skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of the things that have been added to the list since it was posted to HN are actually obnoxious:

Laughing at jokes like this (http://codetojoy.blogspot.com/2007/08/closures-are-hot.html) because women holding bumper stickers about closures is funny in the same way pictures of cats "reading" calculus books is funny, rather than wondering whether your colleagues see you in the same way as those women.

I do think the Code To Joy thing is funny. Why? Because the discussion about closures in java (so far as i am aware) has left the realm of technical discussion, and now is just gridlocked. The opinion on closures of women at bars (however well informed), at this point is just as relevant to me as other discussions on the pros and cons of including closures.

It's not funny because girls are stupid, or because being hot precludes one's knowledge of pros and cons of closures. I would not expect random strangers at bars (be they male or female) to have an informed opinion about closures in java. The fact that Code To Joy picked only pictures of women to post may be sexist in the sense that they show a bias, but i don't think that the joke is demeaning to women.
BBC Blast Studio: An experiment in creativity
High performance is hard. Very true. Just like camry's vs. formula one cars...
The second point was meant to be about inanimate software constructs: for example, "This guy jumps to that guy without pushing a new stack frame."

The difference between "hi guys and girls" and "hi guys and girls, I guess, too, if you want to get really technical about it!!" is that the second sentence goes out of its way to call attention to the Other-ness of the marginalized group. But why not circumvent the issue entirely and use a gender-neutral term like "folks", "everyone", or (depending on the formality of the occasion) "distinguished colleagues"? It perplexes me that people who have no trouble writing a compiler or debugging device drivers apparently find it so difficult to phrase a simple sentence in a way that doesn't exclude anyone.
Mac vs. PC - A Tool for Every Job
Most "Mac vs. PC" articles are biased and one-sided, depending on the preference of the author, and it's usually just them slamming the opposing side for two pages. Well, I would like to...
I meant a landline phone, not a mobile.

My Mum bought a BT cordless phone for a landline, and the batteries were 40 pounds. A new phone only cost 25 I think, so she bought a new one when it ran out.
Obviously, he couldn't have been richer than Bill Gates because he isn't. From this story it seems like he had many of the same opportunities as Gates, but didn't know how to leverage them into something more. If he had Gates's intuition and insight into the early software industry he might have made the same moves.

But then again, if he had Micheal Jordan's skill in basketball he could have won more championships than others as well.
Four Tips to Save Your Home From Foreclosure Proceedings
It's a beautiful project. Thank you for sharing this with the world.
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Should Twitter be confined to the marketing department?
PR submarines are not only related to the web. They run on tv, radio, newspapers, etc.

Never underestimate the power of a PR agency, and money, lots of money.

TC is just one of the most known propaganda hubs on the web.
On the information alarmageddon
This is a neat idea. I suppose it is like saving your game in a video game. When you get killed, just start over at your last save.
Amy, i think you're off base here.

You (and many others) are making an assertion about the intent of the list. Why do you assume that this is guilt tripping? Are they calling out this behavior to blame someone? Why isn't the assumption simply that they want particular behavior to cease, regardless of what the cause is?

So i want one of two things for people accusing this of being a pointless exercise in flagellation.

1) If there are valid issues in the list that should be addressed (and i would assert that there are), how should the information be communicated in a way that doesn't raise hackles (but still gets the point across).

2) If you don't think that the contents of this list should be raise, how does one raise and preserve awareness of the gender disparity in the programming world, and that there are problems that arise because of it (at least with some segment of our community)?

Additionally, there are other sardonic lists of things particular programmers hate (that questionably characterize their subject matter). Why is this one causing everyone to get their mad on?
the good thing about doing a startup, is that the growth is usually exponential. If you make X in one year, chances are you'll make at least X+1 the next.

Working at a job, you are usually stuck with that 3-5% raise, that barely covers rise in the inflation. And maybe you get lucky and switch jobs to snag an extra 10% raise. Eventually you get tapped out in the $100-150K range.

Meanwhile if you have your own business, the sky is the limit. Your growth rate will no doubt be higher than 3-5%. Chances are, that the first couple of years you'll end up doubling your yearly income. The key thing is to stick it out, keep your costs low so that you can survive long enough to reach the snow ball effect.
Thanks for posting this. I saw his earlier version of this and went hunting for it the other day to no avail.

Giving people the ability to create interesting art with code is too cool.
What would stop ten or twenty shills from an "interested party" to upvote all their stories to get to the front page?

One you detect that pattern you should ban them to avoid further spreading of bad behavior.

And I am not talking about TC only...
Whose says a greeter is totally useless? I believe it's party done to prevent loss, as when people are greeted when they enter a store/shop they're less likely to steal something.
Yes && No

Yes because I /personally/ don't care for it.

No because not all of /us/ do.
Why do you think selective filtering would ruin the front page? It's the equivalent of "don't click on Techcrunch articles", but it makes it much easier and removes the visual nag.

(For that matter, has there ever been a social news site whose primary method of filtering links was letting each individual user ignore things? It might be an interesting way to maintain a community.)
Mees's is a typical blog. Pick a couple of items from a thoughtful article and rant on. You should read Shorto's article too. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03european-t.html...

Her first point of contention is that the Dutch tax rate is 52% and that is unamerican. The average aggregate tax rate for Americans is about 31%. If you add in health insurance, employersponsored or otherwise, the "tax" is probably in the 40-45% range.

The Dutch have a lot of silly automatic benefits payments like a book allowance for children and a vacation expense allowance in addition to paid vacations. If you remove those, I suspect that there isn't a huge difference in tax rates, maybe less than 10%.

Mees devotes half her post to proving that the Netherlands isn't crime free by listing immigrant committed crimes that were so egregious that they made the news here. Case not proven.
Valleywag is specifically about insulting individuals involved with companies. TechCrunch focuses on breaking news, even when a good deal of the time it's crap, and CodingHorror might be uneducated but Jeff Atwood is still writing things that are relevant to this site. We don't need articles about Julia Allison and Tina Fey.

I think Valleywag is actually better-written than those other two. It just happens to be completely off-topic.
This article came up in another thread, let me repeat what I've said there, because this article is inaccurate:

The 20 USD/h sounded like a bit much, so I did a check on that number. According to a site about wages by the largest Dutch union, the minimum wage for a 40 hour workweek is 1491.70 EUR/month. That comes down to about 8.61 EUR/h or (current FX on Yahoo) 12.06 USD/h. It may be higher if a union negotiated more for a certain sector, but in general, 12.06 USD/h is the minimum wage.

It seems like Ms. Mees is exaggerating a bit to make her point.

Another inaccuracy in her article surfaces when she refers to the polls that say that Wilders' party is currently leading. The polls she is referring to suffer from severe selection bias. People sign up to be part of the panel that gets polled. Since Wilders' supporters are mostly disgruntled with current political affairs, it seems very likely that they are overrepresented in those polls.

I don't think she was aware of that though. These polls are done weekly and generally get some press (sad but true), mostly without any critical note (or any note at all) about the methodology (even sadder). [Wilders may very well gain quite a following, but it's not evident from those polls.]

( Original here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624823 )
Stick it out, yes... that's the most important part. That's the hardest part. I think most people who have a startup want to quit at some point. It has to hurt. You have to move through the hurt, because everytime you keep going when you want to give up, someone else out there with the same idea who got to the same point where you want to give up... well, they actually gave up. They gave up which means more customers for you...

I was at a library once and this was a very popular library. There was a whole crowd of people waiting outside before the library opened all wanting to rush inside and find a desk where they could sit and read the books. The security guard had to yell at the people twice DON'T RUN! It was insane.

So what I found was, the people who went the farthest into the library were most likely to find a spot. Some people went in say, half way and instead of simply going farther in, they stopped and turned around and went back and hunted through the desks they'd already passed hoping to find a desk everyone else had passed up.

But on the next floor or closer to the corner, there were still open spots! Those readers simply didn't go far enough. They gave up too soon and so someone who went farther got an open spot those who gave up could have gotten.

It was a metaphor for startups... "Keep walking!" that's my motto. If a customer says no, keep walking, find another customer. If you find a bug, keep walking and fix it. Just keep walking. Don't stop. Don't turn around. You'll stumble, but pick yourself up.

Damn, it's hard sometimes... it's really hard sometimes. You'll want to cry (you'll notice those go from tears of sadness to tears of joy as you walk), you'll want to smash your computer. You'll get depressed. You'll get hungry and have no food. You'll sleep on the floor. Everyone will think you are crazy. You are crazy. Crazy is good.

Just keep walking.
Like I said, envy vs greed. They're related, but they're not the same.
If so it's been polluted from the beginning, because TC articles have always gotten votes here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81
It wasn't used at the time in any significant way.

Saving the French was seen as significant.
Does anyone have any thoughts to offer on when this will change? Will the shift to Vista or Windows 7 change this?
Yup, Hernando de Soto said it very well. There are vastly different kinds of capitalism in the world right now, and US (and Europe) simply have the kind which worked. Living in an ex-comunist country I know the other kind reasonably well: looks the same on the surface, but beneath it's state control all the way. Not a dictatorship nor communism, but a different system altogether. Fortunately my country (Romania) seems to have gotten on a better path lately.
Yeah, bad wording, maybe it's the % of machines with it installed?
If I had the genius to be able to conceive the next quantum leap in social web processes then I'd be able to answer this question. How many of us could envision the impact of a FB or Tw even 5 years ago?
Maybe/probably after the war of 1812 but Britain didn't abolish slavery when it had the US.

When it abolished slavery, Britain (proper) didn't have slavery and had lost the only colony with significant slavery, so abolishing slavery throughout the empire didn't cost much.

Like I said, the US was willing to go to internal war to abolish slavery. Not many countries were.

It's one thing to do good when it doesn't cost much, it's quite another to do said good when it costs a lot.
My now open source class for using MySQL with PHP
IPhone apps are Google's biggest threat in mobile search
Sadly I suspect the aginova parts are much more expensive.

(As an aside, I was trying to buy some of these for a project, but all the site has is "get a quote" and not "buy now" -- argh)
In the always plays the same role category, nobody will ever beat Steven Seagal.
after a good deal of experiences ranging from frameworks to writing SQL by hand, this is the kind of structure that I find most useful.
Well, the Sheevaplug probably has a much higher-end CPU. And an SD card slot. And a bunch more ram. And so on.
I'm currently struggling with a daughter who is academic and artistic but hates school because creative subjects are shoved out of the schedule to meaningless exams, tests and repetitive class work. If she gets creative within a maths lesson she is marked down for not using the prescribed method!

She's only eleven and she already thinks that school is a waste of time despite achieving great results.

There is a lot wrong with the education system in the UK.
Twitter plans a TV competition series
I must have missed that history lesson...what consumer electronics are solar powered, other than perhaps those cheap calculators?
I had a wittier comment, but I think "argh" will suffice here.
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What would I do with it? It would have a computing power of a calculator...

I'd better buy a MacBook that I have never tried. A lot more expensive, but also a lot more positive comments about and reasonable screen/computing power...
Speed vs. Certainty in A/B Testing (w/ spreadsheet model)
"I have been denied a position at a top 5 auto manufacturer due to my "entrepreneurial spirit."

A badge of honor.

Lee Iacocca became even more successful once he was fired by Henry Ford.
"other than perhaps those cheap calculators?"

Read about the history of calculators to understand their evolution.

Since the abacus...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator
Solar PPA's: "Free" Rooftop Solar Installs Financed From Monthly Electric Bill
an excellent demonstration of the sort of regulation competition that should be commonplace. if states were allowed to more freely compete for business corporate taxes would be driven down to a reasonable market rate.
Everyone who has money should be building those. The economics of abundant bandwidth one one hand and software mangement costs on the other dictate massive centralization of computing. Like Amazon't VP of technology said: Amazon pioneered it's massive IT infrastructure because it was the first to need it. Torrow, everyone will need it.
I don't get it. Are the servers Apple Macs?
> That said, if your great way to handle NP complete problems has utility then you could make a closed source application with it and make bucks. No problem.

There is significant social good in getting me to disclose said method.

> My personal belief is that the thieves will take regardless

I'm not concerned about thieves. I'm concerned about disclosure - I want more of it because the more disclosure there is, the faster things advance. I'm willing to pay "but I rediscovered it independently" for more disclosure. (That said, I think that such cases are overstated and come about mainly because someone was trying to get there first, for the patent, and missed.)

> Industries are using legal means, patents and legislation, to create insurmountable barriers to entry which is at the crux of our economic woes.

Patents are not even close to being at the crux of our economic problems.

> So why are software and ideas any different?

I didn't say that software was different, I said that new ideas were different than old ones. I want to encourage folks to disclose new ideas.

We still don't know how GoreTex is made.

Feel free to caricture my position as "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
The failure rate depends on the business. I remember reading that the failure rate for restaurants is something like 75%, for some meaning of failure. The failure for hobbies turned into retail stores is probably similar. A home based business, particularly information based is a whole different animal. The supplemental income can be quite nice without the drag of retail space and employees. Just think of how many employees a restaurant takes.

Losing money in the Schedule C sense is not so bad. You can be making a nice supplemental income but losing money as far as the tax man is concerned when you deduct home office, telecommunications, autos, and office equipment.

And you don't care when a web site "fails", because you probably have one or five on the back burner.
The number USD20/hour comes from the minimum cost to employer - remember that this is a society that has generous unemployment and health provisions: payroll duties, compulsory (employer-paid) social costs are fairly high, up to 100% of the gross salary for low-paid workers.

And when you're not a low-paid worker - like me - the payroll duties etc are a very small part of what my employer pays, maybe 5% or so, but I pay more than 50% of my salary in income tax! So, in either case, the state and the social institutions get their cut.

I personally like living somewhere where health care is a basic right for everyone (even if provision of it is a bit backward compared to somewhere like Spain or Australia - they're just discovering evidence-based medicine for example), people on the street are either foreigners and/or actively refuse help from the social services, and there's a generally strong tendency to solidarity despite recent trends towards an American-style consumerism and (not to be too blunt) selfishness.
Well, the states are allowed to compete on taxation policies. For example Boeing was strong-arming several states for the tax breaks around their 7e7 plane-building factory.

Can you point out something to the contrary?
Ning: The future of online social networking?
They are mac minis. Ultra-small servers are the latest hot(or cold, as it were) trend, for example Dell just shipped this 30 watt server: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/05/22/ServerUnder30W.a...

Apple has been at it for a while now:
http://www.macminicolo.net/
> The liberal arts are just as good at stopping bullshit from coming through. That they rarely choose to do so demonstrates how cowed many people in the liberal arts are, and that's an entirely separate discussion.

Actually, the "physical arts" have another test - it either works or it doesn't.

> But there's a simple test in the liberal arts wherein when somebody doesn't make sense, you ask them to clarify, and repeat the process until they make sense or admit they were faking.

Nope - they call you racist, Republican, fascist, etc., and you lose.
I had them for a couple years through my last employer ("AHF POS II" policy in California, FWIW), with some moderate medical expenses, and I have no complaints.

When I had to buy insurance on my own I ended up with KP after similar online research, scared off by the stories too, but there seem to be horror stories about all the providers; as far as I can tell, at best you can only choose a lower probability of them.
It's nice when traveling to have electronics that all runs from AAs.

AAs can be found all over the world. And, if all your stuff runs the same battery, you can swap them between devices in a pinch. This computer looks awesome.
thanks, eh. I think I fumbled the wording on that one.
"creativity should be as important to education as literacy"

We seem to have found the problem.
I can't seem to view the webcast. Am I missing something?
I've got a love-hate relationship with Techcrunch.

I love it because it's so big and it has a lot of good, breaking news.

I hate it because they're terrible journalists who have a lot of problems with writing style and logic.
> In principle, I don't see a problem with granting someone a temporary monopoly for monetizing discoveries that came about as the result of long and difficult work.

Why does the amount of work matter?

Me, I don't care where the ideas come from or how much work the person did. I want them disclosed.

Then again - I'm on the greed side of envy vs greed. I want everyone out their working as hard as they can to make my life better. To help them with that task, they need information, aka disclosure. To encourage them, I want other people to pay them lots of money.
C-x z (z z z z z z ...)

Repeats the last command. Awesome "combinatoriality"!
It looks exactly like an Asus eee PC. Is this some sort of retrofit or something?
The claim was that family planning services mattered. Pointing out that they have no effect when something else is present, which wasn't mentioned in the list of "what to do", doesn't support that claim.

I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that many "welfare services" are failures in many ways, including population. Perhaps they should have been on the list from the beginning.
Thanks...think you're missing the point. A much better comparison for netbooks is not cheap handheld calculators, but graphing calculators, few of which are solar powered (if any). In the entire spectrum of consumer electronics, the only thing that I can think of that is solar powered is cheap handheld calculators. Not mp3 players, cell phones, pedometers, tv remotes, cordless phones, pdas, etc, etc. Why would you think that netbooks (a class of electronics more complex and power-hungry than any of those categories) would have solar power as their next step, or any step in the foreseeable future? History has taught us the exact opposite so far.
I think that interview will answer your questions.

If it doesn't, Chance, the guy I interviewed, offered to write up a detailed answer to my readers' questions.
For the same reason cities suffer when people flee to the suburbs. If individuals can personally opt out of public problems, they have no incentive to work to solve them. In this case by flagging offtopic posts and criticizing mistaken ones in the comments.
Keyboard macros are great. C-x ( to start recording, C-x ) to finish, C-x e to execute. You can also do Meta-999 C-x e, which will execute your macro 999 times (or until it reaches the end of the file). It's great for turning, say, a CSV file into a sed script.

Or into a list of insert statements if you're too lazy to read up on how to use sqlldr.
Anyone know how many people will be employed by a $1B data center?
macminicolo.net is not an Apple company, they just allow you to colo a Mac Mini as a server.
Different sense of "source." We're the table of contents, not the articles. I meant source in the sense TC is.
M-x align !!!
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The real question is what is Apple going to use the server farm for?