skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One more thing: You're seeking "paid validation" as a writer through Google.

Welcome to the club. Want to compare AdSense revenue?

How much money do you really think you "lost" as a result of this error? How many people do you picture were lined up to purchase your book?

Can't be much. You seem to intrinsically overvalue your self-input.

True hackers hack for free. Anything that comes of it is icing on the cake. Even pennies are enormously welcome. Whining loudly is lame.

You should really try to remember to keep a sense of humor when dealing with certain types of code like JavaScript.

P.S. Thanks, Neil!
"Must be user error" - I thought it's a joke.
"Also, I think it is often politicians who decide which scientists get funding for their research, so in a way people do elect scientists (not sure how the system works in the US)."

You are totally right. And, in my humble opinion, it's dangerous when politicians alone decide what should be investigated and studied. It creates a situation where "intellectual prostitution" is the norm. Scientists know what the funding agencies want to hear, and write grant proposals accordingly. A monoculture is born. No one works outside the mainstream ideas.

Focusing on some areas is good because it creates momentum and leads to faster progress. For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, the investment in the space program led to an amazingly fast progress. This was good. Entire new fields were developed. On the other hand, when the government alone decides that a certain area is "evil" (e.g., stem cell research) then we have a "New Inquisition" in place. This is very bad.

In an ideal world, scientists would report their findings, politicians would propose courses of action, and people would vote for one proposal over the others. The real world is a whole lot less perfect.
I seriously want to know. Have you actually used msysgit for any length of time on a relatively large project?
Kudoz to the author for his understanding and appreciation of pragmatism:

use the right _language_ for the right job

or in a longer form:

English is better than multi-language
Although multi-language is often better than *only* English
Practicality beats purity
Distributed version control to the rescue
"Also – our CEO is named Trip Adler, not Trip Adkins." big lols.
They also happen to share 9 months of very important "nurture" in the womb.
Give them more reasons to give you money

I have little reason to suspect that being in the cloth-map business is going to be any more worthwhile in the long term than being in the IP business.
The amount of money a "Web 2.0" site raises is inversely proportional to the value of the service it offers.
In Savings and Loan crises of 80s, wall streets banks lost all the money they made during the previous 25 years. In the current crises, I dont know the exact number but it is worse than that.

So if you believe that wall street banks actually make any money, you might want to reconsider your view points.
Skype app for iPhone not available in Canada
Giant laser experiment powers up attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion
"Remember the eight-second rule. Consumers have eight seconds worth of patience while waiting for your pages to load. This is especially true for home pages. It's like the restaurant business mantra: Don't keep them waiting, or they'll leave and never return."
- 37s manifesto.

Wow. Now for Google a 500ms -- half a second-- lag for twice as many results per page means a 20% drop in traffic.
News release announcing google, apple, and microsoft were teaming up to "redefine the desktop," developing new hardware, operating system, and user interface to give you "all the functionality of a portable device, but without the fear of losing it."
True - is there any way to un-submit?
It is the Daily Mail - probably felt it had to give it's side a bit of a boost!
Internet people love to declare that X is "fair use", but Internet people tend to have much more confidence than they should. (For one thing, they tend to read the criteria for fair use and think it's a logical or operation, when it's more of an and. It isn't either, really, it's what a judge determines, but it's more of an "and".)

You can't really know until you're in front of a judge, but if we take a tweet as a work, publishing an entire tweet without permission seems awfully likely to fail the amount test. Taking 100% of a work doesn't seem like fair use. You're also in trouble on the "work's value" front, because it's likely that the judge will not accept that Mark Cuban's tweets are not of some value. (A judge might write my tweets off as pretty worthless, but probably not Mark Cuban's.) Being given away voluntarily by the owner does not prove they don't have value, merely that the owner perceives that they have more value to the owner in that form, value you are impinging upon by republishing out of his control.

Your best bet at this point is to try to claim that the tweet is too small to constitute a "work", and you're just excerpting the tweet stream. From this point of view you pass all the fair use tests. However, my uninformed opinion is that this is unlikely to fly, because we recognize important copyrights on small snippets of things all the time, such as advertising slogans, and in every other way, a tweet is clearly an atomic published work, being independent of all the other tweets in the stream.

Maybe with a good enough legal team and the right judge, you could win a case that republishing a tweet is fair use, but it would be an uphill battle in my opinion.
Keeping tabs on your yak shaving
Harvard Admissions Drop to 7% on Record Applicants
I think there must be a basic law of nature that when you have a monopoly you get stupid.

Perhaps the only way for Google to "not be evil" is to cut itself in half and have the two new companies compete with each other.
Laser-Heated Hard Drives Could Break Data Density Barrier
This really pisses me off! We don't get Skype in Canada and we Also don't get Kindle for the iPhone.

We probably aren't going to get Tethering either. And we pay more than anyone else in the world for our wireless.
I think it would be a good April Fools joke if google shut down entirely for 24 hours
I have a potentially silly question: When you buy stock in a public company you have specific protection from liability -- the worst that can happen is you lose your investment. As an angel investor the worst case is worse, in theory. If the company racks up huge debt (maybe by getting sued) then you as a part owner could be on the hook for that. Is that worth worrying about in practice?
Overview of Confiker Variant C, the post-April 1st Virus
What did you learn about human nature from your startup(s)?
Web startups tend to also be psychology and/or sociology experiments. What did you learn from your startup(s)?
Status.net could point to the future of business intelligence
Is it ethical for parents to guide their children towards a life as employees?
One could argue that starting a company is so much more rewarding than working as an employee that discouraging people from doing so should be considered unethical.
A quick journey (with a heat graph) into optimizing for cache. (Louis Brandy)
I'm reminded of the advice from pg's never-delivered high school graduation address (posted here the other day): don't look for excuses to be lazy. Are drugs like Paxil the "lazy" way to avoid dealing with the realities of social interaction? For some surely not, but I think that for a good number of people they are.
Take a regression correlation, multiply by 100, and you have a crude sort of "percent". People intuit percent better than more complex (yet probably more mathematically rigorous) comparisons. If the book is written for a lay audience, this seems like an appropriate term.
Goog has major issues with customer service. If you're running a business, your first inclination 95% of the time, should be to make the customer really happy. If they have a complaint about your service, you bend over backwards to make it right. Especially, when these people are use to paying a CPC of $10 for some of their ad campaigns.

Can you imagine that type of response from Amazon web services support staff? Especially, if you had an unresolved $3000 bill with them.

I recently set up an online store using Yahoo Merchant solutions. I ran into road blocks two separate times, and when I went to their "help" section, I found a 24 hour customer service phone number, so I called them both times after midnight. On both occasions, within a minute, I was talking to a live person who spoke fluent English. And I had my issue resolved within minutes. Needless to say, I'm going to continue using Yahoo Merchant Solutions. The interface is pretty clunky, but I've been really happy with their customer service.

Google could take a lesson or two from Yahoo and Amazon on this.
Does that mean a bootstrapped, unfunded start up (like, say, recent Ask HN candidate ChuWe) delivers infinitely more value than Facebook?

sgroves will be happy to hear that!
I found Atwood's post to be very anglocentric. While for practical purposes it's probably a good idea for any programmer to be functionally literate in English, I certainly don't think they should all use it all the time. I'm Canadian, and I grew up in a very multicultural city. This may have something to do with my views on these issues.

In my first programming job, several co-workers were Chinese and amongst themselves usually spoke Mandarin. At a programming competition I attended a few years ago, several teams were from Quebec and most of them spoke French within their team. All these people could speak English, but chose not to because they were more comfortable speaking their native languages, even about technical issues. I think this is pretty normal, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
That's a stretch.

One could also argue that starting a company is so stressful, so full of risk, and so time-consuming, that encouraging people to do so should be considered unethical.

That said, I don't think parents could encourage or discourage effectively without providing an example. My parents and grandparents on both sides owned their own businesses (grandmother owned a beauty shop and then a thrift store, grandfather on the other side owned a body shop, dad owned an electronics business but later became an engineer working for others, mom owned an antiques and collectibles business); I don't think there's any other way my sister and I could have ended up (sister owns a medical billing company, and I started my first company right after college, which paid the bills but ultimately failed, and now I'm onto a winner).

My parents didn't encourage me to start my own company. In fact, they encouraged me to go the safe path: Get a good education in a marketable field. And, while I was still in college my dad clipped out and gave me the want ad that I replied to that got me my first regular job other than working for my mom in her store or loading furniture for her at garage sales and flea markets. They encouraged me to accept the full-time position offer from that same employer. I opted to quit instead and start my own tech business with the money I'd made in the stock market.

I don't know for sure that the environment I was raised in made a difference, but I do know that when I talk about the risks and expenses and other concerns of starting a business with some folks, they look like I'm speaking a foreign language. And, I also know that parental examples are how kids learn about just about everything, early in life.

So, if parents don't believe in being an entrepreneur themselves, how can that possibly encourage it in their children effectively? That's not to say they shouldn't try. A little entrepreneurial spirit goes a long way when the economy gets weird and jobs are no longer reliable.
http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/index.html#domain-gen...

after looking at this, i can't help but to be curious as to what DGA_random_function() & conficker_D_PRNG_function() actually do. if they're not truly random then it seems like there'd be a way to determine which domains would get hit first. how random can the average windows pc get?
They have monitoring locations around the world, but I've been getting unusually high pings from their Berkeley location.
Why non-selection is not rejection...
And destroys the world economy! Hilarious.
Isn't it compatible with the Microsoft variants? I mean, isn't that the point? Shouldn't you be able to build on Microsoft tools and then compile on Mono for other platforms? Or am I completely missing the boat?
If bit.ly Is Worth $8 Million, TinyURL Is Worth At Least $46 Million
Has anyone built any cross-platform games with Mono? I'm working on a little hobby project that I'd like to release in an installable version for Windows and Mac OS X, and I'm not really sure where to start. I've been so deeply rooted in the UNIX world for so long that I don't even have a guess about good solutions to Windows/Mac desktop application problems.
The numbers will continue to decline, the student body is growing larger and larger every year. My year is the largest freshman class ever...until next year.

The pressure put on students these days is insane. It's a non stop competition since conception.
It benefits everyone when individuals speak on the language that they feel more comfortable with. If what they have to say is valuable it will be translated to other languages anyway.
Ask HN: Recommend chair to comfortably support my hacker ass for 12+ hours a day?
I started working from home recently and my back is starting to demand better seating arrangements. Can anyone recommend a good chair? I really like the Aerons, but I am open to alternatives.
Encouragement in either direction is ethical so long as the parent is taking the child's wellbeing into account. Past that, it's a judgment call on the part of the parent, and a lot of that is informed by their own life experience. I know my parents never tried to instill any entrepreneurial values in me, but instead encouraged me to do well in school and go to college so I could get a decent job. Hardly what I'd call unethical - they were simply valuing my safety and stability over my independence and creative fulfillment. Since they came from less privileged backgrounds, that was likely a reflection of their own aspirations. You grow up wondering if your family will be able to put food on the table, around families who sometimes can't, and you might place a higher value on stability for yourself and your children.
* yawn
I think that was the point. Ten years ago they said it would be silly, now it's successful.

Ten years ago you'd be silly competing with Yahoo and AltaVista... And no, I'm not suggesting making your search engine smell like food will help.

That would be silly.
As stupid as Google's customer service, and their interpretation of the word "deleted" is, it is pretty obviously not intentional. My reasoning is: it adds virtually nothing to Google's income.

If these had not been turned on, the next higher bidder would have gotten those clicks. Presumably this is "dutch auction" -ish pricing, so the high bids on these CPCs only got a high charge per click if there were other high bids out there?
Of course, when discussing "nature" in this context, it is always between two humans. Why, how's the nature/nurture debate between humans and skunk cabbage going? Of course, nature is highly determinant there. When you compare a very stupid human, and a very intelligent human, you are in an absolute sense comparing two extraordinary creatures whose extraordinariness is wholly genetic. Their itty-bitty differences (auto mechanic vs. auto engineer) are how we measure ourselves in a power-spectrum and skew our perceptions.

It doesn't matter: Private sector eugenics is already emerging and will settle all bets.
Cool- I've always wanted to read that :) Isn't all of the contents from Hackers and Painters available on PG's website anyway?
The unfolding legacy of Twitter for software design
Why would they give you an appeal? They are not a charity organisation they are a business for profit. If something they are doing is illegal then by right you have access to the courts. Use them.
" I used to go to the trading floor and watch my software in use amid the sea of screens. A programmer doesn’t admire his creation so much for what it does but for how it does it. This stuff was beautiful and elegant."
This uses mono as a scripting engine, it's a pretty advanced game engines and there are quite a few games that use it: http://unity3d.com/

It supports both windows and os x.
I disagree. How to do localization is usually pretty straightforward, so why teach the APIs? There's barely enough time to communicate a basic understanding of complex systems to students, teaching them localization is a sideshow.

Anybody who wants their program to be used in another country needs to localize it, and that point, a simple Google search is enough.
It's obviously not going to be a huge source of income, but if it a few percent of revenue or something, depending on the amount of work necessary to make it happen, it might be worthwhile.

Example: I've been a fan of the Warcraft universe and lore, and I own a pile of Warcraft merchandise: action figures, posters, t-shirts, and collector's editions of every Blizzard has made a collector's edition for (I don't even play the new WotLK, but I like having the collector's editions for the art and soundtracks).

If he's got some customers are as rabid about his games as I am about the Warcraft universe, he could at least increase his revenue by a few points, even if it's just simple stuff like cloth maps, t-shirts, and soundtracks included with a Collector's edition of a game.

I don't think that's unreasonable. Obviously it's not going to overtake the rest of his business, but it could be an additional source of revenue, and even advertising (T-shirts are walking billboards), people talking about the "awesome" inclusions in collector's editions. Stuff like that.

Edit: He actually does do some special purchase stuff: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...

Total Copies Sold of Geneforge 4 as of March 13, 2009: 3979.

Total Gross Sales Geneforge 4 as of March 13, 2009: $111412.

Total Geneforge 4 Hint Books Sold as of March 13, 2009: 807.

Total Gross Sales Geneforge 4 Hint Books as of March 13, 2009: $5649.

The books served for around 5% revenue from Geneforge 4. It's not huge, but it's a little something more.
The market mechanism should step in before the courts (i.e. they would give you an appeal to stop from losing you to the competition). The problem in this case is that there are no significant competitors.
"When Chinese use their native tongue, the knowledge exchange goes faster and in more depth. It encourages greater participation by a wider audience."

I think that's a very important observation. One's mother tongue determines one's thinking. I'm a native Chinese currently studying Computer Science in Canada. Although I have no problem communicating in English, when it comes to complicated cases, the logic engine in my brain seems to work better if it thinks in Chinese. Another interesting observation is that I always count numbers and do arithmetic in Chinese---I received my primary education in China, which hard wired my brain in certain ways. Plus, English numbers are just too irregular to express decimals properly (by comparison, Chinese numbers are extremely regular and match positional notation perfectly, e.g. 12,345 will be literally pronounced in Chinese as "one 10,000, two 1,000, three 100, four 10, five". )

Another defect in my English thinking process is that I can barely come up with proper phrases or expressions for unfamiliar abstractions. I guess in order to name things properly requires one to have very deep understanding of the culture and its history, which takes a long time for non-native English speakers. (e.g. There used to be an async-IO library for highly concurrent web servers in Python called Medusa. I got the idea for the name immediately, but if I were to name it myself, I'll never come up with such a smart name. )

That said, recently I noticed that somehow my brain starts to re-wire itself and certain ways of thinking in English become more natural. But that's the result of years of reading related stuff in English only, which is certainly not the case for many Chinese programmers.
What is the official branch of MySQL?
Well, it does not work here either for some reason (Opera), but I just googled the title and found the article:
http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/
i went from tons of back issues to none within 2 months of getting the freedom chair with headrest. pricey, but it was totally worth it.
That's Only Ten Lines Of Code
>Nature works through nurture, and nurture through nature, to shape our personalities, aptitudes, health and behaviour. The question should not be which is the dominant influence, but how they fit together.

Interesting article
That is exactly the point, however last year I had an existing .NET build that I wanted to port over to linux - it was developed with VS2005 / .NET 2, so should have been fairly trivial to port.

The issues I ran into were many (eg windows forms, data access being not or only partly implemented) so I just gave up and ran the original .NET in a windows virtual machine, rather than mangle it to work with gtk#.

So in principle it is an ideal idea that in practice has many issues due to MS driving .NET development and MONO having to play catch-up and then attempt to mangle the windows-specific code to be cross-platform. YMMV.
My year is the largest freshman class ever...until next year.

Actually, I think the number of dorm spaces for freshmen puts a hard limit on the number of new students at Harvard each year. Let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly: are you saying you were admitted in the most recent announced new class, the class that entered in fall 2008 (Harvard class of '12)? Or maybe you mean something else.

My prediction is that the number of applicants will still go up next year, but the number of admitted students will be set so that the number of ENROLLED students in 2010 is as near as possible to the number last year and this year.
It's doing quite well, there are some areas that they aren't really focusing on, but before porting try running this tool:
http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA It's a migration analyzer and it will help to identify incompatibilities.
That probably is where his "percent" is coming from, but I'm so used to reading even popular literature that doesn't dumb things down like that (preferring to explain typical ranges of correlations) that it was jarring to read that in the newspaper article. Maybe the newspaper editors imposed that on an author who does better in his book.

But what exactly does it MEAN to say "their IQ scores, for example, tend to be around 70 percent similar" when IQ scores have their own scale?
Wait, he actually got someone at Google to respond to a query in a timely fashion? That seems like a pretty big win to me. He must have a serious ad budget.
I have an Aeron; before I had it my back started to hurt, so I picked one up -- IMHO it's worth the price.
I realize this is cliche but my vote goes to the Aeron.
Show your aviation photos on Planegrazy.com | Aviation news - Planegrazy
Worked for the banks...
Pretty spiffy, but is there an application? Massive storage is all well and good, but I don't know of anyplace where it's a limiting factor. Consumer harddrives seem far more likely to keep going to solid-state, I think. Is there some industry application that'd see significant benefits to a giant storage-density boost?
I wrote this article and, quite honestly, have no idea how it ended up here. I certainly can't vouche for its place in this particular forum but wanted to say thank you to anyone who read it and commented, whether that be positive or negative. If anyone has suggestions for topics that somehow cut across the hacker/psychology interface, please let me know and I will write about those.

Best,
Rob Dobrenski, Ph.D.
ShrinkTalk.Net