skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The gnome problem is definitely an issue for me. Ubuntu's focus is obviously the "average" user so they make their changes in favor of people who don't know what they are doing and while it makes sense, it's not what I need/want. I think the Unity thing is a good example of this. While nice and easy for people to figure out, it's another step in the wrong direction from standard gnome.
Love him. Unconditionally. And make sure he always knows it.

Everything else is just details.

With this, things will inevitably fall nicely into place, no matter what tactics you take.

Without it, he will be fucked up no matter what you do and will be coming to hacker news in 2028 posting, "Ask HN: I'm confused and depressed and don't know why."
Could you clarify this comment? I'm unsure what HTML5 does out of the box, and what flags you're referring to. Thanks!
We got "The Chronicles of Narnia" :) I still have lots of fond memories around that series.
> My dream is to one day create my own startup (possibly right out of college)

If you're going to start your own right out of college, the most important thing will be having people to do it with you. You'll get great work experience at either company. Go to the one where you think you'll be able to make more, stronger connections with other interns. Leave your internship with a list of potential cofounders. I'd probably choose Facebook based on the number of interns, unless you think that culturally you'll bond more with the people that Palantir attracts.
Although, the best problems to solve are you're own problems. Still interesting to see what people are looking to do.
Me too. I was thinking about poor little neglected HTML5 webworkers not getting the proper API privileges necessary to make useful web apps. Poor little webworkers.

But instead it's about real people. Pffft.
Depends what you mean by "know about." I had taken a couple of programming classes. I knew you could write code, compile it, and make a thing that does a thing. I started college as a Computer Engineering major, then realized that really wasn't what I wanted. If I could go back, and if it existed at the time, I'd to informatics.
Congratulations for sticking through and finishing!

In the future, however, I would recommend that you use something more like agile or Steve Blank principles. That way you don't end up half way through something, with a big amount of time sunk into it, and have to finish a product you're not excited about. Those processes are good for allowing you to pause, research what you're doing (and measure how people interact with it), and pivot.

That said, here's the silver lining: you successfully designed and built a product in a very difficult market. That's no small feat. Be proud of what you've done, even if you don't think it's up to your personal standards.
Facebook knows when you'll break up
This is an interesting thought but it should say "a degree is only valuable if: the probability of success for non-degree holders in the same field trends toward zero." In the tech world there are equal parts success of degree vs. non-degree which makes them not as important. On the other hand, no one in their right mind would see a doctor who does not have the credentials for his given field.

There are very few rich people because of old family money but there are many wealthy entrepreneurs. The thing that makes all the difference in my opinion is willingness to accomplish your goals. If you want it bad enough, especially in the tech world, you will find a way.
Granted, the ball is using more pixels to render itself than all the pixels available on an atari 2600, and it's going through 10 levels of abstraction layers rather than using assembly code to blit pixels directly to the framebuffer...
Agreed. Writing something as long-form as a novel without planning it out ahead of time is going to lead to frustration and, ultimately, a weaker final product.

Would you build a house without a blueprint?
Based on my 10 years of interviewing people no one with or without a CS degree can discuss any of those things. I'm usually happy if they know what a hash table is and roughly how it works.
chrome ftw?
I'd imagine there are occasional uses for it. You could use it to start the app with a particular state you wish to test with Monkey, while leaving it usable for human users.
Dell’s Boomi Buy: Here’s What It Means
Change Windows Buttons Layout in Ubuntu 10.10
just let him be a kid
First, I think the idea is not very good and confusing.

My advice? Build it. Forget about monetization and just build it as a fun website. Then iterate, iterate, iterate.

You may end up with a website which you can monetize, or not. Either way you will have learnt something and you would be more ready for your next challenge.
Voters prep for the ballots with Android
Android apps for the election and voting.
Thank you. I couldn't remember that and it was driving me crazy. I thought that was a really nice looking building.
A pitch deck with 5 slides and other useful tips on fundraising
I often wonder if people who say multitasking is impossible have ever met those who do it well.

It's also not just a matter of hiring more people and assigning them each a task. Sometimes there just aren't enough tasks to do that. It's much more efficient to just have 1 person multi-task instead, even if each task is less efficient than if done by itself.
Generally, you're also allowed to register to vote where you go to college, too.
If you
a) have enough of a fundamental understanding of how to structure a story
and
b) are willing to do as many rewrites as it takes to tighten up the work and fill in small holes/do a better job of foreshadowing.

Is it more work? Pretty much guaranteed. But for people who are incapable of writing with an outline (get bored or what have you) it CAN be done, but it ends up being significantly more work.
I think the biggest news here (which I think Google tried to hide under all the announcements of "new" stuff) is that the web search ajax api was deprecated. There is no no official way to search the entire web with a Google api. I imagine this will be painful to many many sites and applications out there.
I didn't notice any real difference between the two on Firefox 3.6.

The only complaint I had was that there was some sort of hit detection problem on the HTML5 side (the ball got caught inside the paddle, and the rally count shot up by about 30 in about a second). I can't hold it against the HTML5 code though, since the flash side did it to me too about 10 seconds later.
KDD 2011: KDD Cup (Machine learning competition)
The First Twitter In-Stream Promoted Tweet Ad
Don't self-diagnose ADHD. I got a psych eval when I was 20 which showed that I was a classic case, and have been adapting ever since. Its often the case that people with ADHD are amazingly capable entrepreneurs, but can still get landmined by the disorder's characteristic inconsistency of focus.

I just finished reading Driven to Distraction (which is 15 years old at this point) and I suggest you give it a read. Bottom line is, if you're a smart person who seems to have an elephantine task when it comes to focus and attention, get evaluated. Just make sure it's not another disease or disorder first.

Don't be wary of the drugs. It will take time to find one that works for you, but when it does, it will pretty much feel like you are "more" able to "just be who you are". It's tough but really, go get the eval. I cannot stress this enough.
Also, be sure to feed him and provide him with all the water and oxygen he needs.
The difference is a contractual one. If I bought some program, and an Apple software update deleted it, I might sue them. And I might win. But if Apple uses the iOS kill switch, then they are within their rights.

The difference is similar to that between a plumber I call in now & then to fix some pipes, and a plumber who gets a key to my house, and my written permission to do anything he wants, whenever he wants. Both of them have the capability to rearrange my plumbing in any way they want. But the latter is scarier.
The Process of Essay Analysis
Essay analysis in this article will refer to its structural, content, style and flow etc. This process is necessary if students wish for a good grade for their essays. By knowing how to analyze one’s essay, students will be able to submit their essays in the most effective manner.
More euphonious in a ternary operator than an if clause:

value = isUserAMonkey() ? left : right ;

if (isUserAMonkey()) { ... }

For an if clause, I prefer userIsAMonkey:

if (userIsAMonkey) { ... }
Then vote in local elections for candidates that will support preference voting and push the issue up the chain.

Further: there are more races on the ballot than the headline-grabbers; those smaller races have a lot more impact on your day-to-day life and you have a lot more impact over the outcome.
He didn't give it up, but changed Emacs/Gnus to automatically add uppercase letters as he sent it. (Trivial, because he ended sentences with a period and two spaces)
In order to improve the performance of hash tables, why not have the buckets be something like a red-black tree instead of a linked list? (You might improve the efficiency a little by spending a bit and saying "This bucket contains a single element and here it is", or "This bucket contains multiple elements and here is the root of the red-black tree".) Then, you would get log-time search instead of linear-time search when buckets start to fill up with multiple elements.
I guess this goes up there with Be's is_computer_on_fire()

http://www.tycomsystems.com/beos/BeBook/The%20Kernel%20Kit/S...
My first computer access was to a DOS machine. I don't think it had any effect on my reading skills, since at the time I didn't actually speak English.
Good tip on when NOT to use a projector
You can say ass here. We're all adults.
I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.
Or read Marx.
Does this work on the game?
Less functionality can be an advantage if all you ever do is create new documents (i.e., you're a developer or a writer).

It's a huge disadvantage if all you ever do is edit existing documents (i.e., you work in government).
Or perhaps, don't launch with a minimal viable product with plans to improve it later unless you have a financial structure that allows you to stay in business for long enough to actually improve it.
If someone has a CS degree I should be able to talk about garbage collection, threads, the pumping lemma, Amdahl's Law, control flow, NP-Completeness, etc...

Has this been your uniform experience? Consider the following thought experiment: We advertise for a position as a programmer. We state that we require a CS degree. Within the set of applicants, what correlation will we observe between the ability to speak knowledgeably about all or even most of the subjects you list and a degree?

I suspect the correlation will be higher with a degree than without it, but too low to be useful for screening applicants in and of itself. This is not a fault of your reasoning, but rather a fault of the current system, where each institution decides for itself what is and isn't part of the curriculum and many (but not all!) undergraduate programs have been moving inexorably towards vocational training rather than teaching Computer Science.

Scarcity really should have nothing to do with it. Either you've acquired the knowledge, in which case the degree signals that or you haven't.

If the knowledge you describe is not scarce, than signalling that you have this abundantly distributed knowledge is not particularly meaningful. Let's say that the degree works exactly as you suggest: Everyone with a degree can and does have strong knowledge of the exact subjects you mention. But let us further say that this is not scarce: When we advertise for a position, 80% or more of the applicants have a degree and the knowledge that goes with it.

How then does this degree help us go from 100 applicants to five interviews? Sure we might choose to throw twenty resumés away right off the bat, now our problem is going from 80 applicants to five interviews. In this scenario, a degree is not meaningful to us because it doesn't help us make a decision.

Thus, we are forced to consider other factors, such as job experience, contributions to open source, writing on line, and so forth. Those factors become more meaningful because they are scarcer.

Sure, there will always be some meaning to a degree, but its utility for making a decision is a function of its scarcity in the sample set.
I understand where you are coming from. I have a hard time focusing for long stretches. For me these are the techniques that I find to work:

1. Remove as many distraction as you can. You work for yourself so you have more control over your environment than most. Try something like Leachblock for Firefox if you have issues with web surfing.

2. When you are off task tell yourself you are just going to do a few minutes of work. Getting started on a task is always the hardest part.

3. Once you are working on a task try to avoid stopping. Even telling yourself you will take a brake in a few minutes is helpful. You just have to get past that moment of distraction.

4. Don't beat yourself up over getting distracted. It will cause you to get a complex and not make the situation better.

5. Take breaks. You should be taking a 15 minute break every hour or 2. Get up and walk away from your computer. You mind needs that time to keep focused when you need it to.
I ask because if knew nothing going in, you'd learn a fair bit in college.

With that said, I'd programmed since 3rd grade and still learned a fair bit in college that I use to this day. Of course, this was pre-internet, so I think it was generally hard to self-teach. But things I learned in college that I used professionally:

* Data structures. Before college I pretty much used primitives and arrays. In college I learned to make much better use of trees, graphs, sparse matrices.

* OOP. Although in fairness, OOP started to come to life when I was in college. There was no ANSI C at the time :-)

* Compilers. I've since built many compilers, but having taken the sequence certainly made it a lot easier.

* Databases. Never used a relational DB until college. I think it would be fair to say I've made millions off of them since. :-)

* Regular expressions and state machines. This is just ingrained now.

* Vi ... Used Vi exclusively for the first decade of my career.

* Unix ... Used various Unix variants in the first decade of my career as well. Learned most of it in college.

* Architecture and internals -- I've done a fair bit of work at the architectural level, and college is where I laid the foundation for understanding both the architecture (registers, cache, tlbs, pipelines, units, etc..) as well as basic EE. None of which I knew much about before college.

There are plenty more, but these are some examples. Probably my big weakness in going in to college is I did all game programming before college. I understood graphics really well and the game loop, But looking back at some of the code, and it was really horrible. You really shouldn't use arrays for everything :-)
I don't mean this sarcastically, but in the age of VirtualBox (which is not only a great product, but is also FOSS, so it appeals to a large market), why not just install F14 and give it a whirl?

That way, you won't be dissuaded by someone else's opinion, and you won't have to explain your metrics to them.

Having said that, I mostly agree with the other posters on this thread: Ubuntu is for your "I just want it to work" types, and Fedora is for sysadmin-hackery-types.
Well that's what Realtime Worlds did, they showed the game, it got a lot of buzz, so they pushed its release date forward (or refrained from delaying to fix the bugs), released it, but it flopped. So yes it's the Launch bit they screwed up.

At first it struck me as contrary to the 'just get your version 1.0 out there no matter how embarrassing it is' wisdom, but I suppose on reflection it's not really.
>Then your monetization model is to pay money to reduce that uncertainty. Said uncertainty is the only reason you used this site to begin. So you're looking for people who want uncertainty, but want to be able to reduce uncertainty within that specific instance? Seems like your target customer has split personalities, which is going to make your idea really hard to sell to them.

The recipient's perception of the sender's certainty is what's important here. If the recipient knows you sent 25 messages in a row, it's as if you sent a regular email. It logically follows that the recipient must respond, which won't happen if the recipient thinks the sender doesn't know if the message went through.

This is as explicit as I can articulate it, I think. But moving on to a few examples makes it more intuitive.

Say your boss has meetings that take up too much time and he needlessly covers off-topic things that reduce efficiency in the workplace. He's a proud guy and if you told him about this he would defend his position, as adjusting because a subordinate suggests it might make him seem weak. Of course this isn't ideal and many of you would claim to never work in such an environment, but this would be a perfect opportunity to shoot off a chancemail message with some constructive criticism. Now he doesn't have to worry about how he's perceived, because he can tell himself he just as easily could've not received the message and decided to change the meeting structure on his own.

Another example would be a father telling his son or daughter that he's sorry for mistakes made in the past, or that he is simply proud of them. This is hard to do because a response to an explicit message is necessary. With chancemail, the recipient can not respond to let the sender save face, (again, since he could have not gotten the message) while being able to appreciate that the communication took place.

As for an elevator pitch, I'm notoriously bad at them and have been meaning to improve. Often I'm so caught up in the theory behind my ideas that I lose sight of the fact that I usually only have a few seconds to sell someone on the concept. Any help would be great.
I have a take on this one.
Im single right now, but I love programming and wonder how i'd like to pass my trade information to my kids (when I get married and have a family). I see programming at some level in the future as essential - like playing football (or basketball) or bicycling etc. For example, I'm guessing almost every youth will be able to use markdown on a blog post by 2040 or some HTML.

First of all today many people see programming as a career. I think by 2040, every kid will be a programmer at some level. I'm assuming by then, a youth then will need to know how to program to survive - it will be a basic elementary skill like we learn in school. So a school curriculum could be something like: draw a face using ascii characters on the screen using print statements in say grade 5. Use a for loop in grade 6. Function call in grade 7. Recursive functions in grade 8. Grade 9 - Advanced programming - introduction to the x86 CPU (optional - you can drop computers and take some other subject if you want). Grade 10 - put the CPU into 32 bit mode with 5 page tables. Do you think these things are very hard for these age level? I don't think so.

What if by then - kids played football/or hockey on some days of the week and got together with friends and built a website on another day and played with Lego on yet another? I think by the time you reached college then, and you had Physics as a subject, you would probably write a program to simulate 3 billiard balls on a table and someone strikes them with a 4th. Or implementing a problem solver applying Kirchoff's laws to circuits using Graphs traversal algorithms which she learned somewhere around high school. Today I think people see careers in the IT industry as an end, in 2040 I think Programming will be a means to an end - they will permeate every branch of study you are dealing with - be a Psychology, or Physics or Maths or anything else - creating a website will be normal.

A lot of people are saying IT skills may not be necessary because your child won't work in IT; I think basic IT and programming skills will help people in the next generation understand and integrate in the world around them - so for me programming could be right alongside Math that you learn in high school (how many people use factorization of polynomials in day to day life (which we learned in school)? )

So I think you are right about teaching your kids some basic programming.

I'm just wondering what is it that I had difficulties with/enjoyed:
1) Typing - throw out the QWERTY keyboard and start your child on a Dvorak keyboard from day one - and do typing lessons with her
2) I remember in basic you had screen 2 - 640x480 mode graphics. You could do some great drawing stuff with that - like a circle in a for loop whose radius and origin kept changing with each iteration.
3) Writing PC boot code as more advanced stuff (like when your child reaches high school and still wants to learn more other wise you can stop at recursion and let her take it forward from there)
There may be people out there more "capable" of writing without an outline than others, but would you bank on most neophytes' being those exceptions to the rule? I wouldn't.

I would advise that most hobbyists or newbies stick to the techniques that have worked since as far back as the days of Aeschylus and Euripides. When you're Hemingway, feel free to break tradition and do your own thing. But assuming one is Hemingway before writing one's first novel is often a misguided assumption.

You don't need to outline exhaustively, mind you, but some sort of architecture is probably advisable. It will make for a better story, which is ultimately what the exercise is supposed to be about. Too often, new writers forget that they're supposed to be writing for an audience, not for themselves.
I can definitely imagine lurkers creating accounts to show off their latest project, so auto-killing posts from newly created accounts doesn't seem like the best way.

Perhaps make it policy that all RMS submissions be text submissions explaining the idea to give it a bit of authenticity, and every RMS submission with a link in the title be auto-killed. I don't imagine spammers would go through the effort of writing out a description of their service, asking for feedback, etc. Also, adjusting the flag threshold to 5 on text submissions could help. People tend to be more accepting and less likely to flag text submissions because the chances of them being spam are less likely (due to a higher degree of effort put into them as opposed to linking to some affiliate site), so a reduced flagging threshold might get rid of those submissions more quickly.
@PG What do you consider an established account on HN?
buy Lego. Lots of it.