skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is ridiculous. 27 points cries out for analysis. For example, points 1 and 23 are the same; and points 2 and 24 are contradictory. And none of this relates to hacking or gratifies intellectual curiosity. This is worse than religion. Please keep this kind of thing off HN.
Working for a startup taught me more of "how not to screw it up" than anything positive I saw the existing company/founders do.
There were some great lessons learnt at the expense of my personal time.
Any of this look familiar? http://books.google.com/books?q=AI+computer+simulation+milit...
I think a years gap for an interesting language discussion is fair enough. In that year quite a few new members have joined HN, and will probably enjoy the discussion.
These look great - what method did you use to define the borders on the risk-like map?
I don't buy it. This is nothing but a list of random feel-good catchphrases, with convenient "benefits" for each one. The reason they never criticize others is that "otherwise people among them will recognize them as persons who tend to talk behind others."? Yeah, really sincere.

If I met a person that actually followed this advice, the stench of fakeness would probably knock me out.
A modern industrialized society can't afford not to put about 50% of the population through an education that gives them at least something like a bachelors degree.
If you have a better list, please do share.
I'd say it's 50/50. Practice just gets you to the point where you can create. Your creative moments will come wether you're ready or not, so you have to put the hours in to hone your skills.
fyi, you should take a look at cloudloop (www.cloudloop.com). it has a nice command line interface that lets you sync data across providers (s3, rackspace, nirvanix, azure, etc).
>Windows "just works"

That has never been my experience. Trying to customize my Windows install to the point where I can actually do anything with it has uniformly been a long, painful, expensive process every time I have had to do it.

Er, not to mention having to go over to friends' houses frequently to try and get their "just works" Windows installs to just work, already, when they run into problems.

Frankly, my last three Ubuntu installs (on an Acer Apire One, a cheap dual-core PC, and the old, decrepit PC that the cheap dual-core PC replaced) were faster, easier, and far less painful than my previous four or five Windows installs.

I had to do a bit of fiddling with the netbook to get wifi working (I had to install and configure madwifi-hal), but I had to do a lot of fiddling to get wifi working on the default XP install, so tit-for-tat.

Suspend just works, the low battery warning just works, remote desktop just works, multiple displays just works, and I'm seamlessly connected to my home PC and the backup server in the basement.

That's not to mention the fact that I can browse easily to remote servers using the default file explorer (Nautilus) without having to muck around with an FTP program, which is kind of handy when doing web application development.
Unlike Mint, the Buxfer name is terrible. Like a combination of "busted" and "fked", not associations want with my money. The "bucks for" association does not come through online and is too clever by half. Of course I wish them well-- hopefully the Mint sale will give them a good valuation and they can upgrade the domain name.
I might just be imagining it, but I seem to be getting an 'anti-college' vibe, or at least 'anti-traditional education' vibe from HN these past few weeks.

Sure, we probably can't afford to send 50% of the country to college. But why not try to send as many as possible, at least of those who want to go?

Dominated by those whose parents can afford to send kids to college? Hasn't it always been that way? After all, if you can't afford it, no matter how bad you want to go, you won't. Not without assistance.

I'm not sure I understand this negative bent on college education - or am I just reading things wrong?
I'm the author of the post. "Don't criticize others" is a tip I got from how to win friends and influence people. I believe it's more appropriate to explain our reasons rather than criticize. That's my idea but thanks for the feedback.
From personal experience, procrastination does nothing to improve my readiness. Diligence, working at my craft, developing a process for working through setbacks and obstacles, etc...these are all things that improve my readiness AND my overall level of inspiration and creativity. My outside reading on creativity confirms my personal opinion.

Frankly, I think procrastination is the single worst drain on an information-based economy, and I have a hard time seeing any arguments in defense of procastination. Just being honest about my bias.
It looks like you have to develop in MonoDevelop to use this, which is a bit of a shame. After all, the reason most teams use C# in the first place is that you get to use the best IDE around. Outside the context of VS.NET, C# doesn't have nearly as much going for it.

Still, if it lets me avoid Objective C, I think I'll give this a shot.
Are we trying to make University trustees rich or have a well-educated and civil society? I don't think 4 years of college are required to teach someone to think critically, be rational, and right/speak well.
excellent timing for the relentless techcrunch self-promotion machine...
If you have a heightmap, the roads should be fairly easy. Pick start and end points (cities?) and use a pathfinding method like A* to plot the road. If you want something more stylized, you could select a handful of points from that method and then use beizer curves or something between them.
I don't think my philosophy is radically different from yours. My experience is similar to yours, and in fact I'm only really productive when I have a lot of (too many?) projects on the go.

I'm not suggesting you should commit every waking moment to a project until it's completed (if I did, I'd be guilty of the worst hypocrisy). Rather, I'm suggesting that if you want to complete a creative project, you need to commit to regular work on it, starting now and not at some unspecified point in the future.
The Evolution of Divorce
Getting started on mobile platforms?
I am an experienced developer who has worked for years on web applications, but I'd like to bone up on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry development. Essentially I want to build an expertise in mobile development, with deep knowledge of at least one of the major platforms, and a good grasp of the others.

What I want to know is,

1) What equipment should I grad to get started ? For example, I'll obviously need a Mac to work with the iPhone.

2) What are the really good resources for the given platforms (both sites and books are fine)?
It's always amazing to hear about advances like this. Articles like this always upset me a little as well though.

I don't think I'm overly sensitive (I'm a fighter, I enjoy a good steak and I'm happy to go hunting) but reading things like this make you realize how many of our medical advances come at the cost of intense discomfort for the animals that help pave the way...

I look forward to more advances, like the new methods that help us culture realistic skin samples independent of a human, that allow further advances to come at a reduced cost to the animals/people involved.
I don't want my open heart surgery to be performed by a dropout, no matter how passionate and relentlessly resourceful they might be.
Procrastination can also be an outward symptom of other problems, such as anxiety, depression, or excessive stress. Also, those with attention problems tend to do everything but focus on their tasks at hand, often without any means of controlling themselves.
Spot the glaring fact-checking failure in this article...
What are you trying to do on a windows install that requires customization?

Also, fiddling with the wifi on *nix and fiddling with it on windows are...not quite the same thing.

I have no problem with it on linux (in fact, I have destroyed several keyboards in fits of rage while trying to get it working on windows.), but my mother would have absolutely no freaking CLUE how to even begin trying to get it to work.
The latest release of F# assumes #light as the default.
Pretty good idea. I have something specially rigged for Ruby use (I basically use this for Ruby Inside): http://www.rubyinside.com/advent2006/7-coloring.html

In future, though, I'll probably move to a JavaScript solution as this hard coding just doesn't feel right anymore.
Can't believe they did a demo with a guy that doesn't know how to type on an iphone (picture: http://grab.by/4cL )
What in the world does this person's experience however many years ago compiling Gentoo have to do with "linux on the desktop"?
Yikes! How do I close my account? Intuit == evil.
Where's the article? It says, "They’re back with another (NSFW) video, “Vend Diagram,” in which they question how the recession has affected New York’s street vendors." But I don't see where they're back.
"While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people."

This is good advice for all aspiring entrepreneurs.
I have my macbook. I like the hardware, for the most part. However, I just installed ubuntu again on my desktop, and it's like coming back to an old friend. I love middle click paste alongside ctrl-V. I still can't get used to all the mac changes in software I already know. For me, Ubuntu just works. shrug

The linux desktop is mature as far as I've been able to see. The linux laptop, on the other hand, still isn't there and from what I can tell, may never be. They still can't get the power management quite right, last I checked. Suspend and hibernate still give it fits on some hardware. I think the only way that will be solved is if the vendors take responsibility to ensure compliance on their own hardware, and that doesn't seem to be happening.
Destructors are just as portable and efficient as close/free functions. Exception handlers that rarely run are just as portable and more efficient than having every caller check for an error code (and let's face it, that is never done 100% correctly anyway).
Paul Graham on the 2:30pm - 4:00pm PST panel on advertising and monetization with Marc Andreessen.
Web 2.0 Domain Hunter - readily available awesome domains
Oh, it's not _that_ bad. It's all just common-sensical platitudes, but worth a quick read to remind us all of what we should already know.
Is making up unnecessary jargon and talking in capital letters also a predictor of success?
Oh come on...

1. This was written by Mint's founder, not TC
2. This *is* a success story for TC
3. There's nothing wrong with self-promotion :)
Javascript Framework Matrix - Overview with functions and examples
How about you just point it out to save everybody some time?
I appreciate that this returns native Python datatypes rather than XML trees or unparsed JSON, which the other Flickr APIs have a tendency to do.
That's a total strawman. It's not even worth expanding on this reply further.
Wow, one line out of the whole story mentions TechCrunch, and they run that as the headline.

And it's slimy how TC implies that because Mint launched at TC50, it caused Mint to be acquired.
I thought she disliked C and C++ equally, believing that direct access to memory prevented the compiler from making optimisations on the data. Really an argument against writing large systems in either.

What makes you think that STL would be a good choice for the kernel?
Agreed. I think the online classes/online colleges will supplement rather than replace traditional colleges.

They can be convenient for someone at a traditional college who has scheduling issues and they can help people attend college who otherwise would not be able to, but I suspect that there will be plenty of need for the things physical colleges provide above and beyond simple information for a long time.
Is IE's default Arial? Because his site looks nothing like Google in Firefox or Safari, and is, I believe, one CSS line away from fixing that.
But I think you have to parse what he's talking about...

As far as I can tell, everything Linus writes that sounds like a provocative "religious" statement about programming is really just a statement about his world of Kernel development. He just isn't concerned about with other space so "C++ is a horrible language.." yes, for Kernel program, sure.
Yup. Creepy, isn't it.
Like everything else in politics, there is a nice gray area in education. The internet is very bad at gray areas, and tends toward extremism.

The gray area here is between "pursuit of knowledge, become better citizens" and "career school, what is history for anyway".

Universities used to be #1, and have shifted toward #2 over the years. Now people see it more as the default to be the career school, and laugh at people who are in favor of learning for the sake of learning.

Then the problem is that while both approaches are relatively valid, they lead to different conclusions to the answer of "who should go to college".
Is location independence 'unrealistic'?
This story does seem to gloss over the VC piece, to me it read like they started with no money and got to $170 million without investment. Didn't they raise 30+ million?
Negative, their C++ compiler is one of the best out there.
anyone know why there is 'loading' activity whenever I select text on the page? I noticed the same effect on yesterday's esquire articles as well.
You can criticize AND give reasons for it. They're not mutually exclusive.
WinCE/WinMobile are known C++ platforms. .NET is the new game in town.

Same with the XBox: serious development is done in C++.
What hope do you have that I'll just automatically see how much better this is than Mozy?

I don't have much hope that anyone will automatically see anything. This is why I go out of my way to educate -- explaining things like why simple code is less likely to have security flaws, pointing out my expertise and experience, and demonstrating that I'm not afraid to have people look at the tarsnap source code.
Botnet commands and data hosted on google groups
Looks like the beginnings of Rife's Raft from Snow Crash.
I should hope so! The portability of a software project like Git is [practically] upper-bound by the tools used to build it.
They're probably using the same text highlighting code as esquire.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/98o77/go_to_esqu...
I'm not sure exactly what IE's default is, but adding font-family: sans-serif to div.boxcontents makes the site look much better.
I do think that this is indeed closer to the pointy end of the stick when it comes to the ethical concerns of medical research, both for the trials involved and the implications of the technology. The first I am more than willing to pay - I have no concern for the lives of laboratory test organisms and take a staunchly Utilitarian approach, justified by my privileged knowledge of the "greater good". The second, I am wary of becoming over invested in as humanities credit rating sucks in that department =S
Very nice app. Bookmarked. Quick suggestion, and it may not be something used by all users, but I attempted to type code in, and naturally hit a tab after the first line to indent the class declaration (I was trying out some Ruby code). Naturally the tab takes me elsewhere.

Maybe capture a Ctrl-Tab (or similar key-stroke) and insert a tab? [I am not sure how useful this would be for most users copy pasting code in, but it does make it easy to type in code]

Again, nice app. Thanks, and good work.
Introducing Elevate: A Boost-like library for C#/.NET
Show me the economy where 15% - let alone 50% - of jobs require a degree.

There are an awful lot of graduates doing work they could just have well have started 3 years earlier and without 5-figures of debt.
I guess the author hit 'replace all' when editing in the word 'Christmas' somewhere:

"You used to look Christmas from here straight over to Indonesia..."
Yeah, I know of Haiku. I'm glad they've made such a colossal effort, and I check back every couple of months to see if they actually have a release yet --

OH WOW THEY RELEASED. Today! Sweet! happydance

(the fine print: technically, Haiku isn't quite BeOS, it's a re-implementation of BeOS.)
http://actualfreedom.com.au/library/topics/dissociation.htm

"""All the mystics advise dissociation (wherein painful reality is transformed into a bad dream) as being the most effective means to deal with all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides and the such-like. Just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, all the Gurus and the God-Men, the Masters and the Messiahs, the Avatars and the Saviours and the Saints and the Sages have desperately done precisely this thing (during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘True Reality’ via the epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for survival purposes) for millennia."""
Anyone know enough to know if a similar approach has been tried for soft tissue repair (joints, tendons, ligaments, etc.)?

EG: injecting nanoparticles with suitable coatings as a way of promoting faster joint repair (hips, wrists, shoulders, etc.).
Yes, you're quite right -- sorry for the omission. The worker daemons (via the Daemons gem) use Kernel.fork and UNIX signals for management, neither of which are really supported on Windows. There's a decent chance that Cygwin will work.
Hey, is there no room for snark about a snarky website? I've got a horse in the TC50 race, so it's great that he bills it as "The Value of TechCrunch", but isn't really about the value of Mint?
You can use C# with XCode:
http://code.google.com/p/cocoa-sharp-dev/wiki/CSharpPlugin

MonoTouch's site has a tutorial on how to use XCode + Monotouch:
http://monotouch.net/Documentation/XCode
You have many excellent points.

I am not sure that calling it "suspended reality" is accurate though. For many, especially those on either very good scholarships or with well off parents, it is an extension of high school. But that just means they get a more gradual transition from high school to the working world.

Then there are a lot of people like me. I worked full time while going to school full time to get my undergrad and now I am working full time and going to school part time working on my masters, both at traditional State colleges. I got married during my undergrad and my second child was born while I was working on my masters. Reality has certainly not been suspended for people in that kind of situation.

I do agree that the Focus and immersion that going to classes in person on a campus surrounded by other students provides a lot of value, if that is what you were getting at.
What are "nonoparticles"? Are they particles whose size is in the "nonometer" range?
Steganography meets VoIP in hacker world
That's a total strawman.

Not really. It's probably not a terribly popular sentiment on a site for web-based hacker startups, but there are plenty of jobs that actually require some sort of meaningful education. Most of the medical system is composed of such jobs, as are large chunks of the legal system. Government bureaucracy (while the benefits of having a degree in such a job may be questionable) commonly requires them, at least in Canada. The government is not a small employer.

50% may well be excessive, but there are a huge number of jobs out there that demand a degree.
triedness kills
True, but this is buried deep down in a very inflammatory reply, where most people would have stopped reading anyway.

He makes some good points, but they could have been made a in a better tone, which makes him a terrible front-man.
Just to kick off the discussion here, if you are a developer who is building on a platform other than .NET, I would love to know why. Tell me anything. I'm an entrepreneur on loan to MSFT and very much trying to build our outreach to the non-MSFT developer crowd, and listen to and learn about their needs so we can build better products.
the problem with an index like this is, that no matter how much you try to quantitatively measure happiness, "societal welfare" remains extremely subjective. put another way, whose definition of societal welfare are we using?

like it or not, GDP remains a very quantifiable and objective number.
Frameworks, popular open source programs and prebuilt social api code.

.Net is great for building things from the ground and enterprise setups but when it comes to hooking into any social site MS just doesn't stack up. Even their sponsored Facebook framework was abandoned. They invested hundreds of millions into Facebook but couldn't keep the simple framework up-to-date for their developers.

No kid is going to say "Hey, I'd love to build an enterprise level reporting program with .net" Instead they're going to want to build cool plug-ins for popular open source programs. The next generation of programmers are growing up on PHP.
Consider toying around with Objective-C. I was pleasantly surprised. I had never used SmallTalk, and I had a good time with the idea of "message passing". This doesn't take away the requirement of having to own a Mac, so it's free to try it out anyway.

If you have already tried it out and hate it, then I'm glad there is a new option!
I'm getting tired of this attitude. The question isn't "what language sucks," it's "what drawbacks and advantages does this language provide"
Where's the Mobile Biz?
I'm an MSFT coder and love the mission you're on. We need more coders working with .net or the language will die off.
You mention the Facebook code library. What else could we do for you and this community?

As for the "cool plug-ins" bit, what is driving that decision, in your opinion? Desire for notoriety?
Hint: first sentence
What he doesn't mention is how much money Mint was making (If it was making any at all).

Plenty of bubble valley hyping up about how it couldn't have happened anywhere else etc etc. Bleugh.
Well, they won $50,000 at TC50, it's hard to get a better launch day than that.
28. They smell good.

29. They enjoy food.

30. They walk with poise and posture.

...
That to me sounds like a better model than Mint. Sure Yodlee doesn't have the media buzz or "explosive" growth (Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.), but the infrastructure is extremely useful and will be around for a long time.

If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.
Anyone know if there's a live chat, or IRC channel to go with the feed?
Great article. "Your people are your product" is a brilliant insight and is really the highlight of the whole thing. I'd say that the employees of the respective places I might visit account for about 80% of my choice in where to go for lunch each day. Last time I bought a car, I'd say employees of the various dealers accounted for about an equal percent of my decision.
Smacks of poor engineering to me; switching to another platform instead of finding the cause of the problem.

"I was hitting some issues with either the scheduler or the memory subsystem, as my code didn’t have any I/O in it."
Curious to know if the anti Oracle talk on MySQL Web site will soon disappear  
"Today, there are over 5,000 organizations that spend more than $1Million on License fees to Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase and IBM. In many cases, that's money that doesn't need to be spent."