skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most of his points, but two of them seem a little off to me.

STOP underlining text that isn’t a LINK - There are a lot of places where underlining makes sense. If you've got the links in a different color, then it shouldn't be an issue; besides, after one click users will figure it out (please don't tell me this isn't true or I'll lose all faith in humanity).

I still really hate dynamic dropdown menus. A lot. - Sometimes they make sense. They probably shouldn't be part of your main navigation, but they work well for things like country and state/province selectors. Remember to have it degrade gracefully, though.
Impressive, but seems like some rounding issue which could be improved... If I scroll, move or zoom, as things settle, the tiles oscillate between 2 pixels, like they are being rounded badly, or perhaps one tiles position is being based on the rounded position of the last, instead of the exact position.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this ;)
These scroll fine for me, but the pages are very long, which itself could be considered a usability blunder.
My understanding is that income tax as well as NIC contributions go towards funding the NHS. Anyone is eligible for NHS treatment, even foreigners, so it seems inaccurate to say that your contribution to the NIC is what pays for your health care.
If you like this, Terry Gross did a good interview with Lessig recently:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9859100...
Having a vision and making money aren't incompatible. Every step Microsoft took towards a computer on every desk was a step towards a larger customer base. Microsoft identified a large trend in computing early on, and made money off of it. The same is true of Google, and pretty much every other large tech company out there.

Visions don't have to be altruistic. Having a vision just means that no matter how successful you become, you know what your next step will be.
What do you do for promotion?
Humen won't be around in the long term.
And arguably neither is Rothbard, who is much closer in his view on ethics to Rand than to von Mises.
I'm doing a bunch of work in Ruby/Cocoa right now and I am having no problems. Highly recommended. Thoughts:

(1)

ObjC syntax is clearly clunkier than Ruby syntax; you can't honestly compare the two languages without noting that Ruby has arrays and tables as first-class citizens, and ObjC has them only as libraries. You could stop right there; your ObjC code is littered with "dict.objectForKey" and "dict.setObjectForKey" calls, and your Ruby code isn't.

The keyword argument bridge syntax turned me off too, but the reality is that 80% of the pain is due to Cocoa's incredibly verbose method names; for instance:

OSX::NSColor.colorWithCalibratedHue:saturation:brightness:alpha

(2)

You can turn garbage collection on in 10.5 ObjC projects, but it isn't recommended; you lose 10.4 compatibility, and allegedly take a performance hit. The Ruby/Cocoa bridge handles retain/release counts automatically.

(3)

Ruby can call into C/C++ code too; there are multiple FFIs (I've done a lot of work with Ruby/DL) and if you're going to suck it up and write C code wrappers anyways, like you would be in ObjC, you can just write a Ruby extension.

(4)

This argument about "OSX revolves around Cocoa and Cocoa revolves around ObjC" is just emotional. What's the thing you can do in ObjC that you can't do in a Ruby/Cocoa project? Ruby/Cocoa can access arbitrary ObjC objects, open them up and redefine methods, or subclass them. In the unlikely event that I find something that doesn't work in Ruby, then I'll go write the 20 lines of ObjC required to make it work, and call into it from Ruby.

It's 2009. We shouldn't be writing application code directly in C anymore.
's/s\/actually\/\//s\/actually\/also\//'
The only valid use of 'actually' that I can think of is to correct someone in a smug way ('actually: synonymous with 'you idiot''). Any other use seems to be filler. Am I missing some good uses for it?

"1 + 1 is 11"
"acccctually, it's 2"
He doesn't really present any evidence as to why it works better with ObjC than Ruby, though.
"But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use."

whaaaa?
I don't write much in terms of stories, poems, blog articles, essays, etc. But I do write a lot in forum posts, emails and everyday work notes (into the tens of thousands of posts over the years).

Yet I've never got much feedback about my writing style. With ten thousand posts of careful practise, I would presumably be pretty good by now. What a wasted opportunity.
I had the same reaction, but ObjC's method names are so bad that I just wound up writing my own Ruby wrappers anyhow, so most of my code is written in Ruby idiom.

ObjC does not fill the role C# fills in .NET. ObjC is still C code. C# doesn't have pointers. It doesn't segfault. Every object has reflection. There aren't aliasing problems.
ObjC fills the place C++ fills in Win32; we still need a C# replacement.
Huh? If you have a product that works, is growing, and revenue coming in, you don't need a VC, you need a normal business loan from a bank. If you actually have money coming in and a business plan that's demonstrably working, but just need money to expand (that's the word regular businesses use to mean "scale"), then you need to 1. get an accountant to write it up in the correct manner and 2. make an appointment with the business section of a good bank.

You still might have trouble with that right now, it's really not a good time for any kind of loans, and you can forget these multi-million dollar speculative paydays with little obligation or timeline, but if you have a proper business then you have proper business options and hopefully don't have to sell your businesses' soul to get the cash you need to grow.
Sometimes I'll use one if it's someone I don't talk to regularly, but if it's someone I know I don't. I have a similar policy with endings. If I'm asking for something, I'll use "thanks" because it seems polite. If I'm apologizing or being formal in some way, I'll often use "sincerely" or something similar.

Otherwise, what I do depends on how often I email them and how well they know me. If they don't know me or I don't often email them, then I'll close with just a dash and my name, in order to make it clear who I am and build an association. If they already know me well and we email fairly regularly, I won't use my name ("Thanks-\nJeb" becomes "Thanks!"), because it just adds noise.

(These aren't hard rules, of course.)
Slightly misleading...they're not going to be available to consumers until late 2010 at the earliest.
For me, the key is "turn off the creativity spigot". I always thought that creativity is one of those lovely positive feedback loops: do more, have more ideas, do more. However, this only works for so long.

I thought that trying to code a new site and write an album at the same time would work. It didn't. My ability to write songs just disappeared.

However, I took Christmas off from creativity and now I'm flying.
Digital watches ARE a pretty neat idea!
I noticed a lot of numbers that were wrong outright last night myself on Google Finance's page. Obviously the source from where MarketWatch and Google Finance are getting their numbers has it screwed up. Take a look at this for instance: http://venkatcc.googlepages.com/ObsceneNumbers.jpg
Please show me this capitalist country so I can move there.

It is true, Libertarianism does not focus on decreasing inequality - at least not in the sense of absolute privilege, because it is a meritocracy - Libertarianism does, however, focus on decreasing inequality of opportunity. If you decide to slack off like the cricket during the summer - your fault. But you learn, that maybe next time you should work, instead of getting bailed out and then noone has incentive to ever do any real work. This is why communism failed.
The truth is, that if you want people to not go hungry, and live prosperously, the only way to do that is to craft the game, such that the Nash equilibrium is beneficial, rather than harmful.
And yes, there are some people incapable of taking care of themselves - they might be handicapped, or get in a car accident - however, in a society of prosperity and freedom, people will have enough extra, and not be afraid of everyone trying to steal what they have, that charity will increase. So, first, you decrease the poor population to a size that is pretty much as small as theoretically possible, and then those people are taken care of by the abundance of all others. I mean, if you had $1million dollars, and you didn't have the government trying to take it all the time, would you really pass up helping out those in need?
The reality is, that there will always be poor people, and history has shown that socialism certainly does not solve that problem (the more socialist countries have more poor people). If you claim the US is a capitalist system, well it might be compared to some other countries, but then again, we are more prosperous compared to those countries as well.
Over a 22-year period, Robert Hanssen, one of the most notorious spies in US history, passed several polygraph tests during his tenure at the FBI while he also sold secrets to Russia.
I've had cross-fiber deep tissue massage (painful). ART sounds similar but I'll give it a try, thanks.
I'm surprised that article didn't mention the result that quadraplegics are only slightly less happy than other people, and no less happy than paraplegics: [http://books.google.com/books?id=P5GsREMbUmAC&pg=PA724&#...]
To an extent, sure, but he didn't say "unambiguous", just "less ambiguous". In fact, just since 1987 a "less ambiguous" natural language has been developed: Lojban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban).

Lojban still has semantic ambiguities, but it is free of the syntactic variety (think "Time flies", which could either be a command or a statement) and thus is a less ambiguous language than most others.

I still haven't gotten around to learning it though. Someday.
I find that very often the perfect cure for too much "thinking" work is an awful lot of physical work. I started feeling a lot better about working on my Ph.D. when I got a second job stocking shelves on the night shift.
Might I make a recommendation? Start with "The Little Schemer" and then graduate to "The Seasoned Schemer". Here: http://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/02...

It takes you more step-by-step than SICP and once you get more practice with those books, SICP will be much more paletable.
Does Windows 7 have any must have features that Windows XP does not?
If so, what are they?
This is barely noticeable on faster computers, so many designers miss this. The browser has to re-draw the whole page because some of it scrolls, yet the static background doesn't.
well this would have been somewhat more useful a few months back.
The article discusses Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma, When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail", which shows why large entrenched companies don't survive disruptive technologies. The dilemma for the incumbent companies is, do I make the the incremental improvements in the current product (which the customers are demanding) or do I cannibalize it in favor of a (currently) niche product?

Innovator's Dilemma is out of print, but I strongly encourage any would be entrepreneur to get hold of a copy. I consider it to be one of the most important books to read and understand. It will show you how to be disruptive. The bigger your competitors, the better.
I think you should have just kept that idea quietly to yourself. Forever.
I agree, though I think that eventually computers will adapt the imprecision of human language/thought.
I've read some good ones and some not so good ones. The reason why Tim O'Reilly has some credibility (with me anyway) is that he has taken interesting steps beyond the traditional role of publishers.

The O'Reilly websites are actually useful (and free), contrary to what other publishers have to offer. He has an interesting blog. He is able to pay other bloggers for their work. He's experimenting with different formats and revenue models (Safari bookshelf) to make interesting content available.

Trying new things and making a living off them is awesome. That's why I like to hear his opinion on these matters.
Can you use Clojure for the Java work? I'd only do Java projects if I could use Clojure as often as humanly possible.
Having run a few ethnographic studies to observe how they maintain their independence I'm not that surprised. The coping mechanisms for human beings truly are amazing.
Which OS and browser do you use?

I'm on Windows XP with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. I have the same trouble in release Firefox and latest Chrome.

Explorer 7 and latest Safari is fine. Latest Opera is ok, though JayIsGames is killing its silly wait-till-all-small-stuff-is-loaded rendering engine.

BTW I see this problem on many sites. These two were just ones that popped into my mind.
This is a strange piece of writing. On the one hand, it's telling you that burnout is real, and that you should be careful to avoid it. On the other hand, it sound an awful lot like "there are worse things in the world than sitting at a cushy desk for 10 hours a day, whiner." The latter seems to undermine the former.

One of the best jobs I've ever had was manual labor: I was a bellman for a hotel. My primary job responsibilities included lifting heavy luggage in 100-degree heat, being yelled at by cranky guests, and running around non-stop for 10-hour shifts. What made it great? I was almost completely autonomous, and I got paid a little bit of money every time I did some work. There was almost always a direct consequence when I did good work, and nobody told me how to do my job. (My boss didn't even work on the same shift!)

I've worked a lot of much more "comfortable" jobs since that time, and I've had a lot of time to think about why that luggage-monkey job was so much better than nearly all of the intellectual gigs I've held. So far, I think it boils down to a simple point: there's no worse tyranny than being told how to think. No matter how much luggage I lifted, I was always free with my thoughts. But when you work in an industry where your thoughts are your primary output, it's inevitable that someone (or something) will try to consume all of them. When that happens, you're on a path to burnout.
I didn't mean to imply that I'm 5-7 months from a funding event. I have 5-7 months left of savings. I keep hearing that funding prospects look good, but I don't know for sure because I'm not directly involved in the fundraising, which is good, because I'd probably have an aneurysm if I had to deal with that. I'd rather work on Wall Street than be trying to raise money.
I'm double-majoring in CS and creative writing--I'm trying to synthesize a curriculum that leads directly to being an optimal choice as a game designer (not developer.) People who think I'm trying to be a developer don't get the writing part, and people who think I'm trying to be something like a screenwriter don't get the CS part. It's all very frustrating, but I think it'll work out.
You're an idiot for not staying and saving more money without being certain you had other work available. Sorry, just saying. I have one month of living expenses left involuntarily. Twit.
Who's Watching You On The Web
I agree. I think most entrepreneurs are motivated more by their vision than by immediate rewards. My point is that, if you want a successful company, you need to keep the financial side in focus too. Gates, Jobs, and Ellison had the business focus from the beginning.

OTOH if the monetary side is of little or no consequence, the Open Source community is the way to go. Make what you believe in and share it. And the web allows a sideline to lead to riches depending on how the wind blows.
Moreover, how does it morally confiscate wealth to finance programs from those inhabitants that don't want to pay for said activities?
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
I have a blog; I find that I only end up posting to it when I avoid Reddit and HN for a while. Not because they're distracting, but because I comment so much that I end up with nothing, personally, to say on my blog; I just feel like I would be repeating myself. All my little ideas get bound up in the context of someone else's article rather than bound together in the strange seed of imagination that writing without a set topic requires.
Pearl River Delta Becomes China’s New Technological Innovation Lab
It could be some browser specific issue. For me it renders everything ok (XP/FF3.1).
I found carpentry to be a good revitalizer, building decks, fences and the like. Long hikes work. I cant turn off the thinking, but I can usually point it somewhere else.
I for one think MSG is a good thing but for someone so concerned with it, I'm surprised you're recommending broccoli. Other than cheese, soy and tomato, broccoli is about as high in glutamate as a food gets.

http://www.swivel.com/data_columns/spreadsheet/2486462
From the article:

In keeping with its master plan, over the next three years about 100 state laboratories designated for engineering innovation and research and development (R&D) will be established. It is expected that by the year 2012 some three-to-five, high technology–powered industrial clusters will be established, generating an industrial output of more than 100 billion yuan (about 14.6 billion U.S. dollars). Generally speaking, hi-tech manufacturing is expected to generate at least 30 percent of the total industrial output of the region by the projected date of 2020.

[...]

The government will also do its part to encourage innovative enterprise by reducing taxes on about 50 of the top competitive companies. By 2012, some 600 new patent applications per one million people are expected and priority will be given to those patents involving independent technological innovations.
Queries.

Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.
Hyperinflation is caused by external countries refusing to invest in a countries currency, not by internal factors. So the current problem with money they are having is controlled by external entities.
No smugness intended.

This just has to be mentionned:

My Seth Godin decline letter. Thoughts?, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398293
I would add to this that writers ideally be able to use "8th grade English", so it is easy for any English speaker to read.

It's a global workforce. Yet too often, I see a colleague send a brain dump of 3 or 4 paragraphs to someone in another country. Imagine yourself having to use a translation dictionary for half of that?

It really helps if you use just common English words, in brief sentences. And yes, this might take extra editing time. Yet, this helps anyone reading it, not just those with English as a second language.
They do use PNGs for tiles. At least that's what I see with "View image" on the right click.

Also it seems you could even have transparent PNGs in SeaDragon:

http://getsatisfaction.com/livelabs/topics/vector_graphics_i...
New computing history book out by Ted Nelson, hypertext guru and personal computing legend
Excel is actually a reasonably complete program. That said, I would like to be able to:

1. Build predictive models from data I've entered in Excel. I find myself exporting from Excel into R a lot to satisfy this need. Microsoft partially addresses this need with the Data Mining Add-ons for Excel.

2. Have more than ~1 million rows (which is Excel 2007's limit).

3. More easily clean up data in a large spreadsheet.

4. Reversibly anonymize data -- if I download some logs with usernames or IPs, I don't want those in my analysis (I just hide those columns), but I do need to have a unique identifier for each row. And later get the names back if I want.

And a couple things I think Excel is great at already:

1. Making data look pretty. The charts are great, and there's (http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/defaul...) for non-power users.

2. Making data easily portable.

3. Filtering/sorting data -- VLOOKUP has saved the day so many times.
I play the banjo, and can't seem to stop playing the banjo. It's like a drug.
Is it aimed at any particular domain? Finance folks pretty much live in excel, they might make a good use-case on what can't be done or what they don't like in excel.

Slides 4 & 5 give some insight: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2191289/yaron-minskycufp-2006

While I am not a big user of excel, the google docs version of excel is very similar to the desktop version + collaboration (think Oddpost). The other approach taken by some people I have spoken with is viewing it more as data and tying to do more (think gmail to some extent).
Huh, that's me. Time to code, I guess.
Surprisingly, Younger Users Care More About Privacy
65,000.

(that's the maximum number of rows in Excel before 2007). I'd like something similar to SPSS, which is more convenient for tables with lots of rows and separates the data from the formulae.

A tool for working with streaming data.

Also, charting that works for large amounts data. Try having Excel chart 65,000 rows and you'll have time to make coffee while you wait. There are no ways to zoom or analyze Excel charts, either.

In fact, charting for data analysis alone is a big enough problem that needs solving (and you won't have to do all that catching up with Excel). Short of using HTML/Flash or .NET/Java components, there is nothing an enterprise worker can use. Get access to a Bloomberg terminal from somewhere and play with its charts to see what I mean.
This minor, but:

A round() function that isn't stupid, i.e. it rounds to a certain number of significant figures, rather than relative to the decimal point. Workarounds exist, but I want a no-work-around.

I suppose it's not a problem worthy of very smart programmers, but it still makes me wish for bullets-over-SMTP.
Ditto. Bike rides, washing dishes, fixing stuff around the apartment are all nice escapes from the cerebral world.
Export to quote-qualified CSV.
Ask HN: Any "semantic web" programmers here? What is the future of the Semantic Web?
Specifically, do you think there will be widespread adoption of the standards being layed out by the W3C, with OWL, RDF, GRDDL and the rest? Who, what kinds of institutions are most likely to go along with it? Lastly, is it possible that this be the frontier of the next generation of hot new startups?

If it wasn't already obvious that I am a newbie to all of this, I am. My instinct, to the extent that I am allowed to have one on this, is that the success of RSS feeds is a sign of things to come. But I don't know exactly what.
"All the terrorists went to Iraq so I had to go there in order to shoot them."

You are an idiot.
Automatic versioning and version control.
Just the ability to represent one-to-many relationships in a native way (without resorting to hiding rows or the like) would be a huge step in that direction. The goal could be: make Excel handle more of the borderline cases where you really should be using a simple database, but all you know is Excel.
Excel is Turing-complete :P
Are they aware of Resolver One? It's spreadsheet-Python mashup.

http://www.resolversystems.com

Sometimes I miss similar type of scripting. With Excel, I often finish copy-and-pasting raw data into Python string, upon which I then do something procedural.
It's requesting a ton of jpeg images, seems a lot of bandwidth for what it's doing...
Haha I feel like him, except I had ebay when I was 13 (I'm 18 now) -- what a difference time makes!
I'm guessing (hoping) that that was tongue-in-cheek.