skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That has got to be one of the most useless landing pages I have ever seen. "You know nothing about who I am or what I do, but here, give me your email address and awesomeness will happen. Can you imagine it?" No, not really.

Seriously, put a real, non-BS description of what you're supposed to do on your landing page, if you want people to care at all.
I followed the links and got to a fuller explanation:
http://importance.corante.com/archives/002925.html#more

I am confused by both the perceived need and the perceived damage. I assumed that the broadcast received copyright protection because of the production artifacts other than the public domain original source. The treaty itself seems to protect the specific broadcast, but does not prohibit other broadcast of the same source material.

Am I missing something? I must be, otherwise why create such a treaty? Of course, the mere existence of an organization such as WIPO means that they have to create law, otherwise everyone would have to give up the high living of Geneva and go home.
Judged by whom? If you're talking about self-judgement, and judgement by G-d, then I fully agree. But as far as people judging other people - I think only actions and to a lesser degree words should count, because we never truly know other people's intentions.
heh, we have a shell script that acts as a bot in our channel. it's an ugly mess :)
Here are some slides from one of my workshops on using magic to create better technology:

They are very controversial, especially out of context, so please understand that the slide that says the value of learning goes down over time has obvious qualifications, and is not generally true. It does however make a lot of sense in the context of my presentation.

http://magicseth.com/presentations/Imagineering%20InsightOut...
OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
The licensing restrictions on this are jarring ("We can only play you a preview of this song until someone else starts DJ'ing") but I guess they can't have it just be a personal music service.
Robotic Nerf gun turret
O language, how poorly suited you are to describing the multidimensional space that holds all possible personalities
How is this any different from any other hosting or colo facility ? - Your colo facility isn't going to be responsible for your security and privacy either.

Also I think you have an mistaken understanding of how IP law works, nothing is public domain (in the IP sense of the word) unless you specifically put it in the public domain.
visit Fry's
Just how many failed startups can Google afford?
Mostly, turntable is growing because they are subsidizing free music. The social is gravy, but people love free stuff. At some point they will need to actually cover their costs (note the shutdown of non-us traffic) and it's going to be a lot more difficult.

Growth has never been the hard part for music startups. Making money has.
I have hive hopes for something like this:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march/new-york-proposal-0...

There are actually several proposals being considered by the city to encourage the creation of a top 10 technical school in NYC. I have high hopes that one of them will bear fruit.

I agree with you that the lack of a top tier tech school right in NYC remains a big problem.
Not to mention iCloud, hugely improved notifications, iMessage, etc. I don't think Apple will have any problem convincing people to upgrade.
Columbia has a good engineering school and a good CS program. It's no Stanford, Berkeley, or MIT but it's no slouch. Columbia has an excellent opportunity to be a leader in the NYC tech space but from what I've seen efforts from the CS department have been lacking. Which is a shame because lots of capable engineers go to Columbia only to be swallowed up by the finance industry.
I am realizing that passwords are a bad thing. I have no problem with 1-2 passwords in my life. I can easily change them, and I can choose secure passwords. My biggest fear with a password is that I use the same password twice, once on a secure system (e.g.: my workstation or a remote server I administer) and once on a web application with holes the size of Mt. Gox.

I have been moving to LastPass, but the service, as nice as it is, just has too many controls, and is a bit ugly. It also only support Mobile Firefox if you have the premium subscription (not a huge price to pay, just another barrier for me). My biggest issue with it is that I will need to set up a premium account for my wife as well, since there are some shared passwords (e.g.: our banks, utilities, etc.) and some that are individual (work-related).

Ideally, what I'd love to find is a cross-platform (mobile, UNIX, Windows) system that syncs data over ssh to a server I specify.

Really ideally, I'd love if everyone adopted OpenID, so I can just maintain a single access point that I secure to my satisfaction (client side certificates, one-time passwords from hardware tokens, etc.)
New discovery might lead to laptops powered through typing
Huh. I switched to Google Video for speaking with my parents on the other side of the world, because Skype video just plain stopped working for some weird reason. It's slightly better both in terms of sound and video, and so far I've experienced less stuttering and freezes.
That is all nice, amazing and innovative.

Yet I think it is time to stop calling devices which create something and connected to a PC via USB a "Printer".

Printer, print a material which you read. Anything else, is a robot which does X or Y.
>"In short: a simple web-form system shouldn’t end up installing Internet Explorer 8 for you. I think it’s interesting particularly because no lean startup would ever ever do this in a million years, yet we aren’t particularly surprised when a big company is flushing dollars down the toilet in this way."

I would hardly be surprised if doing it this way saves ATT millions of dollars. The default browser for Windows XP is IE6 and a large percentage of new ATT internet customers are highly likely to use whatever browser is on their system, and even a small fraction of ATT's customers is millions of people.

Also keep in mind that this default behavior was almost certainly implemented several years ago when the use of IE6 was even greater than it is today in order to avoid lengthy technical support phone conversations with people like your grandparents when they purchased their first computer.

I'll add that it costs ATT very little to only directly support IE - sure a few calls from Firefox users escalate but that is probably offset by the fact that as a market segment those users are more likely to be technically savvy.

ATT knows its market segment in a way that most startups would do well to emulate - and recognizing how their setup procedure goes to their bottom line is a valuable lesson about focusing on MVP rather than perfect code.
I am an avid IRC user, mostly to keep in touch with friends from school, but also for technical, hanging out on various different channels to get help before turning to StackOverflow.
yes, and in this case it's an artificial scarcity. CCP controls access to the items, and thus has complete control over their price and scarcity.
So, you must have had IE6 or IE7? As much as I hate being forced to run any particular browser, one less machines running these old browsers is a good thing.
What? I never said he was trying to suppress the album.
I was just talking about the picture.
Pop pop boats are real and have been around for a long time, I had a couple when I was a kid and it was fun to play with. You can see some more examples of pop pop boats and read some history here: http://www.nmia.com/~vrbass/pop-pop/
The Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg
This is just a fun website.

The level of engagement between DJs and listeners is very special. It beats the algorithmic radio stations of Pandora hands down.
Strange because only a few weeks ago he said that ATMs were killing jobs. Hmmm, maybe he just tells each audience what they want to hear.
While the money's pouring in at millions a minute they can afford as many as it takes to find a winner, even if being a giant corporation sabotages some of their attempts.
It is actually depressing to think that you can encapsulate success on ten easy steps/rules. Advise like this makes it seem like I'm being sold snake oil.
Or they are selling this info to a third party... I've heard of a story of a guy that used his British girlfriend's identity to sign up to one of your American internet (or cable) providers and than got a lot of spam for her, even though that's the only place he used her name.

(Yes, I know this sounds like an urban myth, but I can dig up where I heard it straight from the guy, he has a podcast).
Literary Camouflage
Agreed. Every time I land on an OnSwipe-themed page, I immediately hit my Readability bookmarklet. Sometimes I don't bother and just hit the back button.

I often get frustrated with web pages that are modified/altered to work with the iPad. OnSwipe annoys me the most. I also find it frustrating when a mobile content width is defined which takes away my ability to zoom.
Screen, multiple windows. Three run irssi 24/7

- irc.gimp.net (gnome guy)
- irc.freenode.net (lots of things)
- irc.somedomainIadminstrate.de (private irc server, low traffic, for a web browser game)

What is your replacement?

Mails? Obviously not 'realtime'. I like mailing lists, but they are the 'chess by mail' vs. 'blitz chess' variant and fight lots of problems if you just want to have a talk with multiple people, now.

IM? In my private world every IM network sucks. I tend to like XMPP, but - it's just not useful enough. Even if GTalk and Facebook use it, unless federation works well I won't use it for much. Don't get me started on Skype or somesuch nonsense.. This would be my favorite choice, given a better world.

Web chat? There are lots of neat web applications. Which, somehow, seem to reinvent IRC. The better they are (for me), the more IRC alike they seem to be. Where's the point?
I think you should tell this to the bullies. That way they can tell their victims "Remember, I'm teaching you a valuable life lesson" after they're done beating them up and taking their lunch money.

Seriously though, being a social outcast isn't a valuable experience, nor is it healthy. It sucks, and it teaches you that your only options are to avoid the shitty people or suck it up as you put it. The reality is that you have a third option: being assertive. Believe it or not, you can make a shitty situation tolerable with a bit of honesty and frankness.

After all, there are going to be shitty people you can't avoid, and you'll explode if you just suck it up. But school doesn't teach geeks to do that. It teaches them to be docile and accept their shitty situation.
The Novel That Changed America
Flexibility is the only major reason to go with them, redundancy's easy enough to achieve with additional servers.

I don't know if the price would be within 10 - 15 percent, you're really paying a premium and across multiple billing streams, very easy for it to be a lot more expensive than that.
He forgot to mention the whole part about objectifying women, bad product, and constantly pestering customers to buy stuff they don't want.
Since you live in Chicago, you may be fascinated with this profile of Lois Weisberg.

She is single-handedly responsible for helping found many of Chicago's cultural landmarks like Taste of Chicago.

http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_01_11_a_weisberg.htm
"there seem to be a lot of crap jobs out there, lots of people looking for experts in Java or .NET."

Choice of language has little to do with whether or not the job will be intellectually challenging or whether the company will provide opportunities for you to grow your skills. There are a lot crap jobs in Java and .NET because there a just a lot of jobs in those languages in general. So unless you are keen on using a specific language I would try to be as language/tool agnostic as possible. As to how you detect whether a job will foster your intellectual growth, try asking some questions along those lines in your interviews. For example:

"How far do you feel you have come in terms of your skills compared to when you first started working here?"

"What was the most challenging thing you have gotten to work on here?"

As far as trying to convince employers that you can pick up whatever they are using, my experience has been that employers asking for X years of experience in Y are not likely to be convinced and the likely-hood of changing their minds is probably proportional to the number of years they are asking for. So look for employers emphasizing fundamental skills over particular technologies because they already get it and it won't really be a question.
I'm one of those who don't. This is the way I explain it:

Well, I don't do any of those things but what I often do is provide tools to people in highly technical industries.

Oh. <Change the subject not fully trusting that there is anything beyond iPhone, facebook or web apps>

Argh.
I think the "us against them" mentality has always had steam, and will always have steam. Romans against Christians, Christians against Muslims, the US against Britain, the North against the South, democracy against communism...

I could go on and on...
Many people genuinely believe that when they take these substances they are communing with the universe, with god(s), aliens, ancestors, or the deep levels of their own subconscious.

To call such experiences mere "hallucinations" or "perceptual disturbances" is both reductionist and dismissive.
They often share vulnerabilities with core libraries in other UNIX like systems with samba and java being two examples.

Good thing that Lion jettisons both (Samba for going GPLv3, and Java is non-core download)

The firewall functionality in OS X is impressive, but hardly utilized. The underlying technology is ipfw

Also changed in Lion, which now uses OpenBSD's pf. Apple doesn't make much more use of it though.

It has been a shame to see the sandboxing functionality introduced in Leopard not being utilized to anywhere near its full capacity.

That's changed as well in Lion, as any Mac App Store developer can tell you.
In fact there should be a buy an Arduino (http://arduino.cc) board and program it item on the list.
Why are you running three instances of irssi, instead of just connecting to three servers?
Do you consider it a printer if it's photos? A friend of mine owns a print shop that does very large scale advertising photos (like, building sized stuff). Should I inform his industry that they should stop referring to themselves as "printers" because they're not producing text?
I'm running a startup that 3D prints custom eyewear. When I explain 3D printing to somebody who isn't familiar with it, I usually show them this video of a wrench being made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW0NZgcq9yA

Goodbye, wrench video. I'm going to start showing everybody Markus Kayser's SunCutter instead. Not only is it cooler, but I actually think the video of him printing the bowl in the desert helps you see what's happening more clearly.

His SunCutter is a demonstration of SLS (selective laser sintering) which traditionally uses a laser (or in the above example, focused sun beams) to fuse small particles together.

We're using SLA (Stereolithography) to print the glasses, which uses a UV laser to cure a liquid resin which turns it into a solid. For a good demonstration of SLA in action, check out this video of one of the printers we use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTWFWh1x-yo&t=1m46s

Finally, some shameless self-promotion... we're about to launch the private beta for our startup and we're actively seeking beta testers to kick the tires on our eyewear-designing software. If you're interested you can sign up at http://www.oyoglasses.com
While it is annoying, it is how he got to where he is.

My 10yo daughter knows a godaddy page. Ugly green + chicks. That's branding.

But I always have to explain to her how he is objectifying women and how men who fall for it are stupid.

Then she asks me how I found out about it...
Private interests don't have the greatest record when it comes to public transportation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda...

We should always be skeptical of the motives of people who propose selling public services to private companies.
Is that a licensing restriction? I thought it was just to force people to use it socially, instead of just sitting around and listening to tunes on your own.
Getting out of your comfort zone is the #1 recipe for success.

Do it, all the time.
To a point. I don't visit public rooms, but when I'm playing with my friends, there's usually a few songs that I outright hate, but can't force it to skip. :)
You sound as if you 're one of them.
Properly, because he is a turncoat^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPolitician.

Which reminds me: why is it on Hacker News? It is not a particular revolutional program.
Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?
I think one of the big things about NYC being a startup hub is that a lot of the startups aren't purely technical in nature like they are out in SV. New York has long been a mecca of design and media, and a lot of the startups based out of the city have strong ties to those roots (Aviary, Boxee, etc.) Most of the engineering talent isn't too far away (Cornell, Princeton, Yale, and the Boston schools are reasonably close) and I think a lot of engineers that appreciate beautiful code are also drawn to the elements of working with startups that not only are technically impressive, but also aesthetically impressive.
Also, "Upon the launch of the iPhone 4, Jobs promised that Apple would work in due course with standards bodies to make the FaceTime protocol an open standard." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facetime)

I wonder when (or if) it will happen.
I agree with you on the usage of the word "hack." These are basic techniques. No one would say:

"Top 20 C Hacks:

1. Use a variable to store a value.

2. Use named functions to organize your code.

...."

I also agree with you that you have to work with the motivation that's already there. These techniques don't create motivation; they multiply it. On the other hand, intelligence and effort can be applied to anything, so lists like these are helpful for people who want to improve their edge.
I have never been able to "get" IRC. I've tried to like it a number of times, but it always ends up as nothing but a distraction.

My experience: start a client, join a channel, and watch it go. Meanwhile, try to get work done. I'm either watching IRC in case something interesting goes by (and then not working), or I'm working and then miss whatever was interesting on IRC. Or I try to do both and accomplish neither.

To me, IRC feels exactly like those twitter update widgets that people put on their blogs. I usually end up opening a terminal window and putting it over the widget, otherwise it distracts me like a "look at me!" advertisement.

I get much better value and results from googling; someone has always had whatever problem I'm trying to solve, and if I can't figure it out on my own, I can usually find a thread where someone else has.

I'm not complaining, and I'm not saying IRC has no value (to others). I sometimes wonder if I'm doing it wrong, but I think IRC, among many other things, is just not for me.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=are-babie...

This person thinks they provide a distorted picture. Probably a good pass using all west coast cities and a more complete time span would be the best indicator.
> In Tunisia, high school encourage stupidity

Can you elaborate on this? In what way does these high schools encourage stupidity. (I am also curious as to how these places encourage stupidity as opposed to, say, not encouraging creativity or something like that)
I say go for it... it can't get much worse...

For 4 years, my wife was travelling from Rochester to Syracuse and back every few weeks while she was in school. This is ~100 miles, with no intermediate stops. Pretty much a best-case scenario for a train, right?

After half a dozen attempts, she finally gave up trying to take the train... It was expensive, unreliable, and slow.

What if I wanted to take the train down to NYC for the weekend? It's $80 for a train down on Friday afternoon, and there aren't any trains back on Sunday. Megabus, on the other hand, is $80 round trip (without using any of the readily available promo codes to bring it down even further), and the scheduled trip time is an hour shorter.

Despite being someone who _wants_ to take the train (I find it a very comfortable way to travel), I can't find a single scenario in which it makes sense for me to do so.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to NYC Tech (Part 1 - Places)
I work for AT&T. I have an obligation to inform you that what I say doesn't represent their official blahblah whatever. You should know this isn't an on-message marketing communique.

AT&T, the company that created Unix and C, could be said to no longer exist, or more correctly could be said to be a different company than the one now called by that name.

A little (abridged, simplified) history: AT&T, you may remember, sold its cell business to Cingular long ago. Bell Labs went to Lucent before that. Eventually, it even sold its residential phone business off. They backed out of a lot of markets and dropped the best R&D lab they could have had.

What is called AT&T now is actually SBC, a Baby Bell with a penchant for out-sourcing. SBC bought Cingular, AT&T, Pacific Bell, lots of other companies. Their AT&T purchase was motivated in part by the name: everyione has heard of AT&T.

SBC brought with them metric tons of bureaucracy, all running in IE. Disgusting. It's not just the external web interfaces. We have to deal with this BS internally, too. 1990s web interfaces that only work in IE (sometimes requiring 7, sometimes requiring 6) for every interaction with corporate. Taxes, mandatory training, time reporting, everything.

We have to grab a spare Windows machine or run a VM with XP in it. Most of the tech side of company knows and hates the whole thing. The impenatrable bureaucracy makes it impossible to find out who to complain to. There is no escape. The article is dead-on about what's wrong, and I know first-hand, because we have to eat that dog food weekly.

That said, it's a very cool place to work overall. For us, the consultant-generated tech is a dent in the Porsche. But for a customer trying to give you money? Even my mom doesn't use IE and she wouldn't understand the problem with ActiveX controls.
It's great that you are asking questions. Your mind seems open and you are expressing a willingness to learn. To that end I recommend the following books:

The Psychedelics Experience by Peter Stafford

Pikhal by Alexander Shulgin

Acid Dreams by Lee and Shlain

The Illuminatus Trilogy by Shea and Wilson

Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes

The Archaic Revival by Terrence McKenna

The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman

That should get you started. Good luck, and have a safe trip.
Probably, I just didn't want to write a novel ;)

It's more tedious than anything and we the end user are stuck waiting for government (Bank of Canada) to release the new series banknotes to the vendor so they can create the firmware which then has to be approved by my company's head office testing lab/GLI and then we get it eventually.

Meanwhile while all that is going on the bills may actually be in public circulation and customers are after us for having equipment that won't accept new series bills.
This comes on the heels of a private rail ownership caused derailment, http://www.wcax.com/story/14843332/amtrak-vermonter-derailme...
If a school tried that, you would have parents complaining about the process because their child was placed into a "does not socialize well" track.
After trying lots of irc clients, I've been using Emacs' erc mode for one year and think that it provides best user experience.

Here is my little emacs configuration dedicated to irc and twitter;
https://github.com/azer/emacsfiles/blob/master/profiles/irc....