skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, since it's pretty much dead, contact twitter and let them know that's your startup's name.
He called scams bad (a very controversial stance!), let some scumbags brag about how they got rich off scams (I'm sure they all gave the money back), and has run off some 15 posts on the topic with links back from time & newsweek.

What part of that was difficult or laudable? When he starts suffering personally or professionally to do the right thing there will be something to congratulate him for.
What a squalid petty affair.

I think you need to keep a little perspective. You aren't the first guy to waste a bunch of time on a side project that didn't go anywhere.

1. this was a side project!?! you can't expect great results from a side project. if something happens, then great, if not, well .... you still have a job.

2. Don't you first need to _have something_ before it is conned from you. I certainly didn't hear of any great technical achievements that would have lead to success.

3. Maybe you didn't like the direction the project took. But it sounds like your partner was right about one thing, dealing w/ your dojo guy did get the attention of the Secret guru. It seems like the involvement of the Secret guru is the only thing the project had going for it at one point. And as I mentioned prior, you didn't mention any great technical successes that would have lead to a breakout.

Like i said, welcome to the club of failed side projects.
I'm not sure I would call the author a sucker. He had serious reservations from the beginning. His friend? Definitely gullible. But many of the decisions the author made were out of loyalty to his friend, not out of gullibility. From the start he considered the possibility that his friend was brainwashed but gave him the benefit of the doubt. I think that even the least gullible people on HN are susceptible to this.
Setfocus looks pretty dubious: http://seeker.dice.com/olc/thread.jspa?threadID=12196&ts...

If you start searching for "setfocus" in Google, the top suggestion for the next word is "scam."
because you can write to a variable or pass it to more than one function
No trademark (in the US). Have sent an email to twitter support. Not holding my breath however.
I would find it hard to rant about scams if I owned part of Pool.com. I suppose that's because my aversion to being a hypocrite outweighs my desire to sell ads on my blog.
"he paid $300 for a manual on how to make money on Twitter and gave it to me"

I'm assuming that's how to make money on twitter. Sell books on how to make money on twitter for $300!
I've also used Shaun Inman's Mint (though an older version, not the current, I'm sure the UI is even better now) and have only ever had good things to say about it. Definitely worth the very reasonable cost.
I was young(er) and wanted money. Now, I'm not greedy or anything: I just wanted spending money so I did some freelance web design. I amassed some cash and bought all the gizmos and gadgets I wanted.

Then I thought I should learn to turn those fancy psd's into live websites, which, after learning HTML/CSS got me into PHP and WordPress.

Then I realized I hated PHP syntax so I learned some ruby along with my formal programming classes, then, I realized I like doing this stuff, so here I am.
As an added benefit, you'll soon lose your hearing altogether and the annoying sound of human voices will become a distant memory!
Sounds like the con-couple charged tens of thousands of leisure expenses to the business, which leads me to believe there was some revenue to speak of and at least some of that was generated by work the author completed.

I admit this is not the worst it could have been, but the author got out fairly soon. His friend seems to really be getting screwed.
phish

grateful dead

john coltrane
Another way to phrase that would be "Short-term advertising revenue vs. ensuring the vitality of fundamental Internet infrastructure."
I would really like to mess around with this, but it doesn't compile under OS X because of some utility differences (namely readlink and cp).
It's probably 20 years old by now and I think I taped it back then (with very poor reception!), but Nova did a great episode called "Top Gun and beyond" about the limitations of human pilots in fighter aircraft.

It's got to exist on the web somewhere :-)
Yup...sounds like this from @rishi. http://gettingmoreawesome.blogspot.com/2009/10/examples-arou... (There's examples here, at least.)
Not looking for comments or to start a thread, but I just now read a commentary that addresses your "between tax and forced to buy there isn't a large difference"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/07/obamas-hidde...
Catch NFL Week 9 Live Green Bay Packers vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Prince (the old stuff)
I have tons of music but that's realy the best stuff for getting me to focus and make me feel energized.
I've been building up a javascript library to do this, as visualizizing results/data takes up more than half my research time.

Unfortunately, this library is nowhere close to ready to be released, but I can describe roughly the architecture, in case it's useful to you.

I take all my data and write a python script which will dump it to a .JSON file. This includes the raw data/results, names of different fields, groups of fields to toggle on/off together, and what kinds of visualizations I want to use with a given set of data (view as numbers, as bar graph, as line graph, as linear time-series data, as color-coded images, etc.)

Then I have a standard html + javascript file in which I simply load in this JSON file. Because I've prespecified the format of the JSON file (I.e., what fields it has and how the data is stored), I only need to customize a few functions to display results. Things like filtering data, searching and sorting I get "for free", since they're in the library.

The main advantages:

- Interactive browsing of data in various formats, all in the web browser, with no plugins etc. required.

- Can be viewed locally or across the network

- No need for a server to be running

- Processing done on each local computer, as opposed to on some server

- HTML 5 is now good enough (just barely) to offer all the kinds of interaction I require

- Most of the code is in my standard library for visualizations, and so the time to create a new visualization for a new set of data is quite small.

Drawbacks:

- HTML 5 is still slow

- Can't do very advanced stuff yet, without writing a lot of custom code. On the otherhand, using jQuery + jQuery UI, it's very easy to make things draggable, for example, to compare various things side-by-side or even on top of each other (with transparancy)

- No server, so can't "save" complicated settings or parameters (although cookies help).

Anyway, in case you end up building something of your own, hopefully some of these ideas might help.
Chavs? Or, possibly, feral youth: http://www.google.com/search?q=feral+youth
Stanford to run driverless car up Pikes Peak next year
I just discovered NatureSpace [http://www.naturespace.com/]. They call is "Holographic Sound", and its pretty amazing. Check out their website (there is a preview on their landing page, and I strongly recommend having a pair of stereo headphones/earbuds on ;-) )

They have a free iPhone app, well if you have an iPhone, and want to try it out.

[Update - Seems they have options for the Android too]
The entire J-school educated mainstream media has had the opportunity to do the story that Arrington has done, and yet they have failed.

I think this bears repeating. "A hot new fad sweeping the nation is deceiving your children and scamming customers for well in excess of $100 million per year" doesn't sound out of the purview of the NYT, does it? Instead of doing the ground pounding to shake out a story like that, they mainly get a press release from someone, open the Rolodex and find one of the usual suspects to give a punchy opposing quote for balance, and then publish it.
Creating HTTP Post Requests in C#/.NET
Maybe I've been away from Java for too long, but I understand why the + operator's implementation is so much slower than that of String.concat(). If concat() uses a StringBuilder, why doesn't the + operator as well?
http://bigthink.com/pwsinger/pw-singer-on-video-games-and-wa...

indeed.
right, sucker is a bit harsh. Using it emanated more from him loving the secret more than the story that was told. But the point I pretty much failed to make was that if he felt the enterprise to be worthy, but the people not to be, it is something within his control to find new partners or continue, nothing that happened prevented that. But the story dramatizes events to the level of someone having stolen his business dream or some such. Basically, yes it is a crushing experience to lose your innocence and find out someone you highly respect is just out to exploit you, but there's no reason to get it so mixed up with everything.
How important to the business plan is the twitter name?
I dont think you will get it from twitter just because you want it.

If twitter is vital to your business suceeding/marketing plan, then maybe something like "splitthebilldotcom", to make it look "official".

I see you asked twitter, but have you asked/received a response from the user yet?
"To this day I simply can’t believe that someone out there exists who would con and manipulate people like this"

Yeah, truly shocking that there could be someone out there able to manipulate people who think The Secret is "just so true".
PC owners caught with child porn loaded on their computers--by a computer virus
I can't code. Well, I know a little HTML, but I'm a salesperson/marketer. I'd take no offense to this statement.

I also know very few good salespeople who can code.

This post was written because I had clients who had built software, sold it off, and then were all big in their britches and thought they were marketing gods. The ads they wrote were totally awful and they blamed everyone but themselves for their high bounce rates.

Maybe there are coders who are marketing gods. Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps. Jes' sayin'.
Based on this list you may also like dextro http://www.dextro.co.uk/ also Mike Sheridan is great, I've had one particular album of his on repeat for quite some time http://www.discogs.com/Mike-Sheridan-I-Syv-Sind/release/1473...
No. Stop rationalizing that all there is to a Reese's cup is just calories. A healthy lifestyle has quantifiable metrics in regards to the levels of cholesterol, processed sugars, vitamins and aminoacids you should consume daily.

The food you consume also interacts in complex ways that go beyond what has been formally quantified, but a casual observation of people who eat leaner foods and vegetables instead of processed sugars and dairy products is pretty good circumstantial evidence. There's a reason why dissociative diets can produce different effects on your body even though by the end of the week you may have eaten the same in terms of the amounts of calories and nutrients as other people.

I have two personal observations in favor of that: I have psoriasis, and the level and redness of the rashes is directly correlated to my daily intake of fruits and abstinence of coffee. I also know several people who are healthy vegetarians who have been keeping insanely good dieting regimes for several years, and it's remarkable how good their skin looks in comparison to other people of their own age, less wrinkled and more elastic (not being a scientific observation, my sample size is still large enough to be adequately convinced personally).
Ggobi
Smart Email Marketing - How to Design and Send Emails
Email marketing is one of the most effective methods of advertising online yet the majority of companies are missing out. I have put together an outline on how to design and send emails, along with a few examples.
Beautiful Love Greeting Cards
Well, it's totally new to me!
I've been trying to study up on how conmen succeed, and how to innoculate myself against them. I've been taken to the cleaners a lot in my adult life, but one thing I've figured out is that when someone tries to manipulate me with fear (buy now or be priced out of the market forever! or with the typical threats from a lawyer), I have learned that the most effective technique I can do is dig my feet in and do the exact opposite of what the fearmonger preaches.
So you can infer the type on the first usage only and then treat the variable like it has a static type (because it does). That's what most type-inferring, static languages do.
Thanks, I had totally forgotten about Alcest. If I remember right, they actually started out playing black metal
Flot is super cool but probably a bit off-topic for your needs http://code.google.com/p/flot/

Every time I try to use R I just say "fuck it" and use Matlab. Matlab is pretty flexible w.r.t. manipulating data and there's a lot of tools to deal specifically with time series analysis http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/data_a...

The open source version of Matlab is Octave but they aren't really comparable. But if you're dead set on open source, that's what I'd recommend.

If you want the flexibility of Matlab and the prettiness and manipulation ability of flot, Mathematica produces some pretty elegant figures, but I hate the notebook interface. Yes, I know, you can use a command line interface with it but the UI for Matlab is actually useful and awesome (like being able to see the contents of all the objects you create.)
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Large corporations sitting on piles of cash
Wikipedia
the best dictionary ever saw
I'm an idiot for so many reasons that not using Heroku doesn't even break into my top ten list. As such, I'm not terribly worried about not using Heroku. In any case, thanks for reminding me that I'm an idiot.

Actually, I have used Heroku. The major con of the service is that you are losing control to Heroku which also loses control to Amazon's EC2 service (for example, inability to assign multiple IP addresses to an instance leads to $100 / month extra if you need secure pages.) The major pro for me is the ease of getting into it. Just a quick signup and a free level for getting started.
I'm surprised US schools are pilloried in the press. These are public schools, all this information is available through Freedom of Information Act.

The press would have a field day, if say, your local school district booked Dan Pink for $35,000.
The twitter account will be used more for status/news then for marketing...

Other then sending the user a DM (which they are unlikley to answer on an inactive account) we have no obvious way of contacting the owner...
Read the comments at the end of the article... the author did not effectively test the String.concat() option (since he forgot to assign the results of the call to .concat() back to itself).
'Web developers' should be replaced with 'Engineers' and yes, for the most part, engineers aren't known for their marketing skills.

And as much as this is drilled into our heads over and over again: keep it coming. It's all too easy to forget the fundamentals..

Point #1: "Lead with benefits, not with features." was great.
Vxworks is typical, but Linux does happen sometimes. Most often for ground stations or auxiliary tools, sometimes for continuity between the development and deployed environment, sometimes because it's just a research project and certification isn't an issue.

I wouldn't claim it's common or that you'd be likely to see it in a deployed environment, but it's not totally unheard of. Throw Linux & UAV in Google - you'll see what I mean.
Renttherunway.com - Netflix for dresses
trance, rock
http://di.fm/trance is really good on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Global DJ Broadcast and Corsten's Countdown are awesome.
I've asked Heroku employees about that, and they said that their infrastructure would not be the best for Comet long-polling applications. I'm sure they've developed everything assuming that requests would be short and if they were long then something is wrong.
Luckily it likely won't get to that: http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
How to Create a Persuasive Business Proposal
The term comes from #warez. Groups like Razor 1911 and Fairlight would brag about how recent their software was. 0 day was release day. First-run warez.

There are as many different definitions of zeroday in the security scene as there are people with strong opinions, but all the definitions boil down to, "it's zeroday if it's new". There's patched zeroday (when SUNW releases code that fixes a flaw and they don't tell anyone about it, the exploit for that flaw is zeroday). Unpatched flaws are usually by definition zeroday.

It's kind of a silly thing to argue about, since there's no consensus definition. This TLS flaw definitely qualifies by most people's definitions.
No matter who's defining it, the term is always very much about showing off.
Not so much a particular piece, but many albums -- I rarely listen to single songs, just albums and full discographies.

Iron & Wine, particularly Woman King
Splashdown and Universal Hall Pass
Porcupine Tree - Stupid Dream and The Incident
Agents of Mercy
The Flower Kings
The Decemberists
the really smart, immutable ones, could let you treat the expression as any of those types as you like. this is supposed to be a cleaner C syntax, not another platform.
Depending on your background...maybe.

In my experience, people with strong mathematics, EE, CE or physics backgrounds can become ok programmers in support of their work in that field if they end up learning that skillset later in life. But that's because they've already trained their minds at a younger age to think along those kinds of lines so those neural pathways are already set.

Outside of maybe those few areas (and perhaps very few related ones), I'd say it'll be a struggle. A 20 year old will most likely code faster and more prolific. And if his code stinks, he'll tear it down and rewrite it again, better and from an orthogonal direction, while you are still plugging away getting your first project just setup.

Even experienced developers find that they really have to step aside at some point and teach, or manage. It's just a profession that favors the malleability of the young mind and it seems to have a very high burnout rate past somewhere around 40 -- meaning I see maybe 1% of developers still actively in a development role after that age, they've either entirely left the profession, or moved into a supervisory/mgmt role.

Like anything, it's a language, and the young always learn that kind of thing faster, and internalize it better (grok) than their elders.

That being said, I have seen a fair number of old-timers doing network security, and other kinds of IT "behind the scenes" infrastructure kind of jobs. Their age give them some automatic authority as they blend in with the other greybeards of those professions. One guy I knew went from running a restaurant to doing network mgmt at about 55. He's become reasonable successful in those jobs. But one thing he always laments is the impatience of the faster, younger colleagues that have to deal with him -- he invariably tries to find solo positions in small companies.
The 2005 album Le Secret is more black metal in that it has some dirty vocals but purists would probably scoff at calling it black metal. I haven't listened to Alcest's 2001 demo.

Alcest is a solo project of one guy from Amesoeurs. The full band Amesoeurs is darker and actually black metal, though with an interesting mix of new wave. Their recent album is good if a little inconsistent.

If you know more bands that sound like Alcest, I'd love your recommendations, I haven't managed to find much with exactly that sound. Maybe some of Jesu's recent stuff.
"Zaid", the author of this post is clueless. He does not appear to have read the first paragraph of the article he is responding to. That first paragraph would have informed Zaid that Facebook shut down one of Zynga's applications for violation of the Facebook Terms of Service. [1]

Aside from being just plain wrong, this post is very poorly written. I can hardly make head or tails of it. This is not the sort of material that would have risen to the top of Hacker News in the past.

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/zynga-to-stop-all-in-ga...
I like to look flexibly at things. This is a good case in point. The submitter sees this as a baloney detection kit. I think it makes a good political campaign strategy guide.
Well, at least in retrospect he has "serious reservations".
Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons Project, New London consort, Slash's Snakepit... and many many many more
First half dozen or so jobs were startups and small businesses, so I learned not to fear those environments. Plus I got to see the entire lifecycle from incorporation papers to exit. This was very helpful.

After working for a while in some very large mega-corps got tired of the grind and decided to join up with some folks I worked with for a very long time and have a go at the startup thing again with some specific technology and a target vertical I know very well (with not to mention about another decade of experience under my belt from my early jobs).

First one never got off the ground too many issues between the founders, and the second one is currently off and running (with a bit of a limp, but it's still drawing air).

What's helpful though is knowing that if it all fails, I have an established career I can fall back on without too much hardship.
"Talented and resourceful"isn't quite right. What the US has generally had, though, was the best trained pilots and feedback. When the kill ratio starts favoring the enemy, the US has typically analyzed the problem and improved training.

I referenced Top Gun and Beyond in an earlier post: if you can find the video, it goes into this.
Practical Common Lisp is a really excellent way to get into Common Lisp programming.

http://gigamonkeys.com/book/
So many marketers keep writing this article because so many techies keep trying to do marketing, as if it weren't a real skill.
Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps

You are continuing to make statements which are based more in prejudice than reality, and the edgy I'm-joking-but-I-really-mean-it shtick doesn't suffice to make the statements true.

There is no rule that says after you know a programming language, learning how to market or write copy will cause a cache eviction from your brain. Look at 37Signals, who are marketing gods by any conceivable definition of the term. One of their marketing coups was taking a sort of obscure computer language mostly used by academics in Japan and popularizing it worldwide on the strength of a not-so-revolutionary-but-still-pretty-nice web framework and the very revolutionary idea of marketing an OSS product aimed at developers.

Peldi from Balsamiq is very worthy of emulation as well, and he is also widely viewed as one of the most competent Flex programmers around.

P.S. If a marketing god is looking at bounce rates then that should be considered autodemicide. Bounce rates are a terrible metric which are more useful to people outside your organization -- such as Google's search relevance team -- than people inside it. There is almost no conceivable circumstance under which they're more informative than looking at conversion rates, and the work required to extract what precious little signal they have among the noise would be better spent on almost any other task, for example, A/B testing.

And look how I said all of that while still knowing what a hashmap is.