skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the opposite. I could easily sleep twelve hours a day, but life conspires against me, so I get 7. I heartily endorse well-restedness for learning.
I have a blog, http://www.mechanicalrobotfish.com . I never write on the darned thing, despite good intentions, and despite the good arguments in favor of doing so. Instead, I write here. I can't seem to help it.

Let's invite Zombie Feynman to explain:

http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/feynman.html

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

HN features questions from the students -- literally, in some cases! It's very inspiring. Even the craziest submissions can provide useful food for thought.

Having said that, I need to force myself to blog more. Thanks for the inspiration!
Keep in mind, these are accounting tips for someone who's got a full time job and starting a business on the side.

With a full time job, you get taxed on your normal paycheck and on April 15th you pay the gov't the taxes you owe from your side business (if your withholdings weren't enough to cover tax liability).

If you don't have a full time job, you've gotta pay quarterly estimated taxes or pay interest on what you owe later on.

Also keep in mind, I'm not an accountant but the guy who gave these tips is one.
This is one of Seth's most poorly written posts, which is why I think most people aren't getting it. It touches a nerve with me though, as it's taken me a long time to learn what he's saying.

When an engineer has a proven ability to ship stuff, to keep things humming and not crashing, it's easy to fall into the trap of rejecting anything that hasn't demonstrated that it can work, that hasn't proven itself in the market.

What he's really saying is that it's the status quo to argue against (reject) ideas and technologies that are radical - simply because "engineers" are trained to produce things that "work." Until proven (which takes time), radical ideas and changes are extremely experimental, by definition, and likely to cause friction. This does not make them unwise, however.

The key point, in my mind, is that even if EVERY highly educated person in your field told you that your idea is stupid, wrong, and will never work, you shouldn't believe them blindly. James Dyson didn't, and now he's a billionaire. SOMETIMES (but very rarely) everyone else is wrong when you are right.
I could've sworn I saw the 20% figure bandied about before.

What is more interesting is the % increase in that figure based on mental exertion. I'm being hopeless now with unreferenced hearsay, but I'm sure I read (perhaps in New Scientist?) that the actual caloric increase is minimal, but measurable.
I would test different designs to see what gives the best results.
Cores of the problem
What makes you think that PC vendors need to pay $150 to get a copy of windows on a laptop?
Do you have that written out in another post somewhere? I loved this one.
It looks like tipjoy is positioned to grab a lot of this flashmob-style payment. I had only previously thought about it in terms of recurring content updates, but this behavioral style could also be lucrative.
Download Gossip Girl Episodes
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Maybe because of my exposure to punk culture and art, i have a very strange taste, i mean just look at this:

http://www.bside-rock.com/IMG/jpg/Sex_PistolsNever_Mind_The_...

i know its one of the ugliest album covers ever made, but its still one of my favorite peaces of design(or absence of design). Being good looking and being beautifull are not always the same thing, sometimes you need substance, and like the punk of the 70's, you can do without the looks(those guys deliberately made everything ugly), but you can't do without the substance. And yes, i like ThinkPads.
I must have been the only one paying attention last few weeks during the iphone complaints. Apple is fun, i imagine, when you don't care about OSS, drm, or anything that Jobs has a tight fist clenched around.
Isolator - forced concentration for apps in OSX
Not many quants will remain jobless on Wall Street. Most have already moved to new jobs.
Power storage and distribution is the limiting factor in so many things that it's not even funny. Best of luck to all the researchers working on finding better ways to deliver power where we need it.
And yet, it's the technologists that make new technology. So maybe the idea needs to refined to "competent technologists make incremental improvements; great technologists make revolutionary improvements."

Which we already knew. I agree with the people questioning why this guy always makes his way up HN. Honestly, I have a habit of automatically skipping his articles, but I fell for it this time because I was curious aobut how bad it was.
To an extent I agree. Drupal is probably the most matured platform with tons of templates and plugins.

But I felt its a bit too heavy and it is php. Last resort I would use that. Just wondering if there is anything new more suitable and lighter.
it's not in your profile.
Great article, lots of good points for personnel management.
The missing elements of Microsoft's retooled Zune platform
A friend of mine is a freelance designer, and he does good work.
http://www.artificestudios.com/
The future of the Web is 3D, not video
Quite a lot of people just run webapps in prism etc these days, so they pretty much look like desktop apps.
You use 10 million different desktop apps?
"Take a look at the geek discussion boards and you'll see an endless list of sharp-tongued critics, each angling to shoot down one idea or another."

Untrue.

I do see some people making specious claims, and other people asking for support for those claims, but I also see a good deal of thoughtful discussion and excitement over new ideas.

Maybe Godin just sees what he wants to see?
It also depends on how the company reinvests the profits that could be distributed to shareholders. Quality R&D for future growth or frivolous buyouts and expenditures that serve to prolong a company when its core business is no longer growing.
Wow, that's really cool for both Stormpulse and tipjoy. Maybe Stormpulse will be the first official YC-rejected "success".
Isn't this the 4th or 5th super-capacitor story in the last six months?
There's plenty of opportunity there, but I think you're asking the wrong question. I'm concerned that you don't really understand your customers well enough. It's not obvious to me how Snorg Tees and BustedTees are "insultingly low-quality", and I am part of your target market since I buy the occasional t-shirt on Threadless.

Personally, I don't care that much about the feel of a t-shirt with a joke on it. I care if the joke is funny. In fact, I never even try on t-shirts before buying them, so the feel of the t-shirt really doesn't matter. I suspect a lot of your target market agrees with me.

So, are you sure that your competition is poorly run? Or do they actually understand better what their customers care about.
Ahh, those were the days. I remember being really excited when I went to install 10.0 on a beige G3 desktop. I was still excited when it was finished 2 hours later! :)

The problem I see is that the jump between OS 9 -> OS X was way bigger than XP -> Vista. There are just too many vestigial bits in the core of Vista right now. It's not even close to Apple's Carbon situation. It's far, far worse. I am pretty sure I saw an icon from Windows 3.1 just the other day.
Why is it that everything I read in this blog pisses me off?

Uh, because you're human, and like the rest of us, you take incredibly trivial things far too personally? Seriously, if I asked you whether somewhere on this Earth we can find someone whose views are diametrically opposed to yours AND they express them in a manner you find obnoxious, I guess you would say that statistically, that person--call him "un-unalone"--is out there somewhere.

And no, you wouldn't get pissed off knowing that un-unalone exists and is being vehemently wrong every time he speaks. But if we conjure un-unalone up for you and you read what he's actually writing, you get angry.

I guess we'd all like to be perfectly Zen about this, and shrug our shoulders, but we aren't and we don't.

FWIW, I think Jeff Atwood is pretty-much the un-raganwald, right down to being waaaaaaaaaaay more likable than I am :-)
I agree that following their advice of essentially ignoring the legal entity question for a while is the way to go short term, until you're ready to grow.

I should have been more specific and said that the fact that they neglect to mention what you should do when it's time to grow, and only recommend creating a legal entity past the 5-year mark, tells me that they're definitely not focused on HN types as their target audience. They're targeting the self-employed.
Maybe try to crowd source the design and then just hire someone to do the css?

i.e. 99designs for the layout and then just find someone good with css
Sad thing is, I have already shown him the New York Times is hand coded and he still leans towards WYSIWGS.
Myspace actually looks a lot better these days. Almost normal.

http://www.myspace.com/
I'd like to know if that reflect fast advancing technology or just good publicity.
> Imagine slightly faster computers, faster virtual machines, and the ability for web apps to, with appropriate permissions, access local resources like storage and notification services. Then imagine browser windows without all that browser chrome (buttons an such around the edges so the windows look like app windows).

Is there any reason for trucks anymore?

Imagine a car, but much more powerful, and with a big trailer attached to it.
VW Golf Diesel BlueMotion: 62 MPG, 99g CO2/km
thinkpads are sexy - they are like a lady dressed in a black dress.
I agree, comfort isn't a competitive advantage. Selling the idea of comfort is something you can charge money for though. If you charge $20 more for it, people will feel as if its more comfortable.
"Python had missed a chance to in the ninties to become embedded in browsers, an opportunity that went to JavaScript..."

I didn't know this. Does anyone have a reference?
You need some sort of gimmick to stand out from the rest of the competition. And no design itself won't work.

As an example of a gimmick look at http://200nipples.com (the founder posts on here). His approach will get him the necessary exposure and get people talking about it, and once he gains traction he can put up more designs and expand it.
GM unveils the Chevy Volt
You may have a different requirement from a product (OSS, etc. - I myself prefer to use Linux because of the open-ness) while others may have different (wanting it to look good, do the common things without a hassle) - but why is that a reason to say "passing off crap"? I will agree to the iPhone complaints, so they botched up the launch by sending out a half-baked product. The 2.1 update seems to have fixed a lot of problems for many people. The iPhone is driven by software a whole lot more than other phones are, and so gets updated at a very high rate. That is a good thing. How many phones you know keep adding features to themselves or fixing their own bugs via software updates? Or do other phones just not have any bugs or annoyances?

I will admit, though, that Apple tends to go overboard with its cheesy marketing tricks and ploys many times. They should let the products speak more. In most cases, they just do.
The iPhone is owned by wireless carriers first, Apple second. No matter how Apple feels about OSS or DRM, they still have to treat the iPhone as a signed-and-sealed-and-dictated black box, because that's what the carriers demand in order for Apple to be let onto their networks. If they only had the iPod Touch (and had built their own VoIP suite on top as the "phone" part, say) they would likely be taking a very different approach with the App Store.
I have a 3G iPhone and it is definitely not crap. It is a beautiful product that works really well for me (checking email, surfing, voice).

DRM sucks, but the iPod has proven that the presence of DRM doesn't mean a product is crap.
Too bad Stormpulse can't actually get their money...
Or how about organizing a peer-to-peer aspect? I'll do your problem if you'll do mine? (For example if I know how to deal with company A and you know how to deal with government B.)
"Seth Godin is permission-marketing yahoo! at Yahoo!"

Wait, what? Since when does Seth Godin work for Yahoo? Did I just miss a memo?
If you were setting out to make the next MySpace or Craigslist, would you consciously decide to make it ugly as a competitive advantage?

Sure. But the word you're looking for is functional, not ugly. The ugliness is just a side effect.

Craigslist was criticized for being too plain from the moment it was built. But it's buried a lot of better-Photoshopped competitors.
Ask HN: What are those "other complex financial derivatives?"
So tons of news articles these days talk about mortgage backed securities and usually mention "other complex derivatives" when talking about the latest struggles on Wall Street. So what are these derivatives, and how exactly are they causing all these troubles? I understand the mortgage mess fine, but I'm not sure what a "complex derivative" is, and more importantly, I can't find an article explaining exactly how they cause a firm to lose money. Anyone got any links to something that describes the mess in detail?
Nice find with luvdfoo . . . somehow, I missed this before!
> The risk is that it's a little like selling "high quality bumper stickers"-- people might not be looking for quality there.

Unless you're selling to a niche (e.g. surfers, skateboarders, etc. and more generally people who want to put stickers on their non-flat gear without having friggin bubbles, faded colors due to UV, stickers that peel due to water/salt and so on).
Another alternative is Outward Bound. I went on a 21 day mountaineering course in the Sierra Nevadas that was life-changing.

Having met with people who have done both, Outward Bound offers courses where the most demanding are about the same as a NOLS course.
Do elaborate..
But he is doing things well for the sake of doing them well. He's a marketer; he markets well. Look at him as a practitioner, not a commentator, and do as he does, not as he says.
You also might check out www.elgg.org as they just released version 1. I played with it but the project never took off so I don't have a great deal of experience with it.
> like a lady dressed in a black dress

..with bright yellow recesses and red knobs all over the place.

The Thinkpad looks like a sexy lady in a black dress, but one who took meth for 10 years and is now sickly and diseased.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligations
Or just keep using HN as a blog

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226482)

P.S. Thanks for the URL :)
Competent people are perpetually looking for change and new ways to express themselves. However, they are looking for meaningful change, not for the kind of pseudo-change that marketing buffoons like Seth Godin thrive on.
I agree with you. I was trying to say being good looking is not the point of the ThinkPad.

I would guess that the design of the ThinkPad hasn't changed because they are appealing to past owners. I hated the design of the T40 at first. Now ThinkPad design appeals to me probably because I associate it with my past experience.
I would regret it if I didn't recommend us www.wearewedo.com ... maybe we're a little too web 2.0 for ya? oh & you can contact me at zee@wedocreative.com - we're not cheapies but we're bloody good.
The Sport of Business (having the edge)
Saying something is important and easy to change is not the same thing as saying it's the most important trait. If you are an ok code monkey it's faster and better for your career to become a better communicator than it is to become a better coder. However, if you want to be thought of as a great developer you need to be a great coder. I am willing to work with a talented deaf programmer long before I will work with an idiot.

PS: Stop thinking about skills as a binary choice you can be a great coder, talented writer, and a poor public speaker at the same time.
Rifgraf is a fire-and-forget web service for displaying time-series graphs.
Ask YC: Advice on XMPP
I am writing a client-server piece for a Python ODBMS that will use XMPP. Any advice/resources/opinions on the subject?
TDNAM Firesale Tools - Closeouts (Lots of short .com's for $5)
The people I know in finance are really smart, but their skillset is very different from what you need in a startup (unless the startup happens to be finance-related). It'd be like getting a physics grad student to start a company with you: yeah, you can be sure that the guy is brilliant, but when it comes down to the details of satisfying customers and building product, he's probably not what you want.
Who killed the economy?
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/60751/Who-Kille...
There are dozens of these. I'm a jquery fan so I like flot. Here are a bunch of others:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/charts/

http://solutoire.com/plotr/

http://www.liquidx.net/plotkit/

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

http://www.ejschart.com/
Actually, 20 million.
And that's why we won't listen to our users about our applications. Better that they be pretty than functional
http://tipjoy.com/faq/#q8

Why can't I withdraw cash from my Tipjoy account?

There are legal implications to allowing this transaction which we are currently working through. We expect that you will be able to withdraw cash very soon.

In the meantime, if you have a minimum of $5 in your account after removal of applicable fees, then you can do the following with your earnings:

Donate to any official charity you'd like
Purchase an Amazon gift card
Upmod for ballsy confidence :)
I think we agree here: you're talking about "complex tree code", which, for me, is the realm of libraries, not applications. Those are allowed to be boring (and thus perfect), predictable (and thus with a clean API), and so on.
Interesting to read.

...but it seemed to me that all the manager really did was actually tell the cocky coder to not be a d-bag and he listened...aren't people supposed to listen to their boss? / Why didn't he just do this in the first place when he first noticed the attitude?
You can point at the current financial crisis, but there is absolutely no doubt that financial services are a fundamental part of society.

The current crisis owes a lot to greed, poor governance and ignorance (not only of the bankers, but the stockholders, pension funds, etc, etc, etc - i.e. everyone)... Even so, this isn't unique to the financial industry.
Unfortunately, this tends to be true.

It will very be interesting to see how this changes once Verizon opens up their networks to all products that prove their compatibility. Hopefully it will be much better then the locked down equipment they currently sell.

The only network I get home reception from won't even include flashes on the vast majority of their camera phones.
Can you tell me why the design of Cocoa is stupid? I'm not disagreeing with you - going through the hoops required to play more than 5s of sound on the iPhone is a pretty crap way to spend an evening.

Interface Builder is flawed - but perhaps I haven't used it enough to appreciate its strengths.
If the load is significant, you probably want to use ejabberd for the server. If not, there are solid python implementations.
You will be able to use the python xmpp libs for your client side without issue.
Well, speed is a scalar and velocity is a vector. So I think he's saying 'going fast without direction: not so good.'
Vaporware? Yawn. Speculation? Boring.

The Bill and Jerry cartoons? Eh?

Call me back when it ships, and I'll look at whatever it might be then, and whether it's competitive with whatever else is available then. Until then, I really don't care.
I can't stand articles like this. Not because they don't impart any wisdom, but because they sound so phony and contrived. If you are going to write fiction, at least get your archetypes right. Guys writing memory management code on windows are 50 year olds with giant beards, not cocky youngsters who use the phrase "mad skillz." The mad skillz guys are the ruby programmers who believe the apex of programming is building a "domain specific language."
OM NOM NOM.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Anyhow, the roll-up/acquisitions make a lot of sense - there's a lot of benefit to merging blogs, especially related ones. One way to profit off of the "Long Tail" is to combine smaller blogs - a few blogs making only a little extra can't do much on their own, but combined, you have enough money to really grow a few of them.
what incentive does a person have to own up to the reality of a situation and engineering away the problems when they can enrich themselves by shirking responsibility and profiting from the problems?
The Latest New Motorola EM28
The EM28 is a fantastic flip phone that will quickly become the life of the party. No other phone can switch from productivity to portable DJ so quickly. One of the best features of this phone is the FM Share feature which allows you to share your favorite FM stations with a simple text message.
Credit default swaps were also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap
Well, from the point of view that generally people really want to work with people they like and respect... no.

It's bad enough in small teams, but in large teams people like this can be really destructive.
How about red lips and golden earrings? When I touch the trackpoint - a fully inadequate name by the way, I feel the computer feels me, like touching a living creature. The body also feels like skin.

And when I am not feeling romantic TP are really comfortable to work with..
Can anyone explain this: "The market for credit derivatives is now so large, in many instances the amount of credit derivatives outstanding for an individual name are vastly greater than the bonds outstanding. For instance, company X may have $1 billion of outstanding debt and $10 billion of CDS contracts outstanding. If such a company were to default, and recovery is 40 cents on the dollar, then the loss to investors holding the bonds would be $600 million. However the loss to credit default swap sellers would be $6 billion."

My understanding was, if you have $1 billion in outstanding debt, and that defaults, then the people providing the credit default swap would have to pony up $1 billion. So who are they giving the other $5 Billion to?
Synchronized Style: Fusing the UI and Hardware Aesthetic
I love Jeff's work.

http://www.jeffsarmiento.com/