skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's what I thought originally. Now I use Indexhibit to manage my site and when I've got a good idea, I write it as an essay, publish it when it's revised. I also give a link to my HN threads page, since I'd think that most of my talking about intellectual matters happens here, and since here you can follow the discussions I'm in and really get some good debates.

I think that the idea of a personal "blog" is dead. Other mediums have really taken precedence. Very few blogs really stand out to me, nowadays; my favorite ones tend to be more unique implementations, such as BigContrarian and Kottke. Wordpress blogs look old and dated in a lot of ways: they try too much to bridge the gap between the formal and the personal, and I think they lose out because of it.
+1 I want him to be the President :-)
just had the same thing happen to me from a friend. i knew he'd never send me junk but i looked it up just the same, so i'm going to e-mail him about it. hopefully he can regain control quickly.
trust me. the second i release a patch that turns EVERYONE you see into jessica alba i'll be banking benjamins.

word up
My rule of thumb is that if you think the solution is to create a language, you have not thought about the problem enough. Obviously there are exceptions (I know language designers, etc), but you should have a really clear reason why and an appreciation and/or desire for why not to.
You make some good points. However, I haven't noticed a lot of what you've said.

The keyboard on the newer computers is beautiful. I didn't like the old big keyboard: the new ones feel wonderfully responsive to me. The heat is a problem, but I guess I'm biased, because I rarely have my computer on my lap. I keep it on my desk or in my bed. And I use a fan program to speed up my fans when I need to, and it usually works.

The proprietary formats are a pain, yes, but that doesn't affect me very often. With iTunes, I get most of my music from other sources. I have perhaps 10 CDs that I got from iTunes, and that's mostly from Plus, so it's open enough to send to other people. Everything else is MP3 and MP4, which means - among other things - I can click and drag songs to iChat and it works.

The mail import took me a long time, for Gmail. But it imported my other emails first, and with Gmail it imported mostly the archived email, so I could use it right out of the box. I don't use Maildir, so mail works pretty much beautifully for me.

What does that optimization do for the fonts? Do you have an example? And either way, I'd take the Apple default fonts over anything else I've seen to date. I'd kill to keep Zapfino.
Great response. Don't worry I didn't think you were being a jerk before. In truth I was enjoying advocating a contrarian position and I expected a reaction. (I like to think I wasn't trolling(!) because what I said was my honest opinion). Also I think for a forum discussion not to quickly disappear down the toilet you have to assume the best of people.

Regarding what you actually said, I'll have to do some more investigating/thinking. I will concede you seem more knowledgeable than myself on this matter however the INTP in me won't concede defeat until my spidey senses stop tingling! I'll let you know if it does.

(I do like the evolutionary analogy. I think they're extremely apt).
BlackBerry launching their own application store
Don't sell asterisk short, it's a tremendous tool for businesses of all sizes. Even if you only use mobile extensions it's trivial to write an extensions.conf script to play "Press 1 for sales, 2 for support" and have it ring different queues depending on keypress. If your company has any telephone needs at all this should be on your short list. IVRs, Conference rooms, automated phone status updates, queues, voicemail via email, and on and on. If you have two offices that would communicate by long distance (even/especially international), you can set up an IAX trunk and connect the sites for free.

The company I work for scaled from two people on the queues to 15+ desks+cells and counting -- 50 employees to 1500+ with only the most minor tweaking. For a while we also had IAX trunk links to major vendors and other companies that we spent a lot of phone time with.

I can't recommend it enough.
Yahoo to lay off 1,400 employees
How about this: kill your blog if it sucks and no-one reads it and you can't think of any improvements you could make to get people to read it.
Apple sells record iPhones
Apple sold more iPhones in the Sept quarter than all the number of iPhones sold earlier. They sold 6.9M and surpassed the 10M goal. Whoa ! The 3G is rocking.
What I want to know is what a VC would say if presented with this prior to receiving a business plan.
My tiny startup has a small but stable amount of funding. In our case, it's enough to provide a two-year runway to finish development and iterate the product a couple of times before reaching break-even.

Up until this month, I've had trouble finding A-list programmers because I don't offer a large salary and benefits. This month, I've suddenly found it easier to attract high-skill employees and I expect it to get easier still as the recession deepens. Many are involved in loss-generating startups which they anticipate will soon fail as funding dries up. (Not all these experts choose to return to grad school...some, for instance, are too old for that culture shift or don't have liquid assets to sustain them.)

As you discuss, the recession may make it easier or harder for startups depending on their value proposition and their reliance on additional investments. I encourage you to write on how easier access to expert programmers changes the equation. In my case, I must decide whether to commit our resources to, say, hire another brilliant programmer because it's now possible OR to hold at our current headcount to maximize survivability.

Another variable is whether brilliant hires in this economy are likely to stick with the company when the economy improves in, say 12-18 months. An HR expert who's weathered a few of these cycles pointed out that while it's easier to hire good people in a recession, some of these hires are more likely to jump ship when the economy turns around. I think the description would be "fair weather hires".
I think that books have lost prominence, though. People have found that there are mediums that convey their messages far better.

The book isn't dead. But it's not as used now as it was in the past. People with visions and dreams find that it's easier to make movies, or form bands. Some people write, yes, but the book is not as dominant as it was in 1900. The same stands for the play and the concerto.

Blogs still have their uses. But now, things exist that work better for a lot of people. Twitter and Tumblr come to mind immediately.
for me its th econtrary
Please do quit if your goal is to bask in the adoration of other bloggers.

If you've got useful information or clever insight, by all means continue. For god's sake, I wouldn't know how to program these days without all the "5 steps to XXX" blog posts out there.
Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus
Just released as part of the 4Q results: AAPL sold more iPhones than RIMM this quarter - 6.9M units.
Ugh. I dislike that advice very much.

I'm not a fan of people who use social networking to advertise. I know there are practical benefits, but the idealist in me wishes that people wouldn't pick up media just to abuse it. Some things are great: I remember there was a comment here about somebody who complained about Comcast on Twitter and got an instant response. But I've seen too many people who use Twitter and Jaiku and Tumblr to post links back to their content and that's that, and I hate that.

Of course, the idealist in me thinks that you shouldn't advertise in every venue possible, that you should work until you've got something so useful that word-of-mouth brings people in, and that's not entirely practical either.
ermmm... yeah I meant stanford's teams are often very good. Edited to make sense.
AppLoop - IPhone RSS App Generator
Same with Gizmodo and Engadget. So much cleaner.

EDIT: And Huffington Post and SmashingMag to some degree.
Nice. Appears to support utf-8 Unicode so I can write and edit in Runic ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2962721348/
Ah yeah. If it's worth noting, that charger of mine was in two pieces: the charger, and the power cable. The latter went behind my desk, and once in a while it would get dislodged. The LED would never come on if the battery were charged, but I had two batteries and never kept track of what to charge, and it took effort to seat the battery correctly...it was horrible.

I guess the red/green LEDs is just because those colors are fairly logical, although pretty stupid for colorblind people. My current camera has only one LED going red/green as well, and Apple's laptop chargers have always had some sort of light for that too (although, more than one way to tell if something was charged or not).
Ive had this with Swedish as well.

Jag kan inte prata svenska

turns into:

I can't speak English
" IRC is not for everybody."

What are the down sides to using IRC?
Stanford has one of the country's biggest and most successful NCAA Division 1 athletics programs.

"Stanford has won the NACDA Director's Cup for Division I, awarded annually to the college or university with the most success in collegiate athletics, for 14 consecutive years (1994-95 to 2007-08)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Cardinal
I am pretty sure Turkey is first-world - it's a member of NATO. Not that there are such things as first- and second- worlds really; third-world meant "neither NATO nor Warsaw Pact" when it was first coined. Now it just means any undeveloped nation.
I don't understand why they (Josh Peek) didn't base it on jQuery in the first place. Prototype is like 128K vs 15K of jQuery.
Although this is a worthy topic to explore, the reasons the article mentions are are lousy. So what if there are people making a living blogging? Who cares if Jason Calacanis or Scoble changed their blogging patterns? Who cares about all the noise in the blogosphere, and competing services like Twitter.

The most valid reason is that blogging is hard, and most people aren't willing to put forth the effort to make their blogs readable.
This is awful advice. Our blog has, on some days, received more traffic than our actual site. In addition to generating sales, it has also helped us substantially with SEO and connecting with our users.

This is quite possibly the worst advice I've ever seen on HN in recent memory. Just because you can use facebook/twitter et al doesn't mean you can't have a blog. They aren't mutually exclusive. One word of caution, if you're spending tons of time on your blog with very little to show for it, maybe consider getting rid of it or cut down your post frequency.
I'm not really sure as to what you mean by NCAA-style teams. Stanford is actually the school that the sports world points to as the shinning example of excellence in sports not interfering with excellence in academics. In fact last year Stanford Basketball went to the sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. Before his career as pro-quarterback John Elway was a Stanford student-athlete. Furthermore every university in the academically vaulted Ivy league is also a member of the NCAA Division I.
Is that the old guy who wears sunglasses at night or?
" People with visions and dreams find that it's easier to make movies, or form bands. Some people write, yes, but the book is not as dominant as it was in 1900. The same stands for the play and the concerto."

Any references to back this up?

I bet it's easier to self-publish a book than it is to make a movie.
They didn't lose market share in the Mac vs. PC war because Windows was so open. Windows is proprietary too.

We won't really know who will win the iPhone OS vs. Android war for quite some time.

As developers, we need a comparison of the development experiences from someone who has written and actually shipped an app (preferably the same app) on both platforms.
Did this remind anyone else of the Dharma Initiative? (Lost)
What you see is half assed texteditor?
Im pretty poor too(and from the same region). I managed pretty well, though some money was invested in my education when i was a kid(English lessons). Poverty sucks, it either builds your character, or it sucks the humaneness out of you.

My advice to your friend is to not drop out. I have a friend who dropped out. He was also bright, and ambitious. He worked as a car mechanic for a year, i believe he went back to school.

He just needs to not give up, if he is interested in electronics, he could try and find some repairman he can help out(sort of like an apprenticeship).
"Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths."

"Paul Boutin (paul@valleywag.com) is a correspondent for the Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag."

This made me giggle even though I sometimes view Valleywag as having more journalistic integrity than TC.
Apple's profit up 26 percent on iPhone boom
College basketball + College baseball + College football = thousands of players. Even though it might be a small percent of the total, it's still a significant amount of people.
Is this a quirk of statistical machine translation where the word English shows up in English texts where Francais would show up in French texts?
To be fair, with the skyrocketing cost of tuition, so increases the value of a full-tuition (and room & board) scholarship. While the athletes 'don't earn a red cent,' it is fair to say that they get compensated in many other ways, one of which is free tuition (for the best athletes).

At a major sports school, athletes get tons of perks - from scheduling classes early, private tutoring available in any subject if needed, room & board, clothing & athletic gear, personal medical trainers & Doctors, etc.

Of course, it is in the athletic department/University's interest to take very good care of their players -- both for the ability to bring in new talent, and also for the continued exceptional performance of the players on the field.

All that being said, there are many sports out of the typical 29 at a D-I University, that are not profitable and not generating significant revenue. Typically, from all the empirical data I've seen, that would be every sport except for Football & Basketball.

So there is a bit of 'wealth distribution' as players in sports that aren't significant money-makers still have access to full-tuition scholarships.
They were easily two of the most talented developers in our batch. Their production rate/output is absolutely astronomically. As one of their beta testers, they've had major features & requests pushed out zero day before.
Best of Altgate: Tips on Raising Startup Capital
Why does Yahoo have so many employees to begin with?
Are you somehow saying that a band is in some way equivalent to a book? Songs are just emotional, they don't transfer any information. I don't even know how you can make the statement you made - a book can convey so many thoughts because it's slow and complex. You can absorb ideas by reading that you cannot by watching movies. Movies run at their own pace, books run at your pace.

It's NOT easier to make a movie. A movie is a masive logistical effort. Forming bands is just a trendy thing, but most bands I know produce silly music. They say banal things.

Writing is still the backbone of human thought. In whatever form it comes - the well thought out written word will always accompany human civilisation.
I do. In fact, I think blogging is the next best thing to a resurrection machine. I'll guess there are ten places on the net that cache this stuff (including this comment)

Even now, you'll see people post an article here from five or six years ago. It might have 100 comments on it. Five or Six commenters might already be dead -- including the article's author.

Now multiply that by 50. Most of the net will end up being written by dead people.

I blogged about this a while back -- http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/09/the_dead_spea...
You need your blog, because it's part of your portfolio. It's what people who want to find out more about you read.
Our feeds contain html, so if you're stripping you'll have to put in your own formatting.

Site looks great btw.
I self-published a book in my senior year of high school, so yes. That's possible.

However, I referred to the set of genres overall. The book certainly is not dead. However, it takes up less of the "fine arts" market proportionally than it did a hundred years ago, and that's because other genres exist that allow people certain other freedoms.

It is easier to form a band now than it was a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, it would have been extremely difficult, and there was less of a popular focus. There wasn't the insane level of attention to rock stars back then. And motion pictures didn't exist at all. Neither did animated pictures or video games.

This is applicable to the blogging situation as follows: 5 years ago, if you wanted to write online, a blog was the best way to go. Now? Not necessarily. Now you can Tweet if that serves your purpose, or you can maintain a videolog or a tumblelog. Many friends of mine abandoned their blogs for Tumblr for precisely that reason: it fits their needs. And yes, that's still technically a blog, but the format has changed. There are different rules and there is focus on different things. It's entirely different from maintaining a blog on Wordpress or Movable Type.

Nowadays, I don't see very many interesting posts from personal blogs. The blog posts I DO find interesting come from only a few places. The attention has changed to a variety of different mediums. Look at r/bestof/ on Reddit: suddenly, there are people who come to attention entirely through metaposting. Or, to take my example, I now link to my HN threads on my site and I've abandoned my blog for essays. It lets me build up a better relation between content that I write on the fly and content that builds up, that I slowly formulate and revise.

Of course the book isn't dead, or even dying, though in my opinion it's been 50 years since the last truly revolutionary piece of pure literature (Beckett). However, now if you've got a mind for expression there are more writing-based venues available. 100 years ago, you either wrote poetry, wrote novels, or wrote plays. Now you have lyric writing, film-writing, and game writing available. That fits what people want much more.

Look at the invention of science fiction: when movies first appeared, literature stopped dealing with sci-fi largely for several decades, because the minds that were attracted to sci-fi were attracted to cinema. The same thing is happening with video games right now: not all but many writers are joining on the science fiction game bandwagon. And so, if I were a game designer looking at a bunch of college students interested in science fiction, I might very well advise the students that novel writing might NOT be the best way to go on with sci-fi. Some people would ignore that and go on and try, but with so many other venues available, there's less of a pressure for books. That's how I see this article: it's an argument that a blog isn't necessary anymore. That doesn't mean people won't like it, and use it, but it means that blogging is no longer the primary source of content on the Internet.
Another finger in the dam that has turned into a sieve. Favtape is where it's at - an unlimited collection of all the music in the world.

The winner of this game will be the one which sorts the music in ways that make sense - when I'm in a Barry White mood, I want to hear that type of music. When it's time for Dolly, then I don't want 50 cent intruding.

The sale of music is done for. The money is going to come from concerts and merchandising. Sure, let these guys make money now that they still can, but it's ending.
The Rails crew has a chubby for Prototype.
i find apple fonts too fuzzy. i kept my powerbook for almost a year before i gave up. see this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html (it's a 5 min read)

the optimization just gives you really nice smoothing (i wish i could upload pictures here). i currently use the android font on emacs 23 on a thinkpad (black on light blue) and i find it to be much easier on the eyes (the powerbook fuzziness gave me headaches)

anyhoo, enjoy. the hardware is indeed beautiful. and the new aluminum ones sure are tempting (but i'll wait until someone gets ubuntu working properly on them)

and not to beat a dead horse, i really tried _hard_ to get the powerbook to work for me. i was really determined to like it. but no dice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131930
They will save more than 50 million a year from this. Considering that their yearly income is just 200 million, this is quite a good move financially. Assuming of course, that these workers were excess.

But I like Yahoo. Nothing like tough times to help a company get lean, mean and start innovating again.
OK, but how many small companies will fight for 15 years to get a piece of what is really not a very large market (museums)?

The point is that price is probably not enough of a competitive advantage to topple the market leader. Given enough time anything can happen, but you have to be reasonable about what's likely.
Yeah, we want to help lift people out of poverty, improve education, balance the budget, and pay down the national debt- monstrous! Monstrous I tell you!
yes, but struggling at what price? I'm trying to recruit right now as well, and I'm having very serious trouble. But I'm limited in what I can offer salary-wise by my institution.

But here's the thing - suppose I'm offering enough to get people who have already chosen engineering as a path to work for me instead of someone else. That should be enough. But it isn't going to convince a college student to go into engineering instead of law.

Have you seen the compensation for first year associates at top firms? Engineers (even from top tier schools) don't hit that level until a decade in. (EDIT added later: this definitely does not mean I'd rather be a lawyer - I'm only using it as a reflection of the salary level on one competing field for the "best and brightest")

These struggles to find talent among US citizens may be a consequence of the large number of visas awarded. Which turns into a cause (can't recruit, so issue more visas). Which turns into a consequence...

If you use these programs to control wage growth in high tech, but leave other fields like law unchecked... you should expect us citizens to leave high tech and go into other fields instead, which is what we have.
So fix it to bring the very best.
Nice. It looks like it's confusing the different meanings of "English": "a language originating in England" vs. "native tongue".

If you're translating something like "Give it to me in plain English", you'd want the second meaning. Likewise, "It's Greek to me" doesn't hold the quite same weight when translated literally into Greek.