skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method.

This is really good method, but doing it alone may not teach you the correct paradigms of the language. You can write FORTRAN in any language, but you probably shouldn't.

If I were about to learn Python by just converting some PHP fragments, I would surely miss those characteristics that seperate Python from PHP. However, by reading other people's code or reading some documents on idiomatic Python (e.g. [1]), my understanding would be much better.

[1] - http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...
I haven't read the article as yet, but I experience the fear of being weighed down by responsibilities.

I believe my creativity would propel me to success. But the process that creates my creativity also often leaves me intellectually flighty.

And should I take on staff, customers and debt I'd worry that such flightiness (if I were unable to turn it off) would leave me unable to continue with the project--failing my staff, customers and my ability to repay the debt.

And if I failed them I'd feel awful.
Why do we rape, kill and sleep around? Don't blame the caveman
Why do you think that will happen ?
They probably blocked the IP traffic rather than the TCP traffic. That way, the just discard headers that say to/from: 4chan

TO do it the way you're suggesting (via TCP stream) would suggest they maintain a state machine of their entire user base, knowing who initiates connections to whom. This would require a whole friggin' lot more resources.
It sounds like you need some co-founders to get your project off the ground, preferably at least one that has prior experience with a successful startup and exit.
Apple Yanks Cord On GV Mobile. Is It Trying To Kill Google Voice On The iPhone?
Is there any chance we could expand the conversation beyond "a couple 25 year old founders who can live on practically nothing"?

I'd like to shake the sense that having a wife and kids and a mortgage precludes participation in a minimal profitability trajectory.
Needing to soak the beans is an artifact of cooking on wood burning stoves. The water breaks down the beans before you cook, which is advantageous if your stove isn't that hot, or you're burning something expensive, like wood.

If you have a gas stove or a decently powerful electric, you can just dump the dry beans in the pot and start boiling. Cover the pot and boil for about an hour, and then uncover the pot and continue boiling for about another hour to let thicken (YMMV).
There's another beneficial aspect to not smelling of desperation beyond avoiding being taken advantage of: projecting an "I don't need you" aura is actually attractive -- occasionally maddeningly so. This also applies in dating and job hunting.
If it wasn't for that second line I'd chalk you up as evil :)
"Your biggest fear should not be flaming out spectacularly, but rather creating a zombie that neither truly lives nor dies."

I think the pitfall you are alluding to is hitting ramen profitability and then spending all day fire fighting rather than creating new features. But that is the point to seek funding with specific goals for the money and new plans of attack ($x will allow me to hire y who will write z feature). And since you are ramen profitable, you can do so on your own time schedule with better terms! This then allows you to flame out spectacularly :)
Poll HN: Myers-Briggs Personality Types 
Recently came across this entry http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240 from over a year ago and I thought it would be interesting to rerun the poll, especially in light of the growth HN has experienced since then..
I can honestly say I have noticed a big difference since they turned this new system on. I get more items per box and never got 1 item per box anymore. At first I thought they were being cheap - but its good to know they were becoming smart.

I have been a FD customer for many years and although it takes them awhile to react, they at least take the feedback and try to do something with it.
http://xkcd.com/171/
I thought this looked familiar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642478
Sadly true. I'm (almost) 42 and am trying to build a startup. Unfortunately it's still far from being profitable, and I live in a place with no angel investors or VCs available, so I need to keep a day job while coding my app late at night when everyone else (wife and two kids) fall asleep.

In my case, to be "ramen profitable" means that the monthly profit is equal to my monthly salary, which is currently at about 4000 USD.
I also don't get spam comments anymore. I use the most trivial captcha imaginable, and I use traditional error messages.

But honestly, I hate blog comments. Being able to read a number from an image doesn't mean that what your writing is worthy of being published. (I keep them enabled because I like the fact that people are occasionally so upset with my analysis of Java's type system that they want me to "die in a fire". Really? What exactly would that solve?)
No, I'm not talking about superheating -- I'm talking about boiling in a sealed container. People do this deliberately with pressure cookers, where the pressure typically reaches double atmospheric pressure; but it can happen to a lower yet still dangerous pressure by accident.
Apple would probably create something they're proud of and would use themselves.

And they'd sell it for real money.
bummer - apparently my hosting provider had a DNS outage last night that cut the site down in its prime while it was on the homepage of HN. It's back up now.
clickable links (pulled from previous poll for consistency):

tests:

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

http://apps.facebook.com/my-type/

profiles:

http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html

http://typelogic.com/

previous HN results:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240
Yes.

I believe the solution to my problem is to either find someone who can keep me on the straight and narrow, or to develop enough self-control and motivation to stop such flightiness when innappropriate.
Well, if you believe some of the stuff behind the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shettles_Method for choosing the gender of your children, you could come to all kinds of theories as to the causation...

E.g., maybe men with beautiful wives don't wait for ovulation, rather they're at it all the time? I'll leave further possibilities to your imagination ;)
Is Zynga a Target for State Attorneys General?
I cannot grasp semantically what it would mean for time to slow down. When we say x slows down, we mean that x takes more time to do y than before. Now if we say time slows down, we say that time takes more time to do y than before.

So what does it mean for time to take time?

I have a similar problem with the idea that time has somehow started to exist as the whole concept of starting depends on time.
the web page has "hard newlines" (implemented by BR tags or by some other device) so that a person like me who likes his text size a little on the large size and does not have a huge monitor has to scroll horizontally every single line of text to read the page.

I see that more and more these days.
Let's get rid of patents first.
Apps Apple doesn't want on your iPhone
So I called them out on it. I tweeted about it

Something about this juxtaposition of old-fashioned wild-west mans-gotta-do with urban hip web 2.0 trendiness just doesn't quite work...
Twitter co-founder selling Berkeley cottage
My caution would be to first of all review the research on how poorly validated Myers-Briggs personality types are.

http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/person...

"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

"Employers may hire, fire, or assign personnel by personality type, despite the fact that the MBTI® is not even reliable at identifying one’s type. Several studies have shown that when retested, even after intervals as short as five weeks, as many as 50 percent will be classified into a different type."

http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...

"There is a large body of research that suggests that the claims made about the MBTI cannot be supported. In other words, although the MBTI appears to measure something, many psychologists are not convinced that any significant conclusions can be based on the test."
We're not that far apart then. But I don't see where "turn over large sections of the world's economy to climatologists to make the earth their private lab" is true. That sounds like a scare tactic itself. And Physics did pretty decent work in it's first 100 years. The next 100 were even more revolutionary. I see no reason why Climate Science, with 30 - 50 years under its belt, can't mine important insights, and suggest and test changes, within our lifetimes.

As to the connection between science and politics, I really think it's inevitable. Politicians fund science in every democracy. We need to lobby them on the importance of the work. Unfortunately that sometimes means grandstanding and fear mongering. But the alternative is the science doesn't get funding. I sort of have skins in the game so here my own objectivity gets dicey.

I agree with you on your philosophy of science. But I don't see huge changes in public policy. Kyoto hasn't done much. What's the real risk of cap and trade? Some marginal costs go up? Even as it may appear scientists are running roughshod over and through debates, they're constrained by political and economic pressures, as they should be. The bigger the change in America, at least, the harder it is to pass through Congress, even with one party holding a supramajority. More problematic for climate scientists is the need to get all nations on-board, including developing nations. I don't see that happening. Debates among nations will prevent what you're most worried about up until it's clearly an asteroid.

Just coming back to your main point, on conjecture versus hypothesis-driven research, it seems pretty clear to me what the prevailing hypothesis is: Humans are responsible for some measurable, and significant, changes in the climate. I'm still unclear on the alternative hypothesis and, more importantly, how it can be tested. Can you enlighten me?
The biggest reason why a certain blog does not attract spammers is probably because it is very small. Not using standard software helps, and if you've never run with automatic approval that is another show stopper for spammers.

For every target that is even slightly hardened there are half a million soft targets out there. Better to go after those, the ROI is higher.

If you had lots of visitors it would be worth their time to figure out a way to get in there. Think of spammers as a measure of success, if you are anywhere near successful the spammers will find you, count on it.
The VCs' upper hand
Because along with usury laws comes debtor's prison and indentured servitude. It cuts both ways. You can't just pick the bits out of the past that happen to suit you in the present time.

In those countries where they do have usury laws (it's part of Sharia) it's a crime to miss a payment on a loan. You don't get annoying phonecalls from the bank - you get the local law enforcement confiscating your stuff and hauling you off to jail.
If it is publicly funded definitely. Otherwise there might be restrictions (I'm not in favour of universities being in bed with companies but I understand there is a lot of money involved and that combined with the push for "applicable research" (in other words stuff that makes money) makes it harder for universities to resist such funding.
My quick yogurt mint chutney recipe (I like it with the rice / dal recipe above):

1 cup of fresh mint leaves, removed from the stalks.

1-2 green chilies/jalapenos (more or less depending on your heat tolerance)

A few coriander sprigs

Pulse chop the above ingredients in blender until a nice paste; You can ad a bit of water for consistency.

Mix the paste with yogurt - taste it along the way and ad more of the paste as you like.

Rice / Dal / Yogurt chutney combo got me through college :)
Also regarding the recipe: I quibble with the suggestion not to drain the beans. Canned beans tend to be accompanied by a funky smelling bean sludge, IME; if, like me, you find that unappealing, rinse the beans in a colander.
Using Akismet blocks about 99.99% of the spam comments that hit my blogs. I moderate the rest. It's quick and easy. I almost never delete a comment, but I like to have the option.
So, basically, try and make $1000 first and then aim for 1 million. Why not go for 1 million str8 away?
I agree that filtering out the worst junk doesn't necesarily raise the overall quality to an acceptable level. It seems like there are two issues, which are related: [1] comments are too small-d democratic and [2] there doesn't currently exist a good mechanism for aggregating comments.

With the exception of a few places like HN, the best comments are treated about the same as bad comments. The absence of incentives leads to the absence of quality.

The other issue is related in the sense that if there was a good mechanism for aggregating comments across sites it would almost certainly serve to recognize and reward the best comments. Solve the fragmentation problem, and you get resolution on the first one for free.
As the author of XML (among other things) he has a pile of PageRank to offer, and that attracts automated attention.
Rice cookers turn off automatically (or rather, switch from hot to warm), so they're easier to use because you can't really overcook the rice.
Writing and Organizing a Winning Speech
Thanks for your comments.

@jacquesm Average sale varies from 1k per month to 15.Time:8 months. The potential market is in the trillions. "Make sure that you do not end up paying Mr. X his own investment back as a salary, otherwise he's just an equity-for-work employee, not an investor per-se." -Good point.

@michael_dorfman True. The issue is that Mr.X is willing to work on the project for one year without any cash compensation.
There's not much new here, aside from pg's (secret?) rice-and-beans recipe and a few corrected misunderstandings from earlier essays. Of course, when you say something once and concisely, everyone misunderstands you and you need to repeat yourself, so don't take this comment as criticism or blame. I just think a careful reading of some of pg's earlier essays yields most of the same information.

But there's one point in here I'm not sure is factual:

"He believes it's a good form of discipline to get people to pay you from the beginning. I think that's too constraining. Facebook didn't, and they've done better than most startups."

I got into Facebook relatively late in the college-students-only era, but even then they were playing with alternate revenue models that didn't work out. In particular, they sold "fliers"--you could write up a little ad flier for your university and pay Facebook some small fee to show it on your university's Facebook for awhile. Now they've gone to traditional old boring web advertising to a greater degree than ever before.
I bet you'll see a lot of INTJ (that's me!) and INTPs here.
They don't make much money off people that rack up $25,000 of debt and then refuse to pay, or people that borrow $500,000 for a house that's worth $150,000 who then leave and stop paying the mortgage.

People that pay the minimum payment on their credit card every month are great -- if everyone did that, there would be no credit crisis. I would be getting my 5% on savings, and would probably be able to own a house.
I think that for a period of less than one year, that could be what makes it amazing.
There wasn't really much of a reaction, was there? Surely we've seen a lot worse.
Would they just throw them away if you stopped paying a 'storage fee'(?)?
What would Apple do? They would put OK/Cancel buttons on SOME preferences dialogs (iTunes) but not others (iChat). They would make SOME utility programs quit when you close the last window (System Prefs) but not others (Activity Monitor). The would have a spot for minimized windows, but not opened ones.

In short, they would do whatever they could to frustrate you while at the same time brainwashing you to believe that not having a feature is better than having one.
I completely disagree.

While the GPL and other FOSS licenses would loose power after copyright runs out (int this case, 5 years), so would propreitary licenses.

Now, it might seem that this is an unfair situation proprietary software holds the advantage, after all they can grab our source code and we can't get theirs? Right? Wrong. Name a major piece of software for which the source isn't leaked... And the Pirate Party could add a law requiring that source code be released after copyright expires for distributed works.

This means that the field is always even for all developers open or not. (Well, not quite even, there is a five year difference...) but as long as the FOSS movement is about creating good free software (as apposed to annihilating proprietary software) this doesn't matter.
No, I don't. But I've asked doctors, and they say the nervous system takes up between 20 and 30% of a person's caloric intake. A third is spent on maintenance and two thirds on firing synapses. Apparently it's ridiculously energy-intensive to fire those things. I was surprised too.

It is also the case that humans have a huge amount of brain matter for their size. And keep in mind it does not take that much brain power to survive; in fact, there's a theory humans have evolved large brains as sexual ornamentation, as it apparently helps attract mates.
"Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer 'should depend on the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive.'

"Depend on? The very phrase is anathema to the dogma of a universal human nature. But it is the essence of an emerging, competing field. Called behavioral ecology, it starts from the premise that social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people's fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors--and different human 'natures.'"

The article reports a really interesting integration of evolutionary pressures on human thinking and social constraints on human behavior. Well worth a read.
In high school I worked as a library clerk. Our library was small with only a handful of patrons at a time. I spent the first couple hours of each shift shelving books and doing other data entry tasks, then the rest of the time I pretty much worked on whatever I wanted. The other lady that normally worked with me liked to spend her time reading books.

Working on stuff at the library can have other advantages too. It's a quiet workspace mostly free of distractions, and you have easy access to lots of reference material.
Ditch the seasoning packets, stir fry with garlic, vegies and spices =)
Nobody is forcing you to pay 19.5% interest. My rate is lower than that, but I never carry a balance, making my rate 0 (but with all the conveniences of a credit card). If I overspend, which sometimes happens, then I pay for it out of savings. That money is doing anything for me (1.5% interest, or whatever), so I might as well pay off the credit card with it.
Hey look, it's hardware engineers doing what software engineers do! Except when this thing crashes rebooting will not be an option.
ILIE (Grand Vizier) according to the Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443182

Yes, it's a spoof, but it's a damn sight more entertaining than MBTI, and some say it's more accurate. I used it as a test of sense of humor a while ago when hiring and was surprised at the result it gave. I didn't belive it, I hired anyway, and three years later it's proved to be a remarkably accurate prediction, which has surprised me even more, and disappointed me a lot.

The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but it's made me think.

Oh, and INTJ.
We've seen worse, but I'd call this a bit of a reaction: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/AT%26T_Blocks_4chan
Exploring the politics of Berlin's secret gardens
This strategy clearly lacks some of the benefits of ramen profitability, most obviously the demonstrated ability to get someone to pay for your product. However, I wonder if this approach could serve as a less risky way to pursue ramen profitability. Once you have enough customers, you quit the job.
Twilio Developer Contest Winner: Adam Small - DigitalHomeInfo.com
A Quest for Batteries to Alter the Energy Equation
does that mean therefore that there are NOT 3 billion females and 3 billion males in the world, since, if it is not just about the sperm race and our bodies have mechanisms to determine the chances of survival of the foetus, then it is no longer 50/50?
".. what does it mean for time to take time?"

What does it mean for length to take length?

If space expands doesn't that mean that a meter gets "longer"?
It doesn't seem like it, but from what I understand in the wikipedia article you linked, while the first-sale doctrine says copyright law doesn't apply to resale of copyright, it doesn't guarantee it your reselling as a right. But I don't know much about it at all, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Software patents I could see, but I find no compelling evidence to get rid of patents in general...
I would argue 5 years is most of a software useful lifetime. (for most software.) And open source software changes so fast, would you really if a company uses a 5 year old version of your code with doing copyleft stuff? They'd still have an incentive to use a newer version and follow your license.

Plus the benefits gained in other fields by a five year limit (think research papers, movies, music) would far outweigh anything lost to the software field.
Nothing wrong with "till": http://www.thefreedictionary.com/till
I wish the screen took up almost the entire front of the device.

No you don't. You want a large surface to hold the device, to move it from hand to hand, and to not touch/smudge the screen.
Finally having an effect?? Tell that to the immigrants of 200 years ago. I'm sure they'll attest that the effect was much stronger back then.

The US has a ton of room for improvement on how it treats immigrants, but I think it's safe to say that the trend is actually in the right direction, not the other way around.
As a small team (read: 2 hackers), I have no desire to make things easier for the designers... because we have none. We're trying to get some work done and we can't really afford to hire anyone who can't wear every possible hat. Clearly, we aren't the target customers of Django templates, so we use Jinja2.

Even if we had designers, I'm not sure they should be writing templates. I'd rather they be writing CSS and that the dev team be responsive to template change requests. If a designer needs a div or span or move some stuff around into a table, they should be able to handle basic template manipulation in any language... and those changes need to be code reviewed by a developer anyway.

On a related note, I just wish there a more mature Haml implementation for Python. We use SASS and love it, but Haml is strongly tied to Ruby. GHRML doesn't seem to be well supported or maintained.