skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But you're not likely to find real estate that cheap in the city. Even in the current economy. Trust me, I've been looking. (shameless plug: I just started a coworking space in Atlanta called Ignition Alley: http://www.ignitionalley.com )
Check out Twitter API: Up and Running:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154622

Chapter 1 has a great section called "Creative Uses of Twitter" (& a history of Twitter). Examples range from breaking news & games like Artwiculate to organizing protests & flash mobs. Also, Twitter is adding geotagging [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/21/twitter-goog...], so you'll soon be able to get feeds for, say, restaurant deals in your area...
Another wrinkle in the "fab-prefab" movement. Why is it that beautiful, well designed manufactured homes aren't already the norm? What are the barriers?
You're right. There would have to be a financial benefit to it – we'll continue to fund you if you stay in Indiana. Perhaps you should read up on incentive programs your state offers startups.

This issue is somewhat near and dear to my heart because I've seen how bad Michigan has gotten. (Partly because of that, I live in D.C. now, and the rent certainly isn't cheap.)
I would say: keep focusing on fundamentals. Learning new technologies is pretty easy if you do understand the basic rules that they are all based on.

For example: I you have no idea what the "De Casteljau"-algorithm is about, how could you implement a adequate solution for a given problem with any technology? But if you do, there's not so much difference implementing it with Canvas/JavaScript, SVG, VML, Whatever.

Knowledge of the fundamentals makes you priceworthy. There are enough Visual Studio and other Wysiwyg-Clickers (What is NMEA? There's no button for that in my IDE ...). What is hard to find in software industry are people that really understand what they are doing.
I think "[old school unix] has gotten so much attention lately" because of accidents in the timing of computer science culture and its victories.

The Linux / BSD driven revival of Unix happened, un-fortuitously, just when object-orientation, graphics, UML, patterns, etc, were hitting their peak, largely because they were super successful in dealing with problems in graphic interface design. So these oo approaches became dominant in curriculums and paradigms far beyond their applicability, and no one bothered to study the classics of the previous generation like APUE etc.

Smalltalk and C++ begat Java, begat Ruby/ Python, and now we have a whole bunch of server-side programmers who know how to inherit from multiple base classes but don't know what fork() really does; when these young people (ahem) discover how well their grandfather's Unix addresses many of their current server-side problems, well, they are thrilled.

Let's just say it's the same thing as a twenty something discovering Sly and the Family Stone vinyl in the basement... Yeah, it rocks.
There you're starting to touch on one of my worries, yes.
It's not Erlang it's anything.

A screw driver is a pretty multi-functional tool: you can undo screws with it, you can push the cork in a bottle of wine, I guess you could shank someone with it. However, that doesn't mean most of those uses are optimized.

I'd much rather read an article that says a screw driver is an awesome way of inserting or removing screws (much better than saw a hammer) than read one saying it's the right solution for every problem. Personally I open wine with a corkscrew, and no, I've never shanked anyone.
"As a white, it makes me somewhat sick to my stomach to think that I might have benefited from affirmative action. If Asians are better than me, score better than me, I shouldn't displace any of them in the university."

I didn't know this when I first heard of affirmative actions (moved to the US in junior year) but predominantly Black Colleges have to adhere to quotas too but have a hard time doing so. Many of those colleges simply do not get enough white or other ethnicity applicants. In fact, some give full scholarships to white students to try to attract them.

So a measure that is supposed to help bring more minorities to college actually causes them to loose places they previously had.

Frankly, having grown up in Canada, I had never really thought of the question until I moved to the US. I guess we sorta have a blind eye to those issues up here. Dunno if that's good or bad.
I think Bill Clementson uses these: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060131.html
Foot pedals are indeed an excellent idea. There don't seem to be any available on the market that are programmable under non-Windows-XP, however, and I have not had the chance to build my own yet.
I am currently working out of the Caroline Collective when in Houston. They're a non-profit coworking outfit. (http://carolinecollective.cc/) I've already met some interesting people. (TX-RX Labs for starters: http://www.houstontechnologycollective.org/) This seems to have some of the benefits, but doesn't require travel outside of my home city.

If I wanted to do a startup that required 6-9 months of full time development, the room+board incubator sounds attractive.
To be honest, the same problem exists for RubyForge, since you could build/release a gem with a user name prefix and it doesn't check.

The short answer is: be explicit with what source you're looking at, and start looking into gem signing/certs since it's the way we can trust gems.

More info here: http://litanyagainstfear.com/blog/2009/10/09/on-gem-forking/

*Edit: Looks like rufo already cleared this up...thanks man!
Perhaps also more trusting/optimistic.

Ie, for the newspaper experiment, the message said there were 43 pictures but why should you trust it?
I've been talking to RubyCentral about supporting the project, patience has been key here.

More details on what I want to do: http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubygems-developers/2009-Augu...
Wow, Mary lives in my own city! What a coincidence. ;-)

Flagged.
It sounds like you simply think that forcing employers/unprivileged employees to bear the costs of military service and child rearing is good policy. And it sounds like you would rather label those who disagree "sexist" or "anti-soldier" rather than actually debating this point.

Sorry, but that's just an ad-hominem.

Yes, the employer is worried that someone might miss a few days of work. This worry isn't sexist/anti-soldier, even if it results in fewer women/soldiers being hired. It would only be sexist if fewer women/soldiers (rather than fewer absences) was the goal.
In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear.

Media outlets are still doing this? Really? Don't you have some celebrity affair to cover or something instead?
"I get started the minute I get out of bed, and I have all the context there in my head, so I'm productive immediately."

Well there's your problem! Get some of it written down, on paper, Evernote, or wherever works for you. You will definitely improve your context switching if whenever you need to switch gears you can review your notes from the last time you were working on that task.

I work as a freelance consultant for several clients, and I keep different notebooks for each one. I don't think I'd be able to manage this if I tried to keep everything in my head.
A lot of sales & marketing is engineering.
I'm in Atlanta, and very interested. I also live in Midtown just down the road from you.

Taking a look at the web site now.
Oh, usually I'm the person that's out defending that business folks can contribute quite a lot to a startup. I'm just questioning the logic that you need to do things that way, as the article implies, and not based on some fuzzy notion of utility, but just looking at the history of successful startups. Some have business people on the founding team; a lot don't.
Florence Henderson inexplicably launches tech support service
I wonder if you could get funding from the state this way?

As for the blind leading the blind, how about a teleconferencing link to Boston or Silicon Valley? A company I worked for tried having a couple of webcams/projectors in a meeting room during a Friday social hour to try and link the Connecticut and Houston offices. It only went so far. But maybe if you had an entire wall of an old school "terminal room" style workroom, this could work. Have 3 connected projector/webcam sets linked on a pair of dedicated machines, with software that could quickly and rapidly change functions of the two side screens. (Add some Wiimote hackery for a cheap augmented multi-touch whiteboard, or instant desktop sharing with any machine in the room.)

Hmm, if a rig like this could be scrounged together cheaply enough, one could form a community of such virtually linked hacker-spaces as a network! Maybe use daily round robin, or random pairing. And then, why limit it to just Boston or Silicon Valley? How about Houston-Atlanta for starters?
He's talking about RubyCocoa, which is what OS X comes with, not MacRuby. RubyCocoa uses the Objective-C/Cocoa object bridge, to allow Ruby to talk to Cocoa objects and send messages.

MacRuby is a different beast. It compiles with LLVM, is not bridged, and therefore works directly with Obj-C/Cocoa.

(Though, honestly, the bridged languages are really pretty good, too. Obj-C bridging is good in general. MacRuby is just sensational.)
The trouble is only for developers of native Android app. Not intended, but arguably Google may benefit even more with mess of compatibility problem because eventually only mobile web works across Android phones.
Regardless of how loosely you feel the other statistics are defined, homicide rates don't leave much wiggle room. And homicide rates are many times higher in the west, particularly in the US.

>1 in 1000 per year is satisfactory, if you ask me. I don't think you can do much better than that among the population as a whole without sacrificing a ton more privacy and freedom.

What leads you to that conclusion? From the sound of this article, things are quite a bit more restrictive there. Kicking children out of their normal schools for nothing more than an honest mistake which hurt nobody isn't exactly the most forgiving system.
Schools are not looking to admit the best students - they are looking to admit the best class. That means that they have an idea of what the shape and character of that class will look like, after taking into account certain restrictions (legacies, athletes, the band needs a tuba player, whatnot). There are only so many slots for high-achieving student council presidents.

I look like every other Indian kid to the admissions committees; I needed to distinguish myself in other ways. If you're poor and Latino and you qualify academically, guess what, you've already distinguished yourself. Anti-Asian quotas aren't anti-Asian. They're anti-homogenous.
throw_away: he who can withstand exceptionally long, dense books.
I love the teleconf idea. And not just because I'd get to put a teleconf setup in my house.
But this quickly becomes a case of optimizing for the wrong variable -- because it's already become, "How can you find a way for them to stay?" rather than, "How can you find a way for them to be successful?"

I also don't think that you hook up with mentors via teleconferencing. For whatever reason, face to face meetings matter a lot. You don't have dinner with someone via a teleconference. You don't tell stories over beer via a teleconference. There's a rigid formality -- "Why are we having this conversation?" I think mentorship rarely happens within those lines.

One of the comments above talks about the face-to-face networking opportunities. There's a reason he didn't say, "Why would I want that? I can call up people via Skype Video now..." ;-)
Count me in for the hacker commune.

I've seen so much work get done in similar sittings for musicians and writers.

And it'd be great to have more people who "get it" physically around you.
Now we are currently asking children, 17, 18 or 19 years old, to try and assess how much of a student loan debt burden they can handle vis-a-vis their future income over their entire lives.

19-year-olds are children? We let them go to war and get killed. We can let them go into debt.
This would be a good place to start:

http://www.in.gov/iedc/grants.htm
I'm not sure you'd need to lock people in geographically. If you retain some equity in their venture, and it succeeds, it builds the community no matter where they end up relocating. And if there are enough people doing cool things in Richmond or Timbuctu, then a certain number of them will stay anyway.

Ultimately, enough would stay that they'd influence the local economy. Frankly, any one startup here would influence the economy. It's a small town and hasn't had serious industry since about WWII. Although when my house was built, it was one of the richest towns in this part of the country, and the architecture shows it.

They built cars here. Pianos. Louis Armstrong and Gene Autry recorded here. It was an actual place. It wouldn't take much to make it a place again.
I type 80+ words a minute regularly. It would be insanely difficult to type at that speed without the little nubs on f and j keys, as well as the tactile feedback as fingers slide over keys preparing for what they're going to be typing next.
I disagree; I think he is just using a slightly different definition of luck than you are. Luck is not simply a matter of "defying the odds" or getting the better end of coinflips more often. It's also about opportunities. I think the article did a nice job of examining how "lucky" people are often more fortunate largely because they give themselves more chances to be lucky.

The point about perception of luck being self-perpetuating is good as well. If you view yourself as unlucky, you will tend to be more timid in situations where you might need a little luck to succeed, while a lucky individual will be willing to take more chances.

This dynamic is very visible in poker... After a run of bad luck, it's very easy to miss an opportunity to do something like play a drawing hand aggressively to make a player fold (I don't want to get the money in and lose, again!), instead taking a more passive, less successful route (I'll call the flop... of course, I missed again and don't have odds to continue, now I have to fold.).
I don't think it's so much that they are surprised it happens. They are just surprised to find they aren't considered a minority.
Intuit is putting their website business front and center now
Treatment of depression: time to consider folic acid and vitamin B12.
Good points, but...

You should feel pain when unclear

I had to follow the link to find out what he meant by "when unclear." It's ambiguous between "express yourself unclearly" and "perceive something unclearly," which is a pretty big difference.

Actually, my first thought was the character in some Woody Allen (?) movie who just won't come into focus. It jeopardizes his career as an actor.
Maybe we should get together and write up a proposal and a standards document? We need something that requires minimal financial outlay, but that can be made up for with a lot of technical skill/knowledge. (Like, with the Wiimote hacking, there would be some soldering, dremeling, and hot glue gun action involved.) A fairly hefty bandwidth requirement seems reasonable, though we would only want to take a minority of what is available. (Caroline Collective has 16mbps down and 8 up.)

Future-proofing the standard will take some thought. We would like the standard to grow as technology becomes available, but still be inclusive of older installations.
optimizing for the wrong variable
I agree. If they stay, they'll stay. The idea is to support them, and benefit from it at the same time.

But I stand by my love for the teleconferencing setup in my house. I'm all over that. (Except, of course, that you're right.)
"SEO consultants are just web designers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job"
Effective use of twitter??? Keep it blocked. At the least when you're working on something.
Dyson launches the bladeless electric fan
Damn - thanks!
"While not intended for occupants to remain inside during a hurricane, the structure is designed to minimize catastrophic damage and preserve the homeowner’s investment, Mayne says.

In case of a flood, the base of the house acts as a raft, allowing the home to rise on guide posts up to 12 feet as water levels rise. In the Lower 9th Ward, which saw some of the worst flooding in the city during Katrina, floodwater reached as high as 12 feet."

Looks like this helps 'preserve' your house in the event of flooding.
The quote comes from ex-FCC Chair William Kennard, who argued that this kind of capitalism is triggered "when companies invest in lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians, instead of plant, people, and customer service."

Good line.

I think the overall impression most tech people get (because we've all seen this before, in various industries) is that AT&T and other communications carriers are content to sit on their asses (after taxpayers subsidized the creation of their networks) and do whatever it takes to avoid actually working. It sounds stupid when I write it, but that's what it seems like – a lazy dude with no drive to improve. Things are good now, the people in charge make enough money. Why change if we have to? They'll drag their feet, wave their hands, do anything except improve and deliver products, because that shit is hard. Let's just dick around with the system to impede everyone else's progress as much as possible, so that we aren't made obsolete as quickly.
Just don't be too controlling. "Incubators tend to exert more control than VCs.." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html, http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html
I also don't think that you hook up with mentors via teleconferencing. For whatever reason, face to face meetings matter a lot. You don't have dinner with someone via a teleconference. You don't tell stories over beer via a teleconference. There's a rigid formality --

Well, I don't know about mentoring per se, but if you have an "always on" connection in the workspace, then you leave the situation open for serendipity. What I'm envisioning is just a "serendipity conduit" or maybe "serendipity space." The workspace can become a play-space in the evening or on the weekend. I could even envision communal dinners.

I'm not thinking about people "calling up" other people. I'm thinking of communal spaces with "magic walls."
At least part of the problem is that it isn't well defined what colleges look for in applicants. For applying to something like YC, the goal is pretty clear. Applications are selected based on their likelihood of making lots of money in the future.

Colleges select (I think) looking for people who will be "successful". Being "successful" in life is fortunately very hard to define.
Swoopo profits Greasemonkey script (see how much they're scamming out of people)
That ... actually sounds pretty interesting.

Why limit it to two? Or, I suppose, if the rig were cheap, you'd just have another room that was Houston today.
If only there was a way to directly link the credulous fools to the scruple-less cheats

I suspect that some black-hat entrepreneur is already working on such a database and the tools for automatically harvesting such user's information. Or was that last line sarcasm?

We had those. They were called things like Compuserve and Prodigy. And they didn't do well, as you recall.

But those things had a fee for entry. To directly address spammers, without creating undue friction to participation, all you need is some sort of a fee for posting. But alas, the problem is with collecting the payment. One could argue that stackoverflow's karma/privilege system demands a non-monetary sort of payment, but they don't have this as a barrier to posting.
How Yelp deals with everybody getting four stars (on average)
Just a thought...and this could be very crazy, however if you were able to pull 'camps' together, where each camp is 'hosted' by someone 'famous'.

Just like Y Combinator is hosted by PG, etc., if you get the city behind it, then get a few noteworthy ex-entrepreneurs - and put them up in a building of their own, they might be interested.

As the other guys/gals pointed out, there has to be some key value-proposition. Maybe something unique to the area?

This might be something you might be able to get a federal grant to do, considering the many ideas the President's team has been throwing against the wall to see what sticks. I wouldn't be surprised if there were grants already available that you could use.

If I were not married with a kid, I would definitely strongly consider it.
True and nicely put. But, I would say the "surprise" here is not that it's harder for Asian Americans to get in relative to African Americans. You'd think that if you are guaranteeing or biasing towards a certain number of select groups, then the unselected groups would be equally biased against. But that's not what this study is finding. It's pointing towards the possibility that Asians are not just disadvantaged relative to their fellow minorities; they are disadvantaged relative to whites as well.
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We are using Google Docs' forms tied to a spreadsheet for our startup. We have it load in a jquery window and looks decent, it is fully integrated, is customizable to be as complex or simple as you want, requires no registration and is free.
I don't really want to fight the last war. The real evil to be fought here is credentialism. Apparently even PG might agree: http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

If you take care of that, both from a social angle and for employment, it won't feel like your life has taken a hit if you don't get into one of these schools. In fact you might not even want to go anymore.
Sheerly out of curiosity, how much is that 23-unit building going for?

Edit: Also, you should put an email address in your profile.
Sculley nearly buried Apple. It's by no means clear that was a smart decision.
I would think a school wants more future billionaires and Nobel prize winners instead of cherry picking 10 whites 10 asians 10 hispanics 10 blacks majoring in Art History and Divinity.

This is certainly the image that Harvard et al. are cultivating.
The real evil to be fought here is credentialism.

That's a very good point, and thanks for the link to pg's essay on that issue.
I dunno. I'll ask tomorrow. It can't be much; it has no parking, there's no work here, and my guess it would need roof work, electrical upgrades, and plumbing. If they're asking more than $500,000 they're dreaming. (Frankly, if they're asking for money at all, they're dreaming.)

Edit: I do have an email addy in my profile.

Edit: um, now.
Perhaps diversity is part of the education.
OK; I've done that too. Userscripts are definitely better for hackers, but the article claims they're also better because they don't leak memory and extensions do. Is that true?
the best use of twitter I ever made was when i was listening to pandora and it stopped playing. I tried a few things, figured out it wasn't my network so i thought that maybe pandora was down. i went on twitter and searched #pandora... sure enough, 4 posts in the last few minutes that pandora was down. I added my tweet saying the same thing.

Later, my wife was stuck in a huge traffic jam, i went on twitter and searched for her location and the word 'accident' and sure enough, up came a link to a web page detailing why there was such congestion and how far it went.

twitter is good for finding out about something that is happening RIGHT now.
No, just that if Eliezer is going to critique a position, he should critique the best version of said position.