skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very important. Having the iron discipline to work very hard for a long time at something you don't really like, in order to achieve some unrelated goal (for example getting rich) is also known as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The worst thing is that this approach sometimes works - I have met guitar virtuouses who definitely have this disorder. But if it's at the expense of your well-being, it is probably not worth it.

There is a lot of this in the startup community. I'm pretty sure the early life of Cisco is a pretty good example, but unsuccessful instances are all around you.
The Marketer's Attitude
Actually I didn't say I didn't like Rand (I don't know enough about her to have an opinion), I just said I wouldn't read the book.

Mainly because it's too long, but also because if I wanted to read on that topic I would prefer a survey, plus I don't like philosophy books masquerading as fiction.

I'm glad you are enjoying reading about this, but it seems to have stopped. Plus I got some downmods, so I guess other people are not enjoying it quite as much.
I can assure you he went on a trolling rampage because arguing and karma is a game. And us geeks love to argue and play games.

I am certain there are more like him and there will be a lot more in the future.

The interesting question is can something like a Bayesian spam filter be applied to trolling?
It makes me feel happily small inside to think that we can successfully send an 800lb machine tens of millions of miles to Mars and have it dig stuff, and send back pictures.

I have no real basis for understanding the complexity involved, and I tend to take this stuff for granted, but whenever I do stop and think about it, it's pretty amazing.

Of course, they started all this space stuff before I was born (1986?). That's extra-crazy, since to my mind, 1986 technology sucked.
I don't think ANYONE who is knowledgeable about the actual implementation of this thinks its a good idea. Possible comedic exception of consulting companies getting paid to complete the projects.
Steer way clear of free work, unless you're building your first 1 or 2 sites in your portfolio. You only need to prove that you can build something really good, and you could pretty much do a side project or two to do that. Your clients will want to dictate what the design looks like, so in many cases, you'll end up with a project that you're too ashamed to put on your own portfolio. Unfortunately, designers don't always get to do their job because the client thinks they can do it better with zero experience in the field. "What's this? White space!? That's absurd! I'm paying you, I can't have any of that nonsense!"

Working with the wealthier clients (ie startups who are funded) is a world more rewarding than the nickel and dime people who want everything and then want to negotiate for a lower bid. Wealthy clients are decisive and they let you do your job, so everyone wins--they get a good website, you get payment, and you can be proud to put the work on your portfolio.
I've quite literally done that before. It worked out OK, but there was never enough capital to market the band properly and we ended up with about 800 CDs that still sit in my friend's closet.

The good part about it is that each member gets an equity stake, and people who are not performers, but also help out the band (guy at merch table, managers, website guy, recording engineer, etc) can get equity stakes as well. That way, everyone is invested in making the best product possible, and sees a tangible return when things start selling.

The bad part was that it was hard to explain retained capital to a drummer. As soon as the band started to turn a profit, people wanted their money out of it. It was impossible to convince them that the money would be better spent marketing the band so that they could sell even more albums/t-shirts.
Actually, you don't have to stop (magnitude of velocity vector = 0) to change direction (change orientation of velocity vector). Stopping to change direction is actually fairly rare.

If you reverse the orientation of the velocity vector, at some point the magnitude in the original direction goes through 0, but that's a very different thing.
That something can't be falsified right now does not make it unscientific. As long as something can, in principle, be falsified, it's a valid scientific hypothesis - but perhaps not a useful one.

For the record, I haven't read the article in question closely enough to know if what's being proposed can even be falsified in principle.
Why you should not use clustering to scale an application
Feeding My Graphics Card Addiction
I am using S3 under the covers, but they are very thick covers. It's not feasible to separate out individual users' data to store it in different buckets via devpay. (Also, I'm in Canada, where FPS and devpay aren't supported yet -- as soon as they are, I'll be accepting payments via FPS.)
Totally agree with this one. There's nothing more annoying than someone telling you that a certain gig would be great exposure, as if they're granting you the privilege of working for them for free.

Writing is work. Not everyone can do it, and even fewer can do it well. Do yourself a favor; if you're good, don't write for free. Let these companies settle for a lesser crop of talent.
Making Nested Parens with My Homeboy, Donald Knuth
Picking Time
Revered Thomas Bayes tried to prove it, sadly he couldn't, but he did come up with a very useful theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
Massive update to jMaps (jQuery Map library) released
I can understand why people like them. I don't say they suck and they're of no use. I just don't like them personally. Not really sure why. I think it's because the line "you can't predict baseball" keeps running through my head. PECOTA is as accurate as they come, though.
How so? We've already caused a greater mass extinction than the last ice age did, and it's accelerating. Red blooms are sprouting up in our oceans. Methane and CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing at an accelerating rate, too.

All the while, people are getting fatter and fatter, and less and less active. Our great grandparents had to struggle and suffer just to survive. Most of us have never dealt with true scarcity in our lives.

Each generation is getting lazier, more privilaged and more destructive.
Don't worry, I'm in this to make money. :-)

I started with *nix and a command-line interface for two reasons: 1. This is what I know, and 2. a CLI can be far more easily used as a component of a larger system.

I'm following a fairly standard startup course here: Build something people want, then build something more people want. I expect a GUI to happen in the future (probably using Qt). I expect a Windows version to happen in the future. I expect tarsnap to be included in web server management interfaces in the future. The name might change in the future, or "tarsnap" might just end up being one of the names like "google" which start out looking dumb but end up sounding normal.

But that's all "easy" stuff -- the place to start is with a solid and secure foundation, which is what I'm doing.
Can you share the contact info for #3?
Maria Montessori and peace education
The reason it so cheap to send out so many emails is because they are breaking the law using hijacked machines.

The obvious solution centers around all the damn zombie machines out there.
Take a day off - monolog.it
Are you using emacs at present or have you given up on it already? Did you swap 'Caps Lock' and 'Ctrl'?
My understanding is that it walks all the links on your site and records the times and response codes for each URL. It then compares these URLs to the site's routing information and notes routes that are not reachable.

This is something I wish Rails had, actually...
If you are interested in this you might check out King Corn. It is a documentary about two guys who grow 1 acre of corn to see how it is done and where it goes. They also get into the fact that Americans are mostly made of corn because of the incentives to grow it.
Didn't work in IE7 for me but did in FF3
'I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome"'

In this case, the literal meaning of the phrase could be quite applicable, and well worth devoting 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to the cause.
If I recall correctly, the "universe" is a concept meant to encompass all that exists. How then can there be multiple universes? Wouldn't the set of all universes itself exist within the universe?

It seems more likely to me that "universe" here is being defined as "what we can observe", in which case these multiverses are simply the unobservable part of our universe.
Personally, I prefer this layout on my computer too (except for the lack of a bigger left margin).
This is very common... at least with the people I know. As an example, one of my bands formed an LLC, raised $20k in "VC" and went on the road. Once we got a good enough following, our LLC put together a deal with a record company for distribution. Everyone was happy and we had a good run.

If I may add a nice rant, I hate it when people bitch about evil record labels. Seriously, if an artist gets screwed by a label, it is their fault for not taking the time to learn the business or finding someone who will learn.
How (not) to get a job at a startup...
Adding reinforced doors to airplane cockpits. It becomes significantly harder to hijack an airplane so it's not just for show.

Security theater can be useful. EX: Add fake video camera's in plain sight at a bank and hide the real ones. People act like they are being watched and feel their money is safer but it's harder to disable the camera's.

The value in security is often to prevent people from trying to attack / break in, or to make harder / take longer to do so, or to make people feel safer. While security theater only does 2 out of 3 it's not quite useless.
If you don't like it, don't eat it. I don't agree with crop subsidies but trying to make fast food the new smoking is a bit over the top.

I'm noticing a pattern:
"We have a new President taking his place in the White House. It's a great opportunity to rearrange agricultural policy and to think about obesity," she said. "This study shows that it comes down in a lot of ways to one product."

Several of these articles are asking Obama to overreach his constitutional powers and assume the role of dictator.

That's why so many people resent this type of thing. Instead of presenting the facts and letting people judge for themselves, these people advocate government intervention.

Inside every liberal is a little dictator waiting to get out.
In the grand scheme of things, your joke is less obvious than my gender, and you got that wrong. Just sayin ;)
Do Programming Puzzles Measure Ability?
Bendable, ultra-thin fuel cells coming soon
Apple iPhone 3G tops Razr as favorite consumer phone
you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.
I guess for lack of scientific rigour? Theories aren't scientific because of the maths, they're scientific because of the approach, which involves creating testable hypotheses that can be determined to be right or wrong. The reason why these two are not scientific theories is not because no one can come up with some maths to support them, but because there is no way to observe them.

I did a physics degree. I studied atomic physics and quantum mechanics. We briefly brushed on the multi/single universe, but largely that was not examined in too much detail in the physics cursus. People who were doing Physics & Philosophy, however, got plenty of detail in their course. My point being: this is philosophy, not science.

[edit: my turn to wonder why I am being downmodded, lol]
# how to start a religious war in two easy steps

sudo rm `which vim`

sudo ln -s `which emacs` /usr/local/bin/vim
Definitely looks pretty; it's very slick - but I disagree with the article; actually I didn't find it as usable as a mere text box.

Now, that's anecdotal, but without usability testing rather than opinion, you shouldn't choose this widget over and above existing familiar ones unless "looking slick" is your primary goal.
Evince has 19.5MB resident when loading the document, which seems reasonable for an average desktop, but I don't know how much RAM OLPC has.
Also posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360490

I have to take issue with, "One thing that you'll notice using it is that it's fast. Very fast. I'd argue much faster than clicking into the input area, moving to the keyboard for entering the time, typing the time, then moving back to mouse." This may be true but is it faster than tabbing to the input box, typing in the time and then tabbing to the next field? It's a nice addition but I'm glad you can still tab, type and tab away.
Design your own virtual supercomputer
22-Year-Old Is Youngest World Series of Poker Champ
Web 2.no?
Oh, wow. That's excellent. I wish every site had something like that.
On one hand, money isn't everything, but on the other it's naive to think that people don't have bills to pay, so I can't agree completely with the "don't mind the salary" song. It is important, we like it or not.

That aside, I couldn't find any indicators about the offered salary. But unless I'm missing something, the requirements are really standard, nothing out of the ordinary (complexities of PHP? With CodeIgniter? Right!), and being a startup I wouldn't expect it to be high.

So, maybe a decent rant, but probably out of place.
I'm noticing a pattern of people STILL whining about politics and it's after election day. I thought we all agreed to get it out of our system on November 4th.
Or even better yet, the atrocities committed by the Soviets.
I don't know. The guy who made the spoof accounts submitted two stories about Malcolm Gladwell, and his spoofs commented on other Gladwell stories, but I don't think he was involved in the other ones. It's just that right now Outliers is the new big thing.

I've never seen something like "Rand versus Gladwell" get such a rise out of anybody, ever. Hacker News has religion-v-atheism topics that manage to stay relatively calm. The fact that this is what made somebody flip out I think is a sign more of desperate blog-spam than it is of the actual Hacker News people going berserk. Luckily this was a single person.

I think, though, that in the last few weeks Hacker News has tipped a little bit: a lot of new people are joining, and as a result, the site might be at risk of becoming diluted. Hopefully that won't carry too far (I remember reading that in Usenet, every September would be difficult as new people joined, but until AOL added the feature within a month everybody would be properly inducted).
biddersedge v. ebay is particularly interesting, as is verticalone.com, now yodlee.com.

Trespass to chattels is an old roman law which dictates what should be done if you tresspass on my land and hurt one of my cattle, and it is used as the core of most cases involving scraping in unauthenticated environments (like Y! finance). They can come get you, not for taking data, but for costing them money to support the response volumes you demand. The magic number is $5,000, at which time it becomes a felony (or at least that was the threatening rhetoric, which is a different story altogether). You scrape, hurt their cow for 5k, and it is not a question of restitution, but of punishment. And in each case the scraper is typically viewed as a "thief"... not a label that inspires lighter punishments. see:www.biddersedge.com, yeah, exactly. nuked from orbit... and there, in a nutshell, is the risk inherent in scraping. All a scrapee has to do is wait for you to pass $5k... while they consider the pr ramifications of the whole thing... how much bandwidth and resources need to be used before the public will sympathize? 10k? 20k? 30k before they are lauded as a hero for removing the thieving vermin?

Insidious really, scraping and scrapers are being "set up the bomb" here... to not be viewed as enabling the liberation of data, but rather as thieves of the resources necessary to deliver that data to the general public. Using trespass to chattels as a precedent is therefore a brilliant stroke... apparently, they can be taught. Or, to put it another way, scrapers aren't napster users in dorm rooms, they are felony thieves of public resources.

Yeah, we all know that cease and desist and all other legal remedies are jurisdictionally challenged - the net doesn’t stop at international borders. And, historically, it seems that other countries turn a deaf ear to most cyber crime excepting, of course, for credit card fraud.

Also, limit scraping via tor. Tor has a legitimate use which scraper volumes would impact. Of course, there are tor nets set up for "illegitimate" use... and they let anybody in, including folks like me, who then map all tor exit nodes used by scrapers and interdict em all...

And, don't forget steganography... you take data (even through tor or rotating proxies) and redisplay it, google can find it and I can ask google to tell me where it is. Scrapers, even as very clever data middlemen, will get the squeeze from both sides as scrapees discover where their data is being displayed and utilize legal means to go after those storefronts, who will of course first provide name, rank and serial number of the scraper that provided them the data...

And what about copyrights? Lots of legal precedent here, be careful with image redisplay. Mine field here...
Engine immobilizers in cars. Stats from wikipedia:

"Immobilisers are fitted to around 45% of all cars in Australia, but account for only 7% of those cars that are stolen."
Agreed. Arrington has a huge media empire. Perhaps he trolled and spammed back when that all started (though I'm nowhere near certain of that, either), but now he's got nothing to benefit.
But would we still be able to get the elements we need for life? We are partly made of leftovers from supernovas, and so is our sun. It takes more than just a energy source to create life - you have to have something other than hydrogen to work with.
How To Choose A Web Hosting Provider
Thanks for mention jwilliams. I'm amazed at how fast news has traveled about this site.
neat. bookfinder.com has worked well for me for 10 years.
Not very accessible - what if you're using a touch screen? Not everything has 'hover' functionality.
That's quite impressive. I think my favorite simple feature: it doesn't try to build its own search engine. As a result, I could find some of the really hard-to-find items on Amazon, which I doubt a more custom search enging would have done.

I also love the title of the site.
Building reusable Django apps
So what is the rate offered? I admit the attitude is a bit high brow, but he may have an extremely valid point.
Successful Accidents
CSS Animations and JavaScript
Arguments: A JavaScript Oddity
The New Yahoo Front Page and YUI 3.0
"Universes" in this context means discrete space-times with potentially different physical constants where the laws of physics would be different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Bubble_theory

The Many-Worlds hypothesis also implies separate "realities" ("universes"?) diverge with every quantum measurement.

The word is used for convenience.
Ask HN: Is it worth learning Win32 API anymore?
I've been teaching myself c++ recently and feel I have reached an intermediate level in terms of understanding and using the language.

I am in the process of learning to build desktop applications and have been trying to learn it from the ground up using the win32 api and have spent many recent weekends using winsock to build chat applications etc. I tend to use codeblocks for development and hence don't have access to MFC which I've heard 'makes things easier'.

I am interested in moving into mobile development (particularly software that sits close to the hardware) eventually but not sure if I should continue to hammer away at learning application development basics through Win32 API to gain a solid grounding or just jump into mobile development?

What would be the best place to start with learning mobile dev? Android, windows, symbian or iphone?
Don't worry. The writer just (unfortunately) phrased it that way for a lay audience. It is in no way a reaction or an alternative to anything to do with creationism.
Both theories are testable. They both (sort of) successfully predict the structure of the universe, up to some parameter choices (e.g., fine structure constant). There are ways to falsify both theories simultaneously since they make nearly the same predictions, we just don't have ways to falsify one but not the other.

The question is 'absent plausible experiments, how do we choose between single and multiple universes?' And that is done using occams razor; the 'simpler' or 'more probable' theory is chosen, for a somewhat (but not completely) arbitrary definition of 'simpler'.

Occams razor is a philosophical point, as is (to some extent) your definition of 'simpler'. I thought I was careful to highlight those points.

I was merely trying to explain the reasoning multiverse theory, but in a less vague manner than the article did (I trust most of HN to know Bayes rule).

Incidentally, this thread is bringing out behavior which is weird for HN. Someone downmodded your comment, also for reasons which are completely inscrutable to me.
I think that's a sound idea, for the time being. We've seen articles about the government and Obama's plans top-to-bottom. A break might be nice for a little bit.

Although if it's really something impressive, like "change.gov," give it a chance, if only for the same of conversation. A lot of really good talk came out of that last one.
This was actually made by a reddit user: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7ckzw/dear_reddi...
I updated my profile with my email address.
I can't tell if the affiliate link is hidden or not. Traditionally Amazon affiliate usernames are "username-20" and as you can see in the URL the pattern does exist, only with a strange username: "_0"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0964729237/_0-20
Making Django Imports Less Painful
A Bridge (Loan) to Nowhere
If something walks and quacks like a member variable, I'm happy to make it a member variable. Otherwise, it gets to be a function.

(Obviously this doesn't apply in languages like ObjC or C++ where accessors are often necessary for memory management)
Immigration Lawyers Based in New York City
Calacanis on the Future of Start Ups (with video)
Looks like solid evidence to me, good work.
Google, If Built By Librarians
Google Ad Planner Opens Up To Everyone With Fresh Features
"Their goal was to 'measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two bombs' in other words, to put calipers on the problem so that people back home would have a factual frame of reference within which to draw conclusions about the bomb’s capacities as well as its limitations

What was that for? To make a better bomb? Why don't we stop fighting and do something better? Heck, I'm gonna stop fighting with my neighbor about the cigar bits he throws out of his window. I could write 2 more lines of code by that time.

I remember a quote from the movie 'Troy' - Imagine a king who fights his own battles. Wouldn't that be a sight?

What if we send our leaders on a 1-on-1 battle instead of a million men. We could save a lotta blood.
Confirmed: Owen Van Natta Finds A Home At Project Playlist; Bob Pittman Invests
Why TraceMonkey is Going to Blow Your Web Browsing Mind
It looks like it's completely broken on the iPhone (at least my v1.1 browser). In this case though, it could just not pop up the boxes.

I would hope that other touchscreen devices advertise their (lack of) capability in the user agent.