skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always thought of humor as a way of gaining trust. A joke that succeeds proves that you share a common understanding about some aspect of life. This is why explaining a joke never works (if you have to explain it, it proves you didn't understand each other), and why it's much easier to get a friend to laugh than a stranger; if someone already knows and trusts you, any little thing will remind them of that trust. It's also why insider jokes are only funny to insiders; they are a way of proving shared knowledge and cannot work without it.

It sounds like these researchers showed a special case of this: if you want be the leader in a situation then you need to be able to get people to trust you, so naturally would-be leaders will tell jokes in an attempt to create and reinforce trust. Also, if you're not a leader and you tell a joke then it could be considered a challenge by an insecure leader, so this will be avoided by people who don't want to rock the boat. But to say that jokes are only about aggression is too much. If everyone in the group is comfortable telling jokes then that's a sign that there's a lot of mutual trust.
It's a lame skate helmet with a hat on top. http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2009/08/slow-and-steady-tort...
The advantage the web gives to writers is that it drastically the reduces the barriers to becoming a publisher and reaching a massive audience. The writers who take advantage of this are the ones who benefit from the web, while those who don't are worse off than before. The web doesn't cut out the middle man automatically, but it makes it a lot easier for writers ambitious and savvy enough to do so.
The UNIX Way
Anyone can have ideas. Few can act on them. Inspiration is easy, while implementation is hard.

I am not whining because I am into hardware, not software. Thankfully, in my field a couple of teenagers could never put a 20-year veteran out of business.

I don't think anyone is claiming that Zuckerberg stole the social network website idea. The crux of the matter is whether he stole the code. On the other hand, coding is easy, so why steal it, right?
Effective Meetings on a Budget
Am I alone being very comfortable wearing screaming red colors when i bike through traffic to get to work?

Camouflage green and grey do not seem like strikingly good color choices. They wont even go well with the crimson red blood splat you'll leave under the truck that turned right and didnt notice you.
I call shenanigans.

If the traffic is that bad on a regular and consistent basis, people could account for it by leaving their origin earlier.
Three Khel Ratnas shine bright at Rashtrapati Bhawan
Nice explanation, but the Python example could be expressed just as naturally, and with a bit less code, using a generator instead of a coroutine. I'd have added a note on when to use which style: prefer generators since Python supports them better, but use coroutines when the producer of the data stream has to be 'on top' in the control flow.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745842
I got a similar message while in Cancun a few months ago ($0.03/kb for data - Sprint international roaming). Turns out that they must have meant pesos (Mexico uses the $ sign for pesos, but they are worth 1/9 of a US $), because they only charged me US$0.003/kb.
one thing is the kinda surreptitious way they try to get you to adopt silverlight: "hey, did you know [insert major sporting/cultural/political event] is available as a streaming download? BUT! You have to install silverlight first"

plus, i think many ppl in the more tech-savvy crowd are left wondering why they have to install a plugin for stuff that's already "solved", namely Flash.
Building a better rhyming dictionary
Dude, get this once and for all: I said we should forget labels for a while, didn't I? So, fuck the words "hacker" and "business people".

BTW, I am not a nerdy, deluded, emotionally retarded teenager who is enchanted with PG's essays. I have been in the start-up world since 2002, so I know how reality works.

If you had cared to read my previous comment, you would have understood that the distinction is not between hackers and business people, but rather between people who take the risks, and people who reap the rewards. Ideally, high-risk means high-rewards. The whole fucking point I was trying to make is that smart people position themselves to have disproportionally high rewards for the low risk profile they adopt. That's the whole idea.
When I first opened the page, and saw the front page, I went "Man, this is gonna be great. An in-browser IDE (probably using some site specific syntax) to try out the algorithms. Given a common run-time and an assortment of different types of datasets, you can try out different methods of optimizations right there in the browser without having to do the tedious parts." Then I actually clicked on some links. Then I saw what it was really doing. Then I was sad because I made assumptions.

Seriously though, I'd completely redesign the site. Needing Silverlight to view the algorithm is just insanity. Add in a large amount of varied datasets, and make the goal of it an easy way to experiment with and share algorithms/optimizations (ie, you have 20 different variants of quick sort algorithms. A search for quick sort returns all 20 with graphs indicating the performance of each on each dataset).

As it stands, Wikipedia is a better reference for algorithms, using well-defined and concise pseudo-code to demonstrate the algorithm.
Ask HN: Anyone know the story behind the default twitter avatar?
Natural Hemorrhoid Treatments That Work
For those who have suffered hemorrhoids, you have probably tried every cream and ointment, diet and other remedy you can find to cure your hemorrhoids. What if I told you there are natural hemorrhoid cures that can relieve stubborn hemorrhoid pain and eliminate those nasty critters from your life?
How exactly do you lobby for the car ban ? Just curious.
Futureproofing MapReduce from HadoopSummit 09
Not sure if this the official story??

http://www.seoconsultants.com/twitter/avatars/
Just click outside the lightbox, this works 90% of the time.
Gwibber 2.0 is released
The Landmark Hotel – Luxury Breaks in the Heart of Dundee 
Enjoy Dundee's finest 4-star luxury at The Landmark. More than just a bed for the night, The Landmark Hotel is the perfect haven, set in the midst of the Scottish Glens within easy access of Dundee and local amenities.
It would be cool if people's self-hosted public repos could be crawled and indexed to create a repo search engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Amendment_44_(2006)

"Existing Colorado law classifies possession of one ounce or less of marijuana as a Class 2 petty offense punishable by a fine of $100."

I'm confused, is the article a joke?
This is actually the best quote I've heard from Geller, he speaks very frankly that the publicity has, in the long run, helped more than hurt him. Normally he just pretends to be serious about being a psychic and, true to his statement here, ignores skeptics. It looked like Randi had shut down his career for a while but I understand he's recently had quite a healthy resurgence in popularity.

The maddening thing is, the way that the MSM covers these types of things, I really used to believe all of this stuff as a kid. I really thought that Geller had people bending spoons all over the UK when I was like 11. Randi sometimes comes across as harsh and I don't necessarily buy the rosy picture that is painted of him by his fans, but I think his work and that of others like him is incredibly important. I'm sorry to hear of his cancer, he will be missed when he passes.
"We sent a contract, and asked for a deposit. Months went by. A few times they asked when they could stop by to drop off the deposit, but never actually did so."

The venue's actions seem pretty reasonable to me. They gave the organizers some slack, assuming these are basically decent people. It's not like they're dealing with some unknown or shady operation.

Still, discovering a Twitter-related operation turned out to be much noise/little signal shouldn't be that surprising :)
I would love to see more of those sorts of interviews. I'd probably ask them to give a 30-60 minute presentation on any advanced topic that interests them and that he thought would be relevant for the company.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=792920

As a side note, it looks like the duplication detector won't detect http://something.com and http://www.something.com as being the same thing. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.
Why Microsoft Will Slaughter Its Windows Mobile and PC Partners
Very mediocre post. Including the comments.

"Use php, python, no, use ruby instead! Facebook uses PHP, YouTube Python, blah blah".

Kids, kids, behave! Scripting languages are for kids and web developers who don't know anything about programming and software engineering.

I've worked with Perl and Python developers for the last couple of years... they struggle to understand design patterns and don't even know what a domain object is.
Actually, we booked an overflight (plane) a couple of years back at Foo.
It's been a little bit cropped, but it is the same photo.
Seconded. although it examines criminology, there are interesting isomorphisms with law, management and politics which cynics might regard as simply more mannered versions of the protection racket. Reminds me of this economist article on how the political class draws upon distinctly different pools of professional talent in different cultures: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...
Con men with Asperger's? Call me cynical, but it sounds like another way to play on the sympathies of the people they conned -- people who fall for nerds. Sympathy from their victims will help them avoid the most aggressive prosecution and sentencing. Either that, or they're compensating really well. Modeling a stranger's mind is the key to this kind of deception.
I've been coincidentally re-reading "The Big Con" (highly recommended), and it is amazing to see how little things have changed.
Very mediocre post. Including the comments. I think scripting languages are for kids and web developers who don't know anything about programming and software engineering.

I've worked with Perl and Python developers for the last couple of years... they struggle to understand design patterns and don't even know what a domain object is.
Very mediocre post. Including the comments. I think scripting languages are for kids and web developers who don't know anything about programming and software engineering.

I've worked with Perl and Python developers for the last couple of years, they struggle to understand design patterns and don't even know what a domain object is.
I think scripting languages are for kids and web developers who don't know anything about programming and software engineering.

I've worked with Perl and Python developers for the last couple of years... they struggle to understand design patterns and don't even know what a domain object is.
There can be. There is such thing as integrity and objectivity, particularly with the hindsight of centuries.
http://www.timeapi.org/est/92+days+from+now http://www.timeapi.org/est/3+months+from+now

While we're on the topic, anyone know of a clean Python library for converting local to UTC (that knows about DST)? For example, I'd like to specify a timezone, a local time, and a date, and get a UTC datetime.

In concrete terms, if I know that something is happening at 730pm four months from now in a city that's currently in EDT, suggestions on how to get a UTC for that?
It's not always just two coroutines (could be thousands), and not every language has TCO.

Also: While mutable state is problematic, sometimes the alternatives are worse.
Aha ... That detail had escaped me. Up-voting.
About as long as you have. And yes, I realize that "this is not hacker news" is a common theme, so is the confusion between what is interesting to hackers and what is interesting to startup folks, but I think the content has gotten really bad recently.

There is a pic submission on the front page even as we speak, just one step short of lolcats (frankly, I love lolcats, and so do many younger hackers, but HN would be terrible if the current trends hold up). The number of business submissions is almost always higher than hacking-related submissions. And I see insightful comments downmodded without a response much more frequently these days.
... and the disadvantage is that it might be becoming even more difficult to make money as a writer than it used to be.
You can develop Silverlight apps on a Mac, but only if it has an Intel chip.
I know the view exists, but I slighted it as 'context-free' because I don't know what constitutes 'many people', especially given that commenters are self-selected and thus not statistically representative of the general population. Here in San Francisco, for example, the main newspaper (the moderate-liberal Chronicle) is awash in conservative reader commentary, but this vocal contingent's influence on election results seems to be marginal. So perhaps all the above tells us is that (for example) drivers are more likely to read newspapers as well as owning valuable vehicles, which cyclists are more likely to chat on blogs, in keeping with their lower economic outlay.

I know I'm being pedantic here. Perhaps an interesting freakonomics post would examine different perceptions of few, some, man,y most, all and other such terms, the softness of which is often abused in public discourse.
I spend literally hours trying to get ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript to all play along nicely

If you switch, get ready to spend you hours instead banging your head on Silverlight.
Yes, I hate to sound mean, but it would be nice to wait until there is more content before promoting.. I don't think it would be too much trouble to pick up a copy of "Algorithms in a Nutshell" and start populating the site on your own
Doesn't support Chrome. I was trying to view algorithms here but Chrome was not listed.

http://algorithmatic.com/algorithm/6/version-10/naive-prime-...
> Modeling a stranger's mind is the key to this kind of deception.

I think there are two schools of thought on that question. For instance, you might think that pick up artists are very confident people, but this is not always true:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/cn/instrumental_vs_epistemic_a_bardi...

"Mystery one of the greatest teachers in the [PUA] community has coined the phrase: 'Competence over confidence'. The key is to have a skillset not develop some conceited self-image."

There are some pick up artists who simply know effective techniques, rather than being naturally skilled at picking up women.

Similarly, it is natural to believe that being able to read people is very important to being a con man, but perhaps some con men simply have techniques which they have developed via experiment rather than instinct.
I'm not actually affiliated with the site.
Haha, you are not Van Gough, you are a code monkey. You think your code is a piece of art, but the guy who's going to maintain it may think it's a piece of shit and can end up rewriting it, using a different language, one he thinks is better. Just like you did, Mr. van Gough ;)
Oh, my bad. Sorry about that.
The thing is that natural language processing can't be solved in pieces like this. Even a real human being doesn't understand discreet fragments of otherwise comprehensible human language. It is only by looking language as a whole that we human get the understanding, so spreading language processing out through a number of websites wouldn't work...

Plus this kind of "service" would be very fragile even the cases it would otherwise work...
Doh! I thought it was the web page for a former U.S. Vice-President's new band. :(
Actually, a ticket to the event is $3k so we give these DemoPit tables away as a GIFT to the startups. They get a demo table for one day and TWO tickets. So, it's $6k worth of value...

HOWEVER, you have to be under $500k in angel startup to get them. so it's not like IBM or Google can buy them and put out Google Maps API or something.

Anyway, I understand being skeptical... the event business is filled with crooks like the DEMO conference which charge startups $5k for two minutes on stage or $20k for six minutes!!!

Mike and I started TechCrunch50 to destroy DEMO and that payola model. As a four-time startup founder/CEO I HATE folks asking me to pay... i came up with the idea for TC50 and pitched it to MIke to solve this problem.

all the best, Jason
There are a TON of stories like that.... folks meet VCs, angels, partners, get press and find team members at the event. Networking is WELL worth it from my standpoint.
seconded. even flash would be poisonous here--algorithms want to live in a pre tag!
"What makes you feel icky, irritated, annoyed or off-track if you don't do it enough?"

Showering. I'm not being flippant.

In general, "dealing with life". I am prone to depression, the clinical kind, the kind that causes you to stay in bed or browse web aimlessly all weekend. The kind that makes it seemingly impossible to do the things that need doing, like finishing projects, calling friends, or taking a shower.

I wonder if the many other prone to depression people have similar reaction as I to "life-hack", "feel-good", "aphoristic" blogs/articles/people like this one. The reaction you might imagine a poor person has listening to a top 1%er ponder "which of my seven houses do I not hate spending the summer in".
It looks to me that the only thing going down is you, as a programmer. You've been writing PHP scripts all your life, I understand why you are depressed.
Here are a couple previous winners:

http://tastyplanner.com
http://meetinbetween.us

Both are still running and doing quite well. Although no one has made a million dollars on a Rumble exit quite yet, we're looking forward to the first one :). Maybe someone will buy us a steak for organizing the event heh.
Guilt cultures vs. shame cultures: The Western understanding of Japan
http://www.presdo.com has a much more powerful natural language time parser (that system handles all the timezones in the world) but they don't have a great api for extracting that info. It can't handle stuff like "seven hours before tomorrow" but it can do more common phrases like "tomorrow after lunch" or "day after tomorrow at 3pm"
The reddit comments for this article pointed to a letter Randi wrote regarding his cancer. It's light on details, but hopeful. http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/663-announceme...
The Future of Reading - ‘Reading Workshop’ Approach Lets Students Pick the Books
Medical Marijuana.

Just as you can legally smoke marijuana, you can legally grow it. All they're doing is growing (with a license) and cooking it into different foods, then selling it to medical marijuana dispensaries.
Rising to the Top: 5 ways indie developers succeed on the App Store
Oops, I still have my A1000 in the garage, KS1.1 disks and all.

When I was having a book clear out recently, the Hardware Reference Manual, ROM Kernel Manual: Exec, and the printout of Markus Wandel's Exec disassembly (1) all went onto the 'classics' shelf.

1: http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/exec_disassembly.txt
In South America more people are killed by drunk drivers that stoned drivers.
Is this really the kind of article that should be on HN?
Ever Wonder if You Could Kill What You Eat? We Did the Other Night
I'm not sure that he is. How many times are psychics booked on shows to prove that they are psychic? Instead, they appear on shows like Montel Williams to tell parents of missing children what has happened to their child. They get a lot of publicity without skeptics; skeptics appearing on such shows does convince a few people.
TxtGTD: helps you get organized
If TM 2.0 ever comes out.
There is no official support for Linux, you will need to use moonlight. Until 3.0 font rendering was a major issue, hence NYTimes switched Adobe Air. Creating a stand alone app is harder compared to Air wasn't even possible in Silverlight 2. It still doesn't have printing capabilities even in version 3.

The bright spot of using Silverlight is the programming language, you can code in C# or F#. But considering that you will need to host the solution on a Windows makes it a more expensive to scale. That probably drives away a lot of startups.
Garry Tan and YC have come up with something similar to this way of posting information, with http://www.posterous.com. Similar idea, but specific to music artists and their website info.
I think that's the key to my confusion here -- I wasn't thinking of language constructs like functions or loops as patterns, I was only including things like "factory objects" or "visitors".

Of course, if a function definition is a pattern, does that mean that Lisp (chock-full of function definitions) is a lower-level language than Prolog (which doesn't need functions at all and therefore abstracts away that whole idea)?
yeah, good idea.

The Prime Minister here owns 3 tv channels and somehow more or less controls RAI's other 3 national channels, and they investigate Google...
Reseller and/or affiliate networks come to mind - let them do the selling for you, for a commission.

This would be easier to accomplish with traditional desktop-type software than a packaged web-app - but I would argue that it's not impossible.

You might consider resellers that are willing to work with a pay-per-lead, which likely would work in your favor (protecting your web-app source) more so than a pay-per-sale model. That way, the resellers send interested parties (leads) your way, but you close the deal - and no one gets your product without your say-so.

The normal "protect-your-source" issues arise, but those are out of the confines of this discussion, I think.
TextMate 2: TextMate Forever
UbuntuDeveloperWeek
Ask HN: Best code editor?
Hi, I currently use Notepad++ which I'm really satisfied with. I love Visual Studio but is just a hastle to work with sometimes(long loading time, not useful when working with 1 code file(etc), no reason to create a new "web project" instead of a file, etc).

I'd love to know what you use and if you're satisfied with it?
UltraEdit and Komodo are good. Komodo has a free version, I think.
Discounting vs Predatory Pricing
In a nutshell, it's more expensive to open the club and book bar staff, DJs, security staff etc. than they are likely to take in on that evening with other big events on and no time to promote (ads to the local newspapers have to be submitted a few weeks in advance). The number of people who go to a nightclub just because it's there is likely to be less than 1-200, and a club the size of the DNA lounge needs at least 4-500 to break even.
Some cool projects. However, a small tagline would help a lot with browsing the list.

Edit: just saw that the long list has descriptions.
What, they wondered about it? And to think I used to believe that copy-editing skills would provide me with a living.

Well, I have killed animals but it was only 'hacking' in the very narrowest sense. If you do this again I am going to start cross-posting stuff from Meat-Packer's Monthly :-)
This is a consultative sale. Also, in academia, you're going to have very long sales cycles.

If I were you, I'd try to find a half-time independent sales rep and I'd have one hell of a website. There's absolutely no way that cold-calling is going to work the way that you think it is; it will take up too much of your time to do it correctly. (Honestly, my first recommendation is to stay the hell away from healthcare and education sectors, but looks like that ship has sailed.)
Guy Kawasaki: Twitter spamming works
Coda on MAC is great.
Crimson Editor.
Emacs.

And yes, I'm very satisfied with it. Everytime I see a feature in another editor I like, EmacsWiki usually has an implementation or guide.

Plus emacs has org-mode...
I don't know: HN is rapidly replacing my feed reader; and I think the news is interesting in its own right (may not have anything to do with "hacking", but still).
They've also deleted blog posts mentioning DNA Lounge
If you want to go commercial on windows check out ultraedit.