skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like you managed to find some time for fun while working on S3stat :)

http://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan.ashx
I know for myself, the external cue of "there is still food on my plate" is a strong one, since I was raised to always finish my plate. I now do so religiously, but try to set myself up for success by getting smaller portions :).
Mother's Day Gift Special: Your Mom's Name On Him...For Life (TapInko - DreamIt '09)
Pull ups will do wonders as well.
Perhaps I misread the article, but isn't it unusually heavy on the snark and light on content for HN?
Awesome advice. I'll just tell the landlord, supermarket, phone company, and other suppliers that I'm trying to sell my product before I've raised money and they should be proud of supporting a venture whose founding members and first hires are all willing to work for fresh air.

Sorry for the snark, but I'm in a position like this just now. I am in fact working for nothing at present and stretching out a small personal windfall in order to do it. I'm lucky and grateful to have the freedom to do that. We're not a tech startup so our needs are a bit different from grab laptop, update SDK, churn out code - but even so, unless you happen to have deep pockets it takes time and money for any business to make its first sales (which in our case are b2b and thus not free for the customer). I could not and would not do this if I had kids or if Mrs Browl didn't have a good job that allows me to risk my time participating in this venture I'm working for.
Ugh, yes, as others obviously smarter than I mentioned, it is that they are NOT driven by those dates. sigh I shouldn't post in the morning.
It's not a bad overview. The Register is snarky by nature.
What I'm really interested is data on the specific elements of our lifestyles causing these problems.
When I was using Turbo C++ and then later using and admiring Delphi 1,2 & 3 I never dreamed that the great Borland would be taken over by the company producing the humble PC COBOL compiler I was using at work.
Garage Door Openers, Gate Openers, Access Systems 
High performance garage door openers, garage door operators, gate openers and intercoms frp, Chamberlain. Simple enough to install yourself.
I've found it strange how so many chefs smoke. Smoking affects your sense of taste, which you would think is important.

For evidence, watch "Hell's Kitchen" or "Top Chef" ... or the service door of restaurants/diners/pubs.
Server Quest II
Interesting that it's the same processor in Bender from Futurama.
It absolutely is a psychological defense mechanism at work. Most people want to be happy, so they choose to think about what they have and not dwell on what they don't have.

Anyway, I don't really consider it a problem, because the ability to work on ideas of your own choosing already exists. Simply spend far less money than you make, and bank the rest as time. So if you make $60K/year and live on $20k/year, then for each year you work you get 2 years to do what you want.

I did this and used the excess time to start my own company, which failed miserably but was still an excellent experience, one that I'd recommend anyone take. (Plus, it led to getting a job with enough of a raise that I could still save 75-80% of my take-home pay, yet do so without having to live with my parents.) A few of my friends from college have done so as well - that physics Ph.D baker managed to save roughly 40% of his income on a grad school stipend, which I think is pretty impressive. Best of all, you're not a servant to anyone - you're trading your time for time to pursue your own interests, and nobody's forcing you to make the trade if you find it objectionable. You can't get something for nothing, though.
Bioelectricity promises more 'miles per acre' than ethanol
Before soundcards came out, all there was available (for PC) was the PC Speaker.

Some games emerged that had digitized sounds/speech which played via the PC speaker, with only CLICK and UNCLICK as options.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Seed_(computer_game)

You too can have this effect on your home Linux computer:: http://www.linuxlots.com/~dunne//lj.pc_speaker.html
"never met the people in college who became the connection for a job at a Web 2.0 fashion site"

I think that one was actually a cold call...she applied to like every job in San Diego before finding one that would take her. Persistence pays off.
Start by reading about the mental effects of sleep deprivation - a problem mostly unknown to pre-agricultural humans. This topic is a hotbed of research, yet the one cure which is certain to work - creating opportunities for people to live lives ungoverned by clocks if they so choose - is of course not on the table.
In my experience he's spot-on with 15MB - 18MB being the "safe" range. I've seen low-memory warnings past 18MB, and process death shortly thereafter. Relying on the OS to kill off background processes has not been reliable for me, at all.

Also, amusingly, the iPhone will occasionally hang the phone (requiring a reboot.. not just "wait for it to come back") rather than kill your process.
They must use some wear leveling algorithm.

Also, this shouldn't really be much of a technical problem going forward since solid state drives clearly have swap space on them.
Kindle DX: Sleeper Agent for Amazon’s Future
I submitted this article because it's A) interesting b) I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts here on what's wrong with the textbook industry + how to innovate or fix it.
Barclays hates tech startups
The antitrust thing that won't blow over
link: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/07/tipjoycoypossible.html
I asked that question at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565045 which will probably be helpful. Also see the Equity Equation discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015
You should lift weights, but you should also get a trainer to help show you how to do it correctly and safely. Don't just rely on pictures in books or on the net -- if you screw up your back or knees, it can be permanent and debilitating.

That being said, lifting weights is great for you, doesn't take much time (you can do a very complete job in 4 hours per week), and has significantly helped me with back pain.
Peer-to-peer lending in China
"apart" -> "a part"
Video: A Visit to id Software (1993)
Yeah. Cops would have loved that.

He'd be doing time. (sorry). Which would more than make up for the 20ns
I realize that a lot of people on Hacker News might consider this to be pseudoscience territory, but what about something like The Biology of Love by Arthur Janov?

http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Love-Arthur-Janov/dp/157392829...

His theory is that the primary cause of mental illness is intrauterine trauma, which negatively affects the structure of the emotional brain at a very crucial developmental stage. This trauma is undiagnosed and untreated in the newborn infant, and persists into adulthood, where it results in depression, addiction, panic attacks, etc.

-----------------------------------------

EDIT: asciilifeform, do you have some kind of axe to grind?

Anyways, here's a few links to scientific studies that support the relationship between intrauterine trauma and mental illness:

Relationship of maternal and perinatal conditions to eventual adolescent suicide

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2857957

Obstetric care and proneness of offspring to suicide as adults: case-control study

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9812930

Controversial, yes. Without any scientific support, no.
I like NPA's legal hack! Here's the direct permalink:

http://www.publicadcampaign.com/2009/05/how-to-convert-illeg...

OTOH, a New Yorker once mentioned to me there were people (other than the property owner) who had de facto control over the 'flyposting' in certain areas; if you paid them, you could be sure your posters were up (and not covered by others). It seemed vaguely like a protection racket. Can anyone else confirm or refute that it sometimes works that way?
Well I flyer for my business and we typically put a single flyer in several locations, sticking to billboards or phone poles.

Whats really gross is when an ad agency uses a "street team" to carpet bomb every available surface.

I also provide a bulletin board for public use in my establishment. I regularly have to remove the posters of people who put up ten or more and cover up other peoples flyers.

I also remove the flyers that people put on my front windows, the bathroom mirrors and even tabletops.

So really I see this issue as exactly the same as managing a message board. Encourage good content and delete spam or your board becomes a ghetto with a lousy signal to noise ratio.

As far as the artists go, whether they are better or worse than the ads is a subjective decision. If anything they are at least creating a dialogue which is worth something.
Oh dear, I've just discovered that the thing that I had always assumed was just a joke, was actuallly real. There really was a Duke Nukem Forever? I thought that was just an internet code for Did Not Finish, like you see in racing car results.
It's not that hard to learn the basics of relativity -- time runs slower depending on velocity & gravity.
The color classification scheme used in the visuals (e.g., foundations, combinatorics, number theory, and abstract algebra grouped together in the purple-red range; differential equations and mathematical physics grouped together as blues; topology and analysis in between in the yellow-green range) struck me as natural and significant. Maybe this arrangement of mathematical specialties on a linear color chart corresponds not just library classifications or publication patterns but to some hard-to-describe characteristics of different types of mathematical mind.

In my own limited experience I've never met anyone who loved both combinatorics and differential equations, so it seemed natural to me that these two areas are far apart on the chart. When I read about efforts to recruit more students to math/science/computing, I want to ask what kind math, what area of computing; different kinds of minds thrive in different environments. It's a pleasure to see some these differences laid out visually in the Mathematical Atlas.

(typo edited)
Same for me. I can handle some Pink Floyd and other really familiar music, but mostly it's Apocalyptica (metal on chellos) or soundtracks. I recently started listening to the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, but the track where the orcs are slaving away under Isengard is depressing to work to.
Heh... I just got bitchslapped by Facebook for simply mentioning "The Pirate Bay" in my status. Here's the beginning of an e-mail I received:

We have detected suspicious activity on your Facebook account and have reset your password as a security precaution.

etc...
If we're going to go there, personally I prefer the possession-by-demons theory. It is equally plausible and substantiated.

Edit:
I don't deny the possibility that prenatal trauma could screw you up in any given way. Attributing all mental illness to it is ludicrous. It is the same situation as with vitamin deficiency - the arrow of causation points in only one direction. There are many ways to break something complicated.
I enjoy a good C++ snark from time to time.
More importantly, in one place you say the 75,500 figure is uniques and in another you say its page views. Which is it?
I noticed all of your examples are science majors. I wonder if the same anecdotes exist for lawyers, doctors, and MBAs?
We don't have the time to dedicate to it. If someone has the ability to attract traffic to the site, I believe there is lots of potential to scale.

I am sure I'll be setting a reserve for the auction but until I figure out what the market is willing to pay for the site, I can't give you a ballpark.
> you get 2 years to do what you want.

Subtract the time you would spend on the next job search, and also the time you (or at least I) would spend crippled by the anticipation of it.

> nobody's forcing you to make the trade if you find it objectionable.

I would say that the threat of death by starvation and exposure fits the definition of "force" pretty well. (Assuming the trade you're talking about is employment in general.)

> You can't get something for nothing, though.

Much of Hacker News consists of people who eventually hope to live their lives getting something for nothing (namely, living off the interest from a princely sum earned from the sale of their start-up.) The entire ruling caste of our society continuously gets "something for nothing."
I'm not sure why C++ is the butt of so many jokes. Making fun of it just seems to be the in thing to do. I bet most of the jokers have never seriously used it.

Personally, I get a lot of use out of C++ and actually enjoy using it. Sure, it can get complex at times when doing really hard stuff, but it'll force you to stop and understand the implications of what it is you are doing thus forcing you to do it correctly.

C++ won't let you get away with half the crap that many other languages will. Knowing C++ will make you a better programmer in all languages. Try it and see.
Actually, a lot of the major software from nibble magazine is still downloadable:

http://www.nibblemagazine.com/nibble_disks.htm
Senator to FCC: Time for black-and white net neutrality rules
If you are going to A/B test in that manner or with Google Web-optimizer, you need to be aware of how your tests are setup.

There needs to be a clear and measurable action such as a sale to determine success. However, this is only a piece of the puzzle for most online sites. There are many other goals such as user retention, enjoyment and approval.

That A/B testing can be adequate for something like a sales page (37 signals testing was a good example), but falls short if you don't have clear measurable goals.
I should be uniques. I've changed it.

Thanks for spotting it!
Here's the problem -- you're throwing a lot of user data away. Are you saving the mouse position every mousemove or click? Are you continually monitoring if that page has focus? Are you turning on the videocam to see where they're looking at, if they haven't turned away towards something else?

A/B testing could work, with enough similar page widgets and enough data, but people need to collect orders of magnitude more data.
The concept is great. The execution...has room for improvement.
Here's a classic by Feynman on textbooks: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
Interesting.. not one mention of anything "social"
This was an interesting read - thanks for posting.

It seems the problem is rooted in the fact that some states determine the textbooks used for each district and that combined with the consolidation in the industry leads to fewer textbooks being published that all look like one another.

I think if districts had more control over the textbooks you'd see a lot more diversity in textbooks with districts choosing books based on what fit their needs most.

I think the author has some good ideas but I doubt the big publishing houses will allow the system to change as they have too much vested in it.

An out there idea may be to teach directly from Wikipedia (what the author calls the "core") and then have modules that build on top of that.
A lot of people forget VC is a growth mechanism. It depends on someone's plans. Maybe you don't want to be a big 100 million dollar company that has to play the "VC Exit" game. Then sure, you don't need to raise money. You didn't at fog creek, and you're killing it.

Some people like to play the "VC Exit" game and raise the money to grow a company to potentially become huge. Sure they could still grow with their own revenues, but a 6 million infusion will sure make it happen a lot faster.

Most of this everyone already knows. Just a lot of entrepreneurs out there that want to raise money when a) they havent done the simple things they should have or b) for validation and because tEh Bl0gz instill this need to raise VC to succeed.
No.

The story implies, completely incorrectly, that TV Licensing would be extended to all PCs.

The legislation in question explicitly discounts downloads and streaming downloads from its definition of a 'broadcasting service'.

Nothing to see here, move along.
C++0A... I love it.
I have no idea how different your implementation needs to be to be safe from the patent, though.

Neither does anyone else until you put it before a jury. That's a large part of the problem.
It's mentioned near the end of the article, but vertical emoticons were already documented in 1881:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley
People also weren't obstructed by the computer so much, and the smiley wasn't even invented yet. What I mean by the former is, that I found older books to contain all kinds of very curious typography. Not that I know a lot about it, but I think that the typesetter would in that case just make a custom piece, whereas the early computers certainly didn't have an easy way of embedding arbitrary symbols in text, thereby creating the 'need' for emoticons.

EDIT: that said, I was probably wrong with most of what I said. There's been typographical variants of 'faces' since 1881 or so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley#Typographical_smileys
But note how these differ a lot from what we are 'used' to. And I still doubt they'd been used in that way anyway.
Fascinating and nauseating at the same time.
Cheers. Much appreciated.
Trial drugs 'reverse' Alzheimer's
Give families the power to shop by funding learners rather than schools. This is already done in the Netherlands, by per-capita enrollment payments to schools and a system of general funding to all schools, even those with religious affiliation or affiliation with a particular educational philosophy (e.g., Montessori or Waldorf). The Dutch school system gets better results for less money than the United States school system.

In the United States, some cities have tried experiments with voucher plans, which again allow families to shop for schools, and generally deliver better results at the same cost or the same results at less cost compared to the current system of local oligopoly school systems.

If learners can shop, textbooks don't have captive markets, and better textbooks will gain market share. (My basis for knowledge for this last statement is that as a homeschooling parent, I can and do buy textbooks that are MUCH superior to anything on offer in my friendly local public school system.)
An "Intel Star" TV ad -- Sponsors of Tomorrow
For me it's true. I eat very slowly and I'm thin (some would even say that I'm a bit too thin). Also, all the fat people I know eat faster than me.
Well, my thought is that there's room for a new type of textbook publisher. I think the textbook industry is on the cusp of a true innovator's dilemma. LOTS of different ways to innovate here, but it would be insanely difficult. Anything worth disrupting is though.
I've overheard (people I follow on Twitter for other reasons) many Zappos customers ecstatically receive their goods + emails from Zappos.

Like you, I can't quite imagine how awesome getting clothes could possibly get, from anybody. I've heard the return policy is very accommodating, maybe that's a major differentiator?

Also, customer service interactions can be so dehumanizing, I could see how anything even slightly pro-active would feel radical.

I've never bought anything from them, so I can't comment on how innovative their service is, but I've read enough from people who've toured their offices that I do believe their company culture is something unique (getting paid to quit if you're not drinking their koolaid after training, for example).

I'm always up for stories about emerging work-culture, and one thing about Zappos is that they're not a tech company. It's straight up consumer retail. I'm glad to hear "normal" companies might be rethinking how to create nice places to work that invest in their employees, not just tech startups.
Why Facebook Shut Down the Only Useful App it Ever Had
What sort of business have you started?

I like hearing about non-tech businesses.
phew. thanks.
Unfortunately they appear to have bypassed the whole "text-based" thing and used 3D APIs to render their characters on the screen. I want to see a curses version.
My wife and I were just discussing this... it started out with the fact that we're part of the 20% of US households that don't have a land (phone) line; just cell phones.

After discussion, we concluded that we'd ditch our land internet connection once we could get an all-you-can-eat data connection, such as the one mentioned in the article, for $50/person, and not have our data connectivity costs go up.

Looks like this will become a reality once the price drops by 50% (and this becomes integrated into an iPhone/android-based phone).
Interesting perspective from Hoffman in this answer:

"You have to think of yourself as an organism competing with other organisms in an ecosystem. It's about how you fit into the world around you. The modern world is moving fast, and you have to move at that speed. This is true even for a restaurant owner. How do you get customer flow? How do you compete with the other restaurants? How do you run your restaurant?"

I think he overlooks the value of cooperation in an ecosystem, many organisms have inter-relationships that are not competitive but cooperative, collaborative, commensal, or coopetitive.

A good book that offers an ecosystem perspective on economics is Bionomics by Michael Rothschild. It's http://www.amazon.com/Bionomics-Economy-As-Business-Ecosyste... on Amazon
Doesn't the inclusion of this VFAT long filename creation config flag in the mainline kernel constitute an implicit acceptance of the validity of the Microsoft patent? Perhaps you could argue that using the flag will guarantee legal security against this patent claim and not using the flag is no different from the past. Is it really in the best interests of "Linux" to implicitly acknowledge a patent for something as trivial as a hack to support long filenames in a poorly designed filesystem? Really?
True, but it's become a specialist need - like construction machinery and heavy trucks. I wrote some C++ a few years ago (objects, STL, etc.) in a case where it had been chosen mostly out of inertia - Python could have been used with similar performance and less code (and did get used afterwards for other cases).

Speaking of Python and C++: possibly some of us would wish to write Python and get C++. Mark Dufour has been persistently plugging away at a Python-to-C++ compiler (and welcomes help): http://shed-skin.blogspot.com/