skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of the greatest pieces of expression that have endured the test of time and taste (from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to Norman Rockwell's most iconic American slices of life to Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises") were almost resoundingly commissioned works, the artist working full time on their craft and getting paid to do so. Most artists are career changers, going from a "normal" job to one of creativity and artistry.

Even John Keats, the "poster boy" for poetic works of unending beauty and pure inspiration, quit his job as a surgeon-in-training to become a full-time published-and-paid poet. He could've easily worked his day job as a surgeon and moonlighted as a for-free poet by night. His primary goal was to be a poet, and he found the only way to do so was by making it his career.

Even Vincent Van Gogh, the more modern keeper of raw artistic expression, pined for more people to buy his work, not the least of reasons being to fend off abject poverty, but also as a validation of the style he admittedly created. He was resigned in his later years to live off his brother as he painted prodigiously, but by that point he was in the throes of psychosis. Is that what you meant by "art for art's sake"?

It's surely a romantic notion that artists draw forth passionate forms of expression from fending off psychological defect, hungry bellies, and harsh surroundings. But the truth is, every one of those artists to a person wanted to get paid doing what they do. Perhaps the money is a validation, or incidental being a published or culturally accepted artist, or simply a means to an end. Doesn't matter a whit. They want to do what they want to do full-time.

In other words, "Shakespeare got to get paid, son"[1]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/cyIGF.jpg
I still can't work out what it actually does, and why I would want to join.

Is there information anywhere about why I should be interested?

Having visited http://wheremyfriends.be/ I gues it draws an animated map of where it thinks my Facebook friends are currently located.

Is that it?
Exploring the interface between technique and creativity
Is there a reason for secrecy around the name and nature of your dipshit company? Does it have a website?
Hardly, Scotland in the UK. The phrase four seasons in one day was, I believe, coined about the place - it's why weather apps are rubbish, it's too unpredictable.
It seems the long sales letter is slowly being replaced by video sales letters.

Personally I think video sales letters would be more effective but they also have the inherent problem that people viewing the page at work (or other similar situation) won't be able to see the video (unless they bookmark it and view it later which is unlikely).

I think combining a mixture of the short sales letter, video sales letter and long sales letter would be a good catch all. Show a clear call to action Buy Now button above the fold with a few simple bullet-point benefits and a sales video. Then below that you can continue on with the long sales letter for those who still have pre-sales questions.
Facebook gets a lot of stuff wrong, but they do keep on going, launching new stuff that's really big all the time. Compare with Google. They launch a tiny social feature every 8 months or so. Facebook launches like an entire new platform every 8 months. But yea.

Thanks for the compliment btw :) I'm going to try to blog lots.
Beluga doesn't use SMS for the transport layer they use TCP. Groupflier (me) and Groupme use SMS and Twilio. Congrat's to the Beluga team!
Early Look at GNOME 3.0
The reason is that live on institution subscriptions. If they switched to an iTunes $5/paper download then there would be less pressure on university libraries to pay $1000s/year for a subscription (the library pays a lot more than members for a journal)

It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.
First 2 sentences: "I know what you’re thinking – link bait title, right? Wrong."

Refuge in audacity.

It's still a good article - be talented, work hard, get mentors, build an audience and engage with them.

Like all business articles, it's not really hard facts. It's sloppy stories, that helps you learn through osmosis.

You learn from stories, because you feel emotion, and they trigger the part of your brain that says "I can do that too!" (not totally scientific explanation). They aren't about hard facts though.
Yup that's what it is. It's a simple app to draw your friends on a map.
"Frankly, I find it obnoxious that you said, "People who do use tables should educate themselves - or pass the work onto a front-end developer.""

I'm not trying to be obnoxious. I didn't mean to offend you, or hit a raw nerve - but sometimes a change does require education. I can't see how declaring "it's not me it's you (CSS)" can be part of a reasonable solution.

CSS isn't that difficult - and I'm really tired of hearing (mainly back-end) developers berate something that I (and tens of thousands of other developers) use everyday successfully.

I find it obnoxious that so many people who don't understand how to use CSS successfully (and have chosen to use tables as a result) argue so fervently that their decision is the only logical choice ("I don't need to learn it, it sucks").

It's a case of the tail wagging the dog.

If you understand how to use CSS successfully and still decide to use tables, then fair enough - but in most cases I don't think there are many good reasons for doing so.

--

"I see CSS as providing generally abstract benefits, with very concrete disadvantages."

I'd (sincerely) be interested in finding out what these disadvantages are?
So... why not make it happen? Perhaps not all of it can be done, but Tim Ferriss talks about having an outsourced personal assistant.

If you are the type who could work all those extra hours, try outsourcing as many activities as possible. Start with housekeeping services, as an example, and perhaps a personal cook.
Yeah - that is annoying. I mean my Toaster keeps being upgraded to newer versions of tOaSt, and I require the bread to remain compatible...

...there is something different about software, evidently. I want something I use to still work if Android gets updated to version x, and a dormant app doesn't normally promote confidence that this will happen.
Don't let the voice mail stop you from selling
here it is: http://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9
Headline: Rich Person Does Well.
What's lacking from the psychiatric process is any sort of objectivity in the choice of thresholds distinguishing "normal" from "atypical". The criteria for most disorders apply to huge swaths of the population. They're not symptoms of disease, but symptoms of being human. In order to separate the diseased from the healthy, the psychiatrist must then twiddle nobs to find a distinguishing threshold.

"If you're only annoyed at the shape of your nose, well that's normal. You have a somewhat ugly nose. But, this other chap is really preoccupied with his nose. It's impairing his life quality--- he must be suffering from body dysmorphic disorder. Antidepressants might do the trick!"
That's true, and I have heard that about cyclists (in particular). I wonder if it depends on the amount of hair. I'm not very hairy, and I've never had much of a problem (a couple tugs, but after a few massages you don't notice it any more). Also, if you ever get the chance, different kinds of oil act differently, you might have better luck if you experiment a bit.
That's quite the theory you've cooked up there.
I think that one of the biggest reasons antirez had for writing the manifesto was not for marketing, but so that he had a place to point people to who try to make Redis something that it's not. Feature requests/patches that don't fit the philosophy can be more easily rejected because there is a clear document spelling out what the goals of Redis are.
Pieces of software basically never exist in a vacuum; they're always connected to other pieces of software and hardware (compilers, processors, graphics cards, phones, OSs, libraries, web services, ...). Other pieces of software and hardware always change, and if there's no one home improving this particular piece of software, it will invariably lose pieces of functionality, one by one, as they change to be incompatible with how they were before or disappear entirely because they lost to a competitor or turned out to be a bad idea.

Users know this instinctively, which is why a website that never changes loses users quickly.
I don't think IQ has much to do with success. I've met a lot of brilliant people who can't finish projects, speak up, know when to back down, etc. I think success is more about discipline, moral courage, and hard work than it is about how smart you are.
Do you believe in the separation of church and state? What about the separation of your bedroom and state? Or the separation of our government and forcing our ideals on other countries? Why is it OK to advocate that the government not be involved in those things, but when it comes to advocating that the government not be involved in advancing science and simple economic transactions between two adults, we're labeled as crazy? I'm not lumping Bachmann in with me, but plenty of comments here think libertarian positions are crazy.

Republicans advocate a smaller, less intrusive government. They suck royally at implementing it. Democrats, on the other hand, advocate a larger government and you can do about 10 seconds of googling to see how successful they've been. Given that reality, please tell me why a libertarian should for 1 second consider voting for a Democrat.

Republicans tend to work against the people who want to limit my economic freedom. That does a lot more for the the libertarian cause than Democrats could ever do. An overwhelming number of Democrats have voted for the Patriot Act, so you can't make the argument that they both want to expand the government in different ways. Dems want more control over our lives, period. Advocating smaller government while passing the Patriot Act, starting wars and expanding Medicare might be considered Orwellian, but I don't remember Dems working against Republicans for libertarian values like Republicans are working against Dems now.
Presumably the loaf of bread you bought did everything that it was supposed to when you bought it (and without bugs, or else hopefully you'd throw it away).

Software is almost never bug-free when released, and increasingly isn't feature-complete. I don't think it's crazy to be wary of using software which isn't being actively developed. It will certainly depend on what it does, and whether or not what it doesn't do (or what bugs it has) are livable.
I thought this was obvious to everyone? ACM, IEEE, and the rest of the scientific publishing establishment are antiquated dinosaurs. They will eventually adapt to the existence of the Internet. Thankfully, in CS, they are mostly just a nuisance -- access to the scientific literature in other fields is significantly less open.

To be fair to IEEE, the ACM's official policy is at least as bad.

Actually, the ACM are a little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).
Daniel, if you're on HN, I'd love to know how the visa/immigration situation worked out for you in this case (if you can publicly talk about it, I know that this is not always the case).
It should result in a moderate reduction in trolling. Mainly it's the same appeal as every other Facebook widget - people commenting on your site must spam all their friends' newsfeeds with your article.

This makes it ideal for a personal blog that you actually do want some of your friends to comment on, ideal for a mass media site driven by pageviews, and hopeless for niche enthusiast sites trying to promote debate.

The other "advantage" claimed by TC - that Facebookers can contribute directly to the comment thread without even visiting the article page never mind reading it - sounds like it has pretty dubious value.
>"Then, when they finally go to the doctor, their list of self-reported symptoms is no longer a list of what they independently noticed but a laundry list of whatever they read on webmd."

Sure, it happens all the time, in all areas of medicine. Not just psychiatry. The key here is that when someone says "I'm depressed," or "I have 5 of 9 criteria of a Major Depressive Episode," or "I have gout," that does not mean that the diagnostic evaluation is over. It's important to get clear examples of what people have noticed. Despite their conclusion, is this better explained by cancer, or anxiety, or a thyroid problem, or substance abuse? Like migraine, psychiatric illness is evaluated clinically rather than by imaging or lab tests, but there can be important overlaps that sometimes make these tests helpful to rule out other causes.

A patient's own conclusion is an important piece of the puzzle, but it's still just one piece.
You're right about the head injury. That's the only thing that can make any two people on earth intellectual equals.
frikking love this. Thank you. Can we only get this if we have the beta sign up at PHPFog or can we do it otherwise?
You make what you measure.
A little off topic, but the way text is handled in this blog threw me off. The links are more prominent that the main text, they actually look the way main text should look.
Reminds me of http://frid.ge/ which is also a nice, simple, and good looking product.
Like a lot of investment trading, HFT acts as a "tax" on investments that pass through the market without returning a corresponding value. There is plenty of liquidity without HFT. The cash that HFT extracts from the market flow is cash that doesn't reach the investors or the companies that they invest in.
Assigning Meaning to Programs by Robert Floyd [1976][pdf]
Rovi acquires SideReel, launches AllRovi.com
This will propagate a new wave of facebook trolls who will create accounts with specific demographics and make vulgar comments in hopes to 1) troll, and 2) make said demographic look bad. Problem is now we can't even tell if they are real or not!
Yes, but worse is better.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

The duct tape solution may only do 75% of the functionality, but it's there, and it's simplicity allows for hacks to be built on top of it.
That's an interesting story, but it has little value to entrepreneurs, unless there's a lot more to the story. How did you go from unknown to 3K signups? You got listed on Mashable. That's it?
There is a free Google Apps and a paid Google Apps ("for Business," formerly "Google Apps Premiere" http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html)

But your boarder point still stands - the OP may well be a paying customer and he did not indicate he was using the free edition.
I'm thinking of doing my blog in Hakyll - Yesod seems overkill for my purposes.

Do you hang out on #haskell?
I posted another one :) http://blog.getgush.com/post/3585929252/we-threw-away-the-wi...
Part of the problem is that the journals are part of a complicated infrastructure for judging academic quality. The best authors compete to get published in the best journals. The best journals are based on years or decades of reputation and history. You can't create de novo a system to replace this instantly. There is a chicken and egg problem to be solved before we have free publishing venues with a widely accepted reputation for only publishing the best papers.
NDoom - Doom on a TI Calculator
It's great to hear someone gets excited about being featured on Mashable but that's only a nice start. The press buzz quickly goes down and so does the fresh stream of users. Here is where the real test begins: if the startup is able to keep the users and make more of them sign up.
> Eventually, we get what we celebrate; ...

Serious question. I wonder why if anti-intellectualism is so widespread in the US, you guys still have some of the best native-born scientists in the world (although there are more and more imported ones). What are the offsetting factors that allow all these smart kids to pursue what they love despite the anti-intellectualism in the wider culture?
Anyone with good answers please do chime in.

Also, if the quote is true, then China and India with their strong, sometimes even fanatic, encouragement on nurturing and praising smart kids (from everyone, including other kids) will take over the scientific world in due course.

Of course there are other factors that disadvantage them: funding, bureaucratic system & work environment for scientists, to name a few. But those are getting better very quickly. A key factor that slows down scientific progress in these countries though is the focus on making money and building one's wealth for societal and familial respect instead of pursuing one's passion.

In spite of the all those things, I recently read from the Economist that China will overtake the US in the number of patents granted this year or the next. (And that is probably because patents are more likely than scientific papers to help with wealth creation for its inventors and funding organizations).
I really dislike the idea of "talent". "You have to be talented." "It all starts from talent."

I've seen people with seemingly NO talent for music or coding or whatever turn themselves into virtuosos because they WANTED it. It seems like saying "You need talent" is a way to tell people that "it's okay that you're not trying, because you might not be talented in this area". And that's bullshit.
Smartphones and the Disappearance of Idle Time
Stop relying on your ORM and learn SQL
I thought this was a cool article until I read this line:

"But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public someday, my parents won't be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won't speak to me."

That's pretty sad, actually :(
What a crock - the second challenge requires calling a USA phone number.

Color me unimpressed.
If I might add a data point, When I am busy, I primarily use the upvote button to read later. It's my instapaper.
I upvote the article based on the content when I am not too busy.
Greylock expands fund to $1B, launches new fund for ‘winners circle’ startups
I guess I don't understand your need to have the phrase 'intellectual horsepower' or even 'bright' or 'smart' tied to someone's genetic makeup and potential.

If I see a really big guy in the gym lifting a ton of weight, we can agree he's strong. That doesn't make a judgement on his work ethic vs. his genetics, and it doesn't imply that people who aren't as strong don't have every bit of potential to get to where he is.

It's simply an observation on the facts of reality the way they are now. Now, I happen to be in the camp that believes you can make yourself smarter, so passing judgement on someone's intellectual horsepower in no way is me critiquing their potential.
I don't recall where I heard it, but there was an interesting statement that was made, I think in some movie, about all of us (currently living humans) being the off-spring of the victors of violence/battles past.

That only those who are living and the spawn of Humanities particularly violent nature and history.

One of the thoughts I had on this concept was that we still see humans seeking to dominate each other, and while there is certainly the overt, obvious manifestation of this through continued violence and war in the world -- there is also a more subtle version. Politics. The systems of laws, rules, and conditioning that our systems of control and governance impose on all of us.

That while we have this docile, domesticated peaceful persona - we are really in a struggle against ourselves (as a species) with respect to who has control.

Now we have other forms of exerting our wills on one another, financial violence, if you will. To control through availability of, and access to, required resources.

If financial liquidity that one has access to is akin to the ability to move, then we can "physically" force mass groups to behave in certain ways through controlling their ability to move (make/spend money).

I believe that our physical bodies are highly evolved, in that they are perfect biological machines for what they are designed to do, and we are evolving a great deal now on the mental plane -- the spiritual plane is currently on hold....
Is Beluga one of Facebook’s first product acquisitions?
I agree 100% with your statements except that I think Facebook does understand this. After all, isn't this exactly what the Lists/Groups feature does (albeit, un-intuitively)?

I believe that Facebook knows this is a concern and this is why they relaunched the Groups feature recently. It's a hard problem to solve from a UX perspective. Most normal users would be confused by segregating things out even if there was an easy UI solution for creating/publishing to these groups.

Look to their recent acquisition of Beluga to get a sense of where this is going. They are obviously interested in moving into the group messaging space.

Lets not fool ourselves, though. Facebook has some vested interest in making things more public so that advertisers and media outlets can use them without issue.
Of course, if the guy just goes Software as a Service in the first place, the IP laws are moot.
Zynamics acquired by Google
I agree, life's too short for tabloids unless they're really useful, like the National Enquirer if you're a Man In Black, or Techcrunch if you're a startup entrepreneur.
What Twitter, DiggDigg, Twitterlinks Comments and Thesis Have in Common
That isn't reality. The genetic factors of intelligence are well documented. I could have played basketball six hours a day, every day for the last 25 years, and I'd be really really good. But I wouldn't be as good as Lebron James was when he was 12 years old.
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed your linked piece. Particularly your point here: "You can love something and not know the slightest thing about it."

Exploring that all-important point a bit further, we can arrive at this scary conclusion: You can love a given topic, but not necessarily in the way other people love it. I'd venture to say that plenty of failed passion-followers have dashed their ships aground on those rocks. Loving something, and serving the customer, are two very different and often conflicting things.
Still doesn't help individuals selling products online and are stuck using paypal and risking having their accounts frozen.
Sorry to get statistical, but if you filter for the highest-reputation items of any category X, then most of them are likely to have a reputation that exceeds their actual value, due to reversion to the mean. So this shouldn't surprise you or discourage you from reading these books.
My former boss (I left the company in October 2010) just announced that zynamics was acquired by Google. zynamics is a boostrapped German startup that never took any VC capital. We specialized in building reverse engineering tools that help security researchers find vulnerabilities in software.

Curiously, we always saw HBGary as one of our main competitors. However, we were focused on tech, not shady deals. :)
I built this last night using the previously linked SXSW data dump. It is on app engine and works decently well.

There is a api:
curl http://www.isxgoing.com/ -d "search=harper+reed" -d "api=1"
UCLA grads more likely to be Founders than Stanford grads
There's a brief comparison with yst here: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/abe3o/hakyll_a_simp...
Do corporations have a "personal privacy" right?
Online: Chelsea vs Manchester United live 1.March.2011