skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love this...its so true...very important to get feedback on something very early. No need to have a full product roadmap, just get it out there.
"I've been thinking this for years, ... The people on there the most are broke college kids and younger."

Years are funny that way: things tend to change as they pass.

Facebook has 400 million active users, where "active" means the account has been used in the last 30 days. 200 million of them have logged in in the last 24 hours.

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

To put those numbers in perspective, the Internet itself has about 1.67 billion users. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that many of those daily active users are duplicate or fake, for facebook's demographics to suck, the Internet's demographics must suck.

(Disclaimer: I work for facebook.)
Yikes, typo fixed.
What to Do When a PR Disaster Strikes Your Startup
"["Interesting" may be one word to describe Windows Phone (or whatever they are calling it this month) but most reviews and reports do not seem share your belief that it is in any way indicative of MS finally "bringing things together"...]"

2010 + Wave 4 + Windows Phone + Office 2010 + XBox Live + Zune HD

Yes, they are bringing things together. Is everything complete? No. But you can finally see where they want to go, where everything falls into place, and where they want to go. That's really more what I was meant to say by "bringing things together," the start of the "bringing together", not the end. =)
That's not quite what I was asking. I generally believe that Facebook ads can be successful. I'm curious about what companies are effectively using them now at a large scale.

I also suspect that the effectiveness of Facebook ads has a lot to do with the nature of the product/service being advertised, and the ad itself (just like any advertising).

Your comment applies your specific experience (unknown to me) as evidence for an absurdly general statement ("Facebook ads are worth it") and an ad hominem attack on the author of the article. Classy.
How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity ?

The big problem with Shannon entropy is that it's measured with respect to a probability space, so it's not an "absolute" measure of information. Kolmogorov complexity "solves" this problem by defining information content of a string as the length of the shortest program that generates the string. (You still have to pick a reference UTM, but this only affects the program lengths at worst by a constant.)

[Disclaimer: Hobbyist, not expert.]
Thinking in the Rain: An artist takes on the umbrella (2008)
Take a look at CellTrust:

http://www.celltrust.com/Products/SDKAPI/CellTrust-API-Overv...

I don't know if they have support for sending SMS to Brazil, but we did have success with them here in Canada.
"He defines information based on the frequency of 'events'. This means that both time and 'events' are more primal than his notion of 'information'."

True, but what do you expect for a popular review of a book that itself is a popular review of some pretty abstract ideas.

The basic concept is not just that our universe can be described by statistical measures, but that the foundational laws seem to be governed by statistics. At the small scale (individual particles), quantum mechanics basically says that the universe runs itself by rolling dice in very particular ways. Events involving these particles seem to simply be the tangible embodiment of Shannon entropy. Even at the everyday scale of refrigerators and gasoline engines, entropy calculations are the bread and butter of thermodynamics engineers.

It is a major open question in physics whether entropy and statistics are truly foundational, or whether they are simply the large scale average result of a fine-grained deterministic foundation. The "Copenhagen interpretation" takes statistics to be fundamental, and by gosh the calculations sure work nice, but there is no evidence that it reflects a higher truth.

Re. the anthropic principle in physics, it is one approach to answering why certain laws of physics seem to be balanced on a knife edge between chaos on one side and stagnation on the other. If we posit that universes can be created with nearly arbitrary physical laws, then naturally we find ourselves in one that is neither too chaotic nor too stagnant for our existence. The creation of such a universe might be unlikely, but given enough opportunity it is inevitable. This allows for bizarre physical laws without requiring magic or divine intervention. (There are even evolutionary approaches, where events like black hole formation create a new universe similar to its parent. That way if you find yourself in a part of the multiverse conducive to your kind of life, neighboring universes are likely to be very rich in friendly conditions.)

"And how could it be, if we need minds and language to discuss 'information' in the first place?"

If the evolutionary approach were true, universes of pure thought could potentially be created, where the very atoms were symbols grounded in some reality. A mind there wouldn't pick up a pen to draw a symbol, it would just think it into existence. Or such a parent universe could create a universe like ours, to test whether symbol processing is a necessary law of physics, or if it can spontaneously arise from semi-chaotic fundamental laws.
Twilio is great for that stuff. http://twilio.com/
Interestingly, this story actually helped me once. I was debugging an issue where some people in the multi-national company I work for (many offices) could connect to the server and some people could not, and it was thanks to this story that I seriously entertained the possibility that it had something to do with timing, due to the geographical distribution of the problem reports. Subsequent investigation revealed that for various uninteresting technical reasons, the server was setting a 200ms timeout on the SSL negotiation part of the connection, which closely matched the ping times of the participants, including the people who could sometimes connect and sometimes not. And I discovered this far faster by knowing I should be poking around on timing issues, rather than searching out something deeper.

(I am deliberately eliding other details not relevant to this aspect of the story. My point is merely that I am glad I had encountered it. Could easily have saved me a day or two.)
Serious. It is good out-of-the-box, but that's not the point.

What I find disturbing is that the burden of enlisting potential donors falls on the shoulders of those in need and that they are forced to use such inefficient mechanism. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
This was posted a while back, very entertaining story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068
"Loyalty" is staying together and providing work or benefits even when it is financially a bad move. I've never in my life seen a company that is loyal to its employees.

Even not firing people in recession times, providing four monitors or free massages and lunches are not loyalty if they make workers more productive or attract better talent. It would be loyalty only when these actions cost the company much more than they benefit it, as a gift to the employees out of sheer good will.
Woo. Let's chill out a bit.

1. I actually do like Facebook, and am very impressed by what they are pulling off.

2. I learned about Ponzi schemes a while back in macro theory class, before they were mainstream and irremediably tainted by the vileness of Bernie Madoff. The story of Ponzi himself -- as I remember our macro professor telling it five years ago -- is pretty 'funny', or at least provided welcome distraction between two utility maximization derivations in econ class; he's supposed to have been a 16th century Venitian who ended up in the Venice lagoon once the bankers he was pulling his cash from realized what happened. I didn't think of it as a crime. All this to say that I never implied nor intended to imply that Facebook was committing any sort of fraud, immoral behavior or else.

3. What I mean by this derivative thing is quite simple -- imagine the movie Speed with a bomb that explodes, not when the speed goes under X mph, but when the bus's acceleration goes below X mph/h, forcing the bus to keep on accelerating, driving faster and faster and faster. Eventually you'll hit the physical speed limit of the bus, acceleration will converge to zero, and the bus will explode. That's a very silly metaphor for what I was trying to explain - being that, if indeed FB had to rely on an ever growing in-flow of first time ad buyers to keep the lights up, they are would be in as desperate a situation as was Mr Ponzi in 16th century Venice.

Just to cool everyone's mind -- I really don't think this will happen. The team is least extremely smart to have gotten where they are, and I trust Facebook to eventually find as ridiculously profitable a business model as AdSense, with high probability. As a user I do hope it will respect my privacy, and as an entrepreneur I do hope it will allow some cool new distribution models.
Rolling Stone is another one -- they've published some great investigative journalism:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/rollingstone.com
104 year old video of San Francisco
http://www.clickatell.com/
Hmm. I changed jobs 6 times (5 companies) in 3 1/2 years, which averages to a job change every 6 months. Longest stint I had was about a year. As far as I can tell, I have not been noticeably penalised for it in my professional life.

It's definitely the fastest way to increase one's income, and you can't blame people for doing that. My first job was doing technical support (first full, then part-time) at $8.50/hr, and the subsequent 5 job changes were simply progressions to a very modest mid-level IT salary in the $50-$70k range. I don't think that's ridiculous.
Is there anything like this that goes from RubyOnRails to Wordpress? My blog.whyspam.me (run on wordpress) is a mirror layout of the main site, but every time I tweak an element on my main (RoR) site, i have to copy the change to wordpress. I understand why so few companies have their blog with the same theme as their site. A tool to cut up layouts in RoR and make wordpress templates would be awesome!
A standard can require the use of patented code, allowing the patent holders to hold the users hostage. A standard can mandate enormous unnecessary complexity that benefits large corporations by locking out smaller competition, which is a loss to the users (who lose out on competition and a rich market). The text of the standard can be locked behind a paywall, another way of raising the bar for no good reason. A standard can be written with no regard for users at all and consequently fail, wasting valuable standards-writing time (XHTML2). A standard can be written that imposes mandatory DRM, and I'm yet to see the DRM system that actually benefits a user. And perhaps most commonly, a standard can be not-written-at-all, locking the user in for the pleasure of the company (MS Word and friends).

Many of these are often combined.
> But I don't see how CP laws could apply to them in any way.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking along those lines either way. But negligence sounds pretty good.
I agree fundamentally with a lean startup approach. I think the only thing to be careful of is shortchanging yourself. I think there has to be enough put out to test and get feedback on. It will be different for every project. Some can be built quicky, while others take more time. The trick is just to identify what are the core components that make the product. That's another advantage of a lean mentality, it forces you to focus on what's important and that can help the product evolve more potently I believe.
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Your case is justified because you seem to be qualified for something better than what your starting job was. So job hopping made sense for you.

As a hiring manager, I would not hire someone who has been job hopping for the same position. Think of it as a twist on the Peter Principle.
Python IAQ (Infrequently answered questions)
WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars
The harmony sketcher is AWESOME.
Whether a physicist (in modern times and below a certain age) espouses MWI is quickly becoming a great litmus test for whether you should bother listening to them on anything that isn't established textbook material. Copenhagen is pseudo-scientific nonsense, and I'm amazed anyone can work on developing quantum computers while simultaneously denying the existence of what they're designing. I'd cut him some slack if this were just some tangential side point, but if it's critical to his argument the whole of it isn't worth anyone's time.
pretty amazing what can be done with 7.5 kb worth of javascript
Lang Lang plays iPad
So which is it? A Ponzi scheme or a brilliant business model?
Chances Are
Do you think 'rockstars' are 'interviewed' like plebes?
I've heard similar advice about hiring people who are obviously over-qualified and will probably leave in 6 months. You have to use them not as workers, but as trainers and inspiration beacons for the rest of the team.
Part of a comment I left on the HN thread discussing Suster's post was "It was most often used when a builder had materials or a little cash available to avoid laying off good workers when there wasn't a contract job available." About builders building houses on-spec to keep together their core workers.
.. and the heavenly spirits decided to set the Word free with a GNU license, and released Open Office, and after fixing most of the bugs God saw that it was good (or at least usable).
Just over 500 days ago...
A Gentle Introduction to Haskell
Why is this a hosted web service and not an command-line utility?
...tail-calls...

Note that neither the Microsoft C# compiler nor the Mono one emit tail calls. In practice, the MS .NET Just-In-Time compiler however transforms tail recursion to loops even if the compiler didn't ask for it if a number of conditions are met. I'm no JVM expert by any means but I don't see why the JVM couldn't do something similar, in theory or in practice.
But holding onto physical cash is not without costs, e.g. you have to provide your own security, it's probably not going to be as good as a bank's, etc.
Book on Samsung Divides Korea
Edmond, OK is my hometown. Seeing its paper on HN is a major shock. What are you doing reading their op-eds? :-)
As an employer without a lot of credibility, I have been known to pay for interviews. (Now, usually these were interviews where I asked for work to get done, but those are the best kind of interviews, no?)

I don't understand why more places don't pay for interviews; it seems to make a lot of sense all around; I mean, this idea that a recruit will sacrifice the better part of a day to each potential employer speaks to a larger power imbalance between the two than I think exists, at least at the higher end.
Dammit, that just wasted an hour of my life.
I consider myself to be an information addict. I spend probably half of my day, everyday, reading news/blogs/books.

The real trick is to not just consume information, but to digest it. I.e. don't merely eat a lot, make sure you have a high [information] metabolism. Understand what you read and share what you understand.

I decided that I'm happiest when I'm learning, so why fight it? I quit my job a year ago, and since then have managed to channel my information addiction to create a very satisfying lifestyle consulting and building my own companies with the information I've learned (and continue to learn).
nice! 104 year old google streetview. :)
Well, you'll then be amazed with what can be done with just 297 bytes ;)
http://www.p01.org/releases/512b_jspongy/jspongy_hardcore.ht...
We've been doing a lot of container gardening lately, and have been thinking about making a system like this.

The 'air lift' water delivery system looks particularly inteesting, but kind of Rube Goldberg-ish. I'd be very interested to hear experiences from anyone who has actually built one. How well does it work?
hey, glad you like my stuff :D
Apple’s Walled Garden: iAds and HTML5
To the poster: thanks for spreading the little library over here! ^^
can someone explain how writes are faster than reads?
The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid
None of the buildings in this video -- save the Ferry Building whose tower you can see directly ahead -- are standing today.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/1906/18april/index.p...
"Whether a physicist (in modern times and below a certain age) espouses MWI is quickly becoming a great litmus test for whether you should bother listening to them on anything that isn't established textbook material."

Errr, do you mean you should bother listening or not bother?

My understanding of MWI doesn't go much beyond what I could understand of an early Wheeler paper (I thought it was from the mid-40s, but Wikipedia says MWI starts with the thesis of a student of his with the first publication in 1957 ... and I read that paper (whenever it was published) 25 years ago so it's gotten pretty fuzzy).

Hmmm, Wikipedia says MWI "along with the other decoherence interpretations and the Copenhagen interpretation" are the mainstream interpretations, so I suspect that answers my question.
Floyd Mayweather Jr., lashed out Manny Pacquiao Again
Congress can be modeled by the same process that causes avalanches in sandpiles
Become an angel investor. Part of the value-add in your investments of money is your willingness to be a connector for portfolio.
The New $100 Bill and the War Against Counterfeit Money
The Israeli mind behind the Blue Brain Project
Pretty good observations.

I like the idea of one primary open and one primary closed system coexisting. I typically use both whenever possible.

For example, I use OSX since it is polished and everything works well and there is good commercial software support. But I also use linux for tinkering around and for doing things you cannot easily do in OSX (kernel tweaking, general OS customizing, server stuff, different windowing systems like Xmonad, etc).
> One of the quiet secrets of the format war is that most people would have been perfectly content with DVD-9 in conjunction with the new codecs, even for 1080p HD.

Definitely. And if 1080p isn't required, 720p content would definitely look really good on a DVD-9 if encoded with h.264.
Most interesting to me was the "units" utility. I didn't know it existed.
If we're talking about hypothetical, mostly unenforceable principles, maybe it's the corporations that should follow the Three Laws of Robotics and not the standards?
Working Star Trek Phaser Uses 12x Blu Ray Laser (with video)
Social Objects for Beginners
I think it is something I think all employers would do well to keep in mind. But especially startups, because as you said, you are almost always getting paid below market rates. And, on top of that, it's a rather unstable job; I mean, if the company goes under, you get fired, right?

The thing is, when you are a startup, you /don't need/ people who want to stick around for 5 years. In 5 years, you will be much bigger, or dead. Either way, the employees you need 5 years from now will be /completely different/ from the employees you need now.

As a startup, you want ambitious people; the sort who hop from job to job to increase their salary and to get more interesting projects. You want someone who is relatively bright but inexperienced who really wants to gain experience. There are people who require constant change, and those people do really, really well at startups, and not so well at large corporations. Often, those people are willing to work for less money in exchange for letting them work in things they are not qualified to work on, and nearly always those people are willing to trade away stability, which is important, because as a startup, you can't offer stability.
If you're interested in origami math, there's a conference this summer: http://www.origami-usa.org/5osme
StackOverflow: "Please explain some of Paul Graham’s points on Lisp"
Wow and it is a music video for Air...double bonus! There is an incredibly cool map store in San Francisco, and as you would expect, the proprietor is very friendly. It is called Schein and Schein (http://www.scheinandschein.com/ the website doesn't do it justice) and they have some beautiful old maps and photobooks, with a large portion of the collection devoted to SF and California history.
I use to hate Javascript. I attempted to build a large enterprise system using ExtJS... I ran into a number of problems. I then realized that I could accomplish the same task using GWT/GXT. It was successful. I still don't like Javascript, but I'm warming up to the idea of embracing it.

It seems to me that with the advent of Node.js and document oriented databases that use JSON for their document description, such as MongoDB, Javascript will become the world's most used language. I think Javascript's momentum is unstoppable.

Time will tell.
I was hoping for some LARP photobombing :)
I've just finished listening to it and I recommend it too. It truly helps to understand why it took so long for GM to change its way despite having most of the answers staring it in the face.
Relevant FAQ about the story by the author of the story: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
Seems to me that every node would have to be both server and client, since we need to connect a person's digital profile with their control of the server that handles their profile -- open source at a local machine. (Stallman said something like this in his article.)

Seems like everything hinges on caching and timestamping and digital signing (again, not my ideas). Such handwaving might help solve the scalability problem; how we solve privacy, I don't know -- seems like once a profile has been read, there is nothing to prevent that reader from caching and propagating it however they please. It could be unsigned, but I am sure a thief wouldn't wait to confirm that someone's account password was signed...

Anyway, this is cool, ... I hope someone works on it for me ;)
"Helma" Framework comes to my mind too: http://helma.org/
New Ubuntu Server Release Aims for the Cloud
I disagree -- it takes motivated, large scale cooperation of resources. Sometimes money can buy it, sometimes you don't need money to buy such.

PERHAPS you can argue given a boring problem (e.g. Linux usability for grandma) and getting people to work on it takes money. But that is contingent on the arrangement of society, it isn't a universal principle or anything.

As for Ubuntu -- um, as a newly converted FreeBSD user, I think there appeared a free usable system a long time ago...
Nice sarcasm, I wonder why you got down voted.
Apparently the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Fran happened 4 days after this video was shot!
In the 60's you couldn't prove it
Yeah, I've not become a fan of too many big corporate entities. I tend to ignore lots of FB stuff.
Top Algorithms in Data Mining
I wouldn't have even thought to look for such a program. And this is how I justify reading stories like this :)
Facebook is mirroring Wikipedia
except that the purpose of voting is supposed to be to help readers find the better comments, not to provide karma to the posters.
The Flood Building, the Palace Hotel and the Call Building among others along Market Street survived the earthquake and are standing today.
Resources are RARE. The greater the Civilization the more precious resources are to it. Why to wipe-out a planet with all its resources? Wouldn't it be better to put a few of your own species on the top of the planet and make all the people of the planet slaves?