skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Do you have an argument/explanation for this? Also, why are the quant systems necessarily betting against each other?"

The firms with the good models in the system will tend to keep prices near their optimal values by trading amongst each other so when the dumber investor makes his trades he will get near these prices. It's like in the allegory when the lines are at their optimal because there are enough individuals with knowledge of the fast line, a person that doesn't know about the fast line picking at random will get some benefits because the line lengths are already optimized.

"Would you use the same argument to conclude that the space of internet startups will shrink?"
As an example, consider the bigger gaming firms which now have difficulty competing in the mobile gaming market because the whole process has become too efficient for firms that are capital intensive. On the customer's side of things, they get to chose from a huge library of games most costing less than the price of a cappuccino. More games for less money, that's market efficiency.

I guess you could say that if the investment opportunities grow as a whole, the quant market could grow with it but it should shrink relative to it as it gets more competitive.

Also, what yummyfajitas said.
I'd be more impressed if Ray Kurzweil's AI responded to it.
Put this on the list of the reruns that should be documented somewhere. Bonus points: here's a modern day picture of #13

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
I remember the same situation around those days: everyone wanted to get a database behind their site, but MySQL felt like you were running with scissors. It was easy to sell Oracle to clients then despite the $5k+ cost. Oracle's sales cycle may been protecting them until now, but they must realize what will happen when they abandon their strong technical underpinnings.
Advice from America's Worst Mom
Some businessmen feel obligated to 'give back.' Who says they've taken anything?
Facebook: The Slightly Abusive Best Friend I Just Can’t Quit (Yet)
Actually, I think this sort of infrastructure software may be the one area where it's more important to have good pricing than good support, precisely because the usage scales so large.

For example, take credit card processors: if a $50mil/year company has a choice between a payment gateway that charges 1.9% and one that charges 2.1%, they'll put up with a LOT of poor documentation, bad API design, and bad support to use the 1.9% company instead--that price savings is $100k a year, enough to hire a great engineer to deal with the bullshit.

Similarly, if you have a choice between an infrastructure company that charges you $300k a year vs. one that's $100k a year, a $200k different buys you a lot of "in house support".

When things scale big, pricing really matters.
I didn't know there was a Niman Ranch backlash; I thought it was just Bill.

I agree that different issues relate to different degrees to each other. But locavorism is advocacy of a deeply different structure for the entire food supply chain, and that does relate to every other food issue. If we're going to restructure the whole food supply chain, we should focus on issues that really matter, like whether the resulting structure is just and resilient, not on the flavor of the resulting veal.

Edit: although of course your personal locavorism may not be any kind of advocacy at all, which would explain your puzzlement at political issues being raised.
Translation/i18n service for .po files with an API?
We're in the process of translating our website which uses gettext strings and .po resource files for the UI element text. We're a fairly fast-moving startup, so we frequently deploy and add new strings.

So we're looking for a way to automate the process: an API where we can upload our new .po, humans translate it, then we get a callback which tells us the translated strings are ready and we make another API call to get the translated .po.

Anybody know of such a service, or have any suggestions?

We've looked at ICanLocalize, but its API is currently limited to documents (doesn't support strings). We've also looked at myGengo, which is very documented-oriented, and their Strings product is nice but doesn't link with the translators.
I get the distinction, and its a fair one. Although, I don't get how snippets could be useful. Especially in C++. It seems like for almost anything interesting I'm going to want a dependency on the standard library or Boost or the CRT.

I could imagine some snippets that don't take any dependencies, but they are pretty few and far between. Do you have pointers to some of the more interesting snippets he's posted?
> For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...

The people that score the best on games are the ones not playing them.

And plenty of games are games of skill and not a good way to measure anything other than their reaction speed to visual stimuli.
As an example: What "state" that makes sense of the genome is encoded in, say, mitochondria?

What "state" that makes sense of the human genome is stored in, say, symbiotic bacteria that we host?

Does that make sense to you?
Sad :(

I was looking forward to catting for llamas.
http://blog.hotpotato.com/post/982892868/weve-moved-to-faceb...

that's what they say in their blog about it. No new registrations, a path to download your data, and shut down in about a month.
Lol...just watched one, its was funny. I think its more like we don't know what will make us laugh sometimes. I don't consider this bad taste, look at Napolean Dynamite, i really hated it but i have friends that loved it and it is now one of those cult movies. I would say that there is no accounting for the extremes of taste.

That being said i will not be tuning in to the annoying little orange again.
My personal favourite is "rm -rf * .swp" instead of "rm -rf *.swp" or such.
Notifo (YC W10) Launches New Site and Mac Growl Client
Which website did you used ?
I understand these are individual photos being merged but it's a little jarring.
I started a new LLC for some side projects and setup my Chase bank account with InDinero.

I'm trying not to spend much money (only $7 for our GitHub account so far) but it's looking like a very solid product. I've already recommended it to a couple other business owners.

I don't know if this is a crowded space, but I think this is one of the better recent YC companies in terms of potential (IMO).
[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Does this really seem so hard to believe?

I'm one of the developers for a certain popular online video game. One time, I posted my personal email to the game's forums... it was along the lines of "If you happen to reproduce [certain really hard to reproduce problem], please type [console command] and send the results to [email address]". That kind of thing.

Well, one of the fans managed to trace my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my hacker news comments, then started copy-pasting random things I had written from HN to the game's IRC channel. I didn't really mind... it was just very weird.

But what if I were in an alternate reality, and I had said some really insane things on my HN account, like, say, C/C++ really isn't that terrible? You know, something absolutely crazy. Then an employer traced my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my insane comments. Now a potential employer has another data point about whether to hire me, one that I didn't necessarily want him to have.

So I can see why it would potentially it would potentially be very useful to have a mechanism to very easily legally change your name. I've never looked into how to do that, since I have no reason to, but I assume it's probably difficult, or doesn't catch everything, or causes you headaches down the road, etc.
Just to give another example for a Zencoder use case (although we're definitely small fry to Zencoder): one of our clients is an acting agency representing a small number (<50) of actors. Every actor has at least one showreel to be shown on the agency's website and they come in all formats.

Rather than setting up ffmpeg and dealing with the errors it can throw up, we just set up the upload form and Zencoder takes care of all the format conversions for us. If Zencoder can't decode it, it's safe to tell the client that the file is broken.
The problem is voice. What are you using for VOIP calls?
There are certain social dynamics that have grown up around this variety of single-thread-per-post forum: discussion is channeled into essentially one discussion per post (you start a new post if you want to fork it); threads are "bumped" when someone replies and the expectation is that it's a reply to the main thread of conversation; the pagination encourages discussion to move on (in a 50-page thread, you don't normally belatedly reply to something on page 8, unless you have a good reason for it); etc. Threaded discussions are very different in style imo, and have less of a "conversation" feel.

I tend to prefer threaded overall, but there are some non-threaded forums I'm on where I don't think the community would work as well with threaded. For example, I don't think the SomethingAwful forums would work well at all as a Slashdot-style (K5-style, HN-style, reddit-style) threaded forum. Actually, I think some parts of reddit would work better with unthreaded; there's often a sort of urban-sprawl feel to the thread branching there.
The Denver Post had a similarly interesting series of color photos taken during the Great Depression a couple of months ago: http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/07/26/captured-ame....

They (unlike many of these) actually do feel like they were taken a long time ago, but they're excellent pictures and well-worth looking at if this kind of thing interests you.
John Mellencamp lambasts iPod, compares Internet to Atom Bomb
During my enterprise time, I was a contractor at a BFE, and they did a pretty good job of diverse hiring by many measures. However, once people started, there was no room for diversity of thinking.

So diversity in hiring, no diversity in thinking.
I found "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.", a lot more creepy than the statements about privacy.

I'm not so worried about what they know about me, but I am very concerned that Schmidt thinks Google should try to tell me what to do next.
lesson: be very very cute and/or funny and/or creative -- ideally all three; now record yourself and post to YT; profit!
My marquee move is to shut down the ethernet interface of a box I'm SSHed into.
I'm sure how to express it, but this information could be disruptive in a fairly serious way. The whole purity of the white Greek statues sort of connects to the modern minimalist aesthetic. I think the way the statuary has been presented to us in popular culture and in general education in the US has given us a sense of the Greeks that is subtly changed by this realization that they weren't what we thought of them as. At least many of us.

Greek art may be less like the Miro in the Guggenheim and more like the mural in the barrio. And as the truth spreads that their art was in many ways closer to what white Americans think of as "immigrant" art, it will probably slightly help with multiculturism. And influence design.

And as StavrosK appropriately snarked, "Pity the ancients didn't share our fashion sense, eh." Yes, and I think there was/is a pretty strong myth that they did.
You can't vote in any democracy if you aren't a member. In publicly traded companies, membership is based on ownership. Ownership will cost you $461. If you are not going to contribute to the company, why should you have a vote in its policies?
>> directly proportional

Inversely.
Another Real Estate Listing website... what do you think?
I am trying to find out if the world needs another website for real estate listings, of course it will be better than the current ones! I appreciate the feedback about this being a good idea or something that totally sucks! thanks!
the amount of "niche" hilarious/awesome/interesting video on YT and other video sites is a huge factor (along with blogs and HN/Reddit-like sites) why I don't watch traditional TV anymore. It tends to be better, I'm not forced to watch ads, it tends to be edgier/uncensored, it's more personal and interactive, and it's also more asynchronous and on-demand, easier to time-shift, place-shift and device-shift to suit the moment.
Someone did, above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621594
Ever thought of going in to poetry?
I would disagree a little.

I have been in several startups, and a couple of projects in not-large companies. Much of this time it was a struggle not to be doing the project all the time.

The things that we were working on I found seriously personally exciting, and in fact, the most recent one, my advisor in the effort all but forced me to keep "reasonable" hours. Reasonable converged on 12 hours.
That's like saying only 1 in n people have food, shelter and education. The ones that do have this property are likely to be with their peers (or close), as are the ones that don't.
I think it's worth noting that someone who develops an eating disorder like anorexia is mostly hurting themselves through emotional distress and physical damage to their body. The emotional pain their friends and family experience when such a disorder takes hold of a loved one is part of the situation as well.

When someone pursues the goal of becoming ridiculously rich they get into the position of being able to inflict great financial and emotional pain on a much larger number of people. The Enron executives who contributed to the destruction of many people's pensions and heads of state who siphon government funds to support their royal lifestyles while their citizens starve are two prime examples.

I'm not trying to trivialize eating disorders nor am I saying that pursuit of wealth is inherently bad, but history has numerous examples of how greed can cause people to carry out extremely inhumane actions that affect large numbers of other people.
Good point. Since I read Graham's article I've found myself often saying, "I don't want this at the top of my mind." The things that sneak up there are usually strongly emotion-based.

Clarifying and writing things down is also a way to clear them from your mind. S, the mnemonicist Luria described, had trouble forgetting so he would write things down so he could discard them.
Could you tell us at what stage the startup is? I.e. is there already code? One or more technical co-founders you're going to be working with?
I recently flashed my HTC phone to stock Android 2.2 and I couldn't agree more. It's hard to point to any single major flaw of HTC Sense it's just all the little things that add up. At some point I'd like to do a screenshot comparison. The biggest areas of improvement in AOSP are Dialer, Music and Mail (which happen to be my most frequently used applications)
What Competitors To Include In The Competitors List ...
I am looking forward to apply in next round of Y-combinator program.

The product I am working on doesn’t have any direct competitor but there are many indirect competitors. The product I am working on would drastically reduce app developer's time to bring their products into market. Companies would be able to eliminate 3-4 people's work and would save about 300-500K per year.

Indirect competitors don’t have similar product and don’t improve developer’s productivity at all. But developers can still use competitor’s product and add all remaining missing functionality themselves by adding 3-4 more resources.

Whenever someone asks about competitors, would you:
1. Name these indirect competitors and explain why we are different and good?
2. Simply say no competitors at all.

I would like to get some feedback about how would you go about it?

Thanks,
inDinero is a cool idea. One thing I've wondered after seeing it - why the focus on projecting future cash flows?

To me the killer app is making financial statements for businesses easy. Simplify the complex process of getting a good income sheet and balance statement each month.

Does anyone else feel like the focus on projecting is a distraction from the real value of the product?

It could just be me as a programmer not trusting the projection, or finding little value in it, because I know it's based on limited information. For example, if I know I'm going to buy $5k worth of ads tomorrow, and I know inDinero has no way of knowing this yet (because it's just an idea in my head), then the projection is wrong. What do you think?
except he was being paid a monthly salary and cashing checks which didn't bounce -- those are a form of documentation. Not to say I don't think he got screwed, because it sounds like he did. but i disagree that he necessarily owned all the code he wrote. because he was getting paid cash regularly for it.
Amazing story. I salute you for going through it. Toshiba used to sell CNC milling machines to the Soviets back in the 80's to make very quiet submarine propellers. I wonder whether your version were just a smaller scale. If Fred had played his hand right, he could have made out a lot more.
Absolutely amazing how fast the turnaround times for acceptance/refusal are, 2 weeks!

Also, this page is in English and it says you don't need to know Spanish in the FAQ but the linked form for a visum is in Spanish only.

From the FAQ: "During your 6 to 12 month stay entrepreneurs should seek to achieve the goals stated on their proposed action plan. We will be monitoring and helping you to accomplish those goals."

So this is a temporary situation, not a permanent one!

PDF with average salaries:

http://www.corfo.cl/startupchile/download/Avg_Salaries_USD.p...
Rotating Solar House Generates Five Times The Energy It Consumes
where are you seeing the $30 unlimited data plan?
More info about photographer and his process:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky

His process used a camera that took a series of three monochrome pictures in sequence, each through a different-coloured filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly coloured light, it was possible to reconstruct the original colour scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
If you are ever in LA again I would go by CoLoft. It is the first co-working space ever in LA and has about 40 startups all working in the same space.

It's the first time LA's ever had a real sense of community and I felt the vibe changing for the better.
Something the government would ask Google for when they are investigating you for the illegal act that they suspect you of. If you kill someone, and your recent Google searches are "how to kill someone", then that's not going to look good.

That's not Google's fault. They don't want to leak that information to the government; they have to. So if you don't want Google to leak that information, don't type it into Google. Use Tor, or figure out how to kill someone yourself.

Or, as Schmidt advises, don't kill anyone.
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/
The Hacker Jargon page would probably be the best index of the so called "classics", although it hasn't been updated in years.
Nobody uses the stock Mail app, use K9.

I like the dialer. I wish you could cut-n-paste the phone number from the missed calls window, though. But perhaps I will add that feature tonight!
Well, yeah--- my main point is that the futures market doesn't serve as a functioning long-term pricing mechanism. That's why you have to go to other things outside the futures market if you want to speculate on/hedge against long-term price movements, like buying physical commodities, or stocks, or other such things.
Speaking as someone who treats anorexia, this is a deeply flawed metaphor. Anorexia is not only about self-image but often about control, particularly controlling the one thing that is extremely difficult for other people to force you to do: eat. It is more often rooted in control than mere vanity or jealousy.

It is not the same, even as a shallow metaphor, as desiring to be wealthy.
If you visit it more than once, you could add a rule to Stylish (or, I suppose, greasemonkey).
This thread has come up a couple of times:

Just wanted to point out that even if you get the grant, 1) they are reimbursing you 90% of your startup budget rather than giving $40k cash money, so 2) you have to put in the other 10% which is 4k.

I don't know if you can just budget $44k as salary but I highly doubt it, so you'll need to be able to spend the money to get it.
A "real" tomato does not ship well. It is delicate, prone to bruising, and has a limited shelf-life after it reaches peak ripeness. It is a marvelous treat, but unless you grow your own you will never have a great tomato and unless you have access to a source like a farmers market or quality produce department you will never even know a "good" tomato.

The tomato you see in the bin at a major supermarket chain was picked when it was green and hard as an apple. To get it to the soft consistency and reddish color you expect it was bathed in ethylene gas during shipment or while it was sitting around in a warehouse somewhere. This gas causes the tomato to soften and turn red, but it does not cause the tomato to create the sweet sugars and pleasant consistency that are the hallmarks of a freshly picked ripe tomato. It is this waxy/mealy consistency of a gassed mass-market tomato that was being noted.
InfiniteGraph http://www.infinitegraph.com/
E8 not a 'simple theory of everything' after all
Talk to your congressman.
You cannot logically justify this statement: "Google (the company) is not hurt by its CEO's gaffes"; with this evidence: "Google itself is going strong: it's becoming harder and harder to stop using it."

It's perfectly possible for Google to be doing worse than it could otherwise have been doing, yet still be doing quite well.

As to your other point, the reason I downvoted it was because it was very short-sighted. Companies that are "controlled by a shark", as you put it, are not well liked, don't attract the best employees, and ultimately get replaced when something with higher values comes along. That kind of thinking is not in the company's enlightened self-interest, and is counter-productive in the medium to long term.

And consequently, no, I wouldn't prefer to invest in such a company, because I would believe it wouldn't have much of a growing future ahead of it. At best, it would maximize profits (as best it can) from mature cash cows in static market; something like Unilever, or P&G. It would be a "safe" investment, and consequently not very rewarding. But in a fast-paced and changing market, it would be a very risky play and subject to dramatic change in less than a decade.
It's difficult to scan audio. Don't think for a moment I read every word of the articles I read.

I'd also have to pause (or turn down) the lovely music I'm listening to, which is at the moment Inception.

When I visit a new product's page, and all they have to tell me about it is screencasts, I leave immediately.
Okay, let's try going wayyyy beyond that... think what you could do if you actually designed the game for the purpose of testing the user in ways that didn't affect the score.
Writing this comment, I had to look up the order of the parameters to tar; I still can't remember. Stupid tar.

The -f (--file) flag takes an argument. So you could do:

tar -cf *.cpp -f something.tar

It is easier to remember order if you know what the flags mean.