skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An 80's Schecter strat, a 1987 G&L L2000 bass, and a 2001 Gibson J-45. I also still have a 1969 Fender Malibu acoustic, but once I get it restrung and setup again, I'm going to sell it. I currently also still have my 1984 Marshall JCM 800 100 watt twin combo, which failed to sell, even at a ridiculous discount off of current eBay prices, before moving day (this surprised me, but Mountain View isn't exactly a music town), so I have to get it sold, as well. I'll probably craigslist it when I get down to Los Angeles. I'm gonna replace it with a little 5W Blackstar or something similar.
I'm admittedly in the "young kid just out of college" demographic, but I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't just use their TV as a big monitor, or has an AppleTV with Boxee, or doesn't own a TV and watches Hulu on their laptop.

And isn't this Conan's core fanbase anyway?

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a risky move, but history rewards the bold.
> He could a bigger loon than she is, it takes two to make a fight.

He could be, but we have no evidence of that. Furthermore, she admits sending the messages.

It does not "take two" to make an assault.
They do talk about controlling for profile quality.

This isn't the first stats post from OkCupid, they do this every few months approaching a different aspect of the profile. There are previous entries about race, religion, contents of the first message, and so on.
Where do the reporters in Haiti get their food and shelter?
Hong Kong is governed by a political system that is separate from, but influenced by, the mainland political system. For example, I was there in June and witnessed the march to commemorate the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. No such event would be possible in any territory directly controlled by the mainland government. That being said, my experience is that the residents of Hong Kong seem fairly apolitical, and much more interested in economic concerns. My experience also agrees with the conclusion that Hong Kong has a higher level of economic freedom than either the US or the UK.
So, this post is lots of fun, and I want to encourage folks to do more blogging where they take a bunch of data, graph it up, and test hypotheses with it. Science is great!

On the other hand, though I rarely cite Zed Shaw, I have a special fondness for the theme of his classic article "Programmers Need to Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them All":

http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

... and I used to review journal articles, so I can't resist nitpicking by pointing out that some of these conclusions are a lot more dubious than others. For example, this sentence:

For women, a smile isn’t strictly better: she actually gets the most messages by flirting directly into the camera...

Appears to be based on the difference between 9.1 new monthly contacts and 9.3 new monthly contacts in each category. Is that statistically significant? I rather doubt it. The correct conclusion here is almost certainly "making a flirty face is not significantly more effective than smiling, and you have to be sure to do it into the camera or the result will be a disaster, so smiling might be the more reliable tactic."

Of course, if you really want to start picking nits you can bring up the need for some kind of multifactor analysis to correct for the fact that certain kinds of pictures are probably correlated with certain kinds of personalities. But that would go beyond what I understand. And it's not actually necessary to try for a Ph.D. every time you throw up a graph or two.

Good fun! Publish more raw data and we can turn this into an great statistics problem set.
Actually that would make sense for him too, so he can get more followers and mix the foundation stuff into a larger audience.
True, monaco9 looks a lot like clean12. However, I use a 13point version for coding. It's a little taller and for that reason, in my opinion, clearer. If schumacher disappears, I should look for monaco 10pts, as I can't find it on my linux box...
To me, there are order of magnitude differences between good news sites and regular news sites. NYTimes is, in my mind, the best of the best, so I would have no problem with paying. Actually, I'm glad to see them respect their own content enough to charge for it. The advice to consultants is always to not undervalue their time, yet the advice to big companies always seems to be to undervalue their products.

Don't think about it in terms of news. News is everywhere. In-depths reports, amazing visualizations, and insightful editorials are not everywhere, and NYTimes does these better than anyone else I know. I think they have earned the right to charge.
the html inspection (outlining) works a lot better than in 1.4. several of my sites had outlining way off in 1.4, very frustrating.
It would be a lot more impressive if he made those predictions before PDAs were already commonplace, and WiFi was well established.

So basically his prediction was "there's gonna be the same stuff we have now, but it's gonna be all over the place!"
I have an old Sony network walkman (nwz-e99) that went through a 40 degree wash and works just fine.
Will financial success follow if you do what you love?
XBox
There was an article a few months back that stated that Amazon loses $2 for each book sold on Kindle. Publishers won't sell e-books for less than the publishing price.

http://www.tbiresearch.com/e-readers-should-drive-profits-fo... is the original document, as far as I can find right now.
Yep. I don't understand why people assume Google is some sort of neutral party with no corporate interest in vending their search engine + ad sales in the marketplace.
next time try www.lendingclub.com
(This is not a plug, but an honest suggestion)
Um no. Validity of learning styles research questioned. Less exciting but far more accurate. This is crap journalism.
I lost what little respect I had for Naomi Klein when she started bashing on Milton Friedman, and proved she had no idea what she was talking about.
I was also quite surprised by this, and also that the article didn't mention the other advantage of the myspace pose: it greatly masks weight.
I agree with the general spirit of what you're saying, but I disagree with a few tacit assumptions: that you can automatically equate highly-sought-after with lower quality, that quality women are more forgiving of beta traits, and that quality women don't know their sexual market value.
You are not alone in this. Whenever I fly, train, or passenger around I expect to get some coding done on various backburner projects, and inevitably I run into a "crap i need to look up x" within 20 minutes.
Indie+Relief: App Purchases Today (1/20) = Donations to Haiti
I fired off an email to my dog-owning friend the moment I hit that graph.
Surprised this wasn't on HN earlier, or hopefully this isn't a dupe.
For those interested in more information derived from data mining online dating data sets, you'll find Andrew Fiore's work at Berkeley and MIT interesting - see the Papers section on this site:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~atf/dating/
Sounds like a washing machine? Can fry eggs on it? Can save games to the HDD but still have to put in the damn disc every time to play it?

I'd call it mediocre but YMMV.
As usual, I would love to see the same-sex data. I'm willing to bet that gay men are MUCH more interested in good abs.
How long will it be before someone implements an NYTimesShare, a la GoogleShare (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495)? If they allow a certain amount of free then all you need to do is change your cookies periodically.

To be sure, outfits like the NYT that bring the public high quality news need to make enough money to pay the bills and their staff. I just don't know if this is the plan that will work.
Interesting article, but I was left with a somewhat troubling question about British Intelligence. They developed this elegant crypto algorithm, but felt it may have a weakness which they were unable to find. Being spooks, wouldn't their next thought be, "What if our enemy develops this too and starts using it? We really need to find that weakness!"

Then again, maybe it was ...
How To Evaluate Barriers
Surprisingly accurate.
Back in 2006, someone (http://stateofworldliberty.org/) integrated the then-current Heritage index with the following others:

* The Frasier Institute/Cato Institute "2005 Economic Freedom of the World"

* Freedom House "2005 Freedom in the World"

* Reporters without Borders "Press Freedom Index"

Here are the top few they came up with:

1 Estonia

2 Ireland

3 Canada

4 Switzerland

5 Iceland

6 Bahamas

7 United Kingdom

8 United States

I'd love to update and enhance it with trend charts and so on, one of these days.
Sorry, you're right. Office is still ok and works fairly well. It's still about the only thing that crashes on my macbook. We can but hope that one day google docs etc catch up.
The most interesting things I found in the article had to be the "doing something interesting". To get a date you need to have a conversation and having something interesting makes that easier. This makes a lot of sense after the fact, but not something I had thought about before.

For example a photo of yourself with a NES controller in your hand playing Mario 3. While I would have thought this would be a very 'bad' photo it might actually be very good because it is an easy fun (happy childhood memory for both sexes of a certain age) topic to start with.
I suspect there is also a large component of "my own place" that you cant get from a cheap motel. Such a comfort is a big deal.
Google’s New MapReduce Patent
I don't think that is a concern for most people.

The major concern is 'does it work'. Google has far better results, especially for the long tail, than bing at the moment. It's also what most people 'know'.
Good point. I wish the printable version would automatically create a pdf.
There's certainly a one-time cost in gathering and validating facts (though I'd be surprised if much time at all was spent validating these days). But as facts can't be protected as intellectual property, they will inevitably be repeated, bringing the ultimate cost to consumers down to the cost of distribution. Which, today, is pretty close to $0.

Also, increasingly, facts are self-reported by the audience. Who needs an international bureau when they can simply search for native sources? (e.g. Where does the average reader get their facts regarding the Iranian protests?) Events involving widespread infrastructure failure (Haiti) are an exception.

... You want a citation for it being easier to moderate paying subscribers vs anonymous posts?
>You can always teach a girl how to dress and make herself up to your tastes,

Well, you know, just as long as she doesn't have a mind of her own.

I honestly find discussion about dating on HN a bit disturbing. I mean, would you be comfortable with a girl that you wanted to date reading this post? Speculating on her "quality" as if she was a horse.
Designing for panic
Announcing Open Site Explorer (Tell HN: free for 48 hr)
Apple, Microsoft eye replacing Google on iPhone
I just wish that google pushed this patent to the extreme and trolled everyone, and then went to congress to say "see we just shut down half the web, patent laws are currently fucked up and need changing"
Yoshimoto Cube
yeah. Same for the guitar. It is a good conversation starter.
I also used a Verizon 3G card when traveling by RV and it worked most places in the Western US. Many highway rest areas have cell tower sites right next to them which ensures a good connection.

If satellite Internet will work for you, there's always MotoSAT (motosat.com). I was a beta tester for this setup back in 2001 and it worked very well.
Strategic Financial Aid Modeling
Buy one ($65!):

http://www.momastore.org/museum/moma/ProductDisplay?catalogI...
>218k followers now.

I wonder how many are following him with the intention of trying to escalate their Microsoft tech support problems or just general bashing of Microsoft. I'll bet he learned how to block people early on.
Conan will go to Fox. They lack a "tonight" show and he has a long standing relationship with them as a writer.
View my articles - Free-Press-Release.com
What's not done is for software vendors to drag out specific vulnerabilities --- I would say "particularly vulnerabilities they themselves uncovered", but that's never happened --- and use them to market competing software.

Why? Because Google and Microsoft have a lot more to fear from 4 person companies spending 90% of their time researching vulnerabilities than they do from each other, and waving flaws around as if they were some kind of point score concedes a huge marketing point.

Google would lose because Microsoft outspends Google significantly on vulnerability research. This particular arms race is never going to happen, but if it did, Microsoft would win it.
Why I Say No - Stats for fiction rejections
> Well, you know, just as long as she doesn't have a mind of her own.

Zing! Nicely said.

> I honestly find discussion about dating on HN a bit disturbing.

Huh? Why? It's of interest to hackers, and I find it quite an interesting thread.

> I mean, would you be comfortable with a girl that you wanted to date reading this post? Speculating on her "quality" as if she was a horse.

Yes, by all means, let's PRETEND that when it comes to software engineers there's such a thing as quality, and when it comes to cofounders there's such a thing as quality, and when it comes to friends there's such a thing as quality, but OH, NO, NO, there's no such thing as quality in women - because every single woman on the planet is equally perfect, and it would be SO politically incorrect to say that one woman is cuter, funnier, more intelligent, more loyal, sexier, or tolerant of weekly board game night.
The difficult-to-collect facts would be those necessary for in-depth and investigative pieces. I specifically called that out above as being pay-worthy. I can absolutely see for-pay access to those news pieces.

What doesn't work --can't work-- is charging for things like box scores, election results, stock news, press releases, traffic/crime/weather. (Excepting perhaps extremely time-sensitive subsets of that data.)

And if the NYTimes isn't discriminating between their quality, signature content and simple daily news - the customer isn't going to either. They're just going to be frustrated that if they try to use the NY Times for more than 1 big story a month, they're penalized. Or, god forbid, try to read the NYTimes.com at work, at the library or at a coffee shop...
Yes! People always point out to me that Chrome has built-in powerful Web Inspector and I don't have to go back to Firefox to keep using firebug. Web Inspector _might_ be a powerful dev tool but firebug is very intuitive to me for quick look-ups on the source. I really hope they can do a full firebug port on chrome, this is the only thing that's stopping me from using Chrome exclusively. But I doubt this will happen, because Chrome extension frame work in its current form has limited functionality, unlike Firefox.
Open Site Explorer (new SEO Tools)
They talk the same way about us...and I suspect "not being a hypocrite" is another trait of a "quality" woman!
Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic
Create a super wifi antenna and attach it to your RV?
I wouldn't mind paying for quality news, but I there is no way I will pay for news from an organization that sits on news items for more than a year.
CrowdFlower Raises $5 Million For Cloud Sourced Labor
I'm on Safari 4 on Mac OS X. Same issue. View Source says I received all the content, but it's showing a blank white page.
I think you're right. My comment would probably have been better served without that last sentence. Allow me to apologise for that one, rather than stand by it.

But even regardless of the HN guidelines, I am curious: why does tptacek consider 'flip' to be a dumb name? And why does he consider the sentence he quotes to be 'even worse'? Opinions are easy to produce en masse; what's interesting to me is the reasoning or motivation behind them.
Programming as a super power
Comcast subscribers now get Norton Security Suite free
Though surprisingly, there's only Google and Yahoo! and no way to add custom ones.
Applying Game Achievement Systems to Non Gaming Software [pdf]
Cloud and open source meet to test Web apps
"The U.S. government’s interventionist responses to the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 have significantly undermined economic freedom and long-term prospects for economic growth. Economic freedom has declined in seven of the 10 categories measured in the Index.

Uncertainties caused by ongoing regulatory changes and politically influenced stimulus spending have discouraged entrepreneurship and job creation, slowing recovery. Leadership in free trade has been undercut by “Buy American” provisions in stimulus legislation and failure to pursue previously agreed free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Tax rates are increasingly uncompetitive, and massive stimulus spending is creating unprecedented deficits. Bailouts of financial and automotive firms have generated concerns about property rights."
Is this release is better for debugging than using chrome? What do you recommend?
Doesn't android have some sort of program that presents phone as a generic USB Ethernet interface or uses a bluetooth internet tethering protocol unofficially (like iPhone tethering) so you wont be stuck with something like PDA net?
The Iranian protests are a good example where we don't know the impact without some context. They appear powerful and yet it could just be a vocal (and tech savvy) minority.

Where do people pay to comment and get preferential placement?
An excellent article identifying the true origin of public key cryptosystems by an unknown, with a hint to the shadowy world of spy organizations.
Electric Icarus: NASA Designs a One-Man Stealth Plane
The monetization paradox (or why Google is not my friend) (Charles Stross)
While the claim that google has better results is rather questionable, the suggestion that bing is too complicated for people to use is just silly. For the purposes of most users the two are readily interchangeable.

You are correct that the major concern is "does it work", but are incorrect in assuming that bing does not meet this rather low bar.
Whatever one thinks of Heritage (or Naomi Klein), there's useful data there. There's also a lot of opinion diguised as data. For example, the choice of formula from which to determine, say, trade freedom can reflect the prejudice of the person making that choice. Thus, it looks fair and objective, but you nor I have any idea of the manipulations in those choices to influence the outcome.

One observation that stuck me was the large negative correlation between goverment spend score (where higher spending gives a lower score) and freedom from corruption score. The conclusion is that the more the government spends, the lower the incidence of corruption. I suspect this isn't a well loved relationship by those at Heritage.
failure for not having malbolge as one of the languages.
Same about white pages, and also curious how you would keep my information safe (I'm guessing it's in the FAQ which isn't loading)? I'd definitely be interested in the service if I knew 100% that nothing bad would happen to the data I'd give to you.
Hmm but that would be a 'fun' conversation to have later on when talking about how you met and why you sent the first message.
But if you cater to poor corporate suckers like me, IE still has vast majority of traffic. It's hard to justify spending any time on features they won't see.

In some industries, IE6 is still the plurality.
After a few months of struggling to find a use for it personally (I have good backups, Mac.com synced web accessible storage, etc...) we started using it for our small business's file. Now we all have access to all the in-process documents, contracts, etc... and can access things as needed on our iPhones, etc... Seems like a really great solution for small business file management.
Mathematicians call Complex Analysis "The Disneyland of Mathematics". Everything you might want to be true is, and stuff you want seems to fall out of the air by magic.

Numerical Linear Algebra is math's Exurban Sprawl. Everybody's problem falls into one of a few cookie-cutter categories, and nobody minds the sameness because the solutions we have are good enough and cheap enough.

NLA is an amazing field if you think about it -- but you have to think about it.
Decent journalism?

I haven't seen a newspaper that wasn't 95% copy-paste from AP/Reuters.

When they make the newspaper 95% investigative journalism, then it can be called decent.
I have a question for Lisp programmers. I am fairly new to programming and I have been playing around with ruby. Mostly building simple Rails apps and scraping sites. I have read a lot about Lisp that intrigues me. However, it always seems like Lisp programmers are experienced programmers that become evangelists once they see how easy something was to accomplish in Lisp.

So my question is: Do you think that Lisp is a language you can cut your teeth on, or should I get more experience with Ruby and wait till I hit a wall, then turn to lisp to solve my problems?

To be fair, it seems the documentation for Lisp and ruby are quite different. Where Ruby seems to cater to new programmers with the coddling we need, while Lisp documentation is more sparse for veterans don't need intro material. Does that seem correct or an I mistaken? And I would love to hear the path Lisp programmers here took to become proficient.
It would be nice if you could exercise some minimal charity in interpretation. Of course I'm not saying that all women are equally attractive -- who would say such a thing? My reaction is to the tone of the comments, which seem to indicate a minimal interest in women as people as opposed to "mates". It's the obsession with casting everything in terms of genes and gene "quality", because some people apparently can't bear to make even the most important decisions in their lives on grounds that are actually personal or emotional. Pop evolutionary psychology (which is about a scientific as astrology, frankly) is not going to make you happy or find you a partner. I think a lot of nerds like to cast dating in these pseudoscientific terms because they are basically terrified of things like people, feelings, desires and emotions -- the things that actually matter when you are dating.

> Huh? Why?

I mean that I find the content of the actual discussions disturbing, not the mere idea of discussing this subject on HN.
The main benefit I receive from publishers is filtering. Even the worst publisher printing unbelievable shlock is light years ahead of the garbage in the publishing anteroom, the slush pile.

With that, the greatest blog post on publishing of all time, "Slushkiller":

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html
I believe people quickly know what works and what does not, even without directly being aware of it. If a woman wears a new type of lipstick, the signs that it is working or it is not working are very subtle, but over a few days, she will understand that it's not working. She will then change to one that works a little bit better, and when she tries one (recommended by a friend) she will see other subtle signs it works.

It's the same with profile pics - the girls cycle through many different pictures and there are subtle vs not so subtle signs that a picture works better than some other one.

To be introduced to that particular style, one has to see it somewhere, and as it becomes widespread, you get to see it more and the chances of you trying out increase.
Also: very worth reading Tavis' advisory:

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2010-0...

This is an awesome bug; he had to use CreateRemoteThread to jump into a process with special permissions, then exploit the difference in the way segment selectors are handled from normal 32 bit code and simulated real mode, and finally write code that would make the iret instruction fail to get a trap frame to play with.