skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on who you listen to. I spent a good 2 years post college building upon the foundations of finance, accounting (of all its various stripes), monetary theory, international factor movements, quantitative analysis (read: fairly high-level stats), portfolio theory (risk management), etc. Then you have to learn how to read SEC filings (and foreign versions of the SEC filings), what all of them mean, all the nuanced rules that the FASB puts out (in the form of GAAP) and how they differ from the international standards (in the form of IFRS), entire histories of companies down to the intensely nitty-gritty details...

The list is basically endless. The worst thing about it is that even after all this, something like 90% of portfolio returns can be attributed to sector allocation, meaning that even if you do think a company is great, they might just be the best answering machine company in an age that is on the cusp of seeing smartphones.

This is why you'll often find analysts focus specifically on sectors (or even industries), and only a few companies in them. It takes a lot of time to get enough information about the past, present, and (potential) future of an industry and a company in order to know all the factors to make an educated-enough guess.

In short, you can pick 30 stocks at random and you will probably have returns very close to market average returns. The amount of knowledge (and intelligence) required to guess better than other people is so immense, that unless you're going into financial analysis as a career, I'd stick to ETFs or managed portfolios. With an ETF, you can make bets on sectors, countries, or the entire market, all for minimal fees. People much more experienced than yourself will figure out what the best allocation of companies inside that particular ETF is.

Still, anything beyond a portfolio that is perfectly correlated with average market returns brings with it increased risk. In other words, the more you screw around on the edges without having the years of experience required to know what you're doing, the greater the chance you'll make higher (or lower) returns than the market.
I've tried GTD but no one tool works for me and I end up falling off of the wagon. Email is usually my downfall. I'd prefer everything on paper, whether Moleskine notebooks, index cards, or just folded printer paper. But taking an incoming email (that will take more than 2 minutes to act on) to a task on paper is usually such a heavyweight process that I never do it.

So I end up trying to manage everything in my email+tasks systems (Exchange/Outlook for work and Gmail for personal). That works somewhat well, but breaks down for a couple cases. I still prefer a paper list where I can scribble new input as well, for meetings and offline / distraction-free planning time. It's not as hard to copy from paper to email+tasks, but I never seem to get it done.
Why worry about sustainability ?! If someone wants to do good for the community by offering their skills, let them. "Sustainable model" - Sounds like throwing words around.

I'm going ahead and blaming global warming for this post ;)
Back-of-the-envelope math:

50 characters x 8 bits = 400 bits of entropy

Even if you account for not having backspaces and linfeeds in the password, he could still easily have 256 bits of entropy.

Even with Moore's law, a strong algo like AES-256 is generally considered to be uncrackable, assuming the algorithm and the implementation don't have any flaws.
Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson and the confessions of a start-up addict
I don't think there's any interesting phenomena going on here, and to me the "Offer HN" posts look quintessentially like spam. I don't read HN in order to see a lot of folks touting for business - no matter how talented or fast on the keyboard they may be. I know business is thin on the ground right now, but please post that stuff elsewhere.
There's Jakob Neilsen, of course: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

For your part B advice, it's almost a one-stop shop.
As long as it is genuine, uncorrupted generosity, I don't see the harm. There are not that many offers and it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling that there are people willing to spend time and effort on this sort of stuff :)
I'm sorry, but source? Stats? Anything other than anecdote to back that up?

I tried to find some information, but the best I could do was from an article written in 2009 (http://www.next-gen.biz/news/ps3%E2%80%99s-web-browser-usage...):

"The PS3's browser has a 0.04 share of the 'internet market', a miniscule proportion when compared to, say, the PC's 88.7 percent majority, yet it's a figure which sits comfortably ahead of the Wii's 0.01 percent."

Granted, those numbers are horribly out of date, but it would seem to indicate that the population (at large) does agree.
Thanks. Fixed it.

He had both domains so I didn't catch the mistake when I tested it.
My version is write less code. It doesn't always work, but it is usually a misunderstanding of the domain ( which is a function of no specs).
Currently going through another effort to fully adopt Scrum at work, I wonder if there isn't a workable way to apply that to personal productivity. GTD "projects" are really "product backlog" items that need regular review and reprioritization. Maybe you could shorten your sprint timeboxes depending on how busy you are. Do a more-or-less daily Scrum meeting with yourself. And so on.
How about the baby who died because through unknown causes in its own room, that could have been saved if it was in your own bed?

everything carries a risk. Do what seems natural and right for you.
This is not true. First everybody gets more sleep not less. After the first month or two if you are nursing you can just hook up and go back to sleep.

The risk of SIDS is lower with co-sleeping, and the risk of suffocation or those other horror stories is minuscule. And on top of that they typically only happen with parents who are morbidly obese or on medication (not just illegal drugs, but things like cold medication).

So the prudent thing is not to cosleep it if you took anything, but otherwise it's better.
1) Pair-wise approaches, if I understand what you mean, are those in which you are look at pairs of examples. You want to avoid naive implementations, in which you train on a quadratic number of instances (all-pairs). It really depends upon the specific problem how you get around this. For example, if you have a model that operates over pairs, doing example selection in an intelligent way. For example, use all positive pairs, but sample only one negative pair per positive pair.

2) You are talking about the cold start problem. Basically, the problem is how do you deliver good recommendations to new users as quickly as possible. I am actually currently talking to a big company about this problem.

Google has talked about how they do this for Google News, especially because they have high item churn (news is not news in a day). http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.80.... Essentially, they do clustering of users and news items.

Another approach is to give the user a hunch-like quiz when they join. Basically, you use a decision tree to cluster the users, getting as much information from them with as few questions as possible.

Another approach that requires almost NO user interaction is to use some ambient information about the user. Maybe you have a cookie for the user and other sites will share the user's behavior with you. Maybe you ask them to log in through facebook or twitter, and then can look at their profile and activity history to build a user profile. So getting creative about possible sources of ambient information is another approach.
Amazon is a much better example than the one I used.
Share w/HN: Founders At Work notes
I'm the sort of guy who likes to take notes when he reads a non-fiction book so he'll never have to read it again. (Lazy, right?) My notes for Founders at Work, with an angle toward how to start and run a successful company, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/View?id=dhfmbkzv_58gqgg8nd5

Note that these notes are no substitute for reading the book; I'm sharing them as a companion while you read or a refresher afterward. Even though I said I'm too lazy to _re_read books, but you should definitely read this book at least once, _especially_ if you're a founder. The stories told are inspiring, and Jessica has a real gift for guiding the interviewee toward the most important or insightful moments of their startup days.

I have notes for about 15 other books, either startup or programming related. I think sharing these notes are covered under Fair Use, but every time I think I have an understanding of what Fair use actually is, I see someone get sued within that definition :( If anyone can spell out exactly whether what I have is fair use, I'd love to share the others. I'm sharing these Founders at Work notes because if Paul or Jessica disapprove: a) they can take down this post, and b) the advice in these notes seem to be mostly contained in Paul's essays, so I'm hoping it's not a big deal. (I tried to send you an e-mail Paul, asking for permission, but your address is removed from http://www.paulgraham.com/info.html and my Google-fu wasn't good enough to find an address that seemed legit.)
Ask HN: Safety Critical infrastructure on the Internet
I've been following the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 and while I understand that the "President pulls the plug on the internet" stories are a little exaggerated, it got me thinking about what truly important systems rely on the internet.

Easy ones that come to mind are:
Email communication
Phoneline back hauls
Stock market electronic trades
Cost aware thermostats (imagine they all loose connectivity, default to max usage and bring the power grid down)

What other safety critical infrastructures rely on the internet?
In this example your safe is the medium in which the data is stored. If the police get's a warrant to search my safe, they may do so, but when they find a notebook full of enciphered text or a tape with "noise" in it I'm not obligated to provide them with means to decipher them. Hell I could just say I forgot the key, how is anyone going to prove I'm lying?

Personally I agree with you. My data is my data, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
How much less should someone make if 'Junior' is prepended to their title?
> But please don't post any more "Offer HN". Despite the generous impulse behind them, they are basically just spam that's pushing out other more interesting stuff, at the moment.

I disagree. I think they are interesting stuff. In any case, HN has a voting system so what goes on the front page will be whatever the community finds interesting.
I am not talking about supporting the admin or listing those services, I am talking about opening the content of individual consulting sessions. Summarize the content of the advice of one or all the sessions, and put it back in the thread to make it worth something to people that didn't participate. It will be worth a ton because it is advice tailored specifically to your demographic, a user of Hacker News.
Its from pg's email address, but the sender is "<censored>"

Just a guess, but judging by the first part of that address, PG might prefer that the address not be made public.
Wow. This would be _really_ helpful!

I have an Android app that I've been working on. The primary purpose is to let users see the apps their friends have so they can discover new ones.

You can see screen grabs @ http://www.appadvocate.com/screenshots2/

But the one that I really need help on is the home screen:
http://bit.ly/ackPgK

The most important things for a user to look at are Friends (shows a list of friends and how many apps they have) and Friend's apps (shows a list of apps the user doesn't have but are being used by friends).

And I'd also like to figure out a way to encourage people to invite new friends to join them.
business people bring "more features please so we can make the sale".

It's the designers who deserve the credit here, not the business people.

Plus, not all hackers are feature-centric. There are many hackers who understand design.
At this rate, I see an "offer" link coming between "ask" and "jobs".
This is an awesome track so it's great to see more discussion about it. For reference, here's the previous discussion from last year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752878
Something I suggested elsewhere in an Offer HN-related thread that appears to have died a death was the idea of creating an offer section next to the jobs section at the top, where people can offer their services.

It would be good then if a condition of accepting a service is that you should (not that it'd be enforced, it'd just be good etiquette) post your own offer.

That seems to allow the front page to get back to lumps of ice, Angelgate and other important stuff, encourage the philanthropic behaviour and gives people a place to put it.

I appreciate this could be perceived as a step towards a 'multi-section reddit-style thingummajig' but I think this is a reasonable exception. Certainly offers with sufficient gravity could make the front page by setting a threshold.

It sounds like a bit of work, but what do you think?
Hell, things that work for one PARENT, don't work for another. My daughter acts awesome with me even when I take care of her all day for weeks, but she's a complete terror around my wife.
Ask HN: Five mandatory pages upon first using the Internet?
If you got to pick five webpages (not sites) everyone had to read when they used the Internet for the very first time, what would they be?
Are they going to remove "rock-solid" from their front page copy?
-OR- if you choose to drink shit beer, choose no beer. :)

I will cut out starbucks before I cut out good beer. Bud Light and its equivalents just suck too bad.
Will someone at Heroku please describe your QA process?
I agree that web-based solutions could reach enough people for them to be a feasible replacement for email in terms of availability. The point I was trying to make by talking about access is that everyone has an email address I can send mail to, but generally access to project-specific tools are limited to folks on the project. So if I hash out an interesting technical approach with someone outside the project or outside the company, it will likely be done in email or via the phone.

Once I have resorted to using email, eventually I will forget to move a conversation over or I don't think it will be important and our "repository" has gotten out of sync, which leaves me with a merging issue (do I trust what my email says or the website), and eventually a duplication of effort (I know we talked about this, but my email says x, and the website says y)

As an aside, as I was writing this, I also realized that I tend to use email as my "archive of knowledge". When I move on to a new project I can search back through my email to find relevant discussions and apply them to my new work. I have not seen a tool with a similar ability to archive and take with me my lessons learned (whether because of company policy or lack of feature in the tool). I know lots of managers who religiously archive their email to avoid losing some obscure piece of information or process from years ago.
From a libertarian/utilitarian POV, the processes at those schools are "less wrong" in that they are more likely to admit a student with perfect test scores, incredible grades, and little if any extracurricular activity outside of modding xBoxes and lan parties. Those schools are looking for raw smarts and technical aptitude...

<Ivy League Douchebag>...which is why so many M.I.T. grads end up working for Princeton/Harvard/Yale grads.</Ivy League Douchebag>

At the Ivies, lots of kids apply with perfect grades and scores. Those schools have the luxury of passing on most of those kids in order to select the ones who are truly interesting and/or clearly hell-bent on changing the world for the better.

In my own case, I was applying from a small public high school in a resort town in Western Michigan. Having gone back and pulled my files once I got the admissions job, my read on why I was admitted was because "kid is being doing more with what's available to him in this odd part of Michigan than the other kids we see in his state, he also sounds pretty cool and fun and everyone likes the guy. Plus he's in the top 1% of his class."

So I was admitted to bring in some color and culture, despite being a white male. Despite being "the smart guy" in every social situation growing up, that wasn't even a factor in why I was admitted. My credentials put me squarely in the middle of the pack academically unbeknownst to me. That's humbling but also great self-knowledge to have about oneself. Sometimes I think students at these schools should be told why they were admitted. I probably would have felt better about being the president of half a dozen clubs and playing in the most popular band on campus had I know that's why they brought me there to begin with. :)
The Twitter API docs (http://dev.twitter.com) has HTTP error codes for each Twitter API. There is Twitter Search API, Twitter REST API and Twitter Streaming API. So though the meaning of the error code might differ slightly generally it is the same. For example, 200 is always successful request and 404 is always resource not found.

Are you seriously checking for failwhale's image name in API response?
http://news.ycombinator.com/offers
RSS feeds are subject to the REST API rate limit [1] of 150 requests/hour unauthenticated and 350 requests/hour for user authenticated calls. The reason you don't run into the issue with jQuery is because the rate hit counts against the visitors IP rather then your servers. Two easy ways to help alleviate the issue 1) make a bot account force authentication [2] for all calls 2) proxy your request through apigee.com which has a whitelisted IP with more requests/hour.

[1] http://dev.twitter.com/pages/rate-limiting#rest
[2] http://dev.twitter.com/pages/oauth_single_token
New Library Technologies Dispense With Librarians
Hi Dan

I also think that the stuff that came out of Rails Rumble looked pretty awesome especially done in 48hrs. I created ShelfLuv in about that timeframe as well and see both sides of the coin to use your terminology.

Part A: To me the design and UX is first and foremost. Especially w/ a hackathon - think of your product like a runway fashion show. On the front side it just needs to look and work perfect. Under the hood for me, out of the gate doesn't matter as much as long as it works and isn't slow to the point that it affects the user's perception of the product. I typically try to think of the user's interaction/perception/experience first. Mockups in Photoshop are pretty useful to me, but so are HTML mockups. It all depends on what I am trying to achieve. A visual experience - playing around w/ that would be best served to me by toying around in Photoshop. An interaction experience, mocking variations of that in jquery is best because I can click around. I can touch and feel my app. However I mostly start everything with sketches on pieces of paper or my notebook. I try to draw different variations. I look at how other webapps/apps do them. With ShelfLuv there werent many ideas or variations. I didn't start having variations until I had something working to show. If there's nothing to show yet, I feel that people have no baseline with which to compare. It's a lot easier for most people to say A is better than B, than to just show them B and ask them if this is any good.

Part B - I find that a layperson is immensely useful in this arena. One of my sounding boards is my wife. She's very intelligent but is not what you would call a techie or designer type. Alot of times I just want to use icons but many nontechie people will have no clue what these icons mean. Of course it's a compose icon - it's a pen and paper.

Part C - I would say you can outsource visual design, but it would be hard to outsource the interaction design and how the app works. Interaction is a process that can be very iterative. You try something, it doesn't work and you try it again.

Part D - I am an engineer by training but started focusing on user experience and interaction about midway in my career. I felt like I could have the most impact on users through a great product experience. I started by reading a lot of blogs and sites of great designers. I look at and try a lot of web apps and sites. I also buy a lot of iphone/ipad apps to see how they work and what they've done. Major obstacles for me is that I'm not a graphic artist and I can't design from scratch. I know designers who like to create textures and stuff from scratch and to me I feel more like a cobbler of design elements rather than an original creator of design. I will put this design element together with that element. I'm basically pretty handy at tweaking and modifying in Photoshop but ask me to create stuff in Photoshop and Illustrator from scratch using the pen/brushes/paths and I'm lost.
Oddly enough I didn't (still don't) get the original joke but I did understand the 'so bad' reference implying I obviously missed something really funny.
Is that really called "backwards compatibility"? R2 can run R1 stuff, which is what I would call b.c., but R1 can't run R2 stuff.
I believe non-jailbroken iPhones don't support SSH. So, one way to get around this is to turn on PPTP VPN on a DD-WRT'd router and connect to it while you're away from home.
>«They mean porn apps»

That's not what Jobs said. And besides, it doesn't change the problem : what counts as a "porn app" ? Is an app that allows you to download, among thousands of E-Books, the kama sutra, (one of the cases discussed on the wikipedia page) a "porn app" ?
This story couldn't occur in the USA.

Actually it can and does. If a judge compels you to turn over your password as a part of the discovery process and you refuse then you can be served with a contempt warrant and go straight to jail without trial and with limited possibility to appeal.
> I think a low cost Mac and the evolution of the iPad is a LOT scarier (by an order of magnitude) to Microsoft.

Considering the cheapest Mac you can buy is the $700 mini and you still have to buy a keyboard and screen, I don't think MS is too worried that. Apple is much more interested in margins than market share when it comes to PCs.

On the other hand, the $500 iPad is definitely something that should be keeping Ballmer up at night...
If readers in general don't want that, I should really have gotten many more downvotes. 3 downvotes suggests that a few people just didn't like my comment while everyone else was indifferent.
Thanks -- an old roommate of mine went to Princeton & he was equally proud of his experience. Solid, sharp guy and definitely not a douchebag. :)

I guess I wasn't thinking so much about the "brand" but the chance to get a quality education in spite of missing the admission roulette.
Do cortisone shots actually make things worse?
What Should I Do? If My iPhone Has Best Cydia Apps | InfoMov.Com
The crypto doesn't have to outlast his lifetime, only the statute of limitations for the alleged crime.
What is great about HN is that the community can decide on how useful they are and it will run its course. If there is other content that is "worth" more to users, it will rise to the top. I am going to add a section to the Hacker Newsletter for these since they appear useful at the moment.
It will be great if you could add them here too: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

On a similar note, I wonder if there are other filters which are not listed there?
Apple To Hold Secret iOS Dev Summit – To Make Apple TV Apps?
Do you mean currently or in the past?

Currently I guess news.google.com, nytimes.com(well, before the subscription bull), amazon.com, xkdc.com