skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think such a business may succeed. Your biggest challenge will be what I'll call the "verification problem": How can a customer verify that you've provided them with a "good" product for their money?

Consider selling programming services. The client can request an application or website with certain functionality, and you use your superior expertise to create that functionality. Even though the client can't code, their experience from using the application/website can tell them that you delivered the goods.

Knowledge that is used to support strategic business decisions is not so easy to verify, mainly because it doesn't have consequences that can be directly experienced by non-experts.

So how do people get around this? Large consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc.) spend considerable resources building their reputations, alumni networks (= potential clients), etc.

Small consulting firms usually build their reputations in local business and social circles, relying on repeat business and referrals.

Concretely, I'd suggest thinking about one or more of: (i) specific, rare domain expertise, (ii) finding one or a small handful of clients who can become comfortable hiring you repeatedly, (iii) research services that can be delivered in the form of data or code such that someone less expert than you can verify the quality.
Actually, the US still leads the world in manufacturing output (for the moment...projections seem to suggest China will take first next year -- http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/dailybriefing/2010_06_21/... ) But even a close second is still a long way from what the popular myth that "we don't make anything here anymore" would suggest.
When we are first born, we experience a barrage of new sensations. Our minds automatically integrate this sensory information as perceptual information of the world around us. As we grow older, we begin to form our first abstract concepts of the world in terms of visual images.

Humans cannot communicate in concepts, however, and we need a perceptual language (optimally one that we can both see and hear) to do so. Not only does this enable us to communicate ideas and concepts to others, but it also serves as a kind of storage system for the mind, making learning and the formation of complex thoughts much easier.

It is generally easier to think in terms of language than abstracts, because language is simply the concrete form of conceptual information.

Because deaf people can only visually, not audibly, perceive their language, they are obviously set back in terms of their ability to learn and think audibly. However, because they can still use sign language and understand written language, I would not expect their learning or thinking ability to be lessened by any significant degree.
Ask HN: Good alternative to Flash builder?
Hi there,
I was wondering if some of you know a good alternativ to Adobes Flash builder to develop Flash (AS3 / Flex) applications.
Best
Philipp
> Statistically, 4 in 10 people who say "I do" will be proved wrong eventually

Being proven wrong does not make you a liar, nor dishonest.

A commitment question is not a probability question, it asks whether you are in or out. Is it more honest to answer "probably" when asked whether you want another card when drawing 14 at blackjack? Are you dishonest if it turns out you made a mistake?

> the majority of us say we want to pair for life, a very large proportion of us actually do not want that.

So...the one group should force their viewpoint on the other?

> We need to be more honest and rational, to ourselves and to others.

I think I am being completely honest and rational. I don't tell my kids mummy and daddy will be together for ever, I tell them what the plan is.

> The costs to society are clearly enormous

Do you mean social costs or financial costs? How are the costs reduced if there is no marriage (except for in litigious societies, and if you removed marriage in them then lawsuits would simply shift to the next level)?

> Our cultural and legal concept of marriage is very specific

Yours or mine? You state that "marriage is a lie". I think it is not for everyone, but some people like it.

In my country, the costs of divorce are near-zero. Maybe it is expensive in some countries. Why then is that a problem with marriage, and not with that countries legal and social system?

Why is marriage "a lie"? Why is it dishonest to say "I do"?

Edit: Note that I think you are very likely right about marriage needing reform in the way that it fits into some modern societies. However, the terms you use to describe many people's happy lifestyles, people who may well think about things just as much as you, are somewhat inflammatory.

My marriage is one of the best things in my life, and having it described as a lie and myself described as dishonest is offensive, I guess.

Society has changed a lot, but maybe marriage is not the thing that needs changing to fix the problems you see.
You definitely don't need those ports forwarded. If you remember the introduction, Steve listed a lot of protocols. If I remember correctly from looking into some of them, a few were for making connections around firewalls.
"If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t."

This is important. Darwin, on his journeys, was very strict on himself about noting down any information that seemed to contradict his theories, because he knew that the natural tendency of the brain is to turn a blind eye to any such inconvenient facts.
Dr. InfoSec's Quotes of the Week (003)
You're right, the market for people who want to see and talk to their loved ones from far away isn't that big. And WiFi is hardly anywhere. And you have to hold this device in your hand and lug it around in your pocket...
I haven't tried this but it sounds relevant: http://www.couchsurfing.org/
Regardless of what Steve said, Apple's official support document notes that you need to have those ports open (or forwarded). I'll go with the documentation, you can go with what Steve said.
Overloading the names? Classifications as functional groups?

Um. Ok. That's, um, interesting.

If you start with chemical names and hit the limits of the complexity that permits, are you going to move onward to molecules? Wait for Ununbium to be renamed Copernicium? What's next, molecular host names within the hydroxyl group are assigned to management?

If you're going to use a "corporate-style" naming scheme for your hosts, then just encode whatever it is you want to convey into the host name. Location or whatever.

Or just select random names.

Having the IP address encoded in the name strikes me as particularly problematic, too. Hosts and subnets and VLANs tend to come and go, and names and VLANs and address assignments tend to shift.

And naming based on physical locality is an increasingly quaint concept in the era of virtualization and client mobility.

After a while, most any naming scheme will prove insufficient or will unravel, so why not just have an eye toward the likelihood of distributed management and (increasing) complexity from the onset?

Seems better to spend your time getting (for instance) SNMP and DNS records configured and working for all your boxes, and less time making (more) work for yourself with explaining and maintaining complex host name schemes.
You just about described Skytap Cloud to a 'T'. Although, it does do a lot more than just that. Check it out at http://skytap.com.

(note: i was their sr. program manager and primary ui developer from 2007-2009).
I should have mentioned that. Editline is used by default by the Python readline module if you are on a MacOS or I assume FreeBSD. However, it is still a risk to use the readline module unless you distribute Editline and force its use over Readline.
That's just stupid. You really think you need to setup a static IP on your phone and then forward ports to it? How would it work if you had multiple phones on the network? It wouldn't. Furthermore, I have several friends that have gotten the phone already, and they were able to FaceTime out of the box in the store and when they got home without any configuration.
San Juan Islands-Travel Guides
But those things are only visible if you're on the home screen, to my knowledge.
Thanks for the input.
This gives purpose to all the years of Chemistry I learned at school.. Thank you!
Since sales pays so well, won't those "golden handcuffs" make it that much harder to quit your job to do a startup?
YES there is! A non-profit company, started by a lawyer 47 years ago, will show you how to get pre-patent protection for ALL your ideas. Cost $495. Go here to learn more: www.inventions.org
> There's a lot of FUD in this comment.

No, it's just one persons experience that apparently does not match yours.

> Why is it funny?

Because that person has no more or less business in Canada than I do. A native Canadian would, and technically they're the only people that should be running Canadian immigration.

If you can't see the humor in that it's not my problem.

> this is utterly crap. The Canadian government cannot break any promises because they don't make any. Otherwise please indicate any official site or comment about any "promise".

Wow. You must be able to read all my email with lawyers and government officials right through my fairly well closed up imap account.

For the record, I spent a small fortune in Canada on the written promise of the Canadian government that my entrepreneurs status would be enough to get my paperwork fast-tracked through the Buffalo unit. After the investments were done suddenly nobody remembered about these writings, when confronted with them they 'would see what they could do'. After year upon year of being promised that for sure within the next year matters would be resolved I finally gave up, fired everybody and moved back to Europe.

Too bad, and I'm definitely sorry about what happened to the employees of my two Canadian companies.

So, this is the governments fault, they make promises, in writing and they don't give a damn about breaking them.

After we shut down our companies and moved back within two weeks we had our paperwork done and if we would please come back because Northern Ontario needs those jobs. Right. Once bitten, twice shy.

> The Canadian immigration program is probably one of the most (or "the" most) generous and transparent in the world

Gushing admiration for a system that is so broken that people that I know that have been trying to get their landed immigrant status changed to citizenship after 35 years is indicative of limited experience.

The long winters I can deal with, but they don't help. The unreliable government makes things much harder than they need be and causes hardship where none need be.

That my experience does not match yours is fine, but I'm not going to call yours 'FUD' any more than you should call mine that, my case was heard to ministerial level, the local mayor lobbied on my behalf all to no avail. I'm fairly well connected, if I had that much trouble I think that others may have the same or more and hence my warning not to move or invest until you have your landed immigrant status in your pocket.
Why, because you disagree with it?
As the article states:

"I admit this naming convention is more for the massive nerd factor than practicality. If you have more than about 20 machines, just give them numbered hostnames and be done with it."
It seems to me to be a pointless, hacky kludge. As with every other ORM, the abstraction will leak as soon as you do anything interesting. Even if it doesn't leak, there is mental stress involved with convincing yourself that it won't. And then you still have the performance problems. How does this make life easier?

What am I missing? Is this just for people who need to do "SELECT * FROM comments WHERE articleid=?" and don't want to learn even that much SQL?
Wow, it says -4, but I seem to have lost over 30 karma on this comment. Is -4 just the display cap?
Facebook suggests I "reconnect" with a dead friend
Think they're trying to tell me something? :-)
interesting timing... I'm getting together with some friends today to discuss doing one of these.
I didn't claim that it was but let's assume I did for a minute.

1) no fine motor control involved

2) no complex puzzle solving

3) no storytelling

Those are just a few off the top of my head. I don't really play video games but it is pretty obvious that FarmVille is much different than games you'd play on your television.

And of course motivations differ, too. FarmVille makes more money by consuming your time and taking advantage of your impulses and desire for short-term rewards than most traditional games do.

Zynga isn't really a game company. They don't care about video games as an art form or even as an entertainment medium, they just care about behavior games and milking people out of money with as little effort as possible. It is like a casino that never pays out.
Death is an awkward subject for facebook. I don't think they know how they should be handling it.

This is why I think 1000memories has so much potential.
Well, this guy surely loves Steve Jobs and Apple products. But c'mon, this is a little way over the top:

> From the immense success of the iPod to the hysteria over the iPad, Steve Jobs’ innovation has changed the world forever.

Innovation? or brilliant marketing? how did it change the world exactly?

> The world’s biggest tycoons can only dream of seeing half the success which Steve Jobs enjoys every year.

He probably dreams to have half the success of Bill Gates...

> For me it is not his monetary success which makes him admirable but rather the way he is shaping the world.

How did he shape the world exactly?

> Steve Jobs can therefore be a role model for freelancers, but if you analyse him closer, he can be a role model for anyone in business.

Was Steve Jobs a freelancer? Is Steve Jobs a freelancer?

I rarely see, so much crap in one place...
I could go on and on, but let's rename this to: "A love poem for Steve Jobs"
From the article: "The general idea is that it's absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong"

From an article by PG in 2009: "More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants."

PG article link: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Do you mean shameless and irritating to yourself in the sense that you felt forced to resort to techniques that laid aside technical merit and honest discussion with your target? Or are you refering to devious methods to appear shameless and irritating to your market, that result in lots of sales?
The way I use it:
1. A makeshift Apple TV with video hookups
2. As a radio running Pandora (speakers are great)
3. GPS - the best GPS I've ever used (GPS Drive Motion X)
4. All the standard web browsing/emailing/IM'ing..

Areas still lacking:
1. Multitasking!
2. Browsing the app store on it is painful and clunky
3. I still prefer tabbed browsing. The switching animations in Safari are overblown.
I was really surprised to see this post from Jason; it seems to go against most things I've read from him in the past, including one of my favorite startup posts:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyw...

I was involved in the hiring process for faculty members in academia, and our approach has always been to invest primarily in individuals, rather than in ideas. Ideas are disposable, and competent individuals will quickly learn how to adjust their ideas to the circumstances.

Case in point: Jason's own product Code Historian (see blog post above).

I understand the difficulties that come with 100's of applications. The admission criteria always end up being far from ideal. In my former academic circle, we relied heavily on letters of recommendation; both who wrote them and what was said about the candidate mattered. Everything else the candidate wrote was only glanced over.

I would think something like that can be more effective than meticulously analyzing someone's pitch.
Robert Spillane Falls to Death
Slightly OT, but from the point of view of a founder who's already dived in and is hoping to employ sales people some day, what kind of people should I look for? Is enterprise sales experience of any use to a startup whose market may not be big enterprises?
I've heard there was a logical reason for this (in jaynes' probability book) but i've never gotten around to checking it out.

>The equations also reproduce a more complicated phenomenon, divergence of opinions. One might expect that open discussion of public issues would tend to bring about a general concensus. On the contrary, we observe repeatedly that when some controversial issue has been discussed vigorously for a few years, society becomes polarized into two opposite extreme camps; it is almost impossible to fi nd anyone who retains a moderate view. Probability theory as logic shows how two persons, given the same information, may have their opinions driven in opposite directions by it, and what must be done to avoid this.
Oh, my friend. If only it were that easy. A few years ago a short proto-science-fiction story by Twain was re-discovered and published... with a 2006 copyright. Photographers that make reproductions of famous old paintings can attach their own copyright. Etc.
Ask HN: Please review this thought on securing passwords
I posted it earlier too, but i dint get any response. Maybe its too lame, but i was very excited. Do let me know your comments, they matter a lot and would sure motivate this noob.
"Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda."

Why? Where's the argumentation? Your opinion is not fact, mister.
No it's mobile Safari's fault. You're right about hover/drags but it does have odd rendering issues.

It also has abysmal javascript performance compared to its desktop counterpart.
It boggles the mind that we went from Apollo to the space shuttles in 10 years, and in the 25 years since the construction of Atlantis, we've seen virtually no advancement in American manned space flight.
This seems trivially incorrect. If both arrays are randomized at the outset, there is nothing to prevent them from containing valid data indicating a state having objects marked. In fact, if you free one set of arrays used by this structure and immediately allocate another, there's a good chance that your "random" initial state will, in fact, be the exact one you just freed.
"Organic dyes" have nothing to do with Technicolor print stability. All films and most colorants (in ink jet, dye transfer, etc.) use organic dyes or organic pigments. What made old Technicolor so stable was that it could produce silver separations of the three primary color records, and it was the silver negatives, which are extremely stable, that can be used to strike new color prints (with their organic dyes). Trouble is, this is a very expensive process. Disney used it for its animated features which it intended to release again and again over many decades. Most studios went for the much less expensive dye originals which are less stable, especially if poorly processed or stored. (New viewing prints can be struck from properly stored master prints.) Modern color movie films are quite stable (science marches on), which is largely why the costly Technicolor separation process gradually disappeared.

Digital systems pose their own problems, of course. There's media obsolescene (8-inch floppies, anyone?), digital integrity (bit drift, etc.), and media integrity (oops, that tape broke again). Much of what keeps archivists busy is deciding protocols for the continuous migration of images from one generation of media to another.

For really good up to date information on image permanence, I recommend the independent, non-profit (unlike Wilhelm) Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They've got some excellent, free downloads on both the basics and the advanced stuff. Wilhelm's book may be free, but it's very old and out of date.
http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/
The trick is in the counter variable. Read the update section, and the source code (it's not much, really).
This article is spot on.

Startups do two things: they build product and they sell it (get people to use it).

A lot of non-technical aspiring entrepreneurs miss this point. They think that you build a product and you do "business stuff". They fail to realize that "business stuff" invariably boils down to one thing: sales (at least in the early days of the company).

I think the two most desired skills in a tech startup is the ability to program and the ability to sell.
Actually, any prior art is prior art, whether or not it is "registered". Patent law doesn't require registration or publication with a patent-related agency or paper. It merely requires prior art that is publicly accessible or known.

The point of registering with a publicly known entity like the WGA is that it may prove a date for the prior art.

The specific issue here is whether the WGA's registry is sufficiently accessible that it constitutes a "public" publication.

The answer depends on what exactly is registered, and whether the idea is ever made public (i.e., internet blog, scholastic paper, conference presentation, etc) or is privately known to the persons seeking the patent (i.e., pitching this very idea to the people who later try to patent something based on your prior art, etc).

The WGA registry provides proof that something was registered on a given date, but does not provide a public search engine for searching the contents of registered works. So, by itself, the WGA registration would not provide any benefit unless you're trying to show that the patent-seeker had private knowledge of your prior art on a given date.
(... in your opinion.)

spoilers

Don Draper chooses to lie, he chooses to monopolize on his ability to deceive and he steadfastly places to his own whims above all others. He's manipulative and cunning. He believes he has the right to pay people off to get his own way. He's incredibly secretive - leading double (in some cases, triple lives). He has no true friendships and while he occasionally wrestles with morality, actually cares very little about the majority of those around him. The one person who is closest to a friend (Peggy) has been treated ridiculously badly at times. He fears virtually no situation and has a tendancy to act rashly. He enjoys and seeks out dangerous / risky situations.

Black and white can't be used to paint a full picture, and occasionally his character shows traits which describe another side to his personality. Even so, his character would certainly fit the standard definition of a sociopath / narcissist.

It just happens that the attributes Don Draper has been ascribed, also align with western society's view of 'the perfect man'; which is quite telling itself.

Down-voting based on a difference in opinion would be a little bit Draper-like ;)
Well, yes, this is always opinion (I refuse to constantly add "in my opinion" to all statements :P it stifles the flow).

But I am not sure how easily it can be argued that bias/agenda could be good things for a whistleblower site. Or that it could compromise their aims.

On the other hand there are copious reasons why they would be good things (not least reputation).
AT&T is the reason.
CSS3 or webkit extensions or mozilla extensions != CSS. I would never use any of those methods (for say, the next 2 years or if it was only a personal site I didn't care about and not a customer site).

Also the learning curve to do stuff faster with Fireworks than Photoshop is maybe 30 minutes, it's that simple.