skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember hearing that The Simpsons TV show used to have a writer's retreat.

The goal was to have a place and time where the show runner and the writers would spend a few days mulling over script ideas by their writers. They'd get away from the grind, away from distractions, away from the studio, so they could consider ideas on their merits and hear their young writers sketch out hazy early-stage story visions.

They say it worked well for them initially. They identified good ideas really early, and because they got involved early, while the ideas were still malleable, they could give guidance on what the valuable parts of the story were, and what to focus on; that helped the writer when he went away to work on the idea to turn it into a real script.

However, they stopped doing the story retreats. Why?

The reason a show runner gave was that eventually, the retreat became a formality.

People were coming in with a nearly-finished product. They were practicing their presentations to the show runners, pitching them. Sometimes they came in with whole scripts ready, or nearly-complete outlines or A stories.

Which is great. But now you don't need a retreat. If you're going to prepare all of that stuff on your own time anyway, okay ... just do that. If the idea looks like it merits a slot at all, and you have episode slots to fill, how do you turn down polished work? Of course, the beneficial effects of experienced and talented writers guiding a writer's promising first take disappeared. There was nothing to guide. Again, no reason to have the retreat.

It sounds like pitches to YC have become more polished, and that makes me wonder. (Of course, the parallels are pretty tenuous, it just got me thinking).

Clearly, PG and Company are going to enjoy that. It's hard to turn down done work. It's a good thing if you can pitch. I just hope, for the sake of the little future Reddits and Social Calendars out there, that pg, jessica and the gang are protected from the glare coming off that polish.
Apple deprecates Java what about Nokia?
Yep. Since MLB won't let customers subscribe to in-market games without being tied to a cable provider (shocking?), as long as my local team is primarily on cable[1], I'll be a cable subscriber.

1- They show approximately 30 games on broadcast TV, but many observers expect that to disappear with the next contract renewal.
SO many open source projects could use the help of a designer! While we all like to describe open source projects as having a meritocracy, the accessibility of information about a project can be critical in picking up a large audience.

Git, for example, had a pretty ugly homepage. Something like this: http://git.or.cz/index.html After Scott Chacon got involved (not sure if he designed this or got outside help) launched the new face of git: http://git-scm.com/

We're all affected by our first impressions, and sometimes having a well-design site where folks can understand the context of an open source project can make or break its adoption.

I'd suggest just diving in head first. If you know of a project that you've enjoyed and are passionate about, ask if you can help re-design the web presence of that app. I can't imagine anyone turning you down!
I didn't see a Visual F# Express there - does Visual C# Express include IntelliSense for F#?
"Manchester United" is a contraction of "Manchester United Football Club"
> the difficulty/trick, I guess, is to reconcile the person you have with the person you are now presented with, and realize that they are really one and the same, just with one minor change that makes no difference to your interactions.

No, the real trick is to use this new experience to reexamine your beliefs and assumptions to see if they need updating.
Does F# have functor support by now? Because if that's what's meant by simpler, I'd rather have a bit of complexity. If I program in a functional, symbolic manner, I also don't want to kowtow to the runtime that just wasn't made for such an use (If I recall correctly, Yaron Minsky of Jane Street complained somewhat about F#'s allocation rate in this respect).

Concurrency is an issue that I hope the Ocaml developers will address a bit more, though.
Malicious Voting on social sites and the LIKE button
Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
I bought a laptop with a 12.1" screen and for a while I thought it was fine. But when I plugged it into a 27" monitor I had, I noticed a huge increase in my productivity. I don't completely understand why, but programming became much more enjoyable and easy.

So one datapoint: you can use a 13" laptop as a main development machine, but you will probably be more productive if it has a bigger monitor.
How are sleeping accom different in Japan from the US? What do Japanese people usually eat for breakfast?

I imagined Prov to be somewhat different from SV. Isn't SV composed of some smallish towns (PA, etc) and then vast modern suburbs? Isn't Prov an oldish city by US stds? Multi-story buildings with shopfronts, apts above, more pedestrians, less cars, narrower streets, different building materials, a harbor, more mom & pop shops, than SV? Granted, it's not Japan, but what did you expect?
Here's a screenshot:

http://www.pixiim.com/images/screenshot_hn_small.jpg
Hot dogs and peanut butter burritos.
Here in Canada, hockey (the only sport that really matters) is broadcast live in HD on the CBC's website. The quality is not perfect, but it gets better every year. Our tax dollars at work. :)
"This." == clicking the up-arrow.
This seems to be one of the many cases where a priori neither technique is much more preferable than the other, but where it's much more desirable that something be chosen as a standard than that there is disagreement.
Exactly the sentiment I was going to express. Thank you. There is a story I'm trying to remember that goes something like this: There were two abusive rulers looking out over their people, and one suggests to the other that maybe all the slaves should wear white armbands so they could be identified easier. The other replies "No way! Then they might realize how many of them there are."
Anyone else bothered by the opening quote? Why are people learning about hygiene in a university? I thought we were taught that in the third grade...
I tend to side with the "local" belief that "when the book is lying face-up, its spine is of little value, because you can read all you want on the cover."

I side with the belief that book bindings and cover directions should be in line with the language that book is written in.

In East Asia, tradition dictates that books are opened from left to right, using your right hand, with the spine on the right. As to the direction of the book title on the spine, there's no disagreement, because how it is written on the spine is how it is written on the pages - top to bottom and right to left.

Too bad Chinese books these days are starting to read like a western book. I wonder if it had anything to do with GOST 7.84–2002. It's either that or M$ Word has screwed everyone else's writing and printing tradition.
The Perfect Desktop - Kubuntu 10.10
As a native British English speaker the title feels wrong to me, despite common practices.

Manchester United Win Football Game = fine

TfL Kill Puppies = ok, I suppose

TfL Kill My Apps = No, they killed your app.
For all of you design junkies here, Lebedev's ru/kovodstvo (or com/mandership for English language version and .com domain) is a very interesting read. Too bad "business lynch" is not available in English. This is where aspiring designers send their works to Lebedev and he or his employees do a review (mostly disparaging and with lots of profanities).
I think it was more desperate than genius since it was nothing to do with their product and the goal there was to earn money to sustain them further. The expo>shortage>CNN coverage is an example of a genius move by the same guys.
Anything with Kirin's 小岩井(Koiwai) branding on it, Martinelli's apple juice, Earl Grey or medium roast coffee.
what if you like the experience of buying a possession?
s/Apple/Google
Tucker Max Interview -- Following Your Dreams and the Third Option
Given how literary Russian is an artifact of 19th century francophones, it's no wonder.
> I didn't have any trouble running it on mono/linux - but I've to admit that I last tried it quite a while ago.

It still runs great on mono. I tried it to do some examples while reading "Programming F#". It definitely brings some interesting ideas(not necessarily original but that doesn't make them any less good). I don't have any projects planned for F# but would surely love to use it sometime.
Ultimate Guide to Protecting your Million Dollar Idea
Wow! I am amazed by this.

Some out-loud thinking;
I wonder if you can apply this to news delivery in full. What I mean is, If I could submit a URL of the NYT business column and request that every morning, your app email me the mp3 file covering the whole column or just one article.

Essentially I can be listening to my morning paper on the go rather then reading it or needing a browser.

Very cool app! Nicely done
So

Regime Length -- how long the plan with Mr. Goal will last. I think of it as a personal trainer, so a 1-month regime will be 1-month of help with you goals.

The actual amount you pay is in the cost per month row -- $3.06, $2.70, $2.96. If you multiply the cost per month by the number of months in each regime and then scale by the discount, ($2.70 / month * 6 months) / .82 (as it's 18% off), you get $19.74.

It's pretty confusing, so I think at this point I'll figure out how to simplify the process as a whole.

At the moment, the table moves on 2 degrees of freedom: 1. feature set, 2. plan length. I'll try holding plan length constant -- so I'll make every plan 3 months. I suspect that it's hard to understand a 2-d table when the featureset itself is moving both on features and plan length.

I'm going to re-work the pricing table today. Could you please shoot me an email: omar.bohsali@gmail.com if you're interested in providing some feedback on a new pricing plan? I'll get you setup with whatever plan I come up with, for free, of course.

Thanks.
I didn't know SWG worked so well, even in Chrome.
It's great how it scales on page zoom. I wish desktop application could be zoomed in this way.
There's no significant problem to solve here.
From http://www.sarm.am/en/standarts/view/2550
regarding countries where GOST 7.84-2002 is accepted :
Ukraina
Turkmenistan
Russian Federation
Uzbekistan
Tadjikistan
Moldova
Kazakhstan
Georgia
Belorussia
Armenia
Kirgizstan
Azebaijan
I assume this is going to be done in an interview.

One thing you could try is to see how the person handles constructive criticism. Try to get them engaged in a discussion about what they did wrong and how they could do better in the future. Pick something you have actual knowledge of so you can better tell if they are BSing you.

This can be difficult to do in an interview because you often don't know anything about the person. However, even if you have them pick an example of a screw-up from their past, you should be able to get a general sense of whether or not they try to be accountable for their actions. A bad sign would be if they pick an example where they didn't actually screw up or explain their failure as completely out of their control.
Another SVG based drawing tool is http://markup.io/, which is more useful for marking up web pages.

Example: http://api.markup.io/v/ng7dny7nxj0r
At least I think it is SVG, at the very least it uses Raphael.js
My family is Serbian (Bosnian Serb, more accurately). What my family went through during the Tito era and prior is an interesting story. My grandfathers cousins were part of the Black Hand who assassinated Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo leading to WW1. My father was an active participant in anti-government movements during the 70s and was kicked out of the country as a result (and later arrested when he return, resulting in an international diplomatic indecent as he was an Australian citizen at the time).

Anyway, we weren't allowed to visit again until '01. When we did, we attempted to visit Jasenovac, but the police had road blocks on every road approaching the site in a wide radius. We were blocked from approaching the site from two different directions, and on the second attempt were essentially told to go away and that there was 'nothing to see here'.

The Croatian government has since become a lot more progressive, but there is still a large element of denial for what is essentially the Auschwitz of the Balkans.

The old Yugoslav government of Tito also didn't acknowledge what took place at Jasenovac - which is a large part of the reason why the rest of the world doesn't know about it. Tito pushed it all aside in the name of moving forward with 'brotherhood and unity'.

And btw, a lot of the monuments that you see in this post, at least those that were dedicated to the partizans and 'the workers', have since been heavily graffitied and vandalized. The local populations took their anger for the former state out on these huge monuments that were built at large expense.
A possible title for such an article is a word I first read about when reading Isaiah Berlin and his students for some philosophy of mind work I was doing a few years back. The term they use is "Einfuhlung", which translates to a "feeling into" (empathy?) but one that is quite directly experienced. Thay claim that one cannot feel and be moved by the depth of woe (or any other emotion, for that matter) in a blues song, for instance, without having experienced it firsthand.
I am not because I am Russian :) Seriously though, this joke is an example of a classical sub-genre of Russian jokes where Russians prove their superiority in various areas of life (including, ironically, heavy drinking) over westerners (usually Americans, but sometimes French and Germans).

Any unrealistic assumptions are irrelevant, punchline is all that matters :)
Yeah, I feel like it should've been past tense as well. "TfL Kill(s) My Apps" would be gramatically correct, but, like you said, it doesn't feel as right because it's not a continuous/repetitive action.
Download the VS 2010 redistributable shell and then the F# MSI.
5 Hour Energy
Research Paper Topic Ideas Selection Tips
Often students do not allocate adequate time to the formulation of topic ideas for their research papers. This will result make the writing of the research paper a difficult task. Knowing how to select good research topic ideas, will make the task easier.
When talking about specific companies, yes, Busch was first. However, in this case, this is "regional trademark", the beer with this name was brewed in Budweis (Budejovice) long before the company was established. It is a name of the town, after all.

The same way for Pilsner. "Pilsner Urquell" (Plzensky Prazdroj) is brewed in Pilsen (Plzen).
Thanks! That's a great idea and they actually already produce an audio podcast of the NYT and WSJ each morning on Audible. I could definitely see automating it for other news sites and blogs, etc. In fact, that can already be added using the javascript API!
I have a Nexus One and an iPhone 3G in the drawer, both ready to be adopted
Wow! I feel welcomed.
I was thinking of contributing to WordPress but they already have good designers at hand. So next stop is Drupal perhaps. I see a lot of potential here. Real challenge to solve real problems!

Just need to figure out how to get started. Do I make my own stuff and release it for free? Join some team? Or it varies software to software?
I wrote the site using Django [1]. Here's a great tutorial I used to learn the ins and outs of django a few years ago [2]. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions if you decide to give python/django a try. I'm omarish on freenode.

I also keep this page updated with the technologies we're using: [3] (see the section on technologies).

[1] http://www.djangoproject.com/
[2] http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/
[3] https://mrgoal.net/about/
Sure. Ostrich when in South Africa (best place to get is Woolworths - here's a good recipe: http://www.woolworths.co.za/Caissa.asp?Page=ITB4_RHConText&#...)
Coffee (Higher Ground at the office),
Green Tea,
Beer (Great Divide DPA or IPA; Paulaner Hefeweizen; Sam Adams)
& 10-12 glasses of water throughout the day. No soda or juice.
Ah, OK. I thought you were talking about mechanical keyboards, and then I found it strange that you were still having trouble.

I have a coworker whose right pinky finger starts hurting about an hour into using a keyboard. He replaced his no-name rubber dome keyboard with a Cherry Brown-based Filco, and the problem was solved. The advantage a mechanical keyboard offers over the standard rubber-dome keyboard is that you don't have to press the key to the bottom of it's travel to make it register. This limits the force that your finger is required to transmit to something like 60g, instead of an infinite amount as you press the key against the immobile bottom of the keyboard. Less stress, less pain.

Anyway, if you do get a mechanical keyboard, just make sure to consciously avoid bottoming out for a while. If you pound on it, it will still hurt.
I can appreciate some of these concerns - though the ability to run under mono ameliorates them for me. If you want a language aiming for a similar functional + oop position but don't want to touch Microsoft stuff then Scala might be worth taking a look. Thats assuming you don't extend your fears to Java Virtual Machines as well.
Fascinating: the monuments "had to be neutral enough to be acceptable to both victims and perpetrators. After all, once the slaughter was over, the former opponents had to collectively form the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia."
Those proposed changes being changes that give users and developers more features and options?

Sure: don't buy it because of loyalty, that'd be stupid — but not buying it because of some worry about changes that the next version might have (and that Apple has said nothing about and that would be fraught with a number of technical and political difficulties anyway) is cutting off your nose to spite your face. And to use your phrase, it's voting with your dollars against something that's not harmful - if anything, it's sending a message to Apple that a certain group isn't going to buy their freedomful product anyway, so they might as well let those people use Linux/etc and turn the Mac into what you're afraid of.
Facebook Graph API Explorer
Don't sweat things that are out of your control. Unless and/or until you're invited to an interview, the YC process is out of your control. Just focus on your stuff, what you can have an effect on. Otherwise you're just creating stress that you don't need for yourself.
Interesting writeup. I think calling both the installation process and the window management system "broken" is a bit of an overstatement, but he's very right about de-emphasizing the Finder.

Lukas' blog in general is awesome — thought-provoking and mind-opening. If you have the smallest interest in design (as in "how thing work" in general, not only "how things look"), it's definitely worth a read.
The targeting is the service. They're going to be there anyway, so they might as well be something relevant (or at least inoffensive).
Ships!
"In British English, collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is, respectively, on the body as a whole or on the individual members; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di....

There's also some more information about the differences between the two in these articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_collective_nouns#Metony... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesis
No, you can't reprogram them.
I don't know. Facebook users didn't even have the power to roll back the outrageous TOS changes, they all know exactly how many of themselves there are. You're telling me they have the power to overthrow the Ayatollah? If so, where's the proof that they've made any positive social changes in the last few years that they've been around? Sure, they helped elect Obama, but that can also be read to mean that social network groups can be just as easily manipulated as any other mass of people.
This is the exact reason that I ignore any article or blog post announcing that the author has quit Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or any other social service. If you're quitting you're not seeing the benefits. The people who continue to use the services are reaping the benefits.
Good content, but my favorite part of the article is the anecdote about how Paul started at Google. Putting yourself in a place where you have the opportunity to be lucky makes up some percentage of the total likelihood of being extremely successful (yes, I consider Paul extremely successful along many axes), but I think a much larger portion of this equation is actually being lucky. I guess if you iterate over and over again, by say joining startups repeatedly, eventually most people get lucky in some way. The magnitude of that success however, is certainly highly variant.
"its runtime has some advantages"

Could someone shed some light on this?
That seems to be more of a complete description of being professional than an indicator - I presume the OP is looking for things that indicate a person will do these things before they actually do them.
The joke is hilarious, don't get me wrong, I just found the assumption kind of silly too :p
I like asking people when the last time they've done irreparable harm to data was. (deleting a database table, formatting something they shouldn't have, etc...) Those who say never are liars. Those who have agony in their faces as they answer but can't tell me what they've done to prevent the situation from occurring in the future or those who don't care are pretty unprofessional. Those who regale us with heroic stories of accepting the blame for their mistakes, fixing it in the best way possible and putting safeguards in place to minimize the possibility of it occurring again are pros in my book.
Why does it have to be killed when Man U doesn't have to be won?
I think I remember this being done on an episode of CHiPS.

Don't laugh: I learned how to shift w/o a working clutch from an article in Motor Trend and it came in handy one day.
> both the username and the password lengths are typically capped at relatively short values

What? They are? The only place I've seen this is on bank websites.
Learn to press two keys at once. Now you have 3741 keys.

(And yes, all these expensive keyboards have n-key rollover, meaning that you can press as many keys as you want and they will report exactly what you're pressing. Cheap keyboards have a matrix that results in "phantom" keypresses if you chord anything other than shift or control and a letter.)
Just started a game. ;)
You are making a mistake in not realizing that is Apples end game to make Mac OS much more like iOS. Don't you think they realize how much money they are making off of iOS developers? They want the same thing for desktops. Not to mention the huge amount they would save in customer support from not allowing users to do anything beyond Apples control on their machines.

The truth is for Apple this might as well be a great business decision. It is probably in their best interests, because their goal at the end of the day is to make as much money as possible. There is nothing wrong with that I just won't be buying it.
How interesting that my honest questions are being down-voted.

Edit: I want to be scientific, include all relevant evidence, and some people here dislike it? (I'm not interested in the politics -- I've never even voted in a national election. And yes, I see these down-votes as a form of political activism. Disagree and argue if you have reason and facts.)
Interesting, as Cherry Blue keyswitches are about $1 each in bulk. If you have 103 keys, that puts a lower limit of $103 on the keyboard.