skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's slightly different. Other search engines were poor. They focused on the wrong things, and didn't actually give good search results in the way users wanted.

Facebook actually solves most peoples needs very well for a social network / casual gaming platform.

Any competitor will have to work for a few years just to get the features that people will assume it has. Then comes the massive job of moving people from facebook.

Consider ebay. Ebay actually really sucks. It's terrible. Yet everyone still uses it for auctions. Why aren't there any auction startups? Because it's impossible to get people to move.
If you're going to be continuing your education with a Masters from U of Cinn, you're going to be using whatever tools they use in their curriculum.

That looks like Python and C++ in CS121-122, C++ in CS229, Lisp and Prolog in CS602, etc.

I would imagine that's going to be keeping you busy, but if you want to learn php on the side, sure, go for it. On the other hand, there's really nothing wrong with .NET, and there are lots of C# jobs out there, if that's what you're concerned about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1qoINo2MPM
German high tech vuvuzelas
I would be interested in the technology and architecture behind it.
> "Every startup has more reasons to fail than to succeed. That doesn't stop a few from succeeding though."

That's true for an average startup. But a facebook competitor??? Really? cmon. The odds of success are billions to one. It's probably similar to a startup gaining market share from eBay for auctions. The network effect is just too great.
no, progression of intelligence follows an unknown scale. it is thus impossible to say anything useful about doubling time.
sounds like facebook should recruit you :)
Hello Zed. I find myself doing some sysadmin work, not by plan, but it happens that way. Something needs to be working right now, it is easiest to just do it, etc. Also, scaling and deployment issues come up, and best to just deal with stuff. The question is what fraction of time is spent on sysadmin vs. development. BTW, I look forward to checking out mongrel2, and I think using the AGPL + optional commercial licensing is a good plan.
MongoDB at Etsy, Part 2
i've looked at the source of a few projects but the flow is way over my head, i understand the syntax but not the logic, which is why i'm looking for a project-cenetered learning resource, instead of a reference or language-feature resource. also, it seems that a lot of app programming is 90% gui bindings, with very little actual code, or am i totally way off mark?

i recently picked up the django practical projects book, and in a few days i re-wrote a website i did with django. i feel it was the book's project-centric approach that made this possible.
Creativity at its best
must watch..
What is most disturbing is that these weren't far-away investors of Hashrocket. One was the CFO and they were directly funding Hashrocket since its inception. As Obie's business partners, that's pretty shady. And whether its determined that they were within their legal limits or not, we've all been made aware of how sleazy the whole operation is. Hashrocket would do well to distance themselves from this stuff as much as possible, and declare that they will no longer receive money from an operation that survives on scamming people out of their money. The more Obie shouts to the world, "These are my FRIENDS", the worse he looks.
I think that, given a limited amount of time, I'd rather do exercise (cycling) than meditate, as it's a pretty good way of 'getting away from things' and thinking without interruptions, and I also get some physical benefits from it.
Another comment on AGPL: I both wish that the AGPL became a often-used license and that when required commercial options would be affordable. Obviously developers control the licensing and costs of their creations, but as a for instance, if I could not use AGPL on a customer project: I would be happy to pay about $25 for a VPS license or perhaps $100 for a single server license for good bits of infrastructure software that work better, are more efficient, etc. On the other hand, the neo4j AGPLed project is awesome, I will use it for my own AGPL projects, but the $1000/server cost will probably keep me from being able to use it on customer projects (but maybe not, depending on their budgets).

Sorry for the long rant here, but I would like to see a healthy atmosphere for developers producing quality AGPL projects and the community accepting that they need to pay up reasonable fees for non-AGPL use.
Simpson's paradox (statistics)
My Mum was going online for flights yesterday (though she's never been one to go to a travel agent). I pointed her to Orbitz. She was impressed, but another (UK-based) website she'd tried was $200 cheaper than anything on Orbitz. Not sure why.
.aspx is to ASP.NET what .php is to PHP and .cfm is to ColdFusion.
Thank you. I can't stand it when I build someone's C code and am greeted with page after page of compiler warnings. It gives me a sinking feeling.
The first thing I clicked was 'pricing'.

I do understand that you don't know how to price it right now, but having no idea of what it _might_ cost is tough.
Top Winter Cars
Winter is the season of snow. Falling leaves indicate the arrival of winter. To celebrate the inspiring winter a lovely, winter car is needed. These can also run with decent mileage
I think it's rather rude of you and that previous commentor to assert such things. A company does not 'deceive' its customers just because you think the service they offer is useless and could only possibly be sold as a result of grandiose claims of effectiveness and other false pretenses.

In fact, in this day and age, large parts of the worlds still work the same way they worked ten years ago. Time and time again, we internet savvy folks grossly overestimate the amount of business and consumption that has shifted to 'the web'. Yes, Amazon has a revenue of 24.5 billion. Do you realize what the total size of that market is?

I know someone that still makes money printing books of coupons that the receivers can redeem to obtains discounts, rebates, etc. If you honestely believe that companies only invest in that out of custom and the false belief that it still yields results, then you are out of your mind. You are mistaking intelligence for knowledge and making claims about a subject you actually don't know anything about.
No way to browse contacts. When I use the search, Chrome's suggestions appear on top of your suggestions, which is quite confusing. Quite neat though for a first draft, though not sure that it offers much beyond standard webmail contact management.
This is almost poetry, expertly written.

"The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same."
Reminds me of:

"You can never step in the same river twice." - Heraclitus
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/scroogle.org

it's up (possibly again) at the moment
There are a bunch out there. If you would like one to view SERP's instantly I find Rank checker (the SEO book firefox plugin) handy. If you would like the keyword service to monitor the progress over time the best oout there Authority Labs (It has some of the best export and filter features available). SEOMoz also has a handy keyword tool: Keyword Tracker.

However, there are two things to keep in mind when using a SERP service:
1. Don't obsess over the position or rank of a keyword every week. Keep in mind that search engine rankings fluctuate often and the natural variation of a metric within control limits always takes place. At the same time, you should know when the keywords is losing rank consistently or when it has gained rank significantly due to your efforts.

2. Always ties in gains and losses shown by the keyword tool with your Analytics. Asking questions like I have improved my rank from 30 to 3 over this keyword, has it brought me improved traffic and most importantly has the traffic converted. This will help you distill out keywords over time to help you focus your efforts.
That is a fun book, and Peter Norvig's article was very interesting.

There is only so much work that any of us as individuals can do, so I find myself vicariously enjoying other people's work, in books like Beautiful Data, success stories on HN and Reddit, etc.
I agree on the power of inhibition, but I think the second point you alluded to is the larger one -- the ability to remove the stimulus.

Certainly it's hubris to believe that one can exercise "free will" to remain completely uninfluenced by one's environment. But what we can do is exercise a measure of intelligence and free will to anticipate the relationship between stimulus and response, and alter our environment accordingly.

I.e. if you're trying to lose weight, don't allow yourself to be exposed to fast food advertising.

Our brains may be heavily influenced by our environment in ways that we are not normally aware, but the existence of studies like these shows that we can begin to understand the dynamic of influence. Once we have understanding we can take appropriate measures.

As I see it, that's the true power of intelligence and human agency.

After all, as you point out, animals also have certain powers of inhibition. But none have the ability to comprehend their own minds and alter their environment accordingly.
I imagine that's exactly what the folks on the Pink team were saying right up until Lees pulled his coup and wrested control away from Allard. Mobile was moribund and Pink was a fresh break from the past. They must have been exciting, heady days full of optimism and fighting spirit.

Then suddenly it all changed, and that's the problem with companies run as warring city states. You're at the mercy of a change of weather.
This kind of answer distracts from the honest and interesting question that thefool poses:

The real question is: what will biology be able to do that
computers aren't able to?

If you asked that question about carbon nanotubes ten years ago, I could have answered that question and I think many people would have been interested in the answers, as the ideas and speculations on the subject wouldn't yet be widely known. In the same way, I would really like it if someone knowledgeable answered this question: what actual things are thought to be feasible through tailoring micro-organisms?
In Dan Weinreb's "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" talk he mentioned that SBCL was being used for QPX because of the quality of its compiled code (as I recall they started out with CMU CL so this was a natural choice).

For REs, Clozure CL was being used in part because faster compile times were more important and run time preformance was more than adequate; stateless business middleware is a very different beast than compute intensive route construction, where we can be sure the cutoff in optimizing choices is based on response time.

There were other reasons for Clozure CL, including the fact that it has a company behind it, one who's principles Dan and others have had long relationships with and ITA was buying one (man?)day a week of their services to support RES. SBCL is (has always been?) a volunteer effort.
I think it will help if you are more descriptive about the problems it solves and how it solves it. Before I am welcomed on your site you are already putting pricing in my face. Asking me to put a contact before I can 'have a seat'. It is all too sudden

What I would advise is this, visit 37 signals and copy the format of their apps like BaseCamp. It is pretty the industry standard for productivity software.

Best of luck.
I'm a bit of a contrarian, as some of you may know. When the crowd goes one way, I look to see what the other way looks like.

I find articles like this -- where the underlying premise seems to be "people are stupid, science is not" to be deeply flawed. People use the word "science" to cover all sorts of things. In this example, it was used to cover the results of a study. Guys? Studies are inherently non-conclusive -- for lots of reasons, including the correlation and causation problem. I can show you studies that will show correlations between about any two things you would like. What's the old saying? "If you torture the data enough, you can get it to confess to anything". The stats on medical studies, in particular, are very concerning. The proper response to being presented with any study is to say something like "That's interesting. What other pieces of data do we have?"

It's not to change your world-view. If your world-view is so flimsy that you'll change it on a dime, you're not exactly being a critical consumer of information.

Secondly scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.. Everybody seems to overlook this fact. We all have these wonderful gems of how people act irrationally, self-reinforce in groups, are slow to change opinions, etc., and nobody asks "wonder how all of that affects the study of science?"

Why? Because the purpose of such self-congratulatory bullshit like this is to tell ourselves "I am a creature of reason and science. These other people are primitive non-thinking dweebs"

It's all just so much intellectual self-stimulation.

I'm all for studies in human irrationality to continue. This is a very interesting and fruitful area of research. But the picking it apart and trying to make social or political observations out of it? Not so much.
could be a money spinner if he got sponsored by a vacuum cleaner company for their next ad...
Dumb question time: what does it mean for Mongrel to not be truly open source? And why is it not already?
Even without the Kin debacle, if I were being paid $1,000 an hour to advise partners about their relationship with Microsoft, I would suggest they look at PlaysForSure. It is NOT news that Microsoft will screw its partners, and they know it when they go into business with Ballmer.

Your father did business with Hyman Roth, he respected Hyman Roth... but he never trusted Hyman Roth!
Should BP Nuke its Leaking Well?
Galbraith: Deficit Commission Should Produce No Report
While I agree "There’s no clear path forward for machine intelligence to mimic human problem solving ability."

It's also intriguing how programming language design has improved from a readers standpoint. I enjoy browsing clean ruby (& python) more than well written C++/C/Assembly. It's easier for me to follow the logical flow and organization.
I stay happy as long as my black box continues to function as advertised. That keeps me from obsessing over internal details. Ugly code can stay ugly and I sleep fine at night.

But whenever I wade into the code for good reason, I reward myself by refactoring whatever areas I happen to touch. It's like throwing a fish to a seal. That way I always get a chance to do fun things like unifying similar code or making code more data-driven.

I'm still a perfectionist, but I'm also a strategic procrastinator. So while I'm working on code, whenever I think of anything, however small, that might improve it, I'll throw in a comment such as "TODO 0703 might want to tighten this up" or "TODO 0703 you need to test this case before releasing". I am so relentless and unforgiving that sometimes the TODOs multiply like rabbits.

Before I release anything, I grep on "TODO". As long as any TODOs show up, I can't release. If I need to put off something until later, I'll change that "TODO" to "LATER". Occasionally I'll make a point of revisiting my LATER entries, converting some of them back to TODO. That way perfection is an ongoing process, not an attained state.
This has been done earlier, but not by a 13 year old boy!
Please, clueless journalists, stop using "hacker" as a synonym for "cracker". And also: when posting an article on HN which title contains the word "hacker" it would be nice if you put quotes around it if it's not intended as it should, like:

Steven Levy On The Hacker Spirit (no quotes, hacker is used correctly)

No "Hacker" Left Behind (quotes because hacker is intended as cracker)
Insurance Sales Leads -
Independent decision making structures
Ask HN: Synthetic bio startups?
Do you know any startups doing synthetic biology i.e. creating/modifying organisms, genomes, etc? (Stuff like new algae for oil spill cleanups or fuels or foods, molecular manufacturing, iGEM spinoffs, optogenetics...)

- Name of company, location, URL

- Vague description of what they do (if possible)

- Bonus (if you work there): If I gave you a computer science genie (or a math genie) in a lamp, what would you wish for?

Thanks!
Would love to chat more about this. It's something I've been thinking of for more than a year. My email is omar@productwiki.com
مشاهدة مباراة الارجنتين والمانيا
Exercise is awesome.

I do think the concept of "limited amount of time" is a little flawed. Perhaps the real reason people shy away from meditation is that it's hard and takes discipline and willpower (in a good way)?
This succinctly and so eloquently said everything my father has spent my entire life trying to teach me. It's beautiful.

If I have kids, I hope that one day they understand this essay.
Immigration Reform Won’t Be Enough To Stop The Brain Drain
> I do think the concept of "limited amount of time" is a little flawed.

And you do have a kid. Huh:-)

Well, I do not have enough time for all the activities that I would like to do, so for me it's a very real concept. Proper training is hard and takes discipline in a good way too, so exercise has that one covered.
I created a thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1483783 to try and get a list of synthetic bio startups. If you know one/work at one, would be great to hear about it!
Companies should hire drones. Companies shouldn't hire people with a life.

Is that your conclusion?
Ask HN: How do you pick stocks?
I don't like my savings to sit in the bank and being eaten by inflation, since for now my only source of income is my salary. So I usually invest my savings in long term stocks, the kind of investments that you do once and forget for at least 10 years.

My problem is that it requires me a lot of time and energy to pick some stock, and even when I manage I always feel uncomfortable and feel clueless on which stock to pick.

I studied some basis on reading balance sheets and income statements, but it always requires me a lot of time and since I don't do it frequently (it takes a while to have enough money worth investing) I forget everything I know and I have to go through it again every time. Add to it that this is something I really don't like doing.

So, how do you pick your stocks? Do you analyze each company every time? Do you follow some investors advice? Do you follow some website? Usually I refer to Fortune's "retire rich" of "investment guide year 20XX" guides, but picking one stock is different than allocating the full portfolio they recommend and I don't fell comfortable to pick a stock just because they recommended it.

Any recommendation?
There is almost no discussion about the actual job, instead it's almost all talk about completely unrelated minutae.
I don't think the concept of "limited amount of time" is flawed.

Frankly, some people are constantly working and don't have time to meditate. It isn't that they shy away from it because it is hard or takes discipline and willpower, it is because we live in a world that (unfortunately) gives us a limited amount of time during the day that we can spend awake consistently if we don't want to possibly damage our health.
Nice parody there. I liked the unexpected ending.
If that hour a day pays you back in lower maintenance costs, then it's worth it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
True ... and the last thing I want is altruism. I want good service, and I want to pay for it. Personal touches like this are very promising. It makes me think that if I had a problem or question, they would very competently "pull my file" and resolve it.
Ask HN: Feedback on ToutPourMoniPad.com (ipad case finder for the french market)
"He's like the early hackers at MIT such as [open source advocate Richard] Stallman who fought for people not to have passwords or secrets." .. and now fights for people not to confuse "Free Software" and "Open Source"

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
Feedback (even graphical - sorry it's in french) is most welcome!

http://www.toutpourmonipad.com

A couple of months ago I was looking for an iPad case. I found a lot of french sites selling those, but not a single easily searchable place (eg: max budget, material...).

I found (thanks to HN) http://ipadcasefinder.com/, but the shipping costs of most sellers to France made the purchase not worth it.

So I decided to build something for the french market!

Technically, it's an ETL (extract/transform/load) back-end that stores in MongoHQ, the front-end is based on Heroku, Sinatra, jQuery etc.

It's just a V1, a lot of changes are planned (search by "use case", for instance).
Top Eight Reasons Startups Don’t Get Money
Financial advisor Chicago
The worst part is that the mainstream media really does know what they're doing in this case. They're not idiots. They're being manipulative.
Secondly scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.. Everybody seems to overlook this fact.

I disagree that people overlook that fact. Humans are certainly not infallible, and that's why peer review is an important part of the process for confirming scientific discoveries and claims. That's what is so great about science; claimed results must be reproducible independent of the scientist, otherwise the claims are generally discarded.
Investing seems to be a regular topic here, you might search for similar threads.
And how fair is denying future generations these goods fair? Who should we protect? Corporations or the society?
Ask HN: Are you distracted by any motion on the screen that you did not effect?
in the new redesign of google news i find it distracting that things continuously rearrange themselves - do you think this is a good user experience
Pachter: Gmaes Industry In 'Persistent State Of Decline'
Fair enough. Still though, I don't know, I personally spend a lot of time on things that are not obligatory, so that time is mine to choose how I spend it. Family time, kid time, HN time...

If you're "constantly" working, then that's a choice you made, right?

[edit: just realized I sound kind of like an ass. I shouldn't speak for other people. Just read this as me talking to myself :)]
What might "something bad ass with HTTP" look like in practice? It sounds like merely being a very big website wouldn't be interesting enough to you.
Jefferson changed 'subjects' to 'citizens' in Declaration of Independence
"Hire normal people who depend on you for their income." yes! that's it! Be sure you're the one in control, ensuring your ability to treat them as less than human!

Sorry for the snark, but that last line may be pretty unintentionally revealing. employer/employee relations are a complex relationship which requires a delicate balance of power. Having the employee be entirely dependent on the employer is just as damaging (to both parties!) as having a keystone employee who knows he can't be replaced. I'd replace your last line with "Hire equals who you can treat as equals."

"Authority is solvent to humanity."