skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fail to see how lines from Shakespeare are 'complex [pieces of] information'. They're just words arranged in a particular order.

When memorization happens out of convenience that's a great thing. I have no problem asking students to memorize the derivatives of transcendental functions after they have derived them. It's good to memorize things that appear frequently in the line of work.

For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?
> There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems".

I don't think you have reason to be so pessimistic. Sal Khan, maker of Khan Academy, mentioned in an interview that while a lot of people were predicting that efforts like Khan Academy would spring up, in fact, there are very few of them that had. Sal is just one guy, who up until recently was working part-time and unfunded, who now has the largest private tutoring service in the world. This during a time when thousands of "smart" people funded by billions of dollars were ostensibly trying to do something similar. The number of people who actually start working on solutions is orders of magnitude smaller than people who are merely "looking for" solutions.
I have also been wondering about creating something like that. I am a designer and I can make decent infographics (mainly CSS based) but I needed the data used to be dynamic which would mean getting data from some external source through API's or something.

I am in process of learning Django now (which is awesome) and I might do something on those lines in near future.
I'm surprised you have any upvotes. You haven't actually made a substantial claim. All you've said is that memorizing Shakespeare is not the worst use of one's time. I don't know how anyone could disagree with such a statement when obviously memorizing Shakespeare is better use of one's time than say, joining a gang or watching paint dry.
I am the same, and the effect of music on the productivity of workers has been known for a long time. However, music which is primarily focused on lyrics or just listening to speech (eg. audio books) can be quite disruptive, and in most cases I find that this reduces my productivity. I think this is because when I'm writing software I'm probably also using the same language areas of the brain which are triggered when listening to speech.

Also, it's well established that speech and singing are handled by different brain areas, so do not necessarily conflict.
Buddha Bar and Cafe del Mar discography.
Music with other languages vocal.
First, you're right to assert that the US system of government is not the be-all, end-all of good governmental systems and it certainly has its share of problems. I'm not really arguing that.

However, going down the path of ad hoc comparisons with other countries never ends and and certainly never ends well. The logic of "government causes everything good or bad about a nation's economy" is implicitly assumed and severely flawed.

Also, where are you getting your numbers? According to the CIA factbook Denmark's GDP is actually in the $36,000 range, which is less than Connecticut and Massachusetts, which are similar in population and culturally more diverse.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts
the end works out zero.
lim (6)^(1/n) == 1
n -> inf

The second one is a bit tricky, SUM(N){1 to inf} == inf
thus:
1*(5+1)/inf == 0
College is different. Maybe your first few classes will not be, but quickly you will find that pure memorization is not enough.

And the great thing about college is that if the prior statement is not true, then it's your fault. For the first time, you are responsible for your own education. If you only have easy classes, that's because you did not seek out the challenging ones.
Can't read the article without registering but just wanted go say the recent deal between Yahoo! And Guardian/Telegraph/Mail looked like a win for all involved. I bet The Times would have liked in on that.

(Yahoo! UK added tabs for those newspapers' headlines onto their front page alongside their usual Yahoo News/ Reuters coverage. Clicking takes you to the papers own sites)
That's small consolation to him; his brother, former president of Nigeria, died last year leaving several million dollars behind. They are currently trying to recover them through the aid of western citizens.
Google for it and then you can
The best solutions to corruption is, often, making it irrelevant.

In the Saudi system, the rulers don't pilfer public money (like oil money) the way that most if it will be pilfered in Iraq, the just own it. They aren't corrupted into placing friends, family & allies in government positions, that how systems work and it's exactly what is expected of them. Filing to appoint a powerful ally might result in the weakening of the alliance and instability in the kingdom.

Similarly, capitalism doesn't have to worry about the corruption of greedy individuals out to make money for themselves without regard for the greater scheme, this is how the system works. If people didn't follow their own desire for personal prosperity, nothing would be produced.

Saudi Arabia is not a good example for anything though. The country itself (IE, the land) produces the wealth pretty much autonomously. The people do not have to be productive for the monarchy to have wealth. All government needs to do is provide government services and ensure stability. They don't have to be all that efficient because they can afford to do things the costly way. In other monarchies (EG, neighbouring Jordan) the people have to make the wealth. This creates a completely different dynamic.
See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525639
People discussing this, please dispute the data, offer solutions, talk about root causes, etc. Please don't fall into the trap of calling the data racist.
How Dare They Block My Facebook at Work?
http://www.bluemars.org/
Finally, a weaponized mobile microwave gun! If you are afraid of getting hit by one of these, do not wear contacts! You can handle melted plastic on your skin, but you do not want it on you eyes (contacts have a lot of water in them thus they would heat up fast. Unlike your eyes, contacts melt)
Well I can confirm that their decision to erect a paywall directly led to me no longer visiting their site.

It will be interesting to see whether the paywall works for them, but these things were tried and failed in the past so I expect the result to be the same.

My feeling on this is that there are better ways to monetize journalism. One way to do this would be to have a two tier system were readers can read the news as usual, but if you want to get access to the source materials and editorial decisions used to assemble the stories, or to be able to see the journalists at work (for example validating source material), you might pay a subscription. That way people who wanted a deeper understanding could pay to get that.
di.fm Chillout and soma.fm Groove Salad via PyRadio, my very own command line internet radio player: http://www.coderholic.com/pyradio/
+1 came to say the same thing
di.fm has jpop now too http://www.sky.fm/jpop/

I usually just listen to chillout or minimal
we (or the next generation) will decide that it's in the better interest of society to embrace free sharing of ideas and reject the concept of owning information

Um... what? Can you clarify what you mean by "information"? In the Physical sense, everything is information. I know you don't intend to be that literal, but it sounds like you're proposing that we totally do away with property rights.
To retire comfortably, under-40 workers need to seriously bulk up savings
http://friskyradio.com
With JavaScript, there is an interesting contrast between what its fans say are its strengths and what battle-hardened experience actually requires you to do.

For example:

- Prototype object systems are great... except don't actually use this, it doesn't really work. Use our simulation of a classical object system instead.

- Lambdas are wonderful and powerful when combined with closures... except they leak memory. Don't use them, but declare named functions.

- The 'this' parameter was a stupid idea. Use it as little as possible, except when absolutely necessary.

- Be really conscious all the time, because of a stupid and misguided semi-colon insertion feature that will mess you up.

- Don't bother trying to use anything other than C style for loops over collections. They mess you up.

- The dynamic type system is nice... however experience shows us that what we really want is actually a static system, so JavaDoc types of everything with a cumbersome and extremely verbose syntax instead.

- Extending prototypes of existing objects is an amazing and powerful feature. Please don't ever use it.
Robotic shoes operated by an iPhone
Usually silence, but when I do listen to music and try to work it's one of the following:

1. Final Fantasy, Video Game soundtrack, OCRemix, or similar (current favorites: Kindgom Hearts, Capcom Music Generation Family Computer Soundtracks, both Jet Set Radio soundtracks)

2. Pandora, my Quick Mix, which is basically a radio station for every band I enjoy old and new (examples: Tom Petty, Spoon, Modest Mouse, The Killers, The Beatles, Tokyo Police Club, TV on the Radio, and many more). I'm tempting to purchase the annual subscription.

I found this recent discussion on Reddit as a good resource for music suggestions as well (many mentioned that I had forgotten about):

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/co6iz/anyone_else...
Note that the two statements are quite different. The guy you replied to was implying that all Nigerians are scammers. I, on the other hand, implied no such a thing and simply made a joke about a type of fraud commonly originating from Nigeria.
> I currently live in China and the firewall isn't as bad as it looks.

But isn't that because it's ultimately a losing battle? Can't that still be what it was meant for? Promoting Chinese alternatives just seems like a nice benefit in keeping it around.
There's a whole spectrum of alternatives, many of which are probably already familiar to you from various pieces of desktop software you own.

A Google search on "copy protection" or "software licensing" will bring up lots of commercial options.
Do you mind making it public here after you gather enough experiences? I bet that the hackers would be pleased to take a look at it.
It's surely also designed to eliminate news of unrest, such as the famous protests, political and economic dissent, and allow prompt and easy arrest of citizens saying the 'wrong thing' on-line, or expressing opinions that might damage the party's hold on power.
A Threat By 2.5 Million Muslim Users To Leave Facebook
To say nothing about the implementation or usefulness of either, I'd say the "historious" branding and landing page makes it much clearer what the experience would be.

The different in response could easily be the marketing? Cool idea either way - both of them.
Four Chords Is All You Need: The Limited Nature of Pop Music
I used http://www.boomtango.com/ (looks like the same idea) for Firefox but now I use Chrome unless I need to use yslow or firebug
This article is a bit stale, but it's true. Anyone who has lived near section 8 housing will tell you the same.

For every family that wants to escape, there are a thousand who are mad that their check is late, and scream racism at their neighbors when told to pick up their own trash.
What to do with great generic domain names
I have few great domain names, they get allot of direct navigation traffic and are generic (ex: eyes.com, mouth.com, hairstyle.com type domains). PPC is falling and affiliates isn't the best match for some of them. Need some creative thoughts of what to do with them to maximize value.
Why give caffeine special status over other drugs?
Surely, you don't accept everything that society tells you?

Caffeine is addictive and has strong withdrawal symptoms, unlike many nootropics
Friendship Day wallpapers, Friendship day photo. Friendship day Picture
This beautiful idea of celebrating Friendship Day was joyfully accepted by several other countries across the world. And today, many countries including India, celebrate the first Sunday of August as Friendship Day every year. Celebrating Friendship Day in a traditional manner, people meet their friends and exchange cards and flowers to honor their friends. Lot many social and cultural organization too celebrate the occasion and mark Friendship Day by hosting programs and get together.
If what you say is true, I'm very excited and I'm actually going to VT!

I convinced the undergrad CS department to let me start taking CS classes first semester despite the fact that Exploring Engineering is a prerequisite.

Do you think you could help me get in to audit a few classes? I'm basically not allowed to take any more math/science classes this semester because I don't have the prerequisites. I was thinking about trying to get into MATH-3134 Applied Combinatorics.

Also, you might appreciate this web app/program that I wrote. http://hokienotify.me

It will notify you when a class you want has available seats. It syncs its database every 10 minutes or so with VT's.
Michael Bodekaer on getting traction
It's still interesting to read comments, find new artist and even get the opinion of new HN-ers.

Also, it's kind of contradictory since while this question is on the front page, lots of people upvote this tired-of-this-question-because-it-has-been-asked-already-10-times comment.
No. I'm sorry, but you're cutting this all wrong.
Why Software Development is Different ...
One thing that would be awesome is if historify would spider someone's blog. That way, for instance, I could point it towards paulgraham.com and have all of his essays saved.
Boardwalk: Port of _why's Park Place using Sinatra and MongoDB.
Is it just me or do other people find the documentation on hackageDB lacking and too often very beginner-unfriendly?

Something similar to Perl's http://perldoc.perl.org/ (really excellent!) would do a lot to help beginning Haskellers!
Bingo. Isn't the magic number for hitting near 100% penetration of a household technology around 30%? Once you hit that point, then it will go to nearly 100% within a few years because things just snowball and it is no longer a fringe/geek thing, but something that is common and expected.

I think we all remember when the US had far below 22.5%
I use dropbox. The server has it's own account, and I share the folders I want to sync with that account. That way it's all synced automatically.
For GROOVESHARK or THESIXTYONE users, it would be nice if you share your username. Mine is d0m on ts1.
It's about as funny as a joke about how Americans will invade your country, or italians will murder your cousin.

Pointless jokes about silly stereotypes do not belong on forums where people try to discuss reasonably about things.
HTML. I really hate writing html. Especially html forms. I've recently run across HAML, which I think is gorgeous, but unfortunately we're a python/django house ATM.
I just assumed that if people are interested in reading this thread
they'll also be interested in the large amount of previous posts
asking the exact same thing.

Or maybe people just like telling others what music they like and
aren't particularly interested in reading the same, I don't no.
Yes you should! It's also important to know how basic data structures work(you will learn it in college). I studied before college on a good book of data structures in C which introduce from the basics(like binary numbers and so on) that let you learn C and also improve a lot in algorithms. The book name is "data structures using C". Here is the amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Using-Aaron-Tenenbaum/...

Have much success in your degree!
Dear Facebook, Please keep your UI semantics sensible
If you never have try some 8-BIT music while coding. It really gets you in the zone.
I'm a big fan of ambient electronic music; it fades into the backgrounds well while still being interesting.

To that end, the "Neotokyo" soundtrack by Ed Harrison http://www.neotokyohq.com/music.html is amazing. Whenever I put that on (all 2 hours of it) I get things done.
I propose a test. Set up a fake HN account, and use kickpost to submit stories. With a 20 minute head start, you should be the first poster on many stories. Later, you can reveal the account name for our amazement.
Sigh. Go reread, but here's a hint: the main problem with SSL certs is not their technical implementation.
We are not talking out a pain free process here. In the proposed system Pink Floyd would at the very least go into debt, dedicated songwriters would likely cease in exist in the form we see them today. Change is painful, but in the long run stagnation will kill us far more surely.
Presumably this means that the remaining online readership is now composed only of paying customers? Not exactly disastrous.
I don't know what the answer to problems like this is but I have spent a fair amount of time studying (both formally and informally) issues like poverty and pondering how to effectively address really thorny problems. I have concluded that government programs designed "to help the poor" generally do more harm than good. Part of the problem is with a) requiring recipients to psychologically identify themselves as "the poor" and b) the fact that the very design of such programs tends to reward people for having problems and punish them for trying to resolve their problems. A chief example is Welfare which was designed to "help poor single mothers". It was designed when most poor, single mothers were people we would classify as "the deserving poor": widows. But the way it was designed changed the social contract and actively encouraged women to choose to become poor, single moms in order to qualify for assistance. The result: Welfare actively grew the population of poor, single moms. Not remotely the original intent.

So I have concluded that if you REALLY want to "help the poor", you have to start by removing "poor" from your program definition and qualifying requirements. Instead, ask yourself: what would help the people generally and do so in such a way that, coincidentally, poor people would benefit significantly? For example, countries that help parents generally, regardless of marital status or income, seem to get better results than the American Welfare system.
Bach is almost exclusively my favorite classical composer. If you want some of his music, check out classiccat.net. It makes great programming music, but some of it is worth listening to when you're not distracted. (-:

I also enjoy Aphex Twin (all of the similar bands, like Boards of Canada and Autechre, not as much). I actually wrote one my of first web applications listening to "Selected Ambient Works 85-92". Ratatat is good. Finally, for some reason, I enjoy listening to the Conet Project ( http://www.archive.org/details/ird059 ) while coding.

In general though, I prefer to be in a spot where I don't have to use music to compensate for obnoxious background noise.
I created a website where I can create/listen to my music playlist and at the same time to my friends' music playlist:
http://jamafriend.com
A note for when you go to college: On the surface college may seem like it rewards risk even less than high school. Don't be fooled. You just have to intelligently optimize your GPA (I wrote about optimization a bit here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132222). If you take this approach, the challenge is no longer getting offered a job, but getting the interview in the first place. I've been offered a job for every interview I've had, but damn did I have to work hard to get my foot in the door. Once you DO get your foot in the door, you're pretty much guaranteed the job because your risk taking puts you many technical miles ahead of the competition. I hope (but have no empirical evidence yet) that the same effect will be true when applying to graduate school. Just use your ingenuity to get around the screening process. :)

EDIT: One last thing I thought of. You may be one of those people that will be able to get a 4.0 GPA and have time to work on creative processes. Your 4.0 GPA is still a waste of time. There is always more you can do that is ultimately more impressive than a high GPA (i.e. publishing in competitive conferences, starting a highly technical and useful open source project, working on the Linux/BSD kernel, etc).
We Are Hunted (www.wearehunted.com) is a pretty neat web app for finding new music

Here's what I'm listening to http://wearehunted.com/by/stevelindstrom/
Well as it has been proved to be profitable and you already have clients, it's up to you do decide it(well... it has always been up to you) as you are probably the only who know how big your public will be. If you are afraid of stuff breaking up/it not scaling so well and so on, work on it until you feel satisfied. As you already said, it's B2B and service standards may vary from country to country. A good experience would be try to get some clients from another country with "high service standards" and try to give them some benefits to try it out the services(for free maybe?) and if the feedback is good enough you launch it.

If you would like to wait for the API to be ready, just do it. I know that there's a lot of people that would say that "launch it with 50% done" or something, but the person that know your product best is YOU.

I hope you have much success with it!
I agree, it's not Arc, it's the webapp. And it does seem bizarrely unprofessional (I often consider my comments for a long time, so I almost always get the timeout - I'm being punished for thinking!). There also had to be a substantial outcry before we got a "search" link.

Yet... HN grows and grows... it is reported widely... luminaries routinely post here... and here are you and I.

pg has said he is careful to focus on what matters (eg. spam; ranking), not what seems to. It appears to be working. And it exactly supports this essay's thesis, of working on looking professional vs. what's important. Maybe it's a bit like undergraduates handing in essays in a fancy folder?
They're just words arranged in a particular order

That ordering of words might actually convey some insights into life, love, and other such follies. Maybe in the act of memorizing it this may come through.
Why shouldn't the 22-yr old woman spend their nights hacking like we do? The article just dismisses women kicking ass in their 20's because they, "like to be experienced first" or something like that? Then totally dismisses their 30's due to children. Guess what, if you're serious about running a business then children are often hard to fit into that picture. You can't have everything.

I can't imagine waiting until my 40's to start hitting the ground running as fast as I can. Nor should women. The women I know who have done various accelerators, including y-combinator, were hackers and not interested in having children immediately. They were more interested in doing amazing things as goal #1
One of the best pieces of advice I can give you is to not obsess over the college catalog. Freshmen year is about making friends and enjoying your new found freedom.

If you want to learn more the best thing you can do is be a good student. If a topic interests you, stay after class and discuss it with a professor, or visit them at office hours. Opportunities abound for this sort of thing, usually in smaller classes though. I'd recommend getting used to college in your first year and then hitting up professors more when you have found your place at school.
This was generally my philosophy in high school. So I fully understand your point. The honors program I'm in requires a 3.5 but I never realized how fulfilling undergraduate research can be. That's definitely something I will look in to.
Where's a good collection of 8-bit music? I like the music the 8bit renditions of popular music that Engadget stars their podcast with, but don't know a good archive for them.