skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Over the last few years noise of many types has become extremely distracting. I won't say debilitating, but it feels like it on occasion (just not perpetually constant).

The one thing I've done is taken to wearing in-ear earbuds and running whitenoise (actually, pinknoise usually) as well as sometimes mixing in sounds of oceans or other water. It's not foolproof - it doesn't merge out all distractions, but it does reduce noise distractions considerably. Whether people in another room or minor road traffic (a killer for me), the earbuds with whitenoise has helped.

Regular music doesn't help much, though I may mix in some classical behind the whitenoise some.

I don't bother with 'noise cancelling' stuff. I get cheap earbuds - I'm just using whitenoise in them(!). I usually pick up 3-5 at a time from biglots for $5 each (or less during their friends and family special days). They don't last forever, but at $5, who cares? I've been far more productive with these over almost any accessory I've ever bought.

Total side note: one of the big benefits of a macbook for me a few years ago - after linux on several laptops - is that there was never any contention between audio programs. Music just plays. Sound effects just play. Concurrently. I don't have to futz with various alsa/pulseaudio crap, or worry that because pidgin is running that skype won't be able to access the sound drivers, etc. Yeah, I'm sure I'm the only one ever who had those problems, and linux "just works" fine for everyone else, or it was my fault for not researching properly all the driver support for the 5 laptops I chose to buy over a few years, and yeah windows would have done this just as well as the mac. There's a few things I miss from linux boxes. Sound issues are not among those things.
What do you mean contextualize it? As in having sub-hn groups?
Hsu seems to maintain a blog on IQ supremacy generally and specifically the iq supremacy of asians. Why is this guy getting mainstream attention?

I mean jesus he broke down the grade distribution of one of his undergraduate classes by race just to demonstrate the superiority of recent Chinese immigrants, lest anybody suspect they are slackers for not getting into a top Chinese university (and having to go to the University of Oregon instead, lol): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/12/human-capital-globaliza...

I'm sure the undergrads paying money to take that class appreciate being guinea pigs in their professor's racial supremacy experiments.
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4 Benefits of Running a Link Audit
For as long as there have been acquisitions (at any scale), there's been anecdotal evidence that innovation quickly dies in the acquired company. One thing to consider is that innovation is not dying because the larger company is killing the acquired product but rather that its dying because the talent is being integrated into the larger company's priorities.
I fail to see the problem with this. Why is it bad to work for a large company?

Do you know how ridiculously difficult it is to prove to an established business that "no, I don't have the specific experience you are looking for, but I can learn it in short order and I'll be one of your best employees," and then stand out from the 100 people behind you who say the exact same thing?

It's also ridiculously difficult for companies to figure out who the talented people actually are.

If you're really talented, what better way to prove it and lose nothing in the process? And what better way for a large company to get good people on board?
Translation: "That's a pile of poo. And I mean that in the nicest possible way."
> By the way, learning vi is probably the most standard compatible thing to do. Vi is a standard Unix tool, has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.

This feels a little bit like the scene in Superbad, where McLovin proposes to be named Muhammed to blend in, since it's the most common name in the world. It may be the most common OS in the world, but it's none too common 'round these parts. Off the top of my head, I can't even name two computers that have vi installed. The first is my work computer on which I installed gvim for another attempt after reading this very article.
I've been to HackerNews meetups around the world and the London meetup is one of the biggest and best in my opinion. With more than 400 attendees a month, they sell out usually too.
Hey thanks! I think I did go through that thread, but didn't follow up with HSI and eventually it faded out. Looks like it is still going strong.
You're correct regarding traction. We haven't done any marketing yet as our new features are pretty raw. Developing though is far easier than building the actual 'community'. In fact, we're looking for a marketer to help us do this very thing.
AltDevConf Schedule
How do you get college costs to go down? You lower the demand. It's simple economics 101.

Ambitious people not going to college has nothing to do with the price of college. They don't need to go at any price point. The price reflects the value that customers (students) put on the education.
One reason that is good enough for me: HN is a bit of an echo chamber. It's maintained by a specific VC with specific opinions, which already was a source of some controversy. While I don't see a problem with the existence of opinionated media, I do think it's healthy if we have alternatives. And being "european" is specifically beneficial, because it brings with itself a somewhat different perspective.

I'd probably use both (unless the other one dies, of course — just because it's useful doesn't mean it will work).
Wouldn't this be more successful if it would be split across countries? Stories about US-focused topics interest me as much (or as little) as stories about European countries where i don't live.

Also, for more people than you might imagine a site thats in English (and not in their local language) could be a barrier.
And besides, buying Facebook stock right now is just plain stupid. It's a low-float IPO designed to make people who already own the stock rich. By floating a low number of shares, people who own the shares create artificial demand

The stock is being sold at nearly 25 times sales...Amazon is selling for about 2 times sales. Seriously? This is just a get-rich scheme for current Facebook shareholders.

Not saying anything is wrong with it. But you should definitely wait to invest until after the pop and the prices slide back to something reasonable.

Also, the OP has no business investing in stock right now. Unless you have 10k to throw around as disposable income, investing should be off the table.

3k is almost starving and homeless territory. Pay off your debt and get a part-time job.
As an EU hacker myself, I'm not exactly crazy about this regional split - it feels unnecessary and artificial somehow. On the other hand, if we're going to have an alternative HN site, it will probably have to differentiate itself in some way.
The most fun I ever had was doing exactly this, piping a stream through ssh, but on the one end was a CD image, on the other end was a cd burner. It is kinda obvious you could also do that because pipes and ssh are ubiquitous on UNIX but I still couldn't stop giggling.
We are planning london.hackful.com etc. Watch this space.
Understanding Twitter
An RSS feed would be great !
Just to clarify a point, IRAs are long-term investing vehicles for retirement savings. They are not meaningless, but they are only useful in the context of 40+ years.

Don't worry about them now because you have no money (and need to pay off that debt), but once you get a steady income and have your debt under control - start investing money into your retirement.

A little money put into an IRA now will make a huge difference 40 years from now.
Arduino the documentary
I can't do without an RSS feed either. Hacker News has the top spot on my iGoogle page and if I can't put Hackful next to it, I'll probably forget about it real soon.
This looks like a service that tries to imitate Hacker News and assumes the same traffic and audience.

Focus on fewer posts on the front page; no more than 20% of the posts on it should have 0 comments, because it just serves to make the site look barren - which it probably is. You don't even have a community yet, so there is no hive mind nor zeitgeist on the site; bringing people together to discuss a few issues will make people get to get and know each other and help build the community.

Make it scalable.
Ian Marriott - Ideas Are Easy (PDF, requires login)
Understanding the tool – Full Hard Drive Encryption
Looks much like Antirez's lamernews.com. What's the stack behind it?
Show HN: Unofficial Hacker News Bulletin Board (links to your HN user account)
I've setup a bulletin board for the HN community that only accepts registrations from HN users. The idea behind it is to allow members of the community to have open discussions with each other that would otherwise be regarded as off topic.

Any and all feedback welcome.

http://hnbb.org
The anti-competitive agreements pose a restriction on HR departments and there for the markets which force companies to look at startups for talent.

In order to get such talent companies must offer large payouts to founders since the next source for talent is a highly fragmented group and there for hard to target.
I'm going to be adversarial and say that no one needs to spend $10k in books and $20k in training to learn programming or tech-related skills. There is plenty of material on the internet to get you rolling without a dime invested.

If you own a laptop and can use your schools internet - start learning.

And stop spending your money. Go freeze your credit card in a block of ice or something.
Show HN: Selling a web app, Auto Swatch
Unfortunately, I have a failed startup that needs to pay off some of its debts. Myself and a few others have over a combined 300 hours of work into this project. I'm hesitant to put this on Flippa or eBay or whatever; I just don't think that crowd will appreciate it. I'm looking for suggestions on where to try and sell it (other than HN).

The site is Auto Swatch: http://swatch.nick.sg (this is just a demo site for the purpose of selling it. Actual domain is http://autoswatch.com). Discussion of the launch on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466545

Obviously this is a depressing outcome. The project IMO still has a ton of potential, but I don't have the resources or time to make it successful. I've grown tired of the idea of investors, shlepping myself out just to get some PR, etc. The business side of things sucks. I hope someone can take over and go up against the big guys like Edmunds, Cars.com, etc. New-car research online still needs help.

The project also includes an entire dealership inventory management system that pushes to Cars.com, etc. Just this mini-project alone has a ton of work into it: http://cl.ly/311e1B132N3S3l3E2P08

Email's in profile, if interested.
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Patriots quarterback Tom Brady backpedals after remark about Buffalo hotel
U.S. State Science Standards Are "Mediocre to Awful"
Haha. Good (and bad) to know.
This whole subject is so subjective. I once had the same views as the author, i.e. read a lot, use your time to be as productive as possible. Now I take a much different view. For example I would advocate not "diving into a book world" while commuting but instead be aware of other people, watch them, listen to their talks and try to understand their situations. The same with his 100 pages a day: I think this is also very much arguable. For most mainstream books it seems smarter to just read the summaries, for more demanding literature rushing through them makes only sense if the mission is to "hunt" some specific information down. Reading less but thinking more(critical) about it makes in my option much more sense.
AMD sets out its plans for 2013, hints at a possible ARM future
>then everyone will leave

I don't know. Massive UI changes, a growing creepiness factor and privacy scandals may have caused a tiny number of people, myself included, to leave but I think you underestimate people's ability to suffer through things. To prompt a mass exodus the inconvenience and annoyance caused by ads would have to outweight the huge benefit of social connectivity with a large number of people. There would have to be a better alternative (G+ ?) and an easy way to migrate without losing all your contacts before most users would even consider leaving imho.
I don't see him mentioning CPU caches anywhere.

The point is that a cache, even if it is a fat cache, will remove files eventually. Files the user may be expecting to find.
Clickable: http://hnbb.org
Google fined £415,000 for making Google Maps free
Do These Documents Show That The CIA Was Involved in the Assassination?
I can chime in as I just purchased ViEmu. It's really wonderful to have all the Vim bindings present in studio (and the rest of Office!). I haven't noticed any speed issues and I haven't noticed bugs (yet), but I've only been using now daily for two weeks and I haven't installed any plugins for it.
Agreed - more of a marketing ploy to catch the attention of their target demographic (people who use JSON).
Crunchbase has a section on acquisitions. Never used it personally though.

http://www.crunchbase.com/acquisitions?page=1
>However, if my other half comes home and starts having a phone conversation–at a significantly lower volume in another room–the muffled voice really distracts me.

I find hearing a muffled conversation is actually worse than hearing a plain conversation. My pet theory is that either way, the brain has to commit some resources to parse the voice into actual concepts, but if the conversation is muffled it has to do even more work to 'clean the signal'. Using resources that are taken from your concentration ability.

You can consciously try to ignore the voice as much as you want, your subconscious still have to parse it. At least i've never been able to avoid it. I think that thats why white noise or music does not affect concentration nearly as much as a conversation of the same Db-level.
Am I the only one scratching my head over this one? Fined for giving something away, really?
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Pentru a fi mereu cu un pas înainte, veţi avea nevoie de un pic de ajutor din magazin spion.
Ask HN: The state of non-mac laptops?
I am considering a new laptop, to replace my ageing MacBook, and would like to move to Linux.

Does anyone have any recommendations for quality developer machines? I am suprised in particular it seems hard to get a machine with a small (up to 64GB?) SSD and also tradition HD. I would like an SSD, but can't imagine living in 128GB of space (which seems where SSDs start to get unreasonably priced).
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The article is full of useful observations. The one issue I have is that presenting us with the worst possible management scenario for a new developer and using that to build a separate argument about the misuse of resources before that developer was hired is a little convoluted and even fallacious. The section about hiring and mismanaging the new developer can be removed and restructured as a separate article on the best/worst use cases for new developers.
This is the first time I've seen "The Goal" referenced in relation to software development. I'm surprised I haven't seen it brought up before. I read it as required reading when part of a software project team back in 1999 and it still seems so relevant to this day.
Article's first page ends with a quote from her father: "What I say to Laura is 'The biggest problem you have so far, kid, is you haven't failed yet.'"

I'm not sure if the author is intending to create a sense of dramatic irony here, or it's purely accidental, but it does suggest a reading of Peter Thiel gives 17 year old $100k so she can fail.

Which in a sense isn't too far from the truth. She's not too young to fail, she's just too young to have failed yet.

Hoping this comment isn't misconstrued, as I'm just musing about the article itself. I wish Laura (and all the participants in Peter's program) the best of luck!
Tucows launches Ting, a contract-free mobile service on Sprint's network
And Reddit was created in 2005.

And Digg was created in 2004.

And Slashdot was created in 1997.

And Usenet was created in 1980.

And BBS was created in ... I don't quite know. Some time in the 70s?

Establishing who came first is kind of missing the point. Mashable makes the mistake of assuming that because something looks similar, it is a "rip-off".

The content is what makes a discussion site, not the layout or the software. HN can't be a "rip-off" of Reddit, because they were established for completely separate reasons.
I suppose Occam's Razor was invented by the establishment in a scheme to prevent us from thinking.
tldr: rtfm!

(maybe read about the core principles of unix first. the links suggested by other commentators look good.)

learn how the documentation provided with your linux install is organized: man, info, apropos, whatis. the more comfortable you get with the built-in documentation, the more you'll find that most of your questions will be answered there. it takes a while to get used to it though. understanding the structure of the docs helps a lot with where to start reading. (did you know that the man page browser has a built-in string search?)

next step: dig into online documentation resources. start with the material curated by the distro project of your choice. don't forget wikipedia, some of their free software articles are nicely structured, concise and very well interconnected. you'll find plenty of useful links there, too.

third step: learn how to get the questions you can't answer yourself solved quickly by the community. "how to ask questions the smart way" by esr comes into mind. the way you asked your question here suggests that you might have read that already. anyway: for almost every question there are the right persons to ask and the right way to do so. mailing lists are good, but may not be fast enough. on the other hand, irc culture is a little rough sometimes, not everybody is a catalyst on freenode. look that up, there's a nice article about how to communicate on irc. if you know how to ask in which channel, irc is a fast resource.

when you get used to the culture of documentation and community, the gap between user and developer gets really small.

linux is transparent. learn how this transparency is organized and communicated.

that might sound easy, but it _is_ the hard way.

if you like the experience, consider writing on the web about your very own way of learning linux. or put some time into improving the resources you were using. that's a fun way to say thank you. :-)

have fun!

.~.
I don't think the founding fathers would have allowed the government to use "civil" laws lower standards at any point in time. But, our current systems has a lot of terrible precedent IMO. Which has enabled a huge end run around the constitution to continue with just a wink and a nod.
Show us the redesign vs original design. The best way to tell if a design is "better" than the original is to put both version in front of brand new users who haven't developed usability habits yet.

Sometimes when you make an app the first time, it's badly designed but people get used to the bad design. Then when you improve it they have to relearn everything and that's why they're pissed off.

Another thing you can do is "incremental design". Change things little by little over time.
We are trying - we have a core user base that have kept in communication with an email list called Open Coffee (powered by Meetup.com)

That is where the idea came up - we needed a more open method to ask questions of each other, share info and demos
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The one thing that should really be taken into consideration is username consistency across both sites, that will help.
(And I can't have the same user name because the evil "-" is not allowed. Do something about it.)
https://twitter.com/#!/BrentALang

Send him a message and let him know.
Same here. In order to make a geo based community there better be good reasons for that. All the abandoned Social Networks in Europe that had a localized positioning are still witnesses of this development.
At my place of employment, I seem to be the odd man out. On any given day, there are 5 to 10 people programming at our desk. All of them seem to be able to focus deeply. I, on the other hand, have immense trouble with distractions such as TV. Why would TV be a distraction at work? Oh, there are 5 large screen TVs within my field of vision. Often the sound from different TVs is slightly out of sync so I can't ignore it, no matter how hard I try.

I end up using ear-plugs and try to raise my monitors to keep moving pictures away from my eyes. The joys of working on a trading desk!
Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook
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+1: I really like the fact that you took the seemingly marginal detail of the mass constant and run with it.
At first I didn't liked the idea, but it could work as a way to filter out US centric posts and focus more on Europe.

I think it needs some guidelines: is English the preferred language? If this is limited to Europe, is it ok to have posts related to other parts of the world?
Q&A: Managing Folders in the Safari Bookmarks Bar
I use it and like it. I like the way that it gets out of your way when using applications. I'm still getting used to some of the configuration aspects, but I don't spend that much time tinkering with setup, so all told it's a solid win for me.
If you're not familiar Frederick Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month [1], it's a great read.

In it, he postulates Brook's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Surprisingly how long we've known this (1975), yet we constantly need to be reminded of it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Honestly, that level of cash is insignificant in terms of earning money.

Focus on the skills you have that help you earn money. I don't know whether you have a job or a business, but you'll get much more by investing there. For example, if you work as a programmer, you can probably get a $10k salary bump by learning how to negotiate.
I wrote the post! Check it out:

http://dalethoughts.com/2012/02/6-tips-for-introverted-trave...
A more appropriate solution, I would think, is regional filtering here on HN. Label submissions with the relevant region, if any, and add one more tab which filters results by region according to a black/white list in your profile.

Maybe hackful will show us that such a feature would be heavily used.