skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally believe that there is great value in learning how to use and be proficient with the command line. It is a different way of working from the GUI based systems that many computer users learn and primarily use. And it can be a very powerful and very quick way of working, as well.

I would say install a simple, stripped down Linux distro on a computer and try to use it for everything. Necessity is the best motivator to learning in my experience. You can start off with Gnome, but if you want to force yourself to learn the command line better, install something more lightweight (like enlightenment, or openbox) and then figure out how to configure it and try and do work from there.

If you don't have a box you can put Linux on and can use, find a super cheap Linux VPS (search around on lowendbox.com) and then follow a tutorial on setting up a simple server. Then you can do an email server, try using it as a torrentbox, etc. This may even be a better option, because it will be a place you can put up your other work. It's only a couple bucks a month, and once you've got things figured out, try doing more with it. Switch from Apache to nginx, for example.

The key is simply spending time on the command line, then you will be able to get comfortable with it. Also, there are many, many great tricks that you can learn if you know someone who is good at using Unix command lines and shells simply by watching over their shoulder. Some of the most valuable tidbits I have learned have been when someone saw me do something the hard way, then taught me a better way to do it (it took me a long time before I learned about tab completion, for example).
Help me by drinking Beer
Wow! Hacker News RSS seems to be working now.
>the first place I hit is dunkin donuts

But it's garbage. Boar's head is just as prevalent and way better.
yea I caught that point about too much calculus. I studied math as an undergrad - 3 semesters of calc, 2 real analysis, 2 more of topology and have not used any of it as a programer. I did linear algebra and discrete math but it was not enough to really make a difference. It seems like history is more at play here than anything else. For 300+ years they have been polishing up that continuous math track and it was what all the scientists and engineers found useful.

I also think this is the reason everybody uses doubles and floats for doing financial apps. It makes so much more sense to use integers and talk about "how many" pennies one has rather than "how much" money one has. Floats and doubles were designed to estimate continuous quantities not exact figures.
Should you is nearly a philosophical question, so for the moment I'll just assume you kind of want to. I strongly recommend The Linux Phrasebook if you regularly use Linux. If you use OSX, you might take a look at Peepcode's screencasts on the command line[2]. (Much of The Linux Phrasebook actually applies to OSX as well, but there will be occasional issues because Linux uses GNU versions of things that Mac uses BSD versions of. This can cause lots of small differences, though the underlying basics are pretty similar.)

[1] http://opensource.weblogsinc.com/2006/06/20/my-new-book-linu...

[2] http://peepcode.com/products/meet-the-command-line
> You claim that some of those projects could be done by 2 people in 3-6 weeks. So 1 person (e.g. you) could do it in 6-12 weeks.

And 9 women can give birth to 1 baby in 1 month. I agree that prioritizing is important, but there is a lot more to morale and motivation than that. In my experience, having someone to work with is one of the key motivators. Prioritizing becomes easy after you are in it with someone else.
I think it's suppose to say that the podcast will be about startups and tech.
Interesting post. How many users vs paid users do you have on your current products?
You're giving sedentary lifestyles way too much credit. If you want teenagers with the fitness levels of elderly smokers, you've already got it happening out there.

Quit driving to work, and start biking to work, and you'll see results. It really has to be about lifestyle, and spending too much time on one's behind, combined with eating badly, is slowly killing millions.
Section 2 is for system calls. In other words libc functions which are just thin wrappers around the system call interface provided by the kernel.

Section 3 is for library API's. It typically includes the C standard library functions in addition to pages for other libraries which are installed on the system.

If you look at your examples you will find that fputs and fseek are declared in stdio.h, which is a C standard library header whereas lseek is declared in unistd.h which is a Unix/POSIX header.

lseek is a low level call to the kernel's filesystem interface. You can't access a file more directly unless you write a kernel module or modify the kernel. fseek and fputs wrap the low-level filesystem interface in a stream abstraction.

Also fseek and fputs should be available on any platform with a C compiler (including Windows) whereas lseek is only normally available on Unix/POSIX platforms.
As if we care...
>Here's an alternative ethics. Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author.

This is not an alternative ethics (if indeed this is an ethics instead of a system of legal ownership), it is the _dominant_ ethics.

>they are contracts between an author and publisher, transferring specific and limited rights (not ownership). Publishers can be forced to pay the author royalties, not out of utilitarian reasons, but because they voluntarily agreed to such terms (the author having natural leverage, e.g. she can refuse to disclose his ideas).

Except in a market where ideas are not scarce and the publishing _is_ success, the creatives are exploited and their so-called property rights a joke.

We all understand the _theory_ behind your 'natural property,' the ownership of something you create. We just don't agree with it anymore, because in many cases it has failed and in the future it will not be relevant.

>Did you have that thought, or did the social collective assign it to you?

Missed it. He's pointing out the semi-fictional nature of idea ownership, not claiming originality for his ideas.
So true. It only opens the doors to vertical search opportunities. I have stopped searching Google a few years now, instead I search on Wikipedia for information, on Amazon/Newegg for products to buy and on Yelp for location-based reviews. Wikipedia in particular (not Facebook) has eaten Google's lunch, in my opinion, because when someone says "..to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.." I think of Wikipedia, not Google, despite what http://www.google.com/corporate says.

Google is gmail+maps to me, not search.
Someone have a cached copy? It's not loading for me. I agree completely with the statement, but would like to see his reasoning.
Can we end the myth that using superlatives somehow adds credence to a contrarian standpoint? I can't speak for anybody else, but if I see an article titled "Ideas are Worthless", I just won't read it. That said:

Use discretion, crunch the numbers, make educated decisions, and let the competition rely on silly absolutist platitudes.
Tout has about 700 users, and about ~15 paid users @ $30, with a good number of people "waiting" for a lower priced solo plan. Braintrust has a higher number of users, but most of them are no longer active -- so I've stopped looking too hard until the re-launch.
I wonder how they took the pictures. Was there enough light in the cave thru some holes in the ceiling? Did they install huge lamps or did they use a very long exposure (seems unlikely by looking at the people).

either way stunning and surreal photographs!
How Nintendo Saved the Video Game Industry
Worth noting here that new works such as the LOTR movies would get a fresh copyright term.
Thanks for the advice Elliot. Throughout the process, I've been open about my technical skills with my manager, but he keeps saying he has full confidence I can get it done; without any real advice. Luckily, its more of an independent internal project that replaces a process that's more manual right now, so it doesn't affect anything else.

Yes, the next cycle is more related to what I do, but I don't want to get a reputation as someone who can't get stuff done; it's just that I feel 6 months is not enough time to learn a completely new language, especially when it took 3 months just to figure out the project requirements.
The Ultimate Patent Troll Patent: Get Sued When You File A Patent
Actually, I've found that the "Top idea in mind" is how I do it, and figured someone would have mentioned it already.

http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

I just never put a name into it, until I read that essay. When you mull over something in your mind all the time, you're bound to come up with something as you get more new pieces of information in your day to day life.
> While everyone can have a billion-dollar idea

You know, this is one of those cliches that lives on simply because everyone keeps repeating it. Everyone can have an idea they believe is worth billions of dollars, true. And a billion dollar idea is worthless without billion dollar execution. But don't let this fool you into believing that great ideas are any less rare.

And besides that, my experience is that great ideas drive great execution. I mean, I personally find it harder to execute an idea I don't like than one I love. And I hardly believe that I'm unique.
I think a really bright flash is sufficient.
If one is so capable of building something, why haven't you built XYZ and sold it for many millions already?

Because simply building something doesn't equal success. Other factors are involved, such as potential need for capital, marketing etc.

I would not say ideas are worth zero -- at least not without qualifying/explaining that statement. [1] I believe it's more accurate to say ideas are worth very little -- usually much less than the idea's creator thinks it is -- relative to everything else needed for project success. And many ideas do get built out into existence, and flop, where we see that generally 90% of startups fail.

The confusion as I see it with this debate is "idea people" having the misconception that a great idea equals success, and only needs the product to be built. That's usually not the case. And the problem here is that there is zero risk in having an idea, but elevated risk in every other part of growing a potential business.

As to the importance of execution, well, you can have an average or sub-par project executed extremely well be very valuable and profitable, but an idea without any execution will always be worth zero no matter how great its potential.

I do believe ideas can have value. Highly valuable ideas are ones that are novel and provide great advantage upon execution in the marketplace. These are generally rare. I can only think of a couple in the tech space over the past decade: the page ranking model of Google, and the video sharing model of YouTube.

[1] An idea is worth zero in the dollar value sense because if the idea never leaves the brain of the creator to be introduced into the world it never introduces any value into the world, and remains only an idea.
The issue isn't getting a copy of the original work for free. Of greater concern is the penalty for creating derivative works - so we can't have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies
I apologize if this seems harsh but I am highly skeptical that someone who is "not a developer", and by this I understand you to mean that you have never done software development in your career, is qualified to design large systems and networks.

I don't think that such a person could have a deep enough understanding of the technology to do a good job performing the tasks he purports to.

As for likening developers to "contractors who pounds the nail" that tells me that you have very little understanding of the nature of software development.
"Dealing with american here, no doubt about that" = nationalism. I downvoted both of you, but not your first post, which I agreed with. My point was that I am also an American, yet capable of agreeing with you.
UI Fundamentals for Programmers
I'll talk to my manager first thing tomorrow. Yes, its more of an internal project, and I'm the only one working on it - so me not finishing won't shut down the company.

I didn't mean do-overs, more like it was okay to fail and you had time to learn from your mistakes.

And thanks for replying, I appreciate that you responded.
You can even make it always the default by setting branch.<name>.rebase to true, and can make /that/ the default by setting branch.autosetuprebase to always ;P.
That's an interesting question.
My [minimal] understanding of copyright law suggests that whether the book's in public domain in Britain has no bearing on the rights granted to Americans to use it.

If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.)

I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post back here, since now I'm curious.

(these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways, along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)
>LOTR is being actively commercially exploited and the commercial exploitations are darn good.

Darn good, but not perfect. We are now denied the right to re-interpret LOTR, perhaps because we want to include the Scouring of the Shire--not because the movie was necessarily worse without it, but because we _want_ to.

And heck, take a better example: the Harry Potter movies are in great need of re-interpretation, but don't expect to see independent film-makers getting a bite at that apple anytime soon.
I might be mis-remembering, but doesn't (L)GPL rely on copyright law for its status? If so, then there's at least one bit of IP that's "properly protected" by copyright law.
Everyone can have a billion-dollar idea. Doesn't mean that they do in fact have it, or ever in their lifetime will.

Small yet vital nuance in meaning.

Also there is a statistical bias here in that one can only know their idea was a billion-dollar idea when it becomes a billion-dollar execution. If everything doesn't line up, you might still have had a billion-dollar idea, you just couldn't prove it.
Well, a restricted view that includes Europe as well as North and South America isn't all that restricted.
I also search IMDB for movies suggestions and ratings, in addition to Wikipedia and Amazon.

I would still use Google because I don't like thinking about the kind of search I want to do and I don't think having Wikipedia/Amazon/IMDB as the only sources of information is healthy.

But goddammit, Google needs to do something about that spam.
As I mentioned previously, the 2nd cycle is more along the lines of what I studied for. More than that, I think I realize that I'm not meant for a BigCo and startups want a certain level of experience, and rightly so.
This is an absolutely true point - and I am definitely more on the idea side. In a lot of ways though, it's not so much the "MBA vs Coder" debate as much as the "designer vs coder" debate. I do the high level product design and actually UI for the product, so obsess about things like user behavior. Before I was doing this, I was designing programs for university students that were again, driven by thesis about behavior.

I hope the piece doesn't come off as thinking it's all about idea and no execution. The "in between" for me is that they're part and parcel of the same thing.
I wouldn't even consider Mickey Mouse to be a character - he hasn't been used that way by Disney for at least 50 years, and never had much character development to begin with even when he 'starred' in minstrel cartoons.

Mickey Mouse is a logo, deserving of trademark protection and nothing more.
Thanks for replying Imran. I'm definitely going to wait to see how I like the second placement, but I was worried about how companies generally deal with < 100% success with deliverables.
The only problem with Kroc's rant is that RSS auto discovery and UI wasn't removed from Firefox. It was moved from the addressbar to the Bookmarks menu.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054401
I don't get the whole thing with a light phone being "cheap" feeling. I want my phone to feel like air, because in my hand it really doesn't make that much of a difference. But in my pocket (especially with sweats or PJs), even a moderately heavy smartphone begins to make things sag (especially when running).
Why we don't need a new Google
I was open about my previous experience when I started; I told them first-day that I have limited coding experience, and had not used the language they wanted me to develop in.

In terms of switching jobs - I'm worried about appearing disloyal, and how it will look on my resume down the line.
My problem with this argument is that it positions an "idea" person as static and fixed in time rather than dynamic and evolving. Over the life time of a startup, the idea becomes less about the initial spark and more about the way things evolve. Data can drive lots of that, for sure, which is why things like lean startup are so valuable. But what about the big decisions about where to go next? What's your next product? What's the behavior that's not working? What have you fundamentally misunderstood about your users? A ton of that comes back to judgement and prioritization of ideas. Lots of great developers have that, but it is a fundamentally different skill.
Power: Why some people have it and others don't
There's a fairly new term for this: snowclone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
That sounds awesome dwc, I'm definitely with you on the power of persistence. Thanks for responding :)!
So then what is your argument? Before you seemed to imply that billion-dollar ideas are a dime a dozen. Anyone can have them. But good execution is difficult to come by.

Now you seem to be agreeing with (or at least aren't arguing) the ultimate conclusion that I come to in my last comment which is that good ideas are rare. Whether anyone can have them or not is kind of a moot point if very few people actually do have them don't you think?

If good execution is hard to come by and good ideas are hard to come by, then wouldn't that mean that both are important things to worry about?
Women and Cars
Well, dreams and reality don’t always match. Take a look why!?
Bio / Chem seems better than social sciences. That doesn't really surprise me, unfortunately, and is possibly due to the actual verifiability and lack of ideological baggage in hard sciences.
It wouldn't exist at all without its creator so why should its creators' rights (including transferable rights) ever end? The idea of rights with a time limit is kind of strange, isn't it?
Website went down..trying to figure it out now. In the meantime, here's a copy - http://nlw.posterous.com/temporary-ending-the-ideas-are-wort...
I was imagining a simpler model, where different areas of the beard are either present or not; length doesn't matter. If you're growing one part out, you might as well grow all of it out. Therefore, in this model, you only "grow" to the full beard vertex.

I'm not sure that your reduction from TSP works. Given two nodes A and B, I understand that you're setting their distance on the associated facial areas to match the distance in TSP, but what if they're forced to be even more distant on the area corresponding to some other node C?
I would like to see a real response to this, point-by-point. What this doesn't need is politician style answers, but true responses.
I wonder if anyone has ever considered that existing copyright legislation puts authors' lives at risk by making the term: date of death + N years? There's a short story in that at least but now I'm too afraid for my life to write it. :)
I don't think that ARM is as clear a win in high performance areas as you seem to think. ARM does let you get away with not having most of the decode logic that an x86 has to carry around, but thats pretty small penuts compared to out-or-order logic with a decent reorder window size, or a wide execution cluster with the associated bypass network.

And while instruction predication does let you avoid a lot of branching nearly for free in the ARM architecture it makes out of order logic much less effective because now there are a lot more dependencies between instructions. That was the reason the Alpha team decided not to use predication, even though they were familiar with the idea. Its also why the Itanium, an in order architecture, used predication.
B2B sales funnel, follow up and estimate future revenues
Emacs always had anti-aliased text if you used it within a terminal that had it.

I never missed anti-aliased text that much - there are plenty of good fonts that render well without it. Now that it has, it looks much better. However, the idea of giving up its power in order to get pretty fonts with a lesser editor is ludicrous.
Previously compelling, no longer convincing.

Lessig didn't ignore it, he overruled it.
Beautiful. This is the first time I've ever wanted to visit Vietnam.
One thing I don't agree with here is the concept of generations. Immortality is coming and the idea of generations, and the expectation that authors will die, will become outmoded. The philosophically correct view has to be able to deal with that, not be based on parochial, temporary conditions.

That said, I don't see that Micky is "captive". No one has a right to Micky. Micky's creator created him and he would not exist otherwise. This isn't like a math formula, or a medicine, that if one guy didn't invent it then someone else would have invented it later. It would never exist at all without its creator, so even if the creator has full rights over it forever the world hasn't lost anything that it would have had otherwise.
That's just one of the many points that you have to get right to get a Freemium business working. Summing up Vimeo's success to just that one point (the fact that they, basically, advertise the benefits of their premium product in a tangible, omnipresent fashion) is really a gross over-simplification.
Intuition in Research
I mostly use Google to search specific sites these days. It's fantastic for that. Individual site searches suck and I'm certainly as guilty as anyone else doing a quick job on that ... LIKE '%foo%' ... heh.

But when you stray outside of known sites you get all kinds of garbage in the results and unsurprisingly it's always monetized by AdSense. If Google was serious about fighting spam they only have to audit AdSense publishers. Of course that's asking them not only to invest a ton of resources but to do it with the intent of making less.
Two things for you to consider:

1. Turn this into an API that webmasters can send you their data which you crunch into useful reports. This just might be a decent money earner.

2. A sitemap importer to kick start the reporting. It should be quite easy as sitemaps are some flavour of XML or plain text.