skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it is ridiculous that you and I can't invest in our friend's companies without significant enough hassle that no small company would be interested in such investment (I wouldn't take money from non-accredited investors, even if we really needed money). I'm sure I'd do better investing in Dropbox and Weebly and Wufoo than I would investing in the stock market in general.

I don't recall a conversation about Barack Obama, but I talk a lot, and I don't remember everything I say, so it could have happened. Anyway, I think it'd be a great reform of our investment law, if normal people could buy stock in small companies, without all the hoops and craziness required. This is particularly true now that IPOs are so much less common; it takes years before normal folks have the right to invest in a new company. SOX has eaten up even more of the extremely rapid growth curve of new companies, from the perspective of regular people.
At least "scroll to end" or "scroll more than x pixels" is easy to add, and would work just as well as long as your pages don't fit on screen.
I don't think you really believe that logic.

Hypothetically, suppose it turns out that black drug dealers are far more likely than white drug dealers to be violent criminals [1]. Would you then favor prosecuting drug crimes committed by blacks, but not by whites? Depending on what the numbers work out to be, you will get the same statistical "bang for buck" that you would prosecuting drug sellers but not sex sellers.

[1] Lets give this hypothetical a TV face: take Weeds as the average white drug dealer, and The Wire as the average black drug dealer. Of course, this is only statistics - there are violent white drug dealers and harmless black drug dealers, even in the hypothetical.
How about playing an instrument? Acting in or directing a play? Dance? Painting? Drawing? Are these recreational activities, educational, both, neither? Is competing in a sport at a high level more or less educational than these things?

I read somewhere the suggestion that basketball and football players in big time programs have the option of majoring in their sport, just like a Dance, Drama or Art major might. At least it would drop the pretense that those students are doing anything else.
Considering we're gossiping on PG's dime, are we allowed to describe his Nerd's manifesto as "a steaming pile of stereotypes"?
The populist definition of "nerd" has shifted significantly with the times.

In the 1980s, saying you had a computer at home could have you cast as a "nerd." In the 1990s, saying you used the Internet could automatically make you a nerd. In the 2000s, saying you met your girlfriend (or had a girlfriend you'd never met) online could automatically make you a nerd. A similar shifting of definitions over time even occurred earlier.. consider the reputations of "sci-fi" between 1950 and 1980 (Star Wars, anyone?)

I think nerds are, perhaps, just "edge cases." The activities aren't nerdy, per se, but it's just that the mass public hasn't caught up with the ideas yet. What's nerdy right now might be the next big craze.
Don't confuse 'nerds' with 'geeks'.
I agree about the overcount vs undercount thing, but I think Clicky's method is much closer to the "truth" of site engagement. Tabs aren't used much outside of the "power user" world. Typically when people go to a page, it is the page they are reading.

We do want to make it smarter and only ping when the tab is in the foreground, as that will make it more accurate. It's a planned update for the future.
Hey, didn't expect this to get out to HN yet, but it did. We've been planning this for a while and have had some devs excited, but it's hard to really get people on board without something concrete. We put this together over the weekend as an MVP (im writing an entire post on it with andres this week).

Hopefully using Cappuccino too. Looking forward to feedback, since this is for developers and we need to make it work for you guys.
I don't think this piece goes anywhere near "well-stated", to me it read more like a hysterical outburst. Look, I don't know who Douthat is, he's not one of the NYT writers I read (I'd rather read Dowd for her dazzling word games). And I don't care. All I care is the column he's written and that's the way it should be, I think.

Now, the Salon essay's main point seems to be to argue that "threat-induced censorship" is not "a uniquely Islamic practice". I totally agree with that, other groups also dabble in such threats (and sometimes carry them out, too, e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence). However, carrying-out a unified agenda of world-wide censorship through political influence (http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...) or down-right intimidation when that doesn't work, is quite unique to Islamic countries.

I know, because I'm a Muslim and I come from such a country.
I wonder why people spend so much time deconstructing and perpetuating a classification that has absolutely no meaning outside of highschool.
Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship? (Doctorow on the iPad)
That's from 2006, when a similar Mohammed controversy existed.
Looking for a hacker
We are a small team and in our very early stages. Our business idea has been validated by a couple of key industry executives, from the business model and funding perspective. And we have experienced high-profile advisors. Currently we are working on the prototype. The problem we are trying to solve requires expertise in crawling, search, social network APIs, and social graph algorithms. We are looking for a really good hacker to join the founding team -someone with hands on experience in -
- information retrieval, extraction
- social network APIs (linkedin, facebook, twitter)
- experience or knowledge of social graph (desired)
- social networks aggregation (desired)

We are based out of bay area, california. Contact us for any questions and/or if you are interested - hachilabs at gmail dot com .
I don't think that playing a sport or living a fraternity/sorority prevents someone from getting an education at the same time. For the people that do those things to the exclusion of their education, they deserve to flunk out and lose their place at school.
pls send me teh codez (Reddit announces Open Source Contributor award)
> if you instead define "nerds" to be "people with a lot of interest in some academic subject, and/or people who are quantifiably 'smart'"

So, the Comic Book Guy is not a nerd? Even Wikipedia calls him that.
Sorry, I've just been waiting for something like this for awhile. Really excited about it.
Ask HN: Editors For Hire?
I want to start publishing longer form articles on a regular basis but my community of editors is rather small. Does anyone have any advice for seeking editorial help, paid or unpaid?
I read that Harvard spent tons of money on building projects they could no longer afford when the market tanked. None of them had anything to do with sports, if I recall correctly.
Collective blog/wiki idea: truth learnt from life 
We all learnt lessons throughout life, and sometimes we hope that it wasn't so harsh. These are invaluable lessons one could learn and would be a waste not to share with the others. Yet life is sometimes too busy to sit down and think, let alone share. I see HN has a constant supply of lessons for startups, but the way HN functions makes it hard to dig up knowledge shared a long time ago. So I had this rough idea of creating some kind of platform that encourages individuals to share their experiences and life lessons, sort of like a wikipedia for life lessons. Anyone else interested? Any suggestions?
A well reasoned argument on why Facebook won't become "$10-$20 billion big". Big, healthy, important, certainly, but not a Google killer.

Although as one astute commentator noted, they might figure out something with the Social Graph that will make a lot of money. But that's to be determined.
this is an incredibly complex task to pull off, best of luck guys. when will it be ready for testing?
I'm a nerd and I wasn't popular in school because I simply wasn't very interested in what the others talked about. Thus, I had nothing to say really, which makes a great ground for having nothing much in common between me and other students.
"Receiving some hate mail and phone calls about a 'gay Jesus' character is a lot different than killing someone."

Threatening to burn down the theatre, kill the staff, and kill the director strikes me as more than a strongly worded email. See fundamentalists like to use what I'd call the sandwich method. First you threaten to kill someone, then you kill them, and then you take credit for killing them. These threats seem pretty clearly like step 1.
Stephen Hawking: Aliens might hate us
Doesn't that just mean that the really crazy ones in each religion are pissed off at different things?
Will there be a Business Process Management 'AppStore' in the future ?
I'm stupid, I didn't know you could hit ctrl-r repeatedly to keep searching. I use vi mode so I always try to hit Esc and then j/k but it doesn't work. Thanks for the tip!
Time to throw away your hierarchical business operating model
So what if Stone and Parker just announce to the world they are now Muslim? Wouldn't that be an easy way to solve this for them and then do whatever the hell they want? Sort of like the dentist on Seinfeld that changes religions 'just for the jokes'?

In all seriousness, it worked for some Fox News reporters a few years ago who were capture by muslim extremist. That's almost a South Park ep right there it so absurd.
U.S. Expat Taxes Drive Americans to Renounce Citizenship
The reason this is always such an "outrage" when the Muslim religion is parodied is historical.

The religion was founded on the idea of spreading the itself as widely as possible. Certain leaders (the founder himself even) achieved this through conquering and control. Which was fine thousands of years ago when being invaded was just part and parcel of life. :)

Nowadays the original edicts don't really have any answers of what to do when you get a detractor from the religious teachings (i.e. a parody such as this). Hence extremists turn to literal interpretations and go for violence.

EDIT: hmm, not that I mean to suggest Islam is a violent religion - this was meant as an explanation to the other comments that were wondering why slamming Islam elicits such a violent response from extremists compared to other religions - it is historical.

(I've scrapped all the respectful nonsense - it was a quick opinion at the end of a comment relating to something different. I never intended it to be taken so seriously :))
I was arguing prosecuting dealers as opposed to users, because it's a massive waste of money to prosecute the latter (not that that stops us from doing it, with 3 million people in jail and growing). Entirely different argument.

Regarding prosecuting black ones instead of white ones.. well we already do that, so I'd say the reality has surpassed both of us. However, as far as what I think should happen, then yes, I would differentiate between gang bangers who own corners, run protection rackets, etc and the dude in high school who sells a little weed to his friends. But as far as consistency in the law, if you're decriminalizing usage and keeping dealing criminal, then you need to apply that consistently when you catch people dealing.

Anecdotally, I think the difference you're perceiving isn't so much black/white as it is weed/hard and suburban/urban.
Pricing?
It's worth noting that this information was already available publicly before f8.
We're insanely excited an app developer submitted it :D.
JavaScript: Weighted Random Number
Still working out the exact details by talking to devs/getting feedback. Suggestions? Fyi, no up front fees or monthly minimums. ie- if you're starting out and want to use cloudomatic(flow), you don't have to be doing large volume.
We've created popular culture that doesn't value intelligence. This has an intergenerational compounding effect. When smart people aren't socially valued for their intelligence, they mate with less attractive people, and the effect is reinforced in the next generation.

The opposite is happening in India. Intelligence is a high ideal, and seen as insurance against abject poverty. Men with prestigious degrees and good careers regardless of their attractiveness generally have their pick of wives through arranged marriage. This ends up resulting in a lot of people that are both intelligent and beautiful, and the preference for intelligence is reinforced.
My point was that so much extra time and money that could be focused on improving academics is spent by the university (and by donors to the university) on irrelevant activities. I don't really care what someone does in their free time.
This is drifting offtopic, but CBG was a member of MENSA[1] and therefore falls under the "quantifiably 'smart'" category.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_Comic_Book_Guy_a_member_of_MENS...
If I had to guess, it's because a lot of us here found highschool to be a highly traumatising experience, and it comforts us to know that there were others that went through that hell.

Personally speaking, it took me more than 5 years after graduating before I could even start to believe that people actually liked me. Even today I can still see little emotional tics, learned behaviours, that I developed during that period, that I actively have to work against, as they will lead me into unsuitable responses today.
Set your privacy settings on lockdown and then put your own Id in instead of "4". This is undesirable behavior.
My experience was this. On a call to Delta on 4/20 I was told it would be Monday 4/26 before a seat was available. 15 minutes later I booked a DELTA/KLM flight to my destination that afternoon through travelocity (at a high cost).

When I complained to Delta after returning I was told the travel websites buy seats in block and resell them, so that is why they could not give me a seat. Oh, and there were several empty seats on the flight.
For still images, why would you ever go with GIF over PNG?
Are you being ironic?

Trying to break things is the best part of beta testing something.
I agree. However, this isn't a new development. It's just more in your face now.
Listen to your gut, and tell fear to fuck off.
Many people never escape the conception of themselves they developed in childhood. As banal as it is, this stuff is important.
In a number of schools, athletic departments are self-sufficient, so it's certainly possible the parent poster drew no general funds for his varsity sport participation.

Further, your argument about recreational activities for a few can be applied to pretty much every non-class activity at a university, from theater to quiz bowl to student radio. Why single out athletics?
I haven't read it yet and don't doubt that it's a great op-ed but:

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sounds like useful information for managing upwards as well. What information can you provide to your manager such that they don't need to rely on "The Twinge"?
Was this true for all users or just "4" prior to f8?
I think one of the more interesting points in the article was:
"The bottom line is this : don’t assume that an American public school experience is universal and broadly applicable social lessons can be derived from it."

In European countries, AFAIK, there's very little "Jock worship" in junior-high and hing schools, definitely nowhere near the levels I have seen here. My high school also had sports teams but the people who were in the teams were not necessarily popular. So, my simplistic answer to this social problem: downgrade the sports teams and cheer leading squads in high schools and colleges :-)
Xeni Jardin interviews Matt and Trey about the 200th episode and the Mohammed controversy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSVU-8X8T7U
If it was running 4.0 Beta then that feature doesn't work. Not sure about remotely wiping though
There will eventually be a great turning point on the web when everyone finally understands most of the privacy issues and makes a decision on whether they really want their lives to be private or not. If they go for privacy, Facebook will fizzle out--their business model depends fundamentally on invading privacy. If not, Facebook may just take over the world.
it definitely is, but it's something that has to happen. We're trying to simplify things in the first iteration at least.
Are you sure? I'm checking myself and nothing is available other than my profile photo.

/[my id]/events

data	(empty)

Maybe his privacy settings aren't as stringent as mine?
Method Developed to Identify Musical Notes at any Venue
Decentralize the web with Diaspora
Obviously some people will choose one way and some people the other. And Facebook will continue to serve those that are willing to trade privacy for convenience/connectedness.
Ask HN: Comepetitive Research for the App Store?
What tools/techniques do I have available to me to put together sales projections for an as-yet-unreleased iPhone app?

For any given app I can look at the ranking history, the price, the number of reviews, etc., but it's difficult to extrapolate that into something I can put into an investor presentation.

In certain categories (esp gaming) there are groups of app developers who have gotten together to share sales info, but those are very few data points (and not in the category in which I'll be competing).

What data are you using to come up with sales projections?
It only works with publicly listed events
"It could be said that many people consider RFCs boring. Packets containing RFC text MAY be marked as 'bored'."
I sometimes it's useful to use merge to "group" a large set of changes that all relate to one feature.

That said, if I'm working on a branch for any significant period of time, I tend to push it to the remote repository anyway. It keeps it safe and shows people what you're working on.
The terminology is secondary; the important point is that it seems like smart people are unpopular, but it's not clear whether that's true and if it is true it's not clear why.
You're right, that is obvious. I guess what I'm saying is that it will be a very lopsided split.
We must also consider that popularity is also complex

I thought that was a premise of PG's essay. To be fair, the point being made is that there may be many specific tradeoffs with many nuances.
As others have stated, this argument could be applied to any university activity. Also, it could applied to high school.

The universities are making the decision to encourage sports participation because they understand its value in education.
I disagree that it has no meaning outside of high school. In any big city, there are still many scenes which play on the old stereotypes -- the club/bar scene, rock n roll scene, bohemian scene, gay scene, etc.

For example, if you bring up that you work with computers or have a desk job in a club, it is very noticeable that you are stereotyped as "boring" and "geeky" (at least in LA). It's all part of the popularity contest that we're familiar with from high school.
With a valid sessionkey, I could get a list of the public events that any user was invited to, as well as the ones they RSVP'd for.
They mean that the conversion is defined by a function rather than a scaling factor.

The example that the manual gives is Centigrade to Fahrenheit, which, interestingly enough, is a linear function. http://www.gnu.org/software/units/manual/units.html#Nonlinea...
Launching the Green Tea Party?
There were also probably no death threats.
Similar thing happened here with Sikhs.
A young Sikh writer produced a play about child abuse in a temple (you thought catholic priests had a monopoly).
The local peace loving religious leaders threatened to burn down the city run theatre. So the play was taken off. The city then went further to suggest that all future plays with Sikh characters should be approved by the religious leaders.

Since no writer was going to go for that it simply removed all Sikh character from plays and to be careful from tv aswell.

So the result of this censorship is going to be that the only time muslims are seen on TV it will be in news reports about terrorists. Way to go guys!
It's also worth noting that a lot of facebook's initial appeal, especially when compared to Myspace at the time, beyond its aesthetic improvement, was the fact that it seemed to stand for privacy. The status quo, myspace, was a public-only profile. A facebook profile was accessible only to your contacts or to your school. The available options have slowly but continuously drifted away from that simple promise. A lot of the site's initial traction was driven by huge demand for a reasonable set of privacy controls: myspace was useful but creepy. The argument that the web has moved on in the past six years and that the demand for privacy has lessened is perhaps a red herring, though only time, consumer demand, and viable alternatives will tell: there might be more of an opportunity here than people realize.

Overall, I think this is a really interesting question that society is confronting and it will be fun to see how it plays out.

Side note: I think a lot of the tech press and blogosphere miss a lot of the subtleties here because, well, people like Arrington, Scoble et al. weren't in school at the time, making the cautious decision to open an account. This has been a revolution led by young people, who are often surprisingly concerned about their privacy and don't depend or plan on Internet celebrity for their livelihoods. It feels a bit like eternal September except in reverse: as the demographic ages, the basic tenents erode.
Voted back up out of negative territory.

I strongly oppose the sentiment (I'll avoid the colloquial "violently oppose"). But it's still an important viewpoint in a discussion like this.
For those interested, this week's South Park:
NEW YORK, April 26, 2010 - JIMMY AND TIMMY head off TO SUMMER CAMP WITH ALL THEIR HANDICAPABLE FRIENDS in an all-new episode of "South Park" titled "Crippled Summer," premiering on Wednesday, April 28 at 10:00 p.m. on COMEDY CENTRAL.

Competition is the name of the game this summer. There is no time for Jimmy and his friends to slack off. They're working to be this year's champions at summer camp. Jimmy suits up and prepares to shred in the annual surfing contest.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/news/3880

Interested to see what lines they push given recent events. They certainly have been in this territory with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripple_Fight & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_the_Down_Steroid
I seem to remember that Flurry published some aggregated analytics to their customers. You should check with them: http://flurry.com
I think the issue is knowing which are the stranded passengers and which are no longer stranded.
IPad: The Most Awesomely Average Device in Human History
I'm surprised to see CodeIgniter up there. I never got the impression it was picking up in popularity.
Reminds of a an account I read about a kid whose hippy-throwback parents didn't own a TV. He did ok socially, however, because he had access to their old music collection and played Jimi Hendrix tunes on the electric guitar.
> That said, it didn't air on TV either.

Not true. I watched TA:WP uncut on Comedy Central. I kept thinking, "well, they'll have to cut that scene" but they showed the whole thing.
Confused, especially if you think the Nexus One is intended to keep the carrier honest (e.g. using up to date Android) vs. "disrupting" them. From what this article is saying, Verizon will be selling a better Android phone, and that should make Google happy.
Answers to Your Questions on Personalized Web Tools
Navigating disagreement: How to keep your eye on the evidence
tl; dr.
Is the Android web browser really called "Android"? I thought it was Mobile Chrome, but I admit now that I look at it that the "Chrome" name doesn't appear in Android.