skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's an idea for Google. I don't very much care exactly how they implement it but here's the outline:

1) Let various non-profits like the Red Cross or the Susan Komen Foundation etc. register as 'Recipients' with Google's AdSense program

2) Let website publishers who are (perennially) stuck with sub $100 earnings nominate one of these organizations to receive their AdSense balance- whether it is $0.25 or $99.

Bingo! All that money that Google is sitting on gets put to work immediately for worthy causes. Even if Google pays these orgs only when the total exceeds $100, this would help a ton of people around the world.
I'm not going to deny that there are filtering systems out there that are crazy.

Also: The Ivy League typically doesn't have great CS programs... ;-)

ps, see my other comment -- as much as a top CS school is nice, this was essentially a typo on our part.
a world-changing idea does not need to be not-for-profit. this is one of the biggest misconceptions out there -- an idea that solves a problem for a sub-group of humanity, does not need to run under an NGO/non-profit umbrella.
Agree 100%. We want projects and code samples... the school itself doesn't matter.
This isn't Hacker News, but I do have an opinion on this, so I'll let it slide since it's vaguely business related.

I'm going to take the unpopular option and say that no, business doesn't have to re-think everything because of gen-y.

This generation of young know-it-alls has had the fortunate experience of never having to understand what life is like in an economic downturn. That's clearly evident in most of the y'ers I meet everyday (I'm "x" myself). This is about to change in a big way. Because of that, the days of having companies begging for you to come work for them are soon going to be a thing of the past, at least temporarily.

That, coupled with the natural process of maturity, will give enough of a dose of reality to gen-y'ers that at least some of them will start to reduce the level of demands they would make on corporations.

Some things are changing, like companies allowing for flex-hours, but that has little if anything to do with gen y exclusively.
"Is it professional for boss to cheat you?"
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

Where do you see the orgy of self-sacrificing? And how is this presumed orgy making the world "perish"?

This is just nonsense.
The XBox is no playground, I think to be allowed to develop for it you need to be pre-approved and throw millions of $ in the ring. I haven't checked, though.
GTK+ on OSX is finally available
That's like saying to Bill Gates "you're rich, forget about the Gates foundation, just focus on making money for yourself and creating jobs." Warren Buffet, or how bout the Carnegies, Mellons, and Rockefellers.

This has got to be the least coherent analysis I've read on HN in a while. Google is an organization, yes, but one composed of people, and those people are affected by the decisions of invididuals or groups who could incrementally change the world for better or for worse.

You don't think the engineers writing JS to improve that "cloud computing model" (let's use Google Docs as an example) wouldn't benefit either directly or indirectly from some of the ideas that will come out of this project?

How are innovation and this project mutually exclusive? Google is (and has been via Google.org) trying to spearhead innovation outside of its known core competencies (i.e. search, ads, and apps) and does this project not contribute to that?
> Are they serious? To parse an email and post the contents to a web page?

With this company name ?

But seriously, regardless of how irrational it is to consider the name of the company when accepting their offer, I bet a lot of people actually do that.
Matt Groening's Apple Ad From 1989
Primate intelligence: Out of the mist
Car engines: The old motor roars back
I must say I am surprised at some of the comments that have already been left here. I would think a community like HN would be excited to see a project come out of the woodwork like this...at least I was and heck, I've already submitted an idea and may submit a couple more.

If, as everyone opines on here constantly, ideas have little to no value, but rather it is the execution of those ideas, why not submit ideas that may have some validity, and let Google essentially play matchmaker and help find the organization, people, and talent to execute on that idea?
100% agree -- at the end of the day, no matter what your background is, if you are interested in building something, doing something, or working with a particular team, the bullet points on a job posting are worthless.

What matters is proving what you've done and can do.

We will take a hardcore guy who never even went to high school who codes open source projects or has built great things over a CS guy from Stanford but has never coded production code in his life, no question.

I think anyone who says they are looking for 'top CS schools' would agree. Except Google. They really want those degrees, go figure.
The 5 lines that mystified O’Reilly - how to use a spreadsheet in bash
How about a one-handed, wearable chording keyboard?

http://www.handykey.com
Would someone please put him in charge (or at least make him the power behind the throne) of Homeland Security. This cannot happen soon enough.
CSI Wildlife: 2 Eco-Crimes Unmasked by High-Tech DNA Forensics
I know this whole situation has pissed some people off. But what's sort of hilarious is that until today I had no clue (or I just forgot) that Garry and maybe Sachin went to Stanford. That part of the job posting, as interpreted by many of the people here, felt like reading a torture manual by the Dalai Lama - it just isn't their style at all.

Regarding college: I know Sachin sold computers and had a hell of a time dealing with Paypal as a fledgling entrepreneur and Garry...umm Garry was in chess club? I don't know - college discussions just didn't come up much.

The Posterous guys certainly don't "act" (and by act I mean the generalizations spelled out in these comments) like they went to one of those schools, let alone "elitist". Besides, most of the time when we hung out, they were more interested in talking about ideas or learning about my boring Ohio background.

So if you're hesitant to apply because of this situation, don't be. And if you do not want to take my word for it, I'd be more than happy to email you a list of references of my friends & family that have dealt with Garry and/or Sachin including my parents and a girl friend in Chicago that had problems setting up her Posterous. Or just ask Livingston - she loooves Garry.

As always dan at the domain for ticketstumbler.
at least now you have your iterative feedback...
There has been some discussion on the importance of a good chair. I find the keyboard a very important component, perhaps as much as good office furniture.

I use to half joke that my disdain for Microsoft is not as extensive as it may appear from one reading what I post (I got a -8 mod a couple days back for saying no real programmer would accept programming under Windows). In fact, I love several Microsoft products and, for me, the three best products they do today are the natural keyboards, the mice and SQL Server. In that order.

I loved the Z-80 softcard too. Would place it above SQL Server if it were still in production.
Cuil frozen out, market share drops to next to nothing.
Not a fan of touch-typing, eh?
Why is the middlemen's share of the U.S. economy so high?
Haha, no you can't -- we want people who can do that and Ruby on Rails too. ;-)

I know you were just trying to be flip, but JavaScript is a pretty amazing language for writing frontend code.
There's an edit button, but it goes away after a while.
Nope, we're left clinging like shipwrecked sailors to the Federal Reserve.
Actually, I think you meant to reply to my parent post. I don't disagree with you. I'm really seething mad over the Apple app store and iPhone bullshit (guess how many ignored/closed radars i have regarding iPhone and iPhone sdk right now?) and even moreso because a lot of my friends are worried about their future in iPhone development.

But I'm really curious as to 1% of what my parent post was talking about. Not ANYTHING ELSE related to monopolies and damned statistics.
I think you overestimate the value of most of the worlds workers.

Let's say revenue is 1cent an minute for 40 hours a week and 48 weeks a year. That's 9,216$ / year. Split the cost of a low cost energy efficient PC 300$, electricity ~100$, and internet 400$/year, over 1 year. And your left with ~8416$ which works out to ~700$ a month. In 2004 a southern China factory job would pay about $120 a month for long hours and often dangerous conditions. There are more than 4 billion people who gladly take that job but most of them don't have the skills to do so.

PS: If you think my numbers are a little off 8000$/year places someone in the top ~15% of the worlds income earners. (http://www.globalrichlist.com/)
Buffett buys $5-billion chunk of Goldman Sachs
Ruby aids and abets designing your own syntax

But... how? Can you give an example?

And by isomorphic, I mean that, given a finite number of "utilities" one could translate line for line a Ruby program into a Python program, and still get, maybe not a fully Pythonic program, but close enough. I thought, using this metric, C < Python, Ruby < Lisp
I thought the same thing when I read this article. It's actually the exact formula described by Tim Ferris.
- Establish yourself as an "expert" in some field
- Sell information products about how to make money in said field
- Make far more money talking about said field than you ever actually made working in it

Nothing particularly wrong with it, maybe the advice is good and many people need someone to look up to. But the parallel with Kiyosaki is accurate.
USA change in royalty rates - a boon for digital music startups
Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space
I can see how my comment comes off as that, but in actuality, the question to ask is, "Does going to college give you the knowledge to forsee a situation like that?" Or, "does one acquire this knowledge only from experiences in the real world?"

I was trying to imply that maybe going to college makes you more aware, but I have no clue if this is really true or not... (my assumption is no)
Watching TV is usually done during periods that people consider to be 'free time.' The term 'must-see TV' really is just a slogan.

The premise of the article is therefore that you can free up free time that you were spending doing something recreational, for whatever other purpose you want (implicitly, so you can be productive).

The core of the argument is that watching TV is of inferior value (thereby also implicitly accepting an absolute standard of valuation), and that you can do 'better' things with your life. Which is, to some extent, weird. I think most people realize that their recreational time could be spent differently, they just chose not to do so, perhaps because they derive genuine entertainment or educational value from watching Planet Earth, or Good Eats, or Mythbusters.
They might need someone with practical experience, rather than an academic.
That would work... but only if you weren't making money off it. Once you start getting paid to do that, you can be sure Apple will sic their soulless lawyers on you and rend you unto hades.
Things do seem more boring when you're making money for it. Does this effect have a name?

I'm reminded of the first time I ever went to a casino. After an hour of exploring and putting the occasional dollar in a slot machine, I was about five dollars down. "Oh well, I thought, five dollars for an hour's entertainment is pretty good value!". Then on the next machine, I won ten bucks, and found myself thinking "An hour's work for five dollars? What a gip!"
"I firmly believe that most innovation comes from companies that are fighting for their survival and new customers without a safety net." http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/third-party-com.html
a) It was a typo to put it under 'requirement' (see above)

b) Joining Posterous is actually a cool way to avoid bad culture because you'd have a key hand in creating the what the culture would become. Say if you joined us at Posterous -- it would be you, me and Sachin, making great software and building a great company.

So, how about it? =)
This highlights one of the biggest problems I have with web apps. The flip side of "you can instantly upgrade all users of your software" is "your users are all forced to use the latest version, whether they like it or not".

In the old days, if you didn't like the new version, you simply didn't upgrade. Nothing would stop you from running the old version. (I'm still using a 2001 version of an app which has had 3 major releases since then.)

With open-source, you had the option not only of sticking with the old version, but maintaining it.

Web apps, in this respect, are a step backwards: you can't even run the old version. If you're lucky, they might include an "Older version" link (GMail), but chances are they'll just remove features without even updating the docs (Google Maps). (But I'm not bitter.)

In the economic sense, you used to have to compete with not just your competitors, but with older versions of yourself. On the web, this self-competition is removed. Also, web apps tend to have strong network effects (who's the #2 Facebook or Twitter?), and make it very difficult to get your data out. Great for startups, bad for users.
hey man, every person has their own path. garry and sachin went to stanford then worked at big co's before they started posterous, while david karp lived abroad and studied firsthand how people communicate in countries where communication is far more advanced than in the states. posterous and tumblr are both beautifully simple products made for their respective target demo's - posterous for everyone who can read/write, tumblr for every hipster living in LES or williamsburg w/ a fixed gear bike. haha.
Unlike Herpes. Ah well. :P
also knowing garry and sachin and david karp, they are all product people at heart. they are building products with direct user feedback. i dont know many people who take their customers more seriously, and take more time tweeking and iterating their product than david karp. for someone who hasn't been to college, he is an impressive guy.
Exactly what I thought. I read the title in my RSS feed and thought "is that supposed to be some online license/key manager for end users so they don't lose them?".
Economist: What Apple did for smartphones, Google may do for all the rest
Interesting.

I would suggest the US software industry is older than other software industries and our more established players, have grownup before OSS, are very proprietary. it would make sense that we would be slower to change than newer younger industries built on OSS.
So did reddit. I suppose they should have gone to college too.

Oh, wait.
"...the idiocy of millions who don’t understand that those blue-underlined words on the right of search results are NOT, in fact, search results at all."

Wrong.

If you're researching a paper, then the sponsored search results might not be your best bet. But if you're searching for a product you need, I would argue that the sponsored search results might be even more accurate.

Sponsored search results cost people money. Those people are not throwing their money away. There is a reason why they are paying to appear on that particular keyword. They have something you need. They are willing solve to your need for a price.

You're not an idiot if you need a new pair of shoes, click on a sponsored result for Zappos, and find what you want.
You mean like posting stuff to servers on Mars?
Okay, there is a level of pomposity that has become associated with the full Windsor, I'll give you that.

The half Windsor, however, makes you look like a douche. If you can't be bothered, go buy a clip on. :-)
Erlang: Performing Real-Time Upgrades to an OTP System
I've just heard about this place, don't know anyone who went there: http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/
Chinese Communist Party may soon switch nation to IPv6
i think that means you read philosophy, math, Latin and Greek: Homer, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Pascal, some Whitehead, Russell. Some Sartre and Camus and Nietzsche, Heidegger if you want a tortured existence. You want to go to St Johns college, i think, maybe Univ of Chicago .

With a rigorous math background and some linguistics , you have the foundation of a good programming career.
Okay, so there's a large number of people here who have opinions on, or an interest in, the hiring of hackers. This seems natural -- this is after all "Hacker News" and a large number of hackers will at some point or another participate in the hiring process. This is a recurring discussion here, so we should not be surprised to see the topic come up again.

Curiously enough, there's also a large number of people who have an interest in YC and companies that have received funding from YC. Bizarre, I know.

So, is it really a surprise that people would want to discuss a controversial job advert posted by a YC funded company?

The only disappointment is that these comments couldn't have been added to the advert posting itself.

As to your karma, I think people get tired of meta-discussions / whining about why one item gets more points than another. At the very least it's off topic here.
It's a sign that it's probably a comfortable conceptual boundary in explaining what you're trying to do.
I just attended an SVJUG meeting where Mark Hansen explained REST web services.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/svjug-announce/message/20...
According to him, REST services are suitable for building mashups where the client is a web browser and tight interface specifications aren't necessary. SOAP services are more suitable for EAI where you need high reliability and tight specification of interfaces. Makes sense.
Project 10 to the 100th
That's a pretty bad idea, unless you want to be an ESP. deliverability becomes a challenge when you start sending our massive quantities of email -- you need to deal with ISPs of all kinds, constantly changing legislation and complaints. one esp (my previous employer) does offer an API to tie your customer db to a mailing list (including doing the mail merge and such) -- verticalresponse.com
You're right, sponsored results aren't just for idiots. But the article makes a valid point too. A substantial fraction (maybe majority) of web-users are probably not tech-savvy enough to know the difference between free and paid links.
Your deadpan delivery makes me think that you didn't get the sarcasm. I'm not really asking for a job. That's clear, right?
Digg Raises $28 Million in Series C Funding
isnt shellshadow similar to GNU screen ?
Exploiting people's decision making through tricks or noise is nothing internet specific. Grocery store marketers have their equations to induce purchases on the shelf by using colors, gimmicks, etc - just like spam kings. Consumer brands place their names in movies, tv shows and songs and sneak into peoples buying habits as a virtue of repetition and numbers - much like the numbers that bring domain squatters their traffic. And, of course, our political leaders are elected by poisoning our attention space with commercials full of falsehoods aimed at changing people's sentiment illogically.

Welcome to our age of idiot capitalism. This is the era where we all get to put up with the information noise created by formulaic entrepreneurs who are seeking to exploit the collective idiot among us.
Python's design favors having a simple syntax over a flexible one, whereas Ruby's seems to favor the reverse (though not quite to the same extent as Perl). They're in the same niche, and generally good for the same things, but they feel quite different.

I have only a small amount of experience with Ruby (I already know Python well, and think my time is better spent learning other things), but this seems like a reflection of their design trade-offs.
This self delusion comes from the fact that acknowledging that the Internet is largely made up of simpletons who do not know what a web application is, will never really understand Twitter, and who continue to use Hotmail happily, and who use Yahoo as their "homepage", puts them at risk of catatonic stupifaction and massive permanent brain damage.

This is amazingly condescending... It completely misses the point of figuring out what people want and assumes everyone is doing nothing better with their time.

For example: I understand twitter just fine and couldn't care much less about it.
Android and T-Mobile G1's Five Most Obnoxious Flaws
Is Yahoo Trying To Sell Yahoo Answers?
I have found a remarkable proof that Ruby aids and abets writing your own domain-specific languages, but the margin is too small to write it out.

Actually, I have found this to be true and you will also find the OP makes this exact point. Google ruby and DSL and you will find hundreds of examples. While argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy, I think we have are safe in saying Ruby encourages this. Whether the resulting DSLs are any good is another question.

And by isomorphic, I mean that, given a finite number of "utilities" one could translate line for line a Ruby program into a Python program, and still get, maybe not a fully Pythonic program, but close enough. I thought, using this metric, C < Python, Ruby < Lisp

I don't think this is true. I have a strong feeling that Ruby allows certain things that would require whole-program rewriting to redo in Python, and certainly the reverse is true.

Generators from Python and the various metaprogramming callbacks from Ruby come to mind. Certainly you can translate from one to the other, but I don't think the resulting rewriting will be entirely local.
Wow If you drink 2 cups of coffee/day, 18 coffee trees are out there just for you
Chrome fades as users return to IE, Firefox
Why is almost half of Google in beta?
Layoff Alert: Not If … When
I think the case here is also what got me into computers at a young age. What makes computers, and software specifically, so appealing is its accessibility and control.

To feel a sense of true accomplishment as an architect, physicist, or biologist you generally need something to happen that can be completely out of reach: erect a building or collide particles. Writing code had a profound effect on me when I was eight. I realized that me, sitting at home and banging away on my keyboard, I had potentially the same power as scientists and corporations with much, much larger resources than me. The fact that a few guys in their early twenties can compete with multi-billion dollar corporations is not to be taken lightly, and isn't exactly shared by many other vocations and industries. Not to mention the existence of an open community, willing to share methods and hacks.

Also, when someone codes a very cool tool or program, many can appreciate it; even if they don't understand it. It's hard to say the same about math or physics theorems.

Basically, the notion of an ivory tower is less evident in programming than in other fields.