skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the sentiment.

In general, I think there's a large value to "not asking anything of your customer" from time to time.

Note that Brian's blurb did not mention a coupon, or a promotion, or any insinuation of buying something right now. I think sales / marketing people often send promotions thinking they're doing a favor for the recipient ("Here's $5 off!"), but really, they're just creating pressure to buy stuff.

Obviously, not every marketing message can be like this. But, a certain portion of B2C messages should acknowledge / compliment / convey information, and ask nothing in return. After all, you don't constantly ask favors of your real-world friends ... no reason to think it's different in commerce.
Or the new google maps. A 400 square km harbour down the road from me has just vanished. It's all land now.
This would probably be best for a focused sprint to build the first (or next) iteration of a product. You need to be back in real life to interact with users and pivot the idea if necessary.
My favourite is one that provides mini-games to keep me entertained whilst TextMate completes searches.
We have a Keurig coffee machine along with a lot of different types of coffee. I don't see energy drinks being any worse than coffee. At a small office, the selection of products shouldn't imply what kind of behavior the company expects of employees. It's just a group of people trying to work together, which includes buying whatever food or drinks are desired and reasonable.

I realize that it'd be nice to encourage healthier habits, but since it's not anybody's real job to stock the kitchen, it's been path of least resistance. Personally I hate caffeine, but it's not the worst thing.
(I would love to be proven wrong by somebody who knows what Mensa spends their brainpower thinking about :))
Oh yes, yes! Totally agree!
In my comment I've been referring to a typical russian mentality. And Russian Jews have a very different mentality, from the one I've been referring to.
Very nice! Now I can watch when my brother gets his power back and call him up and freak him out that I know so quickly.

I just started irb and required the sandy gem and ran the example code. And boom: data.
If you paid for it, defeating the dongle isn't something I think of as stealing. If you pay, go for it. I read it as getting the new version for free, that is a different kettle of fish.
The Tool-Task Dichotomy
"should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more content?"

Since the incumbent has already campaigned the previous election, fairness dictates that he shouldn't be allowed to campaign at all against the challenger.
Because tablets lower the bar for proficiency. If tablets were just lower power, cheaper computers that happened to be portable and have touch screens, you wouldn't see adoption of tablets by casual users.
Fantastic. Great start to the week. Everyone go out there and fucking kill it this week.
What percentage of successful HN applicants are Singaporean? I know at least half (he was born there), but it could be a interesting number to know.
I actually think this would be really cool for working on a book or similar creative project. But for a startup.. "with bad internet connection" rules out almost anything I'd want to do startup-wise, alas.

One day I hope to try what John Carmack used to do. Go away to a really dull area with a nice hotel and spend a week working with zero interruptions :-)
Cocos2d Conversion Tips for the iPhone 5
Maybe, to some degree, that's true. But... I never spent any time learning how to take IQ tests, and have been tested at multiple stages - specifically IQ tests, and also the ACT/SAT.

First tests I remember, I was 9. Then ACT at... 15? Maybe it was 16. Then more IQ tests (3 different ones, IIRC) about 4 years ago. All showed me to be in the same X percentile, with a very small degree of variance between tests and over 30+ years of taking them.

And to repeat, I never spent any time learning how to 'take' a test. It was actually disappointing to get the test results and compare them to ~30 years earlier, and not see any change. I thought I'd have been 'smarter' as an adult, but I do realize it's not really testing that so much as... raw capacity perhaps? That hasn't demonstrably changed, despite all the life that's happened to me. No major health issues tho; I can certainly imagine that had I had a brain injury, my IQ test scores would be lower.
I think the simple fact the writer knew the answer, (Hen) but then went on to explain why it might be other things showed a lack of intelligence if anything.

Anyone who's intelligent would know Kosher is a cultural test so is not valid.

If you don't know how to answer the question correctly it's a lack of intelligence, not you're smarter than the test. Knowledge of the state of mind of others is what is normally defines intelligence in animals. Knowing what answer they want is part of the test. Some people just don't get it...

This is the same as psych tests that ask if you want to commit suicide. If you don't know why this question is there then the test is working. You're not smarter than the test because you think it's a stupid question, you just don't understand the test.
Possible virus or corrupted chrome plugin on my mac. Need Help!
I made this post late last night that got 4 comments and then burried: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4739517

It was titled 'Websites i've never visited are in my Chrome history. Mac virus? Corrupt plugin?'. Since posting it, the only plausible/reasonable situation was that i had google chrome syncing my history between devices, but...

1) I didnt watch hulu.com on any other devices

2) I havent been logged into chrome in a week: http://imgur.com/WmrAS

3) I'm the only computer to be logged into my account all month: http://imgur.com/NeL01

I'm thinking I either have a virus or one of my plugins is corrupted. That's the only thing I can think of. If it's a virus, well... a new mac virus in the wild would not be good. If it's a corrupted plugin... I only have 3 pretty popular plugins installed on chrome, so that would also not be good.

The device in question is an Early 2010 MacBook Pro running Mac OSX 10.8.2. My Google Chrome version is 22.0.1229.94

I am using the following Chrome Plugins:

- Reddit Enhancement Suite 4.1.3

- Hacker Face 5.8

- PageSpeed Insights (by Google) 2.0.2.2

I would really like to get to the bottom of this. Any ideas HN?
I have to admit that some themes posted in this article run through my head every now and then. My plan is to use the runway I've amassed over the past year to work on startup projects while cutting out freelance work. Will I find new clients if I fail with my projects? Can I even compete with the lengthy requirements of most companies around here (Silicon Valley) require? Will being "out of work" for a year hurt my chances to get a job if I need one?

While these thoughts pass through my head, I don't believe things are as dire as they were in 2001 - 2002. Hopefully working on side projects can give me enough of a resume in the worst case scenario. I guess time and experience will tell if this and similar situations will be difficult in the next few years.
Building a form isn't a challenge. Its trivial. Most developers have stock CSS and validation they reuse from project to project, customizing as necessary.

Services like wufoo and formstack are for non-technical users, not developers.
One thousand times this. The best way to design flexible and maintainable systems is to encourage small and simple objects and functions that can be asked to collaborate together via well defined interfaces. This collaboration will always require some objects to provide information that other objects and functions can use.

In addition, the fact that part of an object's interface is the same as its implementation can mean that the implementation details are exposed (sounds bad), or that the implementation closely matches the interface (sounds efficient). Use your brain, not a canned rule, to decide which one of those is happening in your code.
"You're a loser until you're a winner."
Intelligence is like an idea: without execution, nothing.
A true genius doesn't want fame, fortune, awards, he doesn't want to stretch hands, hell, he doesn't even want to sign autographs. All he want is peace, out of the spotlight, in absolute and maddening silence, to keep doing what he does best.

To think.
I've actually written an IQ test that a lot of people have taken. When researching how to put together an IQ test it became clear to me that from the beginning IQ testing was not, and never will be, a valid way to rate intelligence.

The simplest explanation is that "IQ score" is not fundamentally different than "SAT score" or "GMAT score" and is in a lot of ways worse because there are so many different interpretations and scoring methods for IQ. You can score 150 on one test but it might be scored completely differently than a test someone else takes. In other words, there is no agreed upon and copyrighted standard for IQ.

All of this type of testing really just sucks. All we really know is that IQ testing (or SATs, etc.) measures... something. And since people need to be quantified in some way, we use these scores for people-sorting. We TOTALLY overuse these scores without understanding them, and people feel great or feel horrible about their scores because of their usage (which is unavoidable) and for what it seems to say about them (which is very little).

It is hard to not feel good or bad about your score, even knowing all of this. We WANT to be rated, we want to score well and score better than others. That's human nature - just don't forget that your score will never impact what you can and can't achieve in life.
Wasn't this on here a couple days ago?
I am pleasantly surprised by how much I agree with this article and it applies to other technology like cars, tools, etc. A good corollary is a proficient user is well served by spares.

Ex: our router is acting up so I'll swap it with one sitting on a shelf. Or, it's easier to fix your computer or car if you have another one to download patches or give you a few days to get the job done.
Agreed it's redundant, but there's something else about it too. IQ is biological. You may just as well have a club for left-handed people, or people with green eyes. You'll have about as much in common with them.

Not entirely true, but the few Mensa meetings I went to were all 'social' ones (met at a restaurant), and I had nothing demonstrable in common with the people there other than having the same biological brain ability. We probably did have some things in common, but no one went out of their way to welcome me, and I didn't bother to try to make myself welcome either, so I quit going.

What I think we may have had in common is some of the same social experiences of being outsiders looking in to 'normal' societal groups. Certainly everyone's experiences are different, but often highly intelligent people will be ostracized (through their own fault or the fault of others or both), and being able to relate based on those shared experiences can be useful in some capacity. The group I went to didn't seem to be in to that.
Do you think I am making a case against prescription medication? Have I failed to communicate that thoroughly?
your recommendation is real good ... thanks for sharing :)
I put on 40 pounds in my 3 years at a .com startup between 2000-2003 mostly because of the free soda machines (and i hadn't switched to diet soda yet) and free junk food vending machines on each floor. there wasn't any fruit ever. i think the healthiest food was someone stocked a cupboard with rice crispy squares on each floor too.
Singaporean here. The article is a typical outsider view of our system, which isn't as perfect as it sounds.

In the first place, the majority of Singapore's successes is largely due to a pro-business policy which has attracted massive amounts of foreign direct investment.

In the second place, my observation is that in general Singaporeans are well-schooled, not well educated. As Mark Twain put it, there is a difference.

And there is also the uglier side of a hyper-competitive system which darylteo has pointed out. And then you ask yourself, where do the "losers" of this competition end up?

The challenge at this stage is to ensure we move our lowest gear up - and I can assure you, our lowest gear is pretty low. Unfortunately, unless the technocrats get mind-transplants from the people who did the Finnish or Danish model, I don't think its going to change.
I suspect you wouldn't have gotten demonstrably/statistically much better with repeated takings. Maybe if it was the same test multiple times, but even then I'm not sure.

A few years ago I had 3 IQ tests administered to me over several weeks. There wasn't any major difference between any of the scoring/ranking, despite the fact that I was taking multiple. I never got much 'better'.
Example: I bought a AMD 3-core CPU a few years ago for about $120. The passmark score for that CPU is just under 3,000. Today for $120 I can get an AMD FX-6100 for $120 which gets a passmark score of 5,400. So, nearly twice the computing power at the same price.

In another year that FX-6100 will cost considerably less, thus giving the same horsepower for a lower cost.

Race to the bottom does imply making things cheaper but it not necessarily true that it's also worse. The XBOX 360 is now half the price it was when it was first released and yet more reliable and uses less power.
The Summly app doesn't create summaries and I don't think algorithms will ever create good summaries.

Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creative, young, ambitious, pulled together a good team and created a great looking app but I don't believe this will solve the problem.

Before I created Skim That[1], a human powered news summarizing website, I looked into how Summly and other TL;DR algorithms worked to decide which direction I wanted to go in. I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph.

Try it yourself. Read a story and try to manually find a few sentences that best summarize it. Then, without rewriting anything, try to put those sentences into a paragraph or two. You'll find that you end up with a confusing summary that's difficult to read.

The amount of words Summly limited itself to (one iPhone screen worth) is brilliant. It keeps things simple and easy to skim through but what's produced by the service is so short that it should be called a "tease" not a "summary".

Of course, the Summly app does hit the nail on the head with a summary every once in a while but this hit or miss style makes for a bad experience.

Summarizing algorithms aren't the automation challenge, those will never work right as demonstrated by the "try it yourself" challenge above. The real automation challenge is rewriting the important sentences in such a way that they make sense together and provide proper context.

On Skim That, I'm trying to solve the problem by crowd sourcing the summarizing process and asking readers to summarize a story. I've gotten a few people to give it a shot and several of those continue to summarize stories every once in a while. My challenge is how to get people more interested in participating and how to get search engine traffic to a website that goes against many SEO principals.

[1] http://skimthat.com

Edit: Human or machine, I think the summary race is great for readers and helps people be more informed. I wish Nick a lot of luck and hope that one of us solves this problem soon.
API Engine - Collaborative API documentation platform
Therefore when we jumped both feet into Clojure we unconsciously brought with us the belief that comments just weren’t needed

I used to be in the "code tells a story, no comments needed" camp. In large part because two of my three university courses had automatic marking system which detracted points if comments exceeded a certain percentage of text mass. Habits!

Gradually I've been finding myself commenting more and more in my code. In FP (mostly F#) code I almost always end up with some incredibly information dense set of lines that needs at least some defense of its existence.

Having spent some recent weekends reading the sources of id-software games[1] I've started to really think about the approach to comments in imperative code too. I've started commenting lots and then cutting it down later. If anything, it helps me reason about my code better.

On a totally separate tangent, I feel like the kernel of most of my FP code for data processing is essentially array programming like APL / J, just way way way more verbose.

[1] https://github.com/id-Software
can I suggest (completely off topic) before you launch to get a domain other than wisecashHq just because it would be better to not have 2 repeating H (especially if you are in france, where the ache sound might make pronunciation tough) wisecash.co ? or something easy to spell. good luck! or better said bonne chance!
I don't exactly think so. I'm referring to places where people prefer intellectually hard, risky, unethical and damaging work (eg cybercrime) instead of working legally on creating valuable products and companies.
I was interested to learn about examples of places and detailed descriptions of circumstances that lead to similar consequences.
One way intelligence manifests itself is through the ability to score well in an IQ test. Another way is through the ability to make an impact on the world. But I think another really strong characteristic of intelligent people is their tendency to lead a rich inner life. I get the strong impression most people go about their business without ever really thinking about how incredible it is that the universe not only exists but contains (at extremely low density) sentient beings capable of reasoning about it. Being one of those sentient beings is a remarkable stroke of luck. Intelligent people recognise that and celebrate accordingly.
go down to key west, inspired hemmingway to do a lot of writing.
If you think that "high IQ" and "genuinely intelligent" are the same thing, you are sadly mistaken.

Granted, IQ is correlated with intelligence. But there are lots of undeniably intelligent people who do not have remarkable IQs (eg Richard Feynman would not qualify for MENSA). Conversely your average MENSA chapter is full of people with undeniably high IQs and little sign of remarkable intelligence.

(Disclaimer. Based on my GRE scores, my IQ is about 1/10,000. Based on my experiences in the real world, I believe myself to be intelligent, but nowhere near what that hypothetical IQ score claims. I've always considered MENSA membership to be a filter for people whose only biggest accomplishment is a good score on an IQ test...)
I have never heard an academic in a race-studies, Sociology, or Communications department seriously grapple with criticisms of the "systemic racism" hypothesis for the white/black performance gap, and nor have I heard any other hypothesis offered. Students and professors outside those departments dutifully recite the same theories. As far as I can see, academia is a den of groupthink and cultural Marxism when it comes to such issues.
Well, it's exactly what Google says:

https://plus.google.com/116899029375914044550/posts/24uqWqvA...
Your analogy is incorrect. Making a copy/breaking DRM is not the same as stealing. Stealing deprives the original owner of a physical good, making a copy does not. That's why I wouldn't agree with you walking out of a store with a physical product.
TechSpy seems to require you to log in to view the article... their mobile site, however, doesn't.

This should be updated to the correct source of the article: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/barnes_noble_cut_table...
Or, you know, you could just use Youtube's playlist feature.
The article is an interesting mix of things you'd expect from economic theory: salaries going down as demand went down and supply stayed high, and things you wouldn't: the irrational aversion to people who got laid off and the importance of ass-kissing. Both of these things reduce efficiency, but they're a major phenomenon of the modern work force.
Lawsuits and "right mind" seldom are within shouting distance of one another.

http://suite101.com/article/good-samaritan-risks-lawsuit---s...

And just for a twist:

http://abovethelaw.com/2011/08/lawsuit-of-the-day-good-samar...
define('YFROG_AUTH_SALT', 'Obama reveals tough executive pay limits ');
This is awesome, I am surprised someone this young hasn't received VC funding previously. Whatever you think of the idea it isn't important, the person is important and he is one to watch. Ideas change all the time, and if this doesn't work he will have to change it. If it does work then all the negative commenters can eat their words.
I agree when comparing atom to a core, but I can't tell the difference between a i5 and a i7.
Probably because hacking into a gmail / facebook / twitter account is usually done by gathering informations about the victim by social engineering, and then trick the "lost password" form to get into the account.

Remember the guy whose macbook, ipad and iphone got wiped through iCloud ?
If you’re interested in healthier, non-junky snacks, check out Blissmo. Blissmo offers a monthly subscription service of healthier snacks, for offices, called the BREAKbox (www.blissmo.com/breakbox).

Examples of snacks include: organic, fair-trade dark chocolate, all-natural dried mango strips, locally-harvested pistachio nuts, and gluten-free, granola bars.

Also, Startups dig BREAKbox. Customers include: Twilio, Retargeter, Involver, indiegogo, Switchcam, Pocket and more.

Disclosure: I’m an intern at blissmo. Feel free to shoot me an email for any reason - yash {at} blissmo {dot} com.
How Tablet Shoppers are Changing eCommerce
This must be unique to the UK or finance jobs or some other variable other than simply "IT" or "consulting". As an independnet consultant, I've never seen demand higher in my niche, and that's with me constantly raising my rates over the past few years.
Most surprising things heard at Harvard’s Cyberposium