skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why the wires behind your computer are a tangled mess.
no, my HS didn't care at all about the performance. the only pressure was on the inside of the team to do better for ourselves.

yes, thats true, but thats a property of the individual teacher, really. i've had teachers all across the spectrum.
AMD, Intel x86 patent fight likely to be long and messy
That is true. I wasn't criticizing their choice of radio architecture. I was trying to point out that you don't have to such extreme lengths to make a working radio.
I actually joined and then attended the Boston FU meet a few times (there were only four of us that ever showed and after a few meetings it fizzled out). Here's something I whipped together in 30 minutes to bring to the first meet:

http://blog.raamdev.com/2008/08/27/boston-fu-retractable-ear...

I love the idea behind FU and wish there were more open hacking groups around where people could attend, even if only to watch and listen to others. I don't necessarily have a ton of time for hacking stuff, but if I could spend an hour or two every week looking over someone's shoulder while they make something, or listen to someone explain their crazy ideas and then have open discussions as a group, I think it would help everyone explore new ideas and opinions.

If not for my ridiculous schedule (working at a start-up), I'd be more inclined to get such a group going myself.
fair enough. We actually put this clause in the employee agreement, but a lot of employees don't read the agreement too well, until it's too late...
In one of your earlier essays, you called "incorporating and raising money an O(1) pain in the ass" - would you say the complexity remained the same this time around?
Best you can do (imho) - Take a look at the existing YC companies, their idea, implementation and the team.

That's what YC is looking for; so the application just needs to be representative of that.
Team? In my case, there was no team. In junior high, I believe everyone (at least at my level of instruction) was expected to write these contests. In high school, it was optional, but teachers looked down on you if you were generally a good math student but didn't go for it.
PG of talks about what a successful application looks like.Just read his stuff.

You basically have to prove that you are a great hacker and have a demo, ready to go.
It's really hard to tell what is compelling about this and how to use it. It looks like someone's personal blog at first glance, and the formatting doesn't make much sense to me.

It's hard to tell if those other features add value as described if we can't figure out how to use them, where they would apply, etc.
Using jQuery and Ajax To Create PHP Sessions
Q&A: The robot wars have arrived
Hummm probably, with your username, loads an iframe from HN (thus giving access to your logged in cookie)... and GETs or POSTs to some page, something like:

GET /vote?story_id=12345&username=inerte
in my school, it was voluntary via a group of people, i.e. team.

again, this sounds like its insular to your school, or maybe your school district via some sort of inter-school rivalry.
Once upon a time, submitting it to reddit would have produced a fine discussion. The problem, however, is that this sort of article is what attracts people who only want to discuss this sort of article, rather than, say, Hacker News. That's what happened to reddit. Since it's a lot easier to dig up articles on batty economics (or even good economics, for that matter), those topics can very easily crowd out the 'on topic' stuff.
Nah, it didn't catch it.
EFF Launches Search Tool for Uncovered Government Documents
"Even if people were willing to post their successful applications, I don't thing pg would approve."

Would PG approve posting a few UNsuccessful applications of different level -- from amusing, to boring, to pretty close? -- guess people like to see those just as much, I sure do, and am not merely joking here.
Not only is there little leakage, but the sound isolation is quite good. The isolation is significantly better than the Sennheiser 280s, as well as the comfort. (I own both.) The Beyerdynamic are also the best sounding closed headphones that I own. I find that they have better highs and a more pleasing sound than the Sennheiser 280s, and are just as detailed.
Without getting into the rest of Rushkoff's argument, he said the stock market, not the economy. Though the media tend to confuse these things, they are not the same. At all.

The S&P 500 is down nearly 50% since last year. Obviously, this has not produced a 50% drop in the standard of living.

Here's a calculation of the historical total-market P/E ratio from 1871 to 2003:

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B236...

The historical average is 11 to 14, depending on how it is calculated. The same source reports that the S&P 500 P/E ratio on February 12 was 29.1:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/how-current-pe-ratios-...

That implies that, in mid-February, the market needed to drop another 52% to 62% to get back to the average P/E ratio of the market over the last century. Obviously, an average P/E of 11 implies that the market has historically spent quite a bit of time at an even lower P/E.

Obviously, this is a facile analysis. The Marketwatch guy himself hedges it quite a bit (e.g. he points out that during a big recession P/E can surge temporarily due to the relative timing of economic events). But it does go to show that, when Rushkoff suggests that the market might drop another 70% or 80%, he's not talking about something unprecedented -- he's merely talking about a market-average P/E of 6. Nor is he suggesting a drop of 80% in a real economic measure, like employment, or GDP.
Why does it have to the the shortest page? The logic is flawed.
Anyone can make a page notable enough to avoid deletion. Fill it with well written, relevant and verifiable materials and its fine.
Well... I have no idea what Rushkoff really knows about economy. But I see nothing wrong with the kind of questions he asks: is the current crisis just another unavoidable cycle? Should we just hope for the economy to "get back to normal or seriously think about something better? Who benefits if most of us think there is no alterative?

Perhaps this really is the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps we already know everything we need to know about economy and politics. But personally, I don't think so. And I enjoy when hackers speculate about these things.
Regardless of thinking speed, the more you know, the better you think. You are able to analyze a given situation or problem more effectively because you can draw on past experience or knowledge and make a more informed decision. I would happily take an 'experienced' brain over a young on that is faster (if thats even true, which i dont really believe...).
Thank God. I'd hope so. The people who develop games are among the most tasteless hacks I've seen in any field - partly because gaming is new, partly because there's just a constant immaturity about things.

Now if only the gaming MAGAZINES would get mature, too. The level of self-obsession is worse in something like Game Informer than it is on the gossip rags. Obsession with nostalgia is a constant pain, the overrating of big-name games makes the reviews irrelevant, and there are very few writers for magazines that say anything at all interesting.

The minute the RPG field gets developers who aren't obsessed with Final Fantasy VII, or the FPS scene gets people who realize how irritatingly mediocre the Bungie developers are, we'll see people experimenting. (To be fair, Valve is already doing a damned good job at that - they're the best hardcore developer around today.)

People who haven't played Passage yet should really get a copy and play it. It's cross-platform and a truly inspiring game. http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
Faking votes on Hacker News
Try the Beyerdynamic 770 pros. I own both the Sennheiser 280s and the Beyerdynamics. To me, the Beyerdyamics are more comfortable, have better highs, and better sound isolation. You can even find 80 Ohm versions of these if you look. (So you can use them with your laptop or iPod without a headphone amp.)

If you don't care about sound isolation, it's hard to beat the Grado headphones for price/performance.
AES Encryption in Python Using PyCrypto
Surprise Google Earth used for robbery
Facebook’s fbFund Is Accepting Applications For FB Connect And iPhone Apps
You miss the point. The concept is that Wikipedia itself is a notable web site. The question became: was it possible to make a page that cited no source outside of Wikipedia, yet managed to create relevant content by citing Wikipedia?

The answer was no, but I still hold that Wikipedia's belief that it can manage to stay NPOV when it's selective about what it deems relevant or not is a deluded one, and one of the most damning parts of the web site.
HP imposes more salary cuts for EDS employees
Well I'm trying to avoid sex as a matter of style, my main character is 17 so I think it would be tasteless anyway. I mean if the Twilight series can have such a rabid fan following, I don't believe there's a need for a sex scene unless there's an actual point to it.

I'd also say 95% of books and movies get sex completely wrong anyway because it's added in out of irrelevance. It's like the author had to add an extra 5,000 words to meet their contract and added in a random sex scene. I mean there's an actual award for worst sex scene, which kind of helps make my point.

I think very few books would actually be worse off without a sex scene.
You're probably right in that regard. But then if you can't go to reddit and you can't go to HN, where do you go?
They were trying to pick up the BBC - a shortwave broadcast. Please suggest how they could have done so more simply.
I'm not sure when exactly I'll be moving [hoping for April 1st, but I might be commuting from Philly for a little bit since our apartment isn't getting rented...] When I do actually move, I'll let you know. I'd love to see what we can come up with.
These cuts are just for April. Interestingly enough, HP's fiscal calendar is set-up such that Q2 ends April 30th.
Not cool. We deliberately don't put that much effort into security, because this is a community based on trust, not a bank. And by choosing to publish this rather than e.g. simply sending me an email about it, he's inviting people to do this.
you guys are so sensitive.
That is great advice, it is very easy to add locations so I could add some other locations to the mix without much trouble. I started with Seattle since I personally follow the listings there. I'll strongly consider narrowing the focus of the site and work on a decent color scheme as well :) Thanks
poor woz
In the 'interesting number paradox' the smallest non-interesting number is chosen. By convention every ordered set has a smallest element which is arbitrarily chosen.

The logic is flawed for the main reason that partitioning sets in any non-objective manner and then drawing conclusions from that is folly, which is the point of such so-called paradoxes.
Zemanta: Crowd Sourcing Contextual CPA Advertising
Violates the DRY principle too and can cause confusion when things need to be updated.
Well done, you proved two things: 1) that you can write script that does an http get and 2) that you should not be trusted.

Was that a net gain for you?
This was easier than raising money for Viaweb in the sense that I didn't have to try that hard to convince people, but harder in the sense that the paperwork is more complicated.
I'm fully opposed to anything TechCrunch does anymore. I pointed out how they were wrong multiple times and instead of fixing them I had Arrington call me wrong and blame it on someone else. I was later blocked from their twitter account.
TechCruch is just posts about whatever Arrington or someone chooses to biasedly write about and to me is loosing its credit more and more every week. I would love for it to go back to how it used to be when they were reporting on interesting start-ups that readers would love to hear about.
I've seen this type of thing a couple of times before. Sometimes it works better than others. The best example I've seen is just little italicized blurbs marked (intent) before each barrage of law-speak. There was, of course, a sizable disclaimer about how the italicized parts were not legally binding yadda-yadda. It was on a car rental contract of all places.

Its kind of like comments on code, so that if the legal code doesn't run correctly on the courthouse hardware, everyone can at least tell what the programmer was trying to do.

The right solution is to go back and clean up 400 years of worthless cruft that's built up in the legal system that makes law documents quite literally another language, with the added confusion that it borrows words from a familiar one but assigns them new meanings and connotations. I was always of the opinion that if I should be required to follow an agreement, then I should be reasonably expected to be able to read it myself.
Generally speaking I upgrade whenever I get the chance, but I always wait for an official release. Sometimes I let some of my smaller apps lag, but I try to keep fairly recent so as not to hold back any other apps that might be relying on major external requirements, such as Passenger ("mod_rails").

In the past I used to track edge, but that proved to be far too cumbersome.
How Rich Countries Die
Sex is a useful tool in a book if it's used well. Same thing with kissing, which Twilight uses for its disgusting soft pornography. But both are misused more often than not.

(Twilight teaches an important and saddening lesson, namely: if you give people exactly what they think they want, they'll be content and you'll be successful. I can't like people who like Twilight for exactly that reason. It's the easy path that takes no effort and creates nothing but wasteful noise, and while I don't dislike Stephanie Meyer for being a lazy writer, I dislike the people who reward her effort.
Do you really think it's something about Indians, or just the large numbers of candidates and the selection process?

In my experience Indians are a lot more willing to commit to long-term, difficult projects at the urgings of elders. But they share that with other Asian cultures. This also helps explain the spelling bee thing; Indian families are used to the idea of rote education being very important, and even participating in the education of their child that way. Really, almost anybody can get that good at spelling, it's just that more European-American parents would tend to see it as pointless.

The one thing I do find interesting is how the gender split works. Asian minorities (in the American sense: China, Japan, SE Asia) seem to have very different expectations of boys versus girls. But modern Indian families, from the castes that are likely to produce US-bound immigrants, seem to encourage their daughters to go for technology jobs. For me at least, almost 100% of the female engineers I've worked with in the Valley were Indian-born.

And the other thing I've always found strange: the QA departments of many companies in the Valley are dominated by Indian-born women.
Why must we pay off the national debt?

It's not like the US Government is going to get old and lose it's income (like a person that retires would). Provided the economy grows (and tax receipts grow along with it) the government has an ever-increasing ability to service its debt.

Just look at the ratio of tax receipts to interest on the debt. The recent financial crisis has obviously made it dive a bit, but in general it's been quite steady or increasing over the last half century or so. In the corporate world, this figure is known as Times Interest Earned, and is a generally accepted measure of credit quality of a company.

Paying back the principal is less of a concern, because when it comes due, there is always a willing buyer of another t-bill to roll it over.

With some pretty charts: http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2008/12/the-usas-debt-bu...
Interesting differences than previous years:

- down from $250k to $100k

- equity rather than a grant

- incubator program in Silicon Valley

- focussed on Facebook Connect
It was more of a joke than a serious question.
Maybe it is also a Canadian thing. While the US routinely has a strong math olympiad team every year, this is not the case in Canada.
Anymore I'm always skeptical of anyone that would. People now think "if they're doing so well, why would they want to IPO?" Seems like a tremendous bad beat for investors.
Sure, although that's not the C++ <=> C compatibility story that was originally intended, AFAIK. Calling back and forth between C++ and C isn't entirely trivial, either (exceptions, longjmp, etc.)
I think infamy is getting to arrington a little. He does tend to exhibit more and more arrogance as well as some classic signs of heading int oa midlife crisis.

I havent stopped reading Techcrunch but I am always extra careful with all the stuff on there now.
Seattle Paper Stops Printing and Shifts to Web
I get this aaall the time and the only way I have of dealing with the "must tell the world" part is to post anonymously on some forum I don't care about and then run away and not even look at the responses.

Later on I can look back at it and use the idea in a more considered essay.
Make decisions with TheFunded’s new Topicki tool
Y Combinator gets a $2M shot in the arm from Sequoia, angels
Ask HN: Presentation on Workplace Feedback
I'm giving a presentation to college students who will be joining the workforce in a year or so. Here's the url: http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=d9jkbg2_40c5q3kdc4&skipauth=true

I'd like your help in reviewing the slides. I'm trying to give pratical advice that they could use.
Quoting Wikipedia: "Linked Data is a sub-topic of the Semantic Web. The term Linked Data is used to describe a method of exposing, sharing, and connecting data via dereferenceable URIs on the Web."
Yeah, I could see that being useful.

My current laptop is maxed out at 2 gigs of RAM so I have to buy another one anyway to handle large-format design work. Maybe having both laptops with me will be good enough. Still, looking at how thin and light laptop screens are, I find it weird that nobody has packaged one up to be portable and independent.
And you can't double connect.
It's worth having a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery

Something to think about for your own applications
Why pay off debt? First, it seems like the honorable thing to do. Honor? Right thing to do? In the US? I guess we lost that a long time ago.

If money that is servicing debt were freed up, wouldn't it be logical that it could flow to other useful places?
Designing Firefox 3.2, without Tabs
I am not PG, but just from the top of my head, I think the application should at least show that:

- You <em>understand</em> what you're building, who needs it and why

- You care about this project (incl. that you have already started working on it)

- You are the kind of team who can pull this off (realistic, committed, hackerish)
In case of death, please send e-mail
I was trying encourage the hacker news reader and aspiring radio enthusiast by pointing out that radios don't all have to be complicated.

It can be very discouraging to a budding interest if you read an article describing how somebody built some incredibly complex thing from the ground up. After reading that article, I am sure no one wanted to go out and insulate their own wires.

The foxhole radio on the other hand, is simple. Reading about it can be very encouraging because it is easier to understand and can be built from a few items.

Granted, the foxhole radio might not be able to pick up the BBC in the South Pacific, but it is probably good enough to pick up the highest power sports or gospel station in your area.
Wait, doesn't the macbook cost the same amount of money for what he just went through?

macbook $ = Articles $.

Hmm. How much is your time worth....
Y Combinator, Sequoia, and Lessons for the Recession
I think almost none of the LOD cloud is metadata. It's all information like the population of Berlin, or the proteins which connect to some receptor.

I've seen some apps which are using RDF mostly for metadata, but in the life sciences world, we use it for the nitty gritty data.
Ask HN: Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams
It has been a while since I last talked about Thymer (www.thymer.com). Based on the feedback we got from our first users we went back to stealth mode and we've given the interface a major overhaul. It's become a one-page-design where all your time-tracking, planning and scheduling happens on a single page. We've noticed that almost all existing time-tracking software either has a terrible interface or doesn't even match the features of pen-and-paper time-trackers. We think our interface turned out pretty well, and it might suit your taste too.

We just entered private beta, so, if you have a few minutes, try it out (key for HN users: NOPROCRAST). Needless to say, we want to know what you think. Don't hold back :)

www.thymer.com
I'm sympathetic to the desire to talk about a broader range of topics with the bright people that inhabit this site, but don't have an answer. I don't think "how to have an intelligent, civil, wide-ranging and long-lasting on line forum" is an easy problem to solve, either. This forum works, in part, because its scope is somewhat limited.
http://www.thymer.com, for people using browsers without copy-paste features ;)
I'm actually moving away from what you describe - a little less than a year ago, I had just finished school, my wife had a baby, and I started a demanding coding job at a startup. For about 6 months, I couldn't code outside of work for my life - I'd doze off to news.yc, RSS feed, even reddit at times.

In those 6 months, though, two ideas have been snowballing - (1) that (Greasemonkey) + (code repository with dependency resolution) + (some other stuff) would be a revolutionary piece of software, and (2) that the great thing about Lisp is vaguely similar to "Dependency Injection" and "Inversion of Control" - macros (reader and otherwise) are dependencies which are injected into the reader and compiler. If I was to figure out an elegant way of doing this in JS, I can piggyback on the buzz of DI and IoC to help people think deeper about programming.

Couple that with the frustration of "people don't get it unless you show them code", and I've been spending more and more nights coding away again. So my recommendation would be:

1) Get excited about something

2) Realize that you're very fortunate to have the resources to be excited about something 99% of the world does not

3) Socially commit by telling people about it (even if they don't get it)