skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Travelling alone can be depressing. Don't just run from your current lifestyle, add something to it. Travel with a purpose.

Stuff like 'Homes for humanity' and many other travel related charities can be quite expensive.

But you can travel and work. Not travel and hack, just work.
I'm not sure what is near Atlanta, and what's available. But you already have fairly nice weather.

No matter where you go, $2000 isn't going to get you very far, flights to buenos airies as an example are nearly $1600
http://www.kayak.com/flights/ATL-BUE/2011-05-03/2011-07-07

Cruise ships could be interesting work if you're into that. I've worked in Ski Resorts for much of my life, and the first few years where you aren't focused on making money or getting ahead, but just looking for an experience were amazing.

I'm a believer in the greatest path to happiness is through service to others. Discovering your purpose is a big part of that. If you don't have a purpose, the best way to find one is to do something, anything.

I hope that helps, though it isn't a direct answer to your question.
That's not to say all comment score data should be gone.

I already like what HN does with the colour of posts. What if HN switched to colour only? Displaying points

* encourages "karma whoring" by posters or just makes people care about how well their comment was received

* biases the decision to upvote/not by subsequent readers. Subconscious, conscious, contrarian, consensus-seeking, whatever -- shouldn't people make up their own minds as to whether a comment was good or not, on its merits rather than on what the rest of the community thought?

The information filtering function would still be accomplished by colour and order only.
Certainly such a service could be even cheaper with official sponsorship and universal coverage.

Perhaps Canadians can lobby their MPs to institute a national system providing every Canadian with a United States IP address. The Single-Payer-Proxy-System – or in French, Proxy Système à Payeur Unique (SPPS-PSPU). There's really no reason for the nation to stand for this sort of Canadophobic discrimination. Indeed, where are the national and provincial Human Rights Commissions on this important issue?
This is true, but to be fair, rightly or wrongly those are the technologies that are put forward by the designers as the primary solution for concurrency problems in the respective languages.

ScalaSTM looks good though and the comparison would be interesting.
On the other hand, I had fulltime offers from my coop companies, before I even graduated. (also not at Waterloo)
Ex-Engadget Crew Starting New Site
What's the justification for management fees at all, let alone such a steep one?

The justification is that people are willing to pay it.

Of course, you're probably asking not whether people pay it, but whether it's a fair price. The answer is no in general; hedge funds historically have underperformed the market.
The Hacker, Off the Couch
Tron Legacy: how the special effects were done
CRTC Canadian content regulations don't apply to the internet.
The video where system tracks Roy from IT Crowd sucking his fingers is epic:)
http://www.youtube.com/user/ekalic2#p/u/2/tKXX3A2WIjs
Some corporations go pretty far to save money (reducing workforce, etc.), all apparently in the name of keeping investors happy. Shouldn't there be investors in banks asking questions about these managers' salaries?

If I were a major shareholder, the first thing I'd demand is that a test of managers' worth be done. Set up a few theoretical funds with spreadsheets, full of what-ifs such as how much money is invested in total, and with goals for each fund (such as a certain amount of gain, or safety). Then, take some people with minimal finance experience, like new college grads, and pay them $50000 a year each; pit them against the hedge fund managers for the same funds.

For a few months, everyone has to try to work those fake funds; they must use real market values and suggest decisions based on real data, but obviously the funds contain no real money and the effects would just be calculated. Here's the best part: since the real managers are making over 100 times what the grads would make, they had better have some pretty damned impressive results. If the grads come anywhere near what the managers do, the managers will automatically have their pay docked accordingly. In other words, if they aren't astronomically better when applying their "experience" to a few simple tests, why the hell would any investor continue to tolerate paying these managers so much?
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Sorry. Thanks for the feedback.
More and more people have been bringing laptops to some of my classes. I find the clicking keys to be very annoying. I'd go nuts if the whole class typed their notes.
I negotiate for food and shelter with members of a nosy, judgmental, sometimes irrational species. I want to avoid self-censoring arguments which I consider valid but controversial, and that's why I comment using a pseudonym. What's your excuse for doing so, since you regard it as a sign of malfeasance?
To some degree, I think unabused HTML 3.2 was less noisy than unabused HTML 5.0...

...but maybe it's really about plain, dumb, and irrational nostalgia.
what is the best example of a comment that is mean and/or dumb that got massively upvoted?

as a last resort you can always stall HN for 1 month.
Basically, they continue to invest in hedge funds because hedge funds keep producing huge returns. These are the folks who operate the supercomputer-powered vacuum cleaners that suck all the arbitrage out of the market.
I found his content on quora hard to read because of the spelling mistakes and general lack of formatting (stream of thought style of writing does equate to easy to consume writing). And even though people had suggested edits, he never seemed to accept them/fold them back into his post.
There will always be a demand for good mentors. Accelerators imply that more than funding can help talent get their business to market ASAP. Like 1999 these times certainly smell like ASAP whether fortune or bust is the end result.
PushStart aiming to be Australia's answer to Y Combinator
How about giving reliably good sources 10 "soft upvotes" to start with so that they'll be visible, but not let their score increase past 10 until 10 users have actually upvoted it. That way, a story won't get much staying power on the front page until users have validated the initial assumption that the article is good.
Probably not, but in this case I imagine it was scratching a personal itch and no other country in the world starts with "can" - I imagine that bit really rubs it in the face of Canadians. I'm sure other copycats will emerge as people think up amusing domain options.
How does anonymously damaging the property of those who hold beliefs you disagree with in any way consistent with those values? Further they aren't advancing an agenda they are harming one. I'm someone who agrees with much of what they advocate but everytime they "take action" I feel sympathy for that company.
Startup America, Startup Britain - why no Startup Australia?
I live in Argentina and I usually speak in Spanish. So when I want to make a comment I have to switch to English mode, write the comment, run a spell checker and then submit it.

I think that an initial 100 karma level for submissions will make the site more difficult to use for the not native English speakers.
Strongly agree with where you're going here. Every time I see a "senior" or "better" HN handle call someone dumb, I think: well, who says you're so smart? Who makes you the dictator of "good" comments?

I never see "nice" tellings-off. A "nice" telling-off might be: "reader123, this comment is mean. please be nicer"
When you suggest trying it in real time, initially, are you saying to just go ahead and generate a new report every time the page is requested? I might as well go ahead and try this, knowing that it's not going to be under heavy user load. That might give me a good cpu load benchmark, as you said.
Urrgh, I agree, this is so ludicrous and stupid. I wish I could say it was surprising, but it is an example of what I mean when I say 'maybe we (collectively) aren't mature enough to handle <insert awesome technology here>'.
I've been in this position a couple of times during my career.

Both times I sent an email to the HR department (always the least efficient of any large corp) stating that I had created new intellectual property relating to mynewdomain.com. I include the relevant paragraphs of my employment contract and state that I believe I am compliant.

I never say what my invention does or what I hope it will do. I never say what I projects worked on for the company. I never say what I want HR to do.

I've never had any follow up except for a thank-you email, but then none of my ideas have become wildly successful.
My school censors almost everything on the internet. paulgrahm.com is blocked for being a personal site, as are all blogs, wikis, and forums. And the best part? The teachers have different censors so if a teacher gives you an assignment with links on it there's a fairly good chance you won't be able to use most of the links. I use my iPhone at school to do research because it has an uncensored internet connection.
Miami is surprisingly cheap if you stay in a hostel and buy food at the grocery store. You could take a bus there, or probably even find a $50 flight from Atlanta. I did this in 2004. Mexico is also inexpensive outside of the tourist resort areas but may cost more to get there.
To get mandated against a niche either as the defacto standard or as literally specified by a government / industry body is brilliant as well.
Actually, there is significant evidence that integrating mobile technology into the classroom does in fact aid learning, but only of the instructor is will to embrace the technology instead of fight it. Unfortunately, most instructors don't feel comfortable changing their teaching methods, so technology is seen as having no impact.

Here's one article about one professor's experience with integrating Twitter into the classroom: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_one_teacher_uses_tw...

There are numerous similar examples of teachers that are experimenting with technology and seeing positive results, but are being stonewalled by administrators who are afraid of trying something new.

Yes, there's always a risk that students will just be able to play Angry Birds on their phones in class, but then, those same students can just doodle in their notebooks instead. Should we take all notebooks and pencils away? Any tool has the potential to be abused, but it also has the potential to significantly help.
I would have upvoted this story, if it hadn't been for the annoying "darken screen and ask for your email address" trick.

Perhaps part of the answer to the question posed by the title is "because the Australian startup community is too dominated by scammy-looking weirdoes trying to sell you "101 tips on somethingorother""
Well, I can say that $2000 would not get you very far if you're targeting beaches in CA. You would probably spend almost that amount just getting there. I recently spent about $8000 on a full relocation to Santa Monica, and found a "cheap" place 4 blocks from the ocean. Cheap out there though was like $1700/mo. =/
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yes, though like I said, there's no reason you can cache the results for a short time (whatever works for you..I've seen as short as 5 seconds and as long as 5 hours). That way, if 10 users happen to look at it at the same time (common if you have an auto-refresh ajax thing going), it will keep the load low.
That is exactly the sort of telling-off I got. It was polite and to the point. After I edited and apologised tptacek deleted his remonstration.
Notice that many of these services offer copyrighted contents online. I think the primary issues they had with doing business outside the U.S. is that there are less copyrighted laws to adequately protect the material and that sort of business in those countries. It would also be notoriously hard to sue people who abuse them.

Other services such as telecom have to deal with Canadian collusion and protectionism towards the readily established telcorps. It's an uphill battle. One that Canadians have been paying the price for, with high wireless phone bills, high internet fees and the recent attempt at imposing Usage-Based Billing.
True. Obviously if we both work for the same company, there's a fixed set of money they pay for our two salaries (generally speaking). Should I perform better, My salary might go up at the expense of yours going down but alternately your salary could stay the same while mine goes up.
Sorry about that, edited the title. Neat toy, though.
Regarding your first point - you could enable a special Anon mode and have the user jump through hoops to comment anonymously. I believe impulsive upvotes and comments are the primary reason for declining quality and making real identities the default choice would avoid that.

Regarding your second point - tying into existing identity providers like Facebook would have little overhead beyond the initial implementation. If you wanted to go a step further, you could create an automated phone verification system, like the one Google uses for new accounts. Again, the intent would be to make it harder to comment or upvote anonymously, not impossible.
A Little Product Management Advice
Google up info on Port Aransas. You can sleep on the beach for up to three days without a camping permit. It was lovely and I considered relocating there. It's about 30 minutes or so from Corpus Christi.
this blew my mind! dude mashes (piano) keyboard, plays it back, sounds as you would expect -- awful. then dude uses software to snap all notes to the nearest sisteenth and adds a boring base line. sounds awesome!

search for heading "An Experiment"
Isn't the purpose of a hedge fund to reduce the total variance in investors' portfolios? Shouldn't they be evaluated by non-correlation rather than comparative returns?
Can we get a Google Voice number in Canada with this service?
Maybe it would be better to discover and address the reasons why these services are unavailable.
Doubts on AT&T Plan to Improve Spectrum
You're trying to control the character of this site. It started in a good position, but has been slowly drifting. You can wait for it to change its course and find its way back to the sweet spot. Or do nothing and hope it finds a new position. These are both long shots and not very likely. The other way is to apply force to move it back where it was.

The content of this site is the average of community activities. If you want to increase the quality of content, you have increase the average quality of activities.

Moderation does this: removing low quality submissions increases the average quality. You could be more aggressive in moderation. Remove more comments. Take away commenting privileges temporarily for repeat offenders. Ban bad users.

Another option is giving trusted users 'megavotes,' worth more than 1 point. They can downvote that admittedly-funny-but-not-constructive comment to a more appropriate point value and upvote that other comment that's downvoted for no good reason. These users work to increase visibility and rewards of high quality content and decrease the visibility and rewards of low quality content. Hopefully this would work in a feedback loop to increase the natural average quality of content.

Both of these suggestions can help force the decline of mean, dumb, and inappropriately upvoted comments.

However, I think many will be wary of these suggestions because it can lead to bad things. I'm concerned too. Trusted users can abuse their power and destroy the feelings of community that have developed. Mistakes will be made and people will be upset.

But it needs to be done. Mistakes are mistakes. People find ways to get upset here everyday. Valuable members leaving already hurts the community.

Technical solutions won't cut it. Hacker News could be about coin collecting and the software could be exactly the same. The software does little to shape the community on a larger scale.

Ultimately, the average of the community is pushing in the wrong direction, so you need to push back by fixing the average to your favor. There may be better ways of doing this then what I've described, but it's time to pushing hard.
Thanks for posting the link. The GHZ state they created is technically entangled (in the way that Einstein was worried about entanglement, where if you took one of the 14 qubits far away from the rest, you could measure it and instantly have knowledge of the other 13 qubits, which seemingly violates special relativity). However, even ignoring the fact that this was only to 50% fidelity, it is also only a superposition of two states. To run, say, the phase estimation algorithm (which is the heavy-lifting part of Shor's algorithm), you need an equal superposition of all 2^14 states, which is obviously a lot different.

Anyway, I agree with your analysis - this is a great accomplishment, but we are still further from having true quantum computers than the news reports would make it seem.
Thanks for the recommendation. Miami had completely slipped my mind. Hope you are having fun in Australia.
The beauty of this is geothermal heat adds the opportunity for life to develop/survive outside the Goldilocks Zone [1]. Not just in our solar system where the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are very active geologically due to tidal forces [2] but on extrasolar moons and planets that otherwise may not be suited to life.

Perhaps there is more life in the universe where the base energy source is that of geothermal than that of radiation from a star? I wonder what an sentient life form evolved from this environment would be like?

I feel a short story coming on.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force
At http://virtuousgiant.com we take our designs to a local print shop, which has a minimum order of 12 for screen printed shirts, so we pay about $150 for 12 shirts, which isn't the best margins, but it's not a loss when we sell them.
Virtual machines receive very little entropy from their environment, which is a real problem when entropy is required for the generation of cryptographic keys.

There have been many attacks based upon vulnerabilities which exist due to misunderstandings entropy, and the need for a secure random number generator, for example the mozilla ssl vulnerability and the debian ssh key vulnerability.

I would agree with you that /dev/urandom can be used for one shot passwords, however I would disagree with you that getting in to the habit of using a non secure random number generator as a source of secure entropy is a bad idea and should be discouraged.

I'd also like to point out that "the standard openssl RSA encryption function" last time I checked worked to spec, and does in fact encrypt a symetric key used for AES (By default), using RSA, including proper cryptographic padding of the key using PKCS#1.

I'm not exactly sure why you thought otherwise.

I do agree with your final assertion, though. Unless you know what you're doing, it's very easy to make a mistake.
> An old copy of Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" and a willing student will make a far more talented engineer than giving a disinterested student an iPad with anywhere/anytime access to the totality of human knowledge (including Angry Birds).

Likewise, a willing student with an iPad is going to have the potential to learn so much more than a disinterested student with a textbook.

If a student is disinterested and completely lacks motivation, it won't matter if you use a tablet or a textbook, that student is probably not going to learn much. However, a willing and interested student can learn so much more with newer, more powerful tools. Does it really make sense to hold the willing student back because of the disinterested student?

As far as motivating the lazy student goes, you are far more likely to spark their interest with real-world applications on a tablet or smartphone than with a boring old textbook.
Yeah, I agree. I think I remember reading maybe in the Hodges biography that there unfortunately isn't any; I think there was some sort of recorded radio interview that got lost somehow...
The World's Most Complex Architecture: Cardboard Columns With 16 Million Facets
If an app like this is useful enough, I'd think rescue organizations would buy iPhones specifically for it.
I like this--it's in particular a great demo of going from images to canvases and back again. Plus it's useful.

Like he says, it's easily bypassed by viewing source (or disabling JS), but it's still quite a useful thing for insecure applications, I'd think.
I would be extremely excited about a static type checker, and given how favorably Python is seen in this community, plenty of others would be here as well. So please do post when you have a finished product!

I'm sure you've seen these already, but if not, they would be highly relevant:

* GvR did a commentary on some of the challenges that would arise with an optional type system:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=85551

* Python 3 included some syntactic changes precisely to support things like type checking:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/
What if I get a bunch of good comments from the good old days, train a Bayesian filter on them, and then make a comment bot with bias in my favour?

Perhaps you could give everyone a comment bot, like a green/red bar that says whether the comment looks like low quality or high quality as you're typing it. A lot of people might edit the comment to make it better, or simply delete the comment (you could design UI to encourage this ... eg RBM's can highlight which words look like they're causing the problem, or offer a Kill Comment "X" when the comment is far into the red).

You could also train the bayesian filter on (graphwise) voting patterns, rather than on comments as bags of words.
Stephen Hawking has a 12-year old child? ;)
A well implemented following system could solve a number of problems. The most important feature of this would be to automatically create (or suggest) "follow" connections based on your upvotes. If I upvote someone a few times, suggest I follow them. Then, display comments from people I follow with some sort of marker.

This would give comments context. The site would in effect be saying "hey, you've read four or five comments by this person and thought they were sharp." or, "don't waste your time with this comment, you haven't liked their others." I don't know how many times I've read smart comments without actually connecting that they were all being written by the same person. It is only extremely good and prolific people who I actually recognize by hnname. This would help me find more.

This is really a reputation/karma system, but scoped per user instead of site wide. You can go further and trickle votes down the follow chain, so that the people who I follow follow also are part of my personal reputation network. This would help cut down the amount of interaction I have to do to make the following system useful. This is essentially page rank.

With this in place, HN can become a more personalized aggregator wherein the links and comments that are liked by the people you like are more often presented to you. It is quite possible this could create the equivalent of subreddits organically as the site's membership creates following chains interested in different things.

Now, this is a very technical solution to the problem, which means it probably isn't merited. I think that metafilter is probably one of the right guides to watch and that for them careful moderation has been key.

Also, there are a number of real problems with this solution, the first being that it significantly increases the risk of the echo-chamber as people start to be split in to like minded groups. I've thought about some ways to deal with these issues, but I don't feel like this post is the place for them.