skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That link supports me, not you. As I already said, Social Security doesn't promise anyone a profit, as long as benefits are managed properly, it can continue indefinitely. It specifically relies on people dying before they receive back what they put in. Social Security is perfectly sustainable, they simply have to cut benefits to an appropriate level or raise the retirement age. You clearly have some personal bias against Social Security that's making you not see it rationally.
Actually this is a good idea for just in time manufacturing. Have mechanical engineers / electrical engineers prototype a product in cad and put it out in a catalog. Once enough purchases are placed then you do the manufacturing. Have a cut off date that all of the money is refunded if the threshold is not met. The company keeps the cash in secure interest bearing securities and keeps the interest even if the mark is not met.
I thought it was a very well made movie, and Fincher has a way with these kind of scripts that lack a traditional story arc that leaves them compelling anyway.

It is kinda funny that Sean Fanning's name in the movie is Sean Parker. Or was that character supposed to be someone else and to protect the identity they claimed he made "napster" instead of whatever he really made? Certainly Timberlake looks nothing like Fanning.

I think the movie is a bit kind to Zuckerberg, but then, it is pretty hard to make a movie focused on a single individual and not have it come out sympathetic. Unless that individual is, say, hitler or idi amin.
Excellent, thanks. I may sign up to stay motivated.
All of them are better designed than everyDNS.
Math in Moscow
/-> Ruby on Rails
C++ -> Java -> Perl -> PHP ->
\--> Python
You live in Boston or SF? Interested in talking to you more but couldnt find your email on AlwaysOn. Shoot me an email: leo at groupie dot mobi
One of the best things about working in machine learning and natural language processing is that the best conference and journal archives are already open access ( books.nips.cc , usually ICML publishes the papers online, there's the ACL anthology, JMLR and JAIR are fully open access, etc).
I also disagree with his downplaying of the importance of branding and design. I definitely remember stumbling across Wesabe a few years ago when I was starting my first job and looking for a personal finance tool on the web. One look at Wesabe made me hit the back button. First, the name was strange and foreign. I didn't know how to pronounce it. Second, the logo (which is the same today, apparently) uses thick, bold strokes that just made it seem less like a legitimate finance product. I don't think I ever made it past a few pages on the Wesabe site before abandoning it.

Mint, on the other hand, had a very direct value proposition to me. As soon as I hit the landing page, I instantly knew what they were offering. The design was pretty, colors were soothing, and the font made me want to read the copy. It was good enough for me to get through the signup process, even though I eventually balked when they asked for bank account login information.

If my experience is anything like anyone else's, I can imagine Wesabe having lost many, many potential customers simply by virtue of having a less desirable site. Even right now, as I look at their current logo, I feel the same way. It's one case where a log actually significantly turns me off towards a service.

The post talked about product design flaws as the second biggest contributing factor to Wesabe failures. I think aesthetics and branding need to be grouped into that. If the appearance of a product isn't good enough to draw potential customers past the landing page, then the design is the bottleneck and the biggest culprit, bar none.
good call! do you know about putting out a press release? also let me know if you think of any more anti-facebook blogs. Thanks for the input :)
More Top Down parsing - JSON
telnet your.mail.server 25

HELO your.domain

MAIL FROM: you@your.domain

RCPT TO: post@posterous.com

DATA

Subject: Post title

[ press Enter twice ]

body of your post

End it with a single . on a line of its own.

QUIT
This might be closer to the mark:

Under the risk compensation theory, helmeted cyclists may be expected to ride less carefully; this is supported by evidence for other road safety interventions such as seat belts and anti-lock braking systems. Anecdotally, many riders report feeling safer with a helmet: "When I wear it, I feel safe..." One researcher randomized his helmet use over a year of commuting to work and found that he rode slightly faster with a helmet.

Motorists may also alter their behavior toward helmeted cyclists. One small study from England found that vehicles passed a helmeted cyclist with measurably less clearance (8.5 cm) than that given to the same cyclist unhelmeted (out of an average total passing distance of 1.2 to 1.3 metres).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Risk_compensatio...
You're such a douche that I am beginning to suspect that OpenDNS is not trustworthy.
Literally devoid of content. I think Giles sometimes hits the mark, but there was nothing here. Good manager is good, bad manager is bad and gets fired.
I think the main reason is because Google uses Python, so many of the top programmers learn it.
Recipes e-mailed to you daily based on what you like
Sorry, I dont buy it.
Turn off email, your phone and the TV.

Try Google AppEngine, Java and JDO. Install IBM Eclipse and the Google AppEngine plugin and deploy in two clicks. Move to VPS if you need more than what Google offers.

Do LISP/RDF research when code is up and running.
Isn't there a business niche here, for buying self defense patents?

Slogan: "Send $X and the name of the company -- and we'll return a list of patents (and prices to buy them) which that company violate."

Edit: Grammar fix.
This is all based on unfounded assumptions about who has sex with whom. If you make a graph in which vertices are people and two people have an edge between them if they've had sex, then the structure you actually get is surprising. Here's a real sex graph; bear in mind that this is from a high school, so the things I say in the rest of the post may not apply outside high schools and colleges:

http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains_pressfigure1.jpg

You've got a lot of two-person monogamous pairings, a smaller number of triads, scattered chains, and then this BIG, HAIRY THING that's vaguely ring-shaped. It doesn't have promiscuous hubs; you can stop the spread of STDs by trying to get as many people as possible to use condoms and get STD screening, thus breaking the chains. It's almost a spanning tree.

This structure can be generated from two simple rules:

1. People tend to date other people with a similar amount of past sexual experience.

2. People avoid dating the exes of other people who are close to them in the relationship graph, since this makes them look bad to their friends, exes, and so on. This accounts for the lack of short cycles.

This was theoretically confirmed by some researchers who wrote computer simulations to try to come up with similar-looking relationship graphs, and succeeded brilliantly:

http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains.pdf
I've definitely heard accounts from credible hackers that Zuck is up there. I don't know him personally, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I do like Lessig's point that "Zuck's a genius, but so are many". There's a lot of insecurity around places like HN where people go, "baw, Zuck can't be a genius, because then not only would he be wealthier and more famous than me, but he'd also be more capable!" The "who's smarter?" argument is really a waste of time. It's highly likely that Zuck is an absurdly strong engineer. But, so are many others, possibly you included. Build until you hit your natural limits; before that, no one has any idea how "smart" you are, yourself included. Find your own market to win instead of taking the respect and credit away from him.
Since you are comparing it to PHP and Ruby, it appears that your comment refers to their use in web development. I can't say much about the broader use of the languages, but here is some perspective regarding the web development side.

A little over a year ago I compared the jobs available for PHP, Django and Rails (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931). I did the same again 3 months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119). A quick glance now shows the same trend and ratios (eg, simply hired has 20,125 PHP jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months; 5,334 Rails jobs, a 39% increase in 3 months; and 1,153 Django jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months).

TL;DR: PHP, Django and Rails jobs are all on the rise, there are vastly more PHP jobs than either Rails or Django jobs and there are many more Rails jobs than Django jobs, and this applies to startups, too.
my shipping policy actually has to do with the printer i am working with, he only ships to the lower 48. That said, this is powerful input. My plan is that if i start getting enough orders and interest from abroad i will be able to convince the printer to ship international. Thanks for providing the info, I really appreciate it.
I'm a huge fan of Chargify after talking to them a little, and they weren't taking any new Braintree customers. It had to do with Braintree API versions (v1 vs v2). I didn't want to wait, so I went with Authorize.net

Maybe Authorize over Braintree was a mistake, but switching to a different CC processor than Amazon was definitely the right move.
Texting censorship flap settled out of court
I would have liked to see what happens with shorter word where it's harder to establish spatial context. I.e. 'I', 'am' etc.
Well of course not. Before I got that last year, I was shooting with a Canon PowerShot A640 for over two years. Just the XSi produces cleaner shots, because of the larger sensor.
This is how Time Life books & movies used to work. They'd advertise "Secret Lives of Nazis" or whatever, but only actually make it if enough people call to order.
some interesting comments on Perl: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3564

This is also good: http://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning cofounded Napster:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Fanning

Sean Parker was President of Facebook.
The wrinkle in this story is that both conclusions were eventually discovered by others as well, acted upon, and eventually became the dominant paradigms by the end of the war (Dyson was doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command and claims to have made the suggestion in regards to cutting weight on Lancasters.) Some of the most successful planes in the war embodied this philosophy before Dyson even enlisted. The most successful light bomber in the war was the De Haviland Mosquito, which was made primarily of wood, usually carried no machine guns, and could outrun every other plane in the sky until the arrival of jet engines.
"i don't think the pomegranate has had the same level of effort/attention."

Wikipedia says that "The pomegranate is native to the region of Persia and the Himalayan ranges of India, and has been cultivated in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Mediterranean region for several millennia."

They seem to have a similar history.
I love this comment in particular. A) my girl friend has been telling me the same thing. B) Relates to me as an artist and brings up all these aesthetic questions, about the audience vs. artist autonomy etc etc. already this project has been interesting in terms of revealing myself as an 'entrepreneur' to some artist friends... (the idea of selling out etc)
.... that said. I didnt have a good camera on me, and wanted to get the site up ASAP... I'll be reshooting soon with an SLR and my other artist friend... who is actually a photographer and not a performance artist like me. :-) thanks for the comment. cheers.
Beerby Helps Answer That Important Question, "What Do You Have on Tap?"
good call. If i plan on using ads on facebook i wont use the term printingfacebook... thanks!
I did mention that option, and basically said it was a bad idea. I think that most SaaS apps are better served by offloading as much as possible onto third parties. Just like I wouldn't encourage someone to write their own web server, I wouldn't encourage them to write a subscription billing service. It's a pain. Pay someone else to handle that and focus on your core competency, whatever that is.
Interested in free video formats? We need your help
The way most vaulting services work is, you pass through credit card details, and they store in their vault. They then send you back a token to reference for future transactions. In most cases, you won't have the ability to pull back the full vault entry (specifically the credit card number) from them. This is the lock in that's being referred to here. Most gateways who won't let you export the cc data yourselves, or to another provider will cite PCI compliance issues, but it's all smoke and mirrors. They just don't want you to leave.

And to be 100% clear, Chargify is not a gateway or anything like that, so they don't do any storage - they're a SaaS provider that has built their app to offer recurring billing on top of a bunch of other gateway's APIs.
The point is that everyone is used to this pattern: free trial that will switch to paid subscription unless you cancel.
A large part of it is that Django is maturing and gaining traction as a great alternative to frameworks like Rails. Many of the complaints of Rails, such as extensive magic and monkeypatching, are less of a problem with Django, so to many it's a fresh breath of air.
Thy Neighbor's Budget: New York City
"more seeds are necessary to ensure reproduction"

Looking at other fruits grown in similar climate (mediterranean) http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1996/V3-416.ht... it seems to me that the number of seeds and aridness of the climate are not related: olive (1 seed); Mandarin (12?). Only fig is similar to Pomegranate; fig too is filled with seeds.
doesn't that mean that he is basically acknowledging that he is not providing a service the user values at full price?

Well, the users seem to like the service, and they're willing to pay full price. That's good enough for me.

long term, you are better off providing enough value that the customer is willing to take active action to stay.

Good luck with that. I take the stance of provide something of value AND make it easy to pay. I guess you could say I want to have my cake and eat it too.
Orlando, Florida - IZEA, Inc. - Senior Ruby Developer

http://toprubyjobs.com/jobs/6-izea-senior-ruby-developer

Izea is a really fun place to work, and you'd be working with a team of other ruby developers integrating with lots of well known systems (Twitter, Wordpress, Blogger, Oauth, etc).

Sites you'd be working on:

http://sponsoredtweets.com
http://socialspark.com
http://payperpost.com
http://wereward.com (and iPhone app!)
http://inpostlinks.com
http://izea.com

We're only hiring locally, but we're doing the whole "we'll help with your relocation expenses", so if you're a Ruby dev who is interested in moving to Orlando, please apply!
Could this be seen as a correction in the market? Is the market reacting to technologies (i.e. Django and ROR) that are speeding up development times as well as improving productivity?
Customer's new laptop, a Toshiba with a Core i7, 3GB RAM (i.e. the new kind of qpath thing), manufacturer shipped SSD.

Running XP, being installed in the middle of Windows Update and prompting for permission, so basically 4 cores, 3 GB, SSD, clean system, idle.

I clicked Outlook. 5 seconds to get tot the startup wizard screen.

I could hardly be more underwhelmed after all the SSD hype I've read. I've seen faster cheap office desktop computers.
Example: the sysinternals tools for windows were originally distributed as single compiled binaries, and this was far and away the best approach for those tools. Also, just because developers used installers on windows doesn't mean some of them weren't making a boneheaded design decision to do it that way and their app would have been more sensibly distributed as a single binary.

A single, statically-linked binary was (and probably still is, though .NET may be better now) the most portable way to distribute a program on windows. You can't expect perl to be there, you can't expect python or ruby to be there. Java was usually there but not trustworthy. Java version conflicts on windows are a nightmare. That's probably improved unless you're a business running legacy apps. Dlls were difficult to manage and library conflicts were common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_hell.

Yes, you could use an installer, but that was unnecessary overhead if your application was not sufficiently complex. On windows, you want to be able to say "download this, click on it, and when the gui pops up: have fun."

This is not true on Unix. On unix, a simple perl script is likely to be far more portable than a single binary. Python and ruby are reliable as well. C source code is as portable (or more portable in some cases) than any of the above, though installation is more complex. Also, many of the utilities that would be convenient as downloadable binaries come standard with the OS (grep, find, awk, vi). Unix package managers are powerful and useful, and developers can trust that typical unix users understand them well enough to use them.
When RoR was all the rage (the one-true-rage even!) couple of years back, there were a lot of people in the Python world, who were concerned that Ruby might steal the thunder from Python.

Python people attacked this "problem" in multiple ways. One was the emergence of competing frameworks like Django and Pylons. The other was to work hard on other product lifecycle stories. Some of which were influenced by what was gaining traction elsewhere (automated deployments, TDD). But, some new things also took flight in the Python world, like WSGI, which inspired similar endeavours (Rack, Plack/Perl).

Also, Python has better overall ecosystem. You want libraries for obscure (say HVAC) protocol, you have a better chance of finding it in Python, than in Ruby.

I think more developers relate to "don't be too clever" attitude taken by python than admitted among this crowd.

While RoR was busy redefining the entire Ruby ecosystem in it's own image, Python people were busy building stuff that were truly framework agnostic. Eg: Paste, WSGI, SQLAlchemy, Various templating languages like Jinja2, Mako.

Today, it is very easy choose from many competing python frameworks without drinking any one brand of kool-aid.
from your license agreement (http://www.rethinkdb.com/license.txt)

Prohibited activities include but are not limited to:

-snip-

* Selling support for products which incorporate RethinkDB.

Can you really enforce this?
Good overview by private beta tester: http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/1037353749/testflight

I'm not sure this is a product that I would pay for, since it is based on an iOS 4 feature[1] that I have used before.

[1] http://jeffreysambells.com/posts/2010/06/22/ios-wireless-app...
In Schmidt's vision, Google will search before you even ask
WW II fighter pilots were very rational about what they aimed at. (I happen to have read a lot about this.)
Bingo.

We decided to go with Authorize.net, and I'm afraid we're locked in again. I willingly and knowingly put my nuts in the vice this time. I asked the sales rep about getting the CC info back, and she cited PCI compliance as their reason for not giving it up.

Still, I decided to go with the big dog, and my hope is that any services like Chargify that we decided to use will also work with Authorize.
I agree, free subscription time is my favorite thing to give. I can sort of do it with Chargify. It basically works as a partial credit toward their next charge. It's not exactly the same as deferring a payment, but it pretty much works out the same.
I suppose my point is that, even with the new hosted suff, chef doesn't have the a polished "wow, I feel like I didn't do anything" feel yet.

If you can capture that you win in my book. If I run chef, or apt-get, or you-name-it through StackFu, then yes. StackFu is my replacement X.

For me the best part is the github-esque "username" / "scriptname", and what I imagine will be the social components behind it.

I think the real show-stopper would be a way to dump in my amazon/rackspace/etc. keys and get a real full stack in one click.
I'm speaking of deferring payments, not free-trial periods. The SimplePay free trials work fine. It's only after they convert to paying that things are fully locked in.
OK, United Artists is a cool idea. GroupOn sounds worthless as you describe it. The idea is simply to create enough aggregate demand to commission and design a product in small batches, even though you aren't dealing with a mass market product. Such a model would go very well with any of the open source design initiatives out there where plans/designs for physical goods are worked on and improved upon by the Internet community at large to everyone's benefit.
Every time I see a video of him speaking, or read something he has written, my opinion of him leaps forward. He uses a lot of big words and yet is able to clearly and simply explain that which needs to be explained. Why the Internet should not be governed by the industrial revolution's concepts.
"Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture talk at the 2002 Open Source Conference. The master of the simple slides shows us how it’s done. And since, as he says, this is his 100th time for this talk, he has this bad boy down solid. Even though this talk is from 2002, his slide presentation style is still as fresh today as Axe Body Spray."[1]

http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

[1] http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best-presentati...
Chargify gives you a hosted payment page that you can brand with your own CSS so you never touch the CC at all. It works waaaay better than Amazon, and is not nearly as jarring.

If you don't like that, you can build your own page and pass off the CC details via the API, but I went with quick-and-easy Chargify hosted pages and have been very, very pleased.
Was this because of their incredibly short ammunition reserves? I heard something recently about spitfires having only having about 20s worth of machine gun fire.
No, this is not the same as Tuskegee. In that experiment the people were not left to get advanced syphilis for years, and intentionally denied proper care. This is much different than being given the cure after exposure. They both start the same -- someone is intentionally given syphilis. The don't however end the same.

Now, if you were saying Tuskegee vs Mengele was one of degree not kind, I would agree with that, as the the disregard and denial of follow-up is mirrored in the two situations.

Please also note: I never claimed anything was "no big deal". While the meat of your argument actually is on point, this first declaration frames the whole thing as a strawman, please don't do this anymore.
I use scrotwm - don't be put off by the silly name, it's a great window manager: think dwm with a plain text, human-readable config file.

That said, most of my 'window' management is handled by tmux.
Ask HN: Have you ever heard of Virtual Sit-in?
there seems to be one coming up next week. Has anyone on HN ever heard of these? What have you heard? Should we participate?
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/10/01/18660447.php
Not a Hotel "Death Ray" - a "Quick-Tan Pool Area".

bug->feature
Lawrence Lessig's thoughts on the movie, posted as a separate story on HN, but I felt I should add it here as well: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zucke...

I left the movie quite satisfied. It was such marvelous dialog paired with excellent directing. I love Fincher's style, though at times it felt like he was being held back, such as during the regatta segment, I felt like he couldn't go as crazy as he would like given the soundtrack.

Sorkin is a master of dialogue, and though the story is wildly inaccurate, I suspended disbelief and enjoyed the ride.
Some of the Best Presentations Ever