skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never been able to get Rails set up on AWS - had problems with the AMIs etc.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a LAMP/Rails setup?
Critique my app: JotBot, a desktop time-tracking tool
Sounds just like "How to Win Friends and Influence People"
The undeniable shift to Keynes
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that the word 'girl' is offensive, but rather its use in the context/back story.

I disagree that comedy is a good excuse for being offensive -- being disagreeable is a very cheap form of humor.
My company, Happy Camper Studios, recently released our first app. JotBot is a cross-platform time-tracking tool that runs on the desktop.

htttp://www.getjotbot

We started out writing it for ourselves since we hated tracking our time, but needed to do it, and didn't like the available tools. It's written in JRuby using the Monkeybars library and Swing, and is, as best I know, the first commercial desktop app written in JRuby.

All feedback welcome. Thanks.
Thanks, great tips.
One thing that Apple doesn't provide is the "overnight you a loner so you won't have any downtime" option that you could get with some of the higher-end support contracts from other vendors. Other than that, I agree that their support tends to be excellent.
> Bill Gates, the Beatles

Bill Gates didn't get rich as a programmer. He got rich as a business man and negotiator (QDOS, IBM). He got stinking rich as a monopolist. (Interesting note: Bill G's father was an anti-trust defense attorney.)

The Beatles did not get rich as live musicians and were never considered a great live act. They made it big as a studio band. I fail to see how cranking out the same songs over and over again for 10,000 hours in Hamburg builds your studio composition chops. Especially when it didn't even seem to lead to great live performance ability.

Haven't read gladwell's book, but it smells like a sloppy pile of misleading anecdotes from here.
I started taking violin lessons with my (then) 5-year-old daughter. We've been going once a week for two years now (I'm 37), and it's a lot of fun, precisely because I had no previous experience with musical instruments, and so I had no expectations for myself. Additionally, it's a nice excuse to spend some time with your kid.
I didn't get that implication, but I did get the implication that it was a lesser priority. Granted, it is very hard to get inflection from text, and this strikes me as one of those emotional appeals where inflection matters, but his saying that he just wants a stable until retirement job suggests that he is willing to kick enjoyability (and possibly a number of other things) to the curb for the sake of that. He wants it, but he's willing to accept that he can't always have it. It is here that I think he goes horribly wrong. As you mention in another comment, it is worthwhile to pursue more desirable situations and not get stuck in a local maximum. Accepting and/or work just to work, without enjoyment or fulfillment, is one of those places where I think your advice is worth following.
The article seems to imply that adults will find learning an instrument extremely difficult and will likely never become really proficient -- but suggests they should just lower their expectations and go ahead and try anyway, because the experience will be enriching. Is that really "not too late"?

As an adult trying to learn to play the piano, this is all rather depressing.
@cousin_it

I also grew up in Russia (25 years between Siberia and Moscow) and have lived in the US for the last 12 years. From my experience, the typical Russian attitude of moral superiority (Americans = materialistic, Russians = spiritual) could not be farther from the truth.

Perhaps I am reading into your comment a bit, but it seems to me that you were essentially trying to assert the above, even if you phrased your assertion as a question. Unless you are very, very young or very, very naive, I doubt that you were truly simply curious to find out whether every single woman in the entire country is a cold-hearted bitch who would kick her husband out when he can't find work, especially based on just one man's story.

If I am mistaken and your question was really a question, then the answer is no, it is not really "this way" in the US. Believe it or not, even in big bad America there are people who understand love and other human feelings, just like "foreigners".
Microsoft holds back full Netbook potential
I've been asking RescueTime to incorporate something like this into their application for about a year now. Unfortunately, they haven't quite yet. I think it would be interesting if you could somehow integrate this into RescueTime, the two of these products together would make for a really useful combination, and finally allow me to track my time accurately, and know my productivity and programs I was using during that time period.
Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from John Carmack:

"I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work."
I watched GroundHog Day in my mid-30s and was inspired to learn the piano. Stop laughing at the back. The fact is that you don't have to be good to enjoy yourself.

My Dad started learning in his mid 70s.
A Tale of 2 Protocols: IPv4, IPv6, MTUs and Fragmentation
Please critique "Read My Tweets" -- using CAPTCHAs to increase your followers on twitter.
Check it out:

http://www.readmytweets.com

It's essentially like a banner exchange but applied to tweets with CAPTCHAs to ensure that people actually do read the tweets.

Also see this discussion:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/c4820fbb9bb296d7

How would you cheat in this service? Do you think many people would bother? What are methods to detect cheating (without making the CAPTCHAs stronger)? I could ban IPs with suspicious activity or perhaps just rate limit the number views any user could get.

BTW, I have built this using the Google App Engine and plan to launch in 2-4 weeks.
Quite the opposite - anyone that plans to do one thin their entire life probably isn't very interesting. I love programming and am fascinated by the field, but I certainly don't intend to do it all my life. There's simply more to life than making computers do cool things.
Being freaked out was the final motivator to get him to really think up of something and act on it. She still stuck by him even though his solution seemed crazy to her. He would have had to pay for the 1000 heavy-stock paper from somewhere. Even if it costed $10.00, she must have been thinking that's another ten bucks that could have fed the kids.

It may have appeared that she gave up on him, but she obviously believed in him enough to give him another chance.

I think the story is awesome. I think the idea is great.
If anyone knows of any additional links, add them in the comments here and I'll add them to the page.
@bd

Just wanted to mention something that you may not be aware of. In most russian cities, housing stock is in very short supply (thanks to the legacy of centralized city planning) and people often stay together because otherwise they would have nowhere to live. I believe this skews the statistic in favor of the US, i.e. I believe that the russian divorce rates would be even higher if more people were able to live separately.
I feel the same but then I'm an educated, middle-class, straight, white male. It's always easy to disregard discrimination when one is part of the group currently having most of the money/power/prestige.
Nah, it's not yellow journalism -- it's from the WSJ's middle column, a place for quirky character profiles (which this story is) and human-interest stories. Previous topics have included truck-driving competitions and the wild-boar infestation of Berlin.
If the joke is just being rude for the sake of shocking the audience, then yes, that's cheap humor. What about satire though. There's some classic comedy that was 'offensive' to people who had no idea what the joke was.

For instance the Brasseye pedophilia special is some of the funniest, cleverest TV ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasseye#2001_paedophilia_speci...

Politicians described the show as "unspeakably sick" (while admitting that they had not seen the programme).
Those Greek Riots
Who cares? Prices aren't based solely on cost, they're based on competition and demand. The author seems to miss the point of capitalism.

From their point of view, why shouldn't AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and TMobile charge whatever the market will bear? What's the incentive to charge less?

Of course, there's an opportunity there. Should one of them, or some new company, start charging $5/month for unlimited texting, it could be pretty popular.
From what I've heard, Caltech and Harvey-Mudd are in that league. Some from Caltech would tell you that it's higher there.
To quote my freshmen year English professor, "Anything is hard if you do it well."

I went to a decent state school, but I averaged more than 40 hours a week on classes and class work. Most of my classes were computer science, math and physics. I wanted to do well in things that were hard, so it was hard.

But I do agree with your main point: it's not lack of intelligence that prevents people from getting through certain majors. It's mostly a lack of motivation and work ethic.
I kept MIT manageable by (1) majoring in math and (2) settling for Bs. They keep cramming more material into engineering programs without taking anything out. Math was better in that regard. A lot of MIT students even managed to do extracurriculars without having to drop out.
I agree with that statement, but isn't that what social news sites like this one are for? A group of people with common interest does the filtering for you (also kinda what Squidoo is for if I've got them right).

If I were you, I'd keep refining your idea. I don't personally don't think you've hit the sweet-spot yet.
http://azarask.in/services/rhyme/?q=orange
[]

why not ["door hinge"] ?
I'm in SW Ohio, you? I do not think there are many Ohioans on HN, and we ought to find each other!
I wish the original site was included in the RSS feed then I wouldn't have to read anything from this "news" source any more, I hereby coin the phrase Mailrolled.
Okay, so the _re_distribution of wealth by a certain political action implies less money spent somewhere. Yes, that's what redistribution of wealth means.

But again, how would spending less effort on digging up non-renewable resources negatively impact healthcare? True, the effort must come from somewhere and it comes from not doing certain things we're doing that we now know are impacting us negatively.
Colleges should focus more on serving needs and less on ineffective preaching. My experience as a TA in 101/102 level courses is that there is no use at all in subject requirements to encourage a breadth of knowledge in students. These only serve to teach students that university is largely bureaucratic bullshit. Give students the freedom to choose the courses they want. Requirements just encourage lowest common denominator behavior in both students and academic departments.
Cuil on Business Week list of most successful companies of 2008
Regardless of whether the title is factually correct on its own, it is not a good description of the article -- which mentions Panarin exclusively as the US-collapse predictor and Todd exclusively as the USSR-collapse predictor.
I've always wanted to learn Common Lisp or Scheme. This is a great motivator for me -- I love the idea of Android, and I hate having to use Java.

Does anyone here have good beginner books on Scheme? I'm thinking long-term; I don't expect functional mastery overnight.
USB - Serial Converter and Eagle
Every thing you need (schematics, libraries, pcb) to built a USB to RS232 converter is available on SparkFun web site
Was it really necessary to treat this as a binary choice? This comment and the one above it seem latent with severe blowhard sentiment, where one declares that x sucks, and the other declares things other than x that suck more. It takes some of the wind out of the argument they are trying to make, which maybe are worth exploring further.

Is there age discrimination in programming? Probably, although I've had at least one manager assert to me, with some plausible evidence, that reverse age discrimination also exists.

But, unfortunately, that conversation gets drowned out in cynicism and hyperbole, and oneupsmanship by additional cynicism. It is tiring, because all it succeeds in doing is creating additional angst and frustration.

In the people who believe what is being said, they now believe they are now facing down a life consisting of death marches and idiocy, with the other option being indefinite unemployment. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, where they will engender that kind of attitude in the places they work and live; with some regularity, what they expect a place to be like is what it will become.

For the people who try to fight against that sentiment but find their thoughts, however reasonable, drowned out in the sea of people who claim that they lack sufficient context simply because they lack the requisite cynicism, they'll eventually give up and either succumb to the prophecy or just leave the community to its own misery.

To this I ask, do we really need more cynicism, and is it really deserved? Are we certain this hasn't gone past discussing things reasonably, into the realm where people attempt to out-gloom one another in hopes that it justifies them tolerating their own plight? When do we stop admitting the inevitability of this and start taking action to change that, or at least investigating deeper what action can be taken? How are we so certain that all of these crappy programming jobs that we look at with disdain aren't the product of the cynicism of people, perhaps like us, who currently work in them and make them and the rest of the culture that way? It is, to me, increasingly hard to tell where things honestly suck, and where people make them suck for the sake of producing drama and fulfilling their own expectations of misery.

I agree with Joel; this is the textbook definition (if there were a textbook) of a mutual self-confirmation club, and I worry that it exists even here on HN.
- Quit smoking
- Learn UI (CSS and Photoshop)
- Excercise daily
- Release my two side projects and turn them into profitable products.
- Learn a new programming language (not sure on this one)
- Publish some pending drafts to ACM
- Publish some articles , long due, to selected magazines
- Asking this girl out
This together with The Economist article on music: http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story...

Is definitely tempting me to pick up a guitar again, that I have not played since I was 12.

Anyone know if you can play quietly with an amp?
I can't tell you how awesome this is. My mother passed away 18 months ago, and I've inherited much of her online life. She had a rare disease which she got treatment for but which ultimately led to her death, and through it all we kept a blog about her life. I'm an emotional SOB so I can't stand to read much of it, but at times I do like to go back through her blog and remember her.

Also, I discovered in her possessions a small booklet she kept for part of my childhood along the lines of what you describe. I wish I still had it, I think it's in my dad's house, but your post has made me remember it and I think I'll be looking to find it again.

One alternative, turning to the technology, is that you might consider a blog engine rather than an email post. You can make it private and not share it with the world, but when it comes to archiving the messages, email does not make it easy to print. So maybe a Tumblr account or something like that which would be more conducive to future desires to print it.
What about the song writing that's sold millions of albums? For a 16 year old that's reasonably impressive no?
New York is already a tech hub and rising quickly. Spend one week here mingling with people working at various startups and you'll be blown away. And rent isn't all that bad in Brooklyn and various parts of Manhattan.
I'm a glasses wearing skinny geek with a big head, who is rubbish at sport. I'd say that's not the position of power in school anyway, and not really in society as a whole.
The rates also don't capture the cultral differences n the realm of dating and marriage. A south-Asian country that features pre-arranged marriages might have a lower divorce rate but it won't mean the people are any happier.
BirdFood: Smarter RSS Feed for Twitter with Yahoo Pipes
Thanks for all the feedback. OK further clarification: I am incorporating as an S-Corp. Income taxes on S-corps flow through to the tax returns of the owners. No taxes are paid at the corporate level.

The IRS doesn't care about the $1 salaries of public CEOs (yes I know apostrophe S isn't plural, it was a typo) because those are C-Corps. C Corps DO pay taxes at the corporate level so the IRS doesn't care what your compensation is on a C-Corp - they've already collected taxes.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear in my first post, I was NOT thinking of a $1 salary or anything like that to avoid taxes. I'm thinking in the $75K - $150K range but that's just a gut feeling that I'm looking to confirm with some kind of data source in case I have to justify it to IRS. My CPA is helpful, but he can't give me a total answer because he's not in the internet/web business...I am, hence the reason I posed the question on Hacker News.

I do however want to minimize my salary to a REASONABLE level as I don't want to overpay FICA (which caps out at 102K, but several CPAs I've spoken with feel Obama will eliminate that cap), plus I don't want to pay Medicare (3.9%) on ALL of the income the corporation generates - only on the portion reasonably attributable to my salary.

I was hoping some of the early stage YC companies or other CEOS/Developers who frequent Hacker News would have some guidance and/or a source for some general ranges of salaries for CEOs of web companies.

Thanks again for all your help.
Because those are code level support tickets I don't really want to waste on something Apple probably doesn't even have existing policy for.

Or, imagine what would happen if I used one of them to ask "Hey, so I have this game I am working on and I wanted clarification on one of your rules for acceptance to the app store. I'm not sure if this is offensive or not based on the standards you are not making public that I will also not make public because this correspondence is NDA'd. Please give me some sort of conditional acceptance on the idea itself". I would probably get shoved to one of the devrel people who then tell me to just upload my app after I'm ready to submit to app store.

On the other hand, your comment made me realize asking devrel and submitting a couple radars first couldn't hurt, except someone's already done it: http://www.openradar.me/6218801
I'm wondering the exact same thing. I only posted that on hacker news, so he either saw it on wordpress or he reads hn.
I'm sorry. Of course similar things happen in Russia all the time. My comment was just a knee-jerk reaction to a phrase. At least it sparked an interesting discussion.
Have You Seen Apple's Netbook?
Sigh, that is a far way down on a site that is painful to read ;)

But it is nice to see he is looking into alternatives to publishing his game. It's what he should have done instead of this 100 day nonsense.
I would argue that allowing anyone to choose whatever courses they want (outside of degree requirements) would not discourage lowest common denominator behavior. It would facilitate that even more (e.g. Accounting + Non-stop PE).

But, since our job is also not to support the LCD but the GCD, I would still support this. I would have taken more Japanese, or possibly another language, if I didn't have to take Geology. I likely would have also substituted more Philosophy for Communications. That would have been a better supplement to my CS coursework and wouldn't have made me a less well-rounded person.
This is higher on our list than you can imagine... Unfortunately, we painted ourselves into a corner a bit by using .NET and had to rebuild our foundation to do this (and other cool things) on the client side in a light/reliable way. Should be out in early 2009 (but not like this guy is doing it-- see other comment).

edit: if you drop me a line (tony@rescuetime dot com), I'd love to run by how we're hoping to implement this to get your thoughts.
Is it 4/1/2009 yet?
Wow, great story!

The problem with using a blogging platform is the likelihood (or rather the unlikelihood) that it will exist in 25 years. There's a huge hassle factor in porting data from a proprietary system like Tumblr. At least with email, the format is likely to be supported in 25 years and exporting is easy.

That said, email doesn't really cut it in terms of viewing. I imagine my son would want to share the data with his family and friends long after I'm gone.
The Ericsson's research was aimed at fields that were not changing a lot: athletic performance, chess, classical music instruments. I think what it's documenting is how much deliberate practice is required to re-wire your brain to allow for unconsciously expert perceptions and performance. That's the inference I make reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409696 and these two sentences from the concluding paragraph in http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

"...the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant."
That is my point! I am all for not discouraging Lowest Common Denominator behavior. You can't prevent it. Actively trying to prevent it causes such LCD behavior to leak into and pollute the efforts of GCD students. Instead, universities should focus their effort on serving the needs of those who want to learn. Coercion just backfires.

I could've done a much better job in my Computer Science 101/102 courses if I could just teach the people who really wanted to study the material, and not people who just wanted to get out of the math requirement.
Not if you know the people and you know the project. Managing outside your area of expertise is a lot more difficult.
Build a pocket amp and use headphones (if you have a pair of headphones with a 1/4 inch jack you can just plug them directly into the guitar. It'll be really quiet without using any amplification though).

Either that or get a Pignose and don't turn it up too loud. I think Marshall makes a baby sized amp as well.
Overall a great article, but I had a few issues too:

1. I worry about giving away some things for free. If you give away research time for free, or you chase a dead end and decide not to bill it, do you set a precedent that those things will be free in the future?

2. You're absolutely right on the financial front. Mingling your business and personal expenses, and not operating as an LLC or corporation, means all sorts of unnecessary risk.

3. He suggests that a consultant who only works regular hours is less valuable than a consultant who is willing to work 24/7, and so justifies lower rates. I think this is backwards: if I'm going to pay someone $100/hour, I want to know that they're thinking clearly and have slept.

Otherwise, this is great advice. I wish I'd had it 5 years ago, when I started my first dev shop. The Warm Fuzzy Feeling (tm) concept right on; customers want a good relationship, and responsive communication, as much as they want technical skills.
Apple wants to swipe your iPhone