skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, I think I might be misunderstanding you, so I'll try to elaborate some. Each athletic program has a certain number of scholarships they give out. In the case of football, these scholarships are awarded almost entirely without regard to the academic quality of the athlete. How true that last statement is varies greatly from school to school, but in general, they only need to meet some pretty minimum requirements. If your question is _why_ do schools do this its because football brings in a LOT of money.

The same thing happens to a lesser extent with basketball, but for the most part other athletes of other sports have to earn there way in to school like everyone else.
Scholarships attract good football players

Good football players increase the prestige of the school. Not just athletically but also academically. At least to the common man or hr person.
This reminds me of structured procrastination:

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
I think it comes down to having an interest in it. Do you think that the English-only preparatory year in Turkey works for most people?

You don't need to master it either. Merely being able to read it is enough.

You're Turk, right? Doesn't the state support students from poor families?
I love the PirateBay. Always one step ahead.
One of the examples: http://qhoxie.com/wysihat/

edit: updated to show button styling
Why is this guy getting downmodded? He's saying the same thing as every other bastard, but making it clear that he's a bastard.
Thanks for the info. Also, check the amount of research on wings and GAs: http://www.google.com/search?q=wing%20design%20genetic%20alg...

but I haven't looked personally into mixing CFD and GA.
Auto-playlists comes to Blackberry
Smartsheet Launches New Version With Enhanced Features
Yeah, very good point about transparency. I remember reading some entrepreneur's story who stressed fostering this kind of environment. It is a somewhat different but related point: he insisted that everyone in the company spend time doing customer service, so everyone had a sense of what the customer's needs were and how the product was progressing. I thought this was very clever.

I also think you're right - there doesn't seem to be enough innovation in regard to compensation. Even bonuses don't necessarily create the right incentives - often these seem more related to the overall health of the economy rather than work or contributions. While it is a good idea to share success with employees, regardless of the cause, it does little to encourage employees in their individual actions. While you say this sort of salary structure is in reaction to a company's growth, it seems like they are even less useful as a company grows and each individual's contribution has an ever smaller affect on how well a company ultimately does.
"Tom was very fortunate that he had something else to walk away to...I only wish everyone had as difficult-yet-easy choice as Tom did."

Don't most people have the same choice, provided that they want it? From reading the account, it didn't sound like Tom had any special advantages other than being willing to take the risk and go for it. HN is packed with ppl who have taken the plunge into the unknown to start something without having any idea how it would turn out. To characterize their difficult decision as being the result of some special advantage that they had seems like an excuse for why some weren't willing to take the same risks.
I've found the best way to stop my self from procrastinating is to just fullscreen my Konsole window and hide the menus, that way i just have a big black screen, and a tab bar at the bottom(which i can also hide). That only works when my work can be done in a terminal, but most of it can.
The Buck Doesn’t Stop Anywhere with the Paulson Plan
Kill your blog? Say it aint so!

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/07/brief-history-of-dangero...
Fantastic read. Thanks for sharing. My favorite paragraphs:

"That is the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds." The discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one. It may seem like a counterintuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media, then why isn't every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might, at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors."
Xenophobe?
So the universities do it because it's a money-making proposition?
They're just trying to be sensationalistic.

To each his own. If you prefer the blog format, by all means keep blogging. If you prefer twitter, go do that..
And stop writing books people, it's so 1900. Surely you can convey everything you'd write about in a series of 140 char twitter messages.
If only the very best were issued visas I might agree with you.
Thanks for the preview. I love the idea of not being stuck with the typical Windows98-looking toolbar all the others seems to have.
Exactly. Some content, like status updates, is perfect for Twitter or Facebook, but this article seems to assume that that's all anyone uses blogs for.

Please god say it ain't so. I would like to think that people who keep blogs (at least the subset thereof that also read Wired) tend to write more interesting things in them, and I can't imagine that being replaced by 140 characters (this notwithstanding: http://twitter.com/_why/statuses/881768089 )
It seems a little pre-apocalyptic to suggest that blogs "as we know them" will soon vanish from the earth. Sure, FB, Twitter, etc. are gaining ground - but more by creating a need that people didn't know to exist previously rather than by pushing out blogs. The problem with a text-full blog is its lack of interactive elements, which FB, Twitter have capture nicely. Collaborative technology may be where it's at, but unique, well-reasoned blogs that contribute to the intellectual landscape can stay around with a strong following (think fivethirtyeight)...it just seems that nobody's particularly interested in reading a tome about your personal daily errands anymore when status updates will suffice.
I wonder if it's possible to run enough controlled peers on a tracker to be able to statistically separate legitimate users from anti-piracy bots.
Ask HN: Culture at various software companies
I'd like to do a psychology class project on the work culture at software companies, big and small. Does anyone know where I can find research/articles/case studies on the following topics?

- The effect of incentivizing workers with things like free food, on-site pampering, and a quirky, high-tech workplace (e.g. Google)

- Relationships/tension between developers, managers, marketing, etc. (e.g. developers resenting the "pointy-haired boss")

- How culture and work/life balance differ between startups and large corporations

- How the company's mission affects the motivation of its workers (e.g. "eat our own dogfood"/"don't be evil")
Yep, that's the way it is.

Universities are only incidentally about knowledge and learning.

Please do not confuse the grant money draw that is research with either teaching or learning.
Clearly they are part of it but money is the main driver.

Money is priority #1, that's why sports are so important.

Money is important to students as well, the bulk of the income their degree will generate depends on the reputation of the school, not on how much they actually know.

And that's when they are first entering the job market.
After that first job, the only way college matters is through the relationships you built there.
Obviously relationships you build at work matter more and more over time.

And here again sports is important in creating that image of tribal success that draws the people that you want to connect with, to make it far in life after college.

That's the way life and college work.

If you don't like this harsh and cynical money based game, go to a school that doesn't have a sports program and be a scholar.
And if you do that, don't ever think about money.

If you do find yourself thinking about money, especially more then is needed to simply survive, then get an MBA... preferably from a school with a very successful sports program.
Yes, college football is insanely popular. I live in a county of 200k people that has absolutely no trouble filling up a stadium of 90k people for home games. The skyboxes sell in the millions, and the best seats in the stands require a 10k/year donation for the right to purchase them. TV deals are also very lucrative, and I would assume so is merchandise.
exactly what I was thinking... Soo, just because some people stop blogging and move to other platforms everyone should? Screw that.

Of course, if you intend to use your blog to make some dinero and pay some of the bills, it's probably not going to work... but neither will twitter or facebook for that matter. If you just want to express yourself, use whatever you want and whatever your public will use.

And can't you have a blog AND twitter, facebook, etc?
>>design and style matter much more than they did in the PC wars.

agreed there. However, there's no stopping other phone manufacturers to pour more resources into making a pretty and usable phone. This could also work against apple when others are able to make a better designed product.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle have a lot of blog posts and the like outlining the culture in the workplace. Googling that is your best bet.

Beyond that, you might have some luck emailing a company you cannot find information on.
Ding, ding. That's why Apple is winning mindshare now, because they are invested in the complete experience, from obsessive design of the hardware to focus on simplicity and elegance in the software.
You can also write in your blog for your great-great-great-grandkids -- family that hasn't been born yet. Or you can write as a way of organizing book material. Or you can write as a way to keep and share memories with just a few people.

Blogging is an internal thing first, external second.
yeah. I guess I would extend this to all advertising that goes beyond making me aware a product is available. If I know about it, and I need it and can afford it, I'll buy it. If you have to browbeat or manipulate me into buying it, you've created negative value. first it wasn't a good deal for me (or else I would have bought it without the browbeating) and add to that the cost of browbeating or manipulating me.

But then, most people seem to prefer to buy from salesmen, even when buying technical products that the salesmen often don't fully understand. After getting the facts about various products, most companies I've worked for then invite salespeople to pitch (salespeople who are often not technically qualified to even discuss the product) and then make decisions based on how good the salespeople were. This seems irrational to me, but it also seems to be how most businesses work, so maybe I'm wrong.
An interesting Google Translate quirk
Is The Mac Mini Dead?: Apple Stops Mac Mini Shipments to Retailers, Says to Expect No More
"Initially it was a zine started in 1988 by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair, then in 1995 it became a website, and in 2000 it became a blog."

heh I wonder if the site ever changed or just the buzzwords
Gary V. had great advice: "people ask what social networking tools I should use ... twitter, jaiku, etc. The answer? Use all of them"

There is nothing exclusive about twitter & blogging. You'll note those with the biggest personal brands and most followers are often bloggers. This is because facebook and twitter are both bad at content/person discovery.

Blogging is a good way to let people find out who you are.
So many upvotes, so little discussion...

Another suggestion: a very useful tool for designing a language is the new OMeta language from VPRI: a language for creating executable grammars - i.e. writing new languages quickly. see http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/
Why the insistence on a WYSIWYG editor? The best method of producing documents that I have ever used is LaTeX and it has no decent WYSIWYG interface (LyX does not provide the full power of TeX).
Wow, great list! Some tools I already happily use, others that I've wanted to investigate, and more that I'm definitely going to check out.
It could lead to a power imbalance with big schools.
I wonder if the dude in the video realizes how ridiculous that earring looks.
Fine, I'll grant you that. But why are they not allowed to accept endorsements? It definitely pays better than being a bouncer at the local pub.

Some of these guys come from financially destitute situations and will leave school the minute they hear NFL so they can support the rest of their family.
Google-Yahoo Search Deal Toast, Says TheDeal
Because their goal wasn't to lay out professional documents in a text area.
I don't think this particular editor, or any other WYSIWYG editors I'm aware of, are really targeted at the use case you're referring to.

Most of us deploying WYSIWYG editors are doing so in applications designed for non-technical users, where text markup is required but no technical knowledge on the users' part can be assumed.
Exactly one of the following is true:

(1) The probability of success is equal whether you start a startup in a good or a bad economy.

(2) The probability of success is greater if you start a startup in a good economy.

(3) The probability of success is greater if you start a startup in a bad economy.

This latest essay is a bit ambiguous as to whether it's defending (1), (3), or (2)-but-not-by-much. Which is it?
Umami and Dashi
YouTube Gets Local With API Update
I sure hope so. Good riddance (at least to 99% of them)
Excellent question. The very best universities don't intermingle them... MIT, Caltech, Stanford come to mind. I know MIT has lots of intramural sports, where the focus is on healthy recreation for students. But they don't have ANY NCAA-style teams.
Can't wait for someone to port this to jQuery! :)
Or how about... http://www.singularitysummit.com/
Business Lessons Learned from Sifter
So a guy who presumably makes his living on being a professional blogger is lamenting the lost of the personal touch in blogs... hmm
but they all have teams, and some of Stanford's are very good, such as their basketball team.
Hah - I mentioned that to the Google guys on the irc channel. No offense to the guy in question, who is presumably a super badass hacker, but it's really distracting to watch that earing bounce around.
Don't Import, Subscribe
Build your profile to get more freelance work
VC funding moving to Clean Energy from IT
Your concerns are valid - if it were to work, you'd have to parcel out the money daily (or just buy food for him).

Since you're going to India, I'll take this opportunity to mention that the best way to support smart, underprivileged children in India is to donate to http://www.angiras.org.
Back in the 80s it would have seemed bizarre to do otherwise. You used whatever OS the manufacturer supplied. It was part of the computer. That was as true with Microsoft OSes.

Apple choosing to make their own OSes instead of buy them from an outsider supplier was in those days no different from e.g. building displays or keyboards rather than buying them from suppliers.
hmm this comment seems to be linked to the wrong thing now.

interesting, BUT IT'S WRONG
Downmodded; joking about prison rape, or any kind of rape, is beneath the dignity of this forum.
The only quirk I see, as opposed to multi-touch (iPhone) is that you'd have to set this device down or hold it in very awkward ways. If you're at a desk that's fine, but it'd lead to precarious situations with not holding on very securely to your device.
HAH

it's a conSPIRACY!
Productivity tips when working from home
BLACKBERRY PEARL FLIP 8220 (UNLOCKED)
Blackberry Pearl 8220 smartphone, the first BlackBerry phone to come in the flip form factor. The quad-band EDGE based BlackBerry Pearl Flip smartphone features a chrome-finished frame surrounding its smooth, luminescent face.
I think when discussing this it's important to get the image of the average student-athlete correct: the vast majority of student-athletes will never play pro sports, are often good students, and do it in their free time for pleasure, fitness, and love of competition. I think that this is a valuable tradition which should be maintained.

The problem is that high-level college football and college basketball, in particular, have grown from amateur sports into de facto professional leagues, with athletes who are grossly underpaid relative to the revenue gathered by the sport they play.

I'm in favor of separating de facto professional sports away from the truly amateur sports, but I think there's value in having amateur sports. (bias alert: I'm an amateur athlete who spends a lot of his time and money playing sports, and coaches a club ultimate team.)
Just waiting for my G1 to arrive tomorrow to really start tinkering.

edit: It just arrived. Woot!
I don't think we're talking about all student athletes, here, but specifically the higher profile athletic teams (men's basketball, football, hockey).

Try to get a million+ to finance the fencing team, or women's wrestling, or (har) ultimate frisbee, or any other worthwhile, but not extremely popular, sport. The 200 people you see on TV get a disproportionate amount of the funding.
writing a blog can demonstrate your subject matter expertise to investors, employees, and business partners. philmichaelson.com has very small readership, but the leads its generated have already been worth the effort.

Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook don't allow you to share the same length and quality of content outside your friend network
This is great. Will HN comments immediately appear on FF or is there a delay?
A $2000 Cell Phone, Motorola? Good Luck With That
Reforming the United Nations
Based on spending - neither party does/has. Cutting taxes is retarded if you don't cut spending along with it.
At Electric Cloud and Scriptics where I worked with John Ousterhout we documented the culture we wanted. See http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/startupCulture.html
Academic Salaries
Deal Radar 2008: Mevio
Something I hope to see this implement:
A function to strip any bad formatting/code that is generated when pasting text into a WYSIWYG editor. So much of my time is spent going through content and stripping bad code that was generated by Word/Outlook.
Downmodded for not getting the Office Space joke?
It's a solidly thorough list, but the upshot should really be "designing a general-purpose language is hard."

Designing a special-purpose language or a DSL is easier, but in my experience a lot of seeming DSLs end up slowly accreting more and more features over time that make them look more like general purpose languages. For example, you start with something simple, but then you realize you need conditionals, then you decide to add loops, then you need some concept of packaging and subroutines, etc. Done in that sort of ad-hoc fashion over time can leave things a mess, and if you knew you'd have to do that much work, you never would have tried to make a DSL in the first place.

The other problem with DSLs is that it provides another set of rules you need to keep in your mind around things like coping, evaluation order, naming conventions, etc. in addition to any other languages you know.

So my personal bias these days is to work within a flexible language if possible and to use metaprogramming where necessary to create a reasonable API; Ruby and Lisp are pretty obvious candidates there.

My company has its own statically-typed JVM scripting language that's gone through some of that evolution, from rules-only configuration language to a full-fledged language with classes, closures, etc. In order to curb the proliferation of mini-DSLs we had for various parts of the system, we instead opened up the type system of the language and allow for essentially a form of type-safe metaprogramming, which lets us get good, clean APIs for things that used to be DSLs while maintaining a single set of language rules and allowing for the use of other language features (adding methods that take blocks to the custom types, for example) in combination with the DSL-ish stuff.
Agreed. I know it's a Microsoft research project, but playing devil's advocate:

What's the point of a mobile device again?

Oh, right. :)
Android is now available as open source
Agreed. These numbers are absolutely nuts. (That's not to say they're not common, but they're crazy.)
Lala: The Web 2.0 Reincarnation of My.MP3.com
A short while ago, ASUS was the only maker of these cheap, tiny notebooks. Now you can find similar products at the same price point from HP, Lenovo, Acer and others. It'll be interesting to see how well ASUS can grow in this new landscape.
People get their accounts hijacked all the time. No reason to freak out about it.

edit for clarity: 'people' == people who fall for phishing traps, I assume.
well here's what i see with the tech, forward about 5 years.

mobile PC eyewear. you're walking around doing whatever it is you want to do, and to access your PC systems reach out in front of you and make gestures. the IR emitted from the glasses reflects and takes note of your hand/finger positions and interprets your actions as interface operations.

far-fetched? maybe i watch too much power rangers
If this is actually a ploy to get pointless blogs out of Google's index and hidden behind Facebook's garden wall, then I'm all for it!
Now remove the period at the end of the URL. :)
There will be a short delay.
Umm... Caltech sports teams? There's a whole movie, Quantum Hoops, about how we historically never won any game.
So all those peers to whom I am trying to seed are not actually real, hence my ratio is not 1:1.
there are people out there who make $2000 in the time it takes to read this comment. those people will choose it for the statement it makes and price will not matter to them, unless the price is too low, then it's unacceptable. i don't think they'll sell a lot of them, but i doubt they'll lose money on it. it's a good move in my humble opinion.
Indaba Offers Call-In Music Session Recording
Elgg, the free open source social networking software, has themes now
> write in your blog for your great-great-great-grandkids

You think stuff we are producing these days will last? I'm dubious. Paper lasts a decent amount of time, but digital media?
I am planning to get Print-outs now. Now all my not-so-creative friends can't steal my creative ideas. ;)
Well in (large) corporations buying things is a little tricky. Needing the product is not the only requirement. You also need to often convince others that the product is necessary and also cover your ass in the event that things don't turn out well. This usually means having to buy expensive products from big companies with talented salespeople.
Pets but not food
It does not seem to do this now, but the base seems flexible enough that it could in the future. Here's hoping.
This is just not true. MIT competes in Division III and has 41 varsity teams according to wikipedia. I'm not sure if they give out any athletic scholarships.
You could have said the same about Linux compared to Solaris, pUnix and Windows 15 years ago. Now Linux is the dominant comercial OS.
1) What are the Liberation fonts? I'm curious.

2) There are still reliability problems. I'd include driver issues as a reliability problem.
The difference is that Github was already established and making money when Tom had to make his choice (heck, I was the first paying customer!)

That's a lot less dicey than the leap into the great wide open that is lionized here.