skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's just as skewed a perspective to look only at the negatives as it is to only consider the positives.

Science and engineering may not be the paths to easy street, but at least there's some sort of perfectly rational story as to how an engineer can get paid: Someone pays the engineer to make stuff, and make stuff better, then sells the stuff. Engineers can actually expand the economy, with new resources, new things to do with those resources, better ways to use those resources, and so on. Yes, there's up-and-coming competition, but it's not as if we're going into that competition empty handed or as if the other side is populated with some sort of superhumans or something (yet); it's just competition. Cry about it if you must, but then get back to work.

For those with humanities degrees, and especially the PhDs we're really talking about in the context of this story, they are, not to put too fine a point on it, luxuries. Expenditures. Ones we're a bit overstocked on, too. And they do not grow the economy, their sustenance comes from producers.

This is not intrinsically bad. We have humanities PhDs in general for good reasons. I am not trying to draw intrinsic "goodness" judgments from this point, because that depends too much on your personal definition of goodness. The point I am trying to draw is that going into science and engineering in general is going to be a stronger bet over time, because you're much closer to the parts of the economy that generate economic value. The humanities majors are at the end of a much longer chain, with every middleman taking their cut, and too many of them trying to drink from the same hose. And what they generate may be valuable to humanity, but... it's hard to eat a thesis on the philosophical similarities between Marxist dialectic and Dingbellian Hypertrophisms as manifested in the movie Titanic. And that's before we talk about "oversupply", which drives the economic value of such things even lower.

I don't think science and engineering are particularly "increasing" in risk; they've never been perfectly safe and they continue to not be perfectly safe; I'm unconvinced the magnitude has changed much, it's just the delusions of safety have been replaced by reality. Humanities is at increasing risk, because in a contraction they're really, really easy to cut off, especially when there's more than we need. And contractions happen.

(Remember, as raw and as rough as it may sound, nothing is perfectly safe. When something is portrayed as perfectly safe, run screaming. Someone is either lying to you, or deluded, and neither is good. Engineering and science are as good a bet as you're going to find over the next 25 years, but in general, the closer you can get to generating value the better. You may get parasites, but try to find ones smart enough to realize they have to let the host live for it to work.)
link to a topic with one of your comments?
Antivirus software is usually more harmful than most viruses.
Will this be restricted to just the U.S?
Wow, this is incredible. I really like the voting & fast access keyboard shortcuts.

Alright github, I forgive you for all the downtime!
Here are the rest of the sites:

http://www.indianpad.com/general_news/667464/the-epic-tale-o...

http://tipd.com/tag/pittsburgh+samaritan

http://www.malaysiastory.com/WorldNews/the-epic-tale-of-the-...

http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pitt...

http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/latest-activity-16
Convertible debt is a bad deal for the investor. Put your money up now but you don't get equity till later, after the cash and time have allowed for valuation growth?

Capped is better but I'm still less excited. You still have to negotiate terms and whatnot (what if there's an early acquisition, do I just get paid back? Or do I get converted? At what price? etc.)
Considering users were actively trying to install software which they thought was trusted (so would have entered passwords when prompted), I don't find this surprising — is there even much you can do to prevent this kind of thing, apart from taking control away from the user?
Ogling women is part of the nature of being a man; if we glance or stare at a woman's ass in the grocery store without her consent or knowledge, which we all do, is that somehow better than if she were a paid and willing professional porn star? $500 for an hour worth of work at entry level with no experience is pretty fair.

Also, btw, they have gay porn on youporn, so they're equal opportunity, they're not just exploiting women.
Absolutely. If anyone ever refers to me as anything less than a ninja rockstar hacker, I never speak to them again.
I think they'd benefit much more if they used their position as the killer git app in order to help git go mainstream.

Having git be universal in the Ruby/Rails world has been a huge accellerator for maintaing open source projects. No longer are we subject to core teams losing interest, anyone can fork and become the new core team.
Ok, I'll be the nudge and say I don't understand the point. I never "got" this type of example from the lispers using destructuring and recursion on simple examples either.

This (and others) has a fairly obvious and equally readable counterpart in C++ (or any other imperative language, really), but there's a reason why one doesn't implement it this way in those languages -- and a reason why (some of) the examples given have a certain bias towards iteration.

Wouldn't the same reason hold in haskell? Or do we care about runtime efficiency at all?
This is pretty cool, it would be nice if they had an api so we could sync with Lighthouse etc.
Twitter Zodiac Signs
Your question makes me wonder: does facebook want more traffic? Lack of traffic isn't the reason they're having trouble. The reason they're having trouble is product/user mismatch. A really good idea will make them lots of money with their current amount of traffic. Actually more traffic just means more infrastructure costs (and probably more of the type of user that doesn't generate any revenue with fb's current products).
Script used - http://ampaste.net/mbce6473
Here is a full list of comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=catz . Nothing of the last 3 days appear. In this topic there are at least 5 comments that also does not appear: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565206 (I posted the largest comment again under this account).

It seems that everything that I write does not appear (a kind of silent ban). It is fairly insulting (since I enjoyed posting on YCnews - and I took care in not posting something offensive).
Well basically your past can send stuff to your future self, in effect its both ways
Oops. I deleted my old #1 (have multiple founders) and forgot to delete the footnote "this is not a dealbreaker." too late to edit
would love to hear details once that's finalized.
I think he is testing those sites to see if any of them outranked you, or to see how they rank in comparison to each other. Since you're #1, I wouldn't worry about it.
Ah. Ok, that would make sense.
Hmm. Only hypothesis I have is that person is trying to build up legit-looking accounts on social news sites by submitting random stuff, so that the links they want to promote don't get recognized as such when they get submitted? (in which case, the "SEO" in the username is a bit puzzling, because it's not very subtle).
Little known fact: Passenger also supports Python WSGI applications/frameworks. Perhaps it will become the de facto replacement for FastCGI.
I find it hard to believe that 30% of their user base never uses any of their own apps: Photos, Notes, Posts, Groups, Events.
I just finished reading a book about David Geffen (The Operator by Tom King). Apparently DreamWorks-SKG's burn rate for the first few years was $400 million a year, which is actually less than YouTube is costing Google.
It's interesting how a porn company can taint your resume, even though the job itself is not about porn, but web development for the Alexa ranked 48th site globally.

Society has a nasty habit of grossly overreacting to things that are "in bad taste" by calling names and condemning them, as long as it's politically correct and trendy to do so.

Porn at least doesn't claim to be something it's not.

Would you really think less of someone who took a technical web job with youporn, when there are sites like eharmony out there? i.e. how many people go to youporn and say "what a horrible site, experience, and waste of money" compared to Eharmony?
I suspect what they're looking for are "useful" apps that drive up the perceived value of their platform, regardless of revenue or traffic. Things like business or general utility, but not games (which by far do the best both revenue and traffic wise on the platform).
I would prefer there to be a down arrow that would increase your karma. Upvoting such a crime as "frogtal" made me feel dirty.
s/torrent downloaders/mac users
This is a fairly uninformative post, pretty much all it says is that Digg is using an item-item collaborative filtering algorithm. That's not particularly interesting in and of itself.

If they went into the technical details about the challenges of creating an item-item collaborative filtering algorithm at Digg's scale, that would be an interesting read.
If mixmax does this, it would be a huge mistake to sell this for $3 or something ridiculous like that. There are two types of people that would buy this:

- the mildly curious who wouldn't buy unless it was just a couple bucks (sounds like this is yummyfajitas)

- the obsessed who are desperate for more info and would probably shell out $50 for a great guide with all the info they need on how to actually change their life by doing this

You want to target the 2nd group, because they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. The people in the first group are cheap and generally opposed to paying for anything, so you'll spend way more time and effort trying to sell to them than they're worth.

Also, to the doubters, the thing to keep in mind with things like this is that while you can find the info for yourself for free, it'll take you tens or hundreds of hours of research (I know). Why not just get it from someone who has actually done it?
maybe you have an alter ego that posts the stuff when you "sleep". Check the timestamp on all those posts and see if thats the case.

although that bizsugar name sounds familiar, I believe someone on here runs that.
Nokia 'voluntary resign' offer a hit
Going through my server logs counting lines which were (a) within 2 days of my submitting a link here, and (b) matched /ycombinator/i, I get the following:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29791 (16 points, June 21, 2007): 260 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70823 (2 points, October 21, 2007): 39 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106071 (4 points, January 29, 2007): 99 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142366 (12 points, March 21, 2008): 191 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182974 (19 points, May 7, 2008): 257 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209799 (16 points, Jun 5, 2008): 259 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227327 (6 points, Jun 25, 2008): 121 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231036 (5 points, Jun 29, 2008): 160 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340820 (31 points, October 23, 2008): 768 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=356704 (4 points, November 7, 2008): 57 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359788 (45 points, November 10, 2008): 884 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=397279 (27 points, December 14, 2008): 982 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401876 (46 points, December 18, 2008): 781 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438070 (37 points, January 17, 2009): 685 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=440370 (5 points, January 19, 2009): 60 hits

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508818 (87 points, March 9, 2009): 2638 hits

Of course, this doesn't count traffic from sites like icombinator.net which "re-skin" HN, nor does it count traffic resulting from people seeing links here and posting them elsewhere.
if this guy really wanted to mess with me, he would have chosen an anagram for my name as his username.
Is Having A Security Blanket A Bad thing?
Does your child have a favorite blanket he doesn`t want to part with? Or maybe a beloved pillow that he has to hug tight before closing his eyes at night? His source of comfort may even be a worn-out stuffed toy, like Wawa, the scraggly teddy bear of Chuckie in Rugrats. When Chuckie`s new stepmom Kira mended Wawa, Chuckie cried and was inconsolable.
After a few minutes of playing around:

* There does not seem to be any documentation

* What are keywords to close a task in a commit. Does it have to be in English? Can the words be customized?

* Can I import from external projects (i.e. Everyone on github uses something else today and needs to migrate)

* Where are issues stored? Are they stored in a git repo?

* Can I export?

* When you make a label shouldn't it pick a color automatically?

* What about when I merge issues from forked projects, when they Close task #12 is that their #12 or my #12?

* If I rebase and remove a commit that fixed #12 will the issue be updated?

* If you fork someones repo do you get the issues? What about when you pull and rebase? How are they merged?

* Can I see if any of my forks have fixed issues?

* What branch does the issue tracker look in to see if an issue has been fixed? master? Is it customizable?

It looks nice, but after poking at it for a minute I am a bit underwhelmed. It is a nice basic and traditional issue tracker, but at least what is exposed is no where near any of the interesting issue trackers built on top of git that people have been playing around with the past year. Maybe it is all built on git and that will be revealed as time goes on, but not sure. Hopefully it wont stop some of the people who have been playing around with issue trackers built on top of git. Part of the joy of Git is that I am not tied to GitHub. Yes I host my projects there, but when it goes down it doesn't matter because I can still keep working. I was really looking forward to a issue tracker that is built on git that I can store in my project tied into GitHub. But this is till very cool and a good step in the right direction.
The Hidden Costs of Apple’s Push Notification Service
I'm with you man -- I consider myself a pretty good coder, but I'm a really crummy sysadmin. Trying to figure out how to configure Mongrel correctly has always been the worst part of Rails development for me, so Passenger is a welcome relief.
Compartmentalization of power: require the application to ask separately for each thing it wants to be able to do (e.g. Install a driver, bind a port, save to a write-protected folder), and then "profile" the set of powers it has requested to determine what kind of app it is when explaining to the user whether he should enter his password. A screensaver shouldn't ask to rewrite the page table, and the OS can know that and help the user avoid it.
The joke's on everybody: Spammers surpassed the mark for 1 million recipients of useless information years ago! They make up 95% of e-mail now; nobody can beat that!

Still, I hope 4Chan wins. Just to piss off everybody who somehow thinks this matters.
There was a comment on iSteve, where someone said that perhaps whites were not intrinsically smarter than the global average (of about 90) but, that they've had a headstart of a century of Flynn Effect.
The Haskell example compiles to an iterative version, as far as I'm aware.
the science is pretty clear

Actually, the science of broad heritability, which is what you are talking about here, is anything but clear. The concept of heritability (it originated with Francis Galton) is a pre-Mendelian concept, an example of the saying that a person with a hammer treats any problem as a nail.

Heritability says NOTHING about malleability of a particular trait in populations, as any professionally edited genetics textbook will remind you. And there is already plenty of empirical evidence that IQ scores, and real-world intelligent behavior outside the testing room, and rationality (which is distinct from IQ) are exquisitely sensitive to environmental influences, many of those influences being cultural or educational rather than nutritional. That's what the book under review is about: providing a large number of citations to primary research literature on the malleability of IQ and educational achievement.
It's not really a Ponzi scheme because the next guy down the line might find value in it. Ever since Madoff, everyone has inaccurately referred to everything as a Ponzi scheme. It's not.

And even if it were, that quote would still be stupid because founders who don't monetize get rich all the time.
If you are into "installing the pirated versions of iWork or Photoshop CS4" (whether on Mac or PC)

...you may already be a zombie.

Just don't even go there.
I wish there were more official YC events open to the public. I'd attend YConf :-)
That's a cool idea and offer - might be able to make it along!
Signs of our worst financial crisis
I did and I am, but revenues dropped a lot after two events. One was Party Poker spinning their affiliates off of the network (long, boring story, but you can probably Google around about Eurobet or Empire Poker and find out more if you care to). I managed to rebuild almost back to where I was, which was no small task at all, but then the other happened, which was the UIGEA forcing Party Poker out of the American market.

Now my revenues and margins are considerably smaller than they were back then. I could maybe, with full time effort over a long period, have rebuilt, but I didn't bother because of the general instability of the industry. I'll pass the opportunity to get on a soap box about our government's stupidity here, but suffice it to say the Bush DoJ (and maybe Obama's too, not sure yet) made the business seem a less worthwhile investment than something not in such a legal minefield.
Sun JVM gets incremental, compacting GC
My grand parents in their prime were just as smart as my parents, and my parents and uncles are just as smart as my cousins.

And this is one of the best empirical proofs that IQ scores are not a "measure" of how smart someone is. James Flynn discusses exactly this point of yours in several of his writings. He relates a story from Arthur Jensen about a mentally retarded man who claimed to be baseball fan, but who was very vague about the rules of baseball and didn't seem to know the names of many professional players. Yet that man had an IQ score that would relate back in time to a population average score from the era when baseball became a popular sport, widely followed in the United States.

All the Flynn effect means is that people have much more exposure to the type of puzzles in the Raven Progressive Matrix today than they did in the 1950's.

I'm very sympathetic to this statement, because I used to think that it offered the best explanation for the Flynn effect. But I am now convinced by Flynn's latest book

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

that on the one hand the gains in IQ test scores are real, and not just artifacts of familiarity with test item content (in large part because so many different kinds of tests have all shown this effect) and on the other hand that IQ has increased in society, and has been applied in the labor market and other aspects of daily life, without wisdom (Flynn's term) or rationality (Stanovich's) term increasing as generally in society.

You'd probably enjoy reading Mackintosh's book,

http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-N-Mackintosh/dp/...

by far the best introductory text on IQ testing, and Flynn's latest

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

to delight your mind by grappling with how some specialist researchers have attempted to resolve the interesting issues you bring up in your reply.
About 3,000 to 4,000 in 48 hours the last three times.
I think the point is, recursive solutions like the above are often easier to read.

In fact the example above looks tail-recursive to me (at least if you add in an accumulator parameter). That means a good compiler will make it efficient.
I've read more of what Haier has to say since his name last came up in an HN thread. I especially like this quote:

"Just because intelligence is strongly genetic, that doesn't mean it cannot be improved. 'It's just the opposite,' says Richard Haier, of the University of California, Irvine, who works with Thompson. 'If it's genetic, it's biochemical, and we have all kinds of ways of influencing biochemistry.'"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126993.300-highspeed...

The all kinds of ways to influence biochemistry include influences that are not themselves biochemical. Things that people DO can cause biochemical changes in their brains. (Sleep deprivation is well known to do that, for example, as are activities that bring about good mood.) Very likely engaging in challenging education brings about biochemical changes that result in changes in IQ.

you quote only from Flynn and not from any scientist holding an opposing viewpoint (e.g. Arthur Jensen)

First of all, let me say very forthrightly that maybe mainstream journalism operates on an equal-time principle, but science manifestly does not. It actually makes no difference at all who says anything in science, because it should be examination of the data that leads to a conclusion, not examination of a scientist's reputation. But since you asked me to quote Arthur Jensen, I will be glad to:

"Now and then I am asked . . . who, in my opinion, are the most respectable critics of my position on the race-IQ issue? The name James R. Flynn is by far the first that comes to mind." Modgil, Sohan & Modgil, Celia (Eds.) (1987) Arthur Jensen: Concensus and Controversy New York: Falmer.
books targeted at useless middle managers are useless. news at 11.
That would be like watching television commercials to learn how to make cars.

Well, it might be a little more like watching television commercials to be aware of what the typical experience of watching broadcast TV is like. A producer of television programs might do that from time to time, although perhaps not all of the time.
Well, okay, but the point is that computing power will catch up to 1b^2 a lot faster than 2^1b.
Thanks for mentioning that specific brand name.
This will be an uphill battle. Hulu's interface is slick, and they host fresh content. YouTube's interface sucks (in this usability consultants humble opinion) the commentator's are vile (they have the same problem that Xbox Live has: c-bomb and racial-slur dropping tweens) and the content they're hosting is old second tier series. It's obviously way early to call the fight, but that's how I see it right now.
I think it was probably more the functional programming. You can do metaprogramming even in PHP.
Build and submit whatever you want other than an app that uses the Twitter API.
Or, turning this around, and I say this based on the behavior of many immigrant families I know, failure to maintain home bilingualism may be because of a weakness of executive functioning on the part of the parents. It takes a bit of discipline to set up cuing situations at home so that children learn to use both languages, when they know that one language suffices for communicating with the parents.
That sounds awfully similar to Windows UAC.

"There's a much, much bigger hole than any programmer could possibly exploit: The annoyance factor."
Source:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222252&cid=180030...
Digg Recommendation Engine
It's wrong to equate science and engineering in terms of productivity. They're both technical disciplines, and a lot of what you learn as a scientist can be applied to productive endeavors, but science in itself isn't inherently productive.

Science is speculative. A good scientist is answering questions for the sake of the questions, and doesn't expect anything for answering them. She certainly doesn't expect to make something that can be sold for a profit.