skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are all different people in different social circles. This is just how successful humans operate. You don't behave the same way over dinner with your parents as you are over dinner with your friends.

It seems to me you have unrealistic expectations. As you grow older you gain many different social circles, ex college, ex work, ex town etc. What binds you is different and what stimulates each group is different. If you seriously can't find something stimulating about a group of people then just stop seeing them... but remember it is also a reflection on you.

Most people offer much more then you seem to be able to extract and when addressed properly are stimulated by challenging conversation.
My friend, you sound like my clone. I haven't really figured it out. We may just be doomed.
If someone say "we only use 10% of our brains", do you really view it as "dumbing yourself down" if you hold back a long lecture about the actual structure of the human brain? If so, I would say you simply lack social skills. This is not a bad judgement on you in itself, not everybody was born with equal endowment in social skills, and they can be learned. However, the way in which you ascribe your lack of ability to get along with your fellow human beings to your much vaster intelligence is a little ugly.

My default instinct is to feel bad for socially inept people, because I have had a good deal of social problems myself. However, I often find that socially-inept people are simply ugly on the inside, even after I give them the benefit of the doubt. Walking around making constant negative judgments about the intelligence of your peers is hardly a good way to get along.
A very interesting example, thanks!

Some of these ideas are are instances of the pattern: redirect more of what would otherwise be a cluttering one-word 'attaboy!' or 'haha!' or 'this doesn't belong' response into a single-click and running-tally.

I see that RSDN.ru has done that with ':)'; Facebook has done it with 'Like'; HN and others have done it with 'flag' (though this flagged tally is usually non-public).
Cornerstone is a good alternative SVN client. Cyberduck is a pretty good general purpose SFTP/FTP/S3/etc client. I like billings better than on the job personally.
> So when I hear people confidently repeat urban myths like "we only use 10% of our brains", or "you'll drown if you don't eat an hour before swimming" etc, I don't bother trying to explain why I think they're wrong.

Why would you do a thing like that? I just go to extraordinary lengths to do the exact opposite... correct people all the time. Over the ages, it has resulted in a lot of nicknames, sarcasm but yes... a group of friends who accept me for what I truly am and with whom I truly enjoy the time I spend. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I really don't understand why would you do a thing like that? Why hide what you are? Who cares what others think? I say jump right in... let them know what you think, pitch your ideas, debate... what's the worse that could happen? You would be back to the dark bedroom, bright monitor, 20 tabs, right?
> 1. Adium

Doesn't do IRC. In fact I've been unable to find any osX chat client that does IRC and IM.

Anyone found a solution?
There is a good list of free (as in beer) Mac apps at http://www.freeapps.co.uk/mac
QuickSilver is quicker than Spotlight. I don't want to have to wait a few seconds for Spotlight to find stuff... QuickSilver is usually instantaneous or very near it. Also, it doesn't depend on the spotlight indexing, so this means I can disable the spotlight indexing jobs which have a nasty habit of using up 100% of my CPU at random times while I'm doing something.

Also, I haven't had any problems with crashes or anything like that... works great here.
Colloquy [http://colloquy.info/] works well for IRC. Doesn't do IM though.
Sources for all the research are quoted in the appendix to the book.
I've heard good things about Global Hotkey: http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/GlobalHotkey.shtm...
You may not like my answer, but you asked, so here goes:

I think the only problem is with your attitude. Like ilitirit, I hate the expression, "dumbing down". I am probably similar in nature to you, and I have never had this problem, much less even thought about it.

At the bookstore over coffee, my SO reads about design & fashion while I read about Galois and number theory. So what? (I just have to remember to nod in agreement to questions like, "Aren't those window treatments beautiful?") When people talk about sports, I don't tune out; in fact, I enjoy a little football and basketball between coding sessions.

OTOH, NASCAR = for(i=0;i<800;i++){turnLeft()};

I don't watch much TV, don't enjoy gossip, and don't recognize many celebrities, but I can still smile and nod in most conversations. At the very least, I can usually politely direct them to something a little more interesting.

Don't forget, you're human before you're a hacker, so being among other people, no matter who they are, is important to your well being. Don't think of "dumbing down", think of "diversifying among potential users of my code". So get out of that bedroom and join the rest of us. You'll be fine.
And the context you choose to iterate in. (Academia, startup, big business, garage, etc.) For rapid growth & discovery, find/build an environment that lets you iterate a lot.

Advantage we have over Incas is we (people educated & wealthy enough to be reading HN) get to choose our contexts, to a significant extent --> lots of wheels get invented.
Quicksilver crashes on me a couple of times a week. But when it's working, it's glorious and wonderful. I think people stick with QS due to momentum and familiarity (muscle memory). I tried LaunchBar 5 for a few days and it's pretty good, very close to QS in terms of functionality, but there are slight differences in usage and plugins (social bookmarking plugin - access delicious links and tags) which keep me sticking with QS.
"Admitting you’re wrong makes people more trustworthy."

Wouldn't that make them more trustful?
http://glimmerblocker.org to get rid of the annoying ads (by default keeps the Google text ads).
Sir, of course I understand the crushing realities of divorce. My original point is this : when you're 20, you do not consider divorce; when you're 20, you think marriage is forever.
The Plumber’s Guide to Finding & Keeping Clients
Paravirtualization With Xen On CentOS 5.3 (x86_64)
Thanks for the comments.

1. You can already see the content without signing up (at least the course overview pages). It is probably not obvious but the Course Catalog link at the top is accessible when you are not signed in. I didn't want people to get lost in looking at courses (especially when there aren't many yet) because I want them to sign up and get involved in the community.

2. Related courses is a great idea, thanks!

3. Due to comments here I am reconsidering the email verification step. Most people just use a trash or temp address to get around it anyways (like I do).
This is not implemented yet but there is already a story for allowing possible course author collaborations.
Don't we usually wait for the replies to engage in fallacies?
It's awkward, but I believe they intend "you're" and "people" to refer to the same entity(s).

But I see what you're saying.
Commute Driving You Crazy? Read On
ouch. Yeah, getting into debt to pay for a day of partying is a stupid idea, especially in your 20s, regardless of if your marriage lasts.

[My will says that my burial/funeral is not to cost more than what i paid for my wedding, which, with rings, is less than a thousand dollars. With inflation, good luck to whoever is stuck with my dead corpse. Most likely by then the only thing $1000 will get you is a straw mat.]
I just went through the first 100 stories on techcrunch, 32 out of 100 mention twitter.
Course Catalog link at the top. It's also the home page when you are logged in.
In addition to what Scriptor had to say - I don't think those images would be a challenge for Google's OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
1password. A must that makes your life much easier.
Scientifically proven; with no proofs.

Yup. Exhorting people to conserve electricity with smiley face postcards caused a meaningful change in power use? Maybe, but I doubt it. (And if it did, may God help the people in that neighborhood.)
You know, the Saudi nationality is in the lede here, but god knows how many batshit crazy immoral ideas the USPTO has had to deal with over the years.
I don't get why you think it's manipulative. The book has a prominent caution not to use such a message unless it is true (see my other comment.) Assuming the hotel wasn't lying, what exactly is the harm?

The thing you would realize if you read the book is that all of our normal conversation is "manipulative," in that we are trying to elicit some desired response from the other person. Otherwise we'd speak like a robot, with no emotions or facial expressions, always make pure statements of fact and never get anything accomplished.
> However, the way in which you ascribe your lack of ability to get along with your fellow human beings to your much vaster intelligence is a little ugly.

Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough, but I get along with other people very well. People like being around me for various reasons. Don't get me wrong - I am fully aware that there is much more to life than intellectual stimulation and in no way do I base my relationships with people on this idea alone. I'm just talking about one outcome of managing my relationship with others, and I would like to find out how many other people have gone through this (or are going through this) and how they deal with it. I find that self-improvement is one of the first steps in managing relations with others. Because at the end of the day, it is my problem, not theirs.

It's difficult to convey your precise meaning when it comes to interpersonal relationships. You can try very hard to explain what you mean but there will invariably be some ambiguity (it took me a few days to figure out how I should verbalize this to HN - in the end I decided to avoid analysis-paralysis). In many cases, the best one can do is hope that what you say strikes a chord with people in similar situations (hence the opening and closing sentences). That more people are commenting on individual pieces of my post rather than sharing there own experiences could be an indication that there aren't many people that can relate to this.

Whatever the case, I am grateful for the responses.
Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org/)
the invention will probably be found to violate paragraph two of the German Patent Law – which does not allow inventions that transgress public order or good morals

I didn't know German Patent Law worked this way. I wonder if this clause has any actual effect. Is the actual manufacture and use of such inventions also prohibited or does this just mean that nobody in Germany can have a monopoly on such things?
I'm a fairly recent Quicksilver convert (6 mos or so) and love it. I don't suffer from any of the problems you've listed and it's great for my needs.
Plenty of very smart people push DRM too.
Great response! I didn't read this until after I made my response, but I couldn't have said it any better myself.

Daniel, sometimes (not always) when I read your writing, I wonder if we were separated at birth. Sure looking forward to meeting you someday.
The financial crisis was grand political theater-- namely banks, their creditors, and derivative counterparties created a panic in order to stick taxpayers with trillions of dollars in losses. The media and policymakers were either in the bag or cowed by unsubstantiated fearmongering about economic collapse. If we had instead created an orderly way for these banks to fail (while protecting retail savers and insurance policyholders), we'd be on the path to recovery by now-- a recovery led by responsible banks. Instead we face massive new levels of government debt, an expansion of corrupt crony capitalism, and likely years of stagnation. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the crisis-- Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Citi, Goldman-- are largely intact and now are taking on even greater risk under the umbrella of expanded government backstops and even direct taxpayer funding.
I just think it is more important to be authenticate with myself and people who knows me.I do not to dumb myself down if I am really smart. And I know there are chances that someone is smarter than I am or learned more domain knowledge than I have. I need to be modest but I need to hold my own ground. Otherwise, I will be a big coward toward my true self.

I did not try to fit in any group. If I don't feel comfortable. I leave. I am a pretty loner and I take it.

I hold very low opinions toward a person who can't be authenticate about himself/herself. When I feel a person are just a fake person and I just move away. IMHO, faking wastes precious resources in the world. I don't want myself to be someone wasting other people's time and emotion. And I don't want people like that to waste my time and emotion.
I think you're looking at this problem in the wrong way. Apply some of that intelligence of yours and try to figure out why you have to "dumb yourself down" to have a good relationship with your friends.

Conversation is a real skill. Communicating your ideas in terms that someone else can really understand and find interesting isn't always easy. And on the flip side, truly understanding what someone is saying and finding value in it for yourself isn't easy either.
This list is great. Here's some more "FREE" software (some would appreciate a donation/purchase but are not crippled):

1. This may be obvious but as of the latest version, you don't gain much from a corporate email program like Entourage. I use Apple Mail, with IMAP and Google Apps for Your Domain. One account has 3.8GB of email and another has 4.1GB, according to Google. It scales fine and stays in sync across devices. Plus Address Book links to Google Contacts, and iCal links to Google Calendar.

2. I prefer MagiCal (http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/magical) rather than Eigenclock as it includes options to put "yyyy-mm-dd [day] hh:mm:ss" by the Spotlight icon, with [day] clickable for the calendar.

3. I like SpeakTime (http://www.mecanisme.net/software/speaktime/) for putting a row of glance-able analog clocks at the lower left of my screen (semi-transparent so they look like part of the background) to be aware of alternate time zones.

4. I use Skitch (http://www.skitch.com) for screengrabs with annotations to share with colleagues/clients.

5. I use Serverskine (http://www.serverskine.com/) to keep track of server logins.

6. I use Foxmarks (http://www.foxmarks.com/) to keep bookmarks in sync across all browsers and computers.

I don't use QuickSilver, Spotlight gets the job done.

I'd also recommend the following paid apps depending on your needs:

1. iWork '09 (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) for all office apps needs with MS Office 03-07 compatibility. It's worth the $79 for the polish and usability. The "free" alternative will cost more in the long run.

2. OmniGraffle Pro for diagramming with Visio (even Visio binary file) compatibility.

3. OmniPlan for MS Project compatibility.

4. Coda for text based web development. (Yes, TextMate is in my dock. But so is Coda.)

5. 1Password for credentials management across browsers and computers

6. Things for "GTD" methodology (or OmniFocus for more features)
Transmission - bittorrent client http://www.transmissionbt.com/

I used to use transmission, but then I started using uTorrent, which I find has better performance.
http://www.utorrent.com
How does the quote go? "It's easy to be rich if all you want is to be rich"?

If the goal is simply money, making it is not necessarily hard. There are many corporate positions that pay an obscene amount of money at the cost of being very dull. Somebody who enters a market with the goal of making money and nothing else is going to make a lot of money. Most of the routes available are much easier than the one that he picked, which requires a good idea and a lot of luck.

Alex was not slamming Sam's achievement. He just said that from a business perspective rather than a hacker's perspective, the hacker route to riches is very fraught and few people ever make it. You're an outlier, as is Sam, but statistically speaking, more people fail as hacker/entrepreneurs than fail as high-powered corporate lawyers or as cutthroat schmoozers. Even the moderate successes, like Sam (moderate being relative to, say, the people who created Facebook/Microsoft/Google), aren't particularly better-off than the people who merely submit to the system and work their asses off, so the risk doesn't pay a higher financial reward. The only reward is that of personal fulfillment.
Mibbit. If you need a desktop solution, then use Fluid to turn it into an SSB.
If anything, meditation pulls one away from all harm that religion pushes -- namely lack of one's own will, "sleep-walking", belief in illusions created by other people.

I got away from my stupid childhood illusions and dreams (including religion, love, patriotism, etc) by meditating, taking disassociative drugs and astral projection.
After you experience these really perverted delusions you start questioning other delusions and hence get closer to a reality.

So: religion = delusions, meditation = reality. There is a reason meditation is called exploration while religion dictates unquestionable obedience to other humans.
* OmniFocus
* CSSEdit
What Solitary Confinement Does to the Brain
How do you disable spotlight indexing?
> You sound like a socially-uncalibrated egotistical person who blames his short-comings on other people.

Why do you say that? I ask because I'm genuinely curious about how to talk about these things without sounding like that, and without having to qualify everything I say.

The fact is that I am aware that it's my shortcoming. That's why I'm not asking for advice on how to change other people. I'd rather find a way to improve the situation for myself. I don't consider myself supremely intelligent, and I don't consider my peers stupid either. For all I know, they might have the same complaints about me when it comes to topics like sports or women. I don't base relationships with people on the basis of my perception of their intelligence either. As I mentioned to someone else, this is just one aspect of the entire spectrum of interpersonal relationships. In the future, I might have a problem with learning to accept people's opinions. But right now, as far as relationships go, this is what has been on my mind.
I can't believe that no one's discovered this yet. Maybe this is a manifestation of the Python paradox. The kind of people using the jar command (Java developers) are the kind of people who just accept the limitations of their systems without questioning.
Absolutely. Inexpensive cuts of meat are by no means 'worse' than expensive cuts. Certain cuts are always going to be expensive, such as fillet of beef, rack of lamb, but more under-appreciated (and cheaper) cuts can be just as good.

As for examples, pork belly is still very cheap, even since it came into fashion a few years ago, and is much more flavoursome than other cuts. Chicken legs are much cheaper than chicken breast, despite the former having more flavour. Rump steak is more flavoursome than Sirloin. Offal can be delicious, too, and despite its cheapness it is used in the very best restaurants without compunction. You simply have to know what you're looking for.
That's a pretty good response. Intelligence has nothing to do with intellectual abilities. 'Idiot savants' can do brilliant and amazing things. The smartest people in the world have trouble remembering where they put their glasses. Some people can recall every detail of every minute of their lives.

People are simply different. The people that feel that they are smarter than others are often way down the line. The really smart people are the ones that want to learn everything from everyone.

As it turns out, when you're always trying to be the teacher, you miss out on many of life's lessons.
Here are some of my favs:

1) Quicksilver. (free) http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver

2) VLC Media Player. (free) It plays pretty much every type of video file. http://videolan.org/vlc

3) Skitch. (free) Essential for quick screenshots, and quick annotations of screenshots. http://plasq.com/skitch

4) Tweetie. (free - ad supported - or $20) The best native Mac app for Twitterring. http://atebits.com/tweetie-mac

5) TextMate. (~$54) It's handling of projects, bundles, etc. is excellent. http://macromates.com

6) HTTP Client. (free) http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/

7) OmniGraffle. ($100-$200) Excellent for constructing user flow diagrams. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

8) The Hit List. ($50) It's one of the best GTD apps for the Mac. http://www.potionfactory.com/thehitlist/

9) TinkerTool. (free) For customizing OS X. http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html

10) Secrets. (free) For easy access to hidden application preferences. http://secrets.blacktree.com/

11) Sequel Pro. (free) For accessing MySQL databases in a nice GUI. http://www.sequelpro.com/

12) Fluid. (free) If you have a commonly accessed site, Fluid is great to create a SSB (site-specific browser) for it. I have a Fluid SSB created for railsapi.com, which allows me to easily launch it with Quicksilver and start searching the Rails docs right away. http://fluidapp.com/
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200711022159128...
I'm going to be a fuddy-duddy and say: most of these apps are not essential for the Mac. Lots of them are nice, but you can skip them entirely when you're just getting started.

Here are the ones I consider absolute essentials for my daily work:

MegaZoomer - http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html - lets you full-screen zoom any application. That mixed with TextEdit gives you the best word processor you'll ever need.

Quicksiler - linked all over - this will fill in every hole you have in your computer usage. I use it to fix a lot of shortcomings in iTunes, for instance, and while I don't use it as insanely as some people do, even light usage makes your life a lot easier. It's also a full-featured file browser, which is excellent.

Perian - http://perian.org/ - makes your life a lot easier when you're watching videos or listening to music, without forcing a reliance on the ugly VLC.

GlimmerBlocker - http://glimmerblocker.org/ - Unless you use Firefox, this adds every feature you'll need to every browser you've got. (Firefox is an awful browser that rebuilds a lot of Mac features from the ground up, and so it isn't affected by this.) It blocks ads (selectively, so you can allow the ads you don't mind), blocks entire sites, and adds retroactive functionality to sites. The big one for me is the Youtube downloader.

Growl - http://growl.info/ - This one's really easy to abuse, but if you set it to notify you of all the really important things - FTP file uploads and long processes and so on - then you get a very nice way of keeping yourself informed of all your computer's goings-on.

Those are the ones that I absolutely need for my Mac. Here are the ones that are obscure-ish and rarely recommended and yet are terrific:

Max - http://sbooth.org/Max/ - converts every format but wma, so your library stays neat and organized without any complaints about iTunes.

Freedom - http://macfreedom.com/ - disables the Internet, so you can't procrastinate at all.

FuzzyClock - http://www.objectpark.org/FuzzyClock.html - makes your clock much more humane.

Chax - http://ksuther.com/chax/ - Fixes a few things in iChat to make it an acceptable chat system (I really dislike Adium for a number of reasons).
Fusion's good for everything but gaming. I use it for Linux but for Windows I stick to Boot Camp.
Is Memcached a Good or Bad Sign for MySQL?
BBedit is the best editor on the mac, by far. (ok, I am a cheapo and use emacs)