skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for putting the failures in perspective. I think my biggest challenge on that front is to represent the time I spend on those projects without showcasing the failure or leaving a time gap on the resume. Also, it would be great to be able to represent the "intangibles" that come with startup experience.
I have often wondered about memory tricks and there use in improving productivity. I even considered taking this course: http://www.pmemory.com/ and seeing if I get the profound impact they, maybe over, promise. It seems to be a lot of work.

Anyone used Mnemonics to great daily benefit (Besides test taking and school based applications)?
I have an early 2006 20" iMac (one of the first Intel ones) and it has one of the best displays I've ever seen. I also have a 1st gen unibody Macbook, and the display on that is pretty crappy.
The fact that Sachin's response was understandable is ample evidence that this post is toxic to HN.

A post about how sound cannons work? Edgy for HN, but fair game. But a post about sound cannons used at a G20 protest written up in The Guardian and routed by way of Slashdot?

What's happening in this thread is a perfect example of When Bad Posts Happen To Good HN Members. _FLAGGED_.
Honestly, that would be worse. To knowingly say that a non-lethal instrument like a sound cannon is morally equivalent to dogs, hoses, and god-knows-what-else is crazy. (And I read the OP as saying sound cannons would be worse, and I don't even know how to begin to express my emotions to that.)

Look, you can have your issues with the police's response to a small group of protesters in Pittsburgh, but you know what the nice thing is about boring photographs? No one there is bleeding to death. No one has been singled out for humiliation and treated as less than human based on the color of their skin.
Demonstrations like Rosa Parks on the bus and the Woolworth's sit-ins wouldn't have been affected. Fewer shocking pictures in the paper might have slowed down the movement but I don't think by much.

http://www.hunterbear.org/Woolworth%20Sitin%20Jackson.htm
Thank you PG for bringing it back. However, the time decay is too fast IMO.

Also an orange dot for comments with more than +2 vote difference from the previous comment, might be useful.
I don't know what the situation is in general, but when I was a teenager (not that long ago, though longer than I'd like), in the town where I lived most places wouldn't even consider hiring anyone under 18 because of legal issues.

If you assume that everyone aged 16 or 17 is unemployed, that the number of people of each age is equal, and that I can do arithmetic just before bed, the unemployment rate for the 18-24 year olds would be only 36% or so.
Young Buck Calls Out Eminem in New Song | Hip Hop MVP
The article also notes that the unemployment rate hasn't been above 50% in any of the last 4 or so major recessions. It also doesn't say what the baseline is. Is 48% unemployment in this bracket the norm? If so this is just economic sensationalism.
If at any point you've operated a sole-proprietorship or LLC with an actual documented name, you should list the earliest justifiable start time and the latest justifiable end time for it, allowing it to span the periods where you worked at your least-successful startups. Demote those startups from standalone entries in your resume to bullets (at most) in your IvyIrwin, LLC entry.
I'd like to jump on with everyone else who has said "a day isn't long enough." In particular, a day over the weekend, where the site traffic is way down does not show any real significance as to how it will work out in the long run.

A few people have mentioned simply adding the feature as a greasemonkey script, but I would like to point out that the only way something like this works is if everyone does it, not just as an opt in. It may help that user a little bit, but it makes the problem worse over all.

From my brief experience with the hidden points it looks like it will cause massive karma inflation. I know it was mentioned that a lot of people set a certain value that they thought a post was worth, and voted to try and help it attain that point. It seems (looking at my karma gain over the weekend, compared to the week before) that far more people vote that way, than were voting with points hidden.

As far as point/no points, I vote to put it back. I know its rather anecdotal, but looking at my recent comments I can definitely see which ones were actually worth posting, and which were rather pointless, due to the points that I received for them. In the past, it was hit or miss. Generally, you can expect points for an early comment, no matter what it says, and the total incoming karma would be heavily related to the time of posting. With points hidden, that didn't happen.

Figure out what you want to attain, and give it a chance. One day isn't nearly enough.
I just set up half a dozen new T400s and they looked fine to me.

shrug
What exactly do you do, it may help us to offer useful suggestions on how to fix it
Actually, I would like to have it set so that you can only see the scores until after you have up/down voted. You wouldn't be able to see the score until after you make a decision as to whether or not the post deserves points.
Were lucky? I guarantee you they would much rather have had to deal with sound cannons than the batons, dogs, and fire hoses that they did have to deal with.
I think the display in the MBA at least is really good. As with any glossy display you have to move it a few CM now and again depending on ambient lighting conditions. Matte screens aren't really immune to that either though.
No one has said either of the two things you say in the first paragraph would upset you.

I read the OP as saying what he wrote.
This reminds me of Terracotta. Anyone care to contrast the two?
We can solve those problems when they become relevant. Until we know what's out there we can't know when we'll want to send people far away.

And we better use robots for solving one problem a time, at least in early experimentation. For example, make robots measure absorbed radiation, to test those antiradiation shells. Or make them build a sustainable water supply and farm in the target planet, to prove it can be done.

That could be cheaper, and less risky in human lives, than trying to juggle all balls at once.
This story is about a guy who was too optimistic about his business prospects. Fair enough; it's not good to be unrealistically optimistic.

But it's (often) far worse to underestimate your chances of success than to overestimate them. The worst thing that happens if you overestimate your chances of success are that you blow some money unnecessarily chasing an opportunity that won't work. That's bad; wasting money isn't smart. But the worst thing that happens if you underestimate your chances of success are that you never seize an opportunity that could have changed your life. That's much worse.

In fact, we often have a very imprecise understanding of our chances for success in a venture. Buying tens of thousands of envelopes with no understanding of how many copies of your CD you might sell is, of course, pretty dumb. But how about depleting your savings trying to get a startup off the ground? That's a more measured risk, sure, and one that might or might not pay off. For a lot of people, it changed their lives. Did some of them get through the hard days by relying on the at-best-misleading "if only 1%" doctrine? I bet so.

To the extent this article is a wry observation about the innumeracy of a lot of people (treating 1% as the smallest possible chance of success), then of course, it's well taken. But people use "if only 1%" type thinking to convince themselves to take worthwhile risks, too. If you think, as I do, that we have fewer entrepreneurs than our economy might support, then query whether the real problem is too much risk-taking or too little.
Someone "skilled in the art" can take the descriptions of H.264 and produce a coder and a decoder without copying anything.

Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now? If I patent a Jack in the Box made using a spring and a box you could come along and make one using compressed air and a box.

The amount of protection H.264 would receive is directly related to how broadly derivative work is applied. Even at its broadest interpretation and everything that decoded or encode H.264 had to be licensed from them, at least it wouldn't stop other encodings from using almost all modern strategies to video encoding.
I think this would lead to people just slinging votes all over the place.
How can you write an article about this and not mention rising minimum wage laws? For most companies, it's just not worth it to buy an hour of employment from a 17 year old for $7.25.
This would be a good time for this age group to learn a trade or do a start-up.

I learned (web design, development, marketing, seo) doing my start-up then I ever did in college.

A start-up that needs to be created is a site that mixes Craiglist job section with Facebook; site lists jobs of X company, lists all employees who denote they work (Facebook connect) there and then the job seeker sees which friend in their network is connected to an employee at the company for a referral. Web 1.0 job sites is where everyone currently goes and the employers are inundated with resumes. Getting introduce to hiring manager, HR person or an employee would get you pushed to the head of the stack; get you an interview over all the others just blindly sending resumes! If you know someone directly then you don't have to use Facebook, but Facebook opens the doors to degrees of separations you never knew about.
Well, if we accidentally exterminated a race of telepathic tin wave surfing aliens, that would be a shame!

Is it already established that life needs water, carbon, and earth-like conditions?
Good, it got taken care of.
Z Corp - The Lamborghini of 3D Color Printing and Scanning (Videos)
Somehow I feel more connected to the community here when I can see the scores. It's like the online forum equivalent of being able to read facial expressions.
This is the funniest thing I've read in a long time.
Obviously the 1% argument is completely invalid. However, knowing the size of your market is always important, and looking at the percentage of that market you need for success, can be a good checkpoint.

For example, imagine that you need to bring in 100K to break even with your product. Say you look at the market you're trying to enter, and find that selling 100K worth of your product means that you need to sell to 5%, 10%, or say 20% of the market, then maybe you should reevaluate the product.

On the other hand, if your break even point is selling to "only" 1%, or .5%, or .1%, then at least you're aiming for a realistic market.

By no means is anything guaranteed, but it can give you an idea if you've got a shot.
Thanks for the offer. But in the spirit of HN, this question is for all of the self-employed people out there that might one day need to put together the ol' resume.
OK, as someone who knows nothing about how to evaluate displays, what kind of laptop monitor should I be looking for? Where do I find information on which laptop has the best monitors?

Thanks in advance.
Can you say misleading?
I'm not convinced interoperability isn't key. If all they wanted was a Java clone that handled generics and boxing better, compatible with nothing but themselves, they could have had that years before C#.
Maybe if humans could share space technology we would be decades behind in space technology.

US and USSR couldn't share technology because they were racing vs each other. If it weren't for that race, maybe they wouldn't have put the huge effort necessary to send people to space in the 20th century.
I support the second point (the time tested highly ranked comments).
At first I thought this was 3D wireframe. A thought: someone could write a "diminished reality" 3D wireframe MMO for the iPhone. Locations would be based on real cities with your location in the game determined by your real life location. The player would use the iPhone as a sort of "viewer" into this alternate universe. I'm envisioning gameplay like "Rez" except that the player is static. (Wouldn't want someone running across the street into traffic.)

The beauty of this setup: product placement. Except, it wouldn't be product placement, it would be Customer Placement. One could have a deal with Starbucks. Certain Starbucks locations in big cities would be a gateway to certain quests to obtain rare items. This could tie into a "virtual coupon" for a certain product Starbucks wants to promote. I picked Starbucks, but any business with lots of urban locations and WiFi would do.

Make the gameplay so that there is an advantage to cooperative play with several in the group. This is good for the sponsor -- it brings a bunch of customers in. It also enhances the social aspect of the game.
It's less similar to RoR and more similar to Cappuccino or something.

More often than not, the choice of language is far less important than the choice of programmer and the comfort in the target language and the amount of pre-debugged library code that already exists. So if you think you can do better with Django/RoR, just say so.
You Commit Three Felonies a Day
A completely closed, proprietary platform, with its own (probably incompatible with everything else) language, that advertises itself as being "easier" than other languages?

People keep trying this sort of thing, and the result is almost always slow, brain-damaged, and painful for actual programmers to use, serving mostly to allow non-programmers to accomplish just enough to shoot themselves in the foot.

So, what's the deal? Does this thing actually have any value to it? I sure can't find anything encouraging from their website.
Sounds suspiciously like a new-age COBOL.
Actually, that sounds like an ideal machine to implement pg's idea of having a dedicated work machine where you don't screw around procrastinating. Your screen doesn't have to look good to use Emacs.
Note how the EPI shill is only allowed to make factual or neutral statements, while the Republican shill gets to discuss the only policy options in the piece.
[skolor]I know it was mentioned that a lot of people set a certain value that they thought a post was worth, and voted to try and help it attain that point.[/skolor]

Interesting! Would it perhaps be worthwhile testing a "score this post", or perhaps even "score this comment", on a fixed scale (say, -5 to 10 points)? Karma could still be calculated the old way, but a post/comment will now have two metrics associated with it, the (new) score and the (old) karma gain/loss?
Are Oklahoma Students Really This Dumb? Or Is Strategic Vision ...
This makes me really glad I got a T60p when I had the chance. Somebody sold off a bunch of them on ebay for $350 each a few months ago.

Is there a truly high-end laptop left? Apple's current offerings are a bit disappointing and it doesn't sound like new Thinkpads are any better.
The central claim of the article

"Given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one with less-reputable external marks of status will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery."

and the content are in conflict.

Before the first paragraph is even over Mr. Guo has provided his actual claim

"the most arrogant and academically-snobby kids in the classroom were the ones who were undoubtedly smart but not the smartest. _The smartest kids in the class had reputable externally-recognizable marks of status --- their top-ranked grades on exams and homeworks --- and thus did not need to assert their intelligence._"

I'm not really sure how much more clear that needs to be made. The parallel he then draws is:

"As adults, one common external mark of status is the reputation of one's college. Just like how there are name-brand clothing lines and electronics products, there are also name-brand colleges: What college-educated person hasn't heard of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford? Thus, I assert that given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one who did not go to a name-brand university will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery as a form of compensation for his/her lack of visible status."

The argument is clear and I stand by my statement. The elitism in the article is clear, and it's not the tier 1+n schooled folks. You'll have to recheck your receiver because the only signal I'm getting from this is, "hey state school, did I give you permission to talk? The grown ups can't hear each other over the racket you're making."

Just because it's couched in fancified language like "externally-recognizable marks of status" doesn't change what he's saying.
I too disagree with the point made.

But I also disagree with downvoting for disagreeing, so I modded you up.
"You wouldn't dare say that in person" isn't much of an argument. There's no shortage of uncomfortable truths I don't trust Joe Average to take rationally.

http://paulgraham.com/say.html
"Stating that you are among the elites" implies that everybody else is inferior to you. By definition, that is elitism.
If we can't live sustainably in the planet we were evolved in, what good is spending our efforts trying to colonize others?

If you have a service that leaks memory like crazy, you want to fix that before replicating it to a cluster of refurbished 486s.
I really didn't think I cared when they went away, but now that they're back, I see how much I do like having them. Good call.
In my experience (Thinkpads as employee laptops at Facebook) there seem to be two varieties of screens: one set is utterly unusably bad while the other set is perfectly normal. They appear randomly on the same model, and your chance of getting one or the other is about 50/50.

Of course, I wouldn't want to leave it to chance. Don't buy one.
Web 2.0 Expo NYC 2009
Nobody but you has claimed they're "morally equivalent". These are on the market because they're thought to be more effective (even if only because they can be used indiscriminately). If that's true we should all be glad the little Eichmanns of the 1960s didn't have them to set back civil rights even farther.
Not many people take economics, and realize these 2 things are connected. Sad fact of life, but the main proponents of higher minimum wage laws are the same people who get hurt by the law in the long run.
Google Safe-Browsing and Chrome Privacy Leak
For free access to * Expo Hall
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Register for the "expo hall only" with the code EXPOPASS. See details at http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2009/public/content/whats-fre...
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61P. It would be a good machine except (1) the screen quality is consistent with that described in this article. Furthermore, it's developed hundreds of dead pixels. (2) The shift keys need to be hit exactly in the right place for them to work - the keyboard is a bit dodgy. (3) I had to replace the battery twice (under warranty) in a period of 6 months after buying it. I paid for quality (and was happy to based on reputation), but did not get it. It's been a very frustrating.

My day job laptop is a Dell D630. Very happy with this. My next laptop will be a Dell. The track ball on the Lenovos is much better.
RunRev is based on MetaCard, which was a cross-platform implementation of Apple's HyperCard that ran on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, etc.

They took the HyperCard-ish IDE and turned it into a more familiar IDE (from the standpoint of users of more mainstream IDEs).
The last Lenovo/IBM laptop with a good screen was the T60p. I believe they actually used IPS panels for that LCD screen.

The only good screens on Lenovo laptops these days are in the tablets. I know for a fact that the X200 tablet uses a good panel with decent colors and viewing angles, although it is hampered somewhat by the digitizer. It is possible to replace the LCD panel in some Lenovo models with other panels of higher quality. Here is an example of one such modification: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=366472
He assumes a MS patent claim won't hurt a mono-using company. He asserts they'll just remove the code and happy days again.

But that's not the worry here: MS could sell a mono-related patent to someone who's willing to attempt to bankrupt a mono-using company.

And so, Mono puts a company at more risk of dying in the court-room, gives MS more "proof" Linux is not safe, and gives MS more leverage in negotiations via patent-threats.
You know, there's a certain charm seeing someone give a lecture on math in MS paint. Of course, it helps that he has an english accent.

In regards to the topic, mathematically 0.9999... is less than 1. Practically 0.9999... = 1. Simple as that.
It's not really the point of this article but magazine advertising is by far the least effective type of marketing we've ever tried.

The prices are high and the circulation numbers you're quoted are rarely the actual number of people who will see your ad.
Orthogonally, if he really wanted people to buy the CD, why place an ad in some magazine and expect people to place orders? Aren't there other ways to advertise?

(yes, I get that the point of this post is about success, and how the 1% argument is flawed, but still..)
The concept of punishment is also out of whack. If this guy was convicted of wiretapping, he could go to prison for longer than someone who ran someone else over with their car.

(The reason is that "intent" is well defined with respect to murder/manslaughter, but not with newer crimes.)
Thanks to the space missions we get technology that is useful for X and Y. So why not invest that money to research solutions to X and Y in first place instead? Presumably, with similar allotted funds we'd stumble into discoveries that are useful for Z (and maybe even W, if we're really lucky).

That's 3 or 4 letters for you, easy. And all we had to do was start with an useful goal. Who knew?
> mathematically 0.9999... is less than 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

"In mathematics, the repeating decimal 0.999… ... denotes a real number equal to one. In other words, the notations 0.999… and 1 represent the same real number. This equality has long been accepted by professional mathematicians and taught in textbooks."

Note the "real number" part, of course. If you use a non-real number system, more power to you.
Reddit XSS worm (Don't mouseover Reddit comments and use FF+Noscript)
Infected page:

http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/9oo78/

Discussion on proggit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9oo8j/source_code_for_the_redditfirefox_exploit/
Considering tools like MoMA are exclusive to Mono and don't have an equivalent in the .Net world (http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA), I'd state that in some cases Mono is a little ahead of its Windows counterpart.
All states with income tax believe that income earned in their state is taxable in their state.

CA happens to be rather agressive about it. FWIW, that's why professional athletes end up paying CA taxes. (Interesting question - suppose that your team plays a game in CA but you don't. Do you owe? Does the answer depend on whether you could have played? I heard about a lawsuit arguing about whether practice time, presumably out of state, counted in the apportionment.)

NY is also rather aggressive. I heard of a lawsuit involving an out of state employee who got dinged for visiting corporate headquarters.

I don't recall how the lawsuit (that I know about - there were probably others) over "move out then sell" wrt CA ended. Your tax attorney should.

And no, you shouldn't rely on tax information that you get on HN. Even if I get all the details right, you have no way to know what applies to your situation.