skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember that the data suggests exactly 2 individuals dropped into human populations that were locally in the tens of thousands

I did not notice that, but it seems that's just what we have detected so far. If it can happen twice, isn't it very likely it would happen quite a few times?

As to species barriers, by definition a species is what is reproductively isolated.

Biology is not nearly as clean as say math, and so reproductive isolation is quite blurry.
Some times A + B works and B + C works but A and C are reproductively isolated.

Often, A + B makes, C and C + (C or A or B) makes D, but D is infertile. Or E is infertile. And while A + B makes C and even D and E, the fact that the lines eventually terminate means A and B are reproductively isolated.

The foals would be mostly horse, and the result of that is an animal that is 3/4 horse which therefore is likely to be able to breed with other horses.

Not so.

It is true that once in a million a fertile mule is born, but that mule's offspring are not fertile, or its grandchildren are not fertile. Mules have been bred throughout history, but I know of no line of mostly donkey or horse hybrids with a fertile mule parent, or gand, or grand-grand-grand parent, or any mule linage.

and by chance on 2 occasions fertile offspring

But that in no way guarantees THEIR offspring with either Humans or Neanderthals (or other hybrids) would be fertile or that their grandchildren would be.

And if they were, then by definition us and Neanderthals are the same species.

And in that case I still don't understand how there could be so little genetic difference contributed.

For sweet zombie jesus' sake, we can identify the descendants of a Central Asian male who lived around the time of Genghis Khan over most of Eurasia. And successful interbreeding with a population who lived apart for 200 THOUSAND freaking years leaves only a few stray genes?
Well, the latter ones might be helpful. For instance, in #8 and #9, if you notice that someone is trying to manipulate your emotions, you might be more on guard.
Visa to Launch Contactless Mobile Payments for iPhone
Fair point.

We believed that the unmaintainable code problem would be less of an issue after launch, and that this person knew his codebase well enough to keep it on life support until that point, at which we could hire people to fix the problem, possibly with aid of post-launch funding. We assumed it was benign "technical debt" -- a bad technical situation that can be paid off later when resources are less scarce.

What we didn't count on was the meltdown of the person responsible for the problematic code. In hindsight, we should have seen it coming, but it seems like there are always things going wrong in a startup, and everything seems urgent.

I've wanted for a while to fire this guy, throw out his code, and rebuild everything from scratch, but have been under the impression that we don't have the time/turning room to do this. I'm not experienced enough to know the externals (e.g. how hard it is to get funding, etc.) and whether or not this is the case.
That's what Long Now's http://www.longbets.org/ is for :)
"What if Wikipedia became so important that people would pay to edit the pages? There are corporations who would love to have the final word, and they could, so long as they paid for it, perhaps?"

This is a terrible idea and would lead to serious astroturfing of otherwise neutral articles. This would only serve to make money the final arbiter of truth.
10 Practical Jquery Style Switchers
Here is a roundup of 10 practical jquery stylesheet switchers for you to test and implement into your website, thus providing a better user experience.
http://diveintohtml5.org/
http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/
HTML5 Unleashed: Tips, Tricks and Techniques
Here were some of my thoughts on it from a couple years ago...

http://www.innovationontherun.com/considering-working-for-a-...
Yeah, it wasn't meant as a criticism of the article. More of a "Python can do nice things too" shout out to other Rubyists. I don't know about them, but I find myself translating code between Ruby and Python for various reasons and it is nice to learn the parallels in idioms and such.

So, upvoted.
Are you ready for the United States of Germany?
Still trying to figure out why this is on Hacker News. It's slightly funny, and a decently executed hoax, but come on, it's obviously just a walkway under the water.
As somebody who dreads scribd links (I won't install flash), this really looks like a good step forward. PDFs are still better viewed in okular, but I could see this being useful for viewing MS formats. Really slick interface, too.
When I visit this page and I'm not logged into FB, I get a pop up after less than a minute. "Not logged in", Login to continue. Anyone else? This should be a public page.
First Time Entrepreneurs Don't Usually Get Funding
It's certainly not inevitable, but there are a number of factors, including the massive resources each country requires as industrialization continues and the standard of living increases, political interests and influence in smaller border nations nearby, directly shared borders, and some amount of history

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1974028,00.htm...
What rules are you referring too? Are you saying that Nasdaq violated their own rules when they rolled things back?
Social Media Revolution – Unbelievable Facts and Figures
kinda threw-up in my mouth a bit when I read that. thanks
I have.

In this case, the patent is considerably narrower than the headline would leave one to believe.

Even if someone did manage to get a patent granted on something like "bitfields", this would be an annoyance and not a tragedy, as the patent would never hold up-- it would be trivial to produce prior art to invalidate it.

I'm all for discussing patent reform, but it's a lot easier to do in terms of specifics. And, in this case, I don't see anything egregious. At least, not yet.
I think you aren't giving the table the credit it deserves. The fonts aren't ordered by rank at all. They are arranged by class (grotesque on the left, proceeding to geometric and didone on the right).

I'll admit though, the rules don't seem entirely consistent to me. But they are consistent enough that I feel like there's an order here that I'm not quite grasping. I'd really like to see a post about how the table was put together, and whether the inconsistencies are arbitrary, or whether there really is a system behind it.
Ask to view their business plan (and then learn how to interpret them if you need to). If they don't have one, they probably don't have a set path for making money in a set amount of time. They might just be hoping for a buyout.
It follows the humor of the actual strip pretty closely.
It's a questions of surface tension of the water.

I'd have to think about the physics a bit, but if you fall wakeboarding, you can skip across the surface of the water for a good ways (done it). Considering your max speed is about 20 mph, and when you fall you immediately let go of the rope and decelerate rapidly, I would say a human body can skip across the water at roughly 15 mph.

It is entirely dependent on you though, if you let anything pierce the surface it's over. If you make sure your limbs stay up then you can skip a few times.

I'm still pretty sure this is a hoax but I bet you could do what they are doing if you could move feet fast enough (which may be impossible for a human, but a machine with feet that moved faster might be able to). Water has surface tension no matter what the speed, you just need to get out of the hole created faster than you fall through it.
"Baron Rothschild, an 18th century British nobleman and member of the Rothschild banking family, is credited with saying that "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets.""

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/08/con...
Well said. The question you responded to, "What kind of person still hasn't made up their mind the day before an election?", is absurd, and that absurdity stems from unclear thinking.

It's as though people think of politics as a one dimensional thing, where we could even assign numbers to different viewpoints. 0 for the hard left, 100 for the hard right; major party A is 38 and major party B is 64, and if I'm a 42 kind of guy, well, 38 is closer, so I'll vote for party A.

Ridiculous, I know, but it's the only way I've managed to explain to myself why people think and say some of the things they do.
Therefore, I assume we can pay this person substantially less than we'd pay an entry-level developer.

You'll end up having to pay any decent employee in any position something near a market-rate salary.

Not sure about the "glut" of people, but also not sure that is relevant. You are looking for a quality person who can work independently, adapt to the environment of the company, maintain some long-term loyalty to the company, and do the work of 2 people. There are rarely a "glut" of those types of people, and they rarely work for a substantially reduced pay.
> The iPad does to the internet what the iPod did to music.

The iPad is an internet appliance. It streamlines the consumption of information/content. The iPad will hasten the bandwidth usage explosion.

OT, AT&T needs to get the message, both in the wireless and terrestrial wireline markets.
I actually think this is a good idea.

1) I would want a trial before I use it.

2) HN is kind-of the wrong audience. You would probably get more bang for your post at digg or something.

3) While I personally won't use it, I know of a few people who would jump at the opportunity to use this (mostly designers).
I thought the most impressive part about the html5 presentation wasn't necessarily the fact that it was HTML5. Its the fact that you can show working examples directly on the slide, they aren't simulated, they are just working javascript.
Coming to a Computer Near You: The Multi-factor Quiz Show
That's the best part. Only the trades that are directly related to the stocks that dropped are being reversed. Even if your trades on the stock are reversed, you have still moved the market and executed your DJIA options.
I'm not from NYC, and have no idea what these kinds of rates are. However, given the goals that you would like this person to achieve, what will that be worth to you? I know it's hard to quantify for people not in sales roles, but how much do you think this role will contribute to your bottom line? What you pay them will depend on whether this is 50k or 500k.
Pregel: Large-scale graph computing at Google
Actually, we're not even as far as we got in the 70's in research labs. (Mainstream-wise)
HTML Tidy finds 21 errors and 3 warnings.

I like Eric Meyer's S5 template for clean markup and slick interface: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
Can someone still patent the meta-patent?
Algorithms vs. Data
The Legal Battle Between Apple And Nokia Heats Up
He's sort of right but also sort of wrong. For an example of why he's wrong, try using a Moto Droid and notice how mediocre the experience is. This is not just because of the hardware.

Creating a high quality "computer appliance" experience is non-trivial, and Apple has done a very good job of it.

Even watching the android on iPhone 3G demo video in another thread, one realizes that extremely few people would ever prefer Android to iPhone OS, at least in the currently available versions.

Sure the differences are subtle and small, and maybe the overall edge Apple has is small... But the question is, as consumers get more demanding, what is Apple's slight edge worth?
Bruce Eckel's books:

http://www.mindviewinc.com/Index.php
Just a thought - it may feel uncomfortable because people never accept changes, we all need time for brain patterns to rebuild. My first impression was - get the old page back. Second impression was - it now exposes some functionality I usually had to go to advanced for. I'd wait a month before jumping to any conclusions.

Yes there are inconsistencies but nothing 3 lines of code won't fix.
I vote for "where we are today."

A (hypothetical) US patent on the Turing Machine would have stopped any attempts to build a mechanical device to Turing's Specifications (like this one: http://aturingmachine.com/index.php) for a period of 20 years.

It wouldn't stop anyone from building a device that is computationally equivalent to a Turing Machine; it wouldn't stop anyone from using the abstract notion of a Turing Machine as an intellectual device.

In short, a patent would have had no practical effect at all.

Now, let's imagine another alternative: one where Turing invented the Turing Machine, but chose not to publish it, as he was afraid of some better-financed competitor learning his "trade secrets" and exploiting the device before he could implement it himself. Where would we be then?

Patents are a trade-off. The inventor gets a monopoly for a limited period of time, in exchange for the idea being passed into the public domain after the monopoly expires. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it's not easy to dismiss out of hand.
What you're describing looks like Google Living Stories. http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/

The code is open-source and there is even an Wordpress plugin.

BTW: I always wanted a website or newspaper that covered stories that made the headlines to investigate it years later, to see how these people are doing now or how events shaped their lives. Would be interesting to read.
Wholesale Privacy violations in the European Union
Yes, it's acceptable to ask questions about their finances, although the term "burn rate" is usually associated with a period of time, e.g. $x per month, we have y dollars in the bank (and maybe) z dollars pledged if we reach the next milestone by such and so date.

If they consider it to be unreasonable to tell you how long they're going to be able to keep you employed go elsewhere. I've can't remember ever having a problem asking this question (e.g. not joining a startup that I in retrospect wished I had) or ever being lied to, although we can be sure others have had the latter problem.

Other important things:

Try to make sure they can fire people. The only thing worse than a bad hire at a startup is when the leaders don't have what it takes to remedy it. It's hard, it requires the ability to be at least a little bit cruel, but it often is utterly fatal if they can't do it.

Assuming you're a programmer, make sure they give you a test to see if your peers who have also been or will be hired though this process can code their way out of a paper bag. See above, plus you just don't want to be working in a shop with too wide a variation in programming ability or at least too many lows. I suspect I don't have to tell you the latter given your current background but I note it's much less affordable in a startup. So are lies. The one time I knew ahead of time that my boss was a liar and I went to work for them anyway (was very desperate due to a cold cubicle that was making me sick) I really regretted it.

Do the Joel Test: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

Nowadays, I'd make sure they have a grasp of Customer Development (search this site for that) and otherwise look like they have a clue WRT to business. That tells you unambiguously why stealth startups are generally to be avoided. Looking back on most of my career I sure wish I'd known of its concepts and it certainly explains the failures of many of the failed startups I've worked for.
That is a great example - bookmarked for later. I have been into SW/RDF/RDFS/OWL tech for a long but Neo4j seems to be a better fit for a lot of general purpose problems.
I vote yes. Everyone in the video is wearing Hi-Tec branded gear, all the time. Hats, t-shirts, shoes, sweatshirts, jackets.

Everything except the wet suits and the vehicles, it looks like.
What's left? there's always an option to go to thepiratebay.
Okay, so I meet someone and decide that we ought to keep in touch. We swap phone numbers, and I say, "add me on Facebook when you get home."

They say, "nah, I don't use Facebook anymore. Do you have a _______ account?"

Someone should really fill in that blank.
That a nice project and all, too bad he's likely to have it go TU on him when his first drive fails.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-i...

I would also be concerned with the single point of failure with his fan. If that seizes up for any reason the temp in that thing is going to skyrocket very quickly.

Personally, after I outgrow my current RAID5 -- similar to the one I built here (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6558), but using SATA drives now -- I'm going to switch over to mirrored large drives instead of RAID5. As long as I don't start videotaping every second of the kid's lives I should be ok.
My first impression was that this concept is the iPad of web development. The graphical development approach adds abstraction, which means it could potentially become popular with those with little technical knowledge but just want to (quickly) launch a website/web app (similar to the way that some people who use the iPad just want to type, use internet radio, TV shows etc. without having to mess about on a computer). HN is definitely NOT your target segment.

At least it's drawing a strong reaction, which is good. Far better than a collective 'so what'. Remember the iPod was criticised too when it was first released, and I seem to recall that did ok in the market.
Facebook's UX failure: preferences
AssertTrue's summary of 37 Signals' Getting Real: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327598 lists a number of takeaways from the book.

This one crystallizes my objections to Facebook's privacy and other settings:

"Avoid preferences. Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions. Instead of using your expertise to choose the best path, you're leaving it in the hands of customers. It may seem like you're doing them a favor but you're just making busy work for them (and it's likely they're busy enough). For customers, preference screens with an endless amount of options are a headache, not a blessing. Customers shouldn't have to think about every nitty gritty detail — don't put that burden on them when it should be your responsibility."

Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions.

That's why I dislike Facebook's settings interface. The settings section is huge, convoluted and not immediately understandable. You essentially have to reverse engineer their settings design to understand what you're doing.

They don't merely "make me think," they make me work for them. I become a Facebook engineer every time I open the settings section. It's a classic/stereotypical "UI designed by programmers," and it likely just mirrors the structure of the code.

They need to boil it down, explain exactly what it does (their current attempt fails at that), and make people trust it. It can't be trusted if you can't understand it. And it can't be trusted if it's constantly changing. The UX is not just how you experience something today, it's also whether what you see today is the same as yesterday. More change means more work.

Facebook, take down your internal dashboard and give me a simple, trustable settings page (one page, whose individual settings don't lead me off to other pages) in it's place.
PASSWORD: GET QUALITY PASSWORD EVALUATED
Perl Design Patterns
"the new Apple-certifed technology combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that will host Visa's contactless payment application, Visa payWave."

So, it's exactly like the payWave technology already integrated in my Visa card, except I have to put a stupid case around my iPhone.

Sounds like buzzword-itis.

I've had payWave in my card for over a year, and I've never even seen an opportunity to use it. The social interaction with the cashier is just too weird. It's already bad enough with debit cards ("do I swipe? do you swipe? do you take the card from me and swipe it for me, making me feel like an idiot?")
Releasing the Kraken Requires 200 Terabytes of Storage
I was thinking the same thing. However, it made me respect them just a little bit more. They could have just written a blog post and said... "We're no longer using Flash," but instead, they took the time to build something that a) illustrated very well their new technology, and 2) actually entertained some of us. Valiant effort.
Why not post the link directly and add your text as a comment?

Anyway, thanks for pointing this out, it looks to work pretty good, it actually caught quite a few links that were relevant in searches that I tried that google missed. There seems to be quite a bit of spam in the results still.
Students - Point them in a direction and get out of the way
How come iPad is popular among facebook users when [farm]ville apps don't work?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

I should perhaps, at the risk of being more correct but harder to understand, have written "s/here/heir/g"

The original has now been changed, although not in the way it is stated, but an error remains, as is so often the case, and no doubt will be in this comment.

My point was serious. Sometimes I have real difficulty in understanding things that have such grammatical oddities, so much so that I spend more time decoding what must have been intended than I spend understanding the point being made. I'm getting to the point where if I don't understand something because the grammar or spelling is "odd" then I move on. The author has lost a reader, for better of for worse.

There is too much to read, and a reader's attention is difficult to get. Don't discard it lightly. Yes, many people have English as a second, third or even fourth language, and all credit to them. But there is a trade-off to be made. Written once, read many times (you would hope). Make sure it's easy to read.

This equates nicely with writing code. Take more time to write it more clearly so that later readers (which may include you!) will be able to understand it. This is a principle we all know, and we all know we should apply. It applies equally to the written word as to the program.
The Strategic Imperative Not to Hire Anybody
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...
But mauve has more RAM
One of my friend just put his week old Google Nexus on ebay because he found Nexus's UI vastly inferior to that of iPhone. He already owns iPhone btw.

The author in article raises some valid points and I do think that Apple's applications on iPad or iPhone are nowhere near that of apps made by independent developers. But initially it was Apple that laid down the groundwork and developers are just picking up from that.
Practice.

Assume the stocks you are manipulating are bid at 99.99, ask at 100.

3 - Your friend's first few sell orders at $0.01 or better are filled at about $99.99.

Your buy orders go unfilled.

4 - If your friend sold enough shares, the algorithms notice someone aggressively selling. They may undercut and sell at 99.99 or even 99.98.

The algorithms also place a few buy orders at 99.96-99.97.

5 - Your friend's trades (assuming he is placing multiple orders, and is selling a lot) execute and drive the price down to 99.96-99.97 or so.

6 - The algorithm's buy orders at 99.96-99.97, are filled by your friend's sell orders.

7 - Price back up to 99.99.

8 - Algorithms eventually sell the shares they bought at 99.96 at 99.99.

Sum total: the algorithms made a few pennies off your friend. Your DJIA short does pretty much whatever it would already have done.
Natural Language Processing/AI video lectures with transcripts from Stanford
Trust me, if Facebook believed in such things as preferences and user options, this whole openGraph debacle would be non existent.
Considerations When Raising Money
It seems to me the main problem is then the keyboard. As far as I can tell, there's no way I can run Emacs with the iPad soft keyboard (brother in law bought one, so I got to try first hand). But I just have a clunky laptop if I attach an external keyboard.

This is also the problem with the ssh client on my G1. I can do minor tasks in the shell but I can't use my editor.