skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have absolutely no idea whether any of this is new or not, I'm a complete novice to bio and evo psych. For the most part I've been exclusively focused on taking inspiration from what seems to work in natural evolution as a guide to improving genetic methods in programming, so I haven't really thought too much about drawing conclusions from the real world (an unfortunate side effect of majoring in math, the real world seems so mundane :P ).

Re: writing something up, I'll add it to my todo list, hopefully it will happen eventually, though I'm fairly slow at more formal writing... I am planning to do a series of posts on evolutionary methods in programming, where I want to cover (and hopefully prove useful) a lot of biologically inspired things usually left out of vanilla genetic algorithms/programming (speciation, gender, chromosome/gene separations, automatic evolution of coding schemes, embeddings of meta-evolutionary abilities within the normal evolution process, and hopefully more), but I'm lagging on actually trying out all the things I'd like to, and I also want to find some more compelling practical uses for this stuff...can't make any promises, this is currently a total side-project for me, but I'm plugging away at it, so I'll do my best to write it up eventually. I'll start thinking more about what might be possible to infer from real DNA; my brother is working on his bio-informatics PhD and I've had a lot of conversations with him about this type of thing, so I know that some of the stuff they're able to pull out of the data is truly incredible, they very well may have the data necessary to answer questions about fixation speeds in each chromosome, which would be extremely interesting whatever the results were.

Sent you an e-mail, and added info to my profile (didn't realize that it wasn't already available from the e-mail field, that should be more clear IMO) - if you really think any of this is worth pursuing, by all means let me know.
While it's great that they realize piracy isn't the reason, I don't understand why they want to bother with increasing security measures that will inevitably get broken again by an already tiny minority. It just increases the system dev time and a portion of the cost of the system as a whole among their customers, possibly even inconveniencing game devs if they have to follow some sort of API for DRM (I haven't worked with Nintendo gear, so I wouldn't know).
Read the Web (Never Ending Language Learner)
It's interesting how negative were comments on the original post about the redesign. HN can be very tough crowd to please :)
If there was an "education blogosphere", I wonder if they'd have a constant stream of articles trying explain why there are so few male elementary school teachers (14%).
Given cperciva current situation, I expect he could grow his company just as well by hiring a sales or marketing professional, perhaps even on a part-time contract basis, and he wouldn't have to give up any control or equity.
Yes, if you ignore the "(until recently)" part.

I'm not trying to be exceptionally profound here; just to point out that the giants on whose shoulders we stand are growing taller by the day.
I think we all see where Google is headed with this: free self-driving cars in return for advertising, like http://www.kahdo.com.au/kahdo.htm

Driver, there's items you like on sale at that store. Driver, I think we should stop and check it out. Driver, we are stopping.

Dear, I don't feel safe having Lisa drive with that new Mark boy. You can just tell he dials aggressive.

But seriously, from a marketing perspective, I think the low-hanging fruit here is highway driving. It's a small, logical and therefore adoptable step up from cruise control, just with a little auto-steering (they already have auto-braking IIRC), and perhaps some networking for predicting lights, congestion and co-ordinating with other (online) cars.

Start with an "online-only" lane.
Do We Rule Our Fate?
Those components offer only the most marginal of value to the specific work at hand, though. They have application to 99% of startups.

Conversely, we see here two very specific components that make success orders of magnitude more easy. This isn't trivial and it's an important part of the overall realities of launching a startup in 2010.

Tasks that would have required another person five years ago can be satisfied by services or frameworks today. Instead of spending money on a server lease, maybe requiring investment when you can convince someone, you start small on Heroku/EC2/App Engine free, tonight. Instead of finding someone who's awesome at databases, you get free ORM with your MVC framework of choice.

These things aren't trivial. And the current situation is new and dramatic in just how complete the tools are. They let ever-smaller teams do ever-larger things with smaller and smaller investment. Seeing these as zero-equity co-founders can be cast in a gimmicky light but it's also a pretty economical means of description.
Why Impress Friends?
... except that AWS and libarchive didn't actually found your company with you. To be honest, the title of the post intrigued me and the actual article was a let down because it was completely different from my expectation.
Why programming languages?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324640 - the only hit for that quote. I totally agree, BTW.
Set Up A Home Recording Studio For Under $1,000
There's a Chrome extension that adds a tab with an URL's HN comments on the side. It will show up for any URL on HN (I think).
Efficiency Is Overrated
It gets even better when you follow the link to his page: http://craignelsen.com/iphone_app.php

He gives 4 "hints" as to what he wants this app to do (sounds like a real-time dating app, but who knows!?). He then asks you to not only give a Total Cost estimate, but also a completion date.

Next time you go to your doctor for a routine physical, ask him/her when the surgery will be complete and how much money it will cost. Do not offer additional details (such as any plausibly surgical conditions that you might have) if your doctor asks for them.
If you look around the startup scene, you'll find lots of "co-founders" who aren't literal co-founders. Usually they're just early hires; I decided to be metaphorical in a different direction.

Personally I think "was around from the beginning and did a lot of the work" is a better claim to co-founder status than "was hired early in the startup's life and was given lots of stock".
"That Owen used this male tool to talk about what men are really like in bed turns our workplace preconceptions on their head."

Um, no. Not really.

It's sort of clever (albeit clumsy), but nothing new, nothing revolutionary, nothing is on its head.

For that, see this: http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/
One other interesting side effect of FB's aggressive stance on these features that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere is that it makes it progressively harder to be an inactive member.

I know many people who have created profiles which they feel obliged to keep (to maintain communication with certain family members, friends or colleagues) but are otherwise not terribly interested in it. FB is subtly adding a form of reputational decay to your profile. If you want your profile to represent you in a non-embarrassing way the next time a friend or colleague looks you up, you now need to log in much more regularly to un-tag yourself from photos and remove yourself from inappropriate groups (on top of figuring out whatever the latest changes are to your privacy settings...) Fun!
It's somewhat unfair to equate co-founders with web services and software. Co-founders can say "you can't do this dude" or "don't you think this'll work better?" or "hey I had this idea which I think is great" or go out and have a beer with you.
I prefer to read about it from Maddox.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=quantum_of_p...
How To Change The World, Part 1: Have an agenda
UGG Button Triplet Boots Sand
I take it this is meant to be a language specification reference?
How To Change The World, Part 2: The Individual as Hero
Any bloggers who have something to say about this, this year's Blog Action Day (http://blogactionday.change.org/) topic is water.
And Swordfish is a great movie about being a hacker... specifically the common recruiting process.

On a more serious note, I do agree with you. Some decent movies with a office environment/work theme: Boiler Room (2000), Duplicity (2009), Glengarry Glen Ross, Other People's Money (1991), Swimming with Sharks and Wall Street (1987).

I've also enjoyed the dramatized real-life stories in Rogue Trader and Barbarians at The Gate.
How To Change The World, Part 3: The Need For Contribution
True. But if I want to hear people say "it's somewhat unfair to do X" I just come to Hacker News instead. :-)
I agree.

Isn't one sign of insanity that you do the exact same thing over and over again within the same context and expect different results?

I think the Japanese economy and it's various problems are related to the battleship Yamato problem (keep trying the same thing over and over even when failure is apparent)
I recently bought a 16GB Corsair Padlock2 secure memory stick, and the first unit was DOA. I did a RMA, and the replacement has been fine. I think that the first got damaged during shipping.

I had also bought a 4GB PNY memory stick a few months ago that would corrupt data. I detected it because I was PGP-encrypting the contents, but the signature would not verify upon copying to another machine. I tried several times, then reformatted several times, then tried a few more times before returning the stick for a replacement (in-store return this time).

I have had about a dozen sticks otherwise that seem to work perfectly, but I don't really trust them. I also use Dropbox (love, love, love it), several external USB drives, and a NAS for backups.
The article seems to be a re-hash of a Linux Journal blog post from February 2009: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-hijack-eu-open-sourc... - just the introduction was added.

(to be fair, the blog owner hints to this, crediting Glyn Moody at the bottom, but he doesn't link to the post)
Less work for more revenue and profits, why not?
Do your part to conserve water: Use plastic, not paper. Don't recycle. If you have a septic system replace it with a sewer. Do not buy local, but from wherever is able to most efficiently grow the crop.

Making paper uses tons of water. So does washing the plastic for recycling. Water is far more precious than energy/oil right now.

A septic system wastes all it's water, but a sewer system recycles almost all of it.

Growing things locally can use more water than if you plant things in the area they grow in best.
Great piece of work.

What about using socket.io to provide a real-time collaborative environment?

Here is the typical use case: my business partner is in Australia and I'm in China. We often browse the internet "together" to share some design inspirations. For now, we have to include position info in the skype call to say "if you look at the trending keywords on the right hand side, blah, blah". It'll be super nice for us to look at the same page and I can see his mouse movement.
fair enough :D
Use Amazon mechanical turk to validate your idea.
Don't forget eggs too. Eggs + beans + rice + salt/chili/other spices = tasty and fairly nutritious meal
I thought this was going to be a joke, and that actually you buy a Sheeva and plug it in at home. I don't think you can yet buy connectivity so cheaply, but if you consider it as a fraction of your existing connection... + electricity cost per month.

Of course, there are advantages for managed, off-site servers. And I applaud http://pluggr.info for kicking it off. It may not be the ideal deal, but it may (who knows?) exactly suit some niche, well enough, that's big enough - and that is all that matters at this stage.

I think businesses would go more for not owning the Sheeva, and instead paying less, and also getting automatic "free upgrades" when the next performance level comes out (in the next 3 minutes.) That's a different organization of costs and finances for pluggr.info, which probably doesn't suit them (yet), but which I think would be more profitable both for them and for (business) customers. But if you got a niche, you got a niche, and you've gotta start somewhere! I hope these goes well for them.
Does losing them count as a failure? If so, a lot have failed on me.

If not, never had one outright fail. At most, I've had a USB slow down transfer speeds once. But, I could still get all of my data off of it.
I have mixed feelings on this. While I can understand most comments, I must say that it's very, very hard to design blind. By blind, I mean, with no directions, or, in other words, with not objectives directly pointed out by Twitter.

I think most of the commenters think that I've made a full, complete, functional redesign of Twitter, while it's not (I focused mainly on typography and white space). There are still a lot of decisions I needed to not think about because I didn't have time, neither it was the purpose of the exercise.

Think of my realign as a spruce up. Not final, but eye-opening in a certain way :-)

Besides, it's hard to beat a design team that works at Twitter's HQ, that knows what they need as a company, have user data, and can test and iterate almost every day.

Oh, and thanks HN for making this possible, BTW. :-)
"I guess the norm is: team (which often means funding) first, product second." Really? I know VCs who never question who the team is.
Crowdsourcing the Employee Suggestion Box
Google Starter Guide to Search Engine Optimization
It's not just that - the younger kids always have a playmate, so it's not necessary for the parent to do that.

You rarely hear "I'm bored" when you have 5 kids in the house all of around the same age.
This one? http://github.com/adamalbrecht/hacker-news-for-chrome

Just tried it, there doesn't appear to be a way to check if a URL is already posted or not
It doesn't sound like they actually do much of anything beyond typing your request into Google. It's not as if they sent someone to Austin to buy a gallon of queso dip, or whatever.

The reference desk at a major metropolitan library would probably be able to field some of the inquiries the author tried, and without charging whatever ungodly annual fee Visa is probably getting for that card.
A product that aids you when you browse the web: the moment you land on a page, it warns you if it thinks the article you are about to read might be a waste of your time:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776409
You can also say `cd -` on Bourne shells to go back to the previously visited directory. If you move from A to B in this manner and then run it again, then you will go back to A.

Also, `alias cd=pushd` to get that same zsh functionality in other Bourne shells.
Exchanging contact information with new people you have just met is still not as easy as one thinks. I'm not going to convince someone I've just met to install some contact mobile app that I have that the other person does not have.

http://times.jayliew.com/2010/10/05/half-baked-idea-of-the-d...
Feature, Quality, Time - as a VP of engineering, you need to pick two of them.
FWIW: I'm not seeing any such phenom. My Opera (10.62) is scarcely discernible from Safari - both of which look very attractive.
[this is gonna sound a bit meta and weird, but bear with me]

Not everyone gets it.

If you have advanced knowledge and expertise in a certain field of study, or even just a knack for it as a layman, you could be speaking Truth about it, your every word advancing the field and breaking new ground, but you will never be heard or understood by the majority. Every field of specialization has this mass of rote practitioners, text-book bureaucrats who perceive it only as it's taught, as it exists, and can not visualize it further than its current state.

Let me repeat that again: for every field of art, science, work, study, etc. the great majority of its practitioners can not see the future of their craft, all their mind can conceive is how things are NOW. If they could see past today, they would invent the future.

That's why if you're lucky enough to be "peerless"; when you're least understood by everyone (and I don't mean in an emotional "kumbaya" sense, but as in research) when your Idea has no google hits, when you can't find a reference text, a conference, or a consortium addressing your questions .. it's those times when you need to take a deep breath and ask yourself: Am I batshit insane, stupid, or do I have a genuinely novel idea?

A good metric is when you have few peers. The more prominent they're, and noted for their smarts, the better. If you find yourself corresponding with the primary sources of a new art, or science, or a new field of mathematics, you know you're breaking new ground.

So, just because a bunch of people shoot your idea down doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. It might be that you're talking above the masses, and addressing only a select few specialists, perhaps in a highly adapted "domain-specific language" (the exact terminology might be different, specially if you're a bright layman; but you mourn just the same, your shared agonizing pain, and you're understood, at least for now, by just by a handful few.)

[I said this was gonna be meta]
A little bit of DRM security keeps people honest.
The trick is, the optimal trade-off between variation and selection pressure is highly dependent on the problem domain (selecting to maintain variation is great when navigating a broad fitness landscape with many sparsely distributed peaks of different sizes, whereas strong selection pressure is best when climbing to the top of one of those peaks). I'd ideally like to pick out a way to embed this trade-off inside the evolutionary process itself, so that individual selection could implicitly seek out a good balance between variation and hill-climbing, based on the current complexity of the problem being solved. I think allowing for some sort of speciation (to some extent, speciation boils down to running natural selection on groups of naturally selected individuals - the recursive possibilities are clear, here, though I don't know if they're useful) as well as allowing the genetic material to (in some manner) specify how it "uses up" its fitness is one approach to this, but I haven't settled yet, that approach still seems a bit ad hoc to me and I'd really like to find a more natural way to achieve something similar.

As a rule, I definitely think that playing with the rules of evolution, and more specifically, letting those rules (perhaps implicitly) evolve themselves, will be a key idea if we want to exploit evolution for all it's worth; finding a way to let the process significantly improve itself is, IMO, the Holy Grail of evolutionary computing. Evolution is, in some sense, a process of emergence that's been optimized by emergence, and I suspect that our best shot at creating intelligence may be to follow that pattern and attempt to achieve an evolutionary process that's optimized by evolution.

What results when you have intelligence optimized by intelligence is another matter, and (IMO) a far more dangerous one, but that's another story for another day...
Happens in London. Not the city centre, but most of the sticks around that.

Anecdotal evidence is this blog, the link is to the first of a growing number of entries.
http://www.101wankers.com/?paged=2
That's an excellent point. The homebrew scene is often the one that does all the hard work and the pirates reap the rewards of the broken security systems (Notice how the security system of the PS3 wasn't broken until well after the Other OS feature was removed and the community wanted it back).

With Nintendo however, they've had a history of absolute control over their console and I think that it's been working against them in the long-run. In fact I remember a specific instance with the Wii where the homebrew scene had discovered a security flaw that was not necessary for homebrew but could be exploited by pirates and the folks who discovered it even attempted to contact Nintendo to let them know and to also extend an "olive branch" to them to let them know that the homebrew scene isn't trying to break the consoles for piracy's sake. Of course Nintendo gave them the cold shoulder and it was exploitable in the wild for a while until it was eventually caught by Nintendo's engineers and patched in a routine update. The only problem is that Nintendo's updates have sometimes been known to cause problems and it was ironically enough the homebrew scene that had the fix.
Main problem I see with this sort of thing:

The money to do this comes from somewhere. My location guesses: increased interest rates, and increased POS charges. All of which ultimately means less money for you, and less for everywhere you buy things.

Another interesting thing I've read somewhere, and would be interested in a link if someone knows of it: all/many of these higher-perk cards charge the merchants more when they're used. It's best for businesses if you use the most basic cards, or far better if you use cash.

But I just dislike credit card companies. And their "rating" systems. I must be cranky right now or something, because I feel like spreading the dislike :\
The Chase Freedom card does not have an annual fee.
I don't know, but you probably want to look at the distribution as well. The "top firms" get a disproportionate share of profits in the industry.
Ask HN: Job for international travel?
What are some jobs that involve traveling to various destinations for extended periods of time?

I am planning to quit my job and take at least a year to go traveling around the world. I am going for the extended stay in a few places in order to get to learn from the local culture, rather than continuously moving on.

I don't have huge savings, so I did look at various volunteering and work-and-travel options, then realized that I could probably do better in terms of productivity and finances if I could get an IT-related job that required extensive traveling instead, especially since I don't have any set destinations.

I am on the jack-of-all-trades side of software development, I can code and admin, but I am also good at understanding a lot of different tech, designing solutions and talking about them.

I never had much luck with freelancing sites because of being spread out a bit thin, and not being able to put my weight on a single topic. I suppose running some form of web business would have been handy for mobility, but I wouldn't imagine starting one now would make living money anytime soon.

Do you know of any companies or types of businesses that would benefit from having someone like me dispatched to various parts of the globe?
It would be a great story if GAP could turn this around, especially with a new logo from a crowd-sourced internet page.

Either way, I liked this one the most: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/design-better-gap-...
How to trump Microsoft, Google, Twitter & Facebook
We had dozens fail.

Than again, I worked on developing embedded USB stacks.
Those guys suffered quite a workload (but nothing astronomical).

Mainly:
Random data corruption (~90%)
Electrical failure - not responding to reset or power-on (~10%)
Anyone remember the colo providers offering hosting for your cobalt qube?
Zero equity isn't the problem, it's that convertible debt with quadruple dilution that's the problem.
The problem with this is that it leaves me asking, "Does cperciva know what a co-founder is?" A co-founder isn't someone you bring in with a one-way communication channel that does your work for you. That would be closer to, "my employees that I don't have to pay", except, well, you do have to pay for AWS.

There are lots of ways to shorten your path to market using external services, whether human or infrastructural. But they won't tell you that you're being a dumbass and help you steer the company in a better direction.