skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged?

And in one paragraph Dawkins shows that he has no understanding of postmodernism what so ever.

The point of postmodernism is not that everything goes, but that we have no absolute frame of reference to judge the trueness of a statement on.

It's not "hey you can do everything you want" but "hey just know that whatever we find out, ultimately we don't know if that is the correct conclusion, as we have no absolute metrics to judge it by.
You don't need to be an accredited investor to invest in startups.

True, but the most-promising/best-advised startups often avoid the risk and expense of taking money from non-Accredited Investors (or at least those who aren't close friends and family). So while it's technically possible, your ability to angel-invest is severely encumbered by the Accredited Investor rules.
You're mistaken. The SEC requirements most certainly do apply to individuals. A company has different obligations if it is taking money from non-accredited investors.
I haven't entirely. I accept that's still quite possible.

I was told to read the Bible and after reading the gospel of Matthew I was told that what I was reading was reliable and to be trusted entirely.
On Startups Lessons Learned (http://pt-br.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510) one founder from Dropbox mentioned as a metrics guide the "Startup Metrics for Pirates" (http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...).

Yes, pageviews is the beginning, not the end.
I'll be among the first to stand up and defend whatever Richard Dawkins has to say (because he provides a much-needed service: skepticism). However, I do appreciate postmodernism for its (accidental?) beauty. This is truly poetic stuff, collages made out of the well-wrought output of the highly educated.

You do have to suspend some of your higher-thinkng to appreciate postmodernism. But you have to do the same to enjoy Neuromancer, which could be seen as a postmodern conference-dump posing as a science fiction story.

So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.
Isn't attacking postmodernism kind of boring/easy these days? Even fellow continental philosophers enjoy indulging in a little pomo-bashing now and then--- it's a favorite pasttime of Slavoj Žižek, for example.

While I don't much like the "school of thought" as a school of thought, I've been somewhat confused by why Derrida in particular seems to anger everyone. As far as I can tell, he's mostly working through some pretty narrow problems in linguistics and literary theory about the difficulty of resolving webs of mutual references into logically consistent, stable frames, not making some sort of general claim about reality (and he rarely mentions science at all). The "Derrideans" may be another story, as often is the case with disciples.
This might just become your new favorite photo sharing site
I would strongly consider making a site which sells the product distinct from the product itself. A blogger is going to probably be evaluating your pitch from their laptop, not from their iPhone.

Dear Real Name of Blogger,

Explain how I came to read his blog. Stroke his ego. Express genuine personal interest in blogger's favorite subjects, demonstrating that I am not an outsourced Indian spammer working his way through an Excel file of bloggers to spam.

Introduce product. Give elevator pitch. Explain why product is intensely interesting to blogger's audience. Include link to landing page on site, which gives a brief feature tour, further selling of the product as an interesting bit of news, and possibly a media kit including screenshots/logos which they can use in their presentation. (Personalize the landing page -- it will both make them respond more favorably and ensure that they don't link to it and link to your service instead. You can also track who opens your emails, who actually visits your landing page, what product videos they were actually interested in, etc.)

Suggest possible angles on story. Namedrop subjects which are on the author's radar like a pro. Suggest possible angles on story. Suggest possible angles on story.

Mention other coverage your product has received, particularly coverage from the blogger's perceived rivals or sources they look up to. In the alternative, mention prominent people who haven't covered you yet but probably will, so that the blogger can scoop them.

Offer to answer any questions blogger has about product. Close warmly.

Regards,

Your Name Here
I like my thecus for much of this.

Basically it has every need filled. The only exception is the playback I handle through a ps3/apple tv's. Home NAS storage. Easy. Plus it's built on linux, modules are easy and fantastic.

www.thecus.com
If I understand correctly, they're playing unsigned garage bands who want extra exposure and not paying any royalties. That will limit their ability to expand outside genres where such bands are common.

I wonder what kind of quality control they have. Will they accept my five-minute a capella nose-singing version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow?
We might have difficulty with truth, but we can evaluate the falsity of a statement about the world. To the degree that statements cannot be falsified, they are arguably without meaning.
The Most Important Algorithms
It's bad if you're a seed investor.

It's also bad if you need a bigger VC round after you take a (highly) inflated seed investment round. This sort of thing happens when bubbles pop.

(For the record, I don't think we're in seed bubble).
Does the nuclear bomb release less energy than was put into it by humans during the manufacturing process?

EDIT: done being a troll :)
Stupid question.. but is there already notepad.cc for this and someone post an application that looked pretty much like this, this morning on HN.
It's limited, not just click and drag as mentioned before but what about scroll wheel action and additional buttons?
The reason I posted this particular one is that the author is well aware of the limitations. The reason it's interesting is that 23andme and their ilk do make a certain level of information more accessible, which is not a bad thing, and hopefully makes people more curious.

On GWAS, while the utility of GWAS alone is questionable, GWAS is and will be a key part of many discovery programs for a while. It's tractable, and combined with expression does provide some fascinating insights into disease.
Pandora gives a lot less choice than it really claims... it's very easy to listen to songs I like that Pandora has, but they very quickly get to playing the same ones over and over again.

I'm willing to take a more niche selection if it means it's easier to find fresh stuff.
A live preview would be nice.
they are file based backups and not snapshot backups.

from: http://www.linode.com/backups/

Files that have been modified, but are the same length and without any metadata changes (like mtime) will not be considered "changed" during a subsequent incremental backup. Currently, only ext2/3 volumes can be backed up (this limitation may be removed in an upcoming release). ACLs and extended attributes are NOT tracked.

The slice version is: http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#backups
My thoughts are that religion and God is about, or at least originates from a desire for, the afterlife. Hence, deathbed conversions, the focus on heaven, hell, and eternal damnation. Thus God -> Afterlife, and the converse is not really focused on.
Sure, cdixon has his biases and own interests like any author, but he's generally pretty insightful. As readers it's up to us to think critically about what we're reading and figure out whether or not it actually makes sense. It's good to be aware of his potential conflicts of interest, but they don't automatically make him right or wrong.

That said, I do wish he would justify the "amount raised" and "pre-money valuation" line items under the "Seed+VC" hypothetical scenario column.
Mercurial 1.6 (now with shared bookmarks)
Derrida is just one of the most famous names, so he gets an extra helping of scorn. No doubt there are plenty of others who are just as bad or worse, but there's no fun in attacking someone that nobody has ever heard of.

But yes, postmodernism is starting to seem rather last-century nowadays. The cutting edge appears to have moved on from "if you disagree with this it's because you're too stupid to understand" to "if you disagree with this it's because you're a racist. Racist!"
You can evaluate the falsity of a statement about our interpretation of the world.

But that is quite different than claiming that our way to interpret reality is the right now.
windows home server is the best microsoft product in years that they don't market too well. I don't get it.
Good research, but I think this is one of those things that stay in the ivory tower, perhaps to one day be a shoulder for the next improvement after the mouse and trackball:

Mom test:
1. Mom asks how do i work this thing w/o a mouse? Tries to touch screen or look for the touch pad. Is then confused. Calls tech support (dad, then siblings... etc..)
2. Scrape fingers on table and get them calloused? No thanks. + would cost to buy more moisturizer.

I always love to be proven wrong though.
IMovie for iPhone – Video Review
iMovie for iPhone has been one of the most highly anticipated apps since WWDC 2010 (June 7th). It is said to be a portable/lite version of the well-known iMovie program by Apple on Mac OS X., brought to your mobile device, the iPhone 4, for $4.99. Should you consider buying it? Keep reading!
my take on 23andme: http://paulstamatiou.com/review-23andme-dna-testing-for-heal...
Somewhat off-topic, but why are people advocating Homebrew over MacPorts?

I've never found a port I thought should have been in MacPorts not being there, `sudo port -v install [package]` always seems to work, and dependencies are automagically followed.

Looking at the website, it seems the general "improvement" is that you can edit formulas before you install; but that's exactly why I use MacPorts! I don't want to know how to install all these things, that abstraction is something I prefer. If you don't intend to do this, is Homebrew really any different?
How to Lay Oil-Catching Boom, 101
The point of postmodernism is not that everything goes, but that we have no absolute frame of reference to judge the trueness of a statement on.

If postmodernism had "a point" which could be so readily expressed in comprehensible terms, would it have ever have gotten so far as it did?
I've had similar feelings. You would think that products that are superior from a technical standpoint would be enough for them to get some traction in the technical community.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but Opera always seems to get ignored.
Nitpick: hits and page views are not the same thing. A hit is just a request for a file. A page view is an entire page, and may consist of many hits.
I think that’s a misreading. “We have no absolute metrics to judge [our findings] by” to me seems to imply that no statement is better than any other statement, that the concept of “truth” is useless; i.e. anything goes (as long as statements about the universe are concerned).

And that’s all Dawkins says, not “you can do everything you want”. Rather “you can say everything you want, everything is equally true because nothing is true”.

That, to me, is obviously rubbish and rightly attacked. There surly is no such thing as absolute certainty or absolute truth but we can get damn close and find out what’s more likely and what’s less likely.

I don’t think I’m attacking a straw man here but I might, so correct me. “Anything goes (as long as statements about the world are concerned)” seems like a fair characterization to me, though.
Great introduction to customer development that all startup founders should read (along with Four Steps to the Epiphany).
Poetry and fiction don't masquerade as serious philosophy. As long as this stuff dominates academic humanities and soaks up precious grant money I'll take all the wet blankets I can get.
It's boring and easy, but it's necessary if one wants to get rid of it. I don't feel like fighting the good fight myself (or even watching it happen), but I'm glad somebody out there is. Really, it's the same situation as with religion.
That is how it got so far. It shows that there are multiple ways to interpret reality.

The way that we are using the internet right now is in many ways supportive of postmodernism.
As the costs for creating a new product or service continue to be driven down, is there not an opportunity here for a new category of angel investors to meet the needs of startups that need ie., < 100K?
Yes, thanks for being selective! I appreciated the author's relatively minor discussion of the disease data and more expansive discussion of the rest. For completeness: when I say 'GWAS' in this context I am referring to 'common SNPs' (MAF>=5%, or perhaps down to 1%), not to genome-wide association studies based on the SNPs. I used to argue with my labmates about the proper use of the term 'GWAS': I felt that it should refer to the studies only, and 'common SNPs' should be called 'common SNPs'; my labmates preferred to call common SNPs 'GWAS data' and I've finally been converted.

Anyways, I do think that expression+GWAS is useful, but it's not going to get us to a place that's better than history for most diseases.[1] Exome and then genome sequencing will be needed for that.

[1] = On the other hand, Purcell has an interesting paper out that discards the genome-wide significance threshold, with interesting results.
What you're looking for is Windows Home Server. It's amazing. Stores all the media you need, plus has streaming capabilities over the net. Able to expand perpetually -- no need to reformat or anything like that. I have it running with 10TB of space. It has a great front-end UI, and as close to zeroconf as you can get with this type of service. See exampel screenshot: http://ivivo.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/windowshomeserver_2...

EDIT: Forgot to mention one of the biggest pluses. Microsoft pioneered a special file system for WHS called Drive Extender. There are no drive letters, just folders, and it spans across all your hard drives and future hard drives. No more "oh that video is in H:, oops I mean K:", it's just "It's in the video folder." See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server#Drive_Exten...

The best thing is that WHS is tightly integrated with Windows, so it has things like autobackup (selective and not), health monitoring (if any of the PC's hooked up at your home springs an alert, like virus found, or low disk space, etc, it notifies the other computers through dismissable systray popup), central user/password management across all your machines, and other cool things. Many companies have also developed plugins for WHS as well (useful things like PerfectDisk for defragmentation). It also works/integrates with Mac environment.

For playback of media content, I have two HTPCs connect from two different rooms as well as some Xbox 360's (yea, the xboxes just found the folders and was able to play the content. it just works). Also, I installed Air Video to stream videos to ipad/iphone.

And since it needs to be always-on, I hooked up a UPS battery to it. It's headless -- just the machine is needed, which is great for a server in the closet. You'll manage the WHS through remote desktop/web ui. You'll also want to get the Rosewill RSV-S8 -- you will need more and more space! (Some people have gone the "octopus" -- lots and lots of external hard drives hooked up through USB. I initially went this route but the throughput became a bottleneck so I got the Rosewill - See: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132...).

Some use-cases: I've got private directories for myself, then I've got public directories such as Photos and Videos, with Photos being writable by certain members of the family. This means I can create a folder, say "07.04.10 July 4th in Boston", and each of us can upload our iphone/camera images to that folder. Now we have a global picture folder for the event we shared together. With Videos, since WHS supports Windows Media Center as well as just normal file streaming, I outfitted my WHS box with 1GBit ethernet card and the machine can stream out files to each of the HTPCs and other consuming devices.

Oh yea, the new Windows Home Server release coming out later this year is going to be even better. If you've got an MSDN subscription, download it and mess with it. You won't be disappointed. It's one of the best products Microsoft has put out.
Why not an HTPC + dropbox?
Popcorn Hour comes pretty close. It's a little rough on the edges (more hacker friendly than grandma friendly), but is highly versatile.

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/
Related piece "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" by a software engineer, Chip Morningstar:
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
Yes - keeping it tight given the diversity of that audience will be key.

In your experience, is there a # of subscribers at which newsletters become interesting to advertisers? e.g., min of 10k subscribers, 20k, etc?
Yeah, that makes sense, but somehow Derrida himself doesn't seem the most objectionable to me, at least on philosophical grounds.

I suppose one can legitimately blame him for some of the writing style, though. In particular, although he argued that all language has multiple meanings / shifting references / etc., he seemed to like emphasizing it by using a writing style that added deliberate multiple readings. For example, something like "we need to (re)construct this meaning", leaving it deliberately ambiguous, with a sort of self-aware textual wink, whether he was "constructing" or "reconstructing" things. Also, lots of puns.

I think he actually pulled it off reasonably well in some parts, and is kind of amusing to read, if you like that sort of thing. In the years since, it's become a really annoying habit that a bunch of folks have picked up, though, most of whom don't do it very well, and take it way too seriously. Now I have this instinctive "argh, I hate you" reaction whenever I see some paper or book title with a construction like "(re)engage".

edit: An interesting oddity is that a lot of the writing style traces back to Nietzsche, even though he himself was quite readable (so much so that teenage kids loving Nietzsche are even a sort of stereotype). He initiated some of the general style of writing half philosophy, half literary performance: jumping from subject to subject, making assertions that you run with and don't carefully argue for, making heavy use of puns in arguments, etc. Maybe the problem is just that most people who try to write like that need to realize that they aren't Nietzsche, and can't pull it off.
That is soem cool news. Opera;s latest JS engine is called Presto. Isn't it?
I'm sorry I missed both, I did look for them (even while looking for them I still miss both of them!), and how does the subscription model work for you ? What's the breakdown percentage wise between ads and subscriptions ? Why do you focus on pageview so much ?

Retention and chargebacks are the interesting figures for a subscription based service, not pageviews.
> So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.

I think he is a wet blanket because he realizes that many of these post-modernists suck public money with their tenure and wield quite a bit of power over up and coming academics.

In other words, nobody minds the insane person as long as they are safely locked away in an asylum. However the same insane person becomes very dangerous once they have control and authority over people's careers, sit on academic committees, there are thousands hours spent by students who are told to "read and interpret" these crazy writings with the insinuation that these are the great philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Congrats! What is your site built on?
DLink DNS-323 with a sync-to-cloud funplug script would probably be near ideal. I have one of those boxes, and I have to say that it's a pretty awesome little Linux box.
No, I just checked. It is Carakan. Nice job Opera. To take on giants like Firefox and Chrome needs more exposure and advertising. Noone notices if you keep creating the best software in the dark!!
The difference is that the former tells you that it doesn't matter what you do everything goes.

The latter tells you to be careful to think that what you know is certain.
The simplest advice I've seen to fight this is to use defensive scheduling. Block out most of your work-day/week with meetings with yourself and reject conflicting meeting requests. People who try to schedule meetings with you will see the conflict and probably try to avoid it to start with, plus it's easier to justify not going to meetings if you have a conflict, even if it's just time you've blocked out for yourself to get things done.

Additionally, if you are able you can work from home fairly often, making sure to mention that it's to concentrate on specific tasks, you'll miss all your meetings for that day but you'll get work done. More often than not nobody will think poorly of you, and your increased productivity will be fairly apparent.
Cable’s move into Mobile: Calculated and Deliberate
If you believe Cable Operators are not thinking about Mobile Networks and what kind of synergies could bring them increased cash-flow in the future, then you’ve probably missed the obvious signs laid out since 2008.
Postmodernism doesn’t seem to have any tools to decide between two statements, does it? Hence, everything still goes.
Because like most enterprise software the people using it aren't the people buying it. When they have a choice they go elsewhere.
My longstanding theory is it's totally the name. What do most people think of when they hear the word opera? Lame, annoying, outdated, slow paced, inaccessible, old, boring, etc. I'm hard pressed to think of a worse name for a web browser.
Exactly! While pointing out that the emperor has no clothes may be a trivially simple exercise, so long as people are willing to support the emperor, we need to keep shouting about his choice of apparel. All the more when (at least in the US) our tax dollars are going to fund his "clothes."
My advice, if you have a few hundred thousand in cash and want to start angel investing: don't.

Don't angel invest until you have enough secure, low-risk investments sitting around that you can shrug off losing your first few hundred thousand dollars worth of investments, as you're very likely to do.

If you have the kind of patience that an angel investor needs, then you'll have the kind of patience you need to wait for December.
Maybe I'm just totally crazy here, but my feeling is that unless you have $10 million+ cash you really should not be investing in startups. It's just way way too risky.

This is probably just my own personal risk tolerance, but you should not be investing more than 10% of your net worth into stratups (because you're very likely going to lose it all) and you should have at least ~10 investments in order to normalize your risk. Not to mention that you're probably tying up all the money you're going to invest for ~5 years until (if you're lucky) there's an exit.

Again, this is purely just my own (admittedly conservative) risk tolerance.
1 million per month, though, and you've got full-time (equivalent) income potential (unless your site is in a low value niche). Heck, even half of that will do for high value niches.
Thanks for the great comment and recommendation! We are writing up a quick post about our experience as a email newsletter company, will post it here once its up.
OK, I shall consider my hypothesis sufficiently falsified.
In our experience, once you hit above 50k subscribers it starts to get the attention of advertisers. Also important is how long you have been doing it for, it takes time to build up trust.
Overbite Project brings Gopher protocol to Android