skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose it depends what you mean by the final product. I would define the final product as something that is installed somewhere and is used.

Ultimately, all products will be scrapped or superseded but to say that means every bit of code you have written is unused seems a bit odd.
Google is a company and there's very little that we (the citizens) can do against it.

duckduckgo.com

That was easy! Now, please let me know how I can select a different set of tax laws, drug laws, civil liberties, tort laws, and foreign policies. (And no, moving to a different country is not as easy as typing in a different URL.)
And what if yahoo does it too (as I imagine they would), and so does Microsoft, and Facebook, and Foursquare... at which point you can't abstain any more?

I also can abstain from using the pensions, or public doctors, etc... Sure the government _can_ know some information, but I would imagine there's a lot that's optional there too. It's just that the alternative is so bad that it's not really an option. So would a future controlled by corporations.
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I thought every science-minded kid had this same thought.
re completely efficient markets, you're right. My eyes focused on the "making mistakes" part and missed the "closer to" part. I guess I could throw something in there about gambler's ruin, but that would be a little pedantic.

re the space of internet startups : To be clear, I wasn't concluding one way or the other, just asking him to apply the same logic to something he might have positive bias towards and see if he comes to the same conclusions. Also, rather than number of companies, I think the market cap/total profit of the companies is a better metric.

I'm not sure that company margins in internet startups or quant finance will shrink. I haven't thought too much about it but I think they might even grow as information/efficiency attains greater value. Margins per action done might shrink but number of actions will grow. Isn't this the whole story of HFT?

Further, old lines of business will have their margins shrink as the service becomes commoditized. But new high(er) margin lines of business will spring up in their place.
Changing the top idea in your mind is performing inception on yourself
> And none can deny that Google (or Facebook) wield tremendous power by keeping so much of personal data, but seriously what alternatives he proposes?

Um, delete the data instead of keeping it?
The Gap Year: Why Taking Time Out to Travel Is Good
Seeking Production Specialist
> He's not creepy, just honest.

Maybe he is creepy AND honest? Possible?
I think that many of Schmidt's comments might be unnecessarily frank (from Google's perspective).

I'm glad he is making these comments because it helps more people understand the privacy issues that they're dealing with. So to that extent, I applaud Schmidt though I'm not sure why he is making all of these comments.It seems like his honesty/candidness (or is it arrogance) is hurting Google.
Comparing sense on a friends' incredible to my rooted droid with froyo, froyo is much better I think. The only advantage to sense is some nicer widgets and fixing some things on android before 2.2
More likely you keep working on your UI until you get traction. If you are solving a real problem, you can get traction while your UI is not very good.
"I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve."

The tech lobby isn't the strongest lobby in the world, but the consumer rights lobby, ACLU et al are even weaker. Given the state of congress, no way any new legislation passes, it'll be "big government usurping the market" and get filibustered or some such. Democrats won't do anything to make it happen and Republicans will outright oppose it on the off-chance that they do.

So we'll see the industry definition of acceptable creep outwards. It's driven by the fundamentals. Nobody puts vague notions of consumer privacy above feeding their kids.

EDIT: Does this have to get downmodded? Nothing in the post is controversial, and it's not exactly news that Congress has a hard time passing bills these days.
You're absolutely right - looking at that quote (and looking through the original one that Myers responded to), he's overstated what we can conclude based on DNA length by a good amount (though Myers argument doesn't disprove the upper bound, by any means; it merely points out that Kurzweil's "proof" doesn't hold). The problematic phrase, which makes this argument pretty ambiguous, is "simulate the brain" - neither party has really pinned down what they mean by that, so it's hard to know what would qualify. In retrospect, I think I cut Kurzweil a little too much slack when deciding what he meant, esp. in light of his other writings on the topic...

It's a shame, because his argument is fully defensible if it's stated correctly and applied to the general problem of AI instead of to Kurzweil's pet theory that full brain simulation is the One True Way.
Like delete my mails and contacts?
It's been hoarded for tens of millions of years in existing salt domes. That's more or less how both the national helium reserve (being sold off) and the privately-owned BLM helium reserve are maintained. It's by no means a trivial problem (you have to know where the domes are and be able to drill through kilometers of solid rock to reach them, then repressurize the helium to a high enough pressure to make it go back underground) but it's not out of the reach of 1920s technology.
Gruber thinks Eric Schmidt is Creepy. Me too.
Just curious - what's your customer base composed of? Is it mostly youtube knockoffs? Adult sites? Enterprise customers?

I understand if you don't share, but I'm just curious. I do transcoding at home from DVD to MP4 for place-shifting (I <3 Handbrake), but I'm thinking your customer would be some sort of video-hosting site. Are there really that many out there?

What kind of challenges have you faced wrt bandwidth?
If you were a shareholder, would you rather want your company to be controlled by a shark, who pursue profits vigourosly at the cost of the occasional PR failure (that doesn't really seem to affect them in any real term). Or would you want it to be controlled by two geeks that started their company with the motto: "Don't be evil" and would put (I imagine) ethics before profit?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1621108
[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.

I'm going to propose something more specific if you want online anonymity. Change your name (or keep this in mind for your future child), both first and last, to something pretty common that suits your taste. When people google you, they'll get so many results of different people with the same name that you'll have anonymity through numbers.

Here is something to help you out, though I'm not sure how good of a tool it is: http://namestatistics.com/

Whenever I google my name, I can never find myself having to sift through hundreds of different people with the same first and last name.
Fewer Americans Need TVs, But Only Because More Need Flat Screen TVs
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That's a good point. Grasping how SEO works isn't all that complicated.

Being able to actually bring in traffic from organic search in competitive niches is the real kicker.
The public can do something about it --- people can make it clear that they support (additional) legislation to restrict what information companies can collect and what they can do with it. But, it's not clear that the public is willing to make this an issue that influences their vote enough to overcome resistance to such laws by companies that benefit from collecting and selling personal data.

As for the government vs private company distinction: It seems pretty likely to me that most information that a company collects about a person will, eventually, become available to the government (Gruber touched on this). It may take a warrant, national security letter, or additional legislation for the government to be able to obtain it, but the usefulness of this data for various government functions (e.g. anti-terrorism, tracking fugitives, mining the data for tax cheats, etc) is too high.
We know. "Engines of Creation" was published in 1986. "The Diamond Age" popularized the idea in 1995. Catch up!
What caught my eye was how high Landline phones are. Cellphones don't have perfect reception, but I barely use landlines anymore. It's also interesting how low cable and satellite TV are, don't think that would be as low if it weren't for Hulu and online streaming.
I think you created the pricing schedule based on your costs. The more keywords being tracked the more "crawlers" necessary, meaning the more servers you need and thus more cost.

Customers don't care about your costs, though. If I buy a first-class plane ticket to fly a can of Coke from Belize to Boise, it's still worth as much as a regular can of coke.

They're pricing what they think their customers will value, especially what they think their richest customers will value.

If you have a few thousand keywords, what you probably have is about a hundred 'stem'-ish keywords whose fluctuations will tell you 90% of what you need to know. If you're selling a ton of products, you will probably need more, but if you're doing that, why not track keywords at the category level (instead of "Aluminum Widget," "Cast Iron Widget," "Plastic Widget," just "Widget")?
Thanks for this great feedback, Omar. (ProductWiki looks very nice, btw.)

A few hundred thousand keywords would most certainly not cost $100K / month. :) Feel free to email me at ray@ginzametrics.com if you'd like to chat.
Russia in color a century ago
Many years ago a Middle-Eastern family bought a famous mansion in Beverly Hills. There was a huge outrage that they had the Greek statuary colorized. The press seemed to think that it proved the lack of taste of those "foreigners". It's funny to now realize that they were probably more correct than the sophisticated Americans who thought the statues should be undecorated.
Money makes a wonderful servant and a terrible master.

You have to ask yourself, is money what you're after or a simulacrum for something else? I suspect for most people its the latter.
It was originally created by Paul Buchheit. It's in point 6 of Google's corporate philosophy "You can make money without doing evil."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_be_evil

Edit: I couldn't tell if you were making a joke or just misinformed.
You're not the first person to say that. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Lite version just for keyword tracking. :)
PHP + Yii Framework + jQuery + MySQL. It does everything you'll need - quickly and neatly. It's got the good bits of Ruby on Rails with the benefits of using PHP (huge amounts of tutorials, modules, components etc). Fuck worrying about what's cool, or what scales. You want to build a product that works so you can show it to people and see if they will pay money / use it.
I'll delete it; don't know why it wasn't flagged as a dupe
Seriously? Look, people several time came up with alternatives.

EU gov: "erase your data after 6 months"
Google (after a lot of opposition): "fine, we'll erase them after 2 years"

Everyone: "you can't just make me use buzz without me having a say"
Schmidt (and I am paraphrasing): "Geez, users are stupid!"

The reason why Schmidt sees no alternatives is because he doesn't want to look for alternatives. They are there. But as the guy with the biggest vault he has all to lose.
"There Isn't Anyone You Couldn't Love Once You've Heard Their Story."
That's why there's statute of frauds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_frauds)
I've never actually been bitten by rm (or done anything remotely this badass) but in college I did have a bad Unix moment:

Late at night, I was tarring up a finished project right before emailing it to my professor. I ran:

tar -cvf *.cpp *.h something.tar

instead of:

tar -cvf something.tar *.cpp *.h

It happily wrote most of my project into a tar file on top of the first source file, then complained that something.tar didn't exist. I overwrote "array.cpp" or something like that, and had to rewrite it (this was before I used source control for anything, and a large part of why I learned to use source control).

Writing this comment, I had to look up the order of the parameters to tar; I still can't remember. Stupid tar.
"I must say I would have given up much more early"

In my experience, it's really easy to fall into the smooth-talking salesman trap, especially if you aren't fully aware of the scope of work. When you're already committed to the project, things like "let's just make a big push to get out feature X" don't sound so unreasonable until you realize that all you have been doing is making big pushes.
Not all shareholders are eager to sacrifice values and principles to maximize returns.
Why Innovation Thrives At The Mayo Clinic
Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan
inDinero (YC S10) peers into your company’s financial future
People On YouTube Make A Lot Of Money
It's a mistake (though a common one, and almost an American truism) to equate "being a shareholder" with "fixated on next quarter's earnings above all other factors". There are other standards of behavior, even if you still profess an interest only in money, especially if you still want your company to be thriving in a decade.
The vast majority of our customers are far from tech savvy. In fact, on the rare occasion where we suggest getting a customer's IT department involved (say, for an email deliverability issue), they often beg us not to -- "IT is too slow, never solves our problems, will want to build their own version of Wistia, etc." I'm always surprised when I hear this, but I guess it means we're doing a good job with the product and support!
Transmeta failed because they tried to compete with Intel on Intel's turf. By the time they got their 2nd version ready for tapeout, Intel had already learned that TransMeta was right about the fact that the low-power market was a growth opportunity.

If TransMeta had gone after ARM instead of x86, they might have had a chance -- as evidenced by the fact that ARM is currently trampling over Intel's offerings in mobile applications because x86 compatibility isn't much of an asset, and Atom doesn't have low enough power consumption to compete with current ARM implementations.
It all starts from a single zygote. Every material in that zygote is either an essential nutrient, a peptide made according to its DNA (including mitochondrial DNA), or catalyzed from essential nutrients by those peptides.

The laws of physics and biochemistry are irrelevant, unless you're claiming that a substantial fraction of the information needed to build intelligence (we're talking tens of megabytes here) is encoded in the laws of physics or in the biochemistry we share with snottites.
David Brin made a similar forecast more than ten years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
15 Creative Book Cover Art
I’m not a really big fan of reading, but I like to think that a book cover can tell you a lot about what you’ll find in it! Book cover art is a great way for graphic designers to showcase their skills to the world at a mainstream scale. Most of the book covers I picked are made by designers so maybe I’ll start reading a little more.
David Brin, author of The Transparent Society [1], should do a 1-hour sit-down interview with Eric Schmidt. I'm sure it'd generate dozens of scary-but-true quotes for the blogosphere and social-news sites to wring their hands over.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
Google's business is heavily based on trust, so I think ethics are fairly important.

I was very disappointed to see Google trying to innovate by legislation. Why should a company with the best engineering talent resort to such games?

Also, don't underestimate the impact of the shifting demographics of internet/privacy awareness.

Google succeeded because it had a simple product (search) that just worked, and because its ads just worked. Schmidt has had nothing to do with most of Google's revenue and I think he's more likely to screw things up by approving unwise M&A activity or making ill-conceived public statements than he is to somehow usher in a new era of corporate growth.

Also, I question anyone who is too gung-ho about a political candidate; particularly anyone who does it from his/her public corporate podium. It suggests that the person is overly attentive to the sort of base, clannish activities of humans, taking sides, being in the "in crowd". Such behavior often correlates with success in bureaucratic organizations, but that's not the person you want as CEO.
> if you were a shareholder

$461.00 will make you one.
So what would YOU want?
On your "Why" page, it should read "Because spell checkers do only 80% of the job." or "do only" could read "only do"

I like the idea (and the site). A lot. Not sure on monetization, but the idea is great and very useful.
awesome coverage everywhere for inDinero! Looks to really be catching on as something people need and want to use.
sure, as far as "job responsibilities" go, I agree that keeping the site running trumps answering support emails. That's the primary job of an engineer or ops guy/gal. But hopefully urgent events like this aren't the hour-to-hour norm for a company.

To answer the first half of your question: as an engineer myself, I am personally very invested in good customer service skills. Admittedly, doing a startup (vs. being part of a much larger organization) probably drives my customer interest quite a bit. However, even from an engineering perspective the customer interaction has definitely helped to focus my work on solving real (often recurring) customer pain points and requests, and communicating those back to the customer in a way they understand.

anybody out there with similar experiences as an engineer doing both customer support and development?
Don't forget the evil Monsanto. Not to be confused with Matasano of course =)
Nashville, TN has a full scale replica of Athens' Parthenon, complete with four story Athena. She was originally unpainted, but recently was updated to match what she looked like in ancient days. Lots of gilt and garish paint.

Before: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~ndsmith/Acropolis/Nashville%20Part...

After: http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~amanda.n.krauss/AthenaGilded.j...
No, not like that.
Good point. Though name is only one of many attributes we have. You should also take a common job (how do you feel about being a waiter?), keep a common wardrobe, live in a big city, drive an average car, and watch/read average stuff. Oh yeah, you probably want to ask a surgeon to give you an average face.

Then you'll be anonymous... and you'll also have one of the most boring lives you could imagine.

Sorry, there's an alternative. Corporations are not above the law: if the citizens decide that certain stuff is illegal, then it becomes so. Full stop.

I realise many americans (and other people) hate any type of regulation, but this is exactly what they are for. You don't need to wonder how to stop bribes. You don't say: "Well, this is the way the world is going and we can't do nothing about it". You make a law against it, and then the police will do their best. Will it solve the problem? No, but it would definitely help.
This whole argument seems to be about whether you need to include the design of the factory in the specifications for the chip.
The approach of painting cities was taken by mayor Edi Rama in Tirana (Albania) to aesthetically revive the "concrete jungle" style eastern bloc buildings:
http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/colorful-painted-b...

While the interior remains as depressing as ever, the response has been very positive. I imagine it has the same psychological effect of waking up to a sunny vs rainy day.
Sure. But there's enough people who would gladly pay the current price _and_ sacrifice values that I doubt any choice by the "ethical" people would make much of a dent in their share price.
> I felt compelled to point out that the chances of becoming a billionaire were pretty darn slim.

There's something subtle here I disagree with... "chances of becoming a billionaire" - chance is involved, but so is choice. I see this a lot, people talking about becoming a billionaire as if it's a random thing. How many people make a serious commitment to becoming a billionaire, research how to do it, manage their time, and actively try? I'll wager - not too many.

I've crunched the numbers on what it'd take to be a billionaire, and I'm not interested in putting in that time - I have science and art and writing to do. But I think I could if I set my mind to it. Or maybe not! But how many people actually look at what it'd take to become a billionaire, say, "Okay, I'm willing to do all of the first steps, then keep taking risks, investing wisely, consumingly moderate/lowly, and so on." How many people try, and how many of them succeed? I'll wager not many try, and quite a lot of those who seriously try succeed.

Edit: About his general point about "wealth anorexia" - yeah, it's just money, not something worth evaluating yourself by. Make a lot of money because there's no real reason not to make a lot of money, so long as you're doing it by creating things people want and getting a small fraction of the value you create in return.

This is a common point I see - people who aren't single-minded don't understand single-minded people. I tried to cover it here - http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=107 - "Rule an Empire, a Fistful of Rice" - it's with excerpts from the Lone Wolf and Cub comic as an argument and eventual duel between two fallen samurai. The first is telling the second that he's doing bad things for money, and why does he need the money? No matter how much money you have, your belly only holds one fistful of rice. But he doesn't understand that people who build empires are very aware of that - the money is a tool for doing other things. Me, I'd like to make at least hundreds of millions so I can sponsor research, build hospitals, build universities, build temples, commission art and support artists, get great engineers working on amazing projects... a friend said he'd be happy making $80k and can't think of anything else he'd do with it. I said - really? Work on curing diseases, sponsor arts, build a private military and go dismantle the North Korean government? I can think of lots of things I'd do with a hell of a lot of money...
> "... which so-and-so clearly does not understand..." or "I'm surprised anyone actually pays attention to that kook."

I beg to disagree.

Such verbal slinging IMO serves the important sociological purpose of publicly provoking the other person to react and calling everyone else's attention to the issue. I'd even venture to say that we're all basically watching the discussion primarily because of the jabs.

Insults would perhaps be unbecoming if this were a clinical and professional exchange in an academic journal. But when our opinions compete to survive in the wild, a little verbal spice helps.

Speaking for myself at least, the primary value of this exchange is entertainment. Any knowledge or insight is merely a bonus.
...unless you're violating the privacy of a police officer, prominent businessman, or a politician. In that case, you'd better be ready to fight a felony wiretapping charge.
Inside the Knockoff-Tennis-Shoe Factory