skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm drawing a distinction though between aggregators that just link and have a short summary and "aggregators" that copypaste more than 300 words of a story to break the Google length barrier.

I run a social news site where we limit people to 300 characters in their summaries. If we let people copy paste full articles cough socialmedian cough then we'd definitely be pulling in a lot more traffic.
"Hackers and Painters" or "Founders at Work" are both good books if you haven't picked them up yet. Not language learning or directly programming but interesting none the less.

A book more directly related to programing would be "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" or "The Little Schemer." bring a notebook and do problems out of them like defunkt said and it will help in all your programming.
Lowering the orbit isn't the problem, if it's already fast enough. The problem is that the end of the velocity change is still going to be in the atmosphere.
Why does the government even have to run an insurance company though? Why can't they give you insurance vouchers?

"Starvation insurance" is indeed a bad idea. So is "insurance" for routine care. It costs a relatively predictable amount of money to have a routine annual blood test and physical. Why can't I just pay that money myself, instead of paying an insurance company to pay that money for me? And if I can't afford it, instead of having the government set up an "insurance" company to buy me doctor visits and a dental plan, why can't they just give me vouchers for that too? Save the "insurance" for stuff that actually makes sense to insure against--things like hospital visits and so forth.
How to make Firefox faster
Many of us find that Firefox is a lot of slower than other browsing such as Chrome and Opera. This a definitely a major drawback for the open source browser since if it was faster, it would be the number one browser by quite a distance!

Follow these nine top tips which will your browsing experience silky smooth!
Haha, yay! Now I can bring people to this post to show them that I'm not alone.

I agree wholeheartedly, why do they just have to touch our screens?

I'm a direct person so I just say swiftly and quickly "Don't touch my screen."
Transport layer
There's nothing wrong with providing incentives for local governments to enforce the rules.
Hey, Matt,

re: your point about requiring a login to comment. Isn't that good for community building? If MetaFilter let just anyone leave a comment, that would kill it off pretty quickly. Having some barrier to entry can add value, you just need to find the appropriate one for your community.
Since it's a vacation, here's a novel with lots of interesting ideas about ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, etc.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

Fun with Python: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...
When you compare public spending, you have to keep in mind the military. Unlike most European welfare states, the US has significant military obligations around the world. In fact, it's probably because of our military obligations to Europe that Europe can afford a welfare state--if they had to pay fully for their own national defense rather than being able to call on the United States, they would have serious problems maintaining a solvent national government.
Meh. SYN floods are pretty much a solved problem. Try to take something behind an F5 offline, for the simplest example.

I agree that, on paper, it's a more useful protocol. Remember though that TCP is about the congestion control algorithm. The rest of what TCP does is trivial.
35 Best iPhone Apps Of The Year (So Far)
You're right, of course. They each have their uses. I still think SCTP has more potential though, but I'm not able to back that up, so whatever :-P
WTF do I care if the protocol you broke was transport layer or application layer? Code execution is code execution. What a strange argument.
What would be inside an Apple tablet
Blaming the X architecture for slow drawing and windowing operations is a common mistake. Most of the latency that's introduced into operations that affect the user's perception of GUI "speed" is introduced by toolkits and inadequate 2D acceleration by the driver infrastructure, not the X protocol. It's true that the experience is poor on many configurations, but the upside is that there have been great advances on fixing these issues in the recent years (check out the new "flicker-free" GTK for an example).
To add to this, also think about why you didn't thrive in the academic environment and get a PhD in 8 years, like some do. If you go back, what will be different?

I think for me, it was the boredom. There was the busywork handed out by the teachers, and the slacker culture that permeated the small state university I went to. If I hadn't been so bored, perhaps I could have stayed on the path.
Rahm Emanuel's Leadership and Authority
It's Caltech. Not CalTech.
I think there's a use for studying and investigating, in philosophy, what we call "the good life". That's the one thing philosophy has been negligent of, although analytic philosophy (other than that) has been a positive triumph.
The Billionaire Universities
Blood Meridian made me a McCarthy fan.
I hope they know rel="nofollow" has to be added to all those links.
If watch folders are very important to you you might look at Hazel (http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php), which is like a more tolerable implementation of Folder Actions. It has a "Import into iTunes" action built in, and can be set to recurse subfolders. If iTunes is set to copy files on import, Hazel can be told to trash the original.

I wouldn't recommend it for just that, but even if it doesn't strike your fancy--after the trial expires, it still works on one folder with two rules (e.g. Add to iTunes & Move to Trash), so it doesn't really cost anything if that's all you use it for.

I'm not excusing the lack of a similar feature in iTunes, but that's what I use and I'm happy with it.
After the water supplies are contaminated, the soil is rendered infertile, most ecosystems implode, and the climate changes ... sure, some humans might survive. But I wouldn't envy their lives of eating cockroaches and moss and delivering misshapen children.
The superstar effect
I'm not sure this is a great idea, but I'm no expert (and you, PG, are). Here are my concerns:

1) It seems like it encourages people who are more passionate about having a startup than it does people who are passionate about their particular idea.

2) Is selecting a RFS as your startup's core going to help or hurt an applicant? I suppose this is something we won't know the answer to until after we see the scope of this round's applications (or get a more general approximation for them). If the RFS is popular, you're going to have half your applicants with similar start-ups. Assuming you select your classes such that you have some measure of diversity in your portfolio, then ultimately groups doing a RFS will be at a disadvantage (since they'll be competing against everyone who did that RFS for a few slots, instead of competing generally), and the program's popularity will dwindle. Note that this assumes there are only a handful of RFS options.
The Call for an Open Source Social Network
Nobody's mentioned it here, yet: Godel Escher Bach
"Where do these ideas come from?"

Probably from http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html, which is roughly a year old. RFS#1 is #3 on that (presumably unranked) list.
I think that you've misinterpreted my original comment. My argument is that C is a poor language for teaching computing theory. There will be classes where students will learn C, certainly any hardware oriented class. The question at hand is, "Do students benefit from learning concepts in languages other than C", and I think that you'll agree the answer is "yes".
Not trying to shoot you down FWIW, just trying to dispel the myth of the TCP SYN flood. You'd be surprised how many otherwise very savvy clients ask us about them.
I'll tell him you approve! =)
Fenway Park and Infrastructure 2.0 - Cloud Computing
This is what I do, and it's never a problem. The reasons why you wouldn't want somebody touching your scren are pretty obvious. I'm not apologizing to someone else for /them/ smudging their filthy hand marks all over /my/ screen!

There's a "please", it's not like it's rude...
Simply because a vulnerability in the transport layer results in every service relying on that protocol to be vulnerable? Are you saying that a remote code execution vulnerability in TCP would not be worse than one in for instance FTP?

(I am aware of your credentials so I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing, not trying to be snippy)
"Since then, it has found its way into all major operating systems, including GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris. It's also available for the Microsoft® Windows® operating systems as a third-party commercial package."

I don't think that you can really exclude Windows from the category "major operating systems". It might not be your favorite operating system (it certainly isn't mine), but give the devil his due.
The idea is very similar to Firefox's incremental search (and for that matter, even more similar to Emacs C-s and C-r).
I wonder what sparkled this? The lack of good ideas in submitted applications or you guys just wanted to be more involved, i.e. wanted to see your own vision of the future materialize in front of you?

I also wonder what happened to idea #2 on this list: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Seemed like pikluk.com applied to solve precisely that (even before the list was published) but we got rejected, then exhausted our savings, burned out and just quietly returned to our day jobs, yet no YC-funded solution emerged up to date. Being rejected is one thing, but getting "Your idea is great, but we'll wait for someone with a better pedigree to work on it" message hurts much more.
It's from the future!
IBM uses DNA to make next-gen microchips
Code Complete 2nd edition is a good and interesting book about programming in general. I also recommend these two because they are much lighter reads, and maybe better for a vacation: "The Passionate Programmer" and also "Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages".

Another thing you could do is find some great piece of software by a well know Python hacker and read his code lol. You could put that code in some readable format on your Kindle, PDA, or Smartphone.
Very true. Your comment reminds me of a question I've always had. Does a refrigerator full of stuff take more energy per unit time (after the stuff is all cooled down) than an empty refrigerator? I don't know exactly how to do rough calculations of that sort of thing in my head, but my best guess is that since more food in the frig means less air, the question becomes, is air easier to keep cool than food?
That's quite a theory. Wouldn't one expect to find other instances of such coercive omission? And yet, double-clicking a file in the Finder or Explorer still opens it in iTunes, which by default copies the track into your library. Ripping CDs still works the same. Drag and drop still works the same.

No, I think it has more to do with watch folders not being a feature in high demand than any conspiratorial nonsense.
I graduated from Caltech. The suicide rate there used to be worse, especially among incoming freshmen who, after being in the top 0.1% of their classes, suddenly find themselves normally distributed for the first time and getting not A+'s. This is why incoming freshmen take their first quarter pass/fail and their second quarter with "shadow" grades.

The school itself is very challenging, much more so than even the closest competitor (MIT). Students there are generally exhausted from working hard and playing hard and there is a culture of depression and self-loathing there. I was generally surprised to not see more suicides there to be honest.
Some interesting observations:

Four of the top five, are Japanese cities

The first US city appears only at no:17 - NY

Abuja at no 18 and Kinhasa at no 19 - they are more expensive than Berlin and Moscow, didn't expect that :)
Writing on the Wall: Will Apple Abandon Developers and the Traditional Consumer?
They come from that list in the same way food comes from a grocery store.
Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups
I love reading about the historical future of technology. Post it and I'll vote it up!
Spark Capital - Planning a Great Business
There actually are Web sites that mock this mess by showing the simplest CSS code and the differing results from the three main browsers and the Safari and Linux browsers.

He forgot Google
It seems like a bunch of Microsoft employees must've found HN recently. There's been a huge surge in pro-MS articles that are devoid of hacker content.
C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3 by Jon Skeet

http://www.amazon.com/Depth-What-you-need-master/dp/19339883...
nice.

Tom Robinson also wrote a similar hack:

http://tlrobinson.net/misc/googlecompare.html
Wonderful idea for Big Brothers all over the world.
Why not also add a link to "Startup Ideas" beside "Feature requests" so anyone can contribute ideas and vote on them?
Please don't use bit.ly links. There's no space limitation here and it will give us all a better idea of where we are about to go.
"Start with e=mc2. This has been accurately measured as true."

By whom? If tachyons were the new measure for fastest thing in the universe I guarantee you that the minimum difference between the old equation and the new one would make no noticeable difference.

"People always talk about how things get heavier when they go faster"

Who says so and who has proved that? You may get heavier by adding gravitron collisions to your particles, and that doesn't mean it is a law.

"As you go faster, you have more energy. Since you have more energy you are heavier."

I didn´t know energy had weight, but again, it may be explainable.

"You find that as you get closer to c your mass goes to infinity."

Unproven. Photons travel at the speed of light and they don't have mass.

"This is probably not enough to convince you"

Nop.

"The light always moved at the same speed."

Who say so? What if light has different speeds based on huge gravitational forces? Nothing to do with the curvature of spacetime (which I call bullshit) but with the perception of the observer.

"Start with that assumption, and create rational formulas to explain how that could work."

If your assumptions are wrong your formulas will also be wrong.

"A clear explanation that anyone can understand."

It is not that I don't understand it, it is just that I don't accept it as truth.

"The final question is, ok you can't send matter faster than light"

I am not talking about matter, it may well be a limit for matter, but how about other forms of known and unknown energy or radiation?

Relativism is ok regarding the observer and using light as a measurement unit. But just throwing a huge number c2 in a formula doesn't make it right, just the same as throwing another t2 (speed of tachyons squared) would make it right either.

Here is my formula: E=mt2

My question stands: why the speed of light squared?
Well, that isn't quite a fair comparison, since the ice-fan only cools the small column of air between the fan and your bed, while an air conditioner cools all the air in a room or building. That said, the ice-fan is probably more efficient than a very small air conditioner than performs the same level of cooling (not that such small air conditioners exist), whereas an air conditioner is surely more efficient than the quantity of fans and ice that would be required to cool an entire room or building.

I have another question, since my basic physics knowledge is a bit lacking. Compressed refrigerant system like air conditioners work by expending (electrical) energy to move heat from one system (the inside air) to another system (generally outdoors). With the ice-fan, where does the heat go? This is probably a fallacious way to explain it, but is the energy being removed from the air and used to transfer the state of the H20 from solid to liquid? And if that's the case, if you wanted to cool an entire room rather than a column of blown air, you'd have to have the liquid water end up outside the room, just like the exhaust from an AC system is outside?
I traveled domestically without I.D. just two weeks ago. They asked me to show anything I had with my name on it, such as credit cards, mail, etc. and put me through the more rigorous security check. It wasn't bad at all.
I told you homeboy
U can't touch this

(...)

Look in my eyes, man
U can't touch this
I live in the US and that's not really my experience, but I was thinking more of written communication, where the differences are very small. (I did say "leaving aside differences in pronunciation.")
I don't know if the goal of this thread is to discuss this particular RFS, but it's one that I've thought about frequently in the recent past.

To me, it seems like anything wanting to hit "google-levels" of success in the news sector has to be more than profitable - it has to solve one or more current flaws in the news-media. Approaching this problem and building a better media mousetrap would seem to require at least some thought as to what those flaws are, which appears to be (wisely, IMHO) left as an exercise to the implementers.
Thanks, a nice read.

First time I've spotted something from my home town university at HN. (Prof. Jarmo Holopainen of the University of Kuopio seems to be co-author of the study)
YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
Somewhat of a tangent, one might even say.
I do think "Einstein's famous breakthrough was one of reason advancing well beyond the facts" bears thinking on. It took years before we could try to falsify relativity empirically, so in the meantime how did we avoid filtering him out as just another crackpot?

But it's hard not to dismiss "even investigative and creative reason have largely been blinkered so as to concentrate it overwhelmingly upon the observable world" as whining that people care more about learning from reality than from nonsense made up on the spot.
Why don't you quit your job and focus on physics?
I think we can help academia by using web apps to create ease off some of the computational requirements needed for papers like factor analysis, MDS, multiple regression etc. - also for surveys etc. My educated guess is that some of the confirmatory factor analysis for something seminal like Hofsteder's work could easily be done in various countries if the people working on the papers have someone with a web app development backgroun.
No, the point of the article is that "X is old and bloated, and that's why it crashes when I'm resizing a video, so it should be deprecated". And that's not sound technical reasoning, and is factually inaccurate.

Windows graphics drivers that suck can also make you lose data. And neither Microsoft, nor your computer vendor can prevent you from installing drivers that suck, and losing data as a consequence. The same goes with X: if you use a closed-source binary blob that the X developers cannot diagnose, fix or improve, that simply doesn't work with XVideo in a composited environment, you can't blame X for the data you lost. Or would you blame Microsoft for the data you lost because of a crappy graphics driver that they didn't ship or lead you to use?

As for "Where is the code?", my point was: without access to any in-depth technicality about how the Windows graphics stack actually manages to isolate crashes (assuming that it's actually a merit of it), claiming that Microsoft has "shown" how it should be done and all X needs to do is follow is rather off the mark. Microsoft may have implemented a high-quality graphics stack that's more stable than X, at least in certain scenarios. That doesn't mean that they have illustrated how it's done in a technical sense, or that their techniques are actually applicable to X, which has an entirely different architecture.
a lot of journals accept reviews also! and they have revenue models as well! :)
More visual pollution. Soon enough people will hit you with a car or rob you on the street and afterwards tell you they work for an insurer or something. They just wanted to show you how important insurance is.
Heck, I (and my friend) was doing pigeon English comedy articles AND hybrid catheads (where the head is half of 2 cat's faces with eyes bulging intermittently), in 1997!
Yes it is, for practical rather than legal reasons. The rental version of a movie is issued to video wholesalers before the consumer DVD becomes available. If you just bought the consumer copy and rented that out to your customers, you'd never have new releases at the same time as other video rental services.
Diapers: Are they necessary?
I'll suggest The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas. Basic stuff, but lives up to the title of being "pragmatic".

If you're going to write commercial software for a living, it's useful stuff to know (or be reminded of).
It seems there are a lot of baby articles, especially contrarian opinions about articles and my wife just sent me this. Thought it may be of interest. A bit shocking when first thinking it, but maybe there's something to it for those raising little hackers of their own.
I think their is also a difference in papers you have skimmed trough, or actually read. I notice that a lot of people make citations to the first category, but when a question is asked about a specific paper, they need to make a clean breast of it and admit that they only skimmed through the paper and did not read it with a certain amount of profoundness.
I'm actually not terribly familiar with how they work, so no worries! I'm happy to be corrected.
Depends on how well they're run, no?

I'm waiting for the big newspapers to start selling supplements to the smaller papers. There's no reason the Hartford Courant couldn't tack on an International and National section with the NY Times brand featured, then they could focus exclusively on local stories. Heck, force the Times and the Journal to compete for the right.

Point is: If you're local, why not go hyperlocal?
That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)
The Road really is a fantastic book, makes you think about how rapidly humanity would change if civilization dissolved. Can't wait for the movie to come out this fall.
1) I think there are several people without ideas but who also want to be polymaths. So they would become wrapped up in whichever RFS they chose.

2) I think the applicant pool is getting large enough that it is worth the risk. pg said the applicant pool was eclipsing 1000. The first round had, what, 220? And most of those companies were successful. If I were to apply, I would stick with one of the 5 ideas that I have brewing, and I think a lot of other people would stick with their ideas too.
I put a sign on the top of my monitor saying "Don't touch the screen".

And I'd smack people's fingers with my ruler when they did.

Damn fingerprints! :-)
Regarding the RFS 1: The Future of Journalism, and specifically the "So what will the content site of the future look like? And how will you make money from it?" part.

The answer to latter appears to be something along the lines of http://contenture.com. I.e. pay in one place, reap the benefits in many. The definition of benefits may vary, but this is the most consumer-friendly model that involves explicit paying.

But even if one has a good understanding how it's going to work, it is not clear how to get there. This project is going to be more of a business development and sales effort rather than anything else and so it is unrealistic to expect a random startup with no existing ties into the news industry to succeed.

So while I understand where this RFS comes from, I am not sure if it's realistic. It seems to be a very long shot. Correct me if I'm too pessimistic.