skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's similar to "Why Nerds are Unpopular".

In my parents' day, "finding a husband/wife" wasn't something most people had to make an active effort in order to do. It happened fairly naturally. So smart people paired off at a similar rate to everyone else.

In the post-"Game" world, wherein breaking through womens' defenses and attracting them requires learning a bag of cheap sales tricks, the big losers are the people who don't learn them. These are the dumb, who are unable, and the smart nerds, who can't be bothered because they find childish social games uninteresting.
We live in a representative democracy.

If the costs were not externalized, market and political forces would dictate changes in both personal choices and infrastructure investment.

I don't see the rational for abdicating responsibility for the choices in where we both live and work, as disclaiming responsibility for the externalities incurred by these choices ensures that a more optimum "sociopolitical geography" will not be reached.
Do a ritual before you start working.
Pregnancy and disease.

Why do you think they shouldn't?
Yes, but since Zipcar is meant for renting very often but for short lengths of them, I can definitely see how checking it every single time would get tedious. Imagine if you had to inspect your car every time you drove it.
+1 for wiki suggestion.

The value in an exercise like this is the insight into the collective assessment, especially spanning different software disciplines, and with broader expert input.
I tentatively agree because these things can be showstoppers, but it really depends. I've seen PhDs who can't tie their shoes. Theoretical knowledge is useless in production software if you don't know how to apply it, and yet without it you will be greatly limited in the scope of systems you can build.
Most of the complaints are about the Zipcar clientele rather than the service. For example, it is impossible to make sure that cars are returned in time with more than a quarter tank of gas unless you have some mechanism for controlling the vehicle remotely if a driver is deliquent...which would only drive up insurance premiums and make the service less attractive for a lot of people. I like the emergency Zipcar idea but that really hurts the margins (maybe they can actually afford it, I don't know.)

The only thing that seemed to be their fault was the reservation cancellation because of routine maintenance...but then again routine maintenance does not mean scheduled maintenance. So it is possible that the proximity card reader stopped working or there was a flat tire or some other urgent matter.

Maintaining and renting cars remotely is a crazy difficult service to provide and yet they pulled it off. I would hardly call these flaws Zipcar's "darkside" although they could definitely improve in some areas.

Competion would improves this space in two ways. The standard more innovation, better features, blah blah blah way. But for this type of rental car service the more companies there are the better selection for the consumer because you are more likely to have a car in close proximity. It isn't feasible to put a Zipcar everywhere, but if more companies start trying to compete then at least some of them will put cars where Zipcar is not, which means you don't have to walk 1+ miles if you live in downtown Palo Alto :)
The problem is that you can't know for sure until you read every line of code in the program, or at least read every function in a given call chain.

In languages like Haskell, the type system ensures that there are functions whose effects can be understood by only reading that one function.
The small-to-midsize companyI work for (http://callcopy.com) use .NET.

Affordit.com, which received funding a few months ago from the Founders Fund, is also built on .NET.
Actually not that silly. If you delete information in a given system you actually make it so that the system generates heat it is a proven principle. But at that high of a level you could implement any language but simply have the gates reversible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
Also, where I live, the Zipcars started to get really beat up and were generally in terrible shape (see my other comment). If you reported every scratch, dent, and problem you'd be calling in every car you rented.
Even though it is Hacker News I still checked the comments before clicking on anything with a "2 guys + n cups" pattern.
Minimalistic is a word meaning:
of or pertaining to someone or something advocating smallness

"minimalistic." Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon. Dictionary.com, LLC. 30 Dec. 2009. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/minimalistic>.
This title was suggested verbatim by JabavuAdams in a recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022269

I think it's slightly unethical to take it word-for-word without giving a hat tip.

That said, this is a rather remarkable video if, like me, you don't know much about the theory of education (I showed it to a smart friend who teaches undergraduate literature and he said that it was all old hat to him.)

What really stood out to me was the hard data behind Mazur's conclusions -- it's "common sense" that students do better when engaging in the process of learning, but I had never before seen it so convincingly demonstrated.
Thanks for the kind words @rauljara. I do indeed love Zipcar and as I mentioned I gave up my personal auto for the service. I'd say the percentage of "bad experiences" for my usage is probably less than 10%, but it is significant enough that you should know that if you become a serious Zipcar user you will run into bad experiences more often than you might think (and they never come at a good time...)
Emotional and psychological complications, sometimes long-lasting. Early loss-of-virginity age, which many people still care about in a marriage partner.

Empirically, people who lose their virginity early (< 18) tend to be hypersexual as adults.
In terms of physical servers, we're actually 50-50 Windows / Linux. Starting on Windows did not blind us to Kannel, Rails, PostGIS, Apache, Samba, Erlang, etc. We use tons of open source software where it makes sense.

What do you use for desktops, e-mail, corporate servers, etc?

My goal was elucidate the hefty cost of Windows lock-in and Window's demonstrably strong tendency to pervade your organization in terms of political, staffing, and technological investment.

If it's considered the best tool for the job and these recognized costs are acceptable, then there's no reason to not use it -- but history should also provide some insight into how Microsoft behaves with organizations that become reliant on their technology.

Microsoft isn't being magnanimous with Bizspark -- they're trying to ensure that more startups are locked into their technology stack early, when the perceived immediate advantages may seem most attractive.
If you want to be immortal, make sure never to die.
Yeah, but that's wrong assumption. This is no one-way street.

I'm counter-example myself. I actually reverted from being hardcore game player to playing mostly simple web games.

And I sure know others which went this way - from AAA titles to Zynga.

Here I said it. Most "real" gamers would be probably too ashamed to admit it :).

And about growth - I'm not sure what is the cause and what is the effect. In non US regions games themselves could actually be the driving mechanism for Facebook growth:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989607
"am a minimalist at heart, I like simple things with clean lines and no clutter."

Judging from the design of his blog, this must be a guest post.
Good idea. I'd like to be your manager. I want every thing done in the range of 2-4 hours. More than that I'll fire you.
Fair enough.

Showing a short list of the "best" recipes on the main page is something we're currently considering. Once we develop the ability for users to submit, comment, and rate on recipes we'll have the data to list the "Best" recipes (based on community rating) on the home page.

However you did point out a few other things that we should address. Such as what more can we give the user when their search doesn't return any results?

And how can we make the experience better for someone like yourself who wasn't searching for something specific but rather was just browsing our database for something interesting.

FYI, Liquorious.com is a great site for browsing, but not so when searching for a specific recipe.

Thanks for the feedback. This has been very enlightening.

Best,
Ben
If you disagree with this 1x1 matrix that means you value form above function... which means you're destined to be a starving artist who writes software that is great for your imaginary friends, but will never become a great programmer that writes things real people want to use.
Evernote Reaches Two Million Lifeloggers, Half Of Them Are On The iPhone
I agree with you that it's inconvenient, but I can't think of an alternative that would be fair to both Zipcar and the renter. If I let Zipcar inspect the car and take their word that there's no damage, I'll be on the hook for $500 if they miss something. On the other hand if they trust me that I didn't damage it, they lose money if I'm lying.

As an aside, I generally do a quick walkaround on my car before driving away. Check for low tires, see if somebody banged their door into it, etc. For my motorcycle there are even more things I check each ride for safety reasons. It's inconvenient, but worth it I think.
oh yeah I know... a while back if you looked back all their top users had the same gravatar(gravatars are pretty random, but they do assign one per ip)...+ they changed their community bot's name to Dennis Rodman, so that people woudln't know that the site was dead when the front page had nothing but "Community" on it.

Hey I gave the 1246 # :P...and yeah I know what you mean, my site has like 5-10 unanswered questions out of the ~1000 I have now.

I think part of that is targetting...they seem to be more mainstream oriented. So they have your local corner store owner asking questions, while onstartups is more web tech oriented.

All new communities astro turf...reddit guys submitted stories and posted in comments between each other for example. You can't launch a community without doing that. Noone wants to go to an empty restaurant.

Actually the fact that you don't, is a strike against you in my book...it just shows that you guys just don't care about the site, and are pretty much letting it sink or swim on it's own. I used your site early on, but then I got bored because it took a whole day to see 2-3 new questions. Same goes for asking, I asked a question a while back about launching...and I didn't get a response for more than 12 hours...in the middle of the day. So you have a site where there are no questions, and no answers, gives people no reason to stick around.

Comfortable? no...but what metric would you use that says that you are doing better? Pretty much the only metric I can see is that you have higher quality users. Which doesn't really mean much, when it takes 12 hours to answer a simple question.

Yes it's nice to have a high-quality beloved site...but that doesn't count for much, when the site appears to be dead.

No those "spammy sites" aren't creaming real sites...for 99.99% of entries, the real site will always show up first.

At the end of the day? I think both of you will last, but startups.com will have better metrics(more users, more traffic, more revenue).

Same goes for profit, if startups.com becomes THE place for startups, will rank high for every startups related question on Google...then even that 6 figure investment won't matter.

I wish all the luck to you guys, but at this rate, you'll be a Web Developer Forum to their Facebook
Adderall.
Already noted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022403
Most of these problems are not related at all to the primary use case of Zipcars - extremely short day trips.

There is a whole whack of competition in the one day plus trip markets - rental cars in general.
Yeah you are right.

Or simply gone to nasa.gov:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29dec_bluemoon.htm

"The modern definition sprang up in the 1940s. In those days, the Farmer's Almanac of Maine offered a definition of Blue Moon so convoluted that even professional astronomers struggled to understand it. It involved factors such as the ecclesiastical dates of Easter and Lent, and the timing of seasons according to the dynamical mean sun. Aiming to explain blue moons to the layman, Sky & Telescope published an article in 1946 entitled "Once in a Blue Moon." The author James Hugh Pruett cited the 1937 Maine almanac and opined that the "second [full moon] in a month, so I interpret it, is called Blue Moon."
It's in response to:

>Just because you spent time constructing an argument doesn't mean it's cogent.

I'm (perhaps mistakenly) equating time spent constructing an argument with argument length, since longer posts tend to take more time to write. It's also fairly well established that longer posts tend to be of higher quality on most message boards, and I'm equating cogent with quality (again, perhaps mistakenly).

time -> length -> quality, therefore invoking the law of transitivity time -> quality.
Coworking spaces continue to grow in popularity where I live (Columbus, OH).

I've found that the actual amount of quality work done in these spaces isn't that high, and the spaces tend to be used more as a casual gathering space for different startups in the city to meet each other.

The two leaders in the area are Sandbox Columbus (http://sandboxcolumbus.com/) and Qwirk (http://qwirkcolumbus.com/).
About the closest you'll get is the apache POI library. It's mostly an excel 97 lib, but it supports word to some extent.
I would introduce ‘make’ in the build automation (level 3) section.

Understanding make (dependency graphs, splitting up the build process into small tasks which can be parallelized, restarted, and leave an exact record of how much was succesfully built) I consider a valuable trade and magnitudes better than “writing your own build script” (as is presently what is the level 3 skill).
Ah, so this is where we disagree. As a taxpayer and consumer of government services, I do not view things this way. We have a government, and to this government I pay taxes, and from this government I receive services. I only care about the amount of taxes that I pay, not how they are apportioned between payroll vs. income vs. other. Since congress sets the rules for all three entities, I can't see how you can argue that "Social Security" is being smart and discretionary spending is not. The money all comes from the same place: taxes and debt. Frankly, and with no offense intended, you seem to be falling for what looks to me like accounting shenanigans.
> In the post-"Game" world, wherein breaking through womens' defenses and attracting them requires learning a bag of cheap sales tricks

The entire industry of pick up technology is based on the premise that there may be a technique that can successfully attract a woman. Wheras, in real life, there is no magic technique - it's all about confidence and putting youself out there, taking a risk/taking the lead.

What the pickup artists are really marketing is protecting the guy's ego - e.g. I wasn't rejected - it was the approach/technique. Which, as we all know, is false marketing.
Where I am it really boils down to whether or not you start kissing the nearest girl in the club when drunk.

You could possibly explain this in the article then with the idea that intelligent people are more likely to be either really introverted or extroverted and that the introverted ones tend not to do this sort of thing, leaving just the extroverted of the smart people to get laid?

Sort of similar to the risk-aversion idea here, except with introversion. I do have smart friends who do this, they just happen to also be reasonably extroverted
Sorry! I waited a day for you or JabavuAdams to post the link, but since you both didn't do it, I posted it myself, because I felt this was good enough to be posted here !
I love Lisp, and find there is a lot to like about Clojure. But we're building a system with critical (life-or-death) high-reliability requirements, so we're going with Erlang for its proven robustness and scalability. Personally, I'm not thrilled with the Prolog-like language syntax, but there are alternatives in the making. Erlisp had promise, but now appears to be fallow, but Robert Virdig's Lisp Flavored Erlang (LFE) [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286288] looks to be progressing well. We're planning on switching over when it achieves a bit more maturity. Lisp on the Erlang VM - best of all worlds!

The only knock I'd have against Haskell is, even though the Haskell proggers I've been fortunate to meet are wizards, all have already involved with cool projects, and are reluctant to jump ship.
Thomson Reuters NewsScope Archive - Machine readable news
It's hard to avoid this, even in a functional language like OCaml (which has mutable ref cells).

Haskell does a pretty good job, by requiring functions that have side effects to show it in their type signature. If you're doing Haskell right, the number of functions that have side effects is very small as a proportion of the number of functions you'll write in total, so most functions you write will be purely referentially transparent. Of course, I'd argue that this is true if you're using any high-level language properly, except possibly in GUI programming.
One thing that works for me is thinking out aloud. I don't really understand why, and frequently, the spoken words turn into some foreign tongue no one really understands (especially if the train of thought goes faster), but somehow this helps with keeping the train of thought going against all kinds of obstacles and distractions.
Two mentions of the "opposite sex" make me wonder how heterocentric this study was. I haven't investigated his source studies and the link to the Counterpoint survey is broken.

If the wording of the original survey asks questions specifically related to kissing, holding hands with, and having sex with members of the opposite sex, this study could fail to consider the sexual activity of intelligent homosexual college students which could also provide some interesting results.
Has Jeff Atwood contributed any open source code? Given that he's criticized Gruber for not giving enough, I'm curious as to his own contributions (on Github, his codinghorror account contains no repos or activities: most likely a placeholder to prevent name squatting).
One of the comments there: 'I think someone at American Airlines has already written and is using this code in production.' Hilarious.
I am skeptical that women are really into construction workers as a whole. If they get any benefit from construction, my guess is that they are more fit on the whole. Women I've met in urban areas don't give a shit about the "manliness" of your work; in fact, I don't even think it's a great disadvantage to be unemployed if you have a good reason to be.

Hm, didn't want to derail this into being really focused on construction workers. Replace that in the previous paragraph with any non-intellectually focused occupation.
This one's pretty cool since it's happening on the last day of the year and all. Although, by definition, they can only happen in the last few days of the month, so it's a little less special than I first thought.

I also remember a few years back, there were two blue moons only two months apart, something that only happens every couple decades. There was a full moon in early January, a blue moon on Jan 31st, then the tiny month of February managed to fit in between full moons, so the next full moon happened on March 1st, with a blue moon later that month.
I agree with this. Just doing it is the only trick. It helps to get off the social networks and websites (HN too), put your head down and just work.

After a short time, provided your work is somewhat engaging, you'll be in the zone in no time.
The Chain Reaction Method. A little bit of work is enough to trigger a snowball effect. The only "trick" I use is to start by working on something that's extremely easy/fun first. Once I'm knee deep it's not difficult to take on more challenging things.

I still have no solution for the larger multi-week productivity swings that seem to occur...
The entire industry of pick up technology is based on the premise that there may be a technique that can successfully attract a woman.

It's not that simple, just as there isn't one "magic trick" that can close a sale. It's a complex set of skills that has to be learned over years.

On the other hand, some guys are able to feast because they've mastered a bag of cheap tricks, and there are a lot more men dying to be like them.
can you expand on why hash isn't sufficient for consensus? (i am just curious - i know nothing about this, but it seems like as long as the hash space is large enough that there are no collisions in the age of the universe etc etc..)
A Cheat Sheet for Keeping Resolutions
"Shoot for the moon.
Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

Les Brown
No, I am not '"forgetting" that the AGW folks fixed the peer review system', I am explaining why even if that's true it doesn't mean that AGW people are "paid to confirm AGW". Also, so far as I can tell it isn't true for any sensible meaning of "fixed". But, no doubt, if you repeat the claim often enough without providing any evidence, it will become true.

The tree data trick does not mean what you say it does; see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.full... (key finding from conclusions section: "We find that the hemispheric-scale warmth of the past decade for the [Northern Hemisphere] is likely anomalous ... This conclusion appears to hold for at least the past 1,300 years ... from reconstructions that do not use tree-ring proxies, and are therefore not subject to the associated additional caveats."). Temperatures vary a lot on a timescale of a few years, so the much-ballyhooed "no warming since 2000" doesn't in the least mean that the models are wrong; see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warm... and also figure 4 in http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2009/20091216_Tempe... (and the text below that figure). Your claim about "accounting for how temperature stations were moved" is too vague to respond to. The AGW folks did not "misrepresent the Russian data" so far as I can tell; see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000732.

Do you have any actual evidence that climate scientists "pick people based on whether [they] think that they've bought in and are not going to rock the boat"?

I simply do not believe your claim that throwaway "this is consistent with AGW" remarks in papers on other topics "constitute[s] much of the supposed consensus". Are you suggesting, e.g., that a large fraction of the papers in Oreskes's study were really about other topics and had only throwaway references to AGW (it sure doesn't seem like it from her description), and that if those papers were excluded then the study would find much less acceptance of AGW (it sure doesn't seem like it from her description)?

I'd like to point out that you have a nice two-way argument here. If papers by climate scientists support AGW, that's because climate scientists are all "true believers" who have been picked based on whether they've bought in and aren't going to rock the boat. If papers by other people also support AGW, that's because they've just slapped brief pro-AGW remarks onto papers about other things. So, I wonder, is there anything the peer-reviewed literature could contain that you would regard as good evidence that careful scientific study supports AGW?
I seem to keep returning to this idea.

1 year ago: http://akkartik.name/blog/resolutions

3 years ago: http://www.reddit.com/comments/4e1f/the_barriers_to_starting...
Headphones and a clear schedule in front of me. A cup of tea or coffee can help.

As far as music goes, have an album that you can put on infinite loop.