skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the subject of relevance and motivation, the one and only thing that encouraged me to do any actual work in school was when my father offered to pay me a bonus for B's and A's.. In retrospect, it's amazing how relevant everything suddenly became.

They say it's bad, but it worked well for me.

Also: the reason that High School teachers can't tell you why you need to learn x is that they don't know themselves. Having come into contact with a few teachers as an adult, I'm appalled at how little they know. They seemed a lot smarter when I was 14.
UK comes out for royalty-free standards for government procurement
I agree, roughly. At the audiophile level there is some improvement to be expected with S/PDIF in particular(less cable noise). But the situation today is nothing like with older on-board sound where they used the cheapest generic AC97 chips and the output sounded like a tin can.

If you're recording or need low latency playback, there's still tons of room for improvement by getting a sound card. For good recordings, you need a preamp stage, you need <50ms latency, and you (often) need more than one track. And the entry price for these features is still relatively high, between $100 and $250.
Isn't it amazing how the whole Universe seems to be revolving around Texas? :D
Yes, you do
If the design is optional, why does Reddit have an 80k CSS file and Craigslist have a 14k one? (Admittedly, HN has a very tiny amount of design).

Design isn't necessarily about embellishment, but aesthetic choices. Good typography and color scheme choices don't have to be paired with elaborate graphics for a design to be good.

But more to the point of what you're saying, design is NOT optional. It is the essence of how people interact with your website/product. There are certainly some exceptions to the rule, but generally people flock to a more attractive product because it is attractive. Look at any Apple product for a perfect example of this. iOS is far less usable and powerful than Android, but people like it more because it's visually pleasing. OSS is never going to win unless it has that similar level of sex appeal in its products.
forgot to mention, stickk.com does that with other types of commitments that require peer monitoring.
Is it the fact that one can see the sky from it? I wonder what other reasons are like :)
DataNucleus 3.0 vs Hibernate 3.5
Also to their credit, Lion hasn't even been released yet.
Gantt charts were designed for "real" engineers, who worry about things like pouring in the cement foundations before painting the doors.

They are just not designed for agile programmers. They can be used for software, and are somewhat useful, if only because nobody ever reads the spec, but they can see what must be done on the Gantt chart.
The single biggest problem for any new business is almost always getting noticed. This sounds like "getting noticed to the third power":

- great name

- y-combinator

- windfall to charity

Sounds a little gimmickly, but so what? Finding a way to be noticed enough to get traction is mandatory. Good job.
Call me crazy but I think Android has it more right.
Looks like the server has been hacker news'd.
Reddit is also terrible at business. Half the ads are 'thank you for not using Adblock'. The founders even left it after their contract ended, so I don't think anyone is really looking at the big picture there.

Still, your point is right. You can't just have a blanket number that works for any site.
The defrecord constructor-by-map feature is actively being worked on for version 1.3.
Thanks for this clear example and explanation!
I love this series of blog posts, especially since I have studied a bit of organic chemistry and loved that lab work (a very one-sided love affair).

As an old "fan" of rocket fuels in general and peroxides in particular, I still giggle a bit nervously at the chemical formula FOOF...

Edit: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...
"If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic."
Frankly, anything that causes one to give pause and ponder the universe has at least some intrinsic intellectual -- or more accurately, perhaps, philosophical -- value. And that, beyond mere tech, startups, and hacking, is one of the driving factors behind the HN community, as the reader feedback to this link clearly demonstrates.
Converting static array references to pointers when passing them as a function parameter. The whole array/pointer conflation.

C's struct "tag name space".

Trigraphs and \ line splicing.

Replace #include with symbolic import.
"the exact sampling rate of 44.1 kHz was inherited from a method of converting digital audio into an analog video signal for storage on U-matic video tape, which was the most affordable way to transfer data from the recording studio to the CD manufacturer at the time the CD specification was being developed."

So again this has absolutely nothing to do with 'the limits of human hearing'.

That is fairly selective quoting. A few linea up, that wikipedia article states:

The selection of the sample rate was based primarily on the need to reproduce the audible frequency range of 20 Hz - 20 kHz.

So, 44100 Hz is both 'around 40kHz' and 'a fixed number of samples per PAL scan line'. That is similar to how the first Mac got 22kHz sampling (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...)
Records also provide better performance than hash tables for their defined keys.

You can think of them as a Java class that has certain fields (it's named fields) and also implements the Map interface for additional expandability. Records provide "accessor" methods for their named fields that provide bare-metal JVM performance.
Appreciate it -- thanks :)
Anyone else suspicious re the timing of the magazine & Oprah appearance? Wonder which PR Mgmt firm suggested these remedies? Brilliant!
Bank of America matches 100% of your Keep the Change savings for the first 3 months. After that, they match 5% a year. The maximum total match is $250 per year. Sign up for SwipeGood through a Keep the Change card and donate to charity for free!

or nearly free.
Is AngelList Creating False Hope?
Beautiful math: Einstein's field equations
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By strict logical standards you would be right. If they can prove it won't damage then it fails the test. But if that is the case then also "if they can't prove it will damage the network" also fails the test and they could block those.

I would think if we looked at the specific ruling it would be:

can't prove it won't damage -> allowed

can prove it will damage -> can block

can prove it won't damage -> allowed

can't prove it will damage -> allowed

So it would have been clearer if they said if they can prove it will damage the network.
The art of Benchmarking
I always give an answer given to me by a used car salesman. Those who don't understand math can and will get rooked for $$$$ by those who sell them financing.
I dropped out for several reasons, one being an unstable childhood, but I don't look back on it. I am successful and generally consider myself to be a well-rounded, critical-thinking individual. None of which school had anything to do with. You can cross parenting off of that list as well.

I would like to see different approaches to education. I tend to see worth in our current system from kindergarten until about grade 5, then it seems to go awry.

From grade 5, forward, I would like to see a "Pull" system implemented, whereby the students pull topics from a full-circle repository of topics, interests, dialects.

Give students the tools to find what they will be good at and give them the space to learn the material they are interested in. Give guidance over teaching.

Having been diagnosed with "A.D.D", I found the curriculum was designed for one type of person and was absolutely inefficient for a relatively large sized minority of students. Yes, the Farmer vs. Hunter argument treads heavily here, but that's the point.

Most students are great with tasking, others have proficiency of hyperfocus. As a society, we should acknowledge that our current vocational system is hurtful more than helpful.

In a system where I could "Pull" interests, I would have faired much better. I know this because this is how I learn new languages, or better implementations of the technology I use today.

As many HNer's know, exposure to data and insightful debate opens up new topics or technologies that you would otherwise be unaware of. Why wouldn't this concept apply to education as well?
Software maintenance is a sign of a successful project. People are using the software and they want bugs fixed so they can continue using it in the future. That can be very satisfying for a programmer, even if the application itself is "boring" or not "sexy".

I have worked plenty of late nights and weekends on "cool" projects that never shipped. A project gets canceled. A startup runs out of money. No user would enjoy the fruit of my labor. My code gathers dust in some archived copy of the source repository.
Apparently this guy was also not sufficiently deferential to some powerful person, so he is not an appropriate attendee for an event that is all about being grateful for their presence.

You don't know what his relationship is. Maybe this donor thinks this person molested his daughter, but doesn't have enough proof to get a conviction. At the end of the day a donor has just as much right to pull or use any influence they have as this applicant has to attend a private conference.

I've quite possibly never seen a more worthless piece of writing or topic. Although I'd have to go through the TC archives to be sure.
Why insanity? I guess there's the entertainment value...
Excellent, thanks for the theme pack link.
Jonny Ive looking to return to the UK. Could be forced out of Apple.
Custora (YC W11) Helps Online Businesses Improve Customer Retention
Why would you value a 'blind test' over what an expert recording engineer, such as Barry Diament, thinks?

There are a lot of problems with blind tests, and there has certainly been much discussion about the arguments and counter arguments.

If you wheel in a bunch of untrained listeners off the street and get them to listen to recordings they are not familiar with, using a Hi-Fi that they are not familiar with, in stressful un-relaxed circumstances. Why would you expect to get some kind of definitive answer about 16/44.1 vs 24/192 for instance, that somehow trumps the opinion of highly regarded recording engineers?
Dave strikes me as rude, obnoxious, and difficult to read. But more importantly, he strikes me as correct. The vast majority of VC's do a terrible job at investing. He's bold enough to try a new way - the index fund of the startup world.

As they say, those who say it can't be done shouldn't interrupt those who are doing it.

Who knows if it will work, but I'm eager to see the results.

Edit: when I say Dave, I mean his writing style - I've never met the guy.
It doesn't say donors send people in their place. It says donors can designate an attendee. It looks almost certain that the donor who pays 100k also gets to go to the conference. If the donor didn't get to go, then the part in the article talking about the donor not having as good of a time if the attendee weren't booted makes little sense.

The article also makes it clear that unimportant attendees can be booted by donors... and apparently barred from coming back in future years as well.
Thoughts on the latest MacBook Pros
There is a reason for more bits, but only at the production stage.

Programmers all know about numeric precision, rounding errors and truncation; in post-processing, a whole chain of plugins hands off the signal, does work on it, hands it off again, sums it with the other tracks, etc. It follows that even with the 16/44 pulldown, precision during processing is going to affect the cleanliness of the final mix. The majority of that burden rests on the DAW and the plugin authors(most of whom have gone to 32/64-bit floating point today), plus any external hardware(which is typically analog or 24-bit fixed digital), but it helps to start with a high-precision original recording.

Still, it's mostly a matter for audiophiles, and it has little bearing on the consumer market.
and also how many programmers are extremely effective and know perhaps none of the list.
People tend to be pretty good at this anyway, especially if your education system has enough drill work in class that you can reduce the amount of homework kids do.

Creative, open-ended homework is a huge time-sink.
What's an example of X?
New blood from the commoners actually helps sustain the system in two ways.

(1) They usually don't dilute anything, but rather add talent and ambition. Remember -- they got their scholarship by being smart and hungry. If they adopt the norms of their new class and make a pile of bucks, why not let them marry your daughter and go to Nantucket with you.

(2) They add plausible deniability to the class structure -- we can say "look, this kid from a middle class family in West Virgina made it, there's no such thing as class structure." (Or "Clarence Thomas made it -- don't tell me about systemic racism".)
This whole discussion just makes me as a designer want to go and help some project.

As a developer, I've already helped a few opensource projects.

What's missing? A centralized location for designers to meet developers. github is unfortunately designer-unfriendly. It's developer oriented, and code-centric. Fixing github into having a design aspect will surely repair this.

I once tried to help out interpals.net. The usability of the site is non-existent, and the visual elements look like they were made by a four-year-old. Thus, I've come up with sketches and UI elements and gave it to the founder. He was amazed and seemed eager to work with me. At the end wanted someone more experienced. By that, he meant someone who can code, not only design. He wanted a developer. At the time I wasn't one.

Beggars can't be choosers. His site continues to be dead-ugly.

I really want to help anything because I need to exercise design as much as coding.
>"Apple does go through heroic lengths to preserve backward compatibility

Hardly. They could easily provide backward compatibility if desktop versions of OSX were easily virtualized and doing so officialy supported - which is the primary route by which Microsoft has provided backward compatibility (i.e code dependent on 16 bit libraries under x64 and legacy applications under Vista and 7).
Yes, they do. Reporters also have every right to call them out on it.
I'd like to see a remote login implementation for OSX that allows you to login remotely, and also adjusts the screen size to match that of the actual physical device you're on.

The existing implementation of screen sharing is frustrating for me to use because I'm often remoting in from a 15" Macbook to a Macpro tower with two heads @ 1920x1200 each. So the options are scale to 1) down the display (slow, fuzzy) or 2) scroll all over the place.

An ideal solution would be to let me log into a virtual display that matches the size of my physical remote terminal. In other words, make the server think it has a head the same size as the client.
Your "logo" example is too contrived. What is more typical is to get a design for something like a form, that has made no consideration for user interaction (space for error messages, error icons, disabling/enabling buttons, etc.) This is where user interface programmers really stand apart from everyone else... Their designs actually work.
Some non-programming related examples: It would be nice to have all AMAs on reddit be non-anonymous, but it would not be backward-compatible with the organizations out there who still try to control the message. I never advocated requiring non-anonymous Glassdoor reviews for a similar reason.
Your sign up page isn't working!
i didn't say "anything else must be as good or better".

what i meant was that blind trust in traditional VC strategy doesn't make any sense, since on average they suck.

my strategy is still new (<12 months old), so there's no historical performance to compare, outside my investing at Founders Fund (which looks pretty good so far) and my own angel investing (which also looks pretty good).

sorry i can't share #'s here on those, but as a personal investor i was in early on Mint, SlideShare, Simply Hired, & Mashery. as a professional investor at Founders Fund i was in early on Twilio, CrowdFlower, CreditKarma, Bitly, and several others which are doing pretty well.

still, it's too early to say whether i'm any good or not.

my point was simply that arguing status quo doesn't make sense when status quo is sucking pretty hard.
more than welcome. I loved putting it together and will be doing one for designers next weekend
Designing society for posterity
One hour each way.
I'm not really sure how Angel List works. I listed my startup a couple of weeks ago and it's had just 3 views. We don't have any "Social Proof" since we have been bootstrapping to this point. It feels as though Angel List has no utility unless you already have taken some money or a have a well known advisor. I also have not listed Price & Terms, which I have a feeling is also hurting the profile, as I'm not yet sure how much I should be raising and would like to discuss that with a potential investor first. So, if I have no "Social Proof", how likely are investors to find my company's profile on Angel List?

Edit: I guess there is also the possibility that my company will not be the next Facebook nor does it even aspire to be and because of that, I guess it might not be interesting to investors.
Sorry about that! It's working for us, what browser are you using? You can reach me directly at jon [at] custora dot com
I think he is counting each star as a different reason.
Adobe AIR also lets Flash developers package their Flash apps for iOS and Android.
Have you had a chance to measure operational throughput vs hardware utilization yet? I'd be very interested in loose metrics and stats instead of a general "faster than" statement.
Before I make this comment, please understand that I've never been to a TED conference and am unlikely to go in the reasonably near future. Having said that what rational being would pay $6,000 to attend an event where he's treated like a second class citizen(I especially liked the "back of the bus" reference) and then next year reregisters for the same event?
Instead, we handle this the way the Obama administration chose to handle the financial crash - by saying it was best "to just move on."

I heard the FAA analogy when this (terrible) policy direction was becoming clear. The commenter observed that handling airplane failures with the same carelessness that we were applying to the banks would mean that no one would every fly.

The problem with similar carelessness in the justice system is that you really can't avoid it by opting out.
Er, ssh?

I don't see what the big deal is. I've been able to remotely ssh into my mac for years.
What do you mean? X11 obviously copied Apple's innovation.

EDIT: every time there's a talk about Android versus iOS there are people complaining about how Google stole interface elements from iOS. This in spite of the fact that no software is revolutionary and every idea is based on previous art; even the interface on iOS.

I am just making a joke here based on repeated evidence that even Apple (indeed an innovative software and hardware company) copies / gets inspiration from others and has done so repeatedly.

Sorry,
It's not really the size but the principle of it. Google is installing something on my PC without asking me about it. Ev6en if in this case the result is good, it's not the kind of thing a program should do.

I know that when one installs Chrome, they are implicitly accepting that it will update itself, but it still is a very unique behaviour that wouldn't be accepeted in most programs.
Get pissy much? I consider it "very cool" in the sense that this is a cool feature that I finally get to use in the OS I prefer to work in.

I don't care if it's been around for decades or done a thousand times before on other OS's, it's being done by them now, and I find it useful.

I'd rather see them do stuff like this and be praised for it than do stuff like this and get shit on by people with the tiresome "it's about time" or "Linux had this a zillion years ago and did it better" crowd.
Evidence trumps authority. I thought that was a basic lesson of science education?
Just press F11 (on linux) and you'll get full screen.
The manual? What's the manual?
True, but that is more along the lines of quantitative thinking. All the specific math actually useful to most people (compound interes, depreciation, etc) could be taught in a one semester course.
The 14 graduates from the Founder Institute Silicon Valley 2010
Can I just show up and say hi at DogPatch?
You know what's installed on your computer. Chrome updates.

The only thing which you don't really know anymore is when or to what version it is currently updating. But why would you care anyway about that.
This can all be done in HTML5 :)
C++ has uses, but it's the sulfuric acid of programming languages: you have to have good personnel control and fire those who screw around outside the boundaries of the right style. A programming group with one guy programming like C with classes and another guy programming like it's Ocaml without garbage collection, and you're in for a mighty piece of hell.
November Sprint app (slightly late): Go Scoring Camera for Android
From my first sentence: serious mistake with a ceramic high-output cook top

We did not go with the induction, I should have run gas. I did, however, test pretty extensively with induction. Even in the $6,000 range I wasn't pleased with the results in testing.
For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education.

Washington actually has a program called "Running Start" that implements this idea.
Yes, I know there are 'mods', but they don't count because only enthusiasts can deal with them, and they don't work on all devices. From that point of view iOS is more 'open' because jailbreaks work on all iPhones.

I hate to break it to you, but non-enthusiasts won't be able to deal with anything that is not pre-installed. The good "mods" are typically full AOSP forks, which is as open as you can get.

And of course, you don't have to have root to download the source code of the built-in apps, edit it, and deploy to your phone.
The way I like to think of this feature is as a throwback to the days of "dumb" terminals that would connect to a server where you stored your files, account info, etc.

"Back to Unix".