skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ability to recognize talented programmers and programs is pretty rare. This is why software projects with founders that can write usually succeed, because the responsibility of selling good code usually falls on the programmer (think Linux, Arc, Rails, etc).

Having the ability to see good code allows an investor to find the hidden gems-- excellent programs that no one knows about because they aren't promoted. I'd be willing to bet that there is a goldmine of ideas implemented in already existing code, just waiting to be discovered.
Some more famous Caltech pranks at: http://www.globalprovince.com/caltech.htm
The first couple of paragraphs where he said that it would be impossible to recreate SO in a weekend because of how long the current code was.

This is making the assumption that the new code would be the same length.
Self-Service Nation: Why Targeting Small Business Is Good Business « Laserlike
What do you think about Londiste (https://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/DbProjects/SkyTools)?
Real quick usability tip: make the bunnies clickable. I shouldn't have to click "I'm a Mike."
I've found that quite often, if all else has failed, posting up something that's incredibly stupid and obviously wrong is a good way to get answers. Is this a form of trolling? Yes. Does it work? Absolutely. People in general cannot resist the urge to correct someone.
I don't think it's that part of Stevens' speech that bugged people.

He also said: "an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially." And a lot of other gibberish about network neutrality.
This looks great and I'm looking forward to reading it properly. But it gave me a jolt to read the following:

Weil wrote this fourteen-page letter to Simone Weil, his sister [...] Keep in mind that the letter was not written for a mathematician, even though Simone could not understand most of it.

Could not understand it? Why'd he write it to her then? (Edit: he commented on this; see below.)

Simone Weil was brilliant. She had remarkable mathematical gifts, though she decided early on that she wasn't good at math by comparing herself to her brother. (André was not only a mathematical genius, he was 3 years older. Talk about an unfortunate data point.) She ended up, in her brief life, doing remarkable philosophical, political, and spiritual work. Her intellect was as deep and as original as they come. At the time this letter was written, she would have been at the height of her powers (working for the French resistance in London, as I recall, writing a book about how to rebuild France after the war - a book which de Gaulle supposedly threw in the garbage without reading).

Simone and André Weil used to act scenes from Greek tragedy in Greek when she was 4 and he was 7. As George Grant once said, that family had intellectual culture in a way we in modern North America can't even imagine.

To make patronizing comments about what Simone Weil couldn't understand is pretty ignorant. Based on what we know about her, though, she wouldn't have minded.

(Sorry this comment has nothing to do with the actual content of the post.)
Celebrity death rumors spread online
Gmail Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more
Have you heard if this thing called the robots.txt file? To get all those pesky, content-stealing search engines off your lawn, all you need to do is put the following two lines in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This has the added benefit of reducing load on your servers greatly, which means you can get cheaper hosting. It's really a win-win.

For the rest of your comment, I can't really say anything without being pointlessly snide.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg opens up
Will that equipment enable us to know exactly where a photon from the subject has hit the detector?
Reminds me of http://www.streamfile.com/

Discussed on HN here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=252019
"Problem Solvers" vs "Theory Developers": The Two Cultures of Mathematics. [pdf]
I just counted 14 people that I know who did a master's degree. Almost all of them in the Engineering, math or Comp Sci fields.

None of those people paid to do it. I wasn't aware that anyone actually paid to do a Masters. I always assumed that grants, scholarships, fellowships and research dollars paid for a masters.

Do people, outside of an MBA*, actually pay for their Masters degree?
I completely agree there's nothing simple about that, but ever since we switched from Slony-I to Londiste at Justin.tv I couldn't be happier. It's been completely bulletproof, recovers from errors easily, and makes schema upgrades a breeze.
>I can't really say anything without being pointlessly snide.

Congratulations, you just summarized the Web 2.0 experience with a sentence fragment.
Until people stop voting up techcrunch crap it won't stop.
Every day, I bike from downtown SF (work) to the top of Russian Hill (home) on a fixed gear bike (~1 mile, ~500ft elevation gain).

About once every month or two, I bike 50-150 miles in a day, and don't find it problematic.
Im too young to know firsthand, but I recall during the .com boom here in the states one of the problems was that anyone who knew how to spell html could get a programming job. It was a hot field and people seeking the "big money" were getting programming jobs they didn't deserve. On the university side I knew several people who switched majors to business when they learned that coding involved typing (no joke). Perhaps the same is going on in India right now? From all accounts, programming is the hot job in India.

I bet if someone put together a good summary of the "brilliant" people in a field, and had them talk about the level of talent when that field is the hot job, it would look the same as these coder stories.
Can Games Become 'Virtual Murder?'
I know Tim. In additional to being a phenomenally good mathematician, his clarity and elegance of expression spills over into his writing and his lectures. Some people take a dislike to his style, but I can't see why.

He's also a really, really nice guy, and it's been a privilege on occasion to work with him. My contributions were miniscule, but he was fantastic to work with. I hope to do so again.
China plans large-scale wind power centres, totalling 120 GW
This notion of "analogy" is formalized in category theory. At times this is done to great effect --- the generalizing power of category theory can help a mathematician see the forest for the trees. This has been done to great effect, e.g., in programming language theory. Then again, at times category theory is shallow, nothing more than abstract nonsense. (N.B. this is a technical term.)

The strict formalist in me likes category theory because it has so many names for things, many of which are in Greek. The intuitionist in me thinks the field is pointless but likes drawings with arrows in them. All in all, it's a win-win. :)
I don't see the part where they "stole" it. They just didn't mention tweetknot by name. I'm not a TC fan at all, but I think you need to back up your accusations a little better.
Just read the linked article. Yes it might be number 1. But having looked at tweetknots, I'm surprised that twitter haven't thrown the book at them considering that their site is pretty much IDENTICAL to twitter. That really is quite shocking. There's using their logo or similar colours (to show that the site is something to do with twitter) and there's stealing the whole layout (which is what tweetknot seems to have done).

I think tweetknot got off lightly.
is selling a startup for "low six figures" not impressive?
I concede. Got confused with the original posts wording, thanks for clearing it up!
A Wilderness of Mirrors
+1 anyway for an insightful introduction to someone I look forward to reading - she sounds like The Magus
Ask HN: Why can't HN tell me what comments have been added since I last visited?
I read HN religiously. I spend a large part of my day learning from the content and reading through comments. However, after I've left a particular page, there's no good way to come back to it and read only new comments. This is incredibly frustrating. Has anyone devised a way?
Am I the only person that thinks their silly name didn't help?

OK, lots of sites have silly names, but whereas Hulu had a big ad campaign to make sure you knew it was pronounced 'hooloo' rather than 'huhluh', Joost is just confusing.

I assume the correct pronunciation is like 'juiced', which makes me wonder why they didn't buy it (juiced.com is just parked with generic ads). Maybe it's because I'm European, but whenever I see the name, I can't help reading it as 'Yoost' (this is how it would sound in Dutch, and the company is Dutch). If I were Latino, I might read it as 'Hoost'.

It just doesn't feel comfortable...talking about it with a friend over the phone last year went like this:'-You spell it j o o s t. - Say what? -like boost with a j. -oh...that's stupid'. I realize this seems like a trivial complaint, but I think there's a fine line between a clever name that uses the momentary 'huh?' reaction to become memorable (eg google), and one that just creates confusion.

Great article overall, and a cautionary tale of what can go wrong with the 'just do it' approach.
I liked Merlin Mann's suggestion of "toot".

Furthermore, my friends and I have started referring to direct messages as "queefs".
Well, relatively speaking a middle class living is privileged, sure. I wouldn't describe $60k/yr in a country like this as "fabulously wealthy", though, and doubt even an inhabitant of the Sao Paulo Favelas (whom I had in mind writing the above) would consider it as such. However, we have at least the opportunity to reach for the stars - or to continue in relative middle class comfort. They don't have this and yes, it is unfair.

But what can we do? Is not the solution to raise the tide for all, rather than scuttle our own ships? There is no reason our planet, properly ordered, cannot provide all its inhabitants a comfortable, dignified, even prosperous stay.

Would that I live to see it happen. Everything good comes from the middle classes. Multiply them and you multiply everything - technology, culture, progress. Expanding the middle class should be the goal of any technocrat with an eye to the future. Helping the poor isn't just altruism, it's self-interest too because while they suffer we cannot conspicuously splash money around on more useful things.
Once again, the tech blog assumes everyone outside its own industry is stupid. My guess is every one of those sites a/b tested those ads to see if they lead to significant drops in user retention, and found that the extra eCPM grossly outweighed that.

Of course, I'm assuming they're not stupid and know about basic split testing. But the people running New York Times are probably not as smart as Robin Wauters, who is making $10 an hour blogging in his underwear.
Amit, Great and to the point writeup. Lets see what techcrunch have to say on this.
Potion: A Short Pamphlet
I know it's unlikely that anyone here will miss this, but note http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682896 - the website Twitter was concerned about was TweetKnot, which looks pretty much exactly like a Twitter knock-off, down to the graphics.
Look at it from different, different perspective: economics. News supply, even what you call "quality" news supply, has skyrocketed during the past few years. Recall that supply is not just the abstract amount produced, either, which may not have changed much, but the supply available to the customer. That's where the skyrocketing has occurred.

This has had the perfectly predictable effect on price (dropped it like a rock), with further perfectly predictable effects (eventually the supply is going to consolidate and contract some) coming in as second-order effects. The only question is timeframe.

"I love the internet as it is, but I honestly believe it's not going to last."

So, for that reason, it pretty much can't. Which isn't to say there won't be some "free-to-the-consumer" news, but there can't be so much of it.

That said, your distinction between "bloggers" and "quality" is already out of date. Ultimately, that's a form of ad hominem. Just as it logically doesn't matter where an argument came from, it doesn't matter whether a good bit of reporting comes from a "blogger" or a "quality" news outlet. Maybe one blog post in 10,000 is a "quality" journalism story, but that's still a lot of real journalism getting done.

(Just to be clear, since the presumption is usually that a post is an argument or disagreement, I'm not disagreeing or arguing, I'm further explaining. Except with the idea that you can completely, 100% write off "bloggers" as a news source as if they are some sort of distinct species or something.)
How is not mentioning both the primary source AND the site in question, not stealing?
No no no, just remember where to look. HN's ideas of business processes and best practices are quite different from what you see in body shops like that.
And only about .1% of the community could actually do it.
Linux is better for me than Windows, hands down.

My girlfriend and parents prefer it too. If your entire interaction with the computer is through Firefox, a music player, and Office like it is for them, OpenOffice is actually closer to what they know than the "new" Office 2007. Subtract out viruses, add in never needing drivers (how do I make my printer work? just plug it in), and they are much happier under Linux than Windows.

I've installed it for a lot of people and there are basically 3 periods. 1) Installing (which turns a lot of people off if they can't get it right there). 2) Getting used to it (which basically is people learning it and finding out its not that alien) and 3) Preferring it.

I have yet to find someone who didn't get to stage 3 in about 6 months. You don't get it at first but eventually you go back to windows and start looking for the 'Always on Top' checkbox or you have a popup during a presentation and say, why the hell am I paying for this?
My CS experience was that it was something that everyone studied, but only in a fairly abstract context, and I don't remember coming away with the notion that you'd ever actually use it for except parsing.
When I've been on the receiving-end of a FrienDA, it's really served more as a signal that the sender wishes me to keep the following to myself. Someone sends the URL and it's a sort of lighthearted and quick way of conveying this information. It didn't even occur to me to take offense at it.

I don't think it's any more effective than just asking the other party to keep something quiet, other than possibly being slightly more memorable, assuming you don't get FrienDAs all the time. To me, it's mostly just a joke.

(And thus, that's why I didn't upvote this story -- who finds the FrienDA and says "finally, I can talk to people about things!"?)
Someone on Slashdot commented and said that they're company has 2 phases for developing software. The initial prototype phase where the hackers get to use whatever tools they need to write the software, just to get something out there. The point is to figure out the specs based on that and then once they do that, once they have the scope of the software determined, then they can just write a spec and feature list out and hand it over to the engineers who turn the prototype into an actual product (with documentation, full-scale test suites, etc.)
TC intentionally didn't reveal their source because it would have undermined the outlandish assertion they wanted to make. As always, TC tried their best to make a story out of nothing.. Link bait.
Thanks, that clears it up a bit.

I'm not sure I agree though, for two reasons.

First, the projects you mentioned are great projects, but they're not something an angel investor would be interested in.

Second, most startups - or at least web startups - do not fail for lack of technical expertise. The product might be an unusable mess, or it might solve entirely the wrong problem, or it might be marketed in completely the wrong way, or there might simply not be enough demand for it. I'm sure there are cases where a startup fails for technical reasons, but I'm willing to bet real money that in the vast majority of cases investors and founders don't say "man, if only the programmers were a tiny bit better, we could've made it". (even when they do say it, chances are that wasn't the real problem)
A short, genericized name for the category is a good idea.

The existing descriptions -- 'status updates', 'activity streams', 'microblogging' -- are awkward for casual/verbed usage.

Possible veins of meaning to mine include:

* similarity to instant-messaging, but more public -- Public Instant Messaging, or PIMming. "I pimmed it." "Check out my pims on Facebook, Twitter, or Laconi.ca."

* similarity to loud-talking -- "shouting". (Could be a prefix letter to IM, as above, to "SIMming" or "SHIMing", or given an e-prefix like e-mail, "e-shouting".)

* conversely, similarity to talking to oneself -- "mumbling", mumble-IM ("mimming", "mimbling"), e-mumbling. (It's interesting that the activity is like both shouting and mumbling in different ways.)

* similarity to 'texting' (as I think your 'mext' example alludes to) -- public-texting ("pexting"), loud-texting ("lexting"), txt-blogging ("togging" or "tlogging"), blog-texting ("blexxing").
this is an awesome article... nice job, Zed. I want to try it.
How Threadless Built Its Online Business
But remember not to fall into the trap of thinking of yourself as an engineer. Two different fields entirely and what may work in one field, may not work in the other field.

Engineers deal with physical products and fully-specified tech specs and all sorts of extra business stuff that is just a hindrance to a software developer (or are impossible to implement, like a full tech spec, all software has a creative component that's hard to control).
I love the idea, especially since the magazine reading experience is somewhat diminished on the web. Unfortunately, the only way they achieve this is by using a pdf, which isn't terrible, I would just prefer to navigate some sort of html in my browser.

Are there any projects out there that attempt to make reading on the web more "print like"? Typogridphy (http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/) is a good example of making a website less like website and more like a well styled magazine, but I have only seen one site use it (http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/). Obviously this is more likely due to my ignorance of other such sites, but the point still stands that there isn't much development in this area.
I've worked with a lot of languages. Python, C++, Scheme (and CLISP), Java, C#, Perl, Ruby, etc. Every language I've used besides Ruby, I feel that I have to fight the language to actually implement my idea. The fact that programmers want flexibility should be obvious by the contortions present in C++ with boost, particularly the lambda libraries. People are so desperate for flexibility that they use template metaprogramming. This general impulse points to programmers wanting better abstraction capabilities. C# and Python have higher order functions and many other virtues, too. Ultimately, for me I could do anything I wanted to in Ruby without fighting the language. I'm sure there are people that have the same personal connection with Python. When I want the very flexible abstraction--I use Ruby. There are things that out of practicality I use Python and other languages for. Awhile ago I was experimenting with fractal terrain generation. The implementation is procedural, and all using Ruby does is greatly limit the performance of the program--so I implemented it in C++. I use Python for Bioinformatics research because of the excellence of Numpy.
That's what I expected the article to say. "X blows because it's impossible to do Y" tends to get the fastest, most accurate answer.
Show me where I can see this story on Tweetknot's site, and then I'll agree with you that it's stealing.

Otherwise, it's just a lack of attribution which is pretty normal when writing stories.
The letter itself says: "So, I decided
to write them down, even if for the most part they
are incomprehensible to you" and "you may be able to understand the beginning; you
will understand nothing of what follows that."

That shows that Andre thought Simone wouldn't understand it.
Everything you mentioned but Vista is available in a free version precisely for things like the aforementioned weekend projects. And I don't think that it's any more fair (for 99% of users) to include buying an OS in "prerequisites for fun weekend project" than to include buying a computer in the first place.
IPhone OS 3.1 Features: Non-Destructive Video Editing, Voice Control Over Bluet
I don't see the point in this. Any publisher or news site who wants people to sign up or pay (with a password) can do so already, without being affected by anyone linking to it. Those who choose to make it public, will want more people to see it I guess.

If copying content from a site is what he means, yes, it should be banned and that makes sense, but how can linking to a public URL be an issue? I just don't see how.
I would think that anyone who gets a degree from a reputable CS program would have to take a class in compiler design, so I wouldn't call such classes "obscure". Of course

(a) just because you covered it in a class doesn't mean you remember it five years later

(b) lots of people rise through the ranks of IT without formal CS training

(c) some CS programs are not so reputable
"Even functions are functions! I invented this concept. Just like Steve Jobs will one day."
I've managed to set up git-svn with svn branches. Well, we use svn tags, but you can probably just s/tags/branches/

[svn-remote "svn"]
url = ...
fetch = trunk/java:refs/remotes/svn/trunk
tags = tags/*:refs/remotes/svn/*
Quite so, but those solutions are very expensive either in terms of up-front costs or labor to apply. This has a 'just works automagically' aspect that's going to make it very popular, enough that it might well show in camera firmware within a few years if it can be sufficiently optimized.

Although this will be greatest interest to indie film and TV makers right now, selling to that market is a loss leader for most companies - the big bucks come from hobbyist consumers that want to shoot pictures or video but are happy to get an assist from the camera - hence the obsession with good autofocus on most camcorders, whereas pros are willing to pay a lot more for manual control of the focus plane. This is instant Win for whoever implements it first - it'll make consumers feel like pros, and it will save pros LOTS of money.
> The SO guys seem to really love to hate on FOSS.

Care to source this? You can start on MS tools for basically free with BizSpark (which SO is a member of). Even if you only wanted to start a weekend project on MS stuff, you could get started with the free express versions (Windows excluded, but if you're going this route, you probably have that taken care of already). They also use FOSS like jQuery and the markdown editor they started with when appropriate.

If you want to talk about wasting money at the start of a project, how about considering the time required to learn a whole new stack?
Isn't it Rails based? Can't you just throw down a new database.yml?
Not ideal, but I use
http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments

If you really do read a lot it's easy enough to pick out the comments in the threads that interest you.
SMC also seems more robust. If you look in the examples section of the manual, they describe an "FSM" that can identify palindromes on the alphabet { '0', '1', 'c' }, where 'c' indicates the center. This is not a regular language -- SMC has a stack.

<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/SwineBeforePe...; is a fun talk that describes an implementation of state machines in Scheme macros. With a good compiler, those tail calls will be translated to local branches!