skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other hand, maybe one of them was shaken into improving, leading the next person to get a better level of care. One never knows.

It is true that to demand better than good is a tough challenge but I suspect it is why people look to Jobs with some confusion: he expected the best from himself and from those around him. In a regular corporate setting, that may seem dictatorial; in a hospital or care room, that seems psychotic; but in either case, it is about trying to inspire people into giving their best and breaking through to new levels.
Paypal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) api just about had me in tears last night.
Zuckerberg at Startup School - "Streamlined" for video skimming
The fewer unknowns there are in a system, the more easily the rest can be reverse engineered.
More on their way at http://tech.streamliner.co
The Wonderful Colorful World Koozie
The most realistic video game simulator ever built
I have a better question: Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better.

Why?

If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for.

Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question.

Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought to be immovable.
Application Engineer or Product Manager, perhaps? Or somthing similar more towards the tech/marketing boundary where you are interfacing with people as much as actual product.
See footnote ;-)
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It's a high risk bet, very little chance of seeing any return from that investment but if you have the funds no reason not to mix in a few high risk bets you feel are capable of paying off.
Roku 2's  New Firmware adds Lot of New Features
Truth about Six Pack Abs - Lose Belly fat , Eat Right and Exercise Regularly
UCSD Pascal compiled to p-code. Other Pascals compiled to native code. The Wikipedia entry for Turbo Pascal indeed mentions that the TP-generated executables were extremely fast, which was a revelation to UCSD users.
Well, JonesForth manages to explain a self-hosting Forth compiler/interpreter (as well as the language itself) in about 30 pages of assembly, including extensive references and ASCII-art diagrams: http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob_plain;f=jone...

Seems like that should qualify as comparable.
Hmm. Nibbles.bas and gorillas.bas are probably the main reason why I'm a programmer today.
the idea of a credit card sized board, running open sourced code, to connect with peripherals is fantastic. but this project is going to disappoint. the guy works for broadcom which is how he got the smaller than minimum quantity of chips, so don't expect it to be repeated by anyone else. it's aim claims to be education, and people compare this to kit computers many years ago, but this is a far cry from that. this guy wants to steer you to use GNU/Linux and scripting languages like Python. no assembly programming. how can a kid learn about hardware without learning assembly? so much for education.
I've said this before, and I will say this again.

Email is a service worth paying for. It is quite possibly the primary method of official communications between you and anyone else these days, far surpassing the volume of paper correspondences you have.

So why are we using free services that offer no guarantees, no SLAs, and no support - for anything other than throwaways accounts?

I run my own server, but this is hardly necessary for the majority of the world. What you do want is a server that backs you up constantly, and can respond to precisely issues like these.
The seed of something great: Acorn 3.1 reviewed
TP is about the same size as Leor Zolman's C compiler for the 8080.

Fast-forward about seven years, and my company was looking at an interpreted BASIC implementation that took about 120K. Since this was supposed to live in ROM, you could think about it as Real Money. We dug into it and found all kinds of fat -- the usual 13 fear-based reimplementations of strlen and strcpy, about a zillion porting layers, endless amounts of cut-and-paste nonsense.

Somewhere between 1978 and 1985, the software industry's drive to be lean and mean on PCs died. I found myself writing 'sed' scripts to do peephole optimization on the intermediate assembly language of one of the C compilers we were using. It was pathetic.

Now, of course, I light my cigars with gigabytes. But in terms of actual cost, I'm still a cheap bastard and I probably don't spend any more money per year on CPUs, memory or storage than I did 30 years ago.

Had a chance last year to write a mission-critical hunk of code that /had/ to fit into 1920 bytes. I can't tell you how much fun that was.
>>>What else is there to do? If people are getting kidnapped now, staying quiet is not going to stop it....So affected people are screwed one way or another and people who should help them cannot or don't want to. What exactly is there to do?<<<<

Well, we could start by not living in armed camps right on the edge of killing each other. Then a few disruptions won't have us escalating to death.

In Hobbes' state of nature life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. We can stay away from that by living peacefully and cooperatively and respecting the rights of others. Social pressure, a reasonable set of laws with clear and reliable enforcement, and a code of polite consideration often suffices.

What is going on with the cartels is that organized crime has broken the delicate balance and the state of nature is returning. Organized crime isn't the only thing that can break the balance; famine or war are just as effective.

In this case, western society is suffering from a self-imposed wound. Those cartels are thriving on revenue from supplying people who want mostly benign consciousness-modifying substances. Usually that's a modestly profitable business (tobacco and beer companies make nice money) but not profitable enough to run a worldwide crime network.

Prohibition is a violation of the balance of peaceful society. A few people in society are demanding to control the mind and mental state of the rest by controlling chemicals. When they control the legal apparatus, the users of those chemicals need to buy them from a guerilla army that can evade the police. Prices rise enough to support a guerilla army of organized crime.

What exactly is there to do? Simple. Stop trying to control what substances people use to manage their consciousness.

Then we can end the violence, kidnapping, extorsion, and other side effects of guerilla conflict easily and move far away from the state of nature.
The Newest Companies Coming Out Of Incubators: EdTech
Making dreams come true is the same as "adding business value" as long as your business is consumer facing.
> Imagine a Buddha with 99 Rolls-Royces and a collection of diamond encrusted watches. Thats Osho! A contradiction.

That's not a contradiction. That's evidence staring you in the face.
motivate yourself in 2 seconds: http://cl.ly/3k1A1u470r2n3W0Q2Y46
Episode 59: Go Big or Go Home
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undistributed_profits_tax
I take it you've never used the Google Voice application for Android/iPhone? On my android phone the text message issues you've mention disappear as there are no forwarding numbers and every message arrives on my phone.
I have much the same history as you. Started out in basic, but turbo pascal was what really got me going. I must admit that sometimes I really miss those days. But then I remember the horrible feeling when the diskette and the backup diskette with my hard work died, and suddenly I don't miss it that much after all.
I would say HS counts as childhood.
Quoting:

A filing in the case shows that Randazza wants the court to “authorize the U.S. Marshalls to execute Hoehn’s judgment through seizure of Righthaven’s bank accounts, real and personal property, and intangible intellectual property rights [my emphasis] for levy, lien, auction or other treatment appropriate for satisfaction of Hoehn’s judgment.”

I hope this isn't a spurious question, but could this end with Hoehn owning copyrights entrusted to Righthaven?
Code Academy: Clearing the Air
Focusing on where they can join the masses is good. Problem is that I worry what would come out of a ubuntu phone. Will it be android-like but not quite android? The same mistake as Windows XP on tablets? Etc. If they can do it well, I will vouch for em.
True, personal value is often aligned with realizing dreams.

But you can make an amazing amount of money making people’s dreams come true in the workplace was well. How do you feel about Visicalc, fax machines, FedEx, and others examples of things sold to businesses that provoked the same “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?" reaction? Sure, people justified these purchases with the money they’d make or save using them, but often people looked at them, stared, then a lightbulb came on and they wanted them.

Businesses are staffed by people. Yes, you can sell them Enterprise Software and Services they hate, and laugh at me from your massive mansion. But you can also sell them software and services that make their dreams come true.
>Had a chance last year to write a mission-critical hunk of code that /had/ to fit into 1920 bytes.

Awesome. What was that for? Please don't leave us hanging :)
> They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.

That's a strange statement, because Feynman was perhaps the most revered physics teacher of the 20th century.
I imagine that such extensions would create an image on the fly for you to scan with your phone?

If so, the big problem I see with that is that you have to pull out your phone right there and then. I personally use "Site to Phone" (http://sitetophone.com/) and the good thing is that I can send something from the browser and open it up later when I'm out and about. (it also keeps a history of the saved items)

Compared to trnsfr, Site to phone also has the benefit or allowing you to send the link to a page but also just any text.
In Auction – Elizabeth Taylor’s Jewelry Collection
1. Backup your emails with Thunderbird and put them on an external hard drive encrypted and/or encrypted on an online backup service, like Dropbox or ADrive.

2. Backup some of your other Google data with Takeout: https://www.google.com/takeout/ Use 2-step authentication as well.

3. Passwords? Use Keepass/KeepassX or LastPass. Generate new random passwords using the generate password feature. You could technically reuse passwords for accounts that aren't sensitive, but with those password managers you don't really need to, especially since they both support search. Backup them up like you did with emails (external hard drive encrypted and/or encrypted on an online backup service, like Dropbox or ADrive.)

4. Master password? Try passphrases (http://xkcd.com/936/) or (for a slightly weaker option) use the initials of the words of part of a song, phrase, or something you can remember that isn't too common. It should be at least 10 characters long. Add memorable symbols or numbers for bonus credit.

5. On Windows? No Anti-virus software? GET SOME.

6. Don't enter your passwords on public computers. In fact, I wouldn't even access any private data on a public computer.

7. Don't tell your friends/family what your passwords are. Should be obvious, but not always so.

8. For Pete's sake, DON'T WRITE YOUR PASSWORDS DOWN ON POST-IT NOTES! and don't store them in unencrypted files. Really, this is a bad idea.

Even if you follow all the above, you still need to use common sense online when it comes to security.
this sounds like something William Gibson came up with 20 years ago.
21.4%? Where do I sign up!
pg tweeted about it earlier today (http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/130786466128334848), so I thought it was actually related to YC. At least, I guess he doesn't mind.
I was in a small town downstate; the lake can actually moderate temperatures in Chicago proper. Downstate Illinois can have more Fargo or Minneapolis weather. Warms up faster in the spring, though.
Okay. So who is offering a service that can match Google's offering? In particular, they need to offer a good (ie, at least as good as Google's) webmail client and spam filtering.
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One aspect of self service that I particularly like is the alignment of incentives. I'm incentivized to bag my groceries / deposit my checks quickly, because I want to get out of there. Employees (esp. in low end service jobs) are generally unconcerned with speed or quality, because they're making $6 / hr.

Much of the time I'd simply prefer to self-serve, because it's more pleasant and faster for myself. (Note that grocery checkers don't really fit this category in the States, because they tend to be fairly well paid.)
Why not just have an option to lock orientation? No added drain.
It is also worth noting, and easily forgotten, that part of 'historical' Tibet is in India.

Already been one war fought along that border.
Absolutely brilliant. It's this sort of stuff that might bring back the old arcade as this system is too expensive for home owners.
Haskell to build a site for a javascript book? I would have expected some client side mvc or maybe node etc.
I don't understand how the title of the article is relevant. I'm inclined to believe that there's some truth to it, but after reading the blog, I didn't gain any insight on the topic. It just seemed like a nice story about a girl who turned her career around.

At the very least, I don't see how an automation engineer is the mean of two Google engineers, a brogrammer, an architect, and a soccer team president.
You've got a +1 from me.

I distinctly remember scoffing at the old stagers for not getting onto the latest and greatest bandwagon.

I certainly hope some of my early bloatware has died it's natural death.

To their credit I was often indulged with my acronym love in the early days by the old stagers. I guess they see it as a process you have to go through, and if they see potential, are willing to let it slide with only a couple of pointers.

Get back to basics. Deliver results. 80/20 analysis on everything that you do. Don't ever insert an abstraction layer until you can explain to someone within 30 seconds where the true business value lies in that layer.
<RANT>

Why can't Justin.TV fix their platform so that people can find the videos?

Every single time there is a startup school thread on HN, there is a sub thread of Justin.TV urls passed around like dodgy bittorrent urls. Surely the platform should support this?

The titles on the URLs make it even worse: "Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv" - hours & days after it isn't being broadcast, isn't live and is only on Justin.TV because they happened to record it.

</RANT>
The whole point is not having to do it for a year and messing up before learning those things.

One of the truly undervalued assets in this world is learning from other people's mistakes instead of having to learn from your own. It can be the difference between winning and losing.
Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt
That judgement looks like it's based on a very brief conversation with one of the founders. Carr seems to dislike his attitude more than anything.

Hardly a convincing condemnation of what Likealittle are doing.
Most likely not, unless you plan on applying for the Windows 8 official logo program.
Piano Lab
This is an interesting analysis of Palantir. His conclusion:

Palantir is a different type of company.

Like a system integrator (SI), they have a small sales force, a large
field technical staff, solve whole problems, and ask for big checks.

Like a software company, they hire world-class engineers and try
to capture everything in product.

Is Palantir an enterprise software company with no sales, marketing,
or services (as they would like to believe) or are they the first SI to
figure out how to build a world-class software business as most SI’s aspire?

You can argue the difference is just semantics, but I’d argue the latter.
Way to sum it up. "Make Things" is a good mantra, that's the fun part anyway. Pretty sure financials, legal work, and HR are not the exciting part of any endeavor :)
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Marketing Matters, Even For Dogs
it also helps you logically deduce stuff you don't know. I remember that after a while, I could almost guess the names of functions that I didn't really know - that's what having a naming convention and regular syntax do for you
Some of my fondest middle school memories are of hacking NIBBLES.BAS to add support for dropping mines. Nothing like the addition of weapons to spice up a game.
Yep. I loved it so much that I wrote a really evil hack to use Turbo Vision in 640x480 graphics mode -- by hooking the vsync interrupt, comparing Turbo Vision's text-mode output to a shadow copy, and making the corresponding changes to the (graphical-mode) displayed output. Net result, Turbo Vision with an added GraphicObject.

... god that code was ugly.
The problem with this is that you can't manufacture cool.
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I didn't port (and wouldn't for the MMS/landline issues alone, I think) - I did it all 'on top' of an at&t and an ipkall.com/SIP/asterisk number.
I'm guessing DoD if he used the word mission.
But doesn't this hinge on the definition of 'bettering yourself'.

To me, your comment isn't mutually exclusive with the original.

People discussing things they've learned, ideas and activities who, by my definition, are bettering themselves. You might like your friends, then probably, your friends are bettering themselves, and so are you. You mightn't realise this, but spend some time with people who have a social circle where complaining and moaning and hating the world are pre-requisites for membership, and you'd probably realise how good your current friends are.

I don't take 'better yourself' line to mean climbing a career/social/income ladder, or obsessively reading Dr Phil type books, to me it just means improving yourself continuously.

If you flip it over and get:
"if you find your friends talking themselves down and complaining all the time, you need to get new friends"

I don't think too many of us would argue with that.

While the thought of dropping friends might seem harsh to some, you are definitely the product of your relationships and the thinking that goes along with them. Your life is also a product of the opportunities that come along, and having the wrong surroundings will produce the wrong opportunities.

You can do a lot worse with your time than make a new friend with someone who is positive and likes to continually learn. There's a lot of people out there who could use that advice.
Public domain - fair game.
I have used the Android app a little bit, the integration looks great on the surface. The problem (as I understand it) is that the GV app uses data, which means it uses more battery than just SMS, and doesn't work as well in low signal circumstances. I don't have first-hand experience of this though, and I can imagine for some people it wouldn't be a problem.
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Which is better annual or semiannual auto insurance contracts?
I am in the unique position of actually having taught/tutored/TA'ed several intro courses in several different languages, which included Python, Java, and Scheme. I would actually say that I had an easier time teaching elementary concepts to people in Scheme, but that the transition from elementary concepts to general-purpose or practical programming was easier for people who started with Python. Overall, I'd argue that Scheme is a better language for introducing computer science, but that Python is a better language for introducing programming and development.

I think one of the biggest problems with advocating Python as a teaching language is that programmers don't understand what the hard parts of Python are. Python is great because it's sort of a lingua franca for people who are well-versed in conventional, Algol-based imperative programming—it boils it down to its essence and omits anything unnecessary—so to a person who was versed in Java/C/C++/Perl/PHP/&c previously, moving to Python feels like everything unnecessary has dropped away. Consequently, it feels easy, and you look at it and think, "Oh, wow, this would be no big deal to teach someone, even a non-programmer."

In reality, though, you'd be surprised at the concepts people struggle with. Assignment poses a huge problem to beginners, and I have spent hours and hours of my life trying to explain the concept to baffled undergrads. Not that Scheme concepts are necessarily easier (e.g. recursion—although loops are not necessarily easier to a beginner) but that Scheme makes a point to have far fewer of those concepts to begin with. Keep in mind that in an introductory class, every new feature, no matter how small, can mean another week of instruction, which is why an intro class in C++ could mean almost no projects at all, but an intro class in Scheme could very easily give way to writing object systems, programming languages, and adventure games, as my first computer science class—using Scheme—did.
The Best Way to Generate Leads Online
Steve Jobs' sister shares his final moments, last words
pg posted about it when they first launched http://ycombinator.com/imaginek12.html
I use www.fastmail.fm (owned by Opera) and can't recommend them highly enough. For a family or small business it's great as you can have shared folders/address books, use your own domain(s), and more.

The web mail doesn't include tagging or inline conversations but otherwise it's pretty good with not too much wastage. Of course you also have IMAP/POP access if that's your flavour.
What else is there to do?

Legalize drugs. Without drug money and the extra-normal profits enabled by drug dealing, a large chunk of the problem would go away, with the added benefit tax revenue benefit.

See further the New Yorker's article on Portugal's drug decriminalization experiment: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_... . It's behind a paywall but worth reading if you can get to it.
Mission-critical is actually a pretty common term and not really connected to the military.
"situation" is about putting a different level of constraints on them and asking them to optimize within those. And not necessarily involving only buying stuff.
The title suggests some sort of study involving more than one person, the content isn't a study, it's an anecdote.

Also, your "bottom line" is worse than patronizing, it's bullshit. I have friends that I talk movies with. I have other friends I talk music with. Others I talk about technology with. Even others I talk about relationships with. None of my goals in knowing and interacting with those people include "get advice from them and become a better person".

Have I become better through interaction with all of them? Of course. But that's expected as long as you are receptive to changing and you have friends that are competent.
I use qr codes for this. A well placed Qr Bookmarlet (such as this[1] one), and barcode scanner, and I'm done.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/qrbookmarklet/
I don't know any practical algorithm for handling closures that'll let you code-gen Lisp in one pass, but in general writing Lisp compilers is frightfully easy: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf