skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not sure if dissing (college) education all together makes sense. I am sure you can claim to have learnt a lot of allied "subjects" during your education including teamwork, competing, leadership, analytical thinking, synthesis of data, risk taking (maybe) etc. But I do agree that education (whether American or Asian) should give students room to develop the above while learning core subjects for it to be holistic. It should not purely rely on it being rote based.
To be honest, part of it is the knack of finding the right keywords. Some ideas I use:

- Hit up Google Books / Amazon for SIP (Statistically improbable phrases) related to your topic. These are useful.

- Add a bunch of +[Author name] keywords into scholar in order to get papers that cite certain people. Eventually you build up a standard list of authors that you want to find papers citing (yes, I know, this can be overly narrow, but it's effective).

- As mentioned elsewhere, use Citeseer.

- Its much easier to navigate a reference graph than to search cold. So find papers you think are excellent, and then serach everyone who cites them, all other work by referenced and citing authors, and so on.

- Use arXiv. You can set up RSS feeds for certain keywords, and search them. This is low-SNR but yields some gems.

- Most importantly: Don't search! Ask other people what's worth reading and what's good, in your group/lab/friends.
I like the concept, have wanted to do something myself for quite some time (my process only went as far as registering a URL).

I don't like the idea of this as a list that is basically just a webpage though. It needs to be more "integrated", at least as a separate window that can popup to open links in the main browser window.

You'll also need a bookmarklet that allows users to book mark sites (ideally) to both the browser and to browserpop.com at the same time.

Another good idea would be a category class that you could share with certain friends. This way, 3 people working on a project could all add bookmarks to this category or group for the others to see. Or, just for casual social bookmark sharing.
Whatever catastrophe that would lead to the eradication of knowledge of English is going to kill a million times more people than the worst case scenario of a nuclear waste exposure.
While I largely agree on most of your points, I think there's a porblem with this:

The incentive structure for a CEO or other executive at a large multi-national oil firm is likely such that he/she would much rather have a lot of oil drilled in the short-term, rather than a smaller ammount of oil in the short-term and a larger total ammount over the long-term.

That seems to me a bit of a strawman, though I confess I know little about how the oil business works. The issue here comes down to a present value calculation for proposed investments. You seem to be implying that the Iraqi engineer pushed for short-term maximization thru the use of new technologies. But those technologies cost money, now. That would reduce the company's profit and (if he's a shareholder) his (short-term) return.
Well, they can integrate it in their next service pack then and charge another 50$! :-)
The survey seems to make sense. Twitter is a business (market communication) and media tool. Celbs use it for MarCom, most individuals do. With most local tv, radio and network news shows having accounts, if I was a kid why would I Think I need this? The answer is they don't unless they want to play along with "#itaintcheatingif" kind of crap that is always top on the trends.

I am not sure why there is so much interest in this topic. Twitter doesn't make money the people that use Twitter really don't make money; having more people follow Miley Cyrus isn't going to change that.
yeah, I think that what the world really needs is more hype about twitter...
Clojure is not as simple and as elegant as scheme, but it's still cool. I don't think it would have been this easy to learn clojure if i didn't learn scheme first. All my knowledge about recursion, FP and data structures i learned while playing with scheme. I've never written anything other than toys with it, but it was a very good introduction to lisp, and now im learning clojure and its fun as hell!
I will have a think about the integration you mention. I'm using it as my homepage and launching the links I want from there, but can see how your integration idea could make it easier to use.

There is a bookmarklet on the /tools page - will make this more obvious though.

Totally agree with the idea of sharing and have listed this as one of the things to do on the /roadmap page. I am often asked what links I personally use so this would be a good place to publish/share them. Also, would be good to have a place to store links for groups to use, such as commonly used links for companies, so this is high up on my to do list.

Thanks for the feedback.
These are the reasons I don't use it. Until now, my near total incomprehension of the phenomenon was making me feel old...
For medicine/biology http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.

During studies I used EBSCO www.search.ebscohost.com , there is almost every field, from Astronautics to Zoology :-), but access to some resources is limited.
In my experience, things that get behemoth-sized tend to grow package managers, like eclipse.
I confess I know little about how the oil business works

So basically you're arguing from the axioms of free-market fundamentalism. \yawn\
I'm allergic to cats and I'm normally fine as long as I take a benadryl (or similar medicine) when I arrive so discomfort is minimal, and they spend a lot more time with the cat than I do so having a cat seems fine.
I'm somewhat disappointed with firefox 3.5. Does anyone else have the bug where it times out randomly when trying to load a page? I looked it up and a lot of people with Netgear routers have the same problem.
The authors point is, free-market or not, the system doesn't produce the same results when compared with many other systems, which are accused of being less free-market.

If people accuse other systems of being less free-market, and those systems are actually more free market, it simply shows that the accusers are either idiots or lying or both. It does not prove that a free-market is a bad idea.

Nor is there some linear continuum between socialism and free markets. Imagine you have two financial systems, one a complete free market, the other covered in a web of regulations. The free market one might be considerably better. But let's then say that one single regulation gets introduced: "Banks that fail get bailed out". With that single regulation, the system is now infinitely bad, much worse than the highly regulated system.

What matters most is the particular details of a system, along with its implementation and its management.

The real reason that the U.S. system so bad is that our political system is so completely dysfunctional.

I could describe a half-dozen plans that on paper would be perfectly acceptable to you and lionhearted, to conservatives and liberals. But none of these plans will happen. Neither will the liberals' dream, European-like plan happen. The actually plan winding its way through Congress is a continuation of the same problems. By funneling more money away from the American people into the pockets of the various factional interests in the healthcare industry, it will most likely make things much worse.
Absurd. I love how he randomly throws out a ridiculous number, $5-10 billion, but never breaks down the justification numerically.
Yes I know that we do things differently than you do and I think the point of the OP is that the consequences of our doing things differently is that we provide health care more universally and more efficiently.

The drug companies spend hundreds of millions if not billions telling you that there would be dire consequences if they couldn't patent their work six ways from Sunday and charge amazing amounts of money for a few pennies worth of chemicals.

They remind me greatly of your entertainment oligopolies, right down to the way they control your laws through their lobbying prowess.

Asking a drug company what would happen if you asked them to charge less is like asking the fox what would happen if you locked the door to the chicken coop.
What's your field? Google scholar works great for me. (Mostly genetics and bioinformatics.)
I like the spirit of this article, but I wish it had more numbers in it.
I started to write a review/summary of this, and after about 50 words simply lost the will to live. I think that pretty much sums up the article.

If anyone found it interesting, I'd like to know what you got from it. (Honest, no sarcasm.)
The original use cae was where you have a method chain and you want to "tap into" one of the values, e.g.

foo().bar().blitz()

becomes:

foo().bar().tap { |b| puts b.inspect }.blitz()

It takes its inspiration from Unix's "tee."
The deification of twitter continues.
Maybe, but it could still be a pretty big number. And don't we owe it to our descendants to warn them?
You clearly have a solid backup infrastructure.
> Hopefully we can get it changed in the next couple of years.

The problems aren't new. It's unclear what's changed recently that would allow them to be fixed.

In fact, I suspect that they're actually going to get worse, as protectionism is the first response to economic woes.

Also the folks who say that they care about making it easier for "the best and the brightest" to come to the US insist on joining forces with the "let everyone in" folks. The two issues are separable and latter has considerably more opposition. If the former is your real goal....
Free the H-1Bs, Free the Economy
In general I agree with the "stop opining, and start hacking" mantra. Though, writing and opinion piece about it sort of defeats the purpose :P
Clickable - http://browserpop.com
To which I reply, American markets aren't free and never have been. Your "free market capitalism" is actually a series of interconnected oligopolies where a few powerful players control the market and use lobbying to errect barriers to free enterprise.

Economic sectors can fall in three general categories:

1) free market ( low or no regulation, freedom of contract, no legal barriers to entry, people voluntarily choose to buy their product, freedom to make profits, freedom to take losses) - Examples include: most manufacturing, retail, entertainment, electronics, furniture, cars, clothes, lasic surgery, trucking, shipping, tourism, software

2) guild & cartel - businesses or associations recieve numerous special privileges and legal barriers to entry. One example is the banking sector and the special access to the lender of last resort and to bailouts. Another is the doctors associations and their monopoly right to dispense life saving pills.

3) socialized - a sector that is under operational management by the government. For instance, the public education system or the park system.

The basic test for a free market is this: If I wanted to start a business to compete with player X in this industry, would I be thwarted or hindered by the government in doing so?

America as whole has never been a perfect & absolute pure free market. But certain sectors tend to pretty come close the ideal. And its those sectors that tend to produce products of increasing quality and lower prices. The sectors that seem to have endemic problems that end up being the subject of national debates, are all in categories 2 and 3 (finance, healthcare, and education).

Of course there is no easy way to go from 3) to 1) or 2) to 1). A socialized system is a system of both price controls and restricted entry. If you remove just the price controls, you have given the industry a license to rake the consumers over the coals. Thus your path from 3) to 1) actually makes things worse. This is the fatal law of many of the Cato libertarians. At the end of the day, competency of the government is still important no matter what path is chosen.
Soul-Searching on Facebook
> So basically you're arguing from the axioms of free-market fundamentalism.

Since he was responding to an argument with even less basis, it's curious that only the response rated the above comment.
It's going to cost $50 regardless, so why work on ZFS? I wonder if they've thought of just charging money for no features.
Well, now that FriendFeed is a lame duck he has to have something to rave about. This is textbook Scoble. How he ever became "a thought leader" is beyond me.
While I think your comment is a bit in jest, I'll just point out how dangerous your line of thinking is.

The Germans don't get "free" health spas, each person pays more money to the government and the government in turn allocates more funds toward non-life-threatening treatment (so that the voters are kept happy.)

I'm not in the position to analyze what that "free spa" is at the cost of (most of us reading this are not), but it's at the cost of something (those with more serious healthcare needs perhaps?).

No one "gets free _____" from their government.
Beyond the hype, Twitter is significant because you can crawl their complete social network graph of millions of users. Delicious et al offers a similar crawling but they don't have the same user base, and facebook doesn't permit to do this.

Why it's important? from a business perspective you can quickly analyze the customer sector of companies: look at dell followers, compare it to the apple ones, what's the difference? (don't know if apple is on Twitter so take this as an example)
I think the limit on H1B's will benefit large multi-nationals and harm smaller American based companies. I also think it will benefit the American born engineer.

The multi-nationals like IBM, Cisco, et al have already moved many of their engineering jobs overseas. They also have the big bucks to pay American citizens to do those jobs. The result is that smaller firms must rely on them for contractors and consultants which increases the price for these engineers even more.

The result is that engineers get paid more money to do local work through multinational corporations who farm them out to the smaller firms without the resources to find them or the deep pockets to give them permanent salaried jobs.

It also increases the prices for technology for local firms who can't afford custom systems or assistance developing their wares.

Either way, I'm not sure "American" companies are harmed, there is a division among the companies in America who are harmed and those who benefit. The large ones with offices overseas may very well benefit, relative to the harm done to smaller firms.

Also, American citizens will benefit through the availability of cheaper products produced in foreign lands, including software and hardware products. Holding America up as a torch doesn't make much sense here because all of america won't experience the same effect.

Furthermore, there is a lot of criticism of the program because many economists, including Milton Friedman have called it a "corporate subsidy" and others argue that there in fact are enough americans to fill the technology positions.

Really, there is a lot of irrationality on both sides of the debate. Arguments are made on "right now" rather than the future of America. It is only the corporations who are saying that this issue has a deliterious effect on our future. They say we need to change the policy for our future, because they are feeling the pain right now. I'm not really sure who is right.
As a teenager crossing into the adult twilight zone, I mostly used twitter to do:

1. What the heck are certain developers coding?

2. Shorthand "RSS" of content update

3. Keep up with cool startups/projects

4. A microblog for my game projects.

Using it as to keep up with what friends are doing or update what the heck I am doing for my life atm? Banal and boring. I would not use it like that.
Sounds like a good story, one that is often repeated in the US. Unfortunately it's not entirely true.

The facts:

* There are severe restrictions on prescription pharmaceutical advertising in Canada. For example, access to product information on pharmaceutical 'brochureware' sites is restricted by 'password' (I developed many of these sites for Pfizer years ago). Television advertising is limited to brand recognition type ads, the ad can't actually tell you what the drug does.

* The result of these restrictions has lead to far less marketing costs for pharmaceuticals.

* Medicare pharmaceutical guidelines (PMPRB) do impose price increase restrictions after they have been introduced to the market, and stated in it basic manner, will not endorse drugs that achieve the same effect as current drugs, yet cost more.

* Canadian gov't provides plenty of tax subsides for pharmaceutical research

So yes, while there are pricing guidelines, it's not a one way street, there a bit of give and take here. In exchange for following pricing guidelines, companies receive generous tax credits for research.

The (intended) effect of pricing on advertising guidelines is designed to guide doctors to prescribe the best (from a cost/effectiveness standpoint) drug, rather than the 'new thing' or the one their patient is demanding due to seeing it advertised repeatedly on television.

This idea that the US is subsidizing the cost of drugs for other countries is silly. Drugs of US origin would not be sold abroad if it weren't profitable to do so. And given the 'free market' in pharmaceuticals in the US, wouldn't drugs be sold at the most profitable price anyways, regardless of market conditions elsewhere?
I looked at the HN comments page expecting to see the usual: a bunch of sycophantic comments to the effect of "America is evil! Her immigration policies are backward!!" I wasn't disappointed.

But I'm glad somebody else noticed the pretentious, creative writing 101 nature of the writing. This author is someone who has yet to learn the value of simple, effective language.

Now where's that copy of Strunk and White....
This person seems to be on some kind of.. crusade, insisting that everything you write be relevant for years, be somehow enthralling..

infact, his very post is the kinda of throwaway that he seems to rail against.
Nevermind. It turned out the pdf is already available at http://shoes.heroku.com
I think they looked at people who actually logged in and excluded bands.
Fabulously written? Please. The writing was sophomoric and cluttered with pretentious metaphors and turns of phrase. The fledgling writer's first attempt at self-aggrandization.

Heh.
And this tells you what, exactly? How does knowing which social marketers, spam bots, and celebrities a nonrandom sampling of 50,000 technically inclined hipsters follow help me sell computers to them?
It's Mac-only.
Clients Flee Cerberus, Fallen Fund Titan
You certainly don't need to know scheme to read SICP. You learn it along the way.
Is Speculating On What Private Companies Are Worth A Good Idea?
I'm not sure this should be taken much more seriously. This is a survey of MyYearbook.com users which right there makes it more biased towards those who would use a service like Twitter. Beyond that we have no real idea of how the numbers break down.

They give some statistics on their user demographics at the end of the post but they seem irrelevant to me. Since they're a service geared exclusively to teens with 3.2 million or so uniques per month (according to compete) yet the survey only got 20,000 results. How do we know all those results weren't from the midwest (for example)?

IMHO, a survey of 20,000 unknown quantities isn't any more helpful than a survey of one 15 year old and his circle of friends.
Should You Upgrade Anything?
The Evolution of Retweeting
Slackware 3.0 was my introduction to Linux in Jr. High. I definitely learned a lot. Although most "friendlier" distros weren't around then, even if they were I hope I would have still started with slack.

I use Ubuntu now in part because my wife and little kids use the computer too, but I am frequently tempted to give slack a try again.
There's no answer to the "why" in the article beyond celebrity mentions and saying that businesses will pay.

A valuation of $5 billion would mean about $200 per user at the 25 million users mark, which would be reasonable were it a porn-site with paying members. But it's not, it's Twitter.
Feel free to downmod, but

(TC + Twitter) = (Don't Care)

I would rather have Arrington to own shares of some Erlang product company. At the very least this wave of forced publicity would've been more relevant to HN.
I think you're right that the post is slightly contradictory, but his premise I believe is correct. In all that I have studied on machine learning in both academia and start-up land, I have observed that you consistently pick algorithms to glean out the information you need from a particular dataset.

In many cases you can do what my graduate advisor recommends "keep it simple stupid" meaning that perhaps all that is needed is a k-nn approach and euclidean distance. But sometimes the data is highly overlapped and complex, so you have to go with a more rigorous means of classification or whatnot.

Finally it should be noted that machine learning techniques are relatively new. Neural networks have been around for quite some time and have well documented advantages. ML by contrast is still a lot of black magic (tweaking of various magic parameters and such) so the benefits of various algorithms are somewhat subjective.
This is a very biased article. The author neglects to mention that a very large portion of income generated by foreign born workers is sent home by those workers. The money doesn't stay in America to benefit the American economy.

It also doesn't benefit the case to call those opposed to more immigration Xenophobes. They aren't xenophobes, they are rationally aware of the situation.

Also, what he says is not true according to the research: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794685 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794677

Furthermore, H1-B's are not "highly skilled." The majority of H1B workers take entry level jobs. There is an O-1 visa for highly skilled workers and there is no cap on this visa. If this debate was really about bringing in more highly skilled workers, then why argue for uncapping the lower skilled visa? Wouldn't corporations just bring in more O-1 visas, for which there is an unlimited supply available?

The reality is that O-1 visas cost more than H1B visas to employ. This debate is really about concentrating more power in the corporations and erradicating the middle class in America.
the growth predictably stopped

While none of the comments or OA itself come out and say it, there seems to be an implicit assumption that this is bad. However when I go to wikipedia there is an article about anything I want to look up. It seems like the low-hanging fruit is gone, so shouldn't we expect that it would slow down? Once there is a critical mass of editors it makes sense to slow it down and keep the bar high for contributions. It's far from perfect, but isn't it better than "grow grow grow"?