skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You need to be able to modify comments for some amount of time to correct typos, but if you can modify them for too long you can rewrite history. The current time limits are arbitrary but seem roughly correct, judging from the fact that users complain roughly equally about missing typos till it's too late, and people they're arguing with rewriting their comments.
7. Use blog software like WordPress, which will get hacked in a second if anyone cares enough to attack your site.
"Sit in on some classes at a nearby university?"

I assume you mean without paying for the course? how does one go about doing this?

I sometimes have the strong urge to sit in a class - to feel like a student. I never knew you could just go and sit in a class? I also read similar HN suggestion on a post some time back. I want to try this out fwiw.
Is there some practical limit to the muzzle velocity of a gun?
Set lofty goals. Attain them. Repeat.

Right now you're living a mediocre life. You live in an apartment, you program web sites and haven't finished college. What's so special about that? Why do you need to be incredibly sharp for that? You don't. Do something you need to be sharp to do and you will become sharp.

My best advice for you is to not worry about this shit until you're 25 and have a normal young adulthood in the meantime. When you're 25 you'll know exactly what you have to do to become sharp. Right now you're probably still overwhelmed by actually having a life of your own and a girl that wants you around.
Thrust for massless photons?

Photons escape earth's gravitational pull because the gravity is not large enough to bend space to collapse the photon back onto the earth.
It most definitely isn't just something you have to accept and deal with. Staying sharp takes effort, but it's worth it. And you don't need to upset your work/life balance or carve out massive portions of your week to do this. You do, however, need to make some time for yourself and your brain even if it's just an hour in the morning while you have your coffee.

The most important thing I could tell you is to read your ass off. Get a good list of RSS feeds for blogs and magazines in your field and read through them all regularly. Routinely look for newly published books in your field of interest and read them. Get involved in discussion boards for the same so that you can have conversations, and even debates, on the issues you want to stay on top of so that you're not in a mental vacuum - and so that you are challenged by others in your field. Keep talking about it, thinking about it, writing about it (I forget who said "you don't know what you know until you write" but it's true)...
Good, but old news.

This is a useful educational article, but I had a pediatrician in 1981 explain much the same facts to us about our just-born daughter.

The lesson is not to go off and overstimulate the child, but 1) observe closely what the child is paying attention to and 2) don't presume that the kid doesn't know significantly more about what is going on that you might think and 3) don't talk baby talk to the kid. Emulate as closely as you can what they say. This will give very positive feedback of the right kind.

i did an experiment with a friends just-born baby. I would get the kid's attention, then stick my tongue out. After a couple of repeats of this, the kid responded by sticking her tongue out, much to the astonishment of her mother. "There is a person in there".

So if we can follow this line of reasoning about adults, at least in some cultures, being off in understanding what kids understand just after birth, how far off has that perception slipped by the time they are six? teenagers?
We can deal with mangled hunk of metal problem in version 2. For now I'm just asking whether one could get anything into orbit by shooting it from this gun.
Are You Insured for Your Blog?
Funny how you can somehow tell the tone the author is using just by reading his words.
I have a full time job as a web developer, do not make open source contributions, do not have a girlfriend or a social life, and do have a healthy amount of free time. I spend much of my free time reading technical articles and textbooks in CS and finance (although I could be reading up on representation theory if I wanted to). I also program in my spare time.

Sadly, you've left out many of the details that would help others understand you: when did you graduate? What was your GPA? Did you take quantum or real analysis or a compilers course? If you wanted to, how would you prepare to finish your degree or begin grad school?

There is nothing particularly mysterious about hard work and devoting time to study.
I hadn't read the original diatribe, but in this article I finally read it:

The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes. They also know nothing about process. Waterfall? Spiral? Agile? Forget it. They've never seen a requirements document, they've never written a design document, they've never drawn a UML diagram, and they haven't even heard of a sequence diagram.

Now I know I can dismiss this "Michael" fellow as an imbecile. Whatever point he may have, will no doubt be made more cogently some other day, if it's worthy of debate. I'll think about it then.
I lost all of my identification one day before a series of domestic flights in the United States in Nov 2008. I was flying SFO <-> MSP and SFO <-> TUS.

If you are flying domestic between MSP and SFO during the holidays I highly recommend not bringing your ID. TSA simply put some marks on my boarding passes and make me go through special screening. It was better than the usual customer experience during the holiday flight season because the "terrorist aisle" was much shorter than the normal path through security. I wouldn't recommend it in PHX or TUS. The TSA agents there seemed to be people who really wanted to be Minutemen Militia border guards but weren't smart enough to get in.
One orbit. Consider the projectile just as it leaves the barrel, if it is in orbit then this point is on its orbit. It will return. The earth will have rotated the gun away, but the projectile is still going to come back into the atmosphere where it will lose too much energy to continue.

Any useful orbit needs to be above the atmosphere and would have to be shot from there.

You could use a secondary nudge of some sort to round out the orbit once it is in space and keep the projectile up, but making such a device that will survive the initial acceleration is unlikely.
My child is a boy. I already had little sympathy for the idea that we're born a blank slate and that society imposes gender templates, but what little sympathy I had for the idea is now gone.

He's not hostile or asocial or anything, but he'd much rather hit his head on something, cry, and crawl right back over to try again in 5 minutes. Note that we know it's not a matter of being dumb, because there are other things like that he learns from. He's just... a boy. I think perhaps boys could fit into the "pet" template a bit longer, since girls are more humanly social, earlier, on average. (He's perfectly within normal parameters for his age and gender; he loves people, plenty of eye contact, etc., but girls are definitely different on average.)
and they solved that one badly as we all know (seriously my point was that the whit farmer they mentioned seemed completely unapologetic about the situation he helped continue!)
Wow this is some bad advice. And with an arrogant/demeaning attitude to match.
Hmm. The article is not coming up for me at the moment. But that won't stop me from commenting!

I accidentally traveled without ID last year. My drivers license is the only picture ID I carry. I'd given it over to test drive a baby seat at a store, and forgot to get it back. Left for vacation the next day.

My stops were Portland, San Jose, and Austin. At all three airports I explained my situation, showed them my YMCA card (or library or credit card or something) and they marked my boarding pass for special security. The processes were not draconian, just a pat down, and actually faster than the regular security line. I skipped the line and went to some designated place on the side, zipped through the pat down, and then had to wait for my properly ID'd wife every time.

YMMV, but based on my experience, I highly recommend traveling without an ID!
What about all the large, successful, serious content and community sites running Wordpress?

And what's the realistic alternative? Many of those sites used to run custom CMS software coded from scratch years ago by some random development agency who farmed the work out to a freelancer who has long since disappeared. Seems doubtful that that's better in any respect.

Edit: Removed my sarcastic tone :)
In university, you're not paying for your seat in the class, but rather for the opportunity to write the exams and get a grade (save for lab-oriented classes, where equipment and materials are limited).

It's quite easy to simply walk in and audit a class, and I remember quite a few people doing just that when the classes I was attending were being taught by fairly well known professors.
Well I just have this feeling that the article is artificially voted up.

And no offense, but askorkin seems to be self promoting. 18 of his 21 submissions are from his own blog.

Note: It's completely OK to post your own content on HN.
This plan sounds like it rests on the classic answer to how to make a million: "first, get a million page views"
Irony at it's finest: Ben Huh is confused.
Hey, I've seen weirder stuff on the internet where someone actually made money. You never know :)
I'm not sure the advice is all that bad. The attitude isn't great, but setting lofty goals is a pretty good way to keep sharp. And ultimately you do have to prioritise what you want to get out of your life, so it's worth thinking about.
It's CalTech, not Tuskegee- Asian males are a large chunk of the population.
Why More Autumn Leaves Are Red In America And Yellow In Europe
If you're in the US just tell them your wallet was stolen.

They'll put you in another line and often times it'll actually be faster than the main security line.

I've done this multiple times, the first time after I actually did lose my wallet in Vegas and had to fly back home. Apparently it happens all the time.
> First, it's not a challenging medium for me.

The guy should probably switch his intellectual efforts over to figuring out how to make his work useful rather than how to make it as complex as possible.
For other interesting persons' daily routines look here,

http://dailyroutines.typepad.com

The Benjamin Franklin post is here http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/2007/07/benj... and contains the same schedule.
Play bridge or poker regularly. Chess is also good.

That's how Buffett is still kicking ass, despite being in his 70s.
As a C# developer the irony for me was that just about everything he mentions is available in a web environment via Silverlight and ASP.NET. So it's odd that this diatribe would come from someone who works for Microsoft.
Not really, no. Especially if you use barrel-less electromagnetic designs. The Navy is testing a rail gun that fires 3.2 kg at 9k kph.

Again, it's the acceleration and heating on the projectile that I would worry about. Then again, I think Project HARP found that electronics survived the firing better than they expected in their fairly crude sand and epoxy suspensions.

One strategy would be to conventionally launch a big satellite factory robot with the most fragile parts (fuel, solar cels, glass instruments, ...) and then do cheap gun launches with the more durable parts at your leisure.
I actually take this back. Obama uses this wording as well, because he is trying to bring down the costs of health care, too. Regulating the insurance industry effects the prices of health care (sometimes negatively). I wish I could explain this better.
External (not remote) hard drive, 7200 RPM. Haven't had any problems using other programs with it.
I sympathize, believe me. Life is too damn short and there's hardly enough time in the day to juggle work and time with people I care about, let alone learning new things that have no immediate application to my life.

I think my long-term strategy for dealing with this is to amass enough wealth to have more freedom of time to be able to do some of these things. Perhaps I'm naive. Time will tell.

On a more immediate and practical note, my new Kindle should arrive any day now. Reading has always been my favorite way of learning new things, and I devour books at a good clip. This makes it difficult, because hauling around several thick books at a time is a pain. Hoping the Kindle makes it easier to fit reading into my life.

Side note: make sure you finish your degree. I know guys with loads of potential who came within a few classes of graduating from top engineering programs and then got distracted by life for several years. Seems like a terrible waste to come so close and not finish.
"...could not bar an American citizen from boarding a plane, even if a passenger refused to produce any identification at all!"

How exactly can you know if someone is an American citizen if they don't show any government approved ID saying so?
Step 1: figure muzzle velocity required to get into orbit.

Step 2: make a basic model for air resistance, which feeds back into velocity

Step 3: does that feedback converge or diverge? If divergent, impossible.

Step 4: make that material

I don't know enough aerodynamics to model high speed air resistance well.

The way we handle it coming back to earth is to add a layer that will be shed in heat to protect the object. That adds mass.
Students to dump textbooks for e-books
He didn't mention how much it costs to have 200 folks in a sub for 2 years. but yeah, it is embarrassing our transport tech is in the dark ages.
The web can never replace the power of desktop applications, and desktop applications can never beat the simplicity of web applications (with both in their current forms). We are currently blurring the lines between desktop and and web, but in the end it will probably resemble more of desktop applications. This is because current web applications run in the browser only because of the limitations of current web technologies. But if we could easily make web applications run like native desktop applications (with no installation necessary), we probably would.

Chrome is making that leap to blur the lines by being a web oriented OS. In the future we'll probably see more of using web technologies, and applications that run remotely coupled with easy (but more powerful) UI development on the client side that runs natively on the user's computer. So we'll have a mix between the best parts of desktop applications: control and power, and the best of web apps: easy UI development and interconnectedness.
There will always be some desktop applications which doesn't make a ton of sense (either logically or financially) to port them to the web.

For most other type of applications, we already have web equivalents (so coyly termed as "the lite version" in some cases).

Javascript may be the most awful language to write code in. But, if there are users (and a way to make money), you'll always find developers willing to write code in JS.
I recently worked on a web based product that installed a server and a database on the users machine. All data was stored locally for privacy and locality of cpu resources, but could be backed up in the cloud and shared with whomever the user chose. Given this kind of setup the distinction between web and desktop applications completely disappears.

There are obvious scaling and security issues for this model in the general sense: do you want 200 servers and 200 databases on your local machine, but as a browser managed facility it makes sense to me.
To make it cost effective, the U.S. has to stop making enemies. Do you know how much it will cost to secure a few hundred nuclear power plants from people willing to blow themselves up?
It seems the assumption is that after you make a comment you are actively checking the thread for some time afterwards. Perhaps this works here because of a correct assumption about how people use HN but a time-constrained lifestyle might prevent this in some other groups.
Ask HN: Trivial etiquette question - can he touch my laptop screen?
Coworkers often touch my laptop screen, jabbing at some interesting item. I don't like it. Actually, I think it is rude, but I feel bad about requesting that they don't do it, or even quietly getting out my eyeglass polishing cloth and removing the mark in front of them.

Is it OK to touch someone's laptop screen?

Or am I being over-sensitive?

As a freelancer, I have my own (expensive) laptop, whereas many co-workers have company-bought ones, but I felt that way even when I had a company one.
Wyman's article ends with recommendations that read like a prescription for a fun startup.
There's some more information here too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Gun
I am in a similar situation.

I listen to books on my iPod when I commute. I catch some online reading sometimes at work. I meditate and get some exercise 3 times a week. And I hang out with sharp people.

But I guess there is no all encompassing formula. Some people here seem to have other avenues.
We already have Medicaid and Medicare. I've read so much about their role in the rising costs of health care that I wouldn't even know where to start.

I like Mankiw's thoughts on the public option: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/06/whats-point-of-public...
Congrats on the site, it is fast and clean. I like it. Out of curiosity what language or frameworks did you use for the backend?
I was snooping around that web site after reading the fascinating article, and found this article in the 'Scary' section. Food for thought no?

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/06/05/the-computer-data-...
Writing a simple WS-BPEL process for WSO2-BPS and Apache ODE
http://techdrawl.com/ignition-alley-coworking-to-opens-in-at...

Looks like you're right next door, if this is the Borders next to City Hall East :)
Here's the expanded link.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006124189X?ie=UTF8&tag=...
I actually have 3 credits (equivalent to one class) in a non-science related field left to my degree, which I will be finishing in the next semester.

Most of the classes I took were honours level, and my GPA was quite average. My grades suffered a bit from me needing to work quite a bit to pay tuition, but that's not something that particularly bothers me. I learned much from working in the 'real world', and the few GPA points I traded for that experience has put me quite far ahead of many of my peers.

I took two classes in statistical mechanics (one graduate level), three classes in quantum physics (one graduate level), two classes in classical mechanics, one class in general relativity (graduate level) taught by a relatively well known cosmologist, and various other honours level classes in calculus, algebra, real analysis, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, as well as your boilerplate base classes physics and mathematics.

I've been thinking about going to grad school in a few years, perhaps in a more CS-related domain - I find Information Theory to be interesting, even if I don't quite understand everything that I'm reading.

I realize that I could drop everything and focus all of my efforts on study, but at this point in my life I'm not ready to do that. I am more interested in how others manage to strike a balance between life and an insatiable quest for knowledge, which is something I believe many on HN have to deal with.
It's not a war, and they will live side-by-side.

Desktop applications will still be necessary for the foreseeable future. Developers will want to do what the web is bad at - whether they need speed, high resource size, high complexity, access to local resources, or background access. I'm sure there's other examples of what the web is bad. These problems all have no solutions in sight.

Web applications are better for most other situations, since they're cross-platform, instant-on, simple to deploy, available from many places, and allow for seamless integration of the social aspect, which is often compelling for end-users.
I would have bought into that if only he'd done a Flash version.
Too bad this is such a short and content-less article. I was hoping for more insights into how MS manages to run the best basic research lab in computer science in the world, while being hopelessly clueless in their corporate life.
I am not suggesting you skip those steps. I think most people falls into the "analysis paralysis" stage and end up not implementing those ideas in to action. While "tweaking with ideas" can be considered an action - it is still an "idea".

I consider action to be the beginning of an actual product or implementation of that idea. Tweaking with idea is still an idea.
Poll: Constitutional ban on making money from tax-return programs
It's commonplace now for ordinary people to use programs like Turbotax to do their taxes for them. This means that taxes are so complex for an _individual_, that there's a market for computer software to mitigate that complexity. Every lawyer, account, and programmer who's dedicated their career to knowing the ins and outs of the tax system is a sympton of the horribly crufty, unnecessarily complex being that is/are U.S. tax laws. As tax laws grow ever more complex people will become ever more dependent on computer programs to do the labor of figuring out how they're supposed to fill those forms out. People could get arrested and fined because of errors in the tax software they use.<p>To keep this from happening, and to get ordinary people more strongly invested in the simplification of tax laws I propose a constitutional ban on making money, in any way, from software that does tax returns.<p>

I say making money and not writing such programs because I think the danger of scope creep from a law banning the writing of a certain program is greater than the gain from banning such programs.
Yes, it's a good idea, and'll will save people a lot of pain later on.
No, it's a dangerous infringement on people's rights.
No clothes + fan. No matter how hot, you'll start needing a sheet to keep the surface of your skin warm. It works for me in an AC-less shack on the equator!
Actually, I think your observations show the opposite: i.e. the strength of socialization.

Suppose I didn't know your child's gender. The behaviour you described would not sound particularly male or female to me, given my biases. On the other hand, I infer that for you this appears to be typically "boyish" behaviour, and you use this as evidence of strong in-born gender traits. I.e. my daughter does exactly the same thing, but I didn't consider it "girlish". More "babies are duuuumb."

One interesting thing about raising an infant is that everyone seems to project different things on to the child, and to have different interpretations of the same events. For instance, my wife and I focus on the fact that our daughter seems strong and smart. Others keep telling us how pretty she is.

If she makes certain facial expressions, friends tell us it means one thing, while various relatives all have their own interpretations, that differ from our own interpretation.

I don't think your observations confirm anything except your own biases. In case that sounds harsh, I think this is true of all of us.

Note that I'm not making the strong claim that there are no gender differences. I just observe that there's much larger variation between individuals than between genders. Finally, I observe that parents treat girls and boys subtly differently even from before birth, and that this can't help but have an effect on their development.