skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A quick response to your comment above: "Oh lord, I don't even watch the Daily Show and Conan which seem to be mindless trite that other people watch. Heck I don't even know what these shows are."

A friendly warning: be wary of thinking yourself superior to others, especially intellectually, or assuming that calling something "mindless trite" (or tripe) makes you smart. What makes you smart is your own knowledge, not whether you can put various forms of entertainment down.

I'm a grad student and have been teaching freshmen for the last two years, some of whom have the know-it-all disease that you might be manifesting. If you haven't watched The Last Lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo , do so. Notice the part where Randy tells the story of a mentor telling him, "If people perceive you as arrogant, you won't be able to accomplish what you want to accomplish." I would say the same to you, especially with comments like this:

"You have yet to demonstrate actual evidence of adults having the proper wisdom," which is a) vacuous and b) will make people think less of you.

Anyway, you'll likely perceive my comment as a) demonstrating my inferior intelligence or b) hostile to you. I make it anyway out of hope rather than expectation.
Hackers have now solved every problem they face? None left? This sort of awe-of-our-own-brilliance seems more likely to retard the progress of this community than advance it.
Then flag it and move on.
I'm going to write this as a high-school drop-out that did very well:

Finish that college and forget about that startup, assuming you're in a halfway decent college and a somewhat useful discipline.

I know you've been asked to speak about your experience, but keep in mind you've been asked because of your success, and the road behind you is littered by the corpses of those that didn't make it.

Starting a business, while in college, or out of it, is in large part luck if it is successful. By talking to people about what you've achieved you may give them the impression that this is easier than it looks, so stress the amount of luck that went in to it, to make sure they can weigh the odds accordingly.

Starting early or late isn't really much of a decision, the longer you wait the more knowledge you have, so the bigger the chance that you will succeed the first time, but by then the people that started earlier will have failed once already and will have learned from that as well. It works out about even.

Being a 'domain expert' is limiting your business to something very small right away, better to be general and to know how to procure the services of domain experts!

You know you have a 'right idea' when it starts moving under its own power, instead of you having to push it.

Finding investors is for a very lucky few, better concentrate on realistic scenarios for bootstrapping.

Possible additions to your list:

- the value of networking

- keep your fixed costs DOWN! (even today I still do this)

- make a nest egg as soon as you can afford it

- live healthy, running a startup is like top sport
Does anyone obey the "turn off electronic equipment" requests on planes anymore?
Slapping a 25% tariff on Chinese imports would be a terrible move from a diplomatic point of view. The CCP's main pillars of legitimacy are the economy and protecting national honour. If the U.S. put a 25% tariff on Chinese imports the CCP would likely hit back hard or else they would look weak to the Chinese public. Mr Krugman should think of who lends the money to pay for U.S. deficits.
Results 1 - 20 of about 32,000 for "paypal stole my money". (0.29 seconds)

No, Paypal's thefts are not generally about issues with Visa/MC, but rather with Paypal unilaterally deciding that an account is "fraudulent", and Paypal deciding to permanently keep all funds in that account. This is in addition to their broken dispute resolution process as well. Using Paypal is a risk that a corporation should be required to disclose to all investors in bold print. "WARNING: THIS COMPANY USES PAYPAL TO PROCESS PAYMENTS AND THUS MAY BE PUT OUT OF BUSINESS AT ANY TIME WITHOUT NOTICE."
I agree with many postings here but would like to add the following perspective. I dislike labels and "roles" so I would suggest thinking in the following way - you like creating good, viable solutions. You are prepared to go above and beyond to make something work well and work in all applications.The best and fastest way of achieving this is to meet with people who could use what you do and find out what they need. If you use this as an optimization tool, I believe the "selling" part will take care of itself.
No list of iPhone development resources is complete without the Three20 framework, which provides various UI (and other) components extracted from the Facebook app and used all over the place.

http://github.com/facebook/three20
Right. And it uses jruby for parsing.
Completely useless article. If you're going to criticize something, present an interesting solution. Otherwise, stop trying to increase your hit count.

I do agree that the labels can be confusing and should probably be changed to the same way roads are handled: text perpendicular to the road, making it easy to distinguish.
so many people follow the crowd that any time someone doesn't, the crowd assumes there's some ulterior motive.

I wish people would recognize that it is oppression that is wrong and not the latest form of oppression to be declared politically incorrect that is wrong. But that ideal is not how the human animal works unfortunately.
It is not the User's Fault
False analogy.
patio11: I certainly wasn't implying you drink.
(A few downvotes to my post tell me that people thought I was attacking you)
one more illusion dismissed
http://kuler.adobe.com/#create/fromacolor is a pretty nice resource for creating and finding pleasing colour schemes.
I'll second this article, having for a lot of my life always opened an account at a local bank and in recent years switched over wholly to USAA, they are head and shoulders above anyone I have banked with. I have always had my insurance through them, so cannot really compare them to anyone else, but I have been so happy with them you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming away.

I feel bad that my children may not be able to use them for insurance as well (me being the air force brat, not them).
China's Class of 1977 - First university entrance exams in a decade
Because, thats the American dream. We dont want to give up on the dream by confessing most of us may never make more than 200K. Do we?
Interesting. Why did you assume Afghanistan? I had America in mind...

It is much harder to take over a country where everyone is already self-sufficient. It would be hard to take over Africa, as many villages are more or less self sufficient. They are not doing great but they can survive without a Starbucks. The same in Afghanistan. If someone has a herd of goats, a well, and the ability to grow some edible plants, they might be alright and will keep fighting.

Now try shutting down power, water, hospitals and grocery stores in US and see what happens. The most advanced a society is, the more dependent the people are dependent on multiple layers of private and governmental services. And I guess, that makes them in a certain way more vulnerable.

(How did I even think of this? I witnessed what happened when there was a large power outage in Ohio last year).

> I suspect even Americans who live in relative luxury and have all the above would fight to the death aginst (say) Chinese soldiers patrolling their cities.

I think you have a very optimistic view of our fellow Americans. I saw them get desperate when they couldn't take a shower for 2 weeks. Another 2-3 month and many would have pledged allegiance to the first country providing hot showers and hot egg mcmuffins.
I've never heard that usage before, and I was an English major.
I am talking about how to, given some code in an arbitrary language and you wanting to change the color of some construct, do that with built-in emacs mechanisms. I think going to a web page, pasting your code, tweaking, and then putting some random lisp back into emacs is a waste of effort when Emacs already has this functionality built in.
Also see http://www.findabetterbank.com
This has "Up-to-date checking, savings and money market account information for over 11,000 US cities and towns and over 53,000 branch locations."
Cloaking device makes objects invisible – to infrared light anyway
Is that $200K inflation adjusted?

Is anyone guaranteeing that the threshold will never ever be lowered?

Perhaps like Joe the Plumber they aspire to someday make that much money?

Perhaps they care about how the people who make that much money will have that much less capital?

For that matter, it's a straight transfer from the nation's stock of private capital to public spending. That has bad effects.
Jimmy Wales Wants Me Dead (The Neutrality Of This Article Is Disputed)
It would be nice to know what the framework is for rather than who made it.
Sharebuilder is indeed nice. I had to close my account because my employer has to pre-approve all market trades, and Sharebuilder does not integrate with their system for that. (The joys of working for an investment bank...)
I would love a similar guide for Android-based phones like the Nexus One. Anybody know of such a link?
A friendly warning: be wary of thinking yourself superior to others, especially intellectually, or assuming that calling something "mindless trite" (or tripe) makes you smart. What makes you smart is your own knowledge, not whether you can put various forms of entertainment down.

Why the hell are you trying to pyscho-analyze me? Alright, I made a dumb comment and will try to avoid that in the future.

"You have yet to demonstrate actual evidence of adults having the proper wisdom," which is a) vacuous and b) will make people think less of you.

Lady and gentleman, this is called an appeal to authority. Calling my comment stupid and dumb isn't addressing the issue. Demonstrate why it is dumb and stupid.

Anyway, you'll likely perceive my comment as a) demonstrating my inferior intelligence or b) hostile to you. I make it anyway out of hope rather than expectation.

Well I don't know what to think about this. I respect some adults, and know that I am not most experienced person in the world, don't know everything, and can be wrong. However, I won't be tricked by logical fallacies.

You know, I actually think beyond "HAHAHA, I am superior" steps sometime. Not alway successful mind you, but enough to meta-analyze myself.
Just because it was the hardest thing you ever did doesn't mean starting a business has to be the hardest thing every student's done. Plenty of businesses have grown out of hobby sites set up in the spare time by college students.
I've found this part really amusing (re. nondeterminism of multithreaded programs in a real environment):

"To offer a third analogy, a folk definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again
and to expect the results to be different. By this definition, we in fact require that programmers of
multithreaded systems be insane. Were they sane, they could not understand their programs."
The solution is pretty obvious: don't put highway labels on top of intersections.
Oh, come on, you're cherry picking the features that suit your argument. If we include "garbage collected", that gets rid of C and C++. If we include "dynamically typed", that gets rid of OCaml, ML, Haskell. If we include "single namespace for functions and variables", that gets rid of Ruby, Io, and Perl. Now we're down to JavaScript, Python, and Scheme, which, yes, are all in basically the same family of languages. If you add the (admittedly subjective) feature "small language spec", that gets rid of Python, and we're left with JavaScript and Scheme as the only two mainstream languages with that particular feature set.
"I think you have a very optimistic view of our fellow Americans. I saw them get desperate when they couldn't take a shower for 2 weeks. Another 2-3 month and many would have pledged allegiance to the first country providing hot showers and hot egg mcmuffins."

Well I am not an American but I have lived in the USA. I think underestimating Americans as weak hedonists who don't have the iron in their souls for battle would be to make the same mistake the Japanese did in WW2. The Japanese high command (except famously Yamomoto) actually believed that Americans were soft and decadent and couldn't stand up to the tough Japanese soldiers. That didn't turn out so well even before the atom bomb.

As to getting desperate about no showers, sure if in peacetime your infrastructure broke down for whatever reason you'd get desperate. But when you are at war, and when you are under invasion (an invasion of the United States is well nigh unimaginable today, but just as a thought experiment), the mindset is probably very different.
Hrm. I might be mistaken, but isn't the restriction on transmitting devices? It'd make a difference, I think, on how much they'd care about what you're using at the time.
>> What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

You are not as experienced as you think you are.

I wish someone I respected had told me this when I was a college student. In college, I thought I was super-awesome. I thought I was already a leader. I thought I was qualified to manage a 100-person company. I thought I didn't have much else to learn; I just wanted to start a company so I could grow it and sell it and make a ton of money like everyone else.

Now I know that I am merely above-average and lucky. I know that for every problem I face, there is someone more experienced than I who has already solved that problem, thrice-over, and wants to help me. If I had known this 10 years ago, I think I would have sought out a lot more advice, been much more receptive to criticism, and been a better entrepreneur.

Note: obviously this is 100% personal and anecdotal. I may have been the only a-hole in college who needed to hear that message, so YMMV.
1. Don't mess around, just do it.

2. Aim high
This article is about the banking system in the United States. Checks are a necessary evil there right now. They are slowly fading away, but still exist. They still exist because there is an established system to process payments with them. It was a big investment to create that system and it will be a big investment to replace it with something better.

I think some things move slowly in the US because of just how massive the economy is here. There is a lot of inertia.

What country do you live in?
Don't you mean Africa?
At The Tea Party
Aside: this is why I always purchase the "business" plan. It's usually $20-$30 more per month than the equivalent residential, but that's a small price to pay to have to remove the ISP's draconian rules.
Yes, the Japanese knew they were totally fscked when we kept slugging it out in The Slot, culminating in a battle where in one night action we lost 2 admirals. The southern end of The Slot gained the name Iron Bottom Sound....
They share only one defining feature? Bullshit. If we include "garbage collected", that gets rid of C and C++. If we include "dynamically typed", that gets rid of OCaml, ML, Haskell. If we include "single namespace for functions and variables", that gets rid of Ruby, Io, and Perl. Now we're down to JavaScript, Python, and Scheme, which, yes, are all in basically the same family of languages. If we include the (admittedly subjective) feature "small language spec", that gets rid of Python, and we're left with JavaScript and Scheme as the only two mainstream languages with those particular defining features.

If I were describing JavaScript to someone who was a programming language expert but somehow was never exposed to it, I would describe it as "Scheme, with C syntax, no tail calls, and a strange prototype-based object system".
How is this differnt/What benifits does it offer compared to the many other pastebins available these days?
Really nice one, and it would be better if you could can more settings like fonts and mode-line-inactive.
USAA has a great reputation and is a wonderful institution, but I wouldn't simply say "best". I'm a member of Alliant Credit Union and receive 1.75% interest checking and 2% interest on savings. It's a credit union so they aren't trying to hit me with fees or teasing me with intro-rates. Heck, they even give me a FREE credit score without a hard pull every 3 months! I can deposit checks by scanning them (just like USAA), but there's no cool iPhone app. I get free ACH transfers to other institutions. The one thing missing is ATM reimbursement, but for the interest rate I can deal with going to one of the co-op network ATMs (or other free ATMs).

USAA does have an excellent reputation and they are an excellent institution. But "best" really depends on what you need. The most convenient ATMs for me are all free with Alliant and I get higher interest. You might prefer the ATM reimbursements and might have no qualms about getting no interest on balances under $1,000.

There are often better options than Citibank, Bank of America and Chase. There are even for-profit banks that offer really good terms such as SalemFive (http://www.salemfivedirect.com/) of which I'm also a customer.

This isn't my website, but a fellow HN reader is responsible for it so I'll plug it: http://www.bankfox.com/. It tracks interest rates, features, even bank health and it has a wonderful, clean interface.
Because they have been brain washed.

The few who make $200k have to keep feeding lies and propaganda to lots of stupid idiots who will never make $200k so they can do their bidding for them. So they can go to "Tea Parties" and town hall meetings and foam at the mouth against (or for) a bill they haven't even read.

It is completely baffling me that people who would benefit most from a public options are against it. I understand why Donald Trump or any other billionaire would be against, but why are people on the verge of poverty, who are rabidly opposed to free health-care.

I tip my hat to Lippmann and Bernays. Propaganda can really create wonders (or horrors depending on which side you are on).

What is most scary about America (at least to me personally) is the amount of of people that are so easy to control and manipulate.
The Internet is also known for its series of tubes.
I'm a college student who wants to start a business, these are the questions that I'd like answered:

- do it full-time or on the side?

- what kind of advice should I not listen to?

- My skills are programming and designing, what kind of stuff should I learn?

- do I really need to move to a technology-rich country? (For the effects of your talk, maybe you should change country for city.)

- how do you get customers and do sales if you are an introvert geek?

- what to look for in a cofounder?
Strangely, this is the first article about or by Randi that I've seen on Hacker News. I'd never heard of him until now.
Javascript's scoping is also closer to Scheme's lexical scoping, I think. If you always use var for local variables, their scope will always be the immediately enclosing function. With Python, the scope of a variable is less clear. To me, the combination of first class functions, anonymous function syntax, and lexical scope are very high on the list of features that make a language "Scheme-like."
Hell, can you name a piece of software that was last updated 5 years ago that you still find useful?

Yes, tons. For example, the firmware for my car's electronic fuel injection (EFI). A lot of software can't easily be updated, or lasts far longer than originally intended.

Treating software development as solely an engineering discipline is, in my opinion, a mistake. That being said, the vast majority of software projects today would benefit greatly from that approach.
No. All electronic devices.
I'm with you on this. Not only am I confused about the Hacker News component of this story, I'm confused about the "news" component of this story. If he was, say, a politician married to a woman who had voted against every law recognizing homosexuals as equal members of society, this would be news albeit not hacker news.

As it is, it simply isn't newsworthy. It might be titillating or perhaps surprising to people who bothered to hang the wrong label around his neck. That's about it.
I agree with your suggestion that he ought to have written this post. I also suggest that there are many types of blog posts that ought to be written. That doesn't mean they ought to be on the front page of Hacker News.
If they don't go straight to their comp then they usually won't remember - with a new brand that is.
And despite what our habits may be most people don't have a laptop open while watching TV.
It was not scientific, but we saw ZERO uptick in sign ups while running millions of TV impressions. I would never run TV ads trying to get traffic for an unknown web startup again.
It's my new best friend! Thank you so much!
Functional Fixedness - The Candle Problem
Tell HN: HR 3590 (Healthcare) Passed the House
Yea 219
Nay 212

Edit: Fixed vote tally.
FWIW, he only gave 27 names, so it's safe to assume that the other 13 were names like Brooks, Sage and DeBenedictis (the overall winner.) Here is the list of finalists: http://apps.societyforscience.org/sts/69sts/finalists.asp

So not all gloom and doom for white America. Yeah the children of immigrants were over-represented with respect to their numbers here in the US, but if you step back and look at the global picture, then they are just about proportional. And I think its a good sign that the US is still an attractive place for the worlds intellectual elite to come and raise children.
Too late. Health insurance companies have just increased their premiums by at least 20%. And the bill hasn't passed yet. 0ur company will start taking salary pay cuts starting next month based on this.

> This bill is gonna cost 2-5X what they say, and is gonna bankrupt small/medium companies.

The health insurance companies raised the premiums even without the bill passing. Blame them. Don't blame the bill. If they can't stay solvent, then fuck them, let them be taken over by the government just like the banks, or even better let them go bankrupt. As inefficient as the government is, at least voters can have some control over the government, as of now voters have not control over the health insurance companies.

If other countries can provide better health care, at lower total cost, with better coverage and have better over-wall health and life expectancy, so can we. So far, this whole health bill debacle has demonstrated 2 things to me: 1) our legal system is corrupt and 2) a large swath of our people are brainwashed and easily controlled by fear and propaganda. 2) is the expected result of a declining and failing education system.
I actually just had a discussion with a group of students and advisors from the UofM center for entrepreneurship Friday. I think the 3 take-away points from my speech were:

1. You know you want to be an entrepreneur when you don't feel right doing anything else. This life is too short to spend it doing something you hate.

2. Be Flexible. Be passionate. But don't let your passion get in the way of your flexibility. We're all attached to our ideas. But sometimes you have to be open to the possibility that no one wants what you want them to want.

3. (this is the single most important piece of advise I could give anyone, no matter what they decide they want to do with their life) Learn how to tell a story. If you can become a great storyteller, you can succeed in whatever it is you decide to do with your life.
Speed mostly, but also the camera, ability to customize, widgets, the screen and hardware, the android 2.1 operating system, the many Google apps such as Google Voice and Google Goggles. I mean there are clearly some UI advantages that the iphone has where the equivalent in android is a little frustrating, but overall I think this Nexus One is a million times better than the 3G. I'm not talking about the iPhone 3GS, which I never owned. I'm comparing the Nexus One to my iPhone 3G.