skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These kind of posts are not unusual. A few of them:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788777

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1915379

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891223

This very recent one (4 days ago) got props on the highest comment rating for allowing comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951476

It is not very precise to say the community has no tools for filtering these: it can stop upvoting them. But I agree that we have less tools (no flag and no comments). Not to mention meta posts like this serve as a tool to act upon.

Even if people took it all away, there is still google Sidewiki (http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html ) and Marginize (http://www.marginize.com/ ) that enable side comments on any page, not only on HN.

On the other hand, if this bothered me enough, I'd rather filter out such topics from my HN reader rather than use a workaround to contribute to a topic that doesn't want to have contributions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
It makes it easier to embrace HTML5 when you have complete control over the browser used.
This guy is spot on. He actually understands the history and architecture of the Internet, as well as the business and technical reasons for peering.

To summarize his post: Comcast has essential grown to the point where they can demand payment from content providers to peer with their network, otherwise their customer's traffic travels over intentionally congested paid links through their upstream provider, Tata. This sucks because it disrupts the natural order of the Internet being essentially a "joint venture" between private companies that operate the component networks that make up the Internet.
To answer your question as best I can: it's exploratory at the moment, like the examples in the original article. The immediate goal is to pursue directions one of which will hopefully produce software and knowledge clearly valuable enough to warrant significantly increasing resources devoted to it--the next inflection point. Risks and rewards are high at this stage. I won't go into a why starting or joining a startup is fantastic, though, as PG does that just fine[1].

Capturing created value outside of the research arm of a big pharma company is of course a key challenge in bioinformatics, and I'd love to meet or chat with you if you're thinking about this too.

In the missionary vs mercenary divide that John Doerr uses to segment startups, I'm now a missionary. The end goal is to cure disease.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html; http://paulgraham.com/boss.html; http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
go Travis go! you're the bomb!
for 27 dollars he will go wild!
Social Media Jumo? Eh. Here Are Two Better Sites for Social Good
I submit my comments to such articles as blog posts :) :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967401
autonomously? that's definitely illegal.
<b>No major powers have gone to war however. Stalemates of nuclear war and the lack of conventional warfare between capitalistic countries equates to this weird period in history that does not involve actual military expansion. Economic expansion is enough :D</b>

Economic expansion built upon cheap resources for the industries of large powers and obedient world markets. I.e in war, coups, protectorates, old-style and new-style colonization.

And, when everything else fails, war between major powers themselves.

The same fallacies ("economic expansion will replace war") were uttered in late 19th century, we saw how that turned out. Btw, the market was no less global then.
Did Storytlr even bother asking people to pay for the service? Seems kind of strange that with 10,000 users you can't at least cover $500 in hosting.

At $5 a month, that's only .1% signup required.
Totally agreed : had the presenter replaced the "bikini-clad girl" by a tough looking dark-haired muscular-type guy in boxer short holding an iphone, i wonder how many men would've found this offensive? Rethorical question : None. They would've found it funny. Had the conference room been full of women, would the guys still have found it funny? Answer : Yes. And what if the women started to comment on the guy's 'features'. Hilarous.

I whole-heartedly agree that repeated verbal and physical assault are totally unacceptable, and anyone around must take urgent action against it. But as said above please dont see harassment in everything, just because men find something funny, or because they show a girl on a slide, it is almost never meant to be offensive to anyone. It just isnt, and the poor guy hasnt even thought it could offent anyone. it is just a means of trying to avoid Death by Powerpoint.

And just in case anyone wonders. I do not mean to offend anyone :)
A phrase _is_ a set of connotations, so I would argue that his problem is indeed with the phrase.
Fully agreed, I just wrote a blog post just because I could not comment there. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967401

I very much disagree that when you get rejected by YC (or any other angel/VC/incubator) that you should take that as your cue to sign up with this or any other YC funded company.
You would be surprised at how few people would pay $5 a month...
I Wear Your Shirt: Building An AdSense For Tshirt Wearers?
To be clear, Mackenzie, are you saying that you know Noirin personally, and that it's public knowledge that she's in the process of getting a divorce, and [edited] also that she really is looking for a new partner?
MacBook Air Performs Poorly Compared With Similarly Priced Windows Laptops
SkyTap is Making Cloud an Affordable Reality
> Perhaps one could launch a tethered helium baloon with the antena and thus increasing the range ?

I used to know this guy that did something very very naughty back when he was a budding teen (late 1960s). He ordered a weather balloon from Edmund Scientific, filled it with helium, then attached an entire roll of heavy duty institutional grade aluminum foil to it. He then let it go... off the west coast of Florida. MacDill saw something on the radar, and sent a few fighters up to see what it was.

Somehow they tracked it back to him (possibly via Edmund) and he got a serious talking too, and then some.
Thanks Ian! woOOOooohooOOOOooo!
I know, that is the point.
"Vitamin not a pain-killer" is a great metaphor.
While I agree with you I find the same to be true of successful companies. When you ask a successful founder why (s)he succeeded you'l most often get an answer aided by hindsight.

It appears to me that nobody truly knows what makes or breaks a company. There are some prerequistes (hard work, focus on customers, etc.) that you have to have, but these aren't enough.

My guess is that it's like the weather and financial markets: Chaos (as in chaos theory) reigns, and it's just not possible to know who the winnere or losers are.
yeah and if someone decided to give up and join a company, they'd go work for Google not some startup with passive aggressive founders who think they are better than you
I don't need convicing that it is easy to inovate outside of big pharma. Altough bioinformatics startups do require quite a bit more cash then pure software startups.

However, the biggest part of capturing value is the regulatory burden.

In other words, lets say you have a great way to discover biomarkers. Even more so, you go ahead and DO discover a pile of biomarkers with great potential.

Then you attemp to sell those biomarkers to big pharma, and that is when you find out:

Even with all their beurocracy and horrible return on R&D investments, big pharma is sitting on a huge pile of biomarkers.

Pushing any one tratment through the pipeline costs a metric tonne of cash and takes 10 year before you even know if it's worth to keep going.

That is why there's a huge backlog of potential drugs, biomarkers, treatments, etc.

Thus merely finding new things with potential is only slighlty better then nothing.
I took the post you mention to mean "If you even applied to Y Combinator, you're probably awesome even if you got rejected, and we want to hire awesome people." In other words, they're using "applied to YC" as a filter for their applicant pool. If anything, that seems the opposite of snobbish, since they actively reject the idea that being turned down by YC is somehow a blemish on your record.

My guess is the reason they used an anonymous account is that they're not ready to do a "media launch" yet (as opposed to a product launch, which apparently they've already done). If this hypothesis is correct, using a named account might have blown their cover. This could affect their media launch; TechCrunch, for example, might not cover their media launch if they outed themselves on Hacker News as a YC-funded company.
This post just seems needlessly tendentious.

The job posting you're referring to doesn't simply say "you weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead". It says, "we're a YC company with an executive role open especially for people who took the initiative to apply to YC."

For a lot of very smart people who applied to YC, this could very well be a huge win; it's a management team role slot at a company with better-than-average odds of being interesting a year from now. It's not just another job.

And even if it was, what's wrong with that? It's a job at a startup. If you applied to YC because you want the startup life, what's wrong with suggesting you get your hit of it from a company that can pay for health insurance?

If you're living your life waiting to be "accepted into the majors" before doing anything cool, you're already playing to lose. The people who are going to succeed with their own companies aren't going to be broken by offers like this. That mentality is the thing that irritates me most about YC. If getting "rejected" by YC makes so much of a difference to you that having someone else even mention it raises your hackles, then you probably ought to be working at someone else's company anyways.
As a male knitter, I can confirm that I get weird reactions - though usually from nonknitters who see me knitting.
It's an interesting idea, and could be useful. I think that finding a selection that matches your intended submission could be difficult. Would be cool, though.
False comparison: "if you’re interested in getting the most pop possible for your buck, it’s clear that the MacBook Air isn’t the best way to go."
I knew that in advance. The Air is not about pure performance.
Kids these days. Not made of souless cinderblocks and drywall = dumpy to them.
Cite?

There's a whole thriving community of hobbyists building and flying autonomous aircraft, publishing information and code, and selling custom designed hardware.

Here's _their_ take on the legality of autonomous aircraft

http://diydrones.com/forum/categories/regulation-1/listForCa...
Aerosonde's Laima, with a wingspan of under 10 feet and a fuel capacity of about 1.5 gallons, flew trans-atlantic in 1998, a distance of 2044 miles. It's 2462 miles from LA to NY by air. (It was partly R/C and partly autonomous.)

http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/insitu-aerosonde-laim...
In YC's rejection letter, they even say if you go on to success to please let them know how you did it so they can improve their application process.

Very respectable.

Edit: And the cliché: if one rejection would stop you from continuing with your startup, you aren't ready to be an entrepreneur.
I think it'd be hard to directly compare statistics, because the timeframes and mechanics are a lot different.

Startup success, for some definition of success, tends to happen or not happen within five years or so; while the hurdles to become a tenured professor at a top research university are much more spaced out. Typically, it's 5-8 years of grad school, possibly 1-3 years of a postdoc, and 6-7 years being untenured faculty. At any one stage, the odds in academia are not that bad; for example, if you're an untenured Stanford prof, your chances of becoming a tenured prof are actually quite good. But you have to make it through the whole 15-20-year process to get there.

As a result, startups also have more iterability: if a startup fails, you can plausibly try a second, or a third, perhaps taking totally different approaches each time. You can't really do that with an academic career path, since the time needed to get through the process and build a reputation makes it nearly impossible to decide, "well, going for a CS faculty position at CMU didn't work, maybe I'll go back to grad school and try for a philosophy professorship at Oxford this time".

On the other hand, since it's a whole career rather than a single venture, it's less clear what "success" or "failure" is for an academic career, unless you really have your heart set on a very specific goal. For example, if you end up not being able to get the tenured position you want, but do end up working at a research lab in industry doing interesting stuff, is that a success or failure? With startups it's usually clearer that either it's in business or it isn't after five years.
You should not count which platforms it runs on. The claim was:

> .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered

What you're doing is when somebody claims "trains are more energy efficient than cars" then you say "but not if you run a train on a road"/"you can't run a train on a road". This is true but that was not the claim, the claim is clearly about the productivity a programmer has with the tools for developing applications for the platforms that the respective tools are targeting.

And you can build applications that run on OS X and Linux with VS.
This discussion is talking about the notation ambiguity of i and j in denoting a classical complex number with only one real and one imaginary part. As far as I can tell, this python bug report has absolutely nothing to do with quaternions, which is an extension on complex numbers.

i == j, not i == -j in most applications. If you take the number z = a + ib and turn it into z = a - jb, and just take Im(z), you end up with two different answers otherwise.
It's technically illegal according to the FAA.

You can only do it so long as you could take control of the aircraft any time. This means you need LoS, and you need a radio.
His long interview with Rachel Maddow shows his thoughts on this quite well. (link is to an article breakdown with full-video linked)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/11/rachel-maddow-jon-s...
Travis: if you ever want to learn web development with Ruby on Rails, you've got a free PDF+screencast bundle from http://railstutorial.org/ waiting for you. :-)
I'm growing tired of these comparisons. For me: I prefer Mac. Other people prefer Windows. I actually have one of the new MacBook Airs (the 13" upped to 4gb RAM and 256gb hard drive) and it's hands down the best Mac I've purchased.

This doesn't mean that if I bought an equally priced (and benchmark-ed-ly faster) Windows machine that I'd be happier. I would basically just have a machine that is a little bit faster with an interface that I strongly do not prefer. Saving a couple bucks in this way would not make me happy.

These comparisons seem great for people that are truly apathetic to their interface, environment and workflow... the only people I know that fit that description are not playing Call of Duty.

I'm not saying that Mac is better than Windows. I'm saying my preference is a Mac, and with the perceived price-per-power that I normally feel with Macs, I feel like I got a great deal. It's quick, the battery lasts about twice as long as I'd ever need it to, and I'm happy with my purchase.

And at the end of the day, that is what matters.
Exactly. They compared an ultraportable to full-size laptops, without outlining why someone should get one over the other. They only stated the obvious "other computers give you more power."
I had to restart my node servers almost on a daily basis because of this bug. Was about ready to jump on Erlang myself ironically (building a stream server with mochiweb). Glad I read this and will give Node.js some more time to mature.
I think they ignored the fact that people buy the Air because it's ultra thin and light.

I mean, the Alienware they are comparing it to for example has a height of 1.29 inches whereas the Air is 0.11 to 0.68 inches.

Then for weight the 11" Alienware is 4.39 lbs but the 11" Air is 2.3 pounds.

Obviously there is merit in these alternatives they are rating but I wish they put some value into the thinness and weight numbers that people buy Airs for.
Once you understand hindsight bias, it seems so blindingly obvious. - @haruki_zaemon
Oh no, he was doing it totally indirectly - like, sizing me up while being defensive. I guess that's not being threatening, but only after the interaction I realized that he was really preparing a plan for how to kick my ass in case I did anything wrong, until I calmed him down. It was also pretty appropriate for the setting.
It seems odd that comments are allowed to be disabled on some of these posts. Isn't one of the main functions of HN discussion?

Also, it seems like every time I've seen sponsored posts that disallow comments, the backlash from that in other topics is larger than any potential backlash in the comments. It seems like disabling comments completely backfires in terms of controlling negative reactions.
They know that. However, flamebait headlines like these will get them hits.
I like dark on light; it's literally easier for me to read (though there is a medical cause for my choice).

I have Keratoconus, so there are very few corrective lenses which can actually help me have good clear vision. Light screens with black text cause my pupils to contract, which results in better focus (it's related to the reason that pinhole cameras work without any lenses).

If I do light on dark (my favorite colorscheme was Zenburn), the text gets too fuzzy to read at anything smaller than 14 point. On the other hand, if I use dark on light (I prefer bclear now) I can read text comfortably at 8 point.

It's certainly painful on the eyes if the rest of the environment is dark, but if you have a reasonably well lit room, I've noticed very little eye strain.

While my experience obviously does not carry over well to the population at general, it could help explain why dark on light is easier to read - it's easier to make out the details.
Google's Chrome OS Device Very Near, Coming December 7?
"Expert in efficiency analysis, human factors, and process modeling and automation." Your problem might best be solved with programming, building a (human or robotic) assembly line, or making a bunch of individuals want to solve little bits of it semi-manually (reCAPTCHA, freerice, Mechanical Turk); really, what everyone wants is someone who knows which kind of solution a given problem calls for, and can then get it done, regardless of solution space. NASA calls these "systems engineers."
Dumptrucks make lousy airplanes.
There's a decent list of VPN service providers here: http://www.thesparklabs.com/support/vpn_service_providers/

SparkLabs also has a sweet/simple OpenVPN client for OS X that I use and will be coming out with a server sometime in the near future that should make setup a lot easier.
Impressive!

Just as exciting as someone posting a code is seeing a follow-up of someone's examination.

Thanks for sharing the analysis.
Consider the source. 'nuf said.
That is exactly how it works. The version has four components: A.B.C.D. The first two, A.B, are the major version, and have to be bumped on incompatible changes. The third is a minor version, and has to be bumped if you add to the API. The fourth is free for you to do with as you please.

You can then depend on A.B.* in your package, meaning you get all bugfixes, but no API changes that would break your code.

And statically typed doesn't mean new versions automatically work. If you specify >= 1.2 because you tested with 1.2, and version 1.3 comes out, which doesn't work, people trying to build your package will automatically pull in 1.3, and their build will fail. Specifying 1.2.* means their builds will continue to succeed.
You can flag a story (which helps in moderation, dont know the details).

While I do understand that HN is NOT a democratic platform, and do agree with you and tptacek, that YC companies should get the fringe benefit of visibility on HN, but It would make more sense to have higher weightage to such posts while ranking, than creating a separate class.
Congrats Travis! Long-deserved recognition for all that you do for Gumball
http://www.gov2summit.com/gov2010
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/the-three-phases-of-governm...

I hope to see 1) government transparency
2) improvement of government operations (finances, efficiency)
3) more participation by the citizens of the government whom representatives are supposed too...represent.

Gov 2.0 is a good step in the right direction with much potential.

While not on the scale of "solve cancer, Mars" I think this would be a major generational achievement.
I'm usually not a stickler for details, but Stanford is not an Ivy League school.
I could've sworn I saw the mouse logo at the top left corner of my window when I fired it up. I guess that's one less thing I know about Factor after all.
I re-read tomjen3's comment 3 times and couldn't find a value judgement, only a prediction. Where is the value judgement?
NextGen Cluster Monitoring from BBY Open
Why didn't they just go the full hog and compare them against desktops of the same price?
Exactly. Nobody cares if the exact details aren't 100% correct in a non-technical discussion. Suppose I begin recounting a blog entry which describes an odd situation. I may not remember all the details right, but I certainly have the gist of it and can convey that. There is no point in someone stepping in and saying, "you know, it was actually in Des Moines, not Dallas," if the city is entirely irrelevant to actual content of the post.

What is the group supposed to do with that statement? Someone has to segue back to the original topic, while someone else just lost face. Most people will just either ignore the correction entirely, or just drop the topic altogether.
Show HN: GoSneeze - My Attempt To Capture Local News
Hi HN - long time lurker, first time proper poster here!

I'm a 20-year-old Economics student at University College London and I've run a few blogs over the past few years. I want to try and tackle something bigger so using the few technical skills I had picked up and some Wordpress magic, I've hacked together GoSneeze.

The ultimate aim is to go after the local news market but at an extremely micro scale, but with a stance in favour of anonymity in order to provide greater transparency.

Please give me as much feedback as you can, and I'll try and reply to any questions you have.

Adnan Ebrahim
How do the documents fall under the category of unlawfully obtained?

And if they are considered unlawfully obtained (to which I've seen no evidence), would Amazon kick the NYTimes off their servers if the NYTimes hosted the documents there?
I knew I've heard of Joel Spolsky, and when I opened the post I knew why, he wrote one of the best introductions to Mercurial.
On the last page it says "Currency union without fiscal union is bound to fail -- and we are seeing the failure right now."

I guess the argument is that if each country has their own currency, they can devalue it when they are having problems and get out of trouble and the Euro prevents that possibility? But does anyone know how things worked in terms of this issue back when gold was more the common currency and before paper money was more common?