skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait, the site is going to be subscription? I thought this was supposed to compete with Facebook. Almost everyone is on Facebook because it's free.
I've been trusting my precious source code to Hg-Git for a while. The sort of "something goes wrong" moments have usually been fixable with a bit of grubbing around in Hg-Git's source. They've got themselves a pretty inviting code base, FWIW.
"even the simplest of options strategies" - can you provide a link to a good resource?
Agreed.

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-ma...

I'd much rather have low market share and much higher profits than vice versa.
Wow - thank you for the Flowtown love #humbling
Its in vogue to bash the teachers these days. In California, the teachers unions have been more prominent in recent years in state-wide political debates, and that seems to have had an impact on public opinion, which is unfortunate.

Regarding Bill Gates TED-talk, he compares US and Asia test scores. I don't see how having cheerleader style teachers can mitigate the challenges that many children from under-performing areas are faced with nationwide. These under-performing schools are often in poor areas, where the family educational expectations are low, and the home-life is not conducive to educational success. If US society placed as much emphasis on education as do Japan and other Asian countries, US performance would be much improved. Bill Gates' proposals are a band-aid over the more significant issue.
I will add, though, that I just submitted my information to be invited as there is a wait-list. The topic of the event is education, and I am exploring a career in educational psychology. Any help in gaining admission would be appreciated as it would be especially valuable to me at this point in my career.
Steam is relatively trivial to crack on Windows as well. Certainly nothing has prevented the various Steam games from being cracked wide open and distributed independently.
> You didn't lose any data in that scenario. Every line of code you wrote still exists in those files. The problem is that you are in a conflicted state that must be manually resolved.

I think that the point is that file 'foo' has already been merged, regardless of the conflict in file 'bar'. There is no way for you to revert to the pre-update state. In git, your previous commit still exists in the objects store even if it is no longer connected to the tree. And garbage collection won't even clean it out right away because it is still in the reflog ('git reflog'). The point being that once something is committed, it's permanently (barring garbage collection) in the repository. Whenever you make a change to a commit, a new commit is created, some pointers are changed, and the old commit still remains in the repository.

> Oh, and somename is never tab-completed but othername is.

Responsibility for the tab-completion falls squarely on your shell (or where ever you got the tab-completion setup from). Don't point your finger at git and say, "git sucks because bash tab-completion screwed me up." Neither rm nor git can control how your shell bothers to determine tab-completion.
I didn't leave California because of the taxes (I moved to another state with nearly identically high taxes). I left because, despite being in the 95th percentile of income nationally, I couldn't afford to buy a house in a decent neighborhood with decent schools.
In order to "Buy into Fear and Sell into Greed" you have to be able to disconnect yourself emotionally enough to rationally asses whether the market is truly panicking on or overvaluing a particular asset. Not an easy thing to do.
Convert iPad to laptop
looks neat !
It doesn't matter if few people vote, so long as enough votes are registered to rank the comments/articles.

The only thing I can see happening is incentivizing karma whores like me to support popular viewpoints even if I disagree (I don't downvote, but I don't have to upvote). Again, I don't think participation is a problem as long as there is a consistent group of active participants.

Also I don't vote for a warm fuzzy feeling of making the site better. If someone says something I think is right, then I upvote to show my support and hope his viewpoint is propagated enough so that further misunderstandings on the issue is avoided. This way I will decrease the likelihood of some ignorant person making his/her way back to me and forcing me to waste time re-espousing said viewpoint. My motivation for contributing is purely in self-interest.
> Personally, I don't think I'd _ever_ trade money for the freedom and fraternization that can happen when you leave home and start spending money :)

I feel exactly the same way, I moved out really early. That said, I think there is a good way to have multiple generations under the same roof.

I know a guy, an executive, who lives under his parents' roof with his wife, son, and daughter. It's large enough, they eat together a lot of times, the mother and wife split the chores, and his parents love their grandkids. Babysitters are always available. Both the guy and his father are hardcore business types, the father is a college dropout entrepreneur, the son has an MBA. I gather there's some friction sometimes, it seems to work pretty well. That's in Japan, though the same thing happens in a lot of Asia, and to a much lesser extent, the Mediterranean countries still a little bit. Family ties are a lot closer - I remember being in Italy and thinking how cool it was when I saw grandfather/father/son all eating together quite a lot out at a restaurant, having some guy's time.

So, I agree with you, especially the way parenting/freedom in the West works. But I'm personally going to try to keep my home in such a way that the kids feel welcome for a long time - ideally they are independent enough to self-emancipate quite young, but can come back and feel very comfortable at home even as they get into later adulthood. A hard balance to strike and tradeoffs involved, but good if can be gotten down well.
'git gc' ? ;-)
Ask PG: What would be on apps.ycombinator.com?
Curious. I see this subdomain is active and made it to google search results too. Any plans of opening up YC tools/apps or to review apps or is it for YC application process?
Heh. There used to be a job ad on my name. By a former employer. Now there's just one from my current employer.
That is a valid point, but I would counter that, while a small group of active participants does allow "the process" to work, more people would express their opinion if voting was incentivized.

Also, the "warm fuzzies" was a simple metaphor for upping the incentives for voting, as "warm fuzzies" could be considered themselves a net marginal gain. If your going to play the karma game (up and down voting) why not reward the users in the same nominal terms used to describe the content they voted on.
+1 ... I'd be curious to find out
Are you going to analyze teachers performance based on their students results? If so you will be penalizing those in worse areas.

And you will make teachers teach to your performance criteria.

Besides how many programmers would like their value to be assessed by a piece of software?
> These people must have their privacy set to 'Everyone'

Yep - the way Facebook set it by default for them without them realizing. And then it fails to indicate anywhere in the posting UI that the post is going out to the entire universe unless they explicitly click a lock icon that is an standard internet icon for indicating that your content is already secure.
Nice try, GLaDOS. I'm not touching that 1500 megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-colliding Super-button.
Finance Reform Bill would severely throttle angel investment
I was lucky then, my HP just would not suspend. Never had a problem on my IBM.
Where did you see the table and stats you are talking about? There were neither in the linked essay.
AFAIK, this isn't because of the underlying GSM vs CDMA technology. Verizon just has more towers around and better backend infrastructure to handle high loads.
I generally enjoy your posts, but a couple points:

1. As another commenter wrote, investors as an aggregate are the market (hedgers, as another listed, are also considered, or could be considered investors who are investing for reasons other than direct belief in the individual companies/stocks).

2. Investment banks don't need to be investing. It's not their business, which is underwriting securities or acting as broker-dealers for M&A work. What we've seen in recent years are investment banks with trading divisions, but the act of investment banking is a separate business, and it's the performance of the investment banking team that should be compensating them.

3. You talk about option strategies, but for every move you make, say buying a call, another party had to have written the option. For individual investors, your point could still be very accurate. However, at some scale (though ridiculously large these days), this will break down.

That said, I do agree with your final point. An individual can beat the market.
Apple Gives Tribute to Newton with New 'What is iPad?' Ad
If you do, make a list of the links, turn it into a blog post, and post it here-- I'd upvote it.
Issues that I've heard of with Bazaar:

- Being pure Python it doesn't have the same performance that git does. This may not show up in day-to-day usage, but things like 'convert this svn repo to Bazaar' tend to bring the bottlenecks/performance issues into the light.

- Bazaar made this weird design decision to have two revision numbers. a 'r12345' type revision number that is similar to SVN, but only applies to your local checkout of the repo, and a checksum (SHA1 or MD5) which applies globally (across different checkouts). I think that choosing a revision scheme similar to SVN's but one that doesn't map 1-to-1 with SVN is just asking for confusion from newbies. (I'm not entirely sure why one needs to have local and global revision numbers...)
To be fair, just about any tech stock you bought at that time period would have had similar returns. (Even MSFT doubled from it's low of 15)
I don't see C dying until we have computers with radically different architectures. C is too good a fit for current computers and there is too much installed base and too much cost for conversion for things to be switched over until it is really necessary.
"Apple Needs Gullible Customers to Make Money"
The point is that with a smaller market share you can lose it all extremely fast.

Profitability is important of course, but resistance to the changing market / emerging technologies that invalidate your business is also important for big companies.

For all the ranting about how Microsoft has lost momentum and mind-share and influence, it's still here and it's still making a shit-load of money, just because of their marketshare ... yes, they aren't innovating fast enough, but that's because they don't need to.

Apple is highly profitable, but because they are a niche player their only hope is to keep innovating. IMHO the iPhone was a defensive move to keep them relevant. Kudos to them for seeing it coming, but I hope they won't rest on laurels because it won't last long.
Skype talks strategy
HP Hurricane webOS Tablet Coming in Q3 2010
Elgg can be hacked into a distributed Facebook but last time I played with their source, which was about a year ago...well...let's just say that is a jungle meant for the bravest of explorers.
Except you can use any language or tools you want to develop your 360 games.
identica has some serious design and ux issues. I don't think it's safe to use it as a benchmark.
From a modern point of view, SAP's architecture feels pretty alien. In a way you're right, and it's a massive amount of forms on top of a database, plus staggering amounts of business logic. But as it was born before the web, it does not render to HTML, but to it's own display system. Most parts are written in ABAP, an interpreted language, and the source code is stored in the database. A quite usable IDE and a debugger are included. The source code is there, so you can read it and explore how things happen.

There's a database abstraction layer, which works around some limitations of the underlying databases. What SAP sees as a table might be a set of tables in the database.

It's not an unpleasant system to work with.
The ripping groups had the best crackers, while the ISO groups had the best suppliers. It was normal for Myth to partner with an ISO group to get a game, crack it for them, and then rip the audio/videos and release the 0day version.
Pencil Project - Free diagraming and prototyping, Also run as Firefox addon
"active investors as an aggregate" are the market, so of course they never beat it.

By most definitions "active investors" are traders, not investors.

The other problem is that the alternative to not beating the market is picking a generally underperforming mutual fund and giving up almost half of your profit as management fees.

If you get 8% on your mutual fund and the manager takes 2% then....
$1000 * 30 years @ 8% = $10,935.73
$1000 * 30 years @ 6% = $6,022.58
(10 935.73 - 6 022.58) / 10 935.73 = 0.449274991

The problem with most people when they go into the market is that they use a buy high sell low strategy. They buy into the market when "it's doing well" and sell when "they lost their money"
Already posted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341182
Agree with Jason .. scratch an itch .. that way, even if nothing worked out, you would still have one loyal user -> You

In good probability, there'll be others who share the same itch.

http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
Its not about privacy...its about respect
If you want to buy into fear find a bank with large exposure to Greek debt.
And what will you do with the half of the population whose total annual earnings don't meet their tax obligation? That's a lot of soylent green for the rest of us to eat.
HTML 5 Asteroids
The Jobs-less era of Apple also had its fair share of very confusing lineups.

IIRC, when Jobs was brought in in the late 90's, Apple had more than a dozen different models of Macintosh, two or three Newtons, a camera and half a dozen printers, with model names and numbers that gave little clue as to what good they were.
Do you have a resume / credentials? I'd like to make sure my idea reaches a capable person.
:) I guess this is just HTC getting back at Apple for the latter's patent suit ...

Sadly, recent evidence shows patents being increasingly used to stem (honest) competition than protecting IP
provided it came from a high level source (ie they didn't download it off limewire) then i very much doubt it. the original group doing something like that would be scene suicide. keep in mind these groups are only doing it for the kudos.
There might be issues with sound subsystems across distributions (or um.. within distributions), but games on Linux perform quite well and are indistinguishable from other platforms (I spent a good bit of time playing UT 2003 on Linux, and it works perfectly).
Every year you can compare actively managed mutual funds with the market. In any given year 70% of them offer sub-par returns. In any given 5 years, even fewer of them win. In a study I saw a decade ago, across all such funds over the last few decades, only two had put in a performance that was unlikely under chance.

It was unlikely that anyone would have performed as well as Peter Lynch. But not 99% unlikely.

Warren Buffett is clearly a statistical outlier. However other things can be cited for his performance. (Including his excellent management skills, and the fact that he every so often gets very lucrative opportunities that are not available to the market. See, for instance, his sweetheart Goldman Sachs deal in 2008.)

This said, in defense of the mutual funds, most actually managed to outperform the market in the long run. However the amount they outperformed by was less than their expenses for doing so. So your employer is likely beating the market, but is failing to so so for their clients once they subtract your salary and their profit margin.

Incidentally the study that I saw excluded the performance of hedge funds. This excludes some well-known long-term successes like George Soros. The wide variety of strategies that they follow is just too hard to calibrate and do statistics with. However on average it seems that they also lose to the market as a whole. But with much larger volatility in their results.

As for your "simplest options strategies" there are plenty of option strategies, such as covered puts, that will increase your average returns at normal times, but deny you excessive returns when the market does strange things. However a disproportionate fraction of long-term returns happen in sudden events that you will miss. If options are correctly priced, in the long run you don't beat the market with any of them.

As for whether options are correctly priced, that is a matter for debate. But I guarantee that the current market price of options has priced in the most widely accepted theories on how to correctly price options.
What an Idea, startup ji
Stanford still uses Java for the intro classes (as well as a number of grad AI classes - info retrieval, NLP, general game playing, and probably others I'm not thinking of). I don't see it getting replaced here for a while...too much starter code that no one wants to rewrite.
On the Dropbox point, I actually prefer apps that let me choose the folder they use, and I can just set that someplace in my Dropbox folder - no hard work needed :-) 1Password does this and it keeps my passwords synced everywhere.
> Are you going to analyze teachers performance based on their students results? If so you will be penalizing those in worse areas.

I would assume you'd analyze based on the first and second derivatives of the students' results—good teachers leave kids better off than when they started, and great teachers teach kids how to learn faster and better. The important prerequisite to this, though, would be to test kids both before and after each lesson, with tests of equivalent questions and equal difficulty—otherwise, you have no idea how much of their learning was because of the class, and how much they already knew.
Who Deserves The Credit For Software Craftsmanship and Great Design?
What reasons can you think of for California being unable to build enough housing to keep prices affordable? Do you think zoning and property restrictions and regulations might be related? As someone who is interested in the California real estate market, I'm wondering what the fundamentals are that keep the prices so much higher than other states. It seems like earning money here and moving into a much larger house elsewhere might be the smarter move.
Rural Lincolnshire. I believe there's one other frequent HN user around these parts :-) (I'm from London but my wife is from here, and I kinda like it now!)
Yet no one complains when twitter lets me do this
Still, while I liked it very much, I wouldn't want every film to use that same style. It's pretty hard to work without a budget, and in the aggregate, quality will suffer.
Interesting and very insightful points you make in your blog entry. However, I think there is one invalid assumption your social voting is based on - the fact that the first and last user will vote.

In the point in time at which they vote, the first and last user experience a hope for a future incentive - but no actual incentive. Why should the first user vote on a comment about some piece of content?

This dilemma makes this system the same as the current, pre-dominant social voting system - it provides no initial incentive for someone to create activity, only the hope for a future incentive.
The software was actually an early warning system for students (software that detects anomalies in a student's progress). For instance, if a student suddenly started doing bad in three courses it signals different things than if a student starts doing bad in only one course.

You could normalize data to get relative values across teachers and classes. The intent was to find individual students or classes that needed more resources or attention. It was never to get people fired, but the unions fear that's how it will be used.
Apart from the reasons in the article, I'm going to go ahead and say that, if you're on Hacker News, you should be learning how to if you don't know already. If it gets you rooting around the balance sheets of publicly-traded companies, that has got to be a good thing for understanding how a company like Apple or Yahoo runs. You should at least get a sense of why someone would pick a stock. It's a great way to turn analytical interest into business knowledge.

And beating the averages picking stocks is not that different than doing so with a startup. Startup founders, in aggregate, never outperform their opportunity cost. Is that going to discourage you? I really hope not.

Besides, when you learn about this kind of stuff, sometimes you happen upon gems like this:
http://paste.lisp.org/display/14576
Hmm ... wondering how frequently do people google themselves "as compared to other people googling for them". The ratio will be even smaller for famous people.

It can be debated that the others will not click on the link. Or that people actually google themselves more often than I think. Just a thought.
What's the difference between an "angel" investor and "begging from friends"? I mean I appreciate the difference, but why couldn't you put together a deal with an "investor" as if they were just a friend or acquaintance? Do accredited investors get any benefits your friends and family would not?
I suspect if some weird law were passed that said movies could only be made for < $100,000 and had to be sold for $4.99 a pop on iTunes, some very clever and amazing movies would eventually dominate the scene (and our idea of what a "good movie" is would change). Formula 1 racing has sorta thrived on this constant budget and tech limitation process, and yet the cars keep getting faster :-)
I don't know if you are informed how facebook overtook the marked leader in Germany, StudiVZ: StudiVZ got a lot of bad press for privacy violations that were pretty harmless compared to what Facebook is doing now. Subsequently, a significant share of their customers left towards Facebook. Sweet irony...
This is just like Farmville, but in real life :)) No, seriously, great concept. Maybe more people will find it easier to eat health thanks to this.

Best of luck!
Fabrice Talbot
I agree. Poor programmers write convoluted messes. Poor but smart programmers write over-complex code. Smart programmers write simple elegant code. A good language is one that make it easier to write simple elegant code.

But I am not convinced that a manager, I am not one myself, would see that the benefit of non-mainstream languages out weigh the costs. Will they be able to find smart programmers willing to maintain the code? Will these smart programmers cost too much? Will they be able to find anyone with experience with a particular non-mainstream language?
Quick Coding Quandry - can I code this into a Gadget for HTML site?
Can you embed a clever, excel like gadget in simply HTML page?

A friend has very kindly designed and produced (in HTML) our website - http://www.napa-technology.co.uk

I want to create a gadget to calculate pay back etc - just like the one I've modelled in the excel document linked to in the title.

Just want to assess the feasibility as I'll be looking for someone to do this and want to know what i'm asking for!

Any comments on our new site are much appreciated - I like the design personally but think it could be modernised a bit in terms of layout, coding etc.
Looks like he's also in an upcoming documentary about the broken US public school system:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/waiting...

Some of those scenes are from the lottery to get into the DC voucher program. DC is my hometown and the public schools are Cuisinarts for kids. Recently all future funding for the DC voucher program was pulled.
you're right

http://www.cosmolearning.com/documentaries/dangerous-knowled... is wrong