skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first paragraphs sums up what I think on the matter.

If you are at home... nobody is depending on you... It's easy to "drift". If somebody is there to say "Hey, did you finish X?" - that can be enough to get you to remember what you were doing, and get on it, without going off onto obscure feature land.

Whether you're hyper-motivated (and have a tendency to obsess about small things that don't matter) or under-motivated (and have a tendency to not really produce unless necessary), you'll benefit from a partner.

Just knowing someone else in the world loves your idea helps too. But again, I have to agree with the OP, make sure you are on the same page. Those "it sounds cool I'll chip in when I have time" people can be an absolute drain of your time and energy. (Those who want both money and an equity stake for one specific piece of the puzzle are the worst).

A co-founder has to be as committed as you are to derive the benefits.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860778 - 1 day ago discussion about this sample
He's talking about the new section:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Lots of spam, dupes etc. There's even at least one 'social media guy' who's added HN to his link dumping.
If you liked Asimov you'll probably like other classic SF authors like:

- More Asimov
- Philip K. Dick
- Heinlein
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Larry Niven
- Ray Bradbury
Apple Allows Flash-to-HTML5 App
It's one more variation on the "Their team is evil and cunning and my team is too dumb/cowardly/honorable/thoughtful to win" line that both teams Red and Blue use when they lose.
In America there is no system in place today that forces people to remain separate or keeps one Class subservient to another.
If you were born the son of a street sweeper, but excelled, you could become a doctor or lawyer or some celebrity or entrepreneur - and at the same time you would be fully accepted by your peers.
Not so in India. The Caste system freezes everyone in place. It is extremely difficult - almost impossible - for someone from the lowest Caste to rise in education and social status.
An Indian Untouchable would never be allowed to marry into one of the higher Castes and would never be accepted as an equal.
And for an Indian Untouchable to make it into medical school or opening a restaurant or become a priest in a temple or become a member of high society in India is very rare indeed.
My advice for people wanting to try Rejection Therapy
Nov 10: Panel Discussion on Benefit Corporations (Bethesda Green / Bethesda MD)
They do actually have real power in the UK and shape the laws, including sometimes putting a break on some that might be a bit harsh.
Like fcuk? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Connection_(clothing)#fc...)
Absolutely true. I used to play Razor-cracked games all the time. Now I just use Steam. Similar stories for Windows, Office, etc. And millions of people who used to pirate music don't anymore. Once again, me included.

Mark Cuban recently posted a blog post that I think is the best explanation I've ever read as to why this trend seems to happen:
http://blogmaverick.com/2010/10/26/the-value-of-your-time-an...

Honestly, has anyone gone trawling their local used book stores for books? It's fun, but sometimes it's REALLY hard to find the book you want. :) Eventually, something that's as convenient as this is a viable option if you value convenience and your time. And this is coming from someone who loves going to United Way used book sales.
Cache misses are expensive yes.

And when you have an interned string to be searched on - you always have to calculate it's hash-sum as key before looking for it in a hash-table, and you don't have to do that for a linear search (it's an interned symbol that's why). This means you might have to read one, two or more cache lines (if the cache line is 64, then it's strlen(yourstring)/8)

You can't use the pointer itself as a key - either the distribution is not good, or the language would not allow you (you can't do it in Common Lisp which Erik Naggum was talking about).

That calculation of the key might read one two or more cache lines - depending on how big the string is.

Off course it would be better for the hash-table the smaller key is, and worse if not.

And then, there are still CPUs without cache still in popular use - for example PS3's CELL SPE (spu).

And one more thing - in the linear search you always read the same cache lines, while in the hash-table you have to read everytime different memory (the strings to be searched upon).

But in both cases, there are instructions to prefetch, but again - you would be wasting less cache with the assoc table if you are looking a lot (e.g. you'll warm always from the begining and keep that in the L1), while for hash-table you would warm all the keys. It's really hard to compare, but I hope you get the picture.
Ah, and there's a connection, too: the OITC and David James were both involved in bidding to rescue MG Rover. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4681369.stm)
Cryptonomicon anyone? This sounds like a Neal Stephenson book, not Robert Ludlum.
No, it's performance art.
Ask HN: What are you reading right now?
At the end of my first (freshmen) year of engineering I realized I had totally trashed my reading habit (Maybe I because I had to study 8 subjects which were mostly irrelevant to my major i.e. ECE ). I used to read about 50-60 pages per day in my commute to high school (about half hour each way). Even though I commute more now (1&half hour each way) and that too in a much more comfortable bus, I had started reading less. So at the start of this semester(its mostly ended now) I (re)started reading.

I completed the Foundation series and the last two novels of Paulo Coelho. Other than that I completed Makers and FTW. Both were fun. Right now I am reading two books simultaneously (they both require different kind of attention so its no biggie), they are Godel Escher Bach (funny story how I got it, but that would be a big tangent here) and The Elements of Computing systems.

What are you reading right now?
We fat fingered the config. The cookie is marked secure now but we found another issue where it's being sent back on redirected HTTP requests. It should be all plugged up in a bit.
It's all about Numpy. Mayavi, IPython, mlab & friends are great for when I need to plot things or look at data, but Numpy is the workhorse I keep coming back to day in and day out. And also, the thing I wish for most when I have to use other languages. The combination of the speed of C and the elegance of, well, anything that is not C, is hard to beat. Once you get down the basics of array broadcasting, types, etc., it's possible to do some amazingly elegant things in Numpy, and quickly too. The numpy library has seemingly every array function I have ever wanted. If I were Matlab I'd be scared :-)
In Canada, it is exceedingly uncommon to hear bizarre speeches - or anything whatsoever, for that matter - from the Senate.

You are 100% right in that it is not taken exceptionally seriously, as they are lifetime appointments and most often bestowed as an honour. There is an element of power, as at least from a technical standpoint, the Senate in Canada could block the passage of legislation. It is a "rubber stamp" element of government, yes, but only out of tradition. If for some spectacularly weird reason the Senate decided to wield their power, it would have just as much weight - from a technical standpoint - as the US Senate.
An unfortunate coincidence. Ask me anything
presuming, of course that you can do so without penalty, yes. But there are very few source of credit which will let you get away with deferring payments penalty-free.
Yes, but I'm usually paying more than the payment amount on the high interest one. How much has to be done manually, since my income fluctuates.
This post.
I just finished reading the Millenium trilogy
Can Media Be More Ubiquitous Yet Less Invasive? Two Videos Show How
"Curious, why does he end the presentation saying that a tech ladder is bad?"

From the blog post which provides some context to the presentation (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/10/facebook-and-google.html),

"Many consider Google's #1 mistake to be having a tech ladder in the first place. I covered that topic in my post on Promotion Systems (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html) , so did not feel the need to belabor the point."

A snippet from the promotion systems post

"What if I tried to design a promotion system to piss off as many employees as possible? What characteristics would it have?

- No pleasant surprises. In other words, you can only be disappointed if you didn't get a promotion, you can't be pleasantly surprised by a promotion.

- Create unhappiness by dependence on scarce resources. In other words, gate promotions based on scarce resources so that even people who would otherwise be qualified could become disgruntled through no fault of their own.

-Eliminate accountability from people who make the promotion decisions (e.g., through a committee). That way, promotion decisions can seem arbitrary.

-Ensure that promotions are competitive races between all qualified candidates. This ensures that people who manipulate that packet in such a way as to have the best looking packets will win over people who are trying to get feedback and improve, which is supposedly the point behind all these feedback systems.

When I looked at Google's promotion system through this lens, I was very impressed. It seemed as though the system was designed to create disgruntled employees out of people who might otherwise be perfectly happy. And note that the ex-Googlers I interviewed were people who benefited from the system, as in: they were very well respected and were hence ranked highly. They were people who couldn't care less what their ranking was, yet they disliked the system anyway, purely because they thought that having a ranking system actually had a deleterious effect on the exchange of ideas."

There is a follow up post (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/promotion-systems-redux.htm...)

A snippet

"My spies at Google tell me that my essay on promotion systems drew a reaction on a Google mailing list that I didn't read even back when I was employed at Google.

I did get a few interesting responses. I won't post them here, but I'll address what a few points:

Someone.....pointed out that the real compensation at Google was much more dependent on raises, stock and bonuses, so the promotion system didn't matter. But that's not true at all! First of all, there was a level-based salary cap, and people did hit them. So at some point, you have to get promoted if you want your salary to keep going up. Bonuses were based on salaries, so those don't go up if your salary doesn't go up. Secondly, even if it was true that options and bonuses was all that mattered, then you just validated the claim that eliminating the engineering ladder wouldn't hurt productivity at all!"

I've found Piaw's posts to be very worth reading, even if you don't end up agreeing with him. Many gems on his blog.
I can somewhat see your point, but the house of lords is primarily aimed at redrafting/refining legislation, and can be overruled under the Parliament Acts[0]. So it is possible to pass legislation without the permission of the House of Lords, but it isn't possible to pass legislation without it passing through the Senate afaik. Obviously legislation thats passed the senate can still be vetoed or stopped by the House, but thats a different thing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Acts_1911_and_1949
the first 150 - 200 pages are kind of slow, but power through because it will be worth it.
Career ladders are wishful thinking and an easy way to undervalue contributions. They imply that professional development largely occurs along a single axis rather than multiple ones.

Who's worth more, Peter Norvig or Marissa Mayer? What about an overachieving SWE I vs an mailing-it-in SWE III?
> Considering that marijuana impairs driving ability less than driving at the legal limit for alcohol

Source? I've seen stoned people that couldn't stand up, much less drive.
Http://kino.to/
I once worked at company that employed a lot of hourly wage type people. One exec wanted to stack rank each group of wage employees each month and fire the bottom 25%. I tried to explain to him the negative morale effect that would lead to lower performance across the board, the fact any employes who were decent would just leave on their own, and there is a significant training cost for each new employee that he was ignoring. But nope, he wanted me to write the system anyway.

Thankfully someone higher up with a bit of sense got wind of the plan and nixed it. It wasn't too much later that the original exec was canned.
It seems perfectly reasonable to consider madness when discussing the possible reasons for that speech having been made.

It's not like the parent comment is trying to make a counterargument against anything, he's just wondering what's happening here.
12 Awesome Web Design/Development Tools You Shouldn’t Live Without
It is a great time to be a designer/developer of websites. While it is 2010 and we still don’t have flying cars at least we have many great (and free) tools to hold us over until we are traveling in style like the Jetsons. Some of my favorites are the web based tools you see popping up all the time.
Kelly Valen explores dark side of female friendships
Indeed, it's the overall "experience" (for lack of a better word) of programming in a particular language that matters. That's influenced by not just the syntax and structure of a language but also by all of the development tools, libraries, frameworks, documentation, and tutorials available, as well as the methods of working that those enable (i.e. REPL versus fast deployment, compilation steps required, ability to reload code on the fly, etc.).
Python is awfully close to being a superior (and free) replacement for Matlab, but there are a few annoyances that keep preventing me from switching forever. Unfortunately, these are mostly not bugs but bad design that is believed to be correct by the core developers, so it is unlikely to ever change:

- Matrices are a pain. The r_[] and c_[] operators could be a reasonable replacement for Matlab's elegant matrix construction syntax, but they do not work as expected (as smart hstack and vstack), instead doing something completely different and inconsistent for vectors and matrices.

- Tensors are a bigger pain. Matlab has a very well-defined semantics for operations like permute and reshape; in NumPy these operations sometimes create just a view, at other times they reshuffle the memory contents. I know the idea was to "protect" the user from having to know the memory layout of data, but this idea is bad.

- Ipython is great in every way except when it comes to reloading parts of your program. After any tiny change to your code, the only safe thing to do is to quit ipython and start it again. All the other options (run, reset, reload...) make some secret and wrong assumptions on what you want to reload. In contrast, this works flawlessly in Matlab.
My personal banker's indiscretions are bubbling up to daily light. I told Morty to keep his personal business apart from mine and leave any trails pointing away from my accounts.

This draws the line and he will be fired for this airing of my account's balances in plebeian circles. My apologies to the fine people of England and the circle of Lords unfortunate enough to have been bothered with the matter.
However, computers have not demonstrated brilliant chess play is possible without intelligence, unless the programmers of deep blue were not intelligent.
Stack ranking means just that: the employees are ranked. What the company does with the ranking can vary. The uses of a stack rank can be beneficial or harmful.

At one company where I worked, the rank was used to identify employees for promotion. If an employee consistently ranks above employees at a higher level, then the employee should probably be promoted.

The company also merged the ranks for smaller groups into groups of one hundred or more. This resulted in more consistent reviews and promotions across the company.

I consider these uses of stack rank to be beneficial.

The company also did something harmful with the stack rank. The company graded on a curve and used the stack rank for the grading. Even if everybody in a pool is doing great work, somebody needs to be given a bad review.
My company, Startup Garage, is developing a web based social tool to help people with an idea get started, get going and get ready to launch their startup using techniques from games, the customer development process and social pressure when you have more passion than funding and haven't quit your day job yet.

Phew. That's a long sentence.

EDIT: Basically, we're a virtual pre-incubator. That's at least a much shorter sentence.
And here in Texas, I hear talk like that all the time. Not from crazies in the street, but educated professionals.

Yesterday was really the worst.
Essay contest: Is reality digital or analog?
That's pretty cool, though the biggest slowdown for most sites are all of the third-party scripts being loaded from remote servers. If people really realized how much page speed matters in usability, they would be loathe to add in all the scripts from facebook and digg and google and 12 different analytics services.
Very nice, thanks for sharing
Ask HN:

I'm sure there is going to be tons of positives to this from the community, many I can identify myself, but can someone list some NEGATIVEs that may arise by using this?
when I see an elephant I think Postgresql
Apple goes easy on Adobe, allows an app that can run Flash videos on iOS
Exactly. Funny story there . . . we started our JVM language as interpreted, more or less, and ended up having to write our own not-so-great debugger for it. We decided to compile it down to native java bytecode precisely so we could take advantage of all the native Java tools that work with standard Java-like classes, such as debuggers, profilers, and even just stack traces. That approach doesn't work so well for languages that don't match Java relatively closely (i.e. stack traces in Closure are, I understand, pretty horrific), but for our language it's turned out pretty well.
Also, the problem of hunger in the world is largely one of distribution, not production.
Facebook isn’t.
From http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics : “About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States”
I think despite all the differences between systems I would still call someone who is a member of the legislative body a member of the government in general terms.
I think some kind of part time apprenticeship-style program would be fantastic. I wish that I could have spent some meaningful time as a kid learning about different professions and skills. I believe that those experiences in turn would make the traditional school learning even better because it would enable kids to apply their new found knowledge in real world settings.
Electronic implant allows the blind to see
I see that you and I think alike... http://editmole.com (also on appspot).

I'm lazy so I went with the "notepad" style editor.
Not only is it very political, but it forces some baffling decision making.

Assume I have a team of 10 in which 5 are wonderful contributors, and that, due to stack ranking practices, only the top 1/3 of my team gets consideration for big bonuses and promotions. Here, I'm incentivized to immediately hire 5 warm bodies, thus ballooning my team to 15, so that the top 1/3 get the recognition they deserve.

It's actually rational to do that if I'm concerned that those 5 excellent performers will leave without that recognition. The incentives that appear due to stack ranking are really, really bizarre.
History of the Uncanny Valley
John Resig: How could YUI3 improve its image compared to jQuery, MooTools, etc.?
This is absolutely the most annoying thing I've found on the mobile web. Newspapers seem to be particularly bad at it.
yeah, i definitely agree!

I would say its the curse of getting bigger... in good old days (before HN got wide attention), only genuine hackers joined. When it gets so popular and big that every major tech blogger reads/acknowledges it and HN threads show up in first page of google search within 40 minutes of starting, there's bound to be some 'Media Sluts' coming over who's not concerned with being a Hacker!
If you click on the individual filters to read their descriptions, they all have a "Risks" section at the bottom of the page. For example, the inline css removal filter has this:

The 'Inline CSS' filter is low to moderate risk. It should be safe for most pages, but it could potentially break scripts that walk the DOM looking for and examining <link> or <style> tags.
Each of the filters mentions risks:

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/filters.html

This is a tool that mindlessly applies optimisations that are lossy or change behavior of the page. Sometimes it may break things (e.g. I use `input[type=text]` selector in my CSS, and removal of "redundant" `type="text"` attribute from source would break it).

It also wastes some processing time on applying on-the-fly code changes you could do yourself in the source.

If you follow performance best practices, you may optimize pages better yourself (you need to judge what is better to inline, what can be made async. Simple heuristics of this module uses may be too crude).
Yes, nobody is good at everything. However, that's why hiring and delegation of responsibility is an essential skill in a good entrepreneur.

You can't contract a decent designer for $500 to launch a prototype?

You can't hire a good accountant for $50/session?

You won't muster up the strength to manage a remote programmer for $10/hour?

You'd rather give away 55% of your company?

then you probably shouldn't be starting a company.
I wasn't offering a counterargument. I was taking it as read that what he says probably isn't true because (1) it sounds very very implausible and (2) if you read what he actually said, it looks like the kind of thing deranged people say; and offering an explanation for how it might be that he came to say such strange things.

(There is further reason for suspecting LJoB's mental state; his most recent other speech in the Lords is pretty weird too.)

If you think that my suggestion that LJoB might be off his head is so ridiculous that no sensible person would make it, or that the way I expressed it is so incoherent that no normal person would write what I did, and if you happen to want explanations, then you absolutely should be considering the possibility that I'm stupid or crazy. [EDITED to add: Especially if you know that in fact I was treated roughly as an infant in a way that would tend to damage my brain. Which, as it happens, doesn't appear to be the case.]
They do actually sometime use this for very controversial laws. I can't remember that last time it happened but it does happen occasionally hence why every party in power tries to stuff as many of their own in there. It provides longevity to the parties in power.
I left my job at BigCo because I was part of a 8 person team where the manager was supposed to create a normal distribution out of scores from 1-5. I was one of two employees recognized for doing an excellent job, but my manager could rate just one of us as "excellent".

During a performance review, my manager talked for an hour about how much I'm contributing and what an amazing job I do. Then he ranked me as average. I was extremely disappointed because I wanted the awesome job I do to get more official recognition.

I started searching for a new job almost immediately and left shortly after.

So yes, review systems considered harmful.
In the case of Southwest, one would think corporate culture had something to do with it.
The biggest negative is people implement it without understanding and just enable all the filters by default.

It's also another apache module. Personally I try and work without DSOs.
Hm. Any idea why people break up so often before Christmas?