skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other night I spent half an hour in a bar waiting for friends, eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table. It was two young guys (mid-20s) talking about search engines, both obviously comfortable with business concepts, one with a decent technical understanding and the other not so much. I gathered that they lived in the neighborhood, and I knew they needed to be extremely well-off to do so, so I was naturally curious about what kind of people make so much money so fast in technology. Were they, I wondered, extremely bright?

I figured out quickly that the technical guy was pretty bright, but I never got a hand on the other guy. He exhibited behaviors that I associate with idiocy or flat-out frat boy douchebaggery: making things up, pretending to understand things he didn't, ridiculing ideas that he didn't even pretend to understand (I'm not making that up), bragging about himself, continuing stories after his listener had pointed out that their premise was factually untrue, and so on. Yet occasionally he said something that made me think no, a stupid person could never have said that. Plus the technical guy, who apparently knew him well, was taking all of this douchebaggery in stride and was talking to him as if he were an intellectual equal, not holding back or simplifying at all. The technical guy had apparently known this guy long enough to realize that he was much smarter than he seemed.

Even the fact that the technical guy consistently, quietly corrected the other guy's facts -- and then sat patiently while the guy finished his story despite the fact that the correction removed both the point and the credibility of the story -- seemed to indicate that they had a considerable level of mutual comfort and respect. I mean, if the guy had really been a complete idiot, the technical guy would not have bothered correcting him so often. Not to mention that an arrogant idiot would not have been so tolerant of correction as this guy was.

Anyway, that whole story was just to illustrate that there is a huge cultural gap between technical people and nontechnical people. The way that guy acted, I would not have trusted him to feed my goldfish. Apparently, though, he was a bright guy who had learned a different set of social mores.
EPIC GOOGLE WIN
Languages and Security : a short reading list
But everything's a proxy for everything. Employers don't really want educated employees, they just use the college degree as a proxy for the skills and qualities they actually want. The college degree itself doesn't certify learning or the qualities desired by employers; it just certifies that you found a way to make it through college. Ultimately, anything anybody does is largely based on luck, their ability to game the system, who their friends are, etc. If some rich kid has an essay written for him, he's just equaling out the luck some other rich kid had in getting an easy teacher.

Personally, I found that my ability to write papers decreased as I wrote more of them. In that sense, I didn't learn anything by writing; in fact, I unlearned things. Maybe I would be a better writer if I had outsourced my papers.
This is happening for a lot of things. I also can't see my own comments. (In a moment of slight serendipity, I can't see the comments on this page either.)
So what happens when each node in the decision tree has probability attached to it. Worse still, what happens when you do not know the true probabilities of these nodes. Now imagine you have to deal problems all day with uncertain characteristics, i.e., decision trees have nodes with unknown probabilities. You will be stuck, unable to make decision.

This also reminds of the study in which a person's emotional part of the brain was removed (forgot name of the part, its the one that uses hueristics). So, he would have to make every decision completely rationally. That caused him to take a very long time to make even the simplest decisions, like which pencil to choose amongst a set pencils to write with.
This kind of kills the main value of the site
His customers are often private, and they tend to call him in their freetime - evening and weekends. He also has to do a lot of planning meetings off-hours for the same reason.

Maybe we have a difference definition of odd-hours? He never gets calls in the middel of the night though.
I have not seen a single instance of "the media" promoting these stereotypes at all. On the contrary, it seems like there is some covert Twitter media blitz going on all around me. From Comedy Central to C-SPAN there are mentions of people "twittering."

It's normal people who are "promoting myths" about Twitter, although the author does a pretty bad job dispelling those myths. I signed up for a Twitter account, but I find it totally irrelevant to me personally. It is kind of useful for publishing our updates at www.trailbehind.com, but other than that I just don't get it. Maybe, at 24, I'm just too old to tweet.
This one seems to have the same problem.
This article seems kind of strange, talking of "Twitter haters" and "this loathing of all things Twitter", and what "The media wants you to believe".

IMHO Twitter is getting an amazingly positive treatment from the media. Anyone following the tech media has seen their share of hype, but I cannot remember anything that got so much coverage for so few users.

In any case, why would you even care? In the long run, if Twitter's valuable it will stay, if not it will fade. "The Media" and "the haters" have absolutely zero influence on that.
I'm all for widening the world and all, but let me think out loud.

Harvard lets really brilliant people meet each other in a place that offers exclusively brilliant people. (Brilliant by Harvard's standards, anyway: I'm aware that that's not a perfect standard.) It gives them some world-class teachers, and it gives them class sizes small enough that students can build relationships with those teachers.

How do you lessen selectivity without also lessening the experience of being in such an exclusive place?
I write at something like the pace of a hundred words a minute. For me, 815 words is the time it takes for me to wait for a kid on my floor to finish his homework so we can go eat.

I regret that my writing speed comes across as creepy.
I posted another one too... this one has been building up in my head for a while:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/03/27/software-economics-pub...

I find this stuff extremely interesting.
how ironic
I get the feeling I shouldn't bother clicking if Twitter is in the title. Yet, why do I fall for it every time?
If Haskell is good for webpages then I may give it a try, if not I´ll pass.

If it is, please somebody show us how to spit html and from there we´ll pick it up. No better-than-sex monads, no intergalactic scripting services, no functional masturbation.

I really want to know if it is going to save me time and resources for my next startup, nothing else.
One reason current machine translation looks pretty good is that over the years a lot of human translation has been remarkably bad. (I say this as a former member of the American Translators Association who made my living for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter.) Most clients of most translators can only check the accuracy of one of the translator's languages, which allows for a good bit of bluffing. I'm getting better and better satisfied since the 1990s with machine-translated texts I see on the Web, for example translations of my own personal homepage into other languages I know well enough to read.
I can't even see comments for THIS post :)
That's a great question. I'd love to hear some answers.

I'd also like to know how to decide between hiring sales people and selling a product online (self serve), or can both be done simultaineously?

A product we're considering could really be sold either way.
Flickr Co-founder Unveils Her New Startup: Hunch
Me neither, I could only see this here comment of yours on the 'comments' page.
It is essential that someone in your company thinks from the perspective of a customer. The author of this article/post is suggesting that that person's title is "Product Manager" (although they wear different hats).

He is NOT suggesting AFAICT, that you dump financial resources into a do-nothing "manager" as you are implying. I've heard time and time again that you NEED product management in a startup.

Think of a new name if you find the title misleading.
A salesman once told me, "Any salesman, no matter how bad, can sell himself to an engineer." You really need someone you trust to evaluate the candidates. Find successful entrepreneurs in your area and have their VP of sales help. Exercise your network. Enlist your SO, neighbors. VC's might help. I'm not kidding. An ad on Craigslist will probably attract some slick scum.

More advice from the salesman. Hire a salesman driving a Mercedes. The payments will keep him motivated. I once hired a salesman driving a beater and got performance commensurate with his car.

We are supposed to be gender neutral in this world, but I think that women beat us males in people skills, and sales is very much people skills. If nothing else, run your candidate by a sharp woman.

EDIT: When I wrote this I was thinking of direct sales, which is hugely expensive. I strongly recommend against it. Been there. Done that. I found telemarketing with skilled salespeople to be much more cost effective. And I really mean skilled, well trained, and well paid. Serve yourself is the most cost effective of all.

Disclaimer: I have run sales, but I dont pretend that I was any good at it.
Direct link for downloads:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/
I actually don't know why people knock on "You weren't meant to have a boss", even the original, stronger version.
I think that Internet slowly begins to remove the constrains you mention.

You have obviously never graded problem sets. ;) Have fun doing that for a class of 5,000 people.
What the fucking hell, people: take responsibility for your fucking life.

Is it really a good idea for us to be abdicating even more of our decision-making to computers? Then again, does it matter when the "decisions" are this trivial?

What should I be for Halloween?

Who cares?

Do I need a Porsche?

No.

Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid?

Yes.

Is Phoenix a good place to retire?

No.

Whom should I vote for?

Think for yourself, fucktard.

What toe ring should I buy?

Again, who really gives a shit?
Font Series: Arial is everywhere
Social welfare mechanisms like this are optimal in the utilitarian sense, but that's no consolation to those who get the short end of the stick. If the system doesn't leave everyone better off then it's not unquestionably superior to the status quo.
Golf, lots and lots of golf.
Crabs 'feel and remember pain' suggests new study
The hypothetical scenario you describe would be tough for Hazardous software; however, they had the opportunity to do a patent search for related pending applications prior to investing any resources creating Achron.

The Patent subsystem of our govt can serve a useful purpose for inventors and society in general.

But as with nearly any system of this type, there are "corner-cases" for undesirable usage.

A big problem is that someone can submit a patent and "sit on it" for years and years. A fallow patent provides no value to taxpayers. At best, the issue of the patent had a marginal cost for taxpayers, but at worst, there is a huge opportunity cost if commercial development of the invention yields value.

Our patent system should demand inventors make timely, reasonable effort towards commercial development of their inventions.

Kudos to the Achron inventor (Christopher Hazard?) for doing just that.
The streaming music companies will indeed lose money until they are willing to charge the consumer. Several of these companies provide easily as much value as satellite radio and could charge equivalent fees.
"The Media" does matter because it serves to recruit more users, thus increasing the size of the Twitter network and thereby the utility provided to everyone.
Well, you probably sort-of can do that with open source projects that integrate version control and bug tracking. In these repositories you will find lots of commits names "Fixes #42".

The problem, I think, is that making a statistical n-gram model of a programming language doesn't look like it can produce encouraging results (think locally balanced-like, but globally unbalanced parenthesis, which should pop up often in ngrams for parentheses more than n tokens apart). The upper side is that you can get a tokenizer "for free" using the language's own grammar.
What about using a combination of revision control and unit-tests?

A given unit test serves as the annotation for a static piece of functionality. The evolution of the code behind the unit-test shows the pre-bug (French) and post-bug (English) states.

A little harebrained perhaps, but there are a lot of open source projects with a long history behind them; maybe there are a few viable candidates to test this on.
As I said here, I recommend online sales. Sales and marketing can eat 50% of your revenues, and it is very hard for engineers to pick good salespeople.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rubbernecking
Reverse image search engine
Microsoft's anti-Apple ads: they just don't get it.
Seen the MS anti-Apple ads lately? See the link below.

They don't talk about the productivity lost while buying one of those Vista loaded PCs, and the cost of mental torture and frustration. They should spend time & money on fixing their OS rather than these stupid ads. After all, you cannot rationalize with one who is buying a BMW to go and buy a Nissan Sentra (take it easy Sentra owners), or vice versa!
I simply can't imagine a Ph.D. situation in which the advisor knows so little about the candidate that this would actually work. I could maybe see if the candidate did the work but wanted help with the 'wordsmithing' that s/he could pull it off. But even then. An alert advisor would get suspicious, I would think.

Maybe the word alert in the above sentence is where it breaks down.
Link: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/165113.asp
Pretty soon someone will rent you GPUs by the hour, at which point you'd have the advantages of elasticity and price/performance.
Three Reasons for Moving to Multicore
In that case, any coverage of Twitter in the media is positive almost by definition?
Both good points. Determining whether the U.S. or China has more economic freedom is difficult, because their ways of restricting freedom are so different.

discourse means that sound discussion of economic policy at a deep and detailed level can't happen.

It definitely happens among the elites, I once attended a workshop in Guangzhou about problems in urban planning. You can criticize the government's actions, you just cannot question its legitimacy. But even then you probably won't be jailed. Being an open supporter of democracy in China is like being an open racist in the U.S. You probably won't get jailed, but you will find your career not going so well. It is true you see far less policy debate in the popular press, but personally I'd have to be convinced that there is any link between the amount of popular debate over a certain issue and the quality of the eventual solution.

Lack of transparency is always definitely an economic hindrance, no question there. It's a bad problem both in China and the U.S..
This is true. I crawled the twitter graph back in Dec 07 as part of my research on social networks (which is coincidentally on HN currently), and I was shocked by how few users they had (at least in the giant connected component, which is really all that counts.) The numbers that were being thrown around by Arrington and co. were ten times greater.

Twitter has indeed received an amazingly positive coverage, if not for which it would have taken them far longer to get to their current user count (and who knows if they would have had enough cash in the bank in that case?)
That actually sounds like a neat business.
When every student has a laptop, why run computer labs?
Coverage is positive by definition only if it leads to increased profit for Twitter.
> there is a huge cultural gap between technical people and nontechnical people

100% agree. It's sometimes staggering how big it is. My point is that a small amount of effort can go a long way to bridging the divide, and using common language is a powerful first step.
This is a new thing? I've hated this game for years.
International Space Station Fly-Around in HD
Hey, university computer labs were kind of stale back in the mid-1980s
Eucalyptus seems like the most interesting piece of this. I'm looking forward to playing with it.
I have a question for the hackers here. Im a beginner programmer (<1 year of real world programming experience so far). What is the kind of problems (web app in particular) that functional programming helps to resolve? And if i dont use myself all the features of OOP in Ruby, does it makes me a "functional programmer"? There must be some concepts that are unique to functional programming. What is the Essence of functional programming vs OOP programming? Why functional programming? (it would be nice for me to have a wikipedia page about this but in simple english).

Thanks in advance.
Anyone else think "Jump to Conclusions Mat" when they read this?
Can we please keep these types of posts out of HN? "20 blah blah blah", "140 ways to be rich yesterday" -- we don't need another http://delicious.com/popular
Games as a Service: Why I'm Skeptical of OnLive
I certainly think the concept has the potential to be big! Sounds interesting.
Yes but much worse when they try to monetize:

What should I eat for lunch?

A. McDonalds (sponsored by McDonalds)

B. You get the picture...
Apart from the labels issue, online music startups are one of the most thriving and diverse online ecosystems. There's a huge range of music startups, far more than movie, tv, newspapers-related enterprises. It's an area that's adapted to the realities of online really quite quickly. If the labels don't adapt to this (and they have started to, in the form of ensuring they take a cut of tour and merchandise sales of artists) then independents will thrive because it's the only place people can get music from.
Assuming you know where each letter starts and ends. So each word maybe.
Hunch's decision trees seem vaguely reminiscent of the 'checklists to do things right' genre, as well.

I considered doing a webapp in a similar vein a couple years ago, and even reserved 'decidr.com' for it... so I find it amusing that now Ms. Flickr is doing a 'decidr'.
From http://www.hunch.com/fact-sheet/

"The presence of a link to a retailer has no effect on the decision outcomes Hunch proposes. Within a given decision topic, it's likely that some result pages will link to an online retailer, and others won't. Some topics don't have these sorts of links at all."
Actually, I have submitted lots of (mostly small and inconsequential) bugs and minor features over the years

Agreed. I think most programmers do this. I know I do, and I know all of my friends do. It is not hard at all -- first you check out the repository, then you make your change, then you send the patch. Making a change to someone else's software is just like making a change to yours, except they might indent a different number of spaces, or something.
Finally, a practical way to find out the names of porn actresses.
Parsing Roman Numbers - Beautifully
Not bad, but I think it would be more useful if I could submit an image and have the engine give me all the facts it could dig up about it, based on its context in other pages, geo tags and camera type (if available), etc.

I think we're going to see some very interesting developments along these lines very soon. Scary stuff too. Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance. Better keep those Facebook profiles private, folks! More than that, you'll have to convince your friends to keep their profiles private if they have pics of you as well!

<tangent> This is what is rather frightening about the next web; even if you want to remain anonymous, you're going to have to do battle with all the other folks who are more than happy to post and tag pictures of you for the world to see (with good -natured intentions, I might add). Remember that embarrassing moment at that party where you had a little too much to drink? Oh, you were too drunk to recall? Well, it's on somebody's public Facebook profile now. With your name on it. And if I am your employer, what's to stop me from taking your badge photo and plugging it into a service to pull down other pictures of you from the cloud? :O </tangent>

Anyway, back to the matter at hand! I do see your service as being particularly valuable to IP holders who want to know who is displaying their copyrighted images or logos without authorization. If your site were comprehensive enough, you could probably go freemium and become a paid tattle-tale. Take that a step further and "For a nominal fee, you can click here to have our partners at LegalZoom.com send a takedown notice."

:)
This is pretty easy to do on your own. Mail the mailing list, and I am sure someone will get back to you.
Because lab computers can be configured with all the necessary software and support students need to do work in an environment conducive to doing work. It's the software, support, licensing, environment, configuration, maintenance, convenience, peripherals, bandwidth, security, environment, and unity of purpose that's most valuable... not the physical computer itself.

When every student has paper, why print books?
easy: for ease of installation of site license softare such as matlab and for those times when their computer is down
Now would be the time to take down copywritten images from your blog/etc...
I'm surprised there's little mention of either context or culture. I think those are two of the most important elements of translation. Without context, it's impossible to know the tone, or sometimes even the actual grammar/conjugation of translations for certain languages (I'm thinking Korean/Chinese but this probably applies for other languages as well). Context also helps tremendously with disambiguation, one huge flaw in machine translation.

Culture is another interesting aspect. What somebody might translate as a greeting might require a totally different literal translation in another language, but it's always hard to justify translations that aren't exactly literal. This usually impacts tone quite a bit. From my experience, conversational style for the major Asian languages is indirect and hinting. Most people already understand the importance of cultural differences, this is strongly present in speech as well.
Well, it might be a bit more difficult - you have to learn how the other system works in some cases. But generally it's not that tough.
I think web apps are an interesting thing to try at least with FP - in a sense its functional: response = f(request).

You certainly can do FP style in most languages, but when you at least play with something that is more a pure FP (haskell is great and beautiful) it really makes sense when you see those concepts applied elsewhere - an interesting way to use haskell is Happs: http://dbpatterson.com/articles/5 (the haskell app server).

Just make sure its fun !
Think that's insane? What about this:

"Some upper-caste communities are not happy having lavatories in their homes because tradition dictates that such an arrangement is unclean.

Mr Monda said: “People do not want to go to the toilet in the home where they cook food. And many old people enjoy the opportunity to go for a walk. It gives them the opportunity to check on their fields.” "
Labs are great for group projects, free printer access, a place to work on a computer so your backpack isn't 5lb heavier every day, a place away from your room to check your email(s) quickly, etc.
This service didn't work for me, but I'm voting it up in hopes that attention will help this startup as I'd like it to someday.