skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can not see how this could be efficient. The amount of time you would spend evaluating the different options and the cost of having the edits rejected would not add up.

So alternatively..
Find people you think are good by testing them. Hire them.

I would personally like a few editors that I could trust. This would sort out the privacy issues too. Is there such a service that manages these contracts? It seems like a good business idea.
Do you feel like your friends got a good education? Did they feel like they did?
While the article was interesting the first line "We did it. We solved one of the unsolved big SEO (Search Engine Optimization) mysteries of the modern time." had me reaching for the close button. Is it just me or is there a LOT of spin from SEO types?
But that would require work, and besides which, it would give the scientist the opportunity respond to criticism.

It's much easier this way.
Were you actually satisfied after doing that? You probably just wasted your time.
I took a look at the RSVP for this and notice that all were 'Western' names'. Is there a startup culture amongst local Japanese? I ask because there are tons of smart Japanese, many of whom have developed awesome products for their employers, but I haven't heard of any Japanese founded startups.

Then again, maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
Yep, nice nice UI !! Bravo. So, about this business model ? :)
I don't think there is any proof that it is specifically the standardized tests that cause that minority to succeed, but rather the value parents and culture places on education. That makes all the difference.
Still, SEO exists as a concept and as a name for a group of activities. I am not sure what you find wrong with the sentence?
I think you're referring to this bit:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767170

Finding the root cause is certainly interesting, but finding intermediary steps on the road to finding a root cause is also important. The press is notorious for being unable to represent scientific findings in a proper light. I don't know how many times I've read about 'possible cures for cancer' HIV and a whole series of other diseases simply because the press tends to hype things in order to get more eyeballs.

"minor link in bee mystery found" makes for less user engagement than "Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found".

The effect of the pairing of the two pathogens being more sever than either one on their own is also not novel (usually if you suffer from two diseases at the same time you feel a bit worse than if you had only one), but the magnitude of the effect is.

So possibly that's where they key to all this lies.

Even if the effect is real though, I'm not quite sure what can be done other than monitoring the bee populations for any strain of bee that is resistant to this combination.

If it turns out that Bayer funded this research in order to squash the idea that their chemicals are the root cause here then there will be(e) a lot of explaining to do.

Scientific research and 'big business' go hand in hand, Bayer, Monsanto and many other companies have used their money and lobbying muscle in the past to manipulate the scientific community and the press to their advantage, so it would not come as a total shock if they've done it again. However, I think it is a little early to shoot this research down, that should only come after a competing lab has tried to verify their findings and they turn out to be un-reproducible.

Not disclosing funding would be a problem if Bayer funds were used for this particular research, but if it wasn't then I don't have a problem with that, and even if the truth will come out eventually.
For the future September Startup Sprint might be better, what with the alliteration and all. But, in the interest actually getting something done, I think we can let it slide this year. ;)
"Cheap" implies "high ROI".
Someone's testing their link spamming software. Flag it and move on.
I think there is value in reading any successful company's views on business. There is some truth there. I agree that you can't just say "meetings are toxic" but I for one try to avoid them when I can, because only a small amount of good usually comes from them (and it's usually not the exact topic of the meeting).

If you are looking for a good book applicable to businesses big and small, I have to pass on some recent advice I got from fellow HN'ers: read "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steven Gary Blank:

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

An old edition I got my hands on looked like it had never seen a decent book editor in its life. It seemed that it could easily be chopped in half due to the repetition and mistakes in spelling/grammar. And the "Why?" is not answered on a lot of statements (need to spend 1.7x or 3x, but why? what is that based on?). I would hope that the September 2010 edition available via Amazon/Cafepress has eliminated some of these issues. But, there are some excellent cases of businesses described in the book and it gets you thinking of business in a much different way. It was for me a "skimming" book, and I plan to buy the most recent edition as my next book purchase.
If you need unit tests, write unit tests. If you don't, don't.

So in your case you would notice that for iteration 3 you need some unit tests. Then you can write them in iteration 3. You didn't need them in iteration 1, hence no need to write them in iteration 1.

The concept of technical debt will probably inserted into the discussion here. I think it is irrelevant. Yes, there is always technical debt. For example, I currently have a technical debt of several billion dollars because I haven't installed big data centers like Google or Apple have. So should my web app ever need to scale to a gigantic level, I'll have a problem. But not now. So it is a debt I can live with.
FrontRow Enterprise PH
Fair enough. For the record I have no doubt he's acting with good intentions. I just think the outcome will be unfortunate.
Going the Distance: Nike+ GPS Vs. RunKeeper
I'm in. Can someone make it their goal for the month to create a site to aggregate all the sites created during the month, or is that too meta?

Also, I mentioned this elsewhere, but September Startup Sprint has a nice ring to it. Perhaps next year? (Hat-tip to tlack for the original "November Startup Sprint" inspiration.)
Technology = Salvation (WSJ)
The article misses the point that Spolsky makes: some people are smart enough that they can foresee where the duct tape can be applied (and, by extension, where it would be catastrophic to do so).

This is, of course, a far cry from the person who does everything with duct tape, because it's simpler to do so. And it's also a far cry from the person who always follows his/her standard approach, because nobody ever got fired for [using the safe-but-costly approach].

In essence, the duct tape programmer has a safety margin between the smartest he could do, and what he actually does, and uses this safety margin (1) to make the software actually work, because he can avoid stupid errors, and debug the subtle issues that come up, and (2) to make the software ship on time. Not using your most-advanced-yet-poorly-understood techniques does not mean you'd stick to the stone age approach, but that you're perfectly fine with using stone age tools in addition to the fancy-schmancy newfangled stuff where it makes sense.

I, for one, won't Party with Palermo on this. I'm more cautious of people making their money with agile training than with people selling bug tracking systems.
that post is severely lacking in information

all you learn about, is the founder's age, location and a short description of what the site did. For a reddit post, I was expecting details on how they got the deal, traffic numbers etc.
http://groupspaces.com/ does most of what you mention.
Haskell for all. Perfect fit.
Thanks for including Chargify
Sure, but the Gap didn't commit to choosing one, as far as I know, so they still only stand to gain from this.
A nice site indeed, I personally not happy with the UI, can be much more sophisticated as users views regarding a particular couch. But over all a nice non profit service.
If you go to a meet-up organized around a Japanese language website, you will see more native Japanese. We don't really advertise this event anywhere but here.

There is an active startup culture in Japan but it is quite different than in the Valley. It is influenced by the culture, laws and history of the people here. The foreigners living in Japan also bring their culture and have their own interesting relationship. It's a very complex subject.
Do you have any reason to believe the US would continue these practices if we eliminated unions today?

Way back in 1910 small town America, you could be fired from all sorts of respectable professions for many of the things you mentioned. Certainly, no one would want their money manager doing disreputable things like what you mention. And yet even without a union, I've managed to avoid getting fired for interracial dating. I've even gone to a bar in town after dark with my boss!

I think you are engaging in the post-hoc fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
I've read reports that the global bee population is not actually decreacing. The poplution seem to be decreasing in the USA and a few other areas in Great Britaitn and Holand, but overall there's no evidence of the world population being signifficantly lowered.

This is the only source I could find with a quick search, and it's in spanish
[PDF]http://www.fcen.uba.ar/prensa/cable/2010/pdf/Cable_752.pdf
I want to finish a linux files managing application that I have thought a few days back. Though I haven't started coding yet, I hope to complete it by oct end.
What a great question, I was looking for this data for a presentation at gave at FOWA 2010 last week. See slide 30

http://www.slideshare.net/davidhauser/fowa-2010
This is odd, considering how reddit bans the submission as soon as two accounts vote on it from the same IP.

EDIT: Hmm, the page in the video says "unique IPs", so it looks like they are used remotely. Odd.
Get a treadmill desk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPjN07JyVjo

http://lifehacker.com/5596963/ikea-jerker-do+it+yourself-tre...

http://searchyc.com/%2522treadmill+desk%2522
Could someone please explain to me how Groupon could possibly be worth $2 billion?? They aren't fully "mainstream" yet, and there service can easily be redeveloped.

I have not used them yet, is there something I am missing here?
BPH / prostate - Aventis - products new home - Generic Avodart / Dutasteride
The gist of this article was not that the original report was "something fake" the scientist "cooked up". It was that the scientist received funding from an interested party that he failed to disclose.

While it is true that in the realm of pure logical discourse this fact is irrelevant to the argumentative structure of the original paper, in the real world it is a significant fact that legitimately questions the credibility of the scientist.
You mean Homer Simpson? or was that episode a reference to an existing metaphor?
No it only implies low initial cost.
Yay! Looking forward to it! Thanks for organizing!
A mobile app that allows users to create ad-hoc points-of-interest maps, both public and private, based around events.

My inspiration came from spending time at the Brimfield Antique Show this year. My lady wanted an easy way to note specific vendors with items she liked and wanted to revisit, but the iPhone Maps app only let me drop one pin at a time, for some unknown reason. This lead me to imagining a map of the area with dozens of pins dropped by all sorts of people, with tips ("this lady is willing to haggle", "don't get your hopes up, this guy wants twice what his stuff is worth") and recommendations ("avoid the seafood place. trust me."). It's a little Foursquare-y, but less about, "I'm here" and more about, "let me tell you what I've discovered."

I imagine something like this could be used for all sorts of things, from large concerts like Coachella or Lollapalooza to keeping track of where one parked in a parking garage. The idea scales from personal location tracking to a sort of event-focused hive mind of wisdom.

Of course, it is entirely possible this already exists, and I just didn't check the App Store throughly enough. But if it doesn't, it should. I'd use it. We were at the Topsfield Fair last night; it would have been wonderful to know exactly where the maple cotton candy vendor was, or to expect an unbelievable wait before riding the ferris wheel.
According to at least one independent study (i.e., not funded by Kaplan), test prep doesn't help you as much as you think.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html
Windows Phone 7: the best choice for Patent Trolls
Apart from the auto-backslapping this a an interesting confirmation that performance of your website impacts search engine results.

As for google sending multiple requests, from the way the article is written it sounds as though google sends the requests all at once and then waits for the answers to come back one by one, you can cure this by switching keep-alive off on the server side.

Typically in your http configuration you would add a line like this (example for apache):

KeepAlive Off

You could even do this just for the googlebot:

BrowserMatch "GoogleBot" nokeepalive

That way you can 'fix' the google bot issues without affecting the normal users of the site.
Guess what. If they are able to fix the bee genocide with some sort of pharmaceutical... that means that it was the virus/bacteria/fungus that caused the problem! This New York Times article isn't bringing the bees back.

I don't think Bayer thought it would be great to make people think this would work, for PR (?) and then to go ahead and NOT be able to fix it. We're not talking about 9/11 or something that you can sort of say "we're stopping another one of those from happening every day."

Instead, we have ONGOING deaths that we don't know the cause of. So if this particular study, and any extrapolated treatment ACTUALLY WORKS. Then yes, it wasn't pesticides. Maybe Bayer is wrong, but the article is pretty clear this is preliminary.
In general people love to hear (essentially gossip) about other people much more than scientific stuff.
Okay, first off, this article is interesting but very ancient. And I remember the shit storm it caused quite fondly :-)

A couple of obvious points have been made at the time. Yes, it's a gross generalization. Yes, somewhere in there is an uncomfortable truth that is liable to make a couple of Java and COM artists very angry.

At the end the whole point boils down to the overused saying: real programmers ship. It's as simple as that. All this artificial distinction between "Duct Tape Programmers" and whatnot is just an attempt to elaborate somewhat unsuccessfully on a central experience of software development.

This is why:
Our code sucks, and there are many reasons for it. We may have some control over WHY our code will suck, but the core fact is just inescapable. Of course, there are people who claim their code is always beautiful (often paired with energetic statements about some framework technology) and it's worth noting that those developers are easily the worst of them all. At least the rest of us have some semblance of self-awareness.
Standardization is orthogonal to the issue of a well designed test. A simple illustrative example, based on a test of height:

Poor test design: no rule against standing on your toes.

Standardized test: all results must be reported in meters, as opposed to subjective units ("a wee bit taller than the person giving the test").
From now on whenever I read a 'google bought my startup' and there is neither mention of the amount nor of the products projected path post acquisition I'm going to assume it's a talent acquisition, possibly with a signing bonus masquerading as a buy-out.

Anything over a few hundred K deserves the benefit of the doubt.

If your service gets shut down after the acquisition that's not a good indicator that they bought the startup, that's an indicator that they bought you.

In a proper acquisition the team and the product matter, and the product will not normally be discarded after taking over (there are some exceptions to that, but this is not one of those by the looks of it).

In this case, the acquisition was for an undisclosed amount, the TC article guesses $6M but why is not detailed.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/08/google-confirms-acquisition...

So, I'm curious if plannr will be shut down or will be allowed to continue and develop.

The fact that "Having met at Stanford, Eidelson will be Product Manager and Prado will be Software Engineer of a new project they declined to mention at Google." does not bode well for plannr, after all with the two founders working on other stuff it might not survive for long.

Possibly a team of googlers will take over the running of the site or maybe it will be integrated in to other google services.
Thanks for the feedback, HN
I have used a variation of by using email. When I get to the point of needing to ask for help, I write an email to so coworkers. Half the time, I get the answer just by thinking about the best way to describe and write down the problem.
I'd suggest "Gone with the Wind", an ultimate classic. It is tagged as epic romance but I personally feel that it is more than just romance. It has changed a few perspectives of mine and I couldn't get off the story for nearly 3 months. I really enjoyed the book.

If you've enjoyed "Atlas Shrugged, which I'm planning to read, try reading "The Fountain Head" by the same author.
IPhone HTTP Streaming with FFMpeg and an Open Source Segmenter
MySQL data versioning with triggers
Advanced Git tips (slides)
Good tip, we'll look into it.
I imagine getting on Hacker News is a good boost for their SEO, so maybe it worked?
This is the ultimate Glenn Beck machine. Look, everything is ultimately connected to Hitler!

You should try to approach Jon Stewart with it, it would make for excellent satire.
Even better would be to convince GoogleBot not to pipeline, while keeping keep-alive on. Perhaps by sending some kind of IIS/4 Server header to Googlebot?
Yeah, nice noticing that, I've been testing this with mostly tech people, but will be testing this more with "mainstream" people.
You make a good point, AOL would fit more into Yahoo's perceived strategy as being a content company.

Yelp, and Foursquare are great examples of the general lack of strategy or direction to those of us that follow the tech scene closely.

They need to decide whether they are going to play with the big boys and solve interesting problems or continue the web1.0 style of being a landing page.
Nice, I wonder how long before Apple adds the same functionality.
I don't get it. Why would I need a "complex" tool like this, when I can simply note down the most important questions on a piece of paper or in a simple text file? Yeah, I can collaborate with people remotely, but a simple skratchpad does the same job. For me, it feels like another way of procrastinating instead of simply getting the job done, as I have to deal with an interface (even if it is relatively simple) instead of just letting my ideas flow.
What you call "the market" I would disagree with. Just because every other guild host out there offers bulky flashy layouts does not mean that is what the market wants now. Any user of those sites you talk to now will tell you they are not happy with any of it and just use it because they are not aware of other options. We have done the research in that aspect.

However skinning is something we are working on now, we left it out till we had our own designer to offer base themes. Its top priority now. We always hoped to get a designer on board early but we were unable to do so we focused on features and quality.
You realize that the Harlem Children's Zone was not particularly effective, and simply benefited from a downward drift in difficulty of tests, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/education/01schools.html
Keep-alive and pipelining go hand in hand, a trick I abused for many years in order to serve up streaming video using jpegs.

The funny thing is it works both ways, if you switch keepalive to 'on' and you start dumping answers in to the pipe pre-emptively (because, for instance you know you're talking to your own little piece of javascript on the other side, so you can predict the next request) then you can save yourself the round-trip delays that you would have if you stuck to the regular request/answer, request/answer pattern.

Keep-alive on pretty much implies that pipelining is ok.

For many years this was the 'secret sauce' that my company lived off, the fact that nobody clued in to it is something that amazes me to this date, it seemed a pretty obvious thing to do.
This'll be news to a lot of people--esp. web designers.

Styling is encompassed under design (waaaay not different).
I'm not doing any actual work with Scala either. I read Programming in Scala a while back and played with it some but not much more. What I had in mind when I said C# diverges more was Linq.
This is going to sound a bit Machiavellian, I'm surprised that the fear of failure has not been brought up as a strong motivator. I'm assuming the selection bias in the movie shows hard working impoverished children who want to do better in school-- but are they not motivated when they consider the alternatives?

My wife works at the best school in the county (not country!). If a student fails a single test, she is told that the kid will be sat down after school, retaught the course work, and be given the test a 2nd time. Any student with a learning disability on record (including ADHD) is all but exempt from any standards set by the teacher.

Furthermore, teachers are encouraged to "round up" to look better for the school district. If a student fails a class, they will spend time in front of a computer for 3 weeks to make up the credit. If a student fails to have enough credits before graduation, they will still let you walk the stage and you can simply come back during the summer to sit in front of a computer.

There's no social stigma of failure in the school's culture anymore, and that also comes from the family life (the F from jamwt's post). The student could care less about grades because the parents don't care and they will just have them work at the shop after high school.

This carries on with the teachers. Tenure is a very dangerous asset that a teacher can have, and it keeps the bad teachers in. Students will come into my wife's English class without a basic knowledge of sentence structure and many other things that ought to have been known by this age, and the grade level below her shows videos for a very large amount of time. They will read 1/4 of Romeo and Juliet and just watch the rest on TV without any analysis of the material.

This is a social and political system in which individual failure has been discouraged, removed, and subsidized. While positive reinforcements (good grades, more money after graduation) can certainly help, the fact that the lack of hard work can be shrugged off so easily has to be a component of school under-performance.
If standardized tests didn't work (i.e., didn't separate good students from bad ones), how could they be used to skim the cream off the top?
That would just slow them down, no?

I'm all for google to be a force pushing for adoption - pipelining is good - if google requiring it means people pay more attention to making their sites work with it, great.

(I haven't read the spec - does a browser with pipelining on requier the requests rae returned in order?)
Facebook Billionaire Explains Why He Backs Prop 19
Yea but Yahoo does have some merchant services like Yahoo Stores and such, so this would complement those services.