skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a startup (with the little little amount of time):

1) Brewing Beer
2) Watching Arrested Development (or Battlestar Galactica) during dinner
3) Playing Rock Band, or sometimes jamming on musical instruments

Personally:

1) Any physical activity- something with achievement or competition is always nice, MMA is nice
2) Meeting new people
3) Reading about politics
4) Rarely blogging
Wikipedia didn't happen overnight. Just because Knol is a Google project doesn't mean it is going to be a success.

no need to refer what happened with google video
Not just you, but I belong in the camp that never checks xkcd on my own. Not a fan, probably never will be, but if the community thinks its interesting, might as well. This one was indeed interesting.
> I'm going to have fascicles of about 128 pages coming out twice a year. We're gathering four of them before we come out with the first two actually; we're going to keep some in the pipeline! Look for the first fascicles in 1995 or 1996; they will be beta-test versions of the real books. I'm thinking I can finish Volume IV (parts A, B, and C) in the year 2003, Volume V in 2008, then come out with new editions of Volume I, II, and III, then work on VI and VII... There will be a "Reader's Digest" version of volumes I through V.

I guess there's been a little bit of schedule slippage:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

Volume 5 is "Estimated to be ready in 2015."
if that's your opinion why care if you get downvoted?

although I don't clearly understand your point
Awesome. Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't noticed it before your comment.
i'd also like to note that search engine algorithms change and the odds of a startup getting it right, getting it better than the big 3 fresh out of the gate are slim to none.

there are quite a lot of "CUIL FAILS FOREVER" type of posts around the net. a startup doesn't have to be a smash success the day after launching, and a new startup probably isn't going to be quite as refined as the gigantic companies its competing against. the tech media generally seems to be passing immediate judgment and dismissing it outright already. i know i'd hate it if that happened to one of my projects.

i'll revisit cuil in a few months to see whats up and then pass a more solid judgment. until then, google's still my search.
What he says about immediately dropping everything and working on the new idea is key. I initially had the vague feeling that something like this would be useful about a week ago, but wasn't sure exactly what and figured that as a small side project, I could wait until I had a job. If I'd just dropped all the job interview stuff and done it, I could've beaten NowDoThis.
The difference is, CCTV are pretty much used to solve crimes... They do a very very good job at it as well. You don't see the footage from CCTV cameras ending up on the internet in general.

With the google thing, you know it's going to be published.
Although I agree with you that it may make sense to learn the 'way of Cuil', I'm not sure the common internet user will be as likely.

Google has trained us to just type whatever we need into the search bar and wait for the results - I don't think many people conciously craft their queries anymore.
Yeah, especially since the compensation for programmers is still pretty high.
There's a middle ground: build a new OS and provide backwards compatibility using virtualization (closer to Solaris Zones). It could work like the Coherence feature in Parallels VM for the Mac, but be embedded in the OS. If you double-click an app that requires WinXP, it launches it within a Zone containing an XP compatible environment and displays the GUI natively on your desktop.
Is this really surprising? Of course they do.
Download Naruto TV Show - Everyone’s Struggle Episode - Watch Video Free
As Konoha’s shinobi continue to deal with the zombies, Sora finds it hard to believe that Furido’s desire is to wipe out everyone in the village, even those uninvolved. It is a huge sacrifice to reunite the Fire Country and by removing the pawns of the village, the legacy of the king (Hokage) cannot continue. Everyone must die. Once everything is in place, Furiido and the others, along with Sora, will leave.
I sometimes use an old gimmick to help me get started evaluating talent in areas where I do not have expertise.

I establish a baseline getting a candidate's own judgement on an established control. Then I use what I've learned from that to make my own judgements about other things.

For example, I may ask you to discuss the pros and cons of tables vs. css, or hash tables vs. 3rd normal form. Then, once I understand a little bit about how you think and judge, I approach subjects outside my domain.

Since you have just established a -180 degree baseline by explicitly stating a 100% falsehood ("the Steelers Suck"), I must now invert all of your answers to any future questions.

(I sure hope this discussion doesn't discourage you from voicing your opinion here at hacker news. Neither should the fact that the yc evaluation committee has added 2 new members: Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.)
The fact that XKCD comics, when submitted, reach front page status almost every time indicates that they belong right where they are.
1) hacking. i have a fulltime job that lets me play with projects on the side. both hardware and software stuff.

2) fencing. sport/olympic fencing. great sport, i like it, and i'm a national and occasional international level competitor.

3) martial arts. not the same as fencing. used to teach for a living, still like to learn.

4) gaming. i've enjoyed a MMORPG or FPS in my time.
Set the environmental variable LC_CTYPE to something like "en_US.utf-8" for utf-8 output. I don't know where it's documented; I just found it on some guy's blog a while ago. This also apparently doesn't work if python's stdin isn't a console (i.e. it's a pipe), but for interactive sessions it's good enough.
This marketing is combative of Apple's anti-Vista marketing. The goal is to change the perception of the general populous which (due to brilliant ads by Apple) believe that "Vista sucks".

This marketing campaign will resonate well with every person who has concluded that Vista sucks without ever giving it a chance. I have a feeling that is a massive target audience.
Saving The Music Business
Online Funding Marketplace 40billion Launches
Indeed. I was expecting a lot more from the title than it delivered -- perhaps some kind of in-depth discussion of how the largely somewhat bizarre plots of Murakami's books can be related to startups. Maybe the end of the world in Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World tells us something about how to cope with time pressure, or sitting at the bottom of the well in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is something to do with getting your best work done in isolation. Or, er, something.

But nope, just a list of random platitudinous advice which could be related to just about any successful person.
All they talk about is ebay as a marketplace, but when I search ebay for "web site" all I get is a listing of worthless template sites. I wonder where they sell them?
The arrogant bastards aren't going to listen to a "you're doing it wrong if..." piece.
The author mentions that changing tested code decreases its value. The steepness of this curve varies greatly depending on the language. The strong guarantees of a language like Haskell mitigates the risk and so ensures a less dramatic drop.

But what I find more alarming, is that the author completely misses the human side from the perspective of programmers: a good programmer that is forbidden from changing ugly code will become frustrated and will either become less productive or leave.

If there are developers that don't care about ugliness and are very productive, then I am in big trouble (since they would be better hires from a business perspective than me). However, there is quite a strong connection between the caliber of a developer and his or her aesthetic sense in code.

If one looks at projects like Squeak, it's clear just how much good developers can achieve with a relatively small amount of well crafted code. A lot of good programmers are unable to reach this kind of potential because of the coding tar pits they have to negotiate every day at work.
To be fair the article wasn't a light read.

It sounds to me like they're taking Erlang concepts to the next level and baking them into the fundamental architecture of the OS.
It's not about being condescending, my point was that the manager of the OSS project was a bad manager. A bad allocator of resources. That's pretty much it.

I have no desire to get into a Technology A vs Technology B pissing match so I'll not even address those issues.
I use a mind map tool called FreeMind for many things, one of them being keeping a todo list.
Get Your Insurance Yanked For Lying About Your Health
I get asked this question daily at my Health Insurance Agency. Health Insurance can be expensive in California. If you have a preexisting medical condition an insurance company can give you a higher monthly rate or just flat out decline coverage. I’ve seen 50% and even rates 100% higher than the standard rate healthy people with no medical conditions get.
That was poorly worded. I meant to end that sentence by saying I agree with you :/

What does one say to someone who is using C because it's suitable for safety-critical systems? Please don't!
I just upgraded. Its pretty cool. I've been a KDE fan since i started using Linux and KDE 3.5 was really cool, but this is even better.
We are almost seeing something like this at Tulane, where a few Comp Sci guys in IT services really understand the deep magic and provide development space, remote backup, routing, firewall, spam filtering, another set of folks implement the projects that faculty buy (blackboard, Exchange email, etc) and students in various schools build mashups for their schools, departments, and projects. Unfortunately, the guys who understand the deep magic seem not just cynical but sometimes bitter. They work in grey offices with tiny windows on a quiet (empty?) hallway. How to rectify that?
The Coming Death Shortage
I didn't think anyone would expect a marketing campaign to even approximate a valid scientific experiment.
One for the Black Hat on his dark Aeron,
In the Land of Mordor where the Lurkers lie.
One Sun to rule them all, One Mac to find them,
One router to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Lurkers lie.
1. Cycling
2. Tennis
3. Chess
What traffic? Go to work on a Jetpack
The market seems to be there. Ping.fm and HelloTxt have active user bases.
UK "hacker" to be extradited for biggest military hack ever
Interesting story, not least because of the way the mainstream media continues to misuse the word "hacker". Surely "cracker" would be more appropriate ?
1. Programming

2. Leaning new (human) languages

3. Hiking

4. Philosophy and politics

5. Extended conversations with good friends about 1, 2 or 4

6. Gardening (a bit)
Bjorn Lomborg: How to Get the Biggest Bang for 10 Billion Bucks
fulltime: medical student, husband, dad

parttime:

- learning the deep magic

- the community projects where I practice what little neophyte magic I know

- cycling

- photography
My progression was thusly:

Day One: "Oh boy, Mandrake Linux sure is easy to install!"
Day Two: "What the hell is this 'make' bullshit?"
Day Three: "I think I'll try another distro..."
Day Four: "Fuck it, I'm getting a Mac."
I disagree with the writer who believes that the game board isn't highly protectable under copyright law. The number of squares, the arrangement of double and triple letter squares, the point values of the letters and the number of letters of each point value, are all copyrightable expression protected under the law. Copyright law doesn't prevent any else from developing their word-tile game but it does protect the particular combination and arrangement of these components that make Scrabble recognizable as Scrabble.
What an intriguing factoid. Could you elaborate on this? Where and why?
"Is RSS so obscure that I have to go around to every community I'm a part of to push my content out to them?"

Yes.

A lot of my friends - and myself - maintain one blog/journal per community that we're part of. I have a LiveJournal for Harry Potter fandom friends, planWorld for Amherst college friends, FaceBook for high school friends, a blog for Haskell/language-design people, etc. The venue's often determined by the community - almost all of fandom is on LiveJournal, for example, and planWorld is still the journal of choice for Amherst College alums from the classes of 00-07. Most of them rely on cross-posters, because they often have their own external blogs (WordPress, Xanga, MySpace, whatever) for other communities that they're part of.

There's a big world outside of the Silicon Valley techsphere - I'd guess that an order of magnitude more people are on MySpace than even know what RSS is.
"I don’t like to admit it, but even I am sometimes forced to use virtual machines." Who is this guy?
I used to use one of these. It had two keys more than I needed.
Outsource Your Chores And Feel Good While You’re At It
I agree with you. The issues involved seem way more complicated than either of our posts cover. Now I am wondering whether exchange student programs are all that useful in the long run, in terms of GDP or some other national metric. In terms of national testing averages, I don't see a quick answer to whether non-native speaking students affect the average at all.
"Rich versus King": The Core Concept
Protected Cross-Domain Authentication with JavaScript
While I would love to see this happen, I think that people will be clinging too tightly to their shrinking piece of the pie to make it happen. I wouldn't trust anyone besides Apple to build a consumer-acceptable client for this, and it goes against everything they hold dear. MSFT (you name it) and Yahoo (recently discontinued music service) have let consumers down and won't be trusted. Amazon still isn't thought of as a tech company by most people, plus their focus on sales would appear too much of a conflict of interest. Google's products are too unfocused outside of their search core, plus I think they're too big, powerful, and rich for the music companies to trust them. So I think the big tech companies are all out.

Could the music companies come together and make something easy but powerful enough to use, a la Hulu? Based on their history, probably not, but desperation (and a decent model to follow) might convince them to cooperate.

Good luck to Hank on getting this idea going!
I've lived in SF (and Berkeley and Oakland) and I've lived in Zurich. There's no competition. Zurich would win in a heartbeat by anyone who is impartial. My point above is that it's like heaven -- everything is white and boring. But in a competition, let's be honest, heaven is going to win.
Are the college lectures available for the public? If so, where do you get them?
UFO hacker loses appeal
Hm. It depends on the sort of programmer. The writer uses C# (bulky Microsoft tools) and codes in a language that requires compiling. So his assessment is fitting for an ASP.NET or Java programmer, definitely.

I program in Python and PHP mostly, and my two-year-old Macbook is more than enough. 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 60GB harddisk. I run two Virtual OS (XP and Ubuntu) for cross-platform testing using Parallels virtualization, although never both at the same time. I've found that my computer runs just fine with my tools of choice: The usual day-to-day apps (Thunderbird, Firefox, Office 08, etc.), a local MAMP stack, TextMate or MacVim, Photoshop, Transmit (FTP), and a grab bag of other processes (Python, IDLE, Komodo Edit, etc.).

Never needed anything else. I have every browser, the major OS, a great local development server, the choice graphic tools, and good editors. The only other component is my shared hosting account with HostGator which runs twenty sites or so, has unlimited bandwidth, and generally is a very good production server for small-to-medium client sites and my own side projects.
"Automated testing does not have this problem."

Good point. I mentioned in another comment here that some languages (like Haskell with its strong, static type system) mitigate this problem. And for languages without static type systems of this nature, automated testing can produce the same effect (which is not to imply that tests for Haskell programs are useless).
Download Pokemon TV Show - Recap Crossing the Battle Line Episode
Following Dawn’s two contest losses, and Maylene’s loss to Paul, both girls have lost their confidence in battle. The two of them decide to have a battle to regain their spirits.
Sergey Brin: iPhone Users Conduct 30x More Mobile Searches (and other fascinating stats)
That's correct (although our adjustment step changes the lighting and color of the replacement candidate to match the frame of the input image).

This is why I said earlier that one could create multiple databases. Since the replacement candidates might be recognizable, they should be from a set of people who've given their permission for their photos to be used (e.g., stock photo collections). Another option is to use computer graphics to render a large collection of synthetic faces. Modern techniques are good enough to generate fairly realistic faces.

Finally, note that if every face within some application has been replaced (e.g., if this were to be applied on all images on Google Streetview), it wouldn't even be a privacy issue for the replacement candidates -- since users would know that all faces are replaced, seeing a particular face only tells the user that that person was not there.
The type systems in Haskell, OCaml, etc. fit the author's requirements for automated testing. Once you have enough experience to trust them when they check whether local changes are still globally correct, making bold changes to clean things up stops feeling reckless. (Automated testing suites are still helpful, but the type system writes/adapts many of the test cases for you.)

But what I find more alarming, is that the author completely misses the human side from the perspective of programmers: a good programmer that is forbidden from changing ugly code will become frustrated and will either become less productive or leave. YES. The inevitable pain and misery in maintaining a really huge, ill-factored codebase can scare good developers away. While solving hard technical problems is often intrinsically rewarding for hackers, solving problems largely caused by disorganization is just a sigh of relief at best.
There are two. The first is an older series - can't seem to remember it off-hand. I'll repost when I get home this weekend.

The one I use all the time is the Teaching Company http://www.teach12.com

I bet I've gone through at least 15 of their courses so far. Maybe more. Great stuff -- in all kinds of topics. Right now I'm listening to a 36-hour philosophy of science course for my morning workouts and a 18-hour history of the reformation in Europe course for when I'm on airplanes.

I did their "Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition" last summer and had a blast. http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=470&...

But fair warning -- it takes an acquired taste. I found the first set difficult to listen to, since I had gotten so used to history channel/MTV type science. I like the lecture format much better now that I've grown accustomed to it.

Also -- I have the history of languages lecture DVDs which is in my to-do list. As you can see, I'm a fan.
Look like I simultaneously replied to your comment with the same comment you were posting on mine. :)
I think the graphs, bu fault of 'value' not being defined, are showing a hybrid of the long-term and immediate value of the code. Take, for example, a strict refactoring of the code, in the sense that only implementation is being changed and no features are being added. The immediate business value of that action is near zero, but the long term value is more. What the graphs point out is that, due to manual testing and production environments rigorously stress-testing a particular, perhaps brittle, snapshot of the code, the amount of refactoring and beautification of the codebase required to provide a baseline level of long-term value equivalent to the spike is much higher. Yes, the code will be cleaner, and easier to maintain and update for the future, and the resulting spikes from testing and production deployment will be that much higher, too.

Take a look at the very last graph. I would posit that once the code is beautified and a more flexible version deployed, non-source readers would see another spike at the end, but from the original spike, it's hard to justify the valley of little incremental value.
It's ironic this post is downmodded but the comic itself is upmodded.

Goes to show a valuable lesson for all aspects of life: Presentation matters.
Actually, xkcd has been off the front page (or at least not high up it) for a while.
As much as one needs. For me, I need more monitors than I need multiple computers.
Y2K 2.0: Banking software is not ready to handle Zimbabwe's inflation.
If George W. knew that there were nukes lying around Iraq and used deception to motivate the US to go to war to get them, then I'd say that would be better than the current situation, but I'm still not sure it would be ethical. However, it looks like he knew there weren't nukes or any sort of WMDs there.

In the case of the mom, the prospects for long term harm are minimal and the potential for long term benefit are pretty good. In the case of taking a country to war, there's always a whole lot of potential for long term harm.
The correct answer is "as many as you need".

Personally, I use a MacBook and a Linux server over SSH. Between the two I get the best of both worlds.
The evidence indicates that, for most, life is a series of gut reactions that we rationalize later.
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MYOB Indonesia - Perbandingan Fitur Premier V4 - V12
What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?
It seems to be a convention with several webcomics. I know Dinosaur Comics (http://chewbac.ca) and Achewood (http://achewood.com) do it, too.
I can't upmod this enough.

The higher telco profits come at a great cost to the economy as a whole. Bandwidth is today just as important to economic growth as any other basic infrastructure.

The geographic challenge of the US is a red herring. Monopolistic laws, regulations and just plain old collusion, along with very high barriers to entry (regulations again) are responsible for the sorry state of US bandwidth.
Congressional Effect Fund
Hank's titles are almost always hyperbole.

While this is an interesting idea to help advance the revenue model, I'm not sure I understood how this would potentially 'save' the music business.
50+ essays on viral marketing, social network monetization, product design and more
Ubuntu surprised the heck out of me. I was fiddling with the Wifi to try to get it to work when I decided I needed to download something. I connected the machine to the router using CAT5, and Ubuntu connected to the internet and figured out what to do for me. All I had to do was to tell it to proceed. Of course, in reality, it just probed the hardware configuration and downloaded a script someone else had figured out, but still, that was way impressive!
Getting a high karma score is an addictive game. We might need to commit nickb in a rehabilitation program some day.
I never realised that stuff like this was available, thanks for the link.

I have just ordered some stuff to give it a try while I'm on my exercise bike in the mornings.
The article includes a quote suggesting that there are no successful platforms that NDA bans public developer discussion.

This is only true if you ignore the entire gaming industry, where I can think of not a single successful platform that allows public discussion.

I hope that Apple eventually realizes that a healthy developer community is actually in their best interest.