skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow! That's fascinating (and much more detailed a response than I imagined: thank you)!

I never thought there was more of a process than just looking quickly at lots of resumes. That process seems incredibly complex - but I'd imagine it helps select people to some degree when there're so many great people to pick from.
Who's removing domains? I was thinking strictly about unlimited bandwidth and storage.
Not having heard of YC or News.YC is perfectly acceptable.

Spending your time on Digg is absolutely not. If I were pg I'd sooner approve an application from Anon than from a duggalo.
Awesome comment.

One question - you write "The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums." and then " I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly."

Why does this make you skeptical of the tests? Do you think the tests are testing the students' socioeconomic background rather than ability/potential?
This is an extremely myopic perspective of a feature that opens up possibilities. Like somebody said, everything can be abused. But then people have the supreme authority to reject those who do.
I'm certain that at the very least that would make a lot of applicants feel better about themselves.

Our valedictorian spent 12 years of her life doing everything she could to be a "Yale candidate." She took classes she didn't like, extracurriculars she didn't like, just to fit to this billing. When she got rejected it was a pretty tragic week for her.
Show HN: Code draws better than you
I dont quite understand how artists profit from a secondary market, the scalpers dont pay them, they get face value tickets and sell them for what they can get and pocket the profit.

I have not been "conditioned" to dislike scalpers, I have had to sit at a website for a concert and refresh every 30 seconds to not be able to get a ticket then watch them go on ebay by the ton on ebay for a stupid markup.

I know supply and demand comes into it, and comparisons will be drawn with the stock market, but the question is is that a model that we want to be copying?

what is fair in this case, is distributing tickets on the basis of disposable income fair? its often mutually exclusive with the entire reason the demand is high in the first place, which is the usually young with minimum income fans that told everyone about X.

The secondary market is one that purely exists to make a profit by creating no value and exploiting a system that lets the people with the means "win" over those without.

the exact can be said about domain hoarders, spammers all the way down to slave labour. just because there is a market for it doesnt mean it is the best way
It's all relative. Those kids are competing against eachother, not me from podunk Michigan. So it's an arms race. If the kid across the street goes to fancy pre-school, he's going to get advantages you'll miss out on that will put him ahead of the game.

I just read Gladwell's "Outliers" this week and he talks at length about this very thing.

Here's how he puts it. If you're in Canada and you were born just days after the cut-off for age group hockey, then when you're 10, you'll be 6-7 months older than a lot of the other kids on your team. That makes a big difference at that age. So you'll make the traveling team and the younger kids won't. On the traveling team, you get better coaches, better equipment, better opponents. So the gap between you and those other kids gets A LOT wider.

Five years later, you're maybe looking at the NHL while those other kids are sitting in the stands, because you got access to the better coaches, because you were born 6 months before them.

That's why the parents want to get their kids into the fancy pre-schools.

Outliers is an excellent book. Much, much better than "Blink," which I thought was kind of boring.
The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless.

Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.
I'm curious (and this is not a rant), what is the logic behind releasing a mac-only client right at the start?
I might look into buying Outliers. Part of Gladwell's writing style has started to grate on me, but at that recommendation I suppose it's worth checking out?
I seriously doubt that Google doesn't care about market share for this thing that they've invested in. Strategically, what good is advancing the state of the art in browsers if people don't migrate to it?

Expanding on this a bit: we all know and love Google, but its a business, and one that basically supports the existence of another browser by paying to be the default search engine used in one of that browser's interface widgets. It's not an insignificant amount, either (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9804156-7.html); there's no way they paid that much to develop Chrome. Keep that money in house, make the shareholders happy; keep Chrome open source, keep the hackers happy. Why wouldn't they want users to start adopting Chrome instead of FF?
MY LIVING WILL
Last night my wife and I were sitting in the den and I said to her,

'I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on

some machine and fluids from a bottle to keep me alive.

That would be no quality of life at all,

If that ever happens, just pull the plug.'

So she got up, unplugged the computer, and threw out my wine.
You are wrong to use a slash between ability and potential. The kids with strong socioeconomic backgrounds do well and go on to do well. The kids who don't, don't.
The year I took the SATs (1600 scale back then) someone on the Educational Testing Service board threw in a knuckle-ball with an analogy question in the Verbal section that used the term winnowing. I wish I could remember the question..

Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer.

Winnowing: the act of separating grain from chaf
The most important thing here its the censorship. Brainwashing has become very difficult since the internet showed up.
artists and others have completely sorted out supply and demand, my tickets for celtic vs inverness caley thistle were significantly less than my ones for celtic vs manchester united, oasis play to 100,000 instead of a pub of 50 people.

the scalpers just work at a more granular level, there is obviously a natural market for it, but it hurts the fans without money, doesnt help the artists at all, the only people to benefit are the scalpers, (and marginally the people who are happy buying marked up tickets)
I saw a guy a few weeks ago on an evening train in Tokyo watching a ballgame split-screen with his email app, where he was writing a reply. He sent the mail, and then the TV app went back to full-screen. I don't watch TV, but that was just amazingly cool.

A year ago or so at a mid-scale sushi restaurant some guys sitting nearby were watching the ballgame on their phone, though thankfully they had the sound off.
This is something that changes as you grow older, when you have commitments to family members, to career goals or whatever.

You think twice about creating new problems that don't need to be problems in the first place.
So, there you go, even though you don't feel comfortable labeling something for what it clearly is, feel free to label this post with a down vote.

I hate to tell you, but even the people who have lots of karma don't play Hacker News for points. We just like talking with smart people. The only thing I downvote people for constantly are the people who talk about getting downvoted (but you replied to me, so you're safe there).

Evil has more implications than the dictionary definitions. The dictionary defines "sacred" as "connected with God (or the gods) or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration" but there's meaning lost in such a bland definition. Similarly, evil means more than "not good".

It isn't all abuse? Oh, well, fine, I'm so glad that is cleared up because some sick fuck says that "its not all abuse". I can't wait for my kids to hear "Not all methamphetamine will cause you harm" from a speed freak. That logic makes infinite sense.

I love people who put words in my mouth. I suggested that life is complicated - that, say, a speed freak isn't an inherently bad person even if he's addicted to something that's very bad, and that I dislike people who look at something and call it Evil dwelling in man's heart.

There's a whole argument about the nature of "evil" and "profane" in religion studies, where the argument goes that evil or profane things refer to things that are naturally inhuman (or lacking the empathy with God or other human beings that humanity seems to be defined by). Essentially, when you call something "evil" the implication is that it is without ration or excuse and that it is something that a "good" human is inherently incapable of doing. Big-E Evil in particular goes by those rules.

I believe that the world and human nature is too complex to quickly call evil. It's why I hate that a post like this, long and complex and fascinating, gets called "Evil" in a single-sentence condemnation. It's almost certainly horrible. I think the entire trade is sickening. But I'll give it some level of respect, because these are human beings we're talking about, and because no human being deserves to be judged with a single sentence, especially not when he makes the effort to explain himself in a more complex way.

Whether you like it or not, Evil most certainly exists in this world, regardless of whether or not there is a reason that it came in to existence.

The idea of Evil suggests that there's no reason to evil, that it's original sin and that we are inherently flawed. That follows the ration that there's a such thing as inherent good. I subscribe instead to the belief that good and evil are both a part of human logic, and that the really awful thing is that evil is a part of nature (and not just human nature). As a result, I dislike the people who would assume that evil is an illogical, spontaneous thing, and I think that the best way to combat evil is to give it as much respect as possible. If you reject it outright, you're no better in a way, because you offer it no comprehension.
Yah and that "handful" happens to be the hand picked team that used to be the Google Firefox development team. Not exactly a random group of developers hacking on their free time. These guys have been doing Browser work for a long time and knew exactly what they were getting into.

Chrome is a project that is over two and a half years old. Not many would say that is an "incredibly short period of time". It is going to take another year before Linux/OS X support is stable. That is more then three years. Take a look at the Linux code. They are reworking strings, keyboard events, clipboard, window management, pretty much everything. It is like starting work on a whole new application. There is a reason why so many people buy Qt licenses (or use the lgpl version these days), cross platform isn't exactly easy.

From conversations I have had with hackers:

- Google acts like they are all Linux developers, but at least the Chrome team used Visual Studio and use Windows primarily. They don't seem to care about my platform so why should I care about their app?

- Google ports webkit to Android and then separately to Chrome, clearly they have extra resources to burn, but not for a Linux/OS X port so it must be really low on their list.

- Internally all the Linux Google devs knew about Chrome for two years, but didn't bother to help in their 20% free time. Not even to help make it compile. If all of them didn't find Chrome worth their time (and they are all really smart guys) they must know something.

- Apple, the company that locks you down to their platform more then Microsoft has a cross platform browser! Opera and Firefox are on all three. Even the little Arora browser is cross platform. A new browser that wants to be big cannot have cross platform be an afterthought as it clearly was with Chrome.

Chrome is cool yes, I have hacked on the code and even submitted patches to help get it compiling on Linux. It has a lot of nice things going for it design wise and it will do ok in the long run, but as it is today sitting only on Windows it is very hard to attract the early adopters, the ones who buy every new geek toy and tells all their friends about it. Once it can get past this hump it will do ok. The marketing seems to indicate that this early adopter group the very group they are trying to attract and yet the product as it is today is really for mainstream joe average users. It really is no surprise when the early adopter group trashes a product that isn't useable for them. HackerNews isn't exactly known for being a Windows hangout.

There is a lot to cleanup in the Chrome source and I wouldn't be surprised if the next twelve months (minimum) was spent cleaning up all the windows specific code before they can really start on new and innovative features. They decided their technical debt would be Windows during initial development and now they are paying it. But they are a good team with smart developers. Or as I heard from someone else: Chrome is a snowball at the top of a hill. It might be not much now, but with google's cash behind it Chrome will keep on rolling down the hill and getting bigger and eventually you will have to deal with it.
Yeah, bad joke.
"Americans work longer hours than any other people." <- Not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Differences_among_...

I'm personally in favor of working long and hard though - just not doing it stupidly. If you program, time you spend learning a new language is "working." Work's gotten a bad rap these days - it implies something we don't want to do.

But it's not mandated anywhere that you have to hate your work. The sweet spot for me is doing something that I greatly enjoy, that doesn't feel like work, that provides value to others, that I get compensated for. "Playing around for the benefit of society and getting paid for it" - sign me up for as much of that as I can get.
Okay, fair enough. Perhaps I have too youthful a perspective on this right now, when my circle of friends largely changes once a semester.
Its fairly typical of the sites that are sold through Sitepoint and the like. The business peaked in 2006 and revenues fell for two years running - so it started declining before the owner fell ill.

It looks like it is recovering in the first two months of 2009, but it could also be a spike.

It also looks like it needs a fair amount of work to make that much money. So you pay somewhere between $120,000 and $160,000, give up your current job, take the risks entailed, work hard and you might make $100,000+ a year in revenues (not profits!). That does not sound like such a good deal.

In general, the difficulty of verifying the profitability of small sites means that no one will risk paying a high multiple for them. No one with a decent site will sell it at a low multiple, so if it is for sale, expect it to have poor prospects.
Do you know if this is this also true for gradschool admissions? (even business schools?)
True, but I can take a picture of space from by back yard on a clear night.
I've been intrigued by this idea of computers creating art. And not electric sheep those are just people creating art then computers building and sharing it, I don't like it.

The idea of using genetic algorithms to reproduce art is interesting, the idea of computers manipulating images to create new art from old art is also cool(automagically). I've been playing around with it.
Pro. I'm not a zombie-movie aficionado, but I've seen several. My favorite is probably Dead and Breakfast. Comic horror, musical interludes. I liked it better than Shawn of the Dead. Fun.

If you're going for scary, though, I vote for shambling and relentless zombies. The good guys are smarter, and they're faster, but the zombies just...keep...coming...
Woz Survives round one of Dancing with the Stars
The saying is irrelevant, whether it's wrong or not. I shouldn't have even added it, lest I give you another way to deflect.
It was nickelodeon.com on a commercial at the age of 10 or so. And it was pretty damn amazing, strange, and breathtaking even, the first time I booted up AOL dial-up and loaded the page.
Why immigrate (escape) to USA when there are innumerable problems to be solved in India?
I know I'm getting one.
Randall Munroe has been monitoring my dreams
Did you ever notice that aircraft are painted?
Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer.

That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range.

Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
I recommend watching the video on apple.com
I just got back from lunch, where the guy next to me was watching the Japan-Korea baseball game on his cell phone.
No real inside knowledge, but...

If I was building an app, I'd do Mac-only first if I had to choose one. Every major blogger is a Mac user, so you get your initial coverage. Then, when you release a Windows version, it's a legitimate process story (since most people are on Windows), and you can get another round of free media.

There may or may not be technical reasons for it, but purely from a free media standpoint, it strikes me as the right strategy.
I have no direct experience there.

But think about a few things. There's a general sense of what an undergraduate education looks like, 4 years, prerequisites followed by picking a major, etc.

"Grad school," on the other hand, is kind of meaningless. Is it a master's program? PhD? Is it in a hard science? English? It it in a trade a la journalism?

So my assumption is that every program is different and every school does it differently for grad programs. They're small and weird enough that they have to.

I do think there's a lot more faculty involvement in grad school admissions. I also think that master's programs are much, much easier to get into than people suspect. I went to the one of the top journalism schools in the country, and as far as I could tell, it had about a 50% admission rate. 50%!!!!!
I wish people wouldn't make these sorts of arguments

I don't want my government wasting money on something I don't think will work. I believe the resources are better put elsewhere. That's important to me - might not be the case for you.

and because this is the thin end of the wedge of tyranny.

Think I made that point.
You need to take a look at PAL, a 2D game programming library built atop OpenGL and SDL.

http://common-lisp.net/project/pal/

It even has a game written in it already:

http://www.cliki.net/Bermuda

I use SBCL with lambda-gtk, lispbuilder-SDL and CL-OpenGL. Couldn't be happier. And oh, on Win32 and Linux :-)
(Australian) Govt pledges $83M to save tech innovators
Wordpress is hosed. There's only so much square peg-round hole hammering you can do when what you're working with isn't actually a fully fledged CMS. Joomla shows some promise but with the head start and community (and now government) support Drupal is enjoying, I don't think this is going to be much of a contest.
Agreed. But it sounded like, in this case, you were using a list to represent that which would have been represented by a record in a statically typed language.

I'm imagining you'd have some kind of Field record type, with isDisplayable and isModifyable fields. Instead of destructuring as a list (or tuple), you would explicitly look for isDisplayable and isModifyable.

But, of course, you could still make the same mistake in a statically typed language if you chose not to set up the data structure this way.
To start: This whole topic really irks me.

To your comment: Wouldn't entrapment laws cover this?

I would have no problem with a site (run by the police) offers recycled CP/allows others to upload (ala youtube) then tracks really active users (say, 10+ hard core downloads or 1 verifiable homemade upload) for a long time while rounding up the ones that are abusing their own children.

In court the police would have to prove motive, etc.. But a good event log table should do the trick.

If I happen to get emailed CP spam, that is one thing, but when you can prove that a person clicked on button A then button B then button C and searched for "...", that is pretty good evidence in my eyes.

Egh. I really wish there was an easy way to shut this shit down without massive internet privacy invasion.
I think this is the perfect example of a comment that needs a citation to be taken at all seriously. I'm not saying you're lying, I'm just saying it's a pretty sensational and inflaming anecdote, and it would be nice if you could offer some proof.
I remember watching Night of the Living Dead several years ago with friend when we were both into cheesy old films. We were expecting something along the lines of The Giant Gilla Monster or Attack of the Killer Shrews and were surprised to find that it was actually a very good, very gripping movie. It's no surprise that it sparked the genera.
I've been following my own algorithm for ranking teams since the start of the NBA season. USA Today has the best computer readable format that I could find.
Really? Huh! I'll have to give that a look-up, then.
28 Days Later and sequel are not zombie movies. They are stories about a viral sickness, not about the dead coming back to life. The infected are not dead and potentially can be cured.
That was a lot of rhetoric and hand-waving, but you still haven't proven that it is all abuse, nor have you proven that the examples listed in the OP are clearly "that which caused harm or destruction or misfortune" to the people involved, let alone that sex automatically harms or damages minors. While this is merely anecdotal evidence, I do know people who had their first consensual sexual experiences with older partners when they were below the age of 16, and they seem none the worse for wear.
Languages are rapidly disappearing
Couldn't one assume a priori that not all paints are mercury-resistant? If Aluminium is corroded by mercury, would it be unreasonable to conjecture that some paints are too?
I agree. If I wanted to sell an ebook or mp3 or something at a competitive price it would be impossible!
I upvoted this because I didn't feel it was stupid (certainly not enough to hit 0 points). Condemning Gitmo is not endorsing terrorism.

Condemning the idea of "illegal information" is not endorsing child abuse. Child porn is usually a result of child abuse. Child porn may be a contributing factor in child abuse. That still does not equate child porn and child abuse.

I don't agree with sho, but I don't think is argument is stupid or invalid.