skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great quote. Seems like the original version is by John Godfrey Saxe though, and reads "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafir...
There are tons of places bands can sell their music without a middleman or fees. Our site, Bandzoogle.com is one (if you want a full blown website), but you can also use one of dozens of widgets like Bandcamp.mu if you already have a site.

In terms of paying the middleman to be on sites like Amazon and iTunes -- this is really just based on the policies of those stores. They make you go through a middleman because they don't want to deal with artists directly. Because of this, someone has to track royalties, encode the tracks in proprietary formats etc, which does incur a bit of work, which is why they are all fee-based.
I recently packaged up a piece of software for distribution, and I would never have a ZIP file to unpack. It HAS to be a standalone setup.exe which installs to Program Files/program so nobody has to make a decision. Access is with an icon in the system menu. And there's an uninstall. It's made with NIS Edit, which is a great program.
The people who pay the debt back probably have to be the same ones who accumulated it in the first place, otherwise the learning process (for which the whole thing is a metaphor) is short-circuited.
Why Array Indexes Should Start From Zero
Nice, but does it work on Windows?
Travian ro7
I read the samples it and seems decent... although heavily spaced with large nicely formatted quotes. I feel like I'd blow through the whole 83 pages on a lunch break. But of course, this might be a good thing... often times the best advice is succinct.

I'm on the verge of buying it, but I probably won't for two reasons. One: many VC's and entrepreneurs have done such a great job at disseminating this information that it's basically free. I don't mind having to do some digging around to put the bits together.

Two: I want to help out. If I save my $20 for myself to continue working on my hack, then at some point I can pitch to these guys and eventually make them more than $20 richer... so it really is to their own benefit.
There are pendulums in fashion, but not, as far as I know, in technology. If you get pendulum-like behavior for a cycle, you have to assume it's a coincidence.
VC Model Is Not Broken: Insights from Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group
Lift 1.0 released
Good thoughts, Jer. Funny you should mention ad networks. I approached Federated Media a while back.

They loved the traffic, but couldn't deal with the fact that it was a tutorial site. They seemed to think of themselves as Builders of A Great Online Editorial Empire, instead of what they are: ad brokers.

"We work with blogs. This isn't a blog."

"It's better than a blog. The content is more targeted."

"Uh, you're not a blog."

Maybe I'll hit up No Starch Press or somebody like that. Thanks!
Would you buy a song on the recommendation of someone who you knew was getting a commission for recommending that song?

Yet advertising still works...

I think their scheme is actually pretty clever. First off, you assume that if people out to make money are willing to "invest" in a song, they are assuming that it's good enough that other people will actually buy the song. Secondly, if you buy the song, you can also make money from it.

The really interesting part will be when someone decides that they want to see how well they can game this system as an investor, especially using some quantitative analysis tools, tracking other high earners, etc. This is mostly assuming that they switch to cash credit vs store credit.
I wrote something very similar to this a little while ago that's framework agnostic, http://www.github.com/jcapote/theman
Bell/Rogers have horrible cell phone pricing.

Before the iPhone came to Canada about 6 months ago, they were charging 30$ per month for 5 megs of data usage. In 2008.

Why? Because Blackberry users here are mostly corporate users that don't pay their own phone bills, and they were nailing those corps for massive overage bills on data.

Such scamish companies and they are the only 2 options for most of Canada.
Ask HN: What advice do you have for a first time blogger?
I'm in college and am just starting my first blog about an unrelated subject. So far my audience is just my local friends and acquaintances, but I want to build a larger community. How do I form lasting relationships with my readers? I really want to build a community, not just an audience, and that requires interactivity.

I saw this item a week or so ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485592 But it seems as if everyone was off on different tangents rather than discussing how to build a compelling blog.

All advice is very appreciated. Thanks.
Awaken is great, it gets me up every morning. You can put your Macbook to sleep and Awaken will wake it up, so you can have it turned off during the night. You can get it at http://www.embraceware.com/products/awaken/
If that happens, say goodbye to your worldwide tours, and consequently, your favorite band from australia (or somewhere) coming to montana to tour. Right now, the labels pay for that kind of thing. Without the labels, the band has to make a huge amount of money on sales, and we've just described an impossible situation. A band is not going to make enough money unless they have funding (not unlike a startup).

Radiohead did this because they'd already been successful in the past, that's why fans were willing to pay for their music even if it was given away. It might work for a new band, but if ALL bands are on equal footing, I don't think the income will be as high per band.

I could be wrong though.
Why California Is Quickly Dying
Yahoo Management Restructure
How about "I don't care?". Really. I bought the book and I am free to do with it as I please. That's where you rights as an author stop and mine as a reader begin. Will we have fewer authors? Likely. But I don't care. For all I know there are too many books being written already.

To put it another way, should we also charge each parent who reads a book to his child? It would make current authors more prosperous, but then it will also attract more people to writing and those new people will be just as miserable as the current crop is today. There will always be some miserable writers, no matter where the goal posts are set.

Can't make a living writing? Don't write. Go do something people would want.
Great article. It reminds me of another dilemma I came across earlier this week.

I had a 280MB xml file containing about 120,000 records. I needed a way to parse out a subset of the records (about 15,000) and then put their data into a db.

I was developing on a vps with only 256MB of RAM, so I wanted to avoid memory intensive operations. I'm using ruby, so I started looking into how to 'stream' the xml with ruby in such a way that I could read if it was the type of record I wanted to keep, somehow manipulate and store the data and move to the next record. The more I looked into that strategy, the more complex and ominous it seemed. I just really wanted to find a simpler way that wouldn't require all the apparent tediousness of streaming the xml file (it may seem simple enough, but there are dependencies you have to install, api's you have to read and learn, etc). There were just too many moving pieces and it made me feel eery about the outcome. Another aspect of it was just pure laziness. I just don't care how I get that data into the db - I just want to get it in there.

Fortunately, the glorious wonderfulness of linux utilities saved me from a long tedious solution. Behold:

csplit -q catalog.xml '/<title_index_item>/' '{*}'

This splits the large xml file into sub-xml files that start with 'xx' by default, followed by an incremental number, xx10004 for example. It splits the file based on the <title_index_item> tag - which is the tag for the items I want. See `man csplit` for more info...

find xx* | xargs grep -L 'label="instant"' | xargs rm -f

The 'find' lists all the sub-xml files, then we grep for the filenames that do not contain what I'm looking for, then delete those files. I'm left with a directory of 15,000+ xml files with just the type of data I'm interested in.

find . | wc -l

This command is just so I can track the progress of the operations. Obviously `ls` would return too much data, so we pipe the file list to `wc -l` which gives us the number of lines - which in this case is the number of files in the dir.

So, two lines of code on the command-line instead of a far-more complex ruby/streaming-xml solution. Now I can have a ruby script process each individual file and add the data to the db - a much simpler problem to deal with.

My point is that you can accumulate code debt by doing the seemingly 'right' solution sometimes. There are probably coders that will cringe that I just used a couple of shell commands to do this rather than write up a long, well-documented, properly OOP, TDD, etc "right" solution. However, the "right" solution in that case would have accumulated code debt - more code to maintain, more moving pieces, more things that can go wrong. I'd trade maintaining two lines of shell code over 10's or 100's of lines of ruby code and it's dependencies any day of the week.
From Creationism to Evolutionism in Computer Programming
Top Most Expensive Google Android Apps On The T-Mobile G1 Market
> There are so many benefits, and as long as you have a little self-control, pretty much no downside.

I would change that to "a lot of self-control".

As someone who is filing for bankruptcy (due to investment property loss related to the sub-prime debacle, not credit cards) and has had all his credit cards canceled (even the ones paid on time), I can tell you how much more difficult it is to live off cash alone. There have been so many times when the flexibility of a credit card would have saved me from several $35 overdraft fees. Such repeated experiences quickly teaches you to change your habits and be more frugal.

If you don't feel disciplined enough with your credit cards now, try not using them at all for a few months. Take them out of your wallet and stick them in a box at home so you can't use them when you're out.
$19 is the cost of lunch and a couple of lattes. While I don't need the book to learn how to pitch, the humor/entertainment value by itself makes it worth skipping lunch to buy. (Note: this is an unsolicited advertisement. Nivi, if you see this, perhaps you can set up the equivalent of an Amazon affiliate code so I can make 4% off each copy.)
Rocky Mountain News closing after Friday edition
Future of Microsoft 3D simulation platform in doubt
When you buy it (I just did) you get a message with a $5 discount code in it ("for your friends"). I'd share it here (aren't we all friends here?) but I'm not sure if that's OK with the authors.

Is it OK?
"It's managed by the thought process of the programmers." -- In enlightened organizations, sure.

Is it unprofessional to allow managerial deadline pressure to influence code quality ?? At what point is it justified for a programmer to say "No"? At what point is it wise?
On YC? Or just in general? I think you'd have to be pretty dense not to be able to find mine, as it's scattered all over the bloody internet.
Cool. I'm in support of any syntax front-end that brings us closer to a future where everyone uses s-expressions for everything. ;P

(it's not s-expressions, but it's a step in the right direction)
Practice Your Code-Fu: Programming Exercises, Puzzles, & Contests Online
Printing the NYT costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle
Do cron jobs work on Windows?
Travel Insurance Israel - The Perfect Solution For All of Your Traveling Needs
A new ad
I like to listen AM talk radio to keep me awake on long road trips for the exact same reason.
Sorry, I accidentally downmodded you (didn't mean to click there). You can go ahead and hit me too, if you want. :)
If giving it a clever name is the only way to explain it to management (which may be the case here) then it's worth it.
On having an engaging blog:

1. Be topical. The best blogs in my feed reader stick to broad-ish topics I'm interested in. i.e. Rails, Package Design, App Reviews.

2. Be consistent (frequency). This is simple to understand, difficult to execute. Find a schedule and stick to it.

3. Be consistent (structure). Once you've found a blogging style that suits you, stick to 1-2 styles (perhaps a short-form and a long-form). 37signals SvN lost it's spot in my feed reader for mixing snippets, quotes, long insights, and code-heavy posts together.

4. Quality over quantity. The blogs I respect the most are the ones who have thought out, relevant posts - even if they only come once a month.

On building a community:

- Look to see what Seth Godin & Tim Ferris have done to engage their blog readers beyond the comments.

- Remember that blogging is still very much a broadcast medium. Don't expect more than 1% of your readers to engage you on any particular level.
Energy net-zero house: Unity House
I wonder if there is any hope that they will open the plugin up to other developers. Even more, I wish they would have used Unity3d, but for entirely selfish reasons.. granted, porting their assets might have been a bigger challenge than turning their rendering engine into a browser plugin, but I digress.

We are seeing a trend towards in-browser 3d experiences. The built-in 3d accelerator cards are widespread and "good enough" now in ubiquitous computing that the time is coming where Adobe will have to buy or build their own solution.
Engineers use 'nano-origami' to build tiny electronic devices
I found these gems in one of his papers:

Peer-to-Peer file-sharing techniques such as those used in
Napster, allow interested potential consumers to exchange samples of music at will. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of musical groups in Africa have created their own "communities of interest" in Finland based on individuals
who have discovered them after someone has made recordings available via Napster or similar file-sharing programmes.

Currently the Majors are seeking to develop new technology which will prevent consumers from copying CDs or even "burning" their own CDs from digital downloaded files. Historical evidence does not suggest that they will find a
perfect technological solution to any of the business problems created by new technology.

"There is evidence that the increased availability of music in virtual form as MP3 files leads to an increased consumption of physical products such as CDs.

He seems to know what he is talking about ...
I'm curious, do you consider English grammar simpler than German? (The few people I've talked to about linguistics consider German to be a harder language for English speakers to learn than Spanish, which seems like it must be due to grammatical differences...)
This is the only method that's worked for me:
1. Comb the job boards for interesting looking positions. Don't worry about being qualified yet.
2. Find the name and location of the hiring manager.
3. Write a personalized cover letter to that manager and tell them that you're interested. If you're not qualified for the position as advertised, tell them that you'd be interested in something similar. Sell yourself to them.
4. (This one's important) SNAIL MAIL your resume and cover letter in an 8.5 x 11 envelope.

The last one will make you stand out and tell them that you're really interested and not just spamming them.
I am frequently asked to sign NDAs. I used to sign them, but not anymore. I just tell people that if I signed an NDA each time someone came to me with an idea, then I'd probably be too encumbered to work on the ideas that I'm genuinely interested in (such as, potentially, theirs). Worthwhile people usually accept that response.
Well it might be the weather, or the phases of the moon, or it might just be education!

If they couldn't read their IQ score would be 0.

Obviously the IQ test questions strive to be about general problem solving, not culturally specific factual knowledge, etc.

But it should be just as obvious that strive is all they can do. They just can not be divorced from a while lot of stuff that's learned.

Which is why IQ test are very highly correlated with education, they are also correlated with some natural ability, but it's impossible to tell which contributes how much.

East Asian along with us East Europeans, come from very rigorous public schools. I've attended public schools in Eastern Europe and Western Europe and the US.
And I have Japanese friends, I met when we were both exchange students in a top notch US high school.

We were seniors and my Japanese friends and I were amazed how US seniors barely had a 6th grade level of science knowledge in 12th grade.

Now do you think my Japanese fiend and I had all that knowledge because of the systems of public education we came from, or because we were both genetically superior to the US kids?

So it's possible that fist and second generation Mexican immigrants score lower on IQ tests, because of genetics.

But it's much, much, much more likely it is because of a different educational background.

Even if the second generation attended the same schools, that doesn't make up for the educational deficit in their home.

And importing highly educated immigrants is a great way to reap the benefits of an education you didn't pay for.

And important any kind of humans, even illiterate ones, is a good way to grow the economy. Even the lowest of the low buy stuff, and because humanity is so closely related, they are not bringing down the national IQ in the long term.

Or rather they shouldn't be, because if your country is a well functioning state it should be able to educated people and reap the economic benefits from that in the long term.

If it can't do that, immigration is not your problem, your problem is you're barely able to come out even, and unskilled immigration is just making that problem worse.
The Value of the Y Combinator Experience
Wow, this made my day. I've been using FireQuark (a custom firebug that provides CSS selectors - http://www.quarkruby.com/2007/9/5/firequark-quick-html-scree...) and while it was very helpful, SelectorGadget will remove sooo much more of the pain of scraping. Major kudos.

As an aside, I'll mention the nokogiri gem (almost identical to hpricot, but under much more active development), that's what I've been using and it's excellent. http://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri/tree/master
Great 3rd Party Keyboard iPhone Concept & Interview
"A big barrier to entry for Scheme is getting a nice environment set up"

Dunno: DrScheme is very nice out-of-the-box.
Maybe just add the ability to toggle the names on/off.
What about Clojure?

http://gist.github.com/55921
If you are a contractor, it can actually be profit! :-)
I bought one of those pod coffee machines. Set it up next to my alarm clock. (In theory), when I stumble over to my alarm clock to shut it off, I just hit the button on the machine and my coffee is ready in 4 seconds.

Usually, by the time I get up to snooze it a second time, the coffee is sitting there, smelling all coffee-like (yummy). That's my Pavlovian trick.
Excellent work; I also liked your screencast, you did a good job in quickly showing what SelectorGadget did!
exactly, people were just saying "well the model says it will work", and didn't realize that the models they were using had huge assumptions hard coded into them.
That is amazing! Made my fan start screaming, but well worth it!
I'm a huge Nokia fan (N95 8gb here) but they keep building these "mobile computers" that few people buy -- their Nokia Communicator / N800 Tablet are two examples. They should stick to making great cellphones with awesome media capabilities for now. It's the whole reason why I don't buy an iPhone, I get a quality 5MP camera that does great VGA video at 30fps and has really loud stereo speakers for playback.

The whole mini-Laptop thing (which I'm guessing Nokia is looking at) is just another trend that will die off soon. It was a trend about a decade back with the Toshiba Libretto and will die out as another fad once people (again) realize how the mini-laptop is a failed compromise between a full laptop and desktop.

Now a "slate" computer (like an 8.5x11" iPhone) would be sweet, so long as it had a quality touch-OS.
Cool site - I really liked it but it maybe because the featured music just so happened to be in my taste. But I also like the idea of getting paid back for buying music. Very creative concept
Depends on whether one considers it polite to link to a pdf file instead of a web page with context.
I really liked the little flourish in Okami where when you ran a trail of blooming flowers would follow your characters. And of course it was immensely satisfying to purify an area and watch the cut scene of all the evil being washed away.

...I want Okami 2 damn it. hates capcom
You are probably talking about -
http://www.dapper.net/dapp-factory.jsp ,
which is basically a much more powerful 'selectorgadget'.

Edit: After using selectorgadget for a couple of minutes I found a case where selectorgadget works much better than dapper.net. selectorgadget is great!
Just so you know, there was, and may still be, an off-by-one error in Hpricot's implementation of nth-child that may confuse you when using the selectors generated by SelectorGadget.
English is a MUCH easier language grammatically than German. Just the fact that German has gender assignment on words increases the complexity of the German Grammar by a large amount.
It's the player. Controllable speed is high on the feature list.
Technical debt is appropriate in prototype code, where you aim at getting something you can play with as a user; and also get a feel for its technical feasibility. This works fine.

Unfortunately, I ended up wanting to go back to the code to reuse/build on my approaches to the key technical problems... but the hacked mess was tortuous to read or understand (interest payments). So the dilemma is: how to write readable code, when it's only for a prototype and so not worth the effort?

My current tradeoff is to make the prototype code too simple, by cutting out tricky special cases, and by deleting approaches I coded and all my comments discussing them, assessing issues etc. That is, make the code "workmanlike". It might be stupid, incomplete, inefficient and incorrect - but in a crystal clear way.

I actually find this discipline incredibly difficult, and I often lose days at a time exploring alternative coding. This often pays off; but the biggest payoff comes from having a clear and concrete basis to build on. I've just finished the current prototype, and many solutions to technical issues have now clicked into place as obvious to me - because I can now see them. So that works well.

And I also have something - incomplete, buggy, inefficient etc - that I can play with as a user. Ugh. In other words: a crystal clear sense of what needs to be improved. Maybe..."auditable"?
I'm not saying science journalism is useless, but the way of the web is (should be!) to link to the source and more information.

It's not uncommon for the popularisation to lead to alternating "X is good", "X is bad" reporting, while in reality the researchers themselves wouldn't claim they've settled the issue.

If you are interested in psychology, you want to read the original article - this one is readable too :-)
What is the difference between republic style and democratic style voting?
No mention of Linux or OS X?
Man Jason, you're starting to worry me :).

I didn't believe there was enough utility in a record/playback feature (and am still not completely convinced). But looks like people here find it useful.