skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't buy into this. He talks about a world of $8 per gallon bringing on drastic behavioral and economic changes. A world where by school busses would have to stop running etc and private motoring is massively reduced and restricted to hybrid cars.

In the UK (as with most of Europe) due to heavy government taxes on petrol (gas) we pay over £1 per litre. This equates to over $6.35 per US gallon (and at peak prices, it would have passed $7 per US gallon in 2008.

Have our school busses stop running? Has private motoring disappeared? Do well all own hybrids? The answer to all these questions is an obvious no.

Sure - we care a bit more about MPG - the average out-of-town MPG of cars on the market in the UK is 47MPG (admittedly only about 39 miles per US gallon) for extra-urban (out of town). Source; http://www.fuel-economy.co.uk/stats.shtml. Similarly, car ownership per capita across western Europe is broadly similar to North America (http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/spreadsheet/1003604)

I think the author confuses what happens when prices spike (and school districts exceed their budgets) versus what happens when prices rise steadily over above inflation over a number of years.
what is going to happen to twitter when they can't find a 'greater fool' to give them money?
I think we are coming from the same place but I am not sure I agree with "you should already be learning on your own and already "self actualized."

I think the work place is one place of many where you can grow and prove yourself. It's a great place to learn new things, test your theories and be creative. A company should nurture that.
Merit in this examination for sure, but I would have used the StackOverflow vs ExpertExchange comparison to argue the exact opposite side. Maybe there's some gray area of where code and marketing begins and ends. Site UX, flow, the subtle bells and whistles, design patterns and iterated, tested UIs are code to me.. and this what make Stack what it is.
I upvoted you because you're right and it's a good point, but the author's statement has some validity. Freedom of any religious belief is more sacrosanct in America than anywhere else I've visited. That includes freedom to practice some really cultlike, destructive practices. I won't call out any religions in particular, but there's a number of recognized and protected religions that do things that would be criminal if they weren't religions.

My opinion on the religious makeup of America: 10-20% of our recognized religions increase peace, tolerance, community, create a common bond, shared interest, and good community with good people, and are a strong force for the world. Half of the religions are good and bad - they create a community and inspire some good works, but also a lot of hypocrisy, missing the "bigger picture", and some other faults. 30% of religions here are really ugly - they actively cultivate an "us vs. them" dynamic: Very enemy centered, trying to whip their flock into an angry frenzy against other faiths and people with different beliefs. Some good works - really - but a lot of hate speech and creating distance and intolerance and generally being bad for the world. Finally, the worst 10% have all that plus prohibitions on life-saving things, or permission or encouragement of things that destroy mental and physical health and life of the members in addition to the intolerance, hatred, hypocrisy.

I love freedom of religion, and the "good to okay" 50-70% of faiths do some great things in the community and for their members. The other branches, sects, divisions, and religions are really bad news though. I'm not sure how anything could be done about it that wouldn't be twisted into targeting unpopular faiths rather than "bad" ones, though.
I really love vim, but Vimscript is imho braindead.
Yes, you can do pretty much everything in it, but
it's an example of a very poor language design.
Perhaps not even Perl can beat it in its manifold syntax.
No one I've worked with has ever been sent packing, but to the best of my understanding it's generally not a surprise and people are given chances.
I disagree strongly. If you have ever looked at 'enterprise' software, it's generally crap. have you ever tried to use remedy? it looks like something I wrote when I got my hands on my dad's copy of FoxPro as a 14 year old.

People tolerate bugs if you are a big guy marketing to other big guys. middle management would rather do what everyone else is doing (and thus not get fired when it breaks) even if what everyone else is doing is clearly worse than some other product. they have no incentive to choose the better product, and a strong incentive to do what everyone else is doing.

Heck, even in the consumer market, crap is tolerated if it's big. look at the downtime twitter has.

On the other hand, when you are first starting out, people expect to write you off as incompetent. And they will, quickly, if they see a misstep.

I would argue that people expect more out of small and or new companies. Maybe they should; there are many inefficiencies inherent to the standard corporation model.
I have a 1 inch binder with three dividers. There is plain paper, lined paper and graph paper with a final section with spare paper for each sections. I have 3 regular folders in there and a pouch containing a 6 inch triangle and typically a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, occasionally 0.7mm but almost always one of these http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-P1035C-Mechanical-Pencil-Metall... . That takes care of most general ideas and architecture diagrams and mockups and such. Tasks go into bugzilla and text/source goes into files in git. I don't find anything but pencil and paper fast enough for certain things, including tablets.
This is a little gimmicky, but restaurant automation is fascinating -- payroll is still a massive expense for most restaurant. For fine dining, forget it. But for fast food I'm surprised more hasn't been done in this space. I know there have been a few attempts here and there, but the closest thing at scale is some of the crazy vending machines in japan.

Fast food already seems so systematic that I'm kind of surprised that automation hasn't made much progress. It seems like automation costs are the prohibitive factor, but I just don't understand why.

I feel like a concept with these constraints could work:

a) vending machine with minimal real estate / high traffic

b) a very limited menu where the food has been chosen based on ease of automation

c) only uses products from sysco

You still have upfront engineering costs, but assuming you can get food quality above McD's you'll be fine.

I also wonder how much chefs have collaborated with engineers in previous attempts. For instance, if McDonalds built a machine it would HAVE to make a BigMac -- now you've already introduced bad constraints. It's also likely that the natural innovator, manufacturers of food service machinery, have strong financial incentives NOT to innovate.

I'm mostly full of crap, but it is interesting. :)
Haiku poems have been held to be copyrightable; at 17 syllables, they may be 11 words, or less.
If I'm in front of a computer I dump everything into OmniFocus http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/. It will sync across multiple machines so my notes are always up to date on all the different machines.

Voodoo Pad http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/ is also good for longer writing pieces - it's like a personal wiki system. It also syncs across machine.

Oh, and I always carry a little Moleskine http://www.moleskine.com/

Still forget some things though :-)
Fitnesse and xUnit, the perfect TDD marriage.
So where's he now?
Good for long term storage and where you might not know where or when the thoughts are needed. There are security issues for sensitive data.
Ugh and sigh to this article. What to pick to poke at? "If there was a killer algorithm, it would have been implemented by a fair share of the quant shops in a short time and thus drive down its usefulness." Seriously? Nobody can get a special insight that is extremely hard to replicate? It's like this guy swung too far to the other side of the continuum. Yes, getting people to use your software and making useful software are both importat.
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I prefer the pencil and paper route. I have a notebook in which I scribble my thoughts. It's a pain to search for something, but then there's the added advantage of finding something totally unexpected scribbled in there when you're searching for something else.
It won't happen in the near future because there is very little interest in Android even among the early adopters and hackers. Android sales have been dismal.

What makes this round of platform struggles much more interesting is that Apple has learned from its mistakes in the 1980s. Apple listened to its developers and released the iPhone SDK, and lowered the iPhone 3G price to appeal to a wider audience. Sure, there are still many rough patches such as the App Store, and the much touted security vulnerabilities. But the latter are only going further to perpetuate it in the consciousness of the general public. Bad PR is still PR.

On the whole they've been doing a very good job and should remain the benchmark for at least the next 18 months.
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I have a personal stenographer.
This is bloody amazing.
Great question, thanks for asking. Once can differentiate between having sparks, thoughts, ideas and completed works.

When I was writing a blog, I built up insights and mental pictures in my mind until they became too intense to hold with integrity without written expression and publication (in the lead up, little notes may be jotted down in a text file). After publication the intelligence could integrated from the sub-conscious but without the emotion and I'd then delete the text file: from informal to formal. If one looks at ideas and thoughts as transformative, then recording and developing takes an enhanced meaning as such. Of course recording something may be as simple as some arbitrary account information without any of this framework.

The issue I was thinking was: How do you think your thoughts? If you lie in bed awake at night, are you thinking a stream of words? I used to think in words, but find my mind has changed.
Also, copyright, unlike patents REQUIRES copying. A patent can infringe accidentally, even if you didn't know the patent existed. With Copyright you must have actually copied from a copyrighted work for your work to be infringing.
Everett's claims have provoked a firestorm of debate. I was lucky enough to take a seminar with David Pesetsky from MIT shortly after Everett's story began appearing in the popular media, and he discussed what he perceived as serious flaws in Everett's findings and methodology.
Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues have since published a lengthy and detailed rebuttal (http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411) that shows that Piraha does in fact have recursion. In fact, the surprising thing about Piraha is how unremarkable it is. It shares traits with German, Hindi, Hebrew, and many more languages. Pesetsky, et. al. also believe that the argument that quantifiers do not exist is not supported by the facts. More details are in the paper.

As far as their culture is concerned, there is evidence from other anthropologists that the Piraha do indeed have creation myths (the rebuttal paper actually includes one on page 44).

People jump on stories like these because it makes for a good news story ("Rebel Linguist Takes Down Noam Chomsky"). But the evidence I've seen doesn't sound so convincing.
Thank you for posting this, I loved it! I wish I had read this 11 years ago.
According to wikipedia he's working in the film industry now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Farley
I create text files and use EditPlus for writing. I then place the text files in a folder and name each file appropriately.
Who is Jamie Reilly?
I usually have an imaginary conversation with an imaginary person, like I'm explaining the ideas to them. The problem is, there's no permanence to that, and even if I record it, I don't want to listen back to my spoken words at the same speed it took to say them.

This is one reason I'm strongly considering dictation software.
If you had read it 11 years ago would you have understood it? I relate to it a lot because I've had a similar "dropping out" urge for the last while. If I had read this over a decade ago when it was written it probably would have had little effect.
Are Moleskines really worth the cost compared to Mead? If so, why?
I try to think less! (Or, more specifically, focus my thoughts completely on supporting the actions at hand).

I also have tended to jot stuff down on scraps of paper, and then collect those scraps into folders on different subjects, but I've realized that I rarely go back and look at them.

To quote Rudyard Kipling's poem If: "If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim"
Very true. For example, I grew up hearing about the lessons of the early 1990s recession, but they never really sunk in until this last year.

That being said, I was reading quite a bit of Gibson in 1998, so I would have loved that first part.
Ask HN: Highest rated story?
Just curious what story has gotten the most number of points to date on HN. Michael Jackson?
If you're into unsupported ways of extending OS X you may find Ciarán Walsh’s "TerminalColors" SIMBL bundle useful.

http://ciaranwal.sh/2008/02/12/terminal-plug-in-updates
Hi,

Avangate has two main platforms: Avangate eCommerce and ARMS. If you are looking for a system to manage channel partners, invoicing, payments and reports you might find a solution in ARMS (Avangate Reseller Management System - http://www.avangate.com/reseller-management-software/). The pricing is different than the eCommerce platform (the link you've sent) and can be either a license cost if the payments are processed by your own payment system or a variable pricing scheme if the Avangate payment system is used.

In terms of what appears on the customer credit card, it's not just the string "Avangate" that will show on the statement, but also your website. Something like "avangate.com/ycombinator.com".

Hope my info helps.

--
Cristian BADEA | Avangate
CIO
cristian.badea at avangate.com
Tel: +31 20 890 8080 | Fax: +31 20 203 1309
http://www.avangate.com
Right there with you, man - I'm mesmerized.
The Problem With Plastic
Businessweek mention of Google [1998]
China pneumonic plague death toll rises, 100000 people town sealed off
Indeed, and this seems to be one of the main motivations behind the notion of fair use. Is it such a stretch to go from discussing a piece around the water cooler, to e-mailing the link to some friends and associates, to posting opinion and criticism in a more permanent form on a blog? It seems to me that this sort of "reprocessing" of a story has been going on for ages, but that sometime in the late 70s to mid 80s society grew faster than individuals ability to communicate with their peers. It is only now that we are catching up. So why are newspapers so taken aback that we are discussing the stories they write?

In other words, I would highly doubt that what Gawker did does anything materially to diminish the value or profitability of the original reporting. Rather, it seems that news papers are failing not because of re-publication and fair use, but because they had tied themselves to an economic model (advertising) which they, ultimately, did not fully control.
I agree with your sentiment but I think the differences between the UK and the US due to fuel prices are quite noticeable. Here some that I noticed

- UK cities and towns are built more for people. In the US they feel like they are built more for cars.

- Pretty much everything is more expensive in the UK than the US

- Pedestrians take more 'right of way' in the UK whereas in the US it's 'watch out or get hit'.

- The UK has much better public transport than the US

- UK cars are tiny and US cars are huge.

- Some people in the UK people do tend to think it was a big deal to drive 100 k's to go somewhere. I guess this is partly because the UK is geographically small.

So I'd say that there would be some good and some bad changes but they'd certainly be noticeable. Of course technology will adapt so most likely the impact on the cost of living will be reduced.
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Sounds familiar. I am naturally something of a night owl. I used to really dislike eating breakfast. I just didn't feel hungry in the morning and it seemed like too much hassle to prepare something. But now that I have actually started to have breakfast as part of my morning routine (I really had to force myself to begin with) I find that my energy levels during the morning are much improved and so is my concentration.

I'd recommend you try something that you don't have to chew too much to begin with. Like oat meal (lots of complex carbohydrates which is good for me because I do weight training). I buy boxes of compressed bricks of oats that come apart once soaked in milk for a while. two or three bricks in a bowl and I usually add a little protein powder (weight training again) and maybe a little extra sweetener (usually the protein powder is enough). Quick to eat and I'm not really big on chewy/crunchy stuff right after I get up, too much effort. :)
I meant that to figure out how the brain works we will have to figure out it's architecture first, then we will be able to hook up to it to refine that knowledge.

Thank you for the link, I'll read it today. The rate at which hacker news produces good stuff to read is getting higher than I can read fast!
The LHC is the Titanic of the 21st century. It broke down on the first day while testing and they attempted to hide the news about that for weeks.

Also the way they dealt with the critics was more than ugly, they tried to shut them up even by DDoSing their websites.

Last but not least they got hacked by some script kiddies.

This is just the latest in a series of LHC FAIL news. Even conventional nuclear reactors are dangerous but here we have some irresponsible and incapable money burning mad men at work. This is no science it's voodoo. The whole "God particle" thing is just bizarre. I don't buy this explanation for all the waste of billions of dollars.

Btw. Did you know that CERN is working on antimatter nuclear weapons (which are much smaller and powerful) for the last two decades and the LHC is basically an "antimatter factory"?
Thank you, Ben!
As to the money, revenue source is the affiliation with domain registrars (GoDaddy, etc).
A fascinating read. Not having a vacation policy strikes me as an incredibly radical idea.

It sounds so civilized, yet my worry would be that people end up not taking enough time off due to a combination of peer pressure and indifference. In my experience I've found there are a set of people who always struggle to use up a given vacation allowance, and in a situation where there is no allowance I could see the natural behaviour of these people creating pressure on those who enjoy taking time off to take a lot less.
Emacs, org-mode; and my org-file is in version control.
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Great workplace is not day-care, espresso, health benefits, sushi lunches, nice offices, or big compensation, and we only do those that are efficient at attracting stunning colleagues

I find this to be revealing of the culture this document is trying to express : the focus on the people. I don't think you can find that in many workplaces.
Stephen Few comments on the US CIO's IT dashboard
You need to be extremely good at marketing (or at least, have a whole lot of it) to overcome a significant technical disadvantage. I mean, it can be done, but it takes a lot of marketing muscle.

I think most people are better served by focusing on what they are good at. Sure, your company will always have to do some marketing, if nothing else, you need to somehow let your users know 'hey, product X exists. it does Y."

You will also have to create a product of some sort.

if you have more marketing muscle, then sure, squeeze out some fetid failure of a product that crashes every other day, and that requires a re-install every 6 months. market the heck out of it, and you can win.

but you know? without a huge amount of marketing muscle, that won't work.

If you don't have much by way of marketing skills, produce a good product. Sure, you still have to market it, but marketing it becomes much easier, because once one person sees it, she is going to tell five others how great it is.

so yeah, marketing and technical competence are substitutable to a degree. I disagree strongly with the thesis that one is way more important than the other.

To take an example from the article, sure, fogbuz is beating out other bug trackers that are about as good, that don't have good marketing. If fogbuz was not about as good as those other bug trackers, though, significantly more marketing muscle would have been required.

I think why marketing seems more important at the top end of the market (that is, it's easy to name examples of technical superiority being trumped by marketing) is that it is easier to scale marketing, if you are a large company, than to scale technical competence.

Even then, it makes sense to do a cost/benefit and say 'if we diverted x percent of the marketing dollars to dev, how much more good word of mouth would we get?' or 'if we divert x dollars from development to marketing, how many brand new customers in new markets would we get?'

This is ignoring that 'figure out what the user wants' is generally considered part of marketing, and is often an important part of building something worth having. (it doesn't need to be... you can start with 'what would be best for the user' - assuming that you can design something the user can not imagine, that the user would like once they see it because it works better. Both are valid places to start building a product.)
At some point you might want to remember the pool of thoughts just experienced and summarize in point form.
The purpose of writing is about 90% to clarify what you're thinking, and only about 10% to read again later.
Linguistics is not my field, so please bear with me...

As much as I admire and respect Chomsky, would it be too far-fetched to claim that he lacks field work and expects the world to adapt to his theories, rather than adapting his theories to the world?

Theoretical physicists sometimes suffer from the same problem. They see reality as an approximation of theory. Experimental physicists are the ones "in the trenches", so why not listen to what they have to say? Same goes for linguists. Advances in theory should be based on experiment and observation. Otherwise, theory becomes l'art pour l'art and degenerates.
Article/story box:

* Bubonic plague is spread by flea bites or contact with infected animals
* Pneumonic plague, caused by the same bacterium, can spread between humans [directly, without flea/animal]
* Pneumonic plague, affecting the lungs, can kill within 24 hours
* Almost all cases curable if diagnosed in time