skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose I was harsh, my intention was not to say that anyone who has debt is an idiot and could have done better, I have sympathy for the poor kid from nowhere who gets himself way in debt so he can become a doctor, or so he can do something with his life. My lack of sympathy is for those who continually make poor decisions. In the article the woman felt bad because of her medical issues and continued shopping from home even though she already had previous debts, as well as her new medical debts. I have issues feeling for a person like that. I suppose I was too broad. Her issue sounds like a pyscological one, and perhaps she simply had no one to help her, but in the end she is still ultimately responsible for her own desitiny.
Sensible, but I say keep searching for the ultimate mission too.

One of the best ways to assist that search is by doing lots of stuff. So you get the best of both worlds, making progress before discovering your "mission" and learning a little more about what that mission might be.

And, no, the T.R. quote is not too romantic. Without big dreams, many of us would just shrivel up and die.
Just FYI: Windows Mobile phones can do this natively with no hacking. It even allows general connection sharing using a Bluetooth personal area network, with automatic DHCP and NAT. You don't even need to hack your way trough a socks-proxy.

I mean... Cool that a hacked iPhone can almost do connection sharing too, but this just shows another thing the iPhone doesn't do which makes it subpar to competing smartphones. (UI be damned)
I'm not saying all debt is bad, in fact I have a decent amount of debt towards my college education. However I manage it responsibly. Debt as a necessity is one thing, paying $750k for a house because your bank will loan it to you is poor judgement.
Slydial Voicemail Service Offers “The Illusion of Communication”
Windows Mobile phones can tunnel socket connections over ssh natively?
From MacRumors discussion:

"Unlimited" means "around 5GB or so". Multiple months of ~5GB transfer will result in nasty phone calls, them looking deeper in to your account, or both.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=527722&page...
Game Theory and the Dark Knight [spoiler warning]
No. As i added to my comment: It has general connection sharing. No tunneling needed.
Noted reverse engineer outs DNS flaw details.
Here's the CERT vulnerability listing, with a list of affected vendors:

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/800113

We use MaraDNS, and it was very comforting to see this on their blog:

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2008/07/maradns-is-immune-to-new...
But with multitasking you're working on something at the direct cost of working on something else and indirect cost of time lost switching context. With this, you work on things while other items are being autoworked on (e.g. running a test or a crawl, downloading a file).
If software patents stop being valid, companies will keep many of their inventions secret...

As compared to the situation today, where Google's patents allow them to be completely open about how their systems work, and we all get to read the source code to Microsoft's software because it's protected by patent?

Companies already keep their nontrivial inventions as secret as they can, because they know that the patent system is useless for its (supposed) intended purpose. [1] The system moves at a glacial pace relative to the industry, it costs too much to use, its results are unpredictable to the point of randomness, it's filled with reams and reams of invalid chaff, and frankly software itself is too abstract, mutable, and easily copied to be reliably protected by patent. There's a good reason why the inventors of patents didn't let people patent written works. Those folks weren't dummies.

No, software patents are a tool for trolls, nothing more. Every invalidated software patent is a victory for mankind.

[1] If, OTOH, you believe that the intended purpose of software patents was to allow deep-pocketed corporations to patent-troll their smaller competitors to death... the system is working precisely as designed.
This scene immediately took me back to college econ. Anyway, I found it an interesting twist in that both parties knew they could possibly be saved. I also found Deebo's decision to be rather altruistic, bc I would've hit that button so fast...
i think the biggest problem with software patents is how long it takes. You may invent something amazing, but it'll be 5 years before you actually see the patent and by that time your amazing technology will be widely used
I think that the analogy between Picasso's process and software refactoring is rather weak. We generally consider refactored code to be better and less crufty than the original (one would hope!) But the refactored bull isn't necessarily "better" than the original. It's simply more abstract, and not merely more abstract in a purely functional way. The final result is still highly stylized and instantly recognizable as the work of Picasso.

What might be usefully applied to programming is that in abstracting the bull to its minimalistic essence, Picasso illuminates the bull's underlying structure. Perhaps by removing code we can also get a clearer idea of the fundamental workings of a system. ;)
I want my coffee black. Who cares about milk.
Your Stack Trace, Show It To Me
From an email I got once, I really like this quote as I feel it is something I believe in:

"Success is the process of living your life working toward worthy goals. And here is the brain tweak: once you reach your goals, you are no longer a success! You must set new goals!...Success is not being debt-free, having cars, going on vacations or buying expensive toys.

Success is living your life working toward worthy goals. If you are sincerely and diligently working your business on a consistent weekly basis, and you have your reasons for doing the business in front of you daily, then you are a success!"
Check this list out: http://www.bookhuddle.com/list/491/Recommended-Technical-and...

This list is made up from books I've read, books friends and coworkers have read, books on Joel Spolsky's Management Training Program, the Personal MBA reading list, and books recommmened by people on Hacker News.
I've certainly written plenty of criticism of people, companies, and ideas on this site. Usually it's directed towards people who talk about nothing but business and act like know-it-all gits. Saying that something is "dead" (especially when it's still, say, a multi-billion dollar industry) or something is "the new (whatever)" infuriates me.

You don't see anyone here heaping scorn on, say, Erik Meijer even though he does prominent work at a company a lot of people don't like, because all he does is produce code and papers and that doesn't set anyone off.
Flooz CEO's post-mortem: "Market timing matters"
Tell me something my 5 year old normal cellular phone can't do!
Unix Signals for Live Debugging Ruby Processes
I don't see why it should accept any address that isn't needed for the original query.
Even if it does accept those additional addresses, surely they should be held in a separate area and only used for that particular query and nothing else?
Debt as a necessity is one thing

One person's necessity is another person's luxury. I was prudent: I turned down MIT because it was too expensive and took a full-tuition scholarship to a less prestigious school, and it hasn't hurt my career any... or has it? It might have been fun to have been living in a startup hub just before the web was born, back when PG was still a grad student...

It's also much easier to see, now that the bubble has burst, that $750k for a house is a bad move. It wasn't so clear back in 2002, when my friend was kicking himself for having refused to pay $350k for a house back in 1999 because he knew it was terribly overpriced (he was new to the Bay Area). In 2002 the equivalent house was selling for $450k. Such houses may have hit $700k before the bubble burst four years later.

(Fortunately, my friend stuck to his guns, perhaps with some help from the housing-bubble-related articles I sent him two years ago. He's still a renter. But remaining a renter was an extreme fringe position in 2004: No newspaper would tell you that buying was a bad idea (real estate agents buy ads!), so you had to find out from blogs, or by having older friends who had noticed the housing crash of the early 1990s, or by reading Malkiel or Charles Mackay. I'm proud of being numerate, but I can forgive most of society for being less numerate than I am.)
I am not an expert in this topic but they sell this here already. You can e.g. find here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_light-emitting_diode#So...
some information about it.
Microsoft is more generous than Google
In my point of view!
If you stare at this code long enough, you might see something.
Then the snake oil salesmen shouldn't advertise "unlimited".

And if you have an emergency, who cares if you get nasty phone calls? This is a great budget emergency solution.
MobileMe Sneaks Onto Windows Computers...And No One Cares?
Looks like they were a typical first bubble startup, spending more cash than they really needed to, as opposed to organically building product and acquiring customers, which is what Paypal did and got right (having had to face similar fraud issues)
Great comment!

There could be a simpler explanation.

1. Journals tend to publish articles which could increase their impact factor.

2. The impact factor of a journal is calculated based on a (2..5)-year period.

Obviously, an author wants his (her) article to be published, therefore he (she) prefers to reference articles (2..5)-years old.
Reginald, I will greatly miss reading your insights. I may not be a Ruby developer, but your feed has been one of my favorites ever since I discovered it.

Good luck being dangerous.
There are very strong parallels between a web app without Ajax/Comet and a 3270 terminal application.
It's an oversimplification to say the the four corners of the screen are the fastest targets to point at. According to Fitts' Law, the time to point to a target is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. In some cases that may be the corners of the screen (because they effectively have an infinite target size). But if the corners are very far away (as can be the case on large screens), then other nearby targets can be faster to acquire.

So, on a small screen, the Mac approach might be faster. On a large screen where the window size is a smaller fraction of the display size, the Windows approach might be faster.

But Fitts' law doesn't tell the whole story -- there's more to consider than just the raw target acquisition speed. What about the time you spend figuring out where the target is? That's probably lower with a single menu bar, because it's always in the same place no matter where the window is. But if the application has lots of controls in the toolbar, you might find that people instinctively start moving towards the toolbar first, before realizing that the command they need is actually in the menu bar. On Windows, it's a slight correction to start heading for the menu bar; on OS X, it might be a completely new movement.

A better example of how the multiple menu bar approach might be better: on a large monitor, when I have several non-overlapping windows, I sometimes head to the menu bar, only to realize that the wrong application is active. So I have to move the mouse again, select the correct window, then go back to the menu bar to make my selection. With multiple menu bars, this problem doesn't occur.
Yay Matsushita to increase Lithium-ion battery capacity by 300%
Jazzers and Programmers
I do love how INDEX.HTM is all caps.
Vimeo says "no" to one of its biggest userbases
I don't like how he thinks he speaks for everyone..
that it captures the absolute essence of the creature in as concise an image as possible

No, it doesn't. It looks like crap. A bull without the massive bullhead is no longer a bull, but some freaky artist's conceit attached to a declaration, "This is a bull." The fact that he changed the pene so wildly between pictures is a hint that he's playing a joke on us.

Here are some superior, simple bull pictures:

http://www.doublevisionarts.com/images/Boxenbaum/Bull%20seri...

http://www.kshdevelopment.com/DaliPictures/Dali's%20Bullfigh...
thanks raquo, and yes, this is kind of the teaching i meant ;)

this is certainly useful information for me, something i could try
Scaling Bumper Sticker: A 1 Billion Page Per Month Facebook RoR App
Tichy - great idea! Along with the A Startup A Day idea generation site, I also have recently kicked off a new video show called A Startup A Week, where we take an idea and give a team one week to build it out and present it to angel investors. We've filmed two episodes so far and hope to do some more in the future - definitely fun stuff. http://www.astartupaweek.com
75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks
Picasso: Getting from here to there in twelve strokes
New prostate cancer drug "potentially the most significant advance for 70 years"
gtani - thanks for the link, that's pretty much exactly the idea that I was picturing in my head! I gotta check that site out, sounds like good times. To be honest, I generally try to stay away from music-related ideas on my blog, 'cause I feel like there are so many music sites out there that it's pretty difficult to come up with something that is A) original B) useful C) profitable and D) legal
While not a Ruby hacker, I've enjoyed reading your posts as well. I hope that, when you do pursue something dangerous, you will write about that as well.
Ever heard of a software patent that actually advanced the art by being published, when the technique otherwise would be unknown? I've never heard of this happening.

See my poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253318
I totally agree with you. It is the responsibility of the individual. Still there is a wide cultural problem in the U.S. that has to be recognized.

My sister and her husband who live in the US,started making a lot of stupid decisions. The rest of the family who live in Mexico warned them. My sister said that that is the way is done in the U.S. and that everybody lived like that. Needless to say they buried themselves in debt and went bankrupt. It was so weird for us since our grandparents and parents were very, very thrifty.
"Create an ad-hoc network on your computer. On Macs, just click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menubar and select "Create Network." On Windows, set up internet connection sharing."

And on Linux?
Do you remember when Netscape Navigator used to include a 3270 emulator?
The fraud was significant (19% of USD credit card transactions, at one point!), and ironically, at least one other Web-currency service (e-gold) is still having trouble with this issue today:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/22/internet-currency...
Tesla to open showroom at Menlo Park site today
The pros and cons of having a real-life conference with a Second Life component
well all I can say is I owe my lifestyle to the payday loans store on the corner. If it weren't for those nice people, I wouldn't own all the nice things I own.
Sinatra Ruby framework
I know we've discussed IE6 and its myriad problems here before, and I'm strongly on the side of dropping support if your audience is tech-savvy enough to not being using it.

But for sites that do have to keep supporting it, I wanted to point out a few techniques I use when developing sites that keep IE6 headaches to a minimum:

First, I make sure to clear floats using the method described in this article: http://www.positioniseverything.net/easyclearing.html

Next, I explicitly set the margins and padding on list items, paragraphs, and other major elements, so that default settings don't mess things up.

For JavaScript, I use jQuery, which lets me focus on the interactivity I'm trying to create rather than worrying about cross-browser compatibility. I also use jQuery to set rollovers on elements where IE6 doesn't support the CSS hover property.

Finally, if I need to set some style specifically for IE6 only, I use the underscore technique described here:
http://web2pointo.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/css-hack-for-ie6-...

As long as I stick to these things, most IE6 issues don't affect me. Hope it helps!
In some cases openness might allow you to exploit the invention, especially when a patent affects you directly. If you are a webmaster then Google's PR patent does, for example.

In the world without software patents, there's no way of knowing how it works, neither exploiting it. Although of course there's the advantage of using independently made similar inventions without fear.
Arrington reminds me a lot of the character of Anton Ego in Ratatouille. A vicious critic. This speech (by Ego) in particular comes to mind:

[POTENTIAL SPOILER WARNING]

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends."
Y Combinator Challenge #1: A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom
Tinyurl question
won't tinyurl, as it increases in popularity, eventually lose functionality as the indicators after the slash become longer and longer?
It's basically impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without violating half a dozen completely absurd patents, and I don't think I've seen a legitimate software patent lawsuit in the last 10 years. There may be a few in there that I don't hear about, but upwards of 95% are either 1) a big company trying to kill a small competitor before they get too big by tying them up with useless litigation and legal fees, 2) an IP holding company trying to extract money from a big company with deep pockets, or 3) two big companies using patents as leverage to try to extract concessions out of each other.

I can't think of any company or engineer I know of that would stop writing software if they couldn't patent it, or of anyone that's learned anything useful from reading a patent filing.

The most important parts of software are already protected by copyright and trade secret laws, and patents have absolutely no place there.
A guided tour of Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, AppNexus, and GoGrid
New arcticle:

Has/How/Why meta tech blogging has failed you
Sorry, I'm too young for that.
Paradigm shift. Market disruptor.
Mortgage giant rescue could cost $25b
Google says it is a quote from "Is Your Business a “Magnificent Adventure”?" by Dale Calvert http://is.gd/10oD
Yep, but I believed that long before that article was published.
Strategies for getting out of debt: Debt Snowball Vs. Debt Avalanche
Compression algorithms are patented and are interesting. Of course you can't use them directly but certainly you can learn something from them.

Einstein worked in a patent bureau for years before he started inventing his own stuff. This is not a coincidence.
There's a difference between ambition and being an idiot with credit.
For many noncontroversial, unambiguous queries(1), Google already directly answers the search query. For ambiguous or controversial queries, you're gonna want the references and context of the original source.

(1) http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&client...
Check out the screen burn-in! LOL!
How hard would it be to sneak a general SOCKS proxy app into the Apple App Store, to enable this same technique on non-jailbroken phones?

Maybe hidden inside a multiplayer game that also opens and listens on a number of TCP sockets?
Can you relate a time when you went to the patent db to learn something about compression? And can you seriously postulate that good compression algorithms would be unknown without software patents?
"More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs."

A lot of people forget that. Most of the software I've encountered that displayed performance problems did so because of endemic architectural flaws and bad code. Pointless complexity usually leads to slow software.

In most well-written applications, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a version on C++ or a version in Java, because the software is rarely the bottleneck. Obvious exceptions are applications like games and 3D animation systems, where there's a lot of computation going on all the time.

A well-written word processor in Ruby might well feel MORE responsive than a poorly written one in C++, for example.
The Kaminsky Hack: DNS Exploits in the Wild
Heh :-)

Well, it did; the similarities between the web sans AJAX (which we just called "the web" back then!) and 3270 were noticed by the early Netscape developers too.
AOL Digg Clone Figures Out Its Best Asset To Publishers: AOL Homepage Traffic
I read this to be the use-case you're aiming to satisfy: (1) getting access to a range of exotics which are only available through certain providers in addition to (2) also getting the best rate available for all ccy pairs. I think this is currently provided by 'portals' like fxall and currenex (bloomberg now too I think) where majors competitively bid on quotes when they want to and the buyer buys that which best suits them.

There's a couple of problem with deliberate chaining of interbank trades in that if the market moves far you might not get your countertrade (the quote will be rejected on the trade attempt - it's more common for quotes to be non-guaranteed than for them to be guaranteed, presumably because it's easier to build and avoids the situation where hedge funds start gaming you); and - irrespective of that - prices tend to get naturally stale fairly quickly (every few seconds but it's usually inconsistent) which means that latency is a factor.
sold over 100 != raging success
tinyurl uses a-z and 0-9, right? So every new digit increases the possible total thirty-six-fold. A ten-digit ending gives you 3,656,158,440,062,976 possible URLs.

So I think we're safe.
From the comments, it sounds like Vimeo should think about opening a sister site dedicated to _only_ game-based videos. The masses love their quality and usability. Why not?
Video of ReWalk Exoskeleton System
My guess is a transition to only iPod touch models with much larger storage capacities. The increase in memory will increase the cost but Apple will likely sell it at price points comparable to what the large capacity ones are now. This would lead to the mentioned decreased margins. Also sales of these would likely be high to help make up for the decreased margins, especially around the holiday shopping time.

Apple is giving away the old touches now with the purchase of a macbook. They also like to announce iPods at the beginning of the fourth quarter to capitalize on the holiday shopping.

This transition seems like one they could be referring to.
k thanks
Are you saying that in a world without software patents Page and Brin would never have turned in their thesis?
That's a no brainer, but tethering is not available on the iPhone for whatever reason (who knows who's really at fault for that). So unless your carrier's TOS doesn't mind you tethering your phone with the wrong plan (basically with a phone-only data plan, and they will care if they find out), your point is moot.

Also, "UI be damned"? I've used many smartphones before and the iPhone has the only mobile browser worth using right now. The UI matters a lot.
Generally not, but with a $65,000 price tag, it might be reasonably raging.
whew, I'm sad to hear you go, but at the same time, moving on to other topics isn't a bad thing. We all grow, one way or another. I hope that if you end up discovering a dangerous idea to talk about or explore, you'll start blogging about it and let us know. til then.