skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Translating "The Economist" Behind China's Great Firewall
It's not always about money; sometimes hackers just hate you
Ask HN: Does anyone know a good way of reviewing code on the iphone?
When I'm waiting somewhere or on public transport I'd like to be able to read or even edit code on the iphone. Has anyone worked out a halfway decent experience for doing this?
Not worthwhile for AOL and Yahoo is very different from non-viable. They might not have the resources to dedicate to sustaining it. It might not fit with their corporate strategy or vision. Maybe it makes money, but just not enough to justify their manpower.
Sleep or take a shower, and slip into something comfortable. See if you can do it listening to music.

If that fails, re-evaluate your life and introspect how all these deadlines mean that something is ending, giving you an opportunity to either do something better or just give you more free time/sleep.
It's not that simple. For one, you want to lose fat weight, not muscle, bone, etc. weight. How does your body consume or store fat? It depends on available calories, the caloric composition, and your hormone feedback systems. Arguably, the hormones exert more control than anything else.

It gets more complicated from there: hormone's respond to what you eat. Eat more sugar, it raises your insulin (a hormone) which will stop the conversion of fat to energy, and indirectly will cause the conversion of blood sugar to fat. If your insulin is improperly regulated, you'll have difficult following the simple formula above. The same goes for thyroid hormones. They regulate your metabolism. Another hormone involved is cortisol which reponds to stress levels and can increase your blood sugar levels (cascading over into insulin, for example). Note that you can run into the non-intuitive case of over exercise increasing your cortisol causing excessive blood sugar causing fat storage. It's not easy, but it is possible.

One way to look at it simply is to eat foods that control your blood sugar, and manage your stress levels to avoid excessive cortisol. Excessive protein and fiber calories won't cause fat to build, going against the above formula. In fact, protein and fiber are excellent blood sugar regulating foods and are therefore good at controlling fat building.
Memcached based message queues
That's exactly my experience. "Dive into Python" made my head spin, confusingly enough (it is a great book).
I did a small project (a deployment system that compiles HTML from a database of Markdown text using Jinja2 templating), coded it up real fast (I was amazed), refactored the thing to read easily and extend well, and just sat back. Just like that.
I all made so much sense, while being so concise, I didn't realize it could be so elegant to write something, something readable, something you do not have to decipher when you get back to it later. I am absolutely sold.

So here's my two cents -- pick a project, a small one, not necessarily something you're going to sell or even release, some repetitive task you have to perform, for instance, and automate that with Python, bring some structure to it and see how that goes.
You might be not as impressionable, but there is definitely immediate gains with this approach (besides scratching your own itch as with my example).
Pardon me for stating the obvious, because nobody has yet: Nobody PLANS to close down within a year.

If you really want to give customers confidence that you're going to be around for the long run, you have to charge a lot of money. More than the competition. That's the only way to demonstrate that your business is viable.
Nanotechnology Acceleration Buzz is High: Pessimists Were Wrong
How To Erase Old Hard Drives Without A Drill Bit
Garageband.com ended up taking over a large portion of their database and has fairly similar capabilities. I've found a number of artists I like from that site.
Tell that to a diabetic.
Sam Ruby puts relevant icons in each post on his blog. I find it a nice break from text, and it serves as a convenient summary of the topic of the post.
The reason I posted this is that regular users shouldn't be going through such pain to erase their drives. One solution I can think of is a unix live boot CD that specifically only does this (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/) to the drive they want to erase. Won't that work or am I missing something?
One Thing You Don't Need To Be An Entrepreneur: A College Degree
>The distinction between "biz" and "people" doesn't make sense

The business doesn't necessarily need to be based out of California, which means that money doesn't necessarily stay in California. Also, while that business can reinvest in the state, I just don't see how that can quickly reach the needs of citizens. A corporation saving millions might pay its employees more, who will pay income tax, which will eventually reach a state government only causing further centralization of state powers.

>There is a reassessment on sale.

Your right. That reassessment is exactly what drives away large new corporate jobs. Imagine company A has a warehouse since 1975. A pays taxes at (1975 level)*1.02^34. This increase is significantly less than actual property values have increased. So when its main competitor, company B, comes to town shopping for a huge tract of land, it's looking at paying reassessment taxes. If they both did the exact same job with the same income, company A stands at a huge advantage solely because it pays so little in property tax compared to B.

Warren Buffet nearly destroyed Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign when he stated that prop 13 was terrible, specifically targeting the reassessment clause. http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Buffett_Prop13.html
This is assuming netbooks took consumers away from laptops rather than attract consumers who otherwise would not purchase portable computing.

Netbooks were meant to expand the portable computing market, not redistribute it.
It still complicated, though. For example, eat 1500 calories a day while your metabolism uses 1800 or so. Sounds foolproof? What if those 1500 calories are all sugar? There goes your metabolic rate and your body fat will go through the roof. What if you eat 60% protein, 30% fiber, 10% fat? You will probably wind up looking like a career athelete, even if you never exercise. The composition of the calories has a huge effect on their usage (through the mechanism of you hormone feedback systems). It may not be rocket science, but the body is complex to the point of being a black box for most people.
Is anyone else finding this absolutely hilarious? PG was giving a "statistically significant counterexample", which is now being voted down because in its literal sense it is anti-HN spirit.
Seguros de Coches
Writing is much more widespread in modern Spanish than classical Latin, is modern Spanish grammar more complex?
You are right in some respects. There are pockets of livable communities, but they are definitely the exception, not the rule.

The problem is that I live where I can get a hardware design job. I am actually trying to move, but the job market is pretty lousy right now. Also, places with more tech jobs like Silicon Valley are even worse than Santa Rosa for sprawl.
If you have over a year of runway it's very unlikely that you'll close down within a year.
When my roommate gets stressed he has 4 glasses of Carlo Rossi and passes out. Does the trick every time.

In all seriousness though, just take a nap and realize that in the grand scheme of things what you're working on is probably not that important. I always recall one particular chapter in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" where he outlined the fact that the human race somehow survived something like 7 extinction periods. That always puts things in perspective for me.

Just be happy.
Why so low?
Excellent point. I should start thinking through these comments...
The per-capita deficit isn't really that meaningful. $1000 a person isn't even that much - each citizen of the USA would have to pay $35,462.89 to cancel out the country's national debt. the reason it's not a problem is because our national debt is only like 75% of GDP. comparatively, California's deficit of $41 billion is only 2.4% of their GDP. it's a little different because California can't print money, but nothing to get all armageddon-y about. raise some taxes, decrease some spending, seize some swiss bank accounts and call it a day.

another point of comparison - we've already given way more than $41 billion to SINGLE corporations like AIG, not to mention bank of america, citi, fannie, freddie, etc. personally, i'd much rather bail out states than corporations. spending money on teachers - the horror!!
Ask HN: How do you use multiple AWS Accounts from the command line?
It depends on the consequences of data exposure. Writing zeroes works, except that any bad blocks that have been mapped out will still contain their last data. A sufficiently motivated "bad person" could read those, possibly by performing some "unmark bad block" operation on the drive.

Bit zones on a disk are analog things, think of writing zeroes as laying a blank piece of paper over a written secret message. You may still be able to read the secret message. In the olden days it was possible to use specialized tiny devices to read the analog the disk's surface and work out the previous data. (This is the origin of the "erase (7|49) times" rules.)

I rather doubt that modern drives can be read this way after a wipe. There is a dollar reward out for any data retrieval service that can retrieve data from a wiped drive that is, as yet, unclaimed. I think the PR win would inspire that crowd to demonstrate the capability if they had it. That leaves wealthy nations as possible readers.

Given the minimal value of an old hard drive, I give them a few chops with a splitting maul if I have a couple, when getting rid of many of them I take them to an ewaste handler and pay him $10 to throw them in the shredder while I watch. That way they get recycled better.
If the numbers show that people spend irresponsibly with credit cards, that isn't necessarily evidence that it's good advice to say "Don't get a credit card". Those numbers you're basing that advice on have a built-in skew towards people who have chosen to use credit cards. You have to ask the question "Would a person who would accept the advice to not get a credit card behave in the same way as the average credit card user if they did have one?"

I would argue that if you're seeking and open to advice on whether or how to use a credit card, you're probably already differentiated from the free-wheeling credit-abusing mob, and that if that's the case, if you know you can be responsible with it, it's actually a really great idea to have one.
Ning Launches Rich, Persistent Chat Feature
Might Blu-ray be able to save itself yet?
tptacek makes a good point, as do you ryan. I suppose I had assumed we were the target for this post, not "the average consumer".

If I was right, I think my point stands. If not, tptacek's likely right, though perhaps it may lay the seeds of confidence in box's readership.
A Sketchy Brain Booster: Doodling
He's ignoring the fact that tax rates are marginal. 9.3% only kicks in for amounts earned about 40 or 50k...I haven't look up the exact numbers. He's also ignoring various deductions and credits you can take.
Admirable. Assuming this is legally sound, I think its existence should recast multipage byzantine TOS as intentional attempts to obscure and deceive.

I do note that one of the permitted uses is Provide recommendations regarding products and services to other users. and postulate: What if an RIAA enforcement contractor is a user and the recommendation is that they sue user X for having a copy of as yet unreleased track Y? Does this document adequately forbid this? Would an 8 page homage to fine print do so?
At the first startup I worked for we polled our office of 12 people to see who had graduated from college. I'm pretty sure the answer was just two people, myself and the other middle manager. Everybody doing interesting work, developers, designers, and founders had either skipped or dropped out of college.

Three of those college dropouts went on to found a company that Fred is funding. So his story could easily be about those three people.

There are two things I realized after that poll. First, the conventional path is boring and I needed to jump off.

Second, the amount of work required to be great at something completely trumps the tiny amount of work that you're going to put in during college. Sure, the background knowledge is helpful, but only a little bit compared to everything you're going to have to learn after college.
do you think people see airplanes as metal tubes full of highly flammable liquid?

not to mention that balloon vs metal is already very unbalanced
Facebook and the Future of User Generated Governance
I buy into the argument that social networks aren't stable entities. Because the main element is friending somebody, it is incredibly awkward to unfriend somebody, or denying a friend request.

So a boss asks to be your facebook friend, and all of a sudden, you have to be super careful about privacy settings, other friends, talking trash, etc. Now it's become linkedin.

But hey, check out this new social network. Hop on a new network that's growing, and keep up with your friends, who you can convince to also join.

Repeat.
"Despite all the time I have wasted here....it was worth it"

This sentiment is very common here, but I strongly question it. I also wonder why people don't label their time here a little more honestly: as procrastination. We all justify it as "oh, but I might learn something useful for my future". And some of us might have indeed tangibly improved their lives (though I'm sceptical). But surely whatever benefits you gain can be reaped by visiting say once every 3-4 days, vs 12 times in one day? More generally, out of the people who do claim to have benefited their lives, are they able to point to a specific instance or two where HN tangibly improved their lot?

I'll be honest: I resent visiting here often. I'm a worse person for it. Every minute I (or you, for that matter) spend here, someone else is spending that minute doing great work (for some definition of 'great'). In fact I am suspicious of anyone who has a ginormous amount of comments posted frequently; I do not see it as something to be proud of, but quite the opposite.

I'm sure there are people who buck the trend (pg seems to frequently post here, yet still manages to do great work. I am convinced that he has cloned himself without telling anyone).

I realise that what I'm saying might be heresy (see 'What You Can't Say' etc) given the constant optimism among this site's visitors, but I do not mean to denigrate anyone when I say that most of us (me included of course) are timewasters.
Your second point is certainly not universal, some people do a lot of work during college.

If you know what you really want to do before college, sure go for it, but in most cases people have no idea, college is a good place to keep busy and learn about your interests.
Sort of like Pixeljunk Eden. Don't let the flowery decor, trippy music, and effortless videos of floating through space deceive you: it masks a brutally hard platformer which if my friends were not so committed to each other would probably have caused a divorce after failing to properly catch somebody at the top of the last level, which causes BOTH players to fall all the way to the bottom. And its a long way down, with plenty of time for bitter recriminations.
Oh boy, somebody is going to eat his own words.

That post will be frozen in time till the day they close shop, then it will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Hey, Someone took it seriously!

I would assume that strings and "ordinary" O.D. would differ in their object type: each would inherit from an abstract O.D. and each would have a different print/display function (you could have a "hidden" variable specifying this function if you wished to keep in all concrete).

If I do y[1] = 'a' and y[3] = 'b', and then y << 'c', what is the value of y?

probably y = { 1=>'a', 3=>'b', 4=>'c'}, though like any good OO/metaprogramming language, "<<" would be an overidable function.

"Do the above questions really matter?"

I am arguing for the next language and by that token, I haven't answered all the questions this raises. I think old languages like lisp and new languages like Ruby prove that new languages can unleash new possibilities, even more than fifty years after the original computer languages were created.

Thanks for your detailed reply, seriously...
Firefox Productivity Addons
I do a lot of web development and I frequently find myself with 20+ open tabs. I use a lot of addons to manage this and to make my firefox usage more efficient: Aging tabs, sxipper, fire gesture, foxmarks, next tab, a few other minor addons that give minor productivity boosts and a whole suite of web dev/design tools on top of that.(checkbox mate is pretty nice if you haven't seen it) I'm about to try out tabkit and fisheye tabs to see if they help me at all. But the addon that I really want and need doesn't seem to exist.

I work on a laptop, a work computer and a home computer. When I switch computers I frequently need to open the 20+ tabs that were open on the other computer. I have been passing around a text document full of URLs with dropbox but that is an awful and time consuming solution. Not to mention I lose sessions/cookies when I transfer over(though that would be a much more difficult addon from a developer perspective then what I am looking for). What I want is basically a foxmarks for my open tabs, and as far as I can tell this doesn't exist at all. I just grabbed Send Tab URL's, which will make my life slightly easier, but it is not truly what I am looking for.

I would definitely be willing to pay for such an addon, though I have never really heard of addons costing money. But if there was an addon like that that saved sessions and cookies across computers, people would definitely be willing to pay for it.
CBS's TV.com comes to the iPhone, proves pleasant. But we need Hulu for iPhone.
At my first Valley startup job I was the first hire (out of 30) who didn't have a degree. I gather there was a long discussion about it before I was hired.

I missed out on some things, especially getting to know good hackers, and I've probably been paid less over the years. But it hasn't hurt me much. I am under 30 and I have almost 20 years of work experience.
Well, fortunately "financial engineering" hasn't discredited engineering. It is merely an inappropriate and discredited application of the engineering methodology.
Andrew, this is badass! Great work.
well, they do charge more than the competition ;)
Rest assured it will have more thorough documentation at some point, for my own benefit as much as anyone else's. Right now it's all very new and its internals are not that stable, so the only comments tend to be for stuff that followed a long debugging session to remind me why certain things are there. When it's more stable I'll do a better job of writing up how it works.
Better yet, get a team going. Seems like that's more what they're looking for...
I took that to refer to volumes that are just stored on a normal filesystem with their hidden bit set, or a dot prepended. If TCHunt could really find the "stored-in-free-space" Hidden volumes, it definitely would be able to distinguish them, or the disclaimer would at least read "TCHunt cannot differentiate between a deleted volume and a hidden one," because that's what it would look like--data in the filesystem without a corresponding inode/MFT entry. Plus, depending on whether or not it is trying to find these deleted volumes, its scanning algorithm would have to be completely different--one just following down the directory tree, the other working across the block device with a resizable window.
Is this going to be part of ThruQueue?
Why would the word 'bad' die out?
Get drunk or stoned. A solution will come to you!
College is a check box, not a select all button.
That actually works like a charm.
Another game that fits this exact description, at least for me, is Tranquility (http://www.tqworld.com/). It's ten years older (and the basic graphics model shows it), but it's still actively maintained and looks pretty neat even on modern hardware.

A warning, though: unless you've been in microgravity before, or at least read the passages in Ender's Game dealing with reorienting "down" and altering rotational momentum to match targets, the controls might frustrate before they relax :)
If it's a once (or twice) off:

* Go for a run.

* Then take a cold shower.

* Then dose up on caffiene of your choice.

But please don't do stuff like this often - if you're always working like that - then just go to bed.
Economy News: Investing in Jobs is Important
I think it depends on your goals. If your hungry, and can really manage I would start with the startup. If your goal really is to possibly move towards entrepreneurial things then .. its good to see, and start your career off with the right understanding of how you should train in the arts of being a software jedi. Long hours, rigorous reading, training. Wearing every single hat possible, and grabbing every opportunity. When your ready to move on (if you do), then the big company will still be there. And yes working at a startup with people your age that you get along with, not only makes a crappy job fun, but can make many good friendships and connections for the future as well.
Another reason this happens in my opinion: If you graduate from a good college with a marketable degree, you get sucked right into a cushy job at a large company. If you never got that degree and don't have that job, you're not giving up as much as the guy who's used to the status and money associated with the big company job. The opportunity cost of starting a company is less.
Obama’s 2010 Federal Budget Explained in Plain English
+1 on that, I'm about to check it, but I see college as a way to make connections and get to know more people (teachers and students) interested in the same things I'm.

But yes!, you should do whatever you want to do, college is not an obligation, like you said a check box not a select button.
Even if you had a bad YC experience, it wouldn't be to your advantage to go public with it. You'd burn bridges for little gain.

The only people who seem to bad-mouth investors are ones who've already made more money than they know what to do with (Sabeer Bhatia style: http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2009/02/a-note-about-sa...). YC hasn't had any giant, mega-hits yet that would warrant a founder poisoning their relationship with the investment community.
These days, I encourage kids to learn how to hack early and then go to a good school and network. If nothing else, the contacts are well worth it. It's not easy to get into the game anymore without the contacts and unless you've got deep pocketed parents or kooky friends with ambition (and money) you're just gonna get stuck somewhere less than desirable.
Great topic, but the article is too hazy on how their model works and what data they are feeding it.

My fellow HNers, give us more like this. Except better.
Yeah, well, you don't need a college degree to drink a bunch of booze, have sex with lots of chicks, and do lots of interesting drugs and hang around with interesting people, but it's how most people go about doing those things when they're 18-22 years old.