skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this guy's behavior really so perverse? Most of what he did, aside from dropping old friends once he was promoted above them, seems like good advice.

>1. Choose your friends

Seem like a good idea to pursue friends who are similarly ambitious, smart, diligent, etc.

PG touches on this in a few of his essays, e.g. in News From the Front: "The other students are the biggest advantage of going to an elite college; you learn more from them than the professors. But you should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make a conscious effort to find smart friends."

> 2. Make sure your outwards appearance is perfect

Seems prudent to dress well and it's definitely a good idea to exercise.

> 3. Invest in your location

Nothing wrong with having a well appointed apartment.

> 4. Approach people and tell them what to do

This is kind of over the top, and is contradicted by the paragraphs beneath it, which reveal that "Saul" approached people "either [to] build a relationship with them, or to do something for them."

This seems like excellent advice. How is it perverse to build relationship or do things for others? And how is it anything but admirable to do be the one initiating?

>5. Keep your head when everyone else is getting caught up in the rush. Encourage others to lose their heads

First part seems like a prudent idea. Second part sounds manipulative, though. On the other hand, encouraging coworkers to drink heavily is maybe a little too widespread to qualify as Machiavellian.

Edit: typo.
We'll spend an incredible amount of money on health care and social services, but they will never be terribly effective. I've never seen a social service that was effective at anything but spending money. However a profit-driven business could make headway towards solving many transportation issues en masse.
Curating content in one place is going to be compelling, that's definably going to be a big part of this. Conceptually that's a big change from traditional news where a journalist publishes a piece and ends the conversation while things are still unfolding. Its the equivalent to walking out the room while you are in the middle of a conversation with someone.
Skype Deliberately Crippling Functionality of iPhone and WinMo and Verizon Apps?
I also appreciated the fact that it linked called functions to their definition. g] is great in Vim, but it is easy to get a little lost in the navigation stack. Having g] intelligently pop out a new buffer window ala :vsplit would be a great start.
Hic sunt sirenes

(This has been up on the front page for 6 hours with no comments because all who dived in for the first time haven't come back ;-)
transit usage in the denver area jumped with the gas prices, and the cost of rides increased repeatedly, and more than the gas prices increased, as far as i could tell.
All is quite a generalization. Try cramming yourself on any of the buses that run through Chinatown in San Francisco between the hours of 7am and 10pm.
Generally, there are two types of data you're looking for: qualitative and quantitave.

You seem to know a bit about surveys which are great for qualitative data. Keep em short, try different incentives (especially those tied to your product like a discount on next purchase or free X days of premium account) and always have the last question as an open-ended free form text to the voice of the customer.

Quantitative data is basically analytics. Think about what you're offering, who would want it, and what you would consider a successful outcome of a person interacting with your company. Amazon wants me to buy stuff, but they'd also like me to sign up or write a review of a product or one of their merchants. A newspaper would like me to read more than one article, maybe watch a video or write comment, or even click an ad. The point is that you have an overall purpose and multiple related secondary offerings. Identify them, figure out how to measure them, and then test test test (and test some more) in a relentless drive to improve them. These numbers are your customers (and potential customers) telling you directly what they want or like.

Happy to recommend web analytics books for you if that applies to your product.
That's a big part of it, but the piece that's missing is seeding news stories as they break.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Not in stock browsers. But if you are happy with a bookmarklet solution, see the 'named anchors' bookmarklet on this page:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html
I'm not too experienced with voxel rendering, but I'm familiar with the general problem.

The most visible ways that nvidia and ati are tackling the LOD problem is on-GPU tessellation. This means using a mathematically smooth surface (such as beziers or nurbs), and approximating it with polygons at the appropriate level for each frame. This means that if your lettuce is far away, it gets few polys (or culled). If it's 20% of your screen, it gets lots more. You can avoid popping artifacts because it's the same surface, just approximated differently, and it's not too tricky to get approximations that blend smoothly into each other.

If you need more detail that doesn't need to be animated, toss on a displacement map at relatively low memory cost.

True volumetric modeling works best for things that have lots of branching and void spaces, like dandelions.

Displaced surfaces work for lots of interesting things. See Mudbox and ZBrush galleries:

Mudbox http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&...

ZBrush http://www.zbrushcentral.com/featured2col.php
It didn't fail for me. And +1 for spotlight calculator. It's SO fast and always there.
A Better Way to Rank Expertise Online
Elsevier Says "Enough" to Medical Hypotheses Editor
Unfortunately, Wine simply cannot compete with the performance of Windows games running on their native platform (again, “yet”).

My World of Warcraft install would disagree. I get higher framerates in WINE operating off from the same install on the NTFS partition that Windows XP uses. Furthermore, I have older games that are less of a hassle to under WINE than Windows.
It exists in Brazil. It is in buses; you pay twice as much and it has air conditioning and more comfortable seats.

It also exists on the Paris metro.
(disclaimer - I'm not an expert) They're probably using some kind of sparse octree for looking up points. That means they split the space with planes into areas with high concentration of points and empty ones (then split the full ones more). These kind of structures are not easily update-able as far as I know - or if you update them in trivial way (move the boundary), they could lose the fast lookup properties. It's a bit like with global illumination - you have to precalculate a lot of values to render the scene in a reasonable time later on.

It would be interesting to see if anyone can create a hybrid of point-cloud scene + polygon animation... should be enough for most shooters. (Outcast apparently had something like that, but that was pre-"nice graphics")
More like between 30 and 40 years ago, but yes.

What makes Emacs so useful is not only what it has out of the box (it has a whole lot), but what it allows you to do with that. People often jokingly describe it as an operating system, but that's a surprisingly apt description. Everything in Emacs is accessible (most of it, anyway) and it is (a great part of it, at least) written in itself. To make a small function that searches for a, in this case, a booklike block, and replaces the classes with the proper ones is more or less a trivial task. I wouldn't use it for this case - it's too little work - but I would write a search-and-replace-with-option function that would highlight occurrences and offer me a menu of replacements.

If it doesn't exist in there already.

And that would also be a worthwhile exercise in IDE zen.

Contrast that with Eclipse or Visual Studio, where the job of writing extensions start to look like a whole career.
"The problem is, people seem to genuinely like living in fear."

I don't know; I suspect people react very easily to "leadership" hints and cues about danger, and it's thus useful for politicians (of any stripe) to encourage fear.
And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.

ridiculous
Thanks for your post. Come to think about it, it shouldn't be too hard to set your own limits, right? (The harsh rule would be: once 99% of your limit has been reached, paralyze your activity...)
Space Elevators
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Benjamin Franklin
Of course, he flew a kite in a thunderstorm
Now it does.
Mentioned because articles from this "journal" with no peer review have reached the front page of HN before, via the blog run by the same editor.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1018108
That would be part of the problem - most child abuse of all forms takes place within families, but we pretend that we need to intensely scrutinize every unrelated adult in order to protect children from "predators". The odds don't work that way.
Getting every teacher to have lengthly criminal record checks done

Do you actually have children? People who do generally would prefer they are not in the care of criminals (and we are not just talking about sex crimes - I woudn't particularly want a drug dealer or a murderer teaching kids either). It can be theater, but that doesn't mean it is without value to public welfare.

As to the microchipping, I don't understand how this is different than requiring a rabies vaccination or a dog licence. It's not a GPS tracker, for god's sake.
I have never, ever seen defecations or urinations in my public transport system here in Chile. The worst I've seen is two weirdos cossing someone else out, then pulling the emergency break, then getting arrested for it.
Needed: An open robocar driving simulator. Here's how.
As pointed out in the thread the planned features are now maintained in the Emacs repository in etc/TODO. Here's a link to in on GitHub: http://github.com/emacsmirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/TODO#L15
I work in Seattle, and know a number of Microsofties, and this is a pretty reliable consensus too even for people who are still there. The org tree is very, very deep and this causes a lot of problems - especially as a company ages and people go from enthusiastic risk takers to CYA corporate types.
"In Andy Warhol's "Diaries", he describes being at a Thanksgiving 1983 dinner party at Yoko Ono's apartment. Bowie and Madonna are also there. Warhol wanders to a bunch of people in Sean's room, where "some kid is setting up one of those Apple computers". The "kid" springs up to greet him, "Hi, I'm Steve Jobs."

Even before product placement, Jobs was very keen on real-life placement, getting his products in the hands of the "right" people, tastemakers, before anyone else. The Macintosh he was setting up for Sean would famously come out 2 months later. It was a sort of high-end salesmanship he never really stopped, at least when a new product was launching."
I'm very interested in anyones opinions on this topic as well
Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented Experiences
We're a wave function, always in motion and never deterministic. We are a verb!
Nice, I downloaded it and I will blog about it if it works well for me this week.
So no one sees the possibility of humor in a renewable energy technology called "Bottled Wind"?
Don't feel bad weichi, I got it.
I'm still waiting to see how you're meant to animate a point sprite model.
How business savvy are you? As a single founder, you might be better off with a hybrid co-founder who can code and do business stuff too.

Like sales - the ability to sell is probably the most important non-technical skill for a startup founder. Startups need to sell all the time - to customers, partners, investors, journalists, etc. It doesn't hurt to have 2+ founders who can sell.
A lot of trouble for very little? If its absolutely important for your children to be statistically correlated to you, beyond the 99.9% that all humans are ALREADY correleated? It's been said that adoptive children are sometimes loved too.
It is pretty clear that Apple will include some kind of multitasking. Their API already include hints of how this could be done.

I submitted a link to HN that speculated on how it would work.
Workers reveal their passwords for a free pen
Soulver | Acqualia
Does Saul recognize other Sauls and does he like and promote them? It seems like he would be threatened by those that know his game. Does this only work if your boss isn't already Saul?
Joi Ito: Formal vs informal education
"Meanwhile, today’s real-life Boyles constantly lobby for government restraints on their more able competitors. Remember when the überproductive Bill Gates started giving away free Web browsers to his customers, and Netscape ran to Washington demanding that Microsoft be shackled via antitrust laws?"

I was starting to think that this guy was onto something until I came to that sentence. It's nice of him to propose his own counterexample though.
I was once preparing to be the ultimate non-technical cofounder. Then disaster struck my life, and then I learned to program. In any case, here was the skill set I wanted:

- Has tried a startup before and failed because he didn't have enough tech talent (check)

- Exposed to I.P. law at Stanford Law School (as undergrad)

- Experience cold-calling alumni for donations (for selling) (check)

- Studied economics (check), game theory

- Deep knowledge of fundraising process

- Design, typography, statistics, etc.
Just a few qualities:

You want someone with passion. They should have a skin thick enough that they don't take rejection to heart, but thin enough that 'hear' those who would offer them constructive feedback. They need to be able to concisely articulate your vision to customers of all applicable types (investors, retail, industry), and deduce your next course of action (pivot) from many disparate and incomplete data points.

As for skills, these should complement your own such that the whole is significantly greater than the sum of its parts, and that the whole is just about right for the task at hand. Sorry to be so wishy-washy, but it really is one of those case by case things.
Didn't go well for Kiko.
It is extremely helpful. I'd say hour-for-hour, my team is twice as productive working full-time on a startup than doing it on the side. We're more focused, more resourceful, and when we aren't working, our subconscious is spinning on this particular problem, not our day jobs or other projects. Combine that with the fact that our startup gets more hours than it did when it was a side project, and that's a major increase in productivity.

You also need to be able to pay the bills, so save up or raise some money. Friends and family money is good here, because raising from professional investors is usually a full-time job in itself. Or you can consult at a high rate and use the margin to fund a startup. We did this for a few years, which was fine - it was our only option, really - but full-time work is so much better.

The good news: you'll be more motivated, since you see the dwindling bank account balance. You know that you need to move things along quickly so you can pay the bills.
That's probably an even more appropriate term for modern regular expression syntax, but you're right, it isn't the sense I was going for. Fixed, thanks.
No no no,

That guy looks like a textbook sociopath. You should read this to really understand on what's going on:
http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/...

People like him leave a scorched earth approach to anything, and at the end they end up being damaging to the companies where they work.

He doesn't make friends. He acts as a 'friend' to people to get ahead, while simultaneously backstabbing them.

We are not talking just simple "outdo the master" type of manoeuvrings. We are talking about lying, maliciously spreading rumors, destroying other people's careers, while keeping a "friendly and smiling face", and dropping people like a rock once done with them.

You will never understand what hit you, until it is too late.

Just beware.
I was just thinking that
Funny, following a recent HN discussion about another Chrome extension for HN, I had added something similar to my list of things to do. But my goal was to have something more like this: http://www.reddit.com/tb/b9yyc (from said-discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171106)

Is there more to your extension than embedding the linked GreaseMonkey script?
or even an ignore button could work
Jason Calacanis’ Backup Plan For Replacing Content: Steal It From Wikipedia
Sounds like a jitney. Add in onboard wifi, the ability to request pickup via geo-enabled sms.

Bigger question is how much would such a service cost to be profitable to run, and would people pay that much?
Make Sure Your Rails Application is Actually Caching (and not just pretending)
Their "search" algorithm is ray tracing. It must be, to some extend. They claim they only process each pixel on the screen, so they must trace a ray and find out which voxel/point/whatever to draw. The "unlimited" part breaks down as soon as you do any sort of reflection, refraction, or diffuse lighting. You can't just trace one ray for each screen pixel; you need to handle branching and scattering and the number of rays to trace becomes exponential.
"Kids, marriage, TV, etc." can introduce strains or challenges in a relationship that can tear it down if not handled correctly. Pornography by its nature is harmful. It is poison to love. They are entirely different categories.

There is a lot of data to corroborate these ideas. There are many porn consumers who have recognized their addictions, even if they are not actively battling them. You can learn about these things by looking for them. http://obscenitycrimes.org/cline_unabridged.pdf is a 23-page (unfortunately magazine-like) overview of the research of one sex therapist; I couldn't find something more clinical in the brief time I was able to look.

Regarding the default tendency, there are many things that humans naturally prefer that are much, much worse than the alternatives. There is a default inclination toward drugs and other seriously harmful solutions, but that doesn't make heroin good, does it? Our attraction to these things is a very complex issue which I'm not fit to explain scientifically. That doesn't mean it's not real.
Understandable reaction, but Stossel is at least an alternative to the red-meat GOP partisans in the Fox news media.

I was sad when they got rid of Radley Balko awhile back - he used his time working for Fox writing about misuse of force by the police and the failings of the drug war and thus explaining them to people who wouldn't have come across those realities.
However, it makes for entertaining reading.
WakeMate to begin shipping in march
I think it is important to find a cofounder who you truly respect. besides a few specific skills, the skill set is almost irrelevant since you learn so much on the fly
Nothing's actually changed since then.
In addition to the overhead, this has rather significant privacy implications, since you're sending your complete browsing history to a third party (and in real-time).
when we started wepay we quit and had cash for a few months. we ran out. i worked odd jobs off craigslist to pay rent (like tutoring math, wordpress consulting, etc). i was still 10x more productive than when I was working fulltime in another job and trying to work parttime at night. i think it all comes down to comfort. you're too comfortable in a fulltime job.
Netscape imploded for internal reasons just as much as from competitive pressure from Microsoft.

Do you remember Netscape 4? It was awful on every platform I had to run it on (IRIX, NT4 and System 7.) Microsoft didn't make it awful - only Netscape could do that.

I still remember downloading the first IE4 release on my NT machine in the fall of 1997. It was much, much faster, more capable (CSS), nicer looking - and most importantly - more stable than Netscape.

So Brook's example stands.
Anyone recommending Adobe Reader instantly loses all credibility.
According to which source?

Granted most of those are in a home environment not a school

I understood this to be the whole point: that the danger from the general public is vanishingly small. If you're saying that one in 250k is the stranger abduction rate and that the pedophilia is one tenth that, the PC thinks it's 4 times more common than you do.

ETA: What's worse, expending any effort on the 1-in-a-million issues, at best, distracts from actually imporving ones quality of life.
When I was thinking about my implementation, I didn't think about SearchYC but instead was thinking about scraping the homepage (and its 7 little brothers) for the relevant info and then compare it to the current page. It would remove your concern (besides the initial setup) but would work only for recent stories. (which might be good for some people but not all)
Personally, I ignore exit surveys - I'm leaving, why would I bother spending a precious 10 seconds clicking some check boxes? It's ridiculous, it's lazy, and it's selfish, and it's what the vast majority of users are probably thinking!

Donating to Wikipedia is very worthy, though it may not be a cause the users are interested in. I suspect they'd respond better to a donation to charity, possibly one of their choice.
However, users are not necessarily looking at financial incentives to give feedback. The incentive to make a difference to a product, to have some influence, to be credited somewhere may be all it takes.

That particular group of users who did not purchase but would accept a little extra free time might be of value to you - they were about to go, yet you persuaded them to stay. Ask them personally (an email?) - treat them like people, not like survey box tickers.

If you have enough users, have you considered (or already have?) trying A/B testing to see what gets these people to decline/accept your service?

Any chance that you could share a link to your startup so that the community can have a look?
[Regardless, good luck, and please report back with any news!]
Same here, except I use an interactive perl loop that grew more and more features until it became pretty awesome: http://porkrind.org/missives/pc-perl-calculator
"all public transportation in the U.S. save a few exceptions"
Whatever suits you. I don't suppose any of my ordinary expenditures would offend most people--OK, beer, OK salty or starch foods--but frankly I'm just as happy not leaving a data trail. Yes, it would be interesting to know that I bought nerd book x this week or literary book y two weeks before that, but dammit, let them do their own marketing research.
"Proper." Anyway. I live in a place where public transportation is plentiful, convenient, and rarely beset by attacks from the less-fortunate.