skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> She is particularly interested in people who have already demonstrated these skills—for example by running a successful drug business or achieving a high rank in a gang.

That's what you list under "Extracurricular Activiites" on your Harvard application! ;-)
Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Beta Released
Global warming = less need for shirts. ;-)
That does look awesome. I guess a complete solution would know each user's native language (e.g. by detecting the browser language and/or geo-ip) and would just automatically translate everything into that language for him transparently...
Why Lucene isn't that good
Time Tracking Resources
Hey there, Sumon from Snaptalent here. Expect over the next few weeks for us to rampup the number of companies on here.

Who else on the east coast would love this? Some great startups there that we can help get for you

Email me: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com
Use attr_protected or we will hack you
My experience with part time jobs is they use it as bait to lure you in and see if you're as good as the person recommending you says you are. If you think about it, it works out for them since they can see how good you really are on the cheap (relatively speaking).

You'll probably work part time ~1-3 months until they really start to pressure you to go full time (assuming they like you). This is NOT fun.

At that point you need to decide to go full time or peace out. They are not sustainable, especially when you are part of a team and the rest of the team is working full time, and they're getting all frustrated that so and so is out today because he's part time.

I would just save up and then work full time on your idea(s). Figure out your monthly expenses, figure out how many months you can go, etc. There's nothing more focusing than knowing you're losing $x a day out of your savings account by just not working - the Cortez approach, I suppose.

Caveat: This is, of course, my experience. Take it with a grain of salt.
There definitely are plenty of religious wackos who take up the Singularity too. You need to make a distinction between the views of a group and the wackos within that group. Especially when it comes to something as nebulous/fuzzy as the singularity. I totally agree that there are some "singularitarians" who do treat it as a religion, they are just so excited by the ideas that they irrationally glom on and make nonsensical claims, but this doesn't reflect the views of all of the members. Take a look at this: http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singular...

For example, Bush is a member of the Republican Party, but I don't assume that all Republicans are deranged genocidal maniacs.
It all depends on the state you are living. California is pretty good for protecting employees, not recognizing non-compete clauses, etc....

1. If you are working on your own time, and NOT using company equipment.
2. The idea is original, and did NOT came from copying something from the company.
3. The idea is not a direct competitor of what your company is doing.

You can be pretty safe. It will be hard for your company to claim anything on your work.
This looks very cool. Kudos!
You're making random assumptions about the goals these AIs would have. Remember that the goals are put into the AIs by the thing that builds it -- that means us puny humans! So we should build the AIs to value human life and do what we want.
I don't know why you're bringing up monopolies. ExxonMobil is not a monopoly. They have minimal pricing power.
The only petroleum organization that is anything remotely like a monopoly is OPEC. US presidents have some influence over certain OPEC member countries, but in general it isn't subject to US antitrust laws. Attempting to regulate the prices they charge is tilting at windmills.
credit cards are great for building credit, which is useful for other things, like buying a house
A former HR professor had a theory for this. According to him the key to understanding American management is that homogeneity is crucial. Middle managers (and that's the path to the top) are almost always white males (though white females are increasingly acceptable) in the 115-130 IQ range. Lower and you're dumb, higher and you're a flake (or not a team player).

So I found it interesting that they mentioned the 130 as a cutoff for the school where the students generally led "ordinary" lives.
Huh? ExxonMobil is not a member of OPEC.
What are you proposing they do differently?
I've thought about how we could structure a business in such a way that no team became too large, and all functioned relatively independently across the country or the globe. I called it a "federated" business, which had a Constitution at its core that served the same purpose as the Constitution of the United States: to hold together these "federated" business tribes as one company. Each tribe did whatever work they wanted -- they had to find the work and do it, but could always request assistance from other tribes in the company who had expertise in areas they might need to complete a job. Any individual or tribe would be free to leave at any time without any restrictions. The only purpose of the "federal" part of the business would be to manage office-type things like legal, payroll etc. and possibly maintain a core tool kit that could be used by all of the others in their work. I figured out how to map it to the current corporate structure: each tribe would form as its own LLC; the core federated part would be an LLC as well, but would not own the others. There would be an agreement signed between the "tribe" LLCs and the federal LLC, but as I said, any of the tribal LLCs could "secede" at any time, as long as they fulfilled any open obligations to other tribes' customers. Also, all bylaws would restrict any tribe and the federal part of the organization from going public, even if they seceded. That would be the one restriction. I would only be interested in this kind of business if it were for the long-term, and not with the goal of flipping or cashing out. Not sure it would work as advertised, but it sure would be a cool experiment.

/s.
...which reminds me -- one of these days I'll have to learn Erlang.

"Given that Erlang programs are naturally written in a concurrent manner, most programs require no modification at all to take advantage of SMP."

http://www.erlang.org/faq/faq.html#AEN625
For large public works projects to reflect the advancement of actual biological (rather than cultural) evolution, they'd have to affect people's chance of having descendants.

There may have been some of that. Maybe people who could tolerate organization into armies have been exterminating people who couldn't. But the time during which that has been taking place is pretty short by evolutionary standards.
Wubi - Trying Linux on Windows
They seem smart but sometimes impractical. Fortunately smart people can learn to be practical.
Dude, servers aren't a one-time expense... in accounting it's called a capital expense, and it's depreciated. Most computer technology is depreciated over a course of two years, simply because of the assumption that that expense will re-occur in two years.

Do you think Google's server farms have the same racked units that they put into place in 1998? That's crazy talk.
You should be able to do that by taking a steady job in a more established company, not in a startup. And there is nothing wrong with that. My experience is that entrepreneurship is somewhat of an addiction anyway. Good luck.
yconfinorator
This proves without a doubt that selling online solves np-hard complexity. And you don't even need a Turing Machine.
I think that the author's point is that even though Facebook has a huge number of users, they haven't yet figured out a way to properly monetize their business. They're making peanuts compared to Google and income is a very well established metric for success.
Six Principles for Making New Things
My main problem is that this is for people who got caught. If all criminals have something in common with entrepreneurs, then it seems logical to assume that this program isn't getting the cream of the crop (those who don't get caught). Though perhaps that group succeeds without any help or notoriety.
I'll always remember that long night back in 1992 trying to figure out why one of my freshman CS assignments suddenly stopped working when I had finished the features and was just cleaning up the code. It turned out there was a bug in the Sequent Dynix Pascal compiler that caused my program to fail when I deleted a comment. It took me quite a while to figure that out and put the comment back in. :-)

In retrospect it was a valuable lesson. Always use source code control, and check in small changes frequently. That way you can easily roll back in small increments to figure out which change broke something.
So one might say that an optimal size of a business is 150 - family members - external to business friends - significant acquaintances. With various employees being more or less numerically involved in a company.
Google auto detects source language, so the only thing you have to decide is what to translate it into for sending
Germany and UK too.
yeah, provided you pay it off. My brother called me while he was in college and asked if he should get a credit card. I told him "if you can charge $20 a month to it, and pay it off every month on time, then yes, get one. If you can't, don't".

He was nervous about his organizational ability, and decided not to get one. Four years later, he had a tough time getting an apartment in SF because he had no credit.

It's stupid, and credit card companies definitely target college students knowing that many of them will end up paying severe penalties and interest charges. But the thing is, they'll give you a credit card because you're a college student without the same credit history they'd want to see after college. So if you have the discipline to charge very small amounts and always pay it off on time, it is wise to get one.
I'm sure the people who he raised money from are really thrilled by that picture and it's association with their money.
Thanks for correcting me. My self-education in finance is incomplete. So, is it your opinion that Facebook is only reporting half of the cost of their servers when they talk about last year's annual loss? I still suspect that the numbers they throw around are a simple in-out calculation.

But, in any event, a two year lifespan for a server is a little pessimistic.
It sounds like it could be a promising program, but my question is:

Why do you have to go to prison to be offered a chance like that?
COBRA is pricey as hell! My COBRA premiums (if I had taken it when I left my last job) would have been around $850/month.

This is why the company has to pay for this stuff. I'm pretty useless if I get sick...
I heard a radio show (I think it was NPR) about this recently. "Speciality Crops" don't get much in the way of government subsidy.

What's a "specialty crop"? The general rule appears to bet that if it is a recognizable vegetable that would appear in it's natural form on your dinner table, it's a specialty crop. Interestingly, many of the nation's (and world's) specialty crops are either locally grown, or are shipped in from California.

If it gets processed into something no longer recognizable as food, it's not a specialty crop, and is most likely getting subsidized.

Ironically, the government recommended food pyramid is the inverse of government subsidies.
Can you identify some article(s) that had a huge impact on your generation with respect to computing?
For me, one such article is this:

Exploring the Mandelbrot set

AK Dewdney - Scientific American, 1985

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/navigation/ideas/articles/mandelbrot/index.shtml
There are some good comparisons (including benchmarking) of full text search engines here:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql-performance-presen...

One titled "Effective Full Text Search for Databases" and the other "High Performance FullText Search"

Also, Sphinx supports distributed searching - I can't speak to this feature - but if anyone can I'm listening!
There seems to be little competition among US oil companies in prices at the US pump. You seem like you know quite a bit about this--much more than I do--why don't they fight for market share at the pump? The station owners can't do it without help from the "mother" company--their margins are too slim (at least on petrol). It doesn't seem like normal market forces are at play here. I would ordinarily expect one company to drop their margins to try to make more profit on volume.

Do you have any idea why we don't see this? Perhaps there is a brand-loyalty factor that makes it pointless to try.
Andrew Conru biography: from Ph.D. to successful entrepreneur
Or it could be that IQ seems to be an unreliable metric for just about everything.
In the last 16 I saw 10 I would expect to be of interest to at least a handful of readers here:

The Drake Equation (funny math)

How it works (stereotypes & math)

Advanced Technology (von neumann machines)

Fuck Grapefruit (scatter plot about perception)

Nightmares (creative subconscious, what's not to love?)

Ultimate Game (D&D is not for me, but I think it fits the crowd)

Kilobyte

Morning (dead pixels)

Zombie Feynman

TSP
I'm not concerned about evoking anything--but it obviously evoked passion in you. That's a good thing to see though, and I'm glad there's people that feel so strongly about humans continuing to exist on the planet for millenia to come! I'm not sure everyone share's your opinion.

I'm sure what you mean by "ohnoes"--I looked it up in a dictionary and couldn't find it--what <i>does</i> it mean?
I've always been fairly impressed with organized crime's ability to locate new areas to exploit.

Then again, how much of an advantage is it to use "illegal leverage"? I'm sure Movable Type would have a larger install base if they could send goons to the doorsteps of those using Wordpress.
If you charge more than someone else, it's gouging.
If you charge the same as someone else, it's collusion.
If you charge less than someone else, it's predatory.
Use Google as a Vulnerability Scanner
I'm having a very similar experience working for a large corporation and I've made plans to extricate myself and go back to grad school. I'd be careful about associating "kids" with people who are burnt-out or who just want to crawl into their little corner as a faceless cubicle dweller. I'm 26 and have a wife and an 11 month-old son, both by choice. There is joy and fulfillment to be had in a family that commercial success cannot replace. It's interesting to see how many people assume that it's not possible to have a family as well as a stimulating and challenging career. Do not make these assumptions. I will prove them wrong.
I would not expect any correlation between IQ and success.

A good IQ test will give you a general indication of a person's logic, reasoning and spacial abilities. It does not test one's ability to empathize or interact with others, two skills which are essential for "reaching the top".

Therefore, IQ is really only good for measuring a person's potential for gaining new knowledge quickly, not measuring what their future success should be.
Yeah, for whatever reason it doesn't feel right. If you're headed to / live in the bay area, drop me a line and we can have a beer. As far as your transition goes, congrats! You'll miss the epic nature of your previous projects but you won't miss the bureaucracy.
Do they not get it, or are they unwilling to? Admitting to yourself that you want to change is a hard step to take.

I think the people to whom this advice applies already know that something is wrong, and that there must be something better than the corporate monotony. All they need is some encouragement, and a bit of a support network.
Somebody's been watching too much "The Wire" ...
Entirely possible that my previous company would have never lasted had they not been bought. Perhaps those opposing internal forces would be too much to bear. But it did work for a while.
I want to know how she is managing to spend $3.2 million on just 39 prisioners ($82,051/prisioner).
Should Employers Use Social Network Profiles in the Hiring Process?
c.f. ze frank's twitter color war 2008:

http://tailrank.com/5494270/colorwar-2008
You get far more than multicore scalability for free. You get distributed fault-tolerance for free. It's kind of awesome.

With some work on its string handling and "talking to the rest of the world" stuff, Erlang could be really awesome.
Don't get me wrong, lots of those other ones were funny, just not HN material. I'm a faithful subscriber to their RSS feed.
Official - Mahalo is Spam, According to Google's Internal Spam Documents
I'm a bit unsure about the benefits of wubi. I admit I probably haven't given the topic enough consideration, but at first thought giving Windows users an easier time seems hurtful for free software. After all, it will encourage people to keep using non-free software. I say that because people using windows will be encouraged to keep their windows and using wubi for installing GNU/Linux, which runs right from windows' file system. So I expect that people meeting free software through that path is more likely to always keep using non-free software, as opposed to the ones who have a free system installed on a different partition.

Of course, one may argue that stuff like wubi makes it easier for people who would never use free software to at least try some. But if our ultimate goal is to have everyone using free software only, is that being hepful in the long term? That's a question that I never fully understood the answer, maybe someone here can shed me some light.

As you can notice, I do believe in free software as the best mean of software distribution, I'm a little tired of discussing that; so I hope people will talk about my question rather than my premisse that the ultimate goal is to have people only using free software.
Entrepreneur to head U.S. cybersecurity center
We don't know their income; they're a private company.
Threadless' business model takes my breath away.
Welcome to the club of those who are willing to do things that most are not. My company has gone from 2 people to 7 and now to 1 over the last 7 years and I will never work for anyone else.

4 months goes by VERY quickly. Believe that you only have 4 months (or maybe even 3) and do everything you can to make your project work in that time. "Work" doesn't mean it'll be perfect. Get it up and adjust on the fly. PG has said it. Others have said it. Launch and iterate. You can do it!

We're all rooting for you!
I would be really annoyed if I had to leave it now, because I think we're maybe a year away from having a really great solution in our market.

Your answer is sitting there in your words. Keep your day job for a year or a year and a half. Then ask yourself the question again.

If you need a project, focus on cutting your expenses. Learn to budget. Learn to cook. Pay off the credit cards. Move to a less expensive apartment. Every dollar you cut from the budget is not just a dollar you get to save for when you're self-employed, but a dollar that you won't be spending when you're self-employed, because you won't be in the habit of spending it.

If "storm clouds are on the horizon" then there's a chance you'll get laid off in the next year. Then you can collect unemployment while you're looking for a day job that doesn't restrict your extracurricular activities. If you quit now, you'd have to do that anyway, without the benefit of the insurance.

I would listen to the lawyers and not-a-lawyers in this thread: Don't do startup work while you're still employed at the company.
First Vid of Dean Kamen's Miracle Water Distiller...on Colbert
And Mt. Dew (or, when you're lower on money Citrus Drop), which is the epitome of refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil
A few more details: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/28/...
The solution presented is really sub-optimal.

DNS data gets cached at many layers, and often times caching DNS servers won't honor extremely short TTL's, they'll default to caching data for at least 4-24 hours. So while your DynDNS info is updated, you can't rely on the fact that the rest of the world is going to be similarly up-to-date.

A better solution would be to break down an actually host a machine someplace where you can count on it having a static IP. Use Apache, haproxy, pound, squid, or a proxy of your choice to manage the dynamic IP's of your EC2 machines. Connections come into this static machine and are dispatched to the appropriate EC2 machine.

There is really no reliable way to have a 24/7, "5 nines" sort of presence relying solely on EC2.
Don't send object publishing to do a URL dispatcher's job!
Most people I know of from college don't even care to look elsewhere for a job. All they wish is to get into some big company and switch jobs every 2 years to another big company.
Also for those people, getting into anything small is not good enough to be told among friends.
Because German and Swiss states couldn't stand up to a larger force organized hierarchically is not proof that humans have _not_ evolved to work in small groups, it is only very poor empirical evidence that a larger force with better weapons can defeat a smaller, disorganized force.

As for why people seek freedom, I doubt most consciously think about it in those terms. You seem to think that individuals ponder about the pros and cons of going it alone or being part of a collective, but it just doesn't happen that way. When you're brought up in a culture that is already one way or the other, and that is all you know, you rarely choose because it's not even a question that enters your mind.

I'd suggest reading Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn.
Could a person's definition of success change with IQ? Many people we consider geniuses had wide ranging interests, so I'm not sure you would catch many of these people if success is defined as expertise in a specific field, as it seems to be in this article.

Also, here is another interesting take on that question:
http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/grady/realworld.html
I found the OLPC Bitfrost[1] security scheme he worked on more interesting than the drama.

[1] - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost
Very neat trick! Thanks for sharing it.
Wow, the rarely seen twin of IANAL, IAAL. Remind me to pay more attention to everything antiismist says now!
multi-threaded programming is a lot harder than it looks. that's true of a number of things, like opengl, but most programming subjects can be mastered by the usual bumble-along-and-break-things method that i suspect many of us use.

that's not so true for multi-threaded problems. newbies are likely to create bugs that only show up under heavy load and are nearly impossible to recreate and debug. it was enough to scare me away from multi-threaded programming for many years.

now i know that the solution is extreme discipline. don't share objects between threads, create locks sparingly, have threads communicate with each other only through queues or other well-defined interfaces, etc.

but my knowledge of the subject is pretty old-skule. every now and then i read something about memory barriers, lock-free programming methods, and so on, that make me think other people might have a better way.
Swotti - A Semantic Opinions Aggregator
Heaps of nines could be part of the sales pitch if they constructed things a little differently. It's a shame, really.
A remark from 1 mentor I have never forgotten:

1. If you can't think in base-8 you CAN'T be a programmer!

so I set out to write a program that would think in base-8 for me...
"That's only true if your terms of employment are written with a clause like that."

For many potential investors, that won't be enough. They won't touch you without ironclad assurance of clear ownership of IP.

I stand by my original comment. It doesn't matter who's right or wrong. Can you really afford spending any time in your first 2 years on legal matters regarding IP ownership? Believe me, there are people out there that will do ANYTHING to steal from you. Why tempt them?