skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Proprietary storage? I'm skeptical. This is contrary to the open-source mentality: let the details of how the system works be known to everyone. Like PGP encryption: nobody's hiding how it works - in fact, more scrutiny helps prove it's safe. You don't hide the mechanism, you just hide your personal key.

Otherewise, you start feeling secure based on your assumptions, like "only we can read these drives" - when maybe your assumption is wrong. Maybe somebody has hacked one machine somewhere and reverse-engineered the connector.

Now you've got an unknown danger out there. Whereas if you're constantly submitting your system to public scrutiny, you'll probably only have known dangers. Which you can fix.
Wiring Up Android Buttons
Killing To Kill a Mockingbird
Agree that the data itself doesn't really support the implicit policy recommendation of encouraging startups rather than established companies, but the basic finding that firms in their first year account for ten times the gross new jobs created by firms in any subsequent year and thus after a year companies on average lay off more staff than they hire is pretty interesting.

It would be much more interesting to see what the stats looked like excluding firms that fail in a given year (ie. how many net jobs do firms that survive into year five create in their fourth year)
Data mining the heart
Unfortunate indeed. Have a good time at home, and don't forget to look both ways while crossing the street! :)
how about co-launching a book both in hardcover and trade paperback, at the same (high) pricepoint?

Alas, that's not how publishing works; I create and sell the IP that goes between the covers, but how those covers are put together and marketed isn't my department (and I have no control over it).

One point to note is that commercial fiction publishing runs on a reverse-auction basis: prices start high, then drop. Hardcovers (perceived as high value items) come out first, then are superseded by successively cheaper/smaller paperback editions after early-adopter demand is saturated by the high priced product. Unfortunately the pricing model is conflated with the physical product's format, and with the distribution channel (trade vs. mass market), which muddies the water enormously. (I'd love to do an ebook edition that launched at, say, $20, then dropped in price by 5% per month until hitting a floor of $4. It'd be interesting to graph sales against time ... but unfortunately the accounting procedures in place in the publishing business, and locked in via contract, seem to make this impossible without either (a) self-publishing or (b) protracted negotiations with a legal department that are not dissimilar to kicking a dead sperm whale up a beach. In high summer.)
Who says ARM is going to be 32 bits? Rumors say they're going for 64 bits especially for servers. They will need to surpass 4GB limit on >=8 cores per chip.
They did not agree to this in the first place. Most of them were not happy about the deal google was given. I strongly believe it is google's job to ensure that their work is of good quality. This is similar to Wikipedia errors that find their way into newspapers and even research. The difference is that wikipedia isn't claiming to be a reliable source. Google is trying to build an exhaustive catalogue and they are the only one allowed to distribute a large amount of text due to a court settlement. Good metadata should be part of that deal.

And like the article mentioned, there already exist much better catalogues (or whatever they are called) such as the library of congress one. They might not be perfect but they sure beat scanning a book cover and picking the first date found. Why not just license it?
Used to think the same way - now I've got two modes when I'm reading a successful author. Either (1) absorbing his good information, or (2) trying to figure out how the bad stuff could be marketed so well. (2) is more meta-learning, but I start asking questions like, "Who does this appeal to? Why is this worded/marketed like this?" Etc. Sometimes I learn more from bad information, because it forces me to reconsider the level of complexity writing should be if you want to sell in volume (very, very low - dumb it down 10x... okay, now make it dumber) and things of that nature.
Inconsistent behavior for array#slice in ruby
Is there any philosophy behind such a design for the slice?
Yeah, sorry. cnn/fortune has too many different urls. I should have searched.
The IRL Social Graph
Think less like a technically savvy HN reader who does not pay for content online, and more like an info marketing huckster who has an email list of 50,000 people who have bought a similar product in the last six months.
Thanks a lot, that jives well with your blogged articles about how the publishing work flow works (or doesn't work). So I guess "that's not how it's done" was basically what I expected.

And yeah, the e-book concept would be very interesting, too bad it's not possible from where you're at.

We need an author that is ... successful enough to not have to depend on publishing as an income to write something that people want, and then publish it using that e-book model. I'll go and sit over there, waiting for that to happen.
It seems somewhat intuitive that filling your stomach with a zero-calorie substance would prevent you from subsequently filling it with other, more fattening substances.
I dont see this to be hacker-related topic. Not all hackers have problems with their weight. And I doubt that this "hack" is good for your stomach.

Flagged.
Although I tend to agree with you I'm not entirely sure it's not possible.

Danish internet entrepreneur Martin Thorborg sold a 1000 ebooks at 300USD per book.

Also not all conversion is done the way you seem to think.
Ask HN: How can I make money?
I'm not greedy, and very diligent and have good business acumen, yet I'm struggling to find a good business I can run online and actually make money from!

Any good suggestions?
Nah we should do it like proper spies. "Are you a friend of PG?".
Intel's SSD roadmap
If you would like to know more about what made the Albrecht brothers' stores so successful, you should read Dieter Brandes's book. It think the English version is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Bare-Essentials-ALDI-Way-Retailing/dp/...
TCP/IP isn't owned and controlled by a single corporation with a history of restricting user freedoms...
Why don't we have anything that can manipulate objects at the nano-scale? Couldn't we use atomic force microscopes to push some atoms together and at least make some interesting molecules (even if this process couldn't be scaled up)?

Also what ever happened to Feynman's idea of building half size remote controlled arms, which we then use to build half sized of that remote controlled arms, all the way down to a very small scale? Has anyone ever tried that?
Solve a problem preventing people who have money from making more of it.

Solve a problem preventing people who have money from spending time with their children.

Solve a problem preventing people who have money from getting the recognition they think they deserve.

Solve a problem preventing people who have money from... you get the general idea.
SCVNGR Looks to Stay “On Top of the World” After Facebook Places Fallout
I suggest that you play to your strengths, whatever they are.

Surely your life, up to this point, has given you the opportunity to get to know the needs of some niches, some groups of people, better than the average person.

Take what you've learned so far, and figure out how to apply it in a novel way.

You say you have "good business acumen"-- how did you achieve that? In what businesses? Are there any unfilled needs that your former customers may have, that might be filled online?
How-to humanize your Web Application
I think you missed the "grad student" part ;)
A number of these PM tasks go deeply into the development world: defining development processes, architecture, and managing developer checklists.

I've worked with a number of product managers who've grossly overestimated their competence in these areas, and who've been mocked and ignored as much as possible by the development team as a result. I'm familiar with a large, well known software company that uses such a job description. I worked with a product manager who left that company for mine. He was awful. He never gave customer-focused requirements. Instead he'd define implementations as if he knew what he was talking about, and I'd have to play 20 questions to figure out what problems he was trying to solve.

The best product managers I've worked with have leveraged their strengths and trusted others on their team to do what they're best at. In my experience, these product managers have always had a very strong customer/user focus. My favorite product manager was at a medical imaging company. He had been a tech before he moved into product management, so he knew deeply what our users needed from our product, he had many connections in the user community, and he knew how to listen. We'd challenge and ask questions, but at the end of the day we deferred to him in his area of expertise, just as he challenged and asked questions but deferred to us in our area of expertise.
Other option is Saito aged that much between the time he died and Cobb went to look for him.
Wright State researchers developing skeletal scans to recognize terrorists
-> Telling her to "wait three months until the next review process" will probably lose that employee.

Is that really the kind of employee you want? The minute you cave in, you start setting a dangerous pattern. I guess this is where your leadership skills should come into play and you convince the employee to wait. In the mean time you could perhaps plan to transition the employee to a better role/ add further responsibilities so that she feels like she has gotten something. And come appraisal cycle, you better reward her for sticking by you. Anyway, thats how I would do it.
I'm confused. Did it work because people felt more full and ate less, or did they eat the same amount but the water reduced the number of calories the stomach could generate from the food?
That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.
What's wrong with that?

If you have a large working corpus of code in Blub, you absolutely shouldn't replace it just because a new version of Language on Locomotives comes out.

What you should do is exactly what patio11's doing here: evaluate if an upgrade brings you something that offsets the disruption the rewrite will cause.

For me, this also includes factoring in whether or not I'm going to be actively developing the application in the next year. If so, I do things like keep the framework versions current just so, nine months down the line, I'm using a framework version that I can still get docs and plugins for.
Dynamic favicons for Google Calendar
Ten Things You Didn't Know About Super Mario Bros.
I don't see a title on that graphic. Is that for Primer? Which I haven't seen yet? Should you include a spoiler warning?
What about increased compensation transparency? Better communication? Fostering a collaborative environment in every sense possible?

Politics is always a misunderstood interpretation of other people's motives. "He's just in it for the money." "She only thinks of herself." These statements are too general and not true. A person could not live a whole life like that, it won't work.

People want to collaborate, they just don't know how. Seek to understand other people, then help them understand your perspective, and you start knocking out politics
Feynman's Cargo Cult Science
Finding the magic: cognitive aspects of mood and emotion in advertising.(1989)
Crazy how relevant this 1989 paper still is. More things change more they stay the same.<p>"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet, it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effect on him."
Scary in the sense that many inexpert users would find it helpful to have a curated store for applications on their desktop with a simple, reliable payment mechanism, no installation headaches, and no/signficantly-less malware?
Haha, I remember overhearing some suits asking each other "Who the f is Paul Graham?". I dont think they ever got it.
A product manager should manage the gap between his product and competing product.
What "kind" of employee are you referring to? The "kind" that feels they are not fairly compensated for their skills?

Asking someone to wait several months is asking them to place their faith in the fairness of the company and to trust that they will be rewarded for their trust and faith at the "normal" time. An employee's ability to trust in the company is going to be highly dependent on the company's past behavior, make sure your employee's have reasons to trust in you before you ask them to. A company needs to earn this faith, it'd be foolish to expect it blindly.
Early Stage Investors, Prepare to Write a F$$king Check
"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." --Henry Ford
I'm not using drug availability as an indicator of health, I'm using it as an indicator of health care. My point is that comparing the cost of health care in the past to health care today is not a fair comparison, since health care today includes vastly more services and products.

As for health, if people enjoy chips more than not being fat, I'm not going to tell them their choices are wrong (at least until 2014, when their choices are inflicted on me). Broccoli is available, they are free to eat it.

As for relative status, only one kid can be the first with a new toy in any era. In principle one could compare opinions and attitudes, but my guess is that they will be roughly constant over long periods. You can find find "kids these days, get off my lawn" and "my parents had it better" articles in newspapers of any era, for example. All I'm really assuming is that having a playstation or viagra is better than not having it.
Open Space Movement
seem to make this impossible without either (a)
self-publishing or (b) protracted negotiations
with a legal department that are not dissimilar
to kicking a dead sperm whale up a beach. In
high summer.)

That does raise the question, tho - why aren't you self-publishing[1]?

You already have a dedicated fan base (I'm one of them - I think you're basically the only currently-living sci-fi author I still read), getting the word out and selling the books online is surely possible?

Even tho you'd presumably get fewer sales from not being in stores, wouldn't avoiding giving 90% of your revenue to a middle-man possibly make up for it?

IIRC some rock band (I think it was REM or U2) recently successfully did just that by selling their album only in digital format online.

[1] I have no clue about the publishing industry, just curious as to why this isn't done more often.
I'd take it one step further though with eating something with fiber (like broccoli, carrots, etc.) a little bit before the full meal or drink some water with psyllum husk or metamucil or any fiber packed drink.. that would actually fill you up as compared to water, which might fill you up for the moment but it'll just leave u hungry a little earlier by the time of the next meal ..
The default position of HN is skepticism
I've noticed recently that for almost every submission that hits the top page, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response to the thesis of the link content or the poster's argument.

Go ahead, pick any 5 of the front page posts right now and see if I'm right or not.

In general, this is a good thing as taking the skeptical position forces a minimum degree of critical thinking, which makes that comment more useful. And it's an excellent form of filtering out the large amount of BS we come across everyday.

But I certainly would like to see more top comments that agree with what the poster said, or expands on their argument.

(Eagerly awaiting the top comment to this post !!)
Cool article, but his interpreter is broken.

Both repl mode and file mode just spew errors.

gcc version 4.1.2

[briang@ ~]$ gcc lisp.c -o lisp

[briang@ ~]$ ./lisp test.lisp

> Error.

> Error.

> Error.

...
Utility Vehicle Electric Vehicles GolfCart Golf trolley
Thanks for your suggestions fezzl. Would surely try these.

We have made some changes to the homepage, explaining privacy protection and some common QA.

Would like to know your thoughts on the changes.
http://gnu.org is registered with http://www.gandi.net/
The Truth About Real Estate (use your byproducts)
In your post you say:

>> create a cart in the session (bad, bad, bad)

Sorry to be a total n00b, but why is it bad to keep the cart in a session? What do you suggest as an alternative?
It would be much more interesting to see what the stats looked like excluding firms that fail in a given year (ie. how many net jobs do firms that survive into year five create in their fourth year)

I downloaded the BDS data from the US census website and arbitrarily picked companies which were age 0 in 2000 to look at. Of the 486k "establishments" (approximately equal to companies), roughly 50% survived 5 years.

These 486k establishments created 3.1M jobs in 2000, and 1.6M jobs -- roughly 50% -- were lost over the following 5 years due to establishments closing, for a net gain of 1.5M jobs.

Meanwhile, 2.4M jobs were created over years 1-5 while 1.7M were lost (at establishments which did not close), for a net gain of 0.7M jobs.

Over a 5 year timescale, it seems to me that startups (in the general sense of "new companies") outperform existing companies in job creation by a 2:1 ratio -- still impressive, but also rather more credible than the article's claim.
Banked billions spark tech takeover shopping spree
Please people, when you submit something 2+ years old, indicate it in the title. (2007 in this case)
FB Needs Facebook Follow: The Twitter-Eater, The Preemptive Google Me-Killer
It's going to be skepticism, of course.

When someone comes up with a new idea, it's up to them to present it. If they fail to, only skepticism will result. If they do well, there will initially only be skepticism and a few people who 'believe'. 'Belief' is not scientific. You have to wait a while for confirmations to come in, and a fast-moving news site like HN is going to drop the story before confirmation has had time to happen.

That's just life.
Bleh, once again I'll miss you guys by a day.

Any thoughts on doing it one weekend in the future? :D
Do you mind if we quote you on this?
Thank you, that was what I actually meant. When I saw the headline here regarding the "top 5", I didn't know if my inner fanboy could handle e.g. having the singer of Slipknot amongst that set. I thought that my initial comment was evidence enough that I did RTFA.

And I actually inserted the "Well" to make it sound less harsh, but apparently that made it look a bit arrogant to a few people. The nuances of written language…
Affiliate ads are more suited to sites loaded with product reviews, discussions, comparisons, etc. The sort of tips that shoppers look for, combined with an affiliate product link, creates the difference between a stray ad, and a valuable sales proposition.

AdSense effectively determines/auctions PPC placements. Affiliates attempt to recreate the AdSense magic in large part by building content around links to products--in other words, marketing.
I Don’t Much Get GO
Earth before life wasn't much to be looked upon, either.
Ah, don't worry about that, it's Greece, nobody goes on foot :P

I'll send you some sun!
Ask HN: Ever looked at your code and said "now it is a lisp"?
Ask HN: Ever looked at your code and said "now it is a lisp"?

I was always thrilled by _why's poignant guide to ruby and was so upset when the Agile programmers everywhere began celebrating. But...love won out. He was always so patient and giving and eventually I was able to get over all these issues and really be in a position where I could love somebody...and I basically woke up one morning and realized that I was in love with him, and he was the man I would marry. So, I took him to the pier we launched canoes from, and told him how I had overcome all these issues and wasn't scared to let him in anymore and that I was so glad he failed in all his initial plans after college, because it meant we were together in Silicon Valley.
Auralization experiment
It seems to be possible to hear the sound of execution of a Java software; CodeSounding assigns instruments / pitches to programming statements (if, for, etc), so that the flowing of execution can be played as a flow of music.

Max/MSP enabled the auralization of several sorting algorithm’s execution path: every instruction triggers an oscillator, tuned to a specific pitch.

See an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5ml9e2THw
I don't think there's a bubble at all. The original tech bubble happened because companies IPO'd really early, and Joe Average Investor took equity out of his home or took cash advances on his credit cards and invested it in high tech stocks. This inflated the value of those stocks, causing more Joe Average Investors to pour money into high tech stocks. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until mid-2000 when that cycle collapsed.

There are precious few IPO's right now. And, the people investing in startups right now are accredited investors i.e angels and VC's. There isn't money rushing in from Joe Average Investor in the US, because by law they can't invest in a non-publicly traded company.

Angels and VC's plan on a bunch of companies in their portfolio failing. They typically expect to lose money on %40-70 of their investments, break even on %30 of their investments and hopefully make a 2X to GoogleX return on their money on the %10-30 of the companies that "succeed".

There are around 250,000 millionaires in the San Francisco Bay Area and 600,000 millionaires in NYC.[1] That's a huge pool of people that can afford to write a check for $25-50k without really hurting if they lose that money. A lot of those people are also increasingly willing to write a check to a couple of entrepreneurs with a promising product and a bit of traction. Why? Because they would rather do that with some of their wealth rather than pay a professional money manager %3 of their investment a year to manage their money for them.

ref [1]: http://www.us.capgemini.com/news/current_news.asp?ID=840
Agree that [1] social graph value is both proportional to proximity to IRL and massive, [2] current products/offerings are actually pretty far away from IRL and [3] that Google doesn't seem to be their culturally [4] that Facebook is probably not going to get there and that fundamentally the [5] data is fragmented across various platforms (your points re BlackBerry and Foursquare).

The Fridge is a YC company from the most recent batch (the YC demo day is today and tomorrow) that is taking a shot at this from essentially the standpoint Paul Adams outlined. It's got to be very, very tough to build something like this directly from a cold start, though. Especially in 2010 versus 2006.

If the incumbents can't do it, and it's hard to break into, perhaps the problem is at least temporarily intractable. In that case, it leaves the door open to something like Hunch's interest graph, where common clusters of interests (rather than IRL relationships) drive the connections.

[I also posted this comment to the blog post]
You may be right. More info in this reddit comment;
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d4lhp/protein_that_...