skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is hilarious; the less intelligent someone actually is, they higher they rate themselves. Intelligence is knowing what you don't know.

And everyone is way off base with the attractiveness. I would say everyone pictured there is pretty normal in terms of looks. Not bad looking, not awesome looking either. I think most people are average looking (what a concept), but few people want to admit it.

I am average looking :)
The transcript is not complete. It leaves out a Java garbage collection discussion and why the presence of water on Mars is of tremendous importance, for example.
Don't forget thinking they're smarter than they are.

I think that most of the respondents were working based off of a school grading scale, where 6.0 is barely passing and 8.5 is average (mid-B), so to give oneself a 5 is to admit failure. The professor, on the other hand, seemed to be working on a (5, 2) normal distribution that, to make things even tougher, was based on her young, academic peers. Hence, the more modest ratings coming from her.

If they had asked me, I'd have given myself a 2 for both, just to be different.
That is a beauty indeed. Instead of trying to describe the appropriate use of affiliation and risk being associated with ne'er-do-wells, they are just avoiding the problem entirely.

"Neither the name of the <organization> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission." ~ bsd/mit licenses
Google as the new pressroom
# 14.
July 10th, 2008 3:43 pm

You want above average?

http://www.youtube.com/clintosterholz

I’m above average. Everyone else up there is a 5 or a 6. I think Debb Thorne is the only one to assess herself most honestly.

— Posted by Clint

To be fair to him, he is above-average, but he's no less comical in his high self-rating and general cockiness than any of the interviewees.
Writing a program is a linear process. You have an input and an output.

But a novel (for instance) has multiple paths and plotlines, towards an indefinite goal, with the possibility of sequels, prequels, side-plots, and other ancillary matters, all of which can contradict one another in unpredictable ways -- and your debugger is an obsessed adolescent fan emailing you at 3 AM or asking about that musical mixup in 2F09.
I will likely cancel mine, after thinking about it for a few days. There are three competitors in the store today. By the time Apple allows me into the market there will be a defacto standard and in this application's market "good enough" is good enough so I won't be able to unseat the standard.
"Humanization" is fueling explosive (and weird) growth in the pet industry
Yeah, but that's the kind of "just in case" language that's rarely actually used if you're not being a jerk. There's a limit to what's actually enforceable.

If you wrote a blog post stating that you're using Yahoo's new BOSS service in your app, and showed the Yahoo logo there, and talked about how great it is, I sincerely doubt anyone at Yahoo would have a problem with that.

However, if you had an app that was specifically designed to phish passwords, and you put the Yahoo logo on it, and Yahoo sued you for inappropriate use of their IP, you couldn't even begin to claim that they gave you permission. This kind of legal language precludes them from appearing to even accidentally permit that kind of thing. It's just erring on the side of being cautious, which is expected, common, and responsible.
As an addendum, there will always be jobs out there for writing boilerplate code.
It's like dancing, if you can't dance but are confident and are having enjoying yourself/having fun, it's attractive.

Your overall look can be improved slightly (ignoring cosmetic surgery) with the right clothes and attitude. Confidence is dynamic and fluid and can wax (and wane).

If you have have the skills and confidence, it's a powerful combination. My friend Jason's beautiful girlfriend wasn't that confident when he met her but he has helped her build up her confidence.

Most of the most confident people I've met aren't really good looking (5 or 6s) but they make people feel good.

Reading Daniel Goleman's "Emotional Intelligence" pointed out to me that if you lack confidence the other person can intuitively sense it and emphathize [e.g. feel your fear/lack of confidence] (the classic creeping out a random person you see in public that you are attracted to)
Enterprise PHP: ZZEE PHPExe, Compile PHP Scripts into Windows GUI Exes
Good observation; that was my initial thinking as well -- (5,2) as a normal distribution. Side note: the comment by the guy "A Sane Man" praising the PhD for her humility was pretty funny.
just looking at the numbers these guys give out $10,000 to 30,000 for 4%-8% of the company. It is not a great deal of money but certainly most of the non-YC companies seem to be giving out more money.

Assuming that quality of YC and non-YC programs is the same, I wonder how much extra 10,000 going to make a difference.
Throwing together UI screens isn't sexy but it pays the bills so we can do things like hack code (at home) for fun
Ask YC: Cool Things to do with Wikipedia Database?
I have just downloaded the full-text Wikipedia database dump (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download).

I can think of a few things to look at (grammatical constructs, cliques, semantic graphs), but I'm curious to see what fellow HNers might come up with.

What would you investigate if you had the full text and metadata for every Wikipedia page, and a lot of time on your hands?
Or to rephrase the title "The Top 10 books the author would bring with them to a deserted island"

Mirror Worlds. Hard to find this book but a lot of their ideas have already been adopted (e.g. Time Machine for Leopard kind of borrows their life-streaming metaphor)
wonder how many copies have been sold so far
Yeah, that comment was pretty awesome.
Humanized  Weblog: No More More Pages?
ICFP Programming Contest 2008
some of the coolest nasa/lisp stuff I stumbled upon was called "pacman". It was a 3d bin packing algorithm for figuring out optimal placement of cargo etc.
I figured there would be all kind of tricks up AppleT&T's sleeves this time and if you want an unlocked phone, it's probably worth waiting a few months (weeks?) until the proper jailbreaking procedure is figured out.
The essay that this blog points to is one of the most thought-provoking essays I've read in a while. Still trying to grok it
jws - Who are your competitors? Is yours done, or does it still need work?
Be sure to check out this link within the post: http://jontangerine.com/silo/typography/p/

There he gives 12 examples of paragraph styling and the CSS needed.
Yeah, lack of sleep makes me irascible too.

Looking back today, would you have preferred a perfectly engineered system with no users?
They take their percentage out of your next funding round, instead of buying the stock upfront and getting diluted when you do. I don't know if this was deliberate or just a transcription error, but it ends up netting them significantly more stock than the way YC does it: 50-100% more if your next round is a typical VC round.
Great thnx...
But your code missed the completely copied rocket? Porque?
Who Killed the Online Journalism Review?
Indeed. There was not one mention of pornography in the entire piece.
Most likely within the next week. Its already been jailbroken(not unlocked)
I found it funny that no matter what they rated themselves on looks they all rated themselves slightly higher on intelligence.

I take this to mean that while it can't hurt to be good looking being perceived as good looking and stupid is not.
No we'd more likely be using GEM or DR-DOS which were both years ahead of what ms was offering.
Safely Using Package Managers
"It doesn't take a genius to figure out why iTunes is anti-web: iTunes was originally released in January 2001. The best-of-class web browser at the time was IE 5.5. IE6 was nine months in the future. Safari was two years in the future. Firefox 1.0 was nearly four years in the future. The XMLHttpRequest object had not been invented. The term "Ajax" was four years in the future, as was the first famous Ajax application, Google Maps."

Amazon seemed to do just fine. Apple could have as well. I don't think this was motivated by a desire to have a great UX that couldn't be achieved in browsers at the time (given that iTunes is just a glorified browser)... I think it was a desire to be proprietary (anti-web, if you will).
Having spent the better part of this morning playing cro-magnon rally and super monkey ball, I have to say that you are quite incorrect. The d-pad is so 1990. Accelerometers are where its at today. With the multi-touch touchscreen the ipod touch and iphone are going to get a lot more use out of their touchscreen as an input device than the DS did...
I wouldn't expect much in the way of innovation from a run-of-the-mill Harvard undergrad, or MBA, for the reasons the article gives. The problem is that for every genuinely brilliant Ivy undergrad, there are 9 who got in by gaming the system... and in MBA programs, that ratio jumps even higher. On the other hand, I'd imagine that MIT and Stanford CS PhDs are quite capable of innovating. Perhaps the lesson to come out of this is that VC firms should hire more computer scientists and fewer MBAs.
A Green Business Idea that Could Actually Make Money - Any Takers?
Can someone make the rest of the article available?
Posterous: great example of capitalizing on existing user behaviors
Certainly you will find code at those sites, but "great" code?
ACLU, others greets Bush FISA bill signing with new lawsuit
I have had the good fortune to work with exactly one good project manager so far. He is good because he is intelligent enough to realize when he doesn't know something, careful with the team he builds, depends on what his team tells him (rather than ignoring it and going with gut instinct), and focused on processes only insofar as they result in a good product (meaning he approaches any "magic bullet" methodologies with skepticism but with the possibility that they might contain one or two good ideas that make sense in the specific circumstances of the project).

That's really a list of what other project managers do wrong, though, than specifically what makes him valuable to the team.
Facebook’s iPhone App (Almost) Replaces My Contacts List
I wish I could push a Report Spam button.
Software makes virtual servers a moving target
Twitter is a multicast-capable software-based crossbar switch, with a necessary form of message journaling and replay.

Where the destination of or target of the message is what selects and pulls the messages.

And with sparse addressing.

Twitter reverses the norms of routing; the receivers control the routing. It's a distributed forest of packet-cloning and routing servers.

And the entirety of the routing tables involved here are stonking huge.

I'd not look to apply nor use Rails and typical databases here (first); I'd approach this from a completely different direction. This application just doesn't fit into a classic database. You're not even sharding the right pieces here, if you're looking at the database(s).
Building Chempedia: Indexing Wikipedia's 6,411 Compound Monographs
The Folly Of Do-It-Yourself Multithreading
All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad
Me too. Like Andre: http://www.multicians.org/andre.html
He works for sleep.fm. From his limited description it sounds like they based it off of Yc. It seems they try to get every company to help each other out, so much that they all have a small stake in the other companies.
Dark Sun - Richard Rhodes
Very, very interesting. Though it does have the drawback of not allowing any bottom-of-page content (Ads / About / ToS / Contact links, etc.) It also brings up the question of how much data you can fit into one browser window. (Anyone know?)

Still, slick idea. And definitely nice to see someone taking a different approach -- those Google page numbers really are pointless.
The field is musical instrument tuners. Mine is not completed, and can't be until I can run on the hardware. I must choose which techniques will yield the best results within the confines of the available CPU power. My test version uses many algorithms in parallel for the purposes of studying them.

I was working under the assumption that Apple would open the gates a few weeks before release day and that would be time for me to select the algorithm, but I was wrong.
[I'm sorry for decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio.] Andre is the man.
This article claims that venture capital is lacking in innovation, but the article
(a) sites no evidence to back the claim
(b) does not provide support that any perceived lack in innovation might be the result of the recent financial crises (which would be a better-supported conclusion).

The idea that people from these selective schools are too conformist to innovate disregards the fact that most innovations are incremental. Furthermore, if one is taking a risk by innovating in one area of a business, it's better risk management to be more risk averse in other areas of your business. That will allow a greater chance that the business will survive in the longer terms and that you'll be able to test out new innovations and really contribute something.

So, I would guess any skill in conforming would certainly be an asset in innovation, and that this would at least counter-balance any negative effects.
"using any of the body's systems makes them stronger"

Only partly true. This is true in the short term for younger people. It's not true in the long term for older people. Your metabolism results in different kinds of intracellular junk and intercellular junk accumulating. After a certain point, it reaches the level of pathology. But before that happens, using those metabolic pathways does tend to make them stronger.
Lots of the entrepreneurs we know are from these schools, and that's evidence to prove against the article's theory. I think it really depends on the personality and background of the person. People who stand out in the top schools are really ridiculously smart and good.
Car that runs on air, from the makers of the world's cheapest car
Critique of Amazon user book reviews
Developers & Web 2.0 Gurus: Looking for a Great Job?
Is it just me, or do most of those critics seem correct? Obviously Ballmer has a conflict of interest and Dvorak shouldn't be listened too - everyone already knew that.
The Business of Saving the World
That Didn’t Take Long…iPhone 2.0 OS Unlocked
That's also nonsensical though. I think most useful Lisp programs will probably run faster in Lisp. Trying to fake defmacro alone in Perl will be probably be a waste of time and ultimately result in following the original Greenspun rule.
I've had the same experience when writing, whereby my bad stuff was intertwined with my good stuff to the point where merely editing it was not worthwhile, and found that I need (at least) one draft to organize my thoughts before writing a final draft from scratch that generally needs very little editing. The conclusion I came to was that I just need to always write that second draft, rather than Stephenson's conclusion that he just needs to write the better draft the first time. To each his own, I guess . . .

But comparing writing a novel to programming a complex system seems pretty naive, to say the least. The first obvious difference is that a novel (generally) comes out of one person's head, but most larger projects end up far too large for any one person to truly keep it all in their head and understand all the interactions. That immediately makes it pretty much impossible to just do things right the first time; there are always things you don't understand or forget about when working on a larger project. There's also the fact that vagueness is tolerated and often desired in a novel, whereas it's not an option when programming; that just means there are more details to "get right", more decisions to make, and more interactions to worry about. In addition, a program generally has a definite purpose, and you can't re-define your goal as easily based on what it actually does (though sometimes you can; when writing, you often have an idea of where you're going or what effect you want, but if you end up with something different it might still be fine. There are a ton of other differences as well, of course; those are just the ones that first come to mind.
Agreed.

But ziPhone on Thursday (maybe it's still Thursday where you are) announced they've jailbroken firmware 2.0.
See http://status.ziphone.org/
Steve Jobs and Apple should be happy that there's an established lexicon around what you can do with the iPhone.
Disclaimer: I am a noob, so take this for what it is worth.

After/during school I played in Ruby, Perl, PHP and most recently Python. I love Python and find it making sense where the other languages and frameworks seemed unnecessarily confounded at times. After a week in Python, I felt like I absorbed more than a month in any of the others (although PHP is 'easy' to pick up, its peculiarities are a bit cumbersome to work around).

After forming a fondness for Python, I decided to start on Django and love it. I am currently working on a couple of small apps based on the framework and feel the rate of progress concerning both my learning and development to be extremely rapid - far more so than was the case in reading through the various rails tutorials (just for contrast - no flaming please. I admit my complete and total ignorance in advance to any fanboys currently mumbling "idiot" as they read this).

I personally recommend checking out http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Install_Django_and_Build_Y... 1st to wet your appetite - its quick and allows you to see the power of the framework in no time flat. When you finish there, head to http://www.djangobook.com and start working through - I am and am having a blast doing it.

I know it is a bit cliché, but Python + Django has been a pleasure to program in. Although I may not be able to etch out a living doing it right now, I think this is where I will be spending my recreation time for a while.
Feedback on our social media iPhone app
We, zintin, have just launched our social media iPhone app. We have worked really hard over the last few months to be one of the first 500 apps on the iPhone App Store, and we are excited to hear what people think.

We are aiming to help you share media with friends and interact casually with new people. Our product is free, and we would really love to get your feedback. Thanks!

Go here on your iPhone/iPod Touch to download: http://zintin.com
Making newspapers hyperlocal is a scary thought.

I think one of the big values that newspapers and other media -- skipping the intrinsic bias diatribe -- bring is a breath of coverage. I read the newspaper for some amount of news, but I also find it invaluable to have a breath of information brought to my attention.

Part of the value of my higher education (and even my lower) was the breath of topics I was exposed to. If all I read is the huffingtonpost I'm doomed...
Yep, I tried the app, it finds people around you so you don't need to worry about adding friends. And exchanging contact info might be also useful.
I read this article long time back. Amazing read! Shows how important having good (read genuine) set of core values are and how important the "Do Good" principle is in today's world.

The problem in today's world is the menace of ego, actions and decisions coming from ego-driven values. PG talked about "Doing good", but where does one draw the line between good and bad? As long as the ego controlled mind exists and controls all our actions and decisions, the "Doing good" principle will be merely reduced to just another mechanism for satisfying the ego's ulterior motives.

I might be sounding a bit idealistic here, but what do you guys think?
Would be great to have a chatting feature!
You're right, its not hard up to a point.

That 'point' is where a world of troubles begin. That point is where the number of database updates per second exceeds the capability of your hardware platform.

At this point, like massive sites such as YouTube, flickr, or facebook, you are faced with the option of database sharding - splitting your data up by value (ie. Users A-K on this server and L-Z on that server).

You can no longer treat the database as a black box which does all the magic of multi-table joins. Rails also does not provide any tools to help accomplish sharding out of the box.
oh wow.

A pretty cool idea. I wonder how the compressed air is generated. I know that there are some < $100 compressed air generators that run off many other types of power(electricity, petrol etc). I wonder how energy efficient it is in terms of power. I mean, the energy use has just moved from the car to the compressed air generation plants.

It seems they have optimized the car for use in urban areas by making it as lightweight as possible. I wonder if it would pass safety tests in other countries -- with the car being held together with glue, and relying on wireless technology (zigbee maybe)?

Great ideas... it seems to have used a whole bunch of new technologies.
Three Beautiful Quicksorts
A better UI would go a long way, but they missed their chance. There isn't going to be a big swell in MMO worlds for a while that aren't game-centric. The idea has, and will resurface, probably when the next big technical hurdles in modeling and rendering are overcome. My guess is that it won't be Second Life making those advances either.
Phil Hanes: How I Did It
Solar Power, The Other Green Meat | My Philly Network
However although I do see wire format documentation on Google's site, I don't see an actual BNF grammar anywhere and that makes me nervous.

So what? The .proto file may not be a BNF grammar but it tells an application what to expect and presumably the generated code can check for validity. e.g.

message Person {
required int32 id = 1;
required string name = 2;
optional string email = 3;
}

Is that really any different from

<Person> ::= <id> <name> | <id> <name> <email>
...

?
I kind of agree, but with the caveat that nobody's right all the time. (See also the "Don't let bozosity get you down" section of Guy Kawasaki's "Rules for Revolutionaries".)
The old man who farms with the sea (a solution for rising sea levels)
The post-blogging generation
When Distraction is Good
Because the copied rocket actually came from another photo. The original analysis showing it copied from the adjacent rocket was wrong.
PG's quote in context:

Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.

I think the "oscillations" sentence is, in fact, a metaphor: The act of "playing it safe" in design is being compared to the act of damping out some wildly oscillating system. But nothing is actually oscillating here.

A less-metaphoric way of describing the situation would be "when you discard the outliers beyond one sigma, you lose the highs as well as the lows". But that would be double-plus-geeky so PG wisely didn't write that.

And, though as a former physicist I hate to have to say it... to a non-geek, a reference to damped oscillations is very geeky. Eyes will glaze over. I have seen it happen.
Writer's Block and Introspection
Maybe I'll get used to it, but so far I find apps that change the scale/range of the vertical-scrollbar while I'm scrolling (like this Humanized Reader and Google Reader) annoying and a little disorienting.
Google's tutorial for jEdit
We, zintin, have just launched our social media iPhone app. We have worked really hard over the last few months to be one of the first 500 apps on the iPhone App Store, and we are excited to hear what people think.

We are aiming to help you share media with friends and interact casually with new people. Our product is free, and we would really love to get your feedback. Thanks!

Go here on your iPhone/iPod Touch to download: http://zintin.com