skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Croquet, or the future of virtual worlds
"In 1964, Barry Goldwater was much reviled for suggesting that participation in Social Security be voluntary. I thought it was a good idea then. I still think so."

A guess why Goldwater was reviled? Voluntary Social Security would be DOA. It doesn't make fiscal sense for the upper class to pay social security, so they wouldn't. That leaves the lower class' taxes going to pay for it--somehow I don't think there's enough there.

.

Yes, Social Security as is sucks.

No, we shouldn't kick it while it's down.
HN meet-up in Bangalore on Saturday 10th Jan at the Headstart conference?
I will be at the Headstart conference (http://headstart.in/) on Friday(9th) & Saturday(10th). Entry to demo pit & stalls are free.

I was wondering if anyone from HN is attending this conference, if so we could meet-up -- I am assuming there are quite a few folks here from Bangalore.

If so please send me an email or add to the comments here.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=391576
searchyc.com is your friend
I'd be there.
You're implying that Lisp is a subset of VB; do you really want to stand by that statement?
These rules actually favor being "on time", which to me is a terrible goal for a software project. Those who think software can be "on time", tend to also consider the software "done".

In reality, any project can be "on time" and still fail miserably if it's hard to debug, hard to modify, hard to support, or implodes when the lead developer quits.

You don't want software that's "on time", you want customers who are well-informed so that their dependencies are more specific and flexible than a "release date". You want them to be thinking long-term, so that they understand the true risks of insisting on early delivery (e.g. less testing, review and documentation may have been done, hence more bugs may appear in the future).
It's true you can't argue someone out of being upset, because his emotions are distinct from his understanding of the situation. But if his anger is fueled by his view of the situation, changing his view will help him get his anger under control.

You are right there is an emotional bonus when the anger feels justified, and you are right to be skeptical when I say that in a fight one of the things I'm going for is to feel stupid for being upset. I'm probably harder to convince I'm wrong when I'm angry, but still I know it's then that I need it most. The best outcome is when the problem simply disappears because I realize it was only in my head. I'm not saying I'm capable of pulling this off everytime I should. In the fight I mentioned, my friend was actually pointing out that I blew the thing out of proportion, and didn't bother convincing me about the details.

I understand now that what you mean by losing a fight is admitting you were wrong. This is indeed embarassing, but it's also your victory over yourself.

Your idea of arranging to lose a fight sounds dangerous. I once did that with a coworker. I admitted I was wrong just to end an argument. When the coworker later found out I didn't really believe I had been wrong, there was no longer enough trust to solve the problem in a discussion.
Meeting up other HN regulars seems a very good idea. Unfortunatlely, i have no plans of being in B'lore around this time. Please do put a blog post (if possible) later, on how the meet-up went for all.
We backup a complete snapshot of our customer data every hour to S3, via a Ruby cronjob.

We should be able to keep up this strategy because it's "just" a time tracking app (http://letsfreckle.com/) with fairly lightweight data.

I was originally worried that once we got into production, this'd cause a performance drop every time it ran, but so far it's all good.

As for our codebase, we're on github and our own 4 laptops. But thinking about it, we should have another system in place for that. looks around nervously
Confirmed. In a high school course they clocked our reading speed (with comprehension after). I was 432, and wasn't nearly the fastest reader in there.

I'm on the other end of the spectrum -- originally grew up in a Punjabi-speaking household (immigrant family in The States), moved to English around the time of Kindergarten.

I think it's got to do with the innate redundancy in grammar. You can focus on blocks of text and only get partial data from each, but reconstruct the entire thing in your mind in real time. With practice, of course.
As usual with such articles, this one too is low on facts and references and high on drama and exaggeration. They (the Council) don't just "decide" that from now on this is going to be legal. For it to be legal it has to become a law, and to become a law it has to pass through Parliament, a highly unlikely scenario.
Did you include transaction costs in your calculations?
Not in the sense of emotional well-being.
I set goals. For 1 month, 1 year, 5 year, 10 year and 20 year intervals.

I break them up into categories: things, learning and financial.

I start off with ridiculous goals, things that seem unachievable, at the 20 year milestone and bring them closer to reality as the time interval shortens.

I write them down and display them in my home office where I can view them in plain sight each day. I have been incredibly fortunate in achieving almost everything I've written down at the 1 year interval for 3 years running.

I refine these goals every so often which helps me realign the mental image that I have of myself. I think if you can imagine it vividly and remind yourself of this image then you'll naturally move toward becoming it.
I second this. You can sometimes get really great, durable, nice stuff for the same price or less than IKEA.
You're right that it does often come with a moral tone, but comments on HN aside, I think this guy's post is the least moralizing, least preachy, least "magical" article I've ever read on the subject. If you keep reading down to the comments, you'll find this backed up by his responses.
My high school senior year English instructor required the same of all her students. No "to be" words in any assignments. I have to say, the lesson did improve my writing.
I was deeply, deeply skeptical, but then I read a lot
of blogs and comments from people with whom I clearly
identified who said it was fantastic and absolutely
worked for them.

"Getting Things Done" - the personalised version.

I read the summaries, then some snippets, then a "Zen"
version, and thought - actually, this could work for me.
I started some of the techniques and kept track of time
spent, and lo - time was saved.

I bought the book. Despite the very high "Ginger Factor"
in places it communicates well, albeit slowly.

Now I have a GTD system running, and am putting my life
into it. It gives me my goals, it lets me review and
prioritise my projects and activities, it has delivered
my life from worrying about whether I've done things, or
whether I've forgotten something.

It helps me set goals, and it helps me see how to achieve
them.

More importantly, it helps me keep things in perspective
and do what really matters.

YMMV, but it works for me.
USAF Blogging flowchart
Hackers and Painters, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Prism of Grammar
Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup
I've been coding away on my startup for a few months, the end is nearly in sight (for the beta at least) -- my product is a product similar to Techmeme and other news aggregators, but focussing on news recommendation of quality, not speed (ala Newspapers)

Where would you advertise? Would you sponsor a relevant blog, or advertise via Google Adwords / the deck etc?

Or would you put that $1k towards "impressing" blogs and marketing tools?
Syntax-free programming
Ah, I was thinking of going to the proto.in http://proto.in on Jan 23, 24 at Bangalore.
Communism would have worked if people didn't try to game the system too. If your philosophy isn't robust enough to deal with the sharp intrusions of reality, complaining about reality isn't the solution.
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What exactly do you want to do - surely you need to ask that question before deciding which route to go (or at least let us know and we'll try to help). We use AWS extensively for scaling up and down and it is AMAZING for this. We couldn't do what we now do without it - well, without a huge amount of investment anyway. It enables us to sell our products at a decent price point. If you are just wanting to host websites then a dedicated server might be your thing. How much bandwidth are you going to consume? Sometimes a dedicated account will give you a better deal for bandwidth.
I read this essay yesterday (thanks, HN! my addiction pays off!) and got to thinking.

I used to live in a prosperous, expensive, beautiful, poorly kept up 1900s suburb of Washington DC called Takoma Park. I had downsized to a 500 sq ft apartment that I fell in love with -- it had such great design, craftmanship, and big trees outside every window, so idyllic (sigh). My wooden deck, out in the trees, was far bigger than my bedroom, and that was a plus too. It felt wonderfully like home.

I had to go shopping all the time for various things and spent a ridiculous amount of time in the car because everything was about 20-30 minutes away, the roads were bad, and the traffic was incredible.

I lived there just over a year. Then I moved to Vienna, Austria.

Now I live in an apartment in an Altbau (old building), built in the late 1800s and renovated last in the 1970s. And the 1970s here were a lot less prosperous than in the US. It's got an ancient pull-chain toilet. It's got a totally 70s custom wood built-in kitchen with large tile countertops and a broken built-in fridge, replaced with a standalone on the end of the countertop. It's got door handles that pull off, sagging floors (they're like 110 years old) that need refinishing, a couple ancient windows that barely open/close, and lots of 30- to 120-year-old furniture, courtesy my new husband.

This should drive me nuts.

I read this essay and I thought: I haven't really bought any thing in nearly 2 months, with the exception of books (Kindle) and small xmas presents. I've bought lots of food, and I've bought some experiences (museums, etc.), but not... stuff.

It wasn't on purpose. It doesn't really feel strange. I walk by lots of stores every day. We even go grocery shopping every day or two, because the stores are every few blocks and the daily bread is real, without preservatives.

My feeling of "needing" to go shopping just sort of slipped away, even though some things about the apartment irritate me & could be fixed with a trip to IKEA. Getting to IKEA is a fair amount of work since we don't have a car, but that's not really why I haven't done it. I just don't care. And I used to be a person who, once she entered a store, would take 3 times the amount she intended because shiny things caught her eye.

It's very strange, but also nice. I didn't set out to be like this, it just happened. I welcome it, but I don't entirely understand it.
Subversiveness.

Ever read The Diamond Age? You should. It's not only a fantastic novel on its own merits, and a great spec fic, but it's got a lot of pure human truth to it -- specifically regarding what goes into helping a child grow into a great hacker.
Animoto? Really?
Watch my date with the president's daughter online
Sharding for startups
CelebSRC.COM - Female Celebrities Pictures, Biographies, Filmographies, News & Discussion
They load so early because they have to guarantee that everything can happen in time. If you can reduce the time it takes to board, you can board passengers closer to the actual departure time. This allows you to squeeze flights closer together, which saves a ton of money.
DTrace gets guernsey in new FreeBSD
Are You Creating Micromanagement Zombies?
I will be there. How do we coordinate?
Tyler Cowen on reading fast:

"The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago."

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/12...
I appreciated "The Art of UNIX Programming" (ESR), because it clearly demonstrates the value of the "do one small thing well" approach to software. While it's a bit of a refresher to Unix veterans, it still has lots of interesting examples of well-designed programs that uphold Unix design principles (e.g. flexible, simple, transparent). I've seen plenty of developers over the years who've been "tainted" with the Monolithic Blob approach to software design, people who ought to read this book cover-to-cover.
That doesn't work so well with a carry-on on a full flight.
please send me an email. It's in my profile. Based on the # of replies we can find a suitable place in/around the conference.
OS X Automator
very cool tool that i hadn't noticed before
Keep that $1k to feed yourself. Start a blog, talk about your product, get yourself dugg, slashdotted, reddited, HN'ed, etc... That will bring much more than $1k of attention to your product.

Importantly, without being sleazy about it, always be happy, willing, enthusiastic to talk about your product. You may feel a little bit of shame at the beginning, but it will go away. After all, you're telling people about your product because it will make their life better right?

To start at the beginning: why haven't you mentioned your product name in this post? How about an "Ask HN: Review my news aggregator"? Seems like a missed opportunity already.
Music Industry Network
If you are involved with the Music Industry in anyway, this is the place to be!
Oh, I meant in general, it works in the same way. A cron job handles the pulling, and putting the tweets into the SQLite file - but with Rails, instead of just Ruby. I was trying to say that Rails just sits on the cron job and made it easier to parse the API. Hope that makes a bit more sense.
Impressing blogs is free. Labor intensive, but not something you can really buy.

$1k is too little to really net you much of anything. I'd hang on to it and just work for the traffic.

If you absolutely must spend it though, I'd try to optimize. Start off with a small amount of ads in various places, see what converts best. Throw $50 each at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace any other self-serve ad network that might just work for you. You can probably get a good idea for just 20% of the overall budget where the other 80% would be most effective.

I'd try to target as much as possible. With a bigger ad budget, you have to get more popular keywords just to spend it, but with $1,000 you could pick obscure, highly-focused keywords relevant to your audience. For instance with my fantasy sports startup we aimed at second rate NFL players who nobody but a fantasy sports player or stats junkie (the two being nearly synonymous) would ever Google. It would have been impossible for us to spend more than $100 a day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty efficient.
Yeah, that's fair enough - I wouldn't call it an app either, and I made it. There's a rails app in there, but it's only generating a page. Rails made the generation process much easier, though :)
Surprisingly often - a couple of times a minute. It polls every minute and that seems to be more than enough.
An interesting idea but - there is almost always a better user interface than English (or any other language used for inter-human communication).

The example in the post is a case in point - it is way simpler to just grab the little margin widget and set it where you want it. Way simpler than a conversation with the software anyway.

Imagine: "Hey computer set the edge bit erm, margin, yeah thats it, OK set the margin to two inches. Wow, that's a bit wide - maybe a bit less. Let's try one and a half inches - woops maybe I meant centimetres all along".
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Good point. SBS is indeed an exception.
If I wanted to fight (or assist) in a limited war, I'd go for a solar-powered backpack, night-vision goggles and radios (x5), water purification, gold (for money), antibiotics, and a taser.

The trick, as a sibling commenter pointed out, is that you could easily spend 99% of your time getting water, finding food, learning to communicate, etc. You have to find a way to move beyond that point -- and that's a non-trivial barrier.

It'd be much better as a team of seven or so.
I intend on doing that - I'm really excited about getting feedback from here especially - just not quite yet. Adding the final tweaks as it were.
Submitting yourself to digg, slashdot, and reddit will most likely get you about $0.12 worth of publicity. Can't hurt to try, but 999 out of 1,000 startups get 3 click throughs total that way. HN is much better.

The rest I agree with.
Our parent seems to have edited his post to be abouit desktop widgets, so you may be right about him referring to notepad equivalents (or not).

But why do you think comparing GEdit to TM is ridiculous? Both have syntax highlighting, auto indentation, inbuilt terminals, tabs, and other programmer specific features. Neither are emacs style user environments with mail checkers and other unrelated stuff. Also GE and TM have far more discoverable configuration tweaking.
My day job is as a Java developer at a retail chain-focused software firm in Johannesburg, South Africa. I'm 23, this is my first programming job.

Before that I was a political analyst for a time, but quit that profession after I realised it wasn't really my passion. Not much to tell, really.
> Yet to its advocates it's ALWAYS appropriate for a woman to breastfeed in ANY situation, and that of course is where the problems arise.

Your analogy is wrong, as it would be generally inappropriate to bring a baby to a business meeting regardless of gender.

How could it be inappropriate to feed a child? What else do you expect people to do if their infant needs feeding?

This isn't politics, it's logic.
For me diffs are more viewable with decent visualization. '14c57' doesn't compare so much with a visual expansion marker connecting the previous and current states.
Depends how and what you submit.

I can reasonably easily get a few thousand hits out of a combination of these sites, even with a very young blog. Much more with an older blog. All you have to do is write something insightful, bite-size, funny, well written, appealing, with a great headline, and get your friends to upvote you. That works on Reddit. There's no guarantee for any particular article to make it, but over a period of a couple of months any decent writer should be able to make it.

(I'm speaking from experience btw)
I think I wouldn't advertise, but maybe buy something useful with the 1000$. For example, pay somebody to write a press release, or pay a web designer to improve the looks of the site or create a cool new logo.
DD-WRT: Free Linux firmware for WIFI routers
Good walkthrough for setting up Facebook Connect on Wordpress
After some Googling and research I found this how-to on bringing Facebook Connect and Wordpress together. Thought it did a nice job.
I'd also add - get yourself written up by either ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch. They seem to be the two big'uns in the "tech-meme-like" market, and a write up by either of those will be free and will certainly be worth much more than a thousand bucks' worth of advertising.

As a side-note, if anyone knows of any way to reach the construction industry that would be as effective as TechCrunch is for geeks, please let me know :-)
While I believe that you can do this, most people wouldn't have the slightest clue how. Also, my understanding is that it's highly unlikely someone new to Digg or Reddit will get a submission promoted far. Is that not true?
2.88. w00t. Considering how limited my contributions are, that's pretty sweet :-)
Try a version that creates fart sounds when you click on he tiles? iPhone users love special effects.

OK, joke aside, I am just thinking: iPhone users love to show off. So if your app is about memory skills, maybe you could tune it so that the showing off aspect becomes more apparent ("look what I can do").

For example, if I could do stacking, I would probably show it off at any possible occasion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bDgO3_vRXQ

Same goes for guitar hero: if I could play some complicated songs on 100%, I would show them off.

Maybe your app could become something people show off, like solving the Rubik's cube.
Yes but see here for an example of the smarter solution. That is: using RabbitMQ on AWS to get the best of both worlds. Link to AWS blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/12/running-everything-on-aws...
What a silly argument: supposedly it is not a ponzi scheme, because the new entrants to the game keep earning more and more money because of economic growth.

The way the participants got the money they put into the scheme doesn't affect the nature of the scheme.
You'll definitely have to work on it to make it happen - i.e. become active on those sites. However, I only have 288 karma points on reddit and I can get a reasonable success rate when I submit stuff there. The longer your account has existed and the more active it is, though, the better, of course.

Digg is a pain in the ass in that respect. The volumes of "diggs" required to even make a blip are so huge that you'll only make it there if either you've totally gamed it (like that guy who posted that article about it recently), or if you've made it through somewhere else and you're dugg as a side effect. I stopped bothering with it because I kept hearing that the quality of the traffic is also very low anyway (very high bounce rates).

Reddit and HN, however, are relatively easy to promote to, and if you get really picked up very well on reddit (which should happen with 1 article every few months if you're good and write reasonably often), it'll spread to other places too. Articles that succeed only on HN don't seem to spread around too much, however.

The best place so far, though, was Slashdot. Get yourself slashdotted (on their main page), and you can expect 100k+ hits from it, and many links from blogs, and probably you'll get reddited, delicious'ed, dugg, etc, soon after. Be sure that your server is ready to handle it... It's a complete lottery - an actual editor has to decide whether to push your article - but if you win it, it's worth it - so submit there when you have good slashdot content, it's free and might bring you untold amounts of geeky traffic!

Bear in mind also that none of these methods guarantee anything - not even traffic, and definitely no guarantee that people will stick around. But they're not overly hard to achieve if you're a decent writer and have something reasonably interesting to say (those are the hard bits, really).
whatusername, I did search in searchyc.com before I post this question, but no result. But I swear that I read it here ... Anyway, thanks.
Managing concurrent asynchronous URL requests in Cocoa
I wonder if the authors have tried programming with AppleScript? John Gruber has a good article exploring the problem with "English-like" programming (http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster).