skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hadn't heard about it before the redesign and started using it based on the initial "user uproar" post on HN.

That said, there are a lot of interface quirks that still need to be worked out, specifically in the area of "doing something and getting back to the stream you were listening to" - so many times I go into my profile and am not sure how to go back to the "mood" or whatever I was listening to. There are also a few times when I want to force the slideshow stuff to start again but it doesn't.

I haven't seen the previous design but the non-visual design (making an MMO out of discovering new music) is quite good.
You seem to be implying that Apple deliberately contracts out their manufacturing specifically to exploit child labor. I find that absolutely contrary to the evidence--in particular, if Apple were doing that, wouldn't they try to cover this up instead of auditing the manufacturers themselves and making these abuses public? As it stands, Apple goes out of their way to ask the uncomfortable questions.

There are lots of perfectly non-cynical reasons to outsource manufacturing--or for that matter, anything your business itself isn't exceptionally good at.
I see it as people not caring about the truth as much as trying to be happy & safe. If that involves lots of accepted lies & illusions, then so be it. The mind's purpose is to assist the body in achieving darwinian goals -- knowing the truth of the world around them isn't terribly relevant. In parallel, those taking advantage of this situation aren't likely to spend much time thinking hard about it -- it works, that's all that matters. Justifying actions that bring you financial success is an art form driven over millennia of evolution & refinement.

Ha! I grew up in Springfield, VA, mid-late 90s for high school.
"Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers."

Business jobs come and go--humanities jobs never are, never were, and never will be there.
"When you present an idea to someone and they recognize it as good, they will take it with them and they will eventually make money off of that idea. But you will not."

I would venture to say that people have a disproportionate amount of ideas as compared to time to act upon them. People taking your ideas/advice and making money off of them does NOT translate into money out of your bank account. This is the same logic the RIAA is using to prosecute illegal music downloads.

Be a popcorn machine, but don't let them get ahold of your power plug. There is much that we all can give to help each other that will in no way harm our own income or current bank account. Be smart in what you divulge.
Their next version(already in Beta) is pure Cocoa.
New York Angels is a not-for-profit membership organization, which means that the organization itself, unlike a startup company, is not designed to produce a profit. Since it has no shareholders, there is no one to whom any profit (excess of revenue over expenses) would be distributed. Instead, the large bulk of our operating expenses are covered by annual dues of $3500 to $7000 from our investor members.

In terms of nomenclature, "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" are colloquially used to mean the same thing (although technically the former signifies intention, and the latter what actually happens :-). However, you can be a legal not-for-profit organization (such as New York Angels) but NOT also be a public charity (which is what people typically think of when they say "not for profit"; that would mean that you register with the IRS under section 501(c)3 and can take in tax deductible contributions.)
Watch Ninja Assassin (2009) Online
I have to disagree. I find the more I share ideas and advice, the more I get in return. The free flow of ideas benefits the giver as well as the receiver. As an added bonus, the more good advice I can give and the more ideas I can share, the more ideas and advice come my way.

You could make an argument that once you've "made it" this exchange becomes asymmetrical. However, I'm grateful for those interactions I've had with people who have "made it" and wouldn't begrudge that to others when/if I have.

I'm reminded of a quote from Howard Aiken:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
I can TOTALLY see alot of philosophy majors doing LISP (or CSS/XSLT) programming. I remember my philosophy credit in college (working toward my equally touchy-feely degree in English Lit.) was Symbolic Logic. Tarski's World was my friend and nemesis for that semester. They should seriously consider putting happy faces on the dodecahedrons at least.

First-order logic is not to be fussed with. The latter part of that course kicked my ass, but that might've also been due to me smoking an inordinate amount of weed at the time.
<citation needed>

only one proof of concept has been done so far according to the article. would be cool to see a more vigorous explanation of the process.
Yes, wait for evidence that it's going to cause you problems longer term. Having had two friends go into institutions because of this very problem, I'll never touch the stuff again. It may be that it's not causal. It may be genetic. But according to the doctors in the hospital it's a common coincident factor they see in cannabis use.

Glad to see it's being investigated.
Unless you use the word to describe a different type of tree than the standard Ulmus minor elm, elms = elms.
Northwest Hip-Hop Group Bad Habitat of Surreal Music
lol oops, guess I missed them posts.
They're running the same software.
Note: This is a PlayStation game!

It's a key fact which you have to keep in mind when reading this article and considering it for use on PCs. Console copy protection is today important, but not critical as PC copy protection is. Chances are, this protection would have been instantly defeated on a reasonably high-profile PC game.
I went through a similar period too. Turned out to be burn out. It really does creep up on you. Doing a startup work and studying EE is probably too much. In my case it was a day job, moonlighting at a startup and a part-time Masters in software engineering.

Hope your girlfriend is making you have some quality down time. If she is high maintenance, then .... ;-)

My solution was to simplify my life, cut back on TV and take up meditation, ditch the Masters and the startup and build a career and a social life. Your stress levels go way down when you finally learn not sweat over all the materialistic desires. Personally I'm wary of supplements, healthy eating is a simpler and more reliable strategy.
Ideas and advice are worthless without execution. This is why so many successful people are perfectly happy to have their brains picked.
I wish more cities would build connecting mass transit/parking garages on the outskirts of the city. When I live in Boston, I used to drive into Alewife all the time and then take the Red Line into Cambridge or downtown. Now that I'm in the Bay Area, I'll usually park at Daly City and then BART in when I have an occasion to go into the city.

Now if only BART covered more than that narrow corridor near downtown...
I strongly believe the connection is at least partly causal. And since there is no way to know if you are predisposed to schizophrenia or not, you're basically just rolling the dice on your mental health.

That being said, it's pretty much a miracle drug when used for medical purposes. And even using it socially isn't that bad as long as your brain is already fully developed and you aren't abusing it.
> I do know that if there was a silver-bullet language that was 100% "secure", everyone would be using it.

This is completely false. Almost nobody in the software industry cares about safety. This can be proven trivially just by comparing how much more popular C and C++ are compared to memory-safe languages.
VCs are all about competing with existing startups. That's the #1 most used play in their playbook (same with YC and angels). See the paragraph of most TechCrunch posts about any new startup and you will see a list of similar ones that came before. For example: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/cardpool-wants-to-buy-and-s...
From what we read, there was a bureaucrat and one ideas creature. The ideas creature sold the scheme to Eve and bureaucracy intervened to punish Eve and one innocent bystander.

Moral of the story - watch people that only have 'ideas' and do your start-ups legal work properly:)
Seeing as we have two totally different results from different people, my conclusion is that even though the madlibs style can improve your conversion rate, it's too easy to get it wrong and actually reduce your conversion rate.

The majority of websites have used the standard sign up form, and it's known and recongized by most users. It's risky to to go with something like this that could have a strong negative impact if you do it wrong.
There's part of me that actually feels relieved at this news. If these are the same people enforcing the Patriot Act, I feel like I have a fighting chance now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#M...
Robert Baer, the author of the article, is a good (and very qualified) writer on intelligence issues. His book about his experiences in the CIA, See No Evil, is one of my favorites: http://www.amazon.com/See-No-Evil-Soldier-Terrorism/dp/14000...
Anyone else sick of drawn out human interest stories at the beginning of news articles?

WRT to the article:

Most E.I.R.’s receive a monthly stipend of up to $15,000 to sit and think for about six months.

That is a horrible way to create successful products. Good entrepreneurs take action as much as they deeply ponder ideas.
If you want a secure system, you'll have to answer how is the secure Haskell VM different than the "secure" Java VM, or Python VM, or Flash VM?
Yes, you need to first create a prototype or at least avery good detailed set of drawings to explain how the product will work and all the features (buttons, handles, colors, shape etc).

Once you have the basic construction of the product you can pitch it to investors or manufacturers and see if you can convince them to take some risk and work with you on it (both of then).
No, web browser [form] buttons are not pretty.
I read one of pg's essays not too long which had a section along the lines of, "too much in your view = too much to process." I started putting this idea into practice with a purging of nonsense in my work area and noticed a slight improvement.

I've been looking for something like this for a while. This app just needs to have a preference to disable alt + tab
Should not be a matter of belief. Should be a matter of science.
Ideally, cities should be structured so that automobiles are used on special occasions, not for day-to-day transportation. I have the good fortune of living in Cambridge, MA where I can be car-free.
Agreed (first part). There's certainly plenty of tech out there that would have made this more anonymous - these guys just didn't use it.
It is very unlikely that so many kids that are not even 21 years old are self-medicating.

The article does not mention it very clearly, but these are actually results on a study following kids from birth, interviewed at roughly 5,14, and 21 years after birth.
More recently, the developers of the iPhone game BloodnGuns built an anti-piracy level that would only be seen by those playing a cracked version. It placed the player in an arena with a never-ending wave of killer chickens armed only with the weakest weapon and no way to advance.

The forum posts went like: "Hi I can’t seem to get past the first level. I’m too slow. Only a pistol. Too many chickens. Any help with that? Suggestions?" It was great.
... and then get accused of being blunt?
"Self-medication" doesn't necessarily mean you read medical journals then decided the objectively optimal thing to do is to toke up. Instead it means that someone 1) decided that getting high sounds like it could be a pleasant experience or otherwise worth trying (i.e. possibly correlated with feeling unhappy or off-kilter to begin with). 2) this person decided to keep toking up because it improves their mental state somehow.
Try Haskell now with interactive tutorial
Christ onna bike. They seem to have gone out of their way to invent charts that are even more confusing than pie charts. Let's do an annulus! With a wavy edge! And then differently-sized hemicircles... wha?

This is interesting information (eg % of online vs in-store clothing purchases) but badly presented.
http://bradoneill.com/abiding-by-rajeevs-rule Awesome.
.NET PubSubHubbub Subscriber Client
If I were to play pop psychologist, I think we have some fairly simple fixes that we want to work because they're cool/sexy/etc, and some simple fixes which we don't want to work because they're "stupid" or sound marketing-y.

For example, in the original madlibs test, where seven things changed, we want to attribute the change to the madlib element (which was sexy and creative) rather than to e.g. the text on the conversion button changing. I've gotten 20% lifts out of "stupid little things" like that before, and seen good writeups of the same from other people. But e.g. designers do not want to hear that the thing they spend 98% of their time on is essentially meaningless and the elements of the page which they scrutinize least carefully -- like microcopy or button text or (in one memorable test) which way the stock photo model is facing dominate the measurable results. This is like how doctors do not want to hear that the difference in clinical outcomes due to professional experience is totally dwarfed by the difference in clinical outcomes due to following checklists. (On the plus side, designers don't kill anybody for their professional pride.)

In general, I think the point of A/B testing is that you should ruthlessly soulcrush what you want with what the data actually tells you. I respect HN folks enormously, but I'm not hearing "I tested it and it worked" -- I'm hearing "I've got a great theory on why your data does not conform to reality. Reality is, of course, what I predict it to be."
There's also q10, which is basically the same thing, I think.

http://www.baara.com/q10/
Using Uninitialized Memory for Fun and Profit
Dilbert, what did you accompish this week?
Marketers and game designers are just catching onto the notion of achievements (fake or otherwise), and are planning on harnessing it.

Take a look at this DICE presentation that follows these lines:
http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the...
A great read, but... Most people says Israel did it even though nobody has a proof of the case. Israel is the usual suspect in any death of a Palestinian terrorist, and so far there has been little more than the usual suspicious. A couple of Palestinians were arrested, that seems to be it.

The author says the lesson to whomever killed that guy is that nowadays you cannot get away with it. My question is -- who exactly did not get away with it this time?
True. Made a few adjustments and I think it looks a bit better already: http://twitpic.com/15t9cc/full
As does my post, although I'm disappointed in the distribution of karma points on both.

Since child porn predates both wifi and the web, wifi encryption is just a band-aid when it's advocated as a solution to distribution of illegal content. People determined to use the broadband connections of others to mask their usage need only google things like 'break wpa encryption' and find adequate means, and they have plenty of incentive to be determined. Which still leaves the unfortunate middle-man with the same scenario of having his computer confiscated, but only now with even less of an idea of how to avoid the same problem in the future.

Besides that, my bias is instilled from seeing coffeeshops and similar small businesses inevitably annoy paying customers because of snafus with wifi ecryption, e.g. an older mac laptop that doesn't understand WPA2. My opinion is that this does greater damage than the boogie-men of unsecured wifi will ever do.

To again invoke the analogy of car theft, where I live it's considered more sensible to leave your vehicle unlocked and nothing valuable in plain sight than to tint the windows.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ycombinator.com+%s

replace %s with search terms.
Except games can't and will never be run off-site as a service - the technical capabilities for OnLIVE are not and will never be available in the US.

More and more games will be moved to models that require a persistent internet connection though - the article does a good job of pointing out that winning the battle for just two months is nearly "good enough".
It seems so very implausible to me that one of the most experienced and most revered intelligence agencies in the world would fail to recognize security cameras as a viable threat to their operation. Seriously?

What seems more likely to me is that they were sending a very clear message: even with one of the most advanced surveillance and counter-intelligence networks in the world, we can still put two dozens operatives on the ground, run a complex mission with military precision, kill the target, and disappear before you know it's happened. There's nowhere you can hide from us.
WIP, but frontpage on ycombinator. Good work!

By the way, if you like this, feel free to subscribe to http://haskell.reddit.com/
Yeah, that is what I meant by self medication (similarly, many do this with alcohol and nicotine).
"possibly correlated with feeling unhappy or off-kilter"

Very likely, it's called puberty.
To me that does not mean they are "self-medicating" though.
Well, a few people probably bothered with the forums. Everyone else just figured that the game sucked, and made a mental note to never buy (or pirate) your games again. And they told their friends.
I agree with the article's overall thesis, but the example used -- Hartford, CT -- wasn't convincing. Having lived in Hartford and knowing quite a bit about the history there, I think the proliferation of parking was just another symptom rather than the cause of the urban decline.

The downtown core had already fallen into decline when the Interstate got punched through and when most of those parking lots got created; the Interstate (I-84) was a very conscious form of "urban renewal."

The elephant in the room is the phenomenon usually called "white flight" -- there was a sort of positive feedback loop created by the introduction of the automobile after WWII, where people who could afford cars discovered that they could live outside the cities where there was more room, and as they did so the urban core areas become less desirable places for people with means to live. This fed on itself, until the urban core areas became economic and racial ghettos, and the surburbanites started demanding big freeways so they could get in and out to work more easily. Those freeways were constructed by bulldozing the ghettos, sometimes with ill-concealed racism.

That pattern was a big part of what occurred in Hartford, which until very recently was a place that people from the surrounding areas just didn't go except to work, buy drugs, or catch the occasional Whalers game (and not enough of the latter). That is starting to change, or so I've heard, but slowly.

But it's not like the parking lots caused the decline; the parking lots were only created after things had already started to go downhill. They represented a sort of coup de grace to cities, since they oftentimes involved bulldozing beautiful buildings the likes of which will probably never be rebuilt, but they were a predictable effect after the people with money and influence departed for the suburbs.
You have to make it really obvious.

>Some people even thought it was funny when the fairy character, who normally offers players helpful advice, instead told them they were playing a modified game.

I found that hilarious.
There's always someone who leaves a comment like this.
It is ironic that so much development time went into features designed for people that didn't pay for it. If they used the time (and skill) to make their game better, maybe more people would have bought it?

(The computing landscape has also changed significantly since 2001. With hardware support for virtualization, techniques like debugger detection just don't work. The attacker can make his computer behave however he wants, at a level far beyond your control.)

It's probably best to just ignore piracy, because your game is going to be pirated no matter how advanced you think your protection is. Remember, people take their xboxes into expensive microprocessor fabs and use electron microscopes to figure out how to bypass the piracy detection. And, there is only one of you, but millions of people with plenty of time to spare that want to break your copy protection just to spite you. You are going to lose, so why even waste your time? The only people hurt by piracy protection are you and your users -- and that's a pretty silly demographic to try and hurt.

If your game is good, plenty of people will pay for it. Don't worry about the pirates; they wouldn't have bought your game anyway.
EIRs often see pitches because they are often looking for startups to join as executives. Not because they are looking to steal ideas (although I guess this happens.)
In general, buttons that stand out more get clicked more. Ugly things tend to stand out better. In fact, 'standing out' may be a passable proxy for measuring 'ugly.' In a similar trend, annoying TV ads were found to be more effective than non-annoying ones because people remembered them better.
Well, Command-Shift-F fullscreen mode in mvim (Mac's vim gui, i'm not sure if it is also supported in gvim variants on X11) gives you the same if used with an appropriate colorscheme (I use vividchalk)
I like how the first sentence in the post is, "Please don't post this [to] proggit; it's still WIP." I guess HN is not proggit ;)
Screening potentially good projects has a cost. Optimizing this screening should be the focus point.

The $150 fee, as well as the connection criteria, is not a very good screening filter. It test if the project promoter has $150 to give away and is able to make connections with members of NYA. Does this tell if the project is good ?

Would Facebook, in its very early stage, be detected this way ? I doubt it. YC, with its particular and unique project screening process, might have.
What is a tire kicker? I keep seeing that phrase and I don't know what it means.
Wow. This looks great. Maybe I'll finally get around to trying Haskell!
I really don't like the drug culture on sites like Reddit. Otherwise interesting content, but non-stop pro-marijuana stuff in your face.

I'm anti-drugs (except for approved OTC/Rx drugs), personally. Keep it real, I say.
I'd really like to see more descriptions of people applying AI to hard-but-not-commercially-interesting problems.
Really Useful Web Tutorials You Should Have Read in February 2010
Sometimes, I will use vim in a virtual terminal instead of my normal ubuntu desktop. The switch back and forth takes more time than a standard alt+tab which seems to trigger something in my brain to stick with it longer than using vim `normally'.
Should be, except that the science has been corrupted by special interests.