skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have put the website[1] up on Flippa along with a domain name[2].

I'm unsure if I should put a low starting price and expected reserve, or expected start price and no/low reserve. Thoughts?

[1] http://flippa.com/auctions/85671/Planet-Tolkien-com-as-seen-...

[2] http://flippa.com/auctions/85677/alert-ly
How does one get a buyout offer in the first place?
Have you seen this other frontpage post from today? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142733

ASmartBear covers this topic from a related angle and it's well worth a read. Esp if, like me, you frequently have to battle the "I'm not good enough" demon.
I think you should have a longer delay on each book preview in the scrolling list of books at the top. I made it through half of one and then it switched over. 5 more seconds would be perfect.

The "How it works" box isn't very obvious to a first time visitor - maybe you can hang this somewhere off the top next to the logo?

I like the arrows on the left and right but I suspect that they would be too far to the sides on a widescreen monitor - I suppose you would know better what resolutions your visitors are using.

Otherwise I think the concept is cool, you might benefit from putting this out in the various book forums online.
I guess people are upset because he didn't make it clear that it was a pseudonym. I don't see the beef, really.
We had a Wal-Mart come to our small town with no lack of political drama. I've found that the arrival of Wal-Mart provides fast, hard lessons in economics and unintended consequences to local politicos (most of whom previously could barely muddle through the cost/benefit of adding a single traffic signal) that can't be matched by any other event in local government.

It makes you want to make popcorn and watch the spectacle of it all.
CSS Style Variable Height Background Image Actionscript 3 Class
That sounds cool. Is it public someplace so I can try it?
Or, instead of your birthday, search for your name at

http://www.dr-mikes-maths.com/pisearch.html

To encode your name, he expands pi in terms of c/27^n where c=1 for 'a' etc.
Should You Charge For Your Minimum Viable Product?
You'll also need income stmt & balance sheet to prepare the annual tax returns.
iPad: A Goal-Directed Device
Photographer arrested for taking pictures of Christmas celebrations in UK
Sawyer Weighs In On Intellectual Ventures
OMG Flash kills the planet too!!! (BTW, wonder what would be the carbon footprint if NYT switches its background to black? All these #ffffff pixels burning bright..)
I've used homeopathy here in the UK and it does work. However, I seriously doubt any GP here would refer someone to a homeopath unless already suggested by the patient. Different strokes for different folks you know? It's not for everyone.

Personally though, I prefer acupuncture, which is also available via the NHS.
AWESOME TALK (thanks for posting)
After scanning through most of the PDF, the Release Notes are mostly superior. JM provides some decent info though, and the checklist at the end will be useful to people. Worth 12 bucks probably.
SlappedStupid : Re-Opened
Did you use a headhunter of placement place? They often cut all identifying info out of a resume before passing it onto the interviewer. That way they can't be cut out of the conversation when it comes time to talk about money.
I'd be even more drastic.

I'm a huge fan of objectives, key results.

There's a decent description of this approach from Pincus himself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31corner.html?pag...
But if it worked as well as people say it does, I'd cheerfully take a day out of my life to earn a million dollars.

They don't even have to demonstrate it works, just that you can tell homeopathy from water.
I've been a follower of Kohana for a long time, it's good to see it gaining traction.
The gigantic horrible lie about education
I agree with you about the hour. What I did on my last major consulting assignment is to get in at 0600 and get lots of stuff done before any meeting was threatening to happen.
I think the marketing person responsible for Microsoft's spot should be called on the carpet. How lame a pitch is

Internet Explorer is the world’s most widely used browser, designed by Microsoft with you in mind.
Paul Graham RE: succinctness = power
The study was called misleading by a spokesman for Compete America, a coalition of vendors, universities and other sponsors of H-1B visa holders.

As someone very familiar with the visa, I can tell you the article is not misleading. Comparisons to bonded labor always come to my mind when I think about the visa. While these may be a bit far fetched since any kind of visa is opt-in, the fact that the employer can kick an employee out of the country by firing them means that they exert extraordinary control over the employee.

What is worse, and what the article doesn't cover, is that by applying for a permanent residency permit (green card) for an employee, the employer all but guarantees that the employee has to stay with them for 4-7 years. That is how long it takes to go through the initial stages of getting a permanent residency and abandoning the process in the middle means you have to restart it. They also exert even more control over the employee during this period because not only can they kick him/her out of the country by firing them, they can cause the time, effort and expense he/she incurred on the green card thus far to be wasted.
Which country is it that has already given rights to some animals such as gorillas, parrots, ect?
A few of the conclusions of the article are misleading. Or rather, they have not been put in proper context.

Dolphins brains are large, but they are made mostly of glial cells which insulate the dolphins brain from the cold ocean water.

They shown many signs of intelligence, however, that is not as rare as people think in the animal kingdom. For example, Donkeys can count better than dolphins. Most of us have witnessed a dog or cat solving a problem in the world around it. Vampire bats have a system of social 'accounting' keeping track of which bats donate blood to the group and which don't. The examples continue.

Their has been a 'movement' in human thinking for some time that dolphins are our counterparts of the sea. There were many experiments by a Dr. Lily (creator of the deprivation tank) to show the intelligence of dolphins. His studies showed little evidence, but made bold claims. Ever since then I believe there has been a 'buzz' around the intelligence of dolphins. Which is substantial but over exaggerated.

The overall theme of the article, should humans take animal intelligence more seriously is a valid claim. Intelligence is rampant in the animal kingdom and it deserves an examination. A great book on the subject is, "Dragons of Eden" by Carl Sagan, although he focuses on human development.

Douglas Adams (loosely paraphrased): Humans believed themselves to be the most intelligent species on Earth because they developed machines of war and New York City. Dolphins knew they were more intelligent because they did build machines of war or New York City. All they did was eat fish and play all day.
Algae as a biofuel: 3,000 to 5,000 gallons per acre?
Er... ok Mr. Downvote guy, then what beef should I have?
This article does nothing to explain why software engineering is more tricky for toyota, other than saying that they're forced to release models faster (industry-wide problem), and a set of scare quotes around the word engineer when referring to software guys...

I'm not in the states right now (and the economist is mostly, but not entirely, written in the UK, not sure about economist online) but my sense is that there is a lot of hype in the states, and now I assume the UK, about the Toyota problems without a lot of substance to the reporting about what the actual issues are.

If anyone has found a good website/blog/mainstream article that explains the issues clearly, i'd love to read them.
Stewart Brand: I was trained that the worst officer is stupid and industrious
It's probably more useful to look at real scandalous waste, like the computer system:

"Delays to NHS computer system could cost taxpayers £40bn"

I'm not saying the £4m isn't important, but it's not massive compared to their budget. They could likely have cut down on using temp staff, and saved that £4m easily enough.
I'm spotting a pattern here. All the comments so far suggest that I need to explain what the site does. I guess after working on it for so long I developed a blind spot. Thanks for the input.
I never claimed I agreed or disagreed with OP's assertions, I was merely trying to clarify the argument.
I think he's missing the point.

So many people (Gladwell, Cohen, and apparently the Brazen Careerist person) have referenced this 10,000 hours claim, but no one has cited the actual research paper that came up with this notion. The paper actually addresses almost all of his points.[1]

"There are more high school swimmers than ever, therefore more opportunities to find and train great swimmers. They have access to diet, training, technology, and facilities that didn't exist years ago. That's all."
Yes! That's the point! The authors of the research point out that "the fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympic Games was just a minute faster than the required entry time in ... races such as the Boston Marathon," _because_ people now know the proper way to focus their efforts at practice.[2] 'Practice,' here, being training and diet. But it still takes 10 years or so of _deliberate practice_ to become world class. It's just that the bar for world class has been moved.

"I'm a case in point: I practiced the piano for an hour a day for more than ten years. I became good, but there were others who practiced twice as much who were worse, and still others who practiced less and are much better."
Again, he is unwittingly supporting the 10,000 hours claim. The study points out that "the view that merely engaging in a sufficient amount of practice, regardless of the structure of that practice leads to maximal performance has a long and contested history."[3] It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way. (There's a good description of the characteristics of deliberate practice on p. 367 of the study). That is, people who just practice for hours without much thought as to what that practice should be and how it will challenge them in new ways are doomed to be less successful than those who are coached through a process of deliberate practice. It's quality, not quantity.

All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work. Cohen gets around to saying this too. I agree with him. I'm just not sure why he felt the need to try to refute the current literature on becoming a domain expert to say, "Hey, becoming a domain expert probably isn't your goal. Your goal is to become an innovative entrepreneur."

[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

[2] Ibid, p.366

[3] Ibid, p.365

--> Edit 1: matrix cited a more recent text by the same author I was describing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983

--> Edit 2: Oops. The Harvard Business Review article that Penelope Trunk talks about was actually written by the same person who wrote the paper that I cited and the book that matrix referenced, so my "but no one has cited the actual research" claim was inaccurate: http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...
My First Google Buzz App: Who gives a frak?
I think this kind of discussion is a prerequisite to joining any large scale interplanetary cultures that may or may not exist. Perhaps that's only scifi, but we as a species need to become comfortable at accepting and working with different sizes and shapes of intelligence before that even makes sense. We have a long ways to go; we've only relatively recently accepted that other kinds of humans count as full people - and that isn't even a globally accepted concept yet. :/
First thing I noticed: "What Does It Do?" I wasn't really sure right away what it did. I found the "How Bookhu Works" box, but at first glance I thought it was an ad so I didn't even look at it.

My recommendation would be to put a small tagline below your banner. Maybe "Book reviews broken down by gender" or something.

That said I think the design is really good. I'd add some title attributes to the scores in the listings. It would be nice when I hovered over the 5 stars I could get a tooltip saying "3.4 out of 5 stars (from men)" or similar. Also the colored box with the percentage or men or women readers could use the same tooltip. At first glance I thought that was a rating out of 100. I know most people don't bother with tooltips, but do it for me?

I was on this page: http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4... and when I clicked the "Select Bestseller List" it scrolled me down for some reason. I searched the source for an '<a name="menu">' but didn't find one.

One the home page with the slider, the arrows are stretching to the edge of the screen, but the slider container isn't. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/8JVjN

When I use the dropdown to change the bestseller type, it disappears on the listing page and moves to the right side, instead of the top left. I'd keep it in the top left and put the list title right beside it.

For advertising I'd have to say that you should definitely start a blog. You've got some pretty cool data and you could run some interesting blog posts. Maybe do some queries and find the words that are likely to appear in men's favorite book titles, but not women's.

You could also do some sort of contest. I'd make it a "Men vs Women" thing to try to get people into it, and spreading it. Maybe a giveaway of a couple of books, or maybe Amazon gift cards. Maybe pit a predominantly male book against a female book and based on which one gets more votes, give the gift card to a man or a woman. I know if you put Twilight against something you'd have a chance of going viral on Digg, Reddit or 4chan. Those people hate Twilight.

Anyway, good luck with the site. It's well done.
Apple insult their customers, women, free speech
He wrote controversial articles around data he claimed to have gotten from another individual. This alleged source was his own fabrication. That itself is a serious violation of journalistic ethics. The fact that the data itself seems suspicious is the cherry on that stinking pie.

FWIW, I am not the down-vote.
10/GUI – Desktops Without a Mouse, Operating Systems without Windows
Yes you put it much better than me. I agree that many of the underlying abstract aspects are largely unchanging, it's just the technologies that shift.

If I were the best piano player in the world today, I'd probably still be one of the best in the world if I time travelled to 2030. On the other hand, if I were to have brain surgery in 2030 I probably wouldn't want the world's best surgeon from 2010 to time travel and do it.
Guerrillas in the mist? lol

(it's gorillas, not guerrillas) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare vs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla
Good article about lab testing, potentially destructively, the fail conditions of batteries. The lab sounds like an interesting place, with a note at the front desk "All explosives go to Room 1107".

This effort as good, as my feeling is "if it is not tested it is broken". (Of course there is a corollary "if it is fully tested, it still might be broken".)
Why not move the "How Bookhu works" box to the top left? It doesn't seem like you need full width for the book scroller.

For the book scroller, shouldn't you add some functionality there inherent to Bookhu, like the ratings? It just has descriptions right now, which makes it look simply like a catalog.
Could you edit your post to make that clear? As it stands right now, you expect them to be able to do visual design work.
Annual Escalating Patent Fee Proposal
I'm kind of guessing Apple can get them at cost.
Be interested to see the power consumption figures on a windows machine as opposed to a mac...
Then I think you're doing biphasic sleep, something I want to try in the future
Would also like to see HTML5/JS data. Or, even animated GIFs.
Singing 'rewires' damaged brain
H-1B are almost a lottery. The day they start accepting the requests (usually April 1st) they go over quota and they proceed by random selections (in October). Of course the processing fee is not refundable (over $1000).

With the money I spent in visas and attorneys in the past 5 years, you could hire a full time coder oversea for at least one year...
"It's just not that hard to become a good enough programmer to get 20 right every time. All it takes is study, passion, a lot of dedication, and a lot of hard work."

As someone working for a big company with a lot of passion, the four items that you listed is hard. Dedication and hard work requires significant amount of time commitment. My work for 8 hours typically involves so much paper work, process and discussion that only 20% of that time is really spent in programming. Between family & kids and a 8 hour job, I try to spend 1 hour each day doing new stuff, but with that time, it takes a long time to be really good.
Is it legal for a boss to fire an employee for not friending them on Facebook?
Google makes a vertically-integrated smartphone, Apple builds a massive datacenter.

I think the upshot here is simple: It's on.
Net Neutrality for Dummies: Will the FCC control the Internet?
I bought something similar (see my other comment in this thread) and I find it very useful (after 2 winters).
Carmack Gets Lifetime Achievement Honor At 2010 Choice Awards
> On the other hand, if I were to have brain surgery in 2030 I probably wouldn't want the world's best surgeon from 2010 to time travel and do it.

Or even, would you rather by a book on Java written 15 years ago, or written yesterday ?
Simple, but easier said then done.
Actually, they did mention how one 'disc' or wafer powers one lightbulb.

The problem with comparing a lightbulb or refrigerator, etc. is that the average person has to think... ok, so how many discs are in a box? how many lighbulbs do I have in my house? etc.

In the piece (which I admit is very fluff), the founder shows a box and says 'this is a european house', grabs another box and says 'this is an american house, or 4 asian houses'.

These are methods of explanation that the 60 minutes audience can understand.

The actual company is apparently launching on Wednesday, so I'd expect that on that day we'll hear more details.

Seeing as the device can use a different gases as fuel, wouldn't we expect that the output would be dependent on the fuel supplied?
This article raises a very interesting question: WTH is the plural of Prius? What should the plural be?
Here's a quick mockup of a possible redesign for the home page. I'd make the book thumbnail bigger than I put it at, but you get the idea: http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png
I think this article does a good job covering the second best way of selecting programmers - the technical job interview.

The best "interviews" aren't really interviews, though, they're recruiting sessions. A really strong, experienced software development manager who plans to employ programmers should have 1) a strong background in programming, and 2) a strong network of programmers who would jump at the chance to work with him again.

You already know your potential hires are good programmers, because you've worked with them before - in school, on side projects, at work, in various collaborations. You don't need to ask them to print all the nodes in a binary tree, and if you did, well, you'd probably lose the candidate.

I think Joel (on software) put it this way (I'm paraphrasing): if you're a small independent film maker, and Uma Thurman expresses an interest in your movie, you don't ask her to audition, you ask what you can do to get her on board. I think 37Signals is another example of a company that mainly recruits people they already know through programming projects (esp contributions to rails).

I won't say the technical interview is evidence of a "broken" recruiting system the way some people do, because let's face it, we don't all have the recruiting mystique to wave the magic wand and get top people to join us, and our networks just aren't big enough. So we have to interview relative unknowns.

But I will readily admit that this shows that I'm not doing it the best way. This goes both ways. If I'm in an interview and people start asking me how to implement a singleton, I start to wonder if I'm going about my job search the wrong way. If I have to ask the candidate this, then maybe I'm going about the recruitment in the wrong way as well.

But if that's your reality, then yeah, make sure you screen well.
Are you thinking of Ecuador? http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/ecuador-constit...
One man Wii Band - Jazari
electric heating elements to get 1800F? Wouldn't that take more power than this thing would create?
I missed the part about heating to 1800.
And Sony.
That's some high quality feedback (and bug reports) and some good suggestions. Thank you.

I like the idea of blogging the data - something similar to what they're doing over at okcupid will put my mind to it.

As for the competition - I'll have a chew on it, sounds like there might be something to highlighting the gender rivalry aspect.
Free GSM stack in development
Well, you cited music performance, but so did the guy who did the research everyone who talks about "10,000 hours" is referencing:

"Even in music there is evidence for improved skill. When Tchaikovsky asked two of the greatest violinists of his day to play his violin concerto, they refused, deeming the score unplayable (Platt, 1966). Today, elite violinists consider this concerto part of the standard repertory. The improvement in music training is so great that according to Roth (1982) the violin virtuoso Paganini "would indeed cut a sorry figure is placed upon the modern concert stage" (p. 23)." [1] There are no stationary targets.

He uses this as evidence that the notion that "a sufficient amount of experience or practice leads to maximal performance appears to be incorrect" [2]

[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... p.366

[2] Ibid.
A few questions (I don't mean to sound overly brief or critical - it's a nice site - but I'm at work so can't spend ages writing):

* Where do you get the data from about gender? Is it from users of your site? Is it from Amazon or something like that? I like to know where data's from so that I can make some judgement as to whether I want to disregard it. Data with no source definitely gets disregarded :)

* What am I supposed to do on your site? Just look for books and then follow links to buy them? Or can I rate books?

* Why are you basing the whole experience off of gender? I don't see why it's particularly useful to know what other men like, or what women like. I'd rather know what people like me like. i.e. like the whole Netflix recommendations thing. This just seems like a one-dimensional version of that?
Right, and the BBC isn't stating it because it isn't a fact. It's almost the same thing. And of course they're being used properly.

Scare quotes can be used to quote a person and to provide distance from their words

Look at another example off the homepage: Hope over peanut allergy 'cure' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7899383.stm

Cure is in quotes because it's not yet proven that the technique is indeed a cure. Not because the BBC wants to give proper credit to whichever person called it a cure.
address@hidden #fail -- you forgot to hide the email addresses from the thread list at the end of the page.