skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm getting kinda sick of all accusations of racism.

I'm not accusing you of racism. I am pointing out that one of your statements is racist. Those aren't the same thing at all. I invite you to read point one of this interesting essay that went round the other day:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/03/12/mary-ann-mohanraj-gets...

That’s a starting assumption for me — the world is racist, the culture I grew up in is racist, I’ve internalized and carry around a hell of a lot of racist baggage, and on some deep level, many of my basic assumptions are racist. So are yours. That sucks. But I also don’t feel particularly guilty about it, and neither should you. It’s something you’ve inherited, living in this world. The onus now on you isn’t to wallow in guilt — it’s to be aware of these deep-buried attitudes, and consciously try to avoid letting them dictate your choices in life.

All of us draw racist conclusions from time to time. I've done it more than once, and doubtlessly will do so again. If nobody bothers to point this out I'll just keep making the same mistakes forever.

As for whether or not a statement like this is overtly racist:

If other immigrants from a country integrates well and is successful they should be given preference over another country

Here's the deal: When someone says "people who work hard tend to succeed", that is not overtly racist. If someone says "people who speak English tend to succeed", that is not overtly racist. When someone says "people who win math competitions succeed", or "people with a family history of entrepreneurship succeed", or "people who can afford to pay an immigration tax succeed", these statements are not overtly racist. (Though, obviously, people might disagree with them, or dispute their relevance to immigration policy.)

But when I read "people from Culture X tend to succeed; therefore we should give them a preference" what can I call that statement but racist? You're generalizing about people based on their race. It's an unfair generalization -- unfair to the millions of people who work hard, learn fast, and integrate, but who are unfortunate enough to have a less-marketable ethnic background.
Personally, I am not sure why you're in a private beta. Just launch it and iterate as fast as you can.
5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded
Gaining outside investors means that you have established credibility as someone who can identify early-stage start-ups with a bright future. Congratulations.
1984, brother...
No.

It would be so fucking awesome.

Get it right.
I just don't understand how come legalese can't be replaced with some kind of mathematical formal system? A few lawyers I shared this view with laughed at me, but after some digging I realized that was because they lacked a proper training and believed that English was more expressive than Math. Wrong: math is the language that describes the world around us, surely it can be used to describe their stupid laws, which can't even approach the laws of nature in complexity.

Sure such language won't be readable by regular folks, but that's not the point. Such "mathematized legalese" would be made readable by computers and translated into all sorts of usable applications: for instance you can do almost automatic "legislation simulation" without even going to a court room: given two theorems (legal agreements) and variable bindings (facts) a computer (judge) could estimate your chances of winning without wasting a single dollar on lawyers.

Am I an idiot because I see nothing wrong with this?
I always update when the first RC comes out. I figure I can do my part and submit bug reports that way, but I've never actually run into any bugs. The RCs have been totally stable. Go figure.
I'm tired of these oh! "why don't you give me a greencard" attitudes. Even on HN, whenever something related to migrants comes up for discussion, there is this invariable rant about "hard-to-get-greencards" tucked in an insightful(at least apparently to HN users) comment.

What's the deal here? If you are saying, oh! only if you had given me a greencard without 5 year wait, I would have started a startup and changed the world, why don't do it in your home country and make it a better place? Yeah right! if only someone had created a silicon valley in my country, ad infinitum.

Seriously, I have trouble coming to terms with the fact that these highly motivated people with the big ideas to change the world think it appropriate to nag about some other country not granting them citizenship.
I don't think the calculation says anything about the grouping of data. Or does it?

If you have an unbiased sample of 584 votes and 60% of the sample responded "25 - 30", could you say with 95% confidence that 60% (+/-4%) of the sampled population would select "25 - 30"?
The following books also contain some good coverage of the alarming state of unsustainable agriculture especially in the US (among a number of other topics regarding sustainability):

Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins

The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken (to a lesser extent)
This site was the attempt to be exactly that: http://nonhackernews.com/ but it doesn't seem like it ever reached critical mass.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD. I think this is a terrible idea. Hack the system so the most deserving person doesn't win and give hackers a bad name in the process. Really...good...idea.
The author's suggestion seems to be that local governments should pay people directly for creating resources (like his example of receipts for grain.) I'm a little skeptical about how well that model works in the real world.

It's worth noting the parallels though, between the weird socialism he seems to be proposing and our current system. In our system, the fed creates money and lends it to the banks, at interest, so that they can lend that money to productive people. In his world, local governments would just give money directly to productive people. Frankly, I think that's bound to be less inefficient, even though it's more direct.
Wow, this looks like a really nice app. Very polished.
For the record, I'm not xach. I just saw this on Programming Reddit.

Edit: link
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/854w0/faking_vo...
I'm happy with my tabs. If Firefox loses tabs, Firefox loses me as a user.
A lot of YC alumni are willing to talk about this. I emailed one person to ask him about an earlier application draft, and he helped me fix things up a lot.

The things that would come to mind (though mind you, I'm only an applicant at this point as well):

* Stand out
* Show you know what you're doing
* Focus on what's important
* Be confident in your idea and your people
Just to clarify, I think he's refering to the Don't Repeat Yourself principle.
It's not the shortest page on wikipedia, just the shortest non-notable page. (As in "shortest(non-notable page)", not "(shortest, non-notable)page".)
Oh, yeesh, not yet more junk science on IQ. First of all, digit span is exquisitely subject to training effects

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

(this is just one citation among many for this often-replicated result) and digit span is not related to important cognitive functions that sum up to "rationality" as distinct from IQ.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

But in general about articles in the popular press posted to Hacker News about IQ, what I say is that the obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
Apparently you didn't realize that the country as a whole benefits from these startups. By stifling innovation through poor immigration policy, the US is hurting itself.
Rushkoff seems to subscribe to the daddy model of wealth.
http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Seriously, there is an optimum level of debt for countries as well as people, and it's NOT zero.
Thanks for the guidance, Paul. In thinking more about this, I came to the conclusion that this is probably a "taster" for what may become a closer relationship between YC and Sequoia. For example... Could you see a future where YC was part of Sequoia? It seems to be a good fit, as they are not currently targeting deals of the size you pursue, and you'd gain access to their resources and infrastructure.
Yeah, what I really meant by my comment was it is cool to see this style of programming (lightweight procs & messaging) becoming easier to do in more mainstream languages. While implementation details differ greatly, I think it still gives a lot of credit to the guys who developed Erlang.
Why would an unsuccessful applicant care about pg's approval? Won't s/he just post it anywhere on the web if s/he so chooses? Why would even pg care?
The most successful hack of the founders of the United States was to found a constitutional and economic system that could bring in people from different countries all over the world, and have them all work hard to build up a new nation. There must be some reason that the smartest people (however we define smart behavior) in many other countries see more opportunity in the United States than they see in the countries where they grew up. Read the Federalist Papers to become a better political hacker.
Anyone who's followed some of my threads here know that I don't shy away from controversial arguments (some of which got downmodded to hell), despite being in the top 15 on the leaderboard.

Let me be clear - I clearly do enjoy the game of accumulating karma points, but I enjoy the game of speaking my mind far more.

I've seen plenty of controversial arguments (some of which got downmodded to hell too) from other "high karma" people, so I don't think this is a problem here, though it may be a problem in other communities.
from reading zed's two articles about it, it seemed way too organized. something like this has to just evolve out of a few people meeting up, telling their friends, meeting again with a slightly larger group, and so on.

otherwise you have all this meta-discussion about what the group's logo should be (why the hell does it need a logo?) and how meetings should run and what color the bikeshed should be, when all people want to do is get together, meet new people, and hack on stuff. why would anyone want to attend a meeting where you are forced to give a presentation in front of strangers? where's the fun in that?

in the openbsd group, when some people want to create something new or hack on something complex, we don't create a wiki and an irc channel and take minutes on the meetings. we organize a "hackathon", invite the relevant people there, and sit in a room together and hack. when we get tired, we go out for beers and talk, then go back to hacking.
I'm not able to follow that discussion very closely (lots of technical ISP jargon in there that I don't understand), but I guess the concern is the ISP caching copyrighted content, right? Isn't the caching of copyrighted images in an http proxy just the same issue though?
I read somewhere that Steve Jobs tore up a long contract and demanded a new one that was one page long if the other party wanted to do business with Apple. Lots of people demanding such contracts are the only way things will change.

I can't imagine this happening, though, as lawyers would need to write these contracts and greatly simplifying contracts would probably put many of them out of a job.

In addition, many people with their shorter contracts would be shocked when a judge rules against their interpretation of the contract, and others will complicate their contracts to prevent the same thing happening to them. This is likely the process that led to the contracts we have now. Legalese is not intended to be clear and expressive, but as a kind of adversarial form of communication.
> I mean... you're right, you are using modules to do what you get from classes in other languages. So what?

My point is that languages that have classes also seem to need modules. Do haskell's modules address the problems that addressed by the combination of classes and modules in other languages? Does Haskell somehow avoid those problems? Is there some other mechanism?

> I'm interested to see the examples you've seen for other languages that do address large programs.

Examples of modules can be trivial yet demonstrate why modules might be useful for large programs.
Techcrunch is 100% biased
"Within Wikipedia, notability refers to whether or not a topic merits its own article." (emphasis added) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

Topics are notable; articles are not. If a topic is non-notable in the real world, nothing written on Wikipedia should change that.
> Table 1.1 shows annual rates of growth in per-capita GDP for each of three decades, the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, in a range of rich countries. Contrary to our perception of the U.S. as a growth dynamo and the Europeans as sclerotic, France and Germany tremendously outperformed the U.S., as did most of the other countries.

It's easier to grow fast if you're a country that has been blown to bits and is putting everything back together, rather than one that's already prosperous.
Some high karma people are there because they trigger controversy. mattmaroon comes to mind. And I don't know if I count as a high-karma user but I'm on the leaderboard, and I think that most of my karma comes only from controversial discussions.

So far, I've seen very few HN users who have high karma because they're gaming the system. We're too small to have high karma matter much, so a lot of people just try their damndest to contribute to the community - and in a community of thinkers and designers, that usually means speaking your mind rather than conforming.
Exactly - it's all debt of some form - To be honest, I didn't really get a clear picture of his scheme from the article. It seems like he's advocating a highly decentralised form of debt?

So maybe this is great from a community perspective - but it kind of sucks for something bigger... Like a Google or a Stem Cell breakthough.
Here is how you would test your system.

Translate a nation's entire legal code into your system. Pick a bunch of cases in the sub-domain of law you want to tackle first. Find a way to model the evidence and agreed upon facts of the case (I'm guessing this will be especially difficult). Run your system on the translated laws and information on each case, then compare the results to how the court actually ruled.

If you were able to predict outcomes with high accuracy, you would have an extremely valuable tool and can retire soon if you market it effectively.
The ones that do make money all seem to involve either mailing stuff to people who have paid for it online or getting advertising deals from the likes of General Motors.

What kind of web analyst misses out on the slew of other online monetisation strategies and dares make such a ridiculous statement?

I find the whole argument dubious. I'm pretty sure that there are many potential monetisation strategies for Twitter, most of which the analyst couldn't think of, apparently. I don't really want it to be bought, but I don't think it would be a bad purchase for, say, Google.
Making more money is an ok goal, though a bit too general for practical use.

The problem comes from a short-sighted approach to making more money now at the expense of making money later, which is what GM did. If they'd decided to sell more cars by making better ones, it probably would have taken longer to get to that point, but they'd have been in a much better position to compete with the other car makers.
I know why I might want to define a tree.

I have no idea why I want to define an algebraic datatype.

Note "you can define trees using algebraic datatypes" doesn't tell me why I want to use algebraic datatypes.
Ask HN-Y Combinator more prestigious than McKinsey in 10 years?
I run an internet startup but used to be an ex-Mgmt consultant from a top firm and came from a b-school background. The peer pressure was quite a bit to join one of the top consulting firms or IB firms regardless of what you actually enjoyed doing. People would spend hours on Vault to get advise on applications, interviews etc. I was surprised to see a similar thread about YC here- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518656

This got me thinking, if, in another 10-15 years, “getting” into a top "branded" program like YCombinator, TechStars etc... be more socially prestigious than joining a brand name firm?

Or am I a dinosaur and has it already happened?
Point taken; thanks. As I replied to your reply further up in the thread, I could definitely see how a future Sequoia-YC combination would be beneficial to both parties. I hope this works out well for you, as you're doing a great job of helping a new generation of entrepreneurs.
The Size of the Derivatives Bubble = $190K Per Person on Planet
Yeah My entire company would like to use this service, id say as long as its 90% bug free, launch!
Oops. The video on your front page is no longer available on YouTube.

[edit] Now it's back. Weird.
I don't see the option of specialized functions as a bad thing. I also don't see why the existence of code that uses such functions is a bad thing.
Ask HN: Checkout javascript framework Mamoo
New javascript framework based on Prototype and the Motionbox EventHandler. Would love to hear what HN has to say about it.
I met Zed at RubyFringe and I was shocked at how nice he was. Maybe he has a whole Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde thing, but I honestly think he just gets out his anger in his writing.
The results are rather wrong, i.e offensive to the eye (try creating aromatic compounds), but as a GUI prototype, it's pretty neat.
Problems with Google Checkout and its price increase
Why prosthetics should be beautiful
Click on the bond button before adding an atom. It cycles from 1 to 3.
One of my favourite graphs for explaining the power of git is the Rails traffic graph at github: http://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/impact .
Track right until the beginning of April '08. That's when Rails moved to git.
Is it still possible for foreigners to apply for this cycle right now? I.e. can one get appropriate visa to get to US before April 16?
Thanks! I'm glad the effort paid off. For me to be able to work with an app almost every day, the app's interface, its "look and feel" is important enough to put as much effort in as we did. I'm pretty happy the way it turned out, glad you like it.
I suspect this is actually a legal nightmare. What happens when the informal summary actually fails to capture some legal subtlety embodied in the legalese? Which have I agreed to? What happens when a company (deliberately, perhaps) musrepresents the meaning of the legalese in the summary.

The real solution is to write simpler clearer User Agreements, rather than attempting to skin them.
No video? That's bad. Youtube used to be pretty stable. We probably should put up a mirror of the screencast at vimeo. That's what we're going to do next.

Thanks for the heads up.
First, it seems like the honorable thing to do.

Paying off debt and defaulting on debt are two different concepts.

Most companies are permanently in debt in some fashion.
"Olson notes that special-interest groups increase inequality in a society. A union prevents companies from hiring black workers at the same wages at whites. A caste system prevents someone from rising above the station to which he was born. Effective lobbying turns welfare or health care programs into cash cows for government workers or health care providers."

One of these things is not like the others!
Do people really complain about that with Microsoft?

My complaint with them is that they provide fairly shitty computers and I hate working with them. That's a complaint regardless of who's using them. I'm fine with them giving computers to schools: I just wish they were better.
This is the most intuitive scheduling app I've ever used. The way that you just hover over everything and get to see what different features do without committing to anything allows me to explore your app without much fuss.

Feature requests:

1.) When I add a task, sometimes I'd like to add a really detailed description (or any description for that matter) (i.e. a project spec) and I'd like the ability to do that. The ability to bold, italicize, change font size and format, etc, would be helpful in descriptions.

2.) Attachments. I want to be able to attach files to my tasks.

3.) Keep the above features out of the way. Most of the time I won't need them, but when I do, I really need them.

EDIT: 4.) Just realized that the projects aren't hierarchical. I expected them to be, and it doesn't allow me to be super organized for more complex projects/tasks. An example of this might be Work>Websites>ClientA and another might be Life>Exercise or Life>Clean-Up.

If I think of more, I'll let you know. Nice job so far.
We definitely need to release as soon as possible, the private-beta is really just to make sure there aren't any really big problems we've missed. And I suppose it's partially just launch-anxiety :). Flipping the switch with a product that isn't perfect (sure, it never will) is always hard; but we're definitely not going to stay in private beta for long.
Is there an open source alternative that's as easy to install and use? I mean, my computer network had problems and it was using Windows XP. I don't think moving to Ubuntu would have made things any easier.

Open source OSes are very good for some things. "Get things done easily" isn't one of those things. People who aren't tech people get confused by a lot of stuff a lot of the time. Meanwhile, I've never met a kid who finds Macs confusing.
Not really, it's not as if I'm planning it myself. Just generally interesting stuff :)
SHOUTcast founder to leave AOL
Analog Blogging in Liberia
Thanks! Just making sure it's indeed 90% bug free now.
A bug would be I can add items to projects but they don't show up in the project. I can find them in the all tab but not the project they belong in.
Because my office is spun about its axis while I'm not around?
On your frontpage: there are some graphics under the video which frankly are too small to make out. You may as well drop them - maybe replace with a screenshot tour (I don't usually like watching videos because you can't skim through them).

Also on front page, your tag line ("For individuals ...") is too close to the word "planning" with a big gap underneath it. The tagline could be very much bigger and make better use of the available space.

Your signup page is a bit of an eyeful. I like the narrative on the fields, but maybe put the elements in a table with the narrative in a column on the left (in place of regular labels) and the fields on the right. However, thanks for guessing my timezone correctly (or maybe it was a lucky default ;) and letting me change the date format up-front.

The video is too long at 5 minutes. My (admittedly short) attention span ran out at 2 minutes. In fact, the first two minutes were enough to convince me to sign up based on the look and feel, etc. Someone I know who does marketing told me "give them just enough information to choose you over your competitors. Everything else is wasted." So less is more on the video front.

However, I did sign up and I like the look of the app itself. Judging from your help page, there's a lot to know so maybe you should make those pages into a PDF so people can print cheat-sheets? Looks like each section should fit nicely on an A4/letter page.

Sounds like I'm being critical but it looks like a great app and I wish you luck with it. I'll try to use it some more and post again.
"I wonder who broached the idea..."

I suggested it in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481791 "Why not raise a side fund and do full fledged seed investing if you can pick winners?"