skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was wondering when an article like this was going to show up on the HN front page.

The follow-up article gets it right. Minimalism is at its core a "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction", NOT just blindly getting rid of stuff. It is immersion, but only in one thing at a time. It is about reducing your tendancy to over-extend yourself, and focusing on the things you really need, both intellectually and physically.

Can we all just admit that the original article, http://vivekhaldar.tumblr.com/post/2525332092/minimalism-is-... , was just link-bait intended to elicit a response and/or rise from the HN community? The original article contains so little method to it's analysis and represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of minimalism that it bears little water intellectually. Not to be rude, but I'm surprised it made it to the front page.
Build a new year clock with an SQL query? Sure, why not
> I found it extremely annoying to have to 'reset' my hand position every time I wanted to type text in insert mode.

Did you not consider keeping your hand in the standard place? I very rarely use h, and when I do it is a simple moment of the index finger. Backspace has nearly the same functionality as h, and movement keys like b, ^, and I (enter insert mode at the beginning of the line) are typically much more useful.
I'm a Sysadmin so programming would be useful. I can do simple scripts, scan though code, but 20-30 lines I probably my limit on anything.

At work there is plenty of other stuff to do so it's not a priority to improve my programming skill. I sit next to a dozen devs who handle all the programming for the sites.

In my spare time I'm working on a couple of other things so it's not a big priority either.

Despite the people here who say that they went for no-programming to having a huge internet facing webapp in 3 months:

(a) That was 3 months of 60+ hour weeks
(b) I don't think that being a "good" programmer is that easy. The junior programmers at work have been doing it for 5 years full time. I don't think I can get to a reasonable standard in just a few months (even of 60 hour weeks).
It looks fine on Mac and Linux. If you are using Windows, keep in mind that entire site is subtly tuned to irritate IE users.
That's short-sighted. They could have easily opened up the social graph, while maintaining the largest node within the graph. Instead, the social graph will open without them, and they'll find themselves clamoring to catch up, just like AOL did with e-mail and the web. So, long term, not being idealistic, and keeping their users within a walled garden, will show itself to also be a bad business decision.

Businesses will control their business model, but that means we must critique their business model and build open alternatives (which I've been doing), instead of just accepting their actions uncritically.

And sure, they bring huge net value to society. With that kind of money and success, it'd be hard not to. My argument is that they don't bring nearly enough net value to society as they could, given their resources.
Ask HN: What (tech)conferences are you going to in 2011 and why?
I've only ever been to one conference in my lifetime. I'd like to go to more because I had a fairly positive experience. My primary motivation is that I want to meet new, interesting, people and learn new things in a social environment. So, what conferences are HNers going to this year and why are you going to them? That information would be great fodder for me (and anyone else) who'd like to create a conference schedule for 2011.
As frustration grows, airports consider ditching TSA
It was almost unreadable!
Customer Development Interviews How-to: What You Should Be Learning
I am some what of a jack of all trades. I'm not a programmer, but I know how to program. I can make things work in a hacked sort of manner. Just spending two weeks working through a basic book on python would fix this problem. I've hired developers and designers and just being able to talk to them in their own language even at a basic level helps a ton here.

It's hard to hire a good x, when you can't do x your self. You don't know what to look for.
Way to go. Now make sure you save your code and take a look at it in a year. That's when you'll really see how far you've come.
perhaps it was stolen by someone who does not know its value?
How is this "hacker news" material? it was a production camera, not a prototype, stolen probably by thieves who had no idea what it was.
If propert rights included poor people's properties nobody would have to pay 24% interest.This happened 100-300 years ago in Europe and America.According to Hernando de Soto this is what it takes to make capitalism work.If you leave out the majority of people you tend to leave out, if not the majority,a large fraction of the capital.
I think we're forgetting that Hacker News is attracting an increasingly broad audience. How many random strangers would you have to ask before finding one who knows what vim is? How many computer science majors? It's easy to forget that "Unix-based hackers" is a very small minority, even among a somewhat technical audience.
Learning SEO from the Mormons (LDS Church)?
I used to play WoW about twenty hours per week at the cushy exexjob (35 hours of little work per week). It was fun, it gave me an English speaking social outlet when I had none, and the experience of managing a sixty+ member guild was great preparation for later (deadlines, communication, resolving conflicts, etc).

There was an event in my family: the details are private, but it caused me to reassess What I Wanted From Life. Better purple pixels figured rather low on the totem pole. I quit. A few days later I picked up a new hobby: see, there was this teacher who wanted to play bingo...
Facebook Fan Pages via Lujure
I always wonder what are the causes and what are the effects in studies like this one and the ones that say drinking is healthy. Is it possible that those who lead healthier lives are therefore mentally able to resist from drinking, and not the other way around as this study shows? The same applies to the studies that say those who drink a little are healthier than those who don't. As JofArnold said in another comment here, those who don't drink at all may only be less healthy because they are the people who are likely to stress over things.

I'm sure the scientists conducting these studies try to eliminate these inconsistencies to as much as their ability by establishing the cause-effect relationship, but it seems impossible to do this exactly right and thus we should consider the associated problems in studies like these.
Moving the controls away from the supply pipes has maintenance, installation and cosmetic implications. Plumbers get their asses burned in the shower just like anyone else. The controls are directly on the supply pipes because that's the best place to put them when all factors are considered. Moving to motorized valves has it's own host of problems but more importantly most people aren't going to want to deal with the increased installation and maintenance costs associated with having a motor inside the wall of their shower.

The main reason you get burned in the shower when someone flushes a toilet is due to a lack of pressure in the cold water supply pipe when the second valve is opened (toilet tank refills) and the pressure in the hot water pipe staying the same. Moving the controls would allow you to adjust the temperature to reflect this but then you'll just have to do it again when the second valve closes and the pressure returns to the cold water supply. A better approach to solving this problem would probably be to attack the water pressure issue so that a consistent amount of water is always supplied to the shower regardless of other devices on the system using water from either of the supply lines.
Industrial espionage would not care about that. They are after something else.
Read a few of these to know everything you need to know about minimalism: http://www.google.com/search?q=minimalist+site%3Abikesnobnyc...
It looks beautiful to me, and I'm reading it on a thin client VNC session to an old Debian-stable login server that makes half the web look broken.
It's awful in Linux.
The article's recommendation that the U.S. imitate the "diplomacy and deception" of Byzantium is a complete non-starter. The commitment (even if flawed) of the U.S. to an open society plus new technology - emphatically illustrated in recent months - doubly underscores Benjamin Franklin's quip: "Two may keep a secret - if one of them is dead."
yes, it renders and looks fine but museo it's not the best choice for big blocks of text. Comics sans also renders great and you wouldn't use it here, right?
I've had Museo 500 as my body font since the day it was licensed for webfont use. This is my first complaint about it.
Inventory: a mix between bestsellers (e.g. Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter) and the long tail, with very specific titles tailored to smaller audiences. Amazon excels at the long tail and traditional stores can't compete with that, as they're restricted to high street real estate with limited capacity. Another problem for small stores is that they don't have the knowledge and expertise to give advice to their customers on what titles to buy for niche markets (or buy the right stock to begin with beyond using the besteller lists), which Amazon does very well through user generated reviews and the recommendation system. This is a major concern for brick and mortars, because people value a trustworthy authority they can go to that will tell them what to read next (as the erudite bookseller of the past would do in nostalgic stories).

Medium: Moving towards digital, but physical books will remain relevant. Eventually digital might become so superior from a practical perspective that physical books will become collectors items in the sense that people will want to have some of them around for nostalgic reasons (e.g. religious texts, favorite authors). But people are programmed to hoard physical objects, so even when digital becomes superior they'll still want some books. In the mid-term you will see printing on demand in a reasonable quality distributed through and printed by local stores[1], allowing them to participate in the long tail segment instead of just stocking bestsellers.

Shopping experience: It's fun to go to a bookshop and browse, even if you're going to order the books you like from Amazon in the end. This will become something you do on a free afternoon as a form of leisure (as many of us do already). Successful shops will figure out a business model around this, focussing on the experience instead of the practicalities. For more practical purchases (e.g. "I need a book on Haskell, pronto") people will use Amazon instead.

Small players will remain active in niche markets, like selling collectible antiquarian books, where focus and specialization gives them an edge over big players like Borders or Amazon. This will mostly happen over the internet, which is a change that is already happening. A good friend of mine runs a high street antiquarian bookshop and has days where he sells for less than $20 in his brick and mortar store, but makes up for this by selling online. The main reasons for keeping the brick and mortar shop are nostalgic, as a warehouse for this inventory and as an avenue for people to come in and sell him new stock.

[1] That is if copyright holders will go along with this approach, because the publishing, movie and music industries are rackets that don't necessarily have the best interest of their customers in mind (customers as in consumers as well as resellers like bookshops and record stores).
Should this article be titled "How the iPad is Destroying the Future of Journalism?"
Why is there a 7 week lead time?
Overcome Fear in 2011. Get Rejected On Purpose
I'd love to learn how to code, but I grew up with BASIC (TRS-80 CoCo variety) and I'm a linear, spaghetti-code thinker.

I've dabbled in VB (back in 1991), used Prolog for a law school AI assignment, made great use of WordBasic (Office 95) to save a company thousands of dollars a year by autogenerating indices...

More recently I played with Android App Inventor and created a basic "English Nanny" (shake the baby) app, which took a couple of hours. C++, C#, Java etc. just seem too difficult to learn.

Any advice would be appreciated, of course :)
> Any tips?

Succeed, then recruit. Without a track record it's going to be hard to convince someone to be your technical co-founder. If you want to pursue your ideas, and lack the skill set to build them yourself, you need a more convincing pitch.

What would convince me that I might want to work with you? (Were I not knee deep in my own company)

1) Past success. Join a tech heavy team and do all the non-tech work that they are not giving 100% on and help the team succeed. Recruiting with a successful history will be a lot easier.

2) Sell the product first. This obviously depends on what your ideas are, but if you pitched me to be your co-founder and do the tech work, it would be a lot more convincing if you had a pile of customers already lined up and waiting to pay. (As long as the deadlines were reasonable and it wasn't going to be a complete death march)

The key is that a founding developer knows that they are going to be bringing huge concrete value to the venture by actually creating the product. You have to convince them that you are going to be bringing an equal amount of value, and that they won't be the only one busting their ass to make it happen.
I don't program (aside from SAS/R statistical programming and LaTeX). I'm planning on learning how.

I have the feeling that there is a lot of potential good that an epidemiology-oriented hacker could do.

Problem is, I have no direct external pressure to motivate learning, and no direction on what to learn. Reading Hacker News is a way of gaining both motivation and direction.
If you're interested in biking more often, the easiest way is to ensure that you live a short distance from where you work. Then, at least when its nice out, it'll be easy to make your commute more interesting.
Because parts took longer to get to us than expected and we're catching up on the backlog of preorders. It may end up being faster than 7 weeks.
I have found the cognitive surplus, and it hates pigs
Webca did it this year! http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3285
I think link-bait attention grabbing titles are part of the decline of journalism. Rather, I think they're a symptom of the disease.

The disease is the desire to profit from attention instead of value. The symptoms are inflammatory bullshit, poorly researched tripe, and the desire to create at much controversy as possible, instead of attempting to simply present facts and perhaps even intelligent analysis.

Yellow journalism isn't going anywhere, and publishers seem to be discovering that advertising (the primary way to get money when attention grabbing, instead of value-adding) doesn't cover their expenses. It makes it even harder to pay good journalists, especially when they're not necessarily writing those "DID SHIT JUST HIT THE FAN?" articles (tl;dr "No, not really").

In aggregate, the people willing to pay—actually pay—for news are the people who want news. Not bullshit.

Maybe there isn't hope for news in the long-term, but I see at least some in the possibility of an honest exchange of money for a service that I want (and we need)—journalism. I'd rather pay to see Cirque de Soleil if I'm in the mood for a show.
From the discussion in the link, it seems that the unfortunate victim had previously discussed his holiday plans. If this was anything other than a random attack, that information "leakage" could have been a contributing factor.
Issues of privacy, openness, and information security are all long-standing HN themes.
What AI assignment were you given in law school?
I've been reading HN for a while now- I discovered Graham's essays in high school, a year or two before he started the y combinator. I was a soon-to-be-aerospace-engineering major, then.

I haven't really programmed since my freshmen year, when I switched to anthropology. Had an interesting year, post graduation, doing archaeology for CRM firms. Then I decided I kinda liked getting paid, and now I'm doing instructional design for a retailer. I am slightly less broke.

I am also going, "Hm, all my engineering co-horts are not broke. And jeez, why do I read HN all the time? Maybe I should start playing around, again..."

But, no, at the moment, no skillz.
I've seen it circulate in the meta blogging and lifestyle design blogging circles, but not in development circles. It's hip in the same way that nomadic lifestyle appears to be hip. Not based on the merits of the philosophy, but because it sounds sexy.
I'm in IT and have an interest in the edges. Have minimal programming, some scripting, ability to tie things together, (db's, code, servers and storage).
Ok. I'll change it to comic sans. Thanks for the advice!
Yes, 4 ... but the number is not really important, mostly depends on the activity of the cell. Also my code is currently highly sub obptimal (I use 1 entire phone to listent to 1 control channel ... in theory a single phone could dump 32 of them at once).

And only one single of those was modified (the one used to dump the traffic/voice channel, the other only listen to the BTS)
So was last year, and 01 and 00. I guess this is really just the last binary new year until the next century.
Get Better at Anything with the One Hour Rule
Capital - assets available for use in the production of further assets
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=120...

Baseline level of trust = 100% risk

100% risk = 0% return

0% return = Charity

That's not to say charity doesn't have a place in the world. But the conversation about microfinance is about empowering individuals, and you don't empower individuals by writing them a blank check. You empower them by helping them overcome difficulties (i.e. paying back loans that may or may not be favorable to them).

To touch a little more on the suicides, these loans are often structured such that 3 or 4 people are cosigned. So if I can't pay, the other cosigners have to pay. Social pressures can make people do extreme things. When the article says stuff like

Shobha, head of several groups of women borrowers, was being pressured to pay interest on her 12,000 rupee ($265) loan. Lenders also were demanding that she cover for the other women, even though the state had restricted microfinance activities two weeks earlier, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its February issue.

The don't point out that that's the kind of agreement she signed up for. There's no collateral, so the social pressure is intended to serve as the incentive to repay. Of course this has consequences. To draw a parallel, think about social pressures in an enclosed environment where people are counting on you, like the office or high school.
Similar to many retail sectors aka nothing very bright? When the WSJ story about in store smart phone price shopping ran there were people quite proudly commenting that they shopped at borders to find their books and then ordered them all online.

If people don't value the retail experience, it's very possible it'll disappear aside from a few niches like perishables and very expensive impulse items.
Http://www.trackbushido.com/t339-truc-astuces-mac-os-x
The first map of the Internet (1969)
Visual studio is one of the best IDEs out there, so not a bad choice.

Just learn ruby on rails as soon as possible so you aren't tainted by the horrible sample code of c#/java/php. Ay least get into codeigniter.
iirc changing the src attribute directly does not resend the request (in at least some browsers). you need to create a new node.
Not to mention, even if Borders had it, Amazon would be cheaper anyway, and Amazon's reviews are a huge source of book information to me.
My (HN specific) goals for 2011:

1. Distributed social search for Appleseed (almost there!)

2. Build out Appleseed's App API and Graph API.

3. Build out Appleseed's client-side framework.

4. Facebook/Twitter integration. Maybe MySpace if I'm feeling charitable.

5. Promotion. I'm a good developer, I'm a terrible marketer. I think Appleseed is the best open source, distribute social networking product out there right now. I just need to figure out how to let people know.

6. Go to more developer-oriented conferences and meat-space events.

7. Documentation. The code base is solidifying, so there's no excuse to not have everything documented.

8. Learn how to relax.
> "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction"

This in itself has tradeoffs I think; sometimes "distractions" are what lead to unexpected connections and pursuits, which wouldn't have happened if you were working towards concrete, prioritized goals all the time. I know some of the stuff I'm most happy I did started out as stuff I was doing to procrastinate. (It may depend on a given person's personality and intellectual style.)
I want to say you're totally wrong and ignorant, but in case you have a good point, please explain. How is organizing a business like organizing a program, practically speaking?
Managed 3 days (of planned week) before I was called back in. Then told our latest launch was midnight NYE. Launched at 4pm and went out - we'll see how that goes down tomorrow :)
Rejection therapy has gotten a lot of coverage on HN recently, and for good reason.

A lot of people on the Internet use rejection therapy to get over their fears of asking the cute girl out for coffee or going to the trendy nightclub they've never entered before. Here at HN, however, I think rejection therapy is able to really shine: sitting down for lunch with some VC's or C-level executives takes courage, and pitching your idea is literally asking for it to get shot down. It takes a lot of courage, but in the end it's worth it to take the risk for the slim chance of reward. In fact, many aspects of the startup lifestyle involve putting your neck out there in hopes that someone will see your idea and love it just as much as you do.

I haven't played the "Rejection Therapy" game, but I feel like everyone is afraid of getting rejected from something. It gives me the holiday season warm fuzzy feelings when I know that people are following a system that will improve themselves.
How to keep your new years resolutions
Where's the "I have programming ability" option?

EDIT: It's now been added!
Chrome 9 beta running on Win 7 - the text is readable, but the font doesn't make for easy scanning of paragraphs of text (compared to a serif'd font like Times New Roman).
this is yet another reason why I want to always bootstrap and retain 100% equity (or at least controlling share if I give out grants). So much pain, hassle, risk avoided. You might have to grow slower, maybe, depending on the particulars. But I think it's worth it.
As I recall, creating an expert system for personal injury cases...it was pretty limited.
Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data
This is great! One of the reasons 2010 has been so wonderful for me is because of the lack of fear I've had! It took awhile for me to get over all of this... half of 2008, all of 2009, and the beginning of 2010 were all wasted because I was too scared to do anything!

Two years of my life could (and would) have been better spent working in a field I love on projects I enjoy with people that constantly push me to excel but because of the rejection I experienced (mostly in my own head, mind you) in the first half of 2008, I froze and was unable to get past it. Well, thank [insert higher power of choice here] for that because this year I'm back on the horse and 2011 brings nothing but amazing potential and a blank slate every day for me to fill.

To anyone stuck where I was: Keep pushing forward. When you realize that the rejection is your own head working against you, you'll finally feel free. It gets different!
I'm trying to study programming right now, I lack motivation, sadly. But would love to do my own stuff so very much.