skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To HN: Looking for people to talk to...
I'm often fascinated by the people in the HN community. I feel a connection with many of them.

I recently wrote a letter to my local television station about my experiences in college (I'm graduating in June). In it I talk about my lack of friendships, among other things. I have realized that I really enjoy talking to people about almost anything. Learning about others brings a lot of enjoyment to my life. It's also therapeutic ;)

Unfortunately, I haven't met many people in college to do that with. So anyway, I am wondering if any of you would be interested in talking to me? Maybe you've had similar experiences?

Well anyway,

my AIM screename is: stevenbe123

Link to my facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=32403303

Link to the letter I wrote: http://www.stevenbe.com/

My e-mail: stevenboudreau123 [at] gmail.com

*If you want, you can e-mail me your sn, and/or other contact info. Or just leave it as a comment? Well, thanks for reading this :)
I too was looking for a simple "about" page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my description:

This is a lisp-like language whose principal purpose is to help the creator of the language thoroughly understand how programming languages (especially lisp-like programming languages) work.
I don't think it's bad to want to abstract away the low-levels of client-side JavaScript, but you might want to start with JavaScript first to know what and why you are abstracting away.

There's a good introduction in the form of lectures from Douglas Crockford. I watched them recently and they were informative and interesting.

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/learning-javascript-programming...
You should come into the IRC room. There are a lot of cool people. #startups on irc.freenode.net.

My AIM is hybridxaos. Also, Kyro Beshay in Orange County, UCI, and UCSD on Facebook / kyro on #startups. I also do webcam shows every Thursday night, but that'll cost you.
jlbxk8 on aim
disgraceful, pitiful even. at a time when content publishers should be competing on quality or service, and building strong, happy brands, instead they risk everything employing black hat companies to destroy everything that disagrees with their existing business model.
I synpathise with labels whose content is being stolen, honestly, I do - but nothing good can come of the private sector using destructive activity to try and protect its position
AIM - marktbao, email in profile.
Mark Bao on Facebook, Boston, MA network.
MarkBao on the #startups chatroom.

Join HN on Ning: http://newsyc.ning.com/
Gmail Labs? Google pre-announced a mysterious new feature for Gmail.
Ask YC: RSS Feed: Whole Article or First Paragraph?
I was wondering what your thoughts on this are. If I am giving my site an RSS feed, should I provide the whole article in the feed or just give people the first paragraph and force them to come to my site? Its more bandwidth but its also more advertising views. Is there an accepted convention on this? What are your thoughts?
why would someone pay you money to submit information to your wikipedia? I think Wikipedia got that portion right, users can submit all they want, but you have a bunch of thankless moderators filtering your content for you
Groups wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings
There's a #news.yc channel on freenode, but it's been just me and one other guy for the past few months.
ahh, so the project is moreso a bit of self pedagogy, cool!
Awesome. My suggestions:

1) You need a "snap to platonic" type option. I have too many ovals that I wanted to be circles, and too many rectangles I wanted to be squares.

2) Need a "shift" resize functionality, so that it changes scale but not the 'aspect ratio'.

3) Need the ability to resize text by click+dragging.

4) The border of an 'object' is useful for knowing what's going to be affected by my action, but it really should 'do' something, too. Based on my UI experience, I've been trained to think I can click on the border and move whatever I just clicked on. Instead, I kept drawing lines.

5) Could use a "select all" function.

6) If I select an object then click a new color box, it should change the color of the selected object. Or I should be able to "drag" a color onto an object (or both!) to change it.

A few "brilliant" points:

1) I love that you 'save' the pages I've made, and I -absolutely love- that they function as objects that can be used on a new page.

2) Thank you for letting me get "back inside" a text box I've already created.

3) It's -fast-.
You know...bullshit...make your shit happen...you depend on these people like a little puppy, it pathetic. Grow a set of balls and make your dreams come true...work a real job while you do it if you have to. I came here for real info...and you pissed me off.
Hackers Take Over Comcast Portal for Several Hours
Allow me to plug my own project: http://www.ecmascript4.com/
Translates ECMAScript 4 to classic JavaScript. This brings type checking, classes, namespaces etc. to JavaScript, however it is still backwards compatible with classic JavaScript, so you can port gradually and integrate with existing JavaScript libraries. Best of both worlds!
There's also the Hacker News Chatterous chatroom, which has 119 members, including a number of founders from the Y Combinator Winter '08 cycle.

You can hook your Jabber/GTalk, Email, Phone contacts into it as well.

One-click invite link: http://www.chatterous.com/landing/hnyc/hcker/

by phone:
text CHTR JOIN hnyc hcker to 41411

by email:
@join hcker in body to hnyc@chatterous.com

by jabber/google talk:
add hnyc@chatterous.com and send @join hcker
PayPal upgrade chaos prompts StatCounter to publicly slam the service
OS X menu bar, Safari with address+tab & bookmarks bar, OS X dock.
What makes you think you're not spending spam?

I'm not being glib. Really ask yourself if it's necessary to email this information to users. If I get email from a company and I don't want it, I don't like your company. If your company has information that you think is important to me, notify me next time I log in. Let me determine whether or not it's important.
Where are they now? The stories of what happened to ten dot-coms from the first bubble
I like clicking through to read the article if it's interesting.

It's like having the CD instead of downloading it. You get all the extra artwork and everything that comes with it.
If your idea needed funding, why did you apply to YC? You could easily get the same kind of money (if not a lot more) by visiting your local bank, talking to friends/family or simply taking out a few credit cards.

I funded my beta completely out of pocket and would only consider YC for the connections/PR and immersion into the startup world.
As a feed consumer, I actually thought about this too; but truthfully I haven't settled on any preference. Say if I wanted to leave a comment, I'll be heading to the site anyway. But the extra click, when necessary, hasn't aggrivated me at all.

(If you were running your feed through feedburner, you could have ads inserted into the feed as well.)
There's a world of inspiring thoughts in the article. I'm not an engineer at all, but I love the mindset and have learned an incredible amount from YCombinator, Ray Kurzweil, et al.

I'd point to the link on P&G's Connect & Develop strategy as something that has a TON of concrete value for startups/hackers/etc.

Finally, I probably get more excited about this kind of thing than hackers who already practice the naive idealism, pragmatism, and humble irreverence that Umair describes for the reason that I outlined in my comment on the original article: the more people that look at problems through a hacking-esque mindset, the better off the world will be.

(Also, I didn't really mean the tone of my comment to be directly at "you" per se, just in general...there's a lot of "this lacks substance" blowback about Bubblegeneration...I was just trying to be short (but not curt); sorry!
JavaScript is mostly the same across platforms, the difference is in the DOM and CSS support. This can be encapsulated in libraries like JQuery.

GWT solves a different (perceived) problem - the lack of classes, inheritance, packages and static type checking in the core language - which is orthogonal to the platform differences.
I'm shocked that another company would buy the rights to the Pets.com puppet. Yes, the thing was briefly well recognized, but why would you want to spend marketing dollars on a failed brand, and associate your brand with it?

Here's an idea: For my next company I'll try to buy the rights to the image of Jar Jar Binks. That should go over well.
As a data point for you, I only have feeds that provide the full article.

I take that anyone who is looking for ways to force me to pay extra attention (just to get advertising views) is not worthy of that attention.
you must visit http://www.prototypeinvest.com/default.aspx

its a Venture Capital firm providing software, web applications and guidance, and instead of money they ask for equity (just like any other VC) ..

i hope this helps, also if you plan to go with them then let us know your experience .. as you can see its a new kind of VC model.
Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202585 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80353
Interesting ideas? I don't know, at least before age 8. I know that because at that age I was drawing designs for flying machines based on something I heard about a supposed link between electric charge and gravity... in other words, either pseudoscience or taken out of context (high-energy physics, maybe?).

I realized this when I built an apparatus to test it: a crude Van de Graff generator on a scale. I ran it for a while but despite building up a small charge (it ran on a 9V battery), the weight remained unchanged. I was disappointed.

Over time, my ideas have become more practical. Still, I occasionally have urges to create a bipedal robot or a better coffee machine :)
Sorry! That was ott...I edited it down a bit.
I think you're severely underestimating the power of Jar Jar Binks.
I was just trying to figure this out today myself. Very helpful discussion as usual. I love this site.
Star Wars hologram communication now a reality | ajb{log}: learn something new each day
What's Revision3?
Twitter Technology Blog: You've Got Q's, We've Got A's
Twitter Closing its $15 Million Round With Spark
i inevitably get fed up with first-paragraph-only feeds. your site is slow compared to data already in my RAM, and i have 184 other feeds to get through.

i don't mind ads in feeds, though. stick it after the first paragraph, even.

(i even prefer getting a summary of the article over getting only the first paragraph, seeing as how most folks like to fill the first paragraph with fluff anyways. see the ars technica feed for an example.)
He makes the point that what if this happened to a hospital or other critical server. While that point is valid, they seem to only be going after Bittorrent ports, so you would think no important servers would accidently be targeted. However, many colleges nationwide are BT trackers for Linux and other open source projects. How embarrassing would it be if MediaSentry illegally took down one of the colleges it said was not enforcing the law.
You should try #startups, about 30 members on average.
FriendFeed "Likes" Compatibility Index Pre-Pre-Pre Alpha
Michael Arrington: “I’m a Click-Whoring Jackass”
How Many Friends is Too Many?
I realize this is a somewhat unpopular thing to say here, but I don't care about startups. I have little interest in being in a channel where that's the only thing people talk about. I'm here for the general tech news.
Using Amazon S3 As a CDN?
They want to be the Internet's TV providing a wide range of podcasts that appeal to the tech community.
Cincinnati, OH: Learn an instrument.

San Antonio, TX: To the newly minted soldiers/airmen/sailors/marines- welcome back to the real world!

Las Vegas, NV: Be at least 21 and on vacation.
The "Uncanny valley" hypothesis
This page half loads then Firefox (3 beta) switches to its typical error page, but saying "The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression." Anyone else seeing that?
According to my understanding of Piaget's developmental stages, the earliest a child can have "inventive" thought is in the concrete operational stage. Children enter this stage during school years, but before puberty. It's during this time that children begin to grasp basic scientific concepts like conservation of volume.

However, I didn't pay all that much attention in developmental psych, my textbook isn't handy, and the Wikipedia article is not all that helpful. :)
That is about right. However, the only thing that it shares with lisp at the moment are the parens.
;)
An interesting comment, particularly wrt the "natural language" search engines trying to out-algorithm Google:

"The learning curve on search is really fast," she said. "People go from 'Where can I get spaghetti and meatballs in Silicon Valley' to 'italian food san jose' really fast," she said.
When reading code don't treat the task like that of reading a book,
the best way I find is to interact with the code that you are reading.
So it's crucial to get it to run, then get it to do something useful,
then refactor it slightly by making functions shorter and giving the
new functions specific name. E.g. instead of saying (first lst) maybe
say (node-name lst), ideally the library functions should have names
to do with the languages/library data structures and your fns should
have names which correspond to the problem you are looking at.
This is the approach I take when I want to rewrite something.

If you want to use the code as in a library, then try not to read the details
of it until you really have to. Use the interface or write an appropriate interface
for you to use. Work through some examples in the debugger to see what it does.

If you need to fix the code then you need to read the code.
I try to focus on just the problem, rather than understand the whole thing.
This approach makes it much simpler, I get in and out really quick, just focus on
the problem and fix it. If I find something else that's a problem then I look at
that too, otherwise I avoid figuring out how the code works.
Single pill for all lifestyle ailments
One of the interesting take-aways from the story is to that what your users "say" they want and what they actually do are two different things. I wonder if this further proves the diminishing value of old-fashioned surveys in the context of web usability. Beyond the very interesting eye-tracking tools, being able to run live A/B tests seems very effective -- especially if users never even know they are being surveyed.
If your problem is finding your way through big source code repositories you may want to look at http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/
That is exciting technology, but I have to say, the video was pretty disappointing. It might be more interesting for the people in the audience, but from here, there's nothing to showcase the difference from a simple 2D projection.
Just one more reason to consider alternative payment processors.

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Countdown to UK military Skynet 5 launch
This might be a good place to start:
Python Source Walkthrough Series
http://showmedo.com/videos/series?name=qVIxaDJxY
You benefit from partial feeds. But readers hate them. So, are you absolutely awesome? Do you have ridiculous numbers of readers? Then it's your call. Otherwise, people aren't going to read your site.

Freakonomics converted to partial feeds with much fanfare. They lost a lot of readers. And they're Dubner and Levitt. I've never heard of you.
$6k supercomputer made from gaming hardware
Internet Advertising Revenues Top $21 Billion In ’07, Reaching Record High
What does HN owe the author of an article that gets posted here?
My question was inspired by my own experience today after posting an article about the "strategic lessons of hacking" by Umair Haque (Harvard/Bubblegeneration) and Fred Wilson's post [also of today], "Web Discussions: Leaving the Instigator Out."

We all know that the convo that happens here is discrete from what happens on the actual source. In lieu of the i/o plumbing that Disqus, et al, are forging, isn't there some kind of social contract that commentators should be a party to?

As Fred said, "[The author's] reward is the comments it generates. That's how bloggers get paid."

I think this is especially true if there's serious criticism. I'm not sure how I feel about someone posting a comment that flies here, but would be regarded as a flame in context (as happened on my submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203609 )

(Ironically, I was downmodded after responding flippantly to the in-context flame)

Any thoughts?

(Links: my post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203400 // Fred's post http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/05/web-discussions.html
The New New Browser Wars
Does the title imply that a second bubble is upon us?
[Ask YC] Flash vs Shockwave vs Flex for games
Does anyone have any recommendations for a platform to use for creating an online 2D arcade game?

I have read that Shockwave has the fastest rendering engine but there is very little documentation for it.

I have used Flex before and am good with Actionscript, but would probably prefer using Shockwave's Javascript. Also, price isn't too much of an issue, I would rather spend a bit more now than regret it later.

Thoughts?
Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?
Why wait
Dean Kamen’s nerve reading prosthetic smart arm
This Week in Ruby (May 29, 2008)
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201755
FYI: In the new Adobe Director, they created a really sweet 3D racing game. http://blogs.adobe.com/shockwaves/2008/02/
While I agree, this is trolling, and it's not helping maintain a quality level of discussion. I'd recommend deleting this comment.
What Twitter Means
Social networking, gossip, reputation, and the rule of 150
Do men have to wear a jacket in Restaurants in your city?
Fair, but that kind of disagreement is what the "Reply" button's for.
I looked for books on Director 11, but couldn't find any. One advantage of Flex would be the ample documentation and blog posts around the web, which I didn't see for shockwave. It does seem, though, that (documentation availability aside) Shockwave would be better for the purpose.
YouGov launches hedge fund based on poll data (crowd sourced hedge fund?)
> I'm shocked that another company would buy the rights to the Pets.com puppet.

There's a precedent in the UK. A company in the UK that provided a digital television service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV_Digital ) used a monkey puppet to promote its service. Like Pets.com, it failed. Like Pets.com, the rights to the puppet now belong to another company.

The monkey puppet is now used to advertise tea. The tea company was famous for adverts featuring clothed chimpanzees dubbed to promote the brand ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PG_Tips#Advertising ). However, due to the advance of animal rights, the company now uses a monkey puppet which is widely recognised in the UK.
Firms Struggle to Find Programmers Who Can Write Parallel Processing Applications
Enter The Sooloos
What city says, "You should be more philosophical"? What city says, "You should be more romantic"?
Ok, fair enough. Sorry for getting prickly, but somehow in a few very short lines you managed to make me feel like you were implying that I'm "one of the TechCrunch masses", I "need to be spoonfed", I "don't know what 'hack' stands for", and, incidentally, that I missed the point of the article.

(Disclaimer: I am not an official spokesperson for hackers at large, nor do I intend to suggest I am, and so I'm speaking for myself)

I don't think the hacker idealism is naive, or humble for that matter. You could call it naive, but only in the sense that it's willing to question everything. As for humble, there's nothing humble about believing that everyone else might have had it wrong for the last 50 years and that you might know a better way :-)

Being a proponent of that approach, I certainly agree that the world could use even more idealism, pragmatism and not-so-humble irreverence, though :-)
Ask YC: Does choice of programming language matter to VCs?
With all the PHP bashing going on lately, I was wondering .. do VC's actually care about the choice of programming language? Is a web app written in RoR, Python+Django, etc. more valuable than a web app written in PHP+your_choice_of_framework ?
I'm with you on this one. Sometimes it's also nicer since you don't have embedded videos/images load up unless you find the article interesting and wish to click through.

That being said, I know a lot of people that prefer full article feeds, so I would go that route, since I don't know any who would stop reading something if it went from partial feed to full.
Sounds great. Only one problem: money is an illusion. The issue isn't money, it is supply of medical care as measured in units of doctor-hours

That is wrong.

What you are saying is that a doctors hours in 1940 are translatable to a doctors hours in 2008. This is obviously false; the limiting reagent is not the number of hours but the increase in effectiveness of those hours due to the 68 intervening years of medical research.

A single doctor with today's knowledge and technology could have prevented the 1918 influenza epidemic, polio, the Black Plague, etc.

So medical research completely matters.
One of my favorite books is To Mock a Mockingbird, by Raymond Smullyan (http://www.amazon.com/Mock-Mockingbird-Raymond-M-Smullyan/dp...). It presents itself as a puzzle book that teaches combinatory logic along the way. Not only is it lots of fun to work through the puzzles, but at the end, you have a pretty solid understanding of the lambda calculus.
This would be a lot more useful if it were all one one page, or at least if all the links were on one page.
Top Companies Built in an Economic Downtown
Of those I know: Cambridge, Paris.
For a basic 2D arcade game, Flash with Actionscript is probably the best option at the moment for gaming and animation. Shockwave is a very old technology that was seemingly abandoned by Macromedia/Adobe in favor of Flash. Actionscript has seen all of the innovation and creative energy in the past 10 years and was the reason Adobe bought Macromedia. Flex seems geared more towards forms-based applications. It would likely be more difficult to build a game in Flex/MXML than using the standard timeline approach in Flash.
It's really just a performance optimization for C, in situations where the switching value can be hashed. In languages that make method dispatch easy, and the overhead of a function call is not something you're terribly concerned about, it makes sense to just roll your own as needed -- that's why Python never bothered with a switch statement.
Page-view harvesting is a damn ugly business.
yeah, except that the hacker diet /kinda/ sucks. It's the sort of solution someone comes up with by assuming no existing solution is worth anything, and striking out on their own. There's some insights, but mostly it's stunningly naive and banal.

The real secret is to eat fresh, whole, minimally processed food. It doesn't matter if it's organic, free-range, hormone-free, genetically engineered, or anything else, as long as the first three hold.

That said, anything is better than nothing.
Scientists train computer to read people's thoughts
Is anyone honestly surprised by this?
No, most VCs don't care. I've never heard of it making a difference in whether they decided to invest or not.
Bad for StatCounter, good for people like me who loathe PayPal with all their being.
I'd add a third level - debugging the code.

The reason I'd count it as separate is because there have been many times when I've fixed a broken piece of code without fully understanding it, going by gut feeling rather than analytical understanding.

I would suggest this is like a higher skill built on top of 10+ years of experience of both of the skills you mention.