skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
4. The situation is completely artificial, to the extent that experimental partners are simulated and behave randomly. The conclusion could as well be that people don't like erratic behavior, even if the unpredictable behavior is do-goody. I can completely empathize with that: don't we all want to be able to depend on a colleague? To be sure that something that gets promised gets done and gets done well? Someone that behaves erratically is simply less trustworthy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#General
Looks like a feature to formally link to a copy of a book/edition anywhere on the web is coming soon. (Informally linking from description hypertext or a list of related links is already possible.)

Whether Google backlinks or otherwise uses the info to improve their own metadata is of course up to them, but Google didn't get where they are by turning down free sources of crawlable quality information.
Tenacity and creating opportunities out of little and slowly growing self-belief. The latter part is really important and isn't really something anyone gives you.

I don't want to repeat myself so you can check the longer post I made on it through the link here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1201098
Is this even a bad thing? Do you have to like someone to work with them?
What's up with saying "I'm a programmer"? Assuming you are, of course. Being a co-founder is not a profession. I think when a person asks this question, you should answer in the most simple and pragmatic way. Because, in my opinion:

1. Trying to be unconventional when answering this question is wrong. Most of the times you seem like a jerk.

2. Saying you're a co-founder in any way before saying what you actually do (skill) is wrong. It only serves the purpose of informing others how independent and successful you want to seem.
Agreed. How can you not have a flawed approach to this experiment? At some level you know you are not truly homeless, and have a safety net.
If I do, then you're talking about equity, which basically makes them a cofounder.

Early employees typically get options between 0.5-2.0% vesting over several years, and they almost always get a salary. This is an order of magnitude less equity than founders and potentially a lot more cash in hand.

As a #1 employee of a startup currently, I can tell you that the experience of doing a startup is well worth it regardless of the equity. The reason is because you may have all the technical chops in the world (I had 10 years experience of web development), but to actually be in an environment where you personally are responsible for a double-digit percentage or even a majority of the product is invaluable.

Now certainly I don't get paid what I would at Microsoft, but it's an investment in my future. At Microsoft my entire impact may be erased by political infighting. Or I may be tragically under-utilized because there are bigger concerns that I just don't fit into. Whereas in a startup I learn how to ship software and make it work with real meaningful feedback direct from the market. It's not some middle manager breathing down my neck trying to make himself look good. It's "the work I do has a real significant effect on the success of the company and my future career prospects."
WikiLeaks founder says he's been targeted by smear campaign
hah! you're more than welcome whenever you decide to come down, also happy to introduce you around if you want.
Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.
I suppose fear literally is the mind-killer.

I've noticed that my own depth of comprehension is far better when I explore and experiment first, and not study the formalized knowledge from a textbook/documentation until I'm satisfied that I have at least grasped the fundamental patterns on my own. This works not just in computing, but in almost every context (or at least those that don't have the potential to cause serious damage or injury).
Apple negotiating 99 cent TV show rentals ahead of new iTV
Startup Chile: Apply for a 1yr visa and 40,000USD
They do that all the time, since it makes them seem more neutral. Take, for instance, this story on climategate: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.ht...

"Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information." [Notably missing: quotes from Phil Jones asking people to delete emails and hide data.]

The pressthink blog discusses this a lot. In short, reporters want to appear objective and savvy, and "he said she said" makes them look that way.

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/
Like the console access, will download and give it a go :)
I wonder how the ratio compares to developers, because there certainly are a lot of NNPPs safely ensconced in the enterprise.
It is apples-to-apples if you're comparing cost, which (I think) is what UA really cares about. But they didn't do the math explicitly and, like you, I was curious, so:

A small instance costs 8.5¢/hr, so if it handles 35,000 connections with Eventlet that's 0.00024¢/hr/conn. Put another way, that's $57.60 to handle a million connections for a day.

A large instance costs 34¢/hr, so at 500,000 connections that's 0.000068¢/hr/conn, or $16.32 for a million connections for a day.

So the NIO implementation apparently saves UA 72% over the Eventlet implementation. Impressive!

(This is where I wait for someone from UA to show up and correct my numbers...)
It may not be any "different" to have a co-founder vs an employee in day to day operations. It may however be impossible to find someone sufficiently skilled to complete the job and yet dumb enough to not feel they are bringing more value to the business than simply a salary is worth.
Even without things, if you have the right attitude you know you will not be homeless for long.

I knew a guy, came to silicon valley with wife and new baby, lived in a park in a pup tent while he interviewed for jobs. We hired him. He's rich now. He always expected he would be.

His attitude meant he was never really homeless, even though his situation was pretty desperate.
Gandi has great support, a friendly web UI and fair prices. You should give them a try.
To which great hustlers might respond "There are an amazing number of coders who don't code very well..."

There's no shortage of incompetence in any field.
Autocomplete is there. Also you have the ability to create your own micros that you can use to build skeletons (like a function, or a loop). I'm not sure about itegrated docs. You'll probably get a brief pop-up (hit-or-miss), but nothing like XCode's inline docs.
My (non-technical) users don't understand version control at all. Which is weird as it was them who insisted on installing Sharepoint. But every folder has file_v1, file_v2, _v3, _v4 and so on.
Innovation, not Location
If you're like me and still have no idea who "Notch" is..
http://www.mojang.com/notch/
I agree. People asking this aren't usually asking "What is your title/position?" they are asking "What activity is it that you spend the majority of your waking adult life taking part in."

It's a relevant question.
"I build apps for people with big YouTube channels."

I find this is always the best answer, because trying to avoid conversations by saying "I have a startup", only results in the re-asking the "so, what do you do" question, to which I have to provide a real answer.
If you are learning from this person, if they are raising your market value, you'd have a pretty strong incentive to not "vote them off the island"

And really, what I've seen is that this plays out socially, too, at least in heavily technical departments. People who are really into technology enjoy spending time with people who are really good.

of course, many people don't seem to be as conscious as I am of the fact that the job market is very much larger than any one job... just keeping up with the next guy might not get me ahead much at this company (assuming I'm just keeping up, and not passing the guy) but if that guy I'm keeping up with is really good, I'm vastly improving my market value to another company that might not have the really good person already.

Really, I think alternating between being the new guy and the expert is pretty good for your career development, if you can pull it off, and unless you are an extreme outlier in either direction, you should be able to do so; both terms are defined relative to the rest of the team.
Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything
I've tried it a couple of times and it didn't work out, people replay with the same question: "Yeah but what do you really do?"

To this seconds question I've tried to answer with "I make applications to help some companies" but they never understood what an application really is...
This may be a debate for another day, but I haven't noticed a big difference in involvement/investment from employees over contractors.
I do, but many people travelling do not. Still doesn't protect you from all the other nasty bugs and issues.
The first models had some ps/2 chips in them (as opposed to software emulations; the CPU etc. are totally different). In later revisions they just left those chips out and stopped advertising the functionality. so if you put a ps3 disk ina later-model ps3 it will just spit it back out again with an error message.

I think 1st-gen PS3s are still selling at a premium on eBay for this reason.
"I tell computers and cell phones what to do"
Parts of Bing are (were?) backed by Hadoop thanks to Microsoft's purchase of Powerset - all their NLP search technology ran on Hadoop.
Right, but what's actually special about matter/energy that it causes the spacetime to bend?

In your analogy the basketball is accelerated through the blanket by gravity, and thus deforms the blanket, but in the real world we don't know what the mechanism is that causes spacetime to bend.
Their approach can work, it's just a matter of whether you can find product/market fit before the money runs out. If you contract out the development you're screwed when you can no longer pay them.

We may be the exception, but I came on as the tech lead after v1.0 and v2.0 were built out by a foreign shop and paying customers had been identified.

This meant that the original founder was able to keep more of the equity since I was given a salary and my risk was greatly reduced in coming on.

Eventually you will probably need a full-time technical person, but you have to make the judgement call as to whether you can get traction before the initial money runs out.
Dev. before design, or design before dev?
I am partial to von Neumann's definition, not rapture of the nerds. A reasonable definition of a singularity is a (technological) the effects of which nearly no one can predict. Examples, agriculture, the industrial revolution, the automobile, the computer. The Luddites predicted massive unemployment, not the incredible abundance we have today. The telephone was seen as a broadcast medium like radio, no device that remove space from personal communications. The computer, we all know what that did.

We dont even know what intelligence really is, so we cant predict what super intelligence is or will do. Will we become extinct? I seriously doubt it, just as most of us dont want our fellow creature to become extinct (except maybe rats an mosquitos). Will they become our curators, or will we have a symbiotic relationship with incredible consequences.

One consequence I do see is a huge augmentation in human intelligence with appliances that grow complexes directly into the brain. Imagine instance face and name recognition (my particular sub-optimal capability) or mathematical proof reasoning. Not that we think way faster, but that everything we want is at our fingertips. And built in virtual reality.

I think we are near the peak in our consumption of material goods. So the optimist in me sees a future free from meaningless work, where even the average Joe will have an IO of 200 or even 1000.
You had me at Heroku.

I'm really looking forward to make the iPad my only device on the go (beside the iPhone of course) and this is definitely going to help me in that direction.
Exactly. When you're starting a business everything is risk. If you pay someone more than you need to then you are jeopardizing the success of the business.

Getting your "fair share" is the responsibility of the employee. If you think you're hot shit that will make the difference between the success or failure of the company, then by all means negotiate for it.

The bottom line is, if, as a developer you think you are worth significantly more than the going rate, you have two options. Either prove it by founding your own company. Or else convince the person hiring you that you are worth that much.
Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.

I always wonder why people choose monkeys for that analogy, seeing as we're more or less descended from a recent ancestor. At some point there were only thousands of that ancestor, but they managed to produce something capable of writing Shakespeare within a few million years! Maybe a better animal to choose would be octopi...
haha, yeah. It was the only song I could even stand to listen to.
Really? In my experience they either lose interest, because in their mind I'm a computer guy who does things that seem boring to them or they get interested and we have a discussion.
little kid mode

Why?
One thing about Bing: they offer developers free APIs for search and spelling correction. (http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/06/ruby-client-for-search-an...). I got a Google search API key in 2000, but they discontinued giving out keys.
Facebook Spam Conversion Rate Hits 47%
This has inspired me to do screen lapses of myself working at home. Get some feedback on my own working style and get data on my methods and goofing off.
"Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome (and more importantly to engineer the whole supporting ecosystem where ribosome can do what it needs to do)."

This isn't supported by observational evidence. Every known life-form on Earth, even the Archaea, makes use of the same fundamental nucleotide transcription machinery (which includes the ribosome). Every indication is that the ribosome is one of the oldest cellular structures, which pegs the upper limit for the amount of time it took to arise via evolution at a few hundred million years.
I think you missed the part where he said to leave your job. I've done most of my longer-term (one month) vacations after getting laid off or quitting.
A tech company with the "Don't make us look bad" attitude is not going to last long, at least, not as a tech company.
"I run a couple websites." - This usually results in questions about the website subject matter, which is much more fun to answer than questions about revenue and what my actual job is.
Visually comparing the Samsung Galaxy to the iPad/ iPhone
Computers do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do.
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A Side Effect of Digital Devices: Brain Fatigue
ah I see what it is...I thought you were promoting a more expensive product. At $50, the 1:10 is a lot harder to believe...for $8 it's still pretty far fetched but it may be possible...has to be some hot product though.

And yes I know Geary...and he never made 500K a day. It went $30K the first year, $100K the second, and $1.1m the third. Now he makes something like 5-10K a day.
I guess I don't see that as completely fair (unless there is already a technical cofounder in your startup who can act as the technical vision of the startup). There are at least as many important technical decisions to be made while building a startup as business decisions. Why stick yourself with an order of magnitude less equity than the founder? If it actually succeeds you're as responsible as the non-technical founder.

Note that I'm not speaking of startups with established technical founders. I would very very seriously consider working at a startup as a technical employee if they already have good technical vision.
This seems almost malicious. Do you have some kind of agenda against non-technical people? Sure, it's their decision and their problem in the end, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least explain your point of view if the opportunity arises. In fact, you might know potential techy cofounders to recommend.

Or you can suggest good people to hire if they decide to bring on a non-founding technical team despite the risks. I suspect a good employee is much better than a bad cofounder. The point is, you can tell the difference, your friends with a business-only background probably can't.

Obviously, if they're just being dicks, don't waste your time (and don't let them hire your friends). But that's good advice in general, regardless of background.
"Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad."

This kind of attitude, is not an attitude you want people working for you to have.
What Really Scares Netflix
Cliffs Notes for A Faster Brain
It's a false analogy with regard to evolution. Purely random input is extraordinarily unlikely to match any specific output. But if you bring in inheritance, mutation, and environmental pressures then you can produce just about anything, given sufficient time.
Can you link to someone who is not an electric universe partisan who says this?
There is always uncertainty in science. That is its strength not weakness. creationists and many others do understand this.
He also posted a screenshot in a Wordpress blog.
I'm not sure how big the market is for something /between/ the iPhone and the iPad. It's too big to fit in your pocket, and probably too small to view normal web pages comfortably.
A little googling finds: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/fsharp-041...

"We’ve also seen fantastic applications in server-side data analysis, including in parts of the Bing ad delivery and analysis pipeline. F# seems a particularly good language for programmatic machine learning."

I think that is just one small part of the Bing system though.
I am not aware of any model of star formation that might leave the outside of a star rotating faster than the inside. And helioseismology suggests that our Sun's core rotates 3-5x faster than the equator. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5831/1591
"does everything the user wants"

Then some OS X features completely baffle me. Like installing software. I'm not a "Mac guy" and each time I ask someone how to install software downloaded off the web I get a different answer, all preceeded by "You just ..." and then 10 or 11 simple steps. Apparently they have never heard of installers. I'd guess from this, that the average Mac has never had ANY software installed after it left the factory.
I think "almost impossible" is too harsh. Hiring a technical person off the street will be very difficult. However, a smart non-technical person should be able make reasonable decisions about people they know (personally or professionally) based on past achievement, other people's recommendations, previous interation, gut feel, ex.

Obviously there will still be false positives, but if you know someone is very smart, and is also in a technical field, there is a reasonable chance they will be good technically.
Eistein's original formulation of SR required two postulates: that the laws of physics are indistinguishable between any two inertial reference frames, and that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames. Both of these are experimentally motivated.

However, that's not the only way to obtain SR. You can, for example, assume Maxwell's equations (or any of the higher-level electrodynamic field formulations) and postulate #1, and obtain the invariant speed of light as the only valid solution for self-propagating EM waves in free space. I rather prefer this formulation, as the EM field formulation feels more "fundamental" than a fixed speed of light.

You can also derive SR from postulate #1 and some properties of space: isotropy, homogeneity, and memorylessness.
On Philly’s “blog tax”
Inc.com's Pricing Guide: How to Price Your Products
One perspective is that physics at this level is purely descriptive. Hawking, in his response to Penrose in the book The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, writes: "[I believe] that physics theories are just mathematical models we construct, and that it is meaningless to ask if they correspond to reality, just whether they predict observations." It is a common mistake for people to confuse a physical theory like Newtonian mechanics or general relativity for reality itself. I feel like an explanation of gravity at this point is a metaphysical question that is outside the realm of science. It may be that science ultimately comes up with an explanation, but it will be in terms of something else and you will naturally be led to ask, what is an explanation of THAT thing?

As for your description "... two objects attract each other ...," this is an outdated, Newtonian way of thinking about gravity. It involves a "spooky" action at a distance. As I understand it, it is generally thought that the best theories are purely local ones. General relativity is the proper local formulation of gravity: masses curve space, and all objects move in "straight" lines (that is, geodesics) through curved space. Newton was right about inertia. There might be more sophisticated ways of understanding gravity in quantum gravity, but that's beyond me.
[Ask HN] (function(){ return new Feedback('The Scholar App'); })();
You clearly deal with this regularly whereas I'm just observing from the sidelines, so I'm happy to be corrected. I extrapolated from the single-task game/home computers of the 80s, where a lot of those other considerations simply didn't exist and hooking into hardware clocks etc. was considered acceptable if it delivered something to the user. You can see the downsides of this with emulators, where some games run unplayably fast unless you use a command-line switch to throttle the emulator speed to the original ~30fps or similar. Sinclair Spectrum games are particularly prone to this. Now I feel old :-)

I didn't realize today's console manufacturers enforced such strict discipline on programmers/publishers; I guess breaking the terms means losing access to the development platform completely?

On a side note, since you're in the profession, why is it that consoles have such small amounts of RAM? IIRC the ps3 has 256mb each of main and GPU RAM, which is less than the (cheap) graphics card in my PC. I'm perplexed as to why one would go with less than a gigabyte, given the low cost of memory.
Cheers - thanks a lot of the link!

Didn't know it was such a common question...
Yet another product that's "promised" to come out. There have been more than enough promised tablets and e-readers that have failed to make it to sale lately. Let's believe it when we see it.

I wish companies would take Apple's approach of shutting up until they have something concrete to show, rather than giving vague announcements of announcements.
It seems kind of pointless to take a patent on something even /you/ think will only become big in 15-20 years...