skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the title indicates that you are less a member of their target audience than you might have suspected. It was pretty funny and effective to me?

And to the poster who called that "mysogyny"...really? Hatred of women? All women? Not just the ugly ones who screw up your attempts to get with the hot ones? And hate? A little strong.

This article is about how yahoo is pitiable, and something you don't want to associate with. Kinda like ugly girls at dances.

Reality is cruel. Mea culpa.
The problem is not that we can't find the answer, but that we don't want to. We have the technology to determine the effectiveness of many policy choices, and we've had it for a while - it's called a randomized trial (basically a great big A/B test).

We choose not to use it - it gave us results we didn't like the last time we did.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/knowing-too-much.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/too-much-debate.html
Concerning drugs. I was thinking in broader terms, not just the cost of scientists' salaries and laboratiry equipment, but also cost of clinical trials, approval process under various countries' regulators, marketing.
This is true, but it only accounts for a very small slice of the over-spending pie. This is outlined throughout the series of blog posts. I recommended reading all of the posts in the series, it is well worth it.
Everyone Forgets Memory
Clickable: http://questionify.com
Chances are that if you pick a date at random, there will be some heinous crime that the Iranian regime has committed on that day. As to myrtus. Even if we assume that whoever did this knew that myrtus=hadas, very few Israelis who aren't biblical scholars would associate the name Hadas with queen Esther.

I would say that if this is the best we have, then it's pretty certain it's not the Israelis who did this.
I was surprised by the chalk boards, do other devs/designers people really prefer those over whiteboards?
What is his hypothesis? He doesn't seem to have any sort of agenda other than saying that it is a complex issue that can't be solved by a political one-liner like "tort reform" or "fixing big pharma".
If, however, the shareholders DO prefer the lower offer, couldn't they call a special meeting to instruct the Board to take the lower offer? Or, along the same lines, I imagine the Board could certify the question to be decided at a special meeting of shareholders and that would relieve them of the duty burden.

Yelp's a pretty big company, and I have no idea what their bylaws look like, but a lot of corporations have provisions allowing those who hold a majority of shares to act on behalf of the shareholders by written consent. It doesn't sound like it would be too difficult for the founders + management to get together with a few of their investors and force the deal they want notwithstanding the Board's fiduciary duty.
I'm getting a "No such app error" from Heroku when I go the to website.
"Heroku | No such app", but this seems to work:
http://questionify.heroku.com/
You will not hesitate to charge that much, and more, when you find your wet finger tips freezing in the cold, or the first time a 30 pound glass panel falls shut on your wrist.

I got just as much business from cleaning companies as direct clients.

You can spend half your time unhinging ancient sliding glass windows, melting 50 year old pain that has sealed them shut, removing storm-windows and screens, tip-toeing on white new carpet while carrying a desk-sized piece of dust and cobweb infested panel. And oh, the fun you will have scrapping plant matter, dead insects and scum off of garden-facing windows. How about the demented old lady who forgets who you are and dials 9/11 at your "sight", right after she calls you a nigger several times and sicks a dog on you?

It's not all get in and get out, but it taught me how to run a business, and my subsequent ventures after that were all a breeze compared. However, it is the most lucrative business with little upfront investment.
An Irreverent Guide to Introducing Your Startup to the Media
(This is Marc, author of the linked post.)

I think people attribute success to a name because that fits the mental model people have for success: You just choose the right name! And then you win!

That's nonsense. Winning is a long series of decisions that have to go right far more often than not. I pulled out the decisions I thought really were critical and irreparable turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot of work to fulfill, both for us and for Mint.

You'd like to believe the name is all that matters because then the path to success is so short and so clear. It just isn't so. (And there are counterexamples galore that you're emphatically ignoring -- companies with fantastic names that never got anywhere.)

To be clear: they did have a better name. I say so in the article. But that's not enough to win.
It's a very interesting alternative to typing my password all the time when sudoing, but it doesn't work for me. If the lighting is bad it takes way too long to give up (please give up in a second or so, it's not worth the hassle to me), when it does succeed it produces a segfault so the command isn't run, the PAM profile doesn't work, just grants permission without any auth, etc etc.
And before people complain about the command line, this is possible in the GUI as well.

System - Administration - Update Manager

Click "Settings"

Under "Updates" select "Show new distribution releases: Normal releases"

By default if you are running an LTS release, Update Manager assumes you want to update only to the next LTS release. This setting will cause it to prompt you to update to the next non-LTS release and each other from then on.
Google Publications [research][tech-papers]
Very clear and indisputable impending global destruction with a short window before the event. (Think Asteroids or Aliens). Also, children who fall into wells or survive airliner crashes. Nothing else will work.
If I incorporate S-Corp for the tax benefit, is it problematic to raise capital later? I've seen that VCs prefer Delaware (which this all seems to be), but I haven't seen anything in particular where they prefer C or S-Corp.
> the government deciding who lives and dies creeps me out

How is that any different than Acme Insurance deciding who lives and dies? And as far as the government is concerned, it's your fellow Americans deciding.
Ask HN: Which ISPs use metered bandwidth pricing?
I'm wondering if anyone knows of a comprehensive list for this sort of thing. Having a list of the bandwidth caps of each ISP would also be very helpful.
It seems pretty cool, but I get the feeling that it'll actually be more of a hindrance in reality. It's much quicker to type a password than it is to let it scan your face. I love the idea of it, but I don't think I'd ever really use it.
Umm.. What about then/than? That seems to be the most common mistake.
LinkedIn Revamp Puts It Into Direct Competition With Facebook And Twitter
Ah, it's phc (http://phpcompiler.org) for Python. Excellent!
huh that's weird ... try again? http://questionify.com/

Should be working now. Sorry about that.
More money goes to marketing only in the accounting sense. Drug companies give away lots of free samples which they list on their balance sheet sheet at retail price (for tax purposes).

Incidentally, a "drug" isn't the same thing as a "molecule". A drug is a molecule, together with efficacy tests, manufacturing process, delivery system, safety tests, distribution protocols and educational ("marketing") material. A molecule is barely more than a drug idea.

[edit: just a thought, this is probably a form of price discrimination as well. According to a few uninsured people I know, doctors tend to give the free samples to people who can't afford the medicine. ]
That's why Plato (or Socrates or so? One of the Greek philosophers) ranted against writing --- it makes people scatterbrained by allowing them to be scatterbrained, instead of having to remember everything.
Clearly HTML5 did not kill Flash
It doesn't mention Mendeley Desktop, which gets huge raves from a PhD student I know.
A little weird ... seems to work fine for me at questionify.com too.

EDIT: Figured it out, just go to http://questionify.com instead of prefixing www; that seems to be the cause of the problem.
I'm amazed/impressed at just how much open space they seem to have in the office.
The biggest point that he is making is that there are a LOT of areas where the US is overspending on health care. Which, if the effectiveness of this health care was in line with the increase spending, it would be alright. Unfortunately, it isn't, so there is a lot of waste.

We are spending money on the wrong things and it is a systematic and cultural problem.

Anecdotally, I tend to see a lot of people in the US go to the doctor "just to play it safe". X-rays for a sore knee, antibiotics used for a mild sinus infection, blood work done because they're not sleeping well at night... we spend a lot of money with the idea in our heads that the medical industry can and will cure all of our ailments.
Youtube is rendered by Flash. Entirely. As in, Ubuntu did not write the software, has no control over it, and can't make it run any faster. Just like Apple and Microsoft can't.

There are also slimmed down Ubuntu versions for older hardware, e.g. Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Those run much faster on aging systems, allowing Ubuntu to support people with newer hardware.

Not to mention that nobody's forcing you to update if you don't want to. For example, 8.04 is still officially supported through April 2011 for desktops and 2013 for servers. Please feel free to continue using that if it works better for you.
Making HTTP Pipelining Usable on the Open Web
Did you design the site layout or did you buy it from somewhere?
Ask HN: Current college student with big goals.
Hi everyone,

I have been lurking around here for some time and am in love with this site. I figured now would be as good a time as any to ask my question.

I am a current college student majoring in Computer Science. I know that, after I am done with school, I want to start a startup at some point (not necessarily right out of school). I know it's going to involve a lot of hard work, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while now. So, my question is this: what sort of advice can you guys give me that will prepare me for such an undertaking. Thank you.

~Aaron
I know you weren't asking me, but I have a similar setup. I block everything by default and only enable specific cookies when necessary for functionality. Same with javascript, which Chrome makes pretty easy. I don't have any specific reason except that it feels cleaner not to send a bunch of data over the wire that isn't really necessary.
haha. I was initially going to go with some random WP theme that had a "Saasy look" then I decided, eh, I could design something much better.

Yes, I did the design. Why ?
There's a word that describes this process: friction. Mint, the name, the website, and flawless yodlee integration, completely eliminates friction. Most importantly, it eliminates viral friction. A web savvy person will seek and find out any name, but telling my grandmother over the phone, in a rush? No way in hell she'd ever remember wasabe.
Metadata design pattern for the web
50% speed up, or even 2x, 3x matters to a few niches and users. But for the vast majority it's not significant enough to change/accept limitations (not 2.7/3.1)/accept risks (is this as tested/supported as CPython). We'll just wait for CPython's regular speed improvements and/or effective processing power to increase another order of magnitude.

Research like this is very important. I just don't think it's wise to be viewing it as a silver bullet for use in production.
Esther was also married to a Persian King.
If name alone could carry a company, sex.com would be a billion-dollar business.
A Look Inside the Obsessive Mind of a Fanboy
There is a toggle to block all third party cookies by default in Chrome.
The Javascript Fractal Machine
How many new drugs on the market will not generate a lawsuit? What is the average amount of time that a patent will last after the drug is approved for sale?
One of the arguments for it being a government is the unusual size and complexity of the code. A large piece of code speaks against a small group. It also speaks against a group with an ethos of producing something simple and elegant, which talented amateurs would be likely to feel.
Relatedly:

Ultimately, the problem is that blocking third-party cookies doesn't really buy you much (if any) privacy from folks who are motivated to track you. On the other hand, blocking third-party cookies does break some real use cases about federated identity and web sites that span more than one host name.

We decided to keep the option because it make some of our users happy, but we decided not to make it the default because we don't think the trade-off is advantageous for the majority of users.

If you'd like more information about this topic, you might be interested in reading this paper:

http://crypto.stanford.edu/safecache/sameorigin.pdf

From http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=51031
> The problem, in general, isn't that Python and languages like it don't have a compiler, it's that the semantics of the language are hostile to good performance by traditional means of compilation.

You are correct, but this approach (using libpython) is probably as good as you can do for static compilation. I did my PhD on a very similar compiler, just for PHP (phc - http://phpcompiler.org). Something like 90% of variables had known static types (and that excludes results of arithmetic which could be either reals or ints).

The best approach would be a hybrid. Throw as much static stuff at it as you can, then encode it for a JIT to use later. That's what I'm planning when I (eventually) get round to writing my language.
Yes. I guess communicating URL orally or on paper (where people have to type them in to use them, or you may even have to write them by hand) is the only real use case for URL shorteners.
Mostly a promotional tool to continue its mostly shoddy Invention Services packages. This "office" is geared towards its consumers, not as a functional work space.

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&rlz=1W1ADRA...
The Call to Action That Reduces Friction in Account Creation
Photos: Tiny Smart Car Secured with Giant Bike-Lock
Here's my problem with it: 60+% (by eyeball) of the costs are not categorized, so there is no real guidance for reform.

Outpatient care is quite high, but part of that is because hospital visits are shorter in the US and many in-hospital procedures are actually done in clinics. A lot of people, especially the poor, go to emergency rooms for routine stuff, because they can get free treatment. But I think the US is way overbuilt in expensive diagnostic equipment. I live in a county of 250K people and there are at least 5 imaging centers that I know of.

Edit: San Luis Obispo is a rural county. The largest city is only about 50K people. This kind of over building is not limited to huge metropolitan areas.
Well, if you test an algorithm that claims to have same image quality with smaller file size, you should compare images of the same quality and look at the files size, not the other way round.

Besides, I don't see why you need megabytes of photo data, regular internet photo data would have sufficed (for which the authors say they have developed webp anyways).

I agree with your point that he included subjective evaluation, though.
Thank you Marc for your insightful article. It must stung like the beejesus to work so hard and still get your head handed to you. It seems like your decisions were guided by your high-mindedness, believe in the best in the people, for the people, for example: people should work and understand closely their financial data. Betcha learned people are f@!#$%ing sloth, eh? Perhaps this is a case of self-project yourself onto your target market, then finds out that people are not like you at all, because if they were, they'd get off their asses and start a company, change the world or something like that :)

I tried wesabe and mint. Mint was easier to use. However, now that you explained a little bit about your Yodlee decision, I can sympathize w/ your conclusion. It turns out to be strategically deadly wrong but given your high-mindedness, don't beat yourself up too much. You can always take comfort in the fact that you were not "Webvan" :).

To get websabe to where it was, you must have made a number of "right" decisions also so you should reviews those too. You'll be back, I'm sure, and we look forward to your next venture. good luck.

ps. do consider the whole user-experience next time.
pps. I ditched mint and went back to quicken for better control of my data and mint haven't got the cash account feature to fully work yet.
Re #2: Most new Canadian doctors get their American certification as a "warm up test" for the Canadian test, since the American test is similar, but easier than the Canadian test.
Please review my startup - Questionify 
I've been tangling with the problem of converting a bunch of emails regarding support(mostly general product questions like "How do I tie in basecamp with ____", etc) and decided to create a product based off my problem.
Right now, I'm pretty much looking for early adopters, to help shape the product.

LINK: http://www.questionify.com
Web 2.0 personal financing tools:

Mint - Aquired by Intuit

Buxfer - not actively maintained, founders working @ facebook

Wesabe - shut down

Anyone want to speculate on what went worked/didn't work and might work in the future in this space? As mentioned in the article, it seems like users don't really care about digging into their data, but seeing pretty graphs is good enough.
And many, many, many more links you've clicked on in the last ten years that lead to 404s right now.
Politicians don't solve based on the sound bytes. They win power with sound bites. There's no shortage of evidence of sound bites being blissfully ignored, by politicians of any stripe, moments after an election victory.

Politicians 'solve' based on lobbying efforts. And that's why they can't fix anything. Lobbying favors the entrenched and they like things nice and wasteful and anti-competitive.
I think you're right about the popular language part. But also important is that it's popular amongst really talented hackers. By contrast, PHP is a million times more popular than Python, but has almost nobody building tools for it. The overlap between the type of people who like PHP and those who have the ability and desire to hack on tools for it, is very very small.
Handing over bank usernames and passwords in order to use Mint was the one thing I thought would be a barrier for Mint compared to Wesabe, esp. since for my banks I can't provide one (limited) credential for Mint while keeping one for myself. It's interesting that a tool like Mint, which is designed to empower people with control over their finances, asks people to give up control over their financial information and most people seem to be OK with that.
A quick guide to get you going with cron jobs
How to Turn Your Ex-Employee into Your Worst Enemy=
That was pleasantly surprising. Very thorough and highly recommended.

Don't miss the PDF link for later perusal.

http://billhails.net/Book/EPLAiP.pdf

Nice find draegtun, thanks!
I've heard they will use a similar technology to xbox kinect, allowing a camera to track you physical movement down to the finger tips. Along with finger gestures to control the interface, a new photo editing app "iSquishYourHead" will be available at launch.
> I pulled out the decisions I thought were really, critical and irreperable turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot of work to fulfill, both for us and for Mint.

Buying mint.com was a hard and critical decision for Mint - they paid $2 million for it in equity during their series A. I think you massively underestimate it as a reason they won. I think if the names are flipped - if your company was named mint.com, theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win. I did enjoy the article a lot though and thought it was very honest and good reading and insightful. But maybe you underestimate the power of their name and branding? Mint might be the best naturally-branded website of all time (edit: maybe ask.com is better, which also proves that branding and name isn't everything). But that was a big advantage.

I thought the rest of your post was very good and insightful and I agree with a lot of it, but I do think you underestimated the name effect. It's big, it has a multiplier on everything - more press, more PR, more virality, more trust, more conversion, more desirability, more user retention, etc, etc, etc, etc.
At a very quick glance, I think he's using libpython as the run-time library. However, there is probably some code that would propagate the license, so careful attention needs to be paid there.
Advice on marketing New tactile erasable magnetic UIkits for App development. 
I just launched a New product. They are tactile erasable magnetic UIkits for App developers www.uikits.com I would really appreciate your valued advice on cost effective marketing ideas. Also, who would you consider to be the 3-6 best possible reviewers, bloggers, companies, services, etc. I should send a kit to? Much appreciated : )
Granted, but if Google can't parse it, I highly doubt anyone else is going to. And as nice as it would be if every web developer read the "Google Guide to Being Nice to Our Web Crawlers", as an internet we still can't get away from IE6. The term "pipe dream" comes to mind.
Windows Phone 7 launching in US exclusively with AT&amp;T
It's worth pointing out that people rarely get the gmake speedups that the authors are seeing from gmake -j because most makefiles contain problems that constrain parallelism and cause broken builds. For example, many have missing dependency information, or reuse the same file over and again for intermediate results.

Fixing that was part of the motivation behind Electric Cloud.
Amusingly, I clicked the first link which took me to goo.gl, and closed the window to see every one of your links turn 'visited', giving me instant confirmation that I did indeed visit each (in spite of there being nothing in the back-history)
It is a bit of a mystery to me, too, but it's clean. Equal parts office managers, people pitching in, a custodian every night, and my dachshund patrolling the ground for remnants of food.
Copy and pasted from other thread:

I don't really get it.

If you're help page doesn't cover someones concerns, your application will add it the help page?

I'd be afraid of getting a monstrous help page filled with random one off errors.

Also, if the process is automated, you may get a help page with some slight variant of "I lost my password" 50 times...
the possibility of it sinking BP's Deepwater Rig was interesting, not something I had considered before reading it in the Q&A
Team Fortress 2 getting micro-transactions via Steam Wallet
Might not be possible, it's not the format or algorithm thats patented - in many cases it's the concept.
A patent on compressing an image by only storing some spatial frequencies gets you however you code the DCT.
Start now. Even if you don't have the time or resources to do something huge, make projects that can be of real use and benefit to people. Some you may charge for; others you may offer for free. Your users might be people at your college, in your community, or all over the world. No matter how small or large the userbase, whatever experience you can get will be helpful, and one of these projects may grow into a significant business.
Hmm. I see your point. I'm more oriented towards having a service that takes the pain out of updating pages like these: tatango.com/help or http://community.freshbooks.com/support/

Basically, you get an email from Questionify(which contains the question from the user. Once you respond, we update your help page with that question and your answer).