skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can think of the first thing Google could do in their fight against Apple: set fire to that godawful-ugly demo phone shown in this story. It reminds me very much of all the me-too iPod "competitors." Creative, Dell, et al: "Hey, we can make one of these things cheaper, and with more features!" Then they turn out an uninspiring piece of junk not unlike that google phone, which quickly fades from view.

This popular mechanics story is tone-deaf, which is true of almost all mainstream articles written about Apple. It really amazes me how often the press and Apple's would-be competitors get it wrong. But the comments it has generated here are good, so I voted it up.

Apple customers are not interested in the highest number of features crammed in the ugliest box. They want a device which looks and feels nice. Something that's easy to figure out, that does what you want it to without having to hunt through the manual. Something that makes a nice addition to your life.
He is a Nietzschean superdork for the digital age — a college student who gamed the system, propelled by a primal understanding of how to program computers to serve human needs.

What a bad writer.
Ever notice that famous hackers use old tools?

Most of them are older.

Older hackers get jaded by fads. That's how they develop their taste.

"Who needs that new dinglefanger? We've always used the wingdinggler!"

Studies show older primates don't adopt new technologies thoroughly embraced by the young.

This is the same thing.
you know you're there when you have that many enemies
What is the average age/generation of a HN reader? I'd like to think Gen Y and I'd sure as anything bet they are the most confident of their close group of friends/colleagues. What do you think?

I'm 23 and this continual stereotype of my generation as "clueless" or "timid" is just absurd.
His critique of Kurzweil as exceptionally afraid of dying and that distorting his scientific validity is spot on. Kurzweil is rigid in exactly the same way as a religious person who believes his body literally will live forever. He just identifies his experiential body as information processes instead of flesh, and has a mythic-technical, instead of mythic-poetic, or mythic-conventional, approach to the details of his eternal life. He's a priest, not a scientist, at least when he speaks about singularity.

He needs to find a buddhist teacher and an LSD dealer to get over his fear of death. He's going to die, his body is going to rot and his greying, decayed, stinking flesh is going to be churned into worm poop, his memory and personality will dissolve, as the thing that observes all that (an is the same behind my eyes as yours, that you can see by considering your self image for a long time, and then asking "if I'm looking at me, what is doing the looking?") discards the used up vehicle and suits up for the next adventure as a different one of these trippy humans, which will have a different set of ultimately illusory relationships with this fact through waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, all before the sun supernovas and destroys every single hint of anything he did with his life, all of which is not only going to happen, but already happening because time is an illusory construct perceived by an illusory ego. The sooner he spends 2 or 3 weeks in a psych word processing that after eating a quarter sheet of acid and screaming about it for twelve hours while burning his retinas out staring at the sun and directly perceiving it, the better off and closer to the truth his community will be.

This critique of AI was a highlight for me. People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.
Seven habits essential for tackling the multitasking virus
New York state
Wow, matasano! I read your blog and I had no idea you were on HN! Unfortunately I live in New York.
Definitely.

Hofstadter, Jack Kornfeld, VS Ramachandran, Alan Watts (at times) (not to start political debate, but Barack Obama)

And for music (what the hell) Phillip Glass, Squarepusher, Tool, Bach, almost any sort of gamelan music, or music with uneven or additive rhythmic structures.
Rent A Coder is a waste of time if you're in a part of the USA with some local high-tech companies you can work at in person.

I got my first UNIX system programing job back in HS in the days when there were lots of little local companies reselling T1 and then later T3 connections using modem pools.

I emailed the CEO and asked for a job. He asked me to write him some perl scripts as a test. I did. He then asked me to come in and talk. I did and after some talking I was hired on the spot.

Find a local, small tech company, contact them and be ready for questions and an in-person interview. If you know your stuff and come across as sane in an interview you'll likely get a job as they know they'll be able pay you in Dew and chocolate covered espresso beans and you'll be happy. (I actually made great money for a HS student and you likely will too.)

Good luck!!!
Business Taxes: Save Money With Section 179
I would describe this piece as criticizing Microsoft's management rather than criticizing Microsoft. The difference may seem subtle to people who dislike Microsoft, but while criticizing Microsoft usually means criticizing what they are trying to do (bully people, monetize other people's R&D, monopolize markets), this author is criticizing their ineffectiveness in doing it.

And he does a really good job of drilling down into detail.
wow this is so useful. kudos =]

My first bookmarklet too, really.
I turned this into a Greasemonkey script for any Firefox users.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/28371

If the author doesn't like it, PM me, and I'll delete this post and the Userscripts.org post.
I say, if you're going to read Hofstadter, read GEB! It's not really a "commitment" if you're interested in what he's talking about. The dialogs in particular are just brilliant and fun to read.

Otherwise I also recommend his "Metamagical Themas" - a collection of all his essays from Scientific American. Here you can skip around, pick out things that sound interesting, and not have to embark on the ~750page journey that is GEB if you don't want to.

I Am A Strange Loop is good, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as some of his other work.
Quite the contrary, thanks for doing it! I used to be worried by the constant security issues when Greasemonkey came out (back in the day). I never got into it and now I use Safari. Do you know if this works under Creammonkey for Safari? I may go install it if it does.
I've done this with a few of my hikes (just the GPS->photo stuff) by cross-correlating based on timestamp. It's not that hard: http://technomancy.us/92
Oow, Eew, Ouch … Yahoo!
I have no idea. All I did really was copy all the Firefox relevant lines out of the functions and if statements, so they'd get executed right as the page loads.
I'm now going to try to get it to work without your web link, so if your website goes down, the script will still work.
If you want any credit, just tell me, and I'll add what I can :)
Battle of the Company Databases: Crunchbase Vs Tradevibes
As far as I can tell, these jobs are all in expensive cities.
Three mistakes your employees should avoid if you get acquired (Humor)
Y'know, I'm a physicist, specializing in quantumy stuff, and I suspect that some form of many-worlds is probably true.

But I don't really like the preachy "Many Worlds is just the way it is, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool" tone of this series of articles. They're actually pretty well written (I'd rate them above David Deutsch's Fabric of Reality, frinstance -- though I don't consider that very high praise), but I recommend taking them with a grain of salt.

Example: We have embarrassed our Earth long enough by failing to see the obvious. So for the honor of my Earth, I write as if the existence of many-worlds were an established fact, because it is. The only question now is how long it will take for the people of this world to update. --- Sheesh, that kind of thing just doesn't belong in any scientific debate.

The domain name bothers me as well. Is it supposed to imply that anybody who doesn't agree with everything written in overcomingbias has simply done a poor job in overcoming their biases?
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/28372

I just modified it so that it would prompt for install when you clicked Install Script. GreaseKit for Safari doesn't have an Install User Script option...work in progress.
oh man, i love this. microsoft is weaker than it's ever been, and it's only going to get worse. better, i mean!

i was working at be when the company went out of business, largely due to microsoft's monopolistic practices. what was left of be even won a small settlement from microsoft on just those grounds.

i wonder if this development means it's almost time for a new round of amigas, ataris, and yes, be's. that was an exciting time to be in the high-tech field, i'd love for those days to return.
WiMax is a giant leap in the field of wireless communication technology. It is capable of covering entire cities.
It is capable of covering entire cities. It provides faster connection for movies, games and other data services than the latest cellular networks. This technology will allow consumers to use a new range of Internet devices. It has the potential to serve from low density residential applications to enterprise customers.
"Not as awesome as Zed Shaw, but close." +1
"I am not looking for high pay, but it should be interesting."

Do you live near a university? If so, check out their job listings, or just contact some professors (email is okay, but dropping in on their office hours or otherwise visiting them in person might work better). They don't have to be CS professors; the interesting programming jobs might actually be in other departments.
This rant has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the company. It is a complaint about the under-performing stock. While I am a believer in the free market, I hardly think that the stock price is the be-all indicator. Let's face it, the stock price is a measure of the speculation of a company. As fashionable as it is to bash Microsoft, it's hard for MSFT to build speculative value. There's nothing that MSFT, with Ballmer or anyone else, can do to bring the wow-factor in this climate.

With MSFT bashing the "in" thing, the personal vendettas of the likes of Neelie Kroes (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/technology/11soft.html), MSFT faces a futile battle if they want to raise the stock price. I applaud MSFT and Ballmer for not giving into Wall St. and foolishly trying to boost the stock price at all costs. I think MSFT is extremely well positioned to be an industry leader.

The other problem is that MSFT has become so diversified, that speculation is difficult since the success of any particular business unit gets diluted on the bottom line. In addition, no one seems to care or pick up on a lot of really great Microsoft successes. For instance, Microsoft’s Health Vault (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/business/10kaiser.html). You can bet that if Apple came out with a program like that, the stock price would shoot up 20% overnight.

In summary, I think MSFT is still a great company that is well positioned and I am happy to have Ballmer at the top. He is a great businessman that understands how the company operates. He certainly doesn't have the charisma and cult-following of Steve Jobs, but I don't think MSFT needs that to do well.
I don't understand what you changed? Can you please elaborate?
Gchat and Yahoo messenger to be interoperable as part of the companies' 10-year ad deal
Direct link to video and slides:

http://sites.google.com/site/io/google-io-sessions
What really annoys me is when I buy a book and the copyright date is listed as the next year. I don't understand how that can possibly be legal.
What about safety, airbags, sensors, etc?
we've been brainwashed to reject the obvious and simple solution. merit-based hiring. have them give examples of the kind of work you'd have them doing at your company.

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

colleges are a form of prestige monopoly.
Father’s Day: A Daughter’s Tribute
I am convinced that one of the most special bonds on earth has to be the one that exists between a father and his daughter. I remember my aunt telling me of the time that my father
saw me for the first time. He saw me for the first time as he waited in the lobby of the maternity hospital; he saw me being carried in a tub all covered in blood and vernix and my aunt often told me about the look of absolute elation on his face when they told him it was a Girl!
I don't really like them either. They're written well enough for one to basically follow along the sentences, and the tone is such that it seems they're really understanding something I'm not. But I looked pretty deeply into these questions. I read the original papers of Einstein Podolsky and Rosen, of Bohr, of Born. I read much of John Bell's original work, and I'm pretty sure that there are results being assumed here (and elsewhere) that haven't really been proven, or were even originally stated.

For example, it's commonly asserted that Bell's theorem rules out any deterministic quantum mechanical description of reality with local hidden variables. But this was, to my knowledge, never shown explicitly by Bell -- he simply ruled out a particular class of local hidden variable theories. There exist theories, consistent with experiment, which are local and deterministic: for what it's worth, a toy example is just a classical computer simulating everything in our universe we've yet seen.

We don't know where the Born probabilities come from, but we also don't really understand the implications of many body entanglement. We don't even have a consistent definition of entanglement for three or more particles. We don't know, we haven't been able to calculate, but I have reason to suspect, that measurement consistent with Born probabilities could be entirely explained by the deterministic axioms already part of Quantum Mechanics. We haven't really gone as far as we could go with them. And already people are treating Many-Worlds as axiomatic. I don't really buy it.
Here's what I'm reading from the story - Mark Z. has an ambition to grow the company as large as the sky, and those around him didn't have the dedication, drive, or capacity to enact that dream.

How do you deal with people who you start with that just don't have what it takes to grow or move the company forward? How do you deal with people who haven't contributed as much work as you have, who don't take initiative to do work on their own, and who don't 'get/grow the idea' as fast as you do? (some of these are gleaned from the article, some I just ask for myself).

Mark Z's actions, if his coworkers were to fall into these categories, are acceptable, and probably the only way to do it properly. And, considering the majority of his coworkers were college students who just happened to be nearby (not hired or specially picked), it is very likely that they didn't have the capicity or willpower to bring the company along as much as Z. did.
Is Scoble really all that big of a deal of a dude? I must be out of touch, man. I thought Adam Curry was the man? :)
Our HQ is in Manhattan. =)
I'll hire you if you know Perl and love it.
Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network
"...it seems inefficient: most of the time is spent on hunting down a manageable project and discussing the problem with the bidder, who usually don't even understand the problem!"

That is how freelance usually works unfortunately. Building a successful freelance business really depends more on how well you can build and maintain relationships with clients than on how talented a programmer you are. You have to learn to educate the client and communicate well.

If I were you, I would try and find a simple project that will allow you to ease your way into the business side of things. Maybe talk with your parents' friends who run small businesses to see if they would like a website?

Managing and educating clients was one thing I wish I would have understood better when I was a senior in high school. I thought I could just get an assignment and code away and get it back to them when I was done, and some of the clients were fine with that because they didn't know any better either.

Also try to be humble. I was cocky then mainly because I was making more money than all my friends. It's hard to learn in that mindset, and business/communication skills can really only be learned with experience.
Redesign A First Step In Bringing Order To The MySpace Chaos
20 Reasons You Fail at Social Media
Social Media for Non-Profits
This is strikingly similar to what the military does with alot of jobs. (Or atleast used to do.) Instead of hiring certain people out of college (Medical Technologists, as an example) they would build an intense training program that would train them for job they needed to do in 16 months or so. Kind-of reminds of of the old ways of training electricians and various craftsman through specialized schools and mentoring.

I love what Zoho is doing with this -- challenging conventional thought and bringing great jobs to people who would ordinarily be over-looked or counted out.
Mass. Blue Cross/Blue Shield signs on to Google Health
Man, this ain't real life, it's only Internet and my name isn't "tx" :) Besides, I lived with my pops in my 20s myself and speaking from experience. (I hated it).
Thanks for the opinions. I might give it a shot.

It looks like you are from Seattle? Me too, send me an email, I work in biotech, and it looks like you might sort of also?
IPhone, iPod Apps worth more then Facebook apps
The Start Conference - One Day Conference on Web Startups in SF
Is anyone here attending The Start Conference? http://www.thestartconference.com/

Seems like an interesting (and cheap) one day seminar focused on web startups. The topics listed are pretty high level but it might help to get insights from individuals who've been through this before. I'm not affiliated with the conf, just thought it was prime Hacker News material.
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But I'm conscious of only one of only being Lefty, or not? If that's true, then for me at least, that behaves like a separate timeline of all others. That's what I meant in the post above: we are only conscious on what happens on a very reasonable timeline. Can this be like this?
I'm 21. I've got significant confidence. I'm also very assertive. Roll those character traits together with my perpetual boredom in class, and I wind up speaking out a lot. Every since high school, I was always the student to speak my opinion first and throw in my 2 cents every chance I got. As a result, I'm not well liked by instructors and some portion of students (typically those with differing views). I'm quite glad I just graduated.

I've made some very unpopular statements in philosophy, government, or similar classes wrought with highly debated topics. In about 8 years of this, not one person has spoken up in agreement with me during class. In fact, I've publicly asked the class "doesn't anyone agree with me?" several times. Not a single hand has ever gone up.

However, on numerous occasions, I have had peers come up to me after class and thank me for voicing an opinion they shared. I can think of 3 reasons for the refusal to do this publicly.

1) Students (or employees) are conditioned not to challenge the views of their instructor (or manager) -- it is in the best interest of their GPA (or career)

2) It seems that there is a expectation that unpopular ideas are held by unpopular people. It is socially safer to keep your opinions to yourself.

3) When someone is in trouble and only one person is there to see it, that person feels compelled to help. When someone is in trouble and there is a crowd watching, it is often far longer before someone steps up to help because no one feels that they are responsible.
Foolish?

Isn't it like, the law, to increase share holder value when you're the CEO? All uncle fester has done is to increase the chair-throwings-to-earnings ratio.
A Style All Their Own
100 Useful Web Tools for Writers
Linda Stone: Is it Time to Retire the Never-Ending List?
I don't want to comment on the story because I really don't care for ads, but I keep wondering why do people think that the result of Microsoft+Yahoo merger would be stronger than two separate companies?

What stops Microsoft from successfully competing with Google starting right now? They freaking OWN 67% of the browser market and 94% of OS market, so they own the address bar and default search setting in nearly every PC sold! How much more leverage do you need???

And yet it's not enough to fight Google off - people keep changing the default search and default homepage setting to http://google.com in every brand-new installation of IE. Why would you want to help that company? And how was Yahoo supposed to help them?

This isn't the auto-industry where mergers help you out with sharing manufacturing plans, part bins, "platforms" and dealer networks. This kind of shit is FREE on the Internet: all you have to do is to build a superior product, it takes seconds for customers to switch.

Message to Microsoft: simply start to innovate again with your engineering, just like you used to against IBM, Lotus and Netscape, forget all that shady marketing BS and half-assed mergers with losers.
I launched a personal project built with Grails a couple months ago. You might want to check it out at http://feedlr.com (which is a mashup inspired by twitterfeed)

IMHO Grails/Groovy is really good stuff that's worth checking out.
Groovy as a dynamic language on JVM is by all means fun to work with compared to Java itself. Also being a Python guy, I don't feel like Groovy is any less fun than Python, the former with more syntactic sugars. Once trying Groovy you won't want to go back to Java any more.
And Grails as a Rails-like framework for the JVM stack is like nothing else in the world of Java frameworks. It's a breeze to live with. And a perfect match for Groovy.

Having said all that, I think the biggest low point for Grails/Groovy now is its community. It's far less mature than the comparable others like Python or Ruby. The G's are like the minorities.

Edit: The framework/language themselves are also still their immature state. It's not uncommon that I find weird bugs caused by bugs of the framework itself.

And if you build your personal project using Grails, hosting is another problem to worry about. There are simply far less choices than Python, PHP, or even Ruby. You have to deploy to the Java stack and there are barely any cheap and usable Java hosting services out there. So I finally landed my project on a VPS at linode.

But the landscape seems to be slowing changing in favor of Grails though. Now mor.ph is providing easy hosting for Grails alongside with Rails.
There's also a blog post on LinkedIn posted yesterday which shares their experience with Grails. It's definitely worth checking out: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/linkedinblog/~3/31010...
Well you do know that 37Signals is distributed across the United States. AFAIK they only have a handful of dudes in the Chicago office.
Haha, I forgot all about that. But Zed would know what to do. So it's true.
If for some reason it isn't immediately obvious to you yet, the answer to your question is "Post this question on Hacker News."
MySpace revamping Web site to help boost usage
How to Prevent Preventable Death
Canadian DMCA is worse than the American one
I use the back of business cards. They're tough enough to sit on, easy to carry and small enough not to write too much.