skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to get terribly sleepy in the afternoons; sometimes I'd go out to my car and take a 15 minute nap, even in the brutal Texas summer. Then I started taking vitamin D and went on a paleo diet, and now I almost never get tired in the afternoons. Nada. It's a great relief to not always be fighting to stay awake.
The Onion That Makes Telcos Cry
Sam appears to have taken Jonathan's suggestion and has posted on the facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/jonathanscard/posts/176232239115101
I have known this only from US people though; in movies, books and real life, I usually see 'intellectual' Americans sitting with thick, big classics in their hands, more looking to see if people are seeing what they are reading than what is actually in the book. A Doors cover band in the Netherland used to have 'Jim' walking up on stage with a thick copy of Das Kapital open in his hand, but upside down to indicate the fakeness of that showing off behavior.

I've had guys quoting from Nietzsche (in horrible horrible German once) and according to every American movie and series ever made with high school kids in it, all people in the US can quote Shakespeare by heart and actually like it and find it romantic. Other countries (UK included) just don't have that kind of show off thing. Going to Paris is not intellectual per se, and holding a big book and learning some quotes from it is neither, so why does the US keep promoting that stereotype in everything it puts out? See a colored person on deathrow; watch carefully if he reads/quotes some crap poetry from some long death famous author and you, as the viewer of this B movie, know she/he isn't guilty! Ugh.

Sorry got a bit offtopic, just curious why this is :)

I understand the OP point about nothing being able to see and show what people are reading, but personally I would like to keep it that way so I can just read what I want without having to look like 'an intellectual'.
I'd have argued that the red soles were indeed intended to be for identification only. Anything else is a function of people's perceptions (e.g. beauty is in the eye of the beholder.)

Lest we argue that red soles are aesthetically functional as well, regardless of the designer's intent, let's consider the possible repercussions of pink insulation when applied inside transparent walls. Or perhaps the calming effect the color has on installers. Now, the pink is functional. Does that make it less able to be protected?

I really think it goes back to the intent of the creator/designer/architect of the product. The designer of the shoes seems to have argued the aesthetic qualities of the color on the sole and therefore nullified his ability to claim the use of color was not "functional." If he'd held out with the argument that his intent was identity, he may have won.
You are describing restkit. Check it out. Goes past the broken standard lib stuff and straight to socket. Very pythonic.
yeah.. its in the link. For your reference it's Molecular Biology of the Gene
In soccer diving is not punished if the referee doesn’t see it, even if three TV cameras captured every detail. Are soccer fans wrong in being disgusted by such diving?

There is no law against slamming the door close before the person behind you can enter. Are people wrong in believing that such behavior is rude?

I think the belief that only following rules is enough to earn the right to never be perceived as an asshole is fundamentally flawed. There is nothing wrong with being disgusted by Sam’s actions, even if there weren’t any rules telling him not to do what he did.

What he did was repugnant and part of the experiment. My reaction here is also part of the experiment.
I suppose they are not, but we expect more of YC because it is supposed to be funding the best of the best, and people are noticing a decrease in quality over the years. But maybe they are not sharing their big visions with us as much, so we can't appreciate the latest YC batches as much. Nonetheless, I can see some grand visions in the list provided above without much scrutiny. Take car insurance for example, it may not sound like a worthy cause, but the economic efficiency gains would be huge if someone disrupts the car insurance industry! Maybe people can't appreciate the domains as much as before.

And maybe a better way to judge the market is to look at what Sequoia is funding over the years.
Eight Steps to Investment Success - Health and Financial Freedom
It's easy to lash Sam Odio, but doing so robs us of some really interesting questions and answers.

First, why was the idea so popular to begin with? Collective funds aren't new, nor is using Twitter as an API for tracking things in the real world. I don't have any good guesses here.

Second, why has the community reacted so passionately? Even here on Hacker News, mostly made up of people who put reason over emotion, have been extremely upset. One: Having the money taken broke people's faith in the greater good of humanity, so indignation naturally follows. Two: Diverting funds was akin to telling people what to do, and nothing makes people angrier than being forced to do things against their will.

People got very emotional over what, in perspective, isn't that much money. $625 could get you an iPad... or a really lousy computer. If somebody had that much stolen from a home break-in, that wouldn't even make local news, let alone Hacker News. It's very curious. Also, it shows money not just as a means of gaining goods and services, but as a way for people to make a mark on the world; 'voting' for things they believe in by giving money, and denying it from things they don't.

I don't approve of what Sam did, but it's better to step back and really see what's going on here, rather than just being a mob about it.
Why some e-books cost more than the hardcover
It doesn't look like you're disagreeing except perhaps as to his likelihood to get hired. If this industry really is about hiring anyone who can get the job done regardless of their ethical standpoint, then I'm really in the wrong place.
All I was saying in my first point wass that its weird that people want to show off what they are reading.

My later point is that it there is a fine line between healthy social curiosity and straight up creepiness. If you would not be comfortable asking the person your question its probably creepy.
杭州网站优化
Ruby & Javascript have syntax defined in their parsers for control structures. for eg:

# Ruby
if someThing()
doThis()
else
doThisInstead()
end

# Javascript/Perl/etc
if (someThing()) { doThis() }
else { doThisInstead() }

Whereas Io & Smalltalk requires no new syntax and uses objects & messages:

# Io
if(someThing, doThis, doThisInstead)

# Io like Ruby,etc
if(something) then(doThis) else(doThisInstead)

# Io like Smalltalk
someThing ifTrue(doThis) ifFalse(doThisInstead)

# Smaltalk
someThing ifTrue: [doThis] ifFalse: [doThisInstead].
Eventually the corporation will be bankrupt, though. Still, I don't claim that corporations are without fail.

It is still necessary to think about "morals" (I don't like morals, because I think they are only necessary if you don't understand what is really going on). Otherwise, why not join the Mafia and make millions selling drugs?
Bullshit.

- Pseudo-funny (read: Fail) introduction

- Crappy questions

- Checkboxes (implying more than one answer make sense, arguable some questions _have_ more than one right answer) while only checking the first 'check'

- Javascript alerts on ~everything~

- Insulting language throughout the whole content

Oh well. It's Sunday, so.. I had the minutes to spare. But far below the quality threshold for here, imo.
> Johnathan provided the Starbucks card to be used in any way people saw fit.

I don't think this is true. I think the only thing he says you can use the card for is to buy a coffee. He certainly failed to prevent the card from be used in any way people saw fit, and maybe that amounts to the same thing.
My opinion is that an optimization that costs less than a couple of hours of development time, if it doesn't harm code quality, is invariably worth doing. Even if there's no evidence (because the code is being constructed at the time) that this matters from a performance perspective, you should spend the hour or two and get that low-hanging fruit and not worry about it being "premature". If you don't do this when you're in-context, it'll cost an order of magnitude more time later on if the problem is discovered in profiling and needs to be addressed in the future.

When premature optimization is evil is when it damages code aesthetics and maintainability. There is a limit, in performance, to what can be achieved with aesthetically clean code. What awful programmers (who think they're being clever) tend to do is write the ugly, dirty code because it's super-fast, but no one can maintain it and even they don't understand it.

What good programmers do is write clean code on sound fundamentals first, so that people can understand what's going on. Then, if a performance problem's discovered and a certain module needs to be optimized, they put the critical region behind a clean interface and allow the dirtiness (which they document heavily) to be in the implementation.

TL;DR: spend time to make your code performant if it doesn't damage code health; be very cautious about replacing clean code with faster, dirty code.
"Register to read this article" ... seriously?
You're spot on with that analogy. This is in the same way that if you were given an invitation to a party, you would hopefully not turn up with 50 of your own guests.

Well you'd hope that wouldn't happen. Because when it does, it's normally through Facebook and people gaming/cheating the tools it gives you to a similar point. Because people can.
I think Dorsey & Twitter is a good example. He had the underlying concepts in his head from the time he was 12 years old and long before Web 2.0. When he was brought onto Odeo, the idea was to be manifested in the form of SMS alerts. I find it hard to believe that he had what we know today as Twitter in his mind at the outset. Nor do I think his intention was for the service to be used by citizens in a fight against oppressive democracies or in other scenarios which one could reasonably assume had a truly global impact.

Contrast that with the startups coming out of incubators boasting about how they're going to change the world with their.....t-shirt recommendation engine app. Or something of the sort.

And who knows? It might actually be a kick-ass product, have phenomenal revenues & truly help people. But it's not going to change the world.

Maybe it's just my issue with the phrase but I think "changing the world" has become one of those trite, overused Web 2.0 expressions that have become as hollow as a dead tree trunk to early adopters & end users. They've simply heard it too many times before and they know not every company is going to change the world.

The other thing that's troublesome is that it's discouraging people from building cool stuff because they think it's not "changing the world." I've already seen questions on Quora from folks who think their ideas (or even existing businesses) are invalid because they don't feel the company's going to become the next Google or Apple; even though, as someone already mentioned, Larry & Sergey were ready to sell at $1 million for the technology. That doesn't sound to me like someone who wanted to change the world from the very outset.

I don't know. Maybe it's just my issue with the phrase but I imagine there are at least a few folks that feel the same way. Apologies for the tangent.
Ask HN: Good books and resources about computer simulations.
Hi HN,

Computer simulations - things like flocking algorithms, cellular automatas, CFD, Monte Carlo methods, etc. - seem to be an useful tool for understanding and solving real-life problems.

Could you reccommend some good books and/or other resources about computer simulations? Something that would help to learn how to choose a proper type, design a simulation for given problem, what to look at, how to validate it and what are the common pitfalls to avoid. I know that every type of simulation has some extensive literature about it, however I've never seen anything more general so far.

Thanks!
Also see Sealand:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

And the Freedom Ship:

http://www.freedomship.com/
The FT's decline
https://github.com/archiloque/rest-client
Are these "negative comments" "way out of line" compared with stealing $600?
Are they somehow less "real" outcomes of Jonathan's experiment?
Do you also have cookies disabled for nytimes? If I disallow cookies, the link redirects to the login page, if I allow cookies, the link opens the article.
I'm unclear on how you're drawing the scope of donors vs "everyone". It's, for all practical purposes, impossible to make a judgment about the moral impact of an action for everyone. There are so many secondary effects of every action that instead you're choosing two points in that space of impact and saying coffee vs orphans, which is really conceding the whole point. Sam took money intended for one purpose and used it for another. The purpose was embodied in the will of the donors and no other people.

Take for instance a simple second order impact, someone gets a free coffee of the card and decides that while it was a good coffee, he or she should instead donate 10x that to feed orphans. If more than 10% of people using the card do this, then there's a 1:1 follow on donation effect to the orphans. That is essentially the idea of "pay it forward" as far as I understand it. Sam decided that betting on his fellow humans wasn't a good one (perhaps knowing his own moral failings) and decided to short circuit the process and make decisions for others. This is the essential problem and why it's not part of the "pay it forward" experiment. The theft was not paying it forward, it was paying it out. It was removing the opportunity for others to be inspired to give.
Depends on how you look at it: Actually we did evolve this mechanism, we just hadn't evolved a way to exploit it yet. We evolved, physiologically, faster mentally than physically and discovered a synthetic way to leverage this exploit before our bodies found a way to naturally.
Cloud Computing Tips and News for Non-Technical People
"But the reality is that, even during boom times, most new businesses fail."

This myth has been debunked many times (right-click => search: "business failure rate myth"). I wish people would stop repeating it. Of course, business coaches like this myth because it makes their services seem more valuable, but the NYT shouldn't be publishing dubious, unconfirmed statistics.
It would make the most sense to outsource it. A small company printing photos will never be able to do it as cheaply as a photo lab that processes a large volume of prints. The lab will have better equipment, and since they buy supplies in bulk, their costs will be lower. For example, Shutterfly has a professional print service, and I'm sure there are others that focus on the B2B market.
Agreed. I felt like his post still seems to talk about the experiment as a whole and his action in the experiment vs. the 'why'.

I felt immediately that I got the why and a co-worker and I used two drinks on the card. We talked about it and the concept of the goodwill behind it. We definitely didn't feel like yuppie developers and we talked more about how different the world would be if more things were like this. Even about startups along these lines and what bigger ideas like these could change the world. Yes, a fantasy, but we felt that's what this was about.

Anyway, Odio's OP felt very much like business as usual in a cynical world vs. JC's actually doing something positive (even if it is just yuppie coffee). Odio's recent apology seems hollow and in my mind the damage has been done.
一起來看流星雨
You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from.

Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided.

When people read or hear things like what you're posting in this thread, it reflects poorly on you. Yeah, it absolutely sucks if things played out the way that you say they did, but being upset about it isn't going to improve anything.

To paraphrase a hacker friend of mine:

"Write shit, build shit, write about building shit...let them know you by the trail of [original content] that you leave behind"

The first time I've ever heard of you was in this thread. Right now, instead of knowing you as

"Aaron, a brilliant hacker working on facecash and doing cool things.",

I know you as

"Aaron, somebody who is really caught up on a dispute he had with a college associate almost 7 years ago."

If the latter is the perception you want people to have of you, continue making noise about your dispute with facebook, otherwise, don't.
First you have to determine whether something works at all. Then you can try dosages. But my implied point was that mice may necessarily need relatively large dosages, because it doesn't work on them otherwise. This faster metabolism thing is nontrivial: for instance, in humans, metabolic rate is coupled to the perceived rate at which time passes.
What is love? part 2:
There is much talk of honour systems and social contracts. None of us sign a literal social contract; it is a way to name an arrangement of affairs that we semi-willingly enter into (if you buy into it; on the other hand you may not: a baby born dependent on the world has neither the ability nor the wherewithal to enter into contracts - but that's another debate).

Sam can be seen to be acting as an agent of those in the periphery of the social contract, those who participate in it not because of mutual gain but because of implicit or explicit threat. The central question, IMHO, is one of what their claims are on our moneys (or social experiments). Sam quotes Mill and (again IMHO) legitimately raises deeper ethical considerations. In that sense, Sam's experiment is a deeper and significantly more interesting version of the original one, and the results (including the response) deserve examination - at least once the built-up rage is spent.
Meet An Asian Girl
Both Finance and Marketing Analysis will still probably need you to sit at a desk.

Being a teacher would probably be better from a "not-sitting" point of view.
Put $10 on it this morning. Enjoy.
Love this comment. The Internet is probably the fastest way to scale education and ideas. Getting Internet access to those who don't have it is just as critical in my opinion. Internet literacy will be key to a good education in generations to come.
Mega dog bone obsession
The Death of Booting Up
I used to work for Samasource; they're all good people and are hiring a Rails dev if anyone's interested after this thread: http://www.samasource.org/about/positions/RubyEngineer
In some areas the list is certainly not accurate. E.g. in computational linguistics:

- Realization of Natural-Language Interfaces Using Lazy Functional Programming, Frost, 2006. I never ever heard of this article, with only 17 citations overall (in 5 years) it can hardly be considered important.

- In the entry of Transformation-based error-driven learning and natural language processing, Brill, 1995 (which is an important publication) it is stated that it "Describes a now commonly-used POS tagger based on transformation-based learning." Which is not true, since nearly everyone uses HMM, maxent, or SVM taggers these days because they give far higher accuracies.

Although it is far from perfect, the number of citations is probably one of the best manners to count importance. Someone actually did this per year for ACL conferences:

http://www.phontron.com/blog/?p=29

Obviously, there are other conferences, journals, etc. But it gives a pretty good overview of papers that are recommended. Also, there's the ACL top-10 rankings:

http://clair.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.cgi
I am adding this because it could be something you havent considered but I think you should.
Do you love the outdoors?

Essentially tours/activites/travel type of jobs.

1. Hiking tour guide.
2. Give Kiteboarding lessons.
3. Scuba instructor.
4. Travel Writer who goes to different points of the earth and writes about them.
5. Gym trainer.
6. Heli Ski tour operator.

These might seem out there and the pay will be lousy - but I know quite a few kiteboarding instructors and they are some of the fittest and happiest people I have ever known. I'm eventually going to end up like this I think - right after I try founding a few startups. I recently quit my job to start my own startup. (Still in the cycle of customer development).

They have happiness in their soul except when theres no wind and no waves then they become painful to hang around :). But with respect to their health - I dont think I've seen a healthier bunch.
Wow, top of hackernews, never expected this. :)

Here is the spreadsheet I was using to think this post.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqqb8SO...

If you have something, add this here, I will do a follow up post, with additions or update this post.
The results of 'evolution' are not perfect in the way we understand 'perfect'. Evolution's 'goal' is not that human beings be super-healthy. As long as an organism can stay alive long enough and healthy enough to reproduce effectively, the 'goal' is met. Obviously, human beings have been living long enough and healthy enough so that the world population has kept increasing rapidly for the recorded history of human societies.
looks interesting! thanks for the pointer.

(Here's the URL for the project: http://benoitc.github.com/restkit/)
Despite what the common perception of hackers is, we're actually highly community driven. Look at places like HN. Look at the concept of the hackerspace, or the computing clubs that preceded them.

Jonathan's card was in the same spirit as a hacker space, which is [bluntly]: if we all pitch into this, and we're all nice about it, we can have something that's pretty freaking cool.

Assume that instead of a starbucks card, we were talking about a hackerspace. What Sam Odio did was the equivalent of showing up, then taking a bunch of the the tools so that he could sell them and donate the money to homeless people. To take it a step farther he then used his website to encourage other people to do the same thing.

He tried to destroy the community (and succeeded). Hackers love communities, and they tend to hate the people that destroy them.
Game theorists offer a surprising insight into the evolution of fair play
Subtitle: "Three cheers for computers that start instantly."

Quote from a few paragraphs down: "... a typical Windows machine was still spending about 80 seconds to boot up. Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster. Apple's MacBook Air loads up in 16 seconds, and machines based on Google's cloud-based Chrome OS boast boot times of under 10 seconds."

It is really sad that the definition of "instantly" has been adjusted to mean 30 instead of 80 seconds, or 10 instead of 80 seconds. Yes, 10 is better than 80, but even 10 is not "instantly".
You can go check. USPS has a long way to go before it comes close to the prices UPS and FedEx charge. It's like comparing coach to business class airline tickets for the vast majority of mail. The postal service is truly an amazing service for small parcels within the United States.
I think that people enjoy listening to short, straightforward stories, without a long preface going into every single gory detail before actually reaching the main part of the story.

Zuckerberg isn't in a court of law, so I'm guessing he's skipping details and bending the truth (or lying) to make his story simpler and easier to understand. He's also probably glossing over things to make his story sound more dramatic and impressive.

Sorry to hear about your history with him though. That sucks. =T
10 Reasons You Should Quit your Job