skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At present, it is arguably a very poor idea for the average American to earn a PhD in science (or anything else). I am concerned about removing the cap on visas for foreign graduate students in science.

When there is an unlimited supply of foreigners willing to work for nothing, salaries for graduate students will surely be depressed even further. I suspect they may decrease to the minimum wage. I suspect few Westerners, with much better options, would be willing to work for the minimum wage for the better part of a decade.

There may be an increase in the number of PhD graduates as a result of their cheapness. Of course, the salaries for professional researchers would then drop. Very suddenly, scientists will become a cheap commodity.

These new visas may be a good thing for business, but I fear they are a disaster for any American making a career in science.
The only thing that would stop me from getting a MB over a MBP is the screen. The "new" MBP LED-backlit screens are amazing!. So clear and bright. The MB glossy screens definitely leave something to be desired. They aren't terrible by any means, but in comparison they just suck. If they fix the MB screens then its basically a no brainer. Put 4GB of ram in the thing and be done with it.

I'm running an old 1stgen alu-Powerbook. It works well enough that I can't possibly justify buying a new one. I'll probably get the Macbook as its pretty cheap when you get the entry level one (especially with the student discount, which I am). I'll surely put 4GB of ram in it though. With that $1000 I save on the macbook pro, I can get 2 months rent, 2 months groceries, a track bike + 1 month rent, a nearly complete climbing kit, a new surfboard and a track bike. I guess you should look at what You'd spend that $1000 on. If you'd spend it on really great things, get the macbook. If not, get the macbook pro for its wonderful screen and fasterness.
Is it the jump from 2.1GHz to 2.6GHz that makes the difference? Or something else?
As the slit gets smaller the percentage of photons that are bouncing off of the walls of the slit as compared to the percentage that goes through directly raises.
The original headline is disagreeable to me. Most of the content of the article is disagreeable to me. It is not a neutral article. There is no simple neutral way to post it.
That's sexy. :)

Well, it pays to use good technology. Lisp and Debian are great. And Ada 2005 (yeah, now vote me down).
'Asshole' is strong, but tx's points are valid. I, too, much prefer the open web, and resent anything that promotes the adoption of closed alternatives.

You're right that one can't fault a guy too much for picking the tech. he likes best, but it's hard not to have a certain distaste for someone who's actions, however slightly, move us closer to a day when we'd be forced to use proprietary tools/protocols/servers to perform most tasks on the Internet.

As developers with this view, of course, all we can do is work to make the 'open' alternatives as attractive as possible. Calling people 'assholes' isn't helpful. Cathartic, though.
I don't understand why keeping a reasonable work-life balance is impossible.

Recruit help if you absolutely need it,

stop doing the things that don't matter,

or just slow down.
i agree with most things this guy says except the use of gif animations. they are clunky and large, at any decent size and defeat his previous statements about speed. Flash has great multimedia benefits and appear exactly the same cross browser.

Sure if you only have text and images, you might want to use html/css instead of frustrating your user, but there are many sites which fully utilize flash in an efficient manner.
Ask HN: any1 has invite codes for Xoopit, Orgoo, other hot startup?
Hi Everyone,
if you are lucky or connected enough to have invite codes for any interesting startups (or yours if you are in private beta) could you please share them. Email invitecodes [at] gmail [dot] com. We will redistribute them to other addicted early users like yourself.

if you need invite codes you can email invitecodes [at] gmail [dot] com the name of the startup and we will use our super connection algorithm to get them to you ASAP.

Thank you for your support.
InviteCodes team.
Oh do not bother checking for the website we do not have one and most likely never will.
Opportunity of a lifetime
The arrows beside a users comment allow you to vote on their comment. If you like or agree with their statement, then you press their up arrow. If they are being mean spirited, or are just plain wrong, then you downgrade their comment by pressing the down arrow.
Ouch.. I guess Lisp is out as far as being able to scale is concerned.
When do you incorporate?

As soon as you have to share (with investors or partners)

or to protect assets.
So That’s What The EU Does With All That Microsoft Money
True. You have to track your receipts also, and it might even be a good idea to have the corporation "reimburse" you for the computer through company funds. I hear you also have to be very careful with the home office deduction, because it's a major red flag for auditors.
I love his old school HeNe Laser! Takes me back.
In the case of a corporation (C-Corporation or S-Corporation) business expenses are paid by the corporation and most are tax deductible on the corporation's tax return. So if a corporation has revenue no taxes are paid on the money used towards deductible business expenses. This is one of the nicest features of corporations because there are so many deductible business expenses.
Do you really need the equipment?
Sure. Every online community is either stagnating or dumbing down. Fact. Hence if Hacker News doesn't stagnate it will dumb down. Then we all move off to graze at someone else's teat. Except for the startup weenies who post here to get close to Peegee.
My 1st generation MacBook Pro was definitely too hot to use on one's lap. But, I've seen reviews that said the 2nd generation one ran a lot cooler (due to the 65nm Merym Intel chip), and now the latest generation is said to run even cooler than that, due to the cooler, 45nm Penryn chip.

Also, it's worth noting that all of Apple's laptops run extremely cool to the touch when the fans are running. If it's an issue for you, you can download smcFanControl (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23049) and manually turn up your fan speed a bit. This will make even the MBPro _cold_ to the touch.
True, but geometric rays of light bouncing off the walls of the slit won't broaden the beam. Similarly, the barrel of a machine gun doesn't broaden the stream of bullets coming out.

Only Heisenberg does (note, however, this is a purely classical/maxwellian use of Heisenberg).
I incorporated my last startup when someone offered to buy it. This is probably slightly too late, but I think you should delay it as long as possible.

If you need an entity for tax purposes, a sole proprietorship or LLP works fine.
Could anybody summarize it? I can't see a thing, the site is so slow.
Japanese ISPs Agree to Ban Pirates from the Internet
So this startup is mostly dominated by "guys". 4 girls out of a ~100. that's a red flag of diversity if I ever saw one. right? I'm not sure they aren't just hiring their friends etc.
If you're going to take investment form a C-Corporation. If you're not going to take investment right away (or ever) elect S-Corporation status.

It's a hassle to sell "shares" of an LLC to investors for capital, so I wouldn't bother because it the possibility is left open with a C-Corporation or S-Corporation.

Being a sole-proprietor or partnership doesn't limit your liability and investment doesn't really apply to either, so they're right out at the start.

And if you're just making something for yourself then there's no need for any of this.
Economic fallacy of the make work bias. If scientists become cheap commodities, they will start to switch jobs until the salaries equalize the other options again. Case in point: In the early 1800s about 98% of the US population was in agriculture. Now the number is less than 2%. In the middle, farms started to get commodotized and it became less and less lucrative to be a farmer so farmers switched to higher paying jobs. Imagine what would have happened if 98% of us were still in farming?
That's a faulty comparison, the playing field was TOTALLY different when Google started.
It was on a server in the guys basement along with some other issues that had to do with the os not Lisp itself.
One reason to not get the slowest current generation processor is that not all Core 2 Duo's support the new virtualization instructions. If you're a cross platform developer using virtual machines a lot, the extra 10-20% cost for a faster Core 2 might be worth it.
There is no down arrow?
If you don't know who Walter Lewin is, have a look here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lewin_Lectures_on_Physic...
Mark Cuban: YouTube Tries to Get Legal
The nPost Widget (and why it’s better than AdSense as I see it)
cool - thanks
I vote YOU (not Ada) up =)

In russian language "yazyk Ada"(language Ada) sounds as "language of Hell" =)
When google started, no one thought you could make money from search. Pretty much everyone agrees you can make a great deal of money from micropayments if you can make them work.
Summary: replacing HTML with flash is lame. its like making a movie out of a videogame, or a book just because you can.

if you are going to adapt something for a new media, you should do it because you can provide an exponentially better interface than HTML can provide.

HTML sucks at vector graphics, file unloaders, consistency, user interfaces, animation (although this is getting better), creating playful experiences.

Flash on the other hand flash is a perfect complement for HTML, its good at vector graphics, file uploads, consistency, user interfaces, animation, and playful experiences.

Both flash and html suck at taking advantage of any computer built in the last 2-4 years, and are missing the emerging web of 3d, and semantic applications. Cross domain policies are making it harder to design web apps than it needs to be.
Extroversion Makes People Happy Say Psychologists
I think I'd like to be a neo-farmer in 2008. With a little land, a few solar panels and access to clean water I'm sure most of us here could make a go of it. Multi-purpose robots are coming soon - they'll be able to help out when the harvest arrives.
For limited use of varied typography you can use flash very selectively by using Sifr (http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr)
Ask YC: What are the top 3 websites you frequently visit?
What are the top 3 websites you frequently visit?
Ask YC: YC Editors Too Active?
The comment below is dead, which means killed by an editor. That seems excessive to me. What do you think?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=137554

1 point by jazj 1 hour ago | link [dead]

Sure. Every online community is either stagnating or dumbing down. Fact. Hence if Hacker News doesn't stagnate it will dumb down. Then we all move off to graze at someone else's teat. Except for the startup weenies who post here to get close to Peegee.
Songkick (YC summer 07) Launches “Alexa For Bands”
wow, this is insanely cool. Probably my favorite new YC startup out of the batch.
facebook
techmeme
twitter (usually through api though)
So you welcome [Asimov's] Caves of Steel scenario. Why not.
As someone already noted Ideas without execution are just dreams, and everybody has dreams:
- I dreamed about going to work flying.
- I dreamed about people not killing theirs self in war.
- I dreamed about everybody loving me.
- I dreamed about travelling all the world.
- I dreamed about making the best voice-recognition software in the world.
- I dreamed about creating the best voice-music generator program in the wold.
- I dreamed about people being able to understand every language on earth easily.
...

It has taken me years of studying and work to be able to put in practice (some of) my ideas. So keep your ideas for yourself, people is busy taking action with their own.
Although the bill may slightly lower the salary for many American workers, especially scientists, it is necessary. It would allow America to brain drain the rest of the world and in doing so greatly help America's economy. Furthermore, the immigrants wouldn't only fill jobs they could also become entrepreneurs or small business owners and created new jobs.
Google (mail, search, reader)
Wikipedia
Hacker News
Google and Facebook. Third place isn't clear.
Aneesh, if you install the wundrbar toolbar for firefox you can actually replace the location bar with wundrbar! It's a big leap, but it's there as an option. Or you can just use the toolbar, which automatically positions itself below the location bar.
The cold, hard truth is: "defense in depth" really means, "don't do anything wrong".
I would say simplicity makes users happy and it is hard to be simple and have lots of information. If a product says "healthy", that is simple. If a product says "10% lower carbs and calories" it is no longer as simple and therefore people no longer care as much.
So instead of posting invite codes here or telling people you have them in comments, we're supposed to email them to some gmail account for some HN account made a few hours ago, under the assumption that they will get redistributed?

Alternate idea: if you have invites, let us know in the comments. If you want invites do the same. Bam, middleman removed.

P.S.-Though I did get a chuckle out of your "super connection algorithm"
If I recall you need a certain amount of karma (points) before you have the ability to vote down.
The REAL reason we use Linux
Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Gmail

[edit: Never mind... corrected!]
I find that interviewers are more interested in the method than the answer...if you just sit there and say "I was never taught this" you probably won't get the job. On the other hand, if you stand up, go to the whiteboard, and start writing things down, while talking them through your train of though ("Well I'm not positive how to do fractions in other bases, but this way makes sense to me" and then proceed to work out the problem as best as you can) then you show more motivation and enthusiasm.
There are a ton of different ways to approach the problem of interpreting a command. if you're interested in a solid reference for computational linguistics, then i recommend either 'speech and language processing' by jurafsky et al or the 'oxford handbook of computational linguistics'. finally, the forthcoming information retrieval book (http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...) is a fantastic resource.

however, keep in mind that a lot of the stuff in these books has been used more at the academic level than in commercial applications. we at wundrbar are being very careful not to bite off more than we can chew. many companies have tried and failed to tackle natural language processing, and we are NOT doing that; we feel like we can add a lot of value without trying to do anything too fancy. our commands right now are identified by keywords located at the start of the command - simple, intuitive, reliable.
Thanks Jason! We're actually from last summer's batch.

Shameless plug...

Digg: http://digg.com/gadgets/See_your_favorite_bands_fight_2
Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/6c7n2/comments/
"If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians." - Warren Buffett.
Google, Facebook, TechCrunch

Also if bored: http://www.thephotostream.com
yes! we've built wundrbar to be intuitive, precisely because it's annoying to need a man page every time we use a new command. wundrbar aims to capture the power and simplicity of a traditional command line (including the ability script and pipe) and to throw in some magic dust so that you don't have to remember the exact command name or what order the parameters come in.

for example, imagine sending money with paypal from the traditional command line. there are two pieces of information, a number (amount of money) and an email. well, in a traditional command, you would have to enter those parameters in a fixed order, or add a flag so the command read 'paypal -to joe@example.com -amount 5'. but really, a number and an email look quite different, and the command should be able to figure out which is which, right? that's what wundrbar does. so 'paypal joe@example.com 5' or 'paypal 5 joe@example.com', both are good.
This is a fair point. I certainly agree with what the article is saying, but the presentation is one-sided. There is no mention of alternative explanations for the decline in ability to self-regulate, or wether standing still is measuring something other than self-regulation.
As well, the headline is an accurate condensation of the research findings. It does not tell us the important part of the article, but it does tell us the only part that I am most willing to believe without reading the original study.
I try not to separate the idea from the implementation, your idea isn't one solid thing, but a whole set of possibilities to go through. There doesn't seem to usually be much value in the Pet Rock-style one-shot Ideas; you need to accumulate many individual compatible and supportive ideas over time. Like an organism, successful software adapts to suit its environment.
what exactly do you mean - why does that lose you? because it's asking for personal information? for google calendar, wundrbar takes you to google for authentication, and then gets back a token from google and stores that. but not all services operate that way. if you want to use a personal account through wundrbar, though, it need to have some way of authenticating as you with that external service. the benefit is that you can access multiple personal accounts from one place, and that soon you will be able to access them by sending a text message, for example.
Right, but it is interesting that if the camera were adjusting it's iris due to the decrease in light, we would see the same thing without Heisenberg. The spread would be there in both cases, but would be overwhelmed in the wide-open case by all of the particles of light making it straight through. As the light intensity lowered and the iris widened to compensate, the effects of the photons bouncing off of the walls of the slit would begin to be more visible.
"There are many ways to address this through task prioritization, and sandboxing background tasks or even limiting their size."

Huh? Limiting the size of an application? Alright...

while(1) malloc(1);

Sandboxing doesn't really address that either.
The only answer is to give them full citizenship and make them Americans.
thanks for the comments. we agree we need more and better ways to showcase the kinds of things that are possible, and we're working on those. also fixed bestbuy, will be deployed soon.
This is a joke, right?
Barry Schwartz has a great book on this subject called The Paradox of Choice.
reddit, sites for researching my current project

(this excludes gmail, gmail chat, skype, news.yc)

Oh and slashdot, but only a 10 second glance when I'm bored.

Sites I completely stopped using at least a year ago:

facebook, myspace, and related.
Cooper & Torczon does cover scanners and parsers.
This isn't just Wall Street's mistake.

Did you read the bit in the article about the 25-year-old kid with "investment properties" in San Francisco and a "lifeline" in the form of a huge home equity loan? That's nothing more than gambling, dressed up as investment (of course, investment banks and hedge funds were doing the same thing on a much larger scale, so it's hard to say that kid was being much dumber than anyone else.)

The article very clearly describes the downward feedback loop that is underway, but what it doesn't tell you, is how this loop is a mirror image of the feedback loop that puffed up home prices in the first place:

1) People overpaid for houses because capital was cheap.

2) Rising home prices made mortgage-backed equities look like a safe, high-return investment.

3) High-risk investment funds (such as hedge funds) went on margin to buy these MBEs in large quantities.

4) Increased demand for MBEs caused mortgage originators to lower lending standards, which made capital cheaper.

5) Goto 1.

I'm certainly annoyed that the government is bailing out companies that should have had better judgment in these matters (companies like Bear Stearns could have interrupted the cycle at step 3; mortgage lenders should have been exercising better judgment at step 4), but I don't see that it now has a choice. When banks the size of Washington Mutual (whose bonds are now almost junk) and Bear Stearns start to go bust, the greater economy has one foot in the grave, and another on a banana peel.

That said, I don't think the Fed is going to save us from our own greed. They can only do so much before they risk turning the dollar into toilet paper. The rest of us just have to not be the 25-year-old kid in San Francisco with huge debt and multiple property "investments" -- he deserves to lose his ass.
1)http://mail.google.com/mail

2)http://groups.google.com/group/webpy

3)http://news.ycombinator.com
[spoiler]
It starts like a regular justin.tv feed, with a "live" chat on the side and everything. A guy somehow got a "parasitic vine" stuck inside his arm, and he explains that. To appease the "live" chatters, he shows it to the camera. Then he notices his eye is bloodshot, shows it to the camera, and passes out and a movie trailer comes up.
Ahh! Thanks for the info :)
Off topic a bit, but conversely, I opened up my MBP and reapplied the thermal paste on the processors. It was a mess when I first opened it up, and that was causing the heatsink to not accurately pick up temperatures, ultimately causing the fans to never turn on. I was hesitant to use a software solution when it was a hardware issue.

Then again, it was risky because if the MBP didn't boot after I reapplied the thermal paste, I would have a very expensive paper weight on my hands!
1. flickr
2. boing-boing
2. news.ycombinator.com (since I discovered it this week)
People as Data Connectors
And how exactly do you figure that? A single process running for two years non stop is out fucking standing. Most frameworks just give the illusion of stability by continually recycling processes, often in time units of minutes or hours.
+1 informative
Google confident Android will beat iPhones
Why are YC companies so secretive before they launch? If ideas are worthless, why not tell the world what they do (and start getting feedback sooner)?

This alone, for me, proves that ideas are not worthless.
"So does that mean it may not be accurate? “Alexa for bands”."

I am continuesly impressed by the comments at TC!
I should check myself into the nearest startup addict recovery center.
Ask YC: To blog or not to blog?
Is it worth it to have a personal blog? What are the benefits and drawbacks of having a personal blog?
1. http://www.google.ca/

2. http://www.netvibes.com/

3. http://192.168.0.100/
http://Coudal.com
http://gapersblock.com
http://twitter.com

Its amazing what ideas can come from sites that aren't about technology. Its important to get outside the bubble from time to time
they are easy to make. just make one when you have an idea you want to post. post again next time you have an idea you want to post. the drawback of not doing this is deleting those potential posts for no reason.
1. http://mail.google.com

2. http://reader.google.com

3. about:blank

Seriously, an RSS reader'll take up all my internet surfing. It's a tossup from there. I follow interesting articles I find, but it's not like they're all on one site.
Ok, here's my crazy idea:

If you have a great idea, you post it to, let's say, 'mycrazyideahaslegs.com' and you pay the site a dollar amount reflecting your belief in the idea. If you really believe in it, you pay $1000. So, what's the point in that? Well, you then get to read all the other $1000 ideas, and those users can read yours. True, your great idea is now shared, but only amongst a small group of people. You all get the chance to execute on it.
When a Brain Scientist Suffers a Stroke
1. http://www.google.ca/

2. http://www.netvibes.com/

3. http://localhost/