skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Erik and I were colleges in the early nineties. Erik was a very nice person when you met him in person, but completely different in emails.

Eight years ago, I wrote a small web application in perl for a Norwegian law firm in Oslo. Erik had done some consulting for them, and was very friendly when we discussed the project in meetings. But later he was exceptionally harsh in his emails, saying among other things, that I had created some of the biggest security holes he had ever seen.

He rewrote the web application himself in common lisp in a few hours. Creating a framework for web apps on the way. I never invoiced the customer just to avoid any further discussions with Erik.

Erik admitted however, that some of my code was a bit interesting. It was the first time he saw code with unit tests.

His ideas for using lisp instead of xml was brilliant, and it's very said he's gone.
Car insurance is simpler than health insurance. There are fewer types of covered conditions, and it's easier to make direct comparisons. Health conditions are more numerous and vary more depending on the individual in question. It's also easier for car insurance companies to make predictions about the expected costs for a customer. People buying health insurance individually face increased costs because of an assumption that those seeking coverage are more likely to need it. In general, this is an area in which the conditions required for an efficient free market do not exist. And, this is one reason why, as Friedman notes, those countries with universal single payer systems spend less than the United States, which is closer to a market system (however imperfectly).

For more information, see, for example: http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2009/03/adminis...
Its not cynical.
You don't invest in companies, you invest in their leaders.
Probably because a lot of smart people find doing other things less managerial more rewarding.

Every time I have to fill a spreadsheet that could be generated by a computer program, I die a little.

Or, as pg could put it, sometimes a promotion into management resembles being scheduled for daily waterboarding sessions. Being dragged into a cargo cult is no fun.
Was this sponsored by Skittles or did they just use them because of the bright colors?

Or do Skittles have well known anti-zombie properties?
Ask HN: Review My Site - Studylance.com
Hello all,

I submitted my site a few days ago for feedback but didn't get too much response, so I thought I'd try one more time...

If anyone has any feedback its much appreciated, both from a design/usability standpoint and a coding standpoint too.

Is it clear what you have to do as a student/tutor?

Many thanks!

The site url is:

www.studylance.com
If I am a modern human moving to africa, would I start eating monkeys?

Why modern humans moving to europe ate neanderthals? Why not cro-magnons, australopithecus, aztecs, mayans, vikings?

Did europeans eat american aborigins when they conquered america?

No, they just killed them.

Just because you saw a jawbone with some marks it doesn't mean one million neanderthals had that fate.

I don't deny cannibalism has existed since the dawn of humanity, but please.
I always sort of wondered if maybe some myths in northern europe about trolls may have originated with the Neanderthals.
Eye of Judgement does that for the PS3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tEqM4BEvLY
is that a bookworm holding a cigar?
Ubuntu licensing dispute resolved in satanists' favor.
Most companies don't fail because of their database. Just build the damn thing and focus on the really big risk, which is that nobody will use it.
True, but it doesn't have to. The root of the problem is the vast number of cars on the road. Much of the emissions from a car come from the manufacture of the car, not just the use of it.

When you think of the wisdom behind millions of cars sitting in rush hour gridlock (on government designed roads), emitting smoke and chemicals into the environment and wasting hours of drivers' valuable time, think of the grand purpose -- so that people can live in the suburbs at an artificially low price.
Well spotted, you passed the studylance test.
And yet it is a certainty that eventually, incrementally, most of the original code will be replaced over time if the product is successful. So perfection shouldn't be where he focuses. He should work with those skills he's got to make maximum progress quickly.

Customers don't see schemas.
Clickable: http://www.studylance.com
This is a good point, but I think taking a few days to look into it would be more rewarding than wasteful.
Steve Jobs transplant uncommon for rare tumor
This is totally fascinating. Would you care to share more about your experience and how you cured yourself?
Having mutating rules is a pretty organic and dynamic game design idea. One other game that does this really well is called Fluxx: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx
Are you Felix.f on the site?
In a startup, particularly as a founder, what you do matters to you personally in a very real way. You are deeply connected with the problem you're solving, the people you're helping and the fruits of your labor. In a regular job at a large company, you are alienated from the problem you are solving and the people you are helping by a large organization in an operating environment that is often organized around other goals than solving people's problems.

Startups give meaning. If that isn't sexy, I don't know what is.

If it didn't do that, if it wasn't so sexy... nobody would do it. Because as the PG quote goes, its "...like getting punched in the face repeatedly." But as the author points out... for some people its just a fantasy, there is no deep need to follow through on it. You either have the bug or you don't.
True, but what if the Startup is promising? what if it has a big profit? In this situation it's all about Time.
Why does this webpage keep reloading every few seconds?
my son likes to change the rules during games ... "if you do that move that means I won" ...
No that's someone else...
Is there a phone which does A? The iPhone does A. Are you kidding, the iPhone doesn't do B!

The grandparent specifically asked about a 1/4 second delay on all touches, the iPhone is (at a guess) faster than 1/16 seconds, certainly well below the magic 1/10 of a second.

Switching apps on the 3G can certainly be sluggish, but is a very different problem, solved in part by upping the processing speed in the 3GS by 300MHz.
.NET Parallelization.

Please edit titles to reflect actual content.

Grumble grumble tagging grumble
Most retirees don't have much in the way of savings anyway, and their adult children tend to earn their own way through life. It's not necessary to "pass on your lands" as is done less industrialized countries. (Warren Buffet intends to give almost none of his wealth to his children).

The question could also be rephrased as would you move from your 2000 dollar mortgage home to a 1000 dollar rent apartment if it meant you live 5 or 10 more healthy years, much of consumer spending is on housing.
This article is from November 2006. Ross's startup, Parakey, was acquired by Facebook in 2007.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parakey
Daniel Kahnemam's nobel price lecture is extremely interesting and informative. Perfect entertainment for a sunday evening.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...
I was over at a friend's place and tried this game out - the gameplay seemed pretty poor.

To be honest, I think creating AR's for games that already have a very good track record for gameplay (eg, catan) is a better prospect than trying to reinvent the wheel and coming up with a square?
Of All Time
1. 3-7 months depending on nationality and type of work. http://www.udi.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=9245

2. http://www.udi.no/templates/Tema.aspx?id=7429
This is extremelly useful for math and physics students who generally can't make an income through the web unlike IT students.

I believe it can succeed, one thing to watch: Keep your site SPAM free, Ban the people asking for very hard and long questions and giving few money for it. Also ban users who bid on every question and they are unable to reply.

If your site continue with high-quality, it'll attract a lot of other people, high-quality also (smart)

Good Luck with it!

(Edit: you forgot the about page)
>Pete Sampras didn't possess more talent than Andre Agassi, but he won 14 grand slams to Agassi's eight because he worked harder and more steadily.

And how many hard-working tennis players failed to match Agassi's eight?

Also for all the talk attempting to downplay the importance of intelligence, the article did say:

>"Studies of chess masters and highly successful artists, scientists and musicians usually find their IQs to be above average, typically in the 115 to 130 range, where some 14 per cent of the population reside"

Coincidence alone couldn't explain such a concentration at the high end... and yet from the rest of the article, no concession whatsoever is made to this fact. It's very hard to put much faith in the conclusions the author came to.
There are ups and downs in any job and a lot of grinding no matter what profession it is. Even passions like music takes A LOT of effort - and one must be lucky, great and work very hard to make a breakthrough.

Like Peter Norvig wrote in "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years": one should not really strive to become an expert or successful at something in 10 days, but 10 years. I think the same can be said about startups, i.e. look on the long-term goal and not the short-term one.
Me too. I'll join you. Here's to our fathers and grandfathers. And to their sons.

I'm glad you brought up your grandfathers. Both of mine led very difficult lives and made great sacrifices so that their children and grandchildren could have a better chance than they did. Whenever I have doubts about my project (which isn't often), I remind myself that they came here so that I could do this. Kinda puts things in perspective.
That's the basic idea behind Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead" (made into the film "The Thirteenth Warrior") except he uses it to explain the Grendel myth rather than trolls.
Ask HN: Good communities like HN
Hi, I have about 2 months since I joined HN and I'm really excited with the athmosphere and the high-quality discussion and articles we have.

Though, I'm looking for other communities. As you are hackers you may know!

I want communities about general programming discussion, specific discussion... anything related to coding and computers.

An example can be stackoverflow.com (and that's the only community I use with HN)

Thanks!
It's not that difficult an idea, even if the trend of comment voting here indicates a disturbing ignorance of how statistics can be manipulated.

What would be mathematically sound would be to agree on a standard set of tests, perhaps including Benford's law, digit distribution, two digit combinations shown to be popular when humans pick numbers at random. And to do so _BEFORE THE DATA HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE_.

How would I trick people into believing a false conclusion? One way would be to find 30 or so measures of what could suggest suspicious patterns. Then I'd test the data with them, and perhaps there would be 2 which have a 5% chance of occurring purely by chance. Then I say "Aha! Look at this! The chance of these two things happening are .05 * 0.05 or practically impossible!"

Apparently I could fool some pretty smart people this way, since they obviously aren't immune to basic statistical fallacy.

As another poster said, none of this suggests that the data weren't manipulated, but just that the stats in the article, as given, are purely bullshit.
Incredibly witty and funny comments about programming.
He wasn't claiming though that it defiantly pointed to the election being rigged, just pointing out the statistic likelihood based on that method.
The unnecessarily personal tone of this comment distracts from the substantive points. These statements only detract:

Your understanding of the points you are arguing against is so terrible and flawed that you need to start over from scratch.

...betrays a profound misunderstanding...

I commend to you a lot of time with a textbook...

...it is objectively true that you don't understand [economic theory].

The grandparent-poster reports having a degree in economics; his points may be be wrong, but a denigratory and lecturing tone won't convince him or others.

(Edit: I initially flagged the 'idea... is such crap' line as problematic too, but then realized it was just a mirror of russell's own language. Still, it was shoddy name-calling by him initially; mirroring it back is understandable in response or to call attention to it, but doesn't lift the tone any.)
How to Write a Good Business Plan
And yet there's precious few celebrities who actually die from disease. Money (or maybe access) helps somewhat.
Maybe I'm being a bit slow today ... but I don't see the binary numbers encoded in the pattern.

I get gray codes (yay Karnaugh maps from EE101!), but I just don't see the binary numbers - someone mind explaining?
In Denmark we have a multi party system, and the government is a coalition of the parties that are represented in parlaiment. Often the government is a minority government and relies upon one or more of the other parties to get laws passed. Sometimes coalitions with similar interests appear, and as long as they have a majority they can pass laws.

This system has the advantage that minority views are not only heard but also have votes. And since politics is a game of agreements, coalitions and I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine even small parties have a chance of getting legislation passed if they are willing to compromise on something else. It equates to more consensus seeking legislation, and an often vocal minority that actually has political influence.
For instance, the same authors, in a previous paper analyzing nigerian election results, state the following "lab experiments indicate that individuals tend
to favor small numbers, even when subjects have incentives to properly randomize. Second, individuals underestimate the likelihood of digit repetition in sequences of random integers, so we should observe relatively fewer instances of repeated numbers in manipulated vote tallies."
there is no mention of either of these statistics in the Iran analysis.
I don't know if this is relevant or not, but Safari uses OSX's ported libraries as DLLs. If the memory size of those DLLs is being used, it would show up as less memory usage on an OSX machine due to those libraries being a shared part of the main OS.
sure thing - read the strips in horizontal rows of 10 bits from the top down, giving a white pixel a value of 0 and a black pixel a 1. So, on the gray code strip on the right, we see:

0000000000
0000000001
0000000011
0000000010
0000000110
0000000101

...etc. Does that make sense?
Why don't you like Chrome's tab design? I was a little off-put when I first saw it, but it makes sense for tabs to live at the top edge of the screen from a Fitt's Law perspective: when you move your mouse upwards to interact with the browser, it's to deal with tabs (so they deserve the larger target). When you want to hit the address bar, you hit ctrl+t to get a new tab in which it's already selected.
Your "about us" page is full of lorem ipsum. Doesn't inspire much confidence in the company...
Calvinball comes to mind as a perfect example of a nomic game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes#Calvinball
Kind of depressing... If we're replacing Holden Caulfield with Harry Potter I'm worried.
Since this virus mutates so often, shouldn't they sequence a few hundred versions of it?

And clearly I need to install a firewall to close some of those open ports.
I think the only example of the insightful outsider was the fellow who ~ 80 years ago who went around espousing the continental drift theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener ) though his ideas weren't necessarily a complete model, which may have been the crux of the issue
Definitely the case.
If you don't need a terabyte of data stored, just use an in-memory data structure, and have 1 server process in whatever language you're using, and manipulate whatever you would do in memory, and work from there. Maybe SQL is the right choice, maybe not, but you'll at least have a better idea of the problem space that you're interested in.
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...
Incorrect title: the original article has "satanists" in quotation marks.
Imagine if you have rheumatoid arthritis, or minor neurological impairment - the kind that comes with age. Eventually, self-administration is not an option, but delaying this inevitability is a great goal.
JQuery Ribbon Controls
In the same vein I wonder if the wars between Giants and Titans in greek mythology is related to the fate of the Neanderthals.
Nice site, I will definitely be giving it a try.

My only design complaint so far is the green on blue buttons at the bottom of a question ('Ask Student a Question', etc.).
Well yes, but so does coffee. But they're minor and I drink it all the time.

If I knew the drugs had no worse effects, that would be fine.
You raise an interesting point, but I'm not sure I buy this argument. What is the chance that your scenario is realistic? In other words, what is the chance that given a set of legitimate vote counts, and a set of 30 known legitimate authenticity tests, that 2 of those tests would report a value of 5%?

It could turn out that if the set of 30 tests are all "good tests", then the chance of your being able to find 2 tests that report low numbers like that approaches 0%, in which case you would simply be wrong.

I am not a statistician, and statistics is notoriously difficult for humans to deal with [1], so until I find an answer to the question above I'm going to maintain a neutral position in this argument. Unless you happen to have a doctorate in statistics, in which case I will take your word for it. ;-)

[1] TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool...
Only 8% of users know what a browser is. Do we have to rethink the browser game?
> 2. http://www.udi.no/templates/Tema.aspx?id=7429

This seems state requirement to obtain permit, not to keep it after it's obtained. Hence myq uestion.
I dunno... I enjoyed Catcher, but I see it as being less and less relevant these days. Call it social evolution.

I feel old now...
It's easier to compute the probability that less than 2 tests report a value of 5%. This is:

(30 choose 0)*(.95^30) + (30 choose 1)*(.95^29)*(.05^1)

= 0.553542075

So there's about a 50-50 chance (obviously I'm assuming that the tests are independent of each other.)

The relevant Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
Teachers make about 40k a year.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

I'm of the opinion that we should value our educators more.
That's what I was hoping it would be when I read it (and also thought the writer was shortsighted in dismissing it) but as far as I can tell it really does search emoticons. The only translation seems to be translating one type of happy emoticon to a bunch of other types.
Would anyone be so kind as to translate that into plain English?
Doesn't that make Fry kind of a hypocrite? http://www.gnu.org/fry/
It seems like the theme of this article is "be honest and self critical".

That sounds pretty reasonable, but I'd be interested in hearing anecdotes from HN/YC-ers in the absence of hard evidence. Anyone care to share?
That's not "HTML5-style"! HTML5 has nothing to do with this. HTML has always had optional closing tags when dealing with non-nesting elements. Purge the nonsense XML propaganda from your brain.

Your example doesn't work though, as heading elements can contain paragraphs -- it's identical to "<h1>This is a header <p>This is some content.</p></h1>"

A better example would be:
<h1>This is a header</h1>
<p>This is some content.
<p>This is more content.
<ul>
<li>Red
<li>Blue
</ul>
I have to say this captures my experience and thoughts on the matter almost perfectly. At Constrex, we launched the product around 8 weeks ago, and I'm now going through the hard, hard slog of raising awareness and educating the market as to what benefits we can bring them.

It's been damn hard going, and will continue to be for quite a while, but in some perverse way, I'm really enjoying myself. I'm definitely keeping this post book-marked, to send to people tempted to become entrepreneurs. It could just be a good litmus test: if you don't find it too discouraging, then maybe - just maybe - you might have what it takes to get a business off the ground.
For some reason it thinks I'm running a mobile browser even though I know I'm running Shiretoko nightly (a.k.a. Firefox 3.5) and doesn't let me view the page until I click on full site and then go to http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/06/21/canonical-stops-sat... again.

I despise UA sniffing.
Did teachers in the 1950's feel the same way about Caulfield as teachers feel now about Potter? I'm sure they did, and I'm just as sure that in 2050 Potter will be just as dated children will have just as much trouble relating.
But I take it that most statutory rape happens less for economic reasons than most authorities/politicians would like us to believe. Most people that abuse/rape children do so because it has happened to them, not because they find it to be a way to make quick money.
"less than 2"? Assuming you're doing the math correctly, it means that there's a 50-50 chance that "0 or 1" of the tests "report a value of 5%" (and does that mean less than or equal to 5%?). Which, again, doesn't say very much...

The question was: What is the chance of being able to find exactly 2 tests?
Best Way to Check Someone's References
I think design/usability are acceptable. At least i can understand it after playing with it for less than 1 minute.

The only thing that you need to be careful of is probably a market-risk. This type of site is platform model and usually run into chicken-and-egg problems, therefore, takes longer than you imagined to take-off.

Overall, the idea is great. It certainly has potentials. Keep it going! ;)
Cool, though I must say your option naming bugs me. a flag like "-popular" suggests adding/using "popular", not removing it. An irrelevant nitpick, but I was compelled ;)
I have a really really good db expert as a co-founder, but we still started out with a simple mysql when we got started. the very simple reason being that specs are never obvious and we wanted to keep things as fluid as possible. We were very iterative - mysql, federated mysql, and now we are moving to a bigtable like system.

Summarizing - Just do it with a DB implementation that is as simple as you can.
It seems like it takes a long time for someone to realize that they don't have the will to see their product to the next step. Or that they haven't built something that's worth millions of dollars.

This seems like a good approach to doing what you suggest:
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/04/the-red-gate-mill...
Np. I was thinking -popular as in "minus popular."
yeah I wasn't really thinking about HN relevance, more the "privacy" issue.

I think Steve is important enough to be relevant to HN.