skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Suggestion: stay the fuck away from reddit, at least anything besides the science and programming subreddits.

Even frequenting programming.reddit you might get the idea that functional programming is poised to break into the mainstream any day now. Don't hold your breath.
> the title comes from slashdot

That explains it. From a site that uses a photoshop of Bill Gates/Borg hybrid for every Microsoft story, it's no wonder the title's misleading.
All pretty good advice. However, if you find yourself out with friends and almost all you do is think about your project, work on your project. My girlfriend was dragging me out to parties, weddings, her family's house, etc. All I did was think about my project.

We've since separated. Things are working out far better now for my programming schedule. Unfortunately, no more sex.

Socialize, but not for the sake of it. Also, some people are for the late nights, some aren't. Just remember to keep tabs on your health. And I mean that more in the mental sense.
Sounds like a good night ian. Unfortunately we can't make the 30th but could definitely do the 27th.
I'm not sure what it actually takes to manufacture them -- there's definitely some lithography that goes into it but I don't know much beyond that. You might be able to convert an existing microprocessor plant into a DNA microarray plant but i don't really know.

This is the one that I believe 23andme is purchasing in bulk -- or, at least it is the highest end microarray sold by the company 23andme gets their arrays from. http://www.illumina.com/pagesnrn.ilmn?ID=70
You've got to balance that stuff out dude... if you really only enjoy hacking and don't like hanging out with friends, going to movies, eating out, partying, whatever, then cool. But if you're working long hours just to be competitive, then don't do it! Life is too short to treat it like some sort of war. Have fun while you're young.

Hacking can be a social activity too. Do you have any friends that are programmers that work on hobby programming? Maybe work alongside them.

But I really give props to you for dropping out of college; probably took a lot of balls. Where did you go to school?
They have also presented the information in the best way I have ever seen such genetic information presented. This alone makes their product more appealing and more interesting to journalists. Take a look at the copy on this page -- https://www.23andme.com/gen101/variation/speed/ -- it's damn good copy.
Should X be envied? No. Envy is wasteful and counterproductive. Learn waht you can from X's life and move on.
Lubos Motl's a string theorist. String theory is not really a science anymore... it's approaching religion: it's not falsifiable and you can "prove" anything using string theory... literally anything you want. I wouldn't trust his review of any opposing theory. You're better off reading what Lee Smolin or Peter Woit have to say. At least they're objective.
But he doesn't claim to have a theory of everything! He claims that the E8 polytope is significant to physics, and I have a feeling it is.
Why are you using university resources for your startup?
Big Bang or Big Goof? Astronomer Challenges 'Seeds' Proof
As someone who has never used a Lisp machine, it interests me to hear about the complexities of the machine. I have been considering buying one, perhaps through the same detailed here: http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html. I don't think I'd use it for any active development, but it would be a fun hobby tool to hack around on. Anybody here besides Paul have much experience on a Symbolics LM?
Still on 1.5. Never should have upgraded that far.
> Supposedly people can hold about seven "items" in their mind at any one time. I was never sure what that meant -- what qualifies as an "item"?

This urban legend PB refers to actually originated with studies of short-term memory and remembering sequences of digits.

See
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:PP_hzY7PqKgJ:www.knosof....
...if you don't mind using Windows...
True. They've got a couple of science writers on staff, and I'm impressed with their sense of style.

Still, that kind of stuff just doesn't explain a feature article in the New York Times. DeCODE is the big fish in this area, and I've heard next to nothing in the media about them. This seems like a blatant case of good PR.

(with the obvious caveat concerning Google and Sergey and Sergey's wife, of course)
If you feel healthy and you're getting enough sleep then there's no problem. Working nights is fine -- the thing that drives people nutty is rotating shifts, e.g. switching between a night and day schedule too often.

It all depends on what you enjoy, and that's the bottom line. Bill Gates wanted to have his own company more than anything else; he wasn't doing it to make money "so he could do what he really wanted". The #1 thing he wanted to do was run his own software company, and you can see that despite becoming a billionaire long ago he didn't stop. Neither did Steve Jobs. If you're doing what you love then you're doing the right thing.

That said, humans need variety, so when you want to do something else, don't make yourself work more. Making yourself work more is only for people who need discipline and aren't putting in a decent number of hours to start, not for people working overtime to work even more. Bill and Steve had a LOT of variety at their jobs and plenty of social functions (including company social functions).

Think of it this way -- you're making a huge investment of your time and energy, but you're going to BLOW IT ALL if you burn out. You'll get like 80% done and then it will just sit there forever and you won't want to look at it.

So, make sure you don't burn out.

It's a bit like overtraining when you work out; except severe burnout isn't like fatigue that gets better in a couple weeks, it's like needing hip replacement.
Reality makes perfect sense if you consider that we're a simulation. Then the fact that solids really aren't is no more surprising than characters in a 3D game finding the same thing -- they aren't solid, they are composed of electrical signals, wtf?!?

I admit this doesn't help explain what's "up a level", other than "some sort of computer".
23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics
Explains why Arc is written in Scheme.
Make your fancy window manager flip the display.
Those can't compete on CPU, RAM, or disk space.
Do you have a favorite tv show? 
I kmnow most of us here probably do not watch much TV, but if you do, can you please state your favorite TV show(s)?
There are some nice examples of coding here. It covers a lot of bases, cross-platform, distributed. The bit I like the best is an encoding of PEP8 [0] ~ http://svn.browsershots.org/trunk/devtools/pep8/pep8.py Did find a trivial bug though. Try entering a non-existent domain name and it barfs a 500.

[0] PEP 8 is Style Guide for Python Code ~ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
Hard to say. One of those things you just need to figure out for yourself over time.

I do really recommend adding exercise and a non-computer hobby to the mix though. Makes a ton of difference for your well being and happiness.
mod_lisp is not like mod_otherlanguages
Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind
Prototype UI beta version (PWC reloaded)
Firefox3 has too many bugs - 80% of 700 bugs marked as blockers will not be fixed in Firefox3
Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 released (Ubuntu for virtual machines - Parallels, VMware Fusion, etc)
when you use code that obfuscatory, wouldn't you want to give a comment explaining its origin and where to go for further info? i never understood why the origin of any piece of code that shipped in a major game from a high-profile development team would ever be hard to track down.

you should know who added it, when, and why (the code should be self-explanatory, or be refactored, or a comment should be provided for cutesy performance hacks like this).
The West Wing is by far the greatest television show ever created. Second would probably be Arrested Development.
I am based in Bangalore, India. When I say resources I mean money (infrastructre costs like hosting and software) and another developer and a designer.
What school do you go to and do they teach writing composition and spelling?
"What matters is people. Which kinda sucks when you think about it."

But it's true. You make money by making people happy. And "stuff" is only a small percentage of what goes into making people happy. So if all your skills revolve around making stuff, then you have the ability to tackle a very small percentage of what goes into MSPW. A quick glance into any OB text will confirm.
Facebook changes the norms for web purchasing and privacy
if i were a physicist, i'd be very skeptical of any single person claiming to have a definitive solution to a challenging open problem.

also, i'd be keen to prevent social science people from pulling a reverse Sokal hoax.

then again, i don't know diddly squat about physics.
It's pretty silly that people keep making a big deal about this guy being a "surfer"...

He has a PhD in theoretical physics... and also happens to be a surfer. So what?
"For example there could be a list of logged in users to be displayed in the sidebar, or any number of widgets. It seems unnatural to have to gather the data for those in every controller call."

Aren't these things conceptually separate views, each having its own controller?

However, mentioning MVC and web applications gives me an excuse to engage in nostalgia and once more mourn the passing[1] of WebObjects. It was simple in WebObjects to make any reusable part of a page into its own component. Also, MVC has a much bigger payoff when you have development tools designed to support it. WOBuilder allowed you to graphically build interface components, then just drag connections between properties in your controller object and the widget you wanted to display them in. And not just top level properties, but you could drill down through the relationships of any object (e.g. user.shoppingCart.numberOfItems, Google "key value coding" if interested). (And yes, this is just like Cocoa and Interface Builder, came out of the same technology base originally.)

I have yet to see any web development tools[2] that come anywhere close to the productivity enabled by WebObjects. And I didn't even get into the Enterprise Objects Framework...

[1] WebObjects is still very much alive inside Apple (iTunes store, Apple Store, pretty much everything Apple does on the web) but for outside developers it is quite dead. The only life support is ant + Eclipse plugins, but that defeats the whole purpose as the development tools were the whole point of WebObjects.
[2] Tools as distinct from programming languages. WebObjects was Java, so nothing special there, but real old timers still miss the Objective C version.
Po Branson's book. Read.
Newsmap saved
Armstrong & Miller and Arrested Development
If you're looking for people to have sex with, this is the easiest, cheapest, and most direct way to make it happen.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/cas/?query=w4m
Yet Another Word Puzzle
They have fast internet and an environment conducive to productivity? It's extremely unlikely that the university would come after him for his IP, especially if he is a student and is not spinning off university sanctioned research into a company.

Of course, you're right, he would still be better off staying away from all university resources, depending on his school's tech transfer policy.
Why Lisp is different
Scribd in the Wall Street Journal
Javascript scoping problems? Is it Firefox, IE or... Prototype?
You don't have to worry about that thanks to the "override" link you can click on. I use it all the time ;)
Great find. There's quite a few things that are useful. Take for instance this quote ...

"... One of the things he often said was that "peace of mind is the most important prerequisite for creative work." And he thought one should do everything one could to achieve that. And he thought that meant, among other things, that one should always stay away from anything worldly, like management. ..."

The reason for this is thinking under stress is quite difficult and anything you can do to reduce it allows more thinking time.

Q: Is a startup environment toxic for thinking?

So it's not surprising prime hacking time might be after hours in a room with the door locked away from distractions such as noise, offices and other people.
"I actually have no idea what "non-corroborative evidence for an idea" means."

It's the opposite of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corroborating_evidence
It's still better than Firefox 2, I can't go back.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Arrested Development
Oh come on, Common Lisp isn't that complicated...
Oliver Sacks Observes the Mind Through Music
You're arguing with the guy that wrote the book, _ANSI Common Lisp_. Just a comment. :)
Looks too much like Digg. Is that what you are going for?
This code was written when the software industry looked very different. Particularly, the teams were super tiny, and cleverness won out over code clarity every time due to the relatively weak computation power that was readily accessible. I would have been surprised to hear that any of the dirty/genius hacks found in apps written in the 80's and early 90's was well documented.

That good sqrt code made it into Quake 3 from previous codebases is also not surprising. If it ain't broke...
what problem are you solving?
Office, The
Well, now that laserboy at ArsTechnica has weighed in, I think we can consider the matter settled. Let's all close the book on this one and head over to Fox News for some insight on foreign policy, then to Slashdot for a nice explanation of copyright law, and finally hit up Penthouse forum for some solid relationship advice.
haha... me too.
I know :-) Are his gripes with it documented somewhere then? Or is that Arc?
have you ever tried to use Windows API and COM stuff? often even simple task requires several pages of complex and cryptic code. there is fine documentation for each function, but barely anyone can write meaningful programs using only this documentation, you need a code samples to do this, and problem is not because APIs are too low level -- they are just too complex.

i had no luck of using Lisp Machines, but if you compare CL to them, i can say CL is absolute easiness, joy and bliss comparing to WinAPI/C++ stuff.

even pure C++ (w/o WinAPI) gets very cryptic with modern template-metaprogramming stuff.

so.. WinAPI and C++ were quite popular and prolific in 90-s, despite their weirdness and complexity. so maybe it's not actually so much problem of itself?
Entourage.
I want ari gold as my co-founder.
Out of things currently airing -- Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, Heroes, in that order.

The greatest TV show of all time is Six Feet Under. If you've never watched it, you're in for the best 64 hours of visual media of your life.

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3420704/Six_Feet_Under_season_1
not to be technical, but i believe "non" means "absense of," not "inverse of." so for a given statement there's a lot of non-corroborating evidence that is irrelevant
Paying People to Argue With You (or How a Guy Found a Novel Use for Amazon's Mech Turk)
Seconded. I also like IT Crowd a lot.
it's always sunny in philadelphia -- it's hilarious.
recent fav: Rome
http://artoffascination.blogspot.com/search/label/TV
This seems to be only the first para. Has anyone put the whole article online anywhere yet?

Edit: Never mind. Firefox just wasn't showing me the scrollbars for some reason.
This kind of abuse is a logical consequence of ad based business models. If the person who uses a service/software is not the person who pays for it the result is a conflict of interest and quality will suffer. We're seeing different variations on this theme in enterprise software and in public services. It doesn't even matter that ultimately the user may indeed pay for the service indirectly. Once you cut the direct ties, the alignment of interest is lost and the whole thing becomes a futile ethics debate.
The version I see on scribd ends with :

"The adult entertainment industry is always, in many ways, on the forefront of technology, so if they can use something to their advantage, like an open hosting platform, they jump on it pretty quickly," he said. For Veoh the move to remove adult material was the right one, Mr. Shapiro said. "Nobody wants to be branded an adult Web site -- unless you're an adult Web site."

Write to Andrew LaVallee at [email here]
Fawlty Towers
I haven't watched anything since The Sopranos finished. Except Seinfeld DVDs.
I created a network or two, but without much customization. One problem is that it felt very slow at times. Problem if you use it: you can't buy a faster server for your service.
"Pontificate" -- I Do Not Think It Means, What You Think It Means.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pontificate
Everything you wanted to know about HDTV but were afraid to ask.
what do you think of this style of Philosophical Dialogue blogging. i rather like it.
Tribute to honor Jim Gray on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley
Sure, a device that does it all would be preferable. I am just saying that people's resistance against ebooks might become history faster than we think.
Nice summary, never thought of it that way.
Facebook also doesn't hold itself up as a "do no evil" type of place, so I don't think they have any reservations of how they will use the social information (unlike google, who whilst being ad funded practically 100%, are held up to higher standards - how long that holds will be interesting to see).
You will probably get down modded, but you are right. We are all whores of some sort, some of the time at least. Its actually liberating to make this realisation, and get over ourselves.
if you're talking about the UK version :)
Definitely Dexter. Was never big on TV, but this one caught my attention and I look forward to it every Sunday.
I'm in. :)
The trick with MVC is to realize that it's not some immutable magic spell, it gives results by enforcing a separation of concerns: data-modeling (and its manipulation and constraints) in the model, control-flow (and selecting and ordering the data to be presented) in the controller, and rendering it a certain way in the view.

If you, as you suggest, have the view (essentially a glorified HTML template) request the data it needs (e.g. from multiple sources), then your data-selection and visual-presentation become tightly coupled. (The point of a view is that you can have multiple views of the same data). If the original view is handling things like data-selection and complex control flow, then when you want to create an alternate presentation of the same data, you'll end up copy-and-pasting code (c.f. "Don't Repeat Yourself").

So the best solution is to get a really good feel for separation of concerns, code-non-duplication, etc., and then organize your code accordingly. When using MVC, use every bit of it to keep your code simple and decoupled; if you just slap code into units called "models", "views", and "controllers" wherever you like, then you will receive NO BENEFIT (or negative benefit!) from using MVC. But, used properly, it can be a powerful tool.
Wii ;-)
The last two sentences of Warren Buffet's answer are priceless:

Q: What is your career advice?

A: If you want to make a lot of money go to Wall Street. More importantly though, do what you would do for free, having passion for what you do is the most important thing. I love what I do; I'm not even that busy. I got a total of five phone calls all day yesterday and one of them was a wrong number. Ms. B from NFM had passion, that's why she was successful. A few months ago I was talking to another MBA student, a very talented man, about 30 years old from a great school with a great resume. I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that's like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense.

http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/clubs/investment/WarrenB...
I would say, though, that news.yc is my favorite leisure activity.
For more on this watch some of this talks....this is from 1998 but still so relevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfuXKpMFUjc
Matt, you should submit this -- I would but I don't want to jack your karma.
Ask YC:  Paul Graham's 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups:  Which are no longer an issue when developing Facebook apps?
Which of these mistakes (if any) are no longer an issue when developing Facebook apps?

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Something else might suit you guys better than stale versions. Konqueror, for example.
Tv is horrible, but every once in a while I watch Fox News for comedy and to study propaganda techniques. I never cease to be amazed at how easy it seems to be...
Family Guy
Battlestar Galactica.
Personally, I don't think "Single Founder" is an issue for facebook apps -- pg's argument of "It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him" is only valid if you're trying to talk your friends into joining you. (In my case, even though I'm not doing a facebook app, I've turned down offers with a "uhh, thanks... but I really don't need any help right now".) Different startups require different amounts of manpower, just like different startups require different amounts of capital -- I think most facebook applications easily fall into the "one person is enough" category.

As for the rest... I'd say they're all relevant to varying degrees. Probably "Bad Location" is less relevant, since it's partly about finding angels and VC (which are less important since facebook apps generally need less capital); while "Hiring Bad Programmers" is probably more relevant (if you're hiring anyone at all, at least), since most greybeards are old enough to have not drunk the facebook kool-aid.
I never used LMs, but I wrote my dissertation in CL. What a monster (this was after 5+ years of Lisp programming writing a couple of interpreters, teaching it). A baroque morass, similar in X to complexity. (Btw, if you're comparing graphics APIs, X is a heck of a lot worse than the Windows API.)

To those commenting upon C++ and its metaprogramming complexity -- a lot of your complaints here really focus on the complexity of metacode WRITTEN in C++/templates, not in the template strucure itself. Even with STL, C++ is simpler and as rich as CL. If you'll exclude the paradigm shift, of course...
A black conservative Christian pastor of an evangelical megachurch has vowed to take over Microsoft.
Heroes is great! It's also a great example of why not to over-value an idea--it's the implementation of Heroes, not the idea, that makes it a hit. Heroes does a great job executing on borrowed ideas from X-Men and other sources. Moreover, when that execution slips (this season, finale of last year) viewership drops...
The Marriage of Psychology and Business: The Century of the Self (Brilliant Documentary)
My favorite part is on the right side of the page:

"This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit:"

Does anyone involved with scribd care to comment about how they deal with copyright issues such as this exact article?
Note the assumption at the end that you can't find love with someone with technical prowess.
What, nobody watches Top Gear?
Developing a Facebook app is mistake 19.
I never drank the Single Founder kool-aid either.

Completely off-topic, cperciva, but regarding your startup, why are you giving away your strongest asset (secure backup implementation and code) in order to make money on an increasingly commoditized product (the storage itself)? I would think it would be in your interest to do the opposite. Am I missing something?
Boston Legal