skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Some people wind up majoring in the humanities and social sciences because they can't cut it in highly mathematical disciplines, sure. But it's also true that many of the mathematically adept are also weak in the humanities and social sciences.

Well, in the sense that those with hard majors tend not to have learned the body of knowledge associated with any one discipline, sure. But in terms of the ability to write—which is pretty clearly the most important skill in the humanities—I'd put money on a technical major's skills over those of a non-technical major.

>Incidentally, the number of sci/math types who cling to the Sokal Affair as an excuse for believing much of contemporary humanities theory is gibberish suggests that an understanding of things like deconstruction probably don't come as easily to them as you might think.

"Cling"? The Sokal Affair showed pretty clearly that there's no easy way to tell the difference between honest literary criticism and bullshit. And the reason is that the entire institution of "literary criticism" consists essentially of people coming up with really trivial ideas and wrapping them in layers and layers of obfuscation. I understand deconstruction. And my reaction to it is, "People think that these ideas are profound enough to be given names?"

>I really don't understand what disciplinary elitism gets you.

Elitism isn't the driving force here. The driving force is that roughly 50% of academic disciplines are complete bullshit, and I (and presumably other logical, unbiased people) quite simply feel compelled to call that kind of stuff out. It might look like elitism if I happen to be working in a discipline that's NOT bullshit when I make that accusation, but rest assured that I would act in the same way even if I were doing nothing at the time.
Here are the titles:

iPhone: The Missing Manual
Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
Facebook: The Missing Manual
Making Things Happen
Open Sources 2.0
The Art of Agile Development
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed

Anyone want to make any guesses how well those titles are selling and whether or not that had anything to do with O'Reilly's decision?
The definition of beta male is that they act as second-in-command, subservient to the alpha. Usually, they're either dethroned, former alpha males or future alphas on the way up.
Not that there's anything wrong with that... Wait, there is something wrong with that -- it's poorly formed XML!
Skype was developed in Estonia by outsourced developers.

I think it's fair to say they've been pretty successful.
UMass Student Shares Stage With Bill Gates
And another link: http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2008/06/09/steve-ball...
Also, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224110 .
I'm glad you so thoroughly understood what I was trying to say, seeing as the article was explaining the idea of focusing on content in web design.

But I knew that someone, probably quite a lot of someones, would inevitably start throwing that quote around as if it's the holy gospel of minimal design when, frankly, it's not anything of the sort.

Basing a design aesthetic on the assumption that minimalism is (per that horrific quote) about taking away everything that can be taken away is like reading Descartes and stopping just before "cogito, ergo sum".
They corrected for this in the tests:

> the tests were repeated using gallons per 100 miles

You could also say "aught-5 gallons per mile," where the decimal is placed by convention. Though then you run into trouble with the .009 gpm cars...
Even if you're not willing to do a search, it's a pretty safe assumption that a month-old New York Times article on XKCD will have been well-covered on a hacker news site.
Quality of girl counts for a lot.
While we're on something that is essentially a more powerful "find and grep", I wrote this years ago:

http://uzix.org/cgvg.html

Like ack, it uses perl's regexes... just add more file extensions and you're golden. The nice thing is you do:

cg pattern

which gives you a list with what it found, which file, the line number and an index... then you

vg index

and it opens that file at that line.
The carefully woven ack duality
A Peek Inside Google’s Gmail Usability Lab
All of our development for http://massify.com was done in house, but we outsourced graphic design to an awesome shop in China, http://plusfactory.com/. Run by ex-ad agency folks from NYC.

It was great since they're 12 hours shifted from us to be able to give them a spec at 5pm and have something to look at in the morning. And their work is top notch.
Google seems to be more of a startup mentality. After reading this I'd far rather work for Google.

It's probably like the difference between Microsoft and IBM 10 or 20 years ago.
Realizing Jython 2.5
Is it possible to install it under Leopard without using Ports?
Also, Greasemonkey + The Image Gallery script.
Well I just spent a weekend waiting around ER rooms as my daughter had half a tooth nocked out (and sedation needed, some minor surgery).

I do not envy your job. Whilst I can assume that there is a large element of satisfaction (and it doesn't seem to be as hellish as they make out in movies) it can't be easy. Its just more bad news and frustrated smelly people all the time. Never ending.

I tip my hat to you.
Yeah it is always surprising when people describe their day job (when it isn't tech).
Please have a look also at the Ask YC Archive from The Startup Wiki over here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Ah, I see you devoted some space on your blog to a thinly veiled ride on the xkcd hate-wagon (and filed it under "pointless words of wisdom", natch).

As soon as I realized that you were seriously citing Scott Adams as an authority on Funny, I knew we wouldn't find the same comics entertaining. You read a whole "5 or 10" of the xkcd comics, and you are a self-professed member of the target audience, so you afford yourself the expertise to declare it "not funny at all".

And, you know what? You're absolutely right.

xkcd isn't always funny. Sometimes -- some might say, often times -- it isn't funny at all. It certainly doesn't strive to deliver the same tired punch lines that so many other comics have.

Aside from being something that I can often identify with, xkcd is charming. In that sense, it strikes me in much the same way that Calvin and Hobbes did, or Pogo. Sometimes, the best comic isn't that one that leaves me laughing, it's the one that leaves a smile on my face, or a temporary reminder of a more innocent way of seeing things, or a peculiar wistfulness.

Those aren't effects that I've ever been able to credit to Scott Adams, and I don't think he could pull any of 'em off if he tried. If you can't see past your hunger for one more punch line, then I don't think you really "get" xkcd, either.

I like xkcd when it's thoughtful instead of cheap, and I'm even amused by yet another spin on 'Twas The Night Before Christmas, as are many other literate nerds.

(P.S.: When you put those "marks" around a word, those are quotes, not parentheses.)
But like everything, if you use it for a little while you get an intuitive sense for the numbers.

I used to struggle with celsius as well, but then I lived in Spain for a while. Once I stopped converting to Fahrenheit all the time and just tried to associate the numbers with days that I remember, I got where I know that 20 is fresh, 25 is warm, 30 is getting toasty, and 42 is a smokin' hot summer day in Sevilla.
Looking for startup partner: Internet Marketing specialist
I need person:
With experience in PR and Marketing in the US and UK web.
With Endless enthusiasm and creativity.
Sense of humor is highly appreciated. :)

Who will:
- contact with journalists to cover muzicons.com and other projects (through linkedin.com, e-mail or social networks)
- write press-releases and spread them
- negotiate with developers of social networks and services (for example muzicons cannot be placed at hi5.com, facebook.com)
- make communities in top social networks
- special marketing tactics like: writing at wikipedia.org, writing articles about "top 5 music sharing widgets" and digging them, social bookmarking, trying to get covered at slashdot.org, contests, etc etc.

Bonuses:
Compensation after first invesment round.
% in project

Write me:
abbukibuki@gmail.com
It would be nice if you will include ideas about spreading widget.
________________________________________________

About project:
Muzicons.com - easy music sharing widget, with ability to show emotions with help of muzicons.
It is virus-like, spreading by itself (but too slow now).

Current state:
Prototype. Next stage is improved widget (more options), translation to another languages, multisong widget, private radio station (ability to create own radio station, or take part in another radio, revenue for Djs) and system of ADvertisment.

Summary:
600+ unique visitors a day, mainly Taiwan, China, Japan and Europe. :/
Covered at Mashable.com and webware.com
www.crunchbase.com
Video from demogirl.com
11.000+ widgets created
Just quit my office job. I'm going to France in July to spend two months cycling. When I come back I am intending to start a startup (though I still have a few ideas I am trying to decide between). I will probably be working part time as well.
Bad science... The article seems to suggest that this is 'genetic'. That there must be coded traits that somehow have to be favored or at least persist.

I have been the nice guy and the bad guy many times. A lot of it has to do with ones mood and phase of life. Pretty weak to suggest that this is genetic. I don't buy it.
if it could be done in a way you could see something updated a week, would be interesting - maybe would make people think twice before a longer trip (would work with me).
Not sure if it's typical but I almost never upvote a story (however I'd happily downvote some of them if I could). Last time I checked it automatically saves it in your favorites. Since I never go back to check a story, no matter how interesting (in which case I'd just hit Google), I find it would be an utter waste. Accumulating stuff I know I will never use like that seems... frightening to me, for some reason.
I'll second that. It's only when you get older and enter the work force that you realise how much spare time you had when you were in school.

When I was 14/15 I started a business in school via a government funded scheme called "young enterprise" that encouraged youngsters to create companies. We had several business people come in from outside school to give advice (ours were a local HSBC bank manager and someone who worked in advertising from Intel). Myself and my friends ended up building a company that made & sold key rings of all things.

It didn't work out very well but the experience was great - I learned that business is really just about making something that people will buy and selling it to them for more than it cost you to make. When you understand that all of the big words business people throw around are not so intimidating.

I'd encourage any young person who is thinking of starting a company to just go and do it. Whatever it is they end up doing and whether it is a big success or completely tanks doesn't really matter. At a young age you can always recover from failure and the experience you gain will make it all worthwhile.
Computing is fun and meaningful IMHO... And really devoting your life 100% to that profession means you'll take the time to "enjoy life" with exercise and other good stuff because it actually pumps up fun, meaningfulness and productivity.
I saw that and voted you back up as it was my understanding too that it was contracted out initially
Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08)
Taking over the world (Pinky and the Brain).
Meet the Antipreneurs
Living in cheap asian countries on savings from my grad school year. Trying to develop AI that isn't Good Old Fashionned AI. Learning music. Learning Turkish. Biology. Reading.
Embedding Python In Apache2 With mod_python (Debian Etch)
I would argue that 'perl regexes' are a member of the set of 'perl compatible regexes' ;-)
yep, it's just straight perl, and Leopard comes with perl
The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company
Yes, someone on slashdot was complaining of this. He visited a pr0n site daily. Fine. However, now there's a good chance that site will flick by, two lines high, as he starts typing in the location bar before he gets too specific. He doesn't want to wipe his whole history, but nor does he want it appearing all the time. I can see his point. Just type `e' and the top match isn't specific to the very vague `e' but may be embarassing.
Peaks are for summits, It's a 'peek'.
And yet, a good 20 voters thought otherwise.

Bottom line is: voting me into oblivion isn't going to make searching this site any easier, or change the way HN deals with dupes.
I don't really understand why anyone would think that the Milgram experiment applies less today than it did 50 years ago. People who think "it worked because lab coats had more status back then" are really deluding themselves - or perhaps they're being intentionally dishonest for some reason.

As the documentary says, people are taught to respect and obey authority. The entire school system, military service and corporate world are exercises in surrendering your will and intelligence to a figure of authority, no matter whether they're right or wrong. As long as those systems are the norm, of course people will do what they're told.

Good documentary, in any case.
My car shows me this on its onboard computer. It gives me instantaneous and averaged litres per 100 kilometres.
Awesome. It's always inspiring when you see somebody making stuff like this for themselves. Reminds me of something I read last year about a Nigerian student building helicopters out of old cars - see http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/homemade-helicopter/nigerian-man-...
Working as a corporate tool. Got a verbal offer (would need to negotiate my comp) to work with some really bright guys again at a startup. Debating what to do, asking myself why am I debating what to do...
I am a strong believer in having code examples on your front page. Ruby wins at this, as does Groovy.
While I'm not 100% a fan of Vice Magazine, this was pretty interesting. No finger pointing!
Who Needs a Computer Science Degree When There’s Wikipedia?
54 out of the US top 100 websites fail Yahoo’s performance test
Google releases Trends for Websites
Apple success linked to more than just Steve Jobs
Will Ozzie Era at Microsoft Signal a Revolution?
Very nice. I hope this makes it into official Slime.
Perhaps they have a mountain in the lab so they can test how usable things are at altitude.
Me too - I used to dislike it, even installed the oldbar extension to disable it. Now though, I find it pretty useful: to get to HN, I can type just 'h'; to get to the Arc forum, I can just type an 'a'; It's saved me a many Google search, too, because I tend to remember webpage titles much better than their URLs for most things.
Twistori is an excellent example of blending art with human experience with a bit of technological black magic.
I saw Eric Kastner give a talk at this year's RailsConf. It was a very intriguing session on microapps. Amy Hoy was in the audience but participated in the talk too.

Twistori was a micro-app, as was Spell with Flickr.

A micro-app is loosely designed as an application you design and build in one continuous period e.g. day (in Amy's case, she woke up one morning with this idea and worked with her husband all through the day and launched Twistori at the end of the day).

Twistori doesn't use Ruby on Rails. It's very lightweight on the backend (once every hour a cron job scrapes the latest Twitter chats containing those human emotives via Summize and a bit of clever javascript). Amy said that the colors were very deliberately chosen. The design was very deliberate - the thoughts that scroll off at the top of the screen - you can't scroll them back - they're ephemeral...

TwitterVision, another favorite of mine (coded in 4 hours by Ruby on Rails ninja David Troy), was just featured in the MOMA! (http://davetroy.blogspot.com/2007/10/moma-ny-selects-twitter...)
OH on train very recently. Yes, the girls were attractive and interesting.

Girl 1: "I think Eric likes me. I like him too"
Girl 2: "Why doesn't he ask you out?"
Girl 1: "I don't know. I like him. He hasn't taken the lead. It's so awkward."
Girl 2: "Yeah. Totally"
Working at a regular consulting company.

In my weekends, I'm trying to marshall what resources I can to learn other things.

Right now, I'm playing with SproutCore, but have been deflected in setting up Django to serve as a back-end, and I'm finally learning some Python, and I'm really impressed with it.
Short answer: A lot of companies (read: most non-startups) have an HR department that requires a 4-yr bachelor's degree in computer science. Yes, I know people who have made it without a bachelor's degree (and even a high-school) but these people did not need it - they could code (and more importanly, self-market).

Are 4-year institutions are almost mafia-like in their influence?

"Writer Noel Weyrich compared college administrators to the mafia. "Call it La Alma Mater," he suggested. "Cultivated and well-connected, its kingpins are masters of what amounts to a high-stakes protection racket. 'Nice kid you got there,' goes the shakedown. 'What a shame if he ends up flipping burgers without a degree.' That's an offer most parents can't refuse." [http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=3]
I might be wrong, but I seem to remember seeing this same idea sometime in the web 1.0 bubble. It failed then, and since then, there have been several attempts to revive this very same business, and it fails each time. So why did YC go and fund a business that just does not seem to work?
That is a great collection of articles, but reading from Wikipedia is never going to teach you taste and style in programming like having Simon Peyton-Jones as a guest lecturer, or having your professor call PASCAL a steaming pile of crp ...

A computer science degree will also expose you to people much smarter than you, that serves as a useful humbling experience. This is assuming you are not the next Bill Gates (holds entire 8080 BASIC interpreter in head).
And on testing it, it does not even work. I tried yahoo.com and it keeps popping up this message box telling me there is a limit of 2000 characters, when I'm selecting small paragraphs. So YC funded a startup with an idea that has been tried many times over and with a product that just does not work? Hmm, somebodies gonna lose $10.000. Not saying who, but somebody....
The environment changes. Online video sharing was tried several times during Web 1.0, but didn't catch on until YouTube in 2005 - because in the meantime, broadband and cell-phone video and social networking had penetrated millions of households. Same with social bookmarking - anyone remember Links?

The fact that others have tried the same idea and failed is probably a bad indication, but it's not a hard rule that this attempt will fail.
Lets test it:

http://awurl.com/pspxuq96279
DL 2.0[1] ships
Newsweek also has an article about the re-shoot of the famous 70's staff photo - http://www.newsweek.com/id/142636
Ask YC: database screwups
So, what do you do if your database servers drop offline and kill your service for up to 24 hours? This has happened to me recently and my first thought is "I can't afford an offsite DB farm", all my MySQL servers are in one data center.
Yes, but get this: If someone had told me in 2000 that I could watch streaming video in good quality without any pauses and without needing any special computer or internet, I would have screamed excitedly: HOW? I would have WANTED it, but unfortunately, the reality of online video back then sucked bigtime.

If someone had told me in 2001 there was a way to easily annote webpages and share them with my friends, I'd have yawned. BORING!

Some concepts are just boring, and technology improvement does not change it. Those companies failed because people just don't have a need to mark pages. I can just copy and paste the text into emails.
I know what you mean about how genetics is often thrown up as the answer without much discussion on the complexities of human development.

The discussion on intelligence often suffers from this. There's a level where we are talking purely about the myelin sheath and conductance latencies among other speed factors in the brain (for example my brother-in-law is obsessed with learning about history, but he is "slow" despite his knowledge), but intelligence is driven by a desire to work through and explore the kinds of things (reading, writing, problem solving) that as a side effect give individuals the qualities that are judged as intelligent. And the presence of smart adults causing children to see these activities as exciting, and also pulling them up via active feedback and passive schaffolding, makes all the difference. Some people have introduced the notion of "multiple intelligence" to describe the fact that a difference focus of one's attention in developing as a person will lead to difference categories of competency.

And my reason for bringing this up is that some will try to explain intelligence in entirely genetic terms but this doesn't square with what is observed. Evolutionary psychology helps explain a lot of things, but it is all too easy to oversimplify.

If I were give my guess right now about how genetics influences traits, I would say that it obviously determines thousands of reflexive behaviors we perform, and of course it establishes potential competencies, but I think it additionally can set up guideposts that determine personality. It is known (if I remember correctly) that in some primitive organisms a single gene switches on avoidance versus more social behavior. There are plenty of ways in which even the complex behavior of behavior of humans could be guided by genetics into certain personality tendencies or strategies. For example if the cingulate cortex turns out to be a behavior-judging module in the brain among other things, then genetics could program the cingulate to fire a note of concern to the system, or fail to do the same, with regard to whatever complex decision is being made, whenever it involves a choice to be with people or not be with people.

Similarly if there are multiple genetically guided development strategies for handling social information, and some of them just don't scale that well to larger groups of people, then perhaps this would produce anxiety and a sense of not being able to handle the situation, among people who have the more brittle genetic strategy. But the same argument could be made for voluntary control that would influence the underlying cognitive strategy, because not enough is known yet.
Bipartite graph algorithms and topological manifolds are not as important as Gardasil and alternative energy.

I highly disagree. Drop by any R&D lab at your closest university and see how badly they depend on the latest software, the most efficient algorithms, and other CS-derived "sciences."

If it weren't for languages like Matlab & the libraries of numerical methods and algorithms, alternative energy R&D wouldn't exist. I was at the Nuclear Engineering department of my university earlier today, and they're using CS stuff we haven't even looked at yet!

CS is far more important in the grand scheme of things than it's being given credit for, but we silly hackers are content to appreciate ourselves and not look for more.
You know that part of your brain that acts as your "tact" filter?

Yeah, just stop using that.
It seems to work fine on this page. I wonder what's on Yahoo! that's causing that issue. I wouldn't consider a warning about 2000 characters a fail. If it didn't highlight and didn't warn you then I would call that a fail. Right now it's more like a bad user experience.

Anyone know how they are calculating their limit and/or why it's there?
Foreign Labor Wage Library
Not sure if this is been submitted here before...
How to get rid of the AwesomeBar in Firefox 3
Why not post a poll - Yes/No/Unsure?
Git the inevitable?
wait - I upmodded this yesterday... I've been duped! Duped, I say!