skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is taken from Simone Santini[0]'s paper "We are Sorry to Inform You..."[1]. Simone is a major critic of the Semantic Web. Watch this talk by him regarding his opinions on the matter[2].

Also, as some of you might know, Larry and Sergey's paper on the architecture of the Google Search Engine was rejected. It is one of most highly cited tech reports today.

[0] http://arantxa.ii.uam.es/~ssantini/
[1] https://noppa.aalto.fi/noppa/kurssi/mat-1.2991/materiaali/Mat-1_2991_6._rsa-kommentteja.pdf
[2] http://videolectures.net/samt08_santini_cnod/
Always cool to see more Hokies doing cool things :-). Turns out there are a lot of resources in town for this sort of thing:

Dr. Perez in Computer Science, he actually has done a ton of research in how individuals use information (PIM) including email.

It might be useful to do some competitive analysis as well:
http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ (attempts solves the 'do this later problem')

As your probably aware MailTrust created by Hokie Pat Mathews and bought by Rackspace still has a pretty big office. I'd track him down and get some feedback from him.

My two cents, feel free to reach out ben at olark.
Keep Your Hands Away from My Files
Hollywood won't die until the movie theater monopoly on new releases ends. Most people have comparable bigscreens and surround sound systems already. All that is left is the ability to pay $12 to see a new release in your home. Film producers would make more money by cutting out the middlemen. People would see more new releases even at $12 each you could see 6-10 movies per month for it to cost as much as cable. Some people would see most new releases and cause middle and lower tier movies to make more money.
Cartels Are an Emergent Phenomenon, Say Complexity Theorists
*cite
Syntax is different, semantics are informed by the type system so programming in one after being familiar with the other is pretty concept-friendly.
Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols
How about disallowing political ads on TV and newspapers for a few months before election, except for publicly funded ones in secured slots for that purpose?
Almost. And I certainly hope they're going to go this way. Their concept of "channels" right now aren't genres, but specific accounts, like CollegeHumor. I'd love to see a generic "comedy" channel that included CollegeHumor, comedians (amateur & professional), clips from TBBT, etc.
Ask HN: How do you get to HN-front page without some 'Friend Members'on HN?
I was trying to show my weekend project. In spite of being a regular HN Reader, I don't have any of my friends on HN. Now how do I get a threshold upvotes on my website.
The website is pretty good, and is being lauded. So it's not that the website is bad. If you want to check it is http://www.instamovi.com
The link is the text of an article [1] by Simone Santini that appeared in:
Computer, Volume 38 Issue 12, December 2005

It's a parody piece, although the author declared that "Many of the
sentences that I use in the article are from actual reviews." (quoted
by B. Meyer review in [2])

[1]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1106763
[2]: http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic...
As you know, though, the cost of film and development is hardly worth talking about, particularly in big budget motion pictures. Shooting video, nowadays, is a convenience mostly. The cameras are far more expensive, as is the support equipment, but transmitting completed video and editing is far cleaner.
Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption (video)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3492031

AFAIK computer science 101 is the only one that didn't send email.
Hey Hokie! Thanks for the post.

Pat Matthews actually emailed me this afternoon, which I was honored to be on the receiving end of.

I know of Dr. Perez, and definitely need to reach out.

Boomerang is interesting, and validated our need to go to subscription billing. Thanks for sending along that link.
I too have received this email for a couple of classes that I signed up for, but I have yet to see any other information than this, so the title seems a little premature, at least in phrasing it this tersely, which implies that there is some kind of insurmountable problem, but really there is just no more information.
Notably, "Administrative" is not "technical". It suggests bureaucracy issues.

I'm a bit paranoid that "administrative" issues are that the school lawyers went crazy and are demanding a system of ID validation and micropayments.
Looking forward to seeing what you did and how you have approached the task of producing and scheduling productions.
I don't owe you scala-tools.org
Acta is a worldwide treaty that probably adds to the Bern convention's law nearly ten years ago. It's a global worry, the equivalents of the MPAA are probably lobbying for it in each country.

Pcopa (or the better name I can't find that was proposed in Congress) wants to keep a massive amount of logs, and I'm not sure I understood who would have access to these logs. At the very least the courts could use it to quickly match torrent logs to ISP logs to find a person. The current system is very slow, the ISPs are taking their time (a slow work protest). Impossible to impose due to the name and the first bill that Sopa is attached to.
err 20th century?
Except that, in the US, bribing congress(wo)men is legal.
There's a reason why there are hundreds of out of work writers. Good scripts are hard to write, as is good music. If you think a million monkeys can do better, think again.
You're absolutely correct. Wall Street makes Hollywood look like complete pikers in this respect.
The HCI course website says it's starting on January 30, and I haven't gotten any emails to contradict that.
HCI has also not sent an email, and their website says the class will start on January 30.
I don't think these reviews are real, but similar things have happened. One example: Stephen Cook was denied tenure at Berkeley (before the NP-completeness paper). Another: Svante Arrhenius barely passed his PhD defence (before getting a Nobel prize for the same work).
"In early 1998, Page submitted his first paper, an overview of the PageRank algorithm, to the Special Interest Group on Information Retriviel of the Association for Computing Machinery (SIGIR-ACM). But the paper was rejected. One peer reviewer wrote of the paper, "I found the overall presentation disjointed…. This needs to focus more on the IR issues and less on web analysis."

http://books.google.com/books?id=G4KfbOt7OYcC&lpg=PT81&#...
It doesn't have to be "downvote points", perhaps it's a limit on downvotes per day, perhaps it's a hit on karma (every downvote means a costs x number of karma points, and below a certain karma you can no longer downvote), etc.

There's always going to be a way for determined users to get around the limits, but if it can reduce the number of reflexive downvotes from most users it could still be a net win.
IBooks 2 and the Apple Textbooks
there is a dangerous tendency to say "someone told me my idea is dumb, but lots of smart people have had their ideas ridiculed and later gone on to success".

it's true, many good ideas have been ridiculed by simple minds. however, you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere", and that has (probably) happened far more than the ridicule of world-changing ideas ...

so while it is probably useful to your ego and mental health to respond to negative criticism with "they just don't understand", you should probably be prepared to accept that your idea is just not that good ...
Business-level support, like 24/7 phone service.
Most of these rejection would have happened because there a lot of people who randomly take a decision and then try to justify it backwards with whatever reason they can come up with.

This happens for a lot of reasons eg : Bias, partiality, over confidence in self, under estimating the candidates ability.
Sure, use piracy. We all understand what that means. But I'm not trying to define it out of existence, I'm trying to use the english language effectively. It's plainly not theft. And furthermore theres no such thing as intellectual property. Unfortunately you will never own any of your copyrightable creations. Your will just own a temporary monopoly on their reproduction in certain circumstances.

It's as simple as that. Thinking that you own any creative works is misunderstanding the law and society. Thinking that copying something is theft of it(or indirectly theft of anything else) is a misunderstanding of the same.
Mentor Yourself With Jeanne-Marie Robillard, National Speakers Bureau
I don't think HN works that way. Almost all of my votes are corrective votes.
Kingsley Davis spoke of a "multiphasic response" that each society does to keep its population balanced (it doesn't always work, but it does happen). Right now, Japan and Europe don't feel they are so close to crisis that they are willing to really do what is necessary to increase fertility -- lots of government support for mothers, lots of propaganda, negative sanctions against those people who don't have families. "Traditional" (high mortality high fertility -- "pre-transition" -- societies have always had these pushes in place). Right now there is a little bit of govt support and a little bit of propaganada. But they will when they feel like they are in a crisis (esp Japan -- you watch...), and it may or may not be too late.

Low fertility is a dynamic that nobody has had widespread experience with, so we don't really know what to expect. We also still have plenty of people on the planet, so a population decrease of 50% might actually be a good thing at the bigger scale.

I am surprised at Rand, if it is as simplistic a report as the comments say (sorry, not reading -- I live and breathe this stuff). Demographers should start doing scenario work, besides trend extrapolation, especially at a place that is crawling with military types like Rand.
One tweak to this can be to segregate karma points by category (or sub-reddit). That way, any downvote points that you need will need to be "earned" in the same topic.
Agreed. This reads to me like an attempt by a professor to show that his research being rejected makes him no different from all these other greats in the field. In reality, the vast majority of great papers are acknowledged as such soon after their release.
Piracy isn't like anything, it's copyright infringement. There is no need for an analogy. What takes place is completely obvious.

Using any analogy actually decreases the understanding even for the layman.
Speaking from the startup's side, I feel a lot of startup hate for Paypal comes from these horror stories. But in reality any low cost service will have bad customer support (Gmail customer support anyone?).

Also, take into account the fact that Paypal has millions of users, so even a 1:million horror story rate will explode into thousands, whereas for these new startups, I doubt they even have a million customers.

Yes, their customer support is stubborn, paranoid, and OCD. They might even sneer at you, but learning to work with them may be one of the best paying skills to have if you're processing volume.

Also, I give paypal credit for taking almost everyone under their wings. Half the people using paypal couldn't get a merchant account with any real reputable bank. They have paranoid security because their standards are so low.

And of course on the other side, if you're willing to give up a percent or two for being treated kind and by the "right people" then of course these startups will probably suit your need better.
Don't all startups don't rip off from each other?
That might happen once or twice, but if you are stubborn, you don't give up and keep trying.

Someday you would have run through sufficient iterations of failure/success and internal feedback loops. After some time by the virtue of all this the person will succeed.
The Invisible Mentor interviews provide readers with role models they can learn things from, and be inspired by. The interviewees share the steps they took to achieve professional success, biggest failures, toughest decision, personal formula for success and much more.
Clay Shirky: Why SOPA's Not Going Away
> The biggest problem with Reddit right now is that not enough people downvote weak content

No the biggest problem is that for the majority of reddit users that 'weak content' is actually what they come to reddit for. It's a systemic problem with the community. The comment system works fine.
I'm struck that there are great sites for learning how to code and how to build a small business around software development. Nothing like this exists for the entertainment industry. We have BFAs and MFAs that are roughly equivalent to your terminal degrees. But, as in software, many of our superstars and journeymen emerge from an entrepreneurial path instead of academia.

Most people who learn-by-doing in entertainment do so without a clearly structured path or often even identifiable short-term goals. They meet and impress people, get on a gigs doing (relatively) menial labor and learn as they go. As their career grows, they learn both craft and business: how do what they like and where, with whom and on what they should be doing it.

Sound familiar?

As with software, folks who hit the ground running on their own without much skill or business knowledge generally fail quite a bit before they succeed, even if they are in the top 1% on smarts and ambition.

Sound familiar?

Boards like this one, the various VC blogs and services like Code Academy, StackOverflow and umpteen Rails training sites all help software entrepreneurs focus their early efforts and move through the learning-to-do-it phase of their careers as quickly as possible.

Where is this for entertainment? We need a Code Academy for people who want to tell stories and get paid to do it.

Start with the basics: What is a story? How does it work? How is something funny or sad?

Move to the specific: Write a story to be read. Tell a story to your friends. Tell a story in a video.

Cover the business: Where to tell your stories. What different audiences expect. How much money do people expect to pay.

Get Detailed: Editing, lighting, acting, advanced wordplay, making-sure-every-single-thing-in-frame-is-perfect.

For the startup-makers:
The absurd proliferation of MFA programs in every discipline of entertainment suggests that there is a large market for a service that caters to people who want to learn to entertain people professionally.

And for the user-students:
1. The emerging industry of professional YouTubers suggests that there is a viable marketplace for entrepreneurs with the skill to make small-scale entertainment people want see.
2. The value that smart, well-trained MFAs bring to the "big entertainment" world suggests to those of us on the inside that some training is totally worth it. We would love to see a way for people to come to us a little less green and with a lot less debt.

From an insider's perspective, this would be hugely disruptive.

Disclosures: I work in commercial theater, not in film. I have an MFA.
Yeah, looks like hour-glass clock is not there and a few other minor things... bug all-in-all it's a clone with almost exact color scheme, identical call to action buttons on the actual offer.

Being from Moscow originally (10 years ago), it saddens me that so much creative potential there is being channelled into crappy imitations. Main problem they have is that people with money most often don't get innovation and lack of confidence in "tomorrow" drives people to look for easiest ways to make a few $$$ now instead of creating sustainable and original business models.
Given how inexpensive reasonably-good home theaters have become, how expensive theaters have become, and how one has no control over the theater experience (bad projection, too loud, talking, etc), this is only going to happen more.

I think Hollywood is doomed, even with draconian laws on their side. Good content has been made online, and it's just getting started. I agree with the GP that simplifying and democratizing the funding would help, but so will new film makers realizing good is absolutely not synonymous with expensive (and is often contradictory).
Stop talking about SOPA or killing Hollywood
Plus, the reviewer is right about Codd. ;)
"In many ways, Reddit is a more accessible, less vulgar version of 4Chan, the meme-spewing online redoubt of the Web’s most vicious trolls."

This sort of sums up Reddit for me. 4chan is an example of what some Usenet groups were years ago, a community of like minded individuals debating their world views which are fundamentally similar and who share a common background/mindset. I suspect there is a relationship between the commonality of the participants and the vibrancy of the community.

It has been my experience that when you take a set of self selected folks and give them a wide ranging area to discuss, their discussions about most topics are energetic and self-reenforcing. This makes for a very strong community experience.

I first noticed it hanging out with 'air force' kids (which is to say early in my life everyone I hung out with, their parents, like mine, were serving in the air force). That shared experience, moving from base to base, base housing which was always nearly the same, stores with the same goods, etc, we (the kids) seemed to have remarkably similar views about things. I noticed it again when I went to college, the bulk of the folks who entered engineering were all there for similar reasons and that created a community with a common set of interests and values. For many folks college was the first place they had experienced the 'community effect' that arises when there is a 'kind of people' selection criteria affecting the overall group.

I am glad for the successes of Reddit. Staying vibrant and alive will be a challenge, it is for any community, but they have a good start.
It was arguably only the dreaded "version 4" redesign that caused the failure of Digg. And it wasn't necessarily the look that everyone hated, it was the fact that every single aspect of functionality was completely changed in a way that made it a different type of website. It took the voting-power out of the users' hands and gave it to the "publishers" of the content.
I like Saasy (http://saasy.com/). It's frictionless and supports international merchants but a little pricier than other options.
Steal This Book On publishing business models.
Dave McClure Isn’t Worried About The “Series A Crunch”
And what about political TV programming and editorials? Should those be censored as well?
Why do you hesitate to say it was an Apple policy? The whole HR staff at both companies were involved. The fact that it was personally negotiated by two people at the top has no bearing on the fact that the companies were abiding by it.

These types of whole-company-on-board policies change departments permanently as well. If HR were willing to poach they would have ended up with "specialists" whose entire jobs were to basically "infiltrate" (either literally or externally at social functions) other companies, figure out who to poach and get them. None of those exist at those companies because of this policy.
Reading through that, it shows the writer has no clue how entertainment is created. It looks like he feels it can be manufactured by anyone with a slight interest in the subject. I doubt anyone here, save @Keyframe, has ever been on a set to see the hundreds involved at every skill level to put together a motion picture. Or the large group needed to put together any TV show.

Kill Hollywood? That's like saying kill Silicon Valley. And equally as stupid.
Steps To Successful SEO for Startups [Synopsis + Slides]
In the same spirit (but not the same), one reviewer wrote on a conference paper about PyPy (paraphrased), "this covers some exceptional engineering results, but we wish there was more novel conceptual work". We were very proud of that paper :)
I'll chime here as being in a similar boat as your nephew was.

Nearly 15 years ago I took a job at the local Wal-Mart as a high-school sophomore (15 1/2 was the minimum required age, with restrictions on hours worked), mostly so I could save up enough money to buy my own computer, or enough fairly recent parts to build something respectable. To my parents this was preferable to me hitching a ride with high school seniors in the computer club to go dumpster diving every weekend for 386s in the back of colleges, company headquarters, and landfills. Though to be honest, it yielded quite a respectable stack of working computers.

I used the computer I built from my Wal-Mart money (Pentium 200MHz with 64MB of RAM) to learn how to program, enough about relational databases, and create dynamic websites (we're talking mid-90s here), so in my latter half of high school I was building basic e-commerce sites for larger local companies to save up tuition money to go to a state college and not have to take out loans. And to play games, of course.

-----

Granted, I think most of the kids I worked with mostly spent their money on music, movies and fast food, and didn't show up when they didn't need spending money. Or to hook up with their coworkers (Kim from the shoe department, leave me alone!). I ended up taking care of 1/3rd of the store floor myself, which really ticked them off when I quit.
Bitcoin is the best!
Why I’m fighting SOPA: We need a solution, but a better solution
This sounds like influence peddling I think a prosecutor needs to look into this.
You didn't "say" it but by referring to someone by their karma points you're obviously speaking down to them in a condescending tone.
I have often wondered what HN would look like if comments had only "upvote" and "flag" options.

The "flag" option would have to include a reason ("offensive", "off-topic", "spam")
Where did I say you should 'compel' someone to hire you? All I said (or rather implied) is that if you go to a place advertising employment opportunities, you pass all of their tests/criteria for hire and then they don't hire you because you work for someone with whom they have made one of these secret agreements, that is a dysfunctional market. The fact these agreements were generally secret says a lot about the people making them and the fact that they knew full well it would be viewed very unfavorably by their employees. When you are instituting something you need to 'keep secret' from your employees maybe you should really think hard about the validity of what you are doing.
The battery savings can vary greatly depending on many hardware issues. The Nexus One, for instance, had some serious limitations.

I wrote some Android video software comparing performance of hardware and software decoders for H.264 and AAC. The Nexus One's H.264 hardware decoder used 2x more battery than a software decoder (for much less than 2x frame rate improvement). Further testing suggested that the power usage of moving video data to and from the hardware decoder outweighed any savings from overloading the CPU.

And the Nexus One's AAC hardware decoder was slower than a software decoder.
The dynamic that stopped it is also underreported: with Republicans lining up against the bills, Democrats started seeing the bills as a partisan liability in an election year. I'm most concerned that if anything, the debate has shifted in favor of the pro-SOPA crowd, even if SOPA is dead. Some kind of consensus has emerged that something must be done, even if SOPA and PIPA aren't it. Thing is, that's dangerously false and makes the resurgence of this battle likely.
Similar story about Kalman.
Would the web have thrived if browsers only accepted perfect html?
Ubuntu, Inkscape, LibreOffice, GIMP, Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, Scribus, PHP, MySQL, K3b, Audacity, Phoenix Firestorm (SecondLife/OpenSim Client), Dokuwiki

Also - switching IDEs, was Quanta Plus, but am leaning toward Aptana - which is based on Eclipse