skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To tag on some constructive criticism: a "you can do it too" kind of post needs to emphasize the limitations of your abilities, so that readers can identify with the before-success version of you, and then show the steps to what you accomplished as simply as possible, so they can realistically imagine themselves becoming the after-success version.

If you emphasize how people's jaws dropped when you did X or Y, then only other programmers who feel confident they can do the same will be nodding along (i.e., not most of them).

If you emphasize the limits of what you had figured out, show clearly how you learned how to do X or Y (and how it's not nearly as complicated as it seems), and puncture the illusion of genius as much as possible (it's mostly just persistence), you can give "normal" developers the chance to imagine themselves making jaws drop simply by putting in some time to learn something most people don't know.

Just my, er, 8 cents; I hope this is of some use.
If it's a big conference where you're already talking to a big auditorium, I could see that. If it's a small conference or workshop, though, it completely changes the dynamics of a talk if you're doing it to be recorded for permanent archival on the internet, vs. talking to 20 colleagues in a room. TED is explicitly a very public platform for charismatic public speakers, which is a good thing to exist, but not what every conference should be like imo.

I personally am not too great at public speaking and don't relish the idea of something I was talking about slightly awkwardly being on the internet forever, so if talks were regularly being recorded at some conferences, I would probably just not submit to give talks at those conferences. Not all of us are TED speakers! I do try to make my stuff freely available and accessible in the medium I'm more comfortable in, though (written text), by
writing accessible blog-style expositions, in addition to putting up PDFs of full papers.

Keynote talks are a bit different, since they're invited specifically to be big public talks. So for those, yeah, maybe it should become routine for them to be recorded/archived. Fortunately, those are also the ones that often have the broadest interest.
Every few months I enjoy rewatching the Cringely PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, which lives forever right in that time.
No, when something is overused, it actually does become a cliche.

Perhaps noise can improve the visual quality of a design when it's used subtly.

However, I'm increasingly seeing it (over) used in a conspicuous way, and I think it's become a trend. In some cases, I think there's an element of 'lets jump on the bandwagon'.

Round corners definitely became a cliche.

EDIT: re. noise - see dribbble for proof.
They're a) lovely, b) just down the road from us, and c) share some of our old staff.

We see them in the pub quite a bit.
If you think a spartan grad school life is comfortable (I do ), it's easy to live in Boston on $20k a year, if you're intensely working on a startup around Davis Sq.
Install Java ad for IE8
Perlin noise[1] could be a nice addition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise
One of the first questions one might wonder is "If it's really poor quality, how'd it get through peer review?"

This is answered by information about the journal that it was published in.
Had you seen http://twistori.com ?
"So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

Looks like all the dots are connecting perfects for Jobs and Apple more and more.
pipe it into SoX

awk [...] | sox -c 1 -b 16 -r 44100 -s -t raw - -d
That's because poor people have nothing to contribute (in the eyes of TED).

At least that's the only logical conclusion I can come to. If they didn't think that, and are not in it for the money, then why else would they exclude them?

Someone tell me where I've gone wrong here, because the underlying attitude is sickening.
Huh? That link says they invited 5,000 scientists to "review" the paper after it was published as part of some kind of publicity stunt.
I was impressed by the clarity of that talk. It makes one point. Sequential programs look like

do rest =
do first one
do rest,

but parallel programs look like

do half =
do one half
do other half.

The examples are interesting, too.
It might be a good idea for conferences to let people opt out of recording and provide a transcript instead.
But then all the comments on HN would be about how Google is copying the *.me sites and squishing poor innocent startups. :(
ebay.com comes with "Withhold", which can disable the opponent's attacks one by one. If you disable them all you have a free round to upgrade/refresh everyone.

I love this game. :)
Yes, U.S. Citizen.
Betty Jennings Bartik is my great aunt and she's a fount of knowledge. I love hearing stories from her about her days as a "computer." I'm glad to see that someone took the time to research the contributions of these fine women.
I hated A Mathematician's Apology and I hate this reference to it. It's a pity the author is unhappy programming because he makes a poor writer. His imitation is as boorish, dull and self-involved as the diatribe it apes.
My reaction to this was to laugh and think 'what a surprise!' That said, interesting that he claims most of the work was done by the US.
Three hundred Thousand?

Assuming the 300k is the total cost of the machine, that's replacing, in a shop open 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, a machine that lives for over six years.

Six years, without maintenance...

Furthermore, a small sandwitch shop (a subway franchise) is worth only 90 to 300 thousand dollars. You're suggesting adding a machine worth the cost of the entire shop, on a very high end shop.

You may be able to build an arm that can make sandwitches, but selling it to firms over cheap minimum wage labor (which is easily replaceable and already has all the software necessary for the process...
nicely done hombre
While not feeling as strongly about the state of the US as you, I am in a position to and will likely end up emigrating in the next few years to one of the countries you have mentioned. Health care, quality of life, etc. will all play into the decision.

As far as immigration policies in the US? I do think things are pretty f'd up. However, I don't think "throwing open the doors" is the actual option. We do need to encourage and readily "recruit" people that want to come here and start and build companies. The US can benefit (like it did in the past) by bringing the best and the brightest (as well as retaining those that come to our universities).

Where I differ, is I think we don't need every warm body coming here to fill tech jobs. There should be a focus on hiring (and if necessary training/continuing education) for those that are in need of jobs where there are openings (like in tech).

Just another view...
The end really hit me deep...very assuring " It may take a while (it took me more than a year to learn 'BASIC', which is a very simple language) and I gave up several times only to go back to it once more." I don't know how many times I've tried learning python only to fail..but I'm going to keep trying until I can stick with it and get better...bit by bit.
Why does everything have to be JQuery dependent these days?
Thanks! I've made a few changes now, hoping that they have improved things.
Entrepreneurship As Social Evil
No, they don't. Apple keeps all that information from developers. (By the way, that's the same information publishers are clamoring for).
That isn't a harder problem. It's a much much easier problem. YOU can decide where to buy from. It's a much saner system from both the customer and the seller's perspective.

And it works right now. In the Netherlands there is a system called iDEAL that works like this:

1. You go to a seller's site e.g. bol.com (which is like amazon).
2. You fill your cart and click checkout.
3. You get sent to your bank's site with a page that displays the amount and a button "pay".
4. The bank then transfers the money to bol.com.
> I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them.

I have read them.

I think that even the byte examples you linked are better than 99% of the articles that appear even on HN and certainly what passes for tech journalism. They don't stir the heart but they are informative and concise - reading them even now doesn't feel like I've wasted my time. I disagree about the lasting value - they are concise and provide a very quick way to get an understanding of what was going on in the industry at the time. Mocking them for using terminology which now seems dated is out of place.

There simply isn't a place now where I can even pay to get this kind of concise but technical view of what's going on.

The LWN stuff is narrow and much less concise, and although the blogs you mention do have very good stuff, they are also narrow and also have some intensely time wasting hobby horses.

BUT

I will concede: most of the individual pieces you list in your penultimate paragraph are indeed excellent. Even though even some of them are surrounded by time wasting random personal fluff, and a couple of them take 10 paragraphs to beautifully make a single emotive point. Which frankly, I can do without most of the time.

It's quite possible that there wasn't even one article per issue on average that compares favorably to the very best blog pieces.

But none of that changes the fact that there is no source for this kind of concise and consistent material anymore.

I want a magazine (electronic is fine) that gives good technical coverage of the industry with concise articles that don't waste my time, where every piece is of reasonable quality and some special pieces are really great. Monthly would be fine.

What I have is tens of sites that give narrow coverage, and are mostly full of dross. In order to find the good material (none of which is the concise cross-industry coverage mind you), I have to visit all of them every day and sift through hundreds of pieces of rubbish looking for the odd gem. Oh - and guess what? I have to read a lot more rubbish to even know whether it was good or not.

As I said originally, the web has brought us stuff we didn't have before - volume, and I'll concede some higher quality stuff than we ever had before.

But we've also obviously lost something. I honestly don't know why you're so trying so hard to claim otherwise.
Are America's best days behind us?
> There are versions of TED that are more ad hoc and grassroots that happen every day

HN meetups/discussions/lectures come to mind.

Maybe we should consider creating a site and post recordings of the lectures combined from all meetups?
This just looks like a justification for what worked out well for you, along with some sweeping generalities about academia in general. Because it worked well for you to write about your experiences in college, everyone should be required to do it. Because you don't understand someone's MS or PhD thesis, they are usually "as unintelligible as they are inconsequential."
Sure, most MS and PhD topics are very specific, and thus intelligible to someone who doesn't have the background to understand them. I would be bored to tears reading a physics thesis. That is much different from inconsequential. Modern computing is built on research performed that was probably unintelligible to most people when it was published.
An OO database interface can look good but be a nightmare to change
Gallery of Startup Demo Videos
My understanding is that Google Maps was largely an acquisition: Where 2 Technologies, from Sydney, acquired in Oct. 2004. Its founders were, incidentally, the Rasmussen brothers, more recently known for Wave.
Is it OK to Hire People from Your Friend's Company?
I hacked up http://github.com/ohrite/jquery-perlin a while back.

edit: I had to go look at it. Now I want to go back and clean it up.
What Is a Dickbar?
I agree, and I would have never posted my comment over on the reddit thread. It was displeasurable enough to post it here.

I have thought that when faced with my last days, I would like to write a blog article (or, knowing me, a freaking series) kind of wrapping things up. I consider HN sort of my home audience, so I would post these articles over here.

But this has got me rethinking that idea. The problem is that then people's lives and final words start competing against each other. What if nobody upvoted my life? Would pg's final words be more important than say, tptacek's? It's just too weird.

So yes, every now and then it is humbling and good to be reminded of the extremely temporary nature of our existence. As an existentialist, I try to do so on a daily basis.

But in a community of 100K, sadly, somebody is going to be dying on a fairly regular basis. I cannot imagine that having their words competing with the latest iPad for the community's attention. It is not something I want to participate in.

But I might be wrong. Like I said, it got me thinking. I am still unsure how I feel about it. My heart goes out to the author of the post over on reddit.
IIRC I think google ran the wave project kind of like this, and look how that turned out.
Buzz is actually way more useful to me than facebook and twitter. The functionality is the same, obviously, but the fact that I can switch tabs while in gmail to check posts is pretty useful. Sadly I only know 2 people that use it, and mostly, it's automatic posts from twitter.
Cool, I'm also a lender with some thousands in. Over-indebtedness is actually a topic we discuss nearly every other day there, though I'm over in engineering so not as involved, but it's apparent they are going to extra efforts to ensure borrowers are not over indebted.
Am curious, any ensemble methods involved? Or was it just a bunch of heuristics mixed in with learning algorithms?

I think Metamarkets, like Palantir and others, understand this very well and thus, are focused on building interactive tools to help humans (particularly domain experts) process and visualize large amounts of data to find interesting patterns more efficiently, rather than trying to automate everything.
nice seeing my lib (validator) in use. Also, damn CoffeeScript is sexy
Ars Technica fills the niche for me, sorta. As well as anything does.

I mean, nothing compares to Byte, which had a series of articles detailing building your own computer from the breadboard up. But what could?
Most good applications are available for free on Android, but not on iOS.

You should try an Android phone before making conclusions.
The OP took the title of the page.

<title>IPad’s Rivals Can’t Beat It on Price - NYTimes.com</title>

Edit: The original comment said something like, and I don't have the exact quote, "The OP changed the title and introduced a mistake."
USPS Delivers Green
http://ignite.oreilly.com/
EG: Salt Lake City: http://www.ignitesaltlake.com/ignite/
The headline was "So Far, Rivals Can’t Beat iPad’s Price"
Not to argue with you or anything, but the guy is really not going to see if other people get upvoted more or something. And he recently got an ipad. He was not lucid enough to do stuff on the internet for a long time. He lost his house to his medical bills. The ipad he was probably given as a last wish is probably the coolest, most alive thing he has gotten to do in a long, long time. Talking to a jillion people at the same time when you have had no real social life in ages is like snorting cocaine or something -- woohoo! give me more of that shit! He said it was his best hour of 2011.

I hope your final days or hours are good enough that some of the concerns you have expressed will still be relevant for you. But I really don't see how any of them apply in this particular instance.
> Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand [...] At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal

If ranting was really extra work, it wouldn't happen so often. Ranting is actually easier than trying to convey the message objectively and fair.

The differences between a first draft and good writing are editing, editing and editing. And by editing I don't mean just finding better words here and there, but also cutting out lots of irrelevant stuff and rewriting whole paragraphs for the sake of clarity.

So a big text that contains lots of crap doesn't mean it was designed this way. It merely means that the "editing" phase was very short or has even been skipped.

It's a sign that the author took less effort rather than more – on the perfect analogy of poor website design.

> It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.

I strongly disagree. You can always strip cut out these nasty (half-)sentences and see what's left. The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.
The latest GNOME doesn't have this limitation because it uses FUSE. Any application, e.g. vim can use those files.
It could very easily be converted to any framework of your choosing, I originally created it in pure javascript.

Do you have any requests for frameworks you'd like me to port it to?
This seems like a good moment to remind people that you can flag individual comments by clicking on 'link' to go to their self page.
I'd like that. I doubt many HN meetups happen where I live.
The most shocking to me was this quote:
"I don't have a home, it was consumed in medical bills."
I don't get why so many people are attacking Vivek. Step back from trying to eval() every single tiny detail to death. The bigger point here is that he is helping shine a light on a huuuuuge pain for immigrant founders in the US that hasn't gotten much attention (or a solution), all this while. Why is that a bad thing?

The DEA has been cracking down on druggies since forever, and it's been beating the same drum ever since. Such a boring agency, find a new pet theme already. People already know drugs are bad, right? If it's not for people like Vivek, who else is going to get the attention of someone who has the political power to change the laws? All you naysayers?

The old adage holds: It doesn't matter what you good do on this planet, there will always be small % of people who attack you no matter what.

Disclosure: I went through the painful F-1, then H-1B route, and now that I have my (conditional) green card, now life begins: I'm burning my savings building a startup in Silicon Valley (hello Hacker Dojo!)

p.s. apologies for the slightly inflammatory comment, I generally don't get myself into frickin' drama on the internets, but this is a topic that hits a very very very sore spot for me, and I couldn't just not say anything.
TED is elitist but it shares its videos with everyone which makes it great.
I think you're arguing with me, but that's fine. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel :)

It's not whether the person in question experiences one thing or another from their posting. The question is whether or not the tools that the community uses to rank tech gossip should be the same tools as it uses to process final words.

I find that a form of monetization of human life, and I'm not in favor of heading down that road. It leads to bad places. Not for the posters, but for the rest of the community.

I think your mistake, if you made one, was assuming that my concern was for the feelings of those posting. It is not. It is for the continuing devaluing of human life by technology. The commnenter said that this article reached out and touched him, and I think that's great. If we had 50 on here a week, it would not. And I think that is unacceptable.
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So for most professionals, the tax-deductibility at most is 30% of the purchase price. And that is assuming that you can deduct the complete cost.
Another Meteorite Paper Review
I have several degreed acquaintances who were ejected from the UK and EU. I'm married to someone who immigrated to Switzerland for work. The impression from people I know is that it's not particularly easy to move to Europe from the US.

I'm not sure what you mean by state / fed institutions, unless you mean that you have to pay both state and federal income tax (... but so does everyone, whether or not they own a company). When we set up Matasano, the only thing I remember us having to do with fedgov was getting an EIN.
The magnificent speech in question

http://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc
i still remember the first time i touched a computer i was 15 in college, and the problem was writing a short program "Hello Turbo C". Then I study more on programming from C to C++ and Java. After graduating as a computer science students i heard that many of my classmates doesn't even want to proceed to development.
I took a job as a computer programmer using Java and the same time as a part-time instructor. i also love to learn new development applications such as groovy and grails.
I am over 35 developer. But i still love to code and teach what i know and learn new things in programming.
To enhance more my programming skills I also volunteered to create free applications in school and community.
The problem with Wave wasn't that it missed its target as much as it was that the folks who "got" what Wave was about were largely the same folks who were already using Lotus Notes/Domino to its full advantage. I've worked in shops where people lived in Notes, and in shops where people lived in email in Notes, and there's a vast difference between using an integrated collaboration environment and messaging links and attachments back and forth.

It's funny, in a way, that people have a hard time putting the pieces together. They seem to "get" email, instant messaging, publicly editable documents, wikis, blogs, "related links" sidebars and so on...
Asterisk Logger: Reveal/recover/monitor password behind asterisks (***)
That's almost exactly what e-gold did.

They stated as a design goal that you shouldn't be able to back out of a transaction once it's gone through. The problem was that the system became popular with sellers of fraudulent goods, and this does, eventually, start to cause problems.

I suspect that iDEAL has some way of letting you report fraud and get a refund from your bank if you get ripped off. they probably have some form of chargbacks, etc.
I logged in to check out my own, ancient Google profile (which I just about barely set up—bare minimum of info and hadn't logged in since the day I'd heard of it) to discover that has a picture in it that I'd never given Google permission to use. I'm sure they got it from Adium (I use gchat with Adium), but I found it creepy to have my profile given a picture without my knowledge or permission.
Ask HN: electric kettle, hacker recipies.
I'm trying to save some money on food.

I've just boiled eggs with my electric kettle (my only appliance).

Has anyone tried making ramen with an electric kettle?

I'm trying to drop my food expences to under 100 euro a month.
And ZFS.
As a 38 year old bachelor, I wish I learned that lesson about fear in my youth, I was one of those “possessive assholes” due to being a Fundamentalist, and regret my social hostility to this day.
The point is job creation. Not novelty of business model.
IPad stylus -- Kickstarter project
While it won't make the iPad (phone, tablets) notably more useful for taking handwritten notes (which strikes me as more of a software than hardware issue), I backed this new pen-cap stylus -- it's a clever design and does have a smaller tip than any other I've encountered (only 9 days left to back the project):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/donlehman/more-real-stylus-cap

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Damion Hankejh | ingk.com