skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I absolutely love the interface, especially:

-Sorting by "Agony" is a brilliant decision. It seems to take into account time spent traveling and cost, which leaves me with a few easy choices to make (spend 20 bucks more, save an hour) instead of a million tiny choices to make.

-I love that the prices seem to take into account taxes and fees without any trouble. I see $550 on Hipmonk, click "buy," and then see $550 on Orbitz.

-It looks nice and performs excellently.

I wonder if seeing data in this format will cause airlines to differently optimize their fare schedule. Obviously I don't have the knowledge of the data to answer this, but my gut feeling is that more people selecting flights based on travel time might lead airlines to find ways to reduce travel time. Wouldn't that be sweet.
My 3 favorite podcasts for start-up SAAS business owners
As far as I know, Roger Penrose first proposed the idea that quantum effects on neural processes will make computational modeling of said processes impossible. It is highly speculative, and the strongest evidence it's got going for it is that an eminent physicist wrote a book based on it (The Emperor's New Mind.)
> Such complexity is too much for a single person - a group of technocrats is a better way to run such a huge and complicated machine.

Someone ends up with the deciding vote.

What are the odds that the technocrats who can competently run healthcare are the same technocrats who can completently run transportation?

What are the odds that either group has relevant information at the right level?

"information" overload on technocrats is why the US has one set of design characteristics for energy efficient windows even though the climate is such that it should have at least three. (Energy efficient window design for Florida is very different from EEWD for Minnesota, let alone Alaska. I suspect that AZ and FL are should be different because of humidity even though they have comparable temperatures.)
That's silly. If GIMP were a better product it wouldn't need to rely on a drop in piracy. "Free" is not sufficient for success.
This is a very cogent comment, although it actually doesn't apply to me. I haven't hired/interviewed an actual employee in many years for various reasons, and when I did hire actual employees, circumstances were such that these specific techniques did not apply.

Also, I rarely talk about specific criteria that I am currently using to filter people. This is because some people treat getting interviews as a game, and employ "SEO" to get interviews:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/03/games-people-play.html

The least broken heuristics are the ones nobody knows you're using, IMO.
> "My hope," says Hinueber, "is we will raise awareness of copyright laws, ..."

Preach it brother, I sincerely hope that the general public becomes aware of current copyright law. Because if they learn about the extremely egregious, one-sided laws that have been payed for by copyright holders they might do something about it.
Massive coral die-off seen in unusually warm 93-degree waters off of Indonesia.
An interesting article nonetheless. The "failed" attempts at least suggest that the perceived slowdown is not simply a matter of your brain processing information faster -- that it instead stores more superfluous information than normal.

So if we intentionally trigger "bullet time", it wouldn't allow us to perform superhuman feats, but it might give us superhuman recollection of details.
FWIW, I'm not too far away from you on this - I don't think we are going to find a very simple algorithm to do whatever general pattern recognition the brain does. All indications suggest that while there may be such an algorithm programmed in and repeated (a lot more times in humans than other animals), it's far too complex for us to simply read off or guess at.

But it does suggest that we should be considering the functions that such higher level units might have, such that they become more intelligent as we compose them. Easier said than done,of course, especially since it's very difficult to actually observe brain dynamics in any detail.
(I work at ITA on the QPX flight search engine).

The new Matrix (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) has the color bar functionality, too, but looks a littler friendlier! When you search, click "time bars" on the right below the carrier matrix. It was one of the most-requested features.
Well, the infrastructure provider market is what I know and care about... but I don't think the privacy needs of, say, facebook users and twitter users are all that different. they could probably use the same privacy policy with no changes.
Let me start by saying I am very happy that you responded to me.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like there is very much an industry standard personality-wise (that I think you are more similar to). I don't think I am anything like the industry standard - I am headstrong with an ego rivaled by few. I don't think I am better or worse suited for what we do, but I am noting the difference.

My ultimate point is that I gain a lot of insight when other people, who I know are different personality wise, give me their thoughts on how they would/do run a business.

A lot of people in my family run successful businesses and I have access to who/what personalities they hire, but the line of work my family is in is not technology-heavy at all. I am inclined to think my dad is more likely to hire people that don't put a large amount of their personal time into their work, simply because he runs a very customer oriented business. Being able to relate to and engage people is very important. Diversified interests help a lot in being able to do this.

So like I said, I approach it differently (maybe it's learned from my parents and relatives), but I appreciate you responding to me very much. It helps me to figure out what makes you tick.
Penrose certainly popularized the idea. Kurzweil addresses this issue in his book "The Singularity is Near."
Basically, they use lower voltage than is traditionally needed. Lowering the CMOS supply voltage turns the logic probabilistic due to thermal noise, and huge power savings are achieved when traded for some probability of error.

Now, they can design their logic to tolerate the errors, or use the probabilistic logic to actually present random variables, where the output of the logic is a sample from the distribution.
It's a bit confusing to figure out where this is better. I don't really grasp the agony part. For flying the real challenges for me are not layovers but planning the stuff out once you get there. Also, finding more local airplane companies internationally..
I want the switch that allows me to turn this on at will.
Good practices for rich web applications
Was the site just HN'd or article withdrawn?
"Error getting pubarticle, Please call the system admin."
Yeah, who would ever do something that crazy? It would be like demanding automakers build safe cars or telling the tobacco industry not to market their product to children.
Ubuntu 11.04 is going to be named the Natty Narwhal
True. However decades long periods of exponential improvement in technology is the norm, not the exception. The most spectacular example is Moore's law, but it is hardly alone. If you read The Innovator's Dilemma you will find plenty of other examples, ranging from the maximum range of a steam ship to the volume of dirt a backhoe can scoop per hour.

The interesting questions are how much computing power you need to perform equivalent tasks to a human brain, and whether current technology will reach that before it plateau's out.
Please give me back the 54 seconds you stole from me. Thanks.
He's just going with the academic meanings, where e.g. `regular expressions' describe `regular languages'.
If you, like me, are in Europe remember we have ryanair. You fly pretty much everywhere for $50 or less on a lot of days. $499 pass gets you 10 flights and not just in a month.

Still, I'd love to do this if I was in the US since it would force me to keep traveling
> It would be like leaving CS education and only learning about Turing machines, and never the Lambda Calculus.

By the way, there are many more models of computing. Some are even useful.
Practical Tips on Starting Your Own Company
Si if I read a book with a gun to my head, I might actually retain more knowledge...
It was definitely interesting, but it wasn't the breakthrough it was hyped-up to be. Seeing it as a 'hello world' is a cool idea, though. The hardware of the cell was ready and waiting. So Venter and his team rewrote an old program and gave it a spin. Nice.

This is more likely a lack of understanding on my part, but I'm not sure where epigenetics comes into it? The majority of the cell components - i.e. all the organelles, chemicals, etc - were already present and arranged in the 'surrogate' cell. So all the 'epigenetic' stuff was already in place. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

Not so sure about the random splicing part, either. Food manufacturers have been inserting genes into specific places on bacterial plasmids for a long a time, using directors like codon relationships and ionic interactions. Again - if I'm outta line... :)
The article's reasoning seems to be that because Gosling said that some Sun engineers tried to see who could get the silliest patent, ALL Sun patents filed by those engineers were silly.
That is also an excellent choice. But I believe they are related, or at least complement each other, in the sense that all of the data structure literals implement seq. I do not think they would work as well as an extension for S-expressions, otherwise.
I don't think we're going to agree on that one. Poland was desperately trying to avoid being crushed by either Germany or Russia at that point and tried to save its own hide at the expense of Czechoslovakia. It's not as though Poland would have invaded Czechoslovakia itself, the way Germany and Russia made their pact.

Not quite idential.

Incidentally, I was in Prague 2 days ago, what a beautiful city it is.
Managing IT As A Business – Current Thinking for IT Leaders
The problem here is that an adult brain has a much higher Kolmogorov complexity than the DNA that codes for its parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
Hadn't seen those before. Definitely a good place for inspiration.
My dad brought his muzzleloader to my 4th grade class in 1980 and gave a talk about how it worked and how to pour your own lead balls. I can't imagine what the SWAT team response to that would be today.
I graduated from high school 10 years ago. It was not mostly Rote memorization at the time, but I did get to see it turned into that. Starting the year after I graduated, students were subjected to yearly standardized tests in all subjects they were taking. The tests were very comprehensive from an information standpoint. The student being passed onto the next grade was subject to ther score on this test and teachers were evaluated based on how their students did. The (state) program that required this was cancelled almost immediately, but schools had already invested heavilly in the program and so still continue to follow it here.
>>a pretty big cultural divide here between people for whom this is a job and people for whom this is their identity
Precisely. :) Still, as ganley points out, "truth is a long spectrum between the two".

Simply put, question is whether the candidate is passionate about programming and software systems (and if so, is he competent enough ;)) or not. For few it is their identity, and for many, it is just a job. Even those who loathe(or do not care a damn about) programming/software/computers/technology could be given fancy designations and be employed in IT, thanks to that thriving segment in the industry (yeah, the one that provides 'cost-effective means to get anything done based on a checklist').

Real fun (read 'misery') is when there is a misfit around; i.e. like when there's a guy totally passionate about programming/computers with a bunch of 'I-won't-even-touch-computer-outside-work' types who abhor programming. /* yeah, the latter ones are for real. :) */
The way GitHub helped Erlang and the way Erlang helped GitHub
Those tips for joining startups seems to be interesting:

"For your first startup:

You want a place with >10 folks but less than 200. I say this under the theory that you are mostly working there to find challenging work and smart people. A startup with >200 people is too close to becoming a big company (or a failure) soon.

Be very strong in your field, if you are not yet that good practice until you are. Try to work on the hardest projects you can find at your current employer.

You will probably not get rich at your first startup, but you will learn at least 3x more per week than you would at a big company.
Don't obsess too much on how many options etc... - it really doesn't matter - you are mostly going there to do good work, learn and find folks who will make successful startups."
This doesn't really prove anything or say anything that we don't already know. All it proves is that this guy hired Zuckerberg to do some work for him
Which means that as streaming video moves from Flash to HTML5, web traffic (according to your definition) will actually increase.
I thought that was the explanation. Your brain has a normal data per unit time ratio, and in these stressful situation it ends up recording much more than normal. Since you're used to a certain data/time ratio, it feels like everything happened in slow-motion.
It costs a company $20-50k to successfully prosecute a patent. Filing alone costs $15k or so by the time the various filing bonuses are paid. (I don't know Sun's numbers, but many companies pay $3-5k to inventors on filing and a comparable amount on issue.)

Filing joke patents aren't responsible for Sun's financial woes, but if you're throwing away that kind of money on "humor".... (And yes, huge meetings also waste large amounts of money.)
Try using Haskell's parsec. It's a combinatorial parser library. (While that may sound horrifying, it's actually a very sane way to write a parser and easy to understand.)
Hyper-Practical Tips on Starting Your Own Company
Ask HN: Anybody used Mathematica, for any reason?
I was just digging around on WolframAlpha.com and there seem to be many different ways to use Mathematica:

http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/SoftwareEngineering/
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/MedicalImaging/
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/Chemistry/
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/ElectricalEngineering/

I was just curious if anybody here has ever used Mathematica, and what your experience has been. I'm asking mostly because I like using Wolfram's search engine, so I am curious if other products by the company are worth looking into.
Why do people leave their signature "Sent from my iPhone"?
Can't you already do this with the Freebase dump system?
It seems like they're mostly focused on geek culture and various things that will get them hits/attention. I haven't really read Wired in the past, so I can't make a comparison to their previous habits, but that definitely seems to be their tone/focus. I subscribed to their RSS feed, but quit after a while because they simply had too much noise to signal. They do post quality stuff occasionally, but I prefer to just let that come to me rather than try to sift it out.
using a proprietary technology that he won't discuss

Er, google with quotes around key phrases?

That is the kind of guy that will end up with contempt of court jail time someday when he tries to lecture a judge.

I wonder what percentage of his lawsuits were actually fair use or could have been modified to meet the requirement.
Still, why would you carry a sword or a gun onto a university campus? It seems rather useless, so the environment is right to consider it not normal and hence threatening.

Even if your logic was correct, it would mean that most people would needlessly have to drag weaponry around in their daily lives.
How to Pitch Your Business to Friends and Family
Nobody, "Max" included, has talked about making money in a method than claimed otherwise. From most indications, his apps are legit. Unglamorous, sure, but I don't think that's reason to "hide" behind a veil of secrecy, as the GP is implying. The only strange thing here is that he works under pseudonyms, but whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I think the investigative work going into this is interesting and it is adding another dimension to this Max character. But HN, lighten up. This place takes everything so seriously it's almost stodgy sometimes.
Sort of a misleading title, as it's actually a fairly wide-ranging interview with one of the Github guys, and an Erlang guy from Ericsson.
hyper-practical? What the does that even mean?
Try NuVim
Something your whole family will enjoy... No more peas under the plate!
Having worked in many kitchens, where everyone also has at least one, usually more, knives, I can say stabbings are a surprisingly common occurrence. Cuttings even more so (not talking about accidents either).
The second result on Google for the search is now Hacker News. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...

I was curious about how this could happen so quickly, so I looked up the PageRank for ycombinator.com, and it's a 7 out of 10. That's a good amount of Google juice, which explains how they can so quickly rank on a keyword (and it's a very obscure keyword, so not much competition up-top).
I'd like to make a graph of the percentage of people that actually see a comment at negative reputation when there is a "why the downvotes" comment immediately following it.
There are a lot of things I have in common with other programmers I've met, but at the same time my life has taken a less-than-stereotypical path. For example, I worked as a salesperson for a number of years and was something of a bright light when doing so. That being said, a skill at "qualifying" and "closing" prospects them should never be confused with being a people person, sometimes quite the opposite.

My mother was a systems programmer in the 1960s, and speaking of discrimination and so forth, she is both Black and Female. There were probably more Unicorns in captivity than Black, female programmers in that decade. She later became a very successful real estate broker, so I was also exposed to entrepreneurship at an early age.
Yes, the Dragon text wasn't very much to my liking. You may be able to implement a C compiler with it. But nothing really interesting. And it's approach is rather pedestrian.

S. P. Jones' text was more interesting. I also like "Modern Compiler Design" (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/MCD.html), which covers imperative/oop programs as well as logical and functional paradigms.
I love the quote at the end: “It’s like setting a hungry wild pig loose in a china shop to find a piece of bacon," Randazza said. "It’ll get the bacon, but it will destroy everything else in the process.”

I wonder if the reference to cannibalism is intentional :)
Wired is Maxim for people who can't get laid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

What if the background stuff that you neglect from your model is where all the interesting stuff happens?

Some people see the philosophical zombie as an argument against consciousness being material at all. I don't really see that, but I do see it as an argument against the idea that you can achieve sentience by emulating a coarse-grained approximation of the brain. I think you would have to either really totally understand the brain or harness evolution and let it build you a sentient being whose structure captures the essence of organic life within whatever its embodiment happens to be. You might end up with something that looks nothing like the brain superficially, but that embodies what the brain does somehow.
The Agile Enterprise – Current Thinking for IT Leaders
Hot Stock GRPS
A company making green and going green.
Yes.

And if the physicist is implementing anything on top of Mathematica, she may profit from knowing some things about parsing.
Even if all is done right there are slim chances for reporters at well known newspapers/blogs to write about you...unless, you actually know that reporter from real life (conferences, etc)...

If right now I would send a story to the TC reporter (Jason K) which has all the right characteristics (and be interesting) I bet 90% he won't write about my story. And that because not that he doesn't care or something but because he already has tons of good stories to write about AND knows personally a lot of people who wants to tell their stories.
Who is getting the first chance? me or those people?
Thanks for the link. I wasn't aware the patent was still in question. I don't think it invalidates my point, though. RIM was criticized for waiting too long before settling the case, and thus paying 10x what NTP originally asked for. Waiting for the patent office to invalidate the patent takes long enough that it has plenty of its own risks.
This seems like an excellent opportunity for someone like blekko to fill the void site explorer's closing will leave.
Skill and expertise related ontological database
where can I find a semantic ontology database of professions and skills? I need a database that would properly depict relations such as marketing->online marketing->search engine marketing
Hipmunk seems to basically just be an attempt to mimic ITA's graphical UI with the ability to purchase tickets, which seems like a dubious business proposition (we'll see). I would think Orbitz could easily just stop doing its affiliate program with them, and then quickly enough make its own identical layout...

And matrix.itasoftware.com is indeed awesome-the query language lets you do incredibly useful stuff you cant to anywhere else. The hard part is then twisting the arm of orbitz/travelocity/etc to get you to book the exact same flights.
oh hey thats pretty good. I wonder if I could get him to make a dingo for the startup i'm working on :) haha
I could have told him that 10 years ago from years of experience in cramming just a few hours before tests and exams.
"Anyway, I would hesitate to call {} and [] an innovation."

What made it an "innovation" was the decision to close off access to reader macros from the general public. It sounds like a nice idea to allow people to define the behavior of {}, [], etc. however they like. But the effect is splintering the language even further with fewer reusable idioms.

The Clojure idiom of always using [] for any place you have let-like destructuring makes it easier to quickly visually parse code, for example. The abbreviation for anonymous functions wouldn't be part of the core language if the corresponding reader macro was not claimed by Benevolent Dictator Hickey.

This decision may or may appeal to you, personally, but I think it is one of the things that has quickly allowed Clojure to quickly gain popularity relative to other Lisps.
It reminds one of that odd chapter on pylons from de Botton in "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" where he mentions the "coquettish sexuality" of Finnish pylons.

http://books.google.com/books?id=SslgkiNvZ9wC&lpg=PA199&...
I'm not agreeing with TC on this terrible article.

But, I will say that $315,000 would have been 5-6 years of money for my start-up, based on how much money my co-founder and I spent before becoming profitable.

If you think ramen-living means spending more, or even as much as $50/K per person per year, you're coming from a different place than me.
So the claim is the Oracle is sue Google with patents that were issued as jokes? It's funny I guess, but I wonder who will be laughing when and if Oracle wins the suit?
A massively large percentage of the travel market is composed business travelers who are generally pretty price insensitive and a lot about things like flight times and layovers. Its probable that you're just not in the target market for a product like this.
How does this make sense? The contract says Ceglia was going to pay $1,000 for one project and another $1,000 for The Face Book. Why is the check for $3,000?