skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep thinking there is a risk dimension here. Build for profit and the worst case scenario is, you have to wait to save enough to have financial independence. Build to flip and worst case is bust, start again.

One strategy is lower risk then the other, pick the one you like best.

But DHH does make a good point about the special scenario when your startup is indeed the most interesting thing you'll ever work on. Then after you flip it and decide retirement is not for you, you've already sold your best idea.

I think that's a rare scenario, there's not much risk of "losing" the idea of your life. Then again, there's not much chance that any particular startup will be sold.
Just curious: What you think is a better alternative to C# for developing software C# was designed for?
Uhhh, politics?
The roots of American Empire began with President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I "to make the world itself at last free", which set in motion a kind of messianic foreign policy of American Exceptionalism

This is bunk. American Exceptionalism is obviously a 19th century construct (even the term itself was coined by de Tocqueville, as ten seconds on Wikipedia would have informed the author). And if you're going to talk about American Empire, saying that its "roots" began with World War I is like saying the roots of rock and roll began with Bon Jovi. What about the Mexican war? The Spanish war?

If you're going to write a historical article, it might be a good idea not to be historically illiterate.
Spam King and Family Dead In Murder-Suicide
Bingo! School is not really about imparting knowledge.

It's a place to keep kids, teach conformity and a very basic level of text and math comprehension, that's all there is to it.
How true... I've actually typed out a few comments before and decided not to post them because I figured they would just result in a bunch of down-voting without any response.

These weren't trolling comments either, but legitimate arguments that popular opinion would probably disagree with.

If pg is really concerned about suppressed ideas, he should require that people give a response when they downvote and have a separate flag for "trolling" or "spam"-like comments.
Telomeres are a cancer stop mechanism.

The thing is, long lived large creatures like us have all kinds of mechanism to repair DNA damage and stop cancer that worms and mice don't.

As I once red in a Slashdot post (I think), we'd get a lot more if we could study elephants and whales, not mice and worms.
From the New Facebook to Modular Innovation Empowerment
I found this essay little more than ableist abnormal abusive adult age-inappropriate ageist aggressive annoying anti-arab anti-black anti-disability anti-gay anti-intellectual anti-semitic atheistic biased bigoted blasphemous bourgeois classist coarse communist corrupting critical crude dangerous degenerate degrading defamatory defeatist demeaning derogatory destructive deviant dirty disabilist discriminatory disgusting disloyal disrespectful disruptive distasteful disturbing divisive elitist ethnocentric erotic eurocentric exclusionary explicit extremist fascist fifth columnist filthy frivolous foul gay genderist graphic gross harmful harrassing hateful hate-ist heterosexist holocaust-denying homophobic homosexual hostile hurtful illegal immodest immoral impertinent impious impolite improper impure in bad taste inappropriate indecent indecorous indelicate inflammatory insensitive insulting intimidating intolerant irregular irreverent judgemental lecherous lesbian lesbophobic lewd libellous licentious lookist low lubricious lustful malicious menacing militant misogynistic mocking morbid nationalistic nazi negative objectifying objectionable obscene off-color offensive orientalist out of line patriarchal perverted phallocentric pornographic prejudiced profane provocative prurient questionable racial racially insensitive racist radical reactionary revisionist risque rude sacrilegious salacious satanic scandalous scatalogical scurrilous selfish sexist sexual sexually explicit sexually oriented shameful sinful sizeist slanderous smutty speciesist stereotyping subversive suggestive supremacist tactless tasteless threatening treasonous unacceptable unamerican unauthorized unbecoming uncalled-for unchaste unchristian uncivil unclean undemocratic undesirable undignified unethical unfair unfit unfitting ungenteel unhealthy unlawful unnatural unnecessary unmentionable unpatriotic unprofessional unrefined unscientific unseemly unsuitable untasteful unthinkable untoward unwanted unwelcome unwholesome outdated violent vulgar wanton xenophobic claptrap.
the same is true for stock
u won't get taxed for buying stock
and the tax is just one time (not recurring every year) at 25% (15% after 1 yr)

contrast this to 'work for company' ... u get taxed 35% every year :(

probably it's the social design school-work-govt
1. you obtain huge debt from school
2. you become obedient by having to work to pay the debt
3. you stay in the loop because of taxes
Choose the Right Medicare Supplement
He had opted for plan with the best benefits possible probably thinking that it would save him a lot of money. He had opted for a health plan that covers physician visits at a $5 co-pay, a very low ($2) co-pay for prescriptions etc.
Scientists Find Trigger for Northern Lights
That's what I said: the professor will get eaten in the jungle, the junge inhabitant will get run over by a car in the city.

Obviously IQ tests measure something: at the very least, they measure performance on IQ tests. The controversy starts when people claim to measure "intelligence".

Might be fun to design a "jungle IQ test".
Netflix to test higher prices for Blu-ray discs soon
At the "halfway through SICP" level, it's probably a bit early to start projects that are interesting. Do you have any pointers for finding open source Lisp projects that could use beginners?
A very few things in that list don't apply to what I am working on now. The rest will be printed out and posted prominently.
That's documentation, not comments. Nothing hurts code readability more than huge chunks of markup (markup!) getting in the way of the code you need to read to maintain. Javadocxygenwhatever generates pretty web pages, but leads to write-only source files.
To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD
The Illogic of Farm Subsidies, and Other Agricultural Truths
Amen. Comments lie. This happens all the time. Programmers who try to maintain code by reference to the comments will get it wrong. You have to debug the code. Comments, at most, should be a guide to what happens where.
Book Review - RSI Theory & Therapy for Computer Professionals
Most of the time I deleted my own comments after things become more obvious - I hate 'moving parts' in my code

The trick is to highlight comments with bright & contrast fg/bg color combo that hurts your eyes (it also serves to say 'hi i'm comment, i'm important, but delete me when u understand me')
Vision Architect
That is a situation where survival of the fittest eventually sets in. Eventually one will finally win just enough users to start eclipsing the others. My guess it will be gnome since it is the WM of choice for Ubuntu and Red Hat. And as more corporations get involved with development in the Linux-realm, there will be more incentive to standardize things and less incentive to fork.
Can't really agree with the examples as provided.

[Information in c:\danger\wipeout_test.reg has been successfully entered into the registry as a result of your accidentally hitting Enter in explorer.exe]

"It gives the information without annoying me. Very good."
It may not be anything so complicated as smarter people being closer to the ball. It looks to me as if there is an inverse correlation between IQ and the running speed necessary in a position. So the simplest explanation for this pattern is that running speed and intelligence aren't highly correlated, and you can't simultaneously optimize for both.

E.g. you can pick a smart guy to be your center even if he's slow, because he doesn't have to run much. Whereas in a wide receiver or a running back you just want the fastest guy you can find.
My understanding is that downvoting is only for trolling or spam-like comments. Disagreement is good, disagreement can be healthy. A well-spoken (or even not-poorly-spoken) argument that is contrary to popular opinion should be upvoted.

If we don't allow, or punish, unpopular ideas we'll become a homogeneous mass with no new ideas.
"And having a hodge-podge set of applications doesn't do it."

Nowhere is it written in stone that a Linux Distribution needs to ship with a hodge-podge of applications.
Randy Pausch, noted CMU prof, succumbs to cancer
Anecdotal, but the article does cite the Patriots offensive line as high scorers on the Wonderlic. They are also considered probably the best offensive line in football.

But, yeah, Gladwell raises a lot of surprising points in that talk.
BricaBox Back From The Dead as Open Source Platform
Comments like this seem cowardly to me. If you can do better, then do. If you can't, write the best code you can and be enough of a man or woman to commit what you did and not clutter it up with excuses.
The best time to use a message box is to confirm a action that may have that may have consequences. For example deleting something.

Besides that, a web app should never use them.
Large Pension Funds Dumping Funds Containing Sprint Stock
Isn't this anti-competitive behavior? I could see some people making a case against Google...
IPhone 2.1 Update to Bring Turn-by-Turn GPS?
Craigslist CEO: our real estate listings are booming
No gender differences in math performance
Building and running my own company. I guess I fall into that rare class of founder who doesn't need to ever flip.
Ask YC:  How important are writing skills when considering new employees/cofounders?
It seems that good writing is actually an important soft skill when it comes to programming. Arguably, it seems that most of the A-list hackers are known primarily for the quality of their writing as opposed to the quality of the code they produce. PG would certainly be largely unknown if it weren't for his essays and books (which lead of course to this site and YC). Other A-list hackers come to mind: Peter Norvig, DHH, Linus Torvalds, Steve Yegge, etc...

When you're looking for new hires, co-founders or contributors, how important are writing skills in your decision making?
So you are using a motherboard under conditions that they state it's not certified for... Where's the news here?

Is this just a pissing match gone bad?

"I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a copy of Vista just to get the crashing caused by Foxconn's BIOS to stop, I am not going to be terrorized."

Isn't this whole thing the result of bad research before purchase?

About the only thing interesting about this is if the guy gets sued under DMCA for disassembling the BIOS of the motherboard.
And who's going to interpret that output if all they have is incompetent contractors?

The problem with database optimization isn't that "people don't understand it well", it's that database optimization is inherently obscure and difficult. With most code, performance is a local effect: you can look at the code and see why it's slow. With some harder problems, performance is data-dependent and you need to look very closely.

With databases, it's worse still: performance is a feature of the schema, configuration, and (worse still) the quirks of the software (ex: I never knew MySQL can't optimize count(*) queries!) . They can be useful, but they're hugely complicated. In general, using a database without an expert DBA is a recipe for poor scalability.
Why Johnny Can't Add
It’s a sad day when anyone passes, but his inspirational "Last Lecture" if anything has taught me to celebrate life.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256638
I already commented on this so I guess it must be a bit of a hobbyhorse, but I think I can answer your question. The comment really has nothing to do with coming back and fixing it later. It has to do with alleviating a feeling of guilt (or is that shame) about shoddy work. So the comment has served its purpose and that is why it is there.

Once you make a point of never doing this, the psychological pressure has to find another outlet, such as just fixing the code in the first place.
Having been lucky enough to hear Randy speak in person, I can earnestly say he was an inspirational and fearless person. When forced to confront his own mortality, he took the extraordinary and selfless step of teaching the rest of us what it means to live.

I hope that he continues to change us in the way he seemed to have wanted, and that our decisions in life will continue to benefit from the perspective he's provided.
In what sense? The progressive movement as currently constructed is not enamored with neither Leninism nor Stalinism, though there is sometimes a smidge of respect for Trotsky.

The 80s just called and they want your meme back.
I use "unless" in ordinary speech. Unless I'm talking with someone who dislikes the word.
Very sad news, indeed.
Once you get enough karma, you can change the color of the orange bar at the top of HN.
Time Management: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758

Last Lecture: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184
The point is that the motherboard was advertised as being ACPI compliant. It is not. In fact, it checks specifically for Linux ands hands back ACPI data which crashes the machine.

I'm not certain what the potential anti-trust implications are.
This guy has a cheapskate attitude. Have him show a way to delete something without warning that I will not regret later...

All he talks about is message boxes that inform you of something. And yes, I want some message boxes to make me think. I do not want to gloss over deleting all the files I just selected in my FTP client, for example.

Every time I have multiple tabs open in both IE and FireFox and I mistakenly hit the button to close the whole browser when I intended just one tab, I am grateful for the confirmation box.
"Is Apple the Worst Company Ever At Public Relations?"
Right. Unless he means:

display_error if invalid_input
Inspiring and amusing speeches
great list of funny and inspirational commencement addresses and speeches
In a perfect world those kinds of comments would never be written. Unfortunately there are times when there simply isn't time to do it the Right Way (tm).

In those times when you have to do it the Fast and Ugly (tm) way, it's nice to make a comment that you really don't like the code. It adds some humor, and lets the maintainer know that there is no emotional attachment to that section of code.
But it's still not Linux certified.

About the DMCA, yes it sucks, and yes, it would be irrational to sue because of that, that's why it would be interesting. Anyway, not that I am hoping for that. Stupid laws should go away.
Ack, I'm talking about education, not literacy and certainly not about passing tests. Let's get a little bit idealistic here. If you had a child what would you want it to know by the time it left high school, and what's the best way to teach it those things? I want my child to know not just about the major theories and processes and so on, but the historical context that caused them to arise.

What you think of some test is hugely about implementation details. Would you be less mad if you didn't have to deal with history as a separate subject? If the notion of tests didn't exist, and there were more positive motivations for students to study? If you already knew a more wide range of human history than most grad students today by the time you entered college, so you didn't have to study history anymore?
You'd never buy a half-speed flight. I'd buy a half-speed flight from Tampa to NYC if it were 2/3 the price of the jet flight. My poorer friends would buy the route on a 1/4 speed airship if it were cheap enough. People have different sensitivities to time vs. money.
I don't think it is. The needs of the military may drive different innovation than the general needs of society.
VCs Have Their Heads in the Clouds
:(

I'd been following Randy's story for a while now. He was constantly upbeat, still going strong two years after his doctor's initial "matter of months" prognosis.

As Randy's web page seems to be inundated, here's a page with links to various Pausch-related media, including his Last Lecture and Time Management talks, as well as various interviews:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/
It's not everything though. Dan Marino had a famously low Wonderlic--15. It's definitely believable when you hear him speak, but he still got it done in amazing fashion on the field.

There's a big list here (it's a SWF and takes a while to load, but is very interesting):

http://www.macmirabile.com/wonderlic.htm
Talking to the Plumber
I don't parse/think-about boolean logic like English.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/get-famous-by-not-pr...
either starting/running or being a part of a small company looking to solve bigger problems, like the one laptop per child project.

problem with that is that the work is so interesting that it doesn't pay well, which is a problem OLPC fell into, too. jobs like these tend to require that you not need to have the job to make a living.
> only one philosophical explanation of an aspect of existence can be correct

If you study philosophy, you will probably get that notion challenged :)
So who is the Vorlons and who is the shadows?
there simply isn't time to do it the Right Way

Of course, this is the first thing that everybody says. And since everybody says it, everybody thinks it must be true. But my experience has been that if you really want to do good work, it turns out not to be true (say) 80% of the time. So the next time you find yourself making a mess because you believe you "have to", you could try stopping and questioning that assumption. You might surprise yourself. How do you think I learned this? Certainly not by following what the majority of programmers believe.

Edit: Rather than using phrases like "the Right Way", I'd suggest toning things down and looking for a way. There are many ways. If you get in the habit of thinking there's only one, and it's capitalized and trademarked, the bar seems a lot higher than it really is.
There is a stunning gap in basic capability between the best worst students, but even within subjects there are large ranges. I found Calculus II in collage a lot easer than mesmerizing multiplication tables in 2nd grade.

Many people say they hate math but love logic puzzles like SUDOKU which is math but not the type of thing they learn in school. The important thing is to not confuse students that learning the basic tools like addition and spelling have anything to do with the type of work you do as an engineer or writer. The way the system works you need to have a wide range of basically irrelevant skills before they are willing to teach real math the gray areas of history. Grouping writing poetry in the same subject as grammar is probably harmful because teachers spend so much time on grammar they the skip poetry because it's to "advanced" and it's not on the tests etc. Yet, they don't build off of each other and many of the greatest poets lived before grammar or spelling rules where written down.

PS: I expect most students would pay more attention to the basics if I they had some use for them.
Sometimes, but be careful.

If you skip the first flight intending to only take the return flight, some (all? just Mexicana?) airlines won't honor your ticket, and they won't return your money either. That's stealing.
Perhaps. But then you can argue that the innovation that would have been created would have been "better" for society.
Minda ICT: Simple interests; Great uses: So, what is Linux, anyway?
it really depends on the situation, i feel.

good writing is a wonderful skill, no question. but there are also other important skills necessary to a business. you've got to judge things on a case-by-case basis depending on the needs of the company.

good writing, just like many other skills, are proverbial icing on the cake of potential employees/founders/etc.
Taxes aren't 60% of GDP, so it's very unlikely that military spending is 60% of GDP.

Miltary spending might be 60% of discretionary spending, but discretionary spending is a small fraction of govt spending.
Google Not Cheating: Knol Pages Buried Deep In Search Result Hell
Ah bugger. Really gutted to hear this. Loved the Last Lecture (book too). A real inspirational guy. Gotta feel for his family.
"Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people."

What a metaphor for challenges in life that we pursue
I didn't like Gladwell's talk because he ignored baseball: teams like Oakland and Boston have started to understand what metrics do work in assessing player performance (Michael Lewis wrote about this in detail in "Moneyball").

By ignoring something because it doesn't fit in his neat theory, Gladwell loses credibility on this topic.
AOL to close services, Weblogs Inc blogs affected
The thing that drives me mad is that if I want legroom, I have to pay. Yet someone who's short (feet shorter than I am) can get legroom for the same price. You should be charged for the total amount of legroom you get!
However, caloric restriction also seems to have a negative effect on reproduction. If it also affects sexual satisfaction....
CMU's official page (of his lectures):

http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/
Offensive lineman have other physical traits of value though. Namely they're very large (and strong). You'd have to argue that size and intelligence are highly correlated, which seems a stretch.
a real mensch.
The prices are actually only falling in areas where it's possible to build more houses. In those areas, the price of housing must eventually fall to the marginal cost of production. In areas where zoning laws and density make new construction very difficult ( Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, New York) housing prices remain very high. Houses have essentially become collectibles ( like paintings or baseball cards). Because you can't create more of them, the price holds up against an inflating dollar.
For the count(*) queries:

Almost no database optimizes this. What they do is count the rows. MyISAM (one of the storage engines for MySQL) heavily optimizes this by having a row count in the table data.

This turns out not to be that useful because who wants to count the number of rows in a table? You usually want to count a subset of those rows. Like, how many comments are there for post_id 7.

So, MySQL isn't unoptimized for this.
Electro-Shock Therapy: GM Makes a Risky Bet on a New Electric Car
I'm not sure what the questions imply. Most code is not going to have a "yes" answer to all of these, and shouldn't.

If I'm writing a 100-line python script to process a text file, I'm not going to worry too much about making it run as quickly as possible, say.
To some extent it depends on your language. jQuery seems about right for that kind of JavaScript.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js
Then you probably won't be happy with languages like Perl and Ruby, DSLs, or the "There is more than one way to do it" line of thinking some people have.

It's a big world out here, there's room for Spock and for Kirk.
New research shows the body turns fructose into fat faster than other sugars.
Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear
Randy Pausch dies, and the world loses a true hero
His point is that there may be a larger pool of people to choose from, and that you would choose the person with the higher IQ all else being equal. Also a stretch.