skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I turn 30 in 5 months and can completely identify with how you've felt. I too have the dozens of domain names for long-abandoned web applications for some idea that I thought was a radical spike of insight at the time.

It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.

And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.

So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others
is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.

I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.

And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.
And I just love me some good old fashioned laziness. I mean seriously THREE equals!?
Ask HN: Good books for the holiday season?
I have some time off over the next few weeks and I'd like to catch up on reading. What are some books about the business of the tech world that you recommend?
The Best San Francisco Startup Offices For 2011
But would you complain that no-one's given you an update? There are better ways to get status updates than pointing fingers.
The trick I use is to set the mouse sensitivity low and throw grab the mouse in the general direction I need the pointer to go. Then a switch costs me the time to my hand 20 centimeters.
Ambition isn't everything to life. Being kind to others, surrounding yourself with friends and family, and seeking out new and fun experiences are all important and more permanent for your happiness.

However, if you have truly figured yourself out and creating something is vital to your happiness (which is probably true given you are on ycombinator), by golly, understand yourself and reengineer your environment so that you can realize your full potential.

Our society is kind of structured so you are thrown into a pipeline to water and tend to dreams that have already taken root; so if you want to realize your own dream, you need to really step outside the box and plant your own seeds.

My 2 cents...
> I meant strategy to prevent it from passing.

Here's a Reddit post that seems worth a look:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ngd4r/i_work_in_...
Also interested. Anyone know of a replacement?
I think you're overestimating how long it'll take until we have automated restaurants. I think we'll have deployment of several fast food places with automated drive thrus within ten years.

Though I expect it to be a touch screen coated with thick plastic that horribly obscures the actual menu. Like a shoddy ATM at a corner store.

Then again, I'm perpetually disappointed with the slow pace of advancement. I often expect too much.
What's infuriating to me was that even when I was going through this (mid-1990's), I was aware of the statistics, that everyone who had studied gender and violence concluded that there was no significant difference in severity or frequency of domestic violence--- that men were more likely to "beat up" their partners but women were far more likely to assault with weapons. This isn't new data. The problem is that talking about gender privilege has taken place entirely in a discussion about sexism rather than a discussion about society in general.

When we talk about trying to get rid of "heterosexism" (I prefer the term heteronormative because it's purely descriptive but also a lot broader), I don't think that still leaves room at the table for heterosexual male victims of DV. We are still well outside a problem that is mainstream to talk about.
There's been reserach looking at the age of which great science occurs and in more established fields it happens later in life.

At age 30 you're just getting started.

http://www.laboratory-journal.com/news/scientific-news/study...
For me the "3-equals-true-non-coerced" is the fastest in Chrome 16.
With the steady-state assumption, doesn't every beneficial mutation also lead to a single death?
Purchasers need to get their heads out of their asses. It's awesome that you got a stipend, but I've born witness to the following phenomenon.

"I need a $300 SSD."
"No, here's another $1200 desktop instead. Does that work?"

Until every developer is crying out in revolt, companies and individuals will keep making this same mistake. It is unacceptable to throttle a Core i7 with 16GB+ of DDR3 RAM with a 7200RPM hard drive for costing concerns.
It works including the defrost effect on my iPad...
Why is oil black?
Art is an extremely general and subjective term. I have seen code that is artful. I have seen paintings that are artful. No artist can lay claim to what is art in a field they may be unfamiliar with.
Perhaps someone was reacting to the fact that your original comment is such a truism on HN that it could have been written by the legendary PGbot? ;)

But that judgement is unfair, because one of the characteristics of a truism is that it's often true.
Using gvfs from Nautilus is also quite an easy and effective way to do this.
"It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots."

I'm not so sure. Take a look at the machinery that produces packaged food now-- it's fairly impressive that every step is automated and human intervention is seldom involved. I don't see a technical reason an entire McDonald's couldn't be completely automated now. If you can analyze and quantify each step in the process, you can build a machine to perform each step.

Customers expect to give special orders (hold the pickles, hold the lettuce), but you can provide those options in a software interface. Customers expect handling of exceptional circumstances (the pie is too dry, please replace it), but McDonald's-style preparatory science can help prevent such things (e.g. instead of cooking 12 pies at once, the equipment could cook a pie every few minutes.) I think the biggest problem is customers expecting to give orders in spoken language, but we're having trouble cracking that nut with software (noise, dialects, etc.) Also, there's political backlash for having few (if any) employees.
I am starting to understand the fall of Rome a little better.

You may not be far off the mark. See "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples" by Herwig Wolfram. He points out that the Western Empire (which fell over a thousand years earlier) had a far greater disparity of income than the Eastern Empire, and that this meant they couldn't raise the taxes necessary to defend themselves. The Eastern Empire spent a third of their budget on their army, and this was more than the Western Empire collected in taxes. He also points out that this doomed Ostrogothic Italy.

However, the thing that's missing from this analysis is that the Senatorial families that Wolfram is talking about as the super-wealthy weren't just family businesses. They were the equivalent of major corporations of their day. They were huge profit-seeking enterprises, owning sometimes tens of thousands of slaves and having thousands of freed slaves attached. Some of these had annual budgets that were as much as a third of what the Western Empire would collect in taxes in the same period.

We are headed down the same road, I think.
Firstly, I think the point of the demo of loading that many integers into the array, was to get a good measure of the memory usage per array item; by making the array big small one-time overhead memory usage is washed out in the average.

As to why you would want to do that in real life -- if you have written a large system with accompanying libraries, objects, or other infrastructure, then even if you pass of some sort of calculation to background or crontab tasks, you still might want to use your PHP code. I do this for some of the Drupal sites I work on - I setup drush commands that will do intensive calculations like most-related-article and etc to run behind the scenes have the results cached.

The best solution would be to improve PHP's memory usage so that the benefits may be had on page loads as well. I suspect (but have little hard evidence) that the size of PHP code and data structures impedes performance as threads and processes get pulled in and out of the CPU.

A secondary solution would be to take some of the libraries out there for doing specific operations, like scientific commputing and numerical libraries, and make them available to your code as a PHP extension. Obviously that doesn't solve as many problems as fixing PHP does.
May I suggest that you try approaching your ideas from a slightly different perspective: pick those that stem from a personal pain point, that way, you'll be personally vested.

Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.

To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:

http://freshlog.com

I had to submit bug reports with attached screenshots in Basecamp (later Pivotal Tracker and Fogbugz), which involves many steps, so I made this.

http://screendocs.com

Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.

http://handpick.me

I felt that Facebook was a little too noisy and public to share personal links with my family and friends, so I made this.

http://letsrecap.com

Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.

Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.
Can we stop writing "smart" applications?
I have a question to my fellow programmer friends : Can we stop writing "smart" applications ? I'm asking it because obviously we suck at this. Two examples :

Google : Just because i'm in Germany, it doesn't mean you have to redirect me from google.com to google.de and bring me a German page. Yes, there is a link on the right bottom corner ( "Google.com in English" ) but if i type google.com, it means i want to visit google.com, not google.de Believe me, people are not stupid as you think and can type google.de also the google.com => google.de => google.com trip isn't funny.

Gnome's wireless network settings : In Ubuntu / Mint, if you look for wireless networks and click one of them accidentally, you fucked up. You will be asked two times in every 5 minutes about the password of the wireless password. Yes, i made a terrible mistake and i'm an idiot but stop punishing me. And, why did you saved this connection in first place ? There is no reason, I didn't even entered the correct password for this wireless network.

We are trying to make our applications smart by prediction but it doesn't work. So please, stop doing it. Just make a boring configuration process smooth/painless and then go back to your cave, so user get it's things done.

ps : yes i'm a programmer and yes i'm "not" a linux newbee, i know how can i fix this network thing but none of them is what i'm talking about.
I've seen code that's poetic and artful. Computer science, like any science, has artistic elements to it, especially when economy of motion is utilized.

Money isn't art. To quote Robert Graves: "If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money."
IOS Notification Center Tap Targets
Now, this is the committee vote, though, right? It means it ends up front and center in front of the full body after the holidays, right?
Replacing Satan with Lucifer isn't really going to help us in the long run. I'd prefer no corporation running the government.
The author likely translated organic polymer to organic plastic, because they didn't realize that these words have very precise meanings and they thought that the word polymer would be 'scary'.
Most nobel prize winners, even in theoretical physics, do their nobel-winning work after 40[1] So don't worry about that.

Also: focus on doing what you love, not doing great things. Trying to do things just because everyone else thinks they're great just makes you a real-life karma whore.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=age...
Screen is vital enough for me that I've modified the MOTD on my servers to include a reminder to use it (I don't log into them that often)
Remember, before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-monkey.html
xkcd reference aside, hristov's question is totally legitimate. sudo is intended to run administrative commands. normally you would use a "physical" group to grant access like you're describing
And on a mac, this will work to create a tunnel over ssh, then start the default vnc viewer and finally close the connection when the vnc viewer is closed:

ssh -C -f -L 5901:localhost:5900 example.com sleep 10; open vnc://localhost:5901;

One line. Add is as an alias, configure ssh keys and you can connect to your home machine from anywhere securely.
This is what happens when you let companies contribute to the campaigns (i.e. ability to rise to power) of politicians.

The American system is broken, get with the program.
If only they defined what they meant by 'output' in the title to make it less sensational.

Most readers will likely interpret this as energy, which is not the case. The author meant output of electrons per photon absorbed. (The breakthrough is that high energy photons can be absorbed with less loss of energy by converting them into multiple electrons.)
Might be too late for reply.

It's better than JSP, clearer and simpler syntax, better support for componenization with shared tags, layouts, and includes.

I have no experience with StringTemplate.
Facebook to sue (a different) Mark Zuckerberg
Obama likes to be the "stern and discipline" "law & order father figure"

I have started calling him "Reg Regum" and "Pater Patria" if only to suggest that our republic seems to be dying. I am sure those who study Rome will get the point (Rex Regum, i.e. "King of Kings" and Pater Patria, i.e. "Father of the Fatherland" were both titles bestowed to Augustus).

One thing Obama has shown consistently throughout his administration is that he wants there to be a very strong executive with powers that can be exercised in largely arbitrary ways. This has been the case with state secrets privilege in arguments, the proposal to allow indefinite detention back in 2009, and more down to the present. There is no way he would veto SOPA.
I visit those Pizza Hut express stores and watch them make my pizza all the time. I don't see anything they do that couldn't be done by a fairly complex vending machine....
You can have it connect to a windows terminal server. It works quite well and is actually better than plain terminal server.

I wish there was NX for mac, since I try my best in life not to use ms technology.
Lwn and linuxnewbies aren't perfect, but they're some of the best resources we have. There are also a few books out there that are pretty useful, but they are always out of date. No need to start from scratch and replace these things;it's easier to just work on improving what we have already.

Linux is a huge program developed by tons of people over decades with limited focus on docs in the past and high code turnover today. Getting useful information about it is just hard.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. People get stupid when they're this opposed to something. His argument had absolutely no value and your characterization of it was spot on.
I used to have this affliction, but it's reasonably easy to overcome once you realize that you've got it. You just have to pick an idea and not shift attention to anything else until you've followed it through to some kind of conclusion.
Original article in Science Daily is here;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111215141617.ht...

Original paper is here;
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1541
There's still quite a bit of work going on in various directions; "simple theory on big data" is just one of many research agendas in statistics/ML, and it's not really the majority one (though it gets quite a bit of press). It's what Google pushes in part because it's their competitive advantage: they have more data, and the ability to access/manipulate it in reasonable time, than many other places do, so it makes sense for them to see what they can get out of it.
we have another project, adsuck ( https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck ), that blocks ads via DNS proxying. it can be setup to proxy DNS requests for a single host, e.g. a laptop, or on a network perimeter, e.g. a firewall, and it works by using blacklists to map DNS requests for 'bad' sites to return a NXDOMAIN. this way the ad images and their associated js are never downloaded or executed. see http://rlwpx.free.fr/WPFF/hosts.htm for more info about the blacklists.

you're right to point out that there is not yet a way to separate 1st and 3rd party scripts, but the cookies are handled by the xxxterm.conf setting

cookie_policy = no3rdparty

there is no handling for surrogate scripts atm. i can say that i personally don't bother with sites that require advertisements for viewing but i can understand the desire to do so.

feel free to post feature requests or bugs at https://opensource.conformal.com/flyspray/index.php?project=... .
Congrats! Looks just like a VigLink type service, is there anything that makes 123LinkIt different? Any surprises or tidbits to share from the acquisition process?
"The Software Freedom Foundation encourages (and participates in) the creation of Liberated Software"
have a look at the reply i made to the other post about adsuck ( https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck ). it blocks all kinds of scripts and malware via DNS proxying.
Lean Startup - Eric Ries,
The Snowball {Warren Buffett} - Alice Schroeder,
Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston,
Essays in Persuasion - John Maynard Keynes,
The Principia - Sir Isaac Newton,
heh, am a fan of lynx since it's in openbsd's base install.

"what do you mean your site isn't optimized for viewing with lynx!?!"
Now try to do something for your friends/family, make them happy. Maybe that matters more in the end.
Page Objects: a pattern for writing more maintainable UI tests in Selenium
I don't know the technique in this case, but personally I use a ThinkPad with a mouse on home row and buttons right next to the spacebar. I can go from typing to mousing almost instantly, though I still prefer to do everything possible with the keyboard unless I truly need an analog input device.
You are being too generous, you not look like one but rather actually are an @hole. The recording industry has f%cked a lot of people and they are getting what the deserve. And if you disagree, frankly you can just go and f%ck yourselve.
i've seen a similar post several times, perhaps i should start suggesting usage of xxxterm every time i see one of these other browsers suggested :-P
I resent being too stupid to work there. :(
But it's not like it's a new problem. I mean printers make something physical happen in the real world and they aren't exactly new, and last time I checked I didn't have to use sudo to print a document on Linux.

I am not sure one should need root privileges to burn a CD either.
Zappos will love this. Great idea and I love the name. As a critique, I'd recommend rearranging the form/descp/iphone image on the launch page. I think you rather have users read what this is before the "SIGN UP" on the left!
Fair point about the americans, but who do you suggest should be put in charge?
I feel like the internet creates a distortion here. Sites like HN make us feel like everyone is out there creating like crazy and doing all this amazing stuff. The reality is a very small minority of people are doing this.

Most people don't create much of anything. At least, anything they could have a major break through on. Most people have day jobs and will always have day jobs. Most people come home from work and watch TV.

It takes serious discipline to take an idea through to success. If I had to guess, discipline is a very important trait for startup success. Maybe you'll never be that disciplined, or maybe it's something you can work on. I can say for sure I am much more disciplined now (at the ripe age of 34) than in my 20s. Yet I still question if I have what it takes to truly do a startup.

To the OP: I think you should just relax and enjoy yourself, let nature take over. Not every idea has to be worth a million dollars. My current project and the one just before it basically have no chance of ever making me any money. I did them because I enjoyed them. I think that is more important and more likely to lead you in a direction you want to go.
I turned 30 today, and I've find myself with a followed trail of crap. I spent 8 years while in high-school/college/grad school working on a game engine that I threw away. I spent a year working endlessly during graduate studies on a computer algebra system for college algebra students to provide step by step instructions. I spent a couple of years in a mathematics graduate program only to drop out and do a start-up. I was homeless for about a year while studying math (living in the CS department). When the start-up turned profitable, I got bored and left.

Now, I look back at all the crap I've made, and I look forward to the things I'm going to make. The things I make each year get better. They get faster, more scalable, better, more beautiful.

The key (I hope) is that no matter what, you don't give up on what you want to do. As I age, I'm getting more comfortable with that.
uuid? Talk about severe overkill. It would be enough to simply not reuse fds, and just keep assigning them sequentially.

A uuid is a 128 bit number - you could assign them sequentially forever and not run out before the universe does.

Even 64 bits would be enough to last longer than the computer will no matter how fast you assigned them.
This is an interesting point.

I have no idea, but is it reasonable to make the claim that the DMCA is flawed? By that I mean, is it excessively annoying / ineffective to actually use the DMCA for its intended purpose?

(I'm not referring to DMCA abuses... just whether it's fundamentally broken or not.)

I haven't really given it much thought. I always assumed that the DMCA was a reasonable middle ground. But is it?