skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fail to see any implication of conspiracy in his statement. It isn't even referencing a real human emotion or intentional malice but anthropomorphizing the institution of government. Growth of government jobs, department budgets, and votes for elected officials all require a constantly increasing scope. It's built in to the system. There is no (easy) mechanism for relinquishing control in an area. Unfortunately, the end result is accelerating government bloat and loss of freedoms.

There is no need for conspiracy when human nature ensures the same result.
The first question you should as is- what happens after you quit your new job? Would you go back to college, find a new job, create a startup?

It might be difficult securing another job to support yourself financially without the help of parents based on your age and the fact that you don't have a bachelors yet. I'm personally one that believes that a degree isn't necessarily a strong reflection of how well your skill level is, but others might not see it the same way, especially if they're paying you.

It might suck working for a company that develops apps that you're not interested in, but working in an environment like that might give you valuable experience. How long will it take before the web app is completed? Have you tried talking to someone else about why you don't like the app?

What are your aspirations? What are you trying to achieve? I'm not sure what you're actually looking for in a job or how you want your future to be.
Liberty Dollar was absolutely meant as currency, not collector's items. What kind of collector collects certificates to the actual items and not the items themselves?
I disagree with such umbrella assessments. Besides, forcing people to use garbage collection is very unlike C.
Does this mean that I've only licensed my dental work?
Okay, there's a lot of things going on here, but most of them are (gradually) improvable. But it would be difficult to improve until you own responsibility for all of it.

Your post has a lot of "XYZ bad thing is happening because of ZYX external thing." Well, you don't have much control over ZYX external thing.

So, the first recommendation I have for you is to stop making that link. Instead of "XYZ bad thing is happening because of..." stop yourself there and instead say, "XYZ bad thing is happening. What would I like to have happen instead? What actions can I take to get there?"

This won't happen instantly, but try to get thinking like that. It'll be a constant battle of sorts to shift your thinking there. Stop pegging your problems to the environment and start thinking about what you'd actually like instead and what action you can take. This goes from disempowering to empowering.

Second recommendation - work on improving fundamental areas in your life. Pick one or two little things in a week, and try to make them a bit better. Spend a little more time in nature, a little more time exercising, a little more time working on a creative project, a little less time aimlessly surfing the net or watching TV, a little more time sending emails and trying to correspond with people you respect (btw, I'm in fucking Outer Mongolia, you want somewhere with no "scene"? Try here. But it's okay because I correspond with a couple dozen interesting people. How'd I get to doing that? Slowly, by dropping a line to interesting people I respect, and encouraging others to drop me a line.)

Anyways, there's lots of things going on in your life. I've been in a similar place at one time. In total, it can be overwhelming. But if you trend upwards in a fundamental area each week, pretty quickly your life starts looking a lot better.

Again -

1. Stop attributing problems to external things. Just say, "XYZ isn't what I want. What do I want? What action can I take that might get me closer to it?"

2. Improve fundamental stuff a little bit each week. Don't beat yourself up if you don't make massive progress, because massive progress is rare. It's also unnecessary. Just trend upwards - eat a little better, a little more time in nature, a little more time corresponding with people you like, a little more time creating things, a little less time on distraction whatever. If you make these regular incremental improvements, your life improves dramatically within not too long.

You're not alone here, many people have been where you're at and have gotten out of it. Lots of people are rooting for you. Good luck and godspeed. Take responsibility for everything and trend upwards gradually and you'll have a pretty good life pretty fast.
The heavy readers in my life will look aghast if you mention that they might want to sell or archive some of their groaning bookshelves
Buy a physical book. Read it. Sell it. Net result is you had the book for a short while, effectively got a discount on it (because you sold it), and if you change your mind and want to read it again you'll have to go buy it again.

Compare to buying that book on Kindle. If the savings are more than what your net cost is in the physical case, you come out ahead, because on the Kindle side you don't actually get rid of the book. At most you stop syncing it to the device. If you later decide you want to read it again, you don't have to go out and buy another copy.

Even for books that you would not sell, Kindle can be a win on freedom simply by being cheaper. I'm free to read more books if I'm spending less per book. It then becomes a matter of weighing the options. Go with physical books, and I don't have to worry that maybe some legal snafu will result in my books ceasing to function. Go with Kindle, and read more books for the same money.

What Stallman overlooks in most of his arguments is that many of us are adults. We are capable of considering the alternatives and deciding which of the competing freedoms are most important to us.
Well, it exists, but unfortunately they're wetware and they're called 'salesmen'.
Why is the focus on apple peels, specifically? Ursolic acid is also in rosemary and oregano, which have been available as dietary supplements for quite a while.
I totally agree with erikstarck. This is actually an amazing opportunity -- when you get past the whole "being poor" thing. (Good news is that we're in a recession, so there aren't any Joneses to keep up with.)

Now that you've had your cry and been flooded with support from HN, start the next phase of your life. The Starting from Scratch Phase. If you're having a hard time seeing your options clearly, pretend you're someone else and assess your life from their perspective. Like, what would Paul Graham do? Or what would a single mom do? Your life is filled with options. You just can't see them right now.

So don't feel unemployed. Feel liberated. ...Or feel like smacking me for being optimistic when you're down and out. :) Sending love and hope your way...
Matt, my recommendation would be to address your parents' situation before trying to handle everything going on in your personal life. If they approaching a condition where they will be unable to take care of themselves there are ways to respectfully bring this to their attention. You will get your career back on track. But you may not get your parents back on track if they injure themselves due to lack of assistance as one of my grandparents did.
Moving Savings Tips - Save on Moving, Savings Tips from Movers Directory 
Moving savings tips: some helpful hints on saving on your move.
Standing up in from of the computer is a major paradigm change, and it's going to take people to do some active advocating.

I know Marco(.org) often works standing up, and I think it'd be a great opportunity for bloggers to do some posts on their experiences.
I clicked through and the site feels quite fast in comparison to a lot of other similar sites. It's the external social media stuff that takes ages to load.

Anyway, I think we all want to know more about those forking web apps you've made. They sound quite impressive.
A tool to take and share screenshots
How bout this - http://soundcloud.com/rduggan/richard-dreyfuss-battle-cry
Thanks for taking the time to reply! Best of luck with the new venture!
Neither SF residents nor the city council are known for their pro-development attitude. Beyond NIMBY is BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
المواضيع العامة - القسم العام - General Topics
المواضيع العامة - القسم العام - General Topics
(I'm curious why you would take a job in game development if you weren't into games in the first place. Or maybe you didn't know you'd be working on games before you accepted the job. I'm not sure.)

You can't guarantee that every task you'll be given throughout your career is something you would prefer to do. That's part of what school is about: you're assigned a wide range of projects that are designed to grow you in ways you wouldn't have chosen otherwise. Maybe you'll like them, maybe you won't. The fact is, you can always find something to learn from your current situation.

Don't underestimate the value of finishing a project, either. Even if it's not your cup of tea right now, there's something to be said for sticking it out.

Sometimes it's okay to leave where you are to find something you might like better, but that isn't _always_ the best answer.
Watch Super 8 Online Megavideo
Watch Super 8 Online Megavideo
Super 8 It was perfect As Charles said repeatedly in their own precursor of curiosity as impressive and the battle lines are drawn The Air Force led by the ruthless Nelec (Noah Emmerich)
Excel has been top notch for as long as I've been using it.

For word processing however I've found OOo Writer a better alternative since it was renamed from Star Office.

(Ever tried sharing >25 page .doc with more than one person over a few weeks?)
Is this true, though?

The unstated assumption appears to be that doing any single thing can be highly parallelized and the window of opportunity is infinite. But reality is rarely that kind.

(1) Some things take 40 years of consistent mid-level effort. Even if you could quadruple your effort on it, it wouldn't get you there in 10 years. Building a family, for instance.

(2) The chronological window. We live in a unique time in history (as have people in every other time). It's an incredible time to be a web developer, for instance. Ten years from now I doubt there will be as many opportunities. In the 1950's, you had amazing opportunities at being a worker in heavy industry; in the 1960's you could play a valorized role in the space race. Nowadays neither is an option.

(3) Age window. Different ages lend themselves to different things. Sure, people in their sixties can run a marathon, but it's a hell of a lot easier to do it in your twenties. And unfortunately many of the things we might want to do are early on in life--people's career paths are fairly set by 30, and we've passed our physical peaks by 30. These aren't hard and fast rules, but they're both very real tendencies that you've got to account for in managing your life plans.

(4) Some things actively conflict in more than just competing for your time and dedication. It's impossible to have an undergraduate experience that is both set in a large Southern state university centered around sports and a small private liberal arts college in New England.

Multitasking to the point of constant stress can lead only to disaster, of course. The solution isn't to pretend that you'll eventually get to do everything you want but instead to choose carefully what you want most and then do it well.
Thinking and Explaining
Cheaper is meaningless in this context. For example, if the traditional counterparts cost $1,000/mile then $100/mile is still cheaper but still far from being pratical. We have no idea what it's cheaper than and by how much it's cheaper by.

Of course, my numbers are completely made. It's just meant as an example.
Ethically I agree, and I think that most other people would as well.

However... I'd suspect it's still illegal, especially if you used bittorrent and thus gave copies out to other people.
From a scope and features standpoint, C++ and Java are quite similar. I would guess that that's why Java made the cut. No idea where Javascript came from, though.
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Beyond git tutorials, I recommend easygit (eg). It's a "training wheels" wrapper for git and available in Ubuntu's Package Manager.

http://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/

easygit is git with sane defaults and better error messages. It uses real git commands, so you don't need to unlearn anything when graduating to git. It has extra sanity checks (like checking for unstaged changes when committing). The help messages are more verbose and use more consistent terminology than git's man pages. For example, easygit always uses the term "staged" instead of "index/staged/add/hard/soft/mixed/cached/HEAD/etc." And `eg revert` behaves the same as Perforce, SVN, and Mercurial revert.
Think of this as an opportunity to learn how to deal with things you don't particularly want to do. If you walk away because it's draining, when are you ever going to not walk away? How will you know the difference between something you should walk away from and something you should stick through?

If it's truly making you miserable or you have a better opportunity lined up, then by all means. But I think first making a more refined distinction about what the problem is will be more useful to you, even if you do eventually decide to leave. Is it the company or the project? Is it the technology or the fact that you're picking up a project someone else already started? Is it the work itself or the expectations and constraints involved? Do you have the power to set or change those constraints to make the project better for you? Can you get that power or authority? Can you, personally, ask for it in lieu of quitting? There will always be some things you can't change, but you should always look for things that you can.

Also, regarding passion: reading HN and being 19 are both great ways to get an exaggerated notion of the importance of passion. You don't have to care about games to be highly engaged in the creation of something that happens to be a game. It helps, I'm sure, but your job isn't the like the game, but to like the work. The verb is the work. And if you need something to be passionate about, try answering the ever-evolving question: "How can you do your best work, given the constraints?"
So it looks like a lot of people here do not have broken workflows, and mail works for them. However, I like the author, have significant problems with my inbox.

My inbox is as someone much smarter than me said "A todo list others write for you". The problem is that they often have valid points, and I do indeed need to do the tasks outlined in the mail. I would pay serious money for a tool that helped me move tasks out of mail into my todo list in a sane fashion. As it is the act of managing todo's inbound from my mail is a major % of my work day. And that seems crazy.
As always you need to be wary of how these results are reported.

AJ already pointed out that they're not measuring "conversions" in the sense of converted to paying customers, but converting to "entering a url in a field"

The 29% increase is always misunderstood (by clients at least)

The original page had a conversion rate of 8.9%

The page they ended up with had a conversion rate of 11.5%

The change is that an additional 2.6% of customers are now entering their urls in a field and clicking a button.
At the risk of being trite, you've hit the nail on the head: there's no real set price. It depends on the data source, quality, recency, collection methods, how tightly focused it is, and who the customer is.

I'd suggest doing some background research on the company in question; if they're talking to you, they'll have talked to other people, probably in your area, probably in others before too. See if you can find some of their names, and see what they did.

Also, start digging around your area in general, and see if anyone else is selling data. If so, find out what they're selling, how they're packaging it, and what they're charging. Step one of selling anything is understanding the market. Know your competitors.

As a second step, once you know what the going rate is, package your pricing around that. You should be able to work out based on other people's pricing methods what your data is worth to this particular company. Bare in mind though that what it's worth to them might not be what it's worth to other people in the future, so have some flexibility built in there too.

Finally, in data sale, as with everything, there's room for negotiation. Ask yourself what you'd consider a fair price, combine that with your other data, and work from that.

However, I'd also raise the question of, is this something you want to do, and how would your customers react if they knew what you were doing? There may be moral, ethical and legal issues to answer, although not knowing the specifics, I can't really comment there.

Hope this helps!
Thanks for your kind words. In D's standard library we consistently attempt to define each and every algorithm in its most general form, with opportunistic specializations wherever available. As a trivial example, startsWith works on average faster on sequences with O(1) length because it can compare the lengths beforehand. D's generic amenities (static if and constrained generics in particular) make it very easy to write code with lots of such micro-specializations effortlessly. You just say "oh, do these guys support the length method? Then if lhs.length < rhs.length return false".

We've managed to reach a very high leverage in std.algorithm (http://d-programming-language.org/phobos/std_algorithm.html) because of that, and there's seldom a need to redo by hand one of its algorithms for efficiency or convenience reasons.
this is very true. at my current company the last person who worked with the huge part of the code i write left about a month after i started. this left me constantly scrambling to figure out how to fix bugs that would come up in parts of the code i never even knew existed. I was managing ok but when we hired new developers, me having to teach them the little bit i knew caused me to understand the code way better than i had before.

I've decided my new method of training employees will have the most recently hired employee train the new hire.
He later turned it into an article on his blog, which has nicer formatting and I think some extra content (though I don't feel like comparing the two side-by-side to confirm it): http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/how-to-become-a-millionai...
Here's a much better article with diagrams and more details:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/05/ssfc-20110526.html

This really will be a major step forward if it pans out. Even if it doesn't work so great for cars it could be amazing for grid storage.
China Ramps Up Android Processor Efforts
Very very cool. Couple of quick thoughts though:

1. I'd like to be able to see a brief bio beside an image when I click on it and the lightbox opens, preferably with links to other work

2. The ability to filter by style and genre would be useful

3. It looks like it doesn't save selections if I hit the back button. That's a no-no for usability

I'll have another think in the morning and post any further thoughts then.
Go to university mate.

You can do some contract development work or write something on the side to keep up your skills and to earn some cash. For now, if you don't have any other job options, stick with the games job for a little while, earn some money and maybe go see the world for a few months.
Yeah, agreed.

In fact, the strongest headwind Esperanto constantly faces is Spanish. There's already a romance language with absolutely systematic spelling, easy pronunciation, simple grammar, and few irregularities. It's already the second most widely spoken language on the planet, it has mountains of interesting and elementary material, and there are lots of interesting people whom you can meet only by speaking it.

It's hard for any rationalized romance language to gain traction against that.
I can't say that I've watched all of Spielberg's movies, but EotS is one of my favorite movies. I was astounded that Bale dropped off the face of the earth for a while after that. But with Batman, Machinist, American Psycho, etc., I'm glad he made a comeback.
Exactly. Google's new campus: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_18081606?nclick_check=1
I seriously wonder how they planned to enforce this, how long it will take the supreme court to throw it out, and whether this is really just a stalking horse for the EFF.
Compete.
Wait a sec. You can buy illegal drugs with Bitcoins?! Thanks senators!
E3 2011: John Carmack on Rage, PC graphics, iOS games, and OnLive
Apple should just make an underground Cupertino downtown at that site.
There has been some research indicating more subtle metabolic advantages of standing vs sitting, is that captured in this calculator?
Well, if it is in oregano then it's in every pizza base. Perhaps junk-fooders are okay.
Wow. I completely forgot about Logicomix: http://www.logicomix.com/ Never got round to reading them. I might just do so tomorrow :)
'Pro Git' is a fine resource, but it is pretty intense for beginners. When I started, I just wanted to check something in. I've found the 'Pragmatic Guide to Git' to be the best reference for getting things done. It has a fantastic organization that sends you exactly where you need to go and lots of examples to perform the most common tasks.
When a major change is made to how something is done, there really needs to be a very significant improvement that makes the cost of changing worthwhile.

I think eventually this will happen with electric vehicles, but no one knows for sure. Which is probably why we shouldn't subsidize solutions that are not compelling enough. The current electric vehicles aren't even as good as what they are attempting to replace and wouldn't be available at all without the massive subsidies.

If we do subsidize things in an effort to "jumpstart" the change, we might actually switch to a system that is not compelling enough and might get persuaded to jumpstart the next generation, which might have been compelling enough on its own. And be stuck with the cost of the subsidies or paying the higher cost directly.

Of course, such changes become so monolithic to begin with when government picks a standard and encourages everyone to adopt it. It may drive down costs in the short run, but it reduces progress in the long run.

For example, the adoption of the NTSC tv format and enforcing it using the FCC. We got color. Then we got closed captioning. And that was probably all the innovation we got over 50 years. But look at how quickly video has evolved on personal computers by comparison.
"Loglan is fine for syllogism, circuitry, and mathematical calculations, but lacks flavor. Useless for gossip or to whisper into girl's ear." -- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis

(I gather there's some sort of religious issue wrt the difference between Loglan and Lojban, though)
YouTube - Nintendo Wii U - E3 2011: Announcement Trailer (New)
Hopefully he owns his apartment, and is looking forward to the value of his house tripling...
abtests (mentioned above) is awesome but there's also http://whichtestwon.com/
Ask HN: What books have helped make who you are today?
I am currently reading a book that my brother found while browsing YC, "Life would be easier if it weren't for other people." I was also turned onto "G.E.B." by this community.

I was wondering what books really helped you develop into the person you are today. I'm really not after just books, but any sources of information that are really at the fundation of who you are as a person today.

Kind of a broad question, but I am hoping that a broad spectrum question will provide interesting, broad spectrum answers.

:) Thanks in advance.