skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you said -- you're going to install Ubuntu -- leads me to believe that the Thinkpad will provide better value. I have serious trouble using any laptop without a Thinkpoint anymore, because I hate moving my hands away from typing position.

Plus, you can always get parts to repair the Thinkpads on eBay. It's harder and more expensive to repair a Macbook. Having rebuilt both types, I'd stick with the Thinkpad, and that in fact is exactly what I do -- get used Thinkpads that other people are discarding, fix them, and use them. When I've completely destroyed a laptop, I sell it for parts on eBay, and start looking for a new one to fix.

I haven't paid for a computer in 10 years, as a result.

However, it occurs to me that this has insulated me from the Lenovo takeover. I'm pecking on an X31 right now. It's great. Took some fussing to get it to hibernate in Linux, but now it works fine. I don't know if the newer Lenovo models are as reliable as the old IBM warhorses.
This Week in Ruby (March 31, 2008)
Javascript mode for Emacs
Picking a Platform: 5 Issues to Consider
Adobe AIR Makes Its Way to Linux
This is why his point about judgment is right on. The challenge is not having good ideas but knowing which of your ideas are good.

When Paul Graham says that all that what they care about is having good people, there's an underlying assumption that good people won't pursue lousy ideas.

Ideas can't be sold, but judgment of what is a good idea can be profitable -- that's one of the things that venture capitalists do.
Get a padded sleeve for your laptop. I paid $9 for a Timbuk2 sleeve at REI on sale. I've taken some whoppers on my bike with my laptops in my messenger bag (enough to put me in the hospital) and the sleeves seem to do a really good job of protecting them.

If you are in the market for a new messenger bag, the re:Load people have a particularly thick sleeve that they used to offer at a discount when you bought one of their bags. (which rule)
Bonus points for the Erdos number reference in the alt text.
I have ThinkPad T61, MBP and a regular Macbook. For programmers Linux running on a ThinkPad is the thing to get. OS X isn't nowhere close to Linux if you're a coder.
Another confounding factor in interpreting such a graph: credentialism.

Countries and cultures vary in how much they value official degrees and titles, and greater reliance on granted credentials is not always better, especially when it serves to protect established interests from competition.

So one interpretation of the relative stability of US education rates across age groups: the US has resisted a wave of creeping credentialism that has afflicted most of the world, having reached optimal level of education earlier than most.
Mac users are often said to be religious about their choice of computer, but they just love the product they have.

I love my Mac :-)
I wrote a great blog post explaining all about this site and how to block their spam with no false positives, but I when I try to submit it I get blocked!

[/lame joke]
register4less.com, on recommendation from the userfriendly.org folks. I've been happy with them.
You can pretty much Google "[any company] sucks" and get a billion hits. It hasn't meant anything in roughly 5 years.

"Apple sucks" returns about 8x as many entries as GoDaddy. All it really means is that way more people use Apple products than GoDaddy.
After the party it's the after-party. I'm down for something.
I applied to TechStars and even got an interview with one of their partners, so with a lot of luck I might get to go there for the summer :)

Boulder does seem like a pretty cool place though - I'd probably spend a lot of time biking and hiking if I ever go there. You can never really appreciate the awesomeness of mountains until you've lived in a flat place like Toronto.
I was mainly just trying to resolve an apparent contradiction and find a good metaphor to structure my thoughts. It's not advice, so much as understanding. Ultimately, understanding is better than advice anyway.
Yes, the metaphor is imperfect. Perhaps you can imagine that the top of the mountain is in the clouds, so although the initial idea is to "go that way", you don't really know exactly where you are going until you've arrive.
I would say you would forced to change your idea if you are not providing what market wants. Either you loose or you change the course of pursuit. Or as Apple did; you toil long and hard to create a market which wasnt existing apparently. In the later case you convince your idea to market.
IPhone vs. BlackBerry 9000: The keyboard wars, round 2
I, too, have been using GoDaddy for some time now, and haven't had a problem.

The biggest annoyance is the hyper-colored ad-noise they throw at you when buying a domain. It's pretty cheesy, but having experienced it i know to look for the "No Thanks" links towards the bottom and move on.

(Note: I do not use them for hosting or DNS, just as a registrar.)
Not true - from current leaders of netflix prize:

Our experiments clearly show that once you have strong CF models, such extra data is redundant and cannot improve accuracy on the Netflix dataset.

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-imdb-data-for-netf...
As I read this, I now feel an even stronger need to take exception to DH4. Graham has used the same 'DH4' to classify both the legitimate counterargument, and the fallacy, so well described by another commentator as "two ships passing each other in the night".

Then again, this particular form of DH4 cannot happen unless generously supported by some _other_ fallacy or fallacies. Otherwise it would be too obvious that they were "passing each other in the night", and no one would be convinced by the arguments.
MountainWest RubyConf 2008 Videos Starting to Go Online
There already exist Erdos-Bacon numbers for mathematically talented actors (or more likely, mathematicians who can act a bit): the sum of your Erdos number and your Bacon number.

Perhaps a similar measure could be instituted based on this comic - the Erdos-Hilton number, with the latter number measuring degrees from Paris Hilton.
It's the end of HN as we know it....
Well - thats what google keep saying (specifically, I think Peter Norvig has said that, I think, over and over - that he hasn't had access to as much data before and its fascinating to him).

Ah Peter Norvig, responsible for hours of my time wiled away on his web site with all sorts of knowledge porn.
what about sony vaio? vaio has very nice keypad and excellent battery life.
There is no private message feature here (and I like it that way). Put your email in your profile if you want people to contact you.
Correction! Deadline is March 31st, Today! Sorry about that.
I'm a moderator for Entrecard. It's not a spam site and people do not get credits for others signing up with a referral link.It's a good service.

One of our members made the mistake of posting a link to here on our forums as a place to submit blog articles. I've removed the post, so you shouldn't get anymore submissions linking from Entrecard. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Interesting guess, but no. The preposition 'ad' in "ad hominem" carries an _adversarial_ connotation. In this sense, it is like "adversus".
Good article. Great pictures.

I'm a CS/ECE undergrad at University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and love it. To be honest I'll second anything positive that's said about Boulder; great environment.
The Democratization of the Music Industry: Why the RIAA Really Hates Downloads
yah. Joker rules. Been using them since 1999.

Other shops come and go, but Joker is a rock.
I agree with Dave. I post on my blog very occasionally because I try to limit it to mostly original content. Keep the signal to noise ratio high.

I never liked the term "blogosphere" because it seemed like the people who associated themselves with that term were the ones who have all these little meta conversations about... the blogosphere.

Of course, this post adds yet another layer to the people talking about people talking about etc etc etc. Sigh.
whenever this topic comes up i always think of the people who never finished college. bill gates, jobs, eminem, etc. i don't think people like that are very rare

in the US it's not a big deal if you go to college or not. more important is whether you have ability

in one of pg's "creating a silicon valley elsewhere" essays he mentioned it may be more acceptable in the US for a PhD to start a startup than it would be in the UK. i think that sort of free-form climate is necessary for innovation

in fact those essays are pretty relevant here

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
Google's Gamble
The students used a simple algorithm and got nearly the same results as the bellkor team. So the extra data isn't redundant if it enables a simpler algorithm to perform as well as a more complicated one, even if the complicated algorithm gets no benefit from the extra data.
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125816
Beyond Minimal Design: Minimal Solutions
Thanks for the previous positive comments about Heritrix, which is my project at the Internet Archive. If anyone has questions, please send them my way.

Heritrix was designed for archival projects, which has meant an emphasis on having a "true record" (including non-text resources) and high configurability for inclusion/exclusion. Any text indexing or link-graph-analysis is completely external; we've used Nutch (without their crawler) for that.

Whole-web multi-billion-page crawls have not been the focus yet, though we've tried one and have heard of outside groups successfully using Heritrix for 2+ and 4+ billion page crawls.

Our distribution story is spotty; we provide some options that help you split the URL-space you want to crawl across crawlers, and remote-control crawlers from other programs, but syncing their launch and other steps is left to an expert operator's own devices. We've run coordinated Heritrix crawls on groups of 4-8 machines (dual-opteron, 4G+ RAM, 4x500GB+ HDs) and understand others have used up to 12.
I just upvoted this article and now I feel dirty. I did it because I agree with it and want to sock one to those Apple fanboys, but there just isn't any substance here. Normally I upvote something because I think its interesting and (or) I want to see what the rest of the HN community says about it. Upvoting to agree, or to express an opinion not about the article itself, seems to be a problem in need of addressing in social news sites.
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2.
Although there's been a influx of new users, I would conjecture that there are still more veteran users than novices.

If this conjecture is the case, then the solution for the "problem" on HN would be for the veteran users to vote more aggressively on the "good" submissions. After you've been vectored off to an interesting Web page via a submission, don't forget to come back to HN and vote it up.

Veteran users can use their frustration with front page stories, and turn it into determination to find better stories. This way, everybody wins :o).
I've used domainsite for many years. They've had a couple of annoying email outages, but other than that they've been pretty solid.
I agree, upvoting, IMO should only happen for interesting/controversial/informative posts. Rhetoric isn't so interesting... It says nothing new.
Eight Rules To Brilliant Brainstorming
I don't think this is always the case. I think that many good ideas are obviously good regardless of their origin and even in the absence of external evidence. You can tell those ideas are good because they solve real problems in people's lives (Ebay, Yahoo, Craigslist, Amazon, Hotmail, etc, are all based on obviously good ideas).

To use Paul's analogy, some pots of gold are at the top of mountains, but others are visible on the flatlands, and only speed of execution determines who will win them.
I couldn't disagree more. This cultivated and mannered ideal that you espouse is rarely practiced on any real blog or forum with a passionate community, or an intelligent community versed in the issues, and that's ok. And your effort to put this out here like the 10 Commandments is just a typical male, geeky bloggy power play. And there, that may be an intolerable insult; it may even be incorrect! but it's not an ad hominem attack, what would be an hominem is to say that your argument is discredited because your name is Paul or you are white. Geeks and males and bloggers need to be characterized, judged, and condemned where necessary, without fear of favour.

It's all about trying to control other people when you put up one of these classic manipulative blog how-tos deliberately in a format to guarantee constant Google-fetching and repasting. These various Internet memes like "OMG don't have a flamewar!" OR "OMG don't feed the trolls" -- these are just tribalist imperatives that lead to horridly dull conformity and spread an awful pall over most social media. Argument is very, very important, and if it gets heated, and sparks fly, good! It's real!

Times vs. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that is a keystone of a lot of media freedom in the US, says basically it is ok to call someone a name. It's ok. It is allowed speech. And that's the sort of robust speech that occurs in a democracy.

It's very important to respond instantly to tone. Tone is what people think they can smuggle in, often, in the emotional medium of forums and blogs, and imagine they can get away with leaving these emotional trapdoors around for people to respond to instinctively, and it's good to bring it to light. They need to be called on it. Instantly. And fiercely sometimes. The tone you are taking here is preachy and hortatory. But one can only say, oh, stop it. Are you smug about all the fanboyz below, about all the people who will cut and paste your link like some latter-day Dear Abby?

Neuralgic types often imagine there is an ad hominem attack, when in fact there's a quite unbiased report. And they often call "ad hominem" something that is a much needed judgement about a person that really needs to be made.

Gregfjohnson is good to remember Aquinas here. But Aquinas also conceived of a number of ways for virtuous men to reach Heaven even if they were not believers or baptised or following the scriptures; had the different categories of those "saved" met each other and converse, the one might be astounded at the heresy and dissent of the other!

Re-stating people's arguments often infuriates them precisely because they don't want to be summarized and fed back in stark form, or take consequence for the tone and the hidden agendas they try to smuggle into forums and blogs. So it's not a magic bullet.

The surest way for a forums discussion to go downhill is for some smug nit to go and pull up some "rules of rhetoric" and beginning banging on somebody's head that they are breaking some arcane "law of logic". Oh, do stop it. People need to express themselves. They know exactly what they are hearing in tone and implication, and they are right to respond to it.
Income Tax Rebate - Get your federal income tax rebate now.
I was thinking about music band metaphor. Like, they compose songs- what is for them better- great skills or great melody/text? I prefer great melody/text even mediocre played. And btw music bands often play in garages too :)
Vlad's recipe is a good one. It might be more than you want to pay, but it is an excellent investment in learning about operating systems. Nowadays computing is more heterogeneous than ever with virtualization becoming more and more important. If you follow Vlad's advice you will be ahead of the game, learn important new technologies, and somewhat future-proof your investment.
Those ideas are obviously good in hindsight, but at the time a lot people thought that they were bad ideas or businesses. (what "idea" is Yahoo btw?)
Matt Maroon's comment is more anecdotal than factual. Apple consistently gets the highest marks in unbiased studies (Consumer Reports) for both the quality of its hardware, customer service and support.

To counter his anecdotal view I'll add mine; I also own a number of Macs and while I had problems with my 1400cs I have not had problems with my refurbished PowerBook. In fact, I dropped it from a meter's height and it is still performing admirably.
Indeed it's often impossible to know if a new idea could lead to a profitable business (or how profitable that business would be), but at least you can have a good hunch that the idea would be something people want.

The original Yahoo idea was a centralized directory of web pages, wasn't it?
One talk in particular in which he focuses on this idea, including with facts and figures from research literature, is a talk he gave a while ago called "Theorizing from Data": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 . You should definitely watch it if you haven't seen it before.

Norvig states his opinion slightly differently: of course being smart about algorithms is good. But until you get a lot of it, you often can't even fairly evaluate different algorithms. It's only when you're no longer getting significant gains from more data that you should then start thinking about being an algorithm smartypants.
Darwin actually held back Origin species for more than ten years because it clashed with his religious beliefs. He only released it when Alfred Russell Wallace sent him a letter asking him to look through a new theory on evolution, which of course was the exact same one that Darwin had come up with many years before.

And yes I agree with you - the implications of this theory are so broad that with a bit of stretching it can probably explain the whole field of psychology. An amazing insight.
my unproven theory is that it can actually be bad for an economy in general if a vast majority of the population has a college degree. salaries will plunge, competition for positions will increase, degrees will loose their value, physicists will flip burgers, an emigration will increase drastically. off course that is until the nation can find a way to sell its talent to other countries. think India selling its IT services to the US and Europe.
Try it on a 1920x1200 laptop screen :-(
If you plan on being at startup school, maybe I can express in plain English to you face-to-face "how the hell" this story made top page...I'll be the guy in the Purdue t-shirt.
The idea is not meant for SHOUTS against FREE. It is just about few services that has the revenue generation capabilities to users, which of course different from the existing stream of services.
Those who have interested to follow the concept, can signup with Email. But it is never meant to make other people also to be excited as I do.
I apologize if the article conveyed a different message to readers.
I use Google's thing:

http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new

Since it's only $10, works well, and I get all their apps and other junk with it.
If ideas are worthless please dump a few on this thread.
If ideas are worthless please dump a few on this thread. Terms and conditions: you cannot come back in 5 years and use this as an evidence that the idea was yours. All ideas submitted here will be available to the entire world and anyone is free to pursue them. now i won't give any because i believe ideas are worth a lot in the head, but just more when they are well executed.
http://entrecard.com/forums/7/5341
Sorry, but why would you want to run Half-Life 2? Are you insane? There's work to be done.
Would you, as a human, prefer a model that gives you accurate predictions with less data, or a model (that is simpler) but needs more data to be accurate?

How is an algorithm any different?
I knew what he was talking about. The article just strikes me as uninspired rather than promotional.
Well put it this way, to get good predictions without a lot of data takes a whole team of researchers at bell labs working on this for over a year, with data its a student project.
Growing a Language, by Guy Steele - Video
Ask HN: Autoposting script?
So as some of you may have noticed, the last 5 or so xkcd's posted have been by me. I wrote up a little autoposting script at some ungodly hour and set it up in a cron to post new comics. I am not doing this for the karma, since anyone looking at my submission history (which I assume YC would do) would notice the source of whatever karma I get. I post because I figured someone would post the xkcd at some point anyway, and I may as well save people the time.

The issue is, I've seem enough negative reactions to warrant concern. While nothing is preventing me from posting the latest comic manually each day, and considering xkcd's low volume I feel it's not a problem, I have no desire to piss anyone off. I'm also curious about how the community feels about this practice. So tell me HN: is such a practice (in the volume of 3 submissions a week) offensive? If there are a significant number of upvotes on comments against me, I will stop this practice, but I feel that tasteful bots, when used in moderation, would make things easier and more efficient on HN, though I can definitely see a potential issue with it snowballing (i.e. posting every TechCrunch entry as someone previously suggested).

Also, how do people feel about the idea of having something like an xkcd bot account, that way no one in particular benefits from the karma gain? While I recognize that most of us have xkcd in our readers, there are some who only want to view the interesting ones, which is what upvoting is meant to do anyway.

If anyone has been bothered by my use of an autoposter I apologize, I never meant to offend :).
Nostalgia for 2001: my old song parodies
I used to use 1&1 for domains and hosting, their hosting and support are terrible, and I find their transfer/cancellation process strangely difficult, but they are the cheapest and domain name registrations don't need much in terms of quality.

I now use namecheap and love them. They also have no delays in registration: when I was at a talk by Randall Munroe, he mentioned a domain name he thought was funny. 3 or 4 people lunged for their laptops to register it, and despite me having to enter my CC# (I have to start leaving $10 in my account for such emergencies), I won it, even though everyone claimed to have gotten confirmation of a successful purchase.
a) dum/p/

b) I believe ideas are worthwhile when combined with good execution. I have several, but I'm holding them for a time when I feel I can commit to releasing a well-made product.
I was planning at some vague point in the future to make bots for Techcrunch, PG, PB and xkcd just to take away that way to game karma. I think it'd be a net positive for the community, personally.
Perl needs to go back to 1995 and stay out of my century.

It's good to let computers do what computers are good at: repetitive, boring tasks. That's why modern languages detect typos and report them to the user. Perl accepts most typos as valid and makes the programmer do the boring work of analyzing the syntax for correctness.

I'm bitter about wasting 30 minutes tracking down a bug because perl accepted 'if(!$string_generator1-() || !$string_generator2->()) {...}' as valid syntax. This kind of thing happens to me very often when writing Perl programs.

I think that C++ and Perl are very different. Perhaps their most important similarity is that they're both older languages. At least C++ is making progress, while Perl seems to be embracing its backwardness.