skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How does one go about finding a mentor?
What criterion helps determine appropriate mentor candidates? Even though I live (and breathe) in the high tech world, it seems I would not limit my choices that way... A good business background? And it seems that geographical location is no big deal/deal breaker?
This is a _very_ poor business decision. If Soros goes through with this, he is going to loose a ton of money.

On a cost-per-BTU basis, taking into account upfront CAPEX, cost-of-capital, present-value discounted cash flow analysis (PV10, for example), storage, processing, transport, and end-use thermodynamics, there are no known energy sources in 2009 that are cost-competitive with hydrocarbons.

Which probably explains why such insanely large amounts of cash are flowing to K-Street for Waxman Markey.

The only applications where using something other than hydrocarbons makes business sense, is in applications where the cost of energy is not important.

For instance, telecommunications satellites. Or, closer to home, energizer batteries at the grocery store. A single D-cell lead-acid battery has an energy cost of $500,000 per kilowatt-hour. However, no one thinks of it in those terms -- cost-of-energy is not an important factor for this niche.

Thinking of "renewable energy" sources as a replacement for hydrocarbons is a huge mistake. Hydrocarbons are used in large-scale applications where cost is the only metric that matters. And on that metric, it is impossible to compete with hydrocarbons.

The best bet for "clean tech" is to target niche applications that are underserved by hydrocarbons. Clearly, you're not going to use an internal combusion engine to power your laptop. Rather, you're going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a lithium ion battery -- and then charge that battery from the grid, which is likely to be powered by coal or natural-gas power plants.

To take a page from the enterprise software world, the problem with "clean tech" and "green tech" startups is that they are trying to make a "value" sale in a cost-driven market. That never works.

Unless, of course, you can get the federal government to tax the low-cost producers to death.
When you say blogs were around for a long time, I know there must have been people publishing journal type sites, but what I think was key with blogger was that anybody, not just webmasters, could post frequently and effortlessly.
I think what he meant in this context is that you can't use deductive reasoning as the main learning strategy in literature and history.

If you're not using deductive reasoning in the study of history or literature you're doing something horribly wrong. The authors statement is flat out wrong, no matter how you spin it.
Google can help you with that one...
Talk about hubris - you sound like you are interviewing job candidates. Your mentor has to choose you just as much if not more than your choosing him or her, don't forget.

This seems like one of those, "If you have to ask, you aren't ready" type of questions to me.
Consider me completely surprised. I'm still looking at both photos and trying to figure out why I key one in as male and one as female. And then trying to resolve that it's the same face!
Did the copy get this right? It says the face with more contrast is perceived as female, but to me the more contrasty face is the one on the right, which I see as male. Adding to this, in my days as a retouch man, we'd add shadows and contrast to men's portraits, but remove it and soften for women's.
One nice thing of having your data on the server instead of on-device is that any syncing can happen between the server and your desktop, without even the need for USB cables.
If finding useful pieces of information from huge databases was really hard search engines would advertise smaller databases. But, fear of large numbers makes a far better story.

PS: The only way a scientist is overwhelmed with information is when they need to do something by hand. It's hard to guess how a scientist would like to collect less information. Worst case you ignore it because you can't process it yet.
Registered - shafqat at newscred dot com.

Great idea btw... look forward to trying it out.
prokhorenko at gmail.com and we'll see how this works out. :)
Speaking of Copenhagen, UNICEF is having a contest for high school students from various countries to go to Copenhagen. It was a written/Youtube video contest.

http://globalclassroomstudentsdev.innovasium.com/en/involved...

Some friends and I made an entry, though we don't expect to win (we didn't have a proper video camera, proper editing, or any experience). Personally, I'm inclined to say that the Youtube video part is a poorly thought out attempt to ``get in touch with the youth of today.''

EDIT: Because it is very difficult to not select for the team with the best video camera, audio, etc. Maybe UNICEF employees can sort through this, somehow...
I couldn't tell which one was supposed to seem female and which male, myself, although I have some problem differentiating faces, anyway.
The pic on the right is definitely less contrasty than the one on the left. Look at the lips relative to the skin.

That said, it looks like it was a non-linear change to the contrast curve. The eyebrows have roughly the same tone in both images, as do the eyes. If I had to guess, the contrast was adjusted in the mid-gray region, with the extremes left unaffected. I'm also guessing that this illusion has to do with the contrast of skin tone between facial features -- not facial shadows (which can definitely affect the perception of beauty).
As many people have said before, you can get reprinted news from everywhere, people will never pay for that kind of news as there will never be a situation where someone doesn't find value distributing in with the advertising model.

Investigative journalism and niche long form articles are the way to go, you create an interesting enough website for long form in a niche and people interested in that area will pay (well at least I could justify it).
Why bother with tracking the downloads or caring at all what the user does? Just get a list of all internet users everywhere, send a nastygram insinuating that they've done something illegal, and send a bill. Some percentage of people will pay. Those interweb thingees are mostly just used for piracy anyway, right?

Random threats of lawsuits are infinitely more profitable than no threats at all.
Not a bad list. The Pomodoro timer is built on Adobe AIR so it works under Linux as well.
I wonder if merely increasing the contrast of the lips is sufficient. Any photoshop experts want to try?
activated, and thanks
I think what they mean is that by increasing the contrast on the left picture many features stand out more, like the lips, and a lot of shadows "blend in" the face, which in turn makes it look smoother and rounder. Both of these characteristics are interpreted as more feminine. In the second picture you are able to distinguish a lot more shadows and that seems like a "stronger" bone structure.

(When I say stronger in the last sentence I mean with more extrusions etc but I cant think of the correct word right now, sorry)
Did you go through the registration process yet?
I'd like to hear a theory about why this might be evolutionarily true. Was it because the men were out in the sun all day, decreasing the contrast of their skin, while women working together tend to have more contrast because they likely lived and worked in the shade?
That's usually a matter of a broken design process. Design really needs to start with figuring out what the content is and design decisions need to be based on content and function requirements.

Too many times, I see a designer use stock images and "lorem ipsum" text, which leads to a design that looks good, but once it's built it won't feel right.

The same goes for this Facebook redesign. The most important content of the feed pages (people's status updates) is de-emphasiced (light grey) and really small. Functional items are also grey and uppercase, which makes them hard to read. Etc, etc.

I still appreciate the effort and thought that goes into it. They should do a few rounds of feedback/iteration and this could be very cool.
Uh,

But he isn't presenting some random opinion, he's claiming he's teaching how think clearly and one assumes he's trying to present well by example. Well, strike-three.

-- I think contrary to his rules, I don't think there is any set, global rules for presentation beyond the basic language skills he correctly says are rather in-born. What there are is a series of interlocking conventions and strategies on a per-subject and per-topic basis. Learning those well takes a long time and can't be summarized by a how-to...
It's funny we all share a similar view on ycombinator.com (the 'facelift' is nothing special), yet everyone on the source page is orgasming over it.

== critical thinkers vs. autofellating designers
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805853
Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.
Mine are
Pixar Touch and
IWOZ
To add to your point, these guys have no idea what the average computer user is running. Hint: it's not a pro-grade 30" widescreen LCD.

Where I work we run a website targeted to everyone - mom, pop, grandpa, college dude, etc. Suffice to say, our minimum resolution and colour depth requirements are really low. Experience has proven this to be far wiser than Web 2.0-ing everything and assuming people have screen real estate.

The design here won't work on low resolution displays. The news feed would - but that's only because their design wastes a truckload of space down the middle. Their photo viewer, and calendar will break on any low-resolution screen.

Can it be fixed? Sure, but I have a feeling the more you "fix" their design, the closer you're going to get to where Facebook already is today ;)
Factor vs. Forth (from a Forth programmer)
Um, it's called a "design pattern" for a reason.

For more interesting discussions about where to draw the line on imitating others, you may want to check out a little company called Zynga.
I've just recently been trying pomodoro so I'm looking forward to trying some tomorrow.
only two ? tough!

The diamond age

Manifold: time

edit: this thread is going to seriously mess with my productivity in the next couple of weeks.
The Berlin Reunion
This is a very comprehensive list. I'll have to try a few of those apps myself.
I have an easier explanation: they're not closing the feedback loop. The problem here is that they've designed this thing in-place, without the benefit of having Facebook's reams of trends and existing user data - nor have they been able to test each of their assumptions in the real world.

Designing without a feedback loop will make very pretty products on paper that utterly fail in real life.
I think the real debate here is that value in the internet is moving relentlessly away from content producers towards content aggregators. Even a big newspaper site doesn't have the diversity that you find in an aggregator like Google News; likewise, no tech blog can compete with the diversity of news in Hacker News. I visit TechMeme and Hacker News far more than I visit any single blog, for example. TechMeme makes far more money than any professional tech blogger too.

Aggregators tend to build much more value to themselves quickly by riding on other people's content. Yet, aggregators are worth nothing without the underlying content. This irks many content producers, particularly the professional ones whose output accounts of the bulk of the traffic that aggregators end up sending. This trend of professionally produced content accounting for the bulk of the links is evident even in Hacker News.

If these trends continue, giant aggregators could end up controlling much of the content. Yahoo already produces a lot of content, and licenses content for Yahoo News (which is fitting considering Yahoo News has more traffic than any news site in the world). Google News, Digg etc. could follow.

This is the future I suspect Murdoch does not like, because it appears from his perspective to be third parties building value out of his content, without compensating him. Legally, I am not sure he has a claim - if there is a lawsuit on this, it will reach the Supreme Court, that's for sure.
No, they are talking about sex. Gender is used to distinguish the socially constructed roles for men and women, or as an euphemism for biological sex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
The total lack of facial hair, even the slightest stubble on either of them has me classifying them both as female. I know they're the same pictures that are manipulated to make me 'believe' one is male the other female, but there is much more to identifying faces than just contrast, and absent other clues I seem to default to 'female'.
Nostalgia is surely as bad a vice as they come, but I can't help be a little nostalgic that marvelous hacks like these no longer have a place in our world.

I've heard there are similar such hacks in the world microbiology, overlapping genes giving bacteria a selective advantage. But in the world of people, genomic code bloat is apparently not a problem.
The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy?

Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily imagine a smaller bureaucracy.

If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents.

Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the bigger a school district becomes.

Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think 10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private schools, and second would be to think about moving.
Maybe you should use proper grammar. "What are your favorite books?" or "Please name two of your most favorite books."
I posted this because I'm trying to get my head wrapped around this subject and it is one of the most concise and clear explanations that I've found so far.

I want to get a more complete understanding of functional programming, and that seems to start with understanding the lambda calculus.
Review on Google Apps Desktop/Mobile Experience
For me there's always a ramp up phase before anything new that I do in life. Usually I've got several Next Big Things that I've been dabbling in and then some critical crossroads will approach where I have to pull the trigger and run with one of them.

This means that there are a lot of things that never make the cut: painting, DJing, learning French, etc. I've taken first steps in them and have paint brushes, turntables and French books, but never pulled the trigger to take them seriously. Other things won.

As long as I'm getting stuff done in my life this is fine, and those options are still there should I choose to go back to them at some point.

What seems a little more dangerous is picking one thing and lingering on the cusp of it indefinitely. I think some people do that as kind of a romantic escapism: one of my best friends always talks about being a bike courier. She doesn't really want to be a bike courier; it's just romantic contrast with her job behind a desk.
Well, if you really want clarity...

Technically speaking, "gender" refers to the set of distinctive features of entities regarded as "male" or "female", including differences in genetics, physical structure, instinctive and learned behaviors, and (for humans, at least) cultural concepts associated with the other differences.

Sex, on the other hand,refers specifically to the genetic and physical component, particularly the configuration of the reproductive organs and the physical characteristics influenced by the sex hormones.

In an academic context, the term "gender" usually refers implicitly to whatever set of differences is most contextually relevant; most frequently this is the behavioral or cultural aspects, as otherwise the more specific term "sex" would be used. Note that the actual title of the article (but not the HN post) uses the narrower term.

In colloquial use the term gender tends to be used indiscriminately, largely due to a taboo over the term for physical differences also being used to refer to the act of sexual reproduction.
Nah, it is just him.
I am reminded of the early-90's complaints from IT organizations -- "You [Univeristy X] don't teach your students how to do anything useful like Visual Basic 3, etc. They come to us, and we have to teach them these basic skills."

While techniques for dealing with large volumes of data are certainly more general (and intellectual) than VB3, these complaints are similar in nature. I don't hear Google complaining about deficiencies in top-ranked undergraduate CS programs. It's not as if a basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures is not still required (if anything, it's more valuable with large datasets).

For years, universities have thought their mission was to educate, and businesses thought their goal ought to be training. Interestingly, those businesses with reputations for hiring top talent don't seem to complain about specific coursework. It's not like the mid-90's Microsoft complained that its recruits didn't know VB! And, Google certainly has a penchant for hiring smart people without regard to specific technical knowledge.
"I can hang it on my wall next to something else I think is beautiful, and see if I still like it next week."

You know if you still like it, but you don't know if it is beautiful. You might like ugly things.
I think most people value education and generally seek it without compulsion (then and now). The idea of codifying the education requirements as law (then and now) directly serves that small fraction of people who would not have found education on their own otherwise. (Indirectly it serves us all because it saves us from trouble uneducated people end up placing on society.) I believe that the essential elimination of that small fraction of the uneducated likely would not have happened without the codification of educational requirements (as law), but that's a point we can't really prove one way or another. And perhaps that unprovable point is the root of whatever friendly disagreement you and I might have?

(It might be possible to do a comparative study of countries/cultures which have codified educational requirements vs. ones that don't-- comparing basic literacy rates to get some insight into this in the general case. It could be very tricky to factor out economics though. I know what I suspect the results would indicate. But I've not the time to do the study.)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
Think about what areas of business/technology you need coaching on. You probably can use a little help in lots of areas and there isn't going to be one person to solve all those needs. Be open (I encourage) having lots of mentors.
Programming by yourself is really hard, no matter what your personality type.

Other people may have more of a "get it done" personality, but they aren't as good at coming up with an "it" to get done. If you put the two together, you have a perfect match!
If women worked in the fields tending crops while men hunted animals (in wooded areas), it could actually work out the other way around in terms of exposure.

In any event, its not clear that phenomena can have an evolutionary basis. Regardless of the perception of sexual gender in a potential mate, if the other is in fact of the same sex, there is no procreation, so its not clear how the selection mechanism would be operative. There are (to be polite) far more suggestive indicators of sexuality in the human body which are fairly readily apparent and far less prone to miscommunication.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRopmfinsWk
Founders at Work
I am a former executive of a large famous company in the computer industry. AMA
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js></script>;

This lagged hardcore the first time for me. Pretty sure you are not supposed to hotlink this in production?
Why I don't play McDonald's Monopoly
Moby-Dick

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
>If finding useful pieces of information from huge databases was really hard search engines would advertise smaller databases.

Come again?
" According to the company they get to keep 80% of the money, leaving 20% for the copyright holders."

Yup, they really have the bands best interest in mind.

I don't understand how all of these companies who blatantly rob the money that should be going to artists think they are any better than the pirates.
Some of these Ask Me Anything threads on Reddit are really fascinating, and often times, you'll get people who are/were heavily involved in the cs/startup/business industries. I'm not sure if you guys view these sort of submissions as spammy, so I've tried to not submit every AMA thread that I find relevant and interesting. Anyway, lots of interesting information in this one.
Understanding modern functional programming via pure lambda calculus is somewhat like understanding C++ via raw assembly. Which is to say, you'll have a great low-level understanding to build on but a long, long road ahead.

It is a lot of fun, though. I once spent a delightful afternoon puzzling out how to subtract Church numerals knowing only that it was possible to do so, having previously worked out the far simpler addition and multiplication functions. Highly recommended!
It's Not News, It's FARK by Drew Curtis

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Guerrilla Marketing - Jay Levinson
Quantitive Finance - Paul Wilmott
Thnx!! Changed it

PS:My English is not that good
_Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ --Douglas Hofstadter

_Moby-Dick_ --Herman Melville
Invasion of the Botnets
Poll: Is self-posting ok?
There are some times where I'll write something that I feel would be of interest to HN. It always feels kind of self-congratulatory though.

The rules don't mention this, so I'm assuming the guideline is "if it's relevant, post it". But I'd like to get a feel for what the community thinks.

Do you feel that such behavior is acceptable?
Its tough, but choose it to reduce the some of noise
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

Fiasco - Stanislaw Lem
Maybe you should not snipe about the grammar without at least naming your favorite books ;) ?
I figure you can't really say you understand a programming language until you can re-implement it from the ground up.

So that's my intermediate goal.

Spot on about C/C++ through the assembler route by the way, if there is one excellent way to really grok those then it is via the -S flag.
You'd be better off posting your thoughts to a blog and then submitting your articles here. I think it was mentioned somewhere that pg made the supplementary text a light gray color to prevent users from posting long pieces. If anything, it'd be better for you to have a blog to archive all your writings, rather than relying on HN where it's difficult to sift and search through everything.
I think you nailed it with "if it's relevant, post it". The fact that you are thoughtful enough to ask the question, means you will probably make good decisions when it comes to submitting personal works. Don't be spammy, keep it relevant, and you should be good to go.
That's what I meant. :-)

I'll usually post my thoughts on my blog then link to them on HN if they seem useful.