skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I can offer a partial answer to the question "Why do you not program." A lot of my friends have asked me to teach them how to program. Mostly they want to learn some basic PHP so they can make minor tweaks to their own websites. So far, only one has gone on to become serious and build a career in web development, mostly doing front end stuff, some jquery, etc.

Of those who don't go further with it, most don't for sheer lack of interest. Of the infinite ways we can spend our time, they have other things that interest them more.

Of the others, the main block is the arbitrariness of programming. They usually have the same problem with math. Most math beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division strikes them as divorced from reality. They question whether statistics are real, or just a fluke. They'll wonder what the practical significance of solving a quadratic equation is. They are put off by the notation, and especially the wholly arbitrary and historically structured use of certain letters for equations, such as x, y and z for unknowns, a and b and c for coefficients. They will ask why? They are not happy to be told that these conventions were adopted for convenience. They will ask "Whose convenience?"

Jeff Atwood has written about this here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...

That page has this good quote:

"It has taken us some time to dare to believe in our own results. It now seems to us, although we are aware that at this point we do not have sufficient data, and so it must remain a speculation, that what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness.
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it."
Those are some pretty strange groupings. I suppose they're counting Economics and Finance degrees as business? I'm also pretty surprised about the amount of social sciences/history degrees that are being pursued. What exactly were these people planning to do? Certainly explains the law school problem.
maybe instead of a captcha (not that hacker news has a captcha, but bare with me), submitters would be required to answer a Project Euler like problem.
Obviously I'm not serious, but it can be an interesting way to moderate the submissions.
Honestly, I think the main reason is inertia. Some of our customers started using VP6 back in 2007-2008, and don't want to simultaneously support two codecs. They generally want to switch down the road, but it will take a bit of work to re-encode their backlog.

Licensing is the other issue: VP6 is royalty-free, while H.264 isn't.
The problem is that bookstores charge too much money.

Borders will sell my book for $49 when it comes out, whereas you can preorder it from Amazon for around $22 which is about what it costs to buy the ebook copy right from the publisher. Then my book won't sell because it's too expensive, so we'll have to buy it back from Borders and I'll get charged against my royalties for a "return".

It's not e-books, it's that the prices are too high. Amazon has every book Borders has, and if I ship the thing overnight I still end up with a cheaper copy than it would cost to buy it across town.

Going out of business is the result of not meeting customer demand, either in terms of relevance, quality, or in this case, price.
- Accumulate as much experience from my job as possible. 10 people firm (financial services, investment management). Build a portfolio of skills that is both transferable and valuable

- Take far more risk with my own personal investing, play poker more regularly and often & approach more women

- Continue building a phenomenal network of high powered professionals, investors, start-up founders and established business men with a focus on private equity/venture capital. Follow up regularly and build a relationship

- Improve my communication. I'll do this by enrolling on a
stand-up comedy course, toastmasters and blogging more regularly
#1. say "I do"
I probably worded it funny, but I think both SJ and PG have said that people are the most important thing. They both have pretty been successful, yet the majority of company execs still think people are interchangeable cogs (except themselves of course).

In companies I have worked in the best performing teams always had managers who worked with an attitude that their people were important and not easily replaceable. This held true from programming teams to basic call center employees.

From my limited anecdotal evidence it's clear to me that people are not interchangeable cogs in the machine. Hiring similar resumes will not always lead to same results, but I'm surprised how many managers still think this is true.
See the comment about industrial espionage above.
I'm taking up self-teaching by choice and habit because I often like to learn things on my own at first. (Half of my "education" from middle school to current college studies have all been self-taught in a variety of subjects during my spare time.) And with all the resources available -- books, online tutorials, quora.com, wikipedia, etc -- it's not difficult to pick up the basics on your own.

As for my progress so far in web programming, I'm starting from the front-end basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript first. The past two weeks were spent on relearning HTML and CSS (I picked them up back in middle school but forgot over the years) and will hopefully start on basic javascript in about a week. By my personal metric of success, I'm pretty satisfied with my daily progress and can at least build basic websites that meets established web standards.
There isn't really much of a tablet market
Is it really? Scaling today means running on more than one machine (google, facebook, twitter, etc.)

That means no shared memory. He helpfully makes this distinction on his front page ("I'm mostly interested in shared-memory system, so if you are looking for information about clusters, web-farms, distributed databases and the like, it's the wrong place")

According to Google's Jeff Dean, "to Google, multi-core computers look like separate servers with really fast interconnections" (i.e. memory).

So if you are running your applications on many machines anyway, you might as well drastically simplify your code by writing it "single-threaded" and running #cores copies on each machine.
I don't disagree with the first part of what you are saying. The problem is that marriage is a multi-faceted agreement - a personal one, a legal one and even a spiritual one if you are so inclined.

Your point is valid at the personal level but that doesn't negate the fact there is a legal binding contractual agreement occurring here too. Most contracts have exit clauses and there is no reason why marriage shouldn't - especially if you are entrepreneurial and the stakes can be high upon the termination of that agreement.

I do wonder, though, what you mean by "If you don't trust someone enough, don't get married. Period. End of story.", specially trust? Trust them to do what - not divorce you or not to fleece you in the event of a divorce?

If it is the former, nothing is certain and marriages can fail completely through the consequences of the other half. If the latter, well why would you hold a contract that says the other party has termination rights of x, y and z but trust them not to exercise those rights?.
You write:

"If you don't trust someone enough, don't get married. Period. End of story."

With divorce at 45% of all marriages, clearly there are a lot of people who trust one another who perhaps should not. Your rule may have a kind of wisdom to it, but, in the first place, people ignore it and, in the second place, lots of people start off trusting each other and then, 5 years later, hate each other. A relationship is a learning experience, and it might be wise to start one with some buffer against the negative things you might learn.

Also, your rule can be turned on its head: if 2 people really trust each other, then they should have no problem agreeing on how to end their relationship, should unforeseen circumstances arise in the future that necessitate that ending.
Is this relevant to the broader HN community?
It’s not a technical problem. Safari on OS X renders the font great, it’s crisp and it looks just like Museo should look at the size you picked for the body text.

It’s a design problem. Museo is a fine font, great when compared to other free fonts. It’s also a quirky font with a lot of detail, detail that does not degrade nicely when the size of the font is reduced. Museo is a good choice for headlines or any type that’s a bit larger but a highly questionable choice for body text.

“For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.” – Dan Mayer, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/14/what-font-should-...
I wouldn't expect anyone thinks it's a good idea to do the separation in the car. You'd do it at a plant somewhere to take advantage of economies of scale.
But we all know that world is not just black and white.

Marriages nowadays always start with good intentions, love and trust. Why would they marry in the first place, otherwise?

Sometimes though things turn bitter. A lot. That's why divorce exists. Would you like then to spend all the rest of your life to share all your income with someone that maybe you end hating? Especially when after divorce you find someone who finally is the right one and you want to build a family?

That's why pre-nups exist. They are not lack of trust in the first place. They are a way to be safe just in case something will happen, despite totally hoping for the contrary. It's looking at marriage pragmatically, since all the other decisions were probably already made on an emotional basis.
Half of marriages end with divorce. You can either refuse to get married to anyone you can't predict perfectly for, say, sixty years, or plan sensibly while you're on amicable terms. If you can't plan a divorce when the two of you like each other, it'll be an absolute nightmare to do it when you're separating.

There's an idea in Aikido I like, which is that one should always consider the end of the relationship just as much as the beginning. The example I learned is rather bloody [1], but it also applies to telephone conversations, outings with friends, starting a company, and I imagine, a marriage.

Given that all things in life are transient, you should think of their path over time instead of as static elements. A marriage may only be a good experience for 40 years; it may be a good fit to end it after that time.

[1] When making a knife thrust to the chest, one arcs the blade inside the body. This prevents suction from trapping the knife.
I want to meet the people encoding to MPEG-4 Part II and punch them in the junk. After their checks clear, I mean.
WakeMate sleep-aid recalled due to 'exploding' USB charger
> Minimalism is at its core a "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction"

You mean, that's leading a productive, meaningful, successful life at its core.
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans - John Lennon
Github 404 page
Can't Find a Technical Co-Founder? Do It Yourself
Until very recently the only way to get truly safe drinking water was through one of two ways. #1 by boiling water and #2 by fermenting grains and fruits mixed with water to create alcohol.

Like the old wives tale says, a glass of wine with dinner will stop you getting food poisoning. And research has been proving this for a while: http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/HealthIssues/1110384069.htm... (It's a far better read than the NYT article it takes from with more citations)

Considering that 30% of the population annually considers themselves to have suffered food poisoning, that's quite the statistic and as most people confuse food poisoning symptoms with flu symptoms it could easily be far higher. Given that wine is of high enough proof to be potentially effective when consumed in any quantity with food that it has far ranging benefits far beyond just what's in it.

If you ate something with a deadly E. Coli strain, you'd probably be kicking yourself in the ass if you drank grape juice over red wine. Not to mention the potential risk you face from food poisoning through tainted juice.
Yea, and what's the deal with people wearing seatbelts?

It's like HELLO...just don't crash your car!

If you think your car might crash, you shouldn't drive it!

Seriously though...there is a small kernel of truth in what you are saying: quite often people jump into marriage sooner than they should.

A prenup has NOTHING to do with this though, it's just basic common sense.

Nobody knows what the future will bring, and I would say you've got it completely backwards.

If the person you're with doesn't trust/love/etc you enough to sign a (reasonable) prenup, it's because they're worried you might have to use it.....and then you should reconsider.
In "about:flags" on Chromium (10.0.613.0 on OSX) there's an option to enable expose-style viewing of tabs by swiping three fingers down.. which is really convenient because swiping 4 fingers down is the default on Macs to invoke expose.
No actual arguments--just a bunch of personal attacks and ranting. Cites earlier blog post about Jarvis which is also pretty much logic-free. I don't see how this is HN material unless Mike Cane is someone famous among the HN crowd. Great flames have been somewhat of a hacker tradition, but the linked article isn't a particularly great flame.
There's no need for that. Users/contributors will do whatever they want with the source already. That includes hacking the source for private purposes only. Github is the pinnacle of that attitude (which in my opinion is not social coding at all -- but I digress).

Of course, the articles misses an important point: talking to the maintainer/author first. If you were about to do a big change, would you know if there were any chance to be integrated first? Maybe knowing if someone is already working on it? (heavy refactoring comes to mind). I've gained precious insights about design by simply talking to authors before starting to work on a contribution, saving my time countless times.

If your intention is doing a change no matter what, then you're not really interested in _contributing_.
> Don't buy her geek toys/gadgets as gifts

...unless she's a geek, presumably?

I mean, there certainly exist men who would love to have a geek toy/gadget as a gift, so why shouldn't at least some women want that as well?
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.

...where by "literally" you mean "figuratively". Unless VCs you lunch with habitually bring firearms or the like to lunch. :)
What is a netstring?
> I can how an interview will end up within the first few minutes.

Supposedly, that's also how long it takes the interviewer to decide.
Introduction to Electronic Literature: a freeware guide
It is largely true that the quality of the people (from HR to security to engineering to the trainers at the gym) that I dealt with at Apple were excellent, but one seldom noted problem is that in an intensely competitive environment, there is little more demotivating than running into a jobsworth, particularly one that you have to work around to get things done. It can really derail the train.
All of those (except the file browser) works in the normal version of Chrome as well.
I love the github guys for their attention to detail, the 500 page is also worth seeing: https://github.com/500
Python + PyAMF behind a Flex interface. Soo nice! :)
"If you don't trust someone enough, don't get married. Period. End of story."

This is bad advice. It's similar to saying: if you need to have a contract with your business partners, why get into business together in the first place?

It's not even about trust with me. I just don't want my future spouse getting half of everything I've worked for..before I met them. Simple as that.

A buddy of mine had no pre-nup. He worked for 25 years for the US postal service. After 10 years of marriage, he caught his wife cheating on him (and she wanted a divorce). The result? She gets half of his retirement and the house.

A better pre-nup is to give your spouse a time at which they will get a portion of your stuff. So at around 50 years of marriage, they get half. If they reject it, you can say: "so you don't think we will be married that long"?

In some states, it's even worse. In New York, you might have to pay not based on how much money you are making, but how much you will potentially earn.

If the US courts weren't so biased against men, I wouldn't even consider getting a pre-nup.
Our local bookstore (part of a regional chain) has three times the shelf space for Manga than they do for computer books.

I used to like browsing in bookstores but now its like they don't want my business. Why should I have the bookstore order something for me? I pay more than Amazon and they add no value - that's why they're failing.
I could've used that...
(update: I somehow read it wrong, it wasn't the car, it was their house)

Not that it's their fault they are a victim of a terrible crime, but seriously, who would leave that in a car overnight?

I don't even leave my factory radio in the car overnight. Thieves are stupid and will break a window just to find out later they got nothing, you cannot "out logic" them, as there is no logic.
Let rephrase it to "the major physical barrier".
Meaning is probably the single most subjective concept that exists.

You can't tell someone else what is meaningful for them, which is what the OP is doing and you are implying.

I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field. That's the nature of humanity. We all find meaning in strange and unique ways.
Now I always have the hand-held shower heads, both for this and for cleaning pets. :-)
You're free to change your priorities at any time. For example, I decided to change aspects of my life so I could lose weight.

We need to be aware of value propositions and how they change. No one is saying you have to lock yourself in stone. Indeed, the minimalist approach increases your flexibility; you've invested the minimum to reach your goal, so if you abandon the goal you've lost the minimum you could invest.
Indeed.. one of the patron saints for hackers IMHO. :)
These aren't specific to the CR-48 or even Chrome OS. The flags are insanely useful and make Chrome the pleasure it is to use day to day.

Click to enable plugins is the killer flag in my opinion.
There's actually tons of non-prototype 3D printing projects happening all the time - it's the fastest growing segment.

Examples:
* Invisalign makes custom, clear braces using the SLA 3DP process.

* Custom jewelry is made by 3D printing wax/resin parts for investment casting, and a lot of mass production jewelry molds use 3DP for creating their initial master pattern.

* The aerospace / military uses tons of the SLS/FDM processes for weapons systems

* F1 teams use metal 3DP to make titanium honeycomb housings for assemblies like transmissions that are light and strong.

* We can print customized implants instead of using standard sizes (would you want an "average" knee socket implant?).

* so many more...

Yea, 3DP (and digital fabrication in general) is only just getting started, and there are TONS are of practical applications once we get people educated on how it.

*Full disclosure: my startup, CloudFab, has an API and software tools for designing / sourcing 3D printed products on demand.
I think setting up cafes in book stores is the model a lot of them use.
When people with partial knowledge start talking about college costs
> I wouldn't want to own a car made in the US.

You might. A lot of Asian carmakers now have plants in the US.

Looks like Honda has 4, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honda_assembly_plants
desktop 3D printers are near the top of my list of geek toys/tools I want to get in the next year or so. i just can't justify them yet financially because I don't have any real need to do home prototyping of a physical product. but the moment I do it'll be like, "here comes a tax deduction!"
> What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW."
> But this isn't necessarily true for everyone.

Sure, some people prefer the blue pill.

But the real world is a strict superset of WoW, and thus (to me) much more interesting.
Enabling the Tip Calculator in Your Brain
What's the point of saving someone's life when they are just going to get old and die?

("Meaning" is not something that you can prove to others. Many people would find your job meaningless, while you may find it highly meaningful. The point is that each person's search for meaning is very individual.)
Indeed.

It would be very nice e.g. for Skyping on e.g. the couch to have a [web] cam in the device.. or when on the road/travelling. :)

Perhaps the feature I missed most when the device was released.
10 Online Tools for Better Attention & Focus
I chose that example because its easy to understand, obviously in modern processors with out of order execution and whatnot, you would need something a lot more elaborate.

Once you add the appropriate memory barriers, it looks a lot more "atomic"

Well, they force in order memory access. That doesn't look terribly "atomic" to me, but I understand your point.
Thanks. Were you able to escape?
note to other entrepreneurs: they pivoted. made something people were willing to pay for. and shipped it, in exchange for money. so, they have the fundamentals down right.
or just go learn how to pick up girls. the skills are relevant to entrepreneurs.
Tolerance gets less important as you move into the consumer market - surface finish is far more important.

Sure, snap-fits need to be pretty tight to work well, but do you really think people will care if their earrings are 0.05" out of round?

The main issue now is really materials and processing cost - it's expensive to get the materials because they're engineered to work with a machine, and there are still things like finish quality, color, etc. that need to improve, but there are tons are good products that can get around these constraints.
You're just telling us what you personally find meaningful.

But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well.

Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill.

(I can make these arguments all day. You're never going to be able to prove to others that your form of meaning is somehow rational or logical. All of your arguments are back rationalization - postdiction.)

"I find the red pill more meaningful because it is redder than the blue pill and red is the colour of the sunset and the sun is really big." <-- This argument is no less arbitrary than your "superset" argument.