skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a thought about Boston. I live in Boston and it definitely is as described, though I have heard that it (especially Cambridge) bloomed culturally more when overgentrification was prevented by rent control. To the extent that there still are some good independent cafes and lots of good bookstores, and interesting events, Boston/Cambridge is certainly the type of place you could expect to strike up a conversation about some arcane technical or cultural topic with people you don't already know. This happens on a fairly regular basis. Another thing worth mentioning though is that the Boston/Cambridge area is a lot smaller than people who have not lived here would expect. It is socially small in that you run into people you know all the time, and it doesn't have the anonymity that New York does for that reason as well. Geographically it is also very small. As pg says, MIT and Harvard are adjacent, this is true (literally a short 5-10 minute walk along the Charles River), but consider also that my typical bike ride from Jamaica Plain to Cambridge is only 15-20 minutes. And Jamaica Plain is a southern/western suburb (actually officially part of the city proper), almost as far south as you can go before hitting the shore (Dorchester is further south), while Cambridge is directly North of the heart of Boston. Similarly my western-leaning home of Jamaica Plain is 30 minute ride to the far eastern community of Charlestown. The point of bringing this is up is to note that cultural millieau of Cambridge is present in the whole area, even if strongest in Cambridge. The same kinds of events that happen in Cambridge occur all around the area, which is not surprising considering that everything is so close geographically.
Technically asymmetric warfare is such that you are only trying to kill civilians.
And what makes you think you don't have 6.25% after 40 hours? When I stop consuming caffeine it takes couple of days for the effect to wear off. Did it twice so far - I'm ususally off caffeine but let it slide during vacations.
If there is an industry that interests you, go to a few trade shows in that industry space, you can meet the key companies, see demos of all the latest things, learn the lingo and so on.

Most professional trade shows aren't cheap (expect to pay 500-3000 dollars) but they are probably the most time efficent way to get to know a new industry.

This also works great as a creativity boost, learning about different problems and different solutions can generate a ton of new ideas for your domain problems.
"Half-life" by biological elimination is not precisely exponential as with radioactive decay, and may trend closer to a linear process -- as in, your liver can eliminate X units per hour, not X% of however much you've had.

Thus the (informal) "half life" of one cup of coffee could be 4 hours, but two cups could be 8 hours, and so on.

(To the extent I can track the estimates of "3.5 to 6" or "5.7" hours of caffeine half-life back to original sources, it looks like the studies were done in 1978 and 1980. Maybe modern caffeine consumption has moved to a level where linear rather than exponential elimination dominates?)
Lurid and uninformed as well.

This is pure speculation with the some definition of terms.
not that i know the actual equation that seth is using, nor do i have knowledge of the values of the variables he's using...

i'm pretty sure that betting on being successful as a "devito" is much like betting on a long shot at a horse race.

i'd rather bet on the field. lower payout, but way better odds...

peace
I agree with you, but I don't think it invalidates the OP's question. There are dozens of topics in computing I could learn right now that I would be interested in, and I think pretty much every HN reader could say the same. If some of those would help their career and others wouldn't, I don't think it would be fair to blame them for learning the one that would help their career.
Would you consider this government job if you were me?
I give you, Boston Dynamics BigDog Robot ... aka the Army Mule: http://youtube.com/watch?v=mpBG-nSRcrQ

Check out the related video for more gas powered mule fun.
PG recently suggested that just going back recovers the composed comment. However, here's a reasonable sequence of events which, in Firefox, causes unrecoverable loss of a submitted reply:

(1) open the 'reply' link in a new tab

(2) compose the reply

(3) submit, getting the 'unknown of expired link' error

(4) go back -- you still have your comment, but...

(5) hit reload, figuring that will refresh your reply form's fnid validity -- after all, this works when commenting at an article's top level

(6) get the "unknown or expired link" error now on the reload, with no place to go further "back" to, and "forward" just leading to the same error. Your comment is unrecoverably lost.

I'm now in the habit of a textarea "select-all, copy" before ever hitting a submit button at News.YC. Thus, I can reclick a path from a fnid-less URL to a new reply box if necessary. But that's a pretty user-hostile workaround to expect of people.
Widget Distribution Network/Issues
hi.

trying to craft a strategy as to how to contact websites/owners to have a conversation about creating a revshare partnership for a widget that would essentially be an advertising play.

the project is embryoinc, but at the point where this issue needs to be addressed.

really looking for actual contacts at the biz.dev/owner level of sites that would be useful (win-win) partners. my network is lacking in having these people in my rolodex!

thoughts/comments/ideas as to how to move forward are appreciated.

thanks

-bruce
bedouglas@earthlink.net
I know all of the arguments. Saving American lives etc. They sound good. I love robotics but I still recoil at the thought of first-world technological giants deploying semi-autonomous, or ever fully autonomous machines to kill vastly outmatched humans in third world nations at no risk to themselves. It just begs for abuse. If not now, certainly in the future.
Disqus' new office [video]
An Inside Look at How we got TechCrunched
The Sky Is Falling
It only goes to show work relationships in general should not be set in stone. It's the basic rule of fiability... if each has a 40% chance of failing, the pair has only 35% chance for success. Ergo, prepare for your partner's failure just as you would for your own, or more.
It'd be just like the last five centuries. Robots would be the new guns. Not that that's good, but it sure isn't new.
video here: http://www.theatlantic.com/movies/rocks/
Whatever you pay for the licence, you don't get to modify the code (unless I'm misunderstanding what "no-derivative" means). That's what "de-excited" me about it.
Ask HN: Sales strategy for a custom software startup
We're 6 month into a custom software startup. The business model is simple: make from scratch a software for a medium company, develop constantly and charge monthly. It worked great for me as a freelancer (and for my customers as well) and I'm trying to scale it together with an investor (former customer who got rich).

The technical side is ok, in about 6 month we have a good team and a couple of more apps. Last month we really started to look for new customers, but it goes a lot more slowly then expected. We have two big problems: First is the way we approach a new client - I dislike spam in any way and most things we can try are email/phone/snail mail spam. Also they don't work very well. The other is the difficulty of explaining the concept. Some like both the idea of custom software and of selling is as a service, but most find them too foreing.

Any ideas on future sales strategy?
I have to hand it to them, knowing their oil wealth will eventually be depleated, building 'world wonders' such as this and the borge etc is a stroke of genius.
Parsing Strings With jQuery
For all non open-source projects it makes sense to have a no-derivative works license. You would be putting yourself out of business without it.

Awesome script, I'll definitely be using it in some projects.
Full Disclosure and why Vendors Hate it
Well no, asymmetric warfare is any warfare where the two parties differ substantially in strength. In Iraq at the moment, for instance, we're trying to kill the enemy while the enemy doesn't seem to care whether they kill our soldiers or random civilians, but it would remain asymmetric even if the enemy would be so kind as to restrict themselves to trying to kill our soldiers.

Unless you're saying that the enemy in Iraq counts as "civilians" because they're not part of any proper and recognized army, but that's a rather point-missing definition of "civilian", since the defining characteristic of a civilian is whether they're engaging in combat.
I understand your concerns but I'm also generally against holding back technological progress as a way to slow down the roadmap to the inevitable bad things that will result alongside the good ones.
It sounds to me like joining an open source project fits those goals far more than joining a startup does.
Zivity has had a "scalability guru" since day 1: http://zivity.com/about
I agree that it makes sense to prohibit the distribution of modified copies, but it is usually better to let people modify the software as long as they keep those modifications internal.
Alcohol induces wakefulness in the second half of sleep, so this is a bad idea. (There are many sources on this. I found http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/alerts/l/blnaa41.htm in a quick search.)
I know of two things that help. One is exercise, which lots of people have mentioned here. The other is meditation. My brother-in-law suffered badly from insomnia for years and says it made the biggest difference out of all the things he tried.
I've had access to alcohol since I was really small, but I never saw much in it. When I got to US to go to college, everyone was crazy about alcohol...it was really weird. To me, it was like seeing adults go to chuck e cheese every day.
Building great universities and the free and open societies necessary to support them would be an even better plan.

Cambodia has world wonders. Singapore doesn't.
So far so good. Can you provide more info in what you built in terms of framework and tech? Thanks.
Yes. But why use ad hoc solutions?
Perhaps they do not know. They just happened to have survived because they had an (unfounded?) bias against contact.

Like genes that do not know anything - but appear selfish.
"The enemy?" You mean the people whose country we invaded?
xPad is free and awesome for Mac OS X.

http://getxpad.com/
They really help with some problems - especially snoring room mates. But they are not a cure-all.
That boring? ;)

Edit: Actually the linked article seems quite interesting.
Ask HN: Fink or Macports?
I've been using Ubuntu for several years (2006) and have grown really accustomed to having all my favorite (open source) software easily installable (django, mysql...etc)

I've recently started playing around with a Mac (Leopard) and I'm rather un-impressed with both Fink and Macports (compared to apt-get with Ubuntu repositories). However, I'm willing to accept that this is because I haven't gotten used to things.

So I'm asking the HN community: Which do you prefer, and why?
In the interests of keeping extremely boring politically-charged semantic arguments away I'll resist the temptation to reply to that one.
It looks like there is some research leading to fixing sleeping problems by simply changing your eating habits. I dont personally know how easy it is to implement these ideas.

http://parentingsquad.com/easy-way-to-reset-your-sleep-cycle...

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=32333
Also, not starting small and iterating will add significant time. If you constantly feel like you just need to add one more thing before it's perfect for launch it's going to take forever.

Come up with a subset of the features you ideally want to have and focus on those so you can launch earlier, then iterate based on your other ideas AND user feedback.
At some point robots will be mainly designed to fight other robots rather than humans. Which is a welcome development, if indeed humans will be allowed only to watch the fight from the sidelines.
Ok article, if fairly superficial, except for point 4. Advocating that someone should write something as changeable as a startup product without any unit tests is just plain bad advice.
Two comments, one personal, one theoretical.Personally, as a geek and physics major turned military officer, specifically spending my last 18 months in the fleet doing force protection planning and ops,now a father, 3rd year med student, and homeowner in New Orleans, I can't conceive of a war these warbots could win. They can only start and continue violence. They can't build homes, mend communities, teach children or care for the sick and injured. They can't stock shelves or forgive debts. These war bots appeal to young men who have not yet faced physical adversity &military & political leaders too far removed and too surrounded by military contractors. Would you want your family to face these machines? I disagree with the claim that force protection is a valid basis for bots. Thebots don'tprotect the troops. They continue violencethey can't stop. Every bomb dropped leaves more work for soldiers on the ground and increases the hostility of the local population toward those troops. Those troops are your friends, neighbors, sons and daughters.

If code is law, what codable theoretical concept can society use to stop young men and the leaders of the military-industrial complex from killing us all in a scorched earth search for a technological solution to war? The concern most have expressed here boils down to moral hazard, the same concept employed to curb bailouts of housing speculators and big companies. In both the bot and bailout cases, moral hazard has been gradually removed from the decision-making process. In finance, computing power, a credible objective(profit), gimicks, and the failure of regulators to keep pace with their charges, made it possible for the actors to get into the problems they now face. In the military-industrial complex the case is more extreme:massive computing power, a credible objective (less danger to our troops (they thought)), and a complete abdication of regulatory responsibility, and exceptionally simple regulatory basis (can't get much simpler than the five bases of jus ad bellum). How to put lot more moral hazard back into the equations?
Yes, OTC Melatonin is not regulated by the FDA, mainly due to the lack of studies on its long-term effects.

If you were going to try it, go for a low dose. Try 300 micrograms [1]. Most stores sell a minimum dose of 1 milligram, but you can find the lower dose stuff on Amazon.

1. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/melatonin.html
Both and neither. On a case-by-case basis, I will do some light google research on the experience of the mac-unix community for that particular package. Sometimes either the fink or ports release is recommended over the other, sometimes a stand-alone installer has been made, and often I just choose to compile from source. The decision is usually based on factors including latest version available (fink and ports are not always up to date), reported stability, dependencies (I might already have some of the dependencies obtained by one particular method), etc. If the choice was just between fink and ports on their merits alone, I slightly prefer ports, but that is probably a religious decision (a la vi vs emacs, etc...).
Ask YC: To Hack or Not to Hack?
I got a phone call this past week from a good pal of mine.

He and an associate of his are looking to have a website built. A directory of sorts for local businesses. Due to a confidentiality agreement that's about as much as I can say, but it's going to be a massive project.

My team of 4 is excited about it, and rightfully they should it looks like it could be a great challenge for all of us, both in production and infrastructure demands.

After performing a project analysis, it became quickly evident that this is going to be a very expensive deal for him. This isn't just a glorified business card website "this is our company, call this number and buy our stuff" situation, and I somewhat fear he and his partner's commitment to this idea may be less than great once they see the costs and responsibilities on their end. This is completely unfounded, but from the rhetoric and context they explained what they wanted, I don't think they completely understand the magnitude of what they're asking for in terms of actually putting together such a website.

We have a ball park estimate produced, as well as a few slides detailing some of the avenues we plan to take in making this site happen that will be presented this coming Monday. All of this said, after alerting him of the possibility that prices will be high, and he may need to seek support from outside investors, would it be wise to continue with this project? As I said my speculation that this project may be over their pay range is completely unfounded, but not unlikely.

(It kind of brings this image to mind: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/38/80500328_2cf369deb4_o.jpg)
How are you supposed to know a person's Myers-Briggs type, when you're trying to understand that person's behavior? It's not exactly listed on the nametag. So the best you can do is infer it from what you already know of that person. But if you already know so much as to be able to infer it, you can understand/predict that person's behavior without resorting to any pigeon-holing.
I feel MacPorts has a better design conceptually, but having used it for the past few weeks, I feel the execution isn't quite there yet. I also get the feeling that the team is very slow on MacPorts.

Fink uses a dpkg/apt-like system, which means binaries are pre-compiled for you. So you lose in flexibility (which is why I feel ports has a better design), but I suspect (having not used it in a while nor for long) that the team is better.

There's also Gentoo Prefix which has ported Gentoo's Portage over to other OSes, including OS X. They're pretty good, but lacking in package selection. I ported over at least a dozen packages in the 2-3 weeks I used them (it's 1-3 commands in 85% of the cases).
I can see where the author is coming from with Point 3 (Don't build a framework or library). In fact, I personally suffered from the problem of spending time on a framework when I really should have just been building the application, but that was partly because it wasn't my application and the framework was more interesting. But that's a different story....

So I do agree that rolling your own framework right from the start is probably a bad idea, but I wouldn't say the same for a library. A library is much-smaller-scale than a framework. In general, a well-built module in your program can likely be converted to a more general-purpose library with just one small iteration (in my experience at least). This should be especially true if you only generalize the functionality that you're currently using and avoid adding every function/method that you will ever possibly need.

The benefit of building a library is that once you do, you can consider that part finished for a long time. You can build a little test that checks the library's edge cases while also serving as a good example of how to use your library (it's always good to have simple code to refer to in 6 months). And if the library isn't too proprietary, you can throw it up on a public-facing server, where you can both help others and have a decent chance of receiving good feedback (if not patches) for better algorithms, bugfixes, or additional helpful functionality that others have implemented.

Specifically if you're working in a language that you will use for the majority of your projects, having a collection of personal libraries is invaluable. You will have this wonderful repository of functionality that you're already intimately familiar with, and instead of having that nagging feeling that you're re-coding something that you've done in the past, you will be able to go back and use a solid piece of tested code with very little effort expended on (re-)learning an API.
One of the problems with all these systems is that they don't identify which software components are already installed on OS X by Apple natively, and to use those for dependencies when possible. So you wind up with two Perls, two Pythons, two Rubys, etc., each with slightly different versions...
A Letter to Facebooks Founder
very, very good article, most shocking was that the US Air Force is currently the #2 space agency in the world (in funding)
Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies
i just went through the process and decided on macports for setting up two machines. it worked fine for the basics (installed mysql, apache, python, git, etc). fyi: in both cases, i received an error installing py25-mysql, but re-issuing the port command a second time did the trick.

one possible reason for picking macports is that there seem to be more people blogging about their experiences with it, so if you run into issues, you might be more likely to find some help online.
yeah, great, 'Why isn't NASA doing more about this?'
Let's blame an underfunded agency whose government won't give them enough to accomplish what they ask of them (remember how we're suppose to go to mars sometime?). NASA is doing great things with little funding it has, so let's not forget how expensive space travel/exploration/intra-sol magic really is. The agency is pretty much controlled in what it does by government directives, how can we blame them for not being able to pursue every space plan?

Plus this article sure does a number on statistical fallacies, 'Even if space strikes are likely only once every million years, that doesn’t mean a million years will pass before the next impact—the sky could suddenly darken tomorrow'

Yeah, great, fear-mongering space object impacts. Remember people: you could win the lottery tomorrow. But you won't.
Easterbrook also wrote a prophetic warning about the Space Shuttle before its first launch, nearly 6 years before the Challenger disaster. [1]

That gives me an extra sense of unease about the dangers he's identified here.

[1] "Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty," April 1980, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/8004.easterbr...
I tried both and, coming from FreeBSD, I was not impressed. I decided to build everything myself and this has so-far been the best solution for me.
Look - the problem with frameworks is that by nature they’re general. But your application is specific.

So by building frameworks or libraries, you have to write a lot more code to cover a lot of use cases, which have nothing to do with your application!

Spoken like a true PHP weenie.

This is why most programming languages are useless; nobody writes any worthwhile libraries. I've found that writing a library rarely affects how quickly I get something done -- solving a general problem and a specific instance of a general problem usually involve the same amount of thinking (and a bit more code). Thinking is slow, and typing is fast... so I wouldn't worry about this being a time sink.

Plus, when you release the library, the other people that happen to use it will start fixing it for you. Now you have people working on your specific problem for free.

Anyway, once you get a culture of library building going, the net result is a huge time savings for everyone in the community.
I got my copy a few weeks ago and I must say that the book is well written and inspiring.
Credit for this is optional. Another way to see obtain a partition of G is to observe that the relation x ~ y if and only if x = y or x = y^{-1} is an equivalence relation on G. The equivalence classes induce the partition above. The point is that any two equivalence classes {x, x^{-1}},{y,y^{-1}} are either disjoint or equal, and their union is G. But this is obvious (the word 'obvious' means "I thought of it.")
If he can pay (and can demonstrate to your satisfaction his ability to pay), what's the downside with going forward? If he can't, he can't, and that's that.

What's the problem?