skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance

An interesting comparison about various industry contributions to the economy: the highly-debated $20 billion bailout for auto companies versus the quickly-resolved $800 billion bailout for financial companies.
I use everydns as well, and donated, but never got credit for it. Though I'm happy I donated and still like the service.
> Because I'm not a minority, not living in a slum, and working my butt off

All of which will contribute to your better being able to find a job when you graduate.

When you show up to the interview right after a black or hispanic kid from the ghetto, and you have the same education, who do you think they're going to choose? This world does not treat people fairly, as you are finding out now. The problem is that when you are given the advantage, you are generally unaware of it, when you are given the disadvantage, you are acutely aware of it.

Please at least wait until you get into the real world before you start getting angry at society because you're white and middle class and like to work hard and don't live in a slum, okay? Seriously, just wait a couple of years before you get upset about these terrible socioeconomic circumstances you've been dealt.

Actually, if you lived in California, that might not seem like such a sarcastic joke, when you show up at Berkeley and 50% of the student population is Asian, almost none of whom are on financial aid. Maybe you do have a point, LOL.
I have the same setup. But for me, XP runs okay on it.
I disabled automatic updates and the spyware removal tool, though. No antivirus either. I also use many "Portable Apps" (http://portableapps.com/ ), so relatively little is really installed on the machine.
Maybe it is also a little weird and will make that kid being laughed at by his peers.
Gmail, HN, QC, XKCD, sometimes Digg.

My web routine == far too much lost time :)

Sometimes I just have to turn off the internet while I work. Unfortunately, I often need the internet to complete my work. Enter procrastination...
Ask HN: I miss Business 2.0. Is there now any other magazine like it?
I'd really like to read a physical magazine with the quality and focus of Business 2.0. Inc and Fast Company don't really fill its place.

Do you guys recommend anything?
Yes, that's right. Most plants have a number of defense mechanisms to ward off insects, bacteria, fungus, etc. to avoid being devoured. (Plus other physical barriers, but that's not the problem here.) If a certain animal can eat a certain plant, it's usually because the animal has its own mechanisms for handling the defensive proteins, or hosts bacteria that can do it. You're probably missing some of these.

Heat makes a protein unfold; and unfolded protein still has the amino acids you can metabolize, but no structure, so it can't do anything.
I'm not claiming that Git is better than Subversion, or that you should use it. I'm merely pointing out that branches in Git have other advantages as well as being faster.

The fundamental problem with Subversion branches, at least in my view, is that you have to know ahead of time that you want a branch. Perhaps this isn't a problem for you, but it is for me. Sometimes I find myself thinking, "Hang on, is this really the right way to solve this problem?" In Git, I can save my current work in a branch, trot back a few revisions, and try a different approach.

In contrast, Subversion encourages a largely linear style of development. I expect some people, like yourself, prefer this approach, finding it conceptually simpler. And that's fine; I'm not saying that's wrong or bad, or that you should stop using Subversion. That's clearly what you're most comfortable with.

But a linear development model isn't for everyone. Those of us who like to experiment and backtrack tend to develop in a tree-like fashion, branching off shoots all over the place and pruning the ones that turn out to be a dead end. For this style of development, Git's branching model is significantly better than Subversion's.
I just think its funny that the "Guy who (admittedly) doesn't use" writes a column about his hate.
Email, HN, RubyFlow and my own site to see what people added, then I get back to work.
Reverse engineering Facebook photo links; circumvents privacy settings
There are a few issues here. When you get paid, that money probably gets deposited into a bank. When you start a family, you probably take out life insurance to make sure that if something happens to you, your family will be financially stable. When mortgage rates fall, you can refinance the mortgage on your house. Those are all financial services provided to you by private industry, and since people use them extensively, I think its fair to say that they are real contributions to the economy. Now you can argue that Wall St. guys are overpaid, have bad incentives, etc. But it is much tougher to argue that politicians should be arbitrarily limiting pay in certain currently-unpopular industries. That introduces distortions, and it does it at the worst possible time. Can you imagine if there were legal limits on startup profits in response to the dot com bubble? Do you think we'd have all of these great enterprises like Facebook, Twitter & YC? And the idea that it was done through a late night ammendment to the stimulus bill by an ethically challenged senator such that congressmen and congresswoman didn't even know that they were voting for these limits is just terrible.

Don't get me wrong: It is also terrible that for the last two decades a lot of our best engineers have gone into finance, rather than building cool stuff, but it sure looks like that is unwinding on its own.
Even though this was done by MSR, there still probably is an implementation. Chris Grier (one of the co-authors) previously worked on OP, a similarly heavily secured browser. OP has an implementation and works (if the performance is pretty bad)

The main benefit is that the IE (or Firefox et al) team can take some of the ideas present and apply to an actual browser with more stringent performance/usability concerns.
Stick a chart in it
At the danger of swerving offtopic, the Geneva Conventions only apply in the case that mutual signatories go to war. Regardless of what the LPOTUS did or didn't do, that is not a factually valid criticism.
Caltech and MIT are elite private schools, and sports are not mandatory there! What a sad, pathetic, weak article... I wonder how this crap even got upvoted to the main page.
An Interview with Nicholas Vanbremeersch: A Blog Pioneer in France
I wonder if the general problem now is that there's too much capital sloshing around the global financial system for the investment opportunities available. Kinda ironic, since the immediate problem is that banks are undercapitalized, but they wouldn't have made the bad loans if they didn't have spare cash and too few legitimate lending prospects.

Anyone ever play Civilization? There's a problem that occurs once you built a manufacturing plant, research lab, and stock exchange (or whatever the terminal improvements are) in every city: there's nothing left to build! So in Civ1, I'd start building city improvements I didn't really want, just to sell them as soon as they're finished and pad the treasury. The computer gamer's equivalent of Keynesian ditch-digging. In Civ2/3, they added a "Capitalization/Wealth" improvement that does this directly, so I just select that, set science to 100%, and watch the cash pile up. Ironically, this always seems to happen right around 1980 in game time.

In a computer game, extra cash is good, because it's just a way of keeping score. But in the real world, extra cash drives prices up. Cash itself is useless (except in times like the present situation), so companies try to invest it in ever-marginal investments. But companies want a return on their investment, and eventually there's no way you can justify the prices paid for these marginal investments, so prices come crashing down to earth in a financial crisis.
My dad always wanted me to be a finance geek, "he who manages the money, makes the money" as he would say. In my eyes, it's a self-serving statement and a prime example of the economy taking a left turn into the deep end.

When 'managing' is valued higher than creation, we have problems. Big problems.
It may also simply be a communication problem. Here's another example, that I'm more familiar with. In engineering physics textbooks, most treatments of AC circuits are very confusing for the student. At that stage of their careers, we use sin and cos as opposed to a more complex-exponential treatment.

Now, the textbooks all tend to make the same basic treatment. When I was a prof, since I am a "challenged" reader, rather than try to wade through the mess in the book I set apart my own derivation. When I was finished, I naturally had to tie it back into what the textbook was saying so that the students had something to hang onto. But when I went to make the link, what I found actually startled me.

In their derivations, all of the authors made the same phase-shift of the source signals and never mentioned it. I couldn't believe it, and tried to figure out where my mistake was. But I didn't make a mistake.

In a section of the book that didn't really figure in to the future of the students' education--could be easily skipped, in fact, because anybody that needed it would do it over "correctly" anyway-- everybody just sort of did what everybody else did.

Perhaps that's what is going on in OOP. I'm not trained as a programmer--I just pick up what I can. So I'm sure that most of my code is laughable, and I do sometimes paint myself into a corner. But I find that I am sometimes surprised by how easy it is to make big changes if I've encapsulated things. Just my personal experience.
How to make viral startups with analytics
Microsoft patents the interface to transform your phone into a PC
My theory on pair programming: a good pair is _more_ productive than two individuals on hard tasks, and _less_ productive on easy tasks.

Basically, when you pair, you get one better programmer instead of two lesser programmers. Think about the old 10x/100x developer question (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DevelopersWithHighProductivityTenxHun...). In reality, it isn't that simple. A 10x programmer won't write simple code (Hello World) 10x faster. On the other side, a mediocre programmer may be unable to do some of the things that a better programmer can do, no matter how much time you give them. So it's silly to compare productivity along a linear scale like this.

Pairing is similar. It's meaningless to say that a pair 2x as productive as 2 developers, or 3x, or 1.5x, because it depends on the task. They might work far faster at a complex problem, but no faster one programmer at an easy one.

That's why my preference is to pair on anything that is moderately challenging (or harder), and to work separately on the easy stuff.
To be fair, some of us saw this coming. Did you ever read blogs like Mish, Daily Reckoning, Prudent Bear etc. I have read them for years (at least 7 years in some cases), and they have been saying these things, based on very rational considerations such as historical comparisons to debt levels and so on. Bill Bonner of Daily Reckoning, in particular, unveiled his "trade of the decade" around 2000: sell the Dow, buy Gold based on VERY FUNDAMENTAL grounds. At that time Dow was ~12,000, gold was around $250/ounce. Today, Dow is ~7300 and gold is at $1000/ounce. Not bad for a long term prediction.

Following a lot of their advice, at a personal level, for example, I sold my home a few years ago (for a tidy profit), have zero debt, I am in mostly cash + CDs, have some gold etc. I haven't made much money on my investments (except in gold, and except the tidy profit on my home) but I haven't lost anything at all over the past 10+ years, simply because I didn't "play" the markets. I have a lot of gun powder dry ... I hope to pick up some great companies at 10+% dividend yield at some point, for example.

Many people did see it coming. Most of them were the Austrian-school libertarian types - in politics, check out Ron Paul's speeches going back several years, as an example.

The unfunny part is that the exact types of mainstream Keynesians who didn't see it coming are claiming they have the fix for all this mess. That is what should make you really afraid. Most of us who saw all this coming think these morons will screw it up even more than it is already screwed up. How is that possible? Think World War III, just as one scenario or Zimbabwe/Weimar Republic for another scenario (and a nightmare that combines World War III + Zimbabwe, if you are really into horror stories!) ...

Is it all psychology? Absolutely not. Debt is REAL. There is nothing psychological about 10x (or 40x) leverage. Psychology simply accentuates the direction, but real fundamental factors are involved here.
Where's the proof that their popularity is maxed out? Their market share's grown steadily every quarter, they own the hottest phone on the planet, and their advertising's everywhere.

I don't have numbers on this and I haven't researched this, but I'd rather bet that Apple's increasing at a faster pace than Ubuntu. Or am I missing something?
This.

People like taking potshots at Apple by ignoring what Apple actually does, and perhaps that's deserved because Apple has a reputation for unflagging arrogance. It bugs me, though, when people make statements like the OP, because Apple and Ubuntu aren't doing the same thing whatsoever. Ubuntu has its goals, which include netbooks. Apple has said again and again: they understand it's an open market, but they don't want to release a product until they're certain they can make something of their accepted quality level. Meanwhile, they've made the iPhone into a miniature netbook with the App Store, and a lot of people are using it as such.

In the end, it's all very silly. The people who think that Ubuntu is cutting edge conflict with the Apple users who think the same, because we two camps use different definitions of "cutting edge". Can we stop bickering about it now? There's room enough for us all to hold hands, kiss, make up, and go back to tormenting the Windows users. (Joke! Don't shoot me.)
I'm not certain if this is "news" per se. It's interesting, and I'm glad that Dropbox is staying kickass, but there's not much discussion to be held, nor is this a particularly newsworthy subject.
I try to start by doing something not online, like walking somewhere to get breakfast and/or working on an essay. When I do sit down in front of a computer, I check HN first, then Gmail. (I'd probably check Gmail first if I weren't the one who had to fix HN if the site was wedged.)

HN and Gmail are the only sites I use regularly. I check the frontpage of Reddit about once every three days, usually when I'm watching HN restart after I've changed something.
True, true. What I was thinking (but didn't expound upon) was tangible vs. non-tangible asset loans. The "word of a wealthy individual" in your example would be the latter. Most intellectual property would also be the latter.
iGoogle (contains Gmail, HN, Slashdot, Edge Online, Google tech news) then reddit. Rinse and repeat.
Considering John Taylor Gatto is a famous high school teacher, it's a logical assumption to make that he is referring to private high schools, many of which do in fact make sports mandatory.
Teaching your kid to avoid being laughed at by his peers: mediocre parenting.

Teaching your kid how and why not to give a shit if he's laughed at by his peers: good parenting.

What's the lesson here? Ridicule trumps morality?
I dunno if that really works with Web X.0 concepts, because there's been a lot of varying discussion and the main concept is fairly meaningless, but I like that model as it holds to development a lot.
Profile of Alastair Crawford, chief execuitve, 192.com
I think that, while it makes for a fair enough educational springboard to use Call of Duty or whatever to talk to your kid about the Geneva Conventions, it also has the slightly off-putting side-effect of teaching your kids to take the content of a video game at face value.

"Stop playing when one of your squadmates violates the Geneva Conventions" is about as awesome in this context as saying "Turn off Apocalypse Now the moment someone violates the Geneva Conventions."

Video games are all about various deliberately designed interactive systems, and the play that comes out of those systems intersecting with the player and (in some cases) with each other. Asking your kid to stop playing a game when it does something it has no control over (or awareness of) like "violating the Geneva Conventions" seems like its breeding a bit of ignorance into the whole thing. It's like yelling at someone in a war film for shooting at a child... it won't change the outcome.

If someone actually used the power of interactivity and systemic NPC AI present in modern gaming to make a game which was aware of the Geneva Conventions and was able to reward players for adhering to them either through their own actions or how they directed their units, and presented notable moral choices surrounding that stuff, that would be I think a pretty interesting achievement.

Other than raising awareness of the presence of the Geneva Conventions in his son's mind (which is worthwhile in and of itself), I don't know what this lesson will teach other than incorrect side-effects like potentially misrepresenting how soldiers behave and think in real life (eg: in real life they have human brains, and are doing things other than creating a cinematic experience for the player, which is all they're there for in most war video games), and misrepresenting how interactive systems work and the potential they hold. It's very noble, and has definite merit and is also a clever idea, but it does also seem like another case of parents not understanding what games are, and trying to assign their own values to them which end up missing at least part of the point.
The Browser Operating System
Isn't it true that when one wants to make a point (especially a polemical one), one should remove all ambiguity? If "schools" refer to "high schools" not universities, then the writer should make that explicit.

"Mandatory sports" means "mandatory team sports", I presume. Schools don't want students to be in shape, they want students to feel loyalty towards their alma mater.
A Look Behind the Curtain at Techmeme
Having another programmer around to talk me through a gnarly bit of code is often enormously helpful.

This tends to happen organically.

When it comes down to the heads-down time necessary to plow through some changes, a second pair of eyes hovering over my shoulder becomes a distraction and a productivity killer.

There exist shops where the mantra is "Pair Programming = Good" and you are encouraged (and socially pressured) to do most or all of your coding at a single screen with someone else. I tend to do not so well in these.
It was indeed a sad, sad day Business 2.0 got sucked into Fortune, relinquishing its fresh, independent vibe to corporate bureaucracy. There are a few webzines that are almost comparable. But in the printed sphere, I think maybe. . . Entrepreneur might be a semi-comparable alternative:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/interstitial/default.html
Grameen Bank didn't get that memo.
It would be interesting if they could build that into the game and keep it fun. I think I would enjoy avoiding the Hague, or working to bring in the violators.
Personally, as a heavy IDE user, I practically never use any code generation (unless you count token completion, but
text editors do that too). Additionally, I don't really code much Java (haven't in years). Most of the time I use Visual Studio and Resharper for C# 3.0. C# 3.0 has a lot of advanced functional features and the code that you write really doesn't have all that much boilerplate compared to Java. However, in the real world, people don't always get to pick their programming language. But let's say you do: Do you consider Ruby to be an unreasonable programming language?

For me, the three biggest IDE feature areas I love are navigation, refactoring, and code analysis.

Navigation: Jump to type or method (super and subclasses or by name), find usages (filtering by callers or assignments), and especially "go to definition". All things that help me spend more time reading code and less time reading code to find the code I want to read.

Refactoring: the power to rename an identifier across my entire project in half of a second is sorely missed when I work on Python stuff. Never underestimate the productivity gains of one keystroke method extraction or safely safely rearranging parameters. Make those changes you are afraid to make with confidence and without manually fixing in a long list of text search results.

Code analysis: finds compile and runtime errors before ever even compiling. Little colored squiggles under my code have saved me so much time, it is not even funny. You'd be surprised at the level of support these things can offer. Resharper, for example, lets me know when I use method overloads that don't pass an optional culture parameter. My code never has a localization bug with list separators such as commas and periods because Resharper warns me when I am not specific about what the correct behavior is.
I also use org-mode for this. All in all I am pretty much happy with it. What would be a plus with one of those Cocoa-base boxes is inline images an rich text. On the other hand I have now a nice file-folder structure which is nicer for scripting.
I found the article inspiring, so thanks to the OP.

As an entrepreneur, I sometime struggle with the idea that everything has been done, all the great ideas have been implemented, and I'm one step behind, trying to get by on the long tail of history.

Of course this is not true. There still are lost cities to be found in the 21st century, and an infinite number of opportunities for those willing to work hard enough to discover them.
Not that surprising. Most popular iPhone apps are built (and priced) to be treated like junk food.
"Teaching your kid to avoid being laughed at by his peers: " Terrible Parenting
There's a link to the CAETE site, which has a big register button.

http://caete.colorado.edu/registration-tuition

CSCI: http://caete.colorado.edu/coursedb/view-course/310

ECEN: http://caete.colorado.edu/coursedb/view-course/309

Though the course website says Fall 2008, so you may have to wait to see if it's offered again in Fall 2009...
Yea I agree its a little soon and I am doing well for myself. The problem is that they are rewarding the lazy punishing the ambitious. I don't care that they help with minorities or poor people thats all well and fine. But who says that I'm not poor? Next month I will be making more per hour then my mother and she has 20 years of experience, I'd argue she is nowhere near the middle class.
There are simple things you might want to teach to avoid being singled out. But altering your principles to avoid ridicule? What the fuck?
At first glance, it seems a touch expensive, as you can get Github and GMail accounts that offer far more storage for less expense. But on the other hand, Dropbox don't have the advantage of being able to assume that most of their customers won't use the full 100GB, as is the case with emails or source control. Also, looking at Amazon's S3 pricing, it isn't much cheaper to use something like Jungledisk with S3 directly, and Dropbox is much nicer.
I'm a bit bothered than there is no objective evidence - just a claim that "everybody knows" followed by a loose application of game theory.

But, if he is right, then as a man you should be holding out.
Linux advocates should pay attention to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a Linux system in a modern computing environment instead of patting themselves on the back because Windows does some things worse. I gave up the first few times I tried to install Ubuntu. When I finally got it running I was unemployed and had the time to wrestle with it.

Flash and wireless still suck.
They only target companies that are really good at wading through bureaucracy and who target themselves almost exclusively at government.