skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to rain on this but I prefer tweetping.net from last week, although it seems not to be working for me right now. Similar concept, but showed tweets as tiny lights across the world.
Without pg and Hacker News, I would still be coding Java in "enterprise", instead of Rails in startup. I would not know about Lisp, Ruby, Clojure and other cool stuff. And probably would have quit coding altogether in frustration.
Parltrack Crowdfunding Appeal
> Go do some physics - then come back to me.

I've actually thought about this a long time ago -- back in high school, and came to the conclusion that if everything were to follow a certain set of "laws", then indeed free will wouldn't exist.

But that isn't the case. Have you heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for starters? If not, look more deeply into physics. After a certain point, the "laws" stop governing, and probability takes over. Probability leaves room for multiple possiblities -- a.k.a. choice. I can't say an electron chooses to be at position X at time T, but I can say that the fact that you can't determine it's positions and that it does tend to be "wherever it wants" within a certain range, hints at something of the kind. For more lookup the "Free Will Theorem": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
Tweetping is great too, though very different – much like http://onemilliontweetmap.com
An Untold Persian Rug Story by Nicko M.
How much does it cost to acquire a customer (CPA Calculator)
Hi guys today I put together a handy little free calculator that enables you to calculate how much it costs you to acquire customers. You can put in your cost to get a visitors and customize each step in your funnel and it will show your CPA instantly. Let me know what you think.
Yes, education is the important factor. Though education != college. It goes farther than that. It is what we learn from our parents ever since the day we can think. Both of my parents are very strongly educated people, something that they passed on to me (and my brothers).

Computers are an amazing tool. That is why I'm always helping people learn to use and program them. I wish all programmers would do the same. It makes a huge difference.

Oh, and I'm not done climbing. :)

Thank you.

PS. Lets keep in touch. Email in profile.
> You can get participation by people without credit cards.

I think this part is aimed at kids.
In my opinion it's all about the golden mean. Party too much and you will regret not achieving anything in life, working a shitty job you hate for mediocre money. Work too much and you will regret not having fun being young, realising it's too late now and even the money you have won't make for the lost time.
The parameters that need to be tuned are the participation types.

I think the strictly technical threads probably have better SNR ratios (number of useful comments/all comments?), and the value of comments in the more generic/generalist comments has dropped.

Right now, there is a thread where someone is expounding X, but no one has come in to offer him a good insightful rebuttal.

I think PG himself said he has noticed a creep of mid-brow dismissals in the comments. The lack of someone who can provide a high level discussion in the marginal threads, is something I seem to be feeling more strongly.

(A thread regarding something like Ortiz, or Aaron would usu. have good representation on the other hand)
Why should you use Client Side MVC framework (like Backbone or AngularJS).
So will a desktop. Why spend $1000 then?
I'm a little disappointed in the middlebrow dismissals here. Let's set aside the brain stuff and do some simple math: you're going to live anywhere from three to seven decades after you reach 30, but only one decade of adulthood before. Therefore your have the opportunity to build a foundation for your life's happiness in your 20's. Economists have this notion called the "discount rate", which is the degree to which one favors instant gratification over greater long-term returns. The younger you are, the more biased towards long-term returns you should be, largely because you have a longer long-term to enjoy them in. This principle is just as true in life as in financial investing. Likewise, as in financial investing, it's prudent to take more risks while younger since you have more time to recover from them.

Of course, we say such things to comfort ourselves now. Advice is wasted on youth.
Finally, physics eliminates the case for free will.

Ever realized that physics (as a science) is incomplete?
There are sectors of the economy that dearly need
electrical storage and are willing to pay for it,
primarily electric vehicles and renewable energy.

This has been true for 200 years. Electrical vehicles were commercially available in the 1850s, but eventually lost out to gasoline vehicles because of... power storage.

If you have actual evidence to support your argument, provide it, but "we need one" certainly isn't it. We've always needed better batteries.
Haven't got a chance to try it right now, but using transform over margin-top sometimes results in a smoother effect on various devices (I believe it gets offloaded onto the GPU as a separate layer).

That said it's running smooth on my desktop.
Look, with Go's interface{} system and its out-of-box "pseudo-generic" typed arrays, slices, maps and channels -- there really isn't an awful lot missing in day-to-day pragmatic programming. Pragmatic as in "old-school imperative line-by-line programming with a few modern ideas mixed in as feasible" -- not necessarily software engineering concoctions of patterns of factories etc.

Again -- the interface{}s and boxing/unboxing, typed maps/slices/arrays/channels -- they all represent stuff where (A) the compiler can infer type knowledge safely and (B) very fast compile-and-link times are not compromised.

Like any language, Go isn't designed to cater to every use-case or programming style. You wouldn't even consider C for your above issues -- right? -- well the safe bet is to always view Go more in the realm of a modern, saner C rather than comparing it to Haskell, or Python, or Scala, or ......

The topic of generics comes up about 2x a week on the golang mailing list / Google Group, often (well sometimes) discussed in-depth with good arguments and quality of discourse. So... either the core gophers are just too clueless and dogmatic to be adding them to the language, or their reasons are still as valid as last month or year with regard to Go's primary design goals and focus.
It's probably worth noting that Virginmedia uses Google for e-mail, so that part of your traffic may already be subject to US law.
Seeing Indonesia bulge like that confirms my own observations of the previous years. Nice to see that. What I have difficulty in believing is the sheer size of Russia's volume, that seems a bit out of place. Rob? Otherwise, fantastic job!
People don't use computers anymore.

Well, that's a very bold statement...
Seeing the smaller countries bulge is very interest. What is out of place about Russia? It's a big place and needs to make up for the vacuum left by China and India.
I think surface pro should be compared to the Acer W700 tablet which come with a i5-3317U processor and 4Gb of RAM.
Somehow acer W700 manages to get 9 hours battery life.
The w700 is also cheaper and comes with a dock, Bluetooth keybord, leather case, and HDMI to VGA adapter.

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Iconia-W700-6691-11-6-Inch-Tablet...
Download Evasi0n Jailbreak iOS 6.x For iPhone, iPad & iPod touch
Some great suggestions on what would be interesting to study have already been made but - I suspect that this is about something more - it is about redirecting a career. Looking for some rigour and a new purpose.

If miriadis wants to stay in a management type role - what skills and experience should he be gaining to re-energise himself and make his future contribution in that role something special.

Perhaps miriadis wants to shift towards a developer role - if so - in what sort of company and thus what sort of skills should be acquired?
This, of course, has unlimited downside.
Git tag secrets
Could the tsunami warning be the reason for it?
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/afp/small-tsunami-hits-solomo...
Are you saying tweets from Asia must be from tourists?
I never said that every single person in Africa is starving, if that is where you are getting.

All I am saying is that the percentage of people literally starving in this continent is so huge that talking about an affordable smartphone is a hybris, if you are familiar with the concept.

It feels inhuman, disgusting, pathetic and a lot of other feelings (to me - IMHO) that someone takes action to address the lack of smartphones in Africa before he adresses starvation.

But then, I would not expect anything less from M$.
That's an interesting point, because in roughly that timescale an awful lot of people had their passions and fearlessness subverted and channelled into pretty awful directions.
I think because the CSS3 hardware accelerate, and this is a good point for this trick!
Bought it... needs a bit more functionality, but it's a good start!

I'd be fascinated to hear how many downloads you got through the app store and other sources after this post. i.e. are such 'niche' apps sustainable, financially? And what percentage of people liked the convenience of the app store, or wanted to contribute, such that they actually bought the app?

RS
IME "root of C: drive" default install location is often a sign that software has bugs when run from paths containing space characters.
Yeah I agree. 20s are the time in which you basically bootstrap your life.

Anyway, did the author ever think for a minute that Kepler or Newton were probably pretty "special" people?

I don't believe any article about the human brain except it is from a decorated Neuroscientist... ;)
Animating scrollTop is quite a common effect that some developers/designers add (personally I'm not a fan).

Usually it's done using the jQuery animate function, meaning you can't take advantage of CSS transitions.

As you can't add a CSS transition onto the window scroll, this demo is useful as it shows a workaround that achieves the same effect using CSS transitions.
Internet Of Things - connects all devices to the internet. API and Demo.
Slingshot - Add items to basket from anywhere.
Don't be so ridiculous. Indonesia is massively distorted, even compared to Japan/Singapore. There is clearly an anomoly in this data, either due to a specific event or a data error.

I say this as someone who has just been to Indonesia (Bali) and not see any evidence of Twitter.
This was well intentioned, no doubt. But it feels like you just jerked off pg, hn and yourself all at the same time.
This looks to be a technical solution to a social problem. What exactly is wrong, from a participant's perspective, with existing forum software? Sure, EE and phpBB et al are terrible technologies, but are the needs of the various communities really not being met? If so, how is Discourse an improvement?
Age 21: Get married.
Age 22: Have first kid.
Age 25: Have second kid/adopt
Age 27: Have third kid/adopt.
Age 29: Have fourth if you want.
Age 47: Start business now that kids are out of house and you have experience.
(-2147483648 0) returns true in C++?
This neglects that for many people your 20s are also when you're at your most active, most sociable and all-round most alive.

To me an over-emphasis on 'investing' during this period is the real waste.
Good answer, Thanks!
Star Wars Episode VII officially announced
If it's a data error, it's on Twitter's part. We trust the geolocation of their data. However, Indonesia is always bulging. It wouldn't need many global tweets to be large in relation to it's area.
On my Lenovo laptop, there's a BIOS setting to swap them, which I was very happy to find!
Granted it's a big place, but if the size on the map is a representation of the volume of tweets, it appears as if 143Mio Russians have a higher volume than 600Mio Europeans (in more or less the same time zones). I had assumed that with internet penetration for Russia estimated at 60Mio (± same as Germany alone), it would not beat the combined internet users of the EU countries. I could be wrong though, just curious.
Bold indeed, and entirely wrong.
A game just in BASH
Does this mean there are no more LPs? Did all of that stop with the latest changes with the scaling back of the guaranteed convertible note from Yuri Milner?
Raise your prices to sell more
9 Rules for Success by British Novelist Amelia E. Barr, 1901
As I said in a previous comment, I've observed this seemingly-out-of-proportion presence of Indonesia on twitter before, since quite a long time. This map confirms those observations. Russia however... ;-)
The Future of Computers as Trucks
QM has Schrödinger's equation at its core - and it is deterministic.
> If you happen to be the next Einstein then I firmly doubt reading baseless self-improvement drivel makes a difference towards realizing or not realizing your potential.

Thanks. My quote of the day!
Well yes, enclosure/fencing was very very British thing. I was just surprised that someone referred to it as the American way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

What happened in America was very ugly colonization, but arguably not the same thing.
HN is best suited to short-term, many-to-many conversation. We're rapidly reaching the end of both of those constraints, HN itself has technical measures to discourage deeply nested threads, and I really do prefer email for long, meandering dialogues anyway.

I wouldn't be opposed to either or both of us posting the rest of our dialogue online, in verbatim, once we were finished, but I do think this is an ill-suited forum to actually continue our discussion in.
I like the premise, but I felt let-down by the conclusion.

Really thought you had some clever proxy to calculate the value of HN.

I do agree that it is hard to quantify it exactly, but feels like you just re-hashed the Wikipedia article and copped out on the interesting part.
One of the other commenters brought up an interesting point: the audience for HN and the teams YC pick are completely different demographic groups.

I don't think it started out that way; in fact I know it didn't. But over time we went from "watercooler for hackers" to "stuff that interests hackers" to "stuff that interests hacker wannabes" to something-else, not sure what to call it. Maybe "stuff that hacker wannabes like and most techies are interested in"

That probably sounds overly-critical of HN, and I apologize if I could have said it better. I just don't think the comparison works the way this author intended it to.

The key issue here is this: does HN have a progression? Is there some sort of goal where after consuming it for a while you become a better person or learn something useful about the world or yourself? (useful enough to offset the time you spend here) In YC there's a format, a goal, clear steps, and you're going somewhere. HN -- anymore? -- it's a hangout. A place you could spend all day picking up little shiny things.

I believe it would be very easy to find more value added by HN, here and there. One guy learns how to program, one guy hooks up with a founder, one guy learns critical things about startups, and so on. And I think if you added up all of those cherry-picked cases, you'd probably end up with more value than YC (for some definition of the word "value"). As an aggregate, however, it's a no-brainer. YC wins. They teach teams to have a clearly-defined external goal and then teams begin a journey towards reaching that goal.

(Note that you can't do this analysis with numbers. This is an entirely subjective question along the lines of "Do you like ice cream?" and should be treated as such)
I have tested Chocolatey, it's definitely not perfect but does its job.

Anyway, I can recommend it to anyone with a Linux background who plans unattended/automated installations on Windows Machines in small scale. It's easy to script and if you want to add registry entries yourself in a post-install script, it's dead easy.

In this context I absolutely agree to the argument "nonstandard because some people..." A common use case for Chocolatey is probably the installation on computers of users who cannot manage the systems for themselves. I think it fills the gap for small scale (semi-)automated installations. I bet for large scales Microsoft has some kind of solution.
I'm disappointed that we see responses like this at HN of all places. We're supposed to be more educated and less ignorant about the world here.

In simple terms, while some parts of Africa are indeed poor and in need of assistance, the majority of the continent is doing ok with many countries falling solidly into the middle-income category with well-developed and extensive consumer markets. As a case in point, Africa's mobile penetration is at least 80%, it's the first place where mobile wallet payments are widely and regularly used and many countries are seeing rapid smartphone adoption.

You can't view Africa through a single simplistic paradigm.
How to move mountains in prayer.
CVE Project planning for beyond hole 9999
Haha man they can't sell any WP8 over here so they send them to Africa in hope of getting them hooked to Windows like they did to the rest of the world, after all the number of PC users there is really low and people all over the continent are buying cheap Android phones.

This is not charity...
Npm module: Mongoose cursor
It's not a search problem, as much as it's an indexing one, no?
In this case, you're likely right but the effect is offset by the lack of tweets and huge vacuum in the areas below Russia. The geometry is preserved as much as possible so the vacuum will pull Russia (which at least has some tweets) down to fill.
Indonesia does have the fourth largest population of any nation in the world... could that explain it?
> The only way you should concern yourself with living is to try to be happy every day, whatever that means to you.

Barf. There's a lot more to life and human flourishing than just making yourself happy.
I love the new Metro interface, when I am in my hot tub with my Lenovo Yoga, but I hate it, when I am using the Yoga as a laptop.

Recently switched from Linux to Windows on my main laptop (driver proplems with Linux) and still using Linux on my development laptop, but I think Microsoft is on to something. Still needs improvement, no question...

I had an iPad and it was kind of "too simple"... Dont know how to describe it.. With my current laptop (the Yoga, which has touch and doubles as tablet and laptop), I kind of have everything in one device... I can do tablet in the tub on in the bed and do development at my desk with one device.
Here are three of my decades thus far. I'm trying to decide which of these was "wasted" according to the article:

Phase I, 21-30: "Work hard/Play hard" mode, socking away retirement savings, building skills & reputation to prepare for Phase II, nights & weekends packed with climbing trips and going out. "I think I can get a full night sleep the weekend after next".

Phase II, 30-40: "Semi-retired nomad" mode, working short (~3mo) contracts about once a year, logging several laps around the world & entire seasons spent chilling at some of the best climbing areas anywhere. Building SaaS products from the beach to finance Phase III.

Phase III, 40-: "Comfortable family guy" mode, working remotely from a little village in the countryside south of Paris with some of the best bouldering in the world, playing with the kid in the garden, and doing "vacations" involving actually booking hotel rooms and not forcing myself to live on $15/day when on the road.

I think according to the article, I was supposed to swap out the "work for employers" part of Phase I for the "build products" part of Phase II. But I'm not sure where Phase II would have come in, had I done that. It's tough.

I guess the best a fella can do is pay attention to one's life and try to at least have a plan. Had you asked 25 year old Jason what his plan was, he would have described something remarkably similar to the above. Except that Phase III might have involved a 19 year old Swedish girl and happened in his sixties:)
MongoDB: Creating capped collections
Avon's Smart Start 2013
I use pycmd -> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/
Also tried console2, and zsh win32 variants i found.
Activity and sociability are exactly the resources you use to create your investments, by achieving real accomplishments, building your skills, and meeting the people who will become your lifelong friends. Hell, you should even have a lot of fun--having good memories and stories to tell are an investment, too. But bias yourself towards things you'll want to have done later, not just things you want to do now.
Can someone properly define "wasting" please? Accomplishments, last I checked, don't have a youth fetish.

This one was well written, but these types of articles miss the point. You can't make sweeping generalizations based on brain chemistry alone. Experience and background plays a large part of who we are, not just genes.

You succeed when you succeed, if it happens. Sometimes, maturity is essential for the process, but age is often not a factor on the Internet. I remember an article posted here (can't recall at the moment, maybe my 30yo brain failed me, HA!) where a designer discussed how people disregarded his accomplishments and talent because he was comparatively young. Well, after going exclusively online, that's not a factor. Same applies for older people as well.

Curiosity, passion, innovation, all the things that make the 20yo brain so wonderful, according to the article, can be sustained well into later years as well.
Visual Studio ​Achievement​s; they're not Xbox live right?
No matter what the age, you can still take control of your life. Also, time wasted enjoyed is not wasted time. So what if your peers were successful in their 20's and you spent your time enjoying what you wanted. Agreed, that with age you are a different person in your physical and mental ability, you got to make the most of your time here and and have no regrets.
“They definitely do mean majority rule. Absolutely. What is democracy, if not majority rule?”

No they don’t. How did that crazy idea ever cross your mind?!
Fun = Pixanova
Sometimes I worry that I'm missing my twenties. I'm 26 now and occasionally wish I had done more.

But if you look back there are lots of things you've done. They might not be as crazy, exciting or important as some people manage. But the truth is your probably ahead of the curve; very few people achieve truly extraordinary things.

I've travelled, met amazing people, started my own business, fallen in and out of love. I could have maybe done more of all these things, but it's hard to regret them.

Don't waste any decades of your life. But also, don't think about your life experience so far as wasted. That's silly.
I wonder what public evidence of Twitter looks like besides people playing with their phones.
Great post James - I read it twice and took detailed notes the second time. This is a must read for any tech start-up or marketer!
From a Meat Loaf song: "A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age"

I've always found those lines to be quite insightful.
It also gets you the worst of both worlds, in that you have to build both a Facebook auth solution, and store some form of user password hash on your servers
and that's why they didn't find any alien intelligence yet
Do we have any idea what it actually _is_ what is getting depleted when we start to run out of energy or concentration? It's something I've wondered about already a few times - I mean I can pretty much feel running out of steam myself. Which means there is some way in which my mind is able to measure whatever it is that it causing this.
It's a lot less interesting if you don't remove the > from the title.