skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the hard thing about the multi-billion dollar exit isn't the extra work needed, but the probability of it working out. Maybe one estimate of the odds is how many projects are started, verses how many cash out (this should include projects that are abandoned even after only a few weeks, if they would have continued had they got a little traction.) Massive survivorship bias, when only the huge payouts are publicized.

I don't think the initial founder/s necessarily must have the right skillset, but someone, sometime must come on board with that skillset. Rather tragically, these people seem to quite often eject the founders. One book ("Crossing the Chasm") even claims that the initial founders don't deserve the big pay-out because they don't have the skillset (and they're more interested in making cool stuff and being their own boss than in making money). Ugh.

To be captain of your soul, master of your destiny is worth more than all the riches and fame in the world - they merely tighten the shackles of the worldly and the opinions of others, not freedom of any kind, only dominance (says me, sans riches and fame. actually, I think it would be great fun).

BTW your 98th percentile puts you squarely in the "smarter than average, but not a genius" camp, which is where I am, and where I think most entrepreneurs are. In business, extremely high intelligence seems to be liability. I think what really counts is something like boldness + quick recovery. I could certainly do with some more of that.

I agree with you about MySpace etc, it's too unpredictable; too easy to switch (mind you, I said that about Google too; I thought their massive PR efforts was one of their few competitive advantages, I wonder if they've become complacent recently.)

> MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30 percent of its workforce in June 2009

> By late 2007 into 2008, Myspace was considered the leading social networking site, and consistently beat out main competitor Facebook in traffic. When Facebook launched new features in an effort to attract a variety of users, Myspace found itself in a continuing decline of membership. As of July 2010, the site was ranked 25th in Internet traffic,[3] opposed to the 2nd position held by Facebook. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace

Kids love cool stuff, which means they switch all the time. Maybe the sustainable business model is a business that generates (or promotes) social sites? (analogous to music publishers always touting the next cool band - most bands have limited lifespan, but the publishers live on)
A JS1K Byte-Saver Quiz
I finished the trip, ended up being the only one that hit all 42 cities plus Puerto Rico. Lots of mini-adventures inside airports and outside big cities. One of the top experiences I've had. Would recommend but it gets expensive if you do a city tour vs straight flights. Pictures are here: http://30dayjetset.com

Two Redditers galavanted across 14 cities and did some fun hunts and nerdy stuff. They manage to get a lot of support from random Redditers too: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddittraveljetblue/

Wired sponsored someone to fly around as well. I met him on day 3 and we chatted a bit. I think he got pretty cool content since Wired's PR team hooked him up well. Check his travel blog: http://www.wired.com/autopia/tag/terminal-man/
How about the more recent "third way" proposition?
If you think about it, that's evolutionary theory in a nutshell. Organisms don't evolve due to any desire or goal to change; rather, random processes cause mutations, and traits that happen to result in more copies of themselves being made tend to become more common, and that's it. There is no purpose to the changes; they just are, and "better" ones happen to become more common because they duplicate more.
It was broken for the past couple days (that I noticed) but I got this post.
Free also ran into some nasty plagiarism accusations: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2009/06/24/the-chris-anderson....
Wow, very nicely done! This kind of thing is very important for international travel, as they often give you some crazy travel proposals.

I tried VCE to PDX in October, and it seemed to do pretty well, although I'd appreciate it if it gave me more information on how to get a cheaper flight, if changing the dates would help at all.
I wish developers could participate in the work, but unfortunately this is difficult because feature development on the client libraries is tied to feature development on the gateway. Until we release the corresponding features in the gateway, the client libraries wouldn't work.

I was thinking about your comment about seeing the progress of the project. While that is conventional for open source projects, it is unconventional for products. And since our client libraries are tied so closely to our product, progress of libraries is progress of our product. Anybody have thoughts/experiences/etc on sharing day-to-day development of their products? I know some companies do it, but it doesn't seem very common.
This is wonderful. I will absolutely be using this the next time I want to search for a flight. The logo makes me smile (although it's a bit indistinct on a white background), and the fact that the default sort method is "agony" makes me very happy.

It seems to be including Amtrak results in there too, which makes for a nice comparison.
EFF Warns of Untrustworthy SSL, Undetectable Surveillance
Andreessen: Valley statesman, HP's front man
1.[], {}, #{} are not the innovation.
2. The innovation is that they are on the same level as lists. All the cool list stuff you can do with lists you can do with all of the structures and you can add more yourself if you want. That allows to write stuff really generic.
3. If you don't like them use (vec ), (map ) and so on. Only the most imported ones have syntax there are many data structures.

P.S. Do you really finish up all your parans yourself???
Probably the only time anything related to Justin Bieber will be on HN
I've been having to do a lot of airline searches recently and this should definitely alleviate the pain. Being able to see the flight plans visually, especially the layovers, is extremely nice. As is the automatic hiding of flight itineraries that suck.

Being able to adjust the day would be a nice feature, would be cool to be able to drag a time slot around to see if there is anything better a day later or a day earlier. Perhaps being able to compare days side by side would be nice.

Overall though, it's pretty awesome. Only thing I've seen that comes close is Kayak.
And the funny thing is, that the British weren't very tyrannical, and evolving to greater democracy all the time.

The Americans were overly paranoid --- or hypocritical (i.e. their revolution had other aims than stated).
This isn't an instance of founders giving up too early. They tried hard. In fact, it is more impressive that they continued to keep the site going after running out of money and having to get jobs than if they'd shut it down completely.
Wow. That is seriously good. I've been planning a trip with my friends and the table-view is absolutely superior to everything I've ever seen. Keep it up Steve!
I, for one, welcome the copyright trolls. It can only quicken the complete reform of the copyright/patent system and the partial or complete destruction of the "intellectual property" industry.
You may be right about that, and I don't think the quantum point is essential to what I wrote above.

But... I do tend to sympathize with the minority view here. The problem is that I don't think the majority are looking at the complete system. Yes, the macroscopic activation and conduction behavior of neurons probably can be modeled classically. But that behavior, as well as things like where the axons and dendrites connect, is governed at the meta level by the genetic regulatory networks and metabolic machinery of neurons and their support cells. All that involves at least thousands of genes and a lot of interactions that may very well extend down to the quantum level.

It's a living cell that grows and changes over time, not a simple gate that can be modeled by an equation. Modeling a neuron like that is like modeling a star as a single point source of light because it looks like that from far away. You can model the way stars look through a telescope like that, but that does not accurately describe what a star is.
Good point. Not only that, but a case can be made that one cannot build such as system as an end stage.

Instead, it appears that ontogeny must recapitulate phylogeny. The system must develop over time as a result of inputs (and the remembered collection of past inputs encoded in the DNA). It would be as if in order to build Twitter with Ruby on Rails, you first had to program a tax calculation application in Cobol on a 1950s mainframe.
The interpreter for DNA is a living cell.

There are two problems with this argument:

1. For the interpreter to substantially reduce the size of the DNA needed to encode a program to build an intelligent system, that interpreter needs to be optimized to reduce the complexity of such programs. However, as far as we can tell, ribosomes and protein folding work exactly the same way in nearly all living cells, from snottites to kelp. It isn't plausible to suggest that each Salmonella cell contains hundreds of megabytes of information that's optimized for producing intelligent systems. Even if Salmonella contains hundreds of megabytes of information, it would amount to a proof of creationism if that information were optimized to simplify the expression of brain designs. So the size of the interpreter is irrelevant.

2. DNA is not just interpreted; it's compiled into cells. The DNA of a cell contains a complete program for making every peptide that is necessary to the cell from individual amino acids, and those peptides together construct all the other chemicals from a small number of simple molecules found in the environment. So the source code for the "interpreter", down to the hardware level, is actually already present in the DNA.
Absolutely, I never said that I think modeling the brain would be easy (I don't) or that building it up from DNA is anywhere near the best way to attempt AI (IMO it's not).

I simply don't buy the argument that the algorithms of cognition inherit any substantial amount of functionality from their physical implementation, and hence, I see Kurzweil's complexity estimate as somewhat reasonable.
To experiment with the language Rich had Clojure Compiler in CL targeting C# and Java.

Then he took time off work and wrote the Java bootstrap compiler.
Similar to jacquesm, my answer to the question of how I became rich was "I was born in America." Our poor people have access to more than anyone in the history of the world. Our poor people have magic boxes with which they can talk to people anywhere. Our poor people can go to a building where they have free books for anyone, and more magic boxes with which they can look up any piece of information they want, for free. Our poor people can walk into a supermarket and buy fresh fruit year round. (If they have kids, the government will even give them coupons) Our poor people have another magic box that receives 24-hour moving pictures of news, movies, entertainment, and educational programming. Many of our poor people have a metal box that you pour gasoline in and it moves by itself much faster than a horse can gallop. When our poor get sick, they can go to the emergency room and get doctors for free (the rich people's insurance and the rich tax-payers foot the bill).

In a third-world country poor people wonder if they are going to have food today. If they get sick, they die. When they want to travel, they walk. If the crops fail, they starve. They can count on the fingers of one hand the number of suits of clothes they have.

If you have a college degree, statistically, you are richer than 98% of the world.
> When you see the results (see screenshot for example), you’ll never want to see flight results in any other format. It’s one of those that’s so obvious why didn’t I think of that moments.

I disagree. I think there are several different groups of people that search for flights and each of them wants to see their results in a different way. I think the other flight search engines (especially Kayak) meet most of their needs quite well. It's great to see another view into this data, but I don't think it's the only way I will want to view it.

When I search for a flight, the only factor I care about is price. I don't care when it leaves, how long it takes to get there, what airline it is: I want it to be the cheapest it can possibly be. When prices are close, I'll sometimes care about airline (I really on't like to fly AirTran for example).

I think Hipmunk's view into the data is perfect for someone that cares about the time spent in flight, layovers and which part of the day they're flying. These people are usually business-people who have money, so it's probably a perfect market to shoot for :).
Where that falls down is that it fails to consider limits. Exponential growth cannot continue forever. At some point, something will limit it.

It may be a physical limit, a supply-side resource limit, or an economic demand limit, but there will be a limit somewhere.

Without limits, a single bacterium could fill the entire universe in a few years.

Sometimes things do grow like that for a while, but Kurzweil's attempt to turn this into a universal law and neglect limits is hand-wavey and silly.
train, bus, working out or if its really interessting i sit at home and stair at the wall.
what you expect is to add 0 temperature difference to 0 temperature value. What it actually calculate - sum of two temperature values. it's matter of notation imho
Slightly off topic but I really hate how youtube tests stuff. I'm sure theres some rhyme or reason to it but from the end-user's perspective it just seems random. Example: I really like the "lower lights" feature on hulu which darkens the page background around the video. I remember for several months I would come across a button to do the same thing on youtube but it would only show up maybe 5% of the time. I can see no reason why that feature would be dependent on the video itself because it has to be just a simple CSS/JS trick.
Not to knock Hipmunk, but this visualization has been available for years as the "graphical view" of ITA Software's matrix demo app:

http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/

Do a search and then View Flights - Graphical. It's excellent and has been my preferred way to find flights for ages.

It's nice to see that someone who might actually care about marketing is offering the same useful tool!
The One Thousand Hour Rule
Unit testing in R: the bare minimum
You know you can sort by price, right? Right at the top there's a "sort by". And you might see that you only have to pay $5 more to avoid leaving at 6am and not have a ridiculous layover.
Ask HN:  Office share in NYC
I'm moving to NYC in two weeks and would like to find an office share or other place to go and work because it kills me to be in one place all day. I will be living in South Harlem and the nearby libraries either open late (NYPL on 115) or are private (Columbia, Barnard, CUNY). Places like Sunshine Suites and We Work NYC look nice and affordable, but I'd rather not trek all the way downtown everyday. Does anyone know of a library or office share that is uptown? How about a startup that would consider leasing a desk to a not-to-smelly code monkey?
Users weren't even aware that there was a problem to be solved"

I'm sorry, but that's not true. At least 1 user recognized it was an issue and came up with a solution for it.
True—but Matrix doesn't let you book tickets. :)
I don't think that's as good.

Even ignoring the cost in lawyer time to draw up and review the policies, knowing that a policy is 'reviewed by X' tells the user less than "ISP Y uses standard policy Z"

Also, just like there are different creative commons licenses that grant different rights, it's reasonable to have different privacy policies that grant different rights... and if you need a particular right, it's much easier to go "Oh, isp X uses policy Y which gives me what I want" than to go reading the custom policy that each ISP drew up.
Actually, that last part is not correct. Torrents are not always legal [http://ask-leo.com/is_it_illegal_to_download_torrent_files.h...], and spam is not always illegal [http://spam.abuse.net/faq/]. It's abusive to say otherwise. I torrent also all the time, but that doesn't change the facts.

But anyway, your argument hinges on the supposition that ISPs guarantee your bandwidth all the time. In fact, most of them do not. If you are buying a strict guaranteed bandwidth, do tell me why it is that the ISPs don't actually say that themselves?

Hence the argument that throttling your traffic betters other customers.
The logo was designed by (Reddit cofounder) Alexis Ohanian.

http://twitter.com/kn0thing/status/21425755974
i am keeping work on my own projects. but still, there is no easier way to get legally permanently to usa without work visa and following greencard. dv lottery is not a way (but i keep trying) and i am already married =) and do not have 500k-1m to invest into something too =)
No a Java program requires an environment to run, so does a brain .

It's just that a brain alters it's behavior and structure as a result of processing inputs (development).

We don't (normally) write Java programs to change their behavior as they process information from their environment during execution.
The software referenced in the description Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch is truly cool. Turns any sound/music into a texture http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

My gut says this might be the beginning of a new fad.
ITA is probably the most underrated travel app on the Net. It's my favorite, cleanest, and also the most powerful tool for searching for good value flights (you can also find flights that will net you maximum miles that sites like Orbitz don't make easy, even with ITA powering the backend).

I think Hipmunk is facing an uphill battle. I don't want to be a naysayer because I want them to do well (and thereby have more choices), but ITA spent years and years to get the kind of buyout they're getting now.
first, please, please don't send passwords unencrypted. I'm not the only one who can look at your traffic. Spoofing a route in bgp is, to my understanding, not a difficult thing to do, which means that really, anyone on the net with a sufficiently well-connected BGP box can sniff your traffic.

but yeah... would just giving you access to all the information I had about your traffic be sufficient notification? That seems like the best way to handle it to me, I mean, if I've got a IDS all setup, it's no more work for me to let you see the results, and especially on incoming traffic, that has value to you.

>However I would expect you to get a notification before you started to murk around with my traffic, since it is liable to interfere with my use of the services that I have paid for.

Yeah. mucking about with people's traffic is tricky, and /certainly/ deserves a notification. Right now, the only time I do it is when you go over your transfer limits; in that case I use tc to bump you down to something that can't hurt me, and obviously, I tell you.

If I /wanted/ to provide a bulk transfer service, rather than limiting the overage accounts to 1mbps or less each, I'd take accounts that are in overage and let them have as much bandwidth as they want, just making that bandwidth a lower priority than the bandwidth of my paying customers.

Now, my experience with that kind of traffic shaping is that it's never perfect, you always interfere at least a little with the high priority traffic; or at least that's been the case every time I've tried doing that, so I don't. But, I've heard of others doing it with varying degrees of success; it's one of those things that can possibly make a cheaper service better if you allow the provider to muck with your packets.
First time I actually got relevant results for a search (a bit obscure search). I don't have any need for tickets now, but when I do I'll certainly use this.

Calendar for input of depart and return was a bit confusing at first.
Please clarify: are you saying you reject the concept of intellectual property, or just the industry that has grown up around enforcing intellectual property laws?
My first time through I didn't notice the prices were listed on the page.
I am imagining the copyfree or copyleft entrepreneurs laughing manically now.

Less pirating mean less advertising for the pirated in questions. Make it easier for market disruption.

The enemy of GIMP is after all the pirated photoshop.
I have been responsible for patents at a tech startup. My job was not only to find patents that we might infringe upon, but to find patents that a troll could use to extort money out of us, even though they did not apply, and then assign risk. I worked with an excellent patent lawyer.

It is impossible to do anything today without infringing on somebody's bullshit patent. However, one can identify patents that can be demonstrated to be bullshit for a reasonable cost.

There is also an element of poker. If someone has a bullshit patent, but they have successfully used it, or think they can, then they risk losing that revenue if it is struck down as invalid. They do have something to lose, in addition to legal fees.

Trolls live on fear. Don't be afraid.

So back to these particular patents: They are bullshit. They are obviously bullshit. I would represent myself if hit with them. I think Google might be able to find a few people better than me to prove it.
1) You have a free source of money, so you can pay off all your debts with time

2) You will probably always have someone by the balls
I honestly don't know if/how the show (http://www.twit.tv/natn) takes questions, but the hosts are @ambermac & @sarahlane, so that might be a place to start. Also, I can take any here as well :)
>> which by the way manages efficiency concerns on your behalf

> Can you elaborate on this?

Sure thing. As a start the form `{:a 1, :b 2}` would start as an array-map because it's really fast to populate while the access efficiency is reasonable. At some point during the use of that map it will cross some critical threshold and become a hash-map providing (effectively) constant time lookup while still maintaining persistence. Additionally, behind the scenes Clojure uses mutable versions of the map for efficiency while again maintaining persistence.

Clojure provides different types of maps for use in different scenarios, but manages implementation efficiencies for you.
What does it take to get the airline price and schedule data?

I imagine a lot of people want to make sites like this, but they don't have the resources to obtain contracts for data feeds.

Much like many people would like to open up streaming sites for Big Label music, but not everybody can afford to enter into contracts with music labels then have hundreds of HDs full of wav files delivered to them.

We need someone to make a pay-per-taste brokered data market.
The Perils of Follow-On Financing Decisions
Oil spill's human health impacts might extend into the future
Better still, use Google App Engine then it won't matter in the slightest.
Even less clear:

> [...] will seek input on important questions such as whether wired
> and wireless broadband access should be treated differently
> in this context, and will invite new ideas.

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-297944...
http://area51.stackexchange.com/ lists a few science related sites in beta, and a few more close to being released.
Why the Oracle Java Patents Were Literally A Joke Played by Sun Engineers