skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Micropayments could easily become a standard, expected part of iPhone use. In that case, there will be no escape.

I suspect that this is the reason why Apple users complain about (even potential!) misfeatures to the extent they do. In the product categories where Apple is a player, from the standpoint of a dedicated Apple user, they have zero competition. All of the supposedly competing products are far below the quality-of-user-experience Apple users are accustomed to. Hence the perception that there is nowhere to run to.
DOJ Seeks Jail Time for Music Sharing
Why won't it have cool tabs? Or do you mean in comparison to Chrome?
If someone gets their financial advice from a guy pretending to be crazy on TV, like some kind of used car salesman, they need to pull their heads out of their asses. Jim Cramer is entertainment, he's not going to make anybody rich. People who think he lost them money need to shut the fuck up.
Why would a start-up make the effort of contacting you if you don't make the effort of contacting them?
Funny thing is that if you have the alternative (ie clock-wise rotation) then the left leg is on the floor.

Anyone know more about this interpretation flipping? It's kinda weird, and makes me wonder if people that have lost the use of one eye ever have this kind of thing happen in real life.
You might find The New Hacker's Dictionary to be useful for establishing some background history and terminology.

For programming material, maybe take a look at Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and see if it looks like a good fit for you. The Little Schemer would also be a good read.

Most important is to start hacking. Pick a language (Python, Ruby, or Scheme might be good starting places), learn how to write some trivial programs, and start expanding, seeking out more books and reference materials as you need them.
It's not hard to flip her spin direction, just focus on the point of her toes and tell yourself that her toes are going from (left->right) or (right->left) and that'll change the way you interpret her spin.
Whole building detoxification because of a single broken thermometer seems like overkill (unless it was some unusually big one).

It's important to clean it properly (good ventilation, don't spread it around, don't vacuum clean), but unless you do something really stupid (that would get significant amount vaporized and inhaled), it should be ok.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember if you break a household thermometer is do not panic. The amount of mercury contained in an oral thermometer is small and does not present an immediate threat to human health.

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs46.html (CDC Public Health Statement for Mercury)
I have been wondering some of the same questions. It seems like Goldman Sachs is one of the best-positioned large bank in this whole thing. Now they get to eat the cake and have it too? Am I missing something?
> `The Art of Electronics' (Horowitz & Hill, Cambridge University Press)

I had to learn this one the hard way...
I think the question that these parents asked themselves was do we let our (other) kids starve to death, let them live on the street and sniff glue , or etc... or get money from something that is "controlled" by them. With the collapse of Eastern bloc it was dark times for many..... and certain forces used the situation for personal gain. And it is not different from parents in Arab country or India selling their 9 years old daughter for arranged marriage.
It works because of the novelty and guilt factor. In general it wont work because people will tend to shave things in their favor. Tips have dropped from 15% to 10%. If people paid what the service was worth, Wikipedia wouldn't have to beg for services. If it really were profit maximizing, Starbucks would be using. (I realize this is an anti-innovation cop out, but I think it's pretty much true.)
How I Learned to Say No
So you read somebody's writings about child porn. Does that make you a bad person? Is mentioning the phrase child porn a crime? Is reading the words of a child pornographer wrong?

There's nothing wrong in reading an article. Anybody that thinks so is either deluding himself or is twisted in a really awful way.

EDIT: Okay, that makes sense. Sorry if it sounds like I was being scoldy.
You would do a remake of "snake on a plane" with your 100ml ?

http://www.break.com/index/burning-mercury-experiment.html
We should really develop a ceremony. A sort of Hack Mitzvah. We could have an eminent member of the open source community dress up in a big ceremonial robe covered in surplus electronic parts, and people could approach one by one to be handed a tiny gold-plated lambda and have the ceremonial blessing pronounced: "Today, you are Free. Go Forth and Build Something People Want."

I'm not sure I'm kidding. The time after one leaves school can be very stressful. Especially if you're trying to cope with parental pressure. So it feels kind of boring, perhaps even harsh, to just come right out and tell you: There's no secret. Just build something. You do not need our permission, and we will give you contradictory advice anyway [1], and all the tools you need are in front of you [2]. Stop flipping wistfully through the Ruby book and dive in to Ruby! If you need help being silly go visit _Why's site!

http://shoooes.net/ [3]

You may also find the presence of actual humans helpful. They can be good for one's morale. Are there any tech-related gatherings in your town? If not, is there a better town you could move to?

Oh, and be sure to watch this Ira Glass video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE&feature=relat...

There may come a dark time when you need to watch this video daily. Hang in there.

---

[1] We're all working on different things, which require different technologies. We have different preferences. And, even if you get everyone to agree on the problem, nobody really knows what the best solution is, or whether the best solution will remain the best beyond next week.

If you really want a recipe: Linux, emacs, Rails, jQuery, Web app. For furious debate about every single element of that list... see all the rest of the posts on HN.

[2] Well, okay, technically that's not true. You are going to need a lot of time. And food. And the occasional break. Get a day job! You can practice subtle career-path misdirection if you manage to get a day job that combines medicine with a smattering of technology. There are lots and lots of those. You might even like one of them.

[3] This was going to be hacketyhack.net but it is currently... "transforming".
Were the > 16 core performance problems addressed?
His point is that special interest groups cause inequality, but his last example is government workers. How are government workers unequal? Do postmen think they're superior to those lowly I-bankers? Do school principals look down on lawyers? It's ridiculous. The US does not have a civil service caste; the US bureaucracy does not create inequality, unless we redefine inequality to be something totally different than the normal usage. I'm not just nitpicking: this kind of sloppy thinking absolutely kills this essay.
I hear Einstein, Newton, and Guass all had IQs of about 100, give or take 100.
I'm so conflicted here, on the one hand there are very old and very good rules for why jurors should be in a sort of information bubble, but then there is the part of me that thinks the more information the better.
Can we reduce piracy by having "morality reminders" in software? For example, every once in a while, you could ask the user whether they paid for the app. If they did not, you might tell them that piracy is not all that common and that most people are actually more honest than they are.
I really don't think it could have been prevented by good journalism. I see the government basically guaranteeing bank losses without adequate collateral. The government did not really know how the banks assets should be valued, but they were willing to accept the bank's word.

So basically the banks had a financial incentive to make extremely risky investments.

But still, Cramer and other journalists failed. By the time Cramer said that AIG was safe, I thought it should have been obvious that the banks had invested a lot of money in some extremely risky assets. In June that year Bear Stearns said it was spending over 3 billion to bail out one of its funds. So instead of Cramer deciding that he did not have enough enough information to evaluate AIG, and saying that, he basically decided that he had enough info to say that AIG was safe. That probably convinced a lot of people to keep their money in AIG stock.
I'm not comfortable using the word Evil big-E. This is human existence, good and bad. This guy obviously thinks there's a reason behind child porn. He made one or two points that sounded like they'd be worthy of debate at the very least, rather than instant dismissal. And the people participating did so for reasons. It isn't all abuse, from what he's saying here.

Calling things Evil is a convenient way of dismissing them. It means you can put it aside and roundly condemn it and feel better for having done so. The truth is more complicated: nothing is roundly good or roundly evil, which is exactly why it's so difficult at times.
The minimum cost for a paid app is $0.99 if I'm not mistaken.
Popcuts (YC S08) wins SXSW Accelerator
Having worked for a scalper as a young person trying to get through school, I have to agree that they are parasites. I can't believe the support they're getting on techcrunch. Oh well.
Cambridge, MA startup releases music gaming community
A good start would be: try not to waste what you've learned. A starting point would be to imagine ways to improve medicine via computing. There are always ways that our information systems can be improved. It doesn't have to be an impressive field or anything, even a small problem will work. Design what you think a solution might be. Learn enough to do coding experiments with said solution. You'll iterate over it a ton. If the problem turns out to be big you will probably find yourself exploring things far off from the original problem and eventually, maybe years out, discover you've hit on something new. It might be viable as a business, or just a ground-breaking concept. Either way you will hit on it if you keep exploring.

(This is from the perspective of doing mostly non-commercial programming. In commercial work you are mostly cleaning up other people's messes; there is little of interest and few learning opportunities after a certain baseline.)
"Seastead governments, having fewer barriers on exit for their citizens, will face better incentives to govern for the social good."

If individuals do not own their own seasteads, barriers to exit may be higher on some seasteads.

"Of course, it may turn out that technological progress generates new wealth faster than government can waste it"

This has been the case so far in most places. It remains to be seen whether it will continue that way. :)
This makes me think of mercury as the Ice-9 of aluminum. Does anyone have videos of this reaction?
Is mentioning the phrase child porn a crime?

Well, yeah. Porn is bad, and kids need protecting. Put porn and kids in the same sentence and you have 100% concentrated evil. It is like a mini-9/11, every time you say the words. Do you hate America? I think you should be executed just for thinking about thinking about children.

Oh sorry, I was just pretending to be an elected official.
Sigh: "seriously creepy", "Evil lurks in the heart of man", "deleting browser history".

These are typical responses, which lack any perspective on life and culture.
At face value, child pornography is not necessarily bad, child pornography is not necessarily damaging and child sex does not need to be a bad thing.

Damage comes from rape, violence and emotional abuse (which is the worst because it lasts).

But these things are not inherent to child pornography and
very common outside child pornography.
The argument is child pornography leads to damaging events. But it certainly isn't the source. People who do such things are usually emotionally disturbed themselves. And making child porn illegal is not going to change that (almost hard to believe it wasn't illegal not so long ago).

You might even have the same "make it illegal, it will become worse" effect as there is with drugs.

So, I guess there is no point to this post, but I do think it's wise to keep perspective on subjects. Even though everyone is inclined to err on the safe side, continuously making the safe side more extreme.
No it doesn't make you a bad person, no mentioning the phrase isn't a crime and no reading the words of a child pornographer isn't wrong--in my opinion. However, not everyone shares my opinion and I can't take the attitude that my boss, client or whoever sees it pop-up in my address bar history is deluded or twisted, just because they don't share the same opinion as me.
So... is your comment orthogonal to mine?

Ahha - yeah - I think I started to reply and wandered off topic :)

I think it was more in reply to the OP's original comment about puzzles being a waste of time. I think 8 hours is fine - if it's progressing in the right areas.

I tend not to like panel interviews, but a broad range of interviewers isn't a bad idea - the best interviews I've had usually include walking the floor a bit, seeing the environment, chatting to potential teammates - although I'd worry that it would be hard to get a consensus if too many people are involved.
A job in which the worker is nearly immune to job loss is quite valuable in and of itself.
What major requires 7-8 years of undergrad schooling? Even with a masters, its hard to imagine 8 years.
I would be afraid of their assumption if I typed the letter "m" into my address bar and "My Life in Child Porn" popped-up

Why do you value the thoughts of people like this? Someone that is going to dislike you for something in your browser history doesn't sound very thoughtful.
Facebook is “Attention King”, Leads Myspace, Yahoo and Google
Or, you could use Y! Boss in 3.

http://github.com/jpignata/bossman-gem/tree/master

However, this is a good first toe-in-the-water for people who want to get more into ruby and web-crawling.
Yeah. That's why I left it slightly qualified - references are only useful if there is a strong network that can recommend and validate people.

This was probably certainly the case for Google, but probably not for many others.
Is quality investigative reporting only the prerogative of the media establishment? I mean, is there something they have that the common person doesn't? I know it used to be an effective way of publicizing their ideas, but it looks like everyone has that now.
which, to be fair, isn't supported on any other iPhone-caliber device either.
I think using the excuse of "trust" for having security holes is not justified.
Big Company Lessons for Small Businesses
I'll throw my support behind this: you've got a knack for writing and keeping attention.

That's a useful thing to be able to do: not for programming, perhaps, but the same tricks that keep people interested in long blocks of writing can be used to make a program appealing and engaging.
yes. i've been disappointed that the controversy about the bonuses on the order of $200M have gotten more press and attention than the AIG bailout which is orders of magnitude more taxpayer dollars.
Eh. There are different levels of monkeypatching. I have no problem with extending even a fundamental class with a new method if it's done with care, despite the potential downsides. I think the upside of monkeypatching can outweigh the downside when it facilitates tight, readable code (not that I'd consider the code in this post an example of that). The real problems show up when changing the behavior of existing methods, and that's where I think the downsides often outweigh the upsides.
Golden Gate Suicide Map
I found the bit about the US prison population growth rate interesting. The author points to a Reuters article that pegs prison population growth rate at about 4% (http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN07275062200710...), and, according to Google, the US population growth rate is 0.883%. I wonder why the former is so much higher than the latter, and how those numbers compare to historical trends.
For personal or non-critical sites, Dreamhost are great.

Their reputation stems from the fact that they publish their issues openly on a blog with comments enabled and zero moderation (dreamhoststatus.com). So the kicking and screaming that goes on when sites are down (and all shared hosts go down about the same on average) is publicly visible. This both damages their reputation compared to hosts without such a public forum for venting, and strengthens it on the honesty side of things too.

I've used them for several years though for non-critical sites and I've been as happy with them as with any other shared host (and I've used quite a few over the years).
A lot of people care more about what people think about them than about what they actually are.

(Not saying this about Dawson, but about the sorts of bosses and clients who would be offended by an accidental happening like that.)
Yes, it does exactly that!
Google AdSense Ads Making Their Way To iPhone Apps?
What are the benefits of winning the Accelerator? Or is it just a publicity event?
Out of curiosity, why is it that you're looking for an internship? Is your previous experience not related to development? Or is it simply the timing issue, that you don't feel you could find a non-internship opportunity given your narrow window of 2-3 months to work?
I still don't think you know what you are talking about.

We modified the shit out of wordpress to use it as a makeshit CMS to power a large portion of the marketing generated content on our site. We even added workflow to it.

It wasn't that hard. The codebase for wordpress isn't that messy. It's not ideal, but what OSS project is?
Apple released new iPods year on year pretty much just for storage space upgrades for a while.

What could it have that couldn't be done in software? How about:

More storage (always more storage), more RAM, maybe a faster CPU if they could do it without ruining existing software by running it too fast, the new more precise more responsive multi touch screen design that was demo'd on recently, a front facing camera, new radio support (e.g. 4G), reduced power consuming components (3G/bluetooth/gps processors), improved internal speaker for music/handsfree use, new WiFi standard support, more CPU features, camera flash.

What about manufacturing changes? If they apply what they've done to the Macbook range to the iPhone, could they get a casing with fewer seams? Better looking? Cheaper to make? With more room for components inside?

And these are just basic predictable potential improvements without going as far as a projector or an nVidia 3D card or a physical keyboard or some new never seen before innovative change.
La télé sur l'iPhone
Regarder la télé gratuitement sur l'iPhone jailbreaké
Or, you know, because it's toxic?
Most of the growth is thanks to our drug policy.
Why? I'm curious. Don't they provide a valuable service?
Are there any musicians who run market bids on tickets, so they're the ones controlling the primary market? Is that legal? (If not, it's a shame: I think that might be a good solution both for letting newer bands sell lots of cheaper tickets and for helping bigger bands make a good profit from touring.)
While I agree that child abuse laws could use some change, mainly with how it deals with sex between people where the age difference is very small. For example, I'm not comfortable with an 18 year-old being viewed as a predator for having consensual sex with a 17 year-old.

But other than the fringe cases, I really don't see how it ever can be healthy for a child to be involved with an adult, or even be in a situation where they can give consent.

There is too great a power difference. Somebody mentioned earlier that some parents were basically forced to get their kids involved with porn so they could eat. What is the child going to do in that situation, say no? Basically, in that situation, if the child has a choice it's between eating and doing porn.

Also, minors today are taught that it is the acceptable thing to defer to adults. So children already have a lot of pressure to defer to adults instead of enforcing their personal boundaries.

And I can't imagine a child being seriously attracted to an adult. They are both in different stages in life. After I started college, I really viewed high school students differently. They are just in a different place in life. I have different goals, responsibilities, and plans then I did in high school. I really doubt I would have enough in common to be attracted to a high school student, let alone be able to make a healthy relationship work.
Preparing for College (Harvard, 1993)
Like with many other measures to prevent piracy, the crackers would find ways to remove the morality reminders and the paying customers would get stuck with them.
The seminal paper in which these findings were published:

BRYSON, A.E. and DENHAM, W.F., "A steepest-ascent method for solving optimum programming problems," Trans. ASME. J. Appl. Mechanics, June 1962, pp. 247-257.

I can't find a PDF copy anywhere. It sucks. If you want to read a non-technical paper on it, try this one: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00506395
I'm with mechanical_fish on this one. I am far from being a "true" hacker but I've learned along the way that programming (hacking) can really only be refined through practice.

Believe me, I used to think that reading books/tutorials/articles made me a better programmer, but, honestly, building something is the best way to learn.

As for steps, I'd say go in this order:

1. Do some (quick) research about some languages you're interested in.

2. Decide on the language that is most intriguing to you and that you think you'd stick with.

3. Find an idea for an app that will be useful to you. Be sure to set the goal of your first app properly-don't try to take on too much (mathetica clone) or too little (Hello World) with it.

4. Build the darn thing. This is the point where you'd start looking up tutorials/etc in order to figure out how you'll actually do things with the language.
Yeah, this is a confound - It's not unrealistic though - as working through a problem together is likely a part of your ongoing work relationship.

This is where you need to start injecting things like "Don't you think?..." or "I hadn't thought about it that way, tell me more...". That kind of interaction will be come critical day to day, it also helps test the depth of the candidate.

I guess that's why I don't like puzzles - it feels too much like a trick (also, I'm terrible at them). What I usually look for are teammates - people I can work together with to crack problems.

I guess it just comes down to picking something that draws that out - something realistic, but without too many preconceptions on the interviewer's part.
For basic motivation and direction, try Don Lancaster's site and books.

Reading programs is just as important to the budding (and expert) hacker as writing them. As goofy as it sounds, I found lots of inspiration trying to convert BASIC game programs (as in Ahl's 101 Computer Games) to Python. First time through try to get it to run. Then try to get it to work with fewer lines. Then add some features. You'll be surprised how much you learn.

Good luck.
Use Tor to anonymize, and if you're really worried, download Freenet and get someone to post a mirror of the article and read it there.
And the reason these jurors are not being held in contempt of court is...? Seriously, they violate the rules, they are held in contempt, and maybe even put in jail overnight. Let's just use the rules that already exist to deal with the problem.
Rebuilding the World with Free Everything
> Start small. Make a website or write a tool for some idea you have, and your development will grow out of there organically.

That's probably the best advice for would-be hackers I have seen for a while. kudos.
Downloading now! wheee