skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This doesn't explain or even address why the Japanese favor 'large round eyed' actors in ads for beauty products, why darker skinned Japanese women are not featured on TV, and why the current depictions of beauty in Japan eschew many traits common to classical Japanese portrayals of beauty.

It is glaringly obvious that European ideals of beauty have enormously affected the Japanese aesthetic, especially including anime; almost any Japanese person you meet will readily admit to this, to claim otherwise takes willful ignorance.
Status Of CrunchPad Litigation
Skyhook Wireless suing Google over wi-fi location biz
> How to find information is a skill that is no longer just for librarians, that's rapidly becoming a 'must have' skill for just about every job.

And don't forget about asking librarians, either. Some research librarians are so good at finding things, it's scary. They're like meta-meta-search engines, except they're usually much better at teasing the relevant details out of vague questions.
I'm curious if Alex3917's response to this was set to dead as a result of automated spam filters or if there's something else going on.
Free market capitalism is supposed to be about innovation and competition. You have to weigh the good with the bad. Has Microsoft probably had an advantage that pushed others out of business - yes, but I'm sure they also inspired programmers to create new products that they could then sell to Microsoft/Google type companies. It's hard to say if large companies create or destroy innovation and competition. There will always be positives and negatives.
I haven't worked with him since 2007, but I do have his email address. Shoot me an email at [my HN username] at gmail and I'll send it to you.
got angry? At astrophysics?
Some people still surprise me. This was the post where i least expected to lose karma.
I was hoping it would support both means of playback. I don't really see why it shouldn't.

For example, I have far more music on my laptop and such than I do on my iOS device, so it's significantly more convenient to stream music from iTunes to an iOS device when I'm at home (say, downstairs with my iPad) than to sync that music over manually.
Is the definition of science really that narrow? Surely doing logical deductions is also science? It doesn't mean you are correct because you can never verify the basic assumptions, but it can still lead to valuable insights.

How does a scientist build a house? Since apparently he can not calculate the statical properties in advance, the only option seems to be to build a random house and then measure if it crumbles down or not? That doesn't seem very effective. In fact, several houses would have to be built to get statistical significance. Then nobody would be allowed to move in for 10 years to be reasonable sure it is stable. As soon as somebody moved in, the conditions of the experiment would change and the house might still topple down. I can't see a way for this to work. If science is like that, it is useless.
Your retirement: courtesy of China.
You're discounting the network effect of compatibility. I don't even mean "network" as in networking, but in the ability to save a Word document or whatever on a floppy on virtually any PC and load it back on another. This was long, long before every device could render a web page (and you could take for granted that it would have a TCP/IP connection!)

There was huge real value in creating "the standard", not least because it enabled some truly phenomenal economies of scale. I mean, the 386 had the hardware for protected memory, virtual memory and preemptive multitasking. Or you could pay 10x as much for a contemporary SPARC or MIPS processor.

In 1994 I was at college and we were doing some numerical stuff, metal fatigue IIRC. You could run your code on a SPARC 5 or drop into DOS on a crappy PC and give 100% of the CPU to your code. Guess which was actually quicker...
So am I. It's illegal to ask questions about family or marital status to a prospective employee, in the US at least. Your company could be sued for discrimination if you ask those types of questions to candidates.
Sure, he's villainized because he aggressively forced his company's software on the world regardless of the poor quality and the negative effect it has had on essentially everyone. They bloodthirstily copied competing software to the pixel and bludgeoned innovators to death with it. I can't even calculate how much the simply poor ideas and execution of DOS/Windows has cost the computing world and everyone as a result.

If you go back to 1988, and compare a DOS machine to say, an Amiga - how could anyone say that Microsoft did the world good by ensuring that the primitive, clunky, non-user friendly junk that was DOS beat out the relatively amazing competition?

So, Gates shoved this awful crap on us to make himself rich, regardless of the consequences. I can't respect a software company that has never appeared to be concerned with or even understand software quality.
Yess! This is amazing. Please make it so that I don't have to remember what commands I need to use or which parameters. I use R once every 4-5 months and every time it feels like I'm starting over. QPlot?! Which parameter goes where? Hist or histogram? Getting over this would be very refreshing. Cheers.
Why Isn't the Price of Sheep in Sudan Obeying Moore's Law?
I think mere observation does count as a form of non-formalised and occasionally unreliable science. Certainly if you're going to classify "science" and "reason" as the two ways of finding out about the world, then you have to bung "observation" in there with science.

In engineering you often do want to generalize to a whole class of examples, and can hardly help doing so. If you want to nail two pieces of wood together, and it's never been done before, you can't help but discover general principles along the way that are applicable to all wood-nailing scenarios. Then one day you'll go to nail two bits of different wood together, they'll behave differently and heck, you'll have discovered some additional facts about different types of wood.

Eventually you'll hit your finger with the hammer and discover that it really hurts to do so. Now I come to think of it, I would classify "hitting your finger with a hammer really hurts" as a perfect example of those true facts about the world which has nonetheless never been the subject of a proper experiment and certainly wasn't derived from reason, either.
> For debugging it mostly relates to chopping up the program in to bits that are 'verified good' and 'unsure', until you are literally staring at the bug.

It should be noted there's a whole class of bugs where divide and conquer simply doesn't work. E.g. about anything with race condition.

Good points otherwise.
Paris Hilton did a clever job turning what she was given (which didn't include talent or beauty), multiplying it manifold, and making a crapload of money out of it. From a purely economic point of view, she did much better than the vast majority of people born into her class.
Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.

Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.

With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter.

No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck.

He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it.

But he made good use of it.

Shame on you and all your upvoters.
I agree. Creative and brilliant ideas can come at anytime, but putting in the work to get those ideas to market, or to polish them off until presentable to outsiders is where the disciple comes in.

I can wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea to improve a UI workflow, or to squeeze more performance out of a process, but if my disciple doesn't kick and I write the code to get it done,

Also it doesn't take intelligence to makes sure my Press page, About page and Resume stay current, it just takes discipline.

All of my prior jobs have been given to me based on my completed portfolio projects, not on my great ideas. And numerous co-workers have been let go because their brilliance never results in 'finished' projects.
If PG isn't opposed to an API, maybe somebody could hack the HN code to add it natively?
What is the Ideal Checkout Login?
Yes, I used an Amiga as a desktop from 88-93 and it was so far beyond DOS/Windows 3.11 and the junk that came before, any comparison is shameful. Amiga OS was very, very close to unix in how the system worked from a user's perspective.

You should probably 'get over yourself' (I really hate that phrase, so I figured I'd throw that in there).
Vernon Hill Is The Best Damn Banker Alive (Just Ask Him)
Tip: Just the text, please
True enough, and interrupt driven programs tend to exhibit very nasty ones as well where that strategy does not work.

It's not a 100% silver bullet but it will get you quite far.
Exactly. Real knowledge is almost always derived from a combination of science and reason.

A scientist building a house might use an experiment to find what kind of mortar is best for holding one brick to another brick. He must, however, use reason to deduce that a mortar that can hold two bricks together is also capable of holding a thousand bricks together.

Then he can combine it with a bunch of other observations about the world... for instance that mortar which works fine on a Sunday will also work fine on a Monday. How do we know this? Well, because no other material has been observed to change its properties depending on the day of the week, and because there is no logical connection between physical properties of materials and the arbitrary cycling of the calendar which is a human invention. On the other hand, some materials do have different properties in December vs July (eg the water in the lake might completely change state depending on where you live). Anyway, I seem to have gone off on a tangent but basically, observation and reasoning are inextricably intertwined if you want to actually figure out anything about the state of the world.
As CTO at ProFounder I'd like to think we are both legit and aboveboard. We've got a very open team and we are all very excited at the opportunity to help small businesses. The legal elements to what we are doing are complex and we see it as port of our jobs to communicate them clearly to all parties who take part.

ProFounder is different from Kickstarter in that we aren't a donation platform but an investment platform. That means that you can get the money you put in back and possibly even have some upside if the business does well. Correspondingly you as the investor take on some risk as with all investments.
Ask HN: anyone playing with the Yahoo Fantasy Sports API?
Yahoo! recently launched an API for their fantasy sports games.

http://developer.yahoo.com/fantasysports/

Has anyone played around with it? It currently restricts development for non-commercial use, but I think there are numerous opportunities to create products that leverage this software for the fantasy community.

The fantasy sports community might be one of the least tapped on the internet, because up until now all software was developed by the giants - ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, NFL. And for the most part, they've taken their users for granted. The interfaces are simple but lack innovation. Yahoo's API really opens doors for a lot of opportunities.

A few numbers:

- there are 30 million fantasy players in the US and Canada
- the average household income of a fantasy player is $92,750
- estimated as a $3 to $4 billion industry

(http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_38/b4195081511463.htm)

So - is anyone playing with the Yahoo API?
Cool site. I'm super experienced in CMS type things like this, having done work for local businesses in the past.

Here's some competitors you might not know about:

www.webstarts.com - They let you drag and drop to make designs, which is great, and have more features than anyone. They also try to bilk you horribly with worthless addons. Check these guys out for ideas, maybe make a free website. With design skills you can make an amazing website with this, most people don't though.

www.sitekreator.com - An expensive ($10 monthly) site creator with many features.
So social security is going to go bust and the markets are losing people money, how is a 20-something techie to build funds for retirement? Go back to stashing hard earned cash in a fireproof safe? Never plan on retiring?
I hate economists.
There is no data to back this up at all. You can't take a set number like $100k and apply to all companies across all industries.
You think I'm arguing that the book should be burned. I'm not; I'm saying that it was irresponsible to write and publish a book with haphazard and amateurish demolitions instructions, and calamitously irresponsible to make that book available to teenagers. I also said, earlier, that the book launched my career, which I'm quite happy with. My feelings about the book are complicated.

It should go without saying that there are many tools that, unlike toaster ovens, are not generally provided to children without supervision --- regardless of whether they can cough up the cash to buy them.
> Using regular expressions for anything but processing lines of text means you're probably doing it wrong

And since half the people noting this usually just handwave about the jwz quote* : Regular expressions have very definite limitations, which is why complex parsing is usually done with a second layer on top of REs. Regular expressions for tokenizing (AKA "lexing": breaking a stream of characters into individual tagged tokens - this is an operator, that's a floating point number, etc.), and then a grammar is made for those tokens with a parser.

If you aren't aware of the limitations of REs, you can just keep adding layers and layers and eventually end up with madness like this RE to recognize RFC822-valid e-mail addresses (http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html).

* "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." -jwz. Funny for people who already know, but not very enlightening otherwise.
Google Fixes 10 Bugs in New Chrome Release (and paid $4k bounty)
Damn, that low.

Is that the official number, and if so does it include everybody who sends an application or just those who gets an interview?
Because of the cost of digging up sidewalks etc (as mentioned: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694456)

But ALSO because of the massive teaming people calling their cable company when their wireless network doesn't work. Ever wonder why they give away wireless networks with data plans? It's to streamline the service they give to their buyers. It isn't just anybody that can setup a router or diagnose a DNS problem from a loss of connectivity one.
Propane.

Propane powered vehicles, propane fueled fire, propane refrigeration.

...and there is this (A Solar Ammonia Absorption Icemaker):
http://homepower.com/article/?file=HP53_pg20_Vanek

Now all you need is a way to power your currency.
Meh. People should not feel entitled to sit around and do nothing for the last third of their life.
The password is probably encrypted, but reversibly so. That's still a potential security hole, but an attacker would need both the database (with its encrypted passwords) and the key.
See Fransisco D'Acconia's "Money" speech in Atlas Shrugged for some of the reasoning behind this view. (It is probably in some of Ayn Rand's non fiction but I just can't remember where off the top of my head)
I might be wrong, but I just got that impression when I saw phrases like "branded like a mullet", "you blew it" in your article.

However wrong you might have been,however big the mistake might be, I think the best way is to have as little emotional baggage attached to it,in thought or word,for it might cloud your analysis.

For instance, at some point later in time, when you think about your branding, the fact that you hadnt projected yourself correctly, and the phrase "branded like a mullet" would come to your mind first. So, you MIGHT be stopping yourself from deeper analysis prematurely, by broad blanket criticism.
Forget enterprises. They have too many wants/needs/requirements (usually they don't really need the features, but I digress...). Focus on consumers and users that are willing to pay for upgraded features.
Well you also have the risk of not fitting into the new company, risking the same.
I have used a similar formula for a long time. 30K x # of employees x 2 to get the gross profit needed to operate. Adjust revenues to match the gross profit of the industry. The author states 50% profit for companies, but some are much lower and some are higher. I have been self-employed for 20 years and most of my friends own small businesses (non-tech). This formula has worked roughly for all of them.
You can always take it down and re-upload under a different name and you'll be on the "new" page for a short amount of time again.
The other issue to consider is how much price affects the perception of value.
This study starts with the assumption that Americans should retire at age 65, which is to say that despite massive changes in health, life expectancy, productivity, and the fundamental nature of work as we shift from the physically demanding manufacture of real goods to a service economy, we should be using the same definition of "retirement age" as our grandparents used.
Make sure your users data is encrypted - then you don't have to worry about that.
"This is easily disproved by dropping a heavy object and a light object of the same shape from a high place and seeing which hit the ground first. Yet it took over a thousand years before anyone thought to try this experiment."

Not to be too pedantic about it, but the reason the belief survived for so long is precisely because it isn't easily disproved. If you drop a heavy object and a light object of the same size from a high place, the heavy one will absolutely hit the ground first. (Try it!)

To see that this must be the case, imagine that they hit terminal velocity. (Formula for this is at http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/2/2/222c90eb77c221a2c6b10...) All variables but m are the same in each case.

To get the "right" result, you have to be fairly thoughtful (e.g., put dense balls on an inclined plane).
...From your comments its clear that you're zealously anti-capitalist and, as a result, anti-Microsoft, so you're simply not applying logic...

There is a difference between making money and making money at the expense of everything else.
If someone has a bloomberg terminal handy it should be fairly easy to setup a worksheet to test it (both employee numbers and revenue are available as standard fields).
Sitting around and doing nothing (or driving around the country in an RV, etc.) is the most depressing thing I can think of doing. I hope when I'm >65 I am still working, if not in an operational role, in some kind of investor or advisory role.

Retirement from a physically demanding job makes sense when you can't do that job any more, but enduring a job/life you hate, just to reach (hopefully) retirement and finally enjoy life, really seems like the wrong model.
Accidentally omitted a link that I wanted to share. Here's the best example so far of the API in action: Pickemfirst scans what you're reading on your browser and calls back to your league to indicate whether the player you're reading about is available for pickup.

http://app.pickemfirst.com/
Ask HN: Working at a startup founded by the "Business Guy"
I'm a developer at a small to medium sized SaaS company, with 10 developers & 150+ full time employees. We have about 5000 paying clients all at different levels of subscription though largely receiving the same service.

It's very much a business oriented culture, with little emphasis on the technology that enables us all. A significant portion of our company can't tell an operating system from a web browser, and often don't use any SaaS tools besides what we provide and facebook or google.

We have 1.2 million lines of production code spread across 3 Microsoft frameworks. Our code evolved from a desktop app based on microsoft access about 5-6 years ago. It's not far off to say you could smell our code from Pluto.

The core functionality of the software has largely remained untouched, though it's become very bloated as hundreds of features have been added as a result of paid feature development from clients. Many of these remain undocumented and require detective work on my part to figure out if something that seems like a bug is actually a feature.

Because our software has usability and accessibility issues stemming throughout our system, signing up a new client usually takes 2-3 weeks plus 3-4 live training appointments so people can actually figure out how to use our software to run their business.

Despite these setbacks we are growing, and just received another round of large venture capital funding to continue doing all the crazy things we do best.

I make a decent impact on our code base and do all I can to encourage the other developers towards good practices, though many of them are here to do the bare minimum amount of work required to get to what their product manager wants. They have very little personal investment in the success or failure of our product as a whole.

So fellow Hackers I ask advice from you. Would you work in a top down sales/marketing company that seriously limits the technology you can use? Do you think our code smells will slow us down as more and more competitors can recreate our service cheaper and quicker? What is the outlook and future of a junior programmer in a company like this? Am I wrong in anyway doubting the quality of our product and it's long term success? Also what options do I have to influence and change things for the better amongst our team?
If I could have up'd you +100 I would have.

For all of us who, in the past, had to fight the unbelievable crap that was -- and for some poor souls still is -- IE6, view this link and savour the memories.

Sleep well.
I believe this as well, but with the bare minimum product philosophy it is tough to build around.
I am a 27 years old Italian male. I am currently looking for a woman from USA for pitching my last startup which will be a "behavioral ad network for amazon associates links" basically. And eventually talk about becoming co-founder, etc. I am launching in a week or so, so hurry to contact me if you are interested. my email is in my profile. You can even google my name ( which is my email name.surname@gmail.com ) and see my public profile or my previous and actual business ventures. And Do not worry, i am not a maniac or a serial assassin, and i already have a girlfriend, checkout my facebook profile too. Thanks!
Ok, but for example for a trip advisor I would have thought there would be registration of travelers, mailing lists, and so on. Maybe I misunderstood - of course if instead of an algorithm, you have some human updating the data on the site, all that is doable.
Well, I just meant that if you treat wood or people as strict commodities, then the fact that the price might continue to rise in the future doesn't really seem to imply that I shouldn't pay a slightly higher price now; you just pay the market price so long as you still make a profit and there isn't a cheaper alternative. (This is the naive, econ-101 analysis.)

But, of course, people are more complicated than wood. So if you wanted to argue that you should refuse to pay the higher price, you would need to explain exactly what the difference between people and wood are, and exactly why it should lead you to reject the naive analysis.