skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Telecom is a red ocean. Too many providers and too few customers. To grow, they have to extract more out of their customers, provide less costly services (increasing margins) or venture into areas outside that red ocean.

But blue oceans are uncharted territory. They are scary and risky and require a level of creativity that exists in few telecom companies.

Most telecoms are so big that to grow at a rate above 1% would require massive opportunity. It's much easier to charge 1% more to all their customers or include a hidden fee or provide 1% less bandwidth. They've done that to an equilibrium now and breaking the deadlock with their competitors is destructive to their own organization. They can't cut costs because they don't have the margins. They can't raise rates because customers will go to a cheaper alternative. They can't reduce services because the FCC comes down on them.

Remember what happened to comcast when they tried to treat bit torrent differently? It seemed reasonable to me. If the FCC wants to turn the internet into a transportation system, then they will need the equivalent of a weigh station, because the heavy trucks cause more damage to the roads.
This thread is turning into a civics lesson.

Yes, you are correct.

"Oversight" committees are set up by Congress to manage the authority they were given. These are -- well, start watching some if you'd like to know what they are. And don't let the Congressmen tell you their staff is on top of it. Managing Congressional staff is something the various agencies have learned a long, long time ago.

The agency itself is a part of the executive branch. So theoretically they report to the president. In practice, however, the government is a huge thing. It is highly unusual to be within 3 people of reporting to the executive. The president makes political appointments, and the top people at each agency are those who manage those guys. Usually contractors are brought in to create a lot of presentations and such so that staff can show to the political hack how great the agency is. Over time agencies get very, very good at managing the hacks and resisting change. After all, the agency is full of people there for life. These guys are just passing through. It's not unusual for the president to bring in activists or ex-corporate types as their political hacks. After all, these guys are contributors and they are interested and qualified (but also have many hidden agendas)

The courts technically oversee whether or not the agencies act in a constitutional manner -- the idea being that although Congress can delegate huge swaths of its power to agencies, it can't delegate something it never had. Appellate courts step in when federal agencies overstep, but historically in an ad-hoc manner. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2647783 The worst abuses with the most political imapct are caught. Lots of little guys get trampled.
Making ActiveResource 34x faster: QActiveResource
Yeah, Zed makes a few good points but most of it is totally off base. Venture capital is not a zero-sum game between tech startups and bankers. A person looking to invest in a startup probably already has investments with several funds and just wants to take a bet on something much more risky but with a lot more potential upside.

He does make a good point about talent though: Most of the good quants and algo guys are already employed, have years of vesting options, and can probably retire in 10 years if they stay at whatever fund they're working at. The base salaries are 6 figures, and with bonuses and employee stock plans they're probably pulling in closer to a quarter of a million annually, so your chances of recruiting them to a startup to live on top ramen for a few years are slim to none. Sorry, that's just the reality here. I'm sure you can find some fresh-faced college grads a lot easier though.
Isn't sudoku bit problematic problem for GA as there is just one correct solution and the rest are just wrong, compared to a problem that has solutions that are better or worse, but potentially no solution is absolutely correct?
Informative (and engaging) google talk with the etherboot/gPXE team: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofOqhO6VVM

They talk about historical details of BIOS booting and PXE along with using open BIOS firmware to speed up booting.
Do you follow a specific set of blogs/publications to keep up with biohacking news or do you just consume what you come across?
Weird, I cut and pasted that link. Oh well, edited, thanks.
I just plain disagree that it would impress donors. Much like how simple things like bed nets or drinking water wells don't seem to get press or inspire donors for aid to Africa -- despite their proven impact -- many dollars flow towards sexier causes like AIDS.

An attack method doesn't have to be super secret. It could be something as simple as pipe bombs in a backpack if they want to nickel and dime us to terror.
This point of view always bothers me because it's not really true. Yes, one of the primary duties board members have is to increase the wealth of the shareholders, but it does not equate to purely performing greedy moves. Look at the case of Dodge v. Ford Motor Company. Here's an excerpt from the decision made (emphasis mine):

"A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the share-holders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. We are not, however, persuaded that we should interfere with the proposed expansion of the Ford Motor Company. In view of the fact that the selling price of products may be increased at any time, the ultimate results of the larger business cannot be certainly estimated. The judges are not business experts."

Yes, they are primarily in it to make money for their shareholders. However, it's nearly impossible to tell the effects of many decisions on the company's bottom line, and moves that increase the company's image in the eyes of the general populace can certainly be argued to have effects that increase the financial well-being of the company.

There's something called the business judgment rule that's applied in cases such as this. The board members must act in good faith, act in the best interests of the corporation, act on an informed basis, not be wasteful, and not involve self-interest. This gives a great deal of wiggle room because, as the judge said in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., "judges are not business experts."

A move like eschewing moves away from net neutrality is arguably (which is all it needs to be) a move done in good faith to increase the bottom line of the company, especially since it builds goodwill with consumers.
I got -4 karma points on this, for refusing to answer point by point the arguments of a naive Apple fanboy. I'll go back to just scanning HN, instead of participating. I've been a professional programmer for over 30 years, Written for Macs since 1984, I know what I'm talking about, and I find the current generation of developers to be, well, babies.
It seems to me that acting like greedy assholes to the point that the regulators step in, would actually be failing at maximizing shareholder value.

I believe also that paying dividends would be an alternative to having a pyramidal share price.
No, but these HPs do. You misread the post you were replying to.
Facebook's new features secretly add apps to your profile
Oh, I see how you're set up now. I thought you were the sole blogger, not a blog host. That makes a little more sense as those sorts of sites do seem to be tougher to monetize without doing things like offering premium features to your bloggers (and even then, you need a pretty huge author base to make it worthwhile).
"The lower the CEO salary, the more likely [a startup] is to succeed." - Peter Thiel

http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best-predictor-...
For those that haven't been following UK politics, the UK's first ever televised prime ministerial debate was in mid April. Many of the dramatic changes in the graphs result from the Liberal Democrats doing well out of that encounter.
I don't understand this. Your resume must not have enough experience or something, because I get calls from recruiters all the time.
I can only relate to having worked hard on something and not having anything to show for it.

I just try and salvage as much as I can and try to fit it into a story that communicates my overall goals.
Honestly I wish the title of the blog post was a link. From feedback I have received, it is very difficult to know where to click to read the entire post.
You could check out HackerMed.com if you want bio/med-hacking news. Not to pimp the site here, but your question really asked for it. :P
Omek Interactive Could Blow Microsoft’s Project Natal Out Of The Water (Video)
A fair point (though technically sudoku can have multiple solutions, they are all equally correct; there is no range of correctness, it's just binary). However, I think something like this is useful as a proof of concept for a GA system, because it's easy to judge its solutions. Many textbook examples of GA I've seen involve evolving a best fit line for a given line, and the simple examples use functions like y = x^2+1 because its easy to judge completion.
I'm sick of American government officials screwing around with our domestic policy. I'm not saying I don't see why it happens, but "senior officials" from Washington should be saving their political clout for legitimate international issues.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215756
Privacy: the Final Frontier for Social Media
It's a huge stretch that Dropbox is portrayed as a "Lean Startup" or that people are claiming they used "Customer Development" methodology.

Dropbox is the classic case of a good idea brilliantly executed, with very little change or course correction on the product or customer targeting. Three years later the product is essentially the same as the YC app described it. It's as close to "build it and they will come" as it gets in practice.

Xobni seems like a much better example, but in their case it's not clear if they've found a winning strategy. They could still fail to return a profit to their investors, which means it's early to call them a success story.

Dropbox on the other hand is virtually guaranteed a $100 million+ exit. They could probably sell today for $100 million. An IPO in the future is not out of the question.
Corporate leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to act like greedy assholes. We have to understand that. It's required by the SEC and the law.

Well, specifically it's directors who have that duty, and (naturally) they select managers whose views further their own. Of course, in recent years there have been examples of tension between managers and shareholders in the US (unrelated to the financial crisis), where shareholders' powers to change policy 'from the floor' are relatively limited. Some argue, too, that directors' fiduciary responsibilities need to be rethought in terms of long-term sustainability and stability rather than in purely expansionary terms.

There's an interesting discussion of these issues here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2009/11/17/shareholders...

And on a slightly tangential note, a cautionary tale about a company that went bust within weeks of its IPO, and how the arguments of the firm's attorney and directors found short shrift in court: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1567657
Thanks.

1. There are certain milestones we have to meet before we can launch. We have a great product, but we have some holes we have to fill. I can't get more specific here.

2. The leadership of the company is excellent. We're in trouble (in my estimation only) because no startup can afford to have a key person take a dive, and every developer is key.

3. Thanks.

4. Why is it this way? My understanding, and I could be mistaken, of the EIR role is that it's someone who works at startups while sponsored and mentored by the VC firm. I would be excellent in such a position, not now (and possibly never) as an EIR-to-CEO, but as an EIR-to-senior developer (if such a thing exists).
They didn't actually store and revive a heart after ten days. They extrapolated the estimate based on tissue samples taken over the coure of a few hours.

To better understand if and how Somah preserved a heart, Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers. One was filled with Somah, the other with Celsior from Genzyme – the standard chemical bath which preserves organs in hospitals today. As described in the journal Circulation, the team took tissue samples every four hours from each heart. They found that the Somah heart had a much lower rate of cell decay, including important cardiomyocyte and endothelial cells which are necessary for the heart to work in a new host. Based on this research they concluded that hearts preserved in Somah should be viable for up to 10 days. Celsior can store the organ for 4 hours. That’s an epic difference.
If I recall, the old "Hotline" protocol is UDP based. There should be a Java implementation of that somewhere, and there is a VB6 one somewhere as well.

KDX is also UDP based for file transfers, but I don't know if it's OSS or not.
And the reason most heavy users do not complain very loudly about this false advertising is that we are benefactors, since our heavy internet usage is subsidized by those that only browse the web a bit and get email, but still want 25 Mbps because it's "more" than 2 Mbps.
He he, I did a double-take when you said you didn't like smalltalk. I was like, hey, object-orientation isn't so bad.

Guess I am one of those introverts too.
To even be considered for an EIR role at a venture fund, you need to have previously exited successfully or failed miserably.

If you don't launch, you're risking everything.

If you do launch, albeit it not 100% ready, at the very LEAST you have a case study on your hands that will help you in other venture and employments. At the very MOST, the people (consumers and investors) see the value proposition in your product and decide to give you a try.

Don't burn the assets, launch with what you got and do whatever it takes to land prototype in front of the right people.

Also, you need to address the co-founder problem right now before it get's more complicated.
A move like eschewing moves away from net neutrality is arguably (which is all it needs to be) a move done in good faith to increase the bottom line of the company

It could be argued that it violates the property rights of the corporation. Almost every restaurant has a sign that says, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."

The telecoms built those wires. They installed the switches. It seems wrong to me to tell them how they must allow traffic to flow over them. Existing transportation companies aren't hounded by the Department of transportation because they charge more for a 12 cubic foot container than they charge for a 1 cubic foot container.

If a railroad wants to charge one company more than another company they can do that. If they want to limit the amount of goods they transport, they can do that. They can refuse to transport certain kinds of goods as well. Grains, liquids, explosives... Or charge a different rate...

How is the internet, where the packages are full of 1's and zeros different?
Check this out: http://www.commoncraft.com/making-election-video-behind-scen...

Maybe not the easiest way to do it?
How about just social without the network? Where being anonymous is part of the attraction and so privacy is at less of a risk - think omegle and chatroulette.
Oops - thanks. Deleting now.
If the trade is the limits on regulation at the discretion instead of limits on speed and access at the discretion of comcast, I'm pretty fine with it.
Good question. Really, it depends on the TTL... but that's not very helpful.

I checked the stats for one of our embedded apps, and I'm seeing a ratio of ~11 pageviews to 1 DNS query. That's with a 7.5 minute TTL. Clearly, your mileage may vary.

I'd be interested to know the ratio for a destination site with a longer TTL.
Dally must have got round to reading the CS books from the 1990s

This is my favourite from 1992 :

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ulb.tu-da...

His is spot on though, but we need to get the vector unit as standard on the MB, not some add-on card. Larabee talks good graphics talk but the real gift should just be the vector FPU made available to the OS.

SSEx processes 128bits in one operation which can represent 2 x 64bit doubles or 4 x 32bit floats or 8 x dwords or 16 bytes, which I thought was me reading it wrong, they call it SIMD and let you have 2 64bit data points which I suppose is technically true :) I was expecting something spectacular like 128.
Agreed, but they do link to and credit the original article.

It adds absolutely nothing, so the person that posted it really shouldn't have bothered putting his name on top.
Maybe they don't need to work on a ton of tablets, maybe they need to work on one really good one.
That's only the case for the Mac Mini and the G4 Cube - Apple's portable power adapters of that era are pretty much exactly the same as they are now (excluding the fancy MagSafe connector, of course).

I have both a 2004 model iBook (pre-intel) and a brand new 2010 MacBook Pro and the adapters look the same.
I just checked my applications list on Facebook this morning, just days after when I last checked it, and I can confirm the behavior reported in this story. I didn't ask for an application to be installed at all, but two were. Yes, that is malware.

After edit: just changed my Facebook status message to remind me my friends that they know other ways to reach me, with better privacy. I think it's time to take a vacation from Facebook. I don't like this contempt for customer.
Silky circuits: Making electronic circuits that will work inside a person’s body
First IDN ccTLDs Available
Just like he said in the post, we are closer to Minority Report than people think I guess...I was amazed when I saw the video!
An email client with copy and paste would be great, and zoom.
> the idea being that although Congress can delegate huge swaths of its power to agencies, it can't delegate something it never had.

Also, as in this FCC case, there is the matter of whether or not Congress gave them the power to do X in the first place.
Monty Python Election Night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31FFTx6AKmU

I would vote for Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel.
I'm specifically interesting in hibernation, cryogenics, suspended animation, etc.

I just scan several science sites and look for those terms.

(When my browser comes up, I have 43 tabs for my home page)
You could say they are greedy assholes, or you could say they are trying to maximize the revenue potential of their investment.

Software companies do it all the time. Oracle charges Salesforce more for its database than it charges a university and it gives it way for free to some organizations.

Essentially, net neutrality is saying that the telecoms don't have the right to choose how to charge for their product.

If the FCC is saying the internet is a right everyone should enjoy at the same rate, why don't they create a public wireless grid? People argue against that saying the government will control our traffic, but essentially that's what they are arguing for here as well. They want the FCC to control the internet, but keep it private in such a way that limits the corporation's ability to profit.

I'd be angry if the FCC came in and told me what I could charge for my SaaS or my consulting hours. Why is it different for the telecoms?
You're right: the attempt at making a correlation with the slowing of netbook growth deceleration is dubious. That's only half of the article, though. The other half is data from survey respondents:

a Morgan Stanley/Alphawise survey conducted in March that found that 44% of U.S. consumers who were planning to buy an iPad said that they were buying it instead of a netbook or notebook computer.
Stack Overflow's "What's your favorite programmer cartoon" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite...
Facebook claims data portability is criminal
Downloading a separate file and then launching an external application is obnoxious, particularly when it creates a new window. I know a lot of people who actively avoid and refuse to click on PDF links for that reason.

I've always thought that the best solution would be for browsers to just include PDF rendering support alongside HTML. PDF is a popular enough format on the web that it should really be handled by the browser as a core feature, not by some add-on or external application. I really liked Apple's Safari for this reason (although I dumped it for Firefox because of AdBlockPlus).

Done right it would seem like perhaps some of the higher-level rendering layers of the browser could be reused, regardless of whether the underlying content was PDF or HTML. (In fact isn't this how Safari works, with Quartz?)

No offense to Scribd, but I'd like to see the need for their service go away by in-browser support for progressively-downloaded PDFs.
Its extremely heartening to find my blog post is of use to someone else.

It can often be intimidating when approaching something new or different. I find writing down the steps often helps me get my head around any complexities.

The additional step of writing it up has a blog post means that I have to try and write it with extra care and clarity. Thus making it more likely for me to understand it again when I take a look back at it for reference in the future :)
Low != non-existent. He certainly is not saying that money raised should not be for salaries.

'What’s the average salary for CEOs from funded startups? Thiel was hesitant to answer, but eventually said “$100-125k.”'
The content of the macros section is mostly complete, although there are some tweaks to be done here and there. Of course, if you want to know more about macros we will cover them throughout chapters 8-12 also. However, if you can't wait that long then check out "On Lisp" by pg and "Let over Lambda" by Doug Hoyte. Not only are they the best books on macrology -- they are likely the best possible books on macrology.
It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries.

To some extent that is a result of the fact that we had it early. A lot of money was put into the early infrastructure, and it now needs to be upgraded, but there's little incentive to do so as long as it's working well enough.

Whereas latecomers to the party can get equipment three generations better than what we started with, and install it for a lot less money than we had to sink into our old stuff.

This is not too uncommon in business, either, where (especially in fields where patents don't ensure a monopoly for the innovator), the innovator spends a lot of resources in development, setting up the supply chain, and driving consumer demand. The "me, too!" business then comes along and benefits from all of this without having to pay a dime, and can skip right past many unprofitable months and challenge the innovator to a game of catch-up very quickly.
Small but annoying? Try saying that to someone who runs a website that has been forced to pay extortion fees as the price of staying up. And truth be told, if the public had any idea how often bot nets are responsible for their computers running slowly and their personal financial details getting stolen, there would be a lot of justified outrage about that as well.

Just because people aren't aware of how big a problem it is doesn't mean that it isn't a big problem.
Dropbox for WebOS...?
We made a very similar video for our prom night. The audience was literally jaw dropping.
Here it is (it's in Slovene so you probably won't understand it): http://www.vimeo.com/10852791
Would you care to share what they are? (As many feeds as I subscribe to, I'm always interested in new sources)
Check the reference to Delphi Methods in above wikipedia link. They are used for estimating efforts in software development.
Android SDK: Still got a ways to go