skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similarly, an interesting review of a book critical of the status-quo in academia (The Access Principle, by John Willinsky):

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.html

It seems that journals (and textbook publishers) give the authors of intellectual works prestige and bragging rights in return for billions of dollars worth of intellectual property. The more valuable the intellectual property you give up, the more bragging rights you get. The entire industry reminds me of Tom Sawyer's whitewashing trick:

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html

Or is there something I not getting?
That's interesting. I've heard that one of the defining aspects of Western civilization's success is its emphasis on the written word, which is our most common form of linear, logical mind maps.

Where does lateral thinking come into this process, and has it been useful in your experience? I tend to think counter to the conventional wisdom, and people tend to think such ideas weird.

While it's normal to say this is a good thing, I'm not sure it is and am curious if there is any data on the usefulness of lateral thinking.
Interesting title. You indict the entire community of scientific researchers based on a single decision made by a single journal. Is your decision making process any better than theirs?
I heard Google doesn't like fixing stuff manually. They'd rather fix their algorithm instead.

But if they can't fix your problem by fixing their algorithm, you're basically fucked.
Startup School 2008
It's Google's malware warning system gone astray.

Joe Hewitt is the creator of Firebug and a Y Combinator company founder and all around good guy.
Oh, I get it now! :-)
When a Murderer wants to Practice Medicine
Joe Hewitt is a YC founder? For what company? Are you Joe Hewitt??
I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently.

I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts:

http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on...
It's the friggin Dethklok Dethphone, wonder if it'll have all of those minute eating menus.?.. brutal.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dethphone&...
Moore would be spinning in his grave.
Only if you study the p3df.
Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness.

I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys.

The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature.

I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically.

The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great.

The architecture seems better than vim.

I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me.

The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control.

I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)
Duncan Watts vs. Malcolm Gladwell:  Mathematician turned sociologist challenges "Tipping Point" idea.
parakey (acquired by facebook)
I guess the best way would be to have blog.yourdomain.com redirect to yourblog.bloggingwebsite.com.
Ex-Apple Team Prepares To Launch Stealth Startup
So wait, webmasters are working for Google because... Google works for them?
WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web
Thanks for comments in the RSS feed, can haz points too?
Having a comments link in the RSS feed is great - thx!

What do you think about also adding the number of points for a submission, so I can skip submissions below my threshold?
Doesn't Lisp already do this?
No. That's my point.
Ha, I accidentally tipped them the 10 cents I've earned so far.
I think facebook's inability to get this stuff right the first time is what makes so many people uneasy. It makes you think that the culture inside the company is maybe not as user friendly as they try to portray.
Google got big just as quickly and had access to as much sensitive data, but avoided any major privacy missteps.
The idea of double blind review goes against the recent (almost as old as the internet actually) trend of posting everything online long before publication.
Motorola: Since We're Not Innovating, We'll Litigate Over Patents
Ask YC Poll: Which is your favorite YC startup?
The range of YC startups has become quite broad. I thought it would be interesting to see how their popularity varies within the hacker community. So lets try and design a poll.

Rules: Vote for only one launched YC startup and don't vote for the company you work for.

Mechanism: If your choice is present, vote it up. Otherwise submit it in a new single line comment. If two people end up submitting the same name at the same time, the lower one should delete their comment.

Karma issues: If people feel that the person to submit a new choice first shouldn't be getting all that karma, then the mods could just remove karma for the top choices once the post is no longer active.

Finally, the list of launched startups is at the top here: http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Edit: Please use the poll choices for voting only. The place for discussion is at the bottom where a special -1 karma post has been created.

Edit: I don't think you need to be bound by any particular criteria for voting. Design, success potential, personal appeal are all valid. For example, I haven't even used the site I voted for. I was just very very impressed when I visited it recently.
I used Eclipse nearly every business day for about 18 months.

Search didn't fully work; accordingly, search and replace didn't fully work.

Workspaces would randomly get corrupted, and code would "build" that really shouldn't build (i.e., code with syntax errors would claim to have built). Sometimes deleting every object and make file cleaned things up, but sometimes it didn't, and I would just have to make an entirely new workspace. (Possibly a bug in our makefile system rather than Eclipse proper.)

Buttons along the lines of "Check here if you never want to see this again" didn't actually work.

Depending on the workspace, I would have to log myself into Subversion over and over and over; generally multiple times for commit/update/whatever. (Possibly a bug in Subclipse rather than Eclipse proper.)

An older version of Eclipse (3.1.1, if I recall correctly) got so corrupted on my machine that I could literally launch if, then just sit there for a minute or two, and Eclipse would die. I wouldn't even have to use it; it'd just die.

In short, I have not had pleasurable experiences with Eclipse. I strongly suspect that my experiences were not the norm, since Eclipse is so popular, but whatever the cause of this badness -- the fault of Eclipse proper or not -- I prefer going back to Emacs. :-)

Honestly, if I hadn't had such weird experiences with Eclipse, I probably would like it. It seems to be a very nice system (or at least it ought to be, when it works right). You can even set it up with Emacs keybindings, which help ease the transition somewhat.
http://iminlikewithyou.com/
http://www.reddit.com is the only one I use everyday
I'd agree. If you're going to go to the trouble of writing a blog, you should own and control the domain.
See, when I saw the Hacker News title for this, my first thought was "Good to know, I'll simply avoid installing Joe Hewitt." Now that I think about it, maybe a blanket policy of not installing people on my computer is a good one. Better just to stick to programs.
Silly idea:

1. take every email exchange you've had with past YC companies whose outcomes are now known.
Good=bought, IPO, etc., Bad=no longer exists (with exceptions for folks like Kiko?)

2. train a bayesian filter on the set

3. Apply to the rest with as yet unknown outcomes

4. Publish the results :D
Ditto. Used it on PC, PSP, and PS3.
That is the ugliest thing I have ever seen.
I agree that the post head is melodramatic. But I think perhaps you missed something in the article. As it pointed out, the kind of "easy guesses" you mention are far less likely to occur in broad fields, even if they are more likely in narrower fields. Besides, so long as the default "fail" state in a double-blind review is at least _no worse than_ the current "succeed" state of single-blind, I don't see why there would be an objection.

I confess that I've done a reasonable amount of graduate work, and I work at a well-known college (staff, not faculty), and I was genuinely surprised to learn that most reviews aren't double-blind. It seems to me to make more sense as the default option.

But again, I don't disagree that the submitter is hyping the situation with that head. The situation isn't necessarily "corrupt" -- but I can understand the inclination to interpret it that way.
They really lost me with this claim.

I have a hard time believing that anyone that would build such a thing could resist running it on themselves.

I don't know these guys, but if it were me:

Run software on self. It says I'm going to fail. There's a bug in the software! Tweak, tweak. Run software on self. It says I'm going to fail. There's a bug in the software! Tweak, tweak...
I may have a bit of excessive taste for melodrama, please forgive.

In my experience, most scientists who are qualified to review a paper will be able to infer the name of the researcher behind it, based solely on the content.

Your point isn't just anecdotal, the original Nature editorial mentions a study: "Referees could identify at least one of the authors on about 40% of the papers, undermining the raison d'être for double-blinding."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/full/451605b...

But sexism is probably a problem with female names one doesn't recognize, not females whose work one is familiar with (anecdotal, but I'm sure I could find studies on prejudice/discrimination), so double-blind review would still help.

Still, we're talking on different premises: I think it's important both for publishers to strive for fairness in publishing and for researchers to demand a unceasing effort towards general progress in publishing. The real problem is a lack of dedication to thought about the best way to organize research, which, if I understand correctly, is the biggest value added by the journals. Why is it that the closest thing to thinking about organizing research on a macro level is one of Nature's 17 blogs (is it really just as important as the Avian Flu)?

http://blogs.nature.com/

Why is there so little thought about how it is we organize our research? Is it just because old business models stand in the way? Is it because those that benefit from the status quo have undue influence?
Nice observation..and the situation is, I think, exacerbated by the often-cited "publish or perish" nature of things. I strongly suspect that this increases the tendency to adhere to the narrative, making it even more self-reinforcing.

Dangerous.
"In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice even in practice."
I don't read Haskell, and though I tried searching for it, I was unsuccessful, so I figured I'd ask.

What's the "(card, rem) <- (selectOne deck)" notation mean?
And does the "in" put the second if statement inside the else clause of the first if statement, or outside of it?

Thanks
> But if they can't fix your problem by fixing their algorithm, you're basically fucked.

I think it's reasonable to say that the algorithm isn't worth much if it has such false positives.
Whatever happened to parakey?
At the risk of sounding the killjoy, those aren't exactly pictures, so much as an artist renditions notion of what an Alienware phone might look like. The pictures are all labeled "Designed by Jas Seehra for Dial-a-Phone - www.dialaphone.co.uk"

I'm thinking the real phone's probably going to look nothing like this and will probably look more like a phone that people won't actually mind being seen in public with.
I like the phrasing:

"The difference between practice and theory is greater in practice than in theory."
I asked this a while ago on here because I was wondering if parakey was going to end up integrated into Facebook. A YC founder answered that he didn't think Parakey had gotten very far before the acquisition and that it was a talent acquisition.
DIY Unmanned Aerial Vehicles [video]
Hideous.

I want that monitor though.
What would happen if you drank nothing but whiskey for 30 days?  Super-size me (with whiskey)
Microsoft To Announce WorldWide Telescope On February 27 (is this what Scoble was raving about?)
Wow, in light of recent Zed events, I think I owe you an apology! That must be one heck of a grapevine.
TipJoy is very cool. It's one of those "far out" ideas that might not work, but it's New Thinking and we don't have enough of that. I wish them success.
Having worked in local shops, the phrase "We just don't have time" is a very popular excuse. Reusable / easily maintainable code = fewer billable hours - it's the clients that aren't savvy enough or are too budget conscious to make it a priority.
Uh...somebody already did this, and called it MySQL. It's been fairly successful, though universally reviled by database experts who know what they're doing...
http://scribd.com/
...with an emphasis on the extensible - particularly the GUI.
Does http://news.ycombinator.com/ count?

The only one I use every day.
Its gotta be super difficult to get in. I wonder what criteria they use to pick people who can attend.
That's good reasoning, and is what I would have done, until I realized that I'm competing with blogging platforms almost as much as I'm competing with photo-sharing sites.
Good point, and thanks for pointing out defaultdict(); I wasn't even aware of that class. I suppose one could use defaultdict() to gain associativity also (pass 'not found' variables through unmodified). I think I still slightly prefer replace(), for uninteresting reasons.
Xobni is pretty cool, although I'd love to have their services in my gmail instead of Outlook. I am pretty sure they have it in the works.
http://loopt.com/
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/

paid for all the others. it did pretty well.
Justin.tv

They pretty much introduced me to YC and got me seriously interested in the startup world.
Well, intelligent programmers who happen to be poor!
I just saw a presentation on Franz's Allegro-graph - a system that stores triples up to the billions with very advanced query abilities: We are seriously considering using this: (they have a free java version that supports up to 50,000,000 triples) http://agraph.franz.com/allegrograph/
I gotta say Splashup! ( don't see it in that list )

Thats the only one i've used.

( i did vote for news.y, but that doesn't count )
By saying consciousness is a pattern in the flux of matter, you are echoing my point that consciousness can't be based on the particular matter. So, if you then think consciousness is the pattern, shouldn't two instantiations of the same pattern be the same consciousness?

Sorry we're going in circles here, but I do not understand your jump in logic. We aren't talking about identity in terms of how to pick a particular consciousness out of a set. We're talking about the subjective experience of "I", and I have a hard time seeing how any of those identifiers give me my sense of continuity.

It is also completely impossible for me to consider the "I" to be an illusion, because I am involved in the very act of trying to escape myself. It is just as incoherent as saying there is no truth, or the law of non contradiction doesn't hold. You can tell yourself such things if you want, but you can't do so in an intellectually honest way, since intellectual honesty presupposes these concepts.
Russians hijacked American science to make Artic dive
What strikes me about sql is that new programmers think even the smallest shrinkwrapped desktop app that persists data has to ship with a db engine with a sql interface. The ultimate result is all this modelling that's done to generate SQL for your interfaces using some fancy toolkit. The problem with this is that it creates an appearance of separation by generating a bunch of business objects for you. But it still encourages designing interfaces with data access in mind = monolithic development.

SQL is especially good for those times when you do not have all the answers for the questions that may be asked of your data. But if you already know all the ways your data will be queried, what's the point?
Rather than licensing, subscription or ads BlueTie is using "featuretisements"
Google’s huge data centers: the IT failures question
I applied anyway, now keeping my fingers crossed.
Poi has worked well for our projects where we have to export customer data to XLS (a commonly-requested feature that is almost like a checklist item)

I find the file system within a file (OLE2 compound document) fascinating. I wonder who at Microsoft came up with that idea (or was it really an idea by technical committee)
Not only is the picture totally a speculative mock-up (see the original image here: http://image.alienware.com/Images/product_detail_page_images...), if you read carefully there is no indication that alienware is actually building a phone at all. Really this is just some guy making up stuff about a phone, in order to have the "exclusive" and get backlinks from people too clueless to realize he's making it all up.
10 best CSS hacks
http://www.rescuetime.com/

Looks pretty cool and original, and seems to fit the "create value" rule more than most of the others. That said, I am under Linux and haven't tried the product.
I've bought tens of self-help/self-discovery books and even read some of them. Of those I've read, I've found lots of commonalities and themes.

The most important theme, in my mind, which is echoed in successful startups and businesses is:
You don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going..." (as Mike Litman puts it)
Thank you for yet another great essay Mr. Graham . . .

I think that - in a sense - your essays are programs for human minds.
$200 Million for Electric Cars?
There are probably performance improvements over python:

http://luajit.org/luajit_performance.html
I've started doing this again. If you're introspective, it's hard to find someone to talk to about your life - Writing your thoughts and feelings down is immensely therapeutic - it's like listening to yourself.

I use a private, password-protected blog (TypePad) and can even use their mobile interface. I find paper diaries can be hard to use as you have to establish a habit, while since most of us are always online in some form - it's easier to journal digitally.

I did do lots of journalling years ago (using a bound paper diary) during a difficult workaholic phase and it is painful to read the self-pity and negativeness of the entries. But, it is good to see how I've changed since then.
http://snipshot.com/

Integrating with them just rose to number 2 on my to-do list, and #1 is a prereq for #2.
>>shouldn't two instantiations of the same pattern be the same consciousness?

No--they will never occupy the same coordinates as each other in time and space, and therefore can't be the same consciousness, by definition.

The "I" doesn't have to be entirely an illusion, but our understanding of can be wrong.

I didn't used to like dark chocolate. Now I do. Which "version" is the real me, the one who doesn't like dark chocolate, or the one who does?
Harvard Web site hacked, database on file-sharing site
Design better Web pages with Firefox extensions
8 Big Eating Mistakes You Are Still Making
February 20th's Eclipse of the Moon
My vote goes to Xobni.

The founders are both great guys and they're solving an ugly problem that millions of people care about. I'm a GMail user myself now, but it's unlikely Outlook is going anywhere anytime soon.

I'm kicking myself for not pushing Adam to let me invest when I met him in Boston.
Discussion begins here: (Mods please downmod this comment to -1)

people you can carry out discussion threads as children of this comment (just don't upmod it).

This way there is a clean separation between the poll and its discussion.
FireBug and Web Developer plugins are all I need.

edit: I'm going to try that GridFox, sound interesting.
Google Sued Over Google Sky Feature
If you don't already have a alpha/beta/gamma of your web application live, I think a prototype of an interesting web project would help raise your application's chances. That being said, interesting ideas are cheap - my goal is to put the time/effort/energe to mold one of my ideas into a live proof-of-concept/prototype by the application deadline... in basically one month's time.. in Ruby on Rails (which I've just started learning).

The fact that GMail started out from humble beginnings ("I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine." - http://tinyurl.com/2zs4pe) is inspiring.
SeeSat-L Feb-08 : USA 193 NOTAM released?
That's exactly what they're targeting here -- Alienware's existing (and not altogether small) market, full of gamers, geek chic, and those that might wear t-shirts advertising their hackitude.

Designers look at it and wince, but I can definitely see that phone being successful in that crowd.

EDIT: Argh. I should've paid closer attention to the text. As others pointed out, this thing's completely fictional. They're not targeting anything. Mea culpa.
RescueTime...see discussion below.
Succinct, sensible coding style: WebKit (Safari)
Im tied; I use Xobni daily but I also use RescueTime daily...

I think I like RescueTime cause at work, it will make me look like a rockstar once the business edition comes out and I can track employee productivity, pull the data out through an API and show it to the CIO/CEO/C*O for decision making as well as improving the system that is used overall at work.
http://disqus.com/ is the best IMHO
Maybe it's just me, but I don't take Blogger blogs seriously, at _all_.
Obama was chosen by party insiders early on.
Hey could you delete your rescuetime entry from the poll, as its a duplicate entry? Instead just upmod paulgb's comment which votes for rescuetime too.

Edit: never mind. there are more duplicates already, and they are in turn going to confuse more voters.. so its already a losing battle. Well played Entropy, well played.
Heroku is awesome. Great idea, great vision. Scalable hosting makes so much sense for web applications. If they get it developed and working properly I'd definitely pay to use their service.
Harvard Site Hacked + SQL files Leaked
Maybe this post came from Soviet Russia.
Critical sentence:

"Jonathan Cobb claims that during his work for Google as contractor he posted a complete description of Google Sky in an internal Google discussion group."

Who knows what kind of contract work he was doing, but I'll bet there's a clause in his contract from Google that states "All your base are belong to us." Besides, it was posted in an internal discussion group. The ideas there already belong to Google by default.