skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I'll admit to watching The Woz dance. I think he moved pretty well for a big guy, but the judges didn't agree with me.

It was great to hear him go on about how he's used to digital things and how dance is analog, all while his dance partner's eyes glazed over. He's lost 30 pounds while practicing for the competition, so even if he loses the competition right away, he's got that going for him.

It's also great to see Woz, who apparently doesn't need the money, doing it just for fun. He stands out from some of the other "celebrities" who really are just desperate for a paycheck. It was obvious he was having a blast and his dance partner said he was the nicest man she's ever met.
> Boston area feels old, expensive, somewhat dilapidated, miserable in the winter

I lived in the Boston area for about 7 years, and I can't help but agree with you. It's got it's upsides, but overall it's just not that nice there.
The Realities of Selling On Apple's App Store
This is getting a little silly now.

When you have to resort to name calling, you've pretty much lost the argument.

Both are extremely viable business models, with many success examples on both sides. Do what works for you.
First Class Functions And Logical Negation in C#
MIT is the biggest March Madness surprise of 2009
There's an important distinction to make between "advertising business" and "data business." Data can be useful for advertising, but can also be useful for tons of other stuff--news, filtering, etc.
Your product is free because its value is not substantial.
It’s not (just) about performance
I wonder if there is a market for open desktop software that is designed to be as fast as possible and still get the job done.

Imagine a WYSIWYG editor that is actually 2^10 times faster than those made 15 years ago.

I think uTorrent has proven small can be loved.
Microsoft drops the Y-bomb, again
Can the iPhone do something like cron, or alarms? This program doesn't need to run all the time, every 15 minutes is enough.
I have used chronic for several years and as a developer I find that it provides three important benefits, and I believe that for many developers it could provide the same but with important caveats and considerations.

1. It helps me get a peaceful full nights sleep, which for me is approximately 7 hours, with and clearheaded thoughts the next day

2. As an aid to creativity, but about only 10% or less of the time while working. My mind is getting stronger and so I can now be directly productive while high, however I tend instead to take notes and later revisit those notes while not high for speedier production

3. As an aid to learning, but perhaps only 10% or less of the time while studying. Rather I regularly review difficult material lightly while high in order to experience the benefits of heightened abstract thought

Very important notes:

-- There is a long process to the mind learning about and how to benefit from something as intoxicating as chronic. You won't know many things about it and yourself until you've had a lot of experience

-- Chronic is a strong sedative, many people fall asleep easily when they are first getting experience with it

-- It is very important to only smoke the female plant. The male plant has a lot of negative effects and can cause you to be groggy similar to over-drinking, and the positive effects are in my opinion not enough to warrant the negative effects

-- It's very important to take notes of creative ideas, since your memory for specifics is likely to be fuzzy

-- When approaching new concepts and abstracts

-- If you care about your productivity and learning, wait until you've gained lots of experience before trying to accomplish or study when you're high, otherwise a lot valuable time can be wasted. With a bit of experience it because possible to learn which creative and learning experiences can be directly improved from smoking

-- Use a vaporizer. It is not 100% safe as others have claimed, but it significantly reduces risks, as well as reduces all forms of odor, red eyes, etc, and the dosage can be controlled better

My programming capability has become so significantly better from smoking, but legal and medical dangers shouldn't be taken lightly. People who already know they are susceptible to self-destructive behavior need to realize that this is a drug that can sedate you heavily and it's important to learn when you can and cannot take it due to pressing work.

But as a way to improve your programming skills and learn abstract concepts (functional programming, linear algebra, and so on) and connecting the dots between fields of study its a godsend.

Plus, you'll just be happier :-)
I think asking what we really want is a good exercise for anyone. Once one realizes what's most important, one can focus on those goals and not worry about making excuses for the other things.

There's no "shame" in not starting a business, not majoring in a certain subject, etc, except what society tries to tell us and society is trying to tell us that 100 different things are important. It's up to us to find what our destination is and head there, in spite of what other people say.
Ian is right about one thing: many programmers have an irrational fear of tech support. To hear some people tell the tale you would think it is a black hole of wasted time sucking out any ability or desire to improve the product.

If you treat it like an engineering problem, it really doesn't have to bury you. Improve the product, get less support requests. Improve your answers, get less support requests. Proactively answer questions on the site and in the app, get less support requests. Provide self-help tools, get less support requests. Do a bang-up job on those emails you do get, get less support requests.

I used to work as a CSR and picked up the habit of charting stuff (it is much harder to improve things you can't measure). Since January 1st I've passed out something like 16k trials and had about 225 sales, and that has resulted in about 40 emails to me (including pre-sales inquiries).

That's about one-fifth the mails-per-sale ratio I had when I started out. Measure it, make improvements, do more of what works. (Plus, the less mail you get the more you can afford to blow folks away on the ones you have to answer personally.)
Well no response... if you are interested I have a draft email composed. I'll send it to <your username> @ ycombinator.com later today if I dont hear anything...

Though I suspect you were attempting to call a bluff ;) oops...
For what it's worth, if something is only a little funny, I tend to mod it down.
That's akin to saying "My legs are what gives me locomotion. I don't want to create stress and tear their muscle tissue by exercising. It will just mess with them."

Please note that I'm not taking one side or another, but caffeine has been shown to provide more benefits than harms in moderation.
I'm a digital marketer. I work with coders. Lots. What stuff should I learn?
I work in digital marketing, often involved in the production of "Web 2.0" buzzword compliant mashups, viral games, microsite etc for entertainment brands. I consider myself very technically literate, and like to think I'm generally recognised as such by the programmers I work with.

As I work very closely though - sometimes even in a way that could be construed as "managing" them - I want to learn as much as I can about what they do so we can speak the same language, if you'll pardon the pun.

So what stuff should I read about? I'm finding the Joel on Software articles very enlightening (especially the recent one about program managers, who seem to have lots of parallels with my work), as well as Paul Graham (from a less tech POV). I think I'm gonna try to learn about the inner workings of a LAMP stack. What programming language should I dip my toe in the water of?

Any thoughts?
You have a choice in life:

You can smoke dope, get stoned, start dozens of unfinished projects in Ruby or Scala or Haskell or whatever you've just read about, wear bad clothes and think you're doing something worthwhile just because you're up to date with xkcd and know how to jailbreak your iPhone.

Or you can learn a real language - one with braces, as God intended - preferably C# but Java is acceptable, build a business and hang out on yachts with beautiful women covered in cocaine. It's your choice.
Guardian launches Open Platform tool to make online content available free
uh, php?
Speaking of quality of life issues, I was thinking of moving to California, but they really need to fix that gay marriage ban.
Amber Alert: Good

Public Pressure: Ridiculous

It is none of your competence why the AppStore has the guidelines they have in place.

It is not a good idea to try to cause a bad PR storm in order to get their attention.

If you need help, ask for it gently. They'll respond in accordance.
But one was created (though the options are not what I would have picked):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509693
I guess it depends on what you like. I just moved back to Boston and am glad to be back. I like the snow and sitting by a roaring fire drinking tea, and walking the esplanade in the summer is always lovely. I like the SV/SF area to visit, but honestly I'd never want to live there.
Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?
I smoked extensively for years between the ages of 16-22.

To begin with it increased my creativity a lot (thinking outside the box), I came up with a lot of (objectively verified) really genius pencil art.

Then, with habitual use, creativity levelled off to where it probably was before I started smoking, but, importantly, with creativity and general joy dipping noticeably in dry periods. I believe this is caused by artificially high dopamine production from the smoking, conversely resulting in lower general dopamine levels when sober.

Also, I am one of those persons for whom pot impairs social interaction. I felt increasingly alienated and only felt 'normal' after two-three days of sobriety. Basically I came to enjoy sobriety more, which was the direct reason I gave it up.

As far as coding is concerned, pot makes coding sessions fun and enjoyable so it probably helps you sit down at the keyboard, but I am sure it hurts the output (of the code, it may help with very high-level design). Pot makes you interested in investigating little details, but makes it difficult to keep a consistent overview of things.
Fluent NHibernate and Inheritance Mapping
Article presents how to use table per class hierarchy inheritance mapping strategy with Fluent NHibernate.
What Everybody Ought to Know About Joomla
Windows 7 has the ability to disable more than just IE8
I think a lot of people come to the mistaken conclusion that smoking pot makes you "stupid." I don't think it necessarily impairs cognitive performance as much as it makes it seem less important. If we were passing around a joint and before I had to hit it again, I had to multiply two 3-digit numbers together and translate a a paragraph into spanish, I could. But smoking makes you less likely to approach a problem like that. It allows you to take in perspectives other than your own.

While smoking, I have uncovered repressed memories of childhood, resolved interpersonal conflicts, and redesigned interfaces.

Calling a high person "stupid" is like calling someone stupid because they speak a different language, or calling a child stupid because they ask a question about something that seems trivial.

I've always felt that weed helps one reconcile disparate concepts. When you take off all your different hats and just look at the problem with a more basic human perspective, without the little compartments into which we organize all our issues. Of course, some people can achieve this level of perspective without drugs, more power to them. Similarly, some people react differently to marijuana - bummer for them. I smoke regularly, but not when I need to code - it's not that I can't code, it's just horrendously unappealing when high.

The bottom line is just knowing what helps you accomplish what and when to take part. I speak significantly better french with a little booze in me and I design better logos after a few hits. Some people are better designers and french speakers than me without ever having tried either.
May sound like a silly reply, but I genuinely wouldn't have known whether best to spend my time on this or Java etc.
Gmail down again for some users
Why Sweden rules the web
Are you saying he is violating the DRY-principle? Blasphemy! ;-)
Android Developer Phone gets updated, paid Android Market partially opened
Are you disagreeing because you have copious experience showing that following your dream leads to happiness, or are you disagreeing because it's what you've been told all your life and you can't easily give the idea up?

Mike Rowe is not necessarily the world's expert on job-related happiness, but he does have a unique and extraordinarily well-traveled perspective. I am not entirely inclined to agree with him either (because of my own personal experience; I am very happy as a programmer, but I note that even many of my coworkers aren't, in the very same environment), but I can't dismiss what he says entirely either, because the man has me creamed on the experience front.
Shigeru Ban has done a lot with cardboard; his WikiPedia entry doesn't really do him justice, but the Phaidon book on his work is pretty good.

http://www.arcspace.com/books/ban/ban_book.html
Using Django's Aggregation Features
The Mistake Script
Those things are great, and Boston does have its unique advantages. Digging your car out of the snow, slipping on ice, and gloomy days aren't. After 3 (ok, 2.8) winters here, those are the things that made me finally understand why people don't like winter.
Some notes on the Guardian Open Platform
Guide to testability is now downloadable
What linux sysadmins should know about ext4
Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery
Ben Schneiderman from the University of Maryland, gave a fascinating talk in Cambridge on 5th March 2009 about the topic of “Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery.”
No. The iPhone cannot currently do anything like that. There was an early preview talk about a background push framework at Apple's WWDC in June 2008, but still hasn't been made real yet.

I appreciate the app author's desire to create something that can enhance the AMBER alert system, I think that this app will be useless until the iPhone supports background processing.
Why Is Al Gore Supporting A .Eco Top-Level Domain?
Free online news and the prisoners dilemma
Yeah, they get it from a lot of crap in society that doesn't hold as true as people pretend.

"Everybody should be equal" means that everybody ought to have an equal chance. That doesn't mean everybody should succeed equally. This idea that we should all be the same person is twisted and wrong and actively harmful.

This applies to phones, too. You have a choice of phone. You know what phone I use? It's this model by Samsung that doesn't allow any applications because I think applications on a standard phone are bunk. I don't complain. I like that my phone makes calls and sends text.

It's worth saying again, because people like you really like ignoring it to complain: Apple changed the mobile industry forever. The sheer existence of the iPhone changed the game plan of everybody else on the planet. Now the iPhone's been out for 2 years, and nobody has a user experience that comes close! I've used other multitouch phones. They're all pathetic. When the iPhone came out, it was the announcement of a vast reform in the way phones worked.

Apple didn't have applications. Nobody cared. Suddenly, Apple releases this App Store, which has become a hundred-million-app success in a year, and people are complaining because this magical thing they didn't have before is imperfect. It's like Louis C.K.'s routine. Everything is amazing, and yet nobody is happy, because we all feel entitled. (I'm not saying complaining is bad if it's constructive, but your response unlike the OP's was just lazy and fat and ugly and I hate that attitude.)

You don't like Apple? Go buy other phones. Buy one like mine, with small keys and a bad screen, because that's all you're getting from other groups until Apple made their phone. Revel in the lack of user experience. Note the lack of decent apps on those phones, too.

You want equal treatment, you'd better stop dealing with the human race. I was forced into working in groups for classes in school, under this notion that we all can contribute equal parts. I got worse grades in classes because people would mess things up. At some point I started doing all the work myself, because I couldn't stand this equal distribution. It made me into a manager rather than an employee. I prefer the auteur route, where unless you have somebody as smart as you working on something, you do it yourself and don't complain.

You don't like that? Say goodbye to art. Know who was dictatorial and unfair? Stanley Kubrick, who referred to actors as tools to be disposed of and who disliked all but a handful of actors (the rest of whom called him abusive). James Joyce, who produced two novels so complex that people refused to work fairly with them for years, who insisted on not compromsing his work. (Or Ayn Rand if you'd prefer something more "pop" - she refused the notion that anybody could edit her writing.) Pretty much everything awesome comes from somebody who's unfair and doesn't treat people equally and gets done the stuff that's supposed to get done.

Now buckle up and stop complaining unless you've got a better solution.*

*Switching to a worse phone system doesn't count as a solution.
No. A notification API/service was supposed to be available to work around this. But no further (public) news about it has been released.
Shorter version:

"I care more about my own righteous indignation than the children I purport to be interested in saving, so I'm going to publicly tweak the nose of the one company whose support I need the most."
Wundrbar (YC W08) launches new iPhone app
Why? Apple's being lax about publishing apps isn't particularly newsworthy. Even if it's a fairly good cause, this isn't ultraurgent news.

We've still got genocide in Africa. How about we make a deal where if we're going to be melodramatic, we be melodramatic about something that matters?
How rude of him to not assume that everybody already reads and listens to every word he ever says.
There is a real possibility that lobbying by scientists is at least behind this. I can easily imagine someone so angry that their grant forbids them from sending their paper to Nature (which has prestige above any open journal) that they write to their representatives.
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz Speaks
Top Freelance Developer Job Sites
The most amazing thing about this, and DHH in general, is that it is all common sense. But he is the only one that has the guts to shout "but the emperor has no clothes on"
He is annoyed that critics take DHH's "Fuck" words out of context, but he's not really helping the cause with that blog post title.
How much detail do you go into? I can see the value of tracking progress and trying out different ways of improving your tech/sales support but there must be a point when you've taken things too far.

For example do you track which page a user is on before they contact you? If you do A/B testing do you include tech support as an endpoint?
One thing that bugs me about the Twitter boom is that local blogs and even mainstream publications in Chicago now use Twitter to link out to stories they like rather than actually writing about them on their blogs or sites. As someone looking for backlinks and referrals from them, this stinks. The halflife of a tweet is about 10 minutes. The halflife of a blog post is about 5 months, plus it boosts your Google mojo.
Opposite of hapless: happy?

:)

Jim
Poll: Are you losing time doing consulting work?
While I was writing http://tinyurl.com/dbx8rn , I kept wondering how many people business owner were doing consulting work. Now is the time to ask.
Just my business
My business. If consulting passes, I redirect it
My business. If consulting passes, I take it
My business but too much consulting, I want to stop
Just consulting
Now that's a tasty treat. There are tons of things I'd love to know if I could find out in 1 second, but not if it takes 30 seconds, several pages, and several screen resizings just to get to the search box.

Purchased. Thanks Wundrbars!
I have always been firmly against company drug testing. How is that legal? Also, you could be a severe alcoholic or on huge amounts of prescribed medications and that is just fine?
I was just pointing out that the article really isn't worth a look for those who have read most of what he's already written.
"Can You Count?" - A test of your execution skills
I've tried, but I simply can't. I sit down with a text editor and get stuck immediately. I think it's because too much of my knowledge is encoded in state-dependent learning.

(Another user making a new account to answer this one anonymously. This is not a post you want to come up when someone googles your name!)
many startups are founded by programmers - I don't think this is true, but for a programmer, who presumably hangs around other programmers, this is an easy mistake to make. I bet that a lot of business school types wonder why mostly business types start companies. You are biased because of the people you meet.

I have a couple of friends who are doing startups, one is selling vitamins on the net, another is doing an E-book on sex, and a third runs a successful online translation service. None of them are programmers.
Unveiling the "Sixth Sense," game-changing wearable tech
One idea I like is to pay members of congress a ton (like $3M/yr) and then execute them if they do anything wrong. Or something like that. That's like $2B/yr in salaries but would probably save $500B-$1T/yr in graft.
Given the tested max throughput of the Hitachi 1TB SATAs (http://www.storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr) you should be able to get ~2GBps with 2/3 the drives (16 instead of 24) and near triple the storage space (16TB instead of 6TB). They're cheaper, too, of course. That's just theory, though. It would probably be difficult to get all drives "bursting" at the same time but anyway, this kind of looks like a "jumping into jeans" viral published by Samsung.
Well, yeah. The government said those are OK, and the government is never wrong. They have people with guns that say so.
Are short methods actually worse?
I'm not much of an economist, but I think interest basically represents risk. So it's insurance against being wrong. If we average it out over all the loans made by everybody, I don't think this is necessarily inflationary.

Even if the miner doesn't find copper, he's still obligated to pay back his loans. Maybe the bank seizes his property or he pays it off slowly from some regular job where he generates some other value. Either way it will work out in the end, although perhaps the effect is slightly inflationary until he pays off his loan.

And you have to take into consideration all the other loans made. If there is some other miner whose enterprise works out, then, if risk estimation techniques are good, it balances the one that failed.

When the techniques that everyone is using to estimate risk are totally wrong, you get the USA in 2009.

Again: not an economist.
I'm not doing any consulting work, but if I was offered some which I found interesting, I'd probably take it. Just like I find that being FreeBSD Security Officer exposes me to ideas which make me more qualified to work on tarsnap, I think that for appropriate consulting work the learning potential would compensate for the lost time.
Twitter gets its 'million dollar homepage' scheme
I've see marijuana have a very negative effect on my friends work, (whether they realized it or not) and that was enough to make me not ever try it.