skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except, in Apollo people died/can die. They didn't work 18 hours a day because you make mistakes at that point. If your "web application" fails, no one really bats an eye. But if you start killing people - it is a bit different. Please don't compare these toy companies that get created, which barely have a business model much less a purpose, to one of the greatest achievements of all time just because you sit in front of your computer for long hours.
I think their metrics need some help as I've been to most of these cities and I can't imagine many of them outranking a city like San Francisco.
Good free content that is
You can play "six degrees of hacker news" with stories like this:

UFO's are science fiction -> lots of hackers like to read science fiction -> it's hacker news!

Using this technique, you can justify the presence of any article on this site.
It was a joke. Apparently people here have no sense of humor.
Honolulu? I lived in Honolulu for 2 years and it sucked. About the only thing going for it is the beach, but you can get that in a lot of places. Meanwhile the place is overrun with poverty, drug use, and high cost of living for basically no culture. I feel like the editor of this list said "give me 23 cities no one else has listed before" instead of the actual best places. New York City? San Fran? Boulder? Singapore? Come on
Ask HN: Cities and Ambition Practicum
I liked Cities and Ambition. I like ideas too, maybe more than anything else. That might explain why I'm sitting in Cambridge now, just three weeks after reading the essay. So far it's been a blast. Smart people reading good books everywhere, great eavesdropping, and joining conversations is easy. Indeed Cambridge does seem to be about ideas. That's refreshing.

It didn't take long to be reminded that there are a lot of people here who are brainy, but unambitious. People who aren't after ideas that can change the world but after ideas that can get them a job in academia. I try to clarify, "You want to teach because that's how you can make the biggest impact? "No," comes the casual reply. "Academia just suits me," or "It's what I'm used to." This is why a lot of people are rightly skeptical about the place and why some didn't like the essay - a lot of ideas (and their devotees) seem impotent.

But there are too many good signs that keep me hopeful and that ward off a sense of futility about the place. I've found great spots like Toscanini's in Central where laptops aren't allowed on weekend mornings to preserve "an atmosphere of Luddite gentility and charm." I talked Tolstoy with the barmaid at Shay's and Augustine with the guys at the next table. On the way out of Cafe Luna I stopped at the bulletin board to check out local events and for the next hour ended up reading a pamphlet on educational "revolution" called, The Bachelors Degree is Obsolete.

Overall, I'm still convinced that Cambridge must be a fertile place to find people who care about powerful ideas. In particular, I'm looking for people who care about powerful ideas that:

1. are philosophical, can have big social implications, and are best embodied in an ideology or movement.

2. can have big social implications and are best embodied in companies.

I'm hoping the local HN community can help steer me away from the ivory towers toward what I'm looking for. So if anyone out there knows of any groups, cliques, gatherings, or individuals in Cambridge who might fit the bill, please let me know either on this thread or in email.

Thanks,
Developers needed; Hackers need not apply
Joining a tribe...
Sounds a bit fishy to me, although I can't really put a finger on why...
I agree completely. What self respecting hacker doesn't like the occasional UFO diversion? I just suspect that in this case I was lured in by a Reddit troll.
When I say (and, I think, the author) "image the company projects," I mean by marketing. If their marketing said the company was run by angry iguanas, then it would be accurate to say they project an image of being run by angry iguanas, regardless of the truth.
Housing Bailout Bill: Say Goodbye to Untaxed Internet Transactions
As an Australian, I find it odd that Perth didn't rate as high as either Sydney or Melbourne which came in as 10th and 17th respectively. Perth ranked 21st overall but wasn't shown on the list associated with this link.

Sure, Perth does not have the nightlife or the population density that either of those 2 cities have (1.1 million vs ~4 and ~3.5 respectively) but then again, Perth has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, the lowest unemployment rate, pollution is nonexistant, fantastic weather (its warm and sunny about 300-320 days a year) and they're currently undergoing a resources boom that is the envy of the rest of the country.

The guidelines for defining quality of life can be found on the Mercer Consulting site which conducted the survey. Link below for convenience.
http://www.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1306640

I'd be curious to see what the weightings were for each of the factors, as this list seems a little strange.

Full Disclosure: I'm a resident of Perth, but I've lived in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane within Australia.
I think what the guy means is that if you tried to implement garbage collection, threading and object management using registers, flip flops and PROM, you'll end up with such large circuits that your chip would become way slower, not to speak of being extremely complex.

Byte code is not assembler like ASM, it has some pretty high level functions in there that are quite difficult to implement on a very low level.
As I understand it the whole UFO idea was created by the Air force as counter intelligence to cover up spy plane missions. Basically, if people in the US started talking about UFO’s so would people in the USSR. So it acted like Radar jamming where people would see a fast moving speak in the sky and think Aliens not Air Force.

I like to think of it as a great social hack much like the idea that Facebook could be worth 15billion.
Software Liabilities and Free Software
Is Evil Considered Harmful (spoiler: yes)
Hmm,

Did I say I glue myself 60 to 80 hours in front of computers for 25 years? I included my time thinking over ideas as work, reading books as work, congregation in cult as work. I even analyse strategic consequences of my friends relationship problems as logic and psychology exercises in work. It is really inhuman conditions because my mind has to run all the time to challenge itself without paycheck.

I see a big difference is most people thinking work/learning as slavery to the employers/teacher. So leisure time is classified as the time to avoid their work/learning. While you are working for yourself, everything you do in your life is work and learning.

But you are right that I don't care what the author said and have no intent to disprove what he wrote. I just enjoy my own way of living.
> The second developer receives the assignment and spends the next 30 minutes talking to the business to see how the software will be used and what value it provides.

He then spends the next three years writing software to import and export CSV files into various other formats. XML figures heavily in his job. Java is of course the only programming language allowed, due to corporate rules.
Actually there's a fundamental incompatibility between cults and startups. Cult followers tend to be people who want someone to tell them what to do. There are a lot of people like that, but they're the opposite of the kind of people who make good startup founders. What you want
in a startup founder is the sort of tenacious independent mindedness
that makes you start a new search engine in 1998, when everyone else
thinks it's too late.

If the startups we funded were run by the kind of people who'd feel
at home in a cult, they'd get creamed as soon as they hit the real world, and our returns would be terrible. A regular company could
tend toward the cultish and succeed (some technology companies show signs of it), but a venture firm couldn't be, because its startups would lose in the market.
For me, creating a web OS is the wrong thing to do because the web already is an OS. It just needs more apps porting to it, and more interoperability between them.

If you really want to create a new platform, I think it lives or dies depending on the apps you can get on it that can't be found elsewhere. I don't know if youos had any such killer apps...
What went wrong: they tried to do a "web OS." So many of these have failed, or are on track to fail, that it really surprised me to see a new one the other day.
This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money.

First of all, money is nothing but a resource. Get that word in your head. Resource. It means you can use it towards a goal. You can administer it.

So this guy gave $5K to someone that does not know how to manage it. At least the administrator is smart enough not to touch it (when in doubt, do nothing, some people say). But he is also a bad enough administrator not to touch it.

What would I do with $5K on a OSS project? Hire developers for a beginning. Hire a full-time guy for 3-6 months (depending on where the programmer is) and set a very clear goal as to what is to be accomplished during this time. The goal will vary depending on the project, but the idea is to have a person deadly-focused on a goal.

This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead.

The conclusion this guy makes is that time matters more than money. Duh! Of course it does. Money, however, buys time. Therein lies the missed connection.
Life and Def ---Russell Simmons... A little preachy but at it's core a good read. Nothing beats hearing how to hustle from a NBH. natural born hustla
I agree, but I think there is a positive correlation between specific climates and getting stuff done. Where you can blow off working to go surfing and live cheaply it's a lot harder to keep going but when it’s cold outside it seems to motivate people to keep going. (Or get depressed.)
Looking for feedback and some advice on how to get more users
I wanted to ask you for some feedback about a web app that me and a friend have developed: WOLPY, a web application for tracking your travels.

http://www.wolpy.com

It's currently an alpha version where you can create a map of your visited places (I think we've developed the easiest and quickest interface for doing that). We are going to add soon some more features to share your travels (dates, tips, photos...) and to grow the community (forum, contacts importer...)

We've made 1000 registered users in 3 months, which, for us, it's great, but I find this figure low compared with other startups. What are we missing? How can we get more users?
From earlier news: No views, no stored procedures, no prepared statements, trigger, and who knows what else.

Seriously, THIS IS NOT A DATABASE.
im curious about stackless python, and how do the two compare?
I made some comments about this, YC is slowly but surely going down the reddit way. Unfortunate, since there are so many smart folks that make insightful submissions and comments.
Processors transition around 95%+ of their energy to heat so it's not a significant statement. (A little is used to communicate with RAM etc.)
Pushup: Automated Upgrade Links for Old Browsers
You’re Doing it Wrong If
This is probably the best thread for this question, what is with all these pc, lg, pd (two letter, pg lookalike)usernames? Are you trying to be like him? Or hoping that a not-so-attentive user will read you and or vote you up because of that nickname? There seem to be way more than I see elsewhere, so I don't think abbreviating based on the first and last names is the only explanation.
I don't understand how the desire to "solve the money problem" and get to the point where money is not that essential is supposedly on some higher moral plane. It's like you're saying, "Hey, we're not greedy. We just want enough money so that we don't ever have to worry about money anymore, that's all." How does that differentiate you from the rest of the money-grubbers? Do you think that greedy people have a different goal?

I'd like to solve the money problem as well, but unless I use my money for unselfish purposes I'm not going to pretend that I have higher ideals than others who are seeking for money.
I guess the "politically correct < correct" debacle is the one thing nowadays future generations will look back on our time and say, "These people were vehemently retarded about some things. [1]" This is the current case of "emperor's new clothes". I for one prefer to have intellectual self-respect and avert my gaze, even though I'm Hispanic. My IQ, as given by race, should be around 93, and I still can't put up with this nonsense. I'd benefit if every brain was suddenly standardized to match that of Anglo-Saxons, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lie to myself. If I have to lie to myself, I'm going to do it about bullshit that isn't quite so pungent.

The evidence in favor of cognitive differences across race and gender is enormous; in fact, it couldn't reasonably expected to be any greater. Hundreds of millions of standardized tests, tens of thousands of autopsies, brain scans, hormonal testing, etc. They all align. Not only that, but it's plain even to small children that not all humans were created equal. We're past the point of an emperor's new clothes dilemma; at this point, the emperor is butt-ass naked, trudging through snow, losing toes to frostbite, with big billboards of closeups of his genitals all over the place. I don't publicly call out the nakedness, but I'll at least avert my gaze.

[1] They'll say retarded because it will be the most appropriate term for something that is slow and stupid, and because they won't be chastised for saying it.
IMDB's ranking system is one of the least sophisticated out there, which is surprising given that they're owned by Amazon these days. I assume it's still just the same couple of guys that started it left to run it in relative independence. You really don't need to game their system much; it's just bad technology.
I seriously wonder what's wrong with people.
I don't think Garrett works for/with ubuntu for some time. See even the tags in the blog.
Weren't Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt "icons of revolution"? I mean, oil, steel, and shipping are more important than ipods, right?
I agree... take a look at this... especially the videos(http://www.nestedguis.com)
make sure that what you’re doing is worth it

That's the most important tip for me. I never had trouble with productivity when working on stuff that mattered. On the other hand, when I'm just a clog in a huge machine, sitting in the middle of an ocean of cubicles.... I'm posting here.
Be very careful about using that as a measuring stick.
Rhino is very cool, but the documentation is horribly lacking. There are a couple tutorials on the Mozilla site. I believe this is the better one. It's enough to get you started, but anything even remotely complex is going to require lots of trial and error.

There are also quite a few little gotchas that you're left to figure out on your own. One that comes to mind as I skim through that tutorial has to do with the jsGet_ and jsSet_ methods used for implementing dynamic properties. You must implement both of them even if you only intend to use one. If you only implement the jsSet_ method it will mysteriously and silently fail. As soon as you add a corresponding jsGet_ method it magically works.

Don't forget about SpiderMonkey- http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/. It's the C version and if I remember correctly people have already created modules in the cool scripting languages to easily embed it.
Find people you look up to and then do what they did.
That kind of justification behavior ("I can't change") is a classic symptom of addiction, actually. So clearly you're right. The solution is to work on changing it.
Scrabulous shut down on Facebook
Same here. Incredibly stressful. The only positive side is that after screwing taxes up for a few years and even being audited, the IRS has treated me with the utmost respect. They have waived penalties and interest and given me ridiculously forgiving extensions. A little humility mixed with a touch of patronization can go along way.
You tend to pass properties instead of instances to functions

What does this mean?
Summary: Switzerland good, U.S. not so much.
It's well suited to a certain class of applications, specifically web apps. I've never needed the things you list and I'm not the only one.
After smoozing the bigwigs, he goes off and tries to figure out how to install Eclipse for 3 days, and gets ever more creative for his reasons for not producing code, eventually using his networking (people) abilities to carve out a niche where he doesn't have to produce anything but still gets paid, and generally tries to have as many meetings as possible, where he shoots down ideas that might have a small chance of causing him to have to produce something. Developers are CANCER.
Usernames and passwords to San Francisco network exposed in court docs
Do you really care about access to your applications (e.g. MS Word) or the functionality they provide (e.g. editing a document)? I think it's more likely just the functionality + the information. I think more likely Mac OS and Windows are doomed to failure. All I want is my information + function + communication (an emergent property of this would seem to be collaboration).
If anyone wants to implement this in the greater Boston area and needs C++ hackers, I'm available.
That is correct.The web is an OS, and we only need to structure it a bit more or find a way to unify applications as Google does. Google is the web OS.
I'm afraid you guys have missed the point on why I posted this:

1. It's the NY Times Op-ed page.

2. It's written by the guy "in charge of U.F.O. investigations for the British Ministry of Defense from 1991 to 1994."

I don't believe in UFOs but it makes me stop to think when I read something like this - considering the sources.
Perhaps (s)he likes to self-identify as politically correct? There can be many, many explanations for the handles people choose. Be careful that you don't find yourself trying to make sense of a Rorschach Inkblot...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test
After three years of living in Toronto, I'm still shocked as why people rank Toronto so high. Go live in Toronto for awhile and then tell me what you think about:

1. Pollution
2. Traffic
3. Taxes

I'll stop here since I don't want to get all worked up.
It's just a little tic that I have: pretty much every conversation site I've been to, this one included, has a vocal minority that will smatter gobs of AdBlock vitriol into any conversation. Considering most conversation sites are a bit of a time-waster anyway, I felt it was prudent to mention.

Thanks for the link, though: I didn't know there was a free adblocker for Safari. I might check it out. </hypocrisy>
I'm not sure how using 20 threads tests threading performance, but there's probably some issue that Ruby used to have that I'm not aware of.

It is impressive though, that to beat the given Ruby time on my machine in SBCL, I actually had to add optimize declarations. Of course, I have no idea what kind of machine the published number were from, and I'm too lazy to try and install Ruby 1.9 myself, but it seems that the old 'Ruby use -> slowness' implication no longer holds.

[edit] Hold on, the Ruby 1.8 test, which takes 22 seconds in their figures, takes 4.3 on my machine. So that would mean Ruby 1.9 is like super-sonic ultra fast. At least on this benchmark. Which is mostly testing the speed of the sorting routine which I suppose is written in C. So what are we talking about, anyway? I'll shut up now.
I am not sure I like his line of reasoning. I have a manic depressive friend who starts overly intense reform missions from time to time (to correct all the perceived flaws in his life). The tone of this article reminds me of this friend.

Yes, a lot of us slack off quite a bit, but Bertrand Russell rightly pointed out in "The Conquest of Happiness" that one needs to be able to enjoy idleness to be happy (and what point, pray tell, is there to life if you cannot be happy?).

This should not be a justification for too much idleness, which is an evil of the same degree as the puritan anti-idleness espoused in the posted item.
Web 2.0 Expo NYC Sep 16-19
"You could try to avoid cutting leisure altogether...".

It's an admirable ambition to cut out distractions and focus only on being productive, but leisure is for relaxing the mind. Even if you don't plan for leisure, you're gonna engage it anyways. Even if it's something simple like staring at a dancing flame or watching the clouds pass by.

Separating your productive environment from your fun environment is a good idea. Now, if only I could eliminate distractions for long enough to do such a thing...
Which is why places like the California bay area, Los Angeles, and large portions of Australia are so depressed economically?
I've had the same problems with Ubuntu. I recommend using it if ou're trying to create a productive work environment solely because of the apps directory. I feel much less of a need to fiddle when I can download everything from one small box.

That said, if you want to use Ubuntu to replicate Windows, it's better off just sticking with Windows.
EarthLink expects 8-10 million dialup users left in 2014, wants to buy them now
An interesting side-note... my own observation this time - I've noticed that the more time you spend creative, productive and wide-awake, the more your daily supply of brain-hours expands.
Is DSL dead? Is cable winning? Or will fiber rule?
I should definitely have said "which of your work would you want to be used/remembered?", thanks for pointing it out.
There are four or five of us in Phoenix I think.
Yeah. Hence what I said about avoiding cold turkey.

Though it also helps if your leisure is something that gets the mind working, like engaging in debate on a site like this. I've rarely found myself wasting much time here, thanks to the tight little community. I stop by a few times a day and then I'm done.
it seems that the old 'Ruby use -> slowness' implication no longer holds.

That's a fallacy in the first place (at least for web apps)... Most web application code spends most of its time waiting for the db to respond, not number-crunching.
Oh thanks for the tip. A quick search revealed this: http://code.google.com/p/ruby-spidermonkey

Niice! :)
I'm very pricky in terms of the items that I use, so for me, not using Windows fixed a lot. I'm very sensitive to the things that I use: when something doesn't work logically, I'm just immediately set at edge. And of the three OS designs (Ubuntu = Linux, in my amateur mind), Windows is the one that most bombards me with things like that. Ubuntu, for all its I-can't-get-my-audio-to-work, has a very tight little design, and Macs run just absolutely beautifully. I've found that the OS I use defines my mentality regarding productivity. Thought that may be just me.
"Unethically manipulative"!? WTF is that?
Honolulu? Obviously, the people who did this survey did not spend much time there. Maybe Maui.
Working on it is important, but learning to work with it I find more valuable. If you still suck at something in your mid-20s, chances are you're stuck with it. Find work arounds. Like so many of the pseudo-self-help articles popping up here lately, this seems to get the chain of causality backwards -- people don't goof off because they're founding startups; goof-offs tend to make good to be good startup founders. The link between impatience, hyperactivity and entrepreneurship is no coincidence.
I tend to rerevise things I write, but this one I liked loose. Another thing I was writing against (not in terms of content, but in terms of "reasons for writing" was the overpolished blog post. The sorts of people who pack bits of advice into tidy little boxes are the ones who are never worth reading.

So consider this more a "rant" than a "post."