skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are these people I like to refer to as "friends". If you don't have any competent or willing friends, how about co-workers. Failing that, why not just post and let commenters tell you what they think.
i'm on MA's state health insurance. i hear it would be pretty killer if i actually had a hospital visit...which to me defeats the whole purpose of health insurance. i don't care about the small beans for doctor visits. i just don't want to get saddled with a 10k hospital visit bill for broken bones or something.

i see health insurance as one of the biggest obstacles against going the startup route. i live cooperatively, so my monthly fees, when i had a 'real job' and was on BCBS, were more than rent + food.

sure, most startupers are young folk, but we also live pretty risky lifestyles. i bike and roller blade along city streets all the time.
BCAAs. Tho' I second st3fan's advice.
Ha, yeah, and the study cited 3, which I'm guessing to be significantly less meaningful than 5 even.
Asking a philosophical question like "what does X really mean" is akin to asking "what data structure would best represent X in a program?" They could even be considered to be the same question. So philosophy is as central to programming as mathematics.
Yeah, financial bankers are paid WAY too much (and considering how badly they make a mess of things).
The problem with philosophy now is that students spend so much time slogging through the old incomprehensible junk. A philosophy degree (I have one) should be a separate entity from a degree studying the history of philosophy. Psych majors don't have to take classes on Phrenology.

It's very frustrating to be told to write in a concise style and then asked to read some really obfuscated nonsense.
I had some problems accessing some webpages, but that was probably due to a Trojan which I got rid of. Then the web was fine.
Great! Now what would it take to actually get that added to ASDF?
Learn From Zappos.com For $39.95
The art of (literary) prize-fighting
Ask HN: Any Special Projects Over the Holidays?
I just finished all of my work for this semester. Now I am free to do whatever I want until about the middle of January. My plan is to learn more about Objective-C. Since a lot of us are college students, I was wondering: What projects are you working on over the break?
If you are healthy, the cheapest thing to do is an HSA + high-deductible health plan. I've been on an individual plan I found at http://www.ehealthinsurance.com for a few years. Remember to price shop your plan every couple of years as you can usually save 25% or so by switching to a different plan (even with the same company).

At least in the US, the way "health insurance" works nowadays, it's not really "insurance" in the true sense of the word. From Wikipedia:

"Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss."

Problem is, most people think health insurance should pay ALL of their medical bills. This is why health costs rise so much in the US. People think health care is "free" because insurance pays for it. So individuals consume health services without regard for the true costs and that punishes everyone. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.

An HSA plan + high-deductible health insurance gets back to how things should be; you have health insurance to protect you from a loss you can't absorb individually. But you still pay for routine & predictable care yourself, with your own money. It's cheaper for you, and better for everybody.

Plus, with an HSA, all of your "routine" expenses are TAX FREE!
Concentration and motivation from the task at hand. Most of my all-nighters have been unplanned and were reactive to a software upgrade gone bad.

A memorable one was a software upgrade to Cascade switches at AADS. Turns out the new firmware consumed more RAM than anticipated and we ended up with 10's of thousands of circuits down throughout their network of ~250 backbone switches. I spent 3.5 days straight with nothing more than a couple of two hours naps and LOTS of pizza, coffee, soda, etc. The magnitude of the situation pretty much prevented me from sleeping. Had a couple of other 36 and 48 hour shifts during that same job. Every time I've done any marathon sessions, it was always unplanned and urgent.
Earlier there was a thread on here about what you'd want to do if you scored big with your startup.

That video's pretty much my answer.
"this [...] crisis is not only a once-in-a-lifetime event"

This is the sort of phrase that makes Zeus start sharpening his thunderbolts.
Awesome :) Me, I'm in Argentina.
Flock simulator in either ObjC, some form of lisp/scheme, or Erlang. Haven't decided yet but Erlang really makes me happy.

I'll probably start up another company January 2. I have a dream about educating the world's future smart people.
Digg is losing $5 Million a year
⌘+⇧+L and other useful OS X hidden features
Ok. BTW, why are you using the twitter search API instead of Gnip?
Apple's favorite iPhone apps
Huffington Post blasted for stealing content
What's new in PHP V5.3, Part 2: Closures and lambda functions
Explain your "educating the world's future smart people." I have thought about writing a free online textbook for some branch of undergrad mathematics.
Ask HN: Point thresholds?
I noticed there is a karma point threshold for flagging, and one of my friends said that he can't change the color of his top nav bar but I can. Are there any other cool tricks that get unlocked as your karma grows?
Media On Twitter
I've got updated versions for all of my products (http://www.wonderwarp.com) in the works.

I've got an incremental update to ShoveBox in testing now, but I'm spending most of my resources finalizing the iPhone version of the app and getting it to sync properly with the desktop app. That will probably be 1.8 or 2.0.

I'm not sure if I should charge for the iPhone app or not though. I'm worried Windows people will accidentally download it and get pissed. Hmm. But none of my direct competitors (except for maybe Evernote) have this feature, so I'll be psyched to have it out.
If you read carefully on our website you will learn about the limitations of cookie based methods.
There are no guarantees, of course. Sometimes chance breaks the relationship between results and rewards. And, sometimes crime pays.

But the degree matters. If looting and destruction is occasionally rewarded, it can be a manageable expense. If it dominates the industry, even if not via conscious malice, we've got problems. What if every high-paid 'top baseball player' for 10 seasons running was a bust? Then something in scouting or compensation would have to change, a lot.

Is it [a crime], actually?

Yes. A manager who promises investors the possibility of positive return, but knows he has purposefully designed things so that the investors are guaranteed to ultimately lose, while the manager gains, has at the very least engaged in criminal fraud.

So to pull off net-losing strategies within the law, a manager should deceive himself as well as his investors. Fortunately for this class of managers, a whole industry of external rationalizations was spawned by the potential profits.
interesting philosophy didn't come around until hume and kant. post hume and kant hasn't been all that interesting either.
Two displays in one laptop?  This makes the netbook market look sensible.
This leaves blue "snow" artifacts on Safari 3.2.1. Seems like there's a bug in Safari's rendering.

Cool effect though.
Ask HN: Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN?
I thought the purpose of the site is to aggregate links that people in the community find "interesting." Shouldn't it be a prerequisite that someone at least semi-impartial finds it interesting before it makes it on here? Perhaps I misunderstand the site...
Many useful threads, I'll need to read one day:

http://searchyc.com/health+insurance
It's not that uncommon for a particular asset class to lose money for a decade. But a basket comprising the safest investments from the major asset classes should never lose money over a 10 year period. Nor should CD's lose money over a 10 year period. If they do, it's a sign the financial system has serious problems. And if the average investor is losing money, while those running the show ( Wall St., the Ivy League endowments, Robert Rubin, Rahm Emmanuel ) are making more than ever, it's a sign the financial system is not only fubarred, but down right corrupt.

The underlying issue is the dilution rate of the dollar. From 1998 to 2008 the money supply was diluting at ~10% a year. With the money supply growing that fast, and CD's are paying only ~3% a year, holding anything other than dollars seems like a good idea. So people speculate in stocks, gold, oil, real estate - anything that dilutes at a lower rate than dollars. But most people aren't good at speculating, so they lose money.

No government running a sound money system should be diluting at 10% a year. It's simply inexcusable.
I have a 5000-line, awfully written and horribly slow (but working!) patch from an offshore team that implements the rather complicated MBAFF features of H.264 in the open source x264 encoder.

I'm going to take it and make it committable.

Yes, I'm risking my sanity.
I would have told them [the VCs] to go take a long dance off a short pier.
Collaborative zombies
Finish XMPP/Jabber support in Mibbit.

It's a ridiculously overcomplicated horrible format designed by committee :( Seems like a good job to pick though...
Not entirely, no. Some people need input and an unbiased pair of eyes on their startups, and this is a great place to get it, or someone who posts a blog entry they think others might find interesting or beneficial, it's worse not to share your knowledge with others.
Wow!! this is amazing... waiting for Doom II clone in Javascript :)
"Paul Graham said that most philosophers have been wasting their time. Now I'll refute the statement that all philosophers have been wasting their time. Also, speculation about neuroscience counts as philosophy as long as the people involved call themselves philosophers."
You can experiment with some functional ideas in Python, though -- once you're familiar with basic Python, exploring the stuff you can do using higher-order functions is likely to be quite educational, with the caveat that (in that language) recursion will blow up on you when it gets too deeply nested.

So, while it doesn't really support FP fully, it's probably sufficient for basic FP from a pedagogical standpoint. (I also think it's one of the better candidates for a first programming language overall.)
Interview with Clay Shirky
it. made. my. machine. very. slow.

Interesting, I guess. What purpose though other than "neat"? I'm trying to come up with a UI need it would fulfill, but can't.

Mind you, I love neat for the sake of it, and if that's the intent, well and good. But wondered if there was something else I was overlooking.
I'm sure someone else has thought of it. But I can't remember reading it anywhere else.
I'm going to be improving metapaw-dip: http://www.metapaw.co.uk/projects/metapaw-dip/

At the moment I'm working on automatically generating maps from a small base dataset, and shortly I'll start working on a Django based wrapper to host this for many people's use.
Yes and no. There are cultural issues that cause Lispers to build not "a package system" but "a (complex) meta-system with which you can build your own package system", but I think there's still a recognition that the situation today is pretty lousy.

It sure seems like we've had ASDF forever, but it only dates to late-2002 -- before that, we had mk-defsystem (which was even worse). I think ASDF will turn out to be one of those things that people only used because we had no alternative. If XCVB is good, ASDF could die a very quick death.
That was kind of what I was getting at...soon, we're going to be seeing lots of picture-filled presentations on AJAX, where every other slide is a profanity. ;-)
A lot of mathematicians who think about how to practice to become better mathematicians draw a distinction between exercises and problems. Both are important, but problems are especially important.

"It is perhaps pertinent to make a comment or two here about the problems of the text. There is a distinction between what may be called a PROBLEM and what may be considered an EXERCISE. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little, if any, original thought. Thus, after a student beginning algebra has encountered the quadratic formula, he should undoubtedly be given a set of exercises in the form of specific quadratic equations to be solved by the newly acquired tool. The working of these exercises will help clinch his grasp of the formula and will assure his ability to use the formula. An exercise, then, can always be done with reasonable dispatch and with a minimum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require thought on the part of the student. The student must devise strategic attacks, some of which may fail, others of which may partially or completely carry him through. He may need to look up some procedure or some associated material in texts, so that
he can push his plan through. Having successfully solved a problem, the student should consider it to see if he can devise a different and perhaps better solution. He should look for further deductions, generalizations, applications, and allied results. In short, he should live with the thing for a time, and examine it carefully in all lights. To be suitable, a problem must be such that the student cannot solve it immediately. One does not complain about a problem being too difficult, but rather too easy."

"It is impossible to overstate the importance of problems in
mathematics. It is by means of of problems that mathematics develops and actually lifts itself by its own bootstraps. Every research article, every doctoral thesis, every new discovery in mathematics, results from an attempt to solve some problem. The posing of appropriate problems, then, appears to be a very suitable way to introduce the student to mathematical research. And it is worth noting, the more problems one plays with, the more problems one may be able to pose on one's own. The ability to propose significant problems is one requirement to be a creative mathematician."

Eves, Howard (1963). A Survey of Geometry volume 1. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, page ix.
I definitely plan on switching to gnip. As i said, tweetweather is just something I put together after work the past week, grabbing from the search api was the quick and easy solution to getting tweets into the system.

Gnip rocks.
I see some of the blue snow artifacts on firefox 3.0.5 too so it's probably not a bug in Safari.
hey mate, don't be a hater. it's an uber cool effect.
It may be premature to say that it's neat just for the sake of neatness. It may not have a direct UI usage, but we could probably learn something about mouse events and drawing by examining the code, for example. Also, from a UI perspective, you migh be able to make mousing more efficient by dragging UI elements around in a cloud around the mouse. (You could fade them out so that they were just barely visible, for example, until you right-clicked or shift-right-clicked to pin them down and use them.) It looked, at first glance, like the effect was running on a Canvas, so I don't know how easy it would be to do outside of one.

Also, call it mkn's first law: There's always something you're overlooking. (Where 'you' is the hypothetical you, not you in particular.) :o)
Yea, my proc usage went through the roof. Is it because of the "hit detection"?
This bit is quite funny:
Function to work out approximate width of a word based on Arial font letter widths.

Probably possible to do by putting the word in an offscreen div with style set so it's only as wide as content, then checking the size of the div...

function fontWidth(word){
// arial font
var S = "a68b68c68d68e68f31g68h68i31j31k68l31m108\
n68o68p68q68r39s68t39u68v50w90x68y68z68A\
90B90C90D90E90F78G98H90I28J59K90L68M108N\
90O98P90Q98R90S90T68U90V90W130X68Y90Z68'\
30.42!29?68-41/41=72";
var l = word.length;
var s = 0;
var x = 0;
var c = 0;
for(i=0;i<l;i++){
c = word.charAt(i);
x = S.indexOf(c);
if(c>="0" && c<="9")s+=69;
else
if(x>=0)s+=parseInt(S.substring(x+1,x+4));
else s+=68;
}
return s/10;
}
There would be something very wrong if every baseball team managed to lose every match.

But the value of baseball comes from entertaining, not from winning, so I'd rather put it this way:

There would be something very wrong if you would suddenly realize that every game you saw in the last ten years had unconsciously bored you to death.
I'm not a college student, but I have been taking advantage of a little bit of a slowdown during the holidays (sales always drop off a bit for a couple of weeks).

I'm working on a chiptune version of Abbey Road, in order to teach myself a few new trackers that I've never used before (the last trackers I used heavily were OctaMED and ProTracker on the Amiga). I'm mainly tinkering with Renoise, which is an awesome multi-platform modern tracker with VST/LADSPA support. But I'm also playing with a cool sounding SID emulating tracker called Goattracker, and NitroTracker for the Nintendo DS. I probably won't finish all of Abbey Road in two weeks or spare time, since it's quite elaborate, and I'm only about half of the way through one song two days in, but I'm sure I can make three or four nice tracks. And I'll probably get faster as I get more comfortable with the tools.
Working on finishing up two web applications and an iPhone app that compliments one of the web apps.

Also some updates to my current iPhone apps (http://www.awaytalk.com).
Why should it be lame to point to my own work? There's nothing wrong with that at all. A lot of things people are linking to are projects or writing that they have invested some serious time or thought in. They ought to be proud to point out what they've done.
We have that, it's called a context menu.
I suspect students could be plotted on both axes, and probably several others (amount of background knowledge, for example) as well.

It seems clear that smart/passionate will generally do well and stupid/CCL will generally fail, but that leaves smart/couldn't-care-less (know-it-alls who won't listen to anything in class) and stupid/passionate (who will probably need to put in extra time, but have a good chance).

Everyone will fall somewhere in between, of course - those are just quadrants.
Cool! I love shovebox. iPhone sync would be rad
Going to take a nice week long break away from my home in Austin. For the past 4 months I've been cooped up in my place trying to get everything put together with this mobile app company. It's been many late nights and 7 day work weeks... time to recharge.

Spiked egg-nog... here I come!
You say jsomers is defending analytic philosophy in this section.

Later jsomers says philosophy was bad but has reformed.

So on the one hand he defends old philosophy. And on the other he claims philosophy was bad, but is OK now because it has reformed. These defenses are incompatible.
It's funny, now that Javascript interpreters are getting fast and decent effects can be written in Javascript you start seeing lots pages like this.

I say it's funny because it reminds me of the explosion of similar animations that were created in Flash a few years around the time that Flash 5 and 6 came out. Animations that were mostly cool and revolutionary-seeming because of the technology rather than the actual content.

I'm not knocking this type of creation--I was really fun time to be working in Flash with so many 'breakthroughs.' Now it's cool to see a similar surge in creativity happening in a language that is even more ubiquitous than ActionScript.
Obama takes a stand for making decisions based on science and facts rather than ideology
Making a local politician tracker for Chicago.

Basically a Chicago clone of this:

http://prototype.nytimes.com/represent/
I'm a grad student. I'm working on a way to turn papers written in latex into a form that's readable online, because having to print everything is so 1990s. I start from the output of latex2html and go from there. For instance, if you hover over a citation, I pop up a bubble showing you links to author homepages, the abstract of the cited paper, download links, etc., even though the latex bibliography didn't specify any of those.

Edit: I do this by doing a full-text search on the citeseer database, which is a couple gigs uncompressed. Right now I'm grappling with the xapian library: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/xapian-python/ If someone knows an easier/better way to do this, I'd love to hear. Thanks.
For my last winter break, I'll be working on completely re-doing a web-based game I made. I'm thinking I might also work my way through a simple book on NLP (http://www.nltk.org/book).
My personal favorite is ⌘+⇧+4 in conjunction with GrabUp.

http://www.grabup.com
We don't really create-- we merely transform physical resources from one form to another

If I were to give you an equal mass of rocks in exchange for everything that you own, would you be equally wealthy (equally secure)?

If society were instantly given equal masses of rock and mud in echange for all of the artifacts that it had created over the past 100,000 years, and if in the same instant all of any otherwise technology gains of the past 100,000 years were also lost, would the 6.7 billion people alive today be equally as secure as before that instant change? If not, why not?

If humans have been able, over the past 100,000 years, to transform matter and energy into forms that better serve their security, why might they suddenly no longer be able to do that?

If nothing has been created, the how is it that 6.7 billion people today exist in relatively high security where previously only a handful of thousands could exist and in relatively low security?
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080425101050.cni2ks3...

Regarding energy:

Did our developed energy resources exist before humans created them? Are they imminently running out? Is general entropy imminent?

.

The matter/energy that exists naturally tends to either be too general to best serve human security, or if specific tends to be so in suboptimal directions. Do humans not improve their own security by transforming general and chaotically-specific resources into specific and orderly ones tailored to their own security needs? Are humans running out of general resources and chaos with which to transform into security-enhancing resources? Are humans running out of the creativity that has been driving this 100,000+ -year-long improvement in human security?
Future iPhones to wield OpenCL acceleration
Actually, his "obsession" has been life long so she must have known what she was getting into (or perhaps its even why she was attracted to him). :-)

He gave a very similar talk at this year Maker's Faire in the Bay Area. On display, they had quite of few his prop recreations he's made since he was a teenager (e.g. Indiana Jones whip). His attention to detail is simply awe inspiring.
Gonna read more Feynman and Popper.
The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless.

It forces you to bite the bullet and really think about how systems must be able to give rise to intelligence, regardless of their physical makeup.

The wikipedia article that you linked has this quote:
"The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as 'the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false.'"

Incorrect arguments are an important step in establishing correct ones, which is a central point of jsomer's argument.