skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I have with this self directed kind of learning
is that sooner or later I always get stuck and have no
one to ask questions to. For example, I'm currently going
through this book on neural networks that someone posted last week (http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/).
However, when I get to the exercises at the end of the
chapter, I inevitably fail to complete some of them. Most
of the time I don't even want the answer, since that
defeats the purpose, but some kind of hint to get me
going in the right direction would be really
useful. Anyone doing a lot of self directed learning
from text books with suggestions?
And if your kids are math-oriented, there's UMTYMP (http://www.itcep.umn.edu/umtymp/), where starting in 7th grade or earlier, students basically cover two years of math per year, starting with algebra, geometry, stats, and then calculus and differential equations. By the time I graduated from high school, I had taken three years of calculus, along with a ton of various other college classes through PSEO. I entered college as sophomore, and due to the crushing homework load that I was used to from UMTYMP, college homework was a breeze :)

Minnesota really is great for motivated students with supportive parents. It did take a lot of fighting between my parents and the school district to get them to actually accept my college classes for graduation though; some school administrations are very proud of their programs, and take UMTYMP and PSEO as personal insults to what they offer.
"Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking."

It's interesting that anomalies, events or things that don't fit our expectations or match patterns that we are familiar with increase our pattern matching and sensemaking efforts. I wonder if some aspect of "flow" is the continual reduction of uncertainty/confusion.
I took this to mean that Autodesk anticipated a decline in its own sales if an after market was allowed; and hence would need to raise prices to stay on track for revenue.

Of course, the customers would just buy second hand s/w - which is where the argument breaks down
I started programming for the exact reason as well. Created Medieval Battles [http://medievalbattles.com] while I was in high school, quickly realized that creating a BBMMORPG isn't profitable and turned this into a career.
That pretty much defines Microsoft.
At 100 tools, when does it stop being a toolbox and start becoming an obsessive hoarding disorder? I don't think even Backtrack has that much crap.
Dewalt drill.
This is a bunch of rambling gibberish. I sort of checked out when he said that the universe could be represented digitally. Theoretically true, but that doesn't mean it is the basis of things. The problem is like with PI, and trying to determine the circumference of a circle... the precision is asymptotic, and so it is with a digital sample of the world. Simply, the amount of which that can be represented digitally is limited by your digital sample, which has to be continually improved. It is much simpler to think that the world is analog, with the equations that represent the analog pattern, or C = PI * d .......
Have you even tried to contribute to the discussion?
The concept of "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" (Ignorantia juris non excusat) was really only ever meant in the context of natural laws, e.g. murder, theft, rape, etc. These things are so obviously horrible that anyone should know they are wrong. Hence "crossed over that line knowing what he or she was doing."

In the realm of political laws, ignorance absolutely excuses. Why should it be obvious that importing orchids requires certain paperwork?
Google Paid $1 Billion More For YouTube Than It Thought The Site Was Worth
Well, I agree that we should transition to other energy sources, but that's not really topical to the article. It doesn't matter much whether we use oil or not domestically. It's whether or not major chunks of international trade will remain denominated in dollars. Oil just happens to be a major, internationally traded commodity, and oil markets are mostly denominated in dollars because the dollar is seen as the most stable/reliable currency (as opposed to the domestic currencies of oil-producing countries say).

The threat of oil-producing countries shifting their exchanges from dollar denomination to a non-dollar basket of currencies is that all of a sudden the demand for this vast amount of dollars in circulation outside of the United States will drop, and there's very little that the U.S. could do about that immediately. If the demand for dollars drops, its value relative to other currencies drops, and the United States will face massive inflation in imported manufactures, commodities, and raw materials.

Producing green technology at home may wean our dependence on oil, but doesn't do much to prevent our currency from collapsing due to a sudden drop in demand for it abroad.
I predict that this image:

http://www.whatbrowser.org/img/browser-timeline.png

linked from the site here:

http://www.whatbrowser.org/more/

will not be of much use to people who refer to their browsers as "the internet".
And will your legal system include only such clear-cut cases as premeditated murder? What do you do when someone starts file-sharing your program? Apply a single, simple, almost certainly ambiguously worded law about theft? And let's pretend your law is perfectly worded so as to have a clear application in every single situation: do you deem file-sharing theft?

What about if, in self-defense, someone goes further than necessary? He's attacked and choked by someone bigger and stronger. He reasonably fears for his life. Through chance or skill, he gets the upper hand, and knocks his attacker out. Then, before caveman adrenaline has faded, he slams the guy's head into the pavement until he dies. Do you apply the single "thou shalt not kill" law?

I don't really want answers to these specific questions, but to the meta-question: how do you handle actions which are harmful to society, but which cannot be resolved by straightforward common-sense ethical reasoning?
Ok, you pretty much stated my big problem with Microsoft. They don't have a great idea for a new product, but their competitor of the week has a product that they want to stomp.

What business does Microsoft have going after Sony?
This is just plain wrong. The authenticity provided by expensive spending is still there. When something becomes cheap to buy (advertising in papers) and its authenticity had been based on it being expensive, well then it's authenticity is gone along with its high prices.

When something reliably vets its advertisers, that can have greater authenticity then is provided simply by high add rates. For example, TWIT and PA and many other blogs/podcasts/comics vet their advertisers. And their audience trusts them and extends that trust to the advertisers - priceless.
It's described in Feynman's biography 20 years ago - only for safes holding the designs of the atom bomb!
Interesting post (I love Steven Levitt) but there's a great lesson for developers here: Efficiency is only one consideration. What about usability? Do you really want to wait in line at McDonald's or Starbucks while someone (maybe a high school dropout) counts on his fingers to make change in 71 & 37 cent coins? The overhead here (an extra coin in your pocket) is well worth the added convenience. Aggregated over the whole economy, those extra seconds would literally be worth billions of dollars a year..
Secret Formula: How To Write Viral Content For Your Website
In a TV Guide, could I get away with displaying a rough time?
I have made a TV Guide, http://staytuned.in. In it I chose to not show the exact time when shows are on, but instead show what general part of the day they are on.

The reasons are two fold. One, bad data, at this point I can't justify spending the money to get access to the data that would let me do that. Second, I am not sure its necessary. Many people have on screen guides now days, and if I can give people the channel, and the general time things are they can look it up on screen.

My assumption is that people will use staytuned.in as place to create a weekly viewing guide. A place where they can quickly glance at what is one tonight.
I believe this, but I've never found articles that discuss it. Do you have a few example cites? Thanks!
Why I gave marijuana to my autistic child
I won't spell it out here because I'd like to make any bad guys out there dig too, but it's not particularly hard to divine my approximate age and where I went to school by Googling.
Many new bloggers (or social media participants) may not know that the federal government has created regulations that pertain to what they do. And if they did know that the regulations exist, they may not know how to find those regulations, and they may not know how to be confident they comply (see my other message speculating on what sort of disclosure is necessary - do you really want to be the one in court arguing that your disclosure was prominent enough?). Creating this regulation adds a layer of complexity that I don't think is necessary.

Perhaps we have fundamentally different views on the role of the government in regulating speech. I agree that disclosing conflicts is desirable, and I think that people should behave ethically when reviewing products. However, I'm not sure why you feel government intervention is necessary here.
Yes it bothers me very much, if they wanna cripple someone's account why not just admit it?They are the superuser moderators, who's gonna go against them?
does it bother anyone else that superuser-level moderation occurs in secret without any public recourse or justification?

It is a good question. It doesn't bother me. Maybe that's because I've been in the role of an ordinary user on plenty of sites with little or no moderation, and I have also been in the role of a moderator (with varying degrees of moderation power and authority in the chain of command) on various sites. Most discussion sites need moderation. Most moderation actions don't need metadiscussion.
Costing Sony money would reduce the amount of money Sony could spend on other ventures. At least a subset of those "other ventures" are things Microsoft is actively interested in.

Disclaimer: I have no actual experience with either Microsoft or Sony when it comes to this sort of thing, so I might be way off target here.
I had a high-ranking local police official tell me over 30 years ago that there were so many laws that the police could basically control whoever they wanted by selective enforcement of the legal code.

Of course that wouldn't work for a rich or famous person -- the cops would be embarrassed -- but for the rest of us we've been in a situation for many decades where there are so many laws that we're basically in a police state. The only reason more folks don't rise up is that so far, mostly, it's a benevolent dictatorship.

I love the analogy between code and the law, because it's so true. We in the IT industry have a unique insight into how complex systems are created and maintained. Our current legal system is way out of whack.

But politicians get elected for doing something -- and that means spending money, passing laws, or fighting wars. That's about all the options they have. So the system continues to spend more and more money, create more and more complex laws, and we end up with "wars" on poverty, drugs, and carbon emissions.

All laws should have an expiration date.
It's fun to go back and read an early edition of Gates' The Road Ahead, in which he just completely misses the value, growth potential and benefits of an open, neutral data network. Rather, he simply transposed "a PC in every house" to "an MSN connection in every house".

In fairness, Gates caught on pretty fast and didn't let his own prior prognostication get in the way of positioning Microsoft to extend his company's product lock-in to customers' internet access (see: IE).
I think you've done a nice job of meeting a real gap in the product space. In ten years of watching this stuff (mostly from the sidelines -- anyone more involved please correct me if I'm wrong), I haven't seen much in the way of an all-in-one kit that includes actual interesting components and well-written / MIT-literate instructional content.

The quality online presence -- forums and video tutorials! -- may even be a killer feature.
The subscriber-only link seems in bad taste.
Very wise words for anyone negotiating an acquisition:

In the deal dynamics, the price, remember, is not set by my judgment or by financial model or discounted cash flow. It’s set by what people are willing to pay.
A friend of mine from our jogging group just finished "Born to Run". He now starts every sentence with, "You know the Tarahumara Indians..." :)
He's also showed up to run for the past few weeks in sandals!
Buying a Business: 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs
"Also, the popular Linux/Mono apps hardly work on Windows."

How can this possibly be a good thing? It either means mono is a poor .NET substitute, or the linux mono apps are less cross platform than apps written in other languages - also a bad thing.
There is a slight element of sour grapes in the undertone of many of these comments.

"Its just php scripts", "I could knock that up in a weekend".

These are pretty poor arguments.

Not that many of you care but im slightly surprised at some off the negativity.

What exactly is the difference between people paying him 3 quid and neopets, facebook ( the list goes on ) which sells virtual goods.

One side, comments regularly complain about sites with ads.

Here is a guy, who has an income stream on a website which is not purely ad based. Yet half of you guys are ripping it apart as a simple knocked up site.

I wish I could knock a text-based game up in the weekend, yet we all know there is a lot more to building an app ( yes this would be an app in my eyes ).

As rightfully pointed out, he has somehow found a huge userbase. Tapped it and has made something which gives value ( i'm guessing in the form of entertainment and escapism ) to his users, so much so that they come back everyday.

As for his actual site, I read the article and signed up, took me less than 5mins to leave. Thats just me. His site is shocking and thats polite. Yet it works for him very well.

These are my thoughts I accept I might be in the minority here and most of the people who comment on HN own / run websites which have turnovers of more than 100,000 pounds / month.

Commence downgrading of my karma;)
It's a world of RSIs out there waiting for these critters
Because, while it doesn't provide particularly useful advice, it is at least a good starting point for discussion on an interesting subject?

Also, because people upvoted it before taking time to read it carefully and think about whether the advice was really valuable?
I'm running Ubuntu, and I see all 5 options when I use Firefox 3.5 or Chromium.
They want to teach people about web browsers, as long as they convert to Chrome. Note the Analytics UTM params on the Chrome link in the "What Browser" page.

Yeah, very ".org" and altruistic...
I am much more likely to follow the David Allen, Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology - and not only because its a more detailed study. What I found this article lacking was the suggestion of a learning curve, or how a scatterbrained person can become more organized and effective. The GTD lectures highlight the importance of finding a methodology and a set of tools that work for you. There is no silver bullet, and I bet a very small minority of super-achievers skipped over the whole organizational tool phase. They probably used them, then internalized the processes.
Talking about moderation, I posted some things from an account which the people of HN didnt like and without any reason I have been crippled, the same thing is happening to me. All the comments that I post appear when I am logged In but they are actually not there.

This is preposterous. HN has steeped so low that they cannot even take views other than there own?Ridiculous.
Are you really happy?
Sometimes a negative object lesson is helpful.
Seriously. This sadly written article lacks weight of any sort.
FBI file on Aaron Swartz
I often wonder how much of the big-company dynamics (especially overhiring and personnel inefficiency) are driven by the desire to impact competitors.
It sure is. And not only that but he had Bill Wulf and Alan Kay try to tell him it is gibberish but the light bulb never went on.
Google lands energy device partner, doesn’t have to wait for smart meters
It is reasonable to recall that Java was being promoted in 1996 as the "net" language, yet lacked basic mature libraries for being so. Java only became a decent language with mature libs after many years of front running this position. Some of us that used Java early on, mainly because business drivers forced it on us (Sun/IBM/BEA wouldn't lie to corporate America?), don't have fond memories.
If I had to guess I would say that "Super Achievers" are people so excited to work on something that they constantly feel frustrated when they're not getting it done. To fight this, they probably tweak and adjust their habits until they find ones that minimize their frustration. So you'll find some people that swear off todo lists, and some people that swear by them. Some people who plan things out meticulously and some who wait for inspiration to strike and then work till 2:00 am. There's probably a few basic techniques that seem to be universal (though I don't think not using to-do lists is one of them), but the most important is to fiercely want to do something - everything else will stem from that.
Published in a major UK newspaper - and discussed on HN. This guy has some good skills in getting attention. And we're part of it!

And if a newspaper writes that he says he's making £50K, it doesn't mean he actually is. He could be all part of the PR campaign.
9 years ago there was a small writeup about me in the New Yorker- http://www.petermaass.com/articles/the_supercool_top-secret_... - small as in it was in the "talk of the town" section, which tends to cover trivial things in a column or so.

That one write-up of the incident changed my perception of the media profoundly. I had been interviewed probably a dozen times before the interview with Peter Maass, and had even appeared on TV (some Canadian show I don't remember)- and had been mentioned in 60-minutes.

Most of the interviews were probably 5-10 minutes long and resulted in multi-page articles. The interview with Peter took over two hours and resulted in the 7 paragraphs that you can't even find leafing through the issue because it's so small (not a complaint, btw- I was just super pleased to be in the New Yorker at all).

More importantly, though, in addition to the two hour interview, I received a call from a no-nonsense "fact-checker" the day after. She had a pre-compiled list of every (_every_) fact Peter was going to mention in his article. It went something like this:

"You say you had [x] downloads of the song in [x] days. Do you have logs that can prove this to some degree?"

"You say you are enrolled at the University of Utah but they cannot get us proof before we go to print- do you have proof?" (I didn't, it was nixed).

"You say you were ranked #1 in folk-songs at mp3.com- they have chosen not to comment and say they have no idea. Do you have proof?" (thankfully I had taken a screenshot that mp3.com verified as accurate).

This went on for _3 hours_ and several emails and physical mailings.

Of all the other blogs, tv shows, magazines, newspapers, etc. that talked to me- (btw, I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't really heard of blogs until then)- guess how many did _any_ sort of fact checking? None.

The thought occurred to me then that if they went through that much trouble for something more or less in the gossip section, I could probably trust their more meaty articles. More importantly it showed me that there are definitely worlds of difference between how media vets what they report.

Edit: Now I just read the magazine for the cartoons though because of pressures on my time (:
google's push into energy is pretty substantial - are we seeing the beginnings of their next billion-dollar business, or is it honestly just a philanthropic effort?
At the very least, comments and stories that are killed should show the username of the user responsible. Is there any real justification for keeping it secret?
If only bloggers had the Washington Post's high ethical standards
They were head to head in a lot of places. Both wanted to create the next DRM standard, Sony was pushing Blu-ray so Microsoft pushed back, Microsoft wanted to push its software into portable devices, and Sony didn't want them there, and Microsoft was afraid that the Playstation would grow up into a general purpose computer in every household and undermine the PC market.

So Microsoft saw a company going head to head with them in a lot of key areas, and they decided to weaken the threat.
Its actually crazy, because his game isn't on a platform and hes making $1.5m. He could probably make much more than that if he found out a way to leverage his current userbase on Facebook, Iphone et al.
Imagine DHH read that and make up something he might say about charging for stuff.
I would argue that the biggest stumbling block to Linux going mainstream is actually X. Get rid of it, start something sensible from scratch that's based on current (i.e. more developed) ideas than what was leading edge 25 years ago. Seriously.

Case in point: trying to configure two screens on Linux is anything between painful to downright impossible. In 2009! Windows 95 had that ability.
I agree that comment sites require moderation, but HN makes every appearance of being community-moderated. The voting system is supposed to take care of the signal-to-noise ratio, and I think it does a pretty good job.

The moderation actions I am talking about, however, are unilateral (you can't even ask why), magical (you don't know it is happening), persistent (the account posts dead comments for a period of time, perhaps infinite), and arbitrary (the comments are not necessarily undesirable or contrary to the HN culture). These traits are bothersome to me, and to at least a few others. I think it warrants a discussion.
Thanks - lots of handy links, including one [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/reddit-stumbleupon-delicious-and-...] to "Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed!"

The formula for HN (as of July '08):
(p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5
where:
p = votes (points) from users.
t = time since submission in hours.

p is subtracted by 1 to negate submitters vote.
age factor is (time since submission in hours plus two) to the power of 1.5.
Strange attractors - beautiful chaos and canvas
Google’s Experimental Homepage Fades To A Single Word
The video really makes a great point. Use pivots to take advantage of Product market fit. Build to learn, and make validated learning about what customer wants as the unit of progress. Also factor in the speed of learning to get more value out of the dollars and human capital.

Know your customer, give them what they want, be ready to change gears quickly to do it more cost effectively.