skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Traffic won't double. Total traffic is all requests (images, stylesheets, scripts), not just requests to the root HTML page.

Not only that, but the client's browser probably caches it anyway.
Microsoft Virtual PC Flaw Lets Hackers Bypass Windows Defenses
Boston was a very, very close second place.

My feeling was that I could get out into the cheap countryside much easier in Austin, the cost of housing was generally much, much cheaper, and the traffic, bad as it was, wasn't up to par with the Boston area.

I'd love to hear reasons why I missed something.
Thanks for this great piece of software. I've discovered mongoengine a few days ago, and found myself trying to add iexact and other methods. Now 0.3 leaves more time to focus on to the projects :)
GM Develops Augmented Reality Windshield
It could well be CitizenParker. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=citizenparker

He submitted the Human Flesh story from NYTimes that he mentioned in his comment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167615

And he's only submitted 2 stories since starting his account 341 days ago. So the story must have meant a lot to him, 1st to submit it, 2nd to mention it in that comment.

Also, (s)he's only made 18 comments in total and his last comment was 104 days ago yet the flesh story was submitted 13 days ago: so he's careful with his comments: probably careful with his identity and privacy too, so much so that CitizenParker has no bio info: and look at the name CitizenParker (sort of like call yourself John Smith on a sample credit card) - so generic naming could be important to CitizenParker: something he's conscious about, and will write about it: whilst also doing that anonymously.

But mainly, his style seems similar, which was what got me thinking.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=citizenparker

http://searchyc.com/user/citizenparker?only=comments

Does it really matter?

edit: http://citizenparker.com/
Scott Parker: http://citizenparker.com/page/About-Scott-Parker.aspx
So they're a staffing agency?
Usually I see the start date for 4 years for founder vesting back-dated to start when the people actually started working on the project, not necessarily from taking funding or even incorporation.
"high-end criminals" isn't unusual. Certainly not to these British eyes. If you Google for "high end criminals" even without the hyphen, about half of the results use the hyphenated version.

The other things you point out encourage me to share your opinion, however.
I know the founder of this startup. She is awesome. I think their methodology is smart when it comes to temporary talent. I would rather hire someone connected to me via linked in rather than a random off elance or craigslist.
The bet is that you could build it for $40, sell it for $80, and capture enough volume to make it meaningful.

This could be a dumb bet. I'm treading on thin ice because I don't have experience with selling hardware. It seems like your biggest disagreement is the sale price needed to be profitable. So let's see -- if you make $40 on each purchase and want to make $4M per year you'd need to sell 100,000 units per year.

That's probably about what Sonos is doing now, six years into the company.

So it's a huge challenge, yes.

(Am I missing anything else?)
Ben Nanonote with WiFi - the new direction for netbooks?
Some years back, I knew someone with a hacker career who bought one of those "Best Places" books and used the CD that came with it to do some custom searches for someplace low cost, high tech. Much to their frustration and chagrin, no matter how they tweaked it, the results showing low cost places with good opportunities for high tech jobs strongly favored Texas.

Obviously, the data is old. But I would think Texas is still your best bet for family-friendly prices and access to the tech scene. The state is quite large, so there are several large cities you could look at. All you would need to do would be to confirm this general trend, then check out which of the larger cities had the other factors you are looking for. (I personally would avoid Houston. It's horribly polluted. But that's just me.) So I don't think Austin is a bad idea at all.

Good luck with this.

EDIT: You can do some city comparisons here for free: http://www.bestplaces.net/
So I wrote a bit of code to compare against other HN comments

Do you have a corpus?

Further, and this is an open question, is there an archive/downloadable corpus of HN in part or entirety anywhere? It would be fascinating and I'd love to keep a copy to look back at in years to come.
He's not dividing by zero. He's just using ...

a = b -> a - b = 0 -> c * (a - b) = 0 -> c * a = c * b

The whole point of the article is that implication is a binary function that doesn't have an intuitive behavior to many people.

Like the following statement which evaluates to TRUE ...

I have 6 legs *implies* it will rain tonight

That's because the definition of the function is this ...

A -> B => NOT(A) or B

And this actually makes sense ...

I have 6 legs *implies* I am not normal

Which is true. But the reverse is false ...

I am not normal, therefore I have 6 legs

A -> B doesn't imply that B -> A. The equivalence function would be ...

(NOT(A) and NOT(B)) or (A and B)
Excellent walk-through, thank you. You also removed one of my uses of additive inverses, which gets us closer to not needing the negative integers. I have two ideas for getting rid of the last use of them in your last step, but I'm sure they're kosher.

1) From the equation x0 + x0 = x0, you don't need inverses, just cancellation. I believe that cancellation is a strictly weaker property.

2) From the equation x0 + x0 = x0, note that x0 is the additive identity. Inverses are unique, thus x0 = 0.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Peano arithmetic to know if proving either of these statements requires the statement we're trying to prove, that x*0 = 0. I'm more familiar with algebra, where inverses exist axiomatically. But at least we've weakened the hypotheses!
Ugh, talking popover (or whatever you call that).

This one has no popover, supports Costco cards (which, last I checked CardPool didn't) and offers cash or Amazon cards in return: http://www.plasticjungle.com/pjweb/
It ensures you're "hip" and "get it". It means you're in the in crowd who know what 'bumping' is.

The rest of us just email/sms/anything less stupid sounding than "bumping". Really. It's right up there with microsoft Zunes and their "squirting".
Bay Area Beatmaker Freematik Makes Album with iPhone [Interview]
Now that I think about it, you have a good point!

And I think you may be closer to the mark with 14 years than I was with 25, though some franchises continue to be active longer than 14 years. The Simpsons for instance are still producing new episodes after roughly 23 years.

Either way, 1988 is extremely recent in comparison with the way the current copyright laws are written and many other books that are still under copyright after multiple decades. I may disagree with the law as it is now, but until we manage to get it changed, it is the law.
I don't see this. The times article says you do one of the two (and the app screenshot seems to confirm this).
$249. But as JoachimSchipper notes, 60 days isn't really a draw. I'm going to change it back to 30 (or perhaps 45). In most cases the job has had enough applicants in 30 days and, in many cases, is no longer even open (so attracting traffic unnecessarily).
Google's regular search doesn't handle hyphenation but Trends appears to: http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22high-end%22%2C%22high+end%.... Google searches give me results which suspect this Trend search is not sound however.

I'm from the UK too.
This is also only true if the distribution of each sample is the same. If you don't understand the system you're sampling from, or where the variability comes from (maybe its systematic), then all bets are off.
"American Empire", if it could be called such, is one of the most unusual in the history of the world. Firstly, it is not one of direct dominance, as nearly all others in history have been. It is primarily one of mutual beneficial relationships, and most frequently of voluntary associations. Secondly, it is less a dominance relationship and more of a leadership relationship. Why do factories in Malaysia produce Intel processors, because of the power of American military might or because of Intel's innovation and product excellence?

America hasn't retained it's position on the top of the economic stack of the world merely out of some abundance of natural resources, military might, or large corporations. Rather, America has proven to be more innovative and more dynamic than the rest of the world, generally by a fair margin. America has germinated and grown not just many of today's largest corporations but many of today's biggest industries. A huge percentage of the Fortune 500 companies didn't even exist 20, or 50 years ago.

No country has been able to match that dynamism, nor do any countries look likely to match that dynamism in the near future. The rest of the world is still struggling to break out of business models that would be more familiar in 1950s America, meanwhile America is transitioning to an even more dynamic and innovation centric economic model as startup culture begins to spread and more and more individuals start to see themselves as and become freelancers and founders than mere employees. For that reason alone I think America will probably do just fine and keep its place at the top of the heap in the world economy. That being said, there's plenty of room for everyone in the world to be rich, regardless of where the engine of dynamism in the world rests. I think in the next 20 to 50 years we'll see much of India, South America, and at least coastal China become fully first world societies, with individual income and wealth in the same range as that of America, Western Europe, Japan et al.
Here's a copy on Google Docs. I hate PDFs:

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B8mB_WI1jRkCMzgyZWY5MzY...
Patrick, I will absolutely buy you the 99d logo of your choosing if you'll A/B test it. I would love to know the results of this test.

If only we could convince Colin to try this experiment.
Another workaround is to assign a data url to the image tag, then replace the source with javascript.

Something like
<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7">
Whether or not Paul Graham is "a fraud", the way to get that message out is not posting links on random HN discussions. That's spam.
A rational market has to discount your bank balance by the probability they will ever see their piece of it. It's rare now for a company to wind down in an orderly way, rather than spend all their money trying to recover and then fold.
Can we agree that it's possible for a start-up to buy more office space than it needs, and that would be a waste of money? Is it also possible to buy more logo than you need? Wouldn't that be a waste of money too?

Larger companies can (and should) shell out for design, but a smaller company should be spending a much smaller amount. They don't need a 150 page branding and style guide, they just need a logo for the top of the newsletter so they can present an image that's proportional to the size of their business.
For those that haven't come across it before the object-capability model deals with this sort of problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model

Edit: That of restricting each process to only be allowed to do certain things.
This is a pretty good article. The ideas are things that both Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky have mentioned many times in their articles but it is nice to see these ideas backed up by some real experience.
I see your point about progress but I'm not sure I agree that everything has progressed. At the very least it seems as though it has taken us 70 years to revive the booms in social rights and lifestyle that happened in 10 years through the 1920s. I guess I just find it hard to look at kids growing up in LA among regular gang violence, or murders and regular serious violence happening in schools and say that this is progress.

Some comparison points:

Marriage rates have fallen massively. Divorce rates have risen massively.

% Illiteracy (1930: 4.3% / 1%) (1930 had significant gains since prior decade) However, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States raises serious questions about current literacy rates, suggesting illteracy may be 25% or higher, the point being claiming we are more educated on average is questionable.

Prisoners / 100k (1929: 98.8 | 2008: 754)

Crime Rates: Statistics vary but seem comparable. This was quite a surprise as crime rates today are around double that of 1960 (much higher for particular forms of crime).

Mean income (only counts those who filed, inflation adjusted to 2007) (1923: $74,102.15 | 2007: $62,369)

Life Expectancy: Much higher now, but general sources suggest this is due to medicine, not better living (factors such as lack of exercise and poor nutrition are considerably higher now).
Thanks for posting the link. I just read the entire page, hundreds of comments. Fascinating. Like very few writers - Ebert has a rare gift of making people write back to express themselves. Everyone has personal stories. Reading through the hundreds of responses, Ebert has made them happier by letting them express them.

Two comments stood out.

"Let me share my favourite guidance from Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, my mentor in life:
"Life is the accumulation of all the moments we live. One who cannot live meaningfully today cannot hope to lead a brilliant life tomorrow. No matter what grand plans one makes, if he does not value each moment, they will be just so many castles in the air. All the causes in the past and all the effects in the future are condensed within the present moment of life. Whether or not we improve our state of life at this moment will determine whether we can expiate the evils we have caused since the infinite past and be able to build up good fortune to remain for all eternity. The key is whether or not we have faith strong enough to decide that this may be the last moment of our life. The above passage, therefore, gives us the principle for changing our karma."

Two:

"Here is an homage to the passionate kiss, in a poem by a romanian poet, Nichita Stănescu - "They kiss". In beautiful images as well, next to the translation http://bit.ly/54KtKw
Wonderful kissing pictures, then and now: http://bit.ly/b2sWCI ('Le Baiser de L'Hotel de Ville') , http://bit.ly/bjtZAV

Ebert: I just tweeted "They Kiss." Yes, the video plays perfectly once the poem has been read. Such a melodic language. And I love your taste in movies and books on your blog. "
How about donating small prices for the winners? Similar to ICFP programming contest bragging rights [1].

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFP_Programming_Contest#Prizes
> Well... hopefully R6 will pull things together a bit.

Do you mean "R7"? Because R6 seems to have actually done the opposite.

> Personally I'm not a real fan of cpan. The qualilty is sort of hit and miss.

The hit-or-miss quality is a necessary "evil" for having something as good as the CPAN. Yes, it's got a lot of crap, but there are a lot of gems that save many people a lot of work.

> I like python's approach better. The standard library is robust and broad enough to handle most things.

It has been said that the Python standard lib is where modules go to die. Guido himself has implied [^1] that modules in the std lib already have one foot in the grave.

[^1]: http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/the-fate-of-distu...

The future of successful general purpose languages is to have a small core with a vibrant external "CPAN". There just aren't enough core developers to maintain a large high-quality batteries-included standard library of modules. Much better is a dedicated loosely-coupled mostly active community of maintainers -- maintaining the bits that they are personally interested in (which is exactly what the CPAN has).
Just make a new username for your contest-organizing activity.
People could post their own challenges, that would be fine too.
The product would need to be sold in retail to actually reach most customers, so your $40 BOM is going to be a $100 product (with your per unit costs like assembly, test, packaging, shippng) and then a $200+ product at retail.

The challenge is the squeeze from airfoil, roll your own, or just moving your ipod into the other room on the low end, and Sonos on the high end.

Sonos can always drop their pricing and produce a Sonos Lite for $250 if you become a threat.

Unless you come up with a fundamentally cheaper way to do something, it's hard to justify doing a startup. A fundamentally cheaper way in this case is selling Airfoil -- their marginal cost is $0. They can be more profitable selling Airfoil for $10 than you would be selling AlmostSonosLite for $200.

The other problem is user adoption and marketing -- the set of potential users for this is pretty small, relative to the overall consumer electronics market. Convincing people they actually need this is going to be very hard. The main use cases I see for wireless speakers are wireless rears in an HT system to avoid running cable, and temporary setups in large spaces (like at a party outdoors).

The core Sonos use case, listening to a central repository of music or HT audio in multiple rooms, seems rather specialized, and a lot of the potential customers would value the higher audio quality and polish of the sonos system enough to pay for it. If you're not going to put good speakers + amp in each room, having a good quality portable system (like a dock for an ipod) seems like the standard solution.

The biggest indicator that this is a soft market is that Sonos hasn't sold a huge volume in 6 years, even adjusting huge volume for their pricing being kind of high.
Also, anyone who gets below -10, or something, should have their commenting ability either just totally killed (which is basically banning them, since their votes wouldn't count and they couldn't comment, though I guess they could post some submissions to get back into commenting territory and then fix themselves) or at least frozen until a moderator decides that they aren't spamming/intensely trolling.
i could care less if you get karma. frankly, you'd deserve it for orchestrating this.
Your immune system uses a wide range of methods to find and fight infection. However, while identification is based on finding things outside of the "Normal" range, fighting it is all about signatures.

Vaccination works by preparing the body to fight something that looks like X by dumping millions of copy of something that looks like X into your body. At which point your immune system feels it needs to really fight X with everything it has so it develops a specific response. aka Adaptive immunity is triggered in vertebrates when a pathogen evades the innate immune system and generates a threshold level of antigen. SEE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system

This is also why you can have auto immune diseases, if you trip the "fight" response to something that should be left along you get a world of problems. You immune system is more than willing to kill cancer, or even normal cells, and inflammation can be vary harmful.
This is straight scary. I've lived in Spain, UK and Germany (after being in the US for 4 years) and the contrast is ... astounding. Most young people here do want to be civil servants.
He had me until he quoted Kanye West.
I guess my point isn't that 1920s were better than now completely, but that the rate of social progress made in the 1920s (including citizenship for Native Americans as you've pointed out) was unparalleled. If that had continued my argument is that by 1940 society would be where it is now, instead of taking 1948 for full Native American rights, the 1960s for an end to segregation or 2003 for homosexuality to be legal.

Do you think if the 1920s society could trade with modern society it would take long to exceed our lifespans with their healthier lifestyles and our modern medicine and plumbing as you've pointed out?
Ummm...

>People need to accept that they are just assuming their rightful place atop the world order

No, that's okay. Thanks for the suggestion though. I'd love to hear your theory of 'rightful' places in the world order.

You have an odd view of the world and seem to be very angry. You hate older people, but revere the Chinese, who revere old people. Strange.

I have met very intelligent people from many backgrounds. Whether they are from East Asia, or South Asia, or anyplace that produces stereotypically smart people makes little difference in my experience.

In other posts you have implied that you had special knowledge of Chinese internet usage patterns. Are you being incredibly disingenuous when you act like the overwhelmed white American in your post?
That would certainly spice things up.

Hacking and puzzling are intricately interwoven anyway, especially debugging. It's no wonder that plenty of hackers have hobbies like lockpicking.
Atlanta. It's a huge metro with a fairly low cost of living. Fair winter weather (no snow) and the summers are alright too. Lots of smart kids from Georgia Tech, plenty of security-related startups, lots of finance companies, etc. I also recently learned of an early stage tech statup seed funding firm based here (Shotput ventures).
Yeah definitely is. I guess I should be talking about the first derivative of social rights. I believe this was higher in the 1920s than now.
Shooting for the stars simply isn't in the best interests of the founders. That's why it's not popular. The most common exit now is a relatively small acquisition. All founders want (their first time anyway) is to walk away with FU money. Shooting for a $1.6 billion exit simply isn't worth the risk. Better to sell for $50 million to the guy that's shooting for the stars.
One more:

"I don't know what happened in normal co-ed colleges. My best pal Shapiro and I enrolled at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs New York, the year it went co-ed. Maybe two dozen young men in a sea of thousands of horny, curious young women.

In addition, I was a rock'n'roll musician with a hot band duded out in the heighth of nadsat fashion. I was also an athlete, currently tops in gymnastics. What a hunk I was. What a stud. A thoroughly modern and sexually enlightened young lion! The pick of the litter was always mine to be had. I engaged with oh, 5 or 6 whole women over the course of about a year. I may be exaggerating.

Shapiro was a skinny nebbish with glasses. Could hardly even play guitar. His hobby was candle making. He planned to be a marine biologist. His hero was Alfred Korzybski and he liked baseball.

One Sunday afternoon I paid Shapiro a visit. He told me he'd been depressed the night before, so he'd laid awake counting up the women he'd been to bed with in the past year here at Skidmore. One hundred twenty five, he said plaintively. With his penchant for honesty and mathematics, I knew he wasn't exaggerating."

By Tom Dark on January 15, 2010 11:01 AM

Ebert (about my pal Shapiro, nebbish, stud, self-made multimillionaire): What does a guy like that have?

---A complete and utter lack of pretentiousness, is what I finally learned. We're still pals. If it's any consolation, he's been sick a few times. Albeit, he's fine now.

---And now, what does a guy like Roger Ebert have? I went nuts over your last essay and you've topped yourself again. This memoir of yours: if you really want to help save the world, we'll need a chapter titled "How To Do That."
Crime rates are considerably higher too though.