skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vertical axis is f(x), and the shaded region represents f(x) > 1.
I couldn't get past the point where he's going on about doing lead-gen for payday loans.

I care about creating value far more than I care about making money. In my eyes, $500k earned by creating value is far sweeter than $5m acquired by helping loan sharks.

I'm not sure if this guy had anything interesting to say, but I'm canceling my wife's shopify account based on this interview. I'd recommended them on the basis that they were simple and not horrible... but I don't want a nickel going to this guy.

he can have his payday loans... but he can't have my dollars too.
Split Test (A/B Test) Calculator
The numerator is equivalent to (x-1.5)*(x-1).
Cancel out the (x-1.5) from numerator and denominator, leaving x - 1 > 0.

I'm not sure what the point of the post is, or why the discussions here are using so many words I don't understand.
> Who better to run a food company than someone who has worked in the USDA?

Are you asking as the food company, or as the proverbial "concerned citizen?"

Because I would want the USDA to work for me, since I am paying my taxes. I want it to do its job and protect me from Kraft selling me salmonela infested cookie dough. It is hard for USDA to do that when they expect to be hired by Kraft and be payed large bonuses and salaries in the future.

> The real issue is that our government can too easily reward individual companies or industry groups with hand-outs.

The other serious problem is that individual companies can easily 'reward' (read 'bribe') their friends in high places so they can turn a blind eye and in turn harm the public.

I have the naive desire to have a government that would take care and protect its citizens. I don't have the time and the resources to carry a microscope and a bacterial toolkit to the grocery store when I buy meat or eggs. I expect to pay my taxes and USDA to do its job.
But this isn't limited to software start ups, and I have a pretty big sample set to look at.

The angel firm I'm advising is involved in or funding about 20 ventures, of which only two are software related. Only one of those has a woman involved in any capacity.

Overall there are an insignificant number of people of either sex who are willing to take on the very real risk of bankruptcy however - to me the male/female split seems much less remarkable than the 99.9%-0.1% split with the general population.
I think all of these show one thing: when people like what they use, they will tell everyone else. You watch an amazing short film on youtube - you tell everyone you know, and the tree grows very quickly.

The good stuff bubbles to the top. It really is that way. You cannot have something brilliant and wanted, and it does not get its day. People will discover it and they will tell others and so on.

When I read an amazing book, the first thing I do is call my sister to tell her to read it too, so we can discuss it.

If it's good, all you need to do is seed it with a certain number of initial users. The rest will come by itself.
It is one of the more obnoxious traits of the common computer geek to conflate being good with computers with being intelligent. This kind of attitude only serves to turn more people off. So you're really good at what you're interested in, amazing! ... There are just as many "intelligent/dumb" geeks as there are "intelligent/dumb" lawyers/pilots/bankers/et al, they just choose different things to geek out on (ever seen a lawyer geek out over fantasy football stats)?
That is SO me. Many thanks for this excellent article, I will keep it in mind!
Ask HN: A competitor is part of the angel group I want to pitch to
I am thinking of applying to pitch at the Open Angel Forum next month (the group recently founded by @Jason Calacanis, who recruited some awesome angel investors from SF & LA), but I noticed that the CEO of a potential competitor is one of the angels. Open Angel Forum says the details from the applications will be shared with their angel membership -- should I be worried the guy in question will just steal my ideas & improve his product? Should I apply anyway?
Getting Drunk at New Aria Casino
Type these two expressions into a calculator or spreadsheet:

((1.5 - 1.5) * (1.5 - 1))/(1.5 - 1.5)

(1.5 - 1)

Did you get the same answer? If not then there must either a bug in your calculator/spreadsheet or in wolfram alpha.
No, the GPL2 is a conditional copyright grant agreeing to waive some of the standard "All Rights Reserved" terms provided that you meet its copyleft terms.

It's not a contract, and hasn't been enforced that way -- all GPL2 violations are copyright infringement -- you're distributing someone else's work without their permission.

This is also why the AGPL is unenforceable bullshit (it attempts to restrain your right to run the software, not just distribution), and why the GPL3 is extremely questionable (restraining the system on which you distribute the work).
the only thing i got out of it, is that basically relationships will help you jump start your business.
Notably, Arvind Narayanan, one of the deanonymizers is our very own randomwalker:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=randomwalker
But then I am not sure what useful conclusion to draw from that research. Is it even useful research? Without the study I could also have told you that few women like Star Wars figurines. That is why they are associated with geeks...

Should there now be an ad campaign displaying normal looking geeks?
The solution is exactly what Alpha computed: x > 1. The numerator factors to (x-1.5)(x-1), which reduces the problem to x - 1 > 0. Solve for x: x > 1. Not sure what the fuss here is.
Does she still use Netflix?
Links from articles back to comments on HN now added.
I'll often browse the new page and upvote stories without leaving comment. My hope is that someone with more knowledge than me can take a look and voice some opinions.
But, just as you point out they can't sue them accepting their apology doesn't guarantee they won't see Juku 2.0 again in a month or two. They got basically a stay of execution on this, but they don't have MS saying we won't be in the market.

I would be pursuing options of a lawsuit and talks with MS at the same time. If talks break down with MS I'd want have researched that option. Even if it's just a negotiation trick should it get really dirty.
Project Fortress Blog: Types and "Run-time Types"
Wrong. You are invoking division by zero to prove what, exactly?

0.5 * 0 / 0 = 0.5

Excel or your calculator will freak out, but it's still true.
just to point it out, postgres now has a builtin hash data type. This sees like it could be a better solution thatn serialized json
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/hstore.html
Erlang test suite revealed
I appreciate your summary. I just can't take anybody seriously once they mention payday loans.
The new portability nightmare
This is really just the black swan problem. You can't predict unpredictable problems. The only real solution is to stay agile.
I originally argued against the statement that we will have a "lower energy budget" in 90 years.

Given increasing population, how much more energy do you expect to be able to use? While true we may be able to increase our energy usage, I doubt most of mankind will be able to use as much as we do.

Also, do you realize how much effort (and energy expenditure) would it be to manufacture 10 square meters for every human being alive? Count 10 billion people - that's 100 billion square meters, not counting replacing damaged solar cells.

Nuclear fission is also a point that could be much improved, but it is pretty much a dead end unless we discover some new laws of physics. Nuclear facilities are horrendously expensive to build and to safely manage. There are safer designs, but how much safe is safe in a world you have to guard nuclear fuel (and waste) and keep if from people who are willing to blow themselves up?

As for fusion, you could add the chances of success if they were completely different approaches, but they are not. Also, giving them even a 10% chance of success is very optimistic.

There is no reason to panic, but there is reason to proceed carefully and think through what we are doing and what we are going to do.
This reminds me of First, Break All The Rules (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684852861?ie=UTF8&tag=... to get the book). They point out that many promotions require different skills, and that sometimes works badly. This is particularly true when people are promoted to manager.

To avoid this problem they recommend giving people promotion possibilities within job roles AND requiring that moving into management always come with a pay cut to make people honest about whether they are seeking the job because they think they would be good at it, or because they want a raise. (A manager who is good would likely make up the pay cut with interest over time.)
Indeed, if we would listen to every message abt food wish is contaminated with gen altering stuff, traces of lead through the tins and coating, pesticides on fruits, and contaminated soil, ... we couldn't eat anything.

Still, from what I read, effects show up only long-term. I might get impotent because of these plastic altering stuff, which makes plastic softer (ie bottles) but this stuff leaks into the fluid/food - alter genes, increase cancer risk, and act like estrogen.
The best way to be an interesting person is to have a broad range of interests -- that way you can find an interest in common with just about anyone you might talk to.

The best way to be an extremely boring person is to have only one interest and obsess over it non-stop. I once worked next to a guy who only ever talked about rock climbing; no matter what you tried to talk to him about he'd find a way to bring the conversation back to his rock climbing hobby. To a fellow climber he might have been at least slightly interesting, but to me he was so memorably dull that here I am, five years later, using him as an example of dullness.

If you put up a bust of Spock in your office, you're basically saying to the world "Hey world! You know that TV show which maybe you used to like a bit when you were a kid? I think that's one of the most interesting things in the world!" This is generally a pretty good indicator of a fairly narrow range of interests which will make you pretty boring to others.

Anyone who really thinks that a long-defunct TV show is interesting enough to make it a significant part of their identity really needs to start developing a few new interests.
Yes, I realize that was the intended argument. It's a charming idea that, unfortunately, happens to be wrong.

It works fine as long as you have single ownership by a relatively rational person. hyperbovine pointed out the problem with the latter assumption; but the former is similarly problematic.

On the other hand, once ownership passes to a collective entity with diffuse responsibility (e.g., a corporation), it's easy to end up in a situation where no single individual actually has an incentive to ensure the long-term benefit of the collective, and by extension the elephant's survival.

A simple scenario along those lines is low-level employees paid unrelated to their impact on the company, high-level employees rewarded in response to short-term results, and a large number of small shareholders, none of whom have a large enough stake to justify time spent monitoring the company's actions directly.

Privatization as a cure-all for tragedy of the commons is an idea with the rough shape of a solution, but oversimplified into something barely sensible enough to be called "wrong".

Actual economics tends to be a bit more complicated than what popular presentations suggest, or what people with quasi-religious notions about how the economy should work wish.
Was just browsing through the game engine code and came across this:

// Effect Game Engine
// Copyright (c) 2005 - 2009 Effect Games LLC and Joseph Huckaby.
// All rights reserved. Patent Pending.

Patent pending? Seriously? What aspects of your code you are attempting to patent?

While I'm sure you've pulled off many cool JS tricks in creating your product, is a patent necessary? The problem for every one, once your patent issues, if it does, is the temptation to chase down every smart programmer who has done something cool with browser based game programming.

What in your work is so novel that copyright won't suffice? Is it more about the entire ecosystem/framework you've created?
Darn it you made me click an Alpha link. Now I'm bound by a 2777 word license if I need to use this equation. Thanks a lot.
The C Programming Language: 4.10 (HP Lovecraft version)
I think every big company has done "unethical" things like this in their past.

Then once they get big, they clean up their image.

It's like Google first few years of adwords they pretty much let anything go, then once they became a big player they cleaned up their image and banned all those ads.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 115 - Linux Smackdown
Agile really, really doesn't work with systems like torpedos. Or with hardware in general. Or with many types of security systems.
Heh. When I saw the title, my first thought was Srsly? An article on HN about Gringotts!?

(ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_in_Harry_Potter#Economy)
Well, you certainly deanonymized him..
I think that almost by definition tests which fail in every major browser shouldn't be considered a high priority. It's nice that they have been fixed in some browsers, but I can't fault IE for prioritizing other things more.
Mnemosyne/Supermemo do not support crossword puzzles. Spicy Elephant is an online flashcard service.

Mnemosyne in particular is geared towards learning vocabulary, and includes 'three sided' flashcards for learning the meaning, non-roman characters and pronounciation of a word.

Something you should address in explaining your service is data export. If I am going to load a ton of words into memodrops, how can I get them out if I need to in a format usable in other programs?
Steve Jobs: "I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do."
Bullshit. No one forces you to go to college.

Society does.

A college degree doubles your income compared to a high school degree. If you only have a high school degree, you are viewed as an incompetent buffoon. You will also struggle to scrape by in many areas, let alone raise a family.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/25/pf/college/census_degree/ind...
I tried University. I hated it. I much preferred running my business. I dropped out after the first year and now I'm living & partying with students and working in the day. I love the balance my life has. When my friends graduate I hope to have a fat savings account and two or three businesses running without me being there. I want the freedom a business gives you. I want the ability to do pretty much what I want, when I want. I want to work with the best team I can find and build awesome products. I want to have fun.
No, not really. You can subscribe to different block lists, but last I checked the goal of all the lists (or at least all the default lists) is to block all ads.

And anyway many of the block rules target ad networks and platforms. One site may use doubleclick.net's ad servers to serve up great, well-targeted ads and someone else may use the same system to server really obnoxious ads.

Personally, I don't subscribe to any lists and add all the block rules by hand. I really just don't want anything that moves or talks to me. But it ain't easy.
So did the lady get outed?

This article is very mindboggling to me and hard to follow.
Shopify sponsors the interviewer, I don't see any relation to the interviewee.
No. SEO is, and will continue to be, just as important. It's just getting harder, because of all of the reasons mentioned.
Both are common/valid, at least in the UK, but the plural is more common here than singular afaik.
As you say, good for the consumer who may not have confidence in a site's honesty.

Good for the site too, in that a consumer's credit card information never touches your database; less liability in case of a data breach.
They could make life a lot harder for AdBlock plugins if they wanted to, but site usability would take a hit and it would always be a cat and mouse game.
Facebook did this as well, as did Zynga.
Hey, if there were a plugin for Outlook that blocked all commercial messages (spam or not), I'm sure many people would use it.
An Internet Bill of Rights
Lead Gen. You sell the contact information for people who express an active interest in a high-margin good to the seller of such goods.
Project Ares: Full mobile development environment from Palm all in the browser
The Bork Tapes
(0.5 * 0)/0 does not in any way equal 0.5 (assuming real numbers and all normal definition of operators). Sure the limit of (0.5 * x)/x =0.5 as x->0, but that is not the same thing.
guess that explains why we haven't heard of prize part 2.. and may never will, sad.
“a privacy blunder that could cost millions of dollars in fines and civil damages.”

Since they considered the knowledge gained from the original contest cheap at $1 million, I'm sure the bigwigs at Netflix are wondering, "How many millions?"
Walenuts.
I agree that programming today has a lot of properties you mention.

What I'd ask is how or why has the 'geek' factor changed the computer field compared to, the 1980s, when there was a notably larger percentage of women in programming.

I think this part of the 'equation' seriously needs to understood if we're going to think clearly about the situation.
"I use both PayPal and Fastspring as our payment processors (Fastspring is there to give customers an option besides paypal)."

I wonder if this is something of a best practice, to have two payment processors running live. Besides giving customers a choice, you also have the other one already up, running and accepting money if paypal or whoever freezes you.
Summary: a woman wrote something like this...http://bit.ly/8BLUAw (describing her sexual orientation in an "anonymous" (imdb) forum), and then, based on her other reviews and data in the Netflix contest, a couple of hackers (security/privacy researchers) put 2 + 2 together to find out her identity (not their intended purpose, but as a side effect.) She blames Netflix.

I'm actually unclear as to who's right and wrong here. Clearly, it seems unjust that she unknowingly outed herself, but how responsible is she of her online personas? I also wouldn't be surprised if Netflix has something in their ToS relating to this kind of "anonymous" release of information.

This is a complicated scenario.
They are also stupid easy to manufacture. The design has been copied numerous times as well. Basically, they are the Honda Civics of military weapons. Cheap, easy to use, reliable, easy and cheap to fix when they do break, and lasts forever.

I've seen AKs in 3rd world countries that were probably less than 20% original parts.
I think this demonstrates why people should be more careful about what they post in public forums, under their own names. The ability to make associations like this is only going to become easier.
This happened to my company earlier this month. The categorization, not any particular activity, of my business tripped one of PayPal's safety triggers. PayPal was unapologetic and wildly unhelpful in resolving the issue (that didn't exist!) quickly.
[The researchers] identified several NetFlix users by comparing their “anonymous” reviews in the Netflix data to ones posted on the Internet Movie Database website

So why sue netflix instead of IMDB? Additionally, is there an expectation of privacy when posting movie reviews to public websites?
Not quite a fair comparison:

If basketball was a paid profession, like say, carpentry, that a large number of folks thought of as a career path, then effectively making players be within black culture rightly wouldn't be acceptable.
That does not stop it from parsing, so even though the page is rendered, it is not interactive.
What do you think about the whole school thing?

Wow, sounds like a familiar story. That was more or less me in my college days in the early 90s, long before the WWW and all the help and suggestions and info you could easily find online.

I remember getting the letter from my college that said "Yeah, thanks and everything, but don't come back next year".

I don't regret any of it. I made more money before I was 30 than most people make in an entire careers worth of work. I'm having fun doing what I like and never regretted not finishing college.

Here is one thing that I HAVE found. College can be a little bit like a startup... 40 years work in 4 years time. Too many people in the job market look at a college degree as proof/validation of your abilities. If you don't have the degree you will most likely have to work harder at the job market over a long period of time if you want to really excel (if you just want to get a better-than-average tech job but not really pursue upper-level executive roles, then it doesn't matter as much). So, you can spend 4 years in college studying hard, or you can spend the next 20 years (at least it's not 40;) ) or so pushing yourself and working through some of the roadblocks you'll encounter by not having a degree.

I've generally always been a self-starter and technology-oriented, so it wasn't too hard to keep my career progressing. But that is because I'm not afraid to push for my own desires and agendas. If you have a strong mind, but a more reserved disposition, you might want to re-consider the college thing. If you have a strong mind and a strong will, you may very well be wasting time and money that could be better applied in a career field.

Sorry this is kind of quick and sloppy... I'm currently in China on business and my day starts in about 10 minutes.

Good luck either way.
I dropped out of high-school when my family more or less imploded and to tell you the truth I can see that a degree can give you advantages but there is plenty of good stuff to be had without one.

And I wouldn't trade with any of my high-school buddies that went to college.

Not having a degree effectively translates in to having to work that much harder to prove yourself later on in life, there's nothing wrong with that, in fact it may be an advantage.

If your wish would be to pursue a career in academia then it would be a different matter, if your wish is to be hired by 'bigcorp' then a degree in philosophy wouldn't be worth much anyway.

best of luck!

One fantastic way to beat depression by the way is to work with your hands, consider it as an option please. Something outside of 'brain work' where you get some tangible result for time invested.
I am not sure I understand - wouldn't you want to be working with the DIALOG_HEIGHT in relation to the DIALOG_WIDTH?
The qualifier "usually" does not prevent a statement from being overly-broad.
Bumper Stickers as Additional Marketing Tool
The wonderful product of bumper stickers is a huge hit among the vehicle owners. They provide a great way for roadside marketing. There versatility allows them to be designed in many shapes and sizes so that they could be used by a variety of customers at their will.
I guess that's true. Still, XHR respects HTTP headers. You could request the code and immediately get it out of the browser cache if it is there. I see the problem they are trying to solve, but the solution is so obtuse I can't bring myself to using something like this.
Thanks Scott. I just want to say that I had nothing to do with this lawsuit. Also, this comment I posted earlier might be relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838226
Why would they invest in a competitor and you both ?

I remember another HN member here saying in very clear words that a startup he worked for got stuff from would-be competitors through VC pitches. Be careful.
SEO Clients Shouldn't be PotatoHeads
Progression Of Thoughts In An Entrepreneur’s Day
Alrighty you're bumped up til jan 16 2011. your account might still say 2010 but it still think you're in the 30day pro trial.