skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget HN's "noprocrast" setting. I bet it's often overlooked but I found it invaluable in breaking the habit of "cmd-t news.yco..."-ing.
That's the wobble bass.
IPhone5 delayed for legal reasons over Apple's alleged iTunes cloud service
Strawman, meet axe.
This is exactly what I was thinking, while reading through the comments, the phrase "Neeerds!" kept playing in my head from the Revenge of the Nerds movie. The American culture has not been favorable to intellectuals socially, at least in my life time, 36 years. I believe most people tend to gravitate to what is socially acceptable. Also there is a sense I get from the political media, that intellectuals are to be demonized. Intellectuals generally seem to speak of complex problems, with complex solutions. Which are a hard sell in a form that seems to live off the 30 second sound clip, not to mention any ideological conflicts. And then there is the part where being an intellectual is hard work, it takes dedication, sometimes a complete lifestyle to gain, and maintain. Something that you'd have to put down the remote control, get off the sofa and go get. Its an up hill battle, TV, which is the most powerful form of dispersing to the people, what their culture is and thus, what they should be doing, to maintain their social status, is easy to do, more so than learning about a topic. Also the people making it, want to do what ever it takes, to make sure you keep watching instead. Then the people through ratings, tell the producers what they want to watch. So it is rather easy for this process to spiral out of control. The race to the bottom if you will. The internet has changed things a bit, it brought fame and glory to some smart people, the innovators and the builders, but I would still wager the vast majority is still tied up in social networking. Recently getting a twitter account I've noticed whats on TV tonight, seems to trend quite often.
Translate Your Tweets With Hashtags
Okay! But, me, I couldn't tell the rest was just gray! I assumed you had lots of nice reds and greens in there!
Right, it's a figurative expression for a reason. There's a balance where the listener/reader must understand the literal sense of the phrase to understanding the rhetorical meaning. If the listener/reader doesn't understand "heisenberg debugging" in any relevant context, they can't easily find the second meaning in the figure of speech. I'd go so far as arguing that figures of speech need to approach cliche entirely because of this necessity. It's not rocket science.
Why Working On Tasks In Parallel is A Pipe Dream
Right! I have pixel color picker and could have discovered that!
Man, well done. Very well done.

Just a quick suggestion: I think having "Discover Pivots" on a separate Reddit- or HN-style ranking page might be better than having a bunch of popup windows.
Drupal Upgrade Patch Generator
Five-Thousand NYC Metrocards Went Into Making This Bench
No one has mentioned that you can be a part of YC and still apply to MassChallenge. Why not do both and get even farther ahead? MC doesn't require you to be in Boston, so it's in your interest to place multiple bets.
This is my opinion for the future of journalism. Let's discuss.
Very very well done. I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Best of luck to you!
For those interested in maze generation, Jamis Buck's maze series (http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit...) covers the whole spectrum of algorithms and has recently started on weave mazes.
It makes sense that Energy Secretaries would have a scientific background.. but then when you look into the past 6 or so, Chu and Bodman are the only ones.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Ener...
+1 on that! Another suggestion: Is it possible to make private posts?
I'd never heard of that form, but I'll look into it.
Great idea -- will add that today or tomorrow!
I didn't say that he was a good example.. just noting that it's been 80 years since any engineer, scientist, etc was in the role. No wonder they're disconnected.
Asian (western educated) engineers have committed some of the worst atrocities in Asia. Khmer Rouge, et al.

In Iran, the honorific "Mohandes" (Engineer), "Doktor" (MD or PhD), and the ultimate, Doctor Mohandes (PhD in technical fields) were frequently applied as sign of respect. Of course, this was during the Shah's reign. He and his father were single handedly responsible for injecting this societal respect for the intellectual class, and in fact, creating a middle class in Iran.

(A subset of the same class duly became communists -- apparently they offer this course for all Asian engineers in Europe and America -- and substantially, and one can fairly say stupidly, contributed to the demise of the regime; most are now either dead/executed/newly-Fervent-Muslim or abroad.)
There's also sorting algorhitms based on this law iirc. Can';t find the link in 5 mins googling. Anyone?
I am a little set back by the fact that we are comparing $50k pro video cameras to an iphone... higher resolution won't fix a crappy camera.
Thank you! Yeah I know, the UI for discovering pivots is very early -- there is just so much to do and we were busy refining the pivot view first. We are definitely thinking about a concept for the homepage, possibly with snapshots of how the pivot looks. Will come next week!
State Department Builds A Panic Button App
Why is it newsworthy that the iPhone 5 will have a camera?
If you only end up with a quarter of the cake, how is that reasonable?
1. Life is not fair. Sure, it isn't always, but we can try to make it more fair, for example by acknowledging that people are equal in their humanity. And we are part of life, not existing passively apart from it. I've noticed that people who say things like 'life isn't fair' and 'the world is a cruel place' often act to make it so.

2. Self-esteem. School may state that it cares about pupils' self-esteem, but, without stating it, and perhaps without even realising, it tries to crush people's creativity and autonomy. And it often succeeds.

3. $40k. There are plenty of computer programmers who make that much w/o a degree.

4. Bosses are mean. Plenty of those programmers work from home and don't have bosses, or they work for bosses who stay well away.

5. Flipping burgers. Unless you're a creative chef then flipping burgers is beneath your dignity, in the long run. Eventually this will come to be acknowledged by most people, just as having servants is no longer cool. The sooner we get robots to do the flipping, the better.

6. Don't blame parents. Plenty of hang ups are passed from parents to their children via anti-rational memes. I would agree that we shouldn't blame our parents for this. (Blaming is the opposite of problem solving.)

7. Tidiness and bills. People shouldn't worry about tidiness, which, like shaving and personal grooming, isn't intrinsically very important. Ditto spending money on extra cars, expensive clothes and holidays, live sporting events, doing up houses, school fees, etc. Combating lice is a parental responsibility. Stop herding children into schools -- that would probably help!

8. Grades haven't been abolished just yet, although I think they ought to be, because they don't measure anything useful, and they cause a lot of upset.

9. Eight hours work every day. See 3. These programmers choose their own hours. Frequently they enjoy working 12+ hours. And they have long breaks between contracts. If we are optimistic and keep improving then eventually all jobs will be like this.

10. Televisions are physical objects and watching them is part of real life. Art and entertainment are sources of education and inspiration. If somebody is watching TV compulsively, this may be a problem, but it's not a problem to do with TV (maybe he's been damaged by all these rules).

11. Be nice to nerds. Yes! We can judge societies by how they treat nerds. But go further: become a nerd. Become interested in something.

12. Smoking does not make you look cool. Possibly. However, going on and on about this is sufficient to cause young people to take up smoking.

13. Immortal. Why can't I be? I expect Aubrey de Grey will begin repairing my body about 25 years from now. Ultimately I'll be able to start making backups of myself.

14. Enjoy this while you can. Yes, everyone should try to make the best of the situation, however old and wherever they are. Tackling problems is fun. Life is good.
Anyone want to bet that the iPhone 5 ends up not having a Sony camera in it? This reminds me of the CEO of the publishing company that blurted out about the iPad days before it was going to be released.
The iPhone 3GS' camera has a 1/4" sensor. With the iPhone 4, Apple shaved off 24 percent of the size of the iPhone 3GS. And yet, the iPhone 4's camera has a larger 1/3.2" sensor.

Sure, to get to 1/1.6", the iPhone would have to get thicker. Personally, I wouldn't mind. I've owned every iPhone model since 2007, and honestly, the original iPhone was thin enough for me. (Of course, Apple likes to make their products thinner, not thicker, so it's not likely.)
> apparent admiration

This. Kids don't know what power is. Desire to serve the country is not going to play a role here either. It's the cultural programming targeting kids: "oh, cool, look, a firetruck!" Same with sports. It's somewhat ironic that many blue-collar jobs are probably more glorified in the mainland U.S. than they are in former Soviet countries. Though this illusion disappears as soon as you realize that jobs where the majority of the workforce are immigrants immediately lose the "cool" status.
Slavery Help Wanted
what did you do to in terms of marketing to get to 20k users? I think the site is good.
Manchester Property
For professional property management in and around Manchester, turn to Madina Property Services Ltd.
Another idea: Since Apple knows exactly how much money I've spent in their store, that signal can somehow also be weighed in with my reviews.

This means that reviews by people that have spent a fair amount in the app store would get a better/heavier scores than those that have not yet spent as much money in the store.
The only marketing so far was to post it to HN and Forrst, and at a usually bad time too (Saturday evening). But people upvoted it a lot and it was #1 almost all Sunday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373785
Honestly, me too. But that's a personal sacrificial choice I'm making.

I just find it repugnant when people morally criticize the business activities of workers while simultaneously giving a HUGE SWEEPING pass to the management class in general.

As long as our society finds it accepted, expected, and encouraged for executives to be purely self-interested schemers, then it must be accepted, expected, and encouraged for other job descriptions in society to hold the same motivation.

Moral condemnation of one group of people, while giving a pass to another group, is awful. All it does is empower sociopaths.
Maybe Stringer doesn't really want to sell Apple these parts and is hoping Apple will switch manufacturers.

They probably didn't refuse right away to protect Sony's reputation as a supplier to other companies. The OEM and components market seems very politicized.
"Most of my college-graduate friends have post-graduation jobs where they have no impact on the company's success, and do mostly busywork filling out forms and going through the motions."

Really? I'm a little surprised that most of your college friends have jobs where their bosses don't care that much about performance. Can you give a few examples?
> This is a variation of the famous question used to judge the level of testosterone in men in regards to "alpha" behaviour.

As long as they're not smart enough to be self-aware of their own bullshit, for then they should treat other people fairly no matter how big and hairy a fucking ape they are.
Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM -- iPhone Dead In The Water
Basically, this applies to a lot of developing countries (I believe, to Russia, India, Brazil, African countries, etc).
USA also has it, but at a bigger scale (think of a politician supporters, the Cenate, etc).
Personally, I think bribes in one or another form are just inevitable. It is just a part of human nature.
the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.

Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts?

The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them.

By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket.

it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.

If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.
Adding laws about bribery demands new legal machinery. I was wondering whether the need for that can be bypassed by piggy backing on contract law.
I've started remedying this for myself.

What I did: Told myself not to go to Fark, Reddit, 4chan, or any adult websites. Slashdot, Drudgereport, and Hacker News were allowed for personal reasons (they have interesting content and news while filtering out a lot of low-value stuff. I also spend less time at the latter sites than the former).
Results:

-Movies. I watched a few movies and TV shows. Doing this helped my mind relax, because information overload DOES happen.

-Programming: I got back into Scala, and have an idea for a fun project I want to start working on. For me, programming is a mental exercise and is my outlet for creativity.

-People: When I don't have long hours at work (IT, surprise), I hang out with friends more. This can quickly drain funds, though, so watch your spending.

-Sex: Abstaining from adult material on the web for a few days makes you more ready for a mate, if there's one available.

-Less distraction: No matter what I list above, they were all things I devoted all my attention to while I was doing it (especially the last one). Browsing tons of sites on the net for hours on end kills your focus on specific tasks (like having a life, or truly excelling at a task).

Basically, interesting stuff on the Internet is like fats and oils on the old food pyramid: delicious, and necessary in small amounts.

FOR YOU:
Don't cut out every gluttonous activity you have. Start with the top two or three time-wasters, and start from there. Don't let yourself go to it at all. Cold turkey. Find other things to do when you get bored looking for articles.
Works nice and smooth on iPhone 4 until you zoom in — the further you zoom in, the more jumpy it becomes.
Don't judge the platform now. Look at iOS when it started or even worst, Android in the G1!
Unless he signed and recorded something saying otherwise he is not personally responsible for the debt of anyone else, including the Corp, and the state is trying to levy a tax on ignorance.
I am comfortable with the $199 entry fee, though I thought about it for a few days. I'll spend more in various false starts - services, contractors, software, and paths.

It is also a simple filter against people simply cutting and pasting their applications from other opportunities. The applicants may find this frustrating, but a smaller applicant pool means that the judges can invest more time in the people who do apply. That, for the people who do submit, is a big win.
I actually find "aimlessly" browsing the web less of a time sink than going to the few websites that truly suck me in.

Lately, I've been using an egg timer to stop working every twenty minutes and stretch. This has the side effect of forcing me to also consider whether the last twenty minutes were productive. That I'm here shows it's not perfect but I do think it has helped (both keeping my body more active and my computer activities more productive).
A significant and recurring step for myself has been recognizing that in my scramble to consume everything that seemed interesting I was trying to hoard something that's in rampant abundance.

You will never have enough time to dick around on the Internet, because there will always be new things that seem interesting. The most interesting thing in the world will be the thing you mark "Read Later" in the moments before you die. It never ends. You will.

What you've got to recognize in this is that "Does this seem interesting?" is not a good heuristic for reading / watching / listening / doing. It's the natural and intuitive one we're all equipped with, but it fails in a world of abundance. To get out of the trap you've got to internalize a rule more like "Do I need this for something?" or "Can I safely ignore this?" or "Am I going to act on this?"

Try it with the tabs you've got open right now and see how you feel.
There's not that much to say. I'm a below average looking guy who used to be able to attract a woman and now, as far as I've been able to tell over the last few years, I'm universally rejected romantically and sexually.

I've been reading the guides out there for years and I don't do any of the classic mistakes that I'm aware of. My best guesses are that, in addition to a few physical flaws (nothing major) it's about changing expectations of women. I'm 35 and I look 22 and still act like a kid in some ways and am quite socially awkward. I don't think I have the verbal skills to pull off those moves where you put on a puppet show in order to push the right buttons and fuck women, and that's not what I want anyway. (I'd like nothing more in life than to meet a single woman who was attracted to me and with whom I could be myself with.) I have a personality where I don't take bullshit from anyone and if I'm asked a question I give the answer. Everyone I meet likes me and I hear lines like "You're smart and interesting but I don't know if the chemistry is there" consistently.

I've been doing things like internet dating, speed dating, a salsa classes, and I'm a pretty accomplished singer, and some guys actually have to try pretty hard not to attract women doing these things!
- Try to only create and care. If I am not creating nor caring then it's probably a waste of time (create = code, draw, make music, solder etc... care = do yoga, train, clean the house, repair stuff around the house, garden, water the plants, cook food etc...)

- klip.me to read page later on my kindle (any page that has a lot of text I send it to my kindle so I can walk away from my computer once in a while to read about other stuff I want to do)

- 2 screen computer - one for watching stuff (video,web stuff) one for working, creating,producing

- Being clear and telling myself : It's been 30minutes that you check facebook photo aimlessly anything else you can do ?

- Do the dishes, clean the house, have so non computer task that needs to be done when too much procrastination happen

- Not feeling bad or guilty as it ends up making me wanting to do more aimless browsing

- Have a precise goal and passion in my life ;) If I am confuse about these I make mind map to see where I am at !
One of my professors has a large collection of previous ACM programming contest problems (with solutions) on his web site, along with problems from the contest he runs: http://math.nmu.edu/~apoe/
I assume you mean something like Google Doc's spreadsheet app. Let's say it's 1996.

The DOM wasn't standard, HTML4 was still in the works. I'm not sure if IE2/3 or Netscape 2 could even dynamically access table elements at the time.

Javascript performance was utterly terrible, and JScript had a strong presence that created an important and problematic language/support divide.

CSS didn't exist at all, your visual styles were either images or elements rendered as the browser saw fit.

XHR didn't exist and wouldn't exist until IE5, 4 years later. There was no way to update a page without a round trip to the server. This was also during the days of AOL and Dialup.
Phishing emails are by no means restricted to Craigslist users, nor are they CL's responsibility. Should I complain to Chase bank that I received a phishing email in their guise?
Interview with the author here: http://www.pointofinquiry.org/lawrence_krauss_quantum_man/
This is a classic procrastination story, but also a side effect of the 40-hour work-week. Would you still spend so much time surfing if you could go home when your work was done? Killing time eats into your free time, affects the quality of your work, and makes you feel lazy at the end of the day. The problem is not that you're reading all these articles; it's that you're reading them at the cost of your productivity. You'll enjoy this activity much more if you can do it after you know your day's work is done.

We're building LazyMeter to help with procrastination and overwhelming to-do lists. LazyMeter filters each user's overwhelming to-do list into a today list, so that they have an achievable goal each day, with an end point, and then tracks their progress so you can see how much they've done. Our users know exactly what they need to focus on, and can recognize when they're killing time. As a result, they know what to do, they know when they're done, and they feel better at the end of the day. We're now in beta and would love to get your feedback. http://www.LazyMeter.com
Thanks for the advice. Who's the 'we' and do you still take interns? Worth a try!
my first impulse was - let me rush out and buy an eggtimer. i had to tell myself to relax, experiment with this idea. i am now arguing that if i had that much self discipline in the first place, it would not be a problem in the first place! So tell me, how long have you done this? how effective has it been? do you cheat a lot?
A little more grist for your mill... the former president of India, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam , aeronautical engineer.
This analogy seems a bit poor,
The laws preserving the integrity of postal service in most countries stem from the fact the government manages the post.

If the government managed the internet to the same degree perhaps the analogy would hold. The question this begs is: Do you want the government to run the internet versus provider companies?
This is a great idea. Mind sharing your script? I block annoying sites with my hostfile, too, but every once in while I actually need to look at something on Facebook. This would also be useful as it's a big mess with all the changes I have to make for work, too. Storing them separately would be super helpful.