skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is exactly what happens on the official Arch Linux IRC channel. The entire process stinks of condescension and probably drives quite a few people away from the channel (including myself).

What I found was that very few people on the distro channels have original knowledge - they just run some bot commands or link to some page they Googled for. If I ask a question that hasn't been answered before, nobody replies. That's why I usually end up going to the upstream channel instead, where they actually know what they're doing and are willing to help, even if that means you have to wait 12+ hours for a reply.
Wow, what an achievement.
So it strikes me that part of the issue is that most (certainly not all) education professionals have a different and non-scientific perspective. This presents large problems because the larger society needs kids to grow up with an appropriate understanding of critical thinking.

The vast majority of school administrators don't actually care that much about helping kids become thoughtful, independent people. Their incentives push them to produce kids with core "skills" and achieve various financial objectives. Evidence-based evaluation of commercial pedagogical methods can run counter to the administrators' interests.

Which just means that these kids are working in the finest traditions of scientists throughout history.
yeh but google wouldnt bring the higher ranked comments or stories to the top, which i think is a great feature
I wish I read this when I first started using irc. I always used to ask to ask...
So can we identify any startups that would be a part of the Cultural Revolution that Wilson is talking about?
Correct, it's not that 'anyone can start a groupon'. But it's rather 'any website/app with a large enough reach in at least one or more local market can start a groupon service'.

- yelp/gowalla/foursquare/scvngr/etc.

- facebook/google/apple/microsoft/etc.

- country-specific like rakuten/renren/yandex.

- local-specific like eatla/sfgate/latimes.

Literally hundreds and thousands of well-established websites can do coupons. They just have to look up which stores already have done a group-buying deal before and contact them. And they can all undercut each other until probably they only take 2-3% and give the rest back to vendors.

No wonder Groupon wants to IPO RIGHT NOW.
Sad story. Bad apples are everywhere, and when you work with a hundred entrepreneurs, 99% are genuine, and then you get the con artist. It's so hard to spot at first.
That could be a good app for the HNSearch API contest:
http://www.hnsearch.com/contest
Replying to my own comment... even the day after this is still just as awesome :)
Groupon IPO: Bad Love
Ask HN: Small events to demo at this summer (SFBay area)
We're releasing UpOut for public use sometime soon and would love to demo at an event here. We're just trying to find the right one.

We've just moved to the Bay Area so we're a little clueless as far as which events are worth demoing at. Any help would be much appreciated!
Interesting. Although I understand this to mean that Wordpress hosted some of the deal copy. The group buying logic would have been served up by those embedded widgets talking to The Point's server logic. My understanding is still: early Groupon = hacked together front end (Wordpress I guess) + slightly modified group buying system from The Point + hacked together fulfillment system. But I'm not 100% certain I'm right about this. It's based on old bar conversations with a few early Grouponers, and given the quality and quantity of beer consumed I could certainly be misremembering.
it just goes to show that your not trying to be malicious in your somewhat harsh statement. Sometimes there is no way to put something delicately to a complete stranger. adding the smiley is more of a way to get the reader to look at it as constructive as supposed to judgement on the person asking the question.
I've been working with a couple of other people on http://www.clubcompy.com/ which runs completely in the browser.
Java is so popular, easy to learn and use that there are tons of terrible frameworks and bad programmers in the community. Rebel against it all you want but in the hands of great developer you can get pretty amazing software written in Java like Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Cassandra, etc. Java is the assembly language of the JVM and since most of the cooler new languages are on the JVM (and written in Java often) it will likely remain as the way to eek the best performance out of your applications and likely has the library you need to get your job done.

As for your points in here. Most of them I can respond with "don't do that".
Ha! I like the 'content-wise' disclaimer. It's a bit of an ugly duckling, and I'm working on that.

As for the content, thanks. Slowly but surely... It's funny. Sometimes I think our small group is in a competition, trying to one-up each other in esoterica.
Wedding Hairstyles 2011,Short hair styles
Wedding on a beach, as the cold water touches your feet and the silver sand recedes below, is a dream come true. But, let's get real, your dream can turn into a nightmare when the breeze decides to play with your hair.
I don't think you can compete on price, which is why you should compete on quality.

Just as an example, I have seen some bids request that the person speak fluently English. Obviously, the person posting the project has been bitten in the past with communication issues with their outsourced resource. That's one of your strengths.

How professional and thoughtful are your answers? They'd better stand out if you want to justify charging more.
I continue to be astonished that anyone still comes to the USA without either a specific rule allowing his activity (e.g. tourism, negotiating contracts) or a consultation with a US immigration lawyer.

Aren't there enough horror stories? Isn't the craziness well known abroad?

In most of the world people who want to be tourists in the USA dread the extensive and humiliating application interview, questionnaire, and documentation process just to get a visa. The same is required to change planes at a US airport.

The process is byzantine and irrational. Read all the available documents and hire a lawyer if anything seems uncertain.

The border authorities routinely retain old documents, especially those submitted in error, and use them in a Kafkaesque process to deny all future permissions. Every thing you say or send to the government can be reinterpreted and used against you forever. It would be best to consult a lawyer every time you interact with CBP, though that would be expensive.
A Small Incident in A Superpower
Video: Create a Custom Facebook Page Tab with Google Sites
+1 for this. I use AutoPatchWork so it's not very accessible (I can imagine this the same for those not using AutoPatchWork too, though)
I submitted this with a "TechStars Boulder 2008" part added to the title, why was it removed? I see "YC" references to companies in titles all the time so isn't that relevant info?
Why aren't most computer science universities keeping up with industry trends?
I tend to work as little as possible. Playing is important. Family is important. Living is important.

Might be dead tomorrow and would be thoroughly miffed if I'd worked through my life. I believe life is the reward and must be lived, not some religious fantasy.
Hmm, he wants more 4chan things to invest in?
I never suggested it wasn't worth reposting - I just thought some people might like to know when it was posted, and see the previous set of comments.
I'm almost hesitant to mention it, since they're the startup-du-jour, but Airbnb is a perfect example. Can you imagine your grandparents using it? Maybe, depending on whether or not they were hippies, but my guess is that the majority of people in that generation would be far too scared to try it out. It's definitely a cultural shift towards trust and informal arrangements.
I'm bit shocked that the Dutch American Friendship Treaty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT_(treaty)) doesn't apply in reverse...

The treaty allows Americans like myself to start a business in Holland easily and get around the notoriously-bureaucratic Dutch immigration department.

I always assumed it worked the other way around, but apparently the 'friendship' is unidirectional...
High res mugshot, charge sheet http://mugshots.com/Criminal/White-Collar/Austin-Slattery-Ve...
Footy Station: Portugal vs Norway Live Stream Online - 4 June 2011
You're right in that there's a certain base level of complexity due to the problem being solved.

But I think it goes beyond pattern soup, and beyond what's available in the language. It's almost a neurosis specific to the Java ecosystem that every design must be maximally flexible...perhaps to show off how object-oriented the code is? It's like the devs are reluctant to hardcode anything, instead abstracting over every design decision they made. This wishy-washy design is then played up as 'flexibility,' rather than a design failure.

Suppose I'm looking for a JSON serialization library. Do I really need to be able to configure the JSON parser used? What percentage of people need to do that? The people with the thorny problems (such as deserializing 100MB of JSON as fast as possible) probably won't be able to use it due to the scope of their problem. But, the option is there, as it could happen.

I haven't done Java stuff within the past few years, but it would appear they're getting better about it. It seems like it may have taken something like Rails in order to show the world that 'enterprise' is usually a euphemism for 'lacking in taste.'
That's what I noticed. I think that's called "knowing what you are doing" personally.
Pardon me and I don't want to come off as ignorant, what is the big deal with this? I have been using Google to search hackernews articles by querying `<subject> site:news.ycombinator.com` and it has worked wonders.

Since hackernews is all publicly available, Googlebots must have indexed every single page of this site. And we all know how good Google has been with ranking and relevance. Why did HN decide to reinvent the wheel? Why didn't HN use the Google Custom Search plugin?

(I am just curious to know and not criticizing.)
They also created VCC (Verifying C Compiler), which uses their Z3 theorem prover to check for bugs (especially concurrency bugs, which can be really tough to find).

http://vcc.codeplex.com/
You can add HNSearch as a custom search engine in Firefox as well. Just visit hnsearch.com, click on the favicon in the browser's search box and select "Add HNSearch".

For the Chrom custom search engine it would be better to use the non-javascript url:
http://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=

That will get redirected automatically and won't change with the webapp implementation.

You can filter by date/points with HNSearch.
I don't know if I would recommend this but here is an article on generating traffic...

http://news.nucleusdevelopment.com/2011/01/08/the-fool-proof...
Take a look a my manufacturing guide, if you have more questions about a specific idea I'd be happy to vet it for you. If it's viable I'll tell you how to progress.

If you're smart you can develop a prototype for far less than you would think.When I was actively taking products from concept through production I could do it for under $10,000.

But if you're talking chip set design that's in a whole new category. It really makes no sense to get that in detail now a days since it's really hard to achieve scale and bring the costs down. Off the shelf components are much cheaper, you would be amazing at how cheaply you can buy parts with a little creativity and negotiation skills. If you want to do chip set design, you need to first find a company that needs the chip, design it, and then establish a relationship with a fab and have a minimum order in hand. It's not that hard once you learn how to handle and manage the channel.

It's a very broad area, can't really help you without more details on the specific area you are thinking about.

As an aside, I've moved from hardware to web/mobile software (taught myself iOS, php, and rails) because I got tired of dealing with all the new regulations and hurdles. So be warned before starting a project.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840896
<aside>

If you read reddit, Digg or any other social news site, the format for stories like these seems to always be:

1. Some "obviously" stupid decision.
2. Some bureaucrat that made it.
3. A critical article talking about how obviously stupid this all is and how stupid the bureaucrat(s) are.
4. The implication that the writer (and the reader) would never make that "mistake".

Some of the articles are justified, I'm sure. I have no idea if this one is... I don't have all the facts. I wasn't sitting in the room was the decision was made, I don't know what the reasoning was.

All I know is that the frequency of these stories is absurd.

If we were all so smart all the time and everyone else that wasn't us was so dumb all the time and in desperate need of correction, I don't think the world would function.

Generally speaking (again, not specific to this story) I think we all need to cut each other some slack. What good are these expose articles really doing? Is the world getting any less dumb and more in-line with my expectations of humanity?

No

Is the embarrassment of articles like this helping to decrease the occurrence of stupidity?

No

Are articles like this improving the discourse between groups?

No

The negative carpet-bomb article style, something I'm certainly guilty of, is something that I hope dissolves as we move forward. It's done nothing for actual coverage and in certain areas, like political debate, it has made the topic almost unreadable to me.
Interesting... what about a progressive hellban, where there's a probability that the hellbanned user's participation is seen by others? The probability would exponentially decay after each offense and be slowly restored as a function of time without offense.
It'd be great if there were some good examples of the script up there on the front page - even after a few minutes of clicking around - I had only seen C++, no ChaiScript.

This did not really give me any feel for whether I would want it embedded in my project or not.
a booking manager, expense tracking for holiday let owners http://www.thebookingbee.com
HNSearch consists of a simple javascript webapp hosted at hnsearch.com which sends ajax requests directly to ThriftDB. ThriftDB returns items in the search response which makes it ideal for this type of architecture. For a more detailed explanation checkout the API docs:

http://www.hnsearch.com/api

And here's a sample search response from ThriftDB:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=fac...
The problem with Google Search for a site like Hacker News is that it doesn't have the same level of understanding of the metadata that makes up the site. A good example is sort-by-date (which Google can approximate based on the date something was first spotted by its crawlers, but it's not nearly as accurate as having access to the "date" field in the underlying data structures) - another is "just search comments by this username".
Where is the json/api option?
Reminds me of zillion at the first glance ( a fantastic sega 8 bit classic).

Very cool that it's in Haskell! This is a great sort of project to work on in Haskell for me. I find games and websites give more rewarding immediate feedback than number crunching.
"This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like."

If you try to do real, production programs in Haskell or Ocaml, you find that they have a lot of problems too.

I've written some reasonably cool stuff in Haskell (like one of the top tutorials that people use to learn it). My teammate got his Ph.D under Simon Peyton Jones and did his doctoral thesis in Haskell. We were talking one day about what it'd be like to write real production systems in it. His strong opinion (and my weak opinion) was that it'd be hellish, because of certain misfeatures like lazyness or the hacked-up record system. All the people that complain about Java would merely find new things to complain about with Haskell, other ways in which the language prevents them from getting useful work done. Instead of whining about verbosity, they'd whine about space leaks.

I find that people who are a 9 or 10 on the expertise scale usually know Haskell, but they don't program in Haskell. Because the causation works the other way. If you're a good programmer, you'll seek out other languages and learn them, because it'll make you a better programmer. But if you're a great programmer, you'll know when not to use stuff you've just learned, because it'll just make your life harder. Learning Haskell doesn't make you a great programmer, but great programmers have probably learned Haskell at some point in their path to greatness.
Bitcoin’s Four Hurdles: Part One – Usability
Since there are many languages that now target the JVM, I guess my main distrust should be targeted towards that instead of the language itself. Can someone explain to me what the advantage of running on the JVM is compared to something else (including native code generation)? From what I understand it provides: native tuned GC, stable and tuned JIT, and a class/module mechanism revolving around reusable code libraries (e.g., you could drop in a library written 6 years ago and have it 'just work,' when with C everything needs constantly shifting header files). I haven't used the JVM seriously in years, but I always got the feeling that around these core strengths were layers and layers of bureaucracy -- XML 'makefiles,' a stack-based VM that must inefficiently be translated to a register machine, and the feeling that everything is overengineered to the point that a simple "hello world" takes up gargantuan amounts of time and resources compares to things like Chicken Scheme or Go which have roughly the same features. Would anyone who uses JVM-based languages care to address these fears, I'm honestly curious if my hesitation is well-founded.
Yeah, the big thing here is that almost all of this thing is proven, meaning that the compiler's behavior is well-defined and correct, all the time, on all inputs.

I still had a jaw-drop moment the first time I heard about this; Coq is not a pleasant language, and proving this thing must have been a nightmare.
Pretty much all economists will agree that it would be a good thing. Unfortunately, laws are dictated by politics, not economics.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism
I don't agree with the article. If my employees were showing signs of workaholism and I didn't send them home, then their burnout, lack of creativity, and drag on morale would be my fault, at least in part.
Unfortunately, some people use it to be snide, so its unclear and should be avoided. Some think that adding a 'smiley' is a license to be tactless, blunt or insulting, but it's better to learn how to express ones thoughts properly. 'just sayin' serves the same faulty purpose. If you feel the need to add one of those to avoid being misinterpreted, rewrite your statement. 'not trying to be harsh' or 'please take this as constructive criticism' are more expressive.
Thanks. My school's CS department was very strong in theory, among other things, and so there were a lot of very mathy people in the program mixed in with the more practical proles. Most of them were very nice, but there was something of a communication problem because (I assume) they were too naturally talented at such things to be able to explain them very well. I remember one guy who would get this look of satisfaction on his face every time a teacher would start talking about formalisms, as if he were eating his favorite food, or sitting down after a long day on his feet, and that's my first association with the word "formal" in a CS context.
Not really, it would very much depend on the length of stay.

Someone requesting a visa to teach a course for a few weeks is perfectly reasonable, especially if they are coming from a country with reduced requirements (visa wavier countries) like the EU.
My bias: sometimes JC ask me mobile technology questions.

But than again spending 7 days a week on a problem and business model known not to work is not exactly working smart..ie Mahalo..
Is this any different from other countries? I'm just surprised you expect to go to any first-world country and work without a permit. For a very broad definition of work. London requires a visa for even changing planes. The paperwork for having your parents visit is even more onerous, I'm told. If you have a small child you're required to hire a nanny before they'll let your parents visit. So yeah all immigration authorities are moronic.

OP said he's travelled all over the EU. Well, I assume he has an EU passport?
And didn't I tell you just now that farming is the noblest art for this among other reasons, because it is the easiest to learn?
Most of the Java hate I see comes from C# fans (which is ironic given C#'s origins).
I'm really excited to start using this! Also - "built outside of Octopartitself" needs a space.
I came here to throw some love at searchYC and heard this bad news. Very bad news.
PG: Need to change the link in the bottom right of the page that says search to hnsearch instead of google with site:...
This reminds me of Steve Jobs's speech at Stanford.
On Being Excellent to Each Other
> If you're working on your own personal projects/startup, most of the time you aren't gonna choose Java

... for some values of "you", apparently ;) Lucene, Hadoop, Cassandra, Hudson/Jenkins, RapidMiner, GWT and a gazillion other best of breed open source projects have selected Java, for better or for worse.
any of them write a more successful language than Java? or how about Visual Basic even? For all the complaints, at least Java moved programming technology to another level on a massive scale, lest we all be complaining about C/C++ still.
Jeff LaMarche's follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618298
Suggestion for HN: Timeless Posts
HN has a lot of reposts/duplicate threads. The solution to fixing that was filtering out what ends up on the front page. That works most of the time, but that isn't even the real problem.

The real problem is that timeless content, or posts that will still be relevant, helpful, and interesting for a long time, have the same ranking as news that most people will forget the next day, even if they only share the same ranking temporarily. There should be a separate section on HN for these kinds of posts, and not just the "Top 100", or "Highest Ranked". It should be something that only shows what hasn't been read, but it gives the option of showing already read submissions.

Now that there is search integrated with HN, it should be a lot easier to implement something like this.
Though experiment: let's say he lied to the customs, what are the odds of him getting caught?
Also see Jeff LaMarche's response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620020
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_FVEnmE...
(+1) I totally agree, but people tend to be lazy, especially when their goal is to help the person rather than dealing with them as a human being.
Further, most of those I've seen are not even scientists:

I've been disappointed by this realization a couple of times. Finally, it dawned on me. Doctors aren't scientists. They're not supposed to be. They are technicians. They look in a service manual, pick a likely problem, and do the hotfix. If its not in the manual (or the part they have memorized), they're done.

Medical research and medical practice are two entirely different animals.