skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go to college.

Take science to discover something you're good at.
Take humanities to discover something you may love.
Take at least one art or music class.
Take at least one advanced math class.
Join a fraternity.
Learn how to play bridge (and play all night sometime).
Learn how to play foosball.
Get drunk.
Learn how to play foosball while drunk.
Get laid.
Play an intramural team sport.
Get a part time job.
Eat something you never tried before at least once/month.
Get high.
Do original research.
Take a class you think you'll hate pass/fail.
Do 5 minutes at a comedy club on open mike night.
Hang out with a professor you like.
Get laid.
Do a web start-up on the side.
Make a few friends for life.
Go to at least one party each week.
Pick a major you love whether it makes career sense or not.
Get someone who has written one of your text books to sign it.
Blog about your college experience.
Get laid.
Go to Europe with nothing but a backpack for a month or two.
Enter a college talent show.
Meet as many interesting (and boring) people as you can.
Read good books.
Go without shoes for a week just for the hell of it.
Get laid.
Graduate.

If you don't go to college, exactly when do you expect to do all of this?
A competent pilot union negotiator will present the airline with a plan to transfer essentially all expected future profits into the paychecks of pilots

and

...the pilots, having expected to collect 95 percent of the airline's profits, will in fact be entitled to 115 percent...

WTF! Did the pilots think about the poor entrepreneurs and shareholders who own the business?

More reason why labour should be fungible. Some unions really rile me up.
Bug: HN Doesn't Give 404 Errors
$ curl -i http://news.ycombinator.com/thisdoesntexist
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close

Unknown.
Is Everyone Leaving Google?

As far as I can tell from the outside, many of the well-known employees of Google are still happily with the company.

Someone might want to check this table ( http://www.pixelbeat.org/misc/google_stars.html ) to evaluate whether these "Google Stars" are still with the company in order to get a feeling of whether the sentiment of top employees abandoning Google holds true.
As a soon-to-be MBA, jaded from consulting experience, let me give one piece of advice. Screw any "rankings" or "best places" to work lists. Most are completed and submitted by the companies themselves with no checks, vetting, or due diligence. Research the kind of company you want to work for, interview and learn about their culture, and ignore the headlines about people joining or leaving in droves. The most important thing is to find a company that is a good fit and will value your contribution. That may or may not be at whatever "hot company of the month" the valley press is fellating at the moment.
Interesting; I hadn't heard that. I feel this trend is good for the future: less things to manage is less that a user can do wrong.
When it comes to building hype, I don't look at it as this huge risk considering the platform, but in terms of marketing efficiency and time spent building a following rather then building a great game the two appear to be codependent.

The better you are able to hook people in with your super game concept, the better your community is going to be in the beginning and those are the ones who are following it, offering suggestions/feedback, and telling their friends about it.

If you end up delivering poorly to that community you also lose out on a pool of people to help you hype up your next title.

This is all speculative theory though, you should really just direct your attention towards making a well polished and fun to play game first and foremost.
>Contrast that with Android, which Google continually updates, and which is then automatically updated on consumer's phones.

I thought this was weak, given how long it can take for an Android update to reach some phones. My wife has a Motorola Backflip. It was released 8 months ago with Android 1.5, which was then 11 months old. Sometime this quarter it's supposed to get 2.1, which is already 10 months old.

If MS wanted to go to a continuous update model, they could probably do better than Android does, since there's a lot more homogeneity in PCs than in phones.
Not always possible with all banner networks I am afraid!
How many licenses of Windows will Microsoft sell 5 years from now? 10? 15?

Microsoft has huge inertia today, but markets change. And change really fast. Had Microsoft missed the web by two years and insisted on the Microsoft Network, we would not be having this discussion now.
The MIT VC Conference really is Here & Now
jQuery takes a "sensible defaults" direction. Animations have default values. You can get sliders with one line. Everything works intuitively.

YUI takes a "be explicit up front" direction. You want an animation? Tell us the timing, direction, and easing up front. Instantiate your animation. Run your animation. You want a slider? Tell us the min, max, length, and default values when you create it.

jQuery works great when you want to be fast and done. YUI helps you if you want to be a little slower and get everything tweaked to your exact requirements from the start.
Man, in a similar vein, I remember old ANTIC magazines that my father had, sitting down and typing endless reams of DATA statements printed up in that magazine, and getting glorious PLAYER/MISSILE graphic games out of the deal.

And then losing them entirely when the power went out while I was saving to tape. (booooooooooooooooop.)
Don't believe the hype. I sincerely hope the BRIC countries do well, but you can't assume they will grow at the same rate for the next 20 years. There are Earth shattering events every few years which could derail any of these countries. Politics, war, natural disaster, tech revolutions, etc. The US can adjust to change faster than anyone.
Halfway through SICP, which of course is excellent,
The Brothers Karamazov, and
The Structure of Magic: NLP Change Patterns.
If you really want a doorstop of a tome on nuclear weapons, checkout Rhodes' other book:

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...
The problem with Android is the phone manufacturers. The more they customize the base software, the longer it takes for updates to arrive. There is also an incentive not to update - you'll end up buying another phone.
Google Opensources Sawzall Language
I used to be a confidence/game coach a couple of years ago, and a common theme would be that socially awkward people generally had a higher tolerance to rejection, and vice versa for more socially 'lubricated' people. In my eyes this was down to socially awkward people's lack of understanding of the whole social matrix (e.g. social norms, how you should act etc.) The catch-22 was that as they faced more rejections - and more importantly more interactions - their confidence & social skills improved, and their rejections started to hurt a lot more.

What I'm trying to get at is that in my experience the actual getting rejected part doesn't really help on it's own. Sure, it's great to understand that getting rejected doesn't matter, but beyond that the only thing that is really helping you are the skills you're learning along side the rejection. So in my student's case, a much more productive thing for them to do was to throw themselves into more challenging social situations.
Personal opinion: Google doesn't build great products. They are a technology company

That is a great insight few people want to admit. Google creates great technologies and releases them as soon as possible, often half-working and implemented. Contrast with Apple who is a product company, who release products only after they are iterated to death and almost perfect. Neither approach is wrong, but you have to choose which company is the best fit.

I'd be interested in hearing more about why Apple is an awesome place to work. I've heard some anecdotes but never as much gushing as Google.
Consider that 20% of Facebook is 1.6% of Google.
9 Ways to Stand Out During your Job Search
Please standardize on either lower=better or higher=better. The graphs switch conventions frequently making it hard to interpret at a glance.
Somewhat off-topic, I guess.
If you are interested in learning for retention (i.e. learning something and then
being able to remember it the next week, next month, next year...) then you
should look into Spaced Repetition software (search for "spaced repetition" on
Wikipedia for a good overview). The software presents information in a
question/answer format, like flashcards, but spaces out the repetition so
that the material you need to review most you see more often, and the
material that you remember well you see less often. There are several
programs available that support this form of learning including Mnemosyne,
SuperMemo, and Anki.

As for how I use the software, as I'm reading something I want to retain, I
try to extract essential concepts as question/answers pairs and add them
into a deck in the software. Then review the deck with the software on a
regular basis (usually daily). The spacing effect provides maximum learning
with a minimum time investment.

As for choosing a topic, that's entirely up to your personal interests. There
are no shortages of posts on Hacker News listing books the readers are
interested in. Search Hacker News for "good books", go through one or
more of the lists, and choose one (or more) of the books that sound
interesting to you, and get started.
I also was helping someone do UX modeling. If anyone needs help - feel free to let me know.

jaspal.sawhney@gmail.com
Sorry for the "insensitive clod". It's a slashdottism that's hard to leave behind.
would you kindly go into greater detail?
The perks like free lunches, car washes, laundry, etc are less interesting as people get older. These are all designed to keep you in the office longer. Maybe it's cool to have your social life revolve around work when you are 22, fresh out of college. But at some point you realize you want to get away from work when you are done with work.

This warrants a separate reply. As a 30 year-old I could not agree more. I want to put in productive hours and then get the hell home to spend time with family, friends, or other projects. I would go insane eating three meals a day at work, hauling laundry in, etc.
I like the idea. I think with a little tweaking this could really take off.

Here's my thoughts

1) For the front page, its a little right in your user's face that you're taking a 50% cut of the money. I would word that differently. Not sure exactly how. Maybe take out the bit about how much the ladies get paid and explain that in the signup process, or separate the "how it works" by gender on separate pages. Its just a little too "kimono wide open" on the financials. Also, "Just click here within the next 7 days for a full refund." should either be eliminated or reworded to say something to the effect of "You can get a refund within 7 days of getting a response." While we're on that subject, are you going to award the money to the lady regardless of whether it was rejected? If not, you should clearly state that. I don't think you do. You just say answer the question and get paid. There's nothing talking about the approval process being tied to the money.

2) The bullet points below the top box on the front page repeat a lot of the information that is in the top box. You don't need to repeat yourself. Consider combining those two spaces into one.

3) While "meet the ladies" is a whimsical title for that page, it doesn't actually deliver (as people have already stated). You're not actually introducing us, more telling us about demographics. Maybe "Who are the ladies?" is more accurate and consistent with the message of the page (I noticed you have a link titled exactly that which points to the same place...)

4) You need something to convince us to trust you. A demo of a question/answer? Screen shots perhaps? Testimonials would definitely go a long way.

5) The menus could stand to be cleaned up. Either you don't need the "login/register" links or you don't need the "guys ask a question" and "ladies answer a question" links. I would lean towards getting rid of the latter. That allows you to move buzz down to the footer (its not that important to have up at the top. The average user doesn't care how much you've been talked about... sorry. The "guys ask a question" link points to the login page. I'm not sure why the "ladies:..." doesn't also point to a login/register page. It should as well. Also, fix the capitalization on the text of the login page. You Don't Need To Capitalize Every Word Of A Sentence.

6) On the buzz page, get rid of the buzz in Spanish. The site is in English. Don't expect anyone to take the time to pop it into Google Translate or for a majority of people to know Spanish.

Sorry this kinda jumps around alot and is probably a little too snarky. I hope this helps.

Good Luck!
Yes, they solved it alright.

In an entirely different context.
Startup lessons learned as a MassChallenge finalist
Couldn't agree more. The support from HN has been incredible, and I know that all involved appreciate it tremendously. Thanks for your comment.
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

I'm also:

1) slowly working through F. Copleston's History of Philosophy Volume 1: Greece and Rome while reading selections of the philosophers he discusses

2) reading daily an article or piece from Lapham's Quarterly, and

3) reading almost daily 0.5-1 law from Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power
> "One other choice is to move East to Toronto."

Well, sure, lesser of two evils anyways. The choices are: unemployment in an expensive city like Vancouver, or crappy employment in a cheaper city like Toronto, or slave your ass away and be abused at a media/gaming company in a city like Montreal.

Or live in the desolate tundra that is Ottawa where lucrative but mind-numbingly boring government contracts abound.

No wonder Canada's software scene is completely dead.

I grew up in Vancouver, moved east for school, and looked on both coasts for jobs near graduation. Vancouver had few jobs, and your best bet was EA (no thanks!). Toronto had more interest in entry-level engineers, but upon closer inspection most were monkey jobs pounding out Java boilerplate for some bank or other gargantuan legacy enterprise system.

There were a few companies I encountered that did honestly really cool stuff... they were also tiny and unstable (financially) as hell. Generally a poor idea to work the only good job in town.

I loved living in both Vancouver and Toronto, and honestly wish I can have that lifestyle back (the poverty levels I see in the US is shocking and appalling to my over-protected Canadian ass). But damn, slaving at some enterprise Java-factory for half the pay is a pretty high price to pay.
Much easier to read on the original site: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/strata-week-building-data-s...
Ask HN: Why Don't HN stories open up in a new tab?
Is there some kind of best practice philosophy? I work with many things running at once and it always confused me why sites would push you exclusively to the link you clicked.

Weigh in Gentle Fops and Courtesans.
For a $2000 flat site with minimal graphic work and minimal iteration of the end product you'd probably be looking at an hourly rate of $250 plus, which unless you're investing huge amounts of time into acquiring these customers is good whatever currency you're mistakenly converting into using the wrong ratio...

I agree about customers that try to use the boss' nephew as a bargaining chip generally being the ones that also expect the website to rapidly delivered and perfect, but there's plenty of money to be made from small businesses that don't need or want anything complicated.
>And then losing them entirely

Oh, yeah. I remember one day my dad typed in a long program from Color Computer Magazine, which did 3D images (very sparse wireframe). I played with it for a while, finished, pressed Reset...then, while I still had the button down, remembered that Dad had said he wasn't interested enough in it to save it to tape, so I should if I wanted to keep it.

I thought furiously for a moment, trying to figure out if there was any way to save it before I released the button; but the reset had already happened.
Actually, if you use quote mode (enabled by C-M-q by default) it works great!
Park City is in my mind way better than Mammoth and SLC is a short hop away. Utah isn't exactly California but it has Boulder and Denver near by if you want to run to a "heavy" startup scene in the summer.

I was burned out of a job 2 years out of college and decided to drop it all and head to Jackson Wyoming. You are locked off from a lot of civilization but you meet some amazing people, have plenty of time to ski/snowboard and code. Needless to say I have been away for 2 years and miss it dearly.

Good luck, burnouts are fun hurdles
hey matt mireles, why isn't speakertext powering this site?
Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis.
Because forcing me to open a new tab is evil. If I want a new tab, I'll middle-click.
Gmail at least used to support sharing email URLs among the sender and recipients of an email, so long as they had Gmail accounts. (Nobody else could see them, naturally.) Useful for "...When did you send me that email?" "It's this email, <plink>."

I haven't tried it in awhile, though.
Here's an interesting interview with Mr. Murakami: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fictio...
I had the exact same experience when I realized you got to down vote when you had "enough karma". That is, I found that just a total karma had the same effect. I've only just noticed the average karma, so call me slow.
I had the DEC edition (which pre-dated the Microcomputer edition featured here) and have been trying to buy one used, but copies seem to be extremely hard to come by.

I remember learning to program from books like this (and magazines like Creative Computing and Kilobaud that included program listings) by emulating the machine with paper and pencil.

I've often wondered if folks who have grown up with easy access to computing power still read code in the same way; if so, I'd recommend Knuth's literate programs as a great resource.
s/tricks/fundamentals
Get laid. <--- this.
why is 50/50 the dumbest way to start a company?
Big props for the east coasters. Sunday River (home town mountain) in Maine if you want is amazing as well. Hop a train, you are in Boston in 2-2 1/2 hours.
People don't leave companies, they leave managers.
Last few books:

Wind-Up Girl - Great postapocalyptic novel where the scarcity of 'calories' drives innovation and economy. A cool take on cyberpunk... biopunk?

The Shallows (What the internet is doing to our brains) - Great book, though a few chapters are kinda slow. Whether you believe the studies or not, it's full of excellent anecdotes about the history of book publishing, tv, etc.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Great story of post-wwii england written entirely via letters.

The Secret Lives of People in Love - Extremely beautiful prose. Each story is 5-6 pages.
Have we uncovered “Foundation X”?
For technically inclined, here is the link to the original paper by Rob Pike et al:

Title: Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall

Link: http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall-sciprog.pdf

Lang spec: http://szl.googlecode.com/svn/doc/sawzall-spec.html

Movie (GIF) linked from paper showing how the distribution of requests to google.com around the world changed through the day on August 14, 2003 is at http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall-20030814.gif
Me too! Was a great time, I think I learned a lot, although my next serious stuff was in Turbo Pascal.
Some airplanes for X-Plane 10.
I know it's a single data point but I've lived for several years in each region and worked in government (note I've never been part of the cabinet nor PM, sorry for my apparently uncommon usage).

I'm not arguing that the more intellectual echelons such as political scientists don't use it in the described manner however; don't move in those circles.

I never hear people refer to our country [the UK] as "the state" either. I perceive state as including the people (but ours is a [pseudo] democratic state so I'm coloured by that.

It's strange that I've not heard this usage, isn't it?

I just jumped to the first newspaper I thought of (well the 2nd, but paywall ...) and the first story in the UK Politics section that mentioned government (Ctrl+f search on the UK Pol' page).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-...

"The Government's immigration cap should not affect inter-company transfers for global firms, David Cameron said today. "

Well it's not the "cabinet and prime ministers immigration cap". The immigration cap is that [on some level] agreed in parliament, passed by the Lords and implemented by the relevant civil servants. I'm still not seeing it.

Whereabouts in the UK are you all (upvoters) from, what occupations are you in?
It was very satisfying seeing your post on HN. Too often, it seems, the bigger picture of the college experience is lost on HN.

Heed edw's advice. Go to college. College is as much about the education you get in the classroom as it is about the education you get outside of it.
it always confused me why sites would push you exclusively to the link you clicked

They don't. The browser gives you a choice (via mouse-buttons.) The alternative, forcing links to a new tab or window, is what takes away user choice.
phoronix.com sucks anyway :)
This never made sense to me. Back in freshman/sophomore year of high school I was pretty dumb and a little "grey hat" (just exploring, really). I would spend my spare time writing stack buffer overflows and of course had an Administrator account password to every computer in the network. Why would you do something so trivially traceable to you? I tended to do things more useful and under the radar like install CVS for my CS class.
Yeah, my dad would challenge me to modify these or other listings to do different things or sometimes just to come up with something off the wall. After finishing a couple (or dozen) of those he would buy me a game. I remember getting Frogger on tape like that.
How to present and sell the data is key.
"Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran. It presupposes no knowledge of statistics or machine learning and focuses on 1) what machine learning technique is probably best in a given situation and 2) how to implement it in Python.

My only complaint is it does completely skip over theory. That makes it accessible to a wider audience (I have a degree in literature) but he misses the opportunity of helping out people who are trying to build a better theoretical foundation or are learning higher math / mathematical notation.
Big +1 for Windup Girl, best SF book I have read in a long time
Right, but "displaying on the same tab" seems to be the default standard. I was interested to hear how people felt about both sides.
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (Timothy Gowers, ed)
Jennifer Government (by Max Barry)
The Supernaturalist (by Eoin Colfer)
…
I wonder if HN will wind up being sort of like Slashdot in the sense that the experienced people on the site will continue to make the site rich of such experience, but will be accommodating to those not experienced in whatever area, and slowly, over time, the inexperienced will continue to exert influence. Mind you, not as a collective whole, but as an ongoing wave of new people (those inexperienced people will become experiences either though reading the site, or just going along as usual). So could this cause a slight dumbing down of the site? Or will the two groups (veterans vs. inexperienced) just read different articles?