skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the lesson here is about taking your fair share. Calacanis convinced Arrington to put on the conference, and to split the company 50/50 with him. Arrington eventually realized what an obviously stupid and unfair situation this was and killed it.

This is why one should always try to get a fair share of things, and not take more just because you can. It's not just ethical, it's also enlightened self-interest. I bet Calacanis could have maintained a much smaller share indefinitely.

From Calacanis' new "conference" page: http://thelaunchconference.com/

"...Alas, Mike and I are both strong personalities and we had a different vision of where to take the conferences (and how to split the not insignificant profits from it–but I digress)..."
Anyone ever read the history of the OED? It's a fascinating and ill conceived project that took 70 years to actually yield a product (mind blowing when you compare the time and growth of Wikipedia).

If you know a little about it's history, it's pretty easy to see how mistakes were made. Wikipedia has mistakes too.
Oh yes we still have toll roads and the never ending construction projects. Most of them are managed by the government but the skyway (I-90 from the city into Indiana) has been privatized. I couldn't tell you what it's like though as I almost never take it.

I can say that after Chicago privatized the parking meters the rates (naturally) skyrocketed from their subsidized levels and street parking since then has been used much more efficiently.
If braintree cares this much about this, why don't they allow people who use authorize.net currently to store their credit cards in the braintree vault?
There might be a connection, rich corporations benefit from costly approval procedures. Keeps the small competition at bay.
My recollection is that the ether pad guys went to work on Wave. But they may have moved around.
Yes, yes. Lucky man praises luck.
A hole in space... no really, an actual hole
It seems odd that it is configured to look up a key-pair, when that key-pair is no longer needed. Surely it would better to have it no longer cache queries that are no longer needed.
There's a lot of website analytic tools that like A/B that could be applied to dating. How about mouse tracking to figure out what turns off readers, or dynamic reordering of profiles based upon viewer,
I have tried this before with my processor, and the transactions were denied because of no match on the expiration date.
Good luck - and props on respecting potential hires with some 'sell' of your firm.
Anti-corruptions is a huge area, automated check and removal of opportunities for corruption.

Education's also a huge market, making education scalable is a multi-billion dollar problem.

In developing countries the mobile market is incredibly hot, phone banking and market information by phone is transforming economies.

How about the volunteer problem, volunteering has a high barrier to entry, figure out a way to lower it and you can change the entire third sector.

Infact in pretty much every area you can think of there are opportunities.
A video of audience and police having at it. Sensationalist in some ways, but not very enlightening in and of itself.
Strangling the Net: Stripping DMCA Protections from YouTube
Wikipedia also says that the tensile strength of water is not relevant.
Oh, but they won't sell the Nexus One for them. Interesting.
Good point but even if the 70y.o. had a snakebite that would cost $100k to cure it's still a debate. My point wasn't that you shouldn't go into debt to cure a snakebite. I was just trying to show that your point was over-simplified and is a debate not a given.
This is all for fun and for great justice, so I'm cool reinventing the wheel.
The Artisan and the Automaton: FedEx Office and Hope Bindery
Right, sorry, the endless downmods made it seem as though that comment was interpreted as though I made it seem as though the jit was invented after or because of java. Of course it wasn't. (see the other comment above).

I was just reading that 'early history of smalltalk' thing the other day, and it struck me as though really, since the 60's there hasn't been that much progress at all.

The 'mother of all demos' combined with the 'dynabook' (iPad?) really pretty much covered everything with the exception of the mobile phones.

Sure, we all have the equivalent of several Cray-1's in our houses now (or even in our pockets), but conceptually we are still were we were back then.

Everything looks great, we're burning billions of cycles on spiffy user interfaces and showing movies.

But under the hood it's old hat.

That's why I keep circling around and around trying to find my new 'home', the environment that I think will last me for the next 10 or 20 years.

I haven't found it yet. All I see is endless repetition, configuration files, minor tweaks. Rarely a bold move (fleet comes to mind, but I don't think it will ever be a commercial success). Programming seems to be mired in endless detail, fiddling the bits and tweaking things to get a link here or a widget there and to get them to talk to each other. User interfaces have become the main focal point, when they weren't (or at least when they weren't as pretty) we were happy if stuff just worked.

I feel like a homeless guy looking for a place to stay.

Clojure might be it, I don't know...

but I'll try it for sure. No point criticizing the soup before you've eaten it.

Thanks for digging up that jit reference.
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
This is ancient, wrong, and out of date.

Ah for the days when Karl was mcs.net. A finer ISP there was not to be had. I wish he were still doing that rather than whatever it is that he is doing these days, with boldface and intensity.
not really any data, but just an observance, it seems like if you walk onto a college campus these days, almost everyone is carrying a macbook compared to a few years ago when i rarely saw people with apple computers.
Well done.. even more powerful because this isn't typical fare on this website. If read on a personal development website, it would read like more content fodder. Read here, it reads like amazing.
If you can get the VCs and press to come you're 90% of the way there. If you can't you're in for a very rough ride.

Y Combinator Conference would be awesome, but they already do it for YC companies: Demo Day.
Personally I just ordered an Asus netbook after being all Apple for 3+ years. I'm going back to Linux... can't stand around and watch the walls close around me.
It's like how in postgresql, if a client runs "select * from lots", and you kill the client, the query keeps going even though there's nobody to hand the answer to.

That said, there are ways we can mitigate this, primarily in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-685
Exactly. The effort required to meet insurance and then government regulations for a doctor or hospital to get paid is through the roof. I was at the doctor not long ago and noticed a sign at the desk that if you paid in full with cash or credit he would give you a price that was close to or below many people's rising co-pays.
As always, wikipedia is a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
ArXiv blog: Magnetically-Induced Hallucinations May Explain Ball Lighting
Know what would fix that? Universal, single payer health insurance.
With Sprint pulling out on the Nexus One as well, are we sure that wasn't Google's decision?
“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” --William Arthur Ward

Thank You for giving me that present.
He's moved on from 2009's year of negativity when the divorce seemed anything but a beautiful dance of protons:

http://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1558664990 & http://twitter.com/zeldman/status/12644932699

And it was only six months ago when he said it's necessary to have been abandoned, betrayed and ridiculed and to have a "restless, broken heart" in order to succeed: http://www.zeldman.com/2009/10/22/dirty-little-secret-of-suc...

Just his own output seems to demonstrate that maybe it does take some pain to feel truly grateful for what you do have, but, sadly, I doubt most people will appreciate that until, well, they've been through the mill too.
I was a little surprised that "a siphon with a large leg" works (even tested it out to double check [1]). Could someone explain this to me - surely the weight of the water inside the "large leg" exceeds the weight in the little leg. Why doesn't that make the water move the other way [2]?

1. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/404957/siphon_with_a_large_leg.jpg

2. I realize is impossible because it would end up moving water from a lower reservoir to a higher one, but proof by contradiction doesn't count - I'm trying to understand what's happening at the point of the cap (in [1]).
>It took 10 years for the first beta blockers to be approved in the US after they were in use in Europe.

Yet Europe has drug regulation. Maybe the problem isn't regulation as such, but the way regulation works in the US.
"There's some comfort in knowing that a non-profit agency is looking into the safety of a drug before it goes out to the public for consumption."

You're kidding right? At least with a for profit corporation I know their motives. With a government agency I have no idea if they are returning a favor, taking money, or simply like the person. With that said, the FDA still requires a large profit motive since no one would spend the millions required to get approved unless they expected some return.

I wonder how many possible working drugs for esoteric diseases are floating around that will never be released because of the expense of getting through the FDA.
I wrote irrelevant where I meant to write relevant. Thanks for catching it.
It really puts things into perspective. We get excited when we come up with a different way to display a form and these guys were building planes that traveled at Mach 3 at 80,000 feet nearly 50 years ago. The amount of technical problems you have to solve to get such a plane into the air is simply staggering. Unbelievable.
"Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox." Proverbs 14:4
I was one of the pols. I agonized over the budgets. What we "wanted to do" was continue to pay our teachers. There wasn't enough money for that.

It was simple arithmetic, a choice between letting teachers go or raising taxes.

What many people did for selfish reasons, and you're doing for ideological purity reasons, is attempt to change the debate to some abstract notion of "government spending my money". Hey buddy, it's your kids in the schools, and you even get to vote on the tax increase. Just don't call me a jerk or a liar -- I'm giving it to you straight.

Quote anamax : The "jerk" behavior is to spend the $100 on lower priorities and whine that you don't have enough money to pay for higher priorities.

Which lower priorities was I wasting money on here, exactly? You're the expert. And I'm sure there weren't any state or federal mandates involved, legal obligations or anything like that. "jerk" behavior is refusing to educate yourself on things and hand-waving away instead so you can keep your nice simple universe. Mental shortcuts will always lead to uninformed opinions.
At least you're throwing ideas around. It's a problem that really does need a solution, and it would be nice to get more people thinking about this.

Maybe this is part of the macro problem of communicating to management that isn't necessarily technical (which is a problem in and of itself, because management at some level SHOULD be technical. I've found that if management isn't techy enough when their direct reports are highly technical, you get performance measurement disparity).
"Sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content"
Protect Yourself Against Facebook's New Hacker Path
Care to explain what you mean, please?

PS - I wasn't the one who down-modded you.
I don't see prices on the web site. Would you mind giving me a rough idea of what it costs to print/create various items? (Not a serious prospect, just curious.)
i was at tc50 2 years ago. they did an awesome job putting it on if you're an attendee. The production quality was great. Only gripe was Wifi. As far as the companies go? None were really "startups". Afterwards, I realized I was more excited to see the demo day companies from all the seed accelerators. They all had equal funding playing fields (for the most part), put the company together in 3 months, and were the real "startups". I'd love to see the YC essence mixed in with a TC50 type conference.
The first entry doing define: siphon on Google also gets it wrong. I'll look it up in my old Webster's Unabridged when I get home. If Noah got it wrong,it's possible the error dates back to Samuel Johnson.

There have been intervening editors since Noah Webster's time.
For an overview of the disputed "ball lighting", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

My parents live on top of a hill in the middle of an extinct volcanic valley. On several occasions (over a period of years) my father swore he saw a glowing green ball of light slowly moving toward the ground, which I naturally and sceptically dismissed. Then one night during a storm I witnessed the same phenomena myself.

I was inside the house. It was several hills away, so I had no concept of size (let alone smell). And it was only a few years later that I encountered the concept of ball lightning, which remains the best explanation of what I saw.

It was also late at night, so perhaps I was susceptible to and victim of the type of hallucinations detailed in the OP?
Yeah, Python support will be great.

I will count you under the 'votes for Python' category. If you know others, feel free to send them our way.
Yes, and children are still taught that Bernoulli's principle is the reason why planes can fly. There are a lot of interesting physics misconceptions that have become widely accepted, but because physics (and perhaps science in general) is not a major focus of our culture, no one really worries about these misconceptions being out there.

Well, no one except the physicists :).
I'm younger myself, and I started learning with WYSIWYG html and copy+paste javascript. From there, I learned real html and css, progressing to PHP.
After PHP, I was real interested in this thing called Ruby on Rails, took me forever to even get it installed. After that, I continued to work in rails and ruby, along with php.
I think if I could do it again, I'd start learning just python or ruby. A linux environment is a big plus, even if it's just a virtual machine.
Javascript is a great language, and starting out with jQuery then backtracing to real javascript is a good, and instantly gratifying way to learn, you have to start somewhere.
1000's of photos from the same moment in time
In general, I think reddit's commenting system is much better than HN's. For instance, context quotes, and the fact that permalinks to quotes clearly show the fact that it's a comment and not a submission.
"Nothing makes scientists happier than having to turn their pencils around and use the other end."

What a great turn of phrase.
The experience is very telling, and at the moment it's a no-brainer - iPhone, and it will reign for a long time yet. If you want to develop for Android you're probably better on custom apps / devices (tablets, specialized apps) as an employee rather than as an independent app developer.

The market demographics are very different - Android : 3/4 male, purchase apps 1/2 as often as iPhone users. iPhone users, around 50/50 male/female, affluent (as Android comes with cheaper devices the owners of those devices probably aren't using the platform the same way as iPhone users do).

Obsolete platform hardware/software - this is huge. Most existing Android phones won't ever get an upgrade to 2.x Android OS. Therefore to reach the market, you need to make it backwards compatible with the 1.x, which is a PITA.

Apple has only just announced that their next OS won't work on original iPhone (2G). This is a massive difference. You have been able to build for the latest OS for all iPhone devices for 3 years. Contrast this to Android - some devices released in the last 6-12 months won't run software built against latest Android OS.

Flash - this is big and I believe it will push prices lower in the Android app store. There has already been a "race to the bottom" in some categories (e.g. games, think 99c variety) in the iPhone App store. iPhone users will pay for games that you can play in a browser on a late-model Android phone for free. Therefore there's less incentive to pay for these games on Android devices.

Discoverability will always be a problem for any platform.
Just make it part of the science research grants they give out. I'm sure there are some scientists out there who love to work with venom and anti-venom :)
The connection is not so simple. People who do HFT are painfully aware that orders get broken, and so all exited the market before the drop really began going. The 0.01 orders are always hanging around.

However the fact that people have come to depend on HFT to help make markets means that when they disappear unexpectedly the market is smaller than it would have been, which makes large price swings much more likely.
>RDoc isn't just an abomination because of its approach -- it's an abomination because of its code.

Those are definitely not mutually exclusive.
Well, I own mixce.com, mixce.net and mixce.org. Those would be pretty great names for this sort of event -- short, easy to remember and somewhat hip. The startups would be considered a "mix" of the best of the industry.

I also work directly with a couple of prolific designers in SF, as well as some leading event planners and a couple VCs.

Diageo might also want to sponsor an event like this as well, especially if it had a "mixed drinks" angle. I could talk to the promotion staff over there about it.

Why I am getting downvoted for this? Anyone care to explain why I'm at -3 simply for responding to the request?
You Could See Swipely’s $7.5 Million Round On Blippy, But You Won’t On Swipely
But the semantics of searching on a map is not the "semantic web" that people like Tim Berners-Lee are talking about.

It people out there can't be bothered to search google maps, is there some particular reason they'd instantiate a reasoning engine on a semantic graph to find a local babysitter?
A dyno or two should be able to handle a boatload of traffic for a well-designed "typical" web app. See http://docs.heroku.com/dynos#dyno-concurrency-and-scaling for their performance claims (10-100 req per sec). Remember that with proper caching the number of reqs that actually hit a dyno may be a lot less than the number incoming (with Heroku you get a Varnish cache for free).

Unless your app gets truly impressively large traffic, or your app is so trivial that you have plenty of spare time for sysadmin tasks, Heroku is quite reasonably priced.
I merely glanced at bits of the code without diving into the implementation that much, but my high-level thoughts:

+ I love the "synopsis" header in front of all the classes.

+ I find the style horrible, but still more readable than the SGI-based STL headers. This is a very good thing.

+ Only one developer currently? I wonder how many bugs are yet to be found in this code. Making it ABI-compatible with libstdc++ should make the "swap it in, does it crash?" test very easy.
I tried. I tried really hard. I really wanted to see it this way. But hey. Sorry. I can't. This is just a mockery to me. I can't stand it anymore, happy faces, banal everyday stories "what are you doing tonight? I am… blah blah!". So you are happy, you are doing fine. Great. I can't help myself. Sorry. I don't mean it, you're fine person, I am sure you are. But I hate you.

(Pardon me, HN. I don't feel good after reading this story and I am trying to help myself a little. I know it's silly. Downote this as much as you like, it's ok, I don't mind it, I just wanted to write this. Sorry.)
If this were true, the greeting card market wouldn't be nearly as big as it is.

Also, printing will probably more expensive than buying things made via more conventional processes.
OK, so now the doctor has to come up with the millions of non-FDA approved drugs that are about to come onto the market, because there will be lots of these drugs.

Personally, if you are stupid enough to go for the non-FDA approved drugs, you are too stupid to help anyway. Unless you are going by some other approval system, for example whatever they use in Canada, UK or Australia. But if you are just going by what you read on the website, you are a fool.
Mozilla CEO stepping down, signals end of Firefox
Unlike a digital camera, or, say a pen and paper to write down the cc number?
I am using Clojure a lot right now on a customer's project, a cool language for sure.

That said, I have doubts about Clojure + AppEngine because of the loading request times. I can get a Java + AppEngine app to do about a 1 to 2 second loading request time by not using JDO and minimizing dependencies.

Unfortunately, loading the Clojure JARs (or the JRuby JARs) increase the loading request time.

Sometimes when I go to TheDeadline, I see almost a 10 second delay on the first page load. Does not happen often, but it does happen.
Was Last Week's Market Crash a Direct Attack By Financial Terrorists?
Why does it signal the end? Because the browser is slow, the underlying technology is outdated, they're going to have issues when they announce how much money they have as a non-profit (thanks to the Google relationship, which is continually fraying) and oh by the way the CEO just left.
This exchange ticked me off:

Q: It used to be that I could limit what strangers saw about me to almost nothing. I could not show my profile picture, not allow them to “poke” or message me, certainly not allow them to view my profile page. Now, even my interests have to be public information. Why can’t I control my own information anymore? –sxchen, New York

A: Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share. We study user activity. We’ve found that a few fields of information need to be shared to facilitate the kind of experience people come to Facebook to have. That’s why we require the following fields to be public: name, profile photo (if people choose to have one), gender, connections (again, if people choose to make them), and user ID number. Facebook provides a less satisfying experience for people who choose not to post a photo or make connections with friends or interests. But, other than name and gender, nothing requires them to complete these fields or share information they do not want to share. If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.

Why should I have no choice in whether or not my photo is public?
For the record, I don't think this is the case. But it is interesting that lots of theories like this are starting to pop up.
The Launch Conference will be exactly the same as TechCrunch50--except I'm going to invest all the profits in the startup companies.

It's going to be epic and I encourage everyone to attend Mike's event, and hope you consider coming to mine.
There are seven billion people on this planet and finite resources. If want you to stay happy long term you might want to lower your expectations a bit.
I think people who can internalize and rationally understand what hope insurance is could safely buy lottery tickets. Many people who buy it, it seems, buy it because they think one day they will actually get that $20m for a price of a cup of coffee.

In other words, I am not worried about HN-ers buying lottery tickets. I am worried about people well bellow the poverty line who spend a significant percentage of their already small income on lotteries. The little 'hope' fantasy game for them is a major delusion that sucks resources and time.

I think state run lotteries are a disgrace and should be banned.