skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Computer Science

What's particularly galling about computer science publishing, is that our papers are some of the hardest to reproduce. I read too many papers where the idea sounds cool but I have no idea how to reproduce it. What's senseless is, I shouldn't even need to work to reproduce their experiment. We have a perfect, unchanging laboratory (a computer) and the most advanced language for discussing our experiments (programming languages), and we shrink our argument to 15 slices of dead tree.
Me too. How can I get in touch with you?
"if the shiny feature you want to implement is not absolutely necessary for your solution and it will take more than a day or two to finish then move on"

small hooray for shiney, unnecessary features that do get done in a day or 2 though! keep 'em guessing. =)

thanks for writing this.
I think its unlikely that Apple would settle these. IANAL so I have no idea of the relevant case law but likely Apple would want this to go to court to get a ruling saying "Apple is not responsible for the content provided by the app developers". Then they're off the hook permanently.

The device can download images and copyrighted content, apple can not control downloaded content so there's a nice out here.
By my calculations, that means that the Icelandic developers of Eve Online will represent ~0.5% of Iceland's GDP this year, which is quite impressive.
I agree the political articles bring out some screwy ideas. Is your "solution" that you want a situation where you won't to experience what other peopl, even other hackers, think about these issues.

I mean, if this is a community, then we should respectfully debunk racist ideas rather than just shutting them. Otherwise, the same discussion happens in more screwy venue.

(Agreed, there should be limit to how much of this discussion happens here BUT the limit should not be zero).
The problem is that your articles get measured by the "quality" of the journals that they appear in.

The problem is that the whole system is fundamentelly broken and it is going to take a complete mindshift of everyone involved to change that.

The OpenAccess movement is something that may have a chance now that funders are also seeing the positive effects of it. But this is going to take years to change.
My #blogpostfriday post
Yes, a mismatch exists and can lead to compromises as you try to use the object paradigm to glue the two layers together. But the benefits are also undeniable, primarily that of productivity gained during development by not having to concern yourself with the job of mapping types between the two layers.
You just brought up a great idea. Google can do it, but on a limited basis. A startup that could convert pdfs, word documents, and latex files directly to HTML+CSS, with negligible loss of quality, would be MASSIVE.

Of course, this requires browsers to standardize, and step 0 is for IE6/IE7 to disappear off the face of the earth. And if IE8 can't keep up with the other browsers, then it should go too.

Seriously, what you propose would be super useful.
I am not quite sure

How to write proper haikus.

Is this one valid?
Did anyone else expect this to be for programming languages?
You're showing your age :)

Try ctrl-h on your keyboard.
I am wondering:

Did you just create an account to leave a stupid comment like that?
I didn't mean to say that it was less meaningful. My battlefield was meant to be a Vietnam battlefield, not some alternative or better analogy. I'm defending Neward's analogy up to a point. Any war analogy of course misses the humanitarian horror that is a war. That's why it's always a problematic analogy as well.
Computer Science is one of the places where dead tree publication is going the way of the dodo pretty soon I think.
Results can come very fast, and one of the top journals can take 18+ months to review and publish an article.

By which time it is almost already obsolete.
Is the fantasy genre chronically misunderstood?
> I agree the political articles bring out some screwy ideas. Is your "solution" that you want a situation where you won't to experience what other peopl, even other hackers, think about these issues.

Yes, that's my solution. There are way too many issues that even reasonable people will simply agree to disagree on. And these discussions often tend to attract plenty of people who aren't reasonable.
Very good paper, with an occasional humorous informal tone. Pointers to very seriously thorough bibliographies.

The paper doesn't say anything about the patents in the field, which used to be noted on the wikipedia entry for genetic programming.
One thing you really should at least do is retain the copyright of your own paper. Journals will allow you to retain copyright and almost all rights of your paper if you just ask for it.

Then you can always publish it on your homepage.
It's a much more impressive experience than WoW where you might never see another person

Some of us like that about WoW. I really like the dynamic (on some servers, and much more so now in the lowbie areas) where there are enough people for help if you need it, and enough to stock the auction house and for chat, but you can quest or hunt for half an hour or more without seeing another player. It makes the world feel bigger and more open.
I 'm flabbergasted!

I come here for Hacker News,

and find poetry.

---

these are however

very amusing to read.

Gentlemen, proceed.
Just call it an "anti-depressant".
Thanks for the info.
More metadata sounds nice.
I'll go check it out.
Can you recommend some good RoR books?
We are thinking of scaling Agile to bigger teams (yes, there are challenges) and looking at Ruby on Rails. What are some good RoR books out there? TIA.
Usually the ORM has some notion of "associations" between models so that the data relationships are easier to navigate from the application side.
If you're interested in this stuff 'bunnie' wrote a whole book on the topic: http://hackingthexbox.com/
sounds good. It seems reasonable that decoupling the visa from the employer may fix some of the wage arguments.
BeOS was an
Operating System, 'twas
never meant to Be.
By pg's equity equation, airing your pitch on national television would have to increase your valuation by marginally over 2% (2.04% or so) to make that deal worth it. I'd take it.
According to the Wikipedia definition of ORM, it's primarly about the mapping of types:

Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in relational databases and object-oriented programming languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping
Check out http://www.commandlinefu.com/
It's better than nothing. For some courses, you could easily use the previous edition textbook. Dunno about the papers, though.
what can I learn from this article?
That is, what I can read there: You have to create images and sounds and if you can't you have to buy them. And no matter what you do, in the end you still have to pay your rent (what will be more as $1,000).
In the same way a service that you dial to speak to an operator who dials the number you want would "do the job just fine".
Being ruthless with your attention can be a hard act to pull off without appearing rude.
I searched for "what is isk eve" and found exactly one answer

Heh. You have more faith in NLP than I do. Interestingly, the quotes around your query are critical. Omit them, and you get the same junk I did.

I once heard a guy from Google say that quotes around search queries are sort of the nuclear option of search, i.e. they see it as a failure if the user has to resort to quotes. But they certainly do the job in this case.
I'm curious about the participation rights -- is there any chance to avoid this altogether? Basically, this means that all that the company gets from the VC is a loan, in return for a part of the company. I'm still far from needing a VC, but at the moment I don't see myself allowing this clause.
Am I the only one wondering why is this being posted on HN?

There's nothing interesting about the article, except for the lesson that strip clubs exist to separate losers from their money. Is that news?
Why Big Data Geeks Should Stop Using XML
I really like their approach of trying to solve real-money trading by PLEX (Pilot License Extensions). Essentially a PLEX buys you 30 days of game time. People can buy a PLEX and trade it for in-game items. PLEX only has a value for people who want to play the game because you can't convert a PLEX back into real money. All the economic value is kept inside the EVE ecosystem, allowing for moderate but manageable inflation, hardcore players (i.e. the guys without jobs) to play the game for free and somewhat more casual players (i.e. the guys with jobs) to attain some items using cash. Brilliant.
SEOMoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009
W3C spec - http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/
The Rails Way is pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-...

I've found the peepcode webcasts worth their weight in gold, but that's not a book =)

And I found Design Patterns in Ruby pretty good for Ruby beginners

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Pr...

http://peepcode.com/
Congressmen Asked Apple About iPhone Exclusivity and the Tablet
Before my mouseclick,
This post had forty-two comments.
...I'm sorry.
Ask HN: Teaching others to code
I have a handful of non-techy friends who have said they'd really enjoy learning to write code. Every one of these guys/gals runs windows as their primary OS, so I usually send them to the "try ruby in your browser" page and run through the tutorials with them.

With _why's disappearance, I've been unable to find a suitable replacement for that awesome application.

Can anyone recommend something similar? And while I'm at it, what resources have you all found helpful for those starting out?
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?
I heard a presentation by the Public Library Of Science (http://www.plos.org/), who apparently are attempting to correct some of the problems of journals. For example, all their articles are publicly available on the web and they allow comments to be posted on the web. They claimed to considered to have some of highest "impact" journals in their fields.

Of course, some of the problems cited by the author of this piece could have to do with disagreements among experts. He may think his comment and his point is compelling but other experts may simply not think what he's saying is relevant and not be interested in giving him a forum. A more transparent process might only change things to the point where the folks on top would be forced to be more upfront about saying who is right - even wikipedia has transparency of debate and right-to-reply issues.
Agile Web Development with Rails was one of the better books that were around when I first started learning Ruby/Rails.

I don't know that it still has the presence in the community that it first had but I'm sure it is still a great read.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...
JavaScript is often a fairly good replacement. You can try it in your browser anyway, and you can do fairly impressive stuff with fairly little effort. It's pretty trivial to put together an HTML page that grabs JQuery off the AJAX libraries API and has a text field and submit button that evals the code and executes it immediately on the page.
A lot of credit should go to Strang for being such a great lecturer.
Oh, quite true, and it may not be the most natural behavior for many of us.

Still, I think most people would understand it if you politely explained that time is limited and you're trying to meet as many new people as possible, and here's my contact info so we can continue this discussion later.
Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...

has served me well...
Thanks for the clarification. I did not mean to disregard the considerable costs of providing universal healthcare.

For what it's worth, given my tax bracket and that I'm in my twenties, financially speaking, I am most likely a net win for the system.
Four then Five then Five
A proper haiku makes not
Try Five Seven Five
To select on a site-by-site basis: select Tools>Page info>Permissions.
I think you learn the fastest when you are making decisions and experiencing outcomes that matter to you. In that sense mentor's can provide specific decision-oriented advice that is "just in time."

But to be able to appreciate the context, and to save a lot of time, it seems to me that a significant amount of both technical and business/entrepreneurship reading is critical (or perhaps necessary but not sufficient).
When politics get involved it gets ugly. Special interest groups always try to confuse the public over results which would have otherwise been accepted by the scientific community. This causes the public to form opinions on things which are not based in science but in emotion. For example, global warming, evolution, ex-gay therapies, etc.

Global warming is definitely scientific fact, but the issue here is moreso how much money do we need to spend to mitigate the (still somewhat unknown) risk.
My solution for multithreaded testing in Java. Been using this code for a couple of years. Can easily be generalized for any asynchronous task. The main concept is using a shared barrier construct.

/**
* Executes the task the given number of times in the given number of threads
* @return All the unchecked exceptions thrown by the task during execution, or
* an empty collection; never null.
*/
public Collection<Throwable> run(Runnable task, int nThreads, final int iterationsPerThread) throws BrokenBarrierException, InterruptedException {
// each thread will await upon the start barrier, then run the task, then await at the finish barrier (where the main thread will be waiting)
final CyclicBarrier startBarrier = new CyclicBarrier(nThreads);
final CyclicBarrier finishBarrier = new CyclicBarrier(nThreads + 1); // +1 for the main thread
// exceptions raised by threads will be logged and returned
final Collection<Throwable> exceptions = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Throwable>();

for (int i = 0; i < nThreads; i++) {
new Thread("Thread " + i) {
public void run() {
awaitOnBarrier(startBarrier, 5);
try {
for (int j = 0; j < iterationsPerThread; j++) {
task.run();
}
}
catch (Throwable e) {
e.printStackTrace();
exceptions.add(e);
}
finally {
awaitOnBarrier(finishBarrier, 60);
}
}
}.start();
}
finishBarrier.await();
return exceptions;
}

/** Calls barrier.await and supresses all its checked exceptions */
private void awaitOnBarrier(CyclicBarrier barrier, int timeoutSeconds) {
try {
barrier.await(timeoutSeconds, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
catch (BrokenBarrierException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
catch (TimeoutException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
From the guidelines:

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

So, I infer that strippers claiming that some dude stuck his finger in her asshole is intellectually stimulating to some people here on HN. Good to know...

I flagged it, and hopefully others will too.
Collaborative Network Forensics
I like "Enterprise Rails". It's a rather contrarian Rails book in that it doesn't hew to the Rails anti-DB orthodoxy. It's clearly written and has a good example that evolves over the course of the book. It's meant to be a 2nd Rails book, after you're familiar with the framework.

http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Rails-Dan-Chak/dp/059651520...
I suspect it's because programming is an intense meritocracy, but a meritocracy governed by the intense subjectiveness of how smart your peers think you are

But then, why are the objections so often brain-dead!?
Agreed, while interesting I don't think this really belongs on HN. Using the standard "X is sort of like hacking!" excuse is just too easy.
yes! i was looking for a list like this yesterday. :D
For Ruby books, checkout my page here:

* Recommended Ruby Books (http://antoniocangiano.com/ruby-and-rails-recommended-books/)

I have not updated the Rails page yet, but you should be fine with:

* Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...)

Other books you may want to consider afterward are:

* The Art of Rails (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Rails-Programmer/dp/0470189487)

* Enterprise Rails (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515201/).
Tell HN: PG revises 3 essays
PG seems to have revised a couple of his essays from 2006, labelling them "rev August 2009":
http://www.paulgraham.com/6631327.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/randomness.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html
I for one am glad this article is here, because, frankly, guys need to hear this. I have talked to ex-strippers before, and heard them interviewed. I can think of no other occupation where the employees almost universally despise their customers. The girls admit this themselves, and they say their fellow strippers were of the same opinion. Yeah, I am sure there are exceptions, but in the couple of opportunities I had to hear their stories (not in a club - in a coffee shop, just FYI), they agreed that the way you lose their respect is to enter the strip club in the first place. I remember watching an interview of another ex-stripper online who said much the same thing. When they talk among themselves in the back of the club, they make fun of their patrons: what they wear, how gullible they are, etc. So, guys, if you really want to earn the respect of these girls, just don't go there in the first place.
I own almost every Rails book in one format or another (I run a top Ruby blog so I get them to review) and... it depends what you're trying to do.

The Rails Way kicks ass once you already know Rails to a certain extent - it's definitely not a first book. It's a "bible" type book and is stuck somewhere back in Rails 2.1 land, I believe, but most of it still applies.

AWDwR is reasonable and mostly up to date (focused at Rails 2.2, as far as I recall) and particularly suited for people who are totally new to Rails.

My recommendation for people who are new to both Ruby and Rails is Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Alameda as it has a 30 page primer to Ruby included and spends a long time "touring" Rails. It also covers RSpec which, given you're Agile, might be of significant interest to you.

Books I'd steer away from either because they're out of date or just plain bad IMHO would be all of the Packt books and Beginning Rails from Apress (the latter, hopefully, will be brought up to date in a 2nd edition).
Haiku in Java:
System.out.println(
"My little pony...");
Thanks for adding my book there, btw. I hadn't noticed till now.
1) The screen area I could have been using to read the document has been eroded by: 2 lots of ads, A top nav. bar, and a related document panel.

2) The embedded flash app. appears to consume a lot of cycles.

3) 'Scrollbars within scrollbars' make me unreasonably angry - I want to read a document, not perform keyhole surgery.

I'm not saying any other readers are perfect, but I would say that scribd is not leading the field.
It also picked up Persian while transliterated. That's impressive to me, because Persian does not have a standard method of transliteration.
One of the 'hidden' features of bookmarks I like a lot lets you set a 'keyword' to select a search in the address bar.

For example: Bookmark a 'Bing' search. In 'Organize bookmarks', select that bookmark. Click the 'More' menu at bottom left. Choose the keyword 'b' for Bing. Then change the 'location' to 'http://www.bing.com/search?q=%s.

Now type 'b mysearchterm' in the address field. Viola. Works for most searches I've tried, just bookmark and replace the search text with '%s'.
It's on Hulu, http://www.hulu.com/watch/88498/shark-tank-series-premiere#s...
here is a course i have been working through that describes some learning algorithms: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.867/lectures.html
i also like this book: http://www.amazon.com/All-Statistics-Statistical-Inference-S...
Interesting - especially useful that 'engagement with the blogosphere' rates higher than 'great content' in the survey. Not sure how true that is in practice, but it's a consideration.
I liked how they included a 'consensus/contention' metric alongside their percentage ratings.
Hm. It identified Bislama - pidgin English from Vanuatu - as Indonesian.
8-bit trip (LEGO stop-motion video)
Hal Abelson: The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT [pdf]
Thanks to PG for unbanning me! :)

I still can't believe I ran this script without thinking of how it worked and the coincidences of running it...
Not much of mine is true. I remember being so much smarter than I apparently am... :)
I have understood

A use case of hacker news:

Learning poetry.
all good rec's. Some others, all well-reviewed on amazon and assuming you have a team of java /C, C++, C# / PHP, python or some kind of web app coders

- Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black (infinite number stars!)

- the 2 Wrox books, Professional Rails (Rappin), Art of (Benson)

- Advanced rails (Oreilly, Ediger);

The one i'd stear clear of, i don't remember who wrote it, but it has a picture of an ocean wave on the cover.
The traditional vc-based path to building a company is sub-optimal, this has been the topic much covered on HN. Product-based way of building a company seems to be the future.

The companies that went directly to customers first on merits of their product and then attracted attention of rolodex-waving vcs include google, 37signals and probably pg's viaweb (sorry for non-original examples).

Remember, internet IS a network already. Even mentor knowledge is available through Google. Leverage this network and you're in business. You do need some hard technical knowledge (and books) to achieve this, though.

On the other hand, stuffing startups with executive 'mentors' who bring 'experience' but also grab tons of call options is a venerable vc industry tradition.

As somebody who went once through a vc-funded startup that was later killed by the same vcs, I remain ever sceptical about their motives and see this article as a piece of vc propaganda.
I don't believe I supported my post with any information from special interest groups, I gave you a link to what Freeman Dyson writes.
A lot of good suggestions already.

I think you have to offer one or two very specific symptoms of the problem that you help teams with. Note that a symptom is a prospect's perception of the problem, a diagnosis is the practitioners description.

After the talk exchange business cards with anyone who comes up. If there is some way you can assist them (e.g. send them a url or other info, make an intro) or a point you want to remember, jot down a 2-3 word note on the back of the card immediately so that you don't forget. Follow up within two days.

If you want to hand something out besides your card consider either or both of these:

1. 3x5 card with a pain question on one side (and two or three sentences on how you address) and a short 2-3 sentence backgrounder on the other. This is still small enough to fit in folks pocket. Bonus: preparing this also prepares you for small talk / networking conversations where you need to succinctly describe what you do.

2. An article as a "leave behind" instead of your slide deck, a good slide deck is incomplete without the spoken presentation, and article can be complete stand alone.

There are more than 50 sponsors: research each one's website and determine if there are potential synergies between their offerings and yours. I would visit any you might be able to partner with and introduce yourself.
The scary part is how many of those links Firefox is telling I've actually looked at.
These are salvaged from the blog I briefly tried having in 2006, after one of the startups we funded launched blogging software.