skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How do you approach reading this?"

Normally people solve problems using some variant of the rational decision making problem. That is, define the problem, define assessment criteria, brainstorm solutions, choose solution, implement solution, measure solution against assessment criteria.

A wicked problem, on the other hand, is a problem that can't be clearly defined and has no clear answer. For example, what is the best way to design a car? If you maximize mpg then the car isn't as safe. But if you maximize safety then the car is heavier so the mpg isn't as good. And both safety and mpg affect style.

The idea of the idiagram thing is that while the rational decision making model may be the best way to solve well-bounded problems, it isn't a very good way to solve wicked problems.

This is roughly where the idiagram page leaves off, but it footnotes the book Wicked Problems and Social Complexity, the first chapter of which is available online. This explains dialog mapping, which is a method of discussing wicked problems in group meetings using mindmaps.

Why is this important?

If you've been to a lot of discussion forums on the web, you probably realize that forums with nested comments tend to have more rational discussion than forums with flat comments. After all, it's just easier to reply to specific points of an argument with nested comments than it is to fisk one with flat comments. You can go back and forth on one point, and then go back up in the discussion later and talk about a completely different point raised earlier.

Trying to solve wicked problems in real life meetings without dialog mapping is sort of the equivalent of an flat discussion on the web. You are sitting around and someone comes up with a complicated proposal. The next person responds to whatever they see in it. And then the other points in the original comment become more or less buried. However if you mindmap all of the points of a person's dialog, then people are able to use the visualization to jump back and forth during the discussion and gain perspective on what's important and what's less important. This ultimately means better solutions to wicked problems in less time, with more focus on the problem and less focus on the personalities involved.

The idiagram then is a way of visualization the final output of the brainstorming via dialog mapping process so that all involved can be on the same page when in comes to understanding the solution and each person's responsibilities and how success will be measured. (The whole submission is kind of recursive, because it's a picture about the four steps of the WP solving process, and making a picture is step three of four.)

Anyway, that's what I see in the submission. If you're the kind of person who sits are and thinks about how you can have brainstorming sessions in real life with the same abstract ideas and rational thinking that often arise online (because of the asynchronousness and nestedness of the internet), then this is kind of a cool thing.
25 Mind-Blowing Gadgets
“Give us some information, and we’ll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years”

Ridiculous. One of the silliest things I've ever read in NYTimes. Kedrosky was being way too kind on them.

As for their algorithm, it's probably along the lines of how connected you are on their site.

How did they score funding from Max Levchin? One of the cofounders worked at Slide. http://younoodle.com/about.php So I doubt it's due to their amazing AI alone.

It's just a social network, folks. You can make your own on Ning or Facebook.

A better predictor would probably be someone's comments here on N.YC.
20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life
“So far, we haven’t run ourselves through it,”

Then why should anyone else?
Forget PowerPoint: 13 Online Presentation Apps
I'm trying to install some popular diagnostic tools, downloaded from a popular computer manufacturer, onto my laptop, using a popular install program. The install has been using 100% of a CPU for half an hour.

So Greg is obviously in the dark but rather than post any actual details that could help identify and resolve the actual problem, he's decided instead to pontificate about stuff which may have nothing to do with what's really going on.

This could just be a case where the installer's algorithm is fine but an underlying library call isn't working properly (for example, poll on OSX is known to have problems. http://marc.info/?l=log&m=111515776629581&w=2 ). But without some actual information, we'll never know.

There seems to be no shortage of developers with poor problem solving skills.
ummm, they have seed funding? Amazing! If there is one thing I know its that you can't predict what passion can and will accomplish. I've been coaching gymnastics for over 20 years and I've come to realize that people with heart can and do beat out the most talented, accomplished, educated... "sure winners" time after time. If they've found a way to predict talent and passion I'd love to see it. And of course if your team "gels" - the whole can be much more than the sum of the parts. I'll try to keep an open mind but just look at the Superbowl - who won... And if its possible to predict the success of a business - they really wouldn't need startup funding - they could just play the stock market. p.s. - if this is a simple case of marketing/PR - Good Job Guys...
Without knowing the actual nature of your business, it's hard to say. It's difficult for me to comprehend everyone turning you down. In my experience, banks are relatively forgiving and willing to work with you to get your merchant account up and running.
Without "mark all unread articles as read" (per-page, say) the flood of articles is unmanageable without reverting back to an rss reader. Yet doing so adds a level of indirection that removes any impulse to rank items, diluting the quality of the article ranking .

Please, I love this UI. Just please add Mark as read/ignore all unread articles on this page
Reducing interruptions to boost productivity
Radiator: Your build statuses on a giant LED display
The Crunch Mode Paradox: Turning Superstars Average
How much do I have to spend to get 2 25-year-old women to swoon?
Times out.
New SciAm Article on Limits of Quantum Computing
Downmod me because I'm stating a fact? Jesus there are some bitter individuals out there.
Second order effects can arise out of "base" matter without requiring a ghost in the machine. Conciousness is one of those effects. I am apparently a materialist, but you are muddling that with being a physicalist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism
I think those rates are quoted hourly
I'm with you, Paul. It seemed more of a lynching of Fred than a correction.
meanwhile I spent nothing and went to a bar and met lots of women :p

Note:When I was younger and before I was married :p
"Same blueprint" is different than "same material."

I never said "all properties are emergent." Also, why would repeatability mean something cannot be emergent? I can instantiate many "instances" of an object on a computer. I know they are not the same object, though.

Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. Picture 2 chocolate cakes next to each other. The cake-ness arises from the arrangement of molecules, but they are 2 different instances of a cake. The fact that eggs + sugar + baking causes the emergent "cake" property does not mean they are the ~same~ cake. The fact that the 2 cakes have separate identities (cake 1, and cake 2) does not mean that cake is not an emergent property.

Out of curiosity, are you not a programmer? Are my programming metaphors lost on you?
Funny you should mention that one - it happens to be something I regularly forward to people who like to snicker at bad uses of graphics. One guy I sent it to couldn't stop laughing for an hour.
Help me out and test diystartupnews.com
I just uploaded a wordpress site hacked to be a User Generated content site.

The concept is simple, anyone can post a startup related article but there is a catch and it is the article can only be 240 chars long.

Its pretty simple and is really just a proof of concept. Any feedback or bugs found would be welcome.

Thanks Darren
Arguing a Value For a Computing Degree
What is the difference between andLinux and coLinux?

http://www.colinux.org/

http://www.andlinux.org/

They seem to have similar logos and website...
Inside the Bizarre World of Japanese Pickup Schools
Cool use of Monads: Probabilistic computing.
CINT The C/C++ Interpreter
Girls & Math: How It Works
What motivates programmers?
Microsoft releases specifications for binary formats
As a New School student, I can only say... well... okay yes, you're probably right. It's great fun though. I can't imagine hating school anywhere else.
My understanding is coLinux is just the kernel recompiled as a Windows executable while andLinux includes a Xserver to run GUIs.
Hey DarrenStuart, I just checked out DiyStartupnews.com, and a couple of things come across -

1. Nice layout. Clean, I like the layout and color choice. Nice site URL and catchy phrasing ;-). Very twiterrish... But I am not sure what your intention here is, which brings up point No.2

2. The about page is empty. I can see that the home page pretty much says it all, but then either consider putting everything a user might need on the home page and get rid of the About link, or actually use the about link.

3. If click the "Submit News" link without filling in anything, I get no error, but then nothing happens either. Same with filling out only some of the fields (there's nothing telling me all fields are mandatory, which I am assuming they are)

4. The news story can have 240 characters. Maybe I dont see it, but is the intention here to provide just a gist of what the news is about? You also trim away anything more than 240 characters. This could be misleading because I might be copy pasting thinking that my content is going to show as-is, only to realize that well, it does not. I would rather have validation tell me I crossed the limit, than be surprised after posting.

5. On the other hand, when I got to post a comment, leave all the fields blank, and hit Submit, I get a page with a "Wordpress error" on it.

Just my 2 cents. Good work, hope this helps.
Merely by asking, you've incorrectly answered Google employment question #76.

Think about it: their system has redundancy; yours doesn't. A priori, it's most likely a non-Google problem (or as you state it, your problem).

FWIW I have no problems with Google now, haven't had any problems with Google recently, nor have I ever, for that matter.
Interview: TipJoy CEO, Abby Kirigin
Good on you, brother. When I said "...blah blah blah sales forces...", I had assumed you were trying to sell to Fortune 1000 bureaucracies. If you can eat away at the small and move up, then more power to you.
Writing down my thoughts in disjointed, syntax-less phrases is usually the first step to putting together an article, not the last.
The problems with all online presentation apps is reliability.

When I go somewhere to do a presentation I have it on my laptop, on a USB stick and uploaded on the net somewhere. All professionals take similar care knowing that something will always not work right.

With online apps you rely on an Internet connection, and have no back-up plan.

It is simply too risky for professional use.
Perfect Viewing for Wednesday's Total Lunar Eclipse
Seaside-Style Programming in ErlyWeb
Ask YC:  Users don't like creative founders, right?
If your startup has users, they probably like what you have done as is. In particular, they would not appreciate any major changes no matter how clever/creative/useful you think they are. About the only thing you can do that they will not complain about is to improve speed. Is that about right?
Just not that funny. I doubt any CEO's were fooled by talk like "savings per hectoliter"; these are diplomatic people who probably just tried to give a game response to a seemingly clueless analyst. If someone says something stupid in a setting like this - you don't waste the time of the other people on the call by calling them out or trying to figure out what their gibberish means, you do what these guys did -- hit your closest pre-existing talking point and defer further discussion to a later time.

It's amazing the lengths some people will go to reinforce their worldview in which all executives and finance professionals are clueless PHB's who somehow got to the corner office by crashing tricycles or something.
Seems similar in plot to that book outlining pickup artists (PUAs) in "The Game". In that book, PUAs were also teaching students in the LA area, and it got to a point where their students were mimicking all their best lines, thus rendering their teachers' routines ineffective. I figure the same story will play out here.

If women respond to making them laugh, then like comedians, being original has all its perks.
There used to be a lot of these things, but this one seems the only open source C interpreter with any following these days. Anyone know what ever happened to the others (Saber, eIc, small C, ...)?
No, users used to love it when we introduced new features.
I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community.

'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net for example)

I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set of keystrokes? And why reimplementing a fraction of editing modes that emacs has available? When you can have... So I went back, but I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. Matz uses emacs after all...
I would say that is very wrong.

Check this article that was submitted earlier http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/gmails-humble-begin...

Gmail had nothing when it launched, but kept on adding features as the need from user arose.

This is generally the way to go, I think that the way you describe is stalemate at best, and disaster at worst.
I think there is value to looking at anecdotes because the average collage student is better connected and more intelligent than those who skip it. Most of my friends have collage degrees. Of those who don't one was making 120k/year before he died. One charges 100$+ per hour and is constantly booked. And the last guy is 29 and makes 140k / year at yahoo. IMO a large reason for the disparity in lifetime earnings between those with a collage degree and those without are the type of people who go to collage.

For most people staying in school is probably a good idea. But, when your options are to stay in school or drop out and make 70+k / year staying in school seems less useful. Would these people make more money in 5 years with a collage degree well possibly, but they are making good money now and investments compound with time so it would have to be a huge increase to be worth it.

PS: Doctors get paid a lot latter in life but on average they don’t retire younger than most people.
Just save the pages to a local webarchive file or make some pdf copies.
I found myself in a self-imposed crunch mode this weekend. I had a preconceived notion in my mind how much I was going to be able to accomplish this weekend, and when my estimates were far off (what was estimated to be 6 hours of work were actually 18), I got impatient, thinking that I SHOULD have finished hours ago.

I ended up not doing things the right way, and merely plowed ahead, until I got it to work. However, after the relief of finally getting it done, I have to go back and spend some time refactoring and cleaning up the mess that I made. I often have to remind myself that good engineering simply takes time, and will save in the long run.
That header font is dead ugly. Kinda reminds me of Comic Sans-ish or something.
I think the first picture is pretty ugly, it looks too much like eclipse.
Leak: third-party iPhone apps to be issued through iTunes Store
If you incrementally add one new feature then any existing user may or may not use the new feature. But what happens if you radically overhaul a site, changing its style, changing the items, style and placement of the navigation and improving but changing core functionality?
Unless you can save to .ppt it isn't good enough. I can't rely on there being a PDF reader on whatever computer I will use for my presentation. Besides a PDF reader won't allow me to show my slides in fullscreen resolution, which is definitely not good enough. PDF is made for paper, not for presentations.
I've dabbled a smidgen in picking stocks and managed funds.

What I've realized is that I don't trust anyone with my money more than myself. Feel free to blame hubris. The second-most-trusted entity for me is "the market".

Lately I've taken that to an extreme, and I've even backed away from choosing individual stocks. I've met multiple CEOs over years and a small fraction have struck me as having any sort of intellectual horsepower.

Instead, I'm betting on my startup (as close to under my control as anything can be) and retirement money goes into index funds.

I feel like this bounds the problem!
"they probably like what you have done as is"

If only.

Frankly, I have trouble remembering a single time that has ever happened to me.
berger's disease
A nice collection of videos on berger's disease
I saw this a while back and have pondered on it for a bit. What do you suppose this could be used for or how would it change your programming?

Off the top of my head, I suppose if you had these functions, it'd be much easier to write machine learning algorithms that are based on statistical methods. In addition, you'd be able to write code that branches randomly, but based on a distribution built from user interactions. Anyone have any others?
I am glad you got that, its meant to be that way for the DIY feel.
Chatting with Scott Hanselman
Ruby on Rails Evangelist AkitaOnRails talks to Scott Hanselman from Microsoft camp. Always nice to exchange experiences.
WikiLeaks Under Fire
I've always figured that the "past performance, future performance" phrase principally was just legalese, not investment advice. I'd like to see a study on this.

On the other hand, it would be very interesting to see the "past performance" of these J.P. Morgan whiz kids claiming that they always come out ahead of their reference indexes. Past performance corrected for buyouts of successful funds.
thanks for the feedback,

2. There should be a page there but I just realised that I didn't port that page over from the development site.

3.odd you should get a message box telling you what fields you missed. what browser are you on? also if you have JS off it should just change pages and display a list of missing fields.

4. Sorry yeah this is explained in the missing about us page. I did it because I wanted people to get to the point and make the site viewable in a mobile with no modifying.

5. yeah thats standard wordpress funcationality I will fix it.
I find the only startups that I'm being drawn into are the ones with creative founders. The two that come to mind are Wesabe and now TipJoy, both are sites that launched when they had built enough to be useful, but still have a lot of interesting potential. You can just look at Google's share price if you want proof that users love potential and expect change and improvements.
Ask News.YC: What are your favorite startup-related news feeds?
I would be interested to know about the feeds to which the rest of News.YC subscribes.
Ok I have the about page working http://diystartupnews.com/about/
I think it applies to most intellectual endeavours. Especially the part about working early in the morning, when your mind is still uncluttered with bits of information, like news, conversation, etc. Your focus is greatest then.
The Dumbing Of America
Not sure I follow. Could you explain in more detail?
Can you not throw away what's bad and keep what's good during your overhaul?...
Buy a MacBook!
What don't you like about it? It's obviously not something you'd put on a powerpoint slide, but given enough time to sit down and think about it I think it's quite insightful.
Every cycle's sacred
Every cycle's great
If a cycle is wasted
God gets quite irate

With most people I've talked to, this approach turns into a religion pretty fast. In my opinion, you should use a naïve approach (within limits, recursive Fibonnaci definitions are exempt) until it becomes necessary to do things more efficiently. Of course this entails always keeping in mind who your users are and whether a certain design choice needs to remain in your code for a long time, something it seems this installer team didn't quite grasp.

But always choosing the most efficient algorithm leads to a program where code that runs for two milliseconds every minute runs 10 times faster for 3 times your development effort, with 3 bugs introduced in the process because you weren't paying attention.

How much time is wasted? On my machine summing a billion bytes row-wise takes 9 seconds, whereas
summing them column-wise takes 51 seconds. The less sequential your data acccess, the slower
your program will run.

Yes, if you sum gigabyte-sized arrays all the time, this is definitely something you should worry about. But not all problems require this kind of attention to low-level details. Most of the time you are searching an 8-byte array, in which case the choice of binary search vs. linear search is irrelevant.

Of course it pays to be aware of these things (you won't have to go hunting in the library when you hit a wall) but keeping them in mind at all times is more trouble than it's worth. There are more important things to worry about, for instance whether your unit tests cover every likely case.
Has anybody with word parsing experience read these, that can speak to their level of detail?

Was this release prompted by any legal decision that anybody knows about?
That was excruciating to read through. Being clever only works if it's actually clever.
How to Stop Checking Email on the Evenings and Weekends
You could buy a puppy from an animal shelter. Or you could buy one of the new Macbooks for each of them. Those would probably have about the same effect. After all, "two Airs is humane." [argh, sorry.]
Where on earth did you come up with that idea?
"andLinux uses CoLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. CoLinux is a port of the Linux kernel to Windows.[...] Xming is used as X server and PulseAudio as sound server"

That seems to clarify things a bit. andLinux seems to take coLinux and add a couple of other utilities to give you a more seamless integration. last time I used coLinux I had to use VNC to connect from Windows to my running coLinux instance.
FYI, this article is from December 2006.
I am on FF 2 on Windows... I have JS enabled and did not get the pop-up (Tried it again...)

Just saw the About page, and yup, that does it for No. 2.
Six Word Memoirs via Twitter
> Note:When I was younger and before I was married :p

What a lucky guy you are, to have a wife who reads news.yc! ;- )
Prezentit.com (our webapp) let you download your presentation as an HTML file so you just need a browser to present it.
the takes are very small in all academia
The Word spec is 210 pages. Yikes! I wonder what kind of open-source tools these specs will spawn.

Related: anyone know how Scribd and folks like that read/display Microsoft-formatted documents?
In other news, Travelocity and Orbitz reported a sudden increase in fares to Japan.
something potentially useful for many of the HN users
so the full eclipse is at ~10pm EST? Now to find a good viewing spot in Atlanta..
Therefore the price is about $500 for the puppy depending on the dog. Then you have to factor in food costs and checkups to keep the dog looking cute.
> A better predictor would probably be someone's comments here on N.YC.

Don't you mean, someone's karma, nickb? ;-)
I read that WikiLeaks was on fire also. Some UPS caught fire.