skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This one got comments? ;-)

Now, on a more serious tone: not all HN users are in the same timezone. Sometimes, a story gets posted and few people are up to read/upvote it and it then gets buried by the constant influx of stories. My website gets lots of referrals from HN, mostly in California, but a lot also comes from NY and Europe through HN.

The dupe was not flagged because the URLs are different: the first one had a couple URL parameters ("?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss") this one hasn't. HN could, conceivably, flag dupes by content, but that would require it to be more clever and I don't know how much free time to teach it this trick pg has.
What are financial derivatives?
Randy Pausch
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pg, through his writings (I never met him in real life).

I was studying in college and my AI teacher was using LISP. He redirected us toward pg's essays... and I have to say that it was truly inspiring.

It took 3 more years before I actually started to work on my startup, but without this teacher and pg's essays I'm sure it wouldn't have happened.
I did notice that amongst others, the SWF and RTMP format specs. are now freely available. IIRC, the SWF spec. used to be behind an agreement that limited you to using it to produce content for Adobe's player, rather that writing your own player. I'm not sure when that changed.

I guess this is partly a move against Apple, and also $10M of investment injected into new flash apps.
> [Over-engineering is] more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it.

Meaning that you have to keep justifying that extra bit of complexity, by thinking in terms of it - and therefore making it "true", even if it's not appropriate? Like a theory you have committed to ahead of the facts?

Reminds me of YAGNI and "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" - except applied to solving a real-world problem, instead of a pre-specified technical problem. I would like to add that doing this also increases iteration speed - that is, the speed of learning and adaptation.

http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html - http://c2.com/xp/DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork.htm...
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Bruce Lee, although he was not a programmer.
Yeah, I see this as a fairly transparent move against both Apple and MS.
I'm not finding myself sympathizing with the reviewer. Perhaps I value different things, but I find e.g. relentless bright white in the UI tiring for the eyes, so when the reviewer comments on e.g. battleship grey used in the Mouse control panel widget, I'm rather glad it's there - anything dimmer than glaring white is better.

Windows 7 appearance is remarkably uncustomizable compared to Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode, at least with the tools provided in the OS. I normally use a light blue background for my Window area, and that was respected in 2000, XP etc. for e.g. Windows Explorer, but that's all gone now in Win 7 (and also Win Vista I believe, but I never ran it long enough to find out). As a result, any extended bout of file management leaves me with tired eyes.

The alternative is to fiddle with the monitor brightness, contrast and gamma, but that affects whole system color reproduction. I want bright whites, but in their place, photos and the like, not as a default background colour.

I have many, many other annoyances with Windows 7, but they are largely niggly little things. I've made a list, and I'll write them up eventually.
> This one got comments? ;-)

8-)

> The dupe was not flagged because the URLs are
> different: the first one had a couple URL parameters

Agreed - I said something very similar here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902882

(which is somewhere else in this item)

Question is:

> ... not all HN users are in the same timezone.
> Sometimes, a story gets posted and few people are
> up to read/upvote it and it then gets buried by
> the constant influx of stories.

Is this something to be fixed, tolerated or ignored? In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter, but I'd become less obsessive about reading HN if I knew I'd at least seen the title of all the items.

There are all sorts of things I'd like to try, because I don't have the time to make sure I see everything that might be interesting, and I have ideas, but I don't have time to try them.

Very frustrating.
I don't know if I'd call it their opinion on good design, rather I think the gauche output from non-designers is a product of lacking the ability to make/recognize anything better.

I'm not a sculptor, and if I attempted to create a marble bust it would surely look terrible. That doesn't mean I think it's a good sculpture, it just means that's the best I know how to do, so it works for me.

I do think that the bad design of these sites speaks more to the importance of "form after function". Maybe GeoCities pages were hideous, but they still enabled people to post their pictures/thoughts/etc in a way that most couldn't have figured out before that.
I think we should stop measuring in lines of code. You can have less lines with more code. You can have a lot of lines with less code.

The amount of code matters.

Less code is usually better.
lazy

True. I tend to get things done with less effort than my peers and I don't think it has to do with being smart. I just have an all round better understanding of the surrounding tools/ideas of a problem.

When a lot of people have a project in front of them, I see them jumping in with both feet with a very narrow focus. Afraid of going off in tangents.

Me? I spend most of my time sitting around drinking coffee. Walking. Reading useful stuff on the internet.

I've seen it written before: learn to procrastinate well. I think that's a better way of putting it, no real need to be too derogatory.
maybe the interview was truncated. "Is proportionate (to the industry ratio of 1/1000)".
basically anytime actions are presented without context. for many of the choices presented to you there is no way to logically infer what the system will do based on the information they give you. the design choices are implicit and have to be discovered by the user via rote learning. design choices should be explicit. applications should ask you intuitive questions about how it should handle your data. not a series of drop down boxes and yes or no questions. some third party applications are good about this, OSX and Windows suck at it.
PG indeed in last couple of years.
His changed my thoughts about startups. I am about to start my startup and most of the inspiration guidance come from PG's essays. Although some of his thoughts are apply for startup in India.
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Can you use this as an external monitor?

A few folks, including this article, make it sound like you're buying a monitor and getting a computer for "free". But if it's like previous iMacs then you're buying a monitor that can only be used with the "free" computer.

If that is the case then that's a good reason for Apple getting a good deal. There's no way for this to cannibalize sales of actual monitors, unless the buyer was planning to weld it irreversibly and permanently to a Mac mini.

Which also renders any price comparison moot. It's a thing unto itself, only really directly comparable with other iMacs.
Suspect it also has something to do with the presence (or not) of a full time job. I think working is the smart move in Patrick's case for the extra financial freedom, but it definitely takes pressure off.
my take: the term derivative is apt. price hinges on expected changes in future market conditions, thus if we graph the price of some asset as a curve, you can say that the derivative (instantaneous rate) at any point represents market expectations at that point. people make bets about whether the slope of the derivative will increase or decrease. these bets are financial derivatives. they are distinct from regular purchase of stock because how much money you make is not directly tied to the price changes of the stock, you can make any arbitrarily sized bet with whomever will take you up on it. want to make a billion dollar bet on a penny stock? you can, and you don't have to worry about unwinding a position. this is why the financial derivatives market can dwarf the real assets market in size.

all the rest (puts, calls etc.) are just the structure of the betting.

If my simple explanation is missing something vital please do tell. this is off the top of my head at 5AM and I'm not sure it holds.
Yes, you can. The display port is bi-directional. In a sort of quirky way. Apple has addressed one of the longest lingering questions of the iMac line (and basically all AIO lines). People upgrade the PC but could reuse the display. With an AIO everything had to go.
Cool thanks for sharing your thoughts, much appreciated.

1,2) No worries, I'm in no hurry and I imagine learning web development is a slow process. I'm not sure how I'll improve from this point. I could use text fields for everything on a single page but there are dynamic aspects that are hard to get around. For example how do I enable it to take programs with varying number of weeks.

3) I really like the idea of a drop down boxes of the already completed weeks and a "copy week" button next to it; thanks for the inspiration on that!

4) Okay I just thought fields would be easier because you can use your keyboard and press the digit and tab to the next item. The whole site tabs well, which is how I've been using it. I should mention that!

5) Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant that workouts wouldn't be editable and be tied to a user's account. I imagined that anyone could do variations of a workout easily.

6) I guess lol. 'index' is in 'link format' and there's no button was my subconscious reasoning for everything's done I guess.

Yah I'm taking the criticism so well because I care about the final result ;) Thanks for the extended input!!!
A benefit of having no (or very little) money ...
For various reasons I ended up on this page: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/02/throwing-away-working-code.html

Originally submitted here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500713

From that article:

> We eventually uncovered the problem, that
> a core aspect of our product concept was
> deeply flawed. And along the way we learned
> our first profound lesson in the power of
> metrics, what I would later come to realize
> was a key part of the fundamental startup
> feedback loop.

Hard lessons to learn. But there's another lesson:

> None of it would have happened if we had
> plenty of cash, or were content to count
> our progress by traffic or product
> development milestones.

That seriously struck home with me. If you have plenty of cash you don't have to be particularly efficient to survive for a while, only to realise as you run out of cash (near wrote cache!) that you are in the habit of being inefficient, and change is hard. Newton's laws about inertia really do apply to organisations.

So even if you have cash, you need to pretend you don't. Only spend it if you can prove you'll get a commensurate return.

As always, there's a trade-off, but as with most things, it may not be where you think it is. It's probably closer to the "DON'T SPEND" end of the continuum than you think.

And it emphasises yet again that you must engage with your customers. And if you don't have customers, get some, even if it's only one.
There isn't an individual anywhere in the world (except perhaps a few folks in a tiny rift valley in Africa) that isn't an immigrant or the descendant of one.
I would have preferred "experienced" instead of "dumb". His examples still apply if you replace the latter with the former.
Clickable:

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/02/throwing-away-w...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500713
Again this notion that immigrants "take jobs". And therefore immigrants increase the unemployment rate. This is simply counter-factual. People doing work lead to more people doing work, regardless of the work they do. People doing the same work for less pay arguably reduces the unemployment rate (due to multiple factors).
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Why raise an eyebrow? Developers use whatever gets the job done. This goes for Linux, Windows or OSX. I write Windows software on a Mac. I also use the same Mac for deployment on Linux and Windows servers.
Ubuntu was the first distribution that successfully put a "regular" end-user first. Everything works out of the box and configurable options have sensible/auto-detected defaults and are hidden away. They successfully did away with the editing text-files paradigm for getting Linux to run, while keeping the familiar infrastructure from Debian in place just under the cover for power-users.

There is literally zero effort in installing Ubuntu on almost any post-2000 hardware, and it just keeps ticking for years.
The Dell monitor pricing he quotes - $1200 for LCD - is pretty gougey too. Dell hardware is generally bad value unless it's on special offer, a bare-bones system (in which case it'll lack extensibility), or part of a corporate purchase.
Until we know why the panel is so cheap

I love my Apple products, but Apple fanboys..come on. It took me less than 5 minutes to find out why the panel is so cheap. Seriously, why must you always be so...gushing?

P.S. Instapaper is brilliant!
And for the reader's convenience, they make 'single page mode' click through to a subscription page.
Apparently the Xmonad paradigm also works on physical desktops (re the photo in the post) ...
I sympathize with your point even though everyone wants you to switch to OSX for some reason. I run Linux in a VM -- rarely touch MacPorts or DarwinPorts or whatever is popular these days. They've never met my expectations. Packages out of date or simply don't build correctly. Just seems easier to me to go the VM route or run Linux natively if that's your thing. One big advantage for VMs to me is being able to snapshot the system before library upgrades or dist-upgrades. Very easy to revert back if you encounter problems. (which in my experience is far too common in the Linux world even though it's the year 2009 and Linux is fairly mainstream)
I didn't know about the data() method - very handy.
False and false.

My family lives in the heart of amish country, and the local boards are a bunch of power tripping bureaucrats. They will ruthlessly shut down little old ladies who try to sell jelly.

Zoning is a huge issue, as it is a township's first line of defense against people who want to change things.
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And the assumptions in the paper.
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Laura, someone who I cared for deeply, who passed away 10 days after my 18th birthday. That made me realize that I need to do something with my life.
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I think immigration should be treated the same as the free market for goods. If there is a market, a demand, and a willing supply then there should be little or nothing to stop the flow of labour. The EU for example in the 90s was worried about the entrance of Polish and Greek labour onto their market. The experiment turned out to be successful. Where, in the UK, there was much higher competition for plumbers, an example. Before, if you had a problem you would pay through the nose to get a plumber*. Now, the work is much more sanely priced.

Now that the UK economy has tanked the same Polish migrants are heading home or to other areas of the EU. Obviously, some have decided to stay in the UK. But a lot have gone to Poland to start a business in their home country because now their is demand and money available. If the immigration rules were restrictive than most would be reluctant to leave because you're either in or out.

Immigration should be a simple process; a bit of paperwork and a background check. Each state could make small additions like a health plan and unemployment insurance are bought by the worker or supplied by the company.
But "experienced" is another one of those glowing words (like "smart") that emphasizes you knew your way around in the past. This is an external marker, something other people judge you by and you can advertise with. When you have to solve actual problems, it's no good to think of yourself as smart and experienced, because that will only frustrate you if your amazing talents don't immediately suggest a solution. Taking yourself out of the equation and treating each problem by its own merits rather than your own merits is what's required, and that's the point of the "lazy" and "dumb" epithets: they're a deliberate kick to your ego, something programmers can usually use less of. Your talents can take care of themselves.
Isn't the US itself an outlier? It is both a rare, large immigrant nation and it is the largest first world economy in history.

Do people think these are connected by happenstance?

"Give me your tired, your poor"

"The wretched refuse..."

America takes the refuse of the world, and rather than treating it as refuse we give everyone a chance. We put everyone to work and let everyone realize their potential, amortized over millions all those potentials, even the small ones, add up. And we let the outliers that the rest of the world cast away as refuse shine. Carnegie, Einstein, Fermi, so many more.

If he had not emigrated to the US in the 30s, John von Neumann may well have ended his life in the mid-40s in a Nazi oven instead of making key contributions to physics and computer science.

Let me state this in the clearest possible terms.

Prejudice is a losing strategy.

You can't predict with any certainty the degree to which someone will succeed or fail in their lives. The best you can do is give damned near everyone an equal chance to PROVE themselves. This is the American model. It is through this method that the many, many outliers tossed away as refuse by the rest of the (judgmental, prejudicial, biased) world come to America and realize their full potential. America is the land where a destitute immigrant or a college dropout can become the richest man in the world (Carnegie & Bill Gates respectively).

It's the same sort of "let the doers prove themselves" system that has evolved into the startup world of recent times.

It's a damned amazing thing and it's something I'm utterly proud of.

Please, all you short-sighted, small-minded, prejudiced people out there who don't realize how this works and want to close off America's borders and gut the goose that lays the golden eggs: DON'T FUCK IT UP!
Linkbait title (and I fell for it).

What OP calls "lazy", I call "efficient".

What OP calls "dumb", I call "open-minded".

I sure hope he doesn't name his variables as poorly as he names his adjectives. Now that would be lazy and dumb.
The main issue was that zack's software would automatically make me follow someone. He could probably add some basic heuristics to prevent people from following spammers. Even basic bayesian filtering would have worked. Some of the spammer accounts have completely identical tweets. It would seem kind of stupid if I had to write the software to filter my followers... I could just not use customerfind, it seems easier that way.
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I think you have the wrong idea about what a derivative is. The article does a pretty good job at explaining what a financial derivative is and gives some example of common ones. Financial derivatives have no real relationship with mathematical derivatives.
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You can still modify the window client area in Vista but I'm not sure about Windows 7. In any case, I look forward to your list.
There's also Aquamacs. Seems to work quite fine.
For a serious accounting package, I would wrap up all money calculations, in such a way that you can't get away from double ledger accounting. So no money would ever be lost or created and all the flows are traceable.
I always thought (until some years ago) that Red Hat would do what Ubuntu (or Canonical) has done to bring a friendly Linux Desktop to "normal" users.
The Wikipedia article is also a good port of call -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_%28finance%29

Derivatives are very useful instruments for some. The example of a wheat farmer and a miller is useful for gaining understanding about what a derivative is and how they can be used.
Cocoa Emacs works great for me, I've never had a problem with it.
Is this different than the US's self-incrimination defense? I'm curious, because in the US the prosecution doesn't necessarily need you to say anything to make a strong case against you. Just a lot of evidence pointing at you and you being unable or unwilling to defend yourself against it.

Most defense attorneys view the 5th amendment as an armed grenade. By not saying anything it infers guilt. Saying too much can add to the case against you. Used wisely and you can work it in your favor.

All of this is done without the use of passive surveillance. Just good detective work.
Two Swedish guys called Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström wrote a book called "Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance". They coined the term "Fucking and Shopping" for the first time in Academic text. For the creatives it is now money or sex. The learnings from the book still keep my on the edge.
Also Peter Schwarz a futurist had a massive effect on my optimism towards the future of the world.
'Whiskers' may help robots touch
Conceivably, it could use bayesian logic to rank new submissions based on your previous upvotes and generate a list of submissions that you may be interested in.

But I bet pg will have less and less free time if we keep suggesting improvements like these. Is anybody else maintaining the code behind HN?
Manual labor and craftsmanship were not really popular with higher society in that day and age. I've mentioned this before here, but it's a fun anecdote: Galileo taught at the University of Padova, and to honor him, his students built him a lectern themselves, rather than pay to have it built, which they could have easily afforded. Instead of some find work of art from the time period, you can tell from a mile away that it's really bad work - sloppily put together and rough looking. You can tell they had no idea what they were doing.
Japan is 'Galapagos of mobile industry'
Dick Pick

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

He was so far ahead of his time, you probably never heard of him. He was agile, hashed, and object-oriented in 1965!

When I discovered this technology, an entire world opened up to me in an instant. I've been thinking outside the polygon and making things happen ever since.
damn. do you think I could get people to pay me for a seminar on it anyway?
Mobile net 'heading for data jam'
Mornings are underrated [warning: list post]