skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dropped out of a Ph.D. program in History in 2003 after getting the consolation MA, got an entry-level customer support job at a dot-com on the strength of some BSing and the school I came from, and accidentally found out my history degree was pretty useful for product management. Attention to detail, understanding source material and translating it into other languages (translating sales-speak is easier than working with Old Church Slavonic), writing skills, etc. Co-founded my first start-up in 2008.

I found this article by Rands very relevant when I read it:

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_his...

In my experience it's not that humanities Ph.D.s can't do anything with their degree - in general, these are smart, analytic people - but that they don't want to.
I think the fact that the error was in a scientific magazine warrants the letter.
Why would I want a reminder for bills I never have to see or think about because they're already paid automatically?

It's not that I think your solution is bad. I just think you're solving a non-problem.
Are there some programming tutors around Boston?

If so, I'd really appreciate an invite!
i think my next little building project will be trying to make this happen without electricity somehow.
Make sure you guys put your email in the about part of your profile (you will see it written twice, once in the email slot, once in the about box).
User Goal Tracking in Rails with Vanity and Google Analytics
Every worker on WageMachine is highly talented, industrious, college educated,
English speaking, and lives in the United States.
http://wagemachine.com/blog/learn_more_about_wagemachine

Then why the hell are they working for minimum wage at a deadend job on your site?
"When a site gets large enough, "culture" doesn't work any more. There are too few "trainers," and newbies don't wait to learn. Hence anything not enforced by the software pretty much doesn't work."

I don't think that's inevitable. As the about page says HN is a forum that's primary purpose (other than discussion) is to actively resist the normal degradation a community goes through.

One good way to do that, IMHO, is for the people of the HN community to actively read down-modded comments and up vote those that are polite and honest expressions of opinion.
You're assuming that everyone responds rationally, and that people aren't trolling.
The article mentioned that your past decisions got you to the point you are today. It's about to you make decisions on where you go in the future. There's no such thing as perfection, but if you make the best decision, there's nothing really else you can do. Good luck with school again.
Absolutely not. Releasing frequently gives you the best chance of knowing whether or not your design actually does cause the "of course factor"
That's outside the betting territory, too bad!

I'd gladly taken you up on anything less than 20 years, a hundred is far out enough that we might run in to some kind of spectacular development.

10^14th connections is quite an impressive number to map, especially if it turns out that the state is stored at the molecular level (we have DNA as a hint of how dense nature tends to pack information).

Henry Makram is on the record as saying it will take the blue brain project less than 10 years, in a TED talk given the 22nd of July 09.
That's like saying I hit closing time while I was at the video arcade playing Pac-Man so the government should be able to take the remaining cash value of my quarter for the unconsumed pac-dots, even though my game ended. The minutes are a temporal good, only valid within a timeframe. There is no remaining value to escheat, because they are expired.
A lot of things are "cheaper" if by "cheaper" you mean "supports a political viewpoint that asserts that things will be cheaper in some abstract future where a critical mass of people adopt that viewpoint" instead of "cheaper". In reality, when you cook, you're either (a) paying much more for food by buying local, humane, or organic, or (b) partaking in the same factory system that McDonalds does.

In fact, McDonalds and Chipotle are doing much more to promote sustainability than the typical home cook is.
Anonymous Proxy Woes
Yes, and in many cases he's simply wrong. There are scads of cookbooks, cooking segments, and cooking shows with a "this may sound hard, but it really isn't" approach. The only thing "lacking" in their approach is the patronizing attitude of the roasted chicken recipe.
When I was reading, I wondered if I just consider different things as "mistakes" than Jason, or if he was actively censoring himself. I agree with you that "dialing the wrong number" isn't the kind of mistake I feel like is keeping me back. But I can imagine that if I were to do the 'Week of Pain', I'd have a lot of mistakes written down along the lines of:

- Procrastinated Task X

- Spent too much time watching CSI marathon instead of working

- Didn't reply to Person Y soon enough.

Those are the kind of mistakes it might be worth keeping track of to see which ones are the kind of "D'oh!" mistakes everyone makes once in a while, and which ones are really bad habits that are holding me back more than I realize.
Reinventing Money (video)
Learning Community Charter School
AmeriSchools is a Learning Community Charter School of professionals dedicated to providing a clear choice in education for children ages K-12.
There are many kinds of websites, and not all of them have a community of users. Many ecommerce sites for example have no sense of community and are all about the product and the relationship between the seller and the buyer.

To assume that only blogs or services are bought and sold is a mistake. However it is true that finding a proper buyer is always a concern. Buying and selling websites can be more involved than buying and selling stock for sure.

If you are a computer geek who knows websites better than the stock market, then buying them speculatively could be more interesting than you give it credit.
Why I don’t have a girlfriend: an application of the Drake Equation [pdf]
Thanks. I should have read that before replying to him -- now I feel like I totally wasted 15 minutes writing a reply and checking up my sources. Oh well.
Best Easter Egg hack for Windows seven called the God Mode
Though the topic is interesting, this article is rambling and senseless. For example it states that life, by reducing local entropy, violates the second laws of thermodynamics.
Part of the PhD process is learning how to do publishable research, and learning how to get it published. So if you've already learned that once, the second time should be smoother.
I sincerely would like to see your recursive solution to this. Mine was not successful, so I ripped it out and went with the ugly approach that actually generated answers.
Programming contests and puzzles online
"Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model"
It depends on where your priorities lie. If your goal is to finish your masters or PHD then I agree, I wouldn't work more than you absolutely have to on side jobs.

If you already have a career and are working on your masters on the side, then you need to focus on your job and do the masters as time permits. For instance, I expect my masters to take 7 semesters (3 1/2 calendar years) and it wouldn't bother me too much if it took 4 years. I have a job I like with a salary that pays the bills. I am working on my masters primarily for personal growth and hoping for some career advancement edges down the road.
it seems like there is a bit too much hinged off the email address and the domain that's on. In many cases this is controlled by an ISP or big company (gmail, hotmail etc). It seems like this is a barrier to getting the necessary infrastructure in place for steps 1, 2 & 3 to work correctly.

Perhaps there could also be some public ".well-known/finger" server that one could optionally register with if their email provider was slow moving?
California should just spend less or tax more. If they can't, that's the fault of Californians not the federal govetrnment. (My understanding is that the root cause of the situation is that it's hard to raise taxes in california due to proposition 13, but easy to increase spending commitments through referenda -- can any Californians comment?)
Well, if you're not religious then any foundation must be arbitrary. With no religious presence, the universe has no fundamental meaning or purpose. Therefore, there is no underlying truth or morality that grounds our existence or any other being's existence.

As to why the capability to accumulate knowledge is my ultimate goal, one would turn to my belief that knowledge is the ultimate goal. In essence, I believe that knowledge is something which is unequivocally good in every and all instances. The choices we make with that knowledge are our own, but knowledge in and of itself is purely positive -- one of the few things that I think are. Therefore the pursuit of knowledge is a good and noble endeavor. As Asimov says, "[t]here is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere."
I fully support ideas like this. I see it as lowering the barrier to market. This could solve the problem of finding small work. I have out of work friends who are capable at tutoring but are currently unemployed.

I do wonder what you'll do about quality control. You say you have bright people who are happy to work for very little money, but I'll need to see why I can trust them. A reputation so to speak.

This almost seems like it's begging to be a paid stackoverflow, but I'm not sure what that would look like from a community standpoint (not the same as the free one). I'm getting the feeling it will be more like a craigslist then a structured sytem.
How does it work, and what is the point of such a webservice (your page gives no information concerning both) ?
If most of us won't escape wage slavery, how is humanity still a good idea?
a question inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029998 , which didn't attract much attention.
I'm not talking about some magical hippie love future in which everyone chooses to go local, organic and vegan. I'm talking about material, measurable public subsidies to specific agricultural practices that allow companies to sell their products at far below the cost of production and hence distort the market for those products.
is it auctomatic.com? all the links are dead.
Maybe you could handle 17 WageMachine threads simultaneously.
Some people don't want more then they need. If Minimum wage is supposed to be all you need to live off of, then you'll find people who like helping others working for about that. I've known teachers who's summer or side jobs made them more money their their primary jobs, yet they still teach.

This site isn't supposed to be a full time job, it's supposed to be a low barrier way to pick up a few bucks for the ride home. While programming might not be the best area for this (not sure about the market of tutors) I love the concept.
Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Wednesday, Jan. 27
Agreed. Aesthetics > Reality.

I wrote a fun little web app to draw snowflakes a few weeks ago: http://www.create-a-snowflake.com/ . I settled on 8 sides, although the first version had an option to have anywhere from 4 to 20 sides.
Intelligence of the individual matters equally. It just so happens that individuals of a species have intelligences which tend to clump about the species mean fairly closely (low standard deviation).

I think we are fundamentally speciest and there is no way around it.

Of course we are; that's an evolutionary necessity. Even discarding that, to believe that anything is inherently "wrong" or "right" must be based on some fairly arbitrary code if you don't have a god to back you up. Without religion, there is no universal morality, thus some arbitrary decision must be made. The only difference is how arbitrary and what logic is based upon that.
Using your 'Coming Soon' form to gain info on potential users
It's attributed to Shannon right in the posting:

After seeing a video of such a machine I just had to have one of my own. Normal 0 According to Wikipedia, Claude E. Shannon built the first “Ultimate Machine” based on an idea by Marvin Minsky.
Online Bill pay via my bank solves this problem for me. Unless you are targeting individuals that cannot get a bank account or do not want to get a bank account, what's the point? Unless you want to target creditors to automatically send emails to people that owe them money and are late. I know less about that market, but small businesses like chiropractors or dentists might be able to use that. But most people will just hate you.
OwMyBalls!
Just one of the many lovely gem's in the source:

for (i=1;i<nr;i++)
for (j=1;((j<=i)&&(i+j<=nr-1));j++){
b[i][j]=0.0;
}

When you see the following line you know you are in for a treat (best part i1 and j1 are not even used in one of the functions where it is declared).

int i,j,i1,j1,iup,no;
Mixergy interviewing cofounder of Wufoo
I would have much preferred if the post wasn't acted out as a narrative as it detracted from the powerful message of not using AES and why it's flawed.
I'm ashamed to say that I'm guilty of misrepresenting snowflakes.

I wrote an iPhone app last year that allowed you to create virtual paper snowflakes, and I didn't realize until later that all the flakes it created were "abominations" that had 8, 10, or 12 sides.

I was a little surprised by the amount of feedback I received explaining to me exactly what was wrong with the snowflakes in my app. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to fixing this egregious error just yet ;) .
IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit [pdf]
I can't find an RSS or atom feed for your blog :(
A bit more fascinating information Kevin Kelly's Technium

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/the_unspeakab...
It's a tool for doing arbitrary URL-based things on an external scheduler.
Gmail already supports Webfinger, albeit for early adopters only.

http://groups.google.com/group/portablecontacts/browse_threa...
OK, let's allow $4 for dinner: frozen chicken, bagged frozen vegetable, bagged frozen squash; takes about 15 minutes to nuke up.

$2 for breakfast. Three eggs scrambled in plenty of butter. Some nuked frozen berries in half a cup of whole plain yogurt. Five minutes prep.

$2 for lunch. Some celery, a can of sardines, and a large glass of half&half. Zero prep time, aside from rinsing celery.

This is roughly what I eat and there is no way you can save time or come close to matching the cost at restaurants or even with pre-packaged food. I don't even go to the grocery store: peapod drops my list off every two or three weeks.
2009 Sales numbers for WhereTo iPhone app - one year after app acquisition
Here's a detailed roadmap: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/selected_outputs/fohi_publications/b...
It supports your claim that uploads are pretty far in the future.
Ok, grant it I'm new here, and could be missing the point. I didn't actually go through the full article because I'm not really that much into crypto, and really, didn't the guy fail the interview at the point where he suggest that encryption was the answer for a cookie used for individual identification? I mean, encrypt it all you want, if I can be behind the same NAT as you, and spoof your user agent, all I need to do is get that cookie and put it in my browser, and I've stolen that session.

The real answer is you need to either encrypt the transport, or at the very least minimize the amount of time that cookie is valid for.
Analog to Digital Failure: the Calendar
I can see it now... computer science class averages increasing in correlation to the beta release of WageMachine programming tutors...
You're very right. I think that stems from the 'we're on the right side' feeling that people have somehow.

The truth is a determined enough organization with some money to burn will always, now and forever have the ability to disrupt society to some extent and murder a bunch of people in the process.

To admit that though means that you're going to be lumped in with the fatalists instead of with the realists.

Any fool can break a window, it takes lots of effort and knowledge to make a clear, flat piece of glass. In other words, destruction is so much easier than creation that we should be happy the terrorists are as incompetent as they are.

They'd like to destroy the western world (so we're told) and they've managed to kill < 10,000 people in many years of trying.

They would be more effective if they started cutting brake lines on vehicles at random.
To put that another way: The average level of talent in people is average. We've nailed average in the first world, automating or off-shoring much of what the average person can do out of existence. What are we going to do with all of us average people?
clickable : http://lyrics.azankatech.com
Your narrative doesn't make any sense, especially considering the ending - if your response might make other people vote down the original comment, then won't a pile of other people vote it back up (and even higher)?

Really, it sounds like you assume people down-vote purely out of malice towards other commenters.
If we're all supposed to vote the same way, what's the point of voting at all?
Yes, as well as to down-vote high-rated comments that are overstated, facile, or pat.
Yay for false positives. They had/have those in the CN tower in Toronto, major nuisance. But since it is obviously high on the target list of every extremist organization they can't take chances.
I like the idea of it, but you should really document this more. It's just all on one page now, and that makes it hard to read imo.
Webfinger is a really important and exciting new standard. I am pushing The Small Business Web (http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com) hard to wrap their heads around it. The vision is really powerful:

1. As users type in their email addresses, use AJAX to look for their webfinger profile. If they have one and it has an OpenID provider, replace the password / signup fields with a button to their specific OpenID provider. Goodbye OpenID NASCAR logo problem.

2. When the log in, you can discover other services they are using, such as their Portable Contacts provider, and in the future, Portable Time, Portable Expenses, etc. You will be able to automatically set up a customer with all their existing workflow and business data, and instantaneously get them up and running. Goodbye adoption curve problem.
IPhone App Will Warm the Cockles of Your Heart -- Literally
You are making an effort to eat cheaply. Clearly it can be done. I think most people will lose the $2/person/meal lunch budget because they aren't willing to eat a can of sardines every day forever, and I think $4 is (a) a noticeably cheap dinner and (b) more expensive than some takeout meals portioned appropriately.

Also: a glass of half and half? Really? I get the milk carb thing, but why not just drink something with no carbs or fat?
hmm.. quite interesting. I wonder which scheduler did they use - cron based or roll-your-own using Erlang, Scala or something
What's the point? How would WWII have played out differently, if the majority culture across North America was Germanic?
example use case I'd imagine would be something like "I want to send burst emails every 20 minutes from my shared host which doesn't let me run cron jobs. So I'll write a PHP script to send the emails and runmelater to ping the script every 20 minutes"
Bruce Schneier seems to be very intent to leverage his expertise in computer security in to getting himself associated with the 'war on terror' gravy train, the best thing in the security scene since the red scare and the cold war.

It'll make him a bundle.
I likewise up-vote a lot of unfairly down-voted comments, but I've never up-voted one and seen it go higher than +1, even after refreshing a page.

EDIT: I wonder whether spreading this idea will make some people reluctant to up-vote low-ranked comments to avoid giving too much credit to unobjectionable but unremarkable comments.
Not everyone does this. Im a student, i know a lot of students that pay bills the snail-mail way. I could imagine HN has a someone older and more financially stable community.
Dream CAPTCHA
If Native Americans Worried About Spam...
About which the only influence you have vis a vis eating is to avoid the foods that are a part of that system; I was careful to say "organic, local, or humane" (not vegan) to provide as many non-Food-Inc. options as possible.

I don't see what your point has to do with the cost of cooking in vs. cooking out. At least 'kingkongrevenge has a meal plan to offer us. =)
After the company was purchased by Live Current Media, the team was split up to work on various other projects (Cricket.com, Perfume.com) while Auctomatic was left to languish.

Eventually the servers and services got shuffled around, and at some point stopped working, but since it wasn't profitable and there was no engineering time to work on it, it was left broken and unusable. Now, all the employees that knew anything about it have left (save one), so there's no one to make it work again.

Too bad, it was a pretty cool idea.
Even though it would needlessly complicate the UI, I wouldn't mind a way to set what I thought the comment was 'worth' so that my vote would automatically adjust in the direction of that ideal.

That way I could vote up a comment that I thought was wrongly buried without raising it higher than I consider it to be worth.
Really great idea. Starting with the API is smart. I hope you build it out and let me create an account and manage my tasks and check out logs, etc.
I think you're taking this altogether too serious, I'm just messing with the heads of the griefers, they're damned if they do and even more damned if they don't.

Of course, now that I've admitted this, the cat is out of the bag, we'll see a tremendous flurry of downmods resulting in an equally large flurry of upmods due to the above effect and serious karma inflation as a result ;)

I'm sorry if I didn't manage to get the wink in there clearly enough before.
Note the calendars provided on what is currently the top post:

A 2010 "Graphical Computing" Calendar

http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2009/12/31/a-2010-graphica...
Thanks. Interestingly enough it seems that Australia, not India, is the winner in Thorium reserves, both economically exploitable and total. In total, the US and India have equivalent reserves, while India has more economically exploitable.
I agree. I found the narrative "intimidating" and stopped reading after a short while. I'm turned off by all the crypto-testosterone. :D
Ah, if only I could write another Notepad and make money off that.
I'd say it didn't detract from the narrative; it made the narrative accessible to a different audience.

The screenplay format both presented a story-based framework for understanding the progression of the argument, and humor (unicorn with laser horn) to provide a contrast to the fairly complex topic.

I'm clueless when it comes to crypto, and if I were to read a very well written paper about it, I'd probably get sidetracked, or accept the conclusion without understanding the steps taken to reach it. The format of this article was perfect for driving the point (and its reasonings) home to the uneducated masses such as myself.
Maybe you are in a good position to find that 1+ hour of work any time you want, but this may not be the case for everyone. I wonder how easy it is to win a contract on elance, etc. if you're a college student or have little experience. Similarly, a lot of people don't have time for full-fledged contract work.

I see it as a good way to earn some extra pocket money, as another commenter said, "for the ride home."
So, you're just being facetious. Gotcha.

EDIT: Up-voted your comment, much as I disapprove of the anti-down-vote trolling, so folks will be clear about your intent.