skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Missing the point. This is not about how important your project is to "society" or how much risk there is of other people dying. This is about what goes on inside your head.

When your brain decides how fast to make your heart pump, or how fast to breathe, or how tense to make your muscles -- it can't tell the difference between flying to the moon and building an ajax alarm clock. All it knows are what your emotional hot-spots are, the parts of you that matter to you... you are entirely capable of inflating the significance of whatever project you're working on just as large as the significance of Apollo to one of its engineers.

Likewise, it's just as easy for the Apollo engineer to say "I was just doing my job" as it is for me to say "Holy shit I'm responsible for my baby nephew's livelihood because his dad is a partner in this startup"...

Other people may not bat an eye when your web app fails, but you sure will.
I'm interested to see how HN avoids its eternal September. I'm optimistic. There's more than one way to go about it.
hmmm you can start small, by using the noprocrast feature of HN. I've also seen "accountability buddy" software as well, which captures how long you spend on what sites throughout the day, and sends it to a real life buddy. (the one i saw was for porn control 8D)

Anyway, point is, there's more you can do than listen to advice you won't take and giving up.
How to Ship Code and Influence People
I've been thinking about doing something along the lines of starting up a bunch of sites.

I know that when I see a spammy, single page site, I immediately click back and move on to the next google link. That's zero revenue for the owner, and zero use for me (as somebody looking for something). I'm thinking that there is a nice middle ground where you can provide good value to the user, while still getting a fair number of click-throughs. Spend the time to write up good content, have a halfway decent design, and then leave it with little maintenance over time.

Basically, I think I can do better than the sites I just checked out on sitepoint.

Feedback? Am I scum? Am I lifting the web out of the dark ages of crap?
Mindmeister - A Free & Simple Brainstorming Tool
Last month I read this really nice post over at youmoz about a website called Mindmeister. Mindmeister is an online collaboration tool that allows you to create mind maps - you know those charts where you’d circle an idea, then list related ideas, and keep branching away. You can share your “mind maps” with other users, and they can add to and edit your map. All revisions are tracked and can be easily undone.
No, Summers was not canned because of his comments about women in science (at least that was not the primary reason; it certainly didn’t help him out). That was the whole point of this sub-thread. “People” didn’t nail Summers for mentioning data: that is a straw-man mischaracterization of any serious part of the dispute with Summers, even of the dispute about women in science. Summers did not give up on academia: he holds a University Professorship and teaches courses.

But more to the point, you are conflating three separate disputes, and trying to change the subject as a way to dodge my questions. But again, this discussion is going nowhere, and is therefore pointless.

As for the National Review article, it adds no substance, and makes no attempt to engage with any of the discussion it supposedly disagrees with, and instead makes a classic troll argument of empty epithets. It has no factual inaccuracies, because it not arguing facts. (Note: it does not take factual inaccuracies to make a stupid argument.) It is garbage, because the only possible reactions to reading it are “Yeah, they’re right. Those liberals are just useless elitist leeches on society,” or else “No, they’re wrong. Studying how society works is important,” neither of which is a worthwhile reaction (e.g., “Hey! That article taught me something I didn’t already know,” or “Wow! That article really clarified that concept I was having trouble understanding.”).
where do i start? google?
As much as I wish this were the end-all solution to getting people off of old browsers, I fear time may be the only true solution. The script is pretty neat though, worth the 10K add (or smaller compressed).
well you're also making more money in those top cities, right?
Those future hedges will cost a lot more if the market expects oil prices to rise.
To me, part of the value of a "proper" MBA seems to be meeting like-minded people and the potential to make some great connections. However, I don't have an MBA - neither personal nor the $100,000 variety - so it's just a hunch.

Any thoughts on that? Am I thinking too highly of MBA programs?
Can you give more details on this? Does the score/number of comments just add to the total thread karma? Or is the formula a bit more complex?
European Common Lisp Meeting 2008
private transportation is subsidised much, much more than rail transport as a function of GDP, passenger miles, or population. It isn't even close.

That is surprising. Source? Also, does your source explain why someone would want to know the subsidy per person, mile, $ of GDP, etc., instead of the percentage of spending accounted for by subsidies versus other activities? It seems that the latter measures what you would actually care about -- e.g. the government probably spends more money on retirement (through Social Security) than it does on space flight. But the government spends a higher fraction of the total money spent on space flight than on retirement, so one would argue that space flight is more subsidized.
Are The Olympics Going To Kill The Internet? We Don't Think So
Anyone who should be as bold wouldn't heed that advice anyway.
Naw, they weren't YC funded.

(I kid, obviously)

To the OP: reddit was bought by conde nast. I'd imagine that gave them some cash.
It really depends on the context of your products. If you are working on embedded systems, your have to know when your compiler and hardware has problems. And not all software products works like web based software. Web based software has its problem domain like scaling, security, which is very different to other area of software systems,

Another case is for programmers working in Operating Systems. I remember like this url http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631 was mentioned a while ago when OpenBSD group found a lot of hardware bugs in Core 2 Duo.

The danger is the misplaced blind faith on the reliability of the system that we are using. And teaching only Java to students is a sin for computer science to build such a blind faith.
Did we drop a place to 4th this year because of the 88-day garbage strike last year? Or is it the Unsolved Mystery Of The 5 Severed Feet Found Beached? Or is it the recent gang wars? Or...Surrey?

sorry Surrey. =)
Modifying the faces of Kajol or Rani should be grounds for imprisonment.
Report: Next MacBook won't use Intel chips
Thanks for clarifying that. I was sure after I realized the charts are split-adjusted my calculations were off, so thanks for redoing them properly.
Cetainly, and if you're setting out to build a framework then by all means build a framework. Or if you're setting out to improve a library then by all means, improve the library.

But if you're setting to build a web app chances are it's folly to build your own "framework" and ORM and libraries first (note for the absolutists in the crowd: that is purposely _not_ an absolute statement; we can all come up with suitably contrarian one-off edge cases).
Two years of the Dow Jones Industrial Average
That all sounds SO ridiculous. Two people in one office breaking the entire internet? What?

What is with articles that portray the internet as one computer you can OOPS accidentally break. I thought allyinsider was credible.
Hey, Honolulu's at #28, top of the US! If anyone wants a leg up in moving over here, let me know, I know a few startups that are hiring, and I'll tell you about the (small) tech community.
Isaac Asimov wrote a corollary to Clarke's First Law, stating
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right." - Wikipedia article on Clarke's 3 laws

Just because it seems impractical today doesn't mean it will soon be possible; the great ideas that were scoffed at remain fresh in the memory because the geometrically more numeric unworkable ideas have faded into obscurity. Plus it's impossible--I mean, c'mon, focusing the entire 31-year energy output of the Milky Way?
I am the last one to defend using Java as a teaching language.

The professor in the OP seems to be angry that there are people who spend their time doing things other than making toys for the Pentagon, and I say I don't give a hoot about his Ada silliness.
It is an interesting idea from science fiction point of view.

The aim of this paper is not to discuss the plausibility of warp drive, the questions associated with violation of the null energy condition, or issues regarding causality.
The aim of this paper is to suggest that a warp bubble could be generated using ideas and mathematics from quantum field theory, and to hypothesize how such a bubble could be
created by a sufficiently advanced technology. </quote>

Original paper: "Warp Drive: A New Approach" http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1649

British Interplanetary Society's meeting "Warp Drive, Faster Than Light: Breaking the Interstellar Distance Barrier" http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/sitesia.aspx/page/1539/l/en-g...

One of co-authors at Physics Forum http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=204637 (nick - 'robousy')
The seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography
Dave: Took a college scholarship with a few years of work attached upon completion ;)

I wish I could take your advice, but for now, I've got to make the best of the current situation.
The confusion is due to selective quoting of the article's source:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/07/us-vehicle-mile.html

...which says that not only are we seeing a drop compared to last year, but we are also seeing month-by-month drops, which is unusual because May has historically been an "up" month.
Y'all need to read these quotes from PG:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178773
How Steve Jobs Plans to Eat Firefox (and why I'm not getting an iPhone)
You're getting the two mixed up.

The concern with Microsoft wasn't that they used their OS monopoly to unfairly compete with other operating systems, it was that they used their OS monopoly to unfairly compete with other applications (eg. IE vs. Netscape).

The concern with Google isn't that they might be using their search near-monopoly to unfairly compete with other search engines, it is that they might be using their search near-monopoly to unfairly compete with other websites (eg. Knol vs. Wikipedia).
The design so far looks pretty sharp. The hard part of course is building a community - do you have any plans / features that you would like to share?

I wish you success, if only because it will draw offtopic posts across the internet to one place.
I'm no fan of universities focusing just on Java programming either, but the contentions Dewar makes are completely ludicrous. Either he's deliberately distorting things to make his point or he's completely out of touch with real-world engineering projects; Java is pretty much the main language for business programmers these days, and plenty of things like financial transaction systems are written in it, so saying it's only used in simple web applications is laughable. A large percentage of people writing simple web-apps have moved on to Ruby and Python anyway, leaving Java to be used primarily for back-end enterprise systems.

Similarly, the idea of quizzing candidates on whether they can diagnose and track down compiler or processor bugs is similarly useless; there are far more critical skills to test for in an interview. If I was interviewing someone for a position at a hardware company writing software for prototype chips, then I'd probably care; if the job was for about 98% of the other programming jobs in the world hardware knowledge is about 152nd on the list of things I'd care about.

It's hard to imagine how someone could take this guy as an authority on how universities should educate people and what job skills graduates will need when he's so obviously out of touch with the real world.
I'm all for shifting CS education away from easily outsourced commodity skills, but Dr. Dewar goes beyond that and argues that safety-critical embedded systems is where a CS education should be focusing. I'm sure if you asked a CEO of another tech company with a different technology focus you'd get a completely different take on what a CS department should be instilling into its students. Dewar is just another special interest lobbying for changes that will benefit his own industry.
Although they are not software engineers or scientists, but they adopt open source attitudes long before open source movement in software industry! The process of peer review is exactly what software teams have to learn from those disciplines.
For example color-shading. While it may still be possible to re-extract numbers from the colors --- psychological colors may have another effect than numbers.
The beauty of Java is that it frees the student up from making low-level mistakes (pointer mis-initializations) and spend more time on design/making and fixing higher-level issues. Getting core dumps in GCC while compiling C code ain't the most stress-free experience.
Did Dell just outdesign Apple?
Or perhaps something like Nethack does: http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/pray.html#p0
The web is growing a million pages per day
According to Google, the World Wide Web is growing at a speed of a billion pages per day.
Thanks to everyone for the comments.

I have taken the site down for a few days whilst I implement some of the good ideas here.

Be back soon with v2.0!

Cheers once again.
They look awesome!
The idea that some hostile foreign power could be sending low-observable aircraft to spy on the U.S. is beyond ridiculous. No one else has that level of technology. Even the U.S. government itself can just barely afford it.
You may be misunderstanding the issue, and MSN's headline makes it clearer:

The talk is apple is dumping Intel's CHIPSETS (e.g. motherboard designs), but not the Intel chip itself [processor].
Its not so much the community part that I'm worried about, but the marketing aspect... getting people to know the place exists in the first place. I think once people who are into off-topic chat actually find the site, they would be pretty inclined to stay.

Feature-wise I think it tops a lot of the forums out there today (note that my opinion maaay be biased lol). Most just use the generic phpBB or vBulletin, which is great if your looking for something very specific, but not so great if your trying to browse for interesting stuff to read. IMO, the system used here at Hacker News, Digg, Reddit, etc., is far better, but again, the limitation I see with that is these aren't so much discussion forums as they are news link networks.

But mainly, I'm hoping the main thing that will draw users is that they can post threads that are just links to other discussions that are interesting. So hopefully the site will become like a hub for off-topic/random/general discussion.

Anywhoo, I'm rambling. Thanks for the review!
And at least the C-style syntax matches up with a lot of the most popular languages.

That's a low blow :-P
Ok, that does not really mean they were profitable though. I mean, companies that have a working business model - not just a drive traffic and sell out model (though that can be lucrative).
I have worked with more than one microcontroller in the last few years that was not operating to spec. On top of that, in one case we couldn't even do a work around due to compiler error. I think the problem is a lot more prevalent than you think.
Decent layout -- interesting choice of colors. I think you make the black/green work well. Have you experimented with colors other than green?

Sounds kind of like Reddit for discussions, no?
Improving Online Dating
Online dating is in serious need of rethinking and retooling.
Give me a break. This post, and an number of the other Knol-is-bad commentary pieces floating around, boil down to not much more than "Google owes me/my friends a living".

This quote is priceless: "The company whose mission is to 'organize the world's information' is straying into 'monetizing the world's information'"

And how, precisely, is Google supposed to organize the world's information without monetizing it?

Some people need to calm down. If it's true that Google are inflating the PageRank of Knol pages, then they're damaging their most valuable product -- high quality search results. And it is well within their rights to do that if they choose.
I predict that Twitter is going to face very serious competition. As useful as their service is, it boils down to just being a centralized way to send size-limited messages. An open Twitter could be like the internet, but with restricted packet sizes, and everyone gets to sniff everybody else's traffic.
Dug into this a bit more did a quick writeup here:

http://www.skitoy.com/p/python-vs-ruby-performance/172

Bottom line is well over 70% of time is going to rand() and 25% to list overhead, threading is drowned out by that noise.
I re-read in the on-line version and was fascinated all the way through. Perhaps you could offer some other books/stories to read that you found more interesting or thought provoking.
This professor is also the CEO of AdaCore, which sells an Ada development environment and other Ada-related tools. This explains why he is opposed to Java and is so bothered by people who file sloppy bug reports for compilers. Also his claim that "Java has almost no presence in complex systems" is ridiculous. This article is junk.
Need a regex expert
Hey,
I need to hire someone who is really good at text parsing? specifically sec forms.

Obviously this is a paid project with potential for a full time job, if anyone is interested please im me on bkmrkr314.
Ah, fair enough... that's a bit of an important point!

Keep at it then, it looks like you're on the right path... I'm in the same boat in terms of working a "day job" and developing on my own.

Good luck!
Let me see. With a hand-crank you could get about 25 watts, so... given all six billion humans you could generate that much energy in... uhh, 5.2 * 10^27 fortnights.

Any other units which might be clearer?
Surrey should be apologizing to the rest of us, to be honest!
(I live in west LA)

First thing I did: grab the iPhone and run as fast as I can for the door (given the damage done to the structure I live in during the 1994 northridge earthquake, i don't trust it so much)

Second thing I did: Go on twitter.

That almost scares me :)
"You begin to suspect that a problem you are having is due to a hardware problem, where the processor is not conforming to its specification. How would you track this down? How would you prepare a bug report for the chip manufacturer, and how would you work around the problem?"

Actually he's looking for people who know how to track down a processor bug, report it appropriately to a manufacturer, and work around it. Would it demonstrate complete incompetence and a failure of my CS education to answer: "I would learn how to track it down, learn how to submit a report, and then figure out how to work around it."?

It's one thing to expect job candidates for AdaCore to be experienced embedded-system developers, but it's another thing to expect university CS departments to throw their resources into that small corner of computer science so that he can hire new grads without having to bring them up on embedded systems work. I'm sure that CS departments with tons of resources can provide an embedded-systems track for undergraduates.
Sounds like a real problem which could be solved with a startup?! Anyone have ideas?
I'm going to have to blame blaming. It's the opposite of problem solving.
But if Apple could add hardware feature X, why hasn't Intel already implemented that feature?
> I think it's fair to say that most professional programmers in developed countries (a) make plenty of use of existing libraries, (b) may not have 'deep programming skills', and (c) probably don't have a formal education in Computer Science. It also seems unlikely that the majority of developers in India or wherever have these either.

You make it sound like that's a good thing ;-)
In a nutshell: People who don't learn the skills required to work in my problem domain will be outsourced. So, learn them (and then come work for me).
It's always nice to learn something I'd never even heard of before that's so simple. The article is about how you can use a neat trick (space-filling curves) to turn a multidimensional search into a set of one-dimensional searches, which could come in handy in many areas, not just geospatial ones.
I would recommend trying to figure out what kind of work you want to be doing or enjoy/think you enjoy and then picking the education that will be most appropriate to help you get there.

An MBA, MS in CS, and a Law degree will all be a great additions to your credentials, you will certainly learn a lot, and each will open up a lot of opportunities, but the opportunities will likely be very different.

If you want to be a VC, then combine all three. If you want to be a patent lawyer, then CS and Law are good. :)

Here is a list with the books from the Personal MBA list:
http://www.bookhuddle.com/list/314/Personal-MBA-Reading-List
Nope, from the start it was either going to be green or blue, and blue seemed a little too facebook-ish, so we went with the green. But to be honest, we've been so busy with coding the past few months, haven't had much time to do a whole lot of experimenting with different color schemes. That said, layout, design, etc., is what we're going to be focusing on till we launch in mid-August. Any suggestions on that end?

And yep, its pretty much a forum with reddit/digg features. But I don't think its a bad thing... from personal experience, everytime I browse around on a forum, I wish I could just filter by votes instead of the standard "Recent" sorting most forums utilize. And as I mentioned earlier, I think the biggest selling point is that you can post threads that link to interesting threads on other forums/discussions. If you try doing that on most forums these days, its usually an insta-ban :0 (but that's understandable, since they have no self-moderation system, a.k.a. voting, to remove spammy links).
I guess I'm in the minority here, but it's not your job to maintain my computer. Stick to what you're good at.
You're doing it wrong if you don't look at everything you're doing with a critical eye.

That means you'd better think critically about the ORM/Framework/Fairyland you're using to build things.
Pricing revisited
Also quoted:
"In 'Against the Fall of Night' the human race has mysteriously regressed after a full billion years of civilization. Humanity is faced with the remnants of its past glories: for example, a network of roads and sidewalks that flow like rivers. Although physically possible, it is inexplicable from their perspective. Clarke's Third Law explains the source of our amazement as our limitation, rather than the impossibility of the technology."

Another counter-argument to your quote is that "distinguished but elderly scientists" very publicly claimed it was impossible to fly, as late as 1904. Some even proclaimed this after the Wright brothers had done it.

As for the amount of energy, that is an estimate based on this very early design hypothesis. It points us in the right direction to continue research, but does not necessitate there will not be much more energy efficient ways to power such a device.
What falls in the deemed YC monoculture and what lies outside of it?