skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always assumed those greeting card websites sold their mailing lists to spammers - and was irritated when someone sent me one. In retrospect, that's pretty cynical, bitter and curmudgeonly of me.
Wow, I'm sitting here trying to study for finals and couldn't agree more. Ever since I started university, I've started listening to a ton of music, as you described, even fall asleep to it. Lately, I've been listening to more electronica in addition to my unhealthy addiction to 1980's music. When I try to do homework, I attempt to turn it off since the words in music are too distracting when doing physics or maths. Problem is, the silence is even worse...
Online Journalism versus Print Journalism. Where will the Mediums be in 5 years?
This interview is great stuff. Some great quotes:

"You think the teachers were proud? If a kid wanted to draw or write poetry or do anything artistic, they were full of praise. But as soon as they found out what I was doing, they shut me down. Sharing your candy with others is fine, but there was something disgusting to them about commerce.

...

Ever since elementary school, I wanted to show that businesspeople are the heroes and encourage others to become entrepreneurs."

So true! It's rare that a teacher would appreciate the selling of goods at school. Interestingly, I got busted by my principal in middle school for selling something regularly (I don't even remember what; soda, probably), but he wasn't appalled by the selling, so much as just covering his ass. He actually said he appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit, but that he just can't allow students to sell stuff to other children. (Maybe he was blowing smoke up my ass to keep me complacent, but I got the impression he was generally impressed with the "entrepreneurial spirit")

But I can totally see an elementary school teacher being completely appalled at a student selling (god forbid) goods, rather than sharing.

This quote in particular really strikes home: I hate the pansies who whine that "it takes money to make money." No it doesn’t! It takes a sense of mission. If you’re on a mission, you’ll find a way.

Sounds very much in tune with being "Relentlessly Resourceful."
Apache ZooKeeper: The Making Of
According to the article, freerisk.com is going to be a open data source for financial data taken from SEC filings. This is great for all types of fundamental analysis. I wonder why they're focusing so much on credit risk.
I'm reading a book on the history of Opera (the genre, not the browser) and the author made an interesting observation.

Namely, it used to be the case not so many decades ago that you might only hear your favorite piece of music a dozen times in your lifetime.

I can't even fathom the emotions involved should that be the case, trying to take it all in and knowing it might be a very long time until you hear a particular piece again.
We must not be speaking the same language. I read "monetary policy" and "fiscal stimulus" as "the government getting involved with the markets."

Now I would hate to conflate Keynesian economics with any one proponent, but John Maynard Keynes himself once half-seriously proposed that the government bury dollar bills in old mines so that the economy could be stimulated by people working to dig them up.
The Stupid Fun Club website is wonderfully cryptic, but ugly as sin.

http://www.thestupidfunclub.com
I just don't get facebook. It feels like the AOL of social media.

The part that turned me off is when I tried to sign up it wouldn't let me continue without giving it the logon to my email accounts.

I prefer far more open systems like friend feed.
Technology is a legitimate engine of economic prosperity. I'm happy to see funding flow to this sector. Its just a shame that the government has inserted itself as a middle man, and a generally inefficient one at that.
I wish most companies were that stupid, there would be a lot better products out there.

No, there wouldn't. They'd gradually wither away and die because they're afraid of making money from their business.

I will never understand the reluctance of so-called "entrepreneurs" who have some philosophical aversion to the idea of making money.

Note: I'm not just talking about condor's comment...I see this attitude expressed constantly here on HN and throughout the "Web 2.0" world.
Condor, maybe I said it a bit harshly.

Not long after we saw them, those newsletters that inspired us went out of business. It's hard to keep something going without revenue.
You're living in a dream world to assume corruption won't happen. You have congressmen in charge of handing out billions of dollars, and who want to be re-elected. Congressmen are happy to send the pork in a specific direction for a bribe ^H^H^H^H donation to fund their re-election campaign.

The cost of lobbying is directly measurable: spending $X to lobby for advantageous results, and receiving $Y, where Y >> X. It's all downhill from there.
And I was thinking you meant http://is.gd/rtF6

:D
Writer asks why local newspapers abandoned neighborhood news and intensely local coverage. Says going back to that will save them, along with going deeper in their reporting, running fewer wire stories and being more consistent and aggressive online.
You know what fuck you money looks like? THIS.
is there any way to prevent someone from doing this besides appealing to their ethical sensibilities? i suspect intuitions about "my rights" in cases like this are rooted in a zero-sum-economy psychology which just won't translate to the internet.
Code review meetings with projectors and so forth might be a dying practice (I wouldn't know), but there are tools like Code Collaborator that allow for asynchronous code reviews. CC seems to be widely used.
Are you sure it wouldn't let you continue?

That absolutely doesn't sound right.
What's with the naked pictures?

NSFW!!!!!
Downmod me if you want, but this is what SFC has been making: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o-g9ZjsZ-s
I don't think you can make a better product by sacrificing your social life on nights and weekends than by working full time on it. Otherwise, ycombinator would make founders keep their day jobs.

This just strikes me as anti-commerce bias.
Ok, my last crazy thought for the day:

With rails recipes the division of labor between programmers and "editors" has already begun. The granularity of the web framework has changed from the single monolithic option handed down by the programmers to the gem level. Now we get a default framework from the programmers and dozens or hundreds of remixed frameworks provided by people with specific configuration needs.

These people are doing the same job that the creators of linux distributions are doing. It's up to them to resolve compatibility issues and create any patches needed to make their distribution work. You find the custom framework that does exactly what you need or if it doesn't exist you create it and become an editor yourself.

Now take the component granularity down to the level of a single language extension or monkey patch. Gems might have gem recipes. The authors of the classifier gem would require array#sum and identify a default version, but an editor could change that.

Right now you can create a recipe that replaces prototype with jquery. Maybe someone thinks that rails' #try sucks so they create a recipe that replaces it with raganwald's #try. It's then the job of the editor to make sure all the components of their recipe play nice with each other.

Just like there are more mutual funds than there are stocks you get an explosion of recipes, but that's exactly what you want. Mass customization. You look through the directory and find the package/distribution that does exactly what you need. The software that gets used gets used.

The key here is that no one needs to agree on anything. Coders code and editors edit. The producer->editor->consumer relationship is natural. The producer->consumer relationship is artificial. It's a bug in the system.
Apparently by "Silicon Valley", the Wall Street Journal means VC's.
Yeah, he was just the ex-CEO of Novell and ex-CTO of Sun. What does he know?
I hate this phony exuberance. Along with all the "Great question!" openers.

I once had a sales guy say "here's what I'm going to do for you" and I walked out on the spot.

I simply can't deal with unctuous people.
I like it better when it was closed to Universities and Companies... The signal to noise as increased exponentially since the introduction of regions.
Deriving real value from the social graph
As an outsider, this is an obvious attack from Wall St. to Silicon Valley. Wall St. is getting bailouts about 100 times bigger without almost anything to show for them. Silicon Valley has no credit to pay for its growth.

I hope Silicon Valley wakes up and realizes it doesn't need Wall St. or the help of the US government. It would be great if something like a broad cyber-scrip currency shows up. Or some other way. I'm sure California will join in as they are insolvent already anyway, making it really scale.
That has some interesting consequences on music quality. I find that pop music usually sounds good enough at first but upon repeated listens gets very tiresome. Whereas good music may sound rather uninteresting at first pass, but upon repeated listenings, one discovers the depth of the song.

Were music enthusiasts in the past more sophisticated listeners? Even more provocatively, has recording technology allowed us to create more sophisticated music? Has that indeed happened?
Do you dislike being indexed by Google as well? How is Backtype any different?
its not an aversion to making money, there's no way to survive without making it. I will never understand the glorification of making money as an end, its so obvious, it should go without saying, yet here we are with yet another big bucks lottery article. the energy and focus should be on making things better, focusing on refining the product, with the obvious profit constraint.
Right, tell that to the shop owners where you buy. Tell that to the small companies who won't make it in due to lack of connections.

If Google wants to foot the bill for Youtube, fine. But taxpayer money shouldn't be used in a gamble, IMHO. That's money collected from other businesses who pay.
"It's extremely expressive, extremely readable, and extremely writable. And that just keeps life smooth."

Something hardcore lispers don't fully understand.
And that's bad, because...?

We (and my kids) own lots of guns (my sons (18 and 23) are hunting nuts and gun collectors). Guns are just tools.

And the Second Amendment exists for a reason. Governments are less likely to turn on their people if the latter are widely armed.
We were partners and complemented each others skills well. It was exactly how a partnership should be. We shared in the business development but then went off to handle our respective tasks. And when we talked with outsiders we were able to speak with one voice.
Yeah, but it's not just giving money to corporations and hoping for the best. It's actually creating valuable artifacts (e.g. roads, dams). Basically Keynes-ism (if that's even a word) works (or worked) because it made stuff people could use to make commerce easier. If the government is going to spend money it could, for example, massively upgrade the rail network.
Do they already have a switch to shut-off the power grid?, telephones? regular mail? newspapers?

So why the internet? What's the threat?

Or is it about money? how so?
IIRC a gene pool of about 500 breeding adults should be able to sustain the species health. However, a significantly smaller population of healthy breeding adults can be used to get the population up to 500 before inbreeding becomes a problem.

If you look at pedigree dogs, certain breeds (the north american German Shepherd) are so disgustingly inbred it can be exceptionally difficult to get a healthy dog (I've seen a lot of breeders who've adopted dogs from Germany that have passed schutzhund so they can guarantee their dogs against hip displasia with some confidence). Then you look at another breed, like the Standard Schnauzer that it's very rare to get an unhealthy dog.

If you inbred a small group of NA German Shepherds it wouldn't take long before all puppies born would be virtually guaranteed to have displasia. If you inbred a small group of Standard Schnauzers it would take a long time before appreciable disease took hold of the line. From the AKA estimates only 1% of Standard Schnauzers have serious illnesses, which with controlled breeding could possibly be removed from a small group (if it even presented to begin with).

So a sufficient gene pool might not be necessary, supposing the animals that are cloned are healthy to begin with. Once they've been artificially bred past say 1000 members it might be possible to release the animals into the wild and have them successfully thrive biologically.

I suppose they could raise 1000 Dodo's in zoos or something (pigeon's are possibly closely related enough to give birth to and rear a Dodo) and then dump them all on Mauritius.
Ask HN: Where to find great designers?
Hi,

My company(startup) is seeking a great in-house web designer to join our team. The problem is where do you find talented designers?

Finding good programmers is quite easy. You know they'd frequent local hacker meetups, picking up the esoteric languages and doing cool hobby projects. Great programmers have such characteristics. Are there similar ways to seek great designers out? Where do they usually hang out? And how to tell if they're great? We don't want to use job boards because a lot of noise resumes will come in.
re: "weighing heavily on my mind."

Let me know if you want to talk. mail at awarner dot com
They aren't.

But solid Ruby programmers use them this way and audit third-party code before using it and avoid it if it contains such code smell.

One of the fun things about Ruby is that you can open up, override and chain just about anything.

Apart from allowing for some interesting experiments, it also allows you to do things like monkey-patch faulty methods in libraries (including the std libs) at run-time while you wait for a sanctioned update to come out.

This may or may not be a Good Thing, depending on who you are and what you're doing.
Maybe that teacher was appalled at the gouging. Ten cents for a stick of gum??
On NPR yesterday: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1028518.... Worth a listen.
Have you actually tested this on a complex system of multiple applications running or JVMs to measure the effects, or are you just guessing that it would be a problem? I don't dispute that sharing libraries across multiple processes would be a nice optimization, but for typical use cases it's way down on the priority list.

Most Java applications are written to use multiple threads (rather than multiple processes), which all execute on the same JVM and share all memory. Web apps typically run in some sort of J2EE container and those can be configured to share libraries across multiple applications; the OS doesn't come into play. Even if you're talking about running multiple separate desktop applications those will mostly only have the J2SE runtime library in common; for Java 1.6 the rt.jar file is 42MB, and only a fraction of it even needs to be loaded into memory.
The irresponsibility of the general population is such that I am alarmed by a significant increase in gun ownership, irrespective of my belief in the right to bear arms.

Additionally, gun collecting is demonstrative of collecting behavior, rather than treatment of the gun as purely a tool. Guns, especially given their purpose as tools, are simply not collectible totems.
It will be interesting to see if accidental shootings increase significantly. I was at the range a few weeks ago, and there were a surprising number of first time shooters there (I would about 80% of the lanes had at least one first-timer).

Unfortunately, a lot of them were being "instructed" by friends or family who didn't seem to really be all that experienced themselves. At least judging by the number of people who had a hard time keeping the gun pointed downrange.

I see gun education as being similar to sex education - the more you know, the safer you'll be; teaching abstinence is not the same thing as teaching safety. If people on both sides of the gun-control issue were better educated about firearm safety, I think the gun issue would be far less controversial.
I once heard Michael Milken interviewed by Barbara Walters. Every time he answered a question, he used her name.

I thought, he must do that habitually because it works well in one-on-one conversations, but it comes off obnoxious when you're watching it.

And now I did something similar. Thanks for the feedback.
Usually the people who make up "gun sales" statistics aren't the ones you have to worry about.
So if they didn't have access to guns they would have decided that they wanted to live after all? That doesn't make sense to me.
There's no real indication from what I've heard that this has anything to do with the economy. Gun sales spiked as soon as Obama was elected. I think Time is trying to fit this into the overall narrative about the economy when, in reality, they're just six months late on the story.
I think you're going to get much better feedback if you let people actually use your service. How much trouble could it be to make a bunch of HN invitation codes? You're essentially asking us to critique your front page and screencast.

That said, from the screencast itself, this seems like a tremendous amount of work for not a lot of benefit--especially if I have to (and that's what it seems like) go back into your reader to change these scores and then return to GReader. Why shouldn't I just hit "j" in GReader when I come up to something I don't like as opposed to doing all your work?

Also, the screencast itself: (this is basically just pedantry) you should normalize the vocals. The levels jump around. And while I'm glad you took the time to run it through what sounds like a noise-reduction filter, it would sound much better if you were talking louder and clearer when you recorded it.
As much as I can appreciate the author's point with selling items at school, there also is a time and a place for certain things. Schools aren't shopping malls and lockers and desks aren't storefronts.

Still, schools should do more to teach business and finance skills. But that's another article. :-)
Whoa there! Sounds like you let the perfect be the enemy of the good! That's unfortunate; think of all the lost time.
Interesting article, but it doesn't seem to relate to the general area of this site.
Is anybody else amused by the fact that Joe Weisenthal listed a disclosure that he owns a few google shares but doesn't acknowledge the DIRECT conflict of interest of slamming a google exec on YAHOO?

You know, since they're major competitors in everything from search to mail to web products etc.
Impressive, I don't think I've ever heard of someone creating what's basically a man-made enzyme. It's a bonus that this will provide a great step toward usable, cheap hydrogen.
why yikes? This isn't "gangsters" and criminals buying up the guns btw it collectors, hunters, middle class victims of fear mongering that pass background checks
Ask HN: How/Where can I find a part-time gig so I can work more on my startup?
I currently hold a full-time day job in San Diego. I'd like to move up to the bay area soon and find a part-time programming gig there so I can work longer hours on my startup idea. Ideally something that requires no more than 20 hours a week.

I'm on an H-1 visa and have a valid EAD card (based on a pending GC process) to take up part-time jobs. Money is less of a concern to me. I just need a PT position to stay legal.

I've been working far too long in the little spare time I have, sacrificing my social life in the process for more than an year now. I think I've developed something respectable in that time and learned the initial ropes to risk taking a more committed plunge now.

My coding skills are centered around C and Ruby on Rails/CSS/Javascript.

Any suggestions? How/where can I look? Let me add that I am looking on my own (since some smart asses will I'm sure assume I'm an idiot to not google) but sometimes you're just not aware of a site or a job board.
> are simply not collectible totems

Have you ever met anyone that has a firearm or firearm-related hobby? I'm guessing that you haven't.

A little secret: they're not all hicks, militia members, xenophobes, etc. Those terrible stereotypes don't apply to any of my friends and family members that keep guns, and I strongly suspect that they're not true of the general population either.
This is patently false.

Guns are beautiful machines made by men.

Some people collect cars, others hand-painted Easter eggs.

Guns are quite collectible totems qua beautiful machines.
Inevitable Minds
Anyone recall the ability to see where your friends last logged in from at their school? ex: "Chris last logged in from Simmons Hall".

I found it pretty interesting they had these names, given the rDNS didn't resolve to anything descriptive.
down for me too. yet it seems to be getting a lot of points in spite of that.
really? I've never seen a peer reviewed study even suggest that. Sounds like an assumption made from irrational fear.
In practice, this sentence is very correct. Windows installations become infected with malware as soon as you connect them to the net. An Ubuntu installation is usually safe, as long as you update it regularly. FUD is when you announce false things or exaggerate negligible details in order to make your competition look worse. I don't think that there's any user of windows who wouldn't agree that combating malware is a core experience of running windows.
> because you own a gun, you're more at risk of killing yourself

If you've got a cite that shows that the presence of a gun increases the chance of suicide, I'd like to see it.

Of course, correlation != causation.

Lots of suicidal people buy guns. When they can't get guns, they use other methods.

Japan's suicide rate is twice the US's, despite Japan's strict gun control.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan#Methods

Common methods of suicide [ in Japan ] are jumping in front of trains, leaping off high places, hanging, or overdosing on medication.

A newer method, gaining in popularity partly to publicity from Internet suicide websites, is to use household products to make the poisonous gas hydrogen sulfide.
It's a little off topic, but I thought it's an interesting business statistic. Economic fear (imo) causes an increase in gun sales.
The thought processes of suicidal people don't tend to make sense to me, either.

Suicide is often a fairly impulsive thing, and suicidal people can be deterred by even slight inconveniences. That's why things like suicide barriers on bridges work. Guns are a very attractive method of suicide—they're rather instant, painless, easy to use, and so forth. I'm in favor of gun ownership, but suicidal people, deprived of easy methods of suicide, will often reconsider entirely. The moment will pass and they will not kill themselves.

Of course, some people decide to kill themselves and remain very determined about the process. Not all suicides are alike.
That's how he generates lots of web traffic. Most of his writing is pretty mundane otherwise.
That's commerce though. Each stick of gum comes from a sheet that's about as big as your living room floor and costs them about $10 to make, they then sell the entire thing for like $10,000.
flair259 only has 3 submissions, no comments, 2 of the submissions point to the same site and both domains are owned by the same person in Kazakhstan.
I think many of us were waiting for this.
Ergo: "gun collecting is demonstrative of collecting behavior, rather than treatment of the gun as purely a tool".

You appear to contradict your statement that "Guns are just tools".