skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, that's certainly what he sounded like here (though I'm sure he's a great guy -- we've all got our soapboxes). I stopped reading after this:

"I have no fucking idea where the hard drive is in my MacBook Pro, and even if you drew me a damn diagram with labels and numbers and gave me a replacement drive I wouldn't open my machine even in exchange for a year with Zooey Deschanel."
I don't see how that's fair. What non-scientific fields are more reasonable than, say, physicists?

Scientists may not be perfect. But they have certain standards, which make them better. For example, scientists have a tradition of disregarding the source of an idea and focussing on examining reasons it is correct or not.

Edit: BTW it's ironic that Planck would say that. I think it's pretty clear that his own life, not his death, advanced physics.
If group X is discriminated against in the workplace, then group X can vote for someone in that group who will be more likely to push through policies more favorable to group X in the workplace.
> Did the FAQ come across as arrogant to anyone else?

Yes. It doesn't inspire a lot of trust in its current form.
Yes I did find that interesting. Thanks.
Schools are an interesting ecosystem. As anyone who has walked from building A to building B to building C to building A to work out some issue can attest, inefficiency and resistance to change may be part of their DNA.
Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught
A friend once said it to me best

desire > ability

There's obviously no better way to learn then to immerse yourself in the culture, but you'd be surprised how many friends come back from a year abroad and have minimal gains.

to learn a language, try every time you meet someone in German, or even using online dictionary, spend 30 minutes talking/ asking questions/ writing down how to say that.

review it every day for at least an hour

learning a language takes a ton of diligence, and I've found that I often forgot what I learned if I didn't repeat it every single day for a good bit of time

soon, your mind will begin to think in the language ( a scary thought for me, a mono-lingual speaker at birth)
I say your limb breaks ... although I like your thought pattern

I'll say this, if you've had a teacher , don't they teach you the way they see it?

Reading a book does nothing to force you to think or understand something the way someone else does: why else can you watch the movie of a book you've already read and say "I imagined that differently"

Reading has been used for learning for thousands of years, if only as a tool for greater discussion
Now when you search for your username on searchyc.com, you can see your stats: http://searchyc.com/Xichekolas
This just in: tmz.com makes Hacker News.
One reason for news.yc to allow down voting stories. I cannot believe that (at the time of commenting) 4 people actually give a shit.
"..what you think is cool is NOT what my mom thinks is cool, or what an executive thinks is cool, or what a lawyer who just wants to write a deposition on her laptop thinks is cool.."

I'm sure an executive doesn't think it's cool that the battery's going to die on them before their plane touches down.

"But I understand my iPhone, and I don't have to learn it, because it's learned me."

Your phone "learned" you? Really? Someone with an iPhone, please enlighten me.

"But let's admit amongst ourselves that the overwhelming majority of people out there have never pulled the battery out of their existing laptops, and didn't even know or care that it comes out."

Which means that they weren't complaining that it could come out. Don't fix it if it ain't broke. By that logic, I guess Lotus should make it so that you can't change your oil. Judging from your mechanical skills (it's called a bolt-on because it bolts right on), you were gonna take it to the dealership anyway, right?

That said, I don't think the Air is worthless, just worthless for people who view their laptop as a tool rather than an accessory.
Yeah. UI designers especially.

http://apps.facebook.com/courses is our first product and we are looking to build sweet tools for students and professors/teachers as we move forward.

We have put a lot of thought into how to get our products into schools -- without all the shrimp and cocktails -- and we think we have some good ideas and great opportunities lined up.
I didn't vote it up... but it's interesting not because we care about Zuckerburg's every move, but because he is now attracting paparazzi.
Google Web Toolkit 
I have recently been playing around with Google Web Toolkit and frameworks built on top of that (GWT-Ext and MyGWT in particular). I am curious to hear from anyone who has done something real with these frameworks and what impression it left on them.
Yes. Are you unfamiliar with the fact that crackpots invent perpetual motion machines at the rate of several per year, and that they've been doing so for a hundred years or more?

Believe me, there are few areas of technology that have been raked over as thoroughly as this one.

Articles imply a lot of things. Some journalists will believe absolutely anything.

And who knows what this MIT prof is doing, taking calls from guys like this? Maybe he hopes to gently steer the poor guy into the therapy that he clearly needs. Maybe he likes seeing his own name in print. Or maybe he's a crackpot, too. The fact that he's an MIT professor is hardly very reassuring. I've met some very eccentric Ivy League profs...
It's notable for exactly the reason rms said. Programmers attracting paparazzi is interesting, even if the drivel the gossip rags are writing isn't.
At the University of Pittsburgh, Blackboard is used, and I've never really had too many complaints about it. The one thing that does bother me is the discussion board. In one of my classes, we're required to participate in a discussion board talking about assigned readings. I'm not sure whether it uses Java or what, but whenever I make a new post or reply to a post, it starts to load, then Firefox hangs for 5-10 seconds before the page finishes loading. Sometimes it won't unfreeze and I have to force close the browser. I had a problem once where images wouldn't show up in an online homework in firefox but worked fine in IE. I sent a message to support and it was fixed by the next day.

The software that the university and UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) uses that really sucks is PeopleSoft. Two years ago they started upgrading everything to the PeopleSoft software. It's so buggy, and the back button is broken. Pages take forever to load. It's clearly designed to work in IE, and pages reload every time you move to a different field in a form. If you don't do things in a particular order, you get an error and have to start over. This is really annoying, especially when I'm putting in a large order for the lab where I work and at the last step there is an error and I need to start over again. It's clearly a system that's not designed for what they are using it for, but they insist on using it (and probably paying absurd licensing fees) and hacking together "modules" to do what they want.
Have any of the commenters here used it on the iPhone? I just web-clipped it, works beautifully.
The best way to gain credibility for his device is to employ his invention to create some sort of useful device. Maybe create a car that never needs any sort of fuel, or provide free energy for everyone. If he comes out with that, I'll be a little more inclined to hear him out.
To be fair, revolutionary scientific advances spend a long time in the heresy box.

Sample bias. If a revolutionary advance wins converts relatively quickly via overwhelming evidence (the invention of the transistor, high Tc superconductivity, the discovery of extrasolar planets, siRNA, mammalian cloning, stem cells...) everyone is astonished for a while, but then they get used to it. But if an advance is so subtle or difficult to measure that it takes 20 years to catch on, we are doomed to hear about that incident, over and over, from every crackpot in the world for the next hundred years.

If Galileo's estate could collect a nickel from every perpetual-motion inventor who has invoked his name, they would own Italy and be bidding on the rest of the E.U.
Unethical Tactics in Negotiation: How You Deal with Them
Learn to deal with unethical tactics in negotiation such as lying and threats. Offer useful tactics and strategies.
I also have noticed how terrible blackboard is. I'm the head of a student group that does a major software project every year. Every year, we mention that this is an area that really needs work, and every year we end up doing something else. I've thought a lot about why there isn't any interest in replacing these systems when everybody in the group is negatively affected by them, and all I've come up with is that it's not that much fun.

These systems are enormous and filled with checkbox features that are poorly integrated. The customers are mostly government institutions and the marketplace has one major player. These things combine to make it a very unattractive product space to get into. Most successful web startups are small, feature light programs that gain momentum and features as they gain users. You can't use that model with Universities. You need to demonstrate that your program offers the same kind of functionality as webct and then offers something more. What self respecting developer wants to get into that mess? You can't even get quality feedback until after you've been working on the product for years.

When the best programmers are agile, it's hard to get them interested in a dinosaur market.
last time I heard, ZFS was going to be supported in the server version first.
A broken industry? Greed? Starving artists?

I smell a decent startup brewing.
I think that the voting discrimination you describe (e.g. black people being more likely to vote for black candidates and women being more likely to vote for female candidates) is talked about so openly not because it's acceptable, but because the pundits are in the prognostication business. I think the factors that affect voting are studied more often than the factors that affect hiring.
Depends on who your friends are. Some of my friends are DJ's, and they have a lot of music that you'd be extremely lucky to find via waffles, torrents, etc. I myself have music now that, if I lost it, I possibly would not be able to get back.
I think rather than trying to get universities to change from a system they're familiar with, it might be better to focus on software for elementary and high schools. My mother is a teacher at an elementary school, and all their grades, amongst other things, must be done online. The software made me cringe when I saw it. It's all ActiveX, and most of the time it doesn't work. The database on the backend is horribly slow, and it stops working at random intervals. It's also impossible to use if you don't have broadband, and there are still many areas where my parents live where broadband is not yet available.

My mother told me that just before Christmas when their grades were due, she had 18 students to put grades in for (ie, A, B+, C, etc) for 4 subjects. It took her 5 hours because of how slow the system was. This is not a large school system, so they probably had at most 6 people using it at once.

A lot of school systems, especially smaller ones, feel they need to go more digital to "keep up", but their IT people, to put it frankly, are idiots. They spend a lot of money implementing a system that does more harm than good. These are customers that are just starting out, so there is no issue with convincing them to change from their current system like with a university.
Facebook Graduates: Now Do Something For the World
any plans for eventual Mac / *nix support?
The Microhoo hoo-hah
Why should we care what paparazzi think?
I think you're missing the point.

Paparazzi only take pictures they can sell and they can only sell pictures the public wants to see. It's notable that the general public is interested in seeing where some programmer is eating and what his girlfriend looks like.
Carmack's reverse
If PHP is serious enough for Facebook, it's serious enough for most web startups.
A EULA, if written properly, is legally binding but violating it is not illegal in the criminal sense; it's a tort issue. If we were talking about violating the DMCA, however, it would be illegal.
No. If anything like this is ever legitimate, then it is harnessing of zero point energy. And a big middle finger extended to the universe and the laws of thermodynamics.

Presumably shortly after, if the universe is a VR simulation, it will stop as the people running it get annoyed we hacked into the system/power source.
At my university, we use blackboard.

But if we want to submit grades, we can't use blackboard. We have to fill in bubbles on paper by hand.
How windows screwed typefaces (Helvetica vs Arial)
How to spot Arial.
I think you should not preface posts by telling someone they are missing the point.

So, we should care because the public cares? What's the public's good reason for caring?

We should care because public opinion is notable, whether it has good reasons or not? What's notable about this one?
I certainly find it interesting that Zuckerburg now has a cult of celebrity.
Waffles really has quite a collection. Much better than whatever you can find on a public tracker or p2p and it's all high quality and transcode free. It is not quite Oink yet, but it'll get there eventually.

I'm curious if there is anything in particular from your collection that is unlikely to be on waffles.
"I think you should not preface posts by telling someone they are missing the point."

You're right and I apologize; I was reacting to being downmodded earlier.

"So, we should care because the public cares?"

No, we should care that the public cares. That is the point.
Once you've read this, try this quiz: http://www.iliveonyourvisits.com/helvetica/

Arial or Helvetica?
I second all of the above - I'm a complete Linux know-nothing turd, and the articles in the forums got me completely up and running. I'm a big fan of the Slicehosters.
He didn't mean his own death, necessarily. But the death of older physicists that founded previous revolution stuck with the old (and wrong) ideas that were against his new (and right) ideas.

You'll find that historically, older scientists in prominent positions will be adamant against an uprising revolution in his field. If he/she wields enough power in academia, he'll crush it...at least delay it for a while, until he dies.

Newton was rather notorious for this sort of stuff. He held some high position(forgot what it was called) in academia and made it difficult for lots of other younger scientists that came after while he was in power.
Ahhh my love... Apple //c is what changed my life.
JavaScript Library Loading Speed
Ballmer knows what's wrong with Windows
How Do You Fix An Undersea Cable?
I've been working with it a little over a year. Our startup is based heavily on it and I believe it to be our "secret weapon" relative to our competitors. Its just that damn good.

Popular I would say it is not, probably because it is java based and just about everyone hates Java. Once you get over the learning curve and negative Java bias I think most will discover it is worth it though.

GWT 1.5 is stable enough in the trunk, I actually recommend using that even though the RC is not out yet (probably late summer at the earliest I've read). There are instructions on how to build it on the GWT site, its very easy. And then you can use Java 5 syntax which helps out greatly when dealing a lot with RPCs.

Also check out gwt-dnd, its a fantastic library which enables drag and drop. Its leaps and bounds ahead any of the other drag drop libraries, definitely recommend it. Fred is the guy in charge of it and he is a great resource:
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-dnd/

I've been using GWT Widget Library for animations. Its just a simple wrapper around Scriptaculous libraries. It has some other functionality too which I have not explored. Animations of existing widgets are super easy though, and can make your UI far more dynamic.

Haven't visited GWT-Ext in a while, but last I checked it was coming along pretty well. As far as drag/drop functionality goes though, you will be able to build more custom implementations with gwt-dnd. GWT-Ext just seemed a bit "vanilla" to me since it looks a lot like a lot of other Ext sites out there. We just preferred something that felt more custom, but I guess thats just a matter of preference.

If you code in Eclipse, I'd recommend checking out GWT Designer plugin from Instantiations. Unfortunately its like $30, but if you end up doing lots of coding it will be well worth it. I use it to mock up layouts initially, and its also great at handling RPC code generation. There is a new free GWT plugin for netbeans 6, but its not quite the level of GWT Designer yet.

GWT is great though because it is so modular. As new libraries come out you can just mix and match to get the widgets you want. Try that in native javascript on a large scale and you can quickly get a headache..
Very happy with slicehost. Great latency, too.
Nanotechnology: Entirely New Way Of Storing Gas Created
The Meaningful URL
A day in the life of a memory leak hunter
He didn't mean his own death, necessarily

Let's consider these claims:

- science progresses via funerals of all scientists

- science progresses via funerals of Planck's ideological opponents

Only the first one can pass for a serious theory of scientific progress. But only the second one gets to exclude his own death.
Yeah, Firefox (non-beta 3). The top portion of the search. It seemed to get hung up.
Silicon Valley Donations: Microsoft Loves Hillary; Google, Obama
As a hidebound self-appointed defender of the scientific orthodoxy [1], I say this is almost certainly a bunch of bullshit.

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
You might want to take a look at tummy.com
http://www.tummy.com/Hosting/
You can e-mail them to ask about your needs
He's now down substantially (37 to Hillary's 63).

This Irish Intrade.com website is interesting. Seems like their site markets securities per the Howey Test, but I'm not sure. They say the user should know:

"Is it Legal for me to use Intrade where I live?

The simple answer is that we cant be sure and this is why we require you to confirm to us that your activities are permissible from your own location. If you are in any doubt if your activities are legal from your location then you should not use our service until you take suitable professional advise."

Anyone know the current US regulations on betting games of skill and would this speculative market fall under that domain?
That's what lobbyists are for!
Your point? If they have no predictive power, you are guaranteed a profit by shorting front-runners and/or buying long-shots. If you believe that -- what are you waiting for?
Keeping Your Elements' Kids in Line with Offspring
There's one item on that list that I've always had a gripe with:

> 10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.

This is legitimate, sometimes. See for example the prize offered for cryptanalysis of Salsa20.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20

Oh, and the Galileo thing ought to be worth at least 75 points.
One year after Mac hack contest, Linux and Vista may be tested
>Makes you nostalgic for the pre-Sarbanes Oxley era doesn't it?

SOX refers to management's legal duty to its public shareholders. It has nothing to do with customer service.
call/cc wasn't in the Scheme standard formally until R6RS.
Bonus round: what font is the header "arial or helvetica" set in?
People in this market aren't a random sample of people in the street. They are self-selected based on their willingness to bet money on the event. If they are poor predictors they will lose money on average and if they are good they will gain money. After many events the good predictors will tend to prevail over the poor ones because they have more money to bet and they'll be more eager to bet... Oh screw it I give up... some people just don't get odds or markets.
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-With...

the best book on negotiation i've read. recommended to me by a vc who was a former professional negotiator. it's a great book and especially useful for founders raising money.
One thing I would recommend looking at is Category theory. MarkCC has several blog posts about category theory at the Good Math Bad Math blog (http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/goodmath/category_theory/, in general i would also recommend looking at MarkCC's other blog posts as a source of math inspiration).

Wikipedia also has a nice article about category theory. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory), and I will also recommend 2 books on the subject:

First is, of course, Category Theory for the Working Mathematician by Saunders Maclane. It is an excellent book, but I must also warn that it is not an easy book and probably requires a fair bit on mathematical maturity.

Second is Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists by Benjamin Pierce. It is much more of an introductory book and provides many examples in Computer Science which are useful to those doing theoretical CS.
Before the article: 2/10

After the article: 8/10
send me details please dodeja@gmail.com
This was actually what my partner and I proposed for the very first Summer Founder session, but as Paul Graham pointed out, building great software to serve this purpose would only be 1% of the work.
You spoke at birth?
You don't get it. They aren't being used by universities because they're good, they're used because their massive sales force was able to get the long term service contracts.
why is that interesting
Didn't Einstein himself predict zero-point energy, meaning that you can have perpetual motion without violating the second law of thermodynamics?
I agree with you an many of the discussion here is pointing to that it might not be the software but rather the culture. As entrepreneurs and innovator I think our job is more then just make good apps but persuade the customers to use the right products.
Sun moving in the pc world?
Good point .. if you know more about the frameworks and languages facebook uses please share.

I think PHP have been bashed so long by so many people I am really not surprised by his opinion.

Finally, I remember in an interview with linus torvalds they asked him, what's the most important quality in a programmer, and he said taste!
And i like this thought, your choice of programmer language reflect your taste, who would pick PHP with all the bad press it gets in the geeky community (slashdot,serverside.com, here and elsewhere)
definitely someone with very very bad taste, the bad type of geek, the business man geek

Plus just because facebook is popular, doesn't give credit to php! the guy got lucky!

Google uses python, and i think python is a terrible taste in programming language, terrible taste! why, in my experience, it made script unreadable, i had to find editor with folding, and draw imaginary lines on the screen just to see were a block end and a new one start, and being as paranoid as i am, i just decided to never touch it, python is just bad taste, i wish it dies, i feel bad when i see cool stuff writen in it, cool stuff i would just have to ignore, because, how terrible can the ppl who wrote this program be....they chose python!!!
hi tony. would that be techcruch, valleywag, and reddit? ;)
And you don't get Einstein's Random Walk.
I've been writing in Georgia ever since I read this:

http://fadtastic.net/2006/03/12/the-secret-lives-of-fonts/
FYI I didn't downmod you.

Anyway, it seems a bit like linking to Revenge of the Nerds (pretend it was modern) and saying: look, people like nerds more now. That kind of popular culture event doesn't seem like hacker news to me. On a similar note, I think the "dating advice for introverts" links we sometimes get are off topic too. Even though they, too, reveal something about how the public sees hackers.
sounds like an expensive procedure. I have been wondering about this for the past week since the new broke.