skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd rework Paul Graham's list a little, as the first two items are phrased in negative terms (it's easier to do stuff than to not do stuff).

"Follow your dreams; take a break; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

The idea of putting them at the top of your todo list is interesting. At the moment I organise myself with Trello, one list per project, and at the top of each list I have a card that reminds me why I'm doing the project. Every now and again I check these cards to see if any projects should be culled -- if they're not meeting their goals, or if there's a better way to achieve those goals, or if I no longer care about those goals.

Keeping long-term priorities in mind when caught up in the midst of your daily tasks seems like a winner. Your life is lived one day at a time, after all -- if you don't seize the day, you won't seize your life.

Anyway, the whole idea of combining your todo list with your bucket list -- your daily goals with your life goals -- is interesting. I've seen a few startups based on this idea (evr.st, Goalhawk). It'll be interesting to see if the model works.
Why College Isn't for Everyone.
fogbeam is up there now :)
Is that how cracking begins? They start with "famously" prime numbers? I've always wondered about this.
Neat, I should take a poke around Rust.
"A short history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson is an entertaining read with numerous funny stories behind some scientists/discoveries. Definitely a more lively take than a textbook that presents the end results and omits the process (not to fault said textbooks as that is what they intend to do).
If Valve's organization is simply to let employees fight it out thunderdome style to see who controls projects, culture, and direction, the organization should be grown by spinning off completely new and independent businesses, not by hiring people. Then the economics of free enterprise provides a true risk/reward system. With salaried employees rewards are capped. Employees will only stick around until they discover that the real economy pays much better for hard work and good ideas and that the risks are basically the same: no income.

The "we have no structure" culture is disingenuous. I don't buy the idea that most of the employees at valve don't want to dominate all the projects and their coworkers. It is exactly the same anywhere. You can't simply say 'we don't have managers' as obviously only certain people are going to have power of budget and final hiring decision. Only certain people can sign documents. Only when employees can expense anything they want and hire anyone they feel should be hired would a "no managers" description be appropriate. You might say that this would never work, but it does work if each employee is given assistance or investment to spin off a new organization at any time, hire anyone, and spend money.
I realize this website penalizes people for pointing out the obvious but I have to ask you, did you even read what you responded to because what you wrote has absolutely nothing to do with the question the GP asked. Getting your talking points in is one thing but at least try to put it in context.
God forbid someone put work into something, make it better, and then choose to charge for that work.
Objectives in the negative have a bad effect on the brain according to NLP so

"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

Can be better expressed as:
" pursue your dreams, get appropriate rest and relaxation, say what... "

(if you believe in NLP)
That might be the wrong dream. Find a dream that balances your other needs, and follow that one.
I once did something similar, except inverted.

I'd put at the bottom of my to-do list "...Die unfulfilled and unhappy"

I figured seeing that at the bottom of my to-do list would remind me to make sure it doesn't happen. And maybe even rethink the items on top.
The thing about dreams is, they don't need to be achieved; even failing to achieve them is better than not trying - at least you've tried.

I know this, now I have to go out and actually do it.
There are two ways of living: fear-based, and love-based.

People who live fear-based avoid things. They avoid things that might cause heartache, pain, difficulty, etc. but all of the most interesting pursuits in life have the potential to cause these things sometimes.

People who live love-based move towards things that bring happiness and satisfaction in the long term. They work hard and play hard, and when they hurt they know that things may get better.

I heard this several years ago now, and I see one of these approaches in most people around me.
They're all functionally the same thing, as in they all relate to the same principal:

"Doing bad things just because you were told to do so doesn't absolve you of the responsibility for doing bad things"

It applies whether you are a cop, a third reich officer, an employee at a corporation, whatever. The principal still stands.
As with all mchurch comments, you need to take it with a grain of salt. He was with Google for less than a year and has been extrapolating his short experience into a generalization of the company.
I'm glad PG is finding the time to write essays more frequently. Maybe this is a result of finding the time to do the things that make him happier.
Ask and you shall receive: Filepicker.io now supports IE, Mobile
The religious war of "free" versus "open" is what turns a lot of people off.

Previously, when posting code I wrote, I'd pick MIT license which would allow users to do what they wanted. Picking GPL would mean that many potential users would be prohibited by company policy from using it.
My Weekend project: Stuff I Liked On Internets
I once stumbled upon the question of remembering an url which I liked a while ago with facebook's "Like" button. Surprisingly, this was pretty hard to find out (at least for me). So I made a quick site for this.
I had imagined the linked page was going to say "We got DDOS'd and we're proud!" b/c DDOSing is a kind of free speech, like spending money.
Just shipped it. I've been trying to reach out to people who said they wanted it, but not everyone has emails.

Enjoy!
Good point. I listened to several episodes of This Developer's Life before realising there were two presenters involved.

Maybe I'm just slow :P
"With salaried employees rewards are capped."

Now, this might surprise you, but working on cool projects can be its own reward. Your utility metric is flawed.

"I don't buy the idea that most of the employees at valve don't want to dominate all the projects and their coworkers. It is exactly the same anywhere."

Did you perchance get your worldview from anime? Really? This might also surprise you, but a lot of well-functioning folks don't care about petty politics as much as doing cool stuff.
This would be even cooler if it implemented the S3 REST protocol so that people could use existing S3 clients.

Could be useful for testing or home-grown S3 network. Ie. put that in front of a bunch of Riak-backed servers.
Do you even need an SSH key to get an account? I'm pretty sure that's done after the fact.
Forking the list: Don't tie your dreams to objects; work enough to keep you satisfied; don't be an arrogant prick; build effective relationships; be happy.
Although the trying should lead to some fruition. Always trying but never having succeeded would be a pretty sad way to end up. This awareness gives me the stamina to work through all the details it takes to end up with a polished product.
This is about priority. I'd argue that while this reminder is nice, it doesn't go far enough, it is too passive.

Actively working towards those goals is the only way you'll actually achieve them. Instead of putting these generic statements at the top of your list, put some concrete action or goal there.

This is something I'm trying to live right now. A month ago I quit my job [1] to travel the world after having saved and dreamed about it for years. During the time I was dreaming we put together a plan, set aside money, and tried to reign in expenses. All tangible actions that lead to an end.

[1] http://orofino.me/homeless-and-jobless-travelling-the-world/
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Baader-Meinho...
when something does, eventually, "go wrong", it makes all the fear of gang attack seem trivial.

(I survived an ascending aortic dissection in Aug 09.)
Vigorously-flipped coins are biased to come up the same way they started
It's on Github. That means you could fix that and send a pull request to the developer (which is consructive) instead of making a "constructive criticsm".
I dropped by to make precisely your first point.

Re: adding items to your todo lists, i feel like PG's 5 exhortations (which seem more like general advice than specific prescriptions) fit into something like the "epics" that were recently introduced into Pivotal Tracker, than actual items to do. One should take a look at each of the items placed on a todo list and ask "does this item take me closer or further from my goals?"
The problem there, is that the same dynamics occur with non-monetary compensation. (Or indirect monetary compensation.)
Scrum Log Jeff Sutherland: DoD Goes Agile
I think many of us mistake expressing our feelings with saying whatever comes to mind which can lead to a bigger wreck than ignoring or suppressing them.

I would change it to: don't ignore your feelings. How you act on them is where wisdom comes in.
On the other hand, for the i386 copies of FreeBSD (which the great-grandparent was talking about), Apple does release working copies of their FreeBSD-derived kernel.
Naturally, but that doesn't change the fact that distant threats are less fearsome than immediate ones, and that abstract threats are also less fearsome.

To be clear, when I say "abstract threats" I mean things we cannot properly think about. We know what it feels like to get punched, and we have some idea what it feels like to be stabbed, but we have no idea how to assign fear to something like chemotherapy until it happens to us. We know it is Bad(tm), but not the same way we know getting cut with a knife is bad.
It's hard to step outside the systems of social domination which suppress dreams, encourage overwork, etc. because they operate from fears which are often so deep-seated we're often not even aware of them. Bringing those fears into the light and unlearning the reactions they trigger is the main goal of spiritual practice (at least of mine.) This sort of emotional study and training is on the critical path for all of the desiderata pg lists (again, at least for me) and would have to precede them on my todo list, if I had one for this sort of thing.

Something my teacher wrote along these lines: http://www.unfetteredmind.org/learned-helplessness/0

Can learned helplessness be undone? Well, that’s the big question,
isn’t it? The answer is “Yes.” The cost, however, is high. We can only
undo learned helplessness by severing our internal connection with the
system that gave rise to it.

Our motivation must be clear and strong. We must really want to hear
and respond to our own questions about life. We must really want to
live our own life and not one prescribed by our family, society,
culture, profession or tradition. Metaphorically, we must be willing
to go north, the direction that takes us out of society. We must be
willing to endure pain, know from direct experience, act on what we
see and receive what happens. We must yearn to experience what is
without relying on anything to confirm our existence.
Easy Tips To Create Windows 7 Bootable USB Drive From ISO Image
Let's build a future where people aren't packed together like sardines twenty-four hours a day. Urban living takes the idea of personal space and crushes it down to a bubble three inches around your head, to the point where people think it's acceptable for your neighbors to hear you through the walls, to spend an hour every day sitting in a metal box with fifty strangers you don't talk to or even acknowledge, to walk by graffiti and not take it as a personal insult to your home city and by extension yourself. If the news that someone you know got mugged doesn't badly shock you, you owe it yourself to move somewhere better.
Why don't we construct buildings that have both residential floors and commercial floors, for instance? At least then you'd have more options for living very close to where you work.

Houston sort of does this via very relaxed zoning, which allows office buildings and stores to be placed right next to houses and apartments. It works better than you'd expect and it's usually not hard to live close to work, especially since housing is so cheap.

I'm in NYC now, and enjoy not needing a car, but the difference in rent comes to more than a new car every year.
At some point, if the company is not making efforts to reach out to better programmers (by actually looking up the name behind the open source project and showing a strongly present figure in tech conferences) then it's their loss, no?

If a company only trust "recruiters" to select (or pre-screen) candidates for them, then this says a lot about their way of managing and interacting with "our" kind of programmers (by that I mean people who read HN, are enthused by cool innovative projects, write blogs, publish open source code, ...)

If the company doesn't help you bypass the recruiter, maybe you should bypass them altogether?
Warning: the Reset button doesn't just reset the colored squares, but also deletes the walls you have drawn. I have made a pull request with button labels that make that more clear: https://github.com/qiao/PathFinding.js/pull/3.
That's true. People who say "I'm bored" are usually boring people. Many first- world people who are unhappy on a daily basis just have little sense of agency. This isn't meant to blame those people; many people are told to follow their dreams by adults who have given up on their own dreams. Few people are explicitly taught how to follow their dreams.
Special Sandboxing that, I think, is implemented in Java. So this is an OS in the sense that it only depends on having a JVM and Lua interpreter installed.

Not that this is a great metric (especially when the source languages are taken into account), but here are the LOC counts in the project:

$ find . -name '*.java' | xargs cat | wc -l
28877
$ find . -name '*.lua' | xargs cat | wc -l
6826
$ find . -name '*.slua' | xargs cat | wc -l
1725
Ask HN: What happens if I quit?
Hi Hackers,

I've been working as a contractor with a web design/development agency in New England since last year. I've done mostly front-end work, but am currently in the middle of a backend-heavy project.

The problem is, the project was under-quoted and the schedule was drastically underestimated. We're weeks past the launch deadline and both the client and the agency are upset.

I want to quit, but I'm unsure of the legal ramifications. I never signed ONE piece of paper. No NDA, no contracts, no nothing. On paper, there is literally nothing binding my name to the agency or the project. They agency itself has signed paperwork with the client.

So, I'm asking you guys: What happens if I quit? Can I be sued if I haven't signed a contract? I just want to get out from under this soul-crushing project.
this is cool:)
"Buy a car to get to work, go to work to pay for car" is something that I'd bet a lot of people are familiar with. Suburban sprawl and the middle class.
NSA Whistleblower William Binney's first TV interview
At the risk of sounding cynical, I wonder how much it actually matters. We tend to live our lives thinking as we go that we should be striving to end up at some optimal place and that the purpose of our lives is desperately trying to keep us exactly on that course. If we don't ask the girl to the dance, or give up on an idea, or spend extra nights at the office to get a promotion instead of hanging out with our family we think that we are drifting off of our optimal course and we drive ourselves crazy wondering at every step if we are losing our way and strive to keep our future regrets to a minimum. But the reality is that life is no more valuable at the end than at the beginning or the middle. Why worry about what our future selves will regret while forgoing present happiness? Why should I worry today about what I will feel tomorrow if I know I can be happy today?

When I hear somebody say "I wish I would have spent more time with my family" I wonder whether they really wish they had spent more time with their family or if they just miss their old family and wish they could have them back. That is to say I wonder whether people confuse nostalgia with regret. As you get older you regret not taking advantage of some things in the past, but I tend to think that what you feel as regret is actually just longing for being young again.
You're correct; that was sloppily written of me.
The numbers serve no purpose whatsoever, I've never understood why they are used.
"Don't be a cog."

Inserted as the subtitle at the top of my TiddlyWiki organizer (my rolling ToDo list), and linked to pg's essay.
I'm stuck whether to call this optimistic or pessimistic, but I can sure call it clever.
I noticed that the generated links default to non-SSL even though SSL seems to work and even when the site itself has been accessed via SSL.
This article is saying that web development (using frameworks a la Rails) might be enough to get you a job today, but as soon as the web-trend passes other skills will become needed. Recruiters are becoming more and more stupid (not in the derogatory sense, they just do pattern matching between job offers and what's written on candidates' resumes).

This article is a reminder that it's never too soon to start adding different skills to your arsenal.
A phonology professor of mine at Ohio State spent 20 minutes during one of my classes discussing the syntax and semantics of grade point averages, which i have to say, was one of the most useful things anyone had ever explicitly taught me while at Ohio State.

In particular discussing how, despite using the same syntactic formalism, the semantics of what was considered "passing" for undergraduate students vs for graduate students was something no one had ever enunciated to me explicitly (e.g. you pass as an undergrad if you're getting Cs. If you're getting Bs as a graduate student, you are doing it wrong).
As per your critique, the updated version of this still keeps every priority. All it does is add some much needed spacing, fix some alignment for easier browsing, and simplify the coloring.
PS - Does anyone find "driverless car" to be the 21st century equivalent of "horseless carriage"?

The best words I've read all week.
I've updated it so it doesn't break article pages anymore.
I envy you your tube, and I'd be up in that every day if we had one.
We now work on IE8+ as well as mobile safari and android
Many people have a hard time realizing they are happy. It is all too easy, especially for hacker types, to continuously focus on 'the problems' or things that can be improved or tweaked. Its hard to know you are happy if you never stop and smell the roses.
Weekend Lyrid Meteor Shower Visible From Earth, Space and ... Balloon?
I bought the 15" Serval Pro (sp7). It weighs about the same as my 17" MBP did. So, same weight, but smaller screen. Naturally it's thicker. I went with the 15" because at the time of purchase that was the only one with a matte display option.

I had the hi-res matte 17" MBP. No doubt about it, that screen was nicer. But, I really don't have any complaints about my new 15" screen. I've been using it actively for about 2 months now and have gotten used to it.

The other two areas the MBP clearly win out are battery life and power supply. I couldn't really use my MBP without a Kinesis, so long battery didn't mean much. But the System76 gets about 2.5 hours like most other brands. The power supply is a beast though and adds another 4 lbs or so when traveling. It also lacks the awesome mag-safe connector.

Bonuses: comfortable keyboard, nice rubber finish, no sharp edges, integrated keypad, plenty of ports and no need for dongles, replaceable battery, easy hardware upgrades, up to 32 GB RAM (I went with 16 GB), and well-supported hardware.

The trackpad is nice. It took some getting used to since I had used a clickpad for so long.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I dual-boot Win 7 for dev work and set it up such that I can access that partition as a raw disk in VMWare. While it works pretty well out of the box, it's a Linux laptop so I would expect to do some tinkering. And while it's a pretty attractive system, it has nowhere near the sex appeal of a MBP or MBA. That matters little to me. I treat it as a portable workstation and really just want to get work done. But, just be aware of what you're buying.
My boss doesn't read hn, so I can get away with this. In the last few years, after my daughter was born, I made a decision to not work too much. I consciously reduced my working hours as much as possible.

To my surprise and delight, my productivity and overall work completion has actually gone up. By being time bound (I am leaving at 5 no matter what) I often have to work like mad to get my work done. I have to make decisions quickly and implement.

The results are more projects done, sooner. If a mistake is made, or a more complete solution is needed you iterate and do it tomorrow. Already you are two iterations in where 2 years ago I would have been stalled still trying to work up a good starting point.

Try it.
Or you could work to end aging.
>> The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature.

This feeling is becoming less and less possible in a lot of places. You end up having to herd millions of cars causing massive inconvenience to people who don't have cars; who in turn have to buy cars to make life liveable. If you want a constant sense of freedom buy a bicycle.
Its getting more use, judging from comments before 37 signals are using it embedded in Nginx, Redis has it embedded, people are discovering it.
I'm not terribly well versed with nginx, but the creator mentions only support for .htaccess, I was able to get this working with the following in my config for nginx:

if ($request_filename !~* ai-cache) {
rewrite \.(?:jpe?g|gif|png)$ /adaptive-images.php last;
}
I think this can also defined in the level of risk one's willing to accept. Fear-based is having a low risk tolerance. It's so easy to choose the safe route; steady corporate job, work your way up the ladder, etc. It's predefined and historically tested. But I fail to see a lot of happy people at the end of this line.

Making big life changes is hard, and a risk. The more I talk to people about this topic, though, the more I can see in their eyes that they wish they had taken bigger risks in their youth.
If he's wrong, say he's wrong and how. Comments like this have negative value: they just turn the issue into a soap opera.
Freaky. I had exactly the same reaction when I read that list a couple of years ago. It really reminding me of some of the conversations I had with my dad just before he died, and I knew I didn't want to have those regrets.

At the top of my to do list is:

Honour dreams. Work less. Speak honestly. Have friends. Be happy.
Contributing to open source comes in many flavours. Bug reporting is one of them. I simply don't have the motivation to contribute more than this to a project which doesn't personally interest me. Instead of throwing the little I do give back in my face, why not make use of it?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-in...

and 2 books referenced in that wrticle

http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
> A first-class modern Linux distribution for the desktop

If you want a modern Linux desktop and web browser scriptable in Lua, consider installing Awesome window manager[1] and LuaKit[2] on top of the distro of your choice instead.

[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/

[2] http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/