skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want him as a co-founder because we came up with the idea together and I'm not going to be able to do everything by myself. He has an accounting degree so he will be dealing with all the financial aspects of the business too
Death spiral? MLB revenue was $6.6 billion in 2009. It was $7.6 for the NFL. According to this (outdated) article, MLB was actually growing sales at a better rate than the NFL over the past decade or so: http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/25/commentary/sportsbiz/index.h...

The recession seems to have hit both leagues pretty hard.

The MLBPA is the strongest union in professional sports, and there's no way that they'll allow a salary cap. After what happened with the last player's strike, I don't think the owners would be willing to take another strike.

The MLB still has some competitive balance issues, but they're getting better. And I'd bet that a perfectly competitive league would actually generate less revenue than a league with a team like the Yankees. You have to give it to them, they fill up the house wherever they go.
Now, let network all the hackerspace together, and then network all the members of the hackerspace together and so on. Than you have a pretty awesome cellular network, maybe with free internet built in.

Of course, it would probably cost 30 bucks up-front to set one up for your house.

Can this be done or is it somehow unfeasible?
Isn't Etacts trying to solve this problem?
Grab the compact OED, perhaps? It's no longer $200 new, but you could get it used. And the compact one is heavier & bigger than any volume of the 20+vol edition, so it keeps the physicalness in spades.
Your business is not necessarily where you are. A business is a legal separate entity. You can have a business in, say, india that makes iPhone apps and is registered in India and banks in India and as far as apple or anyone is concerned it is an indian company.

I would recommend focusing on the business idea, refining it and getting it going rather than looking for investment or finding an incubator, etc. Being on an H1 visa with a day job is similar to any American with a day job. You have to be careful to balance your time.

There lots of advice about how you should do a startup, and a lot of it is valid. But every startup is different and none of that advice is as important as the simple act of starting up. Worry about what you can do and don't worry about the things that are beyond your control. Where you were born is beyond your control and beyond your ability to change.
Engagement: why social media numbers don't matter
Discover what your Friends are Buying and Selling Online
I'm going to talk with him and I've been trying to send him all kinds of articles about startups and entrepreneur advice. I can tell he's just beginning to get interested in startups, whereas i've been following startups for a few years now. I'm trying to ignite that spark in him...he's just a little behind
Is Thorium really a viable fuel source? Can it be used to create large-scale reactors?
Disqus handles spam well but anti-spam isn't the sole or even primarily purpose. If that's what you're looking for, Akismet is a good choice.
And the lifetime financial reward one gets for doing the latter will dwarf what you'd get for doing the former. So make sure your children understand that. Being "on top" of a business will pay 10x+ than being "on bottom", even for otherwise comparably difficult tasks.
Facebook feeds narcissism, survey says
I have a hard-copy OED in the full-size edition. I always use online dictionaries because I don't much care about etymology (which is the OED specialty), and because looking words up manually is tedious. If you're thinking about getting one, maybe start with the unabridged Webster's third and see how it goes?
FWIW, at Disqus we've tried making registration as easy as possible. You're also able to show and hide children, though not all sites enabled this. We're also looking to improve notifications, so that area is definitely on our radar.
Towards a Notation System for Foosball
A geekily thorough attempt to design a notation system for Foosball a la Baseball or Chess. Aimed at eventual machine transcribability.
Thanks Paul, I have one other question that may have been answered before, but... Do you issue notices (for acceptance / rejection) all in one go, or as the team has reviewed each application?
This sort of feature always makes me sad that they announce features before rolling them out to everyone. Now I can't wait for it to show up in my account.
whatever happened to balico?
The dating site is OkCupid (http://www.okcupid.com/) and their data analysis can be found on OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/).
Bill Gates on energy, philanthropy, and management style
--it references the amazons - who were mythological--

these are the references in the book to amazons - what do you find objectionable in them

http://books.google.com/books?id=plkmFjler8cC&printsec=f...

--there is quite a bit of disagreement in the academic community about the validity of the conclusions--

i read a book for myself and draw my own conclusions - the authority of an -academic community- means nothing to me - if you read the book and wrote your own opinion that would have been a valuable contribution instead of a reference to the authority of something that does not exist namely -academic community-
How Facebook Scales with Open Source
Thanks for the feedback. Yup we're working on a 'Tour' page and like you said, it can't come soon enough :)
How about publishing it as a physical, digital artifact? An open-hardware eBook reader, preloaded with the unabridged OED in an open format, would be of about equivalent archival and academic value. You could even include a dead-tree technical manual and format spec in the box, to ensure that you could boot it up and get it running again in a few hundred years.
The fact - hackers often neglect usability and graphic design, sadly Disqus is an example. Clean minimalist design separates them from a killer app.
(I think it's one of the gold addons)

It was one of the gold addons, but reddit is using the gold subscriptions as sort of like buying early access to beta features, rather than as a set of purchased features. When new features are built, gold members get first access to them, then when they're solid / when a new batch of new features comes in, the old gold stuff goes public and gold members get access to the latest features first, ad infinitum.

The logo title text was rolled out to public users last week, when reddit introduced a feature to gold members allowing them to have new comments added since their last visit to the page flagged as such.
Whoever downvoted you must not recognize your handle. /upvote to compensate.

This happened years ago, around 2006 or so, so hopefully you guys have solved the problem now. When I first discovered Reddit I became a contributor, most of my links got upvotes, one or two even hit the front page.

But after a couple months, suddenly every single one my submissions was getting downvoted within the first minute or so of submitting, no exceptions. Even many of my comments were getting pointlessly downmodded.

I figured at best I had pissed off some script kiddie with a downmod bot, at worst a voting ring had begun systematically suppressing competing links.

I just read the site for a while after that without submitting or commenting, eventually created a new handle and retired the original, and then discovered subreddits which imho is the best idea ever. It's not a problem anymore, at least among the subreddits I subscribe to.

I <3 reddit, have learned more from people there, esp Proggit and the like, than even my undergrad education, and was one of your recent contributors. I'm sure the anti-gaming code is significantly more evolved now than it was then. Though as this article and this one at Reddit[1] show, voting rings and the like are still a major problem for social link sites.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_ga...
No, I saw them live in a conference in Buenos Aires, where they're from.
How can we - politely, at first - tell Techcrunch to stop linking to us?
Library sales - I have a 10year old encyclopedia Britanica (ok not a classic edition) on my shelf for about $20 and a 2 volume OED for $10.

I don't need to justify it ;-)
Twitter Streaming API access limits increased
After four drafts of my response, I think it can be summed up in one sentence: Minus the paranoia, murder, and mayhem, Ted Kaczynski might have been on to something.
US Economic Risks (Sept 2010): Impact on Investors & Entrepreneurs
I'm reading the same book. What in particular brought you to the book if you don't mind me asking?
Survey Says: Genetics Affect Whether We’re Willing To Take Surveys
The NFL takes 12 out of 32 teams (0.375) to the playoffs, versus the 8 out of 30 (0.267) the MLB carries. That's already four more potential slots for a playoff team, including one more wildcard per league.

Yes, the Yankees have gone to far and away more World Series competitions and acquired more titles than any other team. They're also, historically (and I'm talking a history that spans a time greater than the entire NFL), the most competitive and storied team in baseball. That means talent and money naturally flow to it.

I would also point out that, since 2000, the Giants, Diamondbacks, Red Sox, White Sox, Rockies, Cardinals, Rays, Tigers, Angels, Mets, and Phillies have all gone to the World Series in addition to the Yanks. This year, the Twins, Giants, Reds, and Rangers(!!) are all expected to make the postseason with minimal difficulty. There is competitive balance, and introducing the shenanigans of a salary cap isn't the way to go in my opinion.
Without knowing anything detailed about how all this is implemented, it looks to be derived from nothing more than is stored in your inbox:

The text of the emails, and whether they are read and replied to.

As such it seems like strictly less information than you are requesting that they store.
Everyone is here for a different reason.

True! I am here because I like HN interface and look. There are other sites that provide articles, submissions and discussions on programming and technology. But none do it as well as HN.

One such site is so full of irritating ads, links to other articles and what not that it becomes nearly impossible to focus on the real thing. At another famous site, I am still unable to understand their comment and karma system.

HN is simple, nice and clean. I would say more productive.
Morning is Wiser Than Evening
Lets say I need to raise about $500k; how does the terms look like? If this question is already discussed, could you please point me to the url?
Aptech
To be fair jellyfish are about the least 'animal', animal you can have, it's a little like imprisoning a house plant.
Yes, I did read the article. Then I re-read it before commenting since I found the advice in that section to be so surprisingly bad.

I did not make up my quoted comments. I pulled them right from the posted article and used them in context.

Right under "Point #2: After Your Product Launch", the author states:

"Customers make it necessary to put processes in place for marketing, sales, support, and back-end admin tasks. Any ongoing work that can be described in a written process can be outsourced to a VA and save incredible amounts of time for the founders.

"If you do not outsource these tasks, they will get in the way of work that's truly productive for your business."

The author is stating that a startup should outsource their support and I still think that outsourcing customer support for a new product is an extremely bad idea, no matter how easily that support process can be documented.

Feedback from customer support is one of the best ways for a business to identify where a product can be improved. Yes, you can easily describe support in a written process, but you cannot possibly anticipate what customers will tell you during those support calls.

The information shared during those early support calls is absolute gold.
> There are so many religion disciplines with so many diverse views on so many things that someone from somewhere will point to an obscure reference to a religion and argue "See this religion also talked about this 1000s of years ago and science just discovered it now". And lets forget overwhelming majority of the religious reference that science obliterates.

I think what i spoke of was not one of many diverse things some religions/faiths/whatever have spoken of. It is the principal experience upon investigating one's nature through meditation.

I quoted one text, only due to its small size and the fact that it is one of the oldest. There are many others: such as the Upanishads (many of them), the Vedas, the Avadhuta Gita, the Ribhu Gita that all speak of this "nothing" being the reality from which everything arises as a vibration/ripple/disturbance. They do not just speak of it: they give you the path to realize and confirm it yourself.
Real artists ship! Being an entrepreneur means having a burning desire to succeed.

The Vikings used to burn their boats so that they had to succeed!

Reads like you're already too comfortable where you are to take the plunge. If you can't work on your project part-time, then why not do some other part-time work, save the money and then Do It!.
This graphic, mentioned in the comments (but not created by the OP), is a pretty good example:

http://www.onlineeducation.net/bottled_water

Note url and anchor text.
Why does Silicon Valley have such a cooperative atmosphere?
Abstract:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smll.200901100/ab...

Resistive Switching in Nanogap Systems on SiO2 Substrates
Jun Yao5, Lin Zhong1,2,, Zengxing Zhang3, Tao He3, Zhong Jin3, Patrick J. Wheeler4, Douglas Natelson1,4,, James M. Tour2,3,*

Article first published online: 28 SEP 2009

DOI: 10.1002/smll.200901100

Pdf:

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~mobile/publications/yao09small.pdf

It's quite far from being proved to be feasible.
Hacker News is what helps me to stay up to date with the latest news and trends in technology, to hear interesting people, their opinions on various topics, to find useful resources that help to do my work in better way.

Basically it's a fresh air that I need to breath every day.
"Save the world"? Seriously?

The key paragraph:

A full‐power base station with software costs around
$10,000. Compare that to the typical $50,000 - $100,000
investment for base station controllers, mobile
switching centers and "a whole lot of plumbing" to
bring in power, backhaul, etc., in a traditional
cellular network.

So it's a base station that's a fifth as expensive as a regular base station.

And since there's no BoM, we don't know if that ten thousand dollar number includes solar panels to power the thing, or wireless backhaul to network the base stations together.

Don't forget that it runs on licensed frequencies, so you have to pay your local radio licensing agency to use it. It's not like a wifi router, which you can just buy and turn it on out of the box. It doesn't matter if it's open source if you can't use it without breaking the law.

Really, the only amazing thing here is how they got Network World to run such a blatant puff piece about such a fundamentally unexciting product.
CLEAR 4G rebrands as “Rover” for new pay as you go service | MobileLuv
The jar of luck and the jar of experience of the salesman
Having tested this the last few days, I would raise a rebel army if Google tried to take it away.
This isn't surprising at all. In fact, I met and worked with someone on an unrelated contract who ran a small shop that did just this. It made me happy I stopped using digg years ago.

Digg could have solved a lot of these problems early on by introducing a couple very simple features: first, allow users to block domains, and second, allow users to block users. I can't remember how many times cracked.com or holytaco.com would show up on the frontpage and make me cringe. Reddit is starting to suffer from the same thing.

The fundamental problem with Digg and also with Reddit somewhat is that nobody wants to sit and curate the upcoming stories, and upcoming stories require far too many votes to catch steam and have a chance at hitting the front page. So it falls to a small handful of power users who have a network of friends built up who are willing to vote on their stories.

Digg essentially became an aggregator of cheap, popcorn content; the kind of stuff non-tech savvy people forward around on email.

Hacker News is still good because it's a small niche of highly tech-savvy people, but if it gets to popular it will run into the exact same issues.

I think the new Digg is actually a good step in the right direction. The truly best way to get good content is to decide yourself where it comes from. I get my best links from Twitter because I follow people who are interested in the same stuff I am. If I could define my network, the content would remain relavent. I think it would take around 500-5000 people to really generate great content, provided those people are all people you align with well.
Clojure: Using Sets and Maps as Functions
If you browse a NYT article using their iPad app and want to submit it to HN, the NYT app will give you a like like this: http://nyti.ms/9Db1qc
Maybe I should have done something like this when I was in school, instead of spending all of my time in Starcraft University.
Gruber vs Chpwn
The only way to fix this is for Pirates fans to stop going to the game. As a Pittsburgh fan and living there for a summer I am pretty confident in saying Pittsburgher's will never quit going.
the FCC and similar organizations will frown upon you using the GSM bands without permission.

as will the millions of paying GSM customers, whose service you'd be interfering with.
It's reddit for adults.
I think it basically comes down to a status signaling mechanism. They are selling a dream to these candidates, so later they can sell these candidates to their clients. And selling is just that -- appearances. I doubt other schools don't have the candidates with the appropriate knowledge. However, I am sure, they do not have candidates that are in $200K+ student dept, and who expect to drive a Porsche bought with the signing bonus from their first job after college, who know the tastes of various types of caviar, and spend their vacations on private islands. One needs exactly these kind of people for your customers to interact with. They exude class, luxury, superiority, and confidence.

So it is about signaling a certain status position and it is about giving your client the best ass cover they can imagine. Anyone hiring these consultants can always point to them and say "Look, we had all the best people. If they can't solve the problem, nobody can". These firms tap into that market -- the market for golden scapegoats.

And the funny thing is, if the golden scapegoats fuck up, it is not a problem -- on the contrary, bonuses still roll in. The firm doesn't lose reputation. Because, after all, if these guys and gals can't do it, nobody can. The fuck-up is just a demonstration of impossibility of solving the particular problem.
Thanks for the info. How about the West SF area (from Sunset/Ocean Beach down to Pacifica)? Are those better for proximity? Are they more expensive?

(If you can't tell, I'm hoping to find something near the surf.)
Sounds a lot like SaneBox, except with only one level of priority instead of a few graduated ones.
Why We Love Lisp
Google Voice does come with call screening:
http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html
Yeah, I was trying to solve that as well with my startup... Priority Inbox definitely implements a few of our "killer features". Will be interesting to see if we can compete with Google on this :)
Reading, writing and RFID chips: a scary back-to-school future in California
Wish I could watch it. Am I the only one who can't stream a full video from YouTube half the time? Either it doesn't start at all, or quits streaming half way through.
Conversion statistics, as told by the Princess Bride
Counter-productive byproduct: I'm gonna be checking my email until I see that alert come up...
Anyone know who made that video?
It could be that he looks at all the things that need to be done, goes "Aw crap. Where do I even start?" and then gets frustrated and overwhelmed, leading to inaction and the subsequent guilt over inaction.

In the non-profit I run, I find that I have to come up with a list of things that need to get done; then I sit down with my board members and volunteers and we prioritize and then divvy out tasks. It takes some time, and my board members are still not particularly good at taking action when needed, though they're getting a lot better), but all of our stuff ends up getting done more or less where/when it should.

The other possibility is that he realizes he's in way over his head and wants to go back to something safer/less demanding.

It seems like you're pretty loyal to this fellow and that you want to keep him around. The thing to do, I think, would be to give him a more concrete sense of direction and see how he responds to that. If he doesn't respond well, then it might be time to have a frank discussion with him and to search for someone else to fill that role.
Gmail's "Priority Inbox" sorts important e-mail for you
I do too.

BTW If you didn't know already, this is a nice tool to solve this problem: http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...

I really hope pg would add this to the site (given that how easy it is to add the code).
Today is the 1-year anniversary of my HN registration
Just saw it on my profile.

My life hasn't been the same since :)
grellas, insightful post as always. Do you mind elaborating further on your last sentence/point?

There was an article earlier on HN about the growth of legal outsourcing in places like India, as well as the prevalence of four tiers of law schools overcrowding the marketplace. In your opinion, is the current state of the law labor market a reflection of recent economic shock, or do you think there is a paradigm shift occurring to some degree?
Building a reverse HTTP proxy in Node.js
I presume you mean Fowler's Modern English Usage. Very underrated in our barbaric times. I believe the bit on hyphenation carries on for 14 four-column pages?
Node.js used to mirror DOM across browsers
OK this may get me a few downmods but I just have to say it.Before you click that down arrow, hear me out please.

There is no denying that what Mr. Khan is doing is fantastic. But it would be wrong to de-emphasis the value that a community of learners adds to your education, like a university or a college. I am not a conservative (I not exactly old enough to be a conservative), but I see the point in the university model. First of all, I am not for the high fees and the bureaucracy, nor am I for the heavy course work with no explorations and grades for minimal work. I cannot loath them enough. But why do you want to take away the community that a place like the university would generate?

You do not want to be a lone wolf just watching a few tutorial videos and call it an education. We all know we learn more from each other than from anyone of the faculty members. (Here I am talking about students who really want to learn, not the one's who just want the elite degree. Thought the number is less, but it may increase if we work on making the system reward excellence rather than exam papers).

Also you may be able establish a lab for UG studies of software engineering or electronics (upto a certain extent), but subjects like mechanical engineering and Instrumentation & Control require quite expensive labs. Not feasible for an individual to buy.

Why not pool many student's money and buy those. We would need a common place to meet, so lets buy some buildings. Hey we would definitely need recreation and food, so lets make a recreational centre and a canteen. All this can be managed by students, but if not lets hire some MBA's to manage all this. WALA you have a ditto university but without bureaucracy.