skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reviews and objections and hearings and studies are all necessary because of the treason against the American people committed by an earlier generation of planners and engineers.

A lot of the remaining neighborhoods in New York City were nearly destroyed by the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960's.[1] Most American cities were well on their way to being modern Detroit thanks to planners like NY's Robert Moses and his traffic engineers. They wanted to rebuild America to be easy driving dystopias with free flowing traffic and no space for community and walking lifestyles. They did succeed in the outer parts of NYC and put freeways down both Manhattan waterfronts.

There used to be freeways down the Embarcadero and through the central parts of San Francisco.[2] Tens of thousands of citizens were driven out to build them. Their entire neighborhoods were razed and traditional walkable living was on its way to eradication in America.

Freeway protests started with Jane Jacobs in the 1960's, won against the freeway plans of San Francisco, and resulted in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.[3]

NEPA is the model for analysis paralysis and regulations and safety procedures that block infrastructure projects across America. It continues to be necessary as you can see in most any urban freeway expansion project or wetlands infill development in America today.

The Big Dig in particular proves that even NEPA isn't enough to block idiocy. The best thing for the Central Artery would have been just like the Embarcadero Freeway; tear it down and replace it with nothing. That is, replace it with a regular city street, a couple small parks, and new buildings continuing the urbanism of the North End. The evidence is overwhelming that the traffic situation in Boston would have improved everywhere and the Central Artery (and its underground replacement) actually make things worse.[4][5]

The real insanity isn't that it took 20 years to do the Big Dig but that it wasn't simply a three week demolition project recognizing that the Central Artery was lunacy in the first place.

For now, however, what NEPA can do is slow down the stupidity until we can grow a planning and engineering culture that respects traditional urban form, liveable and walkable communities, and a less motor-oriented way of life.[6]

[1] http://newurbannetwork.com/article/wrestling-moses-how-jane-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_480

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Environmental_Policy_A...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess_paradox

[5] http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/06/06/why-building-road...

[6] http://www.cnu.org/
I have been asked in the past how this is different from 301Works. Let me explain: After tr.im shut down, everyone was suddenly worried about link rot caused by URL shorteners, so bit.ly and others founded 301Works, a backup provider for URL shorteners. Everyone was back to not worrying about link rot, but the sorry state of 301Works is, that only 7 URL shorteners actually send in backups of their data, and those 7 aren't exactly big fish like bit.ly or Tinyurl. Furthermore, all data on 301Works is private and will not be usable for research.

URLTeam on the other hand does not rely on the cooperation of URL shorteners. We make backups, if you want it or not. We also publish those backups regularly.

As for the size of this backup: It's 40 GB compressed, uncompressing to about 160 GB of text files.
For me, the exciting thing here is not so much the story of what these guys went through (though it's amazing and totally an inspiration!), but once again the headsmacking move of taking an old offline idea, and pulling it online with a twist (free promotional materials as marketing materials).

What I'd be really interested in is this:

1. What's the growth strategy longer term?

2. Has anyone on the team got any offline old-school marketing experience (direct mail etc)?

3. What related activities could be pulled in with this as a value-add to the consumer? A blog category interviewing users of the service and how they've used it would be invaluable, and a great way of generating great testimonials, for example.

4. You could potentially end up with a massively valuable data set in terms of looking at what is resonating with consumers, which could be collated and published in some form quarterly. This'd be a huge boon to market researchers, and marketers who deal with broad selections of clients across dozens of market sectors. Hell, I'd pay for it.

5. I'd be interested in knowing how the 60% reduction was made, and what decisions were taken at that point, plus the rational behind those choices.

</braindump>

(To clarify re. old ideas moved online, I'm thinking LinkedIn, MailChimp, Google Maps style services, which traditionally existed, being pivoted on)
Is this the start of cyberwarfare?
Yeah, for that I don't have a solution. It seems like there ought to be a way to have FFI libraries bring along the lib they need and compile it right there, but portable C libs are still a bitch to manage across platforms no matter what you do. I hate to say it, but JVM libraries have a huge advantage here; most JRuby-specific libs that ship a jar file just work on any platform with no recompile and no portability issues. Hard to beat that :(
I think he's pretty right on. One can argue that currently the connection between human beings made possible by the internet is _not_ godlike, but if you extrapolate this kind of connection to its endpoint - telepathy and humankind as an organism, you start to get something very godlike by today's standards. If you still don't agree with him then we're arguing about the definition of god, which is a silly thing to argue about.
The federal government raided the "Liberty Dollar" factory, which isn't even an actual currency (just a collector's item). Why are they being so cautious with something that's actually supposed to replace the dollar?
Actually, the Camera+ developers filed a feature request and asked Apple to add the volume-button-as-shutter feature. See: http://taptaptap.com/blog/cameraplus-volumesnap-rejected/

So I imagine they're pretty happy with this development.
It would be very cool if Optimizely could gather the A/B test results across all customers, run some statistical analysis, and publish which optimizations are significant. Sort of like an OKTrends for websites.

That would be a great resource for initial usability and design decisions. After which, can be tweaked and further optimized by their product.
With respect to specificity of languages, Uncle Bob in "Clean Code" also advocates for extremely short methods in C#, on the same order as what my friend uses. Different languages do give rise to different ideas, but I think that what matters more is how that language thinks about Objects and Classes, as one example. For example, in Smalltalk, methods are messages. In C++ and other contemporaneous langages, nobody talks about messages. They are still procedural chunks, more or less. This fact has a very big influence on how programs are written.

Then in CLOS, you have generic methods that don't belong to a class, which is really a third view quite independent of the other two ways of looking at OO. And you get multiple inheritance without any confusion. And taking a look at those suckers, they are generally not very long at all. I have a bunch that are zero lines outside of the defgeneric part.

So short methods are also very evident in PGs code. While slightly longer, they are the equivalent of the four-line smalltalk method, and brutally simple. Arc takes this to the next level. Kind of like writing Lisp without vowels.
Without diving into the arcane specifics, I can safely say that I wouldn't have my sanity today without Optimizely.

It's mind-numbingly simple to use, but also hugely powerful, and intelligently implemented. Many people seem to assume the power/appeal is in the visual editor, but they've advanced so far ahead of just being "visually created experiments", in both experiment design, targetting, implementation, and customization; they've entirely eliminated the headaches and fudging that usually comes with online testing tools. I'm as happy of a customer as they come.
> then you have to define the loop internal logic elsewhere
صورةاجمل امراة 
صورةاجمل امراة صورةاجمل امراة صورةاجمل امراة صورةاجمل امراة
How to Help Keep Your Family Healthy
I was under the impression that physicists still don't know what the fate of the universe is. It could expand into cold oblivion or contract back into a hot singularity or balance out in stasis. Doesn't it depend on the topology of the universe? Isn't that still 'up in the air'? (punny)
Cute, but flipping the cover back and forth is kind of low-tech right? I think this is a better product: http://ankisrs.net/docs/AnkiMobile.html
Scheme 9 from empty space
The era of programming languages is only beginning, and perhaps within a generation or two programming languages will be learnt at a young age and continuously trained for decades.

Perhaps there'll only be a small number of languages that people learn, so people will have a "native" programming language in the way people have a native natural language.
Single people can't, but commute-only vehicles are common for families. The minivan takes care of major trips, and the commuter car is used for the spouse with the longer commute.
I expect it would play out fine. If people are asking WWJBD and answering it themselves (and fairly well) then I'd say the culture will survive long after Jeff leaves.
Is there any resources such as an IRC channel, or chat room to train and use lojban.

Its most definetely a exciting concept, and one which I would consider pursuing.
And you'll learn how hard it is to sell into these niches. I've met people that have built surprisingly good software for janitorial services, recycling centers, among other niches -- who found it really hard to sell, despite the need being there.

I would love to see some stories about people who successfully sold into these sorts of niche markets.
Add Gesture Search to your Android apps
If the author really watched my videos, he would see that I start most of them telling the listener to be skeptical of anything I tell them or anyone tells them; that no matter how footnoted something is, in the end it is dependent on people's accounts--the people who weren't killed--which are subject to bias (no matter how well-intentioned). Very few history books or professors do this. If anything, they create a false sense of certainty.

Thank you for emphasizing this. It seems that some have forgotten that history is written by the victors.
Sounds like there's an opportunity to create software that will help niche developers sell to niche markets ...
Some advice for the short term, assuming your parents will be ok, get away for a week or so, go stay somewhere with a friend, sleep on their couch/spare room or something. Have a few beers, watch some movies and just try to relax for 2-3 days. Then while still there, start making some plans (see advice from other commenters) about what to do next.

The getting away from it all for a week or should help clear your head a bit and make it easier to create a plan to execute. Try to clear the depression cloud a bit, let someone look after you since you've been looking after your parents. I swear it'll be easier if you're in a slightly better headspace.
practice, practice, practice

don't just read, but write too
I have one gripe with that book- though it dispels some stereotypes, it perpetuates the idea that the primary purpose of conlanging is to fix what's wrong with natural languages, and make better ones. For many conlangs and conlangers, that's simply not true. _In the Land of Invented Languages_ is one of the best publicizations of conlanging, but the world still lacks a good overview of conlangs simply as art or experiment.

What the most important feature of language is depends on the purpose that a particular language serves. It might be better to say that logical disambiguity is not the most important feature required for human communication (although that's much longer to say). On that note, Lojban and loglangs in general have been discussed fairly extensively on the CONLANG mailing list recently; a couple of relevant messages are
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1106A...
and
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1105A...

There is some standing disagreement over whether anyone has ever really become fluent in Lojban, or if they just become fluent in a creole-Lojban that merely happens to reproduce a subset of Lojban's surface forms.
Science For Smart People [video]
Yeah, but I didn't expect people to take it so _personally._

(Or maybe I do, but I unconsciously resent how serious we are and fight it by taking a few downvotes every so often.)
Fundamentally, the idea is the same to the end user, but this is true about a lot of ideas that started on the desktop, then were recreated in the web, and are now being recreated in mobile.

Like anything, ideas are a dime a dozen and execution is everything. Building network storage for tethered devices on reliable connections and building network storage for untethered devices on unreliable connections are two different problems.

The way this post is titled gives him credit for the idea, which is a silly thing. If iCloud works as advertised, kudos for the execution.

But I have no doubt in my mind that the architecture under the hood would be very different if it were 1997 and Apple was building cloud storage in the pc era.
There's been some great advice here, so I'll keep mine short: you are in a situation where you may discover new problems to solve and make money with (perhaps solutions that help aging parents)? I hope you can view this as a doorway to new insights.

And never, ever stop being an entrepreneur.
Y, I do! That companies seeking an isolated, concentrated workforce somehow vibes with new urbanism is a big stretch. Worse, I am biased by the aesthetic and technical qualities of this building concept, and it overwhelms practical considerations. This is exactly how so many planners bought into modernist architecture.
The study is based on dietary factors, there are plenty others out there focused on strength and hypertrophy training. Obviously diet and exercise go hand in hand in order to reduce muscle wasting as a result of ageing.
Show HN: Review my app: Slector, find your favorite graphic illustrators
link: http://slector.com

We choose designers (in this case, graphic illustrators) based on two things:
1) their work/portfolio
2) their rates.

I've created Slector (slector.com) to simplify the process (based on my experience on finding and choosing illustrators for Hacker Monthly).

Slector display all the listed illustrators' portfolio item randomly, and you get to "thumbs up/down" them. After that, click on the big "Generate List" button below to see the list of your favorite illustrators for hire. It's that simple :)

The webapp is still in MVP stage so would really really love your feedback.
You could say that this is not necessarily true, even though we all wish it was. There's an endless supply of people out there who work really really hard and yet they never become billionaires, in fact they might be living at poverty levels.

It's kind of a cool myth, but social mobility doesn't quite work that way.
Everyone who reads an article in the press about health and nutrition should be required to watch this video, Science for Smart People -- a presentation by Tom Naughton, who wrote and directed the movie "Fat Head". It is a brilliant deconstruction of bad science and the bad journalists that report the bad science, in the context of health and nutrition.

One of many points he makes is the ridiculousness of reporting on miraculous health claims that have only been shown to work on rodents.

The video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0

And, I just submitted it to HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2635326
I'd love to stand while I work, but whenever I stand up in my office they assume I'm trying to escape.

In all honesty, I'm not sure I could code as well standing up. When I'm in "the zone" I'm always sitting on the edge of my seat, typically right at the point where either I'll fall out or the chair will go flying backwards if I move too much. It's not a concious thing. I've always worked like that, and I can stay like that for hours. Standing might just be different enough to break the process.

But the rest of the time? Sure, I'd love to work standing up. Sitting in a chair (inside) for eight, nine, ten hours a day drives me nuts.
This only applies when the opportunities you want pursue will still be available when you have time to pursue them.

Sometimes that's not the case, and you simply have to give up on one to pursue another.
I've been downvoted below zero plenty of times -- sometimes when I am attempting to present a non-standard potentially provocative opinion -- but often not. I've also had comments that started off w/ a few upvotes and then went south to -4, and others that started off w/ a few downvotes and went up (this is less frequent).

I think part of the problem is you get penalized pretty quickly w/ the shading differences, and people are happy to knock you down. Believe it or not, the post you are responding to go at least one downvote before the upvotes boosted it back to normal text color.

As for your tactic for "post[ing] your truth" this doesn't work so much if it does get downvoted, since it fairly quickly becomes near invisible.
clickable: http://slector.com
You'll probably have the best luck dissecting a program you're interested in.
Taxing Art: "Hacking" the tax code with art or design
Just a side note, in France too we say week-end... Fin-de-semaine is usually used to mean at the end of the week (for example what people would say at work if they expect the answer to come before friday evening..)
Another object from the series: http://www.betatank.net/B-side.html

I thought this project nicely embodied the playful nature of the hacker mindset in a non-IT field.
If you are so close just finish it and you'll see what to do next! Worst case scenario you just lost that (small?) amount of time but you will have learned a couple of thing in the meantime.

As for Songkick, congratulations!, I don't think I could live without it.

Update: It seems like this app is even better than the site since it added some options which are really nice: "just added" and "your plans". I kinda wish there was a way I could only see currently touring artists and their concerts on the country I am currently in (because I don't mind travelling a few hours to see some amazing concert). Example: I'm in London but I didn't know about Foo Fighters playing in MK. I wish I did before it sold out...
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
I lost my job in PR earlier this year and used the several months of non-employment to laser focus on becoming a professional programmer. I got my first job doing so last month.

If you don't know who you are professionally, it's probably because your heart isn't in whatever it is you do. Quit feeling sorry for yourself and learn to program.
I think that people under-estimate their ability to multi-task!
This is so helpful and interesting! I've been intrigued by yall since I saw your sign in the old SocialMedia building in PA, but figured you were just scareware because the descriptions on your web site are so fluffy.

It would be awesome if this explanation was on there under "technical details" or something.
The Social Web's Dumbest Ideas
I've been a janitor, and it's not such a bad job at all.
Very good advice. Thank you! I do the donkey thing a lot, without realizing I was the donkey.
Actually, Hangzhou is a very rich city by Chinese standards due to their entrepreneurial culture. Despite "only" having 2 million inhabitants, LV sells the most items in Hangzhou compared to all other Chinese cities. Also, their more central streets are lined with luxury car shops.

$20/day does not seem too unreasonable for local Hangzhounese.
Pete,

Thanks for the comment and great questions.

In regards to the future and what we're planning - we try and let the product speak for itself. That way if were wrong, no one knows ;), and it gives us an opportunity to delight and surprise our customers.

re: background - my first startup was MaritimeVacation.com and I used direct mail as my primary marketing channel. Our team has deep DNA in marketing in general - kind of my area of study. http://www.udemy.com/social-marketing-for-startups/

re: 60% reduction
- Let go of our customer coaches / contractors
- Everyone took 50% pay cut
- Cancelled any accounts that weren't critical
- Stopped any payable = no money out unless needed to keep the lights on.

I've been doing startups for a while, and from experience, if you need to cut - make it quick and deep.

Hope that answers some of the questions.
What will you do if everybody suggests quitting your job and finishing your degree?
#lojban on freenode
Great idea! We'll do this.
I suspect this might be the work of Cory Docterow, I believe I heard him mentioning that the did a deal with Amazon where they would publish his books without DRM. But I might be wrong.
The iFortress, Evernote Peek, and the Black Eyed Peas.
Sorry about that. The URL will fade out slightly when you focus on the textbox but I agree it is better to just clear it completely. We'll make that change.
That would rock.
while your at it, pray for some kids with cancer to be cured, thats worked real well for them - here's looking at you big man with a beard in the sky
Naughty Dog?
Cheaper than giving people offices, I'd wager.
Are you suggesting adding small impurities to the gold and then measuring them at a later stage? Surely that would be a very easy thing to change.
I'm learning Javascript and wish there are some Javascript tutorials like this somewhere :(
I think there's two things to consider here.

1. Are you unhappy because you're not proud of what you're working on?

2. Would you be happier elsewhere?

As someone who's done a lot of work for a lot of clients over the years, you learn eventually that even in the best jobs, it's not all rainbows and unicorns all the time. It's about the ratio of good to bad.

Now, on the one hand, you said this app is all HTML and it shows. Is this a concern you've raised, and if so, what was the response?

Secondly, from the standpoint of someone who's run a business, whilst my default position is strive for awesome, when you've got budgets and employee time and client billing and other such things to worry about, sometimes you have to decide what's acceptably good, and anything past that is great.

From a businessman's point of view, the measure of success isn't design quality or usability or anything else, those are just tools to the main goal: profitability.

So, if you haven't had the concerns discussion with those higher up the chain yet, bare those things in mind. Understand that your concerns and theirs will be different. This will result in them taking your concerns more seriously, as it'll show that you're not just concerned with wide-eyed idealism, but with wanting to help further their goals, by making the end product better, thus delivering more profit. Sell the business case for your viewpoint.

Failing that, if you do leave, be realistic about your prospects for a new job. You're not going to be doing high-end super-cool exciting thing yet, but that's OK, because by not doing those things, you can learn how what you do fits in to businesses. That's valuable, and will make you a much more capable developer long term, because you'll be able to relate to the client, the boss, and your work together. That's killer.

Regarding the product itself, I've found that there's ways to find even the most boring things interesting. Just gear it around the things you do find interesting. Nothing, but nothing, is just flat boring. Which isn't to say some things are unpleasant, as they are. But not boring. There's always ways to make work fun.

Hope this helps. If there's anything further I can do, reply here or drop me an email - I'd be happy to help.