skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. Only a handful of top-level chess players are in the multi-million dollar range, while there are thousands of mathematicians in that range (the majority from the financial industry).
Indeed. Professionals want constant reassurance that it's OK for them to be paid to be constantly interfering with children's play.

"How to begin to educate a child. First rule, leave him alone. Second rule, leave him alone. Third rule, leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

(D.H.Lawrence)
with services like cdbaby (who are signed on to spotify), independent artists can get pretty direct access to consumers, its only one separation from artists directly controlling their own distribution.

to be fair its been like that for a while with cdbaby and itunes, lets hope we start seeing a larger throughput of artists "go it alone" now that this is all in place, or maybe we were wrong about the labels (and the artists) all along.
Ask Web Designers: High quality.PSD to template 8.5x11" PDF generation?
What steps would you recommend for taking a .PSD file and transforming it to a standard, 8.5 x 11 inch PDF ready to print?
Oliver Sacks talks about what hallucination reveals about our minds
I am used to typing "ll", so I get very frustrated when ll isn't aliased. Also, this means that I have probably never typed sl since I rarely type ls.
I really don't think that coloring the arrows is going to be a good idea. That will carry entirely too much meaning. People will think the red has something to do with the button and will be confused.

I also suspect that you haven't thought this through. Try mocking up a page full of red arrows instead of red dots. Even without doing so myself, I predict that because the arrows have twice the area of the dots you'll find that it looks far more cluttered.

Meanwhile, my bikeshedding alarm is flashing. ;)
Share the Moment and Spread the Wealth
Ask HN: Is there an app that does the opposite of a dictionary?
Type in a definition or a description and get a word back. I have needed this app for so long and I assume others do to. This surely exists or am I mistaken?
Perhaps, but it certainly doesn't seem to be hurting them that much.

Not to mention that at least some of the regulation is probably net-beneficial even if it inconveniences a few businesses.
A Solar-Powered Home, Without the Bulky Panels
He was an active users before his startup (Direct Edge) joined YC this summer I believe.
I never really went to shows much, so no. That's just me, but if there were a general trend of pirates spending more money on going to shows, the clubs would be booming, but AFAIK they're not. From what I understand (no source here but talking to older scenesters), fewer people go to shows now than they did back in the day.

If the total amount of money going to shows has not increased, then artists are just having to compete harder for a slice of the same (or smaller) pie by giving away something that they used to be able to charge for to promote themselves. It may be the rational thing for an artist to choose to do now, but the overall situation is worse for them than it was back then. It's sort of analogous to how investing in capital goods for a commodity business like textiles ends up benefiting the customer, not the producer (though other producers have to invest too or they are crushed).

Sometime between stints at rehab about 10 years ago Courtney Love suggested downloads + tips as a substitute for the record industry as we know it.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print....

If there had been an free itunes-like service that made it convenient to tip, I would have gone for that (I use the past tense because I'm old and busy now and haven't listened to much new music lately).
There are some people who prefer JavaScript to scheme. More importantly, many more people have been exposed to JavaScript than have been exposed to scheme.
Would this really be an issue? In my experience the biggest hold up is people in the aisles putting their bags in the overhead lockers and edging into their seats while you're trying to get past to your seat. In the image you linked to the although there are more aisles each is shorter so there would be fewer people in front of you blocking your aisle.
I guess there is no new idea under the sun. Check this one out: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gelato_the_friendfeed_o... . It does everything you mentioned. Moreever, it pulls out information not just from your facebook but from all other networks as well.
Seems like a lot of people have their own specific ideas to how they may want comments sorted / listed.

How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that. Store the function in each person's profile, make them visible, and more importantly, make them share-able (like an app store?) so you can see which functions turn out to be most popular...

There's a giant can of worms there safety-wise (people running their own code on your server ?!?!) and unknown loading effects (nothing to stop people writing infinitely recursive loops...), although that said, it didn't stop you with viaweb did it?

Also haven't looked at the news.arc code recently so not entirely sure which part could be customised...
Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard
http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

edit: a google search for 'reverse dictionary' turns up a whole bunch of them:

http://www.google.com/search?q=reverse+dictionary
Being concerned with real implementations largely falls under the category of engineering, and I have yet to hear a concrete example of depending on experimentation that doesn't amount to "we have to use the scientific method to make sense of shoddy, undocumented work by other programmers", which I have a hard time regarding as central to the field, even if regrettably necessary.
Traitor doesn't mean "evil".

If you understand (not necessarily agree with) the reasons Stallman gives for being cautious about Mono/C# then you'd understand why someone who'd done so much for Free Software in the past, who is now driving Mono, could be described as "basically a traitor to the Free Software community" i.e. someone who used to promote their ideals, but now threatens them.

It seems strange that Stallman, widely regarded as some kind of maniac, regularly gets grief for single word choices or off-hand comments. Would this be a discussion if he'd said "his actions no longer align with the best interests of our community"? If he's really that crazy why didn't he go on some venomous tirade and character assassination like some political shock-jock?
Totally. And I hope to expose these people to Scheme :)

That way, when your actual job calls for working on stuff in JavaScript (like me!), you have another perspective in your toolkit.
It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor.

It's only become shocking to people in our culture in the last few decades, since it undermines the Truth that everyone is essentially of equivalent ability, and trying hard is the only reason some are better at some things than others.
why would people downvote the link to what the parent comment was asking/stating?
Nate Silver Finds Unusual Patterns in a Polling Firm's Data. Was it fabricated?
Your average guy maybe, but I doubt you'll get too many women or teenage girls to shower inside of 5 minutes, especially if they have long hair. However a shower longer than 10 minutes might as well be a bath as your average tub only needs 60 gals to fill and your average shower pumps out 50 gals in 10 minutes. So if you take your time showering, you might as well take even longer and have a good bath instead.

After all a shower is supposed to be a fast alternative to a bath, if you take forever in a shower you might as well go full hog.
Why is it other people's job to decide what is and isn't good?
Facebook is a resource for contact information. Most people put it on their profile.
emmmm, that's though. I use eztv.it, but I just am not sure if I want to go that route just yet. At this point I am really open to helping someone create a bookmarklette, or like a grease monkey script.

I am just fresh out of the gate and would love to do a small number of things with this site really well.

So maybe at some point, but I would look out for an aftermarket hack before it shows up on the site.
I've been using namecheap for over 3 years. Haven't had a single problem. I own 20+ domains through them.
Geocities is due to be shut down. Thanks perhaps to me, Archive.org is mirroring all the pages they can, but bizarrely, Geocities have anti-spidering 503 pages, so it's hard to access the pages.
Computer scientists successfully boot one million Linux kernels as VMs
Don't know about your grandparents, but I'm sure that my grandparents mostly listened to music on the wireless. Buying records was a new trend for them (compared to their parents).
How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that?

Harder than you think, I expect. You're proposing to do a custom query, of arbitrary, user-chosen complexity, for every single page view.

Moreover, the result will be of dubious merit. Individualized filter functions screw up conversation. That's what's wrong with conversation on the rest of the web -- people all read blogs, but nobody reads the same blogs, and people encounter the blogs in arbitrary order, and some blog entries are more out of date than others, and the result is like trying to carry on a conversation with a bright but slightly deaf time traveler who is probably a troll.

We have a distributed, personalized version of HN comments: They're called blogs and RSS feeds. The quality tends to be higher. Your personal filtering options are much more numerous and powerful. And they're just not the same thing. Otherwise I, for one, would be writing for my blog instead of posting on HN. Lord knows it would be better for my career.
Microsoft gets cleverer with multitouch screen keyboard
Lessons from Lars Rasmussen (with link to PDF)
You seem to be rather 'vision' oriented in the choice of your significant others, ("For example if I see a cute girl on the site I'll send her a message saying I would love to get to know her and ask if I can see her full facebook profile." and "The only problems I have with the site are sometimes the girls pictures are very mis-representative"), why not choose some of the people that do not have pictures in their profiles and simply converse with them ?

Who knows, you might find that the people whose exterior is unknown to you are more interesting just because you have forced yourself to look further than 'skin deep'.
pg's experiement
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979
It means the comment has reached the "good" threshold and has 5+ upvotes. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
This a summary or transcript of the same event (the Warren Centre Innovation Lecture 2009) that this talk comes from:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784074

(that didn't get any votes or discussion when I posted it, but I still think it's worth watching or reading)
One of best programmers I know is a Waterloo grad. He says looking back they prepared him very well.
cema had it right -- undergraduates in general like to optimize away their education.
Very fast, scalable mutable maps and hashes for Haskell
Spotify uses P2P for distribution as opposed to maintaining high street record shops and expensive product packaging so it saves a lot on distribution costs. Oh and also they don't have any other choice.
For some reason I feel a lot cleaner after a shower than after a bath.
GV does far more than forward calls -- they offer a lot of the same value-added services AT&T charges for. And very importantly: GV includes a dialable number. People in (for example) those Iowa counties can call GV numbers, but those GV numbers can't return those calls. Maybe Google's Vint Cerf can explain how that asymmetry improves the End-to-End Connectivity of the phone and data networks involved?

If AT&T blocked dialing to those counties, AT&T customers would have to pay another long-distance provider more to complete their calls. Since Google blocks dialing those counties, GV customers have to... pay another long-distance provider more to complete those calls. Exactly equivalent, in practice.
There's a post about the background and motivation for the OS (Renraku) here: http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os

If you want to talk more about it or OS dev in general, feel free to ping me on IRC (Daeken on freenode) or on AIM (bloomfilter).
Well, twelve hours ago or so I suggested the quintile idea. So I feel qualified to vehemently disagree with myself. ;)

On second thought, the problem with the quintile idea is that it presumes that every thread has an equal distribution of valuable contributions, middling contributions, and lousy contributions. But we don't want to rule out (e.g.) the possibility that an entire thread might be great and that every post deserves a dot.

Moreover, the quintile idea retains aspects of the piling-on problem: A sufficient quantity of super-upvoted comments will push other worthy comments out of the top quintiles.

Finally, quintiles are just way too complicated.

So I'm prepared to believe that I was wrong twelve hours ago. I like the threshold idea. Especially because the threshold can be tuned. If 5 isn't enough it can be turned up to 11 by a well-meaning moderator, acting at the appropriate time.
A thesaurus does a certain amount of this already, doesn't it?
Being Interesting is Not Enough: Be Useful
California used to be considered considerably more friendly to business with lower taxes and less regulation. This link may be of interest: http://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/who-killed-ca...

I do think the question, given California's fiscal difficulties, of whether or not California will be able to sustain its historical economic advantage is a legitimate one especially with migrations to neighboring states that Texas seems to be benefiting from in particular. In this particular case however, it would be interesting to know whether or not the cost/burden of regulation has gotten progressively worse or if there's even a trend in California as clearly California has been a success until more recently.

There also appears to be a meme developing that Silicon Valley may not hold as many advantages as it did in the past given that the cost to develop a web based business has dropped so dramatically - meaning that access to venture capitalists isn't as important as it used to be. [disclosure - I don't live in California]
World bids farewell to U.S. dollar
Stallman is a 'polarizing figure', it's the if you're not with us you're against us mentality that gets a lot of people up in arms all over the world.

I'm a great fan of free software. I think all software should be free, and in the long run I hope that that will be the case, but I doubt that that will actually happen.

There will always be niches so obscure or unpleasant that the only way to get someone to code that stuff is to pay them for their work.

And that's good, it certainly does not brand them as 'traitors', unless you want to consider open source software versus closed software as a war. I think that is not the right way to approach the problem.

I think it is more along the lines of two competing business models that duke it out in the market, with market share being the yard stick by which you can measure the success of both methods for software development.

So far, open source software has done pretty good, but calling ex open source contributors 'traitors' is actually helping closed source, and hurting open source.
Hmmmm - I'm confused by this one since (a) I do this often, and (b) it's as easy as File -> Print for me. I'm either doing it wrong or it's that easy. I know there is File -> Save As too but I don't use it.

N.B. I'm not a graphic designer or a web designer, per se, but I do that sort of work for my company in the sense that we hired people to do the creative and give us the .ai and .psd then I edit it for upload/print.
AT&T Launches 3G MicroCell Site
I've been experimenting with various ways of indicating high scoring comments. At the moment I use an orange dot after the time.

At one point I tried giving all comments initial dots, and turned them red when the comment had a high score.
First off, you shouldn't be discouraged just because the large company you work for didn't move forward with your idea.
Just because they haven't done it yet, maybe they need a reminder, or maybe there is a reason it didn't go further.

Often a big company needs a stake holder and champion. Maybe they were expecting you to grab the ball and run with it after the meetings you had.
This speaks directly to the 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Big companies often don't follow through, just like start-ups.

I assume the company you work for is already in this space, and has the power to get something like this done. If so, you may be in a great position to get this accomplished.

As with any business, you will run into challenges.

The big challenges I see are
1) artists want to be discovered, and MySpace is the defacto location for that. Then their is iLike, last.fm, etc. etc. etc. Reinventing the wheel just because of the 'local' components might be a serious challenge, as artists want to go and global quickly.
2) look at sites like Amie Street for an example of what is happening in the Indie space. They are really creative and doing some great stuff. More recently they've been working with the big labels because (in all honesty, I believe) it is difficult to build a music community only on the indie community. Even people who say they support indie often like the major artist stuff too.

If you've got the chops or contacts to get it built, give it a go and see what you can do in your local scene. You'll learn a ton just from the experience.

There is no guarantee of a success or failure, and I don't see any truly significant flaws.
I also notice patio from my days on the JOS forums, which he also frequents.
I think the red was much less distracting than the orange, although it may be that it is after the time that is causing that (rather than next to the arrows).
NYT: How Sharing Links Has Become Big Business
Dynamo Kiev was pretty much the national team of the USSR :-)
I'm way behind on basically anything that happened since SFP08. :-) Though I should've remembered Gabor - I've read a few posts on ReMail since.

Also completely forgot tonywright, who's also a YC founder and someone whose posts I enjoy reading a lot.
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/tcl-not
Computer systems are complex, and it's required to understand their performance behavior.
You have an excellent and diverse programming toolbox, you should be an asset to anyone.
Why does a 'bad' post have anything to do with the ratings though? Even with no rating whatsoever you will still find people with 'good' and 'bad' posts and recognize them by their username. The only way to to get rid of this would be to make all users anonymous.
I would agree and say I am a very visual person. It's not necessarily that I'm looking purely based on looks but I like to see who I am talking with.

That being said with pictures you can tell much more than "skin deep" looks. For example you can see if they have friends, what things they like to do, if they like to party or not, etc. Facebook makes it pretty to get that kind of info quickly
Thanks for pointing this site out, I'll definitely check it out!
Great idea, horrible implementation. 5 minutes of something like this followed by an actual serious and worthwhile presentation might have been pretty funny. But 35 minutes is definitely moving into Yoko Ono territory, and not in a good way.
Ask HN: Orange dot?
What is this little orange dot I keep seeing around the comments?

Is it related to the now-missing comment ratings?
I agree with not feeling comfortable with introducing a facebook friend to someone else, which is why I think the premise of Thread is flawed.

But as a guy looking for a date I am looking for people outside of my own network for people who have specifically stated they are looking for someone as well. Which is why I like Plenty of Fish
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846343 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
I see, thanks guys for the timely replies.
Elastic Python deployment networks
Game Console Makers Feeling the Heat from Apple
Will internet enabled TVs hurt video game console sales too?
Will internet enabled TVs also hurt video game console sales?
An Introduction to JavaScript's "this"
Elegantly stated.

I, too, recognize and respect many people here. I would not dare to list them all, just as I would not dare to try and publicly list all my friends. That way lies nothing but inadvertent slights and endless apologies.

And I think knowing a bit about a writer's background is almost always of value to me.

But that doesn't mean I upvote posts on that basis. Upvoting is an editorial function. You don't do it for yourself. You do it for other people. And so the quality of each piece of writing must stand and fall on its own.

You have to learn to think like this to write effectively. You have to try to look dispassionately at the writing of people you like and admire. Because, alas, there is nothing more dear to you than your own prose. William Faulkner said: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings." You will write a lot of stuff that looks good to you, but that just doesn't fit. You will write stuff that starts out sensible and then turns on itself. You will write things that are just too delicate to say on the web. And you will make boneheaded mistakes. The art of writing is not so much to avoid doing these things, but to catch yourself in the act and edit them, as consistently as you can, and hopefully without hurting your own feelings too much.
I'm not so sure about that. I think content should stand on its own, regardless of who wrote it.
That's borderline stalking.

People should reveal themselves to you at their pace, as they grown more comfortable, not at yours.
The ability of professional educators to turn what are valid and powerful observations about childhood development, such as this stuff about executive function, into stale, formulaic, and worst of all ineffective teaching techniques never ceases to astound me.

It probably boils down to the problem that when trying to teach "children" as an amorphous mass, "formulaic" and "effective" are simply never going to go together. No matter how smart the formulator or how hard the formula-applier tries.
So I once happened to be at a company where I was lucky enough to have several colleagues join me in an SICP reading group. We squatted in a conference room once a week and plowed through as many sections as we could during lunch.

The key feature of the reading group, I thought, was that we were able to identify, right in our production code, right there in the conference room, instances where we used particular idioms from the SICP section under discussion. It was that identification of actual fancy SICP concepts (in scheme-world) in the familiar production code (java-world) that made this particularly worthwhile; folks (including me) saw a whole bunch of places where our java codebase would be (or had already been) improved by applying what we were reading about in the book. It was among the more useful exercises of my professional career so far.

So perhaps this django-based discussion group could include illustrations from a reasonable open source codebase (django itself?).

Sounds like great fun.
One standard to rule them all? Make it keyed like Firewire and it sounds like a real winner.
And none of their wifi drivers work.