skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know this is likely to be viewed as off-topic or whatever, but... there are some really cute girls in grad school, especially the European ones. And they are past that whole annoying where's-the-party phase. You also get to learn a lot about a topic, from professors who think you have a brain and are worthy of conversation. So, I have to say, there are some wonderful intangible benefits to grad school. If I didn't travel randomly, I would totally enroll in a graduate studies program, merely for the enjoyable social/intellectual aspects. Some of you who are young and have cash-flow-positive startups should seriously consider it.

Not everything has to be computed in dollars/euros. Remember, there is a human aspect to your life that cannot be bought. You can't spend $15m to be 24 again, even if we DO find a way to live forever.
David Allen: Getting Things Done (45 min Youtube Video)
What this leaves out is Taleb's advice from the book -- to pick a non-scalable career that is guaranteed to pay a high wage. His reasoning is that scalable careers are at the mercy of Black Swans. The vast majority of rewards are distributed to the lucky few at the top. This is not due to any remarkable talent, but luck and the nature of scalable success (it builds upon itself). If you hope to become an author who sells a million copies of a book, you will almost certainly wind up never selling more than a few thousand, while the guy at the top who is no more talented sells millions upon millions.
Swarmforce Launches Twitter Mashup, Swattr
It seems like a lot of people there were full time investors or independently wealthy people who dabbled in it. My conception of the common angel investor outside of SV, due mainly to watching my father go through this with his own personal investments, is that of a doctor or lawyer or other high income bracket person looking to invest some spare cash but who doesn't really know much about investing per se, but that didn't really seem to be the focus of this conference.
Is that correct? 75-80 average? I'm in NY. I think that's more like entry level here.
WaTunes Sells Your Music On iTunes And Amazon Free Of Charge
My biggest counter to this is the reason I went to grad school (MBA - done on an evening program)

After a layoff is a great time to reassess what you are doing in your career. My wife is an associate attorney, many of whom are getting laid off right now. If she got laid off she's not sure she'd go back in to law. I was an engineer who wasn't sure I wanted to write code for the rest of my life so I got an MBA.

Grad school is a great way to get a "second" chance at what you want to do, particularly if you've spent a couple of years working and found that the reality of your career doesn't match the vision you had in college.

In fact, regardless of being laid off, I'd recommend taking a couple of years off between undergrad and grad school working before starting a graduate program.
... it also spits out very good explanations of what failed in the more complex merges, which saves you time. I love good error messages.
From what I hear, git has won the technical challenge. That is, I do not hear anyone claiming that their VCS is better than git in any significant manner.
And refrigerators will never replace the icebox.

"Planning on dying soon"? What if you are in an accidents? I'd say it's being responsible and being prepared. Like having a will.

You've never thought that you'd like to send out an email or two on your passing? I have. If I croak, I need someone in my family to take over running my business, but I certainly don't need them to be looking through my books right now.
Just leave a notebook or a couple of letters in your house, in a somewhat accessible place, when you die they'll come pick up your stuff, find the letters and distribute them. And you want me to pay for that, while involving a third party?

Based on the pricing, it's more of a "spend all your money now, you're gonna die in a few days anyway" service.
If you really want to write your own search library, Manning and Raghavan's introduction to IR is highly recommended (and freely available)

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...

If you just want to use a search library that gives you word proximity (and more), it would be a lot less work to look at existing open source implementations. Xapian and Lucene are both quite useful and can be invoked from PHP, among other languages.
Hey, you get to meet with the guy who, out of paranoia to "protect his investment," hired a private investigator to stalk Sean Parker (as founder/CEO of Plaxo), and then spread nasty gossip about him throughout the Valley when Parker "crossed" him! And nearly ruined Parker's life / ability to do anything in SV, if it weren't for (the utterly brilliant) Peter Thiel! Yeah, let's get in bed with THAT guy! Because, you know, when times are tough (read: right now), he'll TOTALLY be there for us!
Ask HN: webtools for new website design/flow
I am trying to help a friend fully design a new webapp prior to getting bids on programming. By "fully" design, I expect programmer(s) to be able to use this design to identify 90% of the visual assets and easily infer the functional specs based on the UI layout and flow.

I expect to employ a good web designer to do this first phase but do not expect the web designer to be in the same part of the world as the customer. There must be some great web-based solution for the customer to iterate over the design and flow of this new app with the designer. I can't seem to find such tool(s).

The app is mostly data-backed forms and lists with common page structure throughout, no streaming media, flash, etc...just standards based HTML/CSS/maybe JS. Documenting the design, flow, and correct elements on each form is the highly iterative part we want to do with a designer prior to inviting coders to the mix.

Any advice? If there are some good designers that are comfortable with such an undertaking, feel free to contact me.
So your average home user who wants an addon map of all the local McDs on his GPS is going to install a new filesystem driver!
Either Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was just refuted, or this is terrible scientific reporting.
For some reason when I made this post I thought I was on newmogul. So that explains the misplaced tone.
About the GTD cult:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
Good point, that wasn't the best example. Here's a better one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartog_v._Colin_and_Shields

It looks like it comes down to whether a "reasonable person" would be able to see that a mistake was made, and whether the buyer was intentionally taking advantage of what they should have known to be a mistake.
If you manage to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of building a community site, let us know.
This is very nice... but please change the green color of the bar to any other color, or change the color of the items in the menu... like make it white to appear!
About marketing... don't forget to tell your friends and every student at your class about it and encourage them to join.

EDIT: I also advice you to check out this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
so you can know "what people want".. and the features that should be added.

Try to be creative, and look at the link above, so you can get more ideas about enhancing it.
why bother caring about the average pay?, there are people that make a hell of a lot of money doing virtually any job.

Just pick something that you enjoy, then you have a better chance of doing better than the average, and if you dont make your millions, then youve enjoyed the ride.
Absolutely. Linus recognized three things:

1. There is no good solution to merging (the only theoretically interesting aspect of source control.)

2. Of all the "bad" solutions to merging, the best one is to handle whatever cases you can and delegate all other cases to humans.

3. There was a lot to be gained from applying serious
brainpower to the supposedly easy, supposedly theoretically boring aspects of version control.

Linus has a brilliant technical mind, but unlike most brilliant people, he does not have tunnel vision that steers him towards problems that are already framed as "interesting" problems in an existing theoretical framework.
I'm surprised Buck held out so long. I don't know if many people looked at the Capistrano ML, but it was just this giant hellish suckhole of entitled Windows users angrily demanding someone help them with their homework. Buck doesn't spell it out, and probably wouldn't even admit it, but I got the pretty strong idea having to support windows was the main cause of misery.

However, I have some criticism over the way it's been handled, and I'd like to point out before saying it that it's not a personal attack, just some observations. I don't use Cap but I do use net/ssh and I'm very grateful for Buck's contributions. However ...

It's his right to walk away, and as he points out, he owes the community nothing. But it's still a bit weird and passive-aggresive, the way he's done it. Healthy human interaction in a situation like this would be polite but insistent assertiveness; defining your limits and consistently sticking to them, not holding it in, getting silently angrier and more pissed off, then quitting in a blaze of defensiveness.

There are techniques for dealing with users/contributors, distributing the load so no one person is overwhelmed. Capistrano's documentation, for example, was/is awful. The website has almost nothing useful. The way to learn how to use it is to perform any number of searches for people talking about how they did it on their blogs, and then doing it yourself by trial and error. Or the entitled newbie way, which is to pile on the mailing list, where their questions were foolishly answered, attracting ever more entitled newbies looking to have their problems solved for them, causing stress. Decent documentation would have solved a lot of that.

And overloaded with feature requests/patches? There are websites for handling feature requests, and the developer should have insisted on nothing but properly tested patches fixing a known bug. Wouldn't that have gotten the situation more under control? Or hell, why not roll cap into Rails proper and spread the load that way?

It's all just a bit suboptimal, is all. Oh well. Good luck to the dev. Hopefully other projects can also learn from the experience.
I stand by my interpretation of the content now behind your paywall. I am not selling anything.

The bit about the version control system was especially telling. You implied Zuckerberg was shirking classwork to work on his side project. Meanwhile, you volunteered to write a version control system to be used by fellow coders on a speech-recognition class project.

If an entrepreneurially-minded young coder was magically sent back to Spring 2004, what should they work on? A custom version control system to be used by teammates on a single class project, or a college-oriented competitor to Friendster, MySpace, and Orkut?
While I think the concept of scalability in careers is very interesting, I'm not sure Taleb's "look at everything in the world in the context of my last book's title" framework provides the right perspective for the discussion. While the true home runs are indeed low probability events, risk/reward is quite asymmetrical in many scalable careers(i.e. there are no fat-tails to the downside). In the case of the author, the worst case is you spend a year writing a book, and receive zero revenue from the book. That is a pretty well defined worst-case, and is not particularly disastrous (assuming you can afford your expenses while writing).

Put differently, scalability does not imply high-risk. In the most literal sense though, non-scalability does imply limited potential reward.
Are You Being Treated Fairly?
"Planning on dying soon"? What if you are in an accidents?

Well, what if? This service is for people who are dying within the foreseeable future, as noted by their pricing/opinions column -- not for the casual consumer who is looking for something "just in case."

What can be accomplished with this service that can't be accomplished by having a will? Arguably having an official will is better, and not to mention free. And would you really have your family members receive an email from you postmortem?

I'm still not exactly sure what you meant by your last statement.
"Career experts" mostly sell books and enthusiasm. Failure ensures repeat business.

Consider how much you can earn as a doctor or lawyer by choosing a lucrative specialty and working to establish yourself in the field -- why does he discount that? Because he's selling a dream, not a career. It's hard to fantasize about going to medical school, doing a residency, and then doing further postgraduate work, especially if you're already out of school. It's easy to fantasize about entrepreneurship.
I can see the merit to the argument that one shouldn't pursue grad school, but just as a counter balance, I thought I'd list some advantages:

1. You can often earn a higher starting salary when finished (assuming of course that the recession has passed by the time you're finished)

2. Access to educational loans and grants

3. Access to school resources (e.g. library, equipment, other students, mentors, etc.). Just last week I downloaded about $50,000 of market research through my school's subscription to eMarketer, Gartner, Factiva, etc.

4. Access to student pricing on software and hardware (e.g. MSDNAA, Adobe, Apple discounts)

5. Access to student camps competitions

6. Better access to internships

Now, am I doing grad school? Nope. It didn't really seem to make any sense for what I wanted to do for a career. But, I do see some merit.
It's banned again: http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/03/06/the-trials-and-tribulations-...
Boxee RSS workaround banned (again) from Hulu
Nice. I'll try to get some of my friends to check it out as well.

An about page would be nice, to know what kind of content will be accepted. CS Papers only? Or all academic papers? Or anything of interest to CS people?
Half of me wants this to be successful because it's such a great idea. The other half hopes it crashes and burns simply because I don't need another hacker news to eat away my time.
Borg-like cybots may patrol government networks
It is interesting to think of this post in relation to the one regarding scalable vs. non-scalable careers. Professional schools are prerequisites for many of the most obvious, lucrative non-scalable careers. But if you consider the possibility that you will change careers even if you make it through graduate school (because you get tired of being a dentist, for example), then your decision to pursue a non-scalable career looks much riskier.
Thanks for that. I'll update my acronym from here on out.

"IE does V" is pretty much all I was trying to convey. Good luck!
All the more reason for them to hate you, backstabbing cockbite.

See now even I dislike you a little & I'm not an entrepreneur :)
On the contrary, I think having the limit makes sense precisely in this sort of situation. This is a long-standing member of the community, and he's done something not quite right... He's probably not gonna do it again, since it was clearly rejected by the community. Voting this down to -30 would not have made a difference in the effect on the poster.
HPCwire: Berkeley Releases Cloud Computing Study
There's nothing wrong with placing ads on a site where there is nothing but ads. What if someone was looking for something? They click the ad.

If you are buying ads space from Google I'd be more concerned about their endorsement of people allowing their widget to blend into other people's sites. I was on a website a couple months ago where the person set up Adsense so nicely that it nearly fooled me into thinking it was part of their menu. If it had been your ad, I would have unwittingly clicked and you'd owe Google and the owner of that site money.
I'm curious about this. I've heard that failure is a badge of honor in Silicon Valley.

But I'm not comfortable starting up a company and going bankrupt. So if I was involved in a start up that ended up going bankrupt, how would that affect my career options? Is the employment rate for founders of failed executives high because a lot of jobs are open to them, or because the ones who can't find jobs end up quickly leaving Silicon Valley?

I realize that this probably isn't the right attitude to have if I would take a risk like founding a company. I'm just trying to decide how comfortable I am with the worst case scenario.
Minor correction to the above, thanks to another thread here on HN: replace SVG with VML, and IECanvas with ExplorerCanvas (excanvas.js).
If you're dead how does it know you're dead? If I'm relying on someone to enter some code in on the website, why wouldn't I give the "email" to the same person and save myself a bunch of money?
I Want A "Metrotone"
I don't agree with the YouTube bit - it can be a great platform for posting public information (council meetings? press conferences?), and twitter is a great way for the tech-savvy public to be kept in the know with what's going on in their government. Apathy is one of the greatest enemies of democracy, and anything you can do to keep your population engaged is good.

Renewing driver's licenses on Facebook is just stupid, though.
Ever try debugging javascript in a dynamic site with invalid HTML... enough said. No, the user shouldn't care but so little of the code we write is actually for the user.
Agreed. You don't take Google to small claims court to win $761, you take them to small claims court and win so that you can write about it in the Huffington Post and have a bunch of nerds react to it.
I would imagine that the data on the page could change, and therefore it would be irresponsible to assume that the link once bad is always bad.
on either coast, sure, but in the rest of the country, $80K is pretty good.
I am using both Google alerts and Backtype alerts and Backtype brought a lot of valuable comments google alerts has missed (if they are searching through comments at all).
First of all, HN already has a ban list of websites! EDIT [I am not sure, but I think I read about this before]

Secondly, you should note that this is for posting news and articles, and such type of stuff does not change often! I am talking about banning the link - the url, not the whole domain!

And even if we suppose what you say is correct, then they should ban it at least for a while... like 3 months ban or something!
I think Comcast should buy Twitter as part of putting together a massive information database about their customers in preparation for taking on Google's ad platform.

This is my pet outlandish theory, so bear with me.

Few people seem to thinks Google can be knocked off their perch, and the people that do seem to have no imagination, trying to take them head on. Yahoo practically went out of business fighting this battle through Search.

But really you need two things, which could come in many forms. You need data, which Google gets through search, and you need reach, which Google also gets by being the primary search engine.

Comcast has both in spades. They have television viewing data. They have phone data. They have browsing data. Buying twitter would give them data on what you're doing around town.

They also have reach because they are the company servicing your home phone, your tv, and your internet (well, mine at least). Imagine if television ads were specifically targeted to you?

While they're at it, they should also buy a financial company like Wesabe so that they could track how ads effected your spending.
Honestly, I think your post is terrible. Didn't you think you could ask him first? Rather than "asking" publically? Your tweet to me reads like blackmail.
Popcuts gets a makeover
Funny thing is why would they have to make good on these emails. If you die you won't know if they weren't sent.
SXSW News.YC house
So, I posted earlier but I think my timing was bad. There's a house for rent pretty close to downtown austin and I was considering attending SXSW interactive this year.

Would any hackers want to go in on this type of thing?

http://austin.craigslist.org/vac/1055968156.html
Hulu gets nasty, blocks Boxee RSS browser from videos
If your ad appears on a domain parking site and no one clicks it, it doesn't cost you anything, right? Only when someone clicks the link, right? So if you are advertising your website and someone clicks an advertisement, regardless of where it appeared, that's a problem? I could see it being a problem if you paid per impression, but not for clicks, unless the clicks from a domain parking website have a lower "conversion" factor than other types of domains.
Hacking Education (continued)
After seeing the outrageous prices and shady refreshing stats, I feel like launching the same service for free. Couldn't be more than a few hours of work.

Their terms of use are also very similar to Google's (http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS).
As a startup casualty, I can relate to this.

I've been an early stage employee (< 10) at 4 startups over the past 10 years and I haven't made a dime, relatively speaking. These weren't obviously doomed startups, either. At least one of them is still wistfully mentioned by other successful software entrepreneurs as an inspiration[1].

It is a bit trying on your psyche when personal friends have 10s of millions of dollars and you're scrambling to justify why you want to get paid $100K. In a down economy, you often are scrambling to justify why you want to get paid $60K or should be hired at all. At these times those jobs where even the worst get paid $150K sound like a better idea.

Of course it's not all about the money but your landlord, wife, kids, potential dates, aging parents, car salesman and cellular data plan provider will tell you otherwise.

[1] None of whom actually worked at that startup
As a new yorker, my favorite quote is:

You have to be good. Really. That's probably why angel investing hasn't taken root in New York - you can't screw people".
This is a really good idea. Maybe this will generate a lot of public discussion about some recent papers...
This is an excellent idea, and I love the comments so far. It's great to see how open the community is to the idea of others taking a great technology/idea and applying it in new ways.
I hope ideas from Academic Hacker News will be able to flow back and influence the original hacker news.
Makes me wonder what's wrong with posting them here - I'd welcome some "great tech papers" (as they put it) here.
Or you know... you could just write a fucking will. What a joke.
FTA: As a result of the error, the school district will not be using eBay to sell the remaining six trailers, with Heath being quoted as saying, "No I don't think we will go that route again."

This is my favorite part. Instead of educating themselves and conducting the remaining auctions correctly, they're going to abandon the technology that would let them sell the trailers for market value and reach a wider audience.

Most likely, they'll now post them in a local classified ad for a price no one wants to pay ... then they'll sit and uglify the campus for 9+ months. A year or two later, they will end up paying to have them removed and discarded.

I worked at a college ... seen this stuff happen.
Interesting first lecture. I think the great Oscar Waddell (a wizard though no longer in academia to my knowledge) wrote a Scheme program centered around beer for our first lecture at IU. Now that caught the attention of many students and I'm pretty sure the class /grew/ in size for the next lecture.
Suing Facebook because you 'came up with the idea'?

Writing a "tell all" book and trying to sell it?

Blatently violating the Google TOS, and then suing them because they wouldn't tell you what part of the TOS you violated?

That's 3 pretty big reasons.