skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh yes. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

The interesting thing is that my wife has touches of nerdiness, and this article pins most of them. None of them are as clearly defined or extreme, but each is recognisable.

And this article has helped her understand a few things she formerly hadn't articulated.

For us - spot on. Thank you.
Intuitively, it seems highs and lows balance, perhaps, relatively. Belief in divine justice makes this less absurd. I don't believe in biorhythms, though.

Similarly, there is a clockwork in God's plans. I don't think planetary alignments do anything, but God often embelishes Creation, with style to make it more mind boggling.

Causality, is kind-of quaint.

God says...

subduing conquests body presented unfair download X pulse
trembled THE hart Helper withering equals continently
angers filths dare wantonness His ungodliness Gutenberg
eligible exult hardship loses forbid Midnight underwent
infidels denied believeth Led understand Joseph journey
commender intense meanwhile evidently devised replenish
accomplices market currents senator sleeping ornamenting
din stormy Although renowned destroyers alms brows alive
drives hide status conspirators Wilt penitent low knocks
Up unjustly events sparedst content shook agito resurrection
choler eye imitated forget Files ascended moved enlisted
briers stroke gently Mediator sufficeth troop sinks Anger
flocks Themselves sake disguise required upbraided bewitched
piercing VII remembereth Never LETTER who enchantment
promises overspreading Israel indexes Academicians bowers
swoon affirm unmarried strifes hedged moan foster species
teach images choice tracedst goodliness temptation Solomon
avenged manners strong blessedness workest fruitful might
recommend lure watchings
Now you mention it, it would have been a lot more interesting if it had been 'How I helped to ruin everything (else)' by (fake) Steve Jobs.
The traditional media gets their facts wrong again.

I suppose it was better than the NYT article on Zynga.
Any maker is lucky to have a single product in his/her lifetime succeed. Most freelancers only work on a single project at a time, and the success of those projects is mostly in the hand of the client who is responsible for the specs, marketing, integration, etc. Employees of good companies have the opportunity to work in an environment where a process has been put into place of creating, marketing, selling and distributing multiple successful products and input from all levels is integrated and contributes to the future success of the products.

Put another way: the median contribution of an employee at a great company is much higher than the median contribution of a maker or freelancer. The average contribution is up for discussion, but it is skewed towards the very few outlandishly successful.
My first B.Sc will come in handy for the second time in my life. :/
Belief in aliens is irrational and belief there are no aliens elsewhere in the galaxy is irrational - there is no evidence either way, and reasonable arguments both ways. The only rational response is that given current knowledge there are probably other intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy.
In programming AI players for various games, I've found that stupid algorithms with excellently-tuned parameters beat smart algorithms with decently-tuned parameters.
Not on an unlocked phone, anyway. You can still sell apps for unlocked phones, not sure what the returns are.

Apple only gives you access to the address book, very annoying.

Would love to get more access, to calendar, calls data etc...
An Introduction to Planning Poker
Foursquare’s CEO on how to get large companies to take your startup seriously
I'm a half-breed. I'm nerdy but I was blessed with more social skills and only half-as-much stubbornness. But I love the puzzles, the high, etc.

My only fear is my fiancee discovering that 'cool' does actually mean I wasn't listening.
Anyone who can? Dorm rooms are where all the girls are.
I showed this post to my girlfriend a while ago, and there was a lot of "OMG this is you".

Not exactly the same as me (same as RiderOfGiraffes' comment), but I think it helped her understand a lot of my day to day nerdiness.

Recommended if you're in a live-in relationship with someone not quite as nerdy as you. :).
> generally speaking such models command at best low respect and at worst criminalization.

So... a site that allows people to search for other people that want to have sex is a criminal organization? How does facilitating sex between two consenting parties deserve low respect?

If 'Girl A' wants to have sex tonight and 'Boy B' wants to have sex tonight too, what exactly is the problem with finding a way for them to find each other so that they can both have sex tonight?

I'm really not seeing the outrage here. Feminism was (supposed to be) all about empowering women. Doesn't allowing a woman to actively search out sexual partners on her own terms empowerment?

I mean if you really want to misinterpret his post to the extreme you could say that he's advocating becoming a pimp because it "gets people laid," but I doubt that you'll find many other people willing share in that interpretation with you.
Yes, but before Google Closure, the internet was "open source" by default. I mean am using "open source" as a strict antonym to "closed source" rather than in the legal sense. With Google Closure, developers for the first time have a practical option of making the source code of their application unparsable to the human eye. Despite the fact that it is illegal to download MP3s, 95% of all MP3 downloads. Now imagine if it was impossible to download MP3s illegally -- it would significantly impact the music industry. Analogously, Google Closure makes it virtually impossible to read the source code of websites. Given that the entire Microsoft Monopoly was founded on the fact that its source code was unreadable to the public, I think the implications of this are significant.
Familiarity with functional/declarative programming methods. I'm not a guru on this at all but learning a different way of thinking about programming like this has been terrifically helpful -- in some languages more than others. You can write functionally to at least some extent in almost any language -- even Perl has a level of support for it that surprises a lot of hackers.

So if you haven't already, learn a Lisp, or Haskell, or even JavaScript. Something that lets you pass around functions as parameters, and does closures.

It's superb for JavaScript, for example, once you realise it's basically a slightly weird Scheme with C-ish syntax. Suddenly all that ranting about closures and lazy evaluation will seem so much more relevant!
Who, indeed...
So that's why Canadian beer tastes so terrible :-p
For me, just recognizing that something was painful and I was doing something repetitive. It's easy to get lulled into a sense of 'this is how things are'. When you're conscious of it, you can then start looking for features in the tools you're already using, other tools, or build your own.
I wonder if there's a market in being an American company that's willing to act purveyor of apps for foreign developers...

As I'd be perfectly willing to do the minimal work of submitting your app for a small portion of the proceeds.

Dealing with international tax law probably makes this not worth it for a small company, particularly as a side business, but it's a thought...
> your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

Bingo. I work at a command line all day, and even use the "Terminal" GMail theme with plain-text formatting. I'm glad someone else recognizes that monospaced fonts are a hallmark of nerds.
I am so relieved and nostalgic when I land on a website that looks like it was made in 1998.

Oh look....text, just what I wanted and there is the information I need.

Not that I am a total curmudgeon, lots of the new Railsey looking websites have a clean design that is pleasing to the eye.
Yes, totally change your life...but slowly, slowly.
A bit off-topic, but I've been seeing more infoq lately, and I'm wondering if there's a pwnyoutube/deturl type thing for infoq. I found the conclusion to Rich's talk on youtube, but it looked like it was filmed with a cell phone and it was only the last few minutes of the talk. Any pointers to a download link would be much appreciated.
(Warning: personal interpretation ahead.)

Didn't watch the video, but she seems to be complaining about the competition.

Competition is good. Competition keeps you on your toes and validates your ideas. She can complain all she wants that Pownce wasn't in the same space, but it sure looked like a souped-up Twitter to me and a bunch of other people, and they should've responded to that.

And the reality is, Pownce wasn't a worthy competitor to Twitter. Twitter started not by being a closed-in environment, but by trying to reach out to every device, website and service you owned. The API and SMS integration were critical for Twitter to get traction in the early days; everyone on a Mac used Twitteriffic, other web services were coming out all the time that talked to Twitter, and the SMS integration helped people stay connected and get used to the idea of Twitter in their pockets.

Pownce launched with a decent looking web app and a poor AIR app, back when AIR was the next big thing. Their v1 API took months to come out, and it only allowed for read-only access - their API didn't get up to snuff until eight months after launch, and by then everyone had lost interest.
Why this is only natural. What does a 22 y.o. college kid have to talk to his bandmates about ON THE PHONE? Naturally, he chats more with this girlfriend than with his friends. This doesn't mean that he spends more time with them since generally for that demographic I would think the in person communication would be more important.
One of the amazing things in rails compared to many other frameworks is that the methods are all so forgiving, very neatly written multimethods: it doesn't matter if you enter a number,a string, an array or a hash, rails will be able to use the arguments properly.

With lisp/macros you can have similar power but with structure and logic.

Look at the difference between ERB templates and the beautiful templating language in compojure for example. It really kicks the llamas ass.
I've made about $200-$250/month on my Android app, but it looks to be on track of making $500 this month, possibly due to the launch of the Droid phone. Just did a post on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938867
* I think that they'd quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.*

I don't understand why. This is exactly how trash pickup in my area works: there are multiple companies and they only pickup for their own customers. To add insult to injury, I live in a very low-density rural county. Since these guys have been in business for years, I have to assume they're profitable!
But it's much harder to reason about whether or not the program will return the correct answer.
"but your nerd would prefer to hide in his cave for hours on end chasing The High" - That's a beautifully succinct way to label that state of consciousness we all strive to attain throughout our day.
An overview of PEAR for PHP developers
Tell HN: We just launched GeoAPI.com (read/write geo API)
> JavaScript will take the place of both for a large class of problems. But it'll be seven to ten years before that shift becomes apparent.

I'd believe that more if ECMAScript 4 hadn't fallen apart. I'm familiar with the PHP argument that design quality in a language doesn't necessarily harm adoption, but you do need some sort of extensibility to program more than a couple of thousand lines of code.
Sure, but is there enough demand for that for it to really succeed? D hasn't, really.
I wrote the Translate application for Android and I've had numerous people telling me in comments that thanks to my app, they were able to hook up with foreign girls and get laid.

My thought when I got the first comment of this kind was "jwz would be so proud".
usvisanews.com was the best immigration web site last decade. They had a blog, they had live chats, etc. They provided a great service to everyone who had concerns about immigration.

Especially, the "ask an immigration lawyer" live chat was super-popular. Everyone wants to ask a quick question to a lawyer without paying the fee or entering into a long-term commitment.
How Complex Systems Fail: A WebOps Perspective
Not that I support the change, but this headline seems very presumptuous. Is there actually any evidence that they're imposing "tracking cookies"?
Wow, I've heard of car crash television, but never plane crash television. Things must be getting desperate now that Big Bother's finished.
Not one but 2 large impacts? The coincidence sounds like evidence for the Nemesis theory. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star) for more.
It matters because increasingly the programmer may not have either the ability or the desire to add yet another explicit interface onto some class. They may not have the ability because it may be in a library beyond their control. They may not have the desire because it already implements a billion other interfaces.

More to the point, there is a school of thought that looks upon the entire idea in modern OO type systems of organizing types into hierarchies and DAGs as being so much busy work that, at the end of the day, does not provide you with a useful means of expressing behavior. There are those of us who have drunk the kool-ade of aggregation and want to throw inheritance in all its forms into the trash and keep interfaces, the thing we actually use sometimes.

From that perspective (my perspective, emotional and flawed), go's interfaces make all the sense in the world. They look delicious.
I often wished that I had a cyborg-mode: gaming with a very programmable interface. (With basically something like Emacs and a REPL.) I could teach the computer new things as I explored, and eventually start to play in a very high-level way.
The air in the valley
> It won't break all caching, just intermediate caches.

As far as I know, Firefox and maybe other browsers don't store on disk content delivered via https by default, which means that final caches will also be affected. Sure, the default can be changed, but it's an extra security risk. If it wouldn't be, the default setting wouldn't be like this.
An oldie, but a goodie. Rands is great. Following his blog and tweets proves that there can be managerial whimsy.

His site's glossary is worth a skim: http://www.randsinrepose.com/glossary_alpha.html

Collaboration: A word used to convince you to work with people you'd rather avoid.

Office: The square box where you live. Some models come with windows.
A Busy Developer's Guide to Tcl/Tk 8.6
Wait a minute... are you telling me that there are still people who don't have an iPhone?
Startup Crawl during RubyConf (in SF, 11/20/09)
In my opinion expressiveness doesn't exist objectively.
With that motivation for language design (achieving the expressiveness of English), I'm afraid you're running to a self-centered opinion; it is expressive only for those who have learned it since childs. The hierarchy of programming languages derives from the fact that expanding those languages is a lot of work (reimplementing the parser), in comparison with a natural one (metaphors, or neologisms). That's why, I think, a more general language (LISP, Smalltalk) is better. They don't give you expressiveness, which is only given by semantics, but at least they don't narrow those semantics. In comparison, English is a very ambiguous language which seems more expressive because it's semantics are huge. Which leads to the problem that, even if you built an artificial brain, you'd have to teach that brain ontology. Ultimately, the problem's root is not found within programming languages, but is an inertia to extend those which exist.
On their way to meet an investor, one of them runs out of gas and pulls up to fill gas. He tries each of his credit cards and it doesn't work as its all maxed out and its the same case with the other founder. Finally they call a family member who drives up to the gas station and fills gas for them so they can drive to the investor meeting.

Really? Isn't that story slightly embellished by the founder? As an investor, I'd be concerned that this guy is taking me for a ride, especially after I read this:

Well unfortunately he doesn't know Cocoa - but that doesn't stop him. He sends an email to the firm who advertised for a bid to code an iPhone app -- then goes ahead and mis-represents to them that he is an iPhone Cocoa whiz
Concur.next — References: clojure: parallel log analysis
"Any maker is lucky to have a single product in his/her lifetime succeed."

Not nowadays any more, you can make several iPhone apps, web sites, etc. The products don't necessarily create millions, but they may be good investements.

For example, I make a crappy iPhone app in two days -> publish -> app makes $1000 -> good investment for me. For me, success=good investments of my time & money.
That's the book commonly recommended on Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) also. Geoffrey K. Pullum there is highly critical of Strunk and White.
Sorry so terse. It's just when I think of Soviet tanks rolling through Checkoslavakia, or the Peacekeeper missile debates and protests of the 80s, or the almost continual bush wars in Africa, or the domino theory, or the struggles in Latin America, or the demonstrations and marches against communism, or Lysenkoism -- the issues go on and on.

Over the past week I have read about a dozen articles about the Berlin wall falling. Each of them made a completely different argument for why it fell! And each were credible and well-sourced!

So when the author just threw out the analogy of other countries as voters -- as if the world operated like some giant election -- I simply had enough and bailed out.

It's a great topic for an article, but if I let the author get away with an oversimplification half-way through I have little confidence that it's going to end up anywhere worth going. Kind of like building a house on the sand.

But I was wrong to be so terse here. Sorry about that. If I had something to say, I should have taken the time to explain myself.
An employer is an abstraction layer that removes concerns outside one's area of expertise--someone in product development doesn't need to worry about getting press coverage or calculating payroll. Like any abstraction layer, it has costs and benefits. It can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending on your needs.

Employees, freelancers, and "makers" can all work on product, and can all deal with customers. Don't try to tell me that a carpenter employed by a company doesn't "make" product.

Also, this graph's comparisons don't work. A start-up "makes" products, but an employee doesn't "make" a job. It's nonsensical.
Sammy and Kiwi, help us figure out the best architecture for a js framework
You better start using it, then. Be it an official part of pagerank, or some emergent property of their crawlers, I've seen very good evidence that page load speeds have strong influence on natural search rank.

Regardless, Google is doing this to push at the technical limitations on apps like GMail or Google Reader, not Joe Shmo's burger shop.
Free Backlink Analysis Tool | TechJaws.com
Honestly, this is sufficiently bad "advice" that the exceptions far outnumber the occurences.
Google group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/kiwi-js

We're still budding :)
If they need a salary to get started, they're not a co-founder.
Being unemployed is not always fun, it's in society's interest to cheer us up a little bit :) So we at least keep trying to make something.
There is no right answer. Startup advice seems to only make sense in aggregate: you collect all of the opinions and try to map those to your situation.
how would collisions 300k years apart be, in any way, evidence in favor of a star with a 26 million year oscillation period? if you're going to say something like that, back it up.
Thanks for sharing. I make GPS apps for the iPhone, and this indicates to me that I should continue to wait and see on the Android platform.

I've read that while there are a lot of Android phones, the app buying behavior is much less profitable than on the iPhone. I think iPhone users are just conditioned to spend money!
I see.. The investor should understand that your company is still in its early stage. No, it doesn't prove that you have a bad product or something, it's just that your company is not mature enough to work on its own(that's what makes startups a quite risky investment but sometimes it pays off very well - startups are meant to grow).
Deeper analysis can help, but I have found I often get better returns from forcing myself to simply contemplate a problem shallowly and more broadly for a while before I start digging. Taking the time to make sure you are analysing the right problem.
Which is more useful? Google's links or the actual home page?
I always disappointed when I see mixergy come up on HN. The article titles often look great - interviews, interesting topics, etc. - but I just don't have the attention span to consume talk video.

I think a killer start-up might be a mix of video and transcripts... maybe outsource the transcriptions since the technology isn't there yet. Then again, I might read a transcription even if it was garbled like Google Voice messages.
It's a guess. I decided I needed a specific number, because being pulled in several directions all the time is hard, and it's hardest when the pull is between work and relationships. Having a slightly wrong target number for work/relationship balance is better than having no number at all.
Google's two new products for ecommerce marketing
Why does this only includes 10's of thousands of POIs? Why not include USGS and GeoNames points... there are millions of them.

Is this supposed to be strictly urban points?
The "technologically disinclined females" are his market, but the "pay money for software" one stings no matter who you sell to.
An Online Right to Forget: Legislation against storing user data forever
I've tried a notebook beside the bed, and when that didn't work a cassette recorder, but I discovered that the process of writing something down or recording it woke me back up too thoroughly. I'd end up lying awake for another half hour or more.
Lesson 2: Accounting Matters... A Lot!

Then I noticed the talk actually listed eleven lessons...
"What the Fuck is Going On?" A musician's take on MySpace
That is true, unless you spend enough to have a google team assigned to you. I have 3 reps I can call or email and they're extremely responsive.
That was my thinking too. With PageRank Google is trying to find a way to measure the perceived quality of the user experience for each page. Except there's no way to do that directly, so they look at indirect methods, like counting the number of inbound links. This is just another indirect measurement to add to (what I'm sure is) hundreds of other factors they use to rank a site.

IMHO a site that cares about the user experience would have been optimized to load quickly.

Heck, even if Google told people speed was important, and didn't incorporate any speed measurements into PageRank, I think it would have a positive effect.
A good portion of communication in most animals is done visually. These visual cues do not transfer very well to text (okay, they don't transfer at all). The emoticon can be used to help. For instance:

You're an idiot.

Does not mean the same thing as:

You're an idiot :)

This is why emoticons are an important part of comments. They make them flow more like a conversation.