skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This system is a very bad idea, because it fails to address (or even mention!) the Peter principle: "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."

You could have someone who is just great in job description X, but you promote them to Y and they suck at it. I see this all the time.

Not everyone's goals are the same as your goals. It's crucial that a manager try to understand his employee's goals and motivations, without imposing his own.

There's also an implicit assumption that we should derive most of our satisfaction from our jobs. It's okay to have a job that's "just a job", while doing interesting hobbies or side projects.
Sure, I have two.

1) Did they offer you equity for the initial summer position?

2) What motivated you to go work for them for free?
Not so sure about that...

It looks to me that A/B leads quite easily to a local optimum.

But it's better than no method at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

I quote: This fallacy is often confused with begging the question, which offers a premise no more plausible than, and often just a restatement of, the conclusion.

It does become a loaded question if you ask a music industry exec: "Are you aware of the fundamental difference between copyright infringement and stealing?" But, as the wikipedia article says, that's not the same as begging the question. In any case, it's not a loaded question, since it's not a question to begin with.

The original poster did not ask us to answer the question about the record / film industry, while accepting his other statement. He was saying "I believe that there is a fundamental difference between X and Y, and am dismayed by the lack of understanding of this difference in the record / film industry". I doubt he had formal logic in mind.

EDIT: But you do make some very points, and I'm willing to concede that I may be completely wrong about what the original guy was trying to say, or how it should be interpreted. I really should spend less time on HN :)
This did help. Thanks.
Generally it goes to YC startups by default.
Milgram experiment redone: crowd "tortures" man on fake TV show
And 2001 for George Harrison
I was living in Princeton when these little bastards made their appearance in 2004. Just one bug can produce an impressively loud sound - so you can imagine what millions sound like. And there's nothing like walking to work through heaps of bug carcasses.
How Gist Came to Acquire Learn That Name: Old-Fashioned Networking
Moore's law isn't about business growth.
Jane McGonigal at TED: Can Gaming Save the World?
thanks guys i kinda gave up after seeing no comments at first, but im glad i checked back. I will write several versions of it as articles and hopefully it will be worthy of showing up somewhere.
Michele Poligamia
We draw the line wherever the borrower wants to draw it. If the borrower (and his family in the case) are OK with it, then what's the problem?

And if he's not, then he shouldn't borrow the money.

Are you implying people have the right borrow money?
Although this was expected, it is very exciting now that it is official.

Now, we'll have to see whether Dr. Perelman will accept this honor. He astonished people worldwide when he declined the Field Medal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/science/22cnd-math.html
Applying "A Pattern Language" to Online Community Design
We did not apply from the RFP, and YC did not get us onto Twitter. We had to do our own development work there. And Chad : )
Unless they A/B tested the colour change.
Here's How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth Across Top Sites
Hunch Hasn't a Clue About My Intentions
Dark Matter 3D
basically what I'm saying is that as an employee startups are a bad proposition. You get to work long hours, get paid less money, get less benefits, and unless the company hits a Google size homerun the most you can hope for is recovering the extra income you gave up by not joining Google.
"highly paid" is relative. $10k/month in San Francisco is an average programmer's salary .. Once you deal with the realities of a business (unemployment insurance, health insurance, payroll taxes, franchise taxes, income taxes, cell phones, internet, hosting) it's not really a single FTE's salary in say SF, Seattle, or NYC.
The expert pool
And will be deposed, under oath.
There are actually two forms of non-dualism: materalism and idealism. One is that everything lives in the material world and the other is that everything lives within the world of thought. For various reasons, materialism is the only non-dualism scientists give credence to.

Skinner's a materialist, too. He may reject emotions, thoughts, and free will as fiction, but that's because there was, at his time, no scientific evidence for them. Neurology may have changed that, and so in fact may have continued behavioral research. (I suspect there are behavioral studies which would have shown a consistent "internal state" factor to animal behavior, for instance.)
Absolutely. When looking for a fridge rental for a flat I've just moved into, we had a quick Google - and the design on this site (http://www.rentafridge.co.nz/) won them business. Simple, straightforward and tells the user exactly what they need to know.
Did they also remove the bottom 3 ads for those? I thought they just changed the center image.
Can you really take this seriously? I mean, blue text on top of a blue-green background?
That's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.
Do you have any suggestions for a someone looking for an internship in the middle of no where?
> MySQL and Linux weren't as good or better than the closed alternatives when they gained traction

I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors. In some cases just being "open" makes it better, but that's only true if the project is going to be adopted in some way, like Apple using KHTML for WebKit.

In the case of Theora, nobody wants to adopt it as a long term project, they just want to implement video for their users. From that perspective, H.264 is better (I'm a layman here, but as I understand it the quality is better and the file sizes are significantly smaller, but correct me if I'm wrong).

It would certainly be better if they all got together on Theora much like they have on WebKit, but it seems ongoing development can't have the same level of improvement on a video codec that it can on a rendering engine, at least that's my perspective on it.
I love it! I just got downvoted (implying I have "bad karma") because I _thanked_ a poster for an entry I found helpful. I guess I was being "rude" by thanking him.

"Mind, sometimes it just isn't worth dealing with people". Agreed!

Again, a good place for articles, but I'll avoid the schoolyard from here on out. Enjoy your "community".

I know. Here it comes: 3-2-1.....down-voting ensues.
1) No, and I would have been incredibly surprised if they had. I had only finished two years of school, and had very little experience when I started. None of us had any idea how it would work out. It would have been foolish to offer equity then.

2) Being in school, the money wasn't a huge issue for me. They took care of my housing and most of my living expenses, so it's not as if I had to support myself on no income.

More importantly, the opportunity was just too good to pass up. It's rare to get the chance to be at a four-person company. I knew that I'd get fantastic experience and learning out of it. After just two years of school, those two were more important than money.
Web Laureate Insight, "Groupon: Daily"
I'm pretty sure the only loophole is the necessary authorities not knowing about it.
Purely from the financial perspective, I completely agree with you. Looking at the statistics, starting a company is a bad enough idea. Joining one is even worse. I once made this argument in front of a start up employee, but he explained that he approaches it from a different perspective. He said he's young, so the extra $30k he'll get at Facebook or at Google doesn't make a substantial difference to him - he still lives comfortably; he enjoys the work that he does and the environment immensely; he's learning a ton of things he wouldn't learn in a bigger company (of course he's not learning some things he would learn in a bigger company, but he already did work at one before). The fact that he might get rich in the unlikely event of a home-run is just frosting on the cake. If you think of it from this perspective, joining a startup as an employee makes sense.
My basic problem is reconciling "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." with "General Principle 2 repeats the common error that copyright should balance the public interest with 'protecting and rewarding the author'. This error interferes with proper judgment of any copyright policy question, since that should be based on the public interest."
Do it! I've lived in 3 warehouses now, and am looking for a new space this summer when my apartment lease runs out. The key to warehouse living is to find an unassuming, out of the way warehouse (so as not to attract attention from the authorities), with a landlord who knows what you're doing and is fine with it, and to establish really good relations with the neighboring businesses who will otherwise be annoyed that some punk kids are throwing parties all the time.

I was just in one a few nights ago over in Oakland that a friend is living in now. We did some exploring and found an old boiler-room, remnant of an old structure that the warehouse was built over. You'd never find something that fun in some yuppy live/work loft.
http://twitter.com/mhalligan/status/10614020589 has a photo of their main living space.
YC-Funded Data Marketplace is an Amazon for Structured Information
Its still about networking. In my case it was HN -> intermediate group of people -> contact at Bug Labs -> interview. After working at Bug Labs for a while my girlfriend was looking for a job and I introduced her to someone I met at work who knew someone whose wife needed an intern. Neither were advertised jobs. So my suggestion is find the tech crowd and see if they can help you. Right now I'm looking for a job in a completely different part of the country so I'm facing a similar struggle, you really should search for companies that match what you are looking for, don't necessarily search for people advertising internships. Once you find those companies figure out how to talk to SOMEONE and work from there. Linkedin might be helpful.
No they couldn't. They could just simulate more bodies, but it wouldn't prove anything.

You run a simulation with 1000 times as many bodies. Okay, it looks kind of filamenty. What have you learned?
That's certainly an interesting way of getting customers. Employ people, have them quit, they get hired into a position that has the ability to give their old company money.
You're welcome! Also, two more good links:

http://lifehacker.com/5401954/programmer-101-teach-yourself-...

http://lifehacker.com/5336113/how-to-build-a-web-site-from-s...

These will apply to pretty much where you are at now, if you are totally new to web dev as you say.
MySQL would never have caught on if every new computer made came with an already licensed version of a better and faster database. MySQL was "better" because it was accessible. h.264 is already accessible, it's built into every new smartphone and computer.
Pitching your product in a social setting
What is stopping them from revving the spec and breaking compatability?

Is it all those hardware implementations? Clearly not. And existing content would still play just newly encoded material wouldn't play on old encoders. Very similar to H.264 profiles, where Main and High profiles won't play on iPhones.

I would suggest they haven't done this yet because they are making rapid progress without having the need do so. The longer they leave it the more they can improve when they break either by taking advantage of more expired patents or just more experience.

If the argument is that Theora can't be revved (for some unspecified reason) and that limits progress then that argument should be made so it can be challenged. It does not follow directly from anything
said in the article.
Allow them to work remotely. Lots of companies are highly productive working remotely.

Data point: I've still never actually met either of my bosses from last summer. None the less, I got a whole lot done and made good money.
Smoking guns, dark secrets aplenty in YouTube-Viacom lawsuit filings
Facebook Co-Founder Launches New Startup
Short version:

You can't have unpaid interns, unless you're really just doing it for their benefit because you're a nice person. If they generate any value for you, its illegal.

This situation is clearly against the spirit of the law. I am surprised they're being so forthcoming about it. Besides, as Thomas pointed out, can you really not come up with $10/hour to pay your intern?
If you have Java experience it is a small jump to JavaEE technologies.

Check out Servlets and JSP technology. It's bascially the same as LAMP but with a J instead of a P (and often a T instead or as well as an A).
I agree with you entirely right up until you say you can separate aesthetics and functionality. While you can do so arbitrarily, they're both so interdependent that neither can truly excel without a certain amount of care taken for the other. Good functionality improves the aesthetic experience of a UI, and good aesthetics improve the conveyance of functionality.

You'll find varying emphases between these two all over, but very few successful products make it with a significant disconnect between them.
> I asked him if he had ever seen background galaxies distorted into spokes in the absence of luminous foreground galaxies. He said he had seen the phenomenon, but he said it was caused by "something else."

Has someone seen some picture and/or explanation of origin?
I would expect that at least a few HN readers are like me: past developers, who now spend the bulk (if not all)of their time managing projects. In response to questions about the vertical axis, my answer is that from a PM perspective, it's the measure of how much the developers want to play with the latest technology. From a developer perspective it's the measure of "perceived benefit" from applying a specific technology. Having seen a lot of sexy technologies fall by the wayside over the years (often because they turned out to cause more problems than they solved - yes I'm talking about you, CORBA), my sympathies are with the PM view. When I was a young programmer, we had similar "discussions" with the old guys about the merits of C versus COBOL/VSAM versus RDBMS/client-server versus dumb terminals. As far as I'm concerned, if you can show me (the PM) a quantifiable benefit of using a new technology, I'll consider it. But in a lot of cases, the benefit seems to be "it's cool, and I want to try it." I sympathize with you, but that's not enough to justify the risks I'm taking on by using a new technology.
This change was accompanied by a switch to single-stream recycling - that is, all recyclable materials can be deposited in one bin and sorted later. From what I've seen, this change has significantly increased recycling.

Could you give some examples of goods that don't make sense to recycle currently? I certainly believe that could be true, I just haven't read anything solid about it.
He forgot to add cost into the factor.
the rest have essentially wasted years of their life for nothing.

That decidedly is NOT the outcome of the Cravath approach, although it may be the outcome of the Latham and Watkins approach.
I love this idea. Anybody interested in setting up a site to keep this rolling?
This article is extreme; but the points it raises are a major problem for Wikipedia.

I used to be a fairly regular editor but one day realised I was spending 60% of my edits on argument and pointless meta (mostly trying to help defend field experts with not much wiki experience from the idiots).

There is a broad amount of sanity on Wikipedia but there are very very vocal areas that are causing problems.
Tell HN: From unpaid intern to full time as a biz guy in a startup
This is in response to WePay's post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1202168

I hear a lot about intern experiences at startups that seem awesome like the one mention above. The only problem is I am a business guy and would have been virtually useless trying to learn php to code for the summer. I want to share some points from my experience of interning as a business guy in a online startup.

A quick overview; I started interning in October part time while during my senior year (which is still going on). Today I just got a full time offer as employee #15 when I graduate.

One of the first things I try to say to other business guys who are interested in working at internet startups is to readjust what "business stuff" is to them. For example I make the assumption that in a small startup business stuff to a hacker is ANYTHING that doesn't involve hacking. This includes SEM, landing page optimization, analytics, social media marketing, and SEO, in addition to the usual suspects like cold calling and market research. Luckily this is all the stuff I like and/or have experience in and for an early stage startup the former stuff will a lot of times hold more weight. Here is a list of some stuff I did for the startup:

Landing page optimization on feature pages
50% of the design/features of an iphone app
Researched cross selling and upselling optimization points
Data collection
Analyze SEM campaigns
Pro forma cashflow models for new features

As you can tell there's a range, that basically includes everything except coding. I hope this helps any other business guys trying to break into the startup world. I consider myself very very lucky.
Microsoft says IE9 faster than Chrome, but is it?
> I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors.

No, when they got traction was before they were better, but after they were good enough, which means you could run your business on cheap Intel/AMD hardware.
It would be pointless to argue that personal fears/bias are not part of the decision making process. But by the same token, I think you must recognize that programmers also have biases, one of which is to try new things.

There is definitely business value in using technologies that attract and retain the best developers. But that benefit must be weighed against costs like the difficulty of finding trained programmers, instability of immature technology, etc.
Google Developing Google Analytics Opt-Out Plugin
The phrase "let's see if they're right" implies a reward, but none is apparent.

Voters need to feel they're achieving some progress towards a goal, visibly refining a dataset (zeroing in), or learning something, other than just the cheery counter at top right.

Otherwise you're essentially measuring how many altruistic clicks till a person gathers they won't personally benefit from clicking more.
You don't need to assemble the team.

You can build a web site as a one or two person company, and the idea with enough traction you out source each part to oDesk or similar (as your team of technical people).
The Current State of Twitter (Statistics)
Is it really all that strange to find out that we aren't that different from how we were in 1960 with respect to authority? Back then we thought of authority as a government and the nation state, but today it's you and me, our entertainment, tvs, xboxes, corporations, and facebook that exert more control over us. In this case who is the authority? The game show host or the crowd? Is this the power of the perception that "everyone's doing" it has authoritative control over us?

Scary stuff still. Does anyone want to volunteer for the new TV show "Alcatraz" where we recreate Stanford prison experiment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
One reason i-banks and academics pay top dollar for data is reliability and consistency. How does Data Marketplace address errors in user-collected data? Do they guarantee its quality? If I spend $10,000 on a quarterly update on CRSP and find a systematic mistake, they will fix it without charge. Such mistakes are hard to find because CRSP has a reputation to maintain. I wonder if users hired to collect data have the same constraints.
Let's do some arithmetic.

Suppose that the unoptimized computation takes 200 units, the optimized takes 100 units and a cache access takes 1 unit.

With a 99% hit rate, 100 accesses will take 100 units plus the cost of 1 computation. In the unoptimized case, that's 300 units, or an average of 3 units per access. In the optimized case, that's 200 units, or an average of 2 units per case.

This ignores the user-experience benefit of serving that 1 access significantly faster.
That's basically how I look at it. It seems like a great way to get incredible experience when you're young. Plus, I'm still in a position (being a high school student) where big companies wouldn't even consider hiring me, so it's startups or nothing for now.

Even once I'm in college and thus could get big-company internships, I'll probably work for startups instead. The work will be more interesting, rewarding, and fun, and I'll almost certainly learn more from it.

But I do agree that once I'm out of college, I probably wouldn't work for a startup that I didn't start unless it was at the point where it could pay me pretty close to market rate.
Yes, they can get along: http://github.com/schacon/hg-git/
Extremely fast string matching -- I've seen a few research papers on the move to this. Which can play into DNA sequence matching, or information retrieval.

GPU is also good for anything that requires extensive parallel number crunching, like password cracking.

If you search for "GPU String Matching" you should find some good results.
I don't think there is a problem there. Look at the first statement you quoted. It explains why (to promote ...) and then it explains what is to be done (securing for limited times ...). Protecting and rewarding authors may be a result of the "securing" part, but it is not listed as a motivation for it.
Can anyone think of a case in recent memory where the fear mongering over a proprietary, wisely used, web format lived up to the doom & gloom predictions? Seems like it usually turns out fine in the end or, over time, a more open solution wins out on technical merits and better/cheaper accessibility of encoders. In 2010 I still see animated GIFS on a fairly regular basis, MP3s, even RealMedia which thankfully VLC plays well. I don't think it's a bad thing Mozilla is trying to make a point here about open formats but they shouldn't take it too far or they risk really hurting the web by committing market share suicide and limiting the diversity of commonly used browsers.
I think the point should be, if you're caching really really well, algorithmic problems will not matter. Why? I help to admin a site which is algorithmically shitty yet performs big feats of performance and makes bank. Making bank is the goal. If you can accomplish it even with a shitty algorithm via caching, do that.

And honestly, for most horizontally-scaled systems i've seen it's not difficult to "turn down the cache" and watch for load issues. And the best way to debug problems (such as algorithm limitations) is by knowing the hard limits of every facet of your system and comparing against current use metrics. Time-consuming but not very complex.
Such a simple idea, but very compelling and nicely executed.

How is the pricing determined? Simply based on what the data seller/aggregator thinks he can get?

The "requesting for data" reminds me bit of a more structured mechanical turk.
Is the Hare Psychopathy Checklist / PCL-R available online?

I only found the okcupid one (and I'm definitely not taking it from there :) )

No, I don't think I'm a psychopath (an introvert sure, aspergers or autism-related stuff maybe - I did score very high there - but probably not psychopath).