skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt very much that this works (it may have in the past). I'm currently in the H1B process, and the government wants my employer to demonstrate that they already have a going concern, ie. they want
- past tax returns
- proof of at least 2 years of significant revenue and profits
- demonstration of some minimum number of employees for some period of time.
How many of the folks that you see posting here about how they'd rather do thinking-type professions are actively trying to get Ben Bernanke's job? ;-)

My point is that if you took out all the barriers to entry, walked up to someone, and said, "Hey, we want you to control the economy. Seriously. No, there are no strings attached. We want you for the job," I bet most of them would take it. The reason you don't see people actively trying for this job is because there are lots of hurdles in the way. After all, we want the people who do the thinking jobs to have proven themselves first, so we know that they're not just spouting off nonsense.
If you actually think this is correct, please do some actual independent research. Most of his numbers are only acurrate if you make several extream assumptions.

EX: His 100trillion in oil infrastructure includes suburban housing with the assumption that it's only useful due to cheap oil.

EX2: Between 2002 and 2008, global demand for oil supposedly grew by about 9%, while the price of oil went up 600%. The price of oil also dropped from $147 of a high to $40 right after that and it's around 80$ right now. If you priced an earlier year say 1981 and a later year say 2009 you could say the price of oil dropped over that time frame.
You clearly don't work in Silicon Valley. Every building has dozens of Garbage Cans marked "Shred" - The default for anything on your desk is to toss it into one of those.

Nobody (except for HR, Finance and legal) keeps paper files anymore, so if you don't want a permanent record - just deliver it on paper and it will disappear. I've been through several discovery procedures, and all that anybody has ever been interested in was email. Nobody even _thought_ to ask for paper files.
3 weeks into full time startup, need your thoughts on our project
Hello HN,

My partner and I are about 3 weeks full time into our startup. We're both 22, fresh out of college and have always had web projects over the past few years. This time its more serious, we want to make a living out of our startup.

Its been a few weeks (including weekends) and we're ready to start getting people to critique, test, and feedback our project.

The site is http://www.howl.com. Its a link blogging service for people who like to share links but are too lazy to start blogging. You just paste the URL and we'll do the rest. We'd appreciate if you could give it a test run, try posting a few URLs, tell us what you think about the user experience and process, and idea as a whole. We can take the criticism :)

I know theres lots of smart ideas and opinions out there, we'd love to hear it. Thank you so much for your time.

PS. If you don't want to register, you can use (demo // asdfasdf) to login.
You might read about the Paris Salon.
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler and LLVM
How is this better than a mapping between uid and LinkedIn?
Think about allowing powerpoint uploading. turn it into a way for various people to collaborate around specific slides
I have the same problem with Hacker News. I would love to be able to filter it based on my preferences.
You left out the part where in 1. (and 1.5: Postdoc for a professor/researcher), you're the one doing the programming for someone else. ;-)
One of the things required for the H1B is a Labor Certification Application (LCA) where the employer has to demonstrate that they have tried to find americans who could fulfill any position offered, and failed. Unless you're tutoring in a very specialized area, its unlikely they could do that.
A bit disappointed. I thought this was a cleverly disguised post related to Doctor Who...
I think you should allow an option for secondary email address for communication. I don't want to use my corporate or school id for HN-related stuff.
I think in large part all of this is fueled by loss and grief, wondering what might have been, or maybe trying to lay blame as to why '_why' left.

Most of it is really over the top, and you have to wonder how the non-ruby programmers get by, without access to _why's genius or his contribution to thinking in general.

_why was just some guy, he had a nice run at it, decided that it wasn't for him in the long term and proceeded to try to hit the 'undo' button. In a way it is good that most of the stuff got saved, if not we'd have an even larger problem, which is that the scope of his actual contributions would have become the stuff of legend. At least that keeps things a little bit grounded in reality.

Credit where credit is due, but let's keep some scope here _why was an ok guy while it lasted, but he certainly was no Newton, Leibniz or Ramanujan, and he did not put the 'fun' in programming except for the relatively small number of people that learned about programming through him. And for that last we should be grateful, and we should do more of it, and we should NOT destroy what we give to others to use as a base.

Especially for someone that wrote open source libraries his actions were totally unconscionable and they negate a lot of the positive feelings I would have had to his person otherwise.
Don't completely get it. Website should explain why I need this.
_why's influence was felt beyond the Ruby community.

How?

Honest question from a python programmer who never heard about him before the "he disappeared" craze a few months back.
Dont many classifiers pick the most interesting n words and only use those to decide? Where n is something like 15.
I've never met the author of the article, but I assume he's the type of person who is bothered when his Reader unread tally switches over to the plus mark.

I mean, honestly, tweets are 140 characters or less. The average tweet takes a handful of seconds to read. Is my time so important that I can't spend a few minutes of my day learning what my friends thought was important to share with me? Must I tailor their interests down to only those that I deem relevant? Am I so bad at skimming content or choosing which content is worthy of in-depth inspection that I must have a computer do the editing for me?

Obviously, the answers to those questions are highly subjective and use-dependent. Personally, the only editing I need is the unfollow button. If I respect a person enough to want to hear what he has to say, I gladly take the risk that sometimes his output won't be immediately relevant. (As an aside, a year ago I met one of my favorite journalists. I asked how his dog was, since he had been tweeting about his new puppy. It was a nice ice breaker. I didn't follow him for dog-training updates.)

I should make a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy Twitter user. The ratio of feeds:twitters followed for me is something like 10:1.
Filter by account, then, instead of by post? With a sample body of, say, the ten or twenty of an account's most recent posts.
Agreed. Also on my list: PlanetMath and MathWorld.
I don't think there are a lot of areas in the world that can be drilled with current technology that have yet to be exploited.
This is kind of cool, like the weird, dark underbelly of app store success. FREAKISH ANIMAL HYBRIDS, 99c: "Have you ever seen a dog with the head of a bird? Or a frog with the body of a shark?" FACEBOOK STATUSES YOUR FRIENDS WILL LIKE, 99c: "Do you wish to be a bit more interesting on facebook, and not just be the dude saying “I’m bored”?
This app contains status messages that will amuse your friends, and that will definitely get you a lot of “likes” from the prettiest girls (or guys) in your friends list.
Don’t believe me? A friend of mine, Dave, has been using these messages, and at least 2 people have told how creative and funny Dave has become recently! Well, good for you Dave, now how about telling them it was all due to this app?"

It's like the ads in the back of old comic books for sneezing powder or pamphlets about how to be popular.
If I ever get mad enough about it I'll go and fight those windmills. Access should be universal.
It would be nice to have a list of such sites!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353362
I don't think this will bring in a liveable income, but it's work experience and a resume booster.

I would suggest that you get some sort of part time job to make sure that you have your loans covered at least since you just graduated college, assuming you are living with parents.

Otherwise, keep plugging away and keep creating shit you are young and have nothing to lose.
Helping the blind see with AR and OCR
Ask HN: Best resources / websites in your opinion on the www?
Funny question maybe, for a 'social bookmarking' site, but this sub-thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351584

Makes me wonder if we can't put together a list of really good resources on the web that is based on what HN members consider 'good'.
Ha, that's very cool, never saw that before. Thanks for posting.
The Ph.D is itself a long process of "doing", where you're apprenticed to an experienced researcher and do his grunt work while you prove yourself capable of original research. Writing a dissertation is work, and it goes along with a lot of unglamorous work (like a research/teaching fellowship).

I never disputed that it's possible to make a living as a "thinker", only that it's realistic to do so without first proving your worth as a "doer". The people who end up in those thinking positions are the ones who manage to slog through the doing.
With STM and persistent data structures, you're fundamentally limited by how fast you can change a single memory location; and you can't freely modify the memory location because of the risk of missed updates. Cliff's table operates concurrently over the whole data structure - there's no single bottleneck, rather every slot in the table is potentially an update location.

When I said thousands of threads, I was stressing the massively concurrent potential of Cliff's design, but more importantly, the point where the hardware is fully subscribed and physical hardware threads are frequently trying to update the data structure. If there are only 2 threads involved on a dual-core machine, depending on everything else (constant factors), I would still expect Cliff's table to be faster.

Clojure's approach is at a different level of abstraction than Cliff's approach. Probably a better analogy would be whether it's better to manufacture a car or use a travel agent. Not everybody could safely manufacture a car, but almost anyone can use a travel agent with moderate phone, social and organizational skills. But they also solve problems with radically different scopes.
I heard the BP gave a lot of money to Obama.

Maybe it have something to do with Obama wants to stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean, this is like the first oil spill in the gulf of Mexico?

Beside, isn't a whole lot of stuff got tested by Underwriter laboratory and lot of regulations and standard were simply copied from Underwriter Laboratory guidelines? This company been around for more than 200 years. Maybe private regulations have some merit. (coupled with consumer lawsuits to hold private regulatory agencies accountable)

P.S. I think one of the argument has been proposed against government regulations is that when the regulators failed, they get more money so they can do their "job" better. Another argument is that people trust government too much, so it should be left to private institutions because private institutions are trusted less thus get more scrutiny.
I don't fully agree, but I acknowledge the effort and the thought in your reply. Thanks.
Hi, thanks for the reply. What you see now is obviously early and I noticed you didn't actually try the service, so I would say try it!

The upside is the space we can evolve into: link and content discovery (like a feed of posts), unifying comment pages so that discussions can be merged around URL strings, etc.
Outside Money - Why we're bootstrapping
Agreed.

I came here thinking the title was a Spies Like Us reference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lge2_H_8IQ

Doctor.
Good point. Would it suffice to say it helps you store and save links for later, and helps you share cool links with friends quickly?
I respect your sympathy for and willingness to read what those you follow deem interesting. But I think the author of the blog post is speaking of a problem that emerges at a larger scale when you follow more & more people. Your stream becomes bigger while the amount of time you have stays the same so your options are 1) unfollow people, 2) don't read everything, or 3) put in more time. Personally, I don't like 1 or 2 because I feel like I'll miss out on timely, relevant information and 3 isn't an option for most of us. Thus, the need for a solution like the one the blog post describes. Shameless plug: here's how I'm trying to fix the problem - http://slipstre.am/
As I said, I'm fine with a filter that has poor accuracy, as long as it makes twitter marginally better.
They usually have a lot more than 15 words to choose from, though.
I'm currently solving this very problem with a much simpler algorithm and slowly letting folks into my beta over at http://slipstre.am/
Python was released in 1991; Ruby was released in 1995. If Ruby is significantly lagging behind Python at this point, it seems unlikely to make up the difference in the future.
Jack Dorsey: 3 Keys to Success
Astronomy Cast did a good bit on this; "Ep. 147: How to Be Taken Seriously By Scientists": http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-147-how-to-be-take...
You don't have to be a US citizen to have a vested interest in the US economy. America is an elephant. When an elephant collapses and dies, the whole jungle feels the impact and smells the rotting stench.
Warehouse work - working for smaller trucking companies, loading/unloading trucks and preparing shipments. Pays around $18/hr starting out.

Retail - Retail sucks if you hate what you're selling, otherwise it's not too bad. I worked in a supermarket and hated it, but a friend worked for a car parts store and absolutely loved it.

Delivery Driver - Friend who worked at car parts store switched to a driver after awhile and liked that even more. Load up the car and head out, get people to sign off and sometimes collect payments. I always thought I'd like this style job, mostly because it's so independent.

Computer repair/freelance IT work - Most people would give this a big "hell no", in high school I worked for a bunch of small companies and made $25/hr cleaning off viruses/repairing machines/building new PCs. I'd usually go into a place for 3-4hrs on weekends. If you don't hate it, you can make some decent money.

If you're fairly comfortable with computer hardware and windows, you'll get by fairly easily. For all other problems: google. The IT jobs also lead to more side work, typically the companies I worked for didn't have websites. I worked out deals with friends who were designers and asked for a finders fee for referrals I sent. (Knowing what I do now, I would've taken on the work myself at a higher rate for web development and just outsource most of it)
How is Lasik eye surgery done? The fundamentals of laser refractive surgery
How is suburban housing useful outside the context of cheap oil? Not arguing, just curious what your thoughts are.
I'd love to sign up, but apparently students and employees of eight companies can register.

Would the creator consider opening this up? Those of us who work for smaller companies and businesses would love to have the opportunity to connect without being on the same level as Googlers.
So I just posted a link to Khan Academy (linked here earlier).

So tell me, how is your service different and more exciting than say Reddit or Digg or this site? I noticed I could not add a custom title and custom description.

I do like how it grabs the webpage info, however I have seen other link aggregators that do the same thing. Most of them would be called 'social bookmarking' sites. Reddit and Digg and HN are more like 'social bookmarking' + 'commentville'.

If I could add a suggestion.. do 'social bookmarking' + 'your secret sauce' that is magical and team up with some marketers who will spread your shit around the web like wildfire so you can get some traction and then throw up some ads on there if you want to pay for the bandwidth and hopefully a sports car.

Also: fuck that guy who said "get another job". Never back down on your entrepreneurship because you WILL make it happen. It might take 10 sites to make money, or 100. Just don't give up. The world needs more people like you, and more like him to pay us smart guys. :)

One last thing: kudos on the 4 character domain.
academic libraries usually allow access to general public for <$100/month
Before you tax oil, maybe you should list out the possible unintended consequences of taxing oils and funding alternative energy?

Your proposal sound great on the surface but I am afraid that there might be a little sinister unforeseen consequences bubbling beneath. We shouldn't stop at the obvious benefit, but also explore the not-so-obvious consequences.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
Thanks for the response to my article, Elbert.

The difference between E-mail and Facebook is that email isn't designed to be social (aka it isn't designed to spread information to masses of people quickly), while Facebook is.

However, I still don't upload pictures I'm not going to be proud of, even if it's just for an email to someone. Once it's sent to someone else, I assume that it could leak to the web in any number of ways.

Perhaps that line was too harsh, but the point is that Facebook doesn't control what your friends do with the information you post on your profile. Thus, Facebook really doesn't have the ability to keep your private stuff "private," and it's dangerous to assume that they can.
> Everybody wants to be the one deciding what should be done; very few people want to be the ones actually doing it.

I'm going to tell that a colleague of mine who wants to quit his current job because everything he does is talking and negotiating (i.e. deciding or rather preparing decisions) without ever getting anything done.
http://wikipedia.com/

http://google.com/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/
I'm the other developer working on this project. Perhaps I can help explain our vision a little bit better.

Our main goal with this project is link sharing and discovery. The platform right now is very early, and we have intentionally left it open ended so that the product could evolve with the way it gets used.

People want to share links - funny YouTube videos, their new photo set on Flickr, etc. Currently, they do it on websites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. However, this space is not their focus, and as such, we think we can do it better.
http://www.ted.com

http://www.wikipedia.org

http://ocw.mit.edu
Actually, mkramlich specifically said the Republican party's message, which I think most people would agree in regards to. What the Republican party actually does in office, never mind what other parties do, is another matter, and not necessarily related in any meaningful way to aforementioned "message".
Sorry to say you have a lot of bugs going on. My location was automatically set to Toronto (I'm in Australia) and when I go to edit the first link I added it tells me I have 371 links posted.

It's also not clear how I go about deleting links.

EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something, but your scraping of media needs a bit of work. I suggest starting with http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share...
Facebook doesn't control what your friends do with the information you post on your profile

The same is true with emails. But Facebook has a unique ability over email where it can prevent basic spreading, and instead chooses the most public route by default.

I side with "Facebook is for friends" because that's what any random person will tell you they use Facebook for. Friends. That's what it's advertised as, what the UI implies it is, and it's the exact opposite of what their privacy tools do.
Research mathematician - since math is pure thought.
Haha, actually, these are still features we are working on as we speak! Not sure if this was mentioned yet, but the product is far from ready. But seeing as how HN is about startups/development, we thought we would get some really early comments and suggestions :)

Thanks for the link, will take a look.
> uneven topography all at a depth of 1 mile under the ocean.

How was this stuff built up in the first place? (honest question)
I think the answer's yes, but it can sometimes be tricky. You might try submitting to a relevant conference first, before going for a journal. It builds credibility for your ideas, and may get you good feedback on how to discuss your work in a way that authenticates with other researchers in the field (uses the right terminology in the right way, positions itself relative to existing work and appropriately cites that work, etc.). The biggest hurdle is usually finding which sub-community of researchers is interested in the kinds of problems you're studying, and then making sure your paper's written in a way such that they clearly know you're talking to them, in a way that resonates with them. You might also meet relevant collaborators at conferences. The main downside is that it costs some money to register for / travel to them.

When choosing a journal, if you're worried about it, you might want to look for one that explicitly says it uses double-blind review.

Disclaimer: I'm a researcher, but my area isn't physics, so ymmv.
A glimpse into the madness: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/three-projections-of-doctor-f...
It's a well known principle that, given a brief problem description, the less a software engineer knows about the problem domain, the easier they will judge the solution to be.
I doubt it too, for several reasons.

- RIM has its own boatload of patents, so it didn't need those.

- While its OS is mediocre from an end-user standpoint, it does have A LOT of very valuable features. Top-notch security, great push & provisioning tech, good compression etc certainly don't sound sexy, but they're the reason governments and corporations can run on a BB, something that's not true of any other modern smartphone (nor is anyone else seemingly interested in this market).

-RIM does do a fair amount of aquisitions, but they're all fairly small - 10-100 person companies. Such a large aquisition seems quite at odds with their usual approach.

-BB OS 6 might be fairly competitive (due out later this year)
A "thinking job" usually doesn't mean commenting on this or that without knowing what they're talking about (well, there are people who do that but those are in the top 0.1% of the population). Most "thinking jobs" require you to conduct tedious research, getting engaged in discussions, being flamed in front of an audience etc. And most "thinking jobs" limit your expertise to one tiny bit of reality which means that you spend the rest of your life with thinking about inane details hardly anybody really cares about. (Again there are exceptions because once you get famous you can easily pass as expert for everything.)
Agree it's easier said than done. But there's a class of problems I find real hard to believe cannot be solved/addressed when one has had decades and billions to work on it, ahead of time, and when the same species has been able to design computers, spaceships, skyscrapers, etc.
I'd say gore is the most universally offensive thing on Wikipedia

On some level I agree with you. Sure, he's an environmental hypocrite, but banning Al from Wikipedia is taking it a bit too far.
I just wonder what the reasoning is behind making up all these identities.
Noticed I could go back in and edit my post title after I submitted the link. Maybe make it optional up front?