skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't had a chance to go to any academic conferences yet, but I was involved in a discussion regarding networking at conferences with one of my professors [1] earlier this year. Some of his suggestions were,

- don't sit with people you already know. Make a point of sitting with people you don't know for seminars, workshops, meals etc.

- same for queues. If you're with friends, queue up separately for a chance to talk to new people.

- only fill your cup a little at those meet and greet events with food and drinks. This way, if you get stuck in a conversation that's not going anywhere, you've always got an excuse to leave - to re-fill your cup.

I realise these don't really address the questions the OP asked, but I thought I'd add them. Hopefully someone else will have some thoughts, because I'm interested too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Possingham
Deprivation, Entrepreneurs and Optimism
Why is the Richard Brautigan of 2009.
New shoes. The soles of your shoes can easily have 1mm (1/16") of differential wear and so you wind up standing on a consistently uneven surface all day.

[Disclaimer: not science, just my experience, I have flat feet and when I experience heel pain it's to replace the shoes]
From the maintenances mailing list:

The maintenance work has been completed. The datastore was in a read-only period between 12:02-12:45 for a total of 43 minutes. Some users reported two periods of 500 errors unrelated to datastore writes, but these issues should no longer be occurring.

On Nov 6, 12:01 pm, App Engine Downtime Notify <i...@google.com>
Yes, and he also said that the "controls" are very sensitive. Even slightly moving his head changes his course.
Well, he'll be saving $65M in capital gains taxes by selling this year before the rate increases to 20%. No doubt that was a consideration.
"If what these fellows propose is true, then they will have simultaneously discovered 1) Reverse causality 2) Evidence for biological receptors for the mediator of reverse causality"

If either is true, then history suggests that we'll later look back and realize that we already had a ton of evidence for both of these hypotheses, but that it was all being used instead as evidence that the old paradigm was correct.

"If these guys are open with their data, it will be rather straightforward to identify the error that they committed that led to these results."

Maybe. With a lot of these studies it hasn't been obvious if there has been an error or if so what it was, which is why the field keeps going.

"Parapsychology consists of the practice of accidentally or willfully misunderstanding the scientific method."

The hypotheses put forward by parapsychology might well be false, but that's no reason to trash talk the researchers. I don't think there's any reason to think they're less intelligent, competent, or ethical than any other researchers, and a lot of them are highly respected, e.g. Stan Grof.
> To live in a world in which everything is provided for me, with no work and no effort, is to live in a world with no purpose.

Feeding and housing and clothing myself are not my "purpose", and many things which I find enjoyable would not be provided for me in an "age of abundance"; in fact, they are inherently things that no one else can provide for me.
"and sometimes set up their own online authentication systems to give people the feeling they have a legitimate product"

The fragment above is as close as this article's author gets to what I believe to be the core economic argument for Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy. Someone who would never think of spending $300 for a legitimate MS Office license might pay $3 for a DVD from a street vendor knowing full well that the DVD is pirated. People making such a purchase almost always know that they are not buying a legitimate copy. These sales are only one small step away from just downloading a copy of Office via torrent. What rationally must concern Microsoft is when consumers pay tens of dollars for "discounted" software with the belief that they are purchasing a legit license. That's likely lost revenue for Microsoft (only "likely" because the consumer might not have paid the higher price of a legit copy).

Imagine that I went into a diner where servers "self bank" (take cash payments directly, usually using an apron with money pockets), pretended to be a server, and presented customers with fake checks. The customers would pay me and leave thinking that they had completed a legitimate transaction. Obviously, the restaurant's top line suffers, but this sort of theft is worse than if those same customers entered the restaurant with the intent to dine & dash. Why? Because they probably wouldn't have eaten there if an armed guard had been checking receipts at the door. So, the restaurant is out only its marginal cost (probably just the cost of the food if seats were still available, about 30% of the check on average across the restaurant industry). So, while these two kinds of theft might seem identical on the surface, the one where I pose as a fake waiter is over three times as costly for the restaurant.

The market for fake designer handbags is similar. There are two categories of fake goods: those designed to fool the buyer, and those simply manufactured only well enough to convince the buyer that others will perceive the good to be legit. Most luxury purses have internal markings (gilded logos, etc.) which help identify the brand, but only to the owner (presuming that she is the only person who actually sees the inside). If the buyer knows the purse to be fake but desires to impress those who see her carrying it, there's little incentive to pay extra for a purse with replicated innards. However, if a merchant wants to sell a fake handbag for a good price to a buyer who thinks it legit, the details had better match up with those observable at Saks. Handbag manufacturers rationally spend most of their time going after those producing the high quality fakes as those have an immediate impact on revenue. Unlike Microsoft, there is also a strong incentive to attack the market for real-from-a-distance knockoffs as the economic signalling effect of a $1K handbag is weakened when the public computes the likelihood to be low of an arbitrary woman with such a bag to be carrying a legit version.

I was disappointed by the shallowness of the NYT's analysis in the article. Surely its readers expect a bit more depth?
What part of "Free real-time texting for all" and then a picture of an iPhone, Android, and Blackberry doesn't perfectly explain what this app is?

http://www.kik.com/
Zip isn't just a compression format that people can choose to use or not. Java jars, wars, ears, etc. and a number of other apps/frameworks/etc. package files using zip. It is flawed, but many well-used things are flawed.

I personally use tar.gz whenever I don't have to use zip, unless I'm sending to someone where I don't know if the person is using OS X or a *nix OS, in which case I use zip, just in case. But I use unzip and sometimes zip in OS X and Linux, and whenever I'm trying to unpackage something I know is compressed in an unfamiliar format, I unzip it, and I think every time, it was the right guess.

Thanks for the post, though.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm not sure if my post seemed to indicate I only have 3 months coding experience, but I've been coding for almost 2 years.
I'm about to do exactly what you're suggesting with the niche ideas, but just thought I'd ask here first.
There's a good chance I'll have to work on it longer than expected, but that's one of the reasons I want to have a great idea I'm passionate about.
What, Chile? If they stop hiring everyone, they stop hiring everyone. That's not a discrimination issue either, just like the general lack of room for advancement in mature industries that are run by lifers.
Dear java users - time to move to mono !
www.go-mono.org
Do get a co-founder who is good at coming up with customers/revenue if you don't want to do that side.
Ask HN: Anyone have any experience with CPA advertising?
Does anyone here advertise, and does anyone have any experience with CPA (click per action) networks? If so, which networks, what was your cost, and how did it work out?

Thanks for sharing any experiences,
Kevin
Just to clarify, I'm asking if you have experience USING a CPA network to advertise your product, not as an affiliate.
Do you have a citation for your tobacco statistics? Not trying to be an ass; I've just heard the opposite is true for tobacco. Something like 70% of people who begin using it casually eventually become addicted.
Dreamland Online
The paper says it's 36 trials. 30% of experiments with 36 dichotomous decisions where the answers are chosen randomly would be expected to have 20/36 correct (= 56% correct) or better.
Thanks for that, some are a little out of my area but I'll read every last one.
Mapping RuNet politics
I get the feeling that with most companies we are talking binaries. Readline is a pretty good example, it is GPL and it was my understanding that even a dynamically linked C program needed to be GPL compatible to use it (thus the reason for the LGPL). Am I wrong in your opinion?

Also, the recent WordPress theme issue probably mucks this up even more from an understanding point of view. Some said even if the themes hadn't used GPL code but simply called existing routines, they needed to be GPL. Where do come down on that?
I agree with you on 8) I don't see why it matters so much what style of braces are used as long as the block of code and I currently looking as it consistent. If future developers object that badly, there is also many many auto formatters out their to fix it.

the article is clearly rather dated, and a number of the points (as jws notes) are rather irrelevant now.
Time and again, researchers in this field have shown that they cannot or choose not to conduct reproducible science. In its decades of existence, parapsychology has never had a reproducible finding that cannot be explained by common physics or psychology. J Archibald Wheeler was right to try to eject parapsychology from the AAAS.

Why do you say that Stan Grof is associated with parapsychology? I had only heard of him in connection to psychedelic research previously, which is something else entirely.
T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture
People tend to like Google to keep to standards that would only make sense as a not for profit. Sure data portability is a good thing but when in specific instances your helping your competitor without them giving up anything it doesn't make sense.

I doubt shareholders would really want Google to sit back and give up the game on social.
Agricultural policy is built around stabilizing income of farmers. If you look at it in terms of output it never makes sense.
My dinky app dropped from 60ms/request to 20ms/request, but over the next 3 hours crept up more or less linearly to about 30ms/request.
Ask PG: Have you ever been to India or planning to?
Would be really, really great to have you here and take a deeper look on the startup scene here. May be I am just being to ambitious.
Wikipedia has more information for people (like me) who haven't heard of Genera before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)
Do not awkwardly kiss and subsequently force your hand down female conference-goers underwear.
Never been, but I'd like to go one day.
Creative architectural design by Bjarke Ingels
Wow, really? Didn't even know that was still around. I was using kazaa to download music when I was 13 (21 now).
As I enjoy the benefits of immutable data structures and read-only interfaces, it is absolutely not an unmitigated good. Replace "Collection" with "Iterator" above, and the borking you mention is impossible ...
Your comment makes me realize a problem with this article: It's not that it isn't true, it is too true. Its title is a tautology. Of course the technological winner will always be a toy. To a proper hacker, every object is a potential toy.

The very expensive multiphoton microscopes that I once worked with were, and still are, very serious medical research tools. But they were also wonderful toys. Building them was fun. For an R&D engineer, engineering is fun.

Which were the "serious" computers again? The ones that were never used for fun? But that excludes all of them. Sometimes the fun was right out in the open: The DEC PDP-1 of 1959, for example, became famous as a game machine, because Spacewar was written on it. But I'll bet that even old-school bank-account data processing was a lot of fun when it was first being invented. I bet even COBOL programmers had fun, especially in 1960 when COBOL was brand new.
So it’s pretty clear to me that Oracle is playing for keeps, and playing to own the Enterprise space.

It's not like Oracle's behavior with MySQL and Java is something new for them. Larry Ellison has always been a guy who buys a company, streamlines their processes, figures out a way to squeeze every last cent out of their products and then hires 1,000 new sales reps to sell it to enterprise customers. More than anything, I'm puzzled that it took this long and I'm puzzled that this hits anyone as something unexpected.
Why WOULD McD's fries rot? They are saturated in oil, and oil does not rot.
Not me,

I want Google to be the bare-knuckles, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners winner - for good.

In this case, it seems like they are currently doing the right thing.

Demanding reciprocity is the right thing for data portability. It's like the GPL is more restrictive license than the BSD license - and the best license for software freedom.
Call me skeptic but none of the experiments or the so called "significant laboratory evidence of psi" are conclusive at all. Premonition deals mostly with feeling something before it happens and precognition deals with seeing things before it happens. I believe the former is side effect of a mind that analyzes and understands patterns with fairly good accuracy, while the latter is nothing than pure coincidence. It's easy to say random things like "my dog is looking at a turtle" 100 times and get some percentage correct, but I bet you that if I asked you about it, you would only remember the correct ones and mostly discard all the times you where wrong.

Hell not only do it all the time, I did it three times in the last hour while I was taking a shower. I "saw" my dog pee on the studio, I "saw" my significant other arrive with chicken, and I "saw" a call from my sister. I leave the room and my dog peed on the studio, my girlfriend is eating some roasted chicken and my sister called me while I was reading this article. Does it mean I'm a psychic? HELL NO! I've done that same exact thing before, probably by analyzing patterns, and have been utterly wrong.

Believing in this stuff would mean that our futures are ruled by some kind of destiny, which is fine for Prince of Persia, but really makes absolutely no contribution to our collective sanity.

Wohooo I just imagined my girlfriend is going to come out of a giant cake wearing a spandex catsuit. I hope I hit this one too!
I believe goal with the down-voting and shade adjustments is to "shun" the down-voted comments, such that they are given much less visibility, thus much less priority, over comments that offer value to the community. Brilliant, if you ask me.
I agree. In some cases, like Bill Gates, the money is probably on a one-way trip to Africa. But in many cases the money will probably be used to fund new tech ventures.
Said another way.

Where there is an active market for private company shares open only to a limited group (employees, investors and other existing shareholders), potential sellers (employees & investors) have had reasonable opportunity to sell however much they want. Potential buyers, on the other hand, do not necessarily have the opportunity to buy. So if you are relating to the value a company would have a following an IPO, you would expect the value to rise. There aren't many new sellers at the internal market valuation price or lower (they could have sold before at that price).
will respond to this in the next day or so. trying to get a massive project done :D
and we would love to welcome you here.
For those of you wondering, as I did, how to make this amazing pie crust: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2007/11/cooks-illustrated...
It's amazing how the "deliberate ambiguity" policy that seems to surround most border disputes breaks down when there are online maps that most people tend to accept. Even saying areas are disputed tends to cause outrage.
Perhaps instead of an astrix color change, highlight your comments with a slighly different background color. For me it's not the color, but the size of the astrix.
I don't think that's what scott_s meant. When Bill Gates sells his shares, someone else buys them. The amount of money Bill withdraws is exactly matched by a new investor(s). The MS stock price stays roughly the same.

Think of it this way, Microsoft didn't raid its savings account and sell off office furniture to pay him. Another investor pays him.
I think it'd be a lot harder w/o a framework since you'd have to deal with a lot more low level stuff. Webapp is pretty much the most minimalistic cgi framework you'll find...

Though there is a lot of interesting stuff you could do with a lower level of access to the datastore.
Remind HN: Changes Your Clocks Tomorrow (If you observe DST)
Rocket Man Breaks Multi-Loop Record
"working a room" is actually fairly difficult as there are probably not very many rules of thumb that you can follow that don't have exceptions. You have to be sensitive to social cues and have tact.

Getting in and out of conversation circles: hang out nearby and eavesdrop. If the conversation sounds like one that you have something to contribute, wait until you have something to say and there is an adequate lull in the conversation to jump in. It doesn't matter if what you have to say refers to earlier in the conversation "I overheard you said x a while ago,..."

What's appropriate amount to talk about yourself/idea: as little as possible unless you are trying to sell to the person listening (and even in that case, as little as possible, but more than otherwise). People like to talk about themselves. Good conversationalists mostly listen and interject with anecdotes of their own that are relevant and the other person can relate to.

How to approach FAMOUS GUY: just do it. Wait for your chance and then "Hello. I'm x. Big fan. ..." Most FAMOUS GUYs are used to being approached and know how to deal with unwanted attention. Just be polite.

How to ask your friend for an introduction: I assume you mean "how to ask someone you don't know too well for an introduction" -- if it were your friend, just ask bluntly. If it is not your friend, ask bluntly, but provide a little bit more context. Why do you want said introduction, what's the goal, etc.

The best advice: just be yourself. You look approachable when you are comfortable.

Another piece of advice: don't look busy/purposeful. When you are by yourself, just stand in one place, smile at everyone, and wait until you see people that are by themselves. Introduce yourself simply.

Edit: whoaz, I wrote a lot more than I thought I would -- I should disclose that while I think all of the above are good tips, I suck at many of them myself.
LYAH really helped cement some of my Haskell knowledge; I'm at that middle sort of zone where I knew basic stuff, but some of the more advanced things don't make sense to me yet. The Applicative, Monad, and Zippers parts in particular have helped me a lot.
Thanks Jeffrey. I think it would be great if you put your summary from above as the top of the FAQ. I finally read through the entire thing and saw everything you mentioned, but it is just too much for a quick overview (to answer the first question that came to my mind - is this worth $xxx?).
I believe that cocaine is bad and that its users shouldn’t be treated arbitrarily harshly. There’s no contradiction there.
Try to beat this one:

I spent 4 months, full-time (I think I was a bit depressive and unproductive, though (that might have to do with the difficulty of the problem a bit)) to make a goddamn "error message merging" system where you specify some merge rules for error messages, and then said messages are "merged" efficiently at runtime (with another of my adaptations of the awesome Rete algorithm).

For instance, as a trivial example merging "Please enter your Username." and "Please enter your Password." could yield "Please enter your Username and Password."

Merging error messages efficiently with a great concise syntax looked SO EASY =/ I was wondering why the hell no websites (that I know of) do that because it's a pretty obvious feature to me... Well, now I know. People don't really mind that much about these things (maybe they just have low expectations) AND it's really hard to implement.

I finally made it, right now the implementation is utter crap, with some missing features and some bugs but the general architecture is there and works. I'll clean it up and document it within a few months, probably.

It's one of the hardest things I ever made so far in programming.
Well... secure.grepular.com uses an unsigned certificate, that makes most browser squeak.

It is important to understand that albeit it's not proper https, this is still an encrypted connection that will make eavesdropping impossible. Being signed by an actual authority is only necessary to ensure the website we're talking to is actually secure.grepular.com, and not a man-in-the-middle that would intercept our queries and forge answers. "Unfortunately", both ideas of security and authentication are part of https, and having one without the other is going to pop big scary messages.

This sort of https is still more secure than plain http.

His point about transmitting the password in plain sight is a very good one. Firesheep showed how bad it is to transmit your cookies in plaintext, but sending your login/pass is even worse.
Wow. I wrote basically the exact same comment at roughly the same time. Yours wasn't there when I started and it was when I finished.
Like I said- if the time spent maintaining this course (even considering there might "probably" be office hours) is worth that much money, I need to consider teaching. I don't doubt the instructor of this course in particular is capable of maintaining 4 of these courses in a month.

More arguably: this information is information that is not only documented thousands of times- but there are even plenty of human resource available for free as well (consider stackoverflow). I'm certainly not suggesting Rebecca value her time at nothing. But of all professions, I'd expect programming to be the first of which you can truly learn for free.

I don't mean to be argumentative, I am just being idealistic.
If you had one, you had one, and it's in their heap somewhere waiting to be mined. All they did was turn off the visibility flags. The only way is to never have an account... lucky me.
Wow, that's kind of awesome. I looked at the first 2 pages and it's literally almost entirely diapers and coffee, sprinkled in between I noticed maple syrup, coconut oil, and wipes for all those diapers and at the end a box of Honey Bunches of Oats.
Good point, but lets back it up with a controlled decay study. In keeping with the theme of the topic. =)
He co-founded the field of transpersonal psychology, which is very similar. His research in this area was highly regarded even by Carl Sagan, who was probably the most famous skeptic of his day. He was especially interested in birth memories, memories of past lives, and also syncronicities.
oddly enough, i went to a "founders institute" workshop just last night and one of the primary examples involves... diapers.

staple items like diapers are things people like to order without actually seeing. plus, those types of items are easy hooks to get people to buy complimentary items with bigger profit margins.
This goes to show you that being good at conferences isn't unique... it's a skill that is learned though experience along with trail-and-error. For some folks, it comes naturally while others need to work at it. It is a skill though and when practiced can be a lot of fun.