skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not. But like Steve Blank said:

The standard corporate presentation wasn’t working, so the Boston sales rep made up his own. (I asked for the Boston sales rep because in the U.S. they’re furthest from the Silicon Valley corporate office and any oversight.)

We call the five other sales people and find that they are also “winging it.”
Is It True, Faster Sites Sell More Stuff?
If you live in Europe (or New York), you don't even need a car.
It is worth nothing that this "Institute for the Works of Religion", aka IOR, is basically the bank of Vatican. It is shrouded by absolute secrecy, much more than the swiss banks for instance. In the past it has been involved in rather shady stories.
The question is will it go to the bathroom for you as well? I could easily save a lot of time in the day by outsourcing that.
True. What upsets me is that publicly accepted solution to this seems to be "lets breed more babies" as opposed to "lets change our way of thinking as we get older". WTF? I refuse to accept the idea that I'm predestined to get slower, dumber and more conservative as I get older.

I also believe that instead of overbreeding we should find ways to feed the existing 6 billion or/and shrink to a more sustainable number.
It's a sad state of affairs when reading makes you a nerd.
That's definitely a partner. Though ironically it is likely to mean this isn't a top tier firm. Most of the top firms (with the exception of e.g. Union Sq and Andreessen Horowitz) are old enough that most partners aren't founders.
Well, I believe transactions in the US are monitored. At least large cash withdrawals and deposits are. 5,000 or more is usually reported by the banks.
I think you must be referring to perspective... which gives indeed an idea of 3D. Medieval paintings lacked perspective. But technically it's still 2D: both eyes see the same thing.

We are used to 2D: if you look around with one eye, or at very long distances: the moon, the sun and the stars are in 2D.

And we're used to 2D in drawings, paintings and photographs.

3D tries to trick you into seeing 3D by showing a different picture for each eye, but the illusion is far from perfect: according to this article we receive clues that point in different directions. And that, it claims, isn't healthy in the long run.
I don't understand. Can't we just have holograms with lower resolution?
I wouldn't say "learning through osmosis" is necessarily wrong. Knowledge is like water. Throw a human in an environment with concentrated knowledge and he will absorb some. Of course, this isn't strictly the same, but it's just a simile...
I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.
BS. This is true of anybody joining any company.
Aardvark will integrate extremely naturally into Google Buzz.
This jumped out at me:

> the cause is ordinary people who do not "believe in the future" and have few or no children

The notion that the reason people are having fewer children because they don't believe in the future is pure ideology. They may have accidentally landed at the right conclusion (I'm not persuaded of this, particularly given the opportunities related to immigration), but their reasoning is highly suspect.
NASA Solar Observatory Will Make the Best IMAX Movie of the Sun Ever (video)
The nearly $1 billion machine is launching today, one day after its Atlas V rocket taxi shut down due to high winds. Using IMAX quality resolution, its cameras and sensors will study the kind of solar weather that's set to interrupt communications and GPS systems in coming years, sending back 1.5 terrabites of data a day.
More Tools for Sifting Through Government Data
Gesturcons: an icon language to describe natural user interface gestures
That was used by IDEO in their global Rube Goldberg machine video: http://labs.ideo.com/2008/10/28/the-incredible-ideo-global-c... (at 9 minutes and some)
The company where I work currently, an analytics company, was founded by a McKinsey alumn.

The company is going on 9 years.

Our biggest client last year was McKinsey and when he first started the company (i.e. before biz dev), he leveraged the contacts he'd made at McKinsey heavily.

All in all, I'd say the article argues one extreme, when as usual the truth is somewhere in the middle.
This price seems really high considering the amount of traction aardvark had (not much). $50M is a pricey talent acquisition
No, a bad person would be nodding vigorously and taking notes.
Will there be jobs in 20 years for anyone with an IQ under 90?

Are we going to end up with vast structural unemployment?
The article says there are 10 depth perception cues. ONE of them is showing different images to each eye. 2D images do have some of the 10 cues. What is special about this ONE cue and not the ones that a 2D image has?

I.e., why does your brain turn off processing for the differing images to each eye cue but not for the parralax cue, etc?
Our secret to getting funded
I guess the fact the 30 are learning the same thing helps a little.

Is this lack of teacher attention the reason?
From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f90bca10-1679-11df-bf44-00144feab4...

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

The IMF recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.
Gotti Tedeschi is italian. While it's true that a low birth rate is typical of rich countries, it is also true that in Italy the hope for the future is currently at historical lows (sociologists are also writing profusely about this). Not that there is necessarily a causal link, of course.
Wow! I've been an avid 'Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising!

I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:

Just the _highlights_ from http://vark.com/team

* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization

* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years

* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams

* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.

* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research

* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project

--

Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf]

"Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine' and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today!

Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =>Sergey Brin and Larry Page<= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."
No, Avatar did seem to focus only on one thing at a time to me. I noticed it distinctly. I was in a non-imax though.
I completely agree with you. 3D would be so much more immersive if I could look around.
Dragonfly is a built-in (as usual with Opera) developer tool like Firebug. It is pretty cool! (But often fails to load at all for me)
Airbnb hiring UI designer to help visualize the future of travel
American culture has no place for the jock-nerd. You are either an all-American jock or a nerd (pencil-necked, or mobidly-obese).
One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your question.

For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL".

In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person a question, and they answer it with the info you want, so they might be interested in the technology and people that make this intelligent tagging work as a step in that direction.
It may not be too high if you look at the VC money they had raised. $6M had been invested so if that was a 50% stake then you are looking at a 4x return for the VC. Isn't that about right?
IPhone App Adds Photos and Videos to Foursquare Check-ins
One of the rules of thumb I heard somewhere and try to do (though it's pretty damn hard) is to save 1/3 of your gross salary.
There's at least two ways to be "forgetful"; we can either actually destroy data, or we can simply account for it less as time goes by. It should be noted that most people's brains actually work on the latter principle.

But that will require a paradigm shift in both law and culture, because right now we don't have that. I draw an extreme example for didactic purposes, though the principle extends to much smaller cases: Suppose within our lifetimes we develop effective immortality. Do you want to be classified as a "sex offender" in the year 3000 because when you were 19 you went driving down the road, mooning people, and you mooned a cop accidentally?
I don't think the interview is real. There are various phrases he uses that are too American - like "take out loans", "I would use", "send faked letters", "spend all of their time online", "up the chain, to someone", "build up trust", "In the early days".

Those particular sentences are American constructs and would not usually be used by foreigners, particular foreigners from a colonial english background.
I am finding it to be an extension of some the great sharing and commenting that was happening around Google Reader. Sort of a hacker news between my contacts.

Like many of these things, if you are "friends" with lots of idiots, it's not going to be that useful. If you are friends with lots of smart people, you get some really cool stuff sent your way.
Out of context, that statement seems like it's saying that people do not "believe in the future" because they don't have children (i.e. having children gives you hope for the future).
I see nothing wrong with allowing my kids to use social networking sites once I feel confident they're mature enough to accept the responsibility for managing their own privacy (and, in fact, my older child does already, although only on sites that allow pseudonyms for now). My observation is simply that use of email requires an entirely different understanding of privacy concerns than use of Twitter or Facebook, and that the default settings Google Buzz sets up are neither especially obvious (I had to hunt around for a while to figure out what was actually displayed to the public via Google Profile) nor what I would recommend for a minor.

Again: I have no problem with educating my children about the proper use of social networking sites. I simply don't appreciate being forced to do so by a service which they've been able to use without these sorts of concerns since they were old enough to read.
I believe there is already a introductory video to this: Logan's Run.
The number of programmers is pretty elastic. People can and will learn to program if it starts to seem like that's a valuable skill. E.g. there is a founder in this current YC cycle who came to the US to go to business school, but then realized that if he wanted to start a startup he'd be better off spending the time learning to hack instead.

I'd say the upper bound on the number of startups is the number of people who are determined and smart enough. That's probably between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000.
You missed a step.

Remove, [let rest for 5 minutes], call the guests in...
Isn't that the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin's book The End of Work?
Love reviews and feedbacks on my project
The buyer doesn't do his valuation based on what's put into the company.
That's kind of weird: serendipity made it so that I ended up going back to Processing.org just last night and was wondering on my way to work if there was a way to make iPhone apps with Processing. I guess there is.

(serendipity went like so: a colleague had a stone carving class, I looked at the association site, which had electronic classes including about Arduino, which brought me to Arduino.cc, then to Processing.org because they're using the same base framework/IDE)
As long as you have google referral juice.
That's equivalent to asking, are people's desires limited? The answer appears to be no, in the short term.
I'm just sad that they don't have it for apps yet. I'd like to start using it, but then if it does become available for the email address that I actually use (and that people know about) I don't want to have to start all over.
Yeah but not all engineers who join Google stay in Google forever.

The ones who eventually leave and start their own company bring with them whatever parts of the Google culture that they felt were valuable: maybe it's the data-driven, engineer focused management style, maybe it's the code review and use of real computer science in the creation of software, maybe it's the free food rule.

They also leave after meeting a lot of smart people and making a lot more connections that could potentially help them in the future.
I think what GMail did for conversations in email,GBuzz does for conversations in Twitter. The @reply mechanism and the retweet convention never really worked well for me in Twitter, although that may be because I was not using the necessary third party tooling to visualize it.

Also, you can add more than 140 characters, real links, pictures, etc. You lose some of the public version of SMS feel that Twitter has, but those constraints were becoming more of an annoyance to me.
Re-hiring a bunch of ex-employees does not look like a talent acquisition. It looks more like someone was shrewd enough to become buddies with the M&A department the first time around.
What a cool idea!!
In America many civil servants are overpaid when you look at total compensation. The amount of retirement that needs to be paid is ridiculous and most govs didn't actually set aside money to pay it.
I for one welcome our game-show-playing overlords. (can it be Slashdot time?)
The Problem With Google Buzz Is That It Solves Google’s Problem At Your Expense
An interesting point. But it seems like the ideal solution is the capacity for perfect recall. Being able to recall everything you have experienced at will seems to be virtually all good, so long as you are not forced to be constantly conscious of it at all times.

To extend the story of your cat (I am sorry incidentally. Loosing a pet can be rough), I suspect you probably would like the ability to remember every detail of the good times when you so chose, you just don't want to have to deal with thoughts about the death all the time.
The Soonr web services stop dropping the 'e' before that r, the Bettr
Saw these guys at Facebook HQ a couple months ago. Seemed like during their entire presentation they were trying to pitch their company to someone with purchasing power at FB
That was the part that really stuck with me too. The previous startup I worked for sold energy-use reduction software and had initial success selling to local governments who wanted to look "green" and help a local startup (outside the valley). Once that limited market was sold to they started having trouble selling to the wider commercial market and didn't make sales targets. Government wasn't really buying to make a successful return on investment so perhaps the CD was also "hollow" as with friends and family.
This is awesome. Really good idea.
> The United States constitution forbids anything like the war crimes court.

Except that we don't have the problem with ICC when it benefits us. If they rule against our interest we declare "that doesn't apply to us." Well, fine then, Germany should have declared "Nuremberd trials don't apply to us", Serbia should have said "Milosevic's trial doesn't apply to us." and so on.

The reason ICC exists it so enforce human rights abuses and crimes against humanity. These are perpetraited by terrorist states that use fear and intimidation around the world without any regard to human life. It seems to me there is a need for ICC today just like there was a need for it after WWII.
If you ask an interesting, detailed question, you'll usually get something unique in return.

An example of a question (and an awesome answer) I submitted: http://vark.com/t/cad4a0
i make a mean peppersteak using a similar technique that I picked up from a local restaurant.

The diff:

1. crack peppercorns spread across a baking sheet. Lay steak upon them. Compress. I use a heavy (cold) skillet. Flip steak. Repeat.

2. Heat oil just beneath the smoke point in pan, otherwise cook steak as described.

3. Serve with any citrus-based steaksauce. (A1 if you have to, but I prefer to make my own OJ based sauce)

The peppercorn crust is quite good.
Microsoft and Creative Destruction
11 Apple Execs Hellbent On Destroying Google
Books are great - I read one as often as I can.

Having said that, nothing compares to a seminar room full of really smart people and led by a very smart and painfully well-informed professor. I can honestly say that the five years I spent in grad school were more intellectually invigorating than any other time in my life. It's hard to ignite that kind of spark just reading a book on your own.
Google Is Being Evil, Music Bloggers Say – GigaOM
ACM ICPC 2010 World Finals
Cannot upvote this enough. What the hell are you waiting for? What the hell am I waiting for?
Before I die
Where do they get this valuation from? That's greater than $500/user, and their growth curve doesn't look exponential by any means: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv. (Yes, I know compete sucks, but often the shape is correct.)

Talent doesn't make sense at that price, more like a few million. The tech can't be that out of the ordinary for Google given they just launched Buzz and Wave. So what was it that deserved that price? Bidding war?
True. However, the fastest way to learn almost anything is to go hang out with experts. Graduate school, at its best, is a formalization of this. (Of course, you still have to go to the library!)
Http://oneblog20100.blogspot.com/
A new beta of Google Chrome for Mac - with extensions and more
I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and fewer than fifty ended up commenting on that post (though there were probably many more who clicked the post but didn't comment). The commenters are not normal computer users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.999th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web.
Windows 7 activation update aims at high-volume pirates
I looked up the article in Google so as to read it for free (it's the first result): http://www.google.com/search?q=carpenter+before+i+die
Check here: http://android.processing.org/
If you want to reliably maintain (or even build) a given version of the code, it's the right thing to check in the versions of the compilers and build tools that are known to work. A good tool is small, fast, meant to be run non-interactively, and takes instructions in an easily-reviewed file. Making your official build in Visual Studio is a bad idea for all these reasons--even Microsoft doesn't do that, at least when I contracted there. (They used a make clone with some extra support for metadata from win32 binaries.)
Finally I should be able to install a Flash blocker and try using it as my main browser!
Thanks Travis. That link is great. It doesn't totally address what we're dealing with, but does give me a lot of ideas (which is probably the best that can be expected).
Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises Seed Funding From Max Levchin And Michael Birch
So... I pull water out of my well at a cost of $1 per bottle, later sell for $5 per bottle, have $400 in my hand, and yet my profit margin is zero.

I am not sure how to respond to this. You are self-evidently wrong, unless we are to accept your redefining of profit to be "the selling price of goods minus the selling price". Very strange.
EOF - The Google Exposure
Huh? It's just a wrapper around an Ratom parser. Not much to see here yet.
Nice walk-through screenshots for those who, like me, haven't yet bothered/dared to click the "okay" button on the "Welcome to Buzz" message.
Also, and I didn't make this explicit in my OP, we have identity collision issues (as indicated in the Flickr link from Travis) that are playing on our design as well.

Thanks for the help icey
It seemed to me he actually told people "Bill Gates may be a freaking genius, but he also worked harder than you've ever considered working, and took advantage of incredible, nearly unique, opportunities. That's what being a true outlier takes." How many high school kids were taking the bus to the conveniently located university computer lab in the middle of the night and programming all night in the early 1970s?
American Kobe is quite good. It's beef for people who think beef is blue collar and prefer shellfish, lamb, duck, etc.

Jappanese (true) Kobe is even better, and it's the only beef I've ever even considered eating "blue" (super rare). If you're ever in Japan, treat yourself. It's worth it.
Sorry, would you care to elaborate? I'm not really sure what you mean by "the M&A department the first time around". I think the fact that only _some_ of the team members are ex-Googlers is significant.

Additionally, what other business case could their be to purchase such a small, new company. Couldn't Google just have integrated these features into their shiny new Buzz service _last week_ and have overshadowed Vark very quickly?
Cato will never go bankrupt 'cos the wingnut welfare don't stop.
Mark Pesce, technopagan and inventor of VRML. Interesting guy.
I was the same way. I'd have been much more interested in attending a real tech event (CES, perhaps), than something called "Teens in Tech." That said, it could be a good event, I really know nothing about it.
Well, they could go without health insurance. Frankly, if you're going to be uninsured at some point in your life, such a young age is the best time to do it... it's when you're old and sick that you want to be insured most, not when you're young and healthy.
The demand for bribes is one thing... I can get over that. But a teen already using passive-voice apologies, ala "a line was crossed," now that I can't abide!
Ask HN: How do I make a game?
I know nothing about game development but I'd like to learn/experiment a little bit.

I miss the old school games like Mario World. I don't have the patience for the newer games - too many buttons to press, too much 3d space to get used to and I don't have enough days to complete the tutorials before I can actually play the game. So I'd like to design/create an old school side-scroller type game as hobby/side project.

Problem is I don't know where to start. (Not even sure what questions to ask). I am a software developer so development in general isn't an issue.

Can anyone point me in the right direction or give me some reading material that would help?

Thanks, your help is much appreciated.

Nik
The Roman Catholic Church, like any other corporation, is interested in revenue and growth.

When he says ordinary people do not "believe in the future", what he means to say is they don't believe in a Catholic future.
Interesting timing :) Looks like this is what happened with Aardvak. I'm just speculating, but the formula seems to hold true in this instance.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118214