skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting, quick read. I particularly liked the "an HTML5 (non-Flash) internet favors Google, as they can index it" (paraphrased) comparison with Apple liking a closed system, as they're the gatekeeper. And that this isn't really a winner-take-all battle, though it's clearly heated.

That said, of course Apple likes a closed system. They're the underdog right now. As to the somewhat implied claim that it'll ever become a "proprietary app centric universe" headed by Apple, I highly doubt it. If they ever get that big, they'll get nailed with the same kind of legislation that MS has had to deal with, because it is preventing competition. While they're small they are the competition, so it's allowed.
The returns you can get at a given risk are unfortunately not something you can dictate. E.g. I believe safe municipal bonds are now returning around 3% after tax. If you want to get more than that you have to buy bonds with a higher risk of default.

But if you put all your assets in bonds, you risk getting burned by inflation. Over the long term, stocks have higher returns than bonds. But over short periods they can have disastrously lower returns. So experts generally advise you split your assets between stocks and bonds depending on how soon you need the money. The usual advice is to put 100 - your age percent in stocks. E.g. if you're 20, to put 80% of your assets in stocks. But of course you'd have to put more in bonds if you need some of the money to live on.

The one question no one seems to talk about much is what to do when you have to invest a large sum at once, as you do. If your age implies you should put 70% in stocks, does that mean you should put 70% in stocks the next day? What if you're buying at a market peak? So whatever percent you decide to put in stocks, I'd bleed it in over a reasonably long period. Simulations would tell you how long a period; I'd guess years.
You demonstrated to your potential employer that you're interested in pursuing a career in academia. The potential employer is generalizing from your own past behavior.

That's why it's lawful for the employer to ask about your academic proclivities, but flatly unlawful for them to ask women about family planning.

I think you summed your position up nicely with your last sentence ("... if you were a new stay at home daddy, I probably wouldn't give you VC either"), since we're not actually talking about new mothers. We're talking about an entire gender, and the generalizations you're OK with making about them.
Great. I'm also using:

AdThwart

Dictionary Lookup

Downloads

Fast YouTube Search

Google Reader Notifier (by Google)

RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)

Shareaholic for Google Chrome

Smooth Gestures

SmoothScroll

Tab Menu

As far as I'm concerned, Firefox is history.

(Also interesting: Webpage Screenshot, Clickable Links, RapidShare DownloadHelper)
Andrew I was really glad to read even a transcript that remains in the objective realm. Looking on twitter there are folks ready with flaming torches and pitchforks.
I'm not getting into the issue of what was done or not done rather how experienced adults are so fast to judge someone young and clearly in need of guidance and mentoring.

Arrington's apology on techcrunch itself was obviously heartfelt and sincere (if not shocked) still well done for staying amongst the cool headed on this.
You might want to put a "cancel" button on the comment form. The blank comments might be people who are trying to get rid of the comment form after accidentally double-clicking.
Python Machine Learning Code Repository
Ask HN: Please review my Business Briefing
Hey HNers,
One of the things I've just launched is a dead-simple Daily Business Briefing. We send out 12 stories a day after scanning 2-3,000.

Some questions:
(a) Is it too simple?
(b) Will people want/need to personalised it?
(c) How should we get them to personalise it? (Explicitly or is there some better way?)

The link is here: http://bit.ly/Viewsflowdaily
Oh. The link is http://bit.ly/Viewsflowdaily
Ack. All real content is in a 16-minute video from MacWorld 2009, and no transcription. I don't typically want to wade through that much time to get to the meat of what's said.

Anyone know of a transcript?
Can't access the this article, but for window management, I recommend SizeUp: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Among other things, you can define a grid on your screen and move/resize windows in to a given grid slot with keyboard shortcuts.

You notice how inefficient the mouse is for moving/resizing windows after using this. The effect is somewhat like xmonad on Linux, but less strict.
It's more believable that a hormone would work across all social situations than a few specific ones. It's easier for a hormone to have a broad effect than a narrow one. A narrow effect requires a much finer tuning of the neural circuits' reaction to the presence of the hormone.

But there's a massive scientific literature on the effect that testosterone has on both human and animal behavior, so you don't need an anecdote from people who take testosterone to come to a similar conclusion.
Or an option to speed up the video by a factor of 2.
How many of those proud products have you paid for? :-)
Interesting article.

I guess there is definitely some money to be made, if the site is useful ("tool" based). Some examples:

http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/

http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html (don't know how much this site makes, I'd assume more than $1 per day)
There is a lot of merit in setting a series of easily achievable targets, each one slightly harder than the last.

This is the way I get everything done.
This is already available as a javascript bookmarklet from BackType, a YC-funded startup: http://backtweets.com/api (link is on the right)

This Chrome extension uses the BackType API, so either should return the same information.
I'm so glad to see social media articles that include actual tactics. Everybody knows the "strategy" to social media is "engagement" and "conversation" and it's refreshing to actually be presented with a proposed tactical plan.
Mine is a stock iPhone. No jailbreaking or other shenanigans.
I pay for software. TextMate isn't free. Neither is Fireworks. Safari comes free on Snow Leopard, which isn't free. I paid for NetNewsWire, Tweetie, etc. Of course I pay for software. So do many other people. The folks and companies behind these products make money off their labors of love.

Schlock like this "Videos of Owls littered in ads will net you cash" scheme is a hair away from spam, and is not in HN's best interest, other than to demonstrate that this is the route creative professionals should avoid.
Planet Google: From Philosophies to Market Shares
Cultured Code's work is as usual very elegant.
Well, it's a fun experiment per se - but for one it's hard to really get past the few bucks stage here.

I do understand what you say, that said. My overall feeling is that these kind of sites are not really "changing the world", if I dare.

So now I'm trying to solve real issues I have. It's more fun for me!
>...and North Korea got poor

It might be an interesting study to see if North Korea actually just slowed down the collapse via slave labor vs. actually contributing.
Ultimately, every solution I propose will have issues. This is why I did not outline a specific solution. Because they're all stupid until one of them becomes the right one because of specific circumstances, people, etc. That is the nature of difficult problem-solving. If it was easy, people like you might be able to do it.

Here are a few possible solutions, though, off the top of my head right now - I'm sure someone closer to the problem could find more, better potential solutions:

1) Release the player code without the codecs.

2) Obtain a special license from the people that own H.264 to be allowed to release the source code.

3) Get some kind of agreement that the owners of H.264 won't sue Adobe and release the source code.

4) Do so without getting the agreement - maybe they won't sue.

5) Transmit ownership of the code to a different legal entity and release the code via that entity.

6) Slowly migrate to a new codec that can be released (e.g. Ogg).

7) Release the code with Ogg support without the H.264 part.

8) Buy the code patent.

9) Start a public relations campaign to convince the owners to open up H.264 for everyone.

10) Start a public relations campaign to convince the courts to overturn H.264 (say, on grounds that it harms the public good).

That's just off the top of my head. Yes, they all have problems, but they're all starting points - and there's no evidence that Adobe explored any of those or any others. If you can't think of twice as many potential solutions, your brain is effectively the size of a pea when it comes to creative problem-solving.

And if "management-speak" language stops you from understanding a good point, you're a fucking retard.

Downvote away.
a) No. I don't think it's too simple. I mean, look at Twitter? :)

b) I imagine people may want to personalize it, but I don't think that is something you need to worry about just yet. Keep it lean and mean. But that's my personal opinion.

c) Get them to flag individual items in the mail they get (I want more of this, I want less of this)

One thing I missed when going to the site was the ability to see what the last 2-3 days mails looked like. Before I sign up I'd like to see what I'm getting in to. :)
8. The evidence used against him were joking IMs and emails.

Has the "I was only joking" defense ever worked?
20 messages a day is intrusive. I get roughly 20 a day from Roger Ebert --- who I admire greatly --- and am constantly evaluating whether to give up and unfollow him.

The thing that makes Twitter attractive to me is the humanity of it, and the balance it strikes between blog-style publishing and IRC-style chatting. You break that balance with regularly scheduled business updates.

But then, what do I know? Maybe these tactics "work" to build new users up from 3 followers to 400.
Horowitz and Hill, not Hall. It is a superb reference book, agreed, but it's not a good book to learn from, especially if you don't have the basics.
(pssst. I'd edit the story and include the URL there as well, even if it doesn't become clickable)
Could someone plase chime in for me on this: Does Flash have a way of directly patching the current level of software like, say, Google Chrome does? Does Flash 10? It really should.

Secondly, a high-impact pervasive problem which allows a plug-in to crash the entire platform should not be marked fixed in next release.
> Blocks are also an extremely powerful tool when it comes to building DSLs...

I can't read this as anything more insightful than functions are also an extremely powerful tool when it comes to building APIs. I first used Ruby in 2000. What am I missing?
Oh hey thanks. (D) is a good point. I will add that on the sign up page. Cheers
iPhone apps. 2 of 3 of them use the standard free+ads, paid+features model. The other, my most successful, is strictly paid at $1.99.

They were a lot of work up front and some have required minimal maintenance- but supporting them hasn't even taken up even 2% of my coding time in the past year.
> No mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked in years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of communism.

Good then you agree that North Korea was never a proper communist state since it never really showed any of the classic characteristics of communism.
The game is moving, but since your target is so low at $1, you can let your projects not be cutting edge, so long they are meeting their target.

You need to design your projects right and since you know you don't have time to waste, you need to design in an ever-green manner. Don't do things that will flame for a month and burn out - maintainance every 6 months should be the aim.

For asthmatics for example, we need to track lung capacity (there is something you get given that gives you this info when you blow in), and we need to keep track of the spray so it does not finish. Additionally, there are certain excercise one should do to improve lung capacity (like running). If I made such a simple tracker as a start (daily vs capacity), I could start selling this quickly.

I could then use the same tracker as a weight tracker. Or study tracker. Stuff like that. So the new projects are just offshoots of the original project.
The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense
Buy now and You Save: $12.98 (52%)
The comparison would be apt, except for the fact that Apple has taste, whereas Microsoft does not.

Seriously though, it's great that we live at a point in time where it's possible to have a choice between two damn good mobile computing platforms.

As a developer and content producer though, I'm more focused on Apple than I am on Android because that audience has a demonstrated willingness to spend money on software.
Don't know. It's right up there with pleading insanity and the 5th amendment.
You forgot to mention the national religion/ideology of Juche (in support of your #4 point).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
Yes, except "ship" to most people in most contexts means "make available", not "cut a point release". Say there was an egregious typo in an O'Reilly manual—if their spokesman said "we don't ship books with typos," would that imply to you "we're not selling another copy of this book until we fix it" or "we're going to keep selling the version with the typo until we get around to publishing the next edition?"
I'm not a fan of Flash, but all the gripes about Mac performance are strange to me, since it has never been apparent on my MBP or the MacBook I used before that.
Torrent Sites Blamed For Twitter Attack
Absolutely the best analysis of the several dozen I've read over the last few weeks. In a nutshell: Publishers are resetting of prices of eBooks so they don't cannabalize hardcover sales. Basically, they _don't want_ to sell any eBooks, and the "agency" agreement they are signing with Amazon provides them a mechanism to raise the price on eBooks high enough such that nobody will buy them. The key insight that Paul Carr provides (And it's his unique position as a previous Publisher, and now Author that allows him to do this) - is the following:

A) Hardcover Books don't cost much more than softcover to manufacture

B) As Such, Hardcover Books provide a _lot_ more margin that softcover boooks.

C) Most importantly, the people who used to buy those (High Margin) Hardcovers, were now moving to eBooks.

So, basically the publishers are trying to shut down the eBook market so people will buy Hardcovers instead.
> If you find a good enough codec, you can create a plugin yourself

No, you can't. Gecko links directly with liboggplay to support <video> and <audio>. To hack it to do something sane you'd have to fork both Gecko and XULrunner, and distribute your own builds of Firefox with unofficial branding.
Classic long-tail fallacy in there though, 'build it and they will come' is a bad strategy on the high end, on the far end it's much harder still.

I do think there will be 300 youtube aggregated owl sites by tomorrow 9 am though.

Best to diversify and do one on whooping cranes instead.
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
{
fstream f( "test.txt", ios::out );
f << "Hello" << endl;
} // File gets closed
// ...
return 0;
}
Damn! Someone already owns Owlvideos.com - I thought it was my ticket to the big time :)
Or for that matter someone that wants to change their career.
I can recommend this site:
http://www.khanacademy.org/

I suggest you find a video there that you're interested in and that you can't quite understand, then come back and ask a question. You said you were OK with algebra, so pre-calculus would be a good place to start.
As they say, there's an app for that:

http://www.iphonefootprint.com/2008/09/health-information-tr...

I can't find a web version of it off hand, so let's say it doesn't exist yet and you are now going to build it to prove this method works ?

You'd have to keep track of your time to calculate your hourly wage, that would be an interesting experiment.

I'm really curious how that will work out.
If you'd fit such a balcony to an existing app building and the balcony indeed would hold the weight of a group of people, I would still wonder whether the house's frame would hold the balcony.
Whoops, errors in an article about errors. In "Everything is additive", he claims (x + y)^2 == x^2 + y^2 for x = y = pi/2.
To be fair this is for kids around the world, not for someone who's already got a degree.
>Where do we draw the line between my right to control my data, and the right of other people to exchange information about me?

When you make your data public, you no longer have a right to control it. The alternative is that by making your data public, you impose a burden of secrecy on those who hear you talking.

It's mildly creepy that facebook knows so much about you, but it's not a particularly new phenomenon. ("You must be Danny, Jo talks about you all the time! Tell me, did you really...") Facebook just hears more gossip than any one person did in the past.
Please don't. :(
When thinking more about personalizing (might be obvious, I don't know):

Bear in mind, though, I am the kinda person that likes clean and minimal and don't really like having to manage online profiles on a gazillion sites.

But say, next to the articles you send out, perhaps have a few tags that categorizes the article. For instance, if it's related to Europe, US, Global, automobile, IT, woodcrafting. Make the tags clickable (unique ID per user in the mail) -- a click on it means "yay, gimme more". How to undo a click, well, I dunno... Some down-arrow like at HN?
This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance:

"I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day."

I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it would be worth it in a few months. More likely it took an amount of time that would better have been spent (from a purely financial perspective) working at Wal-Mart and then investing the funds in an ETF. To make $1 a day ($365/yr) takes only around $4k (what a good programmer earns in <2 weeks) tossed into the market. Thus any project that takes you longer than that for $1/day in return is a waste.

Also even if you assumed every project would net $1 per day, you'd still be better off thinking big. A hit Facebook app, for instance, might make $10,000 a day. (A megahit 10x that.) A good keyword to arbitrage via an affiliate account and AdSense could do the same.

You're far better off taking a 1% shot at $10k/day than a 100% shot at $1. (You're far better off taking a .1% shot.) You might say "well what about variance" but apparently you have the time to create 400 products.

Also, Twitter followers have done little of real value for anyone in terms of making a business profitable. On the list of ways to get customers to your web-based business, Twitter's still pretty far down the chain.

A far better plan would be to try to create one product that makes $1 per person you drive to it. This is doable. Then you can buy users for far less with ads, roll your profits into more ads, rinse, repeat. This is how people like me who rarely if ever use Twitter have made oodles from the web. (I've done this now multiple times, for reference.)
I got one N900 and I don't see why it's a bad small PC, let alone a really bad one. Granted, most interesting tasks involve accessing a remote machine via ssh, but you can still toy with (for example) ipython, the shell and, in general, a good number of Debian packages. What is bad about it? (Pricing shouldn't qualify as part of the diagnosis.)

If anything, I'd say it's a so-so phone =).
The article claims that even a change from 50:50 to 48.7:51.3 (19 men, 20 women) would have a very large effect. But I doubt the marriage market is liquid enough for a change that small to have a large effect because I don't think it would even be noticed. I agree with you that a change to 40:60 is a large change. That's a change you can't help but notice in your dorm and your classes, so that's a change that is likely to affect your behavior.
I would imagine that he's selling information, i.e. they type in a credit card number or click a PayPal link on his website, and he sends them a PDF or .doc containing some information that is relevant to them.
Never mind the 'sorry', I missed it then and I'm really happy you posted it now.
Sounds like the proverb taught to GO beginners: "Lose Your First 100 Games As Quickly As Possible"
There are many ways to hijack the content. Are you sure you cannot make an extension that rewrites the page before the <video> tag is interpreted by the browser and injects some custom object instead (handled by the h264 plugin)?

Actually, I just realised that noscript does a similar thing (proxy object instead of flash content) - so it has to be possible.
There used to be a piece of software that would do this for audio tracks, that would actually be really nice for speedviewing youtube videos.
Ethics and compliance is a huge topic in bigger companies for a good reason. Cool hip web start-ups shouldn't forget that it applies to them as well and giving a 17yr old some ethics training before letting him write on a blog that makes and breaks businesses seems logical.
Except for projects that require a large userbase before it is useful (auctions, dating sites, etc). Then, a large following can be the jumpstart you need.
These are unusual and unstable times. There are no easy low risk strategies that require little thought any more. Even being in cash bears unknown risks nowadays. So talk to the usual sources advised by other people, and find the place to park your capital that makes you happy. For now.

Then put aside $50k. Use that $50k to learn to trade the market, and learn to read the market. Accept that you're going to lose it, and be happy that you have enough money to play with to trigger all the fight or flight reactions that you have to learn to overcome. It'll take you three years to wrap your head around it. It's a challenge. Aim to find a mix of the known low-risk trading strategies that can work for $5 million and for which 20%/year is more than reasonable. e.g. trading the ES opening gap.

Everything else is either (a) trusting people and pot luck, or (b) not much better than a high interest back account, or (c) a lot riskier than it used to be given present geopolitics.

If you want something done, you have to do it yourself.
For me GigaOm's, or, ReadWriteWeb's content for example, is better than the other two. Mashable is quite good for Social Media News, even if it's sensational.

I'm wondering though if the quality content of GigaOm with fewer readers (how many GigaOm Pro subscribers might there be?) makes him "happy" in terms of revenue.
I think that's actually why there's not a click-and-it-does-it solution for the G1 - because there's far less restrictions on what apps you can install on the device there's much less incentive for people to 'risk' fiddling with it.

Tethering is probably the 'killer app' for jailbreaking/rooting on both platforms for most people, but there's a lot more to be gained by jailbreaking your iPhone.

Having said that - I haven't bothered to re-jailbreak mine after the last few updates since I realised I never used the jailbroken features.
Are you sure? It seems to me that he says:

For instance, all four of those lines
are inequalities when x = y = π/2.

That seems to be the opposite of what you're saying.
Where are you based? And if you're not in the SF Bay Area, are you open to telecommuters?

I can't find an address on your site.