skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have heard this presented as "telcom companies do not want to be reduced to be a bitpipe".

It is a fear I find to be mistaken. Even though a bit is a bit any way it is transferred, things like latency, jitter, guaranteed throughput, those are things that do make a difference to applications.

If I was a telcom company, I would start to write android applications that besides providing VOIP and streaming video, etc, also would set up these connections to use a QoS level that the subscriber would have as extra charge add-ons to their account. QoS might require lots of technology on the server side that isn't there yet.

If I was an evil telecom company, I might even introduce jitter on non QoS and make VoIP completely crappy quality. Making people that pick this route sound like real cheapskates. Aren't you glad I am not a telecom company?
It seems a very simple app, I like it. Some questions:

-Is it really useful?.

-What are the advantages comparing to apps like outright?

-Do you know any app like this one but Open Source?.
The problem is that when you're near confidence you're in the tail, and the student t-test is extremely sensitive to the shape of said tail. If n is large enough this difference will be washed away as everything converges to normals. But with smaller sample sizes the difference can be quite significant.
tl;dr = He doesn't like fat people, and he thinks they should stop being fat. Not really hacker news, or news of any sort.
The problems in Afghanistan are far deeper than the Taliban and we're now embroiled in a civil war that has lasted for decades.

What was once an Afghani problem is now our problem and we're paying for it in various ways.
Clickable: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/30/conway-numbers/
FrieNDA Christian?

I too live in NYC and live an 80% cashless existence. I typically never carry cash unless I'm hitting a poker game.
If you are so smart, why aren’t you an entrepreneur?
"The problem with okcupid, is that it seems that women would rather interact on the site instead of meeting"

That's a problem with you, not okcupid.
Not sure how you are defining "incumbent news organizations", but the New York Times and Der Spiegel essentially broke this story in collaboration with wikileaks and have been analyzing the documents for some time.

Their conclusion seems to be that these documents don't contain anything explosive, but provide a really detailed picture into military thinking and the state of the war effort.
But you definitely shouldn't, ever.
Is it just me or using XML to describe emotions is just stupid....

Even if I pretended this was something to be taken serious, I doubt there is a device that can register emotions or that a psychologist would write this trash instead of forming plain old English sentences.
you don't think being fair is an important part of maximizing profit through a word-of-mouth campaign?
I'm equal parts impressed with, annoyed by and intrigued by Craig Venter and his undertakings.

Impressed because of the relentless energy he pours in to his ventures and their success rate, annoyed because of his tendency to take credit and self-aggrandise at every opportunity and intrigued because I wonder where it will all lead.
That or buy a different phone.
This would be an incredibly powerful program if you could make it work.

But the "making it work" part is non-trivial.

Sounds like you are missing a hook -- something that pulls more people in
you mean that he likes deals with a conflict of interest? or he avoids them?
Cell phone stories writing new chapter in print publishing
I think you've just come up with a new kind of high-explosive.
yes. just like friendster, myspace, and facebook had.
You mean software as service kind of stuff? Would you care to provide some examples?
> yes. just like friendster, myspace, and facebook had.

Facebook had ?
"By 2007, half of the country's 10 best-selling novels were written on cell phones, according to book distributor Tohan while last year mobile novels and comics were a $240 million market in Japan, which is over 5 percent of the country's $4.5 billion total mobile content market, according to Japan's Mobile Content Forum. "
Has anyone heard of this before?
Broken Koans
Switzerland is the same size of The Netherlands (16,000 sq miles), but the two differ in some important ways: Switzerland is very mountainous while The Netherlands are completely flat, and there's only 8 million people living in Switzerland versus 17 million in The Netherlands.

So it doesn't surprise me that Switzerland has higher rates -- there are less customers per square mile, and I can imagine it being a bit harder to put up a cell tower on a mountain slope than in a meadow.
I genuinely believe that you're making a mistake over here; you're assuming that machine learning is a magic bullet that can solve anything. I am afraid that isn't the case. Even for a satisfactory level of functioning you need to factor in these "meta" variables;

- Emotional stability of the user: You need to be able to judge if the user can form serious long term relationships before recommending him or her.

- Level of Emotional maturity: Maturity is really different from stability. Stability means that you'll be roughly the same a week from today whereas maturity applies to your ability to handle problems effectively and rise above petty issues.

- Willingness for Engagement/Commitment: Your users are in a portal, but the levels till which they are willing to use your service vary, and it isn't something you can ask in a questionnaire.

- Acceptance: This is a part of emotional maturity, but it deserves a solitary mention. How do you judge if someone is willing to accept divergent points of view and learn from things?

- Perspective: What does the user seek qualitatively in relationships?

I think that one day this might be possible, but you're dealing with one of the greatest unsolved problems we have ever faced. Making a computer understand things.

Further, I believe that even though you might succeed someday it won't work for people all the time. Why? Because emotions are really hard to parse, and what I seek in relationships is far beyond common interests or anything like that. I seek kinship, love and understanding. How can you possibly judge and match that without having some degree of emotional understanding? This is yet again one of those great unsolved problems.

On the other hand, there must be a solution beyond simply matching interests from a long checklist. Maybe you should approach it like Aardvark. You could make a friend of a friend based contextual system. Imagine a giant grid of people remotely connected to each other through friends and you parse the daily routine conversations between users and create a personality profile using current psychometric testing (it's seriously inaccurate, but we need a shot in the dark). After that you offer to match them together anonymously at first (this is important) and then see how they hit off.

Yet again I doubt that it will work at all due to privacy issues and moreover it will be too computationally expensive to justify...
I accept the concept that Wikileaks puts informants at additional risk. I also accept that the government is lying through their teeth about the activities on the ground in Afghanistan.

Is it more important for a the taxpaying population to be informed of what the military is doing in their name? Or is it more important to hide all information that may have any connection to the activities of informants?

I would suggest, that as an informant you make a direct choice to act, which effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions. No such choice is offered to the public, and even if it were, a large heterogeneous group of people cannot be saddled with the same responsibility that an individual chooses for them self.

Additionally, any government that hides non national security type information from their population, puts itself at risk by allowing it's informants to be possibly exposed by leaks. If it wanted to provide protection from possibly damaging leaks, thus ensuring the anonymity of it's informants, it would provide a robust channel of accurate information to the public. Such information would greatly reduce the perceived need for leaks, hold the government and military more accountable, better serve the public good, and provide additional protection for informants.
according to some recent techcrunch posts about FB stock trading on secondmarket.com, it's about valued at about $25 billion. but they noted that FB has stopped letting new employees sell their stock, so the valuation is potentially inflated by lack of supply.
Maybe I'm old-fashined, but "a site for making friends" sounds a bit creepy to me. I would expect it to be populated by crazies mostly, so not very attractive.

A slightly different approach could be to have a site or sites for people with some niche interest to meet each other. I don't know, carpentry hobbyists or amateur blues players. It seems that Meetup already covers this? Maybe you could see if there are some niches that are not covered well enough by Meetup, and focus on these.
Apple: Puerto Ricans Can't Have Free iPhone 4 Cases
"Sexual love is a human need as fundamental as food and shelter."

That's preposterous. Which one could you live without?
The perils of suing a gripe site
Paying to receive calls is annoying at first blush, but it does have at least one benefit: you're far more callable. With other systems, low level employees at many businesses simply won't be able to. (I've seen this first hand in Australia and Mexico.) This is likely penny-wise, pound-foolish on the part of those businesses, but no less real for that.

Having to pay to receive SMSes, on the other hand, is hard to justify.

Just remember that complex systems emerge as often as they're created upfront, and you'll feel better about it all.
The iPad is not a computer. The iPad is not a computer. Say it with me, Microsoft. Join in, half the tech industry.

Nobody framed it better than Apple themselves at the iPad launch. On the big screen was an iPhone, a MacBook, and in between them, an iPad. Steve called it a new category, and that wasn't just marketing speak. It really is a new kind of gadget, designed to make you do things that you previously did not do. This is why everybody says they have no use for it.. because they truly don't, until they have one in their hands.

With that in mind, Microsoft and the rest of the tablet me-too wave, probably don't appreciate what they are up against. There is no tablet market, there is an iPad market. Microsoft's best shot would be an X-Pad. Everyone else should get behind Google. But really, I think Apple is going to own this category for a good decade.
When I go out to events and parties, I get their digits and a date. Perhaps it's my profile.
Ars digs into irony and hypocrisy around anti-P2P settlement groups and lawyers
Business online: Money Making Ideas - Make Money With Podcasts
Once Pontins offers affiliate commissions, the marketeers will work so hard that even Pontins.com might no longer be #1.
Inside The Data Center Technology Powering Six Top Social Media Sites
Dating sites (b2c), dropbox (both b2b and b2c), tarsnap (b2b), drupal, wordpress, ebay and so on, there must be thousands of examples.
First .. people mostly lie. Specially on sites like eHarmony. This is why this approach can't work as it should no matter what algorithm is used.
I agree, it's most likely it won't be any close to Google's if that's what people is thinking.

In fact, social content is hard to monetize due to privacy concerns, thus IMHO Facebook is lacking of a clear long-term business model other than advertising. Google's investment in Zynga doesn't help that much either.

They have taken the right path targeting developers but I don't seem to understand where that is going.

So my answer is no, I wouldn't buy Facebook stock, except for speculation purposes.
"The problem with okcupid, is that it seems that women would rather interact on the site instead of meeting."

I met with a few women that I met on OkCupid, which was usually not preceded by long times of messaging. So far, a high match percentage usually meant we would get along with quite well. I didn't notice a "difference" between 80% and >90% matches in real life though, but it's a good indication to find people you might like.

Disclaimer, I'm located in Germany, and most women don't have the "replies very selectively" label here.

Edit: spelling
Why would you need to go through all of that for a FRIENDSHIP? I don't think you read his post.
Solutions are demonstrated in Haskell programming language, BTW.

Edit: oh and the direct link to the book, at Amazon, can be found here http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521513383/
Hey there, umen. I'm in the same boat as you, although with three kids. I don't have a lot of time to write much at the moment (see above), but I wanted to let you know it is doable. And worth it. I see far more of my family and have a far more rewarding job than I would if I were working in a corporate environment.

In fact, I have a proposed panel in to SXSW on this very topic — your startup and your family would each happily take up your entire life ... so how do you balance the two of them and not fail at both? Once the panel picker opens up for voting (August 9th), I'd love it if you could vote it up.

Anyway, there are a bunch of different ways your startup can go, and a bunch of different ways your family can go.

On the family side, are there any grandparents nearby? Is your wife supportive of what you're trying to do? Is she income-earning? Are the kids super-needy, or are they older, more capable, and more self-contained? Do you have resources in the community that you can rely on (church members, neighbors willing to babysit for free (or trade babysitting time), etc.)? All of those will help.

On the business side, how young is the startup? Are you bootstrapping, or are you looking for investment? If you're going the financed route, have you taken any rounds yet? Are you the only founder, or do you have co-founders? Do they have families? Or are they all single? Those all have a bearing on how things will go.

My super-quick story: I mentioned my wife and three kids. I also have a mortgage. And it's all paid for with our bootstrapped small web-business. Most here would call it a "lifestyle business", as we've neither taken funding nor are looking for funding for it. I also have a second subscription-based web app (http://monotask.com) that's just about to launch, that I've worked on with a cofounder who also has a wife and three kids.

Summarizing my advice (recognizing it might be wildly inappropriate for your goals, as I can't give advice on financed startups), I'd say:
* build something small that meets a need you either have or see as obvious
* launch it as soon as you can, and start getting feedback on it
* don't quit your day job until the side project has proven itself
* if it doesn't seem like it's going to prove itself, pivot
* start to hoard your cash now; don't spend any money you don't absolutely need to; this is your runway
* don't wait to get moving on it: as someone said once, almost every person you'll talk to who's started his own business — whether it succeeds or fails — will say "I only wish I'd done this earlier."
that is only the 'easy way' if you are already through one of the best schools in the country. just to be considered by a law firm, I'd have to go to school for 6 years; that is enough time to start and fail one or two companies. also, if I wanted to get into a law firm that would pay what we're talking about, that school had better be Harvard or something else that is expensive and difficult to get in to.

I know several newly minted lawyers from reasonable but not top tier schools who are trying to find work. (unfortunately in fields I don't know and don't care much about, like family law, otherwise I'd find something for them to do.)

as for investment banking, the competition, I hear, is absolutely fierce. I'm a pretty bright kid for a biz guy, but your average quantz is going to eat me alive.

Working for other people is really only easier if you are the sort of person who is good at playing the organizational game.

My impression is that if you start a company in an area where you have some experience, your chances of success are way better than 1%. Is it better than your chances of making a lot of money working for other people?
my experience has been that building a business that pays bay area sysadmin wages is a /whole lot/ harder than getting a bay area sysadmin job. But my theory is that multiplying that bay area sysadmin money by five or ten is going to be easier to do with this business than it would be going back to school and attempting to learn a trade that would pay that much natively.

but yeah; most people who run businesses for the long term do it because they enjoy the freedom. My company is paying me about 1/3rd a bay area sysadmin wage right now, and I'm a /whole lot/ happier than I was being a sysadmin for someone else.
First off, I plead guilty to putting words in your mouth. My comment was an accurate description of what annoys me; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether it's an accurate description of your agenda.

1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of those slogans about how life is short become pretty impotent when it's actually not.

2) In engineering we generally make incremental changes to society, test them and either back away from them or put in place feedback mechanisms to keep them in check. "Wouldn't it be great if we abolished death by natural causes (and everything else stayed exactly the same)" is about as far as you can get from this. See Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method, pp. 233-236.
Trust me I read his post.

Any relationship I engage in I take it very seriously. I want to be there for people and love them. That's what it means for me.

On the other hand, I was trying to list what happens in someones mind when they try to decide if someone should be close to them or not. The list must be pretty inaccurate, but it was more to show a point than to form a blueprint.

P.S. - I know that I tend to take stuff too seriously, but I just need to emotionally connect with people. So, I guess that YMMV.
"You can choose your friends and not your family".

1. I don't think an algorithm could be developed to find friends. On the other hand, I think people make friends on game sites where, they strike out on their own to make friends. Even meet up sites, where you go to play golf with a bunch of strangers or go play chess.

2. I don't think this kind of site will get traction and people will not pay for it.

eHarmony exists because it makes finding your potential mates easier, it is for people who have given up on bars and friend's recommendation. Yes, there are other ways to meet people but the frequency of finding a good mate will be very less, I think.

I think people just become friends who get along with each other and don't look for friendship actively, like we look for dates on a dating site.

The concept of a site finding a friend has always bothered me, like facebook is trying to find a friend for me or saying "share more info to find more friends"...

The best thing you can do is launch a portal for like minded people to mingle.

Everything cannot be solved by technology.
As much as I'd love to bash Apple on this one, we don't have a critical piece of info: the guy's type of address. The generic rejection from Apple mentions multiple reasons, including PO boxes. If he's got a PO box then the title and fury against Apple are wrong. If he's got a physical address, we should sharpen the pitchforks. Again.

As evidence, see how many times the phrase "therefore your order has been cancelled" is found in the email from Apple. And the bit explaining PO boxes asks him to edit his address within a week or risk cancellation. It's a rubbish email fro Apple no doubt, but we need more before we call this one.
How About a Shetland Ponie? (some thoughts on Parrot, Rakudo & Perl5/6)
Any such site will immediately be used by people to attempt to find dating partners under the guise of a friendship, defeating the point if it being "friends only". I know someone (female) who recently tried to use the "platonic" section of craigslist to find some new friends, only to find later that all the people who contacted her (a few emails in) started down the path of "I'm bisexual". Some made continual references to how cute she was, but how they understand she isn't into that sort of thing, and would "respect her boundaries"...
This doesn't really address your main point, but GNOME is part of the GNU project. Which means that most of the both the GUI and command-line UI on e.g. Ubuntu is in fact GNU software. But obviously less so under KDE.
Umm, Mongrel2 is probably great, but it certainly doesn't have wide adoption as of yet. It was started only a few weeks ago. You may be thinking of the original Mongrel, which doesn't really have any relation to the new one except by name. (And they're both http servers.)
hahah. getting ahead of myself there, no?

but yes, i am going on record saying that facebook will probably not be the last word in social networking. someone else will come along and figure out how to do it better, just like what happened to friendster and myspace.

They do have some strong network effects, but just like its predecessors, this market moves too fast for that to create a durable lead, I think.

Also, social networking is subject to the whims of fashion. I think part of what facebook used to kill myspace was that myspace was full of lower class people. Facebook seeded themselves from colleges, giving themselves a nice middle class base to build upon. Facebook has largely abandoned that level of control now, and it has yet to be seen if the seeding was enough.
This is also thoroughly debunked in another article posted here an hour ago or so:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/07/an-accurate-compar...

Comes across to me like chicken-little syndrome.
I spend my days up to my elbows in perl, I've dabbled with PHP in the past, (the 'p' is always ambiguous) and I spent some time this week fixing broken MySQL databases. Fun times.

I'm pretty comfortable with the whole stack, really.

Edit: Neat, you guys are in Kirkcaldy? I'm in Inverkeithing.
The Irony - Black Hat Video Stream Hack
Design Tip - Pantone to RGB Conversion Table
There already is (or...was):

Facebook.

Back in 04 that's how people found friends before they went off to college; they would look people up in their class who had a common interest in music, movies, activities, etc.
I'm with you on that one, but I thought it was a little premature ;)

See here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172025
Jury damage award held unconstitutionally large in music download case
How to Start a Startup (2005)
>he did wrote code

It's 'did write.' Just FYI, in case you're not native and that wasn't just an auto-complete gaffe.
The vibe in your profile or your messages, yes.
Here's the HN post referred to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563618