skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was surprisingly good.

Although, I think it paints with too fine a brush sometimes (narrowing its conclusions to the Ivy Leagues).

For example, I've definitely noticed a loss of solitude and way too much over specialization too early. A lot of the people I know in Ivy League schools began competing and winning in contests in their chosen field by middle school. I understand that a University would rather admit a USAMO or Intel Science Fair Winner - but the competition there is so intense it forces students aiming high to begin specializing before they're even teenagers.

Frankly I've taken more math courses than anyone ever should, and there are still some USAMO problems that I couldn't solve given unlimited time. Take a look: http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/USAMO-IMO/q-... And they expect 16 year olds to do that!

Hell, I've personally seen a few high school science fair projects that are essentially graduate level work involving genetic engineering and monte carlo simulations.

Although, to be fair, a lot of these kids also try to see the bigger picture and recognize the role of their formal education (they are usually the ones who end up as quants or traders ;-)).
The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

Interesting... I found the opposite. I went to Oxford University (as elite as it gets), with a head big as a balloon, and clearly thinking myself better than everyone. Four years in the presence of people whose intellect crushed me like an insignificant cockroach taught me humility. Since I still needed to believe that I wasn't... you know... just plainly inferior, that forced me to re-rationalise what it means to be "better", and to come to the conclusion that intellectual prowess has nothing to do with being a better person.

It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

I also disagree with this, to an extent. My time in Oxford made me a more rounded person, intellectually, inter-personally, and emotionally. And I think that was the right result - that's certainly what my parents hoped when I went in. I think the purpose of education is to make people - not just minds or careers. A person is a combination of many different things, including mind, network of connections, desires, abilities, and a myriad other things.

Mind you, Oxford might just be different from Yale... perhaps Yale should take a leaf ;-)
I can attest to Paul's claims that this is a valid problem. Yes, a lot of bloggers do write whatever they feel and it just comes out real easy, but a lot of bloggers (such as myself) would love to have some sort of resource to find out what readers want to hear.

Skribit is a great idea. I think it's still very young and has a lot of room to grow, but it's a terrific start and the first of its kind.
Has Microsoft Sent Yahoo into a Death Spiral?
Beyond CAPTCHA: No Bots Allowed!
Don't sign any NDAs, I guess.
Travel Content - Tourism Content - Tourism Tycoon
Place to get quality PLR travel content. Instant downloads.
Immunotherapy 'breakthrough' makes big news
I prefer to write slightly longer, clearer code.

What I find infuriating is writing the same code all over again, with little variations over many files.
start doing regular blah blah on HN ;)
I'm interning at Sun, volunteering with Miro, and taking summer classes.

I'll be getting my BS after a little over two years in school and as one of those “big picture” people, have become increasingly more focused on what I'm going to do once December rolls around.
My usage pattern is almost the exact opposite. If I like a story and find it relevant, I upvote it in part so I can easily reference it later.
Dymaxion Man: The visions of Buckminster Fuller
Is Hacker News going soft?
I am really concerned about the quality of stories being submitted to Hacker News, is it just me? but i have noticed that some stories submitted are not really relevant to startups, programming etc.?
Has anyone else noticed this?
Ask HN: Which is the best prog. laptop (battery, Linux Hardware support etc.)?
Hello Readers,
I want to have a really good machine for my programming needs. Just wanted your input as to which laptop is really the best for the purpose. I cannot afford a Mac (yet!) and my budget is just about a 1000$. I mostly program in Python and C++.<p>Thanks for your comments.
I (like many here I guess), already have this, at least as far as technical books are concerned - it's called Safari Books. That coupled with an iPhone means that you have a massive collection of technical works in your pocket all of the time. It's brilliant. I finally have a solution for what to do when I'm at a party and I need to know the correct grammar for K&R style C.

It would be nice to have the same service for non-technical books. Amazon's Kindle service is not bad, but it's not really a library, you have to purchase each book...
Lenovo
However, I think Dvorak actually puts some fingers to even more use than QWERTY? I had pain in my index finger, and it seemed to me with DVORAK I would use it even more, as the most common keys would be put on the index finger. I haven't actually tried Dvorak, though, only looked into it.
Get religion about ergonomics. I've spend close to $1k on my workstation's ergonomics at home (decent desk, chair, keyboard, tried a bunch of different mice, adjustible monitor arms, etc...) I probably need to invest another $500-1000 just to get it tuned even further. A small price to pay, to not have to quit coding.

Is the pain in your R hand on your wrist (palmar side?) or is it in the back of your hand? It' makes a difference. A doctor can help you sort things out. All the tendons and nerves that control your hand flow through a narrow band in your wrist. If you rest your arm's weight on your wrist for extended periods of time (i.e. mousing on your R hand), you can put pressure on that bundle of nerves and tendons. Do it too long, and you can end up like a friend did and not be able to button a shirt for 4 months.

So, may I suggest a trackball, trackpad or vertical mouse. I actually have a track ball and a mouse connected to my computer, and I switch back and forth between them every so often. I'm probably going to purchase a vertical mouse soon, because my wrist is aching a little bit.
when i said this is true - i was referring only to the linkbaitish title.

'Presumably each year has been a record high?' - Not if the record is on a year by year basis
Ed's an all around nice guy. We've met both online and in meat space at the last Startup School.
Well, here would be a good place to start. But you'd need to be clear and honest from the start. What is it that you want to do, and why and so on...

Programmers(or what you call hackers) like things to be specific.
This won't help with the current symptoms you have, but when you've recovered:

The best thing you can do is to switch hands frequently through the day. The second best thing you can do is work out in the gym regularly. This will strengthen your fingers, wrists and arms.
So can you confirm if he is PG or not? Just kidding ;)
Sorry about your daughter. I hope she's okay.

Thanks, though. It's a lot better here in Silicon Valley than it was in the ghetto in Chicago. It was pretty much a nightly occurrence to be wrestling a drug addict or drunk every night. Nights were measured by how many gun shots or stabbings we took care of. There's not nearly the culture of violence here, which makes work a lot easier.

It's still pretty high pressure and high stress. I could be a little weird, but working on my business is a lot less stressful for me. I hope it takes off.
USAMO problems... Take a look

Ok, it's wildly unfair for a Putnam fellow to be looking at these, but since you asked... I think I can see how to solve problem 6, but I'd have to take a few minutes to make sure that my solution works. The other 5 problems took me about 30 seconds each.

Hell, I've personally seen a few high school science fair projects that are essentially graduate level work involving genetic engineering and monte carlo simulations.

Funny, I was about to say that I've seen far too many graduate students doing work which is essentially high school science fair material.
A lightbulb wastes watts, idle power adaptors waste milliwatts.

You can still save a few <currency> on your annual bill by switching the lights off when you don't need them and using energy-saving bulbs. OK, so that's probably in the order of 1% of your bill, but still, 1% for something that takes virtually no effort at all.

What he's shown is that not all energy-saving tips are equal. Unplugging your power adaptor isn't really worth the effort. Turning your thermostat down half a degree, using a colder washing machine cycle, driving 5mph slower or more evenly or without air conditioning and not reboiling the kettle when it's still hot are all little actions that can have a significant effect on your energy usage.
Far more practical version is:

What doesn't break you makes you stronger.

I can't count the number of times this thought was the only thing got me through otherwise unbearable stress.
Oxford taught me that I'm a better computer scientist than I am a mathematician (or at least, that I'm better at algorithms than at algebraic number theory), but it didn't teach me humility.

I realized that intelligence has nothing to do with being a better person when I came up against the apparent contradiction that all of the fascinating people I enjoyed talking to were far less intelligent than myself. :-)
The entire article reads like satire. He can't talk to a plumber, the poor chap. Maybe he should publish a few thousand words in some "venerable but lively quarterly magazine".
How the brain works: Illusions
As far as I can tell, the majority of C# programmers are either not aware of these features or don't know how to use it.

What stops me from praising C# is its ridiculous verbosity. A language in which the shortest possible form of a character array literal is

new char[] {'a', 'b'}

is doomed to be low-end, low entry-level, low-respect language, despite all efforts to bring some high-end features into it.
Programmer and Freelancer and fledgling founder here. I share your views about how a todo app is supposed to function. I am actually trying to implement one, now if someone would like to collaborate with me, then that would be great.

I have a simple app called taskit(GPL) that i wrote hoping that it would transition to what you describe, but i didn't really have time for that alone. And it's beginning to show its design deficiencies.
It doesn't have most of the features we need, but I like the Braindump. Thanks.
If you cannot buy a new Mac (or better still a Mac Book Pro) why not try and get a used one from eBay? $1000 should get you something fairly decent.
"hitting keys"

Stop hitting them then. Only use a laptop, and touch them lightly. Don't use a mouse, use a trackpad.
Anything from ASUS.
I just submitted a relevant New Yorker article but attention spans aren't really that high anymore.
Different paths, same destination :-)
Interesting to see that pen, cards and paper are still used a lot. It's obviously really important that adding tasks and ideas into some kind of software system isn't more time consuming or harder to do than simply keeping a system of paper cards (or vim and notepad). Lots of software out there requires too many clicks for a simple operation like adding a task. It's the price I have to pay for staying organized, as I would loose all the paper cards.
Why isn't social software spreading like wildfire through business?
I have zero doubt that this is true. I have been around a lot of those medical errors, and I have seen people who have been killed by medical errors and malpractice. It's tragic.

But, just because there are problems, that doesn't mean that the system doesn't work.

In the article that you posted, they mentioned 10's of millions of unnecessary antibiotics. The reason that antibiotics are prescribed for viral infections is twofold. And, it's primarily because people want them. If I take my child who has been sick for 1 week to the ER, spend 3 hours waiting in line for a 5-10 minute visit with an ER doc. I want to go home with a prescription in hand. If not, I'm going to be very angry. So, it's easier for the MD to prescribe an antibiotic than deal with the 5-10 minute conversation convincing the parents that it's only 2008 and we haven't found a cure for the common cold yet.

As for unnecessary medical procedures... That pretty much speaks to 95% of plastic surgery cases and 80% of dermatology practices.

Our society also has very high expectations of the medical community. We used to go to a shaman, priest or pastor when our family was dying and looked for answers or expected miracles. Now, we take then in a ambulance to the hospital and expect answers and miracles from our doctors and medical systems.

Doctors feel those expectations and generally work very hard in very difficult circumstances. They also are trying to make a decent living to pay for the 12-15 years of schooling they suffered through. So, the average MD will work 70-110 hours a week. When you work that much, you're bound to make mistakes.

There's no doubt about it, there are a lot of problems with the system, but that doesn't mean that we should throw the baby out with the bath water.

Tips to getting better health care:

#1 Bar none, go to the rich people's hospital. Go to the neighborhood with the most expensive homes, and find a doctor in that neighborhood. You get much better medical care in those areas because that's where the good doctors go to practice. After working in 35 different hospitals in 15 years, I settled on working at an upper class/upper middle class hospital in Silicon Valley. That was deliberate. I can give better care here than any where else I've ever worked.
totally agree that it's "happening" everywhere now

but what i want is for it to be recorded and synched everywhere as well
This wouldn't seem like a contradiction if we had better definition of intelligence. For example, it wouldn't seem like a contradiction to say you enjoy talking with fascinating people who were all worse than you at math and logic.
wow, so many in the market? i use hiveminder.com .nothing great, but simple enough and works for us.
<irony> wow ... that just makes me feel bad about myself. </irony>

Even so, that's very impressive. After looking through, I only see likely solutions to 3 of the 6, and I would still have a fair amount of work to even verify those 3.

goes and mopes in the corner
Where the hell is matt?
You must not have skimmed very far, because two paragraphs later he says:

> "I mention this not because it’s any sort of earth-shattering revelation, but simply because it’s important to recognize that minimalism for minimalism’s sake is just dumb. Like any other design tool, it should be a means to an end.

The thing that’s useful about reaching the point of absolute minimalism, then, is not that it’s the point at which you’ve achieved perfection, or even anything resembling your end goal. Rather, it’s the point at which you realize which of the things you’ve removed were actually important, because their absence brings them into stark focus."

... and then proceded to talk about ways he went about making content actionable rather than have administrative cruft all over the page.
How uncertain are you about your beliefs?
He hacked culture, I guess.
So is ice water.
Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave
What kind of meeting?

In some cases I'll recommend Lego Serious Play, http://www.seriousplay.com/. Basically uses Lego to project the issues discusses in the meeting so it's easier to (1) de-personalize them and (2) to visualize.
I'd like to hear from D practitioners, what the real benefit they experienced by coding in D. Couldn't I just use related subset of C++ or C# to achieve the very similar effect?
Ask HN: What software engineering process for startups?
What kind of engineering process do you want for a startup?

Typically you want to iterate fast, adding/changing features as necessary. Unit test make code harder to change (you may need to fix broken tests) but also more reliable (you can be pretty sure you didn't miss anything if the unit test all pass). If you have many people working on the same code, you typically need to agree to certain things ("architecture") in advance and set it in writing as a design doc. If it is just one or two guys writing code and talking to each other, isn't that too much overhead?

To set some baseline, Google apparently did design docs, code and design reviews, and unit tests from the start. OTOH, it seems PG doesn't write unit test, at least there were no unit tests in the Arc/Hacker News source code release. He obviously doesn't write specs or design docs as he prefers exploratory programming.

What do you practice and why?
I was in the room at the same time that PG and Ed were. I think that dcurtis and xichekolas were there chewing the fat with us at the same time.
In a current project I do mostly exploratory programming (figure out the code structure as I go), but I will probably also have automatic tests that exercise large chunks of the application at once, from user perspective, without going into any detail. These are supposed to serve as smoke tests, ringing the alarm if I broke anything big.
Exploratory programming to play with ideas and concepts and to quickly prototype and evaluate things.

Once a clear vision/direction is established, I switch to a more test driven development model more to ensure robustness and iron out errors than anything else.
Sugarcrm, it has modules for almost anything.

http://www.sugarcrm.org
Michael Whalen - http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whalesalad

jokes.
s/break/kill/
Eeeeeez. Meat space just sounds sooo wrong.
It's worth noting that in some parts of the world (including the US) there are days which are 23 hours long and others which are 25 hours long, which occur when daylight savings time starts and stops. (I'm guessing your calendar isn't high resolution enough to worry about leap seconds.) So if I'm reading your code aright, the timestamp will be off by an hour on two Sundays a year in places where DST is observed.

But to answer your original question, I'd have to say it depends. If the clever stuff is really much more efficient, or less likely to break in unusual circumstances, I say use it, but document it carefully. Otherwise, best to code it clearly.
CUSAT Results
Cochin University of Science & Technology Results 2008
What's your business model?

That's the most important question. If you don't want to talk about it it's okay but there is no point in discussing about a startup without knowing the business model. If we do, we are talking about something else than the startup.
A long way of saying "I can't read other people's code (since I never try), so I just redo their work." or perhaps "Any code that isn't written exactly the way I would write it is intolerable."

If there's one good thing about Perl's TMTOWTDI motto, it's that you get used to different styles of code very very quickly.
In my opinion we are still OK.

(I was horrified yesterday after visiting reddit. I wasn't there for some time and the degree of decline was unbelievable. I hope this will not happen to HN.)
In the words of a celebrity I once met, longtime Sports Illustrated writer and Pittsburgh Steelers commentator, Myron Cope,

"Notorious, yes. Famous, not so sure."

Anyone who ever had to maintain my code would probably agree.

(Aside: While I'm at it, a quick Myron Cope story...Myron noticed that Lee Flowers was coming off the disabled list with a high ankle sprain after only 2 weeks when the usual diagnosis was 4 weeks. He asked Coach Cowher why. Coach told him that the first high ankle sprain usually took 4 weeks to heal, but subseqent high ankle sprains only took 2 weeks to heal. This was Lee's second injury. Myron then asked, "Well then, why don't you take the whole team out in February and sprain all their ankles?")
I heard Paul Graham comes around sometimes.
I hope this will not happen to HN.

It will. It's inevitable. Compare HN from a year ago to HN today. Totally different.

I have to admit that MetaFilter is doing a pretty good job keeping things sane by charging new members $5. But unfortunately the userbase there is boring (intellectual wannabes, mostly), and their commenting system sucks rocks.

The good thing is that back when reddit was good, I wasted a lot of time there. Now that all the social news sites suck so badly, I'm getting a lot more work done.

One site that hasn't changed much over the years is slashdot. I sometimes read slashdot and wonder if I'm not just getting a 1999 version of the site with names and dates changed. Same arguments, same opinions. Boring.
I really like the idea that "notable" people may be lurking here. If only for the reason that we should all think twice before degrading someone else (or generally acting like an idiot). You never know who you're really talking to or who else may be witnessing it.

(Imagine losing a 7 figure deal a year from now because the investor found out you insulted him here.)
Nokia buys social networking site Plazes
Is Hacker News Going Soft or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Meta
BBC Removes hCalendar from /programmes
I wouldn't be worried about what laptop you have - I generally find it's better to buy cheap stuff and replace it often (I tend to stay about 1-2 years behind the best in PC's for example and buy a new one each year, selling the old one on ebay to cover part of the cost).

The only hardware aspect worth thinking about with a laptop for coding is how big a screen you will be getting - get the largest you can afford so that you can see as many lines of code as possible.

Try http://www.linux-laptop.net to make sure you get something you can run your favourite Linux distro on.
I have read hundreds if not thousands of News.YC comments - and this one about failure (not famous but personal and real ) from a Chicago-based trader is my favorite: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413

"38 points by fiaz 121 days ago | link | parent

APOLOGIES for making this post so annoyingly long..."
Real time virtual ball pit
Here's some other projects he's worked on as well:

Real time video time shifting: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2007/09/been-too-busy-to-post-for-while-but.html

Image warping: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-had-this-idea-long-time-ago-finally.html

Smoke effect?: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2007/09/some-fun-with-messrs.html

2D wave effect warping real time video: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2006/11/i-work-with-video-as-well-as-still.html
Here's some other projects he's worked on as well:

Real time video time shifting: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2007/09/been-too-busy-to-post-...

Glass fun house warping: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-had-this-idea-long-t...

Smoke effect?: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2007/09/some-fun-with-messrs.h...

2D wave: http://methodart.blogspot.com/2006/11/i-work-with-video-as-w...
As much as I love this community, it's even better when you get a chance to meet your on-line friends in person.

After talking iamelgringo and Xichekolas for 30 seconds, I felt as if I knew them for years.

I enjoyed debating browsers and screen resolutions with dcurtis. No one ever wins a debate like that, you just laugh and have another beer.

I learned more about 27 new things from kirubakaran is 1 day than in the past year.

Of course, it's always cool to hang out with wizards like alaskamiller, chengmi, and rms.

dfranke is brilliant. He can discuss the pros and cons of 3rd and 4th normal form in one minute and laugh like Albert Einstein the next. I have a feeling there'll be threads like this about him before too long.

My advice to noobs: Make friends here. And find a way to meet them in person (Startup School or even something local). This is not your usual crowd. (We're all notable in some way.) And who knows, you may even make friends for life.
'Shake up' for internet proposed