skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Devil's advocate: If Be became OSX, we probably wouldn't have ever seen the iPod, iPhone or iPad.
Try Techmeme.

Here's the discussion on this topic: http://techme.me/B0l1
If you were looking for copyrighted music material, there's Zune Pass. Unlimited music for $15 a month. (http://www.zune.net/en-US/products/zunepass/default.htm)
My experience with going soap free at various times in my life is that it works a lot better for me if I'm not showering in hard water. In soft water (I've mostly lived places with naturally soft water), I can scrub my armpits a bit and they are scent free pretty quick. In hard water the stink doesn't seem to come off quite as easily.
Check out Readability. It discards the ads and reformats the article like a newspaper. Best of all, it's free!
My suggestion would be to find a simple website and clone it, or come up with your own idea. Start with Django and Python as it's easy to pick up compared to most anything else in my experience, and just learn by doing, searching stack overflow, and looking at other Django projects on github. That's how I learn new languages and frameworks and it seems to work well. However it might be different since you aren't yet a programmer.

I would say not to spend too much time reading books as you won't remember any of it when it comes time to code.
Logic+Emotion: Deconstructing Your Social Business Plan For 2011
What makes you say that? I think BeOS / OSX could've been a fantastic embedded platform to build an iOS type device around.
Ah, soap-dodgers. They remind me of people who say "you don't need to write unit tests". Also, hands too?
Kerie cable equipment
Bringing some game mechanics like this is a great idea. The rewards of doing work are usually distant but an index like you describe makes it apparent immediately..
I can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't. Drag and Drop between applications? Got it. Combining soundcards to use in aggregate? Got it[1]. Object Oriented APIs? Had it since NeXTSTEP (and they're called 'Kits' as well).

The only thing that seemed mildly interesting to me was the routing of audio between apps, but this is mostly achieved these days using ReWire or Soundflower (admittedly not an ideal solution).

It seems like a fun hobby (I'm into OS nostalgia myself) but suggesting that it's going to have any effect on 'the world' is pretty silly.

[1]: http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/aggregateaudio/
I grew up on a farm. A pig farm. Between getting home from school and eating dinner, I had chores to do, in the pig barns. I usually came back from chores with pig shit all over my hands.

If I hadn't had soap to wash my hands before biting into my hamburger, I probably would have invented it.

Considering it wasn't that long ago (historically) that virtually all of the worlds population was agrarian, I suspect being dirty was a fairly strong motivation for the invention of soap.
use olive oil like the ancient Greeks and Romans?
The Job Market Stinks, Is Freelancing the Answer?
The problem isn't RSS itself, its shitty RSS readers.

Think about the way RSS feeds are handled by browsersfor a second, because that's the most likely place a user is going to encounter RSS feeds anyway ...

Google Chrome sends you to Google reader or another RSS reader of your choice ... if you've never messed with RSS, you're going to tap out immediately (what the heck is an RSS reader?), Firefox adds it to your bookmarks, and you can't even tell when new items have arrived etc, The RSS feeds in IE are an absolute joke ... only Opera even gets this remotely right.

Even on Feed Demon which is by far the best RSS reader on the market, the way it is initially set up, makes consuming content rather awkward unless you know exactly what you're doing. The View Port is half or a quarter the normal size of a browser window (until you adjust the reader orientation in the options), and you're forced to click twice to read content since the actual article isn't usually shown in the window ... Unless you're a determined user, you're not going to care very much for all the hoops you have to jump through to actually read content in an RSS reader ... when you can just keep using a browser.

That is the problem.

Google reader is nice, but why should I go to a web page to read content that I could be reading in a browser anyway?

If someone sits down and makes a kick ass RSS reader (feed demon with smart defaults is pretty much there already), and sells the fact that you can now read, tag, annotate and bookmark your content as easily as you would with email ... and like email ... have the ability to get access to all these bookmarks, notes, read/unread articles regardless of what machine they were on ... I think RSS would get a lot more traction.

So, lets focus less on the technology (how many email readers really care if they're using IMAP or POP, for example) and just get users a new, smarter way of consuming content.

I bet there's some money in it even ;)
Code. Build something. Figure out something you'd like to build, then figure out out to build it. You can't help but learn if you take that route.

If that's not your cup of tea, then start contributing to open source projects. Learn Git and Subversion, then start taking tickets for Firefox or Chrome. Start off with the easy things, then work your way up. There's lots out there that needs attention, and being able to show a potential employer your commits will stand you in good stead. There was a guy who was developing Chrome on here a while back offering you just that: get in touch with him, and he'll start feeding you tickets.

Ah, found it. here you go: http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-g...
Quite a few people actively don't use toothpaste in the paleo community. Many use baking soda or something else like that. Not that I would advocate that, I'm just saying.
The idea is to solve for one side of the equation "the chicken" before focusing on the egg problem, but yes I will need more "eggs" as well.

Currently you don't have to provide feedback in order to get apps for free on the service but I am currently exploring a service that provides usability/feedback for a fee from app developers. We will see how it works out and if there is a market for this soon.
In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismiss its impact on our longevity out of hand.

Bathing regularly -- with soap -- has benefits, such as cleaning dirt from your skin better than plain water. Dirt; which is the home of such wonderful things as anthrax. I hate to use a scare tactic, but anthrax, as well as a host of other nasty vermin like MRSA, live in the soil. I know because my family owns a landscaping business, which means a lot of time spent in the dirt, and by consequence, knowledge of such infections. Bathing is good. Soap is good. Anti-bacterial-soap-with-ultra-lathering-action (tm) is probably a bit of an overkill, but I'm not convinced that it will be the end of our species.

On the topic of brushing your teeth and the ancestral diet, it's worth considering that our hunter/gatherer ancestors (Paleolithic) -- those who enjoyed the diet most frequently referred to as "ancestral" -- only lived to see 33 years of age on average. Without refined sugars and acidic soda, the primary danger to your teeth was biting down on a the hard pit of a fruit, or having them knocked out by prey that turned on you. Basically, you didn't need your teeth to last you 60+ years, so consider that before abandoning toothpaste on a naturalist kick.

I don't mean to be entirely dismissive, because I frequently question some of the practices we engage in daily, but the outcome of my questioning always involves the application of some common sense. Abandoning soap and toothpaste defies that principle.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...

PS - Yes, I'm citing Wikipedia. It, in turn, has many citations for the fact I'm claiming.
For the users or app developers?

For users you get a minimum of 10 cents for an app and for paid apps the minimum payout is the price of the app itself.
you're important enough in you company to "resign"? most of us peons here have to make do with "quittng"
Currently only iPhone specific sadly. I hope to expand horizontally eventually but want to move the needle in one market before I do that.
Steve Jobs wouldn't have been brought back to the company. (But that's not a commentary about the technology.)
In other words, Google is a monopoly. Their strategy is to monopolize markets and charge artificially high prices for advertising.

It's a weird sort of monopoly though, their users can go elsewhere, but their users are not their customers. Their customers are advertisers, and they are basically forced to use Google.
So having a site like Grooveshark host whole datacenters of illegal content for anyone in the world to play at will is the same as quoting short snippets of an article?
I have to say that I did try this for about 2 weeks (just under, 12 days, I think) and I don't know if it is just me or not, but there is no way I could get away with it.

My hair got really, REALLY greasy. I have very oily hair and it just got unmanageable. My wife complained about it on day 2. It didn't stop further into the experiment.

My skin, which is also very oily, just never felt clean and I looked like I needed to scrub good and hard.

Odor...well, lets just say that when I worked out I smelled something awful. It "went away" when I showered, but as soon as I sweat later in the day at all I started to smell again.

Just my simple experiment. Nothing more.
Does anyone know what it would cost to buy borders or how you would start to evaluate a private equity buyout?
Depends on what you do for a living, or even what you do on occasion. There are days I come home and my hair is so grimy it's sticky, and my hands are black with grease, oil, and road grit. Water does not, I repeat does NOT even touch any of that.
Goldman’s Invest-and-Advise Model Thrives
This is pretty interesting, and a smart move for Chegg. Logistics could improve their margins substantially. Look at diapers.com/soap.com
Two questions pop to my mind when I was interviewed by Google:

1. Given n number of computers with x number of numbers stored. Find the median of all the numbers distributed among those computers. Catch is that no single machine can store all the numbers. (Hope this is clear.)

2. Given a text file of logs, write a threaded program that scans the logs and produce some statistics. (My answer was to create n threads that reads every nth line.)

None of those brain teasers were asked of me.
If you have traditional-man length hair, you don't need shampoo and you especially don't need conditioner. Hair grows about half an inch a month, and your hair can only get so fucked up in the course of six months, so if your hair is within three inches long root-to-tip, fuck it.
I regularly brush without toothpaste. It works fine. The toothbrush tends to squeak a little when the teeth are clean. It might help that I'm vegetarian and have a pretty simple diet.
I use soap on my nasty bits, and that's about it.
Learn python the hard way:
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index

Try to think about exiting programs that intrigue or excite you. Clone these.

Think about whether you want to write "web" applications, mobile applications, scientific applications, etc. Basically, with a background like yours, coding will be easy to "step up", you just need to commit the time and discipline to doing so. Pick something, do it, and stick with it until you're good at it.
You should check out Geckoboard. It is pretty much exactly what you described. It is also free, so you can spend that $5 on an extra coffee every month :)
Actually, according to HD manufacturers, 0.5 TiB is roughly equal to 465.66 GB. That's a difference of almost 50GB.
The reason that I'm excited about Haiku: a fledgling open-source OS that isn't based on the Linux kernel. It has been awesome to see Linux find its place on the desktop and mobile, yet, the homogeny is rather stifling and it's disappointing to see there's no alternative to maintaining UNIX's legacy (X11, filesystem layout, my personal dislikes). Haiku seems to have the potential to fill that void.
Wherever I've had soft water, I've felt a lot cleaner even with soap. The difference between soaps is nothing compared to the difference between hard and soft water.
I go with enom. They allow wildcard subdomains, so I just ask nginx to 301-redirect the .www to the root

server {
listen 80 default;
server_name your_domain.net;
rewrite ^ http://www.your_domain.net$request_uri? permanent;
}
I just downloaded it and put it in a virtualbox vm. It's very fast and clean. I like it.
This is great, as is rchaudhary's link.

I can usually deal very well with tools/software/etc, but I have more problems getting really straight answers on non-technical things sometimes.

Does anybody have similar links for business processes? "Here's the least amount of accounting/legal/business/etc you need for starting up a business..."

Quick steps like:
- Use this template as your Articles of Organization and file for an LLC.
- Get a company credit card and buy everything on it.
- Your accounts should look like "this"
- Here's the steps you go through to add money from your personal savings to your company's in a clean way (no corporate veil piercing or anything of that nature) _after_ the beginning of the company
- A guide to internet advertising -- what works/what doesn't/who the players are

Programmers have so many bulidings blocks these days for handling sys admin, money handling, etc, but there are still a lot of things I'm very curious about and can't seem to find a single simple source of information for.
I'm not sure. I think it depends a lot on the diet. Here's a related article about that and the accompanying HN comments.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-toot...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=543293
Oh, I was definitely open about it. Usually I'd be signing in person, so I'd just say, "hey, I can't agree to this, and here's why," and then we'd mark up the contract together. I think I once sent an email with my objections, then edited the contract before I printed and signed it.

The actual mechanics aren't that important, though. The point is to actively negotiate the agreement. Usually, employment agreements are cooked up by lawyers that do everything they can think of to protect the interests of their clients. That doesn't mean that they're sacrosanct.

If the company is putting a contract in front of you, they've already decided to hire you. They've already put a lot of effort into the hiring process and they won't want to throw that away over a few clauses that they may not be able to enforce anyway.

So read the contract, and if there's something you don't like, say so. Get it removed. It's usually that easy.
The best exercises are to look for ACM Programming Contest Questions.

Here are some programming contest questions from 2005 from an Atlantic Canada programming contest http://projects.cs.dal.ca/apics/contest05/
Strange, I kind of feel the opposite way about Twitter.

I can paste any website's URL to Google Reader to subscribe to that site's RSS feed.

What kind of a standard way is there to find out the Twitter feed of a random website or blog I happen to run across and want to follow? Do I search for the author's name on Twitter? Can I be sure I get all the posts and not some other crap he's tweeting?
Ha! I made one of these a couple of years back and tried to sell it Vodafone. Maybe I should have applied to YC with that instead of Decal ;)
Puppy-With-Phone Freebie in PETA Doghouse
Or just use a plain old, natural soap. Soap is nothing but an alkali fat pressed in to a bar. If you can find natural soap without tons of fragrance and anti-bacterial, it's not bad for you or your skin. Overuse or overly harsh soaps are what kill your skin.
Not sure why that would matter that much. Our ancestors experienced tooth decay too. Of course their adult teeth only had to last 20-25 years or so.
It's naive and inaccurate to view copyright (or, in fact, any form of intellectual property) as an absolute right.

The state allows IP so that creators can be rewarded for their efforts in the hopes that this will allow various industries to flourish.

But such IP has limits. Patents can't be granted on certain things. For example, India does not allow patents on certain (all?) pharmaceuticals because it views low-cost health care for its citizens as being more in the national interest.

The US does not allow the patenting of nuclear technology.

Copyright has term limits, typically being X years after the death of the creator, although lobbying has steadily increased this limit (the so-called "Mickey Mouse" law).

The idea is that at some point copyrighted works will pass into the public domain because that's in the public's interest without needlessly enriching countless descendants of the creators.

Copyright has other limits: fair use, use by nonprofits, education use and so on.

You may not even be aware that there is such a thing as compulsory licensing [1], which allows you to pay statutory royalties and use something without permission for certain enumerated purposes.

Basically, copyright (or any IP for that matter) is not absolute. So we're simply haggling over what those limits are.

As an aside, the content creators themselves, apart from a very few, don't derive significant economic benefit from their works (particularly in the music industry). What you're really doing is simply protecting the intermediaries (being the record companies).

So arguing that they have the right is not only incorrect but it misses the point entirely: those rights exist by the grace of the state for the perceived (alleged?) national interest.

"Stifling innovation" is not really something worth arguing about (in the sense of having a right to do so). Any protected industry fighting the tide still loses in the end. The genie never goes back in the bottle.

Look at the millions spent on lobbying Congress to pass crazy laws, abuse of the judicial system for mass lawsuits, PR campaigns and so on. Have they stamped out piracy? No. Have they killed the idea of and the desire to download content over the Internet so we can all go back to buying CDs from the corner record store? Hardly.

The writing is on the wall. So legislation is important too obviously but here it's only an issue because the various industries are so intransigent to the inevitability of change.

[1]: http://copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf
"In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismiss its impact on our longevity out of hand."

I'm not a huge fan of the life-expectancy argument. Goto any hospital or old folks homes and see how many people are basically the walking-dead. There are patients who basically died 20 years ago but can afford to be kept alive for quite some time.

I'm not saying we should live like a caveman, rather just that I'm not a fan of the life-expectancy argument b/c I think there are too many holes in it.

And remember, most people are not living longer b/c of things like diet, nor did our paleo ancestors die b/c of diet. We are living longer b/c of medicine, advances in science and other things....people died in the paleo era from sprained ankles. We can't readily compare them.

It just isn't fruitful to compare the two eras b/c we can't control the variables to make a valid conclusion. However, using common sense, modern medical findings on diet, we can deduce that eating like our ancestor is actually quite beneficial and coupled with our modern medicine we can get the best of both worlds.
Android is not the platform Google is selling. Google Apps is the platform Google is selling. You can access Google Apps through an Android device, but Google doesn't make a meaningfully larger amount of money when you do than when you access Google Apps through any other means.
You can learn a lot in 6 to 12 months, but you probably shouldn't expect to become a skilled developer in that time period. There are a lot of edge cases that you just have to experience to understand, and you'll never stop experiencing them, as long as you're programming.

These days, my advice -- if I felt qualified to give any, which I don't -- would be to decide now whether you want to be "a programmer", or "a (COBOL | Python | Ruby | PHP | Java | JavaScript | .NET) programmer". That is, decide whether you want to learn the principles of programming, and apply those to multiple languages, or whether you want to learn a language, and specialize in it.

If you choose to be a generalist, then you'll be able to more easily pick up new languages and work in alien frameworks, because everything you look at will be similar to something else you already understand. You won't be as good as someone who specializes in that particular language or framework, but you'll be good enough to get a job and do reasonably well at it. The flexibility will also make it easier for you to find jobs, assuming that you're able to sell your generalism as an advantage instead of a disadvantage.

If you choose to specialize, you might not ever understand certain low-level programming concepts, but if someone needs work done in your language or framework of choice, you'll be able to knock it out without any concern about how long it'll take you to familiarize yourself with the environment.

This decision will probably mostly be the result of your own mindset -- whether you prefer puzzles or stability -- as well as whether you'd rather aim for a job as a consultant (or freelancer) or a regular job as an employed programmer for some company.

If you decide to be a generalist, I'd recommend spending a couple of months learning basic concepts in an "easy" language (PHP, VisualBasic, Pascal), and then diving into C and then C++. By then you should be able to relate most languages to one of the couple you've worked with, and you'll have a better idea of what to learn next. You'll also develop a solid understanding of types, stacks, heaps, object frameworks, and on and on.

If you decide to specialize, then honestly the best recommendation I'd have would be to hit some of the job sites, see what people are looking for (and willing to pay for), then get some real, actual books on that particular language and dive in.

Your background in math and physics will help you when it comes to thinking analytically, but programming is still a whole other level of analytical thinking.

Good luck!
> Doing what Spotify did isn't that easy.

Indeed.

The record industry's business model for the internet seems to be this: bleed dry any startup (or any company for that matter) who tries to innovate in this space by making them bleed through the nose in legal fees and lose money on ridiculous royalties until they run out of money.
Jeffrey Steingarten's excellent "It Must've Been Something I Ate" has a good chapter on MSG and the myths about it

http://www.amazon.com/Mustve-Been-Something-Ate-Everything/d...
In the comments he clarifies that he still washes his hands with soap.