skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* does it bother you when you say stock phrases such as "HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!"?

No, it allows me to simply respond with a stock answer and move on with my day.

* does it make sense to have resolutions once a year at the same time as everyone else?

Yes, Life is long. Having a sprint last a year makes sense. It is also easier for people to reflect and major changes in their life on natural boundaries like a new years, 20th, 30th, 40th... birthday.

* what exactly is the new year a celebration of for most people? The fact that humanity is still here? Or perhaps the making of resolutions? Something religious?

I will speak for most people; they are celebrating the past years accomplishments, friends they made, places they have gone, things they have experienced...

* what do studies say about how effective the making of resolutions is and whether they improve society overall?

It is not a time for research... it is a time for drinking late into the night while coding your next project.

2010 kicked ass, but now it is on to the next one!!!
Open Source Contribution Etiquette
My resolution this year is the same as last year: 1680x1050!
Yes, both were really awesome, though my girlfriend _hated_ objectfied.
Reminds me of this Ted TV Talk by Tom Chatfield:

http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_t...

There was another Ted TV talk that it reminded me of too, but I couldn't remember what it was.
also high rates of default
Paul Graham, who created this very Hacker News you are reading now.
Every life counts. But I feel like this is only showing one side of the issue. Capital is distilled, economic trust. All human beings deserve a baseline level of trust. As such, access to capital is a human right. Without some form of trust extended to those in poverty (through capital lending or otherwise) how could they ever emerge from their poverty?

I hope this does not sound too callous. Every single suicide is a tragedy. But only 70 of 14,364 suicides were related to microloans -- only half a percent. 70 suicides represents only one millionth of Andhra Pradesh's population, a state with an infant mortality rate of 5.2%. If the actions of those 70 suicides merely improve infant mortality by even one percent for one percent of the population, microfinance will have paid itself back for the health of families several fold -- and for the families who strove and succeeded, not those who, by their own actions, created a situation they did not have the willpower to escape.

1.2 million people a year are killed by automobiles -- and yet they have given us tremendous freedom. The solution to the problem of automobile deaths is not an outright ban, but infrastructure, norms, and education -- which can drop deaths from nearly than 80 per annum per 100,000 inhabitants in Iraq and Iran to over 50 in South Africa to less than 5 in Canada, Australia and Argentina.

Though hundreds die from general anaesthesia each year, its positive impact on medicine and surgery has been tremendous. The solution to these deaths is not a ban, but improved education, environmental support, and systematic changes in health care (see for example: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...)

Access to capital -- and more generally, access to trust, is a powerful force. Wielded properly, it is can be a tremendously powerful tool for good -- but also for harm.

I hope that these revelations will be a learning experience, and force us to think more deeply about how to connect with the impoverished. Clearly, access to capital alone is not enough to enable the ascension from poverty. But in many cases, it is a limiting factor. We must not retract willingness to lending of capital -- our trust in a whole class of impoverished people -- as a result of these early mistakes.
Yes, if the customers are doing hardware testing it's a disaster for satisfaction, and you also have the cost of repair and shipping and recalls. It's very interesting trade off wise. When I worked in the semiconductor industry, there was a fail rate of something like 35% of chips cut from the wafer. Depending on the complexity and size of the chip relative to the wafer, that rate could go up to 90%, or down to 10%. This is because of things outside of human ability to control, microscopic defects in the substrate for example, or a single dust particle that got into the clean room. These were tested on the full sized wafer and marked with dots and then after cutting the ones with dots are tossed out. Needless to say, it is utterly crucial that significant parts of the chip design must be solely for the purpose of being able to completely test functionality on-chip. This results then in 100% functioning of things that went out the door. I've never even seen a CPU that went to a customer that had a known defect at that stage, so the step of tossing away a large number is just part of manufacturing. However in the case of manufacturing boards overseas, it is definitely possible to increase field significantly. The units were just as testable over there as they are here in the US, without the trouble of unpacking and repacking the retail boxes. But for whatever reason reform of the foreign manufacturing plant simply was not happening and not something they were interested in, and management apparently felt that the trade offs involved made sense, including all the extra rework and testing.

One thought that has occurred to me though is that Apple is using much more poor quality manufacturing than they were years ago, and there is a high failure rate of Apple laptops. However, they have a warranty that covers fixing everything for 1 year and everyone sane knows to buy the extended 3 year since there's something like a 1 in 4 chance you'll need it. So Apple has figured that they save enough making it in China that they can absorb the cost of fixing 25% of the ones where the customer bought AppleCare. These repairs are usually replacing the whole motherboard with spares that they buy in vast quantities for each and every model. This is all done very intentionally for sound economic reasons and customer satisfaction is very high despite the failures.
Point. I was unclear in my phrasing, I was more looking into just not accidentally bypassing it. Deliberately bypassing it probably can't be stopped but really at that point you've already lost. Given what I've seen in the world somebody grabbing an existing proxy script and regexing out the check and never once stopping to think this is way worse than hosting the file yourself wouldn't even make me blink.
Ask HN: Portfolio site for Web & Mobile Apps
There's plenty of portfolio websites for web designers, architects, graphic artists etc. but I haven't really come across a similar site for web and mobile app developers. There's github of course, but you can't really showcase your apps with screenshots or video captures through it. So here's my question, would any developer be interested in sharing his work and creating a portfolio of his web and mobile apps if such website existed?
It's quite easy to say what a real accomplishment is in this case; a WoW achievement or piece of gear is a flag or row in a database. The actual value of the accomplishment is near nil; "real" accomplishments are some improvement to some part of your life as a function of work.

WoW accomplishments only feel like accomplishments because there is an artificial barrier in place to reach them. At the end of the day, the net result is "I added a database row". Compare to something like getting in shape, at which point the net result is "I've improved my health and added 15 years to my life" or to learning a skill that helps you contribute to financial success or the creation of something that increases the beauty in others' lives.

If it were actually difficult or noteworthy to achieve things in WoW, then yes, they would be "real" accomplishments. However, a DBA could run a query and give you 6 years worth of "accomplishments" on a whim (at no cost to anyone else!). How can they be called real accomplishments when, after the varnish has been stripped away, they can be granted with six seconds of work?

There are some real accomplishments to be had - you might learn how to manage people, or the basics of supply and demand and arbitrage and resource speculation, or time management, or hone better reflexes and spatial awareness, etc, but none of those are "WoW accomplishments". What I mean to say is that WoW is not fully valueless, but that the things it presents as "accomplishment" are empty and meaningless at the end of the day.
That would describe me as well, though I've taken up self-teaching myself web development since about a week or two ago. Though I come from a (traditional) business and psychology background in my studies, I feel most at home in the strong entrepreneurial culture of the tech space.
To my knowledge the graph of "health benefits" versus alcohol is highest for people who drink the most, of course, but also has a noteworthy increase for people who drink zero. During a discussion with some sedentary behaviour researchers we speculated the lower end of the graph is less so do with the alcohol itself but rather the personalities associated with the different consumptions levels:

- Zero alcohol group; likely to contain above-average numbers of people who are strict on themselves, and thus more likely to be stressed often

- Medium alcohol group; likely to contain above-average numbers of people who enjoy relaxing

- High alcohol group; a high alcohol intake is bad for your health and is likely to include above-average numbers of people with a poor quality of life

I know of no medical evidence to specifically back up that idea, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that worrying less about things can yield improvements in health.

So in conclusion whilst the "eat and drink" bit of "eat, drink and be merry" might be debatable, the "be merry" bit is definitely good advice. HAPPY NEW YEAR HACKER NEWS!!!

:)
Hey man, love your reading lists. Thanks for taking the time to read a lot of what I assume is junk and distill it down to something useful.

Edit (to avoid being entirely off-topic): My resolution, which I've been plugging away at, is to strike up conversation with a stranger a day. On the day I die, I'm confident that I'll be content with the amount of work I've managed to squeeze in. But extrapolating the current trends, I'm not so sure I'll be able to say the same about my social life without a bit of active adjustment.
I would add -- if you're expecting to make money off this, you're probably better off advertising your own consulting services -- at suitably high rates. You're the expert now... :-)
My new year resolution is to set 28 day goals. Every 1st of the month I set a something as my goal, then work on it for 28 days. I have to make sure I do not deviate from it. Then after 28 days, what ever time is left in the month will be "relaxation" time. The cycle repeats.
1) Build and publish my first real app

2) Cut the beer consumption

3) Lose weight (already lost about 10 pounds in about a month due to beginning #2 early)

4) Begin regular exercise (I already started semi-regular walking but then weather suddenly went to -25C and 60 cm of snow...)

5) 1280x1024 and sometimes 2560x1024
I am sorry it takes a while to develop, but if you give it a chance you might find something interesting.

As Pascal said, I didn't have time to write a shorter one.
No problem - that's what I do. :-)
We got started making repraps but decided to move away from the focus of self replication and start our own thing with the focus of bringing 3D printing to the masses by making a printer that's cheap, uses as many off the shelf parts as possible, and that we could produce with tools we had. We had a lasercutter at NYCResistor and I sat in front of that thing for weeks making the first few hundred MakerBots. We still strive to make our stuff compatible with RepRap machines so that folks who don't want to build the whole thing from scratch can get an extruder or electronics from us and hack it into their built from scratch machine.
Beehive, a Multi-core Platform for Low-level Systems Research
I used to think this, but in the last year I've seen that the science isn't really so ambiguous. The /reporting/ of it is total chaos though. Which is what you'd expect given the various different stakeholders in the food industry.
Dude, don't feed the trolls.
Poll: Do you read Hacker News and not have any programming ability?
I'm re-posting this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056020) as a poll because some people might prefer to click an arrow than write a response. As noted: This includes being able to make pretty much any sort of computer or internet program or app, basic html not included.
I have none but want to learn
I have none and don't want to learn
Added a bit about our audience and structure. I'd like to come up with something unique- I thought vita was good, given the academic feel, but on second thought it might be stilted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_share
You don't need to cite the paper. You only need to cite your sources if you are publishing further academic literature. The whole point of publishing literature is to enable other people to actually use the findings in practical life.

If it so moves you, you can write a nice blog post about the algorithm and send an email thanking the author.

You should also be careful. The original author or their institution may have patented the algorithm.
If you read carefully, you can see that I am not saying that journalism or publishing are dead. I am saying that the attempt to grasp at the model of the past is dead.

I don't agree that the iPad is a nail in the coffin. IMO, its impact on the future of journalism and publishing is vastly overestimated.
me! :)
OpenCL - this year I've been learning about GPU acceleration, and while it may not be good for everything it is looking very interesting for various applications.

While my area is currently graphics/simulation I'm wondering how effective adding GPUs as accelerators to large scale web problems would be. It's really taking of in the Super Computing area, so I'm sure there is room for it!
I thought it was great; very applicable to programming (though jordanb made a good point as well). :-) Sorry to hear about your head though, hope it wasn't too serious.
Ha! Great point. My next post will have to be about digging deeper into the real problem.

I don't picture the controls on the other side of a big, tub, just somewhere that they can always be reached. Is there a "better" shower design out there? Voice controlled temp? :-)
For those who don't know, what is so special about this camera?
My favorite way to learn vim was vimtutor, but unfortunately vimtutor ends too soon. There is so much that vimtutor does not cover. Does anyone know of an advanced vimtutor?
Plenty of people use Google Analytics, which, of course, gives Google just as much access.
So much for encouraging people to get college degrees. If they all end up getting the same degree and flooding the market, what was the point? I hoped that the growth would be spread out between many fields, but everyone just piling in and getting business degrees doesn't help.
Here's another Ted Talk you may be thinking of...

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...
Congrats. Programming is made out to be a hard thing and for people who don't think logically it is. But to a logically thinking person it's like the greatest game you'll ever discover.
You are correct that the system is not what is best for the world, however we do not have tariff regulations that would temper the effects of exporting pollution and human misery, and corporate interests control legislation to this effect through lobbyists and bribes. Right now, if you work, the company you work for is destroying the environment. Even Greenpeace and PeTA use computer components made in China, and drive cars that use oil paid for with human misery in authoritarian and failed states. To have a job or a computer at all you become part of the system. There is the option of going completely off grid and being self sufficient in an Adobe house in Mexico, or a cabin in Alaska, but few choose this path.
Slightly different question: If you don't program, why? Because it doesn't seem relevant, or you've tried and don't like it, or you've tried and can't do it, or other people can do it well, or it seems scary, or your expertise is elsewhere, or...?

I meet lots of people who want to build things that require programming but don't program for whatever reason, and I've always wondered what the root cause there is.

Also, happy new years ;)
Count me in. Can't say how many ideas I've head for some startups but always fall short because I lack programming skills. For me, time is of the essence - and it hasn't been easy to wrap my head around programming therefore I estimate at least 5 years of learning to accomplish my ideas.

I've been reading about how no tech people will partner with someone just because they have an idea and frankly I'd like to give the middle finger to those authors, however they are most likely right as I cannot seem to find anyone to help me out.

I just wish there was a place to find good programmers with free time who want to take an idea and turn it into reality.

Any tips?
Why does the title not reflect that? Marketing copy?
Your next step on the path to being a hacker is to share your work. Where can we see your "web scraper" in action?
...Does working in close proximity to engineers count? I truly believe I'm absorbing their brainwaves.
So what do you hope to accomplish if you do these resolutions?
That is what is normally called either a "Golden Parachute" or a "Poison Pill". Management at large firms do it all the time, especially if they suspect that their firm is about to be acquired. While they still control the company, they write themselves contracts with fat, juicy termination clauses. Then, when their company gets taken over, they get huge money if they are fired. It works out well for them either way - the new owners either keep them or give them a hell of a lot of money.
My cofounders were C# guys. One new benefit I thought of recently was that C# is similar to Java and thats what mobile apps are coded apart from Objective-C. Who says the MVP has to be a webapp? :)

In anycase, my thinking was just get started first. Im probably going to dabble in Python or Ruby (probably Python) just to see what its like at some point. But for the time being, just getting my head down and writing code and asking really n00b questions on stackoverflow is definitely the way to go.
If you'll permit me to be annoyingly geeky, "That's good. You have taken your first step into a larger world." :)
Starting Up 2011
Probably because they don't have the mindset of a programmer. They might be good learners but lack motivation - at least that's my problem.
Do you ever mention your ideas to programmers at all? Or do you not know any at all?
Note this is not based on clinical research but likely a survey of surveys. It is the least reliable form of research the point is not to come to conclusions but to question the methodology of the original study and suggest improvements. I don't have easy acess to the article at home but it is highly unlikely the article would approve of the conclusions in the article.

Cardiac health is just one of the possible factors increasing life span. There is no way to factor out the root cause this way. You need a control.

I will warn about alcohol and tylinol use together somehow this is not well known it may be very very dangerous together. Tylinol is so common it was hard to spot the combined risks.
Milton Friedman's Free To Choose
Uh - that's exactly what this script does!
If you're interested in web scraping, take a look at Mechanize (it's available for Perl, Python, and Ruby, at least, though I prefer Ruby) - it makes web scraping trivial.
It uses JSDOM (http://jsdom.org/) under the hood. JSDOM is currently at DOM Level 1 (+additions). It also implements some of Level 2 and Level 3 (https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom/blob/master/test/testlog.txt).
I don't know where can I post it? Probably post it to my blog once I've commented it up. Heading out for dinner with the gf so check later! FYI, it looks like a thing of beauty to me but it probably looks like dogshit to the pros. lol.
Achievement unlocked! Startup Padawan ranked attained!
Reliable headless DOM implementations are one of major obstacles for JS as a first class language. Kudos and thanks to everyone that is working to solve this!
The signup fee is there to put a brake on growth and offset the development and hardware costs of scaling the site when lots of new users arrive.

Our bread and butter is the $25/year from archival accounts.
How To Manage A Tech Career
A Reflection on Networked Professional Learning
I'm not a developer, but software development is my business, since I run a web development software company. HN is a great way to learn as much as I possibly can about this business and stay ahead. I am learning how to code (python), but I am not (nor ever will be) a software developer.
It's indirect. If publishers have difficulty reaching their audience, so do journalists.
I would venture to say that you knew programming, you just didn't know coding. Organizing a good program is not all that different from organizing a good business.
Truth be told I don't know many. The few I know are always busy with something even though it doesn't seem like it ever takes them anywhere. Tried hiring a few and communication always seems to be a huge problem, thus projects going unfinished.
I second this, while I get that it is the only one, what makes it so special, was it a prototype, is it some sort of super collector version?
tip: use dj to delete two lines
> Thiel

Applied :)

> Rich

Physical finances, nope. I wouldn't say so. Investing a lot of money into building some stuff (namely Avecora).
I'm under thirty, but I can't stand e-books and will be reading from dead trees until they stop printing on them.
Im not interested in web scraping per se but in my previous gig, I was doing erm some 'marketing' through social networks and I was frustrated at not being able to contribute more actively to the process. The marketing work was essentially a programmers job.

So its nice to be able to look under the hood now and see whats going on!
I don't code because I don't need to: I an employer to other smart developers who are better at development than I could ever be.
Much like this article right? The article simply brought to light a study that says "previous studies suffer from a bias". The study did not appear to say "alcohol is bad for the heart" or that those studies drew incorrect conclusions. Simply that future work should really take this into account.

That's important, because work needs to be done to identify other lifestyle habits that tend to be present in lifelong-teetotalers, but not in the drinking group. I think it's entirely reasonable to think that folks who abstain from alcohol over the course of a lifetime probably have a lot of other habits that are a bit healthier as well.

So I think it's important to note that this article drew very little in the way of conclusions, but I get the feeling that folks are going to take it and run with it anyways.