skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this article extremely interesting, as I felt that I found my own personality perfectly mirrored in it. To clarify, I'm currently in my final year of high school (doing the Irish Leaving Certificate) - my entire life I have been "acing most of my assignments", indeed doing things at the last minute and doing extremely well with it.

And yes, I am not taking school seriously at all. My punctuality is terrible, I think I can honestly count on one hand the number of days I haven't been late this year (and I live close to the school). I skip classes in which I feel I am wasting my time (religion, anyone?), and have gotten several detentions, etc. because of it. In many ways, my track record in the school (I got a full scholarship for secondary schooling based on an exam in sixth grade, I was the only person in my year to have received an offer from Cambridge etc.), and resulting from that my relationship with the teachers, is the only thing that has kept me afloat in this school.

I have a huge problem with the Irish Leaving Certificate, an exam which in my opinion teaches you exactly two things: How to learn things off by heart, and how to write fast. It has nothing to do with intelligence or skill, but just the number of hours spent memorising pre-written notes, and being able to spit it out onto the page in two hours during the exam. I am utterly bored by it, and so I spend a lot of time in class on my iPhone, checking the news, reading RSS feeds, Hacker News, etc.

This frenetic burst of activity, followed by a period of "[doing] nothing but [strumming] his guitar and [lying] around in bed for several days" completely describes me, except you'd have to replace strumming the guitar with lurking on Hacker News! ;) I have never found anything wrong with that before, and to be honest, this description of being "bipolar" struck me - is there really anything wrong with this sort of behaviour?

This article certainly paints a fairly grim picture for my future university life, if my personality is truly as reflected in the article as I can see it to be at the moment!

Anyway, it was truly enlightening to have found this now, before I'm even at university - I have only now become aware of my attitude. We'll see how things pan out for me, if I'll be "scraping along the bottom" or end up on top...

(This is my first comment here, even though I have been following along for a fairly long time.)
UserVoice launches Helpdesk We want to be the only customer facing tool you need
plenty of good advice here for tech-related videos in general
Cool idea to go along side would be an iPad app, which allows you to compare your actual foot to inside of the shoe. From the bottom, from the side, etc. Would also work for gloves.

EDIT: Hell, you even show it on a regular LCD screen. Or allow the user to print it out to compare.
Those are great features, but probably not part of their MVP. Maybe you should propose that to them as feedback?
Isn't that because clojure core is there?
I like different languages but Erlang is like Lisp in that it has yet to really grab me. The difference being, Lisp has far better odds of grabbing me. As far as I can tell, Erlang's advantages can be cloned elsewhere in more pleasant to work with languages.
You're right g0atbutt. I know the team personally all three of them are great guys who have been working REALLY hard to make this a reality for the past few years. I'm glad to see they are finally being recognized for their awesome product & technology.
Invention brings the idea to life. Innovation brings the ideas to market.
No for me.

If they started charging I think it wouldn't be too long before another free service came in and started to eat their lunch (read freeloaders would defect). Of course even if they lost hundreds of millions of users to some competitor they would still be a viable business. Look at yahoo.
Q: you are willing to offer your help, free?
You're probably right, and I'm speaking mostly from my place of aversion to Facebook. But anecdotally I feel like there is a slow shift away from Facebook happening.

Dave Winer talks about the cyclical nature of these things, and I think I agree that while we're in a closed part of the cycle right now, we're heading toward a more open one.
Charlie Sheen is Suffering a Manic Episode; That’s Not Funny
i like that its sms based, its sorta like Beluga (facebook aquired them today)
"If movie studios want to deal with piracy they have to compete on all those points."

Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves? The music industry listened (as I stated in my post above) and piracy hasn't decreased. Piracy will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates want anyway, but refuse to admit).

"I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a DVD player in 5 years."

You can blame the pirates for DRM. It was created as a direct result.

"Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and I'll start buying in a heartbeat."

"reasonable" is relative to everyone. Since the pirates can download things for free with little effort, even a penny is too much for many people.

"Because that's just not the case."

The problem is that there isn't any way to prove the case either way. Pirates aren't going to admit they just want stuff for free.
I run Terralien, and I can only speak from my own experiences doing so, since it seems most businesses that have been built mostly by a freelancer or a devshop don't go out of their way to publicize that fact.

Terralien does ongoing development work for six businesses for which we built the original technology. Their degree of success varies, but they all have in common that they're successful enough to have persisted 1+ years and are continuing to make progress. All of them rely on software for their core business to some varying degree, but in none of their cases is the software itself rocket science. It may be moderately complicated and there may be a lot of it, but a good hacker could pick it up without completely derailing the project in the meantime.

On the flipside, Terralien had one very tech-heavy business that we got off the ground, after which they brought development in-house in the form of a developer working for equity. It made total sense for them, since they were doing algorithmic work in the energy space so their technology was in a way "rocket science" and they needed to have that close.

I think anyone considering outsourcing the software build for their startup should look for a freelancer or devshop that is ready and willing to serve as their CTO for the long haul. You want a shop or an individual that understands technology as a tool that should serve the larger business purposes, and not an end in itself. That's the way we try to approach it at Terralien, and it seems to be working really well for our clients.
My ex-wife is Japanese, and I know this answer is anecdotal at best, but she always claimed it was because people didn't hang out in their houses, so their cell phones were sort of like taking their living rooms with them: TV, internet, all right there with you. I might be wrong about this stat, and am too lazy/don't care enough to google for it, but I believe Japan internet usage is still largely done with the phone versus a laptop in someone's house. I think the proliferation of internet cafes on every corner, at the least, validate the former point.
That's a nasty solution though, because then every item on your site ends up with two URLs - a concrete, proper, doesn't-break-the-web one and a lousy Ajax hashbang one.

Having one URL per piece of content is especially important in this age of sharing and aggregation, where you don't want your pagerank / number-of-shares / other metrics spread equally across two different URLs.
My impression has been exactly the opposite - aside from full-internet on smartphones (not to say it isn't a big deal), new features in the US lag by something like 5 to 10 years. QR code reading and easy contact transfer(like 赤外線) still aren't out-of-the-box features (hacked in by third party software like Bump), and most Americans don't know what a QR code is. We still can't pay for things at the grocery store or buy train tickets with a cell phone, whereas Japan has had FeliCa Mobile for 7 years now. Live TV on a cell phone is also non-existent in the US. In Japan, these are all so common that they're available on the free-with-plan phones.

Also, according to the Japanese Wikipedia article, the first camera phone was DDI(Wilcom)'s VP-210 in 1999, and they exploded in popularity with Sharp's J-SH04 on J-Phone(Softbank) in 2000.[1] The US, by contrast, got their first camera phone in 2002.

[1] http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/カメラ付き携帯電話
Why does anyone give Facebook an email account password? Facebook asks for it, so they hand it over. It's Social Engineering 101.
Yes, absolutely. This is where the product started, tracking EC2 billing. You have to pull down the raw usage data too as the daily Amazon bill updates can be a bit out of sync.
Intelligence is real but very difficult to quantify.

The last time I was familiar with the literature (~10 years ago), intelligence was best defined as having many dimensions. It's a collection of weakly related gifts. Spatial reasoning, for example, is a different kind of intelligence than musical ability. Perhaps someone more up to date on the science can chime in.

In any case, attempts to squash all those dimensions into a single numerical scale (like an IQ) hide a lot of information and can be very misleading.
Nowhere did I say "equal." I think there is a distribution, but I don't think the distribution is extreme for those who don't have a disability such as mental retardation. As such, while I think inherent intelligence is a factor in people's successes, I don't think it's the dominant factor.
This is actually pretty useful to a small but loyal group: runners. I know folks who run marathons and such, they are fanatical about the right fit and buy 3+ pairs when they find a good fit, because of rapid shoe model obsolescence/changes.

Perhaps with this small but profitable niche they can expand their technology into the mainstream for the likes of you and me.

I'm definitely going to suggest this site to my runner-friends and see what they think.
Sorry, but I don't understand how your argument works. Steam is one of the businesses with a smart business model, sure, but it still basically relies on copyright to keep the hordes in order.

Take copyright away so everyone, including those who currently follow the law, is free to copy as much as they want from wherever they want, and channels like BitTorrent rapidly become more viable. For one thing, more people would soon learn to use them, and their effectiveness increases with the networking effect. For another thing, you don't have to hide your identity if you're sharing ripped stuff any more so the "poisoning the well" tactic by copyright holders becomes almost worthless.

I suspect the optimum model in the absence of any copyright at all may be as simple as free distribution and inviting donations, but given that people have tried this and a tiny fraction of users ever donate anything at all, that's a pretty unappealing prospect if you're the guy looking at investing years and millions in building good software for others to enjoy. I have seen a few other funding/incentive models advocated in similar debates in the past, but usually the administrative burden and risks when you think them through in detail make today's copyright mess look the epitome of elegance.
I have something like craigslist linked to a map. Testers wanted
> When I deliberately dis-engage in uninteresting conversations with "smart people" I can see them judging me immediately.

Agreed. And this is the perspective I have for a lot of the discussion threads here on HN. I love HN. But honestly, much of the so-called discussion here is picking at nits and stamp collecting. Even when you "win" you lose because you've wasted the time and effort that could have been better spent in the real world, or doing something to improve your financial or health situation. Not saying all discussion is bad, but one should pick and choose and get the most bang for your buck.
I suppose so, but not a particularly good reason.
While Responder Pro and Recon are pretty awesome tools, I'd certainly say that BinNavi and BinDiff are very different and serve different purposes.
This reminds me of a quote from Penny Arcade[1]:

'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'

The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.

[1]http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/
You don't, slaves are not people, they don't get to vote and they are not polled. They're not the public.
Of course. That's my M.O. as well. Don't let my previous post and the fact that I was sacked at today's exam make you think otherwise. :(

I get another chance in 2 weeks. I better go back to stuying..
Rob Pike on static methods
I have artist friends who get really annoyed when they hear people say "I wanted to draw but I just don't have any talent for it, not like you". They feel like it's totally dismissing the years of obsessive practice they've put into it to make it /seem/ effortless.

Natural talent counts for something, but it's not going to make you a success. I saw "result = talent * effort" mentioned on the last HN post about this, and I thought it was pretty accurate.
You can check out their pitch at the Launch conference last Thursday here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRRSdvlWd4E&feature=playe...
Question: joomla v drupal v comentum
hi everyone,

im trying to program a prototype so I can get some traction behind my idea (usually the more business side). since its really hard/exp to get a programmer in silicon valley, or at least a programmer I would trust, I've been given the advice to do a simple mock up myself for the proof of concept and get some $$ behind it so I can get a real team. Granted I haven't programmed anything harder than VB in my life, and that was 20 years ago, but I think I cam put something basic together provided there are widgets, etc.

So here's the question, what should I use, joomla, drupal or comentum? Or do you have any better idea for me?

am i totally missing something that joomla doesnt seem that easy?

many thanks,
max
I'm guessing you're referencing Google beating out Yahoo? Could you elaborate more? Is Yahoo still a viable business minus their acquisitions?
Ask HN: Review my startup, blueshoemobile.com
Yes it can be argued, but the argument would be unproductive: either idealizations correspond to fundamental conditions in the universe or they are merely artifacts of human perception. But we would know only when we meet intelligent non-humans, and not before.
Why TechCrunch switched to Facebook comments
Using White Boards to Increase Productivity & Improve Transparency
no, you are trying to make the case that piracy is merely sharing, which is wrong.
Why is this dropping off the frontpage so fast? It's way uncharacteristically down. Is there some kind of hidden penalty at play? It's not spam, and has 50 points in 53 minutes, losing to posts with way less than that...
Where to find your quants in five years
> I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.

I'd like to know where you get this. ACM is paying nobody for writing papers. (I've published in ACM journals and conferences, btw).
Could you list what you consider to be Erlang's advantages? Most of the ones that I can think of off the top of my head fall into the range of "possible to clone, but would take a huge amount of engineering effort" (e.g. OTP), or alternatively "a culture issue" (e.g. "let it crash", and the language's completely obsessive focus on application stability, both of which are pretty much diametrically opposed to the common language philosophies today).
Charlie Sheen, Now On Twitter At CharlieSheen
I use Beluga all the time. However, I have a feeling it'll be killed off soon.
I imagine the problem is that shoes are real things with 3 dimensions, and feet change shape when they're compressed... neither of which are addressed by a printout (sure a printout is better than nothing, but if it's not predictive enough it's not worth the trouble).

If a device could model what kind of shoe you should wear based on an interactive iPad foot print, that would be amazing tech.
We really don't think there's a better customer-facing product out there for other startups like ourselves. It's feedback, support tickets and FAQs all in one package. We've been building this over the last 9 months and I'm super excited to actually have it launch. I'm most proud of the UX but I'd love to have your feedback.
Sure, but why would they do it to Greplin specifically?
Digital Language Analysis Uncovers Truth of Irish Rebellion
Apple staffer: save your excitement for iPad 3, not iPad 2
Is this co-located with any other companion conference?
Make Sure Your Cloud Doesn't Pop
> It doesn't but JavaScript and Skilled js devs can!

You might be overestimating the differences between Flash and JS here -- especially when you add HTML5 into the mix. What's to stop a skilled JS dev from playing <audio> when the user hits a page, burning processors with a few autoplaying <videos>, after forcing the user to sit through an interminable, animated <js/css3/svg> 'loading' screen? At that point, it's up to our own good tastes to decide how to wield that kind of power.
Kind words - thank you!
Halvar wrote a more personal note about the acquisition on his blog: http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/wow.html
The user interface in the admin panel looks very nice, I like it! I was also pleasantly surprised by the pricing.
SendGrid and MailChimp might be large competitors relative to the size of PostageApp, but the scale difference is orders of magnitude less than the scale difference between WePay and PayPal.

I counted 18 people on the "team" page of SendGrid, and MailChimp's website lists them as having about 70 people working for them. I haven't been able to find exact numbers of employees at PayPal, but I know it's easily into the thousands, and very possibly into the tens of thousands.

I think you have a good point: that relying on being able to move faster than your competitors can be dangerous if your competitors aren't actually slow. I don't think you can really make an accurate comparison between SendGrid/MailChimp and PayPal though. The scale (and culture) is just completely different.
"WTF, [rms] can't maintain his own damn website?"
That was the first piece of UI we built as it was the part that made us gouge our eyes out in all other solutions we tried :)
Nobody else says "dub dub dub"?
With that logic, Apple is not selling app stores either.
Unity Platform To Let Developers Convert iOS Apps To Android–With One Click
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds approximately one third of all biomedical research in the USA [1], requires that all peer-reviewed manuscripts that arise from NIH funds be submitted within 12 months of acceptance to a journal to a digital archive, PubMed Central, where the articles can be freely and publicly accessed [2].

[1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...

[2] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
A year ago I wrote up some notes for an idea that has elements of this. Funny enough, I sent it to Google and Amazon. I don't know why I bothered. I just wanted to tell someone, I suppose. I did not have a blog then... well I barely have one now. Also, The plan was not exactly something I could do on my own.

The idea was called Travel Packs. You're going to travel? Send your itinerary to Google and it will decide what you need/want to go into your luggage. Google will do all of this by using your itinerary, profile, body dimensions, weather, etc... The Travel Pack will then magically appear at your destination. When your done with your trip, just leave it behind.

Great things about this:

1) You no longer have to pack or bring luggage with you when traveling.
2) Companies have a new way to target consumers. Imagine all of the companies who will compete to have their products placed in these packs.
3) Consumers get to try out new things without having to buy them. How about letting consumers purchase items from the Travel Pack at discounts.

To make this work, the clothes will have to fit. To do that we probably need 3D scans, although that may not be necessary for first iterations. Google has shown the initiative to map the world, why not drive around and start mapping the people. Just think of what you could do with these data! Of course many people would be uncomfortable with these scans and discussion probably needs to happen about who would own these data.

Anyway, I was once pretty stoked about this. Now I don't really care. But I think it's something that someone will do. Actually, I think there is already a company trying to make a go at pre-packaged luggage though I don't know how intelligent it is.
Simple stuff like getting title tags right takes 5 minutes and does makes a difference.

Thanks for sharing.
What was the James Bond movie where they did that 40years ago - called ???
House [TV Show] Medical Reviews: Exactly how realistic is House?
I came here to say the same thing (even worded the same way in my head).

Why are people so fixated on college degrees -- even if they've already built a profitable company from scratch? Is it to prove something? If so, what?
If this hadn't happened in real life, it certainly would have happened in a Neal Stephenson novel.
Thanks Emmett. I have updated the status of those three companies now.
I saw these guys present at SuperConf.net and what a fantastic idea backed by "patent pending" 3d imaging. Amazing stuff and someone is going to grab them quick for an easy 30 to 50 million.
Le Bernardin is pretty good, but probably not worth the four hour trek! :)
Good point about collecting emails for people searching in areas that aren't covered yet, and alerting them when we expand to those areas. Thanks for the suggestion!
as a german I'm a bit disturbed they didn't call it Nazi-Germany in the text.

Why do you find this disturbing?
Upvoted, but the author cites his own book in his blog post, which I read. I would just have to say, stay away from that book. It is vacuous. It gave a few decent recommendations, but the title was misleading and it was very verbose.

I remember telling Theo's brother my review at an NYPHP post-meeting bar gathering. The look on his face was classic. Like he tasted bitter beer.