skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I far prefer the "making successful X-ers obviously visible within a wider context" approach, but this can involve skewing to some extent.

If only 5% of successful humans in one area are X-ers, and the rest all Y-ers, then you are less likely to see any X-ers in lists, interviews, the media, etc; it also becomes special when you do, which in itself can make X-ers think "this isn't the area I can succeed in". But artificially pointing out all successful X-ers only makes them more of a rare item, reinforcing this view!

Simply presenting a mixed front with realistic examples of success from both X and Y seems a better way. And having mentors that believe that, despite only ever personally knowing Y-ers, an X can do just as well if not better.
Do the employees actually get paid that amount or is it just another cute metric?
In the preview Wolfram gave a couple weeks ago at Harvard [1], he mentioned two sources of income:

1. sponsors (in the sidebars)

2. subscriptions (the main benefit being that you get to upload and run your own data)

[1] video: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram
The nice thing about Code Generation is that you can do it as often as you like. So if you change something, you just re-generate all the boilerplate and you're back in business.

This is the one instance where I'll argue in favor of duplicated code. When something breaks in one of your generated classes, you'll find yourself on a breakpoint at a single line that does a single thing, so you can quickly figure out what happened and why (and what changes you'll need to make to the Codesmith template so that it never happens again). When your "right abstraction" breaks, you might find yourself seven interfaces deep looking at a hash full of Objects, one of which is probably not supposed to be null, maybe, and it's not going to be any fun to debug.
I'm sure those two wouldn't be first on his list..
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i can never get my php shell to work right so having simple math commands like floor() handy will be awesome. I think i'll tokenize them in Launchy.
I'm not certain I disagree here, but you can make an argument that you're optimistic.

>> When I decide to marry someone, I am not going to treat her like a security or an asset or some other financial instrument -- she's a human being

Historically, what has failed most often? Securities or human beings?

I'd bet on humans.

A friend's friend got problems a decade ago -- wife left him, his company crashed etc. A while later, he was diagnosed with whiplash (I think, could have been mild brain damage) from a traffic accident. He probably can't work hard again, but has managed to build quite a good life.

I can tell you that I had (amongst other effects) something like personality changes when I had a painless tooth infection for quite a while.

Things like that are probably more common than we think.

Even if you could guarantee your emotional state for years to come, I doubt you can plan for changes like that. Usually, we tend to think of people as too static.

Fan of Catalyst, by the way.
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I did. Also "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"
I wouldn't overestimate them either. Intelligence isn't as much a factor in the fruition of this as ambition. Wolfram is more on the level of Sergey Brin and Larry Page than the people that work for them, ambition-wise.
Grinds my Firefox to a halt no matter the query. Tried with Seamonkey and it looks OK.
I love how they provide a link to the launch webcast along with the overload error message. Too bad it's not live anymore, though.
I'm not sure software hipster equates to "bad person."
Even if you could guarantee your emotional state for years to come, I doubt you can plan for changes like that. Usually, we tend to think of people as too static.

Sure. But is it a good idea to protect yourself from an unlikely event in the future at the expense of hurting your partner right now?
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I think the choice of cherry-picking over pulling/merging is the right one. Often I do not want to pull in all changes but only specific changes that I approve. Cherry-picking is perfect for this.
WTF? Get off my HN, scum.
I'm new to git. Can you/someone explain a bit further the advantages and disadvantages of both, and what they mean in terms of how things are actually set up in git? Articles like this make me wary of a tool that looks like it involves far too much fiddling and not enough "just working".
If you aren't yet treating the community like they will aggressively abuse and spam the system, I think you should start.

Are you looking at any other information about how this story got voted up so fast? I haven't looked at the HN code at all, but I wonder if there is anything sophisticated for stopping people from colluding and spamming. Do these accounts come from the same geographic area? ISP? Do they vote like each other in the past?

Vote-weighting doesn't even really seem like it's going to be the solution to the problem. Well, it might end up being the solution if you give a great deal of weight to trusted accounts, but you might in the end discourage new users from contributing.

I think maybe you consider attacking spammers head on. I really don't think the problem is a bunch of newbies up-voted this story. HN is just easy to game.
Why did it never occur to them to just sell the house? That is what puzzles me most (among other things). It seems that having your own house is so important as a status symbol that all other concerns are minuscule in comparison?

Also, what happens if the bank you borrowed the money from goes bankrupt? Is there a chance they will just get to keep the house, because nobody will ever come round to claim the money? If so, it wouldn't be so bad after all...
I must admit the attitude of his new spouse also made my blood pressure rise.
Try typing in the name of a college (the abbreviation is fine, too.) It's also interesting that it can not only perform integration, but also tell you the steps it took to get to the answer.
You don't (usually) think about your oil when you're driving, and you especially don't change your oil while driving. Just because you understand how the low level works doesn't mean you keep it loaded in your working memory simultaneously to the high-level knowledge. You change your oil when the car is parked; you optimize when you're not in the middle of writing a feature or fixing a bug.
Can HN make the leaders page more useful by showing average karma per comment?
I think total karma says nothing but total time and effort spent on HN, which rather speaks negatively about the person. On the other hand, someone who joined later may turn out to be a more valuable contributor.

Two suggestions on making this calculation (average karma) easier and more or less meaningful: (1) I think it would be OK to just store monthly averages to avoid needing to go through all historical data. An average of monthly averages for, say, last 6 months can do the job pretty nicely and in any case is more interesting than total karma. (2) Showing up in the leaders chart can be triggered only after certain amount of comments made, say 50.

Should submission karma be included? I don't know. Honestly, in terms of merits your submission karma says very little about you, unless you submit your own articles, of course. But then, just be clever in the comments.

I'd expect the effect of this change to be even more interesting discussions and probably less uninteresting and unstimulating one-liner remarks here and there.
Anyone else gettting unescaped \n in the results sometimes?
try "Virginia Polytechnic Institute"

I guess it needs more Google-style knowledge to accurately parse more queries.
Yeah, I thought that too when I got married at your age.

When I got divorced 5 years later I found out some legal details that made me rethink that position. Specifically, I found that even though my wife was a reasonable person and our split fairly amicable (as much as these things can be) that I wasn't necessarily off the hook for alimony. According to my understanding of California law, the judge can look at my divorce case and if he thinks my ex's income is too low compared to the mine then he can award her alimony even though it was not requested by her.

That opened my eyes and I saw pre-nups in a new light: They are just writing your own personal divorce laws so that you can be sure they are "fair" in your own eyes--They are not a sign of distrust.

It's like signing a confidentiality agreement in business. One party isn't assuming you're going to break the agreement, they're just spelling out the terms so everything is on the table.
The problem is not that you are cherry-picking, but rather that github adds a "Signed-off-by" to the commit log. That is what breaks fast-forwarding.

However, "git pull" is smart enough to fix this, so it is not actually a problem.

See: http://blog.woobling.org/2009/05/githubs-fork-queue.html (notably the comments).
When I tried this I got the message:

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid
I can't do that...

Wolfram|Alpha has temporarily
exceeded its maximum test load.

Its appears that Wolfram Alpha is just HAL9000 in disguise.
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Git tends to "just work". Don't worry.
I'm very unimpressed - I had high hopes alas, here are some real queries from my lab where google gives me the right answer within 1-2 links. (or I can reach for the CRC handbook) W|A

Q: speed of light in glass
A: c (speed of light) and small glasses are not compatible

Q: magnetic moment of cobalt atom
A: wolfram alpha isn't sure what to do with your input

(note just "cobalt" has the information but you have to dig a little)

Q: band structure of bismuth
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input

Q: polarizability of sodium atom
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: dipole moment of water
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: isotopes of copper
A: good job! (this one actually gives me what I'm looking for)

I just read it can do music so..

Q: bach
A: has a very small amount of info and a cute timeline of birth and death

<same for charles mingus, and ozzy osbourne>

Q: bach english suites
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

It's also really annoying that it does the HAL9000 thing like every other query.

Nice effort - better luck next time. I'm sticking with the CRC handbook and GOOG.
Sorry, only 128 MB of RAM.
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...

Q: mass of five hydrogen atoms

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: distance traveled by space shuttle in one day

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: explosive energy of five sticks of dynamite

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: number of keys on a US keyboard

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: world war 2 deaths

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

...
Weird, that article stops half way and starts talking about a magazine "Ebony South Africa". And "page 2" is a list of links.
I've never fully understood the way that some people go about entertaining themselves. I mean, I can't remember the last time I was bored. I'd almost go as far as to say that if you're ever bored, you're doing life wrong.

I can analytically get my head around why people end up in a mental state where they think that buying a television for entertainment is a higher priority than buying food - it has a lot to do with (IMO) the way the brain develops, and how that relates to culture. In other words, pattern recognition in the mind doing what it does best, over the course of someone's entire life.

The problem is that everything around you is fascinating. I guess it's not to most people, and I should just consider myself lucky that I never feel the need to buy a bunch of entertainment luxuries to keep myself entertained.

When she put it like that, it almost seemed rational.

Yeah, it does seem almost rational. Really, I guess it is rational, assuming one puts a really high value on being entertained constantly via external media.

Ahh, people's mindsets get me in a bad mood sometimes.
maybe it is firefox-killer and not google-killer
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"Can entropy ever be reversed?"

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Just me, but it's easy to find a three bedroom apt for less than $2000 around here.

However, after looking on Zillow, I find things have either changed considerably in the last year or I misremember, since I can see a bunch of places for well under $400K around here, now. So, never mind.
A little late for that, but here's hoping.

Stability in a number of Ruby projects is a real problem: Rails, rspec, numerous plugins and gems. I wouldn't care so much if everyone used a versioning system that clearly communicated when things would break, but that's not happening.

Maybe having stable APIs and proper versioning is too "professional" for Rails.
It's really a shame that this kid couldn't get competent adult supervision. With some structure in his life, things might have turned out differently for him.

His social engineering skills were quite impressive... although his habitual lying does make him seem like a psychopath.

All in all, very cool, and very sad. At least he didn't get sent to prison.
This gets back to the earlier discussion of orange usernames for users with the highest average recent karma per comment,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181

an idea that has since been rejected. But if the server load wouldn't be too bad, I wouldn't mind a display of the same figure on each user's profile page. I largely agree with your rationale for reporting this figure.

I also think submission karma should be included or separately reported, as that is how some users mostly contribute to the community, by making good submissions.
SearchYC displays such data. For mojuba it is http://searchyc.com/user/mojuba

It displays avg points for both submission and comments
I think the mandatory showering was a joke. (Three times a day is insane anyway)
Ask HN: Contextual ads for web-apps like todo-lists or mail?
Hi again,

I'm creating a webapp that will deal with user-generated data in a one-to-one interaction behind a login and a password. I'm creating something that can go into a niche of todo-lists.

I don't think charging people is a good idea but ads should be pretty non-intrusive.

Is this ethical (granted I explicitly say what I do)? From what I know, GMail parses my private data for ad purposes.

Can the "default ad-network" -- AdSense do this automatically? From what I understand, it crawls webpages very very rarely and even authorizing it to access protected pages isn't going to speed up the process.

Is there any other solution for fast, document-based advertisiment?
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Many good points, but I have a few quibbles. While I agree that things are getting better, I'm increasingly mistrustful of the "progress" being made on the regulatory front. There's a lot of new rules on the books, but I don't see a lot of real change occurring.

Good regulation requires independent monitoring and enforcement, and right now there's neither. The majority of large businesses have at least some level of government involvement and control, and many are outright state-owned. Moreover, the level of corruption is pretty staggering, to the point where being a government official is currently the best (and often the only) path to real wealth and power. Quality control and product safety are remarkably difficult in that kind of environment.

Hopefully you're right, and solving these things will just take time. However, I don't think we have the option of sanguinely standing by and waiting for things to get better. Consumers and business clients need to demand better quality, the Chinese public needs to demand a more transparent and honest government, and those demands have to be made constantly and consistently. That's the only way change is going to happen.
Actually, this is a better implementation of 'orange' users. Have a page where users with the highest average comment rating are listed.
I think this might be the best short story I've ever read.

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> That's really fatal thinking.

That's the standard line, I know. But your comment about saving misses the point: I was talking about times and situations when you have no option to build savings; you can only choose to go into debt by amount x or amount x+x/10 (for example). In such a case, you cannot save your way out of debt. What needs to happen is a radical change to either your income or outgo stream; if you don't get that change, you're screwed, and it hardly matters how much, but if you do get it, then it won't matter so much if you went into debt a bit more before that.

A dollar saved is certainly not the same, conceptually, as a dollar earned. In particular, the act of choosing not to buy things can only save me up to my current income (in a given period), no matter how much I choose not to buy. So if I decide not to buy that HDTV, I can save $1500, and if I choose not to buy a new Mac either, I can save another $1500, but if my income was only $2000, it's hard to claim that I saved $3000 this period. Money saved is merely potential money, while money earned is real money.
> You are suggesting that available of opportunity and future outcome make slavery ok.

No, he's suggesting that consent makes a situation that looks like slavery not slavery at all.
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I've tried something similar for my first try (as your first question) - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=light+index+of+refracti...

WA does seem to have IOR list of common materials, but that is easily obtainable from almost everywhere, however you can then use to calculate further down the road with WA
Also the leader board... http://top.searchyc.com/points_per_comment
Tell HN: front page caution
For a while (last 5 hours) reddit has been down and behaving iconsistently.

I was wondering if today is going to be one of those links of techcrunch - codinghorror - ron paul - huffingtonpost - on the front page.

better to switch to the new "classic" (irony being, i am among those who remember their latest password - thanks to the openid.) Never mind, FTW.

or perhaps i may be wrong.
Try typing in the name of a college (the abbreviation is fine, too.)

My alma mater doesn't show up as "U of MN," which gets me a calculus problem, but "University of Minnesota" disambiguates nicely among the different campuses. But the information about the flagship campus hits some good information, but misses some too. Try your favorite university for the terms

[name of university] cost of attendance

or

[name of university] admission rate

or

[name of university] SAT range

or other things that people actually look up about colleges.
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While high-level languages and nice operating systems are a good thing, they often mask what's beyond them. If someone grows up in a world they can't look beyond the curtain, bad things happen.

Many times I have witnessed sysadmins banging their heads trying to tune parameters on a Linux server that ran under a virtual machine setting and wondering why some counters were off, without realizing the machine underneath their OS didn't really have hardware counters they could, forgive me, count on.
Google gets patent on floating data centers
May I ask why it is that every time there's an update, the jailbreakers have to find yet another way in? Do you think maybe Apple doesn't want you getting into your hardware?
It's hand-curated data. No kidding it's missing.
Cool... there has to be a threshold though, some 50 or 100 comments minimum.
I was expecting it to be a little more encyclopedic than it seems to be. I mean, math stuff if awesome and although I can do it all (i think) in Mathematica it's very good for the world to have a free tool that does those kinds of things.

But when it comes to facts... well, they're facts... You only get as a return the uninteresting information.

I think Wolfram Alpha can succeed if they point their strategy into something which is rare on the web: certified knowledge. Being able to type a name of a country and instead of getting facts, getting real information about its history. Information that the users can trust as a bibliographic source.

Because facts are facts... they exist but they're so uninteresting.
mass of 5 hydrogen atoms offers results for the mass of hydrogen 5, not a bad guess i suppose.
lol are we the only two ppl on this article who actually know anything about computers? all the other comments seem to have been written by my mom.

did u bust a gut at all that "peeling back the layers" so she could start replacing windows with linux? AHAHAHAHAHAHA

or that crap about rom basic? PUT IN THE FUCKING LINUX FLOPPY MOM!!!

god. this fucktard is a SOFTWARE ENGINEER. plz, kill me now.

no, actually, this kind of person is why ppl who have any skills can basically say YOU'RE GONNA PAY ME THIS AND I'M GONNA DO THAT NOW GET OUT OF MY OFFICE AND DON'T BOTHER ME.

lol.