skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i read a sci fi story recently in Asimov's in which every activity was rankable. it tracked a young man's attempts to "become somebody". he got to 124,425th in yoyo, 513,130th in honey making, 23,098th in blah. you get the point.

the story was a bit cliche in its ending: the young man, in his latest quest to become the world's best lover, is befriended by a young woman who avoids public recordings and doesn't give a damn about ranks. he finds enjoyment in learning how to juggle even though he is terrible.

the story is neither here nor there; i'm just thinking about the future.

note: if the real future, the rankings will be broken down by age, ethnicity, and some much particulars. why stop at 3 billion categories when you can slice it into 30 billion?
Is it really all that difficult to throw in a comment explaining what it is you're trying to do when it's not obvious to someone other than yourself?
As someone who owns a tablet PC I disagree. I have two convertible tablets, one pen only and one with touch and pen.

I almost never use the pen unless I am in note taking mode or doodling in OneNote. There is a certain level of conscious effort required to take out a pen, which limits its overall use. The laptop with touch I find myself tapping the screen to hit links and buttons on a semi-regular basis.

Essentially the pen is super comfortable for a very small niche, but is too big for me to want to carry it all the time. (Its the size of a paper notebook...) I am not the type to carry a moleskin around though, for what thats worth.
What I don't get is why haven't anybody brought one on the black market from some Russian general who is ready to take a lot of black money?

There is got to be plenty of counties who would be prepared to pay a lot of money for such a device, since it guarantees that they will never be attacked by the US.
Your second sentence is correct, but it implies your third is impossible.
I recall sometime around my 2nd or 3rd year in college someone remark that students go into engineering mostly from "blue collar" families. I never thought about it before that of course who would want to work so hard at engineering when you could go to law or b-school instead. Much later, I recalled when in high school, I was offered a scholarship in dramatic arts from a top school. I was very certain when I rejected the proposal that theatre would be a horrible way for me to earn a living. I was 17 at the time, how was I to know that as an adult people would commonly tell me I remind them of Tom Hanks and look like Robin Williams?

I'm not sure that being from a tough or financial disadvantaged background makes one more appropriate or better at being an entrepreneur. However, it may make it so your apparent options direct you to being an entrepreneur.

Two traits I find commonly lacking in entrepreneurs from tough or financial disadvantaged background are 1 - discipline and 2 - access to capital. I think both these attributes are more indicators of entrepreneurial success than anything else.
Job World: Oracle Recruits Freshers
When I read the essay I wasn't offended about Paul's thoughts on Arrington, I simply thought they were wrong. There's a difference between being offended by something and thinking something is incorrect. I think the main focus of the discussion about Arrington was about the fact that the reason why most people dislike Arrington is not because he is un-ingratiating.
SquareTrade only reported a 16.4% failure rate, 60% of which was attributed to RRoD and 40% are other failures, which include overheating and consumer related damage including the use of cooling pads (ironic). This means Microsoft's failure rate for 360s on a hardware standpoint is ~10%, which is slightly above industry standards but certainly isn't deserving of the class actions. Personally I'm wondering what Microsoft has been holding back, the class actions happened way too fast after these "studies" came out meaning MS never got to make an announcement on their own findings. I have a feeling they have a silver bullet in case the class actions ever get to court or they would have already attempted to court sympathy with the public.

I'm wondering if Microsoft will have a leg to stand on arguing that consumer demand for environmentally friendly products negates their claim for defective electronics as high-density electronics are hard to solder efficiently using non-lead based solders. If they can get a judge to side with them that the consumer demand for 'green' products means a higher defect rate could get the entire class action kicked out, but then the 360 wasn't exactly advertised as environmentally friendly (like MacBooks are) so if this would fool a judge or not is a wonder.

The current 'jasper' model 360's have a RRoD rate of less than 4% which is actually significantly better than the industry standard of 5-8% for hardware failures in the first year.
huh? it's a random draw and each drawing is an independent event.

The "statistically right bet" is zero.
I give you that.

Palm should invest more into software like songbird. Shit, palm should buy them and throw money at them. Songbird is meant to start of working like iTunes, but add support for MTP and such, is cross platform (makes developers happy), already has support for iPod, now all that is needed is support for Palm and a good marketing push.

You are right, Palm should not be trying to scratch away at apple's skin with a rubber band, but instead go for the arteries with a nice sharp knife.
I'm not sure why he feels this is a correlation. But if you consider that access to capital is one of the best ways to reduce risk when starting a business, it may be surprising to see such a large number of those with no access to capital trying to do so.
I'm with you all the way on descriptive names.

As for comments though, in my experience they can be extremely useful. And I don't mean just one liner's but a couple sentences here and there explaining what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Agree with you also though, that often a coder working with someone else's base won't take the time to do it. I think this is because we naturally take less pride in maintenance work then we do in the creation of an application.
I think attempts to answer philosophical questions with science are mostly pathological. Most of the time they get 99% of the way to their conclusion due to initial assumptions that are much a matter of faith and then make some thin scientific assertion on top of those monumental assumptions.

A deterministic universe is an okay working assumption for conducting most scientific experiments most of the time, but there's a big jump from that to using it as a fundamental basis for answering the big questions in a "scientific" manner. One might even calling it pseudo-philosophy since it attempts to paper over the hard philosophical issues by using some trite application of scientific reasoning applied to wholly unjustifiable foundations.

Science may eventually come to bear on certain philosophical issues, but it won't be by "scientists" who are simply uncomfortable with certain ideas and thus chase certain conclusions, it will be due to new discoveries that change our understanding in unforeseen ways.
That's an interesting viewpoint.

pg says that one of the key qualities in startup founders is being relentlessly resourceful.

1. What is stopping you from building a product (and thereby getting customers) while working for largeco?

2. What is stopping you from finding an American co-founder to startup with?

One of the risks of #1, of course, is that you run the risk of violating your H1 status if you work for someone else, but if you make something people want, and get traction (without charging for it), then you'll have a much easier time starting a company, raising money for that company and sponsoring your visa.

It would be much easier if the US just allowed you to come here and set up shop, but then, how would they know who to let in? (The UK/Canada/Australia get around this by using your past experience, education and skills and I have no idea why the US does not - it does, however, have a vastly more higher requirement O1 visa.)
I actually agree with you. The polygraph isn't useful. To my way of thinking people can scam it just like they could scam the drawing test. But what is even worse about the polygraph is that it will often misreport someone as lying when they told the truth.

That's why polygraph test aren't usually accepted in court in my country.

For that matter, though, I don't think any type lie detector test, polygraph, drawing, etc is really worthy of being used as court evidence. It may help law officials who suspect that someone is lying, but it isn't going to be conclusive proof no matter how you do it.
"undefined" doesn't mean it has no state. it does have some state. it's just that this state can't be predicted. it can still be recorded and used in debugging backwards.
Whether there's a correlation depends entirely on the proportion you find in the general population.
Even WOPR knows that.

"The only winning move is not to play."
Norvig's article on experiment design is valuable, and a more targeted discussion of sample size with respect to the size of the effect being studied can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power, and in some of the references contained within.
a lot of pythonistas consider monkey-patching to be exceptionally poor taste.
Xobni (YC S06) - moving to the cloud. Looking for Server Eng/Architect [SF]
Senior Server Engineer - email jobs@xobni.com

Xobni is quickly expanding and we're looking for a Server Engineer / Architect who can help lay the foundation for our growing server team. Ideally you've worked with LAMP, live and breathe a flavor of Linux, and know how to structure code in a team setting. Also if "growing a server team" makes you think, "oh, they need a package manager, and a deployment system with DB migrations" and you are capable of putting that together as one of your many projects then you are who we are looking for.

This is a high growth opportunity position and it will be challenging.

Requirements

6+ years of experience as a software developer (internships count)

2+ years with with PHP/MySQL/Apache

2+ years experience working on a server side team of 3 or more.

You must believe that test driven development is good and be upset and when you find out we're not doing it. Well, upset enough to help fix it.

Project Management Skills demonstrated by the ability to break down larger tasks (2 man months) into smaller ones and then deliver.

Knowledge of APT, Python, Javascript, Memcached, JSON, ORMs, WSGI and ROR is a plus

Bachelors degree or higher in Computer Science or similar/relevant field preferred

Willingness to run Outlook (inside of a VM ok)

email jobs@xobni.com if interested
If you know your audience, you can guess what might distract them from the point you want to make.
I guess I've been using Google Earth too much. I see things from several miles up. ;)

But seriously, a good criminal would check Google Street View to see what the area looks like before the drawing test. Then they would be able to draw it.
I wish I had an intelligent comment, but all I can think of is: Hooray!
Clay Shirky: Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers
pg also says do a startup full time. There is a reason for that: startups are iterative and you should develop something in close contact with customers. Trying to do it while working on a full time job makes it very very hard.

Secondly, the legal issues both on the immigration side and in terms of working on something while working for another tech company make it a very very very fine line that you have to walk. Conservative lawyers will tell you there is no line, you are breaking the law if you work on something other than your day job period.

Finding a co-founder is like finding a marriage partner (seriously). It is not impossible to find an American partner but limiting your possibilities only makes it a little harder. Plus, you better hope you are a great judge of people because if your American partner walks out, your startup is doomed.

Finally, yes skill based immigration (as Canada does it) is the answer IMHO. But even if they let people who are already in the US on H1B and who are skilled start their startups through a formal visa process, I will be happy.
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Could I propose that this whole thing is causated in the reverse direction to the one the article proposes: that the gene is for increased sensitivity to pressure and stress, and that kids try to escape the feeling of stress by fleeing into logic and hypothetical situations and memories, things that don't hold the same pressure as the present moment, but also thereby increase their IQ and memory with repeated "practice?"
Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Fight 'Brain Drain'
I'm taking issue with the parent's assertion that a writer shouldn't make two points in the same essay. The implicit reasoning is it is distracting -- which is true whether you think the point is offensive or just wrong. That's a good reason to avoid extraneous points if your purpose is to persuade. If your purpose is to explore though, it is counter-productive to suppress intermediate waypoints.
It's been possible for quite some time. Someone I vaguely know set up a startup back in 2006 looking to do just this:
http://undo-software.com/
4chan vs Scientology: really?
Obviously the Google Analytics people didn't actually write that terrible mess. They used code compression software to obfuscate it and reduce its size.

But seriously, two to three word functions and variables aren't bad. Technically though C++ variables have a max size of 255 characters. At least that is what I seem to remember. Am I right?
OK, let me see... the wide rectangles are cars and the tall ones are people. Is there anything else?
It depends on if you look at your own essays more as a vehicle for exploring ideas, or for expressing ideas.

But they don't need to be mutually exclusive. We take down scaffolding once the building is finished.
And if your purpose is to discover rather than to persuade, then you might not care. Which brings us back to the title of the piece.
Eliminating _all_ comments is a little extreme, but if faced with the choice between excessively long names and insufficiently descriptive names, I'll go with excessively long every time.

I've spent way too many months digging around in Fortran code where every variable and function name was less than eight characters (actually the eight-character limit has been gone since Fortran 77, but some people still insist on writing Fortran 90 as if it were Fortran 4).
Inside Ignition Partners' Cloud Computing and Virtualization Strategy
Too scary to be real, research looks to quantify eeriness in virtual characters
Memory Leak in MySQL Query Browser on Mac OS X?
Your last sentence is phrased as a double negative. Do you mean to say that entrepreneurs from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack discipline and capital?
Has anyone else experienced this memory leak or am I the only one?
Lynx? Is this aimed at OS X? I for one hope so.
a) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear

b) The little triangular "upmod" button is perfectly sufficient to express your agreement if you don't have anything else to add.
An Update is Now Available…
I'm guessing the SEC is both underfunded && following political direction. They may have needed more funding to go after all the potential illicit trading the last 10 years or so, but it seems they could have gone after more than they did. I find it very interesting the SEC did not touch Madoff until the end of 2008 when there seem to be strong warnings several years earlier.
Pictures of adorable kittens on my news.yc.
Quantum Computer Factors the Number 15
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger
Eminem v. Apple heads to trial Thursday
Whenever I see a piece like this, it makes me think I'm just oh so very slightly out of touch with how normal people interpret things. Take for instance:

> Be the best at what you do. Because the difference between #1 and #2 is growing wider in all the fields!

> (But what if you aren’t the best in your field? Read on…)

Growing wider in all fields! (But what if you're not the best?! Read on...!)

Now, I'm not poking fun at that style of writing - I'm genuinely curious, if anyone knows, why it seems to draw people in. Energy? Excitement? People's short attention spans? Very curious, any insight would be welcome.
Papa Bear:

for(i=ii;i<iii;i++){
for(j=jj;j<jjj;j++){
for(k=kk;k<kkk;k++){
doSomething();
}
}
}

Mama Bear:

for(YearCounter=FirstYearOfCycle;YearCounter<LastYearOfCycle;YearCounter++){
for(MonthCounter=FirstMonthOfYear;MonthCounter<LastMonthOfYear;MonthCounter++){
for(DayCounter=FirstDayOfMonth;DayCounter<LastDayOfMonth;DayCounter++){
doSomething();
}
}
}

Baby Bear:

for(Year=FromYear;Year<ThruYear;Year++){
for(Month=FromMonth;Month<ThruMonth;Month++){
for(Day=FromDay;Day<ThruDay;Day++){
doSomething();
}
}
}
It also guarantees sanctions and other nice things.
Look, a lot of folks are looking at their advice as saying "don't quit--it's too risky to your own income" That's just a side effect!

Building it on the side lets you make different decisions. You can focus on getting a small amount of revenue quickly. Can't live on that alone, but paying customers are the ultimate metric, and you can iteratively improve using that.
Finally, A Web Annotation Product That Makes Sense: WebNotes PR
They should just switch to Objective-C/Cocoa and that code would be perfectly normal!
No, it's named after the new default browser.
Ask HN: Where do I go from Godaddy? Need to upgrade SQL Server Space
Hey all,

Im in need of more SQL space and Godaddy just isn't cutting it on the cheap anymore.

I am currently only making about $10.00 a month which isn't enough for a true server, but I am in desperate need to go above and beyond of Godaddy's 200MB SQL Server limit.

Can anyone point me to a 'ON THE CHEAP' SQL Server solution that uses a Windows box?

I run a Microsoft Stack, so I won't be able to used a Linux box.

Help!! ???
But part of the reason Python 3 wasn't "very ambitious" is that the people building it actually accounted for what could be done, and made a distinction between "what would be nice" and "what we actually need". It's been a careful, controlled upgrade process that actually works in the real world. It really is everything that Perl 6 hasn't been.

In my considered opinion, the way that Perl 5 is partially evolving into Perl 6 even before Perl 6 is out is further evidence that a big bang was neither necessary nor desirable. There would be at least one discontinuity point, just like there is for Python 3, but that's manageable.

I'm sure Perl 6 will eventually be released, which is not something I'd say about most projects in this state, but I don't think the perl community is doing itself any favors if it fools itself into thinking this went well. It didn't. Perl 6's process has been a disaster. This point needs to be made.

I'm a professional perl programmer and don't want to see the language die, and it's been frustrating watching Perl 6 try so hard to kill it. As an open source project, they have every right to take as long as they like, I'm not trying to infringe any freedoms, but I have every right to say what I see, and what I see is not flattering at all.
yes, of course. sorry, the above bad sentence structure has been edited/fixed ;)
I've always loved the idea of working on commission. But the problem is we're moving towards a culture of punishing on commission and rewarding on experience / perceived effort.

I wonder how many columnists who write highly trafficked articles are getting bonuses? Or Raises? My bet is very few, and the few who do get them are fighting hard for them.

It's sad, because I've seen the same thing happen in my past working at an agency. People on highly unprofitable projects eventually get fired/demoted, while people who are routinely running 150-200% of their billable capacity are not rewarded.
"You can organize it [what people are saying about you] by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff"

Of the example links, only Trader Joe's had a list of "Not so happy" Twitterers. And all they complained about was not having a local Trader Joe's.

I don't think any brand can manage bad press from a single page. But it would be nice to be proven wrong. Good luck!
This is a serious issue, and thanks for sharing the article. The president of the Mathematical Association of America, David Bressoud, was at the hearing mentioned in the submitted article calling for more programs to encourage women and ethnic minorities to participate in higher education in math. This is an ongoing concern of professional organizations of mathematicians in the United States.

But just as a possibly illuminating contrary view, the controversial article by Philip Greenspun

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

may be on point here. Maybe there are better opportunities for young people who are being recruited into math and science than the opportunities provided by math and science careers.

(Note on personal background: my oldest son, who is in the process of applying to colleges when he doesn't plan his start-up, intends to major in math and computer science, and has taken upper-division courses in each subject already. But he is not part of the population groups mentioned in the submitted article.)
Ask HN: Which hard drives do not emit the dreaded "thermal click"?
It seems that nearly all hard disk manufacturers have added a curious "feature" to their product - periodic thermal recalibration, which emits an annoying "click" or "beep" every two or three minutes. If you run a handful of such disks simultaneously, the racket is maddening (modern drives can't be spindle-sync'd, AFAIK.)

Does anyone here know of even one brand of reasonably large (>= 500GB) mechanical hard disk which does not suffer from this problem?
Not at all... http://dslrfilm.com/?p=340
try a small vps. i don't know much about windows vps providers, but this looks like the least expensive option:

http://vpsland.com/winplans.html
The only difference being that your analogy doesn't use a condition that the majority of its readers would self-identify with and thus validate themselves.
Umm... spam? I don't get it.
Seth Godin's Squidoo tries for a new revenue source
I have used the last two ubuntu LTS server releases for production dedicated servers. Never had a problem. Its very good stuff for mainstream production systems.

I came to ubuntu from FreeBSD. One of the many things I liked about BSD systems is the secure-by-default attitude. Ubuntu server comes close to this in a default install.
Does anyone other than me wonder what the Ubuntu people are going to do when they reach "z"? I guess they'll have to start over at "a" again. ;)
In Debian Live we went a step further, booting Linux from your Gmail account via FUSE & gmailfs.
The USB-IF, Inc. Board of Directors is composed of the following companies and their designated representative Directors:

* Hewlett-Packard Company - Alan Berkema
* Intel Corporation - Jeff Ravencraft
* LSI Corporation - Dave Thompson
* Microsoft Corporation - Fred Bhesania
* NEC Corporation - Steve Roux
* ST-Ericsson - Geert Knapen

Microsoft has always been pro DRM. Intel has leaned pro DRM often. I don't know where HP, NEC, or Ericsson stand, but If the first two hold any sway, I'm not surprised by this ruling.
thanks, looking into now..
How I harnessed the wind (video)
Quite possibly an arch way of saying that DailyWTF postings are a little lowbrow for HN?