skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know...a hustler actually solves problems. Nasty, gross, annoying, fuzzy problems that have no right to exist, but do anyway. Hackers hate these problems[1].

I moved into a new apartment complex a few months ago from out of state. The landlord was going to put us into a different living situation than we contracted for. All our calls were met with a bland, "We ran out of room." Resident hustler roommate had a talk with them and they meekly knocked down a wall to make things right, and gave us a discount.

Hustling has a very different set of skills than hacking. Hacking rewards thinking carefully and doing the Right Thing The First Time, where hustling rewards more of a shotgun approach. Maneuvering one's way past secretaries, remembering 10 acquaintances who might be talked into putting up seed money and calling all of them---these are things hackers hate to do if they can't accomplish them cleverly, and so they often go neglected for great products with hackers behind them (because no one else could be).

I'll take a good hustler over an idea guy any day. If they're legit a hustler, they're worth their weight in gold.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html, search "nasty"
Euler's formula is much cooler and more useful than Euler's identity: e^ix = cos(x) + i*sin(x)

Because you can actually DO something with it, including visualize complex numbers and use them as the foundation of electrical engineering.
No, he's correct - it can be years longer than the UK for a PhD. avg is 7 years here (5 w/a MA) compared to 3 in the UK. But I agree that he should just go for both and try to make them intersect as much as possible. The data from my business is the backbone of my thesis research.
Mars500 – Simulated Human Mission to Mars Ended After 520 Days
Sounds to me like their core tactic - being anonymous - is the best defense against that.
Introducing... the earth-scraper
There are short-term securities that earn 10% in 3 months? How do I get in on that?
Do you guys have a live-demo someplace? The screenshots are interesting, but having a live view would really help me understand why we should move away from NewRelic.
As another (recent) Caltech grad, I'll take a stab this. The Caltech intro calc class is very heavily proof-based. We started with easy problems that had nothing to do with calculus like proving that 1/sqrt(3) is irrational, went into epsilon-delta proofs for limits, and continued on to showing that the Dirichlet function is discontinuous everywhere. I don't think we evaluated a single integral in that class.

A strange feature of the class was that the weeks where we studied derivatives were a lot harder than the weeks when we studied integrals. Although derivatives are a lot easier to evaluate than integrals, it's a lot harder to prove that they exist. Most of our problems were proving the existence of derivatives and integrals, not evaluating them, so it was a weird inversion in what is normally considered difficult in calculus.

If you want a sample of the problems, here's one of the problem sets from this year's class:

http://www.math.caltech.edu/%7E2011-12/1term/ma001a1/homewor...
At the same time, Anon publishing information about the Zetas means the other cartels do their dirty work for them.

Anon can't go head to head with a drug cartel, it's true, especially not on their terms. But let's not pretend that Anon was a paper tiger in all this.
Natural Born Musical Prodigy? Maybe.
Mobile app marketing tips: Counting cards in the app store casino
"Frankel announced his resignation from AOL on January 22, 2004 on his weblog, stating 'Won't repeat it here (in two words: I've resigned). So begins chapter 3... or something cliché/poetic there. Or wait, does I've count as a single word? ha ha.'"*

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel#AOL
He certainly seems quite enthusiastic about them in this making-of promo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apD2CFEJ0MY
A wonderful story well worth reproducing here! Don't want to be churlish but I somehow doubt Feynman wrote the plural of days as day's.
To be fair, Winamp "import" seems to only read iTunes Library (XML file) rather than rescanning the whole library.

FEATURES
- Import from iTunes Library (XML) or music files from specified Watch Folders
If only TDD came in pill form...
I'm wondering about series B... was it hard to raise Series B? Is Series A the new Series B?
@eli "As an example"
My Android tablet is Kenneth Parcell
m4 uses nested quotes in the form of `a `b' c', but it can get pretty confusing if you're not used to it.
I love these -- http://reddpics.com is similar, and I love seeing different takes on a client representations of reddit.

I made http://imgist.com in the same vein -- it's a different take on making good image content easy to browse (on reddit in particular).
My favorite way to procrastinate is to read online article about procrastination. I also bought a book about it, one of the few I never finished.
If you procrastinate too much there is usually a reason for it, try to find out why, and what you can do about it. For me it is ambitious project that are ill defined. Breaking them in smaller task that can become daily achievements helps a lot.
The worst fonts in the world
I'll leave the search for 10% 3-month yield to the parent, but note that the math still works for much smaller yields. Rolling e.g. 12-month US treasuries will yield around .1%, which is roughly $40m annually on the hypothetical $10B. More or less risk free and with excellent margins. This is meaningful even to a company as large as Apple.
I really like vlc, since it works on windows and mac flawlessly, as well as playing video
Reading the title I thought it was going to be some satirical article.
A Site for Data Scientists to Prove Their Skills and Make Money
And the same British government refused to extradite General Pinochet to Spain for war crimes because there wasn't enough evidence!

The courts are going to be very busy if months after every club 18-30 holiday you can regret a drunken 'romance' and have the other party extradited.
Shouldn't it be called Macamp?
To fully explain all the physics they try to dabble in would take a show twice its length and less than half of the entertainment it already "provides".

The times they touch on topics I have actual experience in makes me cringe yes but its in the name of entertainment where it has to be fluffed to actually be interesting.

Take it this way.... the episodes where they play paintball there is so much unnecessarily wrong with the scenarios that it makes me facepalm almost every time. But when I look at it in the sense that doing the "real" thing would make it mind-numbingly boring I realize that I prefer it as it is.

They're exposing a lot of people to a world that most would have no interaction with (the sciences) and I personally feel that half-baked representation is better than nothing. (See: Argument people have for/against Mythbuster's contribution to the science community)
How Fractal Trees Work
I know seems so slow
Except we stopped making new standalone VCRs years ago, and new movies haven't been published on tape for years as well.

The interesting part of the IE6 debacle isn't the fact that a legacy program is sticking around longer than we had hoped, it's how ridiculously strong the longevity of it is. Most likely IE6 marketshare will stay in the double digits in many countries long after the world has completely forgotten about VCRs.
Don't mess with an established brand. This lesson brought to you by Qwikster.
Great infographic on the Euro crisis
All of these features are also available in Spotify. Oh, and streaming too!
I'm gonna skin it to look like iTunes for Windows.
@rabc sent - go crazy!
Corrected.

BTW, I quoted it from "What is Science?" on the Friends of Tuva site. The whole piece is a good read:

http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html
I got that last night by attending the Noam Chomsky lecture in Melbourne.
Visa Problem Prevents Entrepreneur From Creating American Jobs
You know what I have been doing the last hour? Scrolling Reddit :P I got to say, it's really a nice experience... Good work!
Is there an API ? We would want to import this information into our own system as we wouldn't want to use multiple systems; same for our clients.
Engineering The 10,000 Year Clock
I think this is too coarse-grained.

Code I plan to keep? I'm writing unit tests for anything that I'm worried might get broken. Code I'm going to throw away? Fuck it. Rarely worth testing.

The problem comes when people start treating prototype code as production code. That tells me that a) their prototype was probably too rich, and b) they're asking for trouble by building on a shaky foundation.

I think the solution is to be very clear about whether a given chunk of code is a prototype or for real. When a prototype pays off enough that you want to take is seriously, rewrite it. Tests and all.
There's another factor though - in a down economy luxury goods and services tend to get squeezed. Prices will drop, margins will decrease.

What the Groupon model wants to do is throw a 50% discount on top of that. When times are good, margins on luxury services may be enough to let this slide as a marketing expense. What about when times are bad?
Get Free Ipad 2
Many aspects of this story sound too good (too narratively neat, that is) to be true.

Is there any evidence that this is anything other than a big hoax orchestrated by Anonymous for publicity and/or lulz? Any third-party confirmation that any part of this story is true, or are we just basing everything off what Anonymous has told us?

I mean, any evidence that this unnamed guy was ever kidnapped, that he was ever released, or that Anonymous ever actually had any information about Los Zetas in the first place? Just wondering, not accusing anyone of lying, just not entirely confident that "Anonymous" is a trustworthy source.
> Recognising the problem is often the innovation.

It can be an innovation, but it can be very hard for the PTO to tell just how much of an innovation it is. What happens a lot, I believe, is that the emergence of a new technology creates new possibilities, but the actual application of the technology to those possibilities raises certain problems that have to be solved. The existence of those problems is not obvious in advance of the new technology, but once people have it in front of them and start to play around with it, it starts to become more and more likely that someone will think of those problems. The evidence for this is the not infrequent occurrence of simultaneous or near-simultaneous invention.

So while recognizing the problem might be an innovation, it might be an almost inevitable innovation. Furthermore, much of the credit might arguably belong to the enabling technology that made a solution possible, and to the industry that developed and commercialized that technology.

To make an extreme simile, one could say the Internet is like the technology to allow us to colonize the moon, and so many of these software patents are like people booking trips to the moon, arriving, and then staking a land claim. It wasn't very much their own intrepid exploration that made it possible for them to stake that claim; there might have been a little of that, but mostly they're dependent on the massive effort, by an entire industry, that made it possible for them to get there in the first place. So the policy question is, have they really contributed so much that we should reward them with that land claim?
I've worked with a software vendor (as a fortune 50 client) where their architecture and product vision was solid but the engineering team was deciding what aspects of both they would implement. Not when they would implement but if they would. Imagine if a carpenter or autoworker did this? The fallout from this was a major contributing factor to their loss of new business.
Nice! Glad you like it, spread the word :)!
So are econ courses at big universities, yet it's become a very popular major.
Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend
A walk down Firefox memory (and UX) lane
Would they? I think it's arguably not the case.

The OS itself handles 99% of what users use their optical drive for. 3rd party/external readers and burners will still work, just not with 3rd party apps or MAS apps.

I'm not trying to brand this as a great thing or anything, but it does seem very likely to me. If you develop an app that requires access to the optical drive, I wouldn't hold your breath for MAS support. The way I see it going down is Apple grants companies like Roxio temporary exceptions until they kill off products like Toast once and for all, and then Mac OS X drops support for optical media just like they did with floppies.
Lightweight itunes alternative
i'm tired of dealing with itunes.
spotify is more than i need.
i've been using vlc but it's also not great.
anyone know of something fast and simple for playing sound files?
http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/an-alterna...
I found the website interesting, but I didn't see any pricing information (apologies if I missed it). Without pricing information, I don't know if it makes sense to fill out the registration form to try it out.

I'd suggest making pricing prominent, especially since folks will compare you to New Relic anyway. Are you "New Relic, but with more features, that costs 10x more" or "New Relic, but with fewer features, that costs half as much" or something else?
>I also have a hard time seeing how $25M worth of lasers is a supply chain innovation; most other manufacturers would probably prefer to make the laptop for $6 (amortization) less

It looks like Apple's supply logistics chain is similar to WalMart's supply chain. WalMart has deep connections with their suppliers, requiring suppliers to hand over financial records, dictating factory processes, and demanding yearly cost reduction.

The difference (and it is the major difference) is that Apple focuses their relationships with suppliers on quality of process and availability by locking up supply years ahead of time. WalMart just focuses on cost reduction.

The innovation is that Apple willing to pay high upfront costs years in advance to design efficient manufacturing processes so that later it would be able to get both cheaper component rates and a guaranteed supply. Jonathan Ive has said that most of his time is spent designing processes rather than products. Check out this excerpt from the [Objectified](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectified) documentary: [Youtube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...)
Groupon Floats on Air
I am in the process of finishing my daughter's room in the basement. She is an artist. I would love to give her walls to color on, but when the cost of the paint is as much or more than the rest of the room combined, it aes it hard.

I've thought about aconite, but then I'm left with seems all over the room (but I don't have to mud and sand ;). There has to be a better way.
Is there a major difference between iTunes for Windows and iTunes for Mac?
(Don't use Mac OS X, sorry)
Wikipedia describes https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twin_QSO ("Old Faithful") as the first identified gravitationally lensed object.

So, "since forever" is 1979, which makes me feel old.
I met Noam Chomsky about two weeks ago for about 30 seconds. I wanted to talk to him about OpenWatch but he just wanted to eat shrimp. Which is totally understandable. This isn't a very good story.
Apple genius: 'Turn off your phone' for better battery life
I think Assange took to much of a central role, creating a huge weakness that is being successfully exploited.
I personally want to support wikileaks, but I have mixed feelings about Assange.
Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers.

Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the industry, with new specialties like SEO/data mining/brain science taking on a larger role.
Startup School: Mission Impossible- Meet Paul Graham
I think this is obscuring the hover on links. I'm on Firefox and when I hover over a link so I can see what subreddit it's in, the status bar shows it loading stuff from reddit, then reverts back to scrolldit.com.

Cool site, though. Could replace RSS for at least some of my reddit viewing.
They both provide crummy experiences, but the for Windows version manages to be crummier.
I remember Winamp; haven't used it in probably 7-8 years. I gave it up for RealPlayer (which I couldn't stand) and eventually VLC.

Anyone here know the main advantages/disadvantages between Winamp and VLC?
While Assange has caused problems for WikiLeaks, I think he has accomplished something that is not really talked about in this article, and that is important for any WikiLeaks replacement: he turned those leaks into news. It's all too easy for information to be leaked and no one to care, even if the leaks seem important. Assange helped by being the face of WikiLeaks, and I think he's also done good work working with journalists to get the news out there. Not that journalists and Assange have had a happy relationship, or even a healthy relationship, but he did manage to get real coverage.

I would worry that a committee organization will be too conservative and technocratic. That is not an inevitability, of course; if the committee understands the importance of publicity maybe they can delegate appropriately... but it's not something a group of people can really do well together.
OS X has been a ghetto for music players for some time. If you dont't like iTunes, you don't really have many good options. Hopefully this will ignite some more competition in that space.
Ah, ok. This problem doesn't manifest in emacs, as the tab key indents you correctly by 4 spaces in most modes. I can't imagine it's much of a problem to line yourself up with the first character of the previous line and press the spacebar 4 times though.
> I gave it up for RealPlayer (which I couldn't stand)

How come?
DressRush Pitch Deck
I don't get it. If materials modeling, drug discovery, seismology and atmospheric modeling sound "squishy" to you, what on Earth wouldn't be squishy?

Most of those machines are shared between a bunch of researchers working on a bunch of different problems. There's some great stuff going on, some semi-great stuff going on, and probably some fairly useless stuff going on, too. I've used many of 'em myself. In terms of science done per dollar spent, big-arse supercomputers are certainly far more efficient than most publicly-funded research.
The problem is this is piss poor client relations. When you make a declaration like this you seem arrogant. Effectively you are saying that your knowledge of web development trumps any concerns they may have to the point that you don't even need to know about it.

Instead you have to take the time to understand why they are requesting it and then communicate the tradeoffs to them at the appropriate technical level for their expertise.
Lethal Commission Review
Why Daylight Saving Time Should Be Abolished
How Do I Read a Patent? - The Claims
Let me hum a few bars: suppose you were sitting on an enormous pile of money (borrowed from your citizens, but they don't really get irked about that), you had an industry which was almost universally popular (one of the triumphs of marketing technology in your country), its primary beneficiaries were important constituencies, and you could justify almost any amount of expenditure by saying it was for National Greatness And The Advancement Of Science (TM). You might spend an awful lot of money on white elephant projects, regardless of whether that was an efficient method of achieving the stated goals of the program.

For the benefit of previous employers: いや、うちのプロジェクトではなくて、アメリカのNASAを考えていますよ。
There are plenty of things to criticize in the Haskell syntax rules — they're hard to get used to and they're not so beneficial that the learning curve seems worthwhile — but parsing isn't as ambiguous as it seems at first. When you see a sequence of identifiers separated by spaces, the first one has to be a function accepting all the others as arguments.

It's different (and complicated to explain) if there are newlines involved, though. Haskell isn't a whitespace-insensitive language.
Right, but the fact that it requires a 3rd party wrapper is a good indicator that Apple doesn't want 3rd parties relying on the Apple Remote, so don't expect to see an exemption granted for it any time soon.

There is also plenty of growing evidence that the Apple Remote & IR sensor will be removed from future models. It's already gone from the MacBook Airs, 3rd party support was removed with 10.6, Front Row has been killed off, and now this. I feel like this and the lack of support for optical media are both deliberate omissions that we won't be corrected, and are good indicators of future hardware decisions.
It's like how TCBY used to be "The Country's Best Yogurt" but is now "This Can't Be Yogurt."

Win now stands for the-opposite-of-lose, instead of Windows.
Mejores sitios
I just started using Songbird on my Mac at work, and I'm actually pretty happy with it. The interface is pretty close to iTunes, for what it's worth, but it integrates with all sorts of other things. Not really sure if it's a serious competitor to iTunes, though..
right on, great product btw! Would love to see it at an event or in a co-working space
It's true (AFAIK; IANAL) that if you are reading someone's source code and writing your own based closely on theirs, you may well still be infringing their copyright.

But the parent has an valid point nonetheless. If you do a clean room reimplementation of a program, then you are off the hook as far as copyright goes. Yet the user may not be able to tell the difference. In short, the user cares about the functionality of the program, not its expression (the source code).

I think that's a valid argument that copyright protection is not entirely sufficient for software, and that patents could have a useful role to play.

Personally, I think the problem with software patents today is that the obviousness bar is far too low -- we're patenting problems, not solutions. See my comments elsewhere on this page.
VLC is great if you want to keep it lean, Winamp will give you better library management, upnp device support, Android support (wireless as well) and easier discovery.
Oh, the player repeatedly crashed and the Message Center pop-ups were annoying too, although I did eventually disable them. Later, the proprietary license was a (no pun intended) real turn-off for me.
Predictive page preload - prerender.js
prerender.js is a script that predicts and preloads the next page when the shortly before the user goes to the page. This will make the time between loading your pages seem shorter. It is built with a prerender function and a prefetch function for other browsers. The prerender functionality is in a trial period with google chrome but, although it is auto enabled on most recent versions of chrome.

a demo of it in action here http://grahamholborn.com/
On the demo if you click before 600ms has elapsed hovering over the link there will be no effect.

Works best with chrome because other browsers function differently.
Paul Graham's doctorate in computer science probably helped a bit.
According to Wikipedia, you have it reversed: TCBY currently stands for "The Country's Best Yogurt"; "This Can't Be Yogurt" is a former name.
Yes, its scarification. Apparently part of the scar came from an accident and she had the rest done to match.
Making of Need for Speed cinematic by Michael Bay
Amazing behind the scenes shots from Star Wars 1982