skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't care less.

Systems like Facebook depend on a dual sided market. There's nothing to read if nobody is writing, and why write if nobody is reading?

I had a friend years ago who ran a multimedia-oriented site that only took open formats like Ogg Vorbis. Although hypothetically, Ogg Vorbis is a free format which might be accessable on more operating systems and devices, practically, publishing in Ogg Vorbis is like speaking in Pig Latin. MP3 files just play for most people on the devices and OSes that they actually use w/o any trouble.

Even though there is an articulate group of people who are concerned with privacy and other philosophical problems with Facebook, the fact is that most people just don't care -- if you ~really~ cared about those things, you probably wouldn't be oversharing your life on a social network anyway. In fact, from a 2010 perspective, Facebook's early policy of only publishing to your 'close friends' looks medieval: the industrial spy, potential employer, litigator, or other person who wants to use information to harm you is going to extract it one way or another, from such a network. If you really want to keep something a secret, keep your mouth shut.
...and now that Brazilians are no longer so spooked by inflation that they spend money as soon as they receive it, three Brazilian banks are among the world’s top ten credit issuers. (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329294/life-on-...)

One liberal wonk wonders if this is a sign that the country is facing a consumer debt bubble. (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/tomorrows-credit-b...)
Staying Healthy and Losing Weight With Exercise
"skype is poison software and is antithetical to the hacker ethos of open systems."

What sort of BS is that. For most people, it solves a real world problem very well.
In most any not-too-big group, and a nearly infinite set of dimensional data to compare, shouldn't one be able to come up with a list of dimensions for each specimen (i.e., country in this example) in which that specimen exceptional in some statistical analysis?
During the follow-up period, 11,307 men and 7,923 women died.

FROM WHAT ?!

Sheesh, I re-read the article twice and I don't understand what they died from.

I have been thinking about getting one of those "walking desks". Can they be used with coding or is it too much of distraction?
We make similar "cultural" switches when associating with different groups of people in real life. The conversations I have with family, diffrent groups of friends, coworkers and clients will have completely different tones and references, even if the context is the same (eg bumping into them in a supermarket)

Some of the inside jokes I have with some of my friends make reddit memes seem like incisive, original wit by comparison...
Heh, the beauty of English.
Strangely, the article also claims that it works with a cell-phone camera. How does this fit with the brain adaption?
I'll never understand how these damages are calculated. Does anyone actually believe that the patent owners would have made > $600m had Apple never written the supposedly infringing software?
No, honestly. I want to know whether you can turn any IRC channel to very helpful simply by having "NO LOL" policy, or does it work the opposite way: by allowing LOLs your channel will become less helpful…

Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
10,000 Games on your desktop
I suppose there are people reading the comments, who really _really_ like Skype (although not enough to explain their reasoning).
This belief, while widely held is utterly unproven. Things are vastly different now than they were in Genghis Khan's time. Further, in Africa hunter/gatherer was doing pretty well for the most part until the imperialists interfered.

The issues before were poor education and slow communication. If your neighbor country decided to conquer you, by the time you were mobilized to defend yourself you had already lost.

Education has gotten vastly better over time. We didn't switch away from Monarchy because the monarchy decided to give up their power. The people became too educated to be controlled in this manner.

Communication is also practically instant now. If a Genghis Khan began conquering a government-less world with our current level of technology, by the time he finished conquering the first neighbor he would already be surrounded by everyone else.

I'm not saying Anarchy could work, but rather that we don't know yet. It's never been properly tried. Of course you would expect this. Governments don't want it to be tried because if it did somehow manage to work they would lose their power.
How to Understand Typography Like a Professional Designer
Please review WinkVid, my "ChatRoulette for Dating" startup
I can't see skype lasting 10+ years if they continue to
pursue a closed architecture. it just will not happen.

Because? I am amused by this silly attitude that open === good and viable. Always. Just because it is "right" for whatever definition of "right" is.
The reality is that people don't give a damn, open or closed it is as long as it works and gets job done.
My IRC channel had a no LOL policy too but now it's being used again...but only in a sarcastical, ironical way.
I've been stuck for 3 weeks, and I couldn't figure out why. My daughter started talking to me about motivation at University, and I just started talking about my being stuck. Next thing I knew I had figured out why. Maybe you haven't lost motivation. Maybe you are just stuck and don't know why. Talk it out.
I think that says more about your perception of the world than online users' perceptions of the world.
They are the norm. Free Trade accommodations are specifically negotiated and are in fact the real edge cases in the world of trade at the movement. Even when they do exist, there are often disputes.

Give me one example of an import/export international trade experience that has not been subject to protectionist measures of some nature and perhaps I can explore your point some more.
You haven't talked about anything you've done to act on this desire.

Have you made e-mail pitches to 10 - 15 people/companies offering your services?

What type of reception or feedback did you get from that?
The danger with the lack of sense of humor on HN is that it makes it all the more apparent when people shoot down others' ideas here, or give non-constructive advice, or willingly criticize play/experimentation/fun.
It's unbelievable that a company that doesn't even have a website can win a suit like this.

For Apple to have caused "Mirror Worlds" any harm, they would have to be competing with each other. For Mirror Worlds to compete with ANYBODY, a good start would be appearing to be a real business in any way shape or form.

Maybe I don't really understand patent law, but David Gelernter just sounds like a total scumbag here. I've read some of his stuff before, and he seems like a smart guy. What gives?

Edit: apparently this is Mirror Worlds' product website: http://www.scopeware.com/

Nothing. Vaporware.
While I too would like to see the borders opened up a bit, there does have to be some control. If you just let everyone do whatever they want you end up with London: an endless massive sprawl that produces and consumes the majority of resources in England. It would have been much better to control the flow of immigration a bit better and have more big cities than one insanely large one and wouldn't make most of the country look like free loaders on financial topology charts.
That certainly comes to mind. The question is, how could they take jQuery in an incompatible direction, tying developers into their version, thus gaining control over the project? I can't really see a way it could happen here. Pulling a classic 'embrace and extend' would mean rather than contributing to the original product, they'd make their own subtly incompatible version.
If it can't produce an advantage that most consumers understand, it has no way of succeeding.
Analysis is a hot field, so although most startups don't need a full-fledged Business Analyst your knowledge should enable you to spot an opportunity in this sector and to use your knowledge to create something to make analysis for companies easier - or for other analysts. If you are such a fine one and your fellow analysts are not, what can you do, to make them better at their job?

You still need a programmer if you want to create some software, but still you'd have quite a place in a startup as the entrepreneur developing the idea and the business.
Next we need where to eat in SV.
Findings from the A List Apart Webdesign Survey
So, advertising/spam on Twitter. I'm sure Twitter's not going to be implementing anything like that in the near future.
I once had a short conversation with Max Levchin (of PayPal fame) and the one thing he said that stuck in my mind -besides all the drivel about how Slide was going to change the world- was that 10% of a start-up's workforce should be metrics people, obsessed with measuring the company performance i.e. if you have a ten person start-up, at least one should should be an analyst, otherwise he said, the company is essentially flying blind.

From my own experience, if you can not only master the technical side of working with metrics, but be the kind of guy who can actually ask intelligent, relevant questions and structure them in a way that gets meaningful answers from raw data, then you are worth your weight in gold to any start-up.
IANAL, but there is a distinction between compensatory damages (which is what you are talking about) and punitive damages. I don't think the article mentions which, or what combination, of these is being awarded here.
You are paranoid. Also, if you had written the P. Cooper review I hardly would have held it against you. I thought his/her opinion was perfectly sensible.
"In popular culture, people like to say 'It’s just semantics!', which is a kind of put-down: it implies that their correspondent is quibbling over minor details of meaning in a jesuitical way. But communication is all about meaning [...], therefore, we will wear the phrase 'It’s just semantics!' as a badge of honor, because semantics leads to discourse which (we hope) leads to civilization. Just semantics. That’s all there is." -Shriram Krishnamurthi, _Programming Languages:
Application and Interpretation_ (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...)

In other words: Absolutely. (Good, free book, btw.)
A Brief History of Aliens
Note: this is earlier research by Geim, one of two people to be awarded the Nobel prize in physics today.
The surface of the earth is 70% water. I refuse to believe that future generations wont figure out a cost effect way of turning this into drinking water on the required scales.
At a start-up there are at most only two roles:

Can you build it? Or can you sell it?

In tech start-ups, building it means coding, and that might be only role early on.

"Selling it" is broader than pure sales (E.g. Selling it to investors, to non-paying users, to bloggers, etc.), but you need a track record in selling (I.e. Not "analysis" or "marketing").

There's a reason why there is a programming bias: programming is 90% of the work at an early stage consumer web company. So get back to coding, or try something other than start-ups, because there is no job for an 'analyst' at a start-up (or a community manager, or a head of product, or a COO, or any other job that isn't building or selling).
...so, getting people to spam for you.
A functional alcoholic, to be sure.
Couldn't care less.

The name irks me for some reason, it's so pretentious for a site that's trying to hit the mainstream.

I think facebook has really just hit the peak of what social networks can do and they have so much of the market. Getting all your friends to migrate to another service is just, quite frankly, a waste of time
Rkgblog is a great resource for anything search-related.
There are little technical details. As far as i understand the thesis is: CouchDB provides all the groundwork for distributed state, so there is no need to build a lot sync/auth/notify code like Diaspora does. Really?
I'm not sure that Amazon would but maybe the companies that develop the products might have a promo for building their Facebook page? I don't think it's really all that hard to think of a reason.
He also chose his hamster as co-author for one of his articles:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0921-4526(00)00753-5
To answer the title directly, found a company :)

With a background in CS you have the functional hacker skills needed to create a first version of something, but you say your energy lies in marketing skills, so you know what 'something' to build.

I see this as one of the most powerful combinations seen in founders: the skills to get things done, and the soul to see the big picture of what problems people need solving.

On the flip side, the problem you have joining in with another startup is that the founders are often great generalists who need specialist help. Therefore a business/systems analyst is not an obvious fit with a startup, where the hacker-founders shoot first and measure later... at least until they've proven there is something there and they can mature their processes and goals.
The article makes no mention of the solutions implemented in the newer languages on the JVM:

- Groovy has Gant (http://gant.codehaus.org/)

- Clojure has Lancet (http://github.com/stuarthalloway/lancet)

Both of these avoid the "XML tag soup" problem.
There's a bit more info in the projects's README at http://github.com/maxogden/couchappspora

Unlike the link submitted it suggests it's intended to be an alternative implementation of Diaspora's protocols, which for my money makes it a bit more interesting than yet another distributed social network.
Black Duck Buys Ohloh.net: One-Stop Dev Portal Coming
I don't think it's showing off. No one is excluded from adding to the joke or building on a meme, so long as it's funny. In that way, it's more meritocratic. Yes, you have to learn what the joke is about, and it creates its own culture and language and community, but that doesn't make it exclusionary just because it's not common knowledge. Exclusionary would be saying, "YOU can't say that because YOU are new here."
Well, we grey-beard geeks love and use Mac OS X for many reasons, but the most important is that a very pleasant Emacs subset is hard-coded into the Cocoa text subsystem. ;-)
From Alfred Nobel's Will: "...The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics;..."

According to that a price for physics is awarded to both a discovery as well as an invention and this would be the latter.

http://nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html
Their revenue is from 1, or at best 2 'customers', who could stop being 'customers' at the drop of a hat.
Yeah, I'll agree to that. For HW Dev, It's still easier to talk myself into buying a laptop with a docking station and a bunch of different ports than to buy a beautiful, clean, yet limited mac.

Thank god Virtual Machines feel fast enough and do usb i/o these days, I'd go nuts if I still had to dual-boot Windows and Linux.
"But Maven uses XML too" - since Maven 3 you can use Groovy, JRuby & Scala too.
I'm now a business/systems analyst...

I hate to break the news to you, but you describe yourself with a job title that's pretty much exclusive to the enterprise world. For the most part, start-ups don't really have a place for "business/system analysts". Let me explain...

School of Thought A: Call it SDLC (Systems Development Life Cycle), the project approach, or the waterfall approach goes something like this: Define a need, conduct analysis to answer the question "What", conduct design to answer the question "How", program, test, program, test, compare to the Functional Specs from the Analysis Phase, conduct User Acceptance Testing, promote, deploy, repeat anything as required. The more rigorous the documentation and project management, the better.

School of Thought B: Build something ASAP. Get it out there ASAP. Get feedback ASAP. Iterate indefinitely.

For the most part (I'm sure there are many counter-examples), enterprises employ School of Thought A and Start-Ups employ School of Thought B. There simply isn't a need for systems analysis in School of Thought B. By the time you're done analyzing, someone else is servicing the customers you wanted.

My advice: Combine a love for building stuff with your love of systems analysis. They go perfectly together. In fact, we now have a name for that: "programmer/analyst".

The systems analyst who can code is a better systems analyst because he can test/evaluate his ideas.

The programmer who can conduct analysis is a better programmer because he knows what to work on.

This may not be what you wanted to hear, but you're in a perfect position to do both, so do it.
Yes, it is more of an engineering achievement than a physics discovery, but I would not read much more into it. The nobel prize is very frequently given to more of an 'engineering' discovery, as it's goal is to be given to the achievements which benefit man the most.

Just look at several Nobel prizes. The invention of radio, the invention of special gas valves used in lighthouses,the invention of the cloud chamber, the invention of the laser, the invention of the ion trap, etc.

Physics is still very active, but unfortunately we can't be discovering QED everyday.
Please include http://foxnews.com and http://salon.com to cover the extreme ends.
Here is some more info and videos http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
I didn't see the point to begin with.

Social Networks are and have always been interface challenges, not technical ones (at least until you get to massive scale).

The more logical way to address privacy concerns would be through interface (clearer controls, better explanations of who can see what, simpler ways to share with select groups, etc.)

The idea that a buggy, self-hosted, SSL-encrypted node would address any of people's dissatisfaction with Facebook is, I think, silly to begin with.
That is certainly one solution, but what happens when the government puts a limit on how much you can charge for bread?

The best solution is the one my current supermarket uses - the price tags on the shelves are a cheap LCD display, so all they have to do to update the prices are to push the new prices from a database.
Poll: Are you excited by Diaspora?
Based on tav's post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759330
Excited, It has potential
Couldn't care less
Don't know anything about it
That said, one huge area of interest would be to (re)specialize in "user experience measuring" to drive product iterations (similar to the hugely successful Sean Ellis). All startups are concerned with understanding their customers - and most suck at it - which would make such a role pivotal in startup success.
Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759330
Indeed, at one time it looked like she was going to be a household name.
Something like this?

http://www.webdevelopmentdc.com/hackernews-badge.png
I made a poll for it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759504
Will China Be The Next Global Leader?
Also, the Gates building (and others) at Stanford has bits of computer history including a plaque to Vint Cerf and one of Google's lego servers
I think I am pretty good at guesstimating the chances of success of "digital products and services", whether for profit or non profit, and the minute I heard about diaspora I predicted it as a future failure and when I say failure I mean that it will not become a viable alternative to Facebook that is used by a decent amount of people. It might turn out to be a success of a different kind. What kind? I don't know but they certainly surprised me with the amount of money they managed to raise in such a short time with nothing more than a state of principals.
I'm working on a very similar site (though also decidedly different), and I can tell you the challenge I've found in that is publisher bias. For example, if I'm looking at 30 technology sites, and sort out by site, the content looks like a fair representation of what's popular in the world -- however, if I sort just by popularity, almost the entire page consists of HN and TechCrunch posts.

It's a tricky balance, but I'm also working on it. :-)
Bank of Japan Cuts Rates to as Low as Zero Percent
Patent law is to protect the inventor, not necessarily a manufacturer. In this case the jury has decided that Mr. Gelernter invented something, properly acquired a patent (thus documenting his invention's workings for the whole world to read), and that Apple used his invention without compensating him.
The two main jobs that we have or had open were QA Lead and Game Designer. Both jobs did not require CS degrees and paid decently. There are a lot of jobs like these out there, you just have to the look for the medium size startups.
I know. :-) I'm on "be nice and clear the air" alert as yesterday I got a bizarre e-mail from a HN user over a 2 line comment. Most of it can't even be reproduced here but the most pleasant bit was the ending: "Have a horrible day, and if you see your parents tell them that they did a sXXt job, and raised a sXXt human being."

You can't keep everyone happy, it seems, but it's worth a try!
You might want to add
-Scala has sbt

Which is actually pretty interesting, even if you need to mess with the defaults.
I don't think that is PPP-adjusted. Adjusted for PPP, only Ireland, Luxemborg and New Zealand have higher productivity than the US.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=LEVEL

(Most the top countries on Wikipedia's chart have a high cost of living. A burger might cost $8 in France compared to $5 in Ireland, but that doesn't make a French burger flipper more productive than an Irish one.)
Why Wesabe Lost to Mint – A Second Opinion
I can, in sci-fi sense, imagine a world where we wouldn't need to discipline children, but it would take some pretty fundamental changes in our understanding of parenting techniques and probably involve some technology that doesn't exist today. That puts it pretty far away from "stop beating your wife" which just required you to... stop beating your wife. Are you thinking disciplining children instead would be a simple shift from today?

Also, would some acts, like murder, still be punishable? Or are you imagining a shift so deep that no one would need to be punished.
I think it's an impressive piece of work (even with the security bugs in the first version - no software is free of bugs). I'm more interested in what others build on top of it, expand it, etc.
Instant. Customizable. Search. [Rate my start-up]
Ask HN: What Cool Android Projects are You doing?
I am finishing some library frameworks for android development and attempting to pick a cool android project to complete from my list

One of the ones that stands out is maybe put a SIP/VOIP stack on top of JXTA-P2P.

What cool Android Projects are you guys and gals coming up with?
There's an excellent short overview (with many links) of why graphene matters here:

http://blog.joerg.heber.name/2010/10/05/great-the-physics-no...

It punctures some of the hype, while still conveying what's interesting.
I don't think you can call out their passion.

However, technology moves fast and expectations grow each day. I don't think there were that many expectations from Gates or Zuckerberg as much as people expect from these guys. Maybe they'd be better off getting outside help. At some point of time, MS and Fcbk expanded as well. Diaspora needs more involvment (not opensourcey but someone working fulltime on board with them) much sooner than those cases.
>Statistics disprove this point. Maybe true in certain niches;

Maybe, but I'll tell you what: most of the online services that have some form of screenshot of a computer screen on their web site show a screenshot of a Mac.