skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most people, most of the time, are not working on projects so fun and engaging that they enter crunch of their own accord.

If you are, go for it. But the rest of the time you have to assume your programming will be dealing with "boring problems" that don't allow for an exciting solution - a balanced lifestyle helps make those situations acceptable.
As a result of doing that, you'd be transferring the CO2 from the oceans back into the atmosphere.

I'm still unsure about the appropriate process of dealing with all the CO2 released over the last ~200 years - it originally came from somewhere, I'd imagine likely the atmosphere - then over millions of years it was sequestered into the earth through coal and oil. And we've undone that sequestering in a very rapid manner, over approx 200 years, an instant in geological terms.

I'd say the hammer stroke hasn't even started ringing yet, and we haven't even begun to see the changes that we've unleashed - and who knows what they might be? So many unknown unknowns there... and we're attempting to throw our best minds at it, yet we're also still very much continuing with our current trajectory.
Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place.

If that were the case, then history would be one steady series of progressions that would look the same from isolated geographic region to isolated geographic region and from culture to culture.

The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans. The Australian Aborigines would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Chinese. The Incans would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the British.

They didn't. We have records that tell us about the individuals and groups who had ideas that significantly affected the course of history. Your argument is completely contradicted by even a cursory examination of the historical record.
If they keep it up you'll have a ready & sizable market.
How can I get covered on TechCrunch?
Good news! Although am i the only one a little disappointed that this is only the 2nd we've wiped out in our long history?
I think they made the right call on this example -- the whole point of SO is to get specific answers to specific questions. This question is vague and without the context that a reasonable person would need to give a specific answer.

There are plenty of examples of good questions being closed because they are perceived as generating too much discussion (esp. on the "programmers" se site). IMO, you've given us an example of SO moderation working.
Moderating any online community is extremely difficult. Rules are generally guidelines and not always set in stone. So, this leaves things up to the discretion of moderators. It can be quite difficult to determine if something is or is not within rules. Was this locking a mistake? Probably, but one question locked means nothing. Moderators always have to watch out for 'rules creep' where the rules are stretched just a little bit over and over again until they are virtually non-existent.

In the SO case, can the moderators be a bit strict sometimes? Sure, in my opinion. But I don't think this is indicative of any broad problem on SO.
If you enjoyed this question about "Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?" posted on Nov 28 '08 at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3748/storing-images-in-db... here are some other questions you might enjoy:

Storing images on a database - Jul 1 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1071636/storing-images-on...

Save image in database? - Apr 30 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805519/save-image-in-data...

store image in database or in a system file? - Apr 19 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/766048/store-image-in-dat...

Where should I store photos? File system or the database? - Oct 9 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1546485/where-should-i-st...

To Do or Not to Do: Store Images in a Database - May 2 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/815626/to-do-or-not-to-do...

Store images in database or on file system - Dec 28 '10 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4550197/store-images-in-d...

Store pictures as files or in the database for a web app? - Feb 18 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/561447/store-pictures-as-...

Storing a small number of images: blob or fs? - Nov 28 '08 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/325126/storing-a-small-nu...

How to store images in your filesystem - Oct 7 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191845/how-to-store-image...

User images - database vs. filesystem storage - Feb 25 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/585224/user-images-databa...

Should I store my images in the database or folders? - Apr 3 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/713243/should-i-store-my-...

Would you store binary data in database or in file system? - Mar 19 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662488/would-you-store-bi...

storing uploaded photos and documents - filesystem vs database blob - Jul 9 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1105429/storing-uploaded-...

I came in here prepared to write an impassioned criticism of StackOverflow's aggressive moderation, but frankly you've made me understand exactly why they do it.
> Completely contradictory to my personal experience as well as to my observations in society.

Irrelevant. These observations are coloured by selection bias.

> successful enterprises while our competitors floundered

What about all the visionaries that failed? What about the non-visionaries that succeeded?

> Without them, we would have been mediocre like our competitors.

Presumption that competitors would not have done what you had done given enough time. Presumption also that your success makes you not mediocre - when in fact it merely indicates success.

> If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple

Some other company would've released a mp3 player, a tablet and a smart phone. Your not that special - it is foolish to be arrogant enough to think that you deserve what you get and that because your sole reason for success is your own work. This is a fundamental attribution error.

> They failed and almost drove the company out of business

Jobs came back in 1997 correct? After Windows reached its dominance correct? So the cash stops bleeding just after Windows has dominated and there is really nothing left to do but join up with them.

> He made it look easy.

Maybe because it was.

> Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life

Well how do you know DNA was unique and special? Because it succeeded? That does not follow. What if the environment changed - such that it favoured DNA molecules over another just through randomness - well then the other molecules get wiped out.

It is foolhardy to assume that DNA could be the only useful substrate for multi-cellular life. But we can't rerun the damn test because - wait for it - EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE.

I end this conversation.
I lived in the US for nearly two years and didn't make one friend. I had work buddies but never seen them out of work.

People in the UK always ask me why I came back to the UK but it's hard to explain to them how hard it is in another country with nothing to do every evening as you have no friends.

Dave
I applaud the effort. With all the recent hubbub surrounding Padmapper I would have expected startups to avoid messing with Craigslist.

The best way to get a giant like Craigslist to move is to step on its' toes.
Your purpose is not clearly stated, or I am an idiot for not understanding.

I would use the following:

<h1>conweets</h1>

<h2>Track twitter conversations.<h2>

<p>
a short (3 sentences or less) story on how or why to use this service. blah blah ect. If you are interested click the link below to continue: twitter oath here.
</p>

BTW how are you planning on monetizing this? Making money and becoming sustainable is my first goal when building new startups.
I knew someone who handed these straws out in Africa a few years back: http://www.gizmag.com/go/4418/ They are simple and inexpensive but they perfectly filer out the larvae from untreated water.

I'm sure he'd be super impressed to see how dramatically the numbers have fallen.
Let me guess.

He offered his school to help create the school website because it would be fun and good practice. However, it turned out that creating a website for someone else isn't just doing the fun bits you're interested in or tinkering with the tech you'd like to know more about. Suddenly there is a client and this client has requirements and expectations. If you not used to this you might be in for a surprise.

For all the 17 year old's reading this thread; There is a big difference between programming for yourself and programming for someone else.
It sounds weird, but Nexus 7 could legitimately appear on this list:

1. small
2. $200
3. Android ICS

Although it only runs Android ICS, so does the Gooseberry, and they included that. Ubuntu etc distributions will undoubtedly follow. Though... to be fair, it doesn't seem in Google's interest to support linux, whereas the Gooseberry folks may do so.
Similarly, if they include announced-but-unshipped (like raspberry pi), the same reasoning applies to Ouya: small, $100, Android ICS.

Finally, ARM for linux might not be the way to go... I've been making comparisons between ARM and x86, and it's seeming that one core of the iPhone 4S is about equivalent to the 600MHz Celeron M in the original eee PC (701). Current Atom cores are about x5 as powerful (at typical clockrates); and currentish intel desktop CPUs (e.g. i5 2500) are about x10 per core (i.e. twice ATOM). [I make per-core comparisons because in practice, for most tasks, parallelization is hard.) Yet, there's a sense that ARM compute performance is approximately on par. I think this comes from dedicated video hardware: when you hear it can do 1080p video, you think it's comparable to an x86 CPU that can do 1080p video. Please amend/extend - I have an ongoing interest in this.

EDIT I assumed incorrectly that Raspberry Pi hasn't shipped (from this line: I’ve set up Gooseberry for one chief reason, the time the Raspberry Pi is taking to get here!)

EDIT Wow, shocking that Nexus 7 has no HDMI/video out - came across the similar-but-cheaper-with-HDMI Ainol Novo 7 Aurora II http://www.uplaytablet.com/compare-the-spec-of-google-nexus-...
I despise cars too (which definitely makes me an oddball since I'm Canadian and live in a mid-sized city), so I sympathize with you. North America is obsessed with cars, and has caused a lot of pollution and havoc on the landscape.

But I digress. I just wanted to let you know there are others that feel the same way.
This topic isn't about the age of the SO question. It's about whether the SO mods calling such questions invalid and locking them is ruining SO. The SO mod says it's locked because it's not a good, on-topic question. I don't see how the mod fights to keep the question somewhere, by locking it and calling it an off-topic question.
Just so it's clear to everyone, he says

> And then going on to make more ludicrous statements…

> > Axons carry spike signals at 75 meters per second or less (Kandel et al. 2000). That speed is a fixed consequence of our physiology. In contrast, software minds could be ported to faster hardware, and could therefore process information more rapidly.

> You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the subunits? You’ve assumed you’ve got this gigantic database of every cell and synapse in the brain, and you’re going to just tweak the clock speed…how? You’ve got varying length constants in different axons, different kinds of processing, different kinds of synaptic outputs and receptor responses, and you’re just going to wave your hand and say, “Make them go faster!” Jebus. As if timing and hysteresis and fatigue and timing-based potentiation don’t play any role in brain function; as if sensory processing wasn’t dependent on timing. We’ve got cells that respond to phase differences in the activity of inputs, and oh, yeah, we just have a dial that we’ll turn up to 11 to make it go faster.

The only explanation I can think of is that he thinks the proposal is to scan this brain so that it can be duplicated and run as another fleshy brain. But obviously, the idea is to simulate the entire brain on a computer, so that simulating the brain faster than real life is just a matter of having a fast computer. If he missed this, it makes me a bit skeptical of his other criticisms.
Yes.

Thanks, most of the last two years of using CLI have all been using "single specific scripts", so I'm getting sick of not actually knowing how CLI works and being a confused, brainless C&P robot. Everybody who writes the tutorials and provides me with the scripts seem to know what they are doing, but it is hard to figure it out. Thanks for the link.

In terms of specifics, it is the ones I mention at the bottom of the post, regarding finding EBS blocks with lsblk, passing the names into an MDADM command, and then the rest of the script doesn't need anything more dynamic.

I will look up grep/sed/awk (I'm writing a bash script). From what I know of them so far, they are just regexp, which concerns me, because that feels like a very dangerous "hacky" way of performing very delicate and important tasks. But it seems that everybody is saying that is the only way to handle outputs.

Anything else? Thanks for your help.
Didn't Citizens United effectively say that donating money is protected speech? Apparently we need a Wikileaks party in the US.
Uh. This nice story got unexpectedly dark. Sorry for your loss, bro.
> The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans

Wrong.

Just because I indicated that others may take there place - it does not follow that anyone - anywhere could. For Einstein - another European physicist could've taken his place. For the Romans - barbarians could've taken their place (and did - remember the Mongols?). For America - the Spanish could've taken their place (too bad they lost the Spanish Armada thanks to a war started by trying to build an empire using the wealth of silver mined in South America which weakened their North American position and give Louisiana to the French who themselves were weakened by war and sold it to the Americans).

Do you know why? EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE since all things are the accumulation of local ideas/effects - as per causality/evolution.
> Your super-effective caching engine, described with words like "query" and "request" and "server" and "cache", is not relevant to your users. Like, at all.

I agree totally. In my marketing copy on LinkPeek I attempted really hard to stay away from the term API even though that is what the service is. Basically you must describe the product like your real customers would describe it.
I still think the Amazon S3 API is really nice.
Thinking that is so damn difficult for young and not-US startup like us to end up on techblogs like TechCrunch.
What about pull request on GitHub?
Your advice about fonts and texts is certainly correct. I am working on it straight away. About the aggregator thing, yes I am working on it, but we do have a "trending" conversations section, but it isn't very dynamic because of less traffic.
Really. Get off our lawn!!!
> Are you kidding me? The product or package maintainer should handle this better.

Man, you got that right. They should make it so that it can be installed through Package Control.

Oh, wait...

For a bootstrapping method, this seems completely reasonable. It doesn't involve downloading inscrutable single-platform installers, or opening a shell window, or any other external dependencies. The whole process runs inside the one environment you're guaranteed to have: Sublime Text itself.
Please elaborate. If I want to know the pros/cons of storing images in a database, vs. (say) storing only the links to images in the database, what more specific question should I look for? How is that question too general or vague? Apparently at least 400 people thought it was reasonable, than thought it was unreasonable. 50+ people thought it was reasonable enough to respond to.
Walking away from the computer and going outside can be incredibly beneficial to solving problems you're stuck on. You keep thinking about the problem even while you're away, and the problem drifts in and out of your consciousness as you're off doing non-programming things, but somehow this "light" thinking ends up stirring some extra understanding or breakthrough. Many other people report similar experiences, see Rich Hickey's Hammock Driven Development talk for a related but slightly different take.

Other than that, I don't think there is any new wave, unless I'm out of touch and you're not. Most of my peers and colleagues hack through the weekends, on their own work, or something fun and new, like learning a new language, a new app platform, or something hardware related like 3d printing and Arduino tinkering.
Wikipedia is like accordions that way.
I know you've probably read that meditation helps, but you should really try it. The key to meditation is observing your thought patterns, trying to slow them down and eventually completely stop them on demand. This can be very refreshing to your mood and motivation.

The practice eventually helps bring balance to your daily routine by training your brain to turn off noisy/irrelevant thoughts when they become distracting.
I am sorry for terming at as a startup, I think its more of a tool. Although, we are looking to increase its scope by adding more features like tracking all the conversation of a single user.

I am working on making "what it does" more clear. Its certainly not stated clearly. Thanks for the advice

If you have a plan or suggestion about other features, do let me know.
I have no clue what this does.

On the other hand, I don't think this is a startup.
Were I to be in that situation, I would be using my spare time to engage in programming something fun and rewarding for myself - not spending my time further away from programming, loathing and dreading the moment I return to a keyboard. That is what I don't get... surely spending time doing things to avoid solving "boring problems" would further compound the issue of wanting to avoid programming?
Agreed, more of tool than a startup. Working on other suggestions. Thanks a ton.
It's very easy to say "Just adopt a positive attitude!" but this is something that is difficult to really do when you perceive the penalty of failure to be high and the odds of success to be low.

I never said it was easy. It's very difficult, partly because it's hard to accomplish, partly because it's esoteric and hard to even understand for many people. If you have a bad attitude, then it's hard to appreciate the importance of even trying to have a good attitude.

This seems disingenuous however since you have to think about the person giving the message and ask whether their life ambition was really trying to herd unemployed people.

That kind of cynicism is a trap that keeps people from breaking free of their own attitude-based limitations. Maybe the message givers just want to help people and they're performing an extraordinarily important service? Maybe the job they're doing is just a step along the way to other ambitions and heights in their careers?
And it even has hooters today.
Lol, that's confusing patterns with reality, but nice try ;)
Chrome on iPad. The text is to low on the buttons at the top of the page, it looks odd. When reading a conversation the share tool covers half of it up and not only that but it moves with you when you scroll down the page.

Dave
I'm curious how this will work - who knows exactly how many papers they will publish at the start of a grant? And what about fields with low grant amounts (mathematics, humanities, etc?)
We really don't have any other way of monetizing this right now and need to cover up initial costs, hence the ads. We have tried to keep the ads to a minimum apart from that one big banner ad.
I used this project as an excuse to submit a pull request (adding gist viewing), refresh myself some python (it's been a while), and write a blog post about it (http://earino.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/being-a-github-polygl...). I genuinely love what github has provided me, a place to program for fun again, without having to delve so deeply into a sub-community of open source that I have to invest real deeply. I can literally hit a URL, see what issues exist about a project, and fix something. Github is awesome.
If the question was locked because it's a duplicate, I understand and agree with that. But it wasn't locked for being a duplicate; it was locked for being an off-topic question. I don't see how you've addressed that.
Godel's theorum is incomplete.
Agreed. More of a tool than a startup.
It's illustrative to compare the number of parasitic species eliminated to that of non-parasitic species. It's a whole lot easier to knock the crap out of a passenger pigeon than A. aegypti, because the pigeon hasn't been under the selective pressure that the mosquito has.
If it had an HDMI port, it'd be great for hacking on, since you could build all kinds of media center type applications with it. You could make your own Ouya. Without any video output, it doesn't have the utility of a (small) computer. Most of the devices on that list have an HDMI port.

My HTC Evo phone, now 2+ years old, has a mini HDMI port. I don't understand why companies are now shipping tablets without one.
Yeah, that was more confrontational than I wanted to be, sorry guys. If thousands in the niche exist and are reachable in a permission-based way, kudos. That's still kind of mind-blowing. I guess I was primed to expect bad behavior after seeing a reference to cold-calling.
That's a possibility too. I was thinking it would be more difficult, since he might have run into the whole new rich/old rich thing. He would have been perfectly happy living in a suburban tract home, and that's the type of person he grew up with, so I was thinking that would be the easiest.

Besides, you have fewer choices if your pool of potential friends is rich people.
Mistakes to Avoid as a Lean Startup
I think that if I was in HR at Facebook, I'd be thinking "I'm doing HR for a multibillion dollar company in a fierce battle for talent with some of the most savvy companies in the world. I do not have the bandwidth to adjudicate yoga disputes. Hey, company I contract out to for yoga classes: just send someone different next time so I can get on with my real job."

Ultimately I don't care about the specifics of this story, except that it seems like a really good parable for teaching the difference between how businesses and insiders perceive value. Substitute "PHP developer" for "yoga instructor" and you could forklift this whole thread into the "Ask HN: How can I become a consultant" posting from earlier today. "Start by not being like this yoga instructor."

(I don't think the yoga structure is a bad person; I just think she had the wrong job.)
Just tried that today (thanks to the Reddit list) and it has over 280,000 quizzes ... some of them are surprisingly robust ... including user-submitted ones.
"The inspiration was the cell."

That's news to me, although I dont claim to be an OO historian. The original OO language was Simula which was devised to do discrete event simulations. Its direct antecedent was work done on Monte Carlo simulations. Smalltalk and C++ were both inspired by Simula.
Star Wars Call Me Maybe
I think what he means is that the brain is multi-threaded with optimistic locking and hardcoded timing constants.

Try running old MS-DOS games inside an emulator.
Many of them will act quite funny when you turn up the clock-speed.
Grow up. No, that's not a pejorative, it's an observation. When I was younger, I suffered from some of the symptoms you outline (although, omnipresence was less of a problem in 1992 when I got started hacking for a living). As you get older, you will notice that along with increased responsibility comes a decreased ability to be spread so thinly, and you'll start picking your battles better.

Until then, I have no useful advice.