skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Tom (and I) got your point.

I just agree with Tom that you didn't make it very well. You had absolutely no data to back up your claims - just a handful of anecdotes (some of which were simply false).

For example, do you have any evidence to back up your claim that NASA can't find enough qualified scientists? Because I work at a DoD research lab (well, a contractor) that has no problem hiring scientists (we have multiple scientists interviewing every month, for positions in a very narrow field). Frankly, all the data I've seen says that America is graduating far too many PhDs for the number of positions available.

The key mechanism of technological advancement is abstraction. I am fairly good at the type of math that is important today, but I'd probably fare poorly in a high school math class 50 years ago. It just isn't that important, or useful, for me to be able to quickly compute an arbitrary trig function or take a complex derivative by hand. In principle, I know how to do both these things (well, I could probably derive the half angle/angle addition formulas and most of the derivative rules, although I don't actually remember them), but why would I bother when I can just abstract away irrelevant details and focus on the important stuff? And I'm sure students 50 years had lost other skills that earlier generations had deemed important.

Instead, I get to specialize - which increases my (and the world's) productivity. Nobody can truly understand how anything works these days. Even fully understanding a simple pocket calculator would require more knowledge in Metallurgy, Quantum Physics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Applied Math than anyone has.

It's just like how you build black boxes when programming. I don't know (or care about) the implementation details of Python's hash tables, Haskell's type inference, Java's garbage collector, or the web service library my coworker wrote. I have a vague, high level understanding of how they all work. But, if I ever want to get something useful done at some point I just have to take it on faith that they work.
Debunking Social Media Myths
to me it seems .. exploitative.

This is exploitative if you think that a) open source products are not helped by having a company to do their marketing for them and b) there is something vaguely dirty about making money within a 47 mile radius of one. Marketing is a core competency that most OSS products which lack corporate backing fail at, in spades. Whatever your criteria for success for git are (number of developers, number of users, increasing technological awesomeness), they're better off with a bigger community and they'll get a bigger community thanks to github.

Look at how much, e.g., Rails the OSS project gains from being promoted by people who know what they're doing (who subsidize their involvement with Rails by using it to power a fleet of closed-source apps). I think Rails might well be the first OSS programming framework where people actually sat down and discussed really elementary things like a) a marketing plan and b) a visual identity and c) a site that was designed to sell the product, hard, rather than just containing a download and a few desultory links to documentation.

Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is distributed

This is one of those funny engineer tunnel-vision moments. The whole point of git is that it is theoretically better than the alternatives, not that it upholds one holy grail on a bullet point list above all others. Persistence on a central server, management, backups, all that fun stuff is a great boon to folks who are too small scale to get the baked-in distribution backup effect (which would be about 90% of projects, at a bare minimum) and the collaboration ability doesn't hurt either. (If someone is working on a fork of your project halfway around the world and you are mutually ignorant of each other... sucks to be you, right?)

Many people, including myself, would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site.

Yeah, and you're never going to buy a Hello Kitty backpack, either. That does not mean there is no market for Hello Kitty backpacks. (I apologize in advance if you are, in fact, a purchaser of Hello Kitty backpacks.) "I see no use for this, ergo it can't possibly be viable" is one of the categorical developer errors about business.

1,500 paying customers later I still get emails from developers saying "I saw your site, looks like it took a lot of work, but come on, nobody will ever buy it." This was once common enough that I wrote a form letter for it.
Just remember: almost nobody ever picks the bottom of a market right - by definition.
It doesn't have to be read from disk at the other end. It could be data that's already cached in memory, you just have to talk to the cache server over the network.
Things you may not know about jQuery
I feel the same way - even thought I have created a task manager to solve these kind of issues (Todoist).

The general problem for me is that I focus too much on one thing that I forget/postpone a lot of the other tasks and suddenly I have an inbox with 1000 messages where 100 of them need an answer.

I think organization and not taking too much work is the way to move forward. And I generally agree on that multitasking is the way to mediocrity and most productivity tips (e.g those from getting things done) recommend doing things in time blocks with full focus.
FancyForm as a checkbox or radio-button replacement
Not really, it's called statistics.
Retraining (former) masters of the universe | Free exchange | Economist.com
I think we'll be seeing a lot more 120-150 years as we grow older. I mean think about it, right now we have people who are 100 year old, which means they were born in 1900s, the medicine has made leaps and bounds in the last 40-50 years.

So if we take into account another 40-60 years of R&D, and they are bound to get another 20-50 years out of human bodies.

Ofcourse that doesn't take into account the Mayan end of the world in 2012
How to deal with large webforms
I think his point about making money was more about survival. We need money to live, and it takes a long time to get good enough at something that you can make a living doing it. The point is how do you make a living (not necessarily get rich) while learning to do things.
Better lighting for your computer
"a world that is still driven largely by American products and American innovations." - it does seem like America is losing the edge though. Cars and mobile are examples of this, Europe and Asia is way ahead of the US.
I'm sorry, I tl;dr'd at the mention of Thomas Friedman. What did the point end up being?
Anyone use this yet? Does it work well?
Here is a tip - don't hire consultants to talk to you about blog marketing and microformats etc. until you have the basics like backup and support in order.

Magnolia hired such consultants was engaged with them for a while. I know because I am an advisor to a company who hired the same consultants - and I made the same argument to them, ie. there are more basic things that need to be completed before good money is spent on people who love to talk about Blogs, FOAF, OAuth, OpenID, Syndication and online marketing etc.

With the money Magnolia would have saved from these consultants, they could have really had their site in order. I also don't know how you can have so many employees, advisors and 2-3 consultants on tap and nobody mentions backup.

So other startup founders, forget about all that fancy 2.0 stuff - get the essentials in order first.
Hoteles en Valencia
Nice to Book is the best place to book a hotel, you can easily find the best prices, without any cost. All hotels in Spain, with views of real customers who provide impartial views very helpful in deciding what hotel to book. And all in 9 different languages.
We've had exactly one confirmed 120+ in human history, and 90% of 110+ are women, so as a man, I don't think my odds are good at reaching 120, unless radical life extension becomes a reality. (I voted for 80-100, for what it's worth.)

My feeling is that it's all-or-nothing. I see the human life expectancy either plateauing around 90, or shooting off into the stratosphere. The reason for this is that most of the current life expectancy gains come from death reduction, which has occurred across the board in recent decades. But a 50% across-the-board death-rate reduction only buys 8 years, because that's the rate at which a person's mortality doubles. Meaningful life extension requires slowing the aging process itself, and I feel like if that can be done through technological means to any meaningful extent (20% slowdown, meaning that mortality would double every 10 years, or more) it can be stopped and reversed, in which case life expectancy goes to 800+.

I'm 25, and expect to have a normal-ish lifespan around 90, but I think the first 500-year-old will have been born before I die.
The recent case of 27 year old British Reality Television star Jade Goody being diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4853891a1860.html) demonstrates how ridiculous this poll is. Sure we might all "expect" to live to be a 100, or maybe upload our brains onto the internet and then live forever, or at least until the heat death of the universe, but somehow Nature ends up having other plans. So of course it is prudent to plan for the future in terms of things like retirement savings, but beyond that, we should not expect anything other than the present. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.
Meaning no disrespect to HN, but given that we seem to send about 4k visitors a day in my recent experience, getting linked by Slashdot and HN on the same day is a single-whammy.
Only in the sense that "Someone robbed an unlocked house" is a good case for sniper teams. I mean, sure, it will work -- but as an interim measure, locking the door is a bit easier, almost as effective, and far less messy.
How are Asia and Europe ahead of America on cars and phones?

Off the top of my head, the iPhone, Google Android, the Tesla Roadster, and Green Freedom are all American.

What really worries me is the LHC (European). I would argue that Newtonian mechanics gave rise to the industrial revolution, that Relativistic Physics gave us the Space Age and Nuclear Age, and that Quantum Mechanics brought the Information Age (I'd be happy to provide details, if you're interested).

I'm worried that America will be playing catchup in whatever new era comes out of the next major physics breakthrough.
Messing around with things, figuring out how they work and making them do something I want them to do. It's interesting to me. Doesn't really solve any practical problem though.
Perhaps the most important way to deal with long forms: Make them shorter. See if you really need to collect all of that information. Make sure you're using the most efficient and intuitive form controls for the task at hand.
Don't manage your money yourself!!!!!

$2M is absolutely enough to find a "full time" money manager - there are many private wealth management folks with minimum asset levels of 250K or less.

Make sure your adviser is a VALUE INVESTOR, especially one who suggests investing in low-cost index funds. Almost no "active" managers beat low cost index fund performance in the long term.

Next, get a job and let that $2M grow.
Accomodation Catalonia
Well the immortality thing might not be that far fetched:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/08/11/2331197.ht...
IBM delivers broadband over power lines
Obviously, the nature of death is that it can happen at any time. I could die tomorrow, but I'm not likely to. I'm more interested in HN posters' thoughts and projections regarding the progress of medical technology than in whether they expect to be crushed by a falling piano tomorrow.

I think humans will eventually conquer aging, but not death. Mind uploading seems unlikely, given that we don't know what mind is, nor even whether or not it's physical.
Well, they always suffer from the same dilemma: someone else gets it first, and they then can't just do the same even when its the right thing, they somehow gotta 'top' that, add to it so that where less was more, more is now less.
This is the same thing that Apple saw in the app store: when you get people comfortable with the idea of consistently buying, and it's easy, sales soar. It jives with how I think about purchases as well. A $40 purchase is a big deal, but it's very easy to spend $10 4 times.

It'll be interesting to see how far we can push this model. I don't believe in the micropayments or subscription models as a panacea, but it's pretty clear that digital distribution allows for greater volume at lower cost. Will great games like L4D make enough money at $10? $5? $1? Will app store games make enough at $0.10? $0.01?

It'll be interesting to see what it does to quality as well. Steam seems to be doing well with quality, even when distribution costs are nearly nothing, but the Apple's app store has seen a huge number of cheap, addictive games because they make more money for less development time. Hopefully it all balances out, but more and more, software will lose the ability to price itself as a physical good that comes in a box. Where does it settle?

In any case, I'm excited.
Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?
Yes and no. Specialization is good for productivity on paper - but it breaks down horribly in practice. In programming, you may need to extend or re-write your framework or even web server's logic to scale your websites. In real-time trading systems and HPC programming, you need to have a good grasp of compiler and even kernel memory management to achieve low latency.

The analogy extends beyond programming to engineering/science in general. The field of molecular biology was formulated by quantum physicists interested in applying their experimental techniques in Biology. The new emerging field of Bioinformatics was conceived by statisticians and computer scientists to apply data mining techniques to genome data. Genome sequencing itself, is a blend of EE (taken from silicon waffer design) and molecular biology.

My opinion is that if everyone relegates to their own "tower," and aren't curious to drill deep into the bits of the other fields. There will only be incremental improvement to the existing towers, and no new towers. Hence the original author's point: kids are satisfied with interacting with technology on a superficial level (many in fact have a high level understanding of how cellphones work, cell phone gets signal from wireless tower), but they aren't curious enough to dig deep into the bits (program an Android game).
The article explains a few network protocol reverse-engineering techniques that were used over the course of 12 years to write Samba.

The techniques are:

1. Use of publicly available documents on the CIFS/SMB protocol
(not reverse-engineering but the documents are incomplete);

2. Use a network sniffer to listen in on conversations between Microsoft clients and servers;

3. Use of a protocol scanner: a program that tries all possible "words"
in some section of a protocol and uses the response
to automatically deduce new information about the protocol.

4. Use the "differential" technique: You write your own implementation
of the protocol with what you know, then send pairs of identical messages
to both the real implementation and your implementation and verify that the responses are the same.
As if millions of tweets were suddenly silenced.
I'll see your DOS prompt and match you a "changed the desktop background and inverted the screen colors" trip to the principles office.

They wanted to suspend me for two days for that one. Happily, I was able to get another teacher to talk to the principal and explain that computers is "his thing" and that just because it was possible that I knew how to do something doesn't mean that I did do it.
I saw that. It was an interesting article. I agree that halting aging is not far-fetched. (Immortality, on the other hand, I consider impossible.)

However, success in slowing aging is going to come down to success at slowing the failure of the weakest or most fragile part.
Sometimes I like watching videos precisely because it's slower: the delivery has nuance; I can ruminate a bit; things stick in my memory. A good speaker can really amplify the meaning and memorability of information.

Really, it depends on the situation. Speed isn't always the most important thing.
well yeah immortality is not really viable, economically. Even if they had it, they wouldn't release it, if they did Earth would get overpopulated in 50-80 years leading to a crisis. Gas shortage and food shortage all over the place

Need to get spaceships and space stations first before we can expand the earth population.
This strikes me as another in the long line of "Wow, weird non-white foreigners must be able to do absolutely impossible things!" thinking. c.f. the obsession with Japanese management in the 1980s. We do darn impressive feats of engineering here but they're not magic.

One error in 6 million deliveries? Come on. Has there ever been an attempt to measure the error rate in any sort of statistically rigorous fashion? It should be really bloody simple -- interview 400 customers chosen at random, ask if they've had something not delivered in the last month, last six months, etc. (This will not have nearly enough resolution to detect the difference between 99.999% and 99.9999% accuracy but, ahem, I think we won't quite need to be that exacting.)

[Edit: Other sources cite the error rate as 1 in 16 million. Multiple different numbers which all stand for "arbitrarily small" do not give me confidence in the strength of this urban legend.]
I just read this article yesterday - what a timing!!!

You MUST read it as well, it's regarding "Sudden Wealth Syndrome" and may be you should consult Stephen Goldbart and Joan DiFuria.

Having too much money can be a problem : http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2009/feb/18having-too-much-mo...

What is The Sudden Wealth Syndrome? :
http://www.mmcinstitute.com/sws.html

http://www.mmcinstitute.com/who.html
I. Love. Pizza.

And I love mom and pop pizza shops and am against the chain onces. In that sense, I really like the concept of this website but it doesn't deliver on usability.

If I do a quick search in Los Angeles, only Mulberry St. Pizza pops us. If I do it again, Pizzeria Mozza pops up. What is with the inconsistency? What do all the colors mean? Why won't my added location pop up when I search for it? Once all these bugs are fixed and there is a larger user base then all the pizza lovers of the world would think your website is awesome. It is different from Yelp and I like that because it is not cluttered. In any case, I would say to continue working on it and in the end it will pay off somewhat.
Can you elaborate? I assumed the problem was "JavaScript dependency management and concatenation".

What I described is essentially what we do in Objective-J. During development it just resolves the dependencies at runtime, but when you deploy you can flatten them into one big file.
Cable firms look to offer TV programs online
I disagree. Keeping people alive longer without slowing aging would be economically costly, but a cure for aging would be a huge economic boon. Right now, it's a huge cost center for our economy, both in terms of medical expenses for those far down the road, and also the loss of experienced people. I think the economic benefits would offset the population pressure.
At first it seems annoying and really dims the monitor (10PM here). After about 15 minutes I turned it off and was blinded by the brightness. Its now running again. Wonder if this will make me tired earlier, need to stop this 2am nights.
It seems that concatenating scripts could hurt performance in browsers that can do parallel script downloading, since it can no longer take advantage of the parallelism.
How can there not be screenshots?
Social Media Algorithm: Hacker News
我发现 Hacker News 是因为 reddit 的缘故。Hacker News 所属的 Y Combinator 是 reddit 的种子投资公司，后来 reddit 卖给了 Condé Nast，两个团队都赚了一票。

Y Combinator 只关注于最早期的创业团队，在创业团队的起步阶段介入并提供相应的帮助。Y Combinator 会定期举行 Funding Application 的活动，接受创业团队提交的项目资料。项目如果评审通过的话，Y Combinator 会提供一种“$5000 + $5000n”模式的投资，其中 n 指的是愿意参与此项目投资的 Y Combinator 合伙人的人数。比如，如果有 2 个合伙人愿意投资，那么最终的投资额度是 $15000；如果有 3 个的话就是 $20000。作为回报，Y Combinator 将占有创业团队 2% 到 10% 的股份，通常是 6%。钱虽然不多，但在现今创业公司大量使用 open source，AWS 或者 GAE 的情况下，这些钱也确实够展开工作了。

据说 Y Combinator 已经累计投资了 80 多个创业项目，除 reddit 之外，我还算熟悉的另外一个是 Scribd ——“YouTube for Documents”。Y Combinator 最初总共为 Scribd 提供了 $12000 的投资。Scribd 在 2007 年 5 月正式上线，随即就是飞速地增长，上线一个月之后就完成了 $3.5 million 的 A 轮融资，2008 年 12 月又完成了 $9 million 的 B 轮融资，发展得很是不错。一个有意思的事情，Scribd 有一个超级 NB 的用户，Barack Obama，对，现任美国总统！

在 Y Combinator 的合伙人中，我个人比较关注的是 Paul Graham。他写过一篇流传很广的文章，How to Start a Startup。Paul 在 Anti Spam 方面颇有造诣，以前我在研究相关问题时，从他这里学到了很多东西。Paul 是 Lisp 的大牛，另外还是 Arc 语言的设计者，Hacker News 应该就是用 Arc 语言开发的。Paul 始终称自己是一名 programmer，相比于当前乌泱乌泱的架构师，很是洒脱。

下面言归正传，看看 Hacker News 使用了怎么样的算法。

Hacker News 所使用的公式非常简单，

(p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5

其中，
1）p 表示文章得到的投票数，之所以要使用 (p - 1)，应该是想去掉文章提交者的那一票。
2）(t + 2)^1.5， 这个是时间因子。t 表示当前时间与文章提交时间间隔的小时数。但为什么要加 2 之后再取 1.5 的幂，似乎就没什么道理可言了，也许是个 trial-and-error 的结果吧。

总体来讲，Hacker News 的公式不像 reddit 设计的那么巧妙。但是与 reddit 相比，Hacker News 的用户群比较集中，提交的文章更 Focus，质量也相对更高一些，因此实际的效果并不差。其实某些时候，解决问题就是这样，够用就好。
I love this! It will indeed drive some of the VCs nuts. And it's the ultimate test. Everyone's money is the same. What can you bring to the table beyond a check? Tell me something smart and I might take your money.

It's the right way for a founder to do due diligence, and it puts the relationship upside down with VCs. I'd love to be in that position. I got my share of calls from VC associates, but the real VCs I care about barely give me more than the time of day.
Cufon - a flashless alternative to sIFR
Facebook is now competing with Disqus (et. al)
Facebook just launched a comments widget powered by Facebook Connect.
It seems really strange at first, but after giving it a few minutes, it's much easier to look at the screen now. I hadn't realized how blinding the "daylight" setting was at night.
How do we know Facebook stumbled? Maybe their goal was to test the waters and see how much they could get away with, and they succeeded.
Thanks for the frank insight.
Video is an effective way to warm the planet, burn nonrenewable fuels, and send more batteries to toxic dump sites.
While we are on the topic of light... What is the ideal lighting for a home office? I find my eyes start to hurt when I'm on my home PC but they never bother me at work.
Test for the system
This sounds nice. I like to dim the lights a bit before I go to sleep so that I fall asleep faster. When I do that, I manually dim my laptop too.

This might 1) Remind me that it's getting late and that I should go to sleep soon, and 2) Help me fall asleep without the manual brightness-setting.

But alas, I'm an Ubuntu man.
I think the US auto bailout adequately explains why Americans are behind in the automotive industry. The Tesla is really more a showcase than a usable vehicle. In many parts of Europe electric cars are quite normal, where I live the local park authority only drives electrical cars.

You have a point with the Iphone and android, but carrierwise the US is way behind both Europe and Asia. Where I live (in Europe) texting has been a mainstream technology for ten years, and most of my friends only have 3g wireless internet. Cabled internet is old school.

Oh, and with the physics you mention: Newton (newtonian mechanics) was English, Einstein (relativity) was German, Niels Bohr was Danish, Heisenberg was German, Erwin Schrodinger was Austrian, Paul Dirac was British, Max Planck was German, and Ludwig Bolzmann was Austrian. (all of them pioneers of quantum mechanics, along with Einstein).

You do have Feymnann though ;-)
How do I do this for Linux?
An Open Letter to Eric Schonfeld
TechCrunch has done it again, proving themselves to be egotistical jerks.
Based on what I've seen, this site kicks ass for learning guitar:

http://justinguitar.com/