skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I am far from an authority or expert, but really all it takes is getting a half decent camera with a hand full of manual settings, a half decent tripod and start clicking. Click a lot. Luckily with a digital camera and a 2GB memory card, you can click until your finger is sore and all you have spent is time. You will learn a LOT from doing just this. Play with macros and landscapes, day and night, still and action - just shoot. Load em up in Gimp or Photoshop and go to town (might I suggest playing with Shadows and Highlights (PS) to get some instant gratification).

Since you say that you have been interested for a year, but have not taken the steps to start, I definitely would not recommending running out and snatching up a thousand dollar camera - for all you currently know, you might not like the process as much as you do the idea. I can personally recommend the Canon S3 IS as a decent entry level point and shoot with some nice manual settings for under 300 bones - I bought this camera a couple years ago, so if anyone knows a better comparable inexpensive one, by all means chime in. First thing you will want to do is get the CHDK AllBest hacked firmware and familiarize yourself with it - it lets you do a LOT with the camera that the default Canon firmware will not. As a bonus, it will not hurt your camera or replace your Canon firmware - just turn it back off and on and you are back to normal (see CHDK website).

My next camera will hopefully be a Nikon D300, but I definitely would not run out and grab one as a starter. You want something that has some nice automatic functions as well as the manual options - without this, it will be easy to get discouraged.

Also, a fun thing that will whet your appetite is to grab the aforementioned tripod, set your CHDK settings to take multiple exposures of the exact same thing and load them up in PhotoMatix (Mac/Win) or Qtpfs (Linux - I use this). HDRs can be really fun to work with and you can get some interesting pictures with the modern HDR programs (they do the leg work for the lazy.. coughmyselfcough).

Like I said, I am not a pro, just a dude who likes to take lots of pictures. Get bored, check out some of my pics I am most proud of:
http://flickr.com/photos/mattezell/sets/72157601781859375/
http://flickr.com/photos/mattezell/sets/72157605580120812/
As an example of how it is possible to sell software quickly- in one weekend I built a slideshow tool. only about ~350 lines of code and two months later after it got popular I sold it for $3,000 on sitepoint, domain included.
What about Hardy's collaborator Littlewood, who continued to do excellent research into a very ripe old age?

Hardy was a depressive, and this may have had an effect.

How many of the great mathematicians used Cocaine or amphetamines--not a silly idea, look at how many students use such drugs--to get early success. Recall that Cocaine was LEGAL in the 19th century. Does this explain their early burnout, and the
bipolar depression symptoms ( called repeated nervous breakdowns) of so many of the great mathematicians in the 19th and early 20th century?
You're right that the features he mentioned seemed to not be terribly unique to Lisp.

But note that your claim wasn't really true before Python 2.5 (less than 2 years old). Imagine trying to write one of Emacs Lisp's most common special forms, save-excursion, in Python without context managers.

Even (especially!) Python programmers would admit that Python 2.5 is more powerful than Python 2.4. Emacs has a million lines of Lisp written with this feature not easily emulated in Python 2.4. The Lisp in my Emacs here uses save-excursion 9000 times; is there any Python program in the world that uses context managers 9000 times yet?

I'm impressed that a 20+-year-old language can hold its own with a 21st-century one under active development by somebody willing to (somewhat) break backwards compatibility. That's not to say that Elisp was this great 20 years ago -- it had, what, one kind of loop? -- but macros let it grow in directions that its users wanted. You can't really add editing-specific features with custom syntax to Python.
EMI Music Sues Hi5, VideoEgg and Ten Defendants To Be Named Later
One thing this made me think of is the notoriously badly written voting machine software. I wonder what would be required for someone to compete with existing providers to make better software for voting machines.
Firefox 3 already rules the roost
Interview With the Man Who Could Destroy Photography
US central bank accused of unleashing an inflation shock that will rock financial markets
Obama. Two words: network neutrality. McCain would end network neutrality. I recommend checking out Obama's comprehensive technological plan to open up government to grassroots democratic processes. Also see Lawrence Lessig's arguments for why he supports Obama.
Mommy, Apple’s Being Mean Again
I'm not entirely sure, but as far as I can tell I think that was quite possibly the point of the joke.

Now, I'm just going on out on a limb here in assuming it was a joke. Don't quote me on that.
yes. Zuck, with the athleticism of my grandma, will row in the Olympics
Mind if we see it, if it's still around?
The basis of his argument seems to be a character attack. There is no addressing of science in his argument, just "some people have a motive to lie to you, therefore global warming does not exist". Can't you see the logical flaw in that?
Interesting note on the sidebar: "Although successful I guess, I'm still trying to decide if it was really worth the hassle." His first post goes into a little more detail on this: http://nukemanbill.blogspot.com/2008/05/first.html
14 Bazaar Howtos
My objection is that we as humans don't have the right to dictate what temperature the world is set at. Even if it's more economically beneficial for us to not change our behaviors, it's arrogant to think that our species is the only important one.

I haven't ready the fine details of the economic analysis they've done, but I don't think that they have (or are able to) calculate the effects that warmer global temperatures will have on all species on all parts of the earth. If they have gone into that much detail and still found it more beneficial to let temperatures rise then I wouldn't have an objection.
nice....
Easy. The CEO of your voting machine software company simply needs to drink human blood from the skull of Abraham Lincoln with various heads of state and government officials while they are all still juniors in various secret societies at Yale.
:/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones
Thanks for finding that. I thought this was interesting:

"I used to be really easy, always happy and always laid back as an 8-5'er working for the 'man,' but now I realize I have actually become sort of an asshole. Unfortunately, the realities of business make you that way. And you really have to be an asshole to be successful."

I've heard the same thing from a lot of entrepreneurs and I've sensed it happening to myself as I've gotten more aggressive about pursuing my goals. I'm pretty sure I'm happier, or at least more fulfilled, but sometimes it sucks having to replace that lightheartedness with grim determination.
I think they would calculate the cost of losing a particular species by considering its direct and indirect value to humans. If you think that other species have intrinsic rights and value outside of what uses humans have for them ("uses" includes looking at and enjoying them), then the analysis will not be relevant to you. Neither will most other political/economic calculations made in consideration of almost any other topic.
what do you sell?
>Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway.

This is a widespread, but specious, argument. The cost of moving away from fossil fuels is X% of the world's wealth with current technology and Y% of the world's wealth with technology 20 years from now. If we can expect the world to be richer 20 years from now (a reasonable assumption) and technology to be better (again a reasonable assumption) then Y is probably much less than X. It will be a much bigger sacrifice to make the change today than tomorrow.

The point is, although our economy will probably naturally convert away from fossil fuel technology in the long run, forcing the process to accelerate entails significant extra costs on a significantly poorer world. It is NOT costless, as the phrase "things we should and/or need to do anyway" seems to imply. The argument is simplistic and involves a narrow view of the problem.

I see no valid reason to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources faster than what is already happening in the market.
Feedback Loops: “Just give people a feedback loop and they will relentlessly optimize.”
I thought it was a ballsy move to name it "Wii"
Why Jayme Martin (Nike Americas VP) Rocks
The staff of PUP interviewed 23 Harvard graduates, alumni and faculty, asking each “Why do we have seasons?”...The PUP interviewers found that 21 of the 23 interviewed could not explain why we have seasons, a topic that is taught repeatedly in school

http://cmap.ihmc.us/Publications/ResearchPapers/TheoryCmaps/...

I don't find it strange or alarming. No more than the fact that a dog who has learned to bark on command doesn't automatically know how to kneel on command.

Memory is an odd thing though. I mainly remember why the earth has seasons now (though I always knew it) because I remember the study that I quote above.
From the perspective of the web as a giant brain, this has got to be freaking twitter out. Each time people switch like this, that route becomes better greased. Each time this happens, it becomes easier for the giant web brain to reroute it's signals through friendfeed. Very soon, the equilibrium changes and they don't switch back. It's exactly the process ants use to eat your oreos from your cabinet, and it's exactly how children's brains change from one pattern of behavior to another.

But twitter can't punish the kid or poison the ants to stop people from using friendfeed. Which means that unless they stop this trend right now, the giant internet brain we are all neurons in will basically think twitter out of existence. If twitter does not fix their scaling problems very soon and very well, so to stop this pattern of behavior, it will be alta vistad. (Remember Alta Vista? Neither does anyone else.)

Prediction. Jeff Bezos is going to get screwed on his recent investment. I love Jeff Bezos, but he funded twitter just as it was starting to sink.
Orbitz Open Sources Tools To Manage Large Distributed Applications
Harvard Study Questions "Long Tail" Theory
eval(compile("print 'Hello macro!'",'macro','exec'))
It wouldn't replicate too many copies or it would draw attention to itself and risk an antibody being developed for all the copies.

But we're confusing sentience with logical reasoning. A sentient computer probably won't reason logically automatically. That's a pretty large assumption.
Read http://photo.net/ Most especially the introductory "textbook" and the product reviews. This will give you a decent foundation of basic terminology and available equipment.

I would suggest starting with an SLR camera, even if financing restricts you to getting a film SLR camera. Add a prime lens, possibly 35mm or 50mm. There are pros and cons all over the place, but that's why you should read photo.net. :-)
We saw this today and have already switched over to it. Literally three hours later we are using Graphite for our health and performance graphing needs. It took about 14 lines of Python to hook up to our existing stuff. Awesome.
I can see this messing up current cameras but couldn't the added images just be removed with embeddable postprocessing logic?
From his profile: http://www.wonderwarp.com/
Great read, the author seems very realistic and down to earth. A welcome change from the TechCrunch microverse.
His invisible megayacht bought with his invisible billions right?
I'd rather have more along the lines of linus, rms, and of course our own pg - the kind of hacker that has actually tried to improve things for other hackers in the last three decades instead of trying to hold them back.
Another thing to note when going this route is that word of mouth marketing is INCREDIBLY POWERFUL in a niche market.

If you're in a market where people are paying this much for their software, everyone talks to everyone else (competitors included).

So, you live and die by your reputation.
Well, you're probably correct - while the top 10 political action committees spent about $120 million, gathered from a relatively small donor list, in 2004 to get their version of truth made into law, asking actual voters to spend an entire dollar as some sort of opportunity cost, with the thought that it might be the event that promotes an honesty in online polling, is quite likely simply a bridge too far.
Building a Software Company
There's a serious problem in the market, which is that publicly traded corporations pay the people who run them largely in stock. This gives the people in charge a very short-term view, because their pay is based on the difference in share prices over a short period of time.

What this means is that the market is very poor at long-term thinking and investing (which is why I agree with Andreesen about dual class stock structures). In short (and he sums it up better than I could, so read his article if you want clarification) our market has become very bad at long-term strategizing.
Ask HN: Terminal Literature?
Anyone know of any especially good pieces of literature on some advanced uses of the unix command line, covering stuff like piping, various shortcuts, and other novel tricks? I really dug "Command Line Kungfu" which was posted a while back.
amazing this has no comments. Everyone thinking about starting a company should read it.

Better to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all.
After reading this I went back and read all his other posts. They're very good, and it's excellent to read stuff by someone who's actually done this - i.e. built a profitable software business from scratch.
"Unfortunately for Ventastega, a multitude of toes does not inevitably lead to evolutionary success."
Automated post processing won't work well because it is an arbitrary superimposed image, but the big key here is that it only works for flash photographs. They say that in the article but then drop it. Tourist attractions are generally the wrong scale for flashes to be required. Overblown.
FWIW, I know a large mess of people using Twitter and I don't know a single one who has switched to FF for this (or any other) reason.
You're welcome. Thanks for asking interesting questions -- they provided the excuse to dig into this paper that I downloaded last week but hadn't taken the time to skim yet.

Some people become extremely well informed, and can always argue one level of detail lower that I'll ever be able to do.

The trick is to learn to tell the difference between "an argument at a lower level of detail" and "a big cloud of chaff". It's an art. Descending into the data and looking at it for yourself is part of the answer, but it's not always enough -- some people will try to circle around and around, up and down, through a forest of details as part of a strategy to bewilder and exhaust you.
"66. Any time you use open source code in a project, be prepared to maintain your own branch of that code. You never know when the developers will get bored and leave you hanging."

The implication that being left hanging doesn't exist for proprietary code is getting old. Maybe the EOL of Windows XP will put FUD data point to rest.
long, but worth the read.

if the author is to be believed, they were pretty close to having something that would have been a breakthrough for AI. i wonder what happened to the source code, and why it wasn't pursued further.
Indeed: technically, it's impossible. Email addresses, per RFC 822, are not a regular language -- though it's doable in Perl because Perl "regular expressions" are unapologetically more powerful than real regular expressions.

RFC 822, section 3.4.3, defines comments in email addresses to be surrounded by matching parentheses, and which nest -- a classic example of a language which is not regular.

Chalk this up to "stupid technicalities I learned one day when I decided to write a regex to match RFC 822 perfectly". It turned out to be a fun but useless exercise, because most email programs don't accept half the crap that's in RFC 822 anyway.
Vimeo currently uses them and College Humor/Todays Big Thing is in the process of moving over there.
The neuroscience of itching
Is there any truth to the "Birds mimicking cell phones" stories.

Like this one: http://web.archive.org/web/20031005163144/http://www.ananova...

This would also be a great opportunity to talk about tits.
Tackle? How can the tackle something so obviously true?
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, it now has a 2nd edition.
The usual recipe is: spend 10x as much time selling it as writing it. That's one reason hackers tend not to like this route.
"And you really have to be an asshole to be successful."

That part's not true. You may have to be in some areas of business, including perhaps the world of $20k software, but I know plenty of successful people who aren't assholes.

You do definitely have to be determined. But determination doesn't imply being an asshole.
Most books by skeptics of the current order are simply dismissed. Lomborg's book caused a huge stir precisely because it was so packed full of data. It's really a masterpiece (though a bit dated now, it was written around 2001 or so).
I've been really interested in Lisp lately, for someone that knows next to nothing about this language, this is a pretty interesting read.
very cool! thanks for the link.
Maybe it is just me, but I just don't care for either. I am 27, tech savy, but still don't get the allure of twitter, or even friend feed.

I feel old, like the average 65+yo, wondering what's up with their grandkids staying in front of computer all day and just sending messages to each other.
Not getting it. Maybe if I was a journalist I would find it useful, but for the rest of us, I am not sure the value of it.
Truemors :: Entertainment
Point taken. I suppose for some it's a matter of degrees -- determination doesn't imply being an asshole, but sometimes really pushing yourself can lead you to take energy from the things you'd be doing to make the people around you happy and divert that energy into your own work. That is, you don't become cold so much as you sacrifice a bit of warmth.
I'd like to know if washing colors in cold water vs. hot really makes a difference. Maybe that's not explode-y enough though...
Personally I hate the idea of building software with the intention to sell it for as much as possible, as soon as possible.

You will just end up with software which feels unloved. Plus you will treat the project as a job and will likely not have much fun building it.
Bangladesh

A 2% improvement yearly means a doubling in 35 years. Think about that next time someone talks about the minor cost of slightly dampening economic growth. The third world would certainly be better off with climate change and twice the wealth than slightly delayed climate change and the same level of wealth.

Either way, the solution to this and any problem is engineering. I'm formulating an essay on this topic that I'll post soon.
Be that as it may, domestic laws in the US are still relevant to companies and startups operating overseas.

The opposite is true, too.
What a bunch of totally irrelevant nonsense.

Ruby on Rails, like all other frameworks and languages, is just a tool you can use to achieve some end.

If it achieve's your end faster and at lower cost than some other tool then it's definitely something to consider. If it doesn't then it's not.

All this nonsense about whether it's wierd or whether it somehow relates to hookers is just a total waste of time.

It's just a frameword guys. If it works for you use it. If it doesn't work for you don't.

I mean. That's all there is to it.
well 12seconds could be matched to the concept for making short videos(comments) even if they supported more length in new versions.

i think it's interesting because, the time limit will make you record something interesting and will remove the need to wonder, how do i make a more lengthy video (therefore the confussion is avoided and this could endorse more people to make a video comment or some other video)
How I Built a Working Poker Bot, Part 4: The Poker Botting Erector Set
I've just been searching summize for @replies. Generally, I don't like that friendfeed comments aren't threaded, but the twitter-reply is very nice.
http://summize.com/search?q=%40tipjoy
You only have one life. It's smart to collect data points from other people's successes and failures to shape your ideas. Otherwise, you might waste time following low expected value paths.

>Do you think 23 year old PG would be following someone like 2008 PG this obsessively

I'm sure there's a 23 year old "PG" who follows PG right now.
I went through Classic Shell Scripting by Arnold Robbins and Nelson HF Beebe (O'Reilly) recently. It was a pretty solid coverage that highlighted portability issues and canonical uses of the shell. I don't know if you'd call it advanced, though.
Wow, this is really amazing (to me at least because I had not seen or thought of this before).

[ Warning: Spoiler! :) ]

It's in base 1 (tally system).

The first part up to the "|" matches the case where number 1 is the whole string, covering the fact of 1 not being considered prime. It also matches no string, I guess to mean 0.

Next part matches a captured string consisting of 2 or more ones, and the captured string must be repeated at least one time. That is, 2+ repetitions of chunks of 2+ ones.

This much is obvious, but it wasn't until I wrote it out that I realized what it is doing:

multiples of 2

11+11 or 11+11+11 or 11+11+11+11 or ... = 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, ...

multiples of 3

111+111 or 111+111+111 or 111+111+111+111 or ... = 6, 9, 12, ...

multiples of 4

1111+1111 or 1111+1111+1111 or ... = 8, 12, 16, 20, ...

multiples of 5

11111+11111 or 11111+11111+11111 or ... = 10, 15, 20, 25, ...

multiples of n

which leaves only primes remaining.

Side note:
In Perl, executing it this way:

$nstr = 1 x $ARGV[0];
print ($nstr =~ m/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ ? "composite\n" : "prime\n");

The largest prime I can find without a seg fault is 37397

And the largest composite I can find without a seg fault is 37399
It's just a cool script, run on a set of work that most of us are familiar with. What's so wrong with that?

I think some people might be reading too much into the intent of the author.
Bill Gates’ Retirement To Do List
What I don't understand is why people consistently feel the need to say "I don't use Twitter" every time it's mentioned.

A lot of people like it. If you don't understand why, that's fine. Nobody cares whether or not you use Twitter.
DMT, hard to make.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine
Everyone picks the same comment to upmod. People see a good or bad number next to the comment and want to go along with the groupthink. After all, how could you go wrong upmodding a comment that 20 other people already upmodded?
Why No One Will Replace Bill & Steve
Grou.ps Raises $1.1 Million And Goes Open Source
Hollywood's 3-D Cinema Dreams
I'm not an American but I don't think it's too "isolationist".

What's different about that than saying: "I want the food that I buy to feed my family". "I want the money I pay on my shelter to shelter my family."

It seems that everyone, wants the money they spend to help them and their loved ones to one extent or another. Saying I want to help my countrymen I read as just being an exstention to this.
Right, in 2001 it was probably good to be skeptical. 7 or 8 years of data in favor of the "humans are causing climate change" argument has come in since then.
Yahoo Loses One Of Their Top Deal Guys - One More Exec Gone