skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is only true for long-term investors. Algorithmic traders have no vested interest in whether the underlying business succeeds or fails. They are only there trying to predict where the wind will blow next. They are quickly in and out of any potentially profitable company; quick to buy "puts" in a momentary time of weakness or "calls" in a time of temporary strength.

For algorithmic traders, it is indeed a zero-sum game. For the rest of us "investors", as I like to call it, to distinguish it from trading, there is potential for long-term good.
I think it's going to fail, in the sense that when people who have donated to it see the results they're going to be confused and disappointed. Which is fairly significant fail, but hopefully there will be some useful by-products, as it's supposedly open source and based around open standards.
LOL! man i'm an idiot. thanks for pointing that out. :)
Jesus Didn't Die on A Cross - Another Religion Falsehood
Good point. Lot's a great comments on those. Sorry about the repost, I haven't been checking HN as often lately and missed those.
For the most part I totally agree. Rampant speculation combined with a fiat currency and too loose regulation is how we got so much money sloshing around, a deformed market, and this economic crisis (and a near collapse of the financial system). We've gotten too far away from fundamentals. We also see this in startups. For example, I totally agree with Mark Cuban who laments that modern founders often look at valuations, and indeed raise lots of capital, for possible IPOs without even discovering how to profit a single dollar.
Has anyone read the book? I would love to hear some people's opinions before I decide to buy. Thanks
Well, the strategy i'm describing involves a native app. In that case, would it be possible to expose device-specific API to JavaScript?

Also, multi-touch is actually supported by webkit. There a nice WWDC video that intoduces this capability if you'd like to learn more.

To be clear the idea above isn't new of course. For instance http://www.appcelerator.com/ provides a native app with a thin wrapper around a web control.
Noprocrast Enhanced: Chrome Extension
There is no shortage of blog posts on the topic, but there is definitely the shortage of well-maintained and up-to-date guides.
Test your headline with a short Adwords campaing to find out what version works best. Tim Ferris did this for his book "The 4 hour workweek"

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/read-this-post-to-find-out... Increased conversion rate from 0.3% to 4% in only on hour by adding the words get/download in a max 80 signs ad.

List of Call to action phrases:

* Get…
* Download…
* Click Here to…
* Press the…
* Enter your…

http://www.beaconlearningcenter.com/documents/972_01.pdf Don't throw away the junk mail:

1. Guilt: “Because of the way blah blah blah has been treated, you owe it to them to help.”

2. Patriotism: “The American way of life may disappear if you do not support us on this.”

3. Greed: “You could earn 10,000 dollars just by sending us 10 dollars.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity. Act Now!”

4. Compassion: “For just 36 cents a day you could help this starving child.”

5. Snobbery: “You are among the few hand selected people to receive this special offer!! “

Other Resources:

http://www.copyblogger.com/copywriting-101/

http://www.clicknewz.com/free/32ConversionTriggers.pdf
Ask HN: Should we be concerned about benzene exposure from the BP Oil Spill?
I recently met someone claiming to have expertise in Organic Chemistry and Meteorology tell me that benzene levels in the region surrounding the BP oil spill are astoundingly high and will cause life threatening illnesses in the coming months ahead. In particular, if a hurricane were to disperse the toxic gases arising from the oil spill to more remote regions, we would see unprecedented exposure-related deaths. I immediately dismissed him when he started ranting about FEMA prison camps, methane deposit "c4", Haliburton, NWO, and other crackpot theories, but the basics of what he said makes sense to me.

Although I run the risk of contaminating the content here, I respect the HN community for its critical thinking skills and general depth of knowledge in the sciences. I also believe this topic is important enough to warrant a discussion.

Are benzene levels as dangerous as this guy says it is both right now and in the event of a hurricane ("kill millions" so to speak)? What about dangers related to methane, which is combustible and also a very potent greenhouse gas?
> in fact Swarm SG is much deeper than Backgammon or Chess and I believe that it could even take years to master

uhhh, if it's "much deeper than chess" then it definitely takes decades to master.

One shouldn't claim to be deeper than chess without knowing the first thing about how much it's possible to study chess.
My point isn't that central coordination doesn't work, it was just that central coordination is extremely unsophisticated and is typically not a source of added insight, just a source of funds.

In my experience in academe, researchers tailor their work to what the NSF is funding, not what they consider most interesting/important.
A lot of this applies to other JVM languages, like Scala.

Although I think Scala does some of this stuff better, there are still a lot of pain points for the newbie when it comes to different build systems, java toolchain, classpath, library dependencies, binary compatibility issues etc.

On the one hand it's great that tonnes of toolchain options already exist for Java which can be used with these languages. On the other hand, when coming from (say) the Ruby or Python world you just want and expect there to be one main widely-used/well-documented way to do basic things within a language's ecosystem, like installing libraries and so forth.

Rather than first having to figure out how the java world works, then make some arbitrary-seeming choices of java tools without much guidance, and then figure out how to work with the new JVM language on top of those.

It's about making sure this new crop of JVM languages feel like first-class citizens, rather than just add-ons for a java ecosystem which you're implicitly expected to know a lot about.
Raising money before they know what they even really want to do... sounds like trouble. Maybe they could come up with something though. Time will tell.
So sad, so true. This is what happens when you play a zero-sum game. Even if you win, someone has to lose.

When you play football too, if you win someone has to lose. And yet there are positive externalities, to wit millions of people watching the World Cup.

In trading, the externalities might not be so obvious but they do exist.
Jefferson County, Alabama - it is more than rampant I'd say.
Other examples - there is a new book - Free Lunch, which talks a lot about subtle (and not very) ways local governments subsidize WalMarts, BestBuys etc.

It is very dangerous to attempt bribing cops in USA,
compared to 3rd world, where it is safe and streamlined, like in grocery. Trust, I lived in 3rd world.

See, in USA it is hard to accuse some entity in corruption - there is concept of lobbying (which is legalized bribery), special interest groups, and the law, it is contrived, it is constructed the way to benefit big guys.
Look, US patent laws are laugh-stock around the world, the medicines cost at least 30% more than in neighbor Canada.
Medical insurance industry is one huge example of corruption in extreme scales. Bailout - another.
And look at the clip again - nobody knows what BP uses, and there is no way you can learn that - gov-t does not care, because it is bought, been purchased, sold out.
I made this because I found myself getting around noprocrast by opening lots of tabs and not refreshing them. This ought to solve that problem, though it could just be another step in an arms race against myself. Hope someone else finds it useful, any suggestions much appreciated. :)
This is a fair point.

I believe that you are absolutely correct that the Apple design promise has incorporated beauty as a key component, however I still contend that there has always been an element of function as well, even if only implied. Consider Apple's early beginnings, all urban legends and anecdotes aside. Apple found initial success by providing "beautiful" products that were built so virtually any user could handle them - they offered simple, clean functionality, as embodied by the user-interface and the original Apple Mouse for navigation.

Further, consider all of the Apple commercials from recent history - "I'm a Mac v. I'm a PC" - each episode was based on an implied simplicity (function) and beauty of Macs, as opposed to their clunky and confusing PC rivals. Apple has since pulled those commercials in favor of a new angle - perhaps, to your point, something that will focus not on function, but on aesthetic appeal alone going forward.

To your point regarding AT&T, I agree that they are not solely to blame here. The dropped call problem with the iPhone 4 is certainly a design flaw, not one to be blamed on the carrier - though problems with AT&T are not to be ignored completely either.

I would not be surprised if further design flaws emerge around the iPhone 4 in the coming months, but I believe that these speak more to my point here that Apple has neglected its promise for equal parts function and beauty.

...And as an aside, I was spurred to write the original post when I realized that the iPhone 4 received all of the really neat features that I had expected and wanted to see in the iPad. Apple has historically kept me drooling for the next great thing, but in this case, perhaps the release dates were just too close together and their lack of foresight too blatant for me to let go without a word or two on the topic.
Interestingly, it was only later in my life (late teens - boarding school) that I learned metal was bad. I spent my childhood warming my breakfast cereal with the metal spoon in the bowl, no problems. (Nobody wants a cold spoon with warm cereal!) Now I know why I never had a problem - glad I didn't eat breakfast with a fork.
As someone moving into Scala, with previous work experience mainly in Python and a University grounding in Java (which only briefly touched on Ant, Maven etc.)., I could not agree more. Getting Scala up and running cleanly and figuring out how to properly lay out and start a new project has been somewhat nightmarish, especially on Windows.

That said, however, when I moved from Maven to sbt, everything became a lot easier.
This story is not "about" religion (unless somehow pedophilia is a religious practice) it's about a criminal investigation.
I just hope that ten years from now 3D televisions won't have become the standard to the point of buying a regular HDTV being impossible.

I mean, 3D is nice for a change but I just feel like it was the new way for companies to create another high priced product to make people want to replace their already expensive and recently bought TVs without that much value being added to the product.
That is seriously awesome. Reminds me of the cool stuff that used to be on hackaday
What tools do you recommend for text mining?
I have a text file with online discussions from a website (about 54 million words) and I would like to do some analysis on it. I have done some basic word frequency counts but I am interested in doing things like clustering to find what are the words that appear together more often. Something like this: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue4/rosen.html#sixth

I'm looking for simple free tools that can allow me to do some basic analysis on the text that can give me a basic understanding of the content of the text. I'm familiar with perl and python primarily.

Thanks.
Obviously he has the aptitude to learn things on his own. Sounds like he can learn better/faster on his own time than the large majority of students do at a school. So no need to hound him with pessimism for having an unconventional but pleasant lifestyle.
My fiance and I recently downsized to a 1000 sqft condo. Living small is surprisingly expensive, though. Its crowded in the condo, because all the stuff we have as hand-me-downs, like the TV and sofa, is meant for a much larger space. It costs a lot of money to get new stuff that fits in the space better.
Awesome discussion! This is the second time someone has pointed out that Chicago doesn't make rocketships. Tell me why this doesn't count as a spaceship? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37?wasRedirected=tru...

What's your angle on this not being ours?
Is anyone on HN running this?
Startup friendly bank - your thoughts ?
Hi all - I'm looking for some recommendations for a startup friendly bank. Ideally ones that:
1. deal with web startups regularly
2. have been involved with early stage external financing
3. even better if they have a location around Los Angeles

Any ideas or thoughts around startup banking would also be appreciated.

Thanks
Why does that matter?

In brace language:

if (condition) {{ code_1 }} code_2

In Python:

if (condition):\n code_1 \n^H code_2

Unless your editor also knows when to place your close braces, and, haha, it doesn't and indeed can't, you have not even won a keystroke.
I also had trouble getting started with Clojure because I was distracted by the official getting started documentation. I had smooth sailing once I decided to develop Clojure code the same way I develop Python code:

- Edit code in plain Vim.

- Run Clojure from the command line.

I have a single directory where I download the appropriate jars. I ignore Ant, Maven, Leiningen and all that other fancy stuff.
He mentioned everything I like about Forth. Peek and poke machine registers. Quick check out of hardware. Forth should be in the toolkit of any one bringing up new hardware. What is there to hate about it ? Every tool has it's limitations and should be judiciously applied to each task.
'The young are still building their social graph and can be more open to new things. So all those things that tie people to Facebook won’t be relevant to kids growing up today.'

I agree. Was talking to a 9yr-old yesterday and he didn't know what a playstation was. Thought he was kidding at first.

I don't think fb can be killed anytime soon though. It's just so big. Migration of half a billion people to another social networking service can't be simple.
For me, it's a BIG drawback that it's not a hosted service. I don't want to be updating my feed reader myself, I don't want to have to install it and deal with server config issues that might come up, I want to access it from anywhere (I'd probably host it locally on my network, otherwise) I want the computer hosting the service to do all the grunt-work.
As someone who is getting their feet wet in the app store I can attest that this has been a huge headache for me. Getting my app on the app store has actually been harder work than making the app itself!
ABC stores aren't necessarily owned by the same company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_stat...
I certainly didn't have much Java experience. Just reading some articles, and programming this game in Java 1.1 of all things! It still runs, try it! http://jonathanwatmough.com/jplanetoid/ptoidApplet.html

My point is that I fail to see how adding Vim or Emacs or some other IDE or framework actually helps you get your head round Java.

It's only my opinion, but learning enough Java API to write serious Clojure programs involves hitting an O'Reilly reference, and having the Java class docs open in a web browser, with the absolute minimum of distractions from other sources.

It may be unique to me (hopefully not), but Clojure was a drop-in replacement for Perl in my sketching and prototyping workflow that I follow during planning and design. Clojure has access to all the Java APIs, and with pure Java goodies such as drivers for Oracle, SQLite, SQLServer, it's easy to write code that runs well across Mac, Windows and GNU/Linux. None of this stuff needs an IDE, since by and large, just dropping .class files into an appropriate folder is most of the battle in Java/Clojure.
Btw I considered C++ for the C slot. But decided if I really wanted 1st class OO support in a language that Java or Python could do that acceptably, and it wasn't worth the price of dealing with what I felt were C++'s design imperfections. So it fell back to:

* C for (somewhat) bare metal programming (OS, embedded)

* Java for high-level with rubber edges and safety wheels, esp huge codebases in enterprise IT shops with Joe Blub coders

* Python for high-level agile w/solo or small elite teams (calling out to C bits where beneficial)
My understanding (as a chemist's son, but not a chemist) is that yes, there is benzene being released; and yes, in the immediate area above the spill, there might be high enough concentrations to cause toxicity... but that a hurricane spreading the gas over millions of cubic miles of atmosphere would dilute it to harmless levels.
But i'm sure she'd never get a cellphone just like yours. True?
Yep, sbt is nice. Hopefully it'll get official blessing at some point.

sbaz (their package management / repository system) was a bit of a disappointment, though, in that people aren't really using it (the last time I checked anyway).

And you end up having to learn maven anyway (or at least maven repositories?) in order to depend on other java or scala libraries that use it.
I'm living in a 170 square foot apartment in Tokyo. This is on the small side, but not so unusual for an apartment close to the city center. In addition to the savings in rent, I also save money by not collecting possessions. The space isn't such an issue, because I fully utilize it. Having a bigger place would be nice for having people over and what not, but the majority of the time I wouldn't use the space.
I'll pay you 10 dollars to take my G1.
I wouldn't bother with getting a slide out keyboard. If you install Swype, your typing speeds can be faster than it is with a phone keyboard.
Non-Newtonian Fluid on a Speaker Cone [video]
Excellent list of returns from networking. They key for me (and I run workshops and business coaching projects on the topic) is building a smaller number of deep relationships, rather than running all over town creating hundreds of shallow relationships. Only deep relationships provide the opportunities, advice, support and friendship the OP notes.

Most networking is not like this, however, which is why it has a bad reputation. Most networking events are about quantity not quality - quick, everyone in the room introduce themselves for 30 seconds as if that's going to give you the confidence to refer a friend to somebody.

Most attendees at those events want referrals, which is the key reason they don't work for that outcome. People who get the most referrals are the people who give the most referrals. So the people who need referrals most are the very people who aren't good at giving them out. Fill a room with people who need referrals, and you're filling a room with people who don't give referrals.

It's a viscious cycle of disappointment - grab the first interesting person you meet there and go somewhere else for coffee.
Because turnabout if fair play.

Because ignoring them doesn't stem the tide of their rhetoric. Fighting them and winning sends a clear message that they are wrong.
I have a Touch Pro 2 (with slide out keyboard), and one not-so obvious advantage is that I can type without having an onscreen keyboard block half the screen.
I did use the ELPA. It's really a great system. That combined with lein makes clojure very easy to use.

Getting started was, as I mentioned, frustrating though. Nearly all guides recommend the old way.
And that electrical engineers tell you that current goes from + to -, while physicists say it goes from - to +.

And the north magnetic pole is at the geographic south / vice versa.

And horsepower != 1000 Watts.

And Farads are bigger than I'd like them to be.
This reminds me of the whole should-you-build-on-someone-else's-platform thing, with the unpredictable, ever-shifting platform rules being in this case the mishmash of federal/state/local laws. The next family values president could put all these people out of business (and in jail, for that matter) with the stroke of a pen.
I don't believe this project will succeed. It is a project that was completely based on hype. Couple that with the fact that there was a lot of talk over facebook's open graph, Diaspora got a lot of press. Now that that's over, they have to rely on their own wits to make it, which isn't something their team strikes me as capable of doing.
Well intentioned, but uninformed.

Some people are way too enthusiastic about things they don't totally grasp.

Cf. carbon expenditure, recycling (some forms), hybrid automotives, rails (lot of fakers in the 'community'), etc.

Edit: I would like to add however, that black does save energy on CRTs. But again, detection of screen technology is a fail here and the vast majority of users are using LCDs. Not worth the potential hassle. "Why can't I watch the whole video without the screen going black?!"
First up, strabismus implies you're primarily using your dominant eye, and ignoring input from the other eye. In this state, 3D vision based on different inputs to each eye won't do anything for you. If you weren't solid on eye gaze coordination for 3D perception before viewing 3D video, I can maybe buy that it increases the risk that you don't settle in properly. But if you do have eye gaze coordination already, I would believe that 3D vision you can easily track - i.e. alter your gaze point appropriately to coordinate images from both eyes - would not impair this skill, and may even improve it.

I played around with stereograms a bunch when I was 12 or so. I got to making my own using graph paper, creating a random dot pattern, and then carefully repeating it with adjustments to generate the desired depth cues when viewed with crossed vision - the near approach - or parallel vision, the far approach.

So, I did this for many, many hours over a period of weeks. The most practical upshot - if you can call it practical - is that I'm now extremely good at "spot the difference" puzzles, as I can change the intersection point of my eye gaze at will, even to the point of infinity (parallel gaze) and slightly beyond (so that my eyes are actually looking outward in slightly different directions). The practice of conscious control also decouples corneal focusing from gaze direction as desired.

Another slight plus is that I find it reasonably easy to relax my eyes, putting on a "1000 yard stare", including distance-focusing my eyes. I often do this when I'm sitting by the computer, but caught up in thought. FWIW, I'm slightly short-sighted, but have experienced no loss in visual acuity in 20 years of almost entirely indoor, close computer work.

I feel pretty confident from my personal experience in saying that I'm not afraid that there will be any side-effects from 3D video. But I am only an anecdote, and I don't own a television, much less would I consider buying a 3D TV.
This popped out at me as well. Especially with recent versions of Xcode, the process is incredibly simple. Run the wizard, download the files it gives you, and then open them. Boom, you're ready to run the app on your device and submit it to the store.
I always thought those houses quite fascinating. This, plus some storage space would allow you to go not-quite-Walden. OTOH, minimalism isn't exactly about square-footage. A slightly bigger house, with a bit more "whitespace" would probably be more comfortabl -- imagine a small traditional Japanese house, or one of those buildings based on upcycled shipping containers...

Also, for ecological reasons, this would still be a waste of space, as you're only using two dimensions and probably need some space around the building. A typical apartment building would be better.

This is quite good if you've got a lot more land, but only a little space to build upon (forest, hills, etc.).

If I remember correctly, even the founder of the company selling those houses only partially lives in one of them. He's got a bigger, traditional house next to it.