skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you.

Did you know that even Albert Einstein used to play the violin?

Also the characteristics of the periodic table, that is, every 7th element resembles the characteristicts of the previous 7th element (example 1,7,14,21........n) is similar to the harmonic scale of music.... (do re mi fa so la ti do).....

I am not quite sure.. but I think this correlation was derived from the harmonic scale....
> Your discussion of health care systems is simplistic.

People have written books on the subject. Any internet discussion of it is bound to be "simplistic" to some degree.

Really, though, wheels sums it up best:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503
Also use it as an opportunity to sell / give away things you don't really need.
The interesting thing is that there is probably considerable potential for the population of Zimbabwe to earn foreign hard currency by selling bank notes of this kind of denomination (for example, on eBay, if possible) simply because so many Westerners would find it incredibly novel to obtain one, just for the sheer amazement factor.

It's an economic opportunity to take advantage of just how bewildering the situation is.
Piano, mostly. Actually, I'm graduating this year with a decree in both CS and music.
"when humanity matures - human language will become less ambiguous"

That seems very unlikely. In fact I'd guess natural language has to be imprecise to work.
I'd recommend sticking with ramen. There's zero chance that fruit is cheaper anywhere on a cost per calorie basis, ramen is easier to find everywhere, ramen is pretty tasty and you can take more calories of ramen before you want to throw up, you can take more calories of ramen before you have diarrhea, ramen stores compactly and easily, ramen doesn't go bad, and the health benefits of fruit and vegetables are greatly exaggerated ( partly by some folks whose interest in promoting them has nothing to do with their purported health benefits). I, for one, never get sick, work out all the time, am slim and stronger than 99% of the population, have good blood pressure and cholesterol, and, to cut costs, a significant portion of my diet is ramen.
(you = one human being)

If, as I originally posited, humans were to evolve into in silico entities, then human beings (= naked apes) would not exist, would they (other than, perhaps, as specimens on display in zoos)?
Perl had "better" regexp handling, certainly. But several major products such as AOLServer and CNET's StoryServer (which they later spun off into a separate company) were Tcl-based. Joe Hacker running a website out of his home directory at college wouldn't have seen them but Tcl was once a huge presence on high-traffic websites.

Incidentally back then Tcl was only really a presence on Sun kit... Perl was already everywhere.
He's was pretty consistent on this before that interview. My guess is that his success is due to the fact that he did it for the experience of doing it, not to achieve something.
Libertarianism is about the most basic pragmatic view of life. There simply isn't enough variance in human intelligence for a few people at the top to be able to make effective decisions for everyone else.
Libertarians believe in three basic rights - life, liberty, and property. All government should do only/everything necessary to preserve those rights. It follows then, that Libertarians are strongly against regulation unless it is absolutely necessary (as this leads to corruption, monopolies, etc).

From the perspective of environmental issues, the government is not doing ENOUGH to protect people from corporations that violently destroy citizen's rights to life and property. The corporations do not own the air in the sky, they don't have a right to pollute the river you drink from, and they certainly don't have a right to cause you to be diseased by Mercury poisoning.
I've played guitar for years, not bad but I'll never be great. Just a bit of a hobby, something manual to pick up and play with when I'm not coding.
> You should assume funding will not happen. Follow your intuition here.

That's following your intuition, not his. I agree with yours, though.
http://terrafugia.com/vehicle.html

I would call it a compact airplane, rather than a car.

The Moller at least looks cool
http://www.moller.com/
Printer friendly: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-12/ff_...
I actively play guitar, bass, and drums. Have been playing guitar all my life.

I can play piano and violin.

I like playing around with sequencers, I have some very quickly made tracks up at http://last.fm/music/kaens , probably some stuff with more time put into it up in a few weeks.
I was vaguely intrigued by the notion of the OP revealing some unknown insight on polygraphs or whatever, as well... But after reading it, the fact that the story could have come beat for beat out of a John Grisham novel made me dismiss that fairly quickly.
Well from someone that has had Brock try to aggressively buy out one of his companies in the past and have talked to him many times before... He's a bit of a well... tool.

Actually many of my experiences with Brock and what his company did the reputation of the virtual currency industry was the inspiration for my startup to empower the user to vote with their dollars by providing them information on the background of these virtual currency companies (startup: http://www.gamerates.com; also provides charts of exchange rates and covers industry news: our coverage of this piece is at: http://www.gamerates.com/posts/show/happy_thanksgiving_from_...).
I work for a well known video game company and spent some time evaluating this controller as well as the wii motion plus. Without violating non-disclosure there's not much to say except the new controllers are fun, will enhance game play, and still have some issues.
ramen + exercise > fruits/veggies + no exercise
You have to know where to go, what to buy, and what to cook.

I've been a vegan for a number of years now and I could live off $60/mo if I wanted to. The main point is convenience. If you don't want the effort of preparing food then it costs a lot more. Simple staples like lentals, rice, etc supplemented with vegetables is a crazy cheap way to eat.

In SF districts like the mission it's easy to get cheap fresh fruit and vegetables. A lot of it is supply and demand. If you shop at Safeway they have an expectation about your spending and price accordingly.

If you are trying save every penny shop where other people who have no money shop. That probably means neighborhoods you might avoid otherwise.
Ask friends. If you don't have friends in the local tech community, find out what tech groups there are in your area and visit them. I don't know about New York, but in Seattle there are dozens focused on every aspect of technology you can imagine (Mac programming, Perl, PHP, security, blogging, computer networking, business networking, et cetera).

I moved to Seattle two years ago and knew virtually nobody. I met a lot of people through local groups like SaturdayHouse, Six Hour Startup, and nPost, got to know people, and even found a job through a friend of a friend.

It can be difficult and take time to find the kind of employment that pays and allows you the freedom to do what you love, but it is possible. I wish you much luck.
I compose electronic music. Attempted to learn to play keyboard at a late age, but progressed unsatisfyingly slowly.

I would agree that a disproportionate number of programmers I know are musically inclined.
Keep dreaming..
I play harmonica. Not at very good level but good enough to be able to jam with my friends guitar.
This control probably won't be any more. I think, however, that motion controls are here to stay and improve.

Why? Simple: it removes complexity. You can do things more intuitively and more subtly (think d-stick versus d-pad), and you can suddenly do more with fewer buttons. You need one less stick for aiming at the screen. It makes games better - more involved - while at the same time allowing more people to play it.
Count me in as well. I bought the book as a package deal from amzn with "The little Schemer" and haven't read much of it.
Piano & guitar - hobby songwriter
It's not a typo. In the post I mentioned Three Guys From brooklyn, here's a link to their weekly circular. http://3guysfrombrooklyn.tripod.com/id4.html, note that the price listed for fruit and vegetables in that circular are about the average prices for all their fruits and vegetables. Certainly things like packaged foods will be a little higher, but if you purchase mostly fruits, vegetables, tubas (the average price of a bag of 5lbs potatoes there is $1.99), etc, in addition to a few packaged foods such as orange juice, you can easily eat for less than $60 a month.
Electronic music producer, here.

The unofficial rule is: if you're a Flash programmer, you also create electronic music.
A business model for open source hardware
How transparency can help your business - use cases
I've always wanted to play the guitar, and bought an electric (LP-style) when I turned 18. Tried teaching myself to play, but life happened. Sadly, it's bow collecting dust by my bedside.

When I'm not working 50 hours a week with several side projects on top of my responsibilities as a husband and father, I'd like to pick it back up.
> The original owners of the land were highly captialised.

Err... not to dispute the rest of what you say, which is accurate, but the original owners? I realize you can play that game a long way back in history, but still...
SICP and HtDP have different audiences. HtDP was designed for people who know nothing about computer programming, particularly students who would not be pursuing a degree in computer science. SICP was used in a first CS course. Because they both use Scheme, they're complimentary. If you are starting out trying programming for the first time, then HtDP will certainly be a better choice. When you finish it, you should proceed to read SICP, followed by Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming.
Piano, guitar, bass, clarinet, viola. Haven't played the last three much in the last few years though.
I mess around on the piano, which I bought this last year. Love it to death, it's great to just play when you need a break. (BTW I cannot recommend the Yamaha GT2 enough).

I'm absolutely terrible at reading music, but I can play anything by ear, I wonder if that's usual for hacker types.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=y6UPJJqwc1k
Another option is to interview at some companies with the understanding that you'd only be available after, say, March. What are your skills? (I can try to see if people at my work are interested).
played violin since age 2.

played in various national and all-state hs orchestras.

stopped playing in college though and haven't played since
As everyone else has said, don't bank on funding.

I think starting to put feelers out for consulting work is probably the best strategy. Even though we've got a bit more runway, some customers and some VCs that have approached us, I've been trying to do the same for the what if case.

The upshot is if you can organize enough cash to keep yourself running through the downturn and do just enough consulting to stay afloat and start growing a revenue stream, if your company is still alive on the other side of this downturn it'll have cleared out a lot of the market and it'll put you in a pretty good position to try to raise a round if things are rosier in a year or so or if you can keep costs low to make a transition to living off of the revenue.

That's been the focus of the planning that I've been doing for us at the moment: "How do we make sure that we're alive in a year, and how much revenue will we need at that point to be self-sustaining."
Should a company allow early exercise of stock options?
Rule 1. Work for people who can pay.

Rule 2. See rule 1.
I play the classical guitar as a hobby(other than programming). Still learning now. Now I'm performing for free at old folk's homes during festivals. That's much more meaningful than playing it alone in my room.
Damn reactionaries can't hold the people back!
Remember the key you are going for in your postural work is time. You spend 50+ hours on the keyboard a week. You need to be able to have a [postural] buffer large enough so there are no overflows into poor posture, which means a large work capacity.

Do try ART - (activerelease.com has practitioners probably) - it can work wonders. The basic algorithm is to identify the parts of the muscle that are tenser than the rest, bring the muscle into full flexion, then compress the tense area against the bone while simultaneously moving the muscle into full extension. This causes a mechanical stress that helps lengthen the tissue. You can try it on yourself pretty easily which can be useful.
Same here :) Book club is a go!
I don't get it; how in character were they supposed to be when deciding? Sure, there could be convincing arguments for release made by an actual AI, but for ME the real person sitting in IRC it would be easy to just say no.
House in Brighton school district (housing rentals/new york/282720)
I play Piano and Clarinet. While it's been about 8 years, I used to write orchestral and new age MIDI music for a few years (http://gumm.8k.com)
my band (2-piece called coltrane motion) just played a sold-out show w/ mucca pazza (look them up right this second) at the empty bottle (chicago) last night. blown out hip-hop beats under farfisa, ms-10, and guitar noise. fun stuff.
I don't doubt that whatsoever, I originally was going to expand on what I meant but it didn't come out right, so I removed a large part of my response.

I think the problem extends mostly from the poor choice of platform - the PC

In the greater consumer market (think non geeks), the PC is generally tethered to places that don't have much open space associated with them, eg on desks either in bedrooms, home offices or out of the way places.

I think this is the greatest restriction placed on them, especially for a control device that gets you ducking and diving through a magnetic field.

This is why I don't think the Wii has anything to worry about, it's a dedicated gaming device thats nearly always permanently connected to the main TV in any household and that particular TV has plenty of open space in front of it for swinging your arms around.

Now if they were bringing this out for one of the other consoles with dedicated developer support, that's a whole different story, but right now as an additional controler for a PC I don't think it will do too well.

Great Idea, poor execution IMO
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html...

and

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/home.action
yes, me
One way to understand the difference between the typical Democrat/Republicanism mainstream majority and libertarianism and is to consider at what level each analyzes government action. The typical politician asks if a law encourages people to do the "right" thing. The libertarian asks what special reasons exists to use government force and if there are special reasons, what is the least intrusive way to accomplish the goal.
not to mention: how stupid is it to go 'live' (ahah) with something like this on a Friday?
The story of Muxtape
Well -- not quite as bad as it sounds. 25.5 million people living in America are both foreign born and don't speak English at home. Roughly 85% of them are adults, and roughly half of them (I am going to say probably skewing towards adults) report that they have difficulty with English.

Which if we do the math is something like 3% of the US population not being able to read English primarily because they're not able to speak it. Bad news for them, but the reasons for their problem (and the solutions to address it) are pretty different than for the rest of the illiterate population.

See official Census data:

http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/foreignborn...
I play the guitar. But I wouldn't call myself a musician just yet.

Love music though.
Yeah I agree with you, I think this is just a rumor, no clear evidence so far. Chinese gov doesn't bother to do this at the moment.
This article is a bit... crap.

Writing software, no matter what level, or how much, is very difficult.

...

but there are document after document written on how to write good software, so implementation details can eventually be solved.

???

Then, when I saw he spelled "alma mater" "alma mata", I skimmed through the rest of the article and closed the window. Sounds like he has a very newbieish perspective on writing software.
What?

Then what the hell was that research by the Brit. Physicist Tim Berners Lee?

He is called the father of WWW right?
Yeah, to be fair to the author, the explanation he gives is very close to "release it" but my point is more about which makes a better slogan.
You might find this book useful and interesting:

A Computer Scientist's Guide to Cell Biology
http://books.google.com/books?id=nAjhrOyBhIoC
I play the guitar (electric, acoustic) and the electric bass. Before working as a programmer I taught fretted strings professionally.
For instance, legal language HAS to be imprecise, otherwise no lawyer would ever agree to anything ever. So much negotiation every day goes into the subtle imprecision of clauses in contracts.

That's why there are courts -- to navigate the imprecision of both law and contracts and to give intelligence to ambiguity that could never be replaced by first order logic.
I play the Veena on and off.

I find it's a good release valve from spending too much time in front of the screen.
From the first reference link at the Wikipedia link I gave earlier:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf

In considering the results, the reader should keep in mind that this was a survey of literacy in the English language — not literacy in any universal sense of the word. Thus, the results do not capture the literacy resources and abilities that some respondents possess in languages other than English.
Interesting read, and I hope the new muxtape does well. Basically the major labels and the RIAA aren't evil so much as bureaucratic and they want to get paid. Which practically works out to be the same thing.
why thailand? do u know that thailand is now having political instabilities?
Objective-C, Ruby and Python for Cocoa
It seems Microsoft has released Windows 7 Beta..

You can read the news @ http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20090110/tc_pcworld/windo...
I always thought of natural language as a lossy compression algorithm for ideas, and as always in every lossy compression, you sacrifice some accuracy for the sake of brevity.
Mumbai Police To Search For and Secure Open Wifi
discussion when this was posted several months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315375
Good piece dude..

I like your music...

Keep it up!
Thailand is always unstable politically. Doesn't make it unsafe.

Right now the tourist industry there is under a lot of pressure. It would be quite easy to live there very frugally.

Thailand is quite cheap, very friendly and a good atmosphere. It also has surprisingly good access to wifi (not fast, but quite prevalent).

p.s. I was thinking Thailand is a good place to work - holiday is good too.
if you are able to jam with your friends.. that's enough.. music is about enjoying.. jamming..

:)
Uses Wifi Magic to Figure out your location
at 13 your brother need not worry about memory leaks :)
Just let him start with C.

More importantly you should concentrate on what can be done with code(e.g. create a blog, automatically search from library of congress or wikipedia, create a graph of his favorite football team etc etc).

People get hooked when they accomplish something...bothering about language or the finer nuances like memory leak etc can come later.
I'm not entirely certain how this works, but I live in a fairly residential neighborhood in a Boston suburb, and this was able to pinpoint my street address exactly. I'd love to read about how this actually works - their site is a little sparse on technical details.
European health care systems are a double edged sword for startup founders. I have lived in several european countries and researched the matter for some others as well because I like to move around. I'll spare you the details because they are mind boggingly complicated.

The issue is that in most countries there is no separate health care system. There is an integrated social security system, including pensions, etc. The problem is that there is a minimum charge that you have to pay irrespective of your actual income.

This "standing charge" varies a lot. It's negligible in the UK ($15 per month) and (I believe) in Ireland. But it's awfully high in most of continental europe ($300 per month). That increases the burn rate for self funded startups by about a third.

The reason why it's so high in some countries is that you don't get to choose what kind of risks you want covered. The assumption is that you pay for the older generation so that the next generation pays for you.

It's one size fits all, decoupled from individual choices. You must pay into the retirement system even if you decide (as I have) that you are never going to stop working unless you're unable to (which should be covered by a basic disability insurance which is much cheaper)

As a result, many people (including myself at this moment) have no health coverage at all. Either because they cannot afford it or because the rules are so complicated, inconsistent and inflexible that people with unusual CVs slip through the net.
Go to events and talk to as many people as you can there...
http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/
and other smaller tech meetups
http://nextny.org/

Nate Westheimer (http://innonate.com/) is the new organizer of the NY tech meetup. He has started an experiment doing office hours to have short (15 minute) meetings with people. http://innonate.com/2008/12/15/office-hours/ Sign up and go talk to him, I can almost guarantee he knows a handful of people who are looking for part time programming help.
Go for a long run every day, hang out with your good friends, read a book on zen buddhism and get your head straight. It only seems bad because you have a bad take on it. Once you've managed to stop panicking (which is an art in itself) - take a look at things rationally and the right course of action will make itself apparent. You're (probably) in the 10% of employeeable people, you should feel sorry for the highschool dropouts working at burgerfuel.
Not the same thing.

The energy consumed by your home scales (roughly) linearly with usage. The energy consumed by a computer does not scale linearly with the number of http requests -- most of the energy is just to keep the machine up & running, with a minimal additional cost per request.
My pet theory is that playing a musical instrument is less common a hobby among programmers now than it was a generation ago, because now programming tends to be associated with "Computer Science" as its own discipline, rather than a subdiscipline of math.

Near the end of this interview [http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html], Don Knuth says that one way CS graduate students have changed since the 70s is that they are less interested in music:

"What changes have you seen in the students coming into the computer science program over the years?"

"Knuth: There is a very profound change that I can't account for. In the 70s, the majority of our students were very interested in music. The first thing we'd ask them when they came in was 'What instrument do you play?' We had lots of chamber groups and so on. Now almost none of the students are interested in music. I don't know if it's because a different kind of people are enrolling in computer science, or because it's true of all today's students, or what. If you ask computer science students now what their hobby is, the chances are most of them will say 'Bicycling'. I recently had one who played a harmonica, but there were almost no musicians in the group."