skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously, we have to ask this right now, when we might be starting to emerge from the worst depression since the Great Depression? Bubble? What bubble? Entrepreneurial activity != a bubble. It means capitalism is at work.
Extinct bears found underwater
Do you work for the government? I have to use a Blackberry because of business, but it's a pretty decent smartphone. I'd prefer it to an Android phone, though if I could I'd just get an iPhone. C'est la vie.
If you plot a graph of QQQQ between 1990 and 2000, and compare it to the graph between 2000 and today, you'll find that the technology sector is STILL recovering from the first bubble burst. In fact, the NASDAQ could probably rise about 50% from here and still be right in line with historical growth rates.
I missed the word "app" when reading your comment and thought it was a clever joke.
Litera?
It's a Blackberry Messenger clone which also works on iPhones, and Android phones. If this where to become the de facto messenger, you should be able to chat with anyone regardless of what phone, or messaging services they prefer (as they would be forced to use the service to be able to talk to everyone of their peers).
Most math takes the form of icebergs. :-)
Marketplace Tips for Windows Phone 7 Developers
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly Ahh, the App Hub. Looks like the copied a number of decisions that Apple made later in the game, to try to stop some of the problems we were seeing with iPhone apps. Any changes to app/description require a completely new submission is one example.
FYI, I was making a joke regarding the situation Google is in. Don't really know if you're just trying to be informative or if you're correcting me or something :)
it screams QE2 to me
Basically, Kik’s technology lets you wirelessly “sling” any content on your phone to any device running on any software.

That should have been on the home page. This "free real-time texting" thing makes no sense to me. Doesn't virtually everyone with a modern smartphone have free real-time texting?

But being able to stream live TV from my Media Center box to my phone would be cool.
When google said in the past that users are free to take their data and leave, I dont remember any caveats being in place. Whether they leave to join a idyllic commune or a kleptocratic dictatorship imo their data should freely go with them.
Legalized pot: notice a pattern?
Dvorak is 12 years late to the "Cool URIs don't change" party: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Lesson: If you don't own the domain, you don't own the stability of those domain's URLs.
It's not a disputed land really, the official maps for both Costa Rica and Nicaragua show the area belongs to Costa Rica. Blaming Google Maps is a bit of a red herring from the nicaraguans.
I was wondering if you'd consider adding an opt-in setting that would make users' votes visible to others, both for comments and for submissions. I'm interested in it for a few reasons:

1) I'd like to see what people I respect are voting for, in the hopes of finding things I otherwise would have missed.

2) I'd like to someday make a recommendations system that would work for HN, and starting now to create a corpus of permission-cleared votes would help if I ever get to it.

3) I think it might have a positive effect on social dynamics. While there is in theory greater potential for retaliatory downvotes, I hope that instead people would act more considerately if they felt that others could review their behaviour. I don't see any way to test this other than by trying it out.

I think this option would best be a simple checkbox on each user's settings page: "Make my votes visible to others". The votes would then be visible from a link on that page for others to view. Ideally, it would also be possible to view these from an item-centric viewpoint, accessible from the 'link' page.

If the idea were to catch on, I'd eventually like to see an 'Open' list, parallel to 'Classic', whereby one could view the entire site as it would appear if ordered only by users with their votes set to be visible.

Thanks!

[Originally here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878591]
It works as you described on my macbook. I was on my Mac at work before.
Ask HN: Organizing value taken from online articles/blogs
If you’re anything like me from day to day you probably take in a lot of articles online, these can be anything from current events or fluff pieces to articles which change the way you approach things forever. At the moment there is very little that I keep as a permanent record from what I am taking in online, so nothing except the key articles are really integrated into my thinking, with the rest only being recalled when a cue is given in conversation.

What I’m thinking about is an extension to how instapaper works that after each thing you read you decide if you got any lasting value from it. Something where you are forced (as long as you follow the system) to write a summary on your key takeaways and categorise the article. As in many areas this act of summarising and categorising is a good way to embed what you have learnt in memory, as well as have a reference to refer back to in future.

Really I don’t know if I’d be disciplined enough to follow such a system so I guess I’m just wondering is there anything out there that people use to do this and just throwing the concept out in general. Also this is inspired by the ycombinator startup OhLife which by sending you daily emails assists in staying disciplined in keeping a diary.
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician go to a conference together, and split a room in the hotel. They check in and go to sleep. The hotel is old (they couldn't afford anything better on professors' salaries), so the room is heated by a fireplace. A spark jumps out of the fire and catches the rug on fire. The engineer smells the smoke and wakes up. He jumps out of bed, sees the fire, and looks around. The first thing he sees is the ice bucket, so he takes it, fills it up from the sink, and throws the water on the fire. He drops the ice bucket next to the fireplace and goes back to bed.

The fire throws another spark, creating another fire. The physicist wakes up and sees the fire. He calculates that, given the size of the fire, and amount of oxygen needed to be displaced to put out a fire of said size, a glass of water will be sufficient. He fills up his water glass from the sink, and while running to the fire, throws the water at the fire at the exact distance from the fire that gets the water to the fire earliest, putting it out. He drops the glass next to the fireplace and goes to sleep.

The fire sparks once more, and the mathematician wakes up and sees the fire. He looks at the ice bucket and glass sitting next to the fireplace, says "Aha! A solution exists!", and goes back to bed.

It's a math joke, but not one suitable for t-shirts.
Link to his full article: http://thewebkid.com/Escapia.aspx

At least the company is being acquired instead of simply running out of money and shutting down.

Lesson 1: Don't invest money you can't afford to lose, especially in a high risk startup.

Lesson 2: Don't work for free for 2 years for anyone (except yourself). Doing it for 4% equity is absurd.
Your book is amazing. I've been trying to learn erlang, and you were the first person I've come across who really explains things well. I just wanted to thank you, and encourage you to keep on writing.

A link, for anybody who's curious:

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content
Refactoring to Heaven
Come on guys, this belongs on reddit. Stop screwing up the S/N ratio.
It's sad that they were taken advantage of but you have to have someone on your side, it seems that he didn't know what was going on in his own company.
Where Drugs Come From: The Numbers
I agree, I have been working for free for 3 years so far on my start-up but we have been ramen-profitable from the start and I am a Co-founder who has Co-founder stock. He sounds like he didn't know they were getting funded or anything, and who will let someone invest 100k and he only held 4%. They should have applied to Y-Combinator.
What do you get when you cross an elephant and a banana?

(Elephant)(banana)sin(theta)
Are you arguing that drugs are inherently dangerous? In particular, I'd like you to show me what is dangerous about cannabis.

From the way I see it, the most dangerous aspect of that drug is the risk of catching law enforcement's attention.
Depends on what you're trying to measure, right?
friend had a shirt that said

"be there or c squared minus a squared"

lol
Let me clarify - I'm a startup hacker, not a bigco guy at all :)

And I still use MySQL all the time, right alongside so-called NoSQL solutions where they are better fit to a given purpose: Membase for high-availability collections on the order of billions-of-records in a social game; MySQL for defining the game world itself; mongoDB for any and all data for which eventual-consistency doesn't matter (e.g. analytics). I've streamlined my MySQL dealings in precisely the ways you outlined. I have change scripts for every schema change, and I have YML-driven schema auto-generation in Symfony and declarative. Schema changes are pushed out through staging to production - lazily when possible, and actively when possible.

But despite all the process improvements in the world, the dev time savings that go along with a smart, document-oriented model layer are not a myth. I assure you, they are very real. No longer does every new feature have to start with schema design (no matter how streamlined your schema alteration process may be, it has a nonzero cost, and one which definitely increases with scale). You can instead just get right to the code, and start setting and getting the properties your new feature will need.

The fact remains: SQL is not a one-size-fits-all solution any more than the recent "massively scalable" data stores are. A modern backend engineer should know a lot about a variety of datastore solutions, and should think long and hard about which data should be stored in which manner(s).
Probably because she's mentally ill. Same thing happened to a friend of mine; a girl who turned out to be schizophrenic accused him of rape; luckily her story didn't make sense and she later realised that she'd been delusional. On the other hand, I know at least five women who've been raped; only one went to the cops. The rest had credible stories and witnesses; they still couldn't do it.
Some data here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=iYuh-gfnwb0C&pg=PA361&#...

Basically, it seems that extreme insider buying is a very good sign for the market as a whole, but it's fairly rare. (31.7% returns in one three month period w/ insider buying signal, vs. avg. 4.2% returns in 75 3-month periods w/ insider selling signal)

In terms of individual stocks, it seems that the predictive power of insider buying as a metric is best when mixed with taking into account the company's dividend yield, and they claim that this gives you a 6.2% edge.
I have 3 things to tell you.

1) Consider taking another path on your college education. Web Dev curricula is awful almost everywhere, and borderline regular in the few places where it's not bad. Study business, engineering, design, computer science, etc. Universities just can't keep up with the advances in this sector right now, and the knowledge of managing a business, learning the aspects of graphic design and usability, or learning how to program in C (or Java, or Python, or whatever) will all have a bigger impact in your abilities than the curricula in a Web Dev degree. I'd also argue that for networking those degrees are better suited to put you in contact with the people you want to come in contact with.

I was hiring for the company I work for a few months ago, and to be honest, the only reason I interviewed 3 people with a "Web Dev" degree (2 where actually university certifications though) was because I had to fill a quota of people interviewed. Those 3 people totally failed the simple tests I had for them. Badly. I honestly believe this degree is actually frowned upon in the industry (don't take my word for it though, it might be a regional thing)

2) Consider that since you don't have any ideas yet, why not go on board at someone else's startup and get some experience. Hell you could even do so while you go to college.

3) The best way to come up with a great idea, is to scratch your own itch. What part of your life do you think is lacking that could be solved or improved on with a web app? Trust me, it seems hard at first, but with time you'll realize that there is lots to improve on.
Surprised this isn't already here, pretty popular at my college:

I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves.
"Why would you want to do away with money? As it turns out money is too powerful an incentive. When you throw money into the equation, it tends to drown out other motivations such altruism, social norms and reputation. Dan Ariely has a wonderful example of this in his book “Predictably Irrational” where he describes how a nursery school tried to use cash penalties to prevent parents from dropping off their kids late. With the cash penalty the number of late drop offs went up (!) because now parents felt like they were paying for a service. The money completely overwhelmed feeling bad for imposing upon the teachers. Amazingly, money was so powerful that even when the school dropped the cash penalties the late drop offs stayed above their initial level."

Is it just me or does anyone find something wrong with analysis of the underlying motivations for this para?

My read is: The introduction of money changed the dynamics of dropping their kids off late from a moral obligation to a business transaction. It being a business transaction, the penalty now becomes the loss of some money as compared to a hit to your moral standing. For busy parents, they may prefer the monetary loss as compared to feeling like a bad parent. Hence the number of people dropping their kids off late increased. If this could be true, then money may NOT be the that powerful an incentive. In this case, moral reputation/standing is a more powerful incentive. The school should be appealing to that rather than using money as a penalty.
There's always the classic, 'Snakes ⊂ ℝ²'.
i 8 √-1 Πs. (I ate imaginary pies?) You might have to play around with it, but I hope it's a good start. :)
you will probably get more offers of hospitality on this post than ever before.
To be fair 'Social Text', the journal Sokal submitted his article to was not peer reviewed at the time, so it's not really a good representation of consensus of the academic community in that area. Additionally similar hoaxes (cited at the end of that wikipedia article) have been pulled of in the sciences. The hoax demonstrates many of the current problems with academia, but I don't think it provides good grounds to singularly pick on literary criticism.
This joke might be funnier if the answer is:

To get to the other side.

(The mathematicians will know that the chicken's quest will fail. Then they'll feel sorry for the chicken...)
There are two hard problems in computer science. Naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.
Math problems? Call 1-800-[(10x)(13i)2]-[sin(xy)/2.362x].

(From http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~runde/jokes.html)
The Rise of the 'Edupunk'
xkcd comics are already licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 license. That's probably all you need for a math team t-shirt.
Hey loren and thanks for your great feedback, the "W" issue is fixed now, I've indeed tried to switch both image and form, it looks even goofier, considering that peoples tend to read from the left side to the right (at least most, exceptions: arabic and some others....), I finally decided to stick on it at as it is. Hmm, it's true the logo looks quite conservative, but since the domain issue keeps showing up, I'll change it and the logo as well (when everyone point to the same issue, there must be something wrong with it), I guess it's time for brainstorming. My footer is mostly designed for SEO to point to articles, means for me the lest peoples click on them, the fastest they may convert, I have to agree it's not the best looking but, if it looks realy ordered, it'll be huge, I will try to tweak it somehow.

Thanks for the compliment on the design, I'm not really a designer, so I guess my bog reading's paying out now.
What is the par value of a zero-coupon bond with no maturity?

Pee dollars!

Did you see the SNL segment on options? It was put-call parody!

Complex analysis: it's as easy as pulling out an i.

Analysis, something, something. Balls! (I haven't quite finished that one).
I like how you explained it just in case.
Materials scientists do it with latex.

Biochemists do it with animals.

When civil engineers do it, the earth moves.

Software engineers do it all night long.
It is not meaningless in a non-monospaced font; two spaces should still be wider than one space. I use a double space after a sentence in all of my technical writing, and I'd be extremely disappointed if my wordprocessing package did not honour that.
My experience with Indians is fantastically good, but I am wary of India itself.

They have a very elaborate system of granting and refusing permission for doing practically anything, called the "license raj" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj). The ultimate purpose of that system is to make sure that the designated winners win, and that the designated losers lose; as everybody happens to be born into their designated places.

If the situation accidentally starts working out differently, the "license raj" bureaucrats will keep changing the rules, until the social order desired, has been restored, and the designated winners are winning and the designated losers are losing again.

Nowadays they pretend that they are abolishing that system, but that is not true at all, because they cannot abolish its underlying motivation. As soon as too many designated losers start doing too well -- instead of starving as they are supposed to -- they will urgently reign in that kind of social disorder.

As a foreigner, you cannot expect to be anything else but a designated loser; even though you are probably still considered "touchable" :-)
Well, that's a good point. In these days of high-quality open-source implementations, games can be played under the covers that would be impossible in portable CL.
> I doubt the males that do this think it is a fine thing to do when sober.

I resent the idea that once people are 'under the influence' they lose all grasp of reason. I've been drunk on a number of occasions and I never once thought that sexual assault sounded like a keen idea. And even if I had ever mis-read a woman and kissed her when she didn't want it, I sure as hell wouldn't have thought it was a good idea to then move on to grabbing at her genitals. Don't blame the alcohol here.

That part of your post is almost as bad as the film, 'Reefer Madness.'

> Our society thinks frat parties, dance clubs, and drunken after parties are a swell
> way to have fun and a huge percentage of our women are sexually assaulted at
> some point in their lives. These two facts are related.

You're ignoring a huge number of factors and focusing in on just the idea that you want to be true.
half way through and having a hard time not running to the local McDonalds to buy a burger (to eat!!).
Enquiring minds want to know: Why does G denote Dragons?
That's good to know. I should set something up so that when I do detect insider buying, I go hugely in on the S&P500.

For individual stocks the difference is too small for me to feel comfortable.
Then I guess I'd be the lucky #4. Incidentally, my brother was a hold-out, too, until last month or so.
India is great. I spent 6 weeks there. Not really a good place to just wander around though....I will eat you up....assault all your sense at once. I recommend getting a few contacts before heading over there and then work from there. Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad seem to be the big centers of tech over there. Have fun!
If you can take a trip into Punjab, it's breathtaking to take a walk in the morning fog amongst the irrigation canals and fields of crop. If you have any local friends it's a lot of fun to visit places like that which you wouldn't normally visit.
Math team: like being star quarterback, except you have to wait ten years before you can order the football team around.
BTW I have a different theory about why Lisp Machines failed in the market. Symbolics and LMI were spoiled by the high prices the machines originally commanded (under the influence of the AI bubble and DoD money) and didn't realize how aggressive they needed to be about making them cheap. When the Sun 4/110 came out, it was about 1/5 the price of a comparable Lisp Machine, and faster. Had LispMs been price-competitive with workstations, they would at least have lasted a few more years. Of course, in the end even the workstation vendors succumbed to the marauding hordes of PCs.
It is phishing after all and a clever one also. People need to be more paranoid while browsing the internet.
I'm actually flirting to move to everything Oracle for my career (seriously). There's a big money and (hopefully) less work for those who know how to use 10% of Oracle's other software aside from their database.

Now I can go home by 5 and have a side project/job on the evening and weekend using Emacs, Ruby, Rails, and jQuery.

I'll be set for the next 10 years!
And the companion bio-joke:

I wish I was mRNA polymerase, so I could unzip your genes.
iPad typing is not recommended before morning coffee.
One approach I've found useful when trying to meet any of the speakers at a conference (which I assume includes the FAMOUS GUY you refer to): find the speaker in some other setting at the conference, such as when everyone picks up a boxed lunch and sits at random tables, or people are standing around outside the conference room. At that point, the speaker is just another person hanging out (unless the person is REALLY FAMOUS, and getting mobbed all the time). I once met the Fed CTO at a Starbucks just outside the conf center.

Right after a speech is the WORST time to try to strike up a conversation with a speaker, as some of the other commenters have pointed out - at that point, they're usually surrounded by a group of people handing them business cards and talking at them; yet that's when most people try to meet them.

Getting a friend to introduce you to someone he or she knows is usually the best way; most people will be happy to perform an introduction if you just ask. In the worst case, they can just tell you that they're not comfortable doing it.
"Leibnitz > Newton" could provoke a fist fight. This would be hilarious to see.

edit: Better than xkcd, depending on your sense of humor (i.e., whether you have one) is smbc-comics.com. Dunno how he licenses his stuff though.
Eat right and don't live a sedentary lifestyle. It's not an absolute panacea, but you will be less likely to suffer that fate.
Thanks for your great feedback, well the color scheme is the best I could find, and from the firsts test I've done, many peoples could find where to click, so I had to add this "click here" , a bit ugly but very usable, I could try it with html5, too bad not all browsers support it, so I'll have to wait.
The quotes are also fine (very long story here, but those are the best quotes we could have from our beta testers), the favicon is a good idea, will try something. I already had a smaller text there, and peoples keep asking me what the site does, so I came up with this and nobody ever ask again, I think it's not a good idea to have a bigger logo, it'll just distract from the real goal, user or try the service. I'll use some of the great suggestions on your feedback to improve the product, thanks.