skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article mentions the concept of "flow." This concept is described in detail in the book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I highly recommend this book!

http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...
I'm beginning to think the value of HN is to give you something to do after you've sold your startup.
What else is new?

Commence the downvoting.
If that were the equation, I'd be on board with that point of view. The problem is that the H1B is increasingly used to outsource jobs rather than bring talented engineers to the US. Seven of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are India-based outsourcing companies, and even many of the US-based users are really there to facilitate outsourcing. These companies use the visa to cycle someone through the job in the US for a few years, do "knowledge transfer" where an American is allowed another 6 months of employment and a severance under the condition that they train their replacement, and then move the job and worker overseas.

SO in this case, you'll get your 6% pay cut and the outsourcing of an industry - all under the guise of making sure that talented foreign engineers are allowed to come to the US and create wealth (which is an indisputably wonderful thing for the US and would be possible without all this abuse if the system were reformed).
If that's true, we should re-purpose ADD to stand for Advertisement Deluge Disorder.
Our family's pet dog died today.
IIRC that was a key point in the Napster trial. It was hard to argue there was a "legitimate" use.
About time, Microsoft did a terrible job monetizing Digg. Digg has about half of it's userbase outside of the US where Microsoft sells almost zero ads.
I mean that because of past economic troubles, the whole system was integrated in the 80s. You can easily transfer between any two banks in any point in the country. The banks are also responsible for the safety of their ATMs and internet services so if your account is hacked, it's their responsibility and therefore they make sure it's safe (unlike in England where it's the customer's responsibility and the banks don't take security as seriously as they should). My card number was stolen once, and my bank immediately rolled back all the transactions the crooks had made. Also, if your bank goes under, your money is insured, but they rarely do because they are tightly regulated by the central bank. To sum it up: because we had so much economic turmoil, we ended up with a very safe banking system in both financial and technological terms.
They compete when people choose whether to do what Twitter is good for or what Posterous is good for. That's what made this post more interesting to me than a Posterous vs Tumblr post would have been.
Try MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).
But it has to be 50:50 which way it goes. Do you think it will be warmer or colder? Given where I live - I vote warmer - the thought of mile thick glaciers in my back garden is rather depressing.
David Simon: Very good at making television, not so great at coming up with business plans for newspapers.

Seriously, if this idea were being proposed by anyone who didn't make 'The Wire,' I find it hard to imagine that Hacker News would find it worth our attention.
Professor Norm Matloff of UC Davis has always been a staunch critic of the H-1B visa:

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1bwritings.html
Whoever down voted this clearly does not recall Vice-President Quayle's faux paux to which this comment refers.
shopped
Can't the cycle plugin do this kind of stuff already?
And, of course, there's MySQL...
Proposal: using bacteria to change sand into sandstone
Yeah, quite frankly I don't want to read any more than 140 characters from 99% of the people I follow. At least not multiple times a day.
I think the billion dollar exit and then quick departure would be the referenced golden parachute.
Poster asked why he has to type print "x="+str(x).
I assumed he would like to just type print "x="+x.

For that code to work str.__add__(self,x) should accept int as parameter x.

If that was the case, then "3" + 7 would return "37" (ok, I've thought it will be "10", my bad :)), but 7 + "3" would still cast exception. So + would be not symmetric.
I recently went overboard with effects while learning jQuery. Suddenly things that took days to write could now be implemented in minutes. Extensively using my own product I realized just how annoying these effects become. Once the novelty wears off you realize that usability suffers. The glitz cuts into the users' productivity. I'm now going through my code and removing a lot of these effects.
My first real job (I'm a native-born US citizen) was in such a body shop. Everybody there got paid chicken feed.

In fact, the INS would check that the green card applicants were getting paid market wages. When an employee reached that point in the process, his salary was actually increased as appropriate. But for those of us that had no such immigration issues, we never got such an upward adjustment.

(Things may have changed since then. That was the early '90s, the time of a big downturn in the industry)

I got paid a little extra to do technical interviews for this purpose. A green card applicant had to prove that there were no available US citizens that could do the job, so we'd run an ad in the Times, soliciting applicants for that job. I would then give them technical interviews so difficult that they couldn't pass, thus proving that our employee was the only one qualified.
"The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row"

Simply the sheer awesomeness (for lack of more eloquent words) of this sort of meeting between the titans actually sent chills down my spine.
Beware of reporters proposing business ideas.
Google didn't do anything, it's a custom search, anyone can make one.
What do you expect from someone called "SaveTheGuns" ...
A spoon and a fork are competitors in cases where you're eating corn or rice, but you don't use a fork to sip soup or a spoon to eat salad. Sure, there will be instances in which Twitter and Posterous compete, but I think those might be less frequent corn or rice scenarios. I'm trying to show him that there are two distinct purposes both services serve.

Maybe a Twitterous spork is begging to be made. :p
That was my opinion too...See you all there!
I'm assuming that someone wants us to draw the conclusion that this is a bad thing.

But I don't see why our salaries should be kept at a high level, at the expense of both employers (and thus businesses and consumers) and other humans.

Also, it seems to ignore the demographic problems that society is starting to see. Without a broader base of employed people, we can't keep paying retired people their Social Security and Medicare. An influx of employment-age people is necessary to keep these systems afloat. So in the long run, having these Visa workers will help ensure that I get out of those systems at least some of what I'm putting in.
concentration was always the competitive advantage!
I made graphics, signs and a template for "Hello" stickers that I made for Hackers and Founders. You can easily print them off using Avery 5395 labels. I have them here: http://iamelgringo.storage.s3.amazonaws.com/HackersAndFounde...

Having a "Hello" name tag looks kind of lame, but it really makes meetups a lot easier. If you donwload them, let me know. I'd be happy to email them to you.
Choice quote:

"I researched different types of construction methods involving pile systems and realised that injection piles could probably be used to get the bacteria down into the sand - a procedure that would be analogous to using an oversized 3D printer, solidifying parts of the dune as needed. The piles would be pushed through the dune surface and a first layer of bacteria spread out, solidifying an initial surface within the dune. They would then be pulled up, creating almost any conceivable (structurally sound) surface along their way, with the loose sand acting as a jig before being excavated to create the necessary voids."
Wouldn't this depend on vesting?
Unix To PowerShell - Fold
on confidence: it's more than a front, it is real, but it very dangerous and must be controlled. If you are not wildly optimistic, you probably won't start your own company. However, if you don't learn to control that wild, I-can-do-anything, to temper it with self-doubt, you will fail quickly and spectacularly.

Even socially, confidence is very good in some situations, bad in others. I find that it is best to project a confidence level that is inversely proportional to the technical skill of your audience.
I never said I was against it being in the store, but it just seems like the sort of thing they would have an objection with (simply to avoid the bad PR). They have banned many other apps for much less obvious reasons.
Seriously, if this idea were being proposed by anyone who didn't make 'The Wire,' I find it hard to imagine that Hacker News would find it worth our attention.

Yeah, but it was proposed by the creator of "The Wire," so here we are. :)

David Simon was waaaaay out in front of this issue. Way back in 2006 he chose the demise of the newspaper industry as the theme of the final season of The Wire and covered it critically before the whole "Newspapers Are About to Die" meme was getting any traction outside journalism trade circles.

That's not to say he's got all the answers, but the guy's certainly been thinking about the problem for quite some time and it's interesting to hear his perspective.
EXC (granted I have yet to check whether it exists)
Ask HN: Best User Registration & Password Management Package
My site has been evolving for several years now, and I'm currently using some open source forum software (punbb) to handle all the user registration & management.

While this works fine and well for the moment, punbb is nothing extraordinary (lightweight and fast, for sure though) but the password management & registration process it offers users is clunky at best. The signup process works about as well as any other registration process out of last century. I am implementing some more advanced features and want to streamline the feel of the page instead of leaving user&password management up to punBB.

I have done some research and there are plenty of options between open source projects, or going the Clickpass route... but what is the easiest way to handle this part of the process?

All these startups I read about on HN... are they really all coding it themselves? I think I can find better things to do with my time than rehash user registraiton...
This post is kind of confusing because it starts off with someone else's April Fool's joke.

This article from Nature discusses some of the ethical issues here rather well: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a
Never underestimate people. You'd hope they think twice before hitting publish, yet if millions of tweets prove anything, it's that people still manage to cram in a whole lot of mindless drivel into those 140 characters.
I would argue the exact opposite. Because the amount of information you can transmit is so limited, it makes it far easier not to think twice. Think about it: writing a blog post is, for most people, an activity which requires a good deal of thought, revision, and editing. And why shouldn't it -- you can write and include anything you want.

Compare that to Twitter: how long does it take to think of 140 characters to spew into a tiny box? Not very long. And since it is so easy, it can be done 20 times per day! And since there are so many "posts", you don't really have to care about the quality of those posts individually. You can see this on a lot of blogs, too -- once-poignant bloggers set out to write a post per day and suddenly it becomes obvious they are grasping for topics, jumping sharks, and simply putting stuff out there that is of low quality.

There are two ends to the writing spectrum, and on either end are the essayists and the, uh, twitter-ists. The essayists don't release very often, but when they do it is close to a foregone conclusion that the material will be worth reading. The twitterists release a dozen times per day and while they will occasionally, perhaps merely by statistical probability, release something worth reading, it is close to a foregone conclusion that the material will not be worth reading.

Now we get to the "masses" part, and why Twitter will take off. Answer this question:

The majority of people are: (a) essayists, (b) twitterists

The answer is quite obvious. Tweeting requires neither skill nor forethought which are things that most people either do not possess or do not exercise very often.
Call me sentimental but I really like Sun as a research institution in its own right, even if it hasn't been a spectacularly profitable company lately. The world would be a much poorer place if not for the innovations that have come out of Sun for the last couple of decades. Here's to hoping that Oracle intends to be a good steward of the intellectual wealth that has accumulated there.
The funniest example of how that's just probability was when this problem was discussed in my bachelor's class of about 60 people, and the prof confidently starts asking us for our dates of birth, and there was not even 1 matching pair. The probability is apparently around .01%
Very timely. I had the exact same question (need to implement some sort of simple user management system for http://grader.com).

I looked at ClickPass a little while ago, but thought they had merged with someone else and wasn't sure if they're still pursuing this particular idea. Need to revisit.

Meanwhile, I'm likely going to do something I'm guessing most others do: Just stub-in something simple until I find an existing library/framework that does what I need.
Of course, str.__add__ is already asymmetric, since "3"+"7" != "7"+"3"
Pushed By Celebrities, Twitter Is Poised To Double Its Monthly Traffic Once Again
Easy. You already had that knowledge and just didn't apply it, for one reason or another.

You know when something is cool in your chosen field(s). If you're a geek, that means when you first encountered a modem, IP, Linux or Google, depending on your age. As Pirsig - or rather, his muse - says in 'Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance': Quality is what you like. Everyone has in-depth knowledge of something, even stupid people; so when the 'woah, cool' reaction takes place it's just a matter of relating it back to your area of knowledge and the significance thereof (obviously, if your specialty is knitting, carbon-fiber knitting needles probably won't make the front page...but then, there are a lot of knitters out there....what do I know?).

You can, and do, sense the potential easily. It's the 10% inspiration. The reason most people, myself included, don't capitalize on things like this is because they are unable or unwilling to commit the money or time. Kinda like romance, you know pretty fast whether you'd like to sleep with someone, but committing to seeing them daily requires a decision, and many of us are nervous of risking the money or time involved; indeed, nervous in proportion to our ability to be carried away on a wave on enthusiasm. In this case, I recommend setting a limit of time and/or money to invest, and a cutoff date by which you'll give up if it turns out to suck.

Yes, amateur programmers will soon run up against the limits of their knowledge; a few will go pro, others will give up. But the most important outcome will be from non-programmers and non-designers coming up with paradigm-busting ideas, which will look like crap at first but turn out to be important later.
I keep seeing these types of articles and it's the same story over and over again, "one must work 20 hours a day 7 days a week in order to be successful with your startup." Is this always the case? I can't imagine it is. Surely there are people out there who ran their startup successfully on a part-time basis while working a full time job and enjoying quality family time.
Scala for Java Refugees
The story behind the Hudson River plane crash reconstruction
It's a common problem when hiring the academically brilliant (and recently out of college) - they're more focused on inane details than getting the job done.

I was once part of a college team where nothing ever got done because people couldn't agree on using git vs. svn. Bravo.
I may have misread your post a bit, I was responding mainly to the dual-licensing suggestion (which read to me like a suggestion for getting around the right to fork; i.e. the "open source in name only" business model).

Your points about service businesses are well-taken, though I think this is a hard and uncertain road to turning a profit.

As for turning free software into a money-maker, I think not-for-profit is the stable state of a perfectly efficient software industry. That doesn't mean programmers couldn't be well paid, but it's likely nothing that would be terribly attractive to VC.
EveryBlock: more accurate mapping
It looks even more in place using the pirate language choice.
government contracting private corporations is different from normal market conditions. observe any corporation that competes for government contracts.
I observe a tremendous amount of overlap between the links on HN and the links in my Twitter feed. I think it all comes down to who you're following, which is one reason why it's so useful: you can fine-tune your stream of links very easily to keep them synchronized with your tastes and interests.
365! / ((365-60)! 365^60) = 0.0059

So it's about 1%, assuming uniform distribution of birthdays. Since they're not quite uniformly distributed, the actual odds of 60 people with no common birthdays is a little lower than that.

However, given the thousands of people reading HN who experienced such a classroom exercise, the odds are very good that someone like you will pipe up ;-)
Because Oracle and HP are already tight partners and analysts refer to them as essentially one entity against IBM. Plenty of people expect the Sun hardware line to die or get sold to HP, while Oracle keeps the software line.

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/6606-0-0-225-121....

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2903
Agreement reached on common 'plug' for electric cars
Top 3 Free Keylogger
My top 3 free undetectable keylogger .
Bilingual babies are precocious decision-makers
I moved out of state, away from my employer, so I work from home all the time now.

I'm working on saving up enough for a mortgage down payment and moving back to the area, and one of the number one things I'm looking forward to is being able to work from the office a few days a week.

It helps that I love my employer and my co-workers, but there's just something missing for me working from home, only connected to the workplace through a remote desktop and an IP phone.
part of the HBO model is you can’t sell crap. If it’s not the best out there, no one’s gonna put up money for it.

This is exactly why the subscription model will fail. It's practically impossible for the newspapers, even the big ones, to constantly churn out material thats worth paying for.

If subscriptions really do happen, a few people will just get subscriptions and put up their own versions of http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/ for the rest of the people by rewording, massaging and summarising news without any attribution whatsoever. It's a fallacy to think anyone can really control content delivery online.

P.S. To be fair, the analogy is a slight bit off - not everything on HBO is worth paying for either. But the difference is that noone can rip off HBO shows while anyone can rip off the NYTimes. If there's a need for it.
I bike to work. I ride my bike every weekend. I am thinking of running.. I lift wieghts 4 times a week
I would like to point out one of the values of economics is to study what the effects of a policy change would be. "How does increasing the H1B program change the US economy?" or "How much is the price of heroin changed by drug policy?"

Granted, some of this seems obvious, but I suspect what's "common knowledge" is shaped by the field. F=MA seems obvious now, but it is still a new idea. Ditto the law of supply and demand.
This is awesome advice and "Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is one of my favorite books of all time.
I find myself going back and forth on Twitter too, but mostly because of what will happen to the service as it approaches popular-mass; the beauty and grace of it is diluted to garbage and noise (which is then retweeted). However, I do believe Twitter is a rare startup and deserves its attention. I am in the camp that sees Twitter as a once-in-a-blue-moon event; a communication layer this thin and robust RARELY comes along (much less with this type of adoption rate and explosive growth). Posterous is great and all, but it has nothing on the communication-legos that is Twitter's API. For example, we're integrating Twitter into our exercise app which I think serves a purpose, as oppose to simply leveraging viral ads benefits.

What bothers me about 'social media' in general is that I'm reminded of unionized labor. There's no doubt that customers are extremely important, but there are problems when a mass audience assumes each individual to be the #1 priority and/or the customer is ALWAYS correct. This type of self importance is becoming a problem on the internet with millions looking for a unique identity and it's wearing on me, both as an observer and business owner who has to deal with armchair customers.

ps. I wish there was an auto-block for self-proclaimed 'social media' professionals; it's the new SEO.
Maybe, but the TechCrunch article talks about a "nation-wide sales force"...
My guess is that he wanted to see if you could think your way towards some kind of algorithmic approach. I think his biggest mistake was not moving on to something else after a minute or two. I've used these sorts of questions in interviews before, but usually just as a small part of the overall interview. I prefer to ask questions that relate more to what we're actually doing (a real project, a real technical challenge we recently faced, etc.)

I wonder if FB has formal standards for its interview process, or if they just grab someone and say "Hey, go interview this guy."
In my experience, there is no point doing anything unless you spend at least twenty minutes just getting into it first. This is how long it takes me to get into a 'concentration/focus' zone.
Um, some economists really did see the whole market crash coming.
I'm very well aware of Brazil's economic status as a country. I wasn't seeking to comment on the country as a whole, simply the segment of the population hijacking signals. I stand by my statement that this segment of the population has very little resources in the grand scheme of technical attacks. Seems as if you were looking for something that wasn't there.
By losing that much weight that quickly he is actually overcompensating for one unhealthy behavior with another. He'd be much better off trying to sustainably eat better over a long period of time.