skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the concept of passing functions (which many programmers are not comfortable with)

If this is true, I am apparently quite the programming badass, and so is anyone who has conquered the "callback function" section of your C textbook of choice. In some cases, I wouldn't know what to do without them, and I enjoy the fact that Python makes it seem very natural to be passing them around.
I try to start by capturing all my good thoughts into a notebook. The second part is I try to review all the things I have captured on a daily, and weekly basis. If I am not currently working on a project, then I try to be open to inspiration, total cheese I know, but I find that if I "force" it, like for the next hour I am going to work on having a good idea, I fail. My best idea/projects have all come in a bit and pieces and then they all of a sudden form into a solid idea. When I have an idea, I then try and build a prototype as fast as possible. At that point I am usually in a position to decided if I should continue, shelve, or give up. In the end whatever you decided to do, make sure you try and work with the intention of getting better at something. If you do that, in the long run it doesn't matter if you fail at a project because you still learned something along the way.
Facebook Sentiment Engine?
I can't believe anyone would actually use such a thing.

Discipline, people, discipline.
For me it boils down to whether or not the frame is adding any value to the page, unobtrusive, and easy to close.
I look at every project that is a candidate. The I ask: why would I want to do it? Concrete things, not generals like "I am passionate about it" (that's a prerequesite). I make this list for every candidate. Than I cross-check each reason with each candidate. The same for contra. The project with the most votes wins.
I'm sorry for this... I hadn't heard of it and hadn't seen it on Hacker News all day... thought it was kinda neat... ultimate prank I guess.
Yeah, it made me think about a funny thing that happened to me a month ago:

Last month I created the template for an HTML email on behalf of my brother. Based on the advice of MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/how_to_code_html_emails.p...), I used tables for layout. It worked on my first try. I could NOT believe how easy it was.

Due to the dirty feeling I get from using tables, I didn't let myself consider using tables more broadly for layouts. But now ... I feel like an alchoholic saying, "maybe just one little drink."
In an ideal world the Chinese and Japanese systems could be completely scrapped and replaced with purely phonetic systems.

In an ideal world, the American educational system would be plagued by problems so trivial as the English language being poorly designed.

[Edited to add: There is non-zero value in having the history, culture, and literature built up in one's national language. Japan would never stand for abandoning Japanese and thank goodness for it -- it would be like asking America to abandon every word committed to paper before 2008. You know, minor documents like the US Constitution, collected works of Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, all that rot that our ideal world would dispense with.)
Stanford class to help parents be better Facebook friends with their kids
Why not require your users to bring in new users to your site to avoid account suspension?
For example, you might require each user to bring in two new active users every month.

If they don't, their account will be suspended until they do.

Why would users put up with this? It is in their self-interest to have the site succeed.

Once traffic is high enough, this policy can be relaxed/eliminated.

P.S. I'm very upset with the failure of both http://numbrosia.com and http://chatbotgame.com to bring in much traffic. Numbrosia in particular can be very addictive but there is little incentive for addicted players to get their like-minded friends to play.
and please get rid of retry button too, doesn't refreshing the page serve the same purpose?
Yes, not having to install or maintain an internal Jabber server, plus a number of convenience features an internal Jabber server would not have out of the box. Filed under "I've more important things to do other than bitching about spending a few bucks a month with a Campfire account" :)
Exactly.

To be relevant, you'd need to consider this against XP's adoption taking into account rate of machine turnover.

Few people actually upgrade OS.

Yes, this means there hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade OS. But that doesn't mean that much. There hasn't been a very compelling reason to upgrade machines in general.

It might signal that MS were solving problems with Vista (security mostly) that didn't really exist.
I worked on the same team as Jamis Buck at BYU (I was a student). He introduced me to Ruby. If you think you know something about the culture there, I'd be very interested to hear about it.
It's commit message. (Hence

commit -m

) But I knew what you meant.
Keeping score here:
At the branch where I worked, all the lowest-level employees were allowed this information and were encouraged to make individual decisions about inventory.

I guess that means it's either a lie, a difference in local management, or true but misleading?
even the previous year's (2007) returns were not great (6.9%)...you would have made more on the sp500.

VC spend has been too strongly correlated to the web, a business that continues to move towards fewer larger companies. i defy anyone to take up pg's bet that the future will be a high number of small companies, particularly on the web. go ask amazon's online bookstore competitors how they are doing. ask the bazillion ad networks that are getting stomped by google. this market is out of the build phase.
I fully acknowledge that this is the kind of thing that can give privacy advocates nightmares about what Facebook and Google are capable of, but I'm incredibly excited by ideas like this. Things like this are what keep me interested in Computer Science, the possibility of being able to capture and study real, raw data from people outside of a laboratory setting as they respond to the most important current events of their day. Again, there's a lot of potential for abuse, but I'd be intrigued to see what lawmakers and corporations could do with information on how people at large "really" felt about them.
Just my two cents but I would say that this argument is not counter-productive, but rather essential to the web moving forward.

Until CSS is improved, tables will never go away.
FWIW, they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article, and I think this is where the problem is -- the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well. For better or worse, telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is, for the time being, a non-starter.

The article is really interesting. I guess if the question is "would it be cheaper to raise the food in the sun and drive it into town or use that energy to raise it in a building" it's possible the answer would be the latter, particularly if we're talking specifically about ensuring caloric and nutritional production, not specific foods. Furthermore, there are other points on the continuum that may also work well, such as the large grocery store that has a huge garden inside for fresh ingredients.

I guess the proof is in the pudding. There must be a reason why foods are processed in rural areas and only transported into towns in high calorie form (HFCS, beef, concentrated juices). I suspect subsidies contribute, of course. However, there's too much variability in opportunities to explain it all, in my opinion.
That may be a bit biased since I imagine Mac users would be more willing to stop using IE for another browser.

A Windows user may not be as likely - especially since IE isn't the default browser on a Mac.
Edward Tufte's Flatland Sculptures
More:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/sculpture
As a blogger, speaking from my own personal experience, cold calling is perhaps the absolute worst way to pitch. I generally end up just ignoring calls unless I'm expecting them for a planned product/news brief. They're distracting, take up too much of my time for potentially little reward, and break up my work day making it harder for me to concentrate on blogging.

My former colleague Marshall Kirkpatrick put up a post last April about the wrong ways to pitch ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pitching_rww.php -- #2 is via phone (though Marshall didn't mind it as much, Sarah, Richard, and I all preferred pitches by email).

In July I wrote a post the original poster (or anyone else) might find helpful about how to pitch a blogger: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/12/how-to-pitch-a-blo...

I was mostly writing about how to pitch me, but I think the advice might be helpful when figuring out the best way to pitch any blogger.

The short version: 1. Don’t Cold Call — Email First 2. Engage Us In Our Natural Habitat 3. Personalize Your Communications 4. Offer An Exclusive 5. Pitch An Angle 6. Be Flexible 7. Give Adequate Lead Time
Because people will say "screw this" and leave your site for good?
Perhaps the site has no direct competition?
1 in 7 mobile game downloaders is an iPhone user
As someone who is studying Computer Science, I understand and even share your enthusiasm for exciting new ideas. The technical challenge that a problem like this presents is very, very interesting. That being said, history is full of exciting scientific problems whose solutions have been abused. I certainly don't have a solution, but it seems to be a common theme associated with scientific innovation :-).
What are we looking for here?
> Have fun seeing your SEO go down the drain.

What rubbish are you reading? Tables vs css make zero difference. never has, likely never will, for all the obvious reasons (why bother? What difference does it make to users etc).
I suspect such requirements will be gamed with fake email accounts, which are then abandonded

Much better to do Knighthood on facebook style pyramid schemes: bring in people and you get stronger.
Actually, I believe it's more like a "tag", git's version of which is similar to svn's (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.tags.html)
After this trial ends, they should just not offer service to Italian internet users or businesses ... Ideally they should set up some sore of embargo with all the major players [content providers, network owners, software producers, etc]. I think that a lot of companies would be willing to join in to help make an example of Italy so other countries don't try the same sort of bullshit in the future.
The new users they bring in must be active. To get around the problem with one user using multiple accounts, you could look at overall traffic, require a unique cell phone number to register, reward use of only one account (e.g., to preserve your score in a game), etc.
Friendster relocates to Australia
s/trumpet/trump/
Do we really want this kind of bickering around here? There's a time and a place for every technology. Everything has pros and cons. There's no perfect solution. There are lots of good solutions. Sometimes CSS is one and sometimes Tables are one.

Usually tables are used for tabular data. It is helpful for understanding what is on the page. It helps the robots.

CSS knows nothing about the data. It doesn't care what's in whatever it is making pretty and the robots are fine with that.

There's so much work to do. Why do we argue over these silly things. If you can do it with tables, do it with tables. If you can do it with CSS, I'll pay you 5 or maybe 10 dollars more per hour.

Look, for every weakness you can find in the CSS route, I can find a weakness in the tables route. Try doing a fluid design with tables. Show me a search results page that will automatically fill in tiles to fit the users' resolutions. That's hard to do with tables, you have to use JavaScript and it's nuts.

With CSS, just make them float left.

That's why CSS is cool, little things like that. Yes, Tables are easier, they are. No one denies it. Easier does not make it better. Just because CSS has some flaws doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.

CSS is good, it's separation of data and presentation. It's division of labor. It's not bad. It's good.

If you have an application for example and you want to let your users put information anywhere using only one text file and without programming, let them do it with CSS. That makes sense. Tables are hard to make dynamic...

Maybe that's the divide: static vs. dynamic

Static layout with tables, fine. Dynamic layout with tables, not fine.

Look, anyway, why all the animosity toward the CSS'ers? CSS is totally fine. No need to be hatin. It's not a popularity contest, it's a technology that can be used to do things.
I've been thinking about starting a side project as a learning experience. So what are the ideas and knowledge that you have found most helpful in your current projects? I think having goals about what I wanted to learn would be more beneficial than just doing something, so I'm wondering what all of you want to learn in your businesses/startups.
Yes, that would be a good argument, but that wasn't the one made in the article. Ehrenreich had a job in Minnesota, which is slightly cheaper to live in than Phoenix, by most standards. Should she still have moved?
Behavior: $1? No Thanks. 100 Cents? You Bet.
Do you have enough volume to consider A/B testing?

Given a large enough sample size, you should be able to determine an optimum pricing scheme.

I'm no expert on A/B testing, just my $0.02.
Insulin possible new treatment for Alzheimer's disease
Read the Diffs
The one that keeps floating to the top.
I feel like a good lecture is like a passage in a textbook where someone has highlighted all the good parts for you, and then written a single sentence at the end in thick, dark marker that sums it all up.
Surgeons remove healthy kidney through donor's vagina
Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
This can go somewhat badly. I had a professor who did something like this. He would assign reading and spent a lot of time answering questions, sometimes around a half hour or so. The bad part is that he would not require homework to be turned in until the evening, so the questions have ended up being over homework. This means that if you have done the homework correctly, there is a fair amount of wasted time in class. So it seems to benefit more the people who didn't actually finish the homework before class.
It's possible he meant they simply had the ability to control the number of items ordered for inventory, rather than their placement or marketing.

If the floor employee knows what is selling, it makes sense to let them hit the 'reorder this' button.

But this is entirely conjecture on my part.
Instead of a backpack, I use a "uservoice" page for projects that are interesting but I'm not going to do them. Then others can add comments, add ideas, implement the ideas, ...

Similar to Tantek's reasoning for wikis, I like sharing the ideas that I'm not going to implement any time soon
Explore the Ocean in new Google Earth
Transaction & Batch-processing in Grails
Day 14 shows up twice (day 15 is missing).
> And if Sousa were right, the country wouldn't now be full of clubs, bars, cafes and concert halls where live music is performed

Compared to Sousa's time, the country isn't "full" of places where live music is performed. It's practically empty.

In his time, every bar had live music every night. Today, most don't any night, and most of the ones that do only have it on weekends.

Even fairly small companies had bands - big ones had one or more at every facility. I can't think of three established companies that have bands today. (A group of people getting together to jam at the company party doesn't count.)

We may hear more music today, but people heard far more live music before recorded music caught on.
On the surface I think many will just read that this method is about reading assigned material before you enter a classroom. But I think the real gist of this method is creating a different, better, relationship between student and teacher to create genuine excitement in imagination.

After 2 years in college I stopped taking notes and just started listening. My GPA went from Deans list to "average," but my learning increased exponentially (ever notice how science types like an excuse to use that work?). I did horrible in classes that were only about memorizing facts, like sociology, even though, I have learned now, that that was a horrible way to approach such an awesome topic.

However, I did excel in classes where I had an "endeavor to conquer the subject matter." Most notably, I ended up working way ahead of my CS degree without realizing it. I was just following a path of reading material with just a few conversations with good professors.

In the end, I learned how to learn. I don't really remember much of anything from any of my coursework (4 years out now). But I know how to learn it again if I need to, and more importantly, there is no topic that I fear approaching for the first time or repeatedly.
I think a middle approach is optimal: Have one or two friends to study with, preferably people you know in real life. You get interesting conversations and gentle pressure to keep up without trolls or groupthink.
Hulu Wins the TweetBowl
In a system in which learners could shop for the most suitable schools

That's the way it would be if all schooling were on online. Naturally, there would be no physical schools, but children not logging-in from home might use local commercial generic offices for internet access, just as some telecommuters do. From the local generic office, children could still log-in to the school of their choice. Since the school choices could be worldwide, the number of schools available to choose from might number in the millions.
IMO, those kind of things would cause me to leave the site. Unless it truly offered something amazing, it wouldn't be worth the effort for me

Of course, I may not be the target demographic, just my 2 cents

I don't have anything else to add to the discussion so I won't be checking this thread, I hope you have a good discussion and get lots of solid feedback =)
Doesn't matter. Lots of people just want to get something done. The more rules you put in place to prevent this will just get annoying. Better to think of a different way to approach the problem.
Could you get rid of the override when following links from the homepage but allow it when direct-linking into a post?

I wouldn't care about the override, except that I often have to refer back to previous topics for some technical advice, or end up coming across news.YC from a Google search. It's really frustrating to hit the noprocrast timeout in those cases, particularly since I'm usually doing work at the time.
I'm sorry, but this is a terrible idea. If you have to bring in two new users a month, that's 24 users a year. There are probably about 24 people I know that I'd be ok with sending such an invite to. However, after I send out an invite to the first two during the first month, the next month those two will also have to send out two invites. Odds are that at least a few of those four invites will go to people in my potential invite pool. I'm guessing that within 4 months tops, all the people I'd want to send invites to would have already received one.

Also, keep in mind that such a requirement would definitely reduce the number of users who accept invitations to join. "Oh, hey, join this free, immature site that also requires you to do their work for you (bring in new users" "Yeah, screw that, buddy."

You can't force social marketing. By trying to make users spread the word, you'll end up alienating them and hastening the end for your site unless it is SO AMAZING that it dispenses kittens and blowjobs every time you sign up a new user. If you have a decent idea, you can get the word out and people will spread the news (centsports.com comes to mind, it didn't take long for most of my friends to hop on that via word of mouth).
they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article

It is a book chapter (6, of The Ultimate Resource II). Have you read the book?: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource
I guess the proof is in the pudding.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_...
Well that makes two of us then.
Programmers, Promise Yourself This
I came up with this, but I never use it:

Through the day, I have a fluctuating "importance threshold". During free time the threshold is very low; during work time it's high. At any given time I do the most fun thing that's above the threshold.
My experience is that good investors know that profit+loss projections for certain kinds of products at certain stages are pretty much useless. In these cases, your goal is to make something that isn't laughable (when forced to make projections).

It's easier to forecast expenses -- you know how many engineers you want, and can guess at legal, rent, etc.

But it's also good, if you can't have a market ready piece of hardware within two years, to have an alternate source of revenue in the beginning. For example, you could sell a suped-up (expensive) early-adopter version for a year which will serve as a prototype for the real (cheaper) consumer version.

Plan to sell very little in the beginning, as that's what always happens in hardware. And consider planning to sell through someone else. For example, if your device has to do with telephony, assume you will sell through one of the major telephone networks in your area. Then guess at what percent of their users in your target market area you can convert in the first year and calculate your cut of the sale. It's easier to estimate sales if you're thinking about taking a bigger and bigger slice out of a large, defined pie (rather than growing from nothing).
It's better to make them too big than too small. There's no real reason to be conservative, within reason. If you make them too small you force the investor to think of ways that you could be bigger to generate the return that he or she wants.
For those of us that need it, it makes all kinds of sense. Figuring out better ways to control future me is an ongoing project of mine.

A couple weeks ago I gave my buddy $20, if I get my app out for sale by the end of the month I get it back, if not he spends it.
the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well.

Not if it costs more to produce food in rural areas than to produce the same food in urban areas.

telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is [...] a non-starter.

The statement of HeyLaughingBoy that I was responding to was: "Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn."

What I had been referring to in my original comment was the raising of "dairy cows" in urban areas. If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?
I can't agree with this more. I despised gym and sports in high school, but in college I gradually took on more physical activity through a bit of martial arts (I was still a total slacker when it came to showing up for training, but it was better than before...) and I really think there's something that all intellectuals can learn through the concentration and coordination required from some sort of intense physical exercise. It's just my theory, but I think that part of the problem for "hackers" is that we tend to have eclectic tastes and conventional sports don't always appeal to us. So, if you don't like the normal sports of baseball, football, etc., seek out something different that's still good exercise. Try ultimate frisbee, or kendo, or rock climbing. You're bound to like something.
I am going to delete all my music files
Tim O'Reilly's Zen Reflections