skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody's weird when compared to everyone else. The only comparison you can do is with a mean or an average. Most will not be sitting at the mean.

Yes, we live so strangely. Thats why everybody is abandoning technology so they go back to digging for gourds.

Faster, better, cheaper, wealthier. Yeah its strange. And weird means bad, right? But wouldn't any improvement at all be unusual?

Bad, bad innovators!

And to think, for a second there, we were under the mistaken impression that to use one's mind and to succeed at it was the birthright of every human.
The Hardest Adjustment To Self Employment
There was an old game "kind of" like this. It had EVERY character imaginable; like a Waffle, DBZ, Street Fighters, Pirates, Ninjas, EVERYTHING. I'll find the name and post it if anyone is interested.

I think it would be more appealing if you let the people control their characters. The problem with this is it will require more CPU work on your part- expensive for a start up. You could have them scan the characters in and use a "wire-frame", like the use in art, to lay out the different body parts. You could even use some OCR to see it the character had legs or if it is on some kind of "tracks".

Awesome art, awesome idea, can't wait to see a working version.

P.S. RazaBlaza is too powerful

Edit: About the wire framing and OCR. Instead, to make your life easier, you could have your own custom character creator. Kind of defeats the purpose of bringing your drawings to life, but hell of a lot easier.
Puma Panigale II Ducati Men Shoes White Red Black
It's hard to tell if you're joking, but let's assume that you are not.

Before thinking about design, you MUST fix every typo and grammatical error on your page. I counted nine errors, several of which are repeated over and over again.
Bonobos, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans are apes. Apes are very closely related to humans.

Capuchins, marmosets, tamarins, baboons, and a host of other species are monkeys. Monkeys are more distantly related to humans.

English and French are both imprecise languages. In formal classification, monkeys, apes, and humans are all primates. Furthermore, they are all of suborder Haplorrhini, infraorder Simiiformes. "New world monkeys" are of parvorder Platyrrhini, "old world monkeys", apes, and humans are of parvorder Catarrhini. Old world monkeys are within superfamily Cercopithecoidea, apes and humans are within superfamily Hominoidea.

If you wanted to map the taxonomy to English, you'd probably say Platyrrhini and Cercopithecoidea are monkeys, while Hominoidea are apes. This implies that humans are apes, which is, at least scientifically, fairly accurate. Humans are not, however, monkeys.
Why working at home is both awesome and horrible - The Oatmeal
Easy and simple to use IS a feature, though. All the customizability goes unused by 99% of the population. Apple knows this.
I hate Bidden. Uhh-hut, Uhh hut. Fuck you.

God says...
plenteous proceedeth Ye functions assistance assume mutable
uncorruptness yields should Difficulty duty Mars raged
fig Drunkard Lo psalm overhastily Lastly calledst enmities
weeping fixedly friend Take twelve lap solemnities gliding
gentle suffers twinkling groves prop cruelty formless
detected value paths signified Ignorant Darkness leave
languages astonishment impressions regenerated walks waking
dreading indigested senses assaying gate editing dwelleth
cast literary renderest possesses followeth insatiate
authors But villa voluptuousness wash recourse Employee
shod retained brethren hid subtile equivalent Loving BOOK
damage chooses thriven embittered begun examiner early
possessest physician downward unpassable gratuitous some
hushed Omnipotent Nevertheless accept useth fearing monument
calculation copy tender pear healthy rent
What Can We Learn from Nintendo?
Saying 'no' to making it more socially acceptable for a man to be a stay-at-home dad, and then going on about how 'not everyone can do X' seems to make the following statement indirectly:

Only men are capable of (starting up a company | working at a senior
level | working at a technical level). There are plenty of people who
could never achieve that level of competence (namely women), they
can stay at home.

Unless the poster is making that (very sexist) statement, then I fail to see how he/she is in disagreement with the poster they were responding to. Saying that it shouldn't be socially acceptable for people with great skills to let them languish by becoming a stay-at-home dad is not the same as saying that it should not be socially acceptable at all for a man to be a stay-at-home dad. [ Though in general, the idea that society should pressure people to make decisions that are only in society's best short-term interests. Who's to say that someone working at the 'senior level' is making a larger contribution to society then someone that stays at home to raise the next generation? ]
agree with philwelch. Apple's reputation for good marketing is a very recent phenomenon. As someone who has followed apple for a long time, in the 90's I recall them being mocked for their crappy marketing.
> Ive talks about this.

..in Gary Hustwit's documentary "Objectified", for those interested in exposure to more sweet, reality-distorting Ive radiation. Recommended viewing.
It's interesting to note that Orwell takes a contrary viewpoint: http://www.orwelltoday.com/orwellwaryoungwhy.shtml

"Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings, however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by a war leaves a surplus of women, the enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as important, biologically, as female ones."
There's a pretty clear difference between a report of numbers and a postion that the voluntary activities of a student are equivalent to someone who's been trafficked.
Thanks alot for the input. Is the game your thinking of MUGEN? it was an old school open source fighting game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.G.E.N
Rails is a framework. The equivalent on AppEngine would be django (Python) or J2EE (Java).

So, no. Don't make you framework decision based on what your platform provider has to offer. Do it the other way. Make a decision on your framework, then choose a provider.

If the question is provider vs. own hosting? There is nothing wrong with using a paas-provider for a startup. Make sure there is no lock-in.
I can't make up my mind about the GPS issue. Like yourself I find it extremely intrusive, and I do have a problem with the idea that they can attach it to your car - are you really 'secure...in your [] effects' under the 4th amendment if the police can mess with your stuff in this fashion?

On the other hand, we accept the reality that the police often stake out suspected criminals to observe where they go,, who they meet etc. So if a police officer was watching someone's house from across the street, watched the resident emerge and drive away in his car, and followed the suspected person with a tail car or a police helicopter, we wouldn't find anything particularly unusual about it; when you're out in public you're subject to being observed by law enforcement as well as everyone else.

So in that sense, the GPS is doing nothing more than automating what would previously have required a team of undercover officers to observe - just another instance of modern technology creep. But it means we now gather information on people where we might not have been willing to commit the resources before unless it was serious enough. And there's the issue of where the the line between observation and interference is.
Analysts are like scouts for VC firms - they're assigned or decide on a vertical, then talk to as many companies as they can in that vertical.

If the analyst likes what he hears you may get a shot at the partners who actually make decisions.

He'll ask as many probing questions as he can to try to really understand your business. Keep in mind that he likely will be talking to everybody in your space and may well be funding a competitor. Don't let the excitement of talking to a VC lead to sharing information you'd prefer to keep confidential.

My advice is:

- Ask plenty of questions up front: what exactly is his interest, are they actively looking to invest in this space, what is their typical investment profile, who else are they talking to, how did they find you, what made them interested in you, and so forth.

- Keep it brief. Give enough to show you are serious and have real traction, but don't get overexcited and go overboard.

- Spend as much time showing why your team is worth investing in as you do showing off your business. Early stage investing is mostly about team, so do your best to show you're dependable, committed, and get things done.

- Your goal is to get a meeting with a partner. The person you're talking to is not a decision maker, so all you want from this conversation is to get another conversation with one of the decision makers.

Good luck, and if want to chat further leave an address of some sort and I'll get in touch.
In ancient history there were periods when the standard was to kill all the men, and take the women and children as slaves. In that situation adult male fatalities of close to 100% were quite possible.

In more recent history, during WW II the Soviet Union had an army with 34,401,807 men. The official tally was 8,668,400 dead from various causes. Assuming that this military included all men of draftable age (which is basically correct), about a quarter of men in that generation died. Yet since those losses were born mostly among men (the Soviet Union lost many civilians as well, it was a bloody war), the reproductive capacity of the society was not impacted nearly as badly as their population was.
Hmm,

It's Orwell so it's well written.

But even Orwell needs references to back up this argument.
I'm in Japan and can see it. However, I also have a Google Voice number which was automatically associated with it. I suspect that may take precedence over geographic location
Google Voice effectively has this feature in the form of "block call".
Full-sized, yes, but you'll probably lose a significant amount of diversity. Half of the Y-chromosomes in the population will be eliminated. I would imagine this would cut down the genetic variation significantly.
Brave New World, 1984, The Metamorphosis, The Stranger, and...possibly Les Miserables if you have A LOT of free time.
How do I become a data scientist?
Yeah, Apple's 90's marketing was ass. But I loved every last Mac I owned during that decade.

Apple had overall high product quality but their focus was lacking and they weren't terribly ballsy. They had a distinct feeling of running on the fumes of the Mac's initial success. But it was (and is) a sufficiently great product that those fumes informed an OS that, from a user perspective, remained the best. Mac OS got long in the tooth, but I'd still take it over Win95/98/NT any day.
I dropped everything and went to a tennis academy for high school when I realized I was lucky enough to live have the family to support me financially, and where I lived wasn't a great place to achieve whatever potential I had.

After going to the academy for two years and getting consistently better, I started hearing more and more from people about my "potential", although I wasn't one of the "stars" who would go on to make great money playing professional tennis.

I had finished high school that year, and instead of going to college I decided to take a year off and continue playing international tournaments on the junior circuit. I had done decent and was in the top 1000 worldwide, but wanted to really see how I could do. I had the rest of the year in eligibility (it was June when I graduated, and you can play until the year you turned 19, which started the next January), so I packed my bags and played something like 25 tournaments that fall in a number of different countries.

I did poorly. I made it inside the top 650 or so, far from my goal or realizing any potential I thought I had. It seemed that I just didn't have quite the talent necessary to make it, nor do anything noteworthy with my tennis.

This was disheartening, but I had six more months before I would have to go off to college while keeping full eligibility, so it seemed like my best bet was to practice- with a new perspective that I didn't quite have years earlier.

So this time I got a private coach along with the normal academy practices. Every afternoon when everyone else was in school, we'd keep working. I figured that even though I wasn't a natural talent like some of those guys, a few hours' edge on them every day would help my case. My coach was great, super intense and helped push me when I was tired. I hit my physical capacity a few times and had to take a day or afternoon off every once in a while, but the fact that I was doing more than those supposedly untouchable natural talents was ACTUALLY working. I was noticeably better, a "friggin' moose on the court" as my coach would say, and I started really competing with and even beating some of the guys ranked in the top 100.

I think too few people really work very, very hard, which is what's required to make up for natural talent. This causes the huge amount of naysayers, who never see anyone with little talent exceed expectation. Because of that, too few of the untalented work hard. It's a vicious cycle.
The offer is made only once and the other party is aware of the game.
It's still a Nobel prize in economics. John Carmack made his name writing 3D games, but if he was standing behind me while I was writing some web code and had some ideas for me, I wouldn't tell him to piss off because he's a game programmer.
Points (reputation) and badges that are earned through various ways in interacting with the site
Ask HN: How can I raise a million bucks in less than 6 months?
Not talking about angel inverstors/vc capital. Want to be able to sell something(legal) to raise cash. Any ideas would be appreciated.

The reason I want to raise that amount is to buy a company going bankrupt with lots of assets(IP).
WEIRD stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic", which explains the capitalization.
I can't think of a more worthy successor. Brilliant, if true.

The power multiplier that Jobs brings to the company comes from two things: his uncompromising sense of good taste and his idealism for the role of technology in our lives.

The things that Jonathan Ive builds are reflections of his own deep commitment to those values. He gets it.
I do not own an iPhone, or any type of phone for that matter, and well I can't tell enough about your app to persuade me into purchasing it; if I had one. Apps are simple-esc. It would be very easy for you to take that image to the right(screen shot) and turn it into a look-a-like "demo".

People who are visiting your site can chat back and forth, and kind of get a feel for what it's all about. Your app is all about being in the same place at the same time? Show it off.

You commercial also bugs me. It seems so sad, even the humorous parts bum me out. At least have them meet or someone say hi. You could do another, much shorter version, of some college kids in the quad. Have one IM another, IM another and get a big group together having a party, tossing a Frisbee, playing D&D. You could even go the more adult version and have someone getting laid; sex sells big time, think of your target audience.

Over all I think the idea is amazing. It's like an IRL ChatRoulette. I can see this getting popular without any help. Good luck and great job.
3. Are our brains really 'distorted' or just different? Who is to say what is the better/natural/whatever way of thinking?

In this case there is a clear logical answer.

4. I found it extremely annoying that they capitalized the word 'weird' everywhere, even in quotes from experts.

They do this because they've defined WEIRD to mean something specific and they want to make it clear that they're not using the dictionary definition of the word.
Who Creates Jobs? Small vs Large vs Young
OK--he does, in fact, use the word "prediction", but on the same token, he's still fairly open about his predictions being probabilistic in nature, and about the predictions changing over time as more evidence is presented.

But you're going to have to do better than pounce on my word choice if you want to prove your point.
From the outside, it seems that Google is trying to eat a piece from Facebook's lunch, not to innovate per se.

There are reports that say that a group of people joined Facebook just to play games (and they see everything else that FB offers as 'frivolous' extra, go figure). If Google can tap into that market, it could finally get Google Checkout to fly, which is a big step for Google.
I also think releasing this to the other iGeneration of products would be nice, however:

For iPod touch with Maps, the Maps application provides your approximate location using information based on your proximity to known Wi-Fi networks (when on and available). The more accurate the available information, the smaller the circle identifying your position on the map. The feature is not available in all areas. Known Wi-Fi networks are predominantly in urban areas. In order to provide your location, data is collected in a form that does not personally identify you. If you do not want such data collected, do not enable the feature. Not enabling the feature will not impact the functionality of your iPod touch.[1]

Google dishes out money to have people drive around all day and take pictures. Hell, I'll walk around all day with a laptop and gps dongle to log wifi spots.

The iP(ad)ods do not have the GPS like the phone. That is the only issue I see for releasing it for them. Maybe a zipcode/area select feature would come in handy? Sort of like Facebook groups but for specific locations. You could use YellowBook/Google Maps/Mapquest/Pay Service to help provide the business data for that area.

[1] http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/specs.html
I've always liked to imagine Jobs had some influence on
WALL-E's EVE. It was a Pixar movie, after all...

At some part in the move WALL-E reboots. Guess what sound did it make then ;)
There's a bigger problem than only using "WEIRD" people in experiments; most experiments I've seen seem to substitute college students for all of humanity! I'm pretty sure half our understanding of Psychology really only applies to 20-year-old students, not to all of humanity! :)
Quora's job postings set a very high bar for applicants: http://www.quora.com/jobs
Looking at what they say they can get recorded by a world class symphony for $10k, it sounds like the musicians don't make much money. I would have thought classical musicians good enough to win a spot in a top symphony would make a lot (not pop star level, of course, but better than I typical middle class worker).
"Their open source offerings are loss leaders intended to stimulate enterprise sales. Mission critical systems get built on the open source software, and then managers can elect to buy enterprise features and support from the vendors."

It's even simpler than that. They give away the source and simply sell the support contracts, to both big and small customers (Red Hat does quite a bit of small-mid business sales).

But, to go even smaller than Red Hat, there _is_ value to open sourcing your "crown jewels", and making it up in other ways.

Wordpress and Digium (Asterisk VOIP developer) are two off the top of the head that profit very well from their completely open-source core competencies. MySQL did so well they were bought by Sun (now Oracle) for US$1 Billion, and Trolltech makes about US$30 Million for Nokia marketing Qt toolkit for embedded, which is a niche of a niche.

There are others out there that are sustaining a business based solely on open source software, such as Jaspersoft and SugarCRM. Hell, Motorola just bought that company that makes Cappuccino just yesterday, so there has to be some value to it, for sure.
Awesome feedback.

- I understand your point about Ted not having a value proposition! Ted does benefit from using the service but as you said the text is misleading.

- I'm thinking of getting someone off craigslist that can do the voiceover better than myself for cheap.

- Let me review the "placeholder text" and make sure all of it conveys something.

- That is a small gripe but this is the type of feedback I was hoping for.

- It's my 3rd screencast and each time it takes me about an hour because I mess up over and over. I realized that I should lay an audio track over the video because doing both things at the same time is difficult for me. Or my craigslist idea above :).

Thanks again!
Ask HN: How can I raise 1 million backs in less than 6 months?
No VCs/Angels, want to be able to sell something to raise money to buy a bankrupt company with lots of assets (IP)
I assume he means although the stigma is much less than it once used to be, it's not especially culturally acceptable for a woman to conceive a child from a man who isn't her life partner. Most women who do, do so by accident.

Also, while the man is out at war, the woman usually won't be procreating with anyone else until the man dies. The news of his death will probably affect her badly, and procreation is probably the last thing on her mind at least for a while (after which she may be too old).

But yes, hard data would be even better.
The Y chromosome doesn't carry much genetic information. For the most part it just defers to the X chromosome's version of the data, which is why recessive genetic disorders hosted on the X chromosome are more common in men. (e.g. red/green colour blindness, haemophilia, etc.)
How too frequent and too long are your newsletters
That's not cheap at all! I use JustVoip where landlines to most of the countries are free (after you charge your credit) and mobiles are less than half this amount.

http://www.justvoip.com/en/calling-rates.html
And a direct link to the part of Objectified where Ive is talking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU

That interview for sure shows passion and obsession for details. It gives an impression that Ive is one of the greatest industrial designers of our time partly because his obsession and understanding of manufacturing processes. He knows the limitations and possibilities of his tools.
Unix scripting always amazes me. Every time I read a script or a blog post about it I learn something new.

After all these years using Linux, I don't remember ever noticing input redirection.
It is obviously not your concern if somebody else wants to donate for a startup or not. If you don't want to, you will not be forced to. So, why bother?
The evolutionary processes that got us to where we are were operating during a time when we did breed like animals because we were animals. So I don't know that Orwell's is a contrary viewpoint. It's possible to hold the view that male and female lives are just as important biologically now, while acknowledging that that is only a relatively recent development.
Why did you choose those particular quotes? Are you saying that their tax exmpet status should be revoked because a few of their students are arrogant? While I agree with you that maybe they don't deserve tax exemption attacking the institution based on the behavior of a few students is just spiteful.
Can you imagine a left-aligned dock?

You don't have to imagine it:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start ;
killall Dock

And yes, it does look horrible. On the other hand, one that stretched across the whole screen (even with empty space) wouldn't look so bad, I think.

I'll concede that the current model is more aesthetically pleasing, if less efficient.
Also if machine is on, but display is off, it just glows constantly to let you know it's awake :)