skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My optometrist recommended you unclog the pores in your eyelids. You eyelids have pores that emit a thin layer of oil that covers the eyeball, and helps prevent evaporation. Those pores get blocked.

She said to use a heat pack/mask (as hot as you can handle for as long as you can handle) an then massage the eyelids (pressing down on the top, and up on the bottom) to try and get the wax plugs out (yuk). Then wash your eyes.
This is a really terrible description for this article. The term "mutant" simply means that it is a strain with altered genetic material. A mutation is not necessarily detrimental, and it doesn't mean that it will glow green, or sprout legs, and it certainly doesn't carry any radiation. Mutants are extremely useful for a variety of reasons, mostly for doing genetic studies. Obviously, the best way of producing mutants is to irradiate wild-type strains.

(I'm working on a PhD in the biomedical sciences)
Who are you charging for this, and how can I get in on the action?
As noted, these influences can be very disentangle from any real-world analysis.

There was an interesting study a few years back that looked at the "outcomes" of a cohort of people who had all been admitted to an Ivy League school. Part of the study group attended and graduated from the Ivy League school they were admitted to. The control group ended up matriculating elsewhere for whatever reason.

Past studies showed at a significant improvement in earning potential for Ivy League grads, but they didn't have a distinguished control group. What this recent study found was that for most students of similar qualification (all judged to be Ivy League material by the admissions boards at Ivy Leage schools), attending an Ivy conferred no obvious advantage compared to attending a non-Ivy.

The only difference was for students who came from more challenging backgrounds, those whose families may have flirted with poverty and/or didn't have significant educational attainment. In those cases, attending an Ivy conferred some advantage over going elsewhere.
> Here's a statistic: 99 percent of all achievements in computer science come from men.

Ummm....wouldn't that be because ~99% of all coders are men?
They are Fooled By Randomness :) (good book)
I agree. There is probably an element of survivorship bias; plenty of poorly designed sites don't last long enough to become part of a statistic.
You got a lot of upmods but I don't even understand your comment. What are you talking about?
umm, this just takes me to weebly.com. am i crazy?
same happens to me.
"The Jessica Alba sashay beat off competition"?
Are you serious? I am literally moving to Japan in 1 month.
Probably no more so than selling 'incense'
Brilliant hack: Cool demo using an oscilliscope as the display (vid)
Beware Raising Money When Starting A Start-Up
Our business is doing well yet again, and by our business I am referring to the Internet industry. As a result, there are numerous great ideas being explored and new companies being created, it seems like every week. But what I find most interesting is how many people are unwilling to bootstrap their ideas, and would rather spend 110% of their time trying to raise money, giving up 90% of their ideas, rather than focusing their attention on building out the core ideas for their business! ...
:) Fortunately, there are no powerful lobbyists that have a problem with incense.

I hope the MPAA sues Harvard, it'd make for a great fight. We could use a precedent setting case.
I don't think this is as important as it is made out to be. These preposterously high speeds will certainly create opportunities for << internet >> applications, but I think that they are much less relevant for << web >> applications. The web is the internet's killer app and I suspect this will always be the case. There will be important transformations to be sure, but with more bandwidth we will just have more of the same.

I think that the web is a better interactive application than bandwidth-intensive video alternatives. It (even MySpace) inherently stimulates our higher brain functions, whereas video seems to universally produce a trance-like state. (Although, I suspect this may be a prime opportunity for impression based advertising.) However good a business that may be, I won't be a drug pusher.

More bandwidth doesn't make the internet a new medium; it just makes room for more of what we already have. If I had to guess what The New New Thing will be on the coming high bandwidth internet (and of course all of us here need to), I would say that it will be the old old things that people have been trying from the start. I think it will be nationwide video on demand; I think it will be bit torrent with a toll. I don't think it is an interesting problem for hackers or entrepreneurs. It is too messy. It is for suits in the media companies to clean up.

edit: I may have spoken too quickly. A moment after I posted this, I began to wonder how much bandwidth is necessary to eliminate the need for a local computer. That would make one hell of an internet application. I'm sure there are plenty more. But, I still trust that the web is here to stay.
Justin.TV on Yahoo news
Let me propose the radical idea that you can learn a lot - perhaps more - outside of college. :-)
Do you have a reference for this study?
>Project manager

Good god you're friends dream small...
It's a few times bigger than the ODNB, but not really on a wholly different scale: http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/print/ . (The sample page is at http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/print/psample/ .)

The introduction to the ODNB at http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/prelims/intro gives some other useful points of comparison. (Roughly: 50,000 articles, 10,000 contributors, GBP26 million, and 12 years (1992-2004), not counting the work on the old DNB or the post-2004 material for the new.)

So, by the enormously suspect calculation of applying the ODNB's cost per word to en.wikipedia's wordcount, it seems that you could create such an encyclopedia, to the highest academic standards, for the cost of about two small Alaskan bridges.
I agree. Let's start em' in the coal mines! You first.
Can you answer this: Do people call Scheme a dialect of Lisp? I know often its spoken that way. But as an active (and avid?) user of scheme is it wrong to call it "a lisp"? Or when people say Lisp do they really mean CL (other then in academic circles)?

Just interested.
While you can't argue that there hasn't been a meaningful web application to come out of Japan, the article is still pretty upsetting. The stupidity of the federal government in this country is incredible. As an American I am pretty pissed off that we are this far behind. It is a pretty upsetting paradox , how the us is home to amazing innovators despite the stupidity of the federal government. The state of US infrastructure is disgusting from mass transit to the internet, its pretty depressing.
Should I limit myself to that supposed "woman out there" who is willing let me work for many months at a time?

I hear that worked out great for hans reiser.
That's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life, Leon.
Of course the feature that publicity will pick up on is the recommendations. I though, am more concerned about how resistant this is to various attacks.

Youtube and bittorrent already have popular, legal stuff covered pretty well. What does that leave? Adult video?

That's all they'll have left unless they protect the users very well.
The law is a transient thing. Simply asking the courts whether something is illegal can change its legality.
(news.yc automatically munges the pound symbol into 'GBP'?)
Code with your eyes closed.
No, it is not wrong at all. In the SICP video lectures they call it just Lisp all of the time.

It's true that when someone says Lisp they often mean CL. If it's important for you to highlight that you are talking about the family of languages, you may say "the Lisps" or "a Lisp". But just Lisp should be okay too.
Gateway has always been an also-ran, startup or not. They just happened to hit it big because 90% of Americans thought that Gateway was Bill Gates' company. i did, when I was 10. haha. my how things change.
I'm so incredibly sick of these "Teletubby" company names.

Granted, I'm a cynical thirtysomething so maybe I just don't get it. Maybe Ooma, Lala, Tinker, and Bebo ARE great company names. I don't think so, though. I was rolling my eyes during the last internet bubble too, when everything was iVomit.com and ePuke.com, etc. In retrospect, I think most people will agree that most of those names WERE stupid.

Like the author of the article, I do realize that many of the 'great' names have been taken and that the vast majority of domains seem to be held by domain squatters...

BUT

I think that using coined, nonsensical names is extremely counterproductive. Names should be memorable, easy to spell, and not have obviously bad connotations. It's not that hard to come up with an original name that is appropriate for what you're doing, is it?

I've worked as an entrepreneur/hacker, as a VC, and as a naming consultant. I have a long list of unused names that I think would make great company names. I think of new ones on an almost weekly basis. So many that I will never be able to use them all in this lifetime. Maybe coming up with names is just a skill that many hackers don't take the time to develop?

If a company is unable to come up with even a 'decent' name for what they claim is their all-consuming passion, it makes me seriously doubt their ability to ever properly execute their business plan. I consider it a failure in the marketing department (and marketing is a core function, whether you actually have a 'marketing department' or not.)

If your company name sounds like a Teletubby, maybe you should just hire (or consult with) a marketing person before you launch...?
By the way, this might be the strangest sentence I've ever written.
"U.S. phone and cable companies, which control about 98 percent of the country's broadband market, strongly oppose the proposed laws, saying they would discourage the huge investments needed to upgrade broadband speed."

Huge investments such as the $200B from American tax payers in the 1990's that resulted in nothing?

http://www.muniwireless.com/article/articleview/5011
How did the crew get their inspiration for Justin.tv?

Hah! Catching that crime was brilliant. Did they get him?
I wonder how it was done. The explanation under the video doesn't pass my bullshit-o-meter.
Count on Geeks to Rescue the Earth (or why not everyone should be a social worker)
I've gotten into more than a few arguments with people who disparage entrepreneurs (read capitalists) as greedy, and too insensitive. What do you think the world would be without some of them? Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, greedy, I think not.
The last thing a hospital needs is waiting rooms and patient wards full of people hysterically gabbing on their cell phones to relatives about their injured friends and family.
And what are you talking about?
I second this. My eye doctor recommended them, and it helps quite a bit.
Oddly, I view it fine. The post:

Mitch Kapor was our guest speaker last week. It was a magical moment when he spoke to the room full of founders. Not just because he's rich and famous, but because he is the kind of person they are. There seemed a special sort of fellowship of founders.

One of the guys wrote to me the next day, "Wow, Mitch was truly great. Definitely a nominee for Best Speaker Ever."

I first met Mitch when I interviewed him for Founders at Work. I remember being on the edge of my seat when he told me about the early days of Lotus.

Chapter 6, Founders at Work: "I was so convinced that VisiCalc had a lock on the market that I had to convince myself that we were going to do something that wasn't fundamentally a spreadsheet. Of course, what we did was fundamentally a spreadsheet, but the self-deception I engaged in wasn't sufficiently damaging to be fatal. But there was a big push to call it integrated software, to add other capabilities, to wrap other things in it.

The galvanizing event was when IBM announced the IBM PC in August 1981, and it was very important in the history of PCs because it legitimized the whole field-- because of IBM's imprimatur. Until then, the personal computer hardware companies were Apple, Tandy and Commodore. IBM was the first "real" computer company to come out with a PC, legitimizing it for the business marketplace. And that was not lost on me. And they made some very smart decisions." Read (a little) more.

Mitch's interview is filled with stories that we cite to founders. But it's not just his experience with Lotus that makes him so knowledgeable. He's a cofounder of the EFF and was an early investor in companies like RealNetworks, UUNET, and Second Life's Linden Labs. He talked about his experiences with these and other startups at the most recent Startup School. You can tell immediately that he is genuinely interested in new technology.

What I like best about listening to him talk is that he's so candid. I found myself writing down much of his advice. Dinner talks are off-the-record, but he's given me permission to share one of my favorite quotes. Someone asked what it was like running Lotus and taking the company public. He replied:

"I actually woke up scared every single day that I would do something so stupid that the company would crash as fast as it went up."

I like this because it shows that even a successful startup founders didn't always think he had all the answers.

Since then, he's seen a lot in the world of startups-- and continues to (he gave us a peek at some stuff he was working on with Foxmarks). But what struck me last week was that he does not seem to have lost any enthusiasm for new ideas.
Ummm...no

raw numbers

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:_0JxL7T75-sJ:www.bls.go...

versus prominent programmers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers

I would suggest if you strip off some of the dubious or ceremonial entries ("ada") the picture gets worse still.
Yes they do and authorize.net does not. Personally, I don't understand micro-payments. FPS mandates that micro payments are those that do not exceed 50c. (AFAIK) So... is it so hard to do your own aggregation and submitting larger sums to a regular gateway? (just curious)
It's probably http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf. I found the link from an article on CNN at http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/20/pf/expert/ask_expert/
Clearly you are much better at thinking of names than most people. How much does a name consultant cost?
Yes, we went with Wells Fargo and they gave us an excellent custom quote (much cheaper than web site suggests). No setup fees, fixed $31/mo and $0.20 per transaction. We have our limit though, and once we exceed it the price will go up.
> If a company is unable to come up with even a 'decent' name for what they claim is their all-consuming passion, it makes me seriously doubt their ability to ever properly execute their business plan.

My experience is that they're unrelated skills. Google is a pretty bad name, actually. It has prestige now from its associations, but a misspelling of Googol? If a YC startup came up with that name I'd tell them it was ok, but to keep trying.
Google Phone Prototype Out A
I don't understand. Given the definition of "mutant" you have provided the title strikes me as entirely true to the article. I read (and wrote) "mutations" in the sense you describe.
Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe
Like a lot of things in life, it depends on what you want and how you want to get there. It also depends on the institution's culture (we're going to ignore GetDrunkAndParty U).

For technical and engineering pursuits, a good college is a great place to get a fast and wide overview of theory, competing technologies (or philosophies), and different specializations/tech aspects (database, programmer, ...). (I think this is why I'm more of a generalist as opposed to java or php master...)

More importantly, (a good) college puts a lot of smart, driven people in the same place and time. Going to college allows you to form important relationships with these people that can strongly affect both your personal and professional life both now and in the future. I think both Apple and Microsoft are great examples of my last point.

Finally (assuming you got a useful degree), in case all your entreprenuerial endeavors fail in the short term; a degree can net you a high paying job with a lot of free cycles to relax/regroup and get ready to start that next idea you have =)
Well, I liked your comment. High school has mostly been a waste of time for me. I don't see why kids can't get apprenticed or go to college or do something productive at that age.
It's not the speed of connections what is holding web applications back, it's poor runtime. DOM+JS without standard local storage, with complete absence of standard libraries for anything but trivial, without any access to PC hardware... Pretty pathetic... It is especially ironic to see ridiculously slow speed of simple Flash 2D graphics running full screen on a kick-ass video card.

Besides, it's not only speed what matters, there is latency issue as well. With HTTP I cannot tell much difference (visually) when going from 3mbps to 12mbps unless I'm downloading an ISO file or something like that. Browser will not open more than 2 connections at a time anyway.
The PC business was quickly becoming a commoditized me-too business with numerous players and tiny margins.

To those of us old enough, the catalog "Computer Shopper" was formerly a 1000+ page, 3-inch-thick monster consisting almost entirely of smallish computer companies selling PCs. Nowadays, you have Dell, HP, and a few others.
Wow that is incredible!

> The explanation under the video doesn't pass my bullshit-o-meter.

Download the FLAC file and try for yourself then :)
Good to know. Yes I love the SICP videos and noticed that - but then they were done in the 80's, wasn't sure if things had changed somewhat since then.

In my limited exploration, I always though CL was showing its age, yet scheme seemed more "timeless" - if you can say that about programming languages.
Well... the MV campus of google has over 6000 employees. Facebook has maybe 200, tops. This is like Ohio State losing a football game to Oberlin in terms of sheer population advantage.

Then again... there are no ultimate scholarships, and I know a guy from FB who was a star ultimate player at stanford.
Social News Networking Comment Trackers
Part of social news networking is interaction via commenting. If you are a regular submitter/commenter to multiple services, this can get tedious. There are not many, but you should find what you need here.
Name one other place where are surrounded by smart, thinking people of the same and opposite sex constantly for 4 years.

Name one other place where the law basically doesn't apply and you are basically encouraged to take huge risks with your friendships, your learning, and your life (sometimes).

Sure, college is expensive. Sure, you have to do a lot of things you don't want to do. But, you also don't have many opportunities to learn things that are totally impractical from true experts in the field. Take advantage. Love every minute. Get out of there and do something amazing.

Last, a lot of the people I met in college are incredibly smart and amazingly successful. Some of them work on the most innovative software around. Some write for world-renowned publications. And some of them just have really rich parents. No matter what, if you go to a good university, you will meet people that will help you someday later. Yah, privilege is a bitch, but if you have the opportunity to have it, why not?
Is this guy hacking device drivers? OpenGl? Maybe he's tweaking the last bit of sweat out of microsoft's C++ compiler? No...he's clearly doing CRUD work

This guy wrote Mongrel, which is a very solid HTTP server - the most common way to deploy Ruby applications these days. Also he was one of the guys on ruby-lang who discovered nasty bugs in Ruby's threading implementation (everybody else just preferred bitching about "unreliable" Ruby threads and memory leaks)
Hey thanks, this seems doable.
Computer Programmers .... 3.9%

I count 9 women out of about 230 which comes out to...

3.91%

What is the point you are trying to make anyway? Are you going to go on to tell me black people suck at programming to because they don't compose 25% of that list (but do compose 25% of graduates in CS from the stats you linked)?

Get over yourself.
Great. An a-hole with credentials.

Still, he's clearly doing CRUD work in the provided example. It's not my fault that he wasn't on the list, but to show I'm a good sport I added him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers#S
Women comprise 25.3 percent, not 3.9 percent.
Another useful timer is lots of water (already suggested here). Besides hydrating your eyes, a full bladder makes you get up every now and then. I found that's one type of interruption that is not focus breaking.
Photo Sharing Site Fotolog Acquired By French Company Hi Media For $90 Million
This is one of the first big deals I've heard about outside of the US, although I'm not sure why the site attracted such a large audience with Flickr already out there.

Anyone have any ideas?
Sometimes I just don't know... It's nice to work in the US for a lot of things - money first and foremost. But San Jose is also a good example of what's unpleasant about the US. Even a small town in Italy has (at least) an order of magnitude more character and interesting things, rather than sameness and right angles. It's difficult if not impossible to attach a monetary value to, but I think there are definitely some externalities involved in living in a beautiful place, that at least for some people, compensate for the other things that are wrong.
Can't locate a 'SEARCH in news' function.
Hrm....

http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f233/BigRed2009/Renders%20...
Whoa whoa hang on why are you guys moving there? Am I missing something here? :-)
fair enough, I misread the chart, but my last statement still stands (with numbers swapped 3.9% black, 25% female). Your point?
> Japanese users don't have much use for their awesome connections now.

nicovideo, maybe :-)
Check the screen orientation regarding other light source.
Do not put your screen in front of a source of light (window) or with a source of light in the back reflecting into it.

Optimal orientation is with screen perpendicular to the window or light source to avoid reflections on the screen and light source behind the screen. Otherwise your eyes and brain will have to do allot of effort to focus on your screen.

Check also the screen quality. LCD flat screen are Ok. A long time ago I worked with a tube screen slightly out of focus and had terrible head ache by the end of the day even though I had no problem with my eyes. Changing screen solved the problem.
yeah its hard if you are not familiar with the IDE at hand. Its not unlike say, setting up SLIME for CL when you are gasp not an emacs user ;)