skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's pretty good. (Disclaimer: my dad is the co-author.) It's a little technical in places, especially in the solar photovoltaic chapter, but overall it's far superior to getting your education on renewable energy from articles in Wired or the thinly rewritten press releases that get posted to Reddit and news.yc. It's a current events type book and I don't think it's so insightful that people will be reading it fifty years from now, but it's still definitely worth a read since we're about to see the biggest economic boom in history (as soon as cap-and-trade gets enacted next year) based on the technologies and ideas in the book. I read it twice and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the issues now, especially after taking notes the second time. I'd still like to read more books in the same topic area, but right now I'm working through a pile of educational theory stuff.
I'm currently looking for a new job. I've noticed that the demand for my skills is as high as in 1999, but the market rate for those skills has dropped nearly 20%.
Yes - more like supercollider than connecting boxes.
That's the plan. Three things:

1. I have a lot of respect for what you guys think and wanted to get some input on which one to tackle.

2. It's more fun for me to work on a project with other people than to go it alone. This is my way of trying to find some new people to work with.

3. I'm 100% not in this for the money. This is a side project for me - I love coding, I love brainstorming ideas, and I love getting feedback. If I were a trillionaire, you know what I'd do? I'd come up with some ideas, throw them out there, and hopefully find some cool people to work on it with me.
Uhm, could you be a little more specific than "projects"? What are you good at? What's your background?
That's because you are old (I've experienced the same thing.)
Salaries for recent grads are higher than ever.
Google's moves in the wireless space remind me of the first season of Lost. Either they're doing something really brilliant, but you just can't piece it together yet, or they're just making stuff up as they go and will figure it out later.
What do investors look for in a startup?
On the contrary, there are more attractive bargains on the stock market than I've seen since 2001. If you insist on a cheery consensus, you'll pay dearly for it. Just look at what happened to everyone who bought in the late '90s.

Now is an excellent time to be an investor.
also realize that wind power is running at peak production during the night

How much power in the US is generated by wind?
The advice here is good and well-intentioned, for the most part, but you need to get recommendations form colleagues and friends for an accountant and fee-based financial planner in your area that you trust, explain your tax, real estate, financial holdings, and family situation, and work through different scenarios.
It doesn't sound like your high school is offering you much. If you're even reasonably smart, don't bother with high school anymore at all. The limited curriculum and social life dictated by high school alphas is a waste of your time. Apply to college early - a large one with a great CS department, get your GED and get out!

Once you're at college, you'll find a better and more diverse community of smart people, where you'll be able to have a more valuable social life, find more stimulation and still be relatively insulated from real world repercussions when you make mistakes. A university or college will have much broader resources to offer you, and there will be others like you.

When I was 27, I went undercover back to high school to research a screenplay. It was a shock. It's not the best environment for anyone to grow and develop, except for a very few super-average people who look good. For everyone else, it varies from eh to outright hostile - a holding tank to live out your adolescence until your hormones normalize enough for you to join the workforce or go to college.

If you can actually seek out a better environment, you'll flourish that much sooner and have that much more to contribute, and be that much happier, confident, and yes, laid. No one I know who has gone to college early has regretted it. You don't have to be a genius, just want something other than what high school offers and convince the admissions people at the school where you're applying that you'll flourish there and have the maturity to do well.

Not to mention that you'll make an average of $100,000 per year more during your lifetime for each year earlier you leave high school for college. (I have no attribution for this, read it somewhere on the web so it _must_ be true!)
To me, financial news is on topic for hacker news, as long as they provide some insight into what is going on. Plain facts are borderline, silly jokes and complaints are offtopic.

Personally I'm going to submit posts from Nickbs's and Mattmaroon's sites here, as long as they meet the criteria above. I already did with the alternative energy post (not because I agree with the author, but because he provides an interesting to me point of view, I haven't considered energy density before). If these are really offtopic here, they will get killed/not upmodded, but I don't think so.
Working on hard stuff is in my bones, but it'd be nice at times to be able to live in a la-la land where monetization was completely irrelevant.

If I, say, "solved the money problem" in the sense that Paul usually uses the term, i.e. had a few million piled up, I'd probably get a small team together to rethink the way that music composition on computers is done. Start with a lot of research and interviews about how composers actually build up a piece and just build the best system for expressing musical ideas. I'd like to get around to that someday. It'd be cool being able to ignore the fact that it's a small, poor customer base. ;-)

The fact that computer interfaces are still designed to mimic tape recorders or wire cabling is a embarrassing.
I doubt swombat was being serious. He was merely implying that he was amused by this random occurrence.
Earth's Oldest Rocks
And I was being concrete, but generic...I don't think one should take money from someone you can't trust to share your vision for your company. In our case, we're being extremely particular about what investors we talk to, and who we'd take money from (and, so far, we've opted not to accept any additional funding--we don't need it urgently, and we'd rather it be a perfect fit than a desperate cash-for-suffering deal). Of course, perhaps I shouldn't use the phrase "top ten"...there are certainly great VCs we haven't heard of yet. Sequoia wasn't always top dog (KP held that title for many years in the past, if I recall correctly), or even on the radar for most investors. I'm just saying it's really important to be careful who you allow onto your board.
Take a look around you on this board. Who are the people saying LALALALA? It's certainly not the skeptics. The skeptics are more than willing to engage in intelligent debate.

There's only one side of this discussion who doesn't want to hear the truth -- that's the side that keeps down-modding everything that doesn't fit into their worldview.
It's 2/3, but it can come from coal. There are very significant political/economic advantages to that. A simultaneous 1/3 environmental advantage is icing on the cake.
The last time this type of issue was brought up, the conversation soon focused on 'are those companies overcapitalized.'

The question Lyons is asking is whether all of our ginormous geek brains are solving the "right" problems. Google, Facebook et al are hiring the best and brightest the US engineering schools have to offer, and put them to work on maximizing ad revenue, or - as Lyons puts it - finding better restaurants through social networks.

In the meantime, serious problems are going unaddressed and unsolved by the very same ginormous geek brains because we're too busy building sexy webapps to attract VC funding.

That's the crux of his argument. It's like watching Dodge or GM finding better places to put cup holders in their new huge SUVs or trucks while gas prices are doubling or even tripling. Sure, having a good cupholder in just the right place is a good problem to solve, and frankly that's exactly what I want when I'm looking for a place to put my Big Gulp. But my problem of paying $200 (or whatever) to fill up my car an hour later, surely, is a much more important problem to fix?
The term "strongly-timed" is amusing. Too bad it doesn't really mean anything.
I've experienced it only second-hand, but I sure have been close to the problem. I don't blame you for sticking it out, you'd be crazy not to.

I recently left a company that moved the office about 50 miles south through heavy traffic. It also decided, amazingly enough, that telecommuting was "bad", so they banned it (not even one day a week). Yep, everyone who lived 50 miles away is not obligated to drive in to work every day. They severely diluted everyone's stock, and implemented a bonus plan that was so weak it was embarrassing.

Almost all of the UC citizens have left. But the H1B's are still there. I don't blame them, they'd be crazy to leave and jeopardize their visas and green card applications. But it really makes me sick that my government essentially allowed private corporations to essentially control a worker's right to reside in the United States, along with hopes for becoming a citizen.

The funny thing is, I'm pretty libertarian. In my opinion, businesses should be free do do all that crap that my last company did if that's what they want to do. Nobody owes me a job on my terms, just as nobody owes my former company a talented employee on their terms.

That's how free markets work, but the H1B has proved to me that businesses are not in favor of free markets, they're in favor of regulation that benefits them. When workers gain too much power - not through unions, not through government regulation, but through value - the corporate world will absolutely seek legal systems that give them control over things like visas and green card applications.

Makes me worried. I grew up in SF, so of course I've had plenty of socialists in my life saying things like "if democracy could change anything, it would be illegal..." but really, you have to say the same thing about free markets. It's pretty clear that when they threaten the establishment, the big corps will do everything they can to ensure that free markets are illegalized.
I think its a very good concept and, from my personal research with my own start-up, an industry with a lot of potential for growth. The question is, what is it that will seperate you out specifically from the rest of these CMS and similar systems? I'm not just talking about Blackboard or other enterprise only systems, there are a growing amount of these free/open-source systems. Also, how do you expect to reach your audience. The internet is big and even advertising about it on the side of Facebook or some other place isn't going to get that many people. (Most of the time students aren't going to opt to go out of there way to setup something like this.)
I doubt it. It's been outperforming its sector since july.

There might be other financial institutions to get downgraded, but WFC will be in the back of the line.
That'd be cool. One music related pie-in-the-sky project I would like do would be to create software that could in real time give my voice the timbre of a rock star. I'd change a setting and switch from Axl Rose voice, to Bono, to Robin Wilson.
Buying Goldman Sachs

http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives...
Maybe not evil, but certainly self-interested.
> No one I know who has gone to college early has regretted it.

I know some folks that have gone to college early (like 14ish) and regretted it, sometimes so much so that they have to give up and come back home.

I prefer the path I took: go to college late (I was 20), but start taking college courses early (I took my first one when I'd just turned 15), and sprinkle liberally with internships and work experience. That lets you stretch the adjustment process out to a time period that makes sense for you, and gives you perspective that you wouldn't otherwise have, eg. working for a startup before going to college.
Beautiful design!

I signed up, same name as here.
Avoiding Ruinous Compromises - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
Japan's online social scene isn't so social
Acid 3 doesn't have to make IE fully compliant in this or the next decade to be a good influence. It's bringing the non-IE browsers into line remarkably quickly, which means web developers can concentrate on IE. And from the large (though insufficient) improvements from IE 5 to 7, we can see that Microsoft is actually responding to the competition -- slowly, of course, but surely faster than if every other browser were as quirky as theirs.
Well, the thing there is that you'd have to re-synthesize the voices, wave-shaping wouldn't be enough, so what you'd basically want is a vocoder. The problem, of course, is that synthesis of human voices isn't advanced enough to handle those kind of dynamics, so the problem where you'd end up focusing is on voice synthesis.
Nothing wrong with self-interest. The market leads self-interested people, as if by a hand made of invisible spectrum, to act for the public good.
There is a research group at Cambridge (Oxford??) that is working on a problem like this.
Official Google Blog: Submitting your content to Google
Let me put it this way: I woke up at 6 this morning to the words "biggest bank failure in US history," and immediately thought to myself, "Well, I woke up to the depression." After listening for a little while, I realized it was the same WaMu news from last night, so not a big deal. But things are going downhill and it's due a a fundamentally flawed economy woefully dependent on credit.

I expect tough times ahead, but I'm not too concerned. I have real, technical skills that should keep me working through whatever may come. One thing that I'm doing is brushing up on my DBA abilities, because I figure that no matter how bad things get, maintaining databases will not be an option: They're part of the infrastructure now.

Call me RMS, but now is the time to make sure that your skills with open source software are top-notch. If things go down the toilet, you can bet that businesses will be hesitant to use expensive Microsoft products when free alternatives are around. Now, Microsoft would hopefully adjust to the decrease in demand, but I'll take the almost guaranteed increase in demand any day over that gamble.
Wow, this is perhaps the worst article I've ever read in my life. Very low on facts, very high on random statements passed off on facts. Not good.

I don't think the author has ever been involved with a real open source project before. It seems like he just has some ideal of what "open source" is and thinks that's reality. His ideal seems to be lots of constructive discussion and the open exchange of ideas. That's nice, but we already have the ideas. What most projects need to do is actually write the code. All easily-accessible discussion forums do is create lots of bikeshedding that wastes the time of people actually trying to do work. )Interestingly, the bikeshedders tend to find mailing lists "too hard to use" while the people actually writing code wouldn't use anything else. Do you really wonder why developer discussion forums aren't web-based?)

The thing about flat conversation is also junk. I've used forums with flat comment systems before. Basically, there is no organization and no discussion happens, everyone just posts their feel-good thoughts about the original article. Do not want. (See Metafilter for an example of this.)

I agree that wikis are a nice place for creating documentation, but wtf is this: "Everybody has a browser, but women may have less control over what equipment and software they use, especially as beginners." WTF? Every woman I know has her computer set up exactly the way she needs it to get work done. That includes lots of specific tools.

The advice about using a high-level language is good. Low level languages suck and are horrible historical artifacts that need to die. But all of the reasons the author gives are terrible -- "A language that emphasizes readability, like Python, can make recovering from an interruption easier, and less time is wasted as a result."

Do you have any data, or did you just pull that out of your ass? The syntax of a language is not what makes code hard to read -- the interactions between various parts of the program is. You can make the interactions easy to understand in any langauge, or you can make them completely unreadable. Python is no magic bullet.

The rest of the article is just tedious and continues to be a bunch of opinions the author passes off as fact.

How hard is it to say those two little words, “Thank you”? Men often won’t care (but some will). Women often will care, and the cold shoulder of not responding to a contribution with some kind of acknowledgment is truly unacceptable

I'm a guy, and I care. I get upset when people say, "your software sucks!" and I like it when people say "jrockway++". This is human nature, not some property only shared by women. (After a while it becomes pretty easy to ignore criticism, however. Having a thick skin is always good.)

Anyway, terrible article. Next time do some research instead of making shit up.
Ask YC: Please share your favorite interview questions for programmers (using Google Moderator)
In this times you are short on supply for THAT???!!

Android Apps: Massive Multipayer Online Games with Google Maps so the players actually have to move theire asses out into the real world.
I've done this - you've got the right idea in solving the "money problem" first. ;-)
10 amazingly alternative operating systems and what they could mean for the future
Are you one of those people who thinks the poor are stupid? Sometimes it's out of your hands.
Surely not him. The voting button code he wrote for news.yc is a total hack. I know, because I copied it and used it on my own site.
Also factor in the alternative sources we could use to create electricity that are not practical for having on the car itself. Wind, solar, geothermal, etc.

If we could produce endless supplies of cheap renewable energy, it would be a no-brainer to switch to electric cars.
5 Tips for Choosing a Co-Founder
Is that a poem?
E-mail faster, but snail mail likely more honest
I found it mildly amusing that dogs are the only entry in the table besides humans that "responds to all known emetics".

While I don't own a dog, from what I've read of Dave Barry, dogs excel at locating and responding to all unknown emetics, too.
pg promotes the start-up lifestyle in self interest also, but is that necessarily bad?
Animal Hacking
>We're running out of resources (not just oil. Copper, platinum, I belive... indium? are all going to be in short supply in a short few hundred years).

You should google a man named Julian Simon.
What about advertising plain old conventional goods in-game? That would be a real shift.

People still buy necessities in a recession (and pizza), and they still make buying choices about them. Would work better if localized. Also, fewer people game than watch TV (so far).
New clickjacking affects all browsers; cause remains unknown
No NHL?!
Microsoft may buy Yahoo and AOL if the latter two merge
FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings
An explanation of where the term closure comes from by Max Hailpern
Quick IE6 Fixes (for Those That Still Support It)
Reverse graffiti
How to Read Polls
Link to original source is dead http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/mailarch/plt-scheme-2001/msg00226...
This is a great example of ingenuity. We humans tend to have 'not invented here' syndrome. We understand so little about nature and ourselves that we often don't look for solutions that already exist. We are so often excited about, in the case of the bike world, new alloys and ways to weld lightweight metals that we often overlook existing solutions. This is definitely happening in the world of medicine.

My point? Get out of the house and get in touch with the great outdoors. Nature has solved many problems for a very long time. So maybe we can learn something from it that we can apply to our trivial day to day issues.
Fair enough. But I think we're in violent agreement on this: A degree problem can be a lot more than what's between the covers of the books, but that is not always the case.
I know what you mean, but I don't want to limit NHN to just finance-related stuff. It's obviously the hot topic du jour, but it normally plays a smaller role in the news than it does currently.

I do like the site though.
Women who go into computing do it because they think that it will benefit them them more than the generalizations about women will annoy them.
Most typical users don't care about URLs, and many people don't know the difference between typing a URL into their address bar or typing a search term to get them there. (IMHO, that's an unfortunate truth.)

The primary problem with that truth is that without URLs, we inherently have to rely on a search engine's ranking to determine which terms lead to which site. I suppose the fancy address bars in Chrome, etc., will get it right most of the time. In the end, Google seems to become a fancy DNS server.
Pirate Bay Co-Founder Plotting E-Book Plunder?
Larry Ellison's Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant
It is, however, horker news.
That's a Dilly of a Pickle: Diagnosing and Debugging Problems Under Stress
Precisely. We're working on premium features.
I actually really like the network protocol documentation that Microsoft released; compare it, for example to Luke Leighton's CIFS book, which was the gold standard for a long time. I've implemented against Microsoft's protocol docs and not had much of a problem.

You're right that the real issue here is that much of this stuff wasn't designed to be documented or published.
According to Wikipedia, it will be 1.5% by the end of 2008:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States

However, it accounts for about a third of all new electricity production. You have to remember that a cap-and-trade bill is going to be what makes both V2G and renewable energy profitable, so if it becomes profitable to build V2G cars then it will also be profitable to increase wind capacity. I forgot that solar thermal is also an excellent candidate for creating electricity at night, since you can store excess hot water very efficiently during the day and then use a small amount of natural gas to make sure it's at the optimally efficient temperature to spin the turbines.
Browser Speed Tests: The Compiled, Up-to-Date Results
>This will just allow these unscrupulous lenders to maintain business as usual

How will that happen when they won't exist anymore?

>That $700B will have to come from somewhere

No it won't. The number is the total debt the US would be on the hook for - if people pay off their loans, then the US won't have to spend any of it.

What exactly do you want to do about the "entrenched poor"? Give them presents? This has nothing to do with them.

I don't know if the bailout is a good idea or not, I haven't looked at it in detail, but it's not as bad as you are making it out to be.
Work on riskier ideas with bigger payoffs (financial or otherwise).
-s0 does what you're trying to do with -s10000
> Women who go into computing do it in order to earn money.

Based on what evidence?
> What's wrong with C?

Mostly ignorance of the rant authors :) In fact, one way to view C++ is as a beefed up C. Specifically a moderate use of the following simplifies life quite a bit and retains almost all benefits of C -

* templates instead of macros

* pure classes for the callbacks instead of function pointers with void pointer contexts

* standard inline functions

* STL containers (not perfect from memory utilization and perspective, but typically are ok)

Exceptions can also come handy, but these require a lot of moderation if used in a fastpath code.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 56 - Crocodile DonDee
Now why would someone want to do that :P