skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That seems to have struck a chord with someone.

I come to news.yc to read about hacking, business, and related topics.

I came to Digg to read about technology, and reddit to read about, well progressive things from a variety of areas.

The decline of reddit and digg was marked by many front page posts concerning reddit or digg themselves. I hope the decline of news.yc is not marked by many front page posts concerning news.yc itself.

I don't visit news.yc because I'm interested in news.yc - I'm interested, oddly enough, in Hacker news (with a business bent).

Then again, I fear that may have already happened - a post on news.yc on an article about 'hackers', that criticized the Morris worm was modded into oblivion for no other reason than Robert Morris later went on to found yc - though Robert himself has publicly expressed remorse for releasing said worm.

It seems news.yc is suffering from the cult of personality.
Paul Buchheit: There's no such thing as a "social network"
Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought
Most of my friends got onto FaceBook for #3, the glorified address book, and stay on it for one of 3 other applications:

2.) Photo-sharing. As of now, it really seems to be the best photo-sharing app on the net.

3.) Making plans to meetup offline or catch up with old friends. This seems to be the most common use of the wall (and to a lesser extent, poke/superpoke), though I gather some other social groups use it for actual silliness.

4.) Scrabble.
>2.) Photo-sharing. As of now, it really seems to be the best photo-sharing app on the net.

I just wish it stored/gave access to the original high resolution photos.
Hobbies Are Rich in Mental Rewards
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

We're at #3 - religious veneration. We don't really have #2 yet (vilification of outside enemies), though we could get that pretty yet. I haven't seen much #1 (sex talk) yet, thoug Alex's comment of "My iPhone has replaced my penis as the default thing I reach for when I'm bored" might flirt with that.
Top 10 Google Tech Talks
Thing is, I don't think employers ask for a college degree because the job actually requires one. I think they do it to separate the top 25% from the bottom 75%. A degree is the easiest way to look at an applicant and be able to say "That person is not stupid" (whether or not that judgment is true...)

Now, even if everybody got a college degree, there would still be a top 25% and a bottom 75%. And I don't think that employers would suddenly stop discriminating because suddenly everyone was qualified. I think they'd add other qualifications, like "must have a masters degree" or "must have commit privileges on a major open-source project".

Then all the workers are back where they started, except that they're out $150k for their college degree.

I guess the only way to win is to refuse to play the game. Which is why most of us are on this site, I guess...
answer is 42. I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Mort, Elvis, Einstein, and You
Hahha... you managed to squeeze in two famous 'answers.'
"There is also no telling how much processing power and/or memory would be required to destroy a universe."

With my quad-core all I could manage was a thunderstorm in Denmark.
See Great Electronics Reviews - Very Slick UI Site
That's pretty sweet. They've always released much of the best classical recording available. I'd probably buy a lot of this if not for Rhapsody type services.

Their selection is truly massive it seems. A search for Mahler alone turned up 72 products. Hell, Mahler conducted by Bernstein turns up 21. Only DG could do that.

Classical is probably the only form of music where one label could have their own site and still have awesome selection.

The site design is pretty good. I mean, it's not great, and nothing a Y C group would build, but if you told me that a major record label created a site for classical music only, I'd expect worse.
Six Apart Sells LiveJournal To Russia's SUP
Any of the non-comparison sorts (radix, bucket, etc) would be good since he specified the elements are integers.
I prefer to use my cycles for good rather than evil. For example, my 8-core system is keeping me cozily warm throughout the presently-occuring snowstorm.
Paradox in Game Theory: Losing Strategy That Wins
Damn hard.
Great essay...there is only one point I disagree with and that deals with elite universities. The same argument that is applied to startup hubs applies to elite universities (which usually happen to be in these hubs). The competitive advantage of finding a better cofounder or employee is one that should not be passed up on.
Stealing Books For The Kindle Is Trivially Easy
Flickr is the best photosharing app on the net, without question. I find the intermediary of facebook for photos, even from flickr photos, to be inferior to an rss feed from friend's photos.

I actually have three feeds:

-friend's photos

-comments on my photos

-comments made after my comments on another photo
NeXT machine that started it all: The World's 1st Web Server [Photo]
The first one isn't actually solvable; you get a system of equations with infinite solutions. The second hint for it implies by looking at a drawing to scale and putting in a few extra lines you'll get it, but it sounds more like you're eyeballing angles. You might as well just pull out the protractor.
Not necessarily. The problem's rather underconstrained, but under reasonable asusumptions about memory allocation, you might actually get better performance from a quick sort, since the algorithm works with a lot of locality. Although you'd be right in a strict theoretical sense, sure.
How appropriate that a topic of sorting algorithms comes up in a discussion about politics. Both spheres of discourse contain some of the most useless debate about solved problems.
Fuck the troops
FTA: When you say, "Support the troops," what you really mean is "Don't criticize this war." When you say, "Don't criticize this war," what you're really saying is, "Fuck the troops."
How Regexes Work (1998)
LiveJournal sold to Russian buyer
LiveJournal has been sold by its U.S. owner to a Russian business partner, which will operate it independently
1. Market your book with the formula "The $NUMBER $IMPORTANT_THINGS of $TOPIC_NOBODY_UNDERSTANDS". The goal here is to sound like you did a lot of research to pare down a complex topic to a few easily-masterable rules.

2. $NUMBER: If marketing to idiots, make the $NUMBER be a lucky one, like 10, 7, 5 or 3. If marketing to middlebrows, make it a "funny" number like 17 or 43 so they can congratulate themselves on not falling for that Top 10 bullshit.

3. $IMPORTANT_THINGS: Imply hard, empirical knowledge. Not "observations"; try "principles" or "laws".

4. $TOPIC_NOBODY_UNDERSTANDS: To pick your topic, go to the local big chain bookstore. If the shelves are small to nonexistent, people know a hell of a lot about that topic. Whichever shelves are the largest are the topics that nobody knows anything about, such as business, marketing, religion, relationships, and so on.
Why don't we love science fiction?
Overloading Semicolon, or, monads from 10,000 Feet
Yes. Once upon a time, businesses took responsibility for training their employees. Now they expect the student to come to them having blown a huge wad of cash on speculative investment in education for a job. One that they aren't sure they really like, that they'll probably abandon in 10 years anyway, and where the employer considers them disposable.

In most cases, the state also subsidizes this huge gamble.
I just solved the first one. Not that difficult. You draw two parallel lines to line AB that intersect E and D. This creates a regular trapezoid. The diagonals are congruent. I don't feel like writing out the rest of the steps, but here is a link to the scanned image of it.

http://www.hivgene.com/triangle1.png

The answer is 10 btw.
Yes, let's! Most of the people in my university classes weren't there because they wanted to learn. They were there because they wanted a job.

Remove the artificial credential that school provides, and knowledge-seekers and job-seekers might all be better off. Why torture people with electives in English literature if they're not interested? Or for that matter, mandatory course in computer science if all they want is a Joe Javahead job? These are adults we're talking about, not children.
Google Bans Ads For (Most) Paid Links Marketplaces
I am missing your point; the people running UT have the 10% rule in place to achieve the exact opposite effect: to increase diversity within the student body. Therefore, I believe you mean to say that anybody BUT whites would disappear, i.e. black/hispanic/<underrepresented minority>.

Unless, of course, you are implying that the 10% rule attracts whites, somehow.

While I have witnessed the 10% rule opening doors for many students -- as a hispanic student, many of my hispanic peers would simply not have had the opportunity of a first-class eduction -- I don't believe a general universal rule is the answer, but, rather, admissions should be examined case-by-case.
Please don't misinterpret my post -- it wasn't intended to bash certain majors. I should have pointed out that many fields are a "catch-all," i.e., those which students default to that either lack direction or greater ambition in their studies. Take psychology, for example; while psychology is a VERY difficult science of which little is understood, and much has to be discovered, it does not have a rigorous workload, and doesn't provide the curricular challenges that the majors I mentioned do. I use this as an example because my sister plans to study in psychology, and I have preached this lesson to her repeatedly; that it is most commonly the largest major at universities, and thus the "catch-all"; therefore, the lowest common denominator is reduced to a minimum for the standards of that school. At UT, that is quite low. That is not to say that all psychology majors will be unsuccessful -- of the top of my head, I can think of two brilliant contributors to my field of study, computer science, that were psychologists (Minsky and Licklider) -- but rather, that their journey toward success will be hampered by an expectation of mediocrity.
Maybe googlebot doesn't actually respect nofollow? hmmm....
I'm amazed that someone actually, and so quickly, took the bait. There is some kind of xkcd comparison to be drawn here, like the chessboard on a roller coaster fad... so apparently you won't need to actively outsource your ideas.
Facebook drops controversial 'opt-out' advertising service
How To Crack WEP
First OLPC deployment: now it's real!
Is good design just a formula?
I wonder what, if any, relation this has to Brad Fitzpatrick's departure?
If you're a visual learner, the easiest way to understand monads might be to first understand arrows -- because arrows can be explained nicely through diagrams -- and then understand monads as a special case.
The Secret to Getting a Lot of Web Design Work
Why was this posted to YC news?
Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy
Three, actually.
I disagree. I got 20 (you can check it with a protractor if the figure is drawn to scale). Triangle ADE is not isosceles. The diagonals within the trapezoids are not parallel. The lower diagonal (BD) makes an angle of 60 degrees with AB; the upper diagonal (DE) is at 50 degrees from a line running through D, parallel to AB.
Delegating Effectively
For the busy professional, delegation is a key to success. But the act of delegation is just one step. You must also consider when to delegate, how to communication and when to follow up.
Crafting a Social Networking Strategy
A guide for those who use social networks for idea generation, promotion and networking.
6 Keys to Strategic Thinking
The day to day grind often leaves no time for strategic thinking. This is a habit you must correct in order to ensure long term success. Following are six keys that will help guide your strategic thinking.
Things I learned from Guy Kawasaki at Pubcon 2006
5 Strategies to push your business and website to the next level.
I'm really eager to get mine (ordered on the third day, so I haven't heard any news on shipping dates...though I've heard that first day orders have begun to ship). It'll be the coolest lappy in the room at conferences, and YC events.
Look at my work before you mod me down. The lines I drew were not drawn with a ruler. If x is 10, then DE is 60 degrees from the line running through D (not 50), parallel to AB, just like the angle DBA.

If a protractor says one thing, and the math using known values says another, I'm going to trust the math.

I see where according to the figure, triangle ADE must be isosceles, but I don't trust that the figure is actually drawn to scale. All the measurements of angles I got by calculations. Can you find a flaw in one of those?
Check again. The figure is to scale. I worked it out first and then checked with a protractor. Your assumption that the diagonals within the trapezoids are parallel is incorrect. As a result, angles that you have assigned to the triangles in the upper trapezoid are also incorrect. The fact that triangle ADE is not isosceles makes it impossible for x to be 10.
My thoughts exactly....actually alot of crap that is unrelated with what YC news stands for is making it's way to the front page. What's worse is somebody actually upmodded this submission.
Startup Wars is Live! Rochambeau 2.0
karma whores
yeah, my private jet has let me down countless times.
so has my wife.
> Your assumption that the diagonals within the trapezoids are parallel is incorrect.

Do you mean his assumption that the diagonals within the trapezoids are congruent is incorrect? I'd be curious to see your diagram or proof to see where you differ. Obviously, it makes a lot more sense that the diagram is drawn to scale.
Top Engineering Colleges, Karnataka India
Top Engineering Colleges, Karnataka India
It's actually a pretty good book, in my opinion. Short and to the point.
Flatland: A romance of many dimensions
probably drunk and thought this was reddit or digg
I saw Ivan Krstic speak once... he is very good at using Powerpoint, or the GNU equivalent.
Yeah, I'd love to get one to play with and try and use seriously for a while. It'll be even better to give the future version of the XO to any kids I may have. I wonder what percentage of kids will discover the "view/edit source" button and at what age.
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/shipping-information.php

You should get yours between December 17-31, though those dates are "conservative".

I ordered mine within a couple minutes of them going on sale, so I'm hoping I get mine before I leave for vacation...
Weird as it may sound, I plan to use it as my primary laptop when traveling and when working from the bubble tea shops over on Castro. All I need is ssh and a browser (I use vim, which runs fine remotely), though I also plan to buy a 16GB USB drive for extra storage...keeping a local working copy of my projects will mean I don't have to have connectivity to work, though I suspect it'll be slower than working on the server when WiFi is available.

I like little lappies anyway--my current one is a Dell 700n, and I only got it instead of a smaller one because the smaller ones were twice as expensive.
I was wrong with my project.
The time showed that I was wrong with one of my many spare time projects ... www.jobitems.com (not counting nice pagerank:)

So what :) I'm not a salesman. If you guys have some interesting idea to run some niche job site, we can make a deal. You will provide a domain (owned by you and directed to my dns servers) I will provide a code (owned by me).

Also I would like to give a hosting space at site5.com which I need not anymore to people working on some interesting open-source project. Hosting is prepaid for the next 14 months. You can find hosting parameters here: www.site5.com/hosting

Please understand, I can't reply to every e-mail I get (address is in my profile at news.YC). Also note for some people: jobitems.com domain and code aren't for sale.
Unfortunately at this point the "view/edit source" button is exactly the same as on browsers... view source. It only works for web pages and it's not editable. I think the editable version is in the works.

I do think it's a great idea, but I imagine it would be very overwhelming for a kid who has never used a computer before, let alone programmed (in a foreign language, too, most likely).

What would be really neat was if in addition to opening the source, it also had some sort of dynamic tutorial that would explain what the kid was looking at. For example, they open up a webpage and it explains the HTML to them.
I too plan to use mine as my primary travel laptop. I've realized that 97.482% of the time I'm just coding/web browsing/emailing/chatting, which doesn't require too much horsepower. I also think the XO will make an excellent ebook reader. Screw the Kindle!

It will be a pleasant downgrade from the ginormous 17" PowerBook I've been lugging around for the past 4 years.
Do you guys think the high resolution black and white screen will be better for general use and/or coding than the lower resolution color screen?
That's disappointing. Where did you see that? I was under the impression that it was going to work like an old Lisp Machine where even the OS code could be changed on the fly, just in python.
Was Viaweb ever approached by a Japanese company?
From a case study I'm reading for class:

"Mikitani (founder of Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten) considered but rejected the idea of acquiring a U.S. company that had developed
software for online malls."

Was this Viaweb?
Fitzpatrick's take: http://brad.livejournal.com/2351564.html
The black and white mode is front lit, not back lit, so it definitely won't work well in the dark.

Other than that, I'm not sure, but I'll definitely be interested to try it.
Yeah that's what I thought too.

Someone on #olpc on irc.freenode.net mentioned it a couple days ago. I do think they're still working on it, it's just not going to be ready right away.
So the word "immutable" doesn't make you want to punch the authors in the face? Even physicists hesitate to put the word "immutable" on the laws they discover.
Yes, though that description may be stretching the truth a bit; Hiroshi gave up trying to buy us at about the time we decided not to be bought, so it's not clear even to me who rejected who first.

It is true, however, that he got the idea of doing a web-based online store builder plus mall from us, and that what they launched initially was a very literal imitation of our site-- at least on the surface.
I got x=25. I didn't draw any new lines.. I just worked out all the angles I could within the diagram, and then played x and y (other unknown angle within small triangle containing x) off against one another using dead-simple algebra.

Along the way I got:

y+x=130

x=y-80

Another hint - you know that point E has three angles - 30, x, (180-30-x). Similar logic works on the other side too.
Can you share the casestudy here
Pay Scale For Freshers in India
What I'd find really interesting is a music store that sold new classical music, by David Cope's EMI for example. Generate new scores of classical music (by an algorithm trained on Bach/Vivaldi/Purcell/&c), and synthesize them with something better than MIDI.
Shrug - they're marketers, it wouldn't be the first time some small amount of hype has been produced by them... It doesn't mean that what they say isn't sensible though, and that the rules they present aren't very generally applicable.
Better ways to writing JavaScript
You can also try and offload projects on sitepoint.com .
Rainbow Hash Cracking
Just code in the light. :>
The code giveth and the code taketh away [comic]
I don't think you can recommend Quicksort unless you know something about the distribution of the elements to be sorted, or am I mistaken. After all, Quicksort can be very slow under certain conditions.
I don't know exactly how Beacon works, but here is a rough guess to explain what happened to the author of that article: presumably if you connect to a partnering service, some kind of negotiation takes place to let that service know your Facebook id and wish to log your activities. Not sure if it involves a direct communication between Facebook and partnering site, but I suppose it does (if internet security mechanisms work as they should, there should be no other way).

So now if user logs off from Facebook, partnering site doesn't know about that - how would it? Logging off from Facebook has nothing do with partnering site. Hence partnering site keeps sending information to Facebook.

Measures could be taken by Beacon to avoid that, but not straightforward.

I would expect that if the user deletes all cookies etc and reconnects to partnering site, no information will be sent to Facebook.

Nevertheless, I think many other sites could easily employ something like beacon, without telling the users. I always assumed that lot's of web sites already do that (connected via the ad networks).
Facebook and Decentralized Identifiers
http://mathcircle.berkeley.edu/BMC4/Handouts/geoprob.pdf
Perl on Rails - Why the BBC Fails at the Internet
Wireless keyboards easily cracked
Uruguay is one of the richest countries in Latin America.
In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones
a small bit of inspiration
I don't drink liquor. Much. But this Johnnie Walker Ad, which I think appeared in Wired a few months back caught my eye. I ripped it out and pinned it up.

Now y'all can do the same.
Facebook Facing CEO Woes
Damien Katz: Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite
Mailing list translations, follow what's going on in the non-english mailing lists
Sorry, Lisp. I tried.
Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management
Sanity check: The 10 biggest technology belly flops of 2007
The Hydra Project: An Anti-Piracy Proof BitTorrent Tracker
Zuckerberg has been given a taste of his own medicine - personal info was plastered all over the web
complete blog jack. I'd mod you down if I could.
What is it about facebook photo sharing that makes it best for you? Is it that the photos of most interest to you are there? Is it a certain point of integration with another facebook feature? Is there a unique feature of their photo sharing function that you like?
CS continuations explained (Python code)
Basics of Compiler Design (full book online)
The Monad Laws
UNIX pipes as IO monads
I have a friend that works in the registrar's office at my alma mater. He was, just the other day, bitching about some helicopter mom calling up to drop a class for her son. Before you write this off as some random freshman momma's boy, know that the son in question was a junior that was majoring in business. Inspires confidence doesn't it?

I wonder if his mom will manage his employees when he inevitably gets put in charge of someone someday. I think colleges are definitely diluted nowdays, so the degree means little more than "I had the money and time to finish it," but you can still excel in your education there if you choose to do so.
Quicksort's worst case involves bad pivot picking. The randomized version pretty much makes that a non-issue unless you're incredibly unlucky. Even still, with median-of-medians you can guarantee a deterministic worst case of nlog(n), so that's not true.
Sounds like CL wasn't right for his particular requirements. He would have been better off with a Scheme implementation on the JVM -- Kawa or SISC.