skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We have a generation of people addicted to a sedentary activity in a way that's never happened in human history.

Heh. Heard of this other addictive sedentary activity that people call "TV"?

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/americans-...

The _average_ America watches 153 hours of video per month (2009). 5.5 hours per day on average.

Looking up TV addiction yields many very similar articles.

I expect that some people are more susceptible to gaming than TV, and others the opposite.

But the results from TV seem very comparable to gaming: some is probably fine, maybe even beneficial depending on your choices. Too much is bad for your physical, mental, and social well-being.

kb
Two interesting things about that thread - 1. he's gathering real data on women not just theorising, which is smart, 2. something you can't control - looks (fundamentally, obviously if you're very overweight [like me] you can fix that, same with the way you dress etc.) - has the biggest impact of all.

Moral of the story - real data trumps everything, even if that data makes you realise you aren't entirely in control of the situation :)
VCs rarely go into a deal expecting to fire the founder. The only way that would make sense is if A) the business is red hot and B) the investors see the founder as a lucky fool rather than as the person responsible for the business' success.

That's a pretty rare combination.
45 awesome things I came across in 2010
The tablet market is too young to be regarded as miniscule. Software-wise, we have only started to think about touch input seriously. There still so much that can be done.
I'm both the author of the post and an investor. If everyone bootstrapped, I'd be out of business. But I want entrepreneurs to know the risks they face.
I have ads on my own site, never made much off of them, not even enough to partially cover my hosting costs.

However I leave them there just as a reminder that someone is footing the bill.

If someone doesn't like ads, then they can use an ad blocker :)
Less shirts helps your mind? Really? Really? Not even close to convinced.

There are a ton of thunguses in one's life that can be ditched to remove the maintenance of. There's a lot of validity in that particular concept.

But when one wants to develop a fuller life than virtually living - things become useful towards that goal. Let me give some examples.

* Musical instruments. iPad instruments just don't cut it.

* Older books. There are a ton of out-of-print and hard-to-find books that just aren't online, especially in the non-tech fields.

* Gardening requires tools.

* Any variant of a construction trade requires tools.

* Travelling longer distances in a place without a densely connected public transport requires (bike | car | skateboard | etc), which requires maintenance tools.

* Cooking & baking requires a multitude of tools; hosting people for dinner requires kitchenware.

* Offline gaming usually requires game boards & misc accouterments.

I could go on, but those examples are from my own life. The existence of a monk is simply not pragmatically livable for people who fancy dealing with the physical. I like some of Christopher Alexander's writings as he searched for a pattern language in architecture. He considered highly complex systems where people engaged in their environment and lived and hypothesized the idea of the "Quality without a Name", and he had this to say about it, "It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions". What I see the Minimalism people striving for is this freedom, and they are seeking this freedom by removing as many pieces from the system as they can so that the contradictions go away. I - obviously - don't think that this is the complete solution.

While environments and ourselves do mutually shape each other, I believe that a complete solution is to work towards being consistent and uncontradictory with the things we have both in our heads and outside of them. Sometimes that's getting rid of things, sometimes that's adding things, and other times that's simply changing things around.

Well, that's my 0.02c anyway.

(edit1: formatting)
R2-D2 creator Grant McCune dies
There will never be an article like that-- because the only way to do it is to have nearly infinite leverage when raising money (see Facebook and, likely, Twitter).
How else would you be all-inclusive? If interest rate is a measure of risk, i.e. the riskier the individual the higher the interest rate, then the most untrustworthy person can only get a loan, or access to capital, at the highest possible interest rate and at the greatest possible risk. The greatest possible risk is the situation in which the loaning party never gets their money back. If the baseline is to include everyone, it means you have to include the situation of greatest possible risk, i.e. hand out cash to someone you know won't pay it back. Intent to pay back is well and good, but risk profiling exists for a reason and microfinancing is a banking practice aimed at empowerment.

Aid, on the other hand, engenders the notion of giving and not asking for anything back. Microfinance loans are not intended to be aid.
I think you may be right for jobs you _are_ underqualified for, but what about all the jobs you only _think_ you're underqualified for?

You really have no way of knowing if you're underqualified or not from the amount of information about any particular job you might come across (on a job board or a company's website). Now obviously they may list a bunch of technologies you've never worked for, but even then they might be willing to let a smart person learn.
Yeah, you can smell the BS, can't you? He's a very prolific writer...and a scam artist.

[IIRC, his real name is Mark Ford. He's gotten in trouble in the past for laundering money, fraud, etc.]
Looks more like Wile E. Coyote
I would argue that Android is currently not in a position to dominate the tablet market in the short term. It’s worse for tablets than Windows was for PCs and it has to (and undoubtedly will) improve in that respect this year. (It was not supposed to run on tablets so you can’t really hold that against Google.)

All Android tablets I tried felt like upscaled phones, they use more or less the same phone UI on a bigger screen. That’s just unattractive, why carry around that huge device when using a phone is approximately as comfortable? Tablets have to be more comfortable to use than phones. iOS makes better use of the additional real estate and using it is more fun than using a phone. It’s not just a huge iPod touch.
That would be "don't take much money." To avoid losing a controlling stake in your company, don't sell one.
It depends on the agreement.

For instance you may retain the stock, but have explicit agreements where specific investors get to have a specified representation on the board. Then no matter how much stock you own, you can't get rid of those investors.
Woah. How do you do it? Magic?
Actually, you can get to a terminal without going to developer mode: http://calamitylane.com/articles/programming/chrome-os-on-th...

...but that's pretty sweet. :)
And you'd be amazed to know that khtml (KDE's rendering engine, used by Konqueror) renders it instantly!
Ah yes, Road Runner is what I was thinking
The RED One has been out 3-4 years. The EPIC will likely not be the top-of-the-line camera for more than 3-4 years either. So a 6 month head-start is fairly large.
The problem is that your assessment of risks also depends on your valuation of the underlying issues.

For the sake of argument, suppose that someone considers a 15% chance of going broke and having to live with their parents to be a "moderate" financial risk. Somebody else considers a 30% chance of the same thing to be a "small" financial risk. It's possible that the latter person has a higher risk tolerance. But it's also possible that they just like their parents a lot and wouldn't mind living with them as much as the first person.

My instinctive answer would be that most people consider themselves to be cautious or perhaps even cowardly - because, by nature, you pay the most attention to the risks that bother you the most, and if your internal, subjective mental process is to always avoid those risks, you will feel like a cautious person, even if there are other objectively-measurable risks that you are not avoiding.
I watched that documentary, honestly I find any sporting event far more boring.
My attempt to sum up HTML5 vs. native apps for mobile development
>There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.

What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?

This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.

Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again.

After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive.

This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.

Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
Magic. Got it.
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Gold autumn, personality Mes clothing + Shoes,
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Cute, but damn onmouseover on the iPad.... :(
Great list. With the exception of Coffeescript (I just don't "get it"), that's basically my list, too. I'd like to branch out for this next year, though. Clojure and Erlang are both on my list.
The visual equivalent of reading a paragraph of text would be watching a short clip, so I don't see what's wrong with the site. While you prefer text to video, I think there is a sizeable chunk of the population that would prefer watching a small clip to reading text.

It's just personal preference, I think.
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That seems a bit too optimistic (pessimistic?) to me. I would predict that more than two-thirds of households will have a tablet in five years. I can see tablets replacing kitchen or living room laptops that have become so common in the last years, I can’t see them replacing the office PC, at least not in five years. PCs (~ $800) and tablets (~ $500) are cheap enough to co-exist. I don’t think it was that long ago when you paid $1300 for one desktop PC.
> People using jquery should be evolved enough to know what
> CDNs are

There are lots and lots of monkeys using jquery. Cargo-cultist monkeys, at that. At least that's my impression from the browser bugs I've seen filed with snippets of jquery code.

I wouldn't extrapolate knowledge of CDNs, or much of anything other than jquery basics, from use of jquery.
Thank you for the tip - I guess I should've been clearer and say, "I'm interested in Android programming and some basic Windows 7 stuff, but Android Java's too hard and App Inventor's too limited." :)
> The problem is that bookstores charge too much money.

What exactly do you expect them to do? Do you have any idea of the overhead of running a bookstore? It's easy to say that Borders should match Amazon's price, but if you take one look at an Amazon fulfillment center, you'll see a gap that simply can't be closed.
The obstacle is that it'd probably reveal too much about Apple's secret sauce, or at least there's a perception that it would.

People usually cite all kinds of general reasons why Apple is thriving - product design, emotional marketing, vertical integration - while ignoring the unsexy foundation that makes all of that possible: hiring the best people and setting them up in highly interdisciplinary teams. And any edge there is going to be kept under wraps, especially since competitors like Google are doing it wrong - I've heard of how siloed the designers are there, just like at Yahoo or Microsoft. That's the real reason Google's products look flat and overengineered - their designers hop from team to team like little bees, they're not a core part of the culture.
One of the reasons JavaScript crypto is a bad idea in most cases.
Looks like parallax scrolling, like we saw in some old side-scroller games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling
That's the entire point of Honeycomb. It's too provide native support for tablet interfaces.

*edit: native support for native interfaces doesn't make any sense:)
Great story! Hardware manufacturing in China sounds just like software development in India: if you give very precise specifications - so precise that you may as well have written the code yourself - they will usually be followed. However, if you don't say things like "the software should run without errors" you may well find it crashes on start-up.
Numbers and patterns in nature
Really? You really believe that? I've been using an Android phone exclusively for the last year. I love it. I'm hardly alone. I find it a superior experience to the iPhone in a lot of ways.
Currently insofar as I can see, only third-level domains are offered: "Registrations are made at the third level beneath second-level names" (Wikipedia, and looking at registrars).

Is the news that [something].ng are also going to be available now?
NYC BigTime CityTime Fraud Charges Ripples On
They obviously didn't do the proper due diligence. They did what was legally required, but they did not do what was necessary to avoid to avoid the business nightmare they're in now.
I feel like your prejudice is coloring your reading of that email. "This is what we did, these are the precautions we took," seems like a perfectly reasonable message. (Admittedly, it may be a cheap tactic, but Chinese manufacturers are the butt of many jokes in the US market, so I suspect most people would just shrug and say, "that sucks, glad they warned me.")

If they fail, it's not because of that messaging... it's because the product works poorly (based on some reviews) and now has defective parts.
SEO Competitive Actions
Why is it that your definition of minimalism is paucity? The movement's canonical definition is: the right amount of things for your goals. If you are a cook, a well-appointed kitchen is the Right Thing to have. Anything less is just a conceit, and itself a violation of the goal-oriented thinking we've been talking about.

There is this idea of zen and asceticism that has crept into the conversation and honestly I'm not sure what reputable source people are drawing it from. No one is saying you should be living on a tatami mat and with 256kb of storage. No one worth listening to is saying you should avoid owning a pet or enjoying an occasional drink with an umbrella in it.

A lot of people, particularly in our affluent western world, simply say "yes" to the do-I-want-more-stuff proposition. They don't ask, "Do I need this? Does it serve a purpose?" I think the world would be a better place if people made a habit of asking that question and not being afraid of saying, "No." Even if the answer is "Yes," the conscious consideration of utility has benefits.
To me, baseline trust means that if they squander their first access to capital they do not gain access again. Such a lending strategy would not raise this issue.
The Nook is a reader, not a full-featured tablet. Apples and oranges.
Happy New Year, some things
In brief, and only because vicious attacks on writers I enjoy just rubs me wrong:

1. It is not Sebastian's duty to demonstrate his accomplishments to you.

2. Arrogant? If you hate yourself so much that you can't stand a person with ambition and grand intentions, that's your problem. I'll take Sebastian's "arrogance" over your condescending "objective criticism" any day.

3. On what basis can you say this?

4. I spend my entire LIFE working to build things to help fix the problems in the world. I enjoy reading Sebastian because he writes about doing the same. And from what I can tell, he is one of the hardest working and honestly self-critical writers on the internet.

> People with work to do, work they love, they don't need people like you.

Sebastian hasn't asked anything of you. He's a valued contributor around here for a great number of reasons, and has found a writing style that resonates with many around here. If it doesn't resonate with you, that's fine. We're all in a different place. But there's no cause or excuse for this type of attack. As Sebastian points out below, 17 posts? That is a bit scary. Remember, beneath the posts and karma there's real human beings around here, some of the smartest on the internet, and they all deserve a measure respect, regardless of your thoughts on the value they provide the world for free. What exactly are you trying to prove, and to whom?
I have none, but I am in the process of learning.

Can we add this as an option?
I don't think GitHub markets to devices that can't run Git[Hub].
This strikes me as the right answer. We're not really sure yet. What if you can do input via brainwave headsets at 100 wpm in 5 years? Not impossible; you can type via brainwaves, right now.

Tablets could become nearly magical in less than a decade.
In some countries, programmer time marked "Maintenance" is expensed while that marked "Production" is depreciated over x years for tax purposes, so companies want their programmers to log their activities as "maintenance". If the auditors come, it had better have been maintenance. Perhaps the only real way to develop production code is work for a startup, but the recruiters won't be impressed if you want to go back to a large company later on.
80-90% of websites use keyboard as an input mechanism.

I'm not seeing why a tablet is so massively better than a netbook/laptop.
This brings up an interesting question. You can't deduct time or services donated from your annual tax return, but could you deduct the value of the product you gave them? If I create and donate a website to the nonprofit, can the value of that be deducted based on fair-market value?
No reasons why? No examples? No comparisons between it and what you would consider "good software"?

You might be getting upvoted because the HackerNews hivemind has a giant hard-on for all things Apple, but don't think for a second that you're actually making a valid point. If you want to start an intelligent discussion then go right ahead, but keep the obvious fanboy flamebait out of this.
I worked mornings this past week and took the afternoons off to do fun stuff with wife and kids - others took anything ranging from a couple of days off to a whole week
Who does that ? Each time i had to fix something in a OSS project i touched as little code as possible. Everybody knows is no fun working with code written by somebody else.
> It’s not just a huge iPod touch.

Yes, it is. The only difference you're seeing is that developers for iOS apps have accommodated for the additional screen real estate after its release. Developers of Android apps haven't yet because the OS isn't officially ready for tablets until Honeycomb. Once an official Android tablet is released post-Honeycomb can you actually start to make comparisons.
Historian's Eye
Having to reject someone can be a very stressful experience. I don't like the idea of purposefully inflicting that stress on others unless there's a chance we both could benefit.

"Getting rejected on purpose" sounds like I'd be picking situations where I know for sure I'll be rejected -- an inappropriate proposition, an undeserved request. I don't want to do that to someone else just to try to desensitize myself to rejection.
This one does :-)

https://gist.github.com/761348

Fairly idiomatic code too; particularly impressed with the use of XPath.

Are you scraping glogster or are you with glogster? ;-)
Well, no, there isn't really much of a tablet market. It's an emerging market; a year ago it didn't even exist until the iPad single-handedly created it. Everybody else is still trying to catch up. Right now your choices are basically, an iPad, or something else that probably isn't nowhere near as good (unless you count Kindles and Nooks which are much more specialized devices).

However, in a few years or so, I can totally see casual users ditching their (in their eyes) complicated PCs and netbooks in favor of a tablet of some kind, as long as it does what they want (watch a video, send email, go on Facebook, listen to music, play a game, etc).
Just curious, how much is it worth?
I use Git on my iPad all the time, from Cydia/Telesphoreo. Sure, it's unsupported, but it works great. (Link: http://cydia.saurik.com/package/git)
Try and get involved in your local tech community. Try and find out (usually via twitter) if there is events like a startup weekend, demo camps, or pub outings for tech people. Lots of cities have hacker spaces which are great to get involved in too (if you're lucky enough to have one).
Nipple tracking is the future of Fashion...
I also joined a world top guild (bouncing around #2 in Europe around the time I played). It's a totally different experience from even that described in the OP, and other people's experiences getting sucked into life at the mid-level-40s. I have to say to those who found levelling addictive, hardcore raiding is going to be ten times worse.

I'd agree in general that those who really focus to zerg a new boss as fast as possible end up playing less over time, but I also found many many people of my old guild who played almost constantly once content was cleared. Several would strive to have multiple highly geared alts, clearing the same content multiple times a week on alts as well as mains in case the next encounter needed a different class composition. Few of the people I raided with had jobs or openly talked about them. People who turned up once a week for the farm raid were mocked as being casual.

It's addictive in the way a job is addictive. Once your mind accepts there is some reason for you to be in this raiding cycle, and especially if you play an integral role (I was a main tank and tank officer), you feel you have to be there every night - and it just becomes the centre of your world, despite not receiving any real world compensation. The acclaim, worldwide achievement and knowledge of being part of something that is undeniably awesome all tie into it.
One example: Android still doesn't use the GPU for the interface, so the scrolling on a brand-new Nexus S still isn't as smooth as on a three-plus year old iPhone 2G. Plus, the lists don't bounce at the end, so not only is it choppier but it's (slightly) disconcerting to hit the end of a list as well (maybe the Gingerbread green flashes will help here, but a bounce just is more natural).

(This is not to say I only like Apple things. I think that Windows Phone 7 has the best and most consistent UI/UX of them all, currently, and webOS is quite nice as well.)
http://spoon.net/ ?
What's your source for that statistic? Or did you just make it up?
I'm not so worried about a competitor getting hold of this
camera. If they did, I'm quite sure they would call us and
return it... right after they said "we can't believe you
actually did this!".

http://reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=701458&postcount=30