skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not me, though perhaps I don't count because I only use Linux for development (running in a vm) and osx for everything else.
I don't think that idea applies in this case.

The imported scientists have less natural job mobility than native scientists for several reasons: racism, poor English, and cultural differences.

They probably also have serious artificial barriers to switching jobs and industries because of their visas.

This law is removes the enormous artificial benefit of American citizenship (due to military, cultural and financial dominance) from one industry (science). This will change science dramatically compared to other industries.

Should a student prefer a career in an industry with artificial barriers firmly in place (like law or finance or management or even plumbing) or a career where American citizenship affords no benefit (like science or migrant farming)?
This place is still widely undiscovered, and I'm sure easily moderated if need be. There's always the possibility the site'll get over run with juveniles, but with such a clear cut topic of submissions, it's a slim chance for the foreseeable future.
What kind of a future do you imagine in which science is analogous to subsistence farming?
I put more faith in the fact that PG doesn't need to make money from ever more traffic to the site, so he's free to use hard tactics.
Successful Business = Idea * 1 to 50 years hard work.

When you compare the hour to think up the idea to the work required, there's no comparison. Worse, there's no shortage of ideas--they're nearly infinite, which, in supply and demand terms means their value approaches 0. This does not mean that some ideas are not better than others, only that their economic value is still generally $0.
Another fine example of why I wish I could vote stories down. Even if I only got one down-vote per week...that'd be great. I would use it right now, and it would feel real good.

Worst place, "invitecodes".
It's never particularly bothered me to see posts get downmodded with no explanation, but I like the basic idea.
This lets both the poster know and other readers.

This may cause a problem where we get a bunch of comments that say the same thing. It would probably be better if a reply could be upmodded instead of adding another comment.
Added to my reading list. I'll try to track down the 1989 BBC radio version.
Benefits:

- Having your thoughts/opinions online

- Discussions with readers can be valuable

Drawbacks:

- Taking the time to author original, thought provoking and/or informative posts. When blogs echo or summarize other posts, without any added thoughts/opinions/etc, they suck

- Keeping it up-to-date i.e. Wordpress upgrades, etc
Glad to be an extrovert then :-)
What is a "Go classroom". A place where they teach the boardgame Go?
Ask YC: Have you, or anyone you know, won the lotto?
How unlikely is it, really?
Rather if you find the comment insightful or adding to the discussion you vote it up.

That's an important difference.
You are so right.

The missing LED screen is the only thing that keeps me from buying a new macbook today. I am sure apple is going to streamline its production and sooner or later also the macbooks will come with a LED backlit screen. The air already has the 13 inch screen. So its only a tiny step until also the macbooks get it.
Thank you. I stand corrected
"It's fun to change all the settings, break the system, then have to go to recovery mode to repair it."

...especially fun when you are in the middle of development.
Seems some linux kids have to break their systems because they don't know what else to do.

I use linux only because it is rock solid and does NOT break. And yes, paul, os x for everything else, because in real life, linux sucks for the crudeness of its apps.
does google reader count?

1. popurls.com
2. hacker news
3. cnn.com
It's not really impossible in theory, or possible in practice. Or something.

They just changed the rules a little bit. Since one goes into it knowing that the music is being played on even tempered instruments, you've already ruled out a near infinite array of possibilities. It's just the remaining infinite array of possibilities that they have to deal with. So, you see, it's simply a matter of reducing the problem to its simplest form.

Seriously, though, if given a very complex piece of music played on oddly tempered instruments instead of a traditional piece of music played on even tempered instruments, this software would croak (unless they specifically trained it to deal with those tunings, and even then if the music is particularly complex/dense, there would be artifacts). But, since it knows the basic rules by which the music is playing, and traditional harmony is not very dense--stacked thirds are pretty wide open--it can mostly pick out the bits it needs. If you look at a spectrum analysis of a piece of music at a reasonably high resolution and sample rate--a single track with a single instrument, of course--you can quite easily pick out the individual notes. Combine this kind of analysis with the existing auto-tune functionality (up or down sampling a sound without affecting time) and you've got this tool.

I'm not saying it's not cool. It definitely is. But, it's been possible for quite some time to do this manually...the magic is in the automation, and the accuracy of it. (Though I'm betting there will be artifacts in many situations.)

I don't record music much anymore, but I'll probably pick up a copy of this just for fun.
Review of Snaptalent
... fan noise
If you're in the middle of development and craving for rock hard solid systems, you don't fuzz around changing everything here and there, quite probally something you shouldn't be touching, you're asking for a breakdown. And when it comes, you're OK, because, that's the way it's supposed to be, and most important:

You will definitely learn something from the recovery process!
I am not sure that's it. I wasn't beaten as a child, nor are my children. However, I had much much more unstructured play "in the neighborhood" than my children do. Almost any activity is mediated by adults today. Other parents, primarily fathers, have remarked on this in the last five to ten years when we compare how we organized our time when we were between five and fifteen years old with how our children's time is organized and managed for them. For the most part we didn't have adult umpires or coaches as children, we had to work out situations for ourselves. Sometimes a game would break up, but over time we learned to compromise in ways that seem less common with adult coaches and adult referees who are often more committed to "winning" than the children involved. We may be getting off topic for "Hacker News" but unstructured play seems to be a key component to fostering self-control and creativity is my take-away.
Pretty much, yes. Amusingly, language is "fuzzy" by nature, which is why human-human communication is so verbose. So the word "ideas" has debatable meaning. What you call an idea, I may call a whole business plan, or vice verse, or some other combination of things.

Aside of that, someone indeed has created a "business plan" market website. I don't remember what it's called, but if you can't find it, I can try fishing it out.
I've said as much in the comment thread on the basic article, but basically all of the limitations baked into the SDK boil down to one primary lesson: Apple thinks that they, and only they, can and should decide what software will run on the iPhone.

If I were an independent developer on the Mac platform, I would personally see this as a slap in the face. Indies spent years keeping the Mac alive as a viable platform while the big vendors ignored it. Now, Apple has chosen to give preferential treatment to the same enterprise and entertainment concerns that once shunned them.

The losers will be the indies, hobbyists, open source developers, and everyone else whose labor kept the platform alive through the dark years.

I've been buying Macs for almost 15 years, but my current system will sadly be my last, unless Apple stops showing such contempt for the intelligence of their own long-time supporters.
umm the odds are public knowledge?
http://watrcoolr.us/

Google Reader Next=> Bookmark

Wikipedia
This is a good and substantive piece that is better than the tone of its title. The question it addresses - html or Flash? - is one that we really struggled over, and I would like to hear others' stories of how they made this decision. So here's mine.

We want to compete against established desktop software. UI is critical to us, and there's no way that an html-based UI is going to be as slick or performant as what we could do in an installed program. So the prospect of getting a richer and (presumably) easier to program UI out of Flash was very enticing. Yet in the end we decided against it.

What settled this in my mind was asking, How central is the web to what we're trying to do? Do we want our app to work roughly the way a website does? Is it natural to model it as a series of "pages" represented by URLs, connected by hyperlinks, and so on? Or is this an artificial imposition on our problem?

In our case, the question has a clear answer: making our product work roughly like a web site is key. In fact, the more it works like a website the better: our users need to navigate complex graphs of information, and the web is the established model for that. We want our new stuff to work in a way that users are already familiar with (albeit from a different context, namely web surfing), so as to keep their learning curve as low as possible.

So "webbiness" is an essential part of our product, which should therefore speak the native language of the web. The last thing I wanted to end up having to do was write an ad hoc, informally specified implementation of half of a web browser in Flash. Users would know that they weren't looking at "real" web pages, and it wouldn't feel right. So when I hear about people hacking their Flash app to support URLs and so on, I feel relieved we didn't go down that road.

On the other hand, the decision we did make has caused our programming efforts to become swamped by the minutiae of divs and doms and Javascript. We're hacking a platform that was never intended for what we're building. That sucks, too. And it has slowed us down. But I will say that making this work, and work well, in a web browser has been exhilirating.

Edit: the other thing I wanted to point out is that this webbiness criterion also holds if you look at the successful Flash apps: games, video, photo editing, and so on. These are not problems where it would make sense to structure the solution like a web site. I'd be interested in hearing counterexamples to either side of this.
Very unlikely, but I know three people that have won.

One of our neighbors won over $200 million in a tri-state lottery. They were very nice, sociable people before their win. Everyone liked them.

After?

Well, they built a HUGE 'modern' house (30K+ feet or so, and it looked like someone mixed a neon sign and a Lego set in a blender. It actually glowed in pastels at night.) They basically lost all taste. That didn't go over well with the neighborhood, but people still liked them and assumed it was just a weird splurge. Then the father of the winning family accidentally ran over the dog of one of our mutual friends with his new SUV. He had known the family with the dog for years and had attended barbecues with them almost every weekend in the summer. Their kids were on a soccer team together. The 'winner' refused to even talk to them about the accident - no apologies and no comforting words to the children of the family - because he was terrified they would try to sue him to get his money. He became a HUGE dick. He was eventually "shamed" out of our neighborhood, and he and his wife divorced. I think they're still fighting over their dwindling assets now, about a dozen years after their win. Their house was torn down and only their driveway gate remains.

The second winner I know is one of my uncles. I bought him a six-pack and a couple lotto tickets for Christmas as a joke once. He won around $2,500 with one of the tickets. I've never bought a lottery ticket for myself. I don't like the odds and I don't think I would do well with lots of money if I hadn't earned it myself. The third person I know that won doesn't really count (he became a client of my firm only because he had won and had assets to invest in our venture fund. I never would have known him had he not won.)

In other probability news, I know two people that were struck by lightning ;-) One of them was an alcoholic who worked for a beer distributor. He was wheeling a handcart of brew into a pub when he got zapped. It blew out his heels. He took it as a sign: no more drinking, new job. Now he's "born again" and annoying. I liked him more as an alcoholic ;-) The other guy was just a moron that must have missed the Ben Franklin story in school.
Arc: popular since 2004!
It seems rather unfair that you got upmodded so much, and curi's post 2 layers above got downmodded below 0. curi states a personal opinion, which is valid as one.

You say curi missed the most interesting aspect -- from your POV (and obviously shared by others). I disagree with you about what is the most interesting aspect, but I don't think your point is uninteresting, but neither would I think you missed the "most interesting aspect." I think the "most interesting" is merely the useful idea that "developing self-regulation is beneficial and important."

While there is really nothing wrong about the state of your, and curi's scores, and how much people agree with either of you, this points system makes it look like, at a glance, that something was wrong about curi's post, and yours was, relatively, +18 correct. This is a negative side effect of this point system, which I don't think most people keep in mind when voting.
What bothers me is how we bail out people like that 25 year old, which happens when the government tells banks not to foreclose. People take risks, and people get burned. Nobody understands that better than entrepreneurs. It's not like the government comes and gives your startup a bridge loan if you can't raise VC money.
MySpace Launches Second Phase Of Developer Platform
Actually, by altering the headline to your own taste, you introduced further distortion, which does not facilitate neutral discussion regarding the article itself, which is the actual topic, and should be treated with respect as one. While the article may be biased, introducing further bias does not help the readers's judgment, so the best headline to post would actually be the original headline; you let the reader decide whether it is disagreeable to them or not.
Spam King pleads guilty
In what range of years do you think most of the imagining was done?
Were the launches of Songkick and Dropbox scheduled deliberately to be close to demo day, for PR reasons?
By time or # of visits? Here's mine for Feb:

By time:
mail.google.com/a/ (25 hrs 39 mins)
news.ycombinator.com (9 hrs 26 mins) (ouch)
localhost:3000 (4 hrs 54 mins)
google.com/reader (4 hrs 53 mins)
rescuetime.com (4 hrs 48 mins) (much of it is QA)
google.com/analytics (3 hrs 51 mins)
google.com (2 hrs 21 mins)
groups.google.com (1 hr 27 mins)
twitter.com (1 hr 3 mins)

Wow. Google owns my ass.

(this data brought to you by RescueTime! [grin])
Five reasons why the H-1B visa cap will increase
It shouldn't even need to be an elf binary. It should be able to be any file which could serve as a command in unix, which would include things like she-bang-interpreted executables and alternative binary formats recognized by your kernel. Shouldn't there be some kind of hook into whatever e.g. bash uses? It doesn't seem like such a utility should be hard to write.
...said Squanto.
Hardly excessive. That comment is basically trolling for angry responses.
Yes, the odds of winning are known for a sample set that is all lotto players in the population. This http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=137729 got me wondering if readers of HN would know more or less winners than one would expect.
Indeed. Reddit seemed to go downhill when politics went popular. I would hate to see politics here unless it is relevant to hackers/startups in a more direct way (ie for discussion, not arguments).
I think it's called sarcasm people.

I hope anyways.
I'd agree that extroverts generally are happier, but I'd argue that a large part of the reason is because the majority of people are extroverts and, therefore, society is built around their personality type. Introverts are inherently at a disadvantage in most cases because they are often treated as if something is wrong with being themselves. The author even suggests that introverts try to gain happiness by aping the behavior of those who already have it, essentially saying that if you're not an extrovert, then your only option is to turn yourself into one.
Something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3DyxaCYlfg&fmt=18
no problem Ian, I love anything to do with music on the web. I'm hoping I find some great new music on it, like I often find new sites through alexa. Have you talked with the guys at grooveshark? I can put you in touch, might be some good synergies.

-j
I think the fear is of other companies executing on the same idea, rather than just "knowing" the idea.
The importance of true friends
Ask YC: what is your favorite startup related quote?
So, what is your favorite startup related quote?
I disagree. Short comments like this one would get annoying.
That was my first reaction, but look at what they've got to work with. It's a cheesy-looking horror movie, with a no-name director and (mostly) no-name aging child actors. Your only hope at advertising it is to do something weird and hope it sticks. For all its cheesiness, this was a novel approach.

Compare the iPhone. The ads were "picture of iPhone ... fade to Apple logo", and people lined up around the block for it. You don't need much from an ad when your product sells itself.

I knew a guy who was a recruiter for some podunk university in the midwest, who was very good at it. One of the top universities tried to hire him, but he turned them down: what skill does it take to convince somebody to go to MIT or Harvard?
Sure it does. Try 'man ulimit' on any unix machine.

Given how advanced the iPhone OS is, I doubt that managing and controlling background tasks is that hard to do. Most probably, they have just pushed it back on their priority lists to get it exactly right, that is all.
"Asshole" was harsh, I take it back.
Observation: Lucene rocks
Two-word summary: Lucene rocks. Nine-word summary: It indexed 3 gigs of text in 20 minutes.

I've wanted to figure out Lucene but never got around to it (the Lucene book is very outdated and none of the example code works, for instance) but today I did something simpler, a little experiment in indexing.

I have a directory of about 3.2 GB of XML documents (medical journal papers downloaded from ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.tar.gz -- it's about a 700 MB file). I wondered how long it would take the simple disk-based Lucene demo using default settings (http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_3_1/demo.html).

System stats: 7200 RPM 300 GB disk; Windows XP SP 2, Quad Core 2.4 ghz Core 2, 2 GB DDR2-800 RAM.

It took 23 minutes, the last 5 of which were merely flattening index chunks into a single file so that searches run faster.

So about 20 minutes for 3 gigs of text. The final index file was about 1/5 the size of the original source text at 646 MB.

Memory usage was very reasonable - it hovered around 30-40 MB (unlike, say, Java IDEs which use up 200 MB or so).

Ultimately a benchmark like this is disk-bound, but that's still fast as shit in my opinion. I had to whip together a ghetto homegrown indexing system at work several months ago (I've never had time to optimize it), and this blows away what I created.
I think in this case, the 25 year old does get burnt - at least a little bit. The question at this moment really is: do we let the whole economy (other saner people who had nothing to do with this mess) suffer now that the plague is spreading, or provide some respite to the entire economy (and not care if, as a by-product, the 25 year old is bailed out a little bit.)
And the biggest difference between my ghetto system and Lucene is that searches with lots of results are very, very fast.
Oops. I meant, "making $110mil from $100 mil is inevitable"
Is the idea "ideas are worthless" itself worthless? Explain how. ;)
Hm... that was probably true whenever I was 18 ;) These days I use Linux because:

- All hacker's software is developed for Linux first, and then ported to other platforms later.

- GNU tools, proper command line, various file systems.

- Linux window management beats the hell out of Windows, and slightly better than Mac OS X in my opinion. Gnome is slowly shaping up into a premier desktop.

- Linux offers font rendering that is vastly superior to Microsoft's and Apple's despite their stupid patents. This is a matter of taste, of course, but you can tweak it to render exactly what you prefer. Windows is unusable on high-DPI LCDs.

- There is more software for Linux. Yes, in absolute numbers Windows probably wins, but if you account for junkware, Linux wins easily.

- It is easier to install and remove software on Linux, especially on Debian-based distros.

- There are many Linuxes. If Canonical/Ubuntu start driving me crazy I can always go back to Debian.

Mac OS X scores many points for being a proper UNIX too, but they're more commercialialized that I can digest: too many software comanies who'd be happy to charge you for a stupid screen saver. Even TextMate is not free and not open sourced. Pathetic.
Couldn't have said this better myself. I have just started working on a Mac and I love the looks, but Linux is still more flexible and powerful than a Mac. apt-get is too hard to beat. Hopefully, in the near term when compiz matures well, we will get beautiful looking software on Linux also. (It's hard to beat Apple with the beauty of its hardware.)
if you tell wells fargo that you make many purchases abroad or that you are travelling to such and such a place, they will not lock your card. they lock the card by default as a security measure, when it is being used outside of its normal enviroment, for your protection, in case it has been stolen. call them, speak to a member of the security team and they will remove or add as many security details as you like.
If there are many different things you could change on a production system you're probably doing something wrong. You should have as little software on it as possible, for security and stability reasons.
Welcome to the amazing world of OS X. Try MacPorts. Beats the hell out of Fink.

I am still using Debian on my second computer and on my servers, though.
Kinda. They're both Santa Rosa platform with an 800MHz bus and take the same speed ram (667MHz DDR2 SODIMM). They've got different amounts of L2 cache though, 3MB on the Macbook vs 4MB on the Macbook Pro which helps a bit.
I just read my post again. A bit drunk, so I missed some points. Duh. Basically saying the same as you. Sure thing, on a production system / server / whatevz don't screw around. But on non-critical systems it can be rewarding to break things. When I break my system I need to realize WHAT I broke and WHY it broke and HOW to fix it. In the end I have learned something that will help me setting up stable production systems. No?
I have, quite often, been very close to buying an iPhone. But, I will wait for the Android phones, and if any of them are just somewhat as sleek as the iPhone, that will definitely be my choice over the iPhone.

Looking forward..
i'm not sure that guy wasn't just flamebaiting.