skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are the 8 words?
Would a /leaderposts on YC make sense?
At times when the top stuff on YC seems less interesting, I've occasionally gone back through the recent submissions of the leaders to look for older stuff I may have missed that doesn't appear in /best. I.e.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=edw519

Does anyone else here do this sort of thing? If so, would it make sense to have here or would it be better for something like http://searchyc.com to have?
There are severe limitations on how far Alfie Kohn and his following will follow the implications of his ideas. They have gone so far as to ban discussion of certain ideas, basically because parents were too uncomfortable about being asked to do that much better.
Ability for precise modeling is the most important thing that separates programmers from non-programmers. Dealing with complexity is probably the runner-up, but domain experts should be just as good or better in handling this one.

It's the need for precision that brings out the complexity. In my experience working with domain experts, they usually don't realize how complex their domain is. Only when we start trying to nail things down precisely do the contradictions and edge cases come out of the woodwork. Invariably it's order(s) of magnitude harder than it looked at first. Usually they are surprised and say they had no idea there was so much to do.

So while I agree that domain experts are accomplished at handling complexity, they do so the way that humans do it (ambiguously and inconsistently), not the way that computers do it (through formal specification). The ultimate bottleneck in software development is that there just aren't that many humans who can do the latter well.

I agree that if programming ever does escape the need for precision, then the game changes, completely and unrecognizably. A pet belief is that this would require computers that work more like the way humans do (down to the lowest level), but that's a wild guess. In any case, I haven't seen any evidence of things progressing in this direction, have you?
Parentheses? What parentheses?
I am going to graduate at 40. If you can code, you can code.
Quite frankly 33 is young. I never touched a computer until I was over 30 and yet I was there at the beginning of the PC revolution.

Did my first startup at 46 and in my fifties I am still going strong. Long as you are committed to life long learning then age is as they say but a number.
Alltop.com from Guy Kawasaki & how News 2.0 sites can change your business
I'm really interested in this. Do you have any links, or else could you post/email_me a synopsis of what's going on.
Not a single sentence, unfortunately. A list of words that he elaborates on:
Passion
Work
Good
Focus
Push
Serve
Ideas
Persist
IQ and the Wealth of Nations
Yes I do the same thing, but the profiles that I look at are a bit different from yours.

I think that what is needed is some sort of algorithmic approach, like my yc news. I note that I see many of the same users in the discussions I'm contributing to, and that not all of these are in the top list. And some of the people in the top list I never see. What this suggests is that there are different subsets of users with differing interests.
The Butler Lampson interview from Programmers at Work
I use the "programmer dvorak" layout. Nicer for {} etc etc, initially scary for numbers but you get used to it. All dvorak sucks for ctrl-c/v/x.
Does this mean it will take 10 minutes to "Start" the internet?
For the gcd, I've always liked this version from python's own unit test:

def gcd(a, b):
while a:
a, b = b%a, a
return b
Surely there are not entire nations where the average IQ is 60. To me this indicates broken tests.

I believe you'd find a correlation between learned skills like literacy and GDP. And Occam's Razor implies that's what's being measured here. Any "leaks" in the IQ tests, in the sense of accidentally testing learned rather than innate qualities, would tend to produce a graph this shape.
Another clever game mechanic:  Quantum Minigolf
Patenting Business Methods using a symbolic business process calculus
There are ideas called "Taking Children Seriously" (TCS) and the UP (Unconditional Parenting is a book by Alfie Kohn) forum was closed down to avoid those ideas and the yahoogroup explicitly bans any discussion of TCS -- even when a newbie shows up and asks what TCS is and how it differs from UP, they won't get an answer. The only reason the TCS label is relevant is because that's the way in which they explicitly target which ideas are banned. If I post anonymously and without mentioning the TCS label I would still be unwelcome if I posted exploring certain lines of thought, which are what's actually unwanted.

They want a "supportive atmosphere" which means little criticism (of ideas). This is not unusual. Pretty much no one is philosophically serious about parenting or education, today.

Feel free to email me at curi@curi.us for more details or reply here.

Edit: sigh, Alfie had the major relevant thread on his forum deleted from archive.org, all I seem to have are some partial quotes in AIM logs.
Modern business favors the traits that accompany literacy.
"there are different subsets of users with differing interests"

What a perceptive observation of something I never understood. I submit and participate all the time and, for the life of me, could never figure out what helps a story get "traction". Sometimes I submit something I find extremely interesting (Enterprise moving to Web 2.0 or How to Make Trains Go Faster) and they go nowhere. Then I'll submit something with what I think is of marginal interest (Indian Outsourcing), and it goes wild. I used to think it depended who was on-line the critical first hour or two to make it to the first page. I like your theory better.

One extremely popular type of thread I never find interesting (so I never participate) is the "language war". People seem to love these discussions. My attitude has always been, "Write it in whatever you want, and I'll rewrite it in BASIC (heh heh)".
Decision Tree Learning in Ruby
I think Microsofts biggest problem in relation to a webstrategy is this: Style. They don't have any.

What is required in the web space is elegance and simplicity in your userinterface and workflow. The reason for this being that if a potential customer doesn't "get it" within 5 seconds he will move on to the next offering. Microsoft is not used to this scenario. Of course MS has some muscle to move around, but it won't get them the users they crave. They have tried moving on to the web before, and never had the success a company their size aims for. Remember passport?

Their problem is very fundamental, making it hard for them to bridge the gap. They value lock-in and pushing other services from themselves or their partners. This muddles the proposition of their products, and makes it very hard to create a good webbased product.
I have lost a number of relatives to stroke. If you think you are having a stroke, call 911. Especially once her arm went numb and she couldn't move it she should have called 911 immediately. For a blockage stroke in particular, there are a number of things they can do in the first hour or so to limit the damage and speed recovery.
Generally if you do a startup and you are totally dependant on one customer or supplier you are in trouble. The day facebook changes their strategy you are finished. No matter how great you plugin.
I just had a look through some of the questions of the test and it seems very fair to me. Simple scientific sorts of questions that have good clear questions with answers that can be very definitely said.

I would chock it up to finland being a more homogenous society. Many of those small european countries have top notch education systems, but they are small and everybody is well off. I personally think that the US needs to find its best way to educate, not somebody else's.

They also have free college. I'm jealous.
Life Outside the Fast Lane
The entire book is bogus. About 1/3 of the wikipedia article is dedicated to the criticisms of the book, and they seem pretty damning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#Cr...
I think one big difference between the two is that you don't hear much about "Apple buyout" rumors as opposed to the frequency you do hear about "Microsoft buyout" rumors. I also alluded to the fact that there is an analogous phenomenon beginning to emerge with "Google buyout" rumors and internet startups.

Btw, I hope I'm not coming off as saying that Apple is saintly in their business practices. I'm mainly saying that it is evident to me (hence it is my opinion, not an imposed fact) that Apple does more to encourage diversity with third party developers and such diversity is overall synergistic.

I also hope that people don't perceive my question above as being a troll against Xobni/Ycombinator! I'm just asking a general question.
I think that this observation is actually the key to growing a social news site without it becoming diluted, as it happened to Reddit. If you make an algorithm that simply looks at what posts you contribute to, post in and look at it should be possible to locate other users that fit into the same subset. These users submissions and comments are probably the ones that you like.

I also think there's a pretty good business model in developing a good back-end that people can use to create their own social news sites.

Maybe someone from here would be interested in helping explore it?
This page links to the profiles where you could then click on the submitted link
http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Maybe some employers might mind (and you don't want to work for them anyway), but users definitely don't care how old the person that wrote the code was. Hack away!
Sounds like you want http://news.ycombinator.com/best

What I should do is let people adjust the time on that.
What went wrong with nuclear power?
Hmm. Misleading title then. If I can't reproduce the experiment (i.e. do something successful) using just these 8, then you actually need more. You need in addition the extra words he uses to explain what he means by each of these.
Why humans really need artificial intelligence: To read thru all of that nonsense and produce the 7 page summary that the actual relevant information could be contained in.

If you think engineering produces pointless paper for the sake thereof, you should see law!
Quantity isn't an indicator of quality.
That is almost always the first reaction to logo or name changes. Only time really tells.
I don't think strategies are news.

I'd rather a company tell me what it has done, what products exist. A strategy is just "hey, everyone else is doing something cool, let's tell the world that we are too so we can reserve our piece of the pie".

Especially coming from Microsoft, who made part of its business by telling the public all the great things it was going to do without actually having a product...
You Used Ruby to Write WHAT?!
Sounds reasonable... but so what? To me it seems pretty clear that high GDP causes higher IQ, not IQ causing high GDP (assuming the findings in this book are accurate). We need to remember that IQ is a measure of how well you score on IQ tests, and not a measure of "intelligence" (whatever that is).
"Eventually" the sun will go supernova, and the question will be moot. Given a sufficiently long perspective, all events are guaranteed to occur.

The point is, I'm not holding my breath.
Poll: What would happen if News.YC had explicit support for polls?
Users would create too many, and new arrivals would think News.YC was a poll site.
Users would create fewer polls, because the main reason they do it now is to get karma from people voting up the poll choices.
We'd have the same number of polls, but they wouldn't look as ugly.
So MS will turn into an application hosting company!

Hmmm ... I wonder when will google start offering ERP modules, actually I wonder why are they so late!

All in all, i believe this is a good thing,
it should kill most IT departments or largly downsize them, and MIS ppl might be the first to resist this, but, well, its coming .. and few can stop it
In my experience, people do have different kinds of intelligence (e.g., creative vs analytic ability).

However, the research literature seems to disagree on this point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor
The coal industry.
As you can see, we do. You can read more about it at http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html.
I wonder about their strategy for unveiling the strategy. First they should unveil that.
Users would wonder whether they could/should vote for more than one poll choice because their philosophical mutual exclusivity is not reflected in the voting interface.
So MS will turn into an application hosting company!

The next Microsoft will probably be one. So the question is whether the next Microsoft is Microsoft or someone else.
Sorry, don't mean to spam this conversation, but talking to a great community like YC News is a step in the right direction. I have posed my end of questions, and have had others answered as part of conversations that others answered, and have always come away with supportive and informative suggestions from like minded folks.

To be honest, I have had the same question in my head for some time now, and your question helped me too. Thank you.
It's not so much a question of reflecting as enforcing. If you really felt options were exclusive, you'd never discover they weren't.

I probably will eventually let poll creaters enforce exclusivity, though.
The reason I come here is to read interesting articles, participate in discussions where I can have my views challenged by smart people, and (hopefully) contribute to these discussions in a meaningful way.

Not to degrade polls in any way, but they don't often add to the above reasons for being here. While I would love to chime in on which web framework is the best my observation is that:

a) the information I gain from reading a poll is minimal

b) the comments to a poll are less interesting than an ask YC link or a link to a story. The reason being that polls are (mostly) yes/no answers and tend to promote yes/no answers or flamewars.

Just my opinion of course. And since I come here to have my views challenged, feel free to do so. :-)
Most of the "Ask YC" questions get answers the asker did not expect, so a poll would do no good.
They'd be better than reddit's since there's no downvote.
The computer is nothing more than a thought amplification tool. It doesn't care how old you are.

Its more important what state the mind is in than what body the mind is in!!!
The creator of a poll can add new choices later, in response to comments.
I switched to dvorak for a few weeks a few summers ago. Initially typing every single word was insanely frustrating, and it didn't get much better for me.

I've been using QWERTY for 18 years and I continue to stick with it simply because it's familiar and I'm surrounded by machines all day every day that don't allow me to change the keyboard layout. Alternating between keyboard layouts several times every day is just not worth the frustration for me.
We think we know, but we have no idea.
They say what we don't know won't hurt us. I say what we don't know will hurt us, but at least we know that we don't know. We can always learn. What we should fear is what we don't know that we don't know. The worst of all is we don't know that we don't know something, and on top of that, we don't know what it is.
They say think outside the box. I say think inside the box; just assure we expand it. The box represents discipline and foundation. Just about everything in this world succed because of discipline and foundation. The universe is a box, and we live inside it.
They say knowledge is power. I say knowledge is danger. When we don't know, we go obliviously; we learn as we go; we don't know what to expect; we don't make up our mind; we have fun along the way. When we know, we procrastinate; we brag; we cut corners; we get overconfident; we don't execute.
This seems like a neat idea to get a hang of quantum weirdness. I suppose one would have to get use to the idea of hitting balls through slits and tunneling.

What I'd also like to play is an Electromagnetic minigolf. Though I've had my share of E&M courses, I don't think I really have a good intuitive feel for how radio waves propagate in a room or outdoors--whether they go through walls or around corners. Though no one has to adjust rabbit ears anymore, it seems like getting a cell phone signal is a crapshoot otherwise.
Wouldn't the results then be biased in favor of the original choices (since they were available longer) making it hard to draw any conclusions?
What exactly is "incorrect" about improving desktop software?
You were missing the option: users would vote for all the choices (seems kinda broken).
Poll: When do you upvote an article?
When do you upvote an article?
before I read the article, just based on the title
after I read the article
I don't even read articles that I upvote
No, because it would be added in according to the scientific method.
Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?
I didn't even know it ever had any...
Does anyone know if this is based on unique visits in Google analytics? You wouldn't want the same visitor contributing multiple times to the bounce rate (e.g., by checking the stats on a page every day say).
Also see:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ppgfjo6IIf4
I am a Finn and I agree on introversion. In our culture hard working in solitude is respected and showing your feelings is suppressed; both good for classroom study.
In sports this culture shows too: we do generally very bad in team sports.

The whole society is based on leveling differences.
The week ones drop out and the good ones are held back but on the average everything looks good. It is also very rare to be self-employed. If you want to accomplish something out of ordinary you have to leave the country; think of Linus Torvalds for example.

About history: Finland has been part of Sweden and Russian and we are still been constantly reminded about it. For example, our current president Tarja Halonen refuses answer questions about democracy in Russia. I think the whole country needs a psychotherapy about the Russia issue.

You should think a Finn as passive-aggressive, risk-avoiding, self-loathing, highly educated native with inferiority complex. Those qualities with the lack of courage to speak up makes us the ultimate slave race.
Ask YC:  Would it make sense to use social news sites to talk to someone famous?
If you send someone famous email, it will probably be ignored. But what about using a social news site for this purpose (and not just for contacting the people who created the site)?

The idea is that if many people agree that you have something interesting to say to someone famous, then he/she would probably be interested in hearing what you have to say.

And to encourage people to do this, you might have a social site devoted for making contacts of this sort.
That would skew the results.

If it was possible to downvote choices a new choice could maybe start out with an average of the other choices. But since this isn't possible I don't see an obvious way of resolving this.

Note by the way that the same mechanism applies to comments, particularly since the comments that are added later and therefore have no votes are displayed at the bottom, thus making it proportionally harder for them to make it to the top of the thread before it falls off the frontpage. The last argument assumes that users start from the top of the page, and don't always make it through all the comments to the bottom. A behaviour that I think is quite common - I know I do it...
"Isn't there a difference between startup and random web-based tool?" smacks of sarcasm to me. Of course I value constructive criticism, even complete dismissals of an weak idea. I'm just turned off by the schadenfreude seen on web-industry sites.
Plus, it'd be very difficult to get a good IQ statistic from some of those countries.
You remind me of a joke I heard, and I'm curious to know if it's a common one. It goes something like this: A Finnish farmer answers a loud knock at his door to find a detachment of Russian soldiers. The officer informs him that Russia is taking over this land and demands on penalty of death to know which side the farmer chooses to belong to, Finland or Russia. The farmer replies, "It has always been my heartfelt wish to once again be part of mother Russia. But at my age, I couldn't take another Russian winter."

I wonder if you would detect the "passive-aggressive" temperament you mention in this joke? It could be described that way, though it strikes me more as a kind of shrewdness, based in long experience of managing much more powerful neighbors. (I didn't know that Finland had gotten it from both sides.)
I also come here for the smart people you can find. I don't see why polls would change that.

Zeitgeiss anyone? Vote a), b) or c).
I found an article at one point that claimed there were multilpe intelligences, but g indicates a general ability in all areas. A person with a high g will be good in all or most areas, but it is possible for people to be very good in particular areas and not so much in others. Sorry I don't have a link handy.

Another strange thing about IQ is that it isn't normally distributed.
>>I think Microsofts biggest problem in relation to a >>webstrategy is this: Style. They don't have any.

True. I would say they just don't have the taste. I guess you just cannot create design marvels without taste. I'm still at a loss to figure out why Ray Ozzie couldn't add any magic to the recipe. I also think he's in agreement with MSFT-Yahoo acquisition. If so, then this is beyond my comprehension and they (MSFT) should admit that this is a problem they cannot solve. Even worst, they have lost focus on delivering quality desktop software (but thanks goodness there are investors like YCombinator and companies like Xobni :-). Vista is also miserable failure and a thorough rip-off. Remember Apple SE VP's comments?
I think that the signal/noise ratio would get higher.
I like the approval-voting schema of this poll. :)
Yes, that was a great article. I would like to know what changed in the author's mind. Did he just get good at particular math problems through repeatedly doing them, or did he gain a general math aptitude? Given his performance later in life it seems like he gained the latter.

I became interested in math in a similar manner, and I think learning it this way gave me an edge over those who were just force fed it in school. There is nothing like understanding the practical significance of a subject to make it stick in my mind and give me intuitive links. This aspect of learning seems to be really lacking in public school, at least the ones I've attended.
You are implying this poll doesn't look ugly with #3? I strongly suggest you add some web 3.0 widgets with 3-D charts if you expect this to take off.

I actually really like this - perhaps you can limit users to submitting one poll a week or something, or only allow one or two polls on the main page at any time? Sites like Slashdot has always had one poll running at a time, and I think thats for good reason.
Eh, it's better this way when the options aren't mutually exclusive.
Finland seems to have just as many loud stupid people as I'd imagine can be found in America. In schools, it's the same sort of thing - nerds vs jocks, etc.

Being stupid is certainly not cool, but not exactly frowned upon in the retard-circles either :p

Our social customs are a problem because somehow the whole nation feels like it's not "normal" to strike up a casual conversation with someone you don't already know.

I think that's part of why we seem so introvert. When we get to know others, we can then behave like normal people :)

It's just that getting there is needlessly difficult.
placeSpotting - Do You Have The Skills To Solve The Riddles?
We could adopt a convention that when you vote, you post a short comment to explain your rationale.
Currently, you can vote for more than one choice...