skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very interesting - does anyone know just how many of the polls we see on TV or in magazines are voluntary response polls? Should we be ignoring their results?

Intesting Anecdote: NDTV 24x7 (something like CNN in India) had extensive polls in the last (2004) election where they predicted a huge victory for the BJP party. They had poll results state-wise and interviews with eminent psephologists and so on, all predicting a resounding victory.

In the end, BJP lost - and quite badly too! Lies, damned lies, and statistics...
Ask HN: What headphones do you use in the office?
When I programming/reading at work, I often listen to music. I currently have a pair of great in-ear headphones (Shure E2Cs) that are lightweight, portable, and sound great. However, they get a bit uncomfortable after a few hours, and I was thinking about switching to a pair of circumaural headphones.

I was wondering what headphones the rest of you use in the office (if any)?

I was hoping to take some inspiration from your choices, as I suspect my requirements are similar to most of yours. For what it's worth, the big things I care about are that they not disturb a coworker who I share the office with (~6ft away) and that they should cost under $200 (although, obviously, the cheaper the better). Size/heft/appearance aren't a big issue, since I'm willing to leave them at the office all the time and just use my E2Cs most of the time.
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Ah. Originally the op said 200,000 euroes
Yeah, I've heard the argument that the blu-ray/hd-dvd format war was kind of moot because digital distribution is the future, but we are still a few years away from being able to download/stream the same quality that you get out of blu-ray. Any HD content you can get online at the moment is heavily compressed and often "HD" in resolution only.
It's asymmetric. If someone irritating you, stop following. This is a non issue.
Reia Programming Language
If they are going for $1, they aren't tenable. But they do exist. They just don't have anything of any value left inside, might be condemned, etc..

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/19/1-detroit-house-sel...
Django ships with a redirects app that does TinyURL nicely.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/redirects/
IMHO TimBL did a great job at TED. I dunno where you have seen him stressed out - he certainly enjoyed it. Btw, linked data is mainly about URIs and HTTP and yes RDF (for the data model part) and some lightweight vocabularies such as FOAF, SOIC, Dublin Core, etc. - check out http://webofdata.wordpress.com as well, I blog there about it ;)

Cheers,
Michael

PS: To be honest, I was also sort of surprised to see him calling the audience like 'speak after me'. However, I was positively surprised - I really like when people put enthusiasm in things and not only give interesting but boring talks. In that sense I very much support TimBL to continue this (though, maybe not go as far as Steven B. at MS did with his infamous 'monkey dance' ;)
Of course tech startup don't NEED the Valley, but to me(German resident) it seams that the Valley is a good place to be for a tech startup.
This also serves as a good repro of a Firefox memory leak (watch your task manager while it's running). There won't be many usable canvas apps until their JS engine is tightened up or replaced.
People do it, already. See for example http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG/LODD/Data

Cheers,
Michael
Too true. Then again, should teachers try to be the students friend? When I was teaching I saw way too many young teachers more concerned with being popular, whereas actually the kids seemed to respect the teachers that kept a firm dividing line. There's something very sad about an adult trying to get social assurance from children.
you must have meant SIOC (where SOIC is written)
Seth's Blog: Linear and parallel
Linux Gains Social Networking Hub ?
The Freehacker's Union
Do you need the UNION? and do you think "Business Is Killing The Art Of The Hack"?
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Nice little toy, but what's the next level? 2 objects, try to get a stable orbit? Talk about a steep difficulty curve. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem)
Just as a test, do this: Pick 10 random users who sign-up and start a co-founder conversation. Pick another 10 random users and send an email saying "A member has replied to your message" or "A message was sent to you from Michael". See which is more effective.

You are discounting a very important factor - authority. Your co-founder is an authority figure, he's selling a site. He belongs in another group as the signed-up user. Another user sending a message is a peer. He tells the user that there are other people there, and that they are interested in what he is doing.

There is a big social difference in the two. Don't do one and never test the other.
Why should it be done clientside? Far better to do it on the server; something like the latex to svg projects that already exist is probably ideal.
Post your 'mixed' results. Does your site offer the possibility to test on peers (see my post below on the main thread.) I'm interested in graphing the result of this.
The only people I have heard that say this, travelling around the world, meeting multiple 9+ digit exit entrepreneurs and tons of 7+, are the ones that started in SV.

I tend to think based on what I read that there are a lot more large exits inside SV than outside. But, there seem to be a lot more early deaths and me-too companies there as well.

Are you optimising for the wrong solution (insane exits)?

[edit: early deaths = companies, not people]
Man, spare this forum - this is not an advertising portal.
Bottling the Magic Behind Google and Facebook
Yep, it isn't a new idea. The premise of Von Neumann machines is that you work around the cpu/data bottleneck with increasingly faster (and larger) caches. You have a tiny bit of ludicrously fast on chip memory (registers), a few megs of successively larger and slower L1/L2/L3 cache, a few gigs of kind of slow memory, and hundreds of gigs of unbelievably slow hard disk. This would just split the unbelievably slow disk into two separate layers - kind of slow SSD and really slow disk.
Nice book. Even if it is mostly annotated hyperlinks, the resources seem to be of good quality and organized well.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282731, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=309195
CoyotePoint gets Virtual
This is a great idea. Does anyone know if any of the existing URL shortners do it? You could then differentiate your service by having a very minimal ui, since you'd no longer be dependant on advertising for revenue.
I assume he means "serial and parallel".
Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
This is clearly a reason greed is not that good.
In 92 the SSDs did not have the same growth as today.

They are getting mainstream with the MacBook Air and others following, I guess the wait is finally over.
I agree, wide-screen is great. I've noticed that many developers often code in a single editor window (using tabs or buffers, etc). Is that common?

I have been coding for years with multiple editor windows open in various forms - browsers in Smalltalk, multiple windows in Xcode, Eclipse, etc. If you use multiple windows, you can always fit 2 (or even more) windows side by side on a widescreen. I definitely prefer a wider than a taller screen.
Those who are very greedy should read that.
Open data would be a much more sellable concept if it was integrated into the development process in a fairly seamless way. If the application itself could be built around the open data standards, without obviously spending a lot of time on things that provide no immediate value, it would be much easier to justify.

My boss/client is not going to pay me to add REST interfaces and metadata that has only vague hypothetical future usefulness but he might pay me to build the data layer for the application in a way that just happens to also be somewhat open, especially if doing so makes the application better or easier to build.

To meet that requirement, the universal ontology stuff might have to be sacrificed but just having API access to more web apps, even if they are all proprietary, would be a worthwhile compromise.

Based on the video alone, I thought that was what TBL was proposing but I see from the links that he's still pushing the whole RDF rigamarole. That might catch on among a few large informational projects but the web at large is either going to ignore it or make a mess out of it.
I find that sometimes music distracts me. Instead of earphones, I use earplugs (the wax type) that works pretty well. Especially useful nowadays where I work near a construction site and very inconsiderate neighbours.
> Which means married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism (slightly more complicated -- you need the bishop to sign off on it) are now married Catholic priests.

If you are correct, then by the same trick a woman can become a Catholic priests, but I don't think the rules of theology are quite as literal as that. While I don't doubt that such a person is married, and Catholic, and a priest, I doubt that he would be considered a Catholic priest. Either that, or God itself is trapped in a logical paradox and the universe explodes.
The article mentions this (i.e. that an open standard should be created for IMs between different social networks). I would say that in most cases this doesn't even matter, everyone in my social network, and nearly every new person I meet, is on Facebook, I admit there's obviously a bias there i.e. the demographic of Facebook members probably matches that of my 'real-life' social network.
>It takes a lot of energy to spin platters that fast, and it all gets turned into heat in the end.

Wrong. Just the wasted energy turns to heat. Wasted by means of mechanical/electric friction. The usefully used (to put it this way) get's transformed in kinetic energy (platter rotation)(most), other electrical energy (transformers) and more.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of true hacker meetings (ie art/wires/code):

* hackerspaces: http://hackerspaces.org/

* 2600 meetings: http://www.2600.com/meetings/

* Dorkbot: http://dorkbot.org/
Pagina de start pentru Mozilla Firefox
I think the big problem with rendering LaTeX client side is that everyone uses different style files, fonts, etc. The options are to either include them all on the page (which would make it difficult for me to upload a LaTeX file, since I'd have to include half a dozen auxiliary resources). It seems like this problem has been solved adequately well by just having a PDF file (which embeds fonts, and doesn't need style files).

Even if browsers could render LaTeX clientside, I still feel like there would be no real advantage to PDF. Since there is no standard way to embed LaTeX markup in HTML, you would just have to link to a .tex file which the browser could display as a separate page, just like it displays a PDF.

I almost feel like XHTML would be a good fit for this problem. We could develop a XML schema for which a simple bijection to LaTeX markup exists. Then, since XHTML supports using multiple namespaces in a single document, we could include any LaTeX markup natively within an XHTML web page (by prefacing LaTeX markup elements with the proper namespace). You would still have to deal with fonts/styles, but I think that's a much easier problem in this sort of a framework.
I'm on the mailing list for the development of Reia and I've been watching progress with some interest. There's already a web framework being built (Ryan) so once the language becomes fully usable I think this'll be a very interesting language.

The one thing that worries me is how much Erlang will still be required. Reia is turning out to have a very Ruby-like syntax, so it should be easy to pick up, but having to learn Erlang as well would give me second thoughts.
> Everyone who attends has to eventually show something. If it’s your first night,

Reminds me of Fight Club.

Can't wait for Project Mayhem.
angry man... just ignore the mbas if they bother you. or move to california.
For what it's worth, this is 9 months old and all the specific problems mentioned were fixed a while ago. But the general techniques Zed presents are still valid and interesting.
Checkout this link.
http://www.headphone.com/guide/by-headphone-type/sealed-type...
>> Outside of the valley, something like this isn't possible.

We do have email, IRC, etc etc these days.
The strength of RDF is in seamless data integration.

Think flexible data mashups (where you don't need to code to the interface of a particular service because they all use same linked data principles).

I have seen people build a simple application and then increase its value by automatically pulling in information from other large source of linked data such as DBPedia and GeoNames.

Fully agree that we need simple and understandable demos that show the value of linked data (assuming for a moment that linked data have business value :).
Cloud Strategy: Apathy or Architecture
One cannot expect that a language that young as clojure is mature and stable. Of course it changes, and it is a good thing thah all the changes are discussed in the mailing lists in advance.
Instead second thinking learning Reia and Erlang, just go learn Erlang. Erlang is finished and has a web framework today.
Yeah, those vids are so funny. I'm taking statistics class right now and I really wish I was 1% as excited as he is about the subject.

I can really see how statistics are an awesome way to visualise important stuff to people, but when I'm sitting there trying to calculate the the t-value in a question on the average amount of mineral water in a bottle, it's hard not to find it boring.

How do you guys do to connect boring stuff like Stats with the bigger picture?

Edit: I also find his accent extremely funny :-)
Any companies in NYC hiring summer interns?
Hey guys,

I'm a Stanford student with a really good background in coding (esp RoR) and I'm very interested in an internship in New York this summer. I've written a bunch of programming books (some international bestsellers), spoken at conferences around the world, developed a couple startups, and done lots of awesome projects.

Are there any companies in NYC with opportunities for internships? Let me know. I'm available all summer. You can email me at msethi@stanford.edu

-Maneesh
> Now imagine two people, A and B, who earn $20,000/year and $80,000/year respectively. It's more unethical to take $200 from A than it is to take $800 from B. Why?

Just taking money is wrong. The usual argument is that the government takes money from people to provide a service. If the government takes more money from you and provides less of a service (i.e. it is busy with wealth redistribution) it is wrong - it is simple theft by the masses.

> As an argument ad absurdum, imagine that instead of taking away a flat percentage (1% of annual income for both), a flat absolute amount were taken instead ($500).

The argument for flat tax is usually that in order to make money a person uses the infrastructure (roads, ect...). If he makes more money the argument is that he used the public services more. While this is not correct (lower income groups disproportionately use public services) it can be argued as such. There is however no defence for progressive taxation - other than wealth redistribution.
Almost all the energy a computer takes in (over 99%) is 'wasted' as heat.

Talk to anyone who has ever run a datacenter. The heat output of a machine is exactly equal to the amount of energy consumed. Maybe a watt or two leaves the room as electrical energy on a network cable, as sound energy, or as EM radiation.

Where else does the energy go?

Look at this as a freshmen year physics thermodynamics problem. Your system of interest is the computer case. It has 500 Watts coming in. It has 0.5 watts leaving as EM radiation, 0.5 watts leaving as sound (i.e., vibrations in the air), and 1 Watt leaving on wires connected to it. The other 498 Watts are necessarily heat.
Here's another, if you want to get the gist of what I'm thinking:

When I go to news.yc from my work browser, display any blocker bugs assigned to me in our internal bug tracking application on top of the stories, in bold.

Again, this is doable in greasemonkey, but would should require a trivial amount of work with the right API's in place.
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Ask HN: For a simple forum, should I use bbPress or is there a HN/reddit style one?
I'm thinking of starting a discussion forum over at my Gifty.co.nz website. I've never liked heavy and ugly phpBB-style forums. I'm really keen on simple and minimalist, so I like bbPress. And PunBB looks okay.

But something with the simplicity and threadedness of Hacker News or reddit would really be great.

Does anyone have any ideas or experience?
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You could then differentiate your service

I'm don't think there's any room for differentiation left in the tinyurl space.
There are literally hundreds of such services and some of them work without an UI altogether (see the firefox addon for http://is.gd).

Maybe, just maybe, you could set yourself apart by integrating tinypic, tinyurl and tinyvideo(?) or such into a neat package, and adding some whipcream features on top - but honestly, I'm very doubtful that there's any money in this.
>>
I doubt that he would be considered a Catholic priest
>>

For the first time in my life I get to say "What do you want, signed authorization from the Pope?" and it is actually responsive!

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published in July 1980:

*[T]he Holy See has specified that this exception to the rule of celibacy is granted in favor of these individual persons, and should not be understood as implying any change in the Church's conviction of the value of priestly celibacy, which will remain the rule for future candidates for the priesthood from [persons converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism]."
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And the phone.
I worked on/for Storymash, I also put a couple of my writing exercises on there. I wouldn't consider myself "of" Storymash cause I don't own it / didn't design it / it's not my baby. Not encountered any other njharman's and it's almost always what I use for username (some employers force nharman) so if you see that it's probably me.

> responding to the opinions that I'd stated. That's pretty awesome

I have that feeling for anyone responding to me, I doesn't matter if they are famous(done "something"). Famous people are just people, like you and me. They aren't gods. Jeez you're more of a fame worshiper than your first post implied.[later reading made me doubt this observation]

You contradict yourself: Saying you opt to ignore fame just after you say "kind of an awe that I was talking to the guy who'd created the first big social bookmarking site"

Hmmmmm, writing that out I can see that you might consider creating first big social bookmarking site is having "done something" (and therefor is not contradictory) I consider "having created a social bookmarking site" as something not much though. Being the first and being the biggest is just "having been lucky" and worth little regard.

Most people in the world who have good ideas and execute them aren't famous/don't get famous. I'm impressed by people who try. success is meh (cause if you haven't noticed I consider success largely attributable to luck)

> Am I a smug elitist because I think the people here are more worth talking to than the users on Digg?
That there is a strawman, mister.

btw you should insult even unknown and unliked people who are full of themselves.

And honestly you really don't see the rah, rah, rah hero/fame worship that goes on round here? Some days it's like a Apple forum just with different objects of adoration.
Maybe it isn't what you meant but to me you post comes off as... "What would they know. They aren't from the valley"
Worse than dupe: dead org. Zed hasn't posted to the mailing list since 11/26 last year, meetups kind of fell through.
Apparently, he want this to be open. I was hoping for a secret cabal since then we could make programming mystical and perhaps attract more people.
search.twitter.com is actually provided by a company called Summize that Twitter bought: so it worked for them.
Oh common. I objected to you saying that all energy drawn gets transformed to heat. That's patently false, unless the system you're studying has either efficiency 0% or is indeed a heater of efficiency 100%. Anything in between contradicts what you said. In the specific case I've objected to is even easier to see the problem. The HDD platters spin. That's work done. Energy transformation from electric to kinetic. Whether its quantity is bigger or smaller than that that gets transformed to thermal energy is a matter of efficiency. Otherwise the kinetic one would be free and Perendev and Bedini would be inclined to post here.
Looking at the first page, I notice they've copied Ruby's system of having separate interpreters for interactive use and scripting use. I don't know much about Ruby, but I know Python quite well and I know it gets along quite well with having only one interpreter. Is there any technical reason why having two interpreters is a good idea?
There's always NYC Resistor.
http://www.nycresistor.com/
Kevin Rose Weighs in on iPhone OS 3.0
I've up voted you. Could someone explain the negatives? I had problems with both Microsoft and Borland IDEs coerced to multicolumn (which had to be multiwin, no other way) on the same file too.
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Complex partnerships require corporate/tax lawyers and billable hours. Sorry, but there's no way that you'll get a credible answer on HN.
I used to use multiple laptops and control them from a single keyboard using Synergy. It's not exactly what you're looking for (can't drag documents between windows) but it goes a long way, like being able to offload all the administrative stuff (email, IM, music) to one screen and then work in the other.