skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I think you're right to say that bad ideas have been given more traction than they deserved by having an effective leader promoting them, I don't think this is a counter-argument to the grandparent.

Choosing the country's goals certainly should be democratic, but in an imperfect political system, it still takes tenacious leaders to navigate the rough political landscape to realize those goals.
Eh, it's definitely good advice but at the same time it's far from ideal.

It's like cold fusion. It doesn't work, but it really would be damn handy if it did, so we keep on trying to get it to work.
My company, Social Collective, took part in their 2009 program in DC and we found it really helpful, not so much for the money but more for the strategy advice and the introductions to investors.
These are new small businesses, not startups, specifically. They are the restaurants, catering services, print shops, laundromats, and interior design firms taking up the strip malls of the world. By the metrics used San Jose would rank as rather non-entrepreneurial, because there are many larger, fast growing startup companies, and fewer small businesses.

It's not a value judgment, but they're different things.

Chinatowns across the USA are exceptionally entrepreneurial, but mostly people own small shops. They are not making new things or business models, just running something that's already worked before as well as they can.
AFAIK, there's no comparable service for Android apps. And in the field you don't get competition from the mother ship, like with Apple and Genius, since Google does not seem that interested in controlling the Android market.

This seems to be an excellent opportunity.
The problem here is that FB makes more money by making user profiles more public. They have shown it already. And, I doubt you will disagree with me on this fact.

Now, you can argue that making private information public to generate revenues is not selling, however, IMO, it is, given the fact that they started out as a completely private social network.
Same here. Recalling my triumphs at Perl Golf somehow seems like small consolation now that the Perl world has collectively steered themselves into a ditch.
I believe the area of that graph with a "North" accent is significantly too large. I can tell you that Cleveland, Ohio in no way has the typical "North" accent.
I didn't disagree with that statement. I'm just explaining why Facebook wants users to "share" more data.

What is your explanation for why facebook removed the ability to make your profile picture private to non-friends?
You made a good point. But Dropbox it's a fantastic app in Windows and Linux too, and I guess that after PC vs Mac, Apple is going to come up with a new ad strategy "Mac is better"-ish again.

Safari and iTunes for Windows (as well as iPod and iPhone) are Apple's bait to get users ditch their PCs and buy a Mac. (Well, they are substandard apps, but the intention was/is that).

So I guess Apple could offer the best online sync experience with Dropbox and use it to say: "See? Now you can switch to Mac and instantly use all your documents you had on Windows! Isn't that great?"
How do we know they got a good ROI? It's hard to pin down when they sold it, and for how much. The best information I could find is here:

http://ask.metafilter.com/30833/How-much-of-Apple-Computer-d...
Forgot to put a link to the essay, here it is: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Would everything they ever made disappear too? If so, the loss of Windows and Office would create much more chaos than the loss of Google. The disappearance of all Apple products would not cause that much damage in comparison.
http://lolabrigada.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/little-big-leagu...
I don't know what point you're trying to make, and I don't have a snappy anecdote to back it up. But I know I've observed similar (and similarly unnoticed) slips of pronunciation. It's not like the spoken word is infallible.
Hi Joel, thanks for replying. The part about the marketing copy is surely correct. But for many HN'ers including myself, I would need to be good at marketing copy if I want my business to become in any way sustainable. Many people on here are flying solo, for better or worse. But it would be clear to say your business (i.e. someone inside your business) needs to be good at marketing!
> Well, if your world-view contains only OSX and Windows.

OSX and Windows and any OS that does WebDAV.

iDisk is WebDAV. It's a ... wait for it ... "open standard".

Even on Mac if you don't like the iDisk client, use any other WebDAV client you like.

I see all the iDisk hate in these threads and I wonder about people paying lip service to open standards on the one hand, while pushing proprietary solutions and dissing open standards on the other.
For references and historical purposes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpvOUnz4T7Q
Google Location History Dashboard
AMZN PE 53.69
Calling people "whiny bitch"es if they don't want to suffer or sacrifice, and don't accept that suffering is an insoluble problem, is an anti-human sentiment expressed in a crude and unintellectual way.

Many philosophers have taken contrary views. Ayn Rand is not a whiny bitch for criticizing sacrifice. David Deutsch is not a whiny bitch for applying Karl Popper's epistemology to education (http://takingchildrenseriously.com/), or for saying in his TED talk that problems are soluble (soluble means without suffering, and problems includes the problem of how to learn something). And so on. Criticism of their position would be interesting, but calling them bitches isn't.
Guinness World Records
Interesting book. Have you read :)
Someone mentioned the other day about the need for a standard file for exporting social networks, like there already is for email. Perhaps this is an idea for a startup, unless it already exists. It's obviously not going to be easy, but it's definitely something that's needed.
Yep, learning another language is hard work, but if you want an advantage, find a sleeping dictionary.
When I lived in Indonesia I met a housewife who told me she learned English entirely through diligent application of this method, no formal language education. She told me that I was one of only a few native English speakers she'd spoken to about it (she was really shy about her English, I think the only reason she spoke to me because I spoke fairly poor Indonesian in return!)

For my part, I would have happily believed that she spent 2-3 years living and studying an English speaking country.

She might have been lying to me, but it didn't seem like it at the time. All the information is there if you take the time to really study and memorise it.
Really? It was the driving force behind the creation of .NET, and the motivator for the infamous sweaty (Developers)* rant.
Probably because he’s not a robot and there’s such a thing as rhetoric. The fact that such euphemisms exist means they have a communicative purpose.
I love Ubuntu too, and I think it's awesome that iDisk works for it. It's cool seeing that awesomeness was built into iDisk, since Apple is using open standards for their online storage.
You seem to have encrypted your comment - please decrypt so we can understand and evaluate the point you wish to make.
I am in the midst of studying for a hefty financial certification exam right, so your comment reminded of something that is frowned upon in the financial industry.

Its not that what you're saying is completely wrong, just unnecessary.

A P/E ratio is useful, but it requires lots of context. You provided no context and mentioned a stock that shows little to no correlation to the tech industry and plus the financial industry is somewhat "messy" right now.

I suggest you look up some other large established banks and their P/E ratios right now. For example, Morgan Stanley (MS) has a P/E of 98. Does that mean they have that much more growth potential? Maybe it means that GS is currently undervalued with all the negative press they are getting recently? A low P/E could also be a sign of being undervalued, just as a high P/E can a sign of being overvalued.
On the other hand, the tech industry is proving to be quite lucrative lately. Apple has released the iPad and is coming up on their WWDC and there is plenty of speculation concerning iPhone 4G and mobile advertising opportunities. With all the media attention Apple gets, their "friendly" design, and their phenomenal advertising campaigns, isn't it quite possible that they are overvalued? As soon as a viable Windows 7 based tablet comes out that lets you torrent, play divx via divxplayer and flash, don't you think the iPad might be a little more than fucked in its current incarnation/closed environment? And who knows, maybe Microsoft is undervalued right now seeing as two execs have left? Its at a fairly low share price (historically speaking) right now.

tl;dr Fundamental analysis is complicated enough as it is, don't throw in unrelated numbers.
Podcast recommendations, please.

Thanks.
I did a bit more googling and Delta rockets are also built horizontally and raised. A Delta IV is bigger (or at least taller) than the space shuttle launch system, so size isn't the issue.
Open Source Before The Internet (barcode)
A few thoughts off the top of my head.

1) You've gotta network the shit out of it if you want the big $$$. Otherwise get ready for assholes on craigslist who are looking for "a college student that wants to build their portfolio"

2) Pricing balls. You need them. It's a huge signaling factor. If you are charging $40/hr it doesn't matter how good you are because you've already communicated you suck. My biz partner heard Obie Fernandez (I think) saying if you develop in Rails you should be charging $175/hr minimum. Arbitrary but it works. As a programmer you have to constantly deal with feelings of inadequacy that will make you want to flinch. Don't worry though, it gets easier with each project.

3) Don't take projects less than $10,000. That means no band websites, no real estate companies, etc. They are a waste of your time. The problem with referrals is that if you charge one person $40 you're not gonna get a referral to drop $175. Stay hungry.

4) Partnerships. Quote projects in the $30k-$250k range. Maybe the client doesn't have that much money, so take $20k and half the equity. Never ever do a partnership unless they have lots of skin ($) in the game.

5) Finding new business. What is the best product or tool you've built already? Find businesses in related industries or ways to apply the technology in other industries. The only way to do this is to read a lot and talk to other people about what their pain points are. Don't write any code. Spend time thinking and talking about the problem domain and then seek people out and pitch them. If you have actually thought through what THEIR problems are it's usually an easy sell.

6) Get ahold of some proposals from some big design firms that you respect. Copy their style.

7) Watch this video from Carlos Segura. He is talking to designers but it's all the same. You have to learn how to communicate like this or biz people will not respect you. You have to proactively define the relationship up front.

http://www.businesspov.com/article/315

8) Have an opinion. If someone has a shitty idea don't you dare code it just because they are paying you. The reason people hire consultants is because they are clueless. If you just do what the tell you then they rightfully will assume that you are clueless too. Fight through it with them and you both come out ahead.
Here is Facebook's explanation: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php#basicinfo

Basically, if your profile picture were private, it would be hard for someone (who is your friend/acquaintance in real life) who isn't friends with you (on Facebook) already to find you on the site.
I think you're getting downmodded for implying jacquesm simply doesn't understand english enough to know the difference between learning and teaching. Pretty patronizing.

If you bothered to learn you would know that most Dutch people speak English, and that it's a required course in schools.

But that's OK I'm happy to teach you.
Why not built there own wireless syncing system between iPhone/iPad/PC? They are a software company after all, aren't they? Can't be that hard. As I understand it they already have the basics done with MobileMe.
I hope she asks him about his favorite muffin.
Yeh, your dead right.

It's probably worth saying now that I am partly playing devils advocate here because I suspect (from previous times this has come up) that the overriding consensus here is pro-legalization. I think it's interesting to provoke some debate where the pro-prohibition side isn't a troll/idiot (again, like has happened in the past).

So; not currently on the side of legalization, but not on the opposite side either (though happy to play it temporarily)

My real feeling? I'm still not convinced by full legalization but equally not behind the current hardline attitudes. I've seen the negative effects of drugs - and they can be pretty awful for some. If we can offset those using education, taxation, decriminalization and other methods then that seems a great way to start - then legalization becomes a possibility in my eyes (consider it this way: trying to address the problems of alcohol abuse before it becomes widespread/common)

I'd like to think my aim is to help protect those who might be adversely affected by drug legalization rather than deliberately trying to prevent people having the choice.

EDIT: interested as to why the downvote. Is it for admitting to playing devils advocate - I only ask because if that proves unpopular Ill avoid it in future :)
I was young, but I remember the cover of Time magazine very well.

http://marcchung.com/mc/world_is_a_better_place.jpg
These two podcasts, http://twit.tv/fib52, http://twit.tv/fib55, of an interview with Rahul Sarpeshkar discussing Ultra Power Bioelectronics provide a good summary of current knowledge on how the brain works. There is a decent understanding of how many areas computationally function. The biggest surprises were that the brain is a hybrid digtal/analog computer and something similar jpeg compression is in operation in the brains visual system
I remember the GC stalls being quite apparent for swing applications which I wrote in undergrad back in the 2000 to 2002 time frame (so it must have been java 1.3).

Highly responsive UI and relatively low system memory (256MB on the G1) just strikes as quite the feat on top of a GC language. Although you're right, I may just be dating myself.
Sean Parker: Credits To Make Up 1/3 Of Facebook’s Income In Next 12 Months
Same for iDisk. That's why Apple implemented it with WebDAV.

Anyone can access iDisk from any OS using an open standard client, and iDisk URLs can be replaced with open standard storage URLs, no proprietary platform or API needed.
Google Releases CloudCourse - Blackboard killer?
Although I don't disagree with anything specific in this article, there's an uncontrolled variable here that seems pretty crucial:

- The Korean was living in America (albeit a fairly Korean-influenced part of America) when studying English, so there was an immersion factor (however negligible) present.

- Similarly, in the discussion of other languages The Korean learned in a non-immersion environment, The Korean has only compared their results to other non-immersion students.

Not saying that The Korean is wrong about anything, just that it seems like they can be right, and concurrently immersion can also still be a valuable tool when learning a foreign language.
Should a startup be Ramen Profitable?
I'll second that - in addition to my home university studies, I spent a year on exchange in Japan where pretty much all I did was study kanji and vocab - because we had at test on the 1942 kanji called necessary.

As it turns out I aced the test, and all that study is a big part of why I'm comfortable with reading a newspaper. Still have to look things up from time to time, but for the most part I know how to read the word even if I don't know the exact meaning. In that sense, I agree with the blogger that rote memorisation is key - and not just words, but often whole sentences as that gives context.

As for Spanish, it's cognate in some areas with English, so that's at least one part of why English natives are able to learn latin languages at a faster click than other languages. The blogger will find it easier to learn Japanese.
Ask HN: Looking for paypal alternates, recommendations?
As the title says I'm looking for alternates to paypal for my subscription based startup. I'm running this from Canada, with services available worldwide.
I had a best friend throughout HS/College who was extremely smart. He scored 32 on his ACT on his first try, breezed through AP courses and started college with tons of AP credits and enough tuition assistance that he was being paid a significant wage in excess grant and scholarship refunds just to be an undergrad.

Unless he was just extremely awesome at hiding something from our circle of friends, for absolutely no apparent reason at all, by the second semester of college, he had all but stopped going to class, stopped doing homework, slept through early morning tests, etc, eventually losing his scholarships and failing out of school by his third semester. He was my roommate in the dorms, so I probably would have known if he was doing anything in excess that was directly interfering with his abilities to function, and we were enrolled in similar courses with similar course load, and I handled it fine. He just lost the motivation to continue college.

The point is, is that people fuck up, people get depressed, people change what they place value in, even without drugs.
God, Stephen Wolfram, and Everything Else [2000]
Please no... I love Dropbox as much as i hate apple.. it would be a nightmare..
>These two projects solve totally different problems

No they don't. This is the wavy-hands NoSQL defensive shield that reeks of insincerity. If you show Cassandra or Redis or some other solution replacing a MySQL install, well that's just awesome, but don't dare compare if it doesn't come out the winner.

A lot of people have workloads that could work in VoltDB, a classic RDBMS, or Cassandra, equally. There are workloads that only fit in specific silos, but they are less universal than you imply.

>So why benchmark against Cassandra? It's got a lot of buzz around it, of course. What a better way to shove your name into the "NoSQL" ring. Blech.

Okay this is just silly. Cassandra is the big name in the "next gen database" world -- of COURSE any new entrant is going to compare against it.
Should Persia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Spain, the Balkans, etc, etc, have allowed Muslims to enter their respective countries?
Wow, you are quick. He said profit, not market share. For example, Apple maybe only sell 2-3% of the entire mobile handset market, but make more profit out of any Mobile company. They make more money than Nokia, who sell 100x as many phones.
Happiness is earning $60,000/year
The real question is whether Apple's growth is defensible?

Talking about smart phones, Apple is a latecomer to the industry, and does not have a sufficiently strong patent pool to prevent competitors like Oracle, HP and MS from encroaching.

Apple is the first to deliver to the mass market affordable tablet computing and touch computing devices. This will remain growth areas, and hence Apple's willingness to accept lower margins in return for a beachhead and a sufficiently large user-base to establish itself as a platform-play.

However, further on, Apple is going to have to finely balance the tension of being the most widely used vs being "exclusive", "cool", or "different". Give a few years when competitors reach feature parity, Apple will be at crossroads whether to go mass market or boutique.
Hi Mr. Shoe (an excellent name for discussing matters with a company called 'Hello, Chair', if I may say so),

Perhaps we're assuming too much foreknowledge of the Story So Far — Appsaurus has been out since December of 2009. We were, at the time, racing to be the first recommendation engine for the iPhone. Apple beat us by a few short weeks, which would have been a big bummer, except that Genius was universally panned, and the eventual reviews of Appsaurus nearly all contained the line "better than Genius" (see http://appsaurus.com/press). So it turned out to be great that reviewers had something to compare Appsaurus to.

So, we're making the announcement more as an indication of how dedicated we are to this space. I'll also note that Genius's quality has remained pretty static since its release, whereas we've been steadily improving our recommendations. Anyway, you can email me at luke@hellochair.com — I'd be happy to give you a promo code so you can judge for yourself.

—Luke (CEO, Hello, Chair Inc.)
Very disturbing. I'd like to hook those sons of bitches up to their own milking machines.
Check out Spreedly and their list of gateways: http://spreedly.com/info/payment-gateways/
I might be wrong, but I think it's mostly because at that time people was driven by the possibility of making money in a more, at the time, profitable industry. Now a great number of startups are created by people that, once lay off, decided to give it a shot.
Sorry for the late reply.

Assuming you want your maps and filters to be purely functional, you need only two simple methods: One that constructs an object that implements the Iterable[X] trait from the java object, and another that constructs an instance of the java collection from an Iterable[X]. All the implementation that you'd like is already done for you in the iterable trait, but you can always selectively override them if you'd like to provide a more tailored implementation.

Then it's up to your taste whether you'd like the conversion methods to be implicit (and thus available with a single import but making your code more 'magic') or explicit (single import + adding calls to wrap/unwrap methods).

Total overhead: centralized conversion methods, assuming you write them yourself = implementation of elements(), and in the iterator, next() and hasNext(). One import per module that uses the conversions, and optionally, explicit calls to perform the conversion.
Google Checkout
Facebook will get you laid.

Having an iPod.... nope.

An iphone might have done it about 2 years ago.