skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand in any way how you get from "Ivy League" to "good values." There are some real scumbags who went through Ivy League schools. That shouldn't even be surprising or contentious.
Yep, you're spot on. You just don't get it.
This is a worthless, false platitude.
As opposed to the United States of Murdoch (?!)
How are you not contradicting him? He said he made some great friends through casual sports, and you're saying that lifelong friendship cannot happen through casual sports. You are directly disagreeing with him about how deep his friendships are.

Based on nothing more than armchair psychology!
Thanks for that. Isn't syncing to both iCould and DropBox against Apple's TOS? That would explain why many are not supporting it.
I just don't get retargeting
I'm glad you responded.

Not all positive indicators are created equal. It's totally true. An Ivy league degree is recognizably hard, and it's an easy quantifier, if . If your work is equally hard, you need to figure out a way to show that. You may also have to work harder to find connections in small tight circles that are slightly more immediate if you went to an Ivy League school (that's part of what you're paying for to be totally frank). You can lament it privately, or you can keep learning and keep kicking ass. You could do great through your undergrad and get an Ivy-class education for post-graduate work if you really wanted. Do good work. Show it off to people that would be interested in it. If the people that you think you want to be around aren't interested in the work you're doing, you've got the wrong people, or your work isn't really that good. Figure out which it is, that isn't always easy.

I wrote one of these articles in 2009. Looking back it was stupid. I live in Palo Alto now. I'm working for another startup and learning very different things than I learned by starting a startup, or running a consultancy. I'm also better connected here. Try to take your assumptions and turn them totally on their head "what if pg is 100% correct about 'why to be in a startup hub'?" and try to prove to yourself that he is. It's good practice for all critical thinking.

I don't know what you work on. It's probably not worthless compared to an ivy league degree, but it depends what you want, and why you're comparing them. Learn to do the things that will get you what you want, and learn how to present those to other people, and you'll (hopefully) quit feeling like others got where they were just because they had more cash, you don't buy a degree in CS from Brown, you earn one.

I don't know where you are, or what you're working on, but feel free to reach out, I'm happy to have a conversation about it, in person or online.

http://www.issackelly.com/blog/2009/01/11/Columbus_is_not_ju...
http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
"you simply didn't read to the end"

I did.

He said:

"The right thing to do probably would have been to move far away, live simply, and take up a hobby so he could meet people on an equal footing."

The fact that the above sentence says "live simply" and "take up a hobby" seems to contradict the notion that he should try to take up with people who are equal in wealth which was the issue being discussed.

I said

"live among people"

which is not the same as

"move far away"

and

"live simply"

is not the same as

"make friends with people in the same income bracket or assets or higher"
What's the idea / competitors you think are worth copying?
5 Steps to writing a great sales letter
Larry Summers was recently quoted as saying that the best indicator of future success is not the school you graduated from but the best school you were accepted by.
Why so fancy? Just COPY CON.
Proposal - A Mountain Range for Texas
Congratulations! I definitely envy you for the LC4. From 1 to 10, how comfortable is it?
Building an MVP for an SASS webapp, just me, bouncing ideas of my brother and friends. Basically team-shared and filtered Google Alerts. Learning and applying the principles of lean startup, so here's the launch page: http://signup.alertoid.com

Would love feedback on the concept, name, everything!

PS: Got the idea right here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3475193
PPS: How do I SEO webapp to bring in some visitors ? Baby's first SEO, basically. Reading Kalzumeus religiously, thanks for everything patio11.
Thanks for the feedback! We're going to be working on images being links. We heard about what happened to PadMapper but we still figured this is a nicer way to browse, nicer UI, etc.
Nothing it stopping you from writing a great article, building great software, contributing something amazing to an open source project, etc.

Your time would be better spent focusing on doing good work and sharing it. Assuming you do do good work and learn how to share effectively, the rest will come.
Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?
See http://i.imgur.com/cGtm5.png. I'm not the question's author; I recently searched for this question, specifically pros/cons. Seems nowadays that about 5% of the questions on SO I look up and are perfectly legitimate to me are found to be locked, with a warning to others to knock it off. This is up from ~0% when I started using the site. Every forum I've loved eventually gets lock-happy mods. What does HN think? Am I the unreasonable one? I don't see how this question is unworthy according to the FAQ that SO refers to.
I posted pretty much the same question as you a couple of weeks ago for our product http://flashissue.com. at the end of the day it's important to just measure what's important in YOUR funnel.

it's taken us a while to get mixpanel installed so we can measure this properly.

our key metric is not how many people we get logging in but how many people move through our product and send out an email newsletter. we'll be a/b testing this with a "sign-up" button and an "open" app.

we should compare findings :-)
When Parents Hover and Kids Don't Grow Up
They're not actually cut off, they're in a scrollable text area (use two fingers to scroll within that text area) same as on the desktop. Not very easy to use, but then the device does have a very low (virtual/apparent) resolution of 320x480.
Some Thoughts on App.net
I'd like to see questions like: What I learned. What I did wrong. What I would do again. What I would do differently. How the next gig is going to be different. What insane acts of self-sacrifice or creative ingenuity they committed to keep their ship afloat.
"Me, not really interested in what people who never wrote any widely used software consider more what and less what."

This argument is getting really really really old. Anyone with 5 minutes and a working internet connection can find hundreds of successful widely used applications written with a focus on immutability, either at the language level or the design level.
A decade ago they were ~ $20k/year, which was below average at the time. http://colleges.findthebest.com/ says that it is $27k now, on par with other public schools and $13k less than "elite" schools. As I've been unimpressed with Comp Sci grads from more expensive schools, I recommend Tech to anyone who is primarily interested in a career developing software.
It's really really comfortable. Maybe an 8 or 9 (I suppose I'd reserve a 10 for "the womb").

I've always had a hard time figuring out what to do with my arms though, as I either hang them down by my side, or sort of fold them on my lap, so for years, the chair has mostly been "occasional seating".

With the arm mount though, I end up having a really comfortable typing position.
I don't know that. I'd need to hear from other people in the class before making a judgement on it.

If the student was making the class worse for other students, then despite that student being unhappy about the teacher the teacher's actions were actually good for morale. (Were I a student in the class, that is how I'd have felt. YMMV.) By contrast if this was one in a long line of incidents where the teacher was ticking off students, then the firing was appropriate.

But the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The rude student complained and had enough weight to get the instructor fired. I'll probably never have enough information to have an opinion on whether Facebook made the right decision.
The core conceit here is the idea that what we've seen so far (facebook, g+) represents the apotheosis of social network services. It only takes a few minutes of thinking about that to realize how silly the idea is. Social software is here to stay and it's going to have a big impact on society. But how it works will surely change a great deal over time, to a degree where what exists in 2020 may be completely unrecognizable to us today.

Is social software fundamentally unprofitable? I think the answer has to be no. Even the clumsy monetization of facebook today shows a healthy profit, even if it is orders of magnitude below the fevered expectations of the market. More so, as running high user count services becomes cheaper due to advances in technology social software will merely become easier and easier to profit from.
It's funny to read a comment here a couple days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4237027), bemoaning the quality of the reddit frontpage, for this 'story' just appearing there.

Two days later, it's the second highest story on the Hacker News frontpage.
If there is anything that will kill free access, it will be this:
"British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article."

APCs just murder the desire to publish at all.
Not even that - the article only claims "25,000 messages". Multiple messages in the same conversation, as well as multiple conversations with the same person. The number of _people_ may have only been in the high hundreds…
> "Why should an employer consider context and circumstances?"

Because we aspire to live in a world where we're not always entirely self-serving. Because a world where we operate strictly based on a hard cost/benefit ratio is really unpleasant.

> "I'm not a social services agency."

Neither am I, yet I still find ways to do a little bit of good in the world. The idea isn't "stop hiring from top schools", it's "take a look at people outside the top schools and give them a chance to prove themselves".
Uh....many people don't think like that.

For most of the people I know, they aren't looking for anything besides connection to other people. They're complete & whole people on their own, they don't need anything else. They don't hang around their friends because they're looking for a halo of success. They don't do it for prestige or looks or humor. They just do it because they like company.

It's really a difference in worldview. For some people, things come first in their life, and they surround themselves with people who will help them achieve those things, or ones who have already achieved them so they can bask in their glow. For others, people come first in their life, and they surround themselves with things that will help them relate to the people they care about.

I've been on both sides of the fence, and I can tell you, I have felt miserable every time I tried convincing myself that success was all that mattered. I'm trying to find my way back to a place now where the people matter more than the accolades - it's not all that easy, because it really is a worldview, and once you've optimized your life for success, it's pretty hard to un-optimize it and build relationships. But I can tell you that my friends don't care if you're a hot-shot developer for Google or a yoga instructor or a public-policy consultant or an urban planner. People are people, they're complex, and they're a lot more than a laundry list of characteristics you might like to have.
What Google Is
This is one of the first genuinely original ideas that I have seen in a long time.

It's discussed at length in the 4 Hour Work Week, which, if you don't know, is a bestseller.
It sounded to me like 25,000 messages meant 25,000 times enter was pressed in chat, e.g.

"Hi, I'm Max"
"What SaaS do you use?" counts as 2
Ask HN: Learning to switch off
What do you guys do to try and switch off from your work? I am completely wired in. I never feel relaxed or refreshed, I can't concentrate on anything else (I've tried watching movies, reading, running etc).

Even on days where I've planned to recoup I wake up ultra early, read / respond to emails, check metrics / analytics, read posts in my pocket, scroll through twitter, browse HN .. it goes on.

Has anyone found some successful hacks to lose themselves for a few hours?
Top 15 Alternative Albums Of The Year So Far
OP here. It was in the thousands. :)
I've known Pete since 1990. We went to lunch together most days for 5 years.

These days, everybody is a enemy in cahoots with the shrinks/CIA, even my parents.

I don't like to interact with people -- like getting stabbed all the time.

Kill'em all God!!

God says...nevertheless embittered leaveth displace taughtest students
rocks Press garment skills Vegas slaves severe laxly lieth
Amen believed Cross Dudly_Doright Philippians 1971 dispersed
impure subjoined outrages wait Archive severe Form fleeing
contradicting stablished darkness Indiana not_in_kansas_anymore
book hate disorder licence informed workings loud beings
emptinesses allegorically telling relapseth pernicious
affecting gleams waterest sweat promising imitated page
sentiment alterations fathers Texas uncertainty thought
Croatia intend -Thou one_small_step sun-rising
Ok, I see.

So, out of the 10-15x slowdown, how much is due to deoptimizing and how much is due to not NaNboxing, if it's possible to estimate that? The distinction should be important in the case of a very large codebase whose performance is not focused in a few small loops, so presumably most of the time you will be running unoptimized code (and then if you NaNbox or not gets important).
> "Wouldn't it be a better idea to just finish the projects?"

You can do both. Fix broken links, make your existing website complete. Then finish your projects and add them as you finish them.

Presentation is everything. You are living in a world with literally millions of engineers, and without knowing you personally, how you present yourself is the only indications we have of your competence.

And broken links does not speak well to that presentation.

If you want to be taken as a professional, you need to project professional.
I noticed the same and I'm not sure if there's a commentary as to why this trend has continued to increase.

Programming isn't a syntax only problem and has many steps before, and after it that are relevant in software engineering.

Maybe the mods are taking too much of a narrow programming syntax only approach. To me, that may exacerbate the issues of poor software because people are only searching for a means to the ends instead of understanding why to do things a certain way.
What's wrong with creating a website for your school?
I completely agree. A lot of this is part of living in NYC as opposed to somewhere else. I lived in LA for 7 years and did not experience the same aversion to making new good friends there. I think there are some missing components to this regarding location and local culture that the author didn't seem to be aware of
the ad placements really take away from the experience you're creating. build a great product people come to use, then figure out how to incorporate advertising.

extra thought: you have the luxury of any monetization approach you'd like -- don't feel trapped by typical display units.
My wife and I were recently joking the other day starting a match-making service for couples. But instead of matching single guys with single girls, you'd be matched via the interests and personality of your counterpart in another couple! Finding couples were everyone is a good fit is much harder than finding compatible 1-on-1 relationships, like the article mentions.

I think the outcome of such a service would be great when successful, but I don't think many people would feel comfortable with the process. I know I wouldn't...
A piece of paper you can sell for numbers that represent pieces of paper
> Maybe the mods are taking too much of a narrow programming syntax only approach.

With the 400+ vote count for that question, and 50+ people taking the time to reply, I say yes indeed they are. It is definitely a programming question in my book, one whose answers could save me & others a lot of work/time.
Brazil’s “Revolutionary Internet legislation" is a trojan horse
Two points:

The people who write software with focus on immutability are not the same people who advocate pushing immutability down the students' throats. For example, I do write some functional code, but pragmatically.

And even after that, the total share of functional code is negligible. Sad but true.
Fantastic time-lapse view of aurora in the southern hemisphere
Fundamentally, as someone who went to a Public State University, I feel your pain. Let me take a look (based on my experiences of reviewing resumes)...

Analysis of your "about me" section:

Your CV is "meh". Only interesting thing is the grad school class. Your GPA isn't listed.

Resume:
If I ask you in-depth, hard questions about any language or tech on your resume, I expect an answer. If you can't give me a deep answer, I will give you negative points in my mind. You listed those techs, so you better have something to show.

WRT Technologies. I am a bit idiosyncratic: I want to know your preferred OS and whether you can handle source control. Everything else is noise. You have too much noise.

Your internship this summer details don't tell me why you're awesome. It's too generic.

Your S12 research is ambiguous. what did you find? I don't know what you can do for me.

I don't really care about your in-progress work unless you have a github. You should highlight your leadership experience in tutoring. You should highlight your Honors courses.

In summary, you are an above-average candidate compared to most CS resumes I've seen. Probably in the 80th percentile of the last batch of resumes I looked through. However, you are not a must-hire in my opinion.

---

In order to get to "must hire" state in my mind, you need something like the following:

* Mastery of written communication.

* Explanation of what you have done at each position, why you uniquely made it happen, and what you can do for me and my team.

* Public code repo with a long history and a decent amount of loc in it. You've developed at least a small system (1-10KLoC) and maintained it for years. You support users of it.

* You have studied a "far out" technology - one that may never be written on the job. The more depth is shown here, the more commitment to your craft is demonstrated. At a minimum, this would be, for instance, learning Perl 6 or Haskell. At the higher end, it might be something like writing a working simulator of the CM-2.

* You have extensive internships at well-known companies. While this is limited by location and funds somewhat, it demonstrates that you can play ball with the big boys.

---

Understand that you can better your marketing quickly - set up a github and upload a project, wipe out the placeholder links, rewrite your resume to better express your capabilities. But then the slog starts. You need to commit to building your craft, constantly, in a visibly demonstrable way. Some of that might be expressed via open source, or it might be expressed by a portfolio of shipped software. That's up to you. And, further - express yourself in a more careful fashion. No one wants to take the risk of hiring someone who complains life is unfair.

While I am not a hiring manager, I do assist with technical hiring. I am always happy to look at your resume (or anybody else's) and provide feedback and critique. My contact email is in my HN profile.

Best wishes for your future.
I believe the idea is that future grants would stipulate that some percentage of the grant be used to cover publishing costs, whereas current grants include some money for subscribing to journals. That way the publishers are still guaranteed to get money, but anyone can see the results of the research. Certainly less ideal than circumventing publishers entirely, but hopefully a step forward.
This is not a startup, this is a tool. Maybe you can make a bit of side-income from ads, but don't expect this to become a company on its own.

Problems:

- Don't use buttons that look so 'bubbly'

- Bad colour scheme

- There are two different Facebook share buttons

- The copy on the about page is terribly written

- On the conversation page, I have to click 'track new conversation' to start fresh; big problem when there aren't any results, I'm essentially stranded with no 'obvious' action

- If I track @blah and @bleh, don't put me there under 'You', it's totally irrelevant to the conversation
I left stack overflow about a year ago when they banned my account for a week for spamming. I posted a similar answer to a few similar question (like 3 honest) and they banned me. I was so outraged I quit the site completely.

That being said I thought about building a site to compete, but stackoverflow basically owns the market. I have no way of collecting users like they do.
I've used ST2 quite a bit. It's a nice editor but I really don't see the point.
Well, its mods sure, and all the rest of its users.

But no, AFAICS it's a programming technique memoizer. The important questions have mostly been answered. There will be new important questions, and they will be asked and answered. But between now and then it will mostly be black noise. The color illiteracy and aspiration. Asking how to reverse a linked list?
Yeah? Does that say something I'm not aware of?

Poly Sci doesn't strike me as the kind of person interested in getting their hands dirty. Chalk my reaction up to people I have met who are more interested in taking credit than doing work.

Wouldn't it be a better idea to just finish the projects?

Sure, but until they're worth talking about you're better off not talking about them.

I'll have been doing this for a decade before I graduate. How would I go about better communicating that drive?

My point was to convey how dedicated good people are, not to say that time connotes skill. The way to be a poet is to poeticize. I had a random stroke of awesome just after school from creating a python script that exported 3d objects from Blender into Google Earth. Someone in Boulder saw it and offered me the kind of startup role that I had wanted since high school.

The startup didn't pan out, but the idea that doing good work creates opportunities did. In fact, a bunch of my co-workers went on to create some very successful iPhone games that you've probably heard of. Find something that you are interested in and do it, even if you don't think that you can. Especially if you don't think that you can. Even if you fail, you'll have learned something and possibly created part of the solution in the process. Put that on your blog, and see where it takes you.
Agreed, 7207 is good enough, commas (or fullstops) are helpful when there are more than 5 or 6 digits but there is no confusion with a 4-digit number.

>Or at least on HN, you could use 7.20710^3 and be done with scientific notation.

So would that 7.207 in 7.20710^3 be considered 7 decimal 207 or 7 thousand 207? :D
This is an old topic that was discussed in many different questions on meta.stackoverflow.com. All questions such as these have been given a special archive status where the question is locked, voting is removed and they are popped off the question list.

That lock-happy mod is the one of many fighting to keep these questions somewhere for people like you who push these silly conspiracy theories.

Stop it. It's annoying.