skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife thinks the feet could use improvement. That they're a little creepy and look like something out of Oregon Trail.
No matter how brilliant one is are there are people out there who make one look like rather like a badly shaved monkey.

Obviously this is not true at the limit, but unless you happen to be Hawking posting incognito that consideration is probably not applicable to you.

If that doesn't provide an appropriate perspective then I suggest that you consider that in an infinite universe everything is essentially pointless and the small graduation between your brilliance and their interest in reality television is so small as to be immeasurable.
Several members of the community have been very helpful, but the code and templates are a total disaster.

If moniedinterests attracts a community, then I may write a replacement system or aggressively refactor pligg (that would be a good excuse to learn PHP well).
Yes. I liked Macs starting in 1988 or so. I fell out of love sometime around system 8, and spent many happy years with Unix variants. But OSX brought me back.
What kind of border do you recommend?
Didn't the anti-trust case have more to do with the fact that it was impossible to uninstall IE, and that various actions would cause IE to be reset as the default browser?
The most interesting part is the link to http://www.sics.se/~joe/ex11/download/release-2.5.tgz which includes Armstrong's emacs.erl clone! (in the widgets directory)
"If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long to launch." -- pg

They seem to have gotten it about right. The 128k Mac was a way to start a conversation with customers and developers.
A Coin Toss Helps Divide a NYC Property Empire
Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, or emotional stability required to make it through an engineering degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?
Heard of Sifter.org?
A matter of time is plenty good enough for the time being. It's an email account, not a bank account.
It cost you more than $199. You just don't realize it, because Apple and your carrier did a good job of snookering you.
I only have a minute but.. in McLeod's case, he took it from being a mere hobby of scribbling on the back of business cards, through to refining the concept of the "social object" and, more recently, the "cube grenade." Going into what this is all about is a bit much here but this might help: http://gapingvoid.com/2007/10/24/more-thoughts-on-social-obj... - Crucially, though, his art is specifically focused on business and is primarily sold within a business context - no galleries, often used for offices, etc.

Hirst.. you could talk about for hours and go round in circles, but if you follow him for a bit you'll see a very savvy business mind at work. Not many artists have a couple hundred million dollars in their bank accounts. It's not a cynical money grab though; he's got some great ideas going on.
Well, the one thing the offerpal ceo said which made sense was that user experience is a top priority for facebook. After all, this is what let it blow MySpace out of the water.

It doesn't mean her company isn't treading on the edge of the fb guidelines, but she basically said that when push comes to shove and enough people complain, fb will do what's right by it's users even if it means losing the short-term ad revenue.

Ultimately, the health and trust-worthiness of its platform is paramount to fb ever capitalizing on its astronomical valuation.
Ask HN: What would you do if you run out of ideas?
I consider myself as a man with creativity. But recently I suffered serious drain of ideas. I have no idea what to do to improve the result of my research interest. When read an article, I can get every word of it, but that's it. I cannot derive any thoughtful idea from what I read even the total amount of my daily reading hasn't changed.

Because cannot find any interest idea to implement, I didn't write serious code (> 100 lines) for half a month and I don't feel comfortable about that.
Dynamo is no longer used internally at Amazon at scale

That's certainly relevant. I'd love to know more. Do you know why? What are they doing instead?
This is a pipe dream. I totally get the engineery argument for certainty and perfection, but this can't work in the real world. It's too inconvenient, and relies on users being responsible and educated.
I did run out of ideas, and I ended up taking a job at Google as a result.

If you're really out of ideas, I'd suggest you permute your life as heavily as possible. Take a different job. Move to a different city. Hang out with a different group of friends. Get interested in topics that you've overlooked until now.

Most good ideas don't just spring fully-formed from someone's head. They come from the random recombination of a bunch of strains of experience. You're doing something, and you're doing something else, and you think they have nothing to do with each other, and then suddenly they kinda juxtapose and you realize there's a really good third idea hiding in there.
I agree with Arrington, but his article is long on rhetoric and short on facts. He also totally mischaracterizes Anu's response to his claims, saying she didn't address "any of his points," when in fact she addressed all three of them directly.
The pattern that I am seeing here and after having meditated on this myself is this: My conclusions about humanity at large are mostly correct, but this ought not discourage me from interaction in general due to one critical point. There are many great people despite the mass being largely useless. Further, if one actually attempts to follow rational principles it would not be all that difficult to find these people and maximise one's interactions within this sphere.

Isn't that in fact exactly what I'm doing here? The first place I have ever actually felt mostly socially comfortable in my life?

All the examples of positive social experiences that I can think of I could logically have concluded would likely have ended up that way based on the guessed at characteristics of the groups in question, the trick to human interaction is not to optimise your communications for the mean, but to optimise your communications for the groups whom with which you wish to interact.

Thanks to those that responded.
While I don't like her tone, I listened to her entire response and she seemed to address Arrington's issues pretty effectively.

She should heed the advice: "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."
Everyone who has previously fallen for these scams, or has enough experience to understand that most of the offers are scammy. That leaves a lot of suckers to be mined.

My nanny (a very nice, intelligent woman, but naive about such things) wound up with a $500 cell phone bill last month after falling for a bunch of scams in a single week.
I'm afraid your bubble metaphor is too subtle for me. Educations aren't tradeable investments like houses and shares, so the value of an education does not depend on its potential selling price.
Can you explain more about how you think the education bubble will collapse? What do you think will happen to tuition prices in the future? Will universities go out of business? Will the collapse benefit students, or will it harm them? How?
Marcel Duchamp for his consideration that "art" is something socially constructed i.e. not immanent within the thing itself.

Raphael, seeing his paintings in person renewed my love of art.

Many others.

As far as composed music is concerned there are many as well but at this moment I'll say Webern for mystery and Xenakis for energy. Also Helmut Lachenmann is good.
In the scales of which this article speaks, I am at the limits.

The conclusion you draw at the end would result in an embrace of nihilism in the instance that you assume that this is an unchanging fact or transhumanism in order to widen the gap and make it significant on a cosmological scale.

I'm wholeheartedly in favour of the second option, certainly. My humanity already feels more a shedding skin than a fitting glove, long ago I had wished I could move beyond it's constraints and push the limits of possibility.
No - all I know is based on rumour.
I hadn't, I had a brief look and my curiosity is aroused, are there archives of the list content?
Speaking of scams and scam companies, I’m dealing with a company named MindJet, which makes a mind mapping program called MindManager, which I wanted to test against the open-source programs. BTW, the open-source programs are better, as one might expect.

Before purchasing the software (to test) I contacted the company to ask about the software itself, as well as their refund policy. I was emailed back by Christian Walter, who said they offered a 30-day money back guarantee.

I purchased the software, tried it, determined that it did not meet my needs, to put it nicely, and certainly was not something that was worth any money. Therefore, I emailed the company to request my refund. This is where the fun starts.

When I requested my refund, Christian at MindJet effectively denied the request (in my opinion) and told me I would have to download a form, swear on it, sign it, and fax it to an international number.

On the form it said all fields must be completed or else no refund. One of the fields was “Customer Number,” which it says is listed on your invoice. That is not true (at least not on the invoice I have, nor anywhere on "my" account on their website).

The other part of their scam (that's what I call this kind of business practice) is that when you buy the product they throw in a “free” year of support. What they don’t tell you is that this is really a subscription for paid support, with the first year free, and that they will bill you annually starting next year unless you: (1) figure this out, (2) figure out how to opt out, and (3) do it in time.

I’m still dealing with this MindJet issue, gathering info for a detailed blog post with screenshots. Tune in later to see how the story ends, if they refund me on their own or I have to dispute the charge with Mastercard (I’ve already met the requirements to dispute the charge and am just waiting to see what they will do).

In meantime, I can tell you that, based on this experience (on its own and in comparison with every other company I have ever done business with), I consider MindJet a scam company. If their business practices are legal, they seem at least highly deceptive, tricky, and unethical (to me). Again, this is only my experience and opinion, so take it for what it's worth.
I wasn't suggesting they don't look similar. You'll notice I didn't say that. I think it's obvious that those sites offered a level of interactivity that the current BH page does not though, so I feel like you're being a little disingenuous here.

I guess I'm not clear on what you meant in your original post then. Did you mean that If the web consisted of the pages that were around in 1997 we wouldn't have weekly security updates and 600K memory-hog browsers? Or did you mean that if people designed web-pages to be informational and not interactive we wouldn't have those problems? I interpreted your comment as the latter, but I would take issue with both.

In the end my problem with your comment is that it's a lot like saying "If we didn't have email, we wouldn't have spam" or "If cars didn't have windows, it would be harder to break into them." It just seems like silly nostalgia. I suppose I should have articulated this more clearly from the beginning.
I only see 6 links on the front page. NewMogul had 30. 30 links on the front page is much, much more usable than 6.

I go to aggregator/news sites like this for interesting links...show me more!
Yahoo Mail offers a service called AddressGuard that does exactly this, but it's only available to paid accounts. You can also easily use these as your from address, so even in direct correspondence, you still shield your primary address from the recipient. (This allowed me to verify that eMusic sells their subscriber list to spammers.)

A free alternative is SneakEmail (http://www.sneakemail.com) which allows you to set up disposable addresses that forward to your primary account, and allows you to set up pre-forwarding filters. They also create a unique address for the sender of each email, and you can set up your SneakEmail filters to insert this as the reply-to address of each email you receive.
Augmented reality helps Marine mechanics to be 56 Percent Faster
Don't forget the Apple Newton. 1989, baby! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29
Indeed, bus leap frog is one my less favorite games but I've played it quite a bit...
Social Network Monetization: The Four Dominant Business Models
Could you facebook message me? I don't recognize your username, sorry!
Registering for a single course in Canada will likely cost ~$800 for a single term. That's a lot to pay for access to publications. The other option is subscribe to publications directly, but that can cost much much more than 800.
My first was an IBM 7094, but over in a corner was a trusty 1401 which was used to copy card decks of programs onto tape for the 7094 to execute. The output tapes were carried back to the 1401 for printing.

The 1401 was a marvel of simplicity. Pressing the start button would read one card from the card reader and start executing the code on the card. The boot card would read the rest of the boot program from the card reader and you were ready to go.
Google Wave Guide: User Manual Released for Wave
Actually, being able to ssh from a phone would be about the only thing that would convince me to get one. But I suspect I'm not exactly representative of the potential customer base.
How I surf the Web
Mentions: ... , Steve Ballmer, ... .
I suggest adding the prefix back in to the title. Without "Monetizing Social Networks:" in the front, the title is wrong, as the classic "make stuff, then sell it for a profit" doesn't appear in the list. This article is far more limited than the HN title suggested.
> and nobody wants to ssh from a phone anyways.

Actually, it's pretty handy (when your phone has an actual keyboard). I use pssh on my Palm Centro a couple times per week.
Yea, I tried, but It got cut off -- character limit.

I'll cut out some other thing.
ITunes update screws text. Official solution: remove all your third-party fonts
Cascading Style Sheet Level 2 Visual Cheat Sheet
Thanks. I also found this whilst hunting around, which I found utterly fascinating:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/sep/22/featuresre...
One thing that bugs me in privacy policies is the "we may change this policy at any time and without warning" clause.

RSS could be one way to make sure users can receive warnings and notification of changes. However, subscribing to RSS feeds for each site would be too tedious.

A browser plugin (or rather built-in feature) that popups a warning in an overlay bar at the top of the window (like the password remember feature in Firefox), would be better. It could receive data from a centralized service, privacy policy RSS feeds, or just by screen-scraping the policy at a specified interval and checking for changes.
Such traps can be placed on decoy pages that users and good robots are unlikely to visit. Or, that legitimate users execute rarely -- when clicking a link to send a single legitimate email -- but email harvesters execute in excess.
Edited. That's better. Now it includes the social networking prefix
The mouse is better for things that are primarily spatial, while the keyboard is better for things that can be expressed symbolically (with language). We're not having this discussion right now by pointing at word boxes on the screen and clicking, are we?
Avoiding the Cargo Cult And Getting The Trans-Atlantic Startup Model Right
Thanks. Is that posted somewhere? Is shipping out to customers more automated?

I always wonder about stuff like that.
"taking it easy is the best policy"
"And women with college degrees were 5.4 times more likely to be virgins than women who never got their Bachelor's."

That was totally unexpected.
Let's also legalize murder. If you make someone mad enough to kill you, you deserve to die. Society doesn't need a "safety net".
I think liamk's experience is more typical. I think most countries charge money to attend the university in some way, and/or have a fair amount of bureaucracy associated with signing up.
"His team's survey found that 13.9 per cent of men [...] said they have never had sex."

"The study also found that male homosexuals were 11 times more likely to be virgins than heterosexuals"

So, I'm trying to find some plausible interpretation that would reconcile these two statements... anyone?

[Edit: I don't just mean what would cause gay people to be virgins... I mean how can these figures both be true?]
Any links to studies?
I think your indictment of your peers is neither realistic nor fair, if for no other reason than from a bare quantitative perspective.

For every person who is "not smart enough" to get a job, there are several for whom jobs are not available, but whom you can rationalise as "not smart enough" in order to make yourself feel better about your own luck.
I am more than a little shocked that those numbers are so high. That's almost one in seven men! I guess it just goes to show how much society has conditioned me to believe that everyone is having sex.

It's kind of a vicious cycle. If everyone believes everyone else has had sex, people will be less likely to admit (or at least bring up) that they haven't had sex, and so further contribute to the idea that everyone has had it.
Ditto! Didn't like her tone either but she addressed the issues.
Apple says booting OS X makes an unauthorized copy
Ask YC: Where can I find free founding documents?
I saw a link a while back on YC to a legal firm that posted founding documents online. Believe it included Articles of Incorporation, Shareholders Agreement, and a few others. Can someone point me to the right link please?
Go for a bike ride! I find exercise is a great way of clearing your head. Long walks and bike rides and things like that do wonders for letting my mind wander.
Well that is terrible, why would that be an official solution rather than reverting back to old font rendering system or removing a specific font that is causing issue.

This is like setting a banking website to use a non readable font using css and asking the user to remove that font or disable css to use online banking. (Though Itunes should be less important than banking it is the only example I could think of.. maybe email would be better).
And a several-page "privacy policy" is the solution?
You might want to check out http://lexpuli.ca
They are applying open source ideas to law. The plan is that will create high quality, readable legal documents (with supporting documentation, FAQs etc.) that people can use for free.
They are looking for suggestions on what to work on and I know they are interested in Terms of Service and Privacy Policies for websites.
This is why when a customer asks for a refund, it's a lot easier to just give them one. Especially if you're a software company. You might lose a sale, and a few bucks, but that's nothing compared to the bad press and expense of chargebacks against your merchant account.

If MindJet had just refunded Chris's money, no matter whether or not he is actually 'right', then this post, and the blog post that's likely to follow it, wouldn't even exist. The worst that Chris could say is, "I bought their software, it sucks, they... uh... gave me my money back. Those bastards."

Being scammy just doesn't pay off, at least to my way of thinking.
Maybe whomever created that page meant "temporary work around." this is definitely better than nothing, but is definitely laughable at best if it's not followed up with a patch.
I use Mindjet and have for years. They're not a "scam company". If anybody was scamming, it seems like it was you. Your obvious plan was to get the software, write a bad review of it, and then ask for your money back. You get an article for your blog with no financial impact to your wallet. Now, when that backfired, you're indignant. I have to say, I'm not feeling that sympathetic to your predicament.
13.9% of men includes all age groups. It's probably something like 50% of 18-22 men, and a much smaller number (e.g. 0.5-1% or so) of 35-45 men.

I'm guessing that perhaps 5.5-11% of male homosexuals are virgins?

That seems strange, however, considering that it's vastly easier for gay guys to get laid than for straight guys. (I'm basing this last statement on common sense and my own experience; I've been approached by strange men offering sex, but never by women I've never met.)
Fear of HIV transmission

Limited sexual network in small towns

closeted yet no desire for heterosexual intercourse
SneakEmail is great; it's what I use when I'm seriously suspicious of who I'm sending mail to.

For 95% of the things I sign up for, however, I'm not that paranoid - the slight decrease in security is offset by the added convenience of not having to log into a third-party service (like SneakEmail) to get what I'm doing done.
Found on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/submission/1105620/Apple-says-booting-OS...
If you want to do your presentations in Emacs, consider eslide: http://github.com/jrockway/eslide

It is like takahashi.xul, but everything is contained in Emacs. That means your syntax-highlighted code-blocks look the same on your slides as in Emacs :)
You mean http://lexpubli.ca/
Nature needs us to have sex in order to continue the species, so it has built in very heavy biases to get us to do that. It's the number one imperative besides keeping ourselves alive.

I believe that even for a reasonable person who is well practiced in recognizing biases in his own point of view, getting past all biases involving sex would be extremely difficult.
Also previously posted as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910960
Ask HN: Tool for handling a beta tester group?
I have a small group of beta testers (50-100) that I currently communicate with by sending BCC messages. Can anyone recommend a better tool for this? I wouldn't mind beta testers being able to communicate with the list, instead of me just blasting announcements and releases out.

I thought about Google Groups, but you can't send attachments to a Google Group as far as I can tell. So, I would have to link the beta download from one of my servers - this wouldn't be that bad, but it would be another step for each email.
I've been approached by strange men offering sex...

Well, what do you expect with a name like yummyfajitas?
Based on some other research on this I've seen I think it's actually biological. There is a pretty high correlation between virginity and IQ also.
I bet there are a number of devoutly religious, non-practicing homosexuals.
It just means that the virgin group has a higher percentage of homosexuals than the non-virgin group.
http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/startup-issues/7-legal-docum...

http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/13/cut-your-legal-fees-with-y...

http://www.jasonnazar.com/2008/07/10/10-incredibly-awesome-d...

http://www.businessinsider.com/legal-documents-for-your-star...

http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/...
Skype Open Source "in the nearest future"
Oh please, sex is overrated.
Hopefully he doesn't send swine flu to everybody!

http://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/5187063511
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I'll assume that you're implying that college girls are slutty partiers, and respond to that.

That may be somewhat true, but in general women with college degrees come from financial backgrounds/households where there is more information available about the risks of sex (with regards to pregnancy/STDs). Also, if you haven't been on a campus lately, the religious voice is VERY loud. If you were a woman thinking of remaining a virgin until marriage, you could easily find company who would make you comfortable with that decision.