skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would take care with a statement like this. Because I used to believe it than found out it wasn't true. Case in point. I grew up in an area with high immigration and they did do the jobs that no one else wanted. And because I only saw immigrants (Carribean, South and Central American) doing these jobs, cutting grass for example, I assumed it must be true. So imagine my surprise when I went to a university in the appalachians and I saw white people cutting grass. I was shocked to see white people cut grass because 1) I never saw it happen before, 2) I was always told cutting grass was done by immigrants because no one else wanted the job.

So no, there is no such thing as a job no one wants. A job market works like the free market. If the wage is too low you can increase the wage until someone takes it. Using cheap immigrant labour distorts the free market the same way buying knockoffs does.

A job no one wants is not a valid defense to support immigration.
XMPP and SIMPLE: A Comparative Study
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I am an oldtime-A-fanboi. Netbooks are the first event that let me consider buying a PeeCee since when I decided to do A-miga instead of 386. And sooner or later I probably get one.
I was John's VP of Engineering at those two start-ups and there's one thing he doesn't and can't say (but I can :-)

He truly practices what he preaches in that article: I've seen him act like that over a period of many years. By doing that he set company culture.

Never underestimate the power of a CEO in setting culture.
Teaching Cognitive Science with MATLAB
Is Twitter Successful?
Yes, and the article also says, that simulations support the hypothesis so far.
> I could write a book about my experiences with him and how we finally produced an engine that had only one moving part!

That sounds like a fascinating story. Please consider writing about it.
Breast Cancer and Imbalance in Life
I'm curious now: what do you use? C? ADA?
"Facebook for scientists" .. will anyone friend them?
Apple sells a high-end product; anyone who might be tempted away by a netbook would likely have already been tempted away by a lower-cost PC. It's the same reason that inexpensive Japanese cars don't cannibalize BMW sales.
You can't have 9.3x less memory, either. You can have (1/9.3)x as much memory, or they could just say 10% as much or 90% less.
Nielsen often is quite radical. This is i.e. displayed by the layout of his own website but he is one of the most respected usability experts in the world. He has been fighting for more usable websites for quite some time and the prizes they award to e.g. Intranets are qite prestigeous.

IMHO it is worth listening to his point of view. You can still disagree but if you think twice about what he is saying it often makes sense.

If you think about the password example, how much more useable has the iPhone's password-field become because you see the last letter you typed?
I use lisp and every time I tell another programmer that I use lisp their face morphs into a mask of shock and horror.

They're all like 'how do you use lisp all the time' and I'm like 'well lisp is very powerful', and they say 'yeah it is, but how can you stand to use lisp all the time!' and I really don't know how to respond because using lisp seems more natural than something like C or Java where I have to be very explicit about everything that I want and put in very specific syntax.
Apple promotes the distinction between Macs and PCs in its extremely successful advertising campaign. Anyone who doesn't understand the difference is either ignorant of current computing culture or being willfully obtuse.
Were you trying to do something like google calendar?
Right now, after all these years, the only thing I see that comes pretty close is zcal from ZK.
To work in the USA with a PhD, even as a professor you need an H1B - you are subject to the same quotas and limitations as other H1B IT workers.
Huh? 3.5" form maybe? (Put a 2.5" disk in there and fill the rest with the SSD stuff)

Where do you fit it all in a 2.5" form factor?
Ask HN:  What do you think of my DropZap game demonstration videos?
I installed it.

And then turned it off after a minute of playing with it.

If I want to find HN discussion of a particular URL then it doesn't really help - and I don't want HN links turning up every time I google for something.
It's the literature review and six drafts of the paper only to find your advisor thinks your topic is no good. That kills.
Ah, the power of your social network. I think a lot of young entrepreneurs don't realize this and think that with hard work and a good idea alone they can make it. While these are essential, the need to meet and establish meaningful connections is one of the main reasons why groups like YC exist. Connections breed more connections. Invest in your social network more than updating your linked-in profile and collecting business cards.
Are you hackers ?
Apple may have already stepped up to that with the "Call me when you're ready to compromise" ad starring Patrick Warburton.
Also explaining why the Japanese car makers have built more expensive product; the two markets overlap but aren't the same.
Law of supply and demand.

If there was only a 100 science PhDs granted each year in th eUSA then they would be able to demand a high salary as industry fought for their services.
This would in no way reduce the innovation of industry of force them to move their R+D overseas.

No wonder they call economics the dismal science
Tracked.com Comes Out of Stealth
Chiming in to the chorus: what do you use for that type of programming? How does it support the kinds of formal proofs you mentioned? Although I have proven the correctness of some simple code, I have found that the proof and the code can diverge too much to mean much. (Some of people interviewed in Coders at Work said the same thing.) Do your tools unify the proof and the code somehow?
everyday average normal guy

Said guy's too busy listening to his iPod ;-)

Seriously, tho', Apple has simply chosen not to compete in many of the markets MS sells into. There's no Mac for gamers, for example, Apple simply aren't interested. They aren't interested in selling into corporate desktops either. There's no technical reason Apple couldn't flog 20,000 desktops to Boeing to use as Unix workstations, for example.

That's the secret, really. You don't have to be tech savvy or elite to use a Mac. You just have to be in a sector that Apple is interested in. A non-technical entry-level graphic designer is going to be using a Mac 'cos it's the right tool for the job, as is a hardcore geek who wants a decent Unix laptop.
> Using cheap immigrant labour distorts the free market

Are you seriously suggesting that the free movement of labor _distorts_ the free market? By, you know, putting employers in contact with the most competitive workers.

> If the wage is too low you can increase the wage until someone takes it.

Or, equally likely, you can decide that the job is not worth doing for the higher price.
It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with … Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist” named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates it.”

When reading articles like this I always get the impression that what Twitter users like most is to tweet about Twitter. It's all meta and self-referential.
32 G SSD is not that voluminous, I'm pretty sure a determined engineer could squeeze it in there somewhere.
I don't agree with this snippet, at least it doesn't apply to me. I bought netbook, but I wouldn't buy "real laptop" if netbook didn't exist, so no cannibalization happened.

Moreover, I am not sure about that distinction. What exactly is the difference between netbook and co called "real laptop"? Missing DVD drive? Is there any principal difference?

As I see it, what happened was that Asus was able to create cheap small size laptop, and many people realized that this thing is really useful.
Disclaimer: I wrote an OSS alternative to Website Optimizer (GWO).

GWO is probably the worst Google-branded software I have ever had the displeasure of using. The end-user experience is terrible (page redirects to do variations). The developer experience is like pulling teeth -- I've written an A/B testing library before and I'm not even sure I understand them, but if I do understand them, it looks like it is probably going to take close to a day of work just to do something stupidly trivial like varying a call to action on your site.

Their quick start guide gets you about as far as authenticating to the service, which is wonderful, but you didn't crack open your IDE in the hopes of making some sweet authentication code, now did you?

Having the API doesn't reduce the risk in giving your conversion data to your #1 source of traffic and (possibly) your biggest single vendor.

And to put a cherry on top, you're limited to 10k accesses a day, which is suitable for a hobby site but which will be quickly exhausted in many actual businesses. (Some quick back of the envelope math suggests I'd be on the bubble.)
What granularity for MVC?
See also anthropic principle:

"The conditional probability of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always 1."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
If you took the Lehman job, by now you'd have to accept the fact that you would probably never get the chance to start a business again.

That would drive me nuts because I've always wanted to start my own business and I don't really like working for others. For (most) other people, I'm sure they'd rather have a steady source of income.
Dunno about YC, but the market is gonna be a little too hard if you're doing a software product. Only thing that can offset that, that I can think of, is extensive domain expertise, market insight and deep industry connections.

Try to get some programmers on board, just for your own good.
Agreed. Patrick Warburton, though manly looking, isn't quite the alpha male that a football star type represents. Heck, Warburton was the Tick; a live action comedy character based on a cartoon character for children and Puddy on Seinfeld. Not exactly the guy known for playing an alpha male.

Apple is for betas, plain and simple. MS is missing an opportunity to reach the alphas.
Try turning on the keyboard shortcuts and learning them. I can't imagine wasting time hunting for 'c'ompose, or 'C'ompose for a new window. Some are a little odd ('#' for delete and 'e' for archive), but I think there's a Lab you can turn on to tweak them. I am not even aware of where buttons or links for doing anything are anymore.
Pretty much for the same reason BMW don't sell pickups.

It's not like BMW's engineers couldn't master the technology of the solid rear axle.
No, that's incorrect.

It's related to the format of the video rather than browser sniffing. Firefox only supports Ogg Theora for HTML5 video, but the video on the page is MP4/H.264. Dive Into HTML5 has more detail: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works
Oh god. You aren't a real person are you? You're an Apple promo bot.
There's already at least two Chinese Python-based languages --- Zhongmeng and ZhPy. I played around with the former a bit after working with a guy who was relentlessly evangelising for it.

Obviously since I both speak enough English and am not a native speaker of Chinese, I'm not the target audience, so I can't really comment on whether it's necessary or not. One thing that was nice was identifiers taking up much less horizontal space.

http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english...
I agree that it is technically unsound, but the meaning of "Nx less of something" is still relatively unambiguous when N>1.
Moderately Overweight Live Just As Long?
unfortunately no, but will hire some the minute we can!
It is a bit better since education institutions and are not subject to the quota, but the arcane complexity of the rest of the process still remains.
Why CDC says this year's flu season is "very sobering"
I never checked but I assumed it meant that the memory savings of Q3 compared to the savings of Q2 increased 930%
We will definitely bring on programmers once we can secure funding but am hoping it does not inhibit the Y Comb application process...
Evolving Java Without Changing the Language
ARRRRRHGH. That is NOT THE LESSON. I'm sorry, every time there is a discussion of hard disks and RAID, someone posts this same stupid comment. The GP comment didn't suggest that RAID == Backup. Not in any way. Your reply suggests that they did.

"RAID5 by chance?" How do you know they didn't use it? They might have had multiple failures too close together to rebuild the array.

Sorry for the caps, but I just snapped seeing this comment for the nth time and with so many upvotes.
Does this sound an awful lot like the pleadings of car companies building SUVs when oil hit $150 and those sneaky foreigners started importing subcompacts ?
Still, it seems weird to put those into different categories. There could be a PC maker creating expensive PCs that don't compete with netbooks. In fact, there probably are (for example creating high end PCs for architecture and film editing). That PC maker would not be cannibalized by netbook sales.

Maybe if it is Microsoft vs Apple they are talking, but MS also sells stuff for netbooks.

Also, if there were no netbooks and no PCs, there probably would be more Apple sales. So Apple loses sales to PCs and therefore also to netbooks.
But great hackers don't come cheap, if you manage to hire them at all (they want equity, plenty of it).

If you can't secure the best hackers, you will loose to competition (it's them !)
Next to the platters, which are round, and thus don't fill the entire space of the package.

See this picture: http://technoxy.blogspot.com/2008/03/fujitsu-announced-320gb...

I don't know exactly how big the Intel SSD chips are, but I just bought a 16 gb micro-SDHC card that was smaller than my little finger nail, including a plastic casing with connectors on it for my cellphone.
How To Use Linux epoll with Python
Microsoft will still make more money from Windows7 than Apple makes form selling computers. They made more from Vista than Apple makes.

There is a big difference between 'fails with the HN/Slashdot crowd' and fails to make money.
you're right on - but worth the equity to make sure the idea can come alive!
You'd be correct if the simple assumptions of fundamental economics applied, but they don't:

Most immigrants are _not_ "people doing valuable work" - in fact, most are at hairdresser level or below. Few Nobels there - more likely B ship passengers in the Ark.

Most immigrants do not earn "appropriate compensation". Survey some H1-B slaves (among the highest paid immigrants) for their opinion.

It is quite simple: new immigrants take jobs from US citizens by working for less. Businesses that need workers like that; US citizens who want jobs do not.

The situation is obvious all around you. Don't try to confuse the issue by making it more complex than it is. Certainly cheap immigrant workers lower costs for business and "contributes positively to the economy", but don't try to cover over the fact that they push current workers out of jobs, causing dislocation and social upheaval. US citizens suffer, non-citizen immigrant workers benefit, business benefits. Which of those three groups cast ballots in an election? Is there supposed to be any benefit to being a citizen of the country you inhabit? You're effectively saying "No." and I disagree.
Another interesting factoid I read somewhere today: on average only 15% are fit enough to even reach the egg. Yet sperm fitness has been measured to increase after exposure to pornography involving men and women, while this effect is apparently not observed after viewing lesbian pornography. The theory is that seeing the competition somehow makes the sperm more competitive. And that's why it's better to hang around with your fellow HN'ers than your nay-saying friends.
Hear, hear. You didn't mention how frustrating it is when software tries to "intelligently" guess which language you want based on where you are. If you are in Finland and not logged in to Reddit, it shows the UI in Finnish, even though all the articles are in English. When I go to Google.com, sometimes it decides I want to go to Google.fi instead, and then I'm left wondering why my searches are bringing up odd results.
Tracked.com Launches Massive Structured Database Of People And Companies
Yeah I don't know why they took something that wasn't broken (the reddit envelope system) and made it less useful. It'd also be nice to save pages to view later as Reddit allows one to do. I know the goal was to minimize interface options here, but these are useful interface features that make for less clicking around or using third-party products.

I installed and use the "read it later" extension for firefox solely for the purpose of tagging HN articles to read later.

Alternately I'd also love to see a page which lists all of the stories I've upvoted? That might do the trick for me.
I think it depends on context. For my email account, banking and network logon there's no question that passwords should be hidden. My hackernews account is not such a big deal.
Group pre-order for the hardware though, 8-9 weeks
So by doing some translation effort, you can get perhaps +20% more users, but this should be compared with spending the same amount of effort on some other part of the program. Maybe some nice new feature would also have resulted in +20% users with less effort?
I could definitely see Google launching an iTunes-like music service.

Amazon dropped the ball. Really their only advantage was No DRM but now that iTunes Plus is standard, that went away fast. Since their launch years ago, Amazon has done next to nothing to improve the user experience.

Microsoft is actually doing some interesting stuff with Zune, but they've really positioned it as a niche product for anti-Apple gearheads, not the mass market.

I think Google is by far the most likely company to launch a serious iTunes competitor. With all the work they've done on Android to compete with the iPhone, a music store/service would be a logical next step.
was this implemented on hn as well? i noticed a change a few weeks ago.
(because(as(my(coworker(said:(the(human(brain(is(no(f*ing(pushdown(automata)))))))))))))

SCNR
It seems to me like it would be an unnecessary layer of complexity, and it could make communication between international teams much more difficult. I can't imagine what I would do if I opened the source file from a team in Ireland and found that it was all in Gaelic. Perhaps it's inconvenient for them that they have to read it in English, but at least it's a single language, not several.

Now, one thing I can imagine working would this being supported in an IDE, or at a 'meta symbolic' (for lack of a better term) level.

For example, if we simply implemented a strict transliteration system, so that there was a one-to-one correspondence between a program written in English and the same one written in Chinese, then an editor could convert between them on the fly. This would be useful for switching between alphabets and making code easier to read for different people but doesn't necessarily carry meaning through. (The English word "while," spelled with Chinese characters is still the English word "while.")

Working with an IDE that maintains a one-to-one mapping internally between English keywords in a given language and their non-English equivalents, one could conceivably code in Russian and have the IDE internally translate it to English before passing the code to the compiler or interpreter, a sort of pre-compilation stage if you will. It could work in reverse as well, so that the canonical version is always in English (or whatever the native language of the programming language is) but coders in different nationalities see their own language.

With languages that use symbols, like Lisp, one could create a many-to-one mapping such that a single symbol has multiple printed representations depending on the (human) language in use. This would have to be enabled with a reader level switch. In Common Lisp, you could do something similar to this by creating a package for the language of your choice which maps symbols to their standard equivalents.

Non of these solutions are perfect however. For example, non handle languages designed to imitate English grammar such as SQL, for example. And they introduce complexity that may be unnecessary.

Edit: Changed India to Ireland; apparently Indians speak English.
I like this trivial way to compute scores for similar applications:

score = upvotes*(upvotes/(upvotes+downvotes))

Edit: some example output follows.

10 up, 10 down = 5.0
50 up, 50 down = 25.0
100 up, 0 down = 100.0
70 up, 30 down = 49.0
2 up, 1 down = 1.3333
10 up, 20 down = 3.3333

This removes some bias due to the time, but does not remove from the game the idea that a lot of votes are still an hint of interest. Ah, and the math is trivial ;)

Note that this is just the vanilla formula, you can simply alter the weight of the different parameters changing a bit the math.

Useless to say that this is only the first step to get the actual sorting. You may not want to order by score, but by rank, where rank is something like that (if the items you are sorting must be fresh):

rank = score / time^alpha

alpha is the "obsolescence factor".
Yes, because we should always be afraid of saying unconventional ideas.

He might be wrong, but he has started a conversation around it. Passwords are a usability nightmare, and we definitely can have something better.(Mobile password fields are god compromise IMO, show last char for 10 seconds and then blur.)
You know what would be another good sorting comparator? Conversationality.

A comment that sparked a lot of conversation (has a lot of children) should be a good candidate for floating towards the top as well.
This is something that has been a long time coming.

It all started with ASCII and EBCDIC being the dominant data storage standards, if your characters were not a subset of, or representable in those sets then you were plain out of luck.

Microsoft deserves a good bit of credit here, they worked hard to get their software translated in many languages.

Unicode/Utf8 support in most internet standards now gives parity to the rest of the world on that front, it is only logical that programming languages will follow.

I've seen a listing of a basic program that was written - for fun - with dutch keywords, and one thing that I noticed was that I completely think in English when programming, all my identifiers are in English etc. Also, all the documentation (of my code and most other stuff out there) is in English and so is most of the published research.

It will be a long time still before there is equal representation on that front and we will be facing yet another hurdle in comprehending other peoples code.

Maybe that standardization of programming languages on English is not such a bad thing, even if it isn't 'fair' in the strict sense of the word (because it gives an advantage to all those who have English as their native language), but it does create a very large middle ground.

Think of English as the new Latin, it allows you to communicate with the people active in your field the world over.
Here's the announcement from Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/trackedcom.html