skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why? Why is that disturbing? This is a genuine question.

It doesn't disturb me one bit. As long as each generation is relatively wealthier than the prior one, I don't care about the spread within that generation.

My grandfather died of pneumonia at age 56 due to a lack of oxygen and antibiotics at the hospital. They didn't have enough money to paint their house and instead used old tractor sump oil. My parents, when married, didn't have hot water or a toilet inside the house. They had never travelled more than 200 miles from their place of birth.

My kids have access to better health, leisure, education, food and housing than even I did, which is not that long ago.

This continual improvement in wealth amongst my own family is proof enough that the very rich aren't impinging on what really matters, which is improving living standards for the majority of people.

Paraphrasin PG in one of his essays - it doesn't disturb me that Mozart was 1 million times more musically talented than I am, or that Tiger Woods is 10 million times better at golf. Their ability and success doesn't impede on my life at all - if anything - it improves it. It's not unfair (in any real sense) that Federer can play tennis very well and I can't hit the ball to save myself. So why is it unfair that someone has talent at making money and can make a million times more money than I can? In a free society, (apart from a very tiny minority who steal or lie their way to it) the only way they can get (and stay) rich is by providing excess value to everyone else. That's true whether you are kicking a ball, trading stocks or building software.

Nobody has ever successfully convinced me why wealth disparity in a free society is a problem. If anything, I see it as a sign of a healthy society.
We had a thing on here a while ago called "Offer HN" where all sort of people offered (for free) their services to others. You could do the same thing for startups here for copywriting / marketing.
A) I don't think I'm picking the middle. I'm saying most things aren't as simple as black or white arguments would like to make them be.

B) No, an MD is not a scientist. I have a website, have had it for a few years. Very few people of any sort have expressed any interest in it whatsoever. I'm not holding my breathe. I don't expect it to catch on.
Please, not a rehash of what we've been reading for the last couple weeks.
I have a friend with an autistic son and she is firmly convinced it was caused by his vaccine(s) (according to her, no symptoms prior). Her younger son is perfectly healthy but never vaccinated.

I get that you don't agree with anti-vax people but it can't be too hard to see where those directly affected are coming from—can it?
The process converting these things to glucose, and some of the other ingredients in this food, result in all sorts of chemicals being released into your body. (not bad -- vitamins are chemicals... etc). These in turn affect how the body operates. Depending on how the body is operating, various other chemicals, such as hormones are released -- creating various brain reactions -- and since the brain is affected, presumably this means the brain is affected. (Yes it's a tautology -- done for effect).

This doesn't even include the fact that some things in food directly affect the brain, such as caffeine.
It's too bad this doesn't work on a cell phone contract.
I would love for someone to download all the data and put together lists of the most frequent 10,000 1, 2, 4, and 5 ngrams.

The datasets are just too large for my computer to handle.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/datasets
Now Walt Mossberg and John Gruber can praise Apple for making a 4G iPhone. That sure was easy.
Ah, OK... I thought he was comparing more "CPU-like" to "GPU-like" designs, rather than CISC to RISC.
First off, don't beat yourself up - 20 min is good. Just make sure that 20 min work periods are punctuated with 5 min break periods.

I have ADD (not ADHD), but here is what works for me.

1. Drugs - After much resistance to the idea as well as near exhaustive experimentation with alternative therapies, I tried Concerta and was amazed at the results. On the night of my first dose I had what felt like the best sleep of my life.

2. Awareness and understanding of the symptoms - If you are like me, you are not procrastinating because you lack focus -- you are procrastinating to achieve focus. You are effectively self-medicating with adrenaline. The resultant constant anxiety about both not working and upsetting your wife keeps you sharp as well. You still are going to need the 'fix', but strive to get them from either drugs, or different behaviors.

The solution for me was to strategically fill all of my 'free-time'. It sounds like you have a wife and kids, so this should be easy. Lean into being a good husband and father. Block out dedicated family time where you are focusing on them and not stray thoughts about work. It is the 'limbo' state where you are present at home but thinking about something else that is the killer.

Make sure that this time is centered around an activity - not TV/Computer. Cooking. Washing dishes. Doing Laundry. Playing with the kids (for real). Painting the guest room.

This does 2 things: it keeps your family happy, and leaves you just enough time to cram in work when it is time to work. Too much time on any one task will put you in 'limbo'. I'm sure that your problem isn't just at work, I'm willing to bet that you are not making a habit of being present in the moment. Off hours practice being present at home will only help things.

Also, it sounds like you know that boring problems make you procrastinate. It may be worth looking into ways to make boring problems interesting...

3. Administrative Pre-Planning - I know that trying to work around anything that could derail my attention is not going to work. The solution is really as simple as removing the possibility for those distractions to occur.

Seriously - Restrict your internet access with site-blocking , headphones to keep co-workers away (even without music - I can't listen to music / TV when I am trying to work). Whatever your triggers for 'limbo' are, acknowledge them and make sure that you have no chance of being exposed. Not ever.

4. Unwavering Planned Routine - This doesn't work without #2 and #3. I could never stick to routines because I needed the rush that I got from a chaotic lifestyle. When you turn it around, you can get almost the same rush by being optimally effective at any one time. You can race the clock for your fix. If you have to decide at any given time what to be optimally effective at, you will deliberate and go into 'limbo'. Pre-planned routine is a good way of overcoming the impulsivity and reduced long-term executive-cognition that is characteristic of the condition.
I believe clisp will.

see section 32.6.2. Scripting with CLISP in this document
http://clisp.sourceforge.net/impnotes/quickstart.html
going with a friend makes it much better
It doesnt run that bad on my Windows Phone 7 :) We'll see how far they go with it.
workout at home

just get a pull up bar and some weights and do it at home.

You'll save like an extra hour in the process by not having to go to/from the gym.
I think you should consider a sales job, even if that's not what you want to do long term. I was given the job of "technical guy on the sales team" at a startup and it was a good experience for a year or so even though I didn't want to make a career out of it.

You'd be surprised how many "official marketing materials" get written by the sales team the night before big meetings, especially in the early days when there's no budget for real marketing.
Can we finally get some momentum behind getting rid of Sarbones-Oxley? It's not helping, and it seems to be making things worse.
Thank you all so very much for your comments! You're giving me a lot of insight into the process and the many positive/negative factors I should be thinking about - this is absolutely perfect!
I love this thread. Mainly because I am a total food geek.

I have to say that yes, getting started is a pain, and yes, the easy way seems, well, easier, but better food is a HELL YES reason to overcome the first two.

Just like your startup, starting to get a healthy kitchen going requires a lot of investment before you start to see any outcome. Deep Breath. You're going to need to go... Shopping.

But, once you're boot strapped with supplies, regular top ups is all that's required. I feel better when I eat crap less then I eat well. It's sorta annoying, but not once you get into the rhythm of it.

Provided food is a great idea if it's good quality. Providing junk at the workplace just exacerbates the issue. That said, it's not too hard to prepare extra meals at home and bring them to the office, especially if you can convince your founder/self to install a chest freezer. Sure, fresh stuff is usually better, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Microwaves rock when you don't use them as a magic-1-button-make-hot machine. You can cook grains, make sauces, steam things and even do some poaching in a Nucleonic Oven, as long as you're not totally impatient. If I can stand to wait, you sure as hell can.

Not having greasy fingers helps prevent your keyboard and mouse from getting manky, and stops colouring leaching out of where your wrists rest on your lappy:P
What would you do with it? (I know there are lots of uses, but what's yours?)
You know I've wanted to read Atlas Shrugged for a long time but I can't find a copy that isn't in microscopic brain-hurting print and crappy paper. Any ideas?
It's expensive, but it works. Also, there is the social factor. You have an entire team at a Crossfit gym who you work out with that expect you to be there, and push you while you are there.

In this case, peer-pressure is a good thing.
Kinda ironic how the author is trapped in the same mindset:

He talks about the national debt and then wonders what it can buy and figures out that it would be a bunch of cars and a lot more ipods.

Guess what kiddo? That's what the debt bought and thats what bought on the debt.
wow getting late over here, thanks for catching that {insert aim foot in mouth emoticon} lol
Especially moderation.
Wonder how many duplicate topic and mostly duplicate content articles we're going to see about how Google provides duplicate content and duplicate topic answers to searches?

My irony meter is pegging.
One solution may be for Google to radically change their algorithms and policies for web search to de-emphasize phrase-matching and more strongly prioritize inbound links and credibility.

Inbound links and the calculated "credibility" from the same are what killed the web the first time around. There was once a democratized web era when that actually worked -- when millions of people had their little Goecities pages and were linking the cool stuff -- but in the modern era it's 99% consumers who cast no votes, and the last 1% is extraordinarily incestuous circular link love: Marcos links to Coding Horror who links to Daring Fireball who links to Scoble who links to Marcos, etc.

People with neither information or authority end up being the credible authority on matters they have aren't authorities on. Scoble a few years back pointed out the fact that according to search engines he was the most important Robert in the world. That is a frightening concept.

We will move from an era of search engines to an era of expert engines. Many of the questions I used to "ask" Google I now ask of Wolfram Alpha, and its approach has turned out to be quite useful. Expand that computer knowledge more broadly, and improve the human syntax parsing. and we'll have a winner. Several such systems are built around computer learning of the wikipedia corpus.
Microvision prototype Android 'mini tablet' with built-in projector hands-on
If you don't mind, can you cite an example?
In a lot of the comments around this lately, people have been saying that this is something Google can fix, or needs to fix.

I would suggest that the content farms' success in gaming specifically Google's algorithm was an inevitability (whatever the current state of the arms race) and the only thing that will weaken the effectiveness of their techniques is to expose their business model to a greater range of algorithms. If you have three or four search engines all working on slightly different principles, it becomes a lot harder to game them all with the same content, even if gaming any one of them would be trivial. In other words, competition in the SE space at the algorithmic level is something we sorely need to see.

In parallel, my suggestion for one new search engine to add to the mix: a crawler for unsubsidised content. That is, the results consist solely of pages that don't carry advertising of any kind. This wouldn't exclude ecommerce sites but would exclude most kinds of affiliate marketing. Subscriber-only sites could pay to be indexed at a flat rate, though guaranteeing that this fee wouldn't affect rankings might be tricky. Alternatively a journal-access style of subscription model could see the SE paying the content site owner when one of its paying users consumes their information.
I agree, I can't help but thinking how awesome it would be just to see the press release: "Fuck it, we're doing 5Gs."
Might I suggest http://www.longbets.org/
The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox
Congratulations to everyone who helped create Drupal 7. I took a quick look at it, and the Admin UI looked much improved.
I'm working on a language app and an authoritative (and public domain) list of the most frequent words / phrases would be tremendously helpful :)
Android's swype(sp?) feature improves accuracy of words, but still takes awhile to type a sentence.
I recommend finding a personal trainer who's company and conversation you enjoy and look forward to. They're hard to find, but they do exist. The last time I had to move, out of everything, I was the most reluctant about leaving my gym/trainer.

For anyone near Springfield, MO, look up this guy: http://czechusout.org/meet_pavel.php
Social Media: Next Dotcom Bubble?
working on it... (for cardio, anyway) www.activetheoryinc.com
This sort of "integration" is enormously difficult. In fact, it's even ill-defined.

I challenge you to design a useful system that works, but is general enough to integrate both dpkg and rpm.
BTW I lost 20kg and loved it, I'm serious about helping. I'll enter into a formal contract, give you clean and clear account details et al.
Folks have told me on HN several times they wanted to hear about some number crunching/SEO work/etc that I did regarding the worth of particular college degrees. I just got the OK from my client to share results, so here you go.

Search tool: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/
Summary article: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering-d...

Short version: get an engineering degree.

The client has generously permitted me to talk about the business case for this project in broad strokes, and I think it is potentially very interesting for the average HNer startup. The general gist is that the government has terabytes of very interesting data and very limited resources for publicizing it. The NYT knows this and they totally kill it by turning CSV files of population statistics into compelling, actionable presentations that tell a story. You can do this, too.

With a little creativity, 1 GB of Bureau of Labor Statistics data becomes several hundred pages of rather interesting content for the client's niche. Google doesn't particularly love raw data in terms of rankings, though, so the graphs got beefed up a bit with content written by TextBroker writers, stock photos, and the like.

The business goal is that eventually most of these pages will rank for, e.g., [computer science degree average salary], and that some portion of searchers will request an application packet through the website. The CPA for that is between $10 and $100 (I'm not familiar with exactly how it is set).

This project took a few thousand dollars of outsourced work plus the equivalent of about three weeks of full time work from myself. The client and I anticipate that it will be very successful for them.

You can do something fairly similar for your startup -- I've never seen one that can't combine engineering expertise plus writing to generate fairly compelling content at scale, and the SEO gains for it are considerable. I recommend trying it.
Site has been slashdotted/fireballed/ycombinatored...
Anyone have a mirror?
I think OTA is actually Online Travel Agent. GDS seems to be Global Distribution System, and TMC might be Traffic Message Channel.

In any case, just knowing what these stand for, does not really help me. This article seems to be saying something interesting, but it assumes a fair amount of background knowledge that I do not have and, frankly, do not really know how to obtain.

So: can anyone provide a summary, without the jargon, of this guy's main point(s)?
Bypassing Flash’s local-with-filesystem Sandbox
It's not even going to be available in Europe at launch. It'll be USA only.
I do find it interesting how this has become a meme, but I think that Marco has added something interesting to the discussion. I like his categories of searches, and the decision he outlines google as needing to make.

But, really, if you don't want to talk about this subject anymore, close the tab.
Two words: Regulatory capture.
Come to think about it, this is what I remember most about visiting the Youtube campus, the lunch was spectacular, and crowded to the point of forced socialization.

I work at a university, so have a number of options, but it still doesn't compare to what Google had available.
Absolutely, there is even a lovely latin term for it post hoc ergo propter hoc.

http://www.skepdic.com/posthoc.html
I didn't read the article, but I smiled at the title.
Isn't the form factor just terrible for that tho? It always seemed to me that Tablets are an excellent form for consuming information. Content creation, on the other hand, is best left to our laptops and keyboards that we already have.

So a docking station for a tablet makes sense (effectively changing the form factor back to something more traditional). Holding the thing with one hand while typing with the other really doesn't so much. I think that's ok, the context dictates how you use the device.

Apple didn't stop making Macbooks for a reason:)
Idea: Random purchases, every week, on Amazon.
I have a funny website idea. I looked into it a little bit and am not sure if it's possible, at least with Amazon.

The idea was to allow users to sign up and receive random items ordered off of Amazon.com once a week, month, whatever. The user wouldn't know what was ordered for them until it arrived.

Why? People enjoy receiving packages in the mail - it's fun.

You'd be able to sign up and pre-pay like $100, or however much, and specify your maximum item price-per-purchase. So you could say "do not buy items more expensive than $10". You could also specify the interval for purchases to be made - weekly, every other week, monthly, whatever. You could specify categories to receive items from - not like Books, Electronics, etc, but more like Technology, Fun, Random (ok, perhaps specify books, electronics, and stuff too). This idea would be even better if you didn't have to pre-pay, but could somehow allow the service to make purchases with your paypal account or something.

This wouldn't have any real purposes other than to have fun and receive random fun things in the mail.

Business model? Amazon will pay you for referrals. Perhaps even include tons of retailers and provide an unbiased selling platform for them.

I looked into this and was able to whip up a quick program that grabbed random items from Amazon and took into account categories. It doesn't look like it's possible to automate purchases on Amazon, though. I also don't know how you'd automate buying items for the user unless you made them pre-pay.

What do you think? Would be interesting, no?
Stability and reliability have dramatically improved in HBase over time (2 years ago, those were definitely concerns I had). When we began using HBase in mid-2007, it seemed like the best (read: only viable) option for our use case. Now, there are comparably lots of options. Without much testing so far, Riak's fully distributed (non-master/slave) architecture seems appealing..
I'm merely hypothesising.

Here's another one:

5) Facebook's terms and conditions have adverse effects on Zynga, enough to turn them away from the platform.

Zynga is only going to stick around if there's money to be made. If there's 1 billion users but only marginal profit to be harvested, Facebook's lock-in and reach means squat to Zynga.

It's entirely possible that Facebook's terms and conditions will evolve to somehow disrupt Zynga's revenue stream (e.g. no forms of game currency other than Facebook credits).

There's so many ways it could happen it would be prudent for Zynga to have a plan B at the ready. I'm sure they have one.
Goldman Sachs May Sell, Hedge Facebook Stake Without Warning to Investors
In what way has the government protected freedom of speech? The first amendment is about stopping the government from restricting speech, and it's only when the government restricts speech that there's even a reason. In fact, the government tries time and again to restrict speech, and if they decide, collectively, to block it, there's no recourse besides moving to another country.

You've got press blackouts in the 1940s, you have the PMRC triggering congressional hearings about musical content in the 80s, you've got crypto laws in the 90s, you've got the DMCA, you've got the DHS seizing domains, you've got calls to have Wikileaks banned. Your all-caps "the government" did these, and keeps doing them, and I don't know which government you're watching if you think that these elected officials and unelected bureaucrats shouldn't be kept on the shortest leash possible.

The Bill of Rights regulates no one but the government itself. The government has two roles: to keep others from infringing on my rights, and to keep its nose out of my damned business unles I infringe on others'. It's doing a lousy job, but that's a different issue.

There exists no private entity that can legally stop me from saying what I want. They can keep me from doing it on land they own or with resources they own, but that's fine. I don't want them to be able to freely use my resources without my consent, either. That's the concept of private property. But I can get a bullhorn and run down to city hall and yell, I can publish a newspaper, I can create a blog. If $company_x doesn't want to host my blog, I can get $company_y to do it. If my government can stop me on a whim, though, then I'm screwed.

(Edit: typos, damnable phone, it's trying to censor me.)
This kind of worries me.

On the one hand, Google isn't the best web search tool. I've switched to DuckDuckGo, and so has everyone who's seen me use it. But, I think Google still provides a valuable public service: indexing the entire web and handling that much traffic is not an easy task, and a lot of other things (like DDG) depend on that humongous cluster.

So on the one hand I want to see the best search engine win, but on the other hand if Google goes out of business (or more likely, starts losing money and canceling projects) then I'm afraid it'll take a lot of things out with it, with no clear replacement.
If you honestly believe that the phenomenon of regulatory capture means we shouldn't attempt to regulate anything at all, then please hand over your Freedom of Speech Card. While you're at it, I could also use an indentured servant...

Maybe, one day, regulatory capture will be a thing of the past if The People wake up and learn what that is.
I find this works best with cilantro and parsley from places like Whole Foods. I can get a week out of their cilantro, easy. If I buy from Safeway, it's gone after a couple of days.
Not much to that story other than a homeless guy that doesn't want to leave a parking lot. I was expecting worse.
RIP Bill Zeller
Web Technologies and Trends to Watch in 2011
Best Value Destinations For 2011