skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife had a baby 5mo ago.

The biggest change for us initially was lack of sleep. Now that we're past that hurdle (he sleeps for roughly 12hrs at night) the biggest change I'm seeing is STUFF.

There's huge marketing pressure to buy things for your baby. Some are a necessity (at least in Western society) like diapers, clothes and whatnot. But there are many, many things you'll see at Target/BabiesRUs/where ever you shop that you don't really need.

Humans have been dealing with infants for thousands of years, and most of this stuff has only been around for the last 50.

Purchase judiciously!
I posted two questions.

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3084/what-components-do...

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3085/which-techniques-i...

thanks!

(ps please don't upvote me, I like my 1337 karma)
What if they only like 1 in 10?

Regardless you're focusing too much on the numbers I threw out there solely for example. The point is that without down votes its entirely possible for a number of similar items to hit the front page even though a majority of people dislike them, thus invalidating the idea that a number of similar items on the front page means a majority of people find them useful.
Tell swombat: What/who gives you the right to say that?

Swombat, you are one of the greatest contributors, but you are wrong here. Let them offer, it does not hurt anyone. I think the community is quick to identify the honest folks from those who aren't.

Some people love to help just as much as you love to comment. Saying stop offering services is not so different than saying stop giving feedback on ask HN.

Maybe we just structure the way people Offer HN. They could just probably share the feedbacks here so a lot more companies can benefit from it.

At any rate, keep offering if you want to offer. If you do not care for offers just skip them.
Good materials for those of us who have no background in NLP besides basic computer science theory?

My main proposal is to post a "How do I build X" question on MetaOptimize. (I don't know any place on the web where experienced NLP people chat, besides MetaOptimize, but I would be interested to hear other options.) NLP isn't really very hard once you know what you're doing, it's just that as an inexperienced person you will spend a lot of time going down dead ends and blind alleys, and there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid. So getting the advice of experienced people, right from the beginning, is the best way to do this.

See also:

* What are the best resources to use when starting machine learning for an experienced programmer? http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/334/

* How do I get started understanding statistics & data analysis? http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/154/

* New to data mining - where to start? http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/362/
Ask HN: Ominous email from PG
So late last night I was playing around with some scripting that interacted with HN (submitted a story). I'm not a hacker in the technical sense, so I was just playing around to see what I could make. After a few runs, I got an ominous email from pg asking "What are you doing?". Scary stuff.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this an automated email when abuse is detected or did I really raise some red flags? Its from pg's email address, but the sender is "<censored>". I'm pretty curious about all this since he didn't reply to my reply.

Thanks.
The only coder who does not make any mistake, is one that doesn't code anything.

Since - as you say - you recover quickly, that's a good trait, and a good sign, and an important ability for a coder.
I think xvideos.com serves html5 video to iOS devices.
http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless (as pg posted a couple of posts up)
If it gets really bad, won't the community just respond by having a monthly "Who's Offering" thread, much like we now have the monthly "Who's Hiring" thread?
that's pretty cool. I know it would be a little crazy to implement but having the ability to build some special pages like this would be cool on a user level. Unless it's already there and I haven't seen it (Maybe something as simple as filters?).
I don't think another website would work. There have been several efforts to make off-shoot niche websites based on one aspect of HN, and I think it's precisely because they focus on a single niche that they are so quickly forgotten.

The fact that HN offers so many different things is what makes it so compelling (addictive, even): new knowledge, interesting discussion, a sense of community, a place to find people for real life meetups. And now a means to find and offer free services.

It's that combination of things that compels people to come back day after day. You can't just slice off a minor aspect of HN and expect people to pay attention.
Intel And Another 70 Companies Launch Cloud 2015 Open Data Center Alliance
Beautiful Natural Tree Wallpapers And Photos, Pictures
The trees are built mostly of air and takes carbon dioxide out of the air, adds in hydrogen from water, a trace amount of other chemicals. The it all together with the energy of sunlight to build all the stuff that makes it a tree. A tree is a machine that turns air into tree. The trees literally surrounded by solid air, by air that’s been condensed and solidified over tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years into wood. Life changes the universe, molds it into unique, amazing, highly-ordered structures like trees. So the seed seperates the carbon from the oxygen, and then it mixes the carbon. The carbon dioxide from the air forms 93% by weight of the sugar formed by the tree, the hydrogen from water forms 7%. The oxygen that’s released as waste gas is the oxygen from water.
OP's post is the one time I wish front-page items could be down-voted
I can't agree with you more. Maybe there is a compromise somewhere.

In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839394 I suggested that the offering person summarize advice and findings and puts it back in the thread. Effectively, the thread becomes a reverse Ask HN and can be incredibly useful. The information persists, and it is available to future HN users. You're getting tips/advice/reviews specifically applicable or tailored to someone like you, a member of Hacker News.

In the ideal case, a reverse Ask HN has participants post a link to their content, and the user (hopefully an expert user) would reply in that comment's thread with content instead of in private. If some privacy is preferred, then a summary can be posted to wrap up all the advice they gave to HN users.
> Often, a good test of whether something is worth doing is "what if everyone did the same?"

Nice try, Kant!
First, I'm 100% convinced that design does not sell the product. It some instances it is very important, but in other instances it is not.

I'm using many confusing and ugly products but since they solve my problem, I use them (all HA software product on market, etc.).

I believe the key to solve something people really need. Hey I still have problems how to do code reviews (for cheap - like $10 per seat) - something like google wave but code reviews.

Now, there is also problem how to get your message out and get people interested (since they might not know they have a problem you are solving). I was told to watch infomercials on TV and try to make something like that on your home page, blogs, forums...
Is the Business Cycle In Your DNA?
My only concern is really that in the short/medium term, this could lead to a large influx of freeloaders from other communities, who may have no interest in "paying it forward", but mostly in dropping by for a quick freebie, while not contributing anything.

It would be pretty awesome if I was wrong though, and that a new spirit of collaboration across multiple communities was the end-result, but I remain skeptical.
The idea of welcoming rejection, in order to not be afraid of it, has been inspiring me a lot lately in both personal and startup life. I saw the light when I was taking improv class and realizing that you can only really do improv if you embrace looking stupid. It ends up I look stupid loads of times inadvertently so I might as well go for it.
One question that definitely has plagued me for a while is that of evaluation schemes of recommender systems... On multiple occasions I have designed recommender systems that give a fairly good user experience, but I just have not been able to quantify these results... any pointers on that will be really appreciated.
I summarized all of them in a blog post, and I'll keep it up to date. If someone wants to 'retract' their offer due to being swamped or for some other reason let me know and I'll unlink the link.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839747
Startup concept:

Think about this tiny trend in light of the unemployment situation in the USA. I imagine that most if not all of these offers are from people who are employed. What about the 20M (or whatever it is) who are not?

If there was a site where they could volunteer to work for a startups, think of the army of available talent. And these don't need to be tech startups only. If it could be set up so those volunteering could be compensated later that might be good, but even without any promised compensation I bet people would do it.

Does anyone know if such sites exist, sites that easily let startups hook up with volunteers/remote interns?
With sufficiently large scale you can negotiate better rates with affiliate programs to the point where you can return similar amounts to marketers as they'd earn signing up to the programs directly - at least that's what Skimlinks claim to offer in their advertising pitch.

Services that automatically generated shortners for user-submitted links (e.g. twitter clients and discussion forums) are also logical targets for such a service.
Thanks il. I'll send you an email about http://www.rawsignal.com

We just took the private beta label off, but are flummoxed with how to get users.
No. As a person of relative privilege, it's your duty to generate value for the world with as much aggression as you can muster.

The world is a crazy place full of pleasure and suffering. The world doesn't care what you deserve; what matters is what you're gonna do about it.
I think you're addressing a problem before it's arrived, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I agree that this isn't sustainable, and at some point, the offers are going to become less genuine and less valuable. However, after looking at the bloggergirl copy deck suggestions, I want to clearly state that she (and other offers) don't fall into this group. Great work.

I'd encourage users to ask for help. We're already doing it in the form of "review my ..." Good posts with time invested in describing the problem and asking for very specific help will bubble up from newest, and those that are looking to get out of doing work won't hit the front page.

On the contrary "Offer HN" posts are hard not to upvote...for now.
This post has a lot of upvotes, too.
Bookmarklet for Reloading just CSS on a page
Ex-Wall Street Analyst Quits Jobs, Starts Selling Waffles
Already in there...

I think they call them shadow volumes...
I find it interesting that you are saying its lowering the value/utility of the community here, but in one of these "Offer HN" threads you requested help not too long ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839595

I think all in all thats pretty disingenuous .
Heroku Tuesday Postmortem
If so, somebody should automate this RIGHT NOW. $0.02/hour to watch British/American TV! (Depending which side of the pond you're on)
HP settled their lawsuit with Oracle prior to hiring this new CEO.
If you can then place the router in the country you need the proxy to be, and access it, then yes, your option is probably better.
we're also curious about what marketing techniques you think would be worth our money + what a good message would be to the users.

we'd like to figure out one short sentence where people are like . . . oh i get it.
This, along with a thousand other reasons, is why it is so important that the hardware not impose restrictions on what the owner can load on the device. Running custom ROMs is not just for phones, but is for anyone who has special requirements (privacy, speed, specific usage domain, etc).
I haven't read a lot of HN over the last two days, but I saw that we had one "Offer HN", and then a slew of them.

I think it's a great idea -- pay it forward! But I wonder if I would want to visit a board full of "Offer HN" posts. "Ask HN"? Sure. "Rate my startup"? Sure. But not so much "Offer HN"

Perhaps that means I'm selfish but geesh, this thing could go on forever.

It's the same problem as job offers/requests. It's such a common thing -- it could easily pollute the board.

Not happening yet, sure, and I'm enjoying watching them so far. But this could turn out to be a worse meme than Erlang Innards.

I don't know. I'll let you secret HN leader cabal-types figure it out. I just know that after about 20 "Offer HN" posts, I'm burnt out. And I don't feel that way about the other types of posts. Beats me why.
Just checked that last link. Sorry, but it is not even science. 5 kids died who were sleeping in their parents beds. How many kids die on average, what percentage of them sleeps in their parents beds?

I sure hope the "let them sleep in their own beds" directive has a more solid foundation than that.
Yes, it was me. You submitted quite a lot of stories while you were testing whatever you were testing. It was hard not to notice.
http://www.truecrypt.org/hiddenvolume
Sure, this is all doable. One of the most elegant social hacks out there today is to go to one of the hundreds of 12-month degree-mill graduate programs that "top" schools have launched in the last 20 years, get a degree in "Public Speaking and Elocution" for $30-50,000 and then be able to put "School X" on your CV and resume for the rest of your life.

In truth, most of these programs will admit almost anyone who sounds like they won't embarrass them or flunk out. They don't have to worry about their ability to pay the ever-climbing tuition for these programs because the students have been lulled into thinking it's a good investment to take out loans to get that name as a brand they can wear for the rest of your life.

I am very, very proud to have done my undergrad studies at a place, Princeton, that has resisted the urge to offer programs like this so far. To put on my "Ivy League Douchebag" hat for a second, if you meet someone "who went to Harvard" it could mean all sorts of things, same with Columbia, UPenn, Cornell, etc. If you meet someone who "went to Princeton" then they went there as an undergrad, which means they survived one of the toughest admissions criteria on the planet, or they did PhD work there, which is even tougher to get into. The only other program Princeton has is a 1-2 year (I forget) master's in public policy that I believe was secretly created because Uncle Sam wants a fancy school to send future generals to so they can class up their resumes and learn with some of the sharpest people around. Princeton is one of the few elite schools that actively welcomes these soldiers too. The one's I met while there as a student were incredibly smart. They were tough enough to do the military stuff, and sharp enough to hang with the faculty at the Wilson school. I feel pretty good about that one program. Those are the only two ways anyone gets to "go to Princeton." and I think that's awesome.

Meanwhile, there's a plethora of ways to "go to" a lot of the other elite schools. Anyone want a master's in higher education?

</completed a 12-month master's degree in Journalism at Northwestern, which offers a lot of other programs that>
Offer HN: Save money on beer
Drink Bud Light instead of uh, Beelzebub Gold Nugget Sorghum Darn it Micro-brew.
The other nice thing is that, while each chapter builds on the last, you don't have to do them in that order. For example, you build your compiler to compile for the virtual machine you build, but they provide a VM to use also. This way, if you have build a computer from scratch before but haven't built a compiler, you can do it in that order.
Here is my question: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3086/what-is-the-best-w...

For MSc in Computer Science I wrote my dissertation on sentiment analysis using NLTK for my NLP needs. Although my work was nothing earth shattering, I really enjoyed it and have continued it as a side project investigating different techniques and algorithms. I'm now considering ways that I can turn this interest into my full time career (I'm a .Net developer currently). I don't particularly wish to send out a lot of unsolicited resumes and so was wondering if anyone had some advice on who best to approach? Are there any recruiters and the like that specialize in NLP?

Thanks

Adam p.s. I am an US permanent resident and an Australian Citizen, the website that has my details and some example work is www.emptyorfull.com
Please do lets us know about this, I read PDFs on my computers and ePubs on my portable devices.

And thank you for the book and the awesome video and comic! :-)
Gizmodo does something like this but with all content. Every post has tags and you can filter the stream by excluding certain tags (or only looking at certain tags). It's very nice. Maybe that could be done as a long term solution for all future problems like this.
I'm applying to transfer and would love your input. Will contact.
I would pay for someone to review http://readness.com and produce slides with feedback on the messaging, how awesome.
Better still ...

http://searchyc.com/submissions/Offer_HN?sort=by_date
can I just reply with this?? http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/invest_in_whatever_makes_y...
Thanks! We primarily work on sentiment analysis, anaphora resolution, topic identification. Also work on topic classification and clustering.
Twitter API has rate limits. I think it is 360 req/hour per IP if you are not white-listed. So if you poll using server-side code you are likely to hit the rate-limit. You can cache results to avoid this.
Is Carbon Copy Cloner better than Time Machine?
I think that's the first time in the history of HN that arc praising comment is down voted
Who says its source code that was stolen? "Intellectual Property" covers a very wide range.

It's easy for Oracle to stand up, roll out the long list of their patents, call "They're infringing!", and then the burden is on SAP to show they were not.

I'm sure that some of SAP's products have similar (or near identical) UIs and APIs to Oracle's copyrighted works. Whether the similarity is intended, who knows...
No, it's not available. That's how Vimeo looks in Safari 5 with plug-ins disabled:

http://imgur.com/xrdlF.png (To watch this video, you need Flash 10. You have an old version of Flash. Click here to download the latest version.)

and there's no trace of <video> element in the source.

They only use HTML5 as a workaround for browsers with "iP" in User-Agent string.
Why is this not on the Apps Marketplace? http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/
No. Explorer, IE, Firefox (4), Chrome, Office, Windows Live foo... none of them have menu bars.
Crowd Sourcing Business Development
What have I learned? That I'm beginning to really hate the word ninja!

It used to be such a cool word... I mourn it.
Ok, works now.
On Windows, every app has a menu

No. Lots of applications don't have menus.
I think this could be a shorter course to the problem described by loginx above

>>My only concern is really that in the short/medium term, this could lead to a large influx of freeloaders from other communities, who may have no interest in "paying it forward", but mostly in dropping by for a quick freebie, while not contributing anything.<<
I respect the intention of this idea, but I'm not in the business of giving general advice about the admissions process to people. I don't think there's much in the way of general advice to give, for one. Also, there's a whole industry based around that, and it's full of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. A few years back, I started a site where families can post user reviews of consultants they hired, http://collegeconsultantreviews.com

Right now I run a social news site for Chicago and received seed funding to launch a new advertising startup that will help save newspapers. I'm happy with my life and excited about these challenges.

One day, if I do decide to come back into admissions, it will be to disrupt the system and hopefully destroy all these awful know-nothing consultants and quacks, rather than to add my voice to their chorus.

So I'm happy to look at applications. Pulling general advice from them is really less useful than you'd imagine. Everyone's different. Everyone's red flags are different.

If you want one piece of general advice though: don't mention video games, gaming, Magic Cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokeman, Anime, poker, Comic books, or anything like that on your application. You will automatically be cast into the "misapplied intelligence" pile. I've played my share of video games in life (My Civ III skills are pretty impressive), but at the end of the day, that's time that could have been better spent. My experience in admissions showed that POV to be pretty widespread. No, you won't impress them with your poker winnings or TF2 pro tour success. They think that you are not creating real value with these pursuits for the world, or yourself.
But if everyone posted "Offer HN" posts

That's a false proposition, isn't it? Everyone is not going to offer his services. It's going to happen on occasion, and it's usually useful when it does happen.

If it ever did rise to the level of spam, then HN already has a mechanism for dealing with it. But it's nowhere near there.

Offering services (e.g. SEO) gives occasion for interesting discussions on topics as well. This is certainly useful for the community.
True but that would usually be info you could just pick up from any book. The "ask your pediatrician" disclaimer just makes things seem dangerous that really aren't.

SIDS is 6x higher in families where one or both parents smoke. The lower incidence in the last years might just be because of less people smoking.

Anecdote: our midwife told us that we should put our son to sleep on his back. She also told us that in her working life, she'd first had to tell parents to put their kids to sleep on their belly, years later they were supposed to be safest on their side - there were even little foam triangles sold so the babies would stay put. Now it's on their back.

I'd still say go with what feels right and worry about things that are more important.