skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking about what type of intellectual endeavor might be "safe" from this Invention Machine, and obviously anything that has an intractable evaluation function is "safe". Take, for example, user interface design. Can we build an evaluation function that will give an answer as to whether one design will be more preferred than another? Is something that we considered ground-breaking when it first came out (ie. the iPhone), obvious from "first principles" of design? The evaluation function is intractable because you couldn't possibly put the generated designs in front of a number of people to evaluate it because of the time it will take to iterate.

But then, could you evolve the evaluation function? Take a random sample of things that are considered to have fantastic user interfaces, break them down and evolve an evaluation function that is capable of designing at that level. Then test it against another set of randomly selected samples. And so on. Finally, test the designs on humans.
Co-founders can create a feedback loop between themselves
that a single founder cannot.

Single founder can get feedback from other sources too: customers, friends, etc. On the plus side that feedback can be less biased.

When you are on your own it is much easier to go down the
wrong path because questions didn't get asked earlier on.

It has little to do with a number of founders. Two or more can be asking questions, but those can be wrong questions.

It is much easier to become demoralised. It is much easier
to waste time.

Why? I'd argue that more than single founder have even greater opportunity to waste time arguing if there is some disagreement; waste time trying things thad you don't think will work but your cofounder convinced you to try, etc.
We originally had this feature in Xobni. We informally called it the ex girlfriend finder because those tend to be the people you used to communicate with a ton but not recently.
Look at the videos on the right, they compare Microsoft's products to Google's.
(If I repeat anything that's already been said, my apologies)

Silverlight is slowly becoming an alternative standard to Flash. Reason being is that it's more based on code rather than the custom resources Flash uses. Sure, you have to install something just like the Flash player but overall, Silverlight loads and runs faster.

I've been catching more and more Silverlight where on heavy video based content. All of Netflix's instant streaming is done through Silverlight. Sure, NBC could have just stuck with flash but honestly, their flash runs like crap.

I'm OK with waiting a moment to install a Silverlight player. Flash users already have to install a new player everytime Flash updates. What's the difference?

I think either way there would be unsatisfied viewers. NBC took a risk. Silverlight is probably one of the only things that Microsoft can impress me with.
House, being fictitious, might be a bad example though. It's a TV show, so he needs a foil, how else are the viewers supposed to know what he's thinking? Besides, House is great because of the dialogue writing.

I'd say how good a programmer I am doesn't depend on whether I have company. Being a sole founder sucks because there's just so much to do and it's easy to feel overwhelmed, which means you can lose motivation very quickly, and there's nobody there to help you get fired up again.
May be I am gone make some changes to sql-ledger to make it this much easier (and release open source). Stay in touch. (See my info)
From http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/02/22/googl...

“These fuel cells aren’t powering any off-site data centers,” said a Google spokesperson. “Instead, Bloom fuel cells are powering a portion of Google’s energy needs at our headquarters right here in Mountain View. This is another on-site renewable energy source that we’re exploring to help power our facilities. We have a 400kW installation on Google’s main campus. Over the first 18 months the project has had 98% availability and delivered 3.8 million kWh of electricity.”
We as in us hn users.
please reach out to me when you are ready to discuss. My email is in the profile

Note - we are a company that hosts email on google apps. However, we can not and will not use this service through your website. However, something that we can host ourselves, and includes pricing that is friendly to small companies will be eagerly looked at.
There's something about their content feels fake, though. When I run across one of their pages in a search, it's not always terrible, but if I don't initially notice where I am, I sometimes get this weird feeling that the text I'm reading isn't quite right, and might not actually contain any information. It frequently has this pumping-out-words-to-fill-the-page feeling, very strongly reminiscent of high-school students' essays.
This story feels like spam. I don't want to 'Try Now' only to be taken to a sign-up form.
Una crociera dalla Svizzera a Venezia lungo i Navigli
Well, I didn't get sued. Fortunately I'm not manufacturing pacemakers.
I know one business well and it unfortunately affects my thought on every strategy. All the same, let me offer my solution based off what you want mixed in with my perception on the right price ranges:

- User arrives on page. The page says - all old interviews are available for purchase on iTunes for $4.99. There is an app store link

- There is another little link saying - don't have iTunes? Want access to our full archive for a year? Want to download the file in multiple formats as well as the raw live interview file? Want to support mixergy? Purchase an "Archive membership" card for $99 a year

- A yellow highlighted text: "But wait, there is a way for you to watch this interview for free right now. Simply copy and paste this embed code into your website, blog about it, hit the play button and watch it. You get the free video, I get some publicity"
"X reduces to P = NP, so Nyah!" is a tightly formulated theoretical statement. Work of this form is very important in advancing our basic understanding of the fundamental mathematical foundations behind computation.

It only become deeply unsatisfying and misleading for people who do not understand how to translate this information to the real world.

It seems from your post as you do have that understanding, but not the respect for the importance of the underlying math.
Thanks for the info! I'll check out REE again.
I'm one of the probable few that paid for the 4 channels. I did get in early and get it for $50, but thats almost irrelevant.

I must say it's by far the best way to get it. Its the best coverage I've seen of the olympics here. Way better than Beijing. Every event is on live and then replayed at night.
Very slick, good commentating, and not too much australian person who came 22nd hyperbole.
Why you should learn empathy
That you store passwords in the first place is the problem. As a developer, I consider it to be borderline unethical to build such a system in the first place, as it is inherently insecure. Furthermore, it helps to train users that it is ok to enter your username and password into other sites - which makes it easier for phishers and other sites that may have poor security.
"Efficient markets" are better named inexploitable markets or anti-inductive markets.
It appears that a lack of gamma compensation in image scaling has the effect of dilating dark areas of the image, or eroding light areas. I wonder if this is why some games (like Quake 3) set the system gamma to a really odd value, so that everything but the game looks overly bright. Maybe they can use faster linear calculations with the adjusted gamma scale without sacrificing quality?
Nice catch. It's funny how it changes slightly with each retelling.
The "Why Microsoft: Exchange vs. Gmail" video would be better titled "Why Microsoft: Exchange vs Exchange on Gmail", since half of the issues are with Google's Exchange integration.
New EC2 Instance Type: m2.xlarge 17 GB of RAM, 2 cores @ 3.25 ECU
yeah, but they'll get there.

just like google docs and buzzword can't hold a candle to MS word.

most online apps are still quite early in their life cycles.
A Facebook or Twitter version might be interesting.

edit: nevermind, I just saw a comment on Techcrunch that they may add Facebook/Twitter support
I wish we would stop talking about "left" or "right" politics. Neither are well-defined or rational. It leads to gross over-simplification of important issues by tempting people to dismiss policy X as "socialist" or "fascist" without logically looking at the facts.

Let's the example of financial market regulation you allude to. The reason why it could be a good idea is that a truly free market tends to undervalue risk. For example, if I bought a car from you and it was an optimal deal for both of us, neither of us considered the cost the rest of the population would incur in congestion, pollution, etc. That is considered systemic risk and because it is undervalued it tends to build up. My understanding here isn't full, but I assume those are the forces behind bubbles. Regardless, market regulation is a tool to address these concerns, not a political device to drive the US to socialism.

One of the reasons why I enjoy such articles is that they encourage critical thinking about what is so often mistakenly handled exclusively in the political arena.
Pretty significant challenge to cohort model if they pull it off: two to four seed investments per week with a two week cycle to get a yes or a no. Key paragraph:

We're going to change that. We're planning to fund 100-200 seed-stage
startups each year and give founders a yes-no decision in two weeks.
It's a win-win. Lots of entrepreneurs get a chance to innovate.
We get a well-diversified portfolio.
It's time to bring innovation to the business of innovation.
I'm curious about what are the consequences of the discovery.

What effects will this have on the storage of photos?

Can this principal be extrapolated to other forms of data?
Foodspotting, a Flickr-Meets-Foursquare Service for Foodies
I'd love to hear what you guys think about this site. I had an idea to create a menupages.com but with reviews for each dish. They seem to be attacking this idea with a different approach. If the end goal is to get reviews for dishes, I don't think it will work since it's somewhat difficult to do so and I think reviews need structure which is something they don't have.
I really enjoyed reading this. It is always satisfying to find connections between my interests.

Can anyone suggest more (fluffy) reading on the market efficiency hypothesis? I'd like a fuller grasp of the material covered in the paper.
Awesome is the word I would use to describe it. And it reassured me that the people I think should be important to me are the people important to me.
Nice to know that Microsoft can rely on Google to host it's advertisements.
>and your passwords are securely encrypted.

Just curious, what encryption scheme are you using?
Making Success A Reality
All of us strive hard to achieve success at various levels of our life. We would like to be successful in our career, in our financial life and also in our relationships. Unfortunately not everyone is successful in all the realms of their lives. At the same time we see many people being successful in all their endeavors and most of us spend our lives envying such people.
Trying that link from Tokyo, it doesn't mention access restrictions, but video also doesn't load. It just says it is experiencing loading difficulties.

Market failure -> people will find a way.
Many startups here rely on cheap SEO for marketing.

If Mahalo (or anyone else with a high PR domain) can outrank everyone else simply by spamming, it's not fair to a nascent startup
The type of proposition set forth here is more relevant to an academic debate over women in the tech workforce than it is to any real-world decisions about who to bring in to your founding team.

Why? Because founders get together in teams based mostly on knowing each other, having worked together, hearing about one another's reputation, and the like. The focus is on merit as displayed by real individuals that one knows or hears about and not merit as tied to some form of abstraction such as "diversity."

This does not mean that diverse teams can't come together. They can and do all the time. But it does mean that, if a non-diverse team of founders sees one another as the best people for the venture at hand, no one in a normal real-world situation is going to say, "This won't work because we are not diverse enough." In such cases, founders simply do not measure merit by this sort of criterion - it is hard enough finding good co-founders without superimposing arbitrary rules on top of an already difficult process!

My point is that "diversity" as an abstraction simply does not figure into most decisions about how to constitute a founding team when it comes to specific cases. Thus, while the argument of this piece may be commendable, I think it approaches the issue from an ineffective perspective with its focus on the constitution of founding teams. Men and women alike are free to form whatever founding teams they like and they will do so or not for specific reasons relating to the merits of the individuals involved, not based on "merit" that is defined by gender-based averages or assumptions.
New Research Focuses on the Power of Physical Contact
Despite the article's somewhat confusing presentation, compressed sensing isn't primarily about photos. It's a principle that can be used to reconstruct any sort of signal from a small number of measurements. The only requirement is that we can find a representation for that signal that is sparse (every signal maps to some vector of mostly 0s). Luckily, most natural signals have this property (whereas random noise is not sparse in any representation).

The fundamental breakthrough here is that we can acquire signals (photos, recordings, MRI volumetric images, etc...) using a much smaller number of samples than previously thought possible. A useful application: let radiologists accurately image the body in less time. A weird application: Single-pixel cameras (http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single-pixel-c...)
Wow! I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but way more useful than what I was going to do. What I had in mind was just a Google Reader Trends but for email (showing you when you received/read email by day, time of day, day of week, etc visually).

Having graphs in etacts would be nice, but I think you nailed the really important features! Now I just have to wait for the solution to the password problem. A desktop application, while less convenient than a web app, would still be awesome, and could even be made a portable install I take around on a USB stick.
Google Buzz Two Weeks Later
Scaling python webapps from 0 to 50 million users - A top-down approach
pycon2010 scalability talk: scaling facebook apps
I did, for what it's worth. I was able to make out "five" only by replaying the sound a couple times in my head.
You should release an app that people can self-host which provides a layer of indirection for IMAP. That is, an IMAP client/server I can run myself. I put my credentials in the client part, and give you an account in the server part. That way I don't need to give you my real credentials password.

Of course, this would limit the reliability of your service to the reliability of my connection, but that's a trade-off I'd be willing to make.
Although I understand your points the AdWords and search issues is googles problem. People pay for a product with flaws in it and google is selling, not Mahalo. Mahalo has the freedom to do whatever they want with their pages and they can't be held responsible for what google in it's turn does with them.

Now, stealing other peoples work, that is obviously Mahalos doing and should be a case for the court.

I'm not really sure what the point with this article is. Mahalo spams google - so what? It's up to them to do this and up to google to prevent it. Business is business, even on the internet.
But then NBC can't try to charge him extra (somehow) to fill in the gaps they created in coverage. What is the world coming to when a company can't find a way to profiteer off of the mistakes that they make?
The Future of Game Design
There use to be more of them on the HN frontpage earlier on.
"Demographic diversity is an indicator. It’s a reasonable inference that a group that is homogeneous in appearance was probably chosen by a biased selector."

How about some supporting evidence?

Better yet, how about some evidence that demographic diversity (ethnicity, age, gender, income/wealth) is a useful indicator of useful diversity. After all, that's your claim.

Of course, if you do show that such diversity is an indicator of useful diversity, you've just shown that one should select against certain such characteristics in (albeit not necessarily the same characteristics) in almost every situation. Why? Because in each situation, some characteristics are better than others.

That doesn't imply that a team won't be diverse, just that, if you're correct, successful teams will be more likely to have certain "looks" in each role.

I think that that's bunk, but I can't explain why there hasn't been a white DB in the NFL for several years.
I'm pretty convinced the Prius dashboard changes the way people drive already.

Watch a Prius driver, they just drive differently from the rest.
This is a very useful feature but I dont think it'll work as a standalone product.

I'm guessing they are probably targeting gmail first so that they get bought out by Google if they get a ton of users.
PHƯƠNG PHÁP HỌC VÀ THI HIỆU QUẢ - Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh
there was a big discussion about this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141971
There's one factor the author forgot: persistence.

The best programmers I know are also friends of mine. But I pay them to do work for me. I could ask them to join me as a co-founder, but they would have to be willing to cross the Antarctic on foot to make the company succeed. Frozen toes, black fingers. It's something I would do, and I expect that of anyone with the title "co-founder". If they can't bring that (and that's hard to find -- I've looked), then I'll pay them, we'll remain friends, and I'll remain a single founder.

Investors are many, good investments are few. They might say they have rules, but they'll drop those in a heartbeat to be part of something good. In other words, I don't care about what investors want; I only care about making something great.
I work for Google, and while I don't know anything about this particular situation, one invariant that I've been consistently impressed with is that the ads side of the company doesn't influence the search side of the company _at all_. I've seen well meaning ads support folks emailing people in search quality about an innocent problem with one of their customer's sites, and getting sternly told that they should never again send an email to those mailing lists.
His ideas were not particularly well presented, but they had a real value.

His point, as I understood it, was to encourage the people in that room (ie the people who actually design the games we all play) to take the responsibility for making this coming world more than just commercialized crap. He starts that section talking about how much opportunity there is in current points systems, and encourages skilled designers to move in that direction and influence the shape of the field.

He doesn't express it as clearly as he might, but I believe that was the goal of his talk.
I was just talking about this with a friend of mine. He seems like the ideal candidate to be thrown to the wolves.

I think the vice principal, and any other staff with knowledge of the spying capabilities should not be allowed to shove the blame onto the tech staff. Everyone involved should be punished to the full extent of the law.
In the real world, problem \in P isn't that enlightening. The constant factors matter.

I haven't looked into modern computational complexity research a whole lot, but I suspect it gets a disproportionate amount of attention because of the historical successes and importance of the field. Kind of like particle accelerators and NASA.
Promising to not be evil is not "doing something" in my opinion.

EVERY company in the world promises to not be evil. Not all of them keep their promise.
One hosting provider I've used for a few sites offers SmarterMail for their webmail. They've got an enterprise version as well, which is supposed to have all the features of Exchange (like Blackberry support)...and they offer it for free if you have <= 10 users on your domain.
The bad news is that "bank-level" encryption and assertions of good intentions are not sufficient for me to give you my Google password

indeed I'd say my google account needs more inventive protection than my bank detail. The chance of misuse is a lot higher.
PG on UK tech start-ups (2007)
Sadly enough, that little bit in the video about corporate people spending all day in their Outlook is way too close to truth...

Looks like the guys at MS decided to take a lesson or two from Xobni.
Off the top of my head:

Pierre Omidyar with Ebay.

Gabor Cselle with reMail.

Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook (cash flow positive, at least).

Max Levchin with Slide.com.

And a few others I can't really talk about (they like their low profile).

Personally, as a single founder, I wish I had some cofounders. Next time I probably won't go it alone.
"you couldn't possibly put the generated designs in front of a number of people to evaluate it because of the time it will take to iterate"

It's common practice these days, google A/B Testing. Or Mixpanel, I guess.
We need a Mint.com for small business. It's simplicity and automation blow away the competitors.

The best part is that it learns how to categorize your transactions.

It is missing invoice and payroll functionality in it's current form, but it really is so close to being the perfect accounting software for SB.
An old article, but interesting for the same familiar reasons. I've done some work in genetic programming, most of which was done for a graduate project that I really enjoyed. The part of this article I resonated with the most was the end where they discuss the issue of finding problems to apply this method to. I have had some designs for evolutionary algorithms floating around, and even started parts of a framework, but keep losing motivation for it for the same reason: if I get the GP system up and running, what do I run it on? What do I have to evolve? I hate that my creativity stagnates without a well defined problem...
If you are in Europe, you can access all the OBS live feeds, highlights, as well as all the stations broadcasting the event (bbc, ard, zdf, etc..) for free here:
http://www.eurovisionsports.tv/olympics/
Tumblr vs Posterous: quick blogging showdown
can't message you but I would be interested
One person startup here, now 6 people (and taking on a partner).

The biggest problem I've had is that there are too many hats for one person to wear. Yes you can do it, it's damned painful and sometimes there isn't anyone who can help you avoid bad decisions as employees don't always want to challenge you.

FWIW I was close to taking on a partner before and it would've gone very bad, which as a learning experience has prepared me for the partner I'm looking at taking on now.
Did you even click on the links I provided from BBC, Cambridge University, Collins dictionary, Oxford dictionary, showing that the plural is usually Radii?

And yes, it's pronounced ray-di-eye.
Offtopic but I for one would like to see Google do this for personal information or at least provide the option to do so i.e. info from one G product does not leak to another without explicit opt-in.
Clicking Next on Chat Roulette