skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like the author (kijinbear?) focuses a bit too much on demonizing a culture of shame; nothing makes a culture of guilt inherently "better" or "worse" on any kind of absolute scale. Yes, there are high suicide rates in some developed Asian countries like Korea or Japan, but if you look at a list of countries by suicide rates by percentage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...) only TWO of the top ten countries are those Asian countries with "cultures of shame." I feel like more media attention is directed to those in the East because they're more "exotic." This isn't limited to suicides, by any means, either.

Also, saying that the "culture of shame" is inherently connected to "honor killings" seems more like an ad hominem than anything else: "Look at these barbarians in their shame culture, the shame culture itself must be barbaric!"

There are simply two different kinds of sticks and mothers used both.

I don't agree with the closer, either -- it's too simple. Some people should be ashamed of themselves. The guy who shot Giffords? Shame. Rush Limbaugh and his ching chang chong jokes? Shame.

If you can't control yourself and balloon up to 300 pounds when you're 5'5"? Shame. It's not "okay" to be fat -- you're killing yourself. Sure, you have the freedom, but that doesn't mean you should exercise it to excess.

What does guilt get you? Feelings of remorse after the fact. A culture of guilt, it could be argued, is a culture of remorse and confession in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

My take-away from the article is that it's more focused on using loaded words and stories to beat up on the "dumb," "dehumanizing" culture of shame.
Tell HN: Can we please stop down-voting Protagonists?
I was playing with my settings the other day and turned on Show Dead. Most stuff is just spam, occasionally there are some reasonable comments, but I noticed this today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131615 (Matt Mullenweg responding to a comment about Wordpress Security. Sure his comment was light on details -- but it was incredibly relevant to the overall discussion)

In Short: If HN is talking about someone - don't downvote them, even if you think they are wrong. Getting their side of the story is more valuable than showing your displeasure.
Open Positions at Grow VC
Spot on. I am a geezer (40 y/o) who wants to get some fresh air and I kinda need to know what's out there. No hard feelings against my current employer. I am looking for a challenge and I don't think this is the place.

I find my title vague when I scan the wanted ads.

Recruiters make my head spin as they always seem to look for highly specialized "<skillset>> gurus" or "<<skillset>> ninjas" and I always end up comparing with how broad my set of skills are.

How can I be sure this is what an employer may be looking for?
The only part of the argument which got quoted in the article is that in D&D, some people give orders to other people, and in that way, it "mirrors the structure of a gang". Which is an argument that would encompass not just religion, but all sorts of other things. In a poetry group, one prisoner tells the others that today they'll be writing sonnets. A sure sign of gang activity!

In fairness, there may be more to the argument; all we have is a couple of paraphrased sentences from what was presumably a lot more testimony than that. But it doesn't help that those few sentences are inaccurate. The claim goes that "The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which ... mimics the organization of a gang." That's not how I ever played D&D. The dungeon master doesn't give orders; he tells the players what happens when they do whatever they do of their own accord. One player character might give orders to another. But a DM that regularly tries to tell the PCs what to do, even through an NPC mouthpiece, is a pretty bad DM...
I really like the tools and the food database at livestrong.com. I've never found any value in any of the other content. Guess I know why, now.
I am thinking about 2 things right now:

First, send e-mails to famous blogers and ask them to post about my website.

Second, post about website right here, on hackernews, and ask people to post review on their blogs if they find it useful and interesting website.

What do you think?
For me Twitter is usually much better for an initial contact. So it's an incredibly valuable resource.
That only works for a small number of domains.
Extracting (appropriate) value, yes, but how and when becomes the issue. If the company is going through a cashflow issue - far from unheard of in a startup - insisting on extracting the full value of your pound of flesh there and then would be counterproductive. Equally one's startup should be increasing in value by more to than the cost of the hire so again it could very well be in your interest as that sort of employee not to extract the full value if to provide the lead for free could permit a far earlier hiring than would otherwise be the case.
Any other HN'ers with Java to Scala experience? A friend of my friend tried doing the same, but eventually his team decided that its not worth the effort (I don't know more details actually, only that they are doing some enterprise software)
One important thing in delegation, I find is to not fix things yourselves, even when they would be easy to fix for you. Explain the theory behind it and let them fix it themselves, next time they do it better.

Also, if you over-delegate, make sure you have properly consolidated power at the top. When your employees get too independent, they start to get ideas about creating their own company or they start refusing to take instructions.
Gotta give credit where credit is due. Mark, congrats on successfully selling off Threewords.me. Best of luck in your next startup.
Hmm, that's kind of strange. There's so many important socio-political dilemmas for young people to grapple with these days, why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict? Shouldn't young people be forgiven for holding the unequivocal yet naive belief that we shouldn't kill each other, or even threaten to? I mean, if they're equivocating on nukes when they're a fresh-faced 22, what will they be equivocating on when they're a grizzled 55 and at the reins of some real power?

get's to bottom of article, reads that author represented NM in the house...back up to the byline...

Fucking Heather Wilson. Should have known...
Well if it only crawls predetermined sites then it's an index plus a scraper. If it finds new sites, then it's a search engine.

At least I think that's the distinction.
copying listings in basic from magazines to get games on to my spectrum as a kid, some of it must have sunk in!
I personally bet that we will hit bottom, and pretty soon. But that's totally an unsupportable gut feeling (and certainly could be said to go contrary to experience thus far).

This is really nice; thank you: "The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks."
Lot of students who love maths love Richard Birds books : http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Bird/e/B001HCWQ9I/ref=sr_ntt_s...
Leadership Games - What Makes a Great Leader?
Videos from Scala Days 2010
I'm pretty sure the article is by Elie Mystal, as it says at the top. The article in the sidebar is by Robert Kinney and Evan Jowers of Kinney Recruiting (the sidebar "article" more of a job list). Still, it's an easy enough distinction to miss that it could lead the guy to some trouble. Such is the price one pays for sponsoring content.
this made me sad. I am tempted to post them my set of 20 sided dice.
I'm a natural introvert. I prefer to work alone.

It seems the 1% inspiration --> 99% perspiration ratio is kept, this way.

But really it's just that I like being alone.
We should resist to the temptation to let "crapiness" be a regular part of our vocabulary.
For some queries, not necessarily all, I'd also like to be able to block all sites containing AdSense.

An obscure advanced search operator would be fine. I don't mind having to type it, or having it clutter my query-text. Options for blocking other ad networks, or all, would also be appreciated.

If Google offered this, it would be a strong indicator that search functionality is offered without any contamination by revenue concerns.
Yeah - different lesson, so different story.

I learned, the hard way, that over-delegation can lead to abdication.
When someone I've never met seems overly interested in me for no particularly obvious reason I'm suspicious.
Wow you're right. I missed that. Thanks. It is here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbck...
I don't see why I shouldn't be writing for the largest audience possible

Could your audience also be limited by the fact that your modules are IRC bots and bindings to XML parsers that already have bindings? :)
I meant more along the lines of actually listening to what they're saying and responding in a proper manner.

Rather than the usual "Ahuh, ok great, here's what I do and what my startup is talks for 10+ minutes without stopping"

I think you could also say it as "Be friendly"
> I suppose mail ordering things from another state could qualify

You're supposed to pay "use tax" on those, which for some reason is always equal to the sales tax you think you avoided. So it's still evasion rather than gaming.
Which is why you simplify it in such a way as to make tax games impossible.

Here's my favoured solution: the US Government spent $3.6 trillion this year. There are 280 million people living there. Therefore, Federal tax should be a flat $12,857 per person.

For the average income earner, this is about the same as they're already paying. For those earning more, they find they're incentivised to work harder, since every dollar they earn beyond that point is entirely their own. And for those earning less... well, it's the kick in the butt that they need to start working harder too.

Not too easy to game that system, is it?
Can you clarify when you think it's a good idea to override the user's OS and browser language settings based on IP registration information? (Chrome's wording in the languages settings tab is: "Add the languages you use to read websites, listing in order of preference.")

Also, it's not "localization-challenged". I would be more sympathetic to sites in general if there was no Accept-Language header, and if geo-IP lookup was some automatic service baked into every web app library.

But no, sites doing this go out of their way to do this. It's as if there's some secret coalition of idiot PMs that think adding IP-based language settings is going to get them a bonus or something.
Blech only one in Florida? That can't be right. If it is it's highly discouraging
Is there a way to view these in my android?

Nevermind, figured it out. Downloaded Amazon Kindle, moved the downloaded file to the kindle folder in the sdcard.
Cool to see a writeup on a success :)

Doesn't say what everyone wants to know though - how much it sold for.

Also this is funny and sums up the domain name business for me:

> "He finally sold to Kevin Ham, an Internet entrepreneur who owns 300 million in domain names including God.com and Satan.com."

god.com gets no traffic
satan.com fares even worse

Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean anything.
The publications you mentioned missed the wave with Facebook and Twitter so they are now over-compensating with stories about Foursquare, Quora, et al

I heard directly from a journalist at one of these publications that they have been directed to pursuit the latest hot startups so that they don't miss out again.
For me, the more hard drive space I have, the more PDF's I save. Doesn't mean I read them. The more time I spend on the web, the more "to-read should-read" stuff I find. Doesn't mean I read it.

Real reading happens for me when I shut the computer and focus on just one thing.
> Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean anything.

It means he has money ;-)
The AirPlay Network
Teddy Roosevelt was known for his speed-reading ability:

http://artofmanliness.com/2009/10/18/how-to-speed-read-like-...
$10K iTunes Winner Hung Up On Apple, Thought It Was a Prank
Cool, I will be there again, too.
I'm offended by such bad writing.
What is a non-interactive wiki?
Sounds good to me. A win for both of us.
Once a writer has credentials on Techcrunch, they can go in and write whatever they want. Posts are not reviewed.

MA stresses that each writer has editorial independence, and there isn't a "techcrunch view" per se on any subject.
No problem. I would like to explain though why I think there is not going to be a bottom: physics is an experimental science; all physical theories have to be tested by experimental evidence.

I'm sure you know how much trouble string theory has had -- not because it is bad science, but simply because it is hard to come up with a way to test something that makes claims that lie at the limits of our understanding. Suppose though after decades of painstaking experiments we do come up with a Unified Theory (UT). But then one fine day someone notices some strange effect beneath that is not explained by the UT. What then? When Max Planck decided to become a physicist (end of 19th century), his advisor told him that basically "everything in physics has already been discovered, physics now is only concerned about details." We may feel the same way after we come up with UT, but even UT may be "the tip of an iceberg" that is actual deep reality.

As another illustration, the space-time is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and that space-time expansion is not limited by the speed of light. Some time in the distant future (a few billion years?), the background radiation we now see from the time of the Big Bang will be off limits because the Universe's boundary will have expanded faster than light. So the future scientists will be forever in the dark about how the Universe came about. They will generate some theories about it, maybe even close to correct ones, but they will never really know what happened in the beginning.

There are certain physical bounds (computational complexity, irreversibility of entropy/time, uncertainty principle, the speed-of-light limit, cosmological constant) that prevent us from knowing everything and which may be impossible to overcome. We should remain cautiously optimistic though, since pessimism is counter-productive. Also, hey, it looks like strong AI will be a reality one day, maybe it will answer those questions for us.
or he was just the first person to think of registering them...
eh, if you can afford to pay a headhunter $18K, you can afford to pay your employee little more than a grand. (Most programmers, rightly or wrongly, once they judge a few recruiter-arranged candidates, believe that recruiters bring no value, so the very idea that you are using a recruiter implies waste.)

On the other hand, like I said, if you can't afford to pay the headhunter, then your employee shouldn't whine about not getting a recruiting bonus. I've personally referred many people who got jobs, and I don't think I've ever gotten more than a free beer out of the deal.
Yeah, that's a different story I'll figure out how to properly tell some day as a lesson in what NOT to do. I'm still trying to extract some lessons from that and think what should have been done differently.

But if an employee has low morale, (whether working remotely or not), I'd only suggest this:

Is there another job inside the company they'd rather be doing? If so, help them do that. If not, let them know it's time to go!

Many people will need a push out the door, for their own good, if they're in a rut. Give them clear warning, of course, in case they're in a temporary rut, let them know that this low-morale rut may cost them their job.

But if they're still in a funk after months, you've tried to help but it's not helping, and it's hurting business, then let them go.

I had to fire a few people in this situation, including my VP!, and most told me a year later that it was the best thing for them. That they really were in a rut and needed to be pushed.
Mathematica has a nice syntax for function application, mapping over lists, etc. It's also possible to define such operators in Haskell, which has the added advantage of type-safety.

f @ {1,2,3} == f[{1,2,3}]
f /@ list == map(f, list)
f @@ {1,2,3} == f[1,2,3]

(#1 * 2) /@ {1,2,3} == {2,4,6}

etc.
For those who might have missed it, the Blekko (http://blekko.com/) search-engine already allows one to do this in a quite powerful way, and Google's plans might have been a response to it.

(the beauty of improvement through competition...)
The idea is that a computer could navigate your API as easily as a human could. You're encoding the interface of the state transitions into your responses.

> one to look up which URI to use, and then another to make the actual request.

The idea is that they'd naturally flow. Think about it: if I'm going to comment on a blog post, I've already visited it, and the link is already there.

> gotta parse that XML for the <link>

You'd already be parsing the entire document anyway, this is essentially free.

Maybe try checking this out: how to GET a cup of coffee: http://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow
If you're looking for a more DIY solution, I found a tool call iOS Beta Builder helpful. It prepares the XML manifest and creates a nice HTML page, so your testers just need to click to install. (you need their UDIDs first). The process is:
- "build and archive" from Xcode
- save the ipa
- drag it into beta builder
- publish output to a your website
- send URL to beta testers

http://www.hanchorllc.com/2010/08/24/introducing-ios-beta-bu...
No you are not. I think he mistook cause and effect.
New York Times Prepares Plan to Charge for Online Reading
We must have read different articles. The one I read didn't fault the students, first of all. She merely pointed out that they had been prepared with a narrow focus and weren't demonstrating interest in or thinking about larger frame issues.

If you've considered the issue of the use of nuclear weapons and have either the opinion that it's never justified, or that it is in certain situations, that's one thing. But then when discussing the issue you wouldn't really be equivocating, would you? Equivocation and the problems the author reported in candidates were evidence the students simply hadn't thought about important questions related to the their fields of interest. And yes, I think that's a cause for concern if the trend is increasing.
Using Python generators for real work... or why I switched to Lua.

They're great at first, but then let's say you need to subdivide pieces of the generator into helper functions for better organization. Or yield recursively. Turns out you can't, because yielding is A) syntactical and B) can only be done from the main function body.

It took us until Python 3 to replace "print x" with a more sensical, functional "print(x)". Yet for yield we are stuck with even worse arbitrary syntactical rules for "yield x", instead of being able to do "yield(x)" where it yields to the wrapping generator\coroutine from wherever it is in a call stack. The result is nonintuitive, less-refactorable code.

http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaCoroutinesVersusPythonGenerator...
The court applied the Turner test, which is very similar to the rational basis test: the plaintiff was burdened with showing that the threat of gang formation was "so remote as to render the policy arbitrary or irrational."

This may strike some as odd, given that 1st Amendment cases typically use strict scrutiny, not rational basis. But, here's the catch: it doesn't apply in prison! In prison, your 1st amendment rights are more limited, and something akin to the rational basis test does indeed apply. To quote the court:

"In Turner, the Supreme Court determined that prison regulations that restrict inmates' constitutional rights are nevertheless valid if they are reasonably related to legitimate penological interests."

So, despite the apparent silliness of banning D&D, it seems the prison was within its rights to do so. The prison system may, at its discretion, inflict all kinds of petty punishments upon prisoners. If you're sent to prison, your rights are sharply curtailed. That's what the court decided in Turner, so that's the way it is.

Whether or not this is good policy is, of course, open to debate. It depends on what balance you want to strike between the punitive/rehabilitative purposes of prison. I'm of the opinion that criminal justice ought to be primarily aimed at reducing recidivism, but then society at large doesn't really agree with me.

Here's the full decision:

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1498113.html
They're worth a lot of money, so my thinking was if he didn't have any money he'd sell them, although I guess maybe they're a super long term investment if he did just register them.
How about considering Clojure's style of using recur to support self-tail-call optimization using explicit syntax?
rNTP, not RNA.
Sean Parker: "The Social Network" is a complete work of fiction
Started with a VIC20 programming BASIC games. I was amazed that the games I played were all based on simple logic / rules.
Hacking your life through data collection and analysis
I had the idea for years to create some kind of program that would use statistical analysis to analyze everyday data and advise things to me about my life that I couldn't quite see or didn't quite know.

It all started as a spreadsheet with a bunch of formulas - I found out that the days I exercised were 20% more productive than the days I did nothing but work. I also came to realize that doing something active each day had a huge affect on how happy I was - my perceived happiness was almost 30% greater on the days I did some kind of physical activity.

Once I had a couple weeks worth of data it was plain and obvious to me that there was a better way for me to live my life. After finding out that work brought my mood down an average of 40%, how could I keep working my office programming gig knowing so well that it made me miserable?

So I decided to quit my job and turn this spreadsheet into an app that other people could use. And so LifeUp was born. It goes without saying, I'm a lot happier these days.

I finished LifeUp recently and it's available for download on iOS for 2 bucks - a small price to pay to find out some truly valuable insight into your life.

I mean, when you are stuck in a rut it can become impossible to see the way out. Maybe my app can help you realize important things similarly to how it helped me...

Check it out, you'll be amazed at what you can find... www.getlifeup.com
It is easy to bash sites, but what is Google to do when these sites have even been found useful by users of news.ycombinator.com :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454569

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=615832

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795278

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592295

the link given in the first example above got 6 upvotes, and there is little info in the post other than the link.

a basic description is all that most web-users want. if you are doing some deep research, then these sites probably aren't good fits, but when you just want a quick overview (which is what most Google users want), then they can be useful.

I have a sneaking suspicion that you are a webmaster who sometimes finds that your site(s) rank below the sites that you bash.