skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For good friends, you've got to put the effort in and block out the time, otherwise you'll always make excuses and say "I'm busy".

With women, (I'm 22) I don't really care at this point. If a confident girl comes along that fully understands the sacrifices and lower attention she'll get to make a business successful, then great.

The demands of a startup have to be somewhat similar to a baby. It needs you just about 24/7, can't do anything on its own, and needs the full support and unselfish attention of both parents.

If a girl is going to be constantly upset because the "baby" is getting more attention than her, she'll figure out really fast that she's got two choices - leave or help out. Obviously that's tough when you're trying to get to know someone, so for now I enjoy the lack of obligations to make a good relationship happen.
Let's try to compare the length of the sentence to the excess prison-days he sentenced people to. The story says there were 5,000 detainees, that his sentencing rate was 2.5 times the norm, and the two particular cases described were for 3 months each. If those were typical, that's 3,000 excess detainees times 3 months, or 9,000 total, versus prosecution's offer of 87 months for the judge: two orders of magnitude greater. If the typical sentence was 10 days, then it's 'only' one order of magnitude.
My general experience with the Future of X conferences (I've been to FOWA, and had coworkers go to FOWD) is: they're very well produced, but are more about the present than the future. In other words, I've been underwhelmed by the amount I've learned at them.
I think a simple list of links with comments and the ability for readers to up- and down-vote would be better.

Yeah, like HN, really.
Or most any other math/science/engineering oriented school.
I could think of a few situations where this is useful. For example, it would be ridiculously easy to write a "publish to my GAE weblog" command for any text editor that can talk to Python.
A great improvement, and I love my GitHub free account!

But I still can't justify using GitHub for my private source code. I've been coding for quite some time; my personal repository (along with related assets like images and sounds) consumes 1.7GB.

To hold that much data at GitHub, I'd have to purchase a Medium account at $22/month. But it only costs 36 cents per month to host my source code with jgit and Amazon S3!

Granted, GitHub has a lot of great features, but that's a pretty big gap for me.
Or better yet, have a control test. Tell a person their mental faculties will be enhanced, but don't actually run the test. See if just that knowledge increases their ability.
what do you mean? he draws first without, then with the machine on, then again afterwards with it off.
SXSW. that way, even if you don't learn anything special or the event is somehow a bust for you, you'll still be in a convention where there's other stuff outside the tech realm to see and do.
I'm sure the scientists behind this are on top of that. Just does not make sense for someone writing an article to be part of the control group.
I don't understand this part of the argument:

"Here's the problem: As a matter of simple arithmetic, total spending in the economy is necessarily equal to total income (every sale is also a purchase, and vice versa). So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn't that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods—implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? And if so why should there be a rise in unemployment?"

Isn't the issue that total spending / income decreases? I.e., people are just putting money into the bank instead of external investments or consumption? And the banks themselves are just sitting on the cash?
I don't think there's any reason to call it a 'new plan.' It's an experimental prototype, not a plan.
Nope. That's 40 North ;)
Two things you can do with US debt:

1. Buy precious metals such as gold and silver and then take physical delivery - COMEX is required to accept US debt as an equivalent to cash. This would raise the price of silver significantly - you can just about corner the market for silver with about $5B to $6B. Buying even a fraction of the gold that China has stated they wish to acquire would send the gold price soaring.

2. Buy other assets such as real estate, commodities like copper, aluminum, steel, wheat, chicken legs, etc. Competing with Americans and Europeans for some of these commodities would also drive the price up.

Bottom line: inflation is coming to America and possibly Europe (which may be in better shape) as well.
IFart v. Pull My Finger: The Court Case of the Century
Downmodded for questioning His existence.
yes, after many years of negative real savings we are now trying to make up for it with positive real savings. but because the years of negative savings eventually caused the loan bubble to pop now banks are doing the same thing, saving cash instead of investing it.
banks aggravate the business cycle instead of dampen it.
UC Berkeley ST@B Hackathon Live Feed (demos)
Right now, you can't run long-lived processes on App Engine, so schema changes, backups, and a whole raft of data processing routines must be handled through the HTTP interface. The remote API abstracts that away so you can write scripts as if you were operating locally without those limitations.

Also, the remote API could potentially be used with any other App Engine API, not just the datastore API.

There have been a number of App Engine enhancements over the last few months: a hook system, sorting on keys, this remote API, and most importantly, the relaxation of CPU limits. When taken together, these enhancements will allow some pretty cool management apps purely in user space.
Fair enough, but the article doesn't mention control tests at all. The "transcranial magnetic stimulator" is touted as voodoo magic.

I feel like I just read a 3a.m. infomercial.
nobody reads those reviews, but those reviews drag down your overall rating, possibly making you lose sales to a better rated competitor.

colloquy's reviews are pretty much like that..except for the insane people leaving feature requests (and rating accordingly?! on what world do these people think that'll make a difference?), the rest of our reviews are 4-5 stars with a handful at 1 from the people that, for whatever reason, decided to buy an irc client without knowing what the hell irc was in the first place, and another one that made my day wondering why the fuck we don't have ICB support in the mobile client while we do in the desktop client...but we didn't mention anything BUT irc in the app description in the app store.

(Bonus: check out our latest reviews. the distribution is hilarious: http://img.skitch.com/20090214-df5e6ptrhqpmii4dy4yw8gbrhc.jp... )

And speaking of those people, we regularly get people on our support channel asking for where to find more chat rooms and what IRC was to the tune of at least a couple people a day, if we're lucky, and people who act like complete assholes for no reason and several more people asking what IRC is if we're not. You would be surprised.

edit: someone else on the colloquy team wanted me to mention we have an actual button in the app to connect directly to the support channel and that most apps don't have something like that.
I guess that is how most Americans see the world, the rest of us are aliens.
'Compulsory schooling is, at least in theory, for the students' own good.'

Rubbish. Schooling is for the good of society. Schooling != Education. Nothing in school benefits the student. Everything is about preparing the student for the workforce. The main subject taught in school is obedience.

You should probably read John Gatto to get a clearer picture how and why schools came about. It most certainly was not to educate the working class.
Web 2.0 Dies - Enjoy Hell
We have finally come to the end of Web 2.0. Champagne?
Quoting from the SCons feature list:

"Built-in support for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and past Visual Studio versions, including generation of .dsp, .dsw, .sln and .vcproj files."

Maybe this is just a documentation issue, but the mission seems the same as SCons and I can't get any sense of the diff over SCons itself.

I can't get into the source code right now, but I guess that's the next step.

This person puts it in a more inflammatory way but maybe someone will respond here:

http://groups.google.com/group/swtoolkit/browse_thread/threa...
I would also recommend sxsw. I haven't been before, but I'll be there this year. The talks look interesting. http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/panels
Educated/erudite citizens know the law is rotten to the core with not one redeeming feature. That's not to say all people working in the law are rotten but a good many are damaged in one way or another.

The populous see the law as some sort of high point of civilization. Somehow vital to life. Impossible to conceive of a system of justice that does not involve in some combination the law/judiciary/enforcers/punishment.
Using a CDN like CloudFront and optimizing front-end performance is something that would be useful for all companies that are about to launch and add the "Ask NH: Rate my startup ...." post.
.
I see lots of sites go "live" that can do some simple things that take only minutes and make a big difference.
Entrepreneurship is not about changing the world
This also reminds me of the fact that the reason most people can't draw is because they don't really see their visual field, instead they translate it into a series of symbols representing physical information. It makes sense since that is the higher survival purpose of vision (ie. it makes more sense to know how big something actually is than how big it appears in your field of vision). That also explains why it took until the Renaissance for art to achieve any kind of realistic perspective. Most people's relative lack of drawing ability is really just a lack of understanding how to see. Fortunately there are numerous exercises which you can use to break through that barrier and eventually learn to see as an artist, one good one is drawing the negative space around a still life. Of course you still need your 10,000 hours to actually master drawing, but I don't think talent has much to do with the initial learning curve.

It's unfortunate that most people give up drawing at a young age when the fundamental difficulty of "seeing" properly is conflated with manual dexterity issues.
Personally, as far as I care, let it die. Do we really need shite like Squidoo?
Thats what I call good service.
Oh, sure.

My reply was more of a meta argument than really a defense of the meaning of 6174. There's no reason to say that there isn't some property of its representation in base N that isn't useful, but it's pretty unlikely to be general in any interpretation we're used to dealing with (thus the re-representation of "2").
Twitter is the Dumbest Thing I Have Ever Seen in My Life
It's the New York Times. That's what they do.
As far as divorces go, that's just about the sweet spot.
So, “enterprising” ex-cons are getting into solar installation. If homeowners are giving them the run of the house, what are the possibilities for employing ex-cons in web dev.

They'd probably be attuned to security issues ;) ;)

If anyone starts hiring such cost-saving hackers, please break the news on HN.
Well, I'm going to NYU, so theoretically my being a heterosexual male already gives me an advantage.
Bubbles don't "die." They burst. After the drizzle settles the skies will be clear enough to see what services are valuable enough to monetize.
Next up for GitHub is seeing how big the pie will be for our upcoming Firewall Install product, allowing companies to install their own copy of the site for internal use.
CS Student Hacks Chrono Trigger to Propose
What do you think of this book?

"The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.

Has glowing testimonials like: "I have a degree in commercial art and learned more about drawing from this book than I did in four years of undergraduate instruction. If you practice everyday what Ms. Edwards teaches you will be drawing as good as any professional artist in six months. This really is the best book on drawing ever published!"

http://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/087477...

http://www.drawright.com/
This article is from 2003... would be cool to get an update.

Here's the news page of the "Centre for the mind" (but it's mostly about media coverage): http://www.centreforthemind.com/newsmedia/WHATSHOT/index.cfm

And Wikipedia on the technology (with no mention of temporary savantism): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulati...
GM considering Chapter 11 filing, new company
> So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn't that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods—implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? And if so why should there be a rise in unemployment?

Does he have a good reason not to mention the elephant in the room here? (I'm thinking of monetary policy and trade partners such as China)
Who wants to start a business? A legal "high" for $25. I know I would pay $25 to try this thing out and I bet hundreds of people in any given town would too. Only takes 40 people to recoup the cost of the machine.
The worst error of this piece is the nebulous concept of "good times". Japan in the 1980s and the US recently didn't have generic "good times" but an ill-considered economic bubbles. Even at the height of supposed "good times", there was lot of wealth transfer from the productive sector of the economy to the speculative side. Some ordinary people paid real money for houses of inflate value prices and others attained illusory wealth by watching their house values increase - upshot was not "good times".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A
That's what I would call good risk management
Cool, thanks for using justin.tv!
> austrian economics has probably become too dogmatic for some

Milton Friedman once said "there is no Austrian economics - only good economics, and bad economics".

The question is not whether the theories of the austrian school are too dogmatic or not; the question is whether they are right or not.
If you do, please let us know what it's like.
US debt != US govt. debt.

The bubble started sometime in the 1980s when it became clear that the US was unlikely to ever run a trade surplus. Its been inflating ever since.

Also, bonds are just a proxy for cash. There is effectively no difference except the bonds get interest. Banks are not an option because any cash over $250,000 will have little guarantee. If China ever wanted to purchase US companies, the US govt. securities market would be more than happy to exchange the bonds for hard cash. Also, why would the chinese avoid buying US companies once their economy stabilizes and goes down from the double digit growth? They will buy whatever is most efficient and with their abundance of capital, that may be mean greater investment in American and European stock-markets.

Also, being able to print more money does not make an investment safe. It makes it crap. Read the last sentence you wrote. The key phrase is "devalue the dollar." What exactly is a devalued dollar worth? you tell me but it's not much and it's certainly low enough to wipe out the investment. US bonds are a safe place keep capital because the US government has a reputation of maintaining currency values and honoring debt. A reputation that is more and more divorced from reality as time goes on. Remember something: money != wealth. Also the Chinese government has a few 100 billion (which by the way is not an insignificant amount, have you ever had even a billion to spend? I wish I did.). The Chinese public also has a lot of capital floating around and when considering the country, that capital must be counted.
As another psychologist points out, you still need control subjects who just draw subsequent images of cats. We expect improvement with practice.

A simple experiment would be a large sample of people do the drawings, all are hooked up to the machine, but it's only turned on for half. Of course, the subjects and the experimenters themselves don't know which ones get the machine actually turned on.
Passion isnt part of the definition of entrepreneur, but I do think its a facet that precedes it.

just like becoming a professional swimmer, being the best (swimmer) and not failing (starting a company) both require extremely hard work, and its hard to sustain that level of work required without some(a lot of) passion
The one guy here who works really hard is slightly out of frame.
Ask HN: Good, cheap hosted customer service ticket management?
My startup ( http://www.obsidianportal.com ) is actually taking off quite well now, but I'm beginning to get buried in customer support requests. They all come to a single email address, and I share answering them with my partner. Our policy is to cc the support address with our response so the other person knows it's being handled.

Anyway, that worked fine when we were getting 1-2/week. Now we're getting 2-3/day, and they're starting to fall through the cracks.

We'd like to start using some sort of hosted ticket management, but want to do it on the cheap. $5-$10/mo is our range. We've looked at http://tenderapp.com/ and it's pretty much what we want, but $240/yr is just too high.

Any other solutions people can recommend?
Valuable even if all you get out of it is the correct way to eat a banana (which should be a cheap staple of all bootstrapping hackers).
3 startups, actually, plus a Mac ISV and a dog. :)
I'm quite familiar with Gatto's thesis, and, having been through the public school system myself, I consider it self-evident. The phrase "at least in theory" was meant to communicate my skepticism of the surrounding claim; sorry if that didn't come across. I mean that most members of society believe they are acting in children's best interest by requiring them to attend school, while the primary motivation for keeping prisoners in prison is to protect the safety of others. I agree with you that practical distinction between schools and prisons is much smaller than what most people delude themselves into believing it is.
I don't know what tools Web 3.0 will be built with, but Web 4.0 will be built with sticks and stones.
Hahahahah, well played sir. Props!
They must have added it after you left. They must have hired on some usability gurus to make the site very user friendly(in my eyes, but I am not a typical user).

For Example, they added a javascript hover over a movie title in the list and they "pop-in" an info box of the movie that you are interested in while your mouse is hovered over the title. This does not prevent you from clicking through but it is an easy way to decide if the link is actually worth clicking on.

Another example of the UI adding instead of detracting from the overall experience is when you actually add a movie to your queue. Another pop-in happens that gives you more recommendations based on the movie that you picked. The key thing that makes it usable is that when you are done looking at the recommendations you can close the pop-in and you are back at the original list of titles without any jarring transitions. There is another subtle way in which they make the pop-in more usable by making the original page visible behind the pop-in at all times. This keeps your sense of where you are in the netflix site.

I am definitely not saying that they have a great UI. Just that they have a UI that works well for most use cases.
Now is the Time to Launch Your New Project
http://bluwiki.com/go/User:Sam_Odio/Hacker_House
I would not agree on that, it seems to me that github is used differently than sourceforge or the like. The vast majority of github repos is ruby and javascript of which the majority is most likely rails related. Lots of people also use it to host their private scripts and little tools, you don't have that on sourceforge where most of the big opensource apps are hosted. Maybe Rubyforge will suffer. Anyway, I like github a lot and appreciate the upgrade, but I don't think it will overshadow sourceforge anytime soon.
Web 2.0 dying is sort of like disco dying. Sure there isn't going to be any real new disco, but at the time time did it ever really die or just turn into house and techno?

Web 2.0 itself may be gone, but its contributions will remain.
The <wbr> means word break and according to Peter-Paul Koch, it tells the browser that it may insert a line break here, if it wishes."

If it wishes?! Because I'm always on the hunt for tags that will introduce more ambiguity in my layouts across browsers, I don't have enough yet. o_0
What a silly conclusion. Web 2.0 is so successful that it has become synonymous with Web. When people think of web, do they still think of old, mostly 'read only' apps, or do they think of new, social and user participatory apps?

If you take a look at the charts of top visited web sites, you'll see that the answer to that question is quite clear and that the Web 2.0 has conquered the Web.

Now, the fact that a trademarked search term 'web 2.0' is losing its steam is O'Reilly Media's problem since that's their property. You could say that Tim O'Reilly has been pushing it so hard that he was too successful at it.
This strikes me as very close minded. The measure of success depends on the metric. How innovative I am does not always manifest itself in money. Does that make my endeavor any less entrepreneurial? I think not.

If all you care about it money, than obviously not having it will mean you have failed. If you define your entrepreneurial spirit as something more, you are successful when you achieve that something, whatever it may be.
Where will the advertisements go?
How is this different from a <pre> tag?
Zkoss - UI richness of AJAX but only server-side application code
Definition of an idiot by Einstein: someone who does the same thing over and over again and expects to see different results.

Keynsists, monetarists, lessons from the Great Depression, downfall and destruction of USSR economy - all for nothing. We will print, print, print and again try to see if socialism experiments will succeed. Bernanke, Obama, IMF, economists - they are all idiots. They think that socialism and money printing and more debt will work this time...

And God forbid to listen to Austrians - they are not professors, so they are clueless.

Austrian School of Economics is THE ONLY SCHOOL that foresaw this crisis comming. For years Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber (all Austrian) were telling over and over again that there is a bubble in housing that will end up with financial meltdown. Now, the foresee total USD currency collapse and hiper-inflation in US.

But they can't be right. They are not socialist, not keynsist and are not professors... and all these mainstream professors and bankers and politicians didn't even freakin' know what hit them. Actually, they still don't. They're so busy making situation worse by destroying US currency that... well, what can I tell: IDIOTS.