skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There will be scarcity of time for a long time. Reputation and other social currency will always be scarce. Economics won't be obsolete anytime soon.

Robots might build a dyson's sphere on every star, but economics will still matter.

Also, Anybots is all about tele-operated robots. They're smart, and punting on the hard AI problem. It becomes a control problem of having someone in a 3rd world country act like my butler.

The point is that they can succeed without significant developments in robotic perception, planning, and understanding.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120784
I actually keep up with a lot of old friends even though family life keeps me very busy, but I had to create ourdoings.com to do it.

It's not a social network in terms of meeting new people, but it serves well the purpose of keeping in touch with people you already know.
good graphic design can be bought for a couple hundred bucks. having a good UI design guy on the team is really valuable and should be more a long-term commitment.

http://www.tonywright.com/2007/bootstrap-design-for-geek-pow...
If you're on a Mac OmniGraffle(http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/) is a really awesome application. It's not free, but you can get time-limited demo licenses that don't have any functional restrictions.
Genius hack by PhD candidate (with source code): Turn any monitor into a 3D display using a Wiimote
50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website
What can I say? Sex sells... Perhaps we can disallow the use of the word "sex" in the site description? That will prevent crappy threads from shooting up the list thanks to some nitwits oogling at the word "sex"
Maybe have the HN software go pull the page that is submitted, and assign it a weight based on number of tokens on the page. Obviously you'd remove stop words and HTML tags.

This would assign lower weights to shorter fluff, and lower weights to articles that are split up over a lot of pages (which in my experience tend to be fluff too, with a 4:1 ad to content ratio). It'd be kind of like Bayesian filtering for post importance.

This was actually one of my ideas for submitting to YC, but I rather like HN, so maybe you could experiment with it here.
Steve Wozniak on Apple, Steve Jobs and the Value of a Good Prank
Evernote Screencast
Its hard to answer because honestly I can't remember what I learned in uni specifically. As for using advanced CS topics let me give an example.

I'm writing a web app at the moment for orthodontics. On one hand its just overlaying a template on an image, but its using and manipulating a scene graph for the various parts of the template. The templates are defined by the relationship of various landmarks - these relationships (like the angles and distances between certain points) are represented in my own language so that I can send them to client for evaluation (as they move parts of the template) or to R so that I can generate a set of landmark locations that fit the relationships.

I probably make things more complicated than they need to be but I can't imagine not understanding these concepts. The power and beauty of those advanced CS topics is worth learning for itself. If they don't give you any insight as a programmer (whether you use them directly or not) then I don't think you've really understood them.
Is there a research contribution here?
Whoa. I just got this interview question two days ago and I was like "damn that's a creative question." Nevermind I guess.
Dangerous Knowledge - Four brilliant mathematicians whose genius tragically drove them insane
No, he was not an idiot, at least in my opinion. Nobody's done what they've done before. Practically everyone I've ever met can now get in touch with me. Nobody's ever created a platform like F8. A lot of people are still obsessed with Facebook.

The problems they have come from too much success, too soon, and some boneheaded mistakes that they made in the glare of a media spotlight.
I prefer Python to Ruby, but language choice is another topic entirely. There are a number of web frameworks for Python that are AT LEAST as useful as Rails, including Django and Pylons. In some ways, I think Django might be better for the type of site you seem to be interested in. Of course, I'm going mostly on assumptions...

I know there are a number of Python tutorials that were written specifically for scientists that are new to programming. I would think that a few tutorials that use practical examples from your own field would make the wall a bit easier to scale than a tutorial that just addresses complete noobs? I don't know of any similar "Programming for Scientists"-type tutorials for Ruby... (?)

There is also a good intro to programming book that uses Python (Zelle is the author) that was recently adopted by MIT. If you want a stronger foundation - but with a potentially slower payoff - you should look at htdp.org and SICP, both of which use Scheme.
http://www.gliffy.com/
Ask YC: Linux C/C++ programming workflow?
We're looking to add some C/C++ code to our repository that needs to run under Linux. Having a significant Windows background, I am trying to get a feel for a general "Linux workflow" some programmers use.

I alreasy looked at NetBeans, CodeBlock, Anjuta as far as IDEs are concerned, but strangely enough I liked vim-based code editing the most. Autotools is going to be an issue, but we'll learn it.

But how do you guys deal with help/documentation, for instance? None of the IDEs had any kind of integrated help either. Basically I am interested in well-accepted more-or-less common workflows that C/C++ coders on Linux typically follow. My distro is full of C or C++ libraries, often with doc-packages (man or info files) that I'd want to reference while coding. How do people do that? After 8 years of MSDN library it doesn't feel too good...

Thank you.
Your post made me notice something: There is a very important computer-related social activity -- one that I'm sure is very popular among boys -- that is conspicuously missing from this article: games. You know, games like that one that involves organizing complicated, hierarchical teams of several dozen people, with the mission of killing virtual monsters in order to gain items and treasure that improve the status and style of your virtual avatar.

Something tells me that the people who wrote this article have no idea that video games -- or sports, for that matter -- can be a social and creative outlet.
This clip continues the tradition on the Internet of posting videos of things exploding.
The Register's fall is going to go unnoticed.
xkcd parody + Fourier transform explanation
Start: 8:34pm
End: 8:40pm (turn snipshot on)
(True End: 8:44pm) (figure out how to actually use the snipshot feature. It took me a while to figure out where I could find the edit button.)
Total time: 6(10) minutes.

I hope that data helps you. I noticed a few things while browsing around in there, one being that home image in the top-left corner brings me back to the home page... and shows me the log in just like a random visitor to the site. I would try and set it so that it remembers my session properly.
Why smart people defend bad ideas (old essay, but good read)
Silicon Valley versus Seattle (and Everywhere Else)
So success by accident. Another little known fact, google's rankings aren't perfect.
four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius... tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

Correlation does not imply causality.

Not that I see any correlation here -- not by a long shot. I would embark on a census of all the geniuses who did not go insane, but this post is too short to contain it. I will, however, not miss the opportunity to re-quote the first line of Goodstein's States of Matter, IMHO the most hilarious line in physics-education history:

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spend much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Fortunately, most of us survived stat mech.

Finally, while one can obviously dispute the cause of Turing's death, and claim that it might have had something to do with his "genius", it might also have had something to do with the public humiliation, the removal of his security clearance (and thereby, effectively, his career in cryptography), and the disfiguring hormonal treatments that were forced on him by a homophobic society. I mean, you can see how that might have been kind of depressing.
Rearden Commerce (Click "see how" for very cool flash promo)
I guess taking this kind of head tracking to the wider world is useful. Tracking with cameras and LEDs is definitely not new, but source code and cheap commodity hardware makes it useful. Either way I doubt that this is actually the guys thesis project in its entirety.
Nobody said there is. It's just a "genius hack". I don't see anything wrong with that unless he claims that as a contribution towards his thesis!

As a side note, it's not immediately clear from comments like these whether the question is genuine or just a snide remark! Doesn't take much for somebody to take offense easily.
I guess a bit of benevolent dictatorship is required in keeping the signal/noise ratio high by one/small set of HN folks.

I guess there isn't a single solution, any community site needs to keep adapting to:

1. the raising competence of the current user base &
2. the wave of new users

I remember, during the early days of Joel on Software, we used put up Job descriptions, and Joel used to send folks emails and dissuade them from doing so -- and now he a nice money spinner with JoS job board.
I sincerely feel like standing up and giving a long standing ovation. This is the future of gaming, at lest for 3D shooters, nothing less.
I'm guessing from your name that you're in Menlo Park. And, that might account for the difference in perspective.

In many parts of the country, $15 an hour is seen as really good money for unskilled labor. But, in Silicon Valley, $15 an hour is well below the poverty line. I'm sure that works its way up the economic ladder as well. If a moving company owner can make $60-100k a year, in many parts of the country, that's considered rather wealthy. In Silicon Valley, that would probably be a lower middle class income.

Where my in-laws live, in Toledo, Ohio, there are tons of talented artists and musicians. But while there is a great supply, and no demand from wealthy music lovers to support them. So, while a relative plays in a Jazz band every weekend and packs out the club, he has to keep his day job as a small engine mechanic. The clubs just don't pay enough. It's not that people don't like his music. It's that there is no money in that part of the country for skills. It's a lot harder to pay musicians when you're charging $2 for a beer instead of $8 for a mixed drink, or $120 for dinner and drinks for two at Yoshi's in San Francisco.

I'm assuming that if he move to the Bay area, where there is a lot more demand for Jazz, he might be able to make a decent living by playing clubs.

Just my $.02
How to come up with Breakthrough Ideas
As gently as I can manage ...

At the end of the video is a URL for his website. It is http://johnnylee.net/

His website is pretty neat. It includes more of his Wii remote projects -- including his interactive whiteboard which I think is even more interesting -- and it includes a link to his academic pursuits.

Following the "Academics" link, you'll find that his thesis project is "Projector-Based Location Discovery and Tracking", which takes his whiteboard hobby a couple of steps further.
The most useful thing I've learned in CS is to define and keep stringent rules while programming. These can be time/space constraints, programming time constraints, keeping the code modular, readable, or reusable, etc. Define rules that make the most sense for the project you have to do and write code with these rules in mind regardless of your own personal coding preferences. All CS knowledge learned enables you to keep to these rules.
Of course, good rules to follow can be 'learn as much as possible' or 'enjoy yourself', but when it comes down to building something, enjoying yourself doesn't mean you've written good code.
I should be finishing my degree this summer, and I knew going into the program that I wanted to be doing web startups when I was done. So, I chose a program the focused more on Software Engineering than straight CS.

So, tailored my education along the lines of creating startups. My classes the last 2 years have included Intro to Database systems, Unix programming, Perl, Web Database Programming, Advanced Database systems, Distributed Systems, and Systems Programming. I've avoided Java and Microsoft technologies whenever I've been able to.

Every time that I get a semester break, I work on learning Django, or Ruby on Rails, and every semester web development comes a little easier to me. I've also been doggedly pursuing my own education, and I'm not relying on my school to give it to me on a silver platter. School is there to give you a framework, on which you continue your self-education. So, when I was taking my Distributed systems class, I read up on Erlang, and the other students had no idea what that language was for.

There are people in my advanced database classes that are editing SQL with notepad on windows. I was trying to tell them that a decent text-editor might improve their quality of life a little bit. Several of them didn't know what the difference between notepad and a decent text editor was. Sigh... I guess that it goes to show that it's not the school, it's the student.
Just the other day I had to use a non-trivial string algorithm for some batch string searching (searching for occurrences of any of a few million different strings on a large text corpus). A colleague is working on creating a little language for doing batch image processing, requiring use of undergrad-level compilers material.

As for the string problem I faced, I found an existing implementation in the language I was using, but I wound up having to modify it in order to cope with changing requirements.

If I hadn't learned about algorithms and automata in college, it probably would have been impossible for me to understand what I was using and I'd be flying blind. I probably would have instead not even known about the algorithm and would have believed that an inefficient naive solution was the only way, therefore making the project essentially infeasible (at first glance, anyway).

I'm also thankful that I had the opportunity to learn about functional programming because it made me a better programmer in imperative languages.
re re re remix!
Gdc08: PlayStation Eye Tank War Demo Is "Next Gen" Tech
IPython's enhanced Python shell
It would be hard to think of something I'd done that didn't use this trick. There are lots of examples in Arc. I chose quite different problems to solve than language designers usually do. It's not that common to design a language by writing applications in it, and making the language have whatever features are necessary to make those applications short.

In this case the difference isn't so much that I chose a different problem to solve as that I chose any problem at all. I get the impression most language design is driven not so much by explicit goals as by a collection of half-formulated principles.
What's awesome about this is how some low-tech (but only now common with the Wii) pieces have been assembled to give a more immersive/convincing 3D viewpoint than ever before.

It's still not stereoscopic vision, but I believe there's an obvious and still fairly cheap extension that could reach that next level: place a pixel-aligned vertical lenticular lens¹ on the monitor.

This can make it so that at predictable distances from the screen, each eye sees just even or odd columns of the display, which would each show just the left-eye or right-eye frames. Without eye-tracking, being just a little off optimal position could ruin the effect.

With cheap eye-tracking, software can see which eye is in which zone, always maintaining the proper left-right mapping. (There might be flickering in transitions; I suspect people would adapt or software could fall back to monoscopic when eyes are misaligned. Thus you always have at least as strong an illusion of 3D as in this demo, but if your eyes fall into the proper lens bands -- boom! -- true stereo vision.)

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_lens
Hackonomics and tech adoption cycle
At iRobot I had the luxury of having lots of people trying to sell us 3D headsets and such. It would make a huge difference for controlling a robot remotely.

It's clear that this tech provides much better impression of 3D than any others I've seen.

It would work for a small display as well, letting you look around through a tiny portal.

Also, am I the only one who things "cake" when someone says "portal"?
I just tipped him at http://tipjoy.com for this url:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
I don't know if it was actually paid by google. But it sure does read like an ad.
once someone has physical access to your box all bets are off. You can try all sorts of tricks to make it harder but at the end of the day the best defense is keeping minimal amounts of data on computers that could fall in the wrong hands.
Networks are worth more than the sum of their parts.
I do agree with shooter that python is good technologically... but the problem with Python web frameworks is that there's no one official framework yet for python that's overwhelmingly popular in the python world (though someone can prove me wrong). The end result is that there aren't that many books on stuff like Django (compared to other technologies), which really sucks when you're just starting out.

Rails on the other hand has tons and tons of books. I just started a little less than a year ago and I've caught up fast because of the plethora of books and communities for Rails.

in the end, if you happen to find your partner quick - they may help you choose (that's probably the best route)

Forgot to mention - check out some video tutorials of Rails programming:

http://rubyonrails.com/screencasts

http://railscasts.com

http://peepcode.com (not free but really really good - they actually have 2 vids that covers all of the basics of Rails - in I think about 3-5 hours; you're not goign to remember all of it in the 1st run but it gets u comfy)

a decent list of resources

http://railshandbook.com/

http://rubyinside.com

http://dzone.com

http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ -funny and useful intro into ruby itself
Can I beat the Xerox 6130 for a cheap color laser printer with linux/postscript support?
This one seems to have much better long term cost than comparable HPs because I found toner refill kits for sale. Anyone used toner refill kits before?
My bad. I didn't mean to put words in your mouths, and re-reading my post... it does sound pretty snarky. Sorry about that. I certainly didn't intend for the post to be a criticism of YC or imply that you're not funding enough people. I'm actually impressed by how well the process seems to be scaling.

If anything I was referring to the first part of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70062

Please don't take it personally, because most of the proposals we rejected, we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants.

And this post:
http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2007/10/what-no-means.h...

specifically, this part:

Please don’t take a “no” from us to mean anything more than there happened to be other applications that interested us more. We get a lot of applications and it’s always difficult to choose who we’d like to interview in person. We admit that our review process is “fraught with error.” I’m sure there are many people that we’ve passed over for funding that went on to start promising companies—and there will be many more.

I wasn't aware that space was not a limiting factor. I'm actually shocked that it isn't with as much press as YC has been getting. I figure you'd be overwhelmed with applicants by now.

I was primarily trying to make an observation that the market for would be founders seems to be heavy on the supply side these days. And, while YC is certainly the alpha dog in early, stage funding, it seems like the supply side of the founder equation is rather large, and getting larger. I could be wrong.
I upvoted the current "fluff link". I found it entertaining and at least somewhat on topic (more than the post about Castro). Personally I'm more concerned that the link about 37signals releasing numbers was still on the front page today. Ok, it was news, I read it and it was relevant. but it stopped being relevant after 5 minutes.

I think the solution is not to keep the inevitable influx of stories that will annoy some long time users, but to figure out a way to show users only stories they care about.
Does having 3 main hacker sites (this, proggit, /.) imply the retreat from 14 year olds will reach a stable equilibrium, and end the eternal September problem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

There are only so many 14 year olds in the world, so at some point the rate of change in users will be 0, incoming equals outgoing.
I'm really not sure about that, and for the sake of all the other VR and AR researchers who have gone before Johnny Lee - he really didn't invent rendering based on head tracking. The reason I'm not sure about this tech for 3D shooters is that its like looking through a virtual window, you can't fully reorient yourself in 3D - I'm not sure what combining this and full mouse-look control would be like. Also on a PC based setup where you're close to the screen the lack of stereoscopic vision would be more obvious.

I think its more likely the future of different sort of game - maybe those old cabal style scrolling shooters for instance.

Here's a video of some guys doing the same thing with face tracking (ie no LEDs needed) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUdZk4KUDTI
Well, these types of threads always exist, but the real problem is that the ycnews community or the technology behind ycnews has failed to hammer it down. I'm all for democracy when the majority brings meaningful and intelligent articles to read, but in this situation I don't mind giving up equality for quality.
How many books do you need for a web framework?

Django is pretty simple. There's already the official book in print. Not to mention one of the reasons Rails has so many books to begin with was due to really poor online documentation. Django doesn't have that problem.

Usually I think havings lots of printed documentation is very important, but in Django's case, due to its simplicity and quality of existing docs, I don't think it is an issue.
There's even more books on Java. Maybe you should pick that up :) take a look at some tutorials if you want to learn python web programming. It doesn't take a book to START making useful sites with something like Pylons.

Maybe I should start offering some Pylons lessons online (for free, just to spread the love).
Looking for feedback on our new startup. Built in 24 hours on top of tipjoy.
Yes, both of those seem excellent. Could we give it a try and see how it turns out? You could define the acceleration of a downvote as (exp (- (* numdownvotes 0.5))) or some such, to discourage cabal behavior.
Our goal is to get 50 million users, then making money should be easy.
An interesting anecdote:
My friend tutored a girl in math because she was getting bad grades. She said this was because girls are bad at math. However, once my friend was able to get this idea out of her head, she became very good at math.
well Ruby and Python are near equivalent - so it's unfair to bring up the java point...

Great sites are nice but you shouldn't discount the power of books in the very very beginning of learning when you're not on your Nth programming language. I think u and I are so far off now that we forgot what it was like starting out...