skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A privatized educational system will fail the kids with bad parents even more than the current system. Even a bad high school education is a lot better than absolutely no education. With private education and no vouchers of any kind, a lot of kids just won't go to school which is terrible for us as a society.

I think it'd be great to privatize education but it still needs to be mandatory and free at a certain basic level.
Is today's internet killing our culture? Andrew Keen v Emily Bell
sanj, Offtopic: I can't find your email and I'm not sure this tip is listed anywhere, so I'll point it out here :)

If you surround a phrase with asterisks, you get italic text.
thanks for all the comments and thoughts
My biggest beef with SVN is that I can't checkout from the repository and have it automatically know when I delete or add files and directories. That is, I have to remember to use 'svn rm' instead of just 'rm'.

Past that, it's great.
YC's Terms of Use: "When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page."
I always love it when people pass up opportunities to engage in legal bullshitting.

Although it is interesting to note that they claim that "make something people want" is their trademark.
This guy makes my blood boil.
Hacker News Posting Guidelines?
I am one of those users who welcome (at least the experiment) of broadening news.yc to "Hacker News." However, if the last few days of postings are any prediction of the next n, then perhaps some Hacker News Posting Guidelines would be in order. I think that there should be a link to them on the Submit Link page because new posters won't know (and old posters may forget) that the Hacker News announcement even exists. PG's "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" maybe a good start, but I just don't think it is enough. My suggestion would be to add:

No politics.
No old stuff.
If you post a question, post 1 not >1.

What else?
Why not spell-check the titles?
Institutions, unlike people, can be truly idealistic. No NRA member is 100 percent devoted to guns. The NRA itself, however, is 100 percent so devoted. This same thing is possible with political parties. For instance, the "Nationalists" or "Communists" or "Fascists" or "Libertarians" can be counted on (to a large degree) to adhere to their platform.

In parlimentary systems, ideological parties, like the above, can get represented, and often make up the shaky coalition goverments that hold power. With the right kind of backstabbing, Nazis or Bolzhevics can wipe out their allies from within and seize control. Just not possible in the US...

In the US's winner-take-all system, the parties themselves must compromise on their plaform, and generally aim for about 50.1 percent of the vote--they'd rather 60 percent of gun-lovers than 100 percent, because the latter is unpalatable to the rest of their members. Therefore the crazy fringe of every issue is alienated. The GOP and Democrats are not really restricted to a given platform. This is why "GOP success" can never amount to a Fascist takeover, and why "Democrat success" can never amount to a Communist takeover.

* Suggestion:

When the admins see something as "off topic", perhaps they should enable a down arrow for that post only, allowing everyone else to decide for themselves.
Subversion is a big improvement over CVS, but it still has some problems. Perhaps the biggest is the difficulty of making branches, and keeping them in sync with the trunk (which requires keeping track of revision numbers by hand in the comments). There have been many times I've wanted to make a branch but just couldn't summon the mental energy to do it.

I've found darcs to be a significant improvement over Subversion. As one example, here's how to make a branch using darcs:

$ cp -r my_proj_trunk my_proj_branch

Then running

$ darcs pull ../my_proj_trunk

in my_proj_branch keeps you in sync with the trunk.
Come on dude. Be realistic. Do you really think you can create anything without having the skill to use the tools needed to accomplish the task?
Might be a bit late on the reply but the $10 cpm seems to be an inflated statistic. The ones that are quoting that are getting rates of 10 per cpm on the canvas page while in reality that page is only a small fraction of the total page views. If the canvas page accounts for 1/3 of total page views then that statistic gets brought down to a lower number cpm for total pageviews. Is this consistent with what others are seeing?
Mercurial is also nice, and works similarly. Plus it only requires Python, and is thus easier to set up and use. http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/
This is closely resembles the way i did it... With recurrsive includes (views). Performs flawlessly.
That's a feature, not a bug.

I don't want all my random files like object files and temp files getting added to the repository. You can implement this for yourself though, using the output of "svn status".
Whether or not this is the appropriate forum for this particular post, it's high time that hackers became politically aware. Existing power structures are set on criminalizing possession and usage of information in order to enforce artificial scarcity to maintain profits: Germany just passed a law declaring "hacker tools" illegal; the RIAA is now arguing that "making files available", even without copying, is infringement; there are provisions of the DMCA that make decrypting information you have legal access to illegal (DeCSS); Comcast is stopping BitTorrent transfers; patents threaten everyone; even your home Internet connection is severely throttled upstream to make you more of a consumer. The list could go on and on (Skype and new Federal eavesdropping-on-citizens-without-warrants "laws"; possible capital gains/income tax on virtual goods you've never sold; suing entire college student bodies at once in a fishing expedition for mp3 trading, etc., etc.)

There is an enormous amount of money to be made in the near term by plutocratic information restriction. Unfortunately the severe clampdowns threaten to change the model from wealth creation to wealth stagnation, and everyone loses as money transfer moves closer to zero-sum.

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and
had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. ... The solution is
patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay
whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an
interest in excluding future competitors." -- Bill Gates
bigger screen = higher productivity. ( for me it can what about you?)
I have a small 13 inch screen notebook. It works fine for me. It s light enough to carry around and the battery last a good few hours. But I find that when using my 47 inch screen monitor I just enjoy working more. I haven't measured output, but I believe It is slightly more than when I use my notebook.
Are you serious about 47 inches?
Babies are extremely fast learners. This particular one might have had a prior exposition to the interface, so I'm not really impressed. If you left your shiny iPhone with the baby for couple hour and next thing you would see was "Buy a new toy" in your Todo list... now that would be pretty cool.
"while you're in grad school, your professors expect the best and brightest to go into academia, the less smart go off and work in industry"

I'm not sure that's unique to academia though. I've met several financial types that expect the best and brightest to go into finance, and the less smart to go off to academia. And several startup types that expect the best and brightest to go into startups, the less smart to go of off into finance or academia. And several bums that expect the best and brightest to drop out of school and play World of Warcraft all day, while the less smart spend all their time slaving away for the man.

Everybody wants to feel like they made the right choice. Hence, even if they didn't make the right choice, they assume that their choice requires superior intellectual ability. You get a lot of self-justification.

Me, I knew I would suck at academia, so I went and joined a financial software startup. Then I found I sucked at finance, so I'm founding my own startup. Maybe I suck at startups too, but it's what I want to do. If it totally fails I can become a bum and play WoW all day. ;-)
I will be there also.
Some of the old stuff is classic, and will be new to younger hackers:
http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
Sure, but I'd rather it reflect everything except directories I explicitly ignore (you have to explicitly ignore directories anyway).
That's true, but unfortunately the type of "political awareness" that arises out of social news sites seems to be guys sitting around on their computers and complaining about it. That doesn't help anything; it just pisses off ordinary people who complain that "these tech folks are so negative".

IMHO, Google's got the right idea. Become wealthy and powerful, and then you're in a position to lobby the government to change things. Unfortunately many people just sit back and complain about what Google's doing too...
Mobile Web Americas: Conference dedicated to mobile
I agree that there are useful classics, but they are not news. There are also 100s (if not 1000s) of great old books that most hackers would be interested in reading, but I don't think links should be submitted to them individually. Perhaps a new aggregate list of links would be news since it is new. Maybe a Hacker News wiki is a better place for such classics.
Hm, looks like the "bios" link goes to about.html instead of people.html
Nonviolent noncooperation FTW. "Evil" schemes can't be implemented without programmers to do the work. Simply by being aware and choosing to work on something else -- GNU, Linux, your start-up, defeating DRM, anything open source -- you help swing the balance back in favor of everyone else.
47 inches!
Maybe it's just too much, for me any screen with more than 1024 x 768 px works fine.
My startup is a webapp, so users screen size also matters.
Users' screen size matters
My startup is a webapp, and we have a lot of problems designing the interface, the first one was the users screen size.
We think it should all fit in a 1024 x 768 px screen, of course is the screen is bigger than that, The interface will also look good, 800 x 600 screens is just a problem, we solved it with css (overflow-x) in that way an user could even work with a small screen.
Does any of you have the same problem?
In 4th grade my teachers decided there was something wrong with me, but they couldnt figure out exactly what. They put me in both the gifted class and the special ed class at the same time to see what would happen. I donXt remember exactly what happened, but I eventually ended up getting kicked out of both.
A searchable news timeline with the highlights would be handy; zoomed out, only the top stories would show, which makes navigation much more feasible (unlike Slashdot's "Older Stuff") -- kind of like the human history timelines we see from time to time, with "fire", "stone tools", and "landing on Moon" as major points, while zooming in a teensy bit more would get you LOLcats.

This could be subdivided by category so the above ACM article would show up if you were looking at the top Programming articles, in the 1995 part of the timeline. Lisp would show up at the end of the 50s. Kind of puts things in perspective.

Under Start-Ups, "Apple Goes Public" in 1980; Netscape in 1995; Google in 2004. Pets.Com on the zoom-in.
Well, I've personally had titles edited, all for stylistic issues (none for bias, innaccuracy, or anything I'd deem worth editing). I don't really care, but I would prefer that unless my submissions were clearly in need of correction that they were not changed. They do show up under "submissions" clicking from my profile, so I think they ought to reflect what I submitted unless it harms the site.
I don't think that was his point. His point was: Look at me taking wild and unsubstantiated CRAZY ideas to this here CO2 thing. And then laying out why the ideas are quite tame, substantiated, and rational after all, but due to prevailing hip culture, these ideas require a heretic to take root.

At least, that's how I read it.
Change title to

"Hacker News Posting Guidelines?"

We need _some_ posting guidelines.

We need a spell checker, at least for titles (there is a typo in this very topic).

We need _some_ moderation. (For me quality is more important than democracy).

We need a section "Hacker's classic readings" (books, articles, essays).

We need to calm down :).
Much obliged.

Sadly, it appears I've gone past the edit window. I'll have to hope the editors fix it up. Or risk looking like a dork forever.

I poked around for a few minutes trying to find the ML, but had no luck (where is it?!). And I wanted to write while it was an itch I had to scratch.
And who would click them? There's no such thing, btw, as an unobtrusive ad.
Heh, good call. Title changed.
I have made a pact with myself about my son. I answer his questions (as appropriate for a 5 year old) until I just can't. And then I say "I don't know." So far, he believes me.

The only time I ran into a hitch was when, while having to turn off a portable DVD player because the aircraft was landing, he loudly asked:

"But Daddy, why does the movie interfere with the nabigational [sic] equipment?"

It didn't seem like a good time to talk about that particular topic.
Graduate school seems like a good place to start a startup. You have a lot of free time[1] to explore interesting ideas, and are surrounded by smart potential co-founders and employees. There is also built in "life infrastructure" such as libraries, a gym, people to socialize with, members of the opposite sex to meet, entertainment events, etc. Once you get out into the "real world", you have to discover and manage all these details yourself, and they are expensive and time consuming.

Arguably, you could get these same benefits by working at a good company like Google, but Google itself sprung out of a graduate school project. Graduate school gives people an environment to think about "crazy" ideas in depth. Google wouldn't exist if Larry and Sergey had been employees at Altavista rather than bouncing ideas off of each other at Stanford.

[1] a lot of free time compared to a startup, or even a 9-5 grind. (most jobs are 8-6 and require at least some commute)
Not sure I've parsed your grammar correctly, but rewarding the community for participation by letting them downvote only when they reach 20 karma is a good thing.

Also, downvoting past 1 karma in general is a bad thing. It adds bias to the comment for future readers.

It really seems like downvoting in its current form is fine, and if any changes need to be made then capping downvoting at 1 karma might be a good idea.
Yes! Seconded.

Alternatively, cap downvoting at 1 karma, so that comments can't go below that threshold.

(Repeating from my previous post): Letting karma go below 1 adds bias to the comment for future readers, but that bias doesn't reflect how they might feel.
They use the <center> tag which, as far as I know, isn't valid HTML. So they'd have to restructure the page, which is more trouble than it's worth.
It doesn't seem like that's very useful. Anyone can read the story and form their own opinion...
If you use Firefox, you'll enjoy the benefit of a spell checker built into all <textarea> boxes.
Personally I don't see any problems with that, and in fact great hackers tend to have strong political point of views. To mention a few: Stallman (Free Software), Kapor (civil liberties advocate), and esr (libertarian, second amendment advocate).
BoingBoing featured this and a rebutting article:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/15/two_views_on_climate.ht...
Travels Around the Internet: Opportunities outside the US
Not all programs are alike. I got a specialized masters in robotics. That opened up a world of opportunity and allowed me to work on very interesting problems. The space is well funded if you go to a good school, so you don't drain your savings to attend for two years.

For PhDs in the field, I've never seen a more interesting set of problems, though I'm biased. A friend is working on rhythm as related to conversation, and studies dancing robots. It doesn't get much better than that.
http://beatbots.org/

The drama of a PhD is less than that of normal office politics. If you act like an adult, everything should be fine.

Here is what Monzy says about drama in the PhD for CS:
http://www.monzy.com/intro/drama_lyrics.html
It works the other way around. Older people stop learning new things and their brains correspondingly lack freshness. With dedication, there is no age limit on an activity. Every field is learned by doing.

You probably won't be a luminary in the field, but that isn't the question.
In "The Long Tail" there is a great anecdote about a marxist in the 30s lamenting radio as pushing watered down art on uncritical masses. The experience of homogenized culture with mega hits certainly leads to less critical minds than the average person going to an art gallery.

Luckily, the rest of the book is about how this is changing. More people are creating, and more people are consuming a wider diversity of content.

Personal aesthetic is rising over megahits. This is a wonderful trend, enabled by the internet.
BoingBoing on Keen on The Colbert Report:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/17/andrew_keen_on_colbe.ht...
Revenge by Gadget: the emergence of devices that let people interfere with other people's devices
The next revision (1.5) will have branch/merge tracking. It will also have sparse checkouts so you don't need to get the entire repository to do real work.

I've used SVN on a LARGE project where the repository got to well over 200gigs of data over 3000 revisions. I was very impressed with its performance.
It is. When you make a mistake, you should be able to fix it, and there is no reason to prevent this.
You mean down-voting past 1 points? Why it add bias for future readers?

I also don't see why you need to reward the community. The right to down vote is not different from the right to up vote, and any user should have it. Up vote is simply "I want more of this", and down vote "I want less of this".

The same machinery used for up-votes of bad links can be applied to down-votes of good links, so you can protect the site from general stupidity.
Well, when you downvote, you're really saying "The community should have less of this", not "I want less of this". Karma is global, not different depending on which user looks at it.

Therefore, if the community has deemed a comment as stupid (karma < 1), any future readers will read the comment through tinted glasses. But wait a minute, the community really hasn't said that. It was only one or two users that did.

Let's reexamine the purpose of karma on a comment. The purpose is not simply to punish the poster of a comment if it gets downvoted. It's to move the noise down to the bottom of the thread, where it can be ignored.

So I propose an alternative: Let silly comments stay at the bottom with one karma point, and encourage users to upvote more interesting comments higher. This way, users won't be biased against any comments (They won't know if a comment has been downvoted because it might simply be that no one has upvoted it) and the noise can still stay at the bottom.
There is such a thing as "negative people". Folks that cost more in correcting their mistakes than in contributing to a problem. This often happens with anemic partnerships.

The cost of losing someone largely depends on how good and useful they were. It is so case-by-case that such a list is useless.
I understand if you don't want to disclose, but this is hard to discuss without an idea of what features you're including. Maybe something can be take out of the base screen.
1. "Have patience" means that you should avoid jumping to conclusions about what sort of content you were looking for out of this site, and to let "the dust settle" before leaping to conclusions about whether the new site suits you. If it's really that bad, you'll get bored and won't come anymore.

2. "Be a part of the solution" was really only half of what I intended to say, the other half being "stop being part of the problem." Being a part of the solution means voting up the articles you like, contributing knowledgeable and insightful commentary, and submitting the sort of stories you want to see. Being a part of the problem means throwing a temper tantrum without including any interesting or startup-related material.
Anyone here working in this problem area?
I didn't say the opinion, I said the type of submission. Also, the story and points would continue to appear unaffected.

What's going on with the hostilities on this site for the past two days? You could have easily said, "I have another idea about how this could work" with your link.
Become a "Virtual PhD" - list of online courseware (including CS)
A way to find other Y Combinator readers in your area
Interesting. Shame the rebuttal contains no references, whereas Dyson's is littered with them.

Though - the idea that global climate change, even if it ends up making the world a better place, will undoubtedly lead to tension and possibly even war, is almost axiomatic, and something Dyson glossed over.
Recently there have been quite a few posts on here, from people trying to find other hackers in their area to meet. Because the posts tend to get long and drawn out I created this. It's simple and just a start, but it should provide us a base for finding others in our area. If people use it, I'm thinking about adding a location based forum section.
First on the list after you :) My city is wrong because the city ajax dropdown list appeared only after I had already clicked OK.
sorry, bout that, I meant to add a loading notice. Just add yourself again and I'll remove the first one.
I thought I was going to have "a lot of free time" in my master's program, but it really doesn't work out that way. All my other grad school friends tried to warn me, but I didn't listen.

In school you're busy 24/7: doing schoolwork, worrying about schoolwork, or procrastinating on schoolwork. At least when I was working full-time, I would leave the office at 5-ish and not worry about work for 16 hours.
rams, are you M Ramachandra?
Database of over 100 VPS hosting plans
I'm shopping around for a VPS, so I thought I'd share the data I've collected with other hackers.
You forgot the UK.
The only thing that made the management at Xeroc PARC, Bell Labs, etc. good, was that they let smart people do what they wanted and stayed out of the way.
The good news is that it's hard for a person to care about that once he's dead.
Feature request: clicking on a marker causes a bubble to show up (like GMaps) instead of navigating the page away from the map.
On the other hand, I've been a member of a loosely-moderated community for close to 7 years and it's still going strong (I think the forum first opened in 1999). There is a lot of what might be considered "trite" to a casual observer, but for those of us who have been reading and posting there for a long time we simply ignore the content we're not interested in. There's always enough good stuff to keep me going back.

It definitely was never overrun with ignoranuses, at least not for any extended period of time.
yeah, I thought about that, but I wanted to list all the others in the state as well as the one you selected, and I thought that list could get to long for the bubble pop up.
Could someone go in the next room and have pg put down that book and cup of tea? His robot was supposed to have posted hours ago about how startups are the answer to the problem of having to prove your worth to unreasonable people.