skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Skinning YC News
Suggestion: optional alternate skin/theme for the news portion of the site. Some people like dark text on light backgrounds while others prefer the reverse. It would be nice to have the option to switch.

http://www.zentu.net/open-space/hackernews

And as you can see from the link, an example (rendering courtesy of Firebug) has already been tested. The modified css file I edited for that particular rendering is here:

http://zentu.net/open-space/customizedHN.css

Implementation? Maybe an unobtrusive link at the bottom of http://news.ycombinator.com, which gives readers the option to switch skins?

Just an idea. Also is it entirely possible that I spend too much time on this site.

P.S. The highlighted thread titles have been marked as "read"
It's funny how often now people say "write blog" in context of working: "sit, code, write blog, read blogs". I would even say that "twittering" on a regular basis feels almost like a job for many.

The word "blog" has completely lost its original meaning. In fact there aren't any real blogs left anymore. Most of them are more like expanded resumes (programmers acting smart) or nothing but souped-up press-releases (corporate "blogs") or sales pitches mixed with recruiting efforts (guys like joel).

Are you sure you write a blog? Does it have anything not related to work? Like real topics we all think about and discuss in a public setting: like jokes, sex, politics, sports? If not, it's not a blog, it's your personal PR outlet where you're simply selling yourself.

Sorry for ranting. :-)
Legend has it that as Descartes had exhausted himself meditating on the notion of "thinking and being" one day, he saw a fly on the wall in the room he had cloistered himself in. It occurred to him that he could map the position of that fly on the wall in two-dimensional space, and graphing was born. And guess what database methodology will supercede the relational model?
I think Singletons are ok when the core language's runtime promises to take care of them. They are also ok for things like the abstract state objects in a state machine and for special immutable Sentinal objects (e.g. Lisp nil, Python None, ...).
If I may,
I'd rephrase point 2 as: "Be proactive, not passive or reactive".
And I'd compress your points 4-5-6 into one: "Don't replace hard but workwhile work with easy but worthless play."
Yeah, that's why I excluded "technical" materials. You have to read those with pencil&paper and/or a terminal. However, I think there would be some benefit in being able to read things like novels or simple non-fiction quickly.
Why Twitter will be bigger than Facebook
I agree that I was exaggerating things somewhat with usage of "deserve". But that is rather inessential to the core of my argument, which isn't so much about fairness or even public policy:

If it is wrong to force some individuals to give up opportunities and wealth in order to benefit others; is it not then also wrong for a child to be equally or more deprived by the circumstances of their birth?

The two are not identical but they have enough in common to make it a very valid question. Rephrased: An irresponsible parent is stealing their child's future away, just as the state might steal from you to pay for their meals. It is easy to agree that both are wrong... but I think it will take some fancy dancing to justify the second as wrong while the first is okay.

Both yourself and mynameishere have made the same leap of judgment to condemn one possible solution (widely applied), but that's missing the point: either deprivation due to circumstances of birth is wrong or it is not -- regardless of whether the possible solution of wealth distribution might be itself wrong.

I don't have a problem with debating these solutions -- I find estate taxes an elegant compromise, for example -- but what I do have a problem with is those who pretend that poverty & inequality as it exists today is a just part of the natural order and praise that all is as it ought to be: That is self-justifying sanctimonious BS of the first order.
Unless Israel became a member of the EU the Tel-Aviv startup hub probably does not have too great a benefit for Europe.

For a startup hub to affect a country (maybe throw in some quotes for Europe), it seems to me that the following are necessary:

- any citizen needs to have the ability to relocate to the hub easily ie no immigration paperwork

- the country needs to be able to tax the income generated by the hub

- most importantly, the hub needs to be located within its borders so that the region can reap the side-benefits of the hub. This is the same kind of reason statesmen like things like particle accelerators built within their districts

any others?
As a blogger, sure, it's totally acceptable. My best advice would be not to blanket every single blog with a form letter. Take the good with the bad in any review and don't whine in comments if they don't like it, just accept it as suggestions for improvement from someone who sees a LOT of sites; probably the same, if not more, as a VC.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Procrastination is a good example of this phenomena too.
While it's interesting to advocate companies like Yahoo, instead of being sucked up into the Microsoft fold, break themselves up into smaller, more agile firms, it seems to me that perhaps the better action for Yahoo to take would simply be to emulate the practices internally that afford these smaller groups their agility instead of breaking up. There's a certain resilience that a larger company has due to the pooling of funds and resources which each of these groups within the company can harness. Then again, one area's leeching of resources can hinder the others beyond a certain point too...

This is a similar argument to what PG makes here about how ideal group sizes (for members' happiness) ought to be kept small:

http://paulgraham.com/boss.html

From an outsider's perspective, it looks like this is exactly what Google tries to do internally, and what may be their biggest advantage over Yahoo et al. Maintaining an agile (aka fragmented) internal structure (or lack of structure) over a time though may prove to be quite the challenge...
Absolutely (it is the Wall Street Journal, after all). I do agree with some of what Malone says re: free speech on the Net.

However, this is big business' usual schtick....hypocritically arguing for corporate corporate welfare, while decrying assistance for individuals. He's confusing "the U.S." with "U.S. corporations". They are not the same thing.
Most phones these days can use the web. Theoretically they can bypass this all on a data plan and send text messages as large as you want via email/apps/etc. At a minimum this gets around sending costs assuming you can find a site service that will send for free.
Beyond the Banking Crisis: A Strategy Crisis
The question is, who voted this up? That's really who you're annoyed with.
that's still more data than just saving the seed. though maybe he was talking about saving basic things (seed,etc) and when you want to reconstruct them into audio, you basically generate a program instead of an mp3. not really much different than just saving the basics, except it's more shareable and takes up more space

but it didn't sound like that. it really sounded like it never occurred to him to just store the random seed(s) because he said when you hear a great piece in randomly-generated music, it's gone forever, even though the seed is a fundamental and controllable aspect of that

[edit]he said it would generate a log of code which would point back to the generating/generated code. i can't really tell what he was effectively storing though. to reproduce the music well, the seed would have to be in there somewhere, unless it's only in charge of choosing a few discrete items
There are some merits in 20th century continental philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, et alia), and some of the derivative works that circulate as critical theory have merit as well. But most of what circulates in the critical theory world (or at least what circulated as of 15 years ago) is deliberately obfuscatory and has virtually no value. It seemed to be an endemic issue that by treating truth value and value judgements as fundamentally problematic, the tools for distinguishing valuable work from useless nonsense got thrown out as well.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of crap in every academic field, but at least in most fields, sensible practitioners left themselves the traditional tools for identifying the crap and forming a consensus about what was valuable.
Here's the original post this is based on, which is much better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156547
Anyone else think this was codified common sense when you first read it? Seems to be the case with a lot of software engineering stuff I read. I have trouble thinking of anything truly insightful my exposure to software engineering has taught me.
It's available in my network. I couldn't find it at first, it fits in at the bottom of the screen like a browser toolbar. It acts very much like gchat in gmail.
Good point: things like states, true, false, and nil make sense. I think the commonality there is that those are all immutable values whose only purpose is to have a fast object identity comparison. In a way, they're similar to global variables which are all members of the same class, except that it's nice for them to have separate types.
In fact, parents are responsible for their own children. I am not responsible for other people's children. That is a hard, cold fact.

That doesn't sound like a "cold, hard fact" to me. It sounds like an opinion on the best way to structure responsibility within a society.

Do you believe you have any responsibilities at all, to society at large? If so, why do you specifically exclude children?
It's interesting that this article is at the top of the front page -- unexpected topic to fit the category of hacker news.

My theory: problem solving and unconventional solutions are of interest to hackers and this article presents poverty as a puzzle and hints at an intriguing fix.
Thanks. Wish I could give credit to the place I first found it, but I can't remember. Lately I stick it in every page I make.
Congrats on going to Startup School! And, it's cool that Dharmesh picked up the tab for ya.

I was planning on contributing, but I've been working all weekend at my "day" job. Anyhoo, schedule your trip to stop by our Meetup the night before: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/
I agree that this is incredibly useful, and the only way to learn proper reasoning and argumentation is to practice it.

That being said, I studied history and learned those exact same things. I have nothing against philosophy, but there are other disciplines that will teach you to reason equally well. Some will also teach you other things (languages, research skills, etc.) that philosophy doesn't teach.

If someone is specifically interested in the questions philosophy grapples with, that's a good reason to study it. But there are other (and I'm personal inclined to say better) ways to learn argumentation.

History won't get you laid, though.
Check out Dictator:
http://dictator.kieranholland.com/dictator.html

It lets you set how many words are visible at a time, so you can use it to do the exercises jakewolf mentioned.

I could read Crime and Punishment at about 600-700 wpm (around 200-300 is normal) and I think I still had good comprehension. You can also adjust the speed as you go if passages get more difficult.

Also, when I read normally, I don't read linearly. I scan a page and narrow in on interesting words. Usually, if the material isn't too tricky, I can understand a paragraph very quickly this way. It is how I read online.

Finally, it really helps to think about what the author is saying, especially if I try to anticipate what's next. This gives me something to compare and contrast with, which makes me retain and understand what I read much better.
In fact, you could think of Python's None as being a singleton, but True and False being the two allowed instances of a, uh, doubleton? And similarly, states might be implemented as a limited set of allowed values of a single class. This reminds me of Haskell's algebraic types.

This maybe isn't quite "Singleton", but it is at least a useful case for limiting the number of allowed values of a class.
Do you believe you have any responsibilities at all, to society at large?

Yes: To not force others to raise my children.
For me, this pretty much sums it up:

"What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"

from

http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
paradigm shift

best of breed

core competency

ready, fire, aim

<x> is the new <y>

any noun used as a verb, such as: to leverage or to architect
Once in a while if I find a good solid article or paper I'll paste it into ZapReader[1].

[1] - http://www.zapreader.com/reader/index.php
By "online" do you mean some sort of 3rd party service that you can unleash on your servers via a web app?

That could be a pretty cool service. Of course you would need to prevent it from being hijacked for DDoS purposes (maybe require the admin running the test to upload a file with a key to the root of their web server, to prove it's under their control)
I'd go one more step general than that. I prefer to work with programmers who read to those who don't. After that, it's all implementation details.
How to survive the next-gen confab
In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop
People “probably won’t” need discrete graphics cards anymore – Intel
I was just re-reading Robert Cringley's piece on the move from education to certification.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080321_0045...

Of Malone's suggestions (to Washington), "making education more open" is the one thing that can most easily be done at the grass-roots level by parents.

Quoting Malone, "Why, when mom and dad are multitasking jobs at their laptops at Starbucks, are classrooms still bastions of rigid hours and even more rigid schedules?" Why, indeed. Furthering the missed opportunity, many of the younger children of our most educated and creative are being raised by nannies and missing out on the chance to learn by absorbing their parents' winning ways.
3G iPhone in 60 days...
I find it ridiculous that they charge for incoming text messages, especially as SMS spam is beginning to be more prevalent. As if spam wasn't annoying enough already I now get charged for it? I predict lots of class action lawsuits if this continues.
Walt Mossberg says 3G iPhone coming within 60 days
I'll second that. I haven't read the whole thing, but the multiple, deepening passes idea is key.
I don't understand why people are always trying to find shortcuts for somethings that are meant to be done very carefully.

Writing is done to communicate ideas, ideas that the author took considerable time to formulate and put into a coherent work. Reading is one of the tasks in life that should be done very carefully. The only way to read quicker and retain the same level of comprehension is to practice reading.
"I wonder if they're really learning anything useful other than how to bullshit."

Your formulation concedes, of course, that being able to bullshit is, indeed, a useful skill. I would go farther to say that the ability to bullshit well should not be mis-underestimated.
Yes, moving to Europe is a sensible alternative to paying 15 cents per incoming text message.
This kind of thing helps when you're part of a big team and you're in the position to choose the build system for your code but I'm part of a small group and a lot more of my build engineering goes into integrating existing third-party packages. I generally write sucky wrappers around configure/autotools because none of the alternatives are good enough to justify the time required to switch to something better.

So far the most promising systems I've seen that do the sort of stuff I want are Open Embedded's BitBake[1] and rPath's Conary[2], both of which look a little like Waf. I seriously considered throwing out my wrappers and switching to Conary a while back but it only works on Linux and I spend 1/2 my time on OSX.

[1] - http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake

[2] - http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary
By online, I do mean a 3rd party service like you're describing.

I was thinking of something like that for verification. Google webmaster tools does something similar by adding a meta tag, which is a nice way to do it.
Clerk: "Occupation?"

Comicus: "Standup Philosopher!"

Clerk: "What?"

Comicus: "Standup Philosopher! I coalesce the vapor of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension."

Clerk: "Oh - a Bullshit Artist!"

Comicus: "Hmmmmmm...."

Clerk: "Did you bullshit last week?"

Comicus: "No." Clerk: "Did you try to bullshit last week?"

Comicus: "Yes!"

http://woodmoorvillage.typepad.com/zendo/2005/02/bullshit_ar...
the biggest tip that i picked up on how to read faster is this:

eye movement is the bottleneck in the i/o process. your mind will process the words fast, you're losing all of your speed on moving your eyes across each word and focusing on them. learn to use your peripheral vision more.

on each new line, instead of focusing on the first word, focus on the second, but use your peripheral vision to read the first. finish up the line in the same way but backwards. you'll find you'll be reading markedly faster already, without really losing any of the meaning, context, or beauty of language.

you can speed it up even faster by taking the same technique to an extreme, but i don't like to do that, myself.
I'm not sure one can possibly say that a site that's only been around for a few months (like FriendFeed) ever experienced "death". I'm sure Paul would be surprised to hear it.

And, many of the ones that I might agree look a little moribund (like Mahalo, perhaps) also haven't really proven that they have a real life ahead of them.

It's just too early to say much about most of these startups, and I'm not sure there's a lot to learn from trying to analyze snippets of Alexa data to indicate their life/death status.
No luck for me :(
Which, I might add, is very much against speed reading.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (the paper that launched an empire)
I'm roughly 90% sure Mahalo will fail, or at least have to make a major change of direction to avoid doing so.
A VC Perspective: Innovation & Start-ups Landscape in Australia
Yep, I majored in Logic and Computation not quite two decades ago.

http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/undergraduate-bs.php

The thing that pulled me in was all the possible paths to graduation (see "Sample Curricula" on the linked page). CS and ECE basically had every course laid out from freshman to senior year, which seemed really constraining to someone not quite sure what I wanted to do yet. (I ended up in the natural language processing track, now the "Language and Information Technologies" track under the Sample Curricula.)
Introducing Action Messager: Dead simple IM notifications for your app!
This looks a few years old. Interesting how since writing this article, Stevey's flipped on two points:

1) Javascript went from a "language you're stuck with" to the "next big language".

2) Here he has a hunch that, basically, Java is the best language for building large systems, and a dynamically typed, interpreted language probably would fail. Now at Google, he's certainly seen large systems done in Python, he uses Ruby everywhere he's allowed, and he's rewritten Rails and Wyvern in Javascript.

And he never explains why Lisp might be a special case.
Compete Stats vs. Real Stats (round 1)
Compete shows that Hacker News got 75,000 visitors in March...here:

http://grapher.compete.com/ycombinator.com_uv.png

PG stats show approx 110k + visitors:

http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-24mar08.png

In the past my comparisons show that compete usually only shows 70-80% of the traffic a site gets. Is anyone interested in sharing some stats on their site ( I will do the same ) to get a better picture of how inaccurate compete really is?
Ditto. A perfect market wouldn't need regulation, but we're far from a perfect market. The barriers to entry (both financial and regulatory) means that there isn't much competition, so regulation can help. Regulation isn't perfect, but neither is our implementation of the market.
This is very similar to how I learned to speed read, except that I learned to speed read by reading two lines at once.

I admit that it is difficult to get used to, but for reading non-technical documents or for something other than pleasure, it is quite effective.
Nice of author to write this piece, but really no need to expand upon the words of the master. They stand on their own. 1,494 words reduced to 106:

“He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

“Action is the foundational key to all success.”

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”

“Youth has no age.”
Any Suggesstion for simple, unobstructive java script color picker?
Would be great if it's based on jQuery
7 mobile video and photo apps
If reading technical documents or for pleasure, I invest myself pretty deeply, taking a lot of time and occasionally re-reading passages.

If reading for just fast consumption of information, I often will use a multiple sentence technique where you read 2-3 lines as you go across and reconstruct the ideas as you go. It is unusual, but it works eventually. It is not meant for deep understanding though. Kind of like reading something and only getting the highlights (albeit very detailed highlights).
Checkout this blog entry for some ideas http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/05/07/besiege-your-web-a...
I feel sorry for pg. It wasn't intended poorly, but being called a "thought leader" just seems to ring so sketchily anymore.
"DON'T: Compromise on the issue of ethics."

Ethics, like pregnancy, is a binary issue: it's either 100% or 0%. Ignore this advice at your own peril.
"idea demand still outweighs idea supply"

Really? I've met a lot more people with ideas that they don't try to implement than hard workers without ideas.
though in that direction, studying law and especially rhetoric (under communication) would be much better
Yeah, I hear you. One thing I do in that regard is make liberal use of mp3s, to listen to lectures, novels, nontechnical stuff (although I am listening to the complete Feynman Lectures on mp3!). It's an easy way to make use of time like commuting, waiting, etc....and I probably get through a half dozen books or so like that a month.
I don't think that you can eradicate poverty (handouts don't count) because there simply isn't enough non-subsistence related work for 6 billion people.

for our purposes poverty = subsistence or close to it

once energy is cheap (distributed solar) humanity can turn to the problem of food distribution and education. Once we start getting more people educated more einstein's and other people who add disproportionate value to humanity should pop up and we'll get accelerating returns.

the point of all this is to solve the population problem before the population problem solves us, so to speak.
Actually, more like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108

Stylish is an extension made specifically for applying external CSS to sites. Not sure, it might even be based on Greasemonkey, actually... Anyway, it's a good starting place, and I've seen a few very impressive things done with it (mostly to Gmail). If you do end up making any themes using either Stylish or Greasemonkey, please let us know.