skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always thought this way too. The fact that car mechanics make more than programmers points to the fact that there is actually a dearth of education leading up to being a capable mechanic, and perhaps a surfeit of education leading up to being a mediocre programmer. The fact that manufacturing has been shedding jobs for decades makes it even weirder that competence in the manual trades is so expensive to hire. Perhaps America has never provided decent educational support for the trades, and for a long time, the average manufacturing job required little. I wonder how different the nation would be if this education had been available all along.
Yeah that's totally fine. How else are you going to drive up that CPC?! :P

Seriously, it's no problem.
I was looking for something similar to the more powerful app on Linux. The FocusBooster app works great but its only a timer.
House of Leaves - What literature should be. Innovative both in design and in prose. It's very long but you can finish it in a maddening evening, it's hilarious, it's terrifying. Along with Steven King's It, one of two books to give me nightmares. Incredibly complex. It's a puzzle I still haven't fully solved. I consider it the first modern-era novel, and expect others will come like it. When I wrote a novel a year and a half ago, its design was my greatest inspiration.

Finnegans Wake - This book can't be explained until you've seen it. The pinnacle of the English language.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...

The Design of Everyday Things
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...
For extra goodwill points have an ad-free blog.

Interesting how a poll with 8 votes has only one upvote for the article. That happens a lot with polls.
Articles like this always leave me torn with, on one hand, a deep fascination with the power, potential, and elegance of Haskell, yet, on the other hand, a nagging feeling that I'll never be quite smart enough to actually understand it...
This is one of the reasons that texting is so darn popular in China, and email is not. Texting is fast, and you can pack so much info into a single SMS that you almost never need to send anything longer.

The same goes for books and essays. Chinese books and magazines are often shorter, just because the information density is so high. It's a neat feature of the language.

However, sometimes it can be demoralizing when you spend all evening writing something and realize that you've only produced a single page of text.
Just tried Isolator, pretty nifty!
House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski

The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
Go Small Or Go Home: In Praise of Minimalism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- The Black Swan

Sun Tzu -- The Art of War

Lao Tzu -- Tao Te Ching
Uh, pointing out that someone else is obviously insincere isn't "disingenuous" (making a false pretense, something Murdoch is doing).

They may be hitting an easy target but that doesn't mean they're being insincere in their comments.

Also, a lot of people in the "mainstream" may still not fully understand the situation, so sometimes the obvious still needs to be pointed-out.
The Man Who was Thursday by GK Chesterton....very well written allegorical spy novel.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas... I'm a sucker for a good plot and this has always been a favorite of mine since I first read it in 5th grade.
"House of Leaves" by Mark Z Danielewski

and

Catch-22 by Josepf Heller
Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery
Try to stay away from coding hacks as much as you can, which is what I meant by technical. I'm talking about social, mechanical, etc. Should be interesting, entertaining, and enlightening to hear about all the clever real world hacks you guys have come up with.

Also, if you have several you'd like to share, go for it.
Why would it not be okay to get karma for sharing something you produced, but okay to get karma for sharing something someone else produced?
I do not do it.

I am not so much afraid about data loss, but about the privacy of my data. It does not matter how nice or unevil a company is. There are several cases of companies being forced to spy on their users. I try to minimise the exposure of data, that I consider to be sensitive, to outside sources as much as possible.

Looking at successful online mail or calendar applications, I have to admit that I never ever thought that so many people will hand their information over.

I still do hope that we will get a bigger awareness about privacy by the general population. Like environmental activists and parties changed the mind of the general population during the last...hmm..lets say 30 years. Somehow those parties had a big effect. No party could talk nowadays about industry projects without talking about dangers to the environment. (At least they pretend to talk about those issues..)
I would like to see privacy concerns on topic more often.
Once data is 'free'... there is no way back.
(umm.. yes, I do know that the Sidekick fiasco was not about privacy.. :)
There's a motto I like to selectively abide by: Less think, more do. There's a point where making a leap of faith and doing something about your idea's makes sense. Some people never make that leap and perpetually get stuck in idea mode.

Idea mode is a good place to be at the beginning, and you might stick around in it for a while for good reasons. Eventually though, you need to transition into "doing" mode and build your idea, brining it to fruition. That's a big leap of faith for most, and it's why lots of people like to talk about starting a business, but very few do.
Building a windmill and powering my house with it ? (I guess that has mechanical, but it is also technical, hard to be 'mechanical' without 'technical').

Not sure if this qualifies as a 'hack', but when abroad and stopped by the police I suddenly only speak dutch. That seems to reduce the interest level considerably. Saved me a few fines by cops playing the 'fleece the tourist' game.
The reason there is no stubble is that these photos are composites (averages) of multiple faces. Any small irregularities in the original photos (not just stubble, but also wrinkles, blemishes, and facial asymmetries) are smoothed out through this process.

Incidentally, this is one of the theories behind why facial composites tend to be more attractive than the sum of their parts. Here's an interactive demo:

http://faceresearch.org/demos/average

Also, you can experiment with your own images here:

http://www.morphthing.com/
Lockpicking count?
"Cat's Cradle" Kurt Vonnegut
"Frankenstein" Mary Shelley
According to the BLS*
Computer Programmers (15-1021) average $73,000/yr.
Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics(49-3023) average $37,540/yr, or roughly half what programmers make.

* http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm
Even brilliant people can use a spell checker. And if you are presenting at any sort of formal meeting, wouldn't it be a good idea to show your presentation to someone before the main event?

The fact that you can't spell doesn't mean you're stupid. The fact that you are unable to find a way to correct your spelling does.
Been wanting to read "Godel ..." for years. Care to elaborate a bit on why it's a favorite?
How was Raw Shark? I heard it praised as being an ergodic piece, but the preview I read seemed fairly straightforward.
I think you just blew that site up by posting the link here!
I think this is one of those things where neither of us is going to change his opinion based on what some guy wrote on the internet, but if you haven't read it yet, I recommend Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France". Burke was a British Whig MP who supported the American Revolution, but opposed the French. It's an interesting contemporary account of the early days of the French Revolution. You can read it here: http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm

I'd love to read some pro-Revolution writings if you can recommend any.
As American education has become more mass-market and managed like businesses, I think what is being taught is more watered down in terms of knowledge. I once was hanging out with a few professors and one remarked "if my current students had to take the same exams I took as an undergrad, they would all fail." Just for fun, I'd recommend to dig int some academic archives, and read the exams and quizes for college courses from decades ago, then compare them to what you've taken in college courses in this decade. The difference in difficulty rather leaps out. Idiocracy really is happening.
If it's relevant, post it.

:)
It's all good as long as your self-post fits this criteria:

"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Priyanka Chopra Hot New Photos, Wallpapers
Technical: Paradigms Of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig

Fiction: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Well, I guess this explains why women wear eye and lip make-up.
"Spies" by Michael Frayn, "Words and Music" by Paul Morley.
The Story of Civilization; 11 volumes of pure joy. Will and Ariel Durant will make you fall in love with mankind. The most humanist take on history I have read. I read them over 6 years and I still live under the Durants' spell. Exquisite and delightful read.

Muqadimat Ibn Khaldun. History, Sociology, Political Science, Scientific Empiricism, Theology, Superstition, Gossip, Leadership, Trivia .. it's everything. It feels like a collaboration between the Grim brothers, Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and Plato. People well versed in Islamic history will get the most out of it. It's a book written by a scientist for a religious and superstitious audience. You can see him walk the fine line, appeasing his princely sponsors while speaking his mind. It's full of code-language written for a better enlightened generation while accommodating the religious and cultural beliefs of his era. Read his biography and you should see bits and pieces of Rousseau; a hypocritical, pan-handling snob who makes his living saying one thing, and living his life doing another .. while still being a fucking genius :-D
I found the black swan to be unfinishable. It started very (even extremely) well, but then got a lot worse quite rapidly. His attempt to create a structure around anecdotes from his life (and of his acquaintances) does not really work and at times his writing is ego-centric to the point of vulgarity.

The main problem however is that it would be much better (for the reader) condensed down as a long essay. Although many books in the genre are essentially essays flanneled out into books, the problem is particularly acute in The Black Swan.

Sun Tzu, which edition/translation?
Exactly. I don't think Murdoch is actually upset that Google drives people to his sites, what bugs him is that they go to Google first.

When you read a story in a newspaper, you almost automatically consume other content in that paper, including ads. Why pick up another paper to read more news when it's already in your hands? To a lesser extent the same is true for cable news, you watch a brief segment and you are bombarded with "coming up next" teasers and flashy graphics, pretty anchors, etc., all designed to keep you on that channel (watching ads).

The web is way less sticky than even television, sure you could flip channels but you lose context, and you might have to keep flipping to find something interesting, broadcast is a push medium. Contrast this with the web page: what is the easiest thing to do after reading the linked story? Search around the new site (that you may not be familiar with) or hit the back button and resume what you were doing: Pulling down stories you want to read, instead of waiting to see if something interesting comes up.

I think Murdoch gets the power of the aggregator, I don't think he understands that he has always pushed content to consumers. (Yes a lot of work goes into creating a brand that attracts these consumers to the paper/network but once they are there they have content pushed to them.) The web is a pull medium.

Billions were spent on the "portal wars" of the 90's, and everyone who participated lost to a page with a text box and 2 buttons.
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes (the short story, not the novel)

"The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton
A few of mine:

-In college, I found that the card readers to open the gates into the faculty parking lots, and into the inner ring of the campus, didn't really check for anything... other than a physical card in the slot. So 3 years worth of free parking close to campus was definitely great.

-I worked at a franchised sub shop for a time, and the music discs we were required to play were pretty horrible. Listening to Fallout Boy got really annoying after the 400th play or so. I decided to pull down the player, which could 'only' play the cds sent to us, to see if there was anything I can tweak. I found a series of 16 pins on the back, and with some googling, discovered the position to place the connectors so that I could play anything. It worked, and in no time, I turned the place into a hip hop club, making sandwiches to the tunes of Jay-Z and the like.

-Slamming the coin slots on games at arcades, dislodging a few coins.

-After taking a hot shower, I'll turn the knob so the water gets super cold for a few seconds. It's a nice way to get me going after a nice relaxing hot shower.
Best non-fiction book I've ever read: http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/

One of the best fiction books I've ever read: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Tuner-Daniel-Mason/dp/0375414657
I first read it years ago, 1979 or 1980. It was the first time I ever thought about how math related to music, art and nature. I had never heard of recursion or self-reference, never programmed a machine to do anything, never thought about how it could be done, or why I might want to do it.

So the book opened up new worlds for me. It changed the way I think.
2 == 3 for any sufficiently large value of '2' :)
This is a classic problem of averaging. The average of multiple data sets doesn't retain the average of all the properties of the originals. A simple case of this is averaging two similar images: the local variance will go down because you've blurred out detail and noise that varied between the two images.

Thus, as you average large numbers of images together, the composite you get is not necessarily representative of any of those that went in, and for that matter is not necessarily useful for any purpose at all, given that it didn't retain a lot of the properties of the input images.
The difference is much easier to perceive after further increase of contrast and brightness:

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/illusion-of-sex.pn...
Right now at this point in my life I am a Nontrepreneur. No doubt about it.

My excuse is mostly a time thing, school and work generally take up 90% of my time. Every time I start something I really should be working on a lab or studying for a test.

I've got plenty of time to figure it out.
Use Ping-Pong Balls to Create Diffused Party Lights - DIY Creations - Lifehacker
If you self-post something off topic it will probably get flagged and deleted. If you post something on topic that is no good it simply won't get up voted. If you self-post something on topic and high quality you'll get upvoted.
Sure it counts. Any particular tools/methods you use?
Be honest about it and say in the comments that you're the writer.
How to convert PDF to word
Download the software Nemo PDF converter at
http://www.nemopdf.com

Browse the files in the program. On launching the program, you are on the tab "Convert from PDF". Click "Add File(s)" to browse the PDF documents into the program.You can browse more than a file at a time for conversion.

Select document pages. On the "Options", select "All Pages" to convert the entire PDF document. Enter a page number in "Page Number" to convert part of the PDF document.

Select the output file format. Select "Rich Text Format (.rtf)" to convert the PDF document to RTF document. Select "Word Document (.doc)" to convert the PDF document to Microsoft Word document.

Select the output folder. Click "Browse" to locate your output folder for your destination files.

Start to convert.

Done. When the conversion completes, a dialog box comes to you asking to open the file, open the folder, or just close the dialog box.
Having just returned from 4 months traveling, realizing that little more than what we carried in our packs was truly necessary, my wife and I have already taken the full car to Salvation Army with stuff we just don't use. Twice.

There's a good 'starve the beast' message in there too: quit buying shit you don't need. To add my own editorial comment: '...with money you don't have.'
1) The Way Things Work, by David Macaulay, first edition, first read when I was, maybe 12. Taught me half-adders. Degrees in physics and medicine, and I still refer to this cartoon book.

2) The House of God by Samuel Shem. It's about a medical intern 30 years ago. Raunchy, smart, and, now that I'm an intern, all too true.
This commenter nailed it: "It’s ’speculative invoicing’."

Also, the title is a bit shady. It's 150 times more profitable per instance, but only 25% (according to the company) pay up, meaning that it's really only 37.5 times more profitable.
Bonfire Of The Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
"Into to Thin Air" by John Krakauer and "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
So your #1 is The Little Brown Handbook, what's your #2?

;)
ahh, the misdirected adventures of my teens, lock picking always had a sense of excitement to it. Use to frequent totse.com a hefty amount, "temple of the screaming electrion", always thought it was an awesome name.
I submit things I wrote roughly twice as often as I submit anything else (although both are fairly infrequent). My theory has always been that I add very little value by submitting an article to the NYT because someone here already reads that and if it is decent it will have already been submitted. My blog, not so much.
I'd have to say that Self Control is probably the only useful one for me. If an IM pops up or I have an urge to browse HN, I'd circumvent any of the apps that just dims other apps if I want. And for the Pomodoro timers it's too easy to deviate off schedule, and too many tasks that are too short to time.

Self control however is ingenious. I can impulsively block sites, only to block impulses to visit sites afterwards.

That reminds me though, I seriously have to start using the procrastination feature here at HN.
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching

Dave Thomas & Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Programmer
My Family and Other Animals

Medieval Technology and Social Change
Right. Practically no one has "succeeded" at anything except school by 18.

I wonder too... it seems like you think you need to be in an ivy league school, and really in an ivy league among ivy leagues, in order to be successful. If you do think that, why? What don't you have now that you feel you need?
If you feel remorseful about self-posting, you can do what jacquesm did in his post about his experience dealing with VC's (great post by the way). He just put the whole thing here.
The End of the Email Era
If you only have three sentences of stuff to say, I'd rather you make a three sentence self post than pad the thing out to a five paragraph blog entry.
Sorry, I'm not willing to put that much (any) effort into improving my OpenID experience. I just don't care that much. I find plain logins simpler, but will use OpenID if a site wants me to.
Ok - I get it now. Sadly, I expected that type of optimisation to already take place in GHC, which is why I was confused about what do they do differently. But I see why that's hard now...
"Les Miserables", I hated Thenardier, Javert too until I learned to pity him... The book rambles a bit, but it's wonderful. In parts uplifting and crushing. I don't communicate well enough to express how much I think of it.

"Where the Red Fern Grows", I believe it was the first book of quality writing and compelling characters I read. A perfect book for a seven or eight year old boy.
You know what helps me focus? Not messing around with half a dozen apps intended to make me more productive.
Fiddling my ID card into the lock in the door of any room in my school would eventually unlock it. I got into a room after the teacher locked it for lunch once (we leave for lunch and come back after).
Rocco by Sherryl Jordan

The Dragon's Birthday by Margaret Mahy
'Elements of Style', Strunk & White.

It has changed my life. For the last two years I have endeavoured to simplify my thoughts/ideas, so they can be communicated precisely. It's hard, painful work.

That aim has recoloured my being: music; literature; art. Philip Glass. Hemingway. Mondrian.

I am not the same person.
Web Ads Hidden Under Cloak of Invisibility
A Combinatorial Proof of the Summation Identity
(i=1,i->n,i) = n(n+1)/2

http://img.skitch.com/20091012-mt5p22p1fxi3s1y32wqid49pwm.pn...

Zachary Burt, University of Chicago, 2007

Assume n people are in a room and they each shake hands with every other person. This constitutes n(n-1)/2 handshakes: each person shakes hands with every other person. The number is divided by two to account for double-counting the handshakes.

The sum of handshakes can alternatively be computed by summing the number of unique handshakes made by each person: person 1 shakes n-1 hands, person 2 shakes n-2 hands (for he has already shaken hands with the first person), and so forth, until person n-1 shakes only one hand: person n has already shaken hands with everyone else. This can be expressed as: n-1 + n-2 + n-3 + ... + 1, or, through the commutative property of addition, 1 + 2 + .. + n-2 + n-1. This is conveniently expressed as the summation (i=1,i->n-1,i).

We know that the summation (i=1,i->n-1,i) is equivalent to the expression n(n-1)/2. If we replace n-1 with n, this is the same as saying (i=1,i->n,i) = n(n+1)/2. QED.
The Lost World - Michael Crichton
Harry Potter -
I think it's fine as long as you don't go overboard. Anyone who has ever maintained a blog knows there are average posts and there are times when you really hit a homerun.

As long as you limit it to the homerun posts I think it benefits the community.
Girls like sex and want to have sex with me. All I have to do is express interest and not piss them off until afterwards.

Generalizing "afterwards" makes relationships possible.

Women are girls in many respects.
Implementing a language is complicated enough that by doing so you fully learn the implemented language AND the language used for implementation. Win-win!
The Elements of Style, Strunk & White.

Leave it to Psmith, P.G. Wodehouse
"Please explain. Were you not advancing your skills as much, or were you just plain unhappy?"

Writing a coherent answer would take longer than I have today,but essentially I was bored out of my mind after writing the n-th insurance/banking/leasing system.

Some initial thoughts can be seen in a blog entry I wrote long ago.

http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2006/07/but-martin-enterprise-...

As I said, this was written a while ago and I would make a more refined argument today, but that will have to wait till I have some free time.
Neuromancer

Dune
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
I think this comment by the exec may be relevant. (He is talking about his thoughts on starting a company, which he is a part of now.)

"A cool technology or product is not a company or a business. A real business is as much about sales & marketing as it is about product. Even if you have invented a flying moon car that runs on urine, if you can't sell it, you don't have a business. Do not start a business without a marketing person and a salesperson."

You may not agree about starting with a marketing guy and a sales guy, but I think that if these are shoes you can't or don't want to fill, you must hire them soon.
Dremel picks with wiper blade inserts, saw blades, and hacksaw blades. Hammered/flattened nails make for great toque wrenches (alternative is the flat metal clips on pens).