skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technology Review: A Simple Filter Could Make LCDs More Efficient
I actually thought they bought the building but Jason provides a good explanation.

I really liked the 37 seats.
it'd be super awesome if you could vote for us in the node knockout competition http://nodeknockout.com/teams/saber-tooth-moose-lion

thanks !
How Facebook Places Sent Foursquare Soaring Past 3 Million Users
Indeed, anyone who was read any Borges should know that Instantes wasn't written by him. ;-)
The point of the experiment was to demonstrated how the brand affected how the different beers stood out.

The fact that Guinness stood out was just there to show that without a brand you need to be significantly different (in this case, different tasting) in order to stand out.
Guinness is an unfortunate component to this test. Whereas the other beers may have the same color, taste, and mouthfeel, Guinness would be distinguishable from those on any one of those 3 dimensions. Even if you couldn't distinguish based on taste or texture, the color alone would give it away.

In other words, you would probably guess that you're drinking a Guinness if you happen to see its color. I think that's a significant confounder here.
Why Canadian contest winners have to answer skill testing questions
While the initiative is clearly well-intentioned you're making the same "error" as those who espouse food stamps: anything that can be traded for goods and services can be traded for cash, usually at a deep discount.

Basically if someone wants to get alcohol, drugs or whatever, it doesn't matter what you give them: someone somewhere will exchange what they have for drugs or cash to get drugs.
It's possible but very difficult to find a competent developer to partner with for equity. Especially if you haven't already established a good working relationship with developers through previous jobs. There's so many people in your situation lurking around tech meetups that it's become a bit of a stereotype. Try your best, but it's not easy.

Assuming you won't be able to find a developer to work for equity, you can make a certain amount of progress by hiring contractors. This is hard to get right, especially if you don't know anything about programming or at least writing a detailed specification. Unless you've got a large budget, in which case you should just skip looking for a founder and hire a pro to work as an employee, I'd recommend going the oDesk route, relying on the technical tests to initially evaluate candidates, and hiring multiple people simultaneously to do the same very small trivial task at first - until you determine which ones are good ones. There are some hidden gems out there, but you will waste a lot of time and money on garbage contractors until you find them. This is inevitable.

Your goal is, through your pocketbook and brute force, to get the product far enough along that it begins to generate decent revenue on its own (in which case you use it to hire), looks impressive enough to attract a little bit of angel investment (in which case you use it to hire), or looks impressive enough to persuade a developer to join you as co-founder. (Whether you hire or get a co-founder, the developer will then rewrite all the code your crap contractors put together.)

As inspiration, you may want to look at the recent Mixergy interview with Jason Jacobs, CEO of Runkeeper. I met Jason once, and he's an impressive example of a driven but non-technical founder who's managed to make a lot of progress. But be warned that you'll be doing a lot of pounding your head against the wall and the risk of failure is high.
Whatever. I really like this song. And not 'cos it's named "Fuck you" (i am not native and can't hear this easily), but 'cos of nice music and funny voice =)
This article is a bit of a contradiction. On the one hand, it says:
"Unemployment is chronic in much of the country, but in Silicon Valley, employees have their pick of jobs."

Then on the other hand it says:
"And in four months, the hundreds of resumes, dozens of phone screens, and numerous four-hour meetings with viable candidates yielded no one who fit their criteria."

This tells me that the easy job market is there if you are a star. No so much if you're just 'competent'. But the 'stars' have an easy job market in any industry.

This company has the same problem as the New York Yankees. The Yankees have an opening for .350 hitter and it's very difficult for them to find qualified talent.

Similar problem, but it's worse in Silicon Valley. At least the Yankees will pay what you're worth if you 'fit their criteria'.
Conversely, I would imagine this is why people hate on Bing. They associate it with Microsoft, an 'evil empire', and must figure it is shit search (or whatever negative connotation they have with the company).
> In fact, I'd wager to say they don't even play a role.

As someone wearing black tight skinny jeans, I'd go one step further and say that it plays a very important role: by being 'taboo,' curse words enable adolescent rebellion, and cause kids to use them _more_.

See also smoking, drinking, and drugs.
Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
Anecdote: I've had women bosses in 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked for (not IT shops).

In all cases, IT was a collaboration/support department, subservient to the "men's" departments like sales

And of course the CEO, president or equivalent was a man

However, I think the fact that the #2 person was a woman in all three cases is a win for women.

I wonder if it was subconsciously set up by the leader that way, maybe they feel less threatened by a woman as #2?.

Being in a department that's not in the line of fire hinders the possibility of advancement in the career ladder significantly, I've noticed.
So what about the configuration tool? I've never once needed to use it. What matters is the actual performance of the hardware during actual use. Not liking Catalyst is a stupid reason to not buy damn good performing parts for a very good price.
Yeah, people will either go along with a game plan or game the system itself. But maybe this is a way to structure in some freedom and personal connection that isn't there currently.

The move to electronic benefits from paper food stamps has reduced fraud substantially, and perhaps most significantly reduced the social temptation to game the system. So it seems like there's a similar benefit possible from moving from hard currency panhandling through rechargeable gift cards and public-purchase credit cards.

If a Kiva-ish system is more beneficial than standing out on the street, maybe you give people the freedom to stop structuring their life around panhandling and give them incentives to live more independently.

And these tools could even help provide a system that actually fills the gap between someone just making it in the working world and giving up on it for the more toxic world of panhandling.

But it's true that you are facing the most enormous incentives to game the system imaginable. It requires some really careful and clever reward design. I know it seems a little overenthusiastic, but I keep thinking it would be fascinating if there were a nonprofit that offered game design resources to other nonprofits...
"As it turns out, most beers are pretty much the same, well, with the exception of Guinness. When it comes to taste, the key factor isn’t the craftsmanship or ingredients, but the advertising budget."

As a craft brewer myself, statements like that hurt deep in my soul. Of course mass-produced swill all tastes the same, it all uses the same craftsmanship (not much) and ingredients. It's all the same type of beer (some goofy ass mixture of grains including rice and/or corn, mild hops, and lager yeast brewed at standard lager temperatures).

The comparison to Guinness is ridiculous as well. It's as if they gave people 4 shots of vodka and one of tequila and said "look, all liquor other than tequila tastes the same!"

Throw some real lagers in there and I bet they'd stand out even with the labels removed. Not as far as a stout obviously, but nobody could mistake a Boston Lager for a Budweiser.
Charging 75% commission is nuts - right?
Why should they be "held responsible" to try untested technology?

One thing obvious from the gulf spill, is that recovery technology has not kept pace with deep-water drilling technology. The time-lag involved in development & engineering if left to the free market is a huge externality. We don't want accident recovery to lag further and further behind as oil drilling goes into more extreme and environmentally sensitive environments. (And you know that it will!)

contribute to a general R&D fund or something like that.

They need to do more than they have been.
I'm not sure how Steve was using the term, but "gender" isn't equivalent to "sex" in this sort of discussion.

"Sex" denotes biological differences, while "gender" denotes cultural conventions (which may or may not be directly related to biology).
4. Come up with pithy slogans that will impress your underlings.
I'm not sure exactly what you're taking issue with, but both statements can be equally true at the same time, and I can't read either of them in a way in which one contradicts the other.
Diaspora doesn’t have what it takes to topple Facebook
"If you’re going to compete, you have two choices. The first is to spend a boatload of money on advertising—like Microsoft. The second is to create something so unique and different that people can easily recognize your product—like Guinness."

Guinness also spends boatloads on advertising (here in Ireland they're not that unique as we've got several choices of stout for sale, the main ones being Murphys and Beamish apart from Guinness). I'm sure Guinness also advertise heavily in the US and other markets. So it's incorrect to present this as two choices. Two major advertising campaigns Guinness used in recent months include "Arthur's Day" celebrations and the Guinness ads throughout the decades. The former seems a bit of a gimmick to me, but the latter was interesting IMO as a way of showing how advertising changed over the years.
Ask HN: Rails 2.3 or Rails 3.0?
I will start a new project, I am new to rails, which one should I prefer? I want to try rails 3.0 but I am afraid of lacking useful plug-ins.
Rate My Startup: HQ Scheduler, Enterprise Job Scheduling
We are a boot strapped startup with experience building Job Schedulers. Our scheduler is fast, reliable and easy to integrate with a customers infrastructure. Job Schedulers themselves serve 4 functions:

- Providing a way to organize and store all the processes an organization needs to run.

- Providing complex scheduling based upon time and events such as files existing or other jobs completing.
- Providing a trail of logs for every Job run.

- Providing notification of issues with job execution.

Additionally we are unique in having:

- Easy failover of all components with 0 configuration

- Hybrid system where you can have as many controllers(the piece that dispatches jobs) working together to send jobs to agents(the piece that actually execute the jobs).

- Objects in HQ are relational and reusable. Waste less time on data entry.

- Easy integration with third party applications, open source agent spec coming soon.

So please take a look at our product and our website and let us know what you think. You can freely download the HQ Scheduler. There is also an evaluation License for download.

http://www.hux-software.com
For better or for worse, it isn't that unusual.

https://support.sas.com/opal/external/dm
Duh, you're right, any restaurant would have aluminium foil. I bet the question would surprise them though.
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Agree that the Austrian school is not new. The revolution is that it had been out of favor at most US academic institutions, and he's been trying to bring it back. It's a bit of a story that goes along with people beginning to question the standard story line of the great depression, bias in academia, and failures of purely quantitative approaches. Of course, the whole concept of behavioral econ is a bit of a paradigm shift as well, and the intersection of the "imperfectly rational" actor with business cycle theory is quite useful.
And OCaml has had a time-traveling debugger since forever.
Reducing turbulence through software – “gust suppression” on the Boeing 787
It's not really any more nebulous than coding and debugging.
It doesn't say they stopped doing the workshops for 7 years, it says:

Holding workshops there has been a logistical challenge, because those events mean that the people at Coudal Partners can't work at their own office for a day. That doesn't scale well. We'd like to be able to do a workshop every six weeks.

So it doesn't sound like they stopped at all to me, just that they couldn't hold as many as they wanted.
They should have printed the word. It's critical to understanding the story.

This is the same mistake they made when Cheney said "Fuck yourself." They danced around the word, calling it, "An obscene phrase to describe what he thought Mr. Leahy should do." Readers can only clearly judge the offensiveness of the phrases by seeing them written.

The Washington Post decided to print the word in the Cheney case. I bet they'd seriously consider printing the song title, if they don't decide that pop culture and radio freedom are less newsworthy than vice presidential asides.
That's a good question. But cultures have inertia, so it's likely that even with women forming the majority of the workforce, "masculine" conventions will prevail for a while. This is especially true given that men still tend to hold more positions at the top of the corporate hierarchy.
I don't think we neccesarily disagree about that, it's just that "setting a strategy" by itself means diddly-squat, so giving that as your task description is needlessly vague. "Proactively implement executive paradigms"
Using iPads to Reduce Sumo Corruption?
Due to my wife's medical issues, we are in significant medical debt on the scale of half my annual salary even with my insurance. So, not really. And while we're at it: I really don't want legislation forcing others to foot our medical bills, but it'd be absolutely stellar if we could get rid of the price fixing and collusion between medical service providers and insurance companies.
Val de Loire, Rich Heritage
> Debuggers are common for compiled languages, less common for scripting languages.

First, if your bourne shell scripts have grown so much you need a debugger, you might want to consider there are other issues than the lack of a debugger for the bourne shell.

Second, there are debuggers for bash, zsh and ksh. And probably others many other shells.
I really don't see his point. He says Facebook is too big to fail, and compares it to AOL. Yeah, AOL is still around, but it is no longer seen as a controlling force in the ISP industry. The goal of Diaspora has never been to wipe Facebook off the face (no pun intended) of the Earth - but to stop it from being such a controlling factor in social media. If Diaspora causes Facebook to become as popular as AIM is now (which, for the record - I don't think will happen, at least not just because of Diaspora), then it will have caused far more damage than anyone anticipated.
Is Convertible Debt Preferable to Equity?
I would definitely go with rails 3.0. Most of the plugins you will want for a new project, while being new to rails, will be available in rails 3.0.

There's quite a few of good stuff in 3.0 that makes it a lot easier for new people to get started, lots of improvements to ease usage.
> I'm sure Guinness also advertise heavily in the US and other markets.

Indeed they do, but I'd say it's advertisement to make themselves known at all, not to differentiate themselves. Outside the british isles, there are few Guiness-like beers outside of Guiness itself (or more precisely the others are pretty much unknown to the vast majority of the populations).
The Absolute Most Effective Type of Diet For Losing Belly Fat
Yeah, I thought that too... It might be a past/present kind of thing. Like, at the time the author was in China, he was making $5000/month and now that the article is published it's $5000/day.

Although, $5000/day seems a bit high, so I'm thinking it's a typo.
I'm sorry, but really? It was obvious to me within 5 seconds that I was playing with humans.
The title is pretty bad, but I think you're being a little harsh on the article itself.

I took two things from the article that I felt were useful regardless of industry or desired customers:

. keep an eye out for by-products of your primary business that you can use to add/diversify revenue -- as in the lumber mill/sawdust example

. keep in mind that some pretty unsuspecting things can qualify -- as in 37 signals leveraging office space.

It might help that I've long given up on expecting article content to support, or be supported by, their titles.
So you're saying that the amount of sex that takes place in colleges occurs predominately in the girl's dormroom, as opposed to the boy's?
I've seen Guinness ads plenty here in the US. I also see plenty of ads for other "unique" products. Even if one makes a stand-out product, people still have to know about it.
You say you don't have a programming bone in your body. That might be true, but I'd suggest you at least try to learn some programming basics. Best route for that that I can recommend would be the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://railstutorial.org/book).
Back in college, I used to help out with a friend's radio show. It was a late night heavy metal show, once a week. One of the songs we liked to play was by a thrash band called "Overkill", a song entitled "Fuck You" [1].

The funny thing was that while we were allowed to play the song itself, we were not allowed to announce its name.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAkaN3-v01A
HPC benchmarks with Chapel on Cray XT4
Can't agree more with this point: If you create a great culture (a fun work environment filled with people who are high performers and who care about their work and their impact on the world) you will be able to attract and retain better people who will be much more engaged and productive and create a much more financially successful company.
Facebook and the New Age of Privacy
Ask HN: My cofounder disappeared.  What should I do?
About six months ago I was contacted by a HN member who had a decent startup idea, good design skills, but no programming skills. We decided to work together to create a dating website that focused around the concept of posting a date idea, then seeing who might want to join you for that date. In this way the site matches people based on what they want to do, not who they are.

To make a long story shorter, the idea grew and morphed, as we went through design revisions and code refactoring. The original idea of the dating site was broadened into a more general event broadcasting site, like Twitter but specifically for parties, concerts, and other events. I also came up with a few other ideas (they key ones that make the web app stand out) that I won't give away.

But now my cofounder appears to have disappeared. We communicated by email and chat, and all I know of his physical location was that he lived in the Middle East. I haven't heard from him in long enough that it seems likely that he had an accident or some other unfortunate circumstance.

So I'm left wondering what I should do. Should I try to replace him? Might there be legal issues if I do so? We never wrote up a serious contract, just an informal email in which we decided in favor of a 49%/51% division, with me holding 51%.

In the absence of my cofounder I have completely changed the design, and have reworked the site's entire focus. At this point there is literally no relation to the original idea of the dating site.

Without giving away all the details that make my startup idea special, the web app is now focused on bands and their fans, allowing bands to broadcast news and gig schedules, and allowing fans to follow bands and broadcast which gigs/concerts they will attend.

There is really nothing left of the disappearing cofounder's original idea, and all that is left of his original design is the logo.

So to summarize the situation I am in: I have a great startup idea (All ingredients of which are mine, but could possibly be considered derivative of the idea of a disappeared cofounder).

What I need is a cofounder who can help with some design issues, put together a new logo, and who also has good marketing skills. Programming skills would be an added bonus. Primarily what I need is a designer and marketer.

This is an ask HN post so here are my questions:

Is there anything I should do about the original disappearing cofounder?
Could there be legal issues with replacing the cofounder even though I have changed the startup's basic principles completely and never had a serious contract with the cofounder?
If you have applicable skills, would you like to be my new cofounder, or do you know someone who might?
While you are correct, Max Klein has come under fire for credibility issues on HN as of recent. I think that's the commenter's underlying question. Is this just another one of Max's "stories." However, it does seem pretty legit, as it's not that far fetched.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611165
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039104
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600782
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353307
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353181
We held a variety of workshops over the last 7 years, but we had to rent out a separate space each time. Renting out a space was expensive, more complicated than we'd like, and just a general hassle. Having our own space does away with all those negatives.
Ask HN: How does a hacker balance work/personal life?
Sometimes I feel I overwork, sometimes that I underwork, how many hours a week do you usually work? how many hours do you dedicate to yourself/family?

Any comments appreciated.
Lots of small, easily replaceable robots are cheaper than a few giant robots (and probably easier to develop; certainly cheaper). Also, when one breaks it doesn't need to be replaced, whereas with a larger, more expensive one it's harder to just let it die. Low-cost is key for anything which is entirely robotic. They also won't disrupt anything by being massive.

As far as capacity goes, "The nanomaterial, patented at MIT, can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil." [1] I wouldn't call it vaporware, at least not yet; it's still being tested and developed, so it's a prototype. Too early to say that nothing will ever come of it. The bit about cleaning it up in a month, on the other hand, is certainly vapor, or at least exaggeration. Maybe it would work with a really bit swarm, but that's less likely until they can prove that it works really well.

[1] http://senseable.mit.edu/seaswarm/
This is a poorly titled article, very typical of Inc. Magazine. It should more properly have been titled "The Truth About Your Company's Biggest Cost Center" or "How to Turn Cost into Profit". When someone refers to "Real Estate", it usually implies ownership and 37sig does not own any real estate. (One owns real estate and rents/leases space.)

The remainder of the article had good advice and was well written.
For that to work properly, the CEOs goals have to be aligned with the companies goals in the first place. Like founder-CEO, not like Bank-CEO with no interest in long-term outlook of the enterprise.
I half expected a response like this, but I decided to let it run as is.
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