skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Robert Pirsig advocated the abolition of grading. From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

"The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and -whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

"This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system", is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, "location" point of view, but it’s not the [true learning]’s attitude. [True learning]’s attitude is that civilization, or " the system ", or "society", or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man."

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it. "

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he’d see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would be likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren’t directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on."

"It would be the real thing."
Fair question. It seems to me that language isn't ever intrinsically hateful; what's hateful is the intent with which humans sometimes use it. "Nigger" isn't hateful when Chris Rock uses it; arguably not when Mark Twain put it in Huck Finn either. That's one of the fascinating things about language: the minute you try to pin it down, new usages appear that escape your grasp. Often to comedic effect.
I'd argue that where you end is the world we live in today. People are passionate to do what they're doing versus the alternative. You say its passion for money. Others will say the passion to please their parents. Or impress the Jones's or put food in their babies mouth.

And I don't think you can appeal to technology that's not here, and frankly not close. Otherwise you can just begin with the thesis that we have mind reading nanotechnology that can build anything via just thought, including other people. Sure in this dream world everyone can literally just watch TV created by the best staff in the world (which was created by my thoughts).

But that's not going to happen. And quad-copter construction isn't going to build most of what is built today.

But what will happen is that people will do what they're most passionate about versus their alternatives. This is exactly the state of the world today. Every single one of us is doing exactly what we want to do, given the choices in front of us.
I know this isn't exactly typical HN-type material, but when I accidentally stumbled across this guy's photo stream, my mouth literally fell open.

What's most impressive is that -- at least with his Eiffel tower panorama, and, presumably, others as well -- there is no super-fisheye lens used. It's a massive montage that he took and worked on over two days.

Read the descriptions in the photos, and be very impressed.

Also, if you scroll down to the comments section, he has provided links to more of his favorite photos for quick and easy browsing.
because the encoded url is

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&#38;ie=UTF-8&#38;q=adult...

and the HN code that truncates long urls chopped it in the middle of &#38 so it becomes "&#3" which is telling your browser to print the ascii character 3, which it can't show properly, so it shows the character you see instead.
How did people cheat? It seems like if you ask them to create or solve something that hasn't been done before they'd have to figure it out.

Of course they could get someone to write the code for them but A. You can catch that by reviewing the code with them and asking questions and B. If they can get someone to write good code for them And then review that code to make sure it's good you might want to put that person in managment.
I wish the examples here were more concrete. This could be a powerful mechanism, beyond the usual tiresome MVC.
LinkedIn’s Next Data Dive: Professional Skills
As a 'victim' of a few FOIA requests, I can vouch for how much work goes into them. A favicon? Who cares when you've just involved 2 managers, a director and 4 mid-level federal officials? Some FOIA's were beyond reasonable and duly denied, but the reasonable ones could still take days.
Fashion Brand Kenneth Cole Hijacks Egypt Hashtag to Promote Its New Collection
Because people have been conditioned over the past 40 years to believe the government is wasteful, and failures just strengthen those arguments.

Also, the government is generally lousy at PR, and people rarely understand how to connect the dots. The internet, (or specifically, world wide web), and google are good examples of things fostered initially by the government. Whether or not they might have happened without the government is debatable, but they did happen, and the government did help. The wins are far less visible than the failures.
Accidents happen on the way
Accidents happen on the way!
Depends on what you're referring to by "statistical process platforms". Python has been quite popular in the machine learning communities for several years, with some pure Python libraries (e.g. nltk, scikits.learn), and many wrappers to non-Python libraries (Orange, Shogun, and I'm sure some others).

One issue at the moment is that there's an R package for just about anything you would want to do. But the issue with R is its software development tools (which are not very good) and its ability to integrate with other systems.

As far as mainstream frequentist statistics in Python, there's still a ways to go. scikits.statsmodels has made a lot of headway the last couple years in implementing standard linear (regression) modeling classes and econometrics tools, with some time series analysis and other things thrown in (I'm actually actively working on adding time series analysis functionality to that library).

My general view is that given how friendly a language Python is for scientific programmers and the vibrancy of the community (in terms of new tools being built, etc.), Python could become a permanent fixture for statistical computing. Add on top of that things like integrated distributed computing inside IPython and projects like PyCUDA (which could make high performance statistical computing much more accessible), it's looking very good. But there's a slight chicken-and-egg problem at the moment.

I should also point out that R is sort of a frankenstein of half-baked object oriented ideas and remnants of the Splus era. So if you want to design extensible classes for statistical models, it can be quite challenging.
Thanks, and interesting. I hadn't thought of that. I suppose the fact that I didn't even know I could do that--and that it's actually quite easy, functionally, as you say--also suggests some marketing issues? I just felt it was weird that I've been hearing so much hullabaloo about the facebook quandary of business contacts learning too much about your personal life and vice versa due to blanket "friending," but yet, it took only 2 seconds for my friend to shut me up, saying, "I don't have that problem, here's why."
Yes. Though he specifically mentioned "wireless" he probably confused land-line broadband services with wireless services. In the case of "Verizon" (parent company), "Verizon Wireless" is an entirely separate company from their other broadband and landline holdings. I actually have both "Verizon Wireless" service and a "Verizon" landline phone, but there's no way to get just one bill for both.
This is also true, but is sort of tangential to the point we were discussing. (Personally, I think they probably were special-casing Google, at least insofar as it was one of a list of set URL patterns it knew how to parse.)
The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out.

Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses.

£585 is nothing in that sort of context.
I used to be newsletter editor for our local caving club, and two-spacers abounded with submitted material. I do it myself, but I also use the excuse that most of the stuff I type is in fixed-pitch fonts, where I actually want there to be two spaces. Plus I learned to type on a typewriter and old habits really do die hard.

But when I made the newsletter, I search-and-replaced them all to a single space.

And I'm pleased HTML renders it properly no matter what. That way I can keep my two spaces when editing HTML in vim, but still see the correct rendering.
I'm 22 and I read HN purely to learn from the "older" ones. I've got brains, but they've got brains+experience. That's what I find so fascinating about HN, it's like one collective hacker who's seen it all.
I think (understandably) no prospective parent, upon losing their baby for any reason, is going to have "oh yeah, cancel those website reminders" at the forefront of their minds. Certainly, all it would take is probably the first email from one of them to arrive, but subscribing after the fact doesn't un-kick you in the teeth.
disclaimer: I'm the author of the article

I can share more details about how we use it. I didn't feel like giving code samples because our implementation is kind of "besides the point". People might find better ways to implement the same concept, that fits better with their particular needs or language of choice.

If by concrete examples you mean where and what we use this technique for on the website, I'm happy to explain more about that.
I am very impressed! I am always interested in the new ways that people find to reinvent old art styles. Kudos and hats off to this guy!
>We believe that having a consistent interface to complex plugins is a big win for users.

Consistent? jQuery UI is one of the (not the, just high on the list of) least consistent and least flexible javascript tools I use daily. I have to hack around behaviors and inject buttons into areas that aren't blessed to have them all the time, and it's a royal pain because there are zero tools to help you and doing anything not explicitly supported (and some that are) often causes problems further down the rabbit hole. You've got to dive through div.ui-something > li.ui-another span.ul-cryptic div.ui-some-long-name just to get to the container, and God help you if you put something slightly too large in.

I hope they're at least more consistent than jqGrid. I've been using it heavily lately, and hacking on extra features, and holy cow is that an inconsistent mess. It's horrendous. It works quite well as long as you follow the examples, but try to do anything else and have fun! Out-of-date documentation, inconsistent interfaces, and just-plain-incorrect advice are absolutely everywhere.

---

None of this is to say I don't think they can make a good one. I eagerly await it, and will give it all kinds of hell when it comes out to see what it can do. I just fear the API.
All's I'm saying is that it must be a great job if a foreigner can just walk into your country, apply, become employed and live happily ever after for the season without competition from the locals or the authorities. What a country!

Like our very own migrant farm workers here in the United States I guess, or if you're really ambitious, in Oz: http://www.workstay.com.au/backpacker_harvest_jobs.htm

The original premise only works if you meet the following conditions, aside from being young and smart like the guy said:

1. You're taking a gap year between education and/or work to see the world and gain some [travel] experience.
2. You never intend to return to that lifestyle after your year is done and have a plan to a normal lifestyle of continuos employment that doesn't involve taking money from those temporarily impaired by alcohol. Because most people in the world are sober for the majority of their lives and drunks don't have much of a long tail and if you're halfway smart and ambitious you'll tire of them in short order.

The post author uses bar-tending as an example because somewhere, someone decided that it was a sexy job (Cocktail, anyone?) that could someday lead you to owning your own place by the beach meeting fancy people of the desired sexual orientation while you party on your time off. Very few bartenders can do that unless someone buys the bar for them or they have two or more partners.

My response to that is that it's a lazy-man's job where you're just a cog in the wheel of a drug-dealing enterprise and get paid only after the liquor distributor, bar owner and permanent staff, and in the case of the US, paid only by the patrons through their generosity in the form of tips as a reward for being able to stare at your t&a while they slip into their daily haze. You are a sexually stimulating device that can open beer bottles. The ones that can't stimulate any more get jobs at the airport/hotel lounge where they can use their brains even less while being protected by their union. Those who work sporting events are neither.

I prefer the fruit-picking example as it makes more sense to the uninitiated.

Also, all growed-up software engineer here making six figures year after year who will never again pour a drink or throw a bum out of a bar or wear a uniform to work.
What is Mark Pincus of Zynga like to work for?
Doesn't HN have an anti-crack mode you can activate? :) As for twitter, you're left to your own devices of self-control and common sense, I suppose. :)
InDinero (YC S10) Brings Budgeting to Small Businesses
Over time, this curiosity seems to diminish.

I really don't think it does. But I think what is valued becomes more narrow. Being curious about listening to different music bands at age 16 isn't valued as much as being curious about math. Being curious about girls isn't valued as much as being curious about programming. Being curious about knowing the stats of every baseball player isn't valued as much as being curious about Shakeaspeare.

People who are curious about certain things are valued, while people are curious about other things are valued less (or rather their curiosity is valued less).
The content vs. title of the article makes me wonder if a side-project vs. the start-up is more a matter of your mentality toward what you're doing and the stage you're at than the project itself.

If you are thinking too small, it is up to you to figure out the bigger opportunity. Doesn't the rest flow from there?
Not really idealism. When you get an engineer's salary and sock away ~60-70% of it, your options are pretty rosy.

The entrepreneurial bug and divorce are the only things I foresee really jeopardizing that. That or being seriously fertile.

Hard tellin'. I'll be happy either way, and regardless of whether or not I'm getting paid, I'll code 'til I die.
News Corp's acquisition for $500m will probably be remembered as a collossal blunder, but considering Facebook's current valuation, and that Myspace could have been Facebook if it were better executed, it wasn't a bad gamble really.
How does this relate to established models of interactive fiction?

In particular:

Multi-user Dungeons (freestyle, text-based interaction, e.g. DikuMUD and similar)

Visual novels (heavily guided, text+image, with some interactivity, e.g. NScripter)

Adventure Games (freestye, graphical interaction, e.g. SCUMM and later)

Looking from the sparse documentation, it looks like a cross-over of MUD scripting and 70s style story grammar/plot-point based narration. Is that the idea?
Personally, I found Antoniou & van Harmelen's "A Semantic Web Primer" to be very useful. I felt like it covered a lot of ground at just the right level- enough to explain what was going on and why, but not so much that it got bogged down in pointless detail. However, YMMV- I know some people who didn't care for it.

It's a little bit dated at this point, but Shelley Powers' "Practical RDF" was also helpful- but, again, I got a lot more out of it once I'd read Antoniou and had internalized the whole RDF thing at a "30,000 foot" level.

BTW, I just Googled for the Antoniou book to make sure I had remembered its authors correctly, and it turns out that one of the first results is a PDF version of the entire text. I don't know what it's doing up online, but grab it while it's hot. If it's helpful, Powell's has a couple of used copies:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780262012423-2
Well that's what I meant (or rather wanted to mean). I should have phrased the whole thing differently, but I'm still wrestling with English as a language, and rarely if ever used it in mathematics! I should definitely write
more.
I like that way of looking at "find something cool to do."
* you have customers using it
Google Ventures has this too.
That's awful. Babylist has a settings tab with a big delete button for that reason.
Your first line can't necessarily just be summarily true though, can it? I don't get the whole "winner talk" approach to life sometimes.
While I disagree about your arguments against jQuery UI (I actually quite like it as a whole, and the CSS arragenment doesn't bother me at all), I wholeheartedly agree about jqGrid. What a terribly bloated plugin. I have no idea how it got to earn the 'respected' title it has today.
I concur. The beauty is in the site's simplicity/effectiveness. I hope they continue to innovate beyond UX though.
That's actually not a joke. There is probably a whole layer of internal costs for every government agency involved, maintaining the paper trails that allow these questions to be answered in the first place.

There's a near-zero probability that these laws (yes, laws) don't have some impact on the job-management process, which will carry into procedural burdens for vendor to factor into their quoted prices.
Could OS X Lion be Apple's Windows Vista?
Thanks. That's how I'm doing all the branding on the site now. I'm not appearing in google yet, but I'm paying for ads with one of their $100 off coupons.
common guys! the 53 miles of US border fence cost 1B.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/

It is about $300/inch. That would be 53 miles of new favicon/inch ($300 vs 585 pounds - thats 70% volume discount given by Boing to teh US government). Look at the picture at the link above - it is a really hi-tech fence.
Chrome Blog:
*you make money
Missing option: "I am eternal."
Google Chrome Blog: A dash of speed, 3D and apps
I hope my site would provide a good gaming opportunity for Twitter users..
I think it's the jQuery UI CSS integration and that it really does do just about everything. You just need to kick it around to get it to do so correctly, and haunt Stack Overflow when documentation fails and the cryptic source code don't help ("rd[ts.p.colModel[j+gi+si+ni].name] = v;" ? WTF?). I have no clue how Oleg does it, I think they may actually be a super-intelligent chatbot that searches against the source code.

As to the rant against UI's consistency, I should point out that I deal with jQuery and in-house code almost completely, no Ext / other frameworks, and I'm not counting one-trick-ponies, though those are typically simple enough to re-write to do what I want. And I write freakishly flexible code any time I run across a re-use case (I'm helping build a utility base for the company I'm working with). jQuery is fantastic, but UI has nowhere near that level of polish.
Thanks for letting me know. I see the error in the logs and I'll be able to fix the root cause.
Dunno about this.

People with the mathematical maturity to understand it don't really need the "review". And the people who need the review, probably don't have the mathematical background to appreciate this.

Probability theory is not exactly a mathematical field that one can put down and forget (specially one interested in ML.) You brush against it very often in other fields, not to mention other disciplines.

Aaand to top it off it has no refernces. Not even the requisite "see Feller" footnote.
You're just kissing up to us 39-year olds so that we'll upvote your comment.

Well done.

Upvote.

;-)
noprocrast is a great feature. Wish other sites added it.

There's Chrome nanny or Leechblock for Firefox; plugins which take a blacklist and blocks you from visiting those sites for a certain amount of time, or at certain times of day. I used it for a while and it really helps.
I hacked together a quick and dirty wedding registry when we got married. We didn't want to favor any retail store or vendor over another. Almost nobody used it. :( I think people are used to going to stores and using their registry programs, especially since stores with registries will often give you a list and/or give the registrant a scanner to go through and scan all the items he/she wants to add.

My experience was that it doesn't work out very well, but your thing is definitely more polished than mine, and maybe with the right promotion you can make it click. :)
The problem with this, IMO, is that it is really soft. Some research has shown we make up our minds within the first 10s (or so) of an interview if we like the person. And the rest of the interview justifies this decision.

I have to have some "minimum" requirement questions. These are questions that you have to get right. No matter how good I feel about you, I still will no hire you if you get these questions wrong. These are questions that are so easy that most people on HN would scoff me even asking. Yet it actually does eliminate some people.
Incessant dreaming about your startup?
Title says it all: it started happening to me several weeks ago albeit rather infrequently and for shorter durations. But last night especially, it was one of those perpetual dream-filled sleeps where you wake up feeling almost more exhausted from all the dreaming!

I'm not necessarily complaining, frankly, I think it's pretty cool. Always good to have both levels of consciousness firing on all cylinders when trying to launch a new company!
So who want their own planet?
I really feel sorry for founders of sites like MySpace and Delicious.
Neither of those are necessary.

* users
* profit (Or a clear path to getting there)
Actually, I can't be downvoted for posting. That's part of the safety of it. You can only downvote a comment... so here's a comment ;-)

Really, I was just throwing a bit of commentary and intentional hypocrisy in there at the same time. The karma is meaningless.

Polls are great if either the question or answers (or ideally, both) are really well thought-out and interesting. That's not the case with a lot of the polls that hit the front page these days. But people keep voting them up, so the community has spoken.

It's not that big of a deal. I just felt like being a smart-ass.