skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If it wasn't MySQL, the same people would flock to, and poorly use, some other tool.

That's what I said, deeper in the thread. I don't think it's because MySQL is terrible, but almost all the people who don't really know databases start with MySQL by default, so the community surrounding it consistently has more people who are grossly misinformed than (for example) Postgres's.
Checkout Shpongle. It's great chillout.
I hear anything that goes in the mood, from Heavy Metal like Gojira to Pop/Rock like K's Choice.
We tried to get coverage on TC and Mashable for Twitalbums.com but none listened to us (I lost count how many times I wrote them). I also wrote to The Next Web and nothing. Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb.com picked up on the story and she did a wonderful job reviewing our startup. The review sent a ton of traffic and gave us a good initial boost. Needles to say we love RWW :-)
I heard somewhere that people's #1 fear is public speaking (#2 being death). So I certainly don't think your alone.

Simply put, I'd like to emphasize that the problem is entirely within you. This can all change without the action (or awareness) of _any_ other people. You simply have to ask yourself -- why is it that I allow other people's opinion of me to influence what I think about myself? Why is my self-image tied up in the opinion of others?

I used to struggle with this (in middle school) until I realized that other people's behavior is governed entirely by their own problems, their own insecurities and concerns -- so their reaction to you has _very_ little to do with you, and a whole LOT to do with them. So not only is it not healthy, it is ILLOGICAL to allow others' opinions to sway you at all!

Meditate on this when these feelings start to paralyze you. Remember that plenty of great work was ridiculed and derided when it was first accepted -- think about Galileo! No matter how bad the publicly responds to whatever you show it, it will likely not be as bad as it was for Galileo. :)
If the rule is cannot deny coverage, high risk people will buy the cheap policy and then switch when they need the expensive benefits. For that matter low risk people will switch if they roll snake-eyes and need to schedule something expensive like reconstructive surgery. This is essentially the same adverse selection logic that justifies the mandate.

*

People choosing to buy or not buy insurance has gotten reframed, and I find it interesting to see how effectively the switch took place.

In 2008, your hypothetical 25 year old would have been portrayed as a victim, if anything. Screwed over by the greedy health insurance companies who make it impossible to get decent coverage at a reasonable price.

In 2010, he's the bad guy. It's his fault the system is broken. He is morally obligated to buy that health insurance now, and if he argues that he's getting a crappy deal for what he is paying, it's him who is being selfish and greedy.

There are certainly identity politics tangled up in health care reform, but I was talking about the reframing of an issue and fickle public opinion.
Hackers in High School: 2010 Intel Science Talent Search Winners
Cupitor impossibilium.

I've been working on alternative pricing algorithms for 8 years. Most people call this a waste of time. Recently, one of my algorithms started showing great promise. (I'll know within two months.) Do what fascinates you.
How to Save Money in 2010
Of course, but that's orthogonal to my point.
I don't really agree with that. Two examples come to mind:

1) Four color map theorem. I wouldn't have been horribly surprised if the code used to prove this made a mistake in 1,936 maps it had to check. Give that a second program verified it, I'd be more surprised now, but at the time, I would have been most worried about how to input the 1,936 maps. (I have no idea how this was done, if even generating them was programmatic, errors would have been less likely).

2) Automated symbolic logic programs are probably easy to make mistakes with. You need to have perfect parsing logic on the strings of each theorem and generate the new strings perfectly. I'm not saying its impossible, but mistakes are probably easy to make.
I thought he meant the AMAA thread, didn't realise you'd been using pay ads too.
The Haskell Platform 2010.1: the standard development environment for Haskell
Jakob Nielsen: 80-20 rule applies to the page fold
silly question, but why cant someone who knows how to use a scope simply repair it? Off topic i had a bit of fun the other day fixing a HP pavilion laptop which has a design fault (look on ebay) and all it cost me was some copper pipe and heat sink compound.
That has been suggested by the site founder, except that the suggestion is changing flagging rather than changing karma allocation.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589
I load up all of DJ River's Ambient Chillout mixes and his Colored room series (Blue room, Green room, etc) and hit "random".

He was an excellent mixer and I feel sad that he (apparently) has quit. He recently let his site djriver.com lapse but you can still get his stuff through iTunes or torrent.
Ask HN: Anybody here comfortable with Thermomechanical simulation?
Hi, I face a problem, not directly specific to the HN crowd, but since there are so many smart peoples here coming from various fields, I tough I may ask the question as well here, who knows.Is Anybody here comfortable with Thermomechanical simulation? It's for my Thesis (mechanical engineering), and I really can't find much about it. It seems to be a research field at the moment and very new. thanks in advance for any help.
I actually did use it for a week but I'm back at Google. There wasn't enough draw to pull me away - though I'll try it again in a few weeks when the owner has had time to respond fully to the reddit feedback.

I think he's going to be a very wealthy man!
A Multilingual Password Generator using GWT and Google App Engine
As I understand it, if the Senate changes anything, then the house passing the senate bill in the first place undoes itself. I'm not positive on the exact mechanics at this point because they were changed a couple times but I do know that the plan, as publicly pronounced by leadership in both houses, is that what's on paper now is what will be passed by the senate and signed by the president.

Don't count the sale till the money's in the bank and all that, but it seems like that's the most likely scenario at this point, they only need 51 / 59 democratic senators.
Stock Markets Around The World Make A Comeback
A comparison of stock markets around the world and their growth since 2009.
Dubstep here as well. Ambient dub is the best music I've ever coded to; Dirty dubstep for when that gets boring :)
Google sees the Benefits of SEO
nature stuff for the space. i like listening to recordings of thunderstorms.
Looks nice.

Something similar that I have used in that past.

http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-online-emergent-...

http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-series/

I think these are a bit more polished with more options.

Edit: Online Flash version: http://davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/

Now I just use Things for mac. Works for me.
Hey Mark - I think you're moving in the right direction by using your blog to start covering some NYC-based startups. You've always had a passion for that.
www.bassdrive.com

Works great for me.
how did u convert this ?
The eye-tracking image for Amazon is intriguing - I wonder what it was that made so many people scroll right down to the bottom.
This is a very interesting topic, but the linked article does not add much. It can be shortened to one sentence: Japanese are conformists, and therefor unlikely to be entrepreneurs. While certainly part of the problem, Japan used to be far more conformist, and companies like Sony and Nintendo still got started. Many of the companies, such as Hitachi, Toshiba and Panasonic were actually founded in the early 1900s, and later turned into hi-tech electronics companies when the opportunity appeared.

One issue is that most successful startups in the past two decades have been related to computer software, while Japan's strength has rather been electronic appliances.

Perhaps Japan needs to find a path of entrepreneurship that actually appeals to Japanese in their 20s and 30s, rather than desperately try to copy the valley? My interpretation of Japanese history is that the country is very resistant to change, but when it does change, it can happen very quickly and in surprising ways.
It'll get better.

1. Yes, practice little things.

2. Yes, you'll die, so don't focus only on the shyness.

3. Don't worry, it'll get better with age (age brings practice and confidence), and although you'll likely always have some level of shyness, it will get to the level where your shyness is charming, and just an aspect of your personality. Nothing wrong with that.
I've got a buddy with one, and I've seen at least two out in the wild around Milwaukee, not including my own Pre, and my wife's Pixi (both of us love our phones and for different reasons).

I find this whole "Palm doing poorly" thing to be rather odd. I really hoped Palm would return to it's rightful place, and I'm disappointed to see Palm on the way out again.

I sincerely hope WebOS survives. I think it's a great OS.
Try another bike shop. Mine (in USA) will fix spokes and true a wheel for $20.
Medical Comic Books Store for Kids
I listen to post-rock (instrumental) most of the time, and Dragonforce when I really need a boost.
Simple Chart Of Embeddable Scripting Options In Erlang
The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol...
This is great advice. Whenever I've hired a maybe, it's been a complete disaster.

I especially like the idea of only hiring people that intimidate you ... so long as the only intimidating qualities are their skills and knowledge!
Windows/Maemo: just leave me alone, I don't want to learn yet another OS, even if it's Linux. I already have my hands full with Android/iPhone.

WebOS might be a great opportunity. If Google can merge the ChromeOS "browser-centric" interface with Android, then they could create a more seamless mobile <-> desktop experience.

However Apple is in the best position to do this. If they can merge the desktop with the iPhone/iPad Cocoa Touch experience, then they can create a seamless experience from the "digital hub" to all the various mobile devices. Just as a Unix-like command line lurks behind the OS X Desktop experience, a conventional Desktop could lurk behind an iPad-like experience. Perhaps interfaces like the iPad could come to dominate the everyday user's experience more and more, while today's typical workstation becomes the sole province for deep experts.

(Remember the classic PC/Automobile analogy. This would be like the disappearance of oil changes and spark plug cleaning and other home-garage tinkering from the routine experience of car owners, but if you are a true petrol-head, you can save some extra money and buy a MX-5 fitted out with a roll bar as a cheap, fun track car, which you'll have to spend lots of time with to maintain and fix to stand up to the wear and tear of serious driving.)
Xbox 360's Natal will bring 'brilliant innovations,' Sega exec predicts
Don't worry about the technology risk. People already do this, so it isn't impossible. They probably don't do it well, but you only have to do better than random to provide benefit.

Market risk is more of a concern to me. If you're presenting results directly to users they'll probably care greatly about the quality of your algorithm. If you're just using aggregated data to drive, for example, marketing campaigns then the noise will be washed out given enough data.
That is not what I'd call a multisite search engine. It's a multisite search box submitting a query line to a button-selected SE.

I was expecting something like "blindsearch", http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=alicious&type=web .
An Account of the ACM Data Mining Camp
My nr 1 advice: don't forget to make money.
We also discourage posts with no content, even if they're polite - such as just saying "thanks." It's not that we want people to be rude - quite the opposite - it's just that it adds to the noise.
You need a catchy application that lets people understand the benefits of this technique, why not use it to rank the in real-time what things celebrities on Twitter are talking about... or something like that.
How does one know if one arrived before or after this Reddit influx? I first heard about Reddit from people who were complaining about it on hn.
Most bubbles are good, just not for the people who buy in at the top. These tend to be "retail" buyers and so the least able to take the loss. But oh well.

The recent housing bubble is actually distinguished by its particularly useless allocation of capital. The tech boom gave us a number of healthy companies as well as useful infrastructure. The housing bubble gave us a stock of deteriorating future crack houses.
Does it make sense, analytically, to say that there was a healthy railway boom in the 1830s and a bubble in the 1840s? It seems to me that most bubbles grow from a legitimate investment idea; the problem is that as more and more people bid for the securities in question, investors have trouble perceiving when the price has become too high.
I'd start by trying to validate your business model.

1) You need to find out who the paying customers are in this space and what features they really want. It seems very possible that average consumers would have no interest in your service but that power users, marketers or some other segment might. Once you know where the interest is you can make better feature decisions. For example, you might find that reporting, not AI, is what drives marketing sales.

2) Fundemental improvements in AI are really hard. Look at the results of the first Netflix prize. Lots of world class teams worked on that problem and the winning solution only produced something like a 10% improvement in the results. If that's the only edge your business has over the competition I doubt consumers would even notice. On the other hand, AI has matured to the point where it's pretty easy to produce good results. I'd rather bet my business on predicatble, good results and treat it as a pleasant surprise if we make a fundemental breakthrough.

Good luck!
According to CNN, Obama is going to sign the bill on Tuesday. The amendments are a totally separate bill, which will now be punted back and forth between the House and Senate, assuming the Senate doesn't just pass it as it stands.

Source: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/22/obama-to-sig...
In 2008 we sent an email to TechCrunch asking if they wanted an exclusive on our launch. After 2 weeks with no response, we emailed Mashable who promptly responded and wrote an article. The same day the article ran we received a snarky email from TC stating that they expected exclusive coverage and that because Mashable ran us first, TC wasn't going to touch the story. We politely referred them to our original email, they said oops and we all went on with our lives.
Being forced into doing drama also changed my entire life. I cannot recommend it enough. I was relatively talentless and put in the back of the chorus (sang happy birthday during tryouts for a summer musical), but that only gave me more time to socialize with drama people, who are completely different from my close, safe group of friends at the time.

The drama crowd taught me how to relax, how to enjoy life, and how to speak my mind amongst chaos.

It was my mother who forced me to try out (literally threatened me). I was so angry at her for making me do it and so very thankful every day after for having such a life changing experience.
Awesome!

It would be really nice to see what others are creating.

What about saving our themes with a name on the site then the app can allow us to share it and vote it?
"I believe wikipedia would do well in copying ddg interface."

Of all things dukgo has going for it the interface IMO is not one of them.
Amateur made major discovery while accessing telescope over the internet
CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful
It's fairly recent (2 months say): there may have been such influxes before I arrived (about 18 months ago). But recently I noticed a decline in the quality of comments, voting and (yeh) submissions.

The thing that makes me call it a "Reddit influx" is due to a comment posted last week , in response to "what's with all the redditlike commets", from an ex-redditor basically saying that a lot of redditors are coming over to HN because they prefer it now to the "new reddit".

Im sure that's been going on a long time - but it's more noticeable now. Certainly HN is completely different to when I first joined :)
The $80 Million Difference Between Shades Of Blue
Five Easy Ways to Secure Your Linux System
I found this point in particular to be very important:

Speaking of the need to ask any candidate to solve technical problems on the whiteboard:

The best people not only welcome a challenge, they require it. All the great people I know would never work for a company that doesn’t perform a tough, formal interview because they recognize the company will mostly end up with bad employees.
There are plenty of large funds out there, the
more capital you raise the more money you have to deploy and the larger your portfolio exits need to be. Not sure why you think 165MM is a "petty" amount, especially these days! And more than risk management it's "smart" money vs. "dumb" money
"We are worried that we would hit a dead-end and not be able to build what we set out to build."

Listen attentively to your intuition. Your "worry" can stop you faster than any statistical or third opinion about whether AI is a hard problem. Doesn't mean you should stop worrying and continue. Spend time imagining your ideal solution in great detail --- touch, smell and taste it if you can. Judge based on how you feel about that end point.

I heard someone said "AI is what hasn't been done yet." You don't need to prove your worthiness to anyone or any community by "solving a hard problem". Instead, as chasingsparks put it, "do what fascinates you".
That makes no sense to me. A decent wheel costs $70 and of course good ones way more. A spoke costs a couple bucks (tops), so with a decent labor rate, the guy could charge you $35 for the repair. I bet you could find someone to fix it for you.

I wonder if the shop owner stopped carrying repairs because customers are so used to the "disposable everything", that they just assume repair is alwas impossible, and anyone who offers to do it is some sort of scam artist.

Of course,
Is Your Startup Fat or Lean?
Since the comparison happens before var is declared, it will always evaluate to 'true'. I believe the author was thinking about something like so:

(function(name) { var cmp = function() { return name=="tim"; }; var name; return cmp();})("tim");

This still evaluates to true, but I believe it has to do with the rules of shadowing. If you change the declaration to 'var name="bob";' it will return false.
Seems like playing the stock market is the easist way I've found so far. If you bet on a stock by buying 500 shares, the stock goes up ten cents (USD, $0.10), you've made $50 (I'm not counting transaction fees, just the base numbers). If you buy 5000 shares you've made $500. Make $500 three times a month and you're at $18,000 a year. Each $500 gamble may take one or two hours depending on how quickly the NASDAQ is moving.

For the specified amount of $24,000 per year, that's four $500 bets per month.

Mike
On the subject of appealing models for entrepreneurship: see my other post on this thread for why the typical well-prepared middle class person doesn't do it. You have to be a wee bit broken.

Personally I wouldn't touch iPhone development with a ten-foot pole, but there is an entire floor at my local technology incubator related to it, and my town has several iPhone millionaires.

This is one of the "overnight success in ten years" stories: my town has had a technology incubator (previous employer of mine) and an artsy-fartsy "MIT Media Lab"-type academic institution which, for the last decade, has soaked up government subsidies and produced a lot of quirky tortured, brooding artists' takes on the intersection of music and technology. Fast forward to a wee bit ago: it turns out that tortured brooding artists who sweat music and visual design are Kinda Popular Among iPhone Owners. Success breeds success, too -- the technology incubator jumped on the gravy train and there are coffees held every week where folks come to talk iPhone shop.

Now if only we can get them to start doing B2C/B2SB SaaS...
> if you invested in Microsoft or Cisco in the tech boom, you'd be sitting pretty right now

No you wouldn't. MSFT sits now at about a 20% discount to what it was in 2000, while CSCO is trading at about a third of the price it had in early 2000.

This is the defining feature of a bubble -- not only do the bad companies fetch exorbitant prices (there are plenty of those in any economy), but the good companies with valid business models also trade at prices that cannot be justified, meaning that no matter how well you pick the winners, you are still going to get burnt when the bubble bursts.

There were losers in the british railroad bubble in 1830's, but the ones who bought into the winners, did get out ahead. Meaning, the bubble never burst.
This is fantastic. Any tweets with #cashgordon get posted on this smear site, including HTML and JavaScript. Right now this Conservative political site is redirecting to the Labour website or Lemon Party.
it's not an issue, it's in the site:

"Any of the license terms and conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder."
By formal/informal are we discussing setting or interview style?

I've always preferred formal questioning (i.e. asking questions, working with whiteboards etc.) BUT informal setting (so jeans/tshirt, sat on the sofa's with the whiteboard, small talk and chit chat etc.)

This is partly because that is how the company is - and so we interview like we work - but also because I used to hate interviews where you sit over a desk from someone in a suit and tie...

Other good advice I can think of off the top of my head: go out to lunch with your potential candidates. I know the OP advises against that (and agreed, you shouldn't get too personal/involved) but an informal lunch with all the candidates together can be a great ice breaker and a way to judge their personality/interests etc.
Robin Milner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They can be flagged (and are, at least by me), which is better, because then they get killed.
> For what it's worth, my wife really liked those Pre ads.

And FWIW, my wife thought they were creepy and condescending.
Apart from the entire app, you might check out http://kingapi.com/ the website baseline says all "A selection of building blocks for your app"
Side-by-side: How lethal is Vodafone's iPhone killer?
I definitely prefer WebOS over Android.
Hm, what is the error? I can open it in Ubuntu and XP.
I completely missed the point on this post (NoScript was blocking twitter feed). Thought it was some attempt to advertise the Conservatives...
One could make karma = "local karma." Just make one's karma an average of recent posts.
A great product isn’t enough. Why your startup needs to have a Story to tell
Interesting that you don't need a lot of winning bets to make a living. What about losing bets, though? Isn't this a pretty high-risk way to make a living? Also, doesn't it require a fair amount of capital to get started?
By 'formal' I meant having a well defined, consistent list of technical (and possibly non-technical) questions that you will go through with every candidate. Hopefully the questions probe both breadth (various parts of math, computer science, coding ability, and beyond), as well as depth (drilling into an area the candidate is an expert in).

As an interviewer, I couldn't care less what the candidate is wearing or what he looks like (so long as he has basic respect for other people).