skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It needs something on the front page. I think you took to heart the advice to 'cut down on the text', but perhaps went overboard:-)

Also, something that's not flash would be nice too, at the very least as a splash screen.
Is that a joke?
"Your site could sell text link advertisements at a rate of approximately $1,087,500/Link/Month.

If you sell eight links, you could earn approximately $8/Month selling text links on your site."

Right...
I must say, I just love the login window.

But seriously, what are you making? A flash-based webtop? Please give us a little more information and get us excited :)
He classified it as the "obvious next" and qualified it as possibly a "luminary"
I'll back this up by saying my Dell Inspiron 9400 has some odd creaking in areas. I'm sure these are just from age, but firstly the cover protecting the ram is now bald because it was painted steel not anodized aluminium, which rather disappointed me as it now looks even uglier.

The main problem is the hard drive is attatched by 2 screws and makes a funny creaking noise. However, the chassis above it flexes visibly with any form of pressure, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the edging snaps clear of the main body. The DVD drive is attatched by one screw and merely having a two-tone CD in the drive can make it vibrate like hell; I believe the worst was the game disc for Black & White, it sounded like the drive was damaging itself. I downloaded a NOCD patch because I was nervous about having it vibrate that much.

In addition to this, the screen is held flimsily on by IIRC two screws and it has lost its rigidity over the years. Even just putting the laptop down while in use can cause the screen to shift by 2.5-5 degrees.

Comparably, I would go with a MacBook next. My brother, who's had his longer than my laptop, has had no problem with his except that they use torx screws so swapping his ram proved mildly problematic. $20 for a 7 piece set fixed that problem though... I'd sure swap the ease of upgrade in my flimsy Dell for an extra $20 to upgrade a sturdy Mac.
Why Scala is a must-learn language even if you don't plan to use it.
Learning Scala teaches you the state of the art in programming language design. So even if you don't plan to use it, at least you will be familiar with advanced programming language concepts that you may not have learned at university.
"Of course "the September that never ended" ended two years ago."

How so?
Subtext programming language - demo screencast
Spez said he uncommented something on the live server.
Cult of the Dead Cow offers tool to help hackers
Nice graphic: box office revenues since 1986
I completely disagree with your first sentence. At least in the physical sciences. There is a spectrum of academics out there, that map to a spectrum of different personalities. Some work on stuff few people care about, some work in the mainstream and some pioneer the mainstream. There are pro/cons to all three types.

Personally, I do not know many startup founders. But, the basic underlying principle of success (that I've gathered from news.yc) is "build something people want." So startups are there to provide services. Necessarily, founders do care what other people think.

Academic scientists don't necessarily have that constraint.
Electronic Arts Bids for Take-Two Interactive: $2 Billion
I don't really get the point of the article. Mac builds sturdy laptops, and who cares if they use 5 screws or 500 screws to do it. If Macs design is inefficient and expensive then someone will trump them. However, I've had packages delivered damaged because they paste one strip of tape over the main part of the flap; One package even arrived with the tape a good inch off of the flap, so it made it all the way to my house with half of it being open, and if -- like other companies do -- they had taped along the edges too, it wouldn't have meant half my stuff went missing and cost the company over $200.
Yes - and Hilberts contribution to general relativity theory primarily sprung from a seminar held in 1915 where Einstein and Hilbert elaborated on the theory, leading among other things to the Einstein field equations and Einstein-Hilbert action.

What this means is that Hilbert helped elaborate on the theory, and worked out some of the kinks.

Not to dismiss Hilbert, but the idea was Einsteins' and his alone.
Some things that you could learn:

* important concepts such as f-bounded polymorphism, covariance, contravariance, implicit parameters and methods, etc.

* traits that solve the diamond problem with multiple inheritance

* functional programming concepts including monads

* advanced concurrency concepts via the actors library

* pattern matching via case classes and extractors

* that type inference can make you highly productive in a statically typed language
ehm, no.

He says that he can't think of any luminary ideas and goes on to say this:

"If we can theorize that if Einstein had never existed it would have been 50 years (or 100 years or whatever you like) before someone else thought it up - we can probably classify it as luminary."

He doesn't say that the idea is luminary, he is simply lacking an example and theorises on the Einstein idea.
Growth potential, dude!
Hmm, I'd have thought the recordings of webcam girls and clips of porno's and people talking about sex would have been the reason. Go figure, religion doesn't censor on the basis of morals or the logic descending from their morals, but on an abstract basis of insult.
excellent great list I will add them. I came across a blog to day with their groups listed so I might put that at the bottom under groups when I add the groups or maybe even a group widget on its own. I missed del.icio.us off too...

As for an alternative for the iframe, I am working on this too, I will do a flash version and a JS version. I could generate an image for forum sigs but the user would have to link to a profile page on the site.

thanks for the feedback.
Inspired Misfires
In the absence of more information about the graph and how the data was created, yeah. The rest of what she says, though, are mostly bizarre inferences. Based on that, and reading the rest of her profile, I don't think she really cares about science. I have a hard time thinking that people would, as a society, willingly choose to not have clean running water, environmental protection, or sewage treatment plants because it might not be "pious".

The thing to ask now should be to ask is what is the casual relationship, if any, between the two data sets and if there is a way to test the relationship. I think she may also be missing out on the idea of "aggregate" sums.

If you look at the color of the dots, though, you see that richer continents don't overlap; or at least, they seem discrete. That's interesting.
I worked for a company that sold laptops. We had a request from abroad to purchase five laptops and pay equal amounts on four credit cards held in different names. That doesn't look even vaguely legitimate. Nor was it an isolated incident.

Once you take into account more plausable fraud, damages, refunds and Japanese versions of Windows, I'd presume that selling Japanese laptops outside of Japan is a really quick way of getting burned.
Heh. It's barely a surprise. I called the FEC and there is no scheme I could think of around the restrictions.
Interesting indeed!... The post was made in 1999 and a few things have changed since then

The author writes that the conditions in India and China are "worse", which might have been true in 1999, but certainly not today! See http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/feb/20apac.htm
Interestingly, academic jobs are on the rise as well with burgeoning of new grad schools/research institutes. The demand-supply curve in India is skewed in other direction. Finally, (this is an information gathered from a few senior professors, haven't found any web resource yet!), the success of grant proposals in India is of the order of 60-70%, much higher than that in the U.S.

Though, it's still a fact that academia is not looked as a 'lucrative' career option yet.

(Well, as a supplement to an earlier post, there are a bunch of hilarious webpages by Philip Greenspun. See http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/)
So If we don't choose to immediately respond you automatically declare a default victory?

Because even if we can't disprove your assertion, we are expected to go along with your idea without question?
Reinforcement Learning Competition 2008
Sophie Germain was one of the greatest mathematicians of all times.

Well, no. While the term "female mathematician" is oddly dismissive, Sophie Germain is nevertheless famous mainly because she was a woman who did mathematics. This isn't to diminish her remarkable achievements in the face of entrenched sexism, but she was hardly a great mathematician.

In fact, I'd hazard to guess that a plausible list of the 100 greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists (for most of history there was little distinction between the two) would contain at most two women (Emmy Noether and Maria Goeppert Mayer). I have a theory about why this is the case, but this comment box is too small to contain it.
Nobody respects the lone, eccentric time-travel researcher...
How do you refresh your mind during a study break?
I thought this was going to be a joke about imageshack, how [pics] power reddit.
How can you get funding as an academic if you work on something few people care about? How can you attract PhD students? How can you publish in top conferences/journals?
Should burn a lot less than black on white, actually.
Pakistan 'sparks YouTube outage'
Online auction listings down 13% in boycott of eBay
A Guy Named Craig: The Rise of Craigslist
of course no one should want to be a hacker ... in the same sense that no one want to be a book reader, you just can't suddenly force it on you to like reading book! either you do or you don't like to read, think about what you read and than discuss what you read ... if this ever gets a better name than a 'book reader' ... you can't choose to be one

i am of course a book reader

anyway, if you ever decide to be hacker, please read the article in the link above, actually i would recommend you read all of esr writing, particulary the cathedral and the bazaar ... learn python too, and hack on the twistedmatrix networking framework... this will surely make u a great hacker ... :)))
My comment implied that there are people who are broke from grad school.

Last time I checked my bank account, that's still true.
Paulgraham.com - $29,889

I certainly think that the information there is a bit more valuable, though I'm also pretty sure that it doesn't make the $829/month that it could.
Understanding Ruby blocks, Procs and methods
I don't understand how a smart person becomes so hopelessly out of touch with a reality that he make himself (his physical self) into something approaching grotesque.
Declining languages
Mountain Man Turned Mogul
Fun to play with, even if it means nothing. Interesting how San Francisco is the only U.S. city in the top 10 for these searches. Check out India's huge lead -- they love them some Java!

If you add Ruby, Python, or Lisp, they just show up as straight lines along the bottom.
I wonder if the average selling price increased since there are more buyers per listing.
I put in a site that has been making $1200+/month for the last two years and it tells me that the site can make $20/month. Fail.
The book has chapters on mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel and Paul Erdős among others. I'll have to get it. Why no musicians, though? I would have added Glenn Gould to the list.
France tries to build a public media giant
You seem to be implicitly assuming that the world owes you a position in a good group. It doesn't. If you can't find one, then you shouldn't work for whoever has grant money to pay you. You should go and do something else - like start a company.

Now we are getting somewhere! :)
Ask YC: How much do you make on advertising on your site?
A lot of startups are depending on advertising on their site, but it is often hard to find numbers on what kind of income you can expect from this.

The numbers, of course, vary depending on your niche and your audience, the type of advertising you use, and how aggressively you place your ads.

Still I think it would be interesting to see some numbers and/or ranges. Anyone willing to share, or point to some good resources on this?
That's what I was thinking...this physics prof is doing better than he thinks. He's just so bogged down in bureauacracy that he has been unable to publish on it yet...
Mindboggling(ly simple) set theoretic question
This was posted just two days ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121673

Maybe the mods should merge the two?
Easy Ruby tutorial akin to The Little Schemer
Of course it's hard. Harder than people who aren't trying can imagine. Chance of success is low. But there are a number of success stories.

Perfect example: the search for extra solar planets. Twenty years ago, Geoff Marcy, a prof at a teaching school, SF state, begged for telescope time. Now he's a prof at UC Berkeley, and (I think) PI of a roughly trillion-dollar space mission.

Marcy is a multiple-sigma deviation. His success is rare. Careers in academic science have a very poor risk-adjusted payoff, worst than startups. Would I rather be the guy who pioneered planet finding or one of the google guys? Don't know. :)
Fair point. It was actually three years ago:

"On February 9, 2005, AOL discontinued newsgroup access through its service (this was announced on January 25, 2005[6][7])."
Scala looks cool and all, but how is it better than ocaml, haskell, etc.?

That isn't rhetorical.
MIT prof's notorious talk on How to Talk
This is a good joke. It's not a login screen, type in whatever rubbish you like. Then click your name and you can watch yourself if you've got a webcam. I imagine those college kids at the other end get an alert whenever someone enters and watch you cutting faces, laughing their x off.
Click on the green circles. I'm seeing a short clip of someone (it looks like he's in the bathroom). I have no idea what this is though.

Edit: The boxes change depending on what you enter for location/interests. Type "test" in that box to see a few.
Persai, a new filtering program that aims to cure the Web's information overload
It's more familiar to Java programmers and uses the Java platform. You can learn its advanced concepts incrementally starting from a familiar base. Also, it doesn't force you to program in a functional manner as with Haskell.
I think paid barriers to entry just amplify the positive or negative effects of other administrative measures; in and of themselves, all they do is reduce the rate of people coming in without much affecting its make-up. It doesn't even work that well for filtering out teenagers any more with the advent of prepaid gift cards (and before that they could just ask the 'rents to stump up the cash anyway).

I say that paid barriers don't do that much good or bad themselves based on the fact that on MeFi they seem to have been an asset whereas on, say, Something Awful they seem to've just turned the place into an echo chamber, and on Kuro5hin all it's done is drive the site further into stagnation. Paid barriers aren't risk-free either; it makes account gaming even more fun and makes your site a juicier target for attacks, especially if it means you end up storing people's personal details.
RefreshThing.com : 58,434,725 impressions, 19,730 clicks, $3,083.27 rev, Nov 06-Present. Dropped AdSense from most of the content last May to simplify the design. This is AdSense only, not affiliate (CPA) revenue.
Forcing you to learn something isn't good.

Think about an analogy with python. Learning C first would force you to learn memory management. Python doesn't, and it's easier to learn programming because of it.

To master Python, you need to understand C. It comes with time - at the right time.
This is true. While PI's can't always fire you gracefully, they have many ways to make you wish they had fired you.

So, ultimately, if your startup-company moonlighting starts to eat too much into graduate research time, you're going to have to fish or cut bait: Either keep your adviser happy, or take the necessary leave of absence.

Note that (most) graduate advisers are not evil people. I suspect that many of them will quite happily grant you six months off to pursue your startup-company dreams... if the timing is right (hint: don't ask until just after the Nature article is submitted) and after they explain to you that your publication record and your graduation time will be set back by a year or more. Oh, and you probably won't be given the plum projects ever again, since your adviser knows that you have one eye on the door... those are the breaks of the game.

One very special caution: Your adviser may try to enlist your help in his startup company. Be very wary of this situation, or of any potential adviser with a history of this. You want your adviser to be unambiguously focused on helping you graduate and get a better-paying job... or as unambiguously as possible, anyway.
Excellent way to display more than 2 dimensions in 2 dimensions.

Reminds me of this one from 1861 which showed space (map of Europe), time (length of lines), direction (beige for eastward, black for westward), size of army (thickness of lines), and even infers weather conditions (what killed the troops):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Minard.png
Attitude #2 is precisely what our startup http://bug.gd is intended for:

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

[...]

To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
It's All Text! addon for Firefox
Here's another decline: http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+trends&ctab=0&...
Beautiful visualization. Reminds me that it is time to browse my neglected copy of Tufte's Envisioning Information. Thanks
Just out of curiosity, can you disclose which site is that?
How can one do relevant science without the support that comes from a research institution? Research professor (I clump lab researchers into the professor term) is certainly a new thing. So is "big money" science (a consequence of WWII.) As a result of the research prof and "big money" science, the days of ben franklin and his kite are long dead. (ben franklin was a great scientist.)

Academia is setup to provide support for scientists: it provides smart people to talk to. It provides money to pay the bills and run research labs. Where else can I receive this support?

One path is to take a 6 year detour, build a startup that pays me $30M, and then run my own research program. Honestly, that seems even harder than two postdocs.
SYNCY That Phone
When I followed the article to its YouTube video, it said the video was no longer available.

Here appears to be a summary of it here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6084221876531914922&...

And Harvard has it all in a number of separate videos:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58703/winston1.ht...
Thank YOU. Reminded me that there ARE other people who own some of the same books as me.
"... If you find indentation to be a pain in Python, you haven't configured your editor properly. ..."

While it's easy to config your own editor [0]. There are other factors

* uncommonly used editors [1]

* other users/developers

Of the two, other developers is the biggest pain. You have to make sure each developers editor conforms to your coding standards. [1] But making "quick changes" on the server, can short-cut such safeguards.

[0] http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowToEditPythonCode

[1] http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors
I disagree. Beethoven's 5th Symphony doesn't fall into any of those.

1) Definitely not the "next obvious step."

2) The theoretical principles of canons and fugues, etc. were all in place in the 18th century, but no one but Beethoven could have made the 5th symphony, or anything close to it.

3) Obviously, nothing to do with infeasibility.

4) Again, not luminary, because no one would ever have though of it. Contemporary musical style would change, and Beethoven's work would never exist.

P.S. And if anyone dare try to say the 5th Symphony wasn't an idea, it's brought a lot more good, happiness (relaxation, concerts, etc.), and wealth (selling records, etc.) than most startup ideas...
I'm sure you have good reasons for what you said about Scala. But as someone who does not know Scala, the post is not motivating.

Could you state the case for scala, in terms that someone not familiar with it, could appreciate?
With those biceps, he may be taking human growth hormone.
Unless a person needs specialized equipment or materials...

That is a pretty huge caveat. If you're lucky enough to be a mathematician, that's easy to say. If you're a molecular biologist... brace yourself for the sticker shock.

And it depends on your goals. If your goal is to enlighten yourself, you don't need to be an academic: you just need a decent library that gets all the Nature journals, a pile of textbooks, a local university full of grad students that like to talk about their work, and time. But if your goal is to do original work, you've got bigger financial problems.
meh, Einstein worked in a patent office. Galois failed the french public school teacher's exam. Grassman spent an eternity teaching middle school. The Wright brothers repaired bicycles. The academy spent most of its time telling these people they were wrong, and then, maybe, embraced them once they didn't have any choice.
I took that class from Kunen at Wisconsin in the late 80s. But I'll be damned if I can find my copy of that yellow book or remember enough to be of any help.

I have to admit that I never really did understand forcing.

It seemed like all the logic professors at UW at that time, including Kunen, were getting interested in computer science.

Kleene was still around at that time, too.
I went to the Colorado Software Summit. At the presentations and nightly convocations, they were giving out as the door prizes: 'Programming Ruby' books. And the presenters/organizers gushed 'it's really cool, the next big thing. Ruby is it'. That was seven or eight years ago.

While Ruby broke out with Ruby on Rails, Java is firmly entrenched and as someone who is trying to learn Ruby/Ruby on Rails - I'm finding the learning curve painful as Ruby/Ruby on Rails is more than just a syntax or a language it's a different way of doing things. We're trying to justify a small project (business case) but even though the application we are intending to build is perfect for RoR - they are almost like why not Spring/Hibernate/Flex.

I believe many Java programmers are happy that Java is a near default language for a lot of non-startup IT/software shops - you can't learn Ruby on Rails from a 5-day bootcamp.
Are you familiar with most of these concepts already?
nice little app...

Your numbers might be skewed towards the low end due to your business model. I presume that a refresh is an impression here.

But thanks a lot for sharing. :-)
This is on the internet, so it must be true!
I went all the way back to the mid 80's, and the blockbuster back then was Top Gun, which apparently didn't even break 250 mil. Nowadays, we have huge blockbusters that regularly surpass 250 mil every season. Even though we have DVDs and can download copies (pirated or not), collectively, we're spending more on movies than we use to.

However, we don't know whether that's due to more people going to see movies, or merely just an increase in ticket prices. It'd be more interesting to see the graph adjusted for this so we can see if more or less people are going to the movies than before.

It also seems that movies that are series get a second hump, like Jurassic Park III, Harry Potter, etc.

IMAX movies have a looong shelf-life, compared to all other movie types. Mysteries of Egypt was there all the way from 1999 through to the end of 2000, when it had a small resurgence before disappearing.