skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My father wouldn't have cared about an iPad. Gadgets are not a substitute for quality of life; they are merely a means of distraction. I would argue that you are the one missing the point. The difference between being rich and poor is not possessions, and it can't be easily summed up in a quantitative manner. The difference is especially visible in the areas of influence, confidence, and security.

Rich people have the money and the connections to do pretty much anything they want to, to be able to convince other people to do their bidding. They likely grew up in a home where they learned the proper etiquette to enable them to operate smoothly in nearly any social situation. Even if someone doesn't have the etiquette down, that person can still gain confidence by wearing fine clothing or driving a luxury car. Finally, rich people always have a contingency plan; they don't have to worry about becoming insolvent due to an unexpected injury or loss of property.

If you grew up middle class and haven't been rich or poor, you just can't see it. I grew up somewhat poor, and I experienced firsthand the lack of security, and the little bit of influence I had was entirely based on my accomplishments. We busted our asses all summer when I was twelve so that we would have a place to live before we ran out of money. We went to the dentist once in about ten years, and the cure for most of our ailments was water and rest (antibiotics, what?). My dad worked insane hours as a laborer and barely slept just to keep food on the table and a roof over our head. I couldn't be "cool" at school because we didn't have money to buy nice clothes, much less keep up with the latest fashions. And just recently, while seeking work after college, I experienced the awful reality of having creditors call daily, and prioritizing which bills to pay not by due date but by necessity.

I've recently started a job where we operate a lot in more privileged social circles. Rich people have country club memberships that allow them to socialize with other rich people and get deals done that are simply impossible for anyone else. We dress up in suits that feel great, look great, and inspire confidence; I had a wonderful time this past New Year with several people I didn't know -- I was wearing an outfit that cost more than I had earned in six months before getting this job. I've been given resources that show me how to navigate parties and flourish in any social situation. I can convince a dude to get on his knees and shine my shoes simply by giving him some money; I can convince my boss (who has written books on security and cryptography) to review and advise my spare-time-work on a new filesystem, partly thanks to a mutual respect that is an automatic result of belonging to the same social circle.

Don't kid yourself. Being rich is way different from being poor. I don't see any way that can ever change. Not everyone can get what they want.
I think you have a major misconception about how welfare works in the U.S. The idea of a "large government check" or that living off of welfare is preferable to a living wage job, is not really realistic. Since welfare reform in the 90's, TANF, for instance, runs out in just over two years.

Further, countries which have the greatest welfare systems available, don't suffer from the kind of malaise people often incorrectly correlate with the availability of welfare.
Leave the criticizing to your friends. If you're passionate about, just start working on it. Seeing some progress will keep you going.
It happens. Check out Shopify: http://blog.shopify.com/2010/11/16/our-upgrade-to-rails-3

$ bundle show | wc -l
95
From what I understand, /b/ have been trolling Quora recently and quite enjoyed themselves doing so. Don't know how widespread it is.

I think Quora is okay - I don't recall all the answers being great ever - but people need to learn to understand to use the difference between a question comment and an answer soon.

Quora is definitely going to lose a lot of what makes it great if the developers don't come up with some filters.
50% of desktop web users. The encoding landscape is considerably different in the mobile world, and will be until Android tablets are both released and then adopted in large enough quantities. Currently though, most video is still in h.264 format and either served via Quicktime [edit: Media Framework] for iOS, or Flash for PC.
Vim Recipes
First thing I read this week that was lol funny. Oblidged.
It's funny to see people still believing Android is successful (worldwide as well) because Verizon doesn't have the iPhone. I'm guessing it'll increase iPhone's sales by like 500k/quarter, but nothing to write home about.

February 3rd, 2011. Just Another Day. You'll Never Forget. Again.
Merriam-Webster infringed dictionary software copyright, suit says
Erm, no, we actually know a lot of things that like this, with 'this' being 'something we can't explain' (talk of sensing or affecting the future is premature speculation on the explanation and irrelevant). To name one: the speed of the Voyager spacecraft. There are a zillion unexplained effects like that one and this one.
I agree that ideally, you wouldn't wrap your text manually and your editor would do soft-wrapping, as well as any tools like `git log` or email programs that patches were read with, so the commit message would fit on any size screen.

In the real world, however, lots of people use editors that don't have good soft-wrap support turned on by default, meaning that they're going to be doing hard-wrapping at some width. `git log` does not do any wrapping of messages, so depending on your pager settings you either get the line going off the edge of the screen or being wrapped by your terminal with no regard for word breaks.

Furthermore, even when soft-wrap is supported, it sometimes makes text harder to read; if your window is wide, and it just uses the whole thing displaying 150 characters per line, it can make the text a lot harder to read than a nice narrow column of text. I have this problem on the web a lot; some sites use multiple columns which take up lots of horizontal space (under the assumption that everyone runs their browser full-screen), which makes me widen my window, but then I come across a site that just uses the whole width for one big block of text, which now has unreadably long lines.

Given that many of the tools in question don't support soft-wrapping usably, standardizing on 72-column hard wrapping is a reasonable approach. Lines don't come out unreadably long that way, they will be displayed reasonably in `git log` and other tools on standard-width terminals, and they will display well in 80-column email clients even with several levels of quoting.
If only there were a place to get answers to questions like that.
btw. did anyone ever discovered a purchasing history on itunes/app store?
Developed over the last few months - Just a fun way to browse 180+ comic strips on the iPad. There are a many loose ends as this is v1 - but we already took too much time to develop this and wanted real feedback before working on new features.

I have a few coupons to enable free downloads, message me if you want them. Also, what are good ways for generating some buzz? We are already contacting relevant bloggers/forums.

How do you like it HN? We'd love to hear your feedback!
Thanks for the map; I always thought the declination was pretty tiny. Kind of shocking to realize it's 20° in my house.
Aztaka Developer's Edition - game sold with source code
Scientists construct synthetic proteins that sustain life
Cool. At least somebody understands there is a market at all; may this be the harbinger of some further price drop in the future. (I observe this announcement post-dates my laptop which I purchased in late October.)
It may be hitting another bottleneck, all cores share the same L3 cache, memory lane, disk, etc.
I may have been too harsh. The problems i see are actually from experts in non computer science fields. They don't even know that software engineering exists, and are used to being right.

At least non statisticians are respectful of stats. Doesn't apply to programming.
Why 0%? SJ has said TV is important, but people won't pay for 3rd party boxes if they get one for free via Cable? Apple is building a 1MM sqft. data center which is orders of magnitude too big for a music service.

Clearly Apple sees movies/tv as key part of their growth strategy, but will be blocked at the "last mile" by cable companies. By purchasing one of the biggest cable providers out there as well as good content they can own the customer from end to end. This seems like a wildly logical move. It isn't a big splash for the sake of a big splash it would give them total ownership over the entertainment medium that most americans spend 50 hours a week immersed in.

If they are building their own chips to provide a better user experience why not buy some pipe?
Thanks everyone for the votes. I hope it's a helpful document for those wanting to learn to code. Let me know how it can be better!
solidify your concept right away... work with a friend whose an artist/designer have the person make your concept palpable.

And try to get other people excited too.
To be fair, thats a problem with the way browsers render anything inside the <pre> tag. If anything, it is an example of what people should do, not force unnecessary restrictions on the way they write text. Lest you might end up with:

> This is a short paragraph that I am quoting that
> someone
> else sent to me.
And lock down the OS as much as possible. It will be bad enough supporting genuine issues, dealing with 'your laptop doesn't run XYZ' would be even worse.
Hi, I'm a Progress programmer as well.

Would rather be working in Haskell though....
In societies without a welfare government, non-working poor people have to beg. In other words, they still work in the sense of trading their time for money. The poor do not have the option to live in idleness (like the rich do.)
The trouble is that the poverty rate, like the unemployment rate, can never actually fall to zero in a market economy. "Full employment" still results in an unemployment rate of 2 - 6% (depending on how you're counting.) There are always going to be layoffs, family illnesses, fights with the boss, etc. that keep everyone from being employed all the time. In a healthy economy, though, those people are quickly cycling through unemployment and back into the workforce.

In a similar way, something like a 10% poverty rate would probably qualify as "zero poverty." The goal, then, of anti-poverty initiatives should not be to eliminate poverty or to simply provide for the basic needs of the poor (1). The goal should be to ensure that each person below the poverty line is set up to rise up out of poverty as quickly as possible. The trouble is that the programs that help the poor the most (education, substance abuse treatment) are labor-intensive and expensive.

(1) One possible exception - providing for the basic needs of children in poverty.
Remember that September many years ago that never ended?

Yeah, well, it never ended.
I've sent thank-you emails in the past. Never longer than two sentences, but it was always of the flavor, "I enjoyed speaking with you today, I hope to discuss the position more." I can't really say how much it helped, but I know it didn't hurt as I've had a couple job offers that way.
In the Republic, Cephalus says this:

And the great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men. Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest.

I think it is inaccurate to think that people from earlier times would have traded their riches for consumer goods - at least, not the thoughtful ones. The great advantages of riches are freedom, security, peace of mind.
To be clear, the above is a joke. Twitter has not released their numbers.
i know - but i assume thats how it will end up anyway.
Share your technical posts with help from Tagmask
Are there any simple diagrams which illustrate these types of problems from an information perspective? What I mean is, there are various mechanisms available, such as chain-of-authority, shared secrets, etc., and sometimes I get a whiff that something new, like DNSSEC, is, from an information theory (is that the correct term?) perspective, very similar to what's already in existence, for instance TLS, when the particulars of the protocols are stripped away.
also "don't quit your idea".... just put it on the back burner for a bit...

the most important thing is to always have ideas flowing. Don't become stagnate. Invest in your creative fecundity.Imagination will atrophy if not continuously used.
How many of these are bootlegs?

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/06/mac-app-store-bo...
You have to make up your mind: Are you criticizing the coverage or the service? The latter has nothing to do with this parody - but it may of course be fueled by the (completely ridiculous, bubble-like) hype.

That's like hating on Obama for the expectations people other than you had for his presidency.
When I'm feeling insecure about my own UI design skills, this list picks me up off the mat; somehow seeing precious pixel real estate littered with misplaced buttons, uneven gradients, random hues out of some 1970 shag carpet motel nightmare makes me feel... like not such a fucking idiot. Or maybe I'm kidding myself. Damn, I'm insecure about UI design.
Humans ARE animals. The only thing humans do that animals don't is abstract reasoning. But the whole span of love and sex are covered pretty well by other animals, and the physiological and even psychological mechanisms are pretty much the same across the bored.
I believe the valuation that Facebook is running on is predicated on an expectation of sustained future growth. Apple is a fast growing company, but I'm not sure that you can expect them to continue to grow at their current rate for as long as you can expect facebook to continue to grow at.

The Smartphone market is growing very fast, but Apple have competition in this market now that Android has started to grow. I'm not saying Apple are loosing much marketshare, more than while a year ago it looked like they going to gain marketshare in a market that was growing, while now they are holding their own in a growing market.

Facebook doesn't really have any serious competitors - myspace has slowed in terms of growth and is possibly shrinking while linked in are aiming at a different market. The only thing even on the horizon that could undermine them are federated social networks - and its far from proven that they are what consumers want.

Its a high valuation and does smell like a bubble, but I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook hit $100 billion when they IPO assuming they can get to a billion users by then.
Like the "Dolt" button?

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
I guess it's mostly a matter of taking the path of least resistance. I don't have to learn anything new to use an edit/run cycle and I haven't taken the time to figure out how to do it differently because it hasn't been clear what the advantages might be. For example it's not clear to me what you need to do to make sure the right modules get reloaded if you're working interactively.

Right now I'm mostly using Python for offline data analysis scripts that read data files and either dump output or display plots graphically (using matplotlib). I guess it could be useful to be able to look at data structures interactively.
Mac App Store sales figures for Todolicious
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
How the US let al-Qaida get its hands on an Iraqi weapons factory
There's not really any trick to it. You just pick one and build it anyways. At some point you will think it's a waste of time and useless. Just keep going, the hardest part is pretending to be jazzed about it when discussing it with others, but it's essential that you keep pretending it's awesome until you are excited about it again (or it's done, whatever comes first).

I think the key problem statement in your post is "I will usually invest several hours into each idea". You really need to put in several hundred hours before you can tell if something is worth it or not. The "excited" phase is really just a tiny fleeting moment in a project's lifespan.

In reality, projects are rarely clear flops or wild successes. People love describing them that way because it makes a great story, but it's a myth.
Big companies and their commercial interests.
What is the problem with dropping ideas? What would you rather have happen?
My process is probably a little different than most, but the first thing I do when I have an idea is jump into photoshop and make a logo. Doesn't matter if it sucks, if I plan on changing it 500 times, if the product name will change, whatever. Then I have something solid I can look at that defines that idea.

Next step is I start making mockups. Lots of em. I don't write one line of code until I have a mockup that I am excited about. Many times I have started mocking up an idea only to determine during the mockup process that it would be a BITCH to code, or the idea won't execute like I thought, etc..
Soap was supposed to be the enterprisey safe superset of XML-RPC.

From my experience back at the beginning -- XML-RPC was slightly underspecified, and would have used a bit more of a firm hand about clarification of what was legal and what wasn't. SOAP was wildly overspecified and complexified to the point that you needed an army of consultants. Which is just perfect for enterprisey stuff, since you conviently have an army of consultants that need to have something to do.

IMHO, XMLRPC inhabited a middle ground that was washed away by REST and ajax/json type interfaces. It's an extra bit of complexity that's just not all that popular now, rather than a stunningly less complicated version of SOAP.
Report: Analysis Of The Great Mobile App Store Boom Of 2010
If you use MySQL, slap this bad-boy(http://code.nytimes.com/projects/dbslayer) between the app and the database.

The payload is JSON over HTTP.
I would argue that the "do something" button should focus more on where you are in the process than the process itself. The examples in the page all sound like the "start" step, instead they should reflect that they're finishing or moving the user on to the next step. "Submit" is generic, but at least sounds final.

The reality, though, is that we're all guessing. Unless you go to the effort to A/B test something like that, it's just voodoo.
Sure, I'd buy that sex stories, like all sexually explicit material on the internet, is read more by men.

But you didn't say sex stories. You said the erotic romance novel. And that is just decidedly wrong.

My point about the essay, which I think it absolutely true, is that the men get off on the more detailed description of visual information. Whereas most women couldn't give two shits about how veiny some guy's dick was.
Think of it this way - even if you work for 6 weeks on something that turns out to be rubbish, you'll still have learned a huge amount in the process.
Indeed. We can fix all these systems... or stay at 72 columns.
Clean the &$#*) Off of Your Social Profiles
I interpreted this graph to mean broofa was implying that Facebook in the long run could achieve that kind of valuation, not that there were other companies with that valuation now.
It feels also troubling since having Ads in your app simply expose you to these complains since the advertisement SDKs are sending whatever data they want and you have no control on it.
What kind of follow ups have you gotten that seem stalkerly? Usually when I send them, I just say "Thanks for your time, I look forward to hearing more about the position."(albeit more professionally).

If they say, "Thanks for your time. I look forward to hearing more about the position-perhaps when you arrive tomorrow at 8:15 in the parking lot? I'll have your favorite latte in hand" then I would agree that it's stalkerly :)
Good point - I am getting really excited about some of the new players and ideas in the html5 video space. Just applied for the beta of http://sublimevideo.net/ - very promising, html5 video w/ flash fallback and mobile support.
The choice that welfare allows is: welfare (much leisure with little money) versus work (little leisure with X money), where X depends on your productivity. For people with little productivity, welfare looks very attractive.
Yeesh, the media really likes to stir stuff up. Those articles read like self-fulfilling prophecies.
It's definitely easy to set up. I'm thinking about making a greasemonkey script to put a button next to my search results and let me block the site if I hate it, rather than go do it manually as you suggested (which is easy but takes more time than hitting a button).

Alternatively I will stick to my plan to change search providers. One way or another.
Kids shown 20th century tech and asked what it is (video)
I think you misread - "assures", not "assumes". UTF8 guarantees that any valid ASCII char is NOT part of a UTF8 encoded multibyte char.
The Mac App Store has a purchases tab and iTunes on the Mac shows you your purchase history under your account (click your Apple ID in the top right corner and select Account).
Revenue. Once someone pays for something it becomes real IMO. I run digest.io and it was always a side thing until people stared paying and I had to deal w/ customer support and stuff like that. Do whatever you can to just get one paying customer and then whatever you have to do to get your next and your next etc...
So you would like us to talk you out of -- talking yourself out of ideas?

I found with myself that I can over-think things. Remember that action comes first, motivation second.

Instead of all this imagining of how users might show up and how they might use your app, and how you might be able to scale or grow -- stop doing all that.

Think less. Do more.

It's better to do one thing that's completely wrong -- and finish it -- than it is to have a hundred great ideas that never go anywhere. Don't be a spectator in your own life. (Which reminds me I need to get back to work!)
Emacs has spoiled me. As soon as I saw your post, I felt a weird tingling urge to press M-q and fix it.
There's a slideshow linked from the bottom of the 2nd page (bad placement, IMO). Here's a direct link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=gigapixel...
you sure itunes also shows buys made from the iphone?
Has Cringely ever made an accurate prediction? I've seen him linked to so many times, and each time it's with some eye-rollingly ridiculous claim, that no one ever seems to follow up on (or sometimes claims that are obvious to anyone paying any attention at all, or so ill-specified that you can never really call them right or wrong). I don't really understand why anyone links to him; he's not a particularly interesting writer, and he doesn't have a very good track record of making predictions or revealing anything that's not commonly known.
None, probably, because bootlegs are not distributed through the App Store and use an existing receipt.
Ah, I see our disagreement. The author and I are pointing out that most of the 10% or so of society classified by the government as "poor" are doing extremely well. I guess you aren't dispute this at all.

You are saying there is a much narrower subset (I'm guessing veterans and others with mental illness?) which is not doing well. I.e., "crazy people have problems, and many are also poor." Very true. But that isn't what the author is discussing. No one is claiming the mentally ill don't exist.
Designing an API is a skill in itself, but I think rule 1 is "Don't use SOAP"

JSON over REST seems to be flavour of the month FWIW.