skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Better lesson: if you have an employee who gets bored and writes cutting edge code in his spare time while still getting his work done, give them something better to do.

Daniel
This is one of the most thoughtful and apparently correct essays I've read in a long time.
The problem is not rich people, the problem is rich people who ability-wise are slaves. Class is a stupid idea, caste is a better one.
(This is actually from the article:) "Anyway, I’m in a particularly bad mood because I have food poisoning (thanks very much Grand Hyatt Seattle) and Twittering it was going to make me feel marginally better because a bunch of people would say something nice in a reply. But they take even that away from me."

And so the world is denied a minute by minute 160-character descriptions of Michael Arrington's food poisoning :( Guess we'll just have to wait till Scoble eats something bad.
Social networking is a commercial trend. Why? Technology replacing social life in the real world is a bad idea.
I run Hardy, Gusty, and Windows on my laptop, but the only problem that seems to happen that I cannot figure out with Hardy is that it continuously attempts to mount an audio disk, even though there is none in the drive. I have not been able to figure out this problem and it does not seem to come up in forums. If I leave my computer unattended for a while, I could expect to come back and find 10 or so error messages to close.

Other than this specific problem to my situation, Hardy seems to run fine, and in my opinion better than Gutsy. Sometimes I feel as though people tend to make these overblown issues in blogs so they have something controversial to drive traffic to their sites. These issues are small qualms that should be brought up in Ubuntu development forums, not in a blog article that disregards the OS as a whole because of some annoyances of a power user. To be ready for the mass usage, it must be easy to install, have all of the hardware recognized, and have its users easily begin to work as though they previously have. I have had three friends who I would consider to have no computer knowledge other than regular internet usage install the system and get it up and running just from the cd's I gave them, no other input from me. If these people can do it and successfully get work done, I would consider it ready. These are issues that do not apply to 95 percent of computer users.
Very good. How do we solve the overpopulation problem, which is the root cause to global warming?
If you didn't follow the link inside the story: http://www.zazlamarr.com/blog/?p=240. That's how you make raving fans - and a corporate environment where your employee is free to do something like that is just going to out-service everyone else.
How many times will this be tried and continue to fail!? This "tipping" thing has been done since eternity - it's called begging, and the people who do it are regarded as pretty low on the social ladder.

I read a great article, and I do NOT want to tip. I maybe want to read more about the person, or buy a book or something, but just randomly giving money is not financially clever.

If I tip in a restaurant, it's because I want to be remembered. If I anonymously tip some blogger, what do I get? Nothing!

TipJoy is an unnatural phenomena, and it's an uphill battle type of business. I will never tip a blogger. I will buy from him maybe, but never ever tip him.
Is.gd URL Shortener
Yes, glibc in particular uses a very nice PRNG with 992 bits of internal state and good randomness of high and low bits, though it is not cryptographically strong like /dev/urandom. I don't know what one gets on Windows, but from the graph it looks like it's got some tricky squaring thing in it that turns out not to be very good.
Choosing between Abstract Type Members and Existentials in Scala
Where's the True 3D Desktop? (And Compiz Fusion doesn't count)
You're online now...
It's really all about how you describe the service. Tipjoy is all about dead-simple voluntary patronage of digital content. Patronage is a millennia old model for creative content generation.

Also, tipping isn't anonymous. Here is a list of things I've tipped.
http://tipjoy.com/userstream/ivankirigin/

We're going to push this information as far as we can because the social side is so important.
Cry me a freaking river. Is anyone else sick of this one person complaining endlessly that a free service doesn't meet his standards?
Games are surprisingly demanding when it comes to random number generation. Especially in the realm of computer graphics, the human brain is excellent at picking out underlying patterns which can result from insufficiently random data. Even with a good generator, mishandling of the results can ruin things easily.
The Biggest Tech IPO of 2008 Is Coming Out of Russia: Search Engine Yandex to Raise Up To $2 Billion
Well, I could do his in my head. Actually, no, I have that one memorized.

I had a perfectly good algorithm. It was a memoized recursion. The problem was that my program printed something like blah*10^27 and they were asking for an exact answer.
Image Retrieval methods
Facebook should be growing internationally enough to cover that hit, shouldn't it?
because something is free doesnt mean it gets of the leash of reasonable standards. if google, facebook, hacker news, or anything else were constantly down, it would be "ok". Not sure where your standards come from.
Even if the article were true, I still believe in 'bubble up' rather than 'trickle down'.

If you transfer money to the poor, then tend to be happier and thus cause less social problems (e.g. less crime, fewer beggars, etc.). The rich can afford it. Soak 'em :-)
Maybe I should have said "It hides the costs really well." Some people benefit from transfer payments, but much less than they think, and on balance nearly everyone loses. To paraphrase David Friedman, suppose the government takes a penny from each of 100 people, and dumps 50 cents on one lucky winner (that's you)---and then repeats the process 100 times. Everyone feels like they're getting a good deal, but you're still 50 cents poorer.

Sum up the total cost of increased prices due to taxation and your personal lifetime tax burden and it's not nearly as clear-cut that you come out ahead with public schools. Add to that the distorting effect of school monopolies on incentives and quality (virtually all public school teachers are in the bottom half academically, etc.) and you've got a shaky argument for government education, even for your case. I'd bet that even you would have been better off if schools were provided on the market.
Building a Poker Bot: Part 2
Thats a great call! we are spoiled, to have cars, houses, family, food and jobs (not mention computers)

"By being white, male and american; you are ahead of over 70% of people in the world!"
Maybe the easy dumb lies are the best ones to tell. When we grow up they are obviously lies and easy to dump. They serve as markers that say, "Use your own judgment and insert your own belief here."

For example, in the case of the turkey, maybe the absurd lie that turkeys want to die is better than whatever belief the parents use to justify eating meat (BTW- I'm not vegetarian). If the lie can be believed by an adult, the child may not question it when they become one.
From the article: The proper value, which does deserve all of the reverence and adulation bestowed upon the current imposter, is the number now unfortunately known as 2pi.

Does this mean we can have 2pi day on Jun 28?
I upgraded, and a few annoying problems (the biggest being lack of hibernate) were fixed for me.

What I wasn't thrilled with were the compulsory upgrades of a number of apps; I had to remove firefox3 and install ff2 (don't care for some of the changes), lost XMMS, and KOrganizer has a less-simple UI for managing reminders, among other things.

(Luckily I was not compelled to jump to KDE4. :) )
The author has a sense of entitlement to this service, as if he somehow deserves to use it, and if it is down, he has been wronged.
Alternative Number Formats
what happens if you use a url AND text?...
Facebook is boring. I like FriendFeed, Twitter, for keeping in touch, sharing new things, etc.

Only problem is, none of my friends use those (Well, except one), most of my other friends aren't really "early adopter" crowd and essentially a ton of apps and various things plague their Facebook profiles. To me, Facebook seems like a waste of time apart from hooking up with a few older colleagues. Once I hook up with them, I can find other methods to stay in touch (IM, Email, etc)
Touché. Though, I'm at work, and YC looks a lot better than Facebook on my screen as co-workers look on.
Cute, but just not practical. I could bike with more on my back than what I could fit in a single passenger capsule like that.
Still unconfirmed and generally inaccurate. Even if Steve shows it off on the 9th, it will not be available immediately.
Though... Apple stores are out of stock... so, who knows?
Indeed, the first thing I thought was "hey that's PHP! Oh, did he just use rand()?" It ought to be common knowledge in the PHP world that you always use mt_rand().

On OSX, the results aren't very noticeable, probably because the underlying libs are higher quality than Windows, but mt_rand() definitely produces something comparable to his random.org image.

Not sure why rand() isn't simply replaced with mt_rand() under the hood, since improving randomness will hardly break b/c... Maybe PHP9 will have that ;)
Already done: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Send him candy next time
Sounds pretty bad. They should have seen a big bump as students go into finals (at least in the past it seems like people I know are more active on facebook when they have lots of work to do).

Just from my personal experience, I've noticed less and less of my friends using facebook - people aren't listing parties/events on it anymore, groups are annoying, and the apps are mostly useless spam.
Agreed. Those billion$ in subsidies going to coal, oil and nuclear don't make for much of a level playing field, do they?
It's a 2 person car, so you can fit at least a big suitcase in it - in place of the 2nd person.
my version (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/26925) was there 1 minute before that :)
"Your comment superficially sets up an argument I never made, which is the definition of a strawman."

No, because you made no specific argument. If you make a statement that is so short that it can be interpreted to be anything anyone wants then it isn't a strawman if I fail to read your mind!

We all know that government is inefficient, but I think the blame is misplaced. I don't believe it's inefficient because it's a government, but because it's a giant institution. I've worked for the government, for large corporations, and for start ups. Large corporations are equally as inefficient as the government most of the time.
Any reputable gaming site uses an Intel hardware random number generator.
The problem is that for most of us those four hours you feel ok about spending doing nothing are the only hours of the day that can be used for appreciably changing your life. For most employees those four hours are all their non-work hours that are truly discretionary and awake. If they don't use those productively they will be employees all their life until they retire. By then they will probably have forgotten what they really wanted to do in life and perhaps be too tired, run down, and or poor to do anything about it if they do remember or discover it.

If you are doing what you really want to do in your "work life" then I could see it. But if you are really doing what you want to do I sort of doubt that their are 4 hours a day that you could do something with that you would blow doing something other than "what you really want to do". We are not talking hobbies, keeping up with literature, exploring interesting things here so much as like sitting in front of the Tube or the equivalent, vegging.
Well it will start with a small market but the technology will get better and they'll be able to grow the market.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.
I'm not surprised. Jokes don't do well here.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but I suspect that VW is just saying this take momentum away from the upcoming cap-and-trade bills. I doubt they'll ever actually release this car.
Next Gen Apps Won't Be Pushed Around By the Browser
However, even that isn't enough to measure true randomness. What this article doesn't mention is that you quickly run into trouble trying to visualise non-random behaviour in RNGs. At the higher end, the analysis isn't quite so easy.
taxes wouldn't be an issue if the government adjusted spending to reflect taxes instead of adjusting taxes to reflect spending.
http://www.globalrichlist.com/

You are in the 99th percentile even if you make just $47,500 per year (irrespective of your race, gender etc)
Something that I have noticed really distracts me is computer eye candy. I am sort of glad that Linux laptops just aren't as visually WOW as OS X and Windows, especially OS X. I find that when I boot into Linux I get a lot more work done. The environment is just less distracting to me. For some reason a Linux desktop clicks me into work mode much more readily. I guess it could be conditioning but I really thing it is in large part that the screen isn't quite so pretty.
your paraphrasing fails to deal with the reality of the situation. By "dumping" tuition assistance on me you didn't merely transfer money is a zero sum game. I am now a competitive worker in the global economy, which I wouldn't have been, and I make a far larger salary than I would have. Now I"m paying far more money into the government than I would have in order to enable another person a similar opportunity.

This makes us all richer in the long run, and is not the zero sum game you claim it to be.
Since the poor basically aren't paying federal income tax, any tax that they do pay must be, by definition, the majority of their tax burden.

SS is basically a crappy retirement plan for poor people. It's even worse for rich ones. Given that, it's irrational to call it a tax.
Maybe Tim just had the typical aversion to friction that you often find in management. Perhaps his decision looks like genius in hindsight, but was really just motivated by his distaste for disciplining or firing.
Reminds me of my friend from my old school telling me the WORST interview question he has ever been asked:

Tell me a joke.
Saying "no" can be hard to do
what is this garbage? the poor tend to be happy when you give them money? you have zero basis for this. people tend to be happy when they earn success. people who are given money tend to be unsatisfied and lazy.
Under the "who should pay for govt?" question is another question - is it good for a large fraction of the population to have essentially no role in paying for govt?

Suppose that we could get all of the tax revenue from 1000 people, should we? How about 1%?
well, they paid 19 cents out of every 20 after the first million dollars.
Yeah, I just tacked it on to my blacklist, which I'm sure not everyone wants.
"If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file - not a big book, he rarely gives interviews - you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private."

It seems checking the results is no longer part of publishing.
"Ironically, your profit would shrink to zero if the site stopped collecting rake! The thing that more than any other makes games tough to beat - the rake - makes it possible for your bot to turn a healthy profit. And that, as a long-time online poker player, makes me smile."

That's not true at all. In fact, the logic is terrible. If your bot is breaking even at a raked table, and you remove the rake, it would become a winning player. Far more so, in fact, than it makes just taking 35% of the rake back.
Techmeme listens: 32 months in the making, search arrives!
That would dwarf Quaero's US$306 million investment ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136759 ).
This is exactly right. The windows implementation of ANSI C89 rand() was done with a 16 bit linear congruential generator back in the win16 days, and left unchanged for compatibility reasons. It's really not an insane choice on their part. Lots of applications really do rely on PRNG repeatability, and you wouldn't want a platform upgrade to interfere with that.

The real lesson is that applications with solid randomness requirements need to be relying on their own generators (there are lots to choose from) or an OS-supplied RNG (e.g. /dev/urandom) and not ANSI C, which is underspecified.
Interesting. CBIR was my dissertation topic and I haven't thought about it in some time. Brings back fond memories (and some kooky thoughts about what to with it now.) Thanks, nickb.

It's a hard problem (computationally and figuratively) since perfect image search is basically the same problem as computer vision. Most people think of image search like they do textual search: exactness is a requirement. I relaxed that requirement and look at different methods to cull the search space down (throw out images that probably weren't relevant).
"There are about 300 million Americans who consume about 1,500 calories per day."

Fail. When surveyed, the average American claims to eat around 2,000 calories a day, and studies have shown that people greatly underestimate that. Also, over 3,800 food calories per person disappear daily. Even if you consider that much of it is waste, the average number of calories eaten per day is well above 2,500.

Guess who just read "In Defense of Food"?
Startup Riot 2008 Atlanta Recap
NewsCred Launches - would love feedback on my startup
We're still in Private Alpha, so you'll have to register:

http://www.newscred.com/private/invitation/by/shafqat

Many of you know that I've been around the HN community for a while learning, discussing and asking a lot of questions around the different aspects of building a startup. So we've finally done it an launched!

We've been covered in some tech blogs, but what I'm really looking for is honest feedback from the HN community. Specifically, what would it take to make you a happy user? ;-)

And what would we have to add/change/improve to make you use the site as a daily news source?
This Week in Ruby (May 20, 2008)
BTW, I'll put the first piece of feedback myself: we know we have to shorten the registration process, and are working on it!
I thought that the topic was covered comprehensively last week ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185830 ) but, there's plenty to discuss about privacy invasion and bot counter-measures.
where is wozniak?
Is it just me or has techcrunch taken a decided nose-dive of late?
Wow, this is actually a huge turn away from the direction that the original OLPC took. The fact that it will cost only $75 to make is extremely impressive. Somehow I find this hard to believe that they are going this route. How long could the battery life be for a device that has two huge DVD lcd's? This announcement really reflects the intentions of Negroponte and maybe he never really had 3rd world counties children in mind. I have to imagine that it would be tough to learn to touch type using a touchscreen with no tactile response mechanisms.
TED Talk "Once Upon A School": amazing work of volunteers making great impact on education
He has been wronged. It's a service, which he relies on to communicate to thousands of people. If you make a service that people rely upon enough and integrate to their lives, they should expect decent uptime. Twitter doesnt even come close. It really isn't out of line
I definitely agree with you, but I was trying to think about how what he said could be true. Is it possible rakeless games would alter the strategies of the opposing players enough to render the bot ineffective?

But I guess even then the bot could be modified accordingly. Interested to hear the author's response...
Techcrunch: Something Is Technically Wrong

Am I the only one who notices the 5 to 10 second delay on deep links?

You'd think a site that critiques other sites would be a little faster.
Famous Failures
If someone provides me with something, and I give nothing in return, I consider it a gift.
Ask YC: Django vs Ruby on Rails
I have recently finished the design work for a project I am going to be working on this summer and I was having a hard time deciding which framework to implement the project in. A lot of the articles written out there seem to either be dated (so some of the qualms may have been changed in newer versions) or biased. I have no experience in Python or Ruby, so I am completely open to either, I just want to make sure the investment in the time spent learning is worth it not just for this project but also for future ones (and for potential jobs). I also am curious as to which hosting service you all use and how easy it is to implement that framework with it. I had bought my domain name with GoDaddy.com along time ago, but I am open to switching to something reliable (and cheap I am still a student). Thanks for any input!

EDIT (To elaborate a little on my project, without giving details):

The project is relatively simple and provides a service to an area for a small fee. For now, the area would be specific to one geographic location. As the site grows and progresses, the site will need to scale by adding more locations (organized similar to how craiglist is specific to each location).
I think there is a difference between aversion to friction and the ability to completely control your emotions, which was apparently Tim's skill.

My boss is similar. We've been through some brutal meetings together, and while I start to get heated, he stays totally cool and positive. I always admire it, but can't always follow his lead.

While others might have been immediately upset at their employee, Tim could step back, remain level-headed, and look at the big picture. In the big picture, he had found an employee who could be really successful.
I would say some of those are red flags about the company itself... especially "Are you willing to put the interests of X Company ahead of your own?". I would probably answer that with "Depends, is X Company willing to put my interests ahead of its own?"
How do you calculate credibility rankings?

added:

here's how:
http://www.newscred.com/help/credrank
For those wondering how we've been doing relative to that 19.5% of GDP, here's a graph: http://carriedaway.blogs.com/carried_away/2005/04/us_governm...

We probably couldn't lower taxes for a while after spending less than 19.5% of GDP so we could actually pay down the national debt, but I like your plan.
Crazy rasberry ants eating computers in Houston
Ceiling Height Influences Thinking Patterns
Greasemonkey script to de-scribd HN PDFs
"If I anonymously tip some blogger, what do I get? Nothing!"

What about getting more of the kind of content that you enjoyed?
There is statistical evidence that suggests ceiling height influences thinking patterns. Higher ceilings encourage creative thinking and lower ceilings encourage detail-oriented thinking. [1] Obviously both patterns are critically important to hackers and businessmen.

Likely there are a whole suite of variables associated with a physical space that have an effect on thinking.

Yay for good architecture and design!

[1] http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/71190.pdf
Ritalin != Provigil. I've tried adderall, which is similar enough to Ritalin, and can anecdotally confirm the article's claim that creativity is reduced while on the drug. But, Provigil's mechanism is completely different, and I don't think you can make the same claim about it from anecdotal evidence just because they both keep you awake. Adderall and its friends do far more than that.

And if the same claim could be made of Provigil, at best the article's conclusion could be: There is a time and place for everything.