skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
haha, was totally unaware of that. Do people usually meet regularly?
You bet he has. The problem is that he's giving advice for people who don't live there -- and he's apparently forgotten that they don't.
that even FED can't do - but according to warren buffet, we are already in recession ...
Any resources for graduate project ideas?
Hi,
Im a CompSciEng graduate student (MS) looking for a thesis/project topic. Is there a website or other resource that would help in this. If not, wouldn't it be a good idea to have such a collection point for graduate projects ?
From talking to a few VCs, I don't think they're having any problems raising money, and even if they were, there are a lot of funds that are already set to invest over the next few years. (I haven't talked to any in a few weeks, so the former part of that statement might change/have changed.)

I would guess angels would be more affected. These are individuals, who might have lost a chunk of their money in the market and/or lost a shit-ton of equity in their homes. They might be scared more into preservation mode.
no it's worse. i can paste longer text in AIM
> You're being downvoted,

How do you downvote? I've not seen that option.
Bear Stearns collapse will lead to "a wave of startup bankruptcies and failed mergers"
the hottest topic you may work on are mobile phone apps, e-commerce with the help of biometric technology, web 3.0 etc.
What do you think Darwinian fitness is?
It wasn't a biography--it was computer programs.
I think this is the best explanation of the value of Twitter I've ever seen.
He's alright but dexter can do it while wearing some sweet shoes:
http://www.anybots.com/videos.html#walking_080302_title
The good reason why it'll never work is that it has to be done for bilions of pages.
I loved the idea! I would really make the subjects stand out a little more. It seems to me your site is all about content, and at the moment content is not king. Make the content column stand out more, and probably use different fonts for subject title and description.

I love the idea, and I think making the subject list stand out would make your sight more appealing
The point of the article is that there is no good solution, no matter what Microsoft is interested in.
>Great people shouldn't wear pants. If you go around wearing pants, it sounds to me like you've been brainwashed into thinking you're kind of ordinary.

In the 4-Hour Work Week, the author says it is good to be different only when it makes you more productive or effective. If it's just to be different, then you might look silly
Total bullshit.
Resume is not even about HR.
Resume has value itself.

"Genius is a man knowing limits of self" Albert Camut
(read in russian, originally in french and now translated by me in english! =)
Yeah! I know my English is terrible!)
We're delighted with the credit crunch," says a partner at private equity firm
Good idea!
When/if I will change my job - I'll do the same
http://philip.greenspun.com/research/fantasy/
I was reading the article and I realized I'd read the article before.. Congratulations to Tony Wright of RescueTime getting a by-line about building his sustainable Web business in BW!

I'm curious how BW found him. Does BW read News.YC?
http://www.aiderss.com/all/www.tonywright.com
According to Krugmen, things are always falling apart. But I guess if you constantly predict the end of everything then you will be right the only time it matters.
Recommendations for Key-man Life Insurance?
As many of you have experienced, venture capital financing often requires that the founders and management obtain life insurance payable to the company (aka "key-man" policies). Not all life insurance companies are familiar with the practice or the customs in the startup world. With which life insurance companies have you successfully established key-man policies? For what coverage limits ($1M, $5M, $10M, etc)?
Thanks for correcting me.
I think you answered your own question: "Isaac Asimov said that humanoid robots will have an advantage because the whole world is already build for humans."

Given the choice, do you really think we would rebuild the whole world's infrastructure?
Steve Wozniak on Apple, Steve Jobs and the Value of a Good Prank.
The biggest requirement is having encouragement from people around you or examples of success that seem achievable.

Without these, hacking isn't so alluring.
As a web-developer you don't have to worry about IE5.5 now, in 2008, seven years after the release of IE 6.0. Seven years to make sure your site works in IE 6.0. Seven years time to upgrade to IE 6.0.

If Microsoft goes through with what they've promised, one day you've got a web site which works on the latest version of IE, and the next day (when MS releases IE 8) you don't.

Since all web pages aren't going to be fixed in a day, practically nobody will upgrade.

The only solution is to do what they did for version 7, and 6, and 5.5. Maybe they could have prevented the problem by releasing a more standard-compliant IE 5, but since then, they're stuck.

The good thing is that we're slowly getting better at abstracting the problem away.
San Jose,CA
But Twitter is public. Isn't that the main difference with IM?
Boston Dynamics RHex [video]
I have no idea who it is for. I'd rather be doing stuff than telling everyone about what I'm doing.
WebVisible Takes $12 Million Series B
Palo Alto, CA
Well, it also requires the ability to spend a lot of time writing code. There aren't a lot of Mexicans who really work a few hours a day and spend the rest of their time in leisure. Most of them work very hard and just barely scrape by.
I think you should retool your design because:

1. The site requires me to have my browser window full screened at 1280x1024 resolution, otherwise it forces me to scroll horizontally.

2. The top of the site is wasted.

3. It looks strange to me for the background color to extend in to the main "content area" -- maybe consider making the background in the middle all the same color.

Beyond that... The site doesn't really tell me what it does, you should give me some more info, and don't assume that I know what SourceForge is, although I think Wikipedia is widespread enough to use that reference.

"try it out! In the left column..." -- the left column, immediately below that, is your Features image with the pic of the kid.

The "comment on this" link doesn't seem to do anything, neither does "vote on this" or "revision history." I click it and get a busy mouse cursor for a second, but nothing actually happens.

Whenever I saw a link to a quiz or test, it just takes me to a set of blank rich text input boxes. I don't see any questions or a way to submit what I assume are answers.

When editing a subject, I don't see any way to rearrange the Lessons. Drag and drop, ajax style, would be nice for that, in addition to an integer value for the position.

Beyond the usability stuff, I'm not sure how much sense it really makes for anyone to be able to edit the courses. It seems like only the teacher should be allowed to do that, as the teacher should be an expert in his field and should not need to have his lesson plan corrected in the middle of a "semester."

All in all, it looks like you've got an interesting concept there. One possible use I can see for the technology is that, once you get some courses on there that are proven to be correct, you could export the whole course, or a set of courses, to CD and sell or donate them to developing nations. You might even be able to partner with the XO and other laptops aimed for kids who might not have access to quality education.

You also will eventually need to get teachers to create lesson plans on the site. I think a good way to do that would be to approach private schools and sell them on the benefits of having that info online -- the parents can see exactly what their kids are studying, the teachers, if they're any good, will feel good because they're able to teach more kids than just those who sit in front of them, the school can get some philanthropic benefits out of it, etc.
Calgary, AB
I heard about this site here yesterday, and already had a chance to use it today to test out if a newly registered domain worked elsewhere.
I use the word fragmentation because that's how a lot of other people are describing it. Also, decentralized already means a lot of things to other people.
Of course, that's only up to the point that the "smarter people" stop tolerating the dilution and leave, thus leaving the TC members in the exact same position as before.
You need to hire someone with usability expertise.

p.s. Anyone as a spare Heroku invite (lpgauth at gmail)
4 million in sales is not what they are making. If that number is true, then they are grossing somewhere in the $150K range a month. Still not a bad figure for such a small operation.
You can downvote when you reach a certain level of karma. I think it's 200.
Segways can handle most terrain humans encounter daily. Anybot is also working on a wheeled robot, Monty.

Then again, Dean Kamen said cities would be redesigned for Segways...
good move. This is what i would want to hear if i was a Google investor.

Cut The Fat.
Philadelphia and New Yorkish
Twitter has an interesting problem: they sell it as service to tell people "what are you doing", explicitly pushing the "hyper-connected" angle. This was great for early adopters, but normal people don't care about the idea of being "hyper-connected" and being informed every time their friends fart.

Funnily enough though, normal people will care about what Twitter really is: a general-purpose platform-agnostic publish-and-subscribe messaging system. Or as mainstream users will initially see it: a simple way to text & IM all your friends in one go.

If Twitter wants to grow big in the mainstream, I think they would do well to completely change their public sales pitch to focus on this. Once this is sucessfully communicated to the average user it will become huge, and people will quickly and instinctively grasp the usefulness of platform agnostic pub/sub.
Baltimore (start a meetup?)
You seem to be implying that the economy has been good for the last 8 years (it hasn't for most Americans), that the American economy doesn't have any fundamental imbalances (it has), that G W Bush is a good president (he hasn't) and that the war in Iraq was well managed. (It wasn't)

The ideological cyclopes calling Krugman shrill for pointing out those glaringly obvious facts are the real problem for the US.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day from CrunchGear
One other advantage of fragmentation (which I'm surprised he did not touch) that became apparent as I've been trying ffeed is that I am free to say stuff relevant to me as opposed to a public forum with people who do not know me.
Just north of San Francisco, CA, over the Golden Gate Bridge.
IPhone Users, How intuitive is horizontal scrolling?
Companies that don't require resumes
There are none, stop being lazy and make one.
I started making a list in response to mixmax's comment on Seth's original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139066

I'm sure there are a lot that I'm missing though, so hopefully others can provide more examples.

(The lens also has a short essay I wrote about the value of a college degree for finding a job.)
Bad Statistical Reasoning about Weather and Climate
Your inappropriate use of the word "here" for "hear" I can tolerate. But your referral to human beings as "fat" that are easily "cut" is inexcusable.

Please keep this in mind as there are many people in the near future that are going to be losing their jobs as the US economy spins out of control (which I hope it doesn't).
Treadmill Workout Ideas That Make Fitness Fun
"What if we could make a material that is self-re-assembling?"
Digital Camera Information 
Taking digital images on your camera has no implication other then you have captured the image. Then you can review each image on the small screen on the back of your camera. You can shoot as many pictures of the same scene as you like ?store them in memory ?delete the ones that you do not like and print the one(s) you like.
I know domain-names are tough to come by these days, but I just don't dig on slang mis-spellingz in an edumacational site. You feel me cuz?
> I believe Python programmers want to write Python - not Java, nor .Net. What attracts us to Python is a clean syntax. If I want concurrency in Python, I don't want to have to call into java.util.concurrent.

A-freakin-men. Remove the GIL! (I know, I know, easier said than done).
Digital Camera Images To Your Computer
There are a few very important tasks associated with using the digital camera. The most important is of course capturing a beautiful photograph. The next most important task is that of transferring this image somewhere from where it can be printed. The most suitable place is hence the computer. Now, here comes another area of importance that needs to be analyzed and sufficient knowledge is required to be imparted to the users to make ample use of such an important feature. This discussion is thus generally focused upon this mechanism to transfer the digital camera images to the computer, and the various types of such a transfer. Looking from a very simple point of view, there are two methods for transferring the digital camera images to the computer; they are firstly by attaching the digital camera directly to the computer (a process that is popularly called tethering) and secondly by the use of a memory card reader.
Aerobics & Cardio Information
Do you sometimes get bored with your aerobic exercise? Do You sometimes feel like you're not getting the results you should from your aerobic exercise? If so, then aerobic cross-training is for you.
I have to agree. How again is this not a free way to spam 25,000 people a month?
Aerobic Cross Training for Weight Loss
Aerobic Cross Training for Weight Loss

Do you sometimes get bored with your aerobic exercise? Do You sometimes feel like you're not getting the results you should from your aerobic exercise? If so, then aerobic cross-training is for you.
I really haven't looked deeper into it. I'm basing my statement on the notion that HTTP was invented way before the internet went mainstream and that at today's pace of technological evolution every passing year takes us exponentially further away from the original purpose of HTTP.

I would be hard pressed to believe that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned HTTP becoming as popular as it is today and thus designing for this popularity in anticipation. I would be more easily convinced that HTTP is optimal for the time and purpose for which it was designed. Like starlight, we are still within that scope of possibilities, although some VERY creative solutions are available, such as Ajax - but this just indicates to me that needs of the masses are way beyond the needs for which HTTP was originally designed.

Using this approach, it would seem perfectly logical (in my mind) that the needs of today's web be looked upon with a fresh attitude as far as what we use it for today and what we may use it for in the next 10 years. Perhaps we need applications that are capable of dynamically acquiring new protocols (this would be a nice paradigm shift enabling so many possibilities) and thus enable a new level of interaction with the web than that to which we are currently constrained. By unhinging the browser from HTTP then there is an incentive for people to develop their own protocols thus opening up the full range of possibilities for people to invent the future web, whether it be semantic or something equally fantastic.

I will state out-right that I am merely dreaming about possibilities here and that I have not really given this much thought - there are easily many more people that could approach this problem and come up with better solutions than I could; I'm just saying that the future web deserves something better than HTTP. I would also propose that perhaps the web needs to be viewed as a multi-web when considering it's role in the future.
Kind of like this? http://www.geek.com/french-researchers-create-self-healing-r...
Breach Exposes 4.2M Credit, Debit Cards
Type 1 diabetes cure enters human trials
Ask YC: How important do you think it is to have a blog?
It seems like everyone and their mother is blogging. I'm getting ready to jump into the job market (sr. tech mgr.) and don't blog, but read a ton of them. Does the fact that I don't have a blog of my own hurt?
Another source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080313125344.ht...
Yes, exactly. Because it's fragmented, it's also possible for it to be personal, and inside jokes or off topic comments are fun instead of annoying.
"the rule is that there are no rules"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=opera&rls=...
So,i would assume that you would rather have us assigning superficial jobs to employees just to give the impression of a healthy economy.

It's that kinda of think that i believe will render America unable to compete globally and ultimately will do more harm than our temporary slump.

also, it's really lame to down mod someone, just because you don't agree with them.
Hack YC: How would you change the YC model for a hardware-based startup?
I've enjoyed many thoughtful responses to the "Ask YC" threads, so I figured I'd ask about hardware.

As a hardware hacker focused on powered aerodynamics, I've been wondering about which changes to the much-cloned YC model would be required to generate similar likelihood of success for a hardware-based startup. For software-based web applications, 3 months of on-site build, test, improve, repeat building up to demo day seems to work very well, but what changes would you make for a hardware-based startup?
Really? I think it's more like a mini-MySpace: tell the world what you're up to (in excruciating detail). If so I'd expect it to catch on with the same demographic.
Not exactly... That works because of extensive hydrogen bonding. These can break and reform easily, giving the appearance of self healing.

With the new technology, they intend to actually grow materials, much in the same way that animals such as abalone make their shells. A couple of years ago I realized that one day we will grow things rather than manufacture them. There can be dormant "cells" within it that will repair it as necessary. I'm not sure if that is the exact idea the inventor has in mind, but I think it's inevitable.
I'm just glad we get to see in advance what will be chasing us through the woods in a few years, the thum-thum thum-the-thum music playing the background, firing M15 bursts over our shoulders before the camera pans to the blackened sky.

It's going to be sweet.
There exist companies that cherrypick a select group of superstars, therefore no one should do what 99.9% of all companies want you to do, even though there's only room, by definition, for a small group of superstars.

Not a superstar badass? Starve. OK? Starve, Web 2.0 style. God we are so AWESOME.
My troll sense is tingling.
Thanks Boyd,
I have checked out the design patterns head first book and it was incredibly intuitive and even entertaining to read. I have obtained a couple more since, I just have yet to wade through them as of yet... I am going to stop procrastinating on it and start reading them - tomorrow ;)
I have recently come to realize the importance of knowing a database (and management) system or two. I kinda always knew that would be something I would need to get a firm grasp on - something confirmed from your and other's words on this thread. I feel that to be at the top of my list. I have read theory, best practices and paradigms for four years now. I think I have come to a crossroad where the application of all this theory and mess is the next move; a move where databases will be important.

Thanks for the words of encouragement, Boyd.

-Matt
I agree that the headline used is sensationalistic, but most people don't know who Paul Krugman is, and "The B Word" leaves a lot to be desired as a headline. I would suggest the headline:

Paul Krugman: "a bailout is inevitable"

That makes it clear that it's an opinion piece, and clearly conveys the core message of the post.
New wiki - nuospace
Wow, really impressive. The ice was amazing (though as someone with bad knees, transferred anthropomorphization makes me cringe).

Does anyone know why 4 legs was chosen? 4 seems better than 2 for stabilization, but why not 5, or 6, or 8? Maybe looking like a familiar friendly animal is an end goal?
People will tell you that you shouldn't have a Facebook account or a blog because it might hurt your future job prospects. The thing is, if I Google you and your name doesn't come up then you are, quite literally, a nobody. And who wants to hire a nobody?
Tools For Improving Focus [video]
Here's my opinion:

If you are a superstar, have saved the whales from extinction, created an entire family of programming languages, invented self-replicating nanorobots or something similar you don't need a CV. Potential employers will look at the name and think "we've got to have that guy - no matter what" And your biggest problem will probably be to stave off the hordes of headhunters.

Unfortunately I don't fall into the above category, and I think that if I send an application to a potential employer that basically says "I couldn't be bothered to put together a resume so I just provided a few links for you to see how cool I am" my chances of getting the job don't exactly increase.

Besides many employers, especially large companies, have procedures they follow. For instance sending a CV around to a group of people you will potentially be working with, storing your CV in their internal database in case they have another job where you fit better, etc. Links to stuff you have done just doesn't comply to the procedure that many companies follow.
I agree, in a way. I clicked through because I was wondering how anyone could possibly consider disk fragmentation to be a good thing.
Well, thank goodness for Dr. Raibert. And while we're at it, thank goodness for Albert Einstein.

It's the people who would exploit the technology developed by these benign characters that frightens me.

So it is perfectly reasonable to be paranoid about emerging technologies that have the capacity for great good or great evil.
Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads
Pricing and the brain
Wikipedia.org is down presently, and it is nice to know it is down for everyone and not just me. I hope they come back up soon, as I feel crippled by its absence.
The Problem With 1,000 True Fans
Not everyone who realizes twitter is public cares to read the public feed. Just because the mountain is there doesn't mean you have to climb it.
Everybody may be blogging, but very few blogs are actually worth reading - many are just regurgitation.

I think it comes down to: Do you have something original and substantive to say? If you do, then blogging is a great forum for it. If not, then you'll be lost in the noise and it won't help.
I like the math captcha.
Mistake of the Week: “But even he says so, and he’s an X!”
"Given the choice, do you really think we would rebuild the whole world's infrastructure?"

No - because we already have built the infrastructure in such a way that most important places can be reached with wheels rather than legs.

And if I had the choice of

1. maybe buying a small ramp for the stairs in my (not yet existing) house so that a wheeled robot can drive upstairs

2. buying a humanoid robot that can use the stairs himself

I would of course consider the costs - my guess is that the ramp will be much cheaper.
What would you do?
It's as bad as all that, it's not an either or. All these intranet environments are generally very used to using archaic work arounds - I don't think it would be a big deal to get people to use IE7 compatibility mode for those sites. I think the big problem would be users seeing big public sites render incorrectly - most people expect their intranets to be a little quirky and generally have IT departments to deal with it.
Why is it difficult to create an interesting website? You created digg and that, I must say, is a very interesting website. Also how could I contact you about possibly having you work or partner on a possible project? It is an interesting website!