skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in Cleveland, and it was a "controversy" a few years ago when LeBron James entered the NBA instead of going to college first. People said, "He's giving up this great opportunity for an education." Huh? When Nike pays you $90M for endorsing shoes, you can afford to pay the authors of your favorite text books to come to your house and tutor you. Playing basketball in exchange for $50K/year (max) in tuition reimbursement when you could be playing for millions is idiotic. What if you get hurt? And, you're giving up what are literally four of your best earning years.

Even if not via a Rhodes scholarship, wouldn't Oxford still accept this guy a decade from now? What about attending in the off-season? I once met a guy who played football for the Cowboys in the early '80s. He attended a top-tier medical school part-time while playing and went to law school at Stanford when he finally "retired." Was he rational?

I'm all for education (or, more precisely, becoming educated), but if someone had offered me $10M/year to stare at a wall for 2000 hours a year in lieu of college for four years, I think I'd have taken the offer. Think of all the learning I could be doing now if I didn't have to have that day job!
By "expensive" I mean still cheaper than a small 1-person studio in San Francisco in the Marina.
Ask HN: Why aren't there any business-related Q&A sites?
Would somebody enlighten me, why I can't find any Q&A sites for business-related matters (such as: market research, marketing, business development), similar to what stackoverflow is to programming?

Is it because traditional businesses handle this knowledge as intellectual property, rather than an attention economy, or is it because they think it's their competitive advantage?

In either case, are there any particular reason, why applying collective intelligence to this field in a way similar to SO would not work?
In college, I worked 2nd and 3rd shift doing tier 2 tech support at an ISP. I spent most of my time doing my CS homework. The guys working 1st shift didn't have that luxury.

Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.
Not to get too far off track for HN (and hey, why don't I know you? Should get coffee some time.) but OPPL doesn't block SSH outbound, and I use Meebo for IM. I still go there every once in awhile; our office is getting crowded.

There's a whole other conversation to be had about why libraries have these crappy security gateways. Blue Socket randomly locks me out for "bad behavior", but forgets about the lockout if you browse directly to the logout handler. I keep meaning to go find the library IT guy and demanding that they allow AIM.
My experience has been different. After playing with the Colemak keyboard on-and-off for about a week, It's still growing on me. My fingers move a lot less from the home row, even when switching to Spanish.

Since I also write code, it's clear to me how it isn't that great for certain languages, because it moves the semicolon to a rather inaccessible position. But for languages that do not rely on that character to end statements, it works quite well as other symbols remain in the QWERTY standard position.

Overall I find it a lot easier to learn than I thought it would be.
Hmm - your link goes to the Zon affiliate login. Which specific Shures do you think are best?
It takes a remarkably crappy security gateway to allow this trick to work; you can't really do it through a Blue Coat or PIX/ASA, because they're doing full proxy for HTTP/HTTPS and they cut off long-lived connections.
What does this have to do with my comment, though?
Want to turn $5 million into $100 million? Here is your chance. VCs only
Actually I personally agree with you. But my aim was to get the point across, so I was covering all the bases :)
compared to a standard $72/mon min EC2 instance (add maybe $15 for bandwidth), it is. I guess I'll have to try it and see how much the added tools are worth to me.
Cal Poly SLO ... CS (left after jr. year in '00)
Exactly. Buy storage, hook up mobile device to it over a VPN, then map a network drive - done, exactly same end result, but no cloud dependency and no recurrent monthly fees.
Librarian +1
At the very least, rational U.S. taxpayers may start looking askance at why their money is being conscripted to support this slaughter.

I know some here may take exception to my description of what going on here as slaughter, but all I see is the abridgment of human rights and respect of life on the basis of tribalism,mythology, and a past criminal genocide that the victims being attacked here played no part in. This should not be interpreted as hate or anti-semitism, as it is grounded in the basic respect for all human life. I don't wish to start a flame war here, but feel free to post responses.
Haha, I just had a look the original post you were referring to and this conversation struck me as particularly funny:

unalone:
Them, and AVC, and HugotheMongoose, and KimStarr, and Huxley78. It's baffling. I've never seen something like that happen before.

Nerdlinger: So what? I signed up to post.

unalone: I didn't mention your name, so entering right now is only slightly suspicious. :-)
Illinois Institute of Technology - CPE '02

Maybe not one of the IITs you were thinking of, though.
UK e-mail law 'attack on rights'
I have a pair, and they _do_ work. Just not 100%. More like 70-80%, and certain kinds of noise are filtered out better than others. So they might not be a panacea for the OP's noise problem, but they help more than regular headphones.
I see nothing wrong with beginning the post "What bullshit". It's a concise statement of what he believes. And what's wrong with stating your belief up-front and then providing the argument afterwards?
Currently work out of my home office - have for > two years. Regularly go onto the clients' site, though, which I have found quite helpful in upping my productivity (breaks the routine, and there's something about meeting people in person that just rejuvenates.)

At first I was thrilled to work at home, and overall I still appreciate it. But I'm starting to want to have a separation of work and home environments. One of my goals for 2009 is to get my passive income high enough to pay for an office a short walk from my house (I live in a mixed-zoning part of SF, so this is certainly practical). If I'm going to work at all, that's the ideal situation, imo - physically separate spaces, but near zero time lost to commuting.

(Temporary - just until the passive income explodes and I retire to code open source full time, of course :)
When not working at a client, I work from home. I tried renting a very small office but almost went crazy from the isolation and it was not cheap. Now, when I need to get out of the house, I hit the library, coffee shops, or a Jelly (http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyinColumbus). Jellies/co-working are a great option. See what you think.
Are You Serious? (The quickest way to alienate your customers)
I'm still waiting till "It giet oan"...
Ozarks Technical Community College
The effect is the same; as soon as the bottom line turns red, the business's survival becomes acutely time-bound based on burn rate and available cash.

And yeah, there are plenty of things they could be doing to make up that 10%. But there are still plenty of ways people who insist on the old model can introduce inertia into the push for change. They understand the old model, have experience with it, and are averse to a hard bout of learning and possibly failing a indeterminate number of times before getting the new model right. Those things are hard, and come with the added risk of tarnishing their own professional image, and the image of the newspaper. It's easier in the short term to just whine.
Night security at some office building sounds like a dream job to me. I would do it for free and maybe I would even pay to do it since I would get more (computer) work done there than working out of my apartment.
So give me some of these answers then. Educate me!
It's the tram drivers that really take no prisoners :-)
I think morphing into a dead person still counts as dying.
Eventually, yeah. But not right now. I'm working for Google for now, and will see what things are like in a few years.

I think I explained why in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426341) - basically, I didn't know what to do next. So I figured doing something is better than doing nothing, and applied for jobs. We had maybe 6-12 failures, depending on how you count what a failure is. Is a great idea that turns out to not be feasible to implement a failure? How about a site that you launch that's kinda lame and nobody uses it? How bout misconceptions for what the UI should be?

Mostly, I see this as a chance to start fresh and rectify some of the mistakes I made last time. Going by http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html, we did #1 (eventually; had cofounders to start, but they all quit), #2, #8, #11, and #18. Well, now I'm out in Silicon Valley, fixing #2. I'm hoping to meet lots of cool people, increasing the pool for #1. Working at Google gives me a credential that seems quite valuable to investors, helping with #11. It also helps build my technical skills, to avoid #8. And it's sort of a career reset, so if I see a good opportunity, I can go after it, avoiding #18.

Besides, I had an idea for a project that could only be done with Google's resources. So instead of somehow finding $100M in venture capital and duplicating their infrastructure, why not join them as an employee? Yeah, it's not as financially remunerative, but they do have Founders Awards for people who make a significant difference to Google's bottom line, and the credibility of having launched a major product, even within a large corp, gives you a big boost when starting on your own.
There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
I'm disappointed that Project Cool, Webmonkey, and Dan Steinman's Dynamic Duo didn't make the list.
A $50 difference is really only meaningful for startups/individuals with zero expenses or employees.

IMO, this pricing signals: "Not for hobbyists-- businesses with actual payroll and/or revenue only, please".
Maybe in a small town public library, but you will be dealing with kids all the time. Otherwise, you won't have time. I spent years working in academic libraries and you are always expected to be doing something. If you aren't working a desk job, then it's basically like any other office job. Even if you have some boring desk job you'll be expected to be filing or labeling something or working on some part of a project assigned to you. Plus, you'll be constantly interrupted. Remember, librarians take their jobs excessively seriously and expect all library staff to do the same.

Also, the title "Librarian" requires an MLS.
I'm in the same situation. When I need a break I head to the local coffee shop. If that's too loud I'll head to school or the library. Changing scenery often helps keep the juices flowing.

I find even moving around the apartment helps. I have a movable desk, so I've been experimenting with working in different locations throughout the day.
I've sometimes thought about how I could get paid 2x, 3x, or more. As a graduate student RA it wouldn't be that hard to get 2x. Just do my computer research at a nightshift security job. But how about:
RA+security+baby sitting+baking in my portable easy bake oven!
Either that or a big support for popularization of GPG and the like.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Actually I've had that situation several times in technology jobs. It's not so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large company) and hack away.

One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in. It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground.
I won't address the article's historical claims for the same reason I won't address the Bible's historical claims:

- Addressing those historical claims would be an implicit acknowledgement of their relevance, but I believe they aren't.

- It would take a massive effort of research on my part to verify the historical accuracy of the claims, and this effort would be pretty aggravating for me since as I stated the claims are not relevant whether true or false. Also, it's disproportionally easier to make a new (BS) historical claim than to definitely disprove it so it's a losing battle.

And let's see... First August Dvorak claimed his layout is better, then there was the Fable of the keys, which said it wasn't, then there was the Fable of the Fable which contradicted that... And I'm sure there's a Fable of the Fable of the Fable lurking somewhere. So if you believe this historical BS is important, help yourself.
It sounds neat, but don't underestimate the long-term dangers of sleep-deprivation. You really would need to sleep during the day. Before trying something like this, spend some time at home during work hours to make sure that you haven't been missing out on annoying neighbours and noises while you're away.

I lived in a condo once, next to a construction site. The noise started at 8 am and finished at 4pm. I ran into a woman in the elevator, crying because she couldn't sleep and she worked a night shift.
Return to D.I.Y Ethic Erodes Service Businesses
Move. Treat the next place as an investment in your productivity and happiness.
Where to watch Obama’s presidential inauguration online
That is a seriously talented pilot. He makes it look like a natural maneuver but the margin for error was incredibly low.
Is art a product of evolution?
The whole point of Free Software is that you aren't locked in by the producer of your software. It is impossible for a Free Software or open source software project to die unless no one in the world ever uses it. If I were a founder of Jaiku I would be insanely happy because the product hasn't been killed and instead gains a new life this way.
"Puritans love disasters."
My objection is that he does not provide the evidence! He gives a bunch of sensible reasons that Dvorak might be better, but never once addresses anything the article says. You don't get the right to call something "bullshit" with out giving your reasons. If you do give your reasons, saying "bullshit" is unnecessary.
I have a hard time working from my home office (my bedroom) for long stints of time because I get bored and restless really quick. I love working in like a starbucks or something like that but I feel weird just being in there for that long and only getting like a coffee lol.
I work in Boston, live in Belmont, will definitely check out Sebastian's, thanks for the tip!
"We'll copy and paste that into the second half which are almost the same, to save some time. Now we can use the mouse to adjust some of the notes that are different in the second half."

I've been transcribing some music recently, and this is one of my big gripes with "western" musical notation: the control flow is really weak. You can't encode something as simple as "same as before, but replace the last measure with __" (much less something like simple macro substitution!). You get "repeat a section once", "repeat the last measure", and a weak form of GOTO. Even a simple score is not at all DRY, which I've found makes it harder both to transcribe and to learn.

Are there any alternative music notation systems that have more powerful features?
Lists of allegedly illegal websites always leak
> And in this specific case, you're particularly mistaken, because the situation is so much influenced by public opinion. If everyone in the world was talking now about what's happening in Gaza, the Israelis would have to stop.

For values of "world" that equal "United States". It's quite a hot topic over here in Europe, and public opinion is certainly not in favor of Israel. But that's par for the course, and it's the US that doles out the cash, as 'homme' points out.

Also, in terms of postings really influencing things... well, yes, ideas are ideas and can have influence, but on the other hand, some ideas are discussed endlessly without anyone changing their positions much, which would point to the futility of the discussions.
The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware

He missed the point of Worse is Better. Given sufficient time and effort, Lisp will eventually be just as fast as C, and will run on the exact same hardware. Heck, we're already pretty damn close to that, but it took us 50 years. C/Unix won because it got there much earlier, and it did so by compromising the design in order to get a clean/easy implementation.

As for C being easier to master, that's a highly dubious claim, and it's not even relevant. The crux of Worse is Better is that if you can't do the right thing, you simply shift the burden to the user. Bignums are hard to get right? No sweat: programmers will just have to learn to live with integers that magically wrap around when they reach 32768.

Making a language that's easy to learn is the Right Thing. Maybe Lisp failed in that regard, but that's hardly a point against the essay's thesis.
I'm in Limburg for the next couple weeks.
What does it mean to be mobile? Do projectionists hop into a car and drive from theatre to theatre kicking off movies?
I once read that one of the main difference between cro-magnon (modern human) and neanderthal was that cro-magnon had cave paintings.

FYI, both had advance tool making, and neanderthals had bigger brains too.
You have to ask someone to watch your laptop. I'm a psych major, and there was a study that demonstrated that people have a _much_ higher rate of deterring thieves when asked to look after someone's items, for some reason.

Or, get a laptop with built in GPS and 3G internet, and hack the firmware to autoemail you the location on boot-up.
Ask HN: promoting an open source product?
I am one of two main developers on a popular open source program (x264) used widely on both Windows and Linux (available under GPLv2). It has the following attributes:

1. Only one of its kind: there is no other free (open source or otherwise) program that can replace what it does. Consumer-level commercial competitors include Quicktime, Nero, and the new DivX 7. Professional-level commercial competitors include Mainconcept and Elecard.

2. Considerably better than the vast majority of commercial implementations--and arguably, for some purposes, the best in the world.

3. Already an important part of the backend on many major websites, such as Youtube and Facebook.

4. Critical to the entire business plan of many medium-size startups, such as Vudu and Avail Media.

5. Has helped me get a great deal of contracting and consulting work.

6. We own the best possible domain name for the program (www.x264.com).

However, the reason I'm asking about things here is the following problem: while we're extremely popular in the hobbyist world, in the commercial world, we're really only used among those "in the know," like Google; for every Youtube there are a hundred sites that have no idea what they're doing and don't know the benefits of using the product. Part of this is because there is no central website to provide basic information and support for the program--such are things when there are only two main developers on a project.

Worse, more and more commercial programs are ripping us off, usually in violation of the GPL. This is unavoidable, as most of these programs are sold out of China or similar, and if a crackdown ever occurs, they just change the product name again. But both for the future benefit of the project and the benefit of my wallet, I figure it is a good idea to try to spread name recognition. This is made an even bigger problem by the fact that it is apparently official Google policy to refuse to publicly acknowledge the internal use of open source products (yes, I am not kidding you, this is from directly from one of the main backend guys at Youtube)--meaning that we have to go out and say that Youtube is using us because they won't do it. Of course, it helps that our watermarks show up on their new HD videos.

Where is a good place to go to get a basic but professional-looking website for the project where we can post useful information, news updates, and so forth? I can write all the material, but I'm clueless when it comes to web design. The most HTML I've written is handwritten text, image layouts, and sometimes tables. Furthermore, what advice does HN have in general for an open source project looking to "go professional"? We already have corporate backing in the form of development resources and/or money from Joost and Avail Media, but from the outside, none of it shows through; we're just two bored hackers to everyone else.
A niche market can have millions of customers.
That makes two outrageous comments.
ISEL (Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa) - Portugal
If you're providing a messaging system analogous to email you should be covered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...

However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.
I actually hope that a lot of these businesses without a model fail. Most of these higher quality services could probably make it with a subscription model or a freemium model of some sort, but they can't do that now, because everybody else is free.

My hope for everyone involved in a start up is that '09 is the year of the business model.
Read the article again. It says:

The Home Office insists the data ... does
not include e-mails' content ...

They are effectively only keeping the headers. It still lets them do traffic analysis, of course. Beside, nothing will provoke the general populace into using crypto, it will have to be forced on them.
I'm a student and I live in an apartment near the University of Texas campus, working just a few feet from my bed. Freelancing to pay the bills, and my start-up stuff to exhaust whatever surplus I have, which is--thankfully--a lot more lately thanks to my new niche. Noise is high (especially Thursday through Saturday nights due to parties) but I like having noise going on most of the time. If I want some quiet, I can just wake up earlier.

Rent is high, but I see it as an opportunity to find a great way to work that will provide even more surplus/tangible income when I move to somewhere cheaper after school.

I focus on speed of production and finding several small gigs a day. As a designer, it's a lot easier than being a programmer in this regard; lately demand has been at $400 a day but I am only willing to supply $200-300. I don't keep a backlog either, so my rates still have room to grow. This lets me cover my bills and still keep my main focus on my startup (an iPhone app currently, but I have several projects in line, such as http://www.epictee.com).

Here's my setup. My bed is immediately behind my chair:
http://i40.tinypic.com/e69085.jpg