skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In that vein, I think the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) are too wishy-washy:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

The guidelines grant too much leeway here and make it difficult to educate new members about what's appropriate. Off topic should just read: "NO politics, sports, crime or general news stories." Full stop, no excuses.

Likewise, the on topic section provides too much cover for people to submit just about anything (hard to get more broad than "anything that satisfies one's intellectual curiosity."). I'd rather see tight, specific rules and let the community decide when it's appropriate to bend them.
January Internships
A lot of schools (such as MIT) have a "January Term." A frequent activity for students during this period is to take part in an "externship"--a short, month-long internship. Are there any startups taking January interns?
For me, if there was a little text before the "add comment" button that said something like:

Does this comment contribute something to the general discussion rather than just trying to prove that someone else is wrong? If so, [add comment]

then it might stop me from making some of my more bone-headed and offensively off-topic comments.

Imagining HN as a large round table discussion full of very smart strangers that I was lucky enough to join in with seems to help. Only say something that adds to the discussion, moves it along, or points out a seemingly missed but valid and contrary point of view, and don't be so rude as to mention that guy's stutter, the foreign guy's poor pronunciation, or be a boring pedant. If it gets boring, go to the next round table.

I'm a little concerned by the "citation please" two-word comment below someones long contribution for some reason. Not everything needs to be peer-reviewed here, there's plenty of room for well-formed opinions based on one experts own experience. I guess the problem is when they are crowded out by the poorly-formed opinions or dogma. A balance, like most things, I guess.
The Experimental Effectiveness of Mathematical Proof [pdf]
In the USA, map data from the government is public domain. In Europe this is not the case. You have to pay for map data from the government. As a result Google Maps is usually based off 3rd party map data like TeleAtlas, who use things like aerial imagery & guesswork. This can result in not 100% accurate maps, so there can be mistakes and errata like that. That's much more likely than government control.
I've tried but I always end up shutting off my alarm clocks subconsciously... something akin to sleepwalking or something :P. I've even bought one of those alarm clocks where you have to solve a geometric puzzle to turn it off and I STILL do it hahahah.
Isaacson: The Genius of Jobs
yeah; i'm in chile where the supply of scotch is limited, so i've started drinking the local hooch, called pisco, which is a kind of brandy. there are quite a few aged piscos available (the economy here is pretty good and people are starting to have more disposable income). as i tried a few i noticed that the ones in nice bottles, aged for longer (and more expensive), were noticeably more complex. eventually i had enough different bottles to arrange a blind tasting (my partner did the pouring etc; i was blindfold as they have different shades). the results were amazing - my rating was all over the map and completely inconsistent with what i was expecting. yet still, when i can see the bottles, the expensive ones taste better :o)

tl;dr: brain - why are you so shallow?

[in my defense, my proudest wine moment was when i bought a bottle of cousino macul cs on offer, took it home, tasted it, and thought it amazing (for the price). when i checked my receipt i had picked up the reserve (not on sale, twice the price) by mistake... (their labels were very similar a year or two ago)]
Notes: Smart TVs
The connection between the "Peter Principle" and this article isn't obvious to me. Can you say what you mean?
It's always interesting when someone blames all of this on the "Culture of victimhood in the US", because I'm not from the US and I still don't think it's acceptable. Personally, I've never felt sufficiently slighted by another to complain. But when a coworker tells me that they're unenthusiastic about continuing to work in the field because of this kind of shit, I pay attention.

If your specific social situation allows this kind of behaviour, then that's fine. I really don't have any complaints at all. But if there are people who are in your social situation who are unhappy about it, you don't get to just tell them that they're oversensitive. That's not actually something that makes things better.
2 credit cards with 5k limit each.

Do you own any other assets. Car etc, sell those. Even random stuff around your house can probably raise a few thousand.
"First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is." Not just a Donovan lyric, it is also part of Buddhist and Taoist literature going back more than 2500 years. (I assumed, after reading the Tao Te Ching, that the concept for the lyric had been lifted from there, but later found out it came from Qingyuan Weixin through D.T. Suzuki.)
If it boils down to a matter of personal preference, that's true for almost anything.

The author of the actual post that the OP is responding to did not quite get what async behavior meant in node.js - i.e. it's less to do with using process.nextTick() to buy you parallelism, and more to do with async I/O.

And, there are other server-side JavaScript engines than just node.js (although it's only node which is getting all the attention), so I wouldn't be making such a generic statement.
Don't downvote comments that are already gray. Just one or two downvotes is all you need to teach them a lesson. No need kicking someone when they're down.
Ask HN: review searchyt (faceted search for HN)
Hey folks,

It would be great if you could let me know about the utility of a side-project I have
just launched. Its called searchyt:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174607

http://searchyt.twittrank.info/

searchyt helps you filter out HN search results based on age, #comments & #points. I figured it might be worthwhile to run queries such as:

- What were the most commented stories last week?
- What were the most voted stories last month?
- What were the least commented stories with the most points?

Cheers!
I think it's due to the two sides of the argument - one is that the proposed trademark is infringing, the other is that the current trademark is being used. Defending it in court every time is a way of supporting the 2nd side of the argument, not necessarily the first.
The Regrettable Omission in the Candidates’ Tax Reform Plans
The critical parts to being an entrepreneur are to build a product, raise capital, manage a company and sell the product. For each of those pieces, you need a good professional network. Co-founders to build a product are easy to come by if you are studying for an engineering degree, but finding people for the other 3 pieces of the puzzle are equally or more important and are difficult for an engineering student. So, you have to spend an incredible amount of time networking both within the town/city you are in and in other major tech hubs. You will need to search for and attend every possible free/cheap gathering of techies and through them find people to help with the 'other 3 pieces'. But then there is this other big hassle that looms over everything else.

American immigration laws are specifically designed to keep people out, and that is the biggest barrier you will face. The only way around it is to find a local co-founder and sponsor an H1B visa through the company showing yourself as an employee. There have been recently proposed changes to the H1B rules allowing a sole founder to sponsor their own H1B provided they have investors investing in the company and the company has a board of directors. You will also need to wait a little for enough such cases to go through the USCIS to determine what's the winning formula for such H1B visa approvals. In parallel with all of your other efforts at finding people, you will hence have to find a good immigration lawyer who will also work on a project basis at low rates. Of late, USCIS has be onerous in demanding documented evidence for H1B cases, so you can very well rule out applying entirely by yourself.

The gist is that although it's possible, it's very hard to be an entrepreneur straight out of college if you are not from the country. The shortest route is to fall in love with an american (citizen) girl and marry her. And I don't say that in jest.
Best Free Photoshop Tutorials: HQ And Awesome Free Photo Tutorials.
For those interested, there is a ton of great information on Peter Suber's page about open access in the humanities:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/apa.htm

But I don't see any suggestions there for extending open access requirements to the humanities by bootstrapping off open access requirements for publicly-funded science research via grant money that ends up in humanities departments.
I did not like that quote. For the first part: Beginners absolutely do not play be ear unless he by playing by ear means: Make instrument produce note. Continue by trial and error until complete string of notes resembles desired tune. There is a difference between "doodling" on your instrument and playing by ear. The last part: "they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see" is just fluff. And sheet music can just be played and sound good, this is dependent on the skill level of who is playing it. It is like saying code can only be well written after it has been refactored.
Yes I was familiar with that at the time, but I don't recall if it was mentioned in our particular discussion. In any case, Taiwan is relatively far South in its region so the projection effect would tend to be reduced. It would actually have the effect of making mainland China look larger.
I'd argue that "the most important thing in the universe" is always an utterly subjective feeling — an "illusion" — whether evoked by thoughts of oneself, one's child, or anything else. The interesting lesson is that the object of one's supreme devotion can change at all.
Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym thereof.

There's no value in identifying and shaming people who are overenthusiastic about products. Just correct any hyperbole - and don't crow about the fact that it's hyperbole! - and move on.

That's the most topical one, but "idiot", accusations of poor reading comprehension, and mocking interrogatives are all things I'd encourage downvoting as well.
It will be trivial for Google go offer a way to tie them together, much as HN and SO let you claim other online identities via oAuth or openID.
I can't speak for wine, but beer has similar licensing that involves a thorough blind tasting test. The tasting is not to judge good or bad, but to identify variety classifications and various properties of each beer. The results are repeatable since it's a test that can be passed with enough preparation.
A simple epub reader written with pygtk and pywebkit
Not necessarily, and not in this case.
How do three anecdotes strung together justify the 'often' in the title?
I think that the down-voting has gotten out of hand and have seen several instances where participants seemed to have issues with each other or were reacting to a dissenting opinion. Shouldn't we welcome dissenting opinions? Doesn't that actually make the discussion more engaging and valuable?

I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in any way. Perhaps a trick could be borrowed from the StackExchange sites and a down-voter would pay for the privilege with karma points?
I agree with point 1. A Dedicated Full-time Community Manager could shape the community, chip away at the crap and support to cool aspects. Someone who knows HN inside and out, who listens to what the community wants, is willing to put their ego to the side when they are wrong and is stern enough to enforce rules.
Jobs die out when they're no longer needed. In all of the examples provided in the article, better (in my opinion) alternatives displaced the service jobs.
> Edit: Just had a thought that any profit on these sales should really go to a charity or foundation.

They're eBooks so the margins are pretty high.

I think it would have been nice if they'd offered a deep discount on paper books on this occasion.
There's an assumption that those anecdotes would trigger memory of your own experience, and that you'd come to a similar conclusion (or assumption) as the author.

I think.
Give Python a look as well. Also, never try to embed Ruby in a C/C++ application it's not designed for it.
Errors in open-source projects
Reinstate the tax exempt status of Graduate Student Stipends (Petition)
There are actually 91 errors described in the article, but number 90 looks nicer in the title. The article is intended for C/C++ programmers, but developers working with other languages may also find it interesting.

The materials collected in this article will be useful for authors of articles, books and blogs. Examples of errors can be used to demonstrate advantages of different programming styles – for instance, why you should not try to make your code shorter by writing long expressions.
The Rum Diary,Movie,Review
The Rum Diary,Movie,Review
This makes it the perfect holiness sinner to be played by Hollywood superstar who always wants to see himself as a bad guy
Actually, I read more comments than articles.
That was on the linked page:

> Also the license of Ruby has changed. Previously Ruby has been released
under GPLv2 and "Ruby" license. But Ruby 1.9.3 is released under a joint
2-clause BSD license and "Ruby" license.
It's probably the most damning and valid critique of The Valley.

How many Twitters/Facebooks/Dropboxes/Airbnbs don't exist because the founders sold them for $15M in 18 months?

Sometimes it's because the founders aren't really passionate enough about what they're working on.

Other times it's just financially insane to say no. A great example is Mint.com. How do you tell Aaron Patzer not to sell, when he's going to make $40M personally? That's more than he might have made in an IPO after many years.
IPhone hacker successfully ported Siri to iPhone 4 and iPod Touch
If you want to earn fame you could write a nice GUI to wrap around the command line tool (ebook-convert) from Calibre to allow people to do batch conversion of ebooks from one format to another.

Many people dislike the Calibre look and feel, and some of those people aren't sure about simple bash scripting.
HP vai manter linha de Computadores
His Q&A at Startup School was not so good as the rest of the speakers that were invited. The girl that was making the questions was not so good at it either. There was no consistency about what he wanted to say. Many times he lost his own trail of thought. Maybe you need such an article to extract some meaning out of everything he talked.

[EDIT] Well, someone doesn't like that I speak up my mind. So I can't make an opinion about this now without being downvoted?
Living With An Older Dog
You may also want to follow Radley Balko who's focus is criminal justice & the legal system. He was at Reason for several years, he is now at Huffington Post.
Here's a completely anecdotal, "a friend of a friend.." story, but I think it's a cool yi and you'll enjoy it:

A friend of a friend is a cartographer who works in DC. According to this person, the official subway map of DC distorts the true geography of the city -- and the subway lines -- as much for security purposes as it does graphic design purposes. The red line, in particular, apparently is drawn with a completely bogus path through the city on the maps. The true path of the line goes underneath the national mall and several important government buildings, if this person is to be believed.
Same here, I've tried it twice and both times gave in about day 3. It's not that I couldn't physically stay awake, just that my resolve and willpower trended towards zero.
We need an opensource server component to this workflow. I want to share photos between devices but I want my library to be private and in my control.
Well, just a few counterpoints here:

- I gave font size as very easy example, and there are dozens of products that make that very easy. But a lot of our testing ends up being very heavily backend-oriented (e.g. "let's try this new optimization engine combined with this optimization engine"). So any third party tools probably won't be plug and play unless we made some fundamental changes to our web applications.

- And I have quantified making those changes long before the layoffs (although I had another in-house solution in mind, not one that used third-party tools), because even if 1% of engineering time is spent executing scripts like robots, that's 1% that could be better deployed into a profit center for the company. The problem is, like I'm sure many engineers understand, is dealing with executives who don't quite grok the technical limitations of the current system, and who have a hard time prioritizing anything that doesn't directly lead to more money in the bank account.

- And this is my main point... so we had layoffs, and ended up coming to a defacto more efficient solution, which would be okay if me or anyone else involved in this solution was compensated accordingly. Instead it's executives that will get lauded for cutting costs, even though the current solution now introduced a high risk of impacting our ability to actually execute on the aforementioned initiatives that would lead to directly more revenue.

- So basically, what I'm most frustrated about, is this: I had a proposal that would have improved an inefficient process. That proposal got ignored, then we had layoffs, then we were forced to improve on that inefficiency in a way that wasn't that much more efficient. If we ultimately get this all to work, the executives get bonuses for increasing profit by lowering headcount. If it doesn't, they get cut loose with what I assume is some generous compensation package.

I'm not trying to just rattle some populist chains here or complain about "the 1%." My point is, it's not the actual elimination of jobs and creation of 'shadow work' that is a problem, but the context of which is eliminated. In most cases it sucks for the people whose jobs got eliminated, and it sucks for the people who now have do the shadow work because they're not seeing the rewards of the new efficiency (e.g. lower prices at the grocery store). Instead, some layer of people highly detached from the process typically gain the most benefits.
I've tried and failed twice.

However, I did gain one lasting benefit. I taught myself how to reliably fall asleep within 2 minutes. That's a pretty awesome skill.
Why $5 and not $50?

MetaFilter is $5 and the comments there aren't very good either.
No offense to the Twisted guys, but after developing a project using Twisted, you could not pay me to do so again.

Their documentation is a joke, they managed to completely gunk up their architecture with a crudely bootstrapped attempt to solder interfaces onto python, and their development community is not particularly...welcoming...to newcomers.

Suffice it to say that when the only real way to get anything done with a framework is to read the source and then ask questions in their IRC channel, then something is very, very wrong.
Clickable link to the survey mentioned in the slides: http://chesnok.com/u/5e
> Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym thereof.

Seconded. I also believe, more generally, that the growing tendency to express negativity towards people (instead of ideas) is just as much of a problem as frequent offtopic threads. Luckily, this is somewhat easy to fix, because it may be easier to remind participants to keep a respectful tone than to define what actually constitutes a hacker-relevant topic.
I could not agree more. We don't all believe in a multiverse.
Being an international student at a US university you will get 12 months of OPT (Optional Practical Training) once you graduate. It is a free pass which allows you to work without any restrictions for one year in the same field of your degree. If you have your company registered by the time you graduate, you can use the OPT to work for the same. The OPT can be extended for another 17 months if the company is enrolled in e-verify (free registration with the USCIS). So, you can effectively get 29 months of work authorization without any external help.

If you company is successful and generates revenue/raises money in the first ~12 months you can file for your own H1B. I am not a lawyer but talk to the immigration officer at your university and also to a lawyer and you will get more information.
Leather Rolling Luggage
Leather Rolling Luggage
Wow! I just finished reading though the list of common misconceptions. If you were aware of all of those misconceptions am extremely impressed. That list covers an enormous body of knowledge. To be honest I would not have imagined that anyone would know all of those details, congratulations.

Did you really know all of those?
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<a href= http://www.yummihandbags.com/material/leather-handbags >leather handbags</a>
And why the EFF? Can we just have it go to rtm's "buy more ram fund" ?
Reporting for duty...

A dedicated syntax for chaining has been discussed several times for CoffeeScript, with different flavors:

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1495

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1291

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/281

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1431

Personally, I'm a bit iffy on the subject, because although the demonstrated usefulness of the idiom is evident in libraries like jQuery, chaining-as-a-language-feature is inherently focused on stringing together a sequence of imperative side effects, where it can be nicer to use expressions for their values.

For example, where the returned value is a part of the next step of the computation, chaining comes naturally:

list
.concat(other)
.map((x) -> x * x)
.filter((x) -> x % 2 is 0)
.reverse()

And where you need built-in language chaining to do the job for you, it's almost always because you're ignoring the return value, and using each method for its side effects:

brush
.startPath()
.moveTo(10, 10)
.stroke("red")
.fill("blue")
.ellipse(50, 50)
.endPath()

So the enforced imperativeness of chaining syntax makes it feel a bit off. Still, if you were designing such a syntax from scratch, and not following Smalltalk's lead, what would you think it should look like?
I hope this becomes an annual event.
I like Matt Might's take on that particular issue: http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

An open source license for academics has additional needs: (1) it should require that source and modifications used to validate scientific claims be released with those claims; and (2) more importantly, it should absolve authors of shame, embarrassment and ridicule for ugly code.
Thanks for the support and referral! I'm interested in building a web app, so will be sure to try out the ruby site. Much appreciated!
same here! I've been mulling over a mac book as this unity desktop is killing me, just have the mac as the desktop, and keep it headless linux.