skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was working at a dot-com in the late 90's that could have been GovWork's twin: We had a 3-person joint-CEO (the "Three-EO), we were going to give the product away (our target was higher ed), the technical founder was forced out of the company, we were even going to make students' lives better by being able to pay parking tickets online.

It is always fun to watch the movie for nostalgia's sake.
You know, that's a really neat idea. It could be done as a clear plastic clip.

Maybe you could have mock Frankenstein bolts on the clips. Lot of possibilities there.
Challenge HN: math game
spent a lot of time writing this, sorry for bad english, not a native tongue speaker.

the purpose of this game is obtaining 100 as result of various math operations following some rules

1) every digit from 0 to 9 (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) included must be used once and only once in the expression

2) every basic math operation (+ - * /) might be used

3) these math functions might be used:
-power: x^y
-square root: sqrt(x)
-cube root: cbrt(x)
-factorial: x! (for example 4! = 4 * 3 * 2 * 1)
-summation from 1 to x: S(x) (for example S(4) = 4+3+2+1)

4) parenthesis might be used

5) the 0 must be useful to obtain the final result of 100; if the 0 is removed from the expression and the final result doesn't change then the expression is unacceptable (example: expression + 0)

7) you can't juxtaposition (put together without operations/functions in between) digits (example: 78 is incorrect)

---

to value quality of solutions we'll use 3 indexes:
1) Single Occurences (SO): how many different operations/functions are used - the maximum is 9 of course

2) Multiple Occurences (MO): how many times operation/functions are used - the minimum should be 13.

3) Max Repetition (MR): the number of time the most used operation/function is used - the minimum should be 2.

You should maximize SO and minimize MO and MR

For the chart the first index that will be valued is SO, then MO and finally MR.

---

here's an example (it'd be correct if it had 100 as final result):

8 * (7+5) + 0 * (3+1) + (2+9+6) * 4
= 8 * 35 + 0 + 17 * 4
= 280 + 68 = 348

SO: * and + = 2

MO: 3 * and 6 + = 9

MR: + is used 6 times = 6

---

to submit the solution you should calculate your own indexes and final result like i did in the example.
And what makes his definition of "effectiveness" any good? When goals are as clear as "maximize profit", I have no doubt Bill Gates is one of the most competent in the field. However, when it's as vague as "improve education", I have serious doubts.

I'd trust a passionate fifth grade teacher to make good judgements of what's best for their students' education over a billionaire entrepreneur any day.
Honestly, how is it going to suck. You can return your current iPhone 4 now and wait for one of those phones with the insulation already present. Seriously, it seems that in your eyes no matter what Apple does it will still suck.
I said what they were doing in the part you quoted. By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them can do so as well. This is not an intentional thing that they're doing. It's a byproduct. This phenomenon occurs all the time, for groups of all kinds.

To flip it around, think about nurses before male nurses became commonplace. What would run through your head, thinking about being a nurse? There are probably a lot of things that would stop you from taking the idea seriously, just because the profession was dominated by women and had hardly any men.
sweet, I'm really curious as to what features you selected for your model
Exactly! And freebase has a lot of this data mapped. This data is so rich it holds huge potential.

For example (for those that are unfamiliar with the richness of this data), visit: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/y_combinator

And there you'll note that Y Combinator is mapped to the official site, it's Wikipedia page, it can tell you who the founders are, etc. If you link to Paul Grahm, you can then find out what his personal site is, and so on.
I hadn't thought of leaving that link in my profile for that. Perhaps you could make it clearer that that's a good idea? E.g., in the verification, say "Leave the link so people can see find you in the world easily and see your skillset".
I don't find Spaces to be more usable, I find them clunky and confusing...but I have a dozen years worth of habits on Linux desktops which may be working against me. Honestly, though, I find a lot of Mac OS X and Apple interfaces clunky and confusing (and I generally have horrible things happen when I try to use them, like deleting my whole music collection when trying to use iTunes to put stuff on an iPod; iPhones also confuse the heck out of me). I've often referred to myself as "Appletarded" because I don't think I think like a normal person at this point, when it comes to interacting with technology. Apparently, many people find Mac OS X intuitive and easy to use...I find it really difficult to do anything beyond just using applications at a very basic level, and even that is often filled with frustration due to all the magic incantations you have to just know to do things (no right mouse button, so to get a context menu, you gotta know the key combo or how to use the magic mouse pad to create a right click event).

I'm basically the definitive "doesn't like Macs" user. Mac OS X is moderately better than Windows, but only by a smidgen, in my estimation, and it's certainly not a great UNIX. So, take my rants with a grain of salt.
Are you going to return it?
The assumption is that these women are just as capable as Y Combinator applicants, but that the program is biased against them. Even if you believe this, any time you restrict the applicant pool arbitrarily (by gender/etc), you will lose some of the best applicants. For example, you will likely at least double the great applicants by allowing 40+ y/o males to enter as well. Hence, it just doesn't make sense as an investor to participate in "XX Combinator."
Well you did expect others to feed you when you were 14.

The students pay for them in the manner of university fees and too the public at large in the manner of taxation, yet still they hide them behind pay walls.

In regards to this point I think you have missed my question. I was asking why should someone pay for Faust on the internet, in the context of course of regulation and the like.
Just to get some clarity on how people who have the device actually feel about all of this (And that it's not just the media), how many of you are going to return the iPhone 4?
You have given me a mechanic that accounts for a minor discrepancy in behavioral patterns, not a large one.

No evidence of women not getting involved in tech because they felt inadequate as women? This is something that people have been screaming about for a while.

A lot, if not the majority, of women are brought up surrounded by the assumption that they aren't good at math, or that they won't be doing much of anything but be housewives, as a lot of men are brought up surrounded by the assumption that they will be providers, and will chase tail. These are, obviously, simplifications.

A lifetime of being discouraged from "not your gender" activities is going to make an individual less likely to do said activities, regardless of their natural propensity for said activities.

The 7 women who did get in would be women who either realized that they were capable of it, decided they didn't care about the social pressures, or weren't surrounded by the social pressures to begin with. They could also be females that are closer to the average male in the ways that count for joining a startup. There's a lot of possibilities.

I dont think that Y Combinator has been discriminating against women. I do think that the cultural perception of gender roles in the US makes it less likely for women who would otherwise be applying to even get to the point where they'd have something to put on an application.

Less than a hundred years ago, women didn't have the right to vote. There's still a large percentage of the population that thinks that the place for a woman is in the kitchen, making babies. Do you really think that theses attitudes have no effect on the amount of women doing things like joining startups? You and I may not have attitudes like that, but if you think that those attitudes are rare, you are mistaken.

The same thing happens with men with different activities.

The studies you showed, while they did show differences between males and females with regards to risk-taking, did not show a huge difference between males and females. If we were talking about 11 female founders out of 30, it would be one thing. That is not the case. There is a large difference, and I find the "well men are more prone to risk taking" argument quite unconvincing when the data shows that men are more prone to taking risks -- but not nearly to the same degree as the discrepancy.

Furthermore, many of the social risk-taking activities studied may not be motivated out of anything that is intrinsic to being a man or a woman. A man may take risks as a form of mating dance. A man may also take risks because "that's what a man does".

This is not a simple issue, and I doubt it can be reduced to purely biological differences, other than in the very literal level that all differences between individuals can.
Indeed! One can also try the Amazon reviews, e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Through-Intimidation-Robert-Ri... ; the first one details how great a book on sales it is.

But to really get the flavor ... well, what about him entering a bank the minute it opens, dark suit and shades (in Florida perhaps?), with a check for at least $25,000 in today's dollars, cashing the check (which he knew the issuer would stop payment on, but he beat him) and stuffing the cash into his briefcase. This is a book both serious and funny, one that if you like will likely keep your interest which is not something I can say for the majority of business books.

I read it back when in came out in the '70s before I entered the real world and I think its advice was invaluable, even for an introverted scientist/engineer like myself who needs a day of recovery after doing my part of a sales call.
I think what he means by most lisps is the fact that there are literary thousands of toy lisps implementing only the basic functionality of lisp ( lambda, logical operations , define, ca(d)r, first class functions,etc...) that people write just to learn how to write a lisp. They don't have any libraries or nearly anything to do something useful.
Given our economical system - it is a certainty that certain individuals will be so wealthy they can afford anything.

The inevitable is hardly wrong!
Search. Monopoly.
My point was that this is what happens in the practice: you just won't know until you know, so why not make it that way upfront and not spend lots of effort trying to select the best candidate when you could, based on a much more loose criteria, select the best dozen and see who's really good.

I wasn't envisioning a sweatshop: if the company tried to extract everything out of cheap hires for four months, the company itself would lose. And there are these leeching companies anyway, working within conventional hiring practices as well. I had a good company in mind, one that really needs good programmers and not cheap minions.

An incompetent or malicious developer wouldn't really last four months, not probably four days. The projected four months was the final threshold after which most programmers can tell whether the candidate is really worth hiring.

Having new semi-hires around might certainly add up to the team overhead but on the other hand, that's what happens with conventional hires, too. Lots of teaching, tutoring, and support and things might still get crossed in the first few months. Plus the whole process of interviewing and that some hires quit or get fired within months.

So, to reply to your comment: having a batch of new hires, some incompetent and some possibly stellar, and few weeks to sort out the final candidates and few months to seal the deal, might not cost as much as you're afraid. Even a single new hire (carefully selected by HR, phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and all) can eat up surprisingly lot of the team's time. Further, like hires in general, you don't want to be doing this all the time, just once a year or when you really, really need more programmers.
Got it.

I would continue to debate it the box. That was just one persons opinion. More specifically - I thought it made it look a bit like spam, and here - your side navigation runs below the text box making me scroll two places to see the entire site.

As for deciding on which video to watch - maybe a simple rating system:

* ($votes) Result Title

???

Anyway - good start!
I find this sort of reductio ad pundenda dehumanizing: it betrays a pathological contempt for subtlety; and an autistic insensibility to humanity.
Anyway, those who care enough about fashion will remove the case and only put it on when they need a little extra reception.

Or use the headset and put the phone away in your pocket, the way God intended phone calls to be made.
when i click the 'add item' button in the 'add item' modal box the auto-complete usually comes up right at the same time, causing me to get list items like "Tower of London" when i just wanted a list item called 'wer'

this happened twice in chrome on windows. i'd suggest moving the 'add item' button to the top or to the left -- or down below where the auto-complete dropdown goes
Sounds like they're still trying to sell some hand wavy bullshit.
Actually, they could still make that claim, and it goes along with my personal theory about the higher drop rate.

The measurement provided was simply the "drop rate" per 100 calls. Implicit in this is that it's the drop rate for successfully connected calls, since a call that never connects can't be dropped. I believe that the iPhone 4 is more sensitive and has better reception than the 3GS. There are rooms in my house where I get 0 bars and I can't make a phone call on the 3GS but I can successfully make calls on the iPhone 4.

So let's say I try to make 100 calls, but the reception sucks in some rooms so on the 3GS only 80 calls successfully connect and of those 4 get dropped. That's a drop percentage of 5% or 5 our of 100. But let's say on the iPhone 4 I'm able to successfully connect on all 100 calls, but since the signal is so low in some of the rooms, I drop 10 of the calls. So 10% or 10 out of 100.

So I've now got a drop rate that's double the 3GS, even though I'm able to make 10 more completely successful calls per 100.
Imagine if we could do this with all of Google's data (A very cool search engine built on top of Freebase):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497100
I think that is the case for most good software. Many engineer-led companies think the engineering is the hard part, so get totally surprised by #1, to the point that their business fails.

Of course, there is a name for #1. It is a name mocked and derided by engineers world-side: Marketing

Learn it, love it, earn from it.
Why are entrepreneurs mostly male?

I believe this deserves another look: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

TDLR: "For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities."
Interestingly, they're going to give it to everyone who buys an iPhone 4 before 9/30. Does that mean there's a product refresh in the works? Might not be a bad idea to wait another 2 months, I guess.
Is this a meta-joke? I.E. because his post was less-readable maybe you began to forget his ideas in it?
wow I was interested in joining Freebase, now I need to join google!
I don't know why this is being voted down - it is a valid point of view and historically significant!

There are pros and cons to different tax models. A lot of US history has contained very high tax rates for the highly wealthy.

This was the first google result (I don't want to promote that org)

http://s3.moveon.org/images/tax_rate-chart.gif
I'm on the same page regarding gender and the need for an effort for "human friendly spaces". I've been phrasing things in a binary-gender manner because gender being a spectrum is a bit tangential and distracting to the point here, and is something that a much lower percentage of the population seems to have waken up to.

FWIW, I've spent a fair amount of time explaining that it doesn't just suck to be a woman, or a man, or a whatever to people. I think it's very hard for people to see how much assumptions about the way people are supposed to act based on their appearances or physical features really affect peoples day-to-day lives. Whether that's avoidable or not is another discussion.

Anyhow, I wish you luck.
err interesting note Freebase powers some part of Bing Search
I didn't down vote you, but a raw number like 16,000 people is meaningless. What if I said that 16,000 google searches a day give bad results.
Absolutely. This is a human psychology problem, not an engineering problem. They designed the phone knowing that it suffered more attenuation than other phones, but it also dealt with highly-attenuated signals better than previous iPhones. Overall reception is the same or better, all things considered.

What killed them was the way the reception bars dramatically plunged toward zero within seconds of bridging the antennas. If the iPhone 4 had shipped with the bar distribution formula in 4.0.1 and used the same level of hysteresis as other phones, no one would have noticed the drop and everyone would have happily gone on using their iPhone 4's oblivious to the attenuation.
Bingo. I in fact asked my left-handed father yesterday when we had lunch to show me how he holds his phone and it's in his right hand.
The case helps the iPhone 4 because it prevents conductive contact between your skin and the antenna, right? Previous iPhones had no exposed antenna, yes? Or did they? If not, the case would not have made as big a difference.
The tests for Celiac are extremely good. 95% sensitivity and specificity? My life would be amazing if we had that kind of accuracy for every disease.

The bigger problem is probably that people think they have Celiac when they actually have some other real problem that is not Celiac. Mislabeling things is deleterious for patient and physician alike. This is why, unless you actually have evidence to back up your claims about this test, you really should be much more cautious.

If you can point to controlled trials or published works that show that your test is sensitive and specific for -- or even associated with -- Celiac, I'm all ears.

However, I refuse to accept anecdote. Why not? I accept anecdote only in the absence of any evidence. We have actual evidence supporting actual tests that, while imperfect, have known error parameters. The fact that these tests are imperfect does not mean that your imperfect test is just as good; that's a logical fallacy.

Sure, if eating X makes you feel bad, don't eat X; nobody would disagree about that. But don't label it Celiac unless you can show that your home-grown test faithfully diagnoses Celiac and not something else.
HTML: http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfhtml/

Programming: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

Also try the Search link at the bottom to see what else has already been asked on the subject.
Or maybe they'll be shipping a case with each iPhone starting 9/30.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes songs catchy. It's trickier than you might think (if you don't take the bottom of the barrel approach of endless repetition). One day I plan to have an algorithm for this.

Most of these ideas mesh pretty well with my theories on that. Of course, I'd love to see some predictive tests before I declare anything psychological fact.
"Don't assume there are fundamental (crippling) differences."

I think you should assume fundamental differences, because that's what both the research and experience show. Certainly more can be done for younger women, but if you don't think that businesswomen in their 40s are on average more capable than their younger counterparts then you probably haven't spent much time around businesswomen. (For reference, I took a class on women and entrepreneurship so I've been exposed to a lot of 20ish female entrepreneurs and a lot of 40ish businesswomen.)
Ask HN: I need to create a Style Guide - where do I start?
Hi HN! I'm a developer/designer approaching the design phase of a very ambitious personal project. I have identified the need for a style guide much like the recent one put out by the BBC redesign. However, I've never created a style guide before so I'm not sure what software I should be using, what the standards are, if any. What's the best place to start?<p>Thanks everyone!
Now that is all cleared up, does anyone know if any stores in NYC have the phone in stock?
This type of comment isn't useful. Please refrain from feeling the need to add this when people disagree with your comment.
I'm guessing a portion of that money is going towards "passionate 5th grade teachers", giving them the chance to use their expertise and imagination to improve education.

Bill Gates is, at the very least, very smart. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he's spending his considerable net worth in a way that helps.
Agreed. It feels like a hack, rather than a proper solution. I'm sure Ive isn't too happy about his gorgeous device needing to be stuffed in a $1 wrapper.
Do - not - listen - to - him !!!

PhD is a long and uncertain education path... that leads to an even longer and more uncertain career path.

Oh, and you will be 5+ years older that everybody else.
Cultural enforcement starts at a very young age.

Yes, I'm well aware of that. It's more or less what I've been talking about.

A) Provide an environment in which this is possible B) Say that choice A is condescending because it's only due to cultural differences that they didn't start a startup 20 years ago

C) Provide an environment in which this is possible that is not exclusionary in nature. Just do A, but don't exclude non-women, and don't market exclusively at women.
Building a JavaScript-Based Game Engine for the Web (video)