skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get up in the late morning, read the news for a few minutes, drink coffee, and start coding. Sometimes I have breakfast, which can be cereal, bacon and eggs, or chicken wings cooked on the grill.

I work on the code all day long, except when I'm talking to my co-founders, board, or sales prospects. I also like to monitor all the various stat feeds I get - log tails, Google analytics, affiliate sales, etc. - and correspond with people on mailing lists and social networks. I Twitter whenever I push a visible change to my site, which is everyday.

I eat twice a day, usually with my co-founders, who are also my roommates, and I snack. After the sun sets, I eventually watch some tv shows and fall asleep. Then I wake up the next day and do the same thing.

We work all the time, until we get tired. Then we strap on some backpacks and go hiking for a while. When I can't code any longer, I'll do something fun like hike, play go on the internet, or play with my dog. We live in sort of a rural mountain area with lots of mountains and trails.

I'm not sure which part I like the best, the work or the play.
The speed at which you can change the rules is lower than the speed at which smart people can come up with ways of gaming them...
A lot of the analysis of Wave so far has (stupidly) focused on the web app that Google was showing off, on the whiz-bang HTML5 bullshit that ultimately doesn't much matter. I think it's really important to think of Wave not in terms of the front-end they were showing off, but rather in terms of the underlying protocol that powered it. Google envisions it as a sort of SMTP 2.0, powering most person-to-person communication on the internet; if (and only if) the industry gets behind it unilaterally, I think it has a real chance of success.

The paucity of existing documentation can be forgiven, but only to a point -- it's definitely on Google to make the complex elements of that protocol (and there are many) developer-accessible. As cool as the technology is, it'll wither and die without proper support.
heh. i started shaking my head in disbelief at the part where you have to hammer together the rivets to create your own drive chain...

tamiya models are great, i guess the accent kits you can buy from 3rd parties go way over the top. i wouldn't have the ability to put that shit together even if paid
Part I and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=632335
"The point this article is trying to make is that the notion of "spontaneous order" is fundamental to both the theory of evolution and the free market. One would be hard pressed to design from scratch a working flamingo, and one would similarly be hard pressed to design from scratch a working economy."

But what good is a flamingo? If you're trying to solve human problems, spontaneous order from some sort of survival-of-the-fittest system is not good enough. Things that are useful to humans require conscious design. Spontaneous order gave us wood, but it took a human engineer to design the wheel. Evolution by natural selection never could have designed such a tool spontaneously.

Sure, the economy is a lot more complicated than that, and the precautionary principle is sound advice. All the same, there's every reason to believe that humans are capable of designing something better, as long we're not reckless about it.
Not much - Smalltalk code is written in sentences not squiggles.

The productivity comes from reading and re-using the code that has already been written rather than duplicating stuff.
Winner never Quit, they just set higher standards...
35mm digital gets better every year but medium format digital will continue to offer better resolution and dynamic range simply because the chips and lenses are bigger. More light falls on the larger chip, which has more photosites. The same size vs. image quality tradeoffs exist in the digital world as with film.
Proposal: Self-Help Group model for HNers
I'm sure everyone here has heard of micro-finance in developing countries. A close-knit group of people come together and start investing small amounts to build a communal fund. They collaborate and eventually use the money to start a new local venture. Through consensus, whoever is allowed to withdraw from the fund pays it back so that technically the hoard never shrinks.

I fail to see why this would be a bad idea for any group of wage laborers. Obviously, starting a tech biz is more complex than purchasing your first cow, however I would happily put up $25 a month to buy a vote for whichever proposal gets funded, hoping that eventually I could open the door to that proposal someday involving me.

Think we could get 100 other like-minded participants?
Awesome. I actually fired up Sinatra on JRuby for a micro-app that needs to talk to some Java stuff last week. All of the existing stuff in Scala was way too heavy for the purpose. (Clojure/compojure has comparable overhead to Sinatra assuming you're familiar with Clojure, but it was untenable in this particular circumstance.)

At least half the magic of Sinatra is that you can write a single Ruby script, exec it and not have to fool around with build/generate/scaffold script or web server configuration to get something useful. It seems like you're pretty close, given that Java has no standard dependency retrieval system.
pretty much, yep

either take what you know, find an idea that you can create with it, or go about learning more.

or

find a job and float until inspiration hits you
There's also more opportunity to invent a whole field in business than there is in NBA basketball. Totally agreed.

Nonetheless, I think my point in the conclusion holds: if a company is not optimizing what you think they should be optimizing, you're more likely expecting the wrong goal than they are failing to optimize for the goal you expect.
Agreed. Much appreciated. On second thought, you were pretty close to the truth. I'm my worst own enemy in some ways, but I'm changing and maturing every day.
The Economist: Open-source software has won the argument.
Car manufacturers should take note as well : the ker-thunk of a door, and heft of a well damped indicator stalk, the soft-feel plastic of a door handler transmit quality, even if the rest of the car is run-of-the-mill. This is where VW leads in giving a quality feel, even though it's cars often feature badly in quality reports.
first, I did support my argument. second, I don't feel the need to disprove the same thing over and over. some theories are just wrong, and labeling them as such is not an ad hominem attack. do you feel the need to have an entire debate every time someone makes a case for young earth creationism. in my mind Marxism and YEC have about the same level of validity, which has been proven over and over; I feel no need to do so again.

that's just my opinion, and if you disagree, fine. but don't have a knee jerk reaction and assume that because I labelled something Marxist means I'm intellectually shallow.
New Era in Autos as GM Set for Bankruptcy
... and by Bellare, Kohno, and Namprempre for SSH: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/papers/SSH/
Chicago Birth Injuries
Chicago Birth Injury
As one of the organizers for superhappydevhouse, one of my main goals is to keep it from ever becoming an invitation only event. I share a lot of sentiment that Fred Wilson expressed in his blog post.

As superhappydevhouse has grown in popularity and size, this has made finding venues more difficult, we've been extremely fortunate and have had many generous people open their homes and businesses to us.

The "dilution" issue that mellis mentions above has also been a concern, fortunately this hasn't been a difficult issue to address. All that we've needed to do so far is to explicitly state what sort of event we are holding ("A party for hackers and thinkers") as well as discouraging corporate self-promotion and recruiting.
If there's one company that I would have thought could have pulled it off, it was Apple. I was pretty disappointed when I walked into an Apple Store to find the employees using Windows CE-based handhelds which, of course, printed the same uninspired receipts found everywhere else. I do hear they're trying to replace them with iPod Touch-based systems, but I haven't heard anything about whether or not the receipts themselves will also be upgraded.
But who really wants a receipt unless you're expensing the dinner? I'd much rather have some record emailed to me and have nothing to worry about keeping track of or putting in my pocket.
Unless you're going to deliver a receipt that matches my meal in value, I don't particularly see the point. I don't want some stock-printed receipt merely intended to impress.

Receipts are just receipts, and there's no real value you can provide for me there. Instead, remember who I am, and welcome me back next time.

I should also note that the author's point could have been better elucidated without relying so heavily on braggart anecdote.
You don't need a conference to go out for a beer, and you certainly don't need an exclusive conference to go out for a beer with someone interesting.

You do need a way to gather interesting people in one place, but you don't need a traditional conference (especially an expensive conference) to do so.
Agreed. I especially am frustrated with the people who are excited because, "you can see each letter the other person types as they type it during chats!"

There's very little appeal in that. Lots of people need to edit typos and want to formulate complete thoughts before letting others see them. On the other hand, the underlying technology that will make that process even possible is what's really exciting. I'm looking forward to what creative people will be doing with it.
I used to work at a telcom research company. This was required reading for new hires, eight years after its publication (probably still is).

Of course, the industry had changed since 1996. A lot of what he predicted hasn't come to pass. And he certainly didn't see the bottoming out of the market in the early 00's. But it is a great introduction to the world of sub cables. I passed this along to many friends when they made the mistake of asking me what I did.
Drunk Driving Chicago
Chicago drunk driving accident
To play fence-sitter for a moment, I won't be able to tell you what I think until I've used it.

Ignoring that, though, from what I have seen it appears to be providing the communication benefits that have recently been explored by social networking sites, while cutting out a lot of the potential for the egocentricism that seems endemic to places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like.

If it delivers on that, then I shall be very pleased. It'll be good to be able to once again focus on the interaction with my friends, rather than the banner at the top of the page with their name on it.
Interesting. I have number-color synesthesia but that test does nothing for me; I couldn't make out the image at all. For that test to work I would think that one would literally have to "see" the color of a number almost as though it were a hallucination.

I can only speak for myself obviously, but for me a number just invokes a certain color in my mind, almost as though the number has an aura. Two, for example, is blue-green, whereas five is just sort of black on white. But looking at a grey 2 on a background, I just see a grey 2 on a background... nothing more, unfortunately.

It was interesting nonetheless, just thought I'd share my own experience.
Io can do fast vector processing if you use its vector library. That's what I assume is going on.
Nevermind the fact that I remember that being the norm almost 20 years ago on BBS systems :)
I think most receipt printers have the capability to print graphics. The problem is more that the software vendors do not offer this capability, or it is not utilized.
What is the IETF's stance on this? Or has the entire process become so politicized that it is now up to large commercial entities to dictate the future development of the Internet? I'm not entirely comfortable with this if it is true.
Actually, whenever I've been in a place with odd lightswitches, it's been pretty annoying. First, if I have to figure out how to use it by trial and error in the dark, that's a problem. Second, if I'm expecting to live there for years, I'm going to have to replace them, and then, very likely, I'm going to have a bunch of wonderfully different switches, and one that stands out because I could get it at Home Depot, and I couldn't find anyplace to buy one like the others.

All that said, I prefer the wide rocker switches over the lever switches that I grew up with, so I'm not knocking change, just variety. :)
For me, it's having an agenda with one item on it prepared the night before. The last hour before bed I review the code, screens, and notes from that day and decide the most important thing to work on the next day. Then I lay it out in detail including a red marker on my code. When I get to my computer the next day, I'm ready to go. Sounds simple, and it is. It's also very effective.
part of the cheapness of hyundai elantras comes from the fact that resale values are absolute garbage for older models. w/ improving brand perception and reliability of the products itself, resale values for post 2005 cars will be much higher than ppl expect

You're contradicting yourself here. The reason they are cheap is because they have poor resale value. Therefore, you will also get poor resale on the vehicle. Once a brand is tarnished with a 'bad resale' value tag, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one that would take decades to change.

By all means purchase a Hyundai, but don't expect to have an easy time selling it. Brand reputations aren't fixed in 12 months. All the while Hyundai are priced low with long warranties, the resale value will be low, because it's more logical to go and purchase a new one.
Old school programming techniques you probably don't miss
I suspect that there are varying degrees of synesthesia that range from the aura you describe to full-on hallucination. I have a friend that has an aural-color synesthesia who tells me that listening to music in the car (or for that matter having a conversation) is very difficult because the colors get in the way of her driving.

In any event, perhaps even in your case you could perform that test (or another like it) statistically significantly faster than persons without synesthesia.
Orlando Commerical Litigation 
Orlando commercial litigation
K&R, SICP, TAoCP. Those aren't debatable.

Stevens is possibly only really necessary for UNIX systems developers these days, but I see enough people with fundamental misunderstandings about protocols and networking and memory management and processes, etc. that maybe they should also be considered mandatory. At least worth a skim.
How about a pc inkjet printer? They can actually be hooked up to the nice touchscreen ones you see at restaurants. If size/perception is an issue, why not try a small photo-printer such as the new Polaroid PoGo.

Also, as a side note, Starbucks might not be the best fit since it's a relatively low-price-point commodity. Both previous examples were high-price-point, luxury experiences, which would benefit from 1) the lack of a bad reaction 2) receipt as a marketing tool since you create worth through creating a souvenir. Starbucks on the other hand, would only benefit through the latter, where you create worth through impressions (kind of like those annoying magazine signup forms). This is actually not helpful since Starbucks doesn't need any more impressions due to their many stores, and when you throw them away from the back seat of your car, you'll indirectly attribute the brand to junk.

It would be nice to see online services mimic retail merchandising techniques.
SICP comes to mind...
Knuth's TAOCP also.
It took 5 years before my start-up started paying off the debt I had accumulated.

There were a couple of "dark" times where I decided to give up and get a job. But I messed up the interview each time. It's like my heart knew it wasn't right and I bombed. Maybe it gave me clarity about what I needed to be doing.

When you're stuck, it's hard to guess if a change is right. Though, if you start down a path, it might be easier to know if you are going in the right direction.
Right, so I wasn't saying that having a "normal job" is objectively bad, merely that in certain circumstances people have a tendency to "settle" for their lives and mistake rationalized contentment for happiness. I used it as an example since it's something many people in this particular country (U.S.) can relate to -- or could, if they took the time to look at their lives.
Even if you can insure the car, if you do destroy it in an accident, there may be a lifelong feeling of distrust towards you from the other person. This would depend on your relationship with the person, but nobody ever wins from an insurance payout. It's generally less than what you can replace the car for, it does damage to somebody's insurance rating, it's just not fun all round.

Buy your own car and know that you don't owe anyone anything.
I'm all for managing "message overload" and there are plenty of ways to do it.

However, the door swings both ways ... if you're gonna ignore people you no longer have a right to expect replies to your emails/msgs
I liked conferences a lot when I worked in a different industry. Now I'm immersed in web 2.blah and get enough of it at work. I mostly stopped going to stuff.
Jahit H. Kavrut
Kavurt Law Offices is a multilingual immigration attorney firm located in Orlando, Florida speaking English, Turkish, French, Italian, and Spanish.
I'm sure it will be useful for some people but I'm pretty skeptical of all this "social " stuff. Most of my online communication is compartmentalized and direct and I like it that way. As a result it's hard for me to judge it since I'm looking at the product from the "will I* use this? Is it useful to ME?" perspective. The one thing I'm pretty confident about is the UI looks overly complex and convoluted for the average person to use. (look at the success of Twitter and Facebook UI change uproar for proof of that) I think Google needs to seriously improve the UI if they want it to be a mainstream product. Otherwise I see it being a niche service for people who really need this type of tool.
Ditto sentiment. I am curious what is IETF's take on this proposed protocol.
I like this idea (would love to see test data). It reminds me of how Apple innovates in so many ways to create a better customer experience.

When you buy something from the Apple store they ask if you'd like the receipt emailed, printed, or both.

I generally opt for email only.

It's not quite the same thing as mentioned in the article, but it is similar in that it's much nicer than just getting handed a flimsy receipt.
"Tough people last but tough times don't"

If you have to get a job to pay the bills, do so. See it as a detour to your dreams, rather than a permanent change in direction. You can always quit and start your business again. Maybe you'll meet a co-founder at your new job.

I've had several dark hours. At the time they seem like the end of everything. It's just your dreams dying that make you sad. You can have new dreams, where everthing is shinier and better. Dreams are the most renewable resource.
I can't help but say this out loud. "Fred is my kind of man!".

I really feel that most of conferences are power games and I am just averse to power games. Maybe I am antisocial. But I believe doing the good work first then people will follow it. If luckily people likes it and adopt it, it is wonderful recognition. If unfortunately no one likes it, then I have to do it again with a twist keep experimenting. But whether recognition is bestowed, I do things because I like what I am doing. Life is never easy and it should be never easy.

And the cool people are always outsiders, no matter in tech or arts.
Soldiers are not machines which can be programmed once and then retain their skill set indefinitely. All that peace time is spent gaining additional training and maintaining readiness for a time of war. Not off helping unload water trucks or something.

It's interesting to read the thoughts from people on HN, RE the military, because they are almost universally preposterous.
Moose's MOP: Ecosystem
The exciting thing about Wave for me is that it is a way of distributing update capability to a server hosted xml document. The spotlight that is being put on Operational Transforms is the game changer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
A Painless Introduction To Finite State Machines
While I used to agree with this kind of black and white perspective on caring I've lately begun to think differently.

As with everything about the human brain, its all in shades of gray. The logical part of you might care a lot, but your subconscious is distracting it with memories of that cute girl from last night, and so on.

I've learned that its very useful to give your higher brain functions some external help. Sometimes this means throwing out all of the snacks when you go on a diet. And sometimes this means taking a notepad with you and taking notes even when you don't really think you need to.

"Pretending" to care by taking notes quickly turns into really caring and paying much more attention to what you are doing than you would otherwise.
I agree with everything else you just said. Maybe we are not so far apart in our doctrinal views…Peace and Grace to you. http://www.ed-hardy.cc ed hardy
The UI is built by geeks for geeks. Google's issues with keeping designers is well known.
Cloud Computing: A System of Control
The demo reminded me a lot of using Basecamp.
Google to sell eBooks
Heh, I'm 33 and actually in a similar spot in some ways. I hated school, was sick to death of it, went to college because it was just sort of the thing to do. I was interested in math and science but the classes were hard and I realized I just didn't have the drive at that point to compete. I ended up majoring in Anthropology and dropped out after three and a half years.

I do alright as a professional, self-taught programmer, after working my way through various tech support and later testing jobs, but I long for a better foundation in math and comp sci and am trying to go back to school full time. I can say this from my own experience...if you're not reasonably sure you want to knock out a bachelor's degree, don't. It doesn't get easier as you get older but there are still lots of opportunities for adults returning to college. I didn't need a degree to make it as a programmer and many others didn't either, but I also got in during the dot com boom so had some easy experience to go on.
It's a hack to me, and a pretty cool one. They wanted something done, they found a novel way of doing it. Probably taught themselves some valuable skills in the process. http://www.cigarettes-home.com wholesale cigarettes http://www.cigarettes-sky.com wholesale cigarettes
very awesome, should be a part of the official documentation, because it provides a great introduction to the concepts, and the thinking behind them
Absolutely love the 4 Steps book, the best part is how re-reading it as the business grows keeps bringing more insights.

It's hard to digest all the knowledge in it unless the pain has been experienced first-hand
I agree with everything else you just said. Maybe we are not so far apart in our doctrinal views…Peace and Grace to you
http://www.ed-hardy.cc ed hardy
Hey, just get it done.

I understand you are 20, and you still have a lot of sorting out to do, but you know what the answer is?

There is no answer; just get it done. There's no real need to write out this essay about why this, how that... its nonsense, either you want to do something and you start trying to do it, or you don't

Somebody has to say it.

Stop talking, start doing.