skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sick of articles claiming you can't make money blogging.

1. You can (I have).

2. It's not easy. I took the cheaters route by working for already well established blogs, but plenty of bloggers who have started in the past few years are doing well (people like Allen Stern or Louis Gray, who were late to the game, come to mind) -- they just work their asses off to get there.

3. It's true that most bloggers won't make money off a personal blog directly (i.e., via advertising). But many will make money _indirectly_ via consulting gigs, other work offers, speaking engagements, book deals. Blogging is one of the absolute best ways to raise your profile in your field and create demand for yourself.

3a. Even Dan Lyons made very good money from Fake Steve -- not from ads, but how about that book deal? All those speaking engagements? Even his switch from Forbes to Newsweek was likely influenced by his blog's success. He conveniently leaves all that out of his article, though.
Great.

What else should be noted is that only 1/5 of their traffic is US-based (source: Quantcast Directly Measured Data).
Sometimes having 50 million readers is only a great thing when they are from areas that are [easily] monetizable. Not sure what (US) company will want to spend money advertising to a guy in Singapore who is learning how to bake a cake.

If only bandwidth was free.
Pretty good discussion. Thanks for posting this.
Hacking Your Computers BIOS Password | TechJaws
But much slower.

I switched from bzr to hg when I decided I wanted my prompt to include a count of unchecked-in files. `svn st` and `hg st` are effectively instant; `bzr st` was taking about half a second to a second. That kind of delay on my prompt was highly annoying, and it was enough for me to switch to hg.
You don't ever run into that accidental situation where you opened a doc/makefile/source/etc that you just wanted to view but not change? That dialog is handy when you accidentally made a change but weren't aware of it. It doesn't happen a lot, but I know I'd have a number of more random characters in documents than I have now.
I do understand hierarchical filesystems, so why would I want to do things the same way as people that don't?

The filesystem isn't relevant to what either of you want to do - namely, start taking notes, and, not lose them if you forget to save them.

Sure, save them wherever you like however you like - but I bet you start with "I need to make a note of this phonenumber" and not "I need to create ~/data/contacts/business/suppliers/joans.computers" so I can put this phonenumber in it".
Maybe a good idea, but they used Comic Sans for the description and that is the sign of amateur. After they lost all of their own data, I really would never trust anything with these people ever again.
Google Maps Bugged?
It sounds like enough to win a lawsuit. The burden of proof is more likely than not. If they have software that tells them the names of the songs that were playing, then that is pretty damning evidence.

Sure, you could have renamed your songs, but who is going to believe that?

I've thought about using last.fm but didn't for this very reason. Wasn't it obvious to everyone that at some point CBS would avail themselves to the information that their subsidiary was collecting?
LEGO Monsters and Aliens Sculptures
My personal favorite is the woefully outdated (but free) xPad. http://getxpad.com/ It's no longer developed, and has a few annoying bugs and interface quirks, but it comes the closest to my ideal. It's basically just a notebook of RTF (with images) pages.

The simple magic for me is that you can just Cmd-N and start typing, and then when you're done, Cmd-R to rename/title it. No saving, obviously, but also no shift-tab or clicking in a title field. There's also a services menu shortcut for clippings: Cmd-Shift-X.

Contrast with Yojimbo (and many others), where a new note defaults to the title field. You have to either press enter twice or tab three times just to get the cursor to the note field. Even the "Quick Input" panel asks you for a title and tags first.
An Acting Lesson from Peter Coyote
Each street is ~1 mile across.
The distance between two successive "streets" is ~10 miles.
The whole "city" is ~100 miles measured on one edge.

I, for one, welcome our new undersea giant overlords.

P.S.: Gmaps is full of artifacts like that. Here's another one, bigger than Ireland:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=54.188155,-12...
I presume that is exactly the point. If it becomes an open, federated, distributed, open source, social bookmarking (any more buzz words?) service, you don't have to trust them with anything. Really, that is possibly the only way they could ever recover any semblance of trust.
just because a bill is introduced, doesn't mean it'll pass, the brick and mortar gambling industry has a pretty big lobby to make sure of it
The root of this "trick" is that rm does not delete the file it reduces its inode link count, until the inode link count goes to 0, the file is still on disk.

look up fsdb and friends.
Very cool. I wish more people would submit "look at my open source project" articles; I like them a lot more than "review my half-baked startup".

Plus, if there's something I don't like, I can fix it instead of complaining about it. Much better for everyone ;)
I think "socially isolated" => "isolated from society at large" which is, in this case, spot on.
"make the easy things simple and the hard things possible"

Well, it's Git, not Perl :)

I like it a lot, but it is "fiddly" feeling.

To assuage this feeling, I recommend reading the source code for both Git and Subversion. After you realize the flaky shoestring-and-chewing-gum model that holds all your data in subversion, you won't worry at all about Git's UI :)
How To: Hack Boxee To Bring Hulu Back To It
Keep in mind that the problems we're having aren't with XMPP, per se, just with ejabberd. Ejabberd worked flawlessly for several months until it started exhibiting some very strange behavior and performance characteristics. We upgraded to a newer version and we suddenly ran into another, different set of strange behaviors.

That said, word on the street is that ejabberd is the best implementation of an XMPP server. AMQP supposedly offers better reliability (with RabbitMQ) as well as a whole lot of pretty cool features that Jabber really doesn't.
To be fair, the article is agreeing with you. It's interesting that advertising is no longer considered viable for blogs... I thought a fair number of blogs ended up making significant sums that way (e.g. steve pavlina). Isn't that the case any more?
Just to reference another HN discussion "My web is text based" (here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488030 ) - this is the sort of topic where I think video and screencasts would be helpful.

Not a screencast of someone typing DVCS commands into a shell, mind you, or a video of someone talking about DVCS that could be transcribed to text with no loss of explanatory power whatsoever, or, $deity forbid, a video of someone reading inaudibly from illegible slides.

A decent animated introduction to distributed version control explained by characters worthy of Pixar, set in a world of fantasy physics where things can pop into and out of existance.

DVCSs do things which are non linear, text and talk are extremely linear. Text and audio shouldn't be the only two forms of media on the web, video explanation shouldn't mean linear explanation.
+1.

I edit Wikipedia fairly regularly, and have never had anything reverted.

Actually, there was one time when I edited John Dvorak's page to call him a "gasbag". That was reverted pretty quickly, but he did mention the incident on his podcast (which was the point of making the edit). (Also, he is a gas bag. Thankfully I haven't heard about him for a few years now ;)

But really, no legitimate edits of mine have been reverted :)
Ask HN: We're moving into a new office, suggested resources?
The company that I work for is outgrowing its current office space, and so we're moving onto a new floor in our building with a lot more room. Right now its completely empty and lacks sufficient power and ethernet ports. We're going to be buying new tables, chairs, shelving, lamps, you name it.

We're not too sure how to lay it out or what kind of tables we should be buying. We all have our own ideas as to what kind of tables we'd like, how we'd like the space to feel, etc... but none of us have the expertise to get it all out on paper.

Have any of you brought in professional designers or architects to design your spaces? What kind of costs might we expect with having someone design our 2000 sq. ft. office?

We're also having a pretty hard time convincing our CEO to really invest in this move into the new area. Any advice there is appreciated as well.
I would suggest you start the screencast by showing how a real helpdesk staff would use it to solve a ticket more quickly with your system than with just email or their brain. That would help sell it, imho.
Major Foreign Holders of US Treasury Securities
I personally wouldn't care even if he kept it a secret.

I mean, it's a social news site. You have no right to be heard here. (You should hear the complaints I get when I delete comments from my blog. "Free speech!!1!!1". If you want to call me a dumbass, get your own blog. I hear they're free.)

Anyway, if the super-secret auto-kill ruins the site, I will go to one of the other one hundred million (or so). Otherwise, I don't really give a damn.
Clever, but Digg is that way ------>
One neat thing about R is that it's become standard in academic statistics to include an R implementation of your new idea with a journal paper. For example, Gareth James and his colleagues came up with a new method called the Gauss-Dantzig estimator for doing prediction in the case where the number of parameters is much larger than the number of data points. You can download the R code from his research web page here:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~gareth/research/

This makes it much, much easier to try out new prediction methods on your own data. No more having to write code from the paper's description and hoping (praying) that you got it not entirely wrong! Instead you can use the researcher's own code to quickly figure out if the new method is better or worse than previous methods on your own data.

That being said, R does take a lot of getting used to. Graphics in general are tricky, although the ggplot2 package makes some things easier and can produce pretty results:
http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

There also isn't a great story for using R on massive data sets which don't fit in main memory, so far as I know. It doesn't take much before you start hitting data for which an algorithm that requires O(n^2) memory will eat > 15 GB of RAM. At that point you're out of the territory of Amazon instances you can rent cheaply and into building a box just for R, or you're into refactoring your data so you can do the computation in pieces. So you do have to watch out for that a bit when using the default packages.
Actually, people are going to understand, because they'll have grown up in the world of MySpace and cellphones themselves. To a generation still alive, it would be unthinkable to admit in public that one has smoked pot and "read" Playboys, and yet you've just done it, and your career is unlikely to be harmed.

That "very sick people" bit gives away your true motivation for these opinions, though.
Hey guys, thanks for the great suggestions, this is definitely the kind of stuff I'm looking for. I checked out most of the links so far and BarCamp (definitely plan to attend), Betahouse, and Open Coffee look cool, I'll have to try those out. Any good presentations/events are also of interest, I'll keep on top of those and check as many as I can.

Also, as many pointed out, my e-mail was indeed not visible in my profile (it was in the e-mail field instead). It's now in the profile.

I'd also second the idea of the "hacker network" within/in place of the profile section. Fields for geography, interests, programming experience/language preferences would be great, though I'd still like to see it left to each person to provide as much/little of that info as they'd like. Also, in the geography area, people could post links to fun/interesting events so others in that area would have a quick way of finding out about them while reading HN.
This is going to be a pr nightmare if it is true. They are basically attacking their user base. Even if a user doesn't pirate music, nobody would want their information handed over to the RIAA.
Last.fm staff member denies they gave data to the RIAA
Ah, true ... great point.

MIT License and updated README pushed.
"would be"? You mean it isn't?

(I've been reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486574 )
I haven't used windows in a few years, but after clicking through to that article and looking at the screenshot my instant response to seeing the disk manager was shudder.

Does Windows 7 really still manage disks using the same highly broken and unintuitive interface it used 9 years ago?
personal computers got stuck with x86 and hierarchical file systems

And UNIX. Can I have my Lisp machine back, please?

(OK, so I never had a Lisp machine. But I want one :P)
My point is that the article is poorly written. If there's real science backing up the article's points, great, but it sure doesn't give that impression. I don't have time to go off reading papers every time I read a bad article.
Would it make me a "smug Perl weenie" to point out that the Perl should be:

say "Hello, world."

instead of

print "Hello, world.\n"

(Larry++ for having the balls to call it "say" and not "println". It's shorter, and it's a real word!)
First we had aggregators like Kayak, Expedia and Farecast. That's clearly too much work, so now with Tripeedo we have aggregators for the aggregators!
Odd. I never knew this problem even existed. Practically everything I make starts with vi, and I never just type it without an argument.

I write untitled things on Etherpad (because it doesn't let you give things titles yet), but Etherpad backs up every keystroke.
And languages that are more complicated or have tight parser performance requirements - like C++ compilers or Ruby interpreters - tend to have hand-rolled parsers because the automatic parser generators can't do it.

It's actually common for people to use a parser generator when implementing a compiler for a language. He's looking at the tip of the iceberg - quality compilers for popular languages - and assuming that's all there is.

If you're by yourself or on a small team, it's a waste of your time to build a parser for a language by scratch. You might be able to produce a better-performing parser if you implement it yourself, but the performance of your compiler isn't even a second-order concern, it's a third or fourth order concern. I say this because you're going to care about the performance of the code you generate far before you care about the performance of the compiler itself. On par with that is, of course, language features. If your language features require a change in the grammar, it's much easier to change a grammar file than to muck around in your own implementation.

Popular compilers do take time to optimize parsing, but very few compilers have to handle the strain that the likes of gcc and MSVC do.

Unfortunately, that seems to be where my formal education ends, because I just can't figure out why lexical analysis is supposed to be so difficult.

It's not difficult. It's just tedious. Which is why the formal theory exists: given the description of all tokens in a language, we can generate a state machine which will tokenize the input stream.
Uh, open source? What kind of license is it under? I can't see any COPYING or LICENSE file in the github repo.
Hierarchical filesystems are primitive ops. How you use your filesystem, that's a layer above - and a lot of it is convention not necessity, defined in the age of the Apple beige toaster and preserved by generations of don't-make-me-think. File, save, save-as: those are older than the commodity hard drive.

Lets imagine different conventions. As soon as you start typing it puts a file in $HOME/Documents (or a configurable alternative). If the application is amenable to guessing a title (like the first entry in Heading 1), then it uses that, otherwise it goes with the usual "untitled". The menu ops are File -> Open, File -> Save, File -> Save a copy, File -> Set name and File -> Move. The last file opens if you stop and restart. Every single operation gets lazy-queued for flush to disk on an activity log (more than just auto-save: preserve every undo-able op). Save means "commit my changes to the canonical copy and clear the activity log".

All of those still use the hierarchical file system. They just use it in a way that makes modern sense.
I think it's really easy to learn django. Just do the my first django app tutorial and you'll be on your way. Google for _first django app_

It also helps to have a good friend to review your code. And do reviews early and often.

I learned this way and produced my first blog in a weekend, and I was a noob then - about 2 years ago.
I'm surprised he didn't mention the iPhone Notes application as a great example of the principles he's talking about: besides autosave and getting rid of the filing friction it also eliminates the friction of naming.

For me a huge part of the hassle with saving documents is naming them. When I'm in note-jotting mode it's usually low level, so to have to step back and try to quickly come up with a title that covers everything I've not yet written is frustrating because I'm not in an overview mindset and there's nothing yet to summarize. Add on to that the administrative work of filing, and saving text documents becomes something I put off for as long as possible.

I've tried Notational Velocity, but it has the same problem of forcing you to create a title separate from the content. (It also lacks creation dates, which are I find valuable for putting notes into context.)
Against Maturity
Of course it's possible!

But recognize the uphill battle you are going to have.

To get to the level to be an actual real programmer in an actual real startup producing code that doesn't suck, if you start now, and spend at least 4-5 hours a day every single day coding, and you really happen to be a genius .. optimistically, you will get there in maybe 4-5 years.

The "real" hackers took much longer to get to their skill level .. I would say most start around middle school? Guys you agree? (I started when I was 12) so that was when I was a kid and could sit in front of the computer for 10+ hours straight .. I am guessing as an adult you don't have that much time but you have also the intellectual maturity of an adult so you can get there faster than the kids.

I don't think it's a DNA thing .. although some argue that understanding recursion is a "talent". I think you just have to allow yourself to think in new directions and you can do it.

If you just want to hack out a quick me-too webapp in Rails you won't need that long. it's theoretically possible, if you have a really good idea, for you to come up with a website that works well enough for you to make some money. Then you can hire someone to do the real work.

Just understand what you are asking to do is equivalent in terms of amount of work to the kind of commitment it would take from you to get another phd. If you aren't willing to make that kind of commitment maybe you can trick some programmer to do it for you ..
It can be done, it depends mostly on how you like to learn. You will never see a lot of hand-holding in programming.

Manuals and references for programming languages tell you about the syntax and major features but demand endless curiosity on your part to answer your own questions. Tutorials may give you how-tos for certain specific problems but usually fail to explain basic concepts. College courses usually give both how-tos and conceptual information but are usually targeted towards the abstract. In all cases you have to provide the "sweat equity" of writing stuff, failing, testing, retrying, etc.

The most well-rounded introductory literature I've seen is in textbooks. Other programming books are aimed at existing programmers that are transitioning to new languages, learning new concepts, etc.

My suggested starter set for someone intending to write web apps would include several textbooks, a book on SQL, the reference to the web language you wish to use(don't fret too much about this, it's almost a coin toss when you haven't tried using any), and a book on web frameworks for your language. The textbooks will often want to use languages that are not popular web languages, but that can be a benefit, as it teaches you what is really different between these languages, and how to focus on the concepts.

You can start by making sense of the things described in the textbooks and rewriting their examples in the language you want to use. Gradually the frameworks will look more approachable and you can start working with the examples in those. At that point - some months down the line - you may be able to get serious about your app.
Pretending to be Wise
Last.fm staff are denying this:
http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/506518/1#f8660996
It already requires a file named loadimpact.txt on your server to test high loads.

See here:
http://loadimpact.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=7
From the comment:
"I'd like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We've never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn't consent to it.

Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for.

As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."
It doesn't matter. The RIAA doesn't actually have to know who you are before they sue.
Normal Situation.

1. RIAA finds your ip address and a song that had the same name as a copyrighted work.

2. RIAA sues hundreds of John Does in the state where the ISP is located.

3. The RIAA subpoenas the account info, gets it (since the defendant doesn't show up to fight it), and drops the lawsuit.

4. The RIAA sends a settlement offer to the John Doe, since they know the name and address. The RIAA sues if there is no settlement.

http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2006/08/07/the-riaa-vs-jo...

So all the RIAA needs to do is to sue the username in the state CBS is headquartered. RIAA gets your account IP. This is assuming CBS just doesn't give it to them. Now they have the user's ip address, so its just a normal file sharing lawsuit.

And does it matter whether they have sufficient evidence for a lawsuit? As you mentioned it's probably sufficient evidence for a settlement. And nobody wants to hire a lawyer and fight the RIAA over a few grand.
Last.fm utterly refutes this story from Techcrunch. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-ov..., http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/506518/1#f8660996)

To quote:

Hi from Last.fm, I’m one of the founders (and the original founder of audioscrobbler, the music tracking plugin).

I’m not going to write much right now because i’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.

As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a “tip” from _one_ person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11.
OneNote handles this really well. It automatically saves everything. Very handy when working on notes and ideas.
"Incidents like this highlight how the social Web can sometimes bite back if you are not careful"

Incidents like this highlight nothing but the need for 'a cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom'.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
NYPD cop seen in YouTube shove dismissed from force
That's not really good enough. It's unacceptable to let random members of the public use your services to "test" someone else's site. It's bad form let alone the breach of the ToS on 90% of sites.