skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a TED talk, Dimitar Sasselov, a co-investigator on the Kepler mission, said their current best guess for the number of Earth-ish, habitable, planets in the galaxy is looking to be like 100 million (at about the t=9:20 mark in the talk). That is, naturally, an early guess from extrapolations and such, but still it is more based on something than the based-on-nothing and intuition guesses that sometimes float around in these discussions.
>So if it was: revenue - salary - services then I would be a lot closer

you're still driving out everyone who spends a large percentage of their revenue on equipment... actually, those people would probably respond by renting that equipment from foreigners.

for example, if you spend a lot of money on servers and power, etc... instead of owning servers in-house, you'd rent those servers from some guy in Canada or Mexico.
>Imagine that FDA wasn't there (or its European equivalent) and companies could sell you anything whatsoever as food. How often have you gone shopping with a pestiside testing kid, a bacterial testing kit and a geiger counter? How do you know that all 15 type of shampoo you can buy don't all have mercury in them?

Why does it have to be a government agency that's doing the testing? What's to stop a private company with a trusted brand from doing the testing and giving its stamp of approval? Their motivation to keep bad products from slipping through is very strong because their brand is their worth.

It is useful to note that it was the meat packers who lobbied the government for the creation of what became the FDA because they knew that the public would require some testing and the FDA would do it for little money. A private brand would of course have to charge more.

>Maybe I don't like Gmail and Gmail is the only mail in town, I can't force Google to change it. But can at least attempt to call my congressman if I don't like a particular upcoming bill.

If you don't like GMail, you can write your own email service. If enough people don't like it, odds are someone will have already written a competing service. Google cannot stop you from doing that. A government, however, can.
That's harsh, man. So that's what my 3 years on hacker news boils down to, ya?
You're conflating two completely unrelated failings. For example you ignore the fact that in the US the SAT/ACT carry large weight with most schools, and you know what? It's a terrible predictor of college success. Contrary to the this post, most attendees of prestigious schools have all the traditional qualifications. The failures of the American education system are far and wide, but giving too many people an equal shot at a good education are far from one of them.
AMD spun off their fab business in mid-2008, so an acquisition of AMD wouldn't put Apple into the fab business.
Curation and The Next Social Media Business Model
Interesting. Didn't expect that from Amazon. Nice gesture indeed.
Uh, yeah, I was wondering if that word was appropriate in English. I meant it in the sense of:

to make (a technical or abstruse work) easier to understand and more widely known; popularize. (from dictionary.com)
That is not how you make bacon
Did they also disable JavaScript?
The Air is in a completely different league to netbooks, for a number of reasons. Even the slower CPUs in the 11-incher are 30-60% faster than comparable Atom parts, but consume 30% less power. CPU performance of the 11-inch model is comparable to the 2006 Macbooks and the 13-incher to the 2007/2008 Macbooks.

The big performance story is the GPU and SSD.

For the majority of Air buyers, their new machine will feel quicker than any computer they've every used, by simple merit of the SSD. Cold boot times of 15 seconds are being reported and programs will load with similar haste.

The GPU is a big deal, both for graphics performance and OpenCL. OS X has always leaned heavily on the GPU. With the introduction of Snow Leopard, the vast floating point performance of the GPU is available to the whole system. If you've been following the Folding@Home project, you'll know how big a deal that is. Of course third-party developers are proving fairly slow to make use of it, I will bet lumps of my own flesh that iLife 11 will be heavily optimised for OpenCL.

We've already mostly dispatched with the megahertz myth, but we're going to have to confront the idea that CPU speed is a relatively minor part of real-world computer performance. The old Air felt miserably slow, mainly due to hard drive throughput. The new one will feel very fast indeed, in spite of a relatively modest CPU.
The 6 reasons I stopped going to college to work for a startup
Would this really solve anything? It would reduce the rate of serious hits (and thus concussions). But by what amount? Any time you have men this size, who are this motivated, moving this quickly, you'll have serious injuries.

Not to mention the fact that the elephant in the NFLPA's room is that its starting to look like subconcussive impacts are a major part of the problem. The big hits and helmet-to-helmet draw the attention, sure, but the 60 hits per practice are what drive much of the damage.
Right on grellas. Every other company does this and there is a corporate tax industry around these loop holes.

Apple operates Braeburn Capital http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital
Microsoft is known for borrowing its own money from foreign countries to avoid repatriating tax. Because borrowing is cheaper than paying repatriation tax.
Broadcom is known for using R&D tax credits(for spending money in US for R&D) and Singapore and other lower tax states when it comes to selling goods and realizing income.
Even Oil/financial companies are known to set up shops in overseas just to avoid paying higher taxes.

When someone's career is to find ways to reduce taxes, companies will find whatever way to achieve it.
I don't think you know Max as well as you know Patrick. FWIW, I like them both, though they're very different. In any case, let's be nice here :-)
So what? The Mac App Store doesn't erase the fact that I can go to http://www.eclipse.org and get eclipse.
This is mind-blowingly great, not only for them -- compete with Google App engine, and get people hooked on AWS early -- but also for young entrepreneurs, who can get a professional dev env for $0 and a year to see if their idea works.

I think this will also open the gates to developers outside the US -- $50/month for hosting might not seem too much to an American, but in other countries it can be a real barrier.
Not entirely the case. Soylatte is what became the OpenJDK BSD Mac Port. It was granted re-licensing and was merged upstream to OpenJDK.

What this means:

- The Java 6 Java Research License (JRL) binaries are based on Sun's Java 6 JRL releases, which mean they closely mirror the shipping official Java 6. They are also out-of-date and no longer supported. You can only build them using the JRL sources available from Soylatte, and redistribution of code and binaries is limited by the JRL.

- The OpenJDK 6/7 binaries are built from the OpenJDK repository, which is where all the Soylatte and BSD patchset changes were merged. All current development occurs as part of the OpenJDK BSD-Port project, and the code and binaries are fully redistributable.
Want to be an entrepreneur...you will go crazy
I would not sure if anyone on my list would volunteer, but I would be more than happy to send them against their will ;-)

Mars needs politicians.
This is an absolutely brilliant move. Trying to figure out pricing estimates often discourages me from launching more stuff on AWS. Knowing I can get a feel for it, for free, is a real game changer. This gives my projects a strong base to start with.

A few observations:
- I wonder if you could create a new account for each of your projects (er.. startups) or if Amazon would frown on that.
- They seem to be extremely generous with this offer, except for the Amazon S3 limits. 20,000 GETs? That's nothing for the kind of resources that S3 is best at hosting.
Maybe it is just me but I don't understand the current mood, building a new website for things that can already be done in a comfortable manner.

Feedbackroulette could be reduced to reddit.com/r/feedbackroulette (imho)
A $250 million bet that social is just getting started
Haven't listened yet, but the TechZingers do great interviews, and patio11 is a well of knowledge and is generous sharing it. Can't wait!
As the man who made that bacon - I blame iPhone's HDR camera!
> prepare to [have] a night of adventure.

This really put a smile on my face.

That's the best approach to take with anything, but it's especially applicable to technical stuff that's complex and hard to predict.

I've wasted a fair amount of time being pissy and figured out this: with computers, as in life, the only thing over which you have complete control is your attitude. Plan to have fun and learn things and even the sub-optimal can be a good time.
I think it would be better to make these available to everybody, not just to new users.

I talk to people at Amazon frequently enough to know that they don't take existing customers for granted... but doing things like this certainly doesn't help with their image in that respect.
I was going to ask: how can startups (and in particular YC companies) apply similar strategies once they start making revenue? And how can they scale out? What would be really interesting is to see the evolution of the corporate/tax structure of Google as the company grew.
I'm not sure I agree that an API is that different from a UI. Try working with the Windows API in C#. Lack of default parameters means that for every API call I have to explicitly set about 30 options (29 of which I'm usually not using).

It sounds like the point you're making is that, if well-organized, marginal features can add value without encumbering users that aren't interfacing with them. That makes a lot of sense, and I agree with your approach over the 37signals approach. Marginal features can be core features to some users. It's just important that we keep the interface/API organized in a thoughtful manner, so that unused features don't distract people.
Yes, the AMD64 Go compiler (6g) is the most mature.
Another example of revenue hiding is Hollywood movies -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
to each his own. you get yours, ill get mine. don't judge a sentient being based on a few sentences. who are you to do that?
Back to the PC
Well it is a bit of a bummer when I have to repeat my voice commands and dictation to my phone because it lost its connection to the big server farm that does the speech recognition.
Is ingestion the Achilles Heel of Big Data?
It does say you need a valid credit card, which should deter most people who aren't out to ruin their credit rating. Maybe businesses can mint multiple CCs without dinging their rating but it would be riskier for them...
Sorry but I don't like the UI.
May be it's just me but black doesn't look good on the product you use daily. Looks more like a porno. :(
I understand your counterpoints. And I'd like to thank you for taking the time to research and cite all of this -- I truly had no idea of the private money behind some of this research.

However, after further consideration I don't think the tobacco-cancer example was a particularly good one for me to bring up. It was highly controversial in the epi/stats community for many years, mainly because RA Fischer (the father of applied statistics) never believed in the validity of the tests. While I'm sure we could each pick studies that backed the public/private side of things, the truth is that there just wasn't a consensus (about cigarettes) until Congress started investigating. So it's probably not the best topic for me to have brought up.
I agree fully. It just amplifies who you are deep down. It can be creative under the right conditions or destructive under the wrong conditions.
Ask HN: If you could transform higher education, ...
Where would you start? What should go? What should stay? What matters? What doesn't?
Very cool, I like this a lot. I've seen a lot of aggregate tools with google maps like this that seem to have a better sense of how I actually search for things.

Minor criticisms and suggestions:

1. It'd be awesome if this could expand to all aspects of yelp and not just the restraurants. I tried searching for laundromat and got no results, but this search gives results on yelp.

2. It'd be nice to be able to filter by a few of the snippets. The main thing I'd like to be able to do is show only negative reviews. Often times I want to hear what people didn't like about a place more than what they did.

3. It's not really clear what expanding the snippets does. I think it's showing similar snippets, but I'm not 100% sure of that. One weird example:

+ The staff's not 100 % attentive

-The dining room is cozy and intimate.

-The deco is colorful

I'm not sure how these are related.

But as a whole, very cool.
Be sure to post the findings/reason here.
I agree with this - I have a hobby project I was considering writing for GAE (since I could run it for free), but being able to deploy on AWS for free means I could bypass having to write my program custom-fit for AppEngine's datastore and having to wrap my head around that.
I wonder if you could create a new account for each of your projects (er.. startups) or if Amazon would frown on that.

How many credit cards do you have? I suspect that if they see you using the same credit card on many accounts they'll "suggest" that you should be using consolidated billing.
For those who don't know, "Ken" is Ken Thompson himself.
An interesting look at how community creates economy.
You can try angel networks.

Angels join networks that search and filter investment opportunities, and the angels choose to co-invest if there's a match.

The largest one in the US is Tech Coast Angels.

I work in an angel network, based in Chile, with angels/dealflow from abroad. For example, right now we are closing a round in a medical devices startup in San Francisco, where 4 angels (two in Chile, one in Mountain View and on in Spain) are co-investing using convertible notes.
A factually true sentence is downgraded to -1? Voting is broken here. I'm this close to never commenting on this site ever again.
Raphael, have you added filtering by reviewer's location? Most of responses come from Asia and from people eager to earn your 60c per response. They are positively biased at best, and half-assed and incompetent at worst.
Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century
All I am saying is...what does criticizing his art or message have to do with anything productive?
I signed up an account a month ago, and haven't used it for anything except S3. I wonder if/how I can activate the free EC2 micro for the next stage of my project, or if I have to cancel/resub.
Pages with heavy Javascript can cause issues too. For example, open up a large reddit thread on a netbook and wait. However, I don't know whether the MBA's processor will be better enough to handle that.

And not shipping with Flash doesn't mean Flash is now useless. Plenty of video sites out there haven't switched to HTML5, not to mention product sites or Flash game sites.
These free tiers do not expire after 12 months and are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely

Did they tell you something different or just update the page with this?

EDIT: I pulled the wrong quote. Either way, sucks that Amazon would alienate existing customers.
Thanks for your feedback! Do you live in Colorado by any chance? Or stopping through soon? If so I'd love to meet and discuss further over a coffee or something. You made a great point.
Going to give this a whirl. Heard about extensions support when they were chatting with Reddit users the other day.
Counterpoint: well into the 1950s, doctors would routinely endorse cigarettes with menthol because they "cleared up your lungs." Even R.A. Fischer, the man who started modern applied statistics, died in 1962 believing that the conclusions drawn from cig studies were at best inconclusive and bad science.

And I'm curious if you could give me examples of a few epi studies that were done before Fisher's time. I was under the impression that he started everything to do with statistics (and that the field didn't really blossom until we could compute the coefficients digitally. Read "The lady tasting tea" for more background on the origins of this stuff).
Sadly, there is one thing missing. They need to allow you to run a micro instance of RDS. Then the circle would be complete and you could deploy a full application for free to the cloud. (The problem now is you'd have to run the database yourself on your one micro, which is do-able but quite lame.)
I wish I could see and possibly review sites without handing over my email address. I'd like to be able to explore the kinds of sites that are posted and possibly the kinds of feedback they are getting before creating an account.

(Also, what if I don't have a website I want reviewed? I guess that violates the 1:1 relationship feedbackroulette is trying to develop, but I'd be interested in what non-"webmaster" folks have to say if there are any willing to submit a review. )
Facebook, Amazon and Kleiner Perkins Start $250 Million Fund
Anatomy of a Rails Rumble Project (the making of GitWrite)
When people have been saying that the App Store model will happen on OS X, and that OS X and iOS are merging, this is an obvious step in that direction.

This is Trusted Computing happening, albeit on a smaller scale; and Apple can do what Microsoft couldn't ... get people excited about it (same as with DRM).
Social Annealing
There's two categories of free stuff; most is limited to 12 months:

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.
Do we really need corporate income taxes at all? Seems like all of it ends up going to an individual eventually, and gets taxed as income then.
Interesting that it lists 30GB data transfer (15 in/out) as one of the items. All inbound data transfer is currently free anyways for everyone. It's been due to expire at regular intervals, but they keep extending this further (presumably to compete with Azure). I wonder if this indicates they will finally eliminate free inbound data transfer for customers...hopefully not.
IPhone 4 vs Ducati Superbike at 100 mph
This only applies to accounts created on or after October 20th.
I don't really see anything in the article that I would call "gaming" the higher-education system. Maybe you could argue that the concept of going to a cheaper school for undergrad and attending a prestigious grad school is gaming the system, but that's not exactly a secret.

Achieve straight A's in high school, do well on standardized tests, suck up to professors, study absurd amounts... This is more a guide of how to fall victim to the higher-education system.
To state what is perhaps obvious, scientific research and invention flourished before the modern, post WW2 world of state sponsored research.

Given things like the Broad Institue, the Allen Brain Atlas, Microsoft Research, the Google guys' funding of the Singularity Institute, DE Shaw's funding of protein folding, etc. it's pretty clear that billions in private money is spent on R06 research.

It's also not clear that the current system of indentured servitude for grad students and postdocs is optimal. Frankly, in biomedicine, it's the top 10-20 places (and really the top 5) that primarily invent and discover new stuff, as quantified by citation rates[1].

By contrast, a PhD from Directional State is unlikely to do so, and the government funding him or her at the same rate as an MIT scientist is a distortion which is less likely to occur when funding is controlled by individuals rather than politicians with an interest in pork. In the absence of government funding, said marginal PhD candidate would find productive employ as an engineer or scientist in the real economy. (I say all this as a lifelong academic!)

[1] Perhaps the ultimate proof of bibliometry's utility is that it was the inspiration for PageRank.
This is why PHP works well for getting going fast, you don't have to learn all the built-in functions, just the ones you need.

In this case the name-space is the API.
Stop and consider this for a second then move on with your day:

Does this speak of Facelette's product quality or TechCrunch's editorial quality?
That's only for SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS. All the other stuff is "only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date."
I've wanted to do this for so long, good luck, on the app and the interview
I used a similar idea for my YC application answer to the non-computer hack question. Basically, I hacked the traditional education experience and graduated in 2.5 years, with ~$8500 of loans (without any scholarships/reduced tuition), and with lots of great work experience (I worked full time during school). Although I wouldn't advise this route for everyone, it worked out extremely well for me. Here are a few tips towards hacking the undergraduate experience:

1) As the author says, attend a high quality, low cost state school. If you're going to get a masters, undergrad institution doesn't matter beyond being able to get you into the masters program of your choosing. If you aren't going to get a masters, I would wager it doesn't truly matter what undergrad school you choose.

2) Determine your major before your first semester begins.

3) Plan your courses out meticulously, and don't take courses you don't need to.

4) Take as many classes online as you can.

5) Many professors lectures are fairly useless as they just regurgitate their powerpoint slides. Use this to your advantage -- do homework, work on your online classes, do freelance/telecommuting work.

6) Use a service like RateMyProfessors to find sensible professors - there are huge variances in amount of homework, number of tests, etc. between professors for the same course.

7) Night classes are generally easier and have less homework, because they are designed for non-traditional students with full time jobs during the day.

8) Take as many credits per semester as possible - for most majors, 15 is pretty easy for smart/dedicated people, even with working a part/full-time job. I took 24 my last semester, while working full time. It was basically hell, but you can do anything for 3-4 months of your life. (I probably wouldn't have done that, except an older guy I worked with said he had done 24 in his last semester of his masters program, working full time, and with a pregnant wife.)

9) Go year round, but take less classes in summer and get great internships/work more.

10) Books:

a) Make sure you need to buy the book. Lots of classes don't really require buying the book.

b) Make sure you really need the most recent edition, 95%+ of the time, the last edition or two editions ago was fine for me.

c) If you have to buy a book, get used on Amazon marketplace, half.com, etc. and resell them there after the class is over.

11) Get a job. This will help pay bills and reduce the amount of debt you take. Ideally, get one which will benefit your career path and allows you to work on homework. (I was a systems administrator in a generally not very busy swing shift - among other jobs.)

12) Change jobs as often as you can find something that looks better on your resume or pays more. Every job I took paid $10k+ more than the previous, except when I took a pay cut to do a summer internship at Goldman Sachs ($50k to $40k).