skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sugar: Connect to the mesh, join the 'write' activity, sugar automatically downloads and runs the correct software.
The guy who laughs reminds me of a conversation I had years ago. This guy I was talking to was worried about people contracting AIDS from tattoo parlours. I pointed out that this could be prevented by simply sterilizing with bleach. Well, he simply couldn't believe that something as nefarious and complex as AIDS could be prevented with something as mundane as household bleach.

http://www.cdc.gov/od/ohs/biosfty/bleachiv.htm

Also reminds me of the rube who couldn't believe that someone could improve on the speed of MRI by a factor of 50X, simply because he somehow felt that everything about Ruby must be advanced in every possible way.

Scott Adams should sell cards that read: "Congratulations, you've just exhibited a prime example of PHB logic!"
Just curious why he didn't put this on the Mahalo blog? (Well, I have a theory but I'm too polite to say it.)
1. Pay off everything for me and my closest family.
2. Buy house on Hawaii and in Whistler.
3. Batmobile.
4. Try to solve a big, hard problem that I didn't have the means to before. Perhaps not one as "pie in the sky" as "make solar power work" or "cure cancer" but something along those lines.
This is exactly what I was looking for!

I write a lot of embedded microcontroller code (usually AVR but some ARM) and have written my own preprocessor that compiles lisp code between slash-star-L-star and star-L-star-slash tags (sorry, HN changed the characters into formats, I think you should divine what I mean), appending standard out into the C source, which is then compiled by gcc as normal. I have Lisp In Small Pieces and have intended to write something like this, but the time hasn't been worth it yet.

"Why?" you may ask. A couple reasons:

* If you use clock dividers to get a particular frequency, then change the main clock, you have to make sure you changed every instance in the code to a new divider ratio. I wrote functions that automatically generate the C code which correctly programs the timer, uarts, etc.

* Most programmers automatically generate their lookup tables, but they have to rerun the program then cut-and-paste the new values into the C source. Then you have to make sure the length is correct, etc. With the code right there, you can just change a single number and recompile, being assured the new table will be correct.
Interesting hypothesis, not sure I buy it. Doesn't explain to me still why it's 'contagious.'
Tumblr’s lead dev: Scoble doesn’t know what he’s talking about
Well not all chicks...
The industry practice of having dedicated testers is intentional class stratification. They don't have to pay testers as much, testers are interchangeable, and they can use them as entry-level drudgery positions.
Because most zoos I have been to belong to one of these two categories:

- Unbelievably boring places with not enough fun and way too much education. You bring your kids to the zoo so they can learn something, not so some boring guide and put them to sleep with stuff that would probably put a zoology professor off.

- Shamelessly profit minded. SeaWorld, I'm looking at you. Blatant animal abuse for the "entertainment" of the masses - come see our lazy, fat animals roam about ready to expire at a moment's notice, but feel free to buy more overpriced feed so you can keep stuffing their gullets! What? Educational factor? Whuzzat?

Maybe I wouldn't create a zoo if I were rich, but it wouldn't be a waste of time. The world desperately needs zoos and aquariums that are able to educate as well as entertain.
What's your theory?
the devil is in the details

The details are usually what gives one project/company/etc a huge advantage over the rest and are usually the hardest to get right. The basic idea of everything isn't hard to grasp, but to create a proper modern compiler/operating system/game/etc is a ton of work not suited for everyone.
My impression was that Marek assumed every read event would always have a specified timeout, and his insertion time referred to inserting into the timer queue.
FTA: "The researchers noted that previous experiments with flies found that bacterial infection threw off the insects' circadian rhythm, and not having this internal clock working properly made them highly susceptible to infection."

I wonder how much of an effect caffeine has on our circadian rhythm and how much that might be screwing with our health. I've looked around a little and haven't been able to find any studies on the two.
Grow my hair long (again) and get someone good to make it look stylish and neat. Buy some nice clothes, such that I don't have to worry about not having any sense of clothes.

No office dress code, woohoo.

Do some startup funding on useful wearable keyboards, better software for small helpdesks/teams (I have plenty of ideas), better software/user interfaces for virtual desktops, but with grouped applications by user task.

Inject self replicating nanobots under all of Africa, acting as a synthetic water table, pumping, purifying, filtering seawater from the coast and bringing it inland, then piping it up to the surface.

Secretly hire a contracting company to rip out the traffic lights at a nearby road island and replace them with my new design. Keep stats and, when convincing enough, announce the change to all and pressure to get all traffic lights in the country moved over.

Bring some ultra-fantastic business internet access to this area for a reasonable cost, spam the town with wifi and build a couple of good datacenters around, buy various shop facilities around the town and surreptitiously start selling the right kinds of interesting things, buy a couple of central indoor spaces and run barcamp/unconvention/XYZcons regularly. Try to seed and cultivate a high tech, hacker friendly yet quirky and personal friendly cafe style environment around here. Or maybe in another country with better weather. Or maybe both.

Daydream, in other words, while feeling awkward, guilty and undeserving.
Well, the type that double up on a guy like me do.
i still don't get it. i try.. and want to like it, but have not found anything useful
Join Esther Dyson in funding Fluidinfo.
The Extraordinary Happenings At BitTorrent
Biomass for energy might be both a sustainable and economical scenario.
The gotcha:

> The authors do concede that new technologies will be required to convert the chemical energy stored in biomass to electrical energy more efficiently.
Its basically a list of things I've done over the years to make my code more readable as I go to great lengths to make it readable (to the point that people have accused me of being too verbose).

Before I moved to functionalized queries, I would always make my queries look as formatted as possible, especially when they contained a lot of joins.

Also, my biggest pet peeve is not having braces around large case statements as it makes it difficult to find the next case statement, I like using my editor to find the matching brace.
That's the thing - the choice isn't between languages, but between tools. For example, having a lot of libraries is not strictly a language feature, but it does effect choosing one over the other.

I'm not going to be stupid enough to deny this, but my argument was that PHP as a language doesn't offer anything unique, so if they were to actually clean it up and break all compatibility there would no incentive to move to this "new" cleansed PHP platform as opposed to existing, better languages and platforms.

You are pretty much in agreement with my original statement.
Get a house in the Santa Cruz mountains large enough to hold a decent sized library and a miniature lab/computer history museum, invest the money to get a speedy Internet connection there. For the next few years spend the rest of the time reading, writing code (especially code that can't immediately be "something people want": design and write programming languages and OSes "just for fun") doing photography (build out a proper studio and dark room) and collect historical/esoteric hardware (e.g. PDP-10s, VAXen).

Then in few years, attempt another start-up (but without risking my entire wealth on it - won't put more $100k into it) and if that fails, take a job (without regards to pay or seniority of position) at a research lab / university / technology company I believe in.
The Cartoon that's Too Dangerous for the App Store
"Because, statistically speaking, if conditions have induced a yawn in one person (according to these reasons), anybody else in the immediate area is likely to have the same conditions too."

Quoted because I'm just proposing it, not claiming it is true.
Interesting... what about endeavors where the biggest factor in the eventual success is commitment to the venture? I think that as one grows older, one is more critical of oneself and thus liable of giving up earlier.
I sold my startup a few months ago for enough cash that I never have to work or worry about money again. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341565

I went to the most peaceful spot I could find, and relaxed. I did nothing. http://www.vimeo.com/1292105

After only a couple days, it was never more clear that I was never doing anything for the money anyway, and the reason I'm always working, driving, pushing, learning, growing, and building companies is NOT about the future-goal but increasing the quality of my present moment. It's exciting! It's fun!

So, I started working again. Not because I have to, but beacuse I want to. It makes my brain spark in a way that not-working doesn't.

So here I am again, programming, excited about some new thing I'm working on, exactly the same as before I sold the company. I didn't buy anything because there's nothing I want. My debts were already paid off.

Philip Greenspun's article really does describe it best. http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

So does Felix Dennis' book How to Get Rich. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591842050

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any specific questions you don't feel comfortable posting on the board here. http://sivers.org

- Derek
Also, some of these goals might be better met through a (for-profit) startup.
And contagious it is -- I couldn't stop yawning the whole time I read the article.
Bogus WSJ Story on Net Neutrality
Keep it a secret, and try to make a difference: http://is.gd/bPVr
In your place, I'd make college funds for nephews (or anyone for that matter) obsolete, by making education really inexpensive if not free.
Then why the yawning when reading the article?
Scott Adams Blog: Financial Markets Explained
My only problem with this letter is it is not clear if it was personal or sent to everyone rejected.

Getting a personal "you are amazing" is very different from "you are amazing" sent to few hundred people. This is a bad choice of words IMO.
Why I’m backing Palm to make a comeback
Do a theme park based entirely on feeding geese, and then sell their livers off for a (pardon the pun) fat profit.
It is kinda crap, but I wouldn't be insulted. It's not really any worse than more restrained form letters.
1) Kick myself for not selling six months ago when valuations would have been stupidly higher (relatively speaking). :) I think this is the grown up version of "I'd wish for a million wishes!"

2) If the money is larger than just being comfortably set, I'd split it into two pieces -- one being a charitable giving platform modelled after the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation ( http://www.gatesfoundation.org/grantseeker/Pages/foundation-... ).

3) The other half into a fund for playing / investing / geeking. I think once you get to the point that you have enough money that you don't need to go into work any more the next horizon is to make other people successful like you (looking at YC, here)

On the other hand, if it was enough less that this wasn't really doable, I'd at least structure the money in such a way that I couldn't blow it immediately. I understand that it's too common for lottery winners to become depressed and possibly even suicidal after mismanaging their money. It would be important to cover this before I started spending money on things that I would think I wanted (Porsche 911 turbo comes to mind immediately).
how come you yawn just when you wake up?
I don't think this guy understands how simply amazing Cocoa is. Yes, maybe a designer couldn't learn Objective-C, but my goodness is it a beautifully designed framework.

Everything he lists is simple and stupid when you understand how to build iPhone applications.

"want slightly different buttons in a snap? Just photoshop it and you’re off"

HTML and CSS? It's pretty easy to develop a beautiful UI in Photoshop and simple slice it up for Cocoa. When going back into CSS development, I'm frustrated because of the need to move things around by a whole bunch of divs and styling all that type.

He then continues on about server side administration? Hell no. Personally, I'm glad I can just make an app, deploy it, and not have to worry about the e-commerce, server maintenance, and running costs.

If making iPhone applications were like this, I'd die.
TCC : Tiny C Compiler
Because I care a great deal about conservation but am unwilling to put in the many years of education required to become a zoologist. I think that I could run a zoo effectively and compassionately, showing the public these majestic, exotic animals that are at such great risk while doing my best to return their species to viability. Isn't that what zoos are all about?
Cool! My best wishes to you.
It's the slippery-slope, or the "next step," that investor will want G to take that concerns me. I stumbled upon this: http://savetheinternet.com/=faq --a pretty good summary-- since my first post above. It is certainly something to keep our eyes on. Something the recent economic turn-of-events has convinced me of is that without oversight, investors can pressure companies, even benevolent companies, to do evil. It's our job as citizens to put safeguards in place to keep them from the opportunity to do so.
real transparency in journalism would be, below the title of the WSJ article, an update (a la tech blog like TechCrunch or VentureBeat) and link to Lessig's commentary.
like I said, the lamy studio ;) see http://www.lamyusa.com/stpaficosoco.html

I got it mainly because of the looks (most fountain pens tend to lean towards the ornate, if you get what I mean, while this one was exactly the kind of design I loved in matte black, exactly the color I wanted), the weight (since I have tremors, heavier pens help with writing) and the price (less than $100).

Since what everyone will be looking for in a pen will be different, maybe you could look online...but if there's a store near you that sells lots of different types of fountain pens, I really suggest going in person to try out a few, and to talk about what kind of pen you had in mind.

When I went to Flax (a local store in los angeles) I went there with a couple different pens I saw online in mind, but trying them out in person, I wasn't satisfied. I spent a while talking to the guy helping me, really stressing the weight and price point as being my main criteria for selecting one, and he pointed out this little beauty I didn't even know existed.

I like the G2s, I even still have one around for when the fountain pen would be inappropriate to pull out (one being my favorite color was green, so I got a dark green ink for it that I usually use over black), but this makes writing fun again :)
Venture capital - Wikipedia
Don't you think this is a pretty sloppy submission? You spelled the name of the book wrong, and you haven't even bothered to tell us why this is worthy of the recommendation.
I take it you don't buy the hypothesis that is sitting right there in the article?

Contagious yawning is thought to be an evolved mechanism for keeping groups alert so they "remain vigilant against danger," Gallup said.

There's even a link to a related article on contagious yawning:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/contagious-yawn.htm

The scientists described in this article took some pains to ensure they were studying spontaneous yawning instead of contagious yawning:

He and colleagues Michael Miller and Anne Clark analyzed yawning in parakeets as representative vertebrates because the birds have relatively large brains, live wild in Australia, which is subject to frequent temperature swings, and, most importantly, do not engage in contagious yawning, as humans and some other animals do.
Complete & Total Bill$ht
Or perhaps humans are lazy by nature and, since PHP does a very bad job of keeping us in line, the less disciplined of us end up writing bad PHP code. Of course, if we don't know how to write good code to start with, it's not PHP's fault. I think the simple fact that you can write good, elegant PHP code goes to show that it simply demands a more disciplined programmer (or a framework to help with that discipline).
whats that thing about two sides to every story..?
Fabrice Bellard is one of my hacker idols
Altough I agree on one point, that the sliced up photoshop UI also can account for Cocoa. I don't think you read the whole article. The part about server side administration is that it's easy to edit and add functionality to your app in a snap without all resubmitting to the app store and apple hassle.
I also point out that not all iPhone applications should be written like this, just for some apps the advantages of this method outweighs the advantages on using Cocoa (first-last sentence in the article).
PHP is already extremely slow (slower than Ruby! (which is slower than Prolog!)).

Using a pure-PHP framework (a template system built in a templating language) leads to pitiful rock-bottom performance -- orders of magnitude slower than any of the popular templating systems that exist for Perl, Python, or Ruby.
I see, but if it's a timer problem then with libevent you can roll your own timer queue optimized for your workload. The libevent core is small and well designed (but not well documented), integrating custom timer mechanisms is actually pretty straightforward.

However the claim is made that connections are added and removed more often than polling is conducted (definitely the opposite of the average mysql workload), so I'd guess most low level high performance poll apis aren't optimized for that sort of workload.
It's true about those who are endlessly fueled by creating something - that doesn't change. You might not do it for money, but I'm not sure that really matters.

I sold my first company in 1997 and am launching my 10th in January. It never gets old.
As an embedded hacker, I'd love to read more about some of your ideas.
I'm very glad to see his response to what felt to me like a PR piece sponsored by the telcos.
You can now build apps for Yahoo mail without plugins (let's hope gmail is next?)
The worst one was when the HR person just couldn't seem to tell me or send an email. She kept delaying me telling that they hadn't decided yet, but she'd have an answer by such-and-such date. Eventually she just stopped returning calls.

I was at the point where it took me awhile (3 weeks?) to get the hint, desperately clutching to any sort of lead.
Well, yawning equalizes air pressure in your inner ear (let's say decreasing the pressure). If I decrease the pressure inside my head, Boyle's Law dictates that must increases the pressure outside of my head (ie, the entire earth's atmosphere).

Which means everybody around me now needs to equalize the air pressure in their head. So they yawn.

Duh!
I just finished writing a compiler for a CS class. I was surprised at how logical it ended up being. For me, it really took away a lot of the mystic nature surrounding compilers.

Writing a compiler for a small language with minimal optimization features and an easy to understand assembly/bytecode format is actually relatively straightforward.
(starts at 4:05)
You can safely skip learning C if you don't want to know how an operating system works or what a device driver does. Also no C is needed if you just don't care about the internals of the runtime of your favorite programming language (and probably the compiler too). Also you can omit C if you're never going to have any interest at all in 90% of the software you use on your desktop and the servers you communicate with across the internet. Embedded devices are almost exclusively programmed in C, but again, not everybody cares.

So if none of these things matter to you, then yes, it's very easy to rationalize not learning C.
My chapter at University of the Pacific doesn't even have a website right now. We have a forum that doesn't get used, and the club is filled with gamers that don't have very much motivation to do anything related to programming. I'm going to try to start an SICP project group next semester, but right now no one's trying to do anything educational or new.
What? No way, Yahoo leads the way? What has the world come to?
> Out of my mind I can think of perl, python, asp and asp.net which offers similar ease.

Back in the day, Damon Courtney and I created mod_rivet ( http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/ ), which utilizes Tcl. It was very fast, because it cached the byte-compiled versions of scripts/pages in memory. It also let you do either template pages (.rvt) or pure Tcl files (.tcl), so you could construct things in a slightly nicer way than all templates all the time.
I don't usually respond to say I agree with something because it's against hn rules, but that's a really interesting perspective. I didn't think about it that way and it makes a lot of sense.
"how much stuff is dictated simply by convention"

Hm, like what?
The only place where I'd intuit that the event queue is modified as often as raw I/O is performed is for async writes (you're potentially adding/removing them every other timeslice).

Obviously I agree with you on the timer queue thing; I got a performance win simply by shoplifting the timer queue implementation out of MIT Athena; it took maybe a couple hours to integrate and test, and I didn't need to touch the libevent internals to do it.
My speculation: because there are no drawbacks to yawning too much, we've evolved to yawn with even the slightest triggers.
Travel, travel some more then plan my next vacation.
Try and qualify for an Olympic archery team.
Misfire. Evolutionary adaptions aren't perfect. It could be that thinking about yawning in a certain way fires off the same response as viewing others around us yawn.
Here's Who's Getting Hired Right Now in Tech
Interesting theory, but I want them to comment on exercise. I don't yawn much when I work out - sometimes, but rarely. This could be explained by the fact that usually when I get the hottest, I'm in a hot environment. But that's not awlays the case.
Hasbro Finally Drops Scrabulous Suit
It's true. On my last trip to Romania, Austria and France I didn't run into any average Americans.
Matthew Yglesias points out that the revenue that newspapers get from dead-tree subscribers does not make up for the cost of printing and delivering the paper. So the real problem is not that consumers would rather not pay for news, but that advertisers don't want to buy the online ad space.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/news_with...

(Personally, I suspect that the problems are interrelated, because IIUC advertisers are more willing to buy ad space in a publication with paying subscribers--I guess the assumption is that if people are laying down their own cash, then they must respect the content, and that respect rubs off on the ads.)
I sent the authors of that article a pretty nasty letter this morning.
The real devil in compilers is the optimization. It's one thing to take some code and expand it out correctly to lower level code, it's quite another to transform it into compact, efficient AND correct low level code. And often there are no right answers what to optimize, just tradeoffs.