skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found that the thing that affected my handwriting the worst was when I was studying Japanese. Now my handwriting is close to illegible in both Roman and Japanese scripts.

Writing with a ballpoint, my handwriting gets worse. I've found that I need to use a fountain pen to keep it legible (as long as it stays dry) because those pens require more attention to angle/pressure/etc in order to write. The pen I use is a Namiki retractible, which entertains some folks.
I've heard of downrounds, but I've never heard of a startup returning a round to their investors. Are there other examples of this happening?
Incidentally I did something like this back in school to improve my handwriting. At first I stopped connecting letters, but reintroduced some connections later.
WordPress Targets Premium Designers for Deletion
I like the strategy of ditching HTML for Javascript. But it doesn't replace running code on both client and server. Consider writing something like Gmail, or even just its chat client. You are going to need lots of code that handles connections, communicating when they are unavailable, taking a connection as an argument to some sort of function, et cetera. Wouldn't it be convenient if all of that communication code was the same for client and server? If you're still using javascript and a separate server-side language, you have to write two sets of code to handle any data structure you want to pass between client and server.
DNA is based on uTorrent, which is closed source - rather then the open sourced BitTorrent client.

But if you want to go down that road, whats to stop anyone from redoing any idea on their own instead of using a pre-existing product? Not very much, in reality.
In high school, I was doing poorly in my freshman math classes partly because I had terrible handwriting and my '6' looked like a 'b'. Try keeping track of your work when you're using the quadratic formula :P

A friendly biology teacher recognized my plight and helped me retrain my handwriting into something legible. It still isn't great, but at least I don't make that mistake anymore.
Why should you save all your money?
How content thrives (or Doesn't) in different digital mediums
Design competitions for example.
I had to do the same thing in college with t's and +'s, I resisted curling my t's in physics and math class for a while until it was explained to me that everyone did it.
running ads on torrent tracker search sites...that is probably the only viable business behind this technology. not much there to sell a VC, but it is money in the bank.
It doesn't seem completely different.

Scribd: Upload a document, make it visible to anyone
Gmail: Email a document, make it visible to anyone (that you explicitly name)

Scribd: Converts pdf, doc, xls, lots of stuff
Gmail: Converts pdf, doc, supports any file type (the recipient may need software for it)

Seems to me like both are squarely aimed at the "sharing documents" market.
I recently went on a "plant trip" to visit our local ViaWest datacenter. From memory, their facilities are mostly in CO, UT and TX. It looks like they want to sell managed hosting mostly, but they also have a lot of colocation.
One annoying thing is that this keeps the GPS running all the time, which really hurts the battery on the G1. You can disable this in the global Settings, but then you have to re-enable for any other app.

Instead, they should just turn on GPS once every five or ten minutes, especially if I'm not moving.
If you're good at what you do, all you need to do is ask. It'll happen.

I stumbled into this idea 10 years ago, and haven't looked back:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...
I'm in the same boat. I remember doing handwriting practice in grade 2 or 3, writing the alphabet out in books. Each letter had to be done 6 times and they all had to look the same. I never bothered with it. I can read handwriting fairly well, but I just can't write. I can force myself to, but it's just an unreadable mess.

My signature is even pretty bad. My name is quite long so I tend to just initial everything - otherwise I feel like a dbag standing there trying to sign something for like 20 seconds.

And in school, all my in-class essays/assignments were printed, any other homework I would just type up.
-Pragmatic Programmers iPhone SDK book: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/amiphd/iphone-sdk-development

-Erica Sadun's iPhone Developers Cookbook: http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-Developers-Cookbook-Building-Ap...

-Apple's documentation.

-If you're really confused about ObjC, check out Steve Kochan's Programming in Objective C: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Objective-C-Developers-Lib...
Read ' Bob Black - The Abolition of Work '
I've never been the same since...
http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html
"No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. "
Let me see if I've got this straight. It took one guy to write the BitTorrent protocol in the first place, but it takes 19 people (previously even more) to fail at turning it into a business? As soon as you have titles like "Chief Scientist" I think you're pretty much destined for failure.
Questions About Fencing?
Advice to programmers: Get a government job
Fascinating article. It really gives a great feel for how real breakthroughs are made. And it shows what kind of environment is necessary:

But beyond the comment that “molecular-scale electronics” would be interesting and that we should try to have something useful in about 10 years, I was given carte blanche to pursue any topic we wanted. We decided to take on Moore’s Law.

There aren't many places today where that kind of research is going on. Maybe successes like this will remind some of those in a position to make a difference what kind of commitment is required to discover truly revolutionary ideas.
Well, speaking of obsessions, I'm puzzled as to why people are so obsessed with the idea that Yahoo and Google can not co-exist. Why does it have to be "google won", "yahoo lost" and because yahoo yahoo did not "win" they have "failed"?

Yahoo is wildly successful by a tonne of metrics, and yet they seem to be widely perceived as failures. This is something I don't understand.

Best I can explain it is that the tech savvy digerati have moved on from Yahoo personally and are unable to perceive that in the mainstream, Yahoo is widely used and liked.
I love the abrupt banning by Arrington in response to a guy who criticises his grammar, yet has no room to speak.
Get with the program:

if True: print("Yep")
Don't do that:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

Some features of Python are only really meant to be used at interactive prompts, like import STAR ( I can't write star?)
In addition to custom hardware (like the crypto cards modoc mentions downthread) you also have to look at the potential liabilities you face. If you're involved in a HIPAA compliant environment, or one where you are storing large amounts of personal information, it may be a requirement that you have certain controls on physical access to the machinery and logical access to the data that are harder to guarantee with a VM Provider.

This isn't to say that a VM might not be perfectly acceptable for parts of your operation. But realistically, at this time if you look at the way most of the compliance documents for data security are written; you cannot be compliant in a suppliers shared virtualized environment.
Disregarding Neurogenesis, this guy is attempting all-at-once to,

1. Stop smoking, that is from almost chain smoking to none.

2. Start running 4km a day - I've done this, takes incredible amount of effort.

3. Lift etc. every evening - Not as hard as 2, but close.

4. Start meditating - if you do the proper way, incredibly hard.

5. Avoid junk food - difficulty depends, but sounds like he does consume pizza or Ben&Jerry’s daily.

I'd love to seem him succeeding in the 'coming weeks', but he won't. It'll take years at least.

He'll get linked though.
Yahoo already has content and search properties. They would do well to focus laser-sharp on how to properly monetize them.

You can speak to any advertiser who has used both Yahoo's and Google's ad management systems. Yahoo's is awkward and unreliable to the point of uselessness and many advertisers have completely abandoned Yahoo until that company gets purchased by someone who knows how to do the job right.

We're not asking much, Yahoo: Just provide an ad-management system which is as good as Google's was five years ago.

I just spent my afternoon adding a boatload of targeted search advertising to Google for a new campaign. I'd would have happily shoveled some of that cash Yahoo's way, but it would be a complete waste of time and money to do that today.
I don't think it's the job of human beings to enforce style. Proper code style should always be used automatically, but should not force the coder to waste a second thinking about it. The coder should think purely about the logic of the program, and that's my major objection to C.
yeah, but they could really do a lot more with this work, like look at how targeting impacts lift, or how frequency and duration impact it. there's still so much to be learned about online advertising. a lot of the comments to the post are great.
LyX is a godsend for taking LaTeX-formatted notes in class.
Complexification | Gallery of Computation
Completely agreed; I was just pointing it out.
This kind of article is often bought outright by one of the companies referred in the article. Let's try to spot who - in the very last line of the article (so after finishing the article you will go check out the company mentioned):

"There is raw talent in India," says Sridhar Ranganathan, a managing director of Blue Vector India in Bangalore. "But how to polish that talent is India's dilemma and my challenge."
The debian <--> CPAN interface is easily managed, and there are more that a thousand CPAN modules in debian. (See the debian-perl web site: http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/)

The great thing about debian packages is that they not only manage all your perl dependencies for you, but they also manage operating system dependencies too. Gems can't do that.

The Perl Foundation actually holds up debian's packaging work of CPAN modules as the model for other distributions. (See http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?hints_for_dist...)
So proper code style should be forced on the maintainer instead?
Dude I totally have the same problem.

I even started using the word Dude when not stoned :o
I voted "yes" because ever's a long time. But I won't be holding my breath :-(
Mixwit (YC W08) shuts down
Yeah, I'd definitely be more interested in comments from people who actually use the site.
In the perl world, I:

- use apt to manage what's installed on the system

- use CPAN to manage additional stuff installed per-user (you just specify a standard install prefix for all CPAN modules)

that way I don't mess with the system (any packages wanted by system components see the version they are expecting) but I can have (per-user) additional pkgs + updated pkgs, which is often useful.

This seems to be the best of both worlds, to me.
Probably not, but that's a straw man argument.
Funeral director had $250 million stash of IBM stock
This might be the answer to a previous post... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394609
If you cannot name the employer, can you at least say their industry, or whether they have thrived versus competitors (including competitors from other regions) with such policies?
Unless of course you actually want to produce quality software.
depends on what you really want out of a job. if you want security and less stress gov't is the way to go. but you're also going to find people that don't care about quality, "doing it right", the latest technologies, learning, working hard, or sometimes working at all. you deal with the biggest bureaucracy in america... working for the gov't seems to be the opposite of the values purported by hn posts
if only Yahoo! would really embrace its people powered roots, nowadays evident in Flickr and del.icio.us, and keep these sites independent and geeky, and useful to feed bottom-up information and content into Yahoo! (remember? it was a directory 15 years ago), and accept the fact that most of the users of Yahoo! proper are not super technologically savvy anymore, and create a simple portal by the people and for the people, and never be afraid of being too "low" by appealing to normal people's fascination with, well, other people, famous people, singers, movies, sports, gossip etc.
Microsoft iPhone Apps: Just the Beginning?
Seth Godin offers alternative (& free) MBA
The study backs the type of impact we have seen on many of our campaigns.

What's missing, however, is the technology for accurately measuring the various data over a long timespan.
Exactly why you SHOULD consider a government job. We need people willing to rock the boat from the inside if we want things to change.
No, but that's because I started using a tablet for day to day computing.
After my previous post, I was thinking, and it occurred to me that putting the VM in the kernel would skip the user-> kernel-> user transition. So one would put it there, not in user land.

Somehow I don't think multicore will be an issue with the iPhone for some time to come. Also, putting all of the user-app background processing on a specially designated processor on a multicore mobile device actually sounds like a good idea.

I'm certainly not an expert in this sort of thing. Again, my point is really -- okay, Apple says that OS X is not safe enough for background processes on a phone, so why don't they try this ultra-paranoid VM?

As for how I'm thinking of this: there is always some small overhead for real context switches and exception handling. If some malicious program decides to be obnoxious, then this can still be felt by the user. If all user applications are creating background processes and Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" takes hold, then my experience with all desktop OS I've seen makes me suspect that the user will still feel some small effect. I was trying to come up with a way that you could eliminate even this.

Also, I know for a fact that the virtual exception handler in Smalltalk VMs is a lot cheaper from the POV of the OS. It's just normal execution of the app, as far as the OS and other processes go. I can pop off exceptions like it's going out of fashion and no one else cares. They're like "green exceptions."

Programming without synchronous anything is exactly what I had in mind for background code. The OS gets all the advantages. The VM is just the ultra-paranoid option to make sure that there are no unpredictable battery-life or security downsides. (There can still be parts of the API that look synchronous to the background user app code.) The foreground part will need to get the results off of some sort of lightweight message passing mechanism.
I've been a full-time government contractor, and let me tell you: it gives you plenty of time to work on interesting side projects.

But seriously, I hope that the Obama administration ratchets up the level of accountability when it comes to federal use of technology. There is so much redundancy that could be eliminated and, at the same time, so much more work that could be accomplished.
What you just said applies to almost any business with more than 1K employees. I'd say any programmer considering a career at General Electric (random pick) is insane. It's a government job without government benefits.
I got a Fisher Space Pen (http://www.spacepen.ca/) for Christmas last year. I use it every day and it's still going strong.
If you like the idea of making something people will use, but are scared of working for the government, consider making a tool that the government has to take over.

Here's the wonderful history of Carl Malamud doing this with the SEC EDGAR database and his current work on PACER: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/carl-malamud-ta.ht...
"What is despicable is that it is advertised as an auction site, not a gambling game."

If the winner becomes the winner because he bid the highest price, then it's an auction. Since when are auctions considered to be games? Sure, it's an auction in which bidders must pay to bid, but are there laws that ban the charging of fees for participation in an auction?
That's true for one-liners in any language.
No. First of all, the YUI data is served from yahooapis.net, not yahoo.com. Second, every effort is made to keep the request as small as possible, and cached for as long as possible.

1. A cookie would be a waste of bytes.

2. Since the headers instruct your browser to cache it for 10 years, it's quite likely that you won't even hit their server on the second page that uses this file.

Don't believe me? Check for yourself:

curl -I http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/yahoo/yahoo-min.js
Is it not worth considering putting "forward" links into
older essays, so that when you write an essay it gets
referenced by other essays, even when they're older?

Perhaps you don't have time, but would you consider
adding links that other people suggest?

It would be interesting to do to this what I do with my
SiteMap, and colour nodes darker if they have more
traffic.

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SiteMapExpt.html?YC_News
They don't get traffic data, though. They send a far-future expires header, so they don't even expect that the same user will request it more than once, unless their browser hits the limit on its cache size and deletes the file.

The goal is speed, not tracking.
"... We’re very sorry that this has to end. We’re going to try to figure out some way to archive the artwork and playlists, if for nothing at least historic value ..."

Try IA ~ http://www.archive.org/donate who are always interested in archiving interesting stuff.
Really the point of my "ultra paranoid VM" idea that I brought up in the other thread is that there are ways that Apple could put a strict upper bound on the amount of CPU that user background apps can use. I just said it in far too many words, using less than optimal tools.
How accurate is that? Has it been reproduced? Should I stop drinking coffee?
Yes I think the withdrawal effects from quitting smoking and likely to dwarf everything else. After several weeks the conclusion of his experiment is likely to be that 'Neurogenesis' makes you angry, anxious and unable to concentrate.
WaterBoxx Enables Forest Growth in the Desert
Because people can't get over Lisp's lack of syntax. On the other hand, TCL is also a homoiconic language, which can support Lisp style macros and it too lacks popularity with the general programming community... I don't get it.
Thanks, I have added it to my shopping cart.
From the stories about Bram's Aspergers, I'd guess that this role means fewer management responsibilities, which probably suits him just fine: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b41050468...
Those guys and Gartner often just reinforce the popular illusions of the day. The trick is that they get paid for doing that.
"Let me be clear, this is a catastrophic development for our country. When the private sector can no longer compete with the public sector, you know that society is on its way out."

What? Of course the government outcompetes in terms of job security. I would too if I get a dollar for every three you made. But that's where the outcompetition ends. Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.

Get a government job if you want to be financially fed from a tube til death, probably doing tedious, monotonous work. You can stay in your cage where Farmer feeds you on the clock; those of us who have a passion for what we do will continue to live in the wild.

Related is PG's essay on the nature of the employee in a startup as opposed to in a corporation, although in this case the contrast is between the private and public sectors.
Which is to say, of those earning in the top 25%-30% (varies a lot by country) this applies to the majority of people.
Making the comparison of the WP Theme Directory to the iPhone App store was just short of kitschy for the sake of relevance. There's a lot of differences between the App Store and the WP Theme directory; the only similarity between the two is that as mentioned the relevant content (themes) link to the central distribution hub.

But unlike the App Store, if you want a premium theme you can look elsewhere. Distribution isn't a problem with themes. Some discerning developers have found ways to deliver their own apps for the iPhone but the modus operandi is to use iTunes.

Secondly, the spirit of WP is Open Source. Not so much with the App Store. It's proprietary to Apple, applications that are built are the property of the developers (to my knowledge, if the TOS says differently, someone correct me). With WordPress themes, by the nature of GPL you are free to edit them to fit your own needs.

So no, removing a theme from the directory is NOT akin to removing something from the app store, and saying so is just wrongfully begging for some false sense of relevance.
My handwriting basically looks like a five-year-old's.

Doesn't help that I'm left-handed either.
Apple Wrongly Rejects iPhone App for Use of Private APIs
http://nframe.com hosted Monster.com (or part of it), until they chose to open their own facility. Finish Line is a colo customer, ChaCha is a customer, as well as many others. It is located a couple miles north of Indianapolis.

nFrame is owned by Continental Broadband, who also owns Expedient data centers (Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland), as well as DCs in Chicago, and a few others. http://continentalbroadband.com
Computer scientists who have founded companies
No one said it was.
I don't think colocation is worth the hassle. Datacenter operations teams can manage hardware much more efficiently than any small company can.
What’s Ruby’s future?
i'd just like to point out that my state government has advertised for some agile rails jobs. "good" government jobs exist (assuming those were good jobs, i didn't apply or work in them so i can't say for sure).
Given how deeply some of the state and local governments are in the hole in this financial crisis, has anyone given any serious thought as to how safe government pensions really are? The two possible scenarios that worry me the most about our current situation are commercial real estate problems being as bad as residential and the failure of a large state or municipality (e.g. Michigan or Detroit) to be able to meet its debt and pension obligations, which might set off a chain reaction in the municipal bond market of the magnitude that we saw in the commercial paper market after the failure of Lehman. Is there a backstop similar to PBGC available for public sector plans (couldn't find one with a few minutes of research) or is the Federal government the only possible source of help?
"Until then, enjoy the holidays and please take good care of yourselves, your families, and your friends =)"

Is that last part about taking care of your friends a hint at what caused them to shut down? The wording and strange order seems to suggest it, no?
From the article:

You have already received rich rewards for the initial publication of these documents, and releasing this data back into the public domain would significantly grow your market and thus be an investment in your future.

This seems really unlikely. It looks to me like Westlaw makes money by restricting access to information; I don't think they'd make more money if they had open access, though it would of course be very nice of them.
Advice to Incoming Freshmen in Computer Science
I have however said - "hey - we're doing an extension - want to come round, drink some beers and give us a hand"

NOTE: If you're asking for help, always offer beer
Vista to XP "upgrade" triples in price to $150