skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I had the inclination to do such a thing, I wouldn't post an Ask HN about it.

I would:

1. Look at the top 50 HN contributors, looking at their profile (and possibly checking up on some of their posts) to figure out if they are already committed to some project or company that would interfere with working with you.

2. Auto-select any names you recognize as people you "like". You know they're smart, and not merely prolific at posting to HN. Also look into any names you know you like who aren't among the top 50.

3. Figure out your own strengths, and, based on your lists comments, narrow down to a handful of folks with contrasting strengths and interests. A team of hardcore developer that churns out code like a machine, and a generalist that doesn't mind closing vim/emacs when other tasks need doing who also happens to have either design skills or at least an eye for great design, would be my ideal combination (but this may be reflective of my own limited experience rather than any blinding insight).

4. Contact the short list directly, one or two at a time, with a "Hey, would you be interested in trying an experiment with me, based on RFS #X?"

5. Profit!
Hacker forums are a lot like indie rock bands.
I'd think that those which are not in immediate ready-state are probably stored very near a silo or hangar. Simply because it doesn't make much sense to store a nuke very far from a location where it could be used (except when that nuke is heading for disassembly). Consequently I wouldn't be surprised if it was merely a matter of hours (minus the odd dud)...
Ok. Fair point. TCP would be worse than FTP, because you could hit it from ports 21, 22, 80, and 443.

FTP would be far worse than SCTP, because you're much more likely to be using it.

I'll admit, my mind jumped immediately to "vulnerability in the kernel! much worse than vulnerability in a web server!", which is exactly the wrong way to think about the problem --- once you've conceded code execution to an attacker, you've conceded the box.

Maybe that wasn't his argument. Thanks for calling me out on that.

Either way, the Linux advisory he cited should have absolutely no impact on your consideration of SCTP.
Steve Jobs: the man who polished Apple
"Groups applying to work on this idea should include at least one person who can write well and rapidly about any topic, one or more programmers who are good at statistics, data mining, and making sites scale, and someone who's reasonably competent at graphic design. These functions can of course be combined, and in fact it's even better if they are. Xooglers would be particularly well suited to this project."

It seems like that paragraph could be copy-and-pasted at the end of every RFS they put out...
Partial function application hack for Erlang, using parse transform
Are you physically active? The mind and body are connected. Try to pick up something active that is completely different from intellectual pursuits. Try something active that interests you like dancing, martial arts, cycling, etc.
The Magnetic Lasso Algorithm
I've been doing some machine vision research lately and needed an algorithm for finding contiguous image segments. This helped me out greatly.

(sidenote: I'm pretty sure these guys developed the "magic lasso" algorithm you see in photoshop.)
Yea everyone loves touching mine too. But since mine is hard, it probably isn't harmful, but it is annoying.

I have the macbook pro with the hard black screen. Though the matte screen might be more of a concern if someone touches it.
Download A Copy of The Pirate Bay Before It's Gone
Extremely interesting. Last March I actually tried to switch the name on an American Airlines ticket and the agent on the phone informed that it was impossible to switch the name on a ticket. She went so far as to claim the computer system didn't even support name changes. I called her out on that and then she told me that federal law prohibits name changes on tickets.

Assuming this article is valid - how would an airline even know that the name on the ticket doesn't match if I refuse to produce ID? (it was a domestic flight so no passport)
I would drop the please and just say "Oh, could you not touch the screen" and then explain why.
Venture Capital, Still Seeking the Next Big Thing
But the solution is simpler, and the consumer's definitely not paying. I mean, everyone's a stringer now, right? Sites run on ads and buy content from stringers through an auction market that takes a cut of each transaction. You are that auction site. Competitive bidding for genres of content; reputation indices to incentivise quality journalism -- most of the details have been worked out already in other contexts. I mean, it's so brain-dead it must've been tried already, right? What am I missing?
Isnt this what Yahoo Answers and countless competitors has already done, from the other side of the equation?
Buy some a soft cloth and some cleaning fluid (that won't dissolve your screen).

Make a big show of cleaning it.
It doesn't matter anyway, Goog won't crawl more than 100 links on a page.
http://twitter.com/newsycombinator only posts pages that appear on the front page. An RSS feed might get a little noisy.
Are you saying that indie rock bands get louder and louder the more popular they get?

(Serious question -- I don't listen to rock bands, indie or otherwise, so I don't know how the time- and popularity-dependence of their volume.)
It hasn't been updated since July 7th. Unless nothing else that's been up lately has been about programming...
Well, to me "educational" and "useful" are kind of orthogonal. I've made lots of things that were highly educational to make, often because they forced me to think "off the beaten path", but that doesn't make the things themselves useful. In fact, most of them were kind of crap. So I'm mostly thinking about the "important to others" aspect.

The Novix NC4000 and ShBoom came out at a time when compatibility was a lot less important. I agree that they were important and useful to others! Similarly Forth: it didn't start out compatible with anything else except for some computers, but now it runs on any chip, under any OS, and can control all kinds of peripherals. Which is why every cellphone has some Forth in it. (I don't know specifics but they have enough different processors that I'm sure you must be right.)

I'm not so sure about the c18 line (what's the "a series"?) because it seems like they're competing more with FPGAs than microcontrollers, but they don't have the tool support that FPGAs have.

When the ShBoom came out more than 20 years ago, the Verilog and VHDL toolchains were very limited. Now you can download all kinds of crazy stuff off OpenCores, synthesize it, and put it on your FPGA.

Similarly the available C was very limited, and it might take some work to get it to compile for whatever kind of random no-name manufacturer minicomputer you had, or if you had a microcomputer, it might take you a lot of work to find out that it just wasn't going to fit. And of course the available open-source code was pretty limited. Today you can be pretty sure that there's code out there that solves a big chunk of your problem, you can compile it for your computer pretty easily (unless it's a microcontroller or a C18 or an FPGA) and it will fit.

So I think it's possible that the c18 series will turn out to be "amazingly performant" in practice for a wide range of applications, just as FPGAs have the potential to be "amazingly performant". But it's far from guaranteed. You can't just put a bunch of FPGAs (or 40c18s or GA-4s) on a board and be done. After that you have to build software for it.

And I'm pretty sure that Chuck is the only one who's going to use the 40c18 for ASIC simulation.

It might turn out that it's so much easier to build software for a 40c18, or that the GA-4 is so much cheaper than a Spartan-II, that the tooling and compatibility differences will turn out not to matter. But they are real problems. Saying that it's "actually a boon" that you can't run any existing software on the chip is kind of dumb.
I type dvorak on qwerty keyboards, I don't care if they are looking.
Web of talent or mediocrity?
Interesting theories, thank you for the post!
rel="shortlink" - URL shortening that doesn't hurt the internet
Actually ..

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
If you've got a group of people you trust (a team), let the group prioritize the list together. The result will be higher quality and more people will feel ownership of the ultimate selection.

Shameless plug, but on topic: My company makes a tool for exactly this problem, http://www.stormweight.com/
Hell, I recognize a number of them in myself.
I say "Don't touch the screen, it easily smudges or gets scratched."
Here's a "This American Life" episode where they interview one person - it's act two - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=123...

One book I read on the topic that I can remember is "The Testosterone Files" - http://www.amazon.com/Testosterone-Files-Hormonal-Social-Tra...

The author does an excellent job of describing his experience and the differences he noticed between being a women versus being a man.
This works great as an enterprise-o-meter. Try these:

enterprisey:
java
xml
headache
stress
work

not enterprisey:
sex
pizza
trampoline
play
fun
awesome
No, he's saying that the quality is variable. Sometimes they have one great album and the rest are poor, or an album has a few great songs and the rest sounds like filler.
Ask HN: The Importance of a co-founder
I have a startup that I have been working on for a while now and it's nearing completion. I have had several people that wanted to become involved but things did not work out due to lack of dedication and/or lack of knowledge.

When applying to YC would it be better to to settle for a less than ideal co-founder or just continue working solo?

Note: I do not live in an area full of techies like SF so my options have been somewhat limited.
Seems more like one-on-one mentoring.
http://schoolofeverything.com/
Yes, the Web is a brain drain. There will always be some people advancing the state of the art while others productize previous innovations; I'm not particularly concerned about the exact ratio at any given time. At some point the low-hanging fruit will be mined out and people will shift back to research.
What are they?

The future.

The extent to which we constrain ourselves to HTML/JS nowadays is borderline ridiculous. AIR exists and it works. It lets you build user interfaces on a much more powerful platform and these apps will run equally well inside a browser tab or a desktop window. The problem with AIR (and silverlight) is the vendor lockin, nobody likes to rely on proprietary technology.

Free alternatives will emerge as we push the limits of HTML further.
My company makes a product for exactly this purpose [1]. It's better for this sort of task than UserVoice because it works with an ordered list of preferences, not just plus/minus points, which yields far more granular voting. It allows realtime interaction and chat, too. I built it specifically because UserVoice wasn't meeting my needs for internal brainstorming/idea discussion at my previous startup. Let me know what you think if you try it out (jacob@stormweight.com).

[1] http://www.stormweight.com/
not to mention that until you pay off your mortgage, your home belongs to the bank. anecdotally, I know more people who have had to deal with foreclosure than with eviction.

so, OP, would you revise your statement to "boring, but secure in ways nobody really cares about, and even then, not really or interesting, but anxious (if you're prone to be anxious about things that rarely happen and even then are more hassle than hardship)."? I'm not having a hard time with this decision.

home ownership is great if you need lots of space for your things or your kids, or if you want to impress people. but that's not me. and I don't feel the slightest bit anxious about my choice.
Maybe you are just busy and tired? I'm "duller" when I'm busy and tired. I suggest you get some sleep, try to fit in some exercise, work on your diet (assuming it has room for improvement -- most diets do). Having more energy and being physically fit can help with mental clarity.
Yes, I agree. HN has many interesting stuff, but I have problems to follow all news, because it's just too much.
While we don't have enough nukes to quickly and painlessly incinerate all humans. But we do have quite enough to bomb ourselves back into stone-age.

It's not a comforting thought.
I'm not sure all of us here are hackers and we don't always come here for programming articles. I read hacker news as an alternative to google news or watching tv. For me, it's mostly entertainment that alleviates my boredom with a weighting toward improving my skillset and keeping up to date in my industry.

If there were only code articles or technology articles, it'd get boring and I'd probably come back less often. I probably spend way too much time here really, but I probably click on 75% or more of the articles on the front page. I click on them because they are interesting, not necessarily because they are about programming or technology -- they expand my mind.

I think mind expansion is good for hackers.
What solution do you propose? I don't think merely saying "let's keep things topical" is going to work. People are going to keep submitting articles they find interesting, and upvoting articles they find interesting, regardless of the topic.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was the one who submitted the "How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night" article. Yes, it's not topical. However, I'm not ashamed! I thought it was interesting, and clearly so did the 44 other people who upvoted it.

I'm quite pleased with the community that's developed here, who are discriminating enough to pick out many articles I find interesting.

However, HN could definitely be improved, so that people who are only interested in certain topics (such as only computer/hacking related articles) or not interested in other topics (such as off-topic, or political, or venture capitalist articles) could more easily filter through what's becoming a firehydrant of links.

I think the best way to do this is by implementing tags.
I wouldn't do what this person did in front of a VP either but being fired for it is not something I approve of. Although, as another commenter mentioned, if it was delivered in a significantly snotty way being fired becomes quite predictable. Authority believes it has earned the right not be spoken down to but real winners won't care, much.
Several things about Einstein's work made it plausible and not obviously the work of a crackpot, despite its initial non-falsifiability:

* It was consistent with most observations and experiments done thus far.

* It offered an explanation for known issues which were being grappled with at the time, i.e. the observation of speed of light in moving reference frames.

* It built on existing work and showed Einstein's familiarity with the state of physics at that point.

* It was possible to understand how the theory could be tested, even if the technical skills of the time were inadequate.

Compare this to most crackpot theories we see today: they may be inconsistent with previous observations. They claim to debunk "establishment" theories rather than attempting to grapple with new problems. And they are often constructed so they cannot be falsified, even postulating improved experimental techniques.

So if you see a new theory which claims to explain something like high-Tc superconductivity but requires advances in technology to be testable, it is probably a good-faith effort. But if you see a theory which claims to revolutionize physics by means of an unobservable energy field with no plausible experiments, you're probably looking at a crackpot. Bonus points if the author says "Einstein is WRONG!" in a press release.
"We have much higher leverage on our home court and can do more good for the planet than we can, later, in medicine or politics."

Very interesting suggestion for hackers who want to do some good for society. First of all, make the Web work better, and then you will have already contributed something to society before you retire to do charity work.
It's not really meant to just teach you scheme. Scheme by itself is incredibly minimalist and simple. The exercises are more logic/math-based puzzles. Here's a list of the exercises themselves:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/exercises.ps
Oh please don't let this turn into reddit.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I read this is on any page I own I would have to define a short url for it in the head section of the html.

So with this standard no one could short link to a site I control without me going through and making up a short link for every page.

In addition to that, this standard assumes that your url is somewhat short and not something like "thelongesturlintheworld.com" in which case it wouldn't help at all.

Twitter needs to just make it's own URL shortening service and put an end to all this.
This one has been very successful:

http://www.baristanet.com/
"The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced."

I'd warrant most people know that babies respond first to the contrast of black and white and next to bright red - if the experiment worked equally with other colours then just about any other colour combination would be more notable.

I do wonder if this is unique to light-pink skinned babies/parents as I suspect the reaction to red helps in locating the mothers nipple, though I'm not set on that hypothesis.

"When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest."

I disagree there too, preschoolers can focus intently on something they are interested in despite all effort to divert that attention. I suspect they don't have the ability to context switch nor really multi-task and so instead of momentarily diverting attention (multi-tasking) pending a context switch they attempt to complete the current process before interrupting.

"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play."

What does "just allowing them to play" even mean. No toys? That's providing things, not "just". No scenery? That's providing a context. No interaction? I don't think kids really learn by just playing, they have to have experiences to play out, inspiration of their imagination, people to interact with and yes even things. The old favourite of playing with cardboard boxes is providing things (boxes) and relies on the child having been stimulated to have the experience of things to imagine the box as.
Interesting example, I had never read that. Here it is:
http://www.prlog.org/10272725-prison-consultant-vincent-stev...
It's not tags which would turn HN in to Reddit. It's the community. If HN's community was identical to that of Reddit, HN would turn in to Reddit (minus the tags). But HN's community is not the same as Reddit, which is why the articles which are submitted and upvoted on HN generally differ from Reddit (with some overlap, of course).

I don't see how not having tags helps anything or anyone. It just keeps the article space flat instead of organized by topic.

Of course, the articles still have different topics. They're just not easily distinguishable from one another by automated means.
Individuals who want to sell their experiences and expertise are generally called "consultants". A marketplace for whate are essentially dilettante or part-time consultants seems hard to regulate and verify.
I thought he was saying they stop being cool when too many people discover them.
Here's the issue about this:

Newspaper aren't meant to be editorial soapboxes. They, along with journalists, are meant to be just objective and factual. Having an editorial vision is a breach of journalistic integrity. So that said, a successful journalism venture of the future requires a balance of reporters, editors, and writers but anything too opinionated might make you (Fox News) or break you (when you reveal too much of your bias or it goes counter to what the popular opinion is).

Personally I really like Talking Points Memo model of collecting and analyzing news. They've been building quite a lean and fast organization to capitalize on all the future of news.
They basically have. It's called bit.ly (which is the official/default URL shortener and whose servers are housed in Twitter's data center). For all intents and purposes, Bit.ly is Twitter's own URL shortener.

But not every Twitter client and site uses Bit.ly (HootSuite uses ow.ly, for example, and Digg uses, well, digg.com). And, you know, not every short URL is made for Twitter.

(Note: this isn't supposed to be a response to the original post, which I only skimmed.)
Correct, you'd need to add it to each page, but that shouldn't be a huge deal these days unless you just have tons of static html pages on your site. If your site uses some kind of templating system (Wordpress, ASP.NET Master Pages, Smarty, etc.) you should be able to dynamically add the shortened link into the document header without too much trouble.
Also this one (Firefox only)

javascript:(function (){document.querySelector("body").style.MozTransform="rotate(180deg)";})()
If I was setting out to do it, I'd think about a three part system. First would be the gun on the surface, the second would be a launch vehicle, and the third would be a satellite in orbit to act as a target. The gun fires the launch vehicle at the target. The satellite (I picture it as a donut, with the projectile aimed at the center) uses an electromagnet to "fix" the launch vehicle's orbit. Aside from whatever physics I am ignorant of, I think the big question mark here is power as I would expect the draw of the magnet to be beyond what you could plausibly provide with solar panels. It's also questionable how well this would scale. It doesn't seem like something you would ever think of using to launch crewed vehicles or things like the Hubble, but if the marginal cost of your launches is low, it seems like individual cargo capacity is less important. You could launch raw materials, small parts and assemblies, and maybe even things like human consumables.
OTOH, ID cards are not required in (at least) Sweden, Denmark and Norway (not EU). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document#European_Unio...
Neither.

You need a good co-founder as a rule of thumb. You need to prove that at least one other person believes in your crazy idea and is willing to work with you.

If you have had a few cofounder false-starts you should look very closely at the root cause for that situation.
Haquer.
9 Secrets For Losing Calories
Interesting to see all the followups. I had no idea that anyone cared about this. Reminds me of guys who don't like people touching their cars. I'd encourage all the folks advising the OP to be curt or to ostentatiously rub out the smudge to imagine a guy in a polo shirt wearing Ray-Bans. Perhaps his collar is turned up. Now imagine this man behaving the same way after someone touches the finish on his Corvette. You are the geek equivalent of that guy.
The only proper response is to touch their glasses, leaving an identical smudge there.
2 were older guys with families and could not commit. I want people that are as dedicated and experienced as I am.

The other 1 simply could not code worth a damn so I felt like he was dead weight.