skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I take notes in class because I feel that I have to record the information, forgetting that the information is almost always available in the textbook. Taking notes means I don't pay as much attention to the professor. When I miss something, I have to figure out what it means outside of class. It would be much easier to learn if I gave my full attention to the professor.
On the other hand, I have found writing to be a great mnemonic tool. Perhaps a good compromise for me will be to take notes from the textbook instead of the professor, by summarizing each chapter as I read it before class. This would avoid distraction during class and allow me to devote my full attention to the valuable resource of my professor.
Also Vancouver has a HUGE Indian community so I hope he was able to take advantage of that.
Open-source framework for executing Google AppEngine applications
Point taken. Better?
Uh, but that's only because computers make us humble. (Or modest. Not sure which one.)
I realize I may be left with no options, but it's not as easy as just saying run the company from here. For one, I am not a Canadian citizen so I need to apply for all kinds of immigration permissions to move the company and work for it from here.

We have also been building momentum with filmmakers and festivals in the Bay Area and my team is based there. To not have access to any of that does create problems for a startup.
I know you're trying to be correct but using data in this way is annoying - "the data shows", not because it is necessarily right (it depends) but because it sounds right. If it helps then just consider data the singular noun for a block of information.

"The data shows murder causes death" sounds fine to me, nothing jarring about that except that it's probably not true "the data shows murder is a cause of death" (murder doesn't cause all deaths usually depending on the locus).
I thought she was throwing a Zune logo for a second!
Not really. Look at the stuff he's deleting -- hundreds of Facebook notifications = 10s of MB. He goes through and deletes thousands of emails and doesn't really recover more than 100 MB. My first feeling when I read this was that he's obviously deleting the wrong stuff. What he should really be looking for are those picture album emails at 10 MB each. That's what taking up his space and that's what most people aren't doing. Google is practicing the old idea of 80/20 and doing it very well.
Meet Twitter’s Newest Investor: Insight Venture Partners
The Dropbox iPhone App is Out
Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women
I'd argue that it's not at all a "hack" (I really dislike HN's tendency to equate everything to a hack), but nonetheless of significant interest to those of us interested in statistical trends in large web systems and social networks.

This kind of statistical kung-fu is well worth a look even if your own interests do not lie in dating sites.
Yes, but these are the results of the hack, not the hack itself. OkCupid has a nice thing going but this is not about their software, this is about trends they've picked out of their database of dating profiles.

And it's not like we haven't been here before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822782

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803603

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66129
One possible explanation for the low Hindu-Hindu match is that there are many websites dedicated to specifically Hindu dating which means that the Hindus using OkCupid are those who are specifically not looking for a Hindu date.

For other religions, such sites aren't nearly as prevalent.
Could you just write: "Murder is shown to cause death", or do you need to mention the "data"?
Let me say from the beginning that I agree that I have a very old version of Konqueror. So old that there are many, many sites that I can't browse. I accept that. I'm not actually complaining that I can't read the text without doing something "special" - namely, highlighting the text.

However, I am quite frankly amazed that I'm being down-mud for pointing out that this is a serious issue. You, jacquesm, are describing extraordinary lengths to ensure that your visitors can read your site. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people don't go to the lengths you do. And probably they shouldn't.

Perhaps I just didn't make myself clear.

But the point I'm trying to make is that people who care about customers need to make this decision, and need to know they're making it.

Is it not important? Is it not relevant? Is it not an issue for web designers to test across multiple browsers? Do you not care that there are people excluded? Are you not considering this? Have you consciously made the decision as to which browsers you won't support?

Are these questions not appropriate?

Clearly there are people who feel that these are not appropriate questions.

Or maybe I'm being down-mud because they are relevant, people aren't considering them, and I've pricked a conscience or two.

Down-mod me if you choose, but ask yourself why. Better yet, explain why. If people agree with you, you'll get lots of karma. I don't much care about karma, as evidenced by the fact that I've replied again, risking yet more karma in an attempt to make a point that I think is important.

So I've had my say.

As for why I use such an old version of Konqueror, it's a long story. Suffice to say I regularly access HN from hardware so old that I've struggled to run anything more modern than SuSE 8. The system is so fragile that I don't dare try to upgrade anything, because it's likely everything will break, and I really haven't the time to fix it.
Nor have I. The untold story in US health care is the second you say you are uninsured the bills magically evaporate. When my wife was pregnant and on a private policy (where I live there are 0 private policies that cover pregnancy or at least none that we could find at the time) she went to the doctor's office an explained the situation the bills went from several hundred a visit to a fixed $1400 for all visits and the delivery. My mom worked for a heart surgeon who had done open heart surgery on an old guy on fixed income he paid $5 a month for about 3 years and the office decided to call it even. Every doctor's office and hospital I know of has insurance rates and private pay rates, and most have a sliding scale on top of that for the truly poor.
Several of my high school classes, including math classes, used "clickers." http://telr.osu.edu/clickers/
They were better when the questions were interesting, but the competition to get the fastest response made even easy questions fun.
I think there's room for improvement in the technology, though. For example, my geometry class figured out the code to reassign individual clickers, in order to make other people lose points by changing their answers.
FYI a man of your qualifications will get fast-tracked through the Canadian immigration process with zero problems.
I liked this on a few different levels:

-Hacking data to reveal the answers to important difficult questions.

-Exploring contentious issues in a neutral & intelligent way.

-Great example of how to attract potential customers by providing valuable information that also gently demonstrates competence related to your service & differentiates your offering from competitors.

I enjoyed reading this, I learnt something, and I thought favourably of the website based on this. No idea how good they are, but that post was a good marketing lesson.
In theory - however in practice "fast-track" and "Canadian government" don't naturally go together.
Dialogue concerning Neural Coding and Information Theory (2003) [pdf]
That's very interesting, so, if I read you right essentially the system is either purposefully screwing the insurance companies in order to be able to give care to those who need it but can't afford it, or they're willing to do that out of their own expenses, and they fudge the budget on things like overhead and so on to make it all work out.

That's a miniature health care system all by itself, only on the local hospital level instead of something larger or more formalized.

One problem I see with that approach (as much as I like the guerrilla tactic feeling it has) that it will have a certain arbitrary element, some hospitals will have a lot more room to play with than others in this respect, so it'll be luck of the draw where you end up.
Now you've got it passive again.

Final draft: "Murder kills."
Make friends with a local and have them contact their MP. My status process sped up pretty quickly with a politician's office on the case. They can probe to ask what's going on with a particular application,etc. (I also believe that my application was 'fast-tracked' because there was an upcoming election too).
It's easier to development on proven technology than to upgrade sometimes, especially when there are tight product deadlines.

Also, running on a Mac, it is easier to use whatever Mac is using so that your code has less bugs across different dev machines.
How do they determine whether or not you are a woman?
What's the purpose of ordering them by pagerank?
Finally, my baby is born!

We'd love it if you could Digg this article too!!
Can you imagine the reaction if there was a technical conference for men only - and a women could only attend as the guest of a man?

There are far too many grants/scholarships/opportunities that are explicitly only open to women or minorities (I'm a minority and it still bothers me). A hypothesis of implicit discrimination against group A does not justify explicit discrimination against group B.

This happens all the time in the tech (and Math/Science) community and it really bothers me. This workshop in particular is one that I would have liked to attend, but am being excluded from because of my gender.

Frankly, I don't know any women who would be interested in attending a 2-day RoR workshop so I can't go as a 'guest' - and I don't think that is too unusual.
I liked his closing line the best. "Mature industries" get so full of themselves.
Misleading headline:

"Men are warmly welcomed when they find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails who will register and bring a guest."
Indeed. I am horrified when I see our neighbours to the south fail to cast their eyes to this barren wasteland devoid of people who are not blond-haired, blue-eyed, heterosexual white Protestants. If only the Canadian government had not secretly sterilized all our immigrants. The woe.

Edit: I suppose it's possible that you've confused eugenics with euthanasia, in which case I would have to modify the specifics of my post, but the general thrust would more or less be the same.

Edit again: To be more constructive, perhaps I ought to point out that there are all sorts of countries that have a more-or-less public health care system, and yet are not actively engaged in eugenics programs. Some examples would include Canada, Sweden, and France. Perhaps I'm just naive, but I fail to understand why the American government would respond in a flamboyantly different manner and decide to, e.g. murder old people for kicks.
Looking at my own purchasing behavior online - the strongest intent generator are product reviews - especially the ones I find on Amazon. I almost always read a review from amazon and then proceed to buy it from the cheapest online source.
That's true, however, I think that you are underestimating the number of people that have consciously made the decision that any browser with less than .5% is not worth optimizing for (especially since you'll end up upsetting stuff for more popular browsers if you're not careful), and in some companies/situations that .5% might even be a lot higher.

Even my bank, which has a pretty awesome website (and a correspondingly large budget) does not work when I increase the size of my browser past 2048 pixels or when I visit using Konqueror.

It's not that they couldn't get it to work, it's just that they probably don't even care because it is a problem that is too low on their list of priorities.

It's like that with everything, finite budgets -> some of the apples will fall off the cart, and in some cases that's just too bad.

The people that make the decisions are usually well aware of that.

I think what is more amazing here is that you're actually able to see almost all other sites with a browser that old, considering that the vast majority of the site operators are definitely not testing with that particular setup.

Try finding a store that will sell you 78 rpm records or even an 8 track player. Media readers that are 'behind the times' are most of the time pretty useless, compared to that your elderly browser is doing fine.

Just for the heck of it, here are the stats for a small site:

mozilla: 160630
IE: 325291
Opera: 17869
Mobile: 45175
Konqueror: 147

That's unique visitors, not pageviews.
I wonder if Harvard policy allows them to discriminate in this way.
is the mother drew or arash?
bloody well executed. love the tutorial that first loads up as a pdf.
Privileging the Hypothesis (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
> The other thing with a type-inferring compiler is that you don't have to figure out all your types upfront.

I've worked a fair bit with OCaml. You still need to define types for ADTs, and those can change early on. I think the bigger benefit to inferred static typing is during maintenance, ensuring that the design is still internally consistent.

I mostly agree with you, and have the same experience about TDD vs. type inference. I'm not dogmatic about TDD either, though - I use a REPL and asserts, and sometimes QuickCheck-ish tools for testing during the initial writing.
Really-really interesting.

I'm curious why asian females scored worst of all when asian males scored descent.
Indeed. When I was a kid, I would have ideas for things and just do them. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but I always learned something.

Now when I have ideas, I analyze most of them to death, out of concern that... what if it doesn't make money?... what if there's something better I should be working on instead?... etc. So many of my ideas die unused.

Sometimes I see someone else have the same idea and run with it. For example, I thought of the same basic idea as the AfterTheDeadline software, around the same time. I didn't implement it, but someone else did, to great success. Why didn't I do it? I couldn't think of how I could sell it, or who would even use it.

Of course, I applaud the success of AfterTheDeadline. But I gotta stop destroying my own ideas under the hammer of paranoid analysis.
First I'm very sympathetic to Sharan's plight. This has to suck.

But it raises some real issues with the whole startup founder plan. Does a company with (what looks like) 4 people and a few seed investors count as a startup? This seems like a really low bar. I think pg's initial essay kind of glosses over the difficulty of defining a startup - or for that matter even a "startup investor".

I go both ways on this issue. I think letting smart, driven people into the US to work is awesome. But I'm not sold that being the founder of a "startup" is the right bar.
I have done roller coasters... I don't like them.
Actually I just paid over 17K for my wife's delivery and hospital stay. *Background - located in Los Angeles County, CA
Congrats guys, I finally upgraded myself to a pro account just this morning.
Your story is both inspiring and disheartening at the same time.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.
I used gnuplot for the charts in my recent paper originally, but we switched to Excel for the latest version.

EDIT: my advisor likes it better, and it actually makes really pretty graphs.
Entropy and Information Theory (free ebook)
An Exploration of Random Processes for Engineers [pdf] (free ebook)
Your childhood truth still holds, worst case you will learn something.

Go do those things and who knows where it will lead.
American here, I think it'd be amazing if we'd increase our infrastructure by taking oh, say, two billion and helping to cost down someone building these in the US.

I admit I haven't researched this more, but someone just mentioned that there's talks about a cross country high speed rail being built; it would go through MI and that's how I came into contact with the topic. I'd love to see something like that happen...stop building 2/10 bombs and build a few trains/bridges :)
Right now, if I wanted to found a startup without taking some of the risks Sharan took (the LLC route), I'd have to get enough funding to pay myself ~70K/year as salary. Then, and if I had respectable funding, and some well known/ respectable people on the board, I can set up shop and have a US Citizen co-founder "hire" me as an H1B.

So the system as it stands forces immigrant founders to raise funding, even if you had a completely bootstrappable business plan. That's where the bar is set now, and it definitely dissuades people, and that's why I think many of us advocate lowering it. Substitute it with education, experience or endorsements maybe?
Methods of Information Theory in Computational Neuroscience
I always liked Tim Schafer and his fantastic and unique sense of humor. I don't think there is anyone else who writes stuff on the internet (obviously a large group) who can make me laugh as reliably as he can. Oh yeah, and his games are great. If you see this, thanks for the laughs Tim. And thanks for this inspiring post.
Craigslist does need to start charging for personals. $1 would be pretty appropriate - enough to make spam unprofitable, but not enough to drive legit users to a better deal (at least I'm not aware of any).
Do you think people would use...
a website that focuses on aggregating the best strictly editorial content online? Does something like this exist?
Great job. How was the approval process?

I noticed that you are lacking some of the functionality available at getdropbox.com. A quick suggestion is to have a link available from the settings panel. Also, put up your referral program! Have a button for that: "Invite a friend, get 250 MB"
Hah!

If only. Seriously, that's a thing you really can not promise and I've personally seen the other side of that.

Please, you have no idea how many people have been 'recruited' as entrepreneurs entering Canada only to be delayed just about forever.

The proper procedure is to get your paperwork BEFORE you enter Canada, anything else is a complete nightmare, no matter what you qualifications and/or your connections.
Ha! Great commercial, but I wonder if it's really for the audience, or more for the clever zing that is aimed at the egos inside Apple.

Basically, the ad is an epic troll, which makes me smile, but leaves me wondering if it will effectively convert people.
This just kicked out iTunes Remote from its position in my "bottom 4." Great viewer that can read a LOT of different formats (pdf, doc, docx, ppt, xls, html, rtf, mp3, mov, mp4, etc [1]). Interesting 'Favorites' category.

This is basically a better version of dropbox (previews are actually faster than downloading and opening different apps). Just......awesome.

[1] https://www.getdropbox.com/help/80 (supported formats list)
Where do we see these higher prices in the long term? Not in the browser market. Where else? I'm sure there are some examples but they must be few and far between. Not even Standard Oil got pricing power.
They are different groups of people. We have a system whereby we are required to purchase additional days of life at any imaginable cost for those nearing the end. We also have a system whereby younger, healthier people receive care through an insurance company with an incentive to provide the minimum amount of care.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that most of the funding for the system is withheld from peoples' paychecks in the form of taxes and employee/employer contribution to health insurance. So most people have no idea exactly how much our current health care system is costing them.

It is easy to imagine a better health care system, since we pretty much have the worst of both worlds (public/private) now, but I can't imagine any politically feasible way to get there.
excellent work. love it. Like the favorite feature. works really smoothly.
It very much depends on a large number of factors that are not under your control. It's basically a lottery. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. I've had the local mayor, a case officer of the Ontario immigration department (from TO) and a whole bunch of others practically beg the office in Buffalo to finally do something and still time ran out (after 5 years we called it quits).

The really sad thing is that it cost a lot of hardworking Canadians their jobs, and the area where we lived jobs, especially well paying ones with employers that have a different view of employees than so many lemons that need to be squeezed are very hard to come by.
The app works simply and beautifully. Reminds me of their web-client. A perfect extension of their services.

I don't think I could ask for anything else. Thanks DropBox.
What difference do the motivations make? Browsers are now free. If I can get a few more apps free with my OS, I'd like those too.
Netflix definitely does have an affiliate program and pays ~$20 per new user
Grading on a curve is a strange idea. It completely destroys incentives for pear to pear learning, that was very important part of my college experience. I learned a lot by explaining material to my peers. It would be much harder if there was something as discouraging as grading on a curve.
Palm apologizes to JWZ
Stevey still compares to Joel even without writing a thing.
He's amazing.
I see those Nerd Pride pocket protectors at Boston Lisp each month. Abelson's collaborator, Gerry Sussman, is oft seen sporting one.
I'd really like that.

You could probably collect statistical data on reader's preferences and make really good recommendations as well (like Amazon or something, but people tend to read a lot more editorials than they do books, so you'd have more a lot data to work with).
They do type checking.

Edit: The first hit on Google for "ruby type checking" is a post about adding it to Ruby, which would suggest to me that it's not already in there. Apologies for my ignorance on the matter.
While iTunes was loading, I was wondering if the app would be paid or free. I started calculating mentally, what I would do if the app was paid - thought, okay, for 99cents I'd get it. On reflection, I'd get it for 9.99, but I'd post a nasty HN comment about them. For 19.90, I'd have said no way.

By this time, it had loaded, and I saw it was free. I was like - these dudes are pretty good dudes. Free, yarr? Nice!
And then my iTunes popped up and told me that 3.0 was not a high enough version. C'mon dudes, jailbreaking is not that easy for the latest versions, I intentionally stay a version behind.
Do you have access to the firehose feed?
Great, I'll check this one out too.
I dunno.. When I'm evaluating whether or not a new site is worth my time, I look at: 1. screenshots/examples, 2. FAQ, 3. About Us (in that order).

These won't show up in any significant way in your logs, because after the users have digested the information there, they won't go back to those pages again. But I still think those pages are crucial in making the initial impression / conversion, and also to a lesser extent, SEO.
They made something you want to tell your friends about. I noticed people started using it (independently from me) at my engineering college last year and by now shared Dropbox folders are widely used on group projects.
Not really.

The matches are based on answers users give to questions (both site designed and user designed).

When the blogger says they don't match, it means:

- Person A: I like X

- Person B: I don't like people who like X

Where X could mean ice cream, god or tooth-brushing. It has nothing to do with people selecting the race or religion of the people they think they want to date.