skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Worst...written...article...EVER!

Though you found this via a blog post, its origin is an opt-in weekly investors newsletter. That newsletter isn't written to make quick points to hurried drive-by readers following links from social news sites.

Its primary audience is its regular readers, familiar with Mauldin's discursive style, slow build, and combination of multiple topics in one letter. He's providing a mind-meld, not a cliff's notes bullet list. It's good for his intended audience.

I hate to see valuable things criticized in absolute global terms ("worst... EVER") when in fact the criticism is really relative and local ("bad for my purpose of the moment"). For all its benefits, the web makes this problem worse -- because it's so easy to link/excerpt/republish/retitle removing the original context.
Commuter wrote novel on his phone on verge of multi-million dollar movie deal
There is good evidence that you cannot simply burn off calories this way. That the body will reduce energy consumption at other times to compensate. The overall effect of exercise on energy consumed by the body is minimal. That is, exercise does not build metabolism and in the absence of increased food intake exercise will result in lower metabolism. Try reading Good Calories, Bad Calories. I've been surprised by the number of things I have thought or been taught that are directly contradicted by the experiments reported in this book.
"I feel that many people take it at face value and actually think that "the GPL forces to share modification", unconditionally."

If you use GNU licensed software, you are required to give out all of your changes to anyone that asks. In addition to this, anyone that requests the source can just as easily start sharing it and all of your modifications for free.

It sounds like you are getting annoyed because people aren't stating the obvious.
I was under the impression that copying from the location bar was supposed to include the http://. If it doesn't, that is a pretty strange oversight.
That's a reasonable game-theoretic point -- and another reason why I'd like to know their names.

I think the famous investors now rallying against these new rules can meet the new limits themselves, but know the industry as a whole will be hurt if they lose their $1-2.5mil net worth angel peers.

So if there's some subset of angels who like this for non-positive-sum personal-advantage, let's out them. (There may be none; this could so thin the field of hopeful startups they lose far more in dealflow than they gain in lessened competition. But let's see.)
ODE has been around for years. Did something big happen? Why is this here?
In a world where Wolfram Alpha can do all the algebraic calculations for you, isn't learning to solve problems more relevant? I'd say that problem solving is the core of mathematics. Am I wrong?
The www. prefix is a special case for people; it literally means "its the world wide web" or "its the internet" to them. Technically, the subdomain is irrelevant. But, most people don't know this. They don't know how the internet works and (I'd suspect that this is true in more cases than you might think), think that www. is needed to get to whatever site they want to visit.

Of course, this is all assuming that they even type the address in, rather then searching.
The Best of Steve: Performance at JSConf
You are telling me that you eat 1000 calories less than required and you aren't tempted to break the diet?
:)
Banks don't compete with angel financing, because any business capable of getting a bank loan would be crazy to take angel financing instead.

Suppose your company gets a bank loan. If the company is successful it pays back the loan with interest; if it's unsuccessful it goes broke and pays back nothing. The bank thus really hates lending money to companies with a significant chance of failure.

Suppose your company gets an angel investment instead. If the company goes broke it still pays zero, but if the company is successful then they'll have to pay a lot more than the principal back. If you can get a bank to lend you money it's stupid to sell off part of your company at damn near any valuation.
Wouldn't this cause me to get 2 alerts instead of 1 (notifo alert followed by SMS alert)?
Ask PG: Voting Behaviour Wishlist
Manytimes I have clicked the down-arrow when I wanted to click up-arrow and vice versa. Can we have Edit votes functionality OR up-arrow on the left and down arrow on the right of the line OR bigger arrows?

Edit: Upvoted this request: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845173
I went through this exact process a few weeks ago, when I started using Mercurial as my main source control. This article would have helped a lot.

I settled on Codebasehq, btw, and I'm extremely happy so far.
If my estimate of the value of the rest of the text is significantly less than my estimate of the value of the time and effort it would take me to read it, I'll skim to see if there's more value ahead, and if I don't find much I'll stop reading entirely.

Contributing factors:

- length

- clarity (grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.)

- readability (layout, font, color scheme, distracting ads mid-page, etc.)

- directness/relevance (getting to the point, not getting sidetracked.)

- insightful or thought-provoking ideas (even if I disagree)

- correctness (in terms of facts as well as reasoning; non-sequiturs and factual inaccuracies, especially egregious ones, reduce my confidence in the author)

I found this particular article very close to my cutoff several times, though I did eventually finish it. Negative factors included opening with 2 paragraphs on Howard Zinn, several strange non-sequiturs like the one pointed out in the grandparent comment, excessive verbosity, irrelevant details (like the number of coins it costs per pumpkin), and stretches in reasoning (Farmville is "productive" and "not governed by rules" but "cause and effect"?) Occasional insights, and even occasional wrong-but-thought-provoking ideas, provided just enough value to keep me reading. But I'm a stay-at-home dad with a lot of free time; my valuation of my free time would go up if I had less of it, and I probably wouldn't have gotten past the first 3 or 4 paragraphs.
How many angel investors really have less than $2.3 million in assets?

If I had to guess, I'd say that the increase in the cap was to try to cut down on Wall Street shysters ripping off doctors and marketing VPs. People with less than two million in assets are probably not full time investors, but rather are working-wealthy. They have day jobs and they don't have staff accountants or lawyers.

But I could be wrong. Maybe this cap will have a negative impact on Angels. If so, the thing for Angel firms to do is contact your California senators, whose votes will be critical in the passage of the bill, and get an amendment
Exercise a lot. It's easy to reach Marathon levels, and I guarantee you'll loose weight.
I don't buy that. Your whole argument is based around assets being worth enough to mitigate risk and they simply aren't. Taking the hot dog stand for example they're going to spend most of their money on merchandise and rent which aren't assets that can be repossessed. For those few assets that can be repossessed a bank has to go through petitioning a court to give them permission to repossess, then they have to pay someone to repossess the merchandise and then they have to pay to auction off the merchandise. That's a lot of money to spend for what amounts to some tables and a grill.

The same is true of most new businesses. Even those that create assets in their product (since the bank has to sell off something that people clearly weren't willing to buy from the original business).

As for high tech firms my whole point was that banks can't compete with Angel investors right now but if this law passes they'll have limited options which will push them towards the banks (which in turn is exactly what the banks want)
> Among the many product reviews, the best was the one with a two year old having a first encounter with an iPad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT4EbM7dCMs). For her, the iPad was a natural, as natural as month tongue,

uh, that kid already knew how to use an iphone so taking to the ipad is no surprise at all. my older son (not even 2 yet) can use both android and ipod touch without problem. there is no doubt that touch-screens are great in small form factors like these, and apple deserves a lot of credit for popularizing them.
No one forces you to live lavishly. You can rent a small apartment instead of buying a house and having to pay a mortgage, you can travel on a modest budget instead of buying a Summer house you'll use only 2 weeks per year. You don't need a trophy wife if you have some game. You have no one to blame but yourself for your weaknesses. Yes, because living to impress others is weakness.

A couple of friends did what you mentioned. Lived frugally, saved a lot of money, then started their own companies. They're both millionaires now. The guys who were too weak to pull that off are still in "the Street", they lead comfortable lives, but they are miserable... they are slaves to their vanity and to their trophy wives who have a lot to gain from divorce.

This has nothing to do with idealism. It has to do with willpower. Most people lack the will to improve themselves simply because it's too much work and effort...
Airbnb (YC S09) mobilizes to help stranded travelers
Yeah, just make the technology to cope with it. Many of Japan's buildings are earthquake-resistant. Active volcano nearby? Invent ash-resistant datacenter equipment.
Yes, and weighing the whole thing against alternatives makes it questionable.

First, it might save lots of energy, but it is also a lot more complicated than just having brakes, which it is going to have anyway.

And how much energy would it really save? It still has to accelerate that detachable portion which could be a substantial fraction of the whole, and furthermore the train would probably need to be substantially heavier to support the extra mechanism, which would be a loss . . .

Still, it is a creative leap, which makes one think about how to be similarly inventive. You have to get some wild ideas before figuring out the details.
My final paragraph addresses this issue: there's an easy-to-use, unalterable reset switch (either software or hardware) that will restore the device to factory settings, and a clause in the service agreement that says tech support will not help you if you refuse to remove your device from geek mode.

Non-app store apps getting popular hasn't been a problem on other mobile devices.
GV currently doesn't send actual SMS to your phone when you receive a GVSMS. And, since part of the point of GV is to be a free SMS service, they don't want to defeat the purpose for their user by sending them a real one.

They do, however, offer the option of SMS for voicemails.

EDIT: Ah, yes. Thanks to jackowayed I see that they do offer actual SMS. Well, the main advantage here is that it keeps it free. I also don't have an unlimited SMS plan, and several people were asking for this feature on Notifo (including myself), so here it is!
Repeat itself how?
Looking up the Gimli Glider it seems that they had a 12:1 glide ratio, so if your engines fail at 35,000 feet that should give you a range of about 128 km. I'm not sure whether it's possible, without leaving Europe, to get more than 128 km from the nearest airstrip capable of landing at least a small airliner.

Difficulties: if they're flying low to avoid the ash. Also, not all of Europe is at sea level, so if you're flying at 35,000 feet over the Alps then you might only be 25,000 feet above ground.
LTR on my screen
Yes they do. http://pic.danieljackoway.com/04_18_2010_16:16:07.png Just check that box.

But I still really like this--to the extent that I was working on writing the exact same thing before he released this--because I only have 200 SMS/month on my plan, and I don't want to pay the exorbitant fees to get unlimited.
How is Obamacare a pejorative?

Obama thinks that it's a BFD (to quote Biden), one that he worked very hard to achieve. He's said that he sees it as a significant legacy of his administration.

Why shouldn't he get the credit?
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Oracle and all other large tech corporations benefit if the money to startups is cut off or diminished.

Getting rid of potential competition through legislation is a tried and true method.
"I think you have to consider the sort of equilibriums that are created. If, over time, people observe that the set of people who create software are not the same set of people who are making money on it - maybe not even making a living wage off their work - then people will cease to participate. This is one reason why the GPL is popular: it encourages people to participate because they won't feel "screwed"."

I don't know why these people would feel 'screwed'. Most developers don't understand or enjoy marketing. If someone comes along, re-packages your source code, and makes money on it, they are doing a good job at marketing and selling. This takes lots of time and effort.

If they want to make money on their code, they should sell it (or make it into an app).

As I've stated in my above comments, this doesn't sound like freedom to me. I'm allowed to use a person's source code, but only if I follow a strict set of rules (and they are going to feel screwed if I can do what they can't). The GNU is against most forms of commercialism. The FSF and the people supporting it just won't admit it.

The BSD license supports true freedom.
For some reason, the link is here: http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargi...
I posted an open-source command-line utility on github for restoring (downloading) Arq backups from your S3 account:

http://sreitshamer.github.com/arq_restore/
I used to have an old laptop that overheated like crazy, it rested on a 6 pack of soda that had been in the fridge. I had 2 sets of 6 packs so I could rotate them as they warmed up.

Take the six pack, fold it flat:

000

-----

000

Laptop on top :)
> At Stanford, female graduate students in computer science are encouraging freshman women through a group called Women in Computer Science.

We have a Women in Computer Science club here at Arizona State. The current president is a man.
Maybe you just have to clean the fans?
Google Doesn't Do Evil, But It Is Creepy
The conceptual understanding is certainly essential, but if you want to use a computer to do symbolic/algebraic manipulation, how could you be sure to understand the results or even properly phrase the question without a thorough understanding of the symbols and the rules for their manipulation? The best I think that something like Alpha could do is to help elucidate the underlying principles or give you a quick answer for guesswork or estimation, like a calculator.
I hate to get off-topic but it depresses me so much every time I see someone still failing to realise that the expression is "couldn't care less", which makes logical sense, instead of "could care less", which doesn't.
http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/exandwtloss.ht...

"In contrast, Sopko et al. (1985) in a twelve-week study, with obese men, reported that when the negative energy balance created by diet only and exercise only are equal, the two treatments produce similar results. The participants in the diet only group (n=10) experienced a weight loss of 6.1kg by restricting their caloric intake 500 kcal/day. The exercise only group (n=6) lost 6.2 kg by performing a treadmill walking program in which they expended 500 kcal/day. The men in the diet only group went from a body fat of 31.4% to 25%, where as the exercise only group went from 26.7% to 19%"

From reading this, it seem like many studies didn't attempt to make calorie deficit equal.
And if you put your laptop in the oven you can rip a CD faster. Also I've heard that bubble sort finishes faster when in a microwave set to Popcorn.
Springloops -- link: http://springloops.com/ -- also do FTP/SFTP/SCP deployments and provide a much more flexible way of handling deployments in comparison to Beanstalk. The only let down is that they only support SVN at the moment, but I do know that if you ask for beta access you can use Git.

However, I've been waiting on them to implement Git functionality for well over 5 months now and still no luck :(
Papers on MapReduce algorithms
The former, which is really bad and not housing bubble induced (i.e. it looks to be structural), with industrial Ohio south of it also not doing well.

My understanding of MSU (which I considered going to in 1979) is that it's an above average state school. Location aside, I wouldn't expect its grads to have any more than the normal amount of trouble finding jobs (the normal right now of course being bad).
Your post is disgusting and you are a disgusting person. I'm not sure if there's a purpose to your post, other than to call JWZ stupid. Do you feel better about yourself now?

You say he's ignorant? Have you considered that you are the one who is ignorant? The last time I checked, which was only a few minutes ago, JWZ's post was about his experience writing an iPhone port of an application he had written. It was not a hyperrationalist treatise on the differences between the iPhone and Mac OS X api's. What, do you expect people to be some kind of expert on 3D graphics before trying to get anything done with OpenGL? It's not like he works in the video games industry. It's not his job to read everything about OpenGLES and understand it fully before trying to use it.

Speaking of ignorance, you seem to be ignorant of the fact that, regarding his rant about CSS, you're wrong and he is right. I suppose being talented in the spotting of ignorance is simply not a binary situation, which you show quite well.

What other things are you ignorant about? You're ignorant of how arrogant you are. Well, you might not be ignorant in some of the ways you're arrogant, I really don't know. You're also ignorant of the fact that when somebody complains about an API being different than they expect, it's not insightful to say, "Oh ho ho, you're not well educated on that!" Of course he's not well-educated on the subject! That's the reason he had something to write about!

Oh, did I just say "insightful"? No, wait, you said it first. So he's not speaking from a position of insight, is that the problem? What do you expect, do you expect every blog post to be some insightful commentary to help the reader understand the crazy world we live in? Maybe he was just writing about how his day went. You seem to be ignorant of that, too.
Campaign contributions and voting positions
I bought the Simplenote app for the iphone so I could be more productive on the go. I was going to try and write a novel. However, I'm settling for taking notes for my blog and apps that I'm writing. I think mobile learning and productivity are going be big in the future. Want to learn Spanish while on the go? I'm working on it. :-)

http://www.appbrain.com/search?q=h4labs
You are right - but I think there is a difference in that omitting http:// doesn't break so many things.

Try this link: http://www.news.ycombinator.com for example - this is what happens to most addresses not prefixed with www. This means that hiding the www. would mean waiting to work out that the site doesn't exist (or the connection is down) before trying the non www. version, and worse that you would get the wrong site if www.foo.com and foo.com were distinct. Hiding the http:// doesn't have such massive implementation issues.
Sorry about that guys, I was trying to write a little script to auto-post and it had a bug.

Correct link: http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargi...
98% is surprisingly high (though of all the OSS projects I've used, forked, etc., I can think of exactly no women contributors).

Here's a source: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~scotch/maurer_and_scotchmer_os... [PDF, p. 13]
Services on top of Prowl have been doing this in the exact same manner for quite some time. Glad to see a service like Notifo supporting this though. It has a somewhat nicer interface than the Prowl app.
Google uses startups for hiring inflow, I doubt they want to choke them off.
> Small Business Loans are the #1 way that people start businesses in this country (no one Angel invests in a hot dog stand

Even if SBA loans are the number 1 way people start biz (Canada isn't the US), they're not the way people start biz that have new products or services.

No, you can't repossess the rent paid by a hot dog stand or its inventory, but a hot dog stand is fairly low risk. We know that people will buy hot dogs, so the only question is whether the applicant can manage to not screw up the cooking, can sell, can manage, and has a decent location.

Quora isn't going to get an SBA loan.

And, while I like hot dogs as much as the next guy, Quora and its ilk make a bigger difference.

There doesn't seem to be any shortage of the sort of things that the SBA funds.
Maybe you can you put in a redirect using mod_rewrite
Fair enough, I hadn't realised how difficult it was to control the exact speed of a train at high speed.

But if that's the case then it still seems like the original problem of running two trains right alongside each other, on different tracks, for several minutes while people cross from one to another, and with the consequence of any error being passengers getting sliced in half, would be even harder.
They demoed this at jsconf this morning and it was quite impressive. They did a side-by-side comparison between the NPR iPad app and a sproutcore-powered equivalent in mobile Safari. The browser clone looked and ran great, and actually had much smoother scrolling animation.
Right. My point was supposed to be that the average user doesn't know about these implications. And since it actually makes a difference in what page is viewed, don't hide the www. from them. Sorry if I wasn't too clear.
This is specifically for the iphone. The Android Google Voice app supports direct push...

Anyways nice work!
If this is a high speed train, and the front car of the train is always being rotated backward, how do you deal with making sure that this first car is aerodynamic, and remains aerodynamic once it is no longer the first car?
Analyzing my own eating habits, I think that the light, constant exercise factor is representative of regulated behavior that causes people to maintain weight. That is, exercising regularly is a reflection of a person's lifestyle (not a stressed out entrepreneur) that coincides with maintaining a healthy weight, as well as helping a person regulate their behavior (the good feelings and satiation make it easier to not have events where you eat crap).
I'm not a fan of the GNU GPL for most cases, but your statement isn't quite correct. You are required to give out all of your changes to anyone to whom you distribute asks.

If I am a downstream ISV that has code under the GNU GPL because of upstream incorporation and sell my software to users, only those users I sell my software to may legitimately ask for a copy of the source. I cannot restrict them from giving it away or sharing it, but I don't have to honour all requests for the source and my modifications—just the ones from people I've distributed the software to.

Most businesses that use GNU GPLed software choose to either link to the upstream and host local patches, or host their custom distribution entirely, effectively giving the software away to everyone. They aren't required to do so by the terms of the license.
Jungianism calls this the 'self' (I believe; not a Jungian); the wider potential human that you aren't being. Andrew Hodges a psychiatrist discovered something like what's described, too ('Deeper Intelligence'), a subconscious concern with integrity and boundaries.