skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, that's not the case. If you own something, selling it immediately for whatever cash you can get is what you want to do. You want to sell it for as much as you can and that means not dumping it in to the market all at once.

This is especially true when getting more is very difficult. The price is likely to go up in the future, making even more sense to hold on to it.

And not sure what fungibility has to do with it. Doesn't that just mean its easy to quantify and trade? A pound of helium is a pound of helium no matter where you buy? Why would that give you an incentive to dump what you own for whatever you can get now?

Many people like buying assets that hold their value and like holding them instead of pieces of paper the government can and will soon have to inflate away.
That phone has the same features as my current phone (a cheap LG), but a simpler interface. I will try it the next time I need a phone. Thanks for the recommendation!
You know, I'm always skeptical about any article that refers to "truths". Why is it that we are so intent on there being just one "true" way to be a good programmer? Can't we accept that there are multiple paths to becoming good?
Oh dear. That would be a fitness function to optimise against, then.
No. As soon as your function has a dependency on anything else whatsoever, it can no longer be copy-and-pasted into another project

A snippet consists of functions which accomplish a specific task. The important part is that the entire snippet is a single cpp and a single header. No dependencies.
The big thing I think Kurzweil is absolutely right on is that if Moore's law continues (even in its current crippled parallel-only form) until 2045, we can't help but have the ability to simulate a human brain. Am I convinced that will happen? No. But no one has made any money betting against Moore's law since decades before I was born. It's a fact of my life until proven otherwise.
"When things are designed by 1 person (IME) they work better and have a more flowing work flow. Designing in a committee has been a freaking nightmare."

I completely agree. Yet in industry, being that one person (like I am) leads to great management consternation to the tune of "what if you're hit by the proverbial bus?" which leads to "you need an understudy", which leads to expending 2x the resources to achieve <2x results (the time spent selecting, training and guiding an understudy is definitely nowhere near 0, even when the choice of understudy turns out to have been a good one), and there can't help but be some feeling of "training your replacement". Industry loves interchangeable parts (people), and a one-man-band (domain expert or similar) grates against that ethos.
I didn't like Quora at all. It allows users to modify your question and tags and some of them misunderstand your question or just don't want it there. One of my questions received no answers, many followers hoping for an answer, and 13 edits removing tags and changing the question to be something completely different from what it was. In other words, it can be abused.
I was recently tasked with looking for forum solutions to replace phpBB for a contract client and yes there is definitely room. As many others have already stated phpBB is bloated and anyone who has had to dive through the code knows that it certainly doesn't have Wordpress-like extensibility. There's also the problem of user experience. Having been involved forums for the past few years I never noticed usability problems, but our less tech savvy users made sure to point out their gripes with it (bbcode, images, search). Stackoverflow and Quora certainly raised the bar but they are closed solutions that I still can't put on my own community site. Q&A sites also solve a different problem than forum sites. They're meant to answer questions, not foster discussion. This means that they lack several features of forums such as images and rich text editing. I also looked at Reddit type solutions but they have the same problems with discussions based solely around links. I would love to see a self-hosted solution that's somewhere in-between phpBB, stackoverflow and reddit.
So, aside from possible DeLorean effect, any idea why?
The book _Reporting at Wit's End_, a collection of New Yorker pieces by St. Clair McKelway, leads off with a profile of Joseph Brophy, for many years chief fire marshal of New York. Quite interesting on arsonists, both the professionals and those who do it for a thrill.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Raising Money
Ask HN: Comparing beta sign-ups to paying customers
We are currently working on the MVP for our startup. We do hope eventually to include premium features specifically for business and content producers, but our MVP will be a consumer-focused free service.

There are many strong articles detailing how we should find ten people who will say that they'll buy the product. (Good example: http://blog.asmartbear.com/customer-validation.html) Does anyone have advice on how many beta sign-ups could serve as a reasonable gauge in lieu of customer validation?
Meet “STAMP”: The $50 Tablet from India
Interesting. I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you w/r/t HN, because the UX of HN is great, though at this point we may be disagreeing definitionally over "design."

As for the trucking website, I would completely disagree for the following reasons:

1) You have to receive a quote over email. Why? Either their systems are built that way, which is ridiculous, or they require a human to look up values and quote a price, which at this point is also ridiculous.

2) The form design is terrible. Eye movement/focus is all over the place.

3) There's absolutely no reason to use this company vs. other companies based on their home page. What's their selling point? They have the same boilerplate as everyone else.

4) Amateur hour: They misformat their own phone number: "(256) 852-553 5." That nav bar. That frequent shipper link.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/
Link to the deep zoom version (opens faster):
http://zoom.it/A8JK#full
This is the exact problem that Joel talks about (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/08/19.html) [HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618011].

Like the iPhone mute button example, Scott's watch doesn't necessarily need to be simpler, it needs to be easier to use (i.e., elegant).
bit.ly is always looking for good people. Take a look at our jobs page, and shoot us a resume if you think you qualify.

http://bit.ly/jobs
I've learnt from experience that there's another warning sign: Silence. If no one is making suggestions, complaining, or promoting your product then it indicates apathy. Which means that you aren't solving a critical problem
App Engine's High-Performance Image Serving System
I think Hollywood is well past that point. Screenwriters have been writing what the studio execs think they can sell for a while.
>Kurzweil suggests a (surprisingly low) bound on the complexity of this structure (which builds on complex proteins and should be seen as multiplicative of the former complexity).

I think this is where most everyone really is missing the power of exponential growth, to use Kurzweil's language.

The difference between "surprisingly low" and spot-on is +-5 years in Moore's law time. Really what it boils down to is how long Moore's law continues.
Patent _application_
Does anyone actually use that trackball for anything other than text selection, though?

Going from an iPhone to a Nexus One for about six months, I mostly wished that it wasn't there (except when I wanted to select and copy text, at which point I wished I was back on my iPhone).
Anyone can register as a developer and purchase one today (or when the stock is replenished).
I wish I lived in Florida specifically so I could vote for this man. That has to be the most forceful, cogent response to the Google-Verizon proposal I've read so far. Better yet, it makes its points without resorting to stilted analogies or oversimplification.

Its people like Grayson and Al Franken that give me hope for the future of information technology regulation.
Implementing an abstract class when the concrete implementation conforms to the Liskov Substitution Principle is exactly when inheritance does make sense. You would do this so that calling code wouldn't need to care that the function required a MySpecialMapClass rather then something that conforms to the AbstractMap interface.

However, if you just think that some of the functions in AbstractMap are useful but plan on creating a totally different class that doesn't conform to the interface, then inheritance is inappropriate.

Code reuse is not a reason to use inheritance; it is a byproduct of it.
Gmaps Visualizer, SEE your Route
The benefit of many options is that the user can do the simplification himself.
Absolutely depends on how you present it. If you put down what you did, what problems you solved, what you accomplished (use lots of verbs and don't start with "I": ie Developed database accessed by other 1000 users, or Developed mobile application for user sign-ups using JS for cross-platform compatibility).

If you put down "Founded a startup with friends and we are currently in stealth mode" then no company will wantto take you on as they (and you) do not know where you will be in 6 months.

The first is past accomplishments applicable to the position offered. The second is a currently active status that says you are maybe unavailable.

Also, you will want to be very careful about which company you apply to and how they treat your offtime accomplishments. Some look to take a piece of all that you develop.
Good point; I initially interpreted the article's analysis as an attempt to calculate the prior probability of a bird appearing in a specific photo. But then I switched to thinking about the probability of the bird appearing within a sample of photos, which of course depends on the sample size.

Of course, you need to know the prior probabilities in order to calculate the posterior probability distribution, and in this scenario, there doesn't appear to be a reliable way to obtain the prior probabilities, especially considering that there's only a single instance of the event we're looking at in the sample data.
401(k) withdrawals hit 10-year high, says Fidelity
BlackBerry vs the World, Google vs the Individual
I sympathize but the problem with that conclusion is "Who sets the ethical set of rules"? There's a lot of room for bottom-up using the democracy/capitalism combination, provided you don't let those who have money at one particular point in time totally break the system through lobbying, rent-seeking and regulatory capture (fail).
Small Businesses are Not Hiring - Why Should They?
It absolutely makes them less harmful because the government will no longer harm you.
If they're as successful as Adams they might. Plus he's a restaurateur and entrepreneur. And Tim Ferris has written extensively on hiring virtual personal assistants.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وطلائع الجيش
Thinking Under Uncertainty
It is easier. Whether it's better or faster is another question.
Ah. This is a pretty interesting discussion, I think, so let's try to figure it out.

One of my points -- disregarding whether the concept of quoting a price is good or not -- is that there isn't anything fundamentally wrong about this form: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/free_quote_form.png

They provide a phone number, office hours, and a satisfaction assurance.

About whether manually quoting prices is a good idea or not... I think overall it facilitates the sales process, not harms it. It's a fact of the industry, for one. For two, communicating verbally is much more engaging than via the internet. It seems like you would attract more customers in this instance, unless your company did something fundamentally differently from the competition.

) Amateur hour: They misformat their own phone number: "(256) 852-553 5." That nav bar. That frequent shipper link.

But does that really matter? What matters is that they provide a specialized service to move an item from point A to point B. Sure, an extra space is a typo, but not a serious one.

I'm really not trying to be nitpicky. I'm trying to point out that people often make fundamentally wrong assumptions. And that will have a direct negative impact when deciding what to spend time on, which is one of the most precious resources.
Actually, almost everything about Wall Street demolishes the efficient market hypothesis.

Numerous studies have said that an index fund will almost always beat a managed fund after you take out the management fees.

So who's paying all of these people's BMW leases? Their sales skills. If you can give an unsophisticated investor a fuzzy feeling that their money's safer with you than an index fund, you get your management fee, whether or not you outperform the market after it's taken out.

That's the opposite of the efficient market hypothesis, is it not?
It's the best. The year I lived in with my fiancee was the most enjoyable. She is a gigging musician, so we pretty much see eye to eye.

Nothing motivates like a rock chick kicking through door in boots and telling you "we killed baby!" :-D

We both get up around noon and get on our laptops. Sometimes she walks around the apartment like a zombie, humming to herself, then grabs the guitars and goes into frantic improv and song writing. I walk around too, with a notepad, and run to Emacs to jot down ideas. It's hypnotic to code to the sound of the same chords being played over and over again. I could hear a song change from form to another, over the span of a few hours, just as my code migrates from a scratch buffer, to its own file, then to a full fledged directory with a page-long Changelog.

We both go through the hustle; we collect dimes from various paypal and CC accounts, drive to venues and get cash, chase invoices, and by the end of the week we have a fat little wallet that we're giddy over.

I love my girl.
That is a question that I ask me every week. Actually I ask myself two questions?

- How can I identify products that can be adapted to a different culture?

- How can I replicate a successful business model in a different environment/country?

I lived for a while in Miami, and I succeed a couple of times taking a project that I like, I revamped it a little bit to target the US latino market. I am trying to do the same thing in Denmark now, but I am failing all the time.
Facebook acquires Hot Potato
Showing more results from a domain
The whole reason to even list any programming truths is because they would make you a better and faster programmer.
Sure, if you're looking at the probability of that specific event occurring.

But if you want to generalize about kinds of events, rather than a single specific one, it's useful to use past events as sample data to estimate probabilities of similar events occurring in the future (provided, of course, that you have defined meaningful categories for entities and events.)
The classic Unix horror story
Not so fast. If you include something that someone told you you could, that is a defense against copyright infringement if you are willing to take measures to stop infringing once you are informed of this. (This is the spirit, though not the letter, behind the DMCA safe harbor provisions.)

Secondly there are ways in which someone can write something, truly believe they own it, but actually don't own it. So the question of who has permission is not so simple.

Thirdly the cases I pointed to were arguments about what copyright already covered. There were good arguments both ways under existing legislation and previous case law. The right answer to those questions is based on existing case law, and is hardly simple. (I was caught by surprise when I learned that it was OK in the USA to take someone else's copyrighted binary, and reverse engineer what is pretty much their header file out of it, and include that header file in your own copyrighted work without any kind of attribution!)
Does anyone actually use that trackball for anything other than text selection, though?

I find it to be very helpful for scrolling when reading web pages in landscape mode.
Broadly speaking, your market might be too small (-> grow your product into a larger, related market) or your marketing might be inadequate (failing to increase your share in your current market) or the competition is better in some way.
Sigh...where's Eliezer when we need him? :)

It is just there, in that last step, that Kurzweil invokes a fallacy. In general, if you have two different kinds of machines, and you want to program each to compute the same result -- upper bounds on the program size on machine tell you nothing about the the upper bounds on the other machine.

Right on, upper bounds on program size do not directly translate from one machine to another. So we can't set a hard bound, and we always need to speak about information content relative to a given machine - too few people have noticed this.

However, science doesn't give up when hard bounds prove impossible. There's always statistics to fall back on.

And statistically speaking, we can absolutely translate information content claims across machine boundaries if we're careful, as long as we have no reason to believe that the machine in question is somehow "special".

A priori, knowing nothing else about machines A or B, we would expect that if we observe an upper complexity bound on an algorithm relative to machine A, there's better than a 50/50 shot that the same upper complexity bound will also hold relative to machine B (it's greater than 50% because it's almost certain that our observation did not pick out the best theoretical upper complexity bound).

As good Bayesians, exactly how this all translates into a best estimate for the bound relative to machine B depends on a lot of stuff (all our prior distributions - in fact, in cases like this talking about upper bounds is silly, it's far better to talk about the distribution of upper bounds, but I digress).

But it's simply wrong not to adjust your complexity estimates relative to machine B in some manner based on an observation of machine A, unless you know something special about machine A that differentiates it from all machines in such a way that it's well-suited to express the algorithm under consideration.

So I ask you this: do you know a fact about "zygote machines" that makes them much better suited to constructing intelligence algorithms than most other machines? Do you have some reason to suspect that their dynamics are more likely to lead to intelligent computations than, for instance, normal computers?

Because otherwise, Kurzweil is a hell of a lot closer to the "right" estimate than you are.

(Edit) FWIW, I posted a more detailed argument elsewhere in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621053) that more carefully boils Myers' claim down to just about the same question I asked you.
There's nowhere that a non-developer can buy a Nexus One in the US. They aren't for sale. They aren't coming soon. People know a dead phone when they see one.
Verona Shower Systems - Blog
Verona Showers strives to design and manufacture the finest and most innovative bath remodelling products in the industry.
The efficient market hypothesis states that a trader can't beat the market except by chance. Everything you just said is evidence in favor of efficient markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis
The whole reason to even list any programming truths is because they would make you a better and faster programmer.

Says who? Truths are not always good things. That doesn't make them any less factual.
The problem with non-verbal cues is that one has to have video or be physically present in the room to observe them. The paper was conducting an analysis of investor conference calls, where the investors on the other side of the line had no idea what sort of gestures the executive was making.
Why should they? For the same reasons as always. They still need workers in order to make more money.

If they -don't- need workers, they shouldn't be hiring no matter what the economy or government looks like.
Yeah, except as noted above, it's a pretty solid prediction. We're mandated to sell all of this stuff by 2015.

Absent a change in the law, it seems like a good guess that we'll sell it by 2015.

This is not climate science, you don't have to have a chip on your shoulder -- you can objectively evaluate this evidence if you choose to do so.
The first step is knowing that you want to make a change, kudos on that! Great questions and some good answers here, look forward to reading more. As someone light on the programming side, always interested in responses on this kind of question. Especially answers that go beyond, "hey, go learn to program more."
You look like you could use a hug.
Meet the new Facebook Places team!
Are there typically ancillary events planned before/after? If accepted I'll be flying some distance to attend, and would love the chance at more time for conversation with the like-minded.
Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point.

Highlighted for emphasis. Virtually every trend in marketing food to the middle class is "Don't eat that. Poor people eat that. You don't want to eat like a poor person, do you?"

The big picture reasoning for that is here:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Char...

The dollar cost of the inputs to what might be called "traditional food" is cratering, due almost entirely to technological improvements. A 2010 tomato resembles a 1970 tomato, but costs much less. If you ate like someone in the 1970s ate, you would spend much less of your total income on food than they did.

That would be a very negative outcome for some players in the food industry.

Hence, trying to tell you that your 2010 tomato is not really the same tomato as that 1970 tomato your mother used to make pasta sauce with. It is a magic poisoned GMO tomato. Your mother, if she was still making you pasta sauces, would certainly be using good natural organic local tomatoes.

Since your mother doesn't still make you pasta sauces, you can pick up a morally appropriate pasta sauce at Trader Joes for a mere five times the price of the same ingredients with a different label at WalMart. (The change in who cooks and how much is the story behind the story of American food consumption in the last two generations.)
The odds of you being a limp dicked hater that has nothing better to do than malign the sincere efforts of a team of people with more skill in their chodes than you have in your entire family tree are very, very high.
I thought he was referring to the old perfect information canard in misreadings of Adam Smith. Thanks.

EDIT: I actually don't believe in that hypothesis, either :) I think stock prices are more reflective of crowd dynamics and emergent properties of the various algos (what % are computer driven, now?) than it is by actual prospects of the business in question. Tech stocks are a great example, I see them get pummeled or inflated for terrible reasons on the few occasions I look at market prices. So I think it's eminently beatable, both in an algorithmic and in a Buffet-fundamentals sense, I just think that anyone who beats it will naturally raise their management fees by just as much.
I'd say this is a classic Unix success story, told in the context of an almost horror. It shows how a serious understanding of Unix-foo can save the day when someone makes a mistake.
I'd say having a firm grip on reality can only make you a better programmer.
The Strange Popular Morality of Copyrights
Do it to the wrong person and you'll have a mass walk-out on your hands.
He seems to be doing okay with building initial products and then selling them off if they have potential but don't interest him anymore. I would guess that adding a co-founder would put more pressure on him to stay with a project that he wasn't committed to. At least he's honest and aware of his dedication to each project.