skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not exactly true. Kids will play with whatever they want until they feel pressure to conform from either parents (if a girl asks for a toy, she's handed a Barbie) or society (marketing only showing girls playing with dolls, kitchen sets.)

You might think your child had no parental intervention, but parents are only one factor in enforcing gender roles. Are you sure you've kept them from watching TV, reading, and playing with other kids whose parents are not like you?
LearnLaunch Looks to Spur Ed-Tech Startup Cluster in Boston
Lego is great. A while back they had something where you could design your own hero factory on their website, so my son started saving up and doing chores so that he could get one.

Well, after a couple of weeks, we went to build one, but we couldn't find anywhere where we could do it. The website said we could, but we couldn't find where to. My wife emailed Lego and asked them how to do it, but it turns out they were no longer doing it, but the website had not been updated (in fact, they had stopped doing it before we had even seen it to begin with).

My son was very sad of course, but Lego sent him a $20 gift card and a bunch of stickers and some stuff so that he could buy some other hero factory stuff, which made his day and allowed him to get much more than he could of with what he saved up.
I own a credit card company and maybe I could help you. I'll send an email later today :D
A History Of Music Made With Computers
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: For those who've not seen it, this site contains a mindbogglingly exhaustive (though I'd never claim complete) diagram of electronic music's genres throughout history, along with several audio clips for each of the genres listed. This makes it the best site for actually learning about the history of electronic music I've ever had the pleasure of coming across.
This is why it's important to have a todo list with more than one spot, or why it's important to keep another task in the back of one's head.
The real history is a lot more colorful than that. In the first dot-com boom, Zapata was a natural gas and fish meal company that tried to take over Excite (a major portal at that time) by rebranding itself with the name Zap.com [1].

They got widespread mockery and bad press coverage for that, and no longer use the domain.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapata_Corporation
I would like to coin an axiom:

The practical impact of a new invention is inversely proportional to the attention it receives from the popular press.

Weird bicycles, 3d printers, "breakthrough" cancer drugs, alternative energy sources, etc ad nauseum.
> (losing huge amounts of investors' money on hubristic hedge fund bets + lucky VC investments).

Wow, dammed if he does and damned if he doesn't in your eyes.

If he picks a winner it's luck, if he picks a loser, then no luck involved, that was all him.

As someone who sits on the side of trying to pick the winners i can assure you it's extremely hard and alot of work goes into it.

You may not like Peter, but let's try to give some credit where credit is due. He's clearly done many things right in his life.

His idea's might not be worth dismissing out of hand.

> As far as I can tell Thiel's successes are mostly based on tapping his social network. White guys already know how to do that, in theory

Classy
Start A Free Giveaway On Your Facebook Page
Right and Google makes money in a way most of us (meaning the norm) feel is a little smarmy or not ideal at best. Google just has a great brand of being hip (even if they are Bay Area hipsters of yesteryear) that "makes it ok."
I also went through the single founder interview experience and blew it, but for different reasons.

I had the domain knowledge and experience, but PG said my demo was too simple (which it admittedly was - it was a MVP to test some assumptions I had about the market).

It was an intense, yet very fun 10 minutes of my life...
Flux bulbs would entirely possible now that LEDs are becoming common place. Unfortunately it'd be tough to solve how to have all the bulbs change color temperature at once based upon the time of day.
It's not profit itself that is suspect, it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist". This attitude leads to beliefs that anything at all should be allowed, if there is profit in it. Literally anything. Government provides a way to say "perhaps there are other considerations beyond profit". Since you only have the hammer of economics in your acceptable tool list, everything looks like a business nail, and you twist implausible scenarios in which business solves the problem. The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.

Yes there are people to whom government becomes the hammer. But they are not the same set of people who say "lets not go overboard with the nails guys". (for all nails)
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: For those who've not seen it, this site contains a mindbogglingly exhaustive (though I'd never claim complete) diagram of electronic music's genres throughout history, along with several audio clips for each of the genres listed. This makes it the best site for actually learning about the history of electronic music I've ever had the pleasure of coming across.
For me, I got really into Minecraft for a while and felt that same magic and wonder that Lego offered as a kid -- Creating mockups and wireframes of things I wanted to create, then building them in the game, was just a ridiculously awesome experience.
Sign Language Science Lexicon Broadened by Researchers, Crowdsourcing
Read the article, your quote is out of context. Hamas military wing wasn't formed until 1992. Therefor attacks on civilians doesn't reflect their reputation in the 1980s, which is what those paragraphs are about.
I do think practicing is helpful and also having an outline of the major points you want to make in your head.

I use the 'memory palace' technique* for important talks so that I walk through a place I know in my head and each location is associated with a major point I need to make. This is important because I don't have the points on my slides (necessarily). The slides will often support the point, not make it.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
10 Essential Vi Tips
Excellent question. I'd love to see it officially answered as well.

I guess the hotspot owner is protected, given that users are identified by their own Facebook account and the credit card used to pay for the charges.
Using Google Webmasters and Google Analytics To Find Your Next Blog Post
I liked your writing style, it actually kept me engaged until the end. I guess it also helped that I had an interest since I'll be supporting php applications for the first time in 5 years.
Yea I recently moved my site's hosting. Try http://roguelynn.herokuapp.com/words/crap-im-speaking
Wait. Isn't Falcone one of the bad guys in 'Batman Begins'?
> If my niece wants to go down the Hotwheels aisle, she's certainly not going to be kept away.

She is, by other kids and Hotwheels marketing.
At my school (UCLA), there was not a formal requirement for publications or even an informal requirements. It looked like some professors emphasized publications more than others. I think, even if you aren't going into academia, they make a good unit of work and source of external feedback/validation.

My school did replace their Qualifying Examination with a research paper requirement (http://www.cs.ucla.edu/academics/graduate-program/graduate-s...), but it does not have to be published.

Unless things have changed recently, you certainly need more than 3 good publications to get a tenure-track academic position in CS. That means you have to either be a publishing machine while you are a student or do a post-doc.
Cool story, legendary toys.

Their manufacturing practice is also impressive, paying special regard to their consistency: tolerances like 2 micrometers, ~18 fails in a million bricks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#Manufacture). Any LEGO fan knows the difference between the real deal and "compatible" sets.
It's vaguely more useful than The Onion's "troublehacking"

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEE064653669DD57B

Also, have their lousy tips ever been "hacking"?
I have to agree 3 is considered a good rule of thumb but it is all very dependent on a number of factors such as your individual department and advisor.
Ethercalc.tw: design, node.js performance analysis
In the past, I've analyzed piracy rates to see which games were worth playing.

Black markets are still markets, and still have supply and demand. It's a fallacy when game developers don't use piracy numbers to indicate demand for their games.
Paper available here:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170528/msr-tr-2012-79.pdf

Incidentally, I hear this paper is quite similar to one that the Rust[1] folk recently authored regarding their "borrowed pointer" system, due to be possibly published next year. If this sort of thing interests you, I suggest you take a look at Rust (though keep in mind that it's still very pre-alpha).

http://www.rust-lang.org/
As someone who deals in this space both as owning "really good domain names" and helping people buy "really good domain names" for many many years there was nothing smart about what he did and how he spent the money from a quick read of the story.

One thing I can tell you is that we frequently get approached by people who have some kind of an idea that someone is going to let go of an asset because somebody really wants it and tells a good story. That approach is actually quite common. And anyone who owns even 1 good domain has almost for sure been approached by someone with a story about why they need the domain but don't have any money to spend.

Even though the owner of this domain isn't in the domain business they still have some idea of the value. They aren't just going to let the domain go because some guy shows up from London. In fact, how do they even know that's the truth? That he flew in from overseas just to do this transaction? And not for some other reason? This is not "Bud Fox" in "Wall Street".

I'm currently working on a deal trying to purchase a domain for someone which is owned by a non-profit Fortune 500 company. They don't need the money even though the amount the person is willing to pay ($50,000) is a good number for this domain.

The approach that I will try after being turned down by the usual suspects at the company is to simply work my way up to the board of directors at some point and perhaps make a case that as a non-profit the $50,000 can do some good and the domain isn't being used bla bla bla.

Find an angle that matters. (Note same angle probably wouldn't work with a for profit but it's worth a try with a non-profit ..)
His ideas about "picking" maybe, but then, why the hell are we listening to the rest of them?
How social networking helps male chimps get sex
I would not give money to a guy who writes on black background either.
5 Reasons to Invest in a Start-Up
His name is Mads Nipper and I wrote to him and Jorgen Knudstorp (the CEO) over email the day after I saw the film. Sadly despite a day's research I couldn't find an email address for either of them that wouldn't bounce so I left it. I could have killed a tree, but in the end something came up and I moved on.

I just dug it out again. I was really angry. I'm almost glad it didn't get through. Here is a short excerpt:

What in Thor's name were you idiots thinking? Did you seriously believe that you'd engender goodwill in the audience by spoiling the film as it was starting? It's EXACTLY as if you'd shown an advert before a 1980 screening of The Empire Strikes Back featuring Yoda, a handless Luke and Han Solo in a block of carbonite.

For great shame, Jorgen. May your bare feet always find bricks.
You need a Facebook profile to give them money? Why would they do that to themselves?
I think this is great, its always a sign that a community is growing well when it has dedicated conferences with such great speakers. Congrats guys, I'm looking forward to seeing where this takes off to!
You don't need to use the phone's identity for this. Force the user through a login screen on startup - if they have a paid for account, serve the requests, otherwise sever.

It's how Steam does it.
Our secret to getting cheap fans just expired
Transforming the desert into a life flourishing environment is really easy, you just have to add enough water. I believe that's how they do agriculture is large parts of Africa. It's of course quite expensive to do so if you can't get the water from, say, an aquifer. Sometimes you can even flood the whole area, if you want to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
Mars is about 1.5 times as far from the sun, so the intensity of sunlight is less than half

Don't break out the nukes yet…

No cloud cover is going to push up the average insolation, plus a thinner atmosphere will absorb less. Dust will bring it back down some amount.

Temperature could be handled with insulation. Aerogel might be good here. A thin layer of glass sufficiently hard to survive the blowing dust and then a layer of aerogel to retain heat but still pass most of the light.
Rapportive only has info on people who use their service and those who have their info available on their sources (eg social networks). It's a great tool but isn't comprehensive.
A Tool to Manage Recruitment – Review of myStaffingPro
"I'm surprised that calculating risk before investing large amounts of time and money"

The OP made a point of saying how he thought he had a good story to tell YC. The fact is something like this could backfire and show how naive you are and be easily viewed as stupid.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph. Dark background/white text is absolutely horrible.
As an ex-civil engineer, this would be an awesome, but expensive competition for freshman engineering students. I actually remember a problem set containing questions like "how tall a tower" ignoring things like stability for various materials.

Backing out some numbers from the piece, the 2x2 held 950 lbs, which is roughly 1000 lbs in 1/2"x1/2", or 4000psi. That's roughly the strength of ordinary unreinforced concrete, at a far lighter density. Legos are also similar to unreinforced concrete in their tensile strength, which is low, variable, and brittle. The usual calculation is that tensile strength is ~ 10% of the compressive strength for concrete, but it depends greatly on the cracks and other discontinuities.

From the problem set though, there's an interesting effect. If you taper the tower with an exponential curve, 1/e^x, the pressure on the bottom of the tower can be constant as you increase the both the footprint and the height. Not coincidentally, that's the same curve you find in towers in the real world like the Eiffel Tower and the CN Tower.

The ultimate height that you could make with a tower would certainly depend on what constraints you're applying. Is there a limited number of bricks? A limited base area? Any supports at all? How do the people actually assemble the thing? What safety regs are there?

With no constraints, I don't see a reason that legos couldn't be built to the height of the great pyramids. Apart from the obvious one that it would be hellaciously expensive.

Once you start talking about constraints and something more tower shaped than mountain shaped, stability is the biggest concern. Elastic stability will affect the tower, at least as an upper limit to the height/cross section ratio.
Writing style does not suck. Thanks for the timely tips. Just applied htmlspecialchars.
I recently read through a cliche list of attributes of successful people, one of them was 'don't have a backup plan'. I think while this is cliche, it is also true in a lot of ways. To me this sounds like your backup plan became having an awesome story to share, and your persistence transitioned from trying to obtain zap.com to trying to amplify the entertainment value of the story.
The Gmail app for iPhone and iPad: version 2.0
Describing time
Gmail iOS App
(speaking as someone who literally gave buttloads of presentations all over the world for over a decade)

if you use slides i suggest reading cliff atkinson's blog "beyond powerpoint bullets". in it he lays out ideas, principles and templates for PPTs (and any other preso tools) that tell stories. these are based on cognitive studies, like the number of bullet points you should use based on how much your audience can hold and remember.

secondly, advice from one of my ph.d. advisors: "tell 'em what you're going to be telling them, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told 'em". the take home message is not a punchline, so don't be afraid to "spoil" it up front and repeat it.

don't read your slides, use images (see the first paragraph) and tell a story. talk with passion, enthusiasm, and joy. RAVE: rate, articulation, volume, emotion (from mrs hedaman, my old theater teacher back in high school), remember that.

love what you do, and share that joy with your audience. that's the goal.
I think a main tension here is between the idea that PhDs are awarded to a person versus to a dissertation.

On one extreme, if a student has published (say) dozens of top-tier papers and (say) demonstrated broad expertise in the field, haven't they earned a PhD?

On the other extreme, if a dissertation makes a huge advance in its field, doesn't that work deserve a PhD regardless of the author's other accomplishments?
In an Unlikely Echo Chamber, Lucasfilm Captures a Cinematic Gunshot
Instantly invoking Godwin's law; knowing about the Nazis causes a moral shift towards making sure some horrible things don't happen again.

The same applies to PHP. please do use it for a bit, learn about the crimes and don't repeat them :)
Software Engineers Are Vastly Underrated
So I got my first bill from Amazon Web Services after moving off the free tier
I am sure they were extremely easy to work with, since they no longer have a patent on the LEGO brick and thus have no leverage over you:

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/expired-patent-of-the-day-l...
I think you're correct at a low-level, but reducing an entire person's thought process on the long term to a single focus? That is extremist. In any sufficiently complex system or company, you will have multiple inputs driving multiple results. You will be dealing with multiple people. Your work will touch the work of others. This may work in an extremely rigid, top-down authoritative structure, but personally I don't believe extremely rigid top-down authoritative structures are effective. Your opinions may differ from mine, but I think autonomy, mastery, and common purpose are far, far more powerful tools.
> Also, I'd argue that reading a long piece (especially if it contains an illustrative story) is much more memorable than a summary like this.

Yes, sometimes, but ...

1. Many people have limited reading time.

2. Many topics can be accurately distilled to a few words with no loss of meaning.

3. Economy of expression is highly esteemed in journalism, and it can often be accomplished with no loss of useful content.

Some tl;dr endeavors fall flat, and/or excise the meat along with the fat. Some succeed admirably.

Many submitted essays seem to have been written by someone who expects to be paid by the word, therefore the more words, the better. Such essays are often greatly improved through distillation.

So, in my humble opinion, no conclusion can be drawn -- each tl;dr effort should be judged on its merits.

I will close with my favorite tl;dr story, in which Woody Allen says, "I took a speed-reading course so I could read 'War and Peace'. It's about Russia."
$2.12
I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting that.
I use AWS for all the images on my website, because after doing some testing there was a notable difference in speed. I used the free tier for one year, then on November 1st, I started having to pay. I didn't really pay attention to the billing amounts in the past because I wasn't paying but I was expecting a much higher price.

Also notable, this is the biggest month I've in the history of my website, I hit the front page of HN 3 or 4 times, and the front page of Lifehacker and Adafruit industries blog. Most of my days were around 5k uniques, with spikes up to 20k with the plugs from the big sites.

All I can say about this is if you're thinking of using S3 for your CDN to make your website faster and save hard drive space, don't let monetary cost be an obstacle. This is a hell of a bargain, that's why I'm sharing it today.
I have seen PG and others on numerous occasions say they're interested in the smartest of people, some of whom may just have a bad idea and need mentoring in that regard.

It's a lot easier to point a smart/hard working person in the right direction
A Bunch Of Students Think They Have Found The Next Mark Zuckerberg (Dan Shipper)
Any public company worth its salt would do the same thing. The positive PR generated would be completely justifiable if any shareholder was crazy enough to sue. It's the same reason that public companies give to charities or sponsor events.
No other PC, just his iPad. And he uses the keyboard and thinks it works great, so you are wrong in saying that it is bad for generating content. That's your opinion, not a fact.
This is not the first time I've heard good things about Lego, the company.

A friend of a friend (I will try do double-check the story) wanted to use photographs of situations built with Lego to use as illustrations in a internal campaign she created for a company. She wrote to Lego headquarters and they authorised the use of the bricks in her materials, after some minor requests, such as attribution and trademarks.
Shipping is easy, asking for money is hard
We need to collect these stories
That's assuming that the users have the server access to install the packages or an up-to-date PHP interpreter. A lot of the appeal of PHP is that it is available on cheap shared hosting, which until recently would not be guaranteed to have PDO, mysqli and friends installed. If you have access to a VPS of some sort, you can easily install such things, but in that case you can also use a different language.
I wonder how this works when you need input from a coworker whose number one focus is different than your own. If this coworker, in turn, is reliant on input from you for something that is not your number one focus then you are deadlocked...each waiting for the other to finish but unable to finish until the other has time.
Love the concept as I was looking at an API for this :) might be cool in the future if you guys can do re-sizing/cropping in the future too.
> So let's assume we rig up bright lighting to grow our plants.

Sorry, but this is missing the point in as big a way as possible if you are using a nuclear plant. Even providing half intensity sunlight for large scale agricultural purposes is not feasible from an economic standpoint. Use the intensity of sunlight that's there. You just have to accept higher acreages and longer growing times. That would still enable civilization.
It varies by sub-field within CS and depends on the quality of the conferences or journals the papers were published to.
Apaxy: A simple, customisable Apache directory theme
Is WhatsApp the heir to the SMS?
Because all other languages are without problems.
It would be hard to do with a paid download since AFAIK Apple does not include some sort of receipt on an app purchase. What I would have done was implement the game as free to download with an unlock IAP. With an IAP Apple returns a receipt to the client that is tied to the users account. The game server could then verify the receipt with Apple on each client connect.

This would also give the developers the ability to track the receipts and know if it had been hacked and shared. If the same receipt is being used to connect 100s of times simultaneously then it's time to ban a user. So while the IAP method isn't perfect, it would make it a lot harder for casual piracy to succeed.