skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using LaTeX for years to write academic papers. Only recently have some conferences started moving to Word. This has made simultaneous editing a pain.

I've recently started exploring what it would mean to use the experimental CSS multi-column support in Webkit and Gecko to recreate the CHI template. I've had some good luck. Although, it would make life a lot easier if they supported column-span.
The same thing that is there if you ask a bunch of computer science students whether or not they like computers. Sure, the result is statistically significant; it just doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know. The categories of the MBTI are sufficiently broad and vague that having an atypical distribution of results on HN doesn't actually tell us anything about ourselves that wasn't inherently obvious.
I don't use LaTeX directly but I have used Scrivener's LaTeX/XSLT output template scheme and MacTeX with mixed success for some technical documentation.

I say "mixed success" because getting the overall document structure setup the way I wanted very error-prone. Some simple things like generating a table of contents required me to drop down into low level details. I eventually got it to do what I needed to do but for the amount of documentation I ended up writing I'm not sure it was worth the effort.

Scrivener - http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

MacTeX - http://www.tug.org/mactex/
Hi. Yes this is my first comment. Shoot me down.

Do you, in all seriousness, refer to global average mean temperature rises that will invariably result in severe climate instability, innocuously as "global warming"?

Secondly, do you seriously believe that an idealistic exponential growth in computing power will lead to the 'technological singularity' in some sort of vaccuum? You're having a laugh.

Oh, did I say hi?
Probably the unnecessary "lol"
Let me make it on topic again:
http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/65ab4fb270a706dd85d0cb64b...

The combination of this food and first read of H&P makes for a good Sunday.
Am I the only one who thinks ligatures and small caps are practically worthless?

In fact, I think they both hurt readability. The few cases where ligatures help, such as "f)" or "To", are better served by kerning pairs (which both Word and Writer supports).

Word and Writer have spent their development effort on things that users care about: being reasonably easy to use. And almost all of the font research of recent years has gone into screen and print readability, not style.
politics can only corrupt science, never help it.
My preference is a bit biased since most of the documents I type up are mathematical in nature, but LaTeX wins hands down.

Yes, the learning curve is much steeper than Word for LaTeX, but doesn't everything worth knowing involve an initial period of head smacking?
That student was (supposedly) Max Planck that went on to solve Black Body radiation and help give birth to Quantum Mechanics.

In the same vein... There is also a book by Stephen Hawking called "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics: An Inaugural Lecture" from 1980... http://www.amazon.com/End-Sight-Theoretical-Physics-Inaugura...
Rails Tips for Designers, Part 1
<del>Looks like they fixed it -- good.</del> Exposing your web service code is a huge security issue; at least they were prompt about fixing it (says "Service Unavailable" now rather than serving PHP files)

Edit: Apparently not.
That's the Forer effect, a very well replicated result in psychology,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

and a very good reason not to believe Myers-Briggs type results, which have never been carefully validated.
I'm more disappointed to see "10 Totally Stupid Online Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich" on the front page than broken windows or a meteor. Being on-topic doesn't make up for bad content.
It's actually currently my favorite font. It looks awful if you stick to size-twelve nothing-special all-black formatting, but you can make it look gorgeous on a web page and keep it readable. And on print it's absolutely top-rate: used well I actually prefer it to Garamond.

And, for the record: it's better than original Times in a lot of ways. I don't think it handles numbers or the @ sign as well, but the actual characters are much more balanced.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I work in the center of town, where there is a large library, and we also have one local to where I live.

I'm not sure what the state and number of libraries is like in other countries, but here in the UK they are very well stocked and quite numerous.
Minor correction - I think you meant to write "zwanzig".
Not at all. I've heard that comment plenty.

My take on it:

* Social News sites are much better than forums for specific topics. How many forums are there?

* I'm planning on avoiding the geek news demographic and aiming at other markets: financial news, real estate news, gadgets, crafting (Did you know that crafting is a 30 Billion dollar a year industry in the US? ), non-English sites, etc...

* There's a reason that gaming Digg's front page is a big money business. Votes on Digg sell for $1-2 a piece, and it costs $2-500 to get on the front page, or at least it did last year when I looked into it. That tells me that traffic suppliers are in demand.

* If you're outside of the Tech News echo chamber no one has heard of sites like Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, etc... It's a meme that hasn't taken off with the general public yet, even though nerds are bored to death with it. I think there's still a lot of room to grow.
I've written a lot, but none I'd characterize as funny or amazing. I've enjoyed most writing the wrapper classes for embedding Python in Counter-Strike: Source, but there's nothing amazing there.

If you want to cut your teeth on some fun little challenges, you might try codegolf:
http://codegolf.com/competition/browse
"Why do so many people rent movies from Blockbuster instead of checking them out from the library?"

No doubt because the stock they hold is woefully out of date and even then they don't carry the blockbusters. Library budgets just don't stretch to holding the same stock that Blockbuster can afford.
TIGdb - The Indie Game Database
Cricism of the Singularity (webcomic)
This is why I love HN. There's always certain niche industries and companies hiring even in a recession.
Well certainly that's because politicians are not scientists. Assuming we had infinite money and resources, scientists would not need to request grants from institutions.

In a perfect world, we would have no need for politicians because all desires would be maintained and there would be no competition over resources. A politician's job is to serve the greatest vocal majority, or the welfare of the people as a whole (if the majority is not acting in their own best interest).

However, science is squashed by these vocal majorities, as well as by politicians who don't understand the importance of the undergoing scientific research. I believe that it is ignorance which is the greatest enemy of science, not politics.

It's a shame that we have to resort to pandering in order to receive funding.
what if some arbitrarily high (and moving) karma limit is set, above which you can downvote stories?

that way the biggest contributors of thoughtful comments are the ones doing the policing. hell you could just make it the leaderboard.
"... How do you feel about making HN invite only? ..."

Group think at it's worst.

I like to think there is a place like this for those who need somewhere to think out loud. Where participation is devoid of clique's, popularity is not a requirement and intelligence is the true barrier to invitation.
I would just hide (not remove) karma entirely. Submissions, comments, and users. That removes the incentive to game for karma and mitigates against the bandwagon effect, while the karma system still determines placement of submissions and comments within their respective threads. And I'd argue that high placement is reward enough in itself to promote meaningful contributions. Obviously, people can still try to game for placement, but it's less interesting when it doesn't contribute to an overall user score.

Anything having to do with a leader board, in contrast, simply encourages people to game for karma.
I think you're underestimating the limitations of LaTeX. There is more to its functionality than small caps and ligatures. While that may be the topic of this article (which does a fantastic job at weighing the pros and cons of each typesetter/processor), that still does not detract from the vast capability of LaTeX's ability to process equations, particular formats, tables, etc.
> The longer we delay the reach the better, so I vote for invite-only YC. MHO.

Well technically YC is invite-only already. You need to apply and go through an interview process.

I'm being slightly facetious, but there is a broader point in that - Part of the reason for HN was to build a community and to let YC get a feel for the people it takes into the programme.

Making HN invite-only would create a limited gene pool of startup talent - And whilst it's just my own conjecture, I suspect it would stagnate (not in terms of the individuals, but in the diversity of the ideas/topics/beliefs).

Part of the excitement of the startup area is getting something from left-field - someone in their garage building something nobody expected. Invite-only seems to go against that ethos.
incongruence and the taboo make up the majority of humor. now and forever (or at least until humanity significantly modifies itself neurologically).
Pinyin.info is largely devoted to an anti-character crusade that doesn't represent mainstream academic thought. Mark, if you're reading this, I don't mean any disrespect to the work you've put into making the resource it is. I've sent many people there for the rules on pinyin punctuation and spacing.

DeFrancis was the undisputed pre-eminent sinologist of his time, however many of the literacy claims are unfounded. The truth of it is, China is a huge country, full of people speaking dozens of different languages and the Chinese writing system has helped its cohesion.

As a 6-year resident of Taiwan, I feel I have some capacity to comment on this. Here we use traditional characters, which are more complex than those currently in use in China, and despite not being as economically developed as the US, Taiwan has a higher literacy rate. Japan does, too. For that matter, China's literacy rate is higher than other countries with similar levels of economic development, such as Brazil.

Using characters entails some disadvantages, but also allows for some benefits, such as increased reading speed and clearer differentiation of homonyms.

FYI Moser has long since conquered his difficulties and become a literate Chinese reader.
There doesn't seem to be a giant off switch that can wipe out global warming.

There is. All you have to do is bury trees in giant holes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080513101652.ht...

I thought of this, did 15 seconds of research to see if any studies had been done, and it's pretty clear that, not only is it practical, it would be fairly cheap. Doesn't matter. The whole point of "global warming" is the same as every other leftist movement, control over the economy.
The reality is, that even with computers 100 times more powerful than we have now, the problem remains: we don't have the ability to accurately come up with a working mathematical model of "how it works" - much less run that model through a computer.
Jazz Scheme
Good point. With that in mind, I think the ability to downvote articles should be an earned privilege based on a period of high-quality content submission.
My approach is to tell only startup founders about HN. You will be surprised that many founders do not know about HN at all. But, it becomes less and less now.

And, my approach to meet smart people is to check out how many karma points those people have in HN.
I've always preferred articles that focus on what someone did rather than what someone would do.

It's so hard to stick to a plan like this once you get going; too many external factors you can't control.
Amazon Web Services Hosted Public Data Sets
Exposing your code isn't a security issue if your code is written properly in the first place. You shouldn't be putting any private keys into your code.
Short films - how they were edited, narrated, and put to music.
Fantastic link. I'm a New Yorker, I find the city's history fascinating, and I loved the documentary "Helvetica."

If you have the slightest interest in design or typography, go check out "Helvetica." I never realized how common Helvetica really is -- like one of the designers says, it's like air. Plus, the movie has a great soundtrack by El Ten Eleven.
That's because Facebook is burning through cash they don't have. Unless they continue to grow they are going to be in hot water, fast.

Sometimes the Facebook valuations make me think of that Southpark episode where Butters' gay dance earns him 10 million theoretical dollars.

When Facebook show a real consistent monitization stream then I'll be more interested in stories like this.
This is an interesting concept. I'm curious how much of it is offset by the large earth movers required for biomass burial.

Also, the land required to plant AND bury all the biomass towards this end would have to be roughly the size of North America. Albeit creative, this does not seem like the definitive solution to global warming unless you have some serious political muscle.
Funny you mention spam as I started researching automatic spam detection. What I have so far is this list of publicly available spam and malware lists:

1. SpamCop.net's IP address checks:
http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/351.html
2. PhishTank: http://www.phishtank.com/api_documentation.php
3. MalwarePatrol: http://www.malware.com.br/lists.shtml
4. Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/
5. Google Safe Browsing: (
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=URL )

They all have services (APIs) or downloads you can tap into, and I'm starting to put together a plan for a PHP library to check all of them. I'm looking to open source this when it's ready (not sure when yet as it's early days yet), but I'm happy to share earlier if you want. Drop me a line at http://ekstreme.com/contact .

And good luck :)
Pierre
It's not as if we're just asking people if they like computers, and parroting it back. The MBTI was published in 1962. Barely anyone had access to computers then.

I don't know how you'd measure this, but the profiles, to me, certainly aren't broad and vague. They make very specific and very falsifiable claims about personality, and all out of a mere 4 bits of information. The first time I read my profile (ENFP) it was like a bolt of lightning shot through me. It had me to a 'T.' My parents couldn't describe me so well. And my experience is far from atypical.

There are a bunch of other major statistical discoveries about the different groups. For example, INTP's have the lowest level of emotional coping resources, while their cousins, the ENTP's, have the highest! INTJ's have the highest college GPA's, while the adjacent INTP's have much lower, scoring far below what their aptitude tests would indicate. There is a lot of real information in those few bits!

Sources:
J. Shelton, in MBTI Applications by A.L. Hammer, 1996.
More at:
http://www.ransdellassociates.com/INTJ.htm
That's a good metric, actually. Base it on only submissions or something similar, so that the people with influence are the ones who are active doing things like that? Might be tricky to code, but I like the idea.
Ditto. Especially if become capable of using TeX-editing software like Ultra-TeX in Emacs or Vim-LaTeX, with their auto-completion features, you'll be able to write properly typeset text documents in a fraction of the time it takes to write and format them in a WYSIWYG word processor.

Also, it is much easier to combine content from many different TeX files than from Word/OO files, which makes it much easier to do things like compile lecture notes for a class or discussions notes for a project.

I view learning TeX as something like learning how to use vi or emacs. It's difficult, often painful, and hard to see the benefits in the beginning compared to †he big office suites you're used to, but once you get past the initial learning curve, you become remarkably more productive.
Why CouchDB Sucks
This is kind of ironic coming from a user who almost exclusively submits stories from TechCrunch and Mark Cuban. Oh, I see a Photo Bucket submission in there too. Sheesh...
There is no question that the MBTI as a whole does not hold up to scientific testing, but individual pieces of it do work. For example, the (E/I) portion of the type indicator is supported by empirical psych studies. Also, just about everyone on Hacker News is an NT, which surely must mean something. (Regardless of what the site you submitted says.)
Ask HN: Web Frameworks for Perl
Have any of you Perl programmers out there used Catalyst as a framework? What do you like and dislike about it? Any other frameworks you would recommend?

Most of the Perl programming I've done has just been gluing together modules like CGI and DBI on my own. I've thought about using a formal framework, and Catalyst seems to be the Perl framework of choice.
The efficiency of this machine is make-or-break; if it becomes feasable to use in an arid environment, and it's also cheap to produce, this could be world-changing. My intuition, on the other hand, tells me that this is a long time away from becoming ubiquitous, if it ever does. For one, it uses electricity, and environments which are able to support an electrical system usually can also support plumbing. Though it could make for an interesting addition to an environmentally-friendly home.
Lucky for them it is just a recaptcha account. I wonder why the PHP was not interpreted though? It is wrapped properly?
Yes, if enough do.
Sing this out loud in a low voice...awesome.
slashdot has a neat karma system for evaluating, and thus altering visibility of, comments. If a user is active for at least some period of time, and that activity is not overzealous nor too infrequent, he or she is added to a lottery. Winners in this daily lottery are given karma points to spend on evaluating comments. There are many variables that one could tweak differently depending on the news site's situation.

I like the general concept for it's egalitarian giving of power.

New users still get that happy feeling from their comments getting 'up voted' (on slashdot comments are rated not voted for, but I see no reason why different schemes couldn't work in this context). On a site that's just starting out the win-the-lottery constraints are pretty lax, or at least everyone who follows the rules get karma points to hand out. Or maybe simply registering gives one karma points. I think it's important to encourage users to partake in many roles--low barrier to entry for good intentions; stay inclusive while still providing meaningful content.

Their system could be used for submissions, too, not just comments.
That really depends on experience. I remember when I started out with latex that it would take me hours to do the simplest of things but now, I take notes in it in class on the fly and I can handle all the formatting immediately. Also, using latex with an inferior editor will make life excruciating. I would advise emacs with latex-mode (and in my case, several hundred lines of customizations) but vim is also a good choice. If however, you try latex with crap like notepad, nano, pico, or gedit... well, you are asking for hell and you will get it.
Another good move by Amazon.

Most of what I do involves working with small to large datasets. Usually, the challenge is collecting the data & getting it into a structured form. Having this openly available seriously lowers the barrier to analysis.
I'd rather talk about details by email. pg at this site.
His points are fair, but it should be titled What CouchDB Sucks at Doing, because it is far from sucking, and he concedes that.
TextMate has a very nice LaTeX bundle that I use.
In all conscience, mynameishere, you really believe that that 'point' of "global warming" is a leftist conspiracy to gain control over the economy?

It's impossible for me to dissuade you of your logical fallacy in the confines of this text entry box, but allow me to extend the same promise I made to a rabid Ron Paul supporter who was convinced Ron was going to win the 2008 US election a year and a half ago, I'll be back to say 'I told you so'.

However, I'll get no satisfaction in rubbing your nose in the error of your comment by saying "I told you so" when climate change is seriously fucking shit up.

Rather, I'll feel the same disappointment I feel now. You just can't inject perspective into people via a couple of lines of forum comment.
"We're in this game not just for five or 10 years," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. "We're in it for 20 to 30 years."

That makes you sound like an idiot when your CEO says he won't have a business plan for some years.
blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism

Industry in communist countries tended to be a lot more polluting, actually.
Second Life bank crash foretold financial crisis
Possibly (amongst people who know typography). Ligatures and similar devices remove visual clutter and make a document more readable, and small-caps are just another style of font to be used when appropriate. And Word is hellish to use when formatting a document. So many times I've been editing a proposal in Word and wished that I even could have the kind of easy control I get with CSS (and CSS is pretty basic in that support).
Is there any way to have it display the rendered page as-you-type? That would make taking notes much easier, since you could see the equations or such that you were writing as your wrote them.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience with LaTeX, and I'm not yet in college so I can't take notes using a laptop... I'm just being curious here.)
I don't use Perl but one of my favorite sites (jisho.org) use Catalyst.
Taking pitch correction to the limit
Hah...

"I realize it's Sunday evening, and news is a little slow..."
The Reference Frame: Why can anything ever fall into a black hole?
The data that can be obtained from this is really cool. For example, "Various US Census Databases provided by The US Census Bureau" for 1980 available now and 1990 and 2000 coming soon. Definitely can be used for many useful purposes.

Open government APIs (or at least data) is here sooner than I expected.
The SantaMail is in the funny one to me. In Canada, if you mail a letter to Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0H0 then Canada Post employee volunteers send you a response in the guise of Santa. And the only cost to you is stationary and a stamp.
Yeah, I don't use much Perl, but the only not-legacy framework I ever hear about for Perl is Catalyst (http://www.catalystframework.org/)
The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)
I think that pretty much holds true for any forum with activist admins. Problem is, it's not scalable, it's not even sustainable. It's a lot of hard work, it's hard to pass on "in the same spirit", and the larger the admin group, the more unreceptive to change it is.

Also, on HN there's a distinct "we" feeling - my (limited) experience is that admin-dominated forums are more focused on class (ie. looking up, even sucking up, to mods).
Haven't these guys heard of software? I thought the only good reason to do something in hardware was speed, but maybe I'm just crazy.
Feature requests here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

If you really need something important. Admin emails are @ycombinator.com. pg is one.