Learn from his techniques and products, not from his advice. And there's a lot to learn if you step back and look at it.
Thanks. Here's what I've gathered.

Joel brought in a gun, told to take it outside, but not arrested at the time. Times passes, then he's arrested. Conclusion: the arrest is vindictive.

Joel videotaped the encounter, then posted mocking videos. Conclusion: Joel planned on pushing things until somebody did something vindictive.

The arrest may be bogus, but I can't say I'm surprised that someone determined to get arrested was arrested.

As an aside, I like the blog's idea that judges should set bail lower for innocent people.
I agree, but I bet your friend truly understood linked lists after running through the process :)
Personal collections or something like glitch.fm?
Cr-48 Recipient Tries Selling Laptop on eBay, Gets Shut Down
next book: how i made a million dollars in real estate by writing this book about making millions in real estate
Either by typing "dubstep" into Pandora, or http://dubstep.fm/

I'll check out glitch, though, thanks!
The civil liberty to which you refer in this comment is "the right to run a region electric grid provider free from government intervention". Hardly the stuff of Thomas Paine.
Newsgrape: a revolutionary way news and texts can be shared and experienced
This first comment about hiring great generalists rather than people who know mobile development has been echoed countless times and it's amazing how often people make that mistake. The most recent example I can think of is from Kevin Rose who said the same thing about how they needed PHP people at Digg until PHP wasn't good enough or they switched languages. Lesson learned: just hire great engineers, even if they code in ColdFusion or something terrible.
This is quite simple. Every time you sail into a new country you have to approach one of the ports of entry[1]. This has to be the first place you visit and there you can arrange all the formalities (customs, immigration, health, depends on a country). Afterwards you are usually free to visit any other harbour in a given country. Rinse and repeat for each country that you visit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_entry
Why M&A May Rebound
Turn your Body into a Touchscreen
I do find it amazing how people comment on it, yet none of the links work.

Does anybody actually bother to even check out the site.

The only thing that works is the front page!
Ask HN: Does google reflect your design changes to sitelinks
I've asked this to couple places but couldn't a satisfactory answer.

Hi, I have a site where Google displays sitelinks on search results. I want to implement a new design where all sitelink targets would change.

Has anyone tried this? What happens to sitelinks? Should I give 404? 302? 301?
Could the Wikileaks Scandal Lead to New Virtual Currency?
Puterman's An Introduction to Programming C-64 Demos is available here
http://www.antimon.org/code/Linus/
Ditch Caps Lock on Your Mac
Of course you should. With the exception of sociopaths or people raised by wolves, it should be second nature to be nice/respectful to others.

I say hi and "thank you" to the fellow who empties my trash can at work every night because he's another human being, not because I think he can advance my career somehow.

I think the speaker in the video is just reminding us that being nice has concrete benefits sometimes.
The String Memory Gotcha (2005)
Hilarious Vehicles
Life is funny.
And the old standard on c2: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HowToAskQuestionsTheSmartWay
Tim Ferriss started by selling people the idea that they could be successful too.

Except that his entire career and success is based on telling people what they want to hear.

First it was "you can be successful and you don't even need to work hard", more recently he's turned his attention to lifestyle advice such as how to lose weight, how to swim faster, how to look better.

Why would anyone take advice from him beats me, but that's another story.
My girlfriends parents sold all their possessions and their house when she was 10 years old and bought a sailboat. They sailed for a year, starting at the Chesapeake Bay and ending up in the Bahamas, then reversing the route and eventually finishing in Newfoundland. This was a pinnacle experience for her whole family, but for a 10 year old it was absolutely transformative.

Nothing else could duplicate the quantity and quality of learning and growing she did during that year, and to this day she still uses her experiences as a touchstone. Can not recommend undertaking an adventure like this enough.
Most blogs call them "guest posts" — outsourcing implies that he's not explicitly saying it's written by another person.

Here's an example: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/11/21/bill-clinton...
I've never looked into GreaseMonkey so I might be missing some context here, but "cruft" sounds like it would be difficult to draw a clear consensus on.

Ads are relatively cut-and-dry. Wikipedia, at least as an ideal, is a collection of objective facts with citations. But "removing cruft"? I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think it would be tough to get a clear consensus within a community on what exactly that entails. Wikipedia itself has flame wars on half of its discussion pages over any details that are less than totally objective, and many that are. It works because the differences being argued about are usually small points that most users wouldn't really notice either way. If you're trying to get consensus on a hundred "bike shed" issues on each page... well, good luck.

It's a very cool and worthwhile idea though. I'd like to see whatever might come of this after a few iterations.
For those, like me, who don’t get it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3KBuQHHKx0 (I still don’t really get it, though.)
An interesting read and still worth thinking about, although as some of the comments note, some of the specific behavior the post talks about changed in Java 1.5 (the post is from 2005).
I believe Joel was talking about Holland, MI and Herman Miller.

In the story he mentions a name Charlie Sherman, which could be some kind of reference to Herman Miller. Later on he talks about the Gerald R. Ford freeway, which is I-196 that runs right through Holland.

Furthermore, a Google Maps search of Herman Miller in Holland would indicate that there are several possibilities for a person to be driving on Lincoln Ave in which a left would direct them to Herman Miller and going straight would run them into I-196 [1].

Now, the question in my mind is: How does Joel know so much about West Michigan and in such great detail that he can accurately portray the directions he would turn. According to Joel's Wikipedia profile [2], he has never been close to Michigan his entire life. It appears to me he has never even set foot in this great state. So he can not be talking about himself. Jeff Atwood makes no mention of anything relating to Michigan on his profile [2], so I would not believe to the story a reference to Jeff.

Someone would had to have been particularly close to Joel for him to remember a story such as this in such great detail. The search continues....

[1] http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky
[3] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/about-me.html

-Internet Detective
I use caps lock while programming quite a bit for some reason, mainly in C. It might just be habit, but when I want to type something like CONSTANT or MACRO, it's easier for me to do a quick caps-on, constant, caps-off than to hold shift while typing it.

I imagine this isn't a particularly common use case among the general public, though.
Top 5 Things After Launching Tumblr Blog
Things I wish I knew when I started working with Tumblr.
Music or not I'm guessing the problem that most people (programmers, in this case) have is the inability to focus/concentrate for a certain period of time and what they do is to find something to cling on.

What if maybe the way we work as a developer can be improved? What if we should think outside the box and be a problem solver not just in coding, but also in real-life?

How about breaking a big task into smaller chunks of 5 minutes tasks? I've seen plenty software developers who just put their head down and start coding immediately without some planning. I've seen developers to take on complex problems with no plan or strategy.

What if the problem can be solved within 5 minutes, the developer should grab a few other developers and start brainstorming? Make a decision tree. List options.

I mean... it's not that all of us need to solve Google type of problems. Even a Math exam question can be done (and should be done) within 5-15 minutes.
> while the bill sucks and the language is fuzzy, the intent is clear

Is it so hard to believe that a bill could be interpreted in such a way that unexpected and undesired consequences happen? Rather than waving off criticism by claiming "intent is clear", I think it's best to make the language clear.
A good question. It's pretty tough for 4 wheeled vehicles to get across the Darien gap between Panama and South America. Driving is absolutely not an option - the track has been done I think twice by motorcycles, but that's it. Plenty of guerrillas in the midst of the jungle along with those horrific jungle conditions.
There simply is no easy answer, and plenty of horror stories about boats used to transport drugs using a vehicle as a bit of cover.
I've taken a motorcycle across the gap - the normal way, which means flying the bike from Panama to Quito or Bogota.
Was going to say the same myself but saw you said it first. Hard Rock/Rap is my usual choice for coding sessions.
I've been using gnus as my primary mail reader for seven years, but it feels like it's getting a bit long in the tooth. Pulling messages down from the IMAP server and putting it in the appropriate folders takes a good 20s, whereas for the webmail clients I occasionally resort to, retrieval of the header information for new mail is instantaneous.

The notmuch application sounds very useful. Searching my mail has been the other big pain point which often leads me to resort to another client.
I got a bit tired with Emacs' mail readers (VM and Gnus) and moved to mutt.
The Kindle can run code?! I am so sad I didn't get the 3G one...
and it took me, well I'm not even sure, but probably 4-5 years of actual travel time to hit about 70 countries, and all up 12 years or more living abroad.
I didn't see enough of _any_ of those countries. I agree it's not about hitting a number, but about enjoying the meandering, and allowing yourself to be trapped for a time in places that please.
So, to sum up: To get into YC and be successful in Silicon Valley, I have to have gone to Stanford, worked at Google and be building a social app?

pg, say it ain't so! Are people like me who went to state school, never had a real job and are building tools for businesses doomed?
From TFA:
"A bank note is essentially a pointer to some value stored in a vault somewhere."

Not for all countries. The US moved away from the Bretton Woods system with the Nixon Shock of 1971. The value of a US dollar is no longer tied directly to gold in reserve.
Ten miles from a flat surface? That seems a bit ambitious to me.
Okay, let's turn that around. Are you saying that there is such a thing as a good idea that is easily replicated and indefensible? Such that if you show it to other entrepreneurs on HN someone can quickly copy it and beat you to the market?

If so, why are you doing it?

This is exactly the kind of question VCs used to ask. Why this, why now, and why you. If showing it to HN will cause people to say, "oh, that's obvious" and rush out to copy it, you are lacking an answer to the question "why you."
The James Franco Project [New York Magazine]
I liked it. I was expecting to read yet another "entrepreneur" post by some khaki-wearing dickhead. This post was actually interesting, and contained data!
Engineering a “Muse” – Volume 2: Case Studies of Successful Cash-Flow Businesses
All they missed was a can of spam.
I use xpdf for all PDF's, anyway. I only ever pull out reader for documents which clearly actually use its javascript features.
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال سوسيداد
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال سوسيداد مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال سوسيداد مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال سوسيداد
Yeah, it kind of makes it an awesome way to check in on your servers while you're on the go, with the free 3G on Kindles. Of course you'll get similar (100mb free 3g) with Chrome netbooks when they come out.
Might be useful to note (as per the article's title) that these are Paul Allen's patent infringement charges, not Oracle's.
My favourite quote from the article: "a guy named Rahul, a slender 27-year-old Englishman of Indian extraction who's 50 percent hair and 50 percent brain." Which is a hilarious description of YC/HN's own http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rahulvohra
I was just pondering getting his book, but then I read the comments here and reconsidered. Is it worth reading? Obviously you won't get a 4-hour work week, but is there anything of value in it?
I think it mostly has to do with whether someone's ego is all wrapped up in his or her intelligence, which is pretty common for people of above average intelligence. If it is, judgment of relative intelligences will probably be clouded, at least as it relates to the person, since evidence that others are intellectually superior in a particular area will often be treated as a threat to the person's identity and ignored or rejected, often subconsciously.

If the person has a strong feeling of self worth that is independent of intelligence, they won't care very much, and so can be more objective about whether they're the smartest person in a room, regardless of if they are or aren't.

Put another way, there will undoubtedly be situations for a very high percentage of human beings where they happen to be the smartest person in the room. Being able to recognize this doesn't necessarily indicate arrogance or an inflated perception of one's intelligence.

Of course this issue is also obscured by the entirely vague and amorphous nature of the very concept of intelligence. There likely exist countless 'mentally retarded' people who have much higher emotional intelligence than a typical MIT genius, and are thereby probably better equipped for a happy, successful, and socially beneficial life.
Nasal Pirate Ax
I listen to any or all of those depending on my mood (including silence, excluding white noise).
Only in the US, though...
Is there some way to find out if you're in the program or not, or do you just have to wait?
Will do, on Monday morning.
Liu Xiaobo: I Have No Enemies
Is there a good central website for Kindle hacks?

Moreover, I cannot imagine Amazon is happy about 3rd-party code accessing the 3G which is paid by Amazon...
What applications need hardware random numbers at the high data rate those provide? For almost all applications a good CSPRNG like Fortuna periodically seeded with hardware entropy is good enough--even for key generation and one-time pads.

Given the massive cost difference between those and something like the one at http://www.entropykey.co.uk/ ($1300 vs $60), I'm having trouble thinking of when I'd pick the former.

In the discusson of this that just occurred on Reddit, someone did mention a use for the fast but expensive kind. He said they are distributing random numbers to many others for us in seeding. Kind of an internal random.org. Even there I'd expect Fortuna on the distribution machine periodically seeded from a cheaper generator would be sufficient.
This test gives an extreme advantage to lazy functional languages that they don't enjoy in any realistic context.

Trying to come up with a single test that is good turns out to be surprisingly hard. In modern languages I'm looking for the ability to do clean functional code, stateful object code, async programming, a solid module system, and a type system that doesn't get in my way. I really can't imagine a single 5 line program that would encapsulate all of these areas.
Tom Dillard Las Vegas PI is a scam
See for yourself!
"After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars."

Priceless.
Good F*cking Dating Advice
Could probably learn something here...
* Use relational databases (the mysql samples shipped with tornado blocked all network traffic while mysql was performing a query).

* Use non-relational databases (I have a couchdb interface for twisted, and a blocking one for regular python, nothing for tornado)

* Use memcached (it's fast, but it blocks)

* Make long-lived streaming http requests (cited in my blog post)

* Spawn and communicate with subprocesses that might be not be instant

* Schedule periodic execution of events (including http requests)

* Run efficiently on BSDs and OS X

* Send email

* Do DNS lookups (important part of making service requests)

* Use work queues (beanstalkd, gearman, ampq, etc...)

These are things I do with twisted today (though I've got at least one app I've moved to node.js for small kind of small scripty sorts of thing).

Again, you can run arbitrary python code, but if it blocks, it stops all traffic from flowing and new connections from coming in.
So uh, how much did including that wheel of cheese there cost?

EDIT: Why the downvotes? I can't imagine sending 2-3 kilos to space is cheap.
I don't think you understood my comment.

The "Socratic method" as a teaching tool is one thing, and I actually rather like it.

The actual method Socrates uses in the Socratic dialogues is something similar, but less constructive. Basically he asks someone the meaning of "justice" or something, and then uses questions to demonstrate all the flaws in the proffered meaning of "justice". At the end, all you're left with is not a better meaning of "justice", but just the sense that what you had to begin with doesn't work.
Thanks to this article, I had the opportunity to read your other articles on your blog related to programming and sundry. You sir, are my new hero :). No, I am not going to ask you to mentor me, but after ten years in the Enterprise world, went from a not-so-good developer/techie to a paper-pushing, email-sending Ninja of a manager(good one at that) :).

Got tired of it and am back to doing something on my own, which involves actually writing code. There are days that I have doubts about whether I am really any good at this. But I need to work harder and persist, which I never did before.
Use BugMeNot.com so you won't need to register either!
Those benefits are not worthwhile to me personally. I want to code, not constantly overhear office chatter.
Ask HN: Any recommendations for bug tracking software?
I am working on some personal projects and want to start using a bug tracking software for them. I am looking for recommendations for a bug tracking system which is

- Free/Freemium

- Web based so that I don't have to worry about installing/maintaining it.

- Simple to use