skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, from the follow-up article: "I am a 40-year-old trying to be a 20-year-old, and I realise my career is done with and I have to find something else" - not sure if that is really a victory to be proud of?

I took it as quite a positive statement. Realizing that a 40 year old probably shouldn't continuously be trying to act like a 20 year old is generally a good thing, and so is waking up to the idea that you can shift from one career to another (I'm assuming that's what he meant by "my career is done with and I have to find something else").
Second, I suspect that I would get more pleasure out of real appreciation than out of an illusory appreciation, as my "appreciation" of wine would be.

But if you did try to become a wine fanatic, you would train your palate and your ability to distinguish wines would actually increase, not just imaginatively increase, wouldn't it?

It's not literary criticism where you interpret what someone says and there's no right answer; wine does actually have taste and you can taste it yourself, without relying on an authority to tell you what it tastes like.

And anyway, why would you get more pleasure from real appreciation than illusory appreciation?

Wouldn't Rands be better off ignoring desks and focusing his attention on something he has legitimate taste for

If you follow the Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert TED talks, Rands would be better off if there was one shop and it stocked one shaving cream and didn't accept refunds.

my spending $60 just creates an opportunity for unscrupulous folks to make money by overpricing wine. That might not hurt me, but it would hurt real connoisseurs.

No no no, real connoisseurs who could tell the difference would be able to tell the wine was overpriced. And if there isn't really anything to wine tasting, then they wouldn't notice and therefore it wouldn't hurt them - it would, must, be what happens now. And in either case the sellers aren't unscrupulous folk, they are making money providing the exclusive expensive wine experience that connoisseurs will pay money for, even if the wine is nothing special.

It doesn't hurt art collectors to pay more for a painting when the painter turns out to have been the brother of Richard the Lionheart. That's the sort of thing that doesn't change the picture in the slightest but does make it more valuable art and the sort of thing art collectors want.

It's easy to give away excess. Looking for expensive new ways to turn my excess into pleasure is another way of saying, "I'd better find something better to do with this money than give it to the EFF/Doctors Without Borders

Unless you are an extremely frugal minimalist you already implicitly do spend money on things which do less for the greater good than a good charity, so arguing about quite where you draw the line to 'excess' is a bit irrelevant - you could likely afford a very fancy shaving foam and still have 'excess' enough to donate to charity, and it wouldn't take much change in income to enable you to afford an antique desk and still do the same.
So this guy was an undocumented Harvard student without papers. Sure he received funds from Harvard and may have falsified a few documents/ID cards, but what's the big deal? He came there to work.

(Seriously -- the analogy to illegal immigrants is actually very strong. Harvard students are outraged about this because they 'obeyed the rules' and 'worked hard' to get in, yet their financial aid money is going to someone who didn't. This is very similar to the way many citizens and legal immigrants feel about the current government failure at the southern border.)
Kingsharperimages, it's not bigen; it's not black ice hair spray; it's KSI
You get no argument from me there. What about browser based apps? Those have a different set of user expectations. XUL desktop apps, anyone?
Note to tech pundits-- the average joe can't ping his twitter network to get 40 responses to a question about shaving cream. This is a benefit only pundits enjoy. Stop touting it.
Makes sense but a lot of decisions are much less "important" than that as some are purely about the rendering and don't have many meaning beyond it.
> Ah, it was just a metaphor. That makes it alright then.

When we use car analogies to describe tech issues, does that mean we are calling those issues cars? You can try to read into the subtext of why she used that metaphor all you want, but you can't say with 100% certainty why it was chosen, other than to illustrate the point.

> "I am a 40-year-old trying to be a 20-year-old, and I realise my career is done with and I have to find something else" - not sure if that is really a victory to be proud of?

How so? I think that the 'victory' here is not of her over her husband, but of her over herself. The 'easy answer' to the problem would have been to kick her husband to the curb for being an ass (and basically abandoning his family to have his mid-life crisis). She stuck with it believing that he would sort out his issues in his own time. Sticking to her guns while feeling abandoned by her husband is the real 'victory' here.

As far as him coming home with his tail between his legs? He spent the entire summer basically trying to come to grip with reality. It was really his attachment to the past (and to wanting things to 'stay the same') that caused his 'defeat.' He was battling himself and his own misconceptions about how his life was going to be.
What value do you add (besides the money) to a project you invest in?
I would like to be able to delete or lock my Hacker News account in order to cut back on the number of time-wasting websites for which I have logins.
> What do you like to see before you invest? idea? product? traction?

I am trying to build intuition. So some of this is gut sense. Sometimes I look at deals and say, this is obvious. Sometimes I have to sell myself.

I look for new things that are in spaces that have a comfortable competitiveness climate.

> What do you give more importance? idea or team?

Both are important. See above.

> You've had incredible dealflow recently, how are you getting into all these deals?

Luck is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, so I take care to be everywhere. I know everyone. Foursquare: I knew Dennis from NYC. Square: I knew Jack from twitter. StackOverflow: I was on a panel with Joel once. Canvas: I suggested moot to TED and introduced myself at the conference. Dailybooth: Asked for an introduction to me.

> Since you don't lead

If I like the product, I introduce it to relevant people.

> Better location for a pre-funding internet startup

I'm fond of both NYC and Bay Area. I started Delicious in NYC.

> Bootstrap or raise money

Venture money is only useful in some situations - where capital will help grow the business. I also want to see something where I will conceivably get out someday; that's either acquisition or IPO. Do many privately held companies pay dividends?
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I think the Valley offers much easier access to funding. There are also lots of support organizations here -- lawyers, banks, etc, who will understand your needs much better.

I don't understand b2b and am terrified of it.
1) Entrepreneurs need to understand that [ ... ] or I will stab their eyes out. Please fill in the blank.

2) What is the most broken thing about angel investing?
The VML APIs that've been in IE forever are all pretty damn fast individually, but displaying the results slows the rendering down significantly. It's like how straightforward PHP is damn fast as a templating system, but absurdly slow for implementing a high-level templating system in.

Besides, text selection wouldn't work.

Have y'all managed to avoid implementing a GDocs-style system for hiding text underneath bitmaps for selection?
> One thing to keep in mind though is that if an employee does not have the authorization to make such an agreement then the company isn't liable.

I don't think that it is that simple. If a worker for the city cleaning department comes up to you and offers to sell you a small building the city owns then yes, the city is not bound because you can assume that he has no such authorization.

But if the mayor of the town would make you an offer to buy a small building the city owns (in writing) then you'd definitely have a case of sorts, even if it turned out afterwards that he did not have the authority.

It's all about the expectations of authority on the part of the recipient, if those expectations are in line with the function of the other party. And in this case it is perfectly ok to assume that if an HR person from a company offers to re-imburse you for your costs if you make the trip that they will actually do so.
I am not a Wall Street expert, by any means, but...

The NYSE has guys (mostly guys) who stand around on the floor and act as market makers for various stocks. They call 'em specialist. They stand around and run the auctions for shares, match up bids and so on. Basically, they make sure that if you want to sell a stock, there is somebody buying, and vice-versa. This is their business, and they can't just throw up their hands and wander away, ruining the market in some given stock.

The high-frequency traders provide a similar function in electronic exchanges. However, they all threw up their hands and walked away, exacerbating an already bad situation as the liquidity left the market.
Is Christopher Poole really moot's real/birth name?
Some science are in the state of decay, some science progress in little steps, and some science must be revolutionized before moving on.

The state of human knowledge is not that it always improve over time, but regress, advance, and forget as time passes.

Based on technological progress and sophistication of our society, I think it is safe to say that science mostly advance, rather than regress in systematic knowledge.
It seems like they're most likely to perform a positive service if they're a minority of trades, also. Pretty much any kind of market starts going wonky when the people using the market for its official purpose (buying/selling the underlying entity due to real demand for it) aren't a comfortable majority of total transactions. You end up with weird feedback effects where the market looks more like a dynamical system responding to its internal patterns, rather than a clearing-house for settling external supply/demand.
This isn't quite the same as the situation with illegal immigrants. This guy received scholarships which should have gone to other students -- that is, free money, not merely a job.

Even if this guy had gotten into Harvard non-fraudulently, he probably wouldn't have received the same scholarships without deceit.
You need to use credit cards for the rewards too. Credit card rewards eat a couple % of the merchants' profits, which they pass along to all customers in the form of higher prices. Therefore people who pay by other methods are effectively subsidizing the frequent flier miles and Red Lobster gift cards of those who use credit.
> team, market or product

All are important.

> other angels

There's a lot of great angels out there that I like to learn from. Aydin Senkut has shown me a lot that I've liked lately.

> deals that you regret passing on

There are always surprises. I think it's important to compare my feelings at the time I passed to the current feelings to benchmark my intuition.

What I regret more is companies I did want to invest in but either flubbed or wasn't able to get into.
He violated a specific statute by applying for need-based student financial aid under false pretenses.

After edit:

The previous HN submission about this news story

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355494

elicited some comments about other issues.
They are also called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_makers
Marco is right on as usual. My use of the iPad is similar anyway.

While you might be better off with a MacBook Air if you find yourself using iPad + keyboard a lot, it's still about $1000 cheaper to get the iPad.
Ask HN: Help with download/use data for FourSquare / Gowalla / MyTown / etc
Hey HN,
I'm compiling data for a blog post on the fastest growing / highest use mobile apps.

Would appreciate any help you could offer rounding out the stats below (and adding apps that I've missed that have impressive #s):

FourSquare:

• more than 600,000 checkins a day 5/17/2010 http://twitter.com/foursquare/statuses/14182296112

• more than 1,000,000 unique users 4/21/2010 http://twitter.com/foursquare/status/12585316625

Gowalla

• More than 600,000 unique location checkins http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100310006776&newsLang=en

• Gowalla has stronger positive mentions than foursquare http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/191772 and gowalla vs. foursquare http://mashable.com/2010/04/22/foursquare-gowalla-infographi/

• Gowalla users average less "friends" than FourSquare http://osnapz.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/foursquare-vs-gowalla-user-stats/

Google Latitude:

• More than 3,000,000 active users 5/6/2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/google-latitude-users-check-in/

• More than 8,000,000 total downloads 5/6/2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/google-latitude-users-check-in/

MyTown:

• More than 2,000,000 active users up from 500k in January 5/5/2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/booyah-hits-2-million-stealing-foursquares-thunder/

• (From their 1,000,000 user report, doubled) 80 million virtual items consumed weekly, 50 million checkins weekly, daily engagement AVERAGES 65 minutes
Something similar was patented in 1991: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ggQqAAAAEBAJ&dq=5...

Got the link from Reddit.
Why don't more people do this themselves?

Every few months a post like this comes up on HN or Reddit and the general consensus seems to be that Goldman Sachs etc are too smart, too fast and too good to compete with.

I got a bit curious and did some digging, and it turns out that yes, some people are doing it themselves, quite successfully. See http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?s=4a039395d01... for example.

I for one think this looks doable.
Ask HN: Uptime on EC2 vs Slicehost
I'm running a Slicehost slice running Ubuntu that's got an uptime of 450 days. I'm thinking of upgrading the server from Slicehost to EC2 ($40/mo for 0.5GB RAM vs ~$150/mo for 17GB RAM). Can I expect similar stability on EC2? Is even such reliability on Slicehost rare?
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> How do you hear about the startups you invest in? (Introductions from people you trust?)

They come from all directions. One of my best investments came from a chance meeting with the now CEO at a party.

> What is the one piece of advice you would give to people who pitch their startups to you?

Hard to explain. I do a lot of this by gut sense. I look for:
- strong people doing things in interesting spaces
- belief but not inflexibility; religion is bad.
- an ability to roll with the punches: reactions are as important as planning

> How do you add value?

I am a product guy, so I look at the product and can evaluate it. Same thing I use to choose the investments, I guess. I am also reasonably well connected and will use that as asked.
> He is charged with four counts of larceny over $250, eight counts of identity fraud, seven counts of falsifying an endorsement or approval and pretending to hold a degree.

Whenever I see these articles, I always picture some huffy duff in a suit turning red because he was fooled, so in retaliation he throws numerous baseless charges at the fraudster in addition to the ones that are based on something in some sort of legal temper tantrum. Shouldn't he just have a number of counts of fraud rather than, "as many charges as we can pile on and make stick?"
Hunt's Ketchup Removes High Fructose Corn Syrup From Entire Retail Line
Firms like this do tens of thousands of trades per day. It's just a consequence of the law of large numbers.
Tradeworx response to SEC on High Frequency Trading
Almost always $10k-$25k. I am a very small investor.
In addition, I believe they will actually buy shares from you or sell shares to you, in certain circumstances, if there's no one else willing to. That's the key difference the article was referring to.
My product sense, mostly. My connections, a little. I try not to bother the founders unless they ask for help.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundri...

They could start crawling the web today for PDFs that embed fonts infringingly, but they aren't very sophisticated, and even they aren't that stupid.

The situation on the ground isn't going to change from the way its been for the last 25 years -- normal people are going to continue to use whatever fonts, obtained however, and distributed wherever, to whomever, whenever. %90 of font choices made made will continue to be crap.
No, actually here in the United States the presumption of innocence for the accused is sufficiently strong that it is all right to publish the names of the accused. The reason that the names of criminal defendants are a matter of public record is precisely to avoid the totalitarian practice of secret trials, in which no defense witnesses come forward because no friends of the accused know that they need to come forward.
I'm running a Slicehost slice running Ubuntu that's got an uptime of 450 days. [...] Can I expect similar stability on EC2?

Yes. I know several people with EC2 instance uptimes well in excess of that.
It is doable, if you have the knowledge and expertise. Many high frequency trading firms are small operations with just a couple people. The stereotype is two dudes and a Bloomberg terminal. Anyone with enough cash can have their servers colo-ed at the exchange.

The biggest hurdle is initial capital. You could probably start a semi-respectable HF operation with 5-10mm in tradeable funds.
I would like to see people who have succeeded in tough environments. Some degrees are like that, some are not. Evidence of having built something is better.
Usually this is done when there's some doubt about which charges will stick -- you throw everything you've got and take whatever the jury gives you, or more likely you plea bargain down to a less serious charge.
Thanks! To rephrase the NYC vs SF question, if you were starting a new company today, where would you do it?
Ok sure, "man cave" is a dumb phrase, but how do you know the husband hadn't regularly talked about trekking in Nepal or converting the garage?
I will ask to see his birth certificate.

My mother has met Moot... I should demand to meet his mom.
Much has been made of Kurzweil's idea that computers will eventually overtake the raw processing power of the human brain. I wonder what will happen economically if/when software market algorithms become more efficient than the distributed human-driven algorithms of today. (And I would wager that the latter will happen well before the former.)
I'd like to make a thoughtful comment, but I'm struggling to get past the phrase 'age-appropriate'. As someone who has never been 'appropriate' to their chronological age in any respect, it always comes across as reductive, patronising and ultimately dehumanising. It seems to me to be the product of a worldview which sees children not as distinctive individuals with unique preferences and aptitudes, but as mere larvae passing through 'developmental stages'. I consider it an affront to the dignity of all children and my teeth are set on edge every time I hear it.

OK, <thoughtful comment>.

If I expressed my deepest feelings to someone who was close to me, the most painful response I could imagine is "I don't buy it". If they spat at me or hit me, then at least they heard me, took me seriously and emotionally engaged with what I am saying. To hear "I don't buy it" is to be told "I don't recognise your feelings as valid", it is to be told "you don't matter, I'm the one in this relationship that decides what we feel about things". To hear "What can we do to give you the distance you need" is to be told what you need, not asked. When he said "I don't like what you've become", she didn't want to hear what he didn't like, she didn't want to engage, she didn't even acknowledge what he was saying, she just invalidated him and shut the discussion down with "I don't buy it".

There's a good chance I'm being grossly unfair, but I can't see anything but an emotionally manipulative woman, breaking the spirit of her husband by refusing to engage with him emotionally. I see a man who has had his every thought and feeling dismissed for years, who has become scarcely able to recognise his own emotional autonomy. When he says “You’re going to make me go into therapy. You’re not going to let me move out. You’re going to use the kids against me.”, I don't see paranoia, I see a man who had a damned good idea of what he was in for; Her only statements of any real meaning were to tell him “What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”, “[do] anything but hurting the children and me” and “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy.”. They all sound an awful lot to me like some things you might say in order to manipulate someone into not leaving by using their kids against them.

Of course we know nothing about their relationship prior to this incident and very little about it since, but I find what we do know to be deeply troubling. It seems to me that every aspect of this situation screams "PATHOLOGICAL NARCISSIST". She seems completely unable to recognise the thoughts and feelings of others, and seems to simply refuse to acknowledge the possibility that there is an objective reality beyond her own imagination that she is unable to control. As I said, I could be being grossly unfair, but everything about this story sits badly with me and I find it deeply worrying to see this woman unquestioningly lauded as wise and enlightened.

</thoughtful comment>
The entire movement against automated / high frequency trading is a hoax.

Remember how much Dick Grasso was paid as head of the NYSE? Typical exchanges charge substantial membership fees and reap massive profits.

In the age of computers the traditional exchange becomes a lot less valuable, since it's easy to match buyers and sellers over any computer network.

The law requiring all trades to be filled at the lowest price was motivated by major exchanges not wanting to be cut out of the action (even though a trader might be OK with getting not quite the lowest price in exchange for much lower transaction fees overall).

Also, the majority of HFT platforms run off of the major exchanges on private networks that only sometimes pass orders on to the rest of the market. The more liquidity/volume occurs on these smaller networks, the less relevant the older established players (NYSE, NASDAQ) become. Exchanges have traditionally been gatekeepers charging fees to use their monopoly product.

This battle has been going on for a long time (and so far the upstarts have been winning in spite of the hurdles imposed by the influential old timers).

FUD about algorithm based trading strategies is just a part of this larger battle and it's 100% nonsense.
What happened here in the charging is that the prosecutor realized the guy had a pattern of just moving on and committing fraud again each time he was caught in a nonjudicial college disciplinary process. The guy needs to understand the gravity of his wrong-doing.
4. Launch application