skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but together with the surrounding comments and the note saying something about "enhanced vagueness", it's still clear that it is probably bigger. (Unless he also changed the number.)
I've never agreed with this theory. He seems to frame things in terms of irresponsible living and under that criteria I agree. If the difference between 60k and 90k is just "a little more “entertainment” and maybe some bigger stuff" to you than his theory works out.

But to the person who invests that extra 30k a year and gets to retire at 50 instead of 70 I think the happiness difference is pretty significant. I'd bet the 55 year old who gets to spend his days as he wishes is much happier than the 55 year old still working his 9 to 5 job.
I'm not working with a developer at the moment, im just in the planning stages. If i were to look for a developer to consult me on this, what sort of qualifications would i look for?
Indeed. If you think good unit tests are time-consuming, try debugging code with lots of subtle bugs in it.
It seemed from my brief exposure to Indonesian that it uses a very similar set of phonemes to English, which might be another advantage. Not having actually studied the language I can't say for sure.
Suppose you wanted to learn, say, French. I've occasionally wondered if you could do it this way:

1. Pretend that French is a dead language from an ancient culture. Obtain a bunch of French books and study them, to try to notice patterns and infer rules about the language.

2. Do the same with some other language, such as Spanish.

3. Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone.
Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but a fellow HNer (hajrice) is working on questionify.com

They're still in private beta but I know Emil would be more than willing to offer an account. Good luck!
you could check out recurly.com
By your standards, Ruby, Python, C, C++, Java, and C# are "as good as dead".
A lot of open source projects just use MediaWiki.
GQ on the National Enquirer and their attempt to win the Pulitzer
Ask HN: Do you know of a good WYSIWYG editor?
I'm searching for a good WYSIWYG editor, and I haven't been able to find much. By "good", I mean well designed, robust, and that it functions well. I saw a cool one made by Google as part of the CloudCourse app, but it was heavily dependent upon the Closure JavaScript library, which is not something I'd like to convert my app to just to use a WYSIWYG editor. Any help with this is much appreciated!
I'm trying to build a product like autodesk's flame but a bit different. They sell this for $300k/unit, so i'm wondering how much it actually cost them to make it.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&...

Edit:
To elaborate, flame is pretty much like an adobe after effects + premiere hybrid.
Wow, YCharts is pretty great, thanks!
Their tagline "Anti-frustration software" is brilliant.
Possible? Sure! Quick or easy compared to the normal way? Heck no.
"Fanboys" call them the underdog due to their 7-8% market share of the computer market compared to Windows ~90% market share.

I'd still call that an underdog.

Also who is the "you", that you are referring to?
Also we are not claiming, we are merely using todays EOD market-cap to show they are worth more, in which case they are. Also Apple has growth in other areas, which are new areas, and MSFT is just suckling the tit of office and the PC's use of Windows software.

/fanboyism
I bet you any novice with a little bit of experience in web frameworks could write something better than Blackboard Educational Suite.
So the investment was important, but more for its signalling value than for the money?
Editor for what?

If you are asking for a good text editor, I like Notepad++ and SciTe is not at all bad. If you want say a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX, look at Lyx. If you want something else, could you specify?
This is an awesome tutorial one of the best I have seen in quite a while. This book is highly addictive.
How well did an equivalent investment in Microsoft stock either 1997 or 2003, until today fare?
This is an awesome tutorial not just for programmers new to Rails, but also people new to programming and web development. I'm glad you gave an overview of editors, IDEs, version control, and all the other tools associated with development that you usually don't see mentioned in programming books.
How to Screw Up the Right Way
Isn't this still verboten per the C/C++/ObjC requirements for iPhone apps?
Full text: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Yahoo%27s+outlook+remains+...
Q and A: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Chief Executive
audio-technica ATH-M20 ; < $30. Buy 2 or 3.
I don't think there'd be any first-money-out rule (i.e. liquidation preference) unless you actually negotiated one. The default rule is that assets are split proportionally to equity. You could get a minority-shareholder lawsuit if he opposes the sale and feels he's gotten a raw deal, though.

(Standard 'not a lawyer' disclaimer.)
I don't want to look.

Can someone describe a little bit... not too graphic...

(I've been mostly vego for over a decade and definately have lapses, and I drink milk often... but often I think about going totally vego.... it's not always easy with the way food is promoted in our lives)
In Japan, where the laws are different from the United States but not in a very material fashion, the personal information privacy law means you have to treat anything with "personally identifiable information" as toxic and anything regarding a few types of enumerated data as nuclear waste.

Your students' names or email addresses are toxic. (Do you offer them blogs? Do they have commenting features? Tied to email? Toxic!)

Their grades, counseling reports, religious affiliation (do I have to explain what kind of universities need this info?), etc, are nuclear waste.

Just because something is in the cloud doesn't make it illegal, but (to pick one example of many) it is going to make that biannual in-person inspection of your facilities they're going to demand a wee bit tricky now won't it. You can argue until you're blue in the face that Google knows what they're doing regarding physical security and that the university stores equivalent data in servers that are in unlocked rooms in a building housing 1,000 transients, but you will not prevail in that argument.
The theory is that Apple can spend the money better than the investor, by using it to do more R&D, make new products, and make the portion of the company represented by the share more valuable. In growth mode, that's not unusual.

In companies that can't do much R&D, you see much more dividend action, for example, natural resource stocks are high dividend, since there's near nothing they can do to reinvest, at least not with everything they pull in.
> - offer to buy him/her out if you can afford it

Some people have shotgun clauses: Offer to buy him out, or be bought out at the same price.
So if I'm single $60k is fine, throw in some dependents and that changes very fast. I think I'd be happier at $180k a year and $60k more for each new dependent that comes along. That takes care of health, house, education and plenty extra to stash away.
as "Anechoic" pointed out, this was not friendly gesture of MS they were forced into this.

"Later testimony in the U.S. D.O.J. Microsoft anti-trust trial revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening with the cancellation of Office for the Mac. [2] [3] In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock. The companies also agreed to mutual collaboration on Java technologies, and to cross-license all existing patents, and patents obtained during the five-year deal, with one another."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
Try CKEditor, http://www.ckeditor.com.

Most frameworks even have plug-in versions of it so you don't need to do very much to communicate with it. For example, our framework NOLOH has a CKEditor Nodule (NOLOH Module).

You can see a live example of that here: http://www.noloh.com/NOLOH/Nodules/CKEditor/Example/, and the source for the example here: http://github.com/noloh/CKEditor/blob/master/Example/index.p...

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH
The short answer, is consult a lawyer. Seeking competent legal counsel before things potentially turn ugly can often avoid them turning ugly, or at least make sure you are on the firmest possible footing when they do.
The valves opening allowed a pressure release for the system and oil flowed on a pad to a tank that can hold 55,000 barrels (2.3 million gallons). As of Wednesday afternoon, the tank vents were still leaking probably from thermal expansion inside the tank. Another secondary containment area below the tanks capable of holding 104,500 barrels was not yet filled to capacity.

It's spilling into a relief tank and poses zero risk to surrounding area.
It's consistent, not only eventual consistent, it's k-safe, replicated and it's written to disk consistently at intervals you set. http://community.voltdb.com/node/54 (may require login). It's really pretty neat.
Stephen Colbert is a good example. Seen a few people not realize he's a satirist right away.
We're relying on a number of Google services already. This project is somewhat orthogonal to what we are building. Many of these features don't apply, so it is not really directly valuable to us to built on top of it.
You don't need to pay dividends to increase shareholder value. It just depends on how good management is with allocating capital.

Buybacks can work just as well if you are buying back at the right price. A lot of management teams are bad at capital allocation and buyback stock at 52 week highs - that is almost always incredibly stupid.

But sometimes the business is trading at irrationally low levels and it makes a lot of sense to just buyback stock, especially if the fundamentals are in tact. I saw a company doing this and it is a great decision, their business earns a 50% return on invested capital and they have an earnings yield around 20%. It is a slam dunk strategy. When it is overvalued, you can issue stock and use it for acquisitions.

Look at Henry Singleton who ran Teledyne and used that strategy. Teledyne went from $100,000 in profits in 1960 to $238 million in 1986. Shareholders’ equity grew from $2.5 million to over $1.6 billion. Teledyne trounced the market by 4x over that period.

Using excess capital to fund accretive acquisitions, internal growth, or to invest outside of the company can work if you are disciplined in the process (most aren't). Warren Buffett became one of the richest people in the world, simply by doing this (it sure wasn't his $100K salary).
MSFT is basically flat since 2003, and up about 60% since 1997. It did start paying a dividend in 2003, which adds about 15% overall. No multi-thousand percentage returns, though.
From a more thorough read of the policy, III. 3. looks like it means that you're ok to use "basic information" from someone who connects to your service however you like, as long as you don't go selling it to ad networks/third parties. That means that you can store one person's first name, last name, email address, profile pic, FB ids of friends - but not any of their friend's details other than their id.

It's not much, but it's enough to help create someone's account on your competing social network. Whether you'd be able to store/export their posts/other people's comments is a different question - it depends on the definition of application, but FriendFeed seemed to be able to do it, so why can't someone else?
Indeed. I'm not exaggerating when I say iTunes is literally one of the worst applications I've ever used. Sluggish, constantly (and needlessly) updating, horribly out of place UI, locks up when adding tracks or syncing, eats memory like nobody's business, unnecessary cruft added in, lack of FLAC support (last I checked), no skinning or addon system, etc, etc. I honestly just meant to write one or two things there, but the various annoyances just kept springing to mind. I used it for years due to having an iPod and not putting enough effort in to switch, but once I finally did it was liberating.
You might want to give Screen Steps a look. http://www.bluemangolearning.com/
Not that it's a big deal, but in my opinion it's more polite to criticize someone directly than obliquely.
There are hurdles, for sure, but none of it is outright illegal to store. You need permissions and protections, but I don't think any of the legal problems are unsolvable.
God says...
exorbitant I_quit humuongous astrophysics
Historically that has not been "most startups", although maybe in today's world that's severely financing constrained but has a rich web/Internet and FOSS ecosystem that's true.

Which would be a shame, since that means "We aren't inventing the future anymore". I.e. no new microprocessor macroarchitectures, no new weird fun thinks like FPGAs, just endless variations on today's lowest level and most expensive to establish technical foundations, improved by sustaining innovation but very little disruptive.

That said, I'm a bit skeptical that there are all that many people who are really good at the forward facing stuff and seriously scalable backends ... but I could be wrong, and I've seen it reported that many if not most companies seem to be focusing on the first and then if they're hugely successful they spend a year or more paying down their backend technical debt. Some companies fail at that.

Which is the way to do it in my experience. The most frustrating startup failure I experienced was dead when I joined it, since a combination of ultra-stealth mode plus building a massively scalable custom database system ended up spending their first angel's available money (he'd promised more, but then ran into trouble with another company).

So they got some new angels who turned out to be devils, had done no Customer Development (a finer example of "there are no facts inside the building, only opinions" I cannot imagine), but it hardly mattered since the devils preferred to have all of nothing instead of most of something.
I believe we're much closer than other commenters apparently. Here's why.

1. The wetware is nifty but it's not what makes up intelligence.

The differences between sapient and non-sapient species are slight at the level of genetic code. The changes enabling intelligence are also very recent. The changes seem to be focused around the number and distribution of cortical columns in the neo-cortex, which are all remarkably similar regardless of the sensory input they are ultimately connected to. (This is why Hawkins' work is so exciting)

2. A huge portion of what we consider intelligence is a product of language and culture.

Neglected and wild children are barely sapient in a way that we would understand (though with care they can become so). Our minds are largely constructs of a transmissible set of patterns external to our biology.

3. The blue brain project is a ten year project

While I don't think we need molecular level or even synaptic level modeling to understand the software embodied in our brains, we have a hard target to be able to model, in large part, the human brain.

4. The large numbers in the brain are no longer scary

100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections used to seem like an absurd scale for study. Now we regularly deal with billions of rows in databases and petabytes of storage. Not only that, the transmission speeds in the brain are so slow, if we need to replicate anything like the connectivity of the brain we can do it over a massive and distributed area. There's simply no need to cram an intelligence into a single box or server farm.

5. AI research has narrowed a great deal.

Whereas we had 50 tangents twenty years ago research is beginning to focus on two key aspects of learning. A. Large data sets for statistical analysis (e.g. Google) and B. Hierarchical representations of input. (e.g. Hawkins)

6. PR2 (Willow Garage)

I'll go out on a limb here and say that a shared open source robotics platform is the best thing to happen to AI research in 50 years. People forget the sheer number of hours experiencing the world it takes for the brain to acquire sapience. By supplying a common framework for experiencing the world the PR2 will enable the kind of long term learning necessary for intelligence to emerge.
Even if you believe Kahneman (I happen to), the $60k number is probably illusory for most Americans, since location is important. In NYC, perhaps the number is $95k; in rural Arkansas, perhaps it's $25k.

I'd love to see data on how the specific "ideal" income level varies by location.
People contribute to open source projects - doing work for free that many would consider mundane. Looking for loopholes would be a lot like debugging.
I suspect it varies even within America.
There might be places in the midwest where houses cost $60K, bit on this coast it means more than 50% of your take-home is going on rent for a studio apartment.
If you can give a probability distribution instead of a fixed time, you may be able to make the commitment less pathological. Of course, as time goes on, the standard deviation of your distribution should go down, since more and more is known.
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Posterous adds markdown and syntax highlighting support
The sad thing is, people will indict the poor economic situation as a result of marijuana when its a result of every major "rush". People having no sense of how to plan financially.
Until you consider the safety net you need if things go to hell in a handbasket. Is that $60K living at or below your means? Does it consider enough to sock away so you don't have to eat cat food in retirement or cover your real expenses if your job is pulled out from under you?
I'd still very much like to hear what you have to say!
it'd probably require a USB cord to sync too ;)
Instead of asking binary questions, you can ask about economic systems that minimize corruption.
How is this disruptive?

Maybe I am missing some trick here? Microsoft has a free tool that does exactly this for free from the horse's mouth: http://fixitcenter.support.microsoft.com/Portal
Whatever merit the article has I can do without the terrible branding. This is where Toadjaw comes handy: http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://tweetagewasteland.com/...
It's also a 'gateway drug' in that you don't go crazy and commit mass-murder when you try it the first time, so you start to disbelieve all of the anti-drug propaganda and maybe decide that 'they' were lying about the harder drugs too.
Kurzweil has made a living by doing a lot more than just making claims about technology. He's created new and contributed to existing technologies throughout his lifetime, and saying he'll throw up his hands and blame others when his predictions fail to crystalize paints him as a crock and disingenuous -- he strikes me as more than competent and extremely passionate in regards to his work and theories.
This seems pretty huge. Does anyone here use ComScore for their own company? Any opinions on the service?
Blocking would work for about five minutes, until someone releases a user agent spoofing plugin for Safari, just like the one that already exists on Firefox.
"These bastards need to be killed"? Seriously?

Those bastards need to be prosecuted under whatever laws exist to punish this behavior. Killed is pretty damn extreme, regardless of the events in that video.

Those kinds of sentiments get you lumped into the "psycho" category that contains people who talk about killing abortion doctors. That's not a category any movement should want to be part of.
My understanding is that mongodb is not durable (http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tree/2010-02-20.mongodb-and-...) - I am not sure I understand how VoltDB is durable, though (but then I know nothing about db architecture).
If it can be done then it will be done eventually. So the question becomes who does it first.
I feel like you're stretching your story too thin when you claim oil drilling and cleanup is a scenario under "playing God".
Ruby and Rails both have their flaws, of course, but that's just silly.

I agree. I don't see how anyone who is both competent and familiar with all of the technologies mentioned would not be able to state a single advantage. It's a preposterous statement in an all around FUDdy article.
The question is what does it mean to be an underdog? Yes, Apple is an underdog against Microsoft in terms of market share, but few would make the argument that Apple is an underdog against Microsoft in terms of creating a quality OS.

Apple simply has different goals than Microsoft. Apple sells low volume and high margins, Microsoft sells high volume and low margins.

All this underdog talk is bunk.
Having watched how developers (even several from HN) completely mis-understood John Allspaw's talk about business needs & deployments, I now imagine part of the next generation of HN start-up types will begin offering $60k salaries to engineers citing that TED video as the basis of their market rate guesstimate.
iPods and iPhones are competitively priced.

Sure, the Macs are expensive, but the hardware is very high quality, and when you compare them to Thinkpads and Vaios--other high-end computers--it's pretty reasonable.

I'm no Apple fanboy (as of now, the only money I've ever given Apple is 30% of app purchases I've made for my hand-me-down iPhone 2G), but in a couple of days, I'm buying a MacBook Pro because it's a high quality unix system that Just Works. Given that I'm a programmer who will use it constantly, the time it will save me should cover the extra few hundred dollars by the end of summer.
Yes, it seems, governments can't simple hand out money. There's always some rent seeker involved, working for it. (Mostly at high rates, though.)
There was also Windows Live Sync, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh, but none of those made Dropbox any less disruptive.

Sometimes making things simple and reliable -is- the disruption.
Ask HN: Why doesn't my ATM know about my language?
I think it would be trivial to add a line of code to ATM so that it knows from my card number that I use English. Why is the first choice always about choosing the language? Is there a privacy problem here?
However, how do you moderate for "sanity" without just moderating for "ideas we already like"? Maybe they honestly want a self-reinforcement echo chamber, but that doesn't seem very useful to me.

It's the old problem of how you know if someone's being honest, which is hard enough to do when you have face-to-face contact with full nonverbal clues. Are there ideas nobody holds honestly?
Wirehog, Zuckerberg’s Side Project That Almost Killed Facebook
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Does anyone else thing Roughly Drafted is the most biased website around? I mean even John Gruber must read this and think "this guy is way too pro-Apple".

Entertaining reads on occassion, but they really read like fan fiction more than analyis.
Then why don't you focus on robotics or AI right now? Life is too short for NOT focusing on something you find extraordinary.
BP Using Misleading Charts to Show Improvement in Cleanup Efforts