skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So a short tutorial on how to set up Google Calendar with the holidays and reminders would preempt more of these?
Cities have to bid bye-bye to free Wi-Fi
Coalinga solar plant would also burn manure
Didn't I read the same article back in 1993?

One thing that the article does get right is that people are treated and act like adolescents until their 30's or even 40's and it's now considered socially acceptable (to a point).

But that's a longterm demographic and cultural trend that's been going on since World War II.
5 Million Dollars for a Space Flight | Tech Jaws
Fixed to avoid wrath from Dijkstra and the raptors:

while (true)
1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you
2. Make an interesting comment for that submission
3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment
Here's my count of how well they fixed the "places for improvement" Steve mentioned in the keynote:

1. (3G) Done, though the other use of 3G they don't have covered is multimedia. (Their ad copy for the iTunes store still instructs you to "find a WiFi hotspot".)

2. (Enterprise) Done.

3. (Third Party Apps) More or less done, although there are a few capabilities missing: scheduled reminders; playing sound in the background (for music player-type apps).

4. (More countries) They're doing it at an entirely reasonable pace.

5. (More affordable) Cutting the down payment by $200 does not "more affordable" make. With $10 more a month for a 3G plan, you end up forking over more cash than before over a two year period.
Yeah, big spikes in traffic often equals more customers. But not always. If you screw up the demographic data in an advertising campaign you just get clicking monkeys who likes to install spyware.

People like my software, but are probably bored to tears by my web presence. And therefore I get very few comments on my blog. I was hoping for more info so I can tune my software. Maybe I have to build in some social stuff into the main website ?
I'm talking about my blog. I have one blog + sign up process for my paying customers. I don't have the server capacity to go free. I sell software btw. I'm trying to give my customers something extra by offering web login, license control, bookmarking, whois, search, etc. It is probably way to boring though.

The blog thing is great. It has tripled my traffic and 25 percent of incoming users are now from search engines.
Another "everyone in the same age group is the same" post.

All boomers are...

All Gen Xers are...

All Gen Yers are...

Yeah, right.

This is just an excuse for lazy journalism (is there any other kind any more?)

Would have been nice if the author dug a little deeper to try to understand why none of the 7 people answered the phone. To his credit, he brought up several good points:

"They’re trained to work in teams — in school, in extracurriculars"

My theory (even though I'm no more qualified than anyone else):

For many young people, playing on a sports team has replaced the part time job. There was a time when you had to work if you wanted a car, insurance, or money for college. Not so necessary now.

Responsibility to one's teammates has replaced "getting the work done". I have always thought that real responsibility is learned "on the job". Delay work, delay responsibility.

Even in this community, there's a tendency to try to solve problems in our own little vacuum. Here's what I think... I read somewhere... Things oughta work like... As a hacker, I'm just as guilty as anyone else; it's so easy to try to "think" things through.

Then I stop and say, "Find a customer." (Or find a job.) Once you have to really serve others in need, the "issues" cited by the OP melt away.
http://www.anybots.com
It's hard to compare generations, as you are inevitably comparing observations on the current generation with memories about previous generations.
Memories are always distorted by the passing of time.
This article is about the iPod touch, not the iPhone guys (serhei , dougp). The touch is not the new XP. XP was superceded by Vista whereas the touch and the iPhone are two distinct products.

I expect features from the new iPhone to slowly get rolled into the iPod touch (i.e. GPS) but not any time soon, so as not to steal the iPhone's thunder. The usual apple market strategy of changing a product or two slightly every six months will ensue.
If that was the case, why weren't there 100 other applications that looked just like Campfire prior to its release?
I know we've seriously beaten this dead horse, but where is the line between "new business" and "start-up" these days. It would seem to me that everything is being called a "start-up", when in fact, many are just new businesses. I would not call either the bakery or the t-shirt company a start-up, as they are not using technology to take a novel approach to an existing market (or create a new market), nor is the technology really that central to what they are trying to do. One is hoping to set up an online store (hard in the "specialty / gourmet" food world) and the other is trying to market a t-shirt line. These are new businesses, not start-ups (by my definition).

The RentingYourHome guy is definitely a start-up and I feel for him as he seems to be hitting all the standard challenges (too little cash, co-founder leaving, trouble getting/keeping customers). This actually seems like it could be a compelling service, but the actual property owners are a hard group to reach (ie: they are not all farting around online all day) and convincing them that they can do it all online feels like a very, very tough task.
My system is not very open. I get 100 000 spam comments on my blog per year. A thousand or so get through the automated defense system. So people who comment don't get a fluid conversation.
DZone whines about this problem every day now :)
A quote I bring up whenever I deal with job interviews where it's obvious the employer likes effort more than results:

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." - Larry Wall
The iPhone Eyes BlackBerry's Turf
Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise
Looking at Apple's business with the music labels and now with the carriers, they seem to have taken "Where there's muck, there's brass" to heart (thanks, Paul). Their business model seems to be cleaning up the muck, first in music and now in telephony.

I expect an ongoing struggle between Apple's philosophy (simple, straightforward products and pricing) and their partners' philosophies (pay for a song, pay for a ringtone from that song, pay for the bits to move the song over the air, pay for the bits to move the ringtone over the air, system acccess fees, &c.)

Oh wait, I forgot: and what you pay differs depending on whether "over the air" is wifi or 3G. Muck indeed, Apple has an Augean task ahead of itself.
RestyleMe - a great style advice website has been launched
Many universities and organisations in India are gearing towards outsourcing legal talent based on UK/US law and it seems only a matter of time before we see a boom in this area.

This is occurring in both ends of the market from the personal-injury no-win-no-fee farms to the high-end specialist areas e.g. trademark law, intellectual property, copyright law, patents, company law etc.

Initially, outsourced legal may start out as something that sucks (and initially do low-level/menial work), but over time will improve with each iteration/cycle to the point where legal outsourcing in India will be able to match its technology outsourcing model and actually be a viable option for US/UK companies.

For many years I have thought a country like India is very well suited to outsource many service-based models in fields other than I.T. which require little physical asset (i.e. hardware and manufacturing cost) and rely more on intellectual talent and in this respect I think the guy may been on to something with the legal services aspect.

However, as is a common reason for startup failure, his timing may be off. It seems the markets in the US/UK are not ready just yet. Just my $0.0000002.
Whatever happens, Mr. Foley added, “she’ll have gained a better business education than she could at the Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard Business School combined.”

Another great example of choosing a start-up over more formal education. If all else fails, you got the education anyway.
WWDC 2008 Apple Design Award Winners
+1 Does that make me a "raptor"?
Validanguage 0.9: automated form validation
if you get the math in Norvig/Russell's AI text, and the 2 leading Natural Language processing texts (Jurafsky/Martin and Manning/Schuetze) you'll be golden.

Hot off press , 3 week old
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/slp2.html

even hotter
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...

data mining: there's a few good books, look at Amazon reviews (Han/Kamber, Witten/Frank, the one i have:

and a pretty accessible / non-dense intro, Programming collective intelligence
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/
"Branching and merging in git, though, are wonderfully, blissfully straightforward."

That is a lie (or at best something like Stockholm Syndrome). Nothing in git is straightforward, let alone blissfully so.
Well, init and clone are straightforward -- the only porcelain that git actually has, as far as I can tell.
Yes and no (is there ever any other answer?)

I enjoy unit testing when it all lights up green and I'm doing TDD. What I don't enjoy is retrofitting unit tests to my code. Time spent debugging the unit tests themselves (when I know the code is ok for at least a small value of "working") always feels frustrating and wasteful.

I find that TDD doesn't work well for exploratory programming where I'm feeling my way around a new library, or trying to work out a satisfactory architecture for a new component.

It's well worth it for future maintainability but certainly sometimes it is a chore.
interesting that, not only did i take a really huge hit in karma for a joke, that my other recent comments also went down uniformly as well, in what appears to be retaliation.

thats pretty lame. i guess no jokes allowed on YC, even (imo) good natured ones.
How Crocs Rakes in Revenues From Ugly Shoes
They may have been up, but the site was DEADLY slow. Was hard to do anything from the site (I have twhirl, but not at work)
Do we have any numbers on iTouch sales so far? The plan on the iPhone 1.0, was on the expensive side, but I still assume that its adoption rate was higher than the iTouch(based on the fact that I know people that have iPhones but no one that owns an iTouch).

I just don't see the added value of the iTouch if there is no phone, and city wide(let alone nation wide) free wifi hotspots are still not realized, because there is no guarantee of connectivity.
i've not actually taken a good hard look at this before, but i've heard good things about iceberg:

http://www.geticeberg.com/
blogs will definitely do that.

there are tons of great resources for blogging that will give you ideas on how to get participation on your posts.

i'd suggest checking out problogger or something similar for ideas.
www.everyblock.com

I can't wait to see how far they progress towards very ambitious goals. Definitely seems like they've got the team to succeed. Also can't wait until they roll out to other cities.
It's cheaper than sugar water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
The first job I had after college, I remember playing around with my company's online commerce software. I found out I could enter a negative number of items to purchase and my total cost would be negative. Or, I could buy 1.537 dresses.

Amazingly, no one else knew this. (That probably should have been a big red flag for me.)
I couldn't agree with that more. College has a great social life and allows you to mature. But starting a site on the side tought me more then 3 years of school.

But one thing that bothers me, shown by this article, is why everyones uninspired first business idea is either selling t-shirts or restaurants? Probably the worst two industries to chose with their low barriers of entry.
http://www.unfuddle.com

They have an amazing product and keep adding new features (e.g. recently added git support!). Awsome customer service, a person responded to my feature suggestion within 12h.

Most importantly they have a good business model. Most startup's see a problem that needs solving and solve it with no regards to how to make money from it (ad revenue will not make you a millionarie unless your google!). They will ultimately fail. I like companies which actually have a little bit of business acumen and can actually find ways of making money from their product. 37signals is another company that does this well
So you are leveraging the meta-karma of 37 signals to gain your own karma? Devious.

Sarcasm duly noted.
Who sets global crude oil prices?
/signed

great strides in general science and math inspire me more than startup companies. space travel, deep ocean exploration, etc..

i'm a fans of some startups, but i don't think thats the same as inspiration.

the only exception, i think, is the inspirational kick in the pants you get when someone sells their company and gets rich or reaps some other type of reward/recognition and you think to yourself "i thought of that three years ago!" or somesuch. really makes you want to get out there and innovate.
funny, i know several people with the touch, myself included, but few with the iphone. fwiw, i already have a phone and don't like at&t (verizon seems to have much better coverage and it's cheaper), but find it useful to have an ipod with a browser. then again, i live in boston, so i don't have too much trouble finding hotspots.
ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
This is just about the coolest post I've seen in a while. I use a pretty wide spectrum of these (and had no clue that "tick" and "back-tick" were only rarely used). I just wish I had this when I wrote my punctuation limerick (http://www.limerickdb.com/?418).
Stumbled upon this while checking out the blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgQO_kHl39g&fmt=18

Very impressive. The features in Dr. Scheme make for an excellent teaching environment, but look like they would work well for a working programmer, also.
A vulnerable business if there ever was one. Between their patent woes and cheap knock-offs from China, I wonder where they'll be in 2 years.

Thanks, but I think I'll stick with IT.
At least these posts are more useful than some of the other stuff that's made the front page recently. The only way I know it's fathers day is from the ads on the radio, and even then I can usually only narrow it down to within a week or so.
I don't even see the code anymore; just blonde, brunette, redhead...

(In all seriousness, the karma number quantifies the approbation of your peers; and a good reputation is highly valued by most people--and rationally so, I'd say).
I've watched the video, but was not convinced. I might risk a second look.
"They nailed down their supply chain. Crocs purchased the supplier of the resin for the shoes and the factories that make Crocs. They also signed contracts with key retailers."

How does this ensure success? Sure, it ensures that they have complete control over their ability to deliver a product, but that has nothing to do with being able to SELL it.

Not criticizing, just curious.
For anyone reading this w/ a .NET/C#/Visual Basic bend, NUnit is one of the big unit testing tools (and yes you get the big green bar [or you aspire to]). VS2008 has unit testing built in.
I have no experience with lisp or scheme, but reading the new tutorial on their website was such a beautiful introduction to programming, and then I looked at the source code for the tutorial and was blown away at the level of simplicity and sophistication they have achieved.

So why have I never heard of PLT Scheme? Why isn't it popular?
Fastest way to work, too, since you figure out in advance specifically what you're trying to accomplish. It helps avoid YAGNI syndrome (http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html)!
Get offa my lawn!
WTH's a shandy?

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

lol - beer-flavored lemonade? Silly Europeans ;)
US still leads the world in science and technology
While that response is interesting, it actually missed the point of the question: what is a good, single source to point someone to who needs to design a DSL?
Now that is really great. Can't wait!
Google: There’s no 'Evilmeter'
If you lived in Vermont, where (last I knew) you still cannot get an AT&T wireless signal anywhere in the state, you might think differently.
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC3 Released
Firefox 3 (Release Candidate 3) fixed this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436575
Only relevant to Mac users.
This sort of thing is an old, old sport.

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/hesiod/

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

~700 BC
Smart pill creator wins technology prize
Thanks. What do you think of Trac?
I wish people would talk about "people" instead of senseless "generational" gaps. Although of course you are going to be shaped by common experiences of your generation (let's say 9/11, Iraq War, etc. for my generation) and the social (gay rights, black/woman potential president, etc.) and technological changes (grew up with computers and the internet) that are occurring during your time period, you are shaped much more by your friends, parents, education, life experiences, location, and realistically the socio-economic status you were born into.

Some PEOPLE are confident. Some PEOPLE are not. Maybe it's just because I happen to attend a top university that is highly competitive, but I don't commonly see this lack of confidence. Although, at the same point as a generation gets older and matures in it's occupational field, of course it is going to become more confident.

People = People. We are much more alike than we are different. That's what makes classics, classics throughout centuries not just generations. It's because they relate to all PEOPLE.
Interesting I would pretty much like to try out Opera. But being a VIM addict FF comes with the excellent Vimperator plugin. Any of you guys know of a similar plugin for Opera?
Facing South (towards Rt 12), standing at the highest point overlooking Silver Lake in Barnard - I can get 1 bar with my iPhone - barely. Yes, AT&T's coverage is essentially non-existent in VT. When I'm up there though, this is a positive ...
App Store has size and price caps, opening with iPhone 3G
I actually enjoy writing unit tests _because_ I'm lazy :).

When I write a piece of Ruby code, I have a choice: I could either write a unit test or load the code into IRB and manually test it (or even load the real app and test the code in there).

For me, doing it manually is often more work. Let's say I have five tests in my head. My code passes the first four, but fails the fifth. After I fix the bug I found, I have to manually go back and test all five behaviors again. Unfortunately, my code often has more than one bug, so this process can take awhile. Once my code passes the tests, I always run the real app to make sure there are no bugs in my tests.

Plus, for me, writing code is just more fun than doing tedious manual testing, even if it takes a little longer initially.

As with everything, there are exceptions. If I'm fixing bugs, I tend to have a TDD approach, but if I'm doing exploratory programming, I tend to not write tests until the code is pretty stable. It's also hard to unit test GUI code, so think about the expected return on your time investment.

One thing to keep in mind: tests are more fun to write (and more importantly, more effective) as you get better at them. Writing tests is an art unto itself - just because you write good production code doesn't mean you'll instantly write great test code. It takes practice.

I sometimes hear people say, "Unit testing takes too time to write and maintain!" While there will always be some costs, I've found that as I've gotten better at writing tests, those costs have gone way down, while the benefit has gone up.
It does make it harder for me to completely throw out older versions, but it makes it way easier for me to refactor my old version into a better new version (which I think is often more productive than just starting from scratch)
GamerDNA Platform Launch: Profile Aggregator for Gamers?
Are you a FeedBurner Fool?
Methinks that someone is jumping the gun. Yes, AT&T has "raised" the price of their wireless plan... but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, since the new plan is 3G and the old one is not.

Now, if you want to argue that 3G isn't enough of an improvement to be worth the premium price, I'll hear you. I have no experience, myself, so I have no idea. I will note, though, that Apple has thoughtfully discounted the iPhone 3G to the point where the TCO over two years is within $30-$50 of what it has been. So even if 3G turns out to be nearly worthless, I'll only be paying about $3 extra per month over two years.

As for AT&T putting me over a barrel and raising their rates... I wouldn't put it past them, but it would surely be a very stupid move, calculated to ensure the loss of a double-digit percentage of their customers. And can they do that during my contract? Cell phone contracts may be drawn up by Mephistopheles and signed in blood, but they are contracts, and I'm pretty sure that threatening to unilaterally raise prices will invalidate them.
I don't think the WiFi coverage in VT blankets the state either, making that iTouch browser a little less useful.
Holy cow. Firebug is the most complicated, counterintuitive web tool I've ever seen, and Dragonfly is even worse? I almost wonder if it's built for a different brain structure, and I'd find it comprehensible and coherent.
Google CEO talks of good, evil and monopoly fears
USB 3.0 for the masses - Dispelling the myths.
How Much Radiation Does Your Phone Emit?
iPhone 3G's True Price Compared
She has built her cafe to $8,000 in revenue a week

= 416,000/year revenue.

Whole different world, I guess. It's completely possible to have an online business for a few $1000/year in costs. And yet this woman isn't turning a profit yet on nearly 1/2 a million in revenue.
A Flashy Facebook Page, at a Cost to Privacy
Apple putting PA Semi talent to work on iPhone chip
You've touched on a very deep topic, people have been trying to make programming simpler and more 'intuitive' since the beginning.

And occasionally someone succeeds in making small limited improvements in specific areas; usually by heavily constraining choices available to the user/programmer. But widespread and general improvements are few and far between; the rise of loosely typed scripting languages being the main one in the last twenty years.

Programming is in some sense one of the most unnatural things a person can do; and this is made worse by the accumulated layers of cruft of 40 years of computer culture that both limit and enable what we can do today.
SecondBrain Official Launch: Q&A with Founder Lars Teigen
I present to you, the best of the best...

$ - Big Money

% - Double-O-Seven

& - Pretzel

{} - Left Squirrely, Right Squirrely

; - Weenie

# - Pigpen

Anybody work in a startup using solely the above vocabulary? Power to you.
That quote is often trotted out but all it actually means that is at some point in history, people thought that the kids of today are soft. It doesn't imply any continuity between that thought then and the same thought now.
500 bucks for a 32GB iPod touch? Damn I can get an EEE PC for that price, install windows xp on it and have everything the iPhone has, xept I can plug DVDs into it.

This is pure insanity.