skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lamarckian evolution doesn't exist... except as specifically evolved via Darwinian evolution. Its fairly well known that starvation can make even a human's grandchildren smaller on average, so it shouldn't be surprising that other starvation related metabolic effects can be passed on too.
I can't find the link right now, but I'm pretty sure I've seen them say:

1) TF2 is profitable, even including the close to ten years that it spent in development(!)

2) They make money off the updates (because of new sales), but not always enough to break even for the update

3) Valve views TF2 as their sandbox to see how players respond to certain ideas, so they find it useful to keep TF2 around even if it weren't carrying its weight anymore.

(edit this backs up some of my claims: http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/19/interview-valve-on-the-fut...)
H-P's Apotheker Challenge: Don't Mess Anything Up
I probably switched back to the wrong tab after reading the article.
Yes, pretty much. It's fine to hit refresh and see the data as of a couple minutes ago.

Needing to wait a day (as in Google Analytics) would be too much.
> And the "hackers as founders" thing is kinda
> what Y Combinator is all about, yes?

The only person qualified to answer this question is Paul Graham himself. If you read his essays, as well as the various FAQ's and similar for both HN and YCombinator, you can see it in his own words.

After thinking about it for a bit, your article against people using of the term "entrepreneur" shows a lack of experience with "hackers" (as per it's original definition). The vast majority of the greatest hackers I've known absolutely suck at business, marketing, socializing and other important aspects of entrepreneurship. If you read up on Steve Wozniak or Robert Morris, you'll realize their success in business probably would not have happened without having someone else around willing to learn and do all the other stuff required by a successful venture. From what I've read of Paul Graham, including "On Lisp" and "ANSI Common Lisp," he seems to be a rare breed; good at tech and good at business. Most of his writing, HN and YCombinator all seems to emphasize and encourage people to be good at both. In essence, he promotes the idea of hackers as entrepreneurs.

There will always be those self-embracing the term "hacker" or the term "entrepreneur" who really are not what they claim to be, or do not meet the higher/highest end of the definitions. They are both terms of endearment and respect, but they are great things to aspire to be.
I use the B&W P5's. Fantastic headphones. I can't hear a thing when they are on, and they are extremely comfortable.

Best thing of all is the build quality. These are the Macs of headphones.
I partly agree with staunch for MVP kind off startups. For example, creating an iPhone app or a website in a bootstrapping mode will fit in. If you don't want to be a BIG grown up company but want to be only a Startup, then this is the right thing to do. My belief is that if you can get a decent job with not much mental pressure and a steady income, then use that money as your startup capital to get a freelancer for developing your product. Once you see more traction and customers, then GO FOR IT and quit your job.
Does this include employer Social Security and Medicare expenses too? If not, it should, since they come out of your paycheck just as much as employee taxes.
Try this: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8ee1a816-cd81-11df-9c82-00144feab4...

EDIT OK, try Googling "flash crash single order" and clicking the link from there.
Just added this in the tooltips.
You're dead-on with #3. We used Amazon Simplepay for a subscription service, then recently switched to direct credit cards via Chargify. Subscription rates doubled instantly.

I wrote up some of my thoughts here: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...

Summary: Find a way to get the raw credit card. Bypass Amazon, Paypal, Google, etc.
Centamental: Private Conversations Aren’t As Private As You Think
You may not have recognized it, but a really good programmer always uses the off-the-shelf stuff if it will do the job correctly. Chances are, there's nothing on the shelf that does what they want exactly. So they code it. But when there is, they use it.

How many programmers do you know that wrote and use their own programming language? OS? IDE? Web browser? Email client?

There are thousands of apps that they use every week and don't code their own.
What language are you using? Although many IDEs can handle more than one language, few do it well. Plus, it's likely overkill if you are just getting started. If you are still messing around with a bunch of different languages (which is great), stick with a good text editor like gEdit. One thing that's really helpful is syntax hilighting for the language you are working with. Even if you do pick a language, depending on which one you may just stick with a text editor.

Contrary to what other people might tell you, I wouldn't advise going emacs or vi(m) just yet. They are fantastic text editors, but that's one more thing to try to learn.

Keep it simple for now.
Why is Apple not being sued by Microsoft for the same things?
> Start a business to bring a meaningful change in the world. A huge change. A 1000% change.

I know it might be heretical to say this on HN, but establishing and growing the kind of organization that can create this kind of change in the world will require a lot more than just technical and/or academic chops. Ultimately, what you'll need to make a difference in the world is a lot more intangible than that: vision, leadership, ambition, tenacity, etc. My advice would be to focus on society and find a way to "hack" it in a novel way that is mutually beneficial to both your organization and to society as a whole--this is how you can really make a huge change in the world.
I don’t understand that objection at all. Getting some company to print something is not really an accomplishment. It’s nice that it’s possible but that’s about it.

Selecting the articles and designing the magazine is what adds the value. That is hard work, especially if you want to create something as nice looking as this. You get those two things with the PDF.
The article provided "universal" and Ars specific stats. All the % are drastically different between the two, except Opera.
I prefer to not give foxnews.com any traffic.
Please lead with the positions' locations.
Social sensitivity trumps IQ in group intelligence
Is this the Danger INC patents that were bought?
Why not? It's perfectly reasonable to judge the quality of a work by the degree to which it succeeds with its desired audience. To quote Paul Graham:

"Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience. Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. The meaning of 'interest' can vary."

http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html

As to restroom graffiti in a dive bar... what's the problem? If it was in the vatican lavatories, sure, you'd have a case. Where I'm from? Not so much. A lot of joints herebouts have sharpies in the head, should the muse visit you whilst micturating. I guess we're sufficiently horrible. Or awesome.
For the sake of brevity, I didn't go into detail about how CookieSafe works, but try it out and you'll see why it's an entirely different experience than creating a static whitelist in a browser dialog box.
SaaS Subscription Billing, or How to avoid getting your n*ts in a vice
i'd point out that the apple has been cultivated for something like 1000 years. its been developed into a larger fruit with fewer seeds via an extremely long period of selective breeding.

i don't think the pomegranate has had the same level of effort/attention.
I need to remember this for the next time someone tells me my desire for lower tax rates means I must not desire roads, police, and fire fighters. It's remarkable how little of the tax burden of a modern state actually goes towards essential services. A modern country could probably be run with single-digit taxes. You would be missing things like a space program, science subsidies, farm subsidies, and socialized retirement insurance, but you could still pay for the rule of law and basic public goods.

Also, does this include recent large one-time stimulus spending bills, or were those in the next fiscal year?
Opera is fine too, except the sliders are a bit smaller.
Ha, these calculators have had a great past 24 hours. I made one today too: http://taxes.kareemshaya.com

You did a very nice job with the receipt vibe.
I'm curious what the mechanism is, though. From the perspective of a complete layperson - does this mean that the genome is modified based on acquired characteristics? Or are there other mechanism to carry the signal?
San Francisco, CA & Baltimore, MD

Millennial Media

Web dev, mobile app dev, software engineering, QA, and MIS positions are open.

http://www.millennialmedia.com/about-millennialmedia/careers

We are venture-backed and a leader in the mobile advertising space. See the link above or email me if you're interested: cbrown@millennialmedia.com
Los Angeles, CA (and possibly Silicon Valley) -- Factual

Our goal at Factual is to be the place where people meet to share, improve, and mash-up data. We have an awesome team, and an incredible CEO (he was the co-founder of Applied Semantics, which was sold to Google and became AdSense). We just launched an open database with approximately 30 million points of interest (POIs) across the world, and are working on many other exciting things.

We're looking for awesome Java generalists. Bonus points for MapReduce, NoSQL or machine learning expertise.

http://www.factual.com/jobs

You can also email me personally at leo -at- factual.com
How Apple dodged a bullet
I think the tendencies you're pointing out are anecdotally accurate occasionally, but they are in no way "by definition" from immigrate or immigrants.
Because they were not former Windows Mobile license holders. This seems like a ploy to get former a license holder to continue being a license holder.
If you don't listen to music then surely earplugs would be better and cheaper?
That's not how I think about things. If you claim that a certain statement is "incorrect" English, to me that means you must have a decision procedure in mind. Sure, most of the time it's "common sense" whether something is grammatical: "The sky is blue" is fine and "They sky are blue" is wrong. However, the same applies to deciding whether programs halt or not. Most programs either halt quickly or are obviously infinite loops, yet we know a decision procedure that works on arbitrary programs is impossible.

I'm not suggesting that talking about grammar is impossible or pointless. I'm saying that for the discussion to make sense, there needs to be some formal way to settle whether something is grammatical or not. You could try to make a formal grammar for English, but that's probably futile. A better approach would be to choose a list of written works as the English "canon" and judge usage (hopefully as objectively as you can) against that body of work.
I'm not interested in Z, so I won't see this flick. But I hope that more successful companies get positive movies made about them. Too many people down on capitalism, imo, and I find information on how people went from startup to large corporations very interesting.
The problem here is that for every dollar the government currently collects, they spend two. This should be reflected.
If only Congress had an API...

POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=expel
POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=elect&candidate=329183
Learning the shell.
The trick is that books are outdated as soon as they are written. There are a number of great books on design, but you can learn just as much if not more by just searching around.

Assuming you mean site design (learn the golden ratio, learn CSS, get good with photoshop) vs. code design (GoF Design Patterns, etc.), smashing mag is pretty good place to start.
Would be interesting to see how people vote, even if it has no direct effect.
Thanks, yours looks pretty nice too!
Welcome back!

I recently "came back" so to speak. I spent 4 years after college on a development team for a Fortune 500 company that didn't actually develop that much and I came to see my profession as just a paycheck... I got a wake-up call and I've re-discovered my passion.

Congrats. Honestly, I didn't read your entire wall of text there but if you want to get into something cool (and use something you already know) you could do what I'm doing right now and learn Android development. It's a lot of fun and I didn't even know Java starting out. The docs are great.

http://developer.android.com/
No, it isn't :)
No offense intended - I'm an American citizen so I don't have tons of room to talk!

PIGS is an acronym - it just makes it easy to remember. That's the only reason I can name all 5 countries. No one things that citizens of those 5 countries are swine, just like they don't think that citizens of the booming BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are dumb.
What backs a t-bill is the "Full Faith and Credit of the United States Government". Along with smaller amounts of gold, it's the foundation of most countries' national reserves, yes, "most", notably China. If the US gov't defaults, social security getting paid back will be the least of our worries.
Additionally, the pomegranate is native to an extremely arid environment; more seeds are necessary to ensure reproduction.
Couple of possible reasons why its (just) Motorola:

1) they only need one to create FUD.

2) others may have patents that MS infringes on.

3) they are sending a message to other companies who have made MS phones in the past.
I don't know many people who go to the doctor every time they have a cough. Most people seem to just tough it out; even dragging themselves into work sniffling and sneezing, and potentially infecting everyone else in the office.

I also know lots of people with chronic low-level pain or other ailments who don't get any medical attention for a variety of reasons (too much hassle, too time consuming, can't get time off work, don't expect the doctor to actually do anything, can't afford the co-pay, etc).

Americans don't actually see their doctors more often than citizens of other countries. In fact, exactly the opposite is true. See http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.h...
Thought I had put the location. Fixed. Thanks.
If you're not going to be using them to listen to music, simple foam earplugs are comfortable, effective, and dirt cheap.

As far as actual earphones, I ended up picking a pair of Etymotic ER6i's after researching various brands a few years back. About $70, but excellent sound-blocking and audio quality.
Actually, lots of things are formal. Statements in mathematics, assuming all parties agree on notation and convention, is formal. It's quite easy to decide if, for example, a statement in first-order logic is well-formed (correctness is another issue altogether, and as we know no formal axiomatic system can be consistent and complete).

To me, it's a contradiction to say "x isn't a formal language with a decision procedure for well-formedness" and "A is/isn't a well-formed statement in x."
FF 3.6.8 on Win7, all it does is cause all the drop shadows to disappear. And the other slides remain locked.
Meetup.com -- NYC

Current openings:
API Engineer,
QA Engineers,
Senior Systems Administrator,
Software Engineers,
UI Designer,
UI Engineers

We work with Java (and use Jython in production as well) on Apache with Tomcat on GNU/Linux, use MySQL and HBase for storing our data, cache a ton of stuff in Memcache, and are just starting to deploy Varnish for various things. We're also using Ruby/PERL/CPython for some tasks.

Check out the full descriptions at http://www.meetup.com/jobs and apply from there, or send your resume to the address in my profile.
The costs are not always felt in fiscal terms. There is also the cost of an increasingly complex set of legal codes. There is also the cost of broadly-worded laws being applied in ways they were never intended to be applied, etc.
Groupon is looking to hire designers, frontend developers and more in Chicago, Illinois. http://www.groupon.com/jobs
This is awesome. I passed along that article to some friends, the consensus was "great idea, never gonna happen." Now I get to pass this link along. That makes me :)
'It is a lesson for everyone from corporate Canada to community halls: The key to “smart” groups may have less to do with brains and more to do with social sensitivity – a trait typically found in women.'

Yet another article that is cool with making broad statements about a large group of people because the generalization is favorable.
What percentage of your users are still paying yet do not use or do not have access to the service?

I did dev work for a client, service based site, $10.00 a month. I put in some simple tracking reports to let me know a users login history. I found that high percentages of users paid, logged in once, and never logged in again. This struck me as odd because the service was by nature something if you paid for, you would need to login to use it. It was not a trick to get someone to sign up for a site that adds no new value over time.

What was really interesting is the ~14% of users that only logged in once, ever, but still were paying every month on their credit card. 14% seems really high. I wonder if AOL has the same 14% of users not dialing in but paying for dial up still.

I also found ~5% (guesstimate) go right for a chargeback, do not contact support, and do not click the very easy to find "Refunds" tab that allows a one click full account deletion of all data, refund of the partial month, (which was moved to charging at the end of service, instead of up front).

Users purchase habits are indeed strange.
The (deceased) doctor behind this has left a portion of his estate to Pitt, something they used to flaunt on their website. They've yanked the relevant pages in the last few days:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QbyoXXj...

http://www.pitt.planyourlegacy.org/donor-cutler.php
I don’t have much for book recommendations, but start off with The Elements of Typographic Style [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...] and get a feel for creating usable and readable typography in your apps. http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/ makes a good companion site too.

Graphic design comes down to “the art of organizing” and effectively using five elements: line, shape, space, colour and texture. When searching for fundamental design books I’d look for those that cover how to harness said elements effectively.
>>you're saying Modern Perl, they're saying Modern Perl. What is it about?

It is a bit debated. See e.g. http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-tips/what-is-modern-perl.htm...

Also, at the risk of sounding ironic I must ask -- you are really not aware of a web service called "Google" and its (many) competitors? Try e.g. this when you see unknown terms:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=modern+perl

>>ironic how they praise pngout [...] publish 42MB presentation...

Ah, yes. Publishing a big pdf from a presentation do take away all points in the pdf about image sizes sent from a web server. [Edit: For the sleep/caffeine deprived: This was irony.]

Edit: OK viraptor, sorry for being sensitive.

Edit: After reading, what I miss is more discussion about how the game logic was implemented; for fun I've done 2/3 of a couple of board games' logic which literally was hundreds of pages each (which I should finish, sigh).
I actually was quite confused about this when I started hearing about the 2nd mint.
Without the wasabi reference point, it looks like the beginning of a sentence in Gungan. As in, "Wesabe watchin' your monies!"
Reason your an idiot: You refer to your potential clients as idiots and then insult their behavior.
The Wikipedia article on epigenetics goes over some mechanisms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
If you want to be productive ASAP, and have done Java for ten years, I would suggest Java.

Picking up new technologies is great, but even the most user-friendly ones will have a learning curve. IMHO it's best to start with a new language/framework/etc as just a small, isolated chunk that takes advantage of its sweet spot.
Don't forget that 'defense spending' encompasses a huge swath of technology research that may benefit NASA as much as anything else.
Put it on App Engine
Is it possible to view stats in the past?
The flow in the video looks great.

Easier to get into than Chef :) Hope it works as well (or better)

Signed up for the beta
Also, please mention if you're hiring interns or not. I'm sure a number of college students (myself included) read HN, and are _very_ interested in working for one of you for the coming summer. Plus, it's just about that time, where we start applying and interviewing for internships.
"More or less any of them should work"?

You want to burn a $290 billion dollar program to the ground, with consequences like "poor people don't get insulin", and you can't even be bothered to think about which top level line item should be moved around?

This is why Al Gore sighed into his microphone that time. Yeah, it lost him the election, but when are you people going to realize that studied ignorance is not the way to solve problems?
Is this a common big business practice? Suing your former partners so they'll do business with you again in the future?

Seems like a poor form of courtship.
The Dream Is Collapsing: Another Massive Yahoo Re-Org Coming Next Tuesday
It isn't just human nature. If you have a dog or a cat or have watched videos of animals on Youtube you'd see it has to do with most animals on planet earth.

I have a theory: Things have evolved to try and do everything they can do, because nothing is smart enough to act on foresight alone.
Cloudkick in SF, CA: https://www.cloudkick.com/careers

Looking for three main areas:

* Frontend in Javascript. We are making some very cool
and Dynamic applications. We push monitoring data and
graphs milliseconds from when it was collected right to the
frontend.

* General Python. We are a shop built around
Python; We heavily use Django and Cassandra.

* Node.js (or good at Python and willing to learn).
We are building new solutions to deployment, and I'd
like someone to help make it awesome.
On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" .... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

--Babbage (1864), Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"

You can't reasonably use an encoder optimized for PSNR and then "ding" it for producing output with bad SSIM, or vice-versa.
It's not an arbitrage opportunity, it's selling liquidity. The risk is that you might be unable to sell the high-price stock when you want to.

The premium for liquidity is real and important. Compare charts for Chipotle and Chipotle-B (CMG.B = CMG + 10x voting rights) - until the end of last year, CMG traded at a significant premium over CMG.B.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
Why can’t you refer them due to a “paywall”? I have no problem recommending music, books and movies, all of which you have to pay for. Why is that suddenly no more ok as soon as it is online?
Interview w/Conversion Voodoo