skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfollow - I think there can be reasons. For one thing, a big follower list becomes difficult to manage. Suppose you auto-follow, and decide to sample a couple of messages from every followee before you decide to keep following or unfollow. That is already a pretty high cost to pay, considering that it is not uncommon to get dozens of new followers every day (most of them scammers).

On the other hand, since I gave up on managing followers, I found that a lot of them sort themselves out by themselves: by the time I check if I want to follow them back, they have already been deleted from Twitter as spammers. Auto-unfollow could help in the same way, by removing those scammers who managed to evade deletion by Twitter.

Granted, I think Twitter frowns on auto-follow, too, but there are some valid reasons for it imo. Also in some cases it jut seems polite to follow back - think strange acquaintance from last party, if you don't have the guts to say "I don't really like you".
Definitely a very good list. But also an expensive list!

HNers: any suggestions on where to find these books for cheap. (outside university libraries)
Here's who suffers for Abe Lincoln's stand on principles:

It's great that he wants to end the institution of slavery and all, but it isn't so clear cut as it sounds.

Heres who loses:

- poor farmers who can barely afford to work the fields with free labor

- slave ship owners

- a select few tribes on africa's west coast

- anyone who likes cheap cotton or tobacco

NOTE: I am aware that my response is a bit over-the-top, I'm using absurdity to point out the problem I see with the argument, not saying that businessinsider.com is endorsing slavery.
I think you're reading too much in to it. Lots of people are talking about Quora these days; I get the feeling many of them haven't used it either. I think it's just TC trying to use whatever the current buzzword is to look relevant.
I see.

Basically, the consumers of the content (the people just wanting to see what's on the list) want to be completely 100% anonymous. I wonder how the producers of the content (the people entering their information on the spreadsheet) would feel about that.

Well there you go, as suggested above.. you can always logout first - or create a dummy account. Google sign-in is arguably one of the commonly used on the Web, even if you're really anti-Google .. having a dummy account would be real handy.

Excess paranoia, on the other hand, is another topic.
Update from a Chinese anonymous source, credibility unknown

http://www.brookswelding.com/

Undercover agents were sent to Google Shanghai Office, cracked Gmail source code and get away with a 1 million RMB reward
Whilst switching between workspaces with the compiz fusion cube effects enabled I overheard someone say "That's one in the eye for Bill Gates right there".
Norvig's essay applies even more here than it does to programming. http://norvig.com/21-days.html
NewsCred Relaunches, Looks To Become “Ning For Newspapers”
Okay, perhaps not. I didn't do a domain name search to see if he owns the domain.
yeah that's certainly wrong. oink worked like any other private tracker, through invitations that were accrued by maintaining a good ratio
Thank you so much for linking the Phantom Menace reviews. That guys proves that Lucas is an idiot more than anything else I've seen.
abebooks.com is usually the cheapest place to buy textbooks, you can often get the softcover international editions.
"but is anybody seriously going to go through those books one by one now? Personally I have troubles going through just one book (Pattern Recognition by Bishop atm), and even that might be useless without practical application"

Working through CLRS completely is a very time consuming task I think Bradford intended that book as a reference, but yes, you need to work through some of the stuff in order. For example, you need to be fairly conversant in Linear Algebra, probability, and proof technique before you can tackle Bishop, else you won't make much progress. Once you get some basics under you (especially the underlying math stuff) you'll end up being able to read through an ML book the way you can read through a moderately tough book in programming.

" I managed to eventually read through MacKay (enjoyable book and available as a free PDF, too) and feel I have already forgotten most of it again :-("

The best way to learn this stuff is to have an eventual project in mind. I ended up learning most of this stuff because I was working on a Robotics project for the fine folks in the Indian Defence Depts and was very much "thrown in at the deep end" - nothing like it to accelerate learning but I wouldn't wish to do it again. for the first few weeks I couldn't (literally) understand a single sentence in an hour long meeting. Very humbling.

Depending on what exactly you wish to do, you maybe able to avoid many of the books. If you think I can help you narrow down to a smaller list , please ask here or send me email (my email id is in my profile).

But yes, in the end Norvig's point applies here too (as Bradford points out. I have been working in ML for 8 years now so still 2 years to go :-P) .

OTOH I am just a programmer who got bored with enterprise software and have no formal training in math (or CS for that matter) and if I can do it anyone (certainly anyone on HN) can.
yeah I kept seeing it popping up in my feed and I was like wtf I gotta check it out(+I'm sorta in the space and it never hurts seeing what other people are doing), so I eventually tracked down an invite, and it was a huge disappointment.

The only thing I liked was the search bar, the rest just felt too cluttered.
I believe HNer shafqat is a co-founder. Good luck with the redesign/refocus guys.
You must be kidding. They are precious properties of the government and well protected and paid.
Largely speaking I agree with you. My problem here is that I don't know what I've done wrong. If those responsible (PG and his editors) want to communicate a message to me, they've failed.

I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently.

I'm just confused.

Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.
Looks very promising! For a couple of years I've been thinking more and more about both jumping into the Java world and finally embracing a functional language; and Clojure seems like a great opportunity to take on both at the same time.

One note: I noticed what looks like a Markdown artifact in Footnote 3, in which the URL for the Wikipedia entry on jumping the shark appears to have interpreted the underscores in "Jumping_the_shark" as signifiers that "the" should be emphasized (i.e. rendered in italics).
I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore. Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that exhibit that behavior. That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the HN code the benefit of the doubt.
On a nice morning when I'd overslept a bit and couldn't make it to work on time using only my bicycle (15 miles each way), I rode to the bus stop and threw my bike in the rack on the front of the bus. Since I'd woken up late, I didn't get to my usual email/news routine and I cracked the laptop open on the bus, fired up my tether, and proceeded to check up on things. I'd noticed the lady next to me was just gawking, like she'd never seen a laptop before. After about five minutes of this, I asked her if I could help her with something. The conversation went like this:

Her: "I just wonder why you aren't saving up for a car!"

Me: "Excuse me?"

Her: "Why did you buy a laptop if you can't even afford a car?"

Me: "I have a compact car and an SUV. I rode my bike here because I only live two miles away and it's a beautiful morning!" (the truth is I hadn't driven my car to get to work or to a bus stop in over a year, regardless of weather conditions)

Her: "I see. So you got your license taken away?"

Me: facepalm

My laptop is a heavily-stickered 2nd-gen Black MacBook from late 2006. I've also had a few transit riders ask me if I'm a "hacker." My typical response is "Define hacker." They usually get it wrong.
Well this part of it also helps:

The attack had originated from China, the company said.
"When one of Australia’s top mining firms, Rio Tinto, refused to allow China’s Chinalco to double its ownership interest last year (to 18%), China arrested local CEO (and Australian citizen) Stern Hu and three managers, who remain in jail today, under espionage charges. China denies any connection. In politics, thought, and business, China remains a police state."

I think any CEO should be concerned about his and his employees' safety in light of this kind of thing.
Someone forgot to mention the dark side rocks.
This is something I had a hard time understanding and which I thought the article did a poor job of explaining.

In exploiting a remote system, which part of your attack would benefit from being encrypted?
NATIONAL LOTTERY BOARD
One seeming inconsistency that stuck out at me is how he criticizes China's lack of free market behavior - he uses the pegging of the RMB to demonstrate this, which is definitely valid support for his argument - and simultaneously decries the "slave wages" paid to workers.

Claiming the workers are underpaid relative to the USD because of the RMB peg is one thing, but saying that they underpaid relative to their own economy (which is how I interpret "slave wages") is a very different thing. He suggests that the government is the source of these "slave wages". In what way is the government responsible for low wages for uneducated workers when those workers are in competition with many other uneducated workers in a country with a population of ~1.3 billion?

Is it so unreasonable that an "auntie" who cleans houses and does laundry for a living is paid about 1.25 USD / hour (approximately the rate here in Beijing) when a low-level analyst at McKinsey here makes 15,000 USD a year? In relative terms, the manual laborer doesn't seem like she's making slave wages to me.
If the donation thing is incorrect or exaggerated, how did he make the $300,000 he supposedly had (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/8446247.stm) when the police raided his home? Seems impressive if it's just ad revenue.
Fair enough. But that is Hitchens. You didn't have to click the link to know that's his MO.
I really like reading this, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm reading a form of "creation science", where you need some particularly creative interpretations of things in order to make sense.

Making Han Solo into an unwitting front for a Wookie mastermind is a lot like explaining how Carbon 14 would decay at a different rate before the great flood. It's better to just accept that there are holes in the story than to try to make everything fit together perfectly.
yeah, really. i'm not a fan of submissions like that aren't at least tagged with the date. sometimes it's not until the fifth paragraph when you read something suspect like 'dotcoms bursting... high-end c++ gui programming.. the hell?' that you realize you're reading a fossile.
I've been a bicycle commuter for close to a decade. Several years ago, I was picking up my son after school when another parent approached me. "I think it's great that you come here every day to pick him up."

I thought this was a bit odd. Maybe she meant me as a father rather than his mother? I said, "Yeah, I really consider it a luxury to have that kind of flexibility in my day."

She didn't seem sure what to make of this. "I mean it's great that you're so responsible to come and get him every day."

This was getting stranger and stranger. "Well, it is my responsibility."

"I just mean, it's great to see you being so responsible to pick up your little brother every day when I'm sure there are lots of things you'd rather be doing."

Wait, what?

Not sure whether to be flattered or appalled, I spluttered, "Um, I'm his father."

She turned red. "Oh! It's just that I saw you riding here on your bike and assumed you were coming from high school."

This sort of thing is why I have a beard.
66+ Free Cheat Sheets (via abcphp.com)
+1 I've been doing applied research for a decade. I think we need to double Norvig's 10 year rule for this field ... or maybe it is an infinite sequence.

I took a 3 year detour through pure engineering just because that part is so important and was causing me to experience a bottleneck.

I also agree that driving your studies with a real project helps tremendously.

Ultimately, you need to think about whether you really want to commit to this. It is very hard work, but also very fun and rewarding.
The future of UI will be boring
Glancing at the domain there, I would humbly suggest this was mis-posted.
Me too - I spent whole year on that, then abandoned it. :-)

I targeted Linux (or Linux like) users: Ubuntu, Fedora, Android. I leveraged existing working and well tested infrastructure used in Linux. It is simple and working well (for Linux users), but I have no money to push it forward any more...
Donations weren't required. He did accept donations, however.

That $300,000 thing hasn't really been substantiated AFAICT. It's directly from the mouth of the prosecutor. As someone who helps run a website where we ask users for money (but don't require it), $300,000 seems insane.
Sorry.. I didn't even realise it was from 2001 until now... I've updated the title now!
In response to #4, would have been a perfect time to bring up a Matrix screensaver.

Or "cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-F0-9 '"
I just picked up the MEAP (Manning Early Access something-or-the-other) edition yesterday, and read the first 2 chapters.

Naturally, the book is an early access so it looks like it use a second pass with an editor. That aside, I really like the way the authors spend some time discussing the features of the language, and why they are implemented the way they are in Clojure. They do a great job of explaining Rich's design decisions, how they affect the way you would normally approach a problem in Clojure, the pitfalls, along with comparing some of them (esp. the concurrency aspects) with other languages like Erlang.

I was a little skeptical before buying this book, but I am glad I did. fogus and the others have done a pretty good job so far. Definitely worth the money.
Local 4-year universities typically allow the public to access their libraries for a fee; around $100/year.
Keyword arguments done right (in Clojure)
Russian Hackers Jam Automobile Traffic with Porn
> They have better infrastructure than most third world country with cheap labor I can think of.

That's probably true, but this is a chicken&egg problem, isn't it ... if the westerners would outsource to India / Eastern Europe ... with economic growth their infrastructure will be better and better.

And cheap labor is the primary reason ... you take that away and I don't think anything else will matter. Because of its economic growth, costs in China will rise, it's only a matter of time.
Wow, that narrows it down to 33% of the world's population.
wtf? Is that page supposed to be in angry looking chinese?
> I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an
> editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore.

I'm sure that's true. They write complex code that tries to identify deprecated behaviours, and then take action based on that. No doubt I could've expressed that point to better reflect what I think. I will look at going back and editing the phrasing - thank you.

> Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will
> recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that
> exhibit that behavior.

Most likely, yes.

> That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false
> positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

Yes, and no. Yes it's tricky, and yes there will be false positives, but the rate depends on how aggressive they try to be.

> You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the
> HN code the benefit of the doubt.

I suspect I'm giving them more credit than you give me credit for. This is the sort of thing at which I earn my living, and I really do know how hard automated behavioural analysis can be. I also know that behaviour modification works best when the reinforcement is strongly attached to the behaviour. The problem here is that I have no idea what I've done to have my voting privileges revoked, and that is counter-productive.
it's a shame that the misspelling of Tatooine in that article hasn't been corrected in 4+ years

oh and Lucas isn't that clever.
The takeaway I have is a question. Why isn't there a good equivalent to the big mac in the consulting world?

Every time you go cheap, or with the "big consultants" that joel describes the expected outcome is massive time overruns and massive budget overruns.

The closest thing to the big mac model I can think of is installation of existing software, with customization for the environment, but even there you get the 3 year long SAP projects that cost tons.

What prevents software from being put into a manual? I'm hoping the answer is something beyond "requirements don't match up exactly to previous problems... ever", but I fear that's all it is.
Quora was started by a whole slew of Facebook's early tech team, include their past CTO. It has heavy hitters both in-house, and on the investment team. Check out http://gigaom.com/2010/01/05/former-facebookers-try-to-foste... . It gets lots of news as a result, and went into "semi public" beta recently. Hence, it makes sense that it would be top of mind for any writer in the startup/tech space. I highly doubt this is astroturfing.

To me, this blog post almost appears to be a link building attempt via trying to raise artificial controversy...
I'm working on a project like this, initially but not exclusively for tech. If you'd be interested in helping us improve the service, we'd definitely appreciate the feedback. You can DM me @startupsquare or find us at http://startupsquare.com Thanks!
How would you compare it to the Halloway Book?

http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure
A few months ago, because of the mob feel that voting was starting to have now that the site has grown so big, I started experimenting with thresholds for which votes got counted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202). The best test I could think of was the average score of a user's recent comments, so I used that. Currently the threshold is 2. The reason your votes stopped counting is that you dropped just below that.
Your average is currently 1.88. (Ironically, it's much higher now because of the comments on this thread, but comment averages are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag before yours is recalculated.)

I'm probably going to do away with the display of point totals on comments entirely, because thresholds haven't fixed the problem. In that case I'll just use points internally, e.g. to sort threads, and then I'll probably go back to counting most votes.

Edit: Since I was planning to toss the threshold when I stopped displaying comment scores, I just reset it to 1. Also, since users asked to see their avg comment scores in their profile pages, I just added that.
Alan Ellis deserved to make money for what he did - he built a successful, efficient, popular service for people to find music. Instead of suing him, the record companies should have bought oink.cd of him and added some kind of monthly subscription model and/or a pay-to-buy-ratio system.

Importantly... does this mean that other people can now run free torrent sites like Oink with no legal risk? I'm not sure how British law works, in terms of setting precedents and the like...
I totally agree with that. Most of the link request emails are quickly put together and unthoughtful.

The people who write honest emails to me about how we can both provide value to each other do not happen very often but when they do I always listen. If fact if someone has a good resource that would provide value to my users I am happy to link to it. It's great to discover a "diamond in the rough" before my competitors to.

I am not advocating link spam here. I am saying that users should do their research and find sites that an inbound would prove value to both parties.
I run Linux on my Mac laptop, which is always good for a few WTF moments when someone takes a look at it.
50 Amazing games cover
Perhaps the first impression that tamos to know if a game is good and worth buying, is the design of its cover. It calls the attention of the consumer, which is a big step for companies that produce the games.
Well that's the scariest thing I've read in a long time. Turns out the image of China as a worthy, powerful opponent destined to greatness is a carefully crafted ruse. There's no doubt about it's power but some of the stuff in the article would make a young Bill Gates blush.

I wonder what would have to happen for America and Europe to stand up and deal with this? What would be worth the conflict and political outcry due to temporarily lowered standard of living?
> at below global cost

The funny thing about cost is that it defines itself.
Apparently the first reference of "Star Wars" on the Net was by Randal Schwartz of Perl fame: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz

refs:

* http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html

* http://groups.google.com/group/net.movies/msg/1cf7b5461f1032...

So maybe there is something to this? May the schwartz go with you :)
Isn't the buying and selling of those international versions questionably legal in the United States? (Assuming OP is from the US).
He meant it literally - he said you don't have to pay construction workers for the first 6-12 months of a job, and you could fire them before that time without consequences.

"If you are building a downtown tower in Shanghai (and there are a lot of them, many empty), you may not have to pay some of your workers for six months to a year. Or you fire them just before that: free labor!"
I actually like the article but simply wonder if, in the context of 2001, it was not widely believed that organizations like Accenture were incapable of building wonderful software.
Reading this is kind of like reading an article from the 1950's arguing that black people ought to have the same rights as whites. The premise is still valid, but the doubt which justified the article's existence has since been erased.
Thanks for the post! There are a bunch of other HNers on our team now as well. We have some more exciting news on the API side to announce soon as well.

Hope you guys don't mind if I do a separate "Provide Feedback on my startup" post once the Techcrunch bubble subsides. Feel free to chime in here as well.
What’s wrong with airport security?
That'd be brilliant! Send a bug report that your site renders incorrectly in chrome but correctly in IE6. That's an almost guaranteed hit with a known browser!
Spolsky has a talent for using very specific examples in his just-so-stories that then later turn out to be the purest counterexample he could have picked.

Like using Netscape -> Mozilla as your example of why you should never ever rewrite software from scratch.
Bill introduced in Vermont to require state agencies to use FOSS [pdf]
Interesting idea with the user generated editorial of news
btw, we've tried these yesterday here:

User skillset

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/files/thumbnails...

Ideal co-founder:

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/files/thumbnails...
Many reports ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052735

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053262

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053262

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054900

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053991

http://searchyc.com/kodak?sort=by_date

Interestingly, no comments anywhere yet ...