skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not so sure if you're correct. I was polite, and I wanted to know.

When you're on the Internet it's hard to know where people are coming from. I can see now how I misread him, I wish I didn't, but I did. How else do I find out politely what the terms of a debate are in a public forum? Is it truly better to not attempt at true comprehension of a person's words? Is it all just throw-away, a comment on an aggregation site?

And this was a tough thing to ask politely, simply because I had a presumption which was wrong. But I tried to do it right. I think the response I got back was pretty clear, the OP knows the fundamentals of the privacy debate, he/she has an opinion on the privacy issue itself, and the OP is not too offended by my best take on a gentle nudge at the bias question, a pretty safe guess from that is that he understands the questions of bias as a safety net for intellectual thought rather than as an offensive gesture.

I didn't know all of that, and so I asked. That's all it takes.

It's hard to communicate well online. It's this new thing for the human mind, without a 100,000 years of conditioning. Every day I log on to Hacker News for two things: It's shockingly educational in many disciplines; and I want to learn to communicate so I can better participate in society in a positive way. What a challenging place to do it. In the process I've found out that my communication needs a lot of work. I've been lurking since '88 and lurking didn't teach me communicating, what gives ;-).

But I'm pretty sure I took a reasonable tack here. Listening comprehension, interest in knowing what people really mean in short form communication, and trying to find out why people say things that we disagree with seem to be critical needs in this complex medium.
This is thinking like a user, not thinking like a programmer. As a programmer, you don't want to fix the contact form, you need to fix the need to fix the contact form. This is how you avoid deathmarch projects; you program away the tedious parts so that you have a functioning system instead of a bunch of code that does stuff.

Just sayin'.
Why can Apple afford Helvetica? Helvetica Neue? Hoefler Text? Zapfino? Ugly Gill Sans?
I'd love to do this (I get super-bad hay fever), but dude's charging $3000 bucks, which seems pretty steep to pay for a disgusting worm with an uncertain outcome. Anyone know a cheaper source? (I was thinking a farm, but apparently the hookworms animals get and the hookworms humans get aren't the same.)
Most people can't lead. They need someone telling them what to do and keeping them on-track.

These are two separate skills - the ability to lead others, and the ability to work productively without being led.

I'm not convinced either claim is true to be honest - it's probably more true to say that most people have never had the opportunity to even try to develop these skills.
The combination of the title with gems like:

"One of them said he was upset when you talked about nasal sex with plants." I had actually demonstrated this perverse act with the bouquet on the table, at dinner the night before I was sent home. The plants were dead, although well preserved, so I was performing rhinophytonecrophilia on them.

is what makes me love RMS even more. Bless his soul.
This letter is a gem, Carlos Slim might be bad man or whatever, but this letter is genuine good advice.

Don't fall prey to ad hominem, judge the letter for its content not for its author.
They already exist and are called facebook credits: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1038
Web Illiteracy: How Much Is Your Fault?
Taking The Leap Of Faith - Ron Conway [video] (2009)
How to Read a Term Sheet
Personally, I don't like Helvetica except in logos that start with A.

In that case you might fall in love with the logo of Finland's leading tech/economics/design college, Aalto University:

http://www.aalto.fi/en
Give it a go :). Part of how I got to where I am today with cooking was to think of the most ridiculous challenge possible, pile on some additional ridiculousness and then go attempt it.
I have a family member with colitis. In the US, there are treatments available that use hookworms and are regulated, and hopefully safer than the option described above. So before you going tramping off to some African open-air latrine (assuming you don't live in Africa already), I would ask a doctor specifically about helminthic therapy and see what s/he can do for you.
This HN thread from the founder of an automated guitar chord transcription service and the Chords! WinAmp plug--in (k0ban) hints at the state-of-the-art of real-time music detection. Summary: Even beat detection is still a work in progress.

"Ask HN: Guitar Tabs Online"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033188
Film/Music/Interactive. The film portion lasts the whole two weeks. Interactive is the first week, music is the second.

http://sxsw.com
Hey, I'd missed that Farmville is accepting FB Credits now. That's pretty big.

They hadn't truly launched the credit system in a real sense. It existed, but was so low profile as to be non-existent, which I assumed was intentional. But with Farmville signing on, that's a pretty real launch.

The fee structure is still exhorbitant, though. Again, maybe intentional, to prevent it from being a practical parallel currency.
I took a couple quick snaps before I left. Not the greatest quality since they were from my iPhone. They are at http://www.flickr.com/groups/hndinner/
I'm not so confident that it is that much of a problem. Customers seem to know that a Core 2 beats a Pentium 4.
Once 'can this device support x game' becomes enough of a question, users will start paying attention.
I'd say come join my company.

We're operating in a $15 Billion industry with no real market leader (yes, there are still a few of those around). We've made ourselves profitable in less than 6 months with about 3,000 customers.

This is my ninth business, I'm tech and marketing oriented, and a fourth generation entrepreneur.

I'd love to speak with you, get to know you, and hopefully help each other make some money.

Send me an e-mail, lets talk.

blalock.matt AT gmail.com
And if pigs were ducks would they quack? In other words, your question is moronic since netflix didn't attach cc or ssn info.

Also, you're a retard for comparing movie predictions, and the possibility of matching a person to their movie viewing history, as even remotely comparable to human test subjects. Please.

As for invasion of privacy, I'm unsure -- I'm not sure of the probability of matching, the quantity of information necessary to get a good, for various values of good, match, etc. What is clear is the authors had a major hand in stifling a nontrivial nonacademic dataset and damaging the community around it. They further have aided the lawyers suing netflix, and have helped poison the well for any company in the future that decides they might want to do something like this. So I say congratulations! For the author to pretend this didn't happen as a result of his actions is disingenuous.

As for your questions, well, they're just stupid. We live in a world where the fbi/police get access to your PHYSICAL LOCATION 24x7 without a warrant just by asking, where your emails and telephone calls are scanned by the nsa with plans to open this data set to the police at large, where google/yahoo/et al see turning your emails and access patterns over to the police as a revenue opportunity, etc. If you care about privacy, this is such small potatoes as to be a waste of time. BTW, anyone can still spend roughly $100 to access your phone call history. G has, in subpoenable form, your entire search history -- and don't think that clearing cookies prevents stapling that history together.
I am gonna make a note on only a small part of this, which is that 10 guilty men is different than 'an uncountable number of guilty men'. In other words, all principals have soft margins in practice.
I don't know if it is accurate to say "yes, I am" or if it would be better to say "I'm a wannabe single founder". Only it's not really as simple as that either. My two adult sons are kind of in this with me, only they don't plan on being cofounders for my plans. They plan on founding their own company. Still, the three of us are collaborating on working out what needs to be worked out for all of us to get there from here. So I am not entirely alone, though I don't expect to have any actual cofounders.

1)I have been working on several things for a few years. Last summer, I began posting here because I concluded I need to learn a programming language and write a simulation/game as an educational tool for my health site. For better or for worse, the ideas on the site grow out of my own first-hand experience with getting well against impossible odds. Between continuing to work on resolving my health issues and working as much overtime as I can at my job, I haven't made much headway towards my goals for this site, and even less headway on goals for other websites I own. None of this started as a "business" idea. It is only fairly recently that my thoughts have turned in that direction.

2) I have toyed with applying and started to fill out an application for last fall. Stuff I have read recently suggests to me they would never accept me, even if I concluded it was a good fit for my goals. But i seriously doubt it would be. I plan to bootstrap it.

3) As above: No. I expect to bootstrap my business plans.

4) My health site is http://www.healthgazelle.com It is the best developed of the sites I have. The others are languishing in purgatory (or perhaps I should say "languishing even worse than this one").
PayPal Launches Revamped iPhone App, Teams With Bump
Kicking the Chair to the Curb
The pscyhology of bookplates
My biggest problem with Arial is:

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Most (something like 99%?) of computers come with Arial. So, even the ones that have Helvetica installed as well, will get Arial, since its listed first. It seems like a waste to even list it in that order.
You can scan my profile to see the substance of my posts in general.

Whatever you may think of it, my "small" distinction post here has gotten a lot more karma than the long analyses I usually post.

The slide show altogether had little substance; a few interesting statistics, some standard rhetoric and a come-on for a product.

Still, the craven misuse of the term "socialist" is doing more than a little damage to the body politic. If Obama was a socialist trying to change the nature of American society, that would worth debating. But he isn't, so the repetition of such a claim works according to the "big lie principle" (ironically articulated by Joseph Stalin) - if you take a simple falsehood, even one the most informed people know is false, and repeat it enough times, you get can serious traction. This method of operating is worth noting and so this "semantic" distinction is important to make.
Sometimes technology makes it easier to do something, and then people do that thing more than they did before, to the point where they're doing it too much.

It's like AutoTune in music: people have always tried to sing in tune, but now they can sing even more in tune, and so current pop music has almost lost the naturalism and emotional effects produced by subtle variance in pitch.
The problem I see with this, is that the most talented middle class folks are still employed. It's these talented people who have the drive, creativity, and resourcefulness to home-school well, and to build new communities. Until and unless they are out on their butts, I don't think we will see this type of positive societal transformation.

It's likely we'll see more: crime and despair, and that all of those unemployed former worker-drones that the school system wrought, will increasingly look to the government for subsidies.
I'm gratified many of you liked this submission.

You can see this effect a lot on TV too. I think CSI began with a conscious act of manipulating the color palette via computer. Contrast that sort of color bias to rendering true colors via photography in a series such as Miami Vice (made well before there was this possibility).
Hacker News bans Google and all other search engines
Looks like news.ycombinator.com is rejecting all search engine robots with "User-Agent: * Disallow: /". This is unfortuante, I often do site: searches to find old threads here. esp since news.ycombinator.com doesn't have its own site search, this is the only way to find old threads.

pg, what's up?
Please. You directly enabled the lawsuit. At least have the integrity to acknowledge your part -- your pretense "Oh wow, a lawsuit just happened! But I had nothing to do with it!" -- is pretty stupid.

I'll bet money the most likely result of this lawsuits -- and your actions are a big piece of it -- is Netflix, et al, will release no more datasets to the public. Instead, only researchers under NDA will be allowed to work with the data, as was basically the tradition before this.

Good job.
You could try:

font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif;

Helvetica has some weird anti-aliasing issues on Windows PCs (don’t know which versions exactly) so you shouldn’t use it there anyway. Pretty much everyone using a Mac has both Helvetica and Helvetica Neue, so it’s no problem using Neue there.
I'm still amused by liberal arts majors who somehow think that you can't work in the technical fields without a degree. Sure, a degree helps, but if you know what you are doing, it's not required.

Now, I know some really awesome people who went to college, and claim that they learned a lot there, I'm not saying it doesn't have value. hell, all other things being equal, I'll pick the applicant with a degree over the dropout, when I have the chance. But I also know many programmers and SysAdmins who didn't go to college, and a few who didn't finish high school. We don't need to live 'off the grid' mad max style. Not having a degree means that you will need to do real work for retail wages, for a while, but once you have experience, you get to upgrade to real wages.
I understood that not recompiling was the point; I was wondering why it was a valid point.

"Because you want to do it to a running production app" seems far-fetched to me -- not saying that it is, I had just discounted that reasoning.

tbrownaw's point of 'high initial cost, low marginal cost' makes a good amount of sense, though.
Carrots let you see in the dark: started by the RAF to hide success of radar
I don't think the debate is about privacy but more about how certain bits of information about people can be used to manipulate their attention in order to make money. Google uses the information it collects to serve more relevant ads but this is in a certain sense an unfair manipulation of your attention and this is what I find offensive.
How does the Perl Coro library compare to coroutines in Lua or Scheme? (It's been almost a decade (!) since I used Perl really actively, and it seems to have changed quite a bit.)
It's a shallow, contradictory gloss filled with all the usual rhetoric.

The unemployment statistics it showed did seem pretty significant if they are true.
"I became infested almost immediately, it must have been either the first or second day I spent walking barefoot through the latrines. When one thinks of it this was an enormous piece of luck"

Wow - what a glass half-full outlook :-)
I'd completely missed the reusability aspect of things; I guess because the tight coupling to specific addresses would mean redoing a lot of the work for different builds. But once you figure it out, it looks like it could be trivial to replicate for future minor revisions.

And I agree, it's fun stuff! That kind of hacking really makes me smile. I was just curious about the pragmatic motivations.
Probably to stop linkspam?
Well, when I'm writing CSS, I do that. But, thats not the case for a very large majority of the sites out there online. So, I'm wondering if there's any actual reason behind Arial, rather then Helvetica being first (besides the obvious "more computers have it").
I think Helvetica would be almost as reviled as Arial if it was the standard on Windows.
Reihan isn't a libertarian. He's a young conservative. I know him actually, he sat in on a course I took on the conservative movement in American politics. He was the "actual conservative" the professor was showing off to the university students (who presumably aren't exposed to actual conservatives within academe). Reihan's a cool guy and was generally fun to argue with.

His author description mentions that he blogs at National Review and works for e21. I know one of the founding members of e21 actually, she used to be my buddy's neighbor. It's definitely not a "non-partisan" economics think tank, just a run-of-the-mill conservative outfit. I thought Reihan was at The New America Foundation, which actually is a non-partisan think tank known for being more sexy/interesting than your mainstream institutions. Maybe he's moved on.

Anyway, I agree, it's an odd piece.
I just wanted to add on more to your thoughts: when I play piano with sheet music, I "chunk" as you mention, but I also look ahead anywhere from like one measure to an entire page to refresh my memory and see what I need to play next, and/or how I should transition from one section to the next. I also find that these definite divisions by lines and pages of music help memorizing and visualizing what to play. I would love it if there was an app that listened along and flipped/shifted pages over automatically, but marquee scrolling would be disastrous to the way I read sheet music.

(Disclaimer: I've been playing piano for over 15 years of my 21 year existence on this planet, is that enough to comment on my personal preferences? ;) )

On the other hand, throughout the years I spent singing in choirs and with specific situations like guitar hero, a marquee style method of presentation never posed a problem as long as I could see at least a measure or two ahead at a time. Likely because of the information density you mention - singing and guitar hero never felt as demanding as playing piano.
No reason, I guess. It doesn’t make any sense and you shouldn’t use that font stack.
From Steve Job's Commencement Speech at Stanford, and on taking a class in Calligraphy:

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them."
Giving Technical Presentations
You forgot the 5th one:

"We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding."
Yes, no doubt this guy is an expert in screams, teaches the Screams PHD course at MIT, and has analysed and manipulated every single scream produced by all forms of entertainment over the last 50 years.
some ppl have 2 much time on their hands
Arial is great for smaller text. It's made specifically for screen text in 11px-14px range.

I love Helvetica but I think this video is bullshit.
Subordinate has been around for a while.

Inferior denotes one's class in society, subordinate denotes one's position in an organization.
The guy wrote a follow-up piece last year: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/16/3408/66053
It appears to be called the "Youraagh" scream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf6_hok4-lo
It's not 30 years. Kierkegaard was saying that in the early 1800s. Every generation thinks they're the LAST WELL EDUCATED GENERATION AND ALL THESE KIDS ARE NOT NEARLY WELL EDUCATED ENOUGH SO WE'RE SCREWED!

Has been happening for literally hundreds of years.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you apparently lack the time for vowels.
Reasons why "if an HR manager can deny you the job, it's not worth having":

HR managers are corporate bureaucracy, and if they are making critical hiring decisions you can assume the company is bureaucratic.

HR managers go by charm factor, like it or not. When you only need the very brightest, the charm factor is less important.

HR managers like to believe they maintain a corporate status quo, which is a dangerous thing. And most often this means instituting policies of blandness and conformity, even via hiring selections.
It's unfortunate because I often use site: to find old threads on ycombinator. especially since news.ycombinator.com doesn't have its own search facility, external search engines are the old way to comb through old posts here.
"Management that doesn’t understand programming"

Huh? My worst managers have programmers trying to break into management while keeping their hand in programming by telling me how I should structure my programs. My best managers were non-programmers who had deep understanding of the development process and thus would get out of the way while did my thing.
I'd define it as milestones per day. It's important to set small bite sized goals imho. Any programmer who has a boss thinking that !writing code -> !working needs to find a different job asap.
There's a journal article criticizing that exact assumption: "The Hazards of Predicting Divorce Without Crossvalidation"

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118971429/abstrac...
I don't even want to read past the intro. I'll stick with cleaning up my diet and home environment and using alternative remedies to get better, thanks.

(No, I don't have asthma, though I was misdiagnosed with it at one point. I do have "atypical cystic fibrosis" and there is a lot of overlap in treatments between the two things.)

EDIT: Since I have been downvoted, let me clarify: I frequently get strong negative reactions on health discussion lists for the "extremes" to which I have gone to get well, extremes which freak out a lot of other people. To my mind, my choices have been pretty conservative compared to this. I don't keep my health situation a secret here but there is no real reason most folks here would have much context. <shrug>

Carry on.
How a developer became an agile project manager
10 Websites that (Really) Leave an Impression
Does that also kill Search YC?

What about the "official" HNSearch (http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html )?
True, but it is helpful for evaluating what's useful to read.
That notwithstanding, if you go to Google.com, type hacker news into the search box and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" you will find yourself at a familiar web page. ;-)
I think the video was being satirical. "I . . . sound insane don't I?" That's what he said toward the end.
So is SearchYC done, or do they use a scraper not a crawler?
Maybe if Helvetica were also an attempt to re-create a classic Swiss Modernist typeface without paying licensing fees by arbitrarily making a bunch of frequently inconsistent and aesthetically questionable stroke changes, yes.

I don't think Calibri will be disliked anywhere near as much, being an original, with more of an elegant nod to classic humanist types like Frutiger rather than a passive-aggressive attempt to emulate-but-not-fully.
Well he did get on the front page of HN and probably a few hundred views on utube. That's whats bullshit about it really :P
Security doesn’t respect abstraction boundaries
Augmented Reality: Is It Real? Should We Care?
What does this mean for http://www.searchyc.com? Will it stop too? (Afterall, it must be a bot too, and a robots.txt like this implies that no bots /should/ scrape the site.) Or will it be allowed?
The Hammock
Is there anything like this for OS X?
It seems unlikely that except for Steve's brilliance no one would have come up with the idea that proportional typefaces might be nice on computers. They were alive and well elsewhere; it was only a matter of time before they made it into our thinking machines.
Is this permanent?

HN is a good source of google juice for interesting new startups, and it would be a shame to see that go away...
Code Bubbles and the Keyboard