skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting that the words 'web' and 'internet' don't appear in the body of the article.

Virtually all of the material covered in the course of an undergraduate education is already online in multiple places/formats/presentation styles. All that's needed are business models for packaging that content and getting it to students in a way that they are credited for their learning in the job market.
Folder Printing Business is Profitable
Folders have huge benefits. They are good for the business and they increase the value of the product as well.
Oh, I know you can get timtams in the USA at several specialty stores, but its actually cheaper to just send them from Aus even when you factor in the high cost of shipping.

To illustrate. A 200g block of Cadbury Dairy Milk costs $8.95 US from that store, or $10 Aus. The same chocolate costs $3 Aus from pretty much anywhere in Australia.

When I ship a box of timtams at a time, the savings are considerable.
Searching for Biofuels' Sweet Spot
I would like minute details and stream of thoughts during key YC moments. :) also what PG is having for breakfast - everyday.
If you are not a EU citizen you need a residence permit and a work permit. I don't know how different the rules are between the EU countries, but it's roughly the same everwhere. A work permit is typically tied to an employer, and a residence permit is typically tied to a work permit.

Here's the different kinds for Sweden: http://www.migrationsverket.se/info/1074_en.html
ESR writes in his 'How to be sexy' essay: "Being an alpha male in some status hierarchy changes your body language, your sex-hormone levels, and the smell of your sweat. Women home in on men with these traits [...]".

The idea is that if you're a core developer on a project, you will gain alpha-male status from it. It doesn't really matter what kind of project it is. So this is a way in which hackers can become irrestibly attractive to the other sex.

The essay is at http://catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.html
Well, given enough time, women will prefer men who provide more advantages to her children.

Of course, "earning potential" actually doesn't matter much either, in a wealthy society where death from poverty is rare. Instead, look at the people who are having lots of kids vs. few or none. Don't underestimate the power of vertical memetic transmission, either--breeding rapidly is more viable today than ever before as a means of promoting ideas.

Genetic engineering will probably throw everything out the window long before selection pressures could do much anyhow.
http://prezi.com/ 's front page has taken a turn for the worse, but they create some visually interesting presentations.

If you have to use slides specifically, take a look at Garr Reynold's (PresentationZen.com guy) sample slides...

http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/sample1.html

...and presentation tips:

http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/index.html

Finally, http://slideology.com is also a good resource; checkout the most-read articles list in the sidebar.
Off the Bookshelf: self-publishing
The alpha male has long been achieved by means of physical prowess (meow).

First, not after high school, no. Second, being the alpha male has more to do with how other men think of you than about how women seek mates. Third, women have always found intelligence inherently attractive, and smart people who have a hard time with the ladies have always avoided acknowledging that because it would mean acknowledging they have other defects that hold them back.
I'm not suggesting we take the $10,000 from a rich person and give it to 10 poor people, rather I'm saying, "We have a surplus of wealth equal to $10,000 and must decide what to do with it. Someone is going to benefit, how do we distribute the surplus such that it creates the most good?

I would suggest distributing the wealth equally among all is the best route to the greatest happiness, rather than giving most or all of it to one individual for whom it may not even be noticed.

I'm not sure, restricting freedoms of the innocent or demanding individuals work to benefit others at their own expense could create a net positive. The "badness" of that might be infinity.
For the uninitiated (or nonnative speakers) out there: the parent comment uses pimp as a strong compliment, in the sense 6(1) at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pimp:

1)something badass or new and fresh.

And yes, in this context badass is good:

1. badass

The epitome of the American male. He radiates confidence
in everything he does, whether it's ordering a drink,
buying a set of wheels, or dealing with women. He's slow
to anger, brutally efficient when fighting back.

(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=badass)

Indeed, Tesla was a badass pimp.
If the skimmers transmitted the stolen data via Bluetooth, wouldn't the receiver have to be within 30 feet? That would seem to make it easy to track down.
The Economics of the Startup Visa
So that's what "mustard gas" is.
Humor and social skills absolutely require brains, though. Social status games are what our brains are built for; abstract and analytic thinking may be the intellectual power behind the march of technology, but in all likelihood that's probably just an accident, in evolutionary terms.
404 - Not Found. Also missing, this child:
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Infringe
1. To transgress or exceed the limits of; violate: infringe a contract; infringe a patent.
2. (Obsolete) To defeat; invalidate.

Hmmm... This name might actually backfire if second meaning was to be brought back from obsolescence.
Indeed Tesla seems to have been part scientist, part engineer and part showman.
Nahlyee Van Brunt
nahlyee at gmail dot com
> light a candle, don't piss on ours.

Hey mate, did you edit that into your comment or did I just miss it the first time? Because I upvoted you since I agree with the not mutual exclusive/harder to pull off thing, but no need to be crass like that. It doesn't help further the position we generally agree on, and clouds the discussion. tpt is a smart and good commentor anyways, even though we disagree some times - it's totally unnecessary to be crass with him like that.
I am a die-hard Linux fan. However, I recently discovered that the latest Powerpoint is head and shoulders above Beamer and OpenOffice (try SmartArt, for example), so I use the school's Windows machines just to work on my presentation.
Well, on the other side of it. It only takes one bad customer having a bad day to shit all over your business. Some people are crazy and vindictive. Like the guy who reported me to the Consumer Product Safety Commission on fictitious grounds because I refused to be extorted.
Tangentially related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F00f
That's a simplistic unerstanding that ignores the actual technology. Expert systems were nothing more than logic programming dressed up to seem all "ai". Prolog is backward chaining, while Clips expert system shell is forward chaining. Today they are referred to as business rules engines, which can again be forward and backward chaining.
Sql databases are also in fact logic programming, basically prolog without recursion and iteration, but instead have pl-sql and t-sql to make them turing complete. Also, with triggers they are also forward chaining too.
The main difference between crud and expert system is essentially that crud is multiuser and everchanging, and so is actually a better version of classical expert systems.
Hah.

The question is what happens when you fail. Obviously, if you have 100-250k, you can hire 2 people. But then what happens if the biz fails? You created 2 (probably more jobs) and now you're going to get kicked back to your own country? Or am I mis-reading this, and as soon as you hire 2 people you get your green card?
> Africa's most robust economies, such as those in Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa

South Africa is not nearly seeing a “brain gain”. We lose qualified professionals to first world countries, yet only get semi-qualified people from other African countries (a nett loss for Africa). Along with the little qualified people that we get from other African countries, we also get 4 million+ illegal immigrants.

At almost all research institutions, the average age is high. South African universities (the best in the continent) are dropping spectacularly off international rankings (e.g. Shanghai Jiao Tong world ranking). All research indicates that South African research is declining in both quality and quantity (e.g. this article: http://www.up.ac.za/academic/iti/SA_Research_publication_rec... and other articles by the same author).

By and far, the industries in many African countries are driven by mining, with the state creating an artificial middle class of useless civil servants.

The apparent growth that Africa experienced in the past 5 years is just an extension of the commodity boom – the same structural problems remain. Corruption is still there, education is still shit, etc… It can be said that the countries are more stable – but that is all.

They leave out the Angolan example – the majority of investment in that country is done by Chinese companies in exchange of oil.

> Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest black entrepreneur, has also cashed in on this consumer culture, with a net worth of $2.5 billion, according to Forbes.

They also leave out the part that he is heavily connected with the ruling party of Nigeria. There are many entrepreneurs such as this – basically African Oligarchy (other examples are Tokyo Sexwale, Patrice Motsepe, etc…).

---

I may sound negative, but I really have doubts in the past year about the future of South Africa in particular. It seems that corruption is now completely untamed and the ruling party are infighting on who gets the spoils of the government tenders (so called “tenderpreneurs”). The Mbeki government at least had the decency to try and hide the corruption.

Secondary education is basically on the verge of death (in spite of ever increasing allocation of budgets) and the government is doing its best to destroy the last functional universities.

People on all sides of the spectrum in SA are starting to get sick of the system. White people are sick of crime and taxation, poor black people are sick of living in squalor (with nothing changing in the past 20 years). There have recently been quite a few flair-ups of “service delivery” protests (black people that protest because nothing is done to their plight – e.g. in Balfour, Baberton, Khutsong etc..).
Thanks, I'm mainly looking for some help on the design and usability of the site. I'll edit the original post.

I had a feeling about the orange on orange. I checked them against he WCAG and they failed but, I still kept them. That'll teach me.

I didn't think about the login button. Thanks!

-Graysen
Why is this comment at -1 while another comment with the same content posted a few minutes later is at 18?
I've just finished the introduction part and there is one thing he got wrong. the changesets vs revisions thing. Changesets and revisions are completely equivalent as far as merging is concerned (and almost anything else) because one is trivially computed from the other. and git which has even better merging support tracks file contents not diffs, which is another proof that this argument is irrelevant.
check out http://280slides.com/
AFACT will appeal iiNet verdict
Prezi is certainly a refreshing take on things. Unfortunately it seems we do have to create slides, but I'll keep it in mind for next time. Thanks for the rest of the links too.
In my admittedly limited experience as an interested layman, it seems to have swung to an opposing extreme, if anything. I've come to associate plastering degrees and qualifications all over with someone being a borderline crackpot, while things written by the truly impressive people tend to do little more than give their name and where they work.

I mean, seriously. When was the last time you saw something say "Dr. Knuth"?
Please breed.

A lot.
The current education reminds me of waterfall model of software development. You wait for 23 years of learning and planning on what you might want to do for the rest of your life and then when you get a degree you go do something productive in life.
It would be interesting to see if any cultures/countries promote an iterative model of education. You learn a little and try to earn your way with what you learned and then you learn some more etc..
You are what you charge
My comment above explains why sql is pretty much the same as logic programming and business rule engines. The semantic web is just a way of saying that everyone should be using a "universal database schema", and once you think of it in those terms is a pretty silly idea - there isn't a remote chance that will happen.
So, again, requiring a track record of investment over at east 3 years and 6 companies might (for instance) exclude Warren Buffet, and keeping the requirements loose means that virtually anyone can "sponsor" an "entrepreneur" for very little money and get them 3 years residency in the US.

This just doesn't seem well thought out.
HAHAHA. Only on sites like this and reddit.
I find the choice of characters and the paragraph descriptions of them a little strange. I get the point that it helps the story to make up a whole life story for each member of the hypothetical development team. What I don't understand is why each team member is portrayed in such a negative light. Are your co-workers that bad?
It costs less than $100k per year to keep 5 "full-time" workers on staff. Just pay them minimum wage. This seems well-thought-out to you?
Group buys happen a lot of the (Audi) Quattro World forums for example.

A member comes up with an idea, runs it past a vendor, and posts a notice - say, group buy for 10 sets of wheels. People respond by placing pre-orders with the vendor. Once the minimum is reached they turn into orders at the pre-arranged discount and shipped out.

Could even be a generic service to facilitate these kinds of deals through arbitrary small vendors.
Thats true and it goes for dedicated servers and colo'd servers as well in some cases. The issue here isnt outrage about a host having access to your box, which almost all of them do anyways(IPMI, Root Disks, etc..) - but that they used his password to do it and without asking him.
The loose quote mostly. It is essentially, "we can hide the bad reviews a bit if you pay us." Again, IANAL, but it doesn't take much to lose some coin on "unfair business practices."
> Of the ongoing conflicts with 1000+ deaths per year, 6 are in Asia and only 2 are in Africa.

Can you give a citation?

As an example, South Africa is basically engaged in a civil war with itself (22,000+ people die violent deaths).

Zimbabwean life expectancy fell by more than 20 years - more people die there. Zim is basically a civil war (which nobody would acknowledge). Eastern DRC - easily more than a thousand, the same with Sudan.

Also note that sub-Sahara Africa only has a population of 700 million. Asia has a population that is two to three times larger.

> The coup in niger was for an actual breach of democracy - the democratically elected president tried to overstay his term, and he was stopped by the military.

You are ignoring a few things - the ruling parties is becoming incredibly intertwined with government (i.e. it is not democratic anymore, even if they hold elections). Sure, it is a bit more stable - but I doubt that it is better.

There were also recent coups in Mauritania, Madagascar.
http://beatonna.livejournal.com/23574.html
Most innovative web design
Here's the most inspiring landing page I've seen in a long time. Action, anticipation, and message delivery, all into one. (Remember, this is just a landing page-not a useful UI)

Here it is (subject to change)
http://www.macheist.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVzEfR6wL70
(worth it)
PayPal to Open App Store for Developers
Quantify the advice you receive.
http://lilug.org/w/images/a/a2/Esr.jpg
From here it looks like shalmanese posted first.
"Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work he does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal?"

Problem is, we still wouldn't be any wiser - how would we know whether to trust the claim, the critique, or the rebuttal? And wouldn't it be more fair to also allow a rebuttal to the rebuttal? Why should Lumborg have the last word?
Because the guy who posted second down-voted the guy who posted first?
(I have no horse in this race; living in Europe, the idea of a visa seems a bit anachronistic, really.)

I can understand why visas might seem obsolete from a European perspective, but from an American perspective regulation is a necessity. Per year we already accept the highest number of permanent residents in the world. In 2008 we naturalized a record number of people. And most importantly, per year we grant the highest number of people political asylum. These numbers, combined with the fact that unemployment in the US is the highest it's been since the early 1940s, makes accepting large number of immigrants impossible.

I'm not defending this bill or the current system; I know there are areas that need improvement. But fundamentally the US needs some sort of visa system.
Sure, but there is a difference between a pure communications medium (providing a unique point-to-point connection between identified hosts that temporarily transmits arbitrary data) and a content hosting service (which stores persistent data from one party and republishes it to arbitrary others). Treating an ISP analogously to a mail or telephone service provider is a reasonable comparison. Assuming that a hosting site like YouTube should be treated in the same way by default is a stretch, IMHO.
I've seen this happen a couple of times and wondered about it. This is a particularly good example of it because there are so few comments, its likely that both are visible to most readers. "No" should universally get 0 because it adds as much to the discussion.

All I can offer is shalmanese is an old account with much karma and EliRivers is a new account with none. Also the higher scoring one was posted 4-5 minutes earlier.
HTML5 vs Flex for rich Internet applications - Pamela Fox (Google AU)
The article below was sumbitted to HN a while back- rather interesting.

Backstory: The East Bay Express published a story criticizing Yelp and accusing them of extortion. Yelp CEO responds, criticizing the article's use of anonymous sources and general accusations. The article below is a response to the CEO's using named sources along with very specific accusations of what yelp did wrong.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-extortion-allegat...

*this is not the same article linked to in the OPs post.
Wealthy men have always been the alpha males. Geek doesn't necessarily = wealthy.
Patents are property, like it or not
I really dig that a company with only 3 employees can achieve all this. Well done guys.
Great, up-front and open, long-format appeal that I bet will work very well for the owner. I am a sucker for helping small businesses and if someone like that in my country needed support, I'd pledge for sure (even though I buy all my wine at cellar doors).
Unused EB-5 visa numbers spill over to EB-1, and EB-1 to EB-2, and EB-2 to EB-3. This bill would eliminate the EB-5 -> EB-1 spillover, which has the effect of reducing the number of EB-2 and EB-3 green cards available per year.
dividends don't help us, as to pay out dividends, I first have to pay corporate tax, which is usually lower than personal tax, but in California, I think, not lower than personal tax plus capital gains which I would have to pay on the dividends.

Sure, I recoup all the money I put in as well as my 'sweat equity' when I sell, and I pay the low capital gains tax rate on that, but like I said, this encourages short-term thinking. Hell, I could happily run my company for another 10 or 20 years. But the capital gains taxes being so much lower than the income tax I pay on money I take out without selling that it might make sense for me to sell out once I'm not doubling twice a year. It's sad, I think, as I think I'd be happier running the company, and the company would probably be better off with someone with a long-term view running it.
Well how can you claim science is unfinished without even having checked for the state of the science? I can not understand this attitude.

And no, I can not link to such a paper, but I am also not making any claims.
> it's just cold, heartless automation

An alternative view would be that he has captured part of the 'warm, emotional' essence of a few of the algorithms that are at work in musician's brains when they compose music is making them available to the world. Instead of just delivery a 'golden egg' he is trying to create the goose itself. To me that is a far more spectacular act of creativity/passion (no I don't see 'humanity' as being synonymous with these). It is probably worth noting the the silicon chip he runs the algorithm on probably operates at higher than the temperature of a human brain so perhaps 'warm, electronic automation' would be a better description.
Am I the only one who doesn't want to see this succeed? A business that can't control its cash flow should fail.

Yeah, shortages happen. But the complete exhaustion of credit makes me think this isn't the first time they've reached the brink.
No of course not. I'm sure we all use a different password for every box, webapp account, registrar, email address etc. I myself keep 100 or so passwords in my head, just like everyone else...
The argument against net neutrality
Fuel required @ rated power:	0.661 MMBtu/hr of natural gas. Rated power output (AC):	100 kW

Figure fuel costs of $10 per MMBtu. So it pumps out 100kW/hr electricity for $6.60.

~$0.09/kWh for electricity in Oregon (its double that for NYC). So we pay about $9 for 100kW/hr.

Thats a 30% savings in Oregon and about 70% for the East Coast. But it still releases a lot of CO2 - 773 lbs/MW-hr.

http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/

So if you ran one straight for a year and you used all its output, it would save $20k-$40k depending on electricity prices. So if they can get the price sub $100k and natural gas supply and price stays even, they could sell a lot of them.
I understand where it can become a bit cumbersome to explain to non techies. I would agree with the point above that the explanation does not to be as overblown as it is. Just get the key concept out:
1) Want to buy something, but pay less?
2) Invite your friends and if a few of you buy it, everyone will save.

The specific dynamics of how things work do not need to be in the pitch. Good luck!

P.S. I've been working on something in this space. Coming at it from a different angle, though. Hopefully I will be able to have something to show in the next couple of months.
I would like to see the OKTrends blog post on this.