skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made this a while ago, it's still being refined and will be released as a service at some point, but here's a preliminary copy for you to play with. Just enter a comment and press the button, and it will tell you if your comment was stupid or clever.

To clarify, "stupid" and "clever" are only judged on style, not content, so something well-written but erroneous like "The sky is indubitably orange with green stripes" will be judged as clever.

For added fun, try pasting YouTube comments.
You ain't seen nothing yet: Brazil is currently using only 16% of its arable land. It has 65 million hectares in use of a total of 394 million (http://www.viniart.com.br/lucioWhybrasil/whyBrasil.aspx?m=2&...).

Things started to get really interesting when Brazilian farmers stopped using european methods, thanks to research at Embrapa (http://www.embrapa.br/).
I'm sorry; I didn't mean to dig a pitfall to entrap a helpful fellow traveler. When I noticed that a reading with the last two sentences as separable was misleading, I edited directly. I think the "sadly" part was communicated though, and I've tucked away your remarks for when I'm confronted by a multitasking OS. I think debugging the race conditions would be nightmarish.
Perhaps it's neither (or both). Ultimately it's an art piece that provokes 'reflections' about the nature of reflection, high technology and low technology. To me it's brilliant and something that I'd love to have hanging on my wall.
Substitute in what way? Can I list all the computer books I have read on my resume?
Introversion Software: Coming Clean
I can't be the only one that finds this makes YC less attractive. I looked at YC as mentoring and a leg up for interesting ideas, not a sausage factory for Facebook Apps.
I disagree. For the people working on webkit, the fix is probably an hours work.

For me, it'd likely be a week to get up to speed with the project. So it's more efficient for me, and other users not familiar with the codebase to yell at the developers for a day or two and see if they'll fix it.

I know in open source utopia everyone seamlessly just hops into other projects, fixes a bug, says 'here you go! bye for now', and carries on to the next project, but that doesn't happen in real life.

Who knows though, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a really good reason they allow clickjacking. But I certainly can't see one.
I worked on a project at a bank that started insignificant, and became significant and the loss of quality and the increase in waste was phenomenal.

It is great perceived importance that makes a boondoggle.

A few employees, government or otherwise, doing a project of no great significance, will not waste much.
> What then is bound to happen is that we develop some sort of theoretically inter-stellar range communication technology.

'Bound to happen' is quite a bold statement for something that, according to current scientific understanding, is not really possible. That is, if you mean faster-than-light communication, which I think you allude to in the next paragraphs.
I don't think many got a great state of mind before they blew themselves off.
As for the NASA story, you might find this link interesting: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
the concept of a new leg is something that allow us to change significantly the way in which we move. A car is not a new leg, a leg grows with the body.

So the question is: is computational science like a car or like a leg. Is only a tool or is something that will make a change in the way we think and conceive experiments, in the way we consider thinks to be possible and shape our future?

In ancient times there was only one leg for science, that was authority. I see no problem which the three or four legs concept. The only thinks I would consider silly is to confuse a leg with a finger. Anyway, if you don't want to use body analogies, don't ask for know many legs science has in the first place.
There aren't any relational databases doing any thing useful, only non relational databases, like those based on SQL.
I think the confusion centers around the phrase "liking something gives them permission to write to your status feed." I first read that as "liking something gives them permission to publish updates as you." Which is similar to how some apps will get permission to publish as you, but what I believe the author means, is that liking will let the liked page publish their own updates, and you will see them in your personal feed.
I don't know about you, but the things I do not miss are putting spaces in extension names to reorder them (at boot time, they were loaded alphabetically and there were often conflicts, if the order was "incorrect"), manually setting up, how much RAM can a specific app use, or rebooting with virtual memory on/off, depending on which app I wanted to run. I still remember, that reading websites with table-layouts on the only somewhat standards-compliant browser (IE for Mac) was exercise in frustration.

Both windows (95/98) and macs had their share of shortcomings, you just had to pick, which set you can tolerate.
Not really HN, but reminds me of the lyrics to sweet lullaby

Young brother, young brother, be quiet
You are crying, but our father has left us
He has gone to the place of the dead
To protect the living, to protect the orphan child

http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/faq.shtml#secondsong
Technically a relation has to have a primary key so all that set theory is valid. A system could be based on bags, like SQL allows, can also have data.
Art History Term Papers is Way to Tell the History of Art
Normally arts history term papers are given to arts major students as part of their coursework. They help art students determine the art style and help them in critiquing artworks correctly. Here are some interesting term paper ideas for your art history term paper.
People typically say "the galaxy is big, so it's unlikely", which is not necessarily true. You need no more than a few tens of thousands of years to colonize a significant part of the galaxy, and it's not unthinkable many societies have had that kind of head start.

The real expanse that separates civilizations is time. It takes only slightly more than 1000 years to travel a thousand light years, but the gaps in time can be much bigger. It's possible that over the course of a billion years, many thousands of civilizations rise and fall, but at any given time only a handful are in existance concurrently.
In CS how something behaves is far more important than how it's built.

For example one of the most surprising things to me was the fact that all programs built on top of TCP/IP still need their own messaging format because a packet can be split in transport. The header information says almost nothing about the original message sent, just enough information to send a reply up the chain and rebuild the message.

As to linked lists, the speed that fragment virtual/physical memory is in no way obvious from their source code. Build one in C vs Java and they behave vary differently even if the code looks similar.

PS: I really prefer CS projects that require some thought. Quickly sort this 50GB file requires a different mindset than simply, build a linked list library. IMO, build a linked list library is really a lesson in using pointers and tells you vary little about data structures.
It sounds like a script injection, but that would be a pretty big flaw in FB and 1) Would spread pretty fast 2) Would be picked up by FB pretty quickly as well.
I am not YC founder, so i dont know how YC do that. But technically everyone can come to US, register a company and work for it. Its YOUR company, so no prob here.

Although you might need to come back to your country every 6 months or so.

Edit: Surprised to see so many comments and and downvotes from "experts" for that. Get business/tourist (b1/b2). You are not working you are considering investing in US- one of the simples rules to remember when crossing border- and there are many others.
Introduction to String Theory [2004]
I hope you will get some good answers. Just a short note: Please do not include HTML-tags in your posts. Thanks!
Really? It's sound like this would make it possible to work every job, by sub-contracting to your `company'.
Everyone can register a company? But you still need a special VISA to work. That's remarkable.
Business and IT guides for SMBs
There's been a lot written recently about language and its interaction with thinking processes. Here are a few related references here on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365
Reading the preface (matrix like), I thought: You as me are here in the bed for sleeping so do it well. Vanity, emacs and other comments are not the red pill IMHO. Clojure rocks, so I hope the author go back to blogging about clojure, examples and applications that I enjoy reading for free.
This sounds great for YC startups that are building anything married to facebook. Also, really great move by facebook, they get a pre-approved pool of third parties to expand their world of facebook. It sounds like a win-win.

Unless facebook would like to put their fingers all over YC's, including those that aren't related to facebook in any way - e.g. "Pg says we MUST have facebook integration like this, we have this document we got from facebook on how and what to put into our product. Do it bro - he'll shoot us in the face. Here he comes, I can hear the lambda keychain. Just do it!".
Because I could not visit that website without enabling Cookies, here is the full text:

Hackers accidentally give Microsoft their code
By Josh Taylor, ZDNet.com.au on August 26th, 2010 (1 day ago)

When hackers crash their systems while developing viruses, the code is often sent directly to Microsoft, according to one of its senior security architects, Rocky Heckman.

When the hacker's system crashes in Windows, as with all typical Windows crashes, Heckman said the user would be prompted to send the error details — including the malicious code — to Microsoft. The funny thing is that many say yes, according to Heckman.

"People have sent us their virus code when they're trying to develop their virus and they keep crashing their systems," Heckman said. "It's amazing how much stuff we get."

At a Microsoft Tech.Ed 2010 conference session on hacking today, Heckman detailed to the delegates the top five hacking methods and the best methods for developers to avoid falling victim to them. Heckman explained how to create malicious code that could be used in cross-site scripting or SQL injection attacks and, although he said it "wasn't anything you couldn't pick up on the internet", he suggested delegates use the code responsibly to aid in their protection efforts.

According to Heckman, based on the number of attacks on Microsoft's website, the company was only too familiar with what types of attacks were most popular.

"The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com," he said. "On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second at Microsoft.com," said the senior security architect.

"I think overall we've done pretty good, even when MafiaBoy took down half the internet, you know, Amazon and eBay and that, we didn't go down, we were still up."

Heckman said there were two reasons why the top hacking methods of cross-site scripting and SQL injection had not changed in the past six years.

"One, it tells me that the bad guys go with what they know, and two, it says the developers aren't listening," he said.

Heckman said that developers should consider all data input by a user as harmful until proven otherwise.
I don't see how reverse engineering to not use an iframe would help. Presumably Facebook would have some type of check on the iframed like page that ensures that the request is actually coming from FB. How would an attacker recreate an iframed page they don't have access to?
NMSU hosting ‘speed dates’ for entrepreneurs, investors
Sorry for that. Don't know where those html-tags came from.
>claiming that the only possible solution is to pretty much destroy our way of life.

That is what many climate warming deniers like to claim will happen. Doesn't have to be so, Sweden for instance has increased its wealth steadily while at the same time reduced its environmental impact.

>I certainly prefer the Myhrvold approach, of thinking outside the box and challenging others to react, than the Gore fear-mongering.

What Al Gore does is also challenging people to react.
How does measuring CO2 levels answer the question of "what would have happened if there were less CO2 in the atmosphere?"

Can we do the same thing with sulfur dioxide after a volcano? If so, all we need to do is wait for the next big volcano to prove geoengineering is viable.
Live just now: Summer of Startups Demo Day (Helsinki)
As I post this the pitching competition is just starting. Is it just me or is the sound missing?
There is a visa (It's one of the E visas) for people bringing capital into the states but you it's not a trivial amount and you need to prove that you will employ a certain number of Americans.
I know it's early yet, so take this with all appropriate grains of salt, but that is easily the most insightful comment I've read today, and really drives home a point I've been trying to make for awhile (and probably failed to).

I started out with Ruby, because of Rails, and just never seemed to quite make it jive with me mentally. When I found Python (because of Django), everything clicked more. I'm not even sure it was the language differences that clicked more for me, or whether it was the documentation, or the code samples, or some other intangible that made it all work.
Tourist visas are 3 months, and are for tourism, not for working for your company.

I do think that it's possible to register a company, but don't know how that works out for non-US people.
Actually in Ruby you can often use both #size and #length.

It's part of the Ruby's philosophies to have synonyms like that.
Do they accept Mastercard?
No, he's partially right but the `company` needs to be big and needs to employ US citizens I think.
What about development languages?
Great show. Listen to every one, but this one was really good. Amazing story.
Shoe Storage Cabinets
furnitureinfashion.net provides great shoe storage furniture, shoe storage cabinets with pull out sections, adjustable shelves which will surely organize your enviable collect by having shoe storage.
Mozilla Labs » Announcing Jetpack SDK 0.7
I get:

[✓] Enable instant personalisation on partner websites.
Note: instant personalisation is not yet available for you.

The tick is greyed out, so I guess it's not yet active. But I have no way of telling when it will become active, and no way of disabling it preemptively. Another reason to only log onto facebook in incognito/privacy mode.
My experience as Google News publisher and user has shown the Google News ranking algorithme is heavily biased towards time of publishing of the article. This leads to a CNN story published 1 day ago about topicX to be ranked lower compared to a AC article on topicX published one hour ago.

In this case she searches for an "old" topic, hence its algorithme ranks the newest published article as most relevant, dispite its low quality compared to the older onces.
Hacking skills of a modern terrorist
I think the key here, besides stability, is really whether you own the users or not - similar to the iPhone, the rules can change pretty fast and it is easy to be left holding the bag on a lot of time and energy with nothing to show for it.
Perhaps [it's] time for a content mill focused on quality. But then it wouldn't benefit of the trick of making people click on ads because the information is incomplete.
I agree with you, and I was equally frustrated. I think the problem is that most people don't use the Math module that much. Hence they try to keep the Numeric classes smaller rather than filling them with all possible Math functions.

However, it doesn't take much to "fix" it the way you like it. You need to patch Numeric. Whenever you call a method that doesn't exist, it calls the method "method_missing". Hence you can monkey patch Numeric#method_missing to call the equivalent Math function.
I suspect that while the non-US teams are at YC, some of them are technically 'tourists' (i.e just on holiday). They don't need a visa to enter the country so it's a case of hear-no-evil, see-no-evil.

If they decide to stay in the US after YC, then they have to deal with the nightmare of immigration and get themselves proper work permits.

For those who need a tourist visa to even enter the US, I have no idea.
I think it really depends on how well you know the underlying system. Once, I was working on a project written in object pascal and I got to the point where opening the debugger was on average the slower approach to solving most problems. However, I am no where near that point when writing .Net code because the language and the platform became to complex for me to really understand.
Reminds me of the devices in The Difference Engine.
I found that ineffably sad; the author giving up the chance to see his kids grow up, the kids missing their father, the wife with two kids to raise, and all for nothing. (Although it would be almost as sad even if I valued the purpose.)

It's a good reminder to follow my values and build things to help people live, rather than sow hate and destruction; to combat the madness, rather than profit by it.
Yes. I have to find out how no-till agriculture works. (See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming)
Increase salary if employee moves to a country where living costs are higher?
An employee becomes a remote worker by moving to another country. Living costs there are higher. Do we increase her salary to accommodate for that?
this is 5 years old
I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor.

To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison.

Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics.

And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.
I can only agree. A truly amazing man!
Sadly not nearly mentioned enough in study books and lectures though..
Norway, one of the most xenophobic/racist/elitist nations

for me this is a pretty severe accusation. don't know on which data you are basing that on ...

European companies are falling behind their American counterparts in many of the next generation industries.

well, do they? do all of them? which industries? which companies? looking at green technology i.e., Europe (especially Germany) is in a very good position for the future. and this is one of the most promising industries ...
Ask HN: tips for working with Mac OS X without using the mouse? (RSI)
I noticed that avoiding the mouse is very useful to lessen the effects of RSI.

Do you have tips (useful tools, hints, ...) on how to avoid the mouse for almost all tasks on Mac OS X (I'm a developer, most of the day) ?
Jobs also offered, 2.5 times what Gates did
You should still be able to edit your submission and remove them. For paragraph breaks, just insert a blank line.
Part of the problem is that along with all of his indisputable achievements, Tesla himself was a bit of a crank. He's a pretty complicated figure and facets of him appeal to geeks, conspiracy theorists, various stripes of Balkan nationalists, cranks, you name it. And I know you're not supposed to say that but I'll whisper - I thought this was so terrible and ill-fitting for HN, I flagged it.
It seemed like he had an incredible product he could have sold for more in my opinion.

For contractual projects wouldn't it make sense to know the value of what is going to be produced (more or less) and then negotiate the percentage of it.

Is there anything akin to an agent for a programmer in this situation? In all seriousness, it might not be a bad idea for a business.

Assuming that you can add value to the talent by increasing contractual payoffs, and/or your organization could develop a reputation for excellence and potentially be sought out to find talent for certain jobs.

I'm picturing a mixture of a consultant, and a technical programming.

Any thoughts?
Divvy will help tons:

http://www.mizage.com/divvy/

Otherwise, consider getting a trackpad / trackball for when you have to use the mouse. Or even using your mouse with your left hand (my brother does this).
Dollars and sense: tech startups discover revenue is good
A Challenging assignment of Analytical Essay
Writing an essay in the analytical essay format increases your analytical writing abilities. Apart from a few differences in writing, this essay format will be similar to any other type. Adherence to format, structure and in text citations are just a few of the similarities.
Yeah, tell me about it. I spent a small fortune on my multiple entry L visa in HK, and it was only good for a month at a time-- not quite enough time to get my long term residence visa. Worse yet, getting a simple extension while the paperwork goes through is more expensive than just hopping on a train and leaving the country only to re-enter it again. What a waste of my time, of space on the train and of fuel. And for what?
Does YC consider funding an idea for a startup with non-US resident founders?
I don't think the point was that the solution was difficult to implement technically. Rather that it was a clever solution to some very specific restrictions from a legacy system.

A nice example of "thinking outside of the box" if you like.