skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did really simple analysis in an AI class with several thousand posts of a forum I post frequently at, tagged "me" and "not me" (I figured that way it would be minimally invasive to people not participating -- plus, hey, easy naive Bayesian). Got fairly decent results with pretty trivial sample inputs. Numbers elude me, it has been years.

Everyone thinks "Aha, you have some catchphrases" (I do) or "Aha, you were one of the only Republicans and thus someone saying 'death tax' was more likely you" (true) or "You cited nationalreview.com more than the rest of the forum together" (true), but it turns out the distribution of really stupid stuff (stopwords, essentially) works better.

This is ironically the same they've discovered for making female/male authorship decisions, although I never went the next step and said "So what relationship does my distribution have with the average guy distribution?"

Incidentally, here's the reason you'll never have to worry about this in the context of "Google the Internet for everything Patrick McKenzie has ever written": imagine I have a 99.9% effective filter for you, and I dragnet an Internet filled with 5 billion documents of which you've written 1,000. I then identify 5 million documents as written by you... but you only wrote 1,000 of them.

This sort of "don't search the haystack unless you're bloody sure it is packed full of needles" thing is why you never want to test a population not known to be at risk for the disease, etc. (Or why you retest in the event of a positive using a different test.)
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Actually only the two interior offices have that layout. All the other offices have the desk facing a real wall with another behind it, and glass on the left and right.

Oh and the same room from another angle looks much less like a prison:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...
To be honest, I got lost with the concept of dragging text as a productivity tool. Why don't you stick with copy and paste for a while (combined with the convenient window switching keyboard short cut), and see if you end up taking the quotes away from "improvement".
TechMeme: Tech news for everyone?
Looks like paper mache made out of $100 bills, formed into a curvy box, and then painted with pure silver sprinkled with crushed black diamonds to darken it a bit and then laser etched inside of the Macbook factory to make it lose it's luster.
Sarah palin's kids names
In the most successful platforms in the past, the spread among schmoes has been driven by the applications. E.g. the Apple II by Visicalc.
I know it's human to turn these issues into stories, but:

One partner has been laid off, the other fears the same.

This implies an unemployment rate that is, at a minimum, twice that of the Great Depression at its worst. If we hit 10% unemployment, we're still at 90% employment -- the majority of us will have jobs (that don't pay as well as we'd hoped, that don't move along as fast as we'd like).
RSS in 2008 and beyond
Anyone with a pessimistic view of the world should watch this TED talk by Steven Pinker: it's possibly the best TED talk I've ever watched. It completely demolishes the notion that the world is getting worse with a barrage of statistics that will blow your mind. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth...
Espresso Public Beta Released - Textmate finally gets some competition
Don't forget that Gmail deletes accounts which aren't logged into every so often, or at least they used to.
And maybe aliens will invade and enslave us all. That sounds about as likely as anything else he's saying.

I can't stand things like this. Instead of analyzing potential problems, looking for solutions, and encouraging people to work toward them, why do people proceed to assume the absolute worst case scenario for everything simultaneously and then sit back and say "it's so bad that there's nothing we can do to stop it"?

I hate it. It does nothing but depress you and make things worse, instead of making anything better.
Social Psychology of Twitter Groups and Social Networking
I've always wanted to play the bassoon but it seemed too expensive an instrument to purchase so until last year I had not played a single note. That really bugged me until finally I accepted that I didn't need to buy one, I could just rent from the local music store. It's a puzzle of an instrument - your thumbs control ~12 keys - but half the fun was figuring some of those nuances out by trial and error.
Seriously? This is front page news?
It's true. Unless you carry a camera around constantly you're going to miss almost all those unpredictable moments. I completely agree about not needing to document everything - plus documenting things misses the spontaneity of it all - and unless you're some kind of world class photographer/videographer you're going to lose most of the emotion and humanity of those moments.

So why do I still obsessively document events?
Simply an aide-mémoire - because my mémoire is awful.
Student loans turn into crushing burden for unwary borrowers
I had hoped that once "t3h 3v1l Rethuglican" was [headed] out of office, the media might find time for good news. So far, not so much. I think the media is Democrat-biased (well, based on surveys "think" isn't really the right word), but that bias is now dwarfed by their need to generate sturm und drang to keep the eyeballs on them.

In addition, how much of this pessimism is real, and how much is caused by the fact that the people setting the agenda, the media, are all seeing their careers go down the tubes since long before Sept of this year, and with no real prospect of seeing any great benefit from a economic recovery even were it to happen magically tomorrow? Tough question. Their foul mood and their need to keep our attention is certainly a recipe for them to see the worst in everything.
There's no date on this article and I remember bookmarking it long ago. When was it written?
Yes, that's correct. I need to be more precise.
Yeah, that talk is excellent. For a double dose of optimism about the human race, follow it up with the Hans Rosling TED talks. First he shows you some visualizations of economic data to convince you that we're not hopelessly fucked, then he swallows a sword. I love that guy.
As a result of World War I, the governments of the world printed far more money than they had backed in gold. Eventually, people realized that the government did not have enough gold to redeem all the paper currency. People rushed to the bank to withdraw so they could get their money out first. At this point, the government had to either devalue the currency or leave the gold standard. Sticking to the gold standard at the previous valuation was a recipe for ruin. Most countries chose to leave the standard altogether. But they could have simply devalued, learned their lesson about diluting, and returned to a gold standard.

The lesson the Keynesians took from this episode was not to go on a gold standard in the first place. The lesson the Austrians took was that government should not dilute the currency. Since all government's prefer to dilute the currency, and most "mainstream economists" are government funded, mainstream economists are almost all Keynesian, not Austrian.

The best two articles I've read in defense of gold are these two:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/who-hec... and http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/02/return-...
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Why depressing?

One of the hidden pleasures I've discovered about learning new things is that it instils a much finer appreciation of the thing that you are learning. For me that alone is usually more than worth the effort of learning.

Also I've learned not to push too hard and to focus on the journey rather than the goal, but that's also something I've also had to work extremely hard at.
I guess it would be possible to fool any such system if you know your message might be subjected to this type of analysis?
This just in: Paul Buchheit makes a bathroom visit. More details to come.
Looks good for web development, but I'm not always doing web development. I like one editor for everything…
RjDj Continues To Be The Most Trippy App On The iPhone (And I Love It)
I think it's likely, but it will need a lot of work to build software to hide your traces. Note the caveats, however: most ordinary people will not have the foreknowledge to find and use such a tool. Second, think of all the compromising posts -- rants about employers, accounts from cheating spouses, political dissent, etc. -- that have already been written. The day will come when some kid will download a script, let a crawler loose on the web, and post the de-anonymized results for all to see. There will be interesting consequences.
Well it was nice knowing y'all. I'll be in my underground bunker until all this blows over...
As the submitter, I feel an obligation to defend it. I thought the dissection (however brief) of blogging vs. microblogging and what he thinks each is best suited for was interesting. Since he's the founder of a microblogging service, he would be in a position to provide an insightful viewpoint.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
I wish paul would go back to writing again about lisp and computer science, hate this essays all about business...
Actually he gets the "engineering" thing right.

I'm a chemical engineer (MS) and after 17 years on the job I ultimately came to the conclusion that earning a degree in engineering is the functional equivalent of buying your way into slavery. Didn't meet any practicing engineers who disagreed with the analysis either.

Whenever I meet a bright young teenager who expresses an interest in entering the profession I do everything in my power to talk him or her out of it.
I was curious about the no passwords feature so I started a page. I logged out, and then tried to create a page with the same family name. Wow- still valid. "username" isn't a limited resource. neat.

passwords/usernames are rolled into a single url with a long random sequence tacked onto the end. Hardly something I could remember, though the 30 day login might be sufficient. I wonder what kind of feedback you get about this.

Neat attempt at not having usernames/passwords.
I'd be very interested to see the source
I don't get the connection between the article and global warming but have heard that Mr. O's transition team is discussing the possibility of starting a policy initiative that makes it against the law to be a "Global Warming Denier".

So here we are. It's 2010 and it's OK to make porn movie because that activity is protected by the first amendment.

But, boy, if you don't believe in "Human Caused Global Warming" and you haven't bought any of those Carbon Offsets..

Well, the constitution isn't going to be able to help you there. You just went too far over the line.
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He's in a position, but did he provided it? Bush is also in the world leader spot, does his own people aprove what he does?

I know, karma-whoring with my anti-Bush comment, but there's a point here. It's like killing your father and fucking your mother for you Freud folks.

"I've decided to blog differently" is not HN material. It's not even _news_, because he gave very personal reasons for it (and I commented there on his blog).

Don't follow the person, follow the whys.
How about industrial engineering?
well there's a lot of earthquakes at Yellowstone park these last few days, which is on top of a supervolcano:
http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowsto...
Fortunately, none of my student loans are "private" ones as mentioned in the article. I am cutting back on expenses to pay off my federal ones early, primarly because student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and I think that things are going to get really bad by the end of 2009. If you're unemployed, a chapter 7 bk is feasible, but very hard to get if employed. And the way that the "reform" was passed a couple years back, less and less chapter 13s are actually getting discharged at all.
Thanks din0bot! Some insight:

So the cookies are set at one year. Each person also gets an email when something is posted, with their unique login link. The only time a user would really need to access that url again is in two pretty rare scenarios:

a) theyre not at their own computer
b) they clear their cookies. this is for everyday people, and that just isnt an often occurrence.

Obviously though not often, these are occurrences. To deal with that, we let people recover links my having it sent to their email address.

We may let people set an optional password. Any thoughts or other ideas?
Sorry, that should have been TAOCP, The Art Of Computer Programming. And yes, it is one of those books that everybody wishes they had read at some point (although not everybody wants to actually read it).
(Ramamia developer here)

We get some negative feedback about not having passwords. So I think the way we're going to approach this is allow people to use their instant login link anytime, so they can bookmark it, keep requesting it from the homepage when they aren't logged in, etc., but also allow them to set a password in the user settings.

If they aren't logged in, and set a password, they can log in immediately with their password. If they didn't set a password, or forgot it, they can request an instant login link be sent to their email again.

A big portion of the family market are people that aren't insanely knowledgeable about the internet. They can bookmark the instant login link when they're logged out, or they can check their email to get it again. For people on the go, this will allow them to check their site by just logging in even without an instant login link.

In fact, the new period that we remember you for is 6 months. As long as you don't clear your cookies, we'll remember you for that long and you won't have to login again.

Also, re: usernames, nope - even if there are thousands of Smith family accounts, it doesn't make sense to stuff them into one family.
Ask HN: Is there an easy way to work with web services for iPhone dev?
We want to take XML data and convert it to an NSDictionary object, but we don't want to manually iterate over the XML. Is there an easy way to do this? How are you doing web services for your iPhone app?
Yeah, the view is sweet, but even the pigeons get it.
I'd say it's sort of like slavery, in that you work hard for rewards that are generally scantier than those that employ you, but there's a major difference in that you can quit whenever you like. For people like me who actually like solving hard problems, the drudgery is not as heavy as for those who should really be carpenters, financial advisors or whatever.
I was going to disagree with those negative comments below but then read the blog and damn; this guy has a freaking ego to think people would want to edit his ramblings for him in any other way than comical..
> The best moments for me as a parent usually happen when no camera or PC is present.

Sure. It won't be long before a continuously videocammed household becomes practical, though. (And probably commonplace not long after.)

I'm a little sad that we missed that with our kids. On the other hand, I don't spend much time watching the videos we have made, so maybe it wouldn't be that different practically.
Anyone know how do these compare to normal blades?
I've always been a fan of of John Stossel and a while back he had a special on "10 foolish myths". The number one myth was "Life just keeps getting worse". Here's a summary I found on-line, written by Mr Stossel(here:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-12_28_05_JS....)...

"Life getting worse is myth No.1 because in TV newsrooms, I hear a constant whine about life getting worse: avian flu will kill us if terrorism doesn't get us first; crime and pollution keep increasing, and the poor are suffering. But in truth, life keeps getting better. We live longer than ever, and with less pain (think about dental care in the 1960s). Crime is down. In America, even poor people have homes, cars, and access to music and other entertainment that was once only available to royalty. Pollution? The air and water keep getting cleaner. I jumped in the Hudson River not long ago to illustrate the point. There I was, swimming away and looking up at the Empire State building. Despite eight million people flushing nearby, the health department says swimming in the Hudson is now perfectly safe."

To me that pretty much says it all. Desepite the nay-sayers the world has gotten better and better. In no small part thanks to technology.

In fact, I think it's oddly appropriate that this shows up on Hacker News because Mr. Ebert's outlook is exactly what technological minded people should be fighting against.

Only through optimism can we realize all the good we are capable of doing.
Has your education taught you how to engineer things? Did you take a lot of math classes?

We don't have any industrial engineers at present, but when we're growing, we wouldn't rule them out. Really, we want people who are very smart, work hard, communicate well, can solve problems, and actually care about cleantech.

Regarding the specifics of solar cells (before you edited your post above), the field we span is broad, and the problems are narrow-- you can't possibly hope to have expertise in more than a small fraction of the areas in which you work. Fortunately, nobody else can either.
I got the impression that part was very much tongue-in-cheek, and he doesn't actually expect other people to edit his blog for him. It's very PB-style deadpan humor.

Though that just goes to show that we need automatic sarcasm detectors on the Internet, along with a <sarcasm> tag. Then you can be lazy and the compiler will infer your jokes for you.
yea they are going to take the guts of the iphone and make it into a sublaptop. Considering the low end of the EEE pc's are the same clock speed no one would notice the difference.
I'm a fan of CSSEdit, their previous app; I never in a zillion years thought I'd think a special-purpose editor for CSS would be useful (I'm an Emacs person), but CSSEdit winds up on my screen every time I do anything webby.
Looks like more of a competitor to Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/).
Experts say that most drugs work for only about half the people who take them
I'm not quite sure I understand the question...

If this is a coding question, look for the XML parser in the Core Foundation framework (I believe there are also examples for it):
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conc...

If you are asking specifically about Xcode (the IDE), I know it parses XML because it syntax-colors XML files that I open, and its code-folding brackets support hierarchies of open/close tags.
Devlopers Aim for the Sky er, the Cloud (Computing)
I know. It's very Madoffish.
My coworker, a mechanical engineer doing product design, sighs every time someone goes to him with another issue to add to his list. One time I jokingly said, "Wow, does it suck that much?" He said to me, "Don't ever get good at doing something you hate."

I suppose he considers bringing a good income to his family as being more important than his enjoyment of his job.

That's certainly true of my parents, who did blue collar work for most of their working lives in order to provide for the family. I remember my mother having such bad joint pain from working all day that she had me pound on her with a baseball until she bruised, for a little pain relief. My parents found the best paying jobs they could, and did not qualify it with "with interesting work," because success of the family meant sacrifice.

My friend's friend Pete is a father of two, a four year old girl and an adorable 14 month old boy, and when he gets drunk he starts giving out life advice. He says that once the kids come, all your priorities change. They are the last thing you think about every night, and you will find yourself working harder and doing what it takes to see that they are taken care of.

I believe "interesting work" is a luxury, and we are the spoiled of the spoiled.

Not too long in the past, marriages were arranged in order to strengthen family power, and not for love. Like the song lyrics said, "if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with."
I don't know about using a scrapbook... part of the point is to make it personal and frequent. I know that my wife has tried to keep up with a baby book, and it's hard to know where to draw the line between 'scrapbook-able' events and just plain events. The line for email is so much lower that you're going to capture more.
their 'sugar' extensibility framework is more textmate-ish than what coda offers though.

definitely good to see another entry into the editor space. maybe it will prompt a TM2 beta! :)
It doesn't work with my camera. I am using macbook pro.
I guess that means I'm hanging around the right people...
Ask HN: How many different jobs have you had?
I was crunching the numbers today and it's kind of interesting: I just turned 26 and I've already been in 16 different occupations/companies, 14 of them since high school graduation.

A lot of opportunities have come from randomly meeting people in diverse occupations. I got into foreign labour recruiting after being approached while selling industrial trailers at a trade show; I got into entrepreneurship and started my first company after taking an internship in Guatemala, where my best friend introduced me to the world of business that his family had raised him in.

So I'm a little curious what the paths of other founders/entrepreneurs look like -- whether they're convoluted and varied like mine, or focused and deep in one area. I'm guessing there's some of both.

FWIW, here's my list, in chronological order:

Paper boy (4y)

Sanitation worker in a meat plant (4y)

--- graduated high school ---

Graphic designer (10y on and off)

NGO Donor Relations intern (Guatemala, 3m)

Tree Planter (3m)

Youth leadership intern (USA, 3m)

Delegate/Team Leader for international trade NGO (2y)

Export trade development coordinator, public-private partnership (3m)

Founder of project to bring youth to WTO in Hong Kong (3m)

Web developer (8y on and off)

Trade show rep (sporadic)

Foreign labour recruiter/consultant (Canada/Thailand, 3m)

President/Founder of my own importing/brand/online/wholesale company (Canada/Guatemala, 1y)

VP Product Development / founder of a family-owned startup (China, 9m)

SAT prep teacher (Beijing, 2m)

VP Marketing of same family-owned startup (8m)

And this doesn't include any of my studies (I studied at 3 different universities but left without graduating to do my own projects).
Is it better than RescueTime especially since it's not free?
I used to think the same thing, but i'm not so sure anymore.

I think the closedness of the iPhone is actually beneficial (to that particular phone). Skipping past the "average consumer doesn't care about the iPhone being a closed platform" and the "closed platform doesn't let developers innovate as quick" arguments, the iPhone excells at what it does and now -relies- on its closedness to maintain its market position.

The main point of the iPhone was integration with apples line of products, thus the iPhone is just another addition to the apple product line. The system behind that is there to make that product what it is and nothing more. Because, you are dealing with the mobile space with the iPhone, the best way to control how much innovation is taking place on your device is to keep it closed. After all, can't have apps that introduce new functionality that could potentially be folded into future devices, that could hurt the iPhone revenue stream.
I know, but most people don't. Your logo can't be designed only for people who know the language.

Most people think >λ= means "greater than" "lambda" "equals", not a clever play on monad binding op and lambda...