skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that reading stock charts is just a particularly unsophisticated form of statistical arbitrage, and that it _might_ work provided that nobody else in the world is doing it.

Real statistical arbitrage firms, as I understand it, work by looking at the historical variation in thousands of asset prices at once, putting them into an enormous covariance matrix, and using dozens of very smart mathematicians and millions of CPU hours to figure out which assets are likely to be currently underpriced.

That's how folks like Renaissance Technologies got rich. Unfortunately, as soon as the secret got out, other folks started doing it as well, and pretty soon the mispricing of assets got smaller and smaller, so they're in an arms race to find more and more sophisticated algorithms.

So I guess the point is that if mispriced assets are that hard to find when you have a hundred PhDs and a supercomputer, you're not likely to do very well just by looking at whether a squiggly line is currently above or below its recent average. All the easy money has already been vacuumed up.
Microchip-sized 'fan' with no moving parts
if you need 2 monitors you need glasses. make stuff smaller.
Where is all of the music from?
make the title neutral. this is bias for disqus. your skewing the comments unfairly.

thank you, i know i'm right, now you voters are too
Analysts have been predicting Zigbee to take the automation (home and industrial) world by storm for nearly 4 years now. I think it may be failing because it has a hard time dealing with RF interference - it's a low power DSSS radio in a world of high power WiFi and FHSS radios.

Hopefully the next-gen wireless standards like ISA-SP100 will make this a reality.
Liked it straight away. Long time last.fm user and yet have never used their site to listen to music in the way I used this. Do you host the music shared via the share good music feature? What on earth is going on copyright wise?
when all the MASSES go to apple all the weenies will have to buy DELL with linux to be special
Hire an accountant. That's the easiest way.

If by "easiest" what you meant was "cheapest"... I used Turbotax online for personal stuff once and it seemed just fine. I don't use it for small business, though. I don't trust some scripted AI to give me actual financial advice.
c++ is faster if you code it right
How to search Hacker News:

1) go to Google

2) in the search bar type:

<your search terms here> site:ycombinator.com

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=music+hacking+site%3Aycombina...
why does xobni use such a backwards name anyway? (haha get it?)
The page doesn't factor in Splits.
Entry Price: 52.00 (Mar. 8, 2000), Exit Price: 48.88 (Apr. 5, 2000)
Comes out to a 6% loss, but there was a SPLIT on the 21st! I should be up nearly 100%.
don't listen to disney he's a mean capitalist
and he stole the idea for micky mouse
no? it's not that hard.
Mine too, although I have to admit there's something vaguely depressing about a guy who refuses to move to Colorado because he wants to stay in Tennesee.
GeoLocating Visitors for Relevant Homepages
As always, I hack to ETN.FM's Progressive Trance stream.
The classics: Dijkstra's a discipline of programming
Performance comparison: Rails 1.2.6 vs 2.0.2
Long Tail Missing from MySpace Platform, Just Like Facebook
it's etiquette
Does FriendFeed Solve a Problem, or Highlight One?
http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2007/10/video_ro...
I swear I was searching for a post on this topic just last night.

nickb is a powerful discovery engine.
I skip everything so I don't lose money.
ECL.

From a pure Lisp perspective, it's maybe not the really very best choice, but from an OS viewpoint, it's simply the most convenient for my tasks (Apple, Windows, Linux, free, really fast inline C FFI).

Compressed its size can be as small as 1(!) MB on some OS.
like reddit readers care

go home
Splits are factored in. The chart is showing adjusted prices so there's not a huge gap after a split.
aphex twin
how about more money = more chicks
I use my BSD box as a personal file server and never saw any reason to upgrade. Why fix something if it isn't broken?
How many reviews and commentaries on one study can we read?
"The thought of wasting 4-5 months of my life like that scares me."

That's where it's nice to have had some previous experience working in startups. You get to realize that nearly all your time is wasted. I worked on 2 major and a few minor projects at my last employer; neither of them has any customers, nor any users other than my ex-boss. At the employer before that, I had about 4 different projects; none of them amounted to anything, because the company went bankrupt 6 months after I left. A coworker at my last employer had previously worked at Thompson Financial - he finished 4 products, all of which were canceled after he delivered them ("insufficient sales & marketing resources") and never sold.

If I hadn't done some volunteer/open-source projects that have a decent userbase, I would've given up the field. It can get kinda depressing at times.

Instead of thinking about it as a potential waste of your life, I find it's more helpful to think of it as your life. After all, your basic needs are (presumably) taken care of. You don't need to hunt for food; you don't need to build your own shelter. If you weren't working on the startup, you'd either be working on someone else's waste of a life, or you'd be wasting your life using someone else's product. It's sorta liberating to not care whether it works out or not and just do it because it's something to do. (I haven't quite achieved that zen state yet, but I do find I'm a lot more productive when I don't worry about the outcome.)
GenerateData.com: Ever needed custom formatted sample / test data, like, bad?
actually works not too badly if you just want to some random data to test your db with
Microsoft releases Vista SP1
If you're on the do not call list, you could just sue them. It's pretty much a guaranteed win unless you've done business with them recently.

On the other hand, you could ask them to remove you from their call list -- as far as I know, they're legally obligated to do so.
Catching threading bugs at compile time
YC Fans,

I'm looking for initial feedback on a tool I created for catching threading bugs in Java code at compile time:

checkthread.org

Read the "examples" link and let me know what you think. This open source tool is in "very early alpha".
-Joe
.Net is alot better. Its the industry standard.
eminem is banging
> an uber hacker is already the top of their competition.

Those guys are called CEOs. Or rockstars. If you're Bill Joy, you'll know it, and you won't be asking anyone for a job.
don't make excuses
The Black Swan for the Young and Restless (e.g., you)
oh, stop pandering to the techcrunch readers
take your reddit jokes back where they belong
he's a loser, no one makes a tech startup in tenessee
A hefty value, despite the need for much clicking as you paginate

reviews and such:
http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Programming-Prentice-Hall-A...
> (in the metaphorical sense)

Literal, as well. Paper money wears out and needs replacing.
your just mad i got more votes than you. it's not pandering it's inspiration.
the browser is not the desktop

oh right, micro$oft invented the desktop, we cant let them control our minds
stop stalking me you hacker
Insomnia and productivity of coders
no the stupid people downvoting me
that's why i have a new account, to get rid of you all before you drag down HN

go away, you are not welcome
next add a kitchen sink, stupid
how do i ban someone from reading my comments or from talking at all?
I was one of the students to take the first version of the course :) Funtimes :)
ads are not a business model, they are just popular because they are new

mak your users pay, that is the only way you will keep getting money
easy, just turn off your computer, if you can find the buttn
see, you were voted down and i wasnt

that means no one likes you
i got attention and you didn't
see they are voting you down so much because you are not welcome here

i am being voted down less because people agree with me, just the techcrunch readers are trying to fight back
I'll probably use H&R Block's Tango http://hrblock.com/tango next year.
it's just a hazing ritual. you haven't even started yet, hahah
why stay awake? everything has been done before.
it highlights problem for people who don't have a friend. losers.
machines are our slaves, get over it
The Courage to do things Simply (dirtSimple.org)
they should rewrite ruby on rails in C++ so it'd be faster.
what does that even mean?
get a friend and find out
The price tag is not a bug, it's a feature. What, you think DARPA would pay you millions of dollars to invent a real mule? Buck Rodgers movies didn't have mules!

I will say, though, that compared to the typical military-industrial spendthrift extravaganza, this project looks really worthwhile. Think: powered prosthetics for quadriplegics. Think: remote exploration of Martian mountains. Think: lots of generally applicable algorithms for real-time physics.
don't you know how to use firefox?
that's whyou aree on here
and that's another downvote for you and not for me
I actually just presented an argument to the U of Guelph CS department a few months ago saying that, among other things, they should do this (Guelph is about 40km NE of Waterloo). It was remarkably well-received.
The testing decisions feel very arbitrary. If he really wants to show that Java is better than C++, he must give C++ every opportunity to do better, then show that Java does even better despite this. The correct optimization flag to use is the one that gives C++ the best performance, not whichever he felt like using. Likewise for the choice of benchmarks: he should use the version of the C++ benchmark that runs the fastest, and he should have a C++ expert fix the broken benchmarks. Otherwise the only conclusion that can be drawn is: "Java experts are better at tuning Java programs than C++ programs".

While he's at it, he can try the new Shootout benchmarks, which clearly show C++ in the lead, even when using his vaunted "-server" flag:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...

...How old is this, anyway? There's no date in the article, but he's running gcc 3.3.1 and Java 1.4.2 on Fedora Test1, on a Pentium 4 laptop. The version of gcc places it in 2003, so I'd place more confidence the newer Shootout results.
i bet you're downvoting me. but you hacked it so i cant' downvote you.
I've got to say, this just looked like yet another in the line of CMU robot videos -- impressive, but only to someone who actually knows how hard this is -- until the kick. And then the ice-patch sequence, which is just awesome.

Kudos to you and your coworkers. This obviously represents one hell of a lot of patient work.
maybe i'm just reading more comment threads than usual, but doesn't it look like we're under troll attack here?

i see an account that got to -40 karma an hour after being created. after you get a certain amount in the hole, shouldn't your ability to comment be disabled?
A first look at searchme the visual search engine
What's a good resource for best practices or for tutorials to develop programs the correct/proper way, so I don't have to waste time going down bad paths and making the same mistakes others already have made? While trying to develop applications, I feel like I'm figuring out stuff that's already out there and sometimes have to backtrack because of something I didn't think about. Someone may say there is no one proper way and many ways to do something, but I want to know the many proper ways and not do the many wrong ways.
Google Maps, Wiki-Style
What the hell is going on with comments on this topic?
Not to mention the Lemmings documentary...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness
Good point.

Personally, I'd love to have a robotic centaur helping me around the house.
Any college basketball fans on News.YC?
I made a group on cbs sportsline if anyone wants to fill out an NCAA tournament bracket:

http://hackernews.mayhem.sportsline.com

Once you make a sportsline account, the group password is "haxor"
I figured the software did it, I guess PG is just normally quick with the dead button.
Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90
baseball is boring don't post about it
he shouldn't have gone to a primitive country
I bet some people here have mathematically optimized sets of brackets... anyone want to share?
RIP Arthur. May you soon learn the nine billion names of God. http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html
Yeah, Google is going to stop making money any day now.
I included the comment because I thought the presentation was dead on. It certainly did capture the essence of the how the mortgage system works in this country.

It is because of the mortgage crisis and its spread to the general credit markets that I can't find a job in finance at this time. That's why I have made the decision to pursue a second undergraduate degree. I'm done with finance after supporting for three years the house of cards Wall Street built.
I have no idea. If it was my submission that caused it, I apologize to all YC readers out there.

PG, a feature suggestion: create a "Hide this user from me" button. By default, the list of hidden users could contain all users matching .* reddit.* (but without a space after the first * , that's only there due to YC markup rules).
Sci-fi guru Arthur Clarke dies at 90
You got it. DI serves up good stuff. If I hadn't been listening to DI, I probably would have never heard the collection by Shulman - OMG. It's outrageous.
Cellphone as boarding pass
Yes, it's really faster, and I LOVE the font rendering on my LCD. Well, just personal preference. Some people prefer the Windows ClearType fonts.
Bingo: Our webapp was the culprit. We were using mime type "image/jpg" when we should have used "image/jpeg" for safari's benefit. Thanks! :)
A mathematical puzzle: The Case of Sleeping Beauty
The Collatz Conjecture (maths)
Mark Pilgrim on Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets”
FFS - those financial guys are really taking this seriously. screwed up the global finance system? maybe but look how hard we're working:
<quote>Sleep deprivation set in, with some of the hundreds of attorneys and bankers sleeping only a few hours during a 72-hour sprint. Dress was casual, with neckties quickly shorn. </quote>
you see that? quickly shorn!! who says we're not dealing with this crisis? we took our @£$%£$% ties off!! what more do you people want?!
Is venture capital's love affair with Web 2.0 over?
Google Maps Enables Live Editing of Public Map Data
Where's the middle click tab closing?
Do you have any specific questions? I would be happy to answer them.
Disqus: In the middle of a disruptive change in media
dear downmodders,

please spare yters. take me instead.
A pretty good explanation (according to my limited understanding anyway). Can anyone who knows more about this confirm that it is as accurate as an amusing stick figure cartoon can be?
Can't help but thing of this song:

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true;
I'm half crazy over the love of you;
It won't be a stylish marriage;
I can't afford a carriage;
But you look sweet, upon the seat;
Of a bicycle built for two"

Trivia sidenote -- he called the supercomputer in 2001 HAL because he thought the company IBM would become increasingly dominant in a technical world. HAL's letters each are one below IBM's.
Well good luck with the studies - probably a good time.
http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2008/03/17/rails-search-...
Intel Maps Out Course to Eight-Core Nehalem
The Last Question
I don't think you submission has anything to do with them. I suppose it's a simple case of being in the wrong side in the wrong moment.
Why Is There No New "Einstein"?
If you don't understand tax or your situation is relatively complex, I guess go to a well-recommended accountant.

Otherwise, TurboTax is excellent (make sure to buy the version that corresponds to what you need to report, and also be on the lookout for deals- there are often good rebates or sales).
Would you accept a buyout offer that made you rich but you still felt was undervalued?
I.e., would you turn down an otherwise lucrative offer for pride?
Search and you shall find, says Google boss
I'm a sports fan, and I tried to make a bracket, but I got this message:

Error
This is a private fantasy league. You are logged in with userid '*******',
which does not have access to this league. If you think this is wrong,
please contact the league commissioner and ask for an invite.

To log in as another user, click here.
Like the one that you just laid down?
I admit that pursuing the finance degree was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I originally wanted to study mathematics and physics but greed for money got the best of me. The only good result that came out of the finance degree was a healthy understanding of C++ as a large amount of financial modeling is done in the language. It was after graduation that I really became interested in computer programming.
Dow spikes 420 points on rate cut
Personally I wouldn't. I think a lot of entreprenurs get too emotionally attached to their businesses, which is fine if you plan on being around forever and passing it down through the family. For me though, starting a business is about making money and creating new opportunities. A buyout is an stepping stone to my next success.
What is that picture of?

And why?
It is very accurate. The problem occurred with the "division of labor" that is clearly outlined in the presentation.

Many people took out loans that they couldn't pay for. They failed to understand the terms of their mortgage. It didn't help that the mortgage brokers had lowered their lending standards so low that almost anyone could walk in and get a mortgage.

It is true that most mortgage companies were simply in the business of brokering as many deals as possible. They didn't care because they just brokered the deal.

So the next logical group to place the blame on would be the banks. The banks, and their legions of loan officers, should not have allowed the loans to take place. Unfortunately, banks do take their mortgages and sell them on the open market to investment banks who end up wrapping them up in some derivative product.

A good reference work concerning the creation of the mortgage derivatives is a book by Michael Lewis titled Liars Poker. In the book Lewis describes how the mortgage derivatives industry came to be and how they founders of the industry went about valuing these products. It's not a rigorous review at all. That's why many people didn't even know what types of mortgages were in these products.

Like my other comment. The article is very accurate. I would like to see legislation to fix the industry as well as some civil and criminal cases because crimes were indeed committed.
This is a sad moment for me. ACC was the first science fiction author I ever read, and it wouldn't be an understatement to say that he changed my life.

His novels stimulated to think in a new way and to break free of the religious shackles I'd been brought up with.

Thanks.
Good Financial Advice for Startups: AKA Calacanis is Right
Songkick is down
Developers, Developers, Developers: Internet Explorer 8 will drive you nuts
Git-Style Automatic Paging in Ruby
Maybe because this has been up here several times that I've seen, and I'm new. It was too much for someone to handle?

They should probably calm down a little.
ah homesite, that takes you some 10 years back!
Ask YC:  Suggestions for funding a small-scale open-source development project (a la the x prize)
Greetings, YCers. I'm planning to announce a "breadpig prize" (http://breadpig.com/prize.html) but wanted to get some feedback on implementation.

Ideally, I'd like to use about $3,000 I've earned in profit from various breadpig projects (tees/unholidaycards) as a reward for creating a nifty little (open-source) app.

Is there some software you wish existed (that would be worth only 3K of motivation)? I'm thinking along the lines of a nifty FireFox extension -- the sort of thing you've always said you'd build yourself if you weren't so busy.

The other problem is creating a reward system that makes it even worth attempting. What are the criteria by which a winner is chosen and is it even possible to create something on this small scale that makes it worthwhile to developers to even attempt to be that 1 winner (you all are better than most at probability).

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

-Alexis (the reddit co-founder who didn't know Lisp)
Thanks for the tip. I guess I've thought in terms of ezLearnz for so long that it feels noble and dignified to me :~). Also, the tentative slogan is "making learning easy", so I thought ezLearnz was particularly appropriate. If anyone comes with any better suggestions, let me know...
Incredibly cool and effectively told :-)
Sad, but 90 isn't bad.
A few ideas about Negotiation
Yamato Ensemble -- traditional Japanese music with koto, flute, singing...
Depends on the size of the offer & how undervalued it is.

If it's enough to set you for life, then I'd be inclined to take it and move onto the next challenge in life.
Have fine-grained ACLs ever worked? I don't want to criticize Facebook for trying to increase privacy, but I have serious doubts that this will lead to any real improvement.
Though Clarke denied that, asserting it simply stood for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer" and was just a coincidence. Obviously, the odds are against him...
I was in that situation and turned down the offer. The same buyer came back in a couple days with a fair offer and we accepted it. Had the buyer not come back, we would have been caught in the general market crash and the value of our company would have shrunk. But nobody knew that at the time, and I would not have regretted turning the offer down. I wasn't in a hurry to sell and there would have been other opportunities down the road.

Just like buying a house, you shouldn't get too attached to an offer or buyer until the ink is dry on the signatures. Keep your options open and be ready to walk away even at the last minute; if you don't maintain that perspective you lose control of the process and become vulnerable to last-minute deal changes. Don't let buyers put things in terms of how much money you'll make, keep it focused on what the company is worth and whether it's the right strategic move for the company.
The hidden cost principle
Another one of his mysteries I suppose... but I DID learn that while watching a TBS 2001/2010 marathon in like 1996. Ted Turner has never steered me wrong before.
anything by Infected Mushroom.
Does anyone knows if it works with the latest Sogudi? (sogudi turns your location bar into a sort of command line). Alternatives to Sogudi are welcome too.

Opera has had this feature for many years - I didn't switch to Safari until I discovered this plug-in.
Subliminal Exposure to Apple Logo Makes You 'Think Different'
"... How to search Hacker News ..."

my preferred way, but fails on posts where points < 2 because of rel="nofollow".
This is a very interesting question, but unfortunately in this case the author's answer is just the standard scientist's whine: "There's not enough funding for my kind of research".

Better possible answers include:

a) The time isn't right for the emergence of another Einstein just now

b) There are several around, we're just not paying attention

c) Einstein was really more of a media phenomenon than a physicist, and he wasn't really any more of a genius than several of his contemporaries, and several of ours.

d) There are so many more physicists nowadays than there were a hundred years ago that it's harder for one to stand so far above the others

e) Physics is almost over -- there's still things still left to discover, but no surprises on the scale of relativity or quantum mechanics left.

I'm not actually arguing for any of these possibilities right now, just saying that they are possibilities more interesting than Lee Smolin's "can has more money?" article.