skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. People are in groups for purposes. Example: A soccer team is a group for the purpose of playing soccer.

2. Leadership is contextual to the purpose of a group. A great soccer player is likely to be a leader on a soccer team, but if she is a bad musician, she won't be a leader in a band, no matter how charismatic or likeable she is.

3. Popularity is leadership without authority.

4. Lacking an external evaluation function, a group implicitly invents one.

This implies that nerds would actually be popular in groups with an evaluation function for smartness.

The solution is to create critical masses of people brought together in the context of a need to be smart.
Poof! You’re Unpublished.
That also brings up another question though, why are they being forced to emigrate? Could they be intelligent? Because of that aspect, could their views clash with the society they currently reside in? In many fascist nations, the intelligentsia are the first to be marginalized.

Perhaps you could separate this out by motives for immigration to the US, but I think the point still stands that people who hold education dear to them will instill that value into their children.
Personal identity can be important to users. Testing is always important and often worth the effort.
Over the last week, 6% of the top stories were submitted by top-10 users on reddit.
RefleX - A general-purpose XML Virtual Machine
Here is one,

http://highscalability.com/

I bookmarked an AskSlashdot thread on a similar topic a while ago but Slashdot has archived the original thread so here is the google cache entry, look at the O'Reilly books they should answer a lot of your questions.

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:eugOZQ5ltGwJ:ask.slashd...

A final word of caution though, There is no silver bullet. You are your applications best scalability expert.
In Praise of Loopholes - Working Smarter not Harder
Build your own scripting language for Java with JSR 223
To me the percentage itself isn't surprising but the ratio

percent of stories on homepage by top 10
--------------------------------------------
percent of stories submitted total by top 10

might be interesting, especially compared with

percent of stories on homepage by non-top n
-----------------------------------------------
percent of stories submitted total by non-top n

It would reveal if top submitters are just submitting more stories, or if they're submitting better stories.
Ask HN: How to design private messaging emoticons?
I have a social networking site that I have coded myself. I have an option there for members to send comments back and forth to each other. I want to enable 'emoticons'; but I am not sure how to do that.. Do I just put some 'special tags' in the comment and then decode while displaying? can someone offer any input on this?
On the East Coast, it's often cheaper and more environmentally friendly to buy imported French and Spanish wines rather than trucking them from CA. (I forget the study, my apologies.)

On the other hand, if you're just being patriotic, go right ahead.
The Dojo Offline Toolkit - Take your Web Application Offline
Cirtexhosting review
cirtexhostingreview.org is cirtexhosting reviewsite.
What are "top" stories? My front page shows 100 stories on reddit -- the default is higher than Digg right?

I do trust that Reddit does have a more robust top-user base, but I'm curious about the context.
Hmm. That is nice, but I would put back the form to make your own. Make the link to the twitter user's stream an afterthought. Probably not that big of a deal either way.
Power Law of Participation
Database War Stories: Google File System and BigTable
I just got around to watching it and really enjoyed it.

Thank you for the inspiration.
Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks - The Forth Shall Be First
Service and the Fifty Percent Rule
You could get the 2 largest cities in each country from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_and_seco...

Or this has the capital and cities larger than the capital:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_largest_ci...
Agreed. I personally think its a great thing that there are a core set of users that keep a site interesting and fresh.

I failed to mention these on accident, but here are a couple more stats to give a little more insight into how the update has affected things.

Pre Recommendation Engine, the top 10 only accounted for between 12-17% of stories on Digg's frontpage, the #1 digger Pre-RE (MrBabyMan) now barely registers post update (he was tied for 11th at the time of the article).
Ranking CS and SE Institutions by Authors and Publications
A "top" link is a link that has been the hottest link on all of reddit at some point.

There isn't really an analogous concept on Digg since there is no notion of hottness and links don't rise and fall. Links just appear at the top of the front page at some point.
The 11 Best Foods You're Not Eating
very true - that would be enlightening.

You can see something similar at http://top.searchyc.com/points_per_submission . That shows you the top users (on YC at least) by points per submission.

http://top.searchyc.com/points_per_comment is even more interesting in my opinion
Economics of a POW Camp (classic paper)
An interesting comparison would be the last n articles that have been ranked <= 25 for the default sub-reddit mix. At least that would compare the articles a user would see on each frontpage without customization.
This is a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238275
After watching this, it may work out better for you to just download the audio and the slides (and forget the video).

Randall talks ahead of the slides for much of the presentation, and it's honestly just easier to follow the slides plus the audio anyways - the video doesn't really add much.
Can someone copy and paste the full text please? I am not registering with the NY Times
First off, I heavily advise against emoticons. People are usually perfectly happy with plain-text ones, and some people are avidly against graphical ones. Plus, if you have many triggers for emoticons that aren't immediately obvious, people can become confused when an icon pops up where they weren't expecting one.

That said, implementing said emoticons is a simple task. Assign a list of emoticon codes and image files (eg. ":)" => "smile.gif" and ":D" => "grin.gif") either hardcoded or in a database table depending on your needs, and use a simple search-and-replace function to replace the emoticon code with an image tag of the file. Make sure this is done when the message's body is parsed, and NOT before it gets inserted into the database.
Good, because that would be really pathetic to not perform the simplest dead code elimination.
Best Explanation of why Lisp coders use Emacs
look into bbcode or the way msn, yahoo, aim, gmail chat etc. turn character combinations into "emoticons". Depending on your language of choice you will then do a string replace on the character combos for the image it relates to when you display that text.
Only for MyISAM tables...its a different story with Innodb: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/12/01/count-for-inn...
Crossbrowsertesting.com added macs in beta
Dabblers and Blowhards - A Criticism of PG
We just added a couple of macs to our service. We are still really just trying to get going... any advice or any more feedback would be great.
thanks
There are two elephants in the room here:

1. The exorbitant cost of the Bay Area (and other places like NYC, Boston, D.C., etc.) - there's a reason the Bay Area has the lowest ratio of children to overall population in the country. It's just not an affordable place to raise a family. It's essentially a giant suburbs without the traditional cost advantage of a suburb. You can live in Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc. for the price of living in a world class city like Chicago. You make that choice. Good for you.

2. Where are the grandparents? As someone from a more traditional culture, I don't quite understand the desire for couples to go it alone. Why not live near your parents or have them move to live near you? Grandparent-grandchild interaction is extremely valuable. It helps transmit your family values to your children while allowing your parents to stay mentally active and it also keeps them happy. It also significantly reduces childcare costs.

I'm not married yet and probably won't have kids for a few years but I really think this is the correct AND affordable approach:

*Evaluate where you are in life. There's no point waiting for the perfect time. Adversity is good for kids - it prevents them from growing up to be spoiled brats. I grew up in a Third World country and the only things my parents weren't cheap on were my health/nutrition, safety, and education. That's all that really matters. Have kids before you're too old.

A) If you have a lot of capital or high salary, stay where you are, and have one spouse work part time (can alternate), and suck it up till the kids are in school. Mix in a few days of daycare per week to allow for part-time.

B) If you don't have a lot of capital or a high salary, move somewhere cheap. Your spouse and you can both work full-time and afford daycare a few days a week.

In both situations, have the grandparents around! If you're an only child, it's easy - your parents will be there in a heartbeat. If you and your spouse are one of 2 kids, then your parents can alternate. If you and your spouse are one of 3 or more kids, live near your siblings. Raise your kids around your family.
s/frameworks/poorly-written frameworks/.

It's really amazing what poorly-written frameworks have done to the minds of people. When I teach classes on DBIx::Class (the Perl ORM), my students are shocked that $foo->bar->baz actually generates the SQL to follow the two relations as opposed to the "easy" "get list of results, then run query on each result, then return an array...". Actually, $foo->bar->baz, by itself, doesn't touch the database. The database is only contacted when you actually try to get information out of the result object. (And of course, the database is only queried once.)
One of the things so many people forget is that large parts of the internet are archived. It's not as easy as you think to remove something from the net.

Just removed some content? So what? I can find it on Google cache. Removed content a year ago? I'll find you on the Wayback Machine!

And that's before you get into syndication with other sites, bots, etc...
GOOG’s MySpace Problem: Serving Irrelevant Ads
A lot of the guys I knew that were good at maths were labelled nerds, so to admit to being good at maths is to risk being labelled a nerd by association. On the other hand, to say that you suck at maths implicity says things about you that avoid this association eg. "I dispensed with my maths education to hang out with the cool kids". I think most people know this intuitively.

The pride of a self-confessed maths half-wit is anchored in implied social standing rather than genuine pride in a lack of ability. I doubt anybody is saying "I can't add or subtract, how awesome am I?"
postgres has something similar. Pretty nice for benchmarking and optimizing queries.
I've always felt the painters connection was too tightly focused, though I think this essay (which is ancient, and would either be more true of pg's work today or less depending on how much you agree with it) goes overboard and manages to miss the point.

The bone that I do think can be picked with Hackers and Painters is that there just aren't very many hackers who are also painters. In fact, I only know one: pg. I know literally dozens of hackers who are musicians and four who are writers (oh, wait...pg makes it five). It seems to me that if the two categories of people were so alike, there would be significant overlap, but there is very little that I'm aware of. If you take "creative, systematic, and challenging pursuits" as a whole, however, you begin to see a lot more overlap (and again, musicians overlap a lot with hackers, moreso than any other "creative, systematic, and challenging pursuit").

Maybe because I'm a musician and a hacker (by some definition of "musician" and "hacker") I'm seeing all of these connections in the same way that pg, who is a painter and a hacker, sees connections between his two loves. It all makes sense when you're looking at your own likes and dislikes, but nobody else will really understand exactly what you see in your hobbies.
Try this ... its the same story...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25560815/
On jaanix it is the same ~30% for new users (no personalization).

But for returning users we have a personalized front page, and on top of that the posts are diversified so each topic and person gets fair attention the way YOU want it.
Auction software
AJ Auction has the member login page where the member can view his listed products details, Edit his profile, Change passwords, settings etc. The Buyer can send query or comment about the product.
Interesting question. Probably one reason there are a lot more hacker/musicians than hacker/painters is that there are a lot more musicians than painters. Painting is not exactly a flourishing field at the moment. But there are a significant number of hackers who are good at graphic design.

The thing I was saying hackers and painters had in common was that they're both makers. As opposed to the idea prevalent when I was in college, that programming was applied math. I believe it was in protest against this idea that Knuth called his books The Art of Computer Programming.
The Largest Known prime by Year: A Brief History
Well that's the thing: maths as taught in (British) schools is interminably dull. Kids are told, you need to learn to add up in case, errr, you work in a shop. Exciting, huh?

It wasn't until I was 18 and in college that I first encountered interesting maths, linear programming. It was, literally, mind expanding. Suddenly an entire class of problems that I simply could not think about before were, well, not easy necessarily but possible. An experience like that is needed at a younger age.
I'm not sure I understand. It's premised on "vim users who can customize vim with C programming", but I've never used C once in my ten years of using vim--customizations are generally done using vim script, which is sort of like working in csh or bash. And, it rarely takes more than a half dozen or so lines to do just about anything I've ever wanted to do (though some complex scripts are much longer, of course).

So, technically this is really the "best explanation of why the creator of this image mistakenly believes Emacs is better than vim".
I think you must check out the “Hello Bolo” viral on http://www.media2win.com/landingpage/Sprite/?um=10
, its really rib-tickling!
I am employed at a Pittsburgh tech startup (www.pittpatt.com). There seems to be alot of benefits from our perspective to Pittsburgh. The primary difficulty is the prebuilt assumption in the CS/EE programs that you need to leave Pittsburgh to get a good job.
heights of consumer era! Now you don’t even have to waste your money on messaging for your free talktime, all you need to do now is enter your code on http://www.media2win.com/landingpage/Sprite/?um=10
How do they explain why depression comes back when the meds are withdrawn?
check out http://www.media2win.com/landingpage/Sprite/?um=10
, it has this really cool viral called “Hello Babloo” as well as some really wacky ways to win free talktime!
As a hacker / musician and one who's tried my hand at painting, at least painting as it exists in culture at the moment tends to be less analytical than current approaches to music (which are very analytical). I think the balance might be shifted if we were looking at painting in for instance the Bauhaus movement, or classical painting.

That said, as someone who's also pretty serious about music and hacking, while there are similarities in being able to work from an idea and bring that to realization, there are gaps in that programming is functional; music needn't be. In that I see programming as closer to architecture than to painting or music.
But there are a significant number of hackers who are good at graphic design.

Righteous argument. If painting, as an art form, has been replaced by graphic design, then clearly there is significant overlap, and probably on the same order as musicians. I don't know how much I believe "painters", as a class, have become "designers", since almost none of the painters I knew in high school (I went to a school for fine arts, so I knew a lot of painters) have since become digital artists, but that may be just a sign of my age...I was among the last generation of kids that didn't grow up using computers daily.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I think the primary problem is that "painters" is too specific...though it makes for a better title than "Hackers and People Who Make Art of Some Kind". When you open it up to include designers and other visual artists, musicians (like Knuth, who has a massive pipe organ in his house and plays it beautifully), and writers, the overlap becomes very nearly 100%. Every hacker of note that I can think of off the top of my head has at least one of these as a hobby, particularly if you allow "visual arts" to include things like robotics, DIY electronics with an artistic purpose, 3D modeling, etc. As you've said, hackers are makers, and it often spills over into other kinds of production.
That's a great question deserving some serious analysis. I'm not an expert in sociology or history, so you're getting peanut-gallery guesswork instead :)

I'd guess it had to do with the level of dedication among followers. When ideologies clash, the one with more fervent believers tends to roll over the others.
Nachiket,
That should have been "Hello Babloo"...

Anyway...
I didnt understand that... "Kolega to bolega". What does it mean? Open the bottle and then it will talk?
Segway CTO Leaves to Become Apple Product Design VP
Before being acuired by Google, does anyone know Jaiku's uptime and other stats? Were they too this bad as Twitter?
Was so happy to see this BLACK NERD thread but ultimately, I have decided the article just ain't right.

For example, this is wrong: HE SAID>>>For blacks, it goes above and beyond just clothes — sneakers (Air Force ones, Jordans, etc.), jewelry, hairstyle, shape ups, belt buckles, chains, tattoos, diamond studs, do rags, fitted caps — which makes popularity that much more exclusive and more difficult to attain.<<<

Are you kidding me? Where where you on the 4th of July when black folk of all economic backgrounds were out cooking out outside across America, with their families and enjoying Being a Family my Friend?

And he said: >>If you ever watch a black family (and this holds trues from Latinos whom I’ve spent time with as well) they spend much more time worrying about the material and outwardly appearance — driving the right car, clothes, accessories, hair, etc. Paul alludes several times throughout the essay (and indeed, in his response,<<

Naw, this ain't right either because my son, aged 16 (and we all black right) spent a lot of time learning how to drive Boston streets, thru downtown, into Cambridge, past Somerville and back to our burbs and all the way along we discussed why all the music he was playing on the car CD sounded to me like "FALL OUT BOY" or "HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS" and he said -- Daddy now, its all original! His playlist has several hundred tracks, mostly different bands...

"I know it is but I'm sorry son, I said, but with some exceptions in the tracks playing, I haven't heard anything original from your 52 track playlist, that to me did not sound like FALL OUT BOY or HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS."

So, he defended it over and over and said - "No, they don't 'em sound like them dad." Yeah, right. I listen to over a hundred new tracks every month, all genres and I do know better!!

I was itching to get some RAP/HIP HOP even if it was that hypnotic track by Lil Wayne talking about Lolipops.

Personally, I love the FOB, HH stuff but I don't want to give overdue credits to their copiers! Well, he does and so went the discussion.

That's a small diverse taste of Black Life from BLACK NERDS in America Mr. davidadewumi! Your piece screamed of a lack of diversity in the African American American family.

So, you are right and you are so wrong too, which is my ultimate conclusion -- you like a viewpoint that adequately explains how diverse we all are, no matter what color we are.
Yeah... screenshot please!!!
And I'm also wondering how this ink was found
what about "Hackers and Graffiti Artists"? That would make also make sense on a lot of levels depending on your definition of graffiti and hacking.
Like to see more hypotheses.

Read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. He spends a good chunk of the book analyzing some of the human traits that make us susceptible to religion, as well as the evolutionary advantages of each.
Check out kim kardashian sex tape
News on Kim Kardashian and her sex tape scandal.
Spirituality is a type of experience. No more superstitious a term than "happy" or "hungry" or "purple" or "curious".
Good Bye To The Purple Mothership: Leaving Yahoo
I was not being literal. Pittsburgh has so much talent that they don't need an incubator that attracts it from elsewhere. They need more appeal to the talent that's already there, like the founders of Buxfer.

By the way, to all who want to understand the deep roots and historical foundations of how the Bay Area got where it is in this ecosystem, let me be the millionth YC reader to recommend The Secret History of Silicon Valley:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101527
Not AFAICS; count( * ) and count( 1 ) are trivially equivalent, and this doesn't depend on the storage engine being used. It is true that count( * ) without a WHERE clause is much faster in MyISAM than in Innodb (or Postgres), but that is a different optimization (count( * ) => metadata lookup, not count( 1 ) => count( * )).
If you go for the first name last name route, and your target is not just english speaking users, you might want to check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name
For anyone shopping for a great chair, I am totally in love with my Steelcase Think chair. It adjusts to anyone who sits in it, so it can be used by multiple people and the settings are extremely easy to set, unlike the Aeron.

For the eco-conscious, it's also 99% recyclable and is easy to assemble/disassemble. Then there are the looks, which I find much more appealing than most chairs.
Why are we assuming that all nerds are smart? My high school had several "dumb" nerds (Napoleon Dynamite-ish). Nerds are people who are socially inept. Add intelligence to a nerd and all you have is an intelligent nerd, he has not moved up the social ladder at all. The real question should be "Why are smart black kids with no social skills unpopular?" but that wouldn’t be much of a question, would it? They’re unpopular because they have no social skills, being smart has nothing to do with it. Since the author states that blacks put so much emphasis on their social status, it makes perfect sense that anyone not exhibiting socially acceptable behaviors would be deemed unpopular. You could easily have said:

Why are black kids who wear tight clothes unpopular?

Why are black kids who listen to heavy metal unpopular?

Why are black male virgins unpopular?

If you do unpopular stuff then you will not be popular. Interesting article, but way off base. Oh, and if you are wondering, I’m BLACK.
Ask HN: Are you using computers to augment your intellect?
Are you using computers to augment your intellect?

For example, do you often write Python programs to make your life easier?

By augmenting the intellect I mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation.

It seems most people are using computers for entertainment and to connect to other people/ideas.

What do you think? Are we using computers to their full potential?

Are you leveraging the power of computers? How? Do you think knowing how to program would be useful to everyone?

I'm very curious.