skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling.

There are lots of unhappy people in the First World. Telling them that they should be happy because of how much worse things could be is the equivalent of telling a child to eat their broccoli because there are starving children in Africa.

I liked your comment enough to upmod it, but this argument struck me as being considerably less insightful than the (excellent) rest.
> Logo design in today’s world is totally underrated.

I totally disagree take for example the case of the Pepsi versus the Coke logo changes: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/consumerist/2009/07/pe... and who is still on top? Coke, because they still have the better product (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070527_COKE_GRAPHIC.ht...).

So, in my opinion a good logo is totally overrated. Sure, Pepsi and Coke are well established brands and maybe this won't apply to a startup but I wouldn't say either of the logos are particularly outstanding, especially the most recent Pepsi one but if I prefer Pepsi over Coke, the logo ain't stopping me.

Edit: Just to add, really liked the article just thought the above was an interesting thought.
Week in Review: Smart Grid, Nuclear Energy and Nukes in space
As alternative energy funding plans are rolled out, a long-running debate over nuclear rages on Earth and in Space.
"Thrift / self-sacrifice: There's less and less need for this, as we're immensely more wealthy than we used to be,"

I think this makes the argument for the financial wisdom of the old better than anything else you could say (assuming, of course, you're not "old" yourself).

EDIT: Ok, anyone want to argue that we were not in need of more thrift over the last decade?
How to Redis — Part #3 of the paperplanes.de Redis Saga
I'm 22, not old by any standards. The value from "old people" isn't what they can do for me right now (its my turn) its what they did for me long before I existed. Without old people building all this great infrastructure, I would not be living the great life I have now. Feel free to keep taking money out of my paycheck to pay for their medication, I hope my grandchildren will do the same.
If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?
How does Coke have the better product? Maybe Coke's dominance is due to choosing the right logo and sticking with it instead of constantly changing their visual identity.
Cool, thanks for the tip on using "Ask HN:".

Yep OpenID offers a step in the right direction, but not a complete solution. I actually offer this now so people can login with an account they already have (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, etc - this uses rpxnow.com). This reduces the hurdle slightly since they can often login with just a few clicks instead of a full registration process, but it's still a hurdle. Thanks!
Are there actually people who have trouble thinking of business ideas?
I don't think that the author was implying the existence of a vast conspiracy to keep people dumb; rather, the author was suggesting that society is operating in a manner which he believes is suboptimal.

Let's say memorisation is taught in lieu of problem solving for the reasons you stated, then consequently the people who are good at memorisation become thought of as smart, since they do well academically. This, in turn, influences the education system to focus more on memorisation (though, of course, this is all hypothetical).
Also, it looks like I'm unable to edit it now. So I guess I'll have to start a new one?
This is the kind of project I really like; it's the way things should be. Very awesome. This should become universal. A barrier to adoption is that the installation process seems a bit scary/involved - if it was straightforward, this would fly off the shelves like hotcakes (...er), and become part of the standard bash distribution.

I wrote something similar recently (in terms of tech, not in terms of application): a parser for a language with which the user can specify another language (which is used to parse something else). With a lot of experience in it (including a compiler subject at uni), and having written similar things before, professionally and in research, and including reusing some aspects from previous code, it took me 2 weeks - in Java.

How long did it take you? I'm thinking it might have been much faster for you, even without those benefits I had, because you wrote in Haskell...

Does anyone know if there is a Haskell that targets the JVM? That could be a cool solution for me...

I want to note that while 2 weeks seems like a long time, it's fairly straightforward once you know how; the hard work is in what comes before it: coming up with the concept, the design of the language etc.

BTW: "GitHub is Temporarily Offline." http://github.com
yeah, clear ripoff of explainxkcd.com. these guys aren't even original
Patrick tells us everything we need to know about "revisiting 'the fold'"- we don't, it's still there, and it's still important.

Go upvote him: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840972
Migrating from happstack 0.1 to happstack 0.3
"Postgres Plus includes, among other things, compatibility with Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL)'s PL/SQL data access language."

This is huge (if it works). At my job, PL/SQL has us locked in a loveless marriage with Oracle. Sign a pre-nup, use stored procedures judiciously.
Distributed FS: MogileFS
Bottle Bank Arcade Machine
I know at least Spark and Lightspeed have incubators of sorts and that NEA at least does that sometimes.

I think the Sequoia thing has been a tempest in a teapot. It may have miffed some other firms, but I don't think that's affecting meetings we're getting and hasn't ever come up in talks.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911720

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911878

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905268

There are probably more.
Coca-cola has changed its logo MANY times in the last 100 years:

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/coca-col...

Remember, Coca-cola tried to rebrand the product as "Coke," then rebranded it as "Coca-Cola Classic" when that failed, and then rebranded it again as just "Coca-Cola" recently. That's three names for the product. Pepsi has only used two (Pepsi and Pepsi-Cola).
And yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.
Quick Hiring Tip for Founders/HR -- Reverse Captchas ;)
Usually when we put up a posting, we get sent a ton of resumes. One trick we used to help weed out the people who shotgun apply is to put in instructions in the posting to put two words in the subject, like "Read it!" -- like a reverse captcha.

If we're going to put in the time to read resumes, schedule interviews, etc, it should be with people who are genuinely interested in the position.

Anyone have other HR tips to share?
I'd buy balloons and a bag of rice, make five juggling balls and busk. The balls take about 30 minutes to make, I'd get about an hour of busking, so I'd make about $40 as a one off, maybe $100, depending where I am.
Argh! Here's a hastily-setup mirror. Yay for distributed version control!

http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/projects/compleat/

The first commit was on October 6, so this release took about three weeks of programming (mostly on the bus and when I should have been in bed sleeping). And you're totally right - a lot of the work was done in my head long before I typed "git init."

The very next thing on my to-do list is learning the right way to package this with Cabal so that a single command will install and configure it, and so I can provide pre-built Debian and Ubuntu packages.
It is true that older people still have things to offer (if I may put it so crassly)... but that doesn't make it any less true that they have much less to offer than they used to. There isn't much you can do about that.

After all, the article itself pointed out that older people still have stores of wisdom, but where a young person may want to hear about how to make his crops grow better from any source that has that info (especially after your first crop failure), young people in general aren't looking for moral guidance. (Again, until after it has failed them somehow, which tends to take more than one year. They'll learn such things just in time to be ignored by their own children.)

There has been a fairly objective sea change here. It's not just narcissism, in fact I don't think it's narcissism at all.
Kenta Cho, sole member of ABA Games, uses D to write his (excellent, open source, freeware) shmups. Go for the code, stay for the games:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html
Charging from Day 1: Genius or Deathknell?
What is this "decline" in traditional Chinese characters you're talking about? Unlike the PRC, Taiwan and HK both have universal literacy. Residents of Taiwan in particular are amongst the most voracious readers on the planet. According to one study I read, only the Japanese are reading more. Not only that, but mainlanders are now increasingly familiar with traditional characters, due to the influx of HK/TW music videos and movies. The opposite is not true... not even in HK.

Whatever the reasons you have for disliking traditional characters, it's important to recognize that the simplification process involved a trade-off. Characters became faster to write by hand, somewhat more phonetic (for Mandarin speakers), but recognizability was sacrificed to a degree as was semantic information (e.g. swapping the 燕 out of 嚥 and slapping in an 因).

In reading, the important thing is how distinct a character is from another, not how simple it is.

Look at these character pairs (traditional/simplified)

義 vs. 叉 / 义 vs. 叉

無 vs. 天 / 无 vs. 天

廣 vs. 廠 / 广 vs. 厂

術 vs. 木 / 术 vs. 木

When it comes to hand-writing, which isn't nearly as important as it was in the past, most people do use some simplifications for speed. Most aren't as extreme as the PRC simplifications were, though. In truth, simplification still hasn't met its original proponents' goals of promoting widespread literacy, while the areas using traditional characters achieved those goals without changing their writing system.

The Taiwanese Americans you were speaking to were almost certainly aware of all of the above, but they might have been too polite or just too off-guard to point it out.
Very interesting, I feel kinda stupid now. However after docmach's comment below I believe this reenforces the point about logo design being overrated.

However, I think it is more down to an overall brand rather than a specific logo.
+1 on the value is in the data comment. Pick one platform and go all out. You should be able to partner with quite a few existing products.
+1 on the time of day comment. It's most definitely a different business to the one you are proposing but a valid thought. There is value to a system which can show how many people are in line at a given establishment at a given time. Both to the consumer and to the company. Can you coordinate how many cell phone signals are in an establishment similar to the companies that track cell phones on the freeway for congestion monitoring?
Since there is so much emphasis here on technical things, go look at a Lisp Machine then we'll talk. Or what Engelbart did in 1968. It's common knowledge that industry practice is consistently a decade or more behind what is happening in computer science research. Anyone familiar with S-expressions for representing data was not at all surprised by JSON, as an arbitrary example, and might even know some of the pitfalls to avoid and how to best take advantage of this "new" technology.

Secondly, I'm surprised so many are taking at face value the value of Googling arbitrary facts. Without some context to put that information in, or to even know what to Google when you face a new problem, Google won't help you much. Ever take an "open book" exam? Did having the book with you do you much good if you didn't also study?

Lastly, an inherit premise of this whole discussion is that the primary value of a human being is his or her contribution to the gross domestic product. Is that really how we want to evaluate people?
Anyone have other HR tips to share?

Emails from China, India, Pakistan, and Iran which start "Dear Professor Percival" get immediately sent to the bit-bucket. (Those four countries are notorious for students spamming research assistant applications.)

Emails from other countries get a polite reply explaining that I'm not a professor. :-)
You know, now I think more about it, I would very much doubt it does have a better product but that it is down to branding, so maybe logo is important. Not really so sure anymore :).

See my reply to briansmith.
Get as far as you can on $5 of gas and drive to friends and family's houses running msconfig and cleaning up crapware to make their computer run faster. Easily $20 - $40 a pop. Protip: reinvest a little profit into more gas, make even more money!
by convention in base 36, numbers can be represented by [0-9] and [a-z]. 1(36)=1(10) a(36)=10(10) and z(36)=36(10).
or even worse "Xyz closed your message window" in ICQ and other messangers.

Agreed about that, I've had (ex) coworkers give me grief about that, as if closing their message window was some form of devaluing their comments... when in reality I was just trying to make MY environment more manageable for getting my work done, unbelievable. I wish IMs wouldn't include such pointless notifications, I'm not even sure there is really any value to 'X is typing a response'.
I've done my part and not upvoted this.
I don't have first hand experience with them, but I've heard good things about ginger (yep!) with regard to motion sickness, and the British Navy supposedly (per an "outfitter" catalog selling them) has elastic wristbands with a plastic tab/point that presses against an acupressure point in the wrist.

Mums had a 27' sailboat for a while, on Lake Michigan. I was only out on it a couple of times. I found the "keep your eyes on the horizon" suggestion quite useful; going below, out of sight of the horizon, was not a lot of fun.
If your life is difficult, someone undoubtedly has it worse, but feels hopeful
I just remembered reading this:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2009-09-17-young-...

"The incomes of the young and middle-aged — especially men — have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s, a USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found."

So, looks like the fundamental premise of this post is in error. It is the young who's economic utility is in question right now, if the market is to judge.
The "screwed-up" free Web claims its next casualty: online security
Then you'd just sort by length, too.
Further, there is always the domain-specific knowledge that walks out the door. We can read source code and eventually understand it, but the reasons behind the algorithms might be the result of years of experience in the domain. That's not easy to replace quickly.

The core team at my employer has been together for two and half years, and four members of the seven person team have been together since day one.
It's a shame that Firefox doesn't know what to do with the links to the recordings.
The Power of Being Personal on Your Blo
We perceive as a culture that they have less to offer because we have shifted our measure of value. Whether our perception proves accurate is going to have to be proven out by time. I say that it will not be proven correct.
I don't know - they're not saying "Don't apply, old peo^h^h^h^h^h^h^h corporate lifers", they seem to be saying, "We're not old corporate lifers; this won't be an Initech job."

I'm not necessarily convinced, but I don't think they consciously mean "old people need not apply".
This is not to mention that kick ass programmers that leave can end up being competitors. Any employee that's valuable knows the ins and outs of your company/software (what's good about it, where the limitations are, what customers want/don't want). letting them walk away is a risk.

Setting up an environment where employees often walk is even worse, i.e. where there is rampant "poor communication, disregard for an employee's cares and well-being, or a combination of the both". I've been there and watched great programmers leave unhappily. It causes morale issues and leaves a huge hole in institutional knowledge.
I prefer to hold fast to the idea that this commenter actually believes that I think the letters C and D are vaginal.
It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure it would have any benefits for Apple. Sprint has major problems from the lowest levels of customer support all the way up to management (Nextel merger?) Apple would have to gut the entire company. Sprint has no presence outside of the US so Apple would still have to deal with carriers and would still have to produce a GSM/LTE iPhone. Verizon has already committed heavily to LTE and AT&T is leaning in the same direction. Unless AT&T has a change of heart WiMax is going to be doomed in the US.

It would however make sense for Apple to cut a deal with Sprint. Sprint roams on Verizon's network so if Apple were to produce a CDMA iPhone exclusively for Sprint they could sneak into Verizon's network through the backdoor. Sprint is desperate so they probably would accept almost any terms from Apple. Sprint's monthly package costs are more reasonable than both AT&T and Verizon and this would attract a whole new market to the iPhone. Additionally Apple could offer the same CDMA model unlocked, unsubsidized, for use on Verizon's network. (if Verizon didn't want to make a deal)
#1. Buy a hammer.
#2. Threaten people with it.
#3. Take their money.
#4. Profit!

I kid!
Won't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?
This will only increase the snake-oil efforts of companies trying to hawk brain-scans as the new "honesty test".
Natural Selection 2 - Pre-Sales Completely Changed Our Financial Picture
Reflections of a Newsosaur: Wild guesses won’t solve journalism crisis
Is this supposed to be some sort of a sarcastic or humorous piece ?

Yes, old people may not be tech-savvy but of course there are lots of counter-examples to this and yes technology is not the only thing in life so why take painfully contrived technology based examples ?

Then , there is the whole definition of old , my boss considers me a whipper-snapper , my Boss's son considers me an old guy.

So, what new insight does this blog post bring ?
Since it's a video, I will risk ruining the 'surprise' for you since it's hard to scan a video. She says the most successful teams didn't really use the $5 because it was a limitation, they broke out of the standard "framing" of the problem.
I am one of the many that pre-ordered the $40 version. Natural Selection 1 was so good, I wouldn't even mind if they are never even able to get NS2 out the door. I also find it very interesting that one third of their capital was raised this way.
Just because people don't know anything about fonts doesn't mean they don't recognize when something looks nice.
Set the kids out front with as much lemonade and cookies as $5 will buy. Pretty sure they could at least double that $5 in two hours on a warm afternoon with lots of passing traffic.
If the question is what I would actually do, I'd probably offer "computer tune-ups" as someone else suggested. That, or set up and secure wifi routers. A lot of people are afraid of wifi routers because they've heard the person next door can get them in trouble; solving this problem is of definite value to them. Once I did this for someone whose house was big and radio-interfering enough to require repeaters; I made $100 in an hour.

If the question is what would make the most money, I'd print up a bunch of official-looking flyers and an official-looking record sheet, go to some high-traffic spot, and collect "donations". This is very unethical, but it probably earns money the fastest of anything that can be set up so quickly.
I like Feynman's description, where he actually used 10^x first, just noting that 10^x for small real x was 1 + ln(10)*x (approximating from the derivative), assuming that this worked for small complex values too, and then extended to larger values by squaring.
Great, if enough people use this we'll see the emergence of unfollow spam.
Use the 5 dollars to buy a case of Mt. Dew, hop onto eLance or mech turk.

edit: Make that Red Bull, time is money.
That's totally true, though it may depend on the sort of web site you have. The company I work for is in the comparison shopping space, which tends to have a high bounce rate and get a lot of traffic from google. Putting something above the fold has a huge effect if it makes a few percent more people stay and interact with the site.
Very good article, I like the examination of various open source project's use of memory allocation and failure checking.

For me personally it depends on the project. If there is nothing to clean up in the rest of the code an abort in the malloc function is fine. But if there are other things to deal with at shutdown you have to bit the bullet and check your return values all the way back up the call stack.
Fair enough - but "nice" has nothing to do with it. If you're using Twitter, as many are, to get a message out, it's useful to know who no longer thinks your message is interesting, especially if you can pair it with a cause (a recent tweet that may have been offensive or a string of self-centered tweets, e.g.).

Like I said, I was just tinkering around and thought I'd share something I made that might be useful to someone.
"As it turns out, 95 percent of preorders have been for the more expensive package, which Cleveland admits has "really surprised" the team."

I was one of those 95% and I think the primary reason for this is people want to pay him for the original mod. I don't care if NS2 is terrible, in my mind I am paying him for NS1.
Willing to give up blue skies for climate fix?
So how we can "innovate with" increasing the involvement in society of those with non-analytical, non-technical bents?
So, the 2 hours is more important than the 5 dollars? I did get caught by the framing, but in retrospect I should have been tipped off by the fact that most wages are > 2.50/hr.
perhaps highland capital. i'm not sure if spark's program has invested in anything yet. could be lightspeed as well, although they generally fly below the radar (no press for their launches, etc.)
FREE ICE CREAM
You could give away ice cream in the park on a hot day - and plenty of people would take it; but that wouldn't make it a good business.
"Check this out": A defense of marketing and advertising
What's "perceived" about the fact that we don't need them to give us typewriting tips? What's "perceived" about the fact that I really have no need to spend quality time with my grandparent fixing an engine from the 1930s? What's "perceived" about the fact that most people don't need to learn how to can food?

It's not perception. It's fact.

I say this as someone who in fact spends a lot of time with my grandparents, has spent the last three weekends canning applesauce and visiting my grandparents in the hospital, unlike all of my other several cousins. This is because I am a whacko that actually does value their wisdom, their life stories, and some of the store of "ancient wisdom" like how to preserve your own food and advice on gardening from people who have been doing it for half a century. I've walked the walk here. But this only further strengthens the observation I have that there isn't much else I need to go to them for, compared to what might have been useful 200 years ago.

Their entire value isn't gone, but there are huge swathes of value that are. Bemoaning that fact won't change anything. I mention this because you need to look these facts in the eye if you're going to be able to do anything about it. Waxing rhapsodic about entirely hypothetical values isn't going to change anybody's mind on anything. The only way you're going to care is if you look the situation dead on, see the truth, and react to it.

And many will still choose to not care about moral wisdom or how to preserve food or anything else like that. I disagree with them, but such is life.