skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you, this is extremely informative.

I'm a little unclear about one area: When you say to "make it clear than any VAT, import duties, taxes, etc. are the responsibility of the buyer", to what kind of buyer were you referring? If you were stocking inventory before selling to American consumers (assuming that you're an American), wouldn't you be the "intermediate" buyer responsible for import duties, etc?

It sounds like, in some instances, you were providing the goods directly to another distributor or end-consumer. If you imported from China and exported to the UK, would you actually keep inventory in the US? I'm not sure I see many advantages to that approach, except perhaps that you could get your goods to the UK slightly faster and maybe you already had inventory being distributed locally in the US (but shipping twice seems expensive).

I already have a corporation and a friendly attorney, so in terms of the regulations, it sounds as if I just need to dig in and start reading and asking my attorney questions.

Thanks for the info about UPS and pre-ordering, that's a clever trick I hadn't thought of. The idea about starting by sourcing locally to get a feel for volume is also interesting.

It sounds like you quit. May I ask why?
I highly recommend reading "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives"

People perform worse than monkey while predicting random future events because they search patterns everywhere, they think they 'figured things out' and they choose less randomly which is not a good idea if you are betting on truly random event (such as raise or fall of stocks) since by not betting on outcomes mistakenly identified as unlikely reduces your chances.

Investment advice:
1. You can predict nothing so don't play short term and don't watch the stock market information, it doesn't help people that spent entire life trying to predict stock market even a bit so it won't help you but it will take a lot of time and will trash your emotions.
2. Buy whenever you have money.
3. Sell whenever you need money (and by need I mean REALLY need).

You may postpone buying a little bit if you see declining trend and loosen up a bit on 'really' in 'REALLY need' if you stock is currently worth much more than some time ago and tighten it up if you lost some money on your investments, but I am not sure if that does any good or harm.
14 anti-New Years Resolutions from a Web Designer
A venting of the spleen, with words improvidently spoken, over a topic best kept to oneself.
A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything
In strictly language terms, C will always be faster than Java. However, I would dispute that one could say on a general basis that C programs will always be faster than Java programs.

In fact, I would argue that all things being equal, the Java program is more likely to be faster (and yes, I realize there are a metric ton of potential caveats to what I just said). Why? Because Java allows you to focus on the "big picture" optimizations that really make all the difference.

On the other hand, given an infinite amount of development time and experienced developers, the C program will likely be much faster. In some cases this is necessary. But for most cases, I personally would rather just ship something than try to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of it.
I don't, it's just not for the lay audience.
The argument about monkeys beating investors has nothing to do with investor biases. The point is that professional investors charge fees for their stock picking strategies and that due to the fees alone, these returns will be smaller than randomly choosing stocks (market weighted) with no fees. The moral of the story is that few people can successfully beat the market, and if they could they wouldn't be letting you in on their strategy for a reasonable fee.
I think lists and articles are distinct entities on Wikipedia, so a list of articles wouldn't contain a list.
On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up
They match up with ISO week numbers, where week 1 always starts on a Monday.

I regularly see ISO weeks used to mark manufacturing dates, where they often offer the right levels of precision, as many processes run on week-long cycles. Often in stampings the year will be replaced by a letter code with an epoch particular to the company.
You could have said the same thing about Microsoft in the late nineties and few would have doubted you. Yet their stock is now worth somewhat less than in '99 and early 2000. Worst of all, there's been no consistent growth at all during the last 10 years.
I was the project manager at Kickstarter during its initial phase of development, during the time that we went from a single requirements document and some mock-ups to a functional site. We weren't ripping anybody off.

The boring truth is that we took Perry Chen's idea, and, like any software project, continued to refine and adjust our vision of what the site should be, and what the user experience should be, based on the imagined needs of some hypothetical users.

What we ended up building was only remotely similar to what our requirements started out with, and the project continued to morph after those initial stages, to what it is today.

I am sorry that this guy's startup did not take off as Kickstarter has. Making libelous claims about the work of others, though, is no way to be.
http://www.thesixtyone.com does a good job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date

The ISO week date system is a leap week calendar system that is part of the ISO 8601 date and time standard. The system is used (mainly) in government and business for fiscal years, as well as in timekeeping.
I am not sure there are any lessons here.
A Form of Madness - Dive Into HTML5
Yes, you are reinventing the wheel. This kind of approach has been used for decades in disk drive controllers. You sort track accesses in ascending or descending order to prevent longer seeks. It's called the "elevator algorithm".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_algorithm

This is combined with tag queuing, where multiple requests can be accepted from the host at once. The greater your tag depth, the more insight the controller gets into future seeks.
Yeah I just don't work that way. I work linearly :/
it seems they're talking about reading books on the internet, on the PC as opposed to what the title implies: dedicated ebook reading devices.
To me "game mechanics" are just another way of saying "behavioral economics."

Game mechanics are about exploiting irrational but predictable psychological levers in the human mind. To that end, there are lots of apps that use game mechanics, some more obvious than others:

Foursquare/Gowalla are obvious. You get random rewards and points for doing various real-life activities like traveling and eating out.

Opower. See, e.g., this article http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2009/10/californi...

Mechanical Turk. Why would an American do work for $0.50/hour? It's not rational, and I think it's the game-like nature of mturk.

Many websites use the quest/reward mechanic to guide users through the registration process and the first few key steps of the application, e.g., LinkedIn's "your profile is 75%" complete mechanic.
I stand corrected. Wikipedia lists some interesting proto-vaccines in the 1800s and earlier (including one for smallpox). There was a major increase in the availability and breadth of vaccines in the 1900s, but a lot of groundwork was already laid before that. Thanks for the correction.
Except that they are not. They are called "List Articles", cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists#List_articles

Back to the main topic, I think in naive set theory a set of all sets will contains itself. Russell Paradox is problematic when asking the negated statement, i.e. whether a list of all lists that do not contain themselves contains itself.
Well, the hacker news feature a lot of programming-related stuff that is certainly 'above' the (average) blog post level (in the whole blogosphere). I know of no better meta-filter than hacker news for blog entries attracting a hacker's mindset. Certainly, the appreciation for mathematical thinking as well as mathematical methods plays a big role in this (analytic) mind set.

While the novice programmer might not get (the content and purpose of) python vs. ruby comparisons and the like, readers with a weak background in math will not find this probability entry useful (or too 'difficult').

However, for a certain subset of all hacker news readers, which are looking to dig deeper, it is a very nice resource.

Hacker news, to me, is especially useful since it provides links which are well distributed in terms of this 'entry level'.
Top-Down operator precedence parsing
Ask HN: Review my holiday project
I realized yesterday that I wanted this for myself, so I decided to spend a little bit of extra effort to make it usable by anybody:

http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/
As well as use it as a library API, and integrate it with their other libraries/services/etc.
Clickable link: http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/
It is especially bright and vivid on the new Google redesign. Nice find!
DRM and SaaS are two different things, because the former restricts what you can do on machines that you possess.

Okay, i think this is our only serious point of disagreement. I guess I just care how I am restricted, not where the specific restrictions come from, or whether they take place locally or on the server.

Going forward watch for all consumer software that can conceivably go SaaS to do so, as client-based programs become completely unprofitable. They'll say it's because of the advantages of the cloud, but a large portion of it will be because SaaS achieves the goals of DRM.
What I want is a high resolution tablet ebook. That is, so I can take digital notes using the stylus.

Then I'll take the leap, but for now. Ebooks won't replace paper for in-depth study.
Maybe I'm all alone here, but in high school I remember buying a car and thinking exactly "can't wait to show the girls." :)
The phonograph and newspaper were forms of mass reproduced, widely distributed storage though. Most of their media at the time would have been from persistant storage of some form, created once and sold many times over (newspaper, records, player piano rolls, etc).
Noam said it best :-)

http://twitter.com/FakeChomsky
/ncr always redirects on the mobile browser I'm on so I can't see what you're referring to.
Besides some miscellaneous bits about the guy not being a good businessman, one lesson I think everyone can learn from this is the following:

--if you do anything with shifting money on the internet, your first and largest group of customers will be fraudsters. Plans to deal with this need to be in place from day 1, if not before.

Fundable was beset by fraud, and for whatever reason, failed to deal with it in a successful fashion.

It's sort of like input/output sanitization. If you take input from one user, and show it to another user, you've got HTML security problems. If you take money from one user, and you give it another user, you've got massive fraud problems, unless you have a comprehensive "money sanitization" process operating behind the scenes.
I think a better way is needed to teach probability.

Perhaps something more visual and involving interactivity (like visual programming).

What percentage of students after having passed a probability course can define a random variable?
> turns a profit from ads and recruitment services

I spent a lot of time working on a startup in a related space, and came to realize that the real customers of LinkedIn are the recruiters. As long as they can get you to enter your details, they can get thousands of dollars a year from individual recruiters for access to your information.

Look at their site as a service for recruiters which happens to require consumer input. They want you to be promiscuous in your connections, since weak-but-wide links are more effective for recruiting than strong-but-narrow 'true friendships'. They don't have much incentive to drive users to interact with the site, beyond keeping their details up-to-date.

It sounds like they're interested in becoming more compelling to consumers, but I wonder how deep that commitment goes when there's no immediate revenue stream from it?

Here's one older article that discusses LinkedIn's revenue model:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/technology/18linkedin.html
There isn't really any major difference IMHO. The panelists discuss learning from a screen versus learning from a book. I got interested in the article and posted it here trying to find out if there is a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium? Personally I have been through a few ebooks lately and have noticed that I am not absorbing the material at the same rate than a book.
I would never use this at home, but it has worked great for me while going out camping.

I can toss one of these cans in a lunch cooler, and the next morning breakfast is nice and quick with a skillet. No need to have mixing bowls and whatever else. One can usually lasts me and my wife several trips.
If you're going to invest, you might use stocks to hedge instead of doubling down. For example, if you love Apple, you might decide to "invest" 20% of your working hours in building an iPhone app. Since the net present value of your working hours is bigger than the value of your stock portfolio (probably), you are making a massive, undiversified bet on Apple's continued dominance. To hedge, short Apple stock and buy MSFT. That way, as long as you develop a good app, you'll come out okay whether the iPhone gets more popular (you lose money on the short and make money on the app) or less popular (you wasted your time on the app, but made money on your short).

In other words, do arbitrage, not directional bets.

(Note that this is almost never the right decision to make. The only exception might be if you got most of your income from working on Linux, and you bought shares of a patent troll--the events that make them do well will also hurt your normal income.)
The problem was not 'is this appropriate for HN' but 'the title is wildly misleading'.
Audi e-tron: Taking the e-train
Nice one. And nice of you not to call it a 'start-up'.

It's really nice to see useful little projects like this take shape so quickly, do you have a way to track the user if they should wipe their machine / switch browser ?
What a laugh!

Gosh I know how this guy feels -- I've had three other startup ideas that were "copied" by the market and took off in other formats. And he was so dead on and hilarious in his assessment of presenting to investors: * I tried for 4 years to get people to take Fundable seriously, traveling across the country, even giving a presentation to FBFund, Facebook's fund to stimulate development of
new apps. It was a series of rejections for 4 years. I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations. That was not enough. The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn't have to take any risks.*

But guess what? None of that matters and it's all so much whining. Dude -- don't go 4 years with any one idea. Try maybe a year or two. This is a numbers game and you may have to get 10 or 15 of these ideas behind you. Forget about financing. It's a fools game played by people with more money than common sense and all about jumping on the bandwagon and who you know, not about real market-changing potential.

Damn I feel your pain. I really do. It sucks to have a paradigm-shifting idea and watch some other assholes who are simply better-connected run with it. The marketplace is NOT a meritocracy.

I'm right where they were 4 years ago -- new idea, developing a new site, lots of upside potential, and lots of odds stacked against me. I could move to SV and start becoming a professional fundraiser/hanger-on, or I could work my idea and most likely fail.

I choose to work my idea. I'm not going to create charts or blow smoke up investors butts. They get so much of that -- it's one of the reasons their discriminators are so broken. Jesus himself could appear and ask for funding to start a new world religion and they'd probably respond with something like "Wonderful idea, Jesus, but your team doesn't look so good -- lots of fishermen and nobody is even literate. Also the market you're chosen, Judea? Not so good in terms of disposable income. You should move to Rome. Get to know some of the Senators. But good luck with all of that. Don't call us, we'll call you." [damn. That's a good blog idea -- if Jesus was a startup]

Having laughed (and cried) at how real this article was, I wouldn't have written it. As grellas points out, sometimes venting helps and sometimes it doesn't. It's time to get moving, not complaining.
Oops:

> You need to check in -2 more times this week to meet your goal.
Keep marking my posts down to censor me. Come on. Do it. Mark it down. You don't like what I have to say. Put a -1 on this comment.
You have a good point, but I don't think I asserted that any of those points are correct. I mostly agree with JulianMorrison on this one, although I think sometimes you can see performance bottlenecks coming. If you know an inner loop needs to be faster than your interpreted language can normally do, you might as well write that segment in C or ASM from the beginning. Mercurial still seems to me like a good example of optimization done correctly.
I am moving. It's PDXCell.com.
Blogger's rights
Interesting - so in those terms I'm creating a massively deep queue of access requests, and then sorting them into an optimal order.
Tablet PC + Adobe Reader?
OK, a point; the pain with compiling languages is the compile cycle where you edit-and-run just local tests, not for the whole system.
Don't do this. You don't have any more expert knowledge than the pro investor - he knows a LOT more than you and he has access to the same websites you read. If code clarity were relevant to stock price, then the programmer has an advantage, but it's business sense + consumer perception that is important, and a lot of other people have that advantage.

In any case, if you can program, given 4500 you can easily make 20000 in a year by programming something. With stocks, it is VERY difficult for a naive beginner.

Put your money in something more fruitful.
Detect language of a string with MacRuby
Amazing, for once the HTML standard seems to make so much sense :)
Study 4 showed that women rated a man driving a Porsche Boxster as more attractive for a short-term sexual relationship than a man driving a Honda Civic.

The fact that women are even capable of conceiving of short-term sexual relationships is a sign that our society is impotent and dying.
Mortgage Modifications Are Seen as Adding to Housing Woes
How is being an application user negative? How is being helpless negative?

Whatever you write, it solves a problem for someone somewhere. And the less work they have to do to leverage your solution, the better your solution will work for them.

Here are your many words, confusing, lengthy non-empathic. Or you could just say "spoon-feed the solution to your user".

It's about caring, not about attacking or disrespect. The negative connotations are yours alone, you're still reading too much into this.
Here is how strftime on OSX defines it:

%G is replaced by a year as a decimal number with century. This
year is the one that contains the greater part of the week
(Monday as the first day of the week).

%g is replaced by the same year as in ``%G'', but as a decimal
number without century (00-99).

Makes sense to me. People should read the man pages more often before they jump to conclusions.

Granted, that is more clear than man date on Linux (on OSX it doesn't define the format variables):

%g last two digits of year of ISO week number (see %G)

%G year of ISO week number (see %V); normally useful only with %V

%V ISO week number, with Monday as first day of week (01..53)
What bloggers need is a union
11 Marketing Lessons to be Learned from Driving
Why should you reach out to that partner organization that has mastered email marketing and that Red Bull chugging, green-colored spiky haired young fella for your social media? They "get it" and you need them on your side. Knowing the weakness and blind spots in your marketing organization is important. Learn this and more marketing lessons from an activity you and I do every day - Driving.
There's no session info at all; the id in the url is a reference to a backend data store object. That's why I have the bookmarking call-to-action the first time you see the calendar page.

As it's built on appengine, it wouldn't be too hard to tie everything to a google account. I actually wrote about half of that, but it got dropped because I decided I preferred a more polished, less featureful project.
Looks like Heroku is having a major outage right now and that site is down.
I think that idea that men use wealth to attract mates is pretty damn obvious, but I never really considered that women use displays of altruism to attract males.

It makes sense. The contest for status (i.e.. access to women) among men makes men a lot more mean-spirited and despicable than they would like to be, so a woman who is, or seems to be, "above the fray" is very attractive.

This explains the appeal of the female healer, the angel in the house, etc.
What if you hang around in a culture in which conspicuous consumption is generally frowned upon? You would have apparently conflicting goals; a presumably "hard-wired" desire for the car, yet a more learned knowledge that it won't actually help you implement the intentions of your genes.

In short, I'm proposing that it could be one of those examples of an out-of-evolutionary-context kind of behavior.
It's a feature that doesn't add any complexity to the use of the site (though it does add a fair amount of complexity on the backend)
I agree that this is of great value to HN, and especially to me.
if you flip a coin with a consistent force and use the same coin again and again then you'll probably have the same number of spins all the time...ergo based on an earlier result you can start 'learning' to control your outcome.
Kindle + pen and paper?
I bought an ebook reader app for my android phone and I love it. Now when I am stuck in line I reach for my current ebook rather than the web browser. I like reading at night w/o any lights on. Being able to carry around a library is also huge since it is on my phone and that pretty much goes everywhere. Many times I have my tech books split between home and work.

I think the best is yet to come. I have been using 'zap reader' to get through blog reading sessions. The idea of keeping your focus fixed and scrolling the text past the fixed point at 300-400 words per minute is so powerful. I can't believe that this idea hasn't caught on more. I am sure that ebook readers will start to support this kind of reading.
2009's Most Obvious Discoveries
pop-up message with bookmark info is little bit confusing, it took me a while to find close button.
Seems like 2010 is the year of lists!
Just getting lucky with one stock doesn't make you a great investor. Do this a several more times over a period of 5 to 10 yrs then check back.

Also with 20 yrs of development experience (and assuming starting to code at 20 yrs old) - I take it he's around 40 and so are now just starting to invest? Kind of late in the game to plan for retirement. But I guess it's better than never.
> If Lvalue implies variable

Lvalue implies something that goes on the left side of an assign statement. An lvalue needn't be a variable, it could be a whole expression, E.g.:

a := b;
c[x] := d.y;

Here, a and c[x] are lvalues. b and d.y are rvalues.