skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would you please spell it out for me, assuming that I am a complete novice? How exactly do you get copies of actual papers from "CiteSeer, Google Scholar, DBLP, etc."?

It may occur to you that if I'm too dumb to find papers I'm probably too dumb to read them. Please ignore this :) I'm sure that a dumbed-down answer would include some helpful tips for those of us who don't do this every day but have a need to dive into the literature from time to time (and would probably benefit from doing it more often).
I like this post. I'm not sure it's as much about what you want to do, or be, as opposed to what you don't want to do. I believe that figuring out what you want to do with your life is much more difficult than figuring out what you definitely don't want. The problem is that nobody ever asks you, "What is it that you don't want to do when you grow up?". I think that question, presented to us when we were younger, would give far more direction to our lives.
Would you like them better if the Google logo were floating at the top of the page?
I am fairly certain that he meant "American auto industry".
i have to admit, it is surprisingly good. not better than google, but it presents itself as a quality alternative. several steps up from live.

given some more time to chisel away at it, MS might have something which could seriously compete with google in the future.
Are there any large projects using it?
Nice point that there is a little google lock-in, when people have learnt how to find things with google. It's not just the query syntax, but also that we've learnt what kinds of answers it gets back.
I disagree with all the negative responses here--I think this is an excellent article with useful warnings. Yes, the 98% datapoint is random and unsubstatiated, but I think the author is using it more figuratively than literally. Most startups fail. That's all he's saying.
Thanks for all the comments. I've actually followed through on a couple pieces of advice.

I scheduled an interview with an admissions officer at Southern Poly, and I spent all night last night working through the Django Book, so I can try to put together my first webapp idea. I've always learned best by actually getting my hands dirty, so I think it will be a good experience.
The Future of Search and the Intelligent Web, from Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital
I agree that his point is valid for computers built on the ordinary substrate of classical switches (whether relays, tubes, or transistors). There are two very influential ways of representing computation, the lambda calculus and the Turing machine; when starting from switches, people (roughly) build something that looks like a Turing machine (with procedural programs) and then, if they want lambda calculus (with more functional programs) they use Turing completeness to emulate it.

That said, it's not 100% clear to me that this must be true for all physical models of computation. (And the existence of Shor's algorithm suffices to keep practical people at least a little interested in computational mechanisms which are fundamentally different from classical switches.) Does anyone know if there are any reasonably plausible computational mechanisms for which it'd be natural to start by implementing something that looked more like lambda calculus, so that if you needed a Turing machine you'd emulate it?
Global warming, obviously.

Trying to transition global warming fearmongering into "climate change" fearmongering should be laughed out of politics. Climate science has a long way to go before it proves that "climate changes" are both significantly caused by man, are significantly worse than what would have changed anyhow, can be significantly improved by any particular action we can take, and that such actions would be cost-effective. (When you start to look at the problem like this and see what is really scientifically necessary, you start to realize just how far we are from this, by even the most optimistic estimates.)

(The word "fearmongering" in my previous paragraph is not an accident. It's great to research climate change in the spirit of science and look at what's really there; science isn't fearmongering, fearmongering isn't science. There's a lot of very non-scientific stuff occuring in the global warming hysteria field, though. If you want to tell yourself that it's only the non-scientists doing that, I won't argue the point, but it doesn't make the hysteria go away.)
"Aggression is an unattractive quality, so do not call a keen salesman an aggressive one (unless his foot is in the door or beyond)."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - there are no supporting arguments for the idea that aggression is always unattractive. Like much of the rest of the article this is also prescriptive.
Ask HN:  On Being Attacked
I received a nice email message from a HN person about this topic, so I'll repost part of my response.

Until recently, I really liked that place, but more and more lately does it seem to be a little forum for people who are all into self-promotion by tearing others down. Most Internet forums do seem to eventually disintegrate into that mire. For whatever reason, there are just some people who seem to need to deride others to make themselves feel better.

So regarding the topic of being "attacked", what can we do? Respond kindly and apologize? Attack back? Email PG and ask him what on Earth is happening to this place? Stop posting here all together?
I've been surprised how many people say it looks nice. I completely agree with your statement. It looks straight from those fake search results on domains. I thought the homepage was pretty weak too.
DADUN DUN DADUN

DADUN DUN DADUN

DADUN DUN DADUN
And this is the auto industry. Their bad decisions based on their vaunted experience has led them to the situation they face now.

Experience didn't save them. Hell on the other side, experience didn't make Toyota the company it is now (although they did recently post a loss, they are hardly in GM's position). Willingness to disregard that experience and try something that made sense did.

Years of experience is a poor indicator of success.
what "can" you do? any of those.

what "should" you do? kind of depends on the situation, but a kind response and an apology or explanation if necessary goes a long way. especially if you're speaking on behalf of a company/brand/whatever.

for example, that whole fiasco with getsatisfaction. they handled it fairly admirably, imo.
There's another context: gender can mean the psychological and social aspect of sexual identification. I believe that's what the "identity-theory" bit refers to.
What are you talking about? Are you talking about something that happened on HN? If so, could you link to examples? Without context this is incomprehensible.
Meanwhile Windows continues to rot away; Remind me why they need to be so into search again?
The results seem similar to Google. I wonder if PageRank litigation is a possibility.
If it doesn't produce prepress output, it isn't a replacement for Photoshop.

Lolcats and photographs of models changed to look like comic book superheroines are accidental use cases for Photoshop.
Definitely not a bad option, but as Mr. Arrington says, "I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for."

I honestly cannot think of a time in the past year where Google has failed to locate sufficiently relevant information for a given query. If Google ever disappoints, I'll definitely fail over to Bing, but those days will be few and far between.

(And I do have a few presentation nits with Bing. I've seen a sponsored links block inserted ~250ms after the results rendered, immediately shifting the result positions and interrupting my skimming of the page. I can't open image results in tabs using Chrome, and their content wrapping for image results, Wikipedia pages, etc. feels a bit heavy-handed).
I think he meant the _American_* auto industry needs revamping.

(*And by American, of course I mean the United States of America, I was using the common term to refer to stuff from the United States of America since it is the dominant nation on the North American and South American continents with the word America in its name.)
IE is like an 800lbs weight belt locked around the waist of the web.
I don't mind smart people with limited relevant experience having opinions or even defending them vigorously. However three passages in particular struck me:

Mr. Deese was not the only one favoring the Fiat deal, but his lengthy memorandum on how liquidation would increase Medicaid costs, unemployment insurance and municipal bankruptcies ended the debate.

Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues.

How is he drawing his conclusions? Does he really have a deep enough understanding of the underlying model when he 'runs the numbers'?

From there, he can make it quickly to the press office to help devise explanations for why taxpayers are spending more than $50 billion on what polls show is a very unpopular bailout of the auto industry.

I'm sure the NYT is not giving us the whole story, but there's a piece of me that worries that what makes this guy successful is not intelligence (though he certainly may be smart) but charisma. Just because you can sling a good presentation / memorandum and speak eloquently about it does not mean you should be setting critical government policy about tremendously complex problems.
From the guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I think they may have covered this on TV. Just a little bit, you know.

I've got nothing against the nytimes article that takes a very specific angle on this story and tells us about the kind of people they have in charge of all this, but straight-up "GM is bankrupt" stories don't really fit the HN mould imho.
Models that predicted a monotonic rise in temperature due to mankind's influence can not be used to extract mankind's putative signal when it turns out that they were wrong.

It's important not to let global warming hysteria color your view of the science. There's a radical difference between "mankind is the dominant force of global climate change and mankind is causing catastrophic global warming that we must avoid at all costs" and "mankind is adding a small delta below the noise level of natural climate", and the range of things in between. If it does turn out that the sun is getting dimmer and that turns out to have a major effect on climate (and I have seen climate scientists flat-out deny this is true), then it bounds the effect man can be having and moves us closer to the second statement.

Every year that is colder instead of warmer bounds the warming effect we can be having. Frankly it's already pretty small.
"Years of experience is a poor indicator of success."

That's a bold claim that defies common sense. Do you have anything to back it up?
The thing that comes to mind here is the notion of a "controlled vocabulary" from library science. When you're building a hierarchical model of concepts (Library of Congress, or Dewey Decimal Classification) it helps to have a relatively small and consistent set of identifiers so that you can consistently refer to the same thing.

I think of good English usage as being similar. When what you mean is X, use the word for X. So these sorts of lists of usage can be thought of as a mapping from concepts to words.

English is dynamic, true, but you have to remember that when you talk about "English is what English speakers speak" I think you have to also consider, to avoid a grave disservice to history, that "English speakers" mean not only those walking around today, but all the vast collection of written words through the ages.
It will be interesting to see whether history proves him right or wrong in his admonition to not bother responding.

The invisible separation between the famous and the not so famous is getting thinner. The cost of not engaging with the commoners may be high. Mark Cuban himself does somewhat engage, perhaps not as much as it might appear he does. However, it's a crowded field, and only getting more crowded, and the ones who do engage may end up with more influence.

It's all abstract speculation though, and I think only time will tell.
You may find http://aviary.com or http://www.pixlr.com/editor/ a good fit.
Gotta like their sneaky "Sites using Blueprint" section that makes it look like a dozen high-profile sites are using it, when in fact it's only two little ones.
possible, but that would be one hell of an epic court case. probably wouldn't even be worthwhile to try and jump into that. both sides would probably lose a lot, on multiple levels.
Hey Geuis, I work at Gnip. We have a bunch our larger customers highlighted on our web site who like the breadth of data we offer. (see the solution spotlight at http://www.gnip.com/solutions/spotlight).

We also have some smaller mashups powered by Gnip, such as tweetstats, storytellr, etc.

I'm happy to brainstorm with you if you have some ideas on how you might want to use Gnip! We don't fit every use case, but we sure do solve a lot of pain points for a lot of folks!

Send me a note, ingrid @ gnip.com
If not, someone should make one

Why? Would you pay for it?
I think the most general answer is density, but there are actually several indecent properties’ that change the rate of the propagation of both heat and electricity.

Copper becomes a better electrical conductor as it cools. However, hydrogen is a far better conductor as plasma than as a cooler gas. Yet heating things tends to increase their ability to conduct heat.
Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) giving talk in SoMa this Wednesday, June 3rd
There will be a meeting of the Bay Area Clojure User Group in San Francisco this Wednesday, featuring a town-hall discussion with Rich Hickey. It begins at 5:30pm. It will be located at

475 Brannan St (between 3rd and 4th)
Suite 430 (4th floor, offices of 3VR)

I know there are a fair number of you who work only a short distance away from here, and if you even have a passing interest in Clojure I think this will be worth checking out.
This is swimming upstream given the progress of the thread, but I loved this.

It's an opinionated style guide. If you disagree, that's of course fine - and part of the reason I liked it, I suspect, was that it fits well with my own idiolect - but there's a distinction to be drawn between language (non-prescriptive) and style (which you can be as prescriptive about as you like).

One of the best aspects of the Economist is its style; both of its prose and its design. Its politics I can take or leave, but at least it's honest about where it stands.
More mess; less B.S. (or: Nine simple suggestions for using social media)
Splashup lists "Pixel-level control" as a feature on the front page.
Many of these are perfectly good points, and others are stylistically pleasing (like the "don't get a verb, verb it" one), but some are just strange, particularly the hostility to metaphors and other figures of speech ("epicenter" and "bellwether").
There's been a lot of "off-topic" stuff lately. I feel your pain.

On the other hand, there's this other guideline:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."
The biggest thing for me, is that it did not feel like Microsoft made it, plus it felt faster. Google 3.7s, Bing 1.57s, and actually was. Although this could change depending on how well Bing is able to scale.
It is Great Television.
Here are his six rules from the end of the article:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
If they say something's actionable, ask if you can sue them. ;)
Have you heard of heroku.com
Yes, I was thinking PR. Odd fact: Yahoo appears to have a license for PageRank (Yahoo bought overture/goto, whose patent Google infringed with AdWords auction). GOOG-MS might cross-license too.
Twitter and Facebook are covered all the time on TV. Should stories about them be banned too? I just think that the TV litmus test is too simplistic.
Not sure how capistrano can be called painful, all you have to type is 'cap deploy', then you have migrations, rollbacks etc all part of it.
> It tries to guess on what you want

Unfortunately, Google is far worse in that respect. I've had occassions where my search query was automatically "corrected" to search for the exact opposite of what I want. Not too worrisome, if it weren't for the annoying fact that the only way to notice that was by finding (!) a note in normal font at the bottom of the page.

That happened a bit too often. I'm now a Yahoo Search user.
The knee-jerk reaction, for many in the west, is to condemn this censorship as an invasion of privacy, or an unnecessary restriction on free speech, or an example of the old phase "the tighter you grip, the more will slip through your fingers".

The single biggest lesson I learned from a comparative cultures & ethics class at uni is that it is exceptionally, sometimes prohibitively difficult to analyze the ethical implications of policy in a foreign country. So many of the base assumptions that we take for granted in the US - freedom of speech, press, and assembly, for example - are not only less protected in China, but for many chinese citizens, these freedoms take a backseat to more pressing concerns like national pride and patriotism.

If anything, "China's censorship is bad" is a phrase that, coming from a westerner, really doesn't carry much meaning at all.
To be fair, the guide doesn't outright state "use the clearest word", but the implication's clear; the entries for pressurise and for critique, for example.

Orwell's essay is fabulous, as you say!
So what? The algorithm obviously heavily weights search terms in a URL. I doubt this is some sort of conspiracy.
> Try being an African American in the US

Yeah, you might end up as president.
Neither works well. Aviary won't let you zoom in closer than pixels 4 screen pixels wide. Pixlr doesn't seem to work at all.
Bush not bad? Bush and Clinton brothers? WTF is going on?
I don't feel very productive. Most of what I wrote is about doing things. Right now I'm at a company. Different skillset.
CBS Eyes Live Video Edge with Ustream
It's also a big topic likely to get some interesting commentary from HN readers. It, combined with GM's replacement in the DOW by Cisco, represents a shift in the US economy from manufacturing towards technology.
Congrats Raffi - glad to see the progress since we talked on the train ride from TS4AD Boston.
huh? what? the flaws in XYZ piece of code.

(I think your misunderstanding: I was replying to the generalisation with a generalisation)
Yeah, I know. I'm still trying to figure out a clever way to basically state that I've flagged the story and encourage others to do so as well.

I think until pg makes the flagging process more visible so that stories like this get killed, I'll have to go and make silly posts like this (karma be damned).
I like the preview of the content when you hover over the result. It's interesting that Wikipedia pages can be viewed as pages on Bing.com. I think that's a feature that came from Powerset.

It's a reasonable competitor to Google, but I was hoping for a feature or two that would really impress me. Everything I see so far is an incremental improvement at best.
I think the press likes the Obama administration the same way they liked the Bush administration at the start. I still don't see how they go from the facts:

"While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit,"

To this headline:

"The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M."
The Future of JavaScript Engines: Replace Them With JavaScript Compilers
Agreed.

"5,000 people flagged this" would be a visible public notice that most people don't want it there.
-Not an answer-

Why do you want it to be web-based? Any particular reason? I think there are certain things for which a browser is not a good application hosting platform. As an experienced web developer, I can imagine the amount of pain it will take to create a pixel based image editor.

Additionally, there are TONS of image editors available (free, commercial) for Win, Mac, Linux. I am sure you can find a program which you like.
Okay so is 'SQL' an acronym? :)

Also is "TLA" an acronym, or do its initials just lie?
TRV$DJAM Charges Nothing But A Tweet For New Mixtape
"Here’s a cool way for music artists to reward their biggest fans and get some Viral Marketing® in return: drummer Travis Barker and turntablist DJ-AM (aka Adam Goldstein) are offering their just-released second mixtape, “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 - Coachella ‘09″, up for free download in exchange for a mere Twitter message."
http://iconfu.com/
Grading on what though?

Number of lines of code? Size of methods? Number of commits? How much you like them?

An about page with the grading methodology should probably be the next thing you publish. Also, in my mind the historical breakdown is irrelevant. I couldn't care less if the project sucked two weeks ago if they re-factored and are now "a" quality. Of course, that's if I knew what "A" quality meant. :-)

Other than that, not a bad effort for a dash project. It's a neat idea and something that could prove very useful.
‎What Plagiarism Looks Like
That's hardly the only reason to make things.

Though in fact I would, if it was cheap and (more importantly) easy enough.
Agreed, a web based one makes very little sense.

For a desktop solution, I'd recommend Pixen. http://opensword.org/Pixen/
I agree with what you're saying, it's tough, and more tough than is necessary. It's hard to see how it can be "fixed" but I do think that the more social it gets and the more we begin to recognize each other even in the more relatively anonymous forums like HN the more civil and easygoing it gets.

Plus, doesn't it seem that online culture is growing up? Even if very slowly?

But we'll never quite shake the fact that all of us come from different perspectives. We don't often talk about what I think is one of the most different of them all...AGE :-) Hacker forums will always have a percentage of pimply-faced 14 year olds, idealistic 21 year olds, cynical 36 year olds (me) and smug 45 year olds, and chilled out 55 year olds :-D

(Please don't aim all those big guns at me, I'm way over-generalizing and having fun at the same time, just to make a point: Age is a factor :-)
Bing sees things differently
icons are really simple. for most people, making an icon will take less time than the download & installation of any software available.
Argumenting your "That's wrong" "Nonsense" and such interjections would help me understand the usefulness of your post
US cruise passengers catch a break with new passport rules
Why use software that requires installation if there's software that doesn't?
Technically, no. (I've never understood how anyone got sequel from S-Q-L.)

And TLA is more correctly Three Letter Abbreviation. :-)

But like I said, I know there is no hard and fast rule. Acronym has had its meaning changed through popular use, and there isn't much to harp about there. It's as futile as pointing out that "begging the question" is used incorrectly 99% of the time.

For a style guide though, there's nothing wrong with insisting on a particular definition.