skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting and valid point, but I think it only applies to some countries. Søren Kierkegaard, Niels Bohr and Hans Christian Andersen all wrote in Danish (to my knowledge at least) and the Icelandic Sagas were written in Icelandic. So a portion of small countries that have good English skills don't seem to have that tradition.

Bjork does sing in English though :-)
From what I understand (to some extent personal experience), drugs like Paxil can be very helpful for people with certain problems. Unfortunately, there is a significant cost, and the gain may require more than just low-grade $disorder to really be felt.

I guess it depends on your specific case.
But your project is a lot more practical... I sent the link to my wife, and we decided to do something similar with our children next spring, who will be 1 and 3 years old by then. Please do post more info/links/advice/lessons learned!
Google Earth as a traceroute viewer
its not hacker news, but it is hacker related, since a lot of hackers tend to be shy and social outcasts, who'd probably consider taking Paxil eventually.

And if people wish to downvote, they can downvote this comment(since you can't downvote the actual submission)
It has an API. It's called Hpricot/BeautifulSoup and duct tape.
You may want to see how Yandex did it: http://time.yandex.ru
There are links for switching between analog and digital clock on top of the page.

I've found this service by pure accident. Once I've needed to know what time is it now in some other city and I thought "hasn't Yandex made a service for this already?" It turned out, they did!

IMO, that's the ideal version of this service. But if you invented something better (the details you mentioned) - more power to you!
One other service I discovered the similar way is http://mirror.yandex.ru - it turned out that they maintain a comprehensive mirror of open source software, might be useful if you live in Russia; I actually get downloads at higher speeds because Yandex has special agreement with my ISP (Peterstar).
Rotimi is a Nigerian given name. Perhaps it reflects a large number of Nigerian scammers?
IAB Reports Internet Advertising Grew 10 Percent Last Year; Outpacing TV
Economists: Stock Market Volatility Increases With Time Horizon
Perhaps not "hacker", but call something a "hack" and programmers will get a positive connotation, other people will see a negative one.
That might make for an interesting story! There're arguments about the origin: there's the mindset that says it's slang for "the new things", using "news" as a plural for new. Then there's the one that says "NEWS" is an anagram of "North East West South." It leads to some interesting arguments in media class, when it comes to defining "What is News?" (That's an argument that Hacker News seems to have as well, so it's far from dead.)
"Hacker" may very well be (helpfully) keeping the size of HN down. The last time I sent someone a link to an HN discussion they took one look at the url and phoned to tell me that my email had a virus.
List of places blurred out on Google Maps
Aside from the inconveniences that would be caused, the neighborhood could very well end up stuck with the bill for repairing damage done to infrastructure (street, sewer, underground power lines, ...)

After criminal damage is done, the state can press charges. Everything else is a very slippery slope.

As an example, imagine your neighbor has a gas stove and accidentally leaves it on, unlit, all day. A pilot light turns on, and the house explodes, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.

Should the government ban gas stoves? How about electricity?

Finally, stockpiling firearms, making meth in the basement, keeping pet tigers, and storing 3000 gallons of highly-flammable liquid is not the same as having a small swimming pool. The things you list are generally illegal in all circumstances, but having a swimming pool is never illegal. Also, water just isn't that dangerous. The pool collapsing would probably not cause any more damage than watering a tree and forgetting you left the hose on.

So, as I mentioned earlier, you are heading down a very slippery slope. Individual rights should trump the possibility of "inconvenience" to your neighbors.

If anyone should be upset, it's this guy's insurance company.
Blogging From Inside AIG: Exec Says Everyone Else Is Lying
Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts
Originally, the Thai company did do all the packing. The original shipment had seepage of the lubrication, so he sent them back. The reason he had to do a lot of hand work was because, after receiving the new shipment, he realized that: "According to the Food and Drug Administration, I needed to include a "how to use" guide with each key chain.". So, he was stuck doing this work himself.
Another example of this would be in music composition where Italian is the language used (to describe tempo, dynamics, etc.) regardless of native tongue.

I'm not an expert, but I would suspect there many disciplines have a language that is commonly used, and it so happens that Comp Sci happens to be English.
What happens there is that submodules are checked out as a detached head. You'll see that when committing something in a submodule:

Vienna-2:libgit2 pieter$ git commit -am "wawaa"
[detached HEAD 8641889] wawaa

but you'll still have to know it :)

Of course, your changes aren't lost after the update. You can still get access to them from the reflog ('git reflog') or a simple "git checkout @{1}"
37S keep on insisting on the whole "don't write a business plan" thing. In this talk, DHH puts up a strawman.. "Build something good enough that people want to pay us money for, and charge them monthly.. that's my business plan." That's not a business plan, that's a business model.

A business plan is simply the result of doing basic research like:

* estimating the size of the market
* checking out the competition
* estimating your costs
* figuring out what drives your costs
* figuring out just how much you need to sell, and at what price, to cover your costs
* agreeing who's gonna do what when, roughly

and a number of other things..

A "business plan" is just a piece of paper. Business planning, on the other hand, is essential - unless you like to fly with your eyes closed.
I don't know that this is really that irrelevant. Hacking the brain has been an interest of some hackers since at least the 80s, and once you get beyond some over-hyped nootropics, drugs like Paxil are how people are hacking their brains.

Further, there are a lot of shy geeks out there who might want to try something like Paxil. Brain chemistry is a very complicated and sometimes weirdly individual thing, and while there are undoubtedly people who've benefited from Paxil, I think it's useful to have a clearer narrative of what the very possible downsides are beyond some rattled-off disclaimers on a commercial.
From a government point of view, it is dangerous to give people too much information. The less information people have, the more likely they are going to do what they are told in times of a national emergency, when our elected officials decide that they need to take away the guns for people's safety, and declare martial law suspending all elections and other civil rights. This is for the safety of the people, mind you, and that is and always will be the first priority of government. When people don't have to think, they can just do what they are told, and they feel safer too.
Reinventing America’s Cities, The Time Is Now
Anywhere.FM Founder on Brainstorming Startup Ideas
Time for cable companies to fix their awful user interfaces
I'm not sure if blocking a specific URL is the solution... it seems trivial to mirror content on the internet, and so any attempt to block specific content can't be accomplished via black-listing specific URL's... but even if real filtering of data were technologically feasible, it's completely defeated by end-to-end encryption like SSL, which could easily become standard if ISP's start inspecting your packets for "black-listed material".

So moral issues aside, this is a huge waste of effort no matter which way you turn it.
Personally I'm not a fan of antidepressants. For me, Prozac had the side effect of extra-sensory perception: I couldn't do anything without having immediate karmic effects on people I knew who lived hundreds of miles away. I'd be sitting in bed talking to my wife about (essentially unpredictable) events that would happen to take place the next day. People think they might want those kind of powers, but you can count me out. I lasted about a week, but it took most of a month for the metabolites to wash out of my system.

One tablet of lexapro causes my interest in sex to disappear entirely for a week. Personally I think this simplifies my life, but three days of sleeplessness is quite a price to pay.

A friend of mine started taking Effexor, but then we found accounts of how it's impossible to stop taking Effexor: blood-curdling stories about pharmacists who'd dissassemble the pills and reassemble them to titrate the dose down, and who'd still be unable to get the dose to zero. He stopped in three days, before the damage was done.

Anyhow, all of those drugs affect serotonin metabolism, as do the 5-HT2A agonists that some people call psychedelics or entheogens. Alexander Shulgin did a 30-year research program on psychedelic phenethylamines (drugs structurally related to dextroamphetamine, mescaline and ecstacy) and found that certain drugs in that family have a synergism with alcohol much like what the author of that article describes.
Why Skype for the iPhone is no threat to AT&T
Sneak Peek at Skype for iPhone, Available Tuesday
A New Picture of the Two Cultures
This post gives me the overpowering urge to write a rebuttal in Japanese just to prove that an American can.

Let me hum a few bars: if your customers don't speak English, and your colleagues don't speak English, and your business partners don't speak English, then your refusal to use languages other than English cannot be justified by it being efficient. It is hubris to think otherwise -- an arrogant sort of laziness of thought which is entirely different from the productive laziness that programmers generally cultivate.

A programmer who cannot talk to his colleagues and customers, and blames his inadequacy on them, is a failure at his profession : writing code which solves problems for people. If you only get as far as "writing code" without understanding the people and their problems, congratulations, you fail.

On the plus side, the prevalence of attitudes like this means you can do pretty well for yourself if you're bilingual. I got stopped on the train today by the guy who got me my current job (random coincidence -- we live in adjacent small towns). He started the conversation like he always does "Hey, Patrick, how's work? Say, do you know any bilingual engineers looking for employment?"

This week apparently its an aerospace project that needs them. Its always something -- there's hundreds of billions in trade happening between the US and Japan every year, huge portions of it are high-tech, and engineers here are only marginally better at speaking English than engineers in America are at Japanese. (In my experience, though, they're not aggressively proud of being ignorant.)
I don't think english is easier to learn, just more fault tolerant. We are used to translating bad english and have no trouble with statements like this:

In the early part of the 1950's in the USA, a game called "Violence Fight" was in vogue among mafia, reckless drivers and general businessmen. The "Violence Fight" was the game to struggle for "No. 1 Quarreler" with fighters who were gathered from all parts of the USA speaking boastingly of their strength. And of course a lot of winning money as well as the honor were given to the "winner".

(Example taken from here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqnBWgrSt30). Other languages (e.g. french) just don't tolerate stuff like this.

For an example of a really easy to learn language, see modern Turkish. For various reasons (vacations and chicks) I've tried and failed to learn many languages. I came closest with turkish, vocabulary was my only sticking point. Ataturk simplified the language only 70 years ago, and it worked fantastically well.
I don't agree that everyone in the tech world agrees on the term.

When I was in school (late 90s/2000), one of our professors made a clear distinction between "hacker mentality" and "software engineer mentality"–emphasizing that the latter was professional/preferred and the former was undesirable/rogue.

To him, a "hacker" didn't plan, didn't show an engineering thought-process, didn't think long-term, and wasn't a team player.

So, at least in academia, not everyone thinks "hackers" are good.
Building codes exist for a reason, simple as that.
One interesting downside to SSRIs in general I heard about recently comes via Helen Fisher's research (http://www.helenfisher.com/) - SSRIs suppress the dopamine systems in the brain, and high levels of dopamine are associated with the 'artisan' personality type (manic, creative, risk-taking, autonomous). High levels of serotonin are associated with the 'builder' type (managerial, traditional, stubborn).

So by taking SSRIs to hack your brain's level of shyness you might actually end up dampening your entrepreneurial vibes and becoming a middle-manager. Crazy, huh.
The battle has been joined. ;)

Seriously, though, it's probably a good fit. Mercurial is written in Python, after all.
It's both, I think. Basic grammar is fairly easy and succinct. But then there are 60K phrasal verbs (stand up, stand down, understand, stand under, stand over, but never "overstand") and special cases, connotations, figures of speech, etc.

It's difficult to explain to a learner why it is technically correct but not usual to say "This is my election for lunch", or why a "hot chick" goes to college while a "hot chicken" is dinner.
err ... I don't think the people at Wallstreet didn't know the risks , I think they knew the risks , but they where playing with the money of other people, so they played with it as they pleased.

This is worse, but I think this may be the truth, or closer to it!
Yeah...MBAs don't really teach you how to be an entrepreneur.
"It's really hard. If you can medicalize your faults, you get legal protection for them. If you can't medicalize them, you're personally responsible for keeping them in control. That creates a huge incentive for medicalization of everything in the human condition. And we're all worried about being left behind in this Red Queen's Race."

From excellent comment from philosophical discussion about Modafinil (the stay-awake-alert-all-night magic drug).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389321

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389408
That's a very good point! I've never thought of it that way. Most corrections are of that nature. I know what someone means, more or less, but the arrangement or words are slightly off.
What kinds of people get into HBS, Stanford or Wharton?
Haha Hackers...and when you break into a computer system it goes all 3-D too right?
I made a light version of haml for javascript called baconl. It doesn't support embedded code, but I have found that it is not needed when used with most javascript frameworks.

http://code.cohitre.com/baconl/
Nuts. I thought it was a new one.
I think I read sarcasm in here, but I honestly cannot tell if your comment is serious or not. Can you please clarify the sincerity of your statement?
The silent state of the explosion
"Paul" sounds like he stepped out of a Faulkner or Hemingway novel.
This is great-- I had recently started my own Python mercurial repo for minor changes we had to make for embedding it into the Source engine. This will make it easier for us to keep in sync with base.
Reform the International Monetary System
Python switches to Mercurial
Incubator angst about YC
I'm on a listserv for business incubators, and Y Combinator came up from one of the participants:

"While I do not agree with the value given by Y Combinator and the type of Angel Fund/Incubators they have spawned, my original comment was meant to be more of a wake up call to those incubators that develop companies on the Series A track.

If someone wants to go to a Y Combinator and take their deal, then they should.

There are 2 needs every seed company will face after starting: (1) Validation for their product / service and (2) money.

The Y Combinators promote their advantage in getting Validation because of the high profile network of the Fund founders and their tremendous connections within the Validation community (corporations, other startups, etc.).

The Y Combinators promote their advantage in getting Money becuase of the high profile network of the Fund founders and their tremendous connections within the Venture community.

And now, you are seeing traditional VC Funds aligning with Y Combinators (Sequoia/Y Combinator and Spark/TechStars) to make the Validation and Money connection even more realistic to promote. This development is very logical for both parties - Y Combinators get believable partnerships to show potential portfolio companies and VCs get the heavy lifting of sourcing & screening offloaded.

My point is this - and has always been this - if traditional / non-profit incubators do not offer a way for their clients to get both Validation and Money, then the traditional Incubators will be diminished in their appeal.

And, at the same time, if traditional incubators do offer a method to provide Validation and Money to their client companies, they will prosper because of the inherent operating advantage of a local incubator.

The most expensive and labor intensive parts of the Seed stage of Risk investing are: Sourcing, Screening and Post Investment Oversight of the Seed company.

This is what an Incubator does !

The incubator should be compensated for this by a Fund that then delivers funding and validation on a worldwide basis to those incubator clients that are worthy of investment.

Hopefully, this will lead to worthy seed companies getting the validation and money they need at reasonable terms based on a discount from Series A - as opposed to XYZ % upfront.

Hopefully, this will lead to incubators generating good returns from their compensation for providing sourcing, screening and oversight. And this money can then be used to provide even more assistance to seed companies and less reliance on government / corporate grants.

Again, I do not have much respect for the Y Combinator model - but I really don't care what entrepreneurs want to do. If they want to take Y Combinator type money - great - take it and build a great company.

My concern is building a strong network of local incubators that offer what Seed companies really need while being compensated for their work."
This post gives me the overpowering urge to write a rebuttal in Japanese just to prove that an American can.

I'd love to try my hand at reading it. Chinese is my stronger language, but I can read a lot of Japanese for meaning.

Agreeing with your point that everyone, especially a native speaker of English, is well advised to learn the language of customers, I still agree with Jeff's main point that if we want an interlanguage (a "lingua franca") for programming, that language will have to be English for the foreseeable future. Not because Japanese and Chinese and Korean people are unimportant, but for the same reason that Japanese and Chinese and Korean people very often use English for conversations among themselves that include no native speakers of English--an interlanguage gains usefulness from network effects, and English dominates all other conceivable choices of an interlanguage in its network advantages.

頑張って
"At PyCon, Brett already announced that Git was no longer being considered -- while it has obviously many fans, it also provokes strong antipathies."

This seems illogical at best. They chose not to use Git because there are a lot of people that dislike it? This decision should have been based on technical details, not on feelings. Anything else is doing a disservice to the developers and to the community. How many other VCS's were passed up because they had a lot of haters?
I knew a guy that didn't even know his password explicitly, all was just a pattern of finger movements stored in muscle memory.
I am suddenly reminded of how, after a few months studying in an Israeli religious school, I switched my note-taking from English to Hebrew--not because I was terribly fluent in Hebrew, but because the books I was studying (canonical Jewish texts) were in Hebrew and Aramaic, and the terms used to refer to concepts in them were Hebrew, and it was just easier to write everything in Hebrew than to think about how to translate or transliterate all the vocabulary into English. Especially since the equivalent English words all took longer to write.
Oursignal = digg + reddit + del.icio.us + hackernews + yahoo buzz
The Prophetic Brain
I guess the feelings are based on technical details.
You know? This was one hell of an education, the kind of thing I wish I could read and learn more about.
"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business."

That's a little scary.
This is interesting. I wonder if anyone here could comment on their incubator experiences?
First, that sounds pretty damning.

Second, where are all these points whenever someone asks about git? All you ever seem to get in return are fanboys trumpeting git as the second coming, even here on HN.
I like ESX so I'm looking forward to the vCloud API, but it hasn't been released yet.
I sort of see where you're coming from in terms of the parity mismatch between RDBMSs and typical application code. Certainly we can avoid some coding headaches by just dumping things into a data store that is optimized for what we want to do with that data right now. But then you say that most applications have a well-defined data model and rarely run "queries". This is where I think you've gone terribly terribly wrong.

The value of a relational database is that it most agnostically represents the reality of what the data represents. It's not about "big piles of data" or "making sense of your data", relational databases are about making your data as expressive as possible. You're selling this idea that most applications only use data in a few predefined ways. I have to say that sounds like a complete pipe dream. Requirements change all the time. Reporting needs often are not even conceived until you have hundreds of megabytes of data. Let's not even get into multiple applications using the same database.

In every business I've ever been involved with, the data is always more valuable than the code, and it always outlives the code. Too much of the hype around these alternative database technologies are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The idea that "most" applications don't need structured data just strikes me as incredibly naive and short-sighted. Far more applications need structured data than need to scale.