skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I wouldn't say I'm quite "there" yet either, but I understand it enough to realize that you can't find something you already have (e.g., a "path"). Empirical thought still assists me too, but the point is he's looking at meditation and everything else objectively: "People are miserable, they should meditate, it will help" when the real message should be "Try meditation. It'll work if you feel like it should and put forth enough of an effort to satisfy your own requirements."

Now that might make a newcomer wonder, "what on earth does he mean by that?" Then they can actually learn. Instead, they think "Okay, I will sit in silence listening to myself breath 2 hours a day and somehow that will help me be happier!" They're still waiting for "stuff" to "happen" to them. There is no "stuff"! Nothing "happens" to you! They're already on the wrong track.
Buddhist Phenomenolody - by mathematician Henk Barendregt
I've had a lot of success with ZFS in FreeBSD running on some very old hardware with a small ram upgrade and a stack of SATA hard disks.

I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.
Thanks for that link. I agree; that's a serious problem. But now we're talking more about socioeconomic class rather than racial/gender groups.
The dangers of being really, really tired.
I wouldn't call the designs of Qmail or Postfix "strange", they're very well designed systems for what they do and given their age. I intimately know the workings of postfix, and while it's not nginx, it does everything it can to be modular and extensible: see how many ways it allows you to access the mail queue before a message is delivered, for example. Yep, THREE different, well documented ways, in increasing levels of ease/performance.

P.S. Is it just me or has Exim declined in popularity? 10 years ago it was hard to choose between Qmail and Exim, and Postfix was the hot new thing.
First of all, starting a company is not socially acceptable. Having less money cuts out a lot of my options. It means I can't go out as much with friends. After enough times of, "Sorry, guys, can't go out, I have to work.", it becomes very socially unacceptable.

Secondly, and most importantly, I do not view a free-for-all frat party/charade/parade as winning. They aren't smart. They aren't funny or clever. They are definitely NOT winning. I am definitely not jealous or envious of their situations. Maybe a bit jealous that they get all the girls, but I can look past that once I see one of them break a bathroom mirror over their head.

A party at Google is a party of people who "got it". They went after what they wanted and got it. That simple. It's not at all a party made up of mindless drones that the author of this article is talking about. I wouldn't even call a party of Googlers a party unless they were doing body shots off Sergey and singing Sweet Caroline at the top of their lungs. But then what? They aren't mindless drones, but they can still party hard. At this point, the author would say, "Perhaps, while they seem to believe that they have gotten what they wanted, they actually have not. Look how they party. They seem to want more."

If what these party drones are doing is "winning", then they are certainly in the wrong in my mind. Ah, it has just hit me. I know what "ressentiment" is.

It's seeing amazing potential going to waste and "transmuting" my disgust for that into a moral imperative to actively prevent that from happening to myself or anyone I care about.

You're right I have ressentiment, but it's for everyone who's potential is going to waste. It's for all the smart people who got caught with a few grams of pot, or some smart girl who only married the guy because he got her pregnant or the philosophy major who spends more time and energy procrastinating, writing HN comments, then he does finishing his thesis or socializing or socializing about his thesis or socializing at frat parties while expounding on his great ideas in his thesis.

I would think the latter being the most beneficial at least so I have someone to talk to at those damn parties.

EDIT: All I'm saying, is that there should be nothing wrong with believing television is terrible, pop music sucks, and belligerent drunks are losers. All are a waste of time, money, resources better not spent at all. If Nietzsche says I have "ressentiment", then fuck it, that's what I have. If meditation furthers my distance from those things, then that's what I'll do.
They are the two most absurdly obvious ones. Finding foreign havens which are of practical, rather than rhetorical use requires research: laws change, treaties are signed, armies invade, etc.
I can't agree more with this post, after attending the Google Developer day as a .Net developer, I felt very much out of place. Every demo was done using Python or PHP or Ruby...also being a HN lurker, there is rarely any interest in .Net stories amongst startup developers.

Another hurdle with adoption is the sense of having to pay for everything good. With languages born out of the open source movement, there are ample complete source code samples to download / use.

Try finding good open source .Net products like CMS's without having to pay, there are some, but nothing of the quality coming out of the likes of PHP / Ruby / MySQL.

Still I hack on, it might not be as l33t as the open source guys, but I get my prototypes built and running, and that same sense of accomplishment :)
Six Apart Announces Wordpress Plugins
If you're an introverted traveler who actually enjoys talking to the locals and getting to know people, then join

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

or

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

I am a member of both, and I have had a wonderful time traveling around Europe and meeting great people in every city I happened to visit. I am not very good at starting conversations with strangers at youth hostels either, so CS and HC have been wonderful to me.
What I mean is an X-er can be told he or she can accomplish something even if another X-er hasn't done it yet. If I understood philwelch correctly, he's saying that an X-er has to actually do it before other X-ers can be told it's possible. But this presents a dilemma.
Wait... people travel to meet other people? I mean, I like to take in the local flavor and all that, but I've never actually spent time idling chatting with folks. I hadn't even considered it as a motivation; I just want to see the world, not be friends with it.
UPDATE: threw together a simple mock-up of what WoframAlpha inside Wikipedia might look like: http://bit.ly/3PHMD

The content and position of a WolframAlpha block would be selected by article authors. Considering how much space it eats up, it probably wouldn't be expanded by default, but it certainly needs to appear inline. If there was just a link to this simulation in the footer section it would be almost invisible.

Also, another shameless act of self-promotion: http://bit.ly/FT0qj (full blog post)
Ever notice how the page refreshes every time you highlight something on posterous?
They use a service called Tracer: http://tynt.com/
Cut the guy some slack FFS. He managed to get a good idea and launched it. Congratulations are in order and kudoses. We can't really predict the success of his project by the absence or presence of minor details, like a striped banner, and no site feels cheaper than Craigslist.

Fixing the UI/design is an iterative, everyday process, and the great majority of it will ever come to light after heavy traffic and use.

Regards.
Without meeting locals, you may see the world, but you will never understand it. You don't have to befriend everyone. Meeting people is different from being friends with them.
what's your couchsurfing username? I'm at http://www.couchsurfing.org/people/maneesh/
Qpsmtpd is similar (Perl instead of Python):

http://smtpd.develooper.com/
If you own the copyright to that code, it's not clear to me why putting it in the code you're giving to them would necessarily even give them the right to use it, much less give them the copyright to it.

Meaning: if I were your prospective employer, I'd be more

(a) concerned that your work product contains code that I do not have clear title to than

(b) hopeful that I will somehow grab the copyright of your pre-existing work.

You'll be a lot better off if the arrangement is clear beforehand, and don't sign anything that would alter or undermine that arrangement. People will have more respect for your being above-board and straightforward, and for the fact that you have enough self-respect to assert your proper rights while making a fair bargain.
Both of those may be true, and using "befriend" was a bit extreme I admit. But I must take this opportunity to ask: what do you mean by "understand it"? I've heard this phrase before, but it has never had any meaning to me.
Wolfram Alpha error message
I've addressed most of these concerns in the last deployment I just did. The lack of notification on signup was a caching problem.

After signing up for (enrolling in) a course you should be taken to that course's landing page. A navigation section gets added to the sidebar when in a course that lists out that course's sections (assuming it has any). At that point, the norm would be to simply progress through the course's sections in a linear fashion but that is not enforced so you can skip around if you want/need.

I guess I need to somehow make it more obvious what you do when you are in a course.
Avoiding the JavaScript trap
"Understanding" the whole world is a quixotic quest. However, it's possible to understand a bit of the places you visit by meeting the locals and letting them show you their way of life. It may sound like baloney, but I have experienced that many times :-)

Often one assumes that others have the same values and the same habits that one has. Meeting the locals in their "natural habitat" is a way of understanding the local values, the local culture. I do abhor that kind of traveling where you sit on the top deck of a bus and drive around a city while some dude with a mike points to touristic attractions. That stuff you can find on Wikipedia. The cool stuff is to meet locals who will welcome you to their houses so you can have dinner with their families, or show you the underground night scene that tourists never experience, or invite you for a weekend at their country / beach house. That's the good stuff.
This actually worked. Once.

I am one of the founders of Guam's first ISP, back in '93. We used the domain guam.net.

One day a letter arrived from England with only an email address on the front. There was no delivery address. Not even a name. Just an email address.

We were a bit puzzled, but it was pretty clear that the UK (or where ever it was) postal system recognized that Guam was a U.S. territory and sent it to the U.S. The U.S. postal system sent it to the main post office on Guam. Since Guam is a small place, the local postal people were familiar with "guam.net" and knew where our office was, and delivered it to us.

Since we, the ISP, knew the customer (in our database), we called him up and said he had a letter. He came by and picked it up. He was as amazed as we were.
Thanks for the response. As you pointed out, much of the disagreement is over the terms being used. The term "anarcho-capitalism" brings to mind some kind of fascist world ruled by big corporations, and this is not what self-described anarcho-capitalists envision at all. They are opposed to all forms of coercion. Most corporations, if not all, are of course tied to the State in some way.

You also hinted at the acceptance of individualist anarchists. Correct me if I'm wrong, but anarchists have no problem with the coexistence of different communities, each with their own flavor of anarchism. The difference between anarcho-"capitalists" and other individualist anarchists is not very large, and is one of degree. Once individualist anarchists are accepted, only semantic issues prevent the acknowledgment of these other anarchists.

But I agree with you that it's a big source of confusion for them to call themselves capitalists. It also doesn't help that some of them describe themselves as being right-wingers.
On the content issue, most of the existing courses out there were created during the private friends/family beta. I have not removed them under the assumption that they will simply fade to meaningless over time. I believe the "Conversational Japanese" course is still under construction but the owner "published" it for testing purposes. Getting quality content is my primary concern at this point!

Didn't mean to scare you with that enroll button haha. Enrolling at this point really doesn't do anything other than give you full access to the course (you can then rate/review it, access the sections, and partake in the forums).

I have a story to think about letting people in w/out enrolling but am unsure how well that would work because then it is hard to gauge a) how popular is a course and b) should a user be able to review the course. Plus I intend to eventually allow course owners to charge for their courses if they so desire and want to get users used to enrolling since eventually that may have a checkout process attached to it.
FYI for outsiders the main startup hubs in the area are San Francisco proper, then the area around Palo Alto (Sunnyvale up to Menlo Park). San Mateo is a lovely place, but you're not going to walk down the street and bump into your startup friends like you can in South Beach or Univ Ave in Palo Alto.
Career damaging self description
"I am a X programmer" (for arbitrary values of X), is not a good way to describe yourself in my opinion.
I meant that in the sense of "spending thousands of dollars and months of one's life to take a course that revels in incomprehensibility and subjectivity, leavened with stereotypical calls to abandon rationality in a manner eerily reminiscent of a random scene from an Ayn Rand book"

It's just that, good lord, who of us would choose a course like that over a real class?
No, there's no good reason for it. The binding doesn't "go" anywhere, so it's not that big a deal either, but it's "bad style".
I have a special place in my heart for NeXT machines. I have a full cube setup in my dad's basement somewhere and I have a colorstation setup on my desk now. It's mainly geek decoration. I figure if I'm ever someone with an important looking office I'll have this thing in a corner and I'll be able to judge the geeky merits of those who enter by those who know what they are/have used them.
For the other side of the video debate, Noam Chomsky (not saying I agree, just sharing the ideas)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFxYyXGMfZM
[I know who you are] and I lost all interest in discussing with you

Oh, so sorry.

PS. I got that as consciously and purposely insulting.

What I wanted to say, and probably failed, is that beautiful patterns do not form any interesting science, that is they lead to no knowledge. This is a classical dichotomy between intuitionist/inductive and deductive philosophies of science.
Here is something that I have been toying with, please downvote me if you guys think this is out of place:

Why do you need so much fault tolerance and concurrency? It seems to me that the regular server would only need to thread a little bit, process incoming requests, and shoot out responses. (this is assuming you're not building MySQL or a heavy duty web server)
I think people are voting you down because they think you're talking about the guy who WROTE the book, not the author of the article. That's what I thought...

That said I think everyone who goes to college has a few humanities requirements, liberal arts major or not. A class with this book in it would have been much cooler than most of the classes I took, humanities or otherwise.
I think that's the angle we're going to take. It just came as a bit of a shock when I first saw it.

Thanks for the great response!
Ha. Right... Not for $75. That's the lowest bid so far ;)
A party at Google is a party of people who "got it". ... It's not at all a party made up of mindless drones

Obviously you have not been to a Google party recently...
For the really cheap solution, you can just get a mini-itx atom board, mini-itx case, and a few external usb enclosures for the hard drives. It's what I have at home, running opensolaris on Xen. I mapped the usb drives natively to opensolaris so I'm not creating disk images on each. It's still fast enough to stream movies on. Not counting the external hard drives, it'll probably cost you around $200 for the PC, and about $125 per terabyte (usually around $25 per usb enclosure).

One of the reasons I used Xen is because OpenSolaris still lacks proper network drivers for just about all the network cards I own. It also had issues with my external usb drives, so it was just easier getting linux to handle the hardware interfaces to opensolaris.

I use it as timemachine backups for my macs & media storage... but on a cheap budget.
Do you think people who like P.F. Chang's are dopey?

Yes. I thought that would be obvious to anyone of reasonable intelligence who has eaten at P.F. Chang's. Simply horrible food.
Thais, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Columbians, Armenians, Turks, Iraqis, Israelis, and so on, And yes, I'm ignoring the differences in each and I haven't even mentioned the Europeans.
Everyone working mobile had this idea earlier in the decade. Most people working in the field knew that the biggest issue was going to be getting carriers to put this thing on their phone, not actually building the app itself. Sam Altman was young and inexperienced enough (i.e. not jaded) to push it through.

That said I wonder how loopt is going to respond to the Foursquare thing from the dodgeball people. Out here in early adopter land it seems like Foursquare is the new hotness and people consider Loopt a gay hookup application. Not that a gay hookup application is necessarily a bad market to be in...
Maybe it's a personal thing, but I'm not a fan of the whole, "introverts are oppressed, extroverts are shallow and evil" line of thinking. e.g., from the article:

"This is not something I confess easily. I have long been shamed out of owning my introversion by the extroverts who dominate American culture. Extroversion has long been considered healthier than introversion, and introverts often try to push against our natural tendencies in order to fit in, to seem normal so people will stop scolding us. Extroverts are unintentional bullies, demanding that everyone join their party or be considered queer, sad or stunted."

The 'we're oppressed' thing just comes off as so bitter to me. Maybe I feel this way because I'm a lot more sociable than I used to be and have seen this issue from both sides.

I've noticed introverts who have become more outgoing and those who haven't have very different takes on the issue. Those who are still introverted tend to be a little more bitter and into the victim thing, and say introversion is a core personality trait.

Those who worked on becoming more outgoing will say their desire to socialize is more mutable than they once thought it was, and that a lot of their past so-called introversion was just shyness and not liking being around people because they weren't good at or comfortable with it. They still seek out and enjoy their alone time, but on the whole they say they're glad they got better with people.

* It's possible the ones who changed weren't hardcore or 'real' enough introverts.

* You could also start nitpicking the way I used the term, and start debating what 'introvert' really means, something most discussions on this topic devolve into before long I've found.
Look at what dominates the floor space.
I want to agree with this but I've met dozens of really genius people who only like "mall food." Especially in science and engineering. The wizardly EECS PhD who only eats out at the Cheesecake Factory was a total cliche when I lived in Cambridge.
> Political self-interest at least nudges people to stop, take a deep breath, and look at the effects of such a cycle on an environment.

No, it doesn't.

> Negative externalities, one of my favorite econ topics, are rarely addressed logically

NE's in practice are just an excuse to power-grab.

Look at all of the measures that are supposedly motivated by NE. Notice the dominant response is "let's tax" but the money isn't used to address the externality.
What about just not using them?
Or you can find super cheap ones on istockphoto
Public schools only provide coaching for a tiny handful of sports. If you excel in any other physical activity then you're just as SOL as if you excel in any one of academic areas the school doesn't cover.
Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are credited to the wrong people.
Nokia 5800 Theme: Windows Vista
Hot in recession: Chocolate, running shoes, Spam
Why the free software community cares about The Pirate Bay
I thought it was so that the IT guys could watch porn w/o being bothered by management?
Didn't Google launch with little fanfare? Like Cuil, Alpha's pre-launch hype set high expectations. If Wolfram had said, "Hey, we're trying out something interesting and new...far from perfect, but we want to let people try it out and get some feedback"....then these comments would all be, "Gee wiz! Look at this idea they had for music stuff..."
"this is assuming you're not building MySQL or a heavy duty web server"

erlang is for building heavy duty web servers. It scales down pretty well too, but there is still a learning curve.
From the "about" page: http://lamsonproject.org/about.html

However, as great as Lamson is for processing email intelligently, it isn’t the best solution for delivering mail. There is 30+ years of SMTP lore and myth stored in the code of mail servers such as Postfix and Exim that would take years to replicate and make efficient. Being a practical project, Lamson defers to much more capable SMTP servers for the grunt work of getting the mail to the final recipient.

Also see this question in the FAQ: http://lamsonproject.org/docs/faq.html
"What about security?! Shouldn’t Lamson be 20 processes?"
Wow, this article speaks more about the ruin caused by split marriages than anything else. Definitely motivation to stay in love and on the same page with my wife.
Here is Joe Armstrong's doctoral thesis.

http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

I find it highly readable.
Wow, hes almost.... likeable.

(Of course, it would have been funny if the interviewer had put the standard movie disclaimer --
No chairs were harmed in the making of this interview).
No, not even remotely:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ruy+lopez

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Lopez
Agreed that Wolfram Alpha will not kill Wikipedia, but it is unfortunate that some interesting points are associated with such a link-bait title.

Using FaceBook for people searches, Twitter for "what are people saying right now" searches, and Wolfram Alpha for CIA World FactBook searches does demonstrate the potential for vertical search services to thrive in the shadow of Google. If services that are better than Google for some narrow kind of search continue to proliferate, collectively they could become a competitive threat to Google at some point. Or at least threaten some potential Google growth opportunities.

I though Dare made this point rather well, and I think it is worth further discussion.
I guess taste and intelligence are not necessarily the same thing.
It's almost as if the author does not even understand that all Javascript source that is run in the browser can be viewed and that additional source downloaded via XHR is the same. The reasoning in this article and the original Stallman piece is lame.
I don't know how it landed on my server (maybe it was apt-get install mail), but:

shephard@sbwc:~$ cat /etc/issue

Ubuntu 8.04.2 \n \l

shephard@sbwc:~$ sudo netstat -anp | egrep -i tcp.25

tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0: LISTEN 21313/exim4

Ubuntu seems to have an affinity for exim somewhere...