skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find Fireworks to be a much better tool for web mockups. In the latest version, Adobe added the ability to create interactive (clickable) wireframes and mockups that can be exported to multi-page PDF's. Fireworks offers a great toolset for those who are willing give up some of the advanced image editing functionality of Photoshop for more flexibility and speed.
Countercounterpoint:

"There are two ways to wash the dishes. You can wash the dishes so the dishes or clean. You can also wash the dishes to watch the dishes."

The moral I got from your koan when I first read it is what the difference is not in reality, but in the mind. That doesn't mean working when you don't feel like working. It means feel like working, or don't work.
That's the educational theory behind the Summerhill School:

http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/

Some kids that go there spend periods of years doing no work, going to no classes, and aren't punished. The idea is that when the kid is ready to learn, he will learn without provocation.
Me neither. I got the cached front page. Not sure he was expecting a lot of traffic today. It's a shame since this product looks really cool from the descriptions and screen shots I can make out from the cached page.

Love the landing page though.. Really elegant and straight to the point. Definitely inspired me for my upcoming projects.
Music Industry Wants Royalties on 30-Second Previews and TV Downloads
Security in Your Pocket: OpenBSD on ARM
Hydros Bottle: Reusable water bottle with built-in filter
Free Jquery Image Rotator with Description (CSS/jQuery)
I was wondering how dcurtis was doing it. This is great news. Just in time for me to start a blog.
Sorry if I am being negative here, but isn't this off topic?
I'm in the same boat - if I don't make myself work, I'll end up reading all the time with zero to show for it.

Only one thing makes me deliver: deadline

Without deadlines, nothing gets done in my world, as I always get these ideas of how to do something better using the new shiny thing X and there is no end to it.

Deadline enforces discipline and requires me to do a good job of planning to allocate the precious time. Makes me say no to pleasant distractions that I would otherwise agree to...

Once I have something delivered (or during my consulting work), then I allow myself to go on a "sabbatical": read the books and lurk on HN and LTU. However, the sabbatical must have a scheduled end-date too, otherwise nothing will ever get done.

Deadlines must be concrete. Here are mine: my current sabbatical ends in 2 weeks (coincides with the end of my consulting engagement and loss of golden handcuffs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763743). Real work starts on October 4 with a clear deliverable by October 23...
Question: Why doesn't apple just spin off a record label? They own the distribution channel now. There's real demand for quality music outside the mainstream crap.

Someone needs to bring a new model into the mainstream here and quash the labels once and for all. I'm tired of their whining.
Stay tuned :) !!!
All of the Worlds Airports (each airplane is one)
I actually did not realize the date until I read the first few paragraphs either! In my mind, Google has come closer than any company history to doing everything for anyone. With this being said, I agree with the focused innovation point that you made and the attention to positioning themselves as we progress...I find it to be rather exciting to think about what Google will become in 30 years.
Flightcaster stands out as the most interesting here. Not sure about the revenue model they'd use for it but definitely a cool app.

EDIT: They charge for their mobile apps. Maybe something like this is better off being ad supported?
I had a somewhat similar experience. I'm pretty much freaked out my junior year, and almost dropped everything to get a music degree. But I stuck it out, got my CS degree, and landed a good job before graduating. After 1.5 years, I quit. I craved that exploration phase which I never felt I got in school. I spent a year setting up a music studio and teaching guitar lessons out of my apartment. I loved it. But I found my self truly missing hacking on things, and when I got back to it, I realized how much I had missed it. I don't regret my decisions at all. Don't worry so much about what you should do; just do SOMETHING. Good luck!
I have a problem with this phrase have to. I don't have to do anything. There is no proven formula that works for anything.

Winston Churchill was a lazy, lazy man who succeeded because he was capable of brilliance for the short bursts of time he worked. Brian Wilson spent the infamous three years high in his bedroom, then returned with a series of masterpiece albums. Ricky Gervais was a disc jockey until he was 39, then made possibly the best television show of all time despite being lazy and disruptive both while writing and directing it. Marcel Duchamp spent how long making his fountain? It became the most famous piece of art of the century.

While I don't disagree that extraordinary efforts are required to produce things, I don't agree that "extraordinary" means hard work. Sometimes it means a willingness not to work unless the work means something.
Ask HN: Why isn't Zappos the first result for the query "shoes"?
Shoes.com has a pagerank of 5 and 200k inbound links.

Zappos.com has a pagerank of 7 and 2M inbound links. 10 times that of shoes.com!

Does the domain name matter that much?
My technique was:

Just get one thing done. Even if it's an easy, small thing. Get started and do it now. Especially if you don't want to. Having done it, try to do another; it'll be a great deal easier.
Could you expand on that comment somewhat? Does http://dustincurtis.com make use of posterious somehow?
The places I have seen this kind of system in use, they work just like that. Limited number of submissions and flexible pointing system. Those systems gave points according to how many tests you passed, and there was minimum score to pass. The other system I have seen, also scored by coding style, ie. commenting and correct indentation etc. You could see style points and functionality points separately and there was separate minimum points (usually quite high in style).

And IMHO these are good tools. But they don't teach you debugging (at least not directly). They teach that you need to test and debug your code before you submit it, which imho is good practice anywhere, ie you should test and debug your code before committing to SVN (or push your changes to main tree in DVCS-talk).

Of course that should be told to students, and they should be taught proper debugging/testing-methods. I mean these kind systems do not prohibit doing your own tests and debugging those before submitting, now do they?
Excellent; I live in Boston. Is this what you're talking about?

http://www.community-boating.org/
Twitter proves that idiocy sells
I have a feeling most people here saying it's a bad advice, didn't get it in the first place. I think the key is that you got to give yourself a little freedom in the short distance, but be disciplined in the long run. For example, I think I'm going to get some sleep now and work in the morning, not tonight. But I'm still going to do the job. The only difference is: I'd be more productive.

It's like (a + b) is still the same thing as (b + a). But because 'a' is the first letter of the alphabet (for most of us) it's more natural to put it first.

And another short thought that I think is relevant: discipline is not about forcing yourself to work when you don't want to, but it's about managing the time and finding the best spots for your work to be done. Of course, self-employment is best for this.
The question was "How do I work when I don't feel like it." Workaholics don't ask this. People who are doing what they love and don't need discipline because they're already doing it don't ask this.

If you want to make the the world march to your beat, you need to start with your body/self.
What I Learned from TechCrunch50 - 6 pieces of advice for future presenters
http://blog.dustincurtis.com/
What You'll Love About Rubinius
"I see a lot of companies here today that are more an application than a company," said Ted Driscoll of Claremont Creek Ventures. 'They are not something that would scale for ventures.'

Interesting trend. Maybe they all watched DHH's video on not trying to be the next Facebook or Twitter. =)
http://blog.dustincurtis.com/ uses Posterous.
I think the developer is in Australia, so hopefully he'll wake up in a few hours and fix it.
I didn't say that you just work hard at any random thing. it's important to do the right things.

(I think of myself as very lazy as well; I tend to grind on ideas for months or years until they are simple enough.)
There is a DC/Nova Hacker News group on meetup.com. http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC/

I would be interesting in meeting up, but this weekend is the High Holidays and can't really do much else.
You are correct, of course. It's a good thing that it doesn't require a majority to make money!
And I think it's wrong to expect corporations and government to have more moral obligation that the citizens, after all they are composed of the same people.
If people want cheap goods which are made in china and higher revenues and profits from their companies the corporations and government are going to bend over backwards, because that's what the people want.
If all people stop using Google, etc. and stop buying chinese products, write to their senators and congressmen then corporations and government will do something, till then nothing will happen.
It's the FBI compiling dossiers on everyone :)
I don't know much from Zen. I'm the opposite, if anything. I appear to be attempting to achieve a state of complete Worry.

That said, I DID build something while also working at a gruelling day job. So I know a bit about how to do this.
I don't see how these systems limit your ability to debug your code. You need just write your own testcases, which is good exercise in itself, and debug against those. If it passes your own testcases and still fails in the grading system, it indicates that either your testcases are not good enough, or that there is a bug in the system.
It's been years since I studied any knots. The ones I continue to use regularly and to great (personal) effect:

slip
square
double half hitch
bowline
barrel (combine the ends of two equal (esp. equal diameter) ropes)
figure eight
(and, I suppose, whatever it's called that I use for shoelaces)
Gordian (mostly metaphysical applications ;-)
Ask HN: Help with a file conversion
I've tried everything else I can think of, so I finally come here to HN in something akin to desperation.

I have a sound file from a dead Psion 5MX (RIP) and I'd very much like to convert it into a format that I can play on my Windows XP laptop, and on my SuSE 10.1 desktop. On my SuSE 8.1 (yes, yes, I know) machine it plays with this command:

play -r 8000 -s b -c 1 -t raw -f A filename

However, on every platform I've tried, sox segfaults, or the software I have says it doesn't recognise the format. This, despite listing the Psion A-Law format specifically.

I've spent a couple of hours with Google trying to find utilities specific to the purpose, and reinstalled and recompiled sox, but, as you might guess, I've made to real progress.

I've written a small utility to convert the file using the conversion functions from A-Law to raw as given on Wikipedia, but that produces noise with a barely audible sound track underneath.

Advice welcome. I'm not, at heart, a computer person, but I program and I devise algorithms. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822789 if you're interested in what I can do.

Questions for clarification also welcome.

So assuming you got this far, thanks for reading, and sorry if this has wasted your time.
One possibility that I didn't see mentioned is what to do when you accidentally snare an elephant. Do you hold on to it, or set it free because it's too big for one person to manage?

I have/had (don't really devote much time to it these days) a small company making niche electronic hardware. One day I got a message from $BIG_TRUCKING_COMPANY that wanted a unit for evaluation because they were rolling out a fuel management application to all of their trucks and that was my market. I was able to sell the single unit (what, me give away an eval :-) and provided what I thought was excellent support to their software guys, but never made another sale to them even after my followups.

I've wondered a few times if it was better that way. I mean, I could have made a ton of cash selling them many more boxes, but working for a large co. myself, I understand the hoops they make suppliers jump through. Perhaps I was best off having made the single $200 sale to them and sticking to my smaller customers that didn't mind dealing with a 1-man shop?
This post caused an absurd amount of controversy when it was originally posted. Is it really necessary to rehash all of it?
In that case I misinterpreted you.
Good read. Thanks for this Auston.

I especially liked the segment on Clarity/Transparency.
I like DENIM for clickable mockups

http://dub.washington.edu:2007/projects/denim/
Interesting to see which names were there from the beginning. A few unexpected ones I still see today.
Microblogs have a very interesting hype cycle: first they drop all the features that normal blogs have accumulated over the last ten years.

Then, one at a time, and to great fanfare, they add them back.
Ask HN: What's your startup's competitive advantage?
From PG's writings, I'm inspired to believe that simply being a startup with superior technology is in and of itself a huge advantage, and a lasting one.

But that's not what investors want to hear, is it?

This makes me wonder: who really are your competitors? The ones that really might kill you?
This completely abstracts the mind from the concept of self-control, and that's a logical fallacy. Conscious executive decision making originates in the mind as well. The reason you go do something is because you made the choice to do it. Period. Sure, we do things we don't 'want' to do in a narrow sense, but in the broader sense when we choose to do an unpleasant task we have decided, based on outside forces that this task is what we need/want to do.

This isn't to say that there is no merit in working with your mind and being productive when your mind is ready, but the notion that you must not bring willpower to bear on any task is taking things a bit too far.
Don't knock it if it works.

I don't see what makes Photoshop better than scribbling on a page.
I don't think so. There was a popular article from somebody else at the time that was a counterpoint, but it was entirely external.
Ah, thank you. I would love to know how he approaches creating his other website and how he creates his graphics. I love is style.
http://jackaudio.org/ claims to take the PCM output from your audio player program and save it in any of a number of formats.
It appears to an effort, written in Scala, to be Scala but with Java syntax.
Wow, number 6 is ev saying that Twitter is taking up too much of his time and he is selling Odeo.
I have a friend who graduated from college double majoring in Physics and Economics... and now works maybe 15 hours a week at a grocery store and plays video games most of the time, and this is by choice. Strange conditioning, or living naturally?

Oh, and in case you think this is merely a phase, he's been doing this for over a year now.
If you can find part-time employment on campus, you can work for a year and sit in on classes too. That way you can explore without the expense of making it official (most profs are cool with this).

As long as you trust yourself not to slack off during that year.
Winston Churchill was a lazy, lazy man who succeeded because he was capable of brilliance for the short bursts of time he worked

Do you have a reference for that? My impression was that Churchill had a fairly intense work schedule. For example, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-cohen061802.as... :

"Churchill, far from being an aristocratic lounger, was a glutton for work ... His working hours were, it is true, hard on his subordinates, extending as they frequently did into the small hours of the morning."
Another interesting surprise is that CDs are still bringing in close to the gross $ volume of cassettes at their peak. The music industry got fat partly on global sales, but also partly because they were making such a huge margin on CDs, even though they were cheaper and took up less shelf space than records.

When I was a techno DJ I spent a lot of money on both vinyl and CDs in my preferred genre (I was happy to support tiny niche labels), but I bought all my mainstream music on used CDs - they usually played fine and it was a lot cheaper. I would never have done this when vinyl was king and have never bought a cassette, ever.
Windows 7 - $30 For Students
In an ocean of Internet startups, these nine are just like all the others.
No offense to these 9 startups, but why exactly do they stand out? They seem quite random to me.
Churchill had a lopsided schedule. He would wake up, work from his bed for a few hours, then sleep through lunch and wake again in the afternoon. He was criticized for not working a proper workday, but he insisted that taking a break in between kept him sharper for longer periods of time.

So he wasn't lazy in that he did nothing—he wrote a series of histories and was one of Britain's most influential prime ministers—but he worked a unique schedule.
I think that the problem is that Chicago is just a bit too far from Champaign. Champaign is too small of a town to attract many startups, because the people and startup infrastructure aren't there. The logical thing to do is to move to Chicago after college, but if you're going to move that far, you start looking at other places. Most everyone I knew that wanted to get involved in startups moved out to the Bay after graduation. For the Bay area, its great universities are within easy driving distance of the whole area, so staying in town to start up is an easy decision.
I downvoted you; this is why:

1. Your post apologizes for itself. This is offensive to both the reader and the writer.

2. You seem to have not read the very first point in the guidelines. I am reproducing them here for convenience:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This submission is clearly gratifying to intellectual curiosity, being a primer for a presumably esoteric but actually highly useful skillset, and it does not stumble into the territory of politics, crime, sports, or animal pictures.

How is it off topic?
Yeah quite true. FB & Twitter are #1 in their markets (Twitter being a true innovation) not b/c they have a few million users but b/c they have 10s of millions and in FB's case 100s of millions.

No one even knows about the #2s in that space. Whereas with 37signals and other productivity apps there is plenty of room to be #2 or #3 or even carve out a nice well paying niche for yourself - all but impossible in an ad supported model where you need that critical mass or you go the way of Friendster..
It's tough to use intuition to bring any real insight to bear on biological systems, I'd be really interested in finding some real research into the matter.

Re: the lifejackets I was demonstrating that the effectiveness of the jackets is not effected by who chooses to use them. I was pointing out that saying less intelligent people gravitate towards sprinting does not prove that sprinting has no positive benefits on intelligence.
Thank you for letting me know I am a bit off topic. I had just read this:

http://education.jlab.org/qa/electron_01.html

and converted to MPH. I was contributing something I thought was of interest and very much on topic.
After they fail to do so, maybe this idea can be sold to more municipalities. 'See, Vancouver's still standing, plus they saved $$$ by letting their citizens point out improvements instead of paying high-priced management consultants.'
Well you should check out the stats of the national risk league or any of the multiple professional risk league sin Europe.
I think 15-20 hours of work a week is natural. That is the amount the Kung Bushmen have been known to work per week gathering food. The rest of the time is leisure.

When at work, I use a timer to time the time spent in actual productive programming. I find that if I start to go over 20 hours of productive work a week, I start to become miserable and my body reacts by bringing on colds or allergies.

Perhaps your friend chooses to work at a grocery store because he can't find a job in his field where he would have the opportunity to only work 15 hours.
Anyone know of anything like this in west Michigan?
Thanks, to better inform my judgment, any topics in particular you'd like to know about? I'm always looking for blog topics and I'll probably approach some local groups in DC to see if anyone is looking for a speaker.
I played risk online at warfish.net for a while until I felt like I had maxed out the strategy to within the noise level. It isn’t obvious to me that there is a first mover advantage. In our games the initial territories were randomly distributed, and I always felt that whoever got the “most closely clustered” territories had a tremendous advantage.

The best advice I’ve ever heard for competitive Risk is “play the other players, not the continents”. You want to try to create situations such that you are the least desirable player to attack. In general, this means turtling. Occupy a few territories that are close to each other with about 5 armies on each, and put as many armies as you can on one territory that is adjacent to enemies. Don’t take a whole continent because people will try to crack it so you don’t get the bonus armies. Try to get your armies off of continents that it looks like people will fight for. Try to get a card every turn, and hold them as long as you can.

You stop turtling when and only when you can eliminate a player in one move and get a bunch of cards from them. You will usually do this by trading in a set of cards, putting all of the armies on your big territory, and marching it all over the place. You will almost always succeed if you have about 0.75n + 1.0t armies to push with, where n is the number of armies you will need to kill, and t is the number of new territories you will need to occupy.

(Corollary, if you’re weak then try to use all your cards so that you’re not a valuable target.)

Eliminating a player who has 5 cards almost assures that you will win the game.

After a player or two has been eliminated the game will transition to one where the players try to hold continents to collect bonus armies. If the players are fairly competent then the winner will mostly be decided by how lucky people are with collecting cards. The yield from trading in a set of cards starts to dwarf the armies collected from holding territories. Almost as important, the new armies can be place freely.

I have never seen Asia successfully held for even a single turn.

(Regarding the first alleged first-mover advantage: obviously it can’t be disadvantageous to move first. If it were, then the first player would take no action so as to avoid the disadvantage. By induction, if it was disadvantageous to go first then the game would never advance past the initial state.)
Small simple explanation to Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (D-H)
Yes, my name is impossible to get in its base form, even when I'm around from the very beginning.
So wait, are they writing HTML/CSS by hand? That's a bit stupid.