skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes I have started doing this kind of thing as well. I have a lot of crappy business casual clothes that don't really fit anymore. I don't want to toss them because I keep thinking I'll lose the weight to be able to fit back in them real soon.

What I have started doing is donating 2 pairs of old pants to Goodwill and buying 1 pair of nice pants that I will want to wash and deal with. This seems to be working well for me so far.

I also wanted to mention that our hard disks can suffer from this same problem. I have also started making an effort to delete old pdf books that I won't read, delete mp3s that I'm tired of hearing etc.
Hello hga, yes, ultimately the USA and U.K. are too big (in my opinion) to get bailed out. Also: of course the Eurozone news is big, but here in the USA I feel like that story is used to gloss over our own problems.
[2008]
Autonimously Automated Automobiles
But there is the other side: schools have less restraint on raising tuition. If the government is giving out loans like candy, schools don't mind hiking the tuition higher and higher every year (well beyond the level of inflation).

I noticed that with my school. I was in graduate and under-graduate school at the same university. I was there for 7 years. The tuition kept going up at an enormous pace and the school just stared building stadiums, shopping areas, recreation centers and other seemingly useless stuff. Incoming students and their parents had to take higher and higher loans.

I graduated without any loans and we payed my wife's loans in 2 years but that is definetly not the norm.

Producing graduates that are enslaved to paying back giant loans makes less able to competitively choose work places (they can't quit a job they don't like as easily because they have to keep paying another, rather large monthly bill).
I had to stop reading this tripe when I came across "Cookies are stealthily slipped into your laptop like roofies into a margarita."

Seriously? Yellow journalism much? Ugh.
One of my good friends told me that this year, he gave donations to charity in the names of his family members. Great idea! My parents have been packrats, the last thing they need is more stuff. But a donation to a charity for a disease a loved one died of? Probably the best gift they could receive.
That's OK I wasn't offended.

If it's so hard to study, for example, the climate scientifically, then it must be orders of magnitude harder to study something like the effect of pornography scientifically. I simply don't think it's a scientific question.

That's not to say that the article should be confused for an academic study of any sort, but it's certainly useful insofar as it will encourage some readers to think about a specific aspect of pornography prevalence that they'd never thought of before.
Why would someone start to voluntarily pay for content that had previously been free, especially when they can continue getting it for free (by not signing up for flattr in the first place)?

I can see some people using this, but I know high school me would be saving up my money for a new computer, not paying pennies to content providers. Even now, I might throw $20 in to try the service but there are other things I'd rather spend that money on (like a monthly iPad 3G plan or drinks with my friends).
The Listener
There is a SMART log. Let the thing run and any SMART warnings will go there. It's possible for a disk to fail and not give SMART errors, but running SMARTreporter gives you more information about the state of a disk and whether it's behaving in a less-reliable manner. It's possible for a disk to read data and report it accurately, but require retries to compensate for failing hardware. SMART will report this sort of thing, when normal disk use will make it seem that the disk is still behaving as well as it was before.
Was this a joke or did someone earnestly write this: http://twitter.com/gaberivera/status/8976199410

I find Sarah Silverman to be hilarious.
I was thinking reading the article: the guys who mindlessly copy porn moves and replies, how do we know it they would have been any better without porn? A pretty good hypothesis is that they wouldn't, they'd have been either woefully inexperienced or unimaginative. That's why gut feelings are bad and studies are good.
Try foxit reader over the adobe junk :-) I switched a while ago and it's such an improved experience.
The Anti-Competitive Google
I pay a very low federal income tax bill for my gross income because I choose to pay higher local taxes (through both property and sales tax which are both deductible in TX since we have no state income tax).

The federal income tax hits non-property owner singles by far the hardest. As wealth increases people are generally no longer single nor renters. If you start to factor in FICA people making around the ~$104k limit of social security probably pay the highest total federal tax bill percentage wise.

We won't ever fix this system though because the poor, even if you took all their money can't pay for anything and the rich have the money to help shape policy. This leaves the upper middle class responsible for the majority of the burden percentage wise.
"Mandatory group work ... teaches kids how to assign tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them, how to schedule wasteful meetings to re-format and explain individuals’ work, and how to make bad and inconsistent PowerPoint presentations."

So much group work I had in college started out with "keep meeting with your team". It was all just an exercise in seeing how much time we could waste in pointless meetings. Of course when I tried to delegate work, so we could actually accomplish things and waste less time in meetings, some silly girl tattle taled on me saying: "Jason doesn't want us to meet enough".
Sure, as long as you get off your ass and find a good marketing person. And then you work as hard as you can to support them.

I think many people at this point probably go "yes, marketing person, problem solved" but don't put the time into getting a decent co-founder to help them.
Http://xat.com/zhuri_zhuri
I took all my CDs to Amoeba Records for store credit that I used to buy vinyl. Any CD I owned can just as easily be purchased/downloaded online, and I realized that my emotional connection is with the music -- not the CD that I haven't physically used in 5 years. CDs are only going to lose value as time goes on, so why not get the most out of them while some people are still willing to buy them? I plan to start doing the same with my DVDs. And anything that they won't take as trade in, I'm going to give away: giving away stuff on Craigslist is easier than THROWING things away.
If anything, HN scribd posts seem to turn into straight pdfs. I think the admins search for posts with [scribd] in the title and link to a pdf version instead.
A very interesting article that points out that a start-up business requires more than just code. Once the code is done, you need marketing, support and sales. At that point, adding features is just procrastination - far too tempting for many hackers.

I think it is likely this is one reason why PG says you have to go fulltime, fully commit to your startup - once you run out of money you are forced to go to the market place and actually sell. Many people who are creating a startup in their free time can put this off forever.

Imagine how much better Segway would have done if they had gone to market earlier and discovered that few people actually wanted a slow, gyroscopic bike.
It's very interesting. It reminds me that here in Spain, we use 'f-words' constantly. We say "negro" (black) to our black friends and is nothing bad. Why would I say the ultra-political-correct "african" or "afroamerican"?

Same with gay, homosexual, etc. Doesn't mean anything bad.

I'm quite surprised with all the videoclips/songs, tv shows and videogames that avoid f-words or are edited (with noises).

People sometimes want to harm with words, words themselves mean nothing.
In a word: cool.
From it's Twitter Bio "Sometimes I say what I mean. Sometimes I say the opposite." — That's a good alibi.
Interesting points on library design to do the heavy lifting (especially the HTML document regular expression example). Still, the main point of the article is not right: Scala is much more concise than Java (as is Clojure). Article was worth reading however.
How can you tell if your marketing guy is any good if you don't spend some time at it yourself? You know your own product better than anyone else. If you're passionate about the problem you're solving then start telling people who are experiencing that problem.
I came here to say just this. He's right for all the wrong reasons. In most mental areas, kids trounce adults; relevantly, their senses are much sharper. (Just the other day I saw an astronomer's anecdote: he was showing adults and kids some phenomena through his observatory's telescope, and the kids politely told him that it was obviously broken since the object was upside-down - the adults never noticed.)

It's not a matter of them having a smaller coaser model, as one can see by comparing how kids & adults do with the 'pile of stuff' organizational model. They just have more energy to apply to it. As one ages, one has less energy to apply to stuff, and less energy period; and one begins to appreciate minimalism.
Contract enforcement it probably the only thing everybody agrees government does well. I think a percentage of the value of the contract is a reasonable way to pay. If i disagree with a contractor over a $1000 fence, we can go to small claims court and sort it out. If Gigantic Manufacturer X disagrees with Retailer Y over a billion dollar contract, it's a lot more work to sort out. A five dollar lock on billion dollar asset is silly.

If you choose to rely on government to protect property rights, it is ridiculous to assert that people with very little property derive the same benefit as people with lots of property. For information on non-government enforcement, watch the wire. it's a fantastic show.

I don't think I can accept that those advanced financial instruments can exist without government contract enforcement. However, if you have evidence to the contrary, or even a good story I'll think about it.
An undergraduate degree in this country teaches you how to become a worker bee. If you like being a worker bee, getting a decent(?) salary, taking 2 weeks and then later in life maybe 6 weeks vacation, by all means study business, marketing, etc. Otherwise, get educated.

"Self education is, I firmly believe, the only kid of education there is." -Isaac Asimov

If only we could have a few more people every year become free thinkers and creators.
Perspectives skewed? Isn't that another way of saying expectations raised? You could just as well complain about people not being happy with a normal job because their perspectives have been "skewed" by reading PG's essays. Maybe the porn just opened their eyes to what was possible.

I don't know, it just seems the whole thrust of the article is "sex is bad enough, but hardcore sex is even worse, and it's all porn's fault!".

And for what it's worth, myself and pretty much everyone I know have seen our share of pr0n, and I cannot imagine any of us thinking that 2girls1cup-style behaviour is desirable. I mean geeze, talk about the absolute worst example imaginable. Well, except SWAP.avi.

And yeah I'm aware I'm not arguing with you except as a proxy for the site .. ;)
Agreed, the whole thing is a death spiral separating the population...

Easy loans lead to higher tuition...
...higher tuition leads to more debt on graduation...
...more debt on graduation leads to a need for a higher salary...
...the need for a higher salary increases the prices companies charge for goods and services delivered by college educated...

A prime example everyone is familiar with is the rising cost of healthcare.

If this continues we're going to stratify the income in the US so far we'll end up with an aristocratic and peasant class of citizens and the only way the non-college educated peasants will be able to live is through indentured servitude to a "lord or lady".
The recent Buzz around Google Buzz is quiet intriguing. Many tech enthusiasts seem to have a love/hate relationship.

I have turned-off Buzz in my gmail (simply because I like Gmail for mail. period. I already have enough distractions) but I think the product is not to be written off as some hack attempt by Google to compete with Twitter/FB/Tumblr.

Here is why I think Google Buzz could be a big social media player:

1. Opportunities for Mobile (Android and Nexus One)
- Buzz API allows you to see friends buzzes on Google Maps on Android. As Android begins to take the smartphone market share, Buzz will likely be deeply integrated into each phone, taking away the need to download third-party applications to run Twitter etc.

2. Google Buzz auto generates your network= a great feature that makes sense. This also creates the critical mass necessary for a social network. If you use gmail, and are not too active on Twitter or Facebook, Google Buzz is a great and easy way for "normals" to get involved in social networking and posting/sharing/"buzzing"

3. Buzz is Fast

-Over the past 2 years, I have simply spent less time on Facebook. Why? Information overload. Facebook is just getting a bit sluggish.
A school like Michigan draws from kids whose high school experience may be quite varied; as a result most intro classes are extremely slow, memorization intensive, and focus on very crude sorts of assignments and testing.

When these sorts of classes are used as admissions criteria for special programs (such as the BBA) you end up with a huge amount of competitiveness even though the material is easy.

The inevitable consequence of this is a lot of busy work, etc., so that some students eventually stand out as having done a better job at learning easy material and can be awarded the prize (admission to the BBA program, etc.).

I was shocked by the phenomenon of students ganging up on the professors to make tests "open note", and other approaches that allow less able students who are willing to use brute force approaches to thrive.

Note: In life, intelligence isn't really all that important, so the students have the right idea and so the rewards they reap for that behavior probably predict future economic rewards.
Having context to put lessons in is very important for effective academic learning (or almost any learning).

For an engineer, learning electrical theory from a text book makes a lot more sense if you have toyed around with an Arduino before.

For an undergraduate business major who may never have seen a P&L statement, let alone put one together, I can see that it would be tough to find the subject useful or engaging. This is why most MBA programs won't consider applicants until they have some industry experience. Academic learning works much better when you have a foundation to build on, and for an undergraduate studying business, it seems it would be easy to become disenfranchised without this foundation.
You can also try running hardware diagnostics from the disk that came with your mac. That will do a test to see if something is currently broken.
Do programmers/engineers have an inferiority complex vs. Management/MBA types? I don't see many articles on HN bashing sales professions advising youngsters not to go to trade school . . .
JPGs in PDF form? Both of those formats will be around forever.

I recently scanned a bunch of books using gscan2pdf; it makes it relatively easy, and integrates some decent utilities like Tesseract for OCR. (Some fiddling with controls meant that I could start playing a movie and mechanically flip pages and punch the scan button.)

Relatively high-resolution scans like 3-500 DPI mean you can get big PDFs (~200MB for a big anthology was normal), but this isn't much of a concern to me: I can clean them up later if I really need space, and in an era where 1.5tb is 100$, 200MB is nothing (1 or 2 cents of space?).
No. I say this with absolute certainty, having just submitted a link to a PDF, to which the [scribd] portion was added, either by the system or by an HN administrator.

If you click on the title, it still goes to the original URL, which in my case was a straight PDF. If you click on the [scribd] portion, you are taken to a copy at Scribd.
Both of those languages have seen vast improvements in speed throughout the past ten years. Java 1.4.2 was immensely faster than any previous Java implementation. I would be very interested in seeing this study redone with the newest Java, Python, Ruby, and something Lispy.
> Refactoring doubly so :-)

Oh, man, the truth hurts!

I would much rather refactor than go out and sell.

There is such a zen to refactoring. It doesn't require intense problem-solving thought, but it isn't mindless. More, hm... mindful. sigh
I think this is more a product of some aspects of society than just porn.

Sex in porn is reall incredibly different to real life - it takes a level of naievity and, probably, peer pressure to form that sort of impression.

I think it's disingenuous to suggest it's causing these issues for everyone.

Most of the described relationships just sound tucked up generally. The girl who dreads her boyfriends birthday seems as much the victim of her own silence as anything else!
I think that it's fairly clear why they don't do this --would they do it only for books purchased from amazon.com? If not, would they require some sort of proof of purchase? What about used books? What about books not currently available on the Kindle? If you send them an old edition of a book, then what edition do you get on the Kindle?-- but it's such a gorgeous idea. This has been one of the biggest roadblocks in my attempts to decide whether to buy a Kindle: I have a huge library, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars in format-shifting doesn't appeal to me. If I could even just get a discount for books that I already own, it would make me much, much more likely to take the plunge.
Reminds me of this: http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/2008/09/12/louis-ck-hates...

As far as censorship goes, look what we can do now thanks to years of bleeping and blurring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Vh9_Hi1kY
Porting to Python 3:  a guide
Now I remember what Scribd reminds me of: Steven Brill's Brill's content (the web site, not the magazine).
I wish I could see her performance for myself, as I find her hilarious, but the description of Sarah's performance made me cringe.

Not because of the word "retarded," but because she said she would adopt a terminally ill person. I struggle to see how she could make light of something like that...
The consensus here seems to be that it's an effort to promote Scribd, but I had always assumed that it was an attempt at trying to be helpful to those who prefer to remain within a browser, and to those who hate opening PDFs. At least, it serves that use case to me.
But I also like to say "You can tell a worker by his tools". The choice of tools and how they are used tell a lot about the workman ( a programmer in particular ).

- Do they use source control ?
- Do they use unit tests ?
- What kind of language + environment do they use ?
- Do they have strong opinions about deficiencies of other tools, that they specifically refuse to use? (this shows experience perhaps).
The claim about Sarah Silverman's 'brilliance' seems to be this:

"Saying the word 'retarded' can only have extreme negative power if you let it and Sarah Silverman is brave, because she got on stage in front of some global minds and dropped it over and over and over."

To call Sarah Silverman 'brave' for repeating this naughty word in front of a TED audience really is retarded. If this is what it means to be a subversive comedian in 2010, Richard Pryor must be turning in his grave.
> If that sofa takes 2 square meters out of my 40 square meters apartment, that means every 20th rent I pay is just because of this.

If you get rid of the sofa, does your landlord give you a 1/20th discount? If he doesn't, then your reasoning is a bit unsound...
Beautiful to look at.

For anyone who uses this in an app, my guess is that it makes debugging (in firebug etc) kinda annoying? I mean, even though it maps directly to JavaScript, the mental context switch between what you see in firebug and the code you've written would take getting used to?
Interesting thoughts on geo becoming a core part of current and emerging applications.

Even though Facebook has lost some ground to foursquare, Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on the ambitions of Facebook.

"Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...
Making fun of mentally retarded people isn't funny. They are victims of circumstance, and its sad that they'll never be productive, self-supporting individuals.

Making fun of people like Sarah Palin, who believe that they are virtuous because they choose to bring mentally retarded people into this world, is funny. In this case, the comedian attacks a cruel ideology that puts pain and suffering on a pedestal.

Sarah Silverman should have made it more clear who she was making fun of. Her audience was uncomfortable because they thought that she was making fun of retarded people.
An interesting question is: will the TED video of Silverman's talk be made equally available as other talks?

There's a spectrum of things the organizers might do to try to distance themselves. Most extreme would be to not put Silverman's video up at all, or bleep it. Milder options would be hiding her talk from indexes, demoting it in search results, or wrapping it in disclaimers.

(I hope they treat her talk exactly the same as every other TED talk, but they may not be able to resist the strong social pressure to show 'sensitivity' and thus shun Silverman at some level.)
I don't think it is betrayal if it is not intentional.
JsFiddle - Online Editor for the Web
I am studying at a top Master's program in Europe at a Business School and it's oh-so familiar undergraduate or not. I also took a whopping 1 course at the business school during my undergraduate before switching to computer science because it was mind numbingly stupid. The lack of math skills, the type of people it attracts, the teaching style is all accurate for undergraduate. For the master's level I see more motivated and smarter people but the teaching, goals and end result is pretty much the same and leaves so much to be desired.

In one way, it feels nice to know most schools suck just as bad, but in another way it's a shame for humanity that this seems to be the norm.
Oops. I was hoping to post this to HN in a couple of days when it's finished, but the latest commits to CoffeeScript on Github include a compiler that's written entirely in CoffeeScript. It's been compiling itself since Friday.

This means that you can compile scripts in the browser, should you choose to, or within Node.js on the server, and greatly increases the speed of the interactive REPL. It's also a nice showcase for what's possible in CoffeeScript.

For example, take a peek at the Jison parser, using a little DSL function that makes for a nice style of grammar declaration:

http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/gr...

If you'd like to play with the CoffeeScript-in-CoffeeScript implementation, use bin/node_coffee when you check out the source. bin/coffee remains the Ruby implementation until the CoffeeScript side is up to feature parity.

Here's the original post, things have come a long way since then:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080
Cyber warfare: don't inflate it, don't underestimate it
Isn't that already the case?

Just replace "lord or lady" with the name of a large multi-national corporation (Wal-Mart for example).