skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep hearing this meme that "it's very easy for users to switch search engines."

This is true for one user. But BILLIONS of people are using Google. And it's NOT easy for all of them to switch. Google's position is not tenuous at all.
My SO has done a bunch of good work on the topic of Twitter for business. My bias aside, I've been on Twitter since day one, use it for marketing and support of my business, and have it integrated into my products and I still found a lot of useful things in the materials below:

Free: Twitter for Business Webcast.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1162

Pay: Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution O'Reilly Radar Report

http://radar.oreilly.com/research/twitter-report.html
the speech engine I'm using is espeak.sourceforge.net. There are other voices that I can choose from but I haven't messed around with it too much. Quality-wise, compared to Oddcast.com's TTS, espeak is a free alternative so it's understandably with lower sound quality.
I find that a lot of us are using Twitter as a replacement for email. It carries several advantages to traditional email:

Conversations are made public, and therefore are searchable, and they're shorter, eliminating the overhead of sending an actual email.

I actually think that there's a huge business case for setting up internal twitter systems in businesses. Being able to publicly broadcast small updates on a project via twitteresque system would be very useful.

If he's interested in setting up such a system internally, we would be happy to provide that for a small fee. :)
I use Fluther for Q&A. It has a respectful and smart community, just like this one.

http://www.fluther.com
Haddock: Built because I want web apps to make passwords fun
So does that make casual sex UDP?
I'm calling his comments sexist, and he's calling 85% of American women worthless.

Who's the distasteful and intellectually bankrupt one here?

So what you're saying is, that I'm a bad commentor because I used a label like "sexist" to apply to someone's publically, voluntarily, and vociferously stated opinions...

...but it's just fine to apply the label of "unmarriagable," "selfish," "crass," "immoral," "low quality," etc, to millions of people who have committed the sin against this man of simply existing and not doing what he wants?
completely solid.
That's why I planned on showing him Thymer - http://thymer.com/

It's exactly that, and it's full of y-combinator goodness :) Ever since I started using it, my productivity doubled.
It's still racism if you think something good about an entire group of people based on skin color...

...and it's still sexism if you limit your "judgment" to only the 150 million women around you, rather than in other countries.
Caltech and Swarthmore (conflict of interest notice: I have degrees from both) are luxury brands with good success (as brands measured by endowment). They are quite different from the ivies as described by Gladwell.

I was always surprised that Caltech had the highest SATs of entering students: surely Harvard, Princeton, etc. had the ability to outdraw Caltech. Now I understand it: highest SATs is part of Caltech's luxury brand but not that of the ivies, just as high (er) performance is BMW but not Mercedes, or Lamborghini but not Rolls Royce.

Another feature of Admissions that Gladwell doesn't mention in this article is one I discovered when reviewing 400 applicants a year for perhaps 15 spots in the Electrical Engineering PhD program at University of Rochester. Your job is to create a great department, NOT to find the 15 most deserving of the 400. My own evolution on the graduate admissions committee was from poring over the details of hundreds of applications, to using numerical screens to bring myself down to perhaps 60 that I would look at in some details. One of the great things about having so many applicants is I could afford to be wrong about some of my filter metrics. Perhaps limiting myself to 4 or 5 universities in China (for Chinese applicants) was not necessary, but having done so I still had 10X as many good applicants as we could admit.

Is interpreting the admissions job as creating a great university rather than "fairly" picking the top applicants a feature or a bug? On reflection, I think it is clearly a feature. If you were hiring for a startup you would instantly recognize this approach to your selection process as the only one that vaguely made sense. Why would it be different when trying to create quality at older bigger places? But the kicker that makes it a sure thing as the right policy is this: it is IMPOSSIBLE to identify the best few % of a large pool of excellent applicants. When of two policy choices, one is impossible, it is likely it is not the optimum.
This was one of the steps mentioned in 4 hour workweek, although this example is a little different. I don't like the book in general, but you can cherry pick some of the cool strategies like this one.
PDF Miner
How Rawls's political philosophy was influenced by his religion
The key difference here is that one group is going after those they consider guilty of unauthorized copying of media, while the other is simply trying to have their claim of authorship respected.

Torrent files of MP3s and TV shows don't, as a general rule, mis-represent the original creators of a work. Because of that, they can still drive real revenue for those artists -- people may initially acquire an album or episodes of a TV show illegally, then go on in the future to pay for new content from the same people.

Doing a copy-and-paste job on someone else's blog content, however, breaks the link (however tenuous) between author and reader, which means that the author is unlikely to ever see anything of value back from the interaction. Not only are they deprived of direct financial (AdSense) and social (search rankings, public visibility) benefits, they are robbed of one of the most valuable commodities available to a blogger: direct feedback from interested readers.
For 1/10th the price.
gotta start stopping my own password generating algorithm based on temperature, first name of the first person pops in my head, and crazy md5/sha hash of whatever
something like

45john5hit
How many of them need to switch before it become tenuous? -- perhaps if the most profitable go, then it might not be nearly that much.

Google relies on a massive network effect to hold their position - this makes them a very stable system in many regards. However, there is also the risk of a collapse scenario.

In the case of Google, it might only be one or two segments (in whatever demographic/dimension) that are key.
You don't think that users are capable of deciding who is worth following and who isn't, but you expect them to employ "enhanced filters"?

There will always be people who get a kick out of following/friending celebrities, and those who will use twitter for more personal communication or other uses. It doesn't make either behavior right or wrong or more rewarding or less rewarding. But the people who claim that twitter sucks because the interaction isn't personal (or something along those lines) are doing it wrong. They want something specific out of a service but have (possibly unknowingly) set it up to do the complete opposite.
but since we're both busy and pretty satisfied with the arrangement that hasn't happened I guess.

I hate to break it to you, but you're in a relationship. Try sleeping with someone else, you'll see what I mean. :)
I don't disagree with the necessity for fundamental elements ("black boxes") on top of which to build. My only complaint is with the universally shoddy state of these black boxes. Specifically:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=37

The modern computer is the first time mankind has built a system which is actually capable of perfection. You are more likely to have a spontaneous heart attack and die at any given moment than the CPU is to perform a multiplication incorrectly. All of the "hairiness" which your computer's behavior exhibits is purely a result of programmer stupidity. It is theoretically possible for the entire stack to work exactly as expected, and for each element to seem as inevitable and obvious-in-retrospect as Maxwell's equations.

It is possible to build a system where the black boxes aren't fully black and can be forced to state their actual function on a whim. It is possible to expose the entire state of the machine to programmer manipulation and comprehension in real time:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc3...

http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/dev...

>The cat is already out of the bag.

The Lisp Machines existed, and were capable of everything modern, "hairy" systems are capable of, plus much more. You cannot un-create them. They are proof that the entire software-engineering universe is currently "smoking crack" - and I sincerely wish that it would stop doing so.
It really depends what your goals in life are. If you're like me, and at some point want to have sex with many very beautiful women (before maybe getting married at some later point) then being single pushes me to work extra hard. I know that in order to have relationships, encounters and just a great time with high-quality, intelligent and good looking women, you need to be on the top of your game. And I believe the more successful you are in your business, the more witty you'll become, the more confident etc. In fact I think these things are correlated; You'll be more successful business-wise if you are more confident and have better social skills.

So I think you need to figure out what you really want in life. (Wealth, Abundance of hot women, Fame, spiritual fulfillment, intellectual fulfillment, friends etc). Then do the things that in the LONG TERM will bring you those things.

A working relationship can be one the best things that ever happened to you; maybe that's worth being financially successful one or two years later.
I should also note that I didn't notice any attribution on the site, as required by CC-SA 2.5. I don't speak the language though, so I can't be sure.
With 1/1000th the security, stability, and maintainability.
Handwriting Recognition for Android
The neurological basis of intuition
My adversity is toward a culture (Sex and the City) that encourages women to be selfish, oversexed, mean-spirited, uncultured, and unladylike, even when such behavior is usually against their own interests. I don't consider it sexism because I don't believe that there's any intrinsic reason to consider one gender "better" than the other.

Unfortunately, though, there's a lot of rot in our popular culture with regard to sexuality and human relationships. I have no idea if the effects on men are as bad as those on women; obviously, I'm inclined to notice the damage it does to women, but it could be equally damaging to men. It's quite possible that 85+% of American men are unfit for long-term romantic partnerships as well.
In B2B sales there's also a significant gap between "interest" and "purchase". You have to be able to tell how much one implies the other.
The correlation of relationships and achievement probably varies from profession to profession. As I understand it, physicists nearly always do their best work before marriage, while businessmen often do theirs after. There are a bunch of related effects that would have to be teased out to make the correlation clean (eg., physicists tend to do their most interesting work very young, and tend not to get married young), but it seems solvable.

One thing I wouldn't rely on in trying to answer this question is asking people whether having a relationship makes them happier/more creative/more productive. Anything related to reproduction is probably viewed in an unrealistically positive light, and probably has a bunch of taboo protection. ( for example, see http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792 for people's reactions to a sociologist who wrote that having children doesn't make people happier. ) It's in our genes' best interests for us to think that having kids is a tremendous joy, whether it is or not, and the same is probably true for relationships.

I'd imagine the research has already been done for whatever field you're in, so you can just look it up.
"Few people even know there ever WAS a lisp machine."
OK, ok, I know I've been fighting it but I can't hold out any longer...

Thank you so much for telling us who is and isn't fit for marriage!

I know it's so hard for you to pick a marriage partner for yourself, much less for all of the rest of us, so your tireless work is very appreciated.
Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric
Yeah, that would have been better. It's just the link I happened to have handy, didn't mean to dupe.
As I commented previously, we should consider the formation of sub-HNs:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506181
also with 1/1000th the ability to monetize (at the moment). In China you have to serve up loads more ads to get anywhere close to what the U.S. market pays.

Its a necessary thing that it costs so much less to create a start-up like this in China. Because the returns are so much lower.

In the long term, there is hope that size (of China) trumps this problem. But we haven't seen this happen yet.
Polyoxometalate nanostructures: useful in composite nanosystems?
So you're saying that randomly hooking up with many people is like BitTorrent?
To bring up the obvious, I can't pass judgment on a woman who's had casual sex if I never know about it.

The worst side effect of casual sex is its cultural effect. "Hookup culture" is extremely debased and elevates deviant behavior to accepted status, if not a social requirement in some circles (e.g. being inexperienced, even for moral reasons, is looked down upon by many women in New York). However, if the sex is entirely private, and doesn't involve the woman I end up marrying, then I don't know about it, it's none of my business, and I don't care.

What I don't like is living in a culture that engenders distrust and dislike between the sexes, and encourages dishonorable behavior in young people. It seems like a lot of young American men behave unscrupulously and rack up a number not because they want to do so, but because of social pressures; they know most women won't respect them if they aren't at least as experienced as they are.
"we need more regulators"

When did I make this argument? No, it is a convenient strawman for you, and a way of changing the topic away from "Who is to blame for the stupid, stupid, stupid decisions on Wall Street and their rather disastrous consequences?"

I'm willing to apportion some blame to the regulators, but it's quite amusing to see the hypocrisy of some libertarians when they rush to shield the banking and finance industries from the scorn they so richly deserve; blaming anyone and everyone (usually regulators and/or the government, conveniently in line with their ideology) except for the individuals responsible for the decision!

To paraphrase a common libertarian lament, whatever happened to individual responsibility?
It's the same platform as HN?
Haddock seems like a brilliant way to generate passwords with a great memorability to length ratio, but it's not clear to me that they have a great memorability to security ratio.

Haddock uses the UNIX wordlist with a known algorithm for password generation: words = %W(#{random_word} #{random_symbol}#{random_word}) if I'm reading the source right. It seems like it's reducing the search space drastically for a gain in memorability that is difficult to quantify. Might be a win, but might be a loss.

But I don't really know this stuff so well-- any real crypto folks care to comment?
i18n is a technical issue. What matters most in this case is not that StackOverflow does not have a Mandarin interface, but rather, it does not have a Mandarin community.
Well, I'd much prefer a title nicked from the military, like "grunt" or "man on the ground" rather than "code monkey" which I've always found condescending. One implies that you are submitting to the common good, other that you are submitting because you can't do anything else. Different strokes, I guess.

Anyway, whatever you call it, you appear to not be one. You're managing them. If I worked for you I'd tell you straight off "don't call me code monkey." Oh wait, you wouldn't hire me. You think I'm useless.
Yes. The HN source is available in the arc distribution.
If anyone wants to use this for something public-service oriented:

Chicago is running for the 2016 Olympic games. About a month ago they released their official "bid book" in PDF form. The local papers gave it a look and wrote some fine stories, but a bunch of local journalists (myself among them) would like to extract the thing out into a Wiki so people could discuss and annotate it instead of just reading it in PDF form.

Link to the bid book: http://www.chicago2016.org/our-plan/bid-book/bid-book.aspx

We were thinking of using MediaWiki as the wiki engine. One of us is currently running (the excellent) Chicago Elections Wiki over at http://chicagoelections.pbwiki.com/

We'd host, promote, annotate and fill out the wiki, the important thing is to move this from a pdf to an interactive, scannable, hypertext format so people can tear it apart.

We'd been talking about sneaking into PyCon and asking around if anyone there would be interested in working on this. It looks like this PDF miner is the start of something that could do this.
Try to stop drawing an imaginary line between women and women you could marry. Your concept of a woman needing to be 'pure' and fitting some set of standards you impose on them is a recipe for disaster.

People make some bad choices, everyone has their flaws. If you are looking for a relationship that really makes you happy, find someone you love and deal with things you don't agree with.

What caused you to have this reverse "Prince charming" desire? No offense, but you seem to have an incredibly high exclusion rate for women. A lot of it seems to come from sexual oppression.

Lastly, what do you possibly mean by "The main victims of consensual casual sex are future romantic partners of the participants". You claim to not think it is immoral, but lay that judgement down like it is factual?
Another misdirection. I did not refer to AIG specifically as toxic, risky, or over-leveraged, but to many (the majority?) of Wall Street's recent decisions.

Also, it is completely false. Banks only "needed" to buy bond insurance from AIG when they voluntarily chose to securitize + re-sell CDO tranches (for example), and I'm not an expert enough to know what the regulations say, but ratings agencies also insisted on it. Further, AIG was under no obligation whatsoever to sell CDS contracts; this was a fully voluntary activity!
Well, that already happened. Kind of. Also, she's been on other dates, but didn't end up getting involved. We're both perfectly cool with it. Like I said, there is no emotional/romantic attachment. Why is this hard to believe?

[edit] At any rate, the main point I was making was to keep the relationship low-key, if you don't want it to affect your work productivity.
Some non-twitter thoughts:

If you haven't already read the Cluetrain Manifesto, then you should. (www.cluetrain.com). 10 years old now but lots of good stuff about why a business should be interested in social networks.

Also LinkedIn groups: lots of people are using those as a way of getting involved in conversations relevant to their businesses - representing their companies, not just as individuals.
How to spot a Twitter user with a ‘Fake’ Follower Count
Are you a Twitter Faker?
i just use HN for everything. Its a lot more relevant.

There isn't really a HN for "business, management" yet(I don't count the few forums with a few hundred users). I also don't really count newmogul, since a) they too have only a few hundred users and b) most of them are on HN anyways.

And if some time in a future a site will emerge like that, for business owners to post and discuss, most of the content won't really be relevant anyways, since most users will be the brick & mortar/services types(grocery store owners, dentists etc), which face quiet a different set of problems from the web startup world.
Danger: Your Link Is Hidden (BestBuy example) : Volcanic Marketing
The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?
This first version is really just a quick emulation of Apple's version. There are a few simple security improvements that could be made without reducing memorability too much (dropping vowels, toggling case, swapping vowels for numbers that resemble them, randomizing where the symbol comes in, and perhaps making the number of symbols variable, as well), all of which I may put into the next version.

In the end, though, these passwords should be "secure enough" for most purposes, and should be generally more secure than the password of your average user. Using haddock to generate temporary passwords will hopefully just encourage users to be better about passwords in general.
DecTalk (yes I go back to the original DEC box you could hang off a telephone line) but without any consideration of punctuation. Interesting though.
Probably not what you want to hear, but on a previous project (before I knew about LuaRocks) to save some time I used kepler-1.1beta2 as part of my base OSX and linux Lua stack because the Kepler folks went to the trouble of creating an autotools bundle with several extensions I wanted. I didn't actually use Kepler itself but their build logic worked well.
Journalism/News Industry

http://www.jstartup.com
If you're just looking for ass n' tits, hit up the strip club, get wasted at a frat party and score some bitches, hell - order a hooker.

Otherwise, most of the time, viewing a relationship as a hinderance on your productivity is viewing the relationship as an excuse. There really is no concrete solution to your problem because the problem is all in your head. Chances are, you just haven't found the right person to be in a relationship with. And yeah, the good ones are scarce...

I have been a single college hacker for quite a while. I've had my ass n' tits stage. I'm currently in an amazing relationship, see my girl almost every day, and still have plenty of time on my hands. She boosts my mental health in most ways I can think of: creativity, happiness, open-mindedness, etc... About to see how working full-time in the "real world" (vs student) will affect us.

Trust yourself and your judgement, and find yourself someone who compliments you. Otherwise, you're stuck with a mess in your head and seeking advice on HN... which will probably still leave you with a mess in your head ;)
and 100x the market?
"Also, why, then, there is no mention to StackOverflow at all on CNProg.com?"

http://blog.cnprog.com/2009/01/why-create-cnprog/

My chinese is pretty rusty, but in the 3rd section on that page it links to stack overflow and says something like, "Stack Overflow was just released from beta, and it's really great, but slow with localisation" as a reason why this site was created.

Sorry for assuming you were American. I should have guessed from the name! Now it's me making incorrect assumptions : /
So young men sleep around only because they fear being looked down on by women who've slept around more?

Very interesting social theories you have.
I'd say BitTorrent is gang-bang.

[edit: by gang-bang, I meant group-sex. (I'm not understanding the down-votes)]
Sometimes an "average person", like me, is in the early stages of their study of your chosen field Mr. Robinson. As such, articles such as this are very helpful.

Why the disdain and distrust of a novice trying to educate themselves?