skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These people definitely have the money, and probably the brains. The question is: is that enough?

Because I doubt many of them are entrepreneurs by vocation. Otherwise they wouldn't have been G. employees in the first place, working in their own startups instead. So I guess many of them are angels because "that's what you do if you have money in the Valley".

So, how important is being an entrepreneur for the success of the company you are funding? Maybe they should've stayed employees? Or as long as you have the money and the brains, you're a good angel?

I guess we'll find out. If nothing else, it will be a great experiment - I would love to see the final statistics.
Why do they always have to have politics in these sorts of things? I don't care if you're an Obama supporter or a Palin supporter, but putting stuff like that in a site like this just ticks 50% of the people on your website, because you're making fun of "their man" or "their woman".

Unless that's what they're trying to do.
Lesson for VCs?- Buffet's relationship with his portfolio companies
Obviously he just zoomed in and kept saying "enhance image" to his computer until the answer was revealed in a tiny shadow on one of the pixels...
I read staunch's post as a joke -- "obviously Wikipedia is correct, so have pg fix paulgraham.com to what Wikipedia says".
a three year doctoral program

You do know that's a myth, right? When I turned up OUCL for my DPhil, one of the first things the department head told us was "in the history of OUCL, only one student has ever done the DPhil in 3 years".

I'm not sure if that's true or if he was exaggerating slightly; but the norm is 4-5 years, not 3.
I use Lua quite a bit (Lua & C on Unix is my dev environment of choice, actually), but I haven't seen a written formal semantics for it, just the reference manual and bytecode guide. I'm thinking more like _The Definition of Standard ML_ - something that's very "math-y".

I was wondering about that today, actually - the designers are changing / simplifying the behavior for non-local environment scoping in Lua 5.2 (http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-02/msg00753.html), and have been discussing the implications on the mailing list.
Here's a BloggingHeadsTV episode where Gelman discusses this (among other things) with Eliezer Yudkowsky:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1bf/bhtv_eliezer_yudkowsky_and_andre...
I'll admit that the first thought I had was "Why not drop some bombs on it?"

Maybe not nukes, but it doesn't seem like such a terrible idea if the giant sheet of ice is going to be so disruptive.
Investment: Venture Capital Syndicate Collapse
I think they should just go with the "chakra" (wheel) that they have on the Flag since it would be easy to write/draw as well.
There is one point that should be noted for macbook pros (and probably many other varieties of laptop).

> When plugged in, the battery is not in use. The laptop’s power circuitry bypasses the battery unless it’s needed. Depending on how smart the charger is, it may occasionally poll and “top off” the battery if its charge decreases to a certain threshold below 100%, but this is rarely needed in practice.

Not strictly true.

If you plug in your macbook, your battery is still being used. Evidently the power supply actually cannot meet the peak power demand of the system, so the battery needs to be there to provide for that [1] [2]. Apple also feels that the conditioning the battery receives while it interacts with a powered system increases its longevity.

Generally the power adapter provides more power than your machine is using, so obviously it can charge. But if you remove your battery and benchmark your system, you'll find that your system is limiting itself back about 20-30% to account for the lack of battery.

References:
[1] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2332
[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-macbook-pro-battery-b...
Yes there are lots of reprap articles, but this one is the submitters first: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+r...
Sure, that's fine.

But what if someone passes you an email address that's really 500 comma-separated email addresses?

What if someone passes 'admin=true' to your user update URL?

Your output sanitization doesn't do much for those.
Why we don't have file system for X windows?

Everything is a process or a file, and most "new" ideas, for which is needed a lot of work (or afternoon for some kid), could be implemented on top of equality of this concepts.

It might be impossible, but there is abstraction SCREAMING to be explored.

Plan 9 ideas might live again! :)

Anyway, good work!
I've never had problems hot-swapping batteries on my laptops while they're plugged in, at least with my Gateway.
Have a look at http://www.abtests.com

They have great landing page examples.
Yeah, naming has never been free software's strong point. I had a hard time understanding what it was until I read the pdf in the linked blog post. Hopefully by the time the idea is fleshed out and presented to a more mainstream audience there will be a better explanation of what it is and no sign of the poor code name left.
Facebook's the only one I'd consider at an IPO, though Zynga looks interesting. I am on LinkedIn, but really, who goes there when they're not simply updating their profile. I don't see the value in it as a social network.
Funny Hacker Story
I use it so often that I have it bound to a Quicksilver hotkey. I must use it at least 5 times a day.

Even in the cases where the layout isn't particularly bad the consistency of reading things formatted in a way you're used to makes stuff easier to read.
Agreed - I don't care at all and would buy this game if it was my style. Am I going to give up on having an internet connection at my place, ever? No. So how would this negatively affect me? A little bit of downtime? We all need bathroom breaks.

I understand the resentment at these anti-hacking measures given that this is a hacker community but not all companies choose to make their products in the open-source tradition, and that's a perfectly valid choice for them to make.
Ignore that other person saying to escape the quote -- do as the wikipedia article they linked says, and use parametrized queries. This does all the escaping for you, and unlike escaping, makes it much less likely that something will slip between the cracks.

(There's almost never a good reason to construct SQL on the fly.)
Maybe you will be as surprised as I was to hear the name Stephen King mentioned in the context of writing advice, but 896 Amazon reviewers can't be wrong:

Stephen King - On Writing:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743455967?tag=0596800673-20&c...;

This is what Roger Ebert said about the book:

"A lot of people were outraged that he [King] was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer could not be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Writing
My granny is afraid to watch the Inspector Wexford (like Murder She Wrote without the sex and violence) DVD from the library

A BBC dective (none) drama aimed at little old ladies that shows a "you are a criminal funding terrorists and drug dealers" commercial after each episode. She thinks the DVD player knows about something she has done!

It also slightly confuses me how DVD piracy 'funds' drug dealing - I wouldn't have thought that drug dealing was a cost center?
If you're laptop is plugged in you should be able to hot swap the battery. If you're worried about data loss, put your machine to sleep first, wait ~10 seconds, swap the batteries, wake it up from sleep. This is safe even if your machine loses power totally while swapping out the batteries.

OSX and Windows both support writing out your ram to disk, losing all power, then resuming from this state exactly where you left off when power is restored.

It's the default on OSX and may need to be enabled on Windows depending on your hardware: http://maximumpcguides.com/windows-7/turn-hybrid-sleep-on-in...
Should I Take Toyota's Software Update?
The McGurk Effect: an Audio-Visual Illusion
take a look at similar software licenses to your software
That's hardly a solution. There is no way, short of a massive letter-writing campaign, for a software publisher to look at flagging sales and know that it was due to onerous DRM. More likely, they'd blame it on piracy and go looking for even more restrictive DRM.
Visualization and other summary tools remind me of my concerns vis à vis the recurring, seemingly endemic problems I've had over the years in working with same. Or rather, in others' working with same.

Some years ago, I was in an accounting position. We hired a newly minted junior staff member. Requests would come in for certain figures, and he would turn to our admittedly half-baked reporting (inherited, and faulty due not so much to original design as to failure to spend to keep it and its data structures current). He'd generate a a number, graph, etc. out of the system and spend zero effort considering or investigating its validity. If it came out of the system (aka black box), it must be correct.

When the number was used intra-department, I or someone else had an opportunity to double-check and to correct mistaken assumptions. When the number was requested externally, mis-perceptions could quickly propagate, and their correction became troublesome.

I have similar concerns with the data behind current visualization trends. How many people know what is truly going into them, and how much in the way of resources is being invested to ensure that the underlying data are correct?

Something I find particularly troublesome with the Obama administration's initially supplying only "summary information" in some if not all of its "open access" initiatives. If I have only the summary, and based upon my past experience, I have limited trust in what I'm being supplied.

Another example of this seemingly endemic "failure to verify", from a different domain. I've done some QA work in the software field, and all too often fellow QA'a have taken specifications as facts. They don't investigate whether the specifications reflect what was actually developed. Testing becomes a matter of confirming the most basic details, while ignoring real confirmation of underlying functionality much less seeking out and interrogating corner cases.

These testers have been people with four year college degrees and who have seemingly made QA their career. Nonetheless, the assumption is that what they are told is, prima facie, truth.
The music itself is perhaps best known from the Academy Award winning (best cartoon, 1946) Tom and Jerry cartoon, "The Cat Concerto"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWGQaczNL5I
I thought that "miles" is just a nice name for reward points:
"Simply multiply the cost of your travel purchases by 100. For example, if your ticket costs $200, you’d multiply that by 100 to determine you need 20,000 miles to redeem."

In fact, in that story the guy might have had a lot of "miles", but it is only $12,500 in dollar equivalent. It means that this "great" hack is a hack, without "great". Please correct me if I am wrong.
It's nice having that battery as a UPS though, in the event of an outage.
Seriosuly using cakephp? .......why?!
Guideline: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

Maybe it's too darn interesting so when people stumble on it they post it. I think the reprap is genuinely interesting and there's nothing you can do about that.
When the laptop is at home, just charge the battery to 50% then remove it so it works only from the plug. I don't move my laptop as much as I did before and I noticed that I get much better battery lives than my friends who continuously keep their laptop plugged in and with the battery attached.
I have also gone through 2 batteries in just over 2 years. The first was fully recharged quite a bit seeing as I was always working remotely. The second battery went through much fewer charge cycles since I was working from home and I was making attempts at improving the life of the second.

Each of the batteries I purchased died out at about the same time. Unless I got two bad ones, it seems to me that mac batteries weren't of the best quality during the time of my purchases.
Newer Sony laptops come with "Battery Care" software that automatically keeps the battery between 50 and 80% at all times. According to Sony engineers, a battery that is always kept at or below 50% will essentially never degrade in capacity.
Online courses can reduce the costly sting of college
A lot of things are said on the Steam forum.
Maybe Monty Brewster can hitch a motor to it and float it up to the Middle East, where he'll make millions off the ice cubes!
Yeah, it would be really nice if Blizzard would give the Armory a bit more read/write functionality so that I could push and pull events to the calendar through that. But I think you're right that I would have to do that through an addon.

I do plan to add EPGP support to the balances section, that's actually pretty high on my list.

Thanks for your feedback!
VCs/Angels in NYC(northeast as well) are just not in the same investing environment as the West Coast. And it's solely because this area is just not as mature as there. There are the investors that are smart and are willing to take the risks (Founder's Collective, USV, FRC, Flybridge etc.), but the problem is that they are few and far between relative to earlystage VCs and angels on the west coast. Therefore, because they're smart, have branding and don't have serious competition, they DON'T have to take the risk. And why would they, who would blame them? They can wait until the company is almost completely de-risked before they move in. (I guess an argument here is that it's a good thing that the early stage investing industry is small and less risky here. If they succeed more will come.)

The other investors here (the wall streeters turned VCS) just don't get it. They're not investing, as you say, in "change the world" ideas. They're investing in stuff that can make money right away, which is probably why they ask about pricing prematurely.

NYC is frustrating in this respect, and it's easy to see why you're thinking about the West Coast. They're just way more intelligent, early-stage investors. That's changing though, I believe. It just sucks to be a startup in this sort of purgatory. The more Ron Conway's that come to the east the better!
While correct, I really view this as a non-issue.

I suspect for most people, their in-memory data, time, and attention are far more valuable than not having power redundancy protection against an accidental cord disconnect or possible increased degradation on a ~$100 replaceable component on a $1k+ machine--namely the battery.
Are they less interesting? It's not obvious to me.

Hedge fund work tends to be more quantitative than most startup work, and tends to focus on different issues (less UI, latency vs scaling, minimizing transaction costs vs minimizing EC2 costs). Having looked at both hedge funds and startups, I'd say the work can be interesting at both.

To make a completely loaded comparison, I think programming a computer to beat the market is much more interesting than building a facebook/twitter "me too" site.

To make a less loaded comparison, I also find algorithmic trading more interesting (as a technical problem) than connecting $LOCAL_SELLER to $LOCAL_BUYER in $LOCAL_MARKET, or solving the problem of crappy restaurant websites (both of which I think are great business models).
How To Survive Apple's Slow And Frustrating Apps Approval Process
PlanetSolar: World's Largest Solar Boat Finally Unveiled
Yeah, I've done it after hibernating, but hibernating and waking up from it is like a 3-minute process for me.

It's not data loss I'm afraid of (I always save, even moreseo if I'm doing stuff that might make my computer turn off), it's like sparks and other such stuff that can happen when you're dealing with electricity.
Alternatively stop stealing games and pay the game companies for their product and they wouldn't need to go to such great lengths to save their IP.
But that's the point. There were revolutions. Plan 9 was one. Lisp machines were another - an entire environment written in Lisp from top to bottom, as were the Smalltalk machines Xerox built. We had plenty of revolutions after Unix.

OTOH, Lisp is still going strong and regaining lots of followers. Maybe the folks at Bell Labs accidentally hit a local maximum in the OS space...

But I still think we should understand what really happened.
Should publishers be wary of Apple's control over iPad content?
This is a misdiagnosis. The fancy handling is invoked only when the exception reaches the top level (i.e. when the python interpreter is about to exit anyway). It is not done when an exception is raised, and adds no overhead to code that uses exceptions at runtime.

Think of it as similar to the bash handler that searches for known executable names on failed commands and prompts you for an apt-get line to install the software. It takes significant time, but only runs on error.
Entry-level hedge fund salaries are similar to technology salaries, and perhaps a little bit lower. Bonuses are very high, but these vary from year to year and shouldn't be taken for granted (not to say that people don't).

I made this change. I'm 26 and have no kids. My girlfriend's in school but will be able to support both of us when she's out. It's mildly annoying not to have a maid and nice vacations right now, but working on interesting problems is more important than having those comforts, which are disposable for now (you don't need help until you have kids, really). Then again, I can also still afford basic necessities; if I couldn't, I'd have to go back to Wall Street.

The major problem in New York is that rent is ridiculous. Most "lifestyle" factors (vacations, alcohol) are flexible and can be deferred for a few years, but rent is non-negotiable. If it stays this high, the city will bleed talent too fast to reach "critical mass". You want the freshly unemployed quants (although quants are among the last to be let go) to stick around in the city for 6 months, not move back in with their parents because of New York rent.

Regarding lifestyle expenses, any guess as to where top traders spend most of their leisure income? Gambling. I never thought I'd meet people smarter than me who find "games" like Roulette and Craps to be interesting and worth playing (because I'm a game designer and a Euro-snob who'd rather play Tigris than Poker) but I have. This is because it's visceral and not intellectual-- people with the "gambling gene" make great traders but I wouldn't want one as a co-founder (long digression omitted).

I'm going to bet on the Midwest as the startup hub of the 2010s. There are a lot of brilliant graduates of schools like Chicago, Northwestern, Carleton, Michigan, and Grinnell whose graduates (for geographic reasons) are not nearly as likely to go to Wall Street (or Silicon Valley) as their coastal counterparts. Most of them go into graduate school, seeing that as the best option for them, because often it is. Wall Street under-recruits the Midwest, and there aren't a lot of cutting-edge companies out there-- yet. If you want to hire talent on the cheap, buy a set of winter clothes and head out to the Great Lakes region.
Just flag it and then go to the new page and vote up some content you deem more worthy. Or better yet, submit some.
Will it be an R with two lines drawn through it?

All good currency symbols are letters with two lines drawn through it.
How Baidu Was Hacked. This is Borderline Unbelievable…
I agree, but it's a pain in the ass to get into the city from those places.

Brooklyn Heights is close to Manhattan and beautiful-- probably one of the nicest neighborhoods in New York-- but it's almost as expensive as living on the island. There are also affordable, beautiful places in the outer boroughs, but an hour's commute away.
This seems to be a little flakey. I tracked one flight due to end up at aberdeen, and decided to open the page on a different machine so I could watch it out of the corner of my eye. That flight was simply not there. Then, refreshing the screen, it disappeared as well.
Fair point. At a quant hedge fund, you do get to work with some awesome people, and you learn a lot from after-work conversations.
Are they still relevant? Seems to me that the mobile war is between Apple, Google & RIM at this point, with Microsoft and Nokia already out.
I've mentioned before: Microwave a sweet potato. If you don't have a turntable microwave, flip and rotate it once, approximately halfway through the cooking cycle. They sometimes initially cook unevenly; the trick is to let it sit for some minutes after the microwave turns off, so that the latent heat can distribute and finish the cooking process.

Top with (brown) sugar and cinnamon, a bit of maple syrup, or perhaps something savory (I haven't tried the latter; I'd be interested in suggestions).

10 - 12 minutes to a nutritious meal or snack. Sweet potatoes keep showing up on lists of "super foods"; they are apparently quite nutritious (much more so than white potatoes).

P.S. Rinse/wash the sweet potato, first, and BE SURE to use a knife to poke some deep slits into it. Unless you enjoy minor explosions and cleaning the inside of your microwave.
Data Privacy: The Story of a Paradigm Shift
There's so many websites with tiny text and colours with really poor contrast, especially people's blogs about their business/start-up experience, I've found.

Most of them are just about readable on my 24" iMac, but on my tiny little netbook, if it wasn't for Readability I'd miss out on them.

Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't need Readability as much because people would consider small screen sizes and poor eyesight when picking the site design.
In my opinion, this is exactly what you should do! Build a really great product and perhaps even become profitable on your own before you try to take on capital.
That looks like only a small portion of the commercial airline traffic.
A friend of mine is building one. And although some parts can be printed, it's not print-and-go: It's it already took him 3 months (about 1 evening a week).
You'd put up with the game crashing and losing your save data when your internet gets a little bit wonky? I have fiber to my house within the city, and my connection still gets flaky at times.

And you're right, it is a valid choice. Doesn't mean their choice won't be criticized. This also has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with treating your paying users like criminals. This pic from the other day is perfect: http://t1.xavimg.com/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg
"Aircrafts equipped with an ADS-B transponder are visible on the map."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...

Guess most planes don't have it yet.
Make sure you test the voice quality when you speak into the microphone: https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16215?start=630...
Evolution of Testing
It's funny, but how is it relevant?
Parametrized queries still use escaping. The only difference is instead of you doing the escaping and query construction you're letting someone else's code handle it for you. (Code I would assume is far better tested than yours)
You're probably just not the right market for it.

I know folks who obsess over LinkedIn, use it often, and use it profitably. This includes insurance brokers, real estate agents, and most of all, recruiters.

And, as a business, they've done a great job monetizing with premium features.
I posted it because I found it interesting. If you find it not to be, please down-vote. If you think I am spamming, please flag it as such.