skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the scarcity

I recall it all too well, and it seriously damaged my development. I mastered BASIC during the Commodore Christmas of 85. Years later in 11th grade, my high school was teaching...BASIC...on Trash-80s. I thought for a while, what is the fuss about computers for? They haven't moved forward in years and speak a crap language. I'm done with these toys.
What a strange thing for a Greek to read on hacker news. Being in Athens I must say the riots have certainly subsided by now and a semblance of normality is back on the streets, at least until the holidays are out. Other than that, the analysis was pretty good if simplified to fit the size of the article. One thing that does not come out is that the youth is very leftist, very much against privatization and market solutions, perhaps due to the horible way this has gone in the past. Although I personally would hope for a libertarian direction, I am in a very tiny sliver of the population. In all honesty, between state ownership and a capitalism beholden to a small number of powerful families, I am not sure what is worse.

It's hard to tell if greece is a 'last of the mohicans' kind of country where the social fabric is still strong and therefore a lot of 'law and order' policies where the govt cracks down on the people are less tolerated, or if it is a first of a new phase of unrest all over europe and the world. Time will tell I guess.
Or a Children's Film Foundation film?
Ask HN: review my app coded in one month
http://www.kpicturebooth.com/

I wrote this over thanksgiving and completed it last week. You need Flash player 10 and a webcam to use it. Take a look and give me some feedback. Blog post at: http://tharavaad.wordpress.com

Might clean it up and open source it if it generates enough interest.
I think you missed a big one:

6 - Not be a massive pain in the ass to use for extended periods.

Yeah, I can get on IMDB and check a film's ranking pretty easily, but I can do it 10-20x faster on a laptop/netbook. Multiply that by another order of magnitude for composing long emails, or even trying to dive through multiple pages of a site rapidly.

The iPhone does some things capably (moreso than its competitors anyway) but it is far from the "best" solution, not even close.
He can write it late in the evening when the son sleeps...anyway, I probably see your point. If I would get such a gift from my father...I don't know....I would be curious of course, but on the other side, maybe I wouldn't really want to read about his very personal feelings (even if they were related to my childhood).
Organizations Transformed More Deeply & Continuously by Relentless Pursuit of Small Ideas
For those interested, the article does not mention that the actual code is on the front page of http://www.fbi.gov.

That said, despite it being "slightly more difficult" than last year's, this is a very easy code to break for those with even cursory experience in ciphers ...
It wouldn't have anything to do with this, would it?

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-29677.pdf

See pg 38-42

These NEW record keeping regulations extend a NEW recordkeeping requirement to a LOT of work involving mere nudity, and some with no actual nudity at all, presented in any way that can be interpreted as "lascivious exhibition of the genitals or public area" [even if covered] that is produced on or after March 18, 2009

Seems to me that Facebook is just trying to cover it's ass.
A little more corporate suicide from Eastman Kodak
I don't think it's typical that photo albums are thrown in the closet...my father did a lot of photography and I always like to look through them, recently I even scanned the best pieces.
Genesis Of a Web App: 46 Days, 3 Separate Cities, Countless All-Nighters
I think the comment above calls into question the merit of your friends achievement, which will always be the result of affirmative action programs.

How can you say that? Do you know her or what she is capable of? It seems pure idiocy to me to suggest that every woman graduating from a premier science program is never achieving it through merit.

As far as bell curves and distributions, who the hell knows?
People tried to predict housing prices and stock portfolios on gaussians, and they seem to work until they don't. You cannot project your platonic ideal of how you think the world works because it seems to and then handwave on outliers.
"Also, as I was beta testing, the support email address kept bouncing mails back to me."

Really? That's no good. :( I apologize; we thought we had that all in place for the beta.

Was it info@getjotbot.com, by any chance?
I would definitely not be a whiny emo girl if I were to work in that environment. ;-)
Joel seems to be doing extraordinarily well without your advice.
I doubt this is possible with current technology - so many people share the same or similar writing style that, even with a skilled human analyzing, you probably can't do much better than attribute it to a large bucket of perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of individuals.
"However, I've found a free one that does much the same. Personal Time Manager (look for it on sourceforge). It's kinda-sorta not as slick, but it's free."

It's also a Windows app, no? I just downloaded it (ptm.sourceforge.net), and the zip file only has an exe. I develop on Linux, my partners are on Macs, so we made JotBot cross-platform.

Thanks for giving JotBot a try, though, and I hope PTM works well for you.
And yet Powerset gets no mention. We made a big splash, and got acquired by a company that is one of the few that has any chance of taking on google head-to-head.

But Cuil, with there "scaling is our product" plan, weird name and "search-is-hard" image interface get mention here?

The industry pundits can be strange, unpredictable people.
I want my privacy :(
You can imitate someone's writing style with a travesty generator but that doesn't mean everyone has a "writing fingerprint". Very few people have a distinct enough writing style to weed out false positives, and since it's so easy to imitate you'll never really know your precision.

I have a few writing ticks (parens, the '--', certain words like 'certain') but it's much easier to just search on "aristus" to start exposing my shame.

I played with this a few years ago with a project called unmaskr. Heuristics can help precision a lot but does not help with recall. People generally:

* use similar usernames, or a "constellation" of usernames

* have semi-regular posting times

* post in one place at one time

* use similar place names, nicknames for things

* write fluently in one language

* link to a "constellation" of domains
"... I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc. Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon# ..."

The key is to spend capital to get the best programmers to create profit. This idea isn't something Joel made up it's an idea by Phil Greenspun, "Building and keeping a good software engineering team" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...

So what's your idea?
If this is your only experience working with your partner then you should consider either selling out to him or offering to buy him out.

If you have worked with him before successfully you should have a perspective on whether or not to persevere.

If there is someone that both of you trust suggest a three way conversation to get to the root cause set of issues.
Doubtful, its not something you can automate to be reliable, and w/o reliability whats the point?
Seems to me as if IE isn't your only problem. I'm using FF3.0.4 on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy and things are looking a little crazy: http://i42.tinypic.com/35bfl0l.jpg
Axod, I agree the Disney name alone isn't going to ensure success, but I also don't think she rose to the top because of native talent. She has 1) famous father in the business 2) the backing of the most impressive youth marketing organization in the world. Can she sing and write music? absolutely, but I find it hard to believe her success is due to her song writing rather than the push of the amazing organization around her. Again no judgment on her I just think she has the benefit of superior promotion.
Yeah, the idea was something we came up with after we decided to start a company together. We did a bunch of brainstorming over a few months and decided on this project because out of all the ideas, it was the idea that had the best potential to actually support us. We had a lot of free-web-service ideas, but he is very very against ad supported services, and that's what most of the other ideas would have become.

Anyway, the idea we picked was the one he was most passionate about, but I was merely interested in. Since he is really the one funding this and I simply need to support myself, I bit onto it. My passion was building a company that was great to work at. That passion, however is almost gone, as I don't like my 'job' anymore. Maybe I am incapable of creating that environment with this partner/project? Maybe that environment just comes about organically? I really feel like much of what have been done so far has been forced. The problem is I dont know what the successful startup guys feel like in this situation. I dont know how I am supposed to know when it is 'right' because I have never started a successful company. Do they force it? Or does it fall into place? Is it supposed to feel like trudging through 5 feet of snow everyday? Or is that when it goes wrong? Is it normal to burn out on the project and dealing with trying to patch the partnership after only 6 months?

I think it really comes down to this "I cant fail" mentality I have. I want out, but that is failing. That is giving up. I don't give up.

I used to be sooo optimistic.

I appreciate the discussion. And I hope my end does not just come off as a rant.
the question I would ask you is who are these phenoms who achieved great success without a 10,000 time investment. I agree it is somewhat arbitrary, but it seems like a huge number of non-fluke successes have hit that and there aren't many stories of those who haven't.
Hey someone is drinking a Club Mate the hacker drink of choice!
http://tr.im/2qa5
Looks like you have Javascript off, or the page hasn't fully loaded, perhaps.

Can anyone else confirm this is happening to them?
What are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?
Roger Ebert's bleak assessment of the next 100 years
I share his politics, but not his outlook.

Not Hacker News? Well, more so than some of the other political stuff here: Ebert is probably one of the best "blog" writers working today, and it's been fascinating watching him acclimate over the last year.
Oops, I've been caught.

EDIT: Saw that you edited to ask if anyone else has the problem. I gave temporary permissions to everything on the page in NoScript and it renders perfectly, so hopefully no one else has any issues.
I own a Macbook Pro, a EEE Pc, and an Iphone.

Iphone is a good tool for communication and simple web browsing. But, it is not a substitution for my EEE pc. I use my EEE pc for web browsing because it has a bigger screen and a bigger keyboard(both are functional and convenient).

And, I strongly believe that network providers will soon come out with plan that you can sign up a 3G sim card and a 3G-enabled-netbook for a two-year contract like many countries have in the world right now.
It's a good idea in cases like this to set up a shotgun clause:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_clause
To say nothing of the costs of recruiting a single employee. Note that a headhunter will charge you a cool $30k to recruit an employee with a $100k salary:

Two points and a necessary footnote:

1) 30% is on the high end. 20%-25% is a normal fee (and in this environment, you can probably bargain your recruiter down to 20%).

2) That cost is what you pay for a recruiter, instead of paying your HR people to do the initial screening. Your recruiter might call up someone knowing that there are ten client companies that would interview someone who graduated in the top 10% of her class at one of the top 10% of schools -- but that only two or three of those interviewers would be a good cultural fit. It's worth it for your recruiter to chase the weird ones (if they're not right for XYZ Co., ABC Ltd. would still love to have them!); the equation is different for in-house HR.

Footnote: I'm a recruiter, who -- sadly -- does not get to work with awesome companies like Fog Creek. Working on it, though.
As someone who has taught music to adults, I can corroborate:

There is definitely a change in the brain that happens if you are heavily exposed to playing an instrument or otherwise making music at and before 11 to 12 years of age. Adults who do not have this are handicapped like they are missing some sort of sense. The difference is like the difference between an immigrant's adopted language and that same language as spoken by their children.

The former can work really, really hard and speak quite fluently and have the grammar and most of the accent tamed as to speak very elegantly and understandably, but they almost never get rid of the last vestiges of that accent.

If you want your children to truly learn music, then hang out with and have fun with people who do music effortlessly and for the sheer fun of it. This means that you go to jam sessions at private houses. Anything that remotely smells like a performance won't work the same way. Expose them to music done purely for the fun of it.

If you want to learn music as an adult, you have to learn how to hear again. The immigrant in the first example can think he's speaking perfectly, even though native speakers clearly hear that he is not. You have to learn how to hear again. You have to become directly aware sound stimulus, unfiltered through the higher-level notions you've developed about it. Then you have to correlate that with what happens when you manipulate your instrument. Keep doing that for 3 to 5 years.

I should add that, while I was exposed to music at an early age, I didn't really take joy in it until I discovered Irish Traditional music at the age of 19. I knew back then, that it would be impossible for me to accomplish much. I just thought if I could learn just this one tune. Then I learned a second tune. Then I went through a period of time when I was feverishly listening to tapes of myself and comparing what I heard myself play to recordings of masters for 8 hours a day sometimes. Eventually, I got good enough to teach at a school for Irish Music in the US and even qualified to compete at the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, which is basically the world competition.

My journey was two decades. The sooner you start, the more time you have to enjoy fluency!
This seems like an interesting idea, but I think daily entries would be a bit excessive. Perhaps a weekly or monthly e-mail? It might make sense to keep minor notes so you don't forget stuff, but I really couldn't see myself writing an e-mail to somebody every day, even my own kid. There's just not enough interesting stuff to log on a daily basis.
These people must realize that the problem really isn't Facebook. Americans fear the human body. With the current legal atmosphere their actions are most prudent.
All of the methods require a decent amount of text. So unless someone is writing hundreds of words in each sample, they're unlikely to be distinguishable from the crowd. That, to me, rules out typical comments on threads. Lots of little samples seem to be just too noisy with too much overlap among authors to allow for unique information-based fingerprints.

However, if the data is sufficiently large - in number and length (say, lots of essay-type blog posts) I'd expect some classifier-based machine learning techniques could match authors. That is, take a sample of 100 bloggers, split their data in half, train the classifiers on one half then test to match up the other half of the data. Under those conditions you could probably get 90-95% accuracy.

The question, I think, is how small you could push the training set in terms of the fewest words and the fewest posts.
Modern Scrip - Startups allow you to trade or buy giftcards at reduced prices
Just curious, how come your profile is written in 3rd person? Is this really Joel Spolsky, or a representative?
Well. You can get an 8GB iPhone for €99 up-front here (Austria), but you end up paying almost €1200 over the course of 2 years. (€45/mo; alternatively €149 + €35/mo for 24 mo - just under €1000 total)

Given that you can get hold of unlocked, contract-free iPhones for around €580 (€580! for a phone! and the 16GB model is ~€100 more - though the unlocked ones don't seem to be sanctioned by Apple, so no idea where they dig them up) that works out to being tied to a contract that's somewhere between mediocre and rip-off for €20-25/mo for 2 years and then being stuck with the same network after that. (SIM lock) Oh, have I mentioned that the iPhone is offered by Orange and T-Mobile, the two networks with by far the worst 3G coverage in this country?

The developer version of the HTC G1 at $400 (~€285) looks like a bargain in comparison. I wish I could have a look at one - you can't buy the consumer version in shops here yet, and there's only so much you can tell from a bunch of photos. (size, weight, handling)
Sotirov and Applebaum's (redacted) Internet vulnerability, published tomorrow at CCC
Getting sick of Internet-ending vulnerabilities yet? Of course not! Especially when there's a redacted abstract to pick apart and guess on!

A slice of context: neither Sotirov nor Applebaum would bank their reputations on a publicity stunt; they're both well-respected.

Is it SSL? Then why does the redacted text say "even so-called secure...". Is it a js/DOM issue? Then what's the word "infrastructure" doing there?

I'm feeling mildly Thawte about this. The attack was impractical before, exploits known weaknesses, but is possible now that [redacted], and leaves a criminal in possession of something. Known weaknesses that haven't been probed well feels maybe RNG-y. Maybe you can request a zillion personal Thawte certs and bust a pool of entropy.
I'd get out.

There will always be disagreements in a startup. But you should never feel like you dread seeing your cofounder. If it's seriously making you stressed and depressed, give it up. Startups should at least make you feel energized and enthusiastic, even if they aren't exactly "fun". If you can't muster that sort of passion, you're probably already doomed.

The successful teams I've worked on had plenty of disagreements and "we're doomed" moments. But then we'd work things out, come to an agreement, and everything would be great again. The unsuccessful teams were the ones where we just didn't respect the people we were working with. When things went wrong, it was their fault, and they never made rational decisions, and why were we working together anyway?

BTW, there's a lot to be said for quitting before you're broke. It gives you negotiating leverage when you apply for your next job, and can increase your options as far as possible jobs. (For example, I'm moving across the country for my next job, and finding that if I did not have a lot of cash reserves saved up, I'd run into serious cash-flow problems. Good companies will help pay for your move, but you usually need the money before you officially start with them.)
HI, I try to install in my Dell laptop Inspiron 1420 but in
stack and cannot see the apple logo screen....

can you show me the way to installl
my email: chyechye83@gmail.com
Kryptos & Overestimating the CIA
> That's great if you're running a high school in the poorest district in Mississippi

That's just an absurd statement. The design is very high-end, perhaps you just don't like the modern look?
The Perfect 99-Cent iPhone Game
How To Save The Web
Search for "text fingerprinting" - there's a lot of info.
The economics of scientific collaboration
Are Social Media Users Anti-Social In Real Life?
Very cool, although not completely accurate. There is no resistance to folding for example. Also try unpinning it, and letting it fall on the floor, and turn the fan on high - it's doesn't act right, and it walks along the floor for some reason.

But very cool anyway.
More about Google's commodity servers
Online Piracy Menaces Pro Sports
Donald Foster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Foster_(professor) ) is sometimes known as a "forensic linguist" for his use of computers to analyse texts. Famously, he figured out the (formerly anonymous) author of the bestselling novel "Primary Colors" using computer analysis. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I highly recommend starting with the Wikipedia article, which describes a lot of Foster's work.
Awesome! I just can't even imagine how Fog Creek makes enough money for all of this from mostly a single product. They must have tens of thousands of paying customers - which strikes me as incredibly strong for a niche as small as software development - kudos!
Well, getting a job in another city (one where things happen perhaps?) has been on my mind quite a bit. And that has been my rationale: I get out now, then I have some time to look/apply for jobs somewhere else.

But then my train of thought degrades to this:

- look/apply for job in another city
- what to do while looking?
- might as well work on this company and maybe we can turn it around

So then I decide to stay anyway. I should probably just suck it up, eat the failure, be done so we stop poisoning each other, then maybe take freelance stuff for the time being.
Twitter presence is a new thing, but it certainly helps.

In the past I've found having an IRC room or a forum to help. I've chosen hosting providers this way and it's worked out every time. If they can answer my question on their IRC channel and have a bunch of dedicated followers (dedicated enough to be sitting in their IRC channel anyway!) that's a really good sign.
why not, instead, use that money to make an angel investment in a small, needy startup?

odds of success are probably higher and it would feed your own bug vicariously
i'm not saying it doesn't accomplish anything, i just want to point out that he could do better things with the money.
I'm (usually) on my own so I don't have to explain myself (and I can handle the sight of them ;) ) but they're certainly not the norm for stuff linked from HN - this isn't 4chan - so people won't be expecting them. Pointing them out is the right thing to do.
Semantic Tagging Service Zigtag (Finally) Launches
Looks more like elastic sheet physics than cloth.
d, you're supposing an awful lot about how the situation might have been. Fact is, there are a lot of women out there who want what they think is the status quo: husband away during the day, providing plenty of money, newish car(s), family going out to eat once or twice a week, cable tv, buying whatever you want at the grocery store without regard for price, big X-mases, no stress about being able to pay bills, etc., and if hubby doesn't provide it, he's thought of as inadequate.

Yes, there are many women who are shortsighted and only realize after the divorce that life doesn't work the way they thought.

cousin_it, in the US, women have all the advantages when it comes to marriage. If they want a divorce, almost by default the legal system provides them with the kids, house, alimony, and child support.
Why would anyone laugh at that? Groundhog Day is an awesome movie.
The British seem to hold a similar respect for GCHQ (which is probably more like the NSA than the CIA) - there seems to be a widespread belief that they can crack even strong, modern encryption. (I doubt it, but nobody really seems to know anything about GCHQ - the grandfather of a UK friend of mine apparently worked there and the family only found this out after his death)
Nice application, wrong workflow. You shouldn't be bugged every x-minutes polling your state constantly.

It's better to track just state changes.

I use a tiny free application that does exactly this, with minimum clicks needed.

http://cratchit.org/TimeTool/index.htm