skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
High school wasn't all that bad, and hell, I learned some things - a lot my own, but a lot from good teachers, too. Something I noted when I hit a rough spot a few months ago was that there is no teenage angst when you're working from six AM till eight PM doing hard labor. Not that I was asking for it!

I think it's simply a matter of human nature; given too much leisure, or too high a quality of life, our brains will still be physiologically unable to feel a proportional level of happiness. At the chemical level, there are only so many neurotransmitters to go around.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I would have been thrilled to get a "real" job at that age, but I'm not sure that was right. I was always very much in a hurry to finish school, and now that I have a job and am in college early, I keep wondering if, and feeling like, I've made a terrible mistake.

And a separate point about the article: The cost of college is almost entirely the fact that it uses up the four most productive years of your life. That most people choose college almost on instinct surprises me. Forget buying a house or a car - this decision is orders of magnitude more expensive. If you want to have an extraordinary life, you're going to be on that path by the time you're 22, or you're not. It's worth noting that Einstein made his contributions to physics at the age of 25, and even that was somewhat old to develop something so innovative. At the same time, while he stayed influential and productive in physics, he never published anything as revolutionary. At a certain age - I'm inclined to think it's usually in the early to mid twenties, based on anecdotal evidence only - you just lose that ability. If you go to college, you're basically saying "I'll trade my ability to change the world for a predictable life." And honestly, right now that's a trade I would like to make, but I'm just not doing it, and I don't know why.

And besides, every time I put this in writing I am struck by the incredible level of arrogance and hubris in my words (I'm no freaking Einstein!) and I really don't feel like writing again for a long time.
Buy a Mac, get TextMate!
Because it makes you feel guilty?

I find the feelings of guilt and responsibility are very much intertwined. It seems the best-adjusted people don't feel either.
The _price_ of college is only a small fraction of the _cost_ of college.

And yes, I learned this in an economics class... in college.
I was thinking the same thing. He calls it the 'narrative fallacy', saying that people invent stories after the fact to give a reason to things.
I'll grant that they're unrelated skills, but I still think that it is a skill that can be developed and a skill that is worth investing in. It may not be a smart time investment for a hacker to cultivate that skill themselves, but it is probably a good investment to hire or consult with someone that can come up with a a quality name FOR them. [Business and marketing geeks need love to, you know? There are branding geeks on every college campus too, believe me.]

I think the importance of a good name is often underestimated in the overall scheme of things. Founders and VCs don't flinch too much when they spend several grand hiring a legal specialist to draw up incorporation documents (which is another story)...but it never even occurs to them to spend more time and/or money on something that will likely have a greater impact on their overall success, such as their identity in the marketplace.

I'd also argue that part of it goes to TASTE, PG :-)

> Google is a pretty bad name, actually.

I couldn't agree more. But they're one of the instigators of this current naming trend (two O's, seemingly nonsensical), so they almost have grandfather status. It's all of the followers that make these naming trends pathetic. You don't get lost in the shuffle if you're one of the first. After a certain point, it's the volume of the similar names that is comical. During the electronics boom, everything was -etics this and -tek that, then you had iThis and eThat during the late '90s. Now it's Teletubby names. Why get lost in the shuffle? Why choose obviously bad names?

It's like a mother that goes through 9 months of pregnancy, X hours of labor, and then names her kid Harry Richard McNuttsac or something because she was too lazy to think it through or consult a book of baby names.
>Clearly you are much better at thinking of names than most people.

I wasn't trying to brag...I think naming and marketing are skills that can be cultivated, just like learning to be a better public speaker or learning to write well. You just have to determine if it is worth your time, relative to your other skills. People are gifted in different areas. I'll never be a GREAT hacker, for example...but I still found it worthwhile to learn how to program.

> How much does a name consultant cost?

Naming consultants charge whatever they can get away with, just like most consultants. There is a very wide variance in costs because it is an obscure specialty with lots of 'voodoo.' I know of services where you can find domain name suggestions for free or just a few bucks, and I know of naming agencies (Lexicon, etc.) that won't even talk to you unless you have six figures to spend. Some companies spend into the millions on branding efforts that largely hinge on coming up with a new name and then researching that the name is not offensive in other languages,etc. I haven't worked in the field directly in years, but the firm I worked for was pretty high-end.

You should talk to business/marketing geeks on campus or in your neighborhood to try to save money on naming/branding work. Maybe you could even work something out for free or arrange a barter relationship...just make sure you secure all rights if you find a name you like.

If I have no intentions of using a name, and I know of a deserving start-up, I might give away a name. I've given away company names, product names, domain names and registered trademarks. Some of the companies I've named have become very successful, and it's a little bit of a vicarious thrill each time. It's fun, just like acting as an angel/VC investor.

Right now, for example, I have a decent name for a music recommendation service. The entire music/collaborative filtering space is too crowded for my tastes, so I won't be working in that arena. I would be willing to share the name with a deserving company - especially if I had a relationship with them, etc.

It's just like anything else: be creative and don't give up until you're happy with the end product.
I downloaded Textmate once after hearing great things about it, but I never got around to trying it out.

I know there are bundles available for Lisp and Python, but can anyone comment on how good they are relative to Emacs/SLIME and IPython?
Feature Requests and Bug Reports, Social News Networking Style
Can the concepts from social news networking work for software development? Notifir.com is giving their users control of their website features via Digg.com style voting to find out.
I mean submitting https entries...
Nirav Tolia, of Epinions fame, is back -- joins Benchmark as EIR
iJigg, Digg for music, growing despite competition
How Basic Common Lisp Techniques Can Improve Code Configurability, Maintainability, and Reuse
Tales of an Instant Company - the founding of epinions.com
Lectures are Ineffective
FlyPod: Catching Flies With Style
His point was that female programmers aren't superior to male ones. Remember he quoted "women are better programmers because they have less ego". Which is a huge load on both counts.
Google Web Toolkit out of beta
Why? The oscilloscope has an x and y input to control the spot and it's controlled by the sound card output. I'm curious to know what about the explanation you don't find believable.
Replying to that by "no, men are better programmers than women" doesn't seem the way to go. Especially in response to a rant about faulty statistics skills. That argument with 99% whatever certainly was extremely faulty (I can't even begin to describe how faulty, it is just waaaaaaay off). It just goes to show that some carefulness with statistics would be a good idea. Anyway, that response basically proved the point of the article.
Um, I suppose that mask goes on the closed eyelids? I just wanted to clarify that, we don't want to induce a serious accident...
Ah yes. Well anyone who did it incorrectly can't now read the response, but anyway.
lol speak for yourself :) I live in the midwest, San Jose is like an art masterpiece compared to here
I'm not sure either. Flickr is far superior to this app... I'm amazed at the amount of photos and users on this site.

90 million sounds crazy for this
TIOTI - this could be the Next Big Thing from the UK
It's a Social TV Aggregator that's due for a full public launch this summer. It's looking really promising.
In large categories such as photo sharing or social networking there are always going to be big players which conquer differntly because of geographic separation.

It may have been the case that Flickr is more amenable to word-of-mouth traffic in western countries relative to fotolog in south america. Maybe it was the seeding.
This has been about 18 months in the making. Shows what can be achieved with an outsourced team. Do you think it'll fly?
Microsoft to buy chinwag platform Parlano
Improving the internet: some antics
New Technology: Dynamic Resizing of Images
The article goes on to say 'Well, it looks like Michael may have gotten his wish as Adobe has hired co-inventor Shai Avidan to their team.' As such, it looks like this promising technology will be integrated into a proprietary application/technology published by Adobe. I think it would be interesting to have this technology in the HTML 5 spec. <img src="image.png" dynamicresize="vertical|horizontal|both"/> This is, of course, assuming it could be done in-browser and doesn't take a ton of processing power to do. Have there been any attempts to include more innovative technologies, such as this, in a W3C recommendation for something as broad as HTML?
I agree... but in all honesty, I don't think I need a mathematically derived formula to tell me that...:D
I honestly tried to drop emacs in favor of TextMate for hacking scheme. It has the buzz, a great philosophy with a really stand up developer hacking it, sexy integration with osx, subversion hooks, nice bundle system, file browser, intuitive shortcut keys, seemingly deep regex support, and on and on.

The issues I ran into with TM for scheme were really fundamental. While TM has both scheme and lisp bundles, they don't seem to handle code indentation nearly as well as emacs. Proper scheme indentation was mostly a manual process.

The REPL integration is also much better in emacs, in my opinion. That proves to be a huge time saver. REPL integration in TM amounted to opening up terminal.app in a separate process.

These two things - code indentation and repl support - were two things I couldn't look past. They are the bread and butter of scheme hacking. I would love to see TM improve in these areas.

If you're lisp hacking I think you'll be best served by slime/emacs. That combination is the best environment I've found.
I sort off have a website for the consulting stuff I do now, but because I sometimes get crazy here I would like to keep that aside. As for what I do, I had 2 jobs and left one lately. Now I am focus on my main one, as a part of a mobile software devel team ( I am not a coder, just a talker, but I sure know how to bring in deals ).
REPL and auto-indent would be useful for Python and Ruby, too.
This is what happens when a mediocre programmer reads too many Paul Graham essays, hacks his way through a couple of sections of SICP, and shamelessly rips off Peter Norvig's code in chapter 2 of PAIP.

Kids these days.... ;)
they've made a lot of improvements since the beta release - i think it's going to do well. As far as i know the development team has equity stakes etc so its more offshore than outsourced but yeah the technology is pretty impressive.
This seems really out of sorts for higher education, Harvard in particular. Do their lawyers-in-training need more cases? I must admit, I would by tickets to MPAA v. Harvard. Or maybe by then I'll just watch it on "Harvard TV".

Looking through tech glasses, their give-to-get algorithm and "bartercast" algorithms could be fun to write, but they don't feel new or novel.
If A Car Launches In Second Life, Will Anyone Notice It?
The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules
I only hope more mediocre programmers start doing the same.
This is exactly what I was looking for the other day!

But I need it for linux...
Here's some interesting numbers. Let's say you go to a college for four years and it costs $25,000/year, $100,000 total. To pay for it, you take out some college loans at 7% interest that have to paid back in 10 years. So, your loan payment is $1161.08/month. In total you'll pay $139,329 by the time the loan is paid off. So, you earn 1.2 million more over your life time than the non-college grad, but after the cost of college you're only ahead by about $1,060,000. I'm supposing here that by "over your lifetime" means until you retire, that is say from age 22 to age 65.

Now, suppose you don't go to college but instead you start working at 18. You apply yourself to your job, learn what you can on your own time, and by age 22 you've got four years experience and you've been promoted the point that you can sock away $1161.08 per month in savings. Say you do this for 10 years and keep the money in a conservative mutual fund that earns an average return of 7% per year. After the 10 years are over you've got $200,965 in savings. At this point, you stop investing. Even with no additional money, by the time you're 65 (33 years later) you'll have $2,011,064.27 or roughly $1 million more than the guy who invested his money in college.

Of course these are just some made up numbers. A lot of people who aren't motivated to go to college are probably also not motivated to save that much money and live that frugally. If college costs you less than $25,000 per year it might be worth it, or you might go into a profession that allows you to earn way more than $1.2 million more than the average high school grad. On the other hand, lots of colleges cost a good deal more than $25k/year. Also, the high school grad might invest his money more aggressively and earn more than 7% interest. It would be interesting to see where the crossover point is in terms of college cost, loan interest rate, investment interest rate, and so on. The point remains that a return of 1.2 million over 43 years on a $100,000 investment is pretty crappy (around 5.8% compounded monthly, slightly better than an online savings account)
Ruby is TM's driving force. I don't hack much ruby, when I do I use inf-ruby.el (based on cmuscheme.el by the way - where would ruby be without lisp and scheme ;).

I was assuming TM worked well for ruby, given how ga-ga the ruby crowd is over TM. Does ruby auto-indent and repl integration not work well in TM? Us emacs freaks will need to bring the ruby crowd up to speed with a modern editor.
For me the problem was never eye strain, but my contacts get very dry around 4 in the morning. Taking a break is a big distraction since that's when I'm really doing best, hardly time to blink. I think I'll get the corrective surgery.
Ah! I am certain you can find something to better. :)
"Users typically post only one picture a day but may spend several hours a month adding poems or commentary and leaving messages for friends."

Sounds like users are doing different things with fotolog than one would do with flickr. Yes, they're both photo-sharing sites. But you could just as easily say news.yc is just another text-sharing site among millions.
From the article, 'Well, it looks like Michael may have gotten his wish as Adobe has hired co-inventor Shai Avidan to their team.' Unfortunately, that makes it seem like this promising new technology will be lost to a proprietary implementation. It would be great to see something like this in the HTML 5 spec. <img src="image.png" dynamicresize="vertical|horizontal|both"/> This is, of course assuming that it could be done in-browser and isn't very processor intensive to do. Is this something the W3C could possibly consider?
I agree - thats why I live in the very beautiful (on an international scale) San Francisco :)
I certainly did not mean to imply there was anything substantive about that article ;)
It's time for the monthly "I'm still alive ... look at me!" Second Life article.
Phoja Debuts a Digg for Your Photos
Incremental Perfectionism: 5 Ways to Write Perfect Code
Here are 5 ways to bring your software closer to perfection, bit by bit, while still shipping your darn code (no crack required).
I mostly agree with you, but in the article, the slow component had a subsecond response time with a 60 second deviation.
depends on where in the midwest you are. I'm in michigan and routinely visit Chicago for work.Chicago isn't bad at all; but I've been to the valley a few times and it doesn't compare.
"The opening of Japan's copper phone lines to DSL competition launched a "virtuous cycle" of ever-increasing speed..."

They got real performance gains when they decoupled the service provider from the infrastructure provider. Of course, this was implemented through regulation, but I wonder what you could do on an open market. Would it be feasible for consumers to buy into a local fiber network so that they "own" the last mile? That would give them leverage when selecting a provider for TV, Internet, and voice service.
In a few cases, it's really obvious (the company's earnings are out; their stock is way up; thus, they beat earnings), but in most cases journalists have to write something no matter what, so they write something plausible.
I think it is important to read more about epinions. Beyond the fact that it is pretty much dead today, was firesaled, and was had some nasty interpersonal personnel issues, I think it is a classic example of a company with a unmanageable story:

"Here's how it works: we convince people to write opinions. And then when someone else reads that opinion, and ranks it highly, we'll give the writer a piece of an affiliate link sale."

There's way, way, way too many steps involved in making a few pennies.

The story that you tell your users (all of them) is very important. Epinion's was pretty miserable.

A buddy of mine said that one of the reasons that Google's a money machine is that it is dead easy for a neophyte web advertiser to set up an ad:

1. Pick some words
2. Pick how much you want to pay
3. Done.

That's the level of story you want to tell.

Measure your story against that.
Great point sanj.

Its also something Niklas Zennstrom articulates about picking problems to solve: pick simple propositions e.g. Skype: free phone calls, Joost: Tv when you want it, Kazaa: share files easily in order to reach a mainstream market.

Whats your background btw - shoot me an email, i'm pretty interested.
Does My Startup Idea Suck?
The 500,000 population threshold combined with the use of "median household income" is what makes this interesting.

Newton, MA has a MHI of $86,000 but its population is more like 84,000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton,_Massachusetts

The 500,000 population limit rules out lots of suburbs and use of the median eliminates diverse cities with wealthy neighborhoods. I'm not immediately sure what use of "median household" vs. "median individual" means, since I'm not sure what counts as a household. (do 4 young professionals crammed into a small house in Cambridge count as one household?)
Is 'Intelligent Resizing' Coming Soon To Adobe Photoshop?
I wish it was an open source project that could be incorporated into web browsers. That would be great.
If you'd like to take the term Hackers and Painters too literally, might I suggest a mascot?
A one-handed keyboard for the lazy
Some background:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juhansonin/1271643739/

And the back of the t-shirt:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juhansonin/1206029236
Yahoo's New President Oversees a Shake-Up
What Websites Do to Turn On Teens
What's the idea? How to linkbait headlines?
or just get rid of your monitor altogether.
"Monitors are for people with weak memories"
Nokia to Introduce Digital Music Service
I love the fact that this aggregator pulls up articles before the bubble. The language and the tone of the entire article is like nothing can go wrong. It's great.

It's also interesting that the author of the article foreshadowed "Web 2.0" before it was coined 5 years later. The Tom Sawyer model. Brilliant.
WE refer to them as 'hackers' too? :-(
Wish I Cared for a Project That Much
When I read this, it made me a little envious.

I just seem to have trouble trying to find projects to care about.

Does anybody have suggestions on how to find projects, ideas that you would care enough to hack 20 hours a day?
I think you can tell how successful product X is by the amount of "X killer" stories you run across with the "rewrite the rules" or "change the industry" type of hype. Google, make your phone. Microsoft, make your zune, your origami. Creative, make your $5 mp3 player. These people posting these link bait headlines and all this "could be 2008", "could have x" stuff, please.

I'd like to see a gphone. I'd like to see google release their operating system. Both products are periphery to their core competency of search it would give us a good chance to see how malleable they are.

But goodness am I tired of these speculative journalists.

OK, I'm truly sorry for posting this rant.
The guy says programmers are shitpumps because they are men who are guided by primate dominance reflexes not reason, and what do the programmers do in response?

Start a pissing match of course.

I saved his page so I can study up. Also, my dick is bigger than yours and I could kick your ass.
As you're near-sighted, ask your optometris to give you a "near vision" prescription. Such prescription would have lenses that are as weak as possible while still allowing you to see clearly at about arm's length.

Idea being that focusing at things close by requires keeping your ciliary muscle stressed for long periods of time (try to focus on your palm as close to your face as possible, and then keep it there for a few minutes to feel this). Focusing at things far away requires complete relaxation of the eye. If you wear near vision glasses, your screen will hopefully be far enough that your eye is relaxed when focusing on it.

I've been using weak glasses for work for the last 5 years or so, and find it makes a huge difference after a day of coding.
Alt+Shift+Print Screen for those on Windows.

http://www.wikihow.com/Invert-Colors-on-Your-Windows-XP