skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What advantages and disadvantages do you see in publishing this information to your community and the world?

It makes for good linkbait, gives you a quick cut-through-the-noise hook (utility of that declines sharply with exposure), and especially for solo entrepreneurs I think it sort of helps with the crushing social isolation we're otherwise prone to.

People I respect (and respectfully disagree with) have said that it promotes small-time thinking, encourages competitors to come eat your lunch, and complicates your professional dealings with parties who may be concerned that you cannot stuff the genie back in the bottle. (For example, potential acquirers).

I would not expect any substantial increase in conversions from publishing numbers, since the people who are most interested in them are your professional peers rather than your customers.
WOW... that is impressive. 67TB in a 4U. They put a lot of thought into those servers.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h...

Edit: Impressive service and great price point. It looks like the only thing that I would want to have as well is geographic redundancy too.
I don't disagree with you. The entire issue, and comparing the US economy with Japan's, is a gray area.

Fannie and Freddie have always been quasi-government organizations running with government contracts/charters.

To make the conversation slightly political (since we are discussing government influence on the economy), I don't agree with most of the actions the government has taken in relation to the auto industry.

Still, it's not as though the Post Office is acting as a savings account like a bank as was the case in Japan. That's a different shade of gray than what's occurring in the USA.
It's not about looking nice, it's about selling and being in a sales/marketing mindset.

Balsamiq's sales are absolutely dominating tarsnap's. What are they doing differently and how can you learn from them?

Most of the answer, IMO, is contained in the thread from 111 days ago.

Your technology is awesome and deserves an awesome sales effort.
If somebody cuts you off, the radar is guaranteed to have a faster reaction time than you.
Actually, that's exactly what it is:

The canonical MVP strategy for a web application is to create a mock website for the product and purchase online advertising to direct traffic to the site. The mock website may consist of a marketing landing page with a link for more information or purchase. The link is not connected to a purchasing system, instead clicks are recorded and measure customer interest.
I strongly recommend the movie The Cove. It's much more entertaining and less depressing than you would expect. Available via DVD or bittorrent. http://www.thecovemovie.com/ (flash site so I can't link directly to the trailer)
Simple Tab View (i.e. tabbed-content) with YUI 3
Thus, the new-found evidence discussed in the article serves only to dramatize something these scientists want because of their philosophical predispositions,

I don't think this is entirely true here. You've loaded the question by making an assumption, "It is morally repugnant to mistreat animals regardless of the intelligence of the animal" which not everyone will agree with.

In fact, I suspect the vast majority of people do not: every day millions of people knowingly eat meat produced from animals that were horrifically mistreated, despite the fact that they could have eaten something else, often for a lower price. Why? Because it tastes good, and a lot of people don't care about the suffering of cows.

Suppose the following moral axiom that some hypothetical person might hold:

"Mistreating any sapient being is equivalently morally wrong as mistreating a human."

Therefore, if scientists can prove that an animal is sapient, those who follow such a belief will agree that such an animal should not be mistreated. I don't see the problem with scientists arguing that an animal is sapient.
I wish they had a graph showing the growth by year of IPv4 usage and how that compares to the amount of space available with IPv6.

It would probably look like a map of the solar system, since IPv6 is astronomically large compared to IPv4.

BTW, Huston's latest trends and predictions are at http://ipv4.potaroo.net/ (not completely down, but incredibly slow).
That may be, but I still look with suspicion on someone who says he would have gotten in 2 accidents in 11,000 miles had his car not saved him. In my experience, it's very, very rare for someone to just cut you off with no warning. I can almost always predict that someone is going to switch lanes without signaling; usually 2 or 3 seconds before they do it.
The assisted braking 'feature' where the system moves your calipers closer to your rotors sounds really stupid and dangerous. When I press the brakes, I am expecting a buffer period between initial contact with my pedal and the actual deceleration of the vehicle. Because of that buffer, I tend to push my pedal down further to initiate braking. Eliminating that buffer with drivers who have come to expect it will make for very sudden braking, which would probably increase the chance of being hit from behind.
I think a predictable time is better than sooner. If you have IPv6 in your 2012 budget then having to do it earlier might be a problem.
My Amazing Experience of Buying Eyeglasses On line
Yes, but they voluntarily entered in to their business.

What is AMD's competitive advantage? The best I've ever seen is that they are cheaper than Intel for a given processor class/speed. However that doesn't seem to have gotten them much traction. Competing on price alone rarely makes for a successful company.
Anyone have it working in Emacs? I may fool around with it tonight, if not, and see if I can get it working.
That's the GoWalla ripoff? ;-)
I totally agree and after reading the article I was going to post this exact same comment but you beat me to it. I would say that it is just as morally repugnant or in fact more morally repugnant to mistreat an animal that is not intelligent.

It is not like lack of intelligence makes it alright to mistreat an animal.
I'm pretty sure American culture used to be this way about a hundred years ago, given the little research I've done. I also have some personal experience. My paternal grandfather believes that you can't get a white collar job without a GPA of 3.5 or higher. (I don't think he knows the A in GPA means Average) My maternal grandmother told me grades used to meant a lot more back when she was younger.

To be simplistic:
Grading in an organized public school system is fairly new to the world. Everyone thought it was the greatest thing ever and used it as the ultimate measuring stick.

In America (forgive me for ignoring Europe, etc.) people have realized that grades are far from a perfect measurement. Because of this, changes has been made in many companies to find new measures to grade people by. I believe this is because American culture has always had some disrespect for authority in it. (It varies from decade to decade) It is cultural acceptable to challenge old ideas of thinking even if you aren't in charge. (Culturally acceptable doesn't mean you won't get your ass in a sling)

Asian cultural is very different. It is family centric and puts great focus on respect. Old age is respected in a way it never was in America. Once you get stuck with some bad or marginal ideas they tend to stick around for awhile.
GPS-enabled Governors should be put in all cars too, limiting your speed to that of the speed limit, adjusted for weather conditions. If you're in a 35 MPH zone, you car will stop accelerating (and ideally auto-slow when going downhill or onto slower roads) once you hit the limit for that part of the road.

Speed limits would likely have to be re-adjusted in some cases as they may be too low in some area's, but it would certainly cut down on accidents.

An exception would be allowing people to speed in short bursts. While rare, sometimes you need to accelerate to avoid an accident. Not allowing for this would be unfair.

Definitely wouldn't be popular with a lot of people, or police departments generating revenue from speeding tickets. But driving is simply a means of getting from A to B in a safe and efficient manner. So long as people are getting hurt or killed in between A and B, something is very broken.
My comment is of course about the long term ... but the medium term might not be very fun:

Japan is aging at a terrific rate, and those elders will be pulling money at net out of their savings accounts (especially those who have had pension records lost by prefectures). So there will be a "run on the bank" at some level, but not the sort that causes a panic.

Bottom line here is that by definition current consumption must come from current production. Now they might be able to snare some current production from other countries by selling those bonds abroad ... but all in all I just don't see the current Japan Inc. making it work for too many more decades.

Peoples and societies have gone extinct before, I don't think you can say it's impossible in this case.
I'm Chinese American and had parents that attempted to regiment my life but failed since I was so headstrong and stubborn (a pain in the ass, in other words). Here's my take on the matter.

It's a simple matter of a failure of common sense - in other words, smart people being really stupid. Immigrant Asian parents who come to this country and torture their kids with this kind of upbringing are basically trading off long-term well being for short term gain. This would be perfectly understandable as mere human nature if it were not producing fucked up individuals as a result.

However, on the flip side, these kids are just as much at fault in my opinion. They need to take the initiative as Americans (however new their family's status) and start leading the life they want to live as soon as they are able. I threw off those shackles at age 13 and never looked back. Refused to take the piano lessons, refused to get straight A's, and ran around with whomever the hell I pleased. I also learned UNIX and programming at around this time, which has been FAR more useful in my life (I make over a quarter million dollars a year, I'm not a dot com millionaire but I make a good living) than anything my parents ever told me to do.

The language barrier doesn't make things any easier. This is one of the main differences between east Asian and Indian families. Lots of immigrant Indians speak perfect English and have Anglo mannerisms. This matters because the parents and kids can level with each other. This simply cannot happen in a hardass asian American household. Parents and kids don't have conversations, they have dictatorships.

I've had a discussion with my parents about this as a 25+ year old adult and they pretty much agree - the damage done by this kind of parenting is simply a case of smart people doing very stupid things. I literally asked my parents "How do asian parents do this? What the fuck were you thinking?" and they said "we weren't."

I think the greatest irony is unless you are truly exceptional (top 0.5%), the kind of upbringing these parents are meting out will result in an awful cubicle job working making someone else rich who got far worse grades than you.
A Black Market Finds a Home in the Web’s Back Alleys
Predicting un-signaled lane changes is almost a required survival skill on a motorcycle.
Clojure MongoDB Toolkit
The article is not discussing the ethical question of "mistreatment", but rather that of legal rights. This is an important distinction.

Anyone can advocate for dolphin rights, but, as scientists who have done research on dolphins, they are in a position to make ethical arguments against keeping dolphins in a zoo for public entertainment.

The rationale behind these arguments are grounded firmly in science. You have to be able to show the research that proves that one animal has no sense of self, while another (a dolphin) does, etc.
What worries me about this technology are the corner cases. If it's 99.9% effective, eliminating the need for manual braking, the 0.1% of the time where it doesn't work, the user won't be ready to brake, which is dangerous.
The movie is actually quite depressing, but I was happy to find out after watching that the practice has, at least temporarily, stopped.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. I think everyone see's your @reply -- perhaps you mean DMs?
This proposal wouldn't increase safety until all cars on the road had the GPS-governor feature, which would take 15-20 years for old cars to be phased out. In the meantime, the new cars would have an annoyance (no speeding) without providing any measurable safety improvement.
I'd probably agree that it doesn't "just work" (in the sense that e.g. dropbox just works), but if you're reasonably comfortable with a command line and have used tar before, it's pretty straightforward.
This is a perfect example of how not to use bold and profanity. They only subtract from the point he was trying to make.
The opinion of a scientist with a deep understanding of the biology of intelligence is worth more then my shallow understanding of biology.

Everyone's opinion does not have equal weight.

I agree though that no one group has a monopoly on ethics and everyone can have an opinion of some worth.
Yes, I agree with this. A service that is open to everyone is probably too generic for 2010. If I were going to try again in this area, I'd want to go niche by niche:

yoga

cooking

travel

political protests

car races

horse races

fixing cars (how to)

fixing up your house (how to)

There is a huge range of niches. To try to do a generic service in 2010, I think you'd $10 million to spend on marketing. But if you take a niche approach, and you do a good job with the code and interface, then you can rely on word-of-mouth among enthusiasts to spread the word.

If I was doing this again, I'd actually pursue something of a franchise model. The core team should mostly focus on the technical stuff: code, interface, servers. The marketing team should consist of 1 or 2 people from the niche that is being targeted.

I said above that iHanuman had poor marketing. Really, its only marketing came from Tilak Pyle. It was crucial that he was part of our team. And it helped, very much, that he was also a yoga teacher with a video to sell:

http://www.ihanuman.com/albums.php?id=48

Since he is basically non-technical, he made a great beta-tester, telling us what would be non-intuitive to a non-technical audience. And since he himself was selling a video, he wanted to see the site succeed, so he went out and tried to spread the word. And because he was a yoga teacher, he brought instant credibility to the site.

The site would have gone nowhere without him. What little success it had was largely due to the marketing he did (though note that my info about the site ended in early 2008).

So, I would take a niche approach. And I would look for the equivalent of Tilak Pyle in each niche that I decided to go after.
So that begs an important question.. where would/should you best publish your private corporation's revenue and profit numbers if you chose to? To your userbase? The media? Hacker News? :) The user base will ultimately see the information at some point, and I'm trying to understand their reaction to the information.
Quite sure, hah.

Peter and I had an e-mail exchange about 2 years ago when I first found his site. At first I was confused because I thought I had put up a site about javascript and then forgotten about it.

I doubt we look similar, but that would be a riot.
And here I was searching Google Maps for a classy place to drink and brawl.
" Competing on price alone rarely makes for a successful company"

You sure?
I work for NASA Ames (here: http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/groups/intelligent-robotics/). A bunch of us use git where we can, and git-svn for the rest of it.

We're going to be meeting with the lawyers in a few weeks to hopefully get official blessing for pushing any NOSA-licensed project (agency-wide) to github. A couple of my group's projects have open-source releases, but don't really practice open-source development (non-committers can't see the repo). I'm trying to fix that :)

I can keep HN posted if people care, or want to use us as a convincing tool- "hey, the federal government is adopting something faster than you are... something's wrong". Obviously, no promises that it will happen exactly as I say, because... lawyers. We just have to get past their trained skeptical conservatism.

It's worth noting, though, that NASA is not even close to a homogeneous entity. My group is one group in one division at one NASA center (and a smaller center, at that). Many groups are run autonomously by their group leads, and culture is mostly maintained at the group level. Open-source is already here, it's just not distributed equally :)
We make moral judgements to the contrary every day. Our implicit acceptance that humans are "worth more" than other animals acknowledges both an innate desire to defend one's own species over all others, but also that a heirarchy of superiority. For example, you would object to a massacre of puppies but would not over a massacre of bacteria.

The question lies in how you decide superiority. Thr religious tend to believe that we are "made in gods image" and thus superior. I am not religious, so I define my heirarchy by the ability of the species to comprehend the universe and its disruptiveness to other species. This is probably equally arbitrary, but it has at least some logic behind it. I view knowledge of the universe as humanity's ultimate goal as a species and thus judge species based on their ability to complete said goal.

When it comes to a choice between harming another species and the alternative I make a moral judgement based on the species "intelligence". I obviously never justify senseless violence and tend to abhor any purposeful torture.

The scientists' information is thus very important to my moral system.

P.s. Sorry for any typos or similar, this is posted from an iPhone.
Survival of the Kindest
Try Tonido Backup. http://www.tonido.com/app_backup_home.html.

Works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free too.
Do ya think it will have the unintended consequences of making people take more risks then they would have if they know of safety features?

Or maybe the increased safety outweigh the cost of false sense of safety?
After poking around the site posted by wrs, I found:

http://www.element-collection.com/html/coffee_table.html

Forget books, here's an element coffee table!
Car accidents are still the #1 cause of preventable death worldwide.

That strikes me as unlikely, given that car accidents kill something like 50,000 people a year in the US. Just inside the US, an obvious candidate for prevention -- medical mistakes -- kills far more people. (Estimated at 200k per year preventable deaths in hospitals alone.)

Casting our glance worldwide, poorer nations have millions of deaths from causes that aren't even "hard problems", such as clean drinking water, food distribution (solved in Europe in about the 1700s), malaria (solved in America over half a century ago), etc, etc.
Presumably the ABS still works, meaning you won't lose control of the car while slamming on the breaks.

As far as being hit from behind, I suppose this is (and always has been) an issue in accidents and other emergency situations. Still, the car behind you should allow appropriate spacing to prevent rear-ending you. I don't see how emergency breaking systems change really change the basic rules of the roads.
how come you haven't been on Techcrunch yet

I don't know enough about how Techcrunch selects its stories to answer this question. I'd certainly be happy to appear there.
This is the same publication that broke the NSA wiretap story; it operates 20+ foreign bureaus and has won more Pulitzers than any other paper. But, yes, let's shut it down for running linkbait about Apple.
The technology might get there soon but not the legal framework. I can't even imagine the legal implication of cars on autopilot killing pedestrians and drivers.

That is also probably one of the reasons we don't have flying cars yet.
My question #11: after decades of abject failure, why are we still paying attention to string theory?

This is from the the funniest book review I've read in a long, long time, on Amazon.com by Peter W. Shor for The Trouble With Physics (original here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2H7GVX4BUQQ68/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...):

The string theorists were scammed!, September 25, 2006

By Peter W. Shor (Wellesley, MA USA)

The part of the book I found most interesting was the part which tells how the string theorists were scammed by Nature (or Mathematics). Of course, Smolin doesn't put it exactly like this, but imagine the following conversation.

String theorists: We've got the Standard Model, and it works great, but it doesn't include gravity, and it doesn't explain lots of other stuff, like why all the elementary particles have the masses they do. We need a new, broader theory.

Nature: Here's a great new theory I can sell you. It combines quantum field theory and gravity, and there's only one adjustable parameter in it, so all you have to do is find the right value of that parameter, and the Standard Model will pop right out.

String theorists: We'll take it.

String theorists (some time later): Wait a minute, Nature, our new theory won't fit into our driveway. String theory has ten dimensions, and our driveway only has four.

Nature: I can sell you a Calabi-Yau manifold. These are really neat gadgets, and they'll fold up string theory into four dimensions, no problem.

String theorists: We'll take one of those as well, please.

Nature: Happy to help.

String theorists (some time later): Wait a minute, Nature, there's too many different ways to fold our Calabi-Yao manifold up. And it keeps trying to come unfolded. And string theory is only compatible with a negative cosmological constant, and we own a positive one.

Nature: No problem. Just let me tie this Calabi-Yao manifold up with some strings and branes, and maybe a little duct tape, and you'll be all set.

String theorists: But our beautiful new theory is so ugly now!

Nature: Ah! But the Anthropic Principle says that all the best theories are ugly.

String theorists: It does?

Nature: It does. And once you make it the fashion to be ugly, you'll ensure that other theories will never beat you in beauty contests.

String theorists: Hooray! Hooray! Look at our beautiful new theory.

Okay, I've taken a few liberties here. But according to Smolin's book, string theory did start out looking like a very promising theory. And, like a scam, as it looks less and less promising, it's hard to resist the temptation to throw good money (or research) after bad in the hope of getting something back for your return. One of the questions Smolin addresses in the rest of the book is why the theoretical physics community has kept with string theory and largely abandoned all the other approaches to quantum gravity. The short answer is that it's hard to admit that you've been scammed. The long answer is much more complicated. Another thing Smolin addresses in the book is other approaches to quantum gravity....
It's not even remotely economical to eliminate bad drivers, not to mention good drivers who driver badly at times. My sense is that during any test, people will appear much better drivers than they are on average, since they won't be drunk or shooting off an SMS message or whatever else.

It is economical to save a lot of lives with technology. This is a good tech. I don't know if I'd go with most important since seat belts, but it could save lives.
No doubt. He probably Twitters while driving.
Back when the opteron and amd64 instruction sets came out, they were pretty convincingly beating intel in performance, and for quite a long time, and after that they made a big advertising push about their processing power/watt.
Chrome identifies itself as Safari, and we know how protective Apple is of its trademarks.