skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I think there are three different metrics to look at:

1) How physically addictive a drug is. E.g. withdrawals from oxycontin are much worse than withdrawals from cocaine.

2) How 'moreish' the drug is. In other words, how compulsively do users redose. With salvia most people smoke it once and then don't want to do it again for at least a few years if ever, whereas with mephedrone people snort it and then they NEED to keep snorting it ever fifteen minutes or so until they run out.

3) The percentage of people that use a given drug who become addicted. You would expect this to vary wildly depending on factors one and two, but it's actually virtually a constant.[1] Pretty much 10% of people who try a drug will get addicted whether it's alcohol, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc. There is a little variation of course, but not nearly as much as you'd expect if addiction were driven mainly by the properties of the drug itself.

[1] Once you cancel out the differences due to the routes of administration, i.e. smoking a drug is vastly more addictive than eating it regardless of what the substance.
1984 Apple Newsweek Advertising Insert
It's not a stretch to imagine this if you think of it not as "babies believe they can communicate with thoughts" but rather "babies haven't realized that they need to communicate". They simply neglect the step of ensuring that others know the same things as themselves. People who retain this flaw into adulthood are called programmers.
It would be interesting to know how much of the Milky Way SETI has scanned so far. In other words, if someone else out there was running their own version of SETI, how long before they would be likely to find our little radio broadcast bubble?
An intellectual hackers' site like this one tends to be home to people playing with Scala, Erlang, Haskell, etc. Hacker News in particular was started by Paul Graham, so its seed community had a significant number of Lisp adherents. The startup community in general is biased towards dynamic languages, in particular, Ruby.

All this makes me think that Hacker News readers will tend to be on the leading edge of language popularity. But it is interesting to see the progress of mainstream adoption.
Applist.me shares your iPhone apps. Usefull?
I have always installed ubuntu off a USB stick, with no problems.
That's called FOUT (flash of unstyled text)

http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/ describes two different methods you can use to fight it -- I prefer the first where you hide content till load (or 3 seconds) in FF 3.5+

Last time I tested the FF4 betas the FOUT was still present.
If you're giving away software at no cost then you are taking advantage of the marginal cost of software being close to zero.

You could charge, but then you might fail in the market due to competitors not charging. You can attempt to build a market for your time, by giving away the software.
possibly 1 good argument for open source software is that this kind of depedance on 1 other business generally isn't there. most bigger open source projects have people from various companies working on them, so relying on that software is safer cause it doesn't depend on just 1 other company.

having said that, this isn't always the case, but in many situations bigger open source projects that are widey used it is.
It's a false dichotomy to say that if they've seen airplanes in the sky, we might as well airdrop xboxes. I may be misreading you.
Technology and social change: Twitter, Egypt, and the novel
On a subatomic (and subnucleonic) scale it's 100% empty space.

Fundamental particles are true point particles and no spatial extent has ever been found for them.

So it's not just a lot of empty space - it's nothing except empty space.
An interesting idea however from what I've seen it's rather difficult to get professors away from the paper-textbook. Even in more technical fields where having the information online would seem more /plausible/ it still faces the dinosaur of education change.
Groupon Superbowl Commercials
A jQuery Plugin for Comprehensive Animations
If there are no ETs within the bubble how can they discover the signal?
Example for anime would be something like give away the anime and sell the merchandising (toys, t-shirts etc).
Who's going to win the Superbowl today? Sway in
Yah, the galaxy is very flat. Depending on how you define the thickness (do you go by majority of stars, or include all outliers) proportionally the galaxy is flatter than a sheet of paper.
Maybe something sneaky could be done if the fonts are properly cached, ie. load them AFTER the very first page load on a timer after the page is complete - then the following page loads would have the fonts and/or re-render the page after the load is complete.
I threw in the towel and went with Evolution on my main rig. I works ok- occasional hiccups, but with calendar integration becoming more important to me I went with it. The Cal syncs to google and my own caldav. T-bird had to come off of the special builds for a 64-bit box, and getting Cal to work was a pain.

Since I keep the email on a separate workspace (and Evolution doesn't have taskbar notification by default-which is a win for me) I only check it periodically throughout the day. The major pain-point is that it will "forget" the logins of my accounts if I leave it open all day. With my workflow I can just close it if I get annoyed.

Thunderbird handles filters better, in my view. Unless I'm missing something, with Evolution I have to add every single person into a "rule" to sort incoming mails into folders. With Tbird I can say "If member of this list-> go here." Very nice and useful to me as I manage a community service organization with over 100 members. I can send everyone on my mailing list into a special folder for that group without having to enter "by hand."

I have a 32 bit netbook that I use Tbird with, however.
I feel great satisfaction when people find value in the things that I do.
Bixo: Web mining tool that runs as a series of Cascading pipes on top of Hadoop
Rodgers is going to win his first of many rings today...
For one thing, Google in app payments via carrier billing are not available yet. When it will be, I would not bet too many of the world's ~200 countries will be supported, just a few key markets. Same with Android Market itself, it works in just a tiny mnumber of countries: http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13829...

Compare that to mobile payment operators, who's key job is to work on carrier agreements across the world. That's why the likes of Rovio choose companies like Fortumo: http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/06/fortumo-launches-internat...
Probably because the Google payment options are woefully inadequate. I'm sorry it really is.

There are few developers that have the resources to roll their own payment systems and Rovio just happens to be one of them.
Neither your comment or the article you linked to mentions that the $1.25/mo VPN+Email is only true for 12 months max.

edit/ I guess your comment can be read to be only discussing the costs of "privacy", but I guess that implies that the only privacy concern with non-self-hosted web mail is data when it's being transmitted. I'm less worried about you stealing my email over wifi and far more concerned about the FBI reading my mail off of Google's servers. In that sense EC2 costs more than $1.25/mo.

---
edit: your reply below.

I don't know why you keep replying and trying to argue with me. Your comment implied that email privacy was cheap because it only cost $1.25. That's not accurate and that's all I was trying to point out. I'm aware of the changeability of DNS records, still not sure what that has to do with me merely pointing out that email privacy isn't 1.25.
I used to self-host my domain's email, moved to Google Apps a couple years ago, and can't imagine going back.

The onslaught of open relay probing and inbound spam was unbelievable. At some points, I honestly thought I was under a targeted DDoS attack because there were so insanely many inbound connections for hours at a time. Even though I was always able to get it under control, new email-related fires were constantly popping up. Worse, handling all that traffic put considerable load on my server; capacity which would have been better allocated toward serving web traffic.

In the aftermath, I've also noticed that email I send through Google's SMTP server is less often flagged as spam on the receiving end, whereas I had trouble with mail sent through my self-hosted SMTP (and my own ISP's SMTP) ending up in the junk/spam folders at a lot of destinations. That was one of the more insidious drawbacks because it took me a while to fully realize.

At the scale where Google Apps is free (i.e. few enough users that you don't likely have a full-time sysadmin), it's difficult to understand not taking advantage of it. I value my time too much to waste it on unnecessary server administration.
I don't code to make a pile of money, I code because is fun, if you code just to make money you're doing it wrong, programming is an art that's something non-programmers can't understand.

For some reason reading the original Programmers Stack Exchange post made me think of the infamous An Open Letter to Hobbyists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
I think there is a middle ground. Certainly, there are going to be some permissions an app can't function without (e.g. you can't have a phone dialer work that doesn't have access to the phone). On the other hand, there are permissions that are purely optional to an application (such as the afore-mentioned SMS).

It would be better to specify "required permissions" and "enhanced feature permissions". I require the phone permission to run. I can use the SMS feature to make your experience better.
If I were charging money you wouldn't say this [..]

Because then there would be a contract between you and him, preventing you from doing harm.

[..] but since I'm not you seem to believe you're entitled to

I didn't gather that from he said at all. He (implicitly) said he doesn't trust you and won't use your software unless he is able to read the code for himself or obtains a contract that protects him from wrongdoing. Those are two ways of obtaining guarantees. You nor your software provide such guarantees and as such he will not use your software. That is not a complaint, but merely an informative statement.
Witb his skill in non-ASCII text, he should be able to get a great job at Wolfram Alpha.
Love them. Witty, memorable, and most importantly - they get the point across without being in your face.
I know eventually I will have to find a technical co-founder or hire a local hacker but that's really out of the question until I can secure more funding.

Why do you think it's out of the question?
Aye, perhaps the intended effect! Isn't that perhaps the same unease that permeates the martyr mindset? "I'm not going to sell out and make tons of noise on Twitter. If they like it, they will come!" Surely to the martyr, the noisemakers are hustlers in the bad sense. Hence the silence.
In some big races, they start in waves so that the clock is total time, but doesn't represent the runner's time. They use chips to log start and end time.

i.e. He could've started 4 hours later than the first wave.
Someone just told me they're still seeing the unfinished holding page. I assume the DNS update is lagging behind. You can access the new page here instead: http://jooplicate.capturely.com/
I use Google Calendar as well, so Evolution sounds like a nice option. It looks like it's really integrated into GNOME though - does it depend on a lot of GNOME libs?

How is the support for Gmail's "nonstandard" features, like labels and Priority Inbox? I guess what I really want is a desktop mail client that fully supports Gmail's features.

Edit: while reading about Evolution on the ArchWiki, I saw this:

"Unfortunately, Evolution currently (version 2.26) suffers from a serious IMAP issue, as reported in [2]. It appears this issue has existed for at least the past 3 years prior to this version, and it shows no signs of being dealt with soon."

The alternative IMAP setup they describe involves syncing the mail locally, using up several GB of space, which is scarce on my laptop's SSD. The bug report linked to from the wiki shows that it still hasn't been fixed.
Pretty neat. I also recently work on something similar. http://pdfcv.com
Looks like the launch page is a big deal. Glad to see it. We're also thinking much down the same path.

If anyone here wants a launch page from LaunchRock, email me at jameson@launchrock.com, and I'll get you hooked up ASAP.

Just mention this HN thread.

By the way, the launch page method works consistently. We're collecting tons and tons of data that I can't wait to share with the community.
No doubt, I just wanted to point out that C++ does support concurrency and in some use cases can even be superior.
But maybe, just maybe, our industrial and scientific development is producing an occasional side-effect of some kind of as yet-unknown faster-than-light wave which has made it much further out, and significantly more advanced civilizations have the ability to detect it.

Sort of how an archaeologist can look at the surface of earth in a sat. photo and determine there was once human activity in a location based on ground disturbances, etc.
The economy of Free software
Crawler-commons - Shared Java components for web crawlers
As much as I would like the Packers to win today, I think the Steelers are gonna pull this one out in the end with their experience =/
Related article from 2007 that gives further information about Susan's house and her role in Google: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/corporatenews/2007...
Colorful bash prompt reflecting Git status
Sequence is only really useful when dealing with computations with side effects. So I have found the value of these diagrams much less as I try to keep the majority of the system referentially transparent.

The other huge disadvantage to sequence diagrams is that they are very poor at describing concurrency, and only work real well for simple single threaded systems.
I'm not saying it is a bad idea. I really like it in fact. I really don't think it will work as smoothly as (apparently everyone) seems to think. Android wasn't built to have this feature... and I'm not sure that even this middle ground could be done in a way that doesn't break many existing applications.
>What's more substantial writing look like to you?

Here's a recent quote from IRC concerning this discussion, and this particular comment was aimed at your blog specifically.

19:54 < (name censored)> seems like a cheesy self-help blog
19:54 < (name censored)> 10 ways to get rich!!!!

Subject that said this is a brilliant embedded dev that I can't convince to consider the startup industry at all. There's a serious paucity of embedded people in the industry and it would be great to have somebody like him.

Too bad he's extremely skeptical of all of it because of people like you.

More comments from the same person:

Concerning your blog again:

19:57 < (censored)> i basically dislike any author that tries to simplify something difficult, undermining people that have put effort into it

Concerning hackerne.ws:

Someone (the stackoverflow asker) is bitter that someone released a competing product for free.

That's basically what i think of hackernews.

Full of people that are only interested in making money. Don't get me wrong, i want to be rich as well, but have some fucking pride.

/endquote

This community, the victory blog bullshit, all of it damns itself.

My erudition is a self-indulgence and attempt to put a mirror up.

Cheers, enjoy the cat picture.

Edit: Added comments from another programmer below.

21:03 < (name censored)> alnayyir: I just read some of that Sebastian Marshall tripe. Bleh, it made me vomit in my mouth a little bit. What a bunch of unscientific, psycho-babble nonsense.
"But making money is one of the most fun and meaningful games out there. You can make many people happy with the money you have, you can make your life better, you can travel to new places."

In this case, I'd say that making people happy and travel are the fun and meaningful games. Money helps enable them, sure, but there are plenty of ways to make people happy and travel without much money too, so if these are the things that make you feel good, why not focus on doing them as much as possible instead?

"If you win at the entrepreneurship game 20 times, your life becomes a whole lot better."

Not necessarily. I guess this is the root of the whole discussion. It depends how you measure.

"You find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom" -Bob Dylan
You bring up an interesting point - I was a "pull" programmer up until I went to university and took a Java course. I learnt there object oriented programming, and suddenly everything I had learnt previously "clicked" and I saw the big picture, and I'm a much better programmer for it.

You could make a comparison to music. The self-taught guitarist versus the classically trained guitarist, and the guitarist somewhere in between. When I took guitar lessons I wasn't taught classically, but I was taught the concepts (the theory behind chords, scales, etc.) and I was also encouraged to pick things up on my own by both playing around and finding tabs for my favourite songs and having a go.

This push vs pull concept can probably be applied to ways of learning in general. I think it's safe to say most people here are agreeing a mixture is best.
You can hear what they sound like:

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1205/features/Interactive/channel1.ht...

(If you're doing something dangerous, do not play the sound, it's profoundly disturbing to most people who have full hearing the first time they hear it).

There is a better link I cannot find that shows speech, music (which doesn't work well), and various other things through them.
Don't Be Ashamed
Sure-fire way to feel small, sad, and alone: typekit.com

Seriously, the page was completely empty until I unblocked that scripts on that and his main site.
If you really want email privacy:

Plug computer + web server + email server + https + a webmail gui

Once set up costs close to $0/year. For anything which needs to be uber-private you can use pgp, as usual, with next to no chance of Google or anyone else scanning your plain text.
Well I've been running my personal email server (Postfix on a FreeBSD VPS) for four or five years now, and spam just hasn't been an issue for me. Between the Spamhaus ZEN DNSBL, greylisting, and SpamAssassin, I just don't get any appreciable amount of spam in my inbox. (Less than I used to get in my Gmail account.) And as far as I know, I've never missed a message I was supposed to receive.

I don't have trouble with outbound mail getting rejected, either... you have to make sure you have a "clean" IP address (didn't end up on a blacklist because of some previous server at that address), you need a valid reverse DNS PTR record, and it's a good idea to have an SPF record and do DKIM signing as well.

Now sure, this is more work and more expensive than just using Google Apps. But it does work if you do it right, and it's not "unnecessary administration" if you care at all about the privacy and security of your email, or if you need things like full procmail filtering capabilities that aren't available with Google Apps.
But that's an entirely different business model: selling add-ons, not support. One, by the way, that does have analogues in open source: WordPress's Akismet is a good example.

(Back in my investment banking days, I worked on a thought piece with all the various business models for open source; if I recall correctly, I think I managed to find six distinct revenue models. Sadly, I don't have the presentation nor can I remember the other four off the top of my head.)
You don't need funding. You are young and smart and have all the time in the world.

I could see you might need money for hosting and a domain name but everything else you should be able to do on your own time.

What exactly do you need money for?
Focused crawling
Wow, somebody was not amused. No clue why...
If you are smart enough to set up a AWS ubuntu instance, even following directions on a guide meant for OSX, then you can be minimally smart enough to see the FREE TIER only applies for 1 year when you actually sign up.

And a domain name is only a pointer to whatever server you want it to. The name is yours for however long you have it (which you should buy one and keep it for your personal use).

And of course, jump ship when AWS goes to regular pricing, or use my 15$ cc from Walmart to cap it to a sane level.
Can the Federal Reserve Beige Book predict GDP?
Impressive thoughts!
I see a lot of interesting techniques here. I couldn't figure out is how writes are prevented to code areas in the sandbox. I'd guess they mark pages with code-bundles as read-only but I don't see any specific mention of it.

(The article does mention that the guard pages are set to no read/write/execute)
Turning every load or store from one instruction into two sounds slow; pNaCl can't arrive soon enough.
When was the last time a web startup bought a super bowl ad slot? It seems to have been right before the bubble. Or maybe the pets.com ad was just so memorable--for the wrong reasons.
I agree that self hosted email is in many/most cases a recipe for headaches. But the article wasn't suggesting that you should self host - he was merely saying that in the choice between a free service provider that reads and analyzes all your email - and a pay service provider that doesn't snoop - he figures he'd rather pay a couple of bucks a month.
Hacking Genomics
You can try fonts on your browser with:

http://flippingtypical.com/
Earth is a big fish in a small interstellar pond. But what a big fish it is!

The sheer magnitude of order on our planet since the dawn of life - uncanny biodiversity, the rapturous elegance of cellular systems and organisms - and more recently, of our species - the culture, the technology, the spectacularity of both our achievements and failures - is anything but insignificant.

Maybe this happens all the time elsewhere outside our 200-light-year dot. But even if it's common, I propose that it is significant wherever it happens. The universe is significant. And we're a part of it.
Not sure who it'd help. Are you that afraid of talking to your friends directly?
Carthage needs saving (again)
NASA, Colorado company, CU students engineer a passenger spacecraft
>This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put into print, though attempts have been made.

I sense opportunity...
What if you only want to commit a subset of the files that have changed in a given directory?
Oh! I didn't mean to insult you or the blog post, I liked it very much, I meant in production code or open source projects. Your blog post was very straightforward and interesting.