skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just about ready to release a rant about ignorant, car-culture addicted North-Americans that just can't get used to anything other than suburbs, drive-thrus and SUV's (I believe you can even get married in a car in the U.S. etc.).

Oh wow, a bicycle: BIG DEAL. People in Europe just use em everyday. No, you don't need insurance, or taxes or any special regulations to deal with bicycles. Just USE EM.

It's almost like watching somebody seeing chop-sticks for the first time... Oh, they could be dangerous, don't swallow them, we need warning signs on them to prevent injuries etc. etc.
You mean the thoughts I experienced while writing that comment?
While I'm not a Java developer, I was trained on Java in the late 90s and knew about Oak, Green Threads, and the RuntimeException class. 0xCAFEBABE caught me off-guard, though, because I have always known that as the magic number designating Mach binaries on OS X. Anyone know what the connection might be?
This article seems to fall into the increasingly popular category "I failed at X. Here are some tips about how to do X".
The imaginary conversation, whilst in it, remember the interesting parts. At the end of it, jot those interesting parts down.
I think everyone is missing the point here that Android as devices so far haven't been great. I have a G1 and compared to the iPhone it certainly isn't sexy.

But as a platform, in the next 18 months you'll see an explosion of devices for different handset manufacturers that are all compatible with each other to to some extent - so as a developer you can write once and deploy to a range of devices, most of them phones, but some of them devices like the Zii Egg.

Don't write off Android yet. Weren't people saying the same thing about Apple years ago?
there is another starting point for 1.

1. identify a problem you can solve better than anything else on the market.

If everyone is using square wheels, build a round one, even if people aren't asking for it.

Sure, sometimes you loose with a superior product. But it's a pretty big advantage to have.
no, you guys don't get the background story, regarding University of Waterloo's new logo.
Nice, all the words techcrunch would not like to read anymore in one paragraph
No it isn't. There are traffic accident injuries, where people lose large parts of their brain, and the brain compensates.

By comparison, if you would lose your right leg, your body will not grow a new one.
Am I imagining it or is their logo exactly the same as EDGE magazines logo.

http://www.edge-online.com/
The entire economy, and especially the advertising industry desperately needs Lamson AMES now, before another major economic collapse destroys the world.

Stopped reading after this line.
I'm simultaneously amazed by how good this is, and by my uncertainty as to whether I've read it before.

I guess I'd better get used to that feeling as I age - but on the other hand, I can look forward to watching all those great movies again for the first time.*

* some comedian must have already made this observation, but I can't remember.
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I think you may have taken him too seriously ;-)
Personally I think his jokes about Ruby and Rails are getting old and not funny anymore...
They won't get old for as long as people continue to complain about them.
The first time I read this, I was still on dial-up. Every page would take an agonizingly long time to appear onscreen.
Diver photographed in close encounter with shark 
The incredible moment a diver came face-to-face with a giant shark off the coast of Britain was caught on camera.
Dolphin'follows human verbal communication' 
Dolphin body language follows human rules of verbal communication, scientists have discovered.
then you missed the bit where he solves world hunger too
I second this. Consistency is key, however, since if you don't have the ability to retrieve old notes, the endeavor is fruitless.
Until two weeks ago I'd say no but at the current pace Apple is scaring off customers Android may catch up sooner that we'd expect. People tired of Apple will embrace the Android platform so that their critical mass will propel the developer community and thus better interfaces and the large number of apps will convince even more people to use Android phones.
I'd think that Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (OSDI) and the included MINIX3 source would be high on the list of reading for any kernel-curious developers.
Legal pads- for working through something complex, I just divide the issue out among multiple pages and build up to a solution page that ties it all together.
FTC to press on with Apple-Google board probe
It's quite possible there is none, and they're independent "inventions". There aren't that many four-letter words composed of hex digits (by my reckoning, the only common ones are BABE, BEAD, BEEF, CAFE, DADA, DEAD, DEAF, DEED, FACE, FADE and FEED), and stringing two together to get a magic number must be a popular pastime. In fact, Wikipedia has a list of them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29 under "magic debug values", which demonstrates that 1337 can get you some more.
Ask HN: Migrating software to the cloud?
Do you know of a case study that details the necessary steps, possible issues, and cost to migrate on-premise server software to infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2 or MS Azure? Or do you have experiences in doing it?

Something that would help to answer questions like: Under which circumstances does it make sense to migrate a web-application +DB hosted on 5 dedicated servers to EC2?
When I'm away from a computer, I stick to loose paper products. For lecture notes, this means US Letter copy paper. For scribble notes, this means 3x5 notecards. I'm looking to get a sheet-feed scanner to digitize all of this eventually.

When I'm at my computer, I use a mixture of OneNote and Emacs org-mode. I have a Tablet PC, and I make a point of abusing OneNote for handwriting recognition.

When I have a note or set of notes reasonably finalized in OneNote, it's just a matter of copying the recognized text into an Emacs buffer and making a mark on the note in OneNote saying that I'm now tracking it in org-mode.
What makes this so much more complicated is the fact that the App Store is the only (legit) way to get apps on your device.

If there had been other ways to promote and sell apps besides the App Store, then it would have been wrong of Apple to cancel their developer license.

Then they could just have banned them from the App Store — for spamming it. Clearly, they are just spamming the App Store with 900+ apps that does basically nothing in the hopes of tricking a few people to buy it (there's no money back guarantee).

That's a model I'd love to see: the App Store reduced to a store with "safeware" apps approved by Apple.

But the way it is now, that joker certainly is spamming the App Store, his entire business is based on fooling people — he and his company should be banned from it. It is, however, too bad he can't continue to sell his spam apps on the web and promote them on his own.
He does lack field work. But there are many other linguists, like Pesetsky and Stephen Pinker who have spent plenty of time in the field.

Field work for linguists amounts to working with people on dying and lost languages, but also the hard work of understanding and analyzing the intricacies of common languages like Hindi, German, and English. While Chomsky himself may not spend an inordinate amount of time proving his theories in the field, others have.

It should be noted, that Chomsky's theories have changed over time to reflect current findings. But the basic ideas of Universal Grammar and the essence of recursion in language have stayed the same.
Whenever I think about doing something like this, I always get stuck up on x86 ASM. There don't seem to be many books on ASM out there, and the ones I could find in the bookstores were all written around MASM which, of course, does not work on Mac OS X.

Any ideas?
"It was an entirely preventable death caused, let's be frank, by some of the Stone Age superstition that stalks the richest and most technologically advanced nation on earth."

That's patently unfair. Much of that superstition is Bronze Age. Credit where credit's due.
Buying a Luxury Watch: The Common Mistakes You Should Avoid
Men’s luxury watches are so beautiful, making them a difficult buy because there are so many of them. However, there are also mistakes to avoid when buying an expensive watch. That way you don’t regret your purchase later. Watches can be too expensive to regret.
I keep a to-do list broken down by project plus misc things like blog, aims etc. It's lightweight and online so it's easy to access from 3 of the 4 options above. I just add the thought as a task and come back to it when I'm ready.
JIRA issues reporting with Python
Dolphin body language 'follows human verbal communication'
The difference between Intel/MASM syntax and AT&T/GNU syntax is rather superficial[1], so with a little squinting you can use a MASM book with the GNU assembler. Newer versions of the GNU assembler also come with a directive .intel_syntax so you can write your learning programs in MASM syntax.

[1]http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gas-nasm.h...
With a thoughtrecorder. I mean, that's what they were invented for right ?

/jk Exercise for the reader : What would a thought recorder be like ?
To risk stating the obvious -

Most great coders code because they love doing it, or love what they're making. Despite commercial contributions, open source projects thrive on this. When you're a company that sells software, you exist to sell more software. That's the purpose of marketing.

Good code is only useful to the extent that it makes it possible to continue marketing new features, and thereby increase sales. I think this is the reason for the distrust programmers have traditionally had for the people who sell what they make.
Hello World on an AVR Micro Controller
"worse than random" - great way to describe the likely result of big-corp/government investment in IT projects. The YC model (and VC model to some extent) works precisely because of the unpredictable nature of innovation - it is hard to predict 'the next big thing', 'the next google' etc. but you can increase your chances by investing thinly across many startups. The returns for those that succeed will far outweigh the cost of those that don't.
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What a delightful, and in my limited experience, true idea. Having spent stretches of my life thinking mostly in english, then mostly in french, and now mostly in japanese and english, there is a noticeable influence on the basic kind and character of thoughts I have in each of the three. It isn't huge, but each has its own thought coloration and has concepts that are more easily expressed than the others.

Most fun for me now is talking with someone else that speaks all three, and watching the conversation just naturally blend them. Sometimes the blending is black/white (several sentences in one, then a statement in another state-changes the conversation into another language) and other times it ends up a mish-mash of two.
Everyday meeting notes: low-cost A4 pad. This is my short-term memory - I rarely look more than 2 weeks back.

Strategy/product thinking: A5(?) Moleskine notebook. This is my long-term memory. It takes longer to fill and I love looking back on it.

To-do list: single sheet of A4 with 'job' and 'next action' pairs. I re-write this every few days.
Using the GDI+ with snake game example
Way too many single papers, cut off parts from other papers, backsides of papers, old envelopes and so on.
I cannot think as creative when I am in front of a computer, I tend to think more logically and concentrated. For me thoughts need creative freedom and that comes best when I am doing things in the house.
Looks like no one knows... should we promote this story, to have the most points? :P Then we would know the answer :D.
I have a fairly large paper notebook in my bag which is great for sketching interface mockups and taking related notes.

When I'm at a computer I use a password protected server-side tiddlywiki (pytw). But that's mostly a place to get stuff out of my head and out of my INBOX (think GTD). I don't think these ideas are particularly good or valuable, and rarely need to search through them. Having it accessible from anywhere over the internet is useful, though I mostly use it from work and home.
See http://top.searchyc.com/submissions -- I don't know whether it's kept perfectly up to date, but I'm pretty sure there's been nothing recently to match the highest scores there.

Top is "How I hacked Hacker News (with arc security advisory)". Then two from pg: a welcome for new users written at a time when there lots of them for some reason, and "Startup ideas we'd like to fund".

Michael Jackson is at #29, with about 1/3 the points of the #1 story.
I use A4 paper sheets I got from photocopier shop that they give me for free( bad photocopies, half pages clear). They are great for trying different things.

Very important: I use good quality, fine tip, Universal highlighters. COLORS ARE ESENTIAL. And of course mindmaps.

I use a voice grabber with software for transcription, but I don't like how it works.

I have a cheap canon camera for taking photos I save.

On computer:I have done my own software(not public released yet) for it. I use Ubuntu, and don't like what currently exist today, so I made my own tablet-friendly or headphone friendly tools.
When I look at my own behaviour as web content consumer, I'm obliged to feel that the bloggers are in the right here.

For example, when I read Daring Fireball, I very often read the quote that Gruber has chosen from an article, and am interested enough to click through and read the whole article, so that I can appreciate the context of the quote. Gruber's aggregation of content + commentary, is actually generating traffic for the source site.

I can't help feeling that this whole debate is triggered more by the fact that newspapers don't know how to turn web pages served into dollars. Attacking blogging aggregators is just clutching at straws, as they haven't managed to resolve this fundamental problem...
Plenty of people seem to swear by them.

But here's the thing - it's not so much the cost (in absolute sums, it's not that large). It's whether you use it. You obviously sweat over costs; perhaps this sweating can be a cudgel to force you to write down whatever. The more a moleskine isn't worth buying, the more you will find yourself compelled to use it. Then wouldn't you be better off in the end?
Somebody explain again why it's a good idea not to have downvotes on submissions?
With an Ono-Sendai.
I run into quite a few people that were raised either first half in japanese and second half in english, or vice versa, and many of them seem to have this difficulty, not being quite up to the highest level of fluency in any language. They can get by perfectly well in both, but neither language is perfect.
Haha, scanning through the posts i see the "Inards of Erlang" at #11. Might be confusing to someone who wasn't around on "The Great Erlang day"
Pocketmod - http://www.pocketmod.com

In my phone which is not expensive & feature rich like an iPhone or G1. I key in stuff with T9 in to an sms & save it :)

On sticky notes which comes with Ubuntu.

On sides of lecture notes :)
Makes a lot of sense actually. Just today I was forgetting the name of someone I had just written down in the morning, and visualising the japanese characters of their name as I had written them brought the name into clarity.
I have done this kind of work for clients, but did not get to participate in the actual decision to move to EC2. My anecdotal experience is that cloud stuff on EC2 is more expensive to run and requires a non-trivial amount of configuration/writing of shell scripts to implement.

I would counsel a move to EC2 in the following cases:

1. You need the ability to run a large pool of additional servers on short notice. Say you do something computationally expensive and fairly time-sensitive, and need a big burst capacity.

2. You want to be able to set up and tear down numerous staging and testing environments.

I'm sure other commenters can add to this list. My generic advice is, stay out of the cloud unless you know you need it. It's expensive and setting it up is a time sink.
Have you launched a non-unique business? Tell us about your experience
Lately I've been thinking about launching businesses that aren't anything special in their own right and that don't require some kind of eureka moment to discover the concept. Clearly that's nothing new: people have been running bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and mattress stores for decades and each iteration doesn't typically bring any major new improvement along with it.

Do any of you have experience starting and running a business that isn't necessarily the next big thing? Software based or not, I'm interested to learn about your experience. What was the business? What was good and bad about it? Why and how did you succeed or fail?

I'm personally more interested in software startups, but I believe you can learn something from anything, so please share away!
10+k, not 100k
4 useful Bookmarklet for Twitter, Google, CSS, SEO
Assuming I can't get to my blog - which is my preferred method, as it forces me to be clear and concise - I scribble with pencil and paper.
Does a Nation’s Mood Lurk in Its Songs and Blogs?
Here's a trick to help get you started:

Write a relatively simple C program that does something useful that you understand thoroughly, then generate intermediate assembly code from your C compiler, with optimization turned off.

That way you get a problem that you already know how to solve in a .s listing that you can inspect and modify to your hearts content.

Then try to optimize it, make it run quicker by rearranging stuff.

You'll learn lots that way and the barrier to entry is low.
I remember reading this when I was 14 and I didn't understand a single thing but just knew that it was important. It was the reason why I read Neuromancer. I miss 1998.
I guess it's because some people wouldn't understand the humor in sarcasm.
Not familiar with Mead. It's subjective - the thing is worth whatever value you put on it. If it suits you better than the others it's worth it I suppose. But in the end it's just paper. Try different things until you find something that works for you.
No, because Android have a fundemental business model problem. OS supplies by one company, product designed by the manufacturer goes only so far. One size does not fit all.

Apple has demonstrated the value in having top down owneship of a platform quite clearly. You have one product to worry about at any given time and you dedicate all your resources to make it perfect. Google at the same have a distracted focus, they are trying to make Motorla, HTC and what not...
Behind the Google Voice
Seems to be up to date, as this agrees (but is less comprehensive): http://news.ycombinator.com/best
We've done a fairly thorough comparision of self hosting vs EC2 and have found that for us the money isn't there.

Our scaling issues are such that we can slowly add more servers to match our organic growth. We do have it as a backup plan in case we'd ever go faster than we are growing now but that would be a stopgap. Bandwidth costs are the main dealbreaker, we're currently buying at about $5-6 / Mbit and EC2 simply can't match that.

This is for a site that serves up about 800K uniques every day and is very bandwidth intensive. We'd be paying amazon roughly 10 cts / second!
I was wondering whether to hold off on saying the same thing :) He built for a niche which is heavily saturated, had no clear USP, no marketing, seems to have had no customer feedback and spent 8 months of his life doing it before he realised there wasn't a penny in it.

He still doesn't really seem to realise he needs to let go now. Move on. It's not a success.

Pity as the guy's obviously got talent. It's one of these things of keep trying as he's obviously almost there. Just with a different business idea. And something that other hackers won't have done 100 times before. And he needs to massively shorten his time to getting a product in front of customers.
There's something to be gained by networking outside your industry. Not all great ideas exist within the group. Artists talking to coders talking to scientists talking to historians produces connections that may go unnoticed.
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part IV: snipmate.vim
I have a directory called "ideas" full of text files, one per idea - typically a programming project or blog post. I use the simplest outline format imaginable: broken english sentences indented with tabs.. no concern for punctuation or grammer.

Ideas typically evolve in my head faster than I can outline them, so I try to get points written as quickly as possible. I make each point atomic, breaking compound points into sub-trees. I try not to edit myself, but I will restructure the outline as I go because that seems to feed back into the creative process and help the idea take shape.

Lately, I've been holding back this process because I already have more ideas than I will ever have time to realize and I could easily spend all my available time coming up with more :(

The key to effective brainstorming is to minimize obstruction and distraction. Recording your ideas should be effortless and impartial. The ideal system will be different for each person, but when in doubt, start simple and complicate only as needed.
I think this is the biggest risk for any entrepreneur, to fail to recognize when an idea won't fly.

I've been guilty of this myself at times and I think the reason why this happens is based in having invested X in a project already. If X is already in it then you're going to do that little bit more to see if you can get it to work that way. So, now it's X+a little bit more, and so on.

The longer you 'hang in there' the harder it gets to throw it out.

So, the conclusion of this is: Do your thinking before you invest significant resources in to a project. Test the waters while you can still walk away. Then find something that gets traction, preferably without you pushing it.

then go all out.
Amusing? some sleazeball getting rich running a white collar sweatshop makes me feel a lot of things, but amusement wasn't one of them.
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That's true, but seeing how (other) people fail is actually one of the best schools there is. At least you will not need to repeat the mistakes that you know about.
Facebook app lets Intel PCs donate processor power
Someone should do a search of all haiku poems then and check to see which ones coincidentially match up with 11 words that were written before the poems release.

Personally I think if you want to copyright something you should keep it to yourself. Don't poison the pool with the content that you own in order to extract royalties from the rest of us. It's bound to leak through sooner or later.

Let the criterium be that if you perform something in public or spread it it becomes public domain instantly.

This will upset lots of apple carts but I really think it is the only thing that in the long term will make sense.
in a word, yes.

I carry around this Moleskine pretty much everywhere I go:
http://www.moleskine.com/catalogue/classic/cahier/cardboard_...

They costs about $8 for a set of three which last me 2-3 years usually. The thing I like about this Moleskine is it easily bends to the shape of my leg in my front pocket so I don't even notice that I am carrying it.

Now, when I'm at the computer I use Noopsi http://noopsi.com (I'm the main developer) which I created primarily to scratch my own itch of having an easy to add/edit/search/share database of my thoughts and ideas.