skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem lies when these later stage VC firms pitch themselves as the "early stage/seed fund" to founders selling the dream that they will be the first money in.

I've met a few partners at those above larger firms who said exactly this and taking the time to meet with entrepreneurs who are just at the idea stage/first product and taking advantage of the situation.
Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification
I've been using mine on and off since the release day. I think it's a fun toy. And most people use their computers as toys, so I believe it will continue to do quite well, until someone copies Apple exactly enough and at a lower price.
Didn't the reddit guys originally want to develop an app like that?
Depends. PayPal can add a 1% charge for international transactions, and an extra 2.5% charge for currencies other than USD.

Source: https://merchant.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/merch...
I haven't tried this but according to the comments on the post you can do something like this:

Comparator string_lessp = (Comparator) #(String a, String b) {
return a.compareToIgnoreCase(b);
}

sort(list, string_lessp);
When I read this stuff, like what to ban, what to allow and so forth, it's impossible for me to avoid thinking that actually C++, Objective-C, and D, are not enough. We are still in a world where a "better C" is needed as the available choices are not good enough.
Combine that with a device which really is "peel off and roll up in your pocket", maybe something derived from this Sony display, and cheap, and I think we have the future right there.

http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/29/sonys-new-flexible-oled...
Articles on these "rationalist" sites often tend towards a mix of smug superiority about one's ability to analyze other people's supposed biases, and lots of references to pet concepts. I posted this one because it does such an excellent job of analyzing the issue in clear, objective terms.

I think the article you linked is an excellent example of smug superiority with lots of references to pet concepts while deficient in regard to the core subjects under discussion. The author demonstrates little practical experience with or research into the actual science around obesity, the actual medical practices related to obese patients, the reality of being an obese person, or the linguistic meaning of the word disease.
Rampage vs. Rashad; Post Fight Recap
Why a nuke? If you're going to use something explosive to collapse the well, I'm sure there are many other options available that would provide enough "oomph" to collapse that well. A "nuke" sounds like overkill and exaggeration.
"We'll try our best to preserve your data", is the best you can hope for in any situation

If that's the best my customers could hope for, then I'd be broke.

I absolutely guarantee the integrity of my customers' data. To anyone who doesn't, I ask, "Why not?"
China bans torture evidence from trials
Great article, but it completely misunderstands the point of charter schools. Charter schools are suppose to be a testing ground for new methods in public school administration. If a charter school is successful, it's methods are suppose to be implemented on a wider range of public schools.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the tone of the article but it seemed to be suggesting that charter schools in themselves were a viable replacement for normal public schools.
1 Company selling 1 model is very different then 20 companies selling 40 different models with 5 different versions of OS.(and 20 different skins)
BTW, we've been using Opensimulator: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page for synchronous sessions and collaborative projects, and it works pretty well. Croquet: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page and Project Wonderland: http://openwonderland.org/ are also worth a look.
Ask HN: Simplest way to keep historical analytics
Can you recommend any "tricks" to keep long-term analytics of our web app up to date?

We monitor various vital statistics in our site.

Most of these are computed from the various tables that go back way in time, counting events (like user count over time, etc.).

It's really time we refactor all this as we grow and chop off old data from the app. However, we may lose easy access to some long-term stats (or access to new data we may be interested in the future), e.g. what if we wanted to look at signups by day of the week?

The Right Thing (TM) would be to refactor all the code and somehow provide accumulated data, plus the current counts, etc. Then bring back backups and query manually if we need new data.

Are there any ideas you found worked well to manage this?

(The app is in RoR)
No single thing is a "true sign of intelligence", that is to ignore the mutual interdependence of things. You can't have imagination without any knowledge.
You can split it up any way you want to, so long as you don't require more than 1-2 transaction per second in each entity group. On the other hand, lots of tiny entities doesn't perform well either. So it's a pretty severe design constraint.

To get decent performance for batch jobs, I use the remote API with bulk gets and bulk puts and no transactions. But that's useful only for inserts or when you've taken the application offline.
I still can't help but think that it's a device that if I were still single (read: more free time, no kids, no mortgage/property taxes) - I would've bought in a heartbeat.

But, as it is, there's no way I can justify the cost with an iPhone in my pocket & laptop on the table.
Why US and Europe are behind on mobile TV
We were abusing Dropbox beyond belief at that company. We had a single account w/ 50GB and there were about 5 of us sharing the single account, updating it simultaneously. Dropbox was simply never meant for that.

Now that I think about it, $HOME in Dropbox might be ok since (presumably) there'd only be one person using it at any given time.
Indian Startup Lifeblob accuses Facebook of copying its feature
While something like a Haskell/OCaml implementation would probably be too cutting-edge, considering the conservative inertia of such a big project, I wonder why they didn't consider some high-level language better suited for compiler writing.

I imagine bootstrapping could be a problem. If GHC needs a C compiler to build itself, and the C compiler needs GHC to build itself, you'll need a good, very portable C compiler to get started - that's GCC. Cross-compiling could perhaps be an option, although GHC doesn't support it for the moment.
I think you misunderstood the list. It is not a list of normative criteria for the definition of disease, but of descriptive criteria, and not even a list of descriptive criteria for disease, but for uses of the word disease. That is twice removed from what you seem to be seeing here. Your observation that many common conditions fail several of the criteria is exactly the point of the list.
I love mine. I have a laptop, but the iPad is the useful tool that I browse with on the sofa, take to meetings to demonstrate 'stuff' and throw in the car as a 'just in case' as I can use instant messengers, email and the web (plus drop-box) its all I really need in an emergency. It doesn't do everything - of course - because its not supposed to.
UK Student Fined By College For Flirting Site — The Zuckerberg Story This Is Not
Yes: economically we also need ditch diggers in more numbers than classic literature experts. That doesn't make society better off if all the top universities start funneling money into ditch digging just because they can get away with it.

Note: I have a lot of respect for software engineering, just making a point with an extreme.
One prominent energy expert known for predicting the oil price spike of 2008 says sending a small nuclear bomb down the leaking well is "probably the only thing we can do" to stop the leak.

Hold on a second; if you use the word "expert" in association with this I expect it come from, you know, an engineer, munitions specialist, geologist or well driller.

Not an investor...
The 2.5% only applies if you receive in another currency than USD. Usually you request the payment in USD, so the conversion happens on the sender's end.
Didn't know about the 1% though, I'm wondering if that still applies as I can't find in on the regular site.
I don't find any of that surprising... I mean, soda? Are they serious?
IIRC, they were working on a project with BMW a few years ago.
+1 That's really useful to know - thanks for the stats.
To be very honest, my first thought is that in all "HONESTY" you CANNOT do all this - its impossible to do all these things (claimed on the website), without experiencing those in person and it will vary from person to person based on the context, circumstances, idea etc. I think it will be a disservice to any confused soul (I am guessing those are the kind of people who would hit your site) by claiming to do things that are not practically possible, without actually experiencing those.
What do you want from life?

* If you want to run a successful startup, and don't quite care where you live, then go to SF and learn at another startup while building your own on the side

* If you care about living in Michigan, and don't want to uproot yourself, pull some consulting gigs (referrals, craigslist, etc.) or search HN for how to score them and build your startup on the side - FAIL if you have to, in order to learn, and keep at it.

* You can't have everything. Startup, a stable life, and money - chose 2.
The suggestion I have heard is that a nuclear bomb will generate the heat/evergy required to fuse the rock around the edge of the explosion. Otherwise it will just leave open cracks.

I have no idea if that is true; but it seemed reasonable when I read it.
Unshare the folder with them.
I think it is a good point that there are different kinds of aptitudes, but I also think this point should be kept in perspective. I think it is misguided when people speak dismissively of IQ, SATs and the like, saying things like "well, all that proves is that you're good at taking those kinds of tests." (I'm not saying the article does this, but I do hear this rather frequently - ironically, usually from people with high IQs. Privilege Guilt?) There is no reason to be dismissive of the immense power of the type of intelligence that handles symbol/abstraction manipulation, particularly in technology.
who uses links? I have chrome and as soon as i find something which i cannot understand i highlight them and right click (which Steve Jobs hates) and click search on google (or other Search engine). Its funny i dont even need to do copy paste
Although its not a native app, I won't mind using it, if you can get voting and commenting into it.

Another thing I would love to see if infinite scroll. Its a real joy to use on mobile phones.
Any chance someone can come up with a Word/Pages template of this? Perhaps an offline/downloadable version of the site?
BREAKING NEWS: Comment posted in wrong thread on internet gets down-voted.
Boston start-ups finding fertile ground for growth elsewhere
How many apps did the iPhone have, 2 months in?

I guess also that because today the iPhone is a bigger market, and its apps also run on the iPad, it makes more sense to target the iPhone.
Plus, the uncertainty of whether the iPad would really take off.

Now that the iPad does seem to be successful, the apps may follow.
Well, within your few sentences lies the method through which AA is able to remain a meme (in the original Dawkins sense). The core tenant is that alcoholism is a permanent 'spiritual' disease, that cannot be cured, and can only be treated through perpetual use of the 12-step program for the rest of their lives.

None of this, in reality, is based on science or facts. It is something that the original progenitors made up.

Because most people in their normal lives will not develop an addiction firsthand, and because most people are honest and basically believe what they are told (expecting other people to tell them the truth), this continues to propagate.

One way to tell if something propagates mostly as a meme rather than by functional merit is to cross cultural boundaries and look for it elsewhere. If it were something that had merit, there is a better chance for it to have grown within other cultures independently. AA's own self-published census shows that it is overwhelmingly an American and Canadian phenomenon, with some small sprinkling in the UK. It basically exists nowhere else in the world, except for expatriates from the US.

There is also a correlation between alcohol addiction and AA penetration. Places with more problems with alcohol addiction have more AA meetings. At first this seems to make sense -- more alcoholics, more AA members and meetings to help them. But if you go to places where AA does not exist at all, you'll find the same numbers you'd expect from America if there was no correlation with AA. In other words, places without AA have the same numbers you would get in America if you took the AA slider widget and turned it back down to 0.

My own conclusion is that AA and alcoholism is mostly a cultural artifact, not a physical (or 'spiritual') disease manifesting itself in people's bodies. I encourage you to dig up numbers (which AA openly provides from their own surveys, and are not flattering to themselves) and draw your own conclusions.
throwing an exception in the constructor comes to mind, in which case the destructor isn't called

Of course it is not called -- the object has failed to construct. There is no object. You cannot call a destructor on nothing. Now if some data member has been constructed but the call constructor failed, destructors for such members will be called.
I've heard the same thing from people in AA.

Honestly, I think it is something of an excuse to live with the problem (I'm not judging on that, fair enough). A coping mechanism, if you will, to live with relapses and so forth.

I know at least one Alcoholic who is totally dry now (and will not touch a drink because he is scared of slipping back) and yet another who is a normal drinker again. In the first case the guy is pretty like those in the AA - but his coping mechanism is to have scared himself from drinking (again, no issue there - if it works...). The final example, though, suggests that alcoholism is entirely fixable in at least some cases.

(note: I've had problems with slightly excessive/impulsive/habitual drinking in the fairly recent past, so some of this is from experience)
I personally haven't used it, but you might want to consider cassandra for something like this:

http://cassandra.apache.org/
When I was quitting smoking I noticed that there were many places I could not smoke, and that when there I did no have quite the same impulse to smoke as when I was, say, home.

Basically, so long as I knew I had the option to smoke I was way more inclined to want to do so, and found it harder to resist. This was sort of encouraging, because it suggested that a lot of the urge was psychological, which seemed better than a relentless chemistry-driven compulsion I might never beat.

That's not to deny the physical addiction part, but to note that appreciating that it's not all physical addiction makes it seem less impossible to beat.

(I also noticed that the urge to smoke in the morning was greater after I had that first one. I then started throwing any remaining cigs down the toilet before going to sleep. That took will power. :) Sure, I would buy smokes on the way to work, or at lunch time, but it helped me cut down. I must say, addiction sucks.)
JSON presentations for the web
I'll just quote pg from "Hackers and Painters"[1], because he said it better than I can:

> I've never liked the term 'computer science.' The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers-- studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.

> Sometimes what the hackers do is called 'software engineering,' but this term is just as misleading. Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are. The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply defined, but it's there. It falls between what and how: architects decide what to do, and engineers figure out how to do it.

I guess what I'd like to see exist is a "Programming Arts" degree. Or just a "Hacking" degree.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Seems like this guy just needs his problem solved.

Prize: getting a job offer for a very unspecific web company based in India. Yay?

But, in the spirit of being constructive, he should probably forgo solving this in SQL, have PHP generate the date, then use the date as part of the SQL WHERE clause.
Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass
On a low level, Clojure exposes the underlying JVM, so you can instantiate and bang on Java objects all you want. It's "hybrid" in that sense, and always has been. That isn't changing. But dipping into Java in Clojure is used mostly for interop with Java libraries or to get better performance for critical sections of code.

On a higher level, in Clojure itself, there's not much OO going on (depending how you define OO), and that's not changing much either. In the new defrecords: 1) Everything is immutable, 2) There's no encapsulation of methods inside objects, 3) There's no inheritance of method implementations from "parent classes", 4) There's no data-hiding, and all fields are public. Uncontrolled thread-unsafe mutation of "objects" is still not kosher. Defrecords are kind-of-OO in the sense that there are named types that you can instantiate, the resulting things have named fields, and there's some polymorphism going on when you use protocols. But it's not really very OO in my opinion.

http://clojure.org/datatypes and http://clojure.org/protocols are the official docs, if you want to know exactly what you're getting.

"Object oriented" and "functional" are so loosely-defined that it's almost best to avoid using the terms entirely, in my opinion. See http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-04-21.html for some of Rich Hickey's opinions on how OO Clojure is nowadays. Rich uses the term "abstraction-oriented" to describe Clojure.
What a case of assuming your conclusion. If Lisp is poetry, and poetry is beautiful-but-archaic-language-completely-divorced-from-ordinary-human-communication, well then obviously Lisp is for a tiny minority who like to speak Elizabethan; meanwhile the much larger population of practical people will simply prefer to get things done in vernacular.

It's nonsense, of course. If Lisp weren't good for getting things done, I for one wouldn't bother with it. But having assumed his conclusion in the first three words of the second paragraph, the author need offer no argument, and doesn't. In fact he doesn't even mention Lisp after that.
Because giving an absolute guarantee of anything is impossible?
because large-scale C projects end up reinventing C++ features in a more complicated, error-prone way

You are spot on. Here is an excerpt from a blog post on writing a GCC plugin:

The GCC AST itself is a curious data structure in that it is an implementation of the polymorphic data type idea in C (next time someone tells you that polymorphism works perfectly in C and they don’t need “bloated” C++ for that, show them the GCC AST). The base “handle” for all the AST nodes is the tree pointer type. Because the actual nodes can be of some “extended” types, access to the data stored in the AST nodes is done via macros. All such macros are spelled in capital letters and normally perform two operations: they check that the actual node type is compatible with the request and, if so, they return the data requested.

http://www.codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2010/05/10/parsing-...
If its his point to claim that intelligence tests are bunk, I'd quibble with the declaration that any person, or even any academic, could make an 'intelligence test' pertaining to their particular field: that's not a test of intelligence, but of mastery, though how quickly one can master, and how widely they can apply that mastery may well be a test of intelligence.

Are intelligence tests tests of mastery in a field? I'd claim not, and I'd go on to claim that they're built by people who study intelligence, without the intention of testing a person's knowledge, as Asmiov claims such tests do.
> * You can't have everything. Startup, a stable life, and money - chose 2.

The SLM theorem?

Where "S" is really "have fun while working, do exciting stuff" more than "startup".

Btw I think that there is hardly a bigger mistake of running away from a place where you feel good.
Lots of folks only see the DOM and the bad parts when working with JS

Agreed that you can't blame Javascript for the DOM, but there are lots of bad parts aside from that. Default global scope and semioptional semicolons are gigantic WTFs, the with statement should be nuked from orbit, and there are generally lots of ways to write code that appears to be correct but is just waiting to fail in bizarre ways. It's just annoying that we're stuck with Javascript because it's so entrenched, while Python and Ruby offer all of its strengths in much saner packages.
Destination Denmark: Fund the Future of Storytelling and The Miracle in July
i'm sure you know but, fyi, canon a480 is not that high quality p&s camera.
I love it. It's the startup version of medicine's 3F Theorem (fortune, fame, family - choose 2).
Admit it, everyone just wants to see an underwater nuclear explosion.
Of course, I said this in the context of a free app that's still in beta!

Maintaining data integrity during worst case scenarios is difficult, even when you have the budget and expertise for it. Especially if you offer real guarantees to your customers you should know that it's completely unreasonable to expect the same from a proof of concept web 2.0 app.
Playing Google's Pacman with Selenium 2
there is also CAP theorem in the distributed systems world.
re: the third point - I think telecommuting would let me choose Startup/Stability, and that's very acceptable.

Life is quite cheap in MI! I don't need a SF salary to live like an adult around here.
Search youtube.. they're on there...
I find it unlikely that fb copied this feature. FB is in the content discovery game (amongst other things). Once users are sharing photos, a likely next step would be to help them discover photos from their friends and friends of friends.

It's not just fb either. The idea of finding and presenting users with associated content they would find interesting is a staple feature of most social sites
Interestingly, the vast majority of the top 500 supercomputers are owned by countries with permanent membership in UN's security council with the exceptions of Germany and Japan, the leaders of the Axis in WWII.
I found particularly appalling the bit about Medical Justice member doctors having patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice.
Ah, I'm glad some people are qualified to decide what to do with other people's money -- it's all way over my head.
I think waiting for Oracle to do something with Java 7 at this point is like believing Lucy will let you kick the football this time.