skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As soon as I saw the title, I knew Lisp would be Zen. I don't think that takes any thought -- regardless of their actual qualities, they have the same mystique.
I guess people make spelling mistakes when they're frustrated by localizations.
this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...making a PC is easy....so what happened to the 10,000 strip-mall PC makers?

show me real examples outside of the web industry that this theory is even remotely correct
Google App Engine Pricing Model
Another reason threads haven't become more popular is because operating system support is generally poor.

I'd say that on Windows threads are first-class citizens and are very actively used. Windows even comes with a ready-to-use thread pooling and ability to run arbitrary code in different thread contexts. Moreover, Windows-specific documentation often has a special paragraph regarding thread safety for every clib/stl function.

When I moved to Linux world I indeed found that threads aren't treated well. In fact I still don't have a full and deep understanding of threading outside of Win32, I suspect because different UNIXes have them differently. Perhaps it's the lack of POSIX standardization what makes them scary.

I've built a few multi-threaded windows server-like services and never found them to be particularly difficult to grasp or debug: system APIs, docs and tools were excellent.

To summarize, only after becoming a full time Linux/OSX programmer I finally started to see why Internet is full of "threads are evil" articles.
I think it's effectively like buying an advertising and PR firm to work for you in the job market. Word of mouth and demonstrable talent substitute for the expense to the degree to which you stay in the (sadly) smaller circles who aren't significantly influenced by PR and advertising.
I think in this case the Ruby community is a trend follower instead of trend setter.. I guess Emacs (or vim) is being used by open source folks for two decades.
Consciousness is a bug.
Have you tried Wesabe? Similar Firefox extension but with a strong community and more features. Not to mention more people working on it!
College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did.

I'm not sure that's true - in the UK at least, universities often issue press releases when one of their alumni does something notable (like becoming the Prime Minster of Thailand for example, which Oxford is crowing about at the moment).
Before I get flamed out of existence - I use a Mac, and I use TextMate, and I use Emacs. With that disclaimer out of the way -

This guy bought a whole different platform just so that he could run a different text editor? This feels like putting the wrong cart in front of the wrong horse.
i recommend people always use -nw, it will ensure that on the client or remote, you always use emacs the same way. now kill all the menubars and other stuff too...if you are going to use emacs, use the keyboard and the help system. that is the emacs-way
I use Poderosa daily. You have to modify your .inputrc to suit it, but asides from that it's stable and has a decent UI, unlike Putty.

It's also significant more stable than Putty Connection Manager.
Sun's own Java Trails online tutorials are very good. They cover a lot of ground with minimal blabbering (unlike books whose authors are paid by page count).

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/
So then, noncompetes should be allowed for 4-person startups, but disallowed for Walgreens.
you mean like this one? : http://www.blog.juliendesrosiers.com/

I know, shameless plug...
That reminds me of the one about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa.
Nice to know about this approach, but I'm more concerned about non-fatal errors. They are the vast majority and they continue to corrupt your data for months, even years. These are the ones that are so hard to find and reproduce.

I've always thought that if something was wrong, I'd rather have it crash and burn that to continue to run unnoticed.
Indeed. Should be registered with the proper spelling (http://googlealready.com) now.
Disqus and Facebook Connect under the mistletoe
The US Federal government subsidises Nuclear power to the tune of many Billions per year. There is not a single nuclear power plant that works as a 'commercial' entity. I.E they do not pay commercial rates for insurance

Every country that has a 'research' nuclear reactor spends hundred of million to do 'big' science.

Australia installed a new reactor about 4 years ago and it has been off-line for most of the last 2 years. Costing over circa US$ 75 million to import medical isotopes rather than producing them within Australia. Producing isotopes is the main use of the reactor.
As the original poster stated, please don't kill me if you are offended. Its aim was humor.

Bit of a tangent, but I never understand why people say this. Don't they know that humor is one of the most potent weapons? If someone is offended, will they be less offended that they are regarded as laughable?

(Tangent to the tangent - this reminds me a little of Jon Stewart hiding behind "But I'm only a comedian" every time someone wants to talk about the politics in his satire. I happen to like his satire a lot and have no particular objection to his politics, but this is just disingenuous.)
Over the summer an IT guy I knew lost 2 fingers in a sailing accident, it certainly makes the job more difficult.
I am almost certain Zittrain had prophecised an extension of the tethered iphone model to the desktop. Intresting turn of events if it comes to pass.
Reddit's a unique case because their initial user base (like News.YC's) consisted of other YC founders. And since they couldn't afford any form of promotion that cost money, news of the site spread mainly from those users.
? I meant QM not including General Relativity etc. I think this joke has been stretched way past the breaking point but what did you mean?
Discover finally settled a suit with Visa and Mastercard over anti-competitve practices: http://www.reuters.com/article/bankingFinancial/idUSN2735065...

FYI, Discover's been around since 1985 (introduced during '86 Superbowl), suit was filed in 2004 (along with a similar one by AmEx) and finally settled in October for $2.75 billion.
"Ruby - A mixture of different languages and ideas that was beaten together into something that might be identified as a language."

Is that really true? I've never heard anything like that about Ruby. It does, however, sound very much like PHP. From the PHP FAQs:

"Much of [PHP's] syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in."
Agreed. It also seems like he's switching editors for similarly misled reasons. Sure, trying it out because everyone seems to be switching is fine, and if you like it better sure, stick with it. But to switch editors "just because everyone else is doing it" seems uninformed and very "me too me too!"
The general purpose software problem quickly goes away when we consider online apps like Google's suite and whatever webversion of iPhoto, iWork etc Apple would come up with. Developers may not want to write apps for both an iPhone and a netbook, but they will if that's where the audience is.
...or the vim way ;)
One of the most interesting and thoughtful papers I've read.
In the past, I was a big fan on omnioutliner (mac) for that purpose, but now I'm sold on TaskPaper (also mac). Check out the screencast to 'get it'

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper
Just because they don't talk about it, doesn't mean they don't have ideas and plans on how to proceed.
the transmission of power between generations
is also happening within the startup environment. How? Successful entrepreneurs are funding their friends or friends' friends. Furthermore, VCs are known to fund people within their close network. Power Bloggers are known to cover their friends' startups or their friends friends'.

Luckily technology is fairly cheap, learning how to do stuff is free and only requires commitment and time so we can still turn our ideas into products and put it in front of millions of people without bloggers, angels, vcs.....
ARM & Embedded Linux Craigslist
This article is full of sources that can help you to design an ARM for your embedded application. You'll find all the software and hardware tools you need.
Don't worry about it--I can see how one might think that we were just trying to increase clicks. That being said, once we have a moment, we'll certainly be fixing this.

Besides, I expect to be the site's most active user. The last thing I want is to be hampered by extra clicks. :-)
"These days, everybody's talking about cloud computing - the notion that computing's future lies in web-based applications and services and not in software tied to the desktop ... Yet still, some programs remained tied to the desktop with seemingly no plans to move elsewhere. iTunes is one of those programs."

Rather than examining the reasons that iTunes has stayed out of the 'cloud', the author is assuming the cloud is always a Good Thing.

I wonder how long it would take to sync your 160GB iPod from 'the cloud'.
The huge problem with Ni-Zn batteries is the active material actually flows downward with gravity, until the anode and cathode eventually short out. I believe this is termed "zinc migration". Many companies have claimed to solve this problem (see Evercel) but were wrong.

This effect plus dendrite growth yields a very short cycle life, making Ni-Zn unsuitable unless really cheap.
The abundant fossil fuel you’ve never heard of
The timeboxing described here works well for me because it makes me just sit there and start. I've noticed doing that with other things. The reasoning is if I have to sit here anyways, might as well work.

Just so you know, I set up my office along pg's suggestions. I had moved off all non-work-related stuff to the desktop computer.

I've also been using Pivotal Tracker. The gig I'm working on had pulled in Hashrocket, and they insisted on it. The stories are chunked down to easy bite sizes, so I've been able to crank it out.

The real test though will be doing this for the non-consulting projects, where the payoff is going to be far far away...
I use a PC with Windows, will it work?
interviewing at facebook? my guess is that there will be plenty of openings soon enough, even in this downmarket. the fb crowd have been busting their asses old-skule/90s style...and for what? zuck put the ix-nay on their get-rich quick scheme of selling their options, and now a new valuation discussed for the company is just over $1 billion dollars (down from $15 billion). yawn! any notion that the FACE stock bubble would resemble YHOO 1999 or GOOG 2007 are just hopeless dreams at this point. by time markets recover in 2012, fb itself may be passe. i wouldn't be shocked to see more early burnouts throwing in the towel there.

yeah yeah, there's more to work than money. but that logic will only work for a few months. after a couple of years of 2am nights, you're going to want to get paid.
The Bailout Reader
The Loeb Classical Library and a missed marketing chance
There's a few more things worth noting here.

You track your interruptions. It is similar to the "trusted system" in the GTD system. It is also similar to meditative techniques where you let go of extraneous thoughts instead of trying to actively suppress them.

By the way, I've only read the first two chapters which is maybe 10 pages long. I haven't bothered to read the rest of it, though I'll probably add it as a pomodoro. I don't really plan on using it in a team setting and I was itching to get started on stuff after reading it.

As for the kitchen timer, I wrote shell two shell script that tells mplayer to play the Final Fantasy 6 harp theme after 25 minutes using the 'at' daemon.
Here's another JS-based syntax highlighter: http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/

And here's what Google Code uses:
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
Is Google Squandering Its Biggest Asset?
Why not make a docking station for the iphone. (I saw it on a blog a while ago but I think it was just photoshopped or something)

So it's a screen and a keyboard, and your iphone pops in somewhere for the guts of the computer. You even use the iPhone screen as the touch mouse. I bet people might pay 300 or even 400 for that.
oh come on, in this economy, if anyone had a "make $$$ NOW" button under their desk, it would have been pushed long ago. their secret plan was to ride a bubble in the markets, but thats over. i feel bad for the rank and file, if zuck had done an ipo in mid-2007, the rank and file could have made some serious cash.
California has banned non-competes for a while now, and I have yet to see any numbers indicating a mass migration of employers.
The letters on that blog are spaced so far apart as to make it totally unreadable. It reads like a dang word-find puzzle.
"In my opinion, no self-help guide applies for everyone; we all have our own strengths and vices."

This one seems to work particularly well for me precisely beacause my perception of time fits better with the sequenced than the abstract. I also dislike multitasking and I've been practicing concentration exercises and catching internal interruptions outside of work anyways. I can leverage a lot of things I already do. Not everyone is going to be able to do that.
Thanks for posting this - it's an excellent reminder.

Funny enough, I actually have a long rant I wrote that I was about to publish on my blog this morning.

It's completely finished, and sitting in my drafts. I read it over this morning and considered that perhaps ranting about how people I know don't know how to use computers isn't very productive. It won't help anyone else improve their abilities, and it certainly won't make me any more helpful as a teacher.

And now, today I come across this - a nice coincidence and a reminder that just because I'm good at something, that doesn't give me the right to be rude to others who have come to me for help.
Who says you have to cancel the card? Just don't use the thing.
I've been using a timer on the computer. I think a ticker might drive me nuts, but I get what you mean by the ticking sound.

I've been using something similar for my meditative practice, only I use incense. I sit there until the entire stick burns off. What ends up happening is that I subconsciously associate the meditative state with the smell of sandalwood incense.
You are making assertions about what the man wants. Have you talked to him about that? Do you have any basis for your defamatory assertion whatsoever, other than observing that the WSJ has not yet published a Letter to the Editor from him?
Certainly, once you get some momentum your startup will survive or die based on how good it is. But if I hear cperciva correctly, had it not been for his credentials lots of users might not have even tried tarsnap to begin with, and I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now, even though the product would be the same.
Dr. Lenat still refuses to disclose the source code of Eurisko. He is even on record as having claimed that it was "lost", which seems unlikely.

What is more probable is that the program's much-hyped accomplishments were done with substantial human hand-holding a la Deep Blue, and the author will not risk his decades of academic prestige by allowing us to see the code and judge how high it could have flown on its own.
You could make the case. To me, Ruby looks like a strange hybrid of Python, SmallTalk, and Perl.
This guy bought a whole different platform just so that he could run a different text editor?

Well, yeah. Sure. If I saw someone running TextMate, and I didn't know enough about emacs to realize that it's a legitimate alternative, dropping everything to run TextMate would be a very smart move. Your editor is a really important tool!

There's no question that I would switch platforms for emacs. Not that the issue ever comes up, because emacs is open-source, and cross-platform, and (for better and for worse) is not tightly integrated with any particular GUI library. So once you learn it you never have to stop using it for any reason other than personal preference. Which is probably one of the reasons why all of these folks are abandoning TextMate for it.
I actually have a new HDTV with rabbit ears. My parents also have a new HDTV, but with their old cable box. We get HD with a cheap antenna, but they don't because they have not upgraded their cable box. I believe it's a pretty common scenario.

Another benefit to the rabbit ears: There are more channels offered via DTV than with the old analog system. We get 16 now, compared to 9 before (see http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/12/15/over-air-digital-...). Cable owners might get a chuckle out of this, but free TV plus netflix is really all we need.
GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment
I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now

That's the mistake. The number of users you get long term depends more on the "interest rate" than the size of the initial seed. E.g. Google.
That doesn't seem plausible; people with Asperger's are harder to manipulate, not easier, especially when they're smarter than you are. Although Asperger's creates its share of frustrations, being unduly influenced by one's emotions and easily influenced by other people's opinions are not among them.

That said, it might be what the person who posted the BusinessWeek article was thinking about, if he's a fucking idiot with a neurotypical-centric attitude problem.
Because it is positive sum - which means that it creates value. Fiduciary, insurance companies gain more than you, but you gain non-fiduciary value (tranquility etc).
Agreed. On my gentoo systems, I just compile emcs without X support. Makes life easy. Also, one critical skill when using emacs is learning to modify the .emacs.el file as time goes on. Over the years, the little things I accumulated in this file make using emacs a much more pleasant experience.
The vast majority of non-competes are not "mutually beneficial". In order to meet that qualification, the agreement would have to entail some form of compensation during the period that former employees are barred from working for a competitor.
It would seem like good policy for a company built on the premise that everyone should share their information to actually share their information. I'm not saying that they don't have ideas and plans on how to proceed, I'm just saying that if they were really confident about the viability of those plans, they'd be more vocal about them.

As it is, my own guess is that facebook's business plan involves selling the personal information of its members. This would be the most obvious commodity and also the most obvious reason why facebook wouldn't want to talk about their business plans.
Just goto any US university teaching Comp Sci
A counter-example: think about tainted food. When you unknowingly buy and eat tainted food, you get screwed. When you don't get insurance, everyone else is screwed. That's why tainted food is a classical case for information, not regulation. Just stick an ol' label explaining that it contains dioxin, and let the free market decide.

Of course, that's not what happens. So the harm limited to self argument does not apply.
analyst, n. : one who speaks from his ass

Look, it's very simple: iPod Touch. Sure, it isn't a "netbook", but it is a relatively cheap device running a stripped-down Mac OS X optimized for a smaller screen and "cloud computing" without cannibalizing higher-end sales, while having an ecosystem of third-party apps though an Apple-controlled store. Can I have this guy's job now?

Why would Apple choose to further fragment it's product line by entering a segment that their CEO has specifically said they aren't going to enter, when they could just continue selling devices with much of the same functionality in a market where they have no significant competition? Because of a larger screen and a keyboard? Oh please.

It probably behooves the larger PC OEMs to get on the bandwagon because they compete much more directly with ASUS, et al. in that they sell systems that run the same software, but meanwhile, Apple is selling scores of perfectly capable network computers to people who still think they're buying a music player or a cell phone.
View -> Page Style -> No Style is your friend.
Take a look at http://www.javapassion.com/

Some nice tutorials on several aspects of Java.
I'm willing to pay good money for a three-hour video on using Emacs for Rails.
Applications to top schools are extremely competitive; I could easily see 50 SAT points making or breaking an application. I was under the impression that these days your application has to be more or less perfect to even have a chance to get into an Ivy League school, unless you're a legacy or a URM.
"History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly."

Can we assume that pg is in favor of restoring the estate tax?
And most universities make a big deal about any Nobel prizes.

And I've seen in Australia a follow-up 6-12 months later to see if you got a job / further study.
But I've never seen a substantial follow-up of the average population of a uni.
Scott Adams Blog: The End of Capitalism
PG, I enjoy your essays a great deal. Often while reading the content I click on your numerically referenced notes. Clicking on the numbered reference takes you to the details of that note. Please link the number in the notes section back to the location in the essay. This way I can click the note in the text and read the note and then click the note reference to return to the essay content and continue reading. This will prevent me from having to scroll back up to place where I left off. I would appreciate this user interface improvement. Thank you again for your thought provoking work.
Microsoft Internet Explorer users told to switch browsers over 'zero-day' flaw
I'm not surprised. Regardless of how strong the economy actually is, many people feel it is doing poorly; they expect job losses and pay cuts and will thus be more tolerant of smaller raises. Companies will naturally take advantage of this expectation to save money on payroll and reallocate it to more vital areas. This paragraph was particularly telling:

Meanwhile, workers in the construction, engineering and pharmaceutical industries are projected to see above-average salary increases -- as high as 4.5% in construction and engineering. In addition, research and development professionals can also expect to see increases of about 4.0%.
Aha, that explains why resumes are so useless: a resume is a listing of credentials.
Remember Beacon? They do. They're careful.
I had a slightly different take on it: Scheme as Zen, and CL as Tibetan Buddhism, which has added deities and other more complicated theology back into Buddhism, sort of like the complexity of CL.
I certainly have no evidence, as I mentioned I completely stopped reading it when Murdoch took over. Perhaps he will allow it to maintain it's quality. I've followed him for years, he used to own the South China Morning Post, at one point one of the few english papers available in Hong Kong. His flip flops with respect to the chinese government have certainly convinced me we don't share a lot of values.

I don't really watch TV at all, but occasionally view Fox in airports and such to keep up with what is on TV. I'm amazed that a lot of people actually watch that sort of thing as serious news.
I can do better:

"Don't."