skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do people find the iPhone/iPod touch inadequate for browsing the web?

I can see he value of a large form iPod for digital book reading, but for basic web consumption the netbook is the iPhone/Android (For me at least).
I used to have this "blank stare" problem with some of my relatives and former colleagues when they asked what I was working on. I finally realized I was often just being too technical or was using industry-specific terms people weren't familiar with...and sometimes I was being too specific or too general in my explanations. Like I expected everyone else to have the same background and interests as I do. I finally tried putting myself in their shoes. If you're too general, you will sound evasive or apologetic. If you're too specific, it's easy to sound boring. It's a difficult balance to be specific enough that you keep their interest, but not so specific you confuse them or flip their "Techy-talk OFF switch."

I try to use very common analogies and to speak as simply and directly as possible. I usually just explain the selling proposition and/or business model of the startup without any additional information about "how we do it" or "in what industry" or "who our competitors are," etc. If they want more details, they can ask.

I've ended up with a few stock answers I use for every one of my startups. I usually just state the problem, and my solution to that problem, in layman's terms. That usually gets the best response. People usually start asking more specific questions, and we go from there. I try to explain what my startup does, and to convey my passion for the business without sounding too much like a pushy salesman or a nut ;-) If the startup is profitable, I add that tidbit.

I actually went from getting blank stares to getting new business and referrals. A simple, clear answer about the benefits your business offers can literally turn people into customers on the spot...or at least promoters of you and your ideas. Genuine enthusiasm and passion is memorable, and people are drawn to it.
No, but if they listen to a lot of music you might value their opinions on who plays well, and even what the common characteristics of good players are.
I've pondered the idea of a moderated Wiki, where edits come in more-or-less as patchsets which the owner can apply or not apply. This was a while ago, and I'd say my idea is totally trumped by hosting Wikis on git, such that changes really are patchsets, complete with a massive infrastructure to support dealing with patchsets. Wrap a decent web UI around the basic idea, enhancing the git workflow to better support the idea of "submitting" a patch out of the blue, and you might have something powerful. I believe such projects are in progress.

(For git, substitute your choice of DVCS.)

The point of this being that if you pick and choose patches deliberately, with of course the opportunity to modify them as you go, then you can end up with something collaborative that still has a strong editorial voice. That might be something new. It'd have to be very open and easy to use to work at all, but it might.
Do you have a link? I've been looking for something like this.
That's a surprisingly correct use of chauvinism
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chauvinism
Yup, its very much the same point but narrower in focus and less eloquently stated. I should have linked to his article in mine.
If you graduated college, consult with your college librarian. The chance is, most journals have online subscription deals and they are accessible via VPN/proxy through your school's subscriptions. If this doesn't apply, go to a local University's library or research hospital in your area, most of these subscriptions are validated through universities' ip addresses - so any computer on campus will do. Trust me, I do this all this time even though I graduated already.
I'm guessing, but the article is probably talking about total debt, public + private. IIRC Japan has lots of govt debt, but private savings. U.S. has high-average govt debt and also lots of private debt.

The sentence is certainly arguable, I agree.
Someone needs to buy Brightkite stat. I vote Yahoo!, not Facebook.
It's the world's reserve currency, true. But how hard is it to turn dollars into gold? It takes like two days and is practically free. It's not like there's anything stopping countries from going off the dollar and onto gold. It could happen in a week, and no individual country shorting the dollar would incur any cost.
The solution to the "Academic Firewall of Doom" is to get a degree, and then you can generally go back to your alma mater and get some kind of library account that will let you access the stuff behind the firewall (generally from within the library only, of course). Of course its been over a decade since that loophole worked for me, might have been closed up by now. Or it might have expanded.
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Can the United Auto Workers Survive?
This doesn't really have to do with yes-men. We're not talking about people who feel negatively about your company, but rather the fact that you run one at all. The kind of scorn the article author talks about is not "oh man, there's no future in (field)", but rather "why in the world would you risk running your own company?!". The latter certainly still calls for a thick skin, but it would help if your closest friends and family were supportive about the concept.
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I order my groceries from safeway, usually.
'Toadies':

An abbreviation of 'toadeater'. Originally, a charlatan's helper who ate (or pretended to eat) poisonous toads so that his employer could display his prowess in expelling the poison.
"I am fairly hostile to most of the environmental movement, finding it generally a modern tribal religion that justifies condemnation and control of others in the name of protecting the environment. I care nothing at all for the environment in isolation, only for how it positively impacts human life -- civilization is all about beating the environment into forms that suit us better. An "electric car" used to be a conspicuous sign of righteous sacrifice, but you won't get any self-flagellation points for driving a Tesla. Too much fun."

I suppose at its core, any value judgment treads into the religious. It's probably none too surprising that I disagree with this statement. But it's interesting seeing this judgment so completely distilled.

I'll ask HN. Do you care for the environment, only for the sentient beings (including animals) of which they are part, only the humans living inside it, or, largely, only for yourself?
Kung fu grippe - Merlin Mann's Top 10 for 2008
Interesting. I've had trouble finding a rent controlled apartment through craigslist. I'll have to look harder in the future.
You can buy laptops with digitizer screens now, but the software to take advantage of the digitizer is not as usable as the software that currently runs on the iPhone and the iPod touch.
This is an great point! Saying that you're working on some excellent software and what its trying to do may be the best way to approach the conversation, especially in the midwest...

Once you describe what you're doing, then you'll be asked who you work for, and when you say yourself the idea of a startup will be better explained.

I'm always hesitant to do so because I feel that describing what project you work on doesn't describe the hours you work, the responsibilities, and all the extras that come with a startup.
What source is not a paid shill? Everybody has to pay the bills. Sure there are organizations that don't pay or pay very little, but they don't get the best and the brightest and they can't spend money to keep their people informed.
Personal Development Posts from ‘08
Unreliable DVDs. Don't feel safe about my DVD backups anymore...
Grrr... Austrian economics. The ultimate value of a currency has never been shiny metal, even when we were on the gold standard. The value of a currency is that it allows you to invest in companies in a particular country. That is, if you think there are a lot of companies in the US that are going to return high profits, you need to exchange your money for the USD.

This line is laughable: "It is easiest to define "real value" as the price in gold." Why is this any more valid than the price in silver, corn, wheat, dollars, yen, or cocoa puffs?
pbwiki.com?
If the scorn of others is enough to dissuade you, you will not have success in business.
I think you're taking the discussion a bit too seriously and missing the point. I'm pretty sure the blog post wasn't a verbatim conversation, but most people who have lived in the Bay Area and worked on a startup recognize the difference in reaction between people in that area versus people in other parts of the country.
The ACM's copyright form states that author's are legally allowed to put a copy of the paper on their personal website. Really, you don't need to pay any subscription. If you know the author's names for a paper, chances are one of them will have it on their personal page.

Most of this is findable in Google within 30 seconds. Often when I search for a paper's title, I get a pdf from the author's site before an official ACM or IEEE listing.
What is the convenient window switching keyboard shortcut?
More specifically I was interested in a hosted interface that uses git as the backend.
Based on reading the article, I think the point was that the Tesla was lots of fun, not "I'm saving the environment".
Rails and Merb -- Why Merge At All?
This is meant as a comment about personality types, not in any way to disparage the blog post:

Considering:

1. My unusually high level of apathy over the discussion.

2. The level of detail others about it care here.

3. My own lack of skills in web design.

I'm definitely going to have to look into hiring a right-brained designer for any web startup I do in the future :-)
Priced Android Applications Coming Within Weeks
Typing decent amounts, and Flash, are important to a lot of people.
Chneukirchen's ruby styleguide
If you compare one place to another, and clearly one of those locations has an environment more supportive for success in your field, wouldn't that be preferred? Perhaps you are just looking for a challenge, but if you're like the rest of us who are looking to succeed, maximizing the success factors tends to be a good idea.
Rumor has it that John Carmack is an Objectivist, which puts this statement into context.
Of course, and I'm happy that he's having fun. My point is peripheral. But it's interesting to me that he so decisively states that he doesn't care at all for the environment except in consequence to human life. Is this a common view?
Ah, thanks, that does shed some light.
Self Awareness, the Last Frontier. By V. S. Ramachandran
I agree I don't really see what's so sneaky about this. I believe they give a link to both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Google wants you to get the best Gmail experience... that's just not going to happen in IE.
"A few people acting greedily forces an unwilling owner to sell out? That makes no sense."

You think ALL property owners in NYC are unwilling to sell? You think ALL builders/landlords are unwilling to build investment properties, and are unwilling to sell to those who will?

"I didn't address this before because it sounds like something you're pulling out of your ass - and you said it yourself, your building was built for condos but used for rent b/c the market for condos wasn't there. What, exactly, do you want me to argue against here?"

You claim that builders are not greedy enough to create new housing in response to market demand, or that there are other monopolistic factors preventing this.

Yet for some reason, they build new condos. Why don't these same factors prevent condo construction?

"Cute. 30-60 days, that does make things way easier. Gives people plenty of time to find a place they can afford that's really far away from their current job,..."

And someone else is now close to their current job and gets more time with their family. Why do the stationary deserve that more than the mobile?

"Subsidizing the needy isn't my goal. "

In that case, why try to equate mobility with wealth? The two are not very strongly related, if at all.
Users will be happy with no encryption than with a self signed cert.

Personally i think the best solution would be SSH style for most sites (the certificate is stored on first visit and changes are flagged as suspicious), with physical distribution of public keys for sites that really needed security (e.g. banks).
Ask HN: New Year's Resolutions?
What are yours? My biggest one is to go from being comfortable speaking Spanish to being fluent in the language.
Stories That Defined Broadband in 2008
making prime rib. but if i weren't making prime rib, i'd be working. deadline for launch is coming up soooon!
38 bold exhortations to live life creatively. Here's my favorite:

"Sing in your own voice.

Piccasso was a terrible colorist. Turner couldn't paint human beings worth a damn. Saul Steinberg's formal drafting skills were appalling. TS Eliot had a full-time day job. Henry Miller was a wildly uneven writer. Bob Dylan can't sing or play guitar.

But that didn't stop them, right?

So I guess the next question is, "Why not?"

I have no idea. Why should it?"
sexwi.se launched
Hacked together a little side-project over the holidays around the social relationship/dating/friendship advice theme. Wasn't too sure about the name at first.. but what the heck.. sounds sticky .. ahem.. catchy ;)

Oh and it ain't p0rn or anything like it.. just plain ask & community-driven answers.

What do you think?
Microsoft eyes metered-PC boondoggle
False.

In Colombia, 4.5 kg of coca paste, which will yield about one kilo of cocaine, fetches about $4,500. On the streets of the United States, selling this kilogram of cocaine will earn between $200,000 and $600,000. (http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia150.htm)

Claritin 10 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
(http://www.rense.com/general54/preco.htm)
normalized to 1 kilo ... cost $71,000, value $21517000.00

what did we bet again? :)
I really do care for the environment in its own right, and I care for a host of reasons. There's the aesthetic argument against destroying anything beautiful and the argument that more sentient species may emerge if we don't stand in their way. There's also the argument that you cannot arbitrarily distinguish between protecting the environment to better humanity and protecting it in general.

Frankly, I find this third argument very compelling. The environment is a highly complicated system with many chaotic behaviors that make it unreasonable to point to some aspect of the environment as being uniquely critical to human life. Some things are more critical than others, sure, but I think it's unreasonable to completely ignore any aspect of the environment on that basis.

As per these arguments, I would also disagree with the quoted statement. Besides, the author makes a strawman out of environmentalism. It isn't about "self-flagellation," it's about engaging in a sustainable lifestyle.
Hacked together a little side-project over the holidays around the social relationship/dating/friendship advice theme. Wasn't too sure about the name at first.. but what the heck.. sounds sticky .. ahem.. catchy ;) Oh and it ain't p0rn or anything like it.. just plain ask & community-driven answers. What do you think?
To my mind the word "greedy" suggests people who put their own interests above those of others, very often employing the coercive powers of the government to serve themselves and to the detriment of everyone else.

This certainly includes many among the rich and powerful, but I don't think this brush can be applied to developers in general. What is their goal in places where there is no more land to build on, like NY and SF, but to reconfigure it and make it more available (affordable) to more people? Of course they seek profit and some people are substantially inconvenienced in the process, but in the broad perspective it creates value. Whatever its flaws, Manhattan offers more to more people now than it did 100 years ago.

Are they not greedy, those who are renting their spots in these desirable locations and who are using the government's guns to keep others out? As a voting constituency they're leveraging the force of government to serve their own individual interests, seemingly unconcerned about the consequences for everyone else.

I find it ironic that they wield the term "greed" with immunity.
"You think ALL property owners in NYC are unwilling to sell? You think ALL builders/landlords are unwilling to build investment properties, and are unwilling to sell to those who will?"

No, when did I say anything that implied that?

"You claim that builders are not greedy enough to create new housing in response to market demand, or that there are other monopolistic factors preventing this.

Yet for some reason, they build new condos. Why don't these same factors prevent condo construction?"

No, I claimed that the removal of rent control would incentivize some owners to oppose new construction, and that current rent control doesn't disincentivize new building.

"And someone else is now close to their current job and gets more time with their family. Why do the stationary deserve that more than the mobile?"

Seriously? You're seriously claiming that the person who just moves into an area has equivalent roots in the area as the person who has lived there since 1971? Come on, be serious.

"In that case, why try to equate mobility with wealth? The two are not very strongly related, if at all."

Yeah, people moving into expensive areas and bidding up rent prices generally aren't wealthy, my bad.
the appeal of this idea is as old as the web itself - early browsers were as much for editing content as displaying content. [1] this is an important idea to keep in mind when thinking about the growth of a new medium - having the tools to manipulate that medium widely accessible gives the medium a better chance of encouraging interesting content. [2] the central argument against all this mind melding is that the most interesting content isn't necessarily the smartest content[3]. Which isn't to say that it can't be[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

[2] The merits of impressionism aside, it would have been an improbable development without (relatively cheap) tubed oil paints. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_paint

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism
CiteseerX is also a good source of papers though not as good as an ACM subscription.
Squeejee Adds New Features to Tweet Congress
the guy is coming out with a book on poker and business, this is basically self promotion for him to sell more books.
Are mutts like me welcome on HN?
I grew up in Boring, Oregon (that's not a typo). I'm an aerospace engineer by training (public school). I worked on designing and building electric passenger vehicles back in the 90s (the first time they were cool) but then went to b-school (Ivy league) graduating in 1999 and have been a serial entrepreneur since as founder or CEO (i.e. the "business guy").

The first hacking I did was in 1982-ish on an Apple IIe. The last true hacking I did was in the early 90s using FORTRAN77. I wish I were more of a hacker now, but alas I don't have the patience.

Anyone can read and post to HN (and I have been doing both for about 6 months) but I'm curious who the core folks here are and what's the view of mutts like me?
This article fairly accurately sums up the process of doing research: you read about some idea, work like crazy for a few days/weeks/months to try a variant of it on your problem, discover it fails, and repeat the process. For the rare thing that actually does work, you rush to publish it, then quickly move back to the grind. There's no time to polish software for distribution, when the reward is entirely based on the number of documents you produce in a year.

This is why it amuses me when people stereotype academic scientists as impractical dreamers -- anyone who has stuck with the process of completing a PhD has demonstrated him or herself to possess a truly super-human tolerance for drudgery.

(Public service announcement: Hire a PhD! They need the work!)
How does letting a person stay in their home in the face of wild market fluctuations work to the detriment of everyone else, exactly? Wealthier people have to pay more for non rent-controlled apartments or commute a bit further - this hardly seems like a great cost to bear to avoid uprooting the families and communities that made these locations desirable in the first place.
I recall some kind of problem when I attempted to do this at Dalhousie, but I can't remember what it was. Maybe I'll try again soon.
I'm happy the open source and the hacker community is more alive and vibrant now. If there was no open source and the hacker movements, maybe we wouldn't even have recognized if languages are good or bad. We would have accepted what is given to us.
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I'm a tech guy, and I think the site could use more guys like you.
So this is Apple's "netbook"? But sans keyboard.

Apple made a tablet PC in 1989, the Newton. It was attractive, but never really took off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

Microsoft had a Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which likewise went nowhere.

Typing is simply a better technology than writing, for text entry.
I can envision a use case where the user plugs their iPhone-class device into their cinema display and bluetooth to their keyboard and mouse. They use it for professional tasks while at their desk. They take it with them to browse the web^W^W^W take light notes/research during meetings, and consume email/media on their couches at home. They might have a second dock in their home office for additional work or personal input.

I don't know how large the market would be, nor am I sure I would even want such a thing myself, but maybe it would be interesting.
Sony PlayStation 4 Guru
> Now that I'm doing better, I'm happy to pay it forward to the next generation struggling to make something of themselves and make everyone in the country better off a result. Even from a purely selfish viewpoint, graduated tax brackets make sense.

As I've pointed out, the fraction of tax revenue paid by the richest 1, 5, and 10% are much higher now than they were when the top tax rates were higher. And, as the fraction of the tax burden paid by the rich has gone up, the fraction by the poor has gone down, to the point that nearly half don't pay anything.

Higher tax rates for the upper brackets don't lead to less taxes paid by the poor - they lead to more taxes paid by the poor.

Basically, it's a choice between steeply graduated rates and steeply graduated revenue. It's interesting that you choose the former. You claim to be concerned for the poor, yet you advocate a return to a system where they paid more taxes.

Feel free to downmod me for being mean.
> First, at least in Visual Basic 6, functions didn't return values like in any other language

Seems that Microsoft realized this problem and fixed it in VB.NET. You can type "return result" from anywhere and it will work as like C.
Give Away Free Rive
Expand your vocabulary per a new years resolution perhaps and make the world a less hungry place. All with a few clicks.
⌘tab to cycle apps

⌘` to cycle windows within an app

I think that's what he's referring to.
A Developers' Guide to Storage. What you need to know but were afraid to ask
N.B. In case it wasn't clear, thingsilearned is the author of the post.