skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, my money is on the seq abstraction. YMMV.
Bootstrapping a Start-Up in Silicon Valley
The important thing is education (and not calling people idiots.) I realized that after sharing this article as a PSA of sorts on Facebook:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/idiot-users-sti...

I'm sure that there's an article somewhere that would serve the same purpose and doesn't insult all of your Facebook friends.
Ask HN: How to Split the Pot
What’s current thinking on how to allocate shares in a startup before it starts? Here’s the scenario; it’s my idea but I’m not a hacker. The money isn’t in the product but in the back-end (the data). I’ll be responsible for the UI design and overall usability of the product. I’ll need one hacker to get to the demo stage. I’ll need one ‘salesman’ (it’s a free product) to get a reasonable number of users to prove the value of the data. My goal is to be acquired by someone with the wherewithal to boost the users exponentially - which boosts the value of the data exponentially. And profits. So how does one allocate the shares and then how are new-hires cut into the action?
Ash hole on the Moon
I absolutely agree that saying this is the only way to tell a good programmer is taking it too far. And in fact, the post does not say this is the only way to tell a good programmer.

So have an upvote, we agree.
any thoughts on security threats to apps in cars?
Note that, unless I'm mistaken, this is from when Clojure emitted Java and C# source. Check out the * host* variable. AFAIK, CL never "hosted" a Clojure runtime.
When a million people try X, a few hundred can get really lucky.

Tell a million people to go to take a grand to Vegas and bet their 1,000$ on 7 on a roulette table. Then have them take their winnings and do the same thing until FU money. Some of them would become millionaires, but collectively they would all be worse off. (They started with 1 billion.)

The secret is to look for things where risk > reward. Unfortunately writing generic web apps is probably not it. But, the obvious cost is simply time which people tend to undervalue, so it's not obvious if the game is rigged or not.
in response to the last "the setup" interview posted here, i created a "setups" subreddit for people to post links to their own articles describing their workspaces

http://www.reddit.com/r/setups/
Half the price? Not entirely accurate. The subsidized price is going from $199 to $99, but the actual price of the device is just dropping by 20% from $499 to $399. People forget the hidden extra $300.
Could it be also, that the government is now involved in too many aspects of daily life? Education, nutrition, employment, regulation at a micro economic/firm level and economic development are some areas into which the government has expanded.
how about a look see at gitit? http://github.com/jgm/gitit

Its a general wiki app that by default is backed by git, though darcs and mercurial are designed to work too, and it also has the webserver functionality baked in. Oh, and it does syntax highlighting for pretty much any language if you compile it accordingly, and it supports several different backeds for rendering latex math equations!

And since its written in haskell, all you need to do change backend functionality is write a bugfree snippet of the same type as the code you're swapping out, and tada!

edit: also see http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net/ for a live example
Good point, thanks.

Spam is a continuous source of irritation and that shines through sometimes.
I get these from time to time on my professional email address. It's a soft form of a cold call & often contains information pertinent to what you are actually doing. Somehow it creeps me out that somewhere, someone is paid to produce these ppts. en masse. This is a job that deserves to be outsourced, yet most of the time they seem to be produced by cog21@majorcorp.com
I suspect if the case was as open and closed and without merit as many are thinking, Oracle wouldn't have bought it.

Google aren't some tiny outfit who are going to fold at the first threat. They have very deep pockets and plenty of lawyers and there is no reason to think that they'd give in easily.

Oracle will know this and therefore we can reasonably assume that they have bought this case with the willingness to fight it (and spend the significant amounts of time and money involved in doing so).

Certainly if the suspicion is that they spent $7.4bn buying Sun primarily so they could bring this case it seems even more unlikely - you don't cough up that sort of money unless you think your case is really pretty strong.

(Incidentally I think the suggestion that this is the primary reason they bought Sun doesn't really add up - it's far too big a gamble and the damages award would have to be vast, way beyond the Microsoft / Sun damages to justify it. Oracle are a proper company with proper products, generally speaking they're not patent trolls and have better things to do with the money than take this sort of punt.)

I'm not saying that they will win it, just that the frequent claims from technologists that their case is without merit fail to explain why a bunch of smart people (because whatever you think of them over this the evidence is that the people running Oracle are not stupid, they are not SCO) with a lot of very smart, very well paid lawyers, were willing to take such a punt when their case is evidently so weak.
I must disagree; these designs do not appear to be pathetic disguises in the least. They are instead celebrations of the existing design, enhanced to resemble a powerful symbol in a meaningful way.
Take the Money and Stand Still
Interesting graph, but is 'video' really a different class of traffic to web? Every other type shown in the graph is literally a different internet protocol (email, telnet, web, etc). Separating 'video' from 'web' seems a little unwarranted.

It's true that you could make a distinction - the web is hyperlinked multimedia and video isn't very web-like according to that definition.

But I don't think you can claim from that graph that 'the web is dead'. The weaker claim that 'traditional hypermedia is giving way to video' would be better supported, but less interesting.

tldr - false dichotomy
Viravis is a platform that helps tech-savvy users to develop online database applications easily without programming.
I think you need a comma in there.
Edward Tufte's "Chark Junk" May Not Be as Bad as Once Thought
Ask HN/PG: Down votes with a cost or public
It's becoming common to see well written comments in the negative. This breaks the rules but it seems new users don't bother respecting the current etiquette. Anonymous down-voting makes it trivial to hide, unlike the poster being open and public about his opinion. This situation is very unfair because writing involves some dedication and courage while some random troll can just click and go on.

A possible and easy solution to this could be to make down-votes cost in karma. Not just in a 1-to-1 relation because that would add bias, favoring higher ranked users. Perhaps 1% of current karma rounded up to 1?

Another alternative could be to make down-voting public in some form.

I think this is a very important problem as there are active groups gaming social news websites like HN. In particular Digg's case last week.

Edit: minor style.
Best US Colleges 2011 - Rankings of 1,400 schools
BlueLock vCloud Express offers 4- and 8-CPU VMs in a self-service "cloud," much like EC2. The big VMs are expensive, but cheaper than buying 8x "high CPU" amazon instances. Also, memory is not tied to CPU -- you can have an 8-way VM w/ 256M of RAM, if you really want it.

http://www.bluelock.com/bluelock-cloud-hosting/bluelock-vclo...
Seems like arthmatic with temperatures is just broken. This querey: "5 degrees c + 1 degree f in fahrenheit" yields: "501.67 degrees Fahrenheit"
The gentleman planters of that era saw themselves as intellectual bulwarks against base urges of the common man. Thomas Jefferson is the archetypal gentleman planter (with all the good and bad that entails, e.g. education and slavery).

Don't forgot it was common at this time to buy booze for those that supported you in an election. The gentry that created the framework for the government were well aware that they needed to protect the common man from himself most of all, let alone the tyranny of another dictator.
Actually the first answer of the page is completely not about money, it's more about the process of business and I think that it's fine on HN (for as much as I understand what HN is )
Well, you can add temperatures. Temperature is defined to be average kinetic energy of particles, and addition of kinetic energies is well defined. The way Google does the addition is in this sense correct - there's a reason it's called absolute zero.

The thing is that you usually don't want to add temperatures, for the same reason that you generally don't want to add other averages: they're usually not particularly interesting quantities. For this reason, you might encapsulate the definition of temperature and not expose the addition operation, but the dimensional analysis is fine the way Google does it.
Important bit:

>An architecture and design firm called Choi+Shine has submitted a design for the Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition which proposes giant human-shaped pylons carrying electricity cables across the country's landscape.

Meaning the title should be closer to "Human-shaped pylons could carry electricity across Iceland". Though given all the press lately, and how much I like the idea, I really hope they do build them. It's something unique that'll last for a long time; there should be more of that in the world.
You are completely missing the point. Let me help you:

I might take this a little more seriously than most people since seeing the Hiroshima bombing museum in Japan shook me to the core. Capitalism of any stripe - whether under a banner of liberalism, democracy, whatever - produces really fucking evil results. Marx was a decent German Philosopher in some ways, did a poor job in others, but that's besides the point. Playing down or ignoring or marginalizing the utter fucking atrocities that happened under Reaganism, Thatcherism, the McCarthy Era, Winston Churchill, etc, etc - nothing else even comes close. Some people like to play a really backwards moral relativism card here - no, nothing else comes close. I've walked through the jails where they tortured people. Tons of real photos, the CIA documented the hell out of it. I saw where they incinerated hundreds of thousands of children of the "Japs" as an inexpensive execution technique to end the war. These aren't Lenin zombie facts. This is reality. When people stop being individuals and give themselves over to a collective democracy, all hell and madness breaks loose. If we forget this, we'll suffer for it.
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You nailed it with that last sentence, and the OP would seem to be looking for the latter class of people. What troubles me is the constant either-or mudslinging between the job people who think the identity people have no lives, and the identity people who think the job people are nothing but seat-warmers. As with all such false dichotomies, the truth is a long spectrum between the two, and using a single, simple measure such as whether the person programs for fun to measure passion is heuristic at best.
I first thought of a solution, whereby we share distributed lists of hostnames, in the same way torrents are tracked.

I then remembered that you can switch to alternative DNS providers. Google's comes to mind, because its 8.8.8.8 address is easy to remember.
Agreed very much. That pretty much sums it up. (@alttab)
This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?

Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observation that the genome consists in only 50MB of data (after compression) somehow gives us an upper bound to the complexity of the system. I'd however suspect it rather gives us a lower bound: factor in all the epigenetics, external interactions, the not necessarily simple rule set provided by physical chemistry (this is not in the genome, obviously), etc etc, and the problem may be quite a bit larger.

Take for example the way we currently believe gene transcription promoter networks to work. The combinatorial nature of those interactions means that even though the underlying data is "only" a few megabytes, the system you end up simulating gets very big very quickly.
I've heard him give the same talk at several different conferences, several of them unrelated (Entrepreneurship conferences, Blackberry conferences, etc.) Talk about exponential progress, Singularity U, mind uploading, and his belief he'll survive to be 700 years old. He's a bag of fantastic claims and an excellent speaker, and it embodies a lot of the best hopes of technology of the present age, as well as our collective insecurity that we've come so far and yet seem to have improved on the world so little.

But it's grating to see that he's getting so much media attention for such blatant disregard of the human condition. No consideration what a post-sentient-AI world would accomplish. No regard for what happens when people live to be 700 years old and population growth doesn't slow. His ideas are like genetically engineering society with no regard to the collateral damage it'd cause to the societal environment. I don't dislike Kurzweil for being an optimist, I dislike him for being arrogant.
Lycos Still Hanging Around
"At work you scroll through RSS feeds..."

...is the author of The Long Tail really this ignorant of technology?
We're actually looking at this very issue right now. At the moment most of our submitters tend to be spare time tinkerers that actually really believe in their products, so much so that they're willing to spend $99 dollars on the chance to see it in production.

Outside of that, we actually give them back all of the data from the 'popularity contest' in the form of pretty detailed analytics package, so they can refine their idea and take it elsewhere or give us a shot again at a reduced price.
I really understand where this article is coming from. Spend a decade in a biology laboratory working day and night just to figure out a tiny subset of the role of one simple protein, and you'll find that pseudoscientific handwaving no longer sounds like a pleasant breeze, but like the grating of sharpened fingernails on a chalkboard.

(For physicists the equivalent torture is a movie, which goes by the name of "What the Bleep...", that came out a few years ago. OMFG if you want to drive me into a towering rage just show me ten minutes of that film. It's like watching someone make spitballs out of the manuscript of the Eroica symphony.)
>But then addition isn't commutative.

"30 C warmer than 5 C"
= 5 C + 30 C
= 278.15 K + 30 K
= 308.15 K
= 35 C

Am I missing something?
Oddly enough, the people that actually love those backseat catalogs are our core audience at the moment. This current incarnation was more of a following rather than leading our audience.

We're in the process of remedying this "kitsch" right now.
Ok, maybe I abbreviated my train of thought there. Let me elaborate.

And I am speaking solely from my knowledge of US History.

"Bi-Product of the industrial revolution." retirement came about SOLELY because of the industrial revolution. Prior to that most people were artisans and self-employed. However, once everyone got onto an assembly line, older people who couldn't keep up started gumming up the works. And they were being laid off in droves. To counteract that, Roosevelt, enacted Social Security as a form of "Old Age Insurance". Soon after, corporations started pension plans of their own. And this ushered in the era of "Companies look after their own" in America.

The point I was trying to make is that it use to be common belief that your employer would take care of you. It's not that way anymore.

Did I do any better that time?
X-Plane has always charged for a copy, although iirc they had multiple price tiers based on what scenery you wanted. With the announcement of MFS going away, X-Plane slashed their price and adopted a single pricing tier to help draw in converts. I'd been eying X-Plane for a while when the price slashing occurred, and jumped on opportunity, and I love it.
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"Some people are exploited in ways that are horrific compared to how other people are exploited. But until we have words specifically to describe white-collar workers, I'm going to use the available words that I think are most apt."

I realize that some white-collar works are truly exploited. However, most of the people that I see complain about being "exploited" just don't have the balls to quit their job.
Excel 97 had a 3D flight sim. Seriously.
”It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?“

I think the point he is making is that if your goal is to simulate the human brain you also have to simulate and thus understand all the little details of biology because transistors don’t magically have the same properties as proteins.
"he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius"

Looks like he understands the brain just fine, to me...
Goodluck Jonathan 'has right to contest Nigerian election' - Telegraph
So... a) did you move to China; b) are you really doing 5 months work from home, one month work in a 5 star hotel; c) get in a knife fight?

I don't mind privacy at all, but I like to know if what I'm reading is fact or fiction or some combination thereof.

[a] http://maxkle.in/giving-up-on-europe/

[b] http://maxkle.in/my-company-5-months-work-from-home-one-mont...

[c] http://maxkle.in/your-high-iq-will-kill-your-startup/
> thus he deserves to get completely steam-rolled by the open-source community, just like we did to Balmer a decade ago with Linux.

Do you perhaps mean:

'Just like we did to Sun with Linux.'

As Windows was just fine. Linux on the desktop never happened.

Alternatively:

'Just like we're doing to Ballmer with KHTML and Firefox.'
The choice doesn't have to be form over function, or the reverse.

I think we can agree both tasks are handled nicely.

Also amusing, a story on electricity delivery, in "Wired".
> and population growth doesn't slow.

Population growth is slowing. Dramatically. There's tons of evidence that as women are educated, they will have fewer children. And women are starting to get better educations all around the world. There's absolutely no doubt that population growth will slow (slash, is already slowing down) a bunch in the coming decades.

Second, I'm confused about the 700 number. Where does that come from? Does he think that in the next 30 years, we will be able to extend life so much that he can keep on living? Why does that stop at 700?! Doesn't he think that some time in the next 700 years we'd be able to find a way to live longer than 700?

Frankly, I doubt there's much difference between finding a way to live to 700 and finding a way to live until the end of time.
>if it's ever released, will be filled with griefers.

>"Reinventing these franchises with social, shared experiences" and "bring a new perspective to the long-standing genre"

And "friends". And "points". Not that I was a fan before, but that seems it would screw over anyone serious about it.
What is awesome to me is how, presumably surviving the millenia, these will look to generations hundreds or thousands of years later. Will this be our own "Stonehenge?" How long will people someday puzzle over the purpose of these things?

Pretty awesome stuff.
Yes, I think that's his point too. But if you believe that the little details of biology emerge from the underlying physics, then maybe you only need to code the fundamental rules and can have all the rest automatically.
The thing about references is that they should demonstrate or negate the connection or affirmation that was presented.

I fail to see that in these links. I think a more appropriate set of citations would be:

basic research

http://www.religioustolerance.org/spanking_menu.htm

against corporal punishment as an educative method

http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/corporal-
punishment.aspx

http://www.nospank.net/vcb.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankin4.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankin29.htm

for corporal punishment as an educative method

http://www.corpun.com/ukju9803.htm

http://www.corpun.com/10archive/ukd01001.htm#21929

I personally find a lack of serious psychological research that finds correlation between corporal punishment and increase of quality of life in the society where it is practiced. That observation makes me believe that this practice should be abolished, or severely restricted at least.
Ask HN: Where do you listen to podcasts?
In the car? At home? At work? In complete isolation? While making dinner?
Save My Life update: "mild villous blunting"
Here's the reason: your web server is likely to be running using Linux, so you should have some familiarity with that. If you've always used Windows, Linux will be yet another thing to learn when you get to the point of hosting your web app. If you've been using Mac OS X or Linux as your primary computer all along you'll be comfortable with it since you use it on a daily basis. With Mac OS X, you can ease yourself into Linux.

"You didn't even give a reason why OS X or Linux are better, which tells everybody you are just a zealot"

Actually, I didn't give a reason hoping that it would spark an intelligent discussion with other people sharing information about pros and cons. I was opening the topic. I can understand how it looked like zealotry and tribalism to you.
Thank you for picking up the torch!