skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they do look like they have fun: http://images.google.com/images&q=rollercoaster+people
,but that doesn't mean I want to live in a rollercoaster
I'm trying to figure out who the target audience is for this blog post.

I get the feeling it's "people who email Seth Godin"...
Piano. Classically trained, but after I dropped out of college (for unrelated reasons), I spent a couple years playing in cover bands, church organ, piano bars. Sadly, after getting into computers, I haven't touched it for 15 years.
Fail into what? If the video card isn't supported, it's not going to fail into anything really usable.

It's funny that that most people would be happier if you tell them something can't be done than if you gave them some obscure bash incantations. I'm hoping the linux community won't come to regret this influx of new users.
A lot of things that seem cool but useless turn out later to be useful. Back in 1995, a lot of people thought the web itself was cool but useless.
"I'm not sure where you missed the fact that I can't play full-screen DVD's (both discs and iso's) in ubuntu"

No, I didn't miss that.

Something doesn't work for you under Ubuntu on a particular hardware platform? Sorry, but that fails to convince me as proof that Ubuntu's not ready for prime time.

Windows has stupid failings on some hardware. Apple dodge the bullet by controlling their hardware but I'd be surprised if Hackintoshes (or Darwin) were consistently stable on all arbitrary platforms.

Does not work for me != Useless.
Warner Music adding social networking to websites
I should probably qualify my original post by saying that I don't think I could live on 36K/year in NYC indefinitely. If I didn't have the low-paying job, my runway would disappear in 5-6 months just like the OP. As it stands, I take about $250 out of my runway a month, which means it will last much longer.

I don't really know of "less obvious ways" - what I do seems to me fairly obvious.

1) Rent - I pay $620 a month for a room in Brooklyn that fits my needs in a large apartment where a lot of other people live that's 20 minutes away on the subway from Manhattan (where I would assume the OP works). That's fairly low by anyone's standards, and I intend to keep it that way. I know that if I were to move further out (or, let's say, move out of NYC) I would be able to get a larger place for that kind of money - but the point is that I don't need a larger place, so the "per-square-foot ratio" doesn't bother me at all. I have my own room. Ambient noise coming from the living room or from someone else's room is sometimes an issue (I live with musicians). Earplugs or headphones solve that.

The utilities are split between everyone in the house, the addition is fairly negligible.

1a) This is a somewhat unhelpful generalization, but it has been my experience that someone who was working for a hedge fund in New York is usually not the type of guy that will easily get along with a bunch of pot-smoking musicians that live in a recently gentrified but still somewhat ghetto neighborhood in Brooklyn. However, the OP left and became an entrepreneur, so his soul may still be intact.

2) Food - there was a post sometime ago on how do startups minimize on food expenses. I believe PG's quote was "Rice and beans. There's about 1000 variations".

3) Dating - don't go to expensive restaurants where you are going to lose $150 in one night. A coffee in a local coffee-shop and a walk in the park or on the riverfront - $10, and you are going to have a better time anyway.

4) Sell all your old computer equipment. That old IBM X31 sitting on your bottom shelf that you replaced with the MacBook Pro? You can get around $300 for it on craigslist or ebay.

5) This is an anti-saving tip, but will work in your favor in the end - don't compromise on health insurance.

6) Clothing - I have maybe 2 or 3 outfits that are "date" or "interview" worthy. The rest are crappy t-shirts that I have from college.

There's no silver bullet, to paraphrase Brooks. It's like optimizing your software: you look at what your most expensive expenditures are (profiling) and you try to minimize each one of them in order.
> I can play anything by ear, I wonder if that's usual for hacker types.

I think it has more to do with how you learned the instrument. Most classically trained pianists I know couldn't sound out a Doors tune to save their life. On the other hand, once I started playing in bands, just about everybody I met could listen to a song and have it figured out within an hour.

I (a hacker type) was better than most classically trained types at sounding out music, but still had difficulties compared to most people in the band circuit. I usually couldn't really nail a part unless I found the music in a magazine somewhere. (this was pre-Internet, today this wouldn't be an issue)
The Freenode channel has been changed to ##SICP
Like almost all of his other posts, this is directed towards marketers.
Did Seth just realize he wasn't the only one receiving all those personal emails directly from Barack Obama?
This has been a huge problem across state and federal agencies for quite some time.

One day, they'll discover BCC may be applicable for some of these emails.
The wiki is here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community

Personally, I use Google and pick the link that goes to the community wiki, and avoid the forums. Most new users' Ubuntu nightmare situations seem to get started by reading a "this worked for me" sequence of commands on the forums, trying it, causing another chain-reaction of problems, spiralling to a hell of command-line operations and manual software installations that make no sense for the situation, forcing the user to finally reinstall Linux (perhaps another distro) and post angry messages online.

A related problem is that the habits used for casual troubleshooting on Windows -- clicking through menus and dialogs and changing things until the system fixes itself, downloading fixes from a website and installing them -- are generally disastrous on Linux. I suspect this is where most of the land mines on the forums come from.

Searching the wiki documentation is much better than the other two approaches for avoiding these problems.
Losing everything, and seeing it as an invitation to a better life.
Rare is the leader who can actually write well
"highly-publicized"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You write that "More explicit notations were always available and physicists, being more intelligent than computers, were capable of resolving the ambiguities to reveal the fully rigorous structure underneath."

I doubt that's true. For example, here's what Piet Hut, now a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, writes about his experiences with classical mechanics as an undergraduate in his review of SICM available at
http://www.ids.ias.edu/~piet/publ/other/sicm.html :

"Soon I went through the library in search of books on the variational principle in classical mechanics. I found several heavy tomes, borrowed them all, and started on the one that looked most attractive. Alas, it didn't take long for me to realize that there was quite a bit of hand-waving involved. There was no clear definition of the procedure used for computing path integrals, let alone for the operations of differentiating them in various ways, by using partial derivatives and/or using an ordinary derivative along a particular path. And when and why the end points of the various paths had to be considered fixed or open to variation also was unclear, contributing to the overall confusion.

Working through the canned exercises was not very difficult, and from an instrumental point of view, my book was quite clear, as long as the reader would stick to simple examples. But the ambiguity of the presentation frustrated me, and I started scanning through other, even more detailed books. Alas, nowhere did I find the clarity that I desired, and after a few months I simply gave up. Like generations of students before me, I reluctantly accepted the dictum that `you should not try to understand quantum mechanics, since that will lead you astray for doing physics', and going even further, I also gave up trying to really understand classical mechanics! Psychological defense mechanisms turned my bitter sense of disappointment into a dull sense of disenchantment."
This brings up my key critiques of libertarianism.

First, libertarians seem to enjoy attacking other political parties specific positions while taking only a rhetorical one themselves. This feeds into #2:

Second, until the libertarian party actually puts together a platform, they aren't a real party. The reason's simple: first, nobody can tell what they're really voting for in terms of deltas to the legal codebase, and second, without going in with a plan, I don't think we'd even get the libertarians to agree with each other for doing anything.

To sum it up, I haven't seen a political party that's taken a real stance, but would rather sit on the sidelines and throw stones. Call me when you have a platform, not rhetoric. I don't want argument, I spent 11 years in a college town -- I've done it to death, I want actual proposals that I can personally evaluate. Until then, all I hear is ideology, and that's the last thing I want in government.
You just brought back a pleasant memory. Back in my C64 days I wrote a program that created Bach inventions. One of my few early hacker accomplishments that impressed my non-techie parents.

For anybody who doesn't know what that is, here's Bach's most famous:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/js-bach-invention-13-rendi...

(Originally written for the harpsichord I believe.)
Let's get one thing out of the way, first: the simple fact that you can compare Ubuntu (cost: $0) with OSX ($120 + custom hardware) and Windows ($117) is utterly amazing.

You make a valid point that certain things break and take coaxing and searching message boards to work. That's definitely bad.

The point I would question is that of the UI. There are many aspects of OSX that are weird -- the mouse tracking, installing applications, setting a background color for your desktop, bringing up a terminal. Other issues exist for Windows. I can see how it's hard to detach yourself from something you're used to, though.

Those are going to be the two main issues in getting Ubuntu off the ground with average users. Having shit not break, and being close enough to users' existing habits to make the switch easy.

My hunch is that things are pretty close to where they'll end up. Linux will be an attractive alternative among techies, hobbyists, and average folks with spare/old machines. Microsoft and Apple will respond by cutting prices, and in the end, won't lose a substantial share of the market to Linux on the desktop, but suffer decreased margins. The user wins.
I think this is an excellent, well-observed piece. Credentials mattered more at a time when the measurement of effective results took longer to read so that university degrees and performance badges were indicators of the probability of future success. However, the modern age is an accelerated age and turn over of results based on performance is almost immediate. Companies have to be able to make much quicker, adaptive decisions than ever before; it's like everything is in a state of constant crisis management. Obviously the younger and leaner the company, the less baggage its accumulated and the more nimble it can be, but not always.
Larger enterprises that adapt with more localised, distributed structures are able to operate and respond as smaller units but still maintaining the strength of size.
Anything that is more based on measured results is going to be better as long as the means of measurement are also measured.
Based on the quality of books O'Reilly publishes, it's hard to view him as worthy of giving this advice.
The problem here isn't the users; the problem is an e-mail server that allows "reply all" to have this effect. Modify the server to prevent an employee from sending one e-mail to more than X other employees. You will always have dumb users, but your e-mail policy can be smart.
What are the possible ways of marketing an iPhone app?
Having now read it, it doesn't deal with my original point which is essentially:

Libertarianism risks outsourcing manufacture of vital goods to foreign states of dubious intent, leaving domestic industry to die with no means of resurrecting it in an emergency.

The closest the above reference comes to dealing with this issue is:

* with free international trade, nobody will want to attack Libland because they can get at all its resources cheaply anyway, and

* Xia won't actually be able to invade Libland because they'll be too busy dealing with their own citizens, who, impressed by Libland's affluence, are too busy trying to convince Xia's rulers to convert to Libertarianism.
On Moore's Law, Sharding and Device Driver Hell
Given this situation (two and only two competing states), libertarianism is probably less viable. In the real world, however, you have a greater number of players.

If Libland has positive economic relations with other states (as most free people seem to prefer), it would theoretically have alternative sources of food from those allies. In addition, unless Libland's government had irrationally incited Xia's actions (theoretically, an unlikely choice for a free society), other states would see this a flagrant attack on Libland and come to its aid.

The example is certainly viable for a case where one state (out of over 200 in the real world) has a monopoly on producing any essential good, or where Xia's military is more powerful than the combined strength of all potential opposing states. I don't think the example extends beyond those corner cases, however.
I almost always include something very informal (Hi <name>,) in an initial email (or in my first reply of a thread) but often leave it out in later replies. I consider it friendly, but once you start taking the email to bits and reply to individual sentences or paragraphs, there really isn't much point. You're already mid-conversation, no need to say hi again.
System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts. I just changed mine, it looks a lot better now
Same, but played trumpet in between (I find that bassists have often played trumpet in the past).
Beans and rice are fine for awhile. But when you get hungry for meat, find a park, lay out a net and a handful of that yummy cooked rice. Those city pigeons will gather round. They are very fat and tasty! Yummm!
Relevant posts:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/does-pigeon-mea.h...

Or, if you don't want to be caught with a net see
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/127077/a_profession...

And here are some posts on trapping, dressing and cooking them:
http://www.survivalistboards.com/showthread.php?p=206758

One post says pigeons were good city fare during the Great Depression.
Google Search & Google News Widgets
> You won't believe how little you can live on, if you cut out all the bullshit.

No kidding. With my first startup I was living on hot dogs and hadn't left the house for months. I had literally reduced my expenses to mortgage, utilities, food. I stretched 3 months of living expenses into a year, although I ended up not needing it as we got funded after 6 months.

My one splurge was a good suit the first time we went on a fund raising interview.
Milton Friedman is not the only person to sometimes say unlibertarian things. To start with, you can add to your list David Friedman, Ayn Rand, and F A Hayek.

Next you can add me. I think libertarianism today is too isolationist regarding war and terrorism.

But we cannot find the truth by analyzing who said what. The important thing is which ideas are right, not who said them.
I play in the church band every other week, that week involves 3 hours of practice and a 5/6 song set. I highly recommend this as this setting includes other people who require you to participate, and encourage you to play well.

Almost everyone in our band has a bachelor's degree, some have grad school, and there are a couple PhDs and an MBA. Some of the musicians are amazing.
Mentioning a specific year in this "law" really kills any timelessness you might otherwise associate with it.
Fail Fast: A Startup Funding Manifesto
Some versions do. There was a big (funded) push to get Adobe's Creative Suite running on Wine a while ago.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...
Regardless of political belief, Reagan was a prolific writer of letters that were articulate and thoughtful. I seem to remember someone collected them into a book.
Many would say O'Reilly books are good or great. How did you come to your opinion?
Both business and personal emails are read by people, not machines, so write in the same style. Just keep LOL & C U L8r 4 SMS.
Though this looked interesting, I killed it because it seemed a dubious app.
That should be - "Rare is the leader who can actually write good"
Moleskine notebooks, the original PDA
The Ultimate Flying Machine: Sexy as a Sports Car, Portable as a Jet Ski
I own a few. I also own some from Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall, Morgan Kaufmann, etc. For example, "XML Schema" by van der Vlist is just incomprehensible (I don't understand how it got passed the editor). Plus the author is by no means an expert in XML Schema. That's actually the gist of the problem with O'Reilly books: they are written by non-experts and the editorial work is poor.
Startup Interview: Rentimental Enterprises – The world’s on rent
It's called a thought experiment.
Not necessarily, I'm sure a lot of people thought, and still think, Windows is the only choice i.e. Windows = computer. They don't realize there are other Operating Systems suitable for the home user. Now that Apple is gaining in popularity and applications such as Firefox are OS neutral people have a choice, everything is evening out and that is why Mac and Linux are gaining ground.
I disagree. Functions as first class values are more important.
Your sample size sounds small, given the collection of books O'Reilly has. Regardless, even idiots can say wise things (perhaps accidentally). So, your initial complaint amounts to an ad hominem attack. Do you have a problem with the post, itself?
Lovepixel Zoom (Lovepixel + Seadragon + AppEngine)
If you are on ubuntu hardy I feel your pain. It completely blows. Perhaps this will help, the result of many many painful hours combing the forums. It seems to do the trick for me, anyway. I programmed this as a bash shortcut so I wouldn't forget.

I don't really know what the fix is when things crap out, I have just kind of tried things blindly.
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-968697.html

(?) sudo alsa reload
sudo alsa force-reload
also: look for a dialog that pops up, possibly in task bar, if it asks if reload is ok, it is. beh.

also related
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/294859
also suggested:
sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload

also:
rm /var/lib/alsa/asound.state (don't include the rm if googling for this post)
sudo force alsa-reload
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:faaeSQtYS4cJ:pennsylvania.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php%3Fp%3D6242032+gvfs+alsa&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=pl
See also corresponding blog post by the author:

http://antsyawn.blogspot.com/2009/01/lovepixel-mashup.html
http://ping.fm/ is not there yet but you two are heading into the same direction I think.
Nuclear submarines proved we can do life-support in a hostile environment for extended periods of time, not just 3 people like a space station but dozens if not hundreds. The actual problem is a power/fuel source to move mass-produced and well-understood things into space in the first place. What kills the budget right now is that everything has to be custom made for space.
My biggest problem with Ruby for Cocoa work is that I enjoy the Smalltalk message passing syntax (keyword) more than the C++ syntax (object.name). The hacks to make it work right in Ruby do not look quite right.

Objective-C fills the place C++ or C# fill in the .NET platform world. It would be interesting to see a language built for Cocoa that fills the VB role.
Is there a new trick for making these wide comments not screw up the page width? The last trick users suggested stopped working in FF4, apparently. What is the latest?
Spam Alert::CNN.com Daily Top Trojan email
I find it much easier to keep my ideas in order using a notebook instead of my iphone or other PDA. To me theres a lot of beauty in the longevity and immediacy of a notebook. They obviously fill different roles, but I really find myself reaching for a pen much more than I expected.
Ask HN: streaming shoutcast stations in flash (as3)
i was going to use minicaster, but you can't use as2 flash projects inside of as3 flash projects.

ok, fair enough, so i'll just write my own. after trying to create one sound object, let the timer run for 5 minutes, and then delete the object for garbage collection, memory steadily creeps up at a rate of 0.02 mb per second (meaning it doesn't work). so creating new sound objects, deleting old ones, didn't fix the memory leak.

so i figure: ok i'll go try eecolor's as3 streamer on google code. turns out you need to be given explicit permission from a shoutcast station because you're using sockets.

does anyone have any idea how to stream a shoutcast station in flash cs4 (as3) from any website? i'm stuck on this, unless i rewrite minicaster in as3.

one thing i may have left to try: an SWFBridge instance in each swf file, where i load minicaster and rely on the bridge for communication. does anyone know of alternatives?
You mean like the tritium that's just lying there on the surface of the moon? As soon as we have working fusion reactors on Earth that'll make the Saudi oilfields look like pocket change.
The biggest difference is that Slinkset is hosted whereas you have to host Pligg yourself, so Slinkset is going to be a lot easier to get up and running quickly. With Pligg you'll have full control over the source code, but we're pretty proud of how much control you get at Slinkset through an easy to use web interface. With this in mind it makes a lot of sense to at least try Slinkset first.

If you choose Slinkset and have any issues or ideas, we'd love to help out. Please feel free to email me: brett at slinkset.
You mean, it is ok for a publisher to release poor quality books now and again as long as the average stays good enough? I feel that people with this kind of approach are not worthy of giving this kind of advice. So I didn't read the post itself.
Silence is not a good a working strategy, I guess?
"If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more.

That's because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need."

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch08_Wordsmiths.php
Libertarianism is all about distributing power, instead of consolidating in. This results in less violations of individual liberty (you don't have governments stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, or corporations polluting the land the poorer live on, or large media conglomerates effectively brainwashing people into submission). This results in mostly and increase in prosperity for the poorer folks, while the rich of the rich might not be able to sustain their position (although there will still be rich people).