skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen people learn to code in order to build their ideas. It's even occasionally turned out OK.

I've also seen people learn to build in order to build their own gazebo, deck, and even a log cabin. It's not a hotel, but it is a useful piece of construction that a person with no architecture eduction can build with only a moderate amount of knowledge and experience. Some development projects are the equivalent of a deck or gazebo: A weekend project for someone experienced, and a two week learning process for someone who's never lifted a hammer (or opened a text editor).

I don't think it's terrible advice for an "idea guy" that doesn't have money. That's not to say it'll be a success. It almost certainly won't. If they're competing with experienced developers, they'll probably lose in the market, but they'll learn more about the value of developer time, and they'll learn how to better interact with developers because of that understanding. Maybe their next project will be more realistic, and they'll figure out how to fairly compensate a developer for their time.

That said, I think your last sentence is very astute. Maybe a self-proclaimed biz guy ought to prove himself by getting money lined up first, either by earning it, or convincing people to invest in him.
Yes, you missed the deal, but because it was available only on release day (5/23) at the discounted price, not because of your location.
"It's confusing (it's caused me to delete my entire music collection on my PC on multiple occasions)"

What? Ummmm....even my super non-techie wife hasn't done that.
I meant video platforms, but good to know about the Android plans!
They have a tremendous stable of researchers, tremendous market dominance, fairly solid software, and they seem to be unable to capitalize on that.

Two interesting questions: Are there big tech companies that you wouldn't say that about? Why doesn't it matter for those companies?
Finding primality with Python
A Collection of Javascript Gotchas
You'll be downvoted for a bad attitude, not what you're saying. Also, the "I'll be downvoted" meme is rather obnoxious, and I make a point to downvote it every single time I see it. Leave it on reddit. Let your words stand alone, don't rely on manipulating the voters.

However, you do have a good point. It should not matter that it was pg saying it. It should only matter what the actual possibility of Wikipedia being overtaken is. Personally, I don't think that's likely to happen. There's just been too much put into Wikipedia for it to be disrupted, for better or worse.
Read-only and threadsafe are different
What do you mean unable to capitalize? They have a 32% profit margin (for comparison, Apple has 22%) and their dividends are considerably higher than the interest on your savings account.

Why should they care about their stock price? It's not like they're in dire need of a stock emission. They have a cool $20 billion in annual profit flowing in. Their employees won't mind that much either, since a low stock price means they get more shares and with a P/E ratio of under 10 they're likely to go up eventually.
Here's the funny thing about learning to program vs. hiring a developer. I politely decline offers to work on ideas that my non-programmer friends come up with. However, if one of those friends came to me and asked to learn PHP, I'd happily spending a few evenings helping them out. It's a difference that very few "idea guys" seem to understand.
"Frequency" is not the correct nomenclature; "Always", please.
This is effectively cutting out the middle man. They're not looking for a developer, they're looking for an investor who can do the development too.
The article leads me to think that if creative and alternative online/mobile/geo/gamification/social promotions aimed that uses means other than coupons and discounts could be created, that consumer brands would love you (and pay you).

For example, perhaps "happenings" of some sort, tie-ins to grass-roots events. Or perhaps your standard purchase contest but for groups. Or maybe "social loyalty points" (as opposed to individual loyalty programs).
Ever viewed one from more than 15 degrees off-axis? It starts looking strange really quickly.

(I realise these guys would get the same problem with the 3:4 arrangement, but let this at least be a warning to anybody eyeing up a potential vertical 16:9 setup.)
Explain to me exactly what it is about creating the Mona Lisa that cannot be done by a machine, and I will write a program which does it (with apologies to Von Neumann).

In other words, this sounds like an "irrationalism of the gaps" theory.
So which SNES emulator does this?
You're approaching photography wrong. Sometimes, quantity == quality. In this case, it's not the quantity of time you spend studying to be a 'serious' photographer but rather the raw quantity of pictures you take.

Before you give up, try this:

Next time you're out taking photos, commit to throwing away 75% of what you shoot. Now, relax, have fun, and shoot with the goal of filling up your flash card. Forget about everything you've read about aperture settings and exposure. Leave that stuff for the people that depend of their photos for their income.

Shoot in auto mode. Do stupid shit with your camera. Anything that you think will make you look like an idiot will probably make a better picture. Lay on the ground and shoot pictures of people's feet, hold it over your head and blindly snap portraits of your family. Get in people's faces to the point where they are uncomfortable. Switch to aperture priority and set it wide open. Take 20 pictures of the exact same thing 12 different ways.

Then go back home and throw 75% of them away. Most likely, you'll still hate 99% of the ones you saved. But come back to them in a year, after you forgot you shot them, and you'll find you love them.

But more than anything, relax and have fun first. Because ultimately, no one really cares if you can take Pulitzer-winning photos or not, they just want to reminisce about that trip the family took to the Smokey Mountains and joke about that horrible hat they were wearing. And if you can have fun doing that, then you can get better at taking photos.
The Alexandria Library came to my mind as well. Currently, the preservation of digital cultural artifacts is haphazard and has unreliable funding. Yet items like the wayback machine are irreplaceable.

[not arguing that it was worthy of World Heritage protection] but the closure of GeoCities removed access to some 30 million web pages. [http://geocities.yahoo.com/index.php]
that's exactly what I did, I decided that nobody was going to build my product but me, so I taught myself Rails, went to developer meetups, and 3 years later I have a nearly finished product and am working full time as a Rails developer ... True it's taken me a long time to learn the skills necessary to build, but it's been a worthwhile journey!
Not at all! The game is going to be released across 14 DVDs[1], how could it not be great?

[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation... (warning: nsfw audio)

On a more serious note, the Chinese Democracy effect would apply if it were still under development by 3D Realms. Gearbox has turned out a lot of great titles so I have faith in them that they'll make this a good game. I don't know what to expect from it, but they do know that Duke was all about fun(especially since he was a parody to begin with). I'm not expecting the game to redefine first person shooters but I think it'll finally shake off the notion of it being vaporware. Hopefully no other well-deserving franchise gets this kind of treatment again.
I JUST downloaded FF4 and now I see 5 is coming out.

Version-less updates of browsers makes sense, and they should be seamlessly, silently, updated in the back-ground. This is getting crazy.

I install Firefox for friends and family who I want off IE, and this actually embarrasses me a little. If I have to keep telling them to update, they will quit - or end up using REALLY OLD versions of Firefox and we'll have an IE6 situation all over again soon but with Firefox.

I'm starting to install Chrome now. At least I can say that their browser will always update, and they have nothing to worry about.
Where is the Next Generation of Education Leaders Coming From?
I'm Appletarded, and get confused by a lot of Apple software. I don't know how I did it, but it's happened on three separate occasions. Twice on a Windows PC and once on a Mac. Somehow my misunderstanding of the sync feature led to the PC getting what was on the iPod, and the music collection on the PC being deleted. It was many years ago; I eventually learned my lesson and stopped trying to use the damned thing. Maybe it's better/safer now. But, I'll never find out, as I can't think of any reason I'd have to use iTunes.
New vector packs on VectorPack.net
As this school year has almost come to its end, on VectorPack.net we have recently uploaded a Graduate Silhouette Vector Pack. We have also recently uploaded two new floral stock vector packs which include hand-drawn floral elements which can be used for numerous types of designs.
Chris Pirillo’s CDN in a Box looks to make Web sites hum at ‘Google-like speeds’
Seattle super geek Chris Pirillo has a loyal following who love his offbeat musings on technology. But sometimes Pirillo’s network of sites, including LockerGnome.com, get overloaded with traffic. Faced with that challenge, Pirillo and his team have developed a new service called CDN in a Box that’s designed to handle huge traffic spikes and accelerate page loads to “Google-like speeds.”
Opera Mini lands on the iPad in version 6.0
It will be available on both the Xbox 360 and PS3, in addition to the PC.
So you can help out with bandwidth when downloading media (TED talks for example). Back when I used miro that was what I used it for at least.
Clarification: "... do not be surprised if I come to think..."*, rather.

(Typo spotted past the edit timeout.)
Barnes & Noble releases Nook update
They should have announced this on 21st of May :)
500k apps
sed 's/vc_angels/bureaucrats_politicians/g'

I recently attended a conference that billed itself as being focused on "entrepreneurship and innovation." One of the speakers was Aneesh Chopra, the "CTO of the United States" and the other was a representative of the inappropriately titled "Startup America Partnership." We were also treated to twenty minute stump by a Ben Nelson, the Senator that pissed off the entire state of Nebraska when he extorted pounds of pork in exchange for his vote on Obamacare.

None of the speakers did more than illustrate that the bureaucracy they represented was/is antithetical to entrepreneurship and innovation, and I've never seen the energy get sucked out of a room full of energetic people more quickly.
Analysis finds small number of UT faculty teach most students
Nook has 25% of ebook market, launches simple light E-Reader
Should 50 people be allowed to create magazines titled "Entrepreneur", regardless of whether the word is commonly used. If you are the first to think of something, shouldn't you have some limited right to protect whatever investment you are making in developing the idea. It is certainly fair to ask if someone else's magazine title is sufficiently similar as to be confusing, but that isn't a question for a judge and/or jury to adjudicate.

As technologists, we may instinctively view most attempts to use the law to protect intellectual property as abusive, but at least there is a transparent, although expensive, way to solve conflicts.

Think for a moment about how brands, like Entrepreneur Magazine, are built on the internet. The authors work very hard to develop interesting content and then try to get Google to rank the content. Unless you get very large, or spend a lot of money in traditional brand advertising, it is unlikely that anyone will find your content without Google's help. If someone comes along and steals your content, and puts it on a more "trusted" site it may well be seen by more people than the original (there have been plenty of Hacker News articles pointing this out). In this case, the only redress is to try to get Google to listen - certainly an uphill battle. Again, as technologists, we may feel that Google system is fairer because its an algorithm, but when a spammer abuses the system there is rarely any redress.
in a way or another...

In a way that you can eliminate using straightforward technical fixes.
> They don't understand that it's not possible to monitor, govern, control, tax it, simply because it's so cheap and simple to circumvent any of these measures and there's plenty of motivation to do so.

Actually, it is trivial to do all those things. You forget that govt controls access to bit transport.

The hard part is allowing extensive "appropriate" access and denying those things, but with limited appropriate access.....

If govt has a choice between doing what it wants and allowing you extensive access, what do you think will win?
But "done as perfectly as realistically doable" is still better. Rockstar Games (ever since GTA4) comes to mind...
Don't you think this might be taking pedantry a bit too far? While technically true, it doesn't really add value to the conversation.
Kobe VI 6 Shoes Hot Sale, Zoom, kobe basketball shoes online
Maybe I should have, but I didn't know what UNESCO was. In case you're like me here's a link to the World Heritage Convention which isn't on the wikipedia site: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list
It's 400k available in the app store, not 500k. Those firms are just measuring all the apps that have ever been through the app store (including the rejected ones).

But right now there are 400k in the app store, not 500k.
>Sadly, the rot extends to math textbooks as well, which, with very few exceptions, are simply horrible. I mean really, really bad. It is commonly considered a great faux pas to actually explain what you're doing. You will be accused of being overly wordy if you do anything other than produce an endless sequence of definition-theorem-proof. Mathematicians too often seem to take absolute delight in being as opaque as possible. I can't tell you how many times I have heard friends and colleagues praise for their concision textbooks which, to my mind, are better described as harbingers of the apocalypse. If, as a textbook author, you place yourself in the student's shoes and try to anticipate the sorts of questions he is likely to have approaching the material for the first time, a great many of your colleagues will say that you have done it wrong.

As someone who only ever encounters math as a tool rather than a a great passion or source of intellectual stimulation, it makes me really happy to see this said out loud.
No position, and I don't like the stock, but my point is that the fundamentals do matter. MSFT remains a very large and profitable company, and it is at a stage where that influences valuation much more than sentiment does.
Some thoughts, as an academic mathematician who got his Ph.D. three years ago:

First of all, the author is right in one aspect, in that bad writing -- and also bad speaking -- are too widely tolerated in mathematics. Most departments have a regular colloquium, where the entire point is to listen to a talk to mathematicians outside your specialty. Many speakers do a good job, but there are some who will start out with "Let M be a symplectic manifold, let omega be the associated bilinear form, let X be the ring of differentials, ..." [ugh.]

And yet I think there is more pressure to write and speak well than there is to do so poorly. Certainly as a graduate student I was pressured by my advisor to explain things clearly, to add examples and exposition to my papers, to omit technical details from talks, and in general to keep in mind the perspective of the non-expert. The author complains, "Submit a paper with two consecutive sentences of exposition and watch how quickly the referee gets on you for it." But I have not experienced this myself, nor heard this complaint from anyone until this article.

Moreover I can think of lots of well-known books that are loaded with exposition. Representation Theory by Fulton and Harris comes particularly to mind. Of course, there are many books which are notoriously terse as well. (Any HN'ers tried to hack their way through Baby Rudin?)

Indeed, there are many mathematicians who make quite an effort to write and speak well, and largely succeed, and the author seems unable to identify any mathematical writing which he does approve of. If we are doing a bad job, please give us specific examples of what you would like to see instead.

The fact is that learning new math is just damn hard, even from well-written papers. I think that we could do a much better job of explaining our work to others. But, IMHO, this article overstates the problem, and omits to propose any practical solutions.
> I no longer own a Windows PC, play first person shooters, or use a mouse.

What point are you trying to make? FPS are still massively popular, and there's no doubting that many who were small children 14 years ago have taken your place, owning Windows PCs, playing FPS, and using mice.
It is contradictory as written. I meant that paper is slower for writing the full task and faster for writing a brief word or symbol to jog the memory later. This depends on one's typing speed as well as one's ability to decipher cryptic notes, of course...
Ron Conway’s Data On What Makes Successful Entrepreneurs
Just creating and publishing a simple app or proof of concept can make a huge difference in generating interest from possible partners.

Most biz guys make the following offer: "I have an idea; I need you to implement it." Imagine if he could say this: "I have a prototype that I've been working on, but it's pretty amateurish; I need you to make it professional." I know which one I would take seriously.
Or Star Wars.
Devise is authenticating /welcome fyi. Well done project.
Show HN: polkadot - a different way to browse Hacker News
ThinkGeek's iCade Unboxing Photos
tl;dr--Tufte, you're brilliant. You worked hard to build a powerful brand, and now you're very intentionally using that brand to make a crap-ton of money on the contemporary art market. Well played, sir.

But didn't you say that people working in the public interest are inherently more credible than salesmen? Weren't you saying that science is inherently better than advertising?
The difference between other tech companies and Microsoft is that Microsoft is no longer a growth company. That isn't necessarily bad.

IMO, it's reasonable to have a slow-growth company in a mature market that pays a nice dividend (Microsoft's should be higher though).

The danger is that Microsoft's utter dominance is getting chipped at from the margins. Are small companies or individuals buying Office like they once did? Is Apple's growth in the tablet space eventually going to put a bullet in the traditional PC?
Brightcove Launches App Cloud, Open Standards Based App Platform
It doesn't matter that PG was saying it, it matters that the statement has been widely cited and linked, yet didn't and hasn't caused controversy.

If Wikipedia was really world-heritage material, it's strange that a public figure like PG could get away with such a statement with no controversy.
Mine has!
The basic naming used is somewhat insulting - it's basically indicating that developers don't have ideas.
Y Combinator’s Paul Graham: We’re Looking For People Like Us
Could you explain the problem you're referring to (or point me to a page that does)?

I'm currently running FF 3.6 on OS X. Getting regular announcements of 4.0, and thinking I'll install it sometime soon. I don't usually pay much attention to what features/problems the new version might have. So, what's up with this?
Or even "I paid someone to do some mockups and/or a small prototype, but I need someone to make it really work properly". That would indicate they'd gone beyond the 'idea' stage in to concrete action, and aren't afraid to put up a bit of cash to get started.
For many things, getting at least a prototype isn't rocket science. It doesn't have to scale, be well written, have every feature out there or really even work all that well. Most developers just don't want to enter into a situation where the idea guy is just only contributing ideas (and generally not paying them for their work).

I used to just be an idea guy. Then I realized I should learn to program. I'm not the best developer out there, but in an afternoon I can crank out something in Ruby to see if my general concept/logic works. My code will be sloppy, best practices might not be followed, but I can iterate quickly and see if it actually was a practical idea.

Examples of 'idea guys' not understanding is their lack of familiarity with APIs. They think they can just do everything perhaps imaginable, but really there are limitations. Want to crawl the entire social graph of Twitter? Yea, good luck with that. Even with 20,000 API requests/hr, you'll never catch up. You can't just snapshot it also and see changes every day. But an "idea guy" might think that this would be a great idea. It isn't that the programmers turning them down aren't good enough, but just that some things aren't possible with given APIs and unless you're coming to them with $10M+, Twitter isn't going to change their API for you.
The thing that always gets me is that "idea guys" seem to assume that "developers" can't get ideas, like it's a skill that only a select few can possess. Guess what? Everyone has ideas, and being a developer is great because we can actually build our ideas.
I think that in tht moment when we start caring about rights on X more than about the X itself, we have a big problem.

There's an interesting thing. The thing is inaccessible because the site it's on is dead. The thing is known to be free-to-see. Why not cache it? One definitely should.
book? dogs? cats?
Has happened to me on several occasions, especially with an older iPod shuffle. Synced in some music, then set everything I could find to "manually manage music" and "do not autosync". Moved the source files around on the PC, and the next time I connected the iPod, iTunes "helpfully" automatically wiped all the music off the iPod, since it could no longer find it in its library.

I've heard others getting burned in a similar fashion. One person needed to charge the iPod before a long flight, and didn't bother connecting the external drives containing all the music. Only after getting on the plane did he realize iTunes has "synced" his "empty library" and blown away everything on the iPod.
The first thing that struck me was how visually identical to iTunes it was. Considering how Apple sued Samsung over UI similarity, I wouldn't be surprised if Miro could run into similar problems.
Syncing your iPod will never delete music from your PC. It is and has always been a one-way sync, PC to iPod, as far as music content is concerned.
wikipedia World Heritage? i believe not.
1. it is heavily biased.
2. censored.
3. not always as acurate as it could be.
(down vote me, it will still not change the fact that for example what is deleted is someones priority, not necessary in accordance with academia.)
That information seems pretty suspect to me. They are assuming an average force of 100,000 men working at any one time to reach that figure.

Funny enough, this Wikipedia article gives significantly smaller average work forces:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...
Stay to the right with the Lenticular floor pattern
This could not happen in Canada due to its geography. Most of our inhabitants are sitting right by the border with the USA yet in the North we could easily cool buildings for free with our weather and water.
I built this during the weekend as an experiment for my gistpoint app and open sourced the js code as a Raphael plugin here: https://github.com/mquan/polkadot.
With multiple MacRuby apps shipping in the Mac App Store right now, and rumors of iOS support in the near future, it doesn't seem completely unlikely.
Test before you spend: simple early stage user testing